Loading...
Historian Dr Helen Castor explores the lives of seven English queens who challenged male power, the fierce reactions they provoked and whether the term 'she-wolves' was deserved.
The Queen Mother
2019
King Alfred and the Anglo Saxons
2013
Spying on the Royals
2017
Britain's Bloodiest Dynasty
2014
Fit to Rule: How Royal Illness Changed History
2013
The Queen's Palaces
2011
Inside the Crown: Secrets of the Royals
2020
The Boleyns: A Scandalous Family
2021
What's the Monarchy For?
2025
By Royal Appointment: Shops Serving the Queen
2019
Helen Castor
Self - Presenter
2012
800 years ago, Matilda came within a hair's breadth of being the first woman to be crowned queen of England in her own right. Castor explores how Matilda reached this point and why her bid for the throne ultimately failed. Her daughter-in-law Eleanor of Aquitaine was an equally formidable woman. Despite being remembered as the queen of courtly love, in reality during her long life she divorced one king and married another, only to lead a rebellion against him. She only finally achieved the power she craved in her seventies.
In 1308 a 12-year-old girl, Isabella of France, became queen of England when she married the English king. A century later another young French girl, Margaret of Anjou, followed in her footsteps. Both these women were thrust into a violent and dysfunctional England and both felt driven to take control of the kingdom themselves. Isabella would be accused of murder and Margaret of destructive ambition - it was Margaret who Shakespeare named the She Wolf. But as historian Helen Castor reveals, their self-assertion that would have seemed natural in a man was deemed unnatural, even monstrous in a woman.
Helen Castor looks at what happened when England was faced not just with inadequate kings, but no kings at all. In 1553, for the first time in English history all the contenders for the crown were female. In the lives of these three Tudor queens - Jane, Mary and Elizabeth - she explores how each woman struggled in turn with wearing a crown that was made for a male head. Elizabeth I seemed to show that not only could a woman rule, but could do so gloriously.
