The Queen’s Gambit asks how royal women in English and adjacent cultures contribute to or complicate English political nationalisms. Historical queens and queen-consorts, English, French, and Scottish, in their own writings negotiate with and frame their political power and powerlessness, their role in the ideologies of the state. In works about these same queens: chronicles, journals, letters, museum exhibitions and the like--their functions as synecdoches for both gender and the nation become acutely visible. In fictions about the figure of the queen: historical dramas and court masques in particular--the cultural imaginary of the female monarch is reframed yet again vis-a-vis the imaginary of England itself. In this era of emerging colonialist and trafficking practices, in the midst of confessional tensions, and in the ever-simmering tensions between England and the continent, England and its peninsular neighbors, England and its constituent communities, the figure of the queen, like the queen on a chess-board, is both nationalist weapon and pawn, power-broker and token.