Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (36 page)

As it is impossible to exaggerate the virulence of Knox’s language in
The First Blast
it is also impossible to exaggerate the general distaste and anxiety felt towards the notion of a female ruler. When Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary Tudor ascended the throne in 1553, many questioned whether it was even legal for a woman to inherit: there had been no queen regnant since that doubtful, because unsubstantiated, claim of the Empress Maud four centuries before. The rights of the female in the table of
royal succession had generally been subsumed into those of her husband, who would often have a lesser claim of his own. Thus in 1485 Elizabeth of York had in fact an infinitely better dynastic claim to the throne than her future husband, Henry VII,
de facto
monarch after the battle of Bosworth. Then their marriage added her right to Henry’s might and he was of course the one out of the pair who ruled (Elizabeth being merely Queen Consort). The will of Edward VI had concentrated on the
male
heirs to females within the English royal succession such as his Grey cousins, although it was finally disregarded in favour of the superior dynastic claim of his elder half-sister Mary Tudor.
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Where might and right did not coalesce, the choice of a husband was always likely to be a problem in the case of a queen regnant. It was not at all clear that the husband of such a queen might not have the actual right to be regarded as the king: when the youthful Mary Tudor was betrothed to her cousin the Emperor, Henry VIII was worried whether he might not thus secure a title to her throne. One Chief Justice advised that although the husband could not call himself king by right, because the crown lay outside the bounds of feudal law (the husband of a feudal heiress automatically assumed her titles, rights and possessions), the Queen Regnant could grant him the title if she chose.
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In the event Mary Tudor’s actual husband, Philip II of Spain, was considered to be King of England as well (a worrying precedent). Mary Queen of Scots’ disastrous second husband, Darnley, whom she married in 1565, was always referred to as King Henry.

Under the circumstances it was understandable that Cardinal Reginald Pole should have tried to persuade Queen Mary Tudor to take that course actually adopted by Queen Elizabeth: no marriage, but a single-minded devotion to that role granted her by heaven, and for which through many dangers she had been signally spared.
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(Where marriage and position were concerned, as the relative fortunes of the unmarried Elizabeth and much-married Mary Queen of Scots demonstrate, queens regnant in the sixteenth century resembled career women in the late twentieth
century, in that they experienced regrettable difficulty in ‘having it all’.)

The objections to female regiment were not entirely theoretical. As Sir John Neale pointed out in his biography of Elizabeth I, government itself was ‘a masculine business, with its world a court constructed for a king’. The idea of protecting a queen from the rigours and difficulties of government was of course implicit in the concentration on the topic of her marriage; Elizabeth’s widowed brother-in-law Philip II (and putative suitor at the beginning of her reign) advised her to marry soon, if only that her husband could then relieve her ‘of those labours which are only fit for men’.
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In vain the coronation tableaux leaned heavily on such stories as that of Deborah, ruling for forty years of peace. The popular mood was better expressed by the fears of the Spanish Ambassador de Feria following Elizabeth’s accession: ‘what can be expected from a country governed by a Queen, and she a young lass, who though sharp is without prudence?’ This was not mere chauvinism – in both senses of the word. There was trouble in the House of Lords over Elizabeth’s title as ‘Supreme Head of the Church’ in view of her inconvenient sex, and Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, made what were described as some ‘ripe remarks’ on the subject. In the end the Queen became the ‘Supreme Governor’.
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This, then, was to be the triumph of Queen Elizabeth I. She ascended the English throne at a time of outright popular hostility towards female sovereigns, and by a mixture of artfulness, intelligence and instinct survived to rule for forty-five years, her personal prestige – both as a woman and as a monarch – growing with every year.

Such a triumph did not happen overnight. Two years after Elizabeth’s accession – in 1560 – when the question of her own successor was being raised, the claim of Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, the last of the Plantagenets, was advanced over those of a host of females of royal Tudor descent (including Mary
Queen of Scots): ‘the cry is that they do not want any women rulers’. How sublimely different was the mood of Leicester’s will of August 1587 in which he hoped Queen Elizabeth, now in her fifties, would prove to be ‘the eldest [i.e. the longest-living] prince that ever God gave over England’! If Leicester, the favourite, is held to be a prejudiced source, then one might cite the tribute of the Pope Sixtus V, around the same time, against whom the same charge of prejudice can scarcely be laid. The Queen of England might be only a woman, he wrote, and only mistress of half an island, yet she had made herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire and ‘by all’.
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The triumph also remained personal to Elizabeth. Forty years on, when this question of the old Queen’s successor had become acute, it was Mary’s son, Scottish James, who was the front runner (even though excluded, as an alien, by the will of Henry VIII), not only because he was of commensurate rank, but also because he was a man. The ever-confident French Ambassador – ultimately however no great prophet – wrote that it was ‘certain’ that the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman.
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The early years of James’s reign were also marked by a warmth on the part of the English towards the new ruler – just because he was a man, and a vigorous one in his prime – which is often overlooked in view of their subsequent disillusionment.

The general estimate of the female sex, never high, not only declined in the seventeenth century, but declined amid perceptible relief, now that humble lip-service did not have to be paid to She-who-was-on-the-Throne. In a poem printed in 1650 in memory of ‘our dread Virago’, Elizabeth, Anne Bradstreet called attention to this decline following the Queen’s death: ‘Now say, have women worth? Or have they none? Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone?’
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The fact was that the ‘dread Virago’ herself had never made any effort to improve the general appraisal of woman’s worth; for cogent reasons, that was the very last of her intentions. An interesting article in
Feminist Review
of 1980 by Allison Heisch considers Queen Elizabeth I at length in terms of those women
who are ‘honorary males’, and thus have no particular impact ‘unless indirect and negative’ on the status of women of their time.
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(The same ‘negative’ argument was often applied by feminists to the presence of Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister of Great Britain since, as will be seen, Mrs Thatcher explicitly denied any debt to Women’s Liberation.) Queen Elizabeth would hardly have approved of the source of these sentiments – a feminist review. Had she been granted a glimpse into the future to witness the rise of feminism, she would, one must believe, have greeted the spectacle with a royal shudder; just as Queen Victoria, another queen regnant, looked on Women’s Rights with abhorrence.
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On the other hand, Queen Elizabeth I would have heartily approved of the verdict of ‘honorary male’.

It was customary for her to deride her own sex along stereotyped lines, out of policy. For example, women were popularly supposed to be chatterboxes: when the Queen was congratulated on knowing six languages, she remarked wryly that it was ‘no marvel to teach a woman to talk; it were harder to teach her to hold her tongue’.
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She also believed what she said. For she was different. That was the constantly reiterated message.

The differentness of the Queen from all other female subjects was the cornerstone of her self-presentation, worked out or perhaps simply instinctively felt, by a genius at the art. Her weapons in this self-presentation were two. Firstly, she worked upon her female nature to provide a delicate, exquisite image of the lady who needed to be protected – and the goddess who had to be adored. Secondly, she presented herself as a ‘prince’: like many successful pieces of composite propaganda, the second part was in direct contradiction of the first.

In all this, there was one real danger and another possible one. The possible danger was of a husband, bringing with him perpetual masculine control. But by maintaining herself as a virgin goddess to the end of her life, despite a farrago of courtships, the Queen avoided that particular peril. Sir James Melville, visiting the English court on behalf of Mary Queen of Scots, observed to Elizabeth when she had been on the
throne five years without committing herself to a bridegroom: ‘Madam … you think if you were married, you would be but Queen of England, and now you are King and Queen both; you may not endure a commander.’
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He went to the heart of the matter although neither he nor the Queen herself – whose most profound decisions were taken by the highly roundabout method of endless procrastination – can have envisaged that Elizabeth would end her life, still King and Queen, still without suffering a commander.

The real danger to Elizabeth, both as goddess and as ‘prince’, was war. For in the late sixteenth century Europe was a sphere where control passed inevitably to a man. In his
History of Scotland
George Buchanan, tutor to the young King James of Scotland, digressed in his turn on the unnaturalness of female government, especially in war: ‘’Tis no less becoming [in] a Woman to pronounce Judgment, to levy Forces, to conduct an Army, to give a Signal to the Battle, than it is for a Man to tease Wool, to handle the Distaff, to Spin or Card, and to perform the other Services of the Weaker Sex.’ For that which was reckoned ‘Fortitude and Severity’ in a man turned to ‘Madness and Cruelty’ in a woman.
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This was one challenge to her authority that Elizabeth could not avoid. When and if war broke out, the Queen not only had to suffer a commander, but she also had to go further and appoint one.

Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Queen Elizabeth showed from the beginning of her reign to the end a dislike and fear of war verging on the pathological. Her very jewels – always the emblematic messengers of her true feelings – spoke in favour of peace; as the years passed, she took to wearing jewels in the shape of spring flowers, in order to symbolize the peace which she was proud to have brought to the kingdom.
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As to her commanders, she was of course extremely careful that they should be seen at all times as the royal representatives. The first need for a military initiative on the government’s part came in 1569 when the northern earls revolted. (Eleven peaceful years had passed since Elizabeth’s accession: in a poem written to
celebrate the suppression of this rebellion, the Queen was to refer – without regret – to ‘our rusty sword’.) The revolt was put down by Lord Hunsdon. But when the Queen thanked him officially, it was for being ‘by God appointed to be the instrument of
my
glory’.
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Then the Queen used every conceivable card in her hand – including that potential ace of trumps (which would never in fact be played), her marriage, in order to avoid military involvement in the Netherlands, where Protestant rebels were locked in conflict with the overlordship of Catholic Spain. When Elizabeth could hold back no longer, and command had gone to Leicester, she enjoined him firmly ‘not in any sort to hazard a battle without great advantage’. (There were to be no false heroics about the sheer glory of the contest here.) That zest for conquest which possessed Zenobia and Tamara was quite lacking in Queen Elizabeth I, who made of this deficiency – as some might have rated it – a virtue: ‘In my ambition of glory I have never sought to advance the territories of my land … I have used my forces to keep the enemy from you.’ She added pointedly, ‘I have thereby thought your safety the greater and your danger the less.’
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War of course brought another kind of bondage, and this bondage applied to monarchs male and female alike: for war was liable to bring the monarch under the control of those who financed it, notably Parliament voting for the necessary taxation. Elizabeth practised an ostentatious parsimony in this respect, regarding war as a ‘cancer’ which ate up private men and their patrimony, princes and their estates. As Simon Adams has written recently, not only did Elizabeth have ‘no martial ambitions’ but she had on the contrary ‘a healthy suspicion of expensive military adventurism’.
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This sensible attitude (to those indifferent to the rival claims, so costly in men and money, of national glory) was especially prudent in view of her sex. If she were to exercise any control in the sphere of war, such a control might be considered unsuitable coming from a woman: in or out of her control, a war might bankrupt her.

It was Mary Queen of Scots, not Elizabeth, who referred to
herself in the sad declining years of her captivity as one who would rather pray with Esther than take the sword with Judith; but the English Queen too was no Judith at heart. As a result of avoiding Judith’s severe and sword-wielding womanhood, Elizabeth had by 1574 freed herself from debt for the first time. This has been significantly contrasted with the situation in the last years of her reign, when she was no longer able to emulate peace-loving Esther or peacefully ruling Deborah: war now cost her the horrifying sum (then) of three and a half million pounds.
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