Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England

Introduction: It's Good to Be Queen

Introduction It’s Good to Be Queen robert bucholz & carole levin Queens are much in fashion these days, receiving scholarly attention as never before. Always popular with historical novelists, dramatists, filmmakers, and their audiences, queens regnant, consort, mother, and dowager have emerged in recent years as legitimate and frequent subjects of serious academic inquiry.1 For scholars—and perhaps for a wider audience—queens are interesting because they are anomalous and often liminal. In most places, for most of human history, the political, social, and cultural power of rulership has been accorded to males. In early modern Europe that arrangement was buttressed by a patriarchal worldview trumpeted from thousands of pulpits, propounded in hundreds of books and proverbs, manifested in gesture and dress—indeed, in almost every aspect of life. That so few women ruled in medieval and early modern England, that those who did faced obstacles unknown to their male counterparts, and that those who ruled successfully have not always been celebrated for their achievements tells us a great deal about the early modern worldview, in particular its attitudes to order, hierarchy, rulership, property, biology, and the relations between the genders. This is robert bucholz and carole levin ฀xiv because queenly reigns were—like festivals or riots, albeit of a more sustained duration—extended moments of suspension in the normal working of political, social, cultural, and gender history. According to Katherine Eggert such moments established “through counterposition the possibility of another mode of shaping the basic conditions of existence.”2 As real and powerful women ruled, depictions of queens—historical and mythical—also became more multifaceted and complex. Examining together actual early modern women of power and early modern representations of queens yields a far richer understanding of the interplay of gender and power in politics and culture. No wonder that historical queens and literary depictions of them have increasingly moved center stage in the world of early modern scholarship. Because queens were anomalous, their regimes interrupting “normal” monarchy, previous scholars have understandably treated queenly reigns as “one-offs.” One of the purposes of this collection is to demonstrate more continuity than has generally been seen across queenly reigns. The expectations of queenship articulated by Michelle A. White in her paper on Henrietta Maria apply to all the women discussed in this collection. Queens themselves “talked” to each other, either literally, in the case of the “sisterly” correspondence between Catherine de’ Medici and Elizabeth I, or figuratively across time, as when Cleopatra was translated into a post-Elizabethan icon, or, a century later, when Anne consciously evoked Elizabeth’s style by choosing her motto and wearing clothing patterned on hers. As both Elaine Kruse and John Watkins remind us, the third quarter of the sixteenth century, the chronological heart of this collection, saw queens reigning or ruling in England, Scotland, and France, negotiating with each other, and furthering diplomatic unions across the continent via strategic marriages. Despite the horror expressed introduction xv by John Knox in his The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), for a few decades at least, female rule became the norm. The coincidence of so many women ruling or figuring in diplomatic marriages at this moment in history allows John Watkins to interrogate the value of using gender as an analytical tool for the new diplomatic history. He argues that the negotiations for Cateau-Cambrésis may be seen as inhabiting a transitional period in which, on the one hand, consorts and mistresses were still deployed traditionally, as marital bargaining chips, quiet intercessors, or consorts, but in which, on the other hand, sovereign women like Mary I and Elizabeth I ruled in their own right. This introduced a new and potentially disruptive element to the European dynastic system. In particular, Elizabeth’s apparent refusal to play by the traditional rules—to forge alliances through marriage and childbearing—cast the whole system into doubt. After Elizabeth, starting in England, such marriages increasingly became matters of public comment and, often, opposition: John Stubbs’s heirs were William Prynne and Henrietta Maria’s other critics as described by Michelle White. In the later seventeenth century, his intellectual and political successors called for Catherine of Braganza’s divorce during the Exclusion Crisis, demonized Mary Beatrice of Modena, or, later still, complained of the political influence of Caroline of Ansbach or Marie Antoinette. In Watkins’s bold vision, the Virgin Queen...