Behind Every King By MIRANDA SEYMOUR

 Woman was never born to rule. Medieval man never doubted that simple proposition. Neither did the 15th- and 16th-century men whose deplorably low opinion of uppity women helps provide Helen Castor, an accomplished and elegant historian, with a framework for her third book.

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                                                               Eleanor of Aquitaine

 It’s possible that the doomed Duke of York was voicing the view of Shakespeare himself when he informed Margaret of Anjou (Henry VI’s avenging queen, preparing to plunge a dagger into the usurping duke’s heart before mocking his corpse with a paper crown) that she was a “she-wolf” — and one worse, by far, than any of the four-legged variety. It’s certain that John Knox, hurling imprecations at England’s fervently Roman Catholic Queen Mary from his Genevan exile in 1558, believed he spoke for all Protestant men when he called women “a monstrous regiment” that, “among all enormities that do this day abound upon the face of the whole earth, is most detestable and damnable.” Unluckily for Knox, 1558 was the very year in which a Protestant woman succeeded her Catholic sister on the English throne. Grovelling letters from Geneva failed to win him the right, as a member of the superior sex, to issue manly guidance to the affronted new Queen Elizabeth. 

 For the purposes of Castor’s study, Elizabeth represents the apotheosis of female royalty. Here was a woman savvy enough to cast herself as mother of the nation (“for every one of you, and as many as are English, are my children”) while reassuring them that the daughter of Henry VIII also possessed “the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.” Skilful oratory also played a major role in Elizabeth’s hold over her subjects, an aspect of governance to which Castor gives scant attention. She might usefully have considered whether such a consummate mastery of rhetoric could have swayed the destinies of the four royal consorts who form the central subject of “She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth.”

 Whatever Matilda, Eleanor, Isabella and Margaret may have lacked in eloquence, they compensated for in pluck. Which of us would care to replicate Henry I’s fearless daughter Matilda’s midnight flight from imprisonment in a castle by crossing an icebound river and trekking seven miles through the freezing countryside? Yet Matilda’s courage won no plaudits from the male chroniclers of medieval England. Ignoring the fact that Henry I had himself designated her as his successor, the disgruntled official historians gasped at her effrontery: “She actually made herself queen of all England and gloried in so being called.”

 Matilda’s crime had been to challenge the cousin, Stephen, who had usurped her throne. The chroniclers denounced her arrogance, despite the fact that she had been chased by Stephen’s sympathizers from her own pre-coronation banquet and hunted like a hare across the land. Declining to praise a mere woman for the uncommon courage she subsequently displayed, they simply allowed that in her many escapes from captivity the deposed queen had experienced a degree of luck.

 Matilda’s major piece of luck was to have produced an acceptable heir. Her eldest son, Henry, after inheriting the duchy of Normandy from the father who had snatched it from Stephen’s grasp, cannily married one of the greatest heiresses of the age: the newly divorced Eleanor of Aquitaine. Backed by his mother, Henry then presented a formidable challenge to the power of the English throne. Ever pragmatic, the lords of the realm weighed the odds and negotiated a deal: Stephen could quietly live out his years of kingship; subsequently, Matilda’s clever, forceful son would succeed him on the throne. And Matilda? She seems to have been content to retreat to Normandy, where she lived out her remaining years with honor, the proud mother of the fearsome King Henry II, who called himself, in gratitude, Henry FitzEmpress.

 The triumphant accession of Matilda’s son epitomizes the narrative difficulty Castor faces. Henry II became one of England’s most remarkable leaders, and his own son, Richard I, would gain a reputation as a legendary warrior. Men of such stature can’t be confined to the sidelines; neither, however, can they be allowed to overshadow the “she-wolves” of Castor’s title. Wavering between difficult choices, she is forced to compromise and, like the women she writes about, to accept England’s kings in their habitual role as leaders and masters.

 Eleanor of Aquitaine comes nearest to challenging that pre-eminence. A queen who divorced her first husband (Louis VII of France) and went to war against her second (Henry II of England), Eleanor survived 15 years of imprisonment by the enraged Henry before emerging to govern England in the absence of Richard I, her lion-hearted son, with the same confident authority she had already displayed as a temporary ruler of Aquitaine. Eleanor’s flair for strategy and bold leadership might shine even more brightly if Castor had told us more about her role as mother to two kings (John Lackland, the youngest of her nine children, succeeded his older brother, Richard) and as wife to the hot-tempered, all-conquering Henry.

 Isabella, wife to Edward II, appears the most eligible of the lupine candidates for Castor’s racy title. A ravishing beauty, she was betrothed to a man whose tastes ran toward a pretty, boy-shaped bit of rough. Nursing her pride, this formidable queen made use of a trip across the Channel to strike back. “She did not seem to anyone to be offended,” her puzzled husband complained after learning that his wife had joined forces with her brother, the king of France, and Roger Mortimer, chief enemy of Edward and of Edward’s flamboyant lover, Hugh Despenser.

 The depth of Isabella’s loathing for Despenser became apparent only with Edward’s humiliating defeat. After Despenser was stripped of his clothing by a mob, his living body was disemboweled and castrated before he was beheaded. Such vindictiveness boded ill: Isabella’s avarice and haughtiness, vauntingly apparent during her brief subsequent reign as Mortimer’s consort, strengthened the chroniclers in their fierce mistrust of powerful women.

 In 1445, almost 90 years after Isabella’s death, a 15-year-old French girl was welcomed to England as the bride of the tragically vacuous Henry VI. Throughout Henry’s bloody wars for power against the House of York, Margaret of Anjou was honored by her husband’s Lancastrian followers as their brightest hope, but she ended by suffering the saddest fate of all Castor’s valiant consorts. Poised on the brink of victory, the queen lived to see Edward IV of York preside over the slayings of both her son and her husband. Thus robbed of dynastic relevance, the bereaved queen died in 1482, in obscure exile.

 A she-wolf? Hardly. In this sense, all of Castor’s royal women deliver less than her title promises. More interesting conclusions might have resulted from a comparison with, say, the powerful medieval queens of Scotland. When viewed in isolation, Castor’s cast of tough ladies contribute less than they might to the ever-intriguing topic of female leadership.

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