Queen’s Chess: Changing the Rules

Editor’s note: This article was made for Oil and Gas Investor’s 2025 Influential Women in Energy Publication. A documentary on Queen Isabella that includes her invention of Queen’s Chess is available on YouTube. Mention of Queen’s Chess is at approximately 15:30. A documentary about the 1970 Miss World pageant, featuring both contestants and activists, can also be found on YouTube. The archive of the live broadcast of the 1970 pageant itself can be found on YouTube, as well. The protest begins at 39:00.

Until Queen Isabella of Spain changed the rules of chess, the queen piece could only move one or two squares at a time. A voracious learner as a child and throughout her life in the late 15th century, Isabella was also a chess master.

The change she inducted—the queen moving multiple spaces and in any direction—is the one played today and is known as “Queen’s Chess.”

In it, the queen is the most powerful piece.

She applied her chess mastery in her approach to the business of queening itself, defying her king half-brother’s numerous attempts to marry her off to someone suitable to his ambitions rather than hers.

She eloped instead with her own choice: Ferdinand of Aragon, a neighboring monarch, who consented to her demand that he be subordinate to her.

As queen, she physically led troops into battle, bringing her children along.

And there is that world event for which she is most known: financing Italian explorer Christopher Columbus’ expedition that was to discover a western route to Asia.

Her knowledge of science was rich enough to challenge Columbus on his estimate of the number of days the trip would take, thus the amount of supplies needed.

Columbus’ math was fewer than half the number of days she calculated.

And she was correct, as his expedition carried supplies only sufficient to reach the Caribbean and return to Spain rather than enough to reach Asia and return.

(That Earth was spherical and not flat had been well known since ancient Greece; the “flat Earth” story was a 17th century invention that was advanced further by Washington Irving in an 1828 biography of Columbus.)

Isabella’s investment in Columbus’ science project upended the world’s power-ranking.

Spain quickly rose to the top due to its vast new trans-Atlantic empire.

And Isabella contributed to the eventual end of Venice’s monopoly in the eastern Mediterranean over trade with India and other destinations east as others found the South American route, the Panamanian route and the south African route.

World history was changed, but not in terms of the world’s view of the usefulness of women.

‘We were visible’

Amazon Prime Video recently picked up the 2020 movie, “Misbehaviour,” that features events around the 1970 Miss World pageant in London.

Most of us were barely conscious yet in 1970 or not yet born. From a 2025 lens, what was acceptable at the time is shocking today.

Contestants’ measurements were part of judging and were included in the live show’s introductions of each finalist.

More surprising, the group of finalists turned their backsides to the cameras for judges, audience members and television viewers to linger in review of their bums.

Bob Hope began his monologue with, “I’m very happy to be at this cattle market tonight.” He followed with more jokes about women.

Then, he and the broadcast were famously interrupted.

Women who had taken seats in the audience simply by buying tickets stood, rattling noise-makers, throwing flour bombs onto the stage, dropping leaflets onto the floor from the balconies, raising signs and water pistols, and rushing onto the stage.

When Hope returned, he spoke viciously, saying anyone who would disrupt the contestant “girls” and the proceedings “have got to be on some kind of dope.”

The program culminated with crowning a new Miss World—while she was still wearing her swimsuit.

Sue Finch, one of the protestors, told the BBC in 2020, “Nobody had known in the general public about the feminist movement until that moment. All of a sudden, it burst out into people’s homes on their television sets. For that moment, we were visible.”

They changed the world.

Something else happened

But it gets even better. Something else happened that evening: Contestants from two first-time nation participants won both Miss World and runner-up.

The nations: Grenada and a first-time “Africa South” entrant in recognition of apartheid.

Both are Black women: Grenada’s Jennifer Hosten and South Africa’s Pearl Jansen.

There’s a popular response to the inexplicable: “I don’t know. I don’t make the rules.”

But what is known with certainty, as shown throughout history, is that we can change them.