24 Monarchs Whose Legacies Should Face A #MeToo Reckoning

King Richard II (Plantagenet) of England married a six-year-old girl in 1396. Hopefully the marriage was never consummated, because Queen Isabella was 9 or 10 when her husband was deposed, and 10 or 11 when he died.

Long-dead monarchs need to be called out on their shit!

Henry the eighth owns this thread!

Come OFF it, people!

Adolescence is a 20th century construction. All this bullshit "You're a child until you're 18!" is a fucking lie.

All cultures on the earth before the 20th century or so "played ball" if there was "grass on the field."

15-year-old males were conscripted into armies and militias. Marriage was legal and expected immediately after puberty. Children were allowed to have full-time jobs — and had to work the equivalent of full-time jobs on their father's farm, usually.

In fact, marrying young women off ASAP past puberty was a way of protecting their virginity and preventing sexual assault. Their parents arranged it all and got her "off the market" where she might become a slut / damaged goods.

Stop expecting modern values from the ancients.

The United States has a RIDICULOUS age of consent and it needs to be lowered.

And if the U.S. didn't have such stringent property and labor laws, I could have moved out of my parents' house and stopped suffering their homophobic abuse 4 years earlier.

They're not pedophiles if they're having sex with persons who have undergone puberty.

Actually, it was mainly nobility and royalty that married their children off at painfully young ages. The prosperous middle of society didn't tend to marry until they could support families, they might wait until their twenties. And the peasantry tended to marry in their late teens, not their early teens.

No, it was only the upper classes of the Medieval period that forced their children to marry the minute they hit puberty, because a marriage between great families meant financial and social advantages for both, as well as male heirs as soon as physically possible. Or before it was advisable; King Henry VII of England's mother was 13 years older than he was, because Margaret Beaufort had been married at 12 and impregnated the second she produced an ovum. She nearly died in childbirth and was unable to have any more children as a result.

R4 I’ve researched the historical age of females at marriage in America, and you are wrong. After examining over 10,000 census records in Appalachia between 1850 and 1910, I found that less than 5% of women were younger than 15 at the time of bearing their first child.

I also lived in Yemen for four years, and saw many girls who were married at 11 and 12 and 13. It was common knowledge that such girls often died in childbirth or suffered severe physical damage from childbirth with an immature body.

"The United States has a RIDICULOUS age of consent and it needs to be lowered. "

And please join me in F&F-ing R4.

R4 is stupid. Couldn't register the parody thread angle, at all. Also, a creepy pedo.

Don't forget that the average life expectancy in the middle ages was about 30.

By that standard, a 15 year old girl back then would really be about 35 by today's standards.

Well played, OP

Not a monarch, but Fulk the Black was disrespectful toward women in the dark ages. When this Angevin Count discovered that his wife Elisabeth had been unfaithful to him, he had her dressed in her wedding gown and burnt alive at the stake.

I hope that Gloria Allred does not go back in time to seek legal redress against Fulk the Black, however — he’d likely disembowel her and feed her intestines to his hounds.

Fatter bodies and more hormones in our food mean that people undergo puberty at an earlier age now than they used to. It's quite likely that in the middle ages 15-16 was a normal time for puberty, especially for the onset of menstruation. So, yes, these people marrying 12 year olds were marrying children, and would fit the definition of pedophiles.

Peasants didn't have marriage ceremonies, for the most part. (Sorry, that means that the vast majority of us are descended from bastards). Marriage was an economic contract, and if there's no money or property, no reason to get married. That didn't mean that peasants hopped around from bed to bed. (Who would go out of their way to sleep with them anyway? They were dirty and poor). They just had common-law marriages. In any case, most people were dead by the age of 40, and women even earlier, since many died in childbirth. Without birth control, women gave birth every single year of their lives up until menopause, which most didn't reach.

Since adolescence is so prolonged now (really, age 11- 22), because of the way that parents raise their children, delaying sex makes MORE sense now than in the middle ages, whereas people back then were considered "adult" in regards to supporting themselves by working by age SEVEN! However, hormones are most active in late adolescence, and people are at their horniest then, because bodies of both men and women are in their best shape for procreating at that point. So we have horny adolescents with the maturity of children but the bodies of adults having sex with no notion of consequences, either emotional or physical. I guess 16 is probably a reasonable age of consent for sex even now, with a little license for normal sexual experimentation among same-age peers at an earlier age.

Who wasn't a little skeeved out to find out that Aretha Franklin gave birth at age 12 AND 14? Wasn't their ANY adult in the vicinity to explain the facts of life to her?

R13, there are rumors that Aretha's first two children were the product of incest and her own father. Who was a minister, may he burn for all eternity in the hell he threatened others with, if the rumors are true!

The age of consent in Japan is 13.

That old, r15?

Henri IV of France. He arranged the marriage of fifteen year old aristocrat Charlotte de Montmorency to his cousin Henri, Prince of Conde, so that he could keep her as his mistress. The couple fled to the Spanish Netherlands to escape the king. Henri IV threatened war with the Habsburgs unless they forced the couple to return to Paris. Supposedly when asked to toast the health of the French queen, Conde asked which one, since the king had several mistresses.

I thought that it's now believed that Catherine Howard was abused in Grandmas boarding house for aristocratic bastards.....that she wasn't the little ho bag we all thought. That Henry Mannox was all OK Katherine, now it's time for you to practice THIS flute....

Of course when it's said that the average life expectancy in the middle ages was thirty-odd, that doesn't mean that nobody lived to forty. Lots of humans died in infancy or early childhood, which lowered the average considerably, but I suppose a reasonable number made it to sixty. But yeah, death in young adulthood was common enough, which was one reason the aristocratic classes were so eager to push their offspring into marriage as soon as they hit puberty. Boys died in battle and girls died in childbed when they were under 18, but their families wanted heirs already in place, in case of war or plague or something.

Which brings up something I've always wondered about... Edward VI, King of England and only legitimate son of Henry VIII, died at age 16 and left no heirs but two sisters who'd both previously been declared illegitimate. Why the hell wasn't the boy pushed into an arranged marriage the minute he hit puberty? All those early marriages were intended to prevent exactly sort of that dynastic disaster.

I don't understand what the fuss is all about.