Game of Queens (59 page)

Authors: Sarah Gristwood

Chapter 41: ‘daughter of debate’

1.
Margaret of Parma was unusual among female regents in that her (second) husband Ottavio Farnese was still alive. He, however, remained in Italy to govern his duchy of Parma, while their son Alexander accompanied Margaret to the Netherlands.

2.
Later, Margaret would be advisor both to her much younger bastard stepbrother Don John, appointed Governor General of the Netherlands in 1576 and to her son, Alexander Farnese, who succeeded him. She was asked to act as co-regent with her son, dealing with civil administration while he, a commander of genius, took care of what was by now a full-scale military campaign but the two could not work together, and Margaret retired again.

Chapter 42: The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day

1.
The Holy Roman Emperor was now no longer Ferdinand, who had died in 1564, but his son, named Maximilian after his grandfather.

2.
In this too the massacre was a precursor of 1789, which saw intensely sexualised violence directed against, for example, the Princesse de Lamballe.

3.
Twenty years later Christopher Marlowe’s play
The Massacre of Paris
cast her as a stage villain: ‘Tush, all shall die unless I have my will:/For while she lives, Catherine will be queen.

Chapter 43: Turning points

1.
Henri of Navarre, however, said to her, perhaps perceptively: ‘This is trouble pleases you and feeds you – if you were at rest you would not know how to continue to live’.

2.
Elizabeth in these latter years entered into correspondence with Safiye Sultan, the Albanian-born consort of the Ottoman ruler Murad III who, on his death in 1595, promoted their son Mehmed III to the throne and herself exercised such power the English ambassador could report that Mehmed was ‘wholly led by the old Sultana’. Often Murad, whose own communication with Elizabeth was beset with difficulties of status, found letters from his consort a useful way to approach one he saw as being of the weaker sex. Actively promoting a rapport with England, Safiye described Elizabeth (‘most rare among womankind and the world’) as following in the steps of the Virgin Mary. The two exchanged gifts. Safiye sent Elizabeth ‘a robe, a sash, two gold-embroidered bath towels, three handkerchiefs, and a ruby and pearl tiara’. Elizabeth sent her a carriage in which, to the horror of the locals, Safiye used to leave the harem and travel through the street. Joint military action between Murad and Elizabeth was even discussed, just as it had been between Murad’s grandfather Suleiman, and Louise of Savoy. Was Louise another outsider willing to step outside the club of European male rulers in her need for allies?

Postscript

1.
Her Netherlands allies, creating medals that depicted sunken Spanish ships, reportedly added the inscription: ‘Done by a female leader’.

2.
The Duchesse de Montpensier (daughter of François, the Duc de Guise murdered in 1563, and thus first cousin to Mary Stuart), was particularly rabid, carrying always at her belt a pair of scissors with which she threatened to tonsure the king and confine him in a convent.

3.
To be reborn in England, in another time of crisis – the Civil War. Antonia Fraser’s
The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England
(Weidenfeld, 1984) details the importance on women’s efforts on both sides. As Diarmaid MacCulloch notes in
Reformation,
p. 657: ‘Female self assertion was possible in periods of uncertainty and crisis . . . When times quietened, there was a gradual reining-in of possibilities for women, together with a rewriting of history.’

4.
Maria Theresa dictated an autobiographical account of her proceedings entitled, in a phrase reminiscent of Anne de Beaujeu,
Instructions drawn up from motherly solicitude for the special benefit of my posterity
. Advising her son that ‘a mediocre peace is always better than a fortunate war’ she nevertheless celebrated the recapture of Prague in 1743 with a spectacle known as the ‘Ladies’ Carousel’, in which she engaged in a jousting contest with another noblewoman.

A Oneworld Book

First published in Great Britain and Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2016

This ebook published by Oneworld Publications, 2016

The moral right of Sarah Gristwood to be identified as the

Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

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ISBN 978-1-78074-994-5

eISBN 978-1-78074-995-2

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