Two tragic queens

Today's Facebook Note.

I appreciate that you all understand why I’m not able to stop by Facebook as often I would like to do. Eventually life will return to normal, or as normal as it ever gets for a writer. Now our time travel feature of the day.
On February 13, 1177, Henry and Eleanor’s youngest daughter, Joanna, was wed in Palermo to William, the King of Sicily and then crowned as his consort. She was all of eleven years old. It is hard for us to imagine sending children off to foreign lands to marry strangers at such young ages, but this was the way of life for highborn girls in the MA. Surely some parents must have felt some qualms, though, for the safety or wellbeing of their daughters. Some of these marriages were happy ones; Joanna’s older sister Leonora came to love her husband, the King of Castile. Some were not as successful and some brought only misery to the young brides. Surely the worst case was that of Agnes, daughter of Louis VII of France, sent off to wed the son of the Byzantine emperor at age eight; her young husband would be murdered and she would be forced to wed his killer, a man whose reign was so brutal that the citizens of Constantinople rose up against him and he fled the city with his favorite concubine and his little French bride. He was later captured and died rather gruesomely, but Agnes was spared.
Joanna encountered no such horrors in Sicily and was well treated by her husband, although he did keep a harem of Saracen slave girls. It had been a rough trip for her; she’d been escorted into Poitou by her eldest brother Hal, and then Richard escorted her all the way to St Gilles, where she was turned over to the Sicilian envoys. On the voyage, she’d suffered so severely from seasickness that the ships had to hand at Naples and continue on land. But she was given a magnificent welcome into Palermo. Here is Roger de Hoveden’s account of her introduction to her new life in Sicily.
“The whole city welcomed them, and lamps, so many and so large, were lighted up, that the city almost seemed to be on fire…for it was by night that they entered the city of Palermo. The said daughter of the King of England was then escorted, mounted on one of the king’s horses, and resplendent with regal garments, to a certain palace, that there she might in becoming state await the day of her marriage and coronation.
After the expiration of a few days, the before-named daughter of the King of England was married to William, King of Sicily, and solemnly crowned at Palermo, in the royal chapel there, in the presence of Gilles, Bishop of Evreux and the envoys of the King of England.”
That same day William issued a charter in Joanna’s favor, providing generously for her dowry, describing her as “the maiden Joanna, of royal blood, and the most illustrious daughter of Henry, the mighty king of the English, to the end that her fidelity and chaste affection may produce the blessings of the married state.”
A less happy event on February 13th, 1542, when silly little Catherine Howard was beheaded after Henry VIII had rammed a bill through Parliament that made it treason for an “unchaste” woman to marry the king. Tudor justice was the ultimate oxymoron.