Remember our queens for their battles rather than their bodices

Never underestimate a woman’s steeliness – especially if she happens to be royal. A study has revealed that, throughout history, Europe’s queens have been significantly more bellicose and battle-hungry than its kings.

Of the monarchs who ruled between 1480 and 1913, the queens were found to be 27 per cent more likely than the kings to have engaged in inter-state wars. As a result of their determined warmongering, they also succeeded in amassing more territory.

Can there really be something innately more warlike about female rulers? It seems doubtful. Granted, there are some highly memorable warrior queens. In AD 60/61, Boudicca led the brutal revolt of the Iceni against the Romans. Considering the Romans had seized her late husband’s property and raped her daughters, however, can you really blame her? Rewind to five centuries earlier, and an equally mighty queen, Artemisia of Caria, was expertly commanding ships in the Graeco-Persian Wars. These wars were not of her making.

In modern times, queens have often had warlike men breathing down their necks. Sir Francis Drake was decidedly more gung-ho than Elizabeth I initially was about war with Spain. Elizabeth’s sister, Mary I, married Philip II of Spain, who acquired her support for an alliance against France. It was in that war that England lost Calais. Mary bore the blame.

The recent study of monarchs, which was conducted by academics Oeindrila Dube of the University of Chicago and S P Harish of McGill University, indeed suggests that married queens were more warlike than unmarried ones. New alliances, after all, brought new obligations.

That is not to say that married queens were steered by their husbands. Isabella I of Castille, who ruled with her spouse, Ferdinand II of Aragon, was notoriously tenacious. She keenly oversaw both the capture of Grenada and Christopher Columbus’s quest to reach the New World. Closer to home, Matilda, daughter of King Henry I, invaded England in 1139 to assert her right to the throne against Stephen.

Many of these women had been used as pawns from the moment of their birth. Lined up for politically expedient marriages, or courted by men from whom, as Mary I said, “there was nothing to be got but fine words”, they often had no choice but to offer displays of strength and resistance.

We may no longer glorify their strident foreign policies or blooddrenched wars, but far better that Europe’s queens are remembered for their strength and brio than for their bodices and pearls.