The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  Elizabeth's distinctive personal style was already evident at her coronation, which both imitated and improved upon her half sister's recent version. “According to the ancient precedents,” which in fact dated back only five years, Elizabeth made her triumphal procession in a litter rather than on horseback and married her kingdom during the ceremony. However, this time the ceremony and accompanying festivities enjoyed vastly improved publicity: an official account was printed within ten days. The extent to which Elizabeth appropriated her sister's Act of Supremacy of 1554 became apparent even before her coronation, when she told her assembled lords, “I am but one body naturally considered, though by [God's] permission a body politic to govern.” It was her first formulation of the peculiar common-law doctrine of the king's two bodies, formally coined by crown lawyers in 1562 but largely forgotten by the end of her reign. It is unclear whether she saw her political body as gendered; Carol Levin has noted that Elizabeth often referred to herself as a prince and occasionally as a king. At the same time, her physical (if not her mystical) body remained female. Her second official state seal of 1584, more dynamic than its predecessor, portrayed England's monarch on horseback—but mounted sidesaddle.17

  Throughout Elizabeth's reign, one important feature separates her from all of her female contemporaries and indeed from all of her female predecessors: she never married. Responding to her first parliament's request that she marry, Elizabeth referred to her coronation as a marriage to her kingdom, symbolized by the ring that she never removed. A few years later, a Scots diplomat, James Melville, described her motives more bluntly. “By taking a husband,” he told her, “you would be merely a queen, but while remaining celibate you are both queen and king together, and you have too great a heart to imagine giving yourself a master.” About this time she reportedly told a German ambassador who had come with his prince's marriage proposal that “I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.” Deflecting repeated public demands that she produce an heir during her potential childbearing years, Elizabeth maintained her decision to avoid marriage either to a foreigner, as her sister had done, or to one of her own subjects, as her famous father had done. As Melville said, her decisive consideration for avoiding marriage was the extent to which any husband, regardless of the limitations placed on him, would erode her personal authority. As early as 1561 she informed a Swedish diplomat, “I have the heart of a man, not a woman,” and two years later she told her second parliament, “As I think [marriage] best for a private woman, so do I strive with myself to think it not meet for a prince.”18 Nevertheless, Elizabeth could not admit in public that she would never have children so she spun the issue of her possible marriage out for a quarter century, until she finally became too old to play the game convincingly. It is enlightening to compare Elizabeth's behavior with that of two male contemporaries, Sebastian of Portugal (r. 1567–78) and Emperor Rudolf II (r. 1576–1608), neither of whom ever undertook serious marriage negotiations during lengthy reigns. While today Elizabeth is considered a prodigious political success, despite ending her dynasty without naming a successor even on her deathbed, these two perennial bachelors have been generally considered, both then and now, as mentally unbalanced political failures: Sebastian led Portugal into disaster, while Rudolf's relatives finally forced him to retire.

  As a female monarch ruling alone, Elizabeth possessed some advantages which she used to maximum effect. Several Renaissance princesses received good educations, including a mastery of Latin, but Elizabeth stands out as the one best prepared to rule. Her training was not only formal—when she took the throne, she claimed to know six foreign tongues better than English—but also practical because she had to survive several extremely difficult personal situations during the decade before her coronation. This combination equipped her superbly for the task of governing, for which she immediately acquired enormous enthusiasm. As she became entrenched in her position, Elizabeth attempted to fashion positive propaganda from her anomalous situation as a celibate Protestant woman ruler, even though Protestant theology avoided praising virginity. She cultivated a highly original political style which was simultaneously erudite to the point of affectation, nationalistic to the point of chauvinism, and parsimonious to the point of miserly. When Elizabeth traveled on progresses, she reversed the traditions of princely largesse; her hosts gave her presents. On the Protestant side, it played extremely well among foreign as well as domestic audiences for a very long time. As early as 1565 the sister of Sweden's king traveled to England in order to see this modern Queen of Sheba.19 More surprisingly in an age of acute confessional conflict, Elizabeth later drew praise from several of her male Catholic peers for her skill at governing.

  In her forty-five years as monarch, Elizabeth built nothing. Her greatest legacy to her kingdom was not physical but institutional: in a highly confessionalized age, she put her personal and extremely durable stamp on England's national Protestant church, restoring the basic worship services of her father and brother with several touches of her own. For her epitaph Elizabeth reportedly desired only “a line or two, which shall briefly express my name, my virginity, the years of my reign, the reformation of religion under it, and my preservation of peace.”20 Although her famous remark about not wanting to “put windows into men's souls” applies equally well to some of her female peers in Scotland and France, neither of them was “Supreme Governor” of an established national church to which everyone, in theory, owed obedience.

  Elizabeth's piety was intensely personal. She infuriated Protestant zealots by keeping a small crucifix in her private chapel. Because she combined a superb classical Renaissance education with a genuine talent for foreign languages, Elizabeth preferred to express her religious beliefs in highly erudite ways. During her reign she composed some three dozen original prayers, few of them in English. The most revealing expressions of her peculiarly royal religious views come from two collections of these prayers, both printed privately early in her reign. The first, made in 1563, included seven Latin prayers accompanied by her commonplace book and lists of her major officials. Its prayer of thanksgiving included an element of self-congratulation which might have made even Louis XIV blush. After listing the physical and intellectual deformities of many prominent people, some of royal blood, Elizabeth proclaimed, “I am unimpaired in body, with a good form, a healthy and substantial wit, prudence even beyond other women, and beyond this, distinguished and superior in the knowledge and use of literature and languages, which is highly esteemed because unusual in my sex.”21

  A second collection, printed six years later, depicted her on its frontispiece kneeling before an altar containing a prayer book with a crown above it. Inside, Elizabeth flaunted her erudition with seventeen prayers in five foreign languages, including three each in Spanish and Greek. This time her thanksgiving prayer (in French) is modest. Ironically, her final Spanish prayer, taken from Psalm 37, asked God to “give me strength so that I, like another Deborah, like another Judith, like another Esther, may free thy people from the hands of thy enemies,” before concluding by unwittingly repeating the motto of the Spanish Inquisition, “Lord, rise up and judge thy cause.” Around 1580, during serious matrimonial negotiations with a French prince, Elizabeth made still another tiny and very private collection of prayers in her own hand: two in English, separated by one each in French, Italian, Latin, and Greek.22

  Elizabeth's superb Renaissance education also enabled her to act as her own foreign secretary, all the more necessary because no foreign ambassadors at her court understood English. For the first half of her reign, moreover, much of English foreign policy revolved around Elizabeth's matrimonial negotiations, which she conducted in foreign languages with unfailing flair and verve. Nevertheless, some of her most impressive performances came late in her reign. In 1597, not long after telling the scholars of Oxford that she could recall using her Latin perhaps thirty times in thirty-six years on the throne, she burst into an impromptu tirade in Latin after
an impertinent speech by a young Polish ambassador. Barely a month before her death, she gave her last great diplomatic performance in greeting the first Venetian ambassador to her court. After apologizing for her rusty Italian, Elizabeth then used it to harangue his republican employers for taking forty-four years to recognize her officially and for their reluctance to treat female princes the same as males.23

  The best-read female sovereign of Renaissance Europe even knew something about her medieval female predecessors. Defending her detention of Mary Queen of Scots to a French embassy in 1572, Elizabeth reminded them that “the Spaniards imprisoned Queen Urraca after stealing her kingdom” she also cited two twelfth-century examples to prove that it was “no novelty to put children in charge of their mother's kingdoms after depriving them of its administration.” Elizabeth then lectured the French that their own history was “full of examples of queens being imprisoned; it suffices to recall that three consecutive kings [the sons of Philip the Fair] imprisoned their wives” and warned them against such misplaced chivalry as their “unfortunate expeditions on behalf of the famous Joan of Naples.”24

  On becoming England's monarch, Elizabeth had prayed God to give her the grace to govern with clemency and without bloodshed. Although her reign was far less bloody than her father's or her sister's, after 1570 it produced about a thousand executions for sedition. It also included three major treason trials, which approximately trisected her reign: England's only duke was beheaded in 1572, Mary Stuart fifteen years later, and the Earl of Essex in 1601. Elizabeth long hesitated to sign the first two death warrants, especially the second, which she feared would damage her international reputation; as Catherine de Medici remarked, “It was never heard of that one Queen put another to death.” In this case, a Protestant sovereign hid behind the confessional blood lust of her parliament, whose notables took the unprecedented supplementary precaution of signing a bond associating themselves with the execution.25 Meanwhile, her victim tried to fashion herself into a Catholic martyr by disinheriting her son unless he abandoned Protestantism. In different ways, both women inflicted collateral damage on hereditary divine right royalty.

  Even Mary Stuart's execution and celebrations of Elizabeth as a quasi-Christlike figure by Protestant extremists could not erase the respect many Catholic rulers expressed for Elizabeth's skill. “Were she only a Catholic, she would be our dearly beloved,” exclaimed the outstanding late sixteenth-century pope Sixtus V in 1588, “just look at how well she governs!” When his comments reached her, Elizabeth mischievously suggested that perhaps they should get married. In 1594 a surprised English visitor to Florence noticed a portrait of her in the grand duke's palace and was told that he esteemed her for her many virtues. In France her subsequent execution of Essex earned praise from another Catholic ruler, King Henri IV, who commented, in standard male-gendered language, “Only she is a king; only she knows how to rule.” Perhaps the ultimate compliment came from Philip II's daughter; in 1600, Isabel Clara Eugenia jested half seriously to her brother's favorite, the Duke of Lerma, that “the lady [Elizabeth] says she wants to consider me as her daughter; just imagine how much profit I would get from such a mother!"26

  After an almost dowdy beginning, painted images of Elizabeth enhanced her increasing reputation. Early in her reign she showed surprising insensitivity about artistic propaganda, dismissing her sister's very capable court painter and naming no successor. The few portraits of her first dozen years, all by unknown artists, show Elizabeth in sober black and rarely contain any royal symbols. In the 1560s two politically savvy female regents, Margaret of Parma and Catherine de Medici, commented unfavorably about Elizabeth's negligence of this aspect of her public persona. But as her reign progressed, so did the number, scale, and especially the regal symbols on Elizabeth's portraits. In 1579, notes Roy Strong, “when it became virtually certain that Elizabeth would never marry, … the first elaborately allegorical portrait of the Queen was painted.” By the final decade of Elizabeth's reign, her portraits had lost any pretense of realism. “Sometime about 1594,” notes Strong, “a government decision was taken that the official image of the Queen was to be a legendary beauty, ageless and unfading.” Color reproductions of such ageless “bejeweled icons” decorate the covers of an apparently inexhaustible series of Elizabethan biographies. Perhaps her single best-known image, the so-called Ditchley portrait of 1593, shows a young woman with her kingdom literally at her feet (see fig. 7). Near the end of her long reign, in her most triumphant image (Eliza Triumphans, 1601), a hidden wheeled conveyance transports a superbly dressed monarch under a canopy, supported on every side by well-dressed gentlemen and looking rather like a portable life-size relic. Smaller images were ostentatiously worn by English Protestant courtiers in much the same way that a nobleman at a Catholic court might wear an image of the Virgin Mary.27

  However magnificently their heroine was dressed, Elizabethan representational strategies never infringed major gender taboos. No contemporary statues of her exist, nor did she sponsor any literature promoting female rule. Her few commemorative medals stress her kingdom's safety and security. In the mid-1580s the symbol of Noah's ark with the motto “safety through the waves” was copied from the Netherlands. Elizabeth's last medal, designed by her court painter after the defeat of the Armada, portrays a prosperous island honoring its prudent monarch but avoids allusions to a naval battle. It was England's Dutch allies who created mocking medals with sunken Spanish ships; one reportedly boasted an inscription from Virgil's Aeneid, “Done by a female leader.”28

  In 1597 a French ambassador remarked that Elizabeth's government “is fairly pleasing to the people, who love her, but it is little pleasing to the great men and the nobles,” and he predicted that after her death “it is certain that the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman.”29 This was wishful thinking from a female-exclusionist kingdom. In fact, it took ninety-nine years before another female monarch ruled England; and despite having a husband, she tried to pattern herself on Elizabeth.

  Europe's Best-Prepared Heiress

  In the century after Elizabeth I died in 1603, the number of autonomous hereditary kingdoms in Europe shrank to its minimum, and only one produced a genuine royal heiress. At the same time, no female king anywhere in Europe was ever more carefully groomed for her position than Christina of Sweden. Before departing to lead the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years’ War, her famous father, Gustav Adolf, had left detailed instructions for raising his only child. After his death in 1632, his six-year-old daughter received a remarkably thorough and rigorous training, supervised by Sweden's five principal ministers of state, who introduced her to the business of government earlier than several male crown princes. Christina attended state councils before the age of thirteen and presided over them by the time she was eighteen, the same age as Europe's youngest female regent, Juana of Castile. As a monarch, Christina was fortunate. Most historians agree that Sweden attained the summit of its international prestige during the decade of her personal rule, which coincided with large territorial gains from the triumphant end of the long war in the Holy Roman Empire and with the arrival of internationally renowned scholars as well as many artistic treasures looted from central Europe.

  Her posthumous reputation, however, is another matter entirely. Because of her abrupt abdication and repudiation of Sweden's national Lutheran church, Christina has never been especially popular in her native country, although no female monarch since Cleopatra VII has attracted so much scholarly interest outside her homeland. In 1966 the first major conference devoted to her, sponsored by the Council of Europe, presented her as “a personality of European civilization.” During the past two centuries more than a dozen biographies of her have been published in German, English, and Swedish, followed closely by others in Italian and French. Some notable recent attempts still reveal a sense of bafflement about her significance, viewing her as “the restless life of a European eccentric,” “the enigmatic Queen,” and even “
an exceptional king.”30

  In the history of female rule, Christina's reign has two peculiar distinctions. She was the only female monarch in Europe—and by far the youngest of either sex—to abdicate voluntarily after governing successfully for at least ten years. She also became the only dogmatically misogynist female monarch. These aspects converged when she first raised the possibility of abdication in 1651. Her councilors objected that “there is no like example on record anywhere in the world,” and she herself could subsequently name only four men who had done so.31 When persuading Sweden's diet (Riksdag) to make her designated successor a hereditary ruler, Christina also asked them to exclude his female descendants. Two reigns and a lengthy female regency later, Sweden reversed this policy, but Christina continued to oppose any form of female rule in her private writings.

  Her primary reason for abdicating seems clear in retrospect, even if Sweden's great chancellor Axel Oxenstierna admitted to the Riksdag in 1654 that “the Council of the Realm … does not know the reason for what has occurred.” Her major biographers agree that it was Christina's desire to convert to Catholicism, which she had been studying secretly for over a year and would profess openly soon after leaving Sweden. Being the only child of Sweden's greatest Protestant hero and the head of a national Lutheran church in an age when confessional uniformity was normal in European monarchies, her decision to turn Catholic necessarily made her position politically untenable. She also offered other reasons. Christina argued to her councilors that a male ruler would give the kingdom “a champion who, when war threatened, could ride with his people to battle, while a woman could not.” After they answered that “in Your Majesty's times we have fought enough wars … and God has granted us the greatest conceivable success,” Christina dropped this pretext.32 But the daughter of Gustav Adolf remained an enthusiastic admirer of military grandeur, which to her was not authentic unless a ruler commanded his army in person. She compiled extensive notes about Alexander the Great and despised her famous contemporary Louis XIV as a pseudowarrior.