Game of Queens Read Online Free PDF

story, Caterina Sforza may be the most striking of ‘the ones that got away’ (as well as being another suggested as a model for the new chess queen). Machiavelli, who encountered Caterina when sent on an embassy, described how, besieged, with her children taken hostage, Caterina pulled up her skirts and showed the besiegers ‘her genital parts’, telling them she had the means to make more children if necessary. Caterina was perhaps unique even among contemporaries but nonetheless, the stress on a powerful woman’s physicality is something that endures.
     
    Modern comparisons are often invidious and will largely be excluded from this book. Nonetheless, at this of all moments, they cannot be ignored completely. A decade ago as I write – on 19 January 2006, to be precise – the New York Times paid an international group of women a backhanded compliment. It was, it said, ‘the most interesting and accomplished group of female leaders’ ever assembled – ‘with the possible exception of when Queen Elizabeth I dined alone’.
    A good deal has changed in the last ten years concerning women’s role on the international stage. But a lot has not changed – and that includes the visibility of much of women’s history. Elizabeth and her kinswomen apart, the female rulers of sixteenth-century Europe are not always familiar to the general reader in English-speaking countries. In the attempt to change that, this book must be regarded as an opening gambit. But one thing at least it can hope to do: prove that Elizabeth I could dine in some extraordinary company.

Author’s Note
    Of the sixteen protagonists in this book, four are called some version of ‘Margaret’ and another four variants of ‘Mary’. I therefore make no apology for distinguishing them as clearly as possible, even at the cost of some consistency. Thus while Margaret of Austria keeps her natal title despite her three marriages, Marguerite ‘of Navarre’ is so described even before her marriage to the king of that small country. It is the title under which she is most familiar, the title under which her writings are still published today. Also in the interests of clarity, spelling, punctuation and capitalisation have sometimes been modernised.

PART I
    1474–1513
    â€˜Since you have given women letters and continence and magnanimity and temperance, I only marvel that you would not also have them govern cities, make laws and lead armies . . .’
    The Magnifico replies, also laughing:
    â€˜Perhaps even that would not be amiss . . . Do you not believe that there are many to be found who would know how to govern cities and armies as well as men do? But I have not laid these duties on them, because I am fashioning a Court Lady, not a Queen.’
    The Book of the Courtier , Baldassare Castiglione 1528

1
    Entrance
    The Netherlands, 1513
    The girl who arrived at the court of the Netherlands in the summer of 1513 was a courtier’s daughter, bred to know the steps of the dangerous courtly dance; a life where assets were exchanged for attendance, where favour was won by flattery. She knew how the pageantry of a Christmas masque could spell a message, how a family’s fortune could rise or fall on a ruler’s whim and that in the great chess game of European politics, even she might have a part to play.
    No one, of course, had yet any idea just how great a part that would be.
    She arrived as the latest of the eighteen maids of honour waiting on Margaret of Austria, the Regent of the Netherlands. At just twelve years old, she had been handed over to a stranger (one of the regent’s esquires) and escorted from her manor house home in the Weald of Kent, in England, to make the rare journey across the sea. She would have been keyed up to a pitch of excitement, but scared, too, surely. Perhaps no arrival in her life, not even her arrival at the Tower of London more than twenty years later, would be quite as