Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (37 page)

Part of the trouble with the ambitious young Essex in the 1590s was that his hotheaded love of war was inimical to his royal mistress, dote as she might upon his stylish rashness when it was displayed, for example, in a court tournament in her own honour. When Francis Bacon was advising his patron Essex how to secure a reconciliation with the Queen, he suggested that he should not be so warlike in his talk ‘for her majesty loveth peace’.
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As the young Indian braves in Western films used to be routinely portrayed as eager for war, where their elders were content to smoke the pipe of peace, so Elizabeth and Essex were ranged against each other by their generations, he as a war-loving young man, she as a peace-loving old woman. It proved a recipe for disaster, but thanks to Elizabeth’s long practice of what she called the ‘wit of the fox’, it turned out in the end to be Essex’s disaster, not her own. The reference is to the Queen’s interview with the historian William Lambarde. In 1601 Lambarde presented her with his
Pandecta
, the various records of the Tower of London during the Middle Ages. A discussion concerning the meaning of certain mediaeval legal terms followed in which the Queen was pleased to demonstrate her own considerable learning. Were
rediseisnes
, for instance, as she supposed, unlawful and forcible throwing of men out of their lawful possessions? Lambarde confirmed that they were. ‘In those days’, the Queen observed with satisfaction, ‘force and arms did prevail: but now the wit of the fox is everywhere …’
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Integral to Queen Elizabeth’s creation of herself as a ‘prince’ were sedulous references to her descent from King Henry VIII – ‘Great Harry’ – in a rich working of the Appendage Syndrome. Knox had advised the Queen in his somewhat limited apology not to ‘brag of your birth’ but brag she did, in full measure, and over and over again. (‘Well did she show, great Harry was her sire, Whom Europe did for valour most admire’, wrote Lady Diana Primrose after the Queen’s death.) Elizabeth was also artful in associating herself with contemporary male leaders, in order to underline her possession of ‘masculine’ courage. It was her recurrent theme (not only in that reverberating speech at Tilbury to which we will return) that she had ‘the heart of a man’, not of a woman. ‘And I am not afraid of anything’, she added on one occasion, having made the familiar boast to the Spanish Ambassador, declaring herself in the process to be quite as brave as the kings of Spain, France, Scotland and the whole house of Guise.
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The greatest art of all was deployed paradoxically in persistently reminding her audience that she was Only-a-Weak-Woman, in order to evoke the desired reaction of wonder and disbelief: for surely here was the equal of any prince of the past! In 1586 for instance, Queen Elizabeth described her reaction to her accession: ‘bethinking myself on those things that fitted a King’. And she listed ‘justice, temper, magnanimity, judgement’ among them, adding modestly: ‘As for the two latter, I will not boast; my sex doth not permit it.’ The implication was clear. The Queen kept up these quasi-modest allusions to the end of her life. In almost her last public speech she reminded her audience of her ‘sexly weakness’, before going on to boast once again that God had given her a heart ‘which never yet feared foreign or home enemy’.
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Then there were the numerous otherworldly references to Diana, Juno, Astraea, Gloriana, Sweet Cynthia, the Fairy Queen and so on and so forth, as a goddess untouched by the depredations of time. (An ode celebrating her funeral referred to ‘this sweet slumbering
maid
’ with the air of one on her way to
Parliament, not to her burial.) The extensive researches of Roy Strong in art and history have exposed the workings of this subtle and brilliant campaign – like some huge campaign for re-election lasting forty-five years, except the votes were cast in loyalty, not at the polling booth – by which Queen Elizabeth I secured first the affection, then the adoration of her people.
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In the apogee of this campaign, the ‘Accession’ picture of 1600 showing the triumph of Astraea, the Queen had finally been transformed into the first Virgin of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue: Virgo and Venus (at the age of sixty-seven) ever young and ever beautiful.
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Nor, happily, did this self-presentation as a virgin goddess prevent the Queen from appearing also in the guise of the mother of her people, as the years passed. When Leicester expressed that hope in his will that Elizabeth would be the longest-reigning ‘prince that ever He [God] gave over England’ he went on to wish, in a splendid transfer of genders, ‘that she may indeed be a blessed mother and nurse to this people and church of England’. Sir John Harrington referred to her as the ‘natural mother’ of her subjects; Thomas Dekker, in his epitaph, described her as ‘having brought up (even under her wing) a nation that was almost begotten and born under her’.
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For gradually her femininity, which called for a chivalry and protection denied to a king, became an asset, not a weakness. At the beginning of her reign at a tournament given in honour of the Duc de Montmorency, Queen Elizabeth watched with her ladies at the tiltyard while the earls of Rutland and Essex charged at each other at a signal given by her. But it had to be admitted that for all the prettiness of the torchlit spectacle – the two earls in blue and silver, the young Queen gilded and radiant – it was not thus that Great Harry had conducted himself at the beginning of his reign, he who had tired out eight to ten horses hunting, and then played tennis, and finally jousted himself. Twenty years later when the Queen, still more gilded, yet more radiant, watched a tourney of armed ‘Amazons’ versus knights, she had become the centre of an astonishing cult, in which even the warlike ‘Amazons’ had to be played by men, since such games were far
too rough for the delicate sex of which she was the most delicate of all.
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There is a special piquancy in this respect about Queen Elizabeth’s legendary meeting with Grace O’Malley, the Irish pirate captain, who is supposed to have appeared before her at Greenwich in 1593, barefoot, dressed in wild and ragged Irish costume. (One should say that this meeting is legendary only in the sense that it has given rise to many legends: the meeting did take place, as a result of Grace O’Malley’s petition to the Queen regarding her family and properties, although unfortunately no other details concerning it are known.) For Grace O’Malley, a woman of about the Queen’s own age – that is, sixty – had led exactly the kind of buccaneering life which went to make up an old-style Warrior Queen. ‘This was a notorious woman in all the coasts of Ireland’, wrote Sir Henry Sidney in 1577 of her numerous piratical ventures. Even if Grace O’Malley was not actually in rags, as the legend has it, the weatherbeaten appearance of this real-life Warrior Queen must have provided a sharp contrast to that of the bedizened and bejewelled English sovereign, pampered by a lifetime at a chivalric court.
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Of course the process of incarnating the goddess Diana meant that hunting, that standby occupation of the Warrior Queen, could be vigorously pursued. The Queen, who had had arrows headed with silver and flighted with peacock’s feathers when she was a mere princess at Enfield, hunted with enthusiasm till the end of her life. On the other hand her renowned progresses around the country – that art form of self-display which she did not invent but energetically developed – showed her more statically: her purpose was to look, as a contemporary wrote, ‘like a goddess such as painters are wont to depict’.
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And all the time, the tributes, the sonnets, the literary sighs and the long lyrical eulogistic poems poured forth. It was indeed a measure of the Queen’s success that in the last decade of her reign Shakespeare could create in
Henry VI
the savage character of Margaret of Anjou, and be confident that lines such as these following would not be regarded as treason.
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Here York,
smeared by Queen Margaret with his own child’s blood, crowned by her in mockery with a paper crown, knows that he is about to die:

How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex

To Triumph like an Amazonian trull

Upon their woes whom fortune captivates! …

O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!

When Shakespeare had York tell Margaret of Anjou (who was of course French):

Women are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible

Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless

he could not possibly be thought to be addressing Gloriana, Sweet Cynthia, Venus, Virgo, Astraea – or his sovereign. A man’s heart was evidently easier to accommodate within ‘a woman’s hide’ than a tiger’s.

History, as well as art, was summoned to the aid of Queen Elizabeth. The return of British Boadicea, driving her ‘cart’ as it was unromantically known in the sixteenth century, contributed most helpfully to the picture of a patriotic female leader. But there was also a fruitful cross-fertilization. For in turn the presence of a queen regnant on the throne ensured that when Boadicea did quite coincidentally re-emerge from the historical mists into which she had vanished, she was accorded respectful treatment. The first English translation of Tacitus was that of Sir Henry Savile in 1591: it was dedicated in flattering terms to Queen Elizabeth herself. Perhaps his own humble efforts might encourage the Queen to share with the world her own ‘rare and excellent translations of Histories’, wrote Sir Henry, ‘if I may call them translations which have so infinitely exceeded the originals’. The printer however issued a different message to the reader, according to that custom of the time by which some pertinent moral lesson was expected to be drawn from a historical work.
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This was the moral of Tacitus: ‘If thou mislike their wars be thankful for thine own peace; if thou dost abhor their tyrannies, love and reverence thine own wise just and excellent Prince. If thou doest detest their Anarchy, acknowledge our own happy government, and thank God for her, under whom England enjoys as many benefits, as ever Reign did suffer miseries under the greatest Tyrant.’ And so we come back, but now in English, to the fortunes of the Britons’ previous queen ‘Voadica [
sic
], a lady of the blood of kings: for in the matter of governing in chief, they make no distinction of sex.’

The story of Boadicea had already been introduced to readers in Latin through the works of Polydore Vergil, an Italian humanist, who came to England at the beginning of the sixteenth century and became a member of the circle of Sir Thomas More. Polydore Vergil’s
Anglica Historica
, written about 1512, with its first printed edition in Basle in 1534, drew on both Tacitus in the original and those epitomes of Dio Cassius, which were the only form in which his works survived.
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It was Polydore Vergil who divided the protean Warrior Queen into two: in his case named Voadicia and Bonduica, using Tacitus for one and Dio for the other, an error which along with his confused geography was later copied by the Scottish chronicler Hector Boëce.

Boëce, a native of Dundee also writing in Latin, followed Polydore Vergil by placing all the fatal events of Boadicea’s rebellion in the north: his Queen Voada, as he calls her, is the widow of Arviragus (Prasutagus), and when she is daily lashed with ‘insufferable stakes’ while her daughters are deflowered, she appeals to her brother Corbrede, King of Scots, to avenge her. The King does send a message of protest to the Romans, only to receive an ‘outrageous answer’ loftily dismissing the protests of a mere ‘barbarian people’, with a reference to the ‘majesty’ of Rome itself.
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It was Boëce’s
History of Scotland
which Ralph Holinshed quarried for his own chronicles, first issued in 1577; just as Shakespeare in his turn would work over Holinshed’s material.
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It must indeed remain one of the minor but titillating What-might-have-beens of literature to speculate what would have happened if Shakespeare’s fancy had lighted on the story of Boadicea instead of, say, that of Macbeth, also taken via Holinshed from Boëce. Holinshed’s Queen Voada – a woman ‘not unworthy to be numbered among doughty chieftains’ – strongly resembles that of Boëce except that she has been brought slightly further south. The characters of her two daughters, unnamed by Tacitus or Dio, are also for the first time developed, as they were to be in subsequent seventeenth-and eighteenth-century dramas.

The elder daughter, also named Voada, subsequently marries that ‘noble Roman’ called Marius ‘who had deflowered her before her time’. (This sexual theme of the raped daughter either marrying a Roman or falling in love with him will be developed in the Boadicean plays of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.) The younger daughter, Voadicia, having gathered together a crew of soldiers on the Isle of Man, attacks the Romans as her mother had done, and is captured in Galloway by the Roman Petilius: ‘Upon her stout answers made unto him as he questioned with her about her bold enterprises, she was presently slain by the soldiers.’

The false distinction created by Polydore Vergil between Voadicia and Bonduica was one which Petruccio Ubaldini, an enterprising Florentine desiring royal patronage, kept alive. After a series of travels, including a visit to Scotland, Ubaldini, born in about 1542, settled down in England under the patronage of the twelfth Earl of Arundel. But he was after bigger game. In 1576 he presented to Queen Elizabeth the manuscript of
Le vite delle Donne illustri del regno d’Inghilterra, e del regno di Scotia
, which was printed still in Italian in 1591 (Italian was of course among the many languages in which the Queen was proficient).
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There is a long dedicatory epistle ‘to the most serene and very wise Elizabeth, most powerful Queen of England …’ in which Ubaldini manages to blow his own trumpet as a scholar with almost as much vigour as he proclaims the Queen’s manifold virtues, which
include, incidentally, her ‘valour’ in defending her peoples from the enemy, as well as her ‘clemency’. Among the illustrious ladies considered are Cartimandua, ‘a warlike woman’, and Matilda Augusta (Maud), praised for playing a manly role (
intervenedo virilmente
), which demonstrates that ‘women can be wise, prudent and capable …’ so long as they eschew all ‘softness’.