Slowly, one step at a time. I had already written a scholarly book on Catherine de’ Medici, and while researching that project I read several letters that Catherine had written to Elisabeth (Elisabeth was Catherine’s daughter). But I was really surprised at how little I knew about Elisabeth herself – she’s one of these Renaissance queens that no one really talks about. So I took myself off to the library to find out more.
At first, I thought I would write a book about Elisabeth, or about the relationship between Catherine and Elisabeth. But the more I researched, the more I realized that the story of Catherine and Elisabeth was intimately bound up with that of Mary, Queen of Scots – you couldn’t tell one story without the other. It seemed like everywhere I turned, there was Mary. She caused a good deal of trouble for Catherine and Elisabeth, so much so that I started to refer to "The Mary Problem” whenever I was taking notes. That sent me back to the library and archives to find out more about Mary herself.
I was already well down the road when the driving questions behind the book really began to gel. There was something thematically repetitive about the experiences of these three queens. They started in France together but eventually lived in different kingdoms, navigating different cultures, different politics, court dynamics, religions and more. And yet, despite these differences, they faced strikingly similar challenges – challenges that had everything to do with their gender and youth. That grabbed me. What was it like as a young woman to live in the orbit of power? What did they gain from living so close to power? What did they lose? At some point I realized that I wasn’t simply intertwining three biographies. Rather, I was telling a single, unified story about what it was like to be young, female, and royal in the Renaissance.
They are connected in so many ways, both historically and thematically. Historically, Catherine, Elisabeth and Mary were family, related through blood and marriage. Elisabeth was Catherine’s oldest daughter and Mary was Catherine’s daughter-in-law. Mary grew up at the French court and was childhood friends with Elisabeth – they shared a bedroom. Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary spent years together in France when Elisabeth and Mary were children and Catherine was a young mother. At that time, they were all quite close; Catherine and Elisabeth, especially, were devoted to each other. But both were quite fond of Mary, too, until politics began to fray their relationships and force them into new allegiances.
What intrigued me most, however, were the shared themes that bind them. These three women, together, represent every type of queen. Catherine was the Queen consort of France (the wife of a king) and then the Queen Mother and regent; Elisabeth was Queen consort of Spain; Mary was the Queen regnant of Scotland (meaning that she ruled Scotland in her own right) and, for a brief period, a Queen consort when she was married to the king of France. All three of them had to grapple with a single, terrible truth: that a queen’s value was defined foremost by biology and constrained by sixteenth-century cultural views of women. Her chief duty – whether consort or regnant – was to produce an heir. That reproductive duty came with a steep price. These women suffered for the crowns they wore – physically and emotionally, through misogyny, rape, illness and depression, the loss of children and more. You could say that even the centuries-old notoriety that still follows Catherine de’ Medici is part of the cost of power.
Yes, it was difficult to choose just three queens! In fact, for a time, I thought I would focus on four queens, with Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England as the fourth. Elizabeth Tudor made a striking contrast to Catherine, Elisabeth and Mary, not because the pressures were different for her but because she handled them differently. In the end, though, I had to let Elizabeth Tudor go. The first draft of the book was way too crowded. Everyone was elbowing everyone else, trying to grab the spotlight. Once I demoted Elizabeth Tudor to the supporting cast, everyone settled down.
In all seriousness, though, Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary are representative of a much larger phenomenon. Any number of women from this period, and indeed from throughout history, might have a similar tale to tell.
I was so pleased to learn that Suzannah Lipscomb enjoyed Young Queens, and her endorsement means a lot to me.
I had several goals for this book. I wanted to explore the impact of gender, to think about how women were forced to negotiate power. Because they were women, their bodies suffered in particular ways, and they were vulnerable in ways that men weren’t. I also wanted to create an intimate portrait of Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary. These were complex women with as many flaws and weaknesses as strengths – but that is what made them human. Getting that complexity on the page seemed especially important since history hasn’t necessarily been kind to them – Elisabeth de Valois, for instance, has been all but forgotten while Catherine is often depicted as an evil queen, and the young Mary Queen of Scots is sometimes lost behind the better-known story of her later rivalry with Elizabeth Tudor.
Perhaps most importantly, I wanted to tell a good story, to wrap the history in a narrative that would keep readers engaged. I paid a lot of attention to craft. I’ll never forget one of my favorite teachers from school. At the beginning of each lesson, Ms. Smyth would take off her reading classes, perch herself at the edge of her desk, and tell us a story. We would all sit there, a bunch of 14-year-old kids, rapt. She was an amazing storyteller. I think, ever since, I’ve wanted to do what Ms. Smyth did for her students.
I would love for scholars to find value in the overarching project of narrative, women-centered history and in the research that went into the writing of Young Queens. But I really wrote Young Queens for the non-specialist who may know very little about these queens or about sixteenth-century Europe, and who is curious. I want readers to relate to these queens as women, to get lost in the story of Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary. And I want readers to see that some of the issues that women grapple with today – the politicizing of women’s bodies, the political stakes of motherhood, the fraught adolescence of girls, for instance – have a long history. There is a lot that has changed for women over the centuries and yet there is a lot that has stayed the same.
I loved researching and writing about all three of these women. I have a soft spot for Catherine because I’ve lived with her for a very long time, and because she’s been so maligned over the centuries, unfairly in my opinion. She is also such a survivor – I wish I had even a fraction of her grit. It was a joy to discover Elisabeth because she has all but disappeared from our common knowledge of Renaissance queens. She was a remarkable and promising young woman, and I would love for readers to get to know her better. It was through her letters that I really appreciated just how young these girls were when they were married and pushed into politics. And Elisabeth’s story is really one about the female body and its political importance. That history could turn on whether a girl got her period during any given month astounded me.
I really enjoyed working on Mary, Queen of Scots, too. She’s better known, of course, and some of the challenge was to try to see her with fresh eyes. I found, however, that when I reframed her story in relation to Catherine and Elisabeth, and when I tried to walk in Mary’s shoes, a different Mary emerged. I often wished she had made different choices than she did, but my heart goes out to her.
You can probably feel me equivocating – I don’t want to choose. But, ok, I’ll do it – my favorite queen is Catherine de’ Medici. There, I said it!
I could certainly imagine such a book. There is always something more to say about any given topic. Nothing is set in stone. To me, the present and the past are always engaged in a dynamic and fluid relationship. New knowledge and contexts in our present should make us think differently about the past; how we rethink the past, moreover, affects how we understand the present. And so, even though history is far more attentive to men than it has been to women, why not ask new questions about kings and princes?
There are a lot of young boys who show up in Young Queens, and I was quite moved by some of the things I discovered about them. I think my favorite anecdote was about King Charles IX of France. Evidently, he liked gymnastics and was quite flexible. When he was about 10 or 11 (and already king), he made a bet with his friends that he could bend over and kiss his own foot. And he won! Try to picture how he might have done that.
But there are darker stories out there, too, of boys abandoned and neglected, of sexual abuse. Undoubtedly, their experiences altered the course of history. I think we owe it to these children – and to children today – to make those experiences known.
In some ways, royal boys and young men had a lot in common with young royal women. They often found themselves quite powerless, and they were manipulated, pawned, used and exploited just like girls were – the use and abuse just took a different form. Giving these young people a central place in the history books, illuminating the kinds of pressures they endured and how they navigated childhood and adolescence in that context helps chip away at a certain injustice, I think. It can be part of the larger project to give a voice to those who, in the past, have been denied one.
