Mary & George Tuesday 9.00pm Sky Atlantic
How did an unknown commoner become a royal favourite and James I’s lover? Historian Benjamin Woolley tells the extraordinary story behind the scandalous new drama Mary & George
WESTMINSTER ABBEY’S SUBLIME Henry VII Lady Chapel is the mausoleum of British monarchy, stuffed to the fan vaulting with monuments to kings, queens and princes. However, the biggest, gaudiest grave – a monstrosity of “prostrate effigies, kneeling children, weeping deities, and obelisks on skulls”, as one appalled architectural historian noted in the 1810s – is dedicated not to a royal, but the son of an obscure Leicestershire landowner and MP.
And not far away, in the Abbey’s St Nicholas Chapel, lies (in both senses) his mother. Though her grave is more modest, the inscription she commissioned on her own behalf tells us that she was “descended from five of the most powerful kings of Europe, by five direct descents”.
But who are these noble subjects? They are Mary and George Villiers, the focus of Sky TV’s lavish new period drama, Mary & George – a series inspired by The King’s Assassin, my non-fiction book about them both.
Their story comes from the Jacobean age, which may be the reason Mary and George are not better known. The Jacobeans have tended to get lost in the margins of British history, eclipsed by the Tudors. The confusing name doesn’t help. It refers to Jacob, the Latin form of James, the king who presided over the period – strictly, James VI of Scotland and I of England – because he was the sixth of that name to rule Scotland and, following the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, the first to rule England.
BUT GET PAST that nominative jumble, and you find an age of wonders: of artistic innovation, new forms of popular entertainment, Shakespeare at the height of his powers, the birth of Britain’s global empire, the rise of corporate finance, the formulation of key modern scientific and medical ideas and, of course, the King James Bible.
Meanwhile, in rural England, accelerating trends in the enclosure of common land, new agricultural methods and rapid urbanisation were disrupting social order.
This was Mary’s world. She might have later claimed royal descent, but she was born around 1570 in the Leicestershire village of Glenfield to a local squire. A probably meagre education led her to becoming companion and domestic servant to the wife of a richer relative. There she met Sir George Villiers, a local landowner and MP. They were married by 1591 and quickly had four children (plus one who died in
