Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (27 page)

Basile’s version of this tale, “The Three Crowns,” uses a different premise for his cross-dressing protagonist’s adventure into the world, but once the princess Marchetta is off to make her fortune and arrives in the new kingdom, carefully disguised, the plots are parallel.
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Basile’s king is impressed by the “frankness and good manners of Marchetta,” while his queen’s reaction is less measured: “As soon as the queen saw the page, she felt as if a bomb of grace had exploded in the air around her and had ignited all her desires. She tried...to conceal the flame of passion and keep the prickly points of love beneath the tail of desire. But she was too short in the saddle to ride herd and to be able to keep down her unbridled desires.” Unable to control her lust, the queen reveals her feelings to Marchetta, “imploring him by all the seven heavens not to leave her in a furnace of sighs and a mire of tears.” The queen even offers bribes and “tons of gifts” to have her desire satisfied. When Marchetta refuses her, the scorned queen threatens, “When a woman of my stature has been offended, she will try to wash off the stain on her face with the blood of the offender.”

In revenge, the queen tells the king that the page tried to seduce her: “The little rogue just wanted to exact the debt of matrimony that I owe you, and without any respect, without any fear, without any shame, he had the impudence to come to me and the brashness to ask me for a free way into the field that you have so honorably ploughed.”

The king orders Marchetta seized and “without giving him the chance to defend himself, he condemned him to test the weight of the executioner’s sword.” But as Marchetta is about to die, she calls upon an ogress she had previously helped, who calls out, “Let her go! She’s a woman!” Marchetta reveals the truth about her identity as well as the queen’s improper advances and as the king “grasped the maliciousness of his wife” he orders her “to be thrown into the sea with a weight tied around her.” D’Aulnoy’s “Belle-Belle, or The Chevalier Fortuné” follows the general plotlines of Straparola’s and Basile’s tales, but this guilty queen is poisoned by a rival lady-in-waiting.
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All three iterations end at the same point: a king violently executes one queen for her adulterous desires and immediately marries a younger, more desirable princess. Preservation of the male monarchy is predicated on the king’s rapid and dramatic punishment of the queen’s sexual misconduct and his elevation of the next available consort.

Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier’s “The Discreet Princess; or the Adventures of Finette” is another example in a long tradition of tales concerned with a woman’s protection of her chastity.
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Like the “disguised hero” tales, this story celebrates the innocence of a chaste princess, but it more emphatically highlights the protagonist’s creative intelligence as she protects her honor. L’Héritier’s tale also represents a departure from previous tales in that more blame is attributed to the male aggressor. Still, the tale’s premise is grounded in an assumption of women’s intemperance: a king decides to go to war and worries that his three daughters cannot be trusted in his absence, so he has a fairy make three glass distaffs that will break if the young women compromise their honor.

The two eldest daughters are called Nonchalante and Babbler for their respective character flaws, but the youngest, Finette, is diligent and virtuous. Rich-craft, a malicious prince from a nearby kingdom, hears of the king’s precautions, tricks his way into the castle, and quickly seduces the two elder sisters whose distaffs “shattered into a hundred pieces.” Unlike her weak sisters, Finette “had a wonderful presence of mind...and could get out of any predicament,” so she manages to fend off Rich-Craft’s advances by constructing an artificial bed over the underground sewers. The prince falls through the contraption and is so severely wounded and disgraced that he becomes obsessed with revenge. Rich-Craft has Finette captured and after torturing her with imprisonment and threats, he takes her to the top of a mountain: “Then the wicked prince demonstrated his barbaric nature by showing her a barrel lined with penknives, razors, and hooked nails stuck all around the inside. He told her that, in order to punish her the way she deserved, they were going to put her into that barrel and roll her from the top of the mountain down to the valley.” But Finette “retained her courage and presence of mind” and when Rich-Craft peers into the barrel to check its readiness, she quickly pushes him inside and sends him down the hill; he survives but is severely wounded “in a thousand places.” Fairy tales seem to revel in dramatic and public punishments of wicked women, but this tale redirects the violence to the aggressive, evil male.

When Finette returns home she finds that her sisters have each given birth to a baby boy from their liaisons with Rich-Craft. Finette disguises herself as a man and takes the babies to the palace where the dying Rich-Craft is being tended by his kind brother, Bel-à-voir. On the pretext of being a doctor, Finette gains entrance to Rich-Craft’s room and leaves the babies. When the crying children are discovered, Rich-Craft realizes that Finette has again tricked him. His deathbed request is for Bel-à-voir to marry Finette and then murder her in their nuptial bed. Bel-à-voir agrees, but when the wedding night arrives, Finette, ever cautious, puts a figure of straw with a “sheep’s bladder full of blood” in the bed. Although Bel-a-voir is generally compassionate and is smitten by Finette, his masculine code of honor prevails and he decides to keep his promise to his brother and to kill her. Bel-à-voir stabs “the body of the supposed Finette,” and when “he saw the blood trickle out” he turns his dagger on himself. Finette comes forward just in time, Bel-à-voir is exonerated and repentant, and they live together in “a long succession of beautiful days in honor and happiness.” Finette’s clever trick allows Bel-à-voir to honor his vow to his brother, inherit the throne, and enjoy a happy marriage.

Although this story differs from its predecessors in its greater attention to female ingenuity, it also reinforces female susceptibility to sexual temptation and the severe punishment such weakness warrants. When the king discovers his two elder daughters’ failures, he sends them to the fairy for rehabilitation, but they are unable to amend their idle ways. One dies of “sorrow and exhaustion” and the other “broke her skull against a tree and died in the arms of some peasants.”

Furthermore, although the sexual transgression is primarily ascribed to the philandering male, who also dies for his folly, his surrogate, the ostensibly kinder prince, is still willing to murder a woman to honor a promise to his brother. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of the social relationships between the sexes is relevant here; Sedgwick argues that male heterosexual desire and its fulfillment are often manifest in a “desire to consolidate partnership with authoritative males in and through the bodies of females.”
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In this tale as with so many others in the fairy tale canon, the transfer of power from one male to another via the female characters preserves and guarantees the masculine hierarchy. The sexualized female body is necessary for the perpetuation of the monarchy, but it must also be contained and controlled—or severely and spectacularly punished.

Early Modern Queens

In the early modern period, the private activities of all monarchs were subject to widespread speculation, but their sexual lives were of particular interest because of concerns over dynastic continuity and because a ruler’s control over his personal affairs could reflect his control over affairs of state. Kings were occasionally exposed for their sexual improprieties, critiques that often reflected dissatisfaction with their political competence. Nonetheless, the most powerful kings of early modern Europe—including Henry VIII, Francois I, Charles V, Philip II, and Henri IV—entertained extramarital activity with minimal threat to their monarchies.
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A king’s authority could survive rumors and complaints of sexual misconduct, and his virility could even indicate a commanding public presence, but a queen’s sexuality, outside of sanctioned reproductive activity, signaled weakness and a crime against the state.

Because the perception of women as the weaker vessel included their vulnerability in the sexual sphere, women were expected to strive that much harder to overcome their natural flaws and prove themselves chaste. If women in general were held to a higher standard of sexual virtue, a queen’s sexual behavior was deemed even more critical, for any impropriety endangered the legitimacy of the succession and the stability of the entire kingdom. The role of the queen consort was to provide an heir to the throne, and any sexual imputations beyond the boundaries of procreation disastrously undermined the king’s personal and public authority.

The sexual lives of queens regnant were even more scrutinized. In the popular debate over female rule, arguments against gynecocracy assumed that a woman’s natural tendency toward uncontrollable lust rendered her unable to rule effectively: the sexualized woman and the queen were often conflated in their monstrosity. Thomas Becon, a Protestant reformer exiled on the continent during Mary I’s reign, ranted against female rule, citing biblical evidence to support his argument. In one of his occasional prayers, Becon complained to God about the death of Edward VI, lamenting that “to take away the empire from a man, and give it unto a woman, seemeth to be an evident token of thine anger toward us Englishmen.” Becon grounded his complaint about female rule in biblical evidence: “and verily, though we find that sometimes women bare rule among thy people, yet do we read that such as ruled and were queens were for the most part wicked, ungodly, superstitious, and given to idolatry and to all filthy abominations, as we may see in the histories of queen Jesebel, queen Athalia, queen Herodias, and such-like.”
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Becon was anxious about temptations of the flesh for all of mankind, but a queen’s uncontrollable lust could be particularly dire for the state.

John Knox’s more widely read anti-Catholic diatribe protesting female rule, his 
First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Rule of
Women,
 appeared in 1558 just months before Elizabeth assumed the throne. Knox’s work was aimed at Catholic queens Mary of Guise, Mary Stuart, and Mary Tudor, but even if Knox’s work was driven by religious fervor, his “blast” included the entire sex and his railing against “the imperfections of women, their unnatural weakness, and inordinate appetites.”
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Even John Aylmer’s refutation of Knox, 
An
Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjects,
 links effective rule with sexuality. Aylmer praises Elizabeth as fit for rule because of her “maidenly” comportment: “I am sure that her maidenly apparel, which she used in kyng edwardes tyme, made the noble mens daughters and wyves to be ashamed, to be drest and paynted lyke pecockes, being more virtuous example.”
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Although Aylmer is echoing the popular attacks against conspicuous sartorial consumption, he also associates fitness to rule with a chaste demeanor.

Even when a queen’s comportment seemed beyond reproach, her sexual body could still be scrutinized. Mary I, as our discussion of monstrous births revealed, felt it necessary to downplay sexual attraction, insisting that her marriage to Philip was to satisfy political rather than carnal needs. Still, when Mary’s alleged pregnancies proved unsuccessful, rumors about her aberrant offspring were linked with gossip about her lust for Philip. Indeed, even as Mary was mocked for excessive desire, public comments about Philip’s philandering were more jocular. Even taking into account the antiSpanish sentiment in the popular attacks on the king consort, the tone of bravado is clear: one rumor claimed that after Philip “were crowned, he would be content with one woman, but in the mean space he must have three or four in one night, to prove which of them he liketh best; not of ladies and gentlewomen, but of bakers daughters and such poor whores; whereupon they have a certain saying, ‘The baker’s daughter is better in her gown, than Queen Mary without the crown.’”
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In effect, this slander reflected more on Mary’s undesirability and social hierarchy than on Philip’s promiscuity. Similarly, when Henry VIII announced that he found Anne of Cleves unattractive, he not only described her perceived physical shortcomings in detail, but he impugned her chastity as well, claiming that she was “no maid” though this accusation was entirely unfounded. In a culture of such ingrained public and private suspicion, the royal female body was continually vulnerable to attack.

Anne Boleyn

Even though she was surely innocent of the accusations that led to her execution, Anne Boleyn’s reputation may never escape the taint of sexual misconduct.
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In May 1536, after three years of marriage to Henry VIII, Anne—along with five men, including her brother George—was charged with lecherous behavior and harmful intent to the king. Anne was tried and pronounced guilty on May 15.

The Duke of Norfolk, Anne’s uncle, presided over the trial and read the sentence: “Because thou has offended our sovereign the king’s grace in committing treason against his person and here attainted of the same, the law of the realm is this, that thou has deserved death, and thy judgment is this: that thou shalt be burned here within the Tower of London, on the Green, else to have thy head smitten off, as the king’s pleasure shall be further known of the same.”
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The evidence forwarded against Anne and her alleged accomplices is widely believed—now as it was then—to be fabricated.

We have examined Anne’s unfortunate reproductive history, particularly her last miscarriage, as probable cause for the trumped-up charges and Henry’s desire to rid himself of his second queen. But well before Anne’s failure to produce a son, gossip about her suspect sexual history was widespread. Much of the popular antagonism was understandable: the English people had loved Catherine of Aragon, and Henry’s dismissal of his first queen and abrupt break with the Catholic Church was disorienting. Although some of her critics charged Anne with ambition or a desire for riches, most of the complaints were against her sexuality.