The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800 by William Monter

Author:William Monter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300173277
Publisher: Yale University Press

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Source: N. M. McQ. Holmes, Scottish Coins in the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh: Part I, 1526–1603 (Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles, #58: Oxford University Press, 2006); reprinted from Monter, “Numismatics and Female Sovereignty,” Journal of interdisciplinary History 41 (spring 2011), 550.

Her effigies, which begin when she is eleven, appear on 30 percent of her gold coins (17 of 56) and only 9 percent of her silver coins (22 of 238). But only two out of almost forty are joint portraits, one with each husband. The gold Francis-and-Mary coin may have been made (or at least designed) in France rather than Scotland; a single gold crown made during her first widowhood exists in London but not in Scotland. The silver ryals ('royals') from her second marriage are especially instructive. The only one with a portrait shows face-to-face busts of Mary and her younger husband, Henry Lord Darnley, in customary order, but with no crown visible; its inscription follows custom by putting his name first. But these coins were rapidly replaced in 1566 by new varieties without effigies and on which, for the first time in European history, the wife's name precedes her husband's, a detail that perfectly captures Darnley's diminished status.14

Marriage negotiations between Scotland and France in 1558 reversed the Anglo–Habsburg negotiations of five years earlier. Europe's largest kingdom, which inherited from women but forbade them from ruling, attempted to swallow a smaller one through marriage to its heiress. The dowager regent persuaded the Scottish Parliament to award Mary's husband the so-called crown matrimonial, giving him precedence in signing joint documents and full authority to sign acts by himself. Designs on the couple's coins privileged the French fleur-de-lys of a “dauphin-king” over the Scottish heraldry of a “queen-dauphine.” The Scots negotiators, led by the bride's oldest half brother, insisted that French privileges disappeared if the heiress predeceased her husband, and they refused to send Scotland's crown to France for his coronation. Three weeks before her marriage, their heiress signed secret agreements with her father-in-law, nullifying any agreements she might subsequently make with her subjects.

During the eighteen months after May 1559 when Mary Stuart was queen of France, the dowager regent died, and the young royal couple lost all control over Scotland. Protestant nobles seized the state apparatus, and by the time Mary returned as an eighteen-year-old widow they had established the Reformed church in her kingdom. While a religiously divided Europe accepted the slogan cuius regio, eius religio everywhere else, from Tudor England to tiny Béarn, Scotland's sovereign was barely able to maintain her right to practice her religion privately. When she finally had to summon a parliament in 1563, her political skills proved better than expected.15 In 1565 she decided to marry Henry Lord Darnley, a man four years younger then herself with uncertain religious preferences and genealogical links to both Scottish and English royalty; she hoped thereby to reinforce her claim to the English succession, relieve herself of some of the burdens of government, and produce a legitimate heir.

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