Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (38 page)

The next year Ubaldini gave Queen Elizabeth a further volume in manuscript,
Le vite e i fatti di sei Donne illustri
, which was never printed, perhaps because it did not involve British queens. The six ladies included Zenobia who was described as
virile
: ‘in that while her husband lived she was his equal in virtue and valour, and after his death she became famous far and wide for her great achievements in peace and in war’. Thanks, presumably, to this historical barrage, the relationship flourished: not only in 1577 but in 1588 the Queen and Ubaldini exchanged New Year gifts.
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Both Spenser in the reign of Queen Elizabeth and Ben Jonson in that of James I (for his
Masque of Queenes
) drew upon the
Britannia
of William Camden for their allusions to Boadicea. Camden’s is an upbeat picture: ‘the Britains under the conduct of Boadicea had unanimously resolved to recover their old liberty’. It is also scholarly: based, as ever with Camden, on a proper study of the available sources, including not only Tacitus but the monk Gildas.
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And although he hesitates over the name of the Warrior Queen as many have done before and since – Boadicea? Bunduica? Boodicia? – he places the Iceni in roughly their correct geographical position; it is true that Boadicea is described as capturing Maldon in Essex instead of Colchester, but the East Anglian Queen is no longer driving her chariot through the mountain passes of the north.

Spenser’s Warrior Queen, ‘stout Bunduca’, is one of the several ‘women valorous’ who are celebrated as the ancestresses to his ‘fair martial maid’, Britomart. It is a sympathetic portrait, with ‘stout Bunduca’ seen as a patriot, who ‘up arose and taking arms the Britons to her drew’; there is no hint of any atrocities being committed. Even her defeat is blamed upon the treachery of her
captain, here named as Paulinus, and as for her suicide, that too is seen as glorious:

And yet, though overcome in happless fight,

She triumphed on death, in enemies despite.
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Britomart herself, who dresses in man’s clothes for convenience, has had the classical Tomboy upbringing: as her father’s only daughter and his heir, she is taught to upset the most warlike rider with her spear and shield. (She naturally loathes such ladies’ pastimes as ‘to finger the fine needle and nice thread’.) Britomart’s whole delight is in ‘feats of arms’: the feat to which she is set by Spenser is that of rescuing the knight Artegall from the clutches of the evil Radegunde, Queen of the Amazons.

Nothing illustrates more forcibly the distinction successfully made by the 1590s between one valorous female warrior and the general notion of female rulership than Spenser’s treatment of Radegunde and Britomart respectively. Like the other captured knights in the Amazonian stronghold of Radegunde, Artegall is set to spin and sew: nor is there a choice in the matter for this captive househusband, for Artegall has to spin before he is allowed to eat. This behaviour on the part of the Amazons represents an odiously unnatural order to Spenser, as it did to the ancient Greeks. The Amazons are cruel (like Queen Margaret of Anjou) just because ‘they have shaken off the shamefast band, With which wise Nature did them strongly bind’, which is to obey the orders and laws of men. In short:

Virtuous women wisely understand

That they were born to base humility

Unless the heavens them lift to lawful sovereignty.

Britomart herself, her task of rescue performed, and the ‘Tyranesse’ Radegunde defeated, removes the helmet which made her look like the war goddess Bellona, and drops her shield. She now becomes ‘a gentle courteous Dame’. For a while
she remains with the chastened Amazons, to be adored as a goddess; taking the opportunity however to repeal that ‘liberty of women … which they had long usurped; and them restoring to men’s subjection …’ Her story ends with her happy union with the knight Artegall, the warrior maid symbolizing Chastity – one of the many allegorical figures representing Queen Elizabeth in the poem – united to the knight who symbolizes Justice.

Throughout
The Faerie Queene
there are plenty of other women lifted (like Queen Elizabeth) to ‘lawful sovereignty’, who exist to be contrasted with those evil or licentious creatures such as Radegunde, Semiramis and Cleopatra.
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The last named, a figure of lust, is now to be found in the unpleasant House of Pride: in contrast the lawful queens are virgins or at least chaste. There is Belphoebe (one of Elizabeth’s favourite allegorical incarnations), the huntress who puts Braggadochio to flight; Mercilla, ‘a Maiden Queen of high renown’, who wins her duel with the malevolent Duessa, representing Mary Queen of Scots. Most powerfully described of all is Spenser’s Gloriana, ‘the flower of grace and chastity’. Having been chosen – like Queen Elizabeth herself – to rule by God, Gloriana inspires a ‘sacred reverence’ in all her subjects, as being ‘Th’ Idol of her makers [God’s] great magnificence’. It was this sacred reverence which Queen Elizabeth I, no Radegunde at the head of an unnatural order of cruel women, had worked so hard to inspire.

Queen Elizabeth’s incandescent appearance at Tilbury in August 1588, at a moment of national peril, affirmed in practical terms her theoretical triumph. It was just on thirty years since Elizabeth’s tricky accession to the throne of England, when the cry was ‘they do not want women rulers’. Now her country was facing, as it was thought, the assault of the Spanish Armada. Here was one challenge from which this reluctant Britomart could not gracefully extricate herself. Instead, how brilliant she made of the challenge the apogee of her glory both as a monarch and as a Warrior Queen!

Leicester described how her appearance ‘inflamed the hearts of
her poor subjects’. Bishop Goodman spoke for many who would now freely ‘adventure our lives to her service’. Camden, as her first historian, summed it up: ‘Her presence and words fortified the courage of the captains and soldiers beyond all belief.’
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Emulating chaste Diana might be her preferred course in public, but in 1588 Bellona too proved to be within Elizabeth’s range: at least, her own special version of Bellona.

This was her version and this was her performance. A woman in her mid-fifties, raddled and rather overdressed, mounted on a carefully selected docile horse, reviewed loyal troops on top of a small hill in Essex. Yet that feat on the part of the Queen – if feat it can be called – quickly passed into the romantic annals of our history as a deed of daring to be ranked with the first charges of Boadicea’s scythe-wheeled chariot fifteen hundred years before. Boadicea and her daughters were said to have lived again at Tilbury ‘through this our Queen, England’s happie Queene’, in the words of a contemporary poet (James Aske); their bravery no greater ‘in those actual deeds … than did our sacred Queene, Here signs display of courage wonderful’.
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The Earl of Leicester officially invited his sovereign to visit Tilbury on 27 July 1588. He did so in his capacity of the ‘Queen’s lieutenant’ or the ‘Lord General’ as he was sometimes otherwise known. Tilbury Camp – actually at West Tilbury where a church recently turned to a private dwelling now stands – contained the flower of the Queen’s troops and was consequently known as the Camp Royal. Tilbury Fort itself, on the River Thames, some twenty-six miles below London Bridge, had been constructed by Henry VIII in 1539. Some two miles from the river, the site of the camp had been chosen with a view to blocking the Spanish invader from reaching London either by road or river, part of a network of defensive fortifications. Since it lay on a kind of plateau on top of its hill – its sides about one hundred and fifty feet high – the camp provided ‘as goodly a prospect as may be seen or found’.
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It was on 20 July that the Spanish Armada had been sighted approaching the English Channel; whereupon the English fleet
engaged it. Such was the good fortune of the English fireships that by the end of the month the Spanish fleet was compelled to flee northwards, ‘driven like a flock of sheep’ in the immortal phrase of Sir Francis Drake. At this point however the stately Spanish galleon–sheep vanished from view. It is important to realize that just because they did vanish, the extent of their dispersal and damage was not appreciated for some time. (Some messages concerning the damage were received while the Queen was actually at Tilbury.) Elizabeth’s appearance,
dea ex machina
, at Tilbury, should not therefore be understood in terms of an empty exercise. It was an exercise, it is true, but one intended to perform a vital function in rallying the national morale in time of war. ‘Ye shall comfort not only these thousands’, wrote Leicester of the camp’s inhabitants, ‘but many more that shall hear of it.’

The Queen set forth for Tilbury by water on 8 August. Silver trumpets blew to mark her progress, or as one of the contemporary eyewitness accounts had it, with a characteristic allusion to her illustrious parentage:

And to barge upon the water

Being King Henry’s royal daughter

She did go with trumpet’s sounding …

But when she landed at about midday (at the present blockhouse of the fort) there was music of a more martial kind: drums, fifes were heard and finally the guns thundered. And so like Boadicea – in the words of the Essex historian Morant like the war goddess Bellona, or like ‘a king’ in other contemporary accounts – Queen Elizabeth was brought ceremonially into the centre of the Camp Royal.

The method of transport used was a coach: but this bejewelled and spangled affair was indeed different from Boadicea’s mythical chariot, and different again from the light wooden structure of the Celts which that forgotten figure Boudica would actually have used. This chariot – never intended to see a battlefield – was chequered with precious stones in patterns of
emeralds, diamonds and rubies. According to the poet James Aske (who was present among the soldiers) it reminded observers of nothing so much as ‘the heavenly car’ of the sun god Phoebus, drawn by his ‘foaming steeds’.

One side-effect of Elizabeth’s thirty-year propaganda campaign was the frantic desire to protect and cosset the Queen’s own person, a desire which of its very nature could never have been applied to the same extent to a male sovereign. (The Earl of Pembroke offered to attend Her Majesty with 300 horses and 500 foot armed at his own cost; a Dorset regiment was said to have offered five hundred pounds to form part of the Queen’s Guard.)
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Now, as she passed, the men actually fell on their knees as though in prayer to her. Aske, whose descriptive poem of the whole wondrous occasion was aptly titled
Elizabetha Triumphans
, described her passage thus:

They couch their pikes and bow their ensigns down

When as their sacred royal Queen passed by

In token of their loyal bearèd hearts

To her alone, and none but only she …

It was ironic that at one point the cries of the kneeling soldiers as they called out blessings upon her name became so enthusiastic that the Protestant Queen sent messengers of reproof. Officially at least Elizabeth frowned upon such ‘idolatrous reverence’. However much her subjects might happily sublimate their feelings for the banished Virgin Mary of the old Catholic religion in their adoration of their female sovereign, this was not to be a conscious process. Deafening cries of ‘God Save the Queen’ were one thing, prayers quite another. The Queen’s behaviour looked forward not back: for her particular stance, ‘cheerfully her body bending’ and ‘waving her royal hand’, prefigured royal behaviour on ceremonial occasions up to and including the present day.

The Queen spent the night at Saffron Garden.
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The next day – 9 August – she returned to the camp, and with her princely
image cunningly enhanced by the expedient of abandoning her customary female attendants – ‘her ladies she did leave behind her’, wrote Aske – she reviewed her troops and made that speech which would make of her the female equivalent of King Arthur, a symbol of a nation’s proud defiance of danger. Furthermore, for once it is gratifying to relate that mythology has not burnished the event, for Queen Elizabeth I
did
deliver the famous speech – we have the evidence of the Earl of Leicester’s chaplain, Leonel Sharp, who was present at Tilbury, was summoned to record it the next day and related her words later to the Duke of Buckingham: ‘This I thought would delight your Grace …’
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(It should be further noted that its contents, far from being unusual, were, as we have seen, at the very core of her utterances concerning her ‘sexly weakness’ from beginning to end of her reign.)

The Queen was dressed in white velvet, with a silver cuirass over her dress, to symbolize once more – to those who might have missed it – the ever-present danger to her person: ‘the most dainty and sacred thing we have in this world to care for’, as Leicester expressed it.
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A page walked behind her holding a helmet adorned with white plumes: but this Bellona-like helmet was never actually put on, lest one iota of the contrast between the Queen’s fragile femininity of person and the bold masculinity of her demeanour be missed by her audience. Part of the review was conducted on foot. But for the speech itself the Queen was, in Aske’s words, ‘most bravely mounted on a stately steed’: the steed in question being a stout white gelding which could be trusted to behave itself, specially imported for the occasion. Nevertheless the presence of the white horse – which could be a mettlesome charge in the eye of an adoring beholder – was, like the armour and helmet, another piece of careful planning; these were the sumptuous trappings for the message which was to follow.