Regnant Queenship or Female Kingship? Gender, Power, and Legitimacy in Early Modern Europe

In this blog for “Premodern Gender”, Tyler Horton explains the tensions between gender, power and legitimate rule that early modern monarchs faced.

Figure 1: Title page of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha. Wikimedia Commons.

In the early modern period, the strength of the monarchy was fundamentally built on ideas of divine right and dynastic loyalty. A monarch’s claim to the throne was vested in their status as the legitimate heir of a royal bloodline, and the notion that the sovereign was a representative of God, who thus ruled with God-given authority. 

This concept was widely understood across medieval and early modern Europe. It was promoted by an abundance of political literature in this period. Put simply, the idea is that kings derived their authority from God directly and therefore could not be held accountable to any earthly authority.

While this was an effective way to promote monarchical absolutism, the majority of these theories were justified using explicitly masculine rhetoric. For example, English political theorist Robert Filmer’s treatise Patriarcha; or the Natural Power of Kings (1680) states that the divine right of kings comes from their natural right as fathers of the commonwealth, stemming from the roles of Adam and Noah in the Bible.

If monarchy was justified because it was a ‘paternal government’ and the king’s role was to exercise ‘fatherly care’ over his people, how did this work during the reign of an autonomous queen? And, importantly, how could a woman in a position of authority represent herself as both capable and legitimate during this period? 

Queens and Queenship

All types of queenship were impacted and defined by sexual differences, gender roles, and contemporary understandings of sex and power. Yet the position of a queen regnant resulted in wholly different challenges and experiences than those encountered by a queen consort, regent, mother, or dowager. In contrast to these latter categories, a queen regnant is a reigning queen who has inherited the throne in her own right and rules as sovereign. 

Interestingly, most people in the twenty-first century (especially in the British and Australian contexts) are very familiar with regnant queenship owing to the long reign of the late Elizabeth II. Yet historically this is a very rare phenomenon, due to the fact that the majority of European monarchies have favoured male-preference forms of succession. For instance, there have been only six reigning queens in England, one in Scotland, two in Sweden, two in Denmark, two in Poland, one in Austria, and none in France. 

Clearly, the role of a queen regnant in the early modern period represented a series of contradictions and complications. It was a unique position in which a woman, who was legally and socially inferior to her male counterparts, had autonomous authority over an entire country.

Queens regnant had to represent themselves as having a legitimate form of royal authority, fulfil both the masculine role of king and the feminine role of queen, and marry and produce an heir to the throne without endangering their own autonomy. These challenges were complicated even further following the Reformation, when they also had to balance the religious conflict between the various forms of Christianity. 

Anxiety Surrounding Female Authority

This was an issue that came to the forefront of popular consciousness in the early modern period with the successful accession of three queens regnant in England and Scotland between 1542 and 1558: Mary Queen of Scots, Mary I of England, and Elizabeth I of England.

In response, Scottish Calvinist leader John Knox published an infamous tract in 1558 targeting this ‘monstrous regiment of women’.  He characterised the idea of a ruling queen as ‘repugnant to nature’ and ‘contumely to God.’ This discourse highlights the anxiety surrounding women and authority at this time. It was therefore essential for reigning queens to address these issues to construct and maintain legitimate royal authority. 

When considering the royal image of queens regnant – or, more aptly, ‘female kings’ – in early modern Europe, it is evident that there are many ways to approach this challenge. Using the first recognised queens regnant in England and Sweden as case studies, we can see how contemporary understandings of sex, religion, and power played a significant role in the justification of female authority in this period.  

Mary I of England (r. 1553-1558)

Figure 2: Queen Mary I of England holding the Tudor rose. Portrait by Antonis Mor, 1554. Wikimedia Commons.

Mary occupied a precarious position as a Catholic queen trying to reverse the English Reformation established by her father, Henry VIII, and maintained by her brother, Edward VI. At the beginning of her reign, she effectively established her royal authority by highlighting her connection to her father and the Tudor dynasty to suggest she was the rightful ruler of England.

Mary also represented herself as a pious and godly queen, solidifying this image by publicly engaging in religious activities such as foot-washing ceremonies and church services. 

Although Mary was unable to provide an heir to the throne, she represented herself as a wife to the nation and mother to her subjects. She was often pictured with a spousal ring on her finger to represent her commitment to the role.

This was reinforced in her famous Guildhall Speech given in response to Wyatt’s Rebellion in 1554, in which she suggested she was ‘wedded to the realm’. She emphasised that she loved her subjects as ‘the mother doth the childe’.

Christina of Sweden (r. 1632-1654)

Christina, the daughter of the powerful Protestant King Gustavus Adolphus, shocked the nation when she converted to Catholicism and abdicated after twenty years on the throne. Both during and beyond her reign, Christina constructed her royal image by drawing on ideas of divine right to suggest that she was a rightful and legitimate monarch despite her sex.

This is particularly evident in her personal writings, in which she simultaneously expressed misogynistic views about women and their right to rule while emphasising her own masculine virtues, appearance, and education. 

Figure 3: Queen Christina of Sweden. Portrait by Sébastien Bourdon, 1653. Wikimedia Commons.

Christina distanced herself from ideas of traditional femininity by highlighting her ‘indomitable aversion towards all things women usually do and talk about’. She stated that she ‘despised all aspects of [her] sex’. Instead, she wanted to give herself a Spartan or Roman upbringing to ‘show [herself] worthy of the fate [she] was born into’ and ‘overcome [her] gender weaknesses’.

This is reinforced through her desire to learn ‘everything that a prince must know to be worthy of his rule’ alongside her assertion that she spent almost every waking hour divided between ‘kingdom affairs, studies, and sports’ rather than sparing attention to her hair or clothes. 

Christina also emphasised God’s role in her birth to validate her sovereignty. She stated that God had allowed her to be born into ‘unrestricted and intact sovereignty’ and was ‘kind enough to spare [her] soul from all the weaknesses of [her] sex.’ She added to this by promoting her masculinity and intelligence in portraits from throughout her life in which she was depicted on horseback, as Alexander the Great, and as Minerva the goddess of wisdom.  

The Royal Image of a Female King

Mary constructed her royal image around traditional ideas of femininity and motherhood, positioning herself as not only the rightful heir to the throne but a loving and tender monarch. By contrast, Christina engaged with ideas of divine right to represent herself as a capable ruler who embodied the required masculine virtues to fulfil her role as sovereign. 

Both queens had very different approaches to navigating discourses of gender and religion. Yet, it is evident that each of these reigning queens relied on similar themes as key parts of their rhetorical and iconographic strategies to overcome the challenges faced by queens regnant in early modern Europe. 

By exploring the case studies of Mary and Christina, we see how gender presented both challenges and opportunities for the negotiation of female authority in this period. 

Tyler Horton is a PhD Candidate in History at The University of Queensland. Her research examines representations of queens and queenship in early modern Europe, focusing on discourses of gender, sex, embodiment, religion, and power. 

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