The Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  Caterina’s recipe book shows herself obsessed by the preservation of her beauty, in the most traditionally feminine manner: Queen Elizabeth I could not have done more, and in fact where teeth were concerned did less. Lotions of nettle-seed, cinnabar, ivy leaves, saffron and sulphur were applied to maintain the fairness of her celebrated blonde locks. Other lotions removed unwanted hair from her wonderfully white skin. Pearly teeth were guaranteed by daily applications of charcoaled rosemary stems, pulverized marble and coral cuttlebone. There was rose-water to bathe famously blue eyes, and cream for her white breasts. These appurtenances and practices of a Renaissance beauty were all very well; but when Caterina fought a long battle – masculine by the standards of the time – to hang on to her beloved territories of Forlì against the Pope’s desire to grant them elsewhere, she found that her very femininity was gleefully turned against her.

  In 1497, for example, Venice expressed itself shocked by her ‘boundless sensual appetite’, when the real problem was that of Florentine aggression, which it was believed that Forlì might encourage. It hardly needs saying that a ‘boundless sensual appetite’ was if anything the mark of a Renaissance prince. But Caterina was not born a ‘prince’ – nor had she established herself as such in the minds of her people, once again unlike Queen Isabella.

  The accession of Louis XII to the throne of France in 1498 brought with it new turmoil for central Italy. Cesare Borgia went secretly to France, where a deal was struck that Louis would help Cesare to drive the ruling families out of the Romagna in his own interest, while Louis’ own claims to Milan and the southern Italian kingdoms of Naples (also claimed by Ferdinand) would be respected. The Treaty of Blois of February 1499 was an especial blow to Caterina by which Venice, her traditional predatory enemy, allied with France. Finally on 9 March Alexander VI promulgated that papal bull which designated Caterina as the ‘daughter of iniquity’ – and formally invested Cesare Borgia with Imola and Forlì.

  By the autumn of 1499 Milan had fallen to the French and Ludovico Sforza had fled. Beset in Forlì, Caterina wrote to Ludovico: ‘should I have to perish, I want to perish like a man’. That bold wish was not however to be granted to her.

  Imola proved finally impossible to defend against Cesare Borgia. Caterina however clung on to Ravaldino fortress and refused to flee. Some of her plans for defiance were perhaps over-optimistic, such as sending the Borgia Pope Alexander VI letters which had been impregnated with poison or left in a plague chest (it needs a long spoon to poison a Borgia and the plan was bungled). On 12 December she said that she would ‘show the Borgia that a woman too can handle artillery’. The town itself capitulated by the end of 1499. Still Caterina maintained her defiance within the stronghold even after the inhabitants of the town had been given short shrift – rape as well as pillage described by Caterina robustly as ‘just punishment for a city which had surrendered like a whore’. Caterina continued to refuse such inducements as a safe conduct and a pension (showing herself in this respect more of a Boadicea than a Zenobia).

  The final assault took place in January 1500. Cesare asked for ‘la bellicosa signora di Imola e Forlì’ dead or alive, and on receiving her alive – despite the fact that she had been captured by a French officer and was thus officially the captive of the French King – held her incommunicado for forty-eight hours while he treated her as his soldiers had treated the women of Forlì. Bernardi wrote of the ‘injustices committed to our unfortunate Madonna Caterina Sforza who had such a beautiful body’. But Cesare quipped to his officers that Caterina had defended her fortress better than she had defended her virtue.

  Still Caterina would not sign away her rights to Imola and Forlì. She was not released until June 1501 by which time her beauty, that carefully tended asset, had vanished. She still tried to negotiate the return of some of her rights, but in vain. Her last years were happier, however; she began to train up her young son by Giovanni de’ Medici, Giovanni della Banda Nera, born in 1498, to be a solider, a worthy member of the house of Sforza. She died in May 1509.

  It could be argued that at least as a mother Caterina died with more hope than had Isabella the Catholic five years earlier. The Castilian Queen’s only son, Prince John, whose birth had been attended by such rejoicings, had died in 1497. Of her three surviving daughters, Juana was mad: but she inherited the crown officially since her husband Philip the Fair of Flanders refused to allow Ferdinand more than the regency after his wife’s death. (Isabella’s defence of female inheritance had born fruit.) Another daughter Maria, who had been married to the King of Portugal, was already dead, as was her son Miguel, who might have united in his person the crowns of Portugal and Spain, as once his grandparents had united those of Aragon and Castile. Isabella’s third daughter Catherine of Aragon was already a widow following the death of her first husband Prince Arthur of England; she lingered in that country with a view to marrying – perhaps – his younger brother Henry.

  Ferdinand expressed his own reaction to his wife’s death: ‘there is therefore hope that Our Lord has her in His Glory, which for her is a better and more lasting realm than those she ruled here’. Peter Martyr of Anghiera, on the other hand, the humanist historian, did not forget her martial achievements: the world – not only Spain – had lost its noblest ornament, he wrote, since Isabella had been the mirror of every virtue, the shield of the innocent ‘and an avenging sword to the wicked’.33

  Isabella’s own will, however, expressed the matters which had preoccupied her on earth, including the unity of Spain for which she had fought, and just rule for the Indians in the New World.34 But her instinct for simplicity prevailed at the last: she requested that there should not be an extravagant funeral; instead money should be spent on providing dowries for poor girls (otherwise unable to get married) and ransoms for the Christian captives in the hands of the Moors in Africa. And Isabella, still with her prayers fighting the fight for the Faith, prayed that Ferdinand should continue to expand Spain into Muslim Africa, as he had once expanded Castile into Granada with Isabella at his side: she with her prayers (but in full armour), he with many armed men.

  1 ‘Religious unity cannot easily be criticized as an objective by those who live in a world of mutually repellent secular orthodoxies, quite as compelling and all-inclusive in their claims’, wrote J. N. Hillgarth in 1978.5 It is an apt comment. Nevertheless many manage to do so.

  2 Although if, as has been suggested, Caterina Sforza was the ‘cultural model’ for the queen in the game of chess, which attained its present power as a piece in the late fifteenth century, then she has achieved another kind of immortality.29

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Elizabetha Triumphans

  They couch their pikes and bow their ensigns down

  When as their sacred royal Queen passed by

  In token of their loyal bearèd hearts

  To her alone, and none but only she –

  ELIZABETHA TRIUMPHANS (1588)

  The reign in which the character of chariot-driving Boadicea was destined to be restored to British mythology (or history) did not begin under auspicious circumstances for a woman ruler. The concept was on the contrary generally attacked. ‘Murmur ye at mine anointed because she is a woman? Who made man and woman, you, or I? If I made her to live, may I not make her to reign?’ These affronted questions were put into the mouth of Almighty God in a pamphlet of 1559: An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes against the late blown Blast. The anointed woman in question was Elizabeth Tudor, who had succeeded to the throne of England in the previous year at the age of twenty-five. The author was John Aylmer, newly restored Protestant Archdeacon of Stow.1

  Aylmer’s intention in quoting God, as it were, was to defend the new Queen from a far noisier piece of propaganda: John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment of Women. The virulence of Knox’s language in attacking the whole concept of female sovereignty can scarcely be exaggerated. Neither the passage of time nor the standards of anot
her age have paled the rich colours of his abuse.f1 3 ‘How abominable before God, is the Empire or Rule of a wicked woman, yea of a traiteresse and bastard …’ he writes. Again: ‘For to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation or city, is repugnant to nature, continuously to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.’ As for women in general: ‘their sight in civil regiment is but blindness; their strength, weakness; their counsel foolishness and judgment frenzy, if it be rightly considered’.

  The fathers of the Church are quoted, including St Paul, Tertullian (the whole sex is ‘the port and gate of the devil’) and St Augustine (‘woman ought to be repressed and bridled betimes, if she aspire to any dominion’). Then nature is brought into play: ‘no man ever saw the lion make obedience, and stoop before the lioness …’ Finally history is invoked: ‘For when the males of the kingly stock failed, as oft chanced in Israel and sometimes in Juda, it never entered into the hearts of the people to choose and promote any of the king’s daughters …’ In short: ‘where a woman reigneth and papists bear authority … there must needs Satan be president of the council’.

  The reference to papists is significant. The ‘Regiment’ or rulership (its contemporary meaning) of females to which Knox so spuriously objected was that of three Catholic queens – Mary of Guise, regent of Scotland in the absence of her daughter Mary Queen of Scots (crowning her was ‘to put a saddle upon the back of an unruly cow’),4 Catherine de’ Medici in France, and Mary Tudor in England. It was a classic piece of historical bad timing that no sooner had Knox denounced the female regiment than a Protestant monarch – but one who unfortunately for Knox happened to be a woman – replaced Catholic Mary on the throne of England. Nor was Knox alone in his denunciation. The great Calvin too had joined in deploring such an unnatural development.

  Speedy and embarrassed revisionism was the order of the day lest Elizabeth, the hope of the reformers, be fatally offended. It was particularly awkward that both Calvin and Knox, in an extension of that idea attributed to Muhammad that ‘a people who place a woman over their affairs do not prosper’, had stated that civil wars generally tore apart those kingdoms ruled over by women.5 Insecure at the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth would hardly welcome the notion that God himself might foment a rebellion in her own realm, just because she was a woman.

  Calvin wrote a mortified letter to Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, William Cecil. He admitted that Knox had asked him in a private conversation what he thought of female sovereignty. ‘I candidly replied, that as it was a deviation from the original and proper order of nature,’ among the punishments Man had to endure since the Fall ‘it was to be ranked no less than slavery.’ On the other hand, individual women were occasionally well endowed to govern, evidently raised up by God’s authority, either to condemn the inactivity of the opposite sex or simply to set forth His own glory (as a creator). Calvin instanced the biblical Deborah and Huldah and quoted the prophet Isaiah: ‘Queens should be nursing mothers of the church.’ (Knox had dismissed both Deborah and Huldah in The First Blast.)6

  Even Knox himself was compelled to backtrack. In July 1559 he wrote with the best air of apology he could muster to the English Queen. ‘Nothing in my book conceived is, or can be prejudicial to your grace’s just regiment,’ he declared, adding characteristically, ‘providing that ye be not found ingrate [ungrateful] unto God.’ The official line to cope with Elizabeth’s presence on the throne was that indicated by Calvin to Cecil: female rule was still unnatural but every now and then God would provide for it for His own good reasons. Knox however added the rider that this put a special burden upon a female (as opposed to a male) sovereign to prove herself worthy of the task. In general the Protestants now fell back on the distinction between Good Queens and Bad Queens: useful in an age which would be marked by the ostensible public rivalry of a Catholic Mary Queen of Scots and Protestant Elizabeth.7

  Aylmer’s defence in An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes leaned heavily on historical precedent.8 The stage army of Warrior Queens was dutifully paraded across his pages, including those who had enjoyed an ‘antique glory’ such as Artemisia, famous for vanquishing Xerxes. Revisionism was not entirely on the side of the Calvinists: Aylmer pointed out that it had been an obvious error to prefer Stephen to Matilda (the Empress Maud), since England had been punished with prolonged civil war for ignoring the claims of the rightful heir to the kingdom – or in this case heiress. This stood the previous Calvinist argument on its head. But perhaps the most remarkable piece of revisionism was that which introduced the name of Anne Boleyn among celebrated women of the past such as Margaret of Flanders:f2 for had it not been Anne Boleyn who had brought about the wonders of the Protestant Reformation?

  Historical precedent apart, Aylmer’s point of view was not really so far from that of Calvin, as revised, or even that of Knox. It was God who had appointed Queen Elizabeth to reign, as part of His divine plan: even, as in the selection of a female governor, working through weakness. When Aylmer wrote that if God made her to live, might He not also ‘make her to reign?’, he was expressly defending the divine selection of Elizabeth Tudor; in no way did Aylmer, Elizabeth’s other defenders, Elizabeth’s other critics and above all the Queen herself attempt to defend the right of women in general to rule equally with men.

  As it is impossible to exaggerate the virulence of Knox’s language in The First Blast it is also impossible to exaggerate the general distaste and anxiety felt towards the notion of a female ruler. When Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary Tudor ascended the throne in 1553, many questioned whether it was even legal for a woman to inherit: there had been no queen regnant since that doubtful, because unsubstantiated, claim of the Empress Maud four centuries before. The rights of the female in the table of royal succession had generally been subsumed into those of her husband, who would often have a lesser claim of his own. Thus in 1485 Elizabeth of York had in fact an infinitely better dynastic claim to the throne than her future husband, Henry VII, de facto monarch after the battle of Bosworth. Then their marriage added her right to Henry’s might and he was of course the one out of the pair who ruled (Elizabeth being merely Queen Consort). The will of Edward VI had concentrated on the male heirs to females within the English royal succession such as his Grey cousins, although it was finally disregarded in favour of the superior dynastic claim of his elder half-sister Mary Tudor.10

  Where might and right did not coalesce, the choice of a husband was always likely to be a problem in the case of a queen regnant. It was not at all clear that the husband of such a queen might not have the actual right to be regarded as the king: when the youthful Mary Tudor was betrothed to her cousin the Emperor, Henry VIII was worried whether he might not thus secure a title to her throne. One Chief Justice advised that although the husband could not call himself king by right, because the crown lay outside the bounds of feudal law (the husband of a feudal heiress automatically assumed her titles, rights and possessions), the Queen Regnant could grant him the title if she chose.11 In the event Mary Tudor’s actual husband, Philip II of Spain, was considered to be King of England as well (a worrying precedent). Mary Queen of Scots’ disastrous second husband, Darnley, whom she married in 1565, was always referred to as King Henry.

  Under the circumstances it was understandable that Cardinal Reginald Pole should have tried to persuade Queen Mary Tudor to take that course actually adopted by Queen Elizabeth: no marriage, but a single-minded devotion to that role granted her by heaven, and for which through many dangers she had been signally spared.12 (Where marriage and position were concerned, as the relative fortunes of the unmarried Elizabeth and much-married Mary Queen of Scots demonstrate, queens regnant in the sixteenth century resembled career women in the late twentieth century, in that they experienced regrettable difficulty in ‘having it all’.)

  The objections to female regiment
were not entirely theoretical. As Sir John Neale pointed out in his biography of Elizabeth I, government itself was ‘a masculine business, with its world a court constructed for a king’. The idea of protecting a queen from the rigours and difficulties of government was of course implicit in the concentration on the topic of her marriage; Elizabeth’s widowed brother-in-law Philip II (and putative suitor at the beginning of her reign) advised her to marry soon, if only that her husband could then relieve her ‘of those labours which are only fit for men’.13

  In vain the coronation tableaux leaned heavily on such stories as that of Deborah, ruling for forty years of peace. The popular mood was better expressed by the fears of the Spanish Ambassador de Feria following Elizabeth’s accession: ‘what can be expected from a country governed by a Queen, and she a young lass, who though sharp is without prudence?’ This was not mere chauvinism – in both senses of the word. There was trouble in the House of Lords over Elizabeth’s title as ‘Supreme Head of the Church’ in view of her inconvenient sex, and Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, made what were described as some ‘ripe remarks’ on the subject. In the end the Queen became the ‘Supreme Governor’.14

  This, then, was to be the triumph of Queen Elizabeth I. She ascended the English throne at a time of outright popular hostility towards female sovereigns, and by a mixture of artfulness, intelligence and instinct survived to rule for forty-five years, her personal prestige – both as a woman and as a monarch – growing with every year.

  Such a triumph did not happen overnight. Two years after Elizabeth’s accession – in 1560 – when the question of her own successor was being raised, the claim of Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, the last of the Plantagenets, was advanced over those of a host of females of royal Tudor descent (including Mary Queen of Scots): ‘the cry is that they do not want any women rulers’. How sublimely different was the mood of Leicester’s will of August 1587 in which he hoped Queen Elizabeth, now in her fifties, would prove to be ‘the eldest [i.e. the longest-living] prince that ever God gave over England’! If Leicester, the favourite, is held to be a prejudiced source, then one might cite the tribute of the Pope Sixtus V, around the same time, against whom the same charge of prejudice can scarcely be laid. The Queen of England might be only a woman, he wrote, and only mistress of half an island, yet she had made herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire and ‘by all’.15