Game of Queens (56 page)

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).

Margaret of Austria has been the subject of three comparatively modern biographies in English: Eleanor E. Tremayne’s
The First Governess of the Netherlands: Margaret of Austria
(Methuen & Co, 1908); Jane de Iongh’s
Margaret of Austria: Regent of the Netherlands
trans. M.D. Herter Norton (Jonathan Cape, 1954); and Shirley Harrold Bonner’s
Fortune, Misfortune, Fortifies One: Margaret of Austria, Ruler of the Low Countries, 1507–1530
(Amazon, 1981). For Charles Brandon see Steven, Gunn,
Charles Brandon: Henry VIII’s Closest Friend
(Amberley, 2015). Margaret’s correspondence is published in Ghislaine de Boom,
Correspondance de Marguerite d’Autriche . . .
(Bruxelles, 1935); see also André J. G. Le Glay,
Correspondance de l’Empereur Maximilien I et de Marguerite d’Autriche
(Paris, 1839).

Many of the royal women of France lack a solo biography in English but Pauline Matarasso’s
Queen’s Mate: Three Women of Power in France on the Eve of the Renaissance
(Routledge, 2001) is an authoritative consideration of Anne de Beaujeu, Anne of Brittany and (in her earlier years) Louise of Savoy. For Louise’s later life see Dorothy Moulton Mayer,
The Great Regent: Louise of Savoy 1476–1531
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).
Anne of France:
Lessons for my Daughter
by Anne de Beaujeu has been translated and edited by Sharon L. Jansen (L. D. S. Brewer, 2004). Louise of Savoy’s
Journal
ed. M. Petitot in
Collection complète des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France
(Paris, 1826) can be found online.

I must also make special acknowledgement of
Marguerite of Navarre
by Patricia F. and Rouben C. Cholakian (Columbia University Press, 2006) for their development of the idea that passages in the
Heptaméron
are autobiographical: see below. The translation I used is Marguerite of Navarre,
The Heptaméron
trans. P. A. Chilton (Penguin, 1984). See also
Lettres de Marguerite d’Angoulême
, ed. F. Génin (Paris, 1841), and
Nouvelles Lettres
(Paris, 1842), and Pierre, Jourda,
Marguerite d’Angoulême, Duchess d’Alençon, Reine de Navarre
(Paris, 1930). Brantome’s work on Marguerite is in Pierre de Bordeilles Brantôme,
Oeuvres complètes
(Paris, 1864–82).

‘Two long letters, signed simply ‘‘M’’ ’:
The versions in the British Library’s Cotton MS (Titus B. i. ff 142) are in the handwriting of Sir Richard Wingfield, the ambassador sent to the Netherlands to negotiate the proposed marriage between Margaret of Austria’s nephew Charles, and Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary. These are in English, presumably translated by Wingfield from the original French, and the BL will admit only that ‘M’ can ‘probably’ be identified as Margaret. From the internal evidence, however – the places, the occasions, the long interviews with the king – it is hard to see who else ‘M’ was likely to be. Wingfield had, moreover, endorsed the letters as having been written from ‘Loivain’, Louvain, Margaret’s territory, and concerning ‘Secret matters of the Duke of Suffolk’. See also John Gough Nichols, ed.,
The Chronicle of Calais in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII to the Year 1540
, Camden Society, Vol. XXXV, London, 1846.

‘Heptaméron . . . to some degree autobiographical’:
See the Cholakians, op. cit., pp. 21–38. Earlier writers touch on the possibility of an entanglement between Marguerite and Bonnivet, in terms, however, of their own day. Francis Hackett, in his 1934 biography of Francis I, writes that Bonnivet watched Marguerite ‘with guarded avidity while she, the regulator of nuns, tingled with his attention. She invited it, as Francis did his own form of violence, by the way she suffered and endured it’. Hackett, like Louise of Savoy’s biographer Meyer, also subscribed to the theory that Louise, ‘the crafty and experienced matron’, had fostered the affair, since Bonnivet could give Marguerite the child her husband couldn’t. For sexual mores, and a possible autobiographical element in Marguerite’s writings, see also Broad and Green op. cit. 70/1 and 79–89. Chilton, introducing
The Heptaméron
, notes that ‘in periods when women show signs of assertiveness there is a corresponding preoccupation with violence against them’: Marguerite may have been responding to a generally aggressive clime.

Part II: 1514–1521

In addition to the biographies cited above, see Antonia Fraser,
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992); David Starkey,
Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII
(Chatto & Windus, 2003); Alison Weir,
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
(Bodley Head, 1991). Also Glenn Richardson,
The Field of Cloth of Gold
(Yale University Press, 2013).

Part III: 1522–1536

The enigma that is Anne Boleyn has generated a huge volume of literature, though the single most comprehensive and authoritative biography remains Eric Ives’s
The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (
Blackwell, 2004). More controversial views can be found in
Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions
(Yale, 2010) by G. W. Bernard, chief exponent of the theory that Anne was, to some degree at least, guilty, and Retha M. Warnicke’s
The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII
(CUP, 1989). Alison Weir’s
The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn
(Jonathan Cape, 2009) is a riveting forensic analysis of the circumstances leading up to Anne’s execution, while Tracy Borman’s
Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2014) gives the other side of the story, and Suzannah Lipscomb’s
1536: The Year that changed Henry VIII
(Lion, 2009) examines the year of her fall. I also found fascinating Nicola Shulman’s
Graven with Diamonds
(Short Books, 2011), in which Thomas Wyatt serves as a prism through which to observe the court culture that saw Anne’s downfall.

For the great religious struggle of which Anne Boleyn’s story was but a part, see Diarmaid MacCulloch’s great
Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700
(Allen Lane, 2003).