The next episode of The White Queen should see the arrival of a son for Elizabeth and Edward. But although the royal couple did produce three boys in the end, their royal nursery was dominated by girls. It was an age old problem for queens consort - what to do with a gaggle of girls needing wealthy husbands and good marriages?
One of the main duties of being a queen was to have babies and as many boys as possible. Girls were a bit of a problem but did provide currency in the big trade off between royal houses - the marriage game. Need a foothold in a foreign country? Find a daughter to marry one of their sons and heirs. Got a problem with a pesky rival king or lord? Marry a child off to one of theirs and they have to stay friendly for the honeymoon period at least. Elizabeth, like all the queen consorts of England before her, expected pretty big royal weddings for her girls. Unlike the others, she had to fight for them.
Using daughters as power tools was an established routine across the continent for nearly 1000 years by the time Elizabeth Woodville became Queen of England. Even before her husband, William, conquered the country the first modern queen, Matilda of Flanders, had seen two of her daughters offered in marriage to William's great rival for the English throne, Harold II. Neither Adeliza nor Agatha became Queen of England - their mother got that title a few years later when William won the throne by force. But their two of their sisters gained important husbands in Europe as their parents sought to consolidate their power by marrying them into the houses of Brittany and Blois.
And that was the pattern for every subsequent Queen of England who had girls. While Matilda and Eleanor of Aquitaine concentrated on shoring up European alliances through their daughters' marriages, later queens including Eleanor of Provence and Isabella of France both provided girls to marry Scottish kings and so help form uneasy alliances with one of the biggest threats to their husbands' power. Younger daughters might get an important English lord - hence Eleanor of Castile witnessing two of her many girls marry the earls of Hereford and of Hertford and Gloucester.
So when Elizabeth came to marry off her girls she expected great things. And it was lucky for her that a king's daughter could land a foreign prince or lord as she'd snapped up pretty much all the best home grown talent for her sisters. After the final battle with Lancaster in 1471, Edward's reign seemed settled and within a few years Elizabeth's eldest daughter, also Elizabeth, was betrothed to the son of the king of France, daughter number three, Cecily, was in line to be Queen of Scotland while another girl, Anne, was promised to the heir of the house of Burgundy. In 1482 the second youngest of royal baby of Elizabeth, Princes Kate, was betrothed to the heir to the Spanish throne. Alliances were being forged across Europe. Edward IV's unexpected death, in 1483, changed everything.
Suddenly Elizabeth found the choice of husband for her daughters taken away from her. Richard III, the girls' uncle, stepped in to make use of them as he saw fit. Anne was promised to an ally called Thomas Howard while Cecily found herself married to another of Richard's supporters, Ralph Scrope of Upsall. But that was after something far more damaging to the girls' marriage prospects had happened. Rumours swept the court that Richard III would replace his dying wife, Anne, with one of his own nieces - either Cecily or Elizabeth. In the end he was forced to deny, publicly, that he would marry one of his brothers' daughters.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth was plotting behind the scenes to make the most lucrative marriage of all. She promised her eldest girl, who had a great claim to the throne herself, to Henry Tudor who claimed the crown for the House of Lancaster. Their marriage in 1486 brought the houses together, ended the Wars of the Roses, and established the Tudor dynasty on the throne. Her other girls married English nobility and prospered while the youngest followed that other traditional route for princesses - Bridget became a nun.
No comments:
Post a Comment