Gendering Sovereignty: Marriage and International Relations in Elizabethan Times

In this study, I show how the gendered construction of sovereignty in the Elizabethan period helped to make marriage dangerous for female rulers. In a society with firmly held convictions about a husband's divinely ordained dominion over his wife, marriage threatened to diminish a queen's sovereignty. Anticipatory fears about the marriages of England's first two queens, Mary and Elizabeth, had a more general impact, however; they contributed to the elaboration of constitutional doctrines and metaphors that further distanced sovereignty from ruler. Specifically, the need to distinguish the King's `body politic' from his `body natural' became acute when a female body assumed the royal office and began considering matrimony. This makes gender and marriage more fundamental to sovereignty than modern prejudices have hitherto allowed.