She Wolves Read Online Free

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. 9
    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. 10 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. 11 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. 12
    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. 13 Judith, raised to