Other Women

It is logical to assume that a female monarch would further the position of women in England.  Surely having a woman on the throne would, if not create a matriarchy, undermine the patriarchy of the nation?  However, neither Queen seemed willing to contest the mechanics of her society in respect to gender roles and the division of power among the sexes.  In this respect, the two seem remarkably alike.  They were content to surround themselves with men for all governmental matters, leaving their female advisors in the boudoir, ignored and marginalized.  Perhaps even stranger, it was during the two reigns that the moral and sexual controls placed upon the ladies of court because the strongest.  Each Queen was determined that her ladies in waiting remain pure, and each lady saw an unchaste waiting woman as a slander upon her virtue, as well as a defamation of her ability to manage her court.  However, their reasons for doing so were very different.

The court of Queen Elizabeth was very much the stronghold of the Virgin Queen.  Her reluctance to wed, and her denial of the pleasures of the flesh in exchange for self-control, was examples that she preferred everyone follow.  Elizabeth, especially towards her later years, became acutely conscious of her position as a permanent virgin, in a society in which virginity was prized as a precursor to marriage for women of high class and purse.  Though chastity was a feminine ideal, society at the time did not mean for the ever-virgin Diana to be the role model for their daughters, but rather a loyal wife, supporting her male relatives.  For Queen Bess, the struggle was to maintain her superiority politically as it was undermined sexually.

As Queen Elizabeth grew more and more confident in her own power, she began to contest her devaluation as an unmarried woman.  Understandably paranoid about marriage and sexual encounters—the very same institutions and actions that put her mother to death—she was not overly kind to those who dared venture to the chapel without her express permission.  It is of no coincidence that one of her closest friends, Blanche Parry, was a fellow spinster, while many of her other friends, Lady Warwick and the Countess of Southampton, gained royal favor only after the death of their husbands[ix].  Many a girl had her courtly career cut short by an ill-fated night, and a subsequent denouncement.

Elizabeth’s struggle to tame the sexuality of the female members of court was perhaps most apparent in her treatment of her maids of honor.  All young girls of high birth and good connections (as well as paternal deep pockets), these ladies were placed under her charge.  An odd position for an avowed old maid, she was in essence a surrogate mother to them[x].  Unfortunately, most of the women were sent to ensnare husbands, at any cost, and consequently hardly followed the lonely example of their mistress.  This often provoked the Queen’s anger, and girls such as Mistress Bridges and Mary Fitton were to learn that at the very least, ‘fooling around’, especially with the Queen’s favorites, meant having to wait for her successor in order to gain royal favor once more, and at the worst permanent disgrace.

Her waiting women were not the only unlucky females to reject the Queen’s example, and earn her wrath for it.  Any court beauty foolish enough to entertain a royal favorite’s advances would soon reap her just deserts.  In particular was the beautiful, if not perhaps shrewd, Lettice Knollys, a cousin of the Queen.  Pretty enough to gain the hand of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the greatest favorite of the Queen, not even her son, the Earl of Essex and another royal pet could not restore her to the Queen’s good graces.  Lettice Knollys remained one of Elizabeth’s great rivals, nearly on level with the other Queen of the era—Mary, Queen of Scots[xi].  This is rather ironic, considering that Lettice never aspiring to political power, and certainly did not represent a threat to English security in the manner that Mary did.  For Elizabeth, her sexuality—and her feelings towards others’ sexualities—did not have to be sequestered away from her public persona.  The cult of domesticity, with its policy of hiding feminine feelings in the private, had not yet impacting on Elizabeth’s behavior.

For Queen Elizabeth, however, it was not the immorality of sex in a society that was quite repressed that irked her.  Instead, it was the jealousy of an unmarried woman, who hated to be left out of activities.  Her anger to the legitimate marriage of Leicester was equal, if not greater, than her reaction to Mary Fitton’s bastard child.  Elizabeth found most other women grating, especially when they were getting what she was not.  She knew, that as a single woman, she was suspect socially, and her indulgences in flirting with the gentlemen of the court would not have been tolerated had she not been mistress of England.  However, she also understood—unlike her sister, Mary I of England, or her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots—that to lose her political head for her womanly heart would be to sign a political death warrant.  Once a man was declared King Consort, her own power would be severely limited, and his, for better or worse, would flourish.  Understandably, Elizabeth preferred the company of bachelors, much in the way that Beatrice, in the contemporary Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare, did[xii].

Queen Victoria’s relationships to other women were much more complex than that of ‘Old Maid Liz’.  From the start of her life, she had been kept solidly in the woman’s domain, lacking a strong male presence.  Consequently, she was much more comfortable in domestic circles, than Elizabeth, who from the start of her life had studied with the same tutors as her brother, and attended her father’s court.  Victoria’s up bring had taught her that the realm of the private woman was not incompatible with the realm of England, but must be carefully kept separate to avoid compromising the integrity of the private domestic sphere[xiii].

However, she had much in common with her predecessor in regards to her moral demands upon court ladies.  The start of her reign was marred by a scandal in which she, unfairly as it latter turned out, accused a smart and elegant gentlewoman, Lady Flora Hastings, of indecent behavior.  Lady Flora, a noted poet, had the misfortune to have allied herself with Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, as well as the Duchess’ comptroller, John Conroy.  Although the Duchess had acted in what she thought was the former Princess’ best interests during the royal infancy, both she and Conroy were intolerable figures of childhood oppression for the Queen.  Victoria was certain Lady Flora was a parental spy.  In 1839 Victoria found an opening by which to attack the ‘amiable lady’, as she called her.  The lady’s figure was changing; no doubt a sign of pregnancy.  Worse, Victoria was sure the father was Conroy.  Consulting Lady Flora’ physician, Sir James Clark proved indecisive, and another doctor was called in to see the woman, Sir Charles Clarke.  Both decided that Lady Flora was not pregnant.  The matter should have ended there, with the Queen mollified.  However, Conroy and the British press declined to let it lie. 

Any mere hint of gossip immediately was printed for the very next day.  Since Lady Flora was her mother’s waiting woman, the Queen soon began to be painted as an ungrateful child, with little sympathy towards those of her own sex.  Conroy pressed the issue intolerably, and relations between the young Queen and her mother, never good, deteriorated even further.  For Victoria, her mother was the villian in the drama; she would not allow the social life of court to recover from the outrage.   Unfortunately, Victoria had no recourse, being a single young lady she could not separate from her mother, even as she was Queen of England and in her majority[xiv].  The mother of Lady Flora, the Dowager Marchioness of Hastings, even sent a long letter reproaching the young Queen, concluding with the sentence;
 
To a female sovereign especially, woman of all ranks in Britain look with confidence for protection and…for sympathy.[xv]
 

Things began to escalate so rapidly, and tarnish the new Queen’s reputation so badly, that there were few remedies for the Flora Hastings affair besides time.  However, the only practical course of action to avoid another entanglement with ‘Mama’s’ household, and to reduce the consequences of her mother’s wrath, was not to assert her independence but rather transfer allegiances from mother to husband[xvi].  Unlike Elizabeth, Victoria was to remain societally a dependant for her entire life, first the daughter of her mother, later the wife of a gentleman, and lastly the widow tending the memory of her husband.

However, the cry of the Marchioness of Hastings did not go in vain.  Victoria throughout her reign regarded women as her ‘special subjects’, and kept an open ear for all women’s problems.  On the other hand, unfortunately, her solutions to such predicaments were hardly forward thinking.  Not a radical on the topic of female liberation, she was united against the female suffrage movement with her Prime Minister of the early 1870’s, Gladstone.  They were particularly against the concept of female doctors.  The idea “of allowing young girls and young men to enter the dissecting room together…[was a] repulsive subject.”[xvii]

She was a bit more amenable to allowing women to vote, among other gender battles.  Victoria even enjoyed the occasional joke against men, provided they were of the proper sort.  Hardly a radical in most issues, Victoria was almost positively reactionary in her views on feminine independence, perhaps because she had never experienced it.  For Victoria, all women must operate in the bounds of the domestic sphere, content under their loving husbands.  Elizabeth, on the other hand, understood that in order for her to maintain her position, she must remain a virgin Queen, untouchable.  Consequently, she was more tolerant of women in the public sphere, and rather harsh to the poor ladies who ventured unwisely into the private domain of marriage.

Endnotes

[ix] A.L. Rowse, The Elizabethan Renaissane: The Life of the Society (New York: Charles Scriver’s Sons, 1971), p. 32.
[x] Ibid, p. 54.
[xi] Antonia Fraser, The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), P. 207.
[xii] It would not be a stretch of the imagination to see Elizabeth give voice to Beatrice’s wishes to go to “the heavens, …where the bachelors sit, and there live we as merry as the day is long.” [Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, (II.i.47-49)]
[xiii] Cecil Wooodham-Smith, Queen Victoria: From her Birth to the Death of the Prince Consort (New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 76.
[xiv] Ibid, Pp. 175-176.
[xv] Quoted from Longford, P. 101.
[xvi] Ibid, p. 105.
[xvii] Letter from Queen Victoria to Gladstone, 6 May 1870.