Author’s Note

I have been intrigued by Mary Boleyn since I first stumbled upon brief mention of her during my undergraduate history classes in the late 1960s. And so, after graduate school studying European literature and many trips to England, I wrote about Mary for British History Magazine in 1980 and then wrote this novel, which was first published in 1983. Since then, it is obvious that interest in this woman, formerly the least remembered of the radiant and rapacious Boleyn clan, has greatly increased.

Mary, I believe, emerges as the loveliest, and eventually, the wisest and strongest of that fated family. As I have written other historical novels and Elizabethan mysteries over the years centered on Elizabeth Tudor, England’s greatest queen, I have wondered if Mary’s story impacted her brilliant niece. Perhaps it wasn’t only the way Henry VIII had treated Elizabeth’s mother and his other queens that taught Elizabeth never to trust a man, especially if he was a king. The lessons her Aunt Mary had learned the hard way were probably not lost on this clever woman.

Several minor characters in this novel such as servants are necessarily fictional; however, the major characters and places are as authentically drawn as on-site visits, history, maps, and records will allow. I have been fortunate to be able to travel to the sites used in this story, some several times.

Quiet moated Hever Castle, which becomes almost a character in Mary’s story, like much else, fell to the king in 1538 when Thomas Boleyn died a year after his wife. At that time, instead of merely taking Hever, as was the legal custom, the king arranged a sort of sale and, for an unrecorded reason, made certain that a sum was paid to his long-ago mistress Mary Stafford. Guilt money? Affection money? Money to assure her eldest son was well-reared? That is for us to wonder, but it does again suggest the magnetism of this woman.

Henry Tudor and Francois of France died the same year, 1547. Henry had finally been given his male heir through his marriage to Jane Seymour, who died soon after bearing the child, but, as is fully recorded, it is the Boleyn child Elizabeth who was the great-est Tudor ruler. Mary Stafford’s two eldest children served their cousin and queen, Elizabeth I, loyally. Catherine Carey became gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber at the accession of the queen. Henry Carey, 1st Lord Hunsdon, served as her trusted advisor and put down the Catholic Dacre Rebellion in 1570.

Those who were so treacherous to the Boleyns at the last eventually met their own tragic ends: Thomas Cromwell was hanged, drawn, and quartered after falling from power for failing to please his king in the procurement of his fourth queen; Jane Rochford was beheaded with King Henry’s fifth queen, Catherine Howard, for acting as her panderer; and the king himself died a gross and disease-ridden man.

I wish to especially thank Gavin Astor, second Baron Astor of Hever Castle in Kent, who owned Hever when I wrote this novel, for his kind correspondence, the use of his own research, and his encouragement. The Astor family no longer owns Hever, but it is still open to the public and makes a great day trip from London.

And my gratitude as always to my husband, travel companion, and proofreader, Don.

Karen Harper

April 2005