Heiress of the Bohun earls of Hereford and first wife of Henry Bolingbroke; mother of Henry V and his brothers Clarence, Bedford and Gloucester, she died in childbirth in 1394, five years before her husband became Henry IV.
Mary de Bohun was the younger daughter and co-heiress of Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, Essex and Northampton, and the first wife of Henry Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt. She never became queen: she died in 1394, five years before her husband seized the throne as Henry IV of England. But she was the mother of the Lancastrian royal family, including Henry V, and her half of the Bohun inheritance was joined in time to the lands of the crown.
Her family was the patron of some of the finest English illuminated manuscripts of the fourteenth century, the Bohun psalters and books of hours, and one of them contains the image traditionally identified as her.
Mary was born around 1368–1370 to Humphrey de Bohun, the last of the Bohun earls, who died in 1373, and Joan FitzAlan. The inheritance was divided between Mary and her elder sister Eleanor, who married Thomas of Woodstock, Edward III's youngest son. Froissart reports that Thomas hoped to keep the whole estate by placing Mary in a convent, but in 1380 or 1381 John of Gaunt and Mary's mother arranged her marriage to his son Henry, then about fourteen, while she was about eleven; she stayed with her mother for some years before living with her husband.
Little of Mary's personality reaches us directly, and almost nothing written in her own voice survives. What the record shows is a devout and cultivated household. Her family's illuminators, trained under the Bohun earls at Pleshey in Essex, made psalters and books of hours for her kin, and one of them includes a kneeling young woman traditionally identified as Mary.
Chroniclers mention her chiefly through her marriage, which Froissart presents as a coup by John of Gaunt against his brother Thomas of Woodstock, and through the births of her children. That silence is typical of the evidence for aristocratic wives who died young, before their husbands' careers drew the attention of writers.
As countess of Derby Mary bore six children in quick succession: Henry, the future Henry V, born at Monmouth Castle in 1386; Thomas, later Duke of Clarence, in 1387; John, later Duke of Bedford, in 1389; Humphrey, later Duke of Gloucester, in 1390; Blanche, who married Louis III, Elector Palatine; and Philippa, who married Eric of Pomerania and became queen of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. She lived mainly on Bohun and Lancastrian manors while Henry travelled, jousting at Saint-Inglevert near Calais in 1390 and crusading with the Teutonic Knights in Prussia in 1390–1391.
Mary died at Peterborough Castle on 4 June 1394 after giving birth to her daughter Philippa, and was buried in the church of St Mary in the Newarke at Leicester, the collegiate church of the house of Lancaster. Her husband, who became king in 1399, did not remarry until 1403, when he took Joan of Navarre as his queen.
Mary's children were the Lancastrian dynasty: Henry V, the victor of the Battle of Agincourt, and his brothers Clarence, Bedford and Gloucester, who governed England and Lancastrian France after his death. When the Bohun inheritance was finally divided between Henry V and her sister's heirs in 1421, her share passed into the duchy of Lancaster and so to the crown.