Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (WOMEN IN HISTORY)

by Fraser, Antonia

  It is a vivid if intimidating picture. Yet as with the head-hunting of the Celts, and as with Boadicea’s chilling sacrifices to Andraste, one must be wary of condemning the Jagas and Queen Jinga outside the standards of their own time and society; one should bear in mind also the slave trading which was the quite open practice of the alternative officially ‘Christian’ cultures of the Portuguese and Dutch.

  In terms of the outside world at this date, Angola was indeed a mere pawn in the game played out between these two nations, each eager to supply much-needed slaves to the colonies of the New World. Its inhabitants were estimated as something lower than pawns: pieces without any significance so long as the supply was sufficient. About this time the captured Negroes destined for the slave ships and death, or a tormented exile of drudgery at best, were casually described by those responsible for their fate as ‘brutes without intelligent understanding’.28 That was not a description which anyone could or would have applied to Queen Jinga in the years of raiding against the Portuguese, aided by other tribes such as the Congolese and the Dembos, which followed.

  Nor was she herself a pawn. Whatever the cruelties of her own practice, like Boadicea Jinga did at least stand for the independence of her race in the person of at least one individual (a female, as it happened). ‘Every kind of display and power is necessary when dealing with this heathen’, wrote Antonio de Oliveira Cadornego, about twenty years after Jinga’s death;29 but the reverse was of course also true for the Africans dealing with the European ‘heathen’. In the late-twentieth-century meaning of the word, among so-called Mafia business organizations, Queen Jinga demanded and received ‘respect’.

  Captain Fuller’s verdict on her, for all her ‘Devilish Superstition and Idolatry’, her ritual sacrifices and bizarre sexual habits, is fundamentally a respectful one. She was, he wrote, ‘a cunning and prudent Virago, so much addicted to arms that she hardly uses other exercises; and withal so generously valiant that she never hurt a Portuguese after quarter given, and commanded all her slaves and soldiers alike’.30 This is perceptibly the tone of the British Caratach praising his Roman enemy as a comrade-soldier in Fletcher’s Bonduca; it is certainly not that of Caratach denouncing the Warrior Queen herself as a weak, boastful and shameless woman.

  In the end the Queen was responsible, if indirectly, for the defeat of the Portuguese at the hands of the Dutch, by which Luanda fell to the latter in 1641. Her tactical withdrawal to the interior had obliged the Portuguese to penetrate too far from their own base in search of their slave-prey. Queen Jinga was now pleased to make allies of the Dutch. She set up camp on the Dande river. From this vantage point she could both despatch caravans to the Dutch at Luanda – selling them her prisoners of war – and conduct a series of short campaigns on her own account, notably against the puppet monarch of Ndongo, Ngola Ari, and his Portuguese sponsors.

  In 1643 Queen Jinga’s forces routed the Portuguese outside Mbaka and there were further victories in 1647 and 1648. Unfortunately an intervening defeat inflicted by the Portuguese resulted in the capture of Jinga’s sister Mukumbu (to them the Lady Barbara), a considerable blow to one who had none of Queen Elizabeth I’s dislike of her own sex, but rather relied on the matriarchal family network. Jinga’s other sister Kifunji (the Lady Grace), long a captive of the Portuguese, had justified the Queen’s faith in this network by supplying her with intelligence: in October 1647, Kifunji was drowned by the Portuguese as they retreated, either out of fear of her efforts or in retaliation.

  On 10 August 1648, in a reversal of the events which had led to the seizing of Luanda by the Dutch, the daring Brazilian landowner Salvador de Sá recaptured the town for the Portuguese. This time it was the presence of two hundred Dutch soldiers at Jinga’s side in her last victory of 1648 which had fatally weakened the garrison. With the return of Portuguese mastery to Luanda, Queen Jinga’s finest hour was over. Yet even now, where the Kongo state made peace on humiliating terms, Jinga herself was able to retreat back to her Matamba heartlands. Here she was able to lie low for a few years; since the prime concern of the Portuguese remained their slave trade, and that depended on milking the interior, finally they had more to gain from negotiating with Jinga than battling against her. It was however the continued captivity of Mukumbu at the hands of the Portuguese which ultimately persuaded Jinga to agree to an official peace in October 1656.

  One hundred and thirty slaves were formally exchanged for the person of ‘the Lady Barbara’, to be restored to her Mbundu persona for good. Other conditions imposed by the Portuguese were the establishment of ‘trade fairs’ along the borders of their Portuguese territories, and the introduction of a Christian mission into Matamba. In return ‘the ancient Virago’ – now in her seventies – was to receive military help when she required it. Lastly, in a settlement which was certainly to the advantage of most of the parties concerned, the Jagas were to abandon their notoriously savage habits: there was to be no more infanticide, for example, and although the women of the tribe were still compelled to give birth outside the war-camp, at least they could now bring up their offspring.

  This peace lasted until Queen Jinga’s death in 1663. After her death her corpse, still richly arrayed in the royal robes encrusted with precious stones, still clutching a bow and arrow in its hand, as though to symbolize the majesty and ferocity which were Jinga’s dominant qualities, was formally displayed to her subjects.31 They viewed it with a mixture of apprehension, awe and sorrow. All three reactions can surely be justified.

  Even in the short term, the effect of Queen Jinga’s rule was beneficial to the prosperity of Matamba – compared for example to the puppet kingdom of Ndongo, whose fortunes went rapidly downhill and which was eliminated altogether as an independent entity in 1671.32 Matamba benefited from the trade and the missions, and did not suffer direct European authority. In addition, there were the many long-term legacies of her career. The first of these was the undeniable ‘respect’ she had earned by her own capabilities. ‘History furnishes very few instances of bravery, intelligence and perseverance equal to the famous Zhinga, the Negro queen of Angola’: thus wrote Mrs Child in 1833, at the beginning of the American movement for the emancipation of slaves. Mrs Child, a liberal writer, issued An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans.33 She was concerned in particular to refute one contemporary argument against such an emancipation, that the Negroes lacked the natural ability of the white race. Although Mrs Child granted that Queen Jinga had been a despot, and granted that she had committed murderous acts, she still cited the Queen’s story as part of her impassioned plea, since her ability could hardly be doubted.

  Then there is the ‘pan-African’ element to Jinga’s rule, the fact that she did at certain points combine various tribes other than her own under her leadership (a leadership which in itself, being female, acts as an inspiration to a growing women’s movement). Lastly, of course, and most importantly, in the People’s Republic of Angola (established in 1975), there is the legacy of Jinga as the Warrior Queen who attempted gloriously but in vain to oust the Portuguese. Modern Angolan school textbooks naturally stress both of these aspects of Queen Jinga’s heroic careerf2. ‘She tried to unite the different peoples in the struggle against the foreign threat … After a few years of effort she succeeded in her aims, which were to unite the people of Ndongo, Matamba, Congo, Casnje, Dembos, Kissama and the Central Planalto. This was the greatest alliance ever formed to fight against the foreign colonialists.’ Even if Queen Jinga was not successful then, her ‘great dream did not disappear. Her idea of a union of the Angolan people in its struggle against colonialism is today realized.’

  Some modern Angolan students of history are beginning to assess Queen Jinga’s contribution more critically: such matters as her alliance with the Dutch, her co-operation at various stages with the Portuguese, her own involvement in the slave trade, even her own claim to the throne, are being subjected at least to scrutiny. On the other hand the best known of all th
e legends about the Queen explains the deathless quality of her popular image, and why it is not likely to be widely superseded.

  There are many variants of this story, but they unite in taking place in the course of that visit by Queen Jinga to the Portuguese Governor Correira de Sousa in the early 1620s in which her public career was inaugurated. They also unite in having the Governor seated on his throne, while Jinga was required to remain standing; whereupon Jinga, in a gesture at once characteristically bold and characteristically imperious, ordered one of her slaves to kneel on all fours to form a seat. After that she sat down. Did she refuse to take the slave away when she left the Governor’s mansion, saying that she would not remove the Governor’s furniture? Or did she refuse to remove the slave on the grounds that she never sat on the same chair twice? Was the slave actually a maidservant? In one version, she even went as far as to have the slave (or maidservant) executed on the same grounds: ‘I have no further use for him [or her].’

  The clear message of the story is the same in all its versions: even in her enforced national subjection, Queen Jinga’s personal pride was equal, even superior, to that of the Portuguese Governor. And this pride proved to be prophetic:

  Rome for empire far renown’d

  Tramples on a thousand states

  Soon her pride shall kiss the ground, –

  Hark! the Gaul is at her gates.

  Once again Cowper’s lines for a British Boadicea are more appropriate to another Warrior Queen in another country than they were to Britain – and British women – in the age in which he wrote them.

  1 Bonduca is the name usually, but not invariably, employed in the seventeenth century, following Dio’s Greek; but frequent references to Boadicea, in all its rich variety of spellings, following Tacitus, also continue. (Howard himself cites both Voadicia and Boadicea before plumping for Bonduca.) To John Horsley in his Britannia Romana of 1732 has been ascribed the honour of settling the spelling generally in favour of Boadicea.14

  2 These quotations (originally in Portuguese) are taken from a fourth-form history textbook in use in an elementary school in Luanda in 1987.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Queen versus Monster

  Let us fight the Monster, let us beat the Monster down

  QUEEN LOUISE OF PRUSSIA on Napoleon

  A woman with a pretty face, but little intelligence and quite incapable of foreseeing the consequences of what she does

  NAPOLEON on Queen Louise of Prussia

  Butterflies are not associated with battlefields (although they may actually be found there, fluttering incongruously amid the trampled corn and wildflowers of a long hot bloodstained summer’s day). Napoleon Bonaparte thought that women did not belong there either: he had a profound dislike of anything approaching the Amazon in womankind, and theoretically even intriguing women met with his censure. As he assured his first wife Josephine, he liked women to be ‘bonnes, douces et conciliantes’ and on another occasion ‘bonnes, naïves et douces’; adding, with more tact than accuracy, that that was because such good, sweet, naïve, soothing women resembled her.1

  The object of Napoleon’s disapproval was Queen Louise of Prussia. Ironically enough, she was by nature quite as gentle and submissive as the most exigent male could require, as well as being as lovely a princess as ever won the heart of a king. It was cruel destiny – a destiny incarnated by Napoleon himself – which transformed this harmless and iridescent creature into a Warrior Queen ‘dressed as an Amazon’ as Napoleon terms her in 1806, in the uniform of her regiment of dragoons: writing twenty incendiary letters every day, ‘an Armida in her madness destroying her own palace with fire’. The reference was to Gluck’s opera Armide, popular with both French and Prussian audiences: it was in fact performed in Berlin for Louise’s own wedding day. The eponymous heroine was a princess of Damascus at the time of the First Crusade, founded on Tasso’s ‘wily witch’ in Jerusalem Delivered who, foiled by her lover, ended by calling on demons: ‘destroy this palace!’2

  Queen Louise’s tragedy, in one sense, lay in the fact that she found herself matched against a man whom the Queen and her circle were inclined to sum up in one simple expression of horror as the ‘Monster’. This was of course too simple a judgement: the real threat was not so much in Napoleon’s perceived monstrosity of nature as in the brilliance of his military talent. Even one of Louise’s staunchest confidantes ruefully admitted that war was Napoleon’s trade: ‘he understands it and we do not’.3

  But there was another deeper layer to Louise’s tragedy, which made of her a genuine martyr to her people’s own zeal at the time, as well as a patriotic heroine and martyr to the generations which followed. If Napoleon was indeed a monster, then it was optimistic at best to match the frail Queen Louise against him. Why did the fact that she emerged crushed from the encounter, failing to save Prussia from his depredations, generate surprise as well as despair? This was a development which must always have been expected along the level of common sense. The answer lies in the false but exciting expectations sometimes aroused in the human breast by the sight of one type of Warrior Queen: ‘sainted’ and ‘possessed of angelic goodness’ – descriptions freely applied to Queen Louise – this Holy Figurehead of the Prussian armies must surely bless her people with victory over the forces of evil.

  It is true that the Queen did have, apart from her beauty, the natural appeal of a female in distress, to which male soldiers traditionally reply by springing to arms. It is a point of view most famously expressed by Edmund Burke in his lament for another tragic queen, Marie Antoinette: ‘I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult’. In similar if less exotic terms Robert Wilson, a young British envoy at the Prussian court, wrote movingly of the spectacle of Louise’s melancholy following the defeat at Jena in 1806: ‘but soldiers must not reflect, and a beautiful woman in misfortune should animate to enterprise’. Besides, Louise’s grief was a potent symbol of her nation’s woe, for which reason ‘a queen in distress is universally acknowledged to be a more tragical sight than the more disastrous and general calamities of the commonalty’.4

  Despite this inspiration, Queen Louise’s own powers as a Warrior Queen were, if challenged by the brutal reality of conflict and disaster, a mere illusion, vanishing into the mists of romance and chivalry from whence they came. Her story illustrates how the ‘fancy dress’ aspect of a Warrior Queen, so brilliantly developed by Elizabeth I at Tilbury to mask the possible weaknesses of her position as a female ruler in time of war, might come to be mistaken for the real thing: a passive queen allows herself to be used, ignorant of the true hollowness of her position because she has been trained by upbringing to female impotence, just as Boadicea, a doughty battling queen in literature at the end of the sixteenth century, becomes a modest and delicate princess two hundred years later, who conquers with a blush not a spear, rides in a litter not a chariot.

  Under different circumstances – and with a different character involved – the ‘distress’ of a queen could indeed be used to good effect. Robert Wilson, suggesting that Louise’s misfortunes should spur her supporters to military action on her behalf, recalled the example of Maria Theresa sixty years before: ‘So thought and felt the nobles of Hungary, and Maria Theresa retrieved the fortunes of her house.’ The reigns of two great empresses, Maria Theresa of Austria and Catherine the Great of Russia, spanned altogether over seventy years; 1740 to 1780 and 1762 to 1796 respectively. Gibbon was well able to write in his Decline and Fall, first printed in 1776, of those ‘illustrious women’ able to bear the weight of empire: ‘nor is our own age destitute’.5

  These great tracts of time were matched by the vast tracts of land over which each woman presided. At first sight, however, the resemblance between the two stops there; not only their characters but the circumstances which brought them to power were certainly very different. The Archduchess Maria Theresa was a young married woman of twenty-three when the de
ath of her father the Emperor Charles VI brought the male Habsburg succession to an end; but by that treaty of 1713 known as the Pragmatic Sanction, the right of his eldest daughter to succeed had been theoretically accepted. Sophie-Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst, born in 1729 and thus twelve years younger than Maria Theresa, was on the other hand an obscure German princess before her marriage to the Grand Duke Peter, heir to the Tsarina Elisabeth of Russia. By this union she was transformed first into the Grand Duchess Catherine, and then, following a dramatic coup in which her doltish husband was deposed, into the Tsarina Catherine II; she was by now in her early thirties, someone who could claim to have contributed strongly to her own surprising exaltation.

  When time and various military endeavours had combined to establish Maria Theresa securely on her hereditary throne of Hungary, with her husband Francis of Lorraine beside her as the elected Holy Roman Emperor, she displayed in private a love of cosy royal family life with her apparent infinity of children. Personally chaste, she also showed an austerity, even Puritanism of temperament which recall the ‘sainted’ Isabella of Spain. The pleasures of Catherine II were, notoriously, rather different. This was Voltaire’s ‘Semiramis of the North’, the Warrior Queen with a taste for magnificently strong guards officers as lovers, who in her day created a sensation for her debauchery: ‘excesses which would dishonour any woman whatever her station in life’ in the disapproving opinion of the British Ambassador to her court. She herself actually believed, engagingly enough, in frequent (and incidentally straightforward) sexual activity as a means to health; but she never denied that it was also enjoyable, and as such should be welcomed. ‘Nothing in my opinion is more difficult to resist than what gives us pleasure’, wrote Catherine. ‘All arguments to the contrary are prudery.’ It was a hedonistic point of view shared in no way by the pious and self-abnegatory Maria Theresa.6