Depicting Elizabeth I as mother of her people featured in many discourses during the Tudor queen’s reign. She had responded to her minister’s inquiries about marriage only days into her first parliament in 1559 by stating that she was content to remain a virgin and ‘a good mother of my Country’ until the time came that she should take a husband.[1] Such sentiments were reiterated by the queen four years later in her response to a petition by the Commons that she marry:
‘And so I assure you all that though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have any a more mother than I mean to be unto you all’.[2]
Elizabeth was not the only queen who used motherhood metaphors in her ruling rhetoric. Her sister Mary had also proclaimed that, ‘I cannot tell how naturally a mother loveth her children, for I was never the mother of any; but certainly a prince and governor may as naturally and as earnestly love subjects, as the mother doth’.[3]
Motherhood also featured prominently in the political strategies of Elizabeth’s contemporary, Queen Catherine de’ Medici of France. Katherine Crawford has argued that Catherine ‘staked her political career on being considered above all to be a good mother’.[4] She utilised these positive sentiments to construct political claims for herself and to ‘alter several constitutional and ceremonial traditions of the French monarchy’.[5]
Susan Broomhall has also argued that Catherine de’ Medici’s maternal identity as a carer was foregrounded in her management of natural resources, such as tobacco plantations, and her investments in France. Both writings from the queen and those about her, as well as visual and metaphorical representations, framed Catherine’s ‘desire to protect the kingdom as a maternal instinct’ and depicted her investments as charitable labours of love for her people.[6] Indeed, many of Elizabeth I’s acts were framed as ‘tending to the common benefit of the realm’.[7] Like Catherine whose caring identity was expressed in ‘concrete terms of the financial aid that her works provided’, Elizabeth also appears to have authorised crown lands to be leased to the projectors during her reign.[8]
Crown Lands and forests has been used by generations of English sovereigns to generate royal revenue via leasing out these lands to fee farms, charging rent and other taxes.[9] Crown lands were also used as forms of patronage to reward loyal subjects and under the Tudors it was common for lands to be bestowed upon favourites. However, as Katherine S. H. Wyndham has argued, in contrast to those before her Elizabeth ‘gave away hardly any land at all’ and her government ‘was not prepared to ignore what Lord Keeper Bacon described in his speech to the 1559 parliament as the “Marvellous decays and wast of the Revenue of the Crown” or at least to forget the long-term significance of whittling away the sources from which a good deal of that revenue accrued-for no return’.[10] Certainly, it appears that among the renewed push for Elizabethan economic ‘projects’ identified by Joan Thirsk, the queen desired to manage her lands more astutely to enrich both royal coffers and the wider English economy.
While Catherine and Elizabeth both materially invested in acts of care for their people, the nature of their queenship was different. Catherine was a Queen consort, dowager and regent, while Elizabeth was Queen regnant. Elizabeth never had her own biological offspring, while Catherine gave birth to ten children, three of whom became Kings whom she mentored. The realities of Catherine’s motherhood therefore shaped how she was able to draw on this role, particularly as queen regent to her son Charles IX and then as queen mother. It was during her time as queen mother that she expressed the ‘strong desire to be a mother to all your [her son’s] subjects’.[11] This is something which Denis Crouzet has argued linked ‘diplomatic practice with feminine identity’ and linked Catherine’s identity as mother of a king to a ‘motherly figure who protects her son’s subjects’.[12]
Although Elizabeth had no biological children, this did not inhibit her ability to draw on such a metaphor. This is because mothering, as Kristen L. Geaman and Theresa Earenfight have argued, ‘was a socially constructed activity which allowed both childless women and men to participate in maternal practices such as spiritual and nurturing motherhood’.[13] By refusing to marry and have biological children Elizabeth framed herself as a wife to England and mother of its people. In the same year that she declared herself a good mother of England, she is also recorded as telling the commons, while displaying her coronation ring, that ‘I am already bound unto an husband, which is the Kingdom of England’ and ‘I have no children: for every one of you, and as many as are English, are my children’.[14] While there are two different versions of the speech with these details omitted or added in both, the queen’s reasoning was that she need not rush to marriage as she was bound to England and its people, in the same way that a wife is bound to her husband and children. As Coch has concluded, by replacing the conventional biological definition of motherhood with a metaphorical one, Elizabeth escaped practical and cultural constraints while developing ‘a powerful model of female public rule’ where she promised ‘constant, self-sacrificing love and implicitly demands, in return, her subjects’ affectionate respect’.[15]
Remaining a virgin allowed Elizabeth to, as Leah Marcus has argued, ‘preserve her independence’ and tap into other ‘fictionalized versions of herself’.[16] Indeed, Elizabeth frequently drew on different gender roles and positions. Aidan Norrie has noted that in the Golden Speech of 1601, she ‘referred to herself variously as king, prince, and queen: switching between roles and genders with ease’.[17] This was done to prove her legitimacy as woman ruler and a sole one at that; a ‘male body politic in concept while a female body natural in practice’ as Levin has argued.[18] It seems that her subjects were also attentive to the metaphorical gendered identities that the queen wrought for herself, as Norton, in his pamphlet about the Revolt of the Northern Earls, also wrote that:
‘The Queens majesty Queen Elizabeth is by al right the sovereign Lady & Mistress of us al, and of you too… Her grace is the most loving mother and Nurse of all her good subjects, to your shame and reproach of unkindnesses I say it. Her highness is the Husband of the commonwealth, married to the Realm, and the same by ceremony of ring as solemnly signified as any common marriage is’[19]
Here Norton constructs a complex metaphor of Elizabeth as both husband and mother. This reconciled early modern ideas of female sovereignty with those of power; the only way that a queen regnant could maintain power in marriage (an arrangement that saw husbands as naturally superior) was also by ‘playing the husband’.[20]
Although Elizabeth and others often referred to her as ‘king’, ‘prince’ or ‘husband’, what they did not do was to label her a ‘father’. This is because fathers and mothers had very different ‘caring’ roles to play. Kings frequently drew on ideals of fatherhood. However, such ideas were often charged more with the ‘rhetoric of authority’ and order that underlay expectations of fathers under patriarchalism, which drew parallels between households and kingdoms headed by fathers and kings who upheld power.[21] This included keeping other heads of households (that is, men) in line and providing for their families. These stand in contrast to Elizabeth whose status as a mother to England appealed more holistically to general care and employment for all her subjects, including those who were ‘impotent and lame’.[22]
The maternal trope remained a fixture of the queen’s speeches from roughly 1559-1563.[23] However, even after the Queen stopped explicitly calling herself ‘mother’, many continued to frame her as their mother and caregiver. In calls for the queen to deal with the succession issue in 1566, an unnamed MP beseeched her Majesty to consider her ‘princely care and motherly love towards us your servants and children’.[24] In 1569, the English lawyer, politician and playwright Thomas Norton chastised those who had rejected ‘a most gracious Queen our most dear mother, nurse and protectrice’ during the Revolt of the Northern Earls.[25]
Sir Harrington referred to Elizabeth as a royal godmother and this state’s natural mother. In 1578 on a progress in which the Queen sought to cultivate religious and political conformity within the Kingdom, representatives from the City of Norwich welcomed her as ‘My Princess and my peerless Queen, my loving Nurse and Mother’, and then farewelled her with ‘Farewell, oh Queen, farewell, oh Mother dear’.[26] The description of the queen as a ‘nurse’ repeatedly in Norton’s tract and in many others draws attention to the caring qualities that defined mothers and motherhood. It also alludes to wet-nurses and breastfeeding, just as mothers nursed their children with their breast milk the queen nursed and nourished her people via her caregiving acts for the realm.
As previously discussed, the portrayal of Elizabeth as a nurse was common during her reign. Carole Levin has collected many examples of the queen being referred to as such.[27] These were not associations that Elizabeth shied away from. The famous Pelican Portrait of the queen from c.1575, named so due to the pelican jewel that the queen wears, demonstrates this.[28] The pelican symbol connected Elizabeth with her two separate identities: the virgin (the pelican has been connected to the Virgin Mary since at least the time of St Ambrose) and a nursing mother of her people.[29] The pelican was a symbol of motherly love as they were said to pluck their breasts to feed their young in times of famine, just as a mother nurses her infant from her breast.[30] As Susan Doran has succinctly written, the ‘pelican in piety well suited a ruler described by Protestants as the nursing mother of the Church’.[31] The term ‘nurse’ was inherently gendered, as it derives from the Anglo-Norman nourice, meaning a woman who takes care of a child and during the early modern period it was commonly used when referring to those who took on mothering roles, such as wet-nurses who nursed (breastfed) children or nursemaids (nannies).[32]
Later in the seventeenth century, depicting England as a nursing mother to her people was common in political conversations as breast feeding by English mothers was thought to transmit ‘physical health’, a ‘strong moral character’ and strong sense of national identity to their children.[33] So much emphasis was placed on these ideas in the Stuart period that Rachel Trubowitz has argued that rulers such as James I, Charles I and Oliver Cromwell used the nursing father, a ‘potent, divine image of feminized masculinity’, to cultivate the support and love of their people and even to strengthen arguments for the union of England and Scotland.[34] While it is not the scope of this chapter to determine whether Elizabeth was the genesis of this renewed focus on nursing monarchy in English political thought that was then taken up by the Stuarts, it is certainly a rhetorical device that she used and supported. To look after a child as a real or metaphorical nursing mother, or father, involved real concern for their health and wellbeing.
During the reign of Elizabeth I, letters patent for new industries such as seed oil and even saltpeter were framed around the Queen’s image as a caring and nursing mother to her people; a woman who sought to enrich not only the crown but her people who relied on her for nourishment and protection.
I explore these ideas and more in my new book chapter titled ‘The Soap-makers and the Queen: The Rhetoric of Maternalism in the ‘Oil Affairs’ of Late Sixteenth-Century England’, which examines debates about oil production in England during the 1570s. This chapter is published in the new edited collection: Queens, Queenship, and Natural Resource Management in Premodern Europe, 1400-1800, edited by Susan Broomhall, Clare Davidson (Routledge, 2025).
You can find out more about my chapter and others here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781032723068-10/soap-makers-queen-sarah-bendall?context=ubx&refId=86e3b799-e9dd-4c6a-8aac-0113928975d7
References
[1] Christine Coch, ‘“Mother of my Contreye”: Elizabeth I and Tudor Constructions of Motherhood’, English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 3 (1996): 423; Queen Elizabeth I first speech before parliament, February 10, 1559, Version 1, in Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose, eds. Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 58.
[2] Jan 28, 1563, transcribed in Marcus, Mueller and Rose, Elizabeth I, 72.
[3] Quoted in Coch, ‘Elizabeth I and Tudor Constructions of Motherhood’, 424.
[4] Katherine Crawford, ‘Catherine de Medicis and the performance of political motherhood’, Sixteenth Century Journal 31, no. 3 (2000): 657.
[5] Crawford, ‘Catherine de Medicis and the performance of political motherhood’, 653, 672.
[6] Susan Broomhall, The Identities of Catherine de’ Medici (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 263-98.
[7] TNA: SP 12/126, fol.145v.
[8] Broomhall, The Identities of Catherine de’ Medici, 286.
[9] Daniel W. Hollis, ‘The Crown Lands and the Financial Dilemma in Stuart England’, Albion 26, no. 3 (1994): 420–24; Katherine S. H. Wyndham, ‘Crown Land and Royal Patronage in Mid-Sixteenth Century England’, Journal of British Studies 19, No. 2 (1980): 18–34.
[10] Wyndham, ‘Crown Land and Royal Patronage in Mid-Sixteenth Century England’, 33.
[11] Quoted in Denis Crouzet, ‘“A strong desire to be a mother to all your subjects”: A Rhetorical Experiment by Catherine de Medici’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 1 (2008): 113.
[12] Crouzet, ‘A Rhetorical Experiment by Catherine de Medici’, 113-4.
[13] Kristen L. Geaman and Theresa Earenfight, ‘Neither heir nor spare: Childless queens and the practice of monarchy in pre-modern Europe’, in The Routledge History of Monarchy, eds. Woodacre, Lucinda H.S. Dean, Chris Jones, Zita Rohr and Russell Martin (London: Routledge, 2019), 521.
[14] Queen Elizabeth I first speech before parliament, February 10, 1559, Version 2, transcribed in Marcus, Mueller and Rose, Elizabeth I, 59.
[15] Coch, ‘Elizabeth I and Tudor Constructions of Motherhood’, 424-25.
[16] Leah Marcus, ‘Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I, and the Political Uses of Androgyny’, in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 138.
[17] Aidan Norrie, ‘Kings’ Stomachs and Concrete Elephants: Gendering Elizabeth I through the Tilbury Speech’, Royal Studies Journal 6, no. 2 (2019): 186.
[18] Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power, Second edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 121.
[19] Thomas Norton, To the Quenes Maiesties poore deceyued subiectes of the north countrey, drawen into rebellion by the Earles of Northumberland and Westmerland (London: 1569), Biijv.
[20] Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King, 135.
[21] Laura Gowing, Gender Relations in Early Modern England (Edinburgh Gate: Pearson, 2012), 28, 37.
[22] BL: Lansdowne Vol/22, fol. 90.
[23] Allison Machlis Meyer, Telltale Women: Chronicling Gender in Early Modern Historiography (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), 71-2.
[24] T. E. Hartley, Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, vol. 1 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981), 157.
[25] Norton, To the Quenes Maiesties poore deceyued subiectes of the north, Aiiijv.
[26] These examples are cited in Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King, 87. For more on the 1578 progress see: Dustin M. Neighbours, ‘With My Rulinge’: Agency, Queenship and Political Culture through Royal Progresses in the Reign of Elizabeth I (PhD diss., University of York, 2016), 82-120.
[27] Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King, 87, 195.
[28] Attributed to Nicholas Hillard, Elizabeth I, ‘The Pelican Portrait’, c. 1575, oil on panel. Walker Art Gallery, WAG 2994.
[29] Susan Doran, ‘Virginity, Divinity and Power: The Portraits of Elizabeth I’ in The Myth of Elizabeth, eds. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (London: Palgrave, 2003), 178.
[30] Roy Strong, The Elizabethan image: an introduction to English portraiture, 1558 to 1603 (Yale University Press, 2019), 34.
[31] Doran, ‘Virginity, Divinity and Power’, 179.
[32] ‘nourice, n.’ OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2022. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/128701 (accessed October 07, 2022).
[33] Rachel Trubowitz, Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3-4, 37, 42.
[34] Trubowitz, Nation and Nurture, 94-97.
