The Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  The Queen’s soft life so far were fled

  His Art must now recall her from the Dead.

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

  The Society of Roman Knights, which was formed in 1722 and lasted for three years, was the brainchild of William Stukeley, the first Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries founded in 1718.15 Stukeley was a man of an unconventional cast of mind, with a passion for Druids which finally overwhelmed his archaeological good sense – he did much valuable fieldwork at Avebury for example. Members of the Society, whose aim was to ‘search for and illustrate’ Roman monuments in Britain, took their titles from Celtic princes and other notables associated with the Roman Conquest, such as Cingetorix (Lord Winchelsea), Prasutagus and Venutius (Maurice Johnson and Roger Gale, fellow antiquaries) and Agricola (adopted by Sir John Clerk, author of that unflattering portrait of Queen Anne quoted earlier). Stukeley himself was Chyndonax, then believed to be an authentic Druid’s name.

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

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

  In another sense, the character of Frances Countess of Hertford, the philanthropic court lady and poetaster, was about as far from the patriotic and partisan Celtic Warrior Queen as it would be possible to imagine. (An equally inappropriate sobriquet was that of ‘Veleda, Archdruidess of Kew’ – a reference to Tacitus’ tower-dwelling prophetess – applied to the Dowager Princess Augusta, mother of George III, by William Stukeley in 1753, when dedicating a book about Druids to her.) The final accolade for misplaced use of the Boadicean myth must however be reserved for William Cowper in his eponymous ode of 1780.18

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

  When the British warrior queen,

  Bleeding from the Roman rods

  Sought with an indignant mien

  Counsel of her country’s Gods

  Sage beneath a spreading oak

  Sat the Druid, hoary chief,

  Every burning word he spoke

  Full of rage and full of grief.

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

  Regions Caesar never knew

  Thy posterity shall sway

  Where his eagles never flew

  None invincible as they.

  The ode ends:

  Ruffians! pitiless as proud

  Heaven awards the vengeance due;

  Empire is on us bestow’d

  Shame and ruin wait for you.

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

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

  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 d
rowned.

  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.

  Jinga’s task was to negotiate the independence of Ndongo from the Portuguese, and at the same time to enlist their help in expelling the Imbangalas from the Ndongo kingdom. It is generally agreed that Jinga conducted these negotiations skilfully although certainly not as one raising her voice ‘for suppliant humanity’ (as that watered-down Zenobia was purported to do in the eighteenth century: the real Zenobia had much more in common with Queen Jinga). Perceiving for example, in the desire of the Portuguese to baptize her, a possible entry into their favour, she allowed herself to add to her armoury of names with that of Anna de Sousa (in honour of the incoming Governor Correira de Sousa). Her sisters, who would show themselves, like Jinga, wily and intelligent characters, became the Ladies Grace and Barbara respectively.

  In 1624 Jinga’s brother the Ngola died under mysterious circumstances: possibly he committed suicide, but possibly also Jinga had him killed.24 Whatever the truth – and legend credited Jinga with another murder at the same time, that of her nephew, with the additional titillating accusation that she subsequently ate his heart – it was certainly Jinga who benefited from these demises, since she now assumed power. Unlike Pocahontas, who remained ‘the Lady Rebecca’, the Angolan princess now renounced her convenient Christianity. Anna de Sousa was no more; Queen Jinga was born.

  The next important stage in the story of this ‘redoubtable Amazon’, as C. R. Boxer has called her, was reached when the Portuguese declared war upon her.25 They did so reluctantly. A tacit peaceful alliance in the business of producing and shipping slaves was infinitely more desirable. Queen Jinga however played by her own rules. In the end the Portuguese preferred to set up a puppet chief from another tribe on the Ndongo throne, and Jinga was driven out. The loyalty of her Mbandi people however remained steadfast: the puppet kings were scorned as the sons of slaves on the one hand, inadequate rainmakers on the other. And in 1630 Queen Jinga made an alliance with the neighbouring Kasanje kingdom, which had the effect of closing the vital slave routes to the Portuguese.

  The Queen then led her people further east to the kingdom of Matamba, where she conquered the indigenous Jaga tribe, acquiring not only a useful base, but also the ferocious rituals associated with its members. The Jagas themselves have been described as indulging in cannibalism ‘not merely as a ritual sacrifice, but as a matter of habit, convenience and conviction’. They also indulged in deliberate infanticide, in order to preserve the hardy nature of the tribe, turning for replenishments of their population to the children of their conquered enemies.26 />
  Queen Jinga, following her take-over of the Jagas, indulged in the first practice, at least in public and at least for ritual effect. As it happens, we have an eyewitness account of the Queen as she appeared to the Dutch captain of her bodyguard, during her wars against the Portuguese in the late 1640s.27 Captain Fuller, who was in command of sixty men put at the Queen’s service for a period of years, referred to the deep importance attached to her by people: rumours of her death – the death of the Holy Figurehead – were always concealed from the Portuguese lest they take too much heart from them.

  More crucially, he also witnessed Queen Jinga performing a ritual sacrifice. She wore, as she always did, ‘man’s apparel’ for the occasion. She was also hung about with ‘the skins of Beasts, before and behind’, had a sword about her neck, an axe at her girdle and a bow and arrows in her hand. This awesome figure proceeded to leap ‘according to the custom, now here, now there, as nimbly as the most active among her attendants’ (Queen Jinga would by this date have been well over sixty). All the while she continued to strike the two iron bells which she used instead of drums. ‘When she thinks she has made a show long enough, in a masculine manner … then she takes a broad feather and flicks it through the holes of her bored Nose, for a Sign of War.’ This sinister gesture was the prelude to the first sacrifice: Queen Jinga selected the first victim, cut off his head and drank ‘a great draught of his blood’.

  As for male company, the Queen had evidently adopted that second practice of the Jagas: infanticide. According to Fuller, she kept fifty or sixty young men instead of husbands, who were in turn allowed as many wives as they pleased, ‘with the proviso that if any became with child, they must kill the infant’. Jinga was also described as going further and clothing selected young men in women’s clothes (shades of Radegunde, Spenser’s Queen of the Amazons, with her ‘unnatural order’ of knights holding distaffs!). The clothing of her obedient favourites, in the pretence that they had become women, as she herself had been transformed by her ‘man’s apparel’, enabled them to move freely among the other women of her household: ‘and if they fail in their obligations, they seldom escape to tell further news’.