Her first work, Britain's Royal Families (published in 1989), was a genealogical overview of the British royal family. She has also written numerous works of historical fiction.

She primarily writes about the history of English royal women and families, in the form of biographies that explore their historical setting. She died four days later.Alison Weir ( née Matthews born 1951) is a British author and public historian. But it took her three years to actually secure possession of it. And that time, Mary's father and grandmother died, leaving her with half the Boleyn wealth. attended on Anne of Cleves when she came to Calais en route to England. And still rose through the ranks, and he. 'She was a soldier's wife, basically, for the first. On Mary's life once she married her second husband, William Stafford, and was banished from court But I do believe that Mary's daughter, the first child she bore during her marriage to William Carey, was probably fathered by Henry.' But secondly, I have uncovered almost compelling evidence that Henry Carey was the son of Mary Boleyn by because the grants made to his father were granted in tail male, meaning that those lands could only be inherited by the lawfully begotten son of his body. On the story that Boleyn had a son, Henry Carey, by Henry VIII

'There are huge gaps in her life that we cannot hope to fill,' Weir says, 'and many aspects of her life are very controversial.' 'But there's nothing, nothing at all,' she says.Īnd that's true of much of Boleyn's story. Weir says that if Boleyn really had a reputation, there would have been other reports of it. 'That was something that was said of her more than 20 years later, and it comes from the most unreliable source.'

'That's a red herring,' Weir tells NPR's Neal Conan.

Weir says a lot of historians - including herself - have gotten Boleyn's story wrong, starting with that 'great and infamous' sobriquet. Now Mary's getting her first full nonfiction treatment: In Mary Boleyn: The Mistress of Kings, Alison Weir offers a biography of the woman who became known as 'the great and infamous whore.' A fictionalized Mary Boleyn was the central character in The Other Boleyn Girl, Philippa Gregory's best-selling novel that Hollywood adapted into a major motion picture in 2008. Scarlett Johansson plays Mary Boleyn in the 2008 film The Other Boleyn Girl.Īnne Boleyn's story is well-known the queen of England, and second wife of Henry VIII, was beheaded after being charged with treason, incest and adultery.īut her sister, Mary, has largely been a footnote in history, until recently.

Mary boleyn by alison weir