Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Which makes hir walke which way she list,

  And rootes them up, that lie in waite

  To work hir treason, ere she wist

  Hir force is such, against her foes,

  That whom she meetes, she overthrows.

  The Chesse Play, Nicholas Breton, 1593

  In the eastern lands where chess was first played, all the human figures were male, with the king flanked by his general or chief counsellor; his vizier. As the game spread through Europe, after the Arabs invaded in the eighth century, the queen first appeared but still as a comparatively impotent figure, able to advance only one diagonal square at a time. It was in the Spain ruled by Isabella of Castile that the chess queen took on the almost unbounded power of movement we accord her today.

  Two books written in Spain in the last years of the fifteenth century describe these new powers, referring to ‘lady’s chess’ or ‘queen’s chess’. True, in 1493 the Italian translator of Jacobus de Cessolis’s Game of Chess queried whether the queen could really assume the knight’s powers, ‘because it is uncharacteristic of women to carry arms, on account of their frailty’. Two decades earlier, William Caxton’s English translation had stressed above all else the queen’s ‘shamefastedness’ and chastity.

  But the translators can never have met the ‘warrior queen’ Isabella, herself an impassioned player of the game. It is probable that it was largely the example of Isabella and the real-life ruling women who came before her that finally provoked an echo on the board.1

  The allegorical significance of the game was obvious to contemporaries: it was, as many an illustration can testify, this which had made it a staple of courtly love play. But the change of moves would not be without controversy. The new game became known as mad queen’s chess – scacchi de la donna or alla rabiosa in Italian, esches de la dame or de la dame enragée in French. But it was here to stay.

  The time from the accession of Isabella of Castile to the throne in 1474 to France’s Massacre of St Bartholomew almost a century later (a horror which ruptured loyalties across the continent) was an Age of Queens. The period saw an explosion of female rule scarcely equalled in even the twentieth century. These years saw the birth of the new reformed religion, as well as the dawn of the world we know today and for much of them, large swathes of Europe were under the firm hand of a reigning queen or a female regent. This was a sisterhood which recognised both their bonds as women and their ability to exercise power in a specifically feminine way.

  This book will follow the passage of power from mother to daughter, from mentor to protégée. From Isabella of Castile to her daughter Katherine of Aragon and from Katherine to her daughter Mary Tudor. From the French dowager Louise of Savoy to her daughter the writer and reformer Marguerite of Navarre; from Marguerite not only to her own daughter Jeanne d’Albret but to her admirer Anne Boleyn and thence Elizabeth Tudor.

  As the century wore on, the daughters of the first powerful women found themselves at the forefront of the great religious divides that racked the sixteenth century. Most, though not all, attempted to exercise a measure of religious tolerance before those hopes foundered in the face of other, more extreme, opinions.

  Religion helped bring many of them into prominence; religion, in the end, would drive them apart and bring the Age of Queens to an end. But the sheer scale on which the women of the sixteenth century exercised power (as well as the challenges they faced) remains both a spectacle and a warning to our own day.

  Throughout the century the Habsburgs would prove doughty, if unexpected, promoters of female authority. With some notable exceptions, the Habsburg Empire, which in the course of the century came to stretch from the Mediterranean to the English Channel; from the glories of the Alhambra to the grey skies of Antwerp, knew women as regents, rather than as queens regnant. The Netherlands passed from the hands of a ruling duchess into those of an almost unbroken succession of authoritative female governors, each the niece of her predecessor, that endured for sixty years. The Habsburg’s great rival in Europe – France – subscribed to the Salic Law, which forbad women from inheriting the throne. It had, however, a formidable tradition of women exercising rule on behalf of an absent husband or under-age son.

  At the start of this era England was perhaps the least female-friendly of all the European powers. It had no Salic Law; yet when Henry Tudor became Henry VII of England, he subsumed into his claim the blood rights of two women: his mother Margaret Beaufort and his wife Elizabeth of York. No one, including the women themselves, seems to have found his action extraordinary. Yet it was England, of course, which saw a woman – Anne Boleyn – tip a nation into religious revolution. It was England which, in Anne’s daughter, would go on to produce perhaps the most admired female ruler in history.

  That, in a sense, is an impetus for this book. I have written about two royal Elizabeths – Elizabeth of York and Elizabeth I – and I want to join up the dots: to discover what lessons England had learnt in those seventy years that meant it could accept a queen regnant? (And, as a corollary, why did it then cease to do so?) The answer may lie in Europe.

  The female rulers of Europe recognised bonds of sisterhood that crossed the borders, and sometimes even ran contrary to the interests, of their countries. They consciously invoked their status as women to conduct business in a different way. In 1529, the famous Ladies’ Peace of Cambrai, a halt in the long war between Spain and France, was struck between Margaret of Austria, the Habsburg emperor’s aunt and regent, and Louise of Savoy, mother of the French king. The princes might fear loss of honour in making peaceful overtures but (as Margaret wrote) ‘ladies might well come forward’ in such an undertaking.

  This was an ideal which would echo through their century. There were a number of attempts, however abortive, to revive the idea of a ladies’ peace in subsequent decades.2 Sixteen years before Cambrai, in fact on the eve of the Battle of Flodden that cost her her husband, the King of Scots, Margaret Tudor had wished she might meet with her sister-in-law Katherine of Aragon, then ruling England while her husband Henry VIII was away: ‘if we shall meet, who knows what God by our means may bring to pass?’ Mary Stuart always hoped England and Scotland could find lasting peace, if only she and Elizabeth Tudor could meet.

  The line of descent from mother to daughter, whether physical or spiritual, runs like an artery through sixteenth-century Europe. And the connections between the women form a complex web. Margaret ‘of Austria’, born the daughter of the ruling Duchess of Burgundy, was sent as a toddler to the French court, where she fell under the influence of the formidable Anne de Beaujeu and then, as a teenager, to the court of Castile, where she became Isabella’s daughter-in-law and sister-in-law of Katherine of Aragon. She was then, as an adult, herself instrumental in bringing up Anne Boleyn.

  But the powerful women in the later decades of the sixteenth century found themselves in a very different climate from that which their predecessors had enjoyed. Elizabeth I, at the end of this story, has many affinities with Margaret of Austria at the beginning; but while Margaret of Austria had lived in four realms by her early twenties, Elizabeth Tudor never set foot outside her own land. Neither woman bore a living child, yet Margaret would become known as ‘La Grande Mère de l’Europe’, while Elizabeth’s preferred identity was famously that of virgin.

  The Reformation drove fault lines across the continent, while conversely giving to some of these women a fame more enduring than they might otherwise have enjoyed. This book was born, though I didn’t realise it, when as a teenager I read Garrett Mattingly’s classic The Defeat of the Spanish Armada and noted his passing comment that in 1587, the year of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, sixty years had passed since the parties of religion had begun to form, the old versus the new, ‘and always by some trick of Fate one party or the other and usually both, had been rallied and led by a woman’.

  In the so-called gynocracy debate, concerning women’s fitness for authority, two writers influenced the political
thinking of the times to a degree that requires special mention. One, of course, was Niccolò Machiavelli, whose The Prince was first privately distributed in 1513. The second is Christine de Pizan, the French-Italian author and some would argue, early feminist: the first woman to become a professional writer. Her work of the early fifteenth century, The Book of the City of Ladies, had lost none of its relevance by the sixteenth century (or even, perhaps, the twenty-first), as the interest demonstrated by a number of women in this story goes to prove. Anne de Beaujeu and Louise of Savoy inherited copies of Christine’s work, while Margaret of Austria’s three-volume set would have passed to her niece, Mary of Hungary. Anne of Brittany and Margaret of Austria also owned suites of tapestries based on the City of Ladies, as did Elizabeth Tudor. All too aware of the clerical portrayal of women as Eve’s daughters, weak and essentially untrust-worthy, Christine gives into the mouth of Justice a rebuttal of ‘certain authors’ who ‘criticise women so much’, pointing out that there is ‘little criticism of women in the holy legends and the stories of Jesus Christ and his Apostles’, despite what Christ’s later servants might say.

  Machiavelli, who portrayed fickle Fortune as a woman, saw war as a prince’s first duty, as well as pleasure. By contrast, Christine’s model of the virtuous ruler downplayed the ruler’s role as warlord (a practical problem for the female ruler, leaving aside the question of any innately pacific tendencies) and stressed the ‘prudence’ which, in the Aristotelian concept, was the entry point of all the other virtues. Prudence was a virtue attributed to the majority of these women, and The Book of the City of Ladies made a point of describing a number of women from both ancient and more recent French history who had successfully governed nations or territories.

  The continuity of experience – the repetition of tropes and patterns through the century – is something of a theme of this book. Most can be allowed to manifest themselves through the course of the narrative but one is so insistent as to require special note: the question of how frequently debate about these powerful women centres on their bodies. Each of these women would prove to have a role beyond the usual consort’s function of a breeding machine but nonetheless the story abounds with questions of debated virginity and fertility, of women most easily attacked through querying their chastity or their desirability. Questions, even, as to whether the division of a sovereign’s body natural and body politic might not be the best way to allow female rule. This was perhaps the idea behind Elizabeth I’s famous speech at Tilbury: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a king . . .’

  Though the forceful women of fifteenth-century Italy are sadly beyond the scope of this story, Caterina Sforza may be the most striking of ‘the ones that got away’ (as well as being another suggested as a model for the new chess queen). Machiavelli, who encountered Caterina when sent on an embassy, described how, besieged, with her children taken hostage, Caterina pulled up her skirts and showed the besiegers ‘her genital parts’, telling them she had the means to make more children if necessary. Caterina was perhaps unique even among contemporaries but nonetheless, the stress on a powerful woman’s physicality is something that endures.

  Modern comparisons are often invidious and will largely be excluded from this book. Nonetheless, at this of all moments, they cannot be ignored completely. A decade ago as I write – on 19 January 2006, to be precise – the New York Times paid an international group of women a backhanded compliment. It was, it said, ‘the most interesting and accomplished group of female leaders’ ever assembled – ‘with the possible exception of when Queen Elizabeth I dined alone’.

  A good deal has changed in the last ten years concerning women’s role on the international stage. But a lot has not changed – and that includes the visibility of much of women’s history. Elizabeth and her kinswomen apart, the female rulers of sixteenth-century Europe are not always familiar to the general reader in English-speaking countries. In the attempt to change that, this book must be regarded as an opening gambit. But one thing at least it can hope to do: prove that Elizabeth I could dine in some extraordinary company.

  Author’s Note

  Of the sixteen protagonists in this book, four are called some version of ‘Margaret’ and another four variants of ‘Mary’. I therefore make no apology for distinguishing them as clearly as possible, even at the cost of some consistency. Thus while Margaret of Austria keeps her natal title despite her three marriages, Marguerite ‘of Navarre’ is so described even before her marriage to the king of that small country. It is the title under which she is most familiar, the title under which her writings are still published today. Also in the interests of clarity, spelling, punctuation and capitalisation have sometimes been modernised.

  PART I

  1474–1513

  ‘Since you have given women letters and continence and magnanimity and temperance, I only marvel that you would not also have them govern cities, make laws and lead armies . . .’

  The Magnifico replies, also laughing:

  ‘Perhaps even that would not be amiss . . . Do you not believe that there are many to be found who would know how to govern cities and armies as well as men do? But I have not laid these duties on them, because I am fashioning a Court Lady, not a Queen.’

  The Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione 1528

  1

  Entrance

  The Netherlands, 1513

  The girl who arrived at the court of the Netherlands in the summer of 1513 was a courtier’s daughter, bred to know the steps of the dangerous courtly dance; a life where assets were exchanged for attendance, where favour was won by flattery. She knew how the pageantry of a Christmas masque could spell a message, how a family’s fortune could rise or fall on a ruler’s whim and that in the great chess game of European politics, even she might have a part to play.

  No one, of course, had yet any idea just how great a part that would be.

  She arrived as the latest of the eighteen maids of honour waiting on Margaret of Austria, the Regent of the Netherlands. At just twelve years old, she had been handed over to a stranger (one of the regent’s esquires) and escorted from her manor house home in the Weald of Kent, in England, to make the rare journey across the sea. She would have been keyed up to a pitch of excitement, but scared, too, surely. Perhaps no arrival in her life, not even her arrival at the Tower of London more than twenty years later, would be quite as alienating as this one.

  Twelve years old; or about that, anyway. We do not know the date of Anne Boleyn’s birth with certainty. We deduce it, in fact, partly from the knowledge that she came to Margaret of Austria’s court in 1513 and that twelve was the youngest age at which a girl would normally take up such duties.

  ‘I find her so bright and pleasant for her young age that I am more beholden to you for sending her to me than you are to me’, Margaret wrote to Anne’s father. The tribute meant the more for the fact that Margaret had herself served a European-wide political apprenticeship unparalleled even in the sixteenth century. At thirty-three, after six years ruling the Netherlands on behalf of her father Maximilian and his grandson, her nephew Charles, she was a figure of international authority. To follow the early career of Margaret of Austria is to read a Who’s Who of sixteenth-century Europe. And Margaret would come to play a significant role in the lives of two of the most controversial queens in English history.

  ‘Whatever you do, place yourself in the service of a lady who is well regarded, who is constant and who has good judgement’, one of Margaret’s mentors, the French governor Anne de Beaujeu, had advised in a manual of instruction for her daughter. If Anne Boleyn were to learn the lesson that a woman could advance ideas, exercise authority and control her own destiny, she could hardly have fallen into better hands.

  The controversial German scholar Cornelius Agrippa dedicated On the Nobility and Excellence of the Feminine Sex to Margaret of Austria. Agrippa said the differences between men and women were merely physic
al: ‘the woman hath that same mind that a man hath, the same reason and speech, she goeth to the same end of blissfulness, where shall be no exception of kind’, and that the only reason women were subordinate was lack of education and masculine ill-will.

  In schoolgirl French – French being the chosen language of Margaret of Austria’s court – Anne Boleyn wrote to her father of her determination to make the most of her opportunities. She wrote with distinctly idiosyncratic grammar and spelling (she would strive, she wrote in that letter, to learn to speak French well ‘and also spell’) but under a tutor’s eye. Margaret’s court might be a centre both of power and of pleasure but it was also Europe’s finest seminary. The French diplomat, Lancelot de Carles, later described how the young Anne ‘listened carefully to honourable ladies, setting herself to bend all her endeavour to imitate them to perfection and made such good use of her wits that in no time at all she had command of the language’.

  Portraits of the woman Anne Boleyn met in 1513 display a subtle mixture of messages. Since the end of her third and last marriage, Margaret of Austria had made a point of having herself painted always in a widow’s coif, with only the white of the headdress and the sleeves of her costume relieving the inky black. At first sight, no more sombre figure could be imagined. But appearances can be deceptive. To appear as a widow was on the surface a statement of self-abnegation, almost of weakness, a plea for pity. But in fact it allowed a woman both moral and practical authority; the only role that allowed her to operate independently, as neither child nor chattel.

  In heraldry, black was the colour of trustworthiness, or ‘loyaute’. Margaret of Austria had a name for reliability but one Italian visitor noted that as well as ‘a great and truly imperial presence’, she had ‘a certain most pleasing way of laughing’. Black fabric, which needed much expensive dye and labour to produce its depth of colour, was the luxury material of the sixteenth century. And in the portrait, now in Vienna, the pale fur on Margaret’s sleeves is costly ermine. The court to which Anne Boleyn had come, whether at the summer palace of Veure (La Veuren), or at Margaret’s main base of Mechelen, was a place of culture and luxury. Among the illustrated books Anne Boleyn could have seen in Margaret’s library was the already-famous Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (a legacy from Margaret’s last husband), as well as newer books decked with flowers in the margins. Anne would later exchange notes with Henry VIII in the margins of just such a book.