The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  From her early years Christina remained emphatically opposed to the idea of marriage. Sweden's Council had agreed in 1647 that, like England's sixteenth-century female rulers, she would retain full royal rights (iura majestatis) even if she married. Two years later she told them, “I declare quite definitely that it is impossible for me to marry.” Europe's second unmarried female monarch differed from Elizabeth I in two important respects. First, Christina despised the diplomatic and courtly games of flirtation at which her English predecessor excelled. One can believe Christina's later comment that “there was no man in all of Sweden so bold as to talk about [marriage] to the Queen.” Second, Elizabeth never named a successor, but Christina settled this problem long before her abdication. In 1649 she selected a German cousin whom she was widely expected to marry and then bullied the Riksdag into giving him hereditary rights. Christina later commissioned a medal that called her chosen successor, Charles X Gustavus, “King by the Grace of God and Christina” (A Deo et Christinae Gratia Rex) and commented, “This could be said with complete reason and truth.”33

  Throughout her life Christina felt profoundly royal but profoundly uncomfortable in her ascribed gender. At her coronation in 1650, the Swedish Royal Archives assert, Christina was proclaimed king (konungh), even specifying “not as Queen” (nuu är drotningh), and in the official royal genealogy she herself apparently crossed out the word Regina and substituted Rex. During her reign Christina adopted some typical masculine forms of heroic self-presentation. At first the girl monarch was shown on coins with her crown lying on a table. However, at the age of twenty-one, with her kingdom's armies victorious in the Thirty Years’ War, she became Europe's first female monarch depicted on her coins wearing a triumphal laurel wreath instead of a crown (see fig. 9). She had more medals than Elizabeth, several of them with overtly militaristic associations. By 1648 they depicted Christina as Pallas, wearing a helmet crowned with laurel; she also became Minerva.34

  The question of her sexual orientation and behavior pose problems for any biographer, despite (or because of) her own comments on the subject. When the Jesuits negotiating her conversion coded her male (as Signor Teofilo Tancredo), they simply copied their strategy of a century earlier with another strong-willed woman ruler, Juana of Castile. But Christina's male mimicry surpassed that of Europe's other female kings. A Jesuit concluded that “there is nothing feminine about her except her sex … her ways are all quite masculine.” She was the first female ruler to commission a large-size portrait of herself on a rearing horse—although in it, as in real life, Christina rode sidesaddle (see fig. 10). The Spanish ambassador's chaplain noted, “Though she rides side-saddle, she holds herself so well and is so light in her movements that, unless one were quite close to her, one would take her for a man.” Once released from the constraints of court life, Christina began her incognito wanderings under a male pseudonym and usually preferred to dress as a man. “From now on,” notes Veronica Buckley, “she would be reluctant to wear women's clothes or a woman's hairstyle. She would appear in public wearing men's shoes, often boots, and frequently a sword; princes and popes would greet her with her legs showing and her feathered hat in her hand. Her speech would grow coarser … even her voice would deepen.”35

  Christina's royal and self-consciously masculine ego remained unaffected by her abdication. Despite her numerous disappointments and rapidly diminishing revenues, her sense of entitlement remained undiminished. She always insisted on receiving the full privileges of a reigning monarch, and her slogan “The Queen neither says nor does anything casually” testifies to how seriously she took herself. Nevertheless, Christina came to regret her early abdication and soon attempted to claim other crowns. In 1656 she sought French support for taking the kingdom of Naples. Four years later she hurried back to Stockholm when her chosen successor died, leaving a five-year-old son; much to Christina's annoyance, his widow became regent. In 1668 Christina became the Vatican's candidate for the throne of Poland after her Vasa cousin had imitated her by abdicating. This was the only occasion in the Europe before 1800 on which a woman actively sought elected office; but despite an extensive letter-writing campaign, Christina fared no better than other papal candidates for this position.36

  In retirement Christina developed an ambitious but typically unfinished plan to commemorate the major events of her life and reign through a “metallic history” like that of Louis XIV: hers contained no fewer than 120 medals. The third depicted her famous father holding a child in his arms, with the legend, “She was worthy of her father's throne.” In no. 28, the figure of Sweden kneels before its enthroned twelve-year-old monarch, “Sweden's Glory and Hope,” offering her a scepter, crown, and sword. Nine consecutive medals (nos. 38–46) celebrated her military victories. A series on her abdication (nos. 71–74) ended with one inscribed, “All is vanity.” The motto fits the entire project, since only eight reverse sides were ever engraved and only three complete medals were ever struck.37

  Christina also used her leisure to rework no fewer than eighteen surviving drafts of her collection of lapidary maxims and a parallel series of slightly longer reflections. At her death in 1689 the maxims, finally entitled The Fruit of Leisure, numbered 1,139, and the Sentiments, 444. Consistent with her sense of self-importance, Christina also became the first monarch in Europe to compose an autobiography, which she dedicated, like St. Augustine, to God. Like several of her other major projects, it remained unfinished; the extant chapters barely cover the first ten years of her life. It concludes with a diatribe against women rulers that outdoes even Knox. “My feeling is that women should never govern,” she began; “and if I were married, I would have doubtless removed any right of succession from my daughters, because I would love my kingdom more than my children. I should be believed about this all the more because I speak against my own interest.” Three sentences later she remarked, “Everything I have seen about women who ruled or pretended to rule, both in histories and in the world, makes them seem ridiculous in one way or another. And,” she added, “I do not exempt myself.” Christina added, “The Salic law, which excludes women from the throne, is very just; women should never reign, and if there are examples, which I doubt, who did marvelous deeds on the throne, one should not count on this; these examples are so rare that no conclusions can be drawn from them.”38

  Despite her contempt for her female contemporaries, Christina admired some very early female predecessors. “With all their faults,” she wrote, “Semiramis, Cleopatra, and many others deserve our esteem and admiration.” Her ninety classically trained male panegyrists essentially agreed with Christina's assessment. Only one of their 112 Latin panegyrics situated Christina primarily among other well-educated women, but many compared her to other female rulers. Several of these were ancient, primarily Semiramis (10), the Queen of Sheba (9), and a classical warrior-queen, Zenobia (7); more recent female rulers such as Isabel of Castile (4), Christina's Scandinavian predecessor Margaret of Denmark (3), and Mary Tudor (2) suggested fewer parallels. However, comparing her to another relatively recent, equally scholarly and similarly unmarried female monarch seemed so obvious that it easily outnumbered those to any other woman ruler, ancient or modern; no fewer than 13 panegyrics compared Christina to Elizabeth I of England. As a child Christina had read William Camden's account of Elizabeth's reign; but throughout her later rants against the natural incapacity of women rulers, she constantly ignored this recent and illustrious predecessor. The comparison surely made her envious.39

  Subsequent writers also noted the similarities between Europe's two best-known recent female monarchs. In 1718 the pairing of Christina with Elizabeth reappeared in David Fassmann's fourth Dialogue of the Dead (Gesprach im Raum der Todten). This Protestant polygraph avoided the controversial issue of their religious beliefs and instead constructed their discourse around the perils of physical love for women rulers. Christina began by denouncing love as causing women more pain than joy; Elizabeth basically agreed with her.
Although Fassmann concludes his introductory section with both monarchs noting the markedly inferior legal standing of women in both Sweden and England, his dialogue is basically about sexual desire.40

  Europe's Last Crowned Female Figurehead

  Christina lived just long enough to see a woman acquire a share of England's throne in 1689 and confirm her low opinion of female rulers. After the successful invasion of England by the Dutch prince William of Orange in 1688, his wife and first cousin, Mary, was jointly invested with official sovereignty early the next year in order to create a fig leaf of dynastic claims to hide their naked usurpation. Charles Beem omits Mary II from his discussion of England's female kings because she was not a genuine sovereign—nor, it should be added, a genuine heiress given that both her father and legitimate half brother were alive.41 Politically, England's Glorious Revolution was a great leap forward into constitutional monarchy; although their coins proclaimed that they reigned by divine grace, William III and Mary II ruled by the grace of England's Parliament. At the same time, their reign represents a great leap backward dynastically to the medieval Navarrese pattern of joint rule, whereby the husband effectively monopolized royal power even when his wife was acting as regent. Coins and medals from their reign reflect this situation with didactic clarity. Their high-value coins adopt the parallel-profile presentation introduced in 1618 by Belgium's Catholic archdukes, with William's face overshadowing Mary's. Several commemorative medals from their reign depict William without Mary, but she appears only once without him—in order to commemorate her death. William III outlived her and became Europe's first jointly crowned royal widower to rule alone in more than 250 years. From the perspective of the history of female government, England after 1688 looks less like the dawn of modern liberalism than the last gasp of the Middle Ages.

  Mary herself, through an unusually candid autobiographical source, provides the most persuasive evidence for considering her a political cipher, Europe's last crowned female figurehead. In the Netherlands she reviewed her activities at the end of each calendar year, paying primary attention to her religious obligations, and copies of these annual self-examinations from her last six years (1688–93) survive in Continental archives. They shed a curious light on her reactions to this so-called liberal revolution. In 1689, reunited with her husband in England, she recalled them “both bewailing the loss of the liberty we had left behind and were sensible we should never enjoy here.” The very next day, “we were proclaimed and the government put wholly in the prince's hand. This pleased me extreamly, though many would not believe it” as she added a bit later, “My heart is not made for a kingdom.” Their joint coronation soon followed, with “so much pomp and vanity in all the ceremony that it left little time for devotion.”42

  Mary II's reluctance to exercise political authority and her preoccupation with her religious practices emerged even more clearly in the next year's reflections. When her husband departed and named her regent, she asked that he “would take care I should not make a foolish figure in the world, … being wholly a stranger to business…. I was in real fear for it,” she concluded, “my opinion having ever been that women should not meddle in government.” Moreover, “I have never given myself to be inquisitive into those kind of matters since I was married to him, since I saw him so full of it.” She survived the experience, although “I had found how impossible it is to pray much when one has so much business.” Subsequent years record her gradual accommodation to the duties of regency, noting fewer prayers and more quarrels with a younger sister who enjoyed a more affectionate marriage and even produced a male heir. Mary II died unexpectedly at the age of thirty-two, long before her asthmatic husband, provoking a veritable flood of funeral sermons and panegyrics in both English and Dutch. As Rachel Weil suggests, “The problems posed by Mary's possession of regal ‘authority’ without regal ‘power’ could be resolved more easily in poetic conceits than in legal terms.”43

  In 1693, with the self-effacing Mary II as England's official coruler, an Italian polygraph named Gregorio Leti published a laudatory biography of her Protestant predecessor Elizabeth I. Although never translated into English, this work became the most widely read life of a female monarch in Enlightenment Europe; it had nineteen editions in four languages before 1750, followed by a Russian version published a year before Catherine II died. The work offered a radically positive assessment of women's leadership capacities. “I do not know why men have conceived such a strange and evil opinion of women,” Leti began his preamble, “as to consider them incapable of conducting important business … or carrying out great plans with vigor. If [men] see a person of that sex govern a state with prudence and success, they will inevitably take the glory away from her and attribute it to her favorites and ministers.” Leti claimed women could master absolutely anything which they studied seriously, and even anticipated the great goddess theory by arguing that women had originally held political leadership before men usurped it. He then ridiculed the Germans, the French, and his fellow Italians for “consulting the barbarians and the Turks when establishing their laws regarding women” and concluded that “if we did not have many examples of women's marvelous success and extraordinary capacity for government, the sole example of Queen Elizabeth would suffice.”44

  Nine years after the first edition of Leti's biography of Elizabeth, Mary II's younger sister Anne became England's monarch. She did not need to read Leti in order to choose Elizabeth as her political model. Being already married, Anne could not finesse the problem of wifely subordination as her illustrious predecessor had done. Instead, she began a new trend by subordinating her husband.

  6

  Husbands Subordinated

  The Era of Maria Theresa, 1700–1800

  She possibly considered this coronation less important than the two masculine crowns that she wore.

  —report on Maria Theresa attending her husband's imperial coronation, 1745

  All four of Europe's eighteenth-century female monarchs were married when they acquired their thrones, but none ruled jointly with her husband. One of them, Ulrika Eleonora of Sweden (r. 1718–20), was considered little more than a puppet of her husband, but when her kingdom denied her request to allow her to rule jointly with him, she preferred to resign in his favor. The other three—Queen Anne of England (r. 1702–14), Maria Theresa, monarch of both Hungary (r. 1741–80) and Bohemia (r. 1743–80), and Maria I of Portugal (r. 1777–92)—exercised power while finding various ways to keep their husbands in politically useful but subordinate roles.

  Once again, numismatics offers excellent illustrations of these political relationships. For the first time in several centuries, the coins of England's and Sweden's eighteenth-century female sovereigns omit any mention of their husbands. Those of Maria Theresa did likewise until her husband acquired his prestigious imperial title, after which the Austrian heiress ordered separate coins minted in his name. Far more of her coins than his have survived, reversing the only previous occasion when an heiress and her husband had separate coins in fifteenth-century Cyprus. The coins of Portugal's female monarch did name her husband, who was also her paternal uncle and had received an auxiliary coronation. But in an exact reversal of the coinage of England's William III and Mary II, Europe's most recent joint reign, this time Maria's name came first and her profile overshadowed that of her husband.1

  Like Elizabeth I in the previous era, Maria Theresa became the central female ruler of eighteenth-century Latin Europe by virtue of the importance of her possessions combined with the length of her reign; she governed two sizable kingdoms and an archduchy for almost forty years, while the other three female monarchs combined for only twenty-eight years in power. But whereas her illustrious female predecessor finessed the issue of marriage, Maria Theresa adeptly exploited hers to her political advantage. She is still conventionally known through her husband's title (Empress) and her family dynasty is still officially known as the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, the first example in Europea
n royalty in which the wife's family name precedes that of her husband.

  Two Female Constitutional Monarchs

  Like Mary II in England, her sister Anne and Sweden's Ulrika Eleonora have generally been perceived as political lightweights and have seldom been studied as rulers. Despite coronations making them sovereigns “by the grace of God” (this traditional phrase appears on their coins), they lacked the arbitrary authority of their early modern predecessors and of their eighteenth-century successors. The English Parliament presented its Declaration of Rights to its new sovereigns in 1689 before offering them the crown, and their successors ruled through Parliament. In 1718 Sweden's Riksdag proclaimed a similarly sweeping reduction in royal power before offering its new monarch her crown. Anne and Ulrika Eleonora are therefore Europe's first autonomous women rulers who can be considered constitutional monarchs since a beleaguered Mary of Burgundy signed a Great Privilege early in 1477 in order to preserve the core of her father's possessions.