I haven’t read anything by Alison Weir before and I had been under the impression that she only wrote fiction so I was surprised to find Mary Boleyn – The Great and Infamous Whore in the history section at one of my local libraries. Interestingly this book seems to be subtitled The Mistress of Kings on Goodreads, maybe that was for American sensibilties!
Anyway, when I saw this book sitting on the library shelf I immediately wondered if there really was that much known about Mary Boleyn – enough to fill a book, and now that I’ve read the book I can tell you that indeed there is very little known about Mary Boleyn at all.
This book is full of question marks. Pages and pages are devoted to the fact that it isn’t even known which year she was born or even if she was the eldest of the Boleyn daughters or if Anne was. These pages all point out that previous writers have stated facts which couldn’t be correct. I’m afraid I almost gave up, so annoyed was I with it, after all it is really an irrelevance – whether Mary or Anne was the eldest daughter. Although I reckon that any psychologist would tell you that Anne displayed all the classic qualities/faults of a middle child. She wanted to be the centre of everyone’s world. Mary seems to have been disliked by both of her parents, I think by her father because she resembled her mother’s side of the family – the Howards. And probably disliked by her mother because her husband Thomas Boleyn blamed his wife for Mary being a disappointment, she wasn’t a manipulative schemer and that was really what he admired in people, Mary didn’t do anything to help promote her family’s position.
I did plough on to the end and the book does throw up interesting facts about Tudor life which I didn’t know about – such as: that sweating sickness which seemed to be so rife was not the plague as I have previously read. It seems to have been an illness which must have mutated over the years until it was no longer the killer it had been. At the height of its strength it could kill people within a couple of hours of the victim feeling ill. It sounds like a very virulent flu to me.
Inevitably sister Anne makes an appearance in the book and as ever I was struck by how patient Henry VIII had been, I think Anne should have counted herself lucky not to have got the chop a lot sooner than she did, such as immediately after Henry realised that she wasn’t the innocent virgin she had been making herself out to be in the six years or so that she had been holding him at bay!
If you just want to immerse yourself in things Tudor while you wait for the next instalment of Wolf Hall coming around you might enjoy this book, but at the end of it you won’t be much the wiser about Mary Boleyn’s life, although she was much maligned by the sound of things as she doesn’t seem to have been any more promiscuous than the rest of them.
Have any of you read any of Alison Weir’s fiction books and if so what did you think of them?
