Hilton - Queens Consort

QUEENS

CONSORT

ENGLANDS MEDIEVAL QUEENS

LISA HILTON

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK

For Patrizia Moro

CONTENTS

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, Muse 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 lOrdre du Grand Esprit au Droit-Desir (Bibliothque Nationale, Paris/Bridgeman Art Library)

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

Tomb of Isabelle of Angoulme, 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 dAngleterre, by Jean Batard de Wavrin, c.147080 (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.139599, Master of the Wilton Diptych, National Gallery, London (Bridgeman Art Library)

Isabeau of Bavarias 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 Kings 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 kings 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 Englands 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

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 Gods 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.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. 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 queens 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.