Bess of Hardwick–Merry Widow?
As I mentioned recently, I’ve been thinking about widows in the context of writing about women warriors. As a result, I took a little side trip through the concept of the merry widow*–which brought me to someone I haven’t thought about in a long time, Bess of Hardwick, the Countess of Shrewsbury. (Or more formally, Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury)
Bess of Hardwick at the time of her third marriage
Bess of Hardwick ends up in academic discussions of merry widows because of a scurrilous little verse penned in the eighteenth century by Horace Walpole:**
Four times the nuptial bed she warmed,
And every time so well performed,
That when death spoiled each husband’s billing
He left the widow every shilling.
Like all the best pieces of character assassination, Walpole’s verse is true in its essentials.
Bess of Hardwick was one of the most successful social climbers of the Tudor period. She was born Elizabeth Hardwick, the third daughter of five surviving children in a family of respectable but impoverished gentry. She rose to become the Countess of Shrewsbury and the most powerful and wealthiest woman in England next to Queen Elizabeth, though a series of four marriages. She married her way up–each husband richer and more important than the last, ending with the powerful Earl of Shrewsbury.*** While they may not have left her every shilling, she certainly became a little wealthier as each husband died. Unlike many widows of the time, she fought for the right to control her inheritance(s). She managed her own finances. She invested wisely. (Basically, she believed that real estate, not diamonds, is a girl’s best friend.)
She also became embroiled in the convoluted power politics of the Tudor court. While married to her third husband, she ended up in the Tower for seven months for the crime of being a friend of Lady Catherine Grey–and not spilling the beans to Elizabeth about Catherine’s secret marriage of Edward Seymour. As the wife of the Earl of Shrewsbury, she served for fifteen years as the companion and jailer of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, with whom she gossiped and practiced new embroidery techniques.**** (She also spied on her for Queen Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s chief advisor, Lord Cecil. ) During this period, Bess ended up in the Tower again for a brief period because she allowed (or encouraged) her daughter to marry Charles Lennox–a member of the Stuart family in line to succession to the throne–without Queen Elizabeth’s permission. (The Queen was not amused)
Eventually, the stress of guarding Mary destroyed the Shrewsbury marriage. Bess and her husband were estranged at the time of his death. Now 63, she chose not to marry a fifth time. Instead she flung herself into her true passion: building and renovating houses. The most famous of these was Hardwick New Hall–described at the time as being more “more glass than wall.” Mies Van der Rohe would have approved.
*A fascinating social trope that ultimately played no role in the chapter, though it did inhabit a footnote for a few drafts. This is how I end up with chapters that are 30% too long. Luckily My Own True Love is merciless at pointing out when I’ve gone off on an historical toot.
**Exactly the kind of man who would try to whittle down powerful women. Not that I’m opinionated on the subject.
***Just to complicate matters, Bess and the Earl arranged for two of Bess’s children from her third marriage married two of the Earl’s children from his first marriage. Talk about a blended family!
****In addition to being intelligent and ambitious, Bess was also one heck of a needlewoman.***** In fact, she first caught my attention many years ago thanks to my lifelong interest in embroidery. (Even history buffs need other hobbies.) She is best known in needleworking circles as the creator of five embroidered hangings titled Noblewomen of the Ancient World, among whom are included two of the women warriors in my widows chapter, Artemisia II and Zenobia. How’s that for bringing things round full circle?
*****So was Mary, for that matter. Perhaps she would have been better off if she stuck to her knitting?
And speaking of Queens Isabella…
My last blog post was about a queen named Isabella that you probably had never heard of.* Today I thought I’d talk a bit about an Isabella who you probably think you know a lot about: Isabella of Castile.
Isabella is best known to American school children–and consequently to American adults–as the woman who funded Christopher Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic.
Those who were taught a slightly darker version of history* associate Isabella, together with her husband Ferdinand of Aragon, with the conquest of the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, the formation of the Spanish Inquisition, and the expulsion of Jewish communities from Spain. Depending on where you stand on the subjects of cultural tolerance and Muslim Spain, Isabella appears in this version as either the founder of several centuries of Spanish greatness or the bigoted destroyer of a culture of relative tolerance. I would argue that she was both. And more.
Isabella was a reigning queen at a time when reigning queens were rare. She transformed herself from a pawn in the power politics of fifteenth century Europe into one of the players with a brilliant combination of political savvy, military aggression and just plain bluffing.
I would argue that her success in seizing and holding her throne–at a time when women who inherited a throne were expected to turn their power over to their husbands and dwindle into consorts–depended on the fact that she was actively involved in waging war.*** Castile was at war for most of her reign. While Isabella did not lead her troops onto the battlefield,**** she traveled with every campaign, even when seriously pregnant, and was responsible for plotting strategy and tactics for her generals. By any measure, she was Castile’s commander-in-general. She also was one of the great quartermasters of history.
Here are a few of my favorite incidents in Isabella’s life:
In the fifteenth century, princesses were seen as assets that their fathers/uncles/brothers could use as bargaining chips for building political and economic alliances. While Isabella’s brother offered her in marriage first to the King of Portugal and later to the Duke of Berry, the heir to the throne of France, Isabella was determined to marry the man who would be best for her own political future. After sending her chaplain to look over possible husbands, she chose her own husband and married him in secret. Ferdinand of Aragon was young, good-looking, and heir to a kingdom considerably smaller and less powerful than Castile.***** While negotiating their secret marriage, Isabella insisted on the fifteenth century version of a prenuptial agreement that allowed her to govern Castile in her own right, with Ferdinand as her consort. Over time, the two forged a true partnership, ruling their two kingdoms together under the motto tanto monta, monta tanto, “the one as much as the other.”
On the death of her brother, Enrique IV, Isabella seized the throne from the young girl known as Juana La Beltraneja, who was certainly the daughter of Enrique’s wife though there were rumors that Enrique was not her father. Enrique himself had wavered between acknowledging the girl as his own and setting her aside. At the time of his death, Juana was his acknowledged heir, a fact that did not stop twenty-three-year old Isabella from claiming the throne and defending that claim against Portugal and France.
In her role as quarter-master-in-chief, Isabella was responsible for an important innovation in military medicine: mobile field hospitals that came to be known as “the queen’s hospital”.
Just to help you draw the historical lines: Catherine of Aragon, the unhappy first wife of Henry VIII, was Isabella’s youngest child.******
Perhaps it’s easiest to sum up her career in her own words: “Monarchs who wish to govern must also work.”
*I’m basing this on the fact that I hadn’t heard of her until I started poking around in the world of medieval and early modern queens. A fascinating world I might add.
**Obviously the arrival of Columbus in the New World kicked off a series of historical events that was dark by any standard. But the dark side of that history isn’t normally taught in American grade schools. Or at least it wasn’t when I was a junior history buff soaking up stories about the past in Mrs. Bates’ third grade class room.
*** Any guesses as to why she’s on my mind these days?
****Except when she did. She led troops against a besieged city at least once when Ferdinand wasn’t around. During the war against the Muslims she took the field with her army at every battle.
*****See what happens when you let princesses choose their own husbands? Queen Victoria of England made a similar choice.
******Proving once again that the boundaries between academic historical fields are as artificial as barbed wire fences between neighboring farms. Useful as a way of claiming territory, but not the only place to draw the lines.
Isabella Who?
Portrait of Isabella from the workshop of Lucas Cranach, ca 1565
I recently took a little research detour to find out something about Isabella Jagellion, who has been popping up in my reading for roughly a year now, usually in the form of a one-liner to the effect that she was the first ruler in history to issue an edict of universal religious toleration in 1558–an achievement normally accorded to Henry IV of France, who was responsible for the edict of Nantes in 1589.* I’ll let you do the math.
I soon found out that there is more to her story.
Isabella was a Polish princess who was married to the 52-year-old king of Hungary, Janos Zapolyta in 1539, when she was only 20–a way of cementing an alliance between the two kingdoms in their joint fight against the eastern expansion of the Hapsburg dynasty.** Essentially, her job was to get pregnant as quickly as possible and produce an heir. Zapolya had recently lost a ten-year war with the Hapsburg emperor, Ferdinand I The peace treaty divided Hungary into two parts. Western Hungary became part of the Hapsburg empire. Zapolyta now ruled the eastern part of Hungary as the king of Transylvania. If he died without an heir, Transylvania would revert to Ferdinand.
Isabella did not disappoint. A year after their marriage she gave birth to a son. Two weeks later, Zapolyta died, having lived long enough to see his heir if not to ensure that heir’s uncontested succession. The Estates of Transylvania recognized the infant Sigismond aas King of Transylvania and accepted Isabella as queen regent.*** Ferdinand tried to claim Transylvania by occupying Buda. When Ferdinand besieged Isabella at the castle of Olah, the Ottoman emperor, Suleyman the Magnificent, brought a large army to raise the siege. This was like have a hungry dragon save you from the Big Bad Wolf.
For the next five years, Isabella was engaged in an unequal three-way contest with the two empires for control of Transylvania. In 1547, Ferdinand and Suleymana signed a truce and tried to relegate Isabella (and Sigismond–who it’s easy to forget) to the territory of Opole, the smallest and least populated province of Poland. Isabella dug in her heels and fought for the rights of her son. In 1556, the Estates of Transylvania once again confirmed Sigismond as their ruler. From 1556 until her death in 1559, Isabella ruled Transylvania as her son’s regent. Among other acts designed to bring peace to the kingdom, she issued a law giving religious toleration to all her subjects.
I don’t know whether they lived happily, and tolerantly, ever after. But the Hapsburgs did not manage to get control of Transylvania until the eighteenth century.
*In fact, Genghis Khan beat them both to the punch. He not only passed laws of religious toleration three hundred years earlier than either of them, but those laws were far more universal in terms of what religions they covered. Both Isabella and Henry were interested in toleration within Christianity. Genghis Khan extended religious toleration to all religions within his empire. Except Daoism. Every emperor has his blind spots.
**Unlike their counterparts in fairy tales or Disney movies, very few historical princesses got to marry a young and handsome prince.
***Widowed queens or noblewoman were often chosen as regents for underaged sons, on the not-always-accurate presumption that mother-love (or laws that prevented them from inheriting) would make them safer choices than a power hungry uncle or maternal grandfather. Which is not to say than an occasional queen regent didn’t hang onto power long past her sell-by date.