Queen Mother - Exceptional Cases

Exceptional Cases

• Ingeborg of Norway (1301–61), Duchess of Sweden, acted and ranked as if she were a queen regnant for a year before the Swedish reign of her son, King Magnus IV, and thereafter as if she were his queen mother, serving intermittently on his board of regents. However, she was never officially recognized as queen or queen mother.
• Her granddaughter-in-law Margaret (1353–1412), who ruled all of Scandinavia as the mother of one king and the adoptive mother of another, held a similar complicated unofficial position, but much longer and in traditional history given the title of Queen. Early in her career, she had been Queen consort of Norway for 17 years and of Sweden for one year.
• Helen of Greece and Denmark — wife, from 1921–28, of the future Carol II of Romania, and mother of King Michael of Romania. In circumstances that read like a soap opera, Michael first ruled from 1927–30, before his father was king (and again after his father abdicated). When in 1930 Carol returned to Romania and assumed the throne, he actually retrodated his reign to 1927, the year his father (King Ferdinand) died. As Helen had not yet divorced her playboy husband at the time (that was to happen in the following year), he unwittingly granted her the retroactive title of queen. Thus, in 1940, after his abdication and the second accession of their son, she rightfully became the queen mother of Romania.
• Similarly, Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur was the third wife of her husband, the monarch, but not the mother of his successor, a son by the king's first wife. However, she has been accorded the title of queen mother (Rajmata) anyway.
• The Valide Sultan, the mother of an Ottoman Sultan, is sometimes referred to as queen mother.