CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Elizabetha Triumphans

They couch their pikes and bow their ensigns down

When as their sacred royal Queen passed by

In token of their loyal bearèd hearts

To her alone, and none but only she –

ELIZABETHA TRIUMPHANS (1588)

The reign in which the character of chariot-driving Boadicea was destined to be restored to British mythology (or history) did not begin under auspicious circumstances for a woman ruler. The concept was on the contrary generally attacked. ‘Murmur ye at mine anointed because she is a woman? Who made man and woman, you, or I? If I made her to live, may I not make her to reign?’ These affronted questions were put into the mouth of Almighty God in a pamphlet of 1559: An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes against the late blown Blast. The anointed woman in question was Elizabeth Tudor, who had succeeded to the throne of England in the previous year at the age of twenty-five. The author was John Aylmer, newly restored Protestant Archdeacon of Stow.¹

Aylmer’s intention in quoting God, as it were, was to defend the new Queen from a far noisier piece of propaganda: John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment of Women. The virulence of Knox’s language in attacking the whole concept of female sovereignty can scarcely be exaggerated. Neither the passage of time nor the standards of another age have paled the rich colours of his abuse.^{f1 3} ‘How abominable before God, is the Empire or Rule of a wicked woman, yea of a traiteresse and bastard …’ he writes. Again: ‘For to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation or city, is repugnant to nature, continuously to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.’ As for women in general: ‘their sight in civil regiment is but blindness; their strength, weakness; their counsel foolishness and judgment frenzy, if it be rightly considered’.

The fathers of the Church are quoted, including St Paul, Tertullian (the whole sex is ‘the port and gate of the devil’) and St Augustine (‘woman ought to be repressed and bridled betimes, if she aspire to any dominion’). Then nature is brought into play: ‘no man ever saw the lion make obedience, and stoop before the lioness …’ Finally history is invoked: ‘For when the males of the kingly stock failed, as oft chanced in Israel and sometimes in Juda, it never entered into the hearts of the people to choose and promote any of the king’s daughters …’ In short: ‘where a woman reigneth and papists bear authority … there must needs Satan be president of the council’.

The reference to papists is significant. The ‘Regiment’ or rulership (its contemporary meaning) of females to which Knox so spuriously objected was that of three Catholic queens – Mary of Guise, regent of Scotland in the absence of her daughter Mary Queen of Scots (crowning her was ‘to put a saddle upon the back of an unruly cow’),⁴ Catherine de’ Medici in France, and Mary Tudor in England. It was a classic piece of historical bad timing that no sooner had Knox denounced the female regiment than a Protestant monarch – but one who unfortunately for Knox happened to be a woman – replaced Catholic Mary on the throne of England. Nor was Knox alone in his denunciation. The great Calvin too had joined in deploring such an unnatural development.

Speedy and embarrassed revisionism was the order of the day lest Elizabeth, the hope of the reformers, be fatally offended. It was particularly awkward that both Calvin and Knox, in an extension of that idea attributed to Muhammad that ‘a people who place a woman over their affairs do not prosper’, had stated that civil wars generally tore apart those kingdoms ruled over by women.⁵ Insecure at the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth would hardly welcome the notion that God himself might foment a rebellion in her own realm, just because she was a woman.

Calvin wrote a mortified letter to Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, William Cecil. He admitted that Knox had asked him in a private conversation what he thought of female sovereignty. ‘I candidly replied, that as it was a deviation from the original and proper order of nature,’ among the punishments Man had to endure since the Fall ‘it was to be ranked no less than slavery.’ On the other hand, individual women were occasionally well endowed to govern, evidently raised up by God’s authority, either to condemn the inactivity of the opposite sex or simply to set forth His own glory (as a creator). Calvin instanced the biblical Deborah and Huldah and quoted the prophet Isaiah: ‘Queens should be nursing mothers of the church.’ (Knox had dismissed both Deborah and Huldah inThe First Blast.)⁶

Even Knox himself was compelled to backtrack. In July 1559 he wrote with the best air of apology he could muster to the English Queen. ‘Nothing in my book conceived is, or can be prejudicial to your grace’s just regiment,’ he declared, adding characteristically, ‘providing that ye be not found ingrate [ungrateful] unto God.’ The official line to cope with Elizabeth’s presence on the throne was that indicated by Calvin to Cecil: female rule was still unnatural but every now and then God would provide for it for His own good reasons. Knox however added the rider that this put a special burden upon a female (as opposed to a male) sovereign to prove herself worthy of the task. In general the Protestants now fell back on the distinction between Good Queens and Bad Queens: useful in an age which would be marked by the ostensible public rivalry of a Catholic Mary Queen of Scots and Protestant Elizabeth.⁷

Aylmer’s defence in An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes leaned heavily on historical precedent.⁸ The stage army of Warrior Queens was dutifully paraded across his pages, including those who had enjoyed an ‘antique glory’ such as Artemisia, famous for vanquishing Xerxes. Revisionism was not entirely on the side of the Calvinists: Aylmer pointed out that it had been an obvious error to prefer Stephen to Matilda (the Empress Maud), since England had been punished with prolonged civil war for ignoring the claims of the rightful heir to the kingdom – or in this case heiress. This stood the previous Calvinist argument on its head. But perhaps the most remarkable piece of revisionism was that which introduced the name of Anne Boleyn among celebrated women of the past such as Margaret of Flanders:^f2 for had it not been Anne Boleyn who had brought about the wonders of the Protestant Reformation?

Historical precedent apart, Aylmer’s point of view was not really so far from that of Calvin, as revised, or even that of Knox. It was God who had appointed Queen Elizabeth to reign, as part of His divine plan: even, as in the selection of a female governor, working through weakness. When Aylmer wrote that if God made her to live, might He not also ‘make her to reign?’, he was expressly defending the divine selection of Elizabeth Tudor; in no way did Aylmer, Elizabeth’s other defenders, Elizabeth’s other critics and above all the Queen herself attempt to defend the right of women in general to rule equally with men.

As it is impossible to exaggerate the virulence of Knox’s language in The First Blast it is also impossible to exaggerate the general distaste and anxiety felt towards the notion of a female ruler. When Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary Tudor ascended the throne in 1553, many questioned whether it was even legal for a woman to inherit: there had been no queen regnant since that doubtful, because unsubstantiated, claim of the Empress Maud four centuries before. The rights of the female in the table of royal succession had generally been subsumed into those of her husband, who would often have a lesser claim of his own. Thus in 1485 Elizabeth of York had in fact an infinitely better dynastic claim to the throne than her future husband, Henry VII, de facto monarch after the battle of Bosworth. Then their marriage added her right to Henry’s might and he was of course the one out of the pair who ruled (Elizabeth being merely Queen Consort). The will of Edward VI had concentrated on the male heirs to females within the English royal succession such as his Grey cousins, although it was finally disregarded in favour of the superior dynastic claim of his elder half-sister Mary Tudor.¹⁰

Where might and right did not coalesce, the choice of a husband was always likely to be a problem in the case of a queen regnant. It was not at all clear that the husband of such a queen might not have the actual right to be regarded as the king: when the youthful Mary Tudor was betrothed to her cousin the Emperor, Henry VIII was worried whether he might not thus secure a title to her throne. One Chief Justice advised that although the husband could not call himself king by right, because the crown lay outside the bounds of feudal law (the husband of a feudal heiress automatically assumed her titles, rights and possessions), the Queen Regnant could grant him the title if she chose.¹¹ In the event Mary Tudor’s actual husband, Philip II of Spain, was considered to be King of England as well (a worrying precedent). Mary Queen of Scots’ disastrous second husband, Darnley, whom she married in 1565, was always referred to as King Henry.

Under the circumstances it was understandable that Cardinal Reginald Pole should have tried to persuade Queen Mary Tudor to take that course actually adopted by Queen Elizabeth: no marriage, but a single-minded devotion to that role granted her by heaven, and for which through many dangers she had been signally spared.¹² (Where marriage and position were concerned, as the relative fortunes of the unmarried Elizabeth and much-married Mary Queen of Scots demonstrate, queens regnant in the sixteenth century resembled career women in the late twentieth century, in that they experienced regrettable difficulty in ‘having it all’.)

The objections to female regiment were not entirely theoretical. As Sir John Neale pointed out in his biography of Elizabeth I, government itself was ‘a masculine business, with its world a court constructed for a king’. The idea of protecting a queen from the rigours and difficulties of government was of course implicit in the concentration on the topic of her marriage; Elizabeth’s widowed brother-in-law Philip II (and putative suitor at the beginning of her reign) advised her to marry soon, if only that her husband could then relieve her ‘of those labours which are only fit for men’.¹³

In vain the coronation tableaux leaned heavily on such stories as that of Deborah, ruling for forty years of peace. The popular mood was better expressed by the fears of the Spanish Ambassador de Feria following Elizabeth’s accession: ‘what can be expected from a country governed by a Queen, and she a young lass, who though sharp is without prudence?’ This was not mere chauvinism – in both senses of the word. There was trouble in the House of Lords over Elizabeth’s title as ‘Supreme Head of the Church’ in view of her inconvenient sex, and Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, made what were described as some ‘ripe remarks’ on the subject. In the end the Queen became the ‘Supreme Governor’.¹⁴

This, then, was to be the triumph of Queen Elizabeth I. She ascended the English throne at a time of outright popular hostility towards female sovereigns, and by a mixture of artfulness, intelligence and instinct survived to rule for forty-five years, her personal prestige – both as a woman and as a monarch – growing with every year.

Such a triumph did not happen overnight. Two years after Elizabeth’s accession – in 1560 – when the question of her own successor was being raised, the claim of Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, the last of the Plantagenets, was advanced over those of a host of females of royal Tudor descent (including Mary Queen of Scots): ‘the cry is that they do not want any women rulers’. How sublimely different was the mood of Leicester’s will of August 1587 in which he hoped Queen Elizabeth, now in her fifties, would prove to be ‘the eldest [i.e. the longest-living] prince that ever God gave over England’! If Leicester, the favourite, is held to be a prejudiced source, then one might cite the tribute of the Pope Sixtus V, around the same time, against whom the same charge of prejudice can scarcely be laid. The Queen of England might be only a woman, he wrote, and only mistress of half an island, yet she had made herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire and ‘by all’.¹⁵

The triumph also remained personal to Elizabeth. Forty years on, when this question of the old Queen’s successor had become acute, it was Mary’s son, Scottish James, who was the front runner (even though excluded, as an alien, by the will of Henry VIII), not only because he was of commensurate rank, but also because he was a man. The ever-confident French Ambassador – ultimately however no great prophet – wrote that it was ‘certain’ that the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman.¹⁶ The early years of James’s reign were also marked by a warmth on the part of the English towards the new ruler – just because he was a man, and a vigorous one in his prime – which is often overlooked in view of their subsequent disillusionment.

The general estimate of the female sex, never high, not only declined in the seventeenth century, but declined amid perceptible relief, now that humble lip-service did not have to be paid to She-who-was-on-the-Throne. In a poem printed in 1650 in memory of ‘our dread Virago’, Elizabeth, Anne Bradstreet called attention to this decline following the Queen’s death: ‘Now say, have women worth? Or have they none? Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone?’¹⁷

The fact was that the ‘dread Virago’ herself had never made any effort to improve the general appraisal of woman’s worth; for cogent reasons, that was the very last of her intentions. An interesting article in Feminist Review of 1980 by Allison Heisch considers Queen Elizabeth I at length in terms of those women who are ‘honorary males’, and thus have no particular impact ‘unless indirect and negative’ on the status of women of their time.¹⁸ (The same ‘negative’ argument was often applied by feminists to the presence of Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister of Great Britain since, as will be seen, Mrs Thatcher explicitly denied any debt to Women’s Liberation.) Queen Elizabeth would hardly have approved of the source of these sentiments – a feminist review. Had she been granted a glimpse into the future to witness the rise of feminism, she would, one must believe, have greeted the spectacle with a royal shudder; just as Queen Victoria, another queen regnant, looked on Women’s Rights with abhorrence.¹⁹ On the other hand, Queen Elizabeth I would have heartily approved of the verdict of ‘honorary male’.

It was customary for her to deride her own sex along stereotyped lines, out of policy. For example, women were popularly supposed to be chatterboxes: when the Queen was congratulated on knowing six languages, she remarked wryly that it was ‘no marvel to teach a woman to talk; it were harder to teach her to hold her tongue’.²⁰ She also believed what she said. For she was different. That was the constantly reiterated message.

The differentness of the Queen from all other female subjects was the cornerstone of her self-presentation, worked out or perhaps simply instinctively felt, by a genius at the art. Her weapons in this self-presentation were two. Firstly, she worked upon her female nature to provide a delicate, exquisite image of the lady who needed to be protected – and the goddess who had to be adored. Secondly, she presented herself as a ‘prince’: like many successful pieces of composite propaganda, the second part was in direct contradiction of the first.

In all this, there was one real danger and another possible one. The possible danger was of a husband, bringing with him perpetual masculine control. But by maintaining herself as a virgin goddess to the end of her life, despite a farrago of courtships, the Queen avoided that particular peril. Sir James Melville, visiting the English court on behalf of Mary Queen of Scots, observed to Elizabeth when she had been on the throne five years without committing herself to a bridegroom: ‘Madam … you think if you were married, you would be but Queen of England, and now you are King and Queen both; you may not endure a commander.’²¹ He went to the heart of the matter although neither he nor the Queen herself – whose most profound decisions were taken by the highly roundabout method of endless procrastination – can have envisaged that Elizabeth would end her life, still King and Queen, still without suffering a commander.

The real danger to Elizabeth, both as goddess and as ‘prince’, was war. For in the late sixteenth century Europe was a sphere where control passed inevitably to a man. In his History of Scotland George Buchanan, tutor to the young King James of Scotland, digressed in his turn on the unnaturalness of female government, especially in war: ‘’Tis no less becoming [in] a Woman to pronounce Judgment, to levy Forces, to conduct an Army, to give a Signal to the Battle, than it is for a Man to tease Wool, to handle the Distaff, to Spin or Card, and to perform the other Services of the Weaker Sex.’ For that which was reckoned ‘Fortitude and Severity’ in a man turned to ‘Madness and Cruelty’ in a woman.²² This was one challenge to her authority that Elizabeth could not avoid. When and if war broke out, the Queen not only had to suffer a commander, but she also had to go further and appoint one.

Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Queen Elizabeth showed from the beginning of her reign to the end a dislike and fear of war verging on the pathological. Her very jewels – always the emblematic messengers of her true feelings – spoke in favour of peace; as the years passed, she took to wearing jewels in the shape of spring flowers, in order to symbolize the peace which she was proud to have brought to the kingdom.²³ As to her commanders, she was of course extremely careful that they should be seen at all times as the royal representatives. The first need for a military initiative on the government’s part came in 1569 when the northern earls revolted. (Eleven peaceful years had passed since Elizabeth’s accession: in a poem written to celebrate the suppression of this rebellion, the Queen was to refer – without regret – to ‘our rusty sword’.) The revolt was put down by Lord Hunsdon. But when the Queen thanked him officially, it was for being ‘by God appointed to be the instrument of my glory’.²⁴

Then the Queen used every conceivable card in her hand – including that potential ace of trumps (which would never in fact be played), her marriage, in order to avoid military involvement in the Netherlands, where Protestant rebels were locked in conflict with the overlordship of Catholic Spain. When Elizabeth could hold back no longer, and command had gone to Leicester, she enjoined him firmly ‘not in any sort to hazard a battle without great advantage’. (There were to be no false heroics about the sheer glory of the contest here.) That zest for conquest which possessed Zenobia and Tamara was quite lacking in Queen Elizabeth I, who made of this deficiency – as some might have rated it – a virtue: ‘In my ambition of glory I have never sought to advance the territories of my land … I have used my forces to keep the enemy from you.’ She added pointedly, ‘I have thereby thought your safety the greater and your danger the less.’²⁵

War of course brought another kind of bondage, and this bondage applied to monarchs male and female alike: for war was liable to bring the monarch under the control of those who financed it, notably Parliament voting for the necessary taxation. Elizabeth practised an ostentatious parsimony in this respect, regarding war as a ‘cancer’ which ate up private men and their patrimony, princes and their estates. As Simon Adams has written recently, not only did Elizabeth have ‘no martial ambitions’ but she had on the contrary ‘a healthy suspicion of expensive military adventurism’.²⁶This sensible attitude (to those indifferent to the rival claims, so costly in men and money, of national glory) was especially prudent in view of her sex. If she were to exercise any control in the sphere of war, such a control might be considered unsuitable coming from a woman: in or out of her control, a war might bankrupt her.

It was Mary Queen of Scots, not Elizabeth, who referred to herself in the sad declining years of her captivity as one who would rather pray with Esther than take the sword with Judith; but the English Queen too was no Judith at heart. As a result of avoiding Judith’s severe and sword-wielding womanhood, Elizabeth had by 1574 freed herself from debt for the first time. This has been significantly contrasted with the situation in the last years of her reign, when she was no longer able to emulate peace-loving Esther or peacefully ruling Deborah: war now cost her the horrifying sum (then) of three and a half million pounds.²⁷

Part of the trouble with the ambitious young Essex in the 1590s was that his hotheaded love of war was inimical to his royal mistress, dote as she might upon his stylish rashness when it was displayed, for example, in a court tournament in her own honour. When Francis Bacon was advising his patron Essex how to secure a reconciliation with the Queen, he suggested that he should not be so warlike in his talk ‘for her majesty loveth peace’.²⁸

As the young Indian braves in Western films used to be routinely portrayed as eager for war, where their elders were content to smoke the pipe of peace, so Elizabeth and Essex were ranged against each other by their generations, he as a war-loving young man, she as a peace-loving old woman. It proved a recipe for disaster, but thanks to Elizabeth’s long practice of what she called the ‘wit of the fox’, it turned out in the end to be Essex’s disaster, not her own. The reference is to the Queen’s interview with the historian William Lambarde. In 1601 Lambarde presented her with hisPandecta, the various records of the Tower of London during the Middle Ages. A discussion concerning the meaning of certain mediaeval legal terms followed in which the Queen was pleased to demonstrate her own considerable learning. Were rediseisnes, for instance, as she supposed, unlawful and forcible throwing of men out of their lawful possessions? Lambarde confirmed that they were. ‘In those days’, the Queen observed with satisfaction, ‘force and arms did prevail: but now the wit of the fox is everywhere …’²⁹

*

Integral to Queen Elizabeth’s creation of herself as a ‘prince’ were sedulous references to her descent from King Henry VIII – ‘Great Harry’ – in a rich working of the Appendage Syndrome. Knox had advised the Queen in his somewhat limited apology not to ‘brag of your birth’ but brag she did, in full measure, and over and over again. (‘Well did she show, great Harry was her sire, Whom Europe did for valour most admire’, wrote Lady Diana Primrose after the Queen’s death.) Elizabeth was also artful in associating herself with contemporary male leaders, in order to underline her possession of ‘masculine’ courage. It was her recurrent theme (not only in that reverberating speech at Tilbury to which we will return) that she had ‘the heart of a man’, not of a woman. ‘And I am not afraid of anything’, she added on one occasion, having made the familiar boast to the Spanish Ambassador, declaring herself in the process to be quite as brave as the kings of Spain, France, Scotland and the whole house of Guise.³⁰

The greatest art of all was deployed paradoxically in persistently reminding her audience that she was Only-a-Weak-Woman, in order to evoke the desired reaction of wonder and disbelief: for surely here was the equal of any prince of the past! In 1586 for instance, Queen Elizabeth described her reaction to her accession: ‘bethinking myself on those things that fitted a King’. And she listed ‘justice, temper, magnanimity, judgement’ among them, adding modestly: ‘As for the two latter, I will not boast; my sex doth not permit it.’ The implication was clear. The Queen kept up these quasi-modest allusions to the end of her life. In almost her last public speech she reminded her audience of her ‘sexly weakness’, before going on to boast once again that God had given her a heart ‘which never yet feared foreign or home enemy’.³¹

Then there were the numerous otherworldly references to Diana, Juno, Astraea, Gloriana, Sweet Cynthia, the Fairy Queen and so on and so forth, as a goddess untouched by the depredations of time. (An ode celebrating her funeral referred to ‘this sweet slumbering maid’ with the air of one on her way to Parliament, not to her burial.) The extensive researches of Roy Strong in art and history have exposed the workings of this subtle and brilliant campaign – like some huge campaign for re-election lasting forty-five years, except the votes were cast in loyalty, not at the polling booth – by which Queen Elizabeth I secured first the affection, then the adoration of her people.³² In the apogee of this campaign, the ‘Accession’ picture of 1600 showing the triumph of Astraea, the Queen had finally been transformed into the first Virgin of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue: Virgo and Venus (at the age of sixty-seven) ever young and ever beautiful.³³

Nor, happily, did this self-presentation as a virgin goddess prevent the Queen from appearing also in the guise of the mother of her people, as the years passed. When Leicester expressed that hope in his will that Elizabeth would be the longest-reigning ‘prince that ever He [God] gave over England’ he went on to wish, in a splendid transfer of genders, ‘that she may indeed be a blessed mother and nurse to this people and church of England’. Sir John Harrington referred to her as the ‘natural mother’ of her subjects; Thomas Dekker, in his epitaph, described her as ‘having brought up (even under her wing) a nation that was almost begotten and born under her’.³⁴

For gradually her femininity, which called for a chivalry and protection denied to a king, became an asset, not a weakness. At the beginning of her reign at a tournament given in honour of the Duc de Montmorency, Queen Elizabeth watched with her ladies at the tiltyard while the earls of Rutland and Essex charged at each other at a signal given by her. But it had to be admitted that for all the prettiness of the torchlit spectacle – the two earls in blue and silver, the young Queen gilded and radiant – it was not thus that Great Harry had conducted himself at the beginning of his reign, he who had tired out eight to ten horses hunting, and then played tennis, and finally jousted himself. Twenty years later when the Queen, still more gilded, yet more radiant, watched a tourney of armed ‘Amazons’ versus knights, she had become the centre of an astonishing cult, in which even the warlike ‘Amazons’ had to be played by men, since such games were far too rough for the delicate sex of which she was the most delicate of all.³⁵

There is a special piquancy in this respect about Queen Elizabeth’s legendary meeting with Grace O’Malley, the Irish pirate captain, who is supposed to have appeared before her at Greenwich in 1593, barefoot, dressed in wild and ragged Irish costume. (One should say that this meeting is legendary only in the sense that it has given rise to many legends: the meeting did take place, as a result of Grace O’Malley’s petition to the Queen regarding her family and properties, although unfortunately no other details concerning it are known.) For Grace O’Malley, a woman of about the Queen’s own age – that is, sixty – had led exactly the kind of buccaneering life which went to make up an old-style Warrior Queen. ‘This was a notorious woman in all the coasts of Ireland’, wrote Sir Henry Sidney in 1577 of her numerous piratical ventures. Even if Grace O’Malley was not actually in rags, as the legend has it, the weatherbeaten appearance of this real-life Warrior Queen must have provided a sharp contrast to that of the bedizened and bejewelled English sovereign, pampered by a lifetime at a chivalric court.³⁶

Of course the process of incarnating the goddess Diana meant that hunting, that standby occupation of the Warrior Queen, could be vigorously pursued. The Queen, who had had arrows headed with silver and flighted with peacock’s feathers when she was a mere princess at Enfield, hunted with enthusiasm till the end of her life. On the other hand her renowned progresses around the country – that art form of self-display which she did not invent but energetically developed – showed her more statically: her purpose was to look, as a contemporary wrote, ‘like a goddess such as painters are wont to depict’.³⁷

And all the time, the tributes, the sonnets, the literary sighs and the long lyrical eulogistic poems poured forth. It was indeed a measure of the Queen’s success that in the last decade of her reign Shakespeare could create in Henry VI the savage character of Margaret of Anjou, and be confident that lines such as these following would not be regarded as treason.³⁸ Here York, smeared by Queen Margaret with his own child’s blood, crowned by her in mockery with a paper crown, knows that he is about to die:

How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex

To Triumph like an Amazonian trull

Upon their woes whom fortune captivates! …

O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!

When Shakespeare had York tell Margaret of Anjou (who was of course French):

Women are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible

Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless

he could not possibly be thought to be addressing Gloriana, Sweet Cynthia, Venus, Virgo, Astraea – or his sovereign. A man’s heart was evidently easier to accommodate within ‘a woman’s hide’ than a tiger’s.

History, as well as art, was summoned to the aid of Queen Elizabeth. The return of British Boadicea, driving her ‘cart’ as it was unromantically known in the sixteenth century, contributed most helpfully to the picture of a patriotic female leader. But there was also a fruitful cross-fertilization. For in turn the presence of a queen regnant on the throne ensured that when Boadicea did quite coincidentally re-emerge from the historical mists into which she had vanished, she was accorded respectful treatment. The first English translation of Tacitus was that of Sir Henry Savile in 1591: it was dedicated in flattering terms to Queen Elizabeth herself. Perhaps his own humble efforts might encourage the Queen to share with the world her own ‘rare and excellent translations of Histories’, wrote Sir Henry, ‘if I may call them translations which have so infinitely exceeded the originals’. The printer however issued a different message to the reader, according to that custom of the time by which some pertinent moral lesson was expected to be drawn from a historical work.³⁹

This was the moral of Tacitus: ‘If thou mislike their wars be thankful for thine own peace; if thou dost abhor their tyrannies, love and reverence thine own wise just and excellent Prince. If thou doest detest their Anarchy, acknowledge our own happy government, and thank God for her, under whom England enjoys as many benefits, as ever Reign did suffer miseries under the greatest Tyrant.’ And so we come back, but now in English, to the fortunes of the Britons’ previous queen ‘Voadica [sic], a lady of the blood of kings: for in the matter of governing in chief, they make no distinction of sex.’

The story of Boadicea had already been introduced to readers in Latin through the works of Polydore Vergil, an Italian humanist, who came to England at the beginning of the sixteenth century and became a member of the circle of Sir Thomas More. Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historica, written about 1512, with its first printed edition in Basle in 1534, drew on both Tacitus in the original and those epitomes of Dio Cassius, which were the only form in which his works survived.⁴⁰ It was Polydore Vergil who divided the protean Warrior Queen into two: in his case named Voadicia and Bonduica, using Tacitus for one and Dio for the other, an error which along with his confused geography was later copied by the Scottish chronicler Hector Boëce.

Boëce, a native of Dundee also writing in Latin, followed Polydore Vergil by placing all the fatal events of Boadicea’s rebellion in the north: his Queen Voada, as he calls her, is the widow of Arviragus (Prasutagus), and when she is daily lashed with ‘insufferable stakes’ while her daughters are deflowered, she appeals to her brother Corbrede, King of Scots, to avenge her. The King does send a message of protest to the Romans, only to receive an ‘outrageous answer’ loftily dismissing the protests of a mere ‘barbarian people’, with a reference to the ‘majesty’ of Rome itself.⁴¹

It was Boëce’s History of Scotland which Ralph Holinshed quarried for his own chronicles, first issued in 1577; just as Shakespeare in his turn would work over Holinshed’s material.⁴² It must indeed remain one of the minor but titillating What-might-have-beens of literature to speculate what would have happened if Shakespeare’s fancy had lighted on the story of Boadicea instead of, say, that of Macbeth, also taken via Holinshed from Boëce. Holinshed’s Queen Voada – a woman ‘not unworthy to be numbered among doughty chieftains’ – strongly resembles that of Boëce except that she has been brought slightly further south. The characters of her two daughters, unnamed by Tacitus or Dio, are also for the first time developed, as they were to be in subsequent seventeenth-and eighteenth-century dramas.

The elder daughter, also named Voada, subsequently marries that ‘noble Roman’ called Marius ‘who had deflowered her before her time’. (This sexual theme of the raped daughter either marrying a Roman or falling in love with him will be developed in the Boadicean plays of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.) The younger daughter, Voadicia, having gathered together a crew of soldiers on the Isle of Man, attacks the Romans as her mother had done, and is captured in Galloway by the Roman Petilius: ‘Upon her stout answers made unto him as he questioned with her about her bold enterprises, she was presently slain by the soldiers.’

The false distinction created by Polydore Vergil between Voadicia and Bonduica was one which Petruccio Ubaldini, an enterprising Florentine desiring royal patronage, kept alive. After a series of travels, including a visit to Scotland, Ubaldini, born in about 1542, settled down in England under the patronage of the twelfth Earl of Arundel. But he was after bigger game. In 1576 he presented to Queen Elizabeth the manuscript of Le vite delle Donne illustri del regno d’Inghilterra, e del regno di Scotia, which was printed still in Italian in 1591 (Italian was of course among the many languages in which the Queen was proficient).⁴³ There is a long dedicatory epistle ‘to the most serene and very wise Elizabeth, most powerful Queen of England …’ in which Ubaldini manages to blow his own trumpet as a scholar with almost as much vigour as he proclaims the Queen’s manifold virtues, which include, incidentally, her ‘valour’ in defending her peoples from the enemy, as well as her ‘clemency’. Among the illustrious ladies considered are Cartimandua, ‘a warlike woman’, and Matilda Augusta (Maud), praised for playing a manly role (intervenedo virilmente), which demonstrates that ‘women can be wise, prudent and capable …’ so long as they eschew all ‘softness’.

The next year Ubaldini gave Queen Elizabeth a further volume in manuscript, Le vite e i fatti di sei Donne illustri, which was never printed, perhaps because it did not involve British queens. The six ladies included Zenobia who was described as virile: ‘in that while her husband lived she was his equal in virtue and valour, and after his death she became famous far and wide for her great achievements in peace and in war’. Thanks, presumably, to this historical barrage, the relationship flourished: not only in 1577 but in 1588 the Queen and Ubaldini exchanged New Year gifts.⁴⁴

Both Spenser in the reign of Queen Elizabeth and Ben Jonson in that of James I (for his Masque of Queenes) drew upon the Britannia of William Camden for their allusions to Boadicea. Camden’s is an upbeat picture: ‘the Britains under the conduct of Boadicea had unanimously resolved to recover their old liberty’. It is also scholarly: based, as ever with Camden, on a proper study of the available sources, including not only Tacitus but the monk Gildas.⁴⁵ And although he hesitates over the name of the Warrior Queen as many have done before and since – Boadicea? Bunduica? Boodicia? – he places the Iceni in roughly their correct geographical position; it is true that Boadicea is described as capturing Maldon in Essex instead of Colchester, but the East Anglian Queen is no longer driving her chariot through the mountain passes of the north.

Spenser’s Warrior Queen, ‘stout Bunduca’, is one of the several ‘women valorous’ who are celebrated as the ancestresses to his ‘fair martial maid’, Britomart. It is a sympathetic portrait, with ‘stout Bunduca’ seen as a patriot, who ‘up arose and taking arms the Britons to her drew’; there is no hint of any atrocities being committed. Even her defeat is blamed upon the treachery of her captain, here named as Paulinus, and as for her suicide, that too is seen as glorious:

And yet, though overcome in happless fight,

She triumphed on death, in enemies despite.⁴⁶

Britomart herself, who dresses in man’s clothes for convenience, has had the classical Tomboy upbringing: as her father’s only daughter and his heir, she is taught to upset the most warlike rider with her spear and shield. (She naturally loathes such ladies’ pastimes as ‘to finger the fine needle and nice thread’.) Britomart’s whole delight is in ‘feats of arms’: the feat to which she is set by Spenser is that of rescuing the knight Artegall from the clutches of the evil Radegunde, Queen of the Amazons.

Nothing illustrates more forcibly the distinction successfully made by the 1590s between one valorous female warrior and the general notion of female rulership than Spenser’s treatment of Radegunde and Britomart respectively. Like the other captured knights in the Amazonian stronghold of Radegunde, Artegall is set to spin and sew: nor is there a choice in the matter for this captive househusband, for Artegall has to spin before he is allowed to eat. This behaviour on the part of the Amazons represents an odiously unnatural order to Spenser, as it did to the ancient Greeks. The Amazons are cruel (like Queen Margaret of Anjou) just because ‘they have shaken off the shamefast band, With which wise Nature did them strongly bind’, which is to obey the orders and laws of men. In short:

Virtuous women wisely understand

That they were born to base humility

Unless the heavens them lift to lawful sovereignty.

Britomart herself, her task of rescue performed, and the ‘Tyranesse’ Radegunde defeated, removes the helmet which made her look like the war goddess Bellona, and drops her shield. She now becomes ‘a gentle courteous Dame’. For a while she remains with the chastened Amazons, to be adored as a goddess; taking the opportunity however to repeal that ‘liberty of women … which they had long usurped; and them restoring to men’s subjection …’ Her story ends with her happy union with the knight Artegall, the warrior maid symbolizing Chastity – one of the many allegorical figures representing Queen Elizabeth in the poem – united to the knight who symbolizes Justice.

Throughout The Faerie Queene there are plenty of other women lifted (like Queen Elizabeth) to ‘lawful sovereignty’, who exist to be contrasted with those evil or licentious creatures such as Radegunde, Semiramis and Cleopatra.⁴⁷ The last named, a figure of lust, is now to be found in the unpleasant House of Pride: in contrast the lawful queens are virgins or at least chaste. There is Belphoebe (one of Elizabeth’s favourite allegorical incarnations), the huntress who puts Braggadochio to flight; Mercilla, ‘a Maiden Queen of high renown’, who wins her duel with the malevolent Duessa, representing Mary Queen of Scots. Most powerfully described of all is Spenser’s Gloriana, ‘the flower of grace and chastity’. Having been chosen – like Queen Elizabeth herself – to rule by God, Gloriana inspires a ‘sacred reverence’ in all her subjects, as being ‘Th’ Idol of her makers [God’s] great magnificence’. It was this sacred reverence which Queen Elizabeth I, no Radegunde at the head of an unnatural order of cruel women, had worked so hard to inspire.

Queen Elizabeth’s incandescent appearance at Tilbury in August 1588, at a moment of national peril, affirmed in practical terms her theoretical triumph. It was just on thirty years since Elizabeth’s tricky accession to the throne of England, when the cry was ‘they do not want women rulers’. Now her country was facing, as it was thought, the assault of the Spanish Armada. Here was one challenge from which this reluctant Britomart could not gracefully extricate herself. Instead, how brilliant she made of the challenge the apogee of her glory both as a monarch and as a Warrior Queen!

Leicester described how her appearance ‘inflamed the hearts of her poor subjects’. Bishop Goodman spoke for many who would now freely ‘adventure our lives to her service’. Camden, as her first historian, summed it up: ‘Her presence and words fortified the courage of the captains and soldiers beyond all belief.’⁴⁸ Emulating chaste Diana might be her preferred course in public, but in 1588 Bellona too proved to be within Elizabeth’s range: at least, her own special version of Bellona.

This was her version and this was her performance. A woman in her mid-fifties, raddled and rather overdressed, mounted on a carefully selected docile horse, reviewed loyal troops on top of a small hill in Essex. Yet that feat on the part of the Queen – if feat it can be called – quickly passed into the romantic annals of our history as a deed of daring to be ranked with the first charges of Boadicea’s scythe-wheeled chariot fifteen hundred years before. Boadicea and her daughters were said to have lived again at Tilbury ‘through this our Queen, England’s happie Queene’, in the words of a contemporary poet (James Aske); their bravery no greater ‘in those actual deeds … than did our sacred Queene, Here signs display of courage wonderful’.⁴⁹

The Earl of Leicester officially invited his sovereign to visit Tilbury on 27 July 1588. He did so in his capacity of the ‘Queen’s lieutenant’ or the ‘Lord General’ as he was sometimes otherwise known. Tilbury Camp – actually at West Tilbury where a church recently turned to a private dwelling now stands – contained the flower of the Queen’s troops and was consequently known as the Camp Royal. Tilbury Fort itself, on the River Thames, some twenty-six miles below London Bridge, had been constructed by Henry VIII in 1539. Some two miles from the river, the site of the camp had been chosen with a view to blocking the Spanish invader from reaching London either by road or river, part of a network of defensive fortifications. Since it lay on a kind of plateau on top of its hill – its sides about one hundred and fifty feet high – the camp provided ‘as goodly a prospect as may be seen or found’.⁵⁰

It was on 20 July that the Spanish Armada had been sighted approaching the English Channel; whereupon the English fleet engaged it. Such was the good fortune of the English fireships that by the end of the month the Spanish fleet was compelled to flee northwards, ‘driven like a flock of sheep’ in the immortal phrase of Sir Francis Drake. At this point however the stately Spanish galleon–sheep vanished from view. It is important to realize that just because they did vanish, the extent of their dispersal and damage was not appreciated for some time. (Some messages concerning the damage were received while the Queen was actually at Tilbury.) Elizabeth’s appearance, dea ex machina, at Tilbury, should not therefore be understood in terms of an empty exercise. It was an exercise, it is true, but one intended to perform a vital function in rallying the national morale in time of war. ‘Ye shall comfort not only these thousands’, wrote Leicester of the camp’s inhabitants, ‘but many more that shall hear of it.’

The Queen set forth for Tilbury by water on 8 August. Silver trumpets blew to mark her progress, or as one of the contemporary eyewitness accounts had it, with a characteristic allusion to her illustrious parentage:

And to barge upon the water

Being King Henry’s royal daughter

She did go with trumpet’s sounding …

But when she landed at about midday (at the present blockhouse of the fort) there was music of a more martial kind: drums, fifes were heard and finally the guns thundered. And so like Boadicea – in the words of the Essex historian Morant like the war goddess Bellona, or like ‘a king’ in other contemporary accounts – Queen Elizabeth was brought ceremonially into the centre of the Camp Royal.

The method of transport used was a coach: but this bejewelled and spangled affair was indeed different from Boadicea’s mythical chariot, and different again from the light wooden structure of the Celts which that forgotten figure Boudica would actually have used. This chariot – never intended to see a battlefield – was chequered with precious stones in patterns of emeralds, diamonds and rubies. According to the poet James Aske (who was present among the soldiers) it reminded observers of nothing so much as ‘the heavenly car’ of the sun god Phoebus, drawn by his ‘foaming steeds’.

One side-effect of Elizabeth’s thirty-year propaganda campaign was the frantic desire to protect and cosset the Queen’s own person, a desire which of its very nature could never have been applied to the same extent to a male sovereign. (The Earl of Pembroke offered to attend Her Majesty with 300 horses and 500 foot armed at his own cost; a Dorset regiment was said to have offered five hundred pounds to form part of the Queen’s Guard.)⁵¹ Now, as she passed, the men actually fell on their knees as though in prayer to her. Aske, whose descriptive poem of the whole wondrous occasion was aptly titled Elizabetha Triumphans, described her passage thus:

They couch their pikes and bow their ensigns down

When as their sacred royal Queen passed by

In token of their loyal bearèd hearts

To her alone, and none but only she …

It was ironic that at one point the cries of the kneeling soldiers as they called out blessings upon her name became so enthusiastic that the Protestant Queen sent messengers of reproof. Officially at least Elizabeth frowned upon such ‘idolatrous reverence’. However much her subjects might happily sublimate their feelings for the banished Virgin Mary of the old Catholic religion in their adoration of their female sovereign, this was not to be a conscious process. Deafening cries of ‘God Save the Queen’ were one thing, prayers quite another. The Queen’s behaviour looked forward not back: for her particular stance, ‘cheerfully her body bending’ and ‘waving her royal hand’, prefigured royal behaviour on ceremonial occasions up to and including the present day.

The Queen spent the night at Saffron Garden.⁵² The next day – 9 August – she returned to the camp, and with her princely image cunningly enhanced by the expedient of abandoning her customary female attendants – ‘her ladies she did leave behind her’, wrote Aske – she reviewed her troops and made that speech which would make of her the female equivalent of King Arthur, a symbol of a nation’s proud defiance of danger. Furthermore, for once it is gratifying to relate that mythology has not burnished the event, for Queen Elizabeth I did deliver the famous speech – we have the evidence of the Earl of Leicester’s chaplain, Leonel Sharp, who was present at Tilbury, was summoned to record it the next day and related her words later to the Duke of Buckingham: ‘This I thought would delight your Grace …’⁵³ (It should be further noted that its contents, far from being unusual, were, as we have seen, at the very core of her utterances concerning her ‘sexly weakness’ from beginning to end of her reign.)

The Queen was dressed in white velvet, with a silver cuirass over her dress, to symbolize once more – to those who might have missed it – the ever-present danger to her person: ‘the most dainty and sacred thing we have in this world to care for’, as Leicester expressed it.⁵⁴ A page walked behind her holding a helmet adorned with white plumes: but this Bellona-like helmet was never actually put on, lest one iota of the contrast between the Queen’s fragile femininity of person and the bold masculinity of her demeanour be missed by her audience. Part of the review was conducted on foot. But for the speech itself the Queen was, in Aske’s words, ‘most bravely mounted on a stately steed’: the steed in question being a stout white gelding which could be trusted to behave itself, specially imported for the occasion. Nevertheless the presence of the white horse – which could be a mettlesome charge in the eye of an adoring beholder – was, like the armour and helmet, another piece of careful planning; these were the sumptuous trappings for the message which was to follow.

She had come among them, said Queen Elizabeth, as they could see, ‘not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all, to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust’. She continued with that deathless declaration, the very watchword of Elizabeth I as a Warrior Queen: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of Europe should invade the borders of my realm …’ Aske, paraphrasing that section of her speech in his verse tribute, fails, unlike the Queen, at the last fence of inspiration:

Although she be by Nature weak

Because her sex no otherwise can be

Yet wants she not the courage of her sire.

‘Rather than any Dishonour shall grow by me,’ went on Elizabeth, ‘I myself will take up arms … In the meantime my Lieutenant General shall be in my stead.’ The latter sentiment is almost an afterthought compared to the thrilling – but frightening – possibilities of the former.

How far distant the Queen on her white steed had now removed herself from the rest of the lowly female race! Dazzled by the matchless words, it is difficult even to bear in mind that the so-called weaker sex actually played an important if subservient role in European armies of the time. ‘As woman was created to be a helper to man, so women are great helpers to armies, to their husbands, especially those of the lower condition …’, Sir James Turner would write in the next century. In the army, as outside it, women provided what has been called ‘the warp of the social fabric’ by giving sexual favours and by childbearing, quite apart from their ceaseless cooking and nursing which was taken for granted. Three years before Tilbury, Leicester himself in the Netherlands had drawn up a list of ‘sundry disorders and horrible abuses’ among his troops. These included the presence of ‘many vagrant idle women in an army’. But he deliberately excluded from their number the many lawful wives ‘to tend the sick and serve as launderers’.⁵⁵

Elizabetha Triumphans simply did not belong to the same gender as these inferior but essential workers. Or if she did, it was only to enhance still further the measure of her own kind of military glory, far from the sweaty field of battle, close to the minds and hearts of her people.

¹ But the nineteeth-century editor of Knox’s works – male – observed that if John Knox had foreseen Queen Victoria ruling over a vast Christian empire, he would have died happy, like Simeon singing the Nunc Dimittis in the temple!²

² It was another awkward situation that Henry VIII’s Act of Succession of 1536 declaring Elizabeth to be a bastard had never been repealed. Nor was it repealed now.⁹ Since Elizabeth was able to succeed under the terms of her father’s will, it was thought more tactful to let that sleeping and by now rather embarrassing old dog of King Henry’s matrimonial entanglements lie.