Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  In the last years of Elizabeth Tudor’s life, even after Mary Stuart’s death, several women were among the leading candidates to succeed to her throne. Philip of Spain insisted that the chief Catholic claimant was his daughter, the Infanta. In 1601, when Cecil had a list of claimants prepared, James VI of Scotland in first place was followed by Arbella Stuart (daughter of Lord Darnley’s younger brother) in second; and James should, arguably, have been disqualified by reason of his foreign birth. For the crowd of careful international observers Arbella was interesting chiefly insofar as she might be married off to a man who could thus absorb her claim: anyone from Robert Cecil himself to one of Margaret of Parma’s grandsons.

  The trouble was (as the watching envoys reported) that England, for the moment, had had enough of queens. As a Catholic commentator on the succession, publishing as ‘Doleman’, put it: a woman ‘ought not to be preferred, before so many men . . . and that it were much to have three women to reign in England one after the other, whereas in the space of above a thousand years before them, there had not reigned so many of that sex’.

  In the end, by almost universal agreement, Elizabeth was succeeded by a man, Mary Stuart’s Protestant son James VI and I. The proclamation made clear that he owed the throne to his female lineage, being descended ‘from the body of Margaret [Tudor] . . . and of Elizabeth of York’. But James was a man whose imaginative concept of the monarchy was cast in wholly patriarchal terms. Kings are ‘compared to fathers of families’, he told the English parliament, ‘for a king is truly parens patriae, the politique father of his people’.

  James had, after all, been tutored in youth by George Buchanan, a Protestant who had played a leading part in blackening Mary’s reputation. Buchanan wrote that it was as unbecoming for a woman ‘to pronounce Judgment, to levy Forces, to conduct an Army’ as it was for a man to spin wool or to perform ‘the other Services of the Weaker Sex’. This was to be the theme of writing on (or rather, against) female succession in the decades ahead.

  If Elizabeth were one of the two giant figures left standing at the end of the sixteenth century, the other, of course, was Catherine de Medici. One of the reasons Catherine had been so appalled by Mary Stuart’s death was the impetus her martyrdom would give to the Catholic League led by the Guises, which had effectively replaced the Huguenots as the threatening rebel force within the land.2 When in 1588 the Guises assailed Paris and made an attempt to kidnap her son Henri III it was Catherine who had to deal with them, first clambering over the barricades across the city and then remaining behind to liaise with the Leaguers while her son fled. But Catherine’s ‘authority and credit’ with her son were now all but destroyed.

  When her son, on his own impulse, ordered the assassination of the latest Duc de Guise, two days before Christmas of 1588, Catherine said he was ‘headed towards ruin’. She was right. Just seven months later this last surviving, but childless, son was himself murdered by a Dominican friar, outraged that Henri III had allied himself with the Protestant Henri of Navarre. But Catherine did not live to see Jeanne d’Albret’s son, whose marriage had been the trigger for the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, declared Henri IV of France. She died barely a fortnight after the Guise assassination. Henri IV made her epitaph. ‘What could the poor woman do,’ he asked:

  with five children in her arms after the death of her husband, and with two families in France – ours and the Guise – attempting to encroach on the Crown? Was she not forced to play strange parts to deceive the one and other and yet, as she did, to protect her children, who reigned in succession by the wisdom of a woman so able? I wonder she did not do worse!

  In 1593 Henri IV was received back into the church of Rome, having famously if apocryphally, declared that Paris was worth a Mass. What would Jeanne d’Albret have said? Henri’s assassination in 1610 would bring another woman, his wife Marie de Medici, Catherine de Medici’s kinswoman, as well as her successor, into power as regent of France. But Marie’s attempts at rule never amounted to successful control of the country.

  The closing years of the sixteenth century, and the first years of the seventeenth, saw some continued instances of female rule. Philip of Spain made his daughter the Infanta Isabella, with her husband, joint ruler of the Spanish Netherlands, a rule that ushered in the Netherlands’s Golden Age. Queen Elizabeth ‘says she wants to consider me as her daughter; just imagine how much profit I would get from such a mother!’ said the Infanta, ambiguously. But the most famous female ruler of the seventeenth century, Christina of Sweden, would resign her throne, saying ‘no woman is fit to govern’, a sentiment later echoed by Queen Victoria, whose belief was that, ‘We women . . . are not fitted to reign’. Appropriate, perhaps, that the dream of women’s rule, which had progressed northwards through the sixteenth century, should die in the Baltic Sea.

  From a northern European perspective at least, it is tempting to ask whether the end of the sixteenth century did not usher in a reduction in female autonomy: a reduction in the number of women to rule their country; a hushing of the gynocratic debate as to whether a girl should not be educated as well as a boy. Now, the Amazon queen, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and elsewhere, was featured as tamed by man and marriage.

  It is true that the Counter-Reformation had found one of its best weapons in a renewed and refreshed cult of the Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven. The Jesuits promoted the use of the rosary (and within it the ‘Hail Mary’), restored shrines, and encouraged confraternities devoted to the mother of God. Mary was declared the true heroine of Lepanto, the great naval battle that in 1571 saw a Holy League organised by the pope and led by Spain defeat the Turks. The pope had declared the battle day, 7 October, as the Feast of Our Lady of Victory. But the Jesuits, who in their early days had relied so much upon the support of noblewomen, now preferred to turn to less controversial, male, patrons. Female religious orders had flourished during this period, and would continue to do so, but increasingly, the women who had joined them found themselves enclosed.

  Not that things were any better for women in the Protestant community; far from it. The Protestants (and their largely married clergy) had long counterpoised the ideal of the family, with the father at its head, against the Catholic ideal of virginity. This left little room for the concept of the virginal woman warrior. In its early days the Protestant Reformation seemed to offer opportunities for women. But now these seemed to be dwindling.3

  A century after the death of Elizabeth I, England again had a woman on the throne; another woman whose older sister had held it before her. But Queen Anne’s older sister, Mary, declared that ‘women should not meddle in government’. In theory, Mary reigned jointly with her husband, William; in fact, she ceded all control to him. Although, by contrast, Queen Anne relegated her husband, George of Denmark, to a background role, both Stuart sisters reigned over a nation that allowed the monarch far less power than Elizabeth had enjoyed.

  On the Continent, women continued to play an important role. The Habsburg dynasty maintained its practice of using female relatives in a regent’s role; in France, Louis XIV’s mother and regent, Anne of Austria (born a Habsburg) was just one important figure. Nonetheless, in the mid-eighteenth century the power held by Maria Theresa, the Habsburg sovereign of Austria and Hungary, whose success in engineering her husband’s election as Holy Roman Emperor gave her the title of ‘Empress’, represented something of a rebirth.4 So too, of course, did that of the empresses who ruled Russia for much of the eighteenth century: Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth and Catherine II – Catherine ‘the Great’ – but they were operating within a very different political system and playing by different rules.

  Both Elizabeth Tudor and Catherine de Medici were chess players, as were Isabella of Castile, Anne de Beaujeu, Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy. Although Mary, Queen of Scots also played, she is not particularly associated with the game. Catherine, who learnt her game in Italy and promoted it when she came to France, was said to have sou
ght to match herself against the great Italian champion Paolo Boi. Elizabeth, who had played against her great tutor Roger Ascham, was sufficiently aware of the symbolism of the game to have rewarded Sir Charles Blount, after a successful joust, with ‘a Queen at Chesse of gold richly enameled’, which he would wear tied about his arm.

  But female participation in the game was itself in decline by the turn of the seventeenth century. The myriad medieval pictures of a man and a woman playing together dwindled away; by 1694 Thomas Hyde in his study of chess lamented that in a game of battle, to call the most active piece a queen was surely ‘inappropriate’.

  And yet, and yet . . . A tradition of female rule as strong as that seen in the sixteenth century cannot (however it may subsequently be overlooked) ever really go away. From then on, in the Western world, the tally card would record that it had been possible for women to control countries and that a number of them had done so very successfully. From then on, no one could say that was an impossibility.

  Many of the battles these women fought are still relevant. Almost thirty years ago Antonia Fraser, in her groundbreaking book, Boadicea’s Chariot, traced the line of ‘warrior queens’ from the ancient world to the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher. She identified several tropes of female leadership: the Chaste Syndrome and the Voracity Syndrome, the role of a woman as Holy (Armed) Figurehead, or as peacemaker, and traced them from Celtic mythology and the Roman Empire to the female leaders of her own day: Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi.

  The women who ruled sixteenth-century Europe fit Fraser’s patterns almost precisely, from the doublethink that reclassified a successful woman as an honorary man, to the number who reached power by what she called the Appendage Syndrome; as widow, mother, sister of a powerful male. Any look at the newspapers makes clear how well these tropes still work today.

  The battles these queens and regents fought are relevant whenever it comes to the questions of women assuming power, and questions over whether women participating in public life might wield that power in a different way. None of these questions are yet wholly answered but they are being asked with new urgency. I write at a moment when a woman prepares to contest for the world’s most powerful office, the presidency of the United States – and when the United Kingdom has just got its second female Prime Minister. To the names of Hillary Clinton and Theresa May must be added those of Angela Merkel, Nicola Sturgeon, and more. Their achievement is in part these earlier women’s legacy.

  Now say, have women worth? or have they none?

  Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone?

  Nay Masculines, you have thus taxt us long,

  But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.

  Let such as say our sex is void of Reason,

  Know tis a slander now, but once was treason.

  In Honour of That High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory, Anne Bradstreet, 1643

  The game of chess, with its all-important queen, was both popular, and an acknowledged metaphor of rule, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Sofonisba Anguissola painted her sisters playing chess (above). Both Isabella of Castile, pictured with her husband Ferdinand (below left), and Anne de Beaujeu (below right) were notable players.

  The young Margaret of Austria (left) could not have known that she would one day be seated across the conference table oppo­site her erstwhile playmate Louise of Savoy (right).

  Louise’s daughter, Marguerite of Navarre (above) was also an important player in the great game of international diplo­macy, as seen at the spectacular festivities of the Field of the Cloth of Gold (below).

  The Tudor dynasty was split by the contest between Katherine of Aragon (below) and Anne Boleyn (above right) – the first and second wives of Henry VIII. Henry’s sister Margaret Tudor (above left), married to the King of Scots, also got drawn into the debate.

  The personal and religious conflict between Anne Boleyn and Katherine of Aragon would be inherited by their daughters Mary (above right) and Elizabeth (above left). The Allegory of Succession (below) – adapted in Elizabeth’s reign from an earlier painting – shows the Protestant Elizabeth I attended by the goddesses of peace and plenty, and the Catholic Mary by the god of war.

  While in Scotland Marie de Guise (above left) fought to maintain Catholicism, religious divisions were also clear on the continent. As Regents of the Netherlands both Mary of Hungary (above right) and Margaret of Parma (below) were compelled to crack down on Lutheranism. Margaret is pictured fishing for goods in a river of blood as Protestant rebels are con­demned to death.

  In France, Jeanne d’Albret (above left) became the heroine of the Huguenots, while Catherine de Medici (above right) was widely blamed for the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day (below).

  Two queens in one Isle… Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots were divided not only by personal rivalry but by the warring religions that made Mary a contender for Elizabeth’s throne. Mary’s execution at Elizabeth’s hands was a final move in the sixteenth century’s Game of Queens.

  A note on sources

  General and prologue

  This book owes a particular debt to three others in particular – besides, of course, Garrett Mattingly’s The Defeat of the Spanish Armada (Jonathan Cape, 1959) mentioned in the preface. My awareness of the role played in the sixteenth century by women ruling beyond Britain’s shores was heightened by William Monter’s The Rise of the Female Kings in Europe 1300–1800 (Yale University Press, 2012) – as too was my awareness that this was a subject our Anglocentric popular history has been slow to address. I had long been interested in the concept of inheritance from mother to daughter, and was thrilled, halfway through my research, to discover that Sharon L. Jansen, in The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), had done so much to explore the field. I envisage a somewhat different pattern from Jansen, who traces coeval lines of inheritance through the royal families of four different territories – but hers is an infinitely valuable body of work, and itself a formidable legacy.

  The same must of course be said of Antonia Fraser’s groundbreaking Boadicea’s Chariot: The Warrior Queens (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), which I reread as I was finishing this book, admiring once again the dazzling virtuosity with which she explores patterns of female leadership from ancient history through to the modern day. I first met Lady Antonia many years ago, not in the context of any historical work but as joint spectators – sufferers – of a freezing springtime cricket match. I was grateful then for her generous offer of a sip from her warming hip flask; I am infinitely more grateful today.

  It would seem ungracious, too, not to make a more general acknowledgement of academic work now done in this field, notably through the Palgrave Macmillan series Queenship and Power edited by Carole Levin and Charles Beem, a series of which Sharon L. Jansen’s book is one of the fruits. Other particularly relevant titles in the series include Beem’s own The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (2008) and Elena Woodacre’s Royal Mothers and their Ruling Children: Wielding Political Authority from Antiquity to the Early Modern Era (2015) – but everything they issue makes a valuable contribution to this ever-fertile field. Among a host of other books to address the subject, I should like to single out one further example, in particular: A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2009) by Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green.

  I should conversely also like to remind the general reader of the work being done in a very different context: on the Internet. The particular contribution made here is to set the sixteenth-century rulers in the wider context of powerful women across the world and down the centuries: among the exact contemporaries of ‘my’ women rulers, I shall always be sorry that the Rajput Rani who rode into battle on her own war elephant is outside the scope of this study.

  Some suggestions for further reading

  Preface

  My conception
of the changes in the game of chess was formed by Marilyn Yalom’s Birth of the Chess Queen (Pandora Press, 2004). A wealth of information on sixteenth-century contributions to the gynocracy debate can be found in the notes to Sharon L. Jansen’s book above, pp. 229–231 in particular.

  Part I: 1474–1513

  I have previously written about the English experience of these years in Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses (Harper Press, 2012). For Margaret Tudor (and her successors in Scotland) see Linda Porter’s compelling Crown of Thistles: The Fatal Inheritance of Mary Queen of Scots (Macmillan, 2013), while Margaret and her sister Mary are the subjects of Maria Perry’s Sisters to the King (Andre Deutsch, 1998).

  The standard biography in English of Isabella of Castile is Peggy K. Liss’ Isabel the Queen: Life and Times (Oxford University Press, 1992). See also Barbara F. Weissberger’s article in Anne J. Cruz and Mihoko Suzuki eds, The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe (University of Illinois, 2009). Julia Fox has written an important dual biography, Sister Queens: Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011). Katherine has also been the subject of a number of individual biographies, notably Giles Tremlett’s Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen (Faber and Faber, 2010) and Patrick Williams’s Katharine of Aragon (Amberley, 2013).