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Damned If She Didn’t and Damned When She Did: Bodies, Babies, and Bastards in the Lives of Two Queens of France
Abstract
Throughout history, the queen who fails in her first obligation, to provide an heir to her husband’s realm, has rarely failed to attract notice. Some childless royal marriages elicited legends of celibacy and sanctity, as with Emperor Henry II and his wife St. Cunegunde, or with King Edward the Confessor. But childless medieval queens were more likely to attract criticism. Margaret of Anjou’s eight years of childless marriage to Henry VI of England led to charges that she was unfit to be queen; when she bore a son in 1453, rumor insisted that the father was not the feeble king, but his cousin (and Margaret’s), the Beaufort duke of Somerset. In fourteenth-century Naples, Queen Sanchia of Aragon’s Franciscan piety was blamed for her childlessness, and so far from sharing the Confessor’s sanctity, his widow, Edith, was allegedly pursued to her deathbed by rumors of her adultery. Little wonder that Constance of Sicily, aged forty and after childless years as Emperor Henry VI’s wife, reputedly bore her only son in a marketplace to ensure sufficient witnesses to attest that the child was hers.1
... Eleanor paid heavily for her pursuit of power, becoming the object of scurrilous gossip comparable to that hurled at a later French queen, Marie-Antoinette. 2 In a culture of honor and shame, a person's fama (personal honor or reputation) was all important, determined by the opinion of acquaintances, neighbors, friends or enemies. Common knowledge of one's shameful character not only brought loss of bona fama, but could result in serious legal and social disabilities. ...
Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine (1124-1204), is likely the best known medieval queen, first consort of Louis VII of France, of Henry II of England. Despite medieval churchmen's teachings of women’s innate inferiority and subordination to males, she lived as she saw fit, seeking political power. Eleanor paid heavily for her pursuit of power, subjected to scurrilous gossip beginning on the Second Crusade, and spreading to the West. Medieval teachings ascribed women’s actions to irrational, sentimental or libidinous motives, and clerical writers attributed her rifts with her two husbands to personal, not political factors. A 'Black Legend' grew up that haunted her over the centuries.
This article explores allegations of sexual scandal connected with premodern royal women in Europe and China. It begins by assessing expectations of queenly ideals, particularly the emphasis given to female chastity in European and Chinese culture. This forms a foundation for an extended discussion of tales of sexual impropriety of both real and legendary queens from China in the third century BCE to eighteenth century Europe. This survey highlights three key themes: the idea of dangerous and destructive beauty, the topos of the wanton and promiscuous queen and perceptions of transgressive affairs. Finally, the article assesses the connection between the portrayal of the sexual scandal of royal women in contemporary sources with the way in which these women’s lives are represented in modern media, particularly films and television series. Ultimately, it demonstrates that allegations of sexual scandal could both be a means to attack these women (and their royal husbands) in their lifetimes and could have long lasting negative impact on the memory of their lives, resulting in their political power, agency and activity being obscured by an emphasis on their love lives and supposed affairs.
DNA analysis of the human remains discovered on the site of the Franciscan priory in Leicester in 2012 produced a perfect match with female-line descendants of the sister of King Richard III and thus proved beyond reasonable doubt that the remains were those of the king who died at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. However, the experiment on the male line, traced through Richard’s father to King Edward III and then down via John of Gaunt to the Beaufort family, did not establish a match. The scientific team, working with imperfect historical data, concluded that one likely occurrence of ‘false paternity’ in this line was in the case of John of Gaunt. This study emphasizes the fragility of the claims about Gaunt’s illegitimacy, and instead focuses on a wider range of circumstantial evidence surrounding near-contemporary allegations of false paternity in the case of Richard III’s grandfather, Richard, earl of Cambridge (d. 1415). It also considers the wider cultural implications of the increasing frequency of...
While the Man of Law’s Tale points to the nervousness engendered by irrefutable maternal influence within a bloodline, Richard Coer de Lyon expands the range of maternal impact, for it suggests that recognition of maternal influence threatens larger structures of political identity as well. Like many late medieval Middle English romances, the family of romances concerning Richard I of England initially appears to present its audience with the familiar spectacle of a series of dynastic crises, followed by a series of trials that at least implicitly serves to address the challenges to legitimacy and coherent identity posed by the initial disruption of familial integrity. In this romance, however, the family and national dramas represented take place not in the far-removed and indistinct, yet curiously contemporary past so often evoked in romance, but rather, in the quite specific and comparatively recent past occupied by Richard I. Moreover, Richard Coer de Lyon ultimately suggests that maternal influence and its acknowledgment by wider communities radically disrupts central concepts of identity, at the individual and more importantly, communal level.
In the medieval French epics Raoul de Cambrai, Garin le Loherenc, and Gerbert de Mez, the poets sketch noble women and queens who belittle, berate, and render impotent the ruler and his men. These chansons de geste exploit and invert the topos of woman's legendary rebellious nature, voicing through subversive epic ladies an idealized feudal order predicated on loyal service and just reward. If, in the metafiction of an ideal epic world, land and lady are two sides of the gift the ideal king bestows on the ideal knight, in these works the king's brutal attempts to dominate his men waste both lady and land. Portraying the practices of scorched earth and systematic rape as political tools of royal expansion, these epics deliver powerful images of women exercising a righteous resistance through subversive acts, words, and desires. Like Eve, these epic ladies resist patriarchal dominance corporally through their desires and their mouths, and so, women's resistant tongues and desires work to restore order in political landscapes wasted by their kings' empty words and impotence.
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