Queenship in Early Modern Europe

Charles Beem

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350307179
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Histoire
• Sous-sujet: Histoire moderne

Offering a fascinating survey of European queenship from 1500-1800, with each chapter beginning with a discussion of the archetypal queens of Western, Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe, Charles Beem explores the particular nature of the regional forms and functions of queenship – including consorts, queens regnant, dowagers and female regents – while interrogating our understanding of the dynamic operations of queenship as a transnational phenomenon in European history. Incorporating detailed discussions of gender and material culture, this book encourages both instructors and student readers to engage in meaningful further research on queenship. This is an excellent overview of an exciting area of historical research and is the perfect companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students of History with an interest in queens and queenship.

1 Introduction to Early Modern European Queenship

When we think of a queen, dressed in lavish robes, dripping in jewels, wearing a crown, and sitting on a throne, we often conjure up images of Europe’s early modern queens. At the beginning of this era was the formidable Isabella of Castile, who reigned jointly with her husband Ferdinand of Aragon, conquered the Spanish Muslims, and funded Christopher Columbus’s initial voyage to the new world. Or, perhaps the most famous queen of all time, Elizabeth I of England, who reigned confidently as an unmarried virgin queen and gave her name to a particularly illustrious age of English history. More than any other queen in history, Elizabeth’s historical image has been perennially reproduced in countless popular histories, novels, and feature films.

Almost as famous was Elizabeth’s cousin and bête noire, Mary Queen of Scots, whose queenship has for centuries served as a historical counterpoint to Elizabeth’s allegedly much more successful reign. For generations of historians and novelists, the Mary Queen of Scots story was the cautionary tale of a tragic queen destroyed by her passionate romantic nature. And, at the end of the early modern era, we have the regal mastery of Catherine II of Russia, known during her lifetime as “the Great,” who deposed her husband and assumed his place on the throne as she furthered Russia’s progress towards modernity with firm yet enlightened imperial majesty.

Today, the queens of Early Modern Europe capture our popular imaginations in films and in cable television series like Reign, Ekaterina, Versailles, and Isabel, where they are usually cast as sexualized and romanticized heroines and villainesses.¹ In the history of Early Modern Europe, however, queenship was not quite as exciting; there was very little that was romantic about queenship, while actual and consummated romantic love was a physical and emotional luxury that few queens ever enjoyed unless it happened within the context of their marriage. Queenship was in fact a vocation, in the sense that there were responsibilities to perform, such as being a wife, a mother, and a household and estate manager. This book seeks to uncover the processes behind being a queen in Early Modern Europe, to flesh out the possibilities of what a queen could accomplish, and to measure the performances of Europe’s early modern queens as a uniquely trans-European phenomenon.² While most Early Modern European kings remained in their kingdoms for the duration of their reigns, leaving only to fight wars or go on pilgrimages, their queens were drawn from a peripatetic class of women who functioned as the great pollinators of European culture and society, adapting to new homes in foreign kingdoms yet bringing their native cultures with them.³

What emerges from the analysis of queenship in this book is a form of template that identifies certain trends and behaviors that proved to be identifiable strategies for queenly success and failure. As historian Clarissa Campbell Orr has noted, there is a difference between studying queens individually and studying the forms and means by which women exercised queenly power.⁴ Indeed, in Early Modern Europe there were numerous types of queens (to be discussed below) who exercised myriads of forms of power and influence within a variety of dynamic social, cultural, and political contexts.⁵ As Early Modern European monarchies “progressed” through the early modern era, so did forms of queenship, which played an integral role in Europe’s political, religious, and cultural life.

WHAT IS QUEENSHIP?

In their general usage, the terms “king” and “queen” are a binary construction, assigned to individuals like King Louis XIV of France or his Queen Maria Theresa of Spain. Most students of Early Modern European history tend to study the reigns of individual kings and queens, outlining their differences from one another in terms of intelligence, aptitude, accomplishments, and leadership ability. But there is also the study of kingship; the act of being a king, of inhabiting the role and exercising its powers. For the historian, this involves measuring and evaluating kingly strategies as they developed through time in response to the dynamic social and historical forces that shaped the history of Early Modern Europe.⁶ The study of kingship, rather than the study of individual kings, looks for similarities and patterns in the ways in which kings governed their kingdoms, rather than the differences between individual kings. Similarly, this book seeks to uncover the defining features of queenship. What were standard practices, if any, that most queens followed? Which strategies, observed over a three-century period, periodically led to queenly success or failure? How did queenship evolve over the early modern period in response to societal and religious pressures? Thus queenship, in the context of this book, is that collective body of experiences that European queens shared, which are reflective of or reactive to a pan-European template of queenship that possessed certain universal characteristics but was subject to regional variations.

WHAT IS A QUEEN?

As a descriptive term, “queen” is a bit more complicated than “king,” which does not need to be qualified to understand its meaning, unless of course the king is a consort, which was for the most part an anomalous, restrictive, and ambiguous male role.⁷ In contrast, in Early Modern Europe there were several different types of queens. The most prevalent form was a queen consort, a queen who enjoyed her title and position because she was married to a king, such as the French queens Catherine de Medici, Anne of Austria, and Marie Antoinette, and the six women whose fate it was to be married to Henry VIII of England. Most Early Modern European queens were this type of queen, and all the queens of monarchies that did not allow a female succession, such as France and the Holy Roman Empire, were consorts. In theory, European queen consorts were recognized as reigning alongside or in conjunction with kings, and they were often crowned and anointed either alongside their husbands or in separate ceremonies, which conferred even greater dignity as well as sanctity upon their queenships.⁸

The notion that the wives of male monarchs should enjoy formal recognition of their status alongside their husbands has been well entrenched in virtually every human culture and has made the transition to modern, republican forms of government in the concept of a first lady. Like contemporary first ladies, queen consorts functioned as social helpmates to their husbands while presiding over the administration of their own royal household.⁹ As the premier married couple in their kingdoms, the most successful kings and queens were able to provide a positive example of domestic marital harmony and stability for their subjects to emulate, regardless of dynastic considerations that did not always consider compatibility a primary factor in the making of royal marriages.

If kings were idealized as the ultimate role model for their male subjects, emulating male gendered virtues such as leadership, martial virility, courage, rationality, and paternal care and protection, queens were expected to do the same thing for their female subjects, as the most successful of early modern consorts embraced Christian piety and chastity, compassion, charity, obedience to male authority, and motherhood while serving as intercessors between a king and his subjects.¹⁰ But kings and queens also worked together for their mutual benefit. As Joseph F. O’Callaghan has argued, a successful royal marriage bolstered the power of kingship: “the queen who was honored, loved, and protected by her husband would love and honor him, and thus would offer a good example to all the people of the realm.”¹¹

But consorts also played more overtly political roles. As the wife of a king, they had access to their husband’s ear, especially in the royal bedchamber, away from the constraining influence of male advisors and the public and formal institutions of royal government. Consorts also possessed the ability to influence the distribution of patronage, an integral facet of royal power, and participate in the raising and education of their children. Some consorts were actively recruited for their potential to wield political power, like Louisa Ulrika, sister of Frederick the Great of Prussia, who was the power behind the throne of her weak-willed husband, Adolph Frederick of Sweden.¹² But the most talented and politically adept consorts shared their husband’s royal power in various capacities and degrees, such as serving as regents for their husband when they were temporarily out of their kingdoms, usually to fight wars, or when there were multiple dominions under one crown, such as that of the sixteenth-century peripatetic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who employed his empress, Isabel of Portugal, as his regent in Spain. Additionally, queens often filled the political vacuum created when husbands were either incapacitated or unable to perform their duties as kings, such as the seventeenth-century Catherine of Braganza, who served as regent in Portugal for her brother, and the eighteenth-century Maria Carolina of Naples, who wielded a kingly authority in place of her husband Ferdinand IV during the years of revolutionary tumult and the Napoleonic Wars.¹³

Yet even though Maria Carolina reportedly loathed her husband, it did not stop her from propagating the dynasty, which has always been the benchmark for queenly success. In fact, the production of heirs was the essential prerequisite for Maria Carolina’s assumption of regal power, as dynastic reproduction was the primary task of queenship in hereditary monarchies. Often queens were married soon after the onset of puberty, beginning annual reproductive duties for the duration of their childbearing years. Because of dynastic inbreeding, many queens were physically frail. Nonetheless, many spent much of their married lives pregnant, while death in childbirth was the leading cause of queenly mortality, as many early modern queens were literally bred to death, like Queen Claude, consort of Francis I of France, who died at age twenty-five after seven grueling pregnancies, which ruined her health. Conversely, several Holy Roman Empresses from Maria of Spain to Maria Theresa delivered upwards of a dozen children, most of whom survived to maturity.

Despite the dangers, pregnancy was always a welcome development, as even the most capable and popular of queens could find themselves sidelined by their inability to bear children, as the matrimonial career of Henry VIII of England aptly demonstrates. Other queens, however, such as Irina Godunovna, consort of Feodor I of Russia, overcame the handicap of childlessness to enjoy successful and productive queenships. Conversely, queens who suffered marginalization at the hands of their husbands, such as the French queens Catherine de Medici and Anne of Austria and Juliana Maria of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, queen of Denmark, later enjoyed enhanced political power following their husband’s deaths during the reigns of their underage sons.

Most early modern queens also strove to create a reputation for religious devotion. The most successful of early modern queens were also the most pious, a pan-European method of earning queenly prestige. This took several forms, such as attending church services regularly, dispensing charity to the poor and to religious houses, going on ritualistic pilgrimages to religious sites, often to pray for fertility, and setting an example of moral probity. Emulating the Virgin Mary, queens served as intercessors between king and subjects, as Catherine of Aragon famously did for the evil May Day rioters of 1517. The most ambitious of queens also founded and built monastic establishments, churches, hospitals, schools, and orphanages, while exhibiting Christian care for their subjects. Even secular-minded queens such as Catherine II of Russia were ostentatiously devoted to their religious observances and responsibilities.

With the notable exception of Catherine II’s Russia, guaranteeing the legitimacy of heirs was considered extremely important in hereditary monarchies. While kings were free to engage in extramarital sexual activities, queens needed to guard their chastity, both before and after marriage. Most European queens were surrounded in their own households by ladies who constituted a twenty-four-hour per day chaperone service, with the queen’s sexuality highly regulated within the structures of the royal court and her personal relationship with the king. On those occasions when the paternity of a royal heir was suspect, queens were subject to divorce or exile, such as Carolina Matilda of Denmark. Conversely, many queens had to accept the presence of royal mistresses and their progeny within the spaces of the royal court.

For the most part, with a few exceptions, royal and aristocratic women, and occasionally daughters of wealthy merchants, became queens because of arranged marriages which formed part of a treaty or diplomatic alliance, the way in which women from Catherine of Aragon to Marie Antoinette became queens. Indeed, the conduct of pan-European marriage brokering was a key factor in the making of Early Modern European dynastic alliances, as well as a powerful source of queenly power. Negotiations, often conducted between royal and aristocratic women through kinship networks, included provisions for the dowry, the money and/or property the bride brought to the marriage from her family, as well as the dower, or jointure, which a king provided for his queen should she outlive him. The ability to broker the marriages of children and close relatives was the final benchmark for queenly success.

Once the marriage had been negotiated, a consort needed to walk the delicate line between loyalty to their homelands and their adoptive kingdoms. Thus, most consorts were foreigners in their kingdoms and were expected to learn the language and adopt the customs of their kingdom; not surprisingly, some of the more successful Early Modern European queens were brilliant linguists, which proved beneficial in relations with ambassadors as well as the conduct of marriage brokering. Second to their ability to perpetuate the succession, negotiating this process was a key element, whether to becoming a popular queen, like Caroline of Ansbach, who took a crash course in English language and customs prior to her arrival in England, or a detested one, like Elisabeth Farnese of Spain, vilified for her perceived contempt for the Spanish people. It was also advantageous for a queen to create a companionate marriage, which, along with the production of heirs, was the surest route to queenly power and influence.

For those consorts who survived their husbands into the reign of the next monarch, their status changed from consort to dowager. Dowager queens often retained much of the political and economic power they wielded as consorts if they were the mother to the next monarch. And, in the case of a royal minority, dowagers could function as regents for their underage sons, such as the French dowager queens Catherine de Medici, Marie de Medici, and Anne of Austria.¹⁴ Most dowagers gave up queenly apparel for widow’s weeds, signifying their devotion to their dead husband and legitimizing the power they wielded on their children’s behalf. Some dowagers, however, remarried, like Margaret Tudor, who married Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus after the death of her husband, Scottish king James IV, or found a powerful male advisor to assist them in their minority governments, as Anne of Austria did with Cardinal Mazarin. But for dowagers who were unable to perpetuate a hereditary succession, like Catherine of Braganza, the consort of Charles II of England, their widowhoods were often spent in obscurity, as their queenly power and influence was assumed by the next queen consort.

But the next form of queenship is fundamentally different from either consorts or dowagers. Queens regnant, women who in hereditary monarchies inherited the kingly office usually because of a temporary lack of viable male heirs, occupied an anomalous position in Early Modern Europe. They were, in form and function, female kings, women who inherited the estate and occupied the office of king.¹⁵ As such, they possessed the eternal body politic of kingship, as conceptualized in many European monarchies, but they bore the responsibilities of both kingship and queenship, as they were responsible for wielding kingly power as well as the queenly responsibility of providing for a hereditary succession.¹⁶ However, several early modern queens regnant, such as Elizabeth I of England and Christina of Sweden, came to their thrones unmarried but then declined to marry and instead provided for the succession through collateral male members of their ruling dynasties.

In comparison to their male counterparts as kings, queens regnant often faced significant obstacles to maintaining their authority. The most formidable problem that all regnant queens faced was that they were performing the male gendered role of king as women, a gender-bending role fraught with difficulties. Female rulers rarely played the role of military leader, one of the more visceral functions of kingship, with women limited to playing a military role in purely symbolic or allegorical terms. Female authority also ran counter to prevailing notions of female inadequacy and subordination grounded in biblical and classical texts.¹⁷ By and large, female rulers succeeded by demonstrating to their contemporaries that they were exceptions to these rules, rather than arguing against their veracity.

But since most Early Modern European queens were consorts, describing female kings as queens is theoretically analogous to describing contemporary female chief executives as first ladies, which both mislabels and obscures the actual political role they performed. In both English and the Romance languages, the terms king and queen are gender specific, which has meant that the female kings of Early Modern Europe have always been identified as queens. But despite the fundamental differences between consort and regnant queens, there was some permeability between these two seemingly distinct roles; while regnant queens frequently p...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction to Early Modern European Queenship
• 2. Mary Queen of Scots and Early Modern British Queenship
• 3. Anne of Austria and Franco-Iberian Queenship
• 4. The Empress Maria Theresa and Queenship in the Holy Roman Empire
• 5. Bona Sforza and Queenship in the Baltic Kingdoms
• 6. Catherine II “The Great” and Russian Queenship
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index