Authors: Catherine Gilbert Murdock
Wisdom's Kiss (95 page)
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>For readers who missed the
nuance
buried within both the Encyclopedia entry and my
discussion
of said entry allow me to clarify here the whole business of kings and queens and regnants. ("Regnant," being an adjective, doesn't actually have a plural, but for the moment we're going to roll with it.)
For most of human history, the ruler of a country has been male. Whenever anyone thought about this long enough to notice the
sexism
, they'd defend it on the grounds that the leader of government was also expected to lead the military (as through today: the president of the United States is commander in chief), and a woman couldn't, you know, be a soldier—particularly a queen, whose most important job was spawning baby kings. Montagne's response to this ideology can be seen in Queen Compassion's quip that "any strumpet can brace a shield": since Montagne's military operates solely defensively—versus armies that attack and conquer—a woman can lead it just as effectively as any man.
Thus (Montagne being the exception to this rule; we're now discussing the norm) whenever a king of a country died, the crown would pass to the next available male, even if he was the youngest sibling or an infant or a cousin or a distant idiot nephew. Hence
Rüdiger IV
, who took the throne of Lax even though he had nineteen older female cousins; that's traditional succession in a nutshell.
European history has a few glaring exceptions, such as Queen Elizabeth I, who received the crown given the dearth of male alternatives—her father having pretty much wiped out the other bloodlines—and because everyone assumed she'd soon marry. (Psych!) But the vast majority of rulers have been male, and everyone understood that the ruler's queen was in reality a queen consort, meaning that she didn't have power herself. There were, again, exceptions; William and Mary ruled England jointly as king regnant ("regnant" means "reigning") and queen regnant. But a queen was a consort unless otherwise specified, and a king, obversely, was a regnant unless otherwise specified. In fact, the husband of England's Queen Victoria (the Brits by the 1830s had evolved out of the whole it's-gotta-be-a-guy thing) was Prince Consort Albert; she wanted to make him king consort, but Parliament wouldn't allow it—as a foreigner he could have "prince" or nuthin'. The husband of the current Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, has never even had his "consort" title formalized. I could go on, but suffice to say that queens regnant are really, really rare, and king consorts are even rarer.
How many
Wisdom's Kiss
readers know this, or care? Close to zero, I suspect. And trying to explain all that detail within Cuthbert's encyclopedia entry was not the easiest task. But, dork that I am, I love this sort of history. It also has a fairly important role within
Wisdom's Kiss:
by elevating her husband from prince consort to king regnant (a rather trifling distinction given that the poor guy was already dead), Queen Providence established a
legal precedent
that the male spouse of a Montagne queen could also hold power. This was the
loophole
that Wilhelmina sought to exploit. By forcing Temperance's abdication, Wilhelmina was ensuring that when Dizzy was crowned queen, Dizzy's new husband, Roger, would also be crowned king regnant, or coruler. How long Dizzy would have survived after that point ... I'm guessing only long enough to produce a baby Roger to continue the Farina bloodline.
See also
Queen Mothers
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>"Loophole" sounds totally contemporary, right? Something you'd hear on
Law and Order: Special Wall Street Fat Cats You-Lose-Your-House-but-We-Don't-Go-to-Jail Unit.
It's a concept invented by scheming, corrupt modern minds, not the moral, God-fearing people who used to live back, you know, when people were God fearing and moral...
No.
The original term "loophole" (deriving from the Dutch
lûpen
; no connection to "loop" as in "circle") meant a slit in a wall through which defenders could look out and/or shoot arrows. This definition first appeared in print in England around 1590. But within a hundred years, the concept had evolved to its current figurative sense: a weakness or ambiguity—especially in a legal document—that someone metaphorically lying in wait could shoot through and/or attack with.
For some reason I find this immensely comforting, that Englishmen 300 years ago were just as conniving and manipulative and niggling as they are today. Also, in
Wisdom's Kiss
I try not to use modern (by which I mean post-1800; it's my own distinction) words. One of my few exceptions to this rule is "
food poisoning
" ("
the willies
" is another). It turns out that there really isn't an old-fashioned word for food-borne sickness, I guess because no one back then ever figured out the connection. Food (hopefully noncontaminated) for thought.
An explanation on the details of
Wilhelmina's loophole
may be found
here
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>Historically, most rulers of monarchies have been kings, and their wives have most often been not queens but queens consort. When a king dies, the crown passes not to his widow but to his heir, usually the closest male relative. The queen, however, still retains her title. To distinguish this queen from the new king's queen consort—or even, rarely, from the newly crowned queen regnant (you really need to read the "Male Succession"
commentary
to understand what I'm talking about)—the English many centuries ago developed the title "queen mother." A queen mother is a widow of the late king and also mother to the current ruler; one can be a queen's mother but not the formally titled "queen mother" (the mother of Queen Victoria, for example, had never been queen herself so titlewise it was nuts to her).
Thus, it is a bit disingenuous that Ben in
Wisdom's Kiss
dubs herself queen mother, as she was ruler of Montagne, not queen consort to its king, and held the throne until she
abdicated
in favor of
her daughter
. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a real-life example of such a queen-to-queen transfer of power—I'm sure one exists, I just haven't been able to find it. Also, I didn't look very hard because this is a fantasy novel. That's the great joy of fantasy: you get to make stuff up and no one can correct you because it's your world, darn it, and you're the one who concocts all the rules! (Evil laugh!)
Ahem. So, the question was whether Ben should be called "queen mother" or "queen
dowager
" or some other term that I've either forgotten or never knew in the first place. But I love the charming fustiness of "queen mother," and I love its association with England's most recent (and tremendously beloved) Queen Mother, the mother of the current Q.E. II, who lived to 101 and had such marvelous hats. If that's how you want to picture Ben, be my guest.
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