Historical Heroines
Page 4
But on 6 June 1654, when she was 27 and after two years of negotiations with her council, Christina abdicated her throne in favour of her cousin Carl, with home she had a brief, secret engagement. She never married or had children. To the shock of her nation, she converted to Roman Catholicism, a criminal offence in Lutheran Sweden, moved to the Farnese Palace at the Vatican to continue her intellectual pursuits and established a well-known cultural salon.
Despite the fact she’d abdicated, she seemed confused about what she could and couldn’t do. She had courtier the Marquis of Mondaleschia brutally murdered in front of her for ruining her attempts to become Queen of Naples by betraying her plans. She also failed in her own attempt to become Queen of Poland.
Christina died in 1689 at the age of 63 and is buried in St Peter’s in the Vatican (a rare honour for anyone, let alone a mere woman).
Cixi (29 November 1835–15 November 1908)
The Dragon Empress began life as a girl from Beijing named Yehenara, the daughter of middle-ranking Manchu officials.
The last Empress of the Chinese Qing Dynasty started her political and court life as a 16-year-old third-class concubine in the harem of the Emperor Xianfeng. Her brains, intellect and, as legend has it, beautiful singing voice brought her to his attention. Her name was added to his list of nightly bedfellows and eunuchs would deliver her, naked, to the foot of his bed.
Giving birth to a son soon helped boost her kudos in the eyes of the court; the emperor named her Tzu Hsi (modern spelling Cixi), ‘empress of the western palace’. In a sign of things to come, she began helping the emperor, as she could read and write Chinese and offering up her opinions on state affairs. Clearly aware of what trouble her interference could cause, the emperor appointed a regency of eight men to rule China after his death.
After that event in 1861, a completely unfazed Cixi teamed up with Empress Zhen, Xianfeng’s official widow. Thanks to some truly mind-blowing political shenanigans, plotting and the ruthless ‘suicide’ of two of the regents, she elevated her own 5-year-old son to dizzy new heights as the new Emperor Tongzhi.
The promotion made her Empress Dowager and de facto regent, the power ‘behind the curtains’ (chui lian ting zheng), a position she kept until stepping down when her son, by then an alcoholic, turned 17. Eventually she turned her attentions elsewhere, spending huge amounts of government money on a new Summer Palace.
However when Tongzhi. died two years later from smallpox and venereal disease, she became regent once more for her 3-year-old nephew Guangxu, neatly side-stepping the potential ascendancy of Tongzhi’s wife, Cixi’s own daughter-in-law, who was pregnant with their child. Both conveniently ‘died’.
Cixi ‘retired’ in 1889 but came back very quickly when China was defeated by Japan in the first Sino-Japanese War. She ruthlessly tried to turn back the clock on reforms her nephew had implemented, executing anyone who got in her way.
Her reign was a disaster for China. She encouraged the instigators of the Boxer Rebellion uprising (citizens in northern China opposed to what they regarded as the disastrous, modernising effect of the West) and its siege of an area where foreign missionaries and merchants lived. A huge number of them died before armies of the West captured Peking and put an end to the violence. After governing, directly or indirectly for fifty years, she suffered a stroke in 1907. She was still compos mentis enough to appoint her grandnephew Pu Yi as Emperor of China, but he would be the last.
Was she as ruthless and bloodthirsty in her ambition as history tells us – or was she guilty simply by virtue of being a woman acting as a man would? Her final resting place was robbed by revolutionaries in 1928 but restored by the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Cleopatra (c. 69 BC–12 August 30 BC)
Politically astute, multi-lingual, intelligent, ambitious and tenacious, Cleopatra VII Philopator was the last of the Egyptian Pharoahs, the last of the Ptolemy Dynasty that had been established by Alexander the Great.
She was on the throne from 51 BC until her death in 30 BC and noted for being a powerful and unifying female ruler at a time dominated by men. Many historians believe she was actually Greek by birth. She also had a goddess-complex, believing herself to be the reincarnation of Egyptian goddess Isis.
She was renowned (obviously, see ‘complex’, above) for her dramatic entrances and exits – whether being lowered majestically into a bath of ass’s milk, smuggled into see Julius Caesar via a carpet or committing suicide, allegedly via the poisonous bite of an asp. About that asp. Cleopatra’s well-known suicide is about as authentic as a politician’s platitudes. Cleopatra knew her poisons well (one must, after all, have fun with one’s condemned prisoners). She would have known that an asp bite is phenomenally painful and might not have even proved fatal. It’s more likely she created a delicious cocktail using less painful ingredients such as opium and wolf’s bane. But of course there is no good story without its counter conspiracy theory. The ‘Moulder-Scully’ brigade suspect poor Cleo was bumped off by political enemies.
Married to her 10-year-old brother Ptolemy XIII, as was custom, 17- or 18-year-old Cleopatra became co-regent in Alexandria when her father Ptolemy XII died. As per that custom, it’s also likely that Cleopatra’s mother was her father’s sister: her own aunt. Sent into exile after she tried to seize power for herself, Cleo fled to Syria to gather an army. Julius Caesar, meanwhile, came to the palace in 48 BC from the more powerful Rome. He wanted to hold a peace conference between the two siblings, after all, a peaceful Alexandria was in Rome’s best interests.
Banned by Ptolemy from re-entering her own city, Cleopatra smuggled herself in, via a carpet (or as has been suggested, a clothing sack), to ask for the general’s help. The dramatic performance worked. Her brother’s forces were defeated at the subsequent Battle of Nile and Ptolemy himself drowned. Cleopatra moved to Rome with Caesar and had his son, Caesarion, although he refused to acknowledge him as his own.
The short, short version of what ensued: it’s 44 BC and Caesar is assassinated (‘Et tu Brute?’); Cleopatra returns to Egypt, marries her other brother, Ptolemy XIV, then murders him soon after to protect Caesarion’s political future and then she assassinates her pesky sister Arsinoe. Still with us?
In 41 BC Cleopatra falls in love with Marc Anthony and they form a romantic and political alliance, the latter against Roman leader Octavian Caesar. The two lovebirds are defeated by the aforementioned Caesar (Boo! Hiss!) at the Battle of Actium and both commit suicide, although not at the same time, because that would have been far too messy. (Cue: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and a box of Kleenex). Their three children, Ptolemy Philadelphus and the twins Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios, are taken to Rome to be raised by Marc Anthony’s widow Octavia.
Don’t let Hollywood fool you; Cleo’s death wasn’t a romantic one. It wasn’t an act of heartbroken despair at the death of her beloved Marc Anthony, but instead a calculated move to preserve her dignity. If she had been captured by Octavian (the first Emperor of Rome, who renamed himself Augustus, in honour of the month of August marking Cleopatra’s death) he would have paraded her as a trophy of war through the streets of Rome.
No way was she going to give Caesar the last word in the Empire’s war of propaganda. In life, as in death, Cleopatra had control of her image. Exit: stage left.
Coco Chanel (19 August 1883–10 January 1971)
On behalf of every woman who has ever received an invite to a posh do and thought ‘What on earth do do I wear’, we wish to thank Mademoiselle Coco Chanel from the top of our heads all the way down to the hem of our little black dress. Without her revolutionary talent and exquisite eye for detail, this design masterpiece would never have graced wardrobes everywhere. Prior to Chanel’s elegant design in 1912, black was only worn by mourners, but women took up the idea with more excited fervour than a hoard of shopaholics on Black Friday.
Sartorially speaking, Coco, actually christened Gabrielle, enhanced the world of fashion. She may no
t have been the first to embrace the practical and sporty ‘garçonne’ look (a woman with short hair and short dresses) but her designs became the ultimate must-have, helping women everywhere to burst free from corsets and shake bustles off their booty into clothes they could actually breathe in.
It could be said that those clothes were only liberating to those women who had a flat-chested coat-hanger body, rather like Chanel herself. Boobs were not de rigueur and so these fashions must have been an exercise in self-loathing for those more graciously endowed. She hated the lumps and bumps that ruined the line of her creations and abhorred those of us who were plus grosse.
Unfortunately boobs, tums and bums were not the only object of her vitriol. At the age of 12 her mother died and her errant father placed her and her sisters in a strict Catholic convent in Auberge. It’s possible that amid the harsh disciplinarian routine of the convent, little Coco was fully indoctrinated into the popular anti-Semitic beliefs of the day, including the favourite accusation that the Jews killed Jesus Christ. She was rabidly anti-Semitic but would put it aside for a lucrative business deal such as the development of the Chanel No. 5 brand with the very Jewish Wertheimer brothers.
She never trusted them though, and the business relationship was fraught with legal battles over ownership and rights. When Nazi Germany started taking businesses away from Jews, she clapped her manicured hands in glee waiting to do the same in France. The Wertheimers were nobody’s fool and had placed the perfume business in the proxy hands of a Gentile (non-Jew) much earlier before fleeing to the US to wait out the war.
Luckily she was consoled by her Aryan Adonis Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who charmed his way into persuading elite and influential Europeans to turn informants for the Nazis. The big question was how far did Coco go in her support for the Nazis? According to H. Vaughn, she was definitely a spy charged with running Operation Westminster, an alternative peace deal with Churchill for the SS officers who had lost faith in Hitler.
She was certainly a nasty opportunist and enjoyed a lavish party lifestyle during the war in the Ritz where she hobnobbed happily with SS elite. But she could switch her allegiances as fast as her customers changed their handbags. At the end of the war she rushed to give out bottles of her perfume to the American GIs returning home. A show of Allied loyalty or an inspired PR move? She may have been unpleasant but she was an incredibly gifted designer and astute businesswoman who lived the ultimate rags-to-riches story.
Edith Cavell (4 December 1865–12 October 1915)
An incredibly brave and patriotic First World War British nurse who believed unequivocally in her vocation and her duty to God, Edith was blindfolded and shot for treason by a German firing squad in 1915.
Born in Swardeston, a village near Norwich, to Anglican priest the Reverend Frederick Cavell and his young wife Louisa, Edith embraced her schooling in Kensington, Clevedon and Peterborough, where she learned French. Then came a period of working as a governess, before she decided to broaden her horizons and travel to Austria and Bavaria, where she donated some of her inherited money to a hospital. Returning home to look after her ailing father was a pivotal moment; she decided to pursue nursing and undertook gruelling training at the London Hospital in 1896.
A year later, she was awarded the Maidstone Medal for her work in saving lives during the summer typhoid outbreak in Maidstone in 1897; only 132 died out of the 1,700 infected. She then spent time nursing for private clients as well as at St Pancras Infirmary and Shoreditch Infirmary (where she launched the novel idea of follow-up visits for patients who had been discharged) before becoming Matron at Salford Sick Poor and Private Nursing Institution.
In September 1907, her reputation having preceded her, Belgian royal surgeon Dr Antoine Depage (whose wife would perish on the RMS Lusitania) invited her to run L’École Belge d’Infirmières Diplômées, the first Belgian medical school, based in his Berkendael Institute. Just five years later, she had made her mark; her qualified nurses were much sought after by hospitals and schools, and in 1913 by Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, herself a close friend of Depage, when she broke her arm.
When war broke out, though she was visiting her mother in Britain, she insisted on returning to her work in Brussels. Soon after military action began, Austrian, British, French and Belgian wounded came for treatment at her infirmary. To ensure it remained politically neutral, Edith turned it into a Red Cross hospital. (Depage was founder and president of the Belgian branch.)
Following the Battle of Mons on 23 August 1914, when many Allied soldiers were left trapped behind enemy lines, she hid around 200 of them there before helping them escape German-occupied Belgium into neutral Holland through a secret underground network run by architect Philippe Baucq.
Recent Belgian archived war material uncovered by Dame Stella Rimington, DCB and former Director-General of M15, shows that, contrary to public opinion at the time, the members of Edith’s network weren’t just acting as humanitarians; they were in fact providing covert espionage intelligence for the British. There is little doubt Cavell didn’t have at least some inkling of what was going on.
Philippe Baucq was caught at the end of July 1915 and evidence was discovered that incriminated Edith. Arrested by the German secret police, after three days of questioning, her captors tricked her and told her that her fellow prisoners had confessed everything; if she confessed, she would save them. She believed them – and told them all she knew, condemning herself in the process.
Despite frantic American and Spanish diplomatic efforts to intervene, she was kept in solitary confinement before finally being shot by a firing squad in the early hours of 12 October, at the Tir National shooting range, alongside Philippe Baucq and three other Belgian nationals. She was buried in the prison grounds.
The Germans were stunned by the furious outpouring of censure from the international public and press at her murder, but it was great for the British war effort; voluntary sign-ups to the army massively increased as a direct result.
At the end of the war, her body was exhumed and a service attended by the King and Queen of Belgium was held in her honour. Her body was then transported with great dignity and ceremony back to England for a memorial ceremony attended by Queen Alexandra, the Queen Mother. She is now buried in her beloved Norwich, in the grounds of the cathedral. Today the Cavell Trust provides assistance to nurses in need.
Eliza Josolyne (1833–1907)
Bedlam – that way madness lies. The very name makes most of us shudder, picturing images of people battered by its cruel practices and torturous ‘cures’, chained to filthy walls, their humanity stripped away. Bedlam was the stuff of nightmares particularly as it had a reputation for incarcerating perfectly sane people (mainly women) by corrupt doctors paid off by families that wanted rid. (So much easier than divorce.)
More terrifying were the many people committed for reasons of insanity that, quite frankly, we would consider insane, such as adultery, exhaustion, epilepsy and truly heinous behaviour such as flirting or talking back to your parents. An extreme solution to teenage aggravation.
The association of madness with women was so rife that it seems only right to address Bedlam. Inmate Eliza Josolyne’s experience provides just one insight into this insane period of history.
She was brought to Bedlam after struggling to clean a house of at least twenty rooms by herself, which included the onerous task of lighting fires in each of the rooms every day. Whilst she could never be considered lucky, at least when Eliza Josolyne was admitted to Bethlem (the real name of Bedlam), the Victorians had had a change in attitude towards the mentally ill, treating them with more compassion. Bethlem was much improved since its earlier days – it couldn’t have got much worse – although it was still far from a Californian retreat. Unfortunately Eliza would later be admitted to the incurables ward and live there until her death.
The popular image of the savage mad man had been replaced by the crazed, hysterical female, an idea well ingrained in th
e Victorian imagination, from trashy romance to literary greats such as Jane Eyre’s woman in the attic. The overriding belief was that the mentally ill needed to be confined under the leadership of a strong patriarchial leader who would restore order to their minds. The brutality of the treatments depended on the patriarch in charge. Eliza, who had already had four spells in the institution for mania, would experience many of Bethlem’s transformations, from the earlier medical Superintendent Hopkins’ belief that restraints should be abolished to Dr Isaac Brown’s view that restraints were fundamental. Brown served as Medical Superintendent in Bedlam from 1878–88. His was a reign of terror. Depending on the doctor, menstruation – and therefore sexual awakening – was seen as the root of all psychoses. Cures included attaching leeches to the vulva or, in more extreme cases, clitoridectomies and hysterectomies, popular with the dreaded Dr Brown.
Eliza did have poor mental health. She had already been admitted to Bedlam for mania a few times previously where she was described as being in a frenzied and incomprehensible state. Each time she did not stay long and was sent home ‘cured’. However, when she was admitted at the age of 23 in 1857 after the stress of her maid’s job, she was diagnosed as having melancholia and admitted to ward one, the ward for disruptive patients. Records show that she spent some time in the padded cell. Images of padded cells evoke feelings of horror but they were kinder than some of the terrible metal restraints used or heavy clothing in which your hands were sewn in to prevent you from harming yourself or anyone else. Eliza had arrived with injuries to her face and her stepmother said she had been trying to hurt herself.