The Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  A typical comment was that of Ellen C. Clayton (author of Celebrated Women, Notable Women, etc.) in her omnibus study Female Warriors published in 1879, the year before Sir John’s own more judicious work: ‘All agreed as to the extreme licentiousness and immorality of her [the Rani’s] habits; and the rooms in her palace are said to have been hung with pictures “such as pleased Tiberius at Capri”’ – the delicate Victorian allusion is to pornographic art, although the Rani’s keen detractor Lowe, who actually saw her apartments, mentioned no such titillatory detail in his own full description. One of the most damning – but equally quite unsupported – judgements was that of George W. Forrest in A History of the Indian Mutiny, published between 1904 and 1912, since his former position as the Director of Records for the government of India naturally carried weight. Picking eagerly on the phrase ‘the Jezebel of India’, he wrote that ‘to speak of her [the Rani], as some have done, as “The Indian Joan of Arc” is indeed a libel on the fair name of the Maid of Orleans’. (Given Forrest’s nationality, a somewhat self-righteous comment in any case.)49

  He who had so described her – Sir Hugh Rose in two letters back to his royal Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Cambridge – and had just spared her life, was granted no similar mercy by the lady in question. He watched the Rani first firing in his direction and then peering through a telescope to see what harm she had done. ‘Like the 3rd Europeans and the 86th she requires a good deal of drilling,’ commented Rose sardonically, ‘nobody having been able to discover where the Ranee’s shot went.’50 But these days of mutual observation and raining fire could not last for ever. The British assault upon Jhansi, which was to be both fierce and final, took place on 3 April. It may have been prompted by knowledge of a weakness in the defence supplied from inside: all accounts agree that the Rani herself was in the thick of the fighting.

  At some point that night, however, the Rani escaped with about four followers, including her father. It is sometimes supposed that Rose laid a trap for her by allowing her to escape: but if there was a trap, she certainly eluded that too.51 Riding hard, outdistancing her pursuers, in particular one Lieutenant Bowker, she succeeded by stages in reaching the fortress of Kalpi. She had travelled over one hundred miles in twenty-four hours. Here were congregated, among Indian rulers who had joined the rebels, not only Nana Sahib but the Nana’s nephew, Pandurang Rao, known as Rao Sahib, as well as Tatya Tope.

  Lieutenant Bowker’s own story has him perceiving the Rani aloft on her celebrated grey (or white) horse and pursuing her with Rose’s permission. A shot – possibly but not certainly fired by the Rani herself – disabled him, and so ‘the lady escaped for the time being’. Indian sources have the Rani wounding the Lieutenant in a sword fight at Bhander, a small village where she stopped for food; some of these accounts take on the already heady quality of incantation, as in this one written by a barrister and published in Calcutta in 1930: ‘But Lakshmi, put your horse now into a gallop. For Lieutenant Bowker is galloping behind, followed by select horsemen, in order to capture you. And you, O Horse, fortunate on account of the sacred treasure you carry, gallop on! … The dawn has now broken. So, heroic goddess, flying all night on the wings of the wind, test thee!’52

  There can be no question that Lakshmi Bai was right to escape both from her own point of view and that of her cause. The vengeance taken in Jhansi was frightful by any standards; some British historians have suggested that while four to five thousand died in battle, the civilians were spared. But Vishnu Godse, a priest from Bombay who was present, recalled four days of fire, pillage, murder and looting without distinction; it was difficult to breathe, he wrote, for the stink of burning flesh. Lowe’s words, that the enemy were slain in their ‘puffed up thousands … such was the retribution meted out to this Jezebel Ranee and her people …’ do not suggest there was much of a distinction between soldiers and civilians.53

  In his description of the vanished Rani’s personal apartments, however, Lowe dipped his pen into the ink of Sir Walter Scott, as he described the palace doors inlaid with plate-glass, mirrors, chandeliers, velvet and satin beds, bedsteads with silver feet, velvet-cushioned chairs, brazen throne, gold-and silver-handled tulwars, spears, silver bird cages, ivory footstools, dozens of shawls, silver candlesticks ‘and a thousand other things such as a luxurious woman would have’ (although there is no mention of pictures ‘such as pleased Tiberius’). All these accoutrements, as well as the works of Horace, Longfellow and Browning said to have belonged to the dead officers, ‘lay here and there in chaotic confusion in every part of the building’. ‘The soldiery went to and fro tramping over and through these things and kicking them about as they would any heap of rubbish’, wrote Lowe, ‘until order was somewhat restored.’ Meanwhile the rebels fought like tigers ‘so the bayonetting went on till after sunset’. The fate of the Rani might not have been so summary as that of her luxurious belongings but it is difficult to believe she would in the end have fared much better.54

  While the Union Jack flew once more over Jhansi, in Kalpi, in contrast, the Rani was given an honoured reception by Rao Sahib, with a special parade of his soldiers. The next engagement which followed was that of Kalpi itself, to which Sir Hugh Rose and his army patiently slogged their way in heat so great that big tears trickled down the cheeks of the patient elephants and the very camels groaned. It is sometimes suggested that if Rao Sahib had given the command to the Rani, not to Tatya Tope, the result of the battle – another total defeat for the Indians – might have been different.55 Another expression of the general admiration for the Rani is the widespread belief that she was responsible, as ‘their most determined, spirited and influential head’, for the Indians’ next plan, one of extreme daring, to seize the fortress of Gwalior (although Tatya Tope, with contacts inside Gwalior, is perhaps a more likely author).56 As a manoeuvre it was certainly remarkably successful, at a time when the rebel fortunes were badly in need of some coup to rally them. Gwalior was seized, and there the coronation of Rao Sahib took place. From the great regalia of Scindia, which resided in the Treasury at Gwalior, the Rani was granted by Rao Sahib a fabulous pearl necklace. Like the torc of Boadicea, it was to prove an ornament of ritual significance.

  For all the daring which had attended its seizure. Gwalior could not expect to remain long immune from reprisal. When that attack came, the Rani was said to have been put in charge of the eastern side of the defence. She wore her armour, her sword with its jewelled scabbard – and her wonderful new acquisition, the pearl necklace. According to tradition, she took as her motto on this occasion the celebrated verse: ‘If killed in battle we enter the heaven and if victorious, we rule the earth.’

  Of the two alternatives, it seemed that the Rani of Jhansi was not destined to rule the earth. She was killed at some point in the fierce but ultimately unsuccessful battle to defend Gwalior: the most likely date being 17 June – the second day of the fighting. As Boadicea’s daughters traditionally died with their mother, two of the Rani’s ‘maids of honour’ – in the British phrase – were said to have died with her: Indian sources give their names as Mandar and Kashi. One was described as ‘most beautiful’ and in her last agony stripped off her clothes.57

  The exact manner of the Rani’s death is not known for certain, nor who actually killed her. The British clearly took some trouble afterwards to find out. Three independent accounts written within a week of her death agree that she was mortally wounded as a result of a blow received during hand-to-hand fighting.58 As J. Henry Sylvester, who was present, wrote: ‘the gallant Queen of Jhansi fell from a carbine wound, and was carried to the rear, where she expired, and was burnt according to the custom of the Hindoos’. This is probably the truth although some local Indian ballads and songs have the Rani carried by faithful servants to the nearby monastery of Baba Gangadas and whispering to the Baba as he put the Ganges water in her mouth: ‘I leave my [son] Damodar in your charge.’

  A small locked notebook was found among Lord Canning’s
papers after his death (in 1862: like Lord Dalhousie, who died in 1860, he did not long survive his Indian experience). Canning had jotted down the following observations:59 ‘Ranee of Jhansi. Killed by a trooper of 8th Hussars, who was never discovered. Shot in the back, her horse baulked. She then fired at the man and he passed his sword through her … She used to wear gold anklets, and Sindia’s pearl necklace, plundered from Gwalior. (Sindia says its value is untold.) These when dying she distributed among the soldiery, when taken to die under the mango clump.’ (Sir Hugh Rose told the Duke of Cambridge, apropos ‘these ornaments’, that Tatya Tope had ‘intercepted’ the necklace.)60

  Lord Canning went on: ‘The army mourned her for two days.’ But even in this terse report he paid tribute by implication to the Rani’s gallantry – and to her continued femininity: ‘The Infantry attacked the Cavalry for allowing her to be killed. The Cavalry said she would ride too far in front.’ He added: ‘Her tent was very coquettish.’

  At the time, Sir Hugh Rose’s report back to the Duke of Cambridge in England confirmed the story of the Rani’s speedy immolation. After burning, she was buried ‘with great ceremony, under a tamarind tree under the Rock of Gwalior, where I saw her bones and ashes’. His own epitaph contained the generous tribute of one soldier to another: ‘The Ranee was remarkable for her bravery, cleverness and perseverance; her generosity to her Subordinates was unbounded. These qualities, combined with her rank, rendered her the most dangerous of all the rebel leaders.’ In its regimental history, the 8th Hussars, at whose hands the Rani probably died (the squadron commander was granted a VC for his conduct in the course of that charge), reiterated Sir Hugh Rose’s praise: ‘in her death the rebels lost their bravest and best military leader’.61

  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.’62

  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.63 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.f1 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,65 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 …66

  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!

  f1 In 1957, to mark the centenary, his descendant was also given a symbolic monetary reward by the Indian state.64

  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)

  When 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:f1

  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.2 (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.3 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 hersel
f (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.4

  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.5 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.6 (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.