The Man behind the Queen

Male Consorts in History

C. Beem, M. Taylor, C. Beem, M. Taylor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137448354
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the 14th-century king consorts of Navarre to the modern European prince consorts of the 20th century, the male consort has been a peculiar yet recurrent historical figure. In this impressively broad collection, leading historians of monarchy analyze how male partners of female rulers have negotiated their unique roles throughout history.

CHAPTER 1

The Kings Consort of Navarre: 1284–1512

Elena Crislyn Woodacre

Between 1274 and 1512, five women ruled the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre in their own right. These female sovereigns and their husbands form the largest group of reigning queens and consort kings in Europe during the Middle Ages. This sizable cohort presents a unique opportunity to research the impact of these unusual monarchal pairs and to study the way in which these couples functioned as rulers. An examination of the careers of the kings consort of Navarre demonstrates three distinctly different types of power-sharing dynamics between the ruling pairs. It also provides specific examples of how these men coped with the unusual and challenging role of king consort and the positive and negative impact of their joint rule.

Surprisingly, in spite of the wealth of research in the fields of queenship and wider monarchal studies in recent years, neither the reigning queens of Navarre nor their consorts have been subject to a great deal of academic study. While two of the kings consort, Philip IV of France and Juan II of Aragon have been thoroughly investigated as reigning sovereigns in their own right, very little attention has been paid to their role as consort kings.¹ In her groundbreaking article, “Without the Persona of the Prince: Kings, Queens and the idea of Monarchy in Late Medieval Europe,” Theresa Earenfight made a case for the joint or corporate nature of monarchy. She argued that instead of investigating kings and queens separately, it would be more fruitful to examine ruling pairs together and evaluate their partnership:

To examine both kingship and queenship together is to discern not only their distinct shape, but also the shape that they take on together. It exposes more clearly the dynamic relationship of kingship and queenship and permits a better understanding of how theory and agency—coupled with economy, geography, warfare or demography—affect rulership.²

This concept of monarchical partnership is even more central to the study of queens regnant and their kings consort, as it was assumed that a man would take an active role in the rule of his wife’s kingdom, given the medieval understanding of a man’s dominant position in a married couple. This understanding of the superiority of the male spouse was clearly based in Biblical verse and as Margaret Sommerville rightly noted, “Saints Peter and Paul had not inserted exemption clauses for the case of married queens.”³

Just as in Kantorwicz’s notion of the king’s two bodies, a queen regnant could successfully combine the roles of wife and sovereign.⁴ However, this required a different approach from her spouse in his joint roles of king consort and husband in that “a queen regnant’s consort had to obey her in political matters even as he ruled her in domestic ones.”⁵ Although this unusual combination of sovereign and spousal authority was possible given the cooperation of the consort, not all medieval writers or modern historians have agreed that it was a viable proposition. The sixteenth century annalist Jeronimo Zurita claimed that “in the old days whenever the succession of the realm fell to a woman, the government was always done by the husband.”⁶ The Annaliste historian Georges Duby claimed that even when a woman had inherited lands and titles, “the fact remains that it was he who exercised power, not she. She was merely at his side when he exercised it. She had to be there, in token of assent, of association.”⁷ Moreover, there was a key aspect of rulership which was considered to be exclusively masculine; military leadership. As it was considered wholly inappropriate for women to lead an army, this was an element of the royal role which a reigning queen was entirely dependent on her consort king to fulfill.⁸ Indeed in 1343, Elizabeth of Hungary argued that her daughter-in-law Giovanna I of Naples needed her husband to rule as some tasks, such as curbing enemy incursions, were better left to a man.⁹

However, if the king, or even prince consort ruled as “king,” this made him a fairly unusual monarch, for he owed his position to those who selected him as a worthy consort for their heiress instead of having the throne as his birthright. His authority therefore was somewhat weakened by his indebtedness to others for his position as an appointed or selected ruler, without the justification of genuine electoral process. The king consort also had to cope with the potentially emasculating fact that his wife was the true or “natural” sovereign of the realm and as such he had to acknowledge both her authority and the reality that his own position was entirely dependent on his marriage to the queen.

The propensity to label a reigning queen’s husband with the explicit title of “consort” shows both the ambiguity and uncertainty regarding the relative position of both spouses and the weight given to the word “king.” It is normally unnecessary to label the wife of a king as “queen consort” or “princess” so that there is no confusion or ambiguity over who has the right to rule. Theresa Earenfight explores the difficulty in nomenclature with these nonstandard monarchal partnerships. “A queen rarely stands alone,” Earenfight declares, “She needs an adjective.”¹⁰ A woman who inherits the throne can be designated in a variety of ways, as a “queen regnant,” a “sole queen,” a “female monarch,” or even a “female king.” Again it is this last definition which illustrates the gendered understanding of the exercise of power in the Middle Ages and the underlying assumption is that a king is the one who rules the realm.

In contrast to the arguments of Zurita and Duby, all of the Navarrese queens regnant were involved in the exercise of power and the administration of the lands that they inherited. Although the queens’ rights as the legitimate sovereign of the realm was consistently acknowledged, their husbands all played a visible and significant role in the governance of the realm. Each of these unusual royal couples determined the way in which they divided up duties and functioned as a personal and political partnership. In terms of the particular pairs profiled in this study, three distinct forms of power-sharing dynamics developed in order to cope with the demands of ruling both the kingdom of Navarre and the patrimony of the king consort. This study examines each of these power-sharing strategies, evaluates the effectiveness of each personal and political partnership and surveys the legacy that each of the kings consort of Navarre left on the realm.

The kingdom of Navarre was strategically located in the Pyrenean region, controlling several key routes between the Iberian peninsula and the rest of the continent. As a small kingdom, it was imperative to build strong alliances in order to protect the realm’s sovereignty, particularly in the face of neighbors who were keen to control or annex the realm. The marriages of the queens regnant offered a key opportunity in this regard and each of the queens were married to foreigners who could provide a vital alliance. Each consort also brought significant territory to expand the borders of the kingdom. However, there was a price to pay for both the alliances and the expansion. The influence of the king consort could have a pronounced effect on the foreign policy of the realm and the resulting expansion created unwieldy territorial amalgamations which proved difficult to govern effectively.

The first Navarrese queen regnant, Juana I, was married to Philip IV of France. This marriage brought the crown of Navarre into a personal union with the throne of France, which lasted from the couple’s accession to the French throne in 1285 until 1328 when the last of the couple’s three sons, who ruled both realms in turn, died. This union was decidedly unfavorable to Navarre, as the smaller and less powerful realm. While it afforded the Pyrenean kingdom protection against the aggressive attempts of Castile and Aragon to absorb it, the years of Capetian administration were unpopular with the Navarrese as the realm was governed in absentia by a series of governors and edicts from Paris, first from Philip III of France as the young queen’s guardian and later from her husband, Philip IV as king consort.¹¹ Although, Juana was recognized as the rightful heir to Navarre, Champagne, and Brie, and her consent was always given for official acts, it appears that she was not closely involved with the administration of her Iberian kingdom while Philip IV exercised considerable authority as king consort.¹²

The Capetian governors exercised power much more tightly than previous kings and introduced a range of reforms to the administration and organization of the realm along French lines.¹³ This new system of government triggered a series of protests from the Navarrese in the 1290s. In 1294, the Buenas Villas lodged a complaint about the current governor, Hugh de Conflans, who paid little attention to the Fueros or customs and laws of the realm.¹⁴ In 1297, both the infanzones (or lower nobility) and the Buenas villas protested in an attempt to defend their privileges which they felt were being trampled under French rule.¹⁵ However, the royal couple did not respond favorably to the protest of their Navarrese subjects and overt criticism of the king consort in particular was not tolerated; one man who dared to do so in 1304 had his tongue mutilated.¹⁶

It is important to note however, that Philip handled the county of Champagne in a notably different manner to how he administered the kingdom of Navarre. John F. Benton argues that both Philip and his father were “sensitive about usurping the authority” of the Jours de Troyes assembly.¹⁷ Philip carefully emphasized the role of his wife, the rightful countess, through the couple’s nearly annual visits to Champagne and her more visible participation in its governance masked the fact that Philip was simultaneously tightening royal control of the county.¹⁸ If Philip had taken the same care of the sensibilities of the Navarrese, he would have been a far more popular king consort.

The second king consort of Navarre, Philip, count of Evreux, had a decidedly more positive reign with his wife Juana II. However, Philip encountered considerable resistance at the onset of their reign due to the negative experience of a king consort which the Navarrese had previously endured. This manifested itself in an attempt to prevent the new consort from taking part in the coronation of his wife in 1329. The first queen regnant and her husband did not have a formal coronation in Navarre, so there was no precedent for the participation of a king consort in the ceremony.

The plan put forward by the Navarrese was for the queen to be elevated alone on the shield of estate as per their traditional coronation ceremony. The justification for Philip’s exclusion from the ritual was that, “my lady will be raised up . . . as she is the natural lady and no one can be raised up if they are not the natural lord.”¹⁹ However, the Navarrese acknowledged that Philip could still participate in the administration and rule of the realm as her spouse.²⁰ Philip’s envoy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Man behind the Queen
• 1. The Kings Consort of Navarre: 1284–1512
• 2. Ferdinand the Catholic: King and Consort
• 3. “He to Be Intituled Kinge”: King Philip of England and the Anglo-Spanish Court
• 4. Why Prince George of Denmark Did Not Become a King of England
• 5. From Ruler in the Shadows to Shadow King: Frederick I of Sweden
• 6. Count Ernst Johann Bühren and the Russian Court of Anna Ioannovna
• 7. Francis Stephen of Lorraine (Emperor Francis I, 1745–65), Consort of Maria Theresa, Ruler of the Austrian Monarchy from 1740
• 8. Prince Albert: The Creative Consort
• 9. Commemorating the Consort in Colonial Bombay
• 10. Ferdinand II of Portugal: A Conciliatory King in an Age of Turmoil
• 11. Gaston d’Orléans, Comte d’Eu: Prince Consort to Princess Isabel of Brazil
• 12. The Rise and Fall of Siddiq Hasan, Male Consort of Shah Jahan of Bhopal
• 13. Royalty, Rank, and Masculinity: Three Dutch Princes Consort in the Twentieth Century
• 14. Prince Philip: Sportsman and Youth Leader
• 15. The Prince Who Would Be King: Henrik of Denmark’s Struggle for Recognition
• Index