Royal Marriage Secrets Read online

  However, in the other four cases the marriages seem to have been celebrated privately with little or no public ceremonial. The majority of the marriages (eight – or nine if we include the initial wedding by proxy of Edward III) took place outside the realm of England – though whether it would always be appropriate in those cases to use the modern term ‘abroad’ is open to question. The venue for most of the weddings was a church. However, a depiction of the marriage of Edward II and Isabelle of France show their wedding taking place in the open air, outside the west door of the church, and that was probably the norm. In one case (the marriage of Henry III) we have evidence that the bride received a wedding ring. In the next chapter we shall review this early period of English royal marriages again, this time in quest of the requirements expected of a suitable royal marriage partner.

  4

  SUITABLE STATUS

  * * *

  … Oh, if a virgin,

  And your affection not gone forth, I’ll make you

  The queen of Naples.

  Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2

  * * *

  Earlier we noted Fiona Macdonald’s opinion that in royal weddings the ‘bride and groom were always of mutually royal rank’.1 Of course, Macdonald had England in mind, because outside Europe no such ‘rule’ ever applied. Japanese emperors did not habitually marry the daughters of Chinese emperors or vice versa. For Asian and Native American potentates, marriage with subjects was the norm. Having now examined a number of English royal marriages, we begin to see that Macdonald’s statement also appears questionable in a medieval English context.

  The future William I married Matilda of Flanders, the daughter of a ruling aristocrat, but not of a king. The first wife of Henry I was a Scottish princess, but his second wife was noble by birth, not royal. King Stephen’s wife was also aristocratic rather than royal. The first husband of Henry I’s daughter, Matilda, was the Emperor, but her second husband – the progenitor of the Plantagenet dynasty – was a count, and their son, the first Plantagenet King of England, married a duke’s daughter. In fact of the thirteen English monarchs between William I and Edward III, less than half married foreign royalty.2 One king (William II) failed to marry. One attempt at a royal marriage (the first marriage of King John) was within the English royal family. The other seven marriages of sovereigns or would-be sovereigns in this period were aristocratic but non-royal.3

  Implicit in Macdonald’s view that English royal marriages were traditionally with other royalty is the notion that the royal brides usually tended to be foreign – since the opportunities for English royalty to marry other English royalty would obviously be somewhat limited. And in fact we can see that, while all the marriages considered in the last chapter were with Europeans, only one attempt at marriage – the first marriage attempt of King John – could be described as English. Thus it is true that in terms of modern notions of nationality, most early medieval royal marriage partners certainly were foreign.

  Here, however, we must beware of anachronism. Few, if any, of the English monarchs whose marriages were discussed in the last chapter would have regarded English as their native language.4 Most of them did not choose to be buried in England. William I was entombed in Normandy. So too was his consort, Matilda of Flanders. Adeliza of Louvain, the second wife of Henry I, retired to the Abbey of Affligem (Brabant), where she died and was buried.5 The Empress Matilda was buried in Normandy.6 Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard I and Isabelle of Angoulême are all interred at the Abbey of Fontevrault, in France. Berengaria of Navarre is also buried in France, in the chapter house of the Abbaye de l’Epau at Le Mans. Only William II, Henry I and Matilda (Edith) of Scotland were buried in England. William II lies in Winchester Cathedral; Matilda (Edith), in Westminster Abbey. Henry I was buried at Reading Abbey.7

  We should also remember that some of these monarchs spent very little time in their island kingdom while they were alive. Until the reign of King John all of them ruled territory on the European mainland in addition to the kingdom of England. In fact when John lost this mainland territory he was branded with the pejorative nickname of ‘Lackland’ – which indicates very clearly which parts of his territory had been considered the most important.

  If the King of England is regarded chiefly, not as ‘English’, but rather as the Duke of Normandy, or as the Count of Anjou, or the Duke of Aquitaine, then marriage with the daughter of a neighbouring aristocrat who ruled Angoulême, or Provence, might well appear much less ‘foreign’. The same would probably seem true of a marriage with a daughter of the King of France. Even noblewomen from the Low Countries, or daughters of the neighbouring kings of Navarre or Castile would probably not have felt very exotic at a period when modern notions of nationality did not yet exist, and when the whole of Western Europe was united by the Catholic Church and by a history which, to a very large extent, was shared.8

  At this early period, therefore, Macdonald’s bold assertion of the equality of status in traditional royal weddings – with the concomitant implication that royal weddings were normally with foreign royalty – represents a huge error. The class equality was rarely a perfect balance. Sometimes English royal personages married above them. Thus Henry I’s daughter Matilda married the Emperor. Henry I may have considered that in Matilda (Edith) of Scotland he was acquiring a wife who was something of a bargain, for in some ways the daughter of a King of Scotland, who was a descendant of the former English royal house of Wessex, could also be regarded as superior in social status to a younger son of a parvenu English ruling dynasty of bastard origin. Likewise the ‘Daughters of France’ who married Henry the Young King, Edward I, Edward II, and later also Richard II and Henry V, may well have been regarded – at least by their fathers – as superior in status to their English royal husbands. On the other hand non-royal brides like Eleanor of Aquitaine may well have been seen, at the time of their marriages, as more or less the equals of their English royal husbands.

  Another intriguing aspect of the medieval matrimonial situation is the rather curious phenomenon whereby English royal bastard brides were occasionally considered suitable consorts to be offered to foreign royalty. During the period we have already reviewed we can find two examples of this. The first was the marriage of Henry I’s illegitimate daughter, Sybilla de Normandy, with Alexander I of Scotland. The second instance was when Joan, an illegitimate daughter of King John, was married to the Welsh Prince, Llewellyn the Great.9 In the fifteenth century there would be further examples of this phenomenon. Thus, on the Feast of Candlemas (2 February) 1424, Joan Beaufort, half-niece of King Henry IV, was married to James I of Scotland. While Joan herself was not illegitimate, we shall have more to say about the questionable legitimacy of the Beaufort family later.10 And in 1484–85, we find Richard III negotiating the marriage of his niece, Elizabeth of York, who was then officially designated as illegitimate, to a Portuguese prince (the future King Manuel I).11 This was part of a royal marriage pact which also comprised Richard’s own intended marriage to the Infanta Joana of Portugal.12 Of course, these planned Portuguese royal marriages never actually took place, because of Richard III’s defeat and death at the battle of Bosworth, in August 1485: however, the plans were undoubtedly serious.

  There seems to be a popular perception to the effect that English royal brides are expected to be virgins at the time of their marriage, and recent history may offer some justification for this. However, a closer examination reveals that this ‘rule’ has also not been applied invariably. We have already seen that at the time of her marriage to Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine was not a virgin. She had been married for almost 15 years to Louis VII of France, by whom she had given birth to two daughters. In later periods divorce would be seen as an obstacle to a royal marriage, but in Eleanor’s case this issue did not arise. The Catholic Church did not admit of divorce, either in the Middle Ages or later. Eleanor’s union with the King of France was therefore terminated not by a divorce but by an annulment.
This was a formal ruling by the ecclesiastical authorities that no valid marriage between Eleanor and Louis had ever existed. Therefore strictly speaking it could not be claimed that at the time of her marriage to Henry Plantagenet Eleanor had already been married. Nevertheless the fact remained that she had been living with Louis VII for more than fourteen years, and she had borne him two children.

  Eleanor’s marriage to Henry II after the termination of her marriage to Louis VII leads us on to the wider question of how royalty were generally expected to behave when they were widowed. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the rules varied somewhat in the case of men and in the case of women. For kings, the prime consideration was the need for an heir to the throne. If a first marriage did not produce one, then a second marriage would be expected. In the case of Henry VIII this consideration was to become something of an obsession. For widowed queens consort, however, remarriage to produce an heir was not possible, since consorts held their Crown only by right of marriage and not by right of blood. Even so, some widowed queens did remarry.

  One example of a medieval widowed king is Henry I. We have seen that when he became king, in 1100, and at the fairly advanced age of about 32, Henry I had sought a suitable royal bride. He had chosen Matilda (Edith) of Scotland. When Henry was left a widower in 1118, at the age of about 50, he did not immediately remarry. At that time he still had a living legitimate son and heir, William Adelin, who was married in the following year to a daughter of the count of Anjou in order to ensure the future of Henry’s royal line. It was only when William Adelin died without heirs in 1120 that Henry I was compelled to review his own matrimonial status. His second marriage, to Adeliza of Louvain, then followed very quickly.13 Henry I remarried – and was probably expected to remarry – because he needed to try to beget an heir. However, in the event, his second marriage remained childless.

  Another example of a widowed English king of the Middle Ages is Edward I. Edward had less need than Henry I to remarry after the death of his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, as he had a living heir.14 Nevertheless, political considerations made an alliance with France desirable, and so Edward negotiated to marry Blanche of France. When Blanche was married instead to Rudolf of Habsburg, Edward was angry at first, and declared war. But subsequently he was reconciled to the French king, and married Blanche’s younger sister, Margaret. Despite the considerable age gap between the king and his new queen, this second marriage proved a success. However, Margaret was never crowned Queen of England.15 She was destined to outlive Edward I by more than ten years, but she never remarried. She lived quietly in retirement at Marlborough Castle. Although she maintained a good relationship with her half-niece and successor, Queen Isabelle, Margaret did not frequent her stepson’s court. She became a patron of the Franciscan Order, and after her death she was entombed in the Greyfriars’ Church at Newgate.

  As for Henry I’s daughter, the Empress Matilda, she is a curious example of medieval widowed royalty. She was a queen who must to all intents and purposes be regarded as a king, because she was no mere consort. Had her civil war been more successful, she would have become England’s first queen regnant, for she had blood rights to the Crown, which she could transmit. Therefore like her father, Henry I, before her, she needed heirs. When her marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor left her a childless widow, a second marriage was more or less inevitable.

  Henry I’s second wife, Queen Adeliza, offers us one example of the remarriage of a widowed consort. When Henry I’s death left Adeliza a widow in 1135, she at first retired to Wilton Abbey, near Salisbury. However, she was only 32 years old, and in due course she set a precedent for future widowed consorts by marrying a second husband: William d’Aubigny, Earl of Arundel (born 1109, died 1176). William acquired Arundel Castle and his title as a result of his marriage to Adeliza, the castle having been part of the queen’s jointure. By William, Adeliza had a number of children, becoming an ancestress of the subsequent d’Aubigny and Fitzalan earls of Arundel, and through them, of the Mowbray and Howard dukes of Norfolk16 – and thus an ancestress also of Anne Boleyn and Lucy Walter, key figures whom we shall meet in later chapters.17 Unlike some later second marriages of widowed royal consorts, that of Adeliza seems to have been approved by the royal family. Both King Stephen and his rival the Empress Matilda remained on good terms with her, and Henry II subsequently confirmed d’Aubigny’s tenure of the lands and property which he had acquired as a result of his marriage to Adeliza.

  Adeliza of Louvain was far from being the only medieval queen to remarry after being widowed. King John’s wife, Isabelle of Angoulême, was only 28 years old when her husband left her a widow. After arranging the coronation of her young son, she left England, to rule her native Angoulême. There, less than four years after King John’s death, she married Hugh X of Lusignan. In this case the widowed queen’s remarriage had not received the approval of the royal council in England – who, indeed, had not even been asked. The wedding therefore caused a good deal of trouble. Initially Isabelle’s dower lands were confiscated by the council, and payment of her pension was suspended. Isabelle and her new husband retaliated by refusing to hand over Isabelle’s royal daughter, the Princess Joan, then betrothed to the Scottish king. Eventually, however, peace was made. Subsequently Isabelle’s numerous children by her second marriage made their way to their half-brother’s court in England.

  Widowed queens and the question of their possible remarriage remained a problematic issue throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Even in modern times this has had an echo – in the case of the divorced Diana, Princess of Wales. However, our last example of a medieval widowed queen in this chapter is Isabelle of France, the consort of Edward II. In some ways Isabelle’s marriage to Edward seems to have been far from happy (but see below), and from 1325 (possibly even earlier) Isabelle was involved in a love affair with Roger Mortimer, Earl of March. Mortimer, however, had a wife of his own, and he and Isabelle were never married. Nevertheless, together they overthrew – and possibly murdered – Isabelle’s husband. Later Mortimer was executed by Isabelle’s son, Edward III. Isabelle, however, had a long life. Following her aunt and predecessor, Margaret of France (the widow of Edward I) Isabelle developed an interest in the Franciscan Order. She ultimately joined this order just before she died. Her body was carried to London, where Isabelle was buried close to her aunt Margaret (widow of Edward I), at the Greyfriars’ Church, Newgate. Interestingly, Isabelle asked to be buried in her wedding dress, and she had the heart of her royal husband, King Edward II, placed in the same grave with her.

  5

  IRREGULAR

  ROYAL AFFAIRS

  * * *

  Ce n’est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée:

  C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.

  No longer a passion concealed from the light of day,

  But Venus in all her power, grasping her prey.

  Racine, Phèdre, act 1 (translation: J. Ashdown-Hill)

  * * *

  So far we have looked at the royal marriages from the Norman Conquest to the reign of Edward III, and we have identified the royal consorts during these four centuries. In most cases we have also noted where their weddings were celebrated, and in a few cases we have found a little evidence to show how certain parts of the marriage ceremony were conducted – though in that respect there are also many gaps in our knowledge.

  We have also considered what the chosen consorts have to teach us in respect of the underlying criteria by which English sovereigns of these centuries appear to have selected their marriage partners. This information has to be deduced, because there is no surviving document which sets out the criteria explicitly. From the examples, however, we have been able to conclude that social status roughly equal to that of the English monarch was generally expected of a prospective marriage partner. However, this did not invariably mean that the marriage partner had to be of royal blood. At a time when the English sovereigns were feudal dependents of the French Crown,
daughters of other French tenants-in-chief were seen as acceptable consorts. So too were the daughters of other European rulers who might have less than royal status.

  In general, the queens consort chosen for England during these approximately 300 years were expected to be virgins at the time of their marriages. However, there was no absolute rule on this point, and women with a previous matrimonial history were definitely not ruled out, particularly if the king had strong personal reasons for preferring them – as the example of Eleanor of Aquitaine clearly shows.

  The case of Eleanor of Aquitaine also indicates that sometimes personal attraction played a significant part in the choice of a bride. But the same case also shows that such attraction was no guarantee, either of marital fidelity, or of lasting happiness. In fact the outcomes of the royal marriages we have reviewed so far were variable. Some marriages seem to have been very happy, but this could prove to be the case even when the partner was initially selected for political rather than personal reasons – as the two marriages of Edward I, for example, both clearly demonstrate.

  Let us now consider the irregular royal partnerships of the same period. First, what word should we use to describe the woman or women with whom a king conducted an extra-marital affair? The common practice is to use the word ‘mistress’ for all such sexual encounters. However, this word was certainly not in use with that meaning in the Middle Ages. The word ‘mistress’ can be found in texts from the sixteenth century onwards, but in the sixteenth century its meaning was different. At that time it could mean ‘wife’! Thus the word ‘mistress’ needs to be regarded with some caution, particularly when it appears in ancient source material.