Why did I write about Lady Elfrida?
Lady Elfrida could have been Anne Boleyn, marrying for love, only she outlived her husband. She could have been Eleanor of Aquitaine, only she only had one son who lived to adulthood. She could have been Isabella, the She-Wolf of France. No woman before her had ever held so must power in England, and lost it, at the hands of her son.
The delight in Lady Elfrida’s story is playing with the ‘what ifs’ and the ‘possibilities.’ This is why she is a perfect character to explore through fiction, because her life is long and varied, and there’s a great deal to untangle from the historical record.
Elfrida was, officially, the first crowned Queen of Saxon England. Of Saxon England. Before her, there had been queens of Wessex (not as many as you think), Mercia (more), Northumbria, Kent, East Anglia, and even of the Anglo-Saxons, but never of the English.
‘Twice a Queen’ Emma, who married Elfrida’s son, Æthelred II, and the Cnut, would have walked in only recently relinquished footsteps when she married. Equally, Elfrida replaced Lady Eadgifu, a woman not known to have been acknowledged queen, but who just might have known Elfrida before her death, and who had certainly played her own part as a kingmaker following the death of her husband, her stepsons, her sons, and then older grandson.
I confess, the idea of a married king falling passionately in love with Lady Elfrida was almost more than enough to want to write about her, and I did include this in the first novel, much more a romantic historical novel than the subsequent books, but it was what came after that struck me.
A woman of considerable power and influence
But Lady Elfrida was a woman of considerable power, not just a love interest for the king – take a look at the charters issued throughout her second husband’s and second son’s life, and she’s there, named. Not always at the top of the list of attestations, but clearly in evidence, apart from when she and her son seem to have fallen out in about 985 until 993, when she reappears until her death. Lady Elfrida was a ‘mover and shaker’ at the Saxon English Court.
She was the ‘queen’ alongside her husband as king, she was mother to his third and fourth children – two sons.
As queen, she was involved in the Benedictine Reformation, then sweeping England – alongside such political heavyweights as Archbishop Dunstan and Oswald and Bishop Æthelwold, and her husband gave her command over the nunneries of England (which meant their wealth and assets as well as their spiritual needs).
Under her step-son, Edmund the Martyr, Lady Elfrida, was absent from Court, no doubt plotting her son’s return, or, just acknowledging that she had no part to play as her son had been excluded from the succession.
Lady Elfrida returned to Court with her son’s accession. A regency council was formed, and of course Elfrida was included, and this seems to be where Elfrida reached her peak of influence.
It’s worthwhile pausing to consider this outcome. Æthelred was no more than ten, possibly eleven, when he came to the throne. He was a minor. He was a child. And yet he became king of England, his coronation taking place in April 978 or 979, either with unseemly haste after his half-brother’s murder, or with a year of ‘arm twisting’ in between.
He was a minor. He was not a warrior.
A hundred years before Æthelred’s reign, the Alfred-Guthrum treaty had been signed, dividing England between the Danes and the ‘English’ (as they weren’t yet really known). ‘England’ (still not a distinct entity) had nearly been overrun by the Vikings. Fast-forward a hundred years, and ‘England’ has formed and there’s a minor on the throne. This, in any eyes, must be hailed as the greatest victory for Lady Elfrida.
Examining Lady Elfrida’s life with a rational approach and half an eye to the charter evidence for the period, and half an eye on what would happen after her death to smear her image, it‘s difficult not to say that she was not the first truly influential and powerful queen to ever stand close to England’s throne – a queen as well as a wife, the king’s mother, and, in time, the grandmother to a future generation – she deserves much more than her attribution (which formed quite quickly after her death and only grew after the Norman Conquest) of ‘whore’ and ‘murderer’.
The First Queen Trilogy charts Lady Elfrida’s marriage.
The King’s Mother, the first in a second trilogy, charts Lady Elfrida’s role, as well, the King’s Mother. Her story can be read from here.
If you’d like to know more about the historical Elfrida, she features in my first non-fiction title, below (as does Lady Eadgifu).
I’ve written extensively about Lady Elfrida, and she also features in the first Earls of Mercia book, The Earl of Mercia’s Father. You can find out more about Elfrida on her page.
MJ Porter 