Authors: Sarah Gristwood
1555 May 25
Jeanne d’Albret becomes Queen Regnant of Navarre.
1555 October 25
Mary of Hungary resigns regency of the Netherlands.
1556 January 16
Charles V abdicates the crown of Spain to his son Philip II, to whom he had already handed over the Netherlands the previous October.
1558 November 17
Elizabeth I becomes Queen of England, succeeding her half-sister Mary.
1559 April 3
Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, orchestrated by Christina of Denmark, ends sixty-five years of intermittent warfare, much of it centring on rival claims to the Netherlands.
May 2
John Knox returns to Scotland from exile. In Geneva, where he had worked closely with John Calvin, he published the pamphlet
The first blast of the trumpet agaimst the monstrous regiment of women
.
July 10
François II (husband of Mary, Queen of Scots) becomes King of France, succeeding his father Henri II. Rise to power of the Guise family.
1560 December 5
Charles IX becomes King of France, succeeding his brother François II. His mother Catherine de Medici assumes power during his minority, in rivalry with the Guises.
1561 August 9
Mary, Queen of Scots returns to her country to assume active rule.
1562 March 1
The Massacre of Vassy, the killing of French Protestants by the Duc de Guise’s men, triggers the start of the French Wars of Religion.
1564 July 25
Maximilian II becomes Holy Roman Emperor, following his father Ferdinand.
1567 February 10
Lord Darnley, second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, is murdered.
May 15
Mary marries Lord Bothwell, widely held responsible for Darnley’s murder.
July 24
Mary is forced by her rebellious nobles to abdicate in favour of her infant son James VI.
September 5
The Duke of Alba, arriving in the Netherlands to put down iconoclastic riots, establishes the ‘Council of Troubles’. Margaret of Parma resigns her regency and Alba’s harshness signals the start of the long Dutch revolt against Spanish rule.
1568 May 16
Mary, Queen of Scots flees south over the border into England, to begin almost twenty years of captivity.
1571 October 7
The Battle of Lepanto gives a league of European Catholic powers a great naval victory against the Ottoman Turks.
1572 June 9
Jeanne d’Albret dies, to be succeeded as ruler of Navarre by her son Henri.
August 24
Celebrations for Henri of Navarre’s marriage to Catherine de Medici’s daughter, intended to heal religious divides, instead herald the terrible anti-Protestant slaughter of the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day.
1574 May 30
Henri III becomes King of France, succeeding his brother Charles IX.
1581 July 26
Seven northern (and largely Protestant) provinces of the Netherlands formally declare independence from Spain.
1587 February 8
Mary, Queen of Scots is executed at Fotheringhay.
1588 August 8
The approach of the Armada fleet, sent by Philip of Spain against England, provokes Elizabeth I’s address to the troops at Tilbury. Much of the fleet is destroyed by adverse weather.
1589 August 2
Henri of Navarre becomes Henri IV of France, succeeding his kinsman and brother-in-law Henri III. This ends the line of Valois kings and brings in the Bourbon dynasty.
1603 March 24
Elizabeth I dies, leaving the throne of England to James VI of Scotland, Mary, Queen of Scots’s son.
Preface
The Queene is queint and quick conceit,
Which makes hir walke which way she list,
And rootes them up, that lie in waite
To work hir treason, ere she wist
Hir force is such, against her foes,
That whom she meetes, she overthrows.
The Chesse Play
, Nicholas Breton, 1593
In the eastern lands where chess was first played, all the human figures were male, with the king flanked by his general or chief counsellor; his vizier. As the game spread through Europe, after the Arabs invaded in the eighth century, the queen first appeared but still as a comparatively impotent figure, able to advance only one diagonal square at a time. It was in the Spain ruled by Isabella of Castile that the chess queen took on the almost unbounded power of movement we accord her today.
Two books written in Spain in the last years of the fifteenth century describe these new powers, referring to ‘lady’s chess’ or ‘queen’s chess’. True, in 1493 the Italian translator of Jacobus de Cessolis’s
Game of Chess
queried whether the queen could really assume the knight’s powers, ‘because it is uncharacteristic of women to carry arms, on account of their frailty’. Two decades earlier, William Caxton’s English translation had stressed above all else the queen’s ‘shamefastedness’ and chastity.
But the translators can never have met the ‘warrior queen’ Isabella, herself an impassioned player of the game. It is probable that it was largely the example of Isabella and the real-life ruling women who came before her that finally provoked an echo on the board.
1
The allegorical significance of the game was obvious to contemporaries: it was, as many an illustration can testify, this which had made it a staple of courtly love play. But the change of moves would not be without controversy. The new game became known as mad queen’s chess –
scacchi de la donna
or
alla rabiosa
in Italian,
esches de la dame
or
de la dame enragée
in French. But it was here to stay.
The time from the accession of Isabella of Castile to the throne in 1474 to France’s Massacre of St Bartholomew almost a century later (a horror which ruptured loyalties across the continent) was an Age of Queens. The period saw an explosion of female rule scarcely equalled in even the twentieth century. These years saw the birth of the new reformed religion, as well as the dawn of the world we know today and for much of them, large swathes of Europe were under the firm hand of a reigning queen or a female regent. This was a sisterhood which recognised both their bonds as women and their ability to exercise power in a specifically feminine way.
This book will follow the passage of power from mother to daughter, from mentor to protégée. From Isabella of Castile to her daughter Katherine of Aragon and from Katherine to her daughter Mary Tudor. From the French dowager Louise of Savoy to her daughter the writer and reformer Marguerite of Navarre; from Marguerite not only to her own daughter Jeanne d’Albret but to her admirer Anne Boleyn and thence Elizabeth Tudor.
As the century wore on, the daughters of the first powerful women found themselves at the forefront of the great religious divides that racked the sixteenth century. Most, though not all, attempted to exercise a measure of religious tolerance before those hopes foundered in the face of other, more extreme, opinions.
Religion helped bring many of them into prominence; religion, in the end, would drive them apart and bring the Age of Queens to an end. But the sheer scale on which the women of the sixteenth century exercised power (as well as the challenges they faced) remains both a spectacle and a warning to our own day.
Throughout the century the Habsburgs would prove doughty, if unexpected, promoters of female authority. With some notable exceptions, the Habsburg Empire, which in the course of the century came to stretch from the Mediterranean to the English Channel; from the glories of the Alhambra to the grey skies of Antwerp, knew women as regents, rather than as queens regnant. The Netherlands passed from the hands of a ruling duchess into those of an almost unbroken succession of authoritative female governors, each the niece of her predecessor, that endured for sixty years. The Habsburg’s great rival in Europe – France – subscribed to the Salic Law, which forbad women from inheriting the throne. It had, however, a formidable tradition of women exercising rule on behalf of an absent husband or under-age son.
At the start of this era England was perhaps the least female-friendly of all the European powers. It had no Salic Law; yet when Henry Tudor became Henry VII of England, he subsumed into his claim the blood rights of two women: his mother Margaret Beaufort and his wife Elizabeth of York. No one, including the women themselves, seems to have found his action extraordinary. Yet it was England, of course, which saw a woman – Anne Boleyn – tip a nation into religious revolution. It was England which, in Anne’s daughter, would go on to produce perhaps the most admired female ruler in history.
That, in a sense, is an impetus for this book. I have written about two royal Elizabeths – Elizabeth of York and Elizabeth I – and I want to join up the dots: to discover what lessons England had learnt in those seventy years that meant it could accept a queen regnant? (And, as a corollary, why did it then cease to do so?) The answer may lie in Europe.
The female rulers of Europe recognised bonds of sisterhood that crossed the borders, and sometimes even ran contrary to the interests, of their countries. They consciously invoked their status as women to conduct business in a different way. In 1529, the famous Ladies’ Peace of Cambrai, a halt in the long war between Spain and France, was struck between Margaret of Austria, the Habsburg emperor’s aunt and regent, and Louise of Savoy, mother of the French king. The princes might fear loss of honour in making peaceful overtures but (as Margaret wrote) ‘ladies might well come forward’ in such an undertaking.
This was an ideal which would echo through their century. There were a number of attempts, however abortive, to revive the idea of a ladies’ peace in subsequent decades.
2
Sixteen years before Cambrai, in fact on the eve of the Battle of Flodden that cost her her husband, the King of Scots, Margaret Tudor had wished she might meet with her sister-in-law Katherine of Aragon, then ruling England while her husband Henry VIII was away: ‘if we shall meet, who knows what God by our means may bring to pass?’ Mary Stuart always hoped England and Scotland could find lasting peace, if only she and Elizabeth Tudor could meet.
The line of descent from mother to daughter, whether physical or spiritual, runs like an artery through sixteenth-century Europe. And the connections between the women form a complex web. Margaret ‘of Austria’, born the daughter of the ruling Duchess of Burgundy, was sent as a toddler to the French court, where she fell under the influence of the formidable Anne de Beaujeu and then, as a teenager, to the court of Castile, where she became Isabella’s daughter-in-law and sister-in-law of Katherine of Aragon. She was then, as an adult, herself instrumental in bringing up Anne Boleyn.
But the powerful women in the later decades of the sixteenth century found themselves in a very different climate from that which their predecessors had enjoyed. Elizabeth I, at the end of this story, has many affinities with Margaret of Austria at the beginning; but while Margaret of Austria had lived in four realms by her early twenties, Elizabeth Tudor never set foot outside her own land. Neither woman bore a living child, yet Margaret would become known as ‘
La Grande Mère de l’Europe’
, while Elizabeth’s preferred identity was famously that of virgin.
The Reformation drove fault lines across the continent, while conversely giving to some of these women a fame more enduring than they might otherwise have enjoyed. This book was born, though I didn’t realise it, when as a teenager I read Garrett Mattingly’s classic
The Defeat of the Spanish Armada
and noted his passing comment that in 1587, the year of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, sixty years had passed since the parties of religion had begun to form, the old versus the new, ‘and always by some trick of Fate one party or the other and usually both, had been rallied and led by a woman’.
In the so-called gynocracy debate, concerning women’s fitness for authority, two writers influenced the political thinking of the times to a degree that requires special mention. One, of course, was Niccolò Machiavelli, whose
The Prince
was first privately distributed in 1513. The second is Christine de Pizan, the French-Italian author and some would argue, early feminist: the first woman to become a professional writer. Her work of the early fifteenth century,
The Book of the City of Ladies
, had lost none of its relevance by the sixteenth century (or even, perhaps, the twenty-first), as the interest demonstrated by a number of women in this story goes to prove. Anne de Beaujeu and Louise of Savoy inherited copies of Christine’s work, while Margaret of Austria’s three-volume set would have passed to her niece, Mary of Hungary. Anne of Brittany and Margaret of Austria also owned suites of tapestries based on the
City of Ladies
, as did Elizabeth Tudor. All too aware of the clerical portrayal of women as Eve’s daughters, weak and essentially untrust-worthy, Christine gives into the mouth of Justice a rebuttal of ‘certain authors’ who ‘criticise women so much’, pointing out that there is ‘little criticism of women in the holy legends and the stories of Jesus Christ and his Apostles’, despite what Christ’s later servants might say.