Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (23 page)

The early modern period was marked by tension between tumultuous changes in social, economic, and religious structures and a simultaneous urgency to maintain prevailing systems of order and hierarchy. Clothing was perhaps the most visible manifestation of these competing trends: new economic and productive capacities led to dizzying innovations and expanding choices in apparel whereas recurrent attempts at creating and enforcing sumptuary legislation resisted the destabilizing threat of fashion trends. Sumptuary laws, as Alan Hunt, Gilles Lipovetsky, and others have pointed out, arose from multiple motivations—economic, moral, and political—but consistently reflected top-down attempts to define and control complex social distinctions. Sumptuary legislation is most associated with sixteenth-century England, where attempts at codification were ongoing, but in various forms such laws proliferated across Europe throughout the early modern period.
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What did this turmoil over clothing mean for an early modern queen whose royal image was defined by her own meticulously chosen wardrobe? In a sense, a queen was above the fray in her exemption from the labyrinthine restrictions of sumptuary laws; she had the freedom and the financial resources to dress with impunity. On the other hand, queens were not immune from the legislation’s reach. In Henry VIII’s reign, women in general were excluded from the restrictions of sumptuary legislation but queens were mentioned as part of what the royal circle alone could and should wear. According to Maria Hayward, “The queen and other female members of the royal family were the only women mentioned in the acts of apparel and for them the law clearly defined what they [were] expected to wear in order to stress their superior status.”
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In other words, queens were not subject to restriction but they were saddled with expectation. Moreover, queens regnant—most notably, Elizabeth—were responsible for upholding the sumptuary legislation that defined what their subjects could wear precisely to safeguard the exclusivity of their own sumptuous clothing.

Thus, a queen’s wardrobe was both a luxury and a burden—sometimes, literally. Elizabeth, along with most early modern queens, delighted in her splendid clothing but could also find it cumbersome: in her later years she found her parliamentary robes so heavy that she had the tailors remove the fur lining.
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But whether royal clothing was a privilege or a responsibility, it was always understood to be a necessary and visible manifestation of monarchical power. Not only were queens expected to dress in magnificence that was appropriate to their position, they shaped standards of fashion for their court and their subjects, which also contributed to the formation of national identity. But although queens initiated fashion trends, they also had to control the degree of imitation so as to maintain the uniqueness of their own clothing. Such complex management of royal dress could be particularly difficult for the queen consorts and princesses dependent upon kings who exercised considerable control over a queen’s wardrobe.

Like Donkey-Skin and Cinderella and so many other royal heroines of fairy tales, early modern queens—and kings—well understood that the monarchy was inseparable from its external accoutrements.

When Henry’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, was demoted, she was said to accept her decline in status gracefully, though a few years later she felt a competitive sting over the king’s choice of Catherine Parr. Chapuys reported on Anne’s reaction to Henry’s last marriage: “Indeed, I hear from an authentic quarter that the said dame [Anne] would rather lose everything in this world (
être en chemise
) and return to her mother than remain longer in England, especially now that she is in despair and much afflicted in consequence of this late marriage of the King.”
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When Anne and Henry divorced, she received a settlement of income and property, and the former queen proceeded to create a comfortable life for herself, but in a moment of regret for her lost position she noted that she would rather be left with only her shift, or chemise, than remain a mere “Queen sister.” Anne well understood that her abandonment of royal status was synonymous with the abandonment of royal clothing.

Elizabeth similarly alluded to simple clothing to articulate how she would exercise power when the House of Commons urged her to marry and provide the kingdom with an heir. In a speech to Parliament in 1566, Elizabeth insisted that she held absolute power and would make her own decisions; she concluded, “I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of my realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom.”
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The outbursts of both Anne of Cleves and Elizabeth evoke the familiar story of Patient Griselda, who was stripped of her fine clothes and turned out in her shift by a tyrannous husband.
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But as Jones and Stallybrass point out, Elizabeth inverts the Griselda paradigm: “Perhaps the subtlest of her reinscriptions of Boccaccio’s Griselda is that the petticoat is hers... Griselda has to entreat for a smock... Elizabeth, in contrast, represents her petticoat not as a gift, implying her dependence upon a superior, but as an emblem of her inalienable self-possession.”
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Both queens were announcing that the degree of power they would renounce would be their choice, one which would be reflected through menial clothing.

Queens generally preferred their positions of power, however, and their royal status was inseparable from their splendid wardrobes. Inventories, wills, verbal descriptions, ambassadors’ accounts, and portraits reveal how vast were the wardrobes of early modern queens. There were numerous official occasions for which queens were expected to dress in a particular way, including the Maundy Day observations, receptions for foreign dignitaries and ambassadors, New Year’s celebrations, and most importantly, the magnificently staged coronations. Four queens in sixteenth-century England—Henry’s first two wives and his two daughters—had coronation ceremonies, but for a variety of reasons involving timing, status, protocol, and expense, his other four queens were not officially crowned. Catherine of Aragon’s coronation was a splendid and costly spectacle with her garments recalling the magical dresses of fairy tales: as Catherine made her way through London before the admiring public she was “borne on the backs of two white palfreys trapped in white cloth of gold, her person appareled in white satin embroidered, her hair hanging down her back, of a very great length, beautiful and goodly to behold, and on her head a coronal, set with many rich stones.”
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Twenty-four years later, her successor Anne Boleyn was given an even more elaborate and expensive coronation ceremony with festivities stretching over five days. At various stages the new queen, nearly six months pregnant at the time, wore “rich cloth of gold,” “white clothe of Tyssue and a mantle of the same furred with Ermyne,” and “a robe of purple velvet furred with Ermyne.”
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The clothing of her attendants was spectacularly orchestrated as well—given the enormous upheaval Henry’s marriage to Anne had caused, the coronation spectacle was an important means of publicly proclaiming Anne’s queenship.

Figure 4 Portrait of Catherine Parr
(XCF 285133)

If the coronations of Catherine and Anne offered the English people a comparative framework for the two queens, the ceremonial presentations of their daughters, separated by only five years, were more notable for the similarities. For her royal entry into London in 1553, Mary wore “rich apparel, her gowne of purple velvet French fashion, with sleves of the same, her kirtle of purple satten all thicke sett with gouldsmithes worke and great pearle.”
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Elizabeth was also “appareled in purple velvet, with a scarf about her neck” at her accession in 1558.
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The two sisters both chose royal purple for their entries, and they also wore the same coronation robes. According to Maria Hayward, “These formal robes were very expensive and this at least partially explains why the gold robes and the crimson velvet parliament robes that were made for Mary in 1553 were remade for Elizabeth to wear at her coronation in 1559.”
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The reusing and reworking of costly material was not unusual in the early modern period but, as Hayward points out, “This recycling of ceremonial robes was unique amongst the Tudor monarchs and it was reflective more of economy than of sisterly feeling.”
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Elizabeth Mazzola reads this act of “borrowed robes” for the coronation ceremony as a more politically calculating and personally fraught statement about Elizabeth’s positioning of herself in relation to Mary: Elizabeth’s “unusual sartorial decision—especially given their troubled tie (and Elizabeth’s later reputation as a clotheshorse)—is a way for Elizabeth both to reify and obliterate her connection to Mary Tudor, revealing herself as both Mary’s heir and her foil.”
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By adopting the garments of her older sister and former queen, Elizabeth both announced her own occupation of the throne and underscored Mary’s reign as a thing of the past: Elizabeth “buries her sister’s royal claims: if clothes make the queen, Mary has been royally divested.”
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In her selection of clothing, particularly for such public and official occasions, a queen could convey a keen understanding of the politically charged symbolism of clothing.

On a rare occasion, a queen confounded sartorial expectations. Isabela Clara Eugenia, the daughter of Philip II of Spain, became a joint ruler with her husband, Archduke Albert, of the Low Countries. After Albert died in 1621, Isabel only wore brown robes and a wimple, the habit of a Franciscan tertiary, to publicly emphasize her widowhood and religiosity. According to Magdalena Sánchez, court splendor had been the primary means of emphasizing “sovereignty, and by adopting a Franciscan habit and curtailing court entertainment and patronage, Isabel was sacrificing this visible means of proclaiming her authority.” Isabel’s humble self-image was unsettling to other monarchs who were confused about her status, and she “was criticized for her public display of humility.”
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Whether all ruling women complied with the royal dress code, standards of magnificence were universally understood.

Queens were expected to display themselves in appropriately sumptuous clothing and, in turn, their wardrobe selections were seen as establishing fashion trends. Fairy tales frequently refer to the queen’s role as fashion arbiter. In Charlotte-Rose de La Force’s “Persinette,” a version of the Rapunzel tale type, a fairy takes the newborn daughter and raises her in material splendor: “Her wardrobe was just as magnificent as that of the queens of Asia, and she was always the first to start the most recent fashion.”
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Similarly, when Perrault’s Cinderella appears at the ball, “All the ladies were busy examining her headdress and her clothes because they wanted to obtain some similar garments the very next day, provided they could find materials as beautiful and artisans sufficiently clever to make them.”
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Sleeping Beauty, on the other hand, receives an exemption because of her long sleep. When the prince awakens her he notes, “She was fully dressed and most magnificently, but he took care not to tell her that she was attired like his grandmother, who also wore stand-up collars. Still, she looked no less lovely.”
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When her husband Henri II died in 1559, Catherine de Médicis began her lifelong habit of wearing black mourning clothes, so she is not always associated with magnificent royal clothing or fashion setting. But Catherine owned a large, elaborate wardrobe and an impressive cache of jewels; she is also credited with promoting such fashion accessories as the decorative folding fan, bordered handkerchiefs, corsets, luxurious undergarments, and scented gloves. Even Catherine’s mourning garb was richly made and usually accessorized with jewelry, laces, and fur trimmings.
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According to Brantôme,

Catherine also “took great pleasure in her shoes and in them being well dressed and tied, and I believe she had the prettiest hands I have ever seen. In addition, she dressed magnificently, and always with some new and clever fashion.”
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Yassana Croizat points out that Catherine’s commitment to fashion was reflected in advice to her daughter Marguerite: “Being a fashion arbiter was perceived as a mark of leadership and was thus a particularly important trait for women in powerful positions to cultivate. Responding to her daughter’s fears of appearing hopelessly out-of-date after a long absence from court, Catherine remarked: ‘It is you who invents and produces beautiful ways of dressing and wherever you shall go, the Court will emulate you and not you the Court.’”
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Nicholas Sander, whose detailed description of Anne Boleyn was previously examined, also noted a queen’s role as fashion icon: “She was the model and the mirror of those who were at court, for she was always well dressed, and every day she made some change in the fashion of her garments.” Eric Ives argues that Sander’s claim is credible given the “size and elaboration of the queen’s wardrobe.” Anne was particularly noted for French fashions, especially favoring fur-trimmed velvet gowns, silks and satins, and printed velvets. Ives insists that “had she lived, her wardrobe might well have rivaled the 2000 costumes which tradition assigns to that most fashion-conscious of monarchs, her daughter Elizabeth.”
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