Walker J.M. The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

148 The Elizabeth Icon, 1603–2003

Figure 17 “Elizabeth and Mary Stuart,” print, W. Kalbach, c.1896. Collection

of the author

10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Figure 18 Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses, attributed to Hans Eworth, painting c.1569. Reproduced with

permission from Queen’s Gallery

149

10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker

2011-03-24

is a book about Mary Stuart, the expressions of Elizabeth’s men are inter-

esting. They don’t appear all that loyal or ready to defend their queen.

The man on the right appears concerned, but seems to be looking at

Mary; the man on the left seems frankly embarrassed and is looking at

the ground.

The two women’s postures mimic, rather than mirror, each other.

Mary’s right arm, raised toward her heart (or restrained by that lady in

waiting), has a crucifix dangling from it. Elizabeth’s right arm is held

staunchly in front of her waist, with the hand angled up toward the

heart, with her decorative string of pearls incidentally clasped against her

torso. Mary’s left arm and hand are fully extended, as if to scratch the

English queen’s face. Elizabeth stands unflinching, her left hand clutching

a (rather out of place) rose bush. Her left glove, presumably, is still on

her hand. Her face shown in stark profile, Elizabeth’s figure fills more of

the space, while Mary’s two-thirds face disappears into shadow on the

ominous left side. In the background behind Mary is the tower of a castle,

whether one of her places of imprisonment or a visual allusion to

Edinburgh is unclear without the context of the book in which the illus-

tration first appeared. On the ground before Elizabeth is a hooded falcon

or hawk. Again, this can be read as an allusion to the fabled “sport of

kings,” or as the artist’s association between Elizabeth and a bird of prey.

In the context of this study, however, the most interesting thing about

the print is that it is a remake of Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses (c.1569),

one of the first allegorical paintings of the queen (Figure 18). In that

work, the scene is itself a remake of the Choice of Paris, but with Elizabeth

as a fourth female figure. She stands, elevated by three steps, on the left

of the canvas, holding the symbolic apple, her orb. Hera is in the act of

turning away from an angry confrontation, turning so quickly that she

loses a slipper. Elizabeth is attended by two women, making the body-

count equal on both sides (unlike the nineteenth-century version), but

both of Hera’s companions are famous in their own right. Athena, wearing

her armor with the Medusa head, holds up her palm in a conventional

gesture of amazement. The only still member of the classical trio is

Aphrodite, the original winner of the Choice of Paris. She sits casually

at her ease, son Cupid by her side, and her eyes locked with those of

Elizabeth, the new winner, forming a strong diagonal across the canvas.

Behind Hera’s swan-chariot is the Round Tower of Windsor Castle, marking

the very landscape as English.

The visual allusions to the sixteenth-century work could – I suppose,

in a stretch – be a coincidence. All the better. The clear power struggle,

also clearly victorious in the immediate moment, but ultimately

150 The Elizabeth Icon, 1603–2003

10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

ambiguous (as figured by the relaxed posture of Aphrodite), when trans-

ferred to the nineteenth-century picture makes much the same statement.

In Victoria’s time, Elizabeth may have won the battle, but Mary is going

to win the war. The castle behind her head is most emphatically not

Windsor, so the very land upon which Elizabeth stands is in the process

of shifting. In this light, the rose bush can be read as the bramble of

Jotham’s Parable in the Book of Judges. The olive tree, the fig tree, and

the vine all refused the title of king on the grounds that their fruit was

a greater glory than any title. Only the lowly bramble, that bore no fruit,

agreed to become king, providing all the other trees would bow low

before him. Mary may be undignified, under-attended, and more in the

dark in this picture, but the fruit she has already borne will out-last

Elizabeth’s barren Tudor Rose.

Like the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey, this picture argues

for the ultimate judgment that women who are mothers (like Victoria,

of course) will achieve more lasting good and greater fame than the flashy

brambles, however rampant. It’s a sobering view of history, and a

depressing testimony to the reality that Victoria’s view of the role of the

female monarch was closer to that of James I than to that of Elizabeth.

1837–1910: The Shadow of a Paternalistic Queenship 151

10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

1910–1953: The Shadow of History

Elizabeth and the Suffrage Campaign

Between the early 1860s and 1918 various groups of variously dedicated

people worked to bring women the right to vote in Great Britain. Although

branches of the Suffrage Movement were active in villages, towns, and

cities across the UK, my attention – like that of the contemporary media

– is focused on activities in London. The relationship between the English

political movements advocating voting rights for women and the image

and history of Queen Elizabeth is not straightforward. While we might

expect that Elizabeth would have provided a template or at least an

exemplum of the astute and accomplished political woman, and thus so

much grist to the suffrage mills, two major figures problematized that

seemingly logical connection: Queen Victoria and Joan of Arc. Moreover,

the chronology of these two figures in relation to Gloriana is ahistorical,

with the culturally massive figure of Victoria blocking the early suffra-

gists’ view of Elizabeth, while the gleam of Joan’s fabled armor partially

blinded many suffragette speakers and writers to the image of the queen

who was closer to them in both centuries and national identity. But,

once again, the icon of the late queen of glorious memory was simply

too vividly present in the public sphere of memory not to become a

major touchstone for the rhetoric and spectacle of the Movement.

For clarity of discussion, I would employ the distinction between

“suffragist” and “suffragette” set forth by Martin Pugh, who speaks of

Victorian suffragists and Edwardian suffragettes – the former adhering

to constitutional models of behavior in their quest for enfranchisement,

the latter taking a more radical stance.

Pugh, however, warns against

dismissing the earlier group as less committed or daring, simply because

they stayed with the law, justly admonishing us that “in the late 1860s

one should remember, the suffragists who mounted public platforms

152

10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

were militants.”

These Victorian suffragists, he continues, employed a

tactic “described disparagingly as ‘mixed speaking,’ since men were also

present, and was thought to be rather shocking.”

“Rather shocking”

may seem a quaint Victorian hyperbole to us now, but there was nothing

quaint about the views expressed by Victoria herself and those in her

circle. Lady Amberly, one of these “rather shocking” public speakers,

exclaimed at the public’s response: “‘people expressed surprise to me

afterwards to see that a woman could lecture and still look like a lady!’”

Queen Victoria’s (in)famous response to reports of the spectacle was less

complimentary, writing to Sir Theodore Martin on 20 May 1870, referring

in general to women participating in “mixed speaking” and to Lady

Amberly in particular:

The Queen is most anxious to enlist every one who can speak or write

to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of “Women’s Right,” with

all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting

every sense of womanly feeling and propriety. Lady — ought to get a

GOOD WHIPPING.

Constance Rover’s assessment of this is that, despite the “Queen’s attitude,

it was at least obvious that there was a certain contradiction in [the state

of the government] … As may be imagined, the suffragists were not slow

to point out this anomaly.”

Interestingly, as much attention as Queen

Victoria’s remark garnered when Sir Theodore published it in 1908, the

general public was largely unaware of her feelings at the time. Thus we

see that the image of Victoria as a woman ruler had more power than

the actual sentiments of Victoria the person, for during the late 1890s,

when the nation’s imagination was most taken with the queen’s long reign,

“Sir Wilfred Lawson and others suggested [in 1897] that it would be

appropriate to mark her diamond jubilee by enacting a women’s suffrage

bill.”

Needless to say, that never happened. But, in these days when

tabloids purport to bring us every thought that flits through a royal head,

it’s salutary to be reminded that a century ago, a Member of Parliament

could be so unaware of the monarch’s long-standing (17 years, at least)

and strongly (if semi-privately) expressed sentiments, so unaware as to

propose a bill entirely at odds with the views of the queen he was trying

to honor. Insofar as is possible, we should cling to this distinction between

then and now.

But 1897 was actually well over 50 years into the Parliamentary debates

on the topic of women and the vote. We have no less than the words of

one of the nineteenth century’s most famous politicians on the subject:

1910–1953: The Shadow of History 153

10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

I say to you that in a country governed by a woman – where you allow

women to form part of the other estate of the realm – peeresses in their

own right for example – where you allow a woman not only to hold

land but to be a lady of the Manor and hold legal courts – where a

woman by law may be churchwarden – I do not see, where she has so

much to do with the State and Church, on what reasons … she has

not a right to vote. All this proves that right has nothing to do with

the matter.

Benjamin Disraeli,

in a debate in the House of Commons

on 20 June 1848.

That Disraeli began his series of parallel clauses with a reference to Queen

Victoria is hardly surprising, given the inarguable fact that she was a

queen regnant. That he speaks, in Parliament itself, of the country being

“governed by a woman” is hyperbole in the service of a political agenda.

Victoria, of course, did not govern as did Elizabeth Tudor. Nevertheless,

the language of monarchy still flourished in the mid-nineteenth century,

just as it does today, when circumstances – such as the Golden Jubilee

of Elizabeth II – elicit it. Separating the images of the queen who would

symbolize the Empire from the images of the queen who first fostered

empire-building proved a difficult task for supporters of the suffrage

movement. From our vantage-point, using the examples in tandem might

seem both logical and effective. And, to some extent, it was.

Millicent Fawcett’s 1895 Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria,

makes this

point in a number of ways. Illustrating the awareness of Victoria’s father,

the Duke of Kent, of the place of importance held by his new-born

daughter, Fawcett tells us that he “wanted the baby to be called Elizabeth,

because it was the name of the greatest of England’s Queens, and therefore

a popular name with the English people”; his German relatives, however,

insisted on Alexandrina Georgiana. But the Prince Regent objected to

his name coming second, so she was to be christened simply Alexandrina,

when the Duke added, at the last moment, his wife’s name, Victoria, a

name “then almost unknown in England.”

(Surely it would have been

one of history’s most ironic jokes if three of the four longest-reigning

monarchs of England were named Elizabeth.

)

Framing her argument by remarking acidly on the fact that the birth

of a prince is celebrated because it saves a nation “from all the perils and

evils supposed to be associated with the reign of a female Sovereign,”

Fawcett goes on to make a jest of that sentiment by cataloging successful

queens regnant.

154 The Elizabeth Icon, 1603–2003

10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

[I]t is not a little curious that the popular opinion to which these

articles and speeches give expression, namely, that the chances are

that any man will make a better Sovereign than any woman, is wholly

contrary to experience; it is hardly going too far to say that in every

country in which the succession to the Crown has been open to women,

some of the greatest, most capable, and most patriotic Sovereigns have

been queens. The names of Isabella of Spain, of Maria Theresa of

Austria, will rise in this connection to every mind; and, little as she is

to be admired as a woman, Catherine II of Russia showed that she

thoroughly understood the art of ruling. Her vices would have excited

little remark had she been a king instead of a queen. It is an uncon-

scious tribute to the higher standard of conduct queens have taught

the world to expect from them, that while the historic muse stands

aghast at the private life of the Russian Empress, she is only very mildly

scandalized by a Charles V or a Henry IV, thinking, with much justice,

that their great qualities as rulers serve to cover their multitude of sins

as private individuals.

Her nail in the coffin, as it were, is delivered with succinct aplomb: “The

Salic Law did not, to say the least, save the French monarchy from

ruin.”

Indeed, this is an exquisite understatement, as the French

obsession with crowning only male heads led directly to the dynastic

disaster of the Hundred Years War and failed to save the royal necks

during the French Revolution.

Reminding her readers that in the five (at that time) queens regnant

of England “we have had three of eminent distinction as compared with

our other Sovereigns; and of these three, one ranks with the very greatest

of the statesmen who deserve to be remembered as the Makers of

England.”

And here she speaks of Elizabeth. Although a bit florid,

Fawcett’s judgment is unequivocal: “when the feeble flame of Edward VI’s

life was extinguished … England acquired at the most critical moment

of her history, in the person of Elizabeth, perhaps the greatest Sovereign

who has ever occupied the throne of this country.”

Here Fawcett is

carefully trying to thread a critical needle. Elizabeth, she argues, is simply

and absolutely (perhaps) the best monarch England has ever had. But (and

here’s the hard part) if Elizabeth is an exceptional monarch, she is, de

facto, an exceptional woman. Never mind that outstanding male rulers

are also exceptional men; men are the gold-standard. It does not diminish

the ranks of men in general for there to be exceptional men. For women,

on the other hand, “exceptional” resonates with the clearly heard, even

if unarticulated, echo “for a woman.” Far worse, to call Elizabeth an

1910–1953: The Shadow of History 155

10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

exceptional ruler – rather than an exceptional “woman ruler” – sets her

so entirely apart from all her sisters that she becomes something “more”

than a woman.

And this argument can cut both ways. Partly in response to Cicely

Hamilton’s 1909 Pageant of Great Women

– a debate between two abstrac-

tions, Woman and Prejudice, mediated by a third, Justice – Ford Madox

Ford published (yet another) pamphlet called This Monstrous Regiment of

Women, in 1913. In the Pageant of Great Women, Woman brings categories

of extraordinary women in Western civilization: Learned, Saintly, and

Heroic Women, as well as Artists, Rulers, and Warriors. As Barbara Green

recounts, “forty-four exemplary Edwardian women (suffragettes, suf-

fragists, and actresses like Ellen Terry and Edith Craig) represented

forty-four exemplary women from history (like Jane Austen, Sappho,

Elizabeth, Joan of Arc, and Florence Nightingale) through a grand

spectacle.”

Ford zeros in on one of the weak points of using exceptional

women, already a matter of some debate within the Suffrage Movement:

such women are, he argues, by definition, not the norm. While the

women in the Movement worried primarily about ordinary women feeling

shut out or failing to identify with any of the great women of history,

there is another side to the problem. Ford’s rendering of this issue is more

an ad hominem attack than an intellectual response. After this, in the

spirit of Boccaccio’s Concerning Famous Women, Ford professes to acknow-

ledge the connection between national success and women on the throne.

But he continues, introducing the argument that Elizabeth and Victoria

were successful precisely because they embodied un-womanly qualities.

As so Elizabeth paid nobody, cheated everybody, and was mean in a

manner in which no man could have been mean. Had she been a fine

lady living today she would have been the sort of person who would

have underpaid her cabman, docked half the wages of her footman,

ridden first-class with a third–class ticket – and at the cabman, at the

footman, at the ticket collectors she would have made such eyes that

not one of them but would have protested that she was the most

charming lady in the world.

Barbara Green takes on the other weakness of the exceptional woman,

although more fairly, saying that the Movement itself owed more to the

celebrity of women such as Christabel Pankhurst than to the needs of

the disenfranchised. She points out the fundamental “incompatibility of

celebrity (the exception) and citizenship (the dream of equal participa-

tion),” remarking that the WSPU’s willingness to agree to limited

156 The Elizabeth Icon, 1603–2003

10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

enfranchisement constituted “seeming indifference to the demands of

working-class women.”

Needless to say, Green does not cite any examples

from the life of Queen Elizabeth. Nice to mice she may have been, but

Elizabeth was markedly not nice to other women; certainly she did little

or nothing to improve the lot of her gender within her kingdom, except

insofar as she made the lives of all her people safer and more prosperous.

In this regard, Elizabeth is strikingly unhelpful as an icon for the Suffrage

Movement’s goal of citizenship.

But, to paraphrase one of the brothers in Milton’s Mask: “peace, [sister],

be not over-exquisite.” The most general goal of the Suffrage Movement

was to better the lot of women, politically and socially. Not that they were

content to take what they could get, but – within the context of the

British class system in which the activists lived and moved and had their

meetings – Elizabeth’s elite status was no reason to cast her image aside.

The problem of Joan of Arc is only a problem for this book. For the

women in the Suffrage Movement, she must have seemed literally heaven-

sent, regardless of their varied theologies. An active phenomenon in 1429

– and surely seeming to Christine de Pizan, the author of the first French

poem about her, to be the living proof of the arguments in that author’s

1405 The Book of the City of Ladies – Joan did indeed literally lead an army

to victory on not one, but numerous occasions, and crown a King of

France. Burned at the stake after a rigged trial in 1431, re-tried and

vindicated in a process that lasted from 1452 until 1456, declared

Venerable in 1903, Beatified by Pius X in 1909, and Canonized in 1920,

Joan was also a present-tense phenomenon for the women of the Suffrage

Movement. Although her official Canonization

came after British

women (and even American women) had been partially enfranchised,

Joan was still the de facto secular saint of the moment and the Movement.

Joan of Arc is the militant women’s ideal. They feel the closest kinship

with her and in every word and every act of hers they recognize the

same spirit as that which strengthens them to risk their liberty and

endure torture for the sake of freedom.

The Suffragette, 9 May 1913

Like Christine de Pizan, the Pankhursts and their supporters must have

had trouble believing their eyes. There was a figure of Joan, almost always

on a white horse, at every Suffrage spectacle. Pamphlets, posters, banners

– all of the media at the Movement’s disposal figured forth, at one time

or other, Joan. In a 1910 biography of Joan, Grace James writes a clever

analysis, not of Joan, but of the king she crowned, Charles VII.

1910–1953: The Shadow of History 157

10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24