Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (29 page)

Maud lingered in England for several years, mainly in the west, before returning to the safety of Normandy. In any case pressure was now upon the next generation to solve the state of anarchy by arms or treaty. With the agreement of Geoffrey, Maud increasingly allowed her eldest son to exercise her own rights of succession. The death of Stephen, followed by the undisputed accession of this son as Henry II in 1154, left Maud free to complete her life in peace.

As for the whole question of a queen regnant in England, nothing had been proved either way. The fact that Henry II was manifestly ruling in the lifetime of his own mother, and yet his blood claim must have come through her, meant that the matter was left in abeyance. There it remained for the next four hundred years until the death of Edward VI, only son of Henry VIII, leaving only two Tudor sisters Mary and Elizabeth to succeed him, brought it sharply into question again.

Now Queen Dowager, Maud found herself again in a role both highly respected and properly conventional, as she had been in her youth. Maud became to the Normans, as she had been to the Germans twenty years before, ‘the good Matilda’. Once more she displayed all those qualities of piety and grace which had made
her so beloved; age had brought with it an appropriate wisdom as well. The Dowager Queen and Empress now occupied herself chiefly making a series of pious foundations; but she also dispensed some excellent advice along the lines of moderation and practicality to her son on the throne of England. She persuaded Henry for example not to invade Ireland in 1155. And it was Maud who urged the King not to appoint Thomas à Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury (an unparalleled piece of good advice as it turned out, but, like most really good pieces of advice, it was ignored by its recipient). Subsequently Maud acted as mediatrix between King and Archbishop, as well as endeavouring to bring about peace with the Pope after Becket’s death.

The golden opinions won by the Empress Maud in the first and third stages of her life are in such marked contrast to the accusations of pride, temper and intractability which surrounded her in her middle years that it has been suggested that these faults might have had a physical cause. The Earl of Onslow, one of Maud’s male biographers, suggested (in 1939) that her change of attitude was due literally to a change of life: ‘Maud was now in her thirty-ninth year (on arrival in England) … she may have attained that time of life when physical conditions are apt to react on the nervous system’. This suggestion was however firmly refuted by her (female) biographer Nesta Pain in 1978; leaving aside the fact that thirty-eight was early for the menopause even in the twelfth century, she pointed out sensibly enough that ‘Not many women are seized with sheer folly at such times.’
²⁷

It is surely closer to the truth to suppose that Maud, first the child-wife to an older man, then the reluctant wife of a boy (for all the formidable character that Geoffrey of Anjou would later develop), saw, on arrival in England, an opportunity to exert that independence for which as ‘Matilda the Empress, daughter of King Henry’ she may have long secretly yearned. The other side to this independence was a tenacity and sheer steadfastness which must compel admiration – think of her two remarkable escapes – from the disinterested observer. But of course none of the observers of twelfth-century England was disinterested. Her
character and indeed her whole intervention earned her universal abuse from those for whom it was politically awkward. It is true that Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux, her supporter, referred admiringly to Maud’s ‘intrepid spirit’ which had ‘nothing of the woman in it’. Far more characteristic was the reaction of a contemporary chronicler (and opponent): at the moment of her greatest triumph at Winchester he referred to her ‘scornful and arrogant air’ instead of ‘the modest and gentle demeanour proper to her sex’.
²⁸

Maud died in Normandy in 1167. Her epitaph referred to the three men sharing the same name who had dominated the passage of her life, two English kings and a German emperor. ‘Here lies Henry’s daughter, wife and mother; great by birth – greater by marriage – but greatest by motherhood.’
²⁹
(It was of course an epitaph composed in the lifetime of Maud’s son.) Unlike the monument to Countess Matilda of Tuscany which recorded her martial achievements, there was no mention in Maud’s epitaph of that period when she had battled her way across England in her own right as a Warrior Queen, or been acclaimed as Domina – ‘the Lady of the English’.

¹
Thus Matilda of Boulogne and her husband Stephen were both first cousins to the Empress Maud (but not to each other); Matilda through Maud’s mother and Stephen through Maud’s father.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lion of the Caucasus

A lion’s cubs are lions all, male and female alike.

RUSTAVELI,
The Knight in Panther’s Skin, c. 1200

T
o pass from the Anarchy of mid-twelfth-century England to late-twelfth-century Georgia is to pass from mire to mountain. Under its great Queen Tamara (or Thamar), a character both wise and splendid, powerful and beloved, the Caucasian kingdom of Georgia flourished as never before – and indeed never since. Memories of its golden age dominate both Georgian history and myth, and these memories are intricately connected to the story of Tamara. Alone of all the Warrior Queens considered in this book, Queen Tamara succeeded lawfully to her father to the acclaim of her people, added to both the prestige and the dominions of her country, and died leaving a legally begotten male heir to succeed peacefully in his turn. In actual fact, her gender, so far from detracting from all this glory, seems to have added to it.

Yet, even here, there has to be some canker on the rose. To the leading Georgian historian of today, Tamara is ‘the symbol of Georgia’s political might and cultural progress’; but in Georgian folklore and myth her reputation, in addition to this fame and as though provoked by it, is that of a woman of voracious sexual appetite. This Tamara was crystallized in Lermontov’s famous ballad
The Demon
, ‘with scant regard for history’, in the words of his biographer Laurence Kelly, as having the face of an angel but with a heart ‘like sprites from hell’.
¹

She dwells in a tower on a gloomy crag, the sight of whose golden firelight ‘promising warmth and rest’ lures the unwary traveller out of his way. Within the tower, Tamara’s strange
magnetic voice ‘brimming with passion o’er’, urges her suitors to enter. Then:

Warm arms with arms wound eagerly,

And lips to hot lips flew,

And sounds of strange wild revelry

Echoed the long night through …

But in the morning, Tamara’s wild passion slaked, each suitor would be hurled to death over the precipice.

Lo! A lifeless corpse is carried,

Sounds of moaning voices swell,

From the tower a white gleam shimmers,

Comes a distant cry, ‘Farewell’.
²

Today in Georgia, part of the former Soviet Union, legends concerning Tamara abound. (And since the name was a common one in the Georgian royal family, the existence of other less famous and less austere Tamaras, such as the Queen’s granddaughter, contributes to the myth). There are also the familiar modern developments of a legend: there are statues to her, to say nothing of Tamara cigarettes, restaurants and comic-strips. The Lermontov tale of the man-destroying Princess loses nothing in the telling. Since the real Tamara was very different, a woman subsequently canonized by the Georgian Church, certainly more of a matriarch than an erotic heroine, her story provides peculiar evidence of the almost wilful connection of a Warrior Queen with sexuality in the (male) imagination.
³
The two syndromes are ready to claim her: if holy chastity happens not to be the desired image, then extreme voracity replaces it. These are two sides after all of the same coin: as though the one thing that a Warrior Queen cannot be is a ‘normal’ woman; an oddity in political terms, she is also assumed to go to one sexual extreme or the other.

The Georgian kingdom to which Tamara formally succeeded
in 1184 has been compared to the Norman kingdom of Sicily in its cultural importance, as the royal house of Bagrationi, to which she belonged, has been compared to that of the Angevins; her great-grandfather David the Restorer in particular resembling in his vigour and intelligence a Norman king.
⁴
Certainly both Bagrationis and Angevins had to deal with a troublesome warrior nobility. But there were obvious differences between the Norman world and that of the Caucasus. One of these differences is indeed indicated by the very different fate of Queen Tamara to that of the Empress Maud as heiress to her father: both being only surviving children at their royal father’s death and succeeding – or attempting to succeed – according to similar claims.

‘A lion’s cubs are lions all, male and female alike’: so ran a significant line in Rustaveli’s epic poem
The Knight in Panther’s Skin
, thought to allude to the accession of Tamara; with her father King Giorgi III as the lion.
⁵
It was a sentiment to which Henry I of England, unlike his baronage, might well have acceded. This notion of the inherited might of the female via her father was not, however, such a bizarre one to the twelfth-century Georgian as it might be to the English or Norman baron.

Queen Tamara’s royal position fitted into certain primitive conceptions supported by embedded memories, as it has been argued that Boadicea’s own regality derived from the richness of Celtic legend. But in England much of Celtic culture, including gods, goddesses and religious traditions, had been transmogrified into that of the Romans; Boadicea herself was preserved in Tacitus’ (Roman) narrative. When Rome itself fell and Roman history vanished, Boadicea vanished with it; England – and Europe – awoke to a Christian culture where a Warrior Queen must incarnate the ‘severe womanhood’ of Judith in the Bible.

For all the tales of Geoffrey of Monmouth, with his optimistic interpretation of Lear’s story – the happy personal rule of Queen Cordelia – the English point of view in the twelfth century was better expressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury releasing the nobles from their oaths of fealty to Maud as having been taken under duress. Queen Tamara on the other hand was nourished in
the popular imagination by lurking memories of those goddesses of ancient Georgia – Itrujani, Ainina and Danana – whose cult looked back to the Great Mother; and given Georgia’s geographical situation there were later influences of Eastern goddesses. Even with the Christianization of Georgia in the fourth century, these folk memories of the mother goddess did not entirely die away, as reverence continued to be given to mother saints (as opposed to virgin ones) while Lermontov himself may derive his pejorative if exciting picture of Tamara from the kind of orgiastic rites which celebrated the cult of the Eastern goddess Astarte.
⁶

The position of women in Georgian tradition and myth was then an honoured one: and as a matter of fact the coming of Christianity supplied yet another legend, honouring the female sex. Where England was proselytized by a man – St Augustine – the Georgian kingdom of Kartli, according to a variety of sources, owed its conversion to St Nino, a slave-woman from Cappadocia possessed of miraculous powers who healed its Queen Nana.

In other ways than that of matriarchal folk memory, geography, both internal and external, is crucial to an understanding of the mediaeval kingdom of Georgia. The fertile trough in which the country lay was bounded by the Black Sea in the west, reaching towards the Caspian in the east; beyond the Caspian but accessible from its shores were Persia, India and Central Asia. To the north the great mountain range of the Caucasus acted as a barricade against southern Russia; to the south the mountainous plateau of Armenia exercised another kind of barricade against the empire of the Seljuk Turks.

On the one hand therefore Georgia occupied a strategic position on the borders of Christianity and Islam from which, under favourable circumstances – if the kingdom itself was strong – it could aspire towards conquest and overlordship of many different empires. On the other hand the fact that the country was diagonally split by its own mountain range meant that the inhabitants of West Georgia (ancient Colchis, Lazica or Egrisi) were historically inclined to be in conflict with those of East
Georgia, including part of Daghestan and Caucasian Albani (modern Azerbaijan). If the kingdom was weak, Georgia obviously lay in an exceptionally vulnerable position, accessible in its turn to numerous conquerors.