The Royal We: Princesses of the Past
The U.S. formed by breaking ties with a king, but its people remain fascinated by royalty—particularly glamorous queens and princesses, whether fictional or real. While we have no royalty of our own, monarchies (and princesses) do figure in American history. Choose whether the following statements are true or false.
1. When Pocahontas, daughter of Algonquian chief Powhatan, met King James I in England, he chided her husband, colonist John Rolfe, for having dared to marry a royal.
True. Or at least, he is recorded as doing so in colonist Robert Beverley's 1705 The History and Present State of Virginia, today a major resource in early Virginian and colonial history. Beverley gives a full account of Pocahontas's story (though historians debate its accuracy). According to Beverly, in England,
"Pocahontas had many Honours done her by the Queen . . . she was frequently admitted to wait on her Majesty, and was publickly treated as a Prince's Daughter; she was carried to many Plays, Balls, and other publick Entertainments, and very respectfully receiv'd by all the Ladies about the Court. Upon all which Occasions she behaved her self with so much Decency, and show'd so much Grandure in her Deportment, that she made good the brightest Part of the Character Capt. Smith had given of her. In the mean while she gain'd the good Opinion of every Body, so much that the poor Gentleman her Husband had like to have been call'd to an Account for presuming to marry a Princess Royal without the King's Consent . . ."
2. Queen Lili'uokalani, forced to abdicate her throne in 1893, was the last female royal of the Hawaiian monarchy.
False. Upon coming to the throne in 1891—following the death of her brother, King Kalakaua—Queen Lili'uokalani appointed Victoria Ka'iulani Cleghorn, her half-Scottish half-Hawaiian niece, as Crown Princess of Hawaii. Born in 1875 and educated in the UK, Ka'iulani spent the latter part of her short life advocating for the restoration of her country's independence. She died of illness in 1899, at the age of 23—shortly after the U.S. officially annexed Hawaii. The Hawaiian royal line continues today, but Ka'iulani was the last princess appointed while the monarchy held political power.
3. One female sachem (an Algonquian tribal chief) took part in the bloody 1675-1676 conflict between New England colonists and Native Americans known as King Philip's War.
False. Two female sachems took part in King Philip's War. The most famous is Weetamoo, sachem of the Wampanoag tribe called the Pocassets and sister-in-law of Metacom, sachem of the Pokanoket. Called Philip by the English, Metacom was the Philip of King Philip's War and, with Weetamoo and her tribe, fought against the English. Less famous is Awashonks, female sachem of the Sakonnets. Though she originally sided with Weetamoo and Philip, she later chose to ally her tribe with the English.
4. The marriage of Japanese imperial princess Kazunomiya to the acting ruler of Japan, shogun Tokugawa Iemochi, was a direct reaction to the 1854 Convention of Kanagawa, in which American Commodore Matthew C. Perry intimidated Japan into opening its ports to the U.S.
False. The imperial family objected to the opening of Japan—which had kept its borders largely shut to outsiders for centuries—to the U.S., but the imperial princess' marriage did not take place until several years after the shogun concluded a second treaty, this one with the first U.S. Consul General to Japan, Townsend Harris. The shogunate, essentially a monarchy made up of warrior-rulers, had long held the power of government in Japan, while the traditional monarchy of the imperial family had become largely ceremonial. However, the shogunate's agreeing to open the country to Westerners in the treaties of 1854 and 1858 created a political divide between supporters of the shogun and of the emperor; Kazunomiya's marriage to Iemochi in 1862 was meant to bridge this divide.
To read Robert Beverley's full account of the life of Pocahontas, refer to pages 25-33 of his The History and Present State of Virginia online at Documenting the American South.
In contrast to Beverley's account, listen to historian Caroline Cox's attempt to reconstruct the life of Pocahontas in the lecture Biography: Pocahontas. In Colonial Williamsburg's podcast episode We are Starved, archaeologist Ivor Noel Hume provides a very different view from Beverley's of Pocahontas's time in England.
For more information on Crown Princess Ka'iulani, refer to The Ka'iulani Project, a website and research community that seeks to recover the history of Ka'iulani and make her life story more widely known. For class-appropriate readings on Ka'iulani, Scholastic's series of books for young people The Royal Diaries includes Ka'iulani: The People's Princess, a fictionalized first-person account of the princess' life from 1889 to 1893. Currently, much controversy surrounds an in-production film on the life of the princess and the annexation of Hawaii.
Weetamoo's early life, as well as the life of Awashonks, are fictionalized in another volume in Scholastic's The Royal Diaries series: Weetamoo: Heart of the Pocassets, by Patricia Clark Smith. Details on the lives of both Weetamoo and Awashonks are scarce, as the Wampanoag people had no written language; however, Mary Rowlandson, a colonist captured by the Wampanoag during King Philip's War, describes Weetamoo in her memoir, Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Project Gutenberg offers the full-text of the narrative.
For more on King Philip's War, Harvard professor Jill Lepore discusses the conflict in an episode of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History's podcast, Historians on the Record.
In Kazunomiya: Prisoner of Heaven, another volume in Scholastic's Royal Diaries series, Kathryn Lasky imagines Kazunomiya's life from 1858 to 1862.
- Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia… (London: 1705), Documenting the American South (accessed September 4, 2009).
- Sheila Keenan, Scholastic Encyclopedia of Women in the United States (New York, N.Y.: 2002).
- Kathryn Lasky, Kazunomiya: Prisoner of Heaven (New York, N.Y.: Scholastic, 2004).
- Patricia Clark Smith, Weetamoo: Heart of the Pocassets (New York, N.Y.: Scholastic, 2003).
- University of South Florida, Florida Center for Instructional Technology, Clipart ETC, (accessed September 4, 2009).
- Ellen Emerson White, Kaiulani: The People's Princess (New York, N.Y.: Scholastic, 2001).
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