Who was the real Mary Villiers?

Other than scraps of information, though, much of her life is shrouded in mystery.

What do we know about Mary Villiers’ life?

“We don't know a great deal about her,” explains writer and broadcaster Benjamin Woolley on the HistoryExtra podcast. “We don't even know when she was born.”

Conventionally, it’s thought to be around 1570 – “though it’s possibly 1574, which actually makes a difference because she was much younger when she married George Villiers,” he explains.

The son of an MP, an English knight and country gentleman, the senior George Villiers married Mary after the death of his first wife. Over a decade, they had four children: Susan, John, George and Christopher.

Prior to her marriage, Mary had served as a waiting woman to one of her relatives in Leicestershire. “The role of waiting women at this time is a really odd one to modern ears,” explains Woolley. “They’re sort of between service and gentry, so she occupied this rather ambiguous social rank.

“Mary Villiers was miles from court – geographically, but also in terms of social status. The idea that she would find herself inside the king's inner circle would have been inconceivable when she started out.”

That would have been especially true when the senior George Villiers died, and Mary was faced with his substantial debts. She resorted to strategic remarriages, first to Sir William Rayner and later to Sir Thomas Compton, 1st Baron Compton.

“Her first son, John, turned out to be, bluntly, a bit of a dud,” says Woolley. “He didn't look like the kind of figure who could realise any ambitions that this family might have for the Villiers name.

“George, on the other hand, was charismatic, good-looking, clever, witty, complicated. He was not particularly intellectual, but he certainly knew how to work a room.”

George turned out to be an eminently presentable character, and Mary sent him to France as a teenager to learn the kind of manners that would enhance his status.

How did Mary and George Villiers rise to power?

The Villiers’ ascent would begin in earnest after 1603, when James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of England from Elizabeth I and became James I. He began his rule in England surrounded by Scottish nobles, particularly young men. The most prominent of these was Robert Carr, who became a favourite of the king in 1607.

“There was a lot of discussion about James's relationship with these young Scottish men,” explains Woolley. “From an English point of view, the real problem was that there were no young English men in James's close retinue. George was weaponised by Mary in order to fill that gap, and that he did with spectacular success.”

George secured his place in the king’s inner circle, and Mary’s rise in court was swift. She also set about securing advantageous marriages for her other children. In 1618, the same year that she became Countess of Buckingham, the king reportedly said that he “lived to no other end but to advance the Villiers family”.

Of course, chief among them was George, who went from knight to viscount and earl, and eventually, in 1623, was made the 1st Duke of Buckingham.

Yet Mary wielded her own brand of influence. Her later, controversial conversion to Roman Catholicism, says Woolley, is testament to just how powerful she became. “Right in the heart of the Protestant regime that James was trying to stabilise, she decided she would just become a Roman Catholic. James tried to dissuade her, but she wouldn't hear it. That shows the strength of her character.”

Though the few sources often have her as coarse and unmannered, she is a hard figure to pin down. Her many enemies at court were only too happy to provide often unflattering characterisations of her. “You have to sort of pick through those, and think of what's motivating what they're writing, and what you can get out of it that tells a story,” Woolley explains.

“She's not somebody who's easy to nail down in terms of historical research. But she’s all the more intriguing for that.”

How was Mary Villiers involved in the death of King James VI and I?

On 27 March 1625, James VI and I died at Theobalds Palace in Hertfordshire of a condition likely stemming from malaria or typhus (though other sources have cited dysentery as a possible illness).

Yet the secretive nature of what happened in the ‘Chamber of Sorrows’, as the king’s sickbed came to be called, left room for much speculation in the months to follow.

• Read more | How did James VI and I die?

During their long relationship, George and the king had regularly corresponded on ailments and treatments that plagued them both. In this final illness, George had consulted an Essex doctor and, through his mother, procured a plaster that was “applied to the king’s breast” unbeknownst to the other doctors, who were prioritising the usual purging treatments of the day.

George was accused outright of poisoning James. Meanwhile, Mary was known to be present at certain times during the king’s decline, and some sources have her procuring or applying the plaster herself – though the picture remains complicated.

• Read more | Was James VI and I murdered?

Her presence, and possible involvement, in the king’s sick room was what brought Woolley to the tale of George Villiers and his mother in the first place. “I was writing a book about somebody called Nicholas Culpepper, who was this sort of Civil War-era radical, who worked in London as an unlicensed apothecary.

“As part of my research, I was looking at the College of Physicians, and particularly Dr William Harvey and his role in King James’s final illness. And in the Chamber of Sorrows were these two characters, Mary and George, who seemed to be coordinating what was going on in James’s final hours. I saw these characters, basically at the king's bedside, and I just wondered: who are they?”

What happened to Mary Villiers?

When her son George was assassinated in 1628, Mary was said to have shown no reaction. That is despite them sharing an undoubtedly close relationship, according to Woolley. George “had this very difficult relationship with his mother, very close. He once described his love for her as going beyond basically natural. I don't know what he meant by that; I don't think anything too incestuous.

“But he had a very strong link to her, and of course the result is that when there were tensions between them, they were amplified by it. The tensions between them were at times close to one of them having to be ruined at the hands of the other.”

Four years after George’s death, Mary died in 1632. They are both buried at Westminster Abbey.

You can hear more from Benjamin Woolley on the HistoryExtra podcast, on George Villiers and his meteoric rise, and on the real history behind Mary & George