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

Author:Fraser, Antonia [Fraser, Antonia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781780220703
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2011-06-15T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Elizabetha Triumphans

They couch their pikes and bow their ensigns down

When as their sacred royal Queen passed by

In token of their loyal bearèd hearts

To her alone, and none but only she –

ELIZABETHA TRIUMPHANS (1588)

The reign in which the character of chariot-driving Boadicea was destined to be restored to British mythology (or history) did not begin under auspicious circumstances for a woman ruler. The concept was on the contrary generally attacked. ‘Murmur ye at mine anointed because she is a woman? Who made man and woman, you, or I? If I made her to live, may I not make her to reign?’ These affronted questions were put into the mouth of Almighty God in a pamphlet of 1559: An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes against the late blown Blast. The anointed woman in question was Elizabeth Tudor, who had succeeded to the throne of England in the previous year at the age of twenty-five. The author was John Aylmer, newly restored Protestant Archdeacon of Stow.1

Aylmer’s intention in quoting God, as it were, was to defend the new Queen from a far noisier piece of propaganda: John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment of Women. The virulence of Knox’s language in attacking the whole concept of female sovereignty can scarcely be exaggerated. Neither the passage of time nor the standards of another age have paled the rich colours of his abuse.f1 3 ‘How abominable before God, is the Empire or Rule of a wicked woman, yea of a traiteresse and bastard …’ he writes. Again: ‘For to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation or city, is repugnant to nature, continuously to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.’ As for women in general: ‘their sight in civil regiment is but blindness; their strength, weakness; their counsel foolishness and judgment frenzy, if it be rightly considered’.

The fathers of the Church are quoted, including St Paul, Tertullian (the whole sex is ‘the port and gate of the devil’) and St Augustine (‘woman ought to be repressed and bridled betimes, if she aspire to any dominion’). Then nature is brought into play: ‘no man ever saw the lion make obedience, and stoop before the lioness …’ Finally history is invoked: ‘For when the males of the kingly stock failed, as oft chanced in Israel and sometimes in Juda, it never entered into the hearts of the people to choose and promote any of the king’s daughters …’ In short: ‘where a woman reigneth and papists bear authority … there must needs Satan be president of the council’.

The reference to papists is significant. The ‘Regiment’ or rulership (its contemporary meaning) of females to which Knox so spuriously objected was that of three Catholic queens – Mary of Guise, regent of Scotland in the absence of her daughter Mary Queen of Scots (crowning her

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