The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  Moreover, if legitimate female inheritance is the dominant part of this story, it is far from being the only part. Europe's female regents never usurped thrones, but European political history between 1300 and 1800 includes several ambitious women who successfully pushed aside either female or male rivals with better dynastic claims. At least eight of the thirty women in this sample, including Isabel the Catholic in Spain and all four Russian empresses, were technically not legitimate heiresses. Three of the eight women boasting the longest reigns between 1300 and 1800 had seized power through either coups d'état or civil war.

  For such reasons conventional political theory provides little guidance to a historian of female sovereignty. Even the first and most important feminist author of the old regime, Christine de Pizan (1365–c. 1434), had a blind spot about female sovereignty. She explained why women were capable of governing and pointed out that they had done so in antiquity; she also offered modern examples of women who exercised authority temporarily as regents. But for all of her intellectual daring, she never raised the possibility of modern women governing as monarchs. Two reasons probably lurk behind de Pizan's prudent silence on this topic. First, she was writing in France, where female exclusion was already so well entrenched by 1400 as to be beyond criticism by anyone with connections at its court. Second, she loathed the most famous European female sovereign of her lifetime, Joanna I of Naples, and excluded her from the City of Ladies because she believed that Joanna had arranged her first husband's murder. Male authors did no better in explaining either de jure or de facto female sovereignty. If one can infer a few basic rules affecting female inheritance, only Machiavelli's The Prince dared to propose guidelines for usurpers—but the author's republican background prevented him from seeing that a woman like his famous contemporary Isabel the Catholic would fit his description of a new prince better than her husband.

  Europe's most successful female usurper, Catherine the Great, offers an especially illuminating example of the practical difficulties involved in codifying rules of succession. In composing her guidelines for Russia's legislative assembly of 1767, she wanted to replace Peter the Great's precedent that each dying emperor name a successor. The question seemed extremely important because Montesquieu, her principal guide, considered a law of succession to be the most fundamental of all laws. Catherine therefore wrestled with a problem that defeated even a clever, well read, and usually resourceful empress. An undated, unfinished draft, notes her greatest modern expert, Isabel de Madariaga, shows that Catherine II was unable to write a law of succession that would legalize her own position. She began by paraphrasing Montesquieu: “The first principal law of this sovereign realm is the stability of the throne and a fixed succession,” adding, “The throne can never be vacant,” the venerable doctrine that the king never dies. “On my death,” Catherine continued, “my son will inherit” then, “after my son, if his son is already 21 years old, then his eldest son will inherit; if he is less than 21 years old, then his mother should be concerned, and let her reign for the rest of her life, for a minority of the sovereign would be dangerous for the empire; if there is no male heir, then let the eldest daughter [inherit] …” Catherine abandoned the attempt.9 Her forty-two-year-old son, Paul, did indeed follow her and promptly decreed a far simpler rule of succession: no woman could ever again occupy the throne of Russia. It was his most important piece of legislation, lasting until the Bolshevik Revolution.

  The most basic general principle of royal succession throughout Europe, so fundamental that neither Chambers nor Catherine II bothered to mention it, was legitimate birth. Once marriage had become generally recognized as the seventh sacrament in the high Middle Ages, the heir to a major Christian polity had to be born to parents who were legally married; Catherine II, who also had an illegitimate son, ignored him when discussing her order of succession. The next most important principle of monarchical succession, acknowledged by both Chambers and Catherine II, was that male children of any age preceded females of any age—but this principle came second because legitimate females preceded illegitimate males. Several illegitimate sons attempted to seize royal thrones until the eighteenth century, but only two were successful, both of them relatively early and under truly exceptional circumstances. The last such instance, in 1460, required the assistance of a Muslim jihad (see chapter 3); after this usurper's death ten years later, a Venetian fleet commander rebuffed a plea from the dispossessed heiress that it was his Christian duty to restore her, retorting that the previous king was legitimate because the Egyptian sultan (although not the pope) had recognized him.10

  The four general principles applied to both sexes almost everywhere except France, which shortly after 1300 consistently barred any claim involving female succession rights. As Chambers said in 1579—in French and at Paris—if a deceased king anywhere else left legitimate daughters but no legitimate sons, the oldest surviving daughter took precedence over more distantly related males. The most troublesome problems usually occurred if a dying king left only very young daughters but had younger brothers who were already adults. This was precisely the situation in 1316 when Capetian France infringed the third general rule and began a progressively more strident insistence on female exclusion. However, when a similar situation arose only fourteen years later in a large kingdom ruled by a French dynasty, Robert the Wise of Naples awarded his entire inheritance to a four-year-old granddaughter and excluded his two younger brothers from a regency council.

  The second outcome proved typical. Although various major French thinkers of later centuries, men as original and as different as Jean Bodin, Michel de Montaigne, and Montesquieu, claimed that France's Salic law was eminently reasonable and deserved universal application, the overall record of the rest of Latin Christendom presents a very different picture. Outside of a few French satellites like eighteenth-century Bourbon Spain, Chambers's assertion of 1579 was substantially correct: daughters of kings without surviving sons inherited ahead of the former king's younger brothers or more distant male kin. One kingdom, Sweden, usually a French ally, reversed its position on female inheritance, permitting it twice and forbidding it twice between 1593 and 1720 before permitting it again in 1980.

  A few European kingdoms, including its most prestigious unit, the Holy Roman Empire, were elective rather than hereditary. This amounted to a de facto bar against female rule because no woman would be freely elected to head any European government until Margaret Thatcher in 1979. However, in old Europe no elective monarchical state, including the empire, ever prospered politically. Poland became consistently elective after 1572 but soon declined in power and significance before being erased as a state in 1795. Only one woman ever campaigned in any Polish royal election: in 1668 the papacy proposed the former queen Christina of Sweden for its vacant throne, but she received almost no support, even among a devoutly Catholic nobility.11 Bohemia occasionally behaved like an elective kingdom, exercising this privilege in 1618 and 1740, both times with highly unfavorable consequences for its political elite. By 1743, under military occupation, Bohemia was compelled to crown a Habsburg heiress.

  Demographically, because monarchies made considerable efforts to produce sons as dynastic heirs, daughters inherited only about once in every seven or eight royal successions. On the other hand, only one European kingdom, Denmark, was inherited by twelve consecutive generations of sons after 1440. Like their three beleaguered twelfth-century predecessors, female monarchs in Latin Europe between 1300 and 1800 were overwhelmingly (twenty of twenty-four, or 83 percent) daughters of kings without surviving sons. They include several who followed childless siblings, most often a brother (Naples 1414, England 1553, Sweden 1718) but sometimes a sister (England 1558, 1702). The exceptions included a permanent regent of two kingdoms (Denmark and Norway 1386) and a royal usurper crowned jointly with her husband (England 1689), while Castile needed a lengthy civil war after 1474 to decide between an aunt and her niece. All of these women were also daughters of kings, but ea
ch faced major impediments to her claims. The Scandinavian ruler had an older sister whose son promptly claimed his grandfather's Danish throne; both Castilian female claimants had been disinherited at different times by the previous king; and the English usurper had a very young half brother whom she slandered as a changeling. The only complete aberration was the widow of a royal usurper (Cyprus 1474), and she possessed almost no personal authority.

  Did Women Rule Differently from Men?

  Despite an abundant prescriptive literature preaching female subjection, once a woman had established a valid claim to rule a particular kingdom of Latin Christendom she governed it by divine right and faced no fundamental objection from its all-male political elites on grounds of her gender. King may have no female form, but political power has no sex. As Simone de Beauvoir once noted, Europe's most successful women rulers “were neither male nor female—they were sovereigns. It is remarkable that their femininity, when socially abolished, should no longer mean inferiority.”12 Women monarchs could govern effectively in most places at most times because most men adapt quickly to obeying orders from a legitimate commander who happens to be female. Today, in what is probably the closest approximation to absolute rule among civilians in a democracy, male crew members will unquestioningly obey a female airline pilot. Her voice sounds different, but the messages it transmits are not.

  Throughout the five centuries after 1300, for all the talk about female inferiority and frailty, having a woman as divine-right sovereign made very little practical difference in the way governments actually operated. Again, the voice was different but its messages were the same. It is true that women rulers demonstrated greater flexibility, both political and personal, than male rulers; women, but not men, occasionally served as regents after having been sovereigns (see chapter 4), and women, but not men, sometimes changed both their personal names and their religion before becoming rulers (see chapter 7). But this flexibility did not extend to personal appearance. It seems significant that Europe's female rulers rarely felt any need or desire to dress like men in order to rule like men. The unusually tall Mary Stuart of Scotland reportedly wore male clothing in occasional private escapades and even staged one escape dressed as a man;13 but to the best of my knowledge, no European female monarch ever put on men's clothing in public until Peter the Great's equally tall daughter Elisabeth held cross-dressing masquerades in mid-eighteenth-century Russia, and no woman wore military clothing in public until her spectacularly brazen successor Catherine II staged her coup d'état.

  Because women rulers had been so extraordinarily rare in most parts of the world, they had not interacted with each other. But the early twelfth-century armed conflicts between Urraca of León-Castile and Teresa of Portugal suggest that when they did, female rulers behaved exactly like male rulers. After 1300, whenever Europe had two or more women ruling nearby kingdoms simultaneously they interacted no differently from their male counterparts. In 1386 a sister ruling in Poland (now officially a saint) seized two disputed border provinces from her older sister, who had been temporarily deposed as Hungary's sovereign and was then imprisoned. In the fifteenth century two women disputed the same throne and waged war against each other. Although husbands were deeply involved in both early cases, the women themselves were the official protagonists. In the sixteenth century a female monarch ordered the execution of another female monarch, something male kings never did to each other in the early modern era. In mid-eighteenth-century Europe two women, both sole sovereigns of major states, made a military alliance and waged a long and often successful war against the greatest warrior-king of the time, Frederick II of Prussia.

  Women and men conducted nearly all royal business, from making minor appointments to conducting international diplomacy, in essentially identical fashion. Female sovereigns declared wars and ended them; exactly like their male counterparts, they held daily consultations with their principal advisers and made occasional formal public appearances. Both female and male monarchs also managed what was invariably the largest household in their kingdom, the royal court, and directed its official entertainments. Here, women and men sponsored the same kinds of coeducational activities, although, overall, female rulers probably held relatively fewer hunts and more dances and card games.

  Old Europe first adapted to the anomaly of female monarchs by investing them with male attributes. As Albertus Magnus remarked in the thirteenth century, “There is no woman who would not naturally want to shed the definition of femininity and put on masculinity,” and the women who exercised kingship coded themselves as men whenever this tactic seemed convenient.14 Male mimesis was most blatant in the late fourteenth century among Europe's earliest successful female sovereigns: Joanna I of Naples appeared on some of her gold coins with a coat of armor and a man's bare legs, and Margaret of Denmark became the husband of two kingdoms (she was essentially a permanent regent, and her peculiar-sounding title becomes more comprehensible if husband is regarded as a verb rather than a noun). Traces of the transformation of female monarchs into honorary men persisted for centuries; in seventeenth-century Sweden and eighteenth-century Hungary heiresses were still acclaimed as rex rather than regina at their coronations.15

  Female rulers could bend standard gender roles. A useful example compares the indirect audacity of Isabel of Castile with the more direct role of Maria Theresa in manipulating chivalric orders that formally excluded women. In 1476, during her civil war against her niece, Isabel, surrounded by loyal prelates and jurists, personally entered a plenary election meeting of the Knights of Santiago, one of Spain's three great chivalric orders; speaking through male surrogates, she intimidated the assembled knights into electing her husband as grand master, thereby acquiring the order's considerable revenues for her treasury. Three centuries later, after Maria Theresa's husband refused to head an honorary Hungarian order which she had revived, she herself presided over its first meeting as grand master, “by virtue of the masculine status which she acquired at her coronation,” as her master of ceremonies explained.16 All four eighteenth-century Russian empresses had themselves painted wearing the blue sash of St. Andrew, Russia's most prestigious chivalric order, created by Peter the Great, although its statutes expressly forbade awarding it to women.

  After 1500 a linguistic factor, the widespread use of conveniently gender-neutral forms for addressing them, facilitated the acceptance of numerous women as rulers. Such terms as Your Majesty and Your Royal Highness were increasingly adopted in all principal European languages simultaneously with the unprecedented multiplication of female rulers, both monarchs and regents, in the mid-sixteenth century. Even Elizabeth I, sometimes considered the creator of a specifically feminine ruling style, often called herself a prince; as she told the new Venetian ambassador a few weeks before her death, “My sex cannot diminish my prestige nor offend those who treat me as other Princes are treated to whom … Venice sends its ambassadors.”17 Because the basic meaning of king and queen (as king's wife) never changed, such ungendered forms of address either promoted or at least reflected the increasing acceptance of female rule in Europe during the second half of this period. The subject deserves further investigation now that our capacity to digest massive amounts of information permits a cross-national, multilingual, and diachronic comparison of the official forms of address employed by and for Europe's female kings.

  Although my account emphasizes that, overall, Europe's female rulers had some long-term overall improvements in their ability to rule autonomously between 1300 and 1800, such advances were neither linear nor uniform, nor did all of these women rule successfully. Far from it. About one in three—a much higher rate than among male monarchs—suffered some form of political catastrophe. Before 1500 their collective record is littered with depositions. Three female monarchs were deposed during the 1380s (Naples 1381, Portugal and Hungary 1385); afterward, another woman was deposed (Cyprus 1463), and a fifth abdicated involuntarily (Cyprus 1489). In 1479 the woman who lost Castile's civil w
ar was forced to enter a convent.

  Various forms of female political failure also occurred after 1500. In 1506 Castile's widowed heiress refused to exercise any of her political responsibilities; although she never lost her official titles, she was effectively imprisoned for nearly fifty years. In mid-sixteenth-century England a teenage female puppet known as the Nine Days’ Queen was deposed and beheaded. Another young female monarch abdicated involuntarily (Scotland 1567), while two did so voluntarily (Sweden 1654 and 1720); an older woman suffered an irreversible mental breakdown (Portugal 1792). All four of these women lived for at least twenty years after they had ceased to govern. Royal statistics should not be pushed too far, but it seems evident that the political “casualty rate” was much higher for female than for male monarchs. Between 1500 and 1800, while five of sixteen female sovereigns ceased governing prematurely, a sample of well over a hundred male European kings (a ratio of about eight men to every woman) produced a larger number but a much smaller ratio of sudden endings. Only men experienced violent deaths in battle (Portugal 1578, Sweden 1632 and 1718), by assassination (France 1589 and 1610), or were beheaded by rebellious subjects (England 1649, France 1793). However, only five male monarchs were deposed (Sweden 1568 and 1599, Holy Roman Empire 1609, Bohemia 1619, England 1688), and only three men abdicated voluntarily (Spain 1555 and 1724, Poland 1668).