Why did kings married so many wives?

Question

Why did kings married so many wives?

Answer 1

Because they were men. Men always want to have a lot of women around them, they get tired from just having one woman around all the time. And they were kings. Kings could do anything they wanted back in the day. Women were considered more like servants than people back then. They served the men.

Answer 2

Many royal weddings were political, they were not based on love or even attraction, they were used to create alliances. The production of heirs benefited both families. A good example of this process is the Angevin Empire.

http://www.royal.gov.uk/textonly/Page60....

As Nicole notes death in childbirth was not infrequent, but I suspect you are basing your question on one man – Henry VIII and you cannot hang his behaviour on all kings he was the exception (in ordering divorces and executions and destabilising the religious systems of Europe) rather than the rule.

Answer 3

Because they could.

Answer 4

There are many reasons but I like this explanation best:  in a monarchy, even such  things as s*x and marriage have political implications.  While pleasure from s*x with readily available and desirable partners is a privilege reserved for the king, siring a fitting heir is paramount and is his civil duty so as to ensure the continuity of the royal line.  Having only one wife narrows the possibility of producing a reight heir - or at least that was their logic before.  If a king is married to 10 wives, each offspring from each could produce legal heirs.

Answer 5

Not all kings did!  Which part of the world are you thinking of?  Are you talking about kings in history?

In Europe, or England, kings married perhaps more than once if their queens died in order to bear a son.  They needed to have an heir (and more than one "spare" in case some of them died in the olden days of many infant deaths).  They wanted to make sure a son of their own blood would inherit the throne after them and secure their dynasty.  Sometimes the queens couldn't have children, or sons.

They also might have married other queens because they wanted to make peace with another country, or add the wealth of that other country to their own to make it stronger; and they may have needed such a political alliance in order to defend their own realm with greater strength.

Rarely did kings marry for love.  Matches were chosen politically with money and power in mind, and many of these were made when the kings (and queens) were very young

by their parents.

You might be thinking of Henry VIII of England; he married six times because he wanted an heir (amongst other things).  He only managed one son by his third wife because he only had two daughters, and in those days it was not considered possible that a woman could rule a country.  So he had to keep trying in case the boy died - which, eventually, he did, as a teenager.

Edward I of England had an unexpectedly happy marriage to Eleanor of Castile.  He was one of the very few medieval kings not known to have had extra-marital affairs, and when she died he followed her body to its resting place, erecting large crosses where her body stopped on its way.  After that, he did his duty and married again to have more children.

However, it often happened that if the king and queen did not get on, the king would take a mistress, turning to her for witty company and pleasure, though he would still be married to his queen and generally perform his husbandly duties with her.

Answer 6

I dont know for sure...

but I think since the king needs a

son to take over one day for him

if the wife keeps giving births to girls

he gets rid of her and marries a different woman

in hopes of having a son.

I also guess that sometimes the queen would

just die from being sick or something.

Answer 7

This question would be easier to answer if you would specify the area or the dates you what to know about.

Do you have a particular King in mind?  Or a particular country?

The kings of Egypt had many wives - Ramses the Great had over 100 as well as concubines.  

Henry VIII of England had 6 wives, but he's an exception.  Most English monarchs had only one wife, the same is true of French monarchs. (again, there are exceptions)

Until recently, women risked their lives whenever they got pregnant - a woman had a 25% chance of dying in childbirth for EVERY pregnancy until about 1870.  Many kings re-married when their wives died.

Answer 8

Why does King Henry VIII always pop into everybody's thoughts?

Yes, he DID have many wives, six, which is quite a few - and a few too many. But this was because he wanted an heir, nay - he NEEDed an heir! He had two daughters and one son, should his son die [and he did at age 15], Henry would need another to secure his family for another generation on the throne. He had one other son, illegitimate, but he was acknowledged - he could never take the throne, though.

When kings married it was NOT for love, it was for power, alliances, and politics. Most of the time the two people had never seen each other before and on their wedding day they were readily surprised. So when that wife died, what else would a king do? Get a new one. They were treated like objects, they had no power [they were mere Queen Consorts and not Queens Regnant], they were there only to give heirs to the king, and that’s how men treated their wives - nothing more.

And in Henry VIII's case, if his wives were not to his liking, he had them executed or divorced - then found a new one.

If a King had no heir he would have been annoyed constantly by his Privy Counsel, Parliament and what have you, to have an heir for their country - so what else could he have done? Kings ALWAYYSS [save a few of them] had mistresses, and a child by a mistresses was a b*****d and not able to became King or Queen. This is one reason why Henry's daughter, Elizabeth, was harassed all her life as Queen for being a b*****d, though her mother had been Queen for a time, after her mother's - Anne Boleyn - execution, Elizabeth was titled a b*****d - hardly just.

So in the end, not all kings had six wives like Henry, some had one and some had three - one died, they got a new one - these women were treated very rudely, and for it I pity them.

Cheers!