Mary & George is a 2024 British historical drama starring Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitzine as the real-life titular Mary Villiers and her son George, 1st Duke of Buckingham and a favourite of King James VI and I (portrayed by Tony Curran). The series is adapted by DC Moore from Benjamin Woolley's non-fiction book The King's Assassin (2017) and directed by Oliver Hermanus.
Mary & George provides examples of the following tropes:
- Abusive Parents:
- Mary is an interesting case. She blatantly manipulates George into doing her bidding and uses him as her key to greater power and privilege, but she is also very supportive of him, has great faith in his abilities, and does everything she can to help him fulfill his full potential. She's also protective him, doing her best to shield him from the Dirty Business of their political scheming and taking that burden on herself.
- Mary's first husband, the first George Villiers, is shown to be abusive to Mary and used to beat George and his siblings. When he's severely injured after a violent confrontation with his wife, Mary has no issues letting him die.
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: When Carr realizes that he really will go down with his wife for Overbury's murder without a pardon from James (who is refusing to intervene for various reasons), he becomes so desperate for help that he visits a bedridden George and begs him to write to the king in his stead.
- Arch-Enemy: George and Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset (James' first Royal Favorite at the beginning of the series) instantly detest each other from the moment they first meet as they begin competing for the king's affection. Carr torments George at every possible moment until George is eventually taken out of the palace to recover from the pox. George, however, gets the last laugh after sleeping with a soon-to-be-convicted Carr, only to reveal after they're done that he has no intentions of helping his enemy get a pardon.
- Artistic License – History:
- Although the real George had a reputation for being a cunning master manipulator himself, adept at political machinations, the show relegates most of this work to his mother.
- The show has the Somersets executed for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, which causes one of Robert Carr's cousins to try to murder George in retaliation while he's in Scotland (Carr's native country). In reality, both of them were indefinitely imprisoned in the Tower of London up until they were pardoned in the mid-1620s. While they never returned to politics, both outlived George and James, with Robert Carr, in particular, surviving them by almost two decades.
- On the contrary, one of the few scenes that does portray George as political — in which he persuades parliament to go to war with Spain in 1624 — did not happen as the Duke was ill at the time; it was Prince Charles (later Charles I) who did that.
- This adaptation asserts that Mary, the daughter of Anthony Beaumont and Anne Armstrong, had originally been a serving girl and the Beaumonts were paid to claim she was one of their offspring so that George Sr could marry her (which, if known, could delegitimise her children as well), something he threatens to reveal in his will, motivating her to swiftly re-marry Sir Thomas Compton after his death. It's true that Mary was penniless when she married Sir George Villiers and had a reputation for being a social climber, but she was not known to be illegitimate.
- The show depicts Mary as being bisexual herself, in a relationship with an Irish prostitute named Sandie Brooks. While it's possible for this to have happened under the radar, there's no historical evidence to back this up.
- James died of a stroke. Despite allegations made by George Eglisham and other political opponents, the idea that Villiers poisoned James has been widely discredited by historians as "sensationalist".
- Big Brother Instinct: As John is mentally disabled, George is effectively the oldest of the Villier siblings, and they're shown to be the only people he truly cares about. A frequent trick of Mary's to get him to do what she wants is pointing out how much it will benefit the whole family.
- Closet Key: George develops a crush on his tutor Jean, who teaches him gentlemanly manners when upon arriving in France. Jean is aware of George's latent bisexuality and deliberately manipulates him into an encounter with himself and one of his servants so George can embrace his attraction to men instead of hiding it.
- Cool Big Bro: Inverted. Despite his melodramatic and self-centered personality, George is very close to his mentally disabled older brother John. He's upset when Jean breaks the recorder John gave him right before his departure to France, and when Mary tells him John misses him, George earnestly replies that he misses John as well.
- Defector from Decadence: Unlike the ambitious Mary, her second husband Thomas Compton has no real interest in partaking in court or any of the associated power plays. In the first episode alone, he tries to get out of having to host King James, so he won't have to deal with the mess and the accumulated debt when the king leaves, having learned his lesson from hosting him once before.
- Drunk with Power: After he firmly has James under his thumb, George slowly but surely becomes corrupted by his newly-found power, to the point where even Mary can no longer keep him under control. At the end of the series, when James rejects him and tries to strip him of his titles and privileges, George murders him so the order can't be relayed back to the court.
- Establishing Character Moment: The first time we meet George as an adult, he's just tried to hang himself to get out of going to France and ending his relationship with his servant girlfriend, displaying his propensity toward melodrama. Judging by the nonchalant way Mary treats the entire incident, this isn't the first time something like this has happened.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Mary might be a cold-hearted, scheming bitch, and hardly the ideal parent, but she genuinely loves her children and everything she does is for their security. Even George, her (initially) unwilling partner in her machinations, is frequently shielded by the "messier" aspects of her plans to maintain whatever remaining innocence he has left.
- Even the Guys Want Him: As in real life, George is considered very handsome and especially attractive to men.
- Foreign Fanservice: When George arrives in France, his mentor Jean deliberately drags him through an ongoing orgy in his home, both to show him that he is not in England and as the first salvo in helping George get over his prudishness so he can take advantage of his good looks when it's time to enter society.
- Hidden Depths: James' typically hedonistic lifestyle and jovial personality go through a marked shift when on Progress to his native country of Scotland, whereupon he becomes erratic, paranoid, and temperamental. It's gradually revealed to George (and by extension, the audience) that this is because of James' difficult childhood in the Scottish court, where he was surrounded by all sorts of violence and political scheming as different factions fought for control over him, the last remaining direct heir of the House of Stuart and the Scottish throne. He associates Scotland with these traumatic memories and is much more comfortable in England, where his life has been significantly more pleasant.
- How the Mighty Have Fallen: Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, starts the series as King James' lover and the most powerful courtier in the English court. Then Mary meets them, realizes their relationship isn't as secure as Carr thinks it is, and sends George to court to win James over. Carr slowly loses control over the king, and by the end of the third episode, he and his wife are imprisoned in the Tower of London, awaiting their executions.
- May–December Romance: George is 22 when he meets King James, who is 48.
- Meal Ticket:
- After George Sr. dies and Mary finds out that he's completely written her and their children out of his will, she swiftly gets married to Sir Thomas Compton so they have money and a home again.
- King James is the target of multiple handsome young men desperate to gain his favor. Robert Carr, however, has him so completely locked down that it takes Mary the assistance of multiple people just to bring George to his attention.
- Mother Makes You King: Mary is the main driving force behind George's rising star in court, from ensuring he gets a comprehensive education in France to develop all the talents he would need to become a royal favorite to using her connections to get him a position where he can become close to King James. When Somerset proves too big an obstacle for George to overcome on his own, she's the one who arranges his downfall by revealing his and his wife's conspiracy behind Thomas Overbury's murder.
- Parental Favouritism: A rare variation in which Mary strongly favours her second and middle son George, who, although stubborn, is handsome, intelligent and can charm in a way she can use to her advantage, over her firstborn John, who seems to be intellectually disabled and has poor prospects for marriage. In general, Mary seems to favour George over all her other children, because he's by far the most competent out of all of them. She also claims in the first episode that she favours John over Kit (who japes about everything) and Susan (who is considered boring) by a wide margin. To their faces. So John is her second-favourite child.
- Really Gets Around: Being a young man who is both insanely attractive and has an active libido, George sleeps with a lot of people throughout the series. His relationship with James is the only time he seriously commits to monogamy, and even that doesn't stop him from cheating on James when he feels neglected.
- Royal Favorite: The main goal of the titular mother and son is to use George's talent and good looks to make him a favorite of King James and displace James' current favorite and lover, Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset.
- Shame If Something Happened: Mary convinces George to go to France by idly threatening to fire Jenny, his current lover and one of their servants, and send her back to her abusive family.
- Show Some Leg: George unsuccessfully attempts to seduce his assassin John Felton, who stabs him.
- Tantrum Throwing: When the Privy Council refuses to ratify James' blanket pardon for Carr (in anticipation of his upcoming trial for the poisoning of Thomas Overbury), a furious Carr throws a tantrum in the middle of the chamber, which includes smashing a chair to pieces.
- "Take That!" Kiss: Carr attempts to seduce George into saving his life after it seems he's about to go down for Overbury's murder. George plays along, has sex with Carr... and then reveals he has no intentions of helping his enemy and just wanted to literally and figuratively "fuck him" one last time before he hangs. He punctuates his statement with a kiss to Carr as he tumbles to the floor in laughter.
- Trauma Button: James becomes erratic and volatile when he embarks on progress to his native country of Scotland, due to the horrible memories he had growing up in the Scottish Court as a child king.
- Unholy Matrimony: Robert Carr and his wife Frances Howard are both conniving snakes who love to bully others and actively plot against their enemies together.
- Uptown Guy: At the beginning of the series, George is in a relationship with one of his servants, Jenny. Unlike most examples of this trope, the relationship isn't as serious as George tries to make it out to be, and by the time he returns from France, he's completely lost interest in her.
- "Well Done, Son" Guy: As much as George resents his mother and her scheming, he's still at her beck and call and ultimately everything he does, including seducing King James, is to please her. It's only when he realizes that he is the one with the power, not her, that he begins truly chafing under her control.
