The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  But not on earth. Instead of being remembered as the next woman to rule a major European kingdom after her grandmother Isabel of Castile, Mary Tudor's posthumous fame in the history of female rule lies primarily in having inspired John Knox's diatribe against all female rulers. Visitors to Westminster Abbey seldom notice her tomb because it lies directly beneath the magnificently ornate funeral monument to her half sister and successor, Elizabeth. In some ways, this arrangement is appropriate because Elizabeth, during a reign nine times as long as Mary's, destroyed her great work of papal restoration and replaced it with a version of national church which still exists. It is also appropriate because Elizabeth's royal authority rested on some solid foundations laid by her half sister.

  Husbands’ Authority Overturned in Smaller Monarchies, 1562–67

  During Mary Tudor's reign in England, two other women became legal sovereigns of two small kingdoms: Jeanne d'Albret (r. 1555–72) in Navarre and Mary Stuart (r. 1558–67) in Scotland. Mary had become the first Queen of Scots as a week-old baby. By far the youngest royal heiress in European history, she had several illegitimate half brothers, the oldest of whom would play a major role in her reign. In 1553 Scotland imitated England by putting an image of its young female sovereign on a gold coin, although she would not become a legal adult until her marriage five years later to the crown prince of France. In 1555 a married woman with a three-year-old son inherited the northernmost remnants of the kingdom of Navarre, united with the larger sovereign principality of Béarn. Jeanne III (the only female monarch of Europe as yet to reach that modest numeral) became Navarre's fourth woman sovereign since 1328.

  At first, both small kingdoms followed the now-traditional Navarrese solution to female inheritance, that is, marrying their heiresses to powerful princes who were expected to govern in her name. Both husbands were French princes of royal blood. After becoming the fiancée of the four-year-old French dauphin in 1548, Mary spent a decade at the French court preparing to become queen of France. In the late 1550s the constitutional situation of both small kingdoms is neatly captured on their silver coins, which imitate those of Philip and Mary in England by using a single crown floating above two heads, and with the husband's name first on the inscriptions. However, during the following decade, against a background of acute confessional conflicts which then dominated politics throughout western Europe, both female sovereigns would sharply curtail the political authority of their husbands. In Navarre, religious divisions shattered cooperation between royal spouses; in Scotland, they opposed the sovereign to her political nation, with her husband caught in between.

  The joint coronation of Jeanne III of Navarre and her husband, Antoine de Bourbon, in 1555 essentially repeated the ceremonies for her distant predecessor Jeanne II and her husband in 1329. Despite stubborn resistance from local authorities, both heiresses insisted on including their husband as a fully equal participant. In 1555 the Estates of Béarn met a few weeks after the former king's funeral. Jeanne's husband, first prince of the blood in France, met a flat refusal when he demanded to be recognized as king, being “the lord of his wife and of all her property.” A local chronicler reported that the heiress, “in order to please her husband,” repeated his demand, reiterating that he was “lord of [her] person and [her] properties.” The Estates replied that she was “their true and natural Lady” (naturelle Dame) and that there was a great difference between marital and royal preeminence. Under local law, her husband was king only accidentally (par accident) and merely the steward of her goods. After five days of debate, the Estates, exactly like their predecessors at Pamplona 226 years earlier, accepted joint rule. He, not she, took the oath in local dialect to uphold their privileges, whereupon the Estates took an oath of homage to both rulers. Their coinage copied England's floating-crown motif for joint sovereigns, identifying them as “Kings of Navarre and Lords of Béarn.”8

  Over the next few years Jeanne III's husband schemed incessantly to recover Spanish Navarre, engaging in treasonous negotiations with the Spanish king while serving with French armies who were fighting him. The marriage, originally very solid, began crumbling largely because of Jeanne's growing attraction to Reformed Protestantism. At Christmas 1560, while her husband was being outmaneuvered by Catherine de Medici in his bid to become regent of France, his wife converted publicly to the Reformed church; Elizabeth I of England and John Calvin immediately congratulated her. When France stumbled into religious war in 1562, Jeanne III separated from her husband and fled to her hereditary lands. As she noted later, when he tried to repress Protestantism in Béarn without informing her, “I used the natural power which God had given me over my subjects, which I had ceded to my husband, for the obedience which God commands; but when I saw that it was a question of my God's glory and the purity of His worship,” she proceeded to arrest her husband's secretary and cancel his orders. She also revoked her permission for her husband to negotiate with Philip II to exchange Navarre for the island kingdom of Sardinia, which she had “given through force and fear, not having dared refuse a husband.”9

  Fortunately for her, Jeanne III's husband was killed a month later fighting Protestant rebels in northern France. His thirty-four-year-old widow wrote a sad poem, held a solemn funeral for him at her capital, and systematically removed every Catholic official whom he had appointed. “Since the government is entirely in your hands,” Calvin told her, “be aware that God wishes to test your zeal and solicitude.” She tried her best over the next decade, earning a well-deserved reputation as France's Huguenot matriarch and defiantly striking a medal in 1571 with a Spanish slogan “Until Death.”10 Jeanne III died in 1572, after arranging her son's marriage to a sister of the French king but before the notorious massacre of St. Bartholomew that followed it. She was able to establish the Reformed church in Béarn but not in the little Basque-speaking corner of the old kingdom of Navarre.

  Scotland was the only kingdom in Europe ever governed for a female sovereign by a female regent; and during the 1550s the dowager queen, Mary of Guise, probably exercised greater political authority as its regent than her daughter would a decade later as its monarch. In 1548 Scotland's Auld Alliance with France degenerated into a French protectorate under a male regent (who received a French duchy), and its child heiress moved to France. When her mother returned in 1554, the French ambassador placed Scotland's crown on her head and handed her the scepter and sword of state, “to the great satisfaction of all the Estates.” Four years later Mary of Guise had successfully arranged her daughter's marriage and Scotland's eventual incorporation into France. But soon after her daughter unexpectedly became queen of France in mid-1559, Scotland's Protestant nobles rose in revolt. English military aid helped overthrow her regency before Mary of Guise died in June 1560. When her widowed daughter reluctantly returned to Scotland a year later, she confronted the daunting task of ruling the turbulent nobility of a now-heretical kingdom without French soldiers.11

  The personal reign of Mary Stuart as Queen of Scots (1561–67) has inspired sharply discordant opinions. Was she primarily a besieged Catholic expatriate trying to rule a newly Protestant kingdom, as her leading biographer, Antonia Fraser, sees her or simply a striking example of female political ineptitude, as her most important critic, Jenny Wormald, sees her? These conflicting interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, because her record mingles political achievements with avoidable failures. If Mary Stuart became Europe's only crowned female monarch with the dubious distinction of being beheaded, she also became its only female sovereign to produce a legitimate heir through a marriage made during her personal government. The most useful approach is probably to view her as an illustration of the problems that marriage posed for a young royal heiress. Mary Stuart would marry three times before the age of twenty-six, and her marital politics closely resemble the last three marriages of the great fourteenth-century heiress Joanna I of Naples. Mary's first wedding virtually erased her political authority in her own kingdom, but each sub
sequent husband became increasingly dependent: the last one even removed his hat in her presence.12

  Mary's coins shed much light on her political history before, during, and after her personal reign. Numismatists divide her reign into early years (1542–58), French marriage (1558–60), widowhood (1560–65), second marriage (1565–67), and second widowhood (1567); her brief third marriage had no coins. The National Museum of Scotland possesses more than two thousand coins from her reign, which, significantly, include several hundred counterfeits; they constitute a better treasure trove than we possess for any of her female contemporaries.13 Almost three hundred of these coins are gold or silver (crowns are gold and ryals, or royals, are silver). Broken down numismatically, coins with the ruler's portrait reveal the pattern that appears in table 5.1.

  Table 5.1. Coinage of Mary Queen of Scots, 1543–67

  * * *

  Period (years) Gold coins (portraits) Silver coins (portraits)

  * * *

  Girlhood (1543–58) 55 (16) 110 (3)

  First Marriage (1558–60) 1 (1) 59 (0)

  Widowhood (1561–65) none 18 (18)

  Second Marriage (1565–66) none 46 (1)

  Widowhood (1567) none 13 (0)

  * * *

  Source: N. M. McQ. Holmes, Scottish Coins in the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh: Part I, 1526–1603 (Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles, #58: Oxford University Press, 2006); reprinted from Monter, “Numismatics and Female Sovereignty,” Journal of interdisciplinary History 41 (spring 2011), 550.

  Her effigies, which begin when she is eleven, appear on 30 percent of her gold coins (17 of 56) and only 9 percent of her silver coins (22 of 238). But only two out of almost forty are joint portraits, one with each husband. The gold Francis-and-Mary coin may have been made (or at least designed) in France rather than Scotland; a single gold crown made during her first widowhood exists in London but not in Scotland. The silver ryals ('royals') from her second marriage are especially instructive. The only one with a portrait shows face-to-face busts of Mary and her younger husband, Henry Lord Darnley, in customary order, but with no crown visible; its inscription follows custom by putting his name first. But these coins were rapidly replaced in 1566 by new varieties without effigies and on which, for the first time in European history, the wife's name precedes her husband's, a detail that perfectly captures Darnley's diminished status.14

  Marriage negotiations between Scotland and France in 1558 reversed the Anglo–Habsburg negotiations of five years earlier. Europe's largest kingdom, which inherited from women but forbade them from ruling, attempted to swallow a smaller one through marriage to its heiress. The dowager regent persuaded the Scottish Parliament to award Mary's husband the so-called crown matrimonial, giving him precedence in signing joint documents and full authority to sign acts by himself. Designs on the couple's coins privileged the French fleur-de-lys of a “dauphin-king” over the Scottish heraldry of a “queen-dauphine.” The Scots negotiators, led by the bride's oldest half brother, insisted that French privileges disappeared if the heiress predeceased her husband, and they refused to send Scotland's crown to France for his coronation. Three weeks before her marriage, their heiress signed secret agreements with her father-in-law, nullifying any agreements she might subsequently make with her subjects.

  During the eighteen months after May 1559 when Mary Stuart was queen of France, the dowager regent died, and the young royal couple lost all control over Scotland. Protestant nobles seized the state apparatus, and by the time Mary returned as an eighteen-year-old widow they had established the Reformed church in her kingdom. While a religiously divided Europe accepted the slogan cuius regio, eius religio everywhere else, from Tudor England to tiny Béarn, Scotland's sovereign was barely able to maintain her right to practice her religion privately. When she finally had to summon a parliament in 1563, her political skills proved better than expected.15 In 1565 she decided to marry Henry Lord Darnley, a man four years younger then herself with uncertain religious preferences and genealogical links to both Scottish and English royalty; she hoped thereby to reinforce her claim to the English succession, relieve herself of some of the burdens of government, and produce a legitimate heir. She achieved only the last.

  Darnley's constitutional position in Scotland was peculiar. Although he never possessed the crown matrimonial that her first husband had enjoyed, Mary proclaimed him king of Scotland immediately before their marriage and declared shortly afterward that all royal acts would carry both signatures (his signature was sometimes larger, but every surviving state document signed by both has her name in the place of honor on the left). The immediate aftermath of Mary's second marriage marked the peak of her political authority. Her oldest half brother and chief mentor rebelled, hoping to overthrow her with English help. In an Amazonian display, the queen, with a helmet on her head, a pistol in her belt, and her new husband at her side in gilded armor, chased him from her kingdom. Even her nemesis Knox, expressing admiration for her manlike courage, prudently retreated from her capital. During this personal and political honeymoon, she became pregnant even before the papal dispensation arrived. But Mary's relations with her young husband soon soured, primarily because she refused him the crown matrimonial. When he retaliated by refusing to sign joint documents, Mary used a dry seal of his signature. By December the English ambassador noted that Darnley was now called simply her majesty's husband, and his name now followed hers on proclamations and coin inscriptions.

  During her pregnancy, her husband participated in the murder of David Rizzio, her trusted private secretary, in her presence. Mary recovered quickly from the shock, regaining her husband's loyalty and persuading him to betray his associates. She took the initiative in pursuing them, outlawing sixty traitors but condemning very few to death. After giving birth to a son, however, Mary could not divorce Darnley, who did not attend his son's baptism, without impugning the legitimacy of her heir. A solution was found: Darnley was murdered in February 1567 while presumably in his wife's care. It was the first such occurrence in over two centuries, and the last for almost two more. Each time, the female ruler was convicted of complicity in the court of public opinion, although never with formal proof.

  The combined effects of her husband's murder, following that of Rizzio, her first childbirth, and the disintegration of a marriage that she had made herself provoked what even Mary Stuart's admirers admit amounted to temporary paralysis. She stopped writing and dictating letters; even worse, she suffered a complete breakdown in judgment. Not only did she ignore vehement advice from both Elizabeth I and Catherine de Medici to pursue the culprits remorselessly but she compounded this unforgivable negligence with the politically fatal act of marrying the head of her privy council, a man widely considered the mastermind behind Darnley's murder. The explanation is simple: he had raped her (a unique instance in European history), and she feared, correctly, that she was pregnant. By the time she miscarried, it was too late: she had been taken captive by rebellious Scottish nobles and forced to abdicate in favor of her infant son. Mary Stuart would escape from this captivity and live another twenty years, but her reign in Scotland had ended when she was only twenty-five.

  Europe's First Never-Married Heiress

  In 1567 militant Calvinism undermined female rule throughout northern Europe, as Catholic women lost control of both Scotland and the Low Countries and Catherine de Medici suffered serious political damage from religious warfare in France. At the same time, Elizabeth of England, who was the first Protestant female sovereign in Europe as well as the first to remain unmarried, adroitly navigated her ship of state past some major political problems that would include a Catholic rebellion in 1569 and papal excommunication a year later. Surviving numerous assassination attempts, she would remain on her kingdom's throne for forty-five years, the longest reign of any female monarch anywhere in Europe before the nineteenth century.

  A superabundance of valuable English-language studies on England's Protestant Virgin Q
ueen, together with the sheer length of her reign, renders any attempt at detailed reconstruction of her achievements superfluous. At the same time, her reign has rarely been set in the general context of European history. Insularity dominates much that has been written about her, both before and since Katharine Anthony commented more than eighty years ago that Elizabeth I “was in a sense too provincial and ignorant of the rest of the world, in spite of her linguistic attainments and the depth of her learning.” Her first foreign biography had twenty editions in five languages before 1800, but it has yet to appear in English because its original subtitle called her a political comedienne. In the present-day European Union, where English has become a lingua franca, Elizabeth I rarely attracts non-Anglophone biographers.16

  With the obvious exception of Mary Queen of Scots, her unwanted guest for nineteen years, Elizabeth I is almost never studied in the context of Europe's other female rulers. But her reign began amidst an unparalleled regiment of women, to which Knox objected so violently. When Elizabeth claimed England's throne in 1558, western Europe had two other female monarchs and three female regents, and two additional female regents appeared before 1561. These women were all older than she (except, once again, Mary Queen of Scots) and gradually faded away. Seen in the context of her female peers, therefore, the reign of Elizabeth divides into two phases. During her first fifteen years, Europe usually had three or occasionally four other female rulers. After Mary Stuart's abdication in 1567 and Jeanne III's death in 1572, Elizabeth became the lone reigning female monarch; after Catherine de Medici's eclipse in the mid-1570s, she was Europe's only female ruler until 1598, when Philip II of Spain made his oldest daughter co-sovereign of the Netherlands.