“Don’t ask, don’t get”: Mary Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell in “Wolf Hall”

In Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall”, there’s an apparent chemistry between Thomas Cromwell and Mary Boleyn, the sister of Anne. We meet Mary after her first husband William Carey, member of the King’s Privy Chamber, has died of sweating sickness in 1528. Mary regrets being widowed because “I am to be swept out after supper like the old rushes. Now I’m no one’s wife, they [the Boleyns, her family] can say anything they like to me”. She reveals to Thomas Cromwell that she “needs a new husband” and tells him that she needs a husband who would upset her family. “I want to marry a man who frightens them”, says Mary in the course of her conversation with Thomas Cromwell and Hilary Mantel clearly hints that Cromwell, who had recently lost his beloved wife, seems like a great catch to Mary Boleyn: “There is a sudden light in her blue eyes. An idea has dawned. She rests one delicate finger on the grey velvet she so admires, and says softly, ‘Don’t ask, don’t get’”.

“Don’t ask, don’t get”: Mary Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell's apparent chemistry in "Wolf Hall" 

Is there any truth to this? Was Mary Boleyn ever interested in Thomas Cromwell? Was he interested in her? Well, there is no historical evidence to prove that Mary Boleyn was romantically linked with Thomas Cromwell. Or that she was poor and couldn't afford grey velvet, as implied both in the novel and in the TV adaptation of "Wolf Hall". Mary and Cromwell certainly knew each other socially and when in 1534 Mary made a secret match to one William Stafford,  her social inferior, she appealed to Thomas Cromwell because she knew he could help her. According to Mary:

“I saw that all the world did set so little by me, and he [William Stafford] so much, that I thought I could take no better way but to take him and forsake all other ways, and live a poor, honest life with him. And so I do put no doubts but we should, if we might once be so happy to recover the King’s gracious favour and the Queen’s. For well I might have had a greater man of birth and a higher, but I assure you I could never have had one that should have loved me so well, nor a more honest man.”

Thomas Cromwell’s reply does not survive and, sadly, we don’t know if he interceded with Henry VIII and the Boleyns on Mary’s behalf. Mary's letter is the only recorded interaction between her and Cromwell. 

Sources:

Hilary Mantel, "Wolf Hall", (Fourth Estate, 2009)

Mary Stafford to Thomas Cromwell (1534), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1862-1910), Volume 7: 1655.