Our seventh-century saint Etheldreda, who also went by the name “Audry,” was one of four sisters all of whom were eventually sanctified. Their mother was a saint, too. That’s a lot of family sanctity, to say the least.

One of the things that marks Etheldreda’s putative devotion is that although she married a prince (named Tonbercht), by mutual agreement, “they lived together in perpetual continency.” In other words, they never sexually consummated their marriage. And this mutual exercise of righteous temperance lasted for the three years of their marriage, at which point Tonbercht died. A widow (yet still a virgin), Etheldreda then retired to the isle of Ely, where she lived in spiritual (if not economical) poverty and in praise of God.

After five years in this state, a king (a significant step up from a prince) named Egfrid “by the most earnest suit extorted her consent to marry him” and so she did, becoming a wife for the second time. We are told by Butler:

St. Audry [or Etheldreda] . . . during twelve years that she reigned with her husband, lived with him as if she had been his sister, not as his wife, and devoted her time to the exercises of devotion and charity.

Following this second, ostensibly sexless marriage, our saint took the veil and thereafter was a nun who created various convents and monasteries and engaged in a variety of other holy things.

So what’s the deal about these marriages? What was their purpose if the husbands (a prince and a king, respectively) desired no heirs? Or is this all a ruse by the Church to include Etheldreda/Audry in the “saints club”–concocting stories of the saint’s lifelong virginity? Was she barren? Did she wed gay husbands only too happy to have a beard and who wanted heterosexual relations no more than they did? Was it, on either or both sides, all about the money or the prestige?

Indeed, in a world where non-Ptolemaic sisters and brothers do not marry, why would King Egfrid not simply replace a woman unwilling to consummate their marriage with another? Or is that the reason why Egfrid wanted this woman as his wife? In any case, Egfrid–who died at age 40–did so without issue.

With no evidence to the contrary, I think it fair to label Saint Audry’s two wedlocks as “marriages of convenience.” This is, of course, the same term used to describe marriages between two people who want to advance or at least safeguard their lives by obtaining the social, legal, and political privileges and protections available to those in heterosexual matrimony without the requirement of having to privately engage in sexual intercourse. What may be worth noting is that there exists a sacred tradition affirming such arrangements as “one way of doing marriage.”