Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  While the independent-minded Conservative MP Julian Critchley described her as deploying her feminine qualities ‘like artillery pieces’, one biographer summed it up more ambivalently thus: ‘she has played the matter of being a woman, and that of woman’s place in modern society, in a variety of not always very clear-cut ways’.42 The explanation for this lack of clear-cutness lies surely in Mrs Thatcher’s own intuition concerning her situation. As the brilliantly instinctive politician she undoubtedly is, Mrs Thatcher has realized either consciously or unconsciously (the effect is the same) that if the issue were to be clear-cut, it would be to rob her of a great deal of support on the one hand, a good deal of manoeuvrability on the other.

  On the one hand she has played the role of the ‘honorary male’ with all the aplomb of Queen Elizabeth I, as when in 1979 on a visit to Northern Ireland following the murder of Lord Mountbatten and a number of British soldiers, Mrs Thatcher adopted the red beret and flak jacket of the Parachute Regiment (thus pleasing the regiment itself but not the Northern Ireland Office). This can be directly compared to Queen Elizabeth I’s choice of a silver cuirass and plumed helmet for her appearance at Tilbury, since neither lady actually intended to take to the battlefield. There have been numerous other carefully organized sightings of Mrs Thatcher in military situations, particularly in the early days of her premiership, where her symbolic presence as a Warrior Queen was hard to miss.

  Like Queen Elizabeth again, Mrs Thatcher has displayed another interesting characteristic of the honorary male; she has no visible preference for the advancement of her own sex. After nine years of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, only one other woman has been appointed to the Cabinet, and she incidentally a member of the non-competitive House of Lords, not Commons: Baroness (Janet) Young’s two-year stint, in her capacity as Leader of the House of Lords, included the period of the Falklands War, a fact which Mrs Thatcher either had temporarily forgotten, or chose grandly to ignore, when she told her Cabinet on 2 April 1982: ‘Gentlemen, we shall have to fight.’ It ended when Baroness Young was demoted to a minor role in the Government outside the Cabinet. It has been percipiently observed that the presence of another woman in the Cabinet photograph spoils the radiance which the leader alone possesses in photographic terms, making her so clearly unmistakable in her visible female dress.43 At some very primitive level, did Mrs Thatcher resent Baroness Young’s presence?

  For there is the element of chivalry which the woman in a man’s world traditionally evokes (an honorary male perhaps, but not sacrificing any of the prerequisites allowed by society to the female). At Mrs Thatcher’s first Party Conference as Conservative leader, in October 1975, Barbara Castle, a prominent Labour politician in the Wilson government who had yet to see her own party elect a female leader, confided to her diary, possibly not without a small jealous pang, that Mrs Thatcher now displayed a special bloom, produced by ‘the vitamin of power’. In March she had written, ‘Margaret’s election has stirred up her own side wonderfully: all her backbenchers perform like knights jousting a tourney for a lady’s favours, showing off their paces by making an unholy row at every opportunity over everything that the [Labour] Government does.’ Thirteen years later, the official photograph to commemorate Mrs Thatcher’s long-serving record certainly did give her a remarkable air of a Tudor sovereign, in her long gold brocade dress, surrounded by males including Cabinet ministers, top civil servants and her own husband: twenty-six black-and-white (dinner-jacketed) knights.44

  Then there is Mrs Thatcher’s celebrated reaction to a question concerning Women’s Liberation, at her first press conference as Conservative leader: ‘What’s it ever done for me?’ Queen Victoria, among past female rulers, might have approved of this disdain, with her well-known antipathy to Women’s Rights in principle and professional women in practice. But in her own time such contempt has earned Mrs Thatcher the justified dislike and disapproval of the Women’s Movement. An editorial of August 1982 in Spare Rib, a leading feminist magazine, criticized the way ‘masculinity’ had been propagated throughout the whole Falklands crisis, military and sexual powers mixed up together as glorious, most notably by the (female) Prime Minister: ‘We are not saying women should avoid positions of power, but that unless we direct our efforts to the good of all women … we are likely to promote rather than challenge the current notions of masculinity.’ In short, there is the ‘very real danger of leading to more Margaret Thatchers’.45

  On the other hand, with Mrs Thatcher’s denial of any specifically female qualities has gone an ability to capitalize on them where necessary – once again, probably successful just because it is instinctive. (One has to admit that even her reaction to Women’s Liberation may, fortunately or unfortunately depending upon one’s view of the subject, have gained her far more support than she lost in Britain in 1975.) Nor can Mrs Thatcher fairly be blamed for capitalizing on her sex, since she has had to suffer a good many slings and arrows on the subject, from the first moment when Labour supporters shouted ‘Ditch the bitch!’ until honourably restrained by women members of the Labour movement.

  During the Falklands campaign, insults in the Argentine Press varied from ‘chicken brain’ (because she was a woman) to ‘go back to knitting’ and ‘stay in the kitchen’. Although such outbursts were smoothly dismissed by President Galtieri of Argentina in an interview, once more with Oriana Fallaci, on the grounds that ‘humour and caricature belong to the Latin temperament’, the area of attack chosen was surely significant.*47 Under the circumstances, Mrs Thatcher was well entitled to use that metaphorical knitting needle, to which she was told to return, as an offensive weapon.

  As early as 1979, on the eve of her first general election as Conservative leader, Mrs Thatcher emphasized the practical value of her female domesticity: ‘I know what it is to run a home and a job …’ and quoted the recent example of Golda Meir for authority, that characteristic technique of the female leader through history, back to Zenobia stressing her descent from Cleopatra. In an important and prominent interview with George Gale in the Daily Express, shortly after the Falklands War was over, Mrs Thatcher directly compared the running of the campaign to household management – something on which she, as a woman, could be presumed to be an expert, or at least by implication more expert than the men surrounding her.48 This was in answer to the question: ‘Did being a woman make any difference?’ ‘It may just be that many, many women make naturally good managers and organizers. You might not think of it that way, George,’ she went on sweetly, ‘but each woman who runs a house is a manager and an organizer. We thought forward each day, and we did it in a routine way and we were on the job twenty-four hours a day.’

  Mrs Thatcher’s reaction to George Gale’s next topic is however a perfect illustration of the kind of manoeuvrability she has allowed herself. ‘Was it difficult for a woman to issue orders involving blood being shed?’ he asked. ‘We were thinking in terms of saving lives,’ she answered (without directly replying to the question), ‘but bearing in mind that our people had been invaded by a pretty awful dictatorship. One lived with the agony of the troops who were going down on the supply line on ships. One lived with the agony of the soldiers. But we didn’t look only at the agony: we also looked at the professionalism, the loyalty and the devotion of our troops.’ In a trice, the cosy super-feminine housekeeper has become the dedicated Warrior Queen, the ‘singular exception’ in Gibbon’s phrase, the woman ruling proudly in the man’s world.

  So Boadicea marches on in her third modern personification, not the abstract patriotic symbol of empire, not the independent woman, free of shackles which may be political or sexual, but the elected female Prime Minister and occasional war-leader, whose existence continues to enrage, fascinate and inspire, in equal quantities, beyond any capacity of her male contemporaries to do these same three things. The innumerable allusions and comparisons to Boadicea during Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, far from being monolithically favourable in intention (or unfavourable), in fac
t illustrate just this many-sided aspect of her own image, as well as that of Boadicea herself.

  At the time of the Falklands campaign, the left-wing New Statesman in a critical editorial called Mrs Thatcher ‘this Boadicea’ who would have to come back into ‘the real world’ when the war was over. Adam Raphael in the Observer also called her Boadicea at roughly the same date (late May): ‘every time she opens her mouth she castrates one of her ministers’. When the action was over, however, she would need ‘to pipe down’. In 1985 however Woman’s Own magazine interviewed a lady who had just been voted ‘the most feminine woman of the year’ for believing that a woman’s place is not in the office but to stay at home having babies. The happy winner also professed herself a great admirer of Mrs Thatcher. When it was pointed out that this was a contradiction in view of Mrs Thatcher’s manifest career as Prime Minister, ‘the most feminine woman’ was at first nonplussed; then she took refuge in a safe historical comparison: ‘Well, ideally she shouldn’t be there [in office], but she is an extremely exceptional woman and the exceptions will always find their way to the top. Look at Boadicea …’.49

  The most potent image is a visual one, that of the cartoonist Gale in the Daily Telegraph (the foremost newspaper of Conservative sympathies) on polling day, 11 June 1987. Mrs Thatcher is seen dressed as Boadicea, late-twentieth-century version, in a Celtic robe but with pearl necklace and stud earrings (as Thomas Heywood’s seventeenth-century heroine wore the lambent pearls of her own day). As the leader urges forward her chariot towards the third-term Conservative victory – which would in fact resoundingly be hers by the next day – the huge knives set in its wheels dominate the foreground of the picture. Meanwhile sundry small male figures in chains from other political parties drag behind; even Mrs Thatcher’s own recognizable jubilant supporters are tiny in stature compared to the dominant figure of the Warrior Queen.

  * It was not missed. As late as the Second World War, Prime Minister Churchill’s Private Secretary, John Colville, strolling through London in the Blitz to inspect landmarks he might not see again, described Boadicea’s statue as ‘a monument to successful imperialism’.1

  * There were, for example, long queues in London when it was shown at a converted warehouse in White Lion Street, Islington, in the spring of 1986.

  * Nor was the ‘kitchen’ reference confined to the Latin temperament. The puppet Iron Lady, as depicted by Luck and Flaw, the British cartoonists, on television in November 1976, had her breastplate and armour created out of colanders and other pieces of kitchen equipment.46

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  UNBECOMING IN A WOMAN?

  Fell, from those funeral flames

  A golden mist; which token is, from high gods

  Of their unending glory to endure.

  Charles Doughty on the funeral pyre of Boadicea and her daughters, The Dawn in Britain, 1906

  ’Tis no less unbecoming [in] a Woman … to conduct an

  Army, to give a Signal to the Battle, than it is for a

  Man to tease Wool, to handle the Distaff …

  George Buchanan, History of Scotland, 1571

  Boudica of the Iceni was not a savage and she was a patriotic leader; that is to answer two of the questions originally posed about her in Chapter One. A courageous widow, she led her oppressed people in an uprising against a foreign occupation, having herself – and her daughters – been foully treated at the hands of the conqueror. The details of the uprising were not pretty, as such things seldom are. At the end of it, following a last battle, Boudica met her death, most probably at her own hand and again most probably carrying her daughters with her. She is buried in an unknown grave. All this – the known or supposed facts about Boudica – took place around AD 60.

  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 interrelationship of 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 Bradstreet’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.

  Thi
s 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 mendose 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