CHAPTER FIVE

Ruin by a Woman

Moreover, all this ruin was brought upon the Romans by a woman, a fact which in itself caused them the greatest shame.

DIO CASSIUS

Boudica, the widow in whom King Prasutagus of the Iceni had placed such trust, was of royal birth. This much we know from the Agricola. But Tacitus, with his eponymous taciturnity, actually leaves open the question of whether she belonged to the royal family of the Iceni or another one. He simply says that Boudica was generis regii femina, a phrase that can be (and has been) variously translated as ‘a woman of the Royal house’ and ‘a lady of royal descent’. The Greek of Dio Cassius reads less equivocally: ‘A Briton woman of the royal family.’¹

It is theoretically possible, therefore, that Boudica was actually a princess from a neighbouring tribe. It would be romantically fitting, for example, to derive Boudica from the Brigantes, where that strong female leadership was being exercised from the 40s onwards. Making Boudica the sister, daughter or niece of Cartimandua has, however, no evidence to support it, beyond the vaguely comforting feeling that the only two known Warrior Queens of the period must have been related to each other. (But this is to treat a Warrior Queen as a rarity: as has been pointed out in Chapter Four, this was not necessarily so.) Nor is there any proper evidence for the equally pleasing tradition which has Boudica hailing from Ireland. (The known existence of Irish queens in later centuries and the similarity of the Norfolk torcs to those found in Ireland does not seem quite enough.)² In the absence of such evidence, it seems far more likely that, as Tacitus implies and Dio Cassius states, the royal house to which Boudica belonged was that of the Iceni: the tribe she would now successfully stir to action.

Neither Dio nor Tacitus helps us with Boudica’s exact age at the time of the rebellion. It is a fair guess that she was somewhere in her thirties. In 60 we know that Boudica had two living daughters who had reached the age of puberty, who were not married and who needed their mother’s regency. If these daughters were in their teens, and thus born some time around 45 or 46, a rough calculation brings Boudica’s birth to AD 26 or 27, and at least AD 30. It is this calculation, incidentally, which makes it virtually certain that she was married to Prasutagus at the time of the first rebellion of the Iceni in 49, a mere eleven years previously; otherwise this was a remarkably short period in which to cram marriage and the birth of two children who had reached a nubile age. But if Boudica is not likely to have been under thirty in 60, she could of course have been quite a bit older; supposing these daughters were merely the youngest survivors of a large family, Boudica could have been forty or more. Her precise age, like so much else about her, remains guesswork.

Dio, unlike Tacitus, does give a physical description of the British Queen. She had red hair – a mass of ‘the tawniest hair’ hanging to her waist – and she was very tall, ‘in appearance almost terrifying’, with a fierce expression. These attributes were not unusual for her sex and race, at least according to the Classical writers. The proverbial Celtic colouring has been mentioned. The size and indeed strength of Celtic women was also something on which they were prone to comment: Diodorus Siculus went further and complimented them on being the equals of their husbands in courage as well. A celebrated anecdote of Ammianus Marcellinus has a Gaul’s wife, even stronger than her husband, battling with swelled-out neck and grinding teeth, flailing her arms like a windmill, and delivering kicks at the same time ‘like missiles from a catapult’.³

Boudica also had a notably harsh voice, according to Dio. This is a comment which has an additional interest in a study of the Warrior Queen at various periods, since again and again the question of the voice will arise. Condemnation of a female leader very often throws in the fact that her voice is harsh or strident. In 1400 Leonardo Bruno instructed Battista Malatesta that ‘if a woman throws her arms around whilst speaking, or if she increases the volume of her speech with greater forcefulness, she will appear threateningly insane and requiring restraint. These matters belong to men, as war, or battles …’ As will be seen, allusions to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘fishwife’ voice have been frequent in the 1980s.⁴

At the same time approval for a given Warrior Queen frequently takes the form of endowing her with a persistently dulcet tone, in spite of circumstances when any voice, male or female, might be pardoned for being raised. Thus Matilda of Tuscany, although both tall and strong, retained ‘a wonderfully sweet voice’, in the account of an admiring monastic chronicler. The Rani of Jhansi, on the other hand, who led the Indian sepoys following the mutiny of 1857, was allowed a remarkably fine figure by the British, but ‘what spoilt her was her voice’. The best kind of voice for a female leader, achieved by few, was that allowed to the third-century Queen Zenobia of Palmyra by a contemporary commentator: vox clara et virilis – ‘clear and like that of a man’ (which Gibbon, however, translated as ‘strong and harmonious’ – in the eighteenth century, women were not allowed to have manly voices).⁵

Maybe, then, Dio Cassius, who was not after all present to hear Boudica haranguing the Iceni, endowed her with her harsh voice because it was in keeping with what might be expected of a Celtic Warrior Queen; maybe his informants made the same assumption for him. It is even possible that Dio knew nothing of her appearance and merely granted Boudica the likely attributes of such a person. Leaving aside these imponderables, it is sufficient to state that it is from this, Dio’s short but vivid account of the strapping, red-haired Warrior Queen, that all other descriptions of her, to say nothing of later impersonations, have flowed.

Dr Johnson once described this world as one in which ‘much is to be done and little to be known’. That certainly stands for the narrower world of Boudican research. But the nebulous nature of the information available about Queen Boudica should not cause too much dismay; at least, not in terms of the period in which she lived. It has been pointed out that in a revolt which involved perhaps as many as one hundred thousand people, only ten names are known, all from Tacitus.⁶ (Dio added none.) Two are British – Prasutagus and Boudica – and the rest Roman. One more name, that of a Roman woman, Julia Pacata, emerged when the tombstone she commissioned for her husband, Julius Classicianus, was discovered.

It is the contrast between this nebulosity, characteristic of the first century AD and Boudica’s – or rather Boadicea’s – subsequent transcendent fame, which makes the lack of information so tantalizing. (Although it has to be admitted, from the point of view of myth rather than history, that the fire of popular interest often burns all the more brightly for the lack of dampening facts to pour upon it: Boadicea’s lively leaping myth being no doubt a case in point.)

The local Roman administration reacted immediately and unfavourably to the will of King Prasutagus. The latter’s intention in dividing his estate and treasure was presumably to placate the Emperor and safeguard his family’s inheritance at one and the same time. In the event Prasutagus succeeded in doing neither. But this is not to say that the expedient of sacrificing part of the inheritance in order to ensure the safe bestowal of the rest was a wild or even an original plan. Not only did the Roman nobility of this period often resort to the same device to protect the terms of their wills, but the range and number of royal wills involving Rome has recently been shown to be far greater than is sometimes supposed.⁷

Unfortunately in this case the officials on the spot were either unsympathetic or rapacious – or both. They ignored the will of the King. Representatives of the Procurator Catus Decianus – the chief financial administrator of the British province – seized all the King’s estate and the total of his treasure. That was not the end of the depredations. Not only did the Iceni nobles find their own hereditary estates treated as though forfeit to the Romans – for no crime except the death of their king – but members of Prasutagus’ own court were humiliated and maltreated. It is obvious that the Iceni nobility, a free-born and independent caste, suffered an extraordinary and unwelcome change in their status. In Tacitus’ menacing words: ‘Kingdom and household alike were plundered like prizes of war.’⁸

The first step taken by the Procurator’s representatives was however in a different class so far as sheer inhumanity and public insult was concerned. Brutally, Boudica, the new Queen of the Iceni, was flogged. Her two daughters, those princesses designated as heiresses by their dead father, were raped.

The names of these young girls, like so many other women’s names throughout history, are unknown. Rape, equally, is a fate which has been shared by countless women down the ages, both named and nameless; victims of a male aggression, at once casual and horrifying, simply because, historically speaking, they happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. That Roman conquest was not altogether free from this can be seen from the speech made by the Caledonian Calgacus, facing Agricola in battle some twenty years after the Boudican revolt, and reported to Tacitus. He urged on his men by castigating the enemy: ‘They rob, kill and rape and this they call Roman rule.’ In this case however it is impossible to regard the violation of Boudica’s daughters as in any way mindless. This was a deliberate act of policy and as such it was symbolic: this act of rape was what Susan Brownmiller has called ‘the vehicle of his victorious conquest over her being’: he in this case being a Roman and she an Iceni royal princess.⁹

Symbolic too was the flogging of the Queen: or scourging, to be exact, for Tacitus’ words are verberis adfecta – literally, to put to the rods. In principle, the Romans were not merciless or brutal to their captive royal women. One would not expect Cleopatra to have suffered such a fate, nor did she herself anticipate it: for the proud spirit of the ‘Queen of War’ the prospect of exhibition in a Roman triumph was humiliation enough. The wife and daughter of the British Caratacus were shown clemency once they had performed their own part in Claudius’ triumph. On the other hand, the rape of the royal female as a ritual act to signify the suppression of a people is one with obvious psychological connotations.

The young Cesare Borgia held Caterina Sforza, then in her late thirties, incommunicado for a period after he had finally succeeded in storming her stronghold of Ravaldino in 1499; he then committed ‘injustices’ to her body. This was not lust, nor was she acquiescent (despite Cesare Borgia’s coarse joke to his officers afterwards that Caterina had defended her fortress better than her virtue).¹⁰ Cesare Borgia’s act of rape was intended to signify the collapse of Caterina Sforza’s spirited political and military campaign for independence.

It is generally assumed by historians that some act of defiance on the part of the Iceni must have preceded this brutality of the Romans towards their royal women.¹¹ Certainly this is perfectly possible, given the natural temperament for resistance the Iceni had displayed in 49 and would shortly display again. But as a matter of fact Tacitus does not say so. On the contrary he lists the cruelties of the Romans (starting with the flogging of Boudica and the rape of her daughters) and then moves to the consequences: ‘These outrages and the fear of worse … moved the Iceni to arms.’ So perhaps an unconscious assumption has been made by these historians, in view of the bestiality of the Romans’ behaviour, that some gesture or gestures of dissent must have taken place to provoke it.

Tacitus, writing shortly after the event, shows proper understanding of the way subject peoples are frequently handled. Given his order of events, the Romans’ pitiless treatment of Boudica and her daughters was intended not so much to punish the Iceni for defiance but to emphasize their subordinate status and the uselessness of resistance to Roman rule. The fact that the royal family of the Iceni contained, coincidentally, two young females gave the Romans a nice opportunity for that extra-symbolic violence of rape. As for the scourging administered to the Iceni Queen, the Romans happened to believe that women as a whole were incapable of rule because they were incapable of discipline: ‘Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal, and it is no good giving her the reins and expecting her not to kick over the traces’: these were the supposed words of Cato the elder in 195 BC, as reported by Livy two hundred years later on the eve of the Boudican period.¹² To be able to ‘control’ a woman and figuratively control the Iceni at the same time was another fitting coincidence.

If it was just this symbolic Roman brutality which touched off the Iceni revolt, demonstrating that a Warrior Queen can personify her people to the oppressed as well as the oppressor, that was not its sole cause. For such an intense conflagration as now threatened to destroy the whole basis of the Roman occupation could hardly be set off by that brutality alone, however shocking. It was Boudica who led her people in the general uprising, Tacitus noting at this point that lack of distinction between the sexes in the Britons’ appointment of commanders referred to earlier. Furthermore Tacitus had Boudica allude to the outrages performed upon her own body and those of her daughters in the speech he put into her mouth to encourage her warriors on the eve of battle. Nevertheless the rebellion itself had deeper underlying causes. The mere fact that the other tribes to whom Boudica’s wrongs would be less personally shocking joined in with the Iceni under Boudica’s leadership, shows that this was in fact a widespread as well as dangerous protest against the excesses of Roman rule.

Financial exploitation and land appropriation, two slow-burning fuses liable finally to cause an explosion in any society, were at the centre of the problem. According to Dio, the rebels found ‘an excuse for the war’ in the fact that certain sums of money granted to leading Britons by the Emperor Claudius and believed to have been gifts were now declared to be mere loans. The Procurator, Catus Decianus, he who was also responsible for the confiscation of that part of Prasutagus’ estate willed to his daughters, proceeded to demand the return of these ‘loans’. At the same time, Dio accused Seneca, the celebrated Roman philosopher and politician, of first imposing an unwanted financial loan upon the Britons (attracted by the good rate of interest) and then suddenly recalling it in a series of severe measures.¹³

Whatever the truth of these particular exactions – perhaps Dio’s cases merely serve to illustrate the general Roman use of short-sighed exploitive methods – the picture which emerges of the Roman administration of its new province is not a pretty one. The Romans were certainly not pursuing that policy of conciliation towards and co-operation with the local magnates most likely to ensure the long-term pacification of ‘Roman’ Britain. The tribal men of property began by resenting this treatment and ended by rising up against it, since they no longer had anything to gain by backing the Roman cause.¹⁴

The case of the Roman temple at Camulodunum (Colchester) exemplifies this process of exploitation. The situation in and around Camulodunum was already disturbing for the native Trinovantes in view of the arrogance with which the Roman occupation was carried out. The Roman town of Camulodunum had been founded about twelve years previously. It was designed not as a military stronghold, but as a colonia, that is to say, a settlement of Roman army veterans who had received grants of land in the surrounding territorium administered by the town, in place of gratuities at the end of their period of service. The term colonia also meant that an existing town or city was accorded special municipal status. (Camulodunum was in fact the first town in Britain to receive it.)

The establishment of a colonia was always a matter of explicit imperial policy and it was a direct decree from the Emperor Claudius which had brought into being Roman Camulodunum. The intention, obviously, was the ‘Romanization’ of the new province; civilizing loyal veterans would gradually spread and multiply among the rude British.¹⁵ The native Trinovantes, of course did not see it quite like that; in particular their reactions were not helped by the manner in which the ex-soldiers possessed themselves of their grants. According to Tacitus, ‘the settlers drove the Trinovantes from their homes and land, and called them prisoners and slaves’. Furthermore, excavations at Colchester have revealed the cruel conditions in which the native workers were kept, as they were obliged to carry out the construction works of their conquerors.¹⁶ When the ex-soldiers helped themselves to more land than was legally granted, their comrades still in arms turned a blind eye, hoping for the same licence themselves. With all this in mind, it is not difficult to see how the oppressed Trinovantes, whether the tribal aristocrats or their humbler followers, might brood upon their wrongs.

The temple, erected to the Emperor Claudius at Camulodunum, may have been intended by the Romans to imbue the native Trinovantes with loyalty to their new masters, but that was very far from being the effect it had upon them. On the contrary, the temple appeared, according to Tacitus, as the ‘blatant stronghold of alien rule’. The whole concept of civic monument was alien to Celtic society. Moreover the sylvan temples of the Celtic religion had a very different air. This edifice proposing the godhead of a foreign emperor had nothing sublime about it to the indignant eyes of the Trinovantes. What was more, they were expected to pay for it.

It is not clear exactly how much of the temple of Claudius had already been erected by AD 60, since it is no longer thought that construction was begun during the Emperor’s lifetime.¹⁷ It would therefore have been building costs, rather than the maintenance of a priesthood to service the temple, which fell upon the Trinovantes. A series of discoveries, beginning in the late seventeenth century when the existing Norman castle (erected in the eleventh century) was demolished, have, however, given some idea of how the hated temple must have looked.

In 1683 the contractor found vaults below the Norman floor; in 1919 Sir Mortimer Wheeler and P. G. Laver revealed that the castle actually enclosed the podium or platform of the temple; further excavations have followed in 1950 (the 1,900th anniversary of the foundation of the colonia) and 1964. Calculations made from the surviving walls and piers suggest that the temple itself measured some 150 feet by 80 feet, that it was surrounded by a colonnade of columns, thirty-five feet high and over three feet in diameter, and fronted by a sweeping flight of steps where there would have been a series of statues.^f118 Enough of this was already completed to provide a clear and imposing focus for the resentful eye: enough, as it turned out, was already completed to provide a target for destruction.

According to Tacitus, the town of Camulodunum gave out its own desperate but unheeded warning of what lay ahead. The portents were many and various. The statue of Victory fell down with its back turned as though it was fleeing the enemy. Outlandish yells were heard in the senate-house and shrieks in the local theatre (the Romans had indeed gone for those amenities which made their civilization so agreeable to them while ignoring the prime need of maintaining walls round the town). A phantom settlement in ruins was glimpsed at the head of the River Thames. Most troubling of all was the blood-red colour of the sea, and the shapes like human corpses found abandoned at the edge of the shore by the ebb-tide.

Gazing on all these things, the native Britons began to hope – and the Roman settlers began to tremble.

Elsewhere in Britain, there were other frenzied women to be found. These women were not merely chanting, they were delivering their chants as war-cries against the Romans. For as the Iceni rose in revolt, led by the outraged Queen, and the subjugated Trinovantes planned to join them, the Governor of Britain, Suetonius Paulinus, was on the faraway island of Mona (Anglesey). Here, in the celebrated sanctuary of the Druids, numbers of rebels against Roman rule had taken refuge. Suetonius’ mission was one of search and destroy. Moreover the destruction was intended to encompass not only the rebels, but also the host of Druids as well.

The scene at Mona is vividly described by Tacitus. The dense armed mass of the enemy confronting the Roman army included ‘black-robed women with dishevelled hair like Furies, brandishing torches’. Close by stood the Druids, ‘raising their hands to heaven and screaming dreadful curses’. For an instant the Roman host stood as if paralysed by the weird spectacle. But then they urged each other, and were indeed urged by Suetonius himself, not to be afraid of a pack of fanatical women.

In that businesslike way which had made their soldiers the disciplined wonder of the world, the Romans bore irresistibly down on the varied multitudes of their opponents. Curses and women’s cries were no match for them. The torches of these Celtic Furies were actually turned against their brandishers. After the assault, in an equally businesslike fashion, Suetonius had the sacred groves of Mona cut down, so that, as Tacitus put it, Mona’s ‘barbarous superstitions’ could no longer be practised; in these Tacitus included the drenching of the altars in the blood of prisoners, and the consulting of the gods by human entrails. From Suetonius’ point of view it had been a highly satisfactory operation. In that military rivalry with Corbulo to which Tacitus attests, he had now surely scored a victory to rank with Corbulo’s conquest of Armenia.

It was at that very moment that the news of the horrifying disaster which had overcome the Roman settlers of the eastern colonia reached him.

Suetonius was by now a man of about sixty. As a veteran commander, he knew how to handle the kind of mountain warfare with which the Welsh terrain confronted him: he had campaigned in the High Atlas mountains.¹⁹ He had been Governor of Mauretania, and in a distinguished career had shown himself not only a brilliant general but also an accomplished politician. The question remains as to why, at this combustible moment in the history of the province he had been ruling for the last two years, he found himself at the very limits of his territory: as far from the turbulences in the east as it was possible to be.

Was it a coincidence? Was Suetonius merely led on by his own military ambitions at what proved to be an exceptionally ill-timed moment? Or is there some more sinister – and more exciting – interpretation to be placed upon the fact that Suetonius was besieging the Druid sanctuary at the exact moment that the eastern tribes chose to rebel?

As the priest-class of Celtic society, the Druids were drawn from among the tribal aristocracy.²⁰ The Druids of Gaul in the time of Caesar at least, were believed to constitute an important nationalist focus for their people. Caesar was also convinced – a hundred years before the Boudican revolt – that Druidism was an import from Britain to Gaul, with Druids returning to Britain again in order to refresh their knowledge. Even if the Druids were not as politically influential as was supposed by the Romans, it was this belief which was the important point. At any rate, the Druids were suppressed, either for their ‘barbarous practices’ (the official reason given) or for their political activities.²¹

What were these barbarous practices? The normal priestly concerns of the Druids were all those of ritual magic, including of course intercession to the gods via animal sacrifice. Gibbon acquitted the Druids of actual human sacrifice, supposing the charge to be a mere excuse for suppressing them on other (political) grounds, and wrote feelingly of the Celtic religion: ‘the deities of a thousand groves and a thousand streams possessed in peace their local and respective influence’.²² But it is generally believed nowadays that the references are too numerous to be ignored; at some point in the past the Druids must have practised it, though it may well have died out by the first century BC.²³

Human sacrifice was something from which the Romans shrank in fastidious horror (although the unarmed Christians, matched in the arena against wild beasts for the delectation of the emperor and the Roman crowd, might have found such disgust ironical). The notion of human sacrifice, like the notion of nationalist political influence, combined conveniently to present the image of a body both hateful and threatening and thus ripe for suppression. This is not to dismiss Gibbon’s equally evocative image of tranquil sylvan deities, which may represent another part of the truth.

In the early nineteenth century Gérard de Nerval wrote of the history of the death of religions as being even more terrifying than the history of the fall of great empires: ‘all of us must sometimes tremble to find so many dark gates opening out to nothingness’.²⁴ Certainly to contemplate the Druids themselves in the absence of any literature (non-existent because they were non-literate) is to gaze through a very dark gate indeed. The Classical writers, who must under the circumstances remain our only guides, are not necessarily equipped for the task. To discern actual policy in the disparate actions of a body, whose motives and practices are completely alien, is difficult if not impossible.

Returning to the British Druids of Mona, a hundred years after the time of Caesar, they were, according to Tacitus, harbouring rebels at their sanctuary, thus transforming it into a form of political refuge. Does that mean that Druids of first-century Britain were also busily fomenting anti-Roman feelings else-where?²⁵ In short, were the British Druids actually responsible for the coincidence – the planned coincidence – of the East Anglian uprising and Suetonius’ absence in remotest Wales? Tempting as such a theory might be, there is no hard evidence for such a collusion. That might not be relevant if, as was suggested by Sir Cyril Fox, the Druidic hierarchy were busy organizing the gold trade of the Iceni via the sea ports of the Wash.²⁶ Certainly the coastal access of the Iceni, which made their peaceful attitudes interesting to the Romans, is not to be ignored.

In the absence of any proof, however, one is thrown back on the palpable injustices which the Iceni had unquestionably endured, as had the Trinovantes to the south. There was quite enough here to whip up a revolt. It therefore seems more plausible to regard the uprising now led by Boudica as a spontaneous explosion for which there were deep-rooted causes, financial and economic, with a particular incitement of the Iceni arising from the treatment of their queen, rather than something planned or fomented by the Druids of Mona.

If there was a religious dimension to the Boudican revolt – and it seems from Dio’s account of the British behaviour that there was – then it sprang from two sources. One was that natural equation of a popular religion and political resistance which occurs when the religion of the conqueror is markedly different from that of the conquered. (Irish history since 1650, the Catholicism of the people versus the Protestantism of the Ascendancy, is the classic example of this.) Such an equation needed no encouragement from afar. The second source would be Boudica’s own self-identification as a religious figure, whether as priestess, prophetess or even quasi-goddess.

Boudica, according to Dio, addressed her tribe at enormous length on the eve of the rout which would lead them towards Camulodunum. The enunciation of such elaborate orations, if not the common practice of barbarian Warrior Queens (we cannot know), was certainly the common practice of Classical historians, who were accustomed to put these setpieces into the mouths of their characters on appropriately dire, solemn or patriotic occasions. Tacitus gives Boudica his version of a speech both queenly and bellicose at a later point: on the eve of the final battle.

Dio begins his account with that physical description of Boudica quoted earlier, gives her a spear to rattle in her fist (‘to shew herself the more dreadful’, as Holinshed would later have it) and describes her clothing: ‘a tunic of diverse colours over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch’. This, he tells us, was her invariable attire. He then elevates her high on a tribunal, the kind of raised platform used by Roman magistrates and generals. The speech which follows has not fared well at the hands of later historians. Milton, in fine misogynist form, sneered at it in his History of Britain. He ran it together with Tacitus’ version and put Boudica, somewhat opprobriously, ‘on a high heap of Turves in a loose-bodied gown [so much for her Celtic dress] declaiming … fondly’, that is, foolishly. ‘A deal of other fondness they [Dio and Tacitus] put into her mouth, not worth recital; how she was lash’d, how her Daughters were hand’d, things worthier silence, retirement, and a Veil, than for a Woman to repeat as done to her own person, or to hear repeated before an host of men.’ Sir Ronald Syme, who otherwise found Dio’s account ‘verbose and miserable’, regarded the speech as ‘a monstrosity’; more recently it has been described as ‘long, not to say exhaustive’.²⁷

Clearly Boudica did not address her tribe in the terms given to us by a second-century Greek, epitomized by an eleventh-century monk and here translated into early-twentieth-century English. But the sentiments she is made to express do at least serve to remind one quite vividly of the recent treatment of the Britons at the hands of the Romans. Boudica talks about the difference between freedom and slavery which they have learned from experience (Tacitus at this point merely has the Britons in general, without mention of Boudica, arguing for freedom over slavery) and touches on their ancestral mode of life, boasting of their hardiness. She points out how the Britons have suffered since the Romans appeared in Britain. ‘Have we not been robbed entirely of most of our possessions, and those the greatest, while for those that remain we pay taxes?’ Although the Britons should rightly have repelled the Romans when they first invaded, it is not too late for them to act now, if only for the sake of their children, lest they too be raised up in bondage.

It is however what Boudica does, rather than what she says, which gives its importance to Dio’s account. For having spoken, the Queen suddenly released a hare from the folds of her dress ‘as a species of divination’. As the hare fled, it was seen by the multitude to run ‘in the auspicious direction’. There were general shouts of delight at what was clearly a favourable omen for the uprising (as it was clearly intended to be, for one imagines that Boudica, astute enough to install the hare, was also astute enough to ensure that it ran in the right direction). The choice of a hare was also deliberate. This is an animal which features mysteriously and excitingly in the mythology of many countries, from the Far East to the pre-conquest inhabitants of North America, and it had been mentioned already by Caesar as among those animals sacred to the Britons. Various traces of hares in outline and other depictions of them as hunted beasts have been preserved; these may well have religious significance.²⁸

Boudica then prayed to a goddess named Andraste (or Andaste in one manuscript). ‘I thank thee, Andraste, and call upon thee as woman speaking to woman.’ Although this is the only specific mention of the name Andraste/Andaste, it may well relate, given the process of translation and epitomization, to that of the goddess of the Vocontii in south-east Gaul, Andarta, and a general British goddess of Victory, mentioned by Dio later, Andate. It could also be some compound derived from Anu, one of the names of the Celtic super-goddess, the mother of all the mothers, as it were. The name is however less important than the type: for while the local Celtic deities have hundreds of names, the types remain consistent. Andraste was presumably the war-goddess of the Iceni. (One goddess portrayed on an Iceni coin ‘with an individuality and a vigour atypical of classical art’ may be intended to depict Andraste.)²⁹

This is not the unique reference to a woman enacting a prophetic role in this period. Tacitus commented that the German tribe ‘traditionally regard many of the female sex as prophetic, and indeed, by excess of superstition, as divine’. About ten years after the Boudican uprising, ‘an unmarried woman’ designated as Veleda (the word in Celtic implies the functions of a prophetess) was described by him as enjoying wide influence over some Rhinelanders called the Bructeri.³⁰ A captured legionary legate, Munius Lupercus, was despatched to her as a gift, although put to death before she could bend him to her purposes, whatever they might have been. Veleda’s prestige was further enhanced when she foretold the massacre of the Roman army at Vetera. Later Veleda was used as an intermediary by the citizens of Cologne. Personal approaches to Veleda, of any sort, were not permitted; her relatives, with the idea of increasing the aura of veneration about her, kept her immured in a high tower, one of their number transmitting questions and answers, ‘as if he were mediating between a god and his worshippers’. Nor did the Romans attempt to dispute her sacred credentials: it seems that when they finally captured Veleda, she was installed in the service of a temple at Ardea.³¹

Similarly Boudica – whose eventual fate was to be very different – in releasing her hare and issuing her supplication not only associated herself with the goddess, but assumed a composite role of priestess, prophetess and war leader – Holy (Armed) Figurehead – in accordance with Celtic tradition and myth.

So Boudica, Queen and leader of the Iceni, swept down upon hapless Camulodunum in her chariot. She had assembled an initial host of 120,000 according to Dio. It was the apparent suddenness of the attack upon a defenceless city which made it so horrifying in its consequences. But of course the fact of a British assault should not have come upon the Roman inhabitants so suddenly, just as Camulodunum itself should not have been so defenceless. The suddenness was not so much in the British attack itself, as in the minds of the Romans who faced it.

The Roman veterans, happily enjoying their generous grants of land, including those tracts to which they had helped themselves, must have ignored other signs, which should have been more telling to them than the blood-red sea and the outlandish cries in the theatre. Tacitus mentions the fifth column within the city who made sure that it was not defended properly; but this fifth column (occulti rebellionis conscii, literally ‘secret conspirators in the rebellion’ ) must have consisted of native Trinovantes, whose loyalties, given that they were first dispossessed, then ill-treated, should never have been taken for granted.

To explain the Roman negligence, Donald R. Dudley and Graham Webster, authors of the authoritative study The Rebellion of Boudicca, called attention to ‘that overconfidence that often besets colonial powers’. Writing in 1962, they pointed out that the British had shown an equally negligent attitude towards the Mau Mau tribal insurrection in its first stages, for which oversight an official report had recently criticized the government of Kenya.³² The comparison is certainly a valid one, not only for the tribal–nationalist character of both uprisings. The Roman settlers of Camulodunum, confronted by a series of atrocities apparently totally unheralded, must have experienced something like the same appalled bewilderment as the British settlers of Kenya some nineteen hundred years later.

The plain fact was that the Romans simply could not conceive that the Britons could do this to them: rise up, sack a city and massacre its inhabitants. History after all provides plenty of examples of this kind of tragic error. It is a common mistake on the part of the conquering power to consider a rebellion of the conquered to be impossible, because they find it unbelievable. The Romans of Camulodunum merely joined in this error and suffered for it.

Nor was disbelief confined to Camulodunum itself. Once the situation was accepted within the colonia for what it was – serious but not yet desperate – there was still time for the veteran settlers to send for reinforcements from London to the few men still under arms at Camulodunum. Here, however, the Procurator Catus Decianus, showing himself to be complacent as well as rapacious, thought it sufficient to despatch a mere two hundred men (who would perish with their former comrades). Around the wall-less town itself not even a rampart or a palisade was erected, for which there must have been time if reinforcements could still be summoned from afar.³³ Most tragic of all, the women, the children and the old people were not sent away.

The town was overrun without difficulty. Archaeological evidence not only confirms that there were no walls – as Tacitus stated – but that the original defences erected by the legionaries had actually been levelled down. Over them were built a series of houses made of wattle-and-stake, and filled in and covered with daub. These houses were separated by narrow gravelled alleys. All of this would be easy to destroy by fire – and it was. So fierce was the fire that whole buildings became baked into a kind of clay: a section of one such house (discovered in 1972 in the Lion Walk near the site of the temple) can still be seen preserved in the Colchester Castle Museum. The carbonized remains of twill mattresses were found, and other domestic objects such as Samian ware, burned black, as well as food: the charred remains of imported fruits, including dates, plums and figs.³⁴

Even today, in modern Colchester, traces can be seen of a way of life which came to a halt abruptly nearly two thousand years ago. (Modern Colchester has incidentally considerable archaeological value as a site since it had to be totally rebuilt by the Romans following the holocaust of AD 60, allowing precise dating for certain discoveries.) The excavated site of a centurion’s camp gives the visitor a strange Pompeian feeling of the past arrested. This camp, founded about twelve years before, would have been part of the sketchy defences of the town. A Roman grid cooking-iron has been discovered (such grids, by being pressed flat into the earth, have a good chance of survival). One may reflect that the last meal cooked on that iron was cooked in AD 60.³⁵

Moreover there have been plenty of new opportunities for excavation, due to the levelling of one lot of buildings and the erection of another as the town has been rebuilt by stages during the twentieth century. In that brief interval allowed by the grace of the developer can be seen once again the blackened Samian ware and the scorched earth – literally – of the Boudican sack: an extraordinary orange-red hue^f2. However, curiously enough, of actual skeletons there are very few traces. It is to be assumed that sometime later the Romans came back and cremated the remains of their slaughtered comrades.

Three surviving artefacts, two of them of stone and one of bronze, also bear witness to the savagery of the British attack – as also to the motives which inspired it. At some point the British tribes swooped down upon the Roman cemetery to the west of the town where the old soldiers had been interred, as it was hoped, for an eternal rest after their long and honourable labours. The tombstone of one Marcus Favonius Facilis of the XX^th Legion shows him standing confidently in full military panoply, including his vituus or vinestick (the modern swagger stick) in his right hand and his sword in his left. But the tombstone (discovered in 1868) has been broken into two pieces; more significantly still, the face has been hacked away.

In 1928 another tombstone was discovered, that of a man who died at the age of forty belonging to the first Ala (auxiliary cavalry unit) of the Thracians. Named as Longinus Sdapezematygus, his adoption of a Roman name in addition to his Thracian one was a characteristic practice. Unfortunately for his survival, Longinus was depicted as mounted upon an enormous rampant horse while below him crouched some troglodyte figure of a man, who probably symbolized death, but could well have had to the British attackers a more unpleasant symbolism of subjugation. At all events the tombstone of Longinus Sdapezematygus has been set about with a will, the face of Longinus himself and the nose of his horse violently obliterated.

Lastly, a bronze head of the Emperor Claudius was fished out of the River Alde, near Saxmundham in Suffolk, in 1907 by an astonished boy who had gone swimming. This head too has been subjected to violet treatment, as can be seen from the jagged edges at the neck where it has been hacked away from the body. Once thought to be the head of the great equestrian statue of the Emperor which would have fronted the temple erected to his memory, its comparatively moderate size and provincial technique are now considered to rule out that possibility. It must have belonged to some lesser statue erected in the body of the town. From the point of view of the sack of Camulodunum, it is of course more evocative to regard this head as one which might have been once carried on a pole through the burning streets of the colonia – if not the live head of the Emperor, at least the symbolic head of the enemy.^f3 Since the Alde findspot is in Iceni territory, one imagines that the head, a peculiarly incriminating piece of evidence, was finally flung away there, after the defeat of the tribe.³⁶

The temple itself held out for two more days following the sack of the town. The old soldiers congregated there as in a redoubt for one last desperate effort to survive until reinforcements came. Weapons and armour, rusty with disuse, have been discovered, which the veterans must have hastily routed out and donned.³⁷ The picture of these old warhorses, once the masters of Europe, now destined to die, antiquated weapons to hand, at the hands of the despised barbarians outside the limits of the known world (as they had once complained to Claudius) has its own poignancy. For unlike Lucknow and Mafeking, there was to be no relief for this particular garrison. The gaudy temple was battered down and fired, the veterans, like their families, put to the sword.

The Britons under Boudica surveyed the smoking town and turned their faces towards London. For the Romans, when news of the holocaust reached them, there was an additional humiliation to be faced. ‘Moreover,’ wrote Dio Cassius, ‘all this ruin was brought upon [them] by a woman, a fact which in itself caused them the greatest shame.’

¹ A reconstruction at the Castle Museum, Colchester, shows a building of gleaming white, with ostentatious red, blue and golden ornamentation; Roman eagles and a triumphant statue of the Emperor Claudius at the front steps make it easy to understand Tacitus’ reference to a blatant stronghold.

² As for example at a site in Culver Street, Colchester, destined eventually to be a car park, visited by the author in the summer of 1985 when it was worked by the Colchester Archaeological Unit.

³ It is now in the British Museum. Both the military tombstones can be seen in the Castle Museum, Colchester.