Figure 6. Floating-crown coin of married heiress, 1557. After Mary Tudor married Spain's crown prince in 1554, English coinage developed this new motif to depict the elusive location of sovereignty under joint rulers. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 2.5 license by the Classical Numismatic Group, Inc., www.cngcoins.com.
Figure 7. Elizabethan pictorial icon, 1592. England's aging monarch remains eternally youthful in this often-reproduced portrait, named for the location where she appears to stand. Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 8. Female regent as goddess of war, 1622. To conclude her apotheosis cycle, Peter Paul Rubens portrayed Marie de Medici as Bellona and surrounded her with weapons. Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 9. Christina of Sweden triumphant. Starting in 1647, her high-value coins replaced her crown with a classical motif used previously by some male sovereigns. Courtesy of American Numismatic Society.
Figure 10. Cavalier riding sidesaddle, 1653. Sebastian Bourdon's quasi-heroic portrait of Queen Christina of Sweden, intended as a gift to the king of Spain, depicts her on a rearing horse, accompanied by her falcon-carrying groom. Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 11. Sarcastic German medal of 1710 celebrating recent French defeats. On the reverse, a slogan in French about adapting to feminine tastes captions a scene with a woman wearing a crown (Queen Anne of England) playing a harp while an old king (Louis XIV) tries to dance on crutches. Courtesy of American Numismatic Society.
Figure 12. Statue of Tsarina Anna, 1741. The first life-sized modern vertical representation of a female ruler made shortly after her death (now in the Russian Museum of St. Petersburg) portrays a bellicose monarch in an uncharacteristically feminine pose. Photo by Rosellen Monter.
Figure 13. Maria Theresa as matriarch, 1764. The Habsburg heiress, not her husband, is the focus of this family portrait displaying the numerous children of the “first and general mother of the nation.” Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 14. Europe's greatest female usurper, 1765. Catherine II hung Virgilius Erikson's almost life-sized canvas of her dressed as a Guards officer at her coup d'état of 1762 in Peterhof Palace; it is still there. Photo by Rosellen Monter.
Figure 15. Europe's last divine-right joint monarchs, 1779. On this gold coin from Brazil, the profile of Maria I of Portugal overshadows those of her husband and uncle Pedro III (compare fig. 3). Courtesy of American Numismatic Society.
Figure 16. Catherine II in her park, 1792. The earliest known portrait of an informally dressed female sovereign: an old lady walks her greyhound in the gardens of her Summer Palace, casually indicating a monument to her past military triumphs (compare fig. 7). Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 17. Margaret Thatcher inspects troops in Bermuda, 1990. Wearing traditional feminine headgear, Europe's first democratically elected example in a long tradition of militarily successful female rulers performs her role as commander in chief. White House Photo Office.
5
Husbands Finessed
The Era of Elizabeth I, 1550–1700
The reigns of women are commonly obscured by marriage … whereas those that continue unmarried have their glory entire and proper to themselves.
—Sir Francis Bacon, Works
In the second half of the five centuries 1300–1800, when kingdoms were fewer in number but larger, the husbands of Europe's royal heiresses generally enjoyed much less political power than previously. Like their predecessors, the first three royal heiresses after 1550—Mary Tudor, who acquired England in 1553; Jeanne III d'Albret, who acquired Navarre in 1555; and Mary Stuart of Scotland, who became a monarch as a baby and a legal adult through her marriage in 1558—already had or soon acquired husbands. The first married soon after her coronation, not from personal inclination, she said, but from desire to produce an heir; the second was already married and had a son; and the third, soon widowed without children, later remarried during her personal rule. But instead of reigning as conventionally deferential Navarrese-style wives, all three placed significant curbs on their husband's authority between Mary Tudor's marriage in 1554 and the disintegration of Mary Stuart's second marriage twelve years later. In 1562 the Navarrese pattern even broke down in Navarre itself.
Europe's next two royal heiresses, Elizabeth I of England and Christina of Sweden, avoided this spousal problem by remaining unmarried, as would the next unmarried woman who acquired a throne, Empress Elisabeth of Russia in 1741. Between 1550 and 1700, a total of six women, two of whom inherited as children, occupied monarchical thrones in Europe. During an age often described as strongly patriarchal, four of them would govern jointly with their husbands for at least part of their reigns. However, during almost ninety years of rule as adults, these six female monarchs actually had husbands barely 20 percent of the time (nineteen of eighty-eight years). Even excluding the exceptionally long and pivotal reign of Elizabeth I, which accounts for half of the total between 1550 and 1700, other female monarchs ruled jointly with husbands less than half the time, and all these men were foreign princes who usually operated under important restrictions.
Numismatics once again provides exceptionally illuminating examples of the uncertain governmental relationship between female sovereigns and their husbands in early modern Europe. In 1553, two of them, in England and Scotland, appeared alone on their kingdom's coinage before their marriages. Between 1554 and 1558, married female monarchs in three kingdoms, England, Navarre, and Scotland, had their effigies on high-value coins facing their husbands (all of whom were in the primary position on the left), with his name preceding hers on the inscriptions (see fig. 6). All three kingdoms used the same design to express the uncertain location of sovereignty under such circumstances: a single crown floats above the heads of both spouses without touching either. Written evidence suggests that this visual message is not misleading; these were joint reigns in which royal husbands continued to participate in exercising sovereign authority, as they had done previously. But they were no longer clearly the dominant partners; by 1566 Scotland's coinage reflected the political eclipse of the monarch's spouse by naming the wife first. As has been noted, the next royal heiresses finessed any political and numismatic problems with husbands by remaining unmarried.
However, seventeenth-century numismatic evidence also suggests two reversions to medieval female figureheads. One woman, the Spanish archduchess Isabel Clara Eugenia in the Habsburg Netherlands (r. 1598–1621), was devoutly Catholic, while the other, Mary II of England (r. 1689–94), was devoutly Protestant; both had childless marriages to first cousins. Both women appear on high-value coins in a new design that underlined their subordinate political positions: their profiles are partly concealed behind those of their dominant husbands. However, neither woman was a legitimate heiress, so their status as sovereigns was extremely fragile. The first woman held only a provisional sovereignty, granted by her dying father, Philip II, on condition that she marry the man he designated, and when they had no children, these lands reverted to the Spanish crown. The second woman became England's junior co-monarch after her Dutch husband had successfully usurped its throne from her father. Despite its progressive features, the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 also marked Europe's final regression to the medieval pattern of joint rule when a husband could rule alone after outliving his wife. When her brother-in-law died in 1702, Mary II's younger sister (also married to a foreign Protestant prince) selected Elizabeth I as her political role model.
An Unmarried Adult Heiress
Many historians have pointed out that in 1553 the greatest political problem in Tudor England was not whether a woman would inherit its throne, but which woman. Its outgoing male regent attempted to arrange the coronation of his young daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey. Although usually known as the Nine Days’ Queen, a doomed Protestant heroine, Jane Grey also deserves to be remembered as Europe's last failed teenage female royal claimant, seventy-five years after Isabel the Catholic overthrew her unfortunate niece. A well-educated Renaissance pri
ncess, Lady Jane challenged traditional assumptions by announcing that she might make her young husband, for whom she had scant respect, a duke, but not a king. In the event, Henry VIII's older daughter, Mary Tudor, managed to push aside this young rival with remarkable swiftness; no one died fighting, and at first only three of Jane Grey's principal supporters were beheaded. As Anne Whitelock has pointed out, “It was the only successful revolt against central government in sixteenth-century England.” Mary's Council promptly issued a beautiful gold sovereign depicting their new monarch enthroned.1
Once the English succession had been settled, Europe's third-largest kingdom faced an unprecedented problem. Its monarch was already older than a dozen previous royal heiresses in other parts of Christendom; but unlike all of them—or for that matter Jane Grey—she had never been married. Although Mary Tudor's famous father had six marriages himself, he was never able to arrange one for either of his daughters, even after restoring both of them as possible successors. As Charles Beem has pointed out, nobody, including the monarch herself, really knew how to behave when an unmarried adult heiress acquired England's throne, and the peculiar rituals of Mary Tudor's coronation reflected this confusion. Much ritual was completely traditional, including being girt with a sword and having spurs touched to her. But also appropriated were elements from the so-called auxiliary coronations of English queens: Mary was presented with two scepters, the traditional one for kings and one with doves for their wives. Other aspects were entirely feminized. Mary was carried in a litter (men rode horses), dressed in white cloth of gold (men wore purple velvet) and with her hair unbound, like a girl being married (Mary would insist afterward that she had married her kingdom). Like her father and brother, she acquired the title of Defender of the Faith (Defendrix Fidei) at her coronation. A recent peculiarity of the English Reformation also made her, like her father and brother, Supreme Head of the Church in England. Mary quickly dropped this title while using the accompanying authority to remove Protestant ceremonies.2
When she soon decided to marry a foreign prince, a remarkably one-sided prenuptial agreement was rapidly cobbled together in England and the Low Countries. Like those of earlier heiresses to major kingdoms (Joanna I of Naples and Isabel of Castile), it placed strict limitations on her future husband's powers. The bride already governed a major kingdom in her own right; her groom, Philip of Spain, eleven years younger but already a widower with a son, possessed a minor kingdom (Sicily) and was poised to inherit Europe's most powerful kingdom. Such circumstances help explain the unusual precautions for preserving England's autonomy written into the prenuptial arrangement. This document—which Parliament promptly incorporated into statutory English law, preceded by a special act specifying that Mary enjoyed exactly the same royal prerogatives as her male predecessors—constitutes a watershed in the history of marriages of royal heiresses.
The official English copy began with a sentence appropriate for first marriages of every previous royal heiress throughout Europe: “So long as the matrimony endures, Prince Philip shall enjoy jointly with the queen her style and kingly name and shall aid her in the administration.” Its final clauses also seem traditional: “Whoever succeeds shall leave to every dominion their privileges and customs to be administered by their natives. The dominions of the Emperor, the prince and his successors, and the queen shall aid one another,” according to a treaty signed at Utrecht in 1546. However, its central passages disadvantaged Philip in multiple ways: “The prince shall leave to the Queen the disposition of all officers, lands, and revenues of their dominions; they shall be disposed to those born there. All matters shall be treated in English,” a language of which Mary's relatively well-educated husband knew not one word. At the same time, “the queen shall be admitted to the society of the dominions the prince has or shall come to him during their matrimony.” Its financial clauses were even more disadvantageous to her husband. “For her dowry if she outlives the prince,” she was to receive one hundred thousand pounds per year, 40 percent of it from the lands “which Margaret [of York], widow of Charles, Duke of Burgundy, received” but if he outlived her, he received nothing.
Most disadvantageous of all to the groom were the burdens it placed on his six-year-old male heir. To prevent controversy over the succession, “in England males and females of the marriage shall succeed according to law and custom.” Neither Philip nor his son could expect to inherit England; the boy was guaranteed his possessions in Spain and Italy but accompanied “with the burden of the said dowry.” However, “if there is any male child by this marriage,” Philip's son and his heirs “shall be excluded from the Lower Germanies and Burgundy” and even “if only females are born of the marriage, the eldest shall succeed in Lower Germany” as well as in England (one must remember that at this moment, Lower Germany had been governed by women for forty years, and that its current female regent, Mary of Hungary, was the brains behind the Habsburg negotiators in Brussels).3 Philip, who constantly signed himself “your obedient son” to his father, secretly repudiated this prenuptial contract, which offered him neither political nor economic advantages, before agreeing to marry a woman whom he generally described as his “dear old aunt” (she was really his first cousin once removed).
Both their wedding ceremony and Philip's official entry into London displayed a bewildering confusion of male and female prerogatives. At the wedding, both bride and groom wore white, and Philip entered the church on the side traditionally reserved for brides. Even their new great seal of state featured a peculiar design that eloquently depicted the elusive location of sovereignty after the marriage of a royal heiress. Both spouses are on horseback, looking at each other; Philip is foregrounded with a raised sword, but Mary, riding sidesaddle and holding a scepter, precedes him in the primary position on the left. Neither wears England's crown, which appears alone in the upper right atop their joint coat of arms. At the same time, new high-value English coins were made in the names of both spouses, using an equally novel and politically similar design: a single crown above two heads (this time with Philip on the left) but once again touching neither. Otherwise, standard protocol for European joint reigns was observed, with all official documents issued in the names of Philip and Mary. One should not forget that Philip's authority would have increased dramatically if the marriage had fulfilled its primary purpose, the birth of a child: Parliament granted Mary's husband guardianship of a daughter to the age of fifteen and of a son to the age of eighteen, and his wife's will of early 1558, when she again believed herself to be pregnant, named him regent.4
But Mary remained childless, never offered her husband a formal coronation, and left his political role in England undefined. Although no consensus yet exists about Philip's actual share in the major events of Mary I's short yet eventful reign, some outlines emerge. His greatest practical disadvantage was undoubtedly his complete unwillingness to learn the language of his wife and her kingdom; but England's Privy Council, more than half of whose members received Spanish pensions, prepared Latin summaries for his perusal and, sometimes, his annotations. Both he and his wife signed its official Latin proclamations, he first and in larger letters. Most correspondence between Philip and his conjunx noster charissima, who wrote to him in French, was burned at her death; only two letters survive. Their great joint business was the restoration of papal authority, and here they seem to have collaborated as seamlessly as her grandparents Ferdinand and Isabel, who were also his great-grandparents. Philip's diplomatic service compensated for the absence of English representation at Rome; a Spanish source gushed that it was “a miracle by the hand of God that a people and kingdom so ignorant and dissolute could be persuaded to obedience and union with the Church without the least shedding of blood.”5
Actually, much blood was shed soon after the reunion with Rome—but by England's government, not by the rebels. The most notorious aspect of Bloody Mary's reign, its relentless persecution of English Protestants, followed the same rhythm whether her Spanish h
usband was in England or abroad. Almost three hundred heretics were burned in just over four years, ranking among the very worst persecutions anywhere in Reformation Europe. In foreign policy, Philip, on his final trip to England, managed to evade one provision of their prenuptial agreement by exploiting a French provocation in 1557 to drag England into the last phase of the Habsburg–Valois struggle. Judith Richards has pointed out that, unlike any other major document of her reign after her marriage, Mary officially acted alone in declaring war—and she did so against a French king who seemed as clueless as his Ottoman allies about diplomatic protocol involving female monarchs. Henri II explained to his assembled ambassadors, “As the herald [declaring war] came in the name of a woman, it was unnecessary for [me] to listen to anything further.”6 The resulting war proved beneficial to Philip, who commanded many English soldiers at the time of his great victory of St. Quentin, but it was disastrous for the English, who lost their last foothold in France, Calais, to a surprise French attack. When peace came in 1559, Mary was dead, Philip remarried a charming young French princess with a proper royal dowry, and the French retained Calais.
Mary Tudor's official funeral sermon in England noted that she was “a queen, and by the same title a king also.” At Brussels, the capital of her “reverse dowry,” a local prelate delivered a more eloquent commemoration in the presence of Philip's regent. It celebrated exactly what English Catholics admired in her: “courage in difficult matters, … and in every phase of life, integrity, truthfulness, and charity.” Mary Tudor exhibited “great and heroic virtues,” her eulogist affirmed; “the victory that this Princess achieved in surmounting so many adversities without a single false step, gave her the prize among women famed for the masculine virtue of power.” The culmination, unsurprisingly, was Mary's piety: “After carefully considering her deeds, she needed a truly victorious faith in order to put down the lions who raged against her at the outset of her reign and … wished to take over her kingdom.” Only after “dominating so many tumults and pacifying so many seditions” could she “destroy the fortress of the infidels and restore the honor of God and the Church in her kingdom, and rebuild Christian doctrine and discipline.” This achievement evoked favorable comparisons to five male heroes of the Old Testament. Her eulogist, still unaware of her successor Elizabeth's religious policy, concluded that a great place awaited this other Queen Mary in heaven.7
The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800 Page 16