Recently I read Philippa Gregory's <i>Lady of the Rivers</i>, and was left confused by a plot point I'm hoping to clarify here. My question will have spoilers for the book, though I hope it will be answerable without having read it.
Basically, in the novel a foreign noblewoman becomes an English duchess through a very profitable marriage. After the death of the husband however, she marries his squire and is denounced, losing her noble status and most of her fortune (from what I could understand). In spite of this, she's still widely referred as 'Dowager Duchess' and still becomes lady-in-waiting for the queen, which I had thought was a position reserved for nobles of high standing.
So, my question is, should I have read her character as a tiny step above peasant, or rather as a peer of the realm? What were the actual consequences of 'marrying down' for a woman in the XV century?
Jacquetta of Luxembourg was a real person, and a fairly significant one, so she's fairly easy to learn about if you want to dig into more of her real life story. I couldn't tell you how much that novel fictionalizes her story, or what specific years it covers (though a quick skim of the summary would suggest 1430 to early 1461), but the real Jacquetta's punishment for marrying Richard Woodville was fairly short-lived. She wasn't punished solely for marrying a lower-ranked husband, though. She was punished because she was required to seek the king's permission to remarry due to her status as a dowager-widow (basically a widow without any heirs who now controlled a valuable holding). She had been given part of her dead first husband's lands on condition that she had to receive a royal license to remarry (so the crown could control who gained ownership of those lands upon their marriage).
It's almost certain that the king would have balked at the idea of approving a marriage to Richard Woodville, given that he was just a knight and of fairly low birth.
Ultimately, Jacquetta was the aunt (by marriage) of King Henry VI, and also, after 1443, the sister-in-law to the eventual queen, Margaret of Anjou (who married Henry VI in 1445) as well, which would explain her preferential treatment among the ladies of Margaret's court. Once the king forgave her marriage to Woodville, she retained the title of the Duchess of Bedford (from her first husband), hence I assume the novel's events go well into the 1440s, and why it refers to her as "Dowager Duchess," a term which just means she was married to a Duke, and had inherited some of his lands after his death. Given that duke/duchess is basically just one step below the monarchy in terms of noble titles (in England at the time it was reserved for those of the king's bloodline, though her relation was by marriage), she would have likely been of a higher social rank than any of the other women at court.
Kinda complicated, obviously. But her life was anything but ordinary. Her granddaughter would go on to marry Henry VII, and thus she's an ancestor of every British monarch since.
As far as what would the actual consequences be, they'd be more distinct for somebody who wasn't as fortunate as Jacquetta, but just in terms of the step down in social standing and wealth. Somebody else might be able to shed more light on that than I. The main complication for her, and why it was such a big deal, had to do with who her dead husband was, and the title and lands she had received as his widow, as well as her relation to the king.