The New York Review of Books - USA (2022-04-21)

26 The New York Review

notice. For example, at the age of

eleven Elizabeth Tudor made a beau-

tiful book for her stepmother, Kather-

ine Parr: she translated Marguerite de

Navarre’s poetry into English, copied

out the text in her own hand, and em-

broidered a cover on which she show-

cased Katherine’s initials. Elizabeth’s

gift, Quilligan suggests, helped her re-

join the Tudor dynasty after the tumult

of her mother’s death and her father’s

remarriage.

Textiles carried special significance

for female rulers. Mary Stuart gave

Elizabeth a red silk petticoat that she

embroidered herself with silver thread;

the French ambassador observed that

Elizabeth seemed “much softened”

toward Mary after receiving it. Cather-

ine de’ Medici commissioned a monu-

mental tapestry cycle and gave it to her

granddaughter Christina of Lorraine,

who, when she became Grand Duch-

ess of Tuscany, carried them back to

the Medici ancestral home in Florence

along with the rest of her dowry, which

included rock crystal, pearl- studded

bed hangings, and 50,000 scudi (es-

timated to be $1 million in today’s

money). Quilligan writes that Christi-

na’s opulent gifts “would have demon-

strated, as her grandmother would have

wished them to do, her wealth, lineage,

and royal dynastic connections.”

An exceptionally beautiful pear-

shaped pearl, known as La Peregrina,

“makes visible the inheritance of

blood... through the ages.” Found by

an enslaved African working in a Pan-

amanian fishery, it entered Philip II’s

collection in the 1560s. In a portrait

painted in 1605, Philip’s daughter- in-

law, Margaret of Austria, delicately

strokes the gem with slender fingers.

The pearl was beloved by generations

of Habsburg royal women until Napo-

leon conquered Spain in 1808 and took

La Peregrina with him when he left. (It

was eventually sold to an English fam-

ily, from whom Richard Burton bought

it for Elizabeth Taylor in 1969. La Per-

egrina went missing once in their suite

in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas; Liz was

quite upset until she discovered it in

her dog’s mouth.) Elizabeth I liked the

look of La Peregrina but didn’t want to

have to marry Philip II to get it, so she

bought her own nearly identical drop

pearl, shown in the Armada portrait of

1588 (see illustration on page 25). Lest

anyone forget that she was a virgin, the

pearl dangles from a gaudy pink bow

tightly knotted over her crotch.

For a contemporary parallel, Quilli-

gan asks us to think of Kate Middleton,

who wears Diana Spencer’s ring, or of

Meghan Markle, who wears a ring set

with two of Diana’s diamonds. Gifts

of pearls and diamonds illustrate “how

deeply we seem to know that female

agency is inherited from generations of

forebears.” Maybe it’s vulgar to think

instead of Princess Michael of Kent,

lips pursed in the front seat of an SUV

on the way to lunch with Markle, a

glittering seventeenth- century black-

amoor brooch pinned to her breast.

Royal women know the communicative

power of jewels— and that bloodlines

of rule and bloodlines of race are kin-

dred. While jewels can create dynastic

webs of sisterhood, they can also be

used to mutilate them.

The centerpiece of Quilligan’s ob-

ject histories is the so- called prison

embroideries made by Mary, Queen

of Scots. While trapped in the Shrews-

bury estates, far from Scotland and far

from the sea, Mary designed and sewed

elaborate tapestry panels with her com-

panion, Bess of Hardwick. After see-

ing Mary and asking how she passed

the time, Elizabeth’s envoy reported,

“She said that all the day she wrought

with her needle, and that the diversity

of the colours made the work seem less

tedious, and continued so long at it till

very pain did make her to give over.”

The result was more than a hundred

tapestry panels that reworked illus-

trations from natural history books,

scenes from classical literature, and

motifs from emblem books in expertly

plied needle and thread.

This was not just the busywork of a

bored prisoner. Historians have long

seen Mary’s embroideries as a partic-

ularly female form of defiance, remi-

niscent of Ovid’s account of Philomela,

who weaves a tapestry to tell of her

rape by Tereus, after he cut out her

tongue. In one tapestry panel, an or-

ange tabby cat wearing a crown bats at

a gray mouse. Elizabeth, of course, was

a famed redhead; when Mary was exe-

cuted, the axeman held her head aloft

before the crowd, only for the head to

slip out of her wig and tumble, reveal-

ing her gray hair. Another panel shows a

phoenix rising from its ashes, framed by

Mary’s initials, a representation of her

motto “In my end is my beginning.” In

the Noble Women of the Ancient World

series that Mary made with Bess, Mary

is depicted as the figure of Chastity,

flanked by a unicorn— a visual claim for

her purity, contrary to her scandalous

reputation. Not only were the tapestries

a distraction from her imprisonment,

Quilligan writes, but they were “inalien-

able objects of political resistance.”

But are the embroideries so transpar-

ent a window onto Mary’s intentions?

Mary and Bess created the panels in

collaboration with male and female

household servants, with visiting aris-

tocratic daughters and granddaugh-

ters, and with the professional male

embroiderers who joined the house-

hold to complete special silk appliqué

work. Similarly, the gorgeous tapestries

that Catherine de’ Medici “almost cer-

tainly” commissioned weren’t made

by her hand or in her household, but

in professional workshops in the Low

Countries. Quilligan suggests that

Catherine intended the Valois tapes-

tries to be redemptive, to project an

image of tolerance and peace after the

catastrophe of the Saint Bartholomew’s

Day Massacre in France in 1572; they

showed the Catholic de Guise family

and the Huguenot Bourbon families

peacefully reconciled. But the Prot-

estant weavers in the north erased

Charles IX from the design, in an act

of artistic retribution for his role in

the massacre. The textiles are not un-

mediated expressions of the queens’

intentions, then, but objects wrought

collectively and cooperatively by men

and women across social classes and

confessional identities— and are all the

more fascinating for it. And yet these

complexities are relegated to the foot-

notes of Quilligan’s story.

Quilligan wants us to reconsider

these queens not only as affectionate

allies but as uniquely able to bring

peace to Europe. Elizabeth and Cath-

erine de’ Medici, for example, settled

the Treaty of Troyes in 1564, achieving

a lasting peace between England and

France that had eluded previous gener-

ations of kings. The French poet Ron-

sard commemorated the treaty:

For truly, that which the kings of

France and England... did not

know how to do, two queens...

not only undertook but perfected:

showing by such a magnanimous

act, how the female sex, previously

denied rule, is by its generous nature

completely worthy of command.

But were these queens uniquely tol-

erant rulers during a uniquely violent

century? Proving this is a steeper task.

Bloody Mary burned nearly three hun-

dred Protestants, including two infants,

at the stake during her reign. Catherine

de’ Medici also poses a problem. Once

thought to have masterminded the

Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre— a

monthlong spectacle of death in which

thousands of Protestants were mur-

dered by their Catholic neighbors—

Catherine has been remembered as the

wicked Reine Mère. Quilligan follows

the more moderate modern consensus

that Catherine did not strategize the

mass murder of French Protestants,

even though she did plot the bungled

assassination that helped to ignite

the fuse of Saint Bartholomew’s Day.

Particularly in the midst of religious

schism, early modern queenship re-

quired the use of violence.

And even if women were inclined

toward peace, was this some inherent

virtue of their sex, or a result of con-

temporary gendered expectations of

royal rule? These questions are left

unanswered. Certainly the queens

wanted to be perceived as peaceful;

Elizabeth worked diligently to portray

her feminine desire for peace. In her

conclusion, Quilligan celebrates Eliza-

beth, writing that she won the loyalty

of her subjects by her “constancy...

by her bravery, her intelligence, and

frankly, by the beautiful delivery, the

wit, the Good Queen Bess simplicity

and honesty and soaring style of her

speeches.” It’s true that she knew how

to give an excellent speech. The same

Good Queen Bess also ordered seven

hundred commoners killed in the north

after a rebellion in 1569 by Catholic

aristocrats, the earls of Westmorland

and Northumberland, even though the

earls had received no popular support.

Queens like Elizabeth are revered

figures of feminist history and popular

culture because they possessed power,

a rare feminine asset. But power has

its own history. The agency beloved of

twenty- first- century liberal feminism is

not the same as sixteenth- century sov-

ereignty. Invested in a ruler through

an accident of birth, sovereignty was

maintained as much through state-

authorized violence as through con-

sent. Quilligan is at pains to explain

away the violence: Elizabeth’s exe-

cution of Mary, for instance, was the

lamentable consequence of the power

struggles of men. The queens believed

in religious toleration, except when

they didn’t, and then it was the male

figures of the patriarchal Reformation

who were responsible for upsetting the

queens’ peaceful instincts. And yet we

cannot explain away the killing, be-

cause it was fundamental to the mean-

ing of sovereignty in early modern

times— even when women signed the

warrants.

In a laudable effort to address gen-

erations of misogynistic writing about

these queens, Quilligan has empha-

sized their virtues: their sisterhood,

peaceful reigns, and artistic abilities.

In her telling, the women who ruled the

world were highly educated; hyperliter-

ate; skilled horsewomen, dancers, and

musicians; inspirational speakers; deft

politicians. They were at times warm

friends and affectionate sisters. They

were independent and defiant. They

were frequently tolerant. But when we

refashion queens as proto- feminists— a

kind of sorority of early modern girl-

bosses— we lose sight of the complexi-

ties, and indeed the atrocities, involved

in being a sovereign. This is not to deny

their accomplishments as politicians,

patrons, or artists. But without a con-

sideration of the violence that secured

their power, we are left with squeaky-

clean stories of brave and good and vir-

tuous queens— the queens of fairy tale,

not history. Q

A panel embroidered by Mary, Queen of Scots, while she was imprisoned in Derbyshire,

England, circa 1569 –1584 ; the cat and mouse are thought to represent Elizabeth I and Mary

Royal Collect

ion Trust /Her Majesty Queen El

izabeth II 2022 /Palace of Holyroodhouse, Ed

inburgh

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