Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (40 page)

My Fortune wound my Female Soul too high

And lifted me above myself; but thou

Hast kindly work’d down all my Towering Thoughts …

This was an opinion – and language – more calculated to appeal to John Knox than to Queen Elizabeth I.

*

It was not that scholarly interest in the ancient Britons waned in the course of the seventeenth century: very much to the contrary. The ‘discovery’ of the North American Indians by the West Europeans led to a happy obsession with the concept of the so-called noble savage. In many cases, antiquarian accounts of the ancient Britons borrowed characteristics observed in the Indians. On her arrival in England as the wife of an Englishman, John Rolfe, in 1616 Pocahontas, daughter of the chief Powhatan, caused a sensation as a member of the Sioux tribe, who were all about six feet tall with ‘the cleanest and most exact limbs in the world’. But the ‘Nonpareil of Virginia’, as she was known, had turned gracefully into ‘the Lady Rebecca’ on her Christian baptism.
⁹
Nor was Pocahontas in any sense a Warrior Queen; she was the biblical Ruth, not Judith, a well-treated Madam Butterfly, not a Boadicea. Originally she had twice saved the life of an Englishman, John Smith, preferring his welfare to that of her own tribe; peace not war had followed her marriage to Rolfe.

Among antiquarians destined to feel interest in the ancient Britons, another happy obsession which emerged in the seventeenth century concerning the origins of Stonehenge focused particular interest on Boadicea. As has been mentioned in Chapter Seven, Edmund Bolton in 1624 proposed Stonehenge as her missing tomb (where, according to Dio, she had been given that rich burial by her tribe). Thomas Heywood, in his
Exemplary Lives
of 1640, followed suit. His Boadicea, duly buried at Stonehenge – ‘that admirable monument of the stones upon Salisbury Plain’ – is illustrated in the plumes and pearls of the day, a Caroline court lady dressing up, one breast tastefully exposed in something which may have been designed to resemble the Amazon’s chiton, but certainly does not. She is also described as a ‘Mother and nurse of magnanimity’, a description which surely fits Pocahontas more closely than the first-century Queen.
¹⁰

Outside history, Boadicea as a name gradually developed into a useful generic term for a heroine. It was employed for example when the making of lists of such became common in the second
half of the century, figuring with severe Judith but also with peace-loving Deborah, the prophetess Hannah and the learned Abbess Hilda of Whitby; these lists themselves, generally compiled by women, being a form of protest against the prevalent denigration of their sex’s ‘worth’. To term someone a Boadicea was to make of her a heroine, but was not even necessarily to connect her to military feats. The petition of the Leveller women for the release of John Lilburne in 1649 pointed to the various ‘deliverances’ wrought by God by women’s ‘weak hands’, as Boadicea had helped the Britons to defeat the Danes (a well-meant if inaccurate historical comparison).
¹¹
A great lady such as Charlotte, Countess of Derby, who defended her castle against siege in the Civil War, might be compared to the British Queen; but so might the spirited playwright Aphra Behn, the first professional woman writer, whose fortitude was evidently in another sphere than that of the battlefield.

Historians and antiquarians similarly began to make of Boadicea more of a generic figure of patriotic intent, than a rounded female character. Aylett Sammes, in his
Britannia Antiqua Illustrata
of 1676, relies heavily on Tacitus for his account of ‘those insufferable Insolences’ (towards the royal women) which caused the British revolt. But he discounts the idea that Boadicea’s death could have discouraged her people, and salutes her with a laudatory verse beneath her portrait:

To War, this Queen doth with her Daughters move

She for her Wisdom, followed, they for Love …

But they being ravisht, made her understand

’Tis harder beauty to secure than Land.

Yet her example teaching them to dye,

Virtue, the room of Honour did supply.
¹²

This ‘Thrice Happy’ Princess is as stylized, no more real than Purcell’s Bonduca. Her portrait (engraved by W. Fairthorne) shows her voluptuous rather than brawny. Here is the characteristic oval face, small curly mouth, dimpled chin and long nose of
the late Stuart beauty; her long rippling hair has a tiny little crown set on top of it; the low-cut gown sets off her ‘torc’, in fact a double-stranded necklace; on her feet are a pair of elegant sandals. With her toy spear and its pretty tassel, she too is a lady in fancy dress, but with the march of time she has become a professional actress rather than a court lady: one of the stately Marshall sisters perhaps, who specialized in tragedy, playing Zempoalla, Dryden’s tempestuous Indian queen who fell in love with Montezuma.

Two courtly episodes illustrate this increasingly ‘fancy dress’ aspect of Boadicea. In 1669 the Honourable Edward Howard printed ‘An Heroick Poem’, dedicated to his aristocratic friends, including the poet Rochester, in order to elicit their comments.
¹³
Rochester himself took advantage of this opportunity to designate the poem as ‘incomparable’ but also ‘incomprehensible’; Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, from the library at Chats-worth, with more reason to appreciate the demands of aristocratic friendship, responded that it was a virtue in any poet ‘to advance the honour of his remote Ancestors’ while murmuring encouraging names like Homer and Virgil.

After the statutory hesitation over his heroine’s name – and finally going for Bonduca
^f1
– Howard launched himself into a description of a paragon of beauty and virtue. Everyone, it seems, wants to marry this peerless maid, including notably Albanius, son of King Arthur, and the British chieftain Vortiger. Bonduca herself, although courageous – ‘she dares, above her blushing Sex’s gentle fears’ – is hardly a brash Warrior Queen. For one thing her voice – that perennial test – is ‘too soft to accent the rough Laws of War’, and in any case ‘Wars’ stern horrors her soft Soul affright’. Seated as she is on a white charger, with auburn
tresses ‘softer than gossamer’, in a robe embroidered with the dawn stars, surrounded by fellow virgins compared to Spring and Morning, it is hardly surprising that, after the taking of London, this Boadicea goes about the city tenderly nursing the wounded, Britons and Romans alike.

In the end Bonduca virtually dies of modesty, so far as one can make out. Since in her ‘bashful accents’ she is unable to choose between Albanius and Vortiger, they fight it out in a tournament at which both perish; Bonduca temporarily dies too or at least faints into death, until Merlin resurrects her:

The Queen’s soft life so far were fled

His Art must now recall her from the Dead.

One cannot resist observing that the bold Celtic Warrior Queen who led her armies to Colchester, to London, to St Albans and beyond, must have been turning in her grave at this amiable travesty – wherever that grave happened to be.

The Society of Roman Knights, which was formed in 1722 and lasted for three years, was the brainchild of William Stukeley, the first Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries founded in 1718.
¹⁵
Stukeley was a man of an unconventional cast of mind, with a passion for Druids which finally overwhelmed his archaeological good sense – he did much valuable fieldwork at Avebury for example. Members of the Society, whose aim was to ‘search for and illustrate’ Roman monuments in Britain, took their titles from Celtic princes and other notables associated with the Roman Conquest, such as Cingetorix (Lord Winchelsea), Prasutagus and Venutius (Maurice Johnson and Roger Gale, fellow antiquaries) and Agricola (adopted by Sir John Clerk, author of that unflattering portrait of Queen Anne quoted earlier). Stukeley himself was Chyndonax, then believed to be an authentic Druid’s name.

The constitution actually allowed for members of both sexes – doubtless part of Stukeley’s scorn for the conventions, since this was two hundred years before the Society of Antiquaries admitted its first women fellows. At some point Stukeley’s wife
Frances was admitted as Cartimandua, a development which, with members sticking closely to nomenclature in their frequent correspondence, led to laments like this from Cunobelinus (Samuel Gale): ‘Having been inform’d since the arrival of Prasutagus … of the never enough to be lamented Miscarriage of the incomparable Cartimandua, a Misfortune which not only myself but all Albion must be seriously touch’d with, since without doubt we have lost a second Chyndonax, or at least another Boadicea.’
¹⁶

Boadicea herself was chosen by Frances Thynne, Countess of Hertford (later Duchess of Somerset). In one sense it could be argued that this wealthy and well-born patroness of writers was an admirable incarnation of the British heroine. Lady Hertford, who would have been in her twenties at the time of her induction into the society, acted as Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Caroline both as Princess of Wales and Queen Consort. It was Lady Hertford who pleaded for Richard Savage, convicted of homicide, and secured his pardon. Other writers upon whom she looked with favour included Watts, Shenstone and James Thomson, author of ‘Rule Britannia’, who dedicated his ‘Spring’ to her and in another poem, ‘Liberty’, written later, featured Boadicea herself ‘with her raging troops’ – although once Thomson was admitted to her circle, according to naughty Horace Walpole, he took more pleasure in the aristocratic but unintellectual conversation of her husband than in her ladyship’s ‘poetical operations’.
¹⁷

In another sense, the character of Frances Countess of Hertford, the philanthropic court lady and poetaster, was about as far from the patriotic and partisan Celtic Warrior Queen as it would be possible to imagine. (An equally inappropriate sobriquet was that of ‘Veleda, Archdruidess of Kew’ – a reference to Tacitus’ tower-dwelling prophetess – applied to the Dowager Princess Augusta, mother of George III, by William Stukeley in 1753, when dedicating a book about Druids to her.) The final accolade for misplaced use of the Boadicean myth must however be reserved for William Cowper in his eponymous ode of 1780.
¹⁸

Cowper’s ‘Boadicea’ begins, apparently, in fine historical fettle:

When the British warrior queen,

Bleeding from the Roman rods

Sought with an indignant mien

Counsel of her country’s Gods

Sage beneath a spreading oak

Sat the Druid, hoary chief,

Every burning word he spoke

Full of rage and full of grief.

Here is a picture both plausible and poetic, without too much licence, one feels, in its details. It is only when one realizes that Cowper, no friend to the American patriots currently engaged in the War of Independence, is actually casting the Americans as the
Romans
, that the full extent of the transference emerges. For Cowper devoutly hoped for the triumph of the British forces. And he uses the story of Boadicea as a test on which to hang the British right to empire; Boadicea herself may be defeated but the future belongs to Britain – not the Romans (or the Americans).

Regions Caesar never knew

Thy posterity shall sway

Where his eagles never flew

None invincible as they.

The ode ends:

Ruffians! pitiless as proud

Heaven awards the vengeance due;

Empire is on us bestow’d

Shame and ruin wait for you.

For Boadicea, the British Warrior Queen who attempted to throw off the Roman yoke, to be regarded as a symbol of
Britain’s inalienable right to its own imperialism – towards America – is indeed an audacious use of patriotic legend.

About the time Christina of Sweden was formally granted power as ‘king’ – only to surrender it voluntarily a few years later – another genuine Warrior Queen was giving the Portuguese in Angola good reason to regret the persistent tradition of African female leadership in war. An eccentric, intellectually inclined female, a woefully insipid princess as Boadicea had become in certain literary works: these would certainly have provided riper targets for the seventeenth-century Portuguese. Instead they faced Jinga Mbandi. This at least was her tribal name, but since the rich variety of its spellings approaches that of Boadicea, including Nzinga, Singa and Zhinga, she will here be described by the name invariably used by the Portuguese then, and dignified by widespread popular usage in the People’s Republic of Angola today: Queen Jinga.
¹⁹