Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  The illness of Girolamo Riario meant that Caterina effectively ruled Forlì; his death in 1488, slaughtered by the Orsi, meant that she ruled it entirely, if nominally for their son. For the next twelve years, she led a life of extreme turbulence as she attempted to maintain her independence in the light of neighbourly oppression, papal claims and finally the arrival of the French forces. Her refusal to surrender the fortress of Ravaldino stands in general for her attitude towards her own rights – theoretically those of her family, but in fact one detects in her a more personal stubborn refusal to be consigned to the female world of submission. (Not that she was above invoking the image of Only-a-Weak-Woman like many other Warrior Queens when it was to her advantage: ‘nobody believes me … being just a lady and timid too’, she wrote to her uncle Ludovico Sforza concerning the Venetian threat to Marradi which she had persistently predicted.)

  When Caterina’s large family of children were held hostages for the surrender, she is supposed to have shouted – in a famous story related in a series of versions of increasing coarseness: ‘Do you think, you fools, that I haven’t the stuff to make others?’ And so saying, she scornfully lifted up her skirt. (In the version which Caterina Sforza’s biographer, Ernst Breisach, thinks the most likely, Caterina pointed out that she was already pregnant with another child when her existing children were threatened, adding that even if she wasn’t she could always remarry and have another family.)32

  As for her bloodthirstiness, Caterina’s treatment of the Orsi family who were the assassins of her husband recalls the vengeance of Boadicea against the wreckers of her daughters: in both cases the details justify that primitive fear concerning the virago unloosed as being deadlier than the male. There were public executions and secret stranglings, followed by the frightful death of the eighty-year-old Andrea Orsi. Dressed in a vest, shirt and one sock, with his hands tied, the patriarch was first of all condemned to watch his house being pillaged and demolished. Then he was dragged round a square tied to a board at a horse’s tail; finally his heart was cut out and his aged body dismembered, the pieces thrown to the crowd.

  ‘Oh glorious Madonna, be merciful with a miserable sinner’, pleaded Simone Fionni, another potential victim. But Caterina replied: ‘Let vengeance rule, not pity. I shall let the dogs tear you to pieces.’ (In the event he was spared and managed to escape.)

  Then there were the lovers, increasingly young, continuously virile: placing Caterina within the Voracity Syndrome may have been politically expedient for her enemies, but it was not exactly unjust. The vengeance which Caterina would take in 1495 upon another family responsible for the death of her beloved castellan Giacomo Feo (he who transported her into ‘the heaven of Venus and Mars’) would rival that exacted upon the Orsi. The assassin was killed, his wife and sons flung down a well and left to die. But on the other hand Giacomo himself, probably with the connivance of Caterina’s legitimate sons, had been speared and then horribly mutilated before he was killed.

  The sufferings of the Jews, Muslims and suspect Christians at the hands of the Inquisition in distant Spain were inflicted on the orders of Isabella’s religious confessors, not her own; Isabella herself disliked the shedding of blood (including, incidentally, bullfighting). Once again it was easier to be the pious Isabella at her prayers than Caterina, who on certain occasions could hear the sound of the tortures she had ordered in her own chamber. Yet the Orsi and the murderers of Giacomo had personally bereaved and insulted Caterina; the victims of Isabella the Catholic died for a principle – a principle of religious unity. But in the judgement of history where a Warrior Queen is concerned, it seems to be better to be associated with religious principle than with personal vengeance.

  First of the lovers was Mario Ordelaffi, with whom Caterina was probably in love, in an idyll which lasted through the summer of 1489. Then the Pope took the opportunity to announce that because of ‘Caterina’s disorderly life’ he intended to award Forlì to his own son, Francescolotto Gibo, whose life was quite as dissolute. The trap lying in wait for a Warrior Queen (who could not be compared to ‘the new Eve’, like Isabella the Catholic) becomes apparent.

  Caterina’s recipe book shows herself obsessed by the preservation of her beauty, in the most traditionally feminine manner: Queen Elizabeth I could not have done more, and in fact where teeth were concerned did less. Lotions of nettle-seed, cinnabar, ivy leaves, saffron and sulphur were applied to maintain the fairness of her celebrated blonde locks. Other lotions removed unwanted hair from her wonderfully white skin. Pearly teeth were guaranteed by daily applications of charcoaled rosemary stems, pulverized marble and coral cuttlebone. There was rose-water to bathe famously blue eyes, and cream for her white breasts. These appurtenances and practices of a Renaissance beauty were all very well; but when Caterina fought a long battle – masculine by the standards of the time – to hang on to her beloved territories of Forlì against the Pope’s desire to grant them elsewhere, she found that her very femininity was gleefully turned against her.

  In 1497, for example, Venice expressed itself shocked by her ‘boundless sensual appetite’, when the real problem was that of Florentine aggression, which it was believed that Forlì might encourage. It hardly needs saying that a ‘boundless sensual appetite’ was if anything the mark of a Renaissance prince. But Caterina was not born a ‘prince’ – nor had she established herself as such in the minds of her people, once again unlike Queen Isabella.

  The accession of Louis XII to the throne of France in 1498 brought with it new turmoil for central Italy. Cesare Borgia went secretly to France, where a deal was struck that Louis would help Cesare to drive the ruling families out of the Romagna in his own interests, while Louis’ own claims to Milan and the southern Italian kingdoms of Naples (also claimed by Ferdinand) would be respected. The Treaty of Blois of February 1499 was an especial blow to Caterina by which Venice, her traditional predatory enemy, allied with France. Finally on 9 March Alexander VI promulgated that papal bull which designated Caterina as the ‘daughter of iniquity’ – and formally invested Cesare Borgia with Imola and Forlì.

  By the autumn of 1499 Milan had fallen to the French and Ludovico Sforza had fled. Beset in Forlì, Caterina wrote to Ludovico: ‘should I have to perish, I want to perish like a man’. That bold wish was not however to be granted to her.

  Imola proved finally impossible to defend against Cesare Borgia. Caterina however clung on to Ravaldino fortress and refused to flee. Some of her plans for defiance were perhaps over-optimistic, such as sending the Borgia Pope Alexander VI letters which had been impregnated with poison or left in a plague chest (it needs a long spoon to poison a Borgia and the plan was bungled). On 12 December she said that she would ‘show the Borgia that a woman too can handle artillery’. The town itself capitulated by the end of 1499. Still Caterina maintained her defiance within the stronghold even after the inhabitants of the town had been given short shrift – rape as well as pillage described by Caterina robustly as ‘just punishment for a city which had surrendered like a whore’. Caterina continued to refuse such inducements as a safe conduct and a pension (showing herself in this respect more of a Boadicea than a Zenobia).

  The final assault took place in January 1500. Cesare asked for ‘la bellicosa signora di Imola e Forlì’ dead or alive, and on receiving her alive – despite the fact that she had been captured by a French officer and was thus officially the captive of the French King – held her incommunicado for forty-eight hours while he treated her as his soldiers had treated the women of Forlì. Bernardi wrote of the ‘injustices committed to our unfortunate Madonna Caterina Sforza who had such a beautiful body’. But Cesare quipped to his officers that Caterina had defended her fortress better than she had defended her virtue.

  Still Caterina would not sign away her rights to Imola and Forlì. She was not released until June 1501 by which time her beauty, that carefully tended asset, had vanished. She still tried to negotiate the return of some of her rights, but in vain. Her la
st years were happier, however; she began to train up her young son by Giovanni de’ Medici, Giovanni della Banda Nera, born in 1498, to be a soldier, a worthy member of the house of Sforza. She died in May 1509.

  It could be argued that at least as a mother Caterina died with more hope than had Isabella the Catholic five years earlier. The Castilian Queen’s only son, Prince John, whose birth had been attended by such rejoicings, had died in 1497. Of her three surviving daughters, Juana was mad: but she inherited the crown officially since her husband Philip the Fair of Flanders refused to allow Ferdinand more than the regency after his wife’s death. (Isabella’s defence of female inheritance had born fruit.) Another daughter Maria, who had been married to the King of Portugal, was already dead, as was her son Miguel, who might have united in his person the crowns of Portugal and Spain, as once his grandparents had united those of Aragon and Castile. Isabella’s third daughter Catherine of Aragon was already a widow following the death of her first husband Prince Arthur of England; she lingered in that country with a view to marrying – perhaps – his younger brother Henry.

  Ferdinand expressed his own reaction to his wife’s death: ‘there is therefore hope that Our Lord has her in His Glory, which for her is a better and more lasting realm than those she ruled here’. Peter Martyr of Anghiera, on the other hand, the humanist historian, did not forget her martial achievements: the world – not only Spain – had lost its noblest ornament, he wrote, since Isabella had been the mirror of every virtue, the shield of the innocent ‘and an avenging sword to the wicked’.33

  Isabella’s own will, however, expressed the matters which had preoccupied her on earth, including the unity of Spain for which she had fought, and just rule for the Indians in the New World.34 But her instinct for simplicity prevailed at the last: she requested that there should not be an extravagant funeral; instead money should be spent on providing dowries for poor girls (otherwise unable to get married) and ransoms for the Christian captives in the hands of the Moors in Africa. And Isabella, still with her prayers fighting the fight for the Faith, prayed that Ferdinand should continue to expand Spain into Muslim Africa, as he had once expanded Castile into Granada with Isabella at his side: she with her prayers (but in full armour), he with many armed men.

  * ‘Religious unity cannot easily be criticized as an objective by those who live in a world of mutually repellent secular orthodoxies, quite as compelling and all-inclusive in their claims’, wrote J. N. Hillgarth in 1978.5 It is an apt comment. Nevertheless many manage to do so.

  * Although if, as has been suggested, Caterina Sforza was the ‘cultural model’ for the queen in the game of chess, which attained its present power as a piece in the late fifteenth century, then she has achieved another kind of immortality.29

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ELIZABETHA TRIUMPHANS

  They couch their pikes and bow their ensigns down

  When as their sacred royal Queen passed by

  In token of their loyal bearèd hearts

  To her alone, and none but only she –

  Elizabetha Triumphans (1588)

  The reign in which the character of chariot-driving Boadicea was destined to be restored to British mythology (or history) did not begin under auspicious circumstances for a woman ruler. The concept was on the contrary generally attacked. ‘Murmur ye at mine anointed because she is a woman? Who made man and woman, you, or I? If I made her to live, may I not make her to reign?’ These affronted questions were put into the mouth of Almighty God in a pamphlet of 1559: An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes against the late blown Blast. The anointed woman in question was Elizabeth Tudor, who had succeeded to the throne of England in the previous year at the age of twenty-five. The author was John Aylmer, newly restored Protestant Archdeacon of Stow.1

  Aylmer’s intention in quoting God, as it were, was to defend the new Queen from a far noisier piece of propaganda: John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment of Women. The virulence of Knox’s language in attacking the whole concept of female sovereignty can scarcely be exaggerated. Neither the passage of time nor the standards of another age have paled the rich colours of his abuse.*3 ‘How abominable before God, is the Empire or Rule of a wicked woman, yea of a traiteresse and bastard …’ he writes. Again: ‘For promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation or city, is repugnant to nature, continuously to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.’ As for women in general: ‘their sight in civil regiment is but blindness; their strength, weakness; their counsel foolishness and judgment frenzy, if it be rightly considered’.

  The fathers of the Church are quoted, including St Paul, Tertullian (the whole sex is ‘the port and gate of the devil’) and St Augustine (‘woman ought to be repressed and bridled betimes, if she aspire to any dominion’). Then nature is brought into play: ‘no man ever saw the lion make obedience, and stoop before the lioness …’. Finally history is invoked: ‘For when the males of the kingly stock failed, as oft chanced in Israel and sometimes in Juda, it never entered into the hearts of the people to choose and promote any of the king’s daughters …’. In short: ‘where a woman reigneth and papists bear authority … there must needs Satan be president of the council’.

  The reference to papists is significant. The ‘Regiment’ or rulership (its contemporary meaning) of females to which Knox so furiously objected was that of three Catholic queens – Mary of Guise, regent of Scotland in the absence of her daughter Mary Queen of Scots (crowning her was ‘to put a saddle upon the back of an unruly cow’),4 Catherine de’ Medici in France, and Mary Tudor in England. It was a classic piece of historical bad timing that no sooner had Knox denounced the female regiment than a Protestant monarch – but one who unfortunately for Knox happened to be a woman – replaced Catholic Mary on the throne of England. Nor was Knox alone in his denunciation. The great Calvin too had joined in deploring such an unnatural development.

  Speedy and embarrassed revisionism was the order of the day lest Elizabeth, the hope of the reformers, be fatally offended. It was particularly awkward that both Calvin and Knox, in an extension of that idea attributed to Muhammad that ‘a people who place a woman over their affairs do not prosper’, had stated that civil wars generally tore apart those kingdoms ruled over by women.5 Insecure at the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth would hardly welcome the notion that God himself might foment a rebellion in her own realm, just because she was a woman.

  Calvin wrote a mortified letter to Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, William Cecil. He admitted that Knox had asked him in a private conversation what he thought of female sovereignty. ‘I candidly replied, that as it was a deviation from the original and proper order of nature,’ among the punishments Man had to endure since the Fall ‘it was to be ranked no less than slavery.’ On the other hand, individual women were occasionally well endowed to govern, evidently raised up by God’s authority, either to condemn the inactivity of the opposite sex or simply to set forth His own glory (as a creator). Calvin instanced the biblical Deborah and Huldah and quoted the prophet Isaiah: ‘Queens should be nursing mothers of the church.’ (Knox had dismissed both Deborah and Huldah in The First Blast.)6

  Even Knox himself was compelled to backtrack. In July 1559 he wrote with the best air of apology he could muster to the English Queen. ‘Nothing in my book conceived is, or can be prejudicial to your grace’s just regiment,’ he declared, adding characteristically, ‘providing that ye be not found ingrate [ungrateful] unto God.’ The official line to cope with Elizabeth’s presence on the throne was that indicated by Calvin to Cecil: female rule was still unnatural but every now and then God would provide for it for His own good reasons. Knox however added the rider that this put a special burden upon a female (as opposed to a male) sovereign to prove herself worthy of the task. In general the Protestants now fell back on the distinct
ion between Good Queens and Bad Queens: useful in an age which would be marked by the ostensible public rivalry of a Catholic Mary Queen of Scots and Protestant Elizabeth.7

  Aylmer’s defence in An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes leaned heavily on historical precedent.8 The stage army of Warrior Queens was dutifully paraded across his pages, including those who had enjoyed an ‘antique glory’ such as Artemisia, famous for vanquishing Xerxes. Revisionism was not entirely on the side of the Calvinists: Aylmer pointed out that it had been an obvious error to prefer Stephen to Matilda (the Empress Maud), since England had been punished with prolonged civil war for ignoring the claims of the rightful heir to the kingdom – or in this case heiress. This stood the previous Calvinist argument on its head. But perhaps the most remarkable piece of revisionism was that which introduced the name of Anne Boleyn among celebrated women of the past such as Margaret of Flanders:* for had it not been Anne Boleyn who had brought about the wonders of the Protestant Reformation?

  Historical precedent apart, Aylmer’s point of view was not really so far from that of Calvin, as revised, or even that of Knox. It was God who had appointed Queen Elizabeth to reign, as part of His divine plan: even, as in the selection of a female governor, working through weakness. When Aylmer wrote that if God made her to live, might He not also ‘make her to reign?’, he was expressly defending the divine selection of Elizabeth Tudor; in no way did Aylmer, Elizabeth’s other defenders, Elizabeth’s other critics and above all the Queen herself attempt to defend the right of women in general to rule equally with men.