Boadicea and I first met sixty years ago. On
my fifth birthday, my father took me to London ‘to see the sights’. He made it
sound, and feel, like a rite of passage.
In addition to the Changing of the Guard, Trafalgar Square, Westminster
Abbey and Big Ben, he made sure that I saw the statue of Boadicea in her
chariot, which stands on a plinth at the Victoria Embankment side of
Westminster Bridge. Dad had been born in London, and liked to think of himself
as a Londoner, though he’d not been much older than five himself when his
parents moved to Hastings, shortly after the start of the First World War.
Boadicea
stayed in my memory: my father had a book he had somehow kept from his own childhood
– a child’s history of London entitled London
Bells and What They Tell Us (Blackie & Son, 1911) – and when we got
home that evening, he gave it to me, and in it I found the chapter on
Boadicea. I had just learned to read,
and this was the first bedtime book I ever read by myself.
I visited Boadicea again last week. She still rises magnificently above the
Embankment traffic, pointing towards Big Ben and urging her bare-breasted
daughters and her unseen army onwards against the Romans. She is heading
straight towards the Palace of Westminster, and the blades attached to the
wheels of her (entirely non-historical) chariot would still easily scythe their
way through the crowds that nowadays make Parliament Square all but impassable.
Forgotten (by me) and almost unnoticed by
everyone else are two short lines on the river-facing side of her plinth:
REGIONS CAESAR NEVER
KNEW
THY POSTERITY SHALL
SWAY.
The message seems wholly inappropriate. Surely, Boadicea was
revolting against oppressive imperialism? Yet here she is, apparently being
celebrated as the mother of the British Empire. One has to remember that
‘Boudica’ means Victory, and that the memorial was originally designed as a
tribute to Queen Victoria, who in all other respects (apart from a disposition
to bad temper) resembled the Queen of the Iceni not at all. Prince Albert
enthusiastically supported the project, even lending horses from the Royal Mews
for the sculptor, Thomas Thornycroft, to use as models.
Thornycroft* had worked on this giant
sculpture for many years, but it was not finally cast in bronze and presented
to the nation until 1902, seventeen years after his death.
The lines on the plinth are by William Cowper,
who seems an unlikely poet to have been attracted by Boadicea or indeed to have
been an enthusiastic imperialist. But in an eponymous eleven-stanza poem, the
Queen, having been humiliated by the Romans who beat her and raped her
daughters, visits a Druid who predicts that the Roman Empire will be eclipsed by her
glorious descendants:
Then the progeny that springs
From the forests of our land,
Armed with thunder, clad with
wings,
Shall a wider world command.
Regions Cæsar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway,
Where his eagles never flew,
None invincible as they.
This reassures Boadicea no end; and, although she is defeated in
the ensuing battle, she dies (according to Cowper) hurling scorn at the
Romans:
Ruffians, pitiless as proud,
Heaven awards the vengeance
due:
Empire is on us bestowed,
Shame and ruin wait for you!
Unexpectedly, I came across Cowper again later the same day,
having gone into Westminster Abbey to look for a window depicting George Herbert.
But here I must pause: it is many years since I last visited the Abbey, the
place Joseph Addison
once called ‘this great magazine of mortality’. I’ll never go again. After
paying £18 admission – does any other cathedral or abbey, mosque or temple in
the world demand such a fee? – everything conspires to make visitors feel
unwelcome. We are herded like sheep; barriers everywhere pen us in, making it
difficult to move from one part of the Abbey to another; and the rudeness of
some of the vergers and guides shouting (“What makes you think you can use
cameras in here? Can’t you read?”) at uncomprehending overseas visitors is as
embarrassing as offensive. If the Abbey authorities treat visitors as tourists
to be fleeced, they should at least allow them to do what tourists like to do: take
photographs.
There are, of course, exceptions. A kindly green-begowned
volunteer – taking several short cuts not permitted to lesser men - led me from
one end of the Abbey to the other, where I eventually found George Herbert,
sharing a window with William Cowper. Both poets in their time had been
scholars of Westminster School. This
window looks down on St. George’s Chapel, which is where the Coronation throne
has lately been re-sited – minus, however, the Stone
of Scone. It used to be there. London
Bells has a chapter on Westminster Abbey, about a group of small boys (“The
children took off their caps and went in slowly”) on a visit with
their teacher:
Then they saw the chair in
which the King sits when the crown is put on his head for the first time. “What is that big stone under the chair?” asked
one child. “That is the stone on which the Kings of Scotland used to sit when
they were crowned. An English king brought it here long ago. The Scots used to
say that the Kings of Scotland would again be crowned on that stone. And that
saying came true after the death of Good Queen Bess. For the King of Scotland
became the King of England also. Ever since that time the two countries have
had the same king.
Tactfully put. Writing this on the morning after Scotland voted No to
independence, I am glad that what the author of London Bells, And What They Tell Us said in 1911, the year of
George V’s coronation, still applies, for good and aye.
[illustrations: (i) Boadicea and her daughters, by Thomas
Thorneycroft; Victoria Embankment, 1902 (ii. & iii) Title pages from London Bells
© Text and illustrations copyright
Adrian Barlow 2014
