Our mother among the saints, Bealdhild Queen of the Franks
The same day on which Charles the Martyr-King was put to death, another English monarch with French matrimonial ties reposed in the Lord nearly a thousand years before: Bealdhild, nun at Chelles and English-born Queen of France.
Bealdhild was born around 627, was caught and forced into thralldom in 641, and was sold as a kitchen-slave to Erchinoald, the majordomo of Frankish Neustria under the infant Merovingian King Clovis II. She was well-liked among her fellow servants, being kindly, meek and mild of disposition, and physically well-favoured. She also did good deeds for those who shared her condition of poverty and servitude, such as mending her fellow slaves’ clothes and cleaning their shoes. After his wife died Erchinoald desired her for himself, but to preserve herself from rape, she put on an old ragged gown and asked her fellow-servants to hide her from her master’s gaze – which they did. Erchinoald instead took another woman as wife and forgot his desire for Bealdhild.
After this, she put on her wonted clothes again and appeared in the palace, drawing the eye of the adolescent King Clovis II. Smitten, the young king asked Erchinoald for her hand in marriage. Hoping to gain the king’s favour thus, Erchinoald agreed, and Bealdhild married the king in 649 – when she was 21 and he 14. Bealdhild bore Clovis II three sons: Chlothar III, Childeric II and Theuderic III – all of whom later became Frankish kings. But her marriage was short-lived: Clovis II died at a very young age of a nervous ailment. She became queen-mother and regent to her son Chlothar at the behest of Saint Eligius, who served as her advisor.
As queen, and later queen-mother, of Francia, Bealdhild bore herself with the same kindness and self-beshedding meekness that she had shown as a thrall, and additionally gained a reputation for religious devotion, as a patroness of the zealous bishops Audoen and Leodegar. She herself never forgot her days spent as a slave, and used her wealth and influence, not only to ransom and free other slaves from captivity, but to legally abolish the sale of Christian Franks into slavery (but only partly – the first true, categorical abolition of slavery was in Saxony some 550 years later). It was, according to her Vita, her ‘favourite charity’ as well as that of Saint Eligius. She also alleviated the œconomic straits of the Frankish peasantry, that led them to sell their children into thralldom in the first place, by reducing their tax and labour burden. She also sold her jewellery and used the proceeds to help the needy and establish hospitals throughout Francia. In this way, Queen Bealdhild earned the love of the Frankish people and earned a place in Christian history as an early friend of the enslaved, and foe of slavery.
The saintly queen-mother also founded and patronised a number of monasteries. She founded Benedictine houses at Corbie, Chelles, and probably Jumièges, Jouarre and Luxueil as well, and was also responsible for a royal dispensation to the monastery of Condat at Saint-Claude in the Jura mountains. This had the effect of garnering a greater pious reputation for her, but it also had a political dimension: giving more land and power to the clergy helped to neutralise opposition to her anti-slavery policies from the nobility.
In her later years, she retired to the abbey she had founded at Chelles and lived out the rest of her days as an ordinary nun, looking after the poor and the infirm and taking on the humblest tasks as needed by her sister-nuns. She reposed in the Lord at the age of 52, on 30 January in the year 680.
Let us honour today Bealdhild the blessed,
Divinely-wise queen and boast of the Orthodox,
For though frail of body she was strong in spirit,
The grace of God imparting strength to her soul.
Wherefore, let us imitate her zeal for the Lord
Who hath glorified her, and beseech her with tears
To ask Him to grant salvation to our souls!
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