Many readers will immediately recognize my title as an echo of Ernst Kantorowicz's magisterial work on the creation of the modern state, The King's Two Bodies, published in 1957.Footnote ¹ Kantorowicz's goal was to understand how kingdoms handled the problem of continuity and succession; he found his answer in an Elizabethan judicial ruling that distinguished property held by the monarch as an individual from property held by the monarch as monarch. Kings, the distinguished Elizabethan lawyer Edmund Plowden explained in his report on the case, had two bodies, one natural and one politic. While the first grew, decayed, and died like any other mortal body, the second transcended time. The two bodies were not coequal; the monarchial body subsumed the mortal one. The end result was two bodies in one person, a body corporate and indivisible.Footnote ² In this legal fiction, Kantorowicz saw the means to understand the mysteries of charismatic kingship that had long fascinated him, the importance of ritualized phrases such as “the king is dead, long live the king,” and the meanings of literary texts as diverse as The Divine Comedy and William Shakespeare's Richard II. In the pursuit of these understandings, Kantorowicz set out at length a history of how the conceit of the king's two bodies adapted readily to complement changing notions of authority in Western European kingdoms, shifting from a fiction that associated kings with Christ to one that associated kings with law to a culminating reconceptualization in which kings were no longer seen as literally having two bodies, but instead as bodies natural who represented but did not incorporate the community of the body politic.

Kantorowicz had no particular interest in gender, but I am comfortable shadowing his title for my talk on gender—which I am using throughout this piece to mean, as Joan Scott succinctly put it, “a social category imposed on a sexed body”—for several reasons.Footnote ³ The phrase “the king's two bodies” struck such a chord in both academic and popular vocabulary that it has been applied not only to other studies of power relations but also to subjects as disparate as the life of Albert Einstein and the enduring influence of Elvis Presley.Footnote ⁴ When I discovered this summer how frequent even the scholarly rephrasings have been, I felt a little chagrined at adding yet another but reaffirmed in my sense that the phrase has had resonance beyond its specific mooring.Footnote ⁵ Moreover, the actual text of Kantorowicz's book is as much a scholarly grab bag as the uses that have been made of his title. The King's Two Bodies follows no single line of argument, and its shifts in time, sources, and references are so dramatic that, despite Kantorowicz's obvious, indeed overpowering, erudition, many of the initial reviewers, particularly medievalists in England, were unconvinced. Beryl Smalley, writing in Past and Present, called the achievement “rich and muddled.” “By the end of the book,” she wrote, “I felt as queasy as one would after a diet of jam without bread.”Footnote ⁶ By building on Kantorowicz's concept, I hope to add to the grab bag without sending anyone into a sugar-induced coma.

Kantorowicz and historians of gender have more in common than one might expect. Kantorowicz's greatest talent, as his most recent biographer has noted, was as an observer; the originality of The King's Two Bodies lay not in the discovery of new material, but in the author's ability to reimagine the importance of material previously known.Footnote ⁷ Looking at the familiar through a new lens is, of course, one of the primary characteristics of gender history. Kantorowicz's desire to understand how monarchial government, with its vastly unequal distribution of power, so convincingly reproduced itself complements the efforts of today's feminist historians to understand the historical persistence of patriarchal ideas. Long before it became the fashion, Kantorowicz also recognized the power of metaphor to shape the world around it, for he believed that linguistic acts and legal fictions were not merely convenient shorthands but instead actively helped to create the state. This too is comfortable territory for feminist historians: for example, the legal fiction of the femme couvert in English law (which reduced the status of a married woman to that of a dependent child) haunted the lives of early modern women and now in many ways haunts the study of early modern gender relations.Footnote ⁸

Most important, although Kantorowicz never explored it, gender is, in fact, central to his study. It is no accident that the two-body fiction on which he put such weight became prominent in an unprecedented half-century when the most likely heirs to the English throne were all female. The concept's value came partly from its utility as a response to the challenges of having “disabled”—that is, other than adult male—monarchs: first the juvenile Edward VI; then the regnant wedded queen, Mary I; and finally, the regnant, young, and unmarried queen, Elizabeth I. There were wide repercussions to the concept that an eternal and always fully able royal body subsumed the inadequacies of whatever person—adult male, minor, or female—actually occupied the throne. In strictly legal terms, it may have been, as the great legal historian Frederic Maitland dubbed it, a “metaphysiological nonsense that did no useful legal work,” but its constitutional applications were apparent immediately.Footnote ⁹ As Marie Axton has shown so splendidly, the two-body fiction helped some Elizabethan lawyers make a convincing case that Mary Stuart could safely rule England in her corporate capacity despite her insufficiencies as an individual—femaleness and Catholicism.Footnote ¹⁰ For Kantorowicz, the king's two bodies was a genderless abstraction. Yet, as Maitland commented, “English law has liked its persons to be real.”Footnote ¹¹ The real persons behind this fiction were mostly female.

I do not intend to undertake here a gendered rereading of Kantorowicz, although that may well be worth doing. Instead, I want to explore the ways in which a notion of multiple gender identities in monarchy can help us grasp a complex dynamic of early modern governance. Kantorowicz's approach was fundamentally temporal; he wanted to understand how monarchy was represented over time and space, and how particular metaphors supported particular conceptions of kingship. My concern is chronologically and geographically specific: I want to look at some of the junctures in early modern England in which ideas about gender and kingship met, and to ask what such intersections can tell us about the Tudor-Stuart state. Most discussions of the king's two bodies have focused on the crisis of succession, the atypical moment when kingship passed between two distinct human bodies. Yet most English subjects understood the king's two bodies not as something restricted to a moment of transition, but as a concept that shaped an entire reign, a fact both enduring and quotidian. Monarchs inhabited a body natural and a body artificial at the same time; they represented both the individual and corporate concurrently, not just serially. If the king's two bodies was a metaphor that allowed Kantorowicz to explore the problem of succession, the king's two genders is a metaphor that may help us to explore the problem of effective governance. Kantorowicz argued that it was functional for rulers to distinguish between the body natural and the body artificial; I want to argue that it might also have been functional for rulers to inhabit an artificial body that was gendered neither exclusively male nor female, but both.

Words themselves are my first evidence of the gender mixing of Tudor-Stuart monarchy. “King” and “prince” are gendered terms for us—no one would call Elizabeth II a king. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these terms were used to describe female monarchs and, indeed, used by female monarchs to describe themselves. The long list of Elizabethan examples is familiar—descriptions of Elizabeth I as “king-like” before the troops at Tilbury, praises of her “princely” qualities, and her own declarations before parliament and elsewhere that she was prince and king.Footnote ¹² Less familiar may be the fact that the same applied to Mary Tudor: the imprisoned Princess Elizabeth importuned her sister Mary with reminders of the special value of a “king's word,” and Mary's funeral celebrated her with the accoutrements accorded to a king rather than a queen, even displaying the military symbols of gauntlet and spurs.Footnote ¹³ I think that we should attend to these practices; it was not just a conceit to call Elizabeth I a king or to imagine Mary I with spurs. To that end, I will employ the same language here, using the words “prince” and “king” regardless of whether the person so described inhabited a female or male body.

Kingship and gender were both sites of considerable anxiety in early modern English society. Both reflected the belief that the “natural” hierarchy—men over women, kings over commoners—was necessary to ensure good order; both reflected as well the fear that such hierarchies were extremely fragile (not because they were improper, but because in a sinful world, the best was always threatened by the worst). Disorder in either sphere was understood to have dire consequences—tyranny, chaos, even enslavement. The gender hierarchy, it was believed, was more natural and older than the political one. The need for government was a consequence of humanity's fall from grace; following Augustine, Christian theorists had for centuries agreed that a holy commonwealth would have no need for externally imposed discipline.Footnote ¹⁴ Kingship was the best form of government because it was the simplest, but monarchy was still only the best of a bad lot. God ordained monarchs, in a sense, as a sign of his remaining faith that a people who seemed incapable of obeying him might one day be redeemed. Until and unless they were redeemed, human kings could save men and women from their worst selves by convincing them of the value of submission and faith and by helping them to strive to become worthy of something more than human governance.

By 1500, an extensive genre of advice manuals instructed kings and their heirs on how to govern. Guides for princes in use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were as old as Seneca's essays for his pupil Nero and as recent as James I of England's counsel for the Prince of Wales.Footnote ¹⁵ Some were idealistic, some were down-to-earth, and most were written to be read by subjects as well as princes. Each text had its own emphasis, but the image of the “perfect prince” was surprisingly uniform.Footnote ¹⁶ Princely power was deeply personal: kings were as responsible for the kingdom as for their own children, and they would answer to God for the souls of their subjects. Princes were to be exemplars: by observing royal lives, subjects would see, for good or for ill, how to treat their own superiors and inferiors. “Your life is open to view; you cannot hide. The fact is that either you are a good man to the great benefit of all,” Erasmus counseled the future Charles V of Spain, “or a bad one, bringing great disaster to all.” “It is from the head that comes the health of the body,” Seneca explained to Nero. Good princes thrived on peace and justice, and they were to deliver both with royal impartiality and dignity. “You cannot put upon you too much king,” the earl of Newcastle wrote to the future Charles II.Footnote ¹⁷ On the public stage that was both their glory and their prison, kings were expected to serve the general welfare, to protect the weak in a manner that would also affirm the power of the strong. The aspiration was to reverse the results of the primeval test of Eden, to inspire in humans the will to have obedience prevail against temptation, discipline against indulgence, and prudence against impulsiveness.

With the responsibilities given to human kings came special status, as the notion of the king's two bodies illustrates. The dualities of kingship, as understood in early modern England, went well beyond this legal fiction. Kings spoke for God, cured by touch, and were allegedly able to see into their subjects’ hearts; they were humans unlike other humans.Footnote ¹⁸ Kings in England were heads of the church not as laity or priests, but as a bit of both. They embodied the law but also had the power when circumstance demanded to override it. They answered for their behavior, but theoretically only to God. Investing exceptional power and responsibility of this sort in any individual was a considerable risk. As God warned the Israelites when they pleaded for a king, any monarch who could protect them could also deprive them of their children, their goods, and their freedom.Footnote ¹⁹ Kingship, from this perspective, was a test of the king's character, a repeated trial of royal selflessness against venality and endless temptation.

To rule well required traits associated with both the masculine and the feminine: kings had to be both unyielding and tender, both economical and bountiful with words and goods, and both courageous and peace loving.Footnote ²⁰ Kings male and female were supposed to nurture their subjects, to act as scripture said, as “nursing fathers.” James VI used the image in Basilikon Doron; nearly a century later, Queen Anne requested the text as the theme for the sermon at her coronation. Most English subjects would have been familiar not only with the idea of kings as mothers (Christ, too, had maternal attributes) but also with pagan notions of androgynous monarchy.Footnote ²¹ More than a decade ago, the critic Leah Marcus argued that we ought to take seriously Elizabeth I's claim to be “man and woman both” to her subjects.Footnote ²² To some degree, we have done so, although mostly as a measure of the last Tudor queen's exceptionalism. Yet, as Marcus also noted, this exceptionalness might not have been so exceptional. Princes were extraordinary by definition; they defied the set boundaries of mortal and immortal, lay and secular, and single and the corporate. I would argue that they also transcended the confines of a single gender, although not the fears associated with such transcendence.

The key to a well-ordered realm was balancing male and female qualities in proportion; tyrants differed from good kings in degree rather than in kind. They were kings out of balance, princes using the same tools as their worthier counterparts, but excessively and to their private profit. And here we have a second piece of evidence for gender play within Tudor-Stuart kingship: to many commentators, tyranny was the consequence of effeminacy. To Seneca, tyrants were princes who gave into “womanish rage”; for Machiavelli, they were princes who were “inconstant, frivolous, [and] effeminate.” According to Erasmus, the greatest disaster to befall a people was to be ruled by either a child or “girlish weaklings.”Footnote ²³ In proper hierarchical relationship, the combination of masculinity and femininity was monarchy's best face. When femininity prevailed over masculinity, however, compassion degenerated to indulgence, generosity to garrulousness and waste, peace loving to cowardice, and severity to vengeance. Tyranny showed not only a king's capacity for personal decay but also the power and danger still left in effeminate behavior.

Masculine self-control was especially critical to the gender balance of kingship because of the ways that early modern men and women understood sexual difference. Philosophers, theologians, and natural scientists from the Greeks forward had argued over the meaning of sexual character, and it was generally agreed that gender influenced choices over things that we see as impersonal—such as foreign policy and state religion—as well as over matters that we consider to be more private—such as fashion and education. And while writers disagreed about the exact nature of the difference between men and women, few considered the barrier between the sexes to be impassable. Masculine dominance was critical to social order, yet masculinity itself was a fragile commodity.Footnote ²⁴ The list of ways to debilitate masculinity was long, in part because essentially masculine attributes—rationality, moderation, and sobriety, to name a few of the most important—demanded cultivation, as well as vigilance against distractions. In contrast, essentially feminine attributes—such as tenderness, loquaciousness, and love of luxury—were self-indulgent and enticing.Footnote ²⁵ What made this particularly worrying was that the Aristotelian view of inviolable distinctions between men and women had long coexisted (somewhat improbably) with Galenic belief that bodies were dynamic structures. Anatomical observations complemented the Galenic sense that diversity was normal and supported the stories, rare to be sure, of individuals who appeared to have changed sexes. Women, it seemed, could become men, and more frighteningly, men could become women.Footnote ²⁶

Companion to this belief in permeability was a fear of effeminacy as a dangerous and potent infection. Laments about male weakness were common across many genres. Authors of antitheatrical treatises and popular pamphlets bemoaned how effeminate fashion accustomed men to the pleasures of a “weak and soft nature”; Fulke Greville bewailed the current “effeminate age” in his biographical study of Sir Philip Sidney. The memoirist Lucy Hutchinson saw the seeds of civil war in any realm where “masculine princes are so effeminate as to suffer women of foreign birth and different religion to intermeddle with the affairs of state”; the poet Alice D’Anvers chastised the Britain of the 1690s as grown “soft to a scorn, nice and effeminate / from your brace ancestors degenerate.” Other authors agreed, certain that manly Englishness was waning and that England's political, religious, and cultural independence would soon decline as well.Footnote ²⁷ The fear was not new, but it was pervasive, and so too was its invariable companion, the belief that, as one Jacobean pamphleteer put it, never “since the time of Adam [have] women been so masculine.”Footnote ²⁸ Cheap literature coded generic threats as female: Satanism represented by witches, rebelliousness depicted by women who killed their husbands, and Catholicism understood through the image of the temptress whores of Babylon. The laws about the consequences of wanton sexuality punished women more severely than they did men: laws against bastardy, laws against adultery, and laws against concealing pregnancy. Biology meant that a man might deny what a woman in these circumstances could not, but other statutes distinguished female from male as well: men were barraters, women scolds; men who killed their wives were murderers, women who slaughtered their husbands were petty traitors; and married men were legal adults, married women were legal children. The masculinity that ruled society was, as one recent critic has dubbed it, an exceedingly “anxious masculinity.”Footnote ²⁹

And if maleness was persistently insecure, what better evidence that all was well than a king who could embody feminine attributes as well as masculine ones without succumbing to effeminate temptations? Although scholars, myself included, have stressed the analogical connection between monarchs and heads of household and the myriad ways in which each reinforced the other in terms of duties and privileges, and organization and discipline, such mirroring was never complete.Footnote ³⁰ A king was still an altogether different sort of person from a father, one whose two genders in proper balance could incorporate within a single body both fatherhood and the gendered struggle that went on throughout the commonwealth.

The dilemma of female kings—my third (and most predictable) evidence of the two genders of English monarchy—has long occupied scholars of Tudor and Stuart England. If the Anglo-American romance with what was not so long ago thought of as “the Elizabethan miracle” were not reason enough for this, the circumstance of having four regnant queens (Mary I, Elizabeth I, Mary II, Anne—and five, if you count Lady Jane Grey) plus several prominent female candidates as successors (Catherine Brandon, Mary Stuart, Arabella Stuart, and Sophia of Hanover) in little more than two centuries would be. That contemporaries preferred to be ruled by an adult male is incontrovertible, yet we may have painted the disabilities of female kings in darker colors than are appropriate. The coincidence of the dynastic importance of such women with the division of Western Europe into warring religious states invited a flowering of political thought that forced writers to reconsider the abilities of female kings. Some political thinkers such as Jean Bodin and, closer to home, John Knox, rejected any positive role for women as princes, but opinion on this was hardly unanimous.Footnote ³¹ Several modern feminist scholars, among them Constance Jordan, Carole Levin, Amanda Shephard, and Anne McLaren, recently have argued that, transfixed by the powerful rhetoric of Knox's tirades against the “monstrous regiment” of women, we have overlooked how much room early modern political thought had for female princes.Footnote ³² The argument that since the king never died, the individual characteristics of the prince were not disqualification from ruling was only one of several ways to argue support for women kings. Some authors based their theories on the power of royal blood, others on providence, and others still on the spiritual equality of women and men. In his defense of female inheritance, for example, Henry Howard (later the earl of Northampton) provided readers with more than thirty pages of positive historical examples of female kings. Femininity, as the Elizabethan bishop John Aylmer admitted, was a weakness in a governor, but not necessarily one linked to biological sex. Female kings were problematic, but not as deeply and universally troubling as we have believed.Footnote ³³ In print as well as in reality, style could trump biology.

Judith Richards has developed the implications of this conclusion most fully by extending its reach both back into Mary Tudor's reign and forward into the reign of James I. In a series of important essays published over the past decade, Richards has effectively undermined the notion of any simple connection between gender stereotypes and monarchy in early modern England.Footnote ³⁴ She has shown, first of all, how easily mid-Tudor members of Parliament were able to distinguish Mary I as ruler from Mary I as wife; they allowed Philip of Spain what powers they did, she argues, not because Philip was Mary's husband, but because Mary insisted on it.Footnote ³⁵ And Richards also has pointed out how political circumstances rather than the monarch's sex determined the success of various idioms of kingship. So, Elizabeth I's insistence that courtiers use a language of love to describe the relationship between her and her subjects was not an innovation born of her femaleness, but a continuation of earlier male attempts to rethink loyalties once expressed in feudal terms into ones understood as voluntary, affective, and transcending all other political allegiances.Footnote ³⁶

The work of Richards and others on England's female princes has implicitly proven that any female who held the throne successfully had to have two genders as well as two bodies. Female princes assuming masculine traits suited, of course, the Aristotelian view that nature always tends to perfection; such women reaffirmed the dominance of male values even as they depicted kings as mixed personages. We have been slower to realize that male kings might also have had a gender problem and that they, like their female counterparts, might have ruled best by incorporating two genders in productive tension within a single body. Given the contemporary certainty that masculinity was preferable to femininity, male kings, in fact, may even have had the harder undertaking. The transition between Elizabeth and James has long provided us with our classic moment to consider gender and English kingship. David Cressy among others has talked of 1603 as a moment of transition between a “mannish queen” and a “queenish man,” yet there might be more here than just that.Footnote ³⁷ The later link between unpopularity and perceptions of James as effeminate, recently so well detailed for us by Michael Young, may have had less to do with the king's actual behavior than with the delicate political problem of getting the two genders into proper royal balance.Footnote ³⁸

In her essay on James VI's accession to the English throne, Richards suggests that, despite the more familiar interpretation, it was not effeminacy, but the king's obvious masculinity, his fondness for what David Norbrook has called “displays of political virility,” that brought him initially to grief in England. As king of Scotland, James had been noted for intelligence, evenhandedness, and courage; contemporaries saw him as aggressive and impatient with “fopperies” of talk or dress. Yet his expectation that the English would welcome his forthright style was mistaken; after nearly fifty years of female rule, Richards argues, the English saw nurturance and accessibility as princely traits, rather than anything particularly feminine.Footnote ³⁹ James began his English reign with several shows of masculine decisiveness: on the journey from Edinburgh to London, he had a cutpurse summarily hanged when the man stole from someone in the welcoming crowd, he called an ecclesiastical conference to resolve doctrinal controversies that had festered under Elizabeth, and he made immediate plans to unify his two kingships.

The iconography of kingship seems to have transcended gender: Elizabeth and James each appeared as Solomon; Mary I and Henry VIII appeared as Judith. The Holy Roman Emperor was credibly represented as an Amazon and Francois I of France as a parthenogenetic amalgam of both gods and goddesses.Footnote ⁴⁰ Kingship was a world in which gender-bending descriptors were so common that this alone should warn us that they may have been more a code for popular and unpopular behaviors than descriptions of royal personalities. Every male ruler in the seventeenth century, including William III, was at one time or another alleged to be in thrall to a favorite (male or female); every one was accused of overspending; and every one was seen as devious, untrustworthy, and effeminate. Several commentators in the 1630s and thereafter considered Charles I to be unnaturally dependent on his wife Henrietta Maria.Footnote ⁴¹ Early in the reign of Charles II, the diarist Samuel Pepys complained of the king's “horrid effeminacy,” and more than twenty years later, the diarist John Evelyn lamented the court's scenes of “utmost vanity.”Footnote ⁴² William III, one member of Parliament contended publicly, was so much a creature of his courtiers that they kept him at Kensington “as in a box.”Footnote ⁴³

And every female ruler in both centuries was at some point talked about as masculine. Elizabeth I, particularly in her later years, described herself, and was described by others, as the kingdom's “guiding husband.” She associated herself with the chaste huntress Diana (the obvious referent apart from the Virgin Mary for a virgin queen), but those who wrote in praise of Elizabeth used a panoply of other biblical and historical comparisons: David, Moses, Solomon, Alexander, Constantine, and Saint George as well as the more predictable Amazons.Footnote ⁴⁴ Mary II was a reluctant monarch if ever there was one, believing that “women should not meddle in government.” Yet she drew praise from Bishop Burnet for her “extraordinary firmness” when the French defeated the English and Dutch navies at Beachy Head during her regency. The poet Henry Park lauded her “courage masculine” as well as her “feminine sweetness,” and others likened her to Cincinnatus and to Moses.Footnote ⁴⁵ And Queen Anne (who granted her husband George neither power nor royal title) was, as her biographer puts it, the “undisputed” head of her household. One pamphleteer concluded that Anne had a “masculine spirit” within her female body. To those expecting that as a woman, she would be easy to manipulate, she warned, “I thank God I have a soul above that.”Footnote ⁴⁶ If most monarchs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were presented as both female and male, then we will do well to explore the possibility that the explanation for this lies deeper than the manliness of one or the effeminateness of another.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the challenges of kingship with two genders better than my fourth body of evidence: the royal prerogative of mercy. Mercy, it was universally agreed, was essential to good governance. In his advice to governors, Thomas Elyot wrote, “in whom mercy lacks and is not found, in him, all other virtues be drowned and lose their just commendation … nothing more entirely joins the hearts of subjects to their prince or sovereign than mercy.” Other writers echoed the sentiment, and jurists and monarchs each concurred. “God bestows upon princes three special precious gifts for to enable and ennoble their government: power, justice and mercy,” declared the early seventeenth century judge, John Dodderidge. Among the last things Charles I instructed his son to remember was that “your prerogative is best showed, and exercised in remitting, rather than exacting the rigor of the laws; there being nothing worse than legal tyranny.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The early modern English legal system had no equivalent to modern appeals and no official structure of secondary punishments for felony. Unlike today, when pardons mostly go to those harmed by the law, in early modern England, pardons were intended to redeem the person rather than to correct the legal process. Pardons were a gift, not a right; they came of grace rather than of deservedness. Mercy humanized the application of the law, it encouraged trust, and it reminded Christian subjects of the unexpected gift of Divine salvation. But given indiscriminately, mercy unmanned its giver, sickening the realm and discharging, as Howard put it, “a distemper upon the common people.”Footnote ⁴⁸

In the bio-logic of the early modern world, women were natural petitioners for mercy, and their success was as frightening as it was reassuring. In Catholic Europe, of course, the paradigmatic intercessor was the Virgin Mary, always ready as a fourteenth-century parable put it, to use “the cloak of her mercy … to soften the king's anger against us.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Reformed religion demoted Mary, but the association of women and mercy remained strong. In his book on passions, Thomas Wright declared, “Women, by nature, are inclined more to mercy and pity than men.” Elyot saw the Roman Empress Livia as an example of wives’ ability to “persuade sweetly their husbands to mercy and patience.” When told that Charles I would listen only to the queen's petition for his pardon, John Williams, archbishop of York and former Lord Keeper, applauded the way that “princely ladies” could prevail in mercy when councilors could not.Footnote ⁵⁰ But female pleas for mercy too often were dangerous, urged by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. The problem was pardons based on empathy rather than on reason. Womanish mercy derived from pity, from what Elyot called a “sickness of the mind” and the Elizabethan parliamentarian Thomas Digges referred to as a “sugared poison.” Pity, Seneca cautioned, put a kingdom at risk because it “regards the plight, not the cause.”Footnote ⁵¹ The lesson was clear: mercy born of pity alone redeemed no one and left the merciful giver weaker than before. The most familiar laudatory stories of mercy in early modern literature, drama, sermons, and advice manuals follow a single, highly gendered plot: a potential traitor, often someone close to the prince, is discovered; he (and I do not know of any female examples) pleads for pardon, first in person and then through a female intercessor; the monarch's counselors insist that a pardon would endanger both the prince and the realm; the king acknowledges the danger yet offers the traitor clemency; and the traitor becomes a loyal subject.

Seneca's often-repeated story about Augustus and Lucius Cinna fits this narrative; so, too, did the fictional pardon granted by Henry IV to the earl of Rutland in Shakespeare's Life and Death of Richard II.Footnote ⁵² In this episode, although Henry Bolingbroke (now Henry IV) has defeated and deposed Richard, the lost king still has his supporters, and Rutland, the son of the loyal duke and duchess of York, is one of them. On discovering his plans for treason, the duke wants to denounce his son to the king immediately, the duchess to excuse him as long as they can guarantee his loyalty. “Hide the trespass of thine own,” she begs her husband. She can understand his refusal only as a suspicion that the boy is not his, “Hads’t thou groan’d for him as I have done,” she says, “thou wouldst be more pitiful … thou dost suspect that I have been disloyal to thy bed.” In despair, she urges Rutland to throw himself on Henry's mercy before the duke exposes him. The next scene, in the presence of the new king, is staged as a disputation between the traitor's mother pleading for his life and his father urging severity. Again, the duchess talks of pity, the duke of danger. Her plea, delivered on her knees derives from “heart and soul.” “Forget to pity him,” the duke warns Henry, “lest pity prove a serpent that will sting thee to the heart.”

Henry does pardon Rutland, but while he praises the duchess’ sincerity, he lets the audience know that her pity was not what moved him. His first reaction is to the shrillness of her voice; he depicts her arrival as turning the previously all-male discussion “from a serious thing” to farce; he answers her repeated pleading only with the neutral phrase “rise up, good aunt.” The duke ridicules his wife, first for her lack of legal sophistication, then for pleading for something so effeminate it is better expressed in a foreign language. “Speak it in French, king,” he mocks once the pardon is won, “say, pardonne moi.” As the audience already knows, however, Henry's pardon is a calculated risk, not an act born of either sympathy or empathy. Before the duke and duchess appear, the prince tells Rutland that he will pardon him in order “to win thy after-love.” Henry tells the duke that, whatever the old man's view his fidelity has earned Rutland a second chance. The scene ends with the king promising that Rutland's fate will be exceptional; as for the other conspirators, “destruction straight shall dog them at their heels,” he says. In this guise, mercy is a tactic rather than an indulgence. Feminine pleas become masculine acts, pardons born of calculation and expressed as a willingness to sacrifice oneself that manage to echo both the bravery of generals and the trusting nature of Christian love. Acts of mercy such as this were didactic acts of domination; rather than conveying effeminacy, they reinscribed the king's control of femininity.

In both Shakespeare's works and in other contemporary depictions of mercy, audiences seem to have been exposed deliberately to both feminine and masculine ideas of mercy.Footnote ⁵³ First, the venues are not those of the law: trials or due process are deep background, if there at all. The scenes avoid courtrooms, in which women would have no voice, in favor of royal households or more exceptional settings where they might speak. Second, the decision to grant pardon has nothing to do with guilt or innocence (no one in these stories doubts the guilt of the individual in question), nor with the seriousness of the alleged threat to authority (no one doubts the plausibility of successful rebellion). Third, the division over granting pardon is not between a male monarch and a female petitioner: the reluctant male is a royal counselor, and the king embodies a via media between masculine caution and effeminate compassion. The issue is not whether mercy will be granted, but how. Last, despite the offender's duplicity, the intercessor's empathy, and the counselor's dire predictions, the gamble always works. The prince's willingness to trust an erring follower at the cost of royal safety converts the erstwhile traitor into not just a loyal, but an exemplary, subject.

The dilemma for kings male or female was actually to produce this sort of mercy. It could be done. Edward III pardoned the burghers of Calais in 1347 at the behest of his queen, Philippa; Henry VIII listened to Katherine of Aragon's request for mercy for the participants in the May Day riots of 1517.Footnote ⁵⁴ But complaints of too powerful female intercessors and too compassionate kings (male and female) were more common than stories of responsible persuasion. Princes were too often swayed, as one commentator lamented, by “womanish lenity.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Despite recognizing that in Scotland, frequent clemency had earned him contempt rather than obedience, James I pardoned the notorious countess of Somerset, on the advice of several petitioners, among them Queen Anna.Footnote ⁵⁶ Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, remembered Charles I as someone so willing to pardon that his judges had to educate him in the dangers of too much tenderness.Footnote ⁵⁷ Charles II's advisers saw him as irremediably compassionate, a condition they attributed to his life in exile as well as to the desires of his mistresses, the most powerful of whom was considered virtually a “mistress of state.”Footnote ⁵⁸ As regent, Mary II tried to follow the scriptural injunction never to forgive anyone who defiled the land with blood, but Mary's policy was viable only in the short term; most princes had to provide not a kingship without mercy, but rather a kingship that offered mercy in two genders, mercy reflecting a prince who was (as one courtier said of both Elizabeth I and James I) “soon angry, yet without bitterness or stinging revenge.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Female kings faced their own challenges in exercising mercy. Unlike male kings, they could not cloak their grace with the intervention of wives. A male king such as Edward III was not unmanned but merely drawn away from excessive anger by his wife's plea for the burghers of Calais. Public staging of such mercy literally displayed the king's two genders without fueling suspicion about private female influence. No male consort could play the role of intercessor this way without seeming impotent, and no female king could succumb to a husband's (or indeed anyone’s) pleas without fulfilling expectations of effeminate behavior. If we restrict ourselves to secular matters, Elizabeth, Anne, and even Mary I were unsurprisingly reputed, often in contravention of the facts, to be overly merciful and tenderhearted.Footnote ⁶⁰

Even for male kings, properly balanced mercy became harder to maintain in the seventeenth century. Perhaps this was, in part, because the motives of the Stuart queen consorts, all Catholic, were always suspect. Perhaps it reflected as well the early Stuarts’ dislike of public ceremonial and open access. But regardless of individual issues, mercy was becoming more dangerous to manage between 1603 and 1685. First, Catholics often needed and received royal pardons in these decades, but particularly after the twin traumas of the Gunpowder Treason and the rendering of the Oath of Allegiance, no Catholic promise of loyalty, reform, or submission was reliable evidence of repentance.Footnote ⁶¹ Thus any pardon offered to a Catholic or on a Catholic's recommendation made a prince seem either corrupt or womanish. Second, while royal advisers had always needed and received pardons, the revival of impeachment in the 1620s changed the meaning of princely intervention in these instances. As parliaments took more initiative in impeachments, they came to see themselves more emphatically as protectors of the realm.Footnote ⁶² This cast kings—who more often than not hoped to protect their ministers—as either cowardly or effeminately dependent. And third, while kings had always been seen as fonts of mercy, the restored Charles II faced an unprecedented dilemma in 1660. Widespread clemency was a critical tool for restoring order, for it both reminded subjects that Charles was as much a king as his predecessors and showed them that kingship had advantages. At Breda, Charles had declared broad forgiveness as a basic premise of his regime. The peace of the realm at several levels demanded an unsparing approach to pardoning.Footnote ⁶³ Yet wholesale mercy had always been seen as debilitating, a sure sign of royal weakness. Given the backbiting that was inevitable once peace returned, Charles's magnanimity could not help but be seen as damaging to the kingdom. The king was subjected repeatedly to graphic depictions of himself as femininely indolent, femininely indecisive, and femininely self-indulgent.Footnote ⁶⁴ Francis Bacon characterized princes as objects who have “much veneration, but no rest.”Footnote ⁶⁵ A kingship with two genders may be one reason for such constant movement. Historians have conventionally approached the king's gender as a matter of either/or; I have tried to suggest here the advantages of considering it in terms of both/and.Footnote ⁶⁶ To substantiate my conclusions would need detailed studies of each of the regimes I have mentioned, but I venture that considering kingship in two genders might offer a new coherence to the history of the early modern English monarchy.

The framework helps to make sense of continuities across reigns that have seemed anomalous—such as Elizabeth I's court of love and Charles I's court of domesticity or the fluid use of male and female images for monarchs across the era. Treating monarchy as a state of being also encourages fresh comparisons—the reigns of Mary I and Mary II, for example, or James I and Charles I—and suggests fresh avenues for research, such as into the routine use of prerogatives, or, as Kevin Sharpe has recently suggested, into the nuances of royal and parliamentary rhetoric.Footnote ⁶⁷ Understanding the position of a king who simultaneously had two genders offers a new way of seeing both the strategic advantages and the challenges of retaining authority in early modern England.Footnote ⁶⁸

It suggests as well why the task might have become more difficult in a kingdom growing (as the Tudor-Stuart realm was) more heterogeneous. How, for example, could a king with two genders convince realms as culturally different as England and Scotland (not to mention Ireland) that the regime was virile? If putting a proper face on a prerogative such as mercy was hard, how could a prince negotiate the even harsher terrain around the prerogative to make peace or war effectively? If realizing two genders in productive tension within a single body was, indeed, becoming less tenable, how does this add to our understanding of the literal splitting of the kingship in 1688 into two gendered bodies: the war king, William, who owed his legitimacy to his wife, and the reticent queen, Mary, who had “female sweetness” as well as “courage masculine”? Bacon told us that kings had no rest. Perhaps that resulted not only from the traditional cares of office but also from the demands of a realm that asked its kings to be both manly and womanly.