Genealogical narratives often include a strand of violence and physical effort for women, particularly through childbirth but also through exile, migration for marriage, and establishing an independent life, as the previous chapters show. This chapter explores genealogical transmission and its relationship to violence and women’s action in the context of administrative communication networks in the Middle English Athelston, in which the king kicks his wife, killing his heir, and sentences his pregnant sister to a trial by fire. Drawing on network theory, which emphasizes the “doers” and “doing” of a network, the chapter explores the alignment of the two royal heir-bearers with messengers, which positions the women as key transmitters, not unlike the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation, rather than as wives who simply carry their husbands’ children. In this model of transmission, the women influence succession not only through childbearing but also through royal petitioning, letter writing, and prayer.

The intersection of childhood and rulership has a long history. This chapter compares examples of child kingship across Europe before 1050 with cases between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. It illustrates how structural developments in society, culture, politics and law brought greater political stability to a child’s rule during the central Middle Ages. Over this period, cultural attitudes towards violence were changing, practices of succession and inheritance were evolving, and ideas around marriage, illegitimacy and queenship were shifting. Such developments fundamentally altered the court environments into which royal children were born, the political context within which they succeeded, and the practicalities and precarities of their early experiences of rulership. This chapter examines aspects of violence, succession and queenship in turn before, in the fourth and final section, arguing for the need to revise claims of Germany’s exceptional ‘rejection’ of child kingship. While there are meaningful differences in how children were incorporated within systems and practices of kingship, this chapter suggests divergences between kingdoms should not be exaggerated.

When grave illness compelled rulers to plan for the likelihood of a child’s succession, their chief concern was not that their young son would be passed over as king. Instead, most dying rulers focused on making collaborative arrangements for protecting the kingdom and supporting the child in rule. This chapter examines some of the evidence for the preparations dying kings made as they gathered to their side men and women whose involvement would be crucial for the child’s continuing education and the realm’s administration. The first two sections draw attention to shifts over time in familial attendance at royal deathbeds and in the testamentary records of rulers’ intentions. The actions of kings and queens both before and at their deathbeds suggest hesitancy to impose a wardship model upon royal children, especially upon the new boy king, and this royal reluctance is examined in greater detail in the chapter’s third and final part. Even when it became apparent an infant or child would succeed, kings eschewed entrusting their sons and kingdoms to the care of individual magnates, preferring collaborative arrangements in which the queen often took a prominent role.

By abandoning the focus on virtue and replacing it with a focus on preservation by means of occasional deception, the Machiavellian discourse throws suspicion on the role of the counsellor, and especially problematises his powerful role in relation to the monarch. This is especially the case in late Tudor England, ruled by monarchs perceived to be ‘weakened’ by their age or gender. Whereas the Henrician humanists had advocated counsellors who ruled their princes, the threat of Machiavellianism and weak monarchs renders such arguments threatening, and the counsellor falls under greater suspicion for his perceived usurpation of power. At the same time – and by contrast – there is a view that such weak monarchs require strong counsel to guide them. If this cannot come from individuals, as they are likely to be self-interested, then it must come different, ‘dis-interested’, sources. Whereas single private counsellors will be self-interested and thus ought not to rule a monarch, especially a female one, assemblies such as parliament will guide the prince according to the good of the commonwealth. For this reason, they need to have a share in the government. Command becomes ‘bridled’ by this source of counsel.