Queens Consort
Authors: Lisa Hilton
QUEENS
CONSORT
ENGLAND’S MEDIEVAL QUEENS
LISA HILTON
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK
For Patrizia Moro
CONTENTS
13 Anne of Bohemia and Isabelle of France
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
W
ho 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 authority 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.