Richard Grafton and John Stow engaged in a war of printed words in the 1560s through the rapid production of competing chronicles. This essay reconsiders the import of the infamous feud between these writers by examining the shared origins of their abridged histories’ accounts of two medieval French queens, Margaret of Anjou, queen consort of Henry VI, and Isabella, queen consort of Edward II. Though the full-length chronicle histories of Grafton and Stow display strikingly different approaches, these representations of the two so-called “She-Wolves of France” were not born out of static and discrete historical perspectives. For example, Stow’s account of Isabella’s queenship in his 1560s abridgments is in fact nearly identical to Grafton’s laudatory portrait in his own abridged histories, but over successive editions Stow gradually revised his depiction of Isabella, eventually transforming her into the fierce and cruel woman featured in his 1592 Annals. I trace this evolution’s emergence from the historiographers’ own claims to national history, their relationship to each other as contemporary competitors, the debate over historiographic methods, and the pressures of the commercial print market. Attention to the shared origins and nationalist investments of these contentious abridgments reveals the political effects of queenly representation in narrative history. English ideologies of emergent nationalism—and their reliance on gender and race—materialize within competing stories of royal women’s history, and are illuminated by a careful consideration of historiographers’ entangled uses of the past. This essay posits that the complex narrative products of abridging history offer unique insights into the ways royal women’s representation embodies or opposes the self-constructions of England.