The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  The political roles of England's two Stuart sisters resembled those of the earlier pair of sisters occupying the same throne, Mary and Elizabeth Tudor; both times, the younger sister governed autonomously after a period of joint rule by the older sister and her foreign husband. Culturally, the Stuart sisters lacked the superb Renaissance educations of Henry VIII's daughters; English princesses still learned French, but they no longer learned Latin. Anne, shyer than her sister in public but more assertive in private, became eager to handle her public responsibilities after her brother-in-law totally excluded her from state affairs. “Discoursing her sufferings,” the princess “often made a parallel between her selfe and Qu[een] El[izabeth].” Although married, Anne tried to model herself after an illustrious unmarried female predecessor who had governed alone. At her accession, Anne dressed herself from a portrait of Elizabeth and copied both her personal motto, “Always the Same,” and her parochial boast that she was “entirely English” (both women had undistinguished mothers).2

  Anne reacted to the political dominance of her sister's foreign husband by making certain that hers, also a foreign prince, would not be associated with her reign. Both a political and a military nonentity, George of Denmark became Europe's first royal husband since 1415 whose name never appeared on his wife's coins or on her commemorative medals. Deservedly called England's first prince-consort by Beem, his most important function was biological; like a traditional queen, he helped produce legitimate heirs to the throne while avoiding sexual scandals. His marital achievements were impressive: unlike her childless sister, Anne had seventeen pregnancies, but unfortunately most of them ended in miscarriages, and none produced an heir to the throne. The physical consequences contributed to making her a semi-invalid during much of her reign.3

  Anne's rule provided various firsts for European female monarchs. Its most interesting novelty is the combination of her husband's political invisibility with the high political profile of two female advisers. The first and more important of these, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, held the major office of Groom of the Stole in the royal household. This witty, outspoken, avaricious, and deeply ambitious woman married an equally clever and ambitious man who became the greatest English general of his age; they died fabulously wealthy, owning an enormous palace larger than most royal residences. Queen Anne's political relationship with Lady Marlborough is documented through hundreds of surviving letters, written under the code names of Mrs. Morley (Anne) and Mrs. Freeman (Sarah). Only those from the queen survive; at her confidante's request, Anne dutifully burned all of Mrs. Freeman's letters.4

  Their relationship generated all kinds of scurrilous gossip. After 1700 English political pamphleteering became an equal-opportunity profession; the cleverest and most virulent satires, including quasi-pornographic attacks on “Queen Sarah,” were composed by Grub Street's first female hack, Delarivier Manley. After Lady Marlborough lost the queen's favor permanently and was forced to resign her court office in 1709, Anne was supposedly influenced most by a Lady of the Bedchamber, Mrs. Masham. This time the most scurrilous pamphlet was composed by a man and included insinuations about lesbianism, “stuff not fit to be mentioned of passions between women,” as Lady Marlborough sniffed in her final letter to the queen. Anne herself had spread malicious political gossip by insisting that her half brother born in 1688 was a changeling and constantly referring to the baby as “it.” This rumor was not finally laid to rest until more than twenty years later—far too late to improve the Stuart prince's chances of claiming the English throne.5

  Throughout nearly all of Anne's reign English politics was dominated by a major European war against France in which neither its monarch nor her husband exercised any personal leadership. When it began, Anne was a premature invalid, sometimes unable to write unassisted and barely able to “walk a little with ye help of two sticks” before it ended, she needed wheelchairs. Her husband, who died in the middle of her reign (1708), was militarily useless. Named generalissimo of all English land and sea forces at the outset of the war, Prince George never undertook active service (officially because of his health) and was given no administrative duties because of his incompetence. Without interference from either the monarch or her husband, the War of the Spanish Succession, still known in North America as Queen Anne's War, went gloriously for her kingdom.6

  Because of this war Anne became Europe's first female monarch whose reign produced numerous medals. The vast majority often made on the Continent, celebrated British or allied victories on land and sea. Some portrayed this semi-invalid as a goddess of war hurling thunderbolts at her enemies, principally Louis XIV. The Sun King had long ago created a separate government office to make medals commemorating the glories of his reign, and his enemies relished the chance to mock him. Three medals carry the slogan Ludovicus Magnus, Anna Maior (Louis the Great, Anne the Greater). On one of these, made in Germany, Delilah (Anne) cuts Samson's (Louis XIV's) hair while on the reverse, Europe's greatest king tries to dance as Anne plays the tune (see fig. 11). In real life, neither ruler was so spry: Louis XIV sent Anne special wheelchairs (which they both used) during the peace negotiations in 1712.7

  Edward Gregg has demonstrated that Queen Anne stubbornly made her own decisions and took a sustained interest in government, presiding over weekly cabinet meetings and attending key debates in the House of Lords. She was careful to exercise her prerogatives responsibly, trying to balance her kingdom's competing parliamentary factions when appointing bishops and creating peers. She demonstrated considerable diplomatic skill in dealing with Scotland during negotiations for its union with England in 1707 and also with representatives of her designated successors in Hanover, although one of them mistakenly assured Leibniz in 1705 that the queen was a political cipher. Anne was the last English monarch to exercise the prerogative of vetoing a parliamentary bill and the last to revive the custom of touching sufferers from scrofula, the king's evil. She was also the first in several centuries to avoid political executions, even after some prominent Jacobites were captured during an attempted invasion in 1708.8

  The reign of Europe's next constitutional female monarch was brief but not uneventful. Following the plans of her ambitious husband, Frederick of Hesse, Ulrika Eleonora, already Sweden's regent during her unmarried brother Charles XII's frequent absences fighting abroad, successfully claimed the Swedish throne after his unexpected death, while her eighteen-year-old nephew, the son of her deceased older sister, was in Norway. Before being formally crowned in March 1719 (like Christina, as king), Ulrika Eleonora had to ratify a new constitution which greatly limited the monarch's power.9

  Sweden's new ruler inherited a bleak international situation: her kingdom was mired in a long and increasingly unsuccessful war against both Russia and Denmark. Mediation by France and England ended the Danish conflict late in 1719, but Sweden had to sell off its two remaining possessions in western Germany. Ulrika Eleonora neutralized her nephew's supporters by creating 180 new noble families, more than any other monarch in Swedish history, in only fifteen months of rule (Anne had created thirty English peers in twelve years, only six of which represented new titles). Like Queen Anne, she had a close female confidante and adviser in Emerentia von Düben, her lady-in-waiting since 1707. But von Düben, unlike Sarah Churchill, was never accused of abusing her influence.

  Ulrika Eleonora shared Christina's opinion that women were unsuited to govern a kingdom whose monarchs still led its armies into battle, something even England saw as late as 1743. In February 1720 she requested the Swedish Riksdag to follow the English example of William and Mary and make her husband joint monarch. When they replied that joint reigns had been forbidden in Sweden since the fifteenth century, she abdicated in Frederick's favor. However, the Riksdag stipulated that his title was purely personal: Ulrika Eleonora would return to the throne if he predeceased her, which he did not, and the crown was hereditary but restricted to her male descendants—she hoped until 1724 to have an heir but died c
hildless. These events marked the third time in less than a century that Sweden had reversed itself on the issue of female succession, excluding women after both occasions on which they had experienced female rule. The Swedes would not change their minds again on this issue until 1980.

  After her retirement Ulrika Eleonora lived far more quietly than her more famous Swedish predecessor. She served as regent while her husband was abroad in 1727 and 1731; on both occasions her image reappeared briefly on Swedish coins, in exactly the same subordinate position as Mary II had on English coins. In 1730 her spouse became the first king of Sweden to take an official mistress. Nevertheless, his wife continued to cooperate with him politically until her death in 1741.

  The Pragmatic Habsburg Succession

  While the French Bourbons introduced the Salic law to Spain and Sweden returned to female exclusion, Europe's largest and most diverse block of dynastic possessions moved decisively in the opposite direction. The Habsburgs, while amassing a remarkable collection of territories, had usually possessed several legitimate male heirs. They had held the title of Holy Roman emperor since the fifteenth century, but this could not be inherited: a fundamental law of 1358 made it elective. Although this family lost the crown of Spain in the war which filled Queen Anne's reign, it retained a core of Austrian provinces, united as an archduchy, adjacent to two kingdoms, Bohemia and Hungary, which they had held since 1526. They also held parts of northern Italy and the southern Low Countries.

  In 1713, shortly after abandoning a Spanish throne held by male Habsburgs since 1516, Emperor Charles VI summoned two dozen senior officials to promulgate a revised law of Habsburg dynastic succession, soon known as the Pragmatic Sanction. Its most important provision was to keep the various Habsburg territorial possessions forever indivisible, like a Spanish mayorazgo or an English entailment. Another significant provision extended the customary principles of European inheritance, masculinity, primogeniture, and legitimacy, to include the explicit possibility of a female Habsburg succession. “On the extinction of the male line, which may God be pleased to avert,” these diverse lands would “come similarly undivided to [the emperor's] legitimate daughters, again according to the law and order of primogeniture.” If this lineage failed, the succession, still undivided, went to the legitimate descendants of the daughters of his older brother, the previous emperor Joseph I; behind them came the legitimate descendants of the current emperor's sisters.10

  The contents, Charles VI told his advisers, could be freely disseminated. But implementing them throughout his extremely heterogenous possessions proved both difficult and cumbersome. In 1719, when his only living child was a two-year-old daughter, Charles began at the marriage of his older brother's daughter Maria Josepha by obtaining her explicit renunciations of any hereditary rights, which her husband confirmed. Next, the emperor tried to ensure its official acceptance throughout his hereditary possessions. In the spring of 1720 he drafted a formula, or Rescript, which was obediently ratified by each of Austria's provincial assemblies and a few Italian possessions. It was then accepted by the three regional assemblies of the Bohemian crown in October 1720. The Prague diet recalled that in 1510 the future wife of their first Habsburg king had been declared Bohemia's “true and legitimate heir” if her brother died without heirs, which he did. Moreover, they also noted Ferdinand II's revised constitution of 1627, which included a provision that their “right to elect a king becomes operative only when … no heir of royal stock and blood, male or female, is in existence or to be expected.”11

  Negotiating its acceptance by the less docile diet of the kingdom of Hungary required more time and effort. Hungarians had forgotten that their kingdom had once experienced a female monarch in the late fourteenth century. Instead, in 1687 they had guaranteed “for all time … none other than the male heir in primogeniture” of the Habsburg emperor; but if the male Habsburg line died out, “the ancient and honorable prerogative of the Estates to elect and crown their kings [would] again apply.” When Charles began pressuring the Hungarians, they worried less about female succession than about the indivisibility of their own kingdom, which included quasi-autonomous subsidiary regions like Transylvania and Croatia. Here too Charles got his way: his Pragmatic Sanction became Laws I and II passed by the diet of 1723. The last piece fell into place when the distant Italian-speaking city of Fiume, the Mediterranean port of the Hungarian crown, sent its ratification in November 1725; it ended by wishing the emperor a long life—and male descendants.12

  Charles VI still faced the problem of obtaining international approval for this Pragmatic Sanction. No foreign power, no matter how friendly, was interested in guaranteeing the indivisibility of his sprawling inheritance because they had literally nothing to gain by doing so. International guarantees of a female successor became increasingly important in the 1730s, when it became apparent that Charles VI had two healthy daughters but was unlikely to have any legitimate male descendants. No daughter could acquire his title of Holy Roman emperor: only adult males could be elected. France, with its prohibition of female succession and traditional distrust of Austria, was guaranteed to make trouble. However, the only formal objection came from the elector of Bavaria, who accepted female succession but claimed a superior line of female Habsburg descent through a daughter of Charles VI's older brother.

  Thus matters stood when Charles VI died in 1740, making female inheritance a reality for Europe's most prestigious ruling house. In such unprecedented circumstances, no one really knew how far the formal guarantees he had so laboriously obtained both within and beyond his multinational possessions would actually be observed in favor of his older daughter. In the event, the hereditary provinces of the Austrian archduchy fell into line immediately. A pro-Habsburg pamphlet argued that, as king of Bohemia, the heiress also had the right to cast a vote in the imperial electoral college, although no woman had ever done so.13 However, the Bohemian kingdom, which had noted previous traces of female hereditary rights twenty years before, failed to confirm her, and the Hungarians, who had been completely oblivious to a possible female succession in 1687, hesitated. Internationally, the most blatant repudiation of the Pragmatic Sanction came from an unexpected direction: the new king of Prussia, whose father had agreed to respect it, immediately invaded Silesia, Bohemia's richest province, without even offering an official excuse. The ensuing War of the Austrian Succession, which lasted until 1748, became Europe's first major conflict since the Hundred Years’ War to be fought over the issue of female inheritance. This time the heiress herself was the major protagonist, and she survived the experience to become the outstanding female monarch of central Europe and the only Germanophone woman to head a major government until 2005.

  As Karl Vocelka noted, Maria Theresa is the only modern Habsburg ruler who has remained virtually immune from public criticism, except for a few polite whispers from Protestants and Jews who suffered discrimination under her religious policies. Anyone trying to appreciate her achievements immediately encounters the long shadow cast by a nineteenth-century Viennese archivist, Alfred Ritter von Arneth, who crafted two monuments to her. Von Arneth not only published a ten-volume biography of her, the largest project dedicated to any European monarch, male or female, but also designed the imposing statue of her, surrounded by her most important military and civilian officials, which still stands directly opposite the main entrance to the Hofburg, the old Habsburg palace.14

  Maria Theresa also left monuments of her own in Austria. During the 1740s she constructed Schönbrunn, a great palace in the suburbs of Vienna whose magnificence rivaled that of Versailles. She lived here almost constantly during her widowhood, and her successors used it until 1918. Two other innovative creations named for her continue to serve some of their original purposes: the Theresianum, founded in 1746 in an unused Viennese palace, prepared the nobility for diplomatic careers; and the Theresian military academy, founded at Wiener Neustadt in 1751, trained noblemen to become, in her words, “capable officers and
upright men.” Both institutions outlived the Habsburgs and have been revived twice by twentieth-century Austrian republics. She was also the first woman ruler since the Low Countries regent Mary of Hungary to found a new settlement and name it for herself; Theresienfeld, a village she created in 1769 by building an irrigation canal near Wiener Neustadt, remains a small town today.15

  Maria Theresa's most personal legacy to her successors was a lengthy memorandum which she dictated almost ten years into her reign. First published by von Arneth in 1871, it is generally known as her political testament, although she entitled it “Instructions drawn up from motherly solicitude for the special benefit of my posterity.” Difficult to read because of Maria Theresa's idiosyncratic syntax and frequent Gallicisms (modern German versions require a glossary), it contains a moving account of how she survived the first years of her reign, although it is basically an explanation and justification of her reforms of 1749 in taxation and administrative centralization in her Austrian and Bohemian possessions. She began with “the unexpected and lamentable death of my father of blessed memory,” who left her a magnificent inheritance. But she “was at the same time devoid of the experience and knowledge required to rule such extensive and various dominions, because my father had never … informed me of the conduct of either internal or foreign affairs. I found myself suddenly without either money, troops, or counsel,” and just as important, “I had no experience in seeking such counsel.” After giving brief portraits of her father's chief advisers, she explains how she decided “to undertake the business of government incumbent on me quietly and resolutely … making it ever the chief maxim in all I did and left undone to trust in God alone, Whose almighty hand singled me out for this position” and who would therefore make her worthy to fulfill her tasks properly. She protested that “I would instantly have laid down the whole government, … had I believed that in so doing I should be doing my duty or promoting the best welfare of my lands, which two points have always been my chief maxims. And dearly as I love my children, … yet I would always have put the general welfare of my dominions above them, had I been convinced in my conscience that I should do this, or that their welfare demanded it, seeing that I am the first and general mother of these dominions [die erste und allgemeine Landesmutter].”16