Aidan Norrie - Tudor and Stuart Consorts: Power, Influence, and Dynasty

This series focuses on works specializing in gender analysis, womens studies, literary interpretation, and cultural, political, constitutional, and diplomatic history. It aims to broaden our understanding of the strategies that queensboth consorts and regnants, as well as female regentspursued in order to wield political power within the structures of male-dominant societies. The works describe queenship in Europe as well as many other parts of the world, including East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Islamic civilization.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14523

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These readable and incisive essays bring to life the astonishing range of consorts in the Tudor and Stuart periods, including the six wives of Henry VIII, two foreign princes, and even the wives of Oliver Cromwell and his son. Consorts fertility (or lack of it) shaped national stories, but this collection shows that they mattered in other ways too and how they contributed to the political, cultural, and religious life of England and Scotland.

Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Royal consorts have played an important role throughout English (and British) history. Yet, their lives and tenures have been treated unevenly by successive generations of scholars and popular historians. This volume, along with its three companions, aims to redress this uneven treatment.

As the success of the Penguin Monarchs series has shown, there is much interest in more analytical biographies of royalsfor academics and interested readers alike. While the last two decades have seen the publication of a plethora of both scholarly and popular biographies on Englands consorts, there is no single, scholarly compendium wherein all the consorts since the Norman Conquest can be consulted: it is this curious lacuna that these volumes seek to fill. In bringing together an international team of experts, we have endeavoured to create a vital reference work for scholars, students, and the wider public.

While all consorts held an equal positionthat is, they were all spouses of a reigning monarchtheir treatment by both history and historians has varied considerably. Some, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Margaret of Anjou, Anne Boleyn, and Prince Albert, have been the subject of countless biographies, articles, and cultural works and adaptations. On the other hand, non-experts could be forgiven for not being aware of Berengaria of Navarre, Isabella of Valois, Catherine of Braganza , or Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. Certainly, the surviving evidence for the tenures of each consort differs greatly, and other factors must be examinedit is no coincidence that each of these four unfamiliar consorts was not the mother of their husbands successor. Nevertheless, these volumes treat the consorts as equitably as possible, offering biographies that provide an insight into how each consort perceived and shaped their role, and how their spouse and subjects responded to their reign. While all occupying the same office, each consort brought their own interpretation to the role, and by contextualising a consorts tenure against both their predecessors and successors, these volumes illuminate some fascinating continuities, as well as some unexpected idiosyncrasies.

In putting these volumes together, numerousand sometimes competingfactors were carefully considered. On the one hand, we erred on the side of inclusivity throughout, hence the inclusion of Margaret of France , Elizabeth Cromwell , and Dorothy Cromwell the wives of Henry the Young King, and Lords Protector Oliver Cromwell and Richard Cromwell, respectively. There can be no doubt that these women all functioned as a consort in the traditional sense of the term during their husbands period in power. Conversely, we have not included Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, or Guilford Dudleyhusbands of Empress Matilda and Lady Jane Grey , respectively. There is much more to be said on the issue of monarchical succession in England: scholars especially still have yet to really come to terms with how to conceptualise the succession when it deviates from the idealthat is, when the deceased king (yes, king) was succeeded by his eldest son. The absence of Geoffrey and Dudley here should not be taken as an endorsement of the view that their wives did not rule England: rather, we acknowledge that regardless of the political power their wives wielded, they themselves did not function as consorts to their wives. It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that they do not appear within these pages. These men certainly supported their wivesindeed, much more could be said about the soft power they exercisedbut like Sophia Dorothea of Celle and Wallis Simpson, they themselves did not serve as the consort of a reigning monarch.