Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (7 page)

Marguerite became queen in her own right in 1527 when she married Henri d’Albret, ruler of the small but politically strategic kingdom of Navarre. With Henri, she had two children; her son, Jean, died when he was five months old but her daughter, Jeanne, survived. Over a decade later, when she was fifty years old, Marguerite again believed herself to be pregnant. The ambivalent attitudes Marguerite experienced toward her pregnancies are revealed in her letters with remarkable candor and detail; on the one hand, she was grateful to no longer be “sterile” and “useless” in her ability to help populate the royal family, but on the other hand, she was also frustrated that her “big belly” and her condition hindered her from writing and attending court functions. “If I were only twenty,” she wrote to her brother, “I would not dare to announce what at fifty I would prefer to keep quiet.”
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But her pride in her pregnant state overcame her reluctance and she became hopeful about her condition. When she eventually realized that she was not pregnant, she wrote to Francois again, “All the signs that a pregnant woman can have made me hold fast to the belief that I was with child... That is why I dreaded to announce to you that, contrary to my expectation that God would give me something to serve you and your family, it has pleased him to do otherwise.”
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Like so many women, Marguerite was reliant upon “all the signs that a woman can have” to verify her condition; that she was mistaken is understandable, particularly given the impulse to produce a child that would “serve” the royal family.

In this discussion of false pregnancies, another queen deserves mention: Mary Tudor’s mother, Catherine of Aragon. Catherine’s own fertility problems became the tragic centerpiece of her reign as Henry’s consort: although she was able to conceive multiple times, her pregnancies resulted in miscarriage, stillbirths, and the early death of six-week-old Henry. Mary was the only one of Catherine’s children to survive.

Figure 1 Portrait of Queen Catherine of Aragon
(MOU 275296)

Catherine’s first pregnancy progressed under dubious conditions. Henry and Catherine were married in June 1509 and four and a half months later Henry wrote to his father-in-law, Ferdinand of Spain, “Your daughter, her Serene Highness the queen, our dearest consort, has conceived in her womb a living child and is right heavy therewith.”
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But by January 31 Catherine miscarried a daughter. The circumstances surrounding this first miscarriage demonstrate the degree to which royal pregnancy was performed for public spectacle and reassurance. Catherine’s confessor, Fray Diego, wrote later of the miscarriage, “No one knew about it...except the King...two Spanish women, a physician, and I.”
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If there was jubilation at the official announcement of a royal pregnancy, there was also confusion, reticence or silence when a pregnancy did not come to fruition. Often a minimal announcement was made—more often, nothing at all, which left more room for speculation and rumor-mongering. After the miscarriage, the size of Catherine’s stomach did not diminish, presumably because of an infectious swelling, so the queen’s physician insisted, according to Diego, that “her Highness remained pregnant of another child, and it was believed and kept secret... Her Highness believed herself to be with child, although she had some doubts,” perhaps because her menstruation resumed.

Henry and Catherine presumably accepted the physician’s assurance that she was still carrying a child, for in the following months, they carried on with official functions, celebrating their expectant state, and all of the usual, elaborate preparations were made for her lying-in. In March, Catherine began her confinement in Greenwich. After a period of fruitless waiting, Fray Diego explained, elliptically, that “it has pleased our Lord to be her physician in such a way that the swelling decreased.”
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Luiz Caroz, the new Spanish ambassador, was less forgiving, criticizing those willing to “affirm that a menstruating woman was pregnant and...make her withdraw publicly for her delivery.” Caroz added, “The privy councilors of the King are very vexed and angry at this mistake, as they have said to me, although from courtesy they give the blame to the bedchamber women who gave the Queen to understand that she was pregnant whilst she was not.”
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Although it is impossible to know the extent and nature of the deception and self-deception about Catherine’s condition and to what degree the queen, her physician, or her female attendants were most to blame, this episode is again evidence that the premium placed on royal pregnancy was so extreme that many people, not only the queen, colluded in what might be called in fairy-tale parlance “wishful thinking.”
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Catherine of Aragon spent most of her life as queen consort feeling much like the queen in d’Aulnoy’s “The Hind in the Woods”: “The queen felt sure that if she had a child the king would love her more.”
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We conclude with a brief account of the fertility crisis of another early modern queen. Catherine of Braganza, whose father became the King of Portugal, came to England in 1662 at the age of 24 to become the queen consort of Charles II. Catherine’s inability to sustain a pregnancy plagued her entire reign, a situation exacerbated by the fact that Charles’s series of influential mistresses before and throughout his marriage bore him several children whom he publicly recognized. In spite of political pressure on Charles to divorce Catherine in favor of a fertile queen, he remained loyal to her and in the early years of their marriage, the couple continued to wish for an heir. Catherine repeatedly visited the waters of Tunbridge Wells and Bath hoping for a cure to her fertility problems but to no avail. Eventually, she was able to conceive but all three times she suffered miscarriages.

After one such visit Catherine became feverishly ill and from her sickbed spoke deliriously of the three children she believed she had delivered. The prolific diarist Samuel Pepys recorded his version of the story: “The Queen’s delirium in her head continues still, that this morning she talked mightily that she was brought to bed, and that she wondered that she should be delivered without pain and without spueing or being sick, and that she was troubled that her boy was but an ugly boy. But the King being by, said, ‘No, it is a very pretty boy.’ ”
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Charles and Catherine’s attendants repeatedly reassured her that she had given birth to a healthy boy. We have no record of Catherine’s reaction when she recovered and learned the truth, but the sadness that accompanied her childlessness troubled the rest of her life. In d’Aulnoy’s “The Wild Boar,” the queen gives birth to a little pig. When he is born, “Everybody shrieked, which frightened the queen very much. She asked what was the matter, but they did not wish to tell her for fear she should die of grief. So, on the contrary, they assured her that she was the mother of a fine boy and that she had cause for rejoicing.” The false assurances given to d’Aulnoy’s queen as well as to Catherine of Braganza were meant to protect them, but they also encouraged the large web of misinformation and fear that accompanied the royal childbirth experience.

Against the fertility challenges of early modern queens, the longing for a child, which was expressed so fervently and frequently in fairy tales, reveals itself as a historical marker. Although both the king and the queen may desire an heir, the burden of worry and responsibility for conception and delivery was primarily the queen’s. At the same time, because of her duty to the body politic, the queen’s reproductive experiences were never private. In a sense, her body was shared by the whole kingdom, a point Henry made clear in a comment to the Duke of Norfolk about his third queen, Jane Seymour. The queen’s pregnancy, Henry boasted, was a “thing of that quality, as every good English man will think himself to have a part in the same.”
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CHAPTER 3

MATERNAL MONSTROSITIES: QUEENS AND THE REPRODUCTION OF HEIRS AND ERRORS

“He is so ugly that I am ashamed of him.”

—Queen Henrietta Maria of England upon visiting her infant son James in his nursery

“So there he was, father of three of the most frightening and ugly creatures in his kingdom. He said to his queen that they had better leave it at that, for he did not want to populate the earth with monsters.”

—Henriette de Murat, “The Savage”

“Once upon a time there was a queen who gave birth to a son so ugly and so misshapen that for a long time it was doubtful whether he possessed a human form.”

—Charles Perrault, “Riquet with the Tuft”

“When the cunning queen mother saw her son approaching the palace, she went to meet him and told him that his dear wife had given birth to three mongrel pups instead of three children.”

—Straparola, “Ancilotto, King of Provino”

Although both of Mary Tudor’s assumed pregnancies turned out to be false, stories still circulated that she had delivered a “shapeless mass.” More egregious rumors claimed that the fetus was a lapdog or a marmot. It was acknowledged misfortune enough that queens, like all women, could miscarry, deliver stillborns, or even give birth to a daughter rather than the son who would provide dynastic security. But there was also a fear manifest at every level of society that mothers—and especially queens—could produce even more imperfect offspring. Likewise, early modern fairy tales abound in queens who deliver monstrous children.

The pregnancy-wish motif in fairy tales points to the overwhelming concern over fertility that early modern queens experienced, but their reproductive anxiety did not end with conception. Literary and historical queens were often able to conceive after substantial intervention, only to deliver a creature so abnormal, imperfect, or bestial that both mother and child could suffer dire consequences. In the exaggerated realm of the fairy tale genre, abnormal births included snakes, pigs, dogs, cats, and moles. There were also numerous reports of outrageous offspring in popular culture: although this phenomenon was not exclusive to the Renaissance, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an extraordinary obsession with monstrous births comprising the factual and the fictitious, as evidenced in countless publications from medical treatises to broadsheets and ballads. The paranoia was palpable and the monarchy was not immune.

Certainly, babies were born then as now either prematurely or with actual physical deformities, but in the absence of current scientific knowledge, defective births were often reported as unnatural or monstrous occurrences. But the preponderance of monstrous birth accounts suggests that more than a lack of medical explanation was at play: the monstrous birth also signaled the uncertainty over producing a healthy, legitimate, preferably male heir and the attendant responsibility ascribed to the maternal body. Indeed, it was commonly believed that the monstrous birth was not merely an unfortunate natural occurrence but a revelation of divine punishment for the mother’s sins of omission or commission. This chapter considers the convergence of the contemporary fascination with monstrous births and their intertextual tracings in fairy tales and the childbirth experiences of early modern queens.

Early Modern Fairy Tales: Delivering Monsters

Numerous tales by Straparola, Basile, and the French salon writers involve aberrant births. These tales typically follow one of two trajectories: in the first tale type, the queen, initially unable to conceive, eventually delivers a monstrous child, usually an animal or a human so ugly and misshapen that it appears inhuman. In the second type, the queen actually delivers one or more healthy children, but the king is falsely informed that the birth was monstrous, a slander he seldom questions.

The first tale type begins with the ubiquitous pregnancy wish: the childless royal couple longs for an heir, the queen is visited by one or more fairies whose spells impregnate her, but a malevolent fairy guarantees that the birth will be monstrous. In some cases the queen is aware of the horrific curse, but in other stories she only understands once the child is born.

Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s tales are particularly replete with pregnancies gone wrong. In “Babiole,” the childless queen conceives as a result of an angry fairy’s spell and then delivers a lovely baby girl who immediately turns into a monkey. The queen’s fear of repercussions is instantaneous and self-serving: “What is to become of me? What a disgrace for me that all my subjects should think I have brought a monster into the world! And how horrified the king will be at seeing such a child!”
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The queen seems unconcerned about the suffering in store for her simian child; she only considers the perilous consequences for her own royal position, anticipating the reaction of her “subjects” and “the king.” Indeed, her lament “What is to become of me?” suggests that queen consorts who “failed to deliver” were dispensable—a fear grounded in historical precedent. The queen appeals to her ladies-in-waiting for help; one attendant urges her to tell the king that the child died and then recommends murder: “We must shut up this monkey in a box and cast it to the bottom of the sea; it would be a terrible thing to keep an animal of this sort any longer.” However, the monkey-child, Babiole, survives the assassination attempt and is raised at the court of another queen where she acquires human intelligence, speech, and an elite education. In spite of her rich, bejeweled clothing and her royal upbringing, Babiole still sees herself as “little, ugly, and sooty, my hands covered with hair, with a tail, and with teeth ever ready to bite.”