April 21, 2022 25‘Monstrous’ or ‘Prudente’?
Erin Maglaque
When Women Ruled the World:
Making the Renaissance in Europe
by Maureen Quilligan.
Liveright, 301 pp., $29.95Elizabeth I launched her defense
against the Spanish Armada in 1588
with an unforgettable image: “I have
the body of a weak, and feeble woman;
but I have the heart and stomach of a
king.” Only a sovereign could tran-
scend sexual difference, cloaking a
king’s power in a woman’s flesh. But
some saw this gender paradox as a kind
of monstrosity. John Knox, the Scot-
tish religious reformer and radical, had
published The First Blast of the Trum-
pet Against the Monstrous Regiment
of Women in 1558, the year of Eliza-
beth’s coronation. In it, he asked: How
is it that the weak, the foolish, and the
impotent may rule the strong? “Their
sight in civil regiment is but blindness;
their strength, weakness; their counsel,
foolishness; and judgement, frenzy.”
From his pulpit Knox preached that
female rule was an abomination in the
eyes of God.
In his time and our own, women’s
power has given rise to propaganda,
romance, intrigue, scandal, and myth.
Think of Henry VIII’s six wives and
their reputations as shrews, sexpots,
and frumps; Mary Tudor, commonly
known as Bloody Mary, burning Prot-
estants and their unborn children alive
at the stake; Mary, Queen of Scots, cor-
rupting the throne with, as her Protes-
tant opponents wrote, “her lewde lust
and sensualitie”; Catherine de’ Medici,
rumored to eat small children and as-
sassinate her enemies using gloves
scented with poison; or Marguerite de
Valois, Catherine’s daughter, carry-
ing around her dead lovers’ embalmed
hearts in her pockets.
Historians have worked hard in re-
cent decades to ground these women’s
reputations in fact rather than sensa-
tionalism. Drawing on this research,
Maureen Quilligan gives us a feminist
history of early modern queenship in
When Women Ruled the World. A spe-
cialist in English Renaissance litera-
ture, Quilligan has published widely
on allegory and gender; her coedited
volume Rewriting the Renaissance:
The Discourses of Sexual Difference in
Early Modern Europe (1986) remains
an important milestone in our under-
standing of gender and patriarchy in
early modern European culture and
society.
When Women Ruled the World fo-
cuses on four of the best known of
Europe’s many Renaissance queens:
M a r y Tu d o r, E l i z a b et h Tu d o r, M a r y
Stuart, and Catherine de’ Medici.
Many bewigged heads roll. But the
book departs from the usual blood and
gore of biographical accounts to em-
phasize instead the “shared nature” of
these queens’ sovereign power, arguing
that they were bound to one another
not only by dynastic connections and
political interest but by a feeling of sis-
terhood. “Like fellow soldiers in a so-
roral troop, they did try to protect and
aid each other, keeping each other’s
backs, as it were, asking each other to
aid any one of them who might be in
peril,” Quilligan writes, echoing recentand tremendously popular histories of
queenship, most notably Sarah Grist-
wood’s Game of Queens (2016). Two
of the queens Quilligan covers were ac-
tual sisters: Mary and Elizabeth Tudor
were both daughters of Henry VIII, by
successive wives. Mary Stuart, Queen
of Scots, was their cousin. At sixteen,
Mary Stuart married Catherine de’
Medici’s son François de Valois, and
she became queen of France a year
later; Catherine remained interested in
Mary’s affairs long after François died
and she claimed the Scottish throne.
Quilligan argues that her account
of a united group of women rulers is
a feminist corrective to generations
of scholarship that has privileged the
queens’ enmities over their gestures
of solidarity, and the grotesque over
their political accomplishments. David
Hume, for example, flattened the rela-
tionship between Elizabeth and Mary
Stuart into one of “many little passions
and narrow jealousies.” Jules Michelet
called Catherine de’ Medici the “mag-
got that crawled out of Italy’s tomb.”
Popular culture has been even crueler,
playing up the trifling jealousies and
petty hatreds of silly women with too
much power and too much time on
their hands. In Quilligan’s telling, how-
ever, the sisterhood of queens was not
so much a monstrous regiment as a
“prudente Gynecocratie”— the French
poet Pierre de Ronsard’s term for Eu-
rope’s rule by female sovereigns.The problem with this story of sis-
terhood is that the queens did, in
fact, do some monstrous things to one
another— none more so than Eliza-
beth, who ordered the execution of
her “sister queen” and “twin sun,”
Mary, Queen of Scots. After François
died and Mary returned to Scotland,
she wed Henry Darnley, an egomani-
acal drunk who was blown up by reb-
els in 1567; she then possibly eloped
with—but was more likely kidnapped
and raped by—James Hepburn, Earlof Bothwell, a nobleman at her court.
The following year, when Scottish no-
bles rebelled against the crown, Mary
fled to England. Because, as a great-
granddaughter of Henry VII, she had a
legitimate claim to the English throne,
Elizabeth kept her imprisoned for eigh-
teen years in country houses in Derby-
shire. In 1586, after Elizabeth was
presented with forged evidence sug-
gesting Mary’s complicity in Darnley’s
assassination and participation in plots
against Elizabeth’s rule, Mary’s agree-
able incarceration had to end. She was
brought to trial for treason and sen-
tenced to death; Elizabeth signed her
execution warrant. It took three swings
of the axe to behead her.
An execution may seem incontro-
vertible evidence of Elizabeth’s enmity
toward Mary. Certainly past genera-
tions of historians (and poets, play-
wrights, and film directors) have seen
the execution as the culmination of
long- held jealousies and resentments.
Early in Mary’s reign, the Scottish am-
bassador visiting Elizabeth’s court re-
corded that she enviously asked him to
describe Mary’s appearance, dancing
abilities, and musical talents— a thorny
test of his diplomatic skills. In 1566,
when Mary gave birth to a son— the fu-
ture James VI of Scotland and James
I of England— Elizabeth is reported
to have cried in despair, “The queen
of Scots is this day lighter of a fair son,
and I am but a barren stock!”
Quilligan asks us to reconsider. Soon
after deploring her own barrenness,
Elizabeth sent Mary a solid gold bap-
tismal font encrusted with jewels— an
exorbitant gift that makes it difficult
to characterize the Virgin Queen as
straightforwardly jealous of Mary’s
marriage, fertility, and assured line
of succession. Elizabeth gave James
his baptismal name, too, and seemed
to have thought of herself as a second
mother to him, writing that he was “our
child, born of our own body.” Quilligan
places the blame for Mary’s execution
chiefly with William Cecil, Elizabeth’scounselor, who contrived evidence of
Mary’s plots against her reign and sent
Mary’s death warrant to her prison
cell before Elizabeth could reconsider.
Elizabeth evidently regretted the exe-
cution, writing to James, “I would you
knew though not felt the extreme dolor
that overwhelms my mind for that mis-
erable accident which far contrary to
my meaning hath befallen.”
That “miserable accident” had grave
implications, as Elizabeth knew well.
Though Elizabeth signed the execu-
tion warrant, Mary Stuart had been
tried openly for treason. A civil court
had claimed new powers to pass judg-
ment on a reigning queen. At the
same time, Quilligan explains, the pa-
triarchal Reformation posed its own
threats to female rule— and, indeed,
to the monarchy itself. John Knox’s
criticism of the monstrous regiment of
women expanded over time to become
a radical rejection of the divine right of
kings. For Knox, a legitimate king was
not born but elected by his Protestant
subjects, who were themselves moved
by God— and so they could also “un-
elect” him, in Knox’s phrase. Elizabeth
banned him from England for saying
so and ordered a sermon to be deliv-
ered that preached that “Christ taught
us plainly that even wicked rulers have
their power and authority from God.”
But with Mary’s execution, Knox’s
radical dream that subjects could “un-
elect” a monarch came closer to reality.
Queens became newly subject to
their subjects, the nature of sovereign
power transformed. A sign appeared
briefly near Mary Stuart’s tomb:By one and the same wicked sen-
tence is both Mary, Queen of Scots
doomed to a natural death, and
all surviving kings, being made
as common people, are subject to
a civil death. A new and unexam-
pled kind of tomb is here extant,
wherein the living are enclosed
with the dead: for know, that with
the sacred ashes of saint Mary here
lieth violate and prostrate the maj-
esty of all kings and princes.Sixty- two years later Parliament voted
to execute Mary Stuart’s grandson
King Charles I. What had begun as a
critique of female rule had become a
real and future tomb for sovereignty
itself.When Women Ruled the World de-
parts from traditional political narra-
tives of the queens’ tangled reigns to
pay special attention to the gifts they
exchanged. Drawing on feminist an-
thropology, Quilligan argues that royal
gifts concentrated wealth, power, and
prestige privately within dynastic fam-
ilies, and helped women claim political
authority in a patriarchal world. She
suggests that patterns of female gift-
giving stand in stark contrast to gift-
giving by men: men’s gifts forced the
reciprocal return of another gift, were
given in public, and often took the form
of an exchange of women. Gifts thus
help to illuminate the bonds between
givers and recipients that, Quilligan
claims, previously escaped historians’The ‘Armada Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I, circa 1588National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, LondonMaglaque 25 27 .indd 25 3 / 23 / 22 3 : 23 PM