By the time Mary went to comfort the distraught Anne at the birth of the stillborn son in early 1536, Mary had been secretly married for two years to Sir William Stafford, a young gentleman usher with little money and no rank. The marriage was not discovered until months later when Anne learned that Mary was pregnant again. Anne greeted the news with hysteria. Mary's relatives, the Bullens and Norfolks, disowned her. Mary Boleyn had dared to marry for love and to a socially unworthy man of her own choosing. Worse, she was already with child when one was urgently needed elsewhere. Mary and William Stafford were banished from Court in disgrace.
Only Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister from 1533 to 1540, kept communication lines open between the Court and the newly independent Mary. She wrote Cromwell a letter explaining that the world set little store by her, but that her beloved William Stafford cared for her a great deal. She desired only to live a simple honest life with the man she loved, she wrote, although, "...well might I have had a greater man of birth and a higher, but I ensure you I could never a had one that should a loved me so well, nor a more honest man. I had rather beg my bread with him than be the greatest Queen christened ... and I believe verily he would not forsake me to be a king."
Thomas Cromwell, c. 1532Anne's anger at thinking Mary such a fool as to wed Stafford soon abated as her own plight became increasingly serious. Anne feared she could never bear the male heir which she knew would be the best ensurance for the preservations of her marriage, no matter how far the King wandered. In 1536 Henry had his Queen arrested at a tournament at Greenwich and sent to the Tower, charged with adultery and treason. Mary's brother George was also incarcerated on a charge of incest with the Queen.
Mary's insignificant marriage and the comparative privacy of her banishment from Court protected her from the dire and probably trumped-up charges facing her brother and sister, but her liaison with the King gave her importance during Anne's trial. The King's long relationship with Mary placed him in an ironical position. He had used the law to prove that his marriage to his brother Arthur's widow was invalid. "Impediments of affinity in the first degree collateral" had been the argument Henry's advocates put forward to speed his divorce from Catherine so he could marry Anne. Further, Leviticus stated: "Thou shalt not take the sister of thy wife as a concubine," which the King had clearly done when switching his attentions from Mary to Anne. But he plunged ahead with Anne's trial by decreeing that brothers' wives fell under Divine Law while mistresses' sisters did not. Still, because his long relationship with Mary worried him, he had his marriage to Anne annulled rather than simply becoming a widower on her execution.
Elizabeth I of England, niece of Mary Boleyn.The rest of the tragedy of Mary's family is well known. Anne and George were declared guilty and beheaded in May 1536. Of Thomas Bullen's once promising brood of children, Mary alone survived. On the deaths of her siblings and the ruin of her father, who retired a broken man to Hever, Mary Boleyn, Lady Stafford, steps offstage. It is known that in 1538 after the deaths of her parents, Hever Castle was "sold" to the King by Mary's uncle, Sir James Bullen, in what was a very unusual business transaction. By law the property would have automatically reverted to the Crown. From the sale the Patent Rolls record a sum paid to Mary Stafford. The King's reason for this gift of money is as unrecorded as the rest of Mary's years after the fall of the Boleyns.
Mary Boleyn's real legacy to her nation was through her children's services to her niece, Queen Elizabeth I. Catherine Carey became gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber at Elizabeth's accession, married Sir Francis Knollys, and became the grandmother of Lord Essex, the Queen's favourite in her later years. Henry Carey, 1st Lord of Hunsdon, served as trusted advisor and put down the Catholic Dacre rebellion against his royal cousin in February 1570. On that occasion the Queen wrote Henry Carey a touching letter of which his mother Mary Boleyn would have been proud: "I doubt much, my Harry, whether that the victory were given me, more joyed me, or that you were by God appointed the instrument of my glory; and I assure you that for my country's good, the first might suffice, but for my heart's contention the second pleased me ... you have done much for honour ... You loving kinswoman, Elizabeth R."
There had been other victories and joys, heart's contentions and honours, but interwoven with these had been greed, loneliness, cruelty and heartbreak. These intriguingly brief glimpses of Mary Boleyn, whose life touched so many important figures in the Tudor panorama, show her to have been a fascinating woman.
This article was written by Karen Harper for British Heritage magazine.
On the age as who was the older:
There has always been a certain amount of confusion between the Boleyn sisters at this period of their lives, and doubt over their dates of birth. Suggested birth dates for Anne vary between 150l and 1507, and although it is most likely that Mary was the elder of the two, there may have been no more than twelve months between them.
Hever Castle, childhood home of Mary and Anne BoleynAll we really know for sure is that both girls spent some part of their early years abroad. By 1512 their father was undertaking diplomatic missions to Europe and used his official connections to get the extra advantage of a Continental 'finish' for his daughters.
One of them, now generally thought to be Anne, lived for a time in the household of Margaret, Archduchess of Austria and Regent of the Netherlands, and in 1514 Mary Boleyn went over to France in the train of Henry VIII's sister (Mary) when the latter was briefly married to old Louis XII. Again information is scanty, but it is known that Anne presently joined Mary at the French court, entering the service of Queen Claude, wife of the new king Francois I.
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http://www3.dcs.hull.ac.uk/cgi-bin/gedlkup/n=royal?royal02339 (Reliability: 4).
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# [S316] HistoryNet, HistoryNet.com, (Leesburg, Virginia: The Weider Hisrtory Group, 2008), Mary Boleyn by Karen Harper (Reliability: 3).
# [S110] Leo's Genealogics Website, Leonardus Franciscus Maria van de Pas, (Perth, Australia:
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# [S109] Royal Genealogy, Brian Tompset, (Hull, England: University of Hull, 7 Mar 2005).
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