Catherine de'Medici: Queen and Regent of France.

This was the powerful Queen Regent whom Ronsard served. Her influence dominated the artistic life of her time, down to specifying topics to poets. In England Queen Elizabeth was a great but less directly interfering factor in the arts of her time, though the story goes that she requested the creation of The Merry Wives of Windsor because she wanted to see Falstaff in love. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia)