Women of thrones

Sarah Dunant
NYT Syndicate
The Siren temptress Anne Boleyn. Bloody Mary Tudor. Virgin Elizabeth. Mary, Queen of Scots. And the bulldog queen mother of France, Catherine de Medici. The stories of these charismatic 16th-century royals have long had our bookshelves groaning.
Enter the British journalist turned historian Sarah Gristwood. Her Game of Queens (a nod to the pulling power of George R R Martin as well as to the chessboard) sets out to widen our vision. Her subtitle is more nuanced:"The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe." She begins the century early, with Queen Isabella of Castile uniting Spain through marriage, then goes on to highlight Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy, both regents rather than rulers in their own right, who helped broker a much-needed peace between Spain and France.
So far, so persuasive. But the political and dynastic map of early-16th-century Europe is eye-wateringly complex, and as the story jumps back and forth across countries, trying to weave a line of power between women who were often more pawns than queens, even the most dedicated reader risks getting lost in a forest of family trees. There is a detailed chronology, accompanied by charts of dynastic structures and a 40-strong list of dramatis personae, but it's difficult to ignore the fact that popular history works best when it keeps us turning the pages, not flipping back to find our bearings.
The landscape clears as the familiar Tudor soap opera begins. Twelve-year-old Anne Boleyn is the first one we meet, and she pops up regularly, sometimes where history offers no direct proof of her presence. Like Katherine of Aragon before her, Anne was a woman who could be said to have"made" Europe ” but by failure rather than success. Forget queens, this was a game of wombs. However smart a seductress, Anne would never have bagged the crown (and sparked the break with Rome) had Katherine given Henry the male heir he so desperately needed. And it was her own failure on that score that signed Anne's death warrant. As an example of female power, it's the most painful and flawed sort.
But Gristwood goes further: She claims that this"age of queens" produced"a sisterhood that recognised both their own bonds as women and their ability to exercise power in a specifically feminine way." Did female rulers really feel sisterhood? While there are moments they might claim it ” Mary Stuart and Elizabeth could be lavish with the concept in their letters ” beneath the obligatory courtesy there's little evidence of any nascent feminism.
A woman ruler's loyalty was to country (and family), not gender. Four and a half centuries on, Britain's Theresa May and Scotland's Nicola Sturgeon are largely still playing the same game.
There is one area where Gristwood's thesis does bite. Sixteenth-century Europe was violently torn asunder by the birth of Protestantism. Male rulers often favoured cutting out the"gangrene" of heresy. Women, for a while at least, tended to err on the side of tolerance. The Roman Catholic Catherine de Medici and the Protestant Jeanne d'Albret of Navarre might have been enemies in faith, yet they did their best to keep the peace. (D'Albret, a worthy addition to the female canon, deserves to be better known.) Elizabeth famously chose not to"open windows into men's souls."
However, when the going got tough, the women could be as ruthless as the men. These days, history is a little kinder to Catherine over the St Bartholomew's Day massacre, but there's no doubt that the flame she lit ended with as many as 20,000 Protestants slaughtered. And when British Catholics plotted to dethrone Elizabeth, she had no problem sending the ringleaders to agonizing deaths.
Hugely politically astute, Elizabeth Tudor remains the star in this female firmament. While she may have been prey to womanly vanities, she defied the natural order of her gender by having no husband or children. Instead, she encouraged a cult of the Virgin Queen, a powerful alternative, as Gristwood argues, to the Marian cult pushed by the Counter-Reformation.
In our own crisis-filled 21st century, it's both salient and dispiriting to note that most of Europe's current female leaders are childless. For a moment it seemed that a powerful American grandmother would join them on the world stage. How quickly a few yesterdays harden into history.