Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (39 page)

She had come among them, said Queen Elizabeth, as they could see, ‘not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all,
to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust’. She continued with that deathless declaration, the very watchword of Elizabeth I as a Warrior Queen: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of Europe should invade the borders of my realm …’ Aske, paraphrasing that section of her speech in his verse tribute, fails, unlike the Queen, at the last fence of inspiration:

Although she be by Nature weak

Because her sex no otherwise can be

Yet wants she not the courage of her sire.

‘Rather than any Dishonour shall grow by me,’ went on Elizabeth, ‘I myself will take up arms … In the meantime my Lieutenant General shall be in my stead.’ The latter sentiment is almost an afterthought compared to the thrilling – but frightening – possibilities of the former.

How far distant the Queen on her white steed had now removed herself from the rest of the lowly female race! Dazzled by the matchless words, it is difficult even to bear in mind that the so-called weaker sex actually played an important if subservient role in European armies of the time. ‘As woman was created to be a helper to man, so women are great helpers to armies, to their husbands, especially those of the lower condition …’, Sir James Turner would write in the next century. In the army, as outside it, women provided what has been called ‘the warp of the social fabric’ by giving sexual favours and by childbearing, quite apart from their ceaseless cooking and nursing which was taken for granted. Three years before Tilbury, Leicester himself in the Netherlands had drawn up a list of ‘sundry disorders and horrible abuses’ among his troops. These included the presence of ‘many vagrant idle women in an army’. But he deliberately excluded from their
number the many lawful wives ‘to tend the sick and serve as launderers’.
⁵⁵

Elizabetha Triumphans simply did not belong to the same gender as these inferior but essential workers. Or if she did, it was only to enhance still further the measure of her own kind of military glory, far from the sweaty field of battle, close to the minds and hearts of her people.

¹
But the nineteeth-century editor of Knox’s works – male – observed that if John Knox had foreseen Queen Victoria ruling over a vast Christian empire, he would have died happy, like Simeon singing the Nunc Dimittis in the temple!
²

²
It was another awkward situation that Henry VIII’s Act of Succession of 1536 declaring Elizabeth to be a bastard had never been repealed. Nor was it repealed now.
⁹
Since Elizabeth was able to succeed under the terms of her father’s will, it was thought more tactful to let that sleeping and by now rather embarrassing old dog of King Henry’s matrimonial entanglements lie.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jinga at the Gates

Rome for empire far renown’d

Tramples on a thousand states

Soon her pride shall kiss the ground, –

Hark! the Gaul is at her gates.

WILLIAM COWPER,
‘Boadicea’

W
hen Queen Christina of Sweden, daughter of the warrior Gustavus Adolphus, expressed a wish to abdicate in 1651, it was to make room for her first cousin Charles Gustavus. She did so, she declared, in the best interests of her country: ‘The realm would be granted a man and a champion who when war threatened could ride with his people to battle, while a woman could not.’ (As we shall see, this passive estimate of a woman leader’s role in wartime was not shared at this date by Warrior Queens in other continents, where the thrilling or menacing practical involvement of the female in her country’s cause by one such as Jinga of Angola continued.) Although Christina was persuaded not to abdicate in 1651, three years later the eccentric scholarly creature, a convert to Catholicism, who had worn man’s clothing not with martial intent but for the freedom it gave her, departed for Rome. For all the legends which have her wearing Amazonian costume on this occasion, she and her ladies actually wore plain grey gowns to enter the Holy City.
¹

The particular intellectual temperament of Queen Christina – ‘You know how it distresses me to lend my time to matters other than studying’, she wrote – did not prevent her from taking part in various political intrigues in her new life in the south. But like many European queens regnant, she expressed the notion that
participation in war was a masculine business. It is of this period that Joan Kelly has written of the phenomenon of the ‘disarmed lady’.
²
Queen Elizabeth I, gamely acting the Warrior Queen at Tilbury despite a prudent natural pacifism, belonged to a vanished age. Then there were still relics of feudalism in the national unconscious, a vague expectation that the chief must personally wave the sword. Now a female ruler had no need to issue the fake if exciting threat that ‘I myself will take up arms’ in order to shore up her authority. A queen, no longer posing as an honorary male, could give vent to perceived natural feminine dislike of the actual battlefield, leaving the sword to be grasped by the nearest male. Queen Christina, publicly encouraging the trained soldier Charles Gustavus to take the sword away altogether, was merely carrying this trend to the extreme. He did so, incidentally, with alacrity, initiating a series of carnivorous campaigns of conquest.

‘Oh Lord, when will all this dreadful bloodshed cease?’ Thus with fervour exclaimed Queen Anne, reigning over Great Britain a century after the death of her kinswoman Elizabeth, a Britain in full spate of Marlborough’s victories. ‘I have no liking for war,’ she observed on another occasion, ‘and shall end it as soon as possible.’ She was indeed improbable even as a symbolic Warrior Queen, as has been noted with regard to her ‘Amazonian’ display at Bath. ‘Though this great Queen had made a very glorious figure in Europe by her arms and fleets abroad,’ wrote Sir John Clerk, ‘she appeared to me the most despicable mortal I had ever seen in any station.’
³
Yet the time when the sad private spectacle would have fatally negated the glamour of the glorious public figure had passed.

At the battle of Oudenarde in 1708, the young Prince George of Hanover, the Queen’s distant cousin and eventual heir (the future King George II), took part. His courage in fighting on when his horse was shot under him was celebrated by Swift:

Full firmly he stood as became his high blood

Which runs in his veins so blue

For this gallant young man, being a-kin to Queen Anne,

Did as, were she a man, she would do.
⁴

Were the Queen a man … the Warrior Queen, no longer pretending to have the heart and stomach of a king, now admits freely to her very different (female) nature. On the other hand,
were
the Queen a man, she would undoubtedly be a very brave one; the behaviour of her gallant young male relation epitomizes this. She might of course under certain circumstances show herself to be a great deal braver than the timorous men surrounding her. This – an aspect of the Shame Syndrome – received its most famous manifestation in the expostulation of Queen Victoria to Disraeli in 1878. ‘Oh if the Queen were a man’, she wrote furiously, ‘she would like to go and give those horrid Russians whose word one cannot trust such a beating.’
⁵
It is a wonderful expression of unreality; but the Queen’s frustrated sentiments are not purely comic. The ageing Queen Victoria (fifty-eight to Queen Elizabeth’s fifty-four at Tilbury) has no intention of deserting her bonnet and shawl even for white plumes and silver armour. The limitations of her sex are thoroughly accepted.

Boadicea herself, in English literature, begins to float away from the historic queen of Tacitus and Dio, wronged in her situation and bloodthirsty in her behaviour, the one justifying the other: she enters some other idealized sphere of womanhood. At first her character merely underwent a subtle transformation from the appropriate Elizabethan heroine to someone representing the much lower estimate of women in Jacobean times; ‘women’s worth’, as Anne Bradstreet had it, having departed ‘with our Queen’. Fletcher’s
Bonduca
, first performed in about 1614, has as its centre a hero not a heroine: the British Caratach (for Caratacus, whose historic involvement was of course with Cartimandua, not Boadicea). Even the goddess Andraste emerges here as a god: Andate, who inspires the British Queen proudly to roll her ‘swarty [iniquitous] chariot wheels over the heaps of wounds and carcasses sailing through seas of blood’.
⁶

Bonduca herself is a distinctly unheroic figure, for all her chariot wheels and her ‘armed cart’. She is for example sharply ticked off by her ally Caratach for being boastful. After her first victory, Bonduca exults: ‘A woman beat ’em … a weak woman, a woman beat these Romans!’ to which Caratach replies sardonically: ‘So it seems.’ Then he adds: ‘A man would shame to talk so.’ Throughout the play, indeed, Caratach, the trained soldier, shows more respect for the Romans – professionals like himself – than he does for Bonduca or her daughters. He will not let the Queen deride their ‘weight and worth’. As he confesses at one point: ‘I love an enemy, I was born a soldier.’

Most powerfully of all, Caratach saves some Roman soldiers from torture at the daughters’ hands, since they have been captured by treachery. It matters not to Caratach that these are the soldiers responsible for the British princesses’ brutal violation (his language will sound a sombre but not unevocative note to modern ears):

Caratach: A woman’s wisdom in our triumphs? Out, out, ye sluts, ye follies, from our swords filch our revenges basely? [To the Romans] Arm again, Gentlemen. [To the Britons] Soldiers, I charge ye help ’em.

Daughter 2: By —— Uncle, we will have vengeance for our rapes.

Caratach: By —— ye should have kept your legs closed then.

Caratach’s best advice to his nieces is to ‘Learn to spin, and curse your knotted hemp.’

Throughout the play, a Jacobean misogyny prevails. It is Fletcher’s Bonduca – unlike Spenser’s betrayed heroine – who brings about the defeat of the Britons by a military mistake. This elicits from Caratach the violent condemnation, ‘O woman, scurvie woman, beastly woman’, before the Queen in her turn is told to go home and spin. For the Romans equally, Bonduca is ‘woman, woman, unnatural woman’ when she urges her
daughters to kill themselves rather than face the Roman depredation (that fate so coarsely dismissed by their uncle) a second time. Only Bonduca’s patriotic Britishness – her final refusal to plead for mercy with the noble words ‘I am unacquainted with that language’ – is still admired; her sex is scorned.

The floating away of Boadicea from this human, if despised, figure into some gauzier sphere is well illustrated by the changes which have taken place to Fletcher’s play by the time it emerges in an adaptation, with music by Henry Purcell, performed in 1695.
⁷
Fletcher’s original is referred to in the Prologue to the printed play book as ‘so ingenious a Relick’ of time past; in this new ‘fighting age’ – that of William III’s continental campaigns against Louis XIV – it is appropriate that ‘proud Bunduca’, played here by Mrs Frances Knight, should once more tread the British stage. But proud Bonduca is a figure much chastened by the passage of a century, a period in which even the official lustful energy of women has been stripped from them in the public estimation.

Purcell’s score has been described as ranking ‘among his finest’ with the invocation ‘Divine Andate, President of War’, an exquisite tenor recitative; although
Bonduca
has been generally overshadowed in reputation by
The Indian Queen
, written about the same time.
⁸
But the drama lacks all the violence which once made it a savage but effective piece. The language has been generally softened with Fletcher’s lusty expletives omitted. The daughters’ characters have been made tender, languishing, even sentimental, and since they no longer take rebellious action against their unpleasant fate, Caratach is no longer compelled to castigate them. As for Bunduca herself, this is the meek fashion in which she now addresses Caratach: