Queens Consort

by Lisa Hilton

  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.’7 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.8

  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.’9 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, did 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’10 and as such represented a positive obligation for women, yet the queen had also to be mindful of accusations of extravagance or rapacity.

  As aristocratic elites across Europe began to forge a strong cultural identity, ‘courtly’ behaviour became a prop to the social order. Violence still governed the world, but it needed to be contained and controlled in order to be effectively deployed. Hence manners and courtesy, codified and romanticised in chivalric literature, were an essential means of manipulating behaviour. The minutiae of social conduct — how to sit, stand, enter a room, eat, wash, dance — became crucial signifiers of rank and prestige. The distinguished French historian Georges
Duby described this process of coalescence as ‘the fusion of the aristocracy’,11 and it was one in which women, particularly queens, had a central role. Walter Map depicted the sorry state of Henry II’s court after the departure of Eleanor of Aquitaine for Poitiers: a squalid, filthy place where the food was uneatable and the wine so tainted that the wincing courtiers had to filter it through their teeth. Eleanor of Castile took a dim view of the discomforts of royal accommodation and quickly installed glass windows and gardens and promoted the consumption of fruit. Such ‘women’s touches’ were not entirely superficial. The queen’s presence demanded, in theory at least, a higher standard of manners and behaviour and, as the exemplar for the court, she was also in a position to fulfil her role as cultural ambassador. From the impressive promotion of vernacular literature by the Anglo-Norman queens at the beginning of the period to Elizabeth of York’s familial involvement with the printer William Caxton at its end, English queens were particularly associated with literary innovation, but they were also influential on the way the court lived, dressed, ate and entertained. Matilda of Boulogne and Marguerite of Anjou proved that when it came to necessity, a queen could be no mean general, but military success was increasingly balanced by the status accorded to the civility of a court, in which art, music, poetry and deportment gave the measure of royal power.

  From Saxon times, women had been especially connected with the memorialisation of the dead (as the Sachsenspiel laws under which Anne of Bohemia was raised makes explicit), so queens were able to continue the tradition of glorifying and sanctifying their ancestry by initiating and participating as patrons in the most prestigious of all manifestations of power: the establishment of religious houses. That the Church was the backbone of Western civilisation is no longer a very fashionable view, but tension between royal and ecclesiastical powers was a source of tremendous energy as well as dissent. In the founding of monasteries and the sponsoring of new orders such as the Dominicans and the Franciscans, queens found themselves at the heart of the intellectual debates of their times. They corresponded, and sometimes dared to quarrel, with popes and archbishops and promoted their own candidates to ecclesiastical sees. Their gifts to the Church not only advanced the arts but affirmed their own status as patronesses and provided a means of entering the political world even as the expansion of administrative courts reduced their direct opportunities to act as counsellors.

  The briefest assessment of English queens consort demonstrates that they cannot be reduced to mere corollaries of their husbands. Nor are they easily categorised. As this book hopes to show, it is possible to establish a consistent picture of the development of queenship itself, but such a picture is constantly straining against individual women’s responses to their position. What they were not was passive or powerless. What they were, by the nature of their position, is remarkable, in many senses aberrant. Here they are, an exceptional confederacy: magnificent, courageous, foolish, impetuous — splendid in their royal array.

  A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

  Dower and dowry: Dowry was the payment (in money, lands or both) provided by the bride’s family that she brought to her marriage. Dower is the provision made by a husband for his wife after his death.

  Princes and princesses: These titles were not until the fourteenth century widely applied to the children of kings, who were usually styled according to their birthplace, or as ‘Lord’ or ‘Lady’. However, for the sake of clarity, the terms are sometimes employed anachronistically to make it clear that the children mentioned are royal.

  Court: The date of the existence of a royal court, and of what precisely it consisted, are matters of much scholarly discussion. Here the term is used purely in a general sense to refer to the place where the king was, or to the circle around him.

  Consistency of titles: Many of the figures in this book were known by a number of different titles in the course of their lives. To avoid confusion they are called by the first and last titles they held, where relevant, e.g., Henry of Bolingbroke/Henry IV, or simply by the last title they held.

  Names: There is much discrepancy in medieval spelling and ‘proper’ names are a matter of taste as well as convention. In the following pages ‘Eleanor’ is used rather than ‘Alienor’ for Eleanor of Aquitaine, as the sound is similar but the anglicised version easier on the eye in the English language, while the French spelling of Marguerite of Anjou’s name has been retained since it is doubtful that anyone in her lifetime called her Margaret. Joanna of Navarre is often known as Joan or Jeanne, but the contemporary pronunciation is preferred here, as is the traditional spelling of ‘Woodville’ rather than the more accurate but less easily pronounced ‘Wydeville’. Isabelle of France and Isabelle of Angoulême have kept their French spelling, while Edward II’s queen, another Isabelle of France, is distinguished as Isabella.

  PART ONE

  ENGLAND AND NORMANDY

  NORMANS AND ANGEVINS

  CHAPTER 1

  MATILDA OF FLANDERS

  ‘The friend of piety and the soother of distress’

  Matilda of Flanders never expected to be Queen of England. Initially, she was not much attracted to the idea of becoming Duchess of Normandy. A story in the Chronicle of Tours claims that when she learned Duke William of Normandy had proposed for her, she angrily declared she would never marry a bastard, upon which William forced himself into her bedroom in Bruges and soundly beat her. Another version has the illegitimate Duke dragging her from her horse and pursuing his rough courtship in the roadside mud. Matilda was apparently so overcome by this display of macho passion that she took to her bed and announced she would never marry anyone else. The tale ‘may be regarded of more interest to the student of psychology than the student of history’,1 but as with many interpretations of medieval history, what contemporaries could believe had happened is sometimes as revealing as what actually did.

  Matilda was descended from Charlemagne and the Saxon king Alfred the Great and her mother, Adela, was a daughter of the King of France. Her prospective husband may have been a duke, but his title gentrified a family that was only a few generations’ distance from Viking marauders, whereas her own paternal line, the counts of Flanders, had ruled since the ninth century. But if Matilda objected to the match, her father, Count Baldwin IV, saw a Norman alliance as a contribution to Flanders’ growing status as a political power. In the end, that alliance was to become more profitable than the Count could ever have imagined.

  Yet when William and Matilda were betrothed in 1049, the status of both Duke and duchy might have made any bride apprehensive. The rights of the dukes of Normandy had been recognised in the early tenth century and William was a direct descendant of the duchy’s first ruler, Rolf the Viking. After a splendid career of raiding and pillaging in France, Scotland and Ireland, Rolf (or Rollo) was baptised by the Archbishop of Rouen some time before 918 and settled down to a new life as a Christian ruler. Five generations later, in 1034, Duke Robert, William’s father, felt sufficiently detached from his pagan ancestors to set off on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He died on his return journey in 1035, leaving a seven-year-old boy as his heir.

  The first years of William’s minority rule saw a catalogue of anarchic and brutal violence. The archbishop of Rouen, Count Alan of Brittany and the lords Osbern and Turold had been appointed guardians to the boy, but the archbishop died in 1037, followed by Count Alan in 1040. The Count’s replacement, Gilbert of Brionne, was murdered a few months later by assassins in the pay of the Archbishop’s son. Turold was killed at the same time. Then Osbern, who acted as William’s steward, ‘unexpectedly had his throat cut one night … while he and the Duke were sound asleep in the Duke’s chamber at Vaudreuil’.2 The homicidal avarice of competing factions of the Norman nobility keen to take advantage of William’s weakness to seize lands and power for themselves instilled such fear in the boy duke of the treachery within his own household that he was often reduced to sheltering in peasants’ cottages.

  William’s per
sonal survival was dependent mainly on the historical relationship between Normandy and the kings of France. The Norman dukes had been vassals of the kings since 968, and in 1031 King Henry I, Matilda’s maternal uncle, had taken refuge at Rouen during a period of civil war. With the help of William’s grandfather, Duke Richard II, he had managed to recover his kingdom. When, after a decade of bloody skirmishes, war broke out in Normandy in 1046, William appealed to Henry. Together they fought the first significant battle of William’s distinguished military career, at Val-es-Dunes near Caen in 1047, against a rebel army led by William’s cousin Guy of Burgundy. William won, but for the next thirteen years he was to find himself almost constantly at war.

  The marriage between William and Matilda took place towards the end of 1051. In the beginning it was surrounded by controversy. Although it had been planned in 1049, the match was banned in the autumn of that year by Pope Leo IX at the Council of Reims on the grounds of consanguinity. Christian marriage as it was to be understood by future generations was a relatively new invention in the eleventh century, and as part of increasing reforms the Church was anxious to turn a custom into a regulated institution. Canon law forbade the union of individuals who were related in certain ‘prohibited degrees’, and William and Matilda were fifth cousins. Family connections were further complicated by a marriage contract between Matilda’s mother, Adela, and Duke Richard III of Normandy, William’s uncle, before her marriage to Count Baldwin (precontract was another invalidating factor), and by the fact that after the death of Matilda’s grandmother, Ogiva, her grandfather, Baldwin IV, had taken as his second wife Eleanor, a daughter of Duke Richard II of Normandy. Another theory relating to the papal objection is that Matilda herself was already married, to a man named Gerbod, by whom she had a daughter, Gundrada, who eventually became the wife of William of Warenne, first Earl of Surrey. This story has, however, been dismissed as ‘in the highest degree impossible’.3 Nevertheless, the union did not receive a retrospective papal sanction, from Nicholas II, until the second Lateran Council of 1059.