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 ‘tore’, 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 Chatsworth, 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* – 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
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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 text 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
Unlike Queen Elizabeth I, for example, with her private pacifism and her artificial creation of a Warrior Queen persona, Queen Jinga followed in the bold tradition of Boadicea as she actually was (so far as we can tell about the British leader). That is, the Angolan Queen, described by a European with much truth as ‘a Cunning Virago’, led her people in war against the forces of an alien would-be occupying power, failing in the end to throw off their yoke. As a result, there is another parallel with Boadicea. Jinga’s story, too, has survived down the centuries in its own emolliated form, to make her a patriotic heroine in her country today.
The Queen as a symbol of national resistance is of course a category into which female rulers can fall without necessarily displaying the sheer belligerence of a Boadicea or a Jinga. As we shall see, both Maria Theresa and Catherine the Great shared Elizabeth I’s prudent love of peace not war; a preference which in Europe and its environs was fast becoming the hallmark of an intelligent female leader, and, one might argue, has remained so ever since. On the other hand, there is always a special niche for the Boadicean type of Warrior Queen in her country’s pantheon, which does at least suggest a lingering connection in the popular consciousness to the ancient goddesses of war.
Within the confines of this book, the nineteenth-century Rani of Jhansi will also be found to come into that category: but examples are found in many different civilizations throughout the world and straddle history. In AD 39, twenty-odd years before Boadicea led her own uprising, two Vietnamese sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, led the first rising in their country against the domination of the Chinese.20 The parallels between the story of Trung Trac and that of Boadicea are even more exact than those of Queen Jinga; Trung Trac was a lady of title, the widow of a man murdered by the Chinese, and she herself was raped by them. Together with her sister, she mustered an army of vassals to avenge her husband’s death. Hers was not the only female heroism attached to her cause: of Trung Trac’s supporters, Phung Thi Chinh, who was heavily pregnant, did not hesitate to plunge into the middle of the fray and, when she actually gave birth, paused merely to strap her baby on her back before hacking her way out. The kingdom of the battling Trungs, extending south to Hué and north to southern China, lasted only three years: finally defeated by the Chinese, the sisters flung themselves into a river and drowned.
Like the Trungs, Trieu Au in the third century has survived in Vietnamese myth as a female war leader who stood out against Chinese oppression. Trieu Au’s story is the stuff of Western fairy tales as well as Vietnamese myth: an orphan who was cruelly treated by her brother and sister-in-law, she killed the latter and escaped to the mountains. A virgin warrior (she is sometimes known as the ‘Vietnamese Joan of Arc’), she raised a thousand troops to liberate her country from the Chinese in 248. When her brother tried to remonstrate with her, Trieu Au answered him boldly in words which have become enshrined at the heart of her legend: ‘I want to rail against wind and tide, kill the whales in the ocean, sweep the whole country to save people from slavery, and I have no desire to take abuse.’ Trieu Au’s story too ended in defeat and suicide: but the Vietnamese prints which show her in her golden armour, a sword in either hand, riding upon an elephant, give a better impression of the undying quality of her reputation as a patriotic Vietnamese heroine (a reputation only enhanced in Vietnam today where she is regarded as an early resister against Vietnam’s modern enemy: China).
It is the oppression of an imperialist power – the Romans, Portuguese, British and Chinese respectively – which not only links the fortunes of Boadicea, Jinga, the Rani of Jhansi and the Vietnamese heroines, but is also half responsible for their immortality. The other essential element is of course the subsequent resurgence of the defeated people in question, without which their heroines’ martial reputations might have perished with them. (A street in Luanda was named after Queen Jinga immediately after Angolan independence.) Cowper’s ode was written to justify Britain against America – ‘empire is on us bestow’d’ – in an age when a queen no longer needed to be overtly militaristic, and Boadicea had become a mere waxwork figure of generalized patriotism. Yet ironically its lines could have been taken as rallying cries for these other far more genuine ‘Boadiceas’.
Jinga Mbandi was born in the 1580s and lived until 1663, an extraordinary span for any human being at that time. But then Queen Jinga was extraordinary, the mere facts of her career, ungarnished by propaganda, causing wonder. As in the case of Queen Tamara of Georgia, the swirling legends of creation which wreathed so many African societies were not inimical to the idea of a powerful, even all-powerful woman. These legends included a tradition of female semi-deities, such as the two mighty queens of the Mpororo of central East Africa, priestesses to their people, carried round in baskets by their ministers. In the Hausa lands of northern Nigeria (where creation was said to have begun with a woman going out and founding a kingdom), a queen known as Amina ruled in Katsina in the first half of the fifteenth century; south of Zaria, a woman, Bazao-Turunku, led another warrior tribe. There were feats of arms by the women of the Nilotic Lango.21
Nor did this tradition die away with Jinga’s own death. Livingstone and Stanley encountered independent queens ruling the Fanti in Ghani; the ‘King’s Amazons’ of Dahomey were not so much notorious in the eyes of their opponents as celebrated. During the course of King Gueso’s disastrous war against Abeokuta, they stood their ground while the men fled, or, as Captain Duncan of the Life Guards expressed it, ‘On a campaign I would prefer the women of that country, as soldiers, to the men.’ Sarraounia, a recent film directed by Med Hondo of Mauritius from a novel by Aboulaye Mamani of Niger, was based on real events that occurred in Central Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of an African queen, half-warrior, half-sorceress, who leads her people to victory against the oppressive French colonial power in true Boadicean style, a towering figure of matriarchal strength as she shakes her spear and invokes the tribal
gods before battle. Nor have such manifestations died away in the present century: popular uprisings in Uganda in 1987 were headed by a woman, Alice Lakwena, a self-styled high priestess of magic who inspired her Holy Spirit Movement to battle.22
Jinga herself operated in central West Africa, where the two principal kingdoms were those of Kongo and Ndongo. She was probably the daughter of the King – the Ngola – of Ndongo, with a mother from a vassal tribe. Until a few years before Jinga’s birth, the Portuguese presence in Ndongo had consisted of friendly missionaries; but its geographical situation made it an ideal base for the growing Portuguese slave trade. With that in mind, Luanda was founded in 1576, and given its first Portuguese governor. It is from the century of conflict which followed – ending in the Portuguese victory – that Jinga’s name has emerged as a heroic national figure.
We first hear of her, however, as an official negotiator with the Portuguese on behalf of her brother, the new Ngola, in the early 1620s. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the slave markets based in Angola were rapidly expanding: an enthusiastic official wrote that the huge interior population would provide slaves enough ‘until the end of the world’.23 Ten thousand of them annually were already being exported from Luanda. It was a trade from which the African chiefs (like the Arabs) did not flinch when it suited their local purposes. Their selling members of rival or hostile tribes for a good price was one part of the process which enabled the Portuguese to build up such a gargantuan and horrifying trade, in order to satisfy the greedy labour demands of the Brazilian plantations and mines. But the Africans wanted co-operation to be on their own terms: and they also naturally wished to preserve their independence. Thus the aggressive new Portuguese Governor of Luanda – João Mendes de Vasconcelos – had exiled the Ngola of Ndongo to the Kwanza Islands.