Margaret of Parma

Born 5 July 1522 to the Holy Roman Emperor and a Flemish woman, Margaret was married at fourteen to Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Florence; he was assassinated a year later. Her second marriage in 1538 to Ottavio Farnese made her Duchess of Parma in 1547, but her father had other plans. In 1559 Philip II appointed her Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, where she navigated a decade of rising Protestant unrest, noble dissent, and the Duke of Alba's brutal arrival in 1567, which ended her first term. She returned in 1578 for a second governorship, this time cleaning up after the Spanish Fury and Alba's wreckage, before withdrawing in 1582. She died in Ortona on 18 January 1586, having spent most of her life managing the political consequences of men.