Mahthildis (ˈmaχ.til.dɪs)
Dowager Queen of Deira
"Ever since he took the throne, my idiot son has let things fall into chaos and ruin. I would have done better than he, and the rebels knew it too."
Mahthildis is the Dowager Queen of Deira and mother to Eadric, the current King of Deira. For the last twenty-five years, she has been confined under house arrest, after she attempted to prevent her son from taking the throne on the grounds that he was a fool who could never hold the kingdom. She was betrayed when a stableboy opened a postern gate to Eadric's forces, and has since observed her predictions about her son come true with a bitter satisfaction.
Early Life
Mahthildis was born to a noble Bernician family who had long standing connections to the House of Klüpfuchs. When Eotwulf Klüpfuchs was gathering support for his plan to overthrow his cousin Beornric and claim the throne of Bernicia, he agreed to marry Mahthildis as a way of ensuring her family's allegience. While Mahthildis was not consulted, she found the idea of becoming a queen very attractive and believed her father and uncles when they said Eotwulf would succeed. She and Eotwulf were married in 3934; she was fourteen years old, and he was thirty-one.
A Queen in Waiting
When Mahthildis married Eotwulf, she believed that the overthrow of Beornric and ascension to the throne was imminent. She was disappointed to learn that the scheme was not nearly as advanced or straightforward as she had assumed, and that it would be several years before she might expect a crown.
Shortly after the wedding, Mahthildis became pregnant. She did not enjoy pregnancy, and spent the last three and a half months in bed on the orders of the physician Eotwulf hired. When her labor came, it was long and difficult, and she nearly died while delivering Eadric, who was an enormous infant. It was nearly a year and a half before she was well again, and she vowed never to have a second child.
Meanwhile, Eotwulf's plans were developing, and he promised that he would soon be able to take the throne. Despite this, his scheme met with several setbacks which delayed any action, and Mahthildis began to think that she had married the unluckiest person alive. And then Beornric uncovered Eotwulf's plotting, and the entire scheme unraveled overnight.
Luckily for Eotwulf and Mahthildis, Beornric was reluctant to execute his cousin and proposed an alternate plan. Bernicia would support Eotwulf and his forces in an invasion of Deira, a troublesome neighbor to the north, and take all the people who supported him out of Bernicia to become lords of Deira instead.
Mahthildis thought this was a fool's plan, and that Beornric was sending Eotwulf and his followers to their doom. But she was surprised when Beornric and Eotwulf's plan to conquer Deira succeeded, and she became the Queen of Deira in 3942 after eight years of waiting for a crown.
A Queen at Last
For several years after Eotwulf claimed the crown of Deira, he was constantly on the battlefield, hunting all manner of rebels. While he was away, Mahthildis ruled in his stead, and handled much of the actual administration of the kingdom. When Dunwych was besieged, she took to the battlements and directed the city defense. She gained a reputation as a fierce leader and clever strategist, and the Deiran rebels were never able to overcome her defenses.
Together, she and Eotwulf ruled Deira for sixteen years. When he suddenly died in 3958, she immediately suspected that her son had orchestrated the poisoning of his father. While she was never able to prove it, this belief was one of the reasons she fled the capital and began raising an army to overthrow her son. For the first several months of Eadric's reign, it seemed likely that he would be removed from throne and replaced by Mahthildis as monarch.
A Rebel Queen Betrayed
All her plans were brought low by a single stableboy, who opened a gate to Eadric's troops. Many believe he did this in the hopes that Eadric would prove to be an easier monarch to overthrow than his mother. She was captured by Eadric and his loyalists, and he placed her under house arrest for the rest of her life. Over the last several decades, she has remained imprisoned, while her every prediction about her son's incompetence is proven true.
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This article was originally written for Spooktober 2024. You can find all of my Spooktober Articles at Spooktober Central.
This article was originally written for Spooktober 2023. You can find all of my Spooktober Articles at Spooktober Central.
She sounds like a rather ruthless woman. I do think she would be a much better ruler than her son, though I don't know if that would necessarily be a good thing for the country.
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I suppose it depends on the viewpoint. She might have been able to defeat the rebels and hold off the raiders, which would make for a more peaceful realm...but I'm not sure that the peasantry would appreciate her tactics or the skill she would use applying them.