The Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  At Tilsit, while the Emperor Napoleon of France and the Tsar Alexander of Russia met on an island in the middle of the river, King Frederick William of Prussia was condemned to await their summons standing in the pouring rain, on the shore. His unhappy stance perfectly illustrated the comment of the Austrian Prince Metternich: at Tilsit Prussia descended from the first rank ‘to be ranged among powers of the Third Order’.48 What was Prussia’s fate likely to be – what territorial sacrifices, what financial reparations would be demanded at a treaty negotiated under such unpromising circumstances?

  It was at this point that someone at the Prussian court, convinced that the Queen’s ‘fascinating affability’ would win over ‘this Monster vomited from hell’ (the King’s phrase on this occasion), had the idea of sending for Louise. One German biographer suggests that it was Hardenberg and General Kalkreuth who decided to use the Queen. Another name proposed is that of Murat, working on Frederick William. But on the French side Talleyrand was certainly very much against it and, accepting Louise’s putative powers as an enchantress, enquired of Napoleon angrily: ‘Sire, will you jeopardize your greatest conquest for a pair of beautiful eyes?’49

  We know from the testimony of those young British diplomats stationed at Memel – all of them half in love with the Queen – how reluctant she was to go. Her health alone might have precluded such an ordeal. To the King, however, Louise wrote that her arrival would be a proof of her love for him: for as she confided to her diary, ‘this burden is demanded’, whatever it might cost her to be pleasant and courteous towards Napoleon.50 Louise was condemned to the ‘burden’ by the romantic Prussian belief, which she herself obviously shared, that she could succeed where male diplomacy failed. Furthermore, hopeful signs elicited, as it seemed, from the ‘Monster’ only underlined the general atmosphere of expectation: he drank the Queen’s health and asked with some tenderness after her family’s welfare.

  Perhaps it was as well that the Prussian courtiers could not read Napoleon’s reassuring letter to Josephine on the subject of the Prussian Queen’s ‘coquetting’: ‘I am like cere-cloth, along which everything of this sort slides without penetrating. It would cost me too dear to play the gallant on this subject.’ The Queen herself might have been more affronted by the merry gossip of the time in London where bets were being taken on whether she would get Napoleon to fall in love with her. The playwright Sheridan took, on the other hand, the cynical line that Louise would fall in love with Napoleon: from an empress to a housemaid, ‘all women are dazzled by glory, and sure to be in love with a Man whom they begin by hating and who has treated them ill …’51

  In the event what happened satisfied neither the optimists, the romantics nor the cynics. The Queen arrived in Tilsit on 6 July.52 Napoleon behaved extremely courteously all along, ending dinner especially early out of regard for her delicate health. When the Queen gently taxed him, ‘Sire, I know you accuse me of meddling in politics’, Napoleon responded gallantly, ‘Ah, Madame, you must not believe that I listen only to malicious gossip’ (thus splendidly ignoring the subject of his own Bulletins of the Army). Nor did Louise herself find the ‘Monster’ as odious as she had expected (although she certainly did not fall in love with him).

  But while Louise saw it as her role to plead with him, as the traditional Queen-in-distress – ‘I am a wife and mother and it is by these titles that I appeal for your mercy on behalf of Prussia’ – Napoleon responded blandly with compliments on her white embroidered crêpe de Chine dress made in Breslau, and the superb collar she wore of her favourite pearls. After Louise’s death, Countess Voss would comment sadly on the Queen’s love of pearls, with their connotation of tears, as opposed to diamonds, which stood for prosperity; certainly there were tears enough to be shed on this occasion. Again and again the Queen tried to steer the conversation away from clothes back to the fate of Prussia itself. Privately, Napoleon rather admired her for her polite tenacity, how she always got back to her subject: ‘perhaps even too much so, and yet with perfect propriety and in a manner that aroused no antagonism’. He even went as far to admit that ‘In truth, the matter was an important one to her …’ Publicly, he would have none of it.

  There is a celebrated story concerning the occasion following the dinner when Napoleon went to call on Louise in her Tilsit lodgings; like many celebrated stories which sum up the popular image of a particular character (or characters) – the story of Queen Jinga and her royal ‘chair’ is another noted example – it has several variants. It seems that the Queen pleaded with Napoleon to exclude certain Prussian possessions from the confiscation which was planned as part of the peace treaty. Those to be reallocated included all the Prussian territories west of the Elbe, not omitting Magdeburg itself, on the river, most of Prussian Poland (to be reconstituted as the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw) and the Silesian fortresses. It is not known for certain exactly which provinces the Queen named to Napoleon, but attention has generally focused on Magdeburg.

  The most colourful version of the story has Napoleon asking for a single rose from the Queen’s arrangement of flowers. In reply, the Queen asked for an exchange: ‘A rose for Magdeburg, Sire.’ Some biographers have found this behaviour on the part of the Queen to be uncharacteristically arch. In another version (which accords better with Napoleon’s own description of Louise as relentless – but dignified – in pursuit of her aims) the Queen struck a tragic note more or less on Napoleon’s arrival: ‘Sire, Justice! Justice! Magdeburg! Magdeburg!’ There is no dispute however about the Queen’s lack of success in securing from Napoleon even the slightest diminution of the harsh terms imposed upon Prussia, including an enormous bill of financial reparation. (Ironically enough, her reproaches to the Tsar for abandoning them did move him guiltily to plead for an alleviation of the Prussian punishment;53 Louise, however, had been brought to Tilsit to woo Napoleon, not to reproach the Tsar.)

  Everyone had been wrong: Frederick William, Hardenberg, General Kalkreuth, all those who had pinned their hopes on the ‘fascinating affability’ of their Queen. Three years before, seeing Louise dressed as Statira, wife of Alexander the Great (on that same occasion when she had struck Madame de Staël dumb with her beauty), Sir George Jackson had reflected that ‘our queen of beauty’ too would have conquered Alexander, ‘had the hero the happiness of seeing her’. But the Queen of beauty had not conquered the Alexander of the hour: Napoleon. Much later, on St Helena, Napoleon referred to her ‘winning ways’ as well as her attempts to win him over. The Queen on the other hand wept bitterly and continuously afterwards, according to Countess Voss, referring over and over again to her ‘deception’ and reading her favourite Schiller (The Thirty Years’ War) for comfort. ‘In that house’, she told one of the young Englishmen at Memel, referring to Tilsit, ‘I was cruelly deceived.’54 Napoleon had become once more the ‘Monster’, ‘this inhuman being’ who must be beaten down for the sake of the future of Prussia, of her husband and of her children.

  Queen Louise did not survive to see the ‘Monster’ beaten down, although Frederick William did. She died of a pulmonary embolism in July 1810, having given birth to two more children, on 1 February 1808 – she must have been once again in the early stages of pregnancy at Tilsit – and 4 October 1809. But it was widely thought that she had died of a broken heart, to which her humiliation at Tilsit, symbolizing the humiliation of Prussia, had contributed. Her last years were marked by the inevitable sorrow of Prussia’s grievous political situation, as well as by her persistent attempts to bolster up Frederick William. Heinrich von Kleist gives a moving picture of her at this time: ‘She has developed a truly royal character … She, who a short time ago had nothing better to do than amuse herself with dancing or riding horseback, has gathered about her all our great men whom the King neglects and who alone can bring us salvation. Yes, it is she who sustains what has not collapsed.’55

  The Queen also made earnest attempts to study history – Hume, Robertson and Gibbon – as though to try to make sense of th
e great if tragic events she had lived through. As with the whole of Louise’s brief life – she was thirty-four when she died – there is a touching quality about the enterprise. ‘I am so stupid and I hate the stupidity,’ she exclaimed. ‘What was the Punic War? Was it against Carthage? Who were the Gracchi and what were their troubles? What does hierarchy mean?’ Even here, patriotism was never forgotten: Louise admired Theodoric for instance as ‘a genuine German’, with his love of justice, his upright character and his magnanimity.56

  Like Queen Jinga of Angola, however – albeit a very different kind of Warrior Queen – Queen Louise of Prussia was to have another whole life as a national heroine, far more enduring than her actual life on earth. To the grieving King, she quickly became his ‘sainted Louise’, while he was always firm against charges of political interference: she had ‘never quitted her own sphere of feminine usefulness’. Her popularity with the army was deliberately invoked when he instituted the order of the Iron Cross for military valour on the anniversary of her birth in 1813. (The Luisenorde for ladies, on the other hand, instituted on his own birthday – ‘we are determined to do honour to the female sex’ – concentrated on women who relieved suffering, not warriors; and the medal showed the late Queen in silver on a pale blue background, with a crown of stars – not in military uniform). When the ‘Monster’ was despatched to Elba, a hymn was composed in the Queen’s honour beginning: ‘Oh Saint in bliss … Thy tears are dried at last’ and ending with the refrain:

  Louise, the protectress of our right,

  Louise, still the watchword of our fight.57

  Classically, the ordinary soldiers in the Prussian army refused to believe in their beloved Queen’s death for years afterwards; as for the rest of the nation, Princess Anton Radziwill wrote that twenty-five years later ‘still the same regrets are given to the memory of that angel of goodness!’ And an English author, Mrs Charles Richardson, who toured Prussia in the 1840s, subsequently dedicating her biography of Louise to Queen Victoria as another one distinguished ‘for pre-eminence in female excellence’, found many local traditions of the Queen as a guardian angel in time of war, ‘a lovely vision’ who appeared and then disappeared back to heaven.58

  Nor did the cult of the holy and patriotic Warrior Queen stop there. Queen Louise may claim to have possessed a genuine sense of Prussia’s importance as part of the German whole: she was not after all born a Prussian, and throughout Prussia’s troubles retained a conviction that its triumph or defeat should be seen as affecting Germany itself (her remark concerning Theodoric was not uncharacteristic). It was therefore not inappropriate that in the late nineteenth century, continuing into the twentieth, she should come to be regarded as the Holy (departed) Figurehead of the resurgent and mighty Prussian-led Germany. On the sixtieth anniversary of her death, 19 July 1870, her son, then still King William of Prussia, went to pray at her grave; this was the day on which war was declared against France, that war from which he would return as German Emperor. Louise’s son was convinced that he had thus fulfilled her dearest dreams and hopes, she who could be viewed ‘as a martyr to her love for the Fatherland’.59

  The Queen’s verdict on herself was both more modest and more poignant.60 ‘If posterity will not place my name amongst those of celebrated women [she might have instanced Maria Theresa or Catherine the Great] yet those who were acquainted with the troubles of these times, will know what I have gone through and will say “She suffered much and endured with patience”.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Valiant Rani

  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!

  Indian folk song of 1857

  The story of the Rani of Jhansi, which ended with her death leading her men in the course of the Indian Rebellion, or ‘Mutiny’, began like that of Boadicea, with an injustice. In this case, however, the injustice was British, not Roman.

  In Britain itself – two or three months away even by steamer – preparations were already under way for that huge ceremonial sculpture commemorating Boadicea and her daughters which stands today on the Embankment of the Thames. The sculptor Thomas Thornycroft and his wife – also a sculptress – were favourites of the British royal family. She had immortalized the young Princess Alice as ‘Spring’ and the Prince of Wales as ‘Winter’; he had produced public pieces such as ‘Alfred the Great encouraged to the pursuit of learning by his mother’ and an equestrian statue of the Queen. In 1856, under the patronage of Albert, the Prince Consort, who lent horses from his own stable as models and often visited the sculptor’s studio to measure progress, Thornycroft embarked on the Boadicean group.1

  Although, as we shall see, it was to be half a century before Boadicea, her daughters and her chariot achieved their present resting place (the Prince Consort had envisaged the central arch of the entrance to Hyde Park) the accession of another queen regnant in the shape of Victoria had had its predictable effect in drawing attention to Boadicea’s fortunes. In the winter of 1859 the Poet Laureate Lord Tennyson read aloud to his wife what he described as ‘a fiercely brilliant poem’, constructed in an unusual and extremely difficult metre adapted from the Latin of Catullus.2 That poem was Boädicea:

  So the Queen Boädicéa, standing loftily charioted,

  Brandishing in her hand a dart and rolling glances lioness-like,

  Yell’d and shriek’d between her daughters in her fierce volubility

  Till her people all around the royal chariot agitated …

  The poem ended with a sombre picture of the Roman colony awaiting the British holocaust and reflecting in silence on their misdeeds which had brought it about:

  Out of evil evil flourishes, out of tyranny tyranny buds.

  Ran the land with Roman slaughter, multitudinous agonies.

  Perish’d many a maid and matron, many a valorous legionary,

  Fell the colony, city, and citadel, London, Verulam, Cámuldodúne.

  In truth, there was little real parallel to be drawn between Tennyson’s ‘loftily charioted’, yelling and shrieking Boadicea, and Victoria, whose own conception of being a Warrior Queen was more that of Maria Theresa. On the one hand Queen Victoria displayed throughout her long reign a real affection for her ordinary soldiers and devotion to what she perceived as their interests; on the other hand, despite bursts of emotion – ‘Oh, if the Queen were a man!’ – she was in no sense a warmonger. When she urged on Mr Gladstone in 1871 over the Franco– Prussian war ‘the necessity for great prudence and for not departing from our neutral position’,3 above all not to take action alone, one can sense the cautious shade of Queen Elizabeth I at her shoulder.

  Yet ironically enough, within Queen Victoria’s increasingly vast dominions – that ‘empire … on us bestow’d’ celebrated by Cowper – a situation had arisen which did parallel, almost exactly, that of Boadicea and the Romans. At the time the Rani of Jhansi was compared, not to Boadicea, but to another very different warrior-woman, Joan of Arc. Sir Hugh Rose, the British commander who finally defeated her at Gwalior, himself used the phrase ‘a sort of Indian Joan of Arc’ to the Commander-in-Chief of the army, the Duke of Cambridge.4 Since Boadicea had now become a patriotic symbol of British rule on the one hand and an established queen regnant on the other, it was perhaps scarcely surprising that British contemporaries of the Rani did not note the similarities of their two stories.

  The parallels however were and remain remarkable. The injustice with which the story of the Rani of Jhansi began was not only dealt out to her by a dominant ‘occupying’ power of another race, but was also dealt out to her as a young or youngish widow. (As with Boadicea, the Rani’s exact date of birth is unknown.) This was not a case of physical brutality – scourging or rape; but there was a clear element of violation, according to Hindu law, in the way the Rani’s claims to rule Jhansi in the name of her late husband’s adopted son were ignored.
r />   ‘I have always considered Jhansi among the native states of the Bundelkhand as a kind of oasis in the desert’: this was the verdict (in his memoirs) of Sir William Sleeman, long stationed at the court of the Rani’s husband, Gangadhar Rao.5 It is important to realize that the small Mahratta principality of Jhansi, in the Bundelkhand hill country of northern India, had a history of friendship towards the British interest, just as the Iceni’s resentment at their treatment was fuelled by memories of their voluntary submission to Caesar. Jhansi had been raised by the British to princely status by that treaty of 1817 which brought the Mahratta Confederacy to an end although its dynasty had in fact been sovereign for nearly a hundred years. Thereafter the Rajah of Jhansi considered himself to be its independent and hereditary ruler; but he also inherited a tradition of benevolence towards and dependence upon the British government. In 1825 Gangadhar Rao’s grandfather, Ramachandra Rao, was granted the title of maharajah and ‘devoted servant of the glorious King of England’ (George IV) for aiding the British against some rebels. When Gangadhar Rao’s own succession in 1838 was disputed within the family, the British backed his claim.6

  Prosperity and peace followed for Jhansi, in both cases assured by the efficient supervision of British officials. Gangadhar Rao himself liked to spend his time in the theatre, both directing and acting: he played female parts and was reputed to wear female dress offstage as well. Not necessarily for these reasons alone, Gangadhar Rao was believed to be homosexual. Be that as it might, it was more to the point that he did not manage to produce an heir: his first wife died childless. In 1842 Gangadhar Rao married again. His bride was she who would be known to history as Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi.