Gone Medieval - Role of Medieval Queens

Episode Date: July 24, 2021

What was the role of a queen in the Medieval Age? Was she there to strengthen the position of her family and build alliances to protect the interests of England? To stand idly by as her husband took decisions for the nation, then took mistresses for himself? Or could she have a more active role? In this episode with Dr Joanna Laynesmith, we explore the vital historical discipline of medieval queenship, looking at the role of the four women crowned queen of England during the last half- century of the medieval period. Joanna is the author of ‘The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship, 1445-1503’.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. Medieval queens often existed in the shadow of their husbands and sons. The period saw no female ruler of England, but the roles played by queens were central to the power politics of the Middle Ages. I'm delighted to be joined today by Joanna Lane Smith, who is an expert on medieval queenship, to talk about these fascinating women and the power.

that they held in their hands. Thank you for joining us Joanna. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Fabulous. So I guess the first question I would like to ask is was there a medieval ideal of who and what a queen should be? There was. It probably changed. Well it certainly did change to a certain extent over time, but she should be young and fertile when she arrived at the king's side. She should very much be somebody who was going to support and strengthen the king. So in the early middle ages, there would be choosing women who were quite often the daughters of their most senior noblemen who could strengthen their position, or quite often members of families who had a possible claim to the throne as well, so sort of neutralised that.

Then as time went on, things changed partly because, of course, the church was against marrying people who were too close, so they were sort of needing to look a bit further afield for brides. But then the really key thing was the Norman conquest, because after that kings weren't just kings of England, they were also dukes of Normandy. And so first of all, Henry I, although he himself married a potential rival dynasty, he married into the Anglo-Saxon royal family that his father had usurped. But for his son, he wanted to find a bride who would protect Normandy. And although, of course, that son died in the white ship disaster, this then became the norm,

especially as property that the English kings held expanded across France. And so for most of the Middle Ages, it's a question of finding someone who's going to protect the interests of England in France. So did the Norman Conquest kind of refocus the idea of queenship to make it a more international requirement for a king from that point onwards? Yes, it did really, because of the possessions that came with it. And of course, sometimes they were looking for an alliance with the King of France to prevent him invading their lands.

And sometimes they were looking for an alliance with somebody who could strengthen their position against the King of France. That varied over time. Obviously, there were occasions when some other political need came up, but the classic one being Edward D.E. second's Queen Isabella famously took the throne from him and in order to do that she needed alliance with somebody from overseas and so she arranged a marriage for her son, the future Edward III with Haino. So that was all about internal politics. So yeah, there's always exceptions to

this rule. And presumably when we're talking medieval marriages at this kind of level, love is never really normally consideration. Well, funnily enough, they like to think it was. the chronicles, particularly for King Edgar, before the conquest, and Henry the First and Henry the Fifth, who were all very popular, strong kings. The Chronicles suggest that they were in love with the women they chose to marry. Actually, you can see the really strong political reasons for it, but they liked the idea that they might have been as well. And then, of course, right at the very end of the Middle Ages, love really does begin to play a part. So Edward III's heir, Edward the Black Prince secretly married somebody for love, who he knew was completely unsuitable, because

She'd had quite a controversial marital past that was Joan of Kent. So we would have had an English-born queen, definitely chosen for love had Edward the Black Prince not died. And then half a century or so later, Edward VIII succeeded in marrying for love. But it wasn't a completely odd idea even before they did that. And I guess there's marriages that we can see, particularly some of the longer ones.

I'm thinking Henry III and Edward III, where we might think that love grew into those relationships, even if it wasn't there at the start. They absolutely hoped that a marriage should be a loving relationship. So usually it was thought you'll choose someone but you want to grow to love them. And that was what the expectation was. So yeah, Edward I made a really big thing about when his wife, Felon of Castile died the huge mourning and having lots of memorials put up to her across the country

as a testament of how sorry he was that she died and so forth. So yeah, they would definitely hope that they would afford in love with them eventually. The remaining Ellen Cross is a fantastic things to go and see. I think aren't there's three original ones left standing. I think the markers for where she spent the night after her death. Once the king has chosen his queen, what would the nation then expect from this woman who was arriving off and from overseas?

Did the nation have an idea of a model of good queenship? I think it would be fair to say that there's different levels of society would have different priorities. The majority of ordinary people would just be focused on. She needs to produce a child so that we've got a secure dynasty. That was very much the priority as far as. they were concerned, but also that she should be a means for the country to be at peace. So there was two key things really.

Higher up the echelons, they were kind of going to be more concerned about how she would practice her everyday queenship, as it were, whether she would listen to their petitions to influence the king, how she would actually go about perhaps negotiating between them. So they'd want somebody who was impartial between the different lords. they'd want somebody who was keen to support religious foundations and patronage, that kind of thing. So they'd have a richer sense of what they wanted her to be doing. And presumably to some extent, the preconceptions of what she may or may not bring might

might well be affected by where she comes from, so whether this is a state that is traditionally viewed as an enemy state or a friendly state? It certainly could do, yes. So if the marriage had been about making peace with a country they'd previously been at war with, then it would be more complicated if she would. she brought with her some of her fellow countrymen. And Margaret Vanjou, for instance, was sort of bringing Frenchmen and yet they've been at war with France for a long time.

So she kind of had to leave almost everybody behind and had a very small number of women with her. Whereas, say, Philip of Haino, who, as I've said, was part of an alliance to help Edward III get on the throne. She had rather more people with her. And in fact, so one of her men, Paine de Rowette, his daughter was famously Catherine Swinford, who ended up marrying into the royal family.

So that varied. and the number of foreigners they brought with them then had, of course, a wider impact on court culture, court fashions. You quite often get people being uppity about in unsuitable fashions that are brought in or that kind of thing by these foreigners. But sometimes it's also, it's luxury,

it's exciting, it's exotic, and they kind of want that. And often it seems that a queen can't really win in a way it's not what she does so much as how people already predisposed towards her as to how they judge what she's doing. So she's often, I guess, fighting an uphill battle before she even arrives in the country sometimes. For some of them, absolutely, yes. So if we've reached the point where a king has chosen his queen and the nation now has this new queen,

the queen will traditionally undergo a coronation to become the king's consort. How significant was that coronation? I'm thinking in comparison to a king's coronation where he acquires this regal, royal, but also religious aspect to his kingship. Did any of that kind of rub off on? transferred to the Queen as well? I think it did to an extent. Obviously, the evolution of it is a little bit different, but it's actually very early on that queens first get anointed in some way, even before England's unified. But so the very first coronation of a Queen is for Judith,

who was the second wife of King Ethel Wolf of Wessex. And Ethelwolf already had lots of adult sons, and he was marrying this very young daughter of Charles the Bald of France. And the French king was very keen to make sure she was secure in this new land she was going to. So it was about strengthening her position. It was actually, of course, very unusual at that point for kings to be marrying abroad at all. So it was only because he was in this strong position he'd got into that he was sort of looking abroad for a foreign wife. So that's kind of how it originated. Very quickly, it's taken up by the generations below him in cases where kings have more than one wife. The first wife hasn't died necessarily. Sometimes she's been set aside. And it's like,

well, who should be the heir to the throne, the children of which queen? And so it becomes a way of choosing which queen. So there'll be an earlier one. He said, well, I don't want her children to be king, marrying the next one. Then there's a coronation for her to sort of set her up as this is the superior queen. So from that kind of early stage, there's a sense of the children of a crowned queen are more throneworthy. So it's got that sense to it quite early on. And then sort of fast forward really into the 14th century, they're changing the liturgy.

they're making it more like the kings, there's more sort of a sense of her being a sharer in the king's power, obviously subservant, sharer, more of a complementary role to the king, and that's what's coming through in the changes in literature there, and really emphasising her role in protecting the church and as an intercessor. Queens are increasingly being crowned at the same time as there's a new idea within kingship that the kings are meant to be more like Christ, which you might think had sort of happened as soon as kings were being anointed, but they weren't. Kings were originally modelled on sort of the Old Testament kings, but then they come to associate themselves with Christ. And that sort of tall is in with an increase in the status of the Virgin Mary, and images

of the Virgin Mary being crowned. So then queens are meant to be like the Virgin Mary. So you've got these evolving ideologies in tandem. And of course, the Virgin Mary's perceived most important roles are, A, producing a child, Jesus, and interceding with Jesus on behalf of the people. So a queens of England were meant to do the same thing. Very slightly odd dynamic. if kings are equivalent to Christ and their wives are the equivalent to the Virgin Mary Jesus' mother. That's a slightly odd, out-of-ciltre dynamic. It is an out-of-ciltre dynamic. The way it works is because of the mental gymnastics that medieval theologians and thinkers were capable of, really,

that the Virgin Mary was also in some ways a representation of the church, and yet the church was also seen as the bride of Christ. It's all this language kind of enables them to make these links, which, as you say, to us looks a little bit weird, but they didn't seem to have a problem with that. And queens were much more in their images and so forth, explicitly linked with the Virgin Mary. Later on, you get quite a few images, for instance, of Elizabeth Woodville, particularly dressed exactly as you'd see the Virgin Mary dressed. So once a queen has been crowned, where does her household and her lifestyle come from? How is this all funded? How does the king make allowances for his wife?

Well, so early on, the queens were normally coming because they were the daughters of powerful lords. They were coming with a certain amount of estates from their father in the first place, but the king would also grant them some lands. And then as it evolves, the king is having to provide more of the lands directly. Usually the father, the foreign father, would sort of give gifts of money and what have you instead. So it was sort of still equivalent. So it was partly from these lands. There were partly sort of grants that were made from customs and taxes and so forth. There was also something called Queen's Gold, which was a specific extra tax.

when anybody paid a fine for something that wasn't compulsory, that was kind of a bit of luxury, like in order to krenelate their castle or something, they'd crenellate their house and make it a castle, that kind of thing. They would have to pay an extra 10%, and that went to the Queen. Particularly in the 12th, 13th century, that was a really important part of Queen's income, but it did cause quite a lot of resentment. Sometimes people felt, well, this wasn't really a voluntary fine, I have no option but to do this. And so gradually, you find, sort of, especially in the 15th century, they largely abandoned collecting that because it was so unpopular and relied more and more just on the landed estates. Being the person behind additional taxation never feels like a good place to be.

No, it certainly doesn't. Never going to make you popular. How much independence would all of this have given the queen from the king? Was she really still quite dependent on him? Or did she have some degree of independence in her money and her lands? She was unusually independent as a married woman. They sort of evolved the notion that a queen should actually hold her. her lands very much in the same way, well, some of her lands in the same way as a widow did,

actually independent of a man. And so she had a separate council who would advise her on how she was administering them and so forth. It still depended on personalities. So for instance, I'm in Philippe of Haino, it seemed, didn't manage very well with her finances and so forth. And so eventually her king, Edward III, brought their households back together again and had them all managed together because she was doing badly with her finances. And some queens, you actually find are quite often living more independently from the king there away a lot, their household is more separate. So Margaret of Anjou, for instance, spends a lot more time in separate places than Elizabeth Woodville, who spends a lot more time in the king's household. And when she's with the

king, she's obviously not needing her own servants and so forth as much. And do you think that was, to any extent, linked to the reliance of the queen on the king politically? Margaret of Bonjou, you know, came from France and had her own kind of status as a noble woman from France. And France, whereas Elizabeth Woodville, her position and power relied almost exclusively on her marriage to Edward IV. So does that play a part in how detached they're able to be from the king? It probably does. And I think there's also just a sense of, you know, Elizabeth and Edward probably were in love throughout. I'm sure she loved him too. And so it was sort of more keen to be with him. There was also a fact that Margaret Van Gogh was given far more income than Elizabeth Woodville. So if Elizabeth was sort of trying to save on things, being more economically careful, then it would be more logical to spend more time with the king as well. So there's lots of different issues. And of course, with Margaret, sometimes it was about sort of avoiding London

where she particularly doesn't seem to have been very popular, whereas the king was perhaps still there because it's the capital and what have you. So there's lots of different factors going on. Some queens seem to have had quite a difficult relationship with London, don't they? So who would make up a queen's household who would surround her? So we talked a little bit about people she might bring over from her home country, but would the king be keen to involve English noble women around her household as well? Oh yes, the king would have a huge say in her initial household when she first arrived

and he would, yes, he'd appoint the daughters particularly of lords that he wanted to please and so forth. But the number of women in the household is of course very, very tiny. She's this huge household of, you know, over a hundred people, at least most of whom were men. And they would come from the same kind of families that have been serving the royal family for years, generations quite often. Obviously there's occasionally differences. So for instance, Joan of Kent being English, she had her connections who would then influence her daughter-in-law's household. And then Elizabeth Woodville, her sister and one sister and one brother were involved in the household. Also, it would be a place where royal wards lived, which I think is something people often

forget about that sort of young children. So for instance, not just royal wards, but other children that the king had an interest in in some way. So keep going about the 15th century. but Anne Neville, Richard the Third's Queen, in her household, she would have had the daughters of Edward VIII, who had been declared illegitimate and were being excluded from the throne, but they were still in her household. And would the Queen's household have mirrored the King's household in terms of structure, but in miniature maybe?

Yes, it had the same kind of departments, the pantry and the buttery and all those kinds of things. So largely it was modelled on the King's household. And what might a medieval Queen's Day look like? I'm thinking we often get this image of them sitting around sewing with their ladies and reading books. Was it like that at all, or were they much busier people than we allow for them to be? They were sewing and reading. That's very true. That was part of their day. And being skilled as a needlewoman, especially in the early Middle Ages, was one of the qualities that people praised in Queens.

But that was only a very small part of it, really. One of the things that's striking about a Queen's day is actually how much it's structured around religion. They pray as soon as they wake up before they got dressed. they'd go to mass probably before breakfast if they were having breakfast at all and they'd have even song later in the day and so these religious services very much structured the day but they would definitely have a business to do as well quite likely most mornings they would spend some time with their council so these were the men who they and the king between them are chosen as people to advise them on running their estates and on advising on other things like who they should be supporting and

disputes over various issues about who should be prior here or what have you. Council's also certainly by the 15th century, they had their own room at the Palace of Westminster, but they were probably sort of wherever the Queen was, they'd come at that point. And then the midday meal was a very long thing, a drawn-out affair, so that sort of takes up quite a bit of time. Then they'd, of course, they'd have to receive petitioners, people who, just as the King receives petitioners, the Queen would also receive people who wanted either to get her to persuade the King to do something for them, or to favour somebody to sort of put someone into a role in her lands, or very often actually to persuade some other major person, like the mayor or some other nobleman, to favour somebody they wanted.

So it's sort of links of persuasion. A lot of Queen's intercession is naturally with the King, but with other people. So they'd have all that. But they'd also go hunting. We know quite a lot of the Queen's enjoyed. They had falcons and what have you. But they would also spend some time sewing and reading. Books were sort of a bit of a status similar thing. And quite often, it seems, it was an appropriate thing to listen to books being read aloud over meal times as well. Fascinating. And what kind of influence might a queen expect or be able to wield over a king? Is this all soft power and influence? Or were there any ways that she could directly influence the king's policy?

It's something that seems to vary with personalities, again, obviously. And it is very difficult a lot of the time for us to be sure. As you say, with soft power, she's just talking to him and there's no record of that. Although you do find letters that are written from the queen to the king, which always seems slightly odd that she should need to do this, part of the formal running of it. Obviously, sometimes a queen could, you know, Isabella overturned Edward I completely. She got enough people on her on side. So she did muster support in that really extreme situation. But for the most part, it is about influencing when it's influence over the

king. Her real power is actually on her estates who she's choosing to put places, the decisions she's making about that within her little area of control there. So she's able to create a kind of body of powerful men and people to help her get what she wants, I guess? Yes, yes, within that. And of course, often she'll be talking to noble women, whilst the king is talking to noble men who are their husbands or their sons or whatever, and you can see them working together through these different networks.

Two-pronged attack. Yes. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions, and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers, and over on the Warfare podcast, we're exploring the vast history of, ferocious global conflict. We've got the classics. Understandably, when we see it from hindsight, the great revelation in Potsdam was really

Stalin saying, yeah, tell me something I don't know. The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her, all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably, every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to warfare from history hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history. So were there ways in which a queen's power was expected to complement a husband? I'm thinking quite often the women in that Virgin Mary role were seen as being the peacemakers,

their job was to bring about harmony. So I'm thinking sometimes does it allow the king to be the really mean vicious, nasty, dominant one and then the queen can soften him a little bit. So it looks like he's a big terrifying monster, but he knows the queen is always going to rein him back and allow him a little space to be a bit more lenient. That is definitely how it was seen,

particularly you see that through the 14th century and sort of classic cases. So the most famous is when Edward III is threatening to kill the Burgers of Calais and Philippeau of Haino comes and kneels before him and begs for them to be released. And it seems to be very much that actually he needed to be strong in that way,

needed to be able to change his mind and Philippa enables him to change his mind and then that gets repeated when Richard the 2nd's new Queen Anne of Bohemia asks for a pardon for the peasants of the peasants revolt so there's a sort of particularly classic instances of intercession in that way So it's quite a good example of a partnership where

you know the king knows he can go a little bit further than he wants to and the Queen is able to open the door for him to come back without losing face in front of his men yes but sometimes that is also I think for real actually going back to Anne of Bohemia although the issue with the Peasants' Revolt was very much a stage thing. I'm not sure she'd even properly arrived in the country when it was issued. She then does do some important petitionings later on.

And after she dies, and he doesn't have somebody to rein him back in that way, that's when things really spiral into tyranny. So I think it's fair to say that there were queens who were genuinely performing that role. Yeah, I think that and also Edward, Edward the first wife, Eleanor of Castile, it's possible to see a real change in the king once the queen is gone, which suggests that that influence was quite strong. Yes, absolutely. I think that's very much true for some of them. And perhaps for Edward III as well. I mean, obviously the thing with Edward III is that he sort of falls under the spell, as it were, of his mistress, Alice Perez.

And she is not a good influence. So that's how much that's also exaggerated because people are unhappy about who she was is another question. And you've got to do a certain amount of disentangling. But I think Philip of Haino probably was a more positive influence on him. How do you think medieval queens felt about their husbands having mistresses? This is something that we think lots of kings had lots of. Was it something that queens were just expected to tolerate? I think the kings probably expected them to tolerate them, yes, but the evidence suggests that they didn't necessarily. It was very pointed in Philippa of Haino's will.

She gives gifts to lots of her ladies, but she doesn't give anything to Alice Perez, who given her status within the household, you would have expected her to. But clearly, Philippa knew she was her husband's mistress, and she probably only got put into her household because she was her husband's mistress, quite possibly. So she clearly disapproved.

they're hard to trace. I think actually if you go back to Henry I first who famously had a lot of mistresses, I think actually his wife Edith Matilda was okay about that which is a bit surprising to say but they had two children very early on in the marriage. It looks like she was very ill. Doctors were brought in and then they didn't have any more and so I think it's quite possible that in her case she decided she wasn't going to risk her life on getting pregnant anymore and she accepted that Henry was going to have mistresses. But they're They were never the sort of powerful figures at court that we tend to think of when we look

at Charles II's mistresses or some of the French king's mistresses, or indeed Alice Perez was a real anomaly. No other medieval mistress was anything like that influential. So I think as long as the king was discreet about the way it happened, then certainly for some queens it was okay. I suppose as long as he's respecting the queen's position still and not, you know, inserting a mistress. I think with Alice Perez the case was that she was assuming more power than the queen probably felt was right. I suppose to be fair, she didn't really have that much power while Philippa was queen. It's really just as soon as Quillipa dies that she becomes more publicly obvious.

But I'm sure in private, yes, she appeared to be taking too much power. And that's why Philippa was lent for. Yeah. We've talked a little bit about some of the queens who were kind of popular in the medieval period and viewed as having done a good job. But what might make a queen unpopular? Failing to produce a child, and it's quite shocking how quickly the public seemed to expect a child. sometimes queens were still in their teens and there's gossip about, oh, she hasn't produced a child yet.

So that was a big concern. Although, having said that, Anna of Bohemia, Richard the Seconds Queen, doesn't seem to have got much stick for that. So perhaps because she was successful in all other respects, she was getting away with it, as it were. But if there was any other kind of reason for grouch, then people would seize on that as a reason to focus on unpopularity. So Margaret Rangé was the classic case in that respect, because she'd come in a difficult situation anyway from France that had been the enemy and there was still a lot of unhappiness about the deal they've been made with France and on top of that she wasn't producing a child so that sort of made her more vulnerable. Also, yes, she would be unpopular if she was seen to be favouring particular factions at court,

particularly if she seemed to be favouring sort of foreign factions. So Eleanor of Provence, Henry III's queen, struggled in that way because of her own family's influence who came over and so that contributed to her unpopularity. A lot of it is court faction politics, especially if you look in the earlier Middle Ages, so Adiva, third queen of Edward the Elder, and also Elthrith, who was the third queen of King Edgar, both have terrible reputations, sort of after their death, written by people who were supportive of particularly clerics that were at loggerheads with the queen during their lifetime, so that can have a big effect, yeah. All sorts of ways to become unpopular, really.

Yeah, I'm afraid there were, yes. Yeah. And I guess some queens were working uphill a little bit, especially. I'm thinking, you know, we keep bringing it back to the French, but if you're a French princess heading over to England during the Hundred Years' War, you're working uphill before you even get there, aren't you? Well, it depends, actually. So Catherine of Valois, no, she was fine because Catherine of Valois was Henry the Fifth Queen, and he married her as part of the deal which made him heir to the King of France. So the fact that she was French

was sort of overturned in seriousness because of what she represented in terms of the success there. And Catherine Valois was only queen for a very short period of time because, of course, Henry V died so quickly. But she did a very good job of being queen for the short time she was. She produced a son almost immediately. And when she went on sort of royal progresses around England, she really seems to have captured people's hearts, people who were previously very suspicious about the whole deal with France. What was it going to mean, our king, being of France as well? Well, nonetheless, it seems won over and provided more money to help Henry the fifth continue his effort against her brother. So they weren't inevitably having an uphill struggle.

Now, Margaret Vonjou is the classic case of this because she wasn't really what the English had ever wanted. They wanted a bride who was the daughter of the French king and they simply got the niece of the French queen. And she came with a diary which was so small. It didn't even cover the costs of bringing her from Anjou to England. And it was also came with just a truce rather than a proper peace. So for all these reasons, yes, she had a really uphill struggle. The real detail of the deal that brings about the marriage can play an important role in how the queens viewed. That is hugely important, yes, I think so. And so there are several examples.

We've talked about a couple of queens who died before their husbands and the disappearance of their influence. But there are several queens who go on to outlive their husbands and have sometimes quite long lives as dowager queens of England. In that position, again, how were they financially supported? How did they continue to maintain their status once their husbands had gone? assuming normally that their sons are on the throne. Well, usually at the time of their marriage, there's an arrangement made that these are your lands that you can have if the king dies first.

And quite often some of those lands, the queen gets to control immediately. And as the time goes by, they get to control more and more of those lands even before the king dies. But it's seen as their dower lands that they will have as dowager. So they've got these estates that they can live off.

And it's a sizable amount of property. Obviously, things like queen's gold, they haven't got anymore. But they will still also often have. customs income and that kind of thing. So the problems come, of course, when the king has got a new queen and he needs to provide for her as well. So when Henry V, well, he wants money not just for his new queen, but also to help with this war in France. And the dowager queen then was not his mother. It was his stepmother, Joan of Navarre. And he accused her of witchcraft, had one of her servants

accused, well, a Dominican friar who was in her service. Very often as Dominican friars who get accused in these cases because of association with learning and so forth, I suppose. So she had a lot of her states taken away from her, and she was sort of under a loose amount of house arrest for a while. So that was him sort of trying to deal with the fact that he didn't have enough to go around within his finances at the time. So there was quite a tension at that point. Awkward position to being with your steps on, I guess, isn't it? When he wants your stuff, he's got to find a reason to take it off you and witchcraft, I guess, is the oldest mud to sling at someone in this period. So would a dowager queen, to any extent,

still have influence over the king, presumably it's her son normally, unless there's dynastic change, I guess, which must bring its own forms of problems for any surviving Dowerger queens. But could she still have influence over her son in a similar way as she might have had over a husband? Quite often Daryngu queens initially have more influence, I think, over their sons than they ever did over their husbands. Yeah, Edward the Elder's Queen Adiva had so much influence at her son's court that when it came to witnessing charters, she's written as queen.

and the woman who's married to her son, when she does witness a charter, it says concubina, which we'd translate as concubine, but it's the person who's sleeping with the king. But that's the level of how much more authority she had. And then you find the same actually with Ethelred the Unready's mother. We know almost nothing about his first wife because his mother was so dominant at court at that time. And then sort of fast forward into the 14th century, you've got Isabella, Edward II's queen. Obviously, it's an unusual situation with her always because she deposed Edward II. But she and her probably lover, certainly strongest ally Roger Mortimer, are ruling on behalf of her son for a while.

So that's the most powerful dowager queen, perhaps, in the later Middle Ages. But a queen was very much sort of expected to step back once her son had married and let the next queen take that role. In the later middle ages, of course, you've got a number of cases where a king's mother is not actually a dowager because we've got these changes in regime. So Cecily Neville, mother of Edward VIII, and Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry the 7. are similarly really quite influential. Margaret Beaufort isn't good at stepping back when she should do, which is one of the reasons she then gets a bit of a negative reputation. But I suppose for a new king, particularly I'm thinking of Edward VIII,

comes to the throne at a point of dynastic change. He's an unmarried young man. But having his mother there, although she's not a dowager queen, she can perform those functions that the nation expected of a queen so she can kind of fill the vacuum that him not having a wife might create. Absolutely, yes, that's very much what she's able. to do there. She has a household into which he's able to put people he would otherwise want to put in a Queen's household, particularly there's various Lancastrians who he's trying to woo at the time.

And a number of their wives or mothers, you'll find her in Cecil's, his mother's new household. And it seems like, yeah, she's also trying to woo them. And she sort of helps build up some of the men in various regions of the country that he's trying to strengthen. She puts them into positions of power in her estates in those regions as well. So yes, definitely they can work in that way. And as you say, I guess the problem then is stepping back when the job is done and the king's got a wife who's now going to take all of that power and authority that you've enjoyed, as well as taking your little boy away from you. Yes. So I guess in my mind, the ultimate example of a dowager queen is Eleanor of Aquitaine and the amount of influence that she wielded during the reigns of Richard I and to some extent John. Is she quite unique in that? Is that unusual?

In the late Middle Ages, yes. And again, that combination of personality and happening a political situation because Richard is, is away so much of the time because Richard's Queen Berengarry and Eamem even steps foot in England. So that gives Eleanor Vakotain the space to be so powerful and influential. I mean, I suppose it's fair to say her mother-in-law, because she was the Empress Matilda, she'd had a lot of influence and strength. So she kind of had that model of, or the English had that model of queens behaving in that way, women behaving in that way, so that it was not too shocking. And going back into the early Middle Ages, Elfuth and Adiva were probably fairly similar to Eleanor Vakotene.

But we know much more about Eleanor, because the source is. are so much better. But the fact that it tailors off is not necessarily that people are less willing to let dowagers do that, but just the situations that occur are different. Well, I suppose, so when you get to Henry III's reign, his mother, because Henry the Third became King very young, when King John died, his mother was associated with all the negativity of his father, King John, and she was quite young, and she just chose to make a new life for herself. So she goes back to France, so she's not in that position to be influential. Henry the Sixth's mother, I've just been saying Catherine Navalwa was very successful while she was queen, but she again was very young, and although

being French hadn't been a problem when she was queen, because within a very short space of time, the Hundred Years' War was still going on, because the security of the position was undermined by Henry the 5th dying. If he'd carried on as king, it had been fine, but because he died and he had vulnerable left a child as king, the whole power dynamic had changed. So now Catherine of Valois being French was a bit more problematic. And so because there hadn't been a previous strong dowager, but also because of her French birth and her youth, all these things probably impacted. And maybe she also didn't want to. You've got to sort of factor that it. Maybe she didn't want to have a huge influence. The fact that she goes off and eventually marries somebody as lowly

as Owen Tudor, this Welsh squire, makes a bit of a separate life for her there, suggests that actually that wasn't the kind of life she'd have wanted anyway. And does changes in the law during Catherine Navalwa's dowager queenship to stop her remarrying, I think fears around the influence that a potential new father might have over the young king and around the court and those kinds of things? It seems to suggest that people were aware that a dowager queen could have all of these routes to influence and authority and that people were wary of that and trying to cut it off? Yes, this change in the law does very much prove that there's ongoing concerns

that Catherine of Alwar could be a tool for somebody else, particularly an English lord who married her to have too much power in the kingdom, particularly because Henry VI is so young, there's a worry that if he had a stepfather who was powerful and influential, then that would be a threat to the political dynamics. And I guess the bottom line for all of these medieval queens, we had Katha Annie on talking about Empress Matilda a little bit earlier. And Matilda's problem was always that she was trying to wheel power in her own right. And all of the things that she did in her own right, once she's the mother of Henry II, suddenly are absolutely fine because she's doing it on behalf of a man.

So I guess the point for all of these medieval queens is whatever they're doing, they're always doing it on behalf of their husband or perhaps their son. And that makes it acceptable to the medieval mind. That's very much the case, it seems, for a lot of these queens. It's odd because elsewhere in Europe, we do have queens who are queens regnant. And yet there's a sense that perhaps women couldn't be sovereign at all. It's tricky because actually, you know, so Henry I obviously did say that Matilda should be queen. Edward I said that if his eldest son died, his only surviving son died, then his daughter should be queen pregnant. So there's this tension between thinking, yes, it should happen. And then on

the other hand, people's unwillingness to accept women in that authoritative position. And the importance of actually doing things on behalf of their sons is a really key thing to the way queen's power works. And that time and again, you see a queen's status and influence dramatically changes the minute she's the mother of the future heir. It just gives her a very little. validity and authority that she hadn't had until that point, as well as, of course, giving her opportunity. She's usually a member of her son's council and that kind of thing, so practical as well as ideological authority. That's fascinating. Thank you very much. I feel like there's so more we could go into on this really fascinating subject, but I've got a real insight into the

roles these women played and what was expected of them and that they did sit and so, but they also did an awful lot of work as well, that the wife of Christ and also the Virgin Mary all at once, but we can do some gymnastics to make sense of all of this kind of thing. And at the end of the day, they did hold real power and influence and that they were able to affect decisions that were going on in the kingdom. So thank you very much for joining us, Joanna. I hope that's given everyone a bit of food for thought. Thank you.

If you've enjoyed this chat and you'd like more of the same, please don't forget to subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. I'd just like to give a quick shout out to a two-part Amblin special on Susanna Lipscom's Not Just the Tuders podcast. also from History Hit. Ambulin is a queen who comes just after our period, but nevertheless, who captures the imagination like few others have. And Susanna goes into detail on the controversies around Ambelin's life and reign in two episodes of her fabulous podcast. Anyway, I'd better let you go.

I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.