Doomed queens, p.1
Doomed Queens, page 1
Contents
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
GRAPHICS KEY
THE DOOMED QUEEN IN HISTORY: A TIME LINE
CHAPTER ONE: BIBLICAL TIMES AND BEYOND
Athaliah, Artemisia I, Olympias, Roxane, Thessalonike, Amastris, Berenice III, Empress Xu Pingjun, Berenice IV, Anula, Arsinoe IV, Cleopatra, Empress Wang
CHAPTER TWO: DANCING IN THE DARK AGES
Boudicca, Zenobia, Empress Dowager Hu, Amalasuntha, Galswintha, Brunhilde, Irene of Byzantium
CHAPTER THREE: MIDDLE AGE CRISIS
Urraca of Castile, Sibyl of Jerusalem, Gertrude of Meran, Oghul Ghaimish, Theodora of Trebizond, Blanche of Bourbon, Joan I of Naples, Maria of Hungary
CHAPTER FOUR: RENAISSANCE REVELS
Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Catherine Howard, Jane Grey, Juana of Castile, Jeanne III of Navarre, Mary Stuart, Mumtaz Mahal
CHAPTER FIVE: GO BAROQUE
Margarita Theresa of Spain, Maria Luisa of Orléans, Sophia Alekseyevna, Mangammal, Caroline Matilda, Marie Antoinette
CHAPTER SIX: SEMIMODERN TIMES AND MORE
Joséphine de Beauharnais, Caroline of Brunswick, Alute, Elisabeth of Bavaria, Alexandra Romanov, Eva Perón, Diana Spencer
CHAPTER FINAL: ARE YOU A DOOMED QUEEN? A Quiz
AFTERWORD AND SOURCE NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT
For Theresa Park, a queen among women—
with affection and appreciation
A Queen of the past is not an Ex-Queen.
~JOHN RUSKIN
Women have been called queens for a long time, but the kingdom given them isn’t worth ruling.
~LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
INTRODUCTION
[The executioner] shall not have much trouble, for I have a little neck. I shall be known as la reine sans tête.
~ANNE BOLEYN
elcome to your favorite dream—and worst nightmare. You are cosseted in silk, crowned with gold, and bowed to. Courtiers laugh at your jokes and compliment your beauty, even when you know you’re having a bad hair day. All envy you, but things change. Just years later, even those who admired you steer clear of your path. Your influence is on the wane for any number of reasons. The fault could be yours—maybe you weren’t as clever as you thought in the scheming department. Or it could be that others are scheming against you.
When the end finally comes, it arrives with the stroke of an ax at noon—a topsy-turvy Cinderella tale—or with a drumrolled march to the scaffold. The battlefield may provide you with a convenient grave. Or you might lose your crown as you labor to bring forth an heir to the kingdom. Biology becomes destiny. Best case scenario: You will survive a coup and be allowed to live out your days in awkward exile, where opportunistic stragglers will still suck up to your royal majesty, just in case.
No matter how your end finally arrives, one truth remains: Your fall from grace is not your call, though your actions may encourage it. It is your fate. After all, you are a doomed queen—and, if one is to go by the lessons of history, the only good queen is a dead one.
For too many royal women throughout history, the scenario I’ve sketched here was their dark reality. The members of the doomed queens club—a club I suspect few would care to join—are legion, stretching from biblical times to the present day. Their names range from the infamous—Cleopatra, Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette—to those whose deaths are hidden within footnotes, such as Blanche of Bourbon and Thessalonike.
Within Doomed Queens I’ve presented fifty of these lives from around the globe and throughout the ages. While each queen’s final destiny may differ, one fact remains consistent: Despite the perks of royalty, it’s usually not good to be the queen.
What was it about being royal that made so many women so vulnerable to losing their lives for power? Let me count the ways—here is an admittedly abbreviated overview of the doomed queen:
BED, BIBLICAL TIMES, AND BEYOND: It has always been obvious that the female of the species holds the keys to the kingdom—the kingdom of life, that is. Without the fruit of the womb, humanity would crash and burn. Boo-hoo, what’s a power-loving man to do? To solve this problem, mating and relating is safely confined within the institution of matrimony and becomes sanctified with religious rites. The power of female fertility is harnessed, thus creating dynastic succession. Royal women who get uppity with the system get offed. Watch out, Olympias and Cleopatra!
YO, LET’S GET CIVILIZED: Power isn’t enough—there’s money, too. The Dark Ages roll in, disquieting queens everywhere. Men try their darnedest to hold on to property beyond the grave, despite that whole can’t-take-it-with-you dilemma. Salic law, which sprang from the Frankish empire, becomes institutionalized. An excerpt: The whole inheritance of the land shall come to the male sex. But if women can’t inherit property, can they inherit thrones? Over time, Salic law leads to lots of territorial fighting when a male heir isn’t available.
MARRIAGE MAKES THE WORLD GO ’ROUND: No male heir? No problem! To avoid war, the powers that be send their daughters to sleep with their enemies and bear their children, keeping it all in the family. But are these queens royal consorts or royal hostages? The Austrian Hapsburg dynasty, whose rise to power peaks during the Renaissance, is especially adept at this clever little maneuver. Their family motto? “Leave others to make war, while you, lucky Austria, marry.” Like chess queens, women are moved about the game board but are sacrificed first to protect the king—especially if their wombs prove infertile or if they become too power hungry.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE: With the start of the Age of Enlightenment, blue bloods shake in their boots. Power has shifted to the people, as embodied by the press, who no longer respects the sanctity of royalty. Vive la révolution—or not, if your name happens to be Marie Antoinette. Later in history, the media can make or break a reign, as in the cases of Caroline of Brunswick, a nineteenth-century queen of England, and Diana Spencer, a twentieth-century queen of hearts.
* * *
or
Why Ladies Only
The sad reality is that the threat level leaps from ecru to red when the head wearing the crown is missing a Y chromosome. Why are male rulers less doomed?
While kings were also vulnerable to political upheaval—just ask Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette’s headless husband—for the most part men pulled the strings at court. Therefore any woman blocking the way to power was a threat to be eliminated. Common ways to bump off an inconvenient consort included beheading, burning, drowning, poison, stabbing, strangling, starving, and forcing suicide.
The justifications for their deaths were usually based on underlying issues such as religious differences, infertility, or dynastic struggles. And when there wasn’t an easy way to dump a queen, the men got creative. For example, in order to gain the right to slice off Anne Boleyn’s comely head, Henry VIII accused her of treason with a side of adultery.
Women were also more vulnerable to the travails of the flesh. While they usually didn’t go to war, potential royal brood mares were often sent on treacherous journeys to wed. After marriage, childbirth was a dangerous rite of passage many did not survive.
* * *
And now we have reached the twenty-first century. Are there still doomed queens among us? Certainly! Though we have moved on from the guillotine (which was last used by the French government in 1977), the doomed queen still lives and dies. These days, she might not be as easily recognizable as she once was. She may not have royal blood either. Tiaras are de rigueur for red carpets, but today’s doomed queen is more likely to be attired in business best or haute couture. She could be part of a political dynasty, wield the wealth of a global corporation, or bear overwhelming celebrity.
Recognize her now? Just in case, here are two more examples ripped from news headlines. At the time of this writing, Benazir Bhutto, the first woman ruler of an Islamic nation, was assassinated after returning to Pakistan to reclaim the power she once wielded. Meanwhile, rumors fly that Pakistan’s current president or his supporters could be responsible for her death. In the United States, former first lady Hillary Clinton has lost the democratic nomination for the presidency. Did first mate Bill muscle her into oblivion on the campaign trail? Whatever your opinion of Clinton or Bhutto, there’s one point we can all agree on: Their femaleness was—and is—considered a liability in their quest for power.
Like it or not, it’s still a man’s world. As such, the doomed queen reflects our uneasiness with women of power, even in these advanced times. The not-so-subliminal message at hand is that women who strive upward do so at their own risk.
In closing, I leave you with a story that originated in Vienna, land of the marriage-happy Hapsburgs. In olden times, a masked ball was held to which all of society was invited. During the ball, a queen danced with a handsome gentleman, whose identity was concealed by a red mask. As the night wore on, she fell madly in love with him, not realizing that he was the executioner on a break—royalty and death waltzing together in an intimate danse macabre. So it has been since the first crown was donned.
Before we commence our danse macabre through queenly history, here are a few notes to help you enjoy the ride.
The queens’ stories are arranged chronologically according to date of demise or dethronement; when the exact year is uncertain, I’ve used the last date they were noted within history’s annals. During my research, when confronted with contradictory information, I’ve striven to present that which a ppeared most historically persuasive. However, when all things were equal, I allowed the scales to tip toward the more colorful version.
The art and graphics presented within Doomed Queens are adapted from numerous sources. The full-page portraits are my original drawings, some of which were inspired by famous paintings. Many of the other decorative elements were adapted from Victorian-era ornaments or portraits of historical personages.
While some of these doomed queens’ lives are certainly tragic, others are so over the top that they invite disbelief or humor. Whether you find yourself laughing or crying, I hope you will consider their examples cautionary tales for modern women who yearn to avoid the sharp edge of the sword. Humor aside, what’s revealed here is serious stuff: the shadow side of feminine power in all its unsavory glory.
May you read and beware.
GRAPHICS KEY
assassinated or cause of death unknown
beheaded
burned to death
death by pacaptionzzi
deposed
died in childbirth
divorced/annulled
drowned
died of illness
imprisoned
poisoned
sent to religious orders
stabbed
strangled
starved to death
committed suicide
CHAPTER ONE
Biblical Times and Beyond
OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES
Mine honor was not yielded, but conquered merely.
Cleopatra, via William Shakespeare
It is in the ancient world that our survey of unfortunate queens begins. This era is anchored by two figures, Alexander the Great and Cleopatra. Though the two rulers shared little beyond a common ancestor and some serious ambition, both served to inspire the destruction of those close to them. Just call them the Typhoid Marys of blue bloods.
Alexander was a descendant of the powerful Argead dynasty that ruled the vast Macedonian empire in the fourth century BCE. He used his considerable military genius to expand his holdings to encompass just about all of the ancient world, spreading the best of Greek culture (better known as Hellenism) in the process. Alexander’s premature demise in 323 BCE led to numerous power struggles and fatalities. His death also led to the founding of Egypt’s Ptolemaic dynasty, from which Cleopatra sprang like Athena from Zeus’s head.
The saga of Cleopatra and her kin is, in many ways, a tale of sibling rivalry gone wild. Cleopatra lived three centuries after Alexander and was the last pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Though she was a skilled ruler, she was no warrior like her ancestor—instead, she seduced influential men into fighting her battles for her. Her two regent sisters, Berenice and Arsinoe, also coveted the Egyptian throne but weren’t as persuasive in the charm department. Nor did they have Cleo’s canny intelligence.
What exactly was it about Egypt that encouraged women rulers to set their caps so high? The historian Herodotus proposed that things were just different there: “The people, in most of their manners and customs, exactly reverse the common practice of mankind. For example women attend the markets and trade, while men sit at home at the loom…. Women urinate standing up, men sitting down….”
And how did these queens of biblical times end their reigns? Matricide occurred too often for comfort—offspring hungry for power did not allow sweet memories of the womb to discourage their desires. Also popular: poison, drowning, and state-sanctioned suicides. Fun times.
Athaliah
835 BCE
mong royals of the biblical age, Queen Athaliah had quite the pedigree. She was the daughter of Israel’s King Ahab and Queen Jezebel—yes, that Jezebel, the temptress immortalized in blues songs and an old Bette Davis movie. The Book of Kings claims that Athaliah’s infamous mother met a nasty end at the hands of palace eunuchs. As for Athaliah, her life and death illustrate the adage of the apple not falling far from the tree.
Royal marriages in biblical times were no different from royal marriages later in history—dynastic aspirations have ever trumped personal inclination. Jezebel, a princess of Phoenicia, was pragmatically wed to King Ahab to ally their lands against enemies. Like mother, like daughter: When Athaliah came of age, her parents trundled the princess of Israel off to King Jehoram of Judah to say “I do.” Ideally speaking, their union should have created one big happy conglomerate of Judah-Israel where everyone lived in harmony. But there was one problem: Athaliah followed her mother’s worship of Baal, a Mesopotamian fertility god; Jehoram was a descendant of King David. Today, these differences would make prime ingredients for a screwball comedy where everyone learns religious tolerance and how to make a mean matzo ball. In ancient times, they usually spelled bloodshed.
When Athaliah married Jehoram, Jehoram agreed to take on Athaliah’s religion. The new queen of Judah gave birth to a son named Ahaziah, who also followed his mother’s lead in worship.
Though they all may have gotten along in private, in public Jehoram’s rule was unstable—his subjects weren’t too happy with the king’s religion by marriage. Nor did they limit themselves to complaints. Jehoram was fatally shot with an arrow after defending his mother-in-law from accusations of witchcraft and fornication. Ahaziah succeeded his father as king but died a year later in battle.
A BRIEF DIGRESSION
Executions were performed during ancient times for a wide range of infractions beyond murder or treason. The Code of Hammurabi, the first set of written laws, which dates from 1760 BCE Mesopotamia, lists numerous death-worthy offenses, such as bearing false witness or hiding runaway slaves. Methods to dispatch the condemned to the next world included, in no particular order: starvation, hanging, poison, decapitation, strangulation, crucifixion, and stoning. Slaves were deemed unworthy of any official ceremony and simply beaten to death.
But what about royal women like Athaliah? The Bible states that “they slew Athaliah with the sword” one assumes this means a beheading rather than a picturesque fencing match. However, this fate was not shared by all condemned queens. Jezebel, Athaliah’s mother, was killed by defenestration—a fancy way of saying she was shoved out a window. Her body was left where it landed and devoured by dogs.
Now it was Athaliah’s chance to rule, for bad and worse. Grabbing the opportunity presented by her son’s death, she immediately ordered the executions of all possible successors to the throne of Judah—in other words, every member of her family by marriage. However, Queen Athaliah wasn’t as thorough in her machinations as she thought. Her sister-in-law Jehosheba escaped the communal bloodbath, taking the queen’s baby grandson, Joash, with her. She hid him and his nurse in a bedroom, a simple but evidently effective plan.
While Athaliah ruled without impediment, Jehosheba secretly raised little Joash away from the queen’s attention. Six years later in 835 BCE, Joash went public and was anointed king by the powers that be.
Not surprisingly, Athaliah was furious at the royal coup. She tore at her clothes and screamed, “Treason! Treason!” But the queen’s accusations were no match against King Joash’s army. They captured Athaliah and promptly executed her.
CAUTIONARY MORAL
When completing a job,
don’t overlook the small details.
