We see the Boleyn girls at the French court. Anne is reading Christine de Pizan’s "Le Livre de la Cité des Dames" ("The Book of the City of Ladies") while a servant is trying to lace Mary into a corset. Anne and Mary are shown walking down the corridor; Mary is acting seductively towards the two courtiers who pass them by (she blows them a kiss) while Anne treads behind her somewhat timidly.
We
hear Dr Suzannah Lipscomb’s commentary: Mary, Anne's sister, "is much more
interested in the immediate pleasures and the immediate satisfactions of
things, whereas Anne, she holds out for something more.”
Then
we see Anne again, who introduces Francis I, King of France: “King Francis:
Ruler of France, patron of the arts and banging my sister".
The two sisters are pitted against each other in an already familiar fashion. Anne: bookish, intelligent, quick-witted. Mary: looking for carnal pleasures, not the type of girl you would call learned ("you can't possibly have read all these", Mary says as she's pointing at the pile of books belonging to Anne despite the fact that in her own letter Mary once mused that she read "old books" too).
Every single book about the Tudors tells the same tale: Mary Boleyn became Francis I's mistress at some point during her stay at the French court. Francis, however, had only two known mistresses (the official title was maîtresse-en-titre) and a lot of sexual partners. Maîtresse-en-titre was an office and if Mary became the King's mistress, we would have more evidence of it. Did they have sex? Perhaps; if anything happened between them, it was likely a fling.
The notion that Mary Boleyn was sexually promiscuous during her stay at the French court is based on the French King’s reminisce from 1536, when he boasted that he knew Mary Boleyn “here in France” as “una grandissima ribalda” which means more or less that she was notoriously infamous for her promiscuity. The whole report was recorded by Rodolfo Pio di Carpi, Bishop of Faenza, who stated that:
“Francis said also that they are committing more follies than ever in England, and are saying and printing all the ill they can against the Pope and the Church; that ‘that woman’ pretended to have miscarried of a son, not being really with child, and, to keep up the deceit, would allow no one to attend on her but her sister, whom the French king knew here in France ‘per una grandissima ribalda et infame sopre tutte’ [“a great wanton and notoriously infamous”].” [1]
No other contemporary
source records Mary’s allegedly infamous reputation. In the 1580s, Nicholas Sander hinted that Anne Boleyn was Francis I's mistress and known in France as his mule or mare; perhaps he confused the Boleyn sisters or was just trying to be malicious. His book entitled "The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism" depicted Anne and her family as lechers and heretics so anything Sander says is mostly based on lies or anti-Boleyn propaganda that circulated during their times. If the Boleyn sisters were indeed as notorious for their promiscuity as Nicholas Sander and Rodolfo Pio di Carpi claimed, the rumours would have been circulating in England as well as in France, and it remains dubious whether Henry VIII would take one sister as his mistress and the other as his wife had they been so notorious.
Also it looks like the Bishop of Faenza was referring to Anne and not Mary when he made a comment about “that woman...whom the King knew here in France”. I doubt that Mary Boleyn was notoriously promiscuous because there’s just not enough evidence to substantiate this claim.
Pio's report is wrong on many levels. First, “that woman”, Anne Boleyn, was indeed pregnant and did not pretend to have miscarried a son—she really did miscarry a foetus that had the appearance of a male, at about fifteen weeks’ gestation, as recorded by a contemporary chronicler. [2] There is also no tangible evidence that Mary Boleyn was back at court after she and her newly wedded husband, William Stafford, were banished for marrying in secret in 1534. Because of these glaring errors, the report is generally regarded with a touch of reserve when it comes to Anne Boleyn. Oddly, it is rarely questioned when it comes to Mary, and the Bishop of Faenza’s words are often quoted to prove that Mary was Francis I’s mistress and sexually promiscuous because it is assumed that the French King “knew” Mary in the carnal sense.
PS. The only historian
who challenged the view that Mary Boleyn was promiscuous while in France is Retha M.
Warnicke, who pointed out that in 1514 Mary Boleyn was too young to achieve
such notoriety and that Francis I may have well referred to the 1532 meeting in
Calais and “come to this conclusion about her character at that time, aware
that she was Henry’s ex-mistress.” [3]
[1] Letters and Papers, Volume 10, n.
450.
[2] Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, Volume 1, p. 33.
[3] Retha M. Warnicke, Wicked Women of Tudor England, p. 30.
