The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  It is not difficult to understand why a foreign Protestant like Chambers sought Catherine de Medici's patronage, even after 1572. In her capacity as de facto regent and guardian of a kingdom allied to German Lutherans against their Catholic Habsburg rivals, she remained a conventional Catholic; but even after sharpened Protestant–Catholic differences had degenerated into religious warfare in the 1560s, she sometimes cooperated with two female Protestant monarchs, Elizabeth I of England and Jeanne III of Navarre, despite their confessional differences. In 1564, during her son's “great tour” across France, the queen-mother learned that her prominent and thoroughly heretical vassal Jeanne d'Albret had been summoned to Rome to appear before the papal Inquisition. Catherine exploded with indignation because popes had no authority over any sovereign. Grateful for her support, Jeanne III wrote that she would kiss Catherine's feet “more willingly than the Pope's” she joined the royal tour for several months and did homage for her many French fiefs before returning to her sovereign state. In 1570 Catherine de Medici similarly refused to publish the papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth; twelve years later England's Protestant queen quietly repaid her by unofficially loaning several ships for Catherine's futile attempt to invade Portugal and claim its throne from Philip II.29

  Female Regents in the Low Countries, 1559–1633

  Soon after hearing Richardot's funeral sermon for Mary of Hungary, Philip II of Spain left the Netherlands permanently. Having promised his sister Juana that he would never employ her again, he turned to his illegitimate half sister Margaret of Parma to govern this region; like her two predecessors, she had been born there. Margaret was also Europe's only married female regent, but during her term of service her husband remained in Italy governing his duchy. Three portraits of her by the same painter, Antonis Mor, made before (1557), at (1559), and during her appointment (1562), offer a sequential progression in official gravitas appropriate to a ruler. Though not without some successes, her tenure in office proved to be much briefer and more conflictual than those of her female predecessors. Margaret was the only regent of the Low Countries to resign her office, and her government is generally seen in hindsight as the prelude to the long war for Dutch independence from Spain.

  The regent herself believed that she had overcome a serious threat to her authority in late 1566 by raising an army in Germany that defeated local noble malcontents a few months later, and she celebrated by creating Europe's first heroic medal specifically honoring a female ruler. In the inscription accompanying her image on the front, her personal title as Duchess (by marriage) of Parma and Piacenza is abbreviated D.P. et P., while her official rank as governor of Lower Germany (Germaniae Inferioris Gub.) takes far more space. The reverse features a beleaguered Amazon holding both a sword and an olive branch, protecting both church and state amidst storms and waves. The Italian adviser who designed it proudly sent copies to both Cardinal Farnese and the pope in Rome.30 Even after Margaret had pacified the region, Philip II viewed her earlier compromises with local nobles as disastrous and sent the Duke of Alba with a large army and full authority to crush all opposition; the regent, humiliated and furious, resigned. The consequences after Alba replaced her were eighty years of military struggle and eventual Spanish failure; in retrospect, Margaret's triumphant medal of 1567 seems ironic and even modest alongside the large public monument to Alba made by the same artist a few years later (it was soon demolished).

  After more than thirty years of rebellions in the Low Countries and after three years of study, Philip II decided on his deathbed to separate this war-torn region from his Iberian possessions, which now included Portugal. He would be succeeded in the Netherlands not by his son but by his oldest daughter, Isabel Clara Eugenia, who must marry her Austrian cousin, Archduke Albert, already the region's governor general. But these lands would not be separated permanently from Spain. If Isabel, already thirty-two years old, died without children, her younger brother (soon Philip III of Spain) or his heirs would succeed her; if she produced an heir of either sex, he or she must marry back into the Spanish ruling house; and if her brother died without an heir, Isabel must return to Spain to govern all of her father's possessions. Before marrying the new heiress, Albert assumed power in the southern Netherlands in Isabel's name. Because the former monarch had died, the governor general also had a new state seal made in 1598. It depicted Philip II's daughter enthroned, but with a half-empty coat of arms under its crown, because the man who designed it was not yet her co-sovereign. It was replaced after they married and reached their joint state.31

  The political status of the archdukes lay in an intermediate zone between genuine sovereigns and viceroys or regents. Like sovereigns, they could coin money, manage civil government, and establish permanent embassies in a few major foreign courts (England, France, and Rome). But like regents, they could not operate independently: a large army of occupation remained on hand, paid and commanded from Spain, with its own treasury and legal system. Until 1609 only one Belgian appreciably influenced high policy on the Council of State, and even he was excluded from military issues; domestic policy eventually became more autonomous. In 1616, when it became obvious they would have no children, Isabel's younger brother made local notables take an oath to recognize him as the successor to either spouse. Under these restrictions, their high-value coins reflected a dubious sovereignty through the most varied numismatic depictions of joint rulers anywhere in Europe. Some poses were traditional; some gold coins showed husband and wife seated on parallel thrones, while others showed their heads facing each other, with a crown on the reverse; after 1618 a novel arrangement depicted them in profile, facing in the same direction with the husband foremost and overshadowing his wife. When Albert died in 1621, a new Spanish king, Philip IV, canceled Isabel's sovereign status, but he also named her as the region's governor general (her husband's original position), and she remained in office until her death in 1633.32

  The militant piety of these quasi-sovereign regents was exemplary even by Spanish standards. Isabel was very much Philip II's daughter and had spent much time at Madrid's new convent founded by her aunt Juana; her husband had once been a cardinal. They were the last joint rulers of Europe to donate a stained-glass window to a cathedral that showed them kneeling in prayer. Both Isabel and Albert were popular, but Isabel overshadowed her diffident husband. She hunted frequently with falcons and bows, and in 1615 she won a traditional crossbow-shooting contest in Brussels with her first shot. A four-hour parade celebrated Isabel's triumph, and the sponsors suspended the annual competitions so she could remain king of the popinjay (roi du papegay) until her death.33

  Isabel governed this region either jointly or alone for thirty-four years, even longer than her great-aunt Mary of Hungary, with whom she was frequently compared. The last two meetings of the Estates-General of the Netherlands, neither with prior approval from Spain, were held at the beginning of their joint reign (1600) and near the end of her governorship (1632). The horse she rode at her formal entry into Brussels in 1599 is preserved in a local museum, alongside one that Albert used in battle. Militarily, Isabel did as well as her husband; the last great victory of Spain's Army of Flanders, the capture of Breda in 1625, occurred on her watch. A Flemish artist, Pieter Snayers, depicted the victorious general Ambrosio Spinola greeting his civilian superior outside the conquered city; Isabel is dressed as a nun, having taken vows as a Franciscan Tertiary after Albert's death. She thus became not only Europe's only female sovereign to win an archery contest but also its only female regent to govern in nun's clothing (the only male ruler in Europe ever depicted in clerical garb was the pope).34

  Baroque Pretensions

  The other seventeenth-century female regents of Europe all fit the traditional pattern of royal widows serving as guardians for their young sons. They seldom exercised as much personal authority as their sixteenth-century predecessors, and they have seldom enjoyed as high a reputation. Bearing out David Chambers's assertion, it was female-exclusioni
st France that experienced the two most important seventeenth-century female regencies. The first, Marie de Medici, lacked the exceptional political skill and energy of her sixteenth-century Florentine relative, but she enjoyed higher official status and shared some of Catherine de Medici's durability in power. Marie de Medici's most recent biographer, Jean-François Dubost, has restored her political credibility, especially during the years 1610–17, when she exercised effective sovereignty.

  Her political ambitions preceded her coronation one day before her husband's assassination in 1610. In 1609 an engraving depicted her seated under a regal canopy and equipped with a crown, a sword, and the scales of justice; it bore the inscription, “I am the one who makes kings reign, who knows how to use weapons and laws, maintaining peace and good government by correcting the malice of men.” Marie de Medici threw tokens to the crowd attending her coronation, something no other French regent, male or female, ever did. During her regency she commissioned several self-congratulatory medals. One from 1612 shrinks her obligatory widow's veil to a small ornament while her son, the king, disappears completely. The front calls her Regina Regens, “Queen Regent"—she was the only woman to flaunt this title in France. The reverse used even more boastful language, claiming, “A female leader has done so much” (Tanti Dux Femina Facti).35

  In 1617 Marie de Medici was abruptly thrust out of power after alienating her son by monopolizing too much authority for too long. But unlike previous or subsequent female regents, she managed a political comeback during her son's reign. Her ambition continued to draw criticism: in 1623 a French pamphleteer claimed she resembled Semiramis, “that proud queen … who massacred her husband and her son in order to govern over men.” This criticism contained the proverbial grain of truth. The almost two dozen large canvases celebrating her alleged triumphs undoubtedly constitute the most spectacularly overblown pomp associated with a female European ruler. In 1622 she commissioned, from the most famous artist of the time, Peter Paul Rubens, a cycle depicting her “highly illustrious life and heroic deeds” for the main room of her new Parisian palace. Completed three years later, the series continues to draw visitors to the special room at the Louvre which holds nearly all of it.36

  Rubens's work demonstrates the limitations of gender stereotypes when heroic baroque portraiture had to glorify a woman ruler. His celebration of a military triumph of the regent's armies in 1610 foregrounds a mounted woman in a warrior's helmet but with one breast bared and riding demurely sidesaddle. A far more militaristic theme dominates his later portrait of her that accompanies her “triumph” cycle (see fig. 8). When shown the entire cycle, her son Louis XIII apparently remained unaware of his relative unimportance in it. However, Cardinal Richelieu was appalled, and not long afterward he abandoned her patronage. In 1630 Marie de Medici lost all political influence for the second time after failing to remove Richelieu, a disgrace that precipitated her permanent exile. Rubens was never paid in full for Marie's triumphs, and a planned second cycle was canceled. In 1639, a year after Richelieu wrote that “nothing can ruin a state like an evil mind hiding behind the weakness of their sex,” one of his Catholic followers again proposed, as the Huguenots had in 1573, to exclude mothers from French regencies.37

  Baroque portrayals of female regents can carry extremely misleading messages. The contrast between nearly simultaneous portrayals of two widowed female rulers by the same famous artist is instructive. At Paris, Rubens's final painting for the original “Apotheosis” cycle (not in the Louvre) portrayed the former French regent Marie de Medici as a triumphant female figure replete with military symbols: she not only wears Minerva's helmet but also holds a royal sceptre, while two cherubs overhead hold a laurel wreath and, at her feet, a pile of military equipment is visible. But at Brussels during the same year, Rubens also did a well-known realistic portrait of his main patroness, the Spanish infanta and governor general of the Netherlands, Isabel Clara Eugenia. It shows Marie's militarily more successful female counterpart as a smiling Franciscan Tertiary.38

  Marie de Medici's commissioning of Rubens to portray her triumphs culminated a century of high-profile female regents. Subsequently, Europe's female regents avoided ostentation. In the 1670s that incurable royal misogynist Christina of Sweden remarked that her mother, explicitly excluded by her father from having any role in a regency, “was no less capable of governing than anyone we have seen of the other maternal queens and princesses in this century; in truth, they were all as incapable as she of governing.”39 As in her other sweeping condemnations of female rulers, Christina remained blind to such inconvenient recent counterexamples as Louis XIV's mother, Anne of Austria, who served well for a long time under difficult circumstances while maintaining a modest political and cultural profile.

  In Europe, female regents had a complex relationship to female sovereigns, who occupy the center of this account. For all their early associations with innovative political enhancements (beginning with the invention of chess queens around 1000), no female regent in Latin Europe was ever accused of trying to usurp sovereign status, although one tried to do so in Russia in 1686, and another probably planned to do so in 1741. Instead, in Latin Europe, it was possible for a female sovereign to move in the reverse direction and end as a regent. Isabel Clara Eugenia was the first, but not the only, example; after abdicating as Sweden's monarch in 1720, Ulrika Eleonora would briefly serve twice as its regent. By contrast, several male sovereigns (for example, Philip II of Spain), had been regents before becoming kings, but none ever served as a regent after being a sovereign.

  The most important achievement of the long-serving female regents of early modern Europe was to serve as cultural pioneers for its female sovereigns during their gradual transition away from Navarrese-style royal heiresses to women ruling by themselves. These eight women, all of whom governed without husbands, sponsored various cultural promotions of female rule at a time when female monarchs began emancipating themselves from the political authority of their husbands (see chapter 5). However, there is no evidence that such novel affirmations of female political authority spread easily or quickly from regents to sovereigns. For example, Elizabeth I, who reigned over an important kingdom with great success for forty-five years, would have been the major beneficiary in the late sixteenth century. Although her courtiers took the art of painting a female ruler in triumphant poses far beyond her regent predecessors (one made in 1593 showed her kingdom under her feet), Elizabeth's literary defenders seem relatively timid: British treatises defending her sovereign rights against Knox were less vigorous than one printed abroad under the patronage of a female regent. There is no contemporary life-sized statue of Elizabeth, as there is for Mary of Hungary; and the English monarch did not commission a heroic medal of herself, despite having much better reasons than Margaret of Parma to do so.

  The manner of riding horses—Europe's most prestigious form of transportation for a thousand years—illustrates that even incomplete mimesis of regent predecessors could take a long time, though never so long as the five centuries that separate the invention of the chess queen modeled on female regents from the more powerful versions modeled on a female sovereign, Isabel of Castile. In the mid-seventeenth century Christina of Sweden still rode sidesaddle, even in Sébastien Bourdon's portrayal of her on a rearing horse. Not until far into the eighteenth century did any female sovereign ride in public in the manly fashion practiced by the sixteenth-century regent Mary of Hungary. In the 1740s both Maria Theresa of Austria and Tsarina Elisabeth of Russia were portrayed riding fully astride, but despite remarking that they wanted to take the field in person against their enemies, neither woman, unlike Mary of Hungary and Catherine de Medici, ever accompanied her armies on campaign.

  Figure 1. The first documented major female ruler: Hatshepsut (c. 1435 B.C.). This reconstructed statue in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, depicts her enthroned, with a female body but garbed as a male king. Most of its lower fragments were excavated in 1929 near her funerary t
emple, while her torso (discovered in 1845) was acquired from Berlin. Digital photo at Wikimedia Commons by Postdlf, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 3.0 license.

  Figure 2. Cleopatra and son (c. 30 B.C.). In this relief from an Egyptian temple at Dendera, Caesarion precedes his mother Cleopatra VII, although her name precedes his in the accompanying inscription; the tiny figure between them is Caesarion's ka, or guardian spirit. Wikimedia Commons.

  Figure 3. Spouses on medieval Georgian coin, 1200. Tamar's monogram, a theta, is above a delta for her husband, Davit. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 2.5 license by the Classical Numismatic Group, Inc., www.cngcoins.com.

  Figure 4. Neapolitan coin of Spain's Catholic kings, 1503. The inscription on their two-headed silver carlino, now hard to read because of clipping, begins on his side (“Ferdinand and Isabel, by the grace of God”) and concludes on hers (“monarchs of Spain and of both Sicilies”). Since 1282 there had been two separate kings of Sicily, one based in Naples. Courtesy of American Numismatic Society.

  Figure 5. A female figurehead, 1528. Aragon's proprietary sovereign, Juana la loca, faces her son, Emperor Charles V, who monopolized state power throughout Spain and kept his mother imprisoned. Nevertheless, she outranked him; its obverse legend proclaims “by God's grace King [Rex] Juana and Charles, her firstborn son.” Image at Wikimedia Commons licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 3.0 license.