Charles Beem

Queenship and Power: The Heart and Stomach of a Book Series

This introductory chapter chronicles the conceptualization and execution of the “Queenship and Power” book series, published by Palgrave Macmillan and edited by Carole Levin and Charles Beem. Many of the contributors to this volume have published books in the series, some more than once. As this essay briefly recounts the origins of the books published in the series between 2009 and 2016, it also offers a micro-history of Levin’s historical worldview and the relationship between her work as both a scholar and a teacher, which reveals her to be an empathetic and generous historian of protean proportions.

The Tragic Queen: Dynastic Loyalty and the ‘Queenships’ of Mary Queen of Scots

Over the course of her tumultuous and ultimately tragic career, many of the momentous decisions made by Mary Queen of Scots (1542–1587) were motivated by dynastic concerns. A direct descendant of Henry VII of England, Mary was born regnant Queen of Scotland. After spending her childhood in France, where she became queen consort, Mary went to Scotland in 1561, after her first husband’s death, to rule Scotland and entangle herself into the succession of the English crown, as Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudors, did not marry and bear heirs, making the Catholic Mary Elizabeth’s closest dynastic heir. Beem argues that Mary’s marriage choices and flight to England in 1568 were motivated primarily by her quest to realize her English inheritance.

“Greatest in Her Offspring”: Motherhood and the Empress Matilda

The Empress Matilda (1102–1167) is famous for her attempt to become England’s first female ruler in the twelfth century. Following the deaths of her brother William Athling and her first husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, her father designated her as his heir. While Henry I appreciated his daughter’s talents in statecraft, he was also eager for her to continue his bloodline. In 1127, he married her to 14-year-old Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. Matilda was pregnant with the third son when her father died in 1135, which was assumed by her cousin Stephen of Blois, Count of Boulogne. But four years later, Matilda abandoned her husband and three young sons to lay claim to her English inheritance. In 1141, Matilda nearly achieved her goal, but a series of reverses caused her to bring over her eldest son, Henry, to bolster her claim to the throne. In this essay, I will discuss Matilda’s role as a mother, which, as I shall argue, was always subordinate to her political and dynastic ambitions.

Princess of Wales? Mary Tudor and the History of English Heirs to the Throne

For the first 37 years of her life, the future Queen Mary I of England negotiated a sometimes precarious and often tortuous march to the throne. Born February 18, 1516, in Greenwich Palace, the only surviving issue of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon, she was the first woman to hold such a position since the twelfth-century Empress Matilda’s failed attempt to become England’s first female ruler.

Introduction: The Man behind the Queen

On April 23, 1702, Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs of England and Scotland, was crowned with regal solemnity in Westminster Abbey. As a queen regnant, Anne had inherited the office and estate of king, and was crowned in a manner similar to that of her kingly progenitors. There was, however, one important difference. In a clear break with previous English precedent, Anne was crowned alone, even though she had a husband, Prince George of Denmark, who did not become a king of England as did the wives of kings, who enjoy the title of queen. Prince George nonetheless enjoyed precedence over all the other peers of the realm as he watched the ceremony from inside the Abbey. Noted for his joviality, he did not appear to be in any way emasculated by the fact that he did not share his wife’s royal status as a king consort, as Philip of Spain had during his marriage to the sixteenth-century Tudor queen regnant Mary I.1