Sending your daughter away from the court after an "indiscretion"

[Liquid Ghost]

So this idea came to me when my Beautiful, Amazonian, Genius heiress suddenly became pregnant before getting married. After all my careful laid plans she makes one of my oldest knights her lover...*sigh*.

Your character learns that a close female member, who is not married, is having a baby. This would be before she gets the pregnant trait that announces it to everyone, you are getting an early warning before it shows. Maybe you need really good intrigue to notice, or maybe the Court Physician makes a learning check and if they pass it and don't dislike the mother-to-be they let you know or maybe your wife who knows her daughter best alerts you. In any case, now you know and you don't have much time. You can ask someone to be her host for some months by a) spending some gold, or b) surrender a weak hook or, c) do nothing and let it play out. Maybe a diplomacy check determines how costly it'll be. Her actual host who you leaned on could be a vassal of yours, a relative on another realm, a friend from a faraway land, or even your realm chaplain who'll take her to one of your churches.

Your daughter/niece/sister will be removed from your court and become a guest somewhere else. She'll be abroad for over half a year uuuuh..."visiting relatives" or "making a tour of the countryside", maybe "she wanted to learn french so she's with a tutor". If the whole plot is successful, after the birth your daughter will return to court and a secret will be generated about her that is known by you, the host, the father of the child, and whoever alerted you about the pregnancy (the court physician or your spouse), and maybe there's a chance a courtier of the host finds out too. Your daughter will be spared the indignity of having the fornicator trait and a bastard with no known parents will be generated, which leads to the final question of what to do with the baby. Do you keep it at your court? The host's court? Abandon it outside? Give the baby to a shepherd? (Maybe he comes back year later, like Paris of Troy). Also, did you find out who the father is? How do you deal with him?

 

[PasTaCopine]

This is an amazing idea, I'm all for it

 

[plansburn]

I despise the current random seduction events. Children that are clearly yours becoming someone elses. Characters randomly being seduced by people it makes no sense for them to have been seduced or even impregnated by. Its more irritating than in ck2.

 

[luxfelix]

"I'm sure there's a convent around here somewhere..."

 

[BeyondExpectation]

Is this historically accurate for the time period?

 

[Liquid Ghost]

Is this historically accurate for the time period?

Powerful men pulling strings to avoid embarrassment? I'd argue that's universal across the history of humanity. But if you're asking about documented cases, that's kind of difficult to find since the whole point was secrecy. We don't know about the murders kings and dukes ordered, for the most part, either.

Here's what I found:

According to Bennett (“Writing Forni-cation” 153), even though the Church didn’t hold the mothers of illegitimate children solely to blame, medieval villagers did. In their eyes, fornication, that is sex outside of marriage, was a female offence, and further, it was an offence of the female poor. Her evidence comes from the records of leyrwite, a fine for fornication levied by the manorial courts; these were secular courts presided over by the lord of the manor. Those records demonstrate that there were many more instances of fornication reported to the church courts than to the manorial courts (136-7). Of the persons reported to the manorial courts, only a handful were men (139), and a disproportionately large number were poor women: female servants, female wage-laborers, female cottagers and landless young women (143).

Unwed mothers were most likely to be identified and fined when land and resources were scarce. During those times, the fines were also significantly higher than the fines for other offences (155). Moreover, some communities supplemented the fines by seizing the landholdings of such women or expelling them from their land (152).

Because unmarried pregnant women and mothers made their way more frequently into the London church court records than into the manorial court rolls, Barbara Hanawalt concludes that “a stigma was more readily attached to women who had premarital sex and bore children out of wedlock” in urban communities (Growing Up 59). This conclusion is supported by the condition under which Sir Richard Whittington endowed an eight-bed ward for unwed mothers in St. Thomas Hospital in London in 1451. He stipulated that the identities of the women harbored there be kept secret, because knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the birth of their children would cause them shame, and perhaps prevent their eventual marriage (see Gairdner ix).

Source: https://jarm.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jarm/article/viewFile/39335/35663

 

[BeyondExpectation]

Powerful men pulling strings to avoid embarrassment? I'd argue that's universal across the history of humanity. But if you're asking about documented cases, that's kind of difficult to find since the whole point was secrecy.

Given such a technique is clearly not foolproof, if it was done more than very occasionally in the CK3 era, there should be at least one documented case of it, if not from the CK3 era than the few hundred years afterwards with similar sexual morals yet much more widespread literacy and record keeping.