Hell Hath No Fury (6 page)

Reference: Virginia Rounding,
Catherine the Great: Love, Sex and Power,
2006. Catherine was memorably played by Marlene Dietrich in the 1934 movie
The Scarlet Empress.

ELIZABETH I

Queen of England, b. 1533, d. 1603

Queen Elizabeth I became the most famous woman in the world in 1588, when she led England to a stunning victory over the Spanish Armada, the most fearsome foe her sceptered isle had ever faced. When still in the womb, she had earned the undying hatred of the Most Holy Catholic Majesty of Spain, and when the mighty Armada finally put to sea, it bore down on the fifty-five-year-old Queen with all the force of an Islamic jihad.

Elizabeth's notoriety was due to the desperation of her father, King Henry VIII, for a son, after his twenty-four-year marriage to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon had failed to produce a live male heir. Frantic to secure his Tudor dynasty, Henry cast Catherine off in order to remarry, and tried to get his marriage declared null and void by the Church.

Spain's fury at Henry's cruel treatment of Catherine only increased when the king broke with Rome and set up his own Protestant church, in order to marry his pregnant mistress, Anne Boleyn. Anne was confidently expected to produce a boy, but the child was a girl. Elizabeth's conception had triggered Henry's break with Rome in vain. Worse, it fueled the vicious European wars of religion that created the three-hundred-year agony of Ireland, and that still reverberate today.

From her earliest years, the threat of Spain's hostility hung over Elizabeth, but as queen, she did everything she could to keep the foe at bay. For a woman who is revered as one of the greatest war leaders Britain has ever known, Elizabeth was an extremely reluctant belligerent and never willingly went on the attack. She hated the chaos of war, the loss of life, and above all the drain on the Exchequer with the massive costs involved. This natural aversion hardened into a settled policy early in her reign, after a costly and futile expedition against the French.

But indirect operations were a different game. Elizabeth had no scruples about encouraging her privateers such as Francis Drake and John Hawkins to wage a maritime guerrilla war. Secretly funding their expeditions to raid the great galleons of the Spanish main, she greedily pocketed the lion's share of their stupendous loot. Pieces of eight, silver bullion, ingots of gold, sapphires, rubies, and emeralds as big as pigeon's eggs all found their way into the queen's hands. But in public she was always swift to disown and condemn her sailors when the Spanish ambassador came to rage about the “English pirates” and their attacks on the Spanish treasure fleet.

For Elizabeth, these buccaneering raids made strategic sense. Convinced of its religious rightness and driven by a moral crusade, Catholic Spain dominated Europe and bestrode the world, imposing her will and trampling lesser nations in her path. Little England had to take every chance to tip the balance against such an overwhelming enemy.

By 1588 the king of Spain, Philip II, was ready to embrace war against England as a religious crusade. Some 130 mighty ships, including massive galleons of war standing seven stories above the water and thirty lesser warships equipped with 2,360 cannons, set sail with 19,295 handpicked fighting men, 8,460 sailors, and 2,088 galley slaves. It was the greatest force ever assembled against England until Hitler laid his plans for Operation Sealion in the summer of 1940.

Through the superb intelligence of her spymaster, Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth was only too well aware of the situation. But her unwavering courage won the admiration of all, even her ancient enemy, the Pope. As a war leader, Elizabeth rose to the crisis, chose her commanders brilliantly, and reined in her instinct to micromanage. Above all she remained at the helm, fearlessly refusing to leave London despite the entreaties of her ministers, just as the royal family stayed in Buckingham Palace throughout the Blitz of World War II. “Yet David beat Goliath,” she averred.

And Elizabeth's faith in her tiny English fleet was fully justified. Although numerically outclassed by the massive Spanish galleons and only a fraction of their size, the little English warships were far easier to maneuver, nipping in and out of close combat like dogs baiting a bear. Among the English captains, Drake, Hawkins, and others also had the advantage of their previous successful attacks against the galleons on the Spanish main.

The result was devastation. One by one the galleons were blown up, boarded and sunk, or harried up the length of the English Channel in a desperate flight to find a way back to Spain around Scotland and Ireland, where many more were wrecked on those inhospitable shores. Only 54 of the proud 130 ever returned to Spain, and those in such bad shape that they never went to sea again.

The scale of the Spanish disaster was not known at the time. In the following days, England prepared for a land invasion from the Low Countries, where the Duke of Parma had assembled a fleet of 1,500 barges to ferry thousands of Spanish pikemen across the Channel. Elizabeth rode out to hearten her army clad in armor previously made for her late brother Edward VI, who had died at sixteen, as his silver breastplate was the only piece in the royal treasury small enough to fit her slender frame (see
Isabella of Spain,
Chapter 2, for the identical tactic).

At Tilbury on the Thames outside London, she delivered the speech that has become world-famous, declaring, “Though I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, I have the heart and stomach of a king, yea and a king of England too.” She went on to heap insults on the enemy, in the long tradition of commanders pumping up the aggression of the troops: “I think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any prince of Europe should dare invade the borders of our realm!” she proclaimed, promising her soldiers cash rewards and “a famous victory over the enemies of God, my kingdom and my people.”

So the battle of the Armada was won by tactics, but also by fate. That summer the Channel saw violent winds and unseasonable storms, which ravaged the top-heavy galleons while the English fleet escaped damage. But to an Elizabethan, there was no such thing as random good luck, only the working of the hand of God. Once victory was certain, Elizabeth, image-conscious to the last, seized the opportunity for a worldwide anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda coup. She ordered a medal to be struck and widely distributed with the Latin slogan
Deus flavit, et dissipati sunt
(God blew, and they were scattered). God was a Protestant, and he'd shown his true colors: he'd fought on England's side. With a little help from England's rightful if not Holy Roman Majesty, Elizabeth herself, of course.

Reference: Rosalind Miles,
I, Elizabeth,
1994.

ETHELFLEDA

Aethelflaed, “The Lady of the Mercians,” Saxon Queen and War Leader, d. 918
CE

Ethelfleda was the daughter of England's founding king, Alfred the Great, born into war as her father fought to free his emerging country from the invasions of the Danes. A bold tactician and an outstanding commander, she played a major part in driving out the warriors, raiders, and thugs of various races grouped together under the name of the Vikings, who regularly fell on the eastern coast of England from the plague-ridden and famine-prone German and Scandinavian countries across the North Sea.

As king, Alfred insisted on the establishment of the English language and the importance of education, and maintained a lifelong interest in philosophy. It is therefore highly likely that Ethelfleda was taught to read, write, and think, in an age when almost all were illiterate. As a Saxon woman, Ethelfleda also enjoyed more freedom in choosing a husband than the females of the other tribes and cultures of her day. She married Ethelred,
ealdorman
(lord) of the kingdom of West Mercia, and governed with him, though she was the controlling force from early on.

West Mercia, the country at the heart of the English Midlands, formed a first-rate strategic base where Ethelfleda created a military household that she dominated totally. After Ethelred's death in 911, Ethelfleda ruled alone, using her military might to defend the throne. When her father died, she threw her forces into the battle against the Vikings to ensure that her brother Edward succeeded as king of Wessex.

Ethelfleda's sense of strategy went beyond defensive campaigns. Marching the length of England, she fortified key strongholds such as Chester in the northwest and created new fortresses in the Midlands, boosting both peace and local commerce as they became important centers of trade.

By 917, still battling for her brother Edward, she was ready to launch a major attack on the Vikings who continued to harry England's eastern shores. She was also intent on pushing forward the boundaries of her brother's kingdom by conquest, and led her army to major victories over the towns of Derby and Leicester. In 918 she was in the Midlands, planning campaigns farther north. She had already achieved the capitulation of the Viking stronghold in the northern capital city of York when she unexpectedly died.

Ethelfleda followed in a long line of ruling Saxon queens like Bertha, who died in 616, and Eadburga and Cynethryth, who flourished in the eighth century. She paved the way for the imperious Saxon warrior princess Aelgifu (b. 1010), who as mistress of King Cnut of Denmark, regent of Norway, and mother of King Harold “Harefoot” of England, held supreme power in three countries in the eleventh century.

Reference: Antonia Fraser,
The Warrior Queens,
1988.

GANDHI, INDIRA

Indian Politician, b. 1917, d. 1984

The only child of Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru, Gandhi was born into India's political aristocracy and led her country to a decisive victory over Pakistan in the 1971 war that followed the declaration of the independent state of Bangladesh. Although she was only the second woman elected to lead a democracy after Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka in 1960, Gandhi often displayed a ruthless and autocratic approach. She remains, nevertheless, one of her country's most charismatic leaders. Significantly, she once told a friend that
Joan of Arc
(see Chapter 3) was an early heroine of her childhood. She also declared that she was “in no sense a feminist” but nevertheless believed that “women are able to do everything.”

She was born in Allahabad into a family in the vanguard of Indian nationalism—her father had been president of the Congress Party since 1929—and politics was the pulse that regulated her adolescence. By the time she was thirteen, she headed the so-called Monkey Brigade, consisting of children who were used to run messages for the Congress Party, which led the fight for independence from British rule. Nevertheless, her parents sent her to England to be educated, at the elite private Badminton School for Girls and Somerville College, Oxford.

On returning to India in 1938, she joined the Congress Party and four years later was married to the journalist Feroze Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma). As a patriarch with no sons, Nehru planned to make Feroze his political heir, and it is doubtful that Indira would have had any political career if the hapless Feroze had proved up to the task. But the marriage was brief, and the couple were soon separated by events. Between September 1942 and May 1943, both were imprisoned by the British in Allahabad on charges of subversion.

India won its independence from Britain in 1947, and in the same year her father became the country's first prime minister. Nehru was now a widower, and Indira became his hostess and intimate, a role she played until his death in 1964. She proved an adept political trainee, and after the death of her father, she was elected to Parliament in his place and appointed minister of information and broadcasting by Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri.

In 1966 Shastri died of a heart attack, and after only two years in Parliament Indira Gandhi emerged as the compromise candidate to succeed him. She went on to win the general election of 1967, and in her first year in office she was described as “the only man in a cabinet of old women” (see also
Meir, Golda
[Chapter 2], and
Thatcher, Margaret,
Chapter 2). In the 1971 election, she swept to a landslide victory under the slogan “Abolish poverty.”

In 1947 Hindu India and the smaller Muslim nation of Pakistan had both gained their independence from the British in a welter of blood. The major war that had been threatening to erupt between the two nations ever since independence finally broke out after Indira Gandhi's 1971 election triumph. East Pakistan had declared itself the independent state of Bangladesh. West Pakistan attempted to suppress the independence movement, and the ensuing civil strife cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Up to ten million Bengalis took refuge in India, where initial support for a guerrilla response gave way to preparations for a full-scale military intervention.

Gandhi laid the ground with great skill. In August she signed a twenty-year treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union, which ensured that China, an ally of Pakistan, would stay out of the conflict. In the autumn of 1971 she launched a diplomatic offensive, touring Europe and ensuring that Britain and France would join with the United States, which she visited in early November, in blocking any pro-Pakistan resolutions in the United Nations Security Council.

However, US President Richard M. Nixon, whose sympathies lay with Pakistan, was not a soft touch. In conversation with his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, Nixon referred to Gandhi as “the old witch.” Nevertheless, after the outbreak of war in December 1971, Nixon's attempts to persuade the Chinese to come to the aid of Pakistan by mobilizing its forces against India, with the pledge of American support if the Soviet Union became involved, fell on deaf ears. The old witch had the last laugh.

At the beginning of December 1971, Pakistan attempted to forestall the growing threat of an Indian invasion of Bangladesh by launching a preemptive invasion of Kashmir and the Punjab. The Indian Air Force survived attacks on its airfields, and the next day the Indian invasion of East Pakistan began. Within thirteen days the Pakistani commander in Bangladesh had surrendered, while in West Pakistan the Indian Army halted the Pakistani advance. By December 17 the war was over and Pakistan had lost Bangladesh.