Early Modern Queens Revived and Revised

The study of queens has become such a growth industry that it is hard to remember how little there was of it even in the 1970s. Then, only the work of a few pioneers like John Carmi Parsons on Eleanor of Castile escaped the "life and times" biographical model, or the gossipy, even steamy, coverage of some consorts, and attempted to provide some analytical framework within which to examine queens and queenship. The early days of women's history were far more focussed on the previously "invisible" figures than on elite figures who, although visible enough, remained relatively unexplained. The subsequent discovery of (especially English) queens has made clear what a wealth of documentary source material is available in the archives of a monarchy that never suffered from violent revolution and the attendant wholesale destruction of records.

In the British Isles, queens regnant are a rare breed, and one historian remarked that when Elizabeth Tudor came to the throne she had exactly two predecessors in that role, neither of whom inspired confidence—the Empress Matilda of the twelfth-century "anarchy," and her own sister Mary, aka "Bloody Mary," Tudor. While Mary's important reign was too short, and languished in too much historical disrepute, to attract the attention it deserved until relatively recently, Elizabeth I has always beguiled professionals as well as history buffs. This is equally true of her distant successor Victoria, for whom the massive documentation as well as the complex relationship with her prime ministers add to the attraction.

Far more numerous, of course, are the consort queens, but they have been much later to emerge from anecdotal shadow into the light of serious dissection. One problem for modern historians has been the perceived lack of agency of these women, likely to be seen by feminists as object lessons in the horrors of sexual exploitation, arranged marriages, endless childbearing, and political marginalization. Only as political historians have recognized the central role of the court in early modern politics both in the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe have they been able to—indeed forced to—recalibrate the importance of the consort. The picture is not always positive, for the aquifer of misogyny has always run deep, and drawing from it is very common in times of crisis or for the purpose of maligning an enemy.

Two recent books on Mary Queen of Scots exemplify the renewed serious interest in this monarch, long romanticized or vilified in the public eye, often with the connivance of "serious" historians who had axes to grind. To John Neale, writing in the mid-twentieth century, Mary was the dangerous opposite of Elizabeth Tudor, a reckless sexual Catholic figure whose actions were dominated by heart rather than head. His classic and influential biography of Elizabeth set up the latter as a "masculine" and thus rational figure in favorable contrast to her "feminine" cousin, and paid little attention to the very different political landscapes that each encountered at the outset of her reign. Antonia Fraser began to rectify the picture of Mary in 1969, and others—including Jenny Wormald...