11 - Lady Godiva

Summary

In 1857, for Prince Albert's thirty-eighth birthday Queen Victoria gave him ‘a gilded silver statuette of a nude Lady Godiva, side saddle on her horse’. Today we cannot be certain of the motivation behind the gift: was it a private token with erotic overtones between a wife and husband? Was it political, with Godiva's figure signifying Victoria's lifelong and heroic self-sacrifice for her subjects’ common good – a woman who forsook the private role society expected of the weaker sex in order to assume a public duty? Was it political in a marital sense, a sign of wifely submission to Albert, whose official title that very year had been announced as ‘Prince Consort’, permanently labelling him as the queen's social and political inferior? Was its appeal simply aesthetic? Whatever the motivation, Victoria's choice of a gift is an indication of the extent to which the Godiva legend had become domesticated by the nineteenth century. In an age that romanticized the medieval past (as other contributions to this volume demonstrate), Lady Godiva was a household name.

It is still a household name. I am convinced that the name ‘Godiva’ is more widely recognized around the world than that of any other Anglo-Saxon. The greatest irony of her post-medieval notoriety is that the historical Godiva was a pious and respectable countess who almost certainly never made the horseback ride through Coventry that legend attributes to her.