Introduction

‘Famous have been the reigns of our Queens. Some of the greatest periods in our history have unfolded under their sceptre’

Winston Spencer Churchill, 1952

 

‘THE ENGLISH LIKE Queens,’ the old Duchess of Coburg remarked cheerfully when she received news of the birth of her granddaughter, the future Queen Victoria. Indeed, by the early nineteenth century the English greeted the accession of a young female sovereign with relief. Victoria’s sex was very much to her advantage. Even in 1936, the year of the abdication crisis, the nation contemplated the eventual succession of the young Princess Elizabeth with happy anticipation, assuming she would emulate the qualities of her great-great-grandmother Victoria, while, in the aftermath of the Second World War, it was optimistically believed she would recreate a new Elizabethan age.

It had not always been so. England had no Salic law, barring a woman from the throne, but in practice the idea of female sovereignty was anathema. It was assumed that a female succession would plunge the country into civil war, as, indeed, it had when in the early twelfth century Henry I had died, leaving the crown to his daughter, Matilda. Although Henry had had his barons swear to accept her, and Matilda, who had been married to the Holy Roman Emperor, was no ingénue, the hereditary principle was not yet established, and it was easy for her cousin Stephen – one of the boys, as it were, and not even the eldest son – to snatch the crown.

‘Great by birth, greater by marriage, greatest in her offspring’ ran the epitaph for Matilda, who was never crowned or anointed queen. Nor did she ever call herself Queen. Possibly she thought the term, derived from the Saxon cwen, inappropriate, since hitherto it had applied only to queens consort, or possibly she hesitated to call herself Queen before a coronation had taken place. At any rate, the title she used was Lady of the English. There can be no clearer indication than her epitaph that as a woman she was seen merely as a vessel through whom the right to the crown would pass from one male to another, from her father Henry I to her son, Henry II. As she was a woman, it was assumed she would be unable to fulfil a king’s primary function – that of active military leader – even though for nineteen years she courageously and determinedly fought her cause.

Four centuries later Henry VIII was confronted with the same problem, since his wife had failed – as he saw it – to provide him with a son. In theory, his daughter Mary could have fulfilled the same role as Matilda, a vessel to be used for the perpetuation of a masculine dynasty, had Henry married her off early enough. Indeed, Henry’s own claim to the throne derived from two women: his grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, and his mother, Elizabeth, representing the rival claims of Lancaster and York, both of whom had ceded their rights to the men. Unfortunately, Henry’s mind was far too conventional to accept the idea of a female succession and he failed to see the possibilities before him.

For someone as macho as Henry VIII, a daughter was a dent on his manhood, a deep injury to his self-esteem and hence to the glory of the monarchy, of which he was the personification. He would overturn Church and state to get a son, but, ironically, he was still succeeded – after the six-year minority of Edward VI – by two daughters. If the first failed to confound the prejudice against female rule, the second, Elizabeth I, was arguably the greatest sovereign in our history.

Contrast the childhoods of the first two Tudor queens regnant, Mary I and Elizabeth I, with the cocooned existence of the future Elizabeth II in the twentieth century, recalled in the saccharine account of Crawfie, her governess. Henry VIII threatened to chop off his daughter Mary’s head if she did not submit to his will, declaring her mother’s marriage ‘by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful’ and herself a bastard. By the time she was three, Elizabeth’s status had changed from inheritrix of England to bastard; at thirteen, under suspicion of treason, she pitted her wits against the Council, and won; by the time she was twenty-one she was her sister’s prisoner in the Tower, under threat of death. Their cousin, Lady Jane Grey, proclaimed Queen but never crowned and anointed, was only seventeen when she went to the scaffold, the innocent victim of ambitious and unscrupulous schemes to usurp the crown in her name.

Mary I and Elizabeth I came to the throne at a time of enormous religious upheaval. Everything that had brought comfort in previous centuries – the age-old traditions of the Church, which embraced kings, nobles and commoners in the whole body of Christendom from the cradle to the grave and beyond – had been stripped away, just as the reassuringly familiar figure of the King was replaced by a woman. How to assuage the anxiety that female rule generated, and how were these female sovereigns to overcome the drawbacks of their sex?

A tradition reaching back to Aristotle held that women were morally and physically inferior to men and therefore unfit to rule. The prejudice was strongly embedded in Christianity. The traditional Pauline doctrine of the Church – ‘I gyve no licence to a woman to be a teacher nor to have authorite of the man, but to be in silence’ – had applied to queens consort as well as commoners. Indeed, it was Matilda’s authoritative personality that earned her the reputation of being ‘proud’ and alienated the Londoners, whose support was crucial if she was to be crowned. The preponderance of queens regnant and female regents in the mid sixteenth century, in England, Scotland, France and the Low Countries, coinciding with intense religious conflict, fuelled the debate.

John Knox’s bitter diatribe, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, was a vicious attack on female rule generally, although specifically targeted at three Catholic queens, among them Mary Tudor. ‘It is a thinge most repugnant in nature, that women rule and governe over men,’ he ranted, ‘that a woman promoted to sit in the seate of God, that is, to teache, to judge or to reigne above man, is a monster in nature, contumelie to God, and a thing most repugnant to his will and ordinance.’ In Knox’s world, authority was equated with maleness; femaleness and rule were mutually contradictory.

The anomaly of female rule, for which there was no precedent, was partially addressed in England in the year of Mary I’s accession with the passing of the Act Concerning Regal Power, which recognized the authority of a queen regnant by parliamentary statute. Parliament declared that the rule of Mary, and of future queens regnant, was as authoritative as that of a male monarch. The Act not only declared a queen regnant equal to a king, but also – radically – a woman, albeit a particular one, the equal of a man. It called the office ‘kingly’ and authorized a female sovereign to do anything a king could do ‘as King’. This may be interpreted as meaning that a queen regnant was legally a king, that is, male, for the purpose of ruling. It appeared to dismiss all consideration of the alleged natural inferiority of women, perhaps because the crown is a corporation and not subject to the defects of mortality; that is, the monarch has a second, and wholly functional, body politic.

This medieval notion of the King’s two bodies – the one immortal, part of the enduring body politic, the other mortal and open to human frailties – was useful in defining a female sovereign’s dual role as ruler and wife. For the purpose of governing, Mary was a magistrate, superior to her earthly husband; as a woman and as a wife, in her mortal body, she was subordinate to her husband, whose gender lent him superiority. Elizabeth I would adopt the theory of the two bodies and exploit it for her own purposes. Her ‘natural body’ was that of a woman, subject to the weaknesses of her sex; her ‘body politic’ was that of a king, carrying the strength and masculine spirit of the best of her male predecessors: ‘and though I am a woman, I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had.’

Patriarchal societies regard an anomalously powerful woman with suspicion, disquiet and revulsion – or with intense fascination, awe and devotion. In order to function successfully in a man’s world, Elizabeth realized she would have to present herself as an extraordinary woman, not just an honorary male, but someone who could transcend nature itself by assuming a dual sexual identity as both king and queen. Yes, she had ‘the body but of a weak and feeble woman’, she admitted, but she also had ‘the heart and stomach of a king’. In truth, Robert Cecil concluded at the end of her life, she was both ‘more than a man and less than a woman’. Elizabeth’s queenship was pure theatre, but the role she played, de-sexed and elevated above the norm, took an enormous amount of ingenuity. It was inevitable, perhaps, that as her powers began to wane in her last decade there should be a resurgence of misogyny, manifesting itself in an increase of witchcraft trials.

Elizabeth’s success made queenship respectable, but there was little gratitude. ‘If by chance she should die,’ the French ambassador commented during the last decade of her reign – a time of war, poor harvests, inflation and impatience with an old woman’s rule – ‘it is certain that the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman.’ History proved him wrong, of course. While the English nobility have rigidly adhered to the practice of primogeniture, whereby estates pass through the male line, so respectable has queenship become that the present royal family’s Way Ahead Committee is discussing the possibility of altering the rules of inheritance to allow the monarch’s eldest child, regardless of gender, to succeed.

Although Elizabeth made concessions to male discomfort at being commanded by a woman by making frequent references to her ‘womanly weakness’ – usually an implicit invitation to view her otherwise – succeeding queens regnant were both less brilliant and less alarming. During the seventeenth century patriarchal sentiments hardened. The publication of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha in 1680 ensured that Mary II would be forever entrapped in familial models and expected patterns of behaviour. She has always been judged as an appendage to the men in her life – as too bad a daughter and too good a wife – rather than on her own merits.

In a dual monarchy unique in English history, Mary accepted without question the subordinate role, even though she, not William, had the superior claim to the throne. When Parliament offered them joint sovereignty at a ceremony in the Banqueting House in February 1689, William answered for both of them, while Mary kept silent. Her role was to look good and curtsey. A natural diffidence, partly attributable to her limited education, and unquestioning acceptance of patriarchal ideas of female inferiority, meant that she underestimated her own abilities as a shrewd political operator and has in turn been underrated by posterity.

The demeanour of Anne, Victoria and Elizabeth II at their accession evoked the chivalric protectiveness of their male counsellors. Elizabeth I had shown that an image of feminine vulnerability, properly exploited, could arouse the gallantry and loyalty of the gentlemen of England. Less artfully, but just as effectively, Anne addressed her first Parliament in her melodious voice, blushing as she spoke, which some considered very becoming in a woman. ‘Never any woman spoke more audibly or with better grace,’ one member noted approvingly.

When she ascended the throne after her grandfather and two uncles – a lunatic, a profligate and a buffoon – the eighteen-year-old Victoria’s youthful femininity disarmed the monarchy’s fiercest critics. She was a virgin with decorative appeal. The twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth II, with her beauty, serenity and amenability, inspired the same urge to place her on a pedestal. ‘All the film people in the world, if they scoured the globe, could not have found anyone so suited to the part,’ her elderly Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, marvelled. Neither Victoria nor Elizabeth II had any hesitation in using her femininity where it served her purposes to do so. Indeed, Victoria was highly skilled at exploiting the chivalrous instincts of her ministers to shield her whenever there was something she did not want to do.

Five of England’s six queens regnant reigned before other women gained a political voice or the vote. The sixth, Elizabeth II, had been on the throne twenty-seven years before the election of the first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. A queen regnant is an anomaly, an exception: all six believe they have God’s divine sanction to rule, marking them apart, especially from other women. The presence of a female sovereign is not the signal for other women to start wielding power – far from it. By presenting herself as an extraordinary woman, Elizabeth I reinforced the inferior position of other women. In the late nineteenth century Victoria was vociferous in her hostility to the very notion of female advancement, telling Gladstone: ‘The Queen is most anxious to enlist every one who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of “Women’s Rights”, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent.’

In spite of wielding a power unique among women, queens regnant were prevented by their sex from active engagement in war. Traditionally, in the pre-coronation procession a king rode on horseback, symbolizing his readiness as a military leader. Mary I and, subsequently, Elizabeth I, appeared in the procession in a litter rather than on horseback; they wore white cloth of gold and went ‘in their hair’ – the symbols of purity and fertility adopted by queens consort. Her long hair worn loose reassured the onlookers that the queen regnant intended to marry and prove fruitful.

Like Elizabeth I, Anne was a Protestant queen engaged in a war with the most powerful Catholic king on earth. She had at her service the greatest military genius of the age in John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, the hero of Blenheim. Less than forty years later, George II was the last British king who actually went into battle, at Dettingen. During the Crimean War Victoria, who was proud to be a soldier’s daughter, confessed: ‘I regret exceedingly not to be a man and to be able to fight in the war … I consider that there is no finer death for a man than on the battlefield.’ She was more belligerent than her ministers. A year or so before her death at eighty-one, during the Boer War, she was proclaiming: ‘We are not interested in the possibility of defeat. It does not exist.’

Elizabeth II is head of the armed forces, but as a constitutional monarch she is there, as Walter Bagehot described in the nineteenth century, ‘to be consulted, to encourage and to warn’: she is powerless to prevent war if her government decides on it. So discreet has she been about the content of her weekly audiences with her Prime Ministers that we can only speculate as to her views on the Suez debacle of 1956 or the Iraq War.

If queens regnant cannot be leaders in war, they are identified with the nation and its successes, and their patriotism is crucial. When she addressed her troops at Tilbury, Elizabeth I boasted that not only did she have ‘the heart and stomach of a king’, but ‘of a king of England too’ and took ‘foul scorn that Parma or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm’. Mary II confessed to Sophie of Hanover that ‘a woman is but a very useless and helpless creature … in times of war’, but discovered in herself ‘an old English inclination to the love and honour of the nation’. Like Elizabeth, Anne could boast she was ‘mere English’. ‘As I know my heart to be entirely English, I can very sincerely assure you there is not anything you can expect or desire from me which I shall not be ready to do for the happiness and prosperity of England.’ Victoria was fiercely patriotic and a determined advocate of British interests. ‘I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a nation,’ she admitted.

Traditionally a queen’s first duty has been to marry and produce an heir. Only Elizabeth I declined to do so. It took a very bold and courageous woman in the sixteenth century to elect not to marry at all. Elizabeth confessed with almost modern insight: ‘There is a strong idea in the world that a woman cannot live unless she is married, or at all events that if she refrains from marriage she does so for some bad reason.’

A queen who would not be a wife and mother had to become something else. Elizabeth made great play of being married to England, of being both spouse and mother of her people. ‘To conclude, I am already bound unto a husband, which is the kingdom of England,’ she told a parliamentary delegation urging her to marry. Consciously or otherwise, she found she could rely on her sex to tap into the emotional power behind the image of wife-mother, particularly the most sacred mother of all, the Virgin Mary. The bejewelled statue of the Virgin, so abruptly cast out at the Reformation, was replaced by the gorgeously bejewelled and attired figure of the Queen at court. Like the Virgin before her she was carried in procession for her people to worship. Once she was no longer a fertile queen, her chastity became closely associated with England’s impregnability; her virginity was the guarantee of the nation’s welfare.

How does a queen reconcile her supremacy with a husband who must walk two steps behind her? The constitution does not recognize the consort of a queen. There is no defined role for him; he must forge his own. Victoria’s Albert decided to subsume his identity in hers, as a strong husband manager who would not compete for attention with his wife. ‘Whilst a female sovereign has a great many disadvantages in comparison with a king,’ he conceded, ‘yet, if she is married and her husband understands and does his duty, her position … has many compensating advantages, and, in the long run, will be found to be even stronger than that of a male sovereign.’

This did not mean that Albert was going to accept Victoria as he found her. First he had to break her will and mould her into an image of becoming womanhood. Not only was the carefully contrived image of wife and mother misleading, disguising the fact that Victoria exerted a masculine power in government, but it ensured that other women would remain in the domestic sphere. While Albert was alive, Victoria seemed to collude in her own diminishment: ‘I am every day more convinced that we women, if we are to be good women, feminine and amiable and domestic, are not fitted to reign.’ She had become dangerously dependent on Albert, so much so that her long seclusion after his death precipitated the most dangerous swing towards republicanism since she had come to the throne.

Motherhood raises the status of a queen, but queens are as much prisoners of biology as other women. The pressure to produce an heir was often overwhelming. In November 1554 Mary I sat under the cloth of estate in the Great Chamber at Whitehall ‘richly apparelled, and her belly laid out, that all men might see that she was with child’. It was a tragic illusion. So desperate was she to have a child that she suffered one of the most public and humiliating cases of pseudocyesis – phantom pregnancy – in history. In losing control of her body, she exposed the person of the sovereign as all too fallible and lowered the prestige of the monarchy. Anne was equally unlucky. She had seventeen pregnancies and not one of her children survived her; most of them died in the womb in the later stages of pregnancy or in the first few days of life.

Victoria loathed the whole business of childbearing. ‘I think these ladies who are always enceinte quite disgusting,’ she wrote to her eldest daughter, ‘it is more like a rabbit or a guinea pig than anything else and really it is not very nice.’ She had nine children herself, the birth of the last two being eased by the administration of ‘the blessed chloroform’. If, hitherto, Christian society had regarded women’s suffering in childbirth as their just punishment for Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden – ‘I will greatlie multiplie thy sorowe and thy conception, with sorowe shall thou beare thy children’ – Queen Victoria’s approval of the new panacea made it respectable for other women to follow suit. But like other ‘respectable’ women, Victoria had no knowledge of contraception. Could she not just have fun in bed, she asked her doctor after the birth of her last child, without the consequences? Only Elizabeth II emerged fit and well enough to ask for her boxes within a day or two of giving birth.

With or without children, queens are mothers of their people. When Mary I addressed the Londoners at Guildhall during Wyatt’s rebellion she did so as their ‘Queen and mother’, ‘not for having borne you as my children, but full of more than motherly love towards you since the day you chose me as your Queen and mistress’. Elizabeth I assured Parliament that ‘though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have any a more mother than I mean to be unto you all.’ Anne, who had ruined her health in a forlorn attempt to give England an heir, would instead become the mother of her people. Her coronation sermon was preached on Isaiah 49: 23: ‘And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers.’ As long as she lived, she promised her First Lord of the Treasury, it ‘shall be my endeavour to make my country and my friends easy’.

Victoria’s apotheosis as Queen-Empress at the time of the Golden Jubilee owed a great deal to her carefully nurtured image as the imperial mother-figure to which millions of people of diverse races and religions could relate, as well as being in her own family the matriarch whom so many of Europe’s crowned heads called simply ‘Grandmama’.

Like mothers for their children, queens were suffused with love for their people, giving expression to that love in a way that kings did not. ‘There is no jewel, be it never so rich a price, which I set before this jewel – I mean your loves,’ Elizabeth I said in her Golden Speech, ‘and though God has raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown: that I have reigned with your loves.’

For all Elizabeth’s fine words, however, the legacy of childless queens was unease. Doubts about the efficacy of female rule rear their head whenever insecurity creeps in. It is no coincidence that towards the end of Mary I’s reign there were rumours of ‘sightings’ of the boy-King Edward VI, arising from subconscious longing for the return of a king. Resentment at Elizabeth’s refusal to name a successor gave rise to malicious slanders about her: that she and Leicester had children and that she went on progress every summer to give birth to those children. Similarly, Victoria’s ‘invisibility’ during her widowhood fuelled the John Brown scandal. Rumour had it that the Highlander was the Queen’s stallion, that they were secretly married and that they had a child together.

There is one moral standard for men, another for women. Kings are applauded for their mistresses, but no suggestion of scandal must touch a queen. Just as queens have to be exemplars of moral probity, so too, like women in the workplace generally, do they have to work twice as hard as men. All six queens have been hard-working, diligent, conscientious and dutiful. They believe they have been entrusted by God with a special responsibility. ‘I know also that I must seek to discharge myself of that great burden that God hath laid upon me,’ Elizabeth I declared, ‘for of them to whom much is committed, much is required.’

Long before women had their own careers, Victoria was frustrated by the conflicting demands of her role as queen and as the mother of a large, fatherless family. ‘And for a woman alone to be head of so large a family and at the same time reigning Sovereign is I can assure you almost more than human strength can bear,’ she complained. By placing her duty to the country before her children, Elizabeth II perhaps fell short as a mother when her children were young. When she came to the throne, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes passed a resolution urging that the nation ‘should endeavour not to overwork our beloved young Queen, remembering that she has her duties also as a wife and mother’, while the Lancet argued that she should be able to put her family life first, only attending the most important ceremonial occasions. She showed no inclination to take the advice.

The Queen is the embodiment of the nation, the universal representative of society, and it is in her we see our better selves reflected. The divorces of three of her four children and the Prince of Wales’s admission of adultery on national television meant that the House of Windsor could no longer sell itself as the model family. Daylight had indeed been let in on the magic.

The most photographed woman in the world, Elizabeth II has been with most of us all our lives. She is ubiquitous. When she is referred to in the United States, it is simply as the Queen, in Germany Die Königin, in France La Reine; there is no need to specify the country. Like Victoria’s, her head is on the coinage, the banknotes and the postage stamps. Unlike Victoria, she has lived her life under the relentless gaze of the camera lens. Her coronation in 1953 was the first time millions of people around the world saw the crown placed on the head of a queen; she was the first sovereign to be crowned, literally, ‘in the sight of the people’, through the new, intrusive medium of television. Elizabeth I had initiated the walkabout; this Elizabeth was in the living room as well. We probably see her face more often than we do that of our own mothers. She has even entered our dreams.

Longevity helps. Had Victoria died in 1870 her reign would have been considered in no way remarkable, perhaps even a bit of a failure; while in our own time Elizabeth II has weathered the worst – her annus horribilis in 1992 and the public backlash after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 – and seems to be entering a more serene ninth decade. As a queen who is politically impartial, she may well be judged one of the most politically accomplished women of her time.

England’s queens regnant have presided over some of the greatest triumphs and events in our history. Three of them have given their name to an era. They have encouraged the growth of overseas empire, inspired cultural achievement, made possible a glorious and bloodless revolution, and almost always been equated with good government. A queen who became a queen-empress reigned over the greatest global empire the world has ever seen. Even after an era of imperial disintegration, the present Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is Queen of sixteen other countries and Head of a Commonwealth comprising fifty-three countries – a family of nations she has helped shape and nurtured with almost maternal love. If there is a threat to her sovereignty from the encroaching European Union or incipient republicanism, she sails on unfalteringly, her majesty unimpaired, her sense of duty undiminished, so much so that any discussions about ending the monarchy are put on hold while she lives.

Today, more than four centuries after England gained its first female sovereign, queenship remains one of our greatest assets.