“Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe”, by Sarah Gristwood

 

400 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-1541697225

Chess is a game of strategy and forward thinking: anyone even a little familiar with the game knows that the best players always try to think several moves ahead – but it is also a game in which the Queen is the most powerful playing piece whose job it is to protect the King, who is one of the weakest pieces. This is a more than appropriate analogy for Sarah Gristwood to use in Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe, an excellent history of these amazing women who ruled rather than just reigned, usually in support of their young sons until they could reach their majority – Queens protecting Kings on the gameboard of European politics.

The author could just as easily had written sixteen separate biographies, but by combining all of their lives into a single book, Gristwood shows just how each country and each woman truly depended on one another for power and prestige, even if (as they usually were) at odds with one another. I found this to be most interesting, for while there may have been mutual respect and/or even admiration between these women, there was no love lost: they were patriots to their respective nations first, or fierce defenders of their sons and their interests – in this, they indeed fulfilled the stereotypical role held out for mothers.

In a world where male heirs were few or died young, it was women who had to step in and make Europe ready for the future. The 16^th Century was the changing point for European history, and it was women, more often than not, who had to navigate this complex field to keep Europe from completely falling apart, and Game of Queens vividly tells the stories behind the unprecedented emergence of these powerful women in the games countries played in the 1500s, a masterful account of these individuals and of many more ambitious, often public-spirited women of royal blood in 16^th Century Europe.

Indeed, there are so many significant players pacing regally through Gristwood’s saga that the reader might anticipate some narrative confusion. Gristwood chronicles the roles of many other women rulers and powerful influencers during the period. They include Isabella of Castile, Christina of Denmark, Marguerite of Navarre, Margaret of Austria, Louise of Savoy, Anne of Bohemia and Hungary, Margaret Tudor, Mary Tudor, Marie de Guise, Jeanne d’Albret and Anne de Beaujeu, along with the usual suspects of Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots, Catherine de Medici and Elizabeth I.

Game of Queens is as complete a history of the 16^th Century as one could hope for, retelling the tale through the eyes of the women who made it all happen while, thankfully, not infecting the same with any modern-day political hokum.