Regarding Arwa’s columns about his daughter who has fallen under the spell of the “Princess Industrial Complex” (My four-year-olds invited King Charles for ice-cream. Could someone please this please take place? 16 July), if the lives of princess media are like what the real princesses in the past, and some now, survive, maybe observing disappears. Most of the princesses of the Ancien regime do not have many lives. Most can expect:
1) A arranged marriage to a person’s first teens who may have doubled his age before he could ever meet (eg Isabel de Valois, 1545-68, third wife by Philip II in Spain).
2) Childbirth born of the Witnesses so that the heir to the throne is not decaying in surreptitiously.
3) early death of birth – Isabel de Valois again; also Jane Seymour in 1537; Elizabeth of York, Henry VII’s wife; Anne de Candale Candale, Queen of Hungary, in 1506; Another Elizabeth, in Valois, Queen of England in 1409; Maria Leopduine, Holy Roman Empress and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, died at the age of 17. There were many more examples.
4) that does not move in court because the king has a self-chosen master (there are many examples of it).
5) Enter a convent, by choosing some cases, but not at all.
These women are little or no autonomy and their main job as a farmer. There are some exceptions, of course, but a dose of reality is in order.
Sheila Ffolliott
Professor Everita, Department of History and History of Art, George Mason University, Virginia, US; Vice-Chair, The Medici Archive project
