Mary Boleyn Luisterboek Tooltip Luisterboeken beluister je met de bol.com Kobo app. The Great and Infamous Whore

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At first glance, the life of Mary Boleyn, given her racy reputation with the Kings of France (Francois 1st) and England, (Henry the ubiquitous 8th) should form the basis of a fine biography. In many ways all the elements are there; the larger than life characters we already know, including her more exciting sister Anne, the wonderful illustrations, plus the detailed research that one would expect from Alison Weir. And yet, and yet there is something missing at the heart and it is the something that no doubt precipitated Mary's shadowy place in Tudor history, despite being in the orbit of her starry sister and her high flying brother. Mary is just not very interesting (except as a fictional foil in novels about Anne, such as The Other Boleyn Girl) and the work is therefore bedevilled by probablies, possiblies, must haves and maybes. When the King's eye settled on Anne B, poor Mary clearly became something of a liability and a potential technical hitch in divorce proceedings.

We get no sense, because the source data is just not there, of how she herself felt about being a (twice discarded) mistress to royalty or, more importantly, how the tragedy which engulfed her sister Anne and her brother George along with many men whom she would have know, affected her.

What does come across is the compartmentalised nature of the English court at that time, and the secrecy and privacy surrounding the King's personal affairs even in a quite public arena. It also revealed to me that the King in seeking extramarital comfort, had a rather small pool of talent from which to choose, as there were amazingly few women actually present on a day to day basis.

All in all Alison Weir has produced as good a biography as she could, but not one that was crying out to be written. That sister of Mary's threatens to overwhelm proceedings on the page, as she did in life.

- Aeleanor