She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (5 page)

‘I cannot well guide nor rule soldiers, and also they set not by a woman as they should set by a man.’ So wrote Margaret Paston, a Norfolk gentlewoman contemplating the unhappy necessity of defending one of her properties against a rival claimant almost a century before Edward VI’s death. She had her own reasons for emphasising her limitations: recently widowed and exhausted by years in the front line of similar disputes, she wanted to leave her grown-up sons in no doubt that they, not she, now bore responsibility for holding the family fort. Nevertheless, she was right, and about more than her own situation. In a few characteristically succinct and forthright words, she had identified the principal practical constraints on female rule in medieval England.

They were constraints that were evident in the most iconic image of power available to Margaret and her contemporaries. The great seal by which royal commands were authenticated was the physical manifestation of the crown’s authority, a pictorial representation of England’s ruler that was instantly recognisable to the vast majority of England’s people who had neither set eyes on their monarch nor learned to read the documents from which the red wax hung. On one side of the seal the king sat in state to give justice to his people, orb and sceptre in his hands; on the other he rode a towering warhorse, his sword unsheathed in defence of his kingdom.

But a woman could not sit as a judge, nor could she lead an army. Physically, women were equipped for the differently hazardous work of childbearing, rather than to wear and wield heavy steel on the battlefield. Culturally, they were by nature – that is, as designed by a divine creator – lesser than men. At their best, these softer, frailer beings might complement the sterner masculine
virtues of their lords and masters with the feminine ones of mercy, mildness and maternal nurture. At worst, they might lead men astray with their inconstancy, their irrationality and their capacity – as whore rather than madonna – for sexual sin. Either way, it was in obedience, modesty, assistance, supplementarity, that a woman’s place lay within the order of God’s creation. And, as such, a woman was no more capable of leadership in peace than in war.

That, at least, was the theory. Experience, depending on individual capabilities, might be less absolute. Margaret Paston was intent on pointing out to her sons that they should not depend on her as captain of the family’s defences precisely because – resourceful and indomitable as she was – she had had to play the role before, sending to her husband in London for crossbows and poleaxes as well as the sugar and almonds that usually made up her shopping lists. It was not ideal, then, but nor was it unthinkable that a woman might occupy a position of command or control. Supplementarity, after all, might mean that a wife or mother could be called upon to protect the interests of a husband or son if they were temporarily absent or hampered by youth or infirmity; and female assistance might be transmuted into influence or even guidance in the hands of a woman possessed of particular intelligence, charisma or will.

Nevertheless, there were limits to what a woman could do. The power of a monarch, his authority instituted and sanctioned by God, was implicitly and inherently male. In practice, there were a number of ways in which such power might be acquired, but all of them reinforced that most basic identification. The dynasty that ruled Margaret Paston’s England could trace its descent back to Duke William of Normandy, a warrior who had made himself a king on the battlefield in 1066. The Bayeux Tapestry, telling the story of that military conquest in elegantly enigmatic embroidery, depicts just three women within its narrative – one a nameless victim of war, another caught up in a now-unfathomable sexual scandal, and the third, Edith, wife of Edward the Confessor and sister of Harold Godwinson, an archetypal figure of female virtue
at the deathbed of her royal husband. All are marginal figures in a masculine world, vastly outnumbered even by the horses and ships of the duke’s invasion force, let alone by the men of his army. And William’s forcible accession interrupted an older tradition whereby the Anglo-Saxon nobles chose their king from among the men of the royal bloodline. This opportunity for the judicious weighing-up of personal qualities had the unfortunate habit of descending into a bloodbath, as candidates for the throne sought to demonstrate their own kingly ruthlessness and eliminate their rivals in one fell swoop – but, whether an Anglo-Saxon monarch was chosen by consensus or violent competition, there was no doubt that he would be male.

It was only gradually, as new precedent and new custom began to be established in Norman England, that primogeniture emerged as the defining principle of the royal succession. Heredity, of course, risked bestowing the right to rule on daughters as well as sons. The developing common law within England, for example, allowed female heirs to inherit land, albeit not on the same terms as their male counterparts: an eldest son would succeed to an estate in its entirety, whereas, in the absence of a male heir, daughters would each receive an equal share. But a kingdom could not be divided in the same way as a smallholding, a manor or even an earldom; and by the sixteenth century very little had been unequivocally resolved about the possibility of female succession to the English throne, other than the evident fact of its undesirability.

In some ways, the circumstances of 1553 appeared to offer more encouraging signs for the prospects of a female sovereign than had been the case even fifty years earlier. Tudor anxiety about the conspicuous vulnerability of the fledgling dynasty had combined with the personal frailties of the last two Tudor kings to diminish expectations of the monarch as warrior. Henry VIII had been at first too irreplaceable and then too incapacitated, and Edward VI simply too young, to lead an army into battle. Instead, the new model of the humanist prince, entering the fray on the intellectual rather than the military front line, offered a paradigm of government
by brain rather than brawn from which women were less obviously excluded.

On the other hand, the very fact that the tumultuous upheavals in English life over the previous two decades had been fundamentally predicated on Henry VIII’s desperation for a son had reinforced the manifest deficiencies of his rejected alternative, a female heir, in the minds of his subjects. And while the claim to the throne, such as it was, of the entire Tudor dynasty had come through a woman, Henry VII’s mother had still been alive in 1485 to see her son crowned. Why then, if women could indeed rule, had Westminster Abbey not rung with cheers at the coronation of Queen Margaret Beaufort? In fact, the protracted and bloody civil wars from which Henry Tudor had so unexpectedly emerged victorious had gone a long way toward suggesting that a combination of military force and plausible fitness for power was more likely to secure the crown than strict adherence to the hereditary principle. It seemed possible, therefore, that the lessons of recent history might count women out of contention altogether.

Certainly, that was the conclusion to which Edward VI had come when he first sat down to draft his ‘device for the succession’. The young king had a methodical as well as a scholarly mind, and he had absorbed with every fibre of his being his father’s conviction that a monarch could shape his kingdom by royal fiat in the form of statute and ordinance. Government now proceeded by the framing of detailed legislative regulation, and the original version of Edward’s ‘device’ therefore set out a logical plan for the institution of a new set of rules that would provide England with a legitimate, Protestant and, crucially, male monarch to succeed him, should he fail to have a son of his own. His sisters were not legitimate; his Scottish cousins were not Protestant; which left his Grey cousins as the means by which the crown would pass, after the model of his great-grandmother Margaret Beaufort, through the female line to rest on the male head of one of their as yet unborn sons.

But life was too messy and unpredictable to be moulded even
by the formidable will of a Tudor king. Edward had not planned to die at fifteen, and with his last illness his designs for the future of his kingdom fell apart. The nomination of Jane Grey as his successor abandoned logical principle in favour of pragmatic improvisation, since Jane was a female heir whose mother, from whom her claim derived, was still living. This, then, was no wholesale acceptance of female succession but an attempt to preserve the spirit of Edward’s intentions through a lone anomaly – a legitimately born, Protestant woman who would, by Edward’s explicit specification, pass on the crown to her ‘heirs male’. Should his scheme succeed, then, England’s first queen regnant would also be its last. Should his father’s will prevail, on the other hand, and his sister Mary inherit the crown, then an entirely different precedent would be established.

In 1553, therefore, the future of female rule was about to be tested, in principle and in practice. But female rule in England also had a past. In 1153 – exactly four hundred years before Edward’s death, in a world as remote from Tudor England as the sixteenth century is from the twenty-first – a civil war that had raged for two decades was brought to an end with the sealing of a peace treaty at Winchester. That civil war had been caused by the claims of a woman who could – and, her supporters believed, should – have been the first queen to rule England in her own right. Matilda, daughter of Henry I and granddaughter of the Conqueror, came tantalisingly close not only to establishing her right to the throne, but also to securing an unequivocal hold on power.

She did so in a political world where boundaries, laws and precedents were drawn and redrawn with almost every generation – partly because of the fluidity of an uninstitutionalised government, and partly because newly Norman England was not bound by the example of its Anglo-Saxon past. In one sense, then, this militarised society – where monarchs were required to be soldiers, feudal lords at the head of a personal following – offered little scope for female leadership. But at the same time, there were few formal, explicitly articulated obstacles standing in the way
of female rule. And despite contemporary assumptions about the limitations of her sex, Matilda tested the presupposition of male sovereignty almost to destruction.

She did not succeed; nor did she unequivocally fail. Because her challenge ended in concession and compromise, the precedent it set was partial and complex. Women, it seemed, could not expect to exercise royal power in their own right, but Matilda both transmitted her claim to her son and played an influential role in his counsels. The lesson of her failure to secure the throne – and the story of the four centuries that elapsed before the claims of her female Tudor descendants – was therefore not straightforwardly that of the exclusion of women from power in England. Instead, it appeared that the conventional roles of wife and mother might, in some unconventional circumstances, offer opportunities for government to be guided by a female hand.

Between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries three more exceptional women – Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France and Margaret of Anjou – discovered, as queens consort and dowager, how much was possible if presumptions of male rule were not confronted so explicitly. Eleanor governed England during the long absence of her ‘most beloved son’, Richard the Lionheart. Isabella challenged her husband’s misrule, championing the cause of legitimate government in the name of her young son, the future Edward III. Margaret took up the standard of royal authority in defence of her infant son and her incapacitated husband, Henry VI. All three had the freedom to act because their power was exercised under the legitimising mantle of a male monarchy.

But such freedom had limits. Eleanor found herself able to play the elder stateswoman only after she had spent fifteen years in custody for her involvement in a rebellion against her husband, Henry II. Isabella’s failure to comprehend the responsibilities of power as well as its rewards resulted in her overthrow not long after that of her husband, Edward II. And Margaret’s attempt to shoulder her husband’s dead weight gradually collapsed, along with his government, as it became clear that the will animating
this composite royal authority was not that of the king himself.

Freedom to act, in other words, did not mean freedom from censure and condemnation. The risk these queens ran was that their power would be perceived as a perversion of ‘good’ womanhood, a distillation of all that was most to be feared in the unstable depths of female nature. The unease, if not outright denunciation, with which their rule was met has coalesced in the image of the she-wolf, a feral creature driven by instinct rather than reason, a sexual predator whose savagery matched that of her mate – or exceeded it, even, in the ferocity with which she defended her young. ‘She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France’, Shakespeare famously dubbed Margaret of Anjou:

And the appellation was later extended by Thomas Gray to her countrywoman, Edward II’s queen Isabella (‘She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs / That tear’st the bowels of thy mangled mate …’).

The visceral force of this image drew on a characterisation of female power as grotesque and immoral that had surfaced with remarkable speed in a number of vituperatively explicit polemics once the prospect of a female sovereign became an imminent reality in 1553. Most resounding of all was
The
First Blast of the Trumpet
Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
, unleashed from Geneva in 1558 by the Protestant firebrand John Knox. This tract, and others adopting a similar stance, were composed in reaction to the specific political and religious developments of the mid-1550s, but the arguments they made had deep roots within English political culture. Female ‘regiment’ – or regimen, meaning rule or governance – was ‘monstrous’ – that is, unnatural and abominable – because women were doubly subordinate to men, once by reason of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib, and again because of her transgression
in precipitating the fall from Eden. And therefore ‘to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation or city is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice’, Knox ringingly declared, before elaborating several thousand words of largely circular variation on that pungent theme.