The latter-day reputation of the Amazons and their imitators was expressed by Thomas Heywood in his popular Gynaekeion or Nine Bookes of Various History Concerning Women, first printed in 1624. He praised Camilla for being the product of a tomboy upbringing by her father: for taking a vow of chastity to concentrate on the hunting and killing of wild beasts. Heywood translated Virgil’s account of Camilla in battle array with verve if not melody:
To their supply Camilla came
The gallant Volscian lass
Who bravely did command the horse
With troops that shin’d in brass.12
The fact that the Classical writers described the Amazons originally as an example of how badly things would turn out if the world was turned upside down and women ruled was disregarded. Ironically, John Knox, approvingly citing Aristotle on the ‘monstrousness’ of the Amazons, as he thundered against female rule in the mid-sixteenth century (‘their strength weakness, the counsel foolishness and judgment frenzy’) was in fact on firm historical ground.13 It could even be argued that the perversity with which the French King Henri III had male mignons dress up as (female) Amazons at the court of the 1570s had something to be said for it historically: for it reflected the original concept of the Amazon kingdom as a place in which the natural order had been turned upside down.
The Warrior Queens cheerfully ignored all this. In any situation in which a female ruler had perforce to involve herself in war, an allusion to the Amazons was an appeal to history for the verification of her role. Queen Louise of Prussia, the exquisite fragile butterfly whom Napoleon would break on the wheel despite her valiant spirit, was contemptuously described by him as appearing on the battlefield ‘dressed as an Amazon in the uniform of her regiment of dragoons’.14 Napoleon did not want pretty women on the battlefield dressed as Amazons or anything else; but to the Prussian soldiers who cheered the straightforward patriotism of their lovely queen (in contrast to the vacillation of her husband) the deliberate assumption of male uniform by a highly feminine woman was an inspiring symbol.
Eleanor of Aquitaine was the great feudal heiress whose marriage to Louis VII of France in 1137, shortly after the death of her father, brought him vast possessions. At the time of her marriage Eleanor was only fifteen and the complicated future which awaited her, gifted as she was with beauty, riches and the intelligence to make use of her gifts, could hardly have been foreseen: the marriage itself would end in divorce, following which the heiress Eleanor would wed the rival monarch across the water, Henry II of England. Eleanor therefore was still a comparatively young woman on that Easter Day 1146 when she knelt before the celebrated orator, the Abbé Bernard of Clairvaux at Vézelay, and, moved by his eloquence, offered him her thousands of vassals for what was to become the Second Crusade.15 She was attended by numerous ‘ladies of quality’ as she knelt, bearers of such heraldic names as Sybille Countess of Flanders, Mamille of Roucy, Florine of Bourgogne, Torqueri of Bouillon and Faydide of Toulouse.
It was one thing for a great lady to pledge her vassals, quite another for her to go on the crusade herself. This however was what Queen Eleanor proceeded to do, and opinions have varied concerning the reason. Did chivalry demand the presence of a woman at the centre of this pious procession? More humanly, did King Louis himself fear for the consequences of leaving his fascinating young wife at home? Whatever the reason, the chronicler who related the episode considered that the Queen’s departure, surrounded by her ladies, set an extremely bad example to the female sex as a whole. Furthermore the papal bull which promulgated the Crusade, and which was read aloud at Vézelay, expressly forbade the attendance of concubines on the expedition.
It was at this point, according to legend, that Queen Eleanor suddenly appeared among the crowds at Vézelay ‘taking the cross’, riding a white horse and herself dressed in the guise of an Amazon, with gilded buskins on her feet and plumes in her hair. Surrounded by her ladies, similarly if less gorgeously attired, the Queen galloped through crowds, urging on the faithful to join the Crusade in a deliberate imitation of Penthesilea and her ‘soldier-women’. Her squadron of ladies also distributed white distaffs to the fainthearted – an early form of the First World War’s white feather.
According to Nicetas, the Queen kept up her enjoyable Classical charade along the route to the Holy Land. The Greek historian wrote of the ‘women dressed as men, mounted on horses and armed with lance and battle axe’ that they ‘kept a martial mien, bold as Amazons’. And he mentioned that at the head, ‘one in particular [presumably Eleanor] richly dressed … went by the name of the “lady of the golden boot”, the elegance of her bearing and the freedom of her movements recalling the celebrated leader of the Amazons’.16
In a bold gesture, Queen Eleanor had thus separated herself from the category of mortal women, mere concubines (albeit royal) and other female companions; by her plumes and her bold buskins she had appealed ostentatiously to the past, and declared in so doing her right to accompany the Crusade. It should perhaps be noted in conclusion that the bull for the next Crusade – the Third Crusade of 1189 – expressly forbade women of all sorts to join the expedition by general agreement of all the Christian monarchs including King Louis. But by this time Queen Eleanor had been married to King Henry II of England for nearly forty years.
The problem which faced Eleanor’s descendant, Anne, Queen of England from 1702 and of Great Britain from 1707, was one not so much of action as of image. Unlike her sister Mary, in the preceding reign, Queen Anne had no William III at her side as consort, co-ruler and in effect sole controller of the destinies of the country. It was clear that William after Queen Mary’s death in 1694 was as much a de facto ruler by right of his male sex as a de jure monarch. Queen Anne on the other hand had as her consort the dim Danish Prince George who had no claims to the English throne, and whom no one considered making de facto ruler. Yet Anne reigned throughout a period of extraordinary military activity in the history of her country, ending gloriously with the victorious Marlborough campaigns, but coming perilously close to defeat before that happy outcome was achieved.
Across the Channel, Anne’s cousin, Louis XIV, the Sun King, had long dazzled his compatriots with his martial exploits. How was Queen Anne, a middle-aged lady in poor health at the time of her accession, to present an image which was both imposing and opposing? As a younger woman she had had recourse to the traditional training of many Warrior Queens and loved to ride, as though to emulate some legendary goddess of the chase. Swift described Queen Anne out hunting, attired in dark cloak and hood, driving her one-horsed chaise ‘furiously like Jehu, and as a mighty hunter like Nimrod’ (a Boadicean as well as a biblical image). Later the Queen’s enormous weight, following seventeen ill-fated pregnancies, caused her to take to a ‘chariot’ with huge wheels.17
The age of the active warrior monarch was drawing to a close (George II, in the next reign but one, was the last British monarch to lead his own army in battle) but was not yet concluded. Since Queen Anne, for all her command, both titular and actual, of the army and navy, could scarcely fulfil the practical obligations of a commander-in-chief, art and fantasy had to be called into play. Verrio painted the Queen as Justice for the ceiling of Hampton Court Palace, armed with a sword and holding a pair of scales. At a state visit to Bath, for example, Queen Anne was surrounded by a guard of honour of virgins ‘richly attired like Amazons with bows and arrows’, and others who danced beside her coach. Verses solemnizing the Vigo Bay thanksgiving at St Paul’s in 1702 thundered a sonorous message:
As threat-ning Spain did to Eliza bow
So France and Spain shall do to Anna now …
The reality was very different as Sir John Clerk, one of the Scots commissioners, wrote in his memoirs: a gouty old woman with a red spotted face, some nasty bandages and a poultice.18
Nor has the allusion to the Amazons been deemed to lose its usefulness in the modern age: in 1986, for example, the women surrounding Benazir Bhutto, bold female claimant t
o the leadership of Pakistan, are colloquially known as ‘The Amazons’.19 Yet no appeal to the (incorrectly interpreted) past for validation seems more touching and more paradoxical than that made on the magnificent tombstone of Matilda of Tuscany, constructed on a significantly heroic scale following her death in 1115.
It was held to be appropriate that some allusion to her career on the battlefield should be made, apart from the four huge female figures of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance which supported the tomb. So Penthesilea was called into play: Et tunc disposuit turmes invicta Virago Qualis Amazonide Penthesilea solet (And then this warrior-woman disposed her troops as the Amazonian Penthesilea is accustomed to do).20 Thus the deeply religious, Christian Countess Matilda, whose personal crusade was on behalf of the Pope, for the empire of Christ, needed the imprimatur of the savage pagan Queen to justify her unwomanly role.
* The Oxford English Dictionary (1933) definition of ‘matriarchy’ is: ‘That form of social organization where the mother, not the father, is the head of the family, and in which descent and relationships are reckoned through mothers not fathers.’ The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English Usage (1963), in its entry for the word ‘matriarch’, adds: ‘usually jocular’.
CHAPTER THREE
THE QUEEN OF WAR
I am the queen of war. I am the queen of the thunderbolt.
I stir up the sea and calm it. I am the rays of the Sun.
Ptolemaic creed of the goddess Isis
Flesh-and-blood Warrior Queens – stepping out from behind the image of the war goddess – were not unknown to the ancient world; in general their activities were zestfully chronicled, particularly if some lesson could be derived to the detriment of the contemporary male, whether as leader or soldier. For there is a new element introduced by the reality of reported history – or what passes for such – and one which will emerge significantly with many a Warrior Queen including Boudica herself when she proposed the alternative of victory or death: ‘This is what I, as a woman, plan to do: – let the men live in slavery if they will.’1
This is what might be termed the Shame Syndrome: not only is it wondrous to find a mere woman acting in a martial manner, but in so doing the woman concerned shows up, positively shames the weaker males who surround her. The earlier goddess—women were in a sense not able to shame the males they encountered since their supernatural powers clearly placed them in a superior position from the start.
On the other hand the titivating theme of sexual licence, the Voracity Syndrome, is, if anything, developed with the emergence of the flesh-and-blood woman. Lust (especially on the part of a widow, the status of so many Warrior Queens, presumably denied that to which she had become agreeably accustomed) remained a popular vice to associate with the name of a female leader, just as it had been a characteristic of a Celtic goddess.
Of course the trailing clouds of the goddess linger. In the case of Semiramis, zest caused the Greek writers to outrun the historical facts and gleefully transform an Assyrian ruler of the ninth century BC into a demi-legendary creature. The historical basis for Semiramis is one Sammu-ramat, the Babylonian widow of the Assyrian King Shamshi-Adad v, and mother of his heir Adad-nirari III. On Shamshi-Adad’s death in 811 BC, Queen Sammu-ramat ruled as regent for five years during the minority of her son; beyond the fact that her regency was energetic, which suggests a strong character, little else is known for certain concerning her.2
In the hands of the Greeks, Semiramis became a daring character, subject to a series of adventures from birth; being the daughter of the goddess Derceto by an Assyrian, she was exposed in the desert, only to have her life saved by doves, who succoured her for a year. Subsequently she was brought up by a peasant until her beauty secured her two profitable marriages – first to the Governor of Ninevah, and then to Ninus King of Assyria.
Herodotus made Semiramis responsible for some of the remarkable embellishments to the city of Ninevah, which moderated the flooding of the river (although he rated her intelligence lower than that of a succeeding queen, Ninocris); while Propertius wrote that ‘with dams Euphrates she controlled, where through her capital it rolled’.3 But Semiramis’ plans for rebuilding Ninevah were less important to her legend than the use she was alleged to have made of her beauty, securing the throne itself from her doting husband Ninus. Having been proclaimed sole Empress of Assyria, Semiramis lost no time in having the foolish Ninus put to death. Unencumbered by male tutelage, she further glorified her capital Babylon, in the time she spared from her military campaigns, by means of which she conquered many of the neighbouring countries of Mesopotamia.
Semiramis, pattern of the Warrior Queen who was nevertheless all woman, was said on one occasion to have been at her toilette when the news was brought to her that Babylon had revolted. Half-dressed, she swore to quell the insurrection before her toilette should be completed. Her voracious sexual appetites were, like the Queen herself, legendary; the most stalwart soldiers under her command were regularly called into a different kind of service; ungratefully if practically, Semiramis was in the habit of putting her lovers to death immediately after a night of love lest the tale of the Empress’s desires should be spread abroad. Even more licentious, as well as unnatural, was the passion that Semiramis was supposed to have nourished for her son Ninyas (which in one version of her story caused him to kill her).
At least on her death, Semiramis was supposed to have turned into a dove; or, better still, to have been worshipped as a goddess. It was this identification with mysterious and seductive goddesses of the East, such as Astarte (or Ishtar), who first prowled along the edges of the Classical world and then invaded it, which was probably most important in preserving her story. In this manner it was thrillingly carried away from the small patch of historical ground in which it had originally been rooted.
As for the mother-son relationship, Voltaire employed that in his play Semiramis, first performed in 1748 (and used by Rossini as the basis for his opera Semiramide). In so doing Voltaire gave the relationship a gloss which made it at once more tragic and more innocent. Once Semiramis had
led her army and her people captive
And spite of time, with more than magic art,
Chained down the minds of men, the universe
Astonished stood, and trembled at her feet …
Now Semiramis is doomed by her love for Arsaces (unknown to her, he is her own son) because love itself, not incest, will rob her of her ability to command her people and her army.
Nevertheless it is difficult to believe that when Voltaire dubbed Catherine the Great his ‘Semiramis of the North’ he had in mind the possibility of such an agonizing maternal dilemma on her part; surely it was the role of the triumphant female general and even more the out-of-hours employer of strong soldiery, which was the link between Semiramis and Catherine. Voltaire’s Semiramis was the lascivious one described by Diodorus Siculus in the first century BC: ‘what knight in her eye was the most goodly and personable man, him she would covertly choose out from all her army of people and disport her with him after her appetite …’.4
Herodotus had more admiration for the bold Tomyris, Queen of the nomadic Massagetae (living in what is now eastern Iran) than he had for Semiramis. It was to Tomyris, as queen and general of the army, that Herodotus ascribed the death of Cyrus the Great, King of the Medes and Persians, in 529 BC, preferring the account which makes a woman the agent of his fall to all the others. (The point has been made that in half the total mentions of women by Herodotus they are shown as ‘actors who themselves determine the outcome of events’.) Tomyris was a widow, left to rule the Massagetae after her husband’s death, and Cyrus’ first effort to take over her territories was couched in an offer of marriage. Tomyris declined this: ‘for the queen was well aware that he was wooing not herself but her dominions’.5
What was more, Tomyris then urged Cyrus to leave the Massagetae in peace. As she watched the bridges being built which would enable Cyrus’ armies
to cross the River Araxes and begin his assault against her people, she sent him a message urging him to desist, containing the not unreasonable plea: ‘Rule your own people, and try to bear the sight of me ruling mine.’ Unfortunately, as Tomyris herself admitted, peace could scarcely be the aim of the all-powerful Persian King, he who had within twenty years founded an empire based on conquest from the Aegean Sea to the Indus river. So Tomyris’ next suggestion was that Cyrus should abandon his bridge-building and a meeting should be set up. Either the Massagetae would retreat three days’ march from the river and Cyrus would cross, or Cyrus would retreat and the Massagetae would make the crossing.
According to Herodotus, Cyrus seriously considered this proposal and at a meeting of his chief officers it met with almost universal approval. The exception was Croesus the Lydian whose arguments ended tellingly (invoking the spectre of the Shame Syndrome): ‘And apart from what I have already said, it would surely be an intolerable disgrace for Cyrus son of Cambyses to give ground before a woman.’ So Croesus advocated crossing the river and getting the better of the Massagetae by a Glencoe-like strategy involving a banquet.
In the event the Persians would have done better to listen to the reasonable Tomyris than to the tricky Croesus. The latter’s strategy led successfully in the first instance to the slaughter of a number of Massagetae, sated by the banquet, and the capture of Tomyris’ son, Spargapises. This time the message sent back to Cyrus by Tomyris was as follows: ‘Glutton as you are for blood, you have no cause to be proud of this day’s work, which has no smack of soldierly courage.’ She continued grimly: ‘Give me back my son and get out of my country with your forces intact, and be content with your triumph over a third part of the Massagetae. If you refuse, I swear by the sun our master to give you more blood than you can drink, for all your gluttony.’
Warrior Queens Page 4