Young Queens is the latest in a recent flurry of books by female historians seeking to highlight significant but often overlooked women in history: queens and consorts, wives and mothers who, for centuries, have been relegated to the footnotes while male historians wrote of kings and battles.
Redmond Chang’s three queens are Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589), Queen of France and mother of two kings, who ‘changed the face of France’, ruling for 30 years in all but name; Catherine’s eldest daughter, Elisabeth de Valois (1545–1568), who became Queen of Spain; and Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), whose chaotic reign ended in her long imprisonment and eventual execution. All were queens during the Renaissance, ‘an unprecedented era of female rule … women pushed the limits of their political power far beyond what was normally expected of them.’ The ties formed during the years the three women lived at the French court, while often sorely tested, would bond them together throughout their lives. Mary described Elisabeth as ‘the best sister and friend that I had in this world’.
Relations between the European superpowers of France, England and Spain were at this time fragile and ever-shifting. Religious reform was sweeping across the continent, splitting apart alliances, countries and dynasties as Catholics and Protestants fought for supremacy. Religious-inspired rebellions were a constant threat to monarchies. Princesses were pieces in a never-ending game of chess, moved around the board of Europe wherever an advance needing checking or an alliance needed strengthening. Despatched as children and teens to foreign lands, it was irrelevant whether they might find their husband-to-be appealing: ‘Love, that most insidious of passions, was out of the question.’ Catherine de’ Medici was fourteen when she travelled from Italy to marry Henry II of France. Elisabeth de Valois was married to Philip II of Spain at the same age, while Mary, Queen of Scots was sent to France when she was only five.
All three queens suffered from anxiety and depression which, when we learn about their lives, comes as no surprise. The intimate lens through which Redmond Chang reveals their daily existences shows just how fraught with difficulty those lives were.
They endured a complete lack of privacy and a constant stream of (mis)information, spread by courtiers, ambassadors, and spies. ‘You should know that I have spies,’ wrote Catherine de’ Medici to the Bishop of Limoges, after her daughter’s marriage to the King of Spain, ‘who will tell me everything that happens over there.’ In particular, kingly visits to the matrimonial bedchamber were closely monitored. On Catherine’s own wedding night, according to an ‘aghast’ Italian diplomat, her father-in-law kept the newlyweds company to make sure the marriage was consummated.
The stress of being constantly watched and judged would manifest as ‘vapours’, stomach pains, fevers and fluxes, and was dealt with by letting blood, purges – all manner of brutal treatments. Catherine de’ Medici obsessed over her daughter’s erratic periods (a queen who didn’t reproduce was easily put aside if you had the Pope in your pocket), despatching physicians who ‘considered the bodies of women and young girls to be especially hot, moist and leaky, prone to excess blood.’ Ways of encouraging pregnancy included drinking donkey urine, and avoiding sitting on mules in case infertility was contagious. ‘Elizabeth’s young body ached and writhed … It bled too much or it bled too little. It was a body beyond her control.’ Catherine herself failed to breed for ten long years (her husband, Henry II, preferred his mistress) but eventually produced ten children, including three (surviving) little princesses – this one for a king, this one for a duke …
Having grown up at the French court, the ‘beguiling’ Mary, Queen of Scots was far more a Frenchwoman than a Scot. When her husband Francis II died after reigning for only a year, eighteen-year-old Mary reluctantly returned to Scotland. Picture the difference – those fairytale French palaces, the sophisticated culture, exchanged for dark, foreboding Scottish castles and their dour lairds: ‘Sitting among her councillors … Mary felt her foreignness and her ignorance.’ She also felt very much alone. Scotland had a strong cohort of antagonistic Protestant nobles, unimpressed with her ‘Papist’ ways. They included the firebrand (and misogynist) John Knox: ‘Nature, I say, paints [women] to be weak, frail, unconstant, variable, cruel …’ Mary’s is a sad, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tale of betrayal, scandal, murder, rape; of being manipulated by men and constantly outsmarted by her English cousin, Elizabeth Tudor.
Young Queens is a great read, even if you’re not a history buff. The text is authoritative but accessible, a blend of the minutiae of court life and the big-picture tensions playing out across Europe. Although it’s non-fiction, the queens are vividly brought to life through the author’s writing and the letters of Catherine, Elisabeth and Mary, and their contemporaries.
Published 2023, by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux