None more so than in the fifteenth century when a tug of war for the English crown broke out. Infertility was usually blamed on women, but complaints about royal sterility undermined Henry’s masculinity and his authority.England throughout the centuries has known internal strife with civil wars to determine who had the right to rule the island nation. She writes that lack of an heir led to concern over the succession: “As the first duty of a queen was to bear children, this had a serious impact on her popularity. She points to a 1467 document that records Margaret “fasting four or five times a week” during her marriage and enduring weak health – “ironically, probably to fulfil religious vows in the hope of getting pregnant,” Johnson suggests. Johnson’s research has also led her to believe that, part of the reason Margaret and Henry took so long to conceive was that the queen had an eating disorder. Henry VI’s enemies smeared him as weak for taking so long to produce an heir, and spread rumours that the couple’s eventual only child, Edward, was a changeling or bastard. He treated his wife and child with affectionate respect.” Yet Henry himself, the child king who became a martyred holy man, was no tyrant. Conflict was to be Henry’s principal legacy. This was the age of England’s defeat in the hundred years war and the Wars of the Roses. Johnson writes: “The reign of Henry VI is rightly remembered as a nadir in national history – and the king’s shadow fell across his realms for years after he was deposed. This is among discoveries that will feature in her book, Shadow King: The Life and Death of Henry VI, to be published by Head of Zeus next month. She recalled that, in reading the documentary evidence, her “eyes and ears pricked up”: “The evidence that there are people staying in the king’s bedroom potentially some years after he is married… is very odd.” Complaints about royal sterility undermined Henry’s masculinity and even his authority. Johnson observes: “The Ryalle Boke does not make it clear at what point they left, leaving open the intriguing suggestion that they remained to make sure the marriage bed was being properly used.” Johnson suggests that it may have been the Duke of Suffolk, chamberlain of England, or Ralph Botiller, chamberlain of the household. Another witness, describing when “the Kinge and the Quene lie together”, noted his chamberlain lay “in the same chamber”. The Ryalle B oke of court protocol, for example, records that once the king was in bed, “the king’s chamberlain or a squire for the body come for the queen, and with her two gentlewomen and an usher”. Johnson found documentary evidence in the National Archives and royal household accounts, among other sources. Johnson said: “While royal ceremonies could involve public blessings and perhaps processions to the bedchamber on the wedding night, after that point no one was in the royal bedchamber when the king and queen were having their marital relations.” She added that what Henry VI and Margaret experienced was different: “This was not just their wedding night. The earliest English record dates back to Henry V in the 1420s, when ceremonies involved “the wine cup and the blessing of the bed”. Royal marriages were once consummated with “bedding ceremonies”, in which newlyweds were put into the marital bed by their guests on their marriage night.
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