The Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  Queen Boadicea on the other hand has had a far longer and more varied history. If not all female things to all men, she has certainly been a good many of them, and recently she has also represented a good many different things to many very different women. To the sixth-century monk Gildas, for example, Boadicea, far from being a patriot, was a ‘deceitful lioness’ for daring to oppose her morally superior Roman rulers.1 Falling soon after that into a long sleep of obscurity, due to the vanishing of the Classical records, Boadicea awakened to the kiss of humanist scholarship in the sixteenth century to find herself a patriot once more, and on a far grander scale than that of a mere tribal queen.

  For now she was the heroic leader of the Britons in their resolve to recover ‘their old liberty’, in Camden’s phrase. Most importantly, Boadicea as a woman valorous had become a prefiguration of the patriot currently on the English throne, Elizabetha Triumphans: one of those rare women lifted, according to Spenser, to ‘lawful sovereignty’, as opposed to all the rest of her sex, whose destiny from birth to death was ‘base humility’.2 The long fruitful inter-relationship with Boadicea with the queens regnant (or female leaders) of this country had begun.

  Alas for the all-British heroine! It was not only as Camden’s high-minded patriot that Boadicea would survive. The seventeenth-century Queen, in accordance with the general estimate of women at that time, veered from Fletcher’s boastful venal creature at the beginning (described by her ally Caratach as ‘beastly’ and by the Romans as ‘unnatural’) to a fragile blossom, whose very voice was too soft ‘to accent the rough Laws of War’.3

  At least these very differing Warrior Queens had some kind of human character, however inappropriate to the truth. The idealized Boadiceas of eighteenth-century poetry stood for a special kind of national pride, rather than anything more personal. In the case of James Thomson, whose ‘Liberty’ was written around 1730, his was nostalgia for ‘a stubborn isle, disputed hard and never quite subdued’ by the Romans. Thomson was one of the several men of letters patronized by the ‘Patriot King’ movement centred round Frederick Prince of Wales. When he went on to praise Boadicea for her ‘Sparkling ardent flame’ of rebellion, and ended with a vision of the Goddess of Liberty, he wished to show how ill all this accorded with the times in which he lived. Cowper, half a century later, looked to the past in order to issue a hymn to the British Empire.4 But in both cases the woman herself had departed for that allegorical sphere where her feminine gender made her suitable for such an inspiring role, not unsuitable, as it would otherwise have done in real life.

  Nor did the nineteenth-century growth of empire – and imperial values – rescue Boadicea from such an idealization, although the increase in historical novel-writing in the reign of Victoria did bring an inevitable crop of ‘womanly’ Boadiceas, a tribute to the sovereign if not the art. These were in keeping with that belief in the sweetness of feminine influence enunciated by Mrs Matthew Hall in her preface to The Queens Before the Conquest of 1854: ‘Woman has thrown a bright light over the dark history of the first eleven centuries of our annals.’5 (Although according to Victorian rules for women’s conduct neither Boadicea nor Cartimandua really cast much bright light on Britain’s dark first-century history.)

  It was the suffragette movement first, and the Women’s Movement generally, which created a demand for a new kind of heroine, an independent woman operating successfully in what was generally held to be a man’s sphere. Queen Boadicea, still trailing her clouds of patriotic endeavour, fitted neatly into such a mould, just as her imagined Celtic free living made her for others an exciting figure with which to combat the perpetual encroachments of patriarchy.

  Such a brief summary of the fortunes of the legendary Boadicea does not however of itself explain the persistence of the legend. For on one level these fortunes have merely echoed intriguingly the fortunes of ‘women’s worth’, in Anne Brad-street’s eloquent phrase. The endurance of the story is another matter.

  High ride the flames, now giddy bowering wave;

  Which licks, with golden throat, the Summer woods,

  Surging to heaven; wherein ascend their spirits,

  Like unto like: whence now, immortal pure,

  They look from stars.

  This is the ‘timeless death’ of Boadicea and her daughters, described by Charles Doughty in The Dawn in Britain. He recounts her story at length under the name of Boudicca – ‘commonly but mendosè written Boadicea’ – in an epic poem, full of strange imagery. It was written between 1866 and 1875, but first published in 1906. It was also reissued in 1943 when a British wartime generation read again of ‘a furious scour of [British] women warriors’ defying Rome: at a time when women were an integral and essential part in the defence of the nation, or in the words of a spirited ‘woman warrior’ of that period, ‘it had to be done and women were as good at it as men’.6

  Having taken poison, Doughty’s three royal women fall upon a huge funeral pyre as the menacing Romans under Suetonius approach; soon their dead bodies are seen by the mourning Britons to ‘wreathe’ like holly in a herdsman’s fire. The scene of the immolation is one to which Wagner might have done justice in music and setting; certainly Doughty, far more than Tennyson, whose own Boädicea was written roughly a decade earlier, captures that magical and mythical quality of the legend. He concludes:

  Fell, from those funeral flames

  A golden mist; which token is, from high gods

  Of their unending glory to endure.

  For it is finally to her presence in the great pantheon of Valkyries, rather than to her actual historic significance (about which so little is known for certain), that the British Brünnhilde owes her own ‘unending glory’ or at least her enduring reputation. In order to comprehend her survival further it is time to try to catch hold of this shimmering phenomenon of the Warrior Queen.

  At the heart of the matter lies the feeling, almost if not entirely universal in history, that war itself is ‘conduct unbecoming’ in a woman. When George Buchanan attacked female government, especially in time of war, in the late sixteenth century, he explicitly contrasted the established roles of the two sexes. ‘’Tis no less unbecoming [in] a Woman’, he wrote, ‘to levy Forces, to conduct an Army, to give a Signal to the Battle, than it is for a Man to tease Wool, to handle the Distaff, to Spin or Card, and to perform the other Services of the Weaker Sex.’ When a woman did take part in such unnatural (to her sex) procedures, the effects were dire: for that which was reckoned ‘Fortitude and Severity’ in a man, was liable to turn to ‘Madness and Cruelty’ in a woman.7

  It is not difficult to see why this philosophy should be widely held. ‘The act of giving birth itself’ has been considered throughout history to be ‘profoundly incompatible with the act of dealing death’; thus wrote Nancy Huston in a 1986 symposium of ‘contemporary perspectives’ entitled The Female Body in Western Culture8. Biology alone – or by extension let us call it chivalry – provides an obvious explanation: if women, as the mothers of the race, need physical protection which they in turn extend to their young, then surely it is unreasonable, even unkind, to expect them to take part in war as well. From women’s weaker physical strength, a more or less universal estimate, springs the concept of their tenderness, again an almost if not entirely universally held opinion; an extension of this is their timidity. (Why not be timid if physically so much weaker than a potential aggressor? It is a reasonable reaction.) And from their tenderness in one sense is derived another sense of their tenderness: woman the nurse, the nurturer, the succourer …

  The epitaph to Pocahontas in St George’s churchyard, Grave-send, on the outskirts of London, where she lies buried, is a perfect case in point: ‘Gentle and humane, she was the friend of the earliest struggling English colonists whom she boldly rescued, protected and helped.’ It was an early American feminist writer, Margaret Fuller, who commented on the universal appeal of the American Indian Princess: ‘All men love Pocahontas for the angelic impulse of tenderne
ss and pity that impelled her to the rescue of Smith’, she wrote in The Great Lawsuit: Man v. Woman, first published in The Dial, Boston, in 1843; while women pity her for ‘being thus made a main agent in the destruction of her own people’.9 Compared to Boadicea, with those threatening knives on the wheels of her chariot, Pocahontas is a heroine who fulfils the highest expectations concerning her sex in general.

  The problems of ‘masculinity’ in a woman – inevitable in some sense in a woman who leads in war – were argued by Helene Deutsch, one of the first four women to be analysed by Freud. The Psychology of Women was a comprehensive study of the female lifecycle and emotional life, which extended and modified Freud’s own postulates. In it, Helene Deutsch devoted considerable discussion to what she called ‘The “Active” Woman’ and her ‘Masculinity Complex’ which ‘originates in a surplus of aggressive forces that were not subjected to inhibition and that lack the possibility of an outlet such as is open to man. For this reason the masculine woman is also the aggressive woman.’ This view stretches back at least as far as the wild, untamed and basically anarchic conception of the female in Athenian drama, at a time when woman’s physical nature was itself thought to be unstable (based on the demands of her reproductive system).10

  Although The Psychology of Women was published in 1944 (in the United States whither Helene Deutsch had fled in 1933), time and political events have not diminished the strong perceived connection between ‘masculinity’ – activity – in a woman and an ‘aggression’ felt by many to be unsuitable in one of her sex.

  It is the leading role upon the stage which is felt to be unnatural in a woman, as opposed to any role. Many men all through history have after all been content to accept and even approve the ambitions of Fulvia, wife to Antony, as described by Plutarch: ‘her desire was to govern those who governed or to command a commander-in-chief’. Cleopatra the dominatrix (and the seducer) is another matter. Boadicea herself may have acted the Fulvia before the death of her husband Prasutagus: we cannot know, pace Judy Grahn’s freewheeling lesbian Celt. When women have been compelled by circumstances to take a dominating role, they are expected to surrender it gracefully afterwards; the ‘natural’ behaviour is that of Spenser’s Britomart, the chaste warrior-maid who finally dropped her shield when her purpose was fulfilled and became ‘a gentle courteous Dame’. As for the unnatural Amazons whom Britomart subdued, ‘that liberty’ being removed from them, which they as women had wrongfully usurped, they were returned to ‘men’s subjection’.11

  The strong contention of many theorists of the Women’s Movement that war itself is the product of aggressive masculine values, and might even be eliminated if ‘the whole wide world’ were under ‘a woman’s hand’ (one of the Sibylline prophecies linked to Cleopatra), meshes of course with these more primitive feelings.12 Spare Rib’s denunciation of Mrs Thatcher following the Falklands War for promoting such values will be recalled, but the point is inclined to emerge whenever women, outraged by the depredations of war, manage to find a voice.

  Militarism versus Feminism was written in 1915, the anguished product of feminist pacifism in response to the first terrible months of carnage in the First World War.13 It was in effect a plea for internationalism – the Hague Women’s Peace Conference of that year – in the cause of peace. The three authors, Mary Sargent Florence, Catherine E. Marshall and C. K. Ogden, argued not only that war was man’s creation (as opposed to woman’s) but also that man used war as a weapon in order to keep the other sex in perpetual subjection, since in time of war he was the manifest ruler. Catherine Marshall in particular, a prime mover behind the setting up of the conference, referred to the ‘deep horror of war’ which had entered into the soul of the organized women’s movement, adding her belief that ‘women’s experience as mothers and heads of households’ had given them ‘just the outlook on human affairs’ which was needed in such a process of international and creative reconstruction. (This is the argument which Mrs Thatcher, following the Falklands War, stood on its head by announcing that it was just her practical feminine abilities as a homemaker which had enabled her to keep going in the direction of military affairs.)

  ‘But if woman climbed up to the clearer air above the battlefield’, wrote Catherine Marshall in 1915, ‘and cried aloud in her anguish to her sisters afar off: “These things must not be, they shall never be again!”, would man indeed say, “Down with her!” Would he not allow her prerogative? Would he not even wish to climb up, too?’ Once again, the experience of women sixty or seventy years later protesting at Greenham Common against nuclear weapons in the cause of peace does not suggest that man necessarily allows woman her prerogative in this respect. Nor does it propose that all men (any more than all women) wish to climb up to the clearer air above the battlefield.

  Nevertheless the sheer appalling magnitude of the disaster to humankind inherent in any actual use of nuclear weapons suggests an interesting possibility. John Keegan, at the end of The Mask of Command (1987), a study in heroic leadership, calls for a new ‘Post-heroic leadership’; he points out that the old inspiring ‘heroic’ leader, at the forefront of the battle itself, has been rendered obsolete and even dangerous by the advent of nuclear weapons. ‘Today the best must find convictions to play the hero no more’; leaders should now be chosen for ‘intellectuality’ and the capacity for making decisions.14 Women might now make more suitable political leaders than men (being strong enough not to press the button), provided of course that the conventional view of woman the peacemaker is accepted.

  Certainly for many feminists the connection between women and peace remains ‘some sort of “given”’ – the phrase is that of the more sceptical Lynne Segal. As Petra Kelly for example wrote in 1984 in Fighting for Hope: ‘Woman must lead the efforts in education for peace awareness, because only she can … go back to her womb, her roots, her natural rhythms, her inner search for harmony and peace …’ Woman’s pacific nature can however only be taken as some sort of given so long as any outstanding woman who does not seem to suffer from conspicuously peaceful inclinations is treated as an honorary male. According to this argument, which has a circular quality, Tomyris, issuing her plea to Cyrus of Persia, ‘Rule your own people, and try to bear the sight of me ruling mine’, is acting in accordance with her true feminist nature, whereas the same Queen Tomyris who had Cyrus put bloodily to death was acting as a man.15 In the absence of an all-female-ruled state (with all-female-ruled neighbours) the thesis must remain unproved. But the importance of the argument from the point of view of a study of Warrior Queens is that it represents the meeting point of visionary feminism and its direct opposite: war is an unnatural occupation for a woman.

  We return to the question of motherhood, at the source of this unease. The idea of female dominion, that authority posed in childhood from which happy infants must one day escape for the sake of their own maturity, is surely also at the source of the implicit threat posed by the notion of the Warrior Queen. Many percipient women writers and activists have drawn attention to this phenomenon, from Margaret Fuller in 1843 who wrote, ‘Man is of Woman born and her face bends over him in infancy with an expression he can never quite forget’, to Gloria Steinem in 1987 who suggested that part of the antagonism towards Mrs Thatcher ‘may be because, in a deep sense, we fear women having power in the world because we associate that with childhood’.16

  Dorothy Dinnerstein, in a classic of feminist psychological analysis first published in the United States in 1976, drew attention to woman’s primary role in infant care as being responsible for early memories of her domination. For while woman continues to be the parent who is the ‘first [remembered] boss’ in most societies in the world, her relationship to other adults will be unfavourably affected by these memories. ‘The right to be straightforwardly bossy – the right to exercise will head-on … – cannot reside as comfortably in a woman as a man’, wrote Dorothy Dinnerstein.17

  That this is true at least in some measure is indicated most
recently by the innumerable references to Mrs Thatcher as ‘Nanny’, one famed for her ‘bossiness’. (The equivalent words used for a male prime minister might be ‘autocrat’ and ‘authorit ativeness’.) It is therefore fascinating to observe the ways in which the Warrior Queens in history have felt their way to a solution to the problem. At the same time, these solutions, universally adopted, also do suggest that there was (and is) such a universal problem.

  Adopting the role of an honorary male has been only one among the expedients employed by the Warrior Queens with instinctive or calculated cunning, a quality which they have certainly needed in order to survive in what has always been realistically a man’s world. It has however been one of the most successful – to act the King of Kartli as Tamara did, the Catholic King of Spain like Isabella, a mighty prince like Elizabeth I, rex noster of Hungary like Maria Theresa. The frequency with which the Tomboy Syndrome is found in accounts of the childhood of a given Warrior Queen testifies to the same deliberate process. The type of Camilla of the Volsci (‘her girl’s hands had never been trained to Minerva’s distaff’) occurs again and again, be it in the young Catherine the Great who never cared to play with girlish dolls, or in Mrs Gandhi who employed her own dolls in creating Indian nationalist battles. The message put across is that an ‘honorary boy’ has been the father to the honorary man.

  Fortunately adopting the role of the honorary male has not precluded the Warrior Queen from appealing at the same time to the chivalrous instincts of her compeers, the real males. Rather the reverse has been found to be the case, as the Warrior Queen, so clearly marked out by her femininity in a man’s world, has employed another successful series of expedients based on this evidently singular fact. The use of masculine uniform or military accoutrements which set off rather than conceal her sex is one of them. The concept of chivalry due towards the tender woman is also responsible for the Shame Syndrome whereby the Warrior Queen is able to contrast her own willed courage with that lassitude of the supposedly courageous-by-nature males around her. Thus Queen Isabella’s grandees were sufficiently ‘mortified’ at being outdone in zeal for the holy war by a woman to renew their energies.18