Welcome to my Substack. I thought this would be a fun place to tell their stories in a more casual, approachable, narrative way. I hope you enjoy! If I could choose one woman in history to watch their real life unfold like a movie, it would absolutely be Charlotte of Bourbon. Raised from infancy in a French convent but secretly Protestant since childhood, she planned and executed an escape from France to the Holy Roman Empire as a teenager.
She wrote and disseminated protestations defending her reasoning and actions, and eventually married into Dutch royalty, becoming an ancestor of the ruling houses of both England and the Netherlands. Nothing about her life turned out the way it had been planned for her. Thanks for reading Feminist Histories!
Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Louis and Jacqueline were a powerful noble couple in the Kingdom of France who were both related to the royal bloodline of the ruling Valois.
Jacqueline was a political force, recognized by her contemporaries for her wise council and measured diplomacy on behalf of Catherine de Medici, and she was a powerful advocate for the reform of the Catholic Church and civil toleration for the Huguenots, as the Protestants within France were known.
At her untimely death in , Jacqueline was mourned by rulers and courtiers across Europe. Charlotte, the fifth of six children, would have been around fifteen years old when her mother died. But Charlotte was not raised by her parents. As was typical for a younger daughter in a sizable noble family, Charlotte was sent to be raised in a convent - arriving there at only two weeks old. Unlike Charlotte, her sisters Jeanne and Louise seemed content to embrace religious life. Practically speaking, providing for a daughter in a convent was more affordable than providing a dowry for a suitable noble marriage.
