Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (2 page)

I wish to thank the following for advice and/or support in many different ways: Dr R. J. Bingle of the India Office Library and Records; Dr Philip Crummy, Director of the Colchester Archaeological Trust; Mr Frank Delaney with whom I discussed the title at an early stage; Mr Donald Freed; Mr Tony Garratt who reminded me of Charles Doughty; Mr Tony Gregory of the Norfolk Archaeological Unit; Gale of the
Daily Telegraph
(Mr George Gale); Earl Gowrie; Mr Henry Grunwald, former Editor-in-Chief of Time Inc. for references to early Vietnamese heroines, and Ms Judy Stowe of BBC External Services for information concerning their reputation in modern Vietnam; Sir John Hale; Lady Selina Hastings; Mr Christopher Hibbert; Princess Antoinette Hohenlohe; Dr Lisa Jardine; Mr John Keegan; Lady Pansy Lamb; Professor Joyce Lebra-Chapman for illustrative material concerning the Rani of Jhansi; Professor Karl Leyser; Ms Sharon Macdonald; Miss Elizabeth Owles of the Moyses Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds; Dame Felicity (Hanbury) Peake for recollections of her wartime service; Diana Phipps; Mr C. A. Price; Mr Denis Richards; the Hon. Hannah Rothschild; Mr David Spanier; Ms Dale Spender; Emma Tennant; Mr Michael Trend; Mr Paul Usherwood; Ms Kaari Utrio; Marina Warner; and Simone Warner who was my wonderful charioteer in the summer of 1985 when we explored East Anglia.

I have received editorial suggestions and advice from a galaxy of stars in the firmament of publishing, including Robert Gottlieb; Christopher Falkus, Juliet Gardiner and Linden Lawson, all of Weidenfeld’s; Sunny Mehta of Knopf; and my agent Michael Shaw of Curtis Brown; Mr John Gillingham and Mr Alan Palmer provided helpful comments on the text; Ms Jane Blumberg checked the references and Mr Douglas Matthews of the London Library did the index: to each and all of these I have good reason to be profoundly grateful. As for Richard Bates, who created out of my unruly manuscript, with the aid of his word processor, the disks from which this book was set, it seems appropriate to quote the words of Henry James concerning art itself to express my thanks: ‘I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process’. Finally I must not forget the Home Team: from my son Orlando Fraser who did research for me at the Colindale Newspaper Library and elsewhere, and my daughter Flora Fraser Powell-Jones, always prepared to discuss the Classical world with energy, to my mother Elizabeth Longford, who may never have realized what an editorial burden lay ahead when she first encouraged me to read history. My husband Harold Pinter, although coming last in these acknowledgements, is always the first to read my work: no words of mine can express my debt to
him sufficiently, so I will use his to thank him for his support when I ventured into ‘quite remote … utterly foreign … territories’.

ANTONIA FRASER
St Cecilia’s Day 1986
Feast of St Joseph 1988

Part One

CHAPTER ONE

A Singular Exception

A singular exception … a woman is often acknowledged the absolute sovereign of a great kingdom, in which she would be deemed incapable of exercising the smallest employment, civil or military.

GIBBON
, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

E
veryone knows about Boadicea. Every British schoolchild learns her story: the stark tale of her stand against the Romans ‘flashes afresh to hold and horrify’ with each generation. Lest for a moment we forget her, on the banks of the Thames, not far from the Houses of Parliament, she stands aloft in her chariot, knives sprouting from its wheels; and it is in fact those murderous knives which stamp our perception of her indelibly. Hers is a gallant – and a savage story. Even as we bow the knee, we shudder and step back as the Warrior Queen rides by.

For all the strength of this image – depictions of Boadicea be they in art or caricature are made instantly recognizable by use of this detail – Boadicea’s chariot did
not
actually have knives (or scythes) affixed to its wheels. This is one of the very few statements which can be made with any certainty concerning her.

Thus one of the most powerful figures in our history in terms of popular imagination, one who did unquestionably exist in that period assigned to her, unlike ‘King’ Arthur, no chivalric monarch if he did exist but a sixth-century Romano British commander, survives by virtue of an image which is in itself spurious. This is an apt illustration of the paradox which lies at the heart of the subject of Queen Boadicea, and by extension that of the Warrior Queen in general.

Of course the name Boadicea itself is not genuine either. That is the name generally employed in the prolific allusions made to her in contemporary society: it would be a rare day which did not produce at least one in the British Press.
¹
This is something which is only partly dependent on the emergence of a female Prime Minister (although, as we shall see, certain specific military situations such as the Falklands War can produce a bristling harvest of such comparisons) since Boadicea’s name can be and is invoked in a variety of different contexts. Nor is our own age unique in this respect, the unwithered ‘infinite variety’ of Queen Boadicea’s images as perceived down our history being one of the themes of this book.

While Boadicea remains therefore the convenient name for what may be termed the fabulous Queen, driving her cruelly accoutred carriage (and it will be used for that Queen in this book), a clutch of other names have been proposed as being more plausible in relation to the woman herself. ‘Our own honour,
VOADICEA
, or
BOODICIA
, by some
BUNDUICA
and
BUNDUCA
, Queene of the Iceni’ was Ben Jonson’s somewhat despairing description in
the Masque of Queenes.
²
It is a desperation that a modern chronicler of Queen Boadicea’s fortunes can share (although Ben Jonson cited only a few of the possible variants).

This uncertainty jostling the Warrior Queen’s actual name, its spelling and derivation, may also be seen as part of the paradox: the extreme fame of Boadicea contrasts with the extreme ignorance and, in many instances, actual misapprehension about her. It is ‘Boudicca’, given by Tacitus, which is in fact the only contemporary rendering of the name which has come down to us. As a result it has been in the past ‘relished by the learned’ as Winston Churchill felicitously phrased it. ‘Boadicea’, sounding so different to our ears, is actually only two letters apart from Boudicca and the famous name is thus probably based on inaccurate transcriptions of Tacitus’ Boudicca.
³

In recent years however the learned have lost some of their relish for Boudicca. It is suggested, on philological evidence, that Tacitus too was in error: ‘Boudica’ must have been the correct
spelling. This brings the British Warrior Queen’s name in line with the various Celtic words for victory, notably the Old Welsh
bouda
. It also means, happily, that Boadicea too can claim to be described as Queen Victoria (as was not infrequently noted in the late nineteenth century): for these two reasons, scholarly and sentimental, Boudica will be the name adopted for the historic figure who led the
AD
60/61 rebellion against the Romans,
^f1
whereas Boadicea will be used for the legendary character.
⁴

Others variants will be encountered and their origins traced in the course of Boadicea’s latter-day history. At the moment it is enough to point out that this ambivalence towards Boadicea’s name, like the misapprehensions concerning her career and circumstances, is also part of her aura: it has even allowed her at times to flourish under two separate identities.

In the late sixteenth century for example, an enterprising Florentine scholar-courtier named Petruccio Ubaldini, seeking royal patronage in England, wrote two volumes about the lives of illustrious ladies of yore and dedicated them to Queen Elizabeth. ‘To satisfy the most pedantic readers’, as he put it, he decided to divide the characters of Bonduica and Voadicia (although the distinction was of course a mistaken one arising out of the confusions produced by these endless variations of spelling). Faced with the stories of two queens which were, as he honestly admitted, astonishingly similar, Ubaldini boldly decided to derive a different moral from each. The moral of Bonduica’s story is thus that ‘Cruelty destroys any praise for honourable courage …’; that of Voadicia: ‘Tyranny often brings intolerable wickedness which provokes in its victims a thirst for revenge …’
⁵

As a matter of fact, both these morals can be derived quite correctly from Boadicea’s story, although in modern parlance we
might prefer to transform Ubaldini’s ‘morals’ into questions. Was Boadicea a savage attempting to destroy a superior civilization in a series of atrocities (and a
female
savage to boot …)? Or was she a patriotic leader rising up against an alien and brutal occupying power? Suffice it to say for the moment that in this respect the existence of so many variations of her name has evidently been a positive advantage in the promotion of her legend.

Thus the learneds’ Boudica can easily possess quite different characteristics from the chariot-driving heroine aloft on London’s Embankment without troubling the national consciousness too much. This celebrated Warrior Queen turns out to be like Proteus, he who could assume different shapes at will, beginning with her very name. Returning to Warrior Queens in general and the paradox which they present, it will be found that the protean quality is something which many of them have in common with Boadicea.

The central nature of this paradox can be stated as follows: whereas woman has on the whole, taking the rough with the smooth, the good epochs with the bad, been considered inferior to man throughout history, the arrival of a Warrior Queen, by whatever accident of fate, descent or sheer character, has been the signal for a remarkable outburst of excitement and even awe, sometimes accompanied by admiration and enthusiasm for her cause, beyond the ability of a mere male to arouse.

‘In man’s apparel … hanging about her the skins of beasts, before and behind, with a Sword about her neck, an Axe at her girdle, and a Bow and Arrows in her hand, leaping according to the custom, now here, now there, as nimbly as the most active among her attendants, all the while striking her Engema, that is, two Iron Bells, which serve her instead of Drums …’. Thus the Dutch Captain Fuller, commander of her personal bodyguard, admiringly described the seventeenth-century Queen Jinga of Angola, in her long battles against the Portuguese invaders. To Fuller, Jinga was ‘A Cunning and Prudent Virago’, despite or even because of her habit of keeping fifty or sixty young men as husbands (and another habit of human sacrifice); he served her faithfully for many years.
⁶

Conversely, the emergence of a Warrior Queen has at other times been accompanied by disgust and fear at her very existence, emotions which would never be aroused by a male leader occupying the same position: Queen Jinga, the nightmare of the armed and voracious Amazon come to life, was viewed quite differently by her Portuguese enemies. To those on the other side, the actual atrocities committed or instigated by a woman leader bring about a special shudder, which recalls our reaction to the knives on Boadicea’s chariot: it is not so much the mythical weapons themselves as the woman driving the chariot which gives us surely that special
frisson
.

Part of this
frisson
– of fear or admiration – is undoubtedly due to the fact that woman as a whole has been seen as a pacifying influence throughout history, this pacifying role being perceived as hers by nature and hers in duty. The whole question whether women actually
are
more pacific by nature is not the subject of the present book. For our purposes, it is however highly relevant that they have been perceived as such.