Authors: Lisa Hilton
Marriage, however, was a much more prosaic matter. ‘Marriages were matters of allies, claims, lands, treasure and prestige … They were affairs between families rather than individuals, an instrument of policy rather than passion.’
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Royal brides were essential diplomatic tools and personal feelings an irrelevance. Henry III set out the official line: ‘Friendship between princes can be obtained in no more fitting manner than by the link of conjugal troth.’ Yet noble and particularly royal women have too often been reduced to the status of animated title deeds, significant only in terms of the transmission of property. At first glance, the characteristic hostility shown towards women exercising any form of power seems to support this, but if queens were instruments, they were also instrumental. All politics was dynastic politics, that is family politics. The centre of power was the king and no one, in theory at least, was physically closer to the king than the queen. The absolute passivity demanded of royal women in accepting their mates should not blind us either to the degree of wealth, power or dynastic validation carried in the queen’s body, or to the practical powers that individual women could exercise at every level of cultural and political life. More than anything else, it was birth, marriage and death that affected medieval power structures so, as mothers and wives, queens were the focus and the source of political stability.
These elements converged in the coronation ordo, which outlined two essential dynamics of queenship at the moment of consecration. Intercession and maternity were channelled through Christian emphasis on women’s special dignity. In the twelfth century, Abelard wrote of women’s extraordinary status as delineated by Christ, their loyalty during the Passion and their capacity for prophecy in ‘a demonstration of female authority, precedence and exclusivity in religious life … unsurpassed in the Middle Ages’.
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The cult of the Virgin Mary, Marianism, was a device that sanctified childbirth — so much so that the opening blessing of the coronation ceremony has been called a ‘fertility charm’, allying the new queen’s childbearing with that of the women of the elect Davidic line, including the Virgin herself. Maternity was in turn closely associated with intercession, the second dynamic upon which the ordo ultimately dwelled.
Intercession was in some senses a transgressive act, a means by which ‘masculine’ authority was diverted by the power of feminine’ mercy. The Old Testament queen Esther, recast by the Church fathers in the mould of the Virgin, was a particularly important symbol of female intercession. A petition to Anne of Bohemia in the fourteenth century sums up the particular role of the queen: ‘Let the Queen soften royal severity that the King may be forbearing to his people. A woman mellows a man with love; for this God gave her, for this, o blessed woman, may your sweet love aspire.’
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The queen’s merciful love could move her husband to show his human side in what was effectively a skilful division of psychological labour: she could melt the king’s heart without making him appear weak or indecisive. Yet formal intercession became a ritual of queenmaking even as its real power to effect change declined: the progress (admittedly detrimental to queenly power) from a queen as counsellor or adviser to a queen as often merely symbolic intercessor, as in the case of the famous plea of Philippa of Hainault for the burghers of Calais, can be clearly charted over 500 years of medieval queenship.
How could a queen best make use of her sacred capital? What practical, as well as symbolic differences separated her from other women? Common law recognised three states of female existence, each of which was defined in terms of masculine authority: maiden, wife and widow. Only as widows could women be officially released from male guardianship to order their own affairs. Queens, however, enjoyed the status of
femmes soles
even while their husbands were living, and were therefore more independent before the law than any other married woman. They could sue and be sued, acquire property, grant land and witness its granting, preside over legal cases, hear oaths, appoint ecclesiastics and make wills. They could, and did, raise armies. This unique legal status could be employed to manage and expand their finances, create and control their children’s inheritances and, in some cases, to fight wars. From the regencies of Matilda of Flanders and Matilda of Boulogne to the much-vilified money-grubbing of Eleanor of Castile, from the successful revolution of Isabella of France to Marguerite of Anjou’s desperate fight for her son’s crown, English queens used their position according to both temperament and the exigencies of circumstance. Salic law, whereby claimants descended from the female line could not inherit a throne, enshrined in France from the early fourteenth century and widely adopted across Europe, was never applied in England, making English queens exceptional even among their Continental counterparts. Stephen, Henry II, Edward IV and Henry VII owed some or all of their claims to their female ancestors, while those of Edward III
and Henry VI, at the beginning and end of the Hundred Years War, were derived from their mothers.
Direct claims in the maternal line were the most obvious manifestation of the centrality of queens to royal power, but the skein of kinship that connected the intermarried royal families of Europe encompassed generations of women. Recent scholarly work on the importance of the maternal family of Eleanor of Provence and the granddaughters of Eleanor of Aquitaine permit a fresh perspective on trans-Continental networks of authority and patronage. The fostering of kinship, through marriage alliances, religious foundations, gift-giving and embassies, bore practical fruit when queens could call in their claims to broker treaties or raise funds and troops. Given the primacy of marriage in cementing such relationships, royal mothers had a particularly crucial role in negotiating advantageous matches for their children. Queen mothers could be exceptionally influential when their husbands were absent or deceased, and situations in which mothers literally had to fight for their children were confronted by Matilda of Boulogne, Marguerite of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville.
Yet medieval royal motherhood is a contentious issue. Many English queens had to adjust to marriage in their teens, and consequently to exceptional numbers of pregnancies. Childbirth on progress or campaign was an occupational hazard, and queens had to compromise their personal maternal inclinations with the huge demands of their public role. Then, as now, ‘working’ women have been criticised for neglecting or damaging their children, and much retrospective psychologising has been devoted to castigating queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine for their lack of involvement with their offspring. Such theorising fits neatly with a concept of medieval childhood that dismisses bonds of affection between parents and children and claims grandly that ‘the family at the time was unable to nourish a profound existential attitude between parents and children … [parents] cared about them less for themselves … than for the contribution those children could make to the common task’.
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Increasingly, evidence about medieval royal families contradicts this view, demonstrating that while royal women were little involved in the practical aspects of raising their children, entirely in accordance with their culture, they were extremely attentive to matters of education and upbringing. ‘It is the natural bent of all human beings,’ wrote Bernard of Anjou in 994, ‘to believe that in this lies the largest part of their happiness.’ Love of and delight in children is manifest even in the pragmatic details of account books, while evidence of maternal grief at the loss of sons and daughters is moving and poignant. Not all queens were perfect mothers, but nor
were they all the cold, distant figures of a historiography that denies emotional reality. Tiny, intimate portraits such as Matilda of Scotland playing with her little boy in the grounds of Merton Priory, or Marguerite of France carefully choosing buttons for her sons’ best coats, allow us a touching glimpse of royal motherhood beyond its symbolic and political role.
Such examples also reveal that a queen’s private life was not necessarily loveless. Modern Western hostility to arranged marriages recoils at the notion that they might produce satisfactory relationships, but such evidence as there is suggests that several English queens did enjoy loving partnerships with their husbands. Love was certainly not necessary in a dynastic marriage, but it could and did grow, as between Matilda of Flanders and William the Conqueror, Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, Edward III and Philippa of Hainault. King Stephen was so eccentrically affectionate as to remain faithful to his wife. But a beloved queen was also a vulnerable one. Her sexual intimacy with the king was an exclusive power, but it also played on that deeply rooted Christian fear, fear of the corrupting woman, which in turn tapped into disquiet about foreignness, about the possibility of a spy in the royal bed. In the 400 years before the Conquest, only two English queens, Judith and Emma of Normandy, were foreign, compared with sixteen of twenty between 1066 and 1503. International marriages were crucial to the kingdom’s stability and prestige, but outsiders also represented a threat. Queens were often forced to choose between their blood relatives and their marital kin, and excessive patronage of foreign connections led to frequent criticism or even, in the case of Eleanor of Provence, to revolt. Anxieties about the whispering, cajoling woman also militated against the efficacy of the queen’s role as counsellor or adviser. The effectiveness of ‘intimate persuasions’ was noted by several writers, and Eleanor of Provence was not shy of advertising her influence over her husband in bed, but queens were simultaneously confronted with a culture that promoted silence and submissiveness in women. Sages from Aristotle to St Peter acclaimed the virtues of silence, the Virgin herself was associated with dumb fortitude and civic statutes such as Hertford’s 1486 Ordinance on Scolds laid smalltown strife at the door of gossiping women. While ritual intercession was glorified, the confidence and trust that developed in a successful union could arouse profound suspicion.
The physical aspects of a royal marriage were thus a focus for both celebration and apprehension. Since the future of the realm was explicitly dependent on a queen’s body, on her fertility, her marriage might also call the king’s masculinity into question. What might be termed the folk
memory of primitive fertility beliefs, in which fruitfulness was an assurance of virility and therefore of prosperity, was translated through the Christian sacrament of marriage into a reflection of the limitations of the sovereign himself. A barren marriage showed that God was displeased, and boded ill for the nation; conversely, an overly passionate relationship cast doubts on the king’s masculinity: ‘The nature of the king’s marriage, or rather the extent to which the king’s use of this sacrament was pleasing to God, was supposed to impinge on the welfare of the realm in a very material sense.’
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The reputations of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabelle of Angoulême were blackened by interpretations of such misgivings, while Henry VI’s manifest intellectual shortcomings prompted questions as to whether an inadequate sexual bond with his wife, Marguerite of Anjou, was responsible.
And what of love outside marriage? Infidelity was practically expected of kings, though troops of bastard children in the kinds of numbers produced by Henry I and John had diminished somewhat by the end of the period. The very presence of the queen and her ladies in the otherwise male-dominated precincts of the royal palace correlated with her unique symbolic status, but it also created a public ritual out of every moment of her life. Private acts such as prayer, eating and sleeping were ritualised into constant affirmations of power. Sexual pleasure, even within marriage, was viewed dubiously by the Church. Christine de Pisan noted that romance was perilous for women, recommending wholesome activities such as sewing and weaving as distractions for dangerously idle minds, and writer after writer warned against the sins of illicit love:
A great hunger, insatiate to find
A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind,
A right wonderful, sweet-sugared error.
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And in the case of a queen, for whom adultery was treason, solitude was particularly threatening.
Much attention has been given to the position of queens in relation to the dominant literary genre of the period, troubadour poetry, or the school of courtly love. Until quite recently, such poems were interpreted as a sort of manifesto for the aspiring adulterer (medieval people, apparently, didn’t do jokes), but courtly love is best understood as an extremely elegant and complex parlour game, very much a literary movement rather than an ideology. Evidence from ecclesiastical court cases and contemporary literature shows that adultery was consistently enjoyed by
the general population, but troubadour literature, like Hollywood films today, tells us about people’s dreams, not their lives, and the men and women of the period were certainly sophisticated enough to tell the difference: ‘While literary texts offer fantasies of personal choice of spouse … they largely reinforce a lay position that marriage is a family affair.’
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Even so, Isabella of France, the only English queen to have lived openly with her lover, defied the Pope himself to pursue her extramarital relationship with Roger Mortimer. But perhaps a successful affair, like a successful murder, is the one that no one discovers. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabelle of Angoulême and Marguerite of Anjou were accused of adultery, while the romantic adventures of Catherine de Valois in widowhood had extraordinary consequences for the succession. Perhaps the most exceptional relationship of all was that between the relatively low-born Englishwoman Elizabeth Woodville and Edward IV. The handsome prince really did come for Elizabeth, but the outrage surrounding their love match proved that passion was best left to poets.
Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage scandalised the nation, and her critics were quick to find proof of her unsuitability as a royal bride in her conduct. The pride and haughtiness which would have been expected in a better-born woman were swiftly translated in her case into evidence of parvenu arrogance. Similarly, criticism of Henry I’s daughter the Empress Matilda focused on the aggressive ‘masculinity’ of her demeanour. The Empress’s contemporary and opponent, Queen Matilda of Boulogne,
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very similar things — she governed men, raised armies and fought for the crown — but she managed to do so while attracting praise. Both examples point to the centrality of correct behaviour and manners to effective queenship. In all aspects of their self-presentation, queens had to contend with the contradictory expectations contained in their anomalous political position, to tread extremely carefully between seemliness and excess. Beauty, for instance, was seen as the objective correlative of nobility. Indeed, so prodigally are compliments strewn about in the chronicles that it is very difficult to ascertain what royal women really looked like. All the same, it seems quite likely that beauty would have been pretty closely confined to the aristocracy, considering their access to better nutrition and hygiene. Given the appearance of much of the population, details like cleanliness or acceptable teeth could go a long way. The queen’s looks were part of the king’s magnificence, a manifestation of his power, yet praise of her physical charms also diminished her, by making apparent her status as a commodity: potential brides were routinely subjected to immodest physical inspections, and excessive beauty could ignite fear of the over-influential
seductress. Since visible splendour was an essential political tool, gorgeous clothes and precious jewels were ‘an attribute of the royal state, part of the drama of power’
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and as such represented a positive obligation for women, yet the queen had also to be mindful of accusations of extravagance or rapacity.