Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  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 weather-beaten 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.36

  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’.37

  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.38 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.39

  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.40 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.41

  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.42 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).43 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’.

&n
bsp; 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.44

  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.45 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.46

  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 ‘Tyr-anesse’ 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.47 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 brilliantly 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.’48 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’.49

  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’.50

  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 a
t 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’.