Rejected Princesses: Tales of History's Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics Read online

  While in that post, she continually pushed for the Arabs to be self-governing. While she did advocate a colonialist approach (she was a product of her times), she wanted Britain’s influence to be indirect. To this end, she wrote massive documents, papers so clever that the newspapers were shocked to discover a woman was behind them. About this, Bell wrote to her father with characteristic snark that the press found it “most remarkable that a dog should be able to stand up on its hind legs at all—i.e., a female write a white paper. I hope they’ll drop that source of wonder and pay attention to the report itself.”

  Things didn’t go exactly as she’d hoped. Because she butted heads with everyone—she was shunned in the dining halls and not kept in the loop on important cables—her advice was often ignored and the resulting borders for Iraq were a compromised mess. She bemoaned the installation of the Sunnis instead of the Shias, knowing the chaos that would erupt down the line. “Muddle through!” she wrote. “Why yes, so we do—wading through blood and tears that need never have been shed.”

  After the outlines for Iraq had been agreed upon, she was given a new task: training the new nation’s first leader, Prince Amir Faisal. On the one hand, Faisal was a brilliant choice to unite disparate tribes, as he was able to trace his lineage to the Prophet Muhammad, but on the other hand, he was a terrible fit. He’d never lived in Iraq, he spoke a foreign dialect of Arabic, and he had little to no cachet with the local tribes. Bell brought him up to speed and included lessons on how to deal with businessmen and influence tribal councils. It was in this advisory work that she became known as the “uncrowned queen of Mesopotamia.”

  Concurrently, she expended a huge amount of energy in preserving the cultural history of Iraq. She founded the Iraq National Museum and became its first chief curator and director of antiquities. In 1924 she even drafted Iraq’s “Law of Antiquities,” which set a groundbreaking precedent in the world of archaeology and ended the looting that had plagued the field. For an example of the sort of plundering Bell fought, read the entry on Tin Hinan, whose grave was opened a year later, in 1925.

  Unfortunately, her life after Faisal came to power was empty. With her major goals achieved (after a fashion), Bell took stock of her life. Her financial resources were strained, and she’d essentially become a social pariah because of her strong opinions. Whatever other projects she wanted to take on next would surely be difficult to impossible to accomplish. Days before her 58th birthday, she was found dead, an empty bottle of sleeping pills next to her.

  Gertrude Bell was mourned by people the world over, from Britain to Iraq. Perhaps the most fitting testimony came in one obituary: “At last her body . . . was broken by the energy of her soul.”

  Eustaquia de Souza and Ana Lezama de Urinza

  (1639–C. 1661, BOLIVIA)

  The Valiant Ladies of Potosí

  Potosí, Bolivia, was a rough town in the 1600s. It was the kind of place where innocent people couldn’t go out at night for fear they’d be mugged—by the magistrates of the town, no less! It was just the sort of environment that cried out for a hero. For justice. For vigilantes.

  Enter two 14-year-old girls.

  Eustaquia de Souza and Ana Lezama de Urinza were sisters who’d grown up very sheltered. Ana’s parents had died early in her life, and she’d been adopted by Eustaquia’s family. Tragedy struck a second time when Eustaquia’s mother and older brother died too. After that, Papa de Souza was not taking any chances and kept the two young ladies locked away from danger as much as possible.

  Unfortunately for the father, Ana and Eustaquia were plenty good at finding danger on their own. While their brother had been alive, they’d eagerly watch him train with sword and gun. Now that he was gone, whenever their father was traveling, they would train themselves. Because what could possibly go wrong with two untrained (and unsupervised) preteens going at it with sharpened blades and unwieldy firearms?

  Eventually, they decided to make use of their newfound knowledge. They waited until late one night and snuck out dressed as (incredibly stylish) men. Soon after their jaunt began, they met a man named Diego Melgarejo, and their slick outfits and staggering amount of weaponry immediately convinced him to join them. When they finally told him they were women, he was impressed, confused, and a little frightened. All of these feelings were about to magnify for poor Diego.

  Soon the trio ran across a crowd of the thuggish town magistrate’s servants. The head servant demanded that they hand over their money and arms. Eustaquia did so, after a fashion: she unloaded a bullet into him, killing him immediately. Everyone stood in shock for a moment until Ana, not to be outdone, fired her gun. Then the trio took off. The town government was outraged and began a search for the servant’s killers.

  In spite of being the subject of a manhunt, Ana and Eustaquia decided to go out again. They wrote to Diego, cajoling him into joining them, to which he replied, “You’re crazy! No way.” They then sent another letter, this time calling him a coward and (weirdly enough) a woman. That seemed to work, and he agreed to join their gang again, as long as they avoided danger.

  So on the eve of San Juan, the three went out again, and for a while it was a great evening. They went to a nearby plaza, where they played and sang music. It was only when they stopped to tune their instruments in a doorway that they ran into trouble. Four men approached them and told them to scram. Diego was perfectly ready to do so, but Eustaquia wasn’t having it. After a short argument, she tossed the guitar to poor Diego (who ran and hid) and leapt into battle.

  It was a bloody fight, with the men outnumbering the women two to one. When Ana was wounded in the chest, Eustaquia hit Ana’s assailant so hard in retaliation that she broke his shield and wounded his hand. In the end, both girls were wounded heavily, but their opponents came out much worse: one died, and another was close to it. Gradually, the neighborhood watch began arriving, and everyone fled the scene.

  In the weeks that followed, the girls hid their injuries from their father, convalescing in their rooms. (Presumably, they played the “Dad! I’m on my period!” card frequently.) When Dad finally insisted on sending in a doctor, they demanded the doctor be female—and they immediately inducted her into their little conspiracy.

  After two months, they were ready to go out on the town again. Diego respectfully declined this time with, “Screw that noise, you gals are nothing but trouble.”

  It was a moot point anyway. As soon as the girls gussied up for their third outing, their dad found them. He was not amused. In no time he made the lockdown they’d been on look like after-school detention, grounding them for the rest of their lives.

  They escaped, of course, tying ropes to their windows and running across rooftops. They then used poor Diego to procure weapons and men’s clothing before disappearing to Lima, where they became accomplished bullfighters and well-loved socialites.

  Eventually, their father, who searched for them until the end of his days, died, with his last wish being that they become nuns. They agreed, but never followed through. Ana was injured while bullfighting and died. Shortly thereafter, Eustaquia died too, ostensibly of a broken heart. They willed their money to Lima, their servants, and their trusted sidekick, Diego—who received not only 1,000 pesos but also all of their flashy outfits.

  • ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •

  The way the duo are described in that story would suggest, to the people of the time, that they were lesbian lovers. Writers of fan fiction, fire up your word processors.

  Sadly, the historicity of the story is questionable. The sole source, Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela’s Tales of Potosí, is hit-and-miss with its accuracy, to put it mildly.

  Mary Bowser

  (19TH CENTURY, UNITED STATES)

  The Spy Who Set Fire to the Confederate White House

  By late 1864, Confederate president Jefferson Davis was about ready to lose his mind. Somehow, despite taking every precaution, information about troop and supply movements kept ending up in t
he hands of the Union. Little did he know that his enemy was right under his nose—as it was unimaginable to him that Ellen Bond, his slow-thinking, illiterate slave, was actually a highly educated secret agent with a photographic memory: Mary Bowser.

  Bowser’s story, one of the greatest espionage feats in history, is interwoven tightly with that of one of her closest friends, Elizabeth Van Lew. Bowser, born Mary Jane Richards, grew up as a slave to Van Lew’s family, but not for long—Van Lew, a staunch abolitionist, emancipated Bowser when Mary was just three years old. From then on, the two became inseparable. Even after Bowser traveled abroad,* she decided to come back to the Van Lew home in Richmond, Virginia. However, since Bowser’s return was technically illegal (blacks who’d left to be educated in the free states or abroad weren’t allowed to return), Bowser pretended to be Van Lew’s slave again. It was a ruse that would soon become useful.

  In the years Bowser was traveling, Van Lew had gotten seriously involved in Union underground efforts, building a 50-foot-long room in her attic crawl space to hide soldiers and sympathizers. Considering the political climate of the town, this was beyond dangerous. The women of Richmond would collect the bones of Union soldiers to show to their children. A children’s math book of the time contained the question: “If one Confederate soldier kills 90 Yankees, how many Yankees can 10 Confederate soldiers kill?” Prison guards would regularly shoot Union prisoners for sport. Van Lew was playing with fire.

  But as much peril as Van Lew was in, Bowser was soon in far more. Van Lew organized the installation of Bowser—with her ability to memorize images at a glance and recall entire conversations overheard in passing—as a servant for Jefferson Davis’s wife, Varina. The virulent Confederate hatred toward blacks made this an incredibly hazardous proposition. Even Varina, the First Lady of the Confederacy and one of the most powerful women in Richmond, had been ostracized because of the mere suggestion that she was part black. If Bowser made a mistake working in the Davis household, she was sure to be tortured and killed.

  Bowser’s methods of communication with the Yankees were subtle in the extreme. When she had urgent messages to convey, she would hang a red shirt on the clothesline. Then she would take one of Varina’s dresses in for alteration, having sewn messages to the inside of the lining. The seamstress would convey the message to Van Lew or another agent, who would often pass it on in code. Van Lew was partial to poking out holes in the letters of books to spell out secret messages. Her brother would send invoices with specific items as code for military information—370 iron hinges for 3,700 cavalry, 30 anvils for 30 batteries of cavalry, and so on.

  Come January 1865, the jig was up. Davis had arrested another spy in the ring, a baker to whom Bowser would also sometimes convey information. Knowing she was about to be uncovered, Bowser fled, but not before leaving one last good-bye present: a massive fire in the Confederate White House, which she set in the basement. It failed to burn down the entire house, but Bowser was able to escape to Van Lew. From there, she fled north on a horse cart in one of the most harrowing disguises imaginable: being covered completely in layers of horse manure.

  Bowser’s later life falls into the vagaries of history. Many of the records of Civil War espionage were destroyed to protect those involved. It is thought that she returned south and became a teacher, working in Florida and Georgia. She also wrote memoirs that were kept secret by her descendants, for fear of reprisal. Unfortunately, they were permanently lost to history when they were mistakenly thrown out in 1952.

  • ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •

  In the doorway stand Varina Davis and Elizabeth Van Lew. Van Lew is picking at Varina’s sleeve, possibly encouraging her to get it tailored.

  The book in Bowser’s hand has a small pin sticking out of it, a reference to one of Van Lew’s methods for passing messages. Another one involved invisible ink that could only be read when combined with a special acid!

  The out-of-control fire is, of course, a callback to Bowser’s attempt to burn down the Confederate White House.

  The flag on the wall is the actual Confederate flag—its first version, at least. The better-known stars-and-bars design was the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. It was later adopted by Southerners and became synonymous with the Confederate states.

  The “Crazy” Adventures of Elizabeth Van Lew

  Elizabeth Van Lew experienced no shortage of danger herself during the war. As suspicion of her Union sympathies grew, the prestige and protection afforded by her family name gradually gave way to her new reputation as a pariah. Faced with this new public level of scrutiny, she resorted to the only action she thought could excuse her behavior: pretending to be insane. She became known to the citizens of Richmond as “Crazy Bet.”

  Her feigned lunacy was hardly a bulletproof shield, though. Her neighbors threatened to shoot her, strangers tried grabbing her off the street, and she started to check every night behind the bed for someone waiting to abduct her. She took to wearing peculiar dresses and stuffing her cheeks with cotton to make herself unrecognizable, and she kept her spy documents within arm’s length so that she could quickly destroy them if need be.

  After the war, Van Lew, having spent much of her family fortune on helping the Union, was left a destitute outcast in Richmond. With much of the city still shunning her company (some considered her a witch), she took work as a postmaster general for a while to make ends meet. In her later years, she relied on donations from Bostonians and the family of Paul Revere. She died in 1900 and was purportedly buried standing up, facing north.

  Pope Joan

  (9TH CENTURY, VATICAN CITY)

  The Pope Who Gave Birth

  A curious thing happened in 856 CE. During a procession from St. Peter’s Basilica to the Lateran Palace, the pope doubled over. The line of attendants stopped the march immediately and tended to their spiritual father—only to find “him” to be, in fact, a spiritual mother. The pope had given birth in the middle of the street. According to legend, Pope Joan, as she came to be called, either died on the spot or was subsequently beaten and killed by an angry mob.

  How in the world could this happen? Joan, the Vatican discovered, was a lovestruck woman who’d secretly entered the church disguised as a man in order to be with her lover. She turned out to be extremely intelligent—medieval historian Martin Polonus describes her as “advanced in various sciences” to the point where “none could be found to equal her.” And in 854, following the death of Leo IV, she was unanimously elected Pope John VIII.

  The aftermath of her exposure as a woman was wide-ranging and brutal. The cardinals whom she’d deceived were tossed into a dungeon, where they all languished and died. The papal processions from then on avoided the spot where she’d given birth. Future popes were made to sit on a specially fashioned chair with a hole in the bottom so that their genitals might be inspected—to prevent a recurrence of a female pope.

  There was just one problem: none of this ever happened.

  Not that the faithful of 13th- and 14th-century Rome would question the validity of this story. With most convinced of the legend of Pope Joan, it was not until 1451 that the tale—which had first appeared 200 years earlier—would begin to be questioned. As has now been all but conclusively proven, Leo IV’s reign gave way almost immediately to that of Benedictus III. (John VIII did exist, but was a different person than represented in the story.) Pope Joan is a fictional figure.

  (Weirdly enough, popes did sit on a commode-shaped Roman birthing chair. One even still exists, housed in the Louvre. The most rational explanation on offer for its shape seems to be that it was old and Roman, and thus squatting on it somehow gave popes legitimacy.)

  All of which brings us again to the question: How did this story come about? In a word: Protestants. In three: Protestants hated Catholics. In order to chip away at the power of the Catholic Church, the Protestants of the period repeated this legend endlessly. Their point was that the existence of an illegitimate female pope re
vealed Roman corruption and destroyed any claims of an unbroken divine succession dating back to St. Peter.

  By the 1600s, belief in Pope Joan was scant, with only a handful clinging to the tale—mainly those who claimed that her baby (a) was still alive, (b) was the Antichrist, and (c) was waiting behind the scenes to destroy the world. Nevertheless, Joan’s story persists to the present day, and she has become the subject of movies, songs, tarot cards, historical novels, and some unbelievably tedious historiographical books. Her birth name has been reported by various sources as Agnes, Gerberta, Joanna, Margaret, Isabel, Dorothy, and the surpassingly mellifluous Jutt. Not sure where Joan came from.

  Now here’s the twist: there actually was a historical female pope. She just wasn’t named Joan. In the late 1200s, a woman named Guglielma, frustrated at women’s exclusion from the church, began a rival, feminist sect of Christianity. She anointed one of her disciples, Manfreda Visconti da Pirovano, as popess, first in a line thereof. Unfortunately, the sect was short-lived, and Popess Manfreda was burned at the stake in 1300.

  Nwanyeruwa

  (EARLY 20TH CENTURY, NIGERIA)

  Peacekeeper of the Igbo Women’s War

  Contrary to the connotations of its name, the Igbo Women’s War* was nonviolent—think less “warfare” and more “nonstop block party.” A party, that is, that almost shut down the British colonial government in Nigeria. Accustomed to having a say in government matters, the women of Nigeria, in danger of losing their say due to British law, reacted in traditional fashion. They started, en masse, “sitting on a man”: singing, dancing, yelling, and ridiculing government officials all day and night. The protest that drew in over 10,000 women all started with just one: Nwanyeruwa.