Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (51 page)

The Rani’s epitaph at the hands of her own people was to be nobler yet. The verdict of Colonel Malleson, who continued the work of Sir John Kaye in his own history of the mutiny published in 1896, proved correct: ‘Whatever her [the Rani’s] faults in British eyes may have been, her countrymen will ever remember that she was driven by ill-treatment into rebellion and that she lived and died for her country.’
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Nana Sahib, that master of ‘ferocity and slaughter’, escaped to Nepal where his legendary adventures as a wandering fakir inspired Jules Verne. Since his exact date of death was unknown, false Nanas were to reappear throughout the nineteenth century.
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The Rani’s adopted son Damodar Rao had a more prosaic but happier fate: he surrendered to the British in March 1860 and was subsequently granted a pension.
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But the Rani’s reputation passed into the airy world of ballad and song. There are statues of the Rani – at Gwalior as well as Jhansi – and nowadays innumerable highly coloured pictorial representations of the celebrated Warrior Queen. Nevertheless, it is by the ballads that the Rani of Jhansi is preserved in the Indian folk memory. A study by P. C. Joshi –
Folk Songs of ‘1857’
– published as part of a symposium in 1957 to mark the centenary,
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explains why: ‘The Rani’s noble example and supreme sacrifice have blazed the path for countless sons and daughters of India to join the freedom struggle. She is one of the immortals of our national movement and such songs have kept her alive in our memory.’

The song of joy, the song of freedom rises

In every corner of the land this song is heard

Here fought Lakshmi Bai and Peshwa Nana …
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Some of these songs have a fairy-tale quality: the Rani moulds her army from clay and stones, she makes swords from mere wood. Others dwell on the loyalty of her followers: the chief gunner guarding the main gates of Jhansi who tells his companion that ‘we have to die one day, brother’ and ‘I shall choose today, For our Queen I shall lay down my life’. The old names ride again, but in a different guise. Here is ‘Proud Hugh Rose’ begging for ‘one pot of water’ to quench his thirst. The heroism of the Rani is however a constant element:

Old India was filled again with the bloom of youth …

wrote Subhadra Kumari Chauhan,

The old sword flashed once more in fifty-seven

This is the story we have heard

From the Bundelas who worship Shiva

The Rani of Jhansi fought valorously and well.

One popular ballad in particular calls attention to the salient characteristic of a heroine who, like Boadicea, will never be forgotten by her own people: that, for all the apparent weakness of her sex, she was in fact in courage the equivalent of any hero:

How valiantly like a man fought she,

The Rani of Jhansi

On every parapet a gun she set

Raining fire of hell,

How well like a man fought the Rani of Jhansi

How valiantly and well!

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In 1957, to mark the centenary, his descendant was also given a symbolic monetary reward by the Indian state.
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Iron Ladies

The Iron Lady of the Western World! Me? A Cold Warrior? Well, yes – if that is how
they
wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.

MARGARET THATCHER
(1976)

W
hen Queen Boadicea, courtesy of the sculptor Thornycroft, did finally take up her position upon the Thames Embankment in 1902, it was as an embodiment of the age of empire. Lest the message be missed, Cowper’s proud lines of prophecy were inscribed upon the plinth:
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Regions Caesar never knew

Thy Posterity shall sway.

Queen Victoria had died early in the previous year, at the ripe age of eighty-one. The role of the female ruler, provided it did not involve the actual battlefield, appeared to be conducive to longevity. In 1900 a very different kind of Warrior Queen, Tz’u-Hsi, the so-called Dragon Empress of China, had the impudence to solicit support from Queen Victoria during the Boxer Rebellion which she herself had done much to foment on this very basis: ‘two old women’, so ran her telegram, should understand each other’s difficulties.
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(Born in 1835, an approximate
contemporary of the Rani of Jhansi, the Dragon Empress was sixteen years younger than Victoria.) Nevertheless even in 1902 the erection of the Boadicean monument should still be seen as celebrating the kind of maternal imperialism – indistinguishable to its practitioners from patriotism – personified by Victoria herself.

Curiously enough, the Embankment site was a second, or if one remembers Prince Albert’s original suggestion of the Hyde Park Arch nearly a half century before, a third choice.
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Thornycroft’s project had passed through various vicissitudes following the Prince’s premature death in 1861. To be sure, there was a melancholy bonus in a series of equestrian portraits of his former patron; but Thornycroft had toiled on the Boadicean group for fifteen years before a favourable review of it in
The Times
in 1871 suggested the possibility of a government commission. The sculptor resumed work in 1883, but died two years later, at which point his family offered the group to the public, together with a contribution to the heavy cost of casting.

It was a spurt of interest in the supposed burial place of Boadicea near the end of the century which was responsible for the final step. The London County Council proposed to erect the statue at the top of Parliament Fields, on the grounds that a tumulus there was the traditional site; a subscription of £2,800 was raised to have Thornycroft’s statue cast in bronze, with a further £1,500 for a pedestal by J. G. Jackson. Intervention from the Society of Antiquaries, who rejected the Parliament Fields tradition, left the Boadicean group once more siteless, until 1902 when it reached its present resting place, near Westminster Bridge, and within sight of the Houses of Parliament.

Beyond Cowper’s significant lines, the inscription beneath the statue kept various other options open. The subject of the monument was described as ‘Boadicea (Boudicca) Queen of the Iceni Who died
AD
61 after leading her people against the Roman invader’. Boadicea’s daughters, however, although shown as part of the group – two strapping females, bare-breasted as Amazons
for the fight – suffered from their usual official disregard and were not named or even mentioned. As for the Iceni Queen herself (her hair in a neat pageboy style rather than flowing), ‘One really must admire her sang-froid’, wrote Lord Edward Gleichen in 1928 in a study of London’s open-air statuary. For the horses, modelled – not too closely one hopes – on those of Prince Albert’s stables, are galloping wildly, but Boadicea has no reins with which to control them, as she stands coolly aloft with her spear.
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This belief in the nobility of empire, attached to the idealized character of a patriotic woman, was to be one important element in the survival of the Boadicean legend.
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The year 1900 for example saw the publication of
Britain’s Greatness Foretold
, the story of Boadicea by Marie Trevelyan, which traced the foundations of ‘our present freedom’ back to those ancient struggles against the Romans.
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(The South African War against the Boers had begun while Marie Trevelyan was in the process of writing.) The book is redolent with direct comparisons between Boadicea and Queen Victoria: also characteristic of the time is the general emphasis placed upon the inspiring femininity of both queens.

British colonization, Marie Trevelyan pointed out, was the task of families, not soldiers, ‘just as it was the woman Boadicea who rallied all the tribes of Britain round her in her day’. Led by Queen Victoria, it was the women of Great Britain who had materially helped to spread and maintain the British Empire. As for Marie Trevelyan’s Boadicea, even in war she never surrendered her natural tenderness: at the last battle indeed the ‘majestic queen’ was described as being ‘lost in the weeping woman’. On the other hand, when Boadicea’s men responded loudly to her speech with the rallying cry ‘For Britain, Boadicea and freedom’, they were of course intent on making aggressive war rather than domestic peace.

So Boadicea, aided both by late Victorian perceptions concerning women and empire, and by the image of Queen Victoria
herself, passed into the pantheon of idealized patriotic women. It is a place she has not lost in the century since the erection of her statue and is not likely to lose, so long as national crises arise, demanding reference to comforting historic symbols of courage and endurance.

Patriotic fervour helped to make up one part of the modern Boadicean plinth. At the same time, as women stirred in their struggle for general recognition as a sex (rather than as privileged individuals) Boadicea’s protean legend began to be employed in quite a different connection. Pageants had become increasingly popular in late Victorian and Edwardian times; in this manner the British aristocracy was able to show off both its adequate historical knowledge and its more than adequate historical fancy dress, in a pleasurable real-life example of zeugma. But
The Pageant of Great Women
, first performed on 10 November 1909 at the Scala Theatre, London, was a pageant with a difference, since it was performed in the suffragette cause.
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This was two months after the Prime Minister, Asquith, had instructed the prison doctors to feed suffragette hunger-strikers forcibly. Originally produced by the play department of the Actresses’ Franchise League, written by Cicely Hamilton, designed and directed by Edith Craig, the pageant subsequently toured the country.

Boadicea, ‘a Briton in arms’, was one of the most prominent characters. When she appeared, spectators were adjured to ‘look on her who stood … and spat defiance at the hosts of Rome!’ A photograph of the event in the
Daily Mirror
shows what they saw: a stalwart Boadicea, towering over her companions and got up more or less according to Dio Cassius’ instructions, with flowing tresses over a barbaric robe, a torc and other jewels, and an enormous spear in her hand (another possible comparison, to Ellen Terry’s famous portrait as Lady Macbeth, reminds one that Edith Craig was Ellen Terry’s daughter).

The character of Prejudice was played by a man. Otherwise the familiar stage army – in this case literally so – of great women was
paraded in categories which included ‘Learned Women’, ‘Artists’ and ‘Saintly Women’ as well as ‘Rulers’ and ‘Warriors’. Here Queen Zenobia ‘of the hero’s heart’ was placed among the Rulers; but the Rani of Jhansi – ‘though but a child in years’ – found her place among the Warriors together with Boadicea, Joan of Arc and the fourteenth-century Scot Agnes Dunbar. It was intended by this appeal to the rich past to draw public attention to the ‘physical, intellectual, creative and ethical’ strengths of women, in contrast to Prejudice’s contemptuous declaration that Woman’s innate stupidity made her incapable of thought. Fifty-two actresses took part.

In order to facilitate touring, it was Edith Craig’s plan that such a pageant should contain only three speaking parts, all allegorical; these were performed by professionals. Otherwise members of suffragette societies on the spot would supply the colourful heroines, Edith Craig arriving to dress them. This ingenious arrangement was not without its little local difficulties: the extreme popularity of the role of Joan of Arc constituted one of them. Another of a rather different nature was encountered when the members of a suffrage society in a university town thought they knew enough for no one to be anxious to play Catherine the Great: who, ‘whatever may have been her merits as a ruler, was renowned for the scandals of her private life’. Finally a girl was found who presumably shared Edith Craig’s view that a good part was a good part for all that.