by Paul James
January 29 2006

On July 21, 1981, a young Lady Diana Spencer married the Prince of Wales in a spectacular wedding watched by millions around the world. Diana was widely admired as a young English rose, the centre of a real-life twentieth-century fairy tale. However, there were murmurings of concern that, at 20, she was too young to marry (especially an older man) and submit herself to the pressures of public royal life before she had found her own place in life, her own confidence as an adult. Concerned voices hoped that she would, at least, delay starting a family until she was more mature and had established herself in the royal family. It was not to be. Diana was pregnant within months, a mother within the year, and not coping well with the pressures of her new roles, the media and a mismatched marriage which showed signs of strain even before the vows were taken. She was destined to become an icon and a source of crown-rocking controversy, but never to become queen.

And yet, young as she was, Diana was, by no means, Britain’s youngest royal bride. Before her, several young girls found themselves being Queen Consorts much earlier than Diana became Princess of Wales. In the Middle Ages, there was no minimum age of marriage, and young girls and women were pawns in the game of dynastic politics to a much greater extent than Diana was. Of these young royal brides since the Norman Conquest, at least eleven were Queens consort of England before the age of 18.

None of the early consorts after the conquest were below the age of what we now regard as adult when they became queens. King Stephen’s wife, Matilda, was only 14 in 1119 when she married, but didn’t become Queen until she was about 30. King John’s first wife, Isabella of Gloucester, may have been below 18 (her birth date is not known) at the time of her marriage, but had undoubtedly entered her twenties by the time her husband became king. John married her with the full knowledge that she was within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity, and yet later he used this as grounds for an annulment, in 1200. The annulment allowed him to marry the first of a series of child-queens of England.

John’s choice of a second wife was Isabella of Angoulême, who was only about 13 when she married him in 1200 and about twenty years her husband’s junior. Their age difference and temperaments did not produce a particularly happy marriage, but they did produce five children, the first being born when Isabella was about 20. After King John’s death, when she was not yet 30, she returned to France, re-married and went on to be allegedly embroiled in plots against the French king.

Isabella’s eldest son, Henry III, succeeded to the throne at the age of nine, but waited almost 20 years before marrying. His bride, Eleanor of Provence, was only 13 and had never met her 28-year old husband before the day of the wedding. She gave birth to her first son within three years, when still only 16, and had two more children before she was 20 (and another two afterward). She was devoted to her husband, which caused his enemies problems during turbulent years of the reign, and to her children and grandchildren. Unlike her predecessor, she remained in England after the king’s death, entering a convent in her later years. Eleanor died in 1291 at the age of about 68, having spent 55 years as Queen and Queen Dowager of England.

As part of the settlement of a dispute over the territory of Gascony, Henry III and Alfonso X of Castile arranged the marriage of Henry’s son, Edward, to Alfonso’s sister, Eleanor. The marriage took place in 1254 when he was 15 and she 13, but it would be another 18 years before they became King and Queen of England. Eleanor died in 1290, and three years later, Edward set his heart on the young Blanche of France, who was famed for her beauty. In order to win her, the king even agreed to surrender Gascony to France, only to discover later that he had been duped and she was already betrothed to a German truce. King Philippe IV of France offered the English king Blanche’s younger sister, Marguerite, instead, but a furious Edward entered upon a five-year war against the French. When peace was signed, marriage to Marguerite was part of the agreement. Edward I was 60, Marguerite was 17 when they married in Canterbury Cathedral in 1299. Despite the huge age difference, the marriage was a blissfully happy one. She bore him three children, he indulged her, and when he died in 1307, she determined never to marry again, although she was only 25. She died ten years later.

The contrast with the marriage of the next king, Edward II, couldn’t have been greater. He, too, married a young French princess, Isabella, who was 12 at the time of their marriage (compared to Edward’s 24). The King neglected his wife, preferring the company of favourites such as Hugh Despencer and Piers Gaveston, with whom he probably had homosexual relationships. As conflicts and intrigues developed within the court as well as with her native France, Isabella sided against her husband, and eventually took a lover, Roger Mortimer. In 1327, the queen and Mortimer succeeded in overthrowing Edward. She and Mortimer governed England in the name of her son, Edward III until he came of age four years later. Edward II was brutally murdered in Berkeley Castle, but the Queen’s triumph did not long survive the assumption of power of her son, who rewarded her and Mortimer’s treachery against his father by having them both taken prisoner, executing Mortimer and banishing his mother to Norfolk (although she was allowed to visit court).

Edward III also married a young bride, Philippa of Hainault, but, at 15, he was close to her age. Their marriage was a successful one, lasting over 40 years (until her death in 1369) and producing 14 children, the first (Edward the Black Prince) born when she was about 16. She was a popular and compassionate Queen of England.

The Black Prince predeceased his father and on Edward’s death, the throne passed to his grandson, Richard II. Richard was only 15 when he married his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, who was a few months older than him. The marriage was close, although childless, and he was devastated when she died of the plague 12 years later. Two years after Anne’s death, Richard married the youngest queen in English history, Isabella de Valois, daughter of King Charles VI of France, who was only 8. She was still only 12 when her husband was deposed and subsequently murdered and, after refusing to marry the new king’s son, she was allowed to return to France, where she married again, but died in childbirth at the age of 23. Her sister, Catherine, eventually married the son whom Isabella had refused, and who had by that time succeeded to the English throne as Henry V (she was 18 and he 32).

Three, possibly four, further women were to become queen below the age of 18, but none as young as the 8 to 13-year olds of the 13th and 14th centuries. Margaret of Anjou was 16 when she married Henry VI who was about six years her senior. She became a dominant force in his life and a major protagonist in the Wars of the Roses.

Catherine Howard’s age when she married Henry VIII in 1540 is uncertain, but she is believed to have been between 15 and 20, while Henry was 50. The marriage served the purposes of her family and others. She found her husband repulsive and was under pressure to produce a son, and so she entered into at least one affair, which brought about her tragic end. She was charged with treason and beheaded.

The final two teenagers to marry English kings were Henrietta Maria of France, who married Charles I in 1625 at the age of 16, and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who married George III in 1761 when she was 17. Both marriages were loving ones, although both ended in sadness or tragedy. Henrietta Maria endured the Civil War which ended in with her husband’s execution and her own exile to her French homeland, and Charlotte was faced with the king’s apparent madness and loss of power in the later years of his life when it was transferred to their son, the Prince Regent. She predeceased her husband by two years.

Since Charlotte, no consort to a British monarch has married or become queen below the age of 18. With the modern tendency to marry later, and in the light of Diana’s experience, it seems unlikely that we shall see a teenage Queen Consort, or Princess of Wales, in the foreseeable future.