She Wolves (3 page)
Judith was probably not aware, from her place in the royal nursery, of changes that were occurring in her father’s kingdom. The mid-ninth century saw the appearance of the Vikings across Europe and, in the summer of 856, a Viking attack on the Seine heralded six years of fierce attacks on the kingdom of Charles the Bald. Charles probably looked around to neighbouring kingdoms for support and his interest fell on the kingdom of Wessex, ruled by the elderly King Aethelwulf. Aethelwulf also appears to have sought out Charles as an ally and in 855, he passed through Francia on a pilgrimage to Rome.
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He remained at Rome a year before returning to Francia for an extended visit.
King Aethelwulf had become King of Wessex in 839 and by 855 he would have been around fifty years old, several years older than Judith’s own father, Charles the Bald. King Aethelwulf had also been married before, to Osburh, daughter of Oslac, the king’s butler.
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Osburh appears to have been a dutiful wife and bore Aethelwulf several children. However by 856 she was either dead or had been repudiated by her husband, and Aethelwulf was ready to marry again. It seems likely that his choice quickly fell on Judith as the only daughter of Charles the Bald who was of marriageable age and Charles, desperate for allies against the Vikings, was forced to agree to the match.
Judith would have had no involvement in the arrangements for her marriage to Aethelwulf and the first she knew of the match may well have been when she was summoned to attend her own wedding in September 856. Aethelwulf would have been eager to form an alliance with the prestigious Carolingian dynasty and it is unlikely that he sought a meeting with his bride before he agreed to the match. Judith also would probably have only met her future husband for the first time a few days before the wedding and as a twelve year old girl, Aethelwulf must have seemed impossibly elderly to her. Judith may also have been excited by the prospect of becoming a queen and escaping a nunnery and she appears to have made no protest against marrying a man nearly forty years her senior.
If Judith was excited about becoming a queen, her father, Charles the Bald, was determined that she should become one. Queens of Wessex were typically given only a very low status and denied the title of queen, instead being known as ‘king’s wife’.
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Charles the Bald, perhaps remembering his own mother’s difficulties as a young second wife faced with adult stepsons, apparently insisted that Judith be accorded the full rights of a queen. Judith would have approved of this and probably took an interest in the ceremonies as they were prepared for her wedding. She would have been raised to be familiar with the idea of her all-powerful father and it probably would not have occurred to her that he could be wrong. To her contemporaries in Wessex, however, the prospect of crowning a queen was unappealing.
Aethelwulf and Judith were married on 1 October 856.
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Judith probably felt proud adorned in all her finery to reflect her status as a Carolingian princess, although she must also have felt anxious about marrying the elderly Aethelwulf. She would also have known that she was to be the centre of attention at the lavish marriage ceremony and, once the marriage itself had taken place, the ceremonies changed in order to provide a coronation for Judith in her new role as Queen of Wessex. The rite for the coronation had been devised especially for Judith at her father’s command and a crown was placed on her head by the Bishop of Reims.
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Judith was also anointed with holy oil and prayers were said over her womb, suggesting that any children that she produced would have an enhanced claim to Aethelwulf’s throne.
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It seems possible, from this, that Charles had negotiated with Aethelwulf that any son borne by Judith would succeed in preference to Aethelwulf’s elder sons and Judith would have been aware that her primary duty was to bear Aethelwulf a son. It may also have been reasoned, given the ages of the bride and groom, that divine help was necessary if the couple were going to be capable of producing a child together.
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Judith’s coronation was a clear indication of Charles the Bald’s hopes for the succession to the throne in England and the first known instance of such an event in relation to an English queen. The very fact of her coronation greatly enhanced her status relative to earlier English queens, particularly her predecessor, Aethelwulf’s first wife. This fact would have been apparent to everyone gathered for the wedding as well as Aethelwulf’s elder sons in England. Soon after the wedding, Aethelwulf attempted to return home to England with Judith and discovered just how clear his actions had been to his eldest son, Aethelbald. Aethelbald at first refused to receive his father back in the kingdom, rising in rebellion against him.
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This rebellion caught Aethelwulf by surprise and it must also have been worrying for Judith who had been led to believe that she would be well received in her new home. After much negotiation it was agreed between Aethelwulf and Aethelbald that the kingdom would be divided with Aethelbald taking the richer western part of the kingdom and Aethelwulf the eastern part.
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It was probably a chastened Aethelwulf who finally escorted Judith home to his much diminished kingdom.
Aethelbald’s rebellion had a great effect on the remaining years of Aethelwulf’s reign but it also had an effect on Judith herself, along with her reputation. Up until Aethelbald’s rebellion, Judith appears to have had a good, if bland, reputation and to have been accepted as yet another passive ‘king’s wife’. However, the circumstances of the rebellion and the fact that it was clearly connected with her marriage caused Judith’s reputation to take a turn for the worst. For example according to William of Malmesbury, Aethelbald’s rebellion:
Arose on account of his [Aethelwulf’s] foreign wife, yet he held her in the highest estimation, and used to place her on the throne near himself, contrary to the West Saxon custom, for the people never suffered the king’s consort either to be seated by the king, or to be honoured with the appellation of queen, on account of the depravity of Edburga [Eadburh], daughter of Offa, King of the Mercians.
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Judith appears to have been allotted much of the blame for the rebellion, an unfair position given the fact that she had not yet set foot in her husband’s kingdom or, indeed, had any say in the marriage that had been arranged for her. To William of Malmesbury however, who was writing several centuries after Judith died, and other chroniclers, Judith as a potentially powerful woman would always be suspect. Most of the chroniclers at that time and afterwards were monks who were already cut off from women and suspicious of their motives. In her early career, it was Charles the Bald and Aethelwulf who shaped Judith’s life, but it is always Judith, as a prominent woman and thus under suspicion, who received the lion’s share of the blame. The example of an earlier queen, Eadburh, appears to have been uppermost in the minds of the people of Wessex when Judith arrived as a consecrated queen and Judith attained something of this queen’s sullied reputation. Eadburh survives as a stereotype of a wicked queen against which other women could be compared, as Judith apparently was.
Much of the suspicion and unpopularity that surrounded Judith both during her lifetime and later was due to her position as an anointed queen. Judith, as a foreigner, was unlikely to have understood the hostility directed towards her but Aethelwulf must have been fully aware of the situation. However he made no attempt to make this situation any easier for his young bride and appears to have kept to the terms of his agreement with Charles until the end of his life, insisting that Judith be given a throne beside him as his queen.
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Judith, raised to be fully aware of her status as a descendant of Charlemagne, would probably not have expected anything different and may not have been aware of how damaging her adoption of the trappings of queenship was to her reputation. Certainly, she seems to have enjoyed her position as a queen and sought to extend her role even after Aethelwulf’s death.
Aethelwulf’s spirit was probably greatly affected by his son’s rebellion and his health may have begun to decline. In spite of Charles the Bald’s and probably Aethelwulf’s hopes, no child was forthcoming from the marriage and it is possible that Aethelwulf unfairly came to view Judith as the cause of his misfortune. He had little time to dwell on his demotion to the eastern part of his kingdom, however, and he died only two years after the wedding in 858.
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The death appears to have been expected. Aethelwulf made a will several months before his death, although no mention was made of Judith.
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Aethelwulf probably assumed that his young widow would simply return to her father in Francia – but Judith herself had other ideas.
Until the death of Aethelwulf, sources mentioning Judith tended to be lukewarm and sometimes critical in their attitude to her, but following Aethelwulf’s death they became overtly hostile. Judith would not have been shocked at Aethelwulf’s death and his will suggests that he endured a long illness. During that time, she had probably taken stock of her own position regarding the death of her husband and may well have made plans for her own future. Judith would have been well aware that her father expected her to enter a nunnery and the prospect of returning to Francia with its life of seclusion may not have been appealing, especially since she had gained a taste for politics from her time as queen. In 858, Judith apparently decided to take action on her own behalf and either approached, or was approached by, her stepson, Aethelbald, with a view to making a second marriage and retaining her position as queen.
No details survive of the arrangements for Judith’s second marriage but it seems likely that Judith took the initiative and her family in Francia were in no way involved. She would have realised that, like everyone in England, her family would be shocked at the news that she had married her own stepson and, although there was no blood relationship between the couple, it was well understood in England at the time that such a match was incestuous. Today also it is difficult to escape the view that such a marriage was distinctly unsavoury and it was something that would not have been sanctioned by the Church or the people of England or Francia. Both Judith and Aethelbald would have been well aware of this view before their marriage and must have made a conscious decision to defy conventional viewpoints.
The Anglo-Saxons clearly viewed a marriage between a stepmother and her stepson as immoral and irreligious, as can be seen in the reference to an earlier marriage in Kent that was recorded by the Venerable Bede:
The death of Ethelbert and the accession of his son Eadbald proved to be a severe setback to the growth of the young Church; for not only did he refuse to accept the Faith of Christ, but he was also guilty of such fornication as the Apostle Paul mentions as being unheard of even among the heathen, in that he took his father’s [second] wife as his own. His immorality was an incentive to those who, either out of fear or favour of the king his father, had submitted to the discipline of faith and chastity, to revert to their former uncleanness.
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According to Bede, a marriage between a stepmother and her stepson ushered in a wave of immorality and damaged the very fabric of the Church in England. He clearly considered such a marriage to be disgusting beyond words and something that even non-Christians would not deign to indulge in – harsh criticism indeed from the pious Bede. That such a view was still current is clear from the words of Judith’s own contemporary, Asser, in his description of her second marriage:
Once King Aethelwulf was dead, Aethelbald, his son, against God’s prohibition and Christian dignity, and also contrary to the practice of all pagans, took over his father’s marriage-bed and married Judith, daughter of Charles, king of the Franks, incurring great disgrace from all who heard of it; and he controlled the government of the kingdom of the West Saxons for two and a half lawless years after his father.
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Asser was clearly deliberately attempting to draw parallels with the much earlier reign of Eadbald of Kent in his description of the marriage and it once again shows the hostility with which this incestuous marriage was viewed. By carrying out incest, both Aethelbald and Judith were seen as ushering in a period of lawlessness and anarchy in England that was a direct result of their own immorality. Later chroniclers saw the marriage in the same light, with the twelfth-century historian, William of Malmesbury, for example, writing that ‘Ethelbald, base and perfidious, defiled the bed of his father by marrying, after his [Aethelwulf’s] decease, Judith his step-mother’.
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Clearly, Judith’s second marriage was not one that improved her already shady reputation in England.
Before their marriage Judith and Aethelbald would both have been aware that they would be heavily criticised for their actions. Both would have been raised to view such a marriage as incestuous and it seems likely that only higher political considerations enabled them to so subvert the morals of society. Both would have been uncomfortably aware that, according to the rules of the Church and society, Judith was every bit Aethelbald’s mother as if she had given birth to him herself, despite the fact that she must have been several years his junior. However they would also have been aware, from the earlier example of Eadbald of Kent, that such a marriage could yield great political benefits and it is possible that the Church viewed the marriage more severely than secular members of their court. Once again, for Judith, the chroniclers both of her time and later were mostly celibate churchmen and Judith, as a woman drawn into sexual immorality by political considerations, would always be considered notorious.
Aethelbald was described by his contemporary, Asser, as ‘grasping’
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. This suggests that he was highly ambitious and, on his father’s death, wanted to ensure that he gained possession of the kingdom of Wessex without sharing it with his brothers. He appears to have become quickly established as Aethelwulf’s successor but, given that there was no established law of inheritance in England at that time, he would have been eager to ensure that the throne was also secured for his sons on the event of his own death. Aethelbald’s rebellion demonstrates that he keenly appreciated the additional eligibility that Judith’s coronation would confer on her sons and it seems likely that it was Judith’s additional status as an anointed queen that made her a desirable bride, in spite of the obvious difficulties incurred in the match. Aethelbald almost certainly hoped that his own sons, as children of a consecrated mother, would have a more legitimate claim to the throne than the children of his younger brothers.
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He may also have hoped to secure an alliance with Charles the Bald through the marriage although this was probably a secondary consideration.
