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The questionable majesty of queenship
The funny thing about queenship throughout history is that it was normally seen as a perversion of the perceived order, an unjust inheritance as it were, by most men you’d care to ask, especially those in power. Primogeniture was the main vehicle of royal succession; the only time women came into the mix was when it was politically expedient, and even then, the understanding was that it would be a short-lived affair until that queen produced a male heir. We all know the trouble Henry VIII had producing a male heir – “To six wives he was wedded. One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded.” And of course, this male heir affair was inextricably linked to the break with Rome and the Henrician Reformation. His only male heir, Edward VI, died at fifteen, but even at that young age, and literally at death’s door, he nominated, in his carefully considered ‘device for the succession,’ Lady Jane Grey, the only legitimately born Protestant cousin he could find, to succeed him, in the hope that she would quickly produce a male heir. Edward, after all, had not planned to die at fifteen, and this was his only way of carrying on the male Tudor royal line. Of course, his father Henry VIII’s Act of Succession had upheld the rights of his first daughter Mary and his second daughter Elizabeth, despite his declaration that they were illegitimate, to inherit the crown in the highly unlikely circumstance of their younger brother Edward’s death. Both legitimate candidates were unsuitable in the eyes of the fastidious young Edward because of their illegitimacy and Mary’s Catholicism.
But of course, the Tudors were not the exclusive gatekeepers of murder, mayhem and skulduggery if a potential heir was the wrong gender or the wrong religion. If anything, the previous royal dynasties were even more politic and ruthless when it came to finding and disappearing the inconvenient heir; and in more than a few instances, the centrifugal force in the ensuing turmoil, was a strategically astute woman. But how far back to go? Aethelflaed, now there’s a name that doesn’t feature on the top one hundred most popular girls’ names. In 2018, exactly 1,100 years after her death, a BBC[1] news report posed the question: “How does a ruler defeat bloodthirsty invaders, secure a kingdom and lay the foundations for England - and then almost get written out of history?” The answer of course was: “Be a woman, that's how.”
Born in about 870, at the height of the Viking onslaughts, Aethelflaed was the daughter of Alfred the Great, King of Wessex and the Anglo Saxons. At sixteen she married Aethelred, Lord of Mercia; hence her title, Lady of Mercia. This marriage united Mercia and Wessex in resistance to the Vikings. One of the many interesting things about Aethelflaed is that she was accepted as leader of Mercia when her husband Aethelred died in 911. She never remarried, probably not wanting to hand over power to another man. A ‘peaceweaver’ as well as a warrior queen, Aethelflaed achieved amity with Scotland and Wales as well as quelling the Vikings. As in so many subsequent chronicles of English history, women of the stature of Aethelflaed were written out of events, or grudgingly referred to in demeaning terms or vaguely as unnamed female relatives. The most popular version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was written in Wessex, under the reign of Aethelflaed’s brother Edward, and quelle surprise, she barely figures, while Edward is quite the superman. Aethelflaed was also unique in passing on her mantle of power to her daughter Aelfwynn, but the brother Edward, who featured so brilliantly in the Wessex version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, marched into Mercia and deposed Aelfwynn who apparently took herself off to a nunnery. The legacy of her mother Aethelflaed would be conveniently obscured in a man’s world for over one thousand years.
One of the very best books I read this year was She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor. It is a brilliantly entertaining exposition of England’s better-known early queens, starting with Matilda. Some two hundred and fifty years after Aethelflaed, the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I and grand-daughter of William the Conquerer, would also suffer the fate of being diminished by the chroniclers. Her empress moniker came from her marriage to Emperor Heinrich V of Germany to whom she was betrothed at eight-years-old; she kept it all her life despite being widowed at twenty-three. If she had had a son and heir, she could have ruled Germany as regent until he came of age. Her only option now was to return to her father with her imperial title, as Henry’s only surviving heir following the drowning of her brother William.
But for now, and for countless generations to come, kings were expected to be law makers and soldiers leading the charge to protect their crowns; both these pursuits were barred to women, putting any potential female heirs in a difficult position. Monarchs were male and consorts were female. It is true that many kings and consorts shared authority, but the female authority could only be exercised through the male partner. In the case of the consort being widowed, they could only continue as regent if they had a male heir. And so, Matilda married Geoffroi of Anjou who was eleven years her junior. When Henry I died unexpectedly there were too many obstacles preventing Matilda from taking her rightful place as his successor. Her husband, Geoffroi of Anjou was busy fighting his own battles at home, Matilda was not present when Henry died to allow her to swiftly seize the crown, she was pregnant, and she was a woman. When Henry’s nephew Stephen did act swiftly to take the crown, civil war eventually ensued. The intricacies of that war cannot be discussed here.
Matilda did successfully claim her crown and the chroniclers accused her of insufferable pride and arrogance. But she would always have trouble holding onto that crown and her many narrow escapes became the stuff of legend, the most famous being escaping from Oxford Castle in the snow camouflaged in a white cloak. It was shortly after this escape that her husband Geffroi of Anjou sent Matilda’s eldest son, nine-year-old Henry, to England. Now Matilda had to accept that she was no longer fighting for the crown for herself, but for her son. He would become King Henry II twenty years after hostilities began - [That’s the Henry, by the way, who triumphantly marched from Waterford to Dublin in the wake of the Norman's landing in Ireland.] Henry’s future wife though would rival Matilda for sheer cleverness and tenacity.
Eleanor of Aquitaine was an independent ruler in her own right when she inherited the Duchy of Aquitaine and Poitiers, at the age of fifteen. After her first marriage to Louis VII of France was annulled, she married Matilda’s son, Henry of Anjou, ten years her junior. Incidentally, if Eleanor and Louis had been ‘blessed’ with a son, Eleanor would have lost her independence and her control over her Duchy of Aquaitaine. My first introduction to Eleanor and Henry was through Katherine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole’s portrayal of their stormy marriage in that great old sixties Hollywood blockbuster that I apologetically love – The Lion in Winter. Anyway, twenty years and eight children later Eleanor and Henry’s marriage was on the rocks. After two decades of having the babies, reluctantly sharing the power and enduring his marital infidelities, Eleanor was one angry lady and it was payback time. So, she led three of her sons in a rebellion against Henry; but it was quashed, and Eleanor spent the next fifteen years locked up at his majesty’s pleasure.
Fifteen years of incarceration though did nothing to dim her spirits. With Henry II dead and her son Richard now king, the sixty-five-year-old Eleanor just continued like nothing had happened, ruling England for the next four years while Richard went off to the Crusades – [that’s Richard the Lion Heart, by the way, who played good king to his brother John’s bad king in Robin Hood.] Living into her eighties, Eleanor used her second wind to travel around Europe doing what dowagers do - arranging suitable alliances for her army of grandchildren, enough indeed to earn her the title Grandmother of Europe; the next big contender for that title would be Queen Victoria who became known as Matriarch of Europe. Bizarrely lying somewhere between The Wedding Planner and My Big Fat Greek Wedding - a visit from Granny Eleanor usually meant whisking away a teenage granddaughter to be married to another European royal. Hello magazine must weep at the loss of prolific European royal families and their countless royal nuptials. Her trip to Spain to collect her thirteen-year-old grand-daughter, Blanche of Castille to marry Louis VIII of France was prophetic. Years later Blanche was also left holding the country and the grandchildren while her son Louis IX went on crusade. But not only did Blanche baby-sit France, she suppressed rebellions, and succeeded in creating a larger and more powerful country for Louis to return to. As I said, my first introduction to Eleanor of Aquitaine was in the film The Lion in Winter. There is no doubt that Catherine Hepburn cut a fine figure as the independent and spirited Eleanor, but that film was a mere thumbnail sketch of a much bigger story, and a rather misshapen thumbnail at that.[2]
Moving on then, Queen Isabella, also known as Iron Lady, was partnered with the most unfortunate husband in the shape of Edward II. Both Isabella and Edward were descendants of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Isabella ended up in the awkward position of being in competition with Edward’s ‘favourite’ John Gaveston. Edward’s understandable reluctance to ditch poor Gaveston, even in the face of outright war, turned England into a political mess and a bloody battlefield. When Gaveston was brutally despatched, Edward did not lose his determination to avenge his death, some day. In the meantime, he found two more ‘favourites’ the Despensers, father and son. Isabella’s only hope lay in her son, also called Edward and she worked hard to make him king. This involved, among other things, acting as a diplomatic bulwark between her husband Edward II and his ‘favourites.’ Just like Eleanor of Aquitaine could rule England in the absence of a male monarch, Isabella manoeuvred herself into ruling England for her son Edward, by forcing the king through clever machinations to hand over the crown to his son. That same son was bent on also claiming the French crown, which he inherited from Isabella, who had succeeded in ‘unkinging’ a king and igniting the spark that would start the Hundred Years War. Indeed, Isabella lived long enough to see her son Edward III’s victories at Crecy and Poitiers. He would also re-take and restore Aquitaine to the glory it enjoyed under Eleanor’s rule.
The next formidable Queen to rise to the challenges in a man’s world was a descendent of Matilda and Eleanor - Margaret of Anjou. Margaret was unfortunately married to King Henry VI, and she would need every one of those excellent inherited genes to navigate the vagaries of being married to a man who was merely a puppet king who left all the decisions to his nobles, and who eventually suffered from a complete mental and physical breakdown. Margaret’s gender prevented her from being a warrior queen, and Henry’s mental incapacity prevented him from being a warrior king protecting England’s territories in France. Like her predecessors, she would gain power through her son Edward. Like Matilda, she could operate as a political wheeler dealer but not lead her men on the field of battle. Margaret’s story is more tragic than her predecessors because she lost her young son Edward at seventeen-years of age, as he literally fought for his crown. Aged just forty-one herself, her life’s work was wasted.
Returning to the Tudor dynasty, the notable queens who followed Henry VIII’s only legitimate son, Edward VI, were unfortunate pawns in the political and religious maelstrom of men jostling for power and favour, always watching what direction the wind blew in, and ready to place any noble lady unfortunate enough to have any blue blood in her on the sacrificial throne. Lady Jane Grey was the ultimate victim. Edward selected her because she would carry on Protestantism and surely some day have a son who would continue the male Tudor line. Of course, Mary Tudor, Henry’s oldest daughter, was next in line and she was determined to claim her rightful inheritance. Edward by-passed her because she was a devout Roman Catholic and would sweep away his beloved reformed church. But Mary did become queen; poor Lady Jane Grey lost her throne after nine days, and her head some months later.
Edward’s fears were realised; Mary did put Roman Catholicism centre stage again and she would become known as Bloody Mary for good reason – the countless Protestants she executed. Her husband, Philip II of Spain, was not trusted by the people. In theory, he was consort, but in practice, Mary deferred to a lot of his decisions – the people were right then; he was king in everything but name, and a Catholic king at that. Mary’s young sister Elizabeth, being an adherent of the reformed Protestant church, was not safe during the reign of this Catholic monarchy. When Mary died after a four-year reign, without the son she hoped would prevent her young Protestant sister succeeding to the throne, Elizabeth took her rightful place as Queen of England.
And so began another episode of an intelligent, articulate, capable and well-educated woman trying to rule in a man’s world. In her forty-four-year rule, Elizabeth I would have to contend with the entrenched male attitudes that women were inferior to and subordinate to men. Some would deliberately misconstrue her orders to suit their own ends. Her only way of knowing she wasn’t being led up the garden path was to engage in a bit of her own subterfuge, speaking with councillors individually and cross-checking what they said.
Elizabeth’s two ‘go to’ men were William Cecil and Francis Walsingham – letter writers, smoothers over, editors and interpreters, but not always in agreement with Elizabeth. Walsingham had successfully uncovered the Babbington Plot which led to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Here’s how the machine worked smoothly behind the scenes – Elizabeth’s ambassadors abroad always sent home two reports, an upbeat one for Elizabeth and a more honest assessment for Cecil. John Guy, in his wonderfully scholarly Elizabeth, The Forgotten Years, describes her two-pronged goal thus: “It would involve surreptitious convolutions geared towards increasing her power and decreasing her vulnerability.” Guy also marks 1584 as a significant year for two reasons; an unavoidable Anglo-Spanish War, and the realisation that Elizabeth was now too old to have children, and so would never have any biological successors. But this could also be liberating for a woman who was born to rule in her own right; she had said after all: “I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.” Freed from the pressure of having to choose a husband she was now able to do exactly what she wanted, just like her father, Henry VIII. Recognising the benefits of effective branding, this was also Elizabeth’s time to cash in on the cult of the Virgin Queen. Her uncomfortably jarring Tilbury speech to the troops heading out to attack the Spanish Armada in 1588 captures the dilemma of so many of her queenly predecessors: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.” She was at the height of her power, independent of husbands, sons and brothers, but yet she still felt the need to apologise for her gender
Both Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria had favourites when they were elderly. Elizabeth’s favourites were Robert Deveraux, Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh; Essex, noble born with a bloodline going back to the Plantagenets, and Raleigh, an ambitious and talented commoner with notions above his station. But of course, long before these two young guns came on the scene, Elizabeth’s abiding love was Dudley, Earl of Leicester. She had hoped to marry him after his wife’s death but was prevented from doing so by her council. Dudley did eventually re-marry, much to Elizabeth’s displeasure, but they remained lifelong friends and when he died in the autumn of her reign, she felt his loss keenly and the emotional vacuum would be somewhat filled by Essex and Raleigh. But Essex and Raleigh despised each other and were fierce rivals in military campaigns, and for the aging queen’s affections. And this battle for most favoured status played out in a triangle of jealousy, conceit and impetuosity – a perfect mix for the Shakespearian age.
Poor haughty Essex would go from nightly card games and dancing in Elizabeth’s private quarters and being the recipient of over-generous offices and concessions (the most lucrative being the sweet wine monopoly), to the executioner’s block aged just thirty-four. Who knows whether Elizabeth had a romantic crush or doted on Essex as the son she never had? Either way, he pushed his luck and overstepped the boundaries too often to emerge unscathed. One famous incident in 1598 involved Essex turning his back on the queen when she refused a request of his. This was a grave breach of etiquette – not a good situation when both parties are puffed up with self-entitlement. She boxed his ears and he made for his sword. He got away with this and in 1599 he was sent to Ireland, which was engulfed in the Nine Years War, to suppress an uprising. For Essex, this was an unfortunate misadventure on every level. He was dealing with enemies on both sides of the Irish Sea; at court and in the unyielding Irish landscape. Described by Richard Cavendish in The Execution of the Earl of Essex[3] as serving with “the maximum of dash and the minimum of judgement on various military expeditions” it is not surprising that Essex failed in this Irish expedition. To compound the failure and the queen’s displeasure, he defied Elizabeth’s instructions and returned to England to defend himself. With the powers that be fearing that he intended a coup, he was put under house arrest and suspended from his official posts, and his lucrative sweet wine monopoly was cancelled. This cut to his income enraged Essex so much that he actually did spark a coup, but as with so many of his previous exploits, it failed for the usual reasons. Found guilty of treason, he succumbed after three strokes of the axe. The one concession he received from his former admirer was that his execution would take place in private.
Walter Raleigh was every bit as arrogant as Essex, he just lacked the noble blood; but romantic gestures, even if they lacked street credibility, he was not short of, as John Guy reminds us in Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years. “He was fond of grand gestures, but the oft-repeated account of how he first became a courtier after spreading his new plush cloak over a ‘plashy place’ for the queen to walk over is almost certainly apocryphal.” While he was not responsible for the introduction of potatoes and tobacco to England, he did help make smoking a popular pastime in the English court.
Raleigh first caught the eye of Elizabeth I in 1580, when he went to Ireland to help suppress the second Desmond Rebellion in Munster. His rather unsavoury half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert had secured him a captain’s commission in the army, and Raleigh was ruthless in this role at the siege of Smerwick in Co. Kerry where, under his supervision, all but thirty of those who surrendered were massacred. He had obviously taken a few tips from Gilbert who, in an earlier expedition to Ireland in 1569 had imposed his authority with an unflinching cruelty by as John Guy recounts “humiliating those who surrendered by insisting that they first approach him in his tent by crawling on all fours along a corridor marked by the decapitated heads of their relatives.” His military success scored him brownie points with Elizabeth, and much to Essex’s disgust, Raleigh was fast becoming a favourite of the queen. He became a member of parliament in 1584, was knighted and appointed captain of the Queen's Guard in 1587, and of course received about 42,000 acres and properties in the towns of Youghal in Cork and Lismore in Waterford.
It was not a good idea to sneak off and get married if you were a favourite of the queen. When Elizabeth discovered in 1592, that Raleigh secretly married one of her maids of honour, Elizabeth Throckmorton, she vented her anger by incarcerating the unhappy couple in the Tower. On his release, Raleigh tried to inveigle his way back into the queen’s good graces by announcing an expedition to El Dorado, the fabled land full of gold and riches, rumoured to be situated somewhere in what is now modern-day Venezuela, and the very thing Elizabeth needed to fill her coffers in the absence of Spanish galleons to be plundered. This expedition was a failure but unlike Essex, Raleigh outlived Elizabeth. He didn’t have much luck with her successor James I though, who eventually sent him to the executioner’s block.
The world was very different in some ways and surprisingly the same in others when the eighteen-year-old Victoria succeeded William IV as England’s monarch in 1837. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing but so was the cattle market for marrying off European royals, and Victoria’s own children would not escape this practice. The monarchy was not popular at this time, so much so, that there was danger of England becoming a republic. Like her predecessor Elizabeth I, Victoria was an inexperienced, albeit well-educated, young woman, expected to do as she was told by her older male councillors, ministers and advisors, to maintain the status quo. Unlike Elizabeth, Victoria was not an absolute monarch – the English Civil War had seen to that - something that likely saved the monarchy as an institution in Great Britain, allowing it to exist to this very day. After the 1832 Reform Bill the reigning monarch would become even more of an influencer, peace broker and emblematic figure head. While the more constitutional monarch, Victoria, couldn’t order execution at will, she was not averse, like Elizabeth l, to throwing a tantrum. These tantrums worried members of parliament, who feared that Victoria had inherited the madness of her grandfather King George III.
Both Elizabeth and Victoria had relatively solitary childhoods, and interestingly they both had a half-brother and a half-sister. In Elizabeth’s case that was Mary and Edward, in Victoria’s case that was Charles and Feodore from her mother’s first marriage. Unlike Elizabeth, Victoria married, but not until 1840, so she had a few years of queenship under her belt before becoming a wife. Disappointingly though, she deferred to her husband Albert in matters of politics and affairs of state. One might forgive the young Victoria this regrettable practice in light of the fact that she had nine children between 1840 and 1857, notwithstanding she had all the staff in the world to rear them. Albert was certainly a clever chap and the success of his Great Exhibition in 1849 helped to put the monarchy on a stronger footing in the public eye. But was Victoria’s deference due to a lack of confidence, a lack of faith in her own abilities, or the belief that men were in charge? She did not, for example, believe that women should train as medical doctors, and she never managed to pluck up enough courage to deliver her own speech at the yearly Opening of Parliament.
But during Victoria’s reign, Britain was the most powerful country in the world and would become more so as her rule progressed, so much so that by end of her reign it was said that the sun did not set on her empire. And so much happened – the Great Irish Famine, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the publication of the Communist Manifesto and Darwin’s Origin of the Species, the American Civil War, the postal and telegraph service, rail travel, vaccination, and wider provision of education, not to mention the countless political upheavals all over Europe.
After the death of her beloved Albert, Victoria seemed to be rudderless and drifted away from the affairs of state, alternating between hot, cold or complete disinterest on the issues of the day. She did retain enough energy though to hate Gladstone and to object to the Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. Anyway, her withdrawal was interpreted by most onlookers and commentators as slacking on the job. As A. N. Wilson, describes it in his brilliantly insightful and engaging Victoria: A Life: “The press, the Queen’s own children, monarchists and republicans were all finding themselves beginning to ask the same sort of questions. If it was possible for a country to function when its Head of State spent half the year in her Scottish retreat or on the Isle of Wight, was this not a sign that it could function without a monarch at all? If she refused to undertake even such rudimentary duties as taking part in the State Opening of Parliament, were they not entitled to wonder why she was paid huge sums by the Civil List?”
It was after Albert’s death then that Victoria’s favourites came centre stage and caused a lot of worry for her minders. The Scottish John Brown and later the Indian Abdul Karim were viewed as threats from all quarters. A. N. Wilson in Victoria: A Life is forthright in his analysis of this unlikely pairing of Victoria and Brown: “It could be fairly said that without Balmoral, and the friendship of Brown during the 1860s, Victoria probably would have gone mad – or even madder than she actually was.” The next best thing to Albert but not a replacement, Brown could be the obligitary man at Victoria’s side. But Victoria was living in a man’s world, where men made the rules for men and women and where men’s’ dalliances where indulged, while women’s’ flirtations were condemned. As A. N. Wilson wryly observes: “If she had been a widowed King who had bedded one of his servants, the Court would have politely turned a blind eye and even affected a certain manly amusement.”
Another favourite, Abdul Karim, who became known as the Munshi, would come on the scene in 1887 for the last fourteen years of Queen Victoria’s reign. He had been handpicked in India to attend the Queen at the Royal Household and in 1894 she promoted him to the position of her Indian Secretary. Just like Brown before him, he became a despised member of court, but Victoria was steadfast in her attachment, so much so that in her final wishes, she instructed that Karim be one of the principal mourners at her funeral, an honour given only to the monarch’s closest friends and family.
In her 2017 Smithonian.com article Victoria and Abdul: The Friendship that Scandalized England, Kristin Hunt suggests that: “Victoria could not control what happened to the Munshi from beyond the grave, but she did everything in her power to mitigate the harsh treatment she presumed her family would inflict upon him.” Hence, she showered him with titles, lands and properties, in return, it would seem, for being a fine, handsome, affable and intelligent young man who taught her Urdu and introduced her to curry.
According to Kristin Hunt, some royal associates had reasonable complaints about Karim’s extravagant requests. “But it wasn’t just his arrogance that annoyed them. Historians have plainly pinned the hatred on 19th-century racism.” And indeed, the queen’s fears were justified. Upon her death on January 22, 1901, Victoria’s children worked swiftly to evict their mother’s second and final favourite. Edward VII sent guards into Karim’s home, who seized all letters from the Queen and burnt them on the spot. Karim and his family were then unceremoniously returned to India.
And there we will stop. Interestingly, Aethelflaed enjoyed a revival during the reign of Victoria, when female role models were popular. When Victoria became Empress of India, the last queen to hold the title of Empress was Matilda in the twelfth century. If you were to look at all of the kings who reigned in England from Anglo-Saxon times up to modern times you would have no trouble identifying the dullards; the mad, sad and bad; the cruel tyrants and the ineffectual fools; the buffoons, peacocks and gluttons; the downright idiots. While the queens mentioned in this article were no saints, and carried their fair share of snobbery, arrogance, self-entitlement, pride, fanaticism and intolerance; they stood out from the crowded theatre of men, and in many cases trumped them, through pure and unadulterated cleverness.
I would argue that Aethelflead, Matilda, Eleanor, Isabella and Margaret were better role models than Elizabeth and Victoria. They operated in a crueller environment and fought tenaciously and incredibly bravely for their territories and for their children’s rightful inheritance. They endured the discomforts of displacement and imprisonment, the fear of losing their lives, the dangers of being caught up in warfare – always weighing up the risks of every decision they made and stoically living with the consequences. The mistake made by the chroniclers was writing the actions of these female royals out of history, or infuriatingly, concentrating on the more trivial aspects of their lives. In effect, they conveniently denied great role models to generations of women. In comparison to these earlier queens, Elizabeth, and to an even greater extent, Victoria, had to deal with the less dangerous but incredibly infuriating patriarchal landscape, but in many ways, they disappointingly manipulated this landscape when it suited them.
For Elizabeth and Victoria, having favourites in their later years might have been symptomatic of the belief that a woman was not complete if she did not have a man by her side, hence my treatment of this aspect of the later part of their reigns. Victoria was lucky enough to find a man she genuinely loved in the extremely limited and rarefied group she could choose from. But it was this pairing that made her the grandmother of that bunch of squabbling cousins who started World War I; not the best of legacies. Full marks to Elizabeth for prevailing as a monarch without compromising herself by being attached to an unwanted consort.
Much of Elizabeth’s reign was filled with anxiety about relations with Spain, the fear of an imminent Roman Catholic invasion of England, and the undoing of the Reformation. “Wars and rumours of wars” hung in the air[4]. Alice Hogge, in God’s Secret Agents, describes the Armada Year of 1588 as being “swept in on a tide of historical prophecies and dire predictions.” It was a heady mix of religion, superstition, warranted and unwarranted fears, in which St John’s Book of Revelations featured strongly. According to Hogge, “the year offered nothing less than the opening of the Seventh Seal, the overthrow of Antichrist and the sounding of the trumpets for the Last Judgement,” not for the feint hearted then, which was fortuitous for Elizabeth who had “the heart and stomach of a king.” The gentlemen that Victoria had to deal with likely did not instil the same sense of foreboding and terror; Melbourne, Palmerston, Peel, Russell, Disraeli and Gladstone. But I feel compelled to turn the clock back to Anglo-Saxon England and award magna cum laude to Aethelflaed. I believe this warrior queen would have regarded Elizabeth and Victoria as rather pampered and privileged.
How different might history have been if men in power had thought of queens as rightful leaders and not as mere producers of male heirs and male spares.
Suggested reading – these are all available in the public library
Castor. H. She Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth. Faber & Faber. 2010.
Guy. J. Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years. Penguin Viking. 2016.
Hogge. A. God’s Secret Agents. Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot. Harper Collins. 2005.
Wilson. A. N. Victoria: A Life. Atlantic Books. 2014.
Footnotes
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-44069889
[2] Most of this paragraph taken from my earlier piece Crusading Women on http://www.oldfilibuster.com/crusading-women.html
[3] Published in History Today Volume 51 Issue 2 February 2001
[4] Matthew 24:6
The questionable majesty of queenship
The funny thing about queenship throughout history is that it was normally seen as a perversion of the perceived order, an unjust inheritance as it were, by most men you’d care to ask, especially those in power. Primogeniture was the main vehicle of royal succession; the only time women came into the mix was when it was politically expedient, and even then, the understanding was that it would be a short-lived affair until that queen produced a male heir. We all know the trouble Henry VIII had producing a male heir – “To six wives he was wedded. One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded.” And of course, this male heir affair was inextricably linked to the break with Rome and the Henrician Reformation. His only male heir, Edward VI, died at fifteen, but even at that young age, and literally at death’s door, he nominated, in his carefully considered ‘device for the succession,’ Lady Jane Grey, the only legitimately born Protestant cousin he could find, to succeed him, in the hope that she would quickly produce a male heir. Edward, after all, had not planned to die at fifteen, and this was his only way of carrying on the male Tudor royal line. Of course, his father Henry VIII’s Act of Succession had upheld the rights of his first daughter Mary and his second daughter Elizabeth, despite his declaration that they were illegitimate, to inherit the crown in the highly unlikely circumstance of their younger brother Edward’s death. Both legitimate candidates were unsuitable in the eyes of the fastidious young Edward because of their illegitimacy and Mary’s Catholicism.
But of course, the Tudors were not the exclusive gatekeepers of murder, mayhem and skulduggery if a potential heir was the wrong gender or the wrong religion. If anything, the previous royal dynasties were even more politic and ruthless when it came to finding and disappearing the inconvenient heir; and in more than a few instances, the centrifugal force in the ensuing turmoil, was a strategically astute woman. But how far back to go? Aethelflaed, now there’s a name that doesn’t feature on the top one hundred most popular girls’ names. In 2018, exactly 1,100 years after her death, a BBC[1] news report posed the question: “How does a ruler defeat bloodthirsty invaders, secure a kingdom and lay the foundations for England - and then almost get written out of history?” The answer of course was: “Be a woman, that's how.”
Born in about 870, at the height of the Viking onslaughts, Aethelflaed was the daughter of Alfred the Great, King of Wessex and the Anglo Saxons. At sixteen she married Aethelred, Lord of Mercia; hence her title, Lady of Mercia. This marriage united Mercia and Wessex in resistance to the Vikings. One of the many interesting things about Aethelflaed is that she was accepted as leader of Mercia when her husband Aethelred died in 911. She never remarried, probably not wanting to hand over power to another man. A ‘peaceweaver’ as well as a warrior queen, Aethelflaed achieved amity with Scotland and Wales as well as quelling the Vikings. As in so many subsequent chronicles of English history, women of the stature of Aethelflaed were written out of events, or grudgingly referred to in demeaning terms or vaguely as unnamed female relatives. The most popular version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was written in Wessex, under the reign of Aethelflaed’s brother Edward, and quelle surprise, she barely figures, while Edward is quite the superman. Aethelflaed was also unique in passing on her mantle of power to her daughter Aelfwynn, but the brother Edward, who featured so brilliantly in the Wessex version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, marched into Mercia and deposed Aelfwynn who apparently took herself off to a nunnery. The legacy of her mother Aethelflaed would be conveniently obscured in a man’s world for over one thousand years.
One of the very best books I read this year was She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor. It is a brilliantly entertaining exposition of England’s better-known early queens, starting with Matilda. Some two hundred and fifty years after Aethelflaed, the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I and grand-daughter of William the Conquerer, would also suffer the fate of being diminished by the chroniclers. Her empress moniker came from her marriage to Emperor Heinrich V of Germany to whom she was betrothed at eight-years-old; she kept it all her life despite being widowed at twenty-three. If she had had a son and heir, she could have ruled Germany as regent until he came of age. Her only option now was to return to her father with her imperial title, as Henry’s only surviving heir following the drowning of her brother William.
But for now, and for countless generations to come, kings were expected to be law makers and soldiers leading the charge to protect their crowns; both these pursuits were barred to women, putting any potential female heirs in a difficult position. Monarchs were male and consorts were female. It is true that many kings and consorts shared authority, but the female authority could only be exercised through the male partner. In the case of the consort being widowed, they could only continue as regent if they had a male heir. And so, Matilda married Geoffroi of Anjou who was eleven years her junior. When Henry I died unexpectedly there were too many obstacles preventing Matilda from taking her rightful place as his successor. Her husband, Geoffroi of Anjou was busy fighting his own battles at home, Matilda was not present when Henry died to allow her to swiftly seize the crown, she was pregnant, and she was a woman. When Henry’s nephew Stephen did act swiftly to take the crown, civil war eventually ensued. The intricacies of that war cannot be discussed here.
Matilda did successfully claim her crown and the chroniclers accused her of insufferable pride and arrogance. But she would always have trouble holding onto that crown and her many narrow escapes became the stuff of legend, the most famous being escaping from Oxford Castle in the snow camouflaged in a white cloak. It was shortly after this escape that her husband Geffroi of Anjou sent Matilda’s eldest son, nine-year-old Henry, to England. Now Matilda had to accept that she was no longer fighting for the crown for herself, but for her son. He would become King Henry II twenty years after hostilities began - [That’s the Henry, by the way, who triumphantly marched from Waterford to Dublin in the wake of the Norman's landing in Ireland.] Henry’s future wife though would rival Matilda for sheer cleverness and tenacity.
Eleanor of Aquitaine was an independent ruler in her own right when she inherited the Duchy of Aquitaine and Poitiers, at the age of fifteen. After her first marriage to Louis VII of France was annulled, she married Matilda’s son, Henry of Anjou, ten years her junior. Incidentally, if Eleanor and Louis had been ‘blessed’ with a son, Eleanor would have lost her independence and her control over her Duchy of Aquaitaine. My first introduction to Eleanor and Henry was through Katherine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole’s portrayal of their stormy marriage in that great old sixties Hollywood blockbuster that I apologetically love – The Lion in Winter. Anyway, twenty years and eight children later Eleanor and Henry’s marriage was on the rocks. After two decades of having the babies, reluctantly sharing the power and enduring his marital infidelities, Eleanor was one angry lady and it was payback time. So, she led three of her sons in a rebellion against Henry; but it was quashed, and Eleanor spent the next fifteen years locked up at his majesty’s pleasure.
Fifteen years of incarceration though did nothing to dim her spirits. With Henry II dead and her son Richard now king, the sixty-five-year-old Eleanor just continued like nothing had happened, ruling England for the next four years while Richard went off to the Crusades – [that’s Richard the Lion Heart, by the way, who played good king to his brother John’s bad king in Robin Hood.] Living into her eighties, Eleanor used her second wind to travel around Europe doing what dowagers do - arranging suitable alliances for her army of grandchildren, enough indeed to earn her the title Grandmother of Europe; the next big contender for that title would be Queen Victoria who became known as Matriarch of Europe. Bizarrely lying somewhere between The Wedding Planner and My Big Fat Greek Wedding - a visit from Granny Eleanor usually meant whisking away a teenage granddaughter to be married to another European royal. Hello magazine must weep at the loss of prolific European royal families and their countless royal nuptials. Her trip to Spain to collect her thirteen-year-old grand-daughter, Blanche of Castille to marry Louis VIII of France was prophetic. Years later Blanche was also left holding the country and the grandchildren while her son Louis IX went on crusade. But not only did Blanche baby-sit France, she suppressed rebellions, and succeeded in creating a larger and more powerful country for Louis to return to. As I said, my first introduction to Eleanor of Aquitaine was in the film The Lion in Winter. There is no doubt that Catherine Hepburn cut a fine figure as the independent and spirited Eleanor, but that film was a mere thumbnail sketch of a much bigger story, and a rather misshapen thumbnail at that.[2]
Moving on then, Queen Isabella, also known as Iron Lady, was partnered with the most unfortunate husband in the shape of Edward II. Both Isabella and Edward were descendants of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Isabella ended up in the awkward position of being in competition with Edward’s ‘favourite’ John Gaveston. Edward’s understandable reluctance to ditch poor Gaveston, even in the face of outright war, turned England into a political mess and a bloody battlefield. When Gaveston was brutally despatched, Edward did not lose his determination to avenge his death, some day. In the meantime, he found two more ‘favourites’ the Despensers, father and son. Isabella’s only hope lay in her son, also called Edward and she worked hard to make him king. This involved, among other things, acting as a diplomatic bulwark between her husband Edward II and his ‘favourites.’ Just like Eleanor of Aquitaine could rule England in the absence of a male monarch, Isabella manoeuvred herself into ruling England for her son Edward, by forcing the king through clever machinations to hand over the crown to his son. That same son was bent on also claiming the French crown, which he inherited from Isabella, who had succeeded in ‘unkinging’ a king and igniting the spark that would start the Hundred Years War. Indeed, Isabella lived long enough to see her son Edward III’s victories at Crecy and Poitiers. He would also re-take and restore Aquitaine to the glory it enjoyed under Eleanor’s rule.
The next formidable Queen to rise to the challenges in a man’s world was a descendent of Matilda and Eleanor - Margaret of Anjou. Margaret was unfortunately married to King Henry VI, and she would need every one of those excellent inherited genes to navigate the vagaries of being married to a man who was merely a puppet king who left all the decisions to his nobles, and who eventually suffered from a complete mental and physical breakdown. Margaret’s gender prevented her from being a warrior queen, and Henry’s mental incapacity prevented him from being a warrior king protecting England’s territories in France. Like her predecessors, she would gain power through her son Edward. Like Matilda, she could operate as a political wheeler dealer but not lead her men on the field of battle. Margaret’s story is more tragic than her predecessors because she lost her young son Edward at seventeen-years of age, as he literally fought for his crown. Aged just forty-one herself, her life’s work was wasted.
Returning to the Tudor dynasty, the notable queens who followed Henry VIII’s only legitimate son, Edward VI, were unfortunate pawns in the political and religious maelstrom of men jostling for power and favour, always watching what direction the wind blew in, and ready to place any noble lady unfortunate enough to have any blue blood in her on the sacrificial throne. Lady Jane Grey was the ultimate victim. Edward selected her because she would carry on Protestantism and surely some day have a son who would continue the male Tudor line. Of course, Mary Tudor, Henry’s oldest daughter, was next in line and she was determined to claim her rightful inheritance. Edward by-passed her because she was a devout Roman Catholic and would sweep away his beloved reformed church. But Mary did become queen; poor Lady Jane Grey lost her throne after nine days, and her head some months later.
Edward’s fears were realised; Mary did put Roman Catholicism centre stage again and she would become known as Bloody Mary for good reason – the countless Protestants she executed. Her husband, Philip II of Spain, was not trusted by the people. In theory, he was consort, but in practice, Mary deferred to a lot of his decisions – the people were right then; he was king in everything but name, and a Catholic king at that. Mary’s young sister Elizabeth, being an adherent of the reformed Protestant church, was not safe during the reign of this Catholic monarchy. When Mary died after a four-year reign, without the son she hoped would prevent her young Protestant sister succeeding to the throne, Elizabeth took her rightful place as Queen of England.
And so began another episode of an intelligent, articulate, capable and well-educated woman trying to rule in a man’s world. In her forty-four-year rule, Elizabeth I would have to contend with the entrenched male attitudes that women were inferior to and subordinate to men. Some would deliberately misconstrue her orders to suit their own ends. Her only way of knowing she wasn’t being led up the garden path was to engage in a bit of her own subterfuge, speaking with councillors individually and cross-checking what they said.
Elizabeth’s two ‘go to’ men were William Cecil and Francis Walsingham – letter writers, smoothers over, editors and interpreters, but not always in agreement with Elizabeth. Walsingham had successfully uncovered the Babbington Plot which led to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Here’s how the machine worked smoothly behind the scenes – Elizabeth’s ambassadors abroad always sent home two reports, an upbeat one for Elizabeth and a more honest assessment for Cecil. John Guy, in his wonderfully scholarly Elizabeth, The Forgotten Years, describes her two-pronged goal thus: “It would involve surreptitious convolutions geared towards increasing her power and decreasing her vulnerability.” Guy also marks 1584 as a significant year for two reasons; an unavoidable Anglo-Spanish War, and the realisation that Elizabeth was now too old to have children, and so would never have any biological successors. But this could also be liberating for a woman who was born to rule in her own right; she had said after all: “I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.” Freed from the pressure of having to choose a husband she was now able to do exactly what she wanted, just like her father, Henry VIII. Recognising the benefits of effective branding, this was also Elizabeth’s time to cash in on the cult of the Virgin Queen. Her uncomfortably jarring Tilbury speech to the troops heading out to attack the Spanish Armada in 1588 captures the dilemma of so many of her queenly predecessors: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.” She was at the height of her power, independent of husbands, sons and brothers, but yet she still felt the need to apologise for her gender
Both Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria had favourites when they were elderly. Elizabeth’s favourites were Robert Deveraux, Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh; Essex, noble born with a bloodline going back to the Plantagenets, and Raleigh, an ambitious and talented commoner with notions above his station. But of course, long before these two young guns came on the scene, Elizabeth’s abiding love was Dudley, Earl of Leicester. She had hoped to marry him after his wife’s death but was prevented from doing so by her council. Dudley did eventually re-marry, much to Elizabeth’s displeasure, but they remained lifelong friends and when he died in the autumn of her reign, she felt his loss keenly and the emotional vacuum would be somewhat filled by Essex and Raleigh. But Essex and Raleigh despised each other and were fierce rivals in military campaigns, and for the aging queen’s affections. And this battle for most favoured status played out in a triangle of jealousy, conceit and impetuosity – a perfect mix for the Shakespearian age.
Poor haughty Essex would go from nightly card games and dancing in Elizabeth’s private quarters and being the recipient of over-generous offices and concessions (the most lucrative being the sweet wine monopoly), to the executioner’s block aged just thirty-four. Who knows whether Elizabeth had a romantic crush or doted on Essex as the son she never had? Either way, he pushed his luck and overstepped the boundaries too often to emerge unscathed. One famous incident in 1598 involved Essex turning his back on the queen when she refused a request of his. This was a grave breach of etiquette – not a good situation when both parties are puffed up with self-entitlement. She boxed his ears and he made for his sword. He got away with this and in 1599 he was sent to Ireland, which was engulfed in the Nine Years War, to suppress an uprising. For Essex, this was an unfortunate misadventure on every level. He was dealing with enemies on both sides of the Irish Sea; at court and in the unyielding Irish landscape. Described by Richard Cavendish in The Execution of the Earl of Essex[3] as serving with “the maximum of dash and the minimum of judgement on various military expeditions” it is not surprising that Essex failed in this Irish expedition. To compound the failure and the queen’s displeasure, he defied Elizabeth’s instructions and returned to England to defend himself. With the powers that be fearing that he intended a coup, he was put under house arrest and suspended from his official posts, and his lucrative sweet wine monopoly was cancelled. This cut to his income enraged Essex so much that he actually did spark a coup, but as with so many of his previous exploits, it failed for the usual reasons. Found guilty of treason, he succumbed after three strokes of the axe. The one concession he received from his former admirer was that his execution would take place in private.
Walter Raleigh was every bit as arrogant as Essex, he just lacked the noble blood; but romantic gestures, even if they lacked street credibility, he was not short of, as John Guy reminds us in Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years. “He was fond of grand gestures, but the oft-repeated account of how he first became a courtier after spreading his new plush cloak over a ‘plashy place’ for the queen to walk over is almost certainly apocryphal.” While he was not responsible for the introduction of potatoes and tobacco to England, he did help make smoking a popular pastime in the English court.
Raleigh first caught the eye of Elizabeth I in 1580, when he went to Ireland to help suppress the second Desmond Rebellion in Munster. His rather unsavoury half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert had secured him a captain’s commission in the army, and Raleigh was ruthless in this role at the siege of Smerwick in Co. Kerry where, under his supervision, all but thirty of those who surrendered were massacred. He had obviously taken a few tips from Gilbert who, in an earlier expedition to Ireland in 1569 had imposed his authority with an unflinching cruelty by as John Guy recounts “humiliating those who surrendered by insisting that they first approach him in his tent by crawling on all fours along a corridor marked by the decapitated heads of their relatives.” His military success scored him brownie points with Elizabeth, and much to Essex’s disgust, Raleigh was fast becoming a favourite of the queen. He became a member of parliament in 1584, was knighted and appointed captain of the Queen's Guard in 1587, and of course received about 42,000 acres and properties in the towns of Youghal in Cork and Lismore in Waterford.
It was not a good idea to sneak off and get married if you were a favourite of the queen. When Elizabeth discovered in 1592, that Raleigh secretly married one of her maids of honour, Elizabeth Throckmorton, she vented her anger by incarcerating the unhappy couple in the Tower. On his release, Raleigh tried to inveigle his way back into the queen’s good graces by announcing an expedition to El Dorado, the fabled land full of gold and riches, rumoured to be situated somewhere in what is now modern-day Venezuela, and the very thing Elizabeth needed to fill her coffers in the absence of Spanish galleons to be plundered. This expedition was a failure but unlike Essex, Raleigh outlived Elizabeth. He didn’t have much luck with her successor James I though, who eventually sent him to the executioner’s block.
The world was very different in some ways and surprisingly the same in others when the eighteen-year-old Victoria succeeded William IV as England’s monarch in 1837. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing but so was the cattle market for marrying off European royals, and Victoria’s own children would not escape this practice. The monarchy was not popular at this time, so much so, that there was danger of England becoming a republic. Like her predecessor Elizabeth I, Victoria was an inexperienced, albeit well-educated, young woman, expected to do as she was told by her older male councillors, ministers and advisors, to maintain the status quo. Unlike Elizabeth, Victoria was not an absolute monarch – the English Civil War had seen to that - something that likely saved the monarchy as an institution in Great Britain, allowing it to exist to this very day. After the 1832 Reform Bill the reigning monarch would become even more of an influencer, peace broker and emblematic figure head. While the more constitutional monarch, Victoria, couldn’t order execution at will, she was not averse, like Elizabeth l, to throwing a tantrum. These tantrums worried members of parliament, who feared that Victoria had inherited the madness of her grandfather King George III.
Both Elizabeth and Victoria had relatively solitary childhoods, and interestingly they both had a half-brother and a half-sister. In Elizabeth’s case that was Mary and Edward, in Victoria’s case that was Charles and Feodore from her mother’s first marriage. Unlike Elizabeth, Victoria married, but not until 1840, so she had a few years of queenship under her belt before becoming a wife. Disappointingly though, she deferred to her husband Albert in matters of politics and affairs of state. One might forgive the young Victoria this regrettable practice in light of the fact that she had nine children between 1840 and 1857, notwithstanding she had all the staff in the world to rear them. Albert was certainly a clever chap and the success of his Great Exhibition in 1849 helped to put the monarchy on a stronger footing in the public eye. But was Victoria’s deference due to a lack of confidence, a lack of faith in her own abilities, or the belief that men were in charge? She did not, for example, believe that women should train as medical doctors, and she never managed to pluck up enough courage to deliver her own speech at the yearly Opening of Parliament.
But during Victoria’s reign, Britain was the most powerful country in the world and would become more so as her rule progressed, so much so that by end of her reign it was said that the sun did not set on her empire. And so much happened – the Great Irish Famine, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the publication of the Communist Manifesto and Darwin’s Origin of the Species, the American Civil War, the postal and telegraph service, rail travel, vaccination, and wider provision of education, not to mention the countless political upheavals all over Europe.
After the death of her beloved Albert, Victoria seemed to be rudderless and drifted away from the affairs of state, alternating between hot, cold or complete disinterest on the issues of the day. She did retain enough energy though to hate Gladstone and to object to the Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. Anyway, her withdrawal was interpreted by most onlookers and commentators as slacking on the job. As A. N. Wilson, describes it in his brilliantly insightful and engaging Victoria: A Life: “The press, the Queen’s own children, monarchists and republicans were all finding themselves beginning to ask the same sort of questions. If it was possible for a country to function when its Head of State spent half the year in her Scottish retreat or on the Isle of Wight, was this not a sign that it could function without a monarch at all? If she refused to undertake even such rudimentary duties as taking part in the State Opening of Parliament, were they not entitled to wonder why she was paid huge sums by the Civil List?”
It was after Albert’s death then that Victoria’s favourites came centre stage and caused a lot of worry for her minders. The Scottish John Brown and later the Indian Abdul Karim were viewed as threats from all quarters. A. N. Wilson in Victoria: A Life is forthright in his analysis of this unlikely pairing of Victoria and Brown: “It could be fairly said that without Balmoral, and the friendship of Brown during the 1860s, Victoria probably would have gone mad – or even madder than she actually was.” The next best thing to Albert but not a replacement, Brown could be the obligitary man at Victoria’s side. But Victoria was living in a man’s world, where men made the rules for men and women and where men’s’ dalliances where indulged, while women’s’ flirtations were condemned. As A. N. Wilson wryly observes: “If she had been a widowed King who had bedded one of his servants, the Court would have politely turned a blind eye and even affected a certain manly amusement.”
Another favourite, Abdul Karim, who became known as the Munshi, would come on the scene in 1887 for the last fourteen years of Queen Victoria’s reign. He had been handpicked in India to attend the Queen at the Royal Household and in 1894 she promoted him to the position of her Indian Secretary. Just like Brown before him, he became a despised member of court, but Victoria was steadfast in her attachment, so much so that in her final wishes, she instructed that Karim be one of the principal mourners at her funeral, an honour given only to the monarch’s closest friends and family.
In her 2017 Smithonian.com article Victoria and Abdul: The Friendship that Scandalized England, Kristin Hunt suggests that: “Victoria could not control what happened to the Munshi from beyond the grave, but she did everything in her power to mitigate the harsh treatment she presumed her family would inflict upon him.” Hence, she showered him with titles, lands and properties, in return, it would seem, for being a fine, handsome, affable and intelligent young man who taught her Urdu and introduced her to curry.
According to Kristin Hunt, some royal associates had reasonable complaints about Karim’s extravagant requests. “But it wasn’t just his arrogance that annoyed them. Historians have plainly pinned the hatred on 19th-century racism.” And indeed, the queen’s fears were justified. Upon her death on January 22, 1901, Victoria’s children worked swiftly to evict their mother’s second and final favourite. Edward VII sent guards into Karim’s home, who seized all letters from the Queen and burnt them on the spot. Karim and his family were then unceremoniously returned to India.
And there we will stop. Interestingly, Aethelflaed enjoyed a revival during the reign of Victoria, when female role models were popular. When Victoria became Empress of India, the last queen to hold the title of Empress was Matilda in the twelfth century. If you were to look at all of the kings who reigned in England from Anglo-Saxon times up to modern times you would have no trouble identifying the dullards; the mad, sad and bad; the cruel tyrants and the ineffectual fools; the buffoons, peacocks and gluttons; the downright idiots. While the queens mentioned in this article were no saints, and carried their fair share of snobbery, arrogance, self-entitlement, pride, fanaticism and intolerance; they stood out from the crowded theatre of men, and in many cases trumped them, through pure and unadulterated cleverness.
I would argue that Aethelflead, Matilda, Eleanor, Isabella and Margaret were better role models than Elizabeth and Victoria. They operated in a crueller environment and fought tenaciously and incredibly bravely for their territories and for their children’s rightful inheritance. They endured the discomforts of displacement and imprisonment, the fear of losing their lives, the dangers of being caught up in warfare – always weighing up the risks of every decision they made and stoically living with the consequences. The mistake made by the chroniclers was writing the actions of these female royals out of history, or infuriatingly, concentrating on the more trivial aspects of their lives. In effect, they conveniently denied great role models to generations of women. In comparison to these earlier queens, Elizabeth, and to an even greater extent, Victoria, had to deal with the less dangerous but incredibly infuriating patriarchal landscape, but in many ways, they disappointingly manipulated this landscape when it suited them.
For Elizabeth and Victoria, having favourites in their later years might have been symptomatic of the belief that a woman was not complete if she did not have a man by her side, hence my treatment of this aspect of the later part of their reigns. Victoria was lucky enough to find a man she genuinely loved in the extremely limited and rarefied group she could choose from. But it was this pairing that made her the grandmother of that bunch of squabbling cousins who started World War I; not the best of legacies. Full marks to Elizabeth for prevailing as a monarch without compromising herself by being attached to an unwanted consort.
Much of Elizabeth’s reign was filled with anxiety about relations with Spain, the fear of an imminent Roman Catholic invasion of England, and the undoing of the Reformation. “Wars and rumours of wars” hung in the air[4]. Alice Hogge, in God’s Secret Agents, describes the Armada Year of 1588 as being “swept in on a tide of historical prophecies and dire predictions.” It was a heady mix of religion, superstition, warranted and unwarranted fears, in which St John’s Book of Revelations featured strongly. According to Hogge, “the year offered nothing less than the opening of the Seventh Seal, the overthrow of Antichrist and the sounding of the trumpets for the Last Judgement,” not for the feint hearted then, which was fortuitous for Elizabeth who had “the heart and stomach of a king.” The gentlemen that Victoria had to deal with likely did not instil the same sense of foreboding and terror; Melbourne, Palmerston, Peel, Russell, Disraeli and Gladstone. But I feel compelled to turn the clock back to Anglo-Saxon England and award magna cum laude to Aethelflaed. I believe this warrior queen would have regarded Elizabeth and Victoria as rather pampered and privileged.
How different might history have been if men in power had thought of queens as rightful leaders and not as mere producers of male heirs and male spares.
Suggested reading – these are all available in the public library
Castor. H. She Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth. Faber & Faber. 2010.
Guy. J. Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years. Penguin Viking. 2016.
Hogge. A. God’s Secret Agents. Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot. Harper Collins. 2005.
Wilson. A. N. Victoria: A Life. Atlantic Books. 2014.
Footnotes
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-44069889
[2] Most of this paragraph taken from my earlier piece Crusading Women on http://www.oldfilibuster.com/crusading-women.html
[3] Published in History Today Volume 51 Issue 2 February 2001
[4] Matthew 24:6
