XXXV. There have been a thousand examples of princesses, who were expert and able politicians. No age will ever forget the first woman, whose true character history developed and rescued from the obscurity of fable: I mean Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, who in her infancy was nursed by doves, but afterwards soared superior to the eagles: she not only knew how to make herself blindly obeyed by the subjects her husband had left her, but she also made subjects of all the neighbouring nations, and by extending her conquests, she likewise made neighbours of the most distant ones. Her empire extended on one side to Ethiopia, and on the other to India. Nor can Artemisia, queen of Caria, be forgotten, who not only maintained, during her long widowhood, the respect and adoration of that kingdom; but, being invaded by the Rhodians, she, in her own territories, by two singular stratagems, with two attacks only destroyed the troops of her enemies; and, passing suddenly from the defensive to the offensive, she invaded them in her turn, and conquered and triumphed over the island of Rhodes. The two Aspasias also will be ever remembered, to whose admirable management, Pericles the husband of one of them, and Cyrus the son of Darius Notho, gallant of the other, happily and successfully, confided the government of their states; as will likewise the most prudent Phile, daughter of Antipater, whom, while she was a child, her father advised with concerning the government of the kingdom of Macedonia, and who afterwards, by her wise stratagems and great address, extricated her husband, the precipitate and flighty Demetrius, from a thousand difficulties. Livia, of fertile invention, whose subtile cunning seems to have been too deep for the penetration of Augustus, is another instance of female ability, for she could never have had such dominion over his mind, if he had known her. The sagacious Agrippina is likewise another, although her arts, as she unhappily employed them in promoting her son Nero to the throne, were fatal to herself and the world. Amalethunsa also, is well deserving of being reckoned among the women of great talents, in whom, her understanding all the languages of every nation subject to the Roman empire, was esteemed an inferior accomplishment, compared to the great skill and address, which she displayed in governing the state during the minority of her son Athalaricus.
XXXVI. Nor, passing over many others, and approaching nearer to our own times, should we ever forget Elizabeth of England, in whose composition, the influx of the three Graces concurred equally with that of the three Furies. Her conduct as a sovereign, would ever remain the admiration of Europe, if her vices were not so interwoven with her maxims of government, as to make it impossible to separate them; and her political image, will ever present itself to posterity, coloured, or, to speak more properly, stained and blemished with the blood of the innocent Mary Stewart, queen of Scots. Neither should we forget Catharine of Medicis, queen of France, whose sagacity in negotiating and maintaining a balance between the opposite parties of Calvinists and Catholics, in order to save the crown from a precipice, resembled the dexterity of a rope-dancer, who, mounted on a cord, by his ready art and address at poising himself with the weights at the ends of his poles, secures himself from falling, and delights and amuses the spectators, by displaying the risque, at the same time that he dextrously avoids the danger. Our own queen Isabella, would not have been inferior to any of them in the business of administration and government, if, instead of a queen consort, she had been a queen-regent. Under all this disadvantage, when proper occasions presented themselves, she manifested by her actions, that she was a woman of consummate prudence and ability; and Lawrance Beyerlink in his eulogium of her, says, that no great thing was done in her time, in which she did not assist, or was wholly the author of. Quid magni in regno, sine illa, imo nisi per illam ferè gestum est? At least the discovery of the new world, which was an event the most glorious for Spain that had fallen out in the course of many ages, would certainly never have been effected or accomplished, but for the magnanimity of Isabella, who dispelled the fears, and vanquished the sloth of Ferdinand.
XXXVII. In fine, and what seems to have more weight than all the rest, it appears to me, although I am not very certain of the computation, that among the queens who have reigned for any length of time as absolute sovereigns, the greatest part of them, have been celebrated in history for excellent governors. But the poor women, are still so unhappy, as always to have trumped up against this train of illustrious examples, a Brunequilda, a Fredegunda, the two Joans of Naples, and a few others; but, by the way, the two first, although they abounded in mischief, did not want understanding.
XXXVIII. Nor is the world so universally persuaded as some may think, that a crown does not sit well on the head of a woman, because in an island or peninsula, which is formed by the Nile in Ethiopia, called Meroe, women, according to the testimony of Pliny, reigned for many successive ages. Father Cornelius Alapide, speaking of Saba, who was one of their queens, supposes, that her empire extended much beyond the limits of Meroe, and that it might possibly comprehend the greatest part of Ethiopia, grounding his opinion, upon an expression of our Saviour, who called her Queen of the South, which words seemed to imply, that she possessed vast dominions in that quarter. Thomas Cornelius also tells us, that authors were not wanting, who asserted, that Meroe was bigger than the island of Great Britain, and, if so, the territories of those queens were not very confined, though they did not extend beyond the limits of Meroe. Aristotle (Lib. 2. Polit. Cap. 7.) says, that among the Lacedemonians, the women had a great share in the political government; and that their being allowed it, is agreeable to the laws given them by Licurgus.
XXXIX. In Borneo also, according to the relation of Mandeslo, which may be seen in the second volume of Olearius, the women reign, and their husbands enjoy no other privilege, than that of being their most dignified subjects. In the island of Formosa, situated in the southern part of the Chinese sea, those idolaters who inhabit it, have such confidence in the prudent conduct of the women, that the Sacerdotal function, together with every thing which relates to religious matters, is confided wholly to them; and that, with regard to politics, they enjoy a power superior to that of the senators, they being considered as the interpreters of the will of their deities.
XL. Notwithstanding all this, the ordinary practice of nations is most conformable to reason, as it corresponds best with the divine decree notified to our first mother in Paradise, and to all her daughters in her name, which enjoins a subjection to the men; and we should only correct the impatience, which many people shew at submitting to female government, when according to the laws of the land they should obey; and we should also bridle that extravagant estimation for our own sex, which carries us such lengths, as to prefer the government of a weak child, to that of an able and experienced woman. The antient Persians were drawn by this prepossession to such a ridiculous extreme, that the widow of one of their princes happening to be left with child at the death of her husband, and being advised by their magi, that she had conceived a male, they crowned the belly of the queen, and before it was born, proclaimed the fœtus king by the name of Sapor.
SECT. VII.
XLI. We have hitherto treated of political prudence only, in the discussion of which point, we have contented ourselves with a few examples, and have omitted the many. It is needless to insist on the ability of women in point of œconomical prudence, as every day’s experience exhibits to us, houses and families extremely well governed by women, and very badly governed by men.
XLII. We shall next proceed to consider resolution as a property, which the men look upon as peculiarly annexed to, or inseparable from, their own sex. I admit that heaven has endowed them in comparison to the women, with a quadruple portion of this ingredient; but not that it was given them as an exempt property, peculiarly annexed to, and belonging to their sex only, and that the other was to be excluded from the least participation of it.
XLIII. Not an age has passed, which has not been ennobled and graced by women of eminence and worth; and without dwelling on the heroines of Scripture, and the martyrs to the law of grace, because actions, which are aided by the especial intervention of a supernatural hand, should be attributed to the divine power, and not to any natural virtue, or faculty of a sex: I say, without having recourse to these sort of examples, women of heroic valour, present themselves to the memory in crouds; and after the Semiramis’s, the Artamissas, the Thomyris, the Zenobias, there appears an Aretaphila, the wife of Nicrotatus, the sovereign of Cyrene in Libya, in whose incomparably generous nature, the greatest fortitude of mind, the most tender love of her country, and the most subtile and discerning understanding, contended for the pre-eminence; because, to deliver her country from the violent tyranny of her husband, and to revenge the murder, which, for the sake of possessing her he had perpetrated on her first consort, she made herself the leader of a conspiracy, and deprived Nicrotatus of the kingdom and his life. Leander, who inherited all his brother’s cruelty, having succeeded to the crown, she had the valour and address to rid the world of this second tyrant also; crowning in the end, all her heroic actions, by declining to accept the diadem, which from a grateful sense of the many benefits she had conferred on them, was offered to her by the Cyreneans. Denepetina, the daughter of the great Mithridates, and the inseparable companion and partner of her father, in all his dangerous undertakings and projects, in the execution of which she manifested upon every occasion, that strength of mind and body, which the singular circumstance of her coming into the world with double rows of teeth, seems to have foretold at her birth; after her father was defeated by the great Pompey, she was shut up and besieged in a castle by Manlius Priscus, where, finding it impossible to defend herself, she deprived herself of life, to avoid suffering the ignominy of being made a slave. An Arria, the wife of Cecinus Peto, whose husband having been concerned in the conspiracy of Camilus against the emperor Claudius, was for this crime condemned to death; and she, determined not to outlive her consort, having several times tried in vain to beat her head to pieces against a wall, procured at last to be introduced to her husband in prison, where she extorted from him a promise, to anticipate with his own hands the work of the executioner, and, by way of encouraging him to do it, immediately transfixed her own breast with a dagger. An Epponina, upon her husband Julius Sabinus having in Gaul arrogated to himself the title of Cæsar, endured, with rare constancy and fortitude, unspeakable toils; and being at last condemned to death by Vespasian, she frankly and openly told him, she should die contented, as death would deprive her of the disgust of seeing so bad an emperor as him on the throne.