A succession crisis that tore England apart (2023)

> [H]ad Henry left the crown to a 33-year-old, intelligent, well-educated, politically experienced son, such a situation would not have arisen.

> However, even such a decisive military victory was not enough to overturn a genuinely deep-seated prejudice against a female monarch.

Clearly prejudice, and lack of precedent, materially hampered Matilda's attempt at the throne, but speculative and reductive statements like these carry a whiff of dubious history. It gives the impression that Matilda's failed succession hinged uniquely on her gender, when her own father Henry I only gained power after a long and violent succession struggle involving both of his siblings. I assume the author's book goes into much greater detail on the many reasons Matilda's succession never achieved critical mass in England, but I think this short an article is probably worse for giving so much emphasis to this particular detail.

>Designating a woman as his successor was such an unprecedented action that Henry felt obliged to compel his nobles, barons and churchmen to swear an oath of allegiance to Matilda. All of them did so, although some complied with greater reluctance than others. [...] her cousin Stephen (a younger son of Henry’s sister Adela, dowager countess of Blois) had rushed to England, seized the royal treasury and had himself crowned.

G.R.R.M.: it's free real estate

How refreshing to read something on my phone away from pihole which is actually prose and accompanying images, rather than thousands of adverts for al the trashiest scammiest adverts going and if you’re lucky a few sentences between

> For the first time since 1066, the death of an English king did not result in an undignified scramble for the throne

Yes 1066 was a peaceful transition and certainly not a scramble

> The double standards are evident when we consider that all of this would sound ludicrous if aimed at a man who had been proclaimed king...

I don't know about that, the quoted criticisms sound a lot like those that would be levelled at a king too. The issue is more that nobody expects a man to care, even a little bit, if someone accuses him of being crude and arbitrary in his search for power. Obviously it is gendered, but the actual complaints are generic. Anyone with serious power has to bat through things like that.

I can give an example by swapping in Trump. The criticism holds up with a gender swap, adjusted for the fact that by default we expect a man to be in the office so it isn't explicitly gendered. This sounds like stock criticism of him that might turn up in any political conversation.

[Donald Trump] at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to --the gentle sex-- [his office], began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and haughtily than [he] had been wont … [he] arranged everything as [he himself] thought fit and according to [his] own arbitrary will.

Nothing tore England apart like winning the cold war.