Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (43 page)

It is true that the Queen did have, apart from her beauty, the natural appeal of a female in distress, to which male soldiers traditionally reply by springing to arms. It is a point of view most famously expressed by Edmund Burke in his lament for another tragic queen, Marie Antoinette: ‘I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult’. In similar if less exotic terms Robert Wilson, a young British envoy at the Prussian court, wrote
movingly of the spectacle of Louise’s melancholy following the defeat at Jena in 1806: ‘but soldiers must not reflect, and a beautiful woman in misfortune should animate to enterprise’. Besides, Louise’s grief was a potent symbol of her nation’s woe, for which reason ‘a queen in distress is universally acknowledged to be a more tragical sight than the more disastrous and general calamities of the commonalty’.
⁴

Despite this inspiration, Queen Louise’s own powers as a Warrior Queen were, if challenged by the brutal reality of conflict and disaster, a mere illusion, vanishing into the mists of romance and chivalry from whence they came. Her story illustrates how the ‘fancy dress’ aspect of a Warrior Queen, so brilliantly developed by Elizabeth I at Tilbury to mask the possible weaknesses of her position as a female ruler in time of war, might come to be mistaken for the real thing: a passive queen allows herself to be used, ignorant of the true hollowness of her position because she has been trained by upbringing to female impotence, just as Boadicea, a doughty battling queen in literature at the end of the sixteenth century, becomes a modest and delicate princess two hundred years later, who conquers with a blush not a spear, rides in a litter not a chariot.

Under different circumstances – and with a different character involved – the ‘distress’ of a queen could indeed be used to good effect. Robert Wilson, suggesting that Louise’s misfortunes should spur her supporters to military action on her behalf, recalled the example of Maria Theresa sixty years before: ‘So thought and felt the nobles of Hungary, and Maria Theresa retrieved the fortunes of her house.’ The reigns of two great empresses, Maria Theresa of Austria and Catherine the Great of Russia, spanned altogether over seventy years; 1740 to 1780 and 1762 to 1796 respectively. Gibbon was well able to write in his
Decline and Fall
, first printed in 1776, of those ‘illustrious women’ able to bear the weight of empire: ‘nor is our own age destitute’.
⁵

These great tracts of time were matched by the vast tracts of land over which each woman presided. At first sight, however, the resemblance between the two stops there; not only their characters
but the circumstances which brought them to power were certainly very different. The Archduchess Maria Theresa was a young married woman of twenty-three when the death of her father the Emperor Charles VI brought the male Habsburg succession to an end; but by that treaty of 1713 known as the Pragmatic Sanction, the right of his eldest daughter to succeed had been theoretically accepted. Sophie-Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst, born in 1729 and thus twelve years younger than Maria Theresa, was on the other hand an obscure German princess before her marriage to the Grand Duke Peter, heir to the Tsarina Elisabeth of Russia. By this union she was transformed first into the Grand Duchess Catherine, and then, following a dramatic coup in which her doltish husband was deposed, into the Tsarina Catherine II; she was by now in her early thirties, someone who could claim to have contributed strongly to her own surprising exaltation.

When time and various military endeavours had combined to establish Maria Theresa securely on her hereditary throne of Hungary, with her husband Francis of Lorraine beside her as the elected Holy Roman Emperor, she displayed in private a love of cosy royal family life with her apparent infinity of children. Personally chaste, she also showed an austerity, even Puritanism of temperament which recall the ‘sainted’ Isabella of Spain. The pleasures of Catherine II were, notoriously, rather different. This was Voltaire’s ‘Semiramis of the North’, the Warrior Queen with a taste for magnificently strong guards officers as lovers, who in her day created a sensation for her debauchery: ‘excesses which would dishonour any woman whatever her station in life’ in the disapproving opinion of the British Ambassador to her court. She herself actually believed, engagingly enough, in frequent (and incidentally straightforward) sexual activity as a means to health; but she never denied that it was also enjoyable, and as such should be welcomed. ‘Nothing in my opinion is more difficult to resist than what gives us pleasure’, wrote Catherine. ‘All arguments to the contrary are prudery.’ It was a hedonistic point of view shared in no way by the pious and self-abnegatory Maria Theresa.
⁶

Yet there
was
a further interesting resemblance between the two rulers despite their opposing personal morality. Both the Queen–Empress and the Tsarina encountered that familiar problem for a reigning female, the need to exert military leadership, or at least some kind of leadership in war (although the Russian Empire, unlike Austria, had known the rule of other women autocrats, including Catherine’s own mother-in-law Elisabeth). In both cases, they made use of the skilful technique of Elizabeth I, putting on a show of glory, in which the appealing femininity was artfully contrasted with stern and indeed noble patriotic resolve. And neither of them, despite presiding over military victories, had that heroic love of war for its own sake which has marked so many male rulers: Louis XIV, who boasted in 1662 that glory was the principal aim of all his actions, recommended his great-grandson on his deathbed half a century later, ‘Do not imitate my love of war.’
⁷

The first challenge to Maria Theresa occurred when Frederick the Great of Prussia snatched her province of Silesia only seven weeks after her father’s death. To Carlyle, this act of territorial rape, contrary to Frederick’s promised word, was merely the Prussian King grabbing bravely at Opportunity as at a wild horse: ‘rushing hitherward, swift, terrible, clothed with lightning like a courser of the gods; dare you catch
him
by the thunder-mane and fling yourself upon him …’ Many may prefer the cooler estimate of Macaulay concerning the War of the Austrian Succession: ‘The selfish rapacity of the King of Prussia gave the signal to his neighbours. The whole world sprang to arms …’ (We might forgive Carlyle for his blithe cruelty towards one Warrior Queen, for the sake of that bright suggestion made to the young Miss Jane Welsh that Boadicea would be the ideal subject for her initial ‘literary effort’, with the comforting rider that ‘she need not be “big” or “grim” unless you like’ – except for the fact that bigness and grimness were the qualities that Carlyle evidently admired.)
⁸

The young Maria Theresa was hailed as Queen of Hungary by her loyal subjects in that country, or rather by an oxymoron of a title –
domina et rex noster
(our mistress and our king), another
variant of that familiar theme of gender transference. In her beleaguered state, the
domina–rex
was at least armed with one important weapon in the shape of an infant male heir; and she was quick to play upon the appealing possibilities of the image of the Warrior Queen as Young Mother. Sending a picture of herself and the child to General Khevenmüller in 1742 just after he had taken Munich on her behalf, Maria Theresa wrote this accompanying letter: ‘Dear and faithful Khevenmüller – Here you behold a queen who knows what it is to be forsaken by the whole world. And here also is the heir to her throne. What do you think will become of this child?’
⁹
The next day the troops at Linz were shown both the picture and the letter, amid outbursts of wild enthusiasm.

At her coronation at Pressburg (Bratislava) in Hungary Maria Theresa mounted a huge black charger, and according to immemorial custom drew her sword to the four points of the compass, to signify her role as Hungary’s protector. This was once again Elizabeth I at Tilbury, making the show stand for the substance, especially as Maria Theresa had to learn to ride astride specially for the event: furthermore, she had only just over a month in which to do so (following the invitation to Pressburg) and was in the process of recovering from the birth of her first son. Thereafter Maria Theresa continued to enjoy all the spectacles of military life such as reviews, parades and manoeuvres in which she could similarly display herself. She designed a uniform for herself and her ladies on these occasions which combined the practical chamois leather breeches and boots of the
rex
beneath, with the voluminous skirts of the
domina
above.

None of this amounted to a predilection for warmongering. The frequent battles she had to fight were more likely to be in defence of her own inheritance than in pursuit of others’. Indeed the Queen (in her own right) and Empress (by virtue of her husband’s election) displayed on occasion a consciousness of the sheer immorality of national aggression which seems to have been rooted in her own personal piety. When the Polish Partition of 1772 was first suggested, Maria Theresa protested against the
robbing of an innocent nation ‘that it has hitherto been our boast to protect and support’, adding ‘The greatness and strength of a state will not be taken into consideration when we are called to render our final account.’ Towards the end of her life the Empress protested vehemently against Austria’s attempt to annex Bavaria: ‘Let them call me a coward, a weakling, a dotard if they like [she was approaching sixty], nothing shall prevent me from extricating Europe from this perilous situation.’ Afterwards she said: ‘For me it is an inexpressible happiness to have prevented a great effusion of blood.’

More symbolic of her personal style than the image of the young Queen on the black charger at the beginning of the reign, is that presented by the statue erected in the nineteenth century opposite the Hofburg in Vienna. Here the Empress – ‘the General and first Mother of the said Dominions’, as she described herself – is seen presiding like an enormous benevolent muffin in her long dress and ceremonial robes (there is no glimpse of those practical chamois leather breeches and boots).
¹⁰
All about her, at the four corners of the statue, prance on horses, her male generals and ministers, both smaller and more active.

Unlike Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great did have, it is true, a penchant towards glory. When she told her adoring correspondent Voltaire in 1771 that ‘the nation’s glory is my own, that is my principle’,
¹¹
she summed up an intelligent philosophy which explained how she had come to rule the unwieldy Russias so successfully for the last nine years. This little German Princess had loved rough games as a child, hating to be fobbed off with dolls and cots instead of riding and shooting birds with the local children. As the unheeded bride of the Grand Duke Peter – their marriage was not consummated for nine years – she took her chief pleasure in riding, even in bed, by her own account, where she galloped away her frustration as ‘a postilion on my pillow’.
¹²
When the Tsarina Elisabeth protested that riding like a man on a flat saddle led to sterility, the neglected wife replied pointedly that
the more violent the exercise, the more she liked it. As Tsarina herself, Catherine put this caged energy to good use.

The coup against Catherine’s husband, who had succeeded as the Tsar Peter III at the beginning of 1762, took place six months later. It was ten o’clock of the light northern night on 29 June, according to the Russian style of dating; there was thus scarcely any darkness to shroud the startling spectacle of the Grand Duchess Catherine, dressed in uniform, at the head of the rebel regiments whose members including prominently her current lover Grigory Orlov and his brother. When these rebels – disgusted by the Tsar’s pro-German policies – had come for Catherine, she had borrowed the green and red uniform of a young officer, Captain Talietzin, in the Semeonovsky regiment, who was slight enough for his clothes to fit her. Her lady-in-waiting Princess Dashkova took the uniform of another young officer, Lieutenant Poushkin. According to the Princess’s memoirs, it was she, Dashkova, who suggested that her mistress should now substitute the Order of St Andrew for that of St Catherine worn over her uniform: the order of St Andrew was theoretically worn only by the reigning sovereign, and the substitution was thus a dramatic gesture indicating the assumption of command.
¹³

‘For a man’s work, you needed a man’s outfit’ was Catherine’s official explanation for her masculine attire
¹⁴
(although since she had been accustomed to steal out of her palace in man’s costume to meet her lover Stanislaus Poniatowski, it could clearly be used for a woman’s work as well). The former tomboy easily mounted the mettlesome grey stallion brought for her use and mastered it. With her drawn sword and her long flowing hair beneath her black three-cornered hat lined with sable and decorated with oak leaves, the symbols of victory, Catherine now presented a very passable goddess of war at the head of her troops. The loyalty inspired by the sight was epitomized when a young NCO rushed forward to present her with a pennant for her naked sword. His name was Grigory Potemkin.

During her long reign, her triumphant progress towards
military victories galore – she listed seventy-eight of them – Catherine never failed to present herself wherever possible in the same heroic light. When the French diplomat the Comte de Ségur first saw her in 1785, he found her ‘richly attired, her hand resting on a column’. Her majestic air, the pride in her expression and her ‘slightly theatrical pose’ so took him aback that he forgot his speech of welcome. So successful was this projection that the portrait painter Madame Vigée Le Brun, meeting her during a tour of Russia, was amazed to discover that the Tsarina was actually very short: ‘I had fancied her prodigiously tall, as high as her grandeur’.
¹⁵