The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  Catalina's intelligence, energy, and attention to detail compensated for her husband's taciturn, procrastinating style, making her a perfect example of a royal woman exercising indirect rule. She became Portugal's only queen ever to be formally acknowledged as a member of its privy council. In 1539 a Spanish ambassador noted that she was “held in great esteem in the kingdom, and the king, knowing this, informs her about everything; there is nothing great or small that does not pass through her hands.” In 1544 his successor noted that the privy council always met in the queen's apartment and that “nothing was done without Her Highness.” A year later the papal nuncio claimed that she, not her husband, governed Portugal. In 1552 Antonis Mor eloquently depicted her political authority: the magnificently dressed queen is standing, and a folded piece of paper lies on a nearby table, a Renaissance code implying access to privileged information that was almost never applied to women. Mor's parallel portrait of her husband, João III, reveals lassitude in his horizontally held scepter.18

  They had nine children. But the last of them, Juana's fifteen-year-old husband, died in early 1554, leaving as Portugal's heir a grandson born three weeks after his father's death and known as el deseado (“the desired one”). Eager to assume the Spanish regency, the widow abandoned her infant son. When João died in 1557 without leaving a will, Catalina simply continued her preeminence in Portugal's government, encountering little opposition in becoming regent for its three-year-old monarch. At fifty, she was Europe's oldest woman regent and the first grandmother to hold such responsibility since the tenth century.

  As regent, Catalina operated much as she had before her husband's death, collaborating closely with a veteran royal secretary who did for her what William Cecil was then doing for Elizabeth in England. Portugal's great nobles were kept at arm's length; major positions which they normally filled remained vacant, while she granted privileges to Portugal's wealthy Jewish “New Christians.” Catalina also patronized the Jesuits, who tutored the young king and opened Portugal's second university in 1558. Her five and a half years of regency saw both domestic and international problems. In 1559 five witches were executed at Lisbon, the only such occurrence in Portuguese history. The Casa de India declared bankruptcy in 1560, and Portugal's vital overseas empire faced military threats in 1562, when the sultan attacked their remaining stronghold in Morocco while the French attacked Brazil. Both were repulsed.19

  Discontent with her rule coalesced around her husband's younger brother Henry, a cardinal and inquisitor-general. In December 1560 Catalina announced she wished to retire and organized a national referendum on the issue. About a hundred responses have been preserved, most of which praised her government. However, continuing pressure from the kingdom's highest-ranking nobles caused her to summon Portugal's Cortes in December 1562. After the opening ceremonies, she sent a letter of resignation, ordering the deputies to replace her with Cardinal Henry in ten days; she had signed it more than two months before without informing him. Afterward, she continued as guardian of Portugal's child-king, but the task became so frustrating that she threatened to move to Spain. Catalina also built a lavish tomb for her husband and joined him in 1578, shortly before their grandson's fatal crusade in north Africa plunged Portugal into political chaos.

  Early in her regency Catalina patronized a remarkable book. Ruy Gonçalves, a law professor recently appointed to Portugal's appellate court, dedicated to her a 110-page treatise entitled Privileges and Prerogatives possessed by the female sex through common law and royal ordinances, above the male sex. “Most high and most powerful Queen, our lady,” it begins, “Emilius Papinius (one of the best jurists of civil law) writes that women are in worse condition than men in many sentences and conclusions, and from this the doctors have accumulated many cases and doctrines to prove that men have more legal privileges and prerogatives than women; others choose … to write against the lives and customs of women, almost accusing Nature for producing females instead of males, as many texts of common law repeat.” Admitting that “the consensus is that Papinius's view is truthful,” he asserts that “nevertheless one can affirm, Most Powerful Lady, that for the most part men and women are treated equally in legal cases and decisions and that the male gender normally includes the female.” Justifying his enterprise “because so many have written to the contrary,” Gonçalves insisted that in some situations, especially those involving the guardianship of minor children, women have privileges equal or even superior to those enjoyed by men. Under a female regent, the Portuguese Inquisition approved publication of this upside-down version of Renaissance jurisprudence, a treatise as paradoxical as Agrippa's far better known Declamatio. More than two centuries later, during the reign of Portugal's first official female monarch, it was republished unchanged.20

  Catherine de Medici and Salic Law

  France had known lengthy female regencies before 1560 and would experience two more in the next century, but none had a greater impact than Catherine de Medici. Among Europe's numerous mid-sixteenth-century female regents, she most closely resembles her Portuguese namesake, who was twelve years older and died eleven years sooner. Both had been foreign queens-consort and consequently always remained vulnerable to xenophobic attacks. Both produced large broods of children (ten and nine, respectively), yet neither could prevent her kingdom from falling into dynastic chaos immediately after her death. Both acquired supreme political authority in middle age by outmaneuvering their dead husband's nearest male relative. Finally, both held de facto control of royal government for a much longer period than their official regencies, although their influence declined sharply during their final years.

  The French Catherine played her political role on a much larger stage, surrounding herself at the peak of her influence with anywhere between eighty and three hundred ladies-in-waiting in her famous Flying Squadron, all of whom were dressed like goddesses in silk and gold cloth. A flood of printed invectives, mainly from her later years and often linked to her role in the infamous massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, has ensured Catherine's posthumous reputation as a sinister Italian black widow (after 1559, she always wore black). Her numerous biographers have rarely explained how this particular French queen managed to acquire and maintain so much authority for so long over a kingdom where, as a Habsburg princess remarked in 1553, queens had less authority in government and enjoyed less respect than anywhere else in Europe. Many biographers explore her rich cultural legacy, but few have noted her patronage of works undermining the origins of France's Salic law, which opposed female inheritance of sovereignty.

  After her husband's death in 1559, Catherine was never officially regent of France except for three months in 1574, but she soon took an increasingly decisive political role alongside her fifteen-year-old son, François II. By mid-1560 his acts began, “This being the good pleasure of the Queen, my lady mother, and I also approving of every opinion that she holds.” At his death in December 1560, she staged a coup d'état, outmaneuvering the king-consort of Navarre, Antoine de Bourbon, who was also France's military commander, to gain de facto control of French government. The Estates-General proclaimed her “governess [gouvernante] of France” and president of the king's council, with authority to receive foreign ambassadors and official correspondence and to appoint officials on behalf of the new king, her ten-year-old son, Charles IX. An ornate official seal showed her full-length, crowned and holding a scepter, with the legend “by the grace of God queen of France and mother of the king.” She continued to use this title, with its implication of divine-right status, long after the king had been declared legally adult.21

  By 1561 Venetian diplomats noted that “she governed as if she were king.” Catherine developed a cumbersome system of opening every official letter addressed to the king and composing two answers, one from her (the real response) and one from the king (the official response). She worked diligently: between 1561 and 1575, omitting the king's official replies, more than 3,250 letters of her state correspondence
survive. Catherine, who hunted until she was sixty, despite suffering numerous falls and serious injuries, adopted Mary of Hungary's method of riding horses and complemented it with an early form of female underpants. Thus the queen-mother looked more imposing when accompanying her army in person, as she did at the siege of Rouen during the first religious war.

  Evaluating Catherine's political record as France's de facto head of state remains difficult. In this era, religious conflicts coexisted with female rule throughout northern Europe, from Scotland to the Low Countries. In France, which had perhaps the most dynamic Protestant movement anywhere in western Europe, an insecure woman ruler sought various religious compromises in order to hold it together peacefully. Although she ultimately failed, Catherine's record also includes some considerable achievements. She opposed religious persecution and devoted the first half of her political ascendancy to creating workable compromises between rival religious factions at court. In 1561, Michel de l'Hôpital, who became chancellor even before her coup d'état, arranged a national summit conference on religion and crafted some remarkably evenhanded legislation. Although enforcement proved impossible, they persisted in this goal even after civil war interrupted their attempts in 1562.

  Catherine's most original political tactic followed the official proclamation of her son's majority (not made at Paris, another innovation). She sought to increase loyalty and obedience through a gigantic visitation covering much of Europe's largest kingdom, taking along the court, including foreign ambassadors, and royal administration, including the chancellor. No contemporary European monarch ever attempted anything remotely similar: upwards of ten thousand people spent twenty-seven months journeying across France. Royal camping equipment included portable triumphal arches for entries into major cities and miniature carriages for the nine dwarves accompanying the queen-mother; most of the time on this interminable journey, it also had a traveling zoo of about three dozen animals, including bears and camels. Government became portable. L'Hôpital presided over the first royal lit de justice ever held outside Paris; in 1565, the only full year of the trip, his office produced the largest number of acts in its history while the Parlement of Paris reached its nadir. A new legal code that reinforced royal control over the judiciary was promulgated at a minor but centrally located town.22

  Then things fell apart. Protestants attempted to capture the king in 1567, rebellion broke out again, and Catherine dismissed l'Hôpital. A longer and more bitter cycle of religious wars ended in 1570 with a more restricted version of the peace of 1563. Catherine last attempted a religious settlement for France by marrying her youngest daughter to the son of the Huguenot matriarch Jeanne III of Navarre. Although completely overshadowed by the bloodbath that followed, in which the groom was lucky to escape alive, the ceremony itself constituted Europe's first politically important mixed confessional marriage. By 1572 her influence over her second son, now married and the father of a daughter, had begun to diminish. After 1574, during her third son's reign, she rarely shaped royal policy. However, as late as 1582 she was still capable of claiming Portugal's throne against Philip II and used her personal funds to equip an ill-fated naval expedition under her Florentine cousin Filippo Strozzi.

  If her political record in her adopted country was problematic, the cultural legacy of Catherine de Medici was more positive. She introduced France to such Italian refinements as ballet, forks, and handkerchiefs. In the 1560s her propagandists created Europe's most elaborate set of political tapestries, celebrating her as a modern Artemisia, the greatest widowed queen of antiquity.23 Her architectural projects reveal the same flair, but here Catherine was unfortunate because her principal undertakings were either abandoned or demolished. A vast mausoleum for the Valois dynasty at the royal cemetery of St. Denis, begun in 1563, was interrupted in the 1570s and torn down in 1719. Nothing remains of Catherine's town house, built in 1572, except a pillar with 147 steps which stood in the center of her courtyard, Now called the Colonne de l'Horoscope, the first astral observatory in Paris held three people at a time. Her major architectural legacy was the Tuileries palace and garden complex, an extension of the Louvre begun in 1564. But after 1572 budgetary restrictions left it to be completed by her successors.

  Catherine's de facto regency coaxed even Frenchmen into voicing occasional praise for female rule. In 1564 the famous court poet Pierre de Ronsard, rarely considered a protofeminist, exclaimed, “The female sex, hitherto removed from royal sceptres, is naturally very generous and worthy to command. … [T]he greater and better parts of Christendom would be very wrong to complain, seeing themselves presently governed by princesses whose natural intelligence, seasoned by long experience of good and bad fortune both in wars and domestic matters, have put a great many kings to shame.” When Catherine de Medici negotiated a military alliance with Elizabeth I despite their religious differences, Ronsard again praised the “prudent gynocracy” of both kingdoms, remarking that “it is sometimes more profitable to a commonwealth [République] to be governed and commanded by a princess of benign and accommodating mind than by a lazy and idle king.”24

  Critical discussions of France's Salic law, undermining its historical authenticity without daring to suggest that it be abandoned, also peaked during her de facto regency among officials close to the queen-mother. The most influential assessment, printed in 1570 and reissued often in the next forty years, called it an invention but nevertheless found it “handsome, admirable, and profitable” its manuscript predecessor had called it “a special law … founded on the greatness of the French, who cannot tolerate being dominated by women.” Brantôme reported that Catherine went further in private, once remarking that if the Salic law were abolished and her daughter Marguerite allowed to inherit the kingdom “by her just rights, as other kingdoms also fall to the distaff,” she would make an excellent monarch. “My daughter,” she boasted, “is just as capable of governing, or more so, than many men and kings whom I know.”25

  In the 1570s Catherine de Medici inspired the most radical sixteenth-century discussions of female rule, both positive and negative. In one direction, French Huguenots, infuriated by her role in the St. Bartholomew's massacre, even tried to extend the Salic law by arguing that women were unfit to act as regents for underage kings. But at almost the same time (1573), another Protestant named David Chambers composed Discourse on the legitimate succession of women to the possessions of their parents and on the government of princesses in empires and kingdoms. This brief but extremely broad defense of female rule was written in French by a close associate of Mary of Scotland's ill-fated third husband, the Earl of Bothwell. Chambers, who had fled to France when Mary surrendered in 1567, dedicated it to Catherine de Medici, “a woman who has accomplished more than any previous governing princess for a long time past in Europe.” It was not published at Paris until 1579.26

  The preface claims that “this subject has never been treated before” because most writers on the subject had either overpraised women rulers or else utterly condemned them and they always relied on “the least probable testimony.” Chambers tried to be both more comprehensive and more concise than previous defenders of female rule. In only sixty-eight pages, he examined female succession by the law of nature, the law of nations, “positive divine law” and “human positive law,” offered a historical survey of women's hereditary succession to public governments, and connected the dots by considering female succession in public governments according to all four types of law—all before examining two current issues, the status of Mary Queen of Scots and France's Salic law.

  Because in hereditary monarchies “the eldest daughter inherits from her father in the absence of sons” and because “no difference of sex is needed to follow [laws], but only prudence and reason,” Chambers insists that “careful upbringing [bonne nourriture] of the daughter of a prince with no sons is of considerable value for advancing her to her father's government.” While admitting that “in ordinary elections, one rarely finds women elect
ed as commanders in chief in the Empire,” Chambers claims that “histories testify that some have governed, and their rule was very well accepted by their subjects.” In kingdoms and lesser hereditary governments, “it is a general rule that women succeed in the absence of males” and “their government in such cases is universally received at all times and approved by all nations,” unless “some great consideration by a special positive law orders the contrary.” To support the near-universality of female inheritance, he resurrects some relatively obscure European female monarchs. The German Protestant chronicler Johann Sleidan told him how “Charlotte, daughter and heir of King John of Cyprus, was prevented from succeeding her father by the trickery [finesse] of the Venetians.” Chambers also sketched how France had acquired and lost the kingdom of Navarre through heiresses, unraveling the tangled history of a small kingdom with numerous female sovereigns. As a foreigner in France, Chambers prudently avoided mentioning Isabel of Castile and offered cautious praise for France's English ally, where “Elizabeth, presently reigning, is considered to have a good and quick mind with many good qualities and capable of good advice.”27

  After summarizing the refutation of Knox by John Leslie (cited here by his alias, Morgan Philips), Chambers concludes by discussing “how the government of Queens and Princesses is profitable to France.” He began by noting French exceptionalism: “In all hereditary kingdoms presently known (at least in Europe), daughters succeed, except in France, because of a positive law, called ‘Salic,’ or some old custom.” However, “one can easily conjecture that the aforementioned Salic law, or old custom of frustrating women of their possessions, was introduced by constraint.” Summarizing his sources, who include Christina de Pise, femme Italienne, Chambers asserted that “no state has been governed by princesses more often than France, nor with greater profit to the public; and it seems a counterweight to foreclosing them from reigning officially over that kingdom.”28