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  QUEENS

  CONSORT

  ENGLAND’S MEDIEVAL QUEENS

  LISA HILTON

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  For Patrizia Moro

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  ENGLAND AND NORMANDY

  1 Matilda of Flanders

  2 Matilda of Scotland

  3 Adeliza of Louvain

  4 Matilda of Boulogne

  PART TWO

  AN EMPIRE TO THE SOUTH

  5 Eleanor of Aquitaine

  6 Berengaria of Navarre

  7 Isabelle of Angoulême

  PART THREE

  PLANTAGENET QUEENS

  8 Eleanor of Provence

  9 Eleanor of Castile

  10 Marguerite of France

  PART FOUR

  DEPOSITIONS, RESTORATIONS

  11 Isabella of France

  12 Philippa of Hainault

  13 Anne of Bohemia and Isabelle of France

  PART FIVE

  LANCASTER AND YORK

  14 Joanna of Navarre

  15 Catherine de Valois

  16 Marguerite of Anjou

  17 Elizabeth Woodville

  18 Anne Neville

  19 Elizabeth of York

  Conclusion

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Endpapers: Isabella of France and her troops at Hereford (British Library / Bridgeman Art Library)

  William the Conqueror exhorts his troops to prepare themselves for the battle against the English army, detail from the Bayeux Tapestry, Musée de la Tapisserie, Bayeux, France (Bridgeman Art Library)

  Matilda of Scotland seal (British Library)

  Henry I, his descendants and the White Ship (British Library)

  Coin showing Stephen and Matilda of Boulogne (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

  Nave and apse of the abbey church with the effigies of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Fontevrault (Bridgeman Art Library)

  Effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Fontevrault Abbey, Fontevrault (Bridgeman Art Library)

  Departure for the Crusades, French book illumination, from Statutes de l’Ordre du Grand Esprit au Droit-Desir (Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Effigy of Berengaria of Navarre, after 1230, Le Mans Cathedral (Topfoto)

  Tomb of Isabelle of Angoulême, Fontevrault Abbey, Fontevrault (Bridgeman Art Library)

  Eleanor of Provence and Henry III (Bridgeman Art Library)

  Eleanor Cross at Geddington, Northamptonshire (Collections Picture Library)

  Marriage of Edward II to Isabella of France at Boulogne, Church of Notre Dame, from Anciennes Chroniques d’Angleterre, by Jean Batard de Wavrin, c.1470—80 (British Library/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Effigy of Philippa of Hainault, Westminster Abbey (Dean and Chapter of Westminster)

  Richard II & Anne of Bohemia coronation, Westminster Abbey (Dean and Chapter of Westminster)

  Richard II Presented to the Virgin and Child by his Patron Saint John the Baptist and Saints Edward and Edmund, c.1395—99, Master of the Wilton Diptych, National Gallery, London (Bridgeman Art Library)

  Isabeau of Bavaria’s arrival in France (British Library/The Art Archive)

  Joan of Navarre and Henry IV effigy, Canterbury cathedral (Topfoto)

  Catherine de Valois wooden effigy, Westminster Abbey (Dean and Chapter of Westminster)

  Page from the Bedford Hours for John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, c.1423 (British Library/AKG Images)

  Catherine de Valois giving birth, manuscript detail (Topfoto)

  Marguerite of Anjou, manuscript detail (Topfoto)

  Elizabeth Woodville, manuscript (Bridgeman Art Library)

  Elizabeth Woodville, oil on panel (The President and Fellows of Queens’ College, Cambridge)

  Detail from The Pageants of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (British Library/The Art Archive)

  Detail from The Pageants of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick showing the ancestry of Anne Neville c.1483 (British Library)

  Elizabeth of York wooden funeral effigy, Westminster Abbey (Dean and Chapter of Westminster)

  Coin commemorating marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York, 1486 (The Art Archive)

  MAPS

  England in the Twelfth Century

  The Angevin Empire in 1154

  GENEALOGICAL TABLES

  The Normans and Angevins

  The Plantaganets

  The Houses of Lancaster and York

  ‘Royalty is a government in which the attention of a nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.’ Walter Bagehot The English Constitution

  ‘It is to be supposed that Henry IV was married, since he certainly had four sons, but it is not in my power to inform the Reader who was his wife.’ Jane Austen A History of England

  INTRODUCTION

  Who is the Queen? The King’s wife? Or something more than that? In the period between the Norman Conquest and the accession of Mary Tudor in the sixteenth century, no woman ruled England as queen in her own right. The role and status of king were constantly in the process of redefinition, an ongoing negotiation between royal, ecclesiastical and aristocratic powers, but they remained throughout essentially constitutional, their authority enshrined in and upheld by law. No equivalent constitutional role existed for the king’s consort. Yet between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, English queenship evolved an identity of its own, an identity predicated on, but not limited to marriage to the king. The story of England’s medieval queens is composed of two entwined narrative strands: the first the development of queenly tradition and practice, the second the diverse lives of the very individual women who controlled, enlarged and manipulated their customary heritage. It is this combination of the abstract and the intimate, this synthesis of statecraft and the self, which makes the exploration of English queenship so exciting and so important to our understanding of the evolution of the country. The political, religious, administrative and cultural history of the emergent English nation cannot be fully considered without reference to the role of the queen; at the same time, queens are exceptional among women of the medieval period in that we can know them more throroughly as people than could almost any of their contemporaries.

  The story of English queenship begins with a French princess. In the centuries after the collapse of Roman imperialism, Europe experienced a perpetually fluctuating regathering of territorial power. Put simply, such power was achieved by violence, but the role of kings was increasingly delineated and formalised by religious liturgy. While their status had yet to become institutional, much less constitutional, a similar process began to arise in the case of queens. As early as 751, evidence exists of the blessing of queens, while two ninth-century texts, De Ordine Palatii and Liber de Rectoribus Christianis, contributed to the understanding of a queen’s duties. The queen orders the king’s household and maintains his royal regalia, she distributes provisions and presides in his hall, dispensing rewards to his warriors and gifts to foreign emissaries. There is also an emphasis on the queen as a model of virtue and a prudent counsellor to her husband. Here already is a sense in which the office of queen is invested with authority; the ‘rectrix’ of De Rectoribus ‘governs’ and ‘rules’. The first ceremony through which such authorit
y was formally bestowed is the consecration of Judith, daughter of the French King Charles the Bald, on her marriage in 856 to Aethelwulf, the King of the West Saxons. The twelve-year-old bride was married to her middle-aged husband at Verberie-sur-Oise ‘and after Bishop Hincmar of Reims had consecrated her and placed a diadem on her head he [Aethelwulf] formally conferred on her the title of queen, which was something not customary before then to him or his people’.1

  Consecration, coronation. These are the processes which set a queen apart from other women in a mystery she shared only with her husband. The concept of ‘God’s anointed’ seems antiquated, if not obsolete, in an age when royalty has become for many something of a tragicomic soap opera, but it is still possessed of tremendous potency even today. When millions watched the televised coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, the cameras turned reverently away at the moment of anointing, but one witness present described the Act of Dedication as ‘the most wonderful thing I ever saw … when she lifted the Sword and laid it on the altar … She was putting her whole heart and soul to the service of her people’.2 Though the ceremony broadcast that day from Westminster Abbey had developed in many ways, it was not in essence so different from the ninth-century rite celebrated in a field in northern France. Very few people may nowadays believe that royalty is semi-divine, but queenmaking connects us, even at this end of this century, with our most atavistic selves. The Christian appropriation of ancient beliefs about women’s sacred fertility explicitly articulated the connection between queenship and earlier birth cults; consecration was thus apotheosis. The transformative power of coronation was noted in the eleventh century by Godfrey of Reims in reference to William the Conqueror’s daughter Adela of Blois who, unlike her older siblings, born while their parents were a mere duke and duchess, is credited with ‘fully royal blood’. An unruly twinge of reverence for such beliefs might now be dismissed as embarrassing sentimentality, but there existed no sense of the irrationality of such a contention for the period in question. Just as the Church was omnipresent for every individual, from peasant to magnate, so the idea of difference, of selection by God, coloured the concept of the medieval monarch. Though there is ample, touching, funny evidence for the humanity of medieval queens, it is essential to remember that they were isolated as well as elevated by consecration. They were unique, they were sacred, they were magical.

  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.’3 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’.4 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.’5 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’.6 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.