The results of this brilliantly executed expansionist policy for Russia were extraordinary: twenty million subjects owed Catherine loyalty at her coronation, compared to thirty-six million in 1795 shortly before her death. It was however expansion, not war itself with its manufactured heroics, which interested her, even if she could manufacture heroics herself with a will, where necessary. ‘We need population not devastation’: that was her philosophy. In short, as she herself declared, ‘peace is necessary to this vast empire’:21 a perceptive comment on the vast Russian ‘empire’ at any stage of its history.
Where Warrior Queens are concerned, we return from the users – Maria Theresa and Catherine – to the used – Louise of Prussia. Although described by Napoleon as an ‘Armida’, there was by temperament nothing of Tasso’s ‘wily witch’ and Gluck’s destructive enchantress about Queen Louise of Prussia. ‘Every day I realize that I am a weak woman,’ she wrote during her early carefree years, ‘and I am weak because I am kindhearted. I want everyone to be happy, and so I forgive, forget, and fail to scold when I should …’.22
Canossa in 1077; Countess Matilda of Tuscany extends a supplicating hand to Pope Gregory VII, on behalf of the kneeling, penitent Emperor Henry IV; from Donizo’s contemporary Vita Mathildis. (ill. 17)
Fifteenth-century depiction of the Empress Maud (Matilda), claimant to the throne of England, from a history of England written by monks at St. Albans. (ill. 18)
A nineteenth-century Belgian evocation of Countess Matilda at Canossa, painted by Alfred Cluysenaar. (ill. 19)
Queen Tamara of Georgia; an engraving published in 1859. (ill. 20)
The monogram of Queen Tamara, formed from the letters TAMAR in the Georgian knightly hand, and employed in the copper coinage of her realm. (ill. 21)
Queen Isabella of Spain; a detail from the painting The Madonna of the Catholic Kings. (ill. 22)
Medal (c. 1480) showing Caterina Sforza, the spirited daughter of the Duke of Milan; her fate, as a would-be female ruler of Forlì, contrasted unhappily with that of Isabella of Spain. (ill. 23)
Triumphal entry of Ferdinand and Isabella, ‘the Catholic kings’ of Spain, into Granada in January 1492 following the conquest of the last Moorish kingdom; a bas-relief on the altar of the Royal Chapel in the cathedral. (ill. 24)
The earliest loose popular print of Queen Elizabeth I: William Rogers’ Eliza, Triumphans of 1589 (the year following the defeat of the Spanish Armada) shows the Queen as Peace, with an olive branch in her hand, while Victory and Plenty proffer her their crowns. (ill. 25)
Queen Elizabeth and the Three Goddesses (Juno, Pallas Athene, and Venus seen against a background of Windsor Castle), attributed to Joris Hoefnagel, 1569; it has been suggested that this allegorical picture refers to the Queen’s suppression of the Northern Rebellion, the first military initiative of her reign. (ill. 26)
Panel from St. Faith’s Church, King’s Lynn, showing Queen Elizabeth reviewing her troops at Tilbury in 1588. (ill. 27)
A group of illustrations of the life of Jinga Mbandi, the seventeenth-century Queen of Angola, from Relation Historique de l’Ethiopie Occidentale by Father J. P. Labat, 1732.
Queen Jinga being received by the Portuguese Governor, Correira de Sousa, in about 1622; according to one of the best-known legends about her, she commanded one of her servants to form a seat when the Governor failed to offer her a chair.(ill. 28)
(ABOVE, LEFT) Queen Jinga receives Christian baptism as the Lady Anna de Sousa (in honor of the Governor); she subsequently returned to her tribal name, variously given as Zhinga, Nzinga, and Jinga. (ABOVE, RIGHT) Queen Jinga venerates the bones of her brother, whom she succeeded as ruler. (Some stories hold that she had him murdered.) (ill. 29) (ill. 30)
Statue of Queen Anne by Rysbrack at Blenheim Palace; the reality of her appearance was very different from this august image. (ill. 31)
The Empress Catherine II of Russia, after a portrait by V. Erichsen painted in 1762, the year of her coronation; this followed the coup by which, at the head of the rebel regiments, she supplanted her husband Tsar Peter III. She borrowed a uniform to do so: ‘For a man’s work, you needed a man’s outfit’, she wrote. (ill. 32)
The Empress Maria Theresa of Austria at her coronation as Queen of Hungary at Pressburg in 1742; she mounted a charger and drew her sword to the four points of the compass to signify her role as Hungary’s protector, according to the ancient tradition of the Hungarian kings. (ill. 33)
Nineteenth-century monument to Maria Theresa opposite the Hofburg in Vienna, showing her towering majestically above her male ministers and generals. (ill. 34)
Queen Louise of Prussia, painted by Grassi in 1802 when she was twenty-six. ‘There prevails a feeling of chivalrous devotion towards her’, wrote an English diplomat at her court; ‘a glance of her bright laughing eyes is a mark of favour eagerly sought for’. (ill. 35)
The celebrated print of King Frederick William III of Prussia and the Tsar Alexander I swearing brotherhood over the tomb of Frederick the Great, watched by Queen Louise; after Napoleon’s occupation of Berlin a cruel caricature of the same print was issued, with the Tsar as Nelson and Louise as Lady Hamilton, currently notorious in Europe as Nelson’s mistress. (ill. 36)
Napoleon receiving Queen Louise at Tilsit, 6 July 1807; the Queen is supported by her husband and watched by the Tsar. A detail from a picture by N. L. F. Gosse. (ill. 37)
The Rani of Jhansi, a watercolour from Kalighat, 1890. (ill. 38)
Contemporary painting, by an unknown artist, of Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi; both Indian and British sources bear witness to her striking appearance. (ill. 39)
The site of the massacre of Europeans at Jhansi on 7 July 1857; the Rani was subsequently blamed—unjustly—for betraying them. (ill. 40)
Hindu mythology contains several warrior goddesses; here Durga, wife of Siva, is seen seated on her tiger, slaying the demon Mahesasura with the aid of her ten arms; unlike Kali, another of Siva’s wives and the goddess of destruction, Durga (to whom both the Rani and Mrs. Gandhi were compared) is portrayed as beautiful and basically benevolent, despite her capacity for aggression. (ill. 41)
Statue of the Rani of Jhansi at Gwalior; she was killed here on or about 17 June 1858, leading her men in a battle to defend the fortress from the British assault under Sir Hugh Rose. (ill. 42)
Mrs. Golda Meir salutes the detachment commander of Israeli paratroops; her own ‘grandmotherly’ uniform includes a handbag. (ill. 43)
Well-wishers present garlands to Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India and Leader of the Congress Party. (The newspaper caption to this photograph read ‘Garlands for Mother Indira’.) (ill. 44)
Mrs. Margaret Thatcher with a model of a Chieftain tank in 1987. (ill. 45)
Her majesty Queen Elizabeth II in military uniform at the Trooping of the Colour, enacting the purely ceremonial role of the ‘Armed Figurehead’. (ill. 46)
Mrs. Thatcher at the dinner held on 26 January 1988 to celebrate her record as the longest-serving Prime Minister in twentieth-century Britain; she is surrounded by members of her cabinet (her husband Denis Thatcher is on her left); it is noticeable that there are no female Cabinet ministers to distract attention from the central figure in her glittering brocade costume, amid the attendant dinner-jacketed males. (ill. 47)
A June 1982 cartoon of Mrs. Thatcher in Boadicean breastplates and driving a chariot (Ronald Reagan is seen, somewhat smaller, as a cowboy). It was published in the Daily Express following Mrs. Thatcher’s appearance on American television after the conclusion of the Falklands War, in which she described herself as having the ‘reputation of being the Iron Lady’. (ill. 48)
Like Catherine a minor German princess, Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz possessed, apart from this sweet feminine pliancy, the gift of beauty. On Louise’s exquisite looks there is a remarkable agreement of testimony. In 1793, when she was seventeen, her ravishing appearance captured the heart of Frederick William, the shy young heir to the throne of Pr
ussia: ‘it is she, and if not she, no other creature in the world’, he is reputed to have exclaimed at the mere sight of her (much as Isabella of Castile is supposed to have greeted Ferdinand). A decade later, seeing the Prussian Queen dressed as Statira, the Persian bride of Alexander the Great at a fête in Berlin, Madame de Staël was ‘struck dumb by her beauty’. In 1801 Madame Vigée Le Brun, whose observant painter’s eye was disappointed in the stature of Catherine the Great, alleged that her pen failed her in trying to describe Louise. The Queen happened to be in deep mourning on their first encounter, but her coronet of black jet served only to set off the dazzling whiteness of her complexion; as for the beauty of her ‘heavenly’ face Madame Vigée Le Brun compared it to that of a sixteen-year-old girl, with the perfect regularity and delicacy of the features, the grace of figure, neck and arms: ‘all was enchanting beyond anything imaginable!’23
In life this perfect regularity of feature and the supple slender figure often led to Queen Louise being compared to a Greek statue. For once, the art by which later generations must judge confirms and does not disappoint: there is something neo-Hellenic about the many representations of her which have survived, enhanced naturally by the clinging Grecian style of contemporary fashion which suited her so well. We can accept with relief the verdict of the English diplomat Sir George Jackson that the Queen was ‘really a beauty and would be thought so even if she did not sit upon a throne’. The chivalry she inspired is equally easy to understand: ‘among the younger men especially’, wrote Jackson, ‘there prevails a feeling of chivalrous devotion towards her; and a sunny smile, or glance of her bright laughing eyes, is a mark of favour eagerly sought for’.24
At first it was all lightness at the Prussian court, Frederick William succeeding his father in 1797, four years after his marriage. Perhaps the Queen – who was after all young – danced a little too much (she danced at a court ball in 1803 within hours of giving birth) and she was also lightheartedly unpunctual. There are unpublished passages in the diary of Countess Sophie von Voss, Louise’s battleaxe of a lady-in-waiting (already in her seventies, with a father who fought against Marlborough at Malplaquet) that criticize the Queen’s frivolity and even her petulance in these early years; but Countess Voss’s final verdict was to be very different: ‘all the loveliest virtues of woman and the most pleasing to God’.25
On the other hand Louise’s surely admirable attempts at enlarging her perfunctory education with a study of German literature, to which more intellectual ladies-in-waiting introduced her, were greeted with boorish mockery by Frederick William. He described one of these intellectuals, Caroline von Berg, as ‘vain, trivial … and forever gushing poetry’. Nor was the reputation of Goethe sacred to the Prussian King. ‘Wha’s ’is name, t’great man from Weimar?’ Frederick William would enquire, aping the local dialect. Another of these ladies, Marie von Kleist, aunt by marriage to the poet and playwright Heinrich von Kleist, persuaded the Queen to patronize her nephew; he received an honorarium under oath of secrecy.26 Schiller became a special favourite: the Queen wanted him as Poet Laureate. She also read Shakespeare in translation.
The Queen’s tentative efforts at intellectual independence had however little in common with that kind of Amazonian behaviour described with all the richness of sexual violence in Kleist’s Penthesilea: ‘A nation has arisen, a nation of women, Bound to no overlord …’.27 Louise’s submissiveness, her wifely wish to please, was most notably demonstrated by the continuous procession of children that she bore. Ten years after her marriage she had already born seven; two of the children had died and there were also various miscarriages. Louise gave birth to a total of nine children in fourteen years, the last of them less than a year before her death.
When Madame Vigée Le Brun met the Queen in 1801, she could not make an appointment before noon because, as Louise explained, ‘the King reviews the troops at ten every morning and likes me to attend’. The only blight on this picture of domestic and marital bliss appeared to be the plain looks of Louise’s numerous children. ‘They are not pretty’, murmured the Queen sadly. ‘Their faces have a great deal of character’, was the painter’s tactful comment. Privately, she thought the youthful princes and princesses of Prussia downright ugly.28
But for Prussia and its king – if not yet its queen – already problems existed along more serious lines than those of a military review or a homely royal family. The rise of Napoleonic France had placed Prussia in a quandary: neutrality? And if not neutrality, alliance with which of the various great powers involved? It was a profound Prussian conviction of the time that its army, built up by Frederick William’s great-uncle Frederick the Great, remained the finest in Europe. Time would test the validity of that belief. In the meantime Frederick William’s indecisive nature led him to see his fine army as a bastion of Prussia’s neutrality rather than as anything more aggressive.
The King’s personal quandary however – neutrality versus alliance – remained. And it was this quandary, finally, which brought Louise to play the role of Warrior Queen. In 1803 the French forces occupied Hanover, a state which on the one hand Prussia was pledged to protect as a neutral zone, and on the other coveted for itself. Prussia was offered Hanover in return for a treaty with France. Frederick William hesitated unhappily. Napoleon made good use of his dilemma of conscience. The French judicial murder of the young Bourbon Prince the Duc d’Enghien on 21 March 1804 for alleged conspiracy horrified all royal Europe: but Louise was persuaded not to wear mourning for the Duc by the new Prussian Foreign Minister, the veteran statesman Carl-August von Hardenberg, who hoped to secure Hanover peaceably.
Louise’s martial instincts were still nascent. Placatory gifts of dresses from the newly created Empress Josephine (Napoleon assumed the title of Emperor on 18 May) were accepted: pale grey satin magnificently embroidered with steel, and white satin embroidered with gold thread, further adorned with Alençon lace and Brussels point. The Queen’s attempts at influencing the King towards war were dated nearly a year later by Sir George Jackson to February 1805. It was not until September of the same year that she was generally reputed to head the ‘war party’.29
What brought about the transformation? Napoleon himself angrily and publicly ascribed the change to another charismatic man: the Tsar Alexander I. There had been that magic summer at the Baltic coastal resort of Memel in 1802, the year following the accession of the young Tsar. The grandson of Catherine the Great, Alexander was an intensely attractive figure: even the crabby Countess Voss found him at this stage ‘irresistible’, with his handsome appearance and striking fair colouring (he was of course genetically far more German than Slav, his mother like his grandmother having been born a German princess).30 Memel, symbolically enough, was not only on the Baltic, but also on the borders of Prussia and Russia: here the two courts mingled and the two youthful royal families – already interrelated – relaxed together.
Louise flowered. ‘She was today more beautiful than ever’, wrote Countess Voss of one particular June evening. There was dancing every night, and presents for Louise from the Tsar including earrings of her favourite pearls (even Countess Voss got a pearl necklace). No wonder the Countess wrote that she was ‘quite grieved that these pleasant days should come to an end’.31 But further delightful co-celebrations were planned by Alexander, such as a pageant based on the happy days at Memel for Louise’s birthday the following March; Louise’s current baby would be named Alexandrina with the Tsar as her godfather.
For all Napoleon’s subsequent excoriations in which he vowed that the Prussian Queen had been ‘so good, so gentle’ until the Tsar’s baleful influence made her desert ‘the serious occupation of her dressing-table’ for politics,32 the story of an actual affair between Alexander and Louise was certainly a calumny. That primitive desire to find a Warrior Queen either preternaturally lustful or preternaturally chaste (Louise came in for both charges) may have played its part. The truth of Louise’s feelings for Alexander was probably subtler. Wha
t a contrast the romantic young Tsar – born in 1777, he was a year younger than Louise – presented to the vacillating and uncultured Frederick William! For Louise, well knowing her duty both as a wife and a queen, her unacknowledged sentimental devotion to the Tsar could be safely expressed in a public admiration for his policies and a trust in his political objectives. ‘I believe in you as I believe in God’, she wrote to Alexander at one point:33 this idolatry was not the outburst of a voluptuous and satisfied woman.
The late summer of 1805 brought persistent murmurs of war in the Prussian capital of Berlin. How could Prussia stand aloof while the French devoured half Europe? Frederick William reflected gloomily concerning his impossible position on 12 September: ‘Many a king has fallen because he loved war too well, but I may fall because I am in love with peace.’34 There was no doubt that the general Prussian mood veered towards war. Napoleon’s enemy the Tsar was cheered wildly at the opera in Berlin (the performance incidentally was of Armide). And when a secret pact was finally concluded between Russia and Prussia, agreeing to send an ultimatum to Napoleon, Louise’s influence over Frederick William was generally believed by those in the know to have brought it about. The treaty was signed on 3 November 1805. That night the three friends – Alexander, Louise and Frederick William – went secretly together to visit the tomb of Frederick the Great at the Tsar’s request (a popular contemporary print would depict them standing reverently beside the historic sepulchre). The episode represented the romantic culmination of Louise’s hopes that war would not only stop the unstoppable Napoleon, but bring honour to the Prussian King at last, by uniting him with the brave and honourable Tsar of Russia.