No, I definitely get what you mean, because often her character is made out to be that way– in Tudors we have a scene where she’s telling Mark Smeaton that her “boring husband” has just dropped dead, and how excited she is to now have a one-night stand…while Perdita Weeks’ incredible delivery and scene where she asks Cromwell to intercede with her sister for financial assistance, and quotes a historically accurate letter she sent him was cut from final editing:

But, y’know, obviously the first one was more important. 

Keeping the scenes they did– the explicit one with Henry in Season 1, and the one just mentioned, while cutting the one above– about as transparent as Rihanna’s CFDA dress, with none of its class. 

But I digress…truthfully, we don’t even really know if the rumor that she was the mistress of Francis I is true.  Claire Ridgway goes over the sources in the article I just linked, and explains how some slander against Anne has actually been misattributed to Mary, much in the way a much-cited quote about Elizabeth Blount has been misattributed to being about Mary Boleyn. 

Would Mary have been able to make such a good marriage to up-and-coming courtier William Carey if she had a well-known reputation of promiscuity? Frankly, I doubt it; although I suppose it’s not impossible. 

It’s assumed she did, also, because she seemed to have a falling-out with her father, Thomas Boleyn. But this could have had many causes. 

All we know for certain is that Mary had sex with three men in her lifetime: her first husband, Henry VIII, and her second husband. 

So little is known about the second, most famous one, and mostly gaps have been filled with our imaginations. Frankly, all we know is that they hooked up, at least once, in some fashion, at some point. It could have happened before she was married. It could have happened while she was married, but I wouldn’t get all moralistic about it if did– because Henry was, too. 

That “the whole court knew” she was his mistress is a fable, because the only reason even we know is the dispensation Henry VIII asked for. That she was his mistress for as long as Bessie Blount was, that she also had at least one illegitimate child with his paternity, is also imaginations filling the gaps– quite simply, there’s not evidence that proves this or even proves this likely. 

But I digress. I would say, no, don’t believe the hype of book titles such as “The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History”. 

Elizabeth Boleyn was not a “femme fatale”– she only had sex with her husband. Mary Boleyn was not a “femme fatale”, as having sex with one’s husband wasn’t especially promiscuous even by 16th century standards. William Carey didn’t die from sex with Mary, he died of the Sweat. 

I wouldn’t refer to Mary Boleyn as a “femme fatale” for having sex with Henry VIII– it’s not as if she killed him, either. 

Nor would I refer to Anne Boleyn as a femme fatale, as she, like her mother, only ever had sex with the man she married. And the men that were executed along with her in May 1536 didn’t “die because she had seduced them”, while Anne had the last laugh and survived– and that’s the linchpin of the whole femme fatale trope in the first place.