The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  Even in the enlightened late eighteenth century, no matter how bizarre their behavior, Europe's divine-right sovereigns, male or female, were almost never officially removed because of insanity. In 1772 King Christian VII of Denmark (r. 1766–1808) had to be replaced for twelve years of de facto regency by his stepmother and his physically disabled half brother until his son could become the legal regent. When Frederick's brother-in-law, George III of England, appeared to require a regent because of insanity in 1788, he was pronounced cured shortly afterward.18 In 1792 the same physician who cured George III tried but failed to help Maria I, the mentally disturbed female monarch of England's close political ally, Portugal. However, Maria's adult son did not become official regent of Portugal until seven years after his mother had ceased to govern.

  The life expectancy of Europe's female monarchs was no greater than that of their male counterparts. Most died from natural causes but few lasted into extreme old age. Three late medieval heiresses died in their midtwenties, but only one succumbed to the aftereffects of childbirth; the other two died from riding accidents. However, only two heiresses outlived Elizabeth I, who died at seventy, and neither was ruling: Juana of Castile, who died at seventy-five, had exercised no political responsibilities for almost half a century, while Maria I of Portugal, who died at eighty-one, had been insane for twenty-four years. Only two adult female monarchs died violent deaths: one was murdered by her male successor in 1382 and the other was beheaded in 1587. On the other hand, three (Naples 1345, Scotland 1567, and Russia 1762) were widely suspected of arranging the murder of their politically inconvenient husbands.

  As political leaders the most noteworthy trait of Europe's female monarchs is that they appear even more deeply enmeshed in Christendom's religious politics than most of their male counterparts. The subject is vast enough to deserve a separate volume, and only a few highlights can be sketched here. In Orthodox Christianity religious preoccupations emerged as early as the Empress Irene of Byzantium, who promoted the restoration of icon worship, and, much later, the future saint Tamar of Georgia, who patronized distant Near Eastern shrines. Religious politics similarly dominated the architectural legacy of Latin Christendom's first female monarch, Urraca of León-Castile, who, like Tamar, patronized famous distant shrines. Religious politics became even more vital among fourteenth-century female monarchs. Only consistent support from her papal suzerains enabled Joanna I to govern an important Mediterranean kingdom for almost twenty years, and her role in the Great Schism of 1378 fatally compromised her rule.

  While no male monarch has ever been seriously proposed for sainthood since 1297, when Louis IX of France was canonized less than thirty years after his death, two female monarchs have been nominated in the twentieth century, one of them successfully. Jadwiga of Poland, who enthusiastically promoted the eastern expansion of the Latin church, was first proposed for this honor during her husband's lifetime, but it took almost six centuries after her death in 1399 before a Polish-born pope finally made her a saint. In 1496 Isabel of Castile owed her new papal title of Catholic king not just to a successful crusade against Muslims in Granada and her persecution of converted Jews through Spain's new state-run Inquisition, but also to the major religious reforms she carried out in her kingdom. After 1970 a serious effort by Spanish reactionaries to beatify her was quietly buried by the papacy.

  After the Protestant Reformation religious politics became a primary concern of all the numerous mid-sixteenth-century women rulers. Two famous examples were half sisters: Mary and Elizabeth Tudor each overturned England's established church in opposite directions within a single decade (1554–63). Conversion to Reformed Protestantism led Jeanne III of Navarre to overturn her husband's authority in her hereditary kingdom in 1562. Two female Catholic regents adopted quasi-monastic behavior. Juana of Castile wore a veil while governing Spain as a secret Jesuit in 1554–59 and retired young to build a convent; her niece Isabel Clara Eugenia later dressed as a Franciscan nun while governing the Low Countries in 1621–33. In 1654 conversion to Catholicism became the decisive factor in the early abdication of Christina of Sweden, heiress to a solidly Lutheran kingdom.

  Even in the century of Enlightenment female sovereigns continued to be (or at least to act) more pious than their male contemporaries. Maria Theresa's only critics were either Protestants or Jews settled in Habsburg territories who suffered religious discrimination during her reign. Although Catherine II justified her usurpation of the Russian Empire largely as a defense of the imperiled Orthodox church and required her daughters-in-law to convert to it, she subsequently extended state-supervised toleration not just to schismatic Old Believers but also to vast numbers of her newly acquired Muslim, Jewish, and Catholic subjects. The mental breakdown in 1792 of Europe's last female monarch of the old regime, Maria I of Portugal, was attributed partly to the severity of her confessor.

  Male Accessories to Female Rule

  Despite widespread ambivalence about having women as divine-right monarchs, European men never developed a coherent theoretical opposition to female rule; John Knox's notorious trumpet blast of 1558 had no imitators. Instead, male critics preferred a more insidious denigration of female sovereignty: the slogan ‘when women rule, men govern’ became almost proverbial before 1800. This adage used conventional beliefs about female frailty to assume that the man with greatest access to a female ruler was necessarily the most prominent person in her state. Such reasoning explains the frequent late medieval coronations of husbands of female sovereigns and the debate in book 3 of Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier about the role of Isabel's husband in her success. It also explains both the frequent rumors of sexual liaisons between women rulers and their favorites and the persistent tradition of historians to see the principal ministers of women rulers as the primary agents shaping state policy, from fourteenth-century Naples to the Austria of Maria Theresa.

  There is corroborative evidence to support this approach. Husbands were considered indispensable to every young royal heiress as late as the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria being the most prominent but not the only example. At the same time, some far older women monarchs, as early as Joanna II in early fifteenth-century Naples, clearly governed through male favorites. All-powerful male favorites reappear with Russia's first two eighteenth-century empresses, Prince Alexander Menshikov with Catherine I and Count (later Duke) Ernest Biron with Anna Ivanovna. However, female rulers as early as Queen Anne of England also had politically prominent female favorites. Rule by royal favorites was never peculiar to female monarchs; both before and after Joanna I, many adult male kings did exactly the same thing. Because men comprised 90 percent of all European monarchs it is appropriate that the outstanding collaborative study of rule by royal favorites should include only one female ruler.19

  If rule through favorites was endemic and independent of gender, were there any important differences between Europe's female and male kings? Although most of the time men and women governed in identical fashion, two special areas remained segregated by gender. The political peculiarities of female royal rule might be represented by a large central circle overlapped at both ends by smaller circles. The large circle represents ordinary government business (appointments, diplomacy, edicts, and so on) that was exercised in essentially the same way by both men and women. The small circle at one end represents an exclusively male sphere of warfare; throughout the five centuries considered here sovereigns were also military commanders, a role that remained taboo for female rulers. The small circle at the other end is the female zone of queenship centered around legitimate dynastic reproduction, so essential to hereditary monarchies. Male rulers needed female accessories in order to have legitimate heirs; female rulers needed male accessories for the same purpose, but for a long time they also needed them to command their armies. In Sweden a tradition of personal military leadership by the monarch remained sufficiently strong to influence the abdication of its two women sovereigns, both of whom succeede
d kings who had been killed in battle.

  Nevertheless, Europe's female sovereigns, who often found themselves entangled in wars, compiled a remarkably successful overall military record. Between the capture of the king of Sweden on the battlefield by the army of Margaret of Denmark in 1389 and the defeat of the previously invincible Frederick II of Prussia by the armies of two female monarchs in 1760, one finds the ten-year conquest of Granada, the last Muslim state in Europe, by the armies of Isabel the Catholic; the defeat of Philip II's Invincible Armada by the navy of Elizabeth I; several great Swedish victories in the Thirty Years’ War during Christina's reign; and the humbling of Louis XIV's armies by those of Queen Anne. Such military successes far outweighed their reverses. Meanwhile, eighteenth-century female monarchs found novel ways to cope with the problem of military leadership by such tactics as portraying themselves on horseback carrying a weapon, founding military academies to train their officer corps, and creating honorary orders for outstanding military service; Maria Theresa did all three, even naming the new order for herself. In western Europe royal military leadership ceased being a political concern; after 1745, no male monarch led an army in person. In more recent times, Margaret Thatcher, the first democratically elected female head of a major European state, continued this tradition of military success (see fig. 17).

  The most obvious difference between male and female monarchs is that women, in addition to their ordinary governmental tasks, were also expected to undertake the burden of dynastic reproduction. Being kings made it harder for these women to be queens; fulfilling their reproductive responsibilities proved extremely difficult. High child mortality rates compounded the difficulties of locating politically suitable spouses during their childbearing years, so that only about 40 percent of Europe's female monarchs (far below the 70 percent rate for their male counterparts) were succeeded by their direct descendants. All but one of these heirs came from marriages made before the mother began her personal reign.

  Royal heiresses inevitably confronted an extremely narrow choice of possible husbands. Their dilemma had three horns. Marrying one of her own subjects almost guaranteed disaster by raising a single clan far above every other noble lineage in her kingdom.20 Marrying any foreigner of nonroyal status reduced her own prestige, but marrying another king or crown prince would automatically merge her kingdom with his and compromise its autonomy. Somehow all these pitfalls had to be avoided in order to preserve their heritage intact.

  From a man's perspective, marrying a royal heiress entailed risks as well as advantages. A military leader was assassinated when he tried to marry the last female ruler of Sassanid Persia, and we do not know what happened to the first husband of Queen Tamar of Georgia; he simply disappears from the record. In Latin Europe, although their military potential sometimes played a role in their selection, no royal husband ever died in battle; however, a few of them were murdered, beginning in 1345 with the first husband of the first major European heiress. Among the few from nonprincely backgrounds, one was driven from his wife's kingdom in 1419 and eventually retired to a foreign monastery, while the last husband of Mary Queen of Scots ended in a Danish prison, where he died insane.

  Whatever scriptural and customary wisdom said about the subordination of wives, such conventional notions were rarely applied to or internalized by women rulers. Folk wisdom knew that a married woman who was older than her husband had a better chance of exercising authority autonomously, so it is not surprising that some of Europe's greatest heiresses married men younger than themselves. At Naples, Robert the Wise did this with his granddaughter, Europe's first major heiress. In 1469 and 1477 two women whose inheritance rights were sharply contested and who were able to choose their own husbands, Isabel of Castile and Mary of Burgundy, also did this, with highly satisfactory results. In the following century Mary Tudor was better positioned to retain England's autonomy after her marriage by being almost twelve years older than her husband. Even Mary Stuart of Scotland, seldom praised for her political astuteness, chose a man four years younger than herself when she decided to remarry during her personal reign. No subsequent female monarch ever remarried, although a few extremely successful female rulers flaunted affairs with much younger men in their old age. The earl of Essex was thirty-three years younger than Elizabeth I. The interchangeable gigolos of Catherine II's final years averaged thirty years younger than their employer, although her only politically important bedmate, Grigory Potemkin, whom she may have secretly married, as Louis XIV did his last mistress, was just ten years younger.

  When they were fortunate enough to have surviving children, reigning mothers were able to avoid the often severe and occasionally murderous antagonism between fathers and crown princes. No mother who was a divine-right monarch ever abdicated in favor of an adult son, although Maria Theresa officially shared power with hers after her husband's death; Catherine II went to the opposite extreme by excluding hers from any political responsibilities. Daughters may have been even more difficult to manage than sons. Old Europe produced only one mother–daughter royal inheritance, and relations between Isabel the Catholic and her second daughter, Juana, turned remarkably bitter after Juana unexpectedly became heiress-apparent in 1502. After Isabel died two years later, the only daughter to acquire a major European kingdom from an extremely politically active mother became the only female sovereign in European history who refused to exercise any political authority whatsoever.

  There was no standard formula for how female kings approached the tasks of government. Europe's most successful examples, the women who exhibited the greatest staying power in major states—Isabel the Catholic, Elizabeth I, Maria Theresa, and Catherine II—each developed strategies tailored to maximize the possibilities of her particular situation, and each manipulated very different images of how a woman wielded supreme political power. Isabel maximized the possibilities of a married woman in a dual monarchy in which her kingdom held most of the joint resources, including those acquired during the marriage; yet she always remained part of a partnership called the kings (los Reyes), and her husband held far more authority in her kingdom than she did in his. A half century after Isabel's death, Elizabeth I dodged the burdens of marriage and dynastic reproduction while presenting herself as either (virgin) mother of her subjects or wife of her kingdom, in either role providing safety and prosperity through prudent stewardship. A century and a half later Maria Theresa, flanked by a husband with an imperial title and a large flock of children, maximized the strategy of becoming truly the “mother of her country” (die erste und allgemeine Landesmutter). All three were native princesses, but the foreign-born Catherine II had usurped her throne from an incompetent and overtly foreign husband. She compensated by becoming a patriot in her adopted country and working tirelessly to acquire both glory for herself and improved conditions for her subjects, ultimately becoming the only female ruler generally known as the Great both at home and abroad.

  Regardless of their individual styles after achieving power, all of Europe's most successful female rulers from the fourteenth through the eighteenth century shared one vital life experience with their most famous predecessors in such places as Egypt and China. Starting with Joanna I of Naples and Margaret of Denmark, these women had invariably surmounted major political obstacles before attaining sovereign authority in their own name. Isabel had to fight a civil war with her niece; Elizabeth spent much time imprisoned in the Tower of London. Even Maria Theresa, despite all her father's efforts to permit female succession throughout his possessions, had to overcome great difficulties before officially acquiring either of her two royal thrones. Women who managed to survive such testing experiences invariably relished the exercise of supreme power afterward; none of them ever retired gracefully like Japan's female tennos, relinquishing effective control to an adult male relative. Instead, European history offers a counterexample. Sweden's meticulously mentored and highly gifted seventeenth-century crown princess Christina, the woman with the least contest
ed path to the throne and the only one who had been carefully groomed for the tasks of royal government, abandoned her monarchical responsibilities at the age of twenty-eight after only ten years of highly successful personal rule.

  3

  Difficult Beginnings

  Heiresses with Crowned Husbands, 1300–1550

  The Magnifico asked, “What prince has there been in our days, or for many years past in Christendom, who deserves to be compared with Queen Isabel of Spain?”

  Gasparo replied, “King Ferdinand, her husband.”

  —Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528)

  After 1300 the history of female sovereigns shifted to Latin Christendom. A pioneering article by Armin Wolf identified twelve female claimants among one hundred royal successions in eighteen different kingdoms during the century between 1350 and 1450.1 But two other women, including Europe's most famous fourteenth-century female ruler, had already inherited their thrones before 1350; and some significant developments occurred shortly after 1450, including some bizarre events in Cyprus, a small kingdom that Wolf omitted. Both the number of women occupying thrones—at least fifteen between 1328 and 1504—and the variety of situations involved permit an aggregate picture of the governmental record of Europe's female monarchs during the first half of these five centuries.

  Most of these women were between the ages of ten and twenty when they inherited a kingdom, but nearly all were already married. Few remained without husbands; even the oldest woman in this group, a widow past childbearing age, remarried shortly after inheriting. Although the primary purpose of their marriages was to ensure legitimate dynastic succession, a goal which fewer than half of them managed to fulfill, the political status of the men they married appears to have been the single most important factor in their governments. If their husbands had received the equivalent of formal coronations—a situation that had occurred at least ten times by 1506—they shared formal political authority with the heiress and normally handled most government business. The only exception, Blanca of Navarre (r. 1425–41), was twelve years older than her husband and had previously served five years as regent of a different kingdom. Three childless royal heiresses were succeeded by their husbands. Three others, also childless, who were deposed or overthrown would eventually bequeath their claims to their husband's heirs, and all three donations are still preserved in the archives of their former in-laws.2