[ SECRET POST #4524 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4524 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 31 secrets from Secret Submission Post #648.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Eh, it's more that it was explicitly a thing NOBILITY ONLY did.

Sauce: I live with a historian whose entire thing is cultures and all that throughout Europe in the past.

[(Anonymous)]

Queen Victoria was married at 20
Queen Consort Juliane Marie of Denmark was married at 23
Princess Sophia Frederica of Denmark and Norway was married at 16, but had no children until she was 23

[(Anonymous)]

And that's a slice from how many marriages that existed?

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, I picked them because they were married in 1840, 1752, and 1774 (respectively), two of them are Dutch (like Hans Christian Andersen), and between the three of them they'd cover the general arc of culture that Hans Christian Andersen (born 1805) would most likely have been influenced by.
I can probably find more, but I have a Candy Crush game open in another window and it's calling my name.

[(Anonymous)]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_brides

[(Anonymous)]

Then there's also the infamous example of Lady Margaret Beaufort who by age 13 was widowed and pregnant with the future King Henry VII of England.

[(Anonymous)]

Henry VII was born in 1457
The goddamn FIFTEENTH CENTURY
Come on!

[(Anonymous)]

And that was extreme even by their standards!

[tree_and_leaf]

In the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon, where members of the nobility were married as children or barely-teenagers, for several years to pass before they slept together. Even if mediaeval people didn't share our ideas about consent and when adults were adults, they weren't stupid and had noticed that thirteen year olds having babies often ended badly. As indeed it did for Margaret - while she and the baby both survived, the birth was very difficult, and she had no further children in either of her two other marriages, apparently because she'd been left infertile by the injuries she sustained. (She had actually been married twice by the age of thirteen, although her first marriage was annulled and she never regarded John de la Pole, the boy she was first married to, as her husband. There's no evidence the marriage was anything more than nominal).

There were specific reasons why Edmund Tudor desperately wanted an heir by Margaret as quickly as possible - it wasn't the norm. Although, of course, it also wasn't considered *completely* unacceptable.