Under Another Sky (7 page)

The trope of the female warrior besting male troops goes back to Herodotus, who had the Persian king Xerxes remarking, ‘My men have turned into women and my women men,’ when he observed Queen Artemisia’s superior naval manoeuvrings at the Battle of Salamis in the Persian Wars, in 480
BC
. But the ambiguities in Tacitus’s treatment of Boudica remind me particularly of the way the Roman poet Horace dealt with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, in his supposedly triumphal ode celebrating her defeat by Augustus at the Battle of Actium in 31
BC
. The poem treats her army as a dangerously exotic rabble – and yet the figure of Cleopatra, never named, seems to exert a strange fascination, even sympathy: after a triumphalist, hostile opening, the poem’s tone changes, and Horace compares her to a dove chased by a falcon, or a hare by a hunter. And this of a woman who had almost torn Rome apart. She goes to her snake-bite suicide calmly and bravely: ‘
voltu sereno
’, ‘with a serene expression’. For the Romans, suicide was an honourable death, a dignified way out of extreme humiliation. In Tacitus’s account, Boudica, like Cleopatra, takes poison after her defeat by Suetonius Paulinus, and her suicide
is, significantly, mirrored by that of a Roman: the camp prefect of the 2nd Legion, who kills himself because he has missed out on the glory. Horace calls Cleopatra ‘
non humilis mulier
’, one of those ringing poetic phrases that struggles for adequate translation into English – perhaps ‘a woman not to be brought low’. Boudica, too, is ‘
non humilis mulier
’.

Tacitus’s account of the Boudican revolt has cast a long shadow. Cassius Dio, writing around a century later, embroidered the events, gilding Tacitus’s phlegmatic account of the scene with a darkly glamorous physical description of the queen. He made her tall and grim, rough-voiced and piercing of eye. Blonde hair falls down her back; she wears a gold torc and a cloak fastened by a gold brooch. Her speech is crude but telling – at least in relation to Roman commonplaces about the world that lay at the edge of its empire. Even though, she says, we Britons are cut off from all other men by the Ocean such that most people believe we live in another world, under another sky, we have been despised and trampled underfoot by the Romans. But we are superior. If we are beaten, we melt into swamps and mountains. We can endure hunger and thirst: they, on the other hand, die without their bread and wine and oil. She prays to the victory goddess Adraste, woman to woman, to bring her triumph. But the real woman in all this, she says, is the emperor Nero, playing the lyre back in Rome, smeared in make-up. Free us from these Roman men, she begs – if indeed they are men at all, with their warm-water bathing, their wine-imbibing, myrrh-perfumed homosexuality. The speech taken as a whole is an almost comical ramping-up of the notion of the luxurious, decadent Roman set against that of the brave, self-denying Briton – all put into the mouth of this savage, primitive, terrifying woman. In this other world, under this other sky, everything is turned on its head.

How do we, the later readers of Tacitus and Dio, read all this? Whose side are we on? Who are ‘we’? Are we to applaud Boudica’s patriotism and bravery, or condemn her atrocities? Is Britain to be redeemed from her barbarity by the civilising force of the Romans – or enslaved? In
Holinshed’s Chronicles
, the late-sixteenth-century histories frequently used as a source by Shakespeare, the account of Boudica’s revolt leans heavily on Dio, revelling in its specifically female-directed atrocities committed by this woman-led rabble. ‘Women of great nobilitie and woorthie fame they tooke and hanged
vp naked, and cutting off their paps, sowed them to their mouthes, that they might seeme as if they sucked and fed on them.’ These were, related the
Chronicles
, ‘dredfull examples of the Britains crueltie’. Here female rule and especial barbarity are grotesquely clamped together.

This edition of the
Chronicles
was published in 1587, the year before Elizabeth I’s appearance before her troops at Tilbury. In a domestic history notably devoid of models for female rulers, it is not surprising that James Aske, in his 1588 poem
Elizabetha Triumphans
, celebrating the defeat of the Armada, compared his monarch to Boudica, ‘once England’s happie Queene’. But Boudica, with that ‘dredfull crueltie’ in the background, could never be a straightforward model for Elizabeth, just as her own role as simultaneously virgin queen and ‘prince’ remained troubling to her subjects. At Tilbury, she addressed her troops from her horse, just as Tacitus’s Boudica spoke from her chariot. But the confusions of sex pile up in Elizabeth’s famous speech: she has the ‘body of but a weak and feeble woman’ but also ‘the heart and stomach of a king’, as if she were a man ‘on the inside’. Finding a rhetoric adequate for the expression of female rule was difficult, almost impossible. Boudica, perpetrator of massacres, was precisely the figure you might choose to express your gravest anxieties about being ruled by a woman, rather than to reassure yourself.

Shakespeare’s
Cymbeline
, first performed sometime before 1611 (but certainly several years after the death of Elizabeth in 1603), is set in ancient Britain on the cusp of Roman invasion. It is a play with many threads and many generic affiliations – it seems at once to be tragedy, comedy, pastoral and history play. The main setting is the court of Cymbeline, who is, via Geoffrey of Monmouth,
Holinshed’s Chronicles
and a thousand Shakespearean imaginative twists and turns, a version of the real Iron Age king in the south-east, Cunobelinus. His wife, simply called the Queen, is the ultimate wicked stepmother, whose machinations include attempting to marry off her own son, the vile Cloten, to the virtuous Imogen, Cymbeline’s daughter. The Queen seems to contain echoes of the figure of Boudica, for it is her primal savagery that must be neutralised before the play unravels its many tangled strands. Only with her death can the nation move towards a new future, with Britons
in harmony with Romans. Native savagery, suggests the play, is an especially female savagery; the Romans, by contrast, bring male, civilised virtues. It is hard not to think of the significance here of the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne. Shakespeare is drawing on a myth of ancient Britain (rather than, specifically, England) that treats of two peoples coming together in harmony – after the death of a queen.
King Lear
, too, is another play premiered early in the reign of James (1605) that harks back to a British, rather than English, Geoffrey-inspired mythology. That same year the playwright Anthony Munday devised a pageant for the mayor of London called
The Triumphs of Re-united Britannia
, which dramatised Geoffrey of Monmouth’s myth of Brutus, and had personified rivers foretelling the unification of the island under ‘our second Brute, Royall King James’.

John Fletcher’s play
Bonduca
was premiered at almost exactly the same time as
Cymbeline
. Scholars disagree on which came first; but it is not hard to argue that, whichever way round they came, they are closely related, and not just by way of their ancient British settings. Fletcher’s play begins after the first great victory of Bonduca, as he names her: she gloats at the defeat of the Romans, but her general, Caratach (a version of Caratacus, whom Fletcher imported to the later story), warns her they are not to be underestimated. A subplot concerns a Roman officer, in love with one of Bonduca’s daughters, who tricks and taunts him: all three women of the play are, in their way, brutal (and, of course, played, like Shakespeare’s Queen, by men or boys in the original productions). As the climatic battle approaches, it is Caratach, not Bonduca, who addresses the British troops. Defeated, Bonduca and her daughters kill themselves, the elder daughter having given a grand speech of self-sacrifice that causes the Roman officer Petillius to fall in love with her. The women are all dispatched well before the end of the drama, as if, as in
Cymbeline
, the play’s tensions can be resolved only once they are out of the way. The action comes to a close when the more moderate Caratach is captured and sent to Rome. And yet Fletcher seems to follow Tacitus – the ultimate source for his story – in balancing the arguments between the Romans and Bonduca. His Romans are by no means universally virtuous: there is dishonesty among them, and sexual violence. Bonduca herself seems to invite sympathy. About to die,
she condemns Rome as ‘vicious’. It is fitter, she says, that she should revere

The thatched howses where the Brittans dwell
In careless mirthe. Where the blest houshold gods
See nought but chaste and simple purity.

As she takes her own life, she suggests that Rome will prosper only if it adopts British virtues: ‘If you will keepe yor lawes and Empire whole/ Place in your Roman flesh a Brittaine soule.’ I am reminded of Camden’s ringing phrase in the first English translation of
Britannia
, which was published around the time of these theatrical premieres. He claimed that ‘the Britans and Romans … by a blessed and joyfull mutuall ingrafting, as it were, have growen into one stocke and nation’. It is as if the resolution offered at the end of
Cymbeline
– Romans in harmony with Britons, as one people – has been worked through, historically as well as imaginatively. And yet nothing in these resolutions is particularly comfortable; in
Cymbeline
it feels very much as if the myth of Britain comes less easily to Shakespeare than his rhetoric about England, so ringingly articulated in plays such as
Henry V
and
Richard II
. But then the great lines of John of Gaunt in
Richard II
elide the truth. ‘This England’ was never, quite, a ‘scepter’d isle’. National myths have a habit of tripping up on the truth.

Boudica and Caratacus both seemed to come once more into focus at the end of another long female reign: that of Queen Victoria. In October 1898, Edward Elgar, then aged forty-one, dedicated his choral cantata
Caractacus
to the monarch. (A year later, he would produce the
Enigma Variations
and achieve, for the first time in his career, widespread acclaim.) The cantata’s libretto was commissioned from Harry Arbuthnot Acworth, a former member of the Indian civil service, and collector and translator of Indian Marathi ballads. Acworth’s libretto begins with Caractacus preparing to face the Romans in battle; he also provides the tale with a romantic subplot, giving the British hero a daughter, Eigen (named after one of the Elgars’ neighbours in Malvern), who is in love with a young Druidic bard.

The Britons having been defeated, the scene changes to Rome. Addressing the emperor, Caractacus appeals not to Claudius’s
reputation, as in the Tacitean original, but to his more delicate, romantic feelings, pleading on behalf of ‘my guileless daughter’ and her lover. Claudius pardons the family, and the cantata ends with a chorus foretelling the glories of the British empire, taking its cue from the prophecies of Rome’s future greatness in the
Aeneid
. In early versions of the piece’s vocal score, Elgar had even used as an epigraph a quotation (‘a land pregnant with empires …’) from the sixth book of Virgil’s epic.

But jingoism is not the only mood in the work. By far its most affecting passages relate to the defeated Caractacus, with whom Elgar strongly identified. While writing the cantata, he and his wife, Alice, stayed in the shadow of the Herefordshire Beacon in the Malverns, which – with its impressive Iron Age hill fort – local antiquaries thought was the site of the rebel’s final battle. Elgar marinated himself in the landscape, walking the hills and the woods. When Caractacus makes his final appeal to Claudius, he sings:

We lived in peace, was that a crime to thee,
That thy fierce eagle stoop’d upon our nest?
A freeborn chieftain, and a people free,
We dwelt among our woodlands, and were blest.

The word ‘woodlands’ is repeated when sung – a moment of shattering poignancy. Elgar wrote of it to his friend A. J. Jaeger: ‘I made old Caractacus stop as if broken down … & choke & say “woodlands” again because I’m so madly devoted to my woods.’ It is as if, for Elgar, Caractacus is sprung from the land – from the very woods and the mountains. The unpleasant sentiments of the last chorus mask, in truth, a complicated web of potential sympathies and allegiances (was not the British empire the ‘fierce eagle’ of its day, swooping upon other nests?). In the end, Elgar’s Caractacus will not be pinned down.

Thornycroft’s bronze sculpture group,
Boadicea and Her Daughters
, which gallops along the Embankment at Westminster Bridge in London, was finally erected in 1902, after decades of toil and fund-raising. The horses had been modelled on some of Prince Albert’s – they rear up terrifyingly, their ears pinned back against their heads, their eyes wild. Boadicea stands, arms raised in victory, the fine fabric of her dress pressed back against her body by the onrushing wind. Her daughters lean to each side of her. Scythes flail from her
wheelhubs. The gold-lettered inscription on the plinth is from William Cowper’s poem ‘Boadicea: An Ode’, which was written in 1780.