Top Female Historians Debate The Greatest Queens In History

[Music] one of the things about being a woman is that one is introduced from a very early age that you have this thing that you have to overcome in order to be taken seriously i think that elizabeth herself exercises power greatly by by refusing to make decisions she goes goes to more cabinet ministers than anyone before or after she turned up to cobra meeting yes she would it's the ultimate source for any historian whether the monarch is named on the wooden ruler and if she's not then i rush my case i think she uses photography doesn't she very effectively and portraiture is a real i mean she's a real propaganda queen says her thing be wary of men near power [Music] right hannah tell us who you are i'm dr hannah gregg i'm a historian at the university of york i'm professor suzanne lipscomb i am emeritus professor at the university of hampton and i'm dr eleanor yanega and i'm a historian at the london school of economics i'm professor kate williams and i'm a historian at the university of reading i'm professor anna whitelock at city university of london which queen would you go to the pub with anna whitelock elizabeth first definitely not mary the first totally boring not that my book on mary is but the person herself yeah caveat okay kate go um 100 merry queen of scots because she was charismatic she was firm and also she was um a champion shopper and pa was poached of the arts but also poaching the decorative arts so i'd also like to go to the shops and to the pub with my queen of scots i'm sticking with eleanor of aquitaine it's going to be the eleanor's on a night out um in the first place i know this girl can drink and in the second place how much do i need to get out of her in order to be like but are the rumors true i'm worried that you'd have to be her wing woman though for all those men i'm not worried um well merry queen of scots is a good idea but actually i'm going to go back to one of my queen's concert i'm going to go with catherine parr because i think that she was brilliant intellectually i think that she was tremendous amounts of fun like she you know she was the one who had us three um female miniature portraits uh her coachy sponsored musicians she spent loads of money on clothes um including a black silk nightgown i mean she was she was i think she was a really interesting character one of the first women in the 16th century to publish a work of prose the first in her own name and i think that she would be it would it would have such a good time chatting about this suzie i'll tell you what though it should be me you mary and lady gian grey well i think i have to let anne go because i don't think she's going to be good on a night out i don't think she is the place to go for a party uh so come on locked down who would i spend my time with it would either be cate blanchett as elizabeth the first but it has to be that combination not just but kate blanchett first or possibly historically be queen charlotte the wife of george iii who is someone who is fascinating and interesting and um on the road yeah keeps us on the road uh comes the english quarters a very young woman um and i just want to yeah find out more about her and i also think she has a good party is there anything that the experience of elizabeth ii in the 20th 21st century has in common with her predecessors whether queen's regnan or consort stretching all the way back well as long as you want to go early medieval matilda william conker's wife is there is there anything that we can say about the nature of being a woman at the head of the political establishment of this of a kingdom i mean isn't it in a way the fact that these women have to both provide and produce an air i mean they are responsible their bodies are at stake they're basically there to if they're queen consorts to produce an air and if they're queen regnants they're both there to reign but also produce an air so i think the thing that unites them is their responsibility for the succession um and that's true both from you know right back at matilda through to um or early queens through to the current queen it's such a dismay thought anna that the thing that connects them is their biology yeah well i mean it's a starting point we can say there's a lot more to them um but of course i think i mean i would also say that before you even get to the point of reigning queens queen regnants that the queen's consort were the ones who kept the show on the road who covered for their incompetent husbands or sons i i suppose that i think this is a really good point because especially if what we're doing is looking at medieval queenship the expectation of any queen is that she's going to produce an heir and that's what makes a queen important however that's sort of the bedrock and then there are things that one can do on top of that that means that you're the sort of queen that we talk about now so there's a reason for example that we always bring up eleanor of aquitaine right and that's because she's one of these queens that really exceeds simply you know the ideal medieval queen which is just oh well yes she's a she's a producer of airs she probably she does some nice charity work she's going to endow monastery and sit quietly you know that's kind of what the the absolute bottom level of queenship is but there's room within being a mother being a consort being all of these things that means that you can exercise power if you've got the tenacity and the intelligence and frankly just the force of will is what you really need in the medieval period to kind of rise above it's true for queen anne as well and she kind of moves beyond the idea of queen ship just being about the body because she fails to produce an air very tragically but she has a legacy that moves beyond that beyond her failures prisoner which is about securing a succession in a different way about uh european war about um establishing the constitution about those sorts of ideas of monarchy that we might attribute to men is what queen anne embodies can can i just take issue just with the fact of talking that just the terminology can we talk about them failing to establish this succession but not their bodies failing i just kind of feel quite strongly about it yeah um fascinating it's fascinating though isn't it that we when a woman doesn't have a child it's a big thing elizabeth doesn't have a child it's a big thing and then her pregnancies charles ii who may make very little effort to have a child who might say at least and try legitimate anyway lots of with other ladies so was it a big thing for elizabeth the first the fact that she didn't have a child i think do you do you not think at the end there was a lot of unpopularity and condemnation off her because there was a child not to continue and james had to catch i think it's interesting that there wasn't that much actually and in subsequently i mean she's pinned up as one of the greatest monarchs but like she failed to even attempt to have a child she didn't even marry and thereby the tudor dynasty ended and she let in the king of scotland and i think it's quite surprising that there wasn't more of a backlash against her at the end of the reign for not even attempting to provide an air or even name one it's interesting though because she was in terms of queen anne and queen victoria that queen anne very much used elizabeth didn't she she had a she bored elizabeth's motto and she very much styled herself as a second gloriana but over and over again it said you fair enough to be a second gloriana but you have to get married and you have to try and have an hour and she was seen as a a different model for victorian it it is fascinating isn't it how how we sort of let male monarchs who don't have children off the hook and we let when women and we let male monarchs who have favorites off the hook but anne gets punished for her favorites can i just gallop into a can i gallop into a gender stereotype pitfall trap here is there something about from what you've always said is there something about queens um coming to terms with changing political reality and societal realities quite effectively here it's really interesting you mentioned mary the first using parliament to um say fine i'll go to parliament um elizabeth obviously is very mindful of parliament in her religious settlements and is is seems quite comfortable in the role of a early modern beginnings of a constitutional post glorious revolution monarch is there a gender is is there something about women getting the job done being more pragmatic and and and working with politicians not they don't we don't try to think they don't precipitate these kind of great constitutional crises that you seem to get in in male reigns yeah i think that there's really something to this and i think that one of the things about being a woman is that one is introduced from a very early age that you have this thing that you have to overcome in order to be taken seriously so if a woman is going to wield power in any meaningful sense she has to be pragmatic enough that she's like that she listens to the right people that she pushes forward in an agenda and she has to stay extraordinarily focused this is really different i think to being well uh there you go that's the oldest boy and he gets everything you know and you can see this for example with matilda and her son henry right so matilda fights and scraps and does everything that she can she does things like puts out her own coinage at a time and puts her face on it you know i was just thinking in terms of propaganda where she's like an important thing is to get my face in front of people get people associating me with queen ship she does all these incredible things and then her children are just idiots you know and and they they do absolutely nothing and it's again they're reliant on women but you know they're men so that's fine it's a really interesting point isn't it that nearly every man when they come to the throne they they are the eldest son but all nearly all of the women we've talked about they had no idea they're necessarily going to come to the floor they weren't supposed to inherit what i mean ann was the younger sister it was thought that her you know her older sister or the or a brother might live and elizabeth uh we she there were so many definitely not intentional there's so many choices victoria as well and so elizabeth ii too came came because her uncle abdicated there's never been a queen to date who's got there by succession by by i guess no queen of scots when she was very small but true but we're looking at the kind of yes yeah for sure but but but it is you know it is it is fascinating that elizabeth ii obviously was pitched into it as as it was news for her when she was 10 she had no idea that she would end up being queen but and she but but so many of them is that i always wonder whether that's a useful thing to not be so secure in getting the throne to see what happens to your predecessors is does that does that help you become more in touch with what the people want when you come to the throne it's just no female equivalent of edward viii a fancy self-satisfied idiot playboy prince of wales his whole life he just thinks that world over living like there's no we don't have that and we still have no title for a female heir to the throne princess of wales was vetoed for elizabeth ii so we still have no title for if george was georgina we have no official title it also means crucially they don't spend their childhood preparing for this role they don't have that sense of expectation and flattered and and yeah maybe that we should see that as offering a freedom and intellectual freedom a kind of an openness to what the role is because you you haven't been prepping for your whole life and then it becomes a moment in your life at either girlhood or teenager when we now see a teenager or young womanhood where you suddenly see actually that could be mine that that could be my throne that could be my crown and and in anne we see a strategy developing you know really quite early on about how she wants to kind of navigate those potential opportunities and um and i think it is interesting that they're not trained in it there's not a sense of this is the education you will get because you're going to be the monarch so perhaps it offers a freedom a freedom of thought and a freedom of behavior that we don't give enough credit for kind of generally in history british history is a little unusual that we do have these queens ragnans recently we've had a lot of time when the britain has had a female on the throne in the last 200 years is that a big part of the reason that britain still has a monarchy today i think those queens have been queens at pivotal moments and they've you know they've ushered in change uh in society or in the monarchy they've evolved the monarchy in a crucial way and i think um [Music] without them at different key points i think victoria being a woman at that point rather than a male monarch similarly the current queen elizabeth ii i think has been really important but i'm conscious that we're all women commentating on queens i suppose and i just wonder from your perspective dan as a kind of male historian um don't think we need kind of which bit to the kind of male or the kind of historian kind of we'll go with kind of kind of historian who's a very interested you know obviously your passion is military and things i mean like gender studies where does i mean what do you think you haven't written particularly on queens is it not because of the fact i mean what's your take on this whole i think it's hard to argue that anything other than women i think women are better at this than men i think in particular we haven't talked about the georgian queen consorts either i think they were uh hugely important in the 18th century and i just men are just not to be trusted with wielding supreme power i think that if the 20th century teaches anything be wary of men near power but so even like republicans in britain recognize they've got a big problem with elizabeth because she is she is very deft at some not she she hasn't done anything wrong but that's that's in her personality i'm not sure it's how much it's about victoria but i do think that the personality of the queen has been absolutely crucial um and the way that for example she has shown a kind of maternal instinct when it's come to managing the commonwealth you know she talked about it all the time as a family you know for going along to every meeting of the commonwealth meeting individual leaders of countries and cultivating relationships in that motherly fashion but that comes down to her personality do you not think the common theme perhaps of these women is of queens is are they enigmatic do we think of male monarchs as enigmatic in the way that perhaps that work that word is associated with queens i wonder do we feel we know female monarchs less perhaps than we think we know men and i wonder if there's a kind of there's a sort of charismatic quality in their enigmatic sense in a way that we don't quite know them i just feel like that word enigmatic is associated with queens more than it is kings i mean i think for elizabeth ii that's been one of her great strengths being enigmatic people haven't been able to identify with a particular point of view i actually think that the future of the monarchy will depend on actually the monarch not being enigmatic in the same way and having much clearer the articulated positions on things so i think that whole position is no longer sustainable but i think for her it absolutely has been the key to the success of her reign in a way if you if the british monkey depends on the the lives of george iv edward vii and edward the eighth we would not have a monarchy today well i mean i agree with this because i think to a certain extent you know even one of the things that's kind of like foiled uh the the republican strife here is almost also like the rise of identity politics there's this way of being like oh well it's a woman you know like you know it's a and when a woman is queen then you have an ability to kind of shield yourself from you know what would be like the worst male excesses and you know these same associations for example if we are having the important conversations that we're having about decolonization right now and there was a man that was the figurehead here i think it would come down more on the side of like you're right this is outmoded and we've done some terrible things there is this way of kind of couching all of this in a maternal kind of feminine that's how people in the work that i'm doing in like in the caribbean it's amazing how people see the queen as this sort of mother figure whilst at the same time you know condemning britain for the atrocities under the empire there is a just you know the queen has this you know they're hanging they hang pictures of the queen you know on their walls there's a sense of sort of adoration for her or love for her as this mother figure that is separate from britain which i think is really interesting and i do think that's down to her her gender her own skill and i can't imagine that would have been the case if she'd been a male monarch okay let's end on a slightly less note best and worse anna best queen worst queen uh best mary worst elizabeth controversial i'm just all right kate best and worst oh my goodness um she pho elizabeth failed to provide an adult i've listened to the podcast um my i bet i because i love mcqueen and scott i want to give a big shout out as well to queen anne for everything that she did and i'm fighting against her the body and all her work his constitutional monarchy and you know i don't mean to be mean but i am a teensy bit disappointed in mary the second i think she could have been she was queen con she really let the role of queen ship be demoted to queen consort and i think it began to push it back again and i know that matt you know william was a very overpowering sort of person but i think i feel that she could have kept being more of a joint monarch than than she allowed to be imposed upon her best and worse this is a hard one because i i don't want to just keep saying eleanor vogue but which i just love her so much but another one of my favorite queens unfortunately is another eleanor who is eleanor of castile and i think that she was a really um a really excellent uh queen consort and she did a lot of really interesting charitable things and had a lot to do with architecture and i really like eleanor of castile and we wouldn't have the eleanor crosses without her so fantastic i'm going to say elizabeth the first for worst queen sorry um i i think that i think that uh elizabeth the first a lot of the reason why people rarify her is just the protestant historiography it's a good story people like it if protestantism hadn't won out no one would care about elizabeth sorry also should that was spanish armada sailors dive hunger and disease when they got back okay here we go susie um so i without trying to sound sycophantic i actually think elizabeth is up there as one of the best queens i i think she has i think she's extraordinary and i think she's done an amazing job in terms of moving the monarchy into the modern world um but if we're looking at historical queens and indeed if we're not looking at just english then i want to say something about isabelle's castile who we haven't really talked about because she's not english but in terms of a spanish queen she is so we're sticking with elizabeth's i mean unfortunately i feel like i want to side with elizabeth the first as burst as well i worse i was dead it's worse this is absolutely extraordinary it seems here okay hannah this is amazing well i'm sort of left on the end there's not that many queens to pick from are they really so we've all kind of gone through them but um i would have said anne and i would have said mary the second as a disappointment for all of those reasons that kate said so in order to find another let's say ann is the best no actually my favorite queen is going to be one we haven't talked about she's not really a queen but she's queen of the blue stockings elizabeth montague who runs these salons she takes the title of queen she runs an intellectual circle and uh that's another queen we're going to add to our list that i've just made up the rules okay and your least favorite is uh you know oh mary the second so many seconds your lisa okay yes damn i think it's really true though when you said we come up like keeping the show on the road i mean is one of the takeaways not that all the women do their very utmost to keep the show on the road and actually there's so many men who did that up most to get the show off the road and that's really what the sort of gift of women to the monarchy is thanks for watching this video on the history hit youtube channel you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out or if you are a true history fan check out our special dedicated history channel history hit dot tv you're gonna love it

Channel: History Hit

Views: 84,462

Keywords: women in history, women history, historical women, elizabeth i, bloody mary, mary queen of scots, queen victoria, badass women, world history, eleanor of aquitaine, elizabeth ii, royal family, platinum jubilee, greatest queens in history, queen of england, queen of britain, best queen, historians debate, suzannah lipscomb, eleanor janega, dan snow history hit, dan snow, panel show, who is the greatest queen, queen matilda of england, kate williams, history hit

Id: d7Sr8zNg7eA

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022