Game of Queens (54 page)

Elizabeth’s long-time favourite and supporter the Earl of Leicester died within weeks of the Armada victory, to her great and solitary grief. She would lose another important councillor in each of the following few years. When William Cecil, by far the longest survivor, died in 1598, he left a son, Robert, to follow him as first minister but Leicester was succeeded as her prime favourite by his stepson the Earl of Essex, and this was a relationship which threw a profoundly unflattering light on her woman’s rule.

Long indulged by Elizabeth, Essex’s final descent into open rebellion was marked by a young and militaristic man’s disdain for an old woman. ‘The Queen’s conditions are as crooked as her carcase’, he was reported to have said once, unforgivably. In a decade of economic hardship and uncertainty about the future, Elizabeth’s court in the 1590s was also rocked by a series of sexual scandals that not only reflected badly on her authority but evoked the old stereotype of a woman ruler surrounded by licentiousness.

Advancing age brought no halt to the slurs on Elizabeth’s reputation. It was in the 1580s that the Catholic polemicist Nicholas Sanders brought out his scurrilous history of Anne Boleyn, a way of visiting the perceived sins of the mother on the daughter, and in the 1590s that Elizabeth’s infamous interrogator Richard Topcliffe could fantasise aloud about having felt her legs and her belly. When, after her death, Robert Cecil wrote that the queen had been ‘more than a man and, in troth, sometimes less than a woman’, it was the reverse side of the coin to the idea of a ruler being above sex, which had once empowered Elizabeth’s female sovereignty.

Elizabeth continued to be addressed in terms of courtly love but her looks had long faded. Anne de Beaujeu had warned her daughter that once over forty, no clothes can make the wrinkles on your face disappear. When Cecil – a loyal servant, but one anxious to secure both his own future and the succession – entered into correspondence with James VI of Scotland, he stressed the need for secrecy on the grounds of Elizabeth’s age and infirmity, ‘joined to the jealousy of her sex’. Even Elizabeth herself, taxing a Venetian envoy with the fact that Venice had failed to keep an ambassador at her court, asked bitterly if ‘my sex hath brought me this demerit?’ Her sex, she had to tell the man angrily, ‘cannot diminish my prestige’.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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 sought 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.