Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (57 page)

We return to the question of motherhood, at the source of this unease. The idea of female dominion, that authority posed in childhood from which happy infants must one day escape for the sake of their own maturity, is surely also at the source of the implicit threat posed by the notion of the Warrior Queen. Many percipient women writers and activists have drawn attention to this phenomenon, from Margaret Fuller in 1843 who wrote, ‘Man is of Woman born and her face bends over him in infancy with an expression he can never quite forget’, to Gloria Steinem in 1987 who suggested that part of the antagonism towards Mrs Thatcher ‘may be because, in a deep sense, we fear women having power in the world because we associate that with childhood’.
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Dorothy Dinnerstein, in a classic of feminist psychological analysis first published in the United States in 1976, drew attention to woman’s primary role in infant care as being responsible for early memories of her domination. For while woman continues to be the parent who is the ‘first [remembered] boss’ in most societies in the world, her relationship to other adults will be unfavourably affected by these memories. ‘The right to be straightforwardly bossy – the right to exercise will head-on … – cannot reside as comfortably in a woman as a man’, wrote Dorothy Dinnerstein.
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That this is true at least in some measure is indicated most recently by the innumerable references to Mrs Thatcher as ‘Nanny’, one famed for her ‘bossiness’. (The equivalent words used for a male prime minister might be ‘autocrat’ and ‘authorit ativeness’.) It is therefore fascinating to observe the ways in which the Warrior Queens in history have felt their way to a solution to the problem. At the same time, these solutions, universally adopted, also do suggest that there was (and is) such a universal problem.

Adopting the role of an honorary male has been only one among the expedients employed by the Warrior Queens with instinctive or calculated cunning, a quality which they have certainly needed in order to survive in what has always been realistically a man’s world. It has however been one of the most successful – to act the King of Kartli as Tamara did, the Catholic King of Spain like Isabella, a mighty prince like Elizabeth I,
rex noster
of Hungary like Maria Theresa. The frequency with which the Tomboy Syndrome is found in accounts of the childhood of a given Warrior Queen testifies to the same deliberate process. The type of Camilla of the Volsci (‘her girl’s hands had never been trained to Minerva’s distaff’) occurs again and again, be it in the young Catherine the Great who never cared to play with girlish dolls, or in Mrs Gandhi who employed her own dolls in creating Indian nationalist battles. The message put across is that an ‘honorary boy’ has been the father to the honorary man.

Fortunately adopting the role of the honorary male has not precluded the Warrior Queen from appealing at the same time to the chivalrous instincts of her compeers, the real males. Rather the reverse has been found to be the case, as the Warrior Queen, so clearly marked out by her femininity in a man’s world, has employed another successful series of expedients based on this evidently singular fact. The use of masculine uniform or military accoutrements which set off rather than conceal her sex is one of them. The concept of chivalry due towards the tender woman is also responsible for the Shame Syndrome whereby the Warrior Queen is able to contrast her own willed courage with that lassitude of the supposedly courageous-by-nature males around her. Thus Queen Isabella’s grandees were sufficiently ‘mortified’ at being outdone in zeal for the holy war by a woman to renew their energies.
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The Shame Syndrome can in turn lead on to the popular estimate of the Warrior Queen as being the ‘Better-Man’ (of the two: if a husband such as Frederick of Prussia and a wife such as Louise is involved). Or it can lead to the Warrior Queen’s own protestations of being ‘Only-a-Weak-Woman’: ‘just a lady and
timid too’ as the beautiful, bold Caterina Sforza declared herself, in order to show up her superior strategic skill. This pose of being ‘Only-a-Weak-Woman’ is of course also convenient when trouble looms: for the Warrior Queen can hope to avoid responsibility at the same time. Hence wily Zenobia was able to live on in her Roman villa, swift female dromedary forgotten, on the grounds that ‘many persons’, i.e. her male advisers, ‘had seduced her as a simple woman’ into mounting her campaigns.
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Since none of these poses, attitudes or expedients would be possible without the existence of the masculine audience at which they are aimed, all of them merely serve to emphasize the Appendage Syndrome. Very few outstanding women in history have achieved or been granted their place without the benefit of some kind of male-derived privilege, generally that of descent, whatever glorious destiny has ensued. This is certainly true of the Warrior Queens, up to the second half of the twentieth century.

Understandably, most Warrior Queens have underlined their claims as honorary males by emphasizing such connections. ‘I am descended from mighty
men
!’: Thus Boadicea boasted in her last speech, at least according to Tacitus.
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It is a pattern – that of Elizabeth I, ‘Great Harry’s daughter’ still, to the end of her long reign – which has been pursued. For such emphasis, like the pose of being an honorary male, once again enables the Warrior Queen to preserve her place within the natural order. She must never forget that the original importance of the Amazon tribe to the Greeks was as a tribe of unnatural as well as belligerent females, unnatural because they were outside the control of men, and nobody’s appendage.

It is however in the confrontation with the whole treacherous theme of motherhood and the unsuitability of the mother to do battle, that the wits of the Warrior Queen have had to be most subtly exercised. In this connection it is significant how many successful Warrior Queens – in the eyes of the world – have been seen to be acting on behalf of their children. Even Cleopatra drew about her the authority of co-rulership, according to Ptolemaic custom, with her infant son. This is one extension of
the Appendage Syndrome which carries with it considerable allure. For there is nothing in the slightest bit unnatural about the mother’s defence of her young, which can even be quite blatantly aggressive without incurring the taint of ‘masculinity’. The rape of Boadicea’s daughters, the imagined agonies of the mother as a result, provide after all the most sympathetic explanation for the atrocities which followed her uprising.

Otherwise a protective and appealing maternity casts a pleasant gloss on what might be the harsh picture of a Warrior Queen, as Maria Theresa realized when she sent a picture of herself with her son to General Khevenmüller with the poignant question: ‘What do you think will become of this child?’ No wonder the troops the next day at Linz, shown the picture and read the letter, roared their enthusiasm! The persistent legends concerning the Rani of Jhansi riding into battle with her adopted son Damodar on the horse behind her, and similar depictions, even if not accurate, belong to the same tradition as does the legend of her dying words ‘Look after Damodar’, spoken in a temple (although, as has been seen, a variety of independent witnesses confirm that she died in the heat of battle). In the nineteenth century Agnes Strickland summed up a widespread feeling of approval for the Mother–Warrior when she described Stephen’s wife, ‘good Queen Matilda’, as avoiding ‘all Amazonian display’ by acting in the name of her son.
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There is another way of handling the whole matter of war and woman’s maternal role in terms of war and that is – triumphantly ignoring the ‘unnatural’ taint – to make of it something boldly transcendent. It is this which accounts for the palpitating thrill which the idea of the Warrior Queen arouses, threat as she may be. The most successful Warrior Queens have always been those who pre-empted the obvious disadvantage of their sex in this field by turning it into an apparent advantage; and biological motherhood is after all the one role which is totally closed to man. Thus the role of the fighting mother in wartime can be put across as primordially patriotic, instead of primitively distasteful,
that of Catherine the Great for example, being hailed by her troops as the ‘Little Mother’ of Russia. Soon the ‘Mother of her Country’ begins to be seen in a supernatural rather than an unnatural light: a goddess, a Mother–Goddess perhaps, and by extension a Goddess of War.

The supernatural aura of the Warrior Queen has the further effect of sanctifying the nation’s struggle in its own eyes: and all through history it is always good for morale to be fighting a holy war. When Judith struck off the head of Holofernes, according to the tenth-century poem, she ‘ascribed the glory of all that to the Lord of Hosts’. A kind of pious patriotism, like the stance of outraged motherhood, gives moral authority to many a Warrior Queen, enabling her to become a Holy Figurehead of her nation’s aspirations, as the Arab Lady of Victory with her long hair and her lute in the forefront of the battle embodied an appeal to valour, honour and passion.
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When the Warrior Queen is successful in her dominion, the way is paved for the idea of the golden age of the nation – especially golden since over it presides a goddess.

The type of goddess most usefully personified by a given Warrior Queen alters, of course, from country to country, age to age and civilization to civilization. If Boadicea represented some kind of Celtic war-goddess and Queen Jinga of Angola an ancient African mother–deity, then Isabella the Catholic was elevated as ‘the new Eve’, the madonna of her country. This is a conspiracy into which the male population enters willingly: given that circumstances have brought about some form of female rule in war, a supernatural woman leader is infinitely better than an unnatural one.

There is certainly a sexuality at the heart of this conspiracy, as the ancient goddesses, those creations of the universal subconscious, were generally creatures of human sexual feeling and appetite if of divine power and strength. Very few Warrior Queens, whatever the true facts of their lives, have been allowed to enjoy an ordinary female sexuality in terms of the propaganda spread about them. The Chaste Syndrome being marked, the
Warrior Queen has been depicted, where possible, as a virgin by her supporters (and sometimes where not possible, as in the case of Zenobia and Matilda of Tuscany): virginity too having its own connotations of sanctity. For Gibbon, for example, Zenobia’s ‘chastity’ meant that her ‘valour’ surpassed that of Cleopatra: an interesting argument if not exactly a logical one. Conversely by the Voracity Syndrome, accusations of lust (so much more exciting in a queen regnant than in a king, where prodigious amours tend to be taken rather wearily for granted) are used to vicious political purpose, as in the case of Caterina Sforza, denounced by the same ruler – the Pope – who wanted her possessions for his son Cesare Borgia.
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It was axiomatic to many of the nineteenth-century British that the Rani of Jhansi
must
be ‘the Jezebel of India’, just because she was an outstanding warrior leader: another interesting if once again illogical argument.

Yet the overriding impression of the personal lives of the Warrior Queens, if one may generalize for a moment, is of austerity, even puritanism, Tamara of Georgia, Isabella of Spain and the real Rani being far more typical in this respect than the admitted exceptions such as Caterina herself, Catherine the Great and Semiramis; details of the latter’s life are however sufficiently veiled in time for it to be quite possible that she never actually possessed the rampant voracity which has enabled her legend to survive. That overriding impression may be put against another subtler one, to which it is most likely to be connected: there is no lack of personal ambition among these Warrior Queens, whatever the fluttering protestations which contemporary social standards may have called forth from some of them. And ambitious women have seldom so far had much time to spare to be
grandes amoureuses
, with so many more demanding problems to tax their time: preferring to bond men to them by a more ethereal kind of loyalty (in short, acting out their own version of the goddess).

Is it not just this appreciation of the Warrior Queen which continues to make her an inspiration to women as well as a source of threat and excitement to men? Whether or not
woman’s nature is in truth more pacific and more tender than that of the other sex, the Warrior Queen is secretly seen by women as one who has made a dazzling job of a position so seldom granted to one of her own sex. Boadicea
is
a heroine, cruel knives on her chariot notwithstanding: and it can be argued that women need heroines even more than men need heroes because their expectations of independence, fortitude and valour have generally speaking been so much lower.

So Queen Boadicea still towers above her reckless horses on the banks of the Thames. In her case the hand that once rocked the cradle now drives the chariot and shakes the spear and ‘yet though overcome in hapless fight’ she does so in manifest victory. Secure within her monument constructed equally of Thornycroft’s bronze and history’s myth, her conduct is no longer unnatural but triumphant. Her glory may be expected to endure.

Reference Notes