The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  Nevertheless, some things had changed. Like Catherine de Medici, Maria Theresa always dressed in black during her widowhood, and she always wore a traditional widow's cap both on her coins and in her few commissioned portraits. She designed a suitably majestic joint funeral monument for herself and her husband, which she apparently tested out before her death; it remains the most ornate tomb in the Habsburg dynastic vault, although somewhat upstaged by the starkly plain tomb of her son and successor alongside it. During her widowhood, administrative reforms became fewer and less fundamental. Except for her son's brief, inconclusive intervention in the Bavarian succession war (1778), there were no more military conflicts with Prussia. “Never lose sight of the fact,” she advised him at that time, with her characteristic abrupt code switching between French and German, “that a mediocre peace is always better than a fortunate war.”32 Instead, she and her son gained much territory without bloodshed. In 1772 Kaunitz and Joseph II persuaded her to sign a treaty partitioning Poland with Russia and Prussia that produced the only important territorial increase in Habsburg possessions during her reign.

  Maria Theresa spent much of those final fifteen years secluded in her palace of Schönbrunn. Michael Yonan has analyzed the most significant, although not the most popular, image of her during this period, Anton von Maron's large official portrait of 1773. It was commissioned to hang alongside a similar portrait of her husband in his redecorated bedroom at Schönbrunn; she liked the work well enough to ennoble Maron for these portraits, and her husband's portrait still hangs exactly where she intended it to go, but she never put hers beside it. Both spouses are depicted seated at desks beneath the same three figures symbolizing peace and prosperity; she even has olive branches over her head. Maria Theresa holds a printed view of Schönbrunn in one hand. Several books lie on her table; an inkwell symbolizes the large number of letters she wrote after 1765 “with maternal solicitude” to her various children; above her, an allegorical Peace bestows a specifically female crown.33

  Europe's Last Heiress of the Old Regime

  Although few people noticed it, the coronation of Maria I of Portugal in 1777 marked the first time in over two centuries that Europe (now including Russia) had as many as three women monarchs ruling simultaneously. However, the last royal heiress of eighteenth-century Europe remains a somewhat shadowy figure with few biographers.34 The most remarkable aspect of her reign was the complete, permanent mental breakdown she suffered after fifteen years on the throne. This situation required a prolonged regency until her death in Brazil twenty-four years later—the first occasion since Spain in 1516 in which a son had to rule in the name of an incapacitated mother.

  Portugal's recurrent obsession with being absorbed by its larger Spanish neighbor had emerged whenever a woman claimed its throne. As early as 1383 much of its political elite feared being governed by the Castilian husband of its heiress. At its next dynastic crisis after its African disaster in 1578, one of the three candidates proposed at the Cortes of 1580 to succeed Portugal's dying king Henrique was a woman, D. Catarina de Braganza. She received one less vote than Philip II of Spain in Portugal's estate of nobility and tied with the illegitimate Prior of Crato, thus creating a stalemate. Unlike her male rivals, D. Catarina lacked military support. After 1640, Portugal ultimately resolved the issue of female rule through a patriotically motivated monastic forgery, purporting to be a ruling of 1143 that had remained completely unknown until 1632: it barred a woman from inheriting or transmitting the royal succession unless she was married to a Portuguese nobleman.

  In the eighteenth century José I enjoyed a long reign and had six legitimate children, all of them daughters. Although his famous enlightened minister, the Marquis de Pombal, opposed endogamy, the king preferred to resolve the succession issue by marrying his oldest daughter to his younger brother Pedro. José I obtained a papal dispensation for this purpose in 1743, when she was nine and her uncle was twenty-six. Portugal's first generally acknowledged heiress received a solid education from a Jesuit tutor, Timoteo de Oliveira, until Pombal had him imprisoned in 1757. In 1760, when she was a spinsterish twenty-six, Pombal tried to arrange her marriage to an English prince; but when Charles III of Spain threatened to invade Portugal and suggested his own brother instead, José I secretly married her to her uncle.35

  The tactic fulfilled its dynastic purpose: six children were born, half of whom survived infancy. The prompt arrival of a male heir in 1761 was celebrated in every major foreign capital except Madrid. As José I's regent during his final illness, his wife continued his endogamous politics by marrying this sixteen-year-old prince to her husband's youngest sister, who was exactly twice his age. Nothing this incestuous had occurred in the eighteen centuries since Ptolemaic rule in Egypt concluded with Cleopatra VII married to her two half brothers. Nevertheless, the end justified the means; Portugal now had native legitimate heirs, and after José I's death in 1777 its first female sovereign was acclaimed as D. Maria I, amidst an outpouring of literary congratulations.36 At the age of forty-three, she was also Europe's oldest female monarch to have a coronation since Joanna II of Naples in 1419.

  Her husband became Dom Pedro III. “Yesterday, in virtue of the fundamental law of this Monarchy,” he wrote proudly to an Italian prince, “which has the same force in Portugal as the Great Charter in England, the Salic Law in France, the Golden Bull in Germany, or the Royal Law of Denmark, establishes that the husband of the Royal Heiress also becomes King, I have participated in this event, which is the first ever verified in this kingdom.” But as their joint portrait illustrates, Portugal's heiress was its real sovereign, while Pedro III's position was closer to a consort than to a joint monarch. The official account of their coronation, printed in 1780 by the Royal Typographical Office, recorded the “memorable solemnities, pomp, and magnificence which exceeded anything seen previously” for “the eternal remembrance of the Portuguese nation and the incomparable Glory of its August Sovereign [Soberana].” The investiture and oaths of obedience were for Maria alone; her husband received separate Viva!’s after hers. The gold coins celebrating their accession emphasize her preeminence, reversing the gender priorities of William III and Mary II ninety years earlier (see fig. 15).37

  Maria I was a typical eighteenth-century monarch, genuinely preoccupied with the welfare of her subjects. Her numerous panegyrists celebrated the prudent moderation of her government. She exiled Pombal without repudiating the general direction of his reforms. She categorically opposed the death penalty before reluctantly allowing public executions of three Brazilian rebel leaders in 1790. In her fifteen years of rule, only four events, including the foundation of Portugal's Academy of Sciences in 1779, were deemed sufficiently memorable to merit medals. Nevertheless, much governmental business got accomplished. A new law code was planned in 1778, and six volumes were printed in 1786; the new United States of America was recognized in 1783 and new treaties made with Russia and Sardinia in 1787; a Royal Marine Academy was founded in 1778, followed by a Royal Academy of Fortification and Artillery in 1790 and a Royal Academy of Design in 1791. The sovereign's most important personal contribution lay in foreign relations: Maria I wrote several hundred private letters to her Spanish relatives attempting to maintain good relations with her kingdom's all-important neighbor.38

  A personal tragedy, the death of her older son in October 1791, deepened into a national emergency three months later as Portugal's monarch slipped from melancholic depression into delirium and occasional frenzy. Political problems, most notably the increasing threat to monarchy in France and a serious revolt in Brazil, undoubtedly contributed to her collapse. A desperate call for help to Francis Willis, the English physician who had recently cured his insane monarch George III, proved both expensive and useless. Maria I would live until 1816, but she stopped ruling early in 1792. Like Juana la loca almost three centuries earlier, Maria a louça never forgot her official position (“I am always the queen of Portugal”). It seems symbolic both that the last
divine-right female sovereign of Europe should be physically moved to a different continent in the Napoleonic era and that her corpse returned home under a constitutional monarchy.39

  Although Maria I had claimed her inheritance without a struggle, in some important ways her diligent and maternal reign before her incapacity in 1792 resembled that of Maria Theresa, but in miniature; the Portuguese heiress had many fewer subjects, many fewer children, and many fewer major political achievements. Like Maria Theresa, Maria I gave her eldest and secular-minded son (but not her husband) a public role in government in 1785. Her husband had already created a new palace for them at Queluz, on the outskirts of Portugal's capital, to which she added a wing after his death. Five centuries of female monarchy in western Europe concluded with this unremarkable reign. However, the real end of Europe's divine-right female rulers came not in Lisbon in 1792 but in St. Petersburg four years later, and the last woman standing was undeniably remarkable.

  7

  Ruling Without Inheriting

  Russian Empresses

  Russia offers a unique historical example: the same century has seen five or six women reigning despotically over an empire where women were previously slaves of male slaves.

  —Charles-François-Philibert Masson, Mémoires secrets sur la Russie (1800)

  Despite Russia's reputation of being semioriental, its Westernizing eighteenth-century governments experienced the longest period of female rule anywhere in Europe. Between 1725 and 1796, four tsarinas and a female regent governed it for all but three and a half years. Like the four heiresses of Latin Europe during the same century, the combined reigns of these Russian women total almost seventy years, with one woman being responsible for half of each total. But essential differences also separate the Russian from the Latin Christian cohort of eighteenth-century female rulers, and historians have yet to analyze the Russian phenomenon adequately in either national or international contexts. Russia's leading eighteenth-century expert, Evgeny Anisimov, reduced the subject to a series of disconnected biographical sketches, although these women's political situations abound in shared experiences.1

  Three peculiarities distinguish the Russian cluster of female rulers. First, although all five were related to male tsars either by blood or marriage, three (both empresses named Catherine and the eighteenth-century female regent) had changed their names after converting from Protestantism to Russian Orthodoxy. Second, none of the four empresses, unlike the married heiresses of Latin Europe, had husbands at any time during their reigns. Third and most important, none of Russia's female autocrats inherited her throne. Instead, for the first time in European history, four women, including a regent, acquired autocratic power through coups by the elite guards regiments created by Peter the Great; and immediately after her proclamation, a fifth woman used these regiments for a constitutional coup to restore absolute rule. So while Russia was indeed Westernizing during this period, it experienced female rule under conditions utterly different from those elsewhere in Europe.

  Although Peter the Great (r. 1689–1725) is justly famous as Russia's great Westernizer, his numerous female successors, beginning with his widow, were intimately connected with the successful implementation of his policies. Their role begins with the location of Russia's capital. In 1727 his young grandson returned it from Peter I's newly built “window on west” to its traditional home in Moscow, which remained the location for Russian coronations. However, by 1732 his female successor had returned it to her uncle's new Baltic seaport of St. Petersburg, and her female successors kept it there. They built, remodeled, and rebuilt all of the numerous European-style imperial palaces in and around Russia's new capital. The most famous of these, their downtown Winter Palace, now known as the Hermitage, ranks among the world's greatest museums; it was constructed by Peter the Great's daughter and furnished magnificently by her successor.

  As rulers, these women became increasingly autonomous and autocratic. If Russian tsarinas were not the only eighteenth-century female rulers to be portrayed riding horses in masculine fashion (a few of Maria Theresa's medals used this pose in the 1740s), only Russian women wore men's hats and even an officer's uniform while riding. Considering their collective achievements, it is perhaps not coincidental that only in the mid-eighteenth century, after a longer delay than in any other non-Muslim country, including China, did chess-loving Russians finally put an extremely powerful woman on their boards alongside the king.2 It would be more appropriately Russian to create a Matrushka doll commemorating its women rulers, with a gaudy Catherine II on the outside concealing Elisabeth, who conceals Anna, who conceals Catherine I; its ultimate figure would be a tiny Sophia, the female regent who preceded them.

  Before and After Peter the Great

  Few of Peter I's numerous biographers notice that his personal reign (1689–1725) was both preceded and followed by the earliest examples of female rule in Russian history. Both situations were also unparalleled in any major state for many centuries. Peter's predecessor was the first female regent to claim formal sovereignty since Irene of Athens usurped the throne of Byzantium almost nine centuries previously; his successor was the first former concubine of humble birth to govern a major state since Egypt's Shagarrat al-Durr in 1250. If Peter's half sister Sophia was officially only a coruler with her brother and himself in 1686–89, his widow Catherine I became Russia's first full-fledged empress (Imperatritsa) in 1725–27. Both women exercised sovereignty in customary ways, issuing decrees and putting their faces and titles on Russian coins. Neither was married, and both conducted government business through a male favorite with whom they worked closely.

  Sophia's regency began as literally the power behind the throne when a dynastic dilemma was resolved in 1682 by the joint rule of her younger brother Ivan, who by all accounts could not rule unaided, and their half brother Peter, who seemed very competent but was underage. Until April 1686 she remained simply “the great Sovereign Lady, Pious Tsarevna [tsar's daughter] and Great Princess Sophia Alekseevna,” and her name invariably followed those of her male siblings. As Lindsay Hughes notes, not until the political and diplomatic success of this odd Russian troika reached its peak did Sophia reinvent her title by moving the key term autocrat (samoderzhitsy) to follow her name instead of preceding it. Under the leadership of a great Westernizer, Prince Vasily Golitsyn, Russia's joint rulers had already begun a new land survey and conducted an extremely active foreign policy, sending ambassadors to several European countries and making treaties, including an Eternal Peace with Poland in 1686.3

  The three years following Sophia's full association as joint ruler were dominated by Golitsyn's unsuccessful war in the Crimea against the Ottoman Empire. These military adventures coincided with Sophia's expanding political ambitions. In the 1680s eulogies addressed to her outnumbered those honoring Russia's nominal sovereigns; after 1686 her image decorated the reverse of Russia's gold coins, with the co-tsars on the front, and her first overtly secular European-style portraits appeared. These seem realistic; unlike previous Western portraiture of female rulers, none displays any flattering physical features, and all foreign chroniclers considered Sophia remarkably ugly. By 1687 she was contemplating a separate coronation for herself; portraits depicting her with imperial regalia circulated both in Russia and abroad. The most daring, an anonymous oil painting that was not published until 1895, placed her, crowned and holding imperial regalia, within a double-headed imperial eagle.4

  After the failure of Golitsyn's Crimean campaign became apparent in 1689, Sophia's downfall was sudden and complete. Peter I, now seventeen, opposed her publicly, stripped her of all state titles, and shut her in a Moscow convent. Nine years later, compromised in an abortive revolt of palace guards (strel'tsy) while Peter was in Europe, Sophia was interrogated. An Austrian diplomat claimed that Peter threatened her with the fate of Mary Stuart, executed “by command of her sister [sic] Elizabeth.”5 Instead, Sophia was forced to become a nun, taking the name Susanna, while the corpses of r
ebel leaders were hung on the convent walls where she could see them. But an oil portrait of Sophia within the double-headed eagle was also preserved in the same convent, perhaps in the same rooms where Peter I later lodged his repudiated first wife, who outlived him.

  Peter's second wife, Catherine I, a Baltic Protestant servant named Marta Skavronsky who had been taken by a Russian officer in 1702, followed him on the imperial throne. Europe's only illiterate female ruler, she also offered its best example of female promotion based on political merit. While bearing several children to the tsar, she also accompanied Peter on several military campaigns and greatly impressed him with her courage and judgment during his most desperate emergency in 1711. Afterward, Peter honored Catherine in special ways, first by marrying her in 1712. Two years later, celebrating a naval victory over Sweden, Peter created a new honorary order bearing her name and made her its grand master. It became Russia's second-ranking order behind that of St. Andrew, which Peter had previously created. Women were prohibited from becoming members, but every eighteenth-century empress, beginning with Peter's widow, immediately put on the order's blue sash and declared herself its head. The most extraordinary honor Peter bestowed on Catherine was to crown her as empress in May 1724, an unprecedented event which began Russia's “uncharted and unplanned journey towards female rule.” Peter himself put the crown on her head while she knelt in prayer. A peculiar coronation sermon omitted both scriptural citations and historical precedents; as the inscription on its commemorative medals proclaimed, this event was entirely the “work of God and Peter the Great.”6