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

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this trope in The Book of the City of Ladies, and we see poetic versions of

it as early as Homer’s epics, where the catalog – in the Iliad, a virtually

endless list of ships and those who arrived in them – is used to impart a

sense of historical reality and accuracy. This is the print version of the

13,000-person procession. For such occasions – in print or in action – more

is definitely more.

Taking this device to perhaps its most extreme use in the period,

Margaret Wynne Nevinson compiles a 1913 work entitled Ancient

Suffragettes

and gives us an almost overwhelming catalog of women.

Her argument is that “the race of Suffragettes is of very ancient lineage,”

and she disputes the claim that “the enfranchisement of women is unscrip-

tural,” calling Leah “one of the earliest martyrs to the ‘mariage de

convenance’!” saying that even “the Jewish Jehovah had compassion

upon her and gave her a son.”

Heading her list are Deborah and Jael

as “militant women,” and Ruth, who was praised by “both women (who

said she was better to Naomi than seven sons)” and Boaz, who calls her

“a virtuous woman.”

She allows that the Queen of Sheba had much

wealth and power and that her subjects, “like Englishmen seem to have

had no objection to the rule of a woman, though with strange want of

logic the enfranchisement of the sex seems so repugnant to them.”

Ignoring Esther, she pronounces:

In those days of the Oriental subjection of women it is cheering to read

of the spirited action of Queen Vashti, who very properly refused to

make a spectacle of herself at the command of a drunken husband.”

Judith, we are told, joins Boadicea and Joan of Arc as heroic women who

save both their countries and their “sex for ever from the charge of

weakness and cowardice.”

Digressing a bit over the topic of divorce, she picks up the thread of

her argument within the classics. Saying that Homer’s times were short

of suffragettes, she labels as

contemptible to a modern house-wife … the supineness of the faithful

Penelope, who suffered so dejectedly the enormous appetites of the

suitors and their havoc in the wine-cellar! Not once does it occur to

this doubtfully virtuous woman to assume the keys of the cupboards,

to turn out the wooers, and to assert her inalienable right to make her

own rules in her own house.

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She continues to lay waste to the classical examples of the feminine, calling

Helen of Troy a typical bad example of “‘the protected women’ beguiling

and ruling men through their lowest nature”; but she nevertheless objects

to Helen and the Greeks and Trojans putting blame on “‘the god’ in a

resigned Calvinist spirit, [appearing] to have had little or no conscious-

ness of Free Will.” Remarking scornfully that Aphrodite “would never

have gone to prison for her opinions, nor headed a raid on the House of

Commons” Nevinson goes on to list “Athene, goddess of wisdom, defender

of the state” as one who “still leads women in their revolt against injustice;

and with her is Hera, wife of Zeus,” who is “no Griselda; she stands up

boldly to Zeus for the equality of the sexes and the rights of women.” She

then adds to “these immortals … the race of Amazons and the two queens

Hippolyte and Penthesilea … In Sophocles, AEschylus, and Euripides, we

find women of character and high courage – Antigone, Clytemnestra,

Alcestis, Medea,” saying that Medea’s speech on the subjugation of women

is great and “might be given to-day from the Suffragist platform without

anyone in the audience suspecting its antiquity.”

All that wit and erudition in a mere seven pages. One marvels at her

existence in 1913, even as one mourns the lack of opportunity to meet

her. But all this is a long way round the mulberry bush to the banner of

Elizabeth. Or not so long. For the first time we are seeing an iconic rep-

resentation of Elizabeth as one figure in a crowd. Just as Lady Florence

Dixie forces us to realize we are revising the icon held in our memories,

so do these processing, list-making, banner-sewing women fighting for

the vote force us to acknowledge that Elizabeth is not as singular as we

have been persuaded to believe. These lists and parades of banners place

the queen in a progression of women, but the progression is not one of

chronology or degree. As Nevinson reminds us that Medea’s speech would

not be out of place in the twentieth century, she also implicitly makes

the point that Euripides’ character had a bolder view of her own worth

as a woman than Elizabeth allowed herself to express. As we are invited

to recall the bravery in combat of Penthesilea, Judith, Boadicea, and Joan,

we must realize that making a speech before a battle in which she has

no plans to participate is not the same as Henry V’s invitation – however

disingenuous – to be one of “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

No, Elizabeth might not make the cut for Margaret Wynne Nevinson

(Mrs. H. W.). But she is there, caught in her historical moment, serving

as a feminist critique to the more modern Victoria, even as the ancient

Boadicea puts Elizabeth to shame in some respects.

And the banner itself (Figure 19, see also front cover) is very beautiful.

The once-orange background has faded a bit to a sort of golden rose, but

1910–1953: The Shadow of History 169

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170 The Elizabeth Icon, 1603–2003

Figure 19 Queen Elizabeth Suffragette Banner, c.1908. Reproduced with the

permission of the Women’s Library

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

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it is picked up in Elizabeth’s gown and does contrast with her famous

hair and the blue of the English Channel. She is depicted as a queen

associated with war. The ships of the Armada battle are ranged behind

her just as they are in the Armada portrait and “Truth Presents the Queen

with a Lance.” Furthermore, unlike the warrior queen Boadicea, the other

bracket to “Victoria, Queen and Mother,” Elizabeth exists in real time,

as it were; she is of early modern history, in the period where the visual

image of an individual leader first could lodge in the memories of a sig-

nificant number of subjects. And, most importantly, Elizabeth’s face is

the only face on any of those 23 banners. Not only has the work of the

artists reached an extraordinarily high degree of detail and realism, but

the complexity of the banner itself sets it apart from all of the others.

Both the women lost in the mists of time – Boadicea, St. Teresa – and the

women whose photographs were readily available – George Eliot, Angelica

Kaufmann, Fanny Byrney – are represented, as are Victoria and Joan of

Arc, simply by their written names. Elizbeth’s face, itself an icon of a

powerful English woman, adorns her banner above her name. She doesn’t

require the title “Queen.” She simply is. Elizabeth.

An icon for the Great War and the second Armada

c.1915: ships, spies, cabbages, and queens

The BBC History website gives us the headline stories from the Daily

Mirror, 24 April 1915,

including the story “Shells that Gave Queen

Elizabeth Her Baptism of Fire at Dardanelles,” from a Special

Correspondent. Here are some highlights from the story:

Eastern Mediterranean, April.

… We left Malta on Friday, April 2 … Many of our merchant captains

and their crews have never traversed the waters of the Mediterranean:

its currents, changing weather conditions, its lights and the innu-

merable islands of the archipelago are a new field of discovery to them.

Amazing as it may seem the charts are also old and very inaccurate,

all of which adds to the difficulty of correct navigation.

But we are a Fleet messenger, under orders to arrive at our destina-

tion without delay; the same blood and spirit of enterprise of the

Elizabethan era courses through the veins of the officers and men, and

we press on, groping our way blindly and risking bumps with the

archipelago …

[As the ship enters the Dardanelles, the correspondent describes what

he sees.] The first sight which greets our eyes are the fighting-tops of

1910–1953: The Shadow of History 171

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the mighty Queen Elizabeth, the most powerful warship afloat in any

waters. Her huge body is hidden by some low-lying land …

A pinnace takes me across to the Queen Elizabeth to visit the admiral.

This, the latest of our super Dreadnoughts, is a revelation. She only

carries eight great 15-inch guns, and a secondary armament of six-

inches. But those eight make every other gun you have ever seen look

ridiculous and contemptible.

The gunners say they can almost land on a penny at 15,000 yards even

with three-quarter charges.

The great ship has in turn received her baptism of fire, and has been

struck by three shells, one of which came through the gun-team, but

fortunately all the midshipmen were at their stations, and no one

was hurt.

Certainly the image of HMS Queen Elizabeth – also known as “Big Bessie”

– in the Dardanelles is one of the most famously reproduced naval images

of the Great War. So pronounced was the patriotic fervor generated by

descriptions, photographs, and narratives about the ship, that the famous

cartoon in Punch (Figure 20) is both easy to read and seemingly inevitable.

It is an Elizabeth icon of great wit, lampooning not the memory of the

queen herself, but the nationalistic image constructed in the popular

imagination. In the Punch icon we see an image of the queen, formally

clad in a dress very like the one she wears in the Armada portrait, with

a scepter in her right hand (that which rested on the globe in the 1688

portrait), while her left hand daintily, but practically, plucks up her skirts

to keep them dry. She seems to be flying upright over the disputed waves,

with suitable outcroppings of foreign lands in the background.

The combination of a great naval battle and the tradition of christen-

ing ships with feminine names was certain to produce a concrete allusion

to Elizabeth and the Armada. The Mirror’s Special Correspondent also

speaks of the “same blood and spirit of enterprise of the Elizabethan era”

coursing “through the veins of the officers and men, and we press on,

groping our way blindly and risking bumps with the archipelago,”

combining both the Elizabethan spirit of adventure and the enchant-

ment of discovery. They are sailing blind, with bad maps, but they sail

literally for – as in the direction of – Queen Elizabeth.

If this icon is easily read, the next is not. One can, indeed, hardly bring

oneself to take it at face value. The 1915 text by Augusta Cook, Queen

Elizabeth: or Spies and Plots in the Sixteenth Century With an Introduction:

History Repeating Itself in the Events of Today,

has on its title page the

obscure biblical quotation: “Thou shalt remember all the way the Lord

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1910–1953: The Shadow of History 173

Figure 20 Queen Elizabeth enters the Dardanelles, from Punch, 17 March 1915.

Collection of the author

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thy God led thee” (Deut. VIII. 2). If ever a text needed to be read in

context, this little epigraph cries out most loudly. Even the immediate

context of Deuteronomy VIII is a testimony to an Empire’s faith in God

as an Englishman. Verse 1 reads: “All the commandments which I

command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and

multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto

your fathers.” The wording of the King James translation lends this jus-

tification of Empire additional authority, although that is rendered

redundant by the larger context of the passage.

When we look at the whole of Deuteronomy VII, the chapter that

provides the true context for Cook’s epigraphy, the verse’s significance

becomes clear, if horrifically apocalyptic and breath-takingly fascist.

1 When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither

thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee,

the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites,

and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations

greater and mightier than thou;

2 And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou

shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no

covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:

3 Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou

shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy

son …

5 But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and

break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their

graven images with fire.

6 For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD

thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above

all people that are upon the face of the earth.

7 The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because

ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all

people:

8 But … the LORD loved …

16 And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God

shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither

shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee.

17 If thou shalt say in thine heart, These nations are more than I;

how can I dispossess them?

18 Thou shalt not be afraid of them …

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20 Moreover the LORD thy God will send the hornet among them,

until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed.

Ok, so the British “we few, we few, we happy few,” with their new Queen

Elizabeth, constitute God’s chosen people, while their foes are the —ites

de jour. The book’s sub-title, History Repeating Itself in the Events of Today,

gives us the parallel between the Armada and the Battle of the Dardanelles,

and the Bible passage citation on the title page gives us the moral context:

all enemies of the chosen people will be destroyed by and/or at the

pleasure of God.

As unambiguous as this seems, the book itself still sends mixed signals

to the reader. Its large, thin, almost quarto-sized format, horizontal ori-

entation, its brevity (56 pages), and illustrations make it look, at first

blush, like a children’s book. On the cover and frontispiece is the Punch

cartoon, clearly captioned “Queen Elizabeth Entering the Dardanelles”

and credited: “Reproduced by kind permission of the Proprietors of

‘Punch.’” On the verso before the first page of text is an illustration of

the ship itself, with the following sub-text:

“The Queen Elizabeth” – called after the Great Queen of the Sixteenth

Century – is the mightiest War Vessel in existence. Her four turrets

contain each a pair of 96 ton 15-inch guns. She burns only oil in her

furnaces, and is the fastest battleship in the world.

If the rendering of the ship came first and the cartoon after, we might

conclude that Cook is stressing the reality and approving even of the

hyperbole. To put the hyperbolically floating, fully-dressed queen first,

making a secondary reference out of the battleship, is to privilege

chronology over, it would seem, common sense, as well as fancy over fact.

Nor does Cook provide the reader with great enlightenment in her

Introduction:

History Repeating Itself in the Events of Today

The following pages on “Queen Elizabeth” were written before the

present War broke out. The publication thereof was postponed until

a suitable opportunity. That seems to have now arrived; for History is

repeating itself. Prophecy also is rapidly finding accomplishment. To

this twofold aspect, in the light of present happening, I would direct

the reader’s attention.

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Cook continues, pointing out that Revelation is the “sacred Book dealing

pre-eminently” with “Divine Prophecy,” a “Programme – foretold in

heiroglyphs – of the most salient points in the history of the Christian

Church, of Israel, and the World.”

Whether, as does the c.1625 print

“Truth Presents the Queen with a Lance,” Cook means to allude literally

to the book of Revelation or to the prophetic nature of the cited passage

from Deuteronomy is not entirely clear. I would, however, argue for the

latter, considering that she took the trouble to put the passage on the

title page, and that its specific context of the killing of earthly enemies

is better suited to the conflict at hand.

This “Programme,” she argues, is chronologically ordered, revealing

as it progresses, the purpose and goal of God’s actions. “That goal is the

return of all creation to the obedience of God … To achieve that goal,

counterforces have to be subdued, and hostile agencies must be

overthrown.”

She calls the Devil the “invisible instigator” of opposition

to this divinely ordained progress, saying that his “Satanic operations”

against God’s people (read “Englishmen”) and against God take on

multiple forms. But, the rant continues, “two systems are specially the

agencies through which he has laboured in this dispensation, and through

which he still works in opposition to the kingdom of Christ. Those two

hostile systems are ROMANISM AND MOHAMMEDANISM.”

Well, we might certainly have seen the bogey of Roman Catholicism

coming, as Elizabeth’s Armada victory was perceived to be as much

religious as geo-political. That Islam is here included, however, brings up

both aspects of the Turkish setting of the Dardanelles and the theme of

an Empire that would bring the godless infidels either to their knees or

to their deaths. (And, writing this in the post-9/11 US, I must say that

this last social construction of evil has a chilling familiarity.)

Cook’s theology would seem to owe more to jingoism than to careful

study – surprising in an author with over a dozen biblically-based books

and published lectures to her credit

– as she states that the two systems

“one in their origin, similar in their characteristics and wide dominion

– the one dominating chiefly the West, the other the east – and united

in their final doom at the coming of Christ.”

Well, yes, Islam and

Catholicism do have the same source – Abraham in the Genesis narrative

– but so do Judaism and the rest of Christianity, not that Cook considered

Rome to be Christian. Nor should we be surprised to find an author who

denies that Catholics are Christians discounting any connection between

Christianity and Islam; again, we have only to pick up any of today’s papers

to read that rhetoric. Sweeping theology aside for “my volumes on the

Apocalypse,” Cook goes on to what she perceives as the heart of the

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matter: “while the warlike person of Queen Elizabeth was the means in

the sixteenth century to oppose the Western system, the war-vessel called

after her – ‘The Queen Elizabeth’ – is the one employed in our days to

shatter the strongholds of the Eastern Evil.”

After reminding the reader of this, Cook pronounces: “Here is not

coincidence only.” She goes on to conclude her Foreword with the

invitation to the reader to enter into her conspiracy theory: “those who

know Divine Prophecy will realize there is a Providence behind this inter-

esting fact, working out the fore-ordained counsel of Jehovah.”

After a discussion covering the inevitability of empire, the virtue of

queens who founded and crowned it (Elizabeth and Victoria), and all

manner of plots to subvert this most admirable of world orders, Cook

takes the strands of fanatic Protestantism, blind nationalism, and the

sort of feminism that has justly become a bad joke and combines them

to tie up the end of her venture into this prophetic re-reading of history.

Queen Elizabeth is the strongest, as well as the most interesting monarch

that ever graced the throne of England … But she was by no means

perfect … she exercised [tyranny] against the Puritans, who were more

Protestant than she was herself. Apart from this blemish, Elizabeth’s

reign is one of the grandest in the annals of English history; it marked

the beginning of Imperial prosperity, the first dawn of world-wide sov-

ereignty destined by Providence for this Empire, and which, foretold

by the Druid-bard in the reign of Boadicea, had its genesis in the reign

of Queen Elizabeth and found its consummation in that of another

Queen – Victoria!

Each Queen was suited to the age in which she flourished, and both

Elizabeth and Victoria constitute the greatest monarchs in English

history.

And where, we might well ask, does this leave the Elizabeth icon?

Obviously, the answer is “at sea.”

c.1940: iterations of “Armada”

We have seen the Elizabeth icon brought into play for the various and

sundry wars of Albion up through the centuries, wars ranging in signif-

icance from Jenkins and his ear to Napoleon and his ambitions for empire

(wisely, Elizabeth and her icon took a pass on the American Revolution,

unless there’s some buried text playing on the theme of “easy come, easy

go”). But when a twentieth- or twenty-first-century person thinks of

Britain at war, the first image is always the Hitler War – World War II.

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