Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  As it is impossible to exaggerate the virulence of Knox’s language in The First Blast it is also impossible to exaggerate the general distaste and anxiety felt towards the notion of a female ruler. When Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary Tudor ascended the throne in 1553, many questioned whether it was even legal for a woman to inherit: there had been no queen regnant since that doubtful, because unsubstantiated, claim of the Empress Maud four centuries before. The rights of the female in the table of royal succession had generally been subsumed into those of her husband, who would often have a lesser claim of his own. Thus in 1485 Elizabeth of York had in fact an infinitely better dynastic claim to the throne than her future husband, Henry VII, de facto monarch after the battle of Bosworth. Then their marriage added her right to Henry’s might and he was of course the one out of the pair who ruled (Elizabeth being merely Queen Consort). The will of Edward VI had concentrated on the male heirs to females within the English royal succession such as his Grey cousins, although it was finally disregarded in favour of the superior dynastic claim of his elder half-sister Mary Tudor.10

  Where might and right did not coalesce, the choice of a husband was always likely to be the problem in the case of a queen regnant. It was not at all clear that the husband of such a queen might not have the actual right to be regarded as the king: when the youthful Mary Tudor was betrothed to her cousin the Emperor, Henry VIII was worried whether he might not thus secure a title to her throne. One Chief Justice advised that although the husband could not call himself king by right, because the crown lay outside the bounds of feudal law (the husband of a feudal heiress automatically assumed her titles, rights and possessions), the Queen Regnant could grant him the title if she chose.11 In the event Mary Tudor’s actual husband, Philip II of Spain, was considered to be King of England as well (a worrying precedent). Mary Queen of Scots’ disastrous second husband, Darnley, whom she married in 1565, was always referred to as King Henry.

  Under the circumstances it was understandable that Cardinal Reginald Pole should have tried to persuade Queen Mary Tudor to take that course actually adopted by Queen Elizabeth: no marriage, but a single-minded devotion to that role granted her by heaven, and for which through many dangers she had been signally spared.12 (Where marriage and position were concerned, as the relative fortunes of the unmarried Elizabeth and much-married Mary Queen of Scots demonstrate, queens regnant in the sixteenth century resembled career women in the late twentieth century, in that they experienced regrettable difficulty in ‘having it all’.)

  The objections to female regiment were not entirely theoretical. As Sir John Neale pointed out in his biography of Elizabeth I, government itself was ‘a masculine business, with its world a court constructed for a king’. The idea of protecting a queen from the rigours and difficulties of government was of course implicit in the concentration on the topic of her marriage; Elizabeth’s widowed brother-in-law Philip II (and putative suitor at the beginning of her reign) advised her to marry soon, if only that her husband could then relieve her ‘of those labours which are only fit for men’.13

  In vain the coronation tableaux leaned heavily on such stories as that of Deborah, ruling for forty years of peace. The popular mood was better expressed by the fears of the Spanish Ambassador de Feria following Elizabeth’s accession: ‘what can be expected from a country governed by a Queen, and she a young lass, who though sharp is without prudence?’ This was not mere chauvinism – in both senses of the word. There was trouble in the House of Lords over Elizabeth’s title as ‘Supreme Head of the Church’ in view of her inconvenient sex, and Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, made what were described as some ‘ripe remarks’ on the subject. In the end the Queen became the ‘Supreme Governor’.14

  This, then, was to be the triumph of Queen Elizabeth I. She ascended the English throne at a time of outright popular hostility towards female sovereigns, and by a mixture of artfulness, intelligence and instinct survived to rule for forty-five years, her personal prestige – both as a woman and as a monarch – growing with every year.

  Such a triumph did not happen overnight. Two years after Elizabeth’s accession – in 1560 – when the question of her own successor was being raised, the claim of Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, the last of the Plantagenets, was advanced over those of a host of females of royal Tudor descent (including Mary Queen of Scots): ‘the cry is that they do not want any women rulers’. How sublimely different was the mood of Leicester’s will of August 1587 in which he hoped Queen Elizabeth, now in her fifties, would prove to be ‘the eldest [i.e. the longest-living] prince that ever God gave over England’! If Leicester, the favourite, is held to be a prejudiced source, then one might cite the tribute of the Pope Sixtus V, around the same time, against whom the same charge of prejudice can scarcely be laid. The Queen of England might be only a woman, he wrote, and only mistress of half an island, yet she had made herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire and ‘by all’.15

  The triumph also remained personal to Elizabeth. Forty years on, when this question of the old Queen’s successor had become acute, it was Mary’s son, Scottish James, who was the front runner (even though excluded, as an alien, by the will of Henry VIII), not only because he was of commensurate rank, but also because he was a man. The ever-confident French Ambassador – ultimately however no great prophet – wrote that it was ‘certain’ that the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman.16 The early years of James’s reign were also marked by a warmth on the part of the English towards the new ruler – just because he was a man, and a vigorous one in his prime – which is often overlooked in view of their subsequent disillusionment.

  The general estimate of the female sex, never high, not only declined in the seventeenth century, but declined amid perceptible relief, now that humble lip-service did not have to be paid to She-who-was-on-the-Throne. In a poem printed in 1650 in memory of ‘our dread Virago’, Elizabeth, Anne Bradstreet called attention to this decline following the Queen’s death: ‘Now say, have women worth? Or have they none? Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone?’17

  The fact was that the ‘dread Virago’ herself had never made any effort to improve the general appraisal of woman’s worth; for cogent reasons, that was the very last of her intentions. An interesting article in Feminist Review of 1980 by Allison Heisch considers Queen Elizabeth I at length in terms of those women who are ‘honorary males’, and thus have no particular impact ‘unless indirect and negative’ on the status of women of their time.18 (The same ‘negative’ argument is often applied by feminists to the presence of Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister of Great Britain since, as will be seen, Mrs Thatcher has explicitly denied any debt to Women’s Liberation.) Queen Elizabeth would hardly have approved of the source of these sentiments – a feminist review. Had she been granted a glimpse into the future to witness the rise of feminism, she would, one must believe, have greeted the spectacle with a royal shudder; just as Queen Victoria, another Queen Regnant, looked on Women’s Rights with abhorrence.19 On the other hand, Queen Elizabeth I would have heartily approved of the verdict of ‘honorary male’.

  It was customary for her to deride her own sex along stereotyped lines, out of policy. For example, women were popularly supposed to be chatterboxes: when the Queen was congratulated on knowing six languages, she remarked wryly that it was ‘no marvel to teach a woman to talk; it were harder to teach her to hold her tongue’.20 She also believed what she said. For she was different. That was the constantly reiterated message.

  The differentness of the Queen from all other female subjects was the cornerstone of her self-presentation, worked out or perhaps simply instinctively felt, by a genius at the art. Her weapons in this self-presentation were two. Firstly, she worked upon her female nature to provide a delicate, exquisite image of the lady who needed to be protected – and the goddess who had to be adored. Secondly, she presented herself as a ‘prince’: like many successful pieces of composite propaganda, the
second part was in direct contradiction of the first.

  In all this, there was one real danger and another possible one. The possible danger was of a husband, bringing with him perpetual masculine control. But by maintaining herself as a virgin goddess to the end of her life, despite a farrago of courtships, the Queen avoided that particular peril. Sir James Melville, visiting the English court on behalf of Mary Queen of Scots, observed to Elizabeth when she had been on the throne five years without committing herself to a bridegroom: ‘Madam … you think if you were married, you would be but Queen of England, and now you are King and Queen both; you may not endure a commander.’21 He went to the heart of the matter although neither he nor the Queen herself – whose most profound decisions were taken by the highly roundabout method of endless procrastination – can have envisaged that Elizabeth would end her life, still King and Queen, still without suffering a commander.

  The real danger to Elizabeth, both as goddess and as ‘prince’, was war. For in the late sixteenth century Europe was a sphere where control passed inevitably to a man. In his History of Scotland George Buchanan, tutor to the young King James of Scotland, digressed in his turn on the unnaturalness of female government, especially in war: ‘’Tis no less unbecoming [in] a Woman to pronounce Judgment, to levy Forces, to conduct an Army, to give a Signal to the Battle, than it is for a Man to tease Wool, to handle the Distaff, to Spin or Card, and to perform the other Services of the Weaker Sex.’ For that which was reckoned ‘Fortitude and Severity’ in a man turned to ‘Madness and Cruelty’ in a woman.22 This was one challenge to her authority that Elizabeth could not avoid. When and if war broke out, the Queen not only had to suffer a commander, but she also had to go further and appoint one.

  Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Queen Elizabeth showed from the beginning of her reign to the end a dislike and fear of war verging on the pathological. Her very jewels – always the emblematic messengers of her true feelings – spoke in favour of peace; as the years passed, she took to wearing jewels in the shape of spring flowers, in order to symbolize the peace which she was proud to have brought to the kingdom.23 As to her commanders, she was of course extremely careful that they should be seen at all times as the royal representatives. The first need for a military initiative on the government’s part came in 1569 when the northern earls revolted. (Eleven peaceful years had passed since Elizabeth’s accession: in a poem written to celebrate the suppression of this rebellion, the Queen was to refer – without regret – to ‘our rusty sword’.) The revolt was put down by Lord Hunsdon. But when the Queen thanked him officially, it was for being ‘by God appointed to be the instrument of my glory’.24

  Then the Queen used every conceivable card in her hand – including that potential ace of trumps (which would never in fact be played), her marriage, in order to avoid military involvement in the Netherlands, where Protestant rebels were locked in conflict with the overlordship of Catholic Spain. When Elizabeth could hold back no longer, and command had gone to Leicester, she enjoined him firmly ‘not in any sort to hazard a battle without great advantage’. (There were to be no false heroics about the sheer glory of the contest here.) That zest for conquest which possessed Zenobia and Tamara was quite lacking in Queen Elizabeth I, who made of this deficiency – as some might have rated it – a virtue: ‘In my ambition of glory I have never sought to advance the territories of my land … I have used my forces to keep the enemy from you.’ She added pointedly, ‘I have thereby thought your safety the greater and your danger the less.’25

  War of course brought another kind of bondage, and this bondage applied to monarchs male and female alike: for war was liable to bring the monarch under the control of those who financed it, notably Parliament voting for the necessary taxation. Elizabeth practised an ostentatious parsimony in this respect, regarding war as a ‘cancer’ which ate up private men and their patrimony, princes and their estates. As Simon Adams has written recently, not only did Elizabeth have ‘no martial ambitions’ but she had on the contrary ‘a healthy suspicion of expensive military adventurism’.26 This sensible attitude (to those indifferent to the rival claims, so costly in men and money, of national glory) was especially prudent in view of her sex. If she were to exercise any control in the sphere of war, such a control might be considered unsuitable coming from a woman: in or out of her control, a war might bankrupt her.

  It was Mary Queen of Scots, not Elizabeth, who referred to herself in the sad declining years of her captivity as one who would rather pray with Esther than take the sword with Judith; but the English Queen too was no Judith at heart. As a result of avoiding Judith’s severe and sword-wielding womanhood, Elizabeth had by 1574 freed herself from debt for the first time. This has been significantly contrasted with the situation in the last years of her reign, when she was no longer able to emulate peace-loving Esther or peacefully ruling Deborah: war now cost her the horrifying sum (then) of three and a half million pounds.27

  Part of the trouble with the ambitious young Essex in the 1590s was that his hotheaded love of war was inimical to his royal mistress, dote as she might upon his stylish rashness when it was displayed, for example, in a court tournament in her own honour. When Francis Bacon was advising his patron Essex how to secure a reconciliation with the Queen, he suggested that he should not be so warlike in his talk ‘for her majesty loveth peace’.28

  As the young Indian braves in Western films used to be routinely portrayed as eager for war, where their elders were content to smoke the pipe of peace, so Elizabeth and Essex were ranged against each other by their generations, he as a war-loving young man, she as a peace-loving old woman. It proved a recipe for disaster, but thanks to Elizabeth’s long practice of what she called the ‘wit of the fox’, it turned out in the end to be Essex’s disaster, not her own. The reference is to the Queen’s interview with the historian William Lambarde. In 1601 Lambarde presented her with his Pandecta, the various records of the Tower of London during the Middle Ages. A discussion concerning the meaning of certain mediaeval legal terms followed in which the Queen was pleased to demonstrate her own considerable learning. Were rediseisnes, for instance, as she supposed, unlawful and forcible throwing of men out of their lawful possessions? Lambarde confirmed that they were. ‘In those days’, the Queen observed with satisfaction, ‘force and arms did prevail: but now the wit of the fox is everywhere …’.29

  Integral to Queen Elizabeth’s creation of herself as a ‘prince’ were sedulous references to her descent from King Henry VIII – ‘Great Harry’ – in a rich working of the Appendage Syndrome. Knox had advised the Queen in his somewhat limited apology not to ‘brag of your birth’ but brag she did, in full measure, and over and over again. (‘Well did she show, great Harry was her sire, Whom Europe did for valour most admire’, wrote Lady Diana Primrose after the Queen’s death.) Elizabeth was also artful in associating herself with contemporary male leaders, in order to underline her possession of ‘masculine’ courage. It was her recurrent theme (not only in that reverberating speech at Tilbury to which we will return) that she had ‘the heart of a man’, not of a woman. ‘And I am not afraid of anything’, she added on one occasion, having made the familiar boast to the Spanish Ambassador, declaring herself in the process to be quite as brave as the kings of Spain, France, Scotland and the whole house of Guise.30

  The greatest art of all was deployed paradoxically in persistently reminding her audience that she was Only-a-Weak-Woman, in order to evoke the desired reaction of wonder and disbelief: for surely here was the equal of any prince of the past! In 1586 for instance, Queen Elizabeth described her reaction to her accession: ‘bethinking myself on those things that fitted a King’. And she listed ‘justice, temper, magnanimity, judgement’ among them, adding modestly: ‘As for the two latter, I will not boast; my sex doth not permit it.’ The implication was clear. The Queen kept up these quasi-modest allusions to the end of her life. In almost her last public speech she reminded her audience of
her ‘sexly weakness’, before going on to boast once again that God had given her a heart ‘which never yet feared foreign or home enemy’.31

  Then there were the numerous otherworldly references to Diana, Juno, Astraea, Gloriana, Sweet Cynthia, the Fairy Queen and so forth and so on, as a goddess untouched by the depredations of time. (An ode celebrating her funeral referred to ‘this sweet slumbering maid’ with the air of one on her way to Parliament, not to her burial.) The extensive researches of Roy Strong in art and history have exposed the workings of this subtle and brilliant campaign – like some huge campaign for re-election lasting forty-five years, except the votes were cast in loyalty, not at the polling booth – by which Queen Elizabeth I secured first the affection, then the adoration of her people.32 In the apogee of this campaign, the ‘Accession’ picture of 1600 showing the triumph of Astraea, the Queen had finally been transformed into the first Virgin of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue: Virgo and Venus (at the age of sixty-seven) ever young and ever beautiful.33

  Nor, happily, did this self-presentation as a virgin goddess prevent the Queen from appearing also in the guise of the mother of her people, as the years passed. When Leicester expressed that hope in his will that Elizabeth would be the longest-reigning ‘prince that ever He [God] gave over England’ he went on to wish, in a splendid transfer of genders, ‘that she may indeed be a blessed mother and nurse to this people and church of England’. Sir John Harrington referred to her as the ‘natural mother’ of her subjects; Thomas Dekker, in his epitaph, described her as ‘having brought up (even under her wing) a nation that was almost begotten and born under her’.34

  For gradually her femininity, which called for a chivalry and protection denied to a king, became an asset, not a weakness. At the beginning of her reign at a tournament given in honour of the Duc de Montmorency, Queen Elizabeth watched with her ladies at the tiltyard while the earls of Rutland and Essex charged at each other at a signal given by her. But it had to be admitted that for all the prettiness of the torchlit spectacle – the two earls in blue and silver, the young Queen gilded and radiant – it was not thus that Great Harry had conducted himself at the beginning of his reign, he who had tired out eight to ten horses hunting, and then played tennis, and finally jousted himself. Twenty years later when the Queen, still more gilded, yet more radiant, watched a tourney of armed ‘Amazons’ versus knights, she had become the centre of an astonishing cult, in which even the warlike ‘Amazons’ had to be played by men, since such games were far too rough for the delicate sex of which she was the most delicate of all.35