Regarding Arwa Mahdawi’s column about her daughter falling under the spell of the “princess industrial complex” (My four-year-old has invited King Charles over for ice-cream. Can someone please make it happen?, 16 July), if only the lives of media princesses resembled what actual princesses of the past, and some current, endured, perhaps the obsession would fade. Most princesses of the ancien regime didn’t have great lives. Most could expect:
1) An arranged dynastic marriage in her early teens to someone possibly twice her age whom she had never met (eg Isabel de Valois, 1545-68, third wife of Philip II of Spain).
2) Giving birth surrounded by witnesses so that the heir to the throne was not slipped in surreptitiously.
3) Early death in childbirth – Isabel de Valois again; also Jane Seymour in 1537; Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII; Anne de Foix Candale, queen of Hungary, in 1506; another Elizabeth, of Valois, queen of England in 1409; Maria Leopoldine, Holy Roman empress and queen of Hungary and Bohemia, died in 1649 at the age of 17. There are many more examples.
4) Being sidelined at court because the king has a mistress of his own choosing (there are numerous examples of this).
5) Entering a convent, by choice in some cases, but not in all.
These women had little or no autonomy and their main job was as a brood mare. There are some exceptions, of course, but a dose of reality is in order.
Sheila Ffolliott
Professor emerita, department of history and art history, George Mason University, Virginia, US; vice-chair, The Medici Archive Project
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