Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (30 page)

One further incident in the demise of Katherine Howard highlights the gendered disparity in royal conduct. When the king of France heard of Katherine’s misdeeds, he wrote a letter to his “brother” Henry: “I am sorry to hear of the displeasure and trouble which has been caused by the lewd and naughty behavior of the Queen,” but knowing Henry’s “prudence, virtue, and honour,” Francois encouraged him to be brave and “not to let his honor rest in the lightness of women.” A modern sensibility may view such consolation as ironic, coming from a man whose misogynistic views and extramarital activities exceeded even Henry’s, but Francois was merely betraying early modern popular belief that sexual transgression was primarily a female crime.

Caterina Sforza

Katherine Howard faded from view partly because she had so little power. She was seen as a weak and foolish young girl, much like the sisters in L’Héritier’s tale who were portrayed as not having the moral wherewithal to resist temptation. In contrast to the ineffectual Katherine, Caterina Sforza, one of the female rulers in Europe most notoriously associated with sexual license, wielded considerable political clout. Caterina was an illegitimate daughter of Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan, but she was raised and educated in his household alongside his other children. In 1477, when Caterina was 14, she was married to Girolamo Riaro, the nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, and as part of the dowry negotiations the couple was given the Romagnole towns of Forlì and Imoli. In the early years of their marriage, their properties were constantly besieged by rival political factions, and Caterina proved a fearless defender of their estates, even though she was in an almost continuous state of pregnancy. In 1488 a group of conspirators assassinated Girolamo and took Caterina captive along with her mother and her six children.

The conspirators then tried to seize control of the main fortress in the area, Ravaldino, which was being held by Caterina’s loyal captain, Tommaso Feo. Caterina had ordered Feo not to surrender for any reason, and he withstood the siege, only offering to yield on the condition that he could meet and negotiate with Caterina. The rebels were anxious about allowing Caterina inside to meet Feo, but because they held her children hostage they decided that she could be trusted to surrender.

What happened next has become the stuff of legend. According to Machiavelli, Caterina turned on the conspirators and called their bluff: “As soon as she was inside, she reproved them from the walls for the death of her husband and threatened them with every kind of revenge. And to show that she did not care for her children, she showed them her genital parts, saying that she still had the mode for making more of them.”
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Because of Caterina’s bravery in what has become known as the famous “skirt-raising incident,” she was able to hold the fortress and reassume control of Forlì and Imola. Caterina punished the traitors in a grisly and public spectacle and regained the support of the citizens and the control of her territories.

Julia Hairston has analyzed the complex narrative record of this notorious event and explains how Machiavelli and many subsequent authors manipulated and distorted details to emphasize Caterina as histrionic and vulgar, a story which “made good theatre, but little political sense.”
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Hairston explains that the historical account recorded in contemporary local documents does not corroborate the skirt-raising detail but, rather, emphasizes Caterina’s clever rhetorical manipulation of the situation, including her pretense that she was pregnant at the time and thus already carrying another heir. Rather than explaining how a strong, powerful woman—and one who was at the same time known to be a loving, protective mother—managed such a successful coup, authors preferred to construct a story of a monstrous virago as an example of the dangerous intersection between female sexuality and power.

Caterina continued to be a force in Italy’s political landscape because of the strategic location of her properties. She managed to defend her territories against various aggressors until there was a vicious attack by the notorious Cesare Borgia in 1499. For several weeks, Caterina held Ravaldino against Borgia, but he finally seized the fortress and captured her. According to some historians, in the subsequent days Borgia repeatedly raped Caterina and then turned her over to the Pope, who kept her captive in horrific conditions for over a year until she relinquished the rights to her territories.

Caterina was not burned at the stake or beheaded by her enemies, but she was punished through physical assault, public humiliation, and imprisonment.

While Caterina was forced to accept the end of her own political career, she spent her remaining years attending to the political futures of her many surviving children. Caterina’s dramatic life comprised episodes of significant political influence, but at the same time, her beauty, her love affairs, and her many pregnancies were a constant source of speculation, ridicule, and criticism. Caterina Sforza spent much of her life defying attempts to undermine her political or personal autonomy by those who found her display of sexuality and power equally monstrous.

Marguerite de Valois

We conclude with Marguerite de Valois, the early modern queen most notoriously linked with charges of promiscuity. Like Elizabeth, who had to reckon with the legacy of Anne Boleyn’s alleged misconduct, Marguerite was linked with the atmosphere of immorality surrounding her mother’s court. That Catherine de Médicis was suspected of sexual impropriety is perhaps ironic, for she modeled herself as an obedient wife and then somber widow to her husband’s memory, in contrast to Diane de Poitiers, Henri’s fashionable mistress. But Catherine was notorious for her “flying squadron,” the name a Venetian ambassador used to describe the queen mother’s retinue of 80 ladies-in-waiting, “recruited from the noblest houses in France,” who purportedly seduced courtiers to gather political intelligence.
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Katherine Crawford also points out that when Catherine’s son Henri was ascending the throne, he had to wrestle with popular perceptions that he was weak and effeminate and excessively influenced by his mother who was seen as “a lusty, sexually domineering virago.”
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Marguerite, the youngest daughter of Catherine and Henri II, was married at 19 to Henri of Navarre in a political marriage that exacerbated rather than reconciled tensions between Protestant and Catholics. Marguerite’s wedding in Paris became the occasion of one of the most ominous events in French history, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, in which thousands of Protestants were killed. A particularly gruesome event took place on the wedding night: while Henri was meeting with his attendants and Marguerite was sleeping in their chamber, one of Henri’s servants, severely wounded in the mounting violence, burst into the bedroom, bleeding copiously and crying for help. Marguerite managed to summon aid, but the injured man and the bloodstained nuptial bed forecast the terror and destruction of the subsequent days; it was also an ill omen for Marguerite’s marriage.
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Although their relationship was never harmonious, Marguerite and Henri remained married for 27 years. In the early years of their marriage they established a court at Navarre known for cultural brilliance as well as for sexual leniency.
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At first Marguerite and Henri were mutually supportive and accepted each other’s adulterous relationships, but their tolerance eventually dissolved amid external political pressures and Marguerite’s inability to produce an heir. In 1582, ten years after her wedding, Marguerite returned to Paris but was not welcomed by her mother or her brother, Henri III. Though the king’s own reputation was shrouded in sexual scandal, he found Marguerite’s behavior inappropriate. When Marguerite returned to Navarre she was no longer considered a political asset to her husband, so she spent the next several years moving from one castle to another, finally settling at the Château of Usson, devoting time to her reading and writing, her religious faith, her charitable works, her love affairs, and her friendships.

In 1589 Henri III, the last Valois king, was assassinated, and Marguerite’s husband became the next king of France. Henri asked Marguerite for a divorce so he could remarry a new queen who could provide him with an heir. Marguerite agreed on conditions of financial security, and in 1600 Henri married Marie de Médicis, who produced a large dowry and a male heir, the future Louis XIII.

Marguerite’s rich and complex intellectual and emotional life has been carefully examined by scholars, most notably Éliane Viennot, and Marguerite’s writing is increasingly receiving the scholarly attention it deserves.
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Analyses of Marguerite’s life are beginning to unravel the sensationalizing of her reputation as a queen of insatiable sexual appetite, a narrative that can be traced from the sexual slander in her own lifetime through the 1845 Alexander Dumas novel that popularized the name “La Reine Margot” to Patrice Chéreau’s melodramatic film of 1994.
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That Marguerite had romantic relationships outside the confines of her unhappy marriage is not disputed, but the descriptions of those relationships in quantity and quality have been grossly exaggerated. One seventeenth-century author accused Marguerite of “appropriating masculine privileges, of sexual transgressions, and of infanticide,” while another work claimed that she “embalmed the hearts of her deceased lovers, carried them attached to her farthingale during the day, and exhibited them on her bedroom’s walls during the night.”
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Like the many fairy tales that depict sexually suspect queens as monstrous and the accumulation of rumors and hyperbolic gossip that surrounded Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth, Marguerite’s independent sexual life was reinvented as deviance of monstrous proportions. The far greater extramarital activity of her father, her brothers, and her husband garnered much less criticism. Patricia Cholakian points out that “to those familiar only with her legend, it will come as some surprise that [Marguerite]...is one of the most chaste writers of the sixteenth century” and seldom alludes to her sexual life.
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Although her reserve about her personal affairs may be extreme, it counterbalances the more popular familiar depictions of her as a nymphomaniac.

Marguerite’s final years provide a welcome coda to our discussion of the sexual lives and reputations of early modern queens in the literary and historical record. In 1605 Marguerite returned to Paris and reestablished an amicable relationship with Navarre, who appreciated her cooperation, which enabled his second marriage. More importantly, Marguerite and Marie de Médicis became close allies. The former queen advised her successor on court entertainments and social protocol, she was sympathetic to Marie’s frustrations over Henri’s various mistresses, and she was kind and generous to Marie’s children, who referred to her as “Maman, ma fille.”
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When Navarre restored Marguerite’s Paris properties to her, she in turn named Henri and Marie’s children her heirs.

In contrast to the many fairy tales in which one queen is so readily punished and replaced with the next in support of the prevailing male monarchy, the brief episode of the friendship between these two queens offers another story. One withstood the humiliation and public shame of her husband’s promiscuity, whereas the other endured the ongoing assaults on her reputation, both defying popular notions that powerful women must be pitted against one another, suppressed, and punished.

It is not surprising that women in power suffered such outrageous slander and punishment for their actual or imagined sexual lives given the broader historical and literary construction of queenship. The early modern fairy tale tradition and the historical record repeatedly demonstrate that the queen’s body was not her own: her marriages, her reproductive responsibilities, and her physical appearance were always subject to the control of a male monarchy, a scrutinizing council, or an inquisitive public even if she did not always accede to their expectations. Yet, that so many powerful queens emerge in history and fiction as wicked and transgressive is not proof of their monstrous behavior; rather, these portrayals reveal the widespread anxieties that surfaced when women exerted control not only over their own bodies and behaviors but over the political realm as well.

Notes

1 Early Modern Queens and the Intersection of Fairy Tales and Fact

1. The rumor is reported by Leonie Frieda in 
Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France
 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 216. This is one of many stories linking Catherine with poison and assassination attempts in depictions of her as wicked queen.

2. The works of these scholars comprise an impressive body of fairy- tale scholarship. Among the many important works are Cristina Bacchilega, 
Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Stephen Benson, 
Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale
 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2008); Ruth Bottigheimer, 
Fairy Tale
Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition
 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) and 
Fairy Tales: A New
History
 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009); Nancy Canepa, 
From
Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile’s
 Lo Cunto de li Cunti 
and the Birth
 
of the Literary Fairy Tale
(Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999); 
Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy
and France
, ed. Nancy Canepa (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997); 
Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches,
 ed. Donald Haase (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Patricia Hannon, 
Fabulous Identities: Women’s Fairy Tales in Seventeenth Century
France
 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998); Elizabeth Harries, 
Twice Upon a
Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale
 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Lewis Seifert, 
Fairy Tales: Sexuality
and Gender in France 1690–1715
 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Maria Tatar, 
The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales,
 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) and 
Off With
Their Heads: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood
 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Marina Warner, 
From the Beast to
the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996); Jack Zipes, 
Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion
, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 
Why Fairy Tales Stick: The
Evolution and Relevance of a Genre
 (New York: Routledge, 2006), and
Relentless Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children’s Literature, Fairy
Tales, and Storytelling
 (New York: Routledge, 2009). The journal
Marvels & Tales,
 published by Wayne State University Press, is also an excellent resource for current fairy-tale scholarship.