Read Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship Online
Authors: Jo Eldridge Carney
Tags: #History, #Europe, #England/Great Britain, #Legends/Myths/Tales, #Royalty
Hatton worked devotedly throughout Elizabeth’s reign on her behalf, but Elizabeth often reminded him that as shepherd, she was in the position of control. When Hatton was called upon to suppress an uprising in 1579 over the enclosure of a common for sheep, Walsingham wrote Hatton that the queen “willed me to let you understand that, upon report made unto her of an outrage committed upon certain of Sir John Brockett’s sheep, she feared greatly [for] her Mutton, lest he should take some harm amongst those disordered people.”
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Even as the queen ordered Hatton to exert power against the claims of the landowners and their sheep, she also joked that his own status as a “Mutton” could compromise his safety. Elizabeth also referred to Hatton as “Bell-wether”
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: her use of the term for an emasculated sheep may have been a mere reference to Hatton’s lifelong bachelorhood, for which Elizabeth was grateful, but the name was nonetheless demeaning. Hatton remained consistently loyal to Elizabeth until his death in 1591. One of the most popular anecdotes associated with Hatton is that when he was on his deathbed, the queen visited him and brought him some broth.
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But in spite of Elizabeth’s fondness for Hatton, it was always clear that she was the shepherd, he the sheep.
Elizabeth also used the sheep reference to remind another courtier of his proper place. One of her ambassadors, Thomas Arundell, distinguished himself during an expedition fighting against the Turks in Hungary. Rudolf II recognized his service by making him a count of the Holy Roman Empire, but some of Arundell’s English peers questioned whether his foreign title allowed him to claim similar rank in England. Annoyed by his title and his reputation as “the Valiant,” Elizabeth scolded Arundell, telling him “that there was a close tie of affection between sovereigns and their subjects; and as chaste wives should have no eyes but for their husbands, so faithful liegemen should keep their regards at home, and not look after foreign crowns. That for her part she liked not for her sheep to wear a stranger’s mark nor to dance after a foreigner’s whistle.”
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The queen briefly committed Arundell to the Fleet prison to punish him for his seeming presumption even though she had recommended him to Rudolf’s service in the first place.
Elizabeth’s use of animal nicknames was also evident in the realm of official suitors, specifically the one she came closest to marrying, Alençon, the French duke and brother to Henri III. Alençon came to England twice to court the queen, once in 1579 and again in 1581.
Before his first visit, Alençon sent his envoy Jean Simier as his proxy wooer. Simier arrived, full of charm and armed with a cache of jewels to be given to the queen’s courtiers as gifts or bribes. Elizabeth was quite taken by Simier and in short time she also endowed him with a nickname based on a pun—Simier/simian—calling him her “monkey.” Simier responded in gratitude, saying that “he hoped always to be numbered among her beasts.”
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When Alençon himself arrived, Elizabeth was again smitten and she quickly named the prince her “Frog.” Although “Frog” may not have had the degree of nationalistic import that it acquired subsequently, the term was quickly appropriated by those who were opposed to Elizabeth’s potential marriage to the duke and to all things French. Susan Doran points out that “between 1579 and 1581, pejorative references to ‘frogs’ or ‘toads’ appeared regularly in a wide range of printed works as a code for hostility to the match.”
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Regardless of when “frog” became a xenophobic slur, it was an unflattering comparison. Many scholars argue that the nickname was appropriately suited to Alençon’s moral and physical deficiencies; according to MacCaffrey, Alençon was scheming, treacherous, small, “bandy legged and pock marked.”
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Alençon himself did not appear to object to the nickname; one of his gifts to Elizabeth was a brooch made of a small emerald frog with his own face painted on the frog’s back.
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Elizabeth enjoyed Alençon’s flattering courtship, and after years of negotiations the queen announced that she would marry “her frog.” Almost immediately, she was forced to confront the full opposition to the marriage from many of her advisors and subjects. Once Elizabeth had second thoughts about the marriage and what must have then seemed like a rash promise to her frog suitor, she found it difficult to rid herself of him, and the atmosphere at court was tense during the months of his final leave-taking. It was during this time that Elizabeth wrote “On Monsieur’s Departure,” which Ilona Bell keenly analyzes as a carefully crafted and deliberately ambiguous poem whose “darker subtext...serves Elizabeth’s complicated rhetorical purposes”—to smoothly extricate herself from the negotiations and to allow Alençon to leave with his dignity intact.
With the help of a sizable loan from Elizabeth, Alençon was finally persuaded to leave England for a campaign in the Low Countries. At Alençon’s departure, Elizabeth put on a great show of regret: the Spanish ambassador reported that the queen wept and told Leicester and Walsingham that she would not live an hour longer were it not for her hope to see Alençon again. The ambassador, Mendoza, continued, “When Alençon left the Queen told him to write to her from Flanders addressed to ‘my wife the Queen of England,’ which he has done, but it is all nonsense, and the letters are full of love and his desolation at being away from her. She makes much of them, and says openly that she would give a million for her ‘frog,’ as she calls Alençon, to be swimming in the Thames rather than in the stagnant waters of the Netherlands.”
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But, Mendoza added that “both the Queen’s tears and his tender regrets are equally fictitious and feigned”
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and that even though “she displayed grief publicly at his departure, I understand that in her own chamber she danced for very joy at getting rid of him, as she desired of all things to get him away from here.”
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The fairy tale princess in “The Frog Prince” was forced to keep her promise to marry the frog, but Queen Elizabeth, in spite of any public commitments she may have made, finally refused to be coerced into marrying her frog prince.
By the time Elizabeth was in the last decades of her reign, marriage was no longer a question, but her favorites still played an important role in her emotional and political life. When the ambitious, and some would argue, monomaniacal, Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex, came to Elizabeth’s attention, the queen was still susceptible to the charms of a flattering courtier. Because there were more than 30 years between them, the specter of a potentially romantic or erotic relationship was diminished. Elizabeth’s relationship with Essex was still emotionally intense, but it lacked the intimate confidence and reciprocity that characterized many of her other relationships, which, according to Paul Hammer, is evident in the fact that Essex “never received any pet name.” Hammer maintains that “the dominance of Essex was somewhat illusory” and that he had “elevated notions of public service and of his own status,” which “made him less amenable than other favorites to courtly politics.”
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Elizabeth appointed the headstrong and energetic Essex as Master of the Horse to succeed Leicester. While Elizabeth may not have given Essex a nickname, she resorted to equestrian references in discussing him, particularly when she found him difficult to manage. When Essex begged to lead the English troops during the Siege of Rouen, Elizabeth hesitated, warning Henri IV that Essex was “too tempestuous to be given the reins” and that he would “require the bridle rather than the spur.”
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Perhaps it is not surprising that one of the many scandals surrounding Essex involved “the sale of an equestrian portrait of Essex, engraved by Thomas Cockson, which described him as ‘Vertue’s honor,’ ‘Grace’s servant,’ and ‘God’s elected,’” the last a reference reserved for the monarchy.
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The association with horse and hubris is fitting and one that Elizabeth played on in her references to Essex.
In the fall of 1600, when Essex applied for a renewal of the sweet wines customs rights, which was his primary source of income, Elizabeth again hesitated and replied that “an unruly horse must be abated of his provender, that he may be the easier and better managed.”
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Elizabeth’s figurative use of the term acknowledges Essex’s inferior and dependent status as a beast of burden. The queen’s decision not to renew Essex’s wine lease precipitated his financial and public disgrace. From that point, Essex’s descent was swift—within four months, he had hatched treasonous plots, was tried, and found guilty. On February 25, 1601, Essex was executed in the courtyard of the Tower.
Throughout her long reign, Elizabeth I was compelled to negotiate and protect her unique position as an unmarried female monarch on the throne of a powerful kingdom. As beloved as she was, her anomalous position elicited considerable dissent—not because of perceived personal flaws but because her unmarried queenship subverted the purportedly dominant and hierarchical worldview of sixteenth-century England. Much of Elizabeth’s deft management of her position involved her ability to articulate and to manage the relationships with the many men in her life: suitors, confidantes, and advisors. Always attentive to the slightest nuance in communication and representation, Elizabeth found a variety of ways to operate in a world so thoroughly driven by hierarchical constructs to maintain her own precarious place; one of these ways was a quite conscious and public use of what would seem to be private “terms of endearment.” That these nicknames simultaneously signaled distance and intimacy was a necessary paradox: the more intimate the relationship, the more important it was to establish distance. Unlike her literary counterparts, Elizabeth did not need to be humbled to reinforce a man’s superior place in the social and political world. The many names she invented for the men in her life surely signaled to them and to the rest of the world who was on top in Elizabeth’s own subversion of a great chain of being.
CHAPTER 5
THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL: QUEENSHIP AND BEAUTY
“Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of us all?”
—The Brothers Grimm, “Snow White”
“But she was earnest with me to declare which of them I judged fairest. I said, ‘She was the fairest Queen in England and mine the fairest Queen in Scotland.’”
—James Melville, the Scottish ambassador reporting on his meeting with Elizabeth in 1564
Giambattista Basile’s fairy tales are known for their exuberant language in contrast to the “chaste compactness” Walter Benjamin claimed as a defining feature of most fairy tales.
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Basile’s portrayal of a beautiful woman in “The Myrtle” is typical of his rhetorical amplifications and his figurative hyperbole: when the prince beholds the “lovely girl” who would become his bride, “he saw the flower of beauty, the marvel of all women, the mirror and painted egg of Venus, a beautiful little tidbit of Love. He saw a baby doll, a gleaming dove, a Fata Morgana, a banner, a golden spike of wheat; he saw a stealer of hearts, a falcon’s eye, a full moon, a little pigeon face, a morsel fit for a king, a jewel; he saw, in short, an eye-popping spectacle.”
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Such rhapsodic descriptions of female beauty are not limited to the fairy tale canon. The chronicler and gossip Brantôme, also notorious for indulging in superlatives, praised Catherine de Médicis’ daughter Marguerite de Valois who became queen in her own right upon her marriage to Henri de Navarre. According to Brantôme, Marguerite was “so beautiful that one had never seen anyone lovelier in the world. Besides the beauty of her face and her well-turned body, she was superbly dressed…Her lovely face shone with faultless white skin and her hair was dressed with big white pearls, precious stones and extremely rare diamonds shaped like stars—one could say that her natural beauty and the shimmering of her jewels competed with a brilliant night sky full of stars.”
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At the other extreme, Basile’s depiction of the antithesis of beauty also demonstrates his stylistic abundance. A less fortunate young woman in another tale is described thus: “Meanwhile, the new bride arrived. She was a plague, a cancer, a harpy, and an evil shadow, with a pug nose and buck teeth; she was an owl, a cracked barrel, and stiff as a pole, so that if you put a hundred flowers and garlands on her she would have looked like a tavern that had just opened.”
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Henry VIII’s sobering assessment after Anne of Cleves, his own “new bride arrived, also contrasts dramatically with the kind of ecstatic praise Brantôme lavished on Marguerite de Valois. Following his wedding night with his fourth wife, the disappointed king told his secretary Cromwell: “Surely, as ye know, I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse. For I have felt her belly and her breasts, and thereby, as I can judge, she should be no maid...the which struck me so to the heart when I felt them that I had neither will nor courage to proceed any further in other matters.”
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Later, other advisors confirmed that Henry complained of Anne’s slack breasts and loose stomach and he persisted in blaming his lapse in virility on his new queen’s physical shortcomings.
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In fairy tales, as well as in the early modern monarchy and royal marriage market, beauty mattered. Conceptions of beauty were highly idealized; Basile’s descriptions, though exaggerated and often comically parodic, are driven by superlatives and outlandish metaphors: “a gleaming dove,” “the marvel of all women,” “a morsel fit for a king.” Brantôme’s Margot is also depicted in extreme terms and highly wrought imagery: she rivals “a brilliant night sky full of stars.” Beauty was also defined by its opposite, particularly in the fairy tale genre so propelled by simple binaries—good/evil, young/old, rich/ poor, beautiful/ugly. However, descriptions of insufficient beauty or downright ugliness are often rendered with more realistic detail: “pug nose,” “buck teeth,” “slack breasts.”
Fairy tale representations of beauty suggest in broad strokes what the historical record reveals in sharper detail: there was an ideal standard of beauty against which women were measured but often failed to reach. This bar was especially high for queens, who were such a valuable commodity in royal marital negotiations and who were so vulnerable to the public gaze. As Sir Philip Sidney said of a “plain” character in his prose romance, the
Arcadia,
“but she was a queen, and therefore beautiful.”
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In context, Sidney’s trenchant comment suggests that queens were often praised undeservedly, but it was also the case that a queen’s appearance was subjected to extraordinary expectations precisely because she was a queen.