In the battle of the sexes, male propaganda has ever branded female virginity worthy of the power of protection. Like any effective branding campaign, it has created its share of subterfuge, incrimination and personal tragedy.
Soon after King Henry VIII had secretly married Anne Boleyn in November 1532, she fell pregnant and a second still-secret wedding took place on 25 January 1533. The future queen Elizabeth was born on 7 September. You do the arithmetic.
On 25 January 1585, the now Queen Elizabeth knighted Walter Raleigh after one of the expeditions funded by him claimed Roanoke and named it Virginia. As the Royal Family’s own website notes, she was known as Gloriana, Good Queen Bess and The Virgin Queen.
None of which helped Raleigh. When he and Bess Throckmorton conceived, they secretly married. As a Gentlewoman of the queen’s Privy Chamber, Bess ought to have and did not make her queen privy to the decision. The result was a stay in the Tower of London, for Raleigh the first but not final visit. Bess might have stirred further thoughts. She was a distant relative of Anne Boleyn and, thereby, her own queen Bess.
Activity on the virgin side of the Atlantic would continue. In the south, Port Egmont in the Falkland Islands was established on 25 January 1765, while in the north, on 25 January 1791, the British Parliament’s Constitutional Act split Quebec into Upper Canada and Lower Canada.
England’s Civil War resulted in Cavalier emigration to the now colonised Virginia, and doubtless contributed to the nickname for sport teams at the University of Virginia, founded on 25 January 1819 by a distinctly republican Thomas Jefferson.
The difficulty of dynasty and direct descent may have been in the mind of Elizabeth’s necessarily collateral and not lineal descendant Queen Victoria when she observed that:
A marriage is no amusement but a solemn act, and generally a sad one.
All was overcome at the wedding of her daughter on 25 January 1858, the event which made Felix Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” known to the world.
