Did It Matter That Elizabeth I Was a Woman?

‘The idea of rule by women was very new’

Carole Levin is Willa Cather Professor of History Emerita at the University of Nebraska

Though Queen Elizabeth I may well, as she claimed, have had ‘the heart and stomach of a king’, she was all too aware that she also had the body of a ‘weak and feeble woman’. Elizabeth was only the second queen regnant after her sister Mary, so the idea of rule by women was very new. What could be expected for a male ruler was more problematic for a woman. One of the ways that a king could gain power and popularity was to be militarily successful, as kings such as Henry V had demonstrated. But in England women did not lead in battle, one reason why Henry VIII was so emphatic about the need to have a legitimate male heir, since, as he put it himself, the battlefield was ‘unmeet for women’s imbecilities’. When Elizabeth said in her speech to the troops at Tilbury in 1588 that ‘I myself will be your general’, this was not something she could actually do.

Kings were traditionally perceived as God’s representative on earth. When Henry broke with the Catholic Church, he became Supreme Head of the Church of England. Though his son, Edward, was only nine years old when he became king, at his coronation in 1547 Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, affirmed that he was Supreme Head. But when 25-year-old Elizabeth became ruler in 1559 Parliament would not grant this title to a queen, and she became Supreme Governor instead.

It is also very possible that churchmen and nobles treated Elizabeth differently than they would have a king. Edmund Grindal, when archbishop of Canterbury, told her that he chose ‘rather to offend your earthly Majesty than to offend the heavenly majesty of God’. In 1598, during a meeting of the Privy Council, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, turned his back on Elizabeth, a terrible insult to a monarch. When she responded by boxing his ears, Essex started to draw his sword before he was stopped.

But Elizabeth also found ways to rule effectively in the manner of male rulers. She listened to her advisers, especially William Cecil and Lord Burghley, but made it clear that the final decisions on policy would always be her own. As James Melville remarked to her early in her reign, he knew she would never marry as now she was ‘king and queen both’. Elizabeth expanded the view of gender and rule so that she could be just that.
 

‘There were plenty of times when she imposed her will effectively’

Neil Younger is Senior Lecturer in History at the Open University and author of Religion and Politics in Elizabethan England: The Life of Sir Christopher Hatton (Manchester University Press)

There’s no doubt that questions around marriage and the succession loomed large across the whole of Elizabeth’s reign, as much the result of the barrenness of the Tudor family tree as of Elizabeth’s gender. Her friends’ compliments and her foes’ criticisms both dwelt a good deal on her femaleness, even though women were to be found ruling in 16th-century Scotland, France, and the Netherlands, as well as England. And it may be that her gender led some of her subjects, ministers, or military commanders to take her less seriously than they would a man – though equally, there were plenty of times when she imposed her will effectively (and indeed scared them stiff).

Yet when considering the successes or failures of her reign, it is hard to see how the challenges which confronted Elizabeth would have been radically different, or would have had substantially different outcomes, if Anne Boleyn had brought forth the much-desired son rather than a daughter in 1533. Few of her main problems were of her own making. Elizabeth faced religious tension and disunity in England, and if she was – at best – only partially successful in resolving this, the same was true of her predecessors and successors, male and female, child and adult. In foreign policy, she faced a forbiddingly powerful enemy in Spain, particularly over the war in the Netherlands; at length, she concluded that intervening in that war to secure her own coasts was necessary, even if it brought the Spanish Armada down upon her. Would a male monarch have pursued a more adventurous, even expansionist, foreign policy? Henry VIII might have done, perhaps, but Elizabeth’s canny grandfather, Henry VII, did not, and nor did her Stuart successors. Her domestic policies – poor relief, taxation, – were responses to large-scale social and economic changes, such as growth in both population and poverty, not to her own decisions.

The so-called ‘great man’ approach to history is currently unfashionable, and whether one regards Elizabeth as great or not, it’s not at all clear that either a ‘great man’ or a ‘great woman’ had the ability to challenge the fundamental position which the Tudor realms faced during the late 16th century.

‘She converted herself from an oxymoron into a miracle’

Helen Hackett is Professor of English at UCL and author of The Elizabethan Mind: Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty (Yale University Press)

Who can fail to be awed by the magnificent portraits of Elizabeth I: the Armada, the Ditchley, and the Rainbow, to name but a few? They surely surpass even the glorifying images of Henry VIII by Holbein, and of Charles I by van Dyck, in their power to impress and fascinate. This not only reflects the fact that the costume of elite Renaissance women was even more flamboyant and sumptuous than that of men; Elizabeth’s portraits also draw us in with complex symbolism, requiring interpretation like texts. Meanwhile, in literary texts themselves Elizabeth generated a plethora of personae. As Thomas Dekker wrote in a court prologue of 1599: ‘Some call her Pandora, some Gloriana, some Cynthia, some Delphaebe.’

Why this mythologisation and proliferation of roles? Because Elizabeth, as a woman, was a representational problem. Monarchs were supposed to excel in virtues traditionally defined as masculine: martial prowess, virility, rational intellect, decisiveness, and powerful oratory. Yet the ideal woman of this period was praised for silence, obedience, and staying at home. She was not supposed to resist marriage and assert her agency and authority as Elizabeth did. Writers and artists grappled with this problem by splitting their queen into many figures: ‘mirrors more than one’, as Edmund Spenser put it in The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), his epic poem dedicated to Elizabeth. She is both Gloriana and Belphoebe, the former representing ‘her rule’, the latter ‘her rare chastity’; and she is also Una, Britomart, Mercilla, Cynthia, and Diana, multiple personae embodying the multiple and often contradictory qualities required of a queen regnant.    

Elizabeth knew she was an anomaly and worked hard to turn this to her advantage in speeches and writings: she thanked God that ‘being a woman by my nature weak, timid, and delicate, as are all women, Thou has caused me to be vigorous, brave, and strong’. She converted herself as female monarch from a kind of oxymoron into a kind of miracle. Meanwhile the surge of creativity in Elizabethan culture generated by the representational challenge of a woman on the throne constructed a mystique around the queen that persists to this day.

‘To Elizabeth herself it was largely irrelevant’

Elizabeth Tunstall is Author of The Succession Debate and Contested Authority in Elizabethan England, 1558-1603 (Palgrave Macmillan)

Channelling Elizabeth herself, I feel this may be an ‘answer answerless’ – or at least a bit yes and a bit no. Elizabeth herself always viewed her authority as queen to be just as complete as that of her father as king. However, she was also aware that for many of her people, the fact that she was a woman would always alter the way that they treated her, and her rights as a monarch.

To balance the inherent contradiction of a woman wielding the masculine powers of a king, Elizabeth and her Privy Council used a theoretical construction as the foundation of her rule. The king’s two bodies theory stated that a monarch had two bodies, the body physical and the body politic. In her first speech as queen, delivered at Hatfield, Elizabeth outlined the theory by declaring that: ‘I am but one body naturally considered, though by His permission a body politic to govern.’ While the body physical was what the monarch was born with, the body politic, which each monarch assumed upon their coronation, could not age, did not die, and was not restricted by gender.

When Elizabeth became queen in 1558 this theory enabled her to circumvent the gender expectations of the time. It enabled her to rule as completely as her father had done while also retaining her own distinctly feminine persona. However, the theory which gave her the means to rule regardless of her gender was also the cause of personal turmoil for Elizabeth.

In 1582, when she bid farewell to her final suitor, the duke of Anjou, Elizabeth wrote a deeply personal poem stating: ‘I love and yet am forced to seem to hate; I do, yet dare not say I ever meant.’ In ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’, Elizabeth wrote of the internal struggle of rejecting this marriage proposal which part of her wished to accept, of doing what was needed as a monarch by denying herself as a woman.

So, did it matter that Elizabeth was a woman? To Elizabeth herself it was largely irrelevant, as she proclaimed at Tilbury: ‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.’ However, gender did matter in 16th-century England, and so the theoretical solution was to separate her royal power from her female form.