Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England

5. Marriage á la Mode, 1559: Elisabeth de Valois, Elizabeth I, and the Changing Practice of Dynastic Marriage

5 Marriage à la Mode, 1559 Elisabeth de Valois, Elizabeth I, and the Changing Practice of Dynastic Marriage john watkins The 1559 peace settlement of Cateau-Cambrésis was the sixteenth century’s most important treaty.1 It brought three major European dynasties into a complex dialogue about the continent’s destiny: the Hapsburgs of Spain, the Valois of France, and the Tudors of England. Spain was arguably the big winner. The treaty not only secured the claims of its king, Philip II, to Italy but, by ending the war with France, helped it to build an immensely lucrative transatlantic empire. Valois France, forced to negotiate in the first place by a fiscal shortfall, gambled that the settlement would allow it to stabilize its finances and its volatile ecclesiastical situation . The gamble failed. The French king, Henri II, was killed in a tournament celebrating the treaty, and his realm erupted almost immediately in religious civil war. Finally, Cateau-Cambrésis played a significant role in English history. Since the Tudor queen Mary I was married to Spain’s Philip II, England fought in the later phases of the Valois-Hapsburg conflict as a Spanish ally. In the process, they lost Calais, the last remnant of an Anglo-French empire that once extended from Ireland to the Pyrenees. Although England 77 marriage à la mode, 1559 negotiated for a return of the French coastal city to their control after eight years, they never got it back. What I have just described is the standard textbook account of Cateau-Cambrésis and its three-point implication for the future of Europe: (1) an end to the contest between France and Spain over Italy; (2) the beginnings of French wars of religion; and (3) the end of England’s territorial ambitions in France. As I have narrated it, and as dozens of scholars have narrated it before me, it is a classic chapter in diplomatic history: an account of high politics, the fate of nations, war, and the elusive dream of peace. I want to reopen Cateau-Cambrésis, not simply because I believe there is more to be said about it, but because a reconsideration can offer a paradigm for reintegrating diplomatic history—currently an isolated subfield—into a broader, more comprehensive interrogation of the past.2 As a scholarly community of medievalists and early modernists, we now have new questions and analytical perspectives to bring to archival materials that have not been touched in decades. For some time we have been examining how the histories of gender and sexuality intersect the political histories of individual nation states. Scholars like Phillipa Barry, Susan Doran, Susan Frye, Carole Levin, Anna Riehl, Linda Shenk, and Mihoko Suzuki have given us a better understanding of how Elizabeth’s self-proclaimed identity as a woman with the “heart and stomach of a king” revolutionized English understandings of sovereignty.3 It is time for us to consider the effect of gender on supernational and transnational political discourse as well. Scholars of comparative literature and comparative social and political history need to begin the same kind of intellectual collaborations that have allowed scholars of individual countries to rewrite the history of the nation state. The peace of Cateau-Cambrésis provides a rich opportunity to begin this inquiry. Just as the treaty marked a watershed in the ฀78 john watkins political history of western Europe, it also foregrounded a series of interrelated and often bewilderingly contradictory developments in the history of women. Their divergent experiences—as negotiators , as supporters, as critics, as brides—contributed at every step to the treaty’s place in the evolving European state system. As the commissioners at Cateau-Cambrésis discussed the protocols for making peace among themselves and with the sovereigns that they represented, they participated in an array of competing discourses about sovereignty. At times, the proceedings make sense primarily in terms of an older understanding of the monarch as someone who effectively shares sovereignty with his or her fellow aristocrats.4 At other times, the process primarily engages a more centralized notion of the monarch as the sole, absolute head of state. Finally, in the case of England, the peacemakers encountered an emergent constitutionalist discourse in which the monarch was imagined to be accountable to ministers and elected members of Parliament. Since these divergent models of sovereignty scripted divergent degrees of women’s participation in the diplomatic...