CHAPTER SEVEN

Eighty Thousand Dead

It was a glorious victory, comparable with bygone triumphs. According to one report, almost eighty thousand Britons fell.

TACITUS, Annals

After the fall of Londinium, there was still a third city to be sacrificed. Not yet gorged with slaughter or, more to the point, plunder, the Britons under Boudica swept on to Verulamium (St Albans). The city was not defended. Suetonius, the Roman commander who had coolly appraised the necessity of deserting an entire expatriate community, was not likely to hesitate over the fate of Verulamium. This was primarily because Suetonius’ attention remained focused on those measures likely to stave off Roman defeat in the first place, and then turn the whole pulsating British advance to the Roman advantage: it was after all for the long-term victory, or at least the saving of the province, that he had taken the decision to abandon Londinium.

At the same time Verulamium as a city was quite different in kind from both Camulodunum and Londinium. It was populated neither by Roman veterans and their families nor by Mediterranean businessmen but by Britons – albeit Britons friendly to the cause of Rome. Tacitus tells us categorically that Verulamium by this date had been granted municipium status, which ranked it below a veteran’s settlement (a colonia) but above an ordinary native tribal town (a civitas).

This privileged status must have had its roots in the events of the Claudian invasion in 43 when the Catuvellauni, in whose territory lay the town of Verulamium, had acted helpfully towards the Roman cause. Certainly Tacitus’ testimony is born out by archaeology. A Belgic stronghold called Verlamio had antedated Verulamium on the same site, but excavations (by Sir Mortimer Wheeler and later Sheppard Frere) have revealed that a carefully planned new British city was laid out from about AD 49 onwards. Furthermore, traces of a country house, a villa made of timber at Gorhambury, reveal that the loyal – to the Romans – Britons at Verulamium were beginning to live as did their new masters and allies.¹

As Verulamium’s privileged status harked back to the events of 43, so the rivalries and hatreds of its inhabitants’ fellow Britons must also have played their part in the destruction which followed. A favourite notoriously has no friends. There was little sympathy and much jealousy to inspire the horde which now swooped down on its third municipal victim (Dio suggests that only two cities were laid waste but, since he does not name them, Tacitus’ testimony of three, bearing in mind his connection to the eyewitness, Agricola, is to be preferred). The fine Gorhambury villa was jealously destroyed by fire, as was much of the rest of the town.²

Once again excavations have provided evidence of a red layer of burned daub and ash far below modern St Albans: three shops disinterred from 1955 onwards give the same impression of normal busy life rudely interrupted, a first-century time warp, as has already been noted at Colchester and London. The modern focus of historical attention is however the later Christian town: the Roman city which was resurrected after the Boudican sack is now the site of a car park and an ornamental lake; the relics of the Roman theatre which can be inspected nearby are witness more to this placid prosperous centre than to the British municipium which the Queen of the Iceni and others in her army set on fire. Early British Verulamium has left little trace compared to these glamorous later developments.

But if there is evidence of fire, the same proportion of charred personal belongings has not survived. The fate of the residents of Camulodunum and Londinium served as an awful warning to the Britons of Verulamium; they had no wish to share it. These more fortunate citizens were able to make their getaway well in advance.

Once again Tacitus is clear on this point: ‘The natives enjoyed plundering and thought of nothing else. Bypassing forts and garrisons, they made for where the loot was richest and protection weakest.’ Even if one allows for Tacitus’ natural tendency to emphasize the superiority of the Romans, it must be admitted that Boudica – or whoever actually decided the direction of the British army under her titular command – had made a strategic mistake in ignoring for the second time the need to strike at Suetonius while he was at his most vulnerable.

For all Suetonius’ rapid and ruthless retreat from Londinium, he remained at risk until he had secured reinforcements for his own small force. This urgent need for reinforcements provides indeed the strongest argument for the theory that Suetonius must now have turned back to the Midlands and away from the London area. (The sources give us neither a specific geographical setting nor a time scale for the crucial events following the sack of Verulamium and leading up to the so-called ‘last battle’ between Romans and Britons.) The principal asset of the Boudican army was its size, enormous if now unquantifiable, but doubtless swollen with each successful foray, as the local tribes increasingly came to see the British side as the winning one. Then there was that famous Celtic courage, rashness if you like, which was particularly effective in surprise attacks and ambushes. Both these assets were liable to diminish as Suetonius caught up with his desired reinforcements, seasoned troops, and the British numerical superiority declined. And an element of surprise in the British attack could obviously not be long preserved, certainly not long enough for the Britons to gorge themselves in a further feast of municipal plunder along the way.

As it was, Suetonius had to face yet another reverse, this time one dealt out to him by his own side. Suetonius’ plans for bolstering up his own numbers from among the various legions scattered about the province included summoning the II^nd Legion Augusta – so called because it had been raised by the Emperor – whose base was in the south-west at Exeter. The designated meeting place would have been modern Wroxeter (then known as Viroconium) or somewhere thereabouts in the West Midlands. Unfortunately Poenius Postumus, the Roman commander in charge of the II^nd Legion – his actual title was praefectus castrorum, that is, camp commandant – failed to bring his men to the appointed rendezvous.

Poenius Postumus’ reasons for ignoring the summons are unknown: he may even have been pinned down by another tribe and had no choice in the matter. But his failure to arrive certainly increased. Suetonius’ problems. Lacking the men of the II^nd Augusta, the latter was left to pull together the XIV^th Legion and a detachment of the XX^th (these had been with him on the Mona expedition) and the nearest auxiliaries available; out of all these Suetonius welded together a force of men variously estimated at between ten and fifteen thousand. Even if Dio’s estimated figure of 230,000 for the Boudican army is reduced to a hundred thousand or less, Suetonius’ troops must still have been heavily outnumbered. On the other hand these were hardened fighting men.³

Under the circumstances, Suetonius decided to attack the Britons without further delay. The bold decision that Boudica – or her deputies – should perhaps have taken themselves was in fact taken by the Roman Governor. This at any rate is Tacitus’ version of events, and it fits with what we already know of Suetonius’ character and his approach to strategy. He needed every advantage he could get against the numerically unequal odds; to choose the site of the battle himself and thus by implication its timing was to award himself two vital ones – as indeed it proved. It is true that Dio suggests to the contrary that the battle was imposed upon Suetonius against his better judgement as his legionaries grew short of food and the barbarians pressed him. But once again, Tacitus’ access to Agricola means that in a contradiction of this sort, especially over matters of military detail, his version takes priority. Furthermore Tacitus is convincingly explicit about the terrain chosen by Suetonius – without unfortunately naming it: ‘a position in a defile with a wood behind him’. This meant, as Suetonius realized, that he would only have to face an enemy at his front and here there was ‘open country without cover for ambushes’. These details smack of actual decisions taken and recollected in tranquillity long after.

Much ink has been spilt over the site of Boudica’s last battle, figuratively as well as actually, since it continues to be spilt in what might be described as the post-ink age. With Dio passing over the subject altogether – he tells us nothing at all about the actual site of the battle, not even the nature of its terrain – and Tacitus confining himself to the physical characteristics quoted above, an atmosphere had prevailed in which supposition, proposition and opposition have all been able to flourish happily. (In the 1980s two scholarly disputants concerning the location of the site did agree about one thing, that ‘the search for the pattern of the Boudica campaign is great fun’.)⁴ The key question must remain the view taken of Suetonius’ movements after his departure from Londinium, and during and after the sack of Verulamium.

It if is accepted that Suetonius went in search of reinforcements in those areas – basically to the west – where the scattered legionary fortresses and garrison could most easily succour his limited force, and then chose the position for the engagement for which he was now himself prepared, then a convincing argument can and has been put forward for a West Midlands site.⁵

In centuries gone by, however, a romantic attachment was felt to the notion of a last battle in London itself with special heed given to the area around King’s Cross station, built in 1852 and for which the name Boadicea’s Cross was at one point even proposed. The name Battle Bridge for an old crossing of the Fleet river near King’s Cross was held optimistically to offer encouragement. Thomas Nelson, author of The History of Islington, printed in 1811, was among antiquaries who were attracted by the idea of locating thereabouts ‘the operations of the Roman General in his arduous contest with that injured and unfortunate Princess’. In his long but spirited biography of 1937, Boadicea, Lewis Spence took much trouble, by the use of ancient contour maps, to point out the existence of some kind of defile around York Road and the Caledonian Road, between the ‘acclivity’ of Pentonville and the high ground near Gray’s Inn Land.⁶

Nor has London and its environs been allowed to dominate the field entirely: other suggested localities have included Wheat-hampstead, while Ambersbury Banks, a large earthwork in Epping Forest, is among local sites where the tradition of the last battle is cherished. Moreover in 1983 a revisionist argument for the Staines area was put forward by Nicholas Fuentes in the London Archaeologist; concentrating on the age-old valley between the well-wooded Shrubs Hill and the River Thames, and placing the ‘defile’ approximately where Virginia Water station is today. This argument however demands a radical reassessment of Suetonius’ campaign following Mona, including the theory that he actually brought his entire task force to Londinium, not merely his cavalry; it also proposed that Cogidubnus and the Atrebates of the Silchester area were somehow involved in the last battle; in the absence of firm new archaeological evidence, all this seems a revision too far.⁷

So for the time being at least the West Midlands region remains the most plausible locality, one supported by the known deployment of the Roman military forces around AD 60, the forces upon which Suetonius now drew, as Tacitus quite clearly tells us. Attention has been focused in particular on the Warwickshire area north-west of Nuneaton, near Atherstone; here, at Mancetter (Roman Manduessum), a steep escarpment can be seen rising from the plain. The discovery and exploration of a Roman camp here, which was the site of the XIV^th Legion until it moved up to Wroxeter in about AD 55, has underlined its claims as a possible site of the last battle. Although the XIV^th Legion would have departed by the time of the Boudican rebellion, auxiliary units – trained non-Roman troops – would presumably have still used the camp, and that would have made Manduessum, coupled with its terrain (still today conforming quite markedly to Tacitus’ description), an ideal focus for Suetonius’ strategic plan.^f1 It would of course take the discovery of ‘some quite remarkable finds … such as a mass burial with closely identifiable weapons in association’ for the status of Mancetter/Manduessum to be finally verifiable.⁸ In the meantime no more plausible alternative has been put forward.

If the site of the last battle is finally unknown and perhaps unknowable, the course of the battle presents a different problem. One travels back in time from the suppositions of the twentieth-century archaeologists – agreeing only on the lack of certainty possible and the ‘fun’ involved in the discussion – to the ancient historians, who express their respective certainties by once again contradicting each other, as they do over Suetonius’ role in its inception. Once again, and for the same reason, Tacitus’ is the preferred account.

There was one matter on which the two ancient historians did agree – that the battle itself was preceded by a series of set speeches. But as with Dio’s earlier Boudican speech, recounted in Chapter Five, this was more a question of contemporary protocol than historical accuracy. In this case Tacitus and Dio give us a total of three speeches: one apiece for Boudica and Suetonius from Tacitus; Dio, having already given the Queen her say, contents himself with awarding Suetonius a tripartite speech, delivered in turn to his three divisions. It is Tacitus’ portrait of the Queen on this occasion, driving round and round the assembled tribes in her chariot, with her daughters in front of her, which has made an indelible impression. It has become joined to that physical description given by Dio on the earlier occasion of the tall, splendid and ferocious red-haired Celt in her war panoply; together they form the popular image of Boadicea.

‘We British are used to women commanders in war’ the Queen cries, before adding, with that neat lack of logic many other Warrior Queens will be found to echo: ‘I am descended from mighty men!’ Otherwise Tacitus’ Boudica emphasizes her ghastly treatment at the hands of the Romans – ‘I am fighting as an ordinary person for my lost freedom, my bruised body and my outraged daughters’ – and dwells further on other Roman atrocities, as well as denigrating the Roman courage. She ends with this clarion call to invoke – like so many Warrior Queens – a sense of masculine shame: ‘consider how many of you are fighting – and why. Then you will win this battle, or perish. That is what I, a woman, plan to do! Let the men live in slavery if they will.’

Suetonius, according to Tacitus, also stressed the feminine presence in the British ranks, but in this case he did so only in order to hold it to scorn: ‘In their ranks there are more women than fighting men.’ Dio’s Suetonius equally took the opportunity to sneer at the natives: ‘Fear not, then, their numbers or their spirit of rebellion; for their boldness rests on nothing more than headlong rashness unaided by arms or training!’ The Britons’ achievement in capturing the two cities of Camulodunum and Londinium is dismissed as being due to betrayal in one case and abandonment in the other. With the confidence of a member of the master race, Dio’s Suetonius declares: ‘let them learn by actual experience the difference between us, whom they have wronged, and themselves’.

The rightness of the Roman cause is indeed one of the major themes of Dio’s Suetonius: ‘the gods are our allies’, he goes on to say to this third division, ‘for they almost always side with those who have been wronged’. His other theme is the natural superiority of their heritage: ‘we are Romans and have triumphed over all mankind by our valour’. Lastly Dio’s Suetonius does at least envisage the possibility of defeat, if only to allow the author to dwell once again on those British atrocities which he had already described so vividly apropos the women sacrificed to Andate. If the Romans did not triumph and were captured, they could expect to be impaled, to look upon their own entrails cut from their bodies, to be spitted on red-hot skewers, to be melted in boiling water … In a word, ‘to suffer as though … thrown to lawless and impious beasts’.

In the event Suetonius’ confidence was justified: except that the courage was found equally on both sides, the skill and experience solely on that of the Romans. Even before battle was joined, the two armies drawn up for battle would have presented an extraordinary contrast in their equipment and the manner of their array, a contrast which only became more intense as the conflict proceeded.

Here were the Britons, a vast concourse of them it is true, but in no sense a standing army: the fact that they were farmers, that they had literally come off the land, would be cruelly emphasized in the aftermath to the battle. The Celtic sword was the traditional weapon of such people, a sword with a long history, a sword such as the sword with which ‘the wild deer’, Cúchulainn, had been able to despatch all fourteen soldiers sent after him by the wicked Queen Medb. They wore no body armour of any sort, except perhaps a pair of loose trousers (if we judge by the Gauls depicted on the Roman sculptural reliefs). The fine helmets and decorated shields which this civilization has left behind were for the aristocrat–warriors among them: these too would have been mounted on the light wickerwork chariots, like to their queen’s, from which they habitually dismounted to fight. (The chariot was however already slightly old-fashioned and had vanished altogether from the British/Celtic host by the second century AD.)⁹

We may believe that this concourse had the noisy, shambling quality of the Celtic array, with its music and its shouting and some hoarse amalgamation of the two. Perhaps the most significant difference of all between the British army and the one which faced it within the defile was that the Britons had brought along their families to see the fun. There they were, women and children, in a series of wagons stationed at the edge of the battlefield – which meant, given the lie of the land, at the back of it. One imagines a certain boastfulness in the mounted warriors of the Britons, and in their foot followers too, as beneath the eyes of their dependants they ‘seethed over a wide area in unprecedented numbers’. The presence of these innocent camp followers, in a position which might well and in fact did prove extraordinarily dangerous, illustrates perfectly how war for the Britons, with its joy of fighting, its hope of plunder, was a serious but also a tribal business.

For the Romans on the opposite side, war was not only a serious business but the only business. It was for this that the legionaries had been trained, trained in many cases over long years and in the hard school of continental warfare; above all it was for this business of fighting that they were equipped, and equipped in a manner which was developed further each decade with the sole aim of making every legion a superb fighting machine. Against their naked or near naked opponents, they wore helmets including neck protection, light body armour to the waist, broad leather belts with metal-tipped leather thongs falling below them, and studded open boots like hobnailed sandals.¹⁰

When it came to weaponry, the Roman cavalry had their lances, while the infantry, as well as curved wooden shields with bosses, had a pair of javelins per man. These javelins were seven feet long with a three-foot iron point, difficult to remove once embedded: but their long wooden shafts made them easy to throw. With the aid of his javelin, the legionary could render his opponent’s shield useless, or even pin the two of them together. Furthermore a legionary also had a shorter two-foot sword (his gladius, hence gladiator) and a dagger. It was the long hero’s sword of Cúchulainn against a battery of professional weapons. But the legionaries of Rome were not to be equated with the soldiers of Queen Medb. Alas, this was not a contest which the epic hero – or heroine – was destined to win.

At the first charge of the Britons towards the defile which contained their enemy, the Roman legionaries deliberately held their ground without counterattacking, as they had been trained to do. But when the order finally came to burst forward with their lethal javelins, they did so in wedge formation and to murderous effect, accompanied by the infantry of the auxiliaries. Finally it was the cavalry’s turn to demolish all resistance. We do not know how long the battle raged – all day? less than that? The duration was of less significance than the final result.

The Britons, by dreadful irony, found themselves pinned in against this fierce counterattack by their own wagons, those wagons brought along so blithely for their families to see the show. It was in this way, in this death-trap, that the Romans were able to put to death the British women, as well as the British baggage animals (which were transfixed) at the same time as they despatched their menfolk. ‘According to one report,’ says Tacitus carefully, eighty thousand of the Britons died, compared to four hundred Romans killed, and others wounded.

Was Queen Boudica herself to be numbered among the eighty thousand British dead? The indications are that she did not actually die on the battlefield, but shortly afterwards and by her own hand: Tacitus tells us that she took poison. (Dio’s story that Boudica fell sick and then died is not incompatible with this, since poison would obviously have brought about sickness, however short-lived, and it may have been this aspect of the story which Dio picked up.) As for the Queen’s daughters, their fate, like their names, remains unknown to history since it is not mentioned by Tacitus, while their very existence is ignored by Dio.

For once, however, the many fictional accounts of Boadicea’s life, be they plays or novels, which have her administering poison to her daughters as well as to herself, are not straining credulity too far. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s play, for example, the heroine’s younger daughter momentarily shrinks back from the mystery of death – ‘O but if I knew but whither …’ – as her mother offers her the fatal draught. The Queen comforts her and issues her last rallying cry:

Keep your minds humble, your devotions high

So shall ye learn the noblest part, to die.¹¹

For if the Iceni princesses did survive the wanton slaughter at the end of the battle, it is surely not likely that their mother, having decided to poison herself, would have risked them falling into the hands of the Romans – a second time.

As it is, myth surrounds Queen Boudica’s burial place as with everything else about her. Dio tells us simply that the British gave her a costly burial, Tacitus nothing. The seventeenth-century story that Boadicea (as she now becomes) was given this ‘costly burial’ at Stonehenge has a great deal to commend it of neatness and romance – if nothing of historical truth – since two mighty legends are disposed of together, the immemorial stones and the woman. The celebrated if equally unhistorical connection of the Druids with Stonehenge only dates in fact from the later years of the seventeenth century: in 1624 for example, the antiquary Edmund Bolton, believing Stonehenge to be the work of Britons (‘the rudeness itself persuades’), concluded that here was to be found the tomb of Boadicea. This theory was rebutted in 1655 in a posthumous publication from notes by Inigo Jones. He pointed out that ‘a mighty Prince may be buried with great Solemnity, yet no material Monument be dedicated to his memory’; adding that it was unlikely the Romans would have permitted ‘an everlasting Remembrance of Boadicea’.¹² (Although the Romans had in fact a tradition of allowing their enemies to carry away their dead for burial – to avoid evil spirits – so that the erection of ‘an everlasting Remembrance’ was not out of the question in Iceni country.)

To many other neighbourhoods and many other monuments, however man-made or otherwise, clings obstinately the tradition that ‘Here lies Boadicea’. Counted among them are a mound on Hampstead Heath known as Boadicea’s Tomb (in reality more likely to be a Roman burial place); various sites around Parliament Hill, following the legend of the London King’s Cross battle; Warlies Park, Waltham Abbey, in Essex; the Bartlow Hills in the same county; and a tumulus known locally as The Bubberies in the grounds of a parsonage at Quidenham in Norfolk – the name being hopefully regarded as a corruption of Boadicea or Boudica. The legend of the King’s Cross battle is also responsible for periodic bursts of enthusiasm (most recently in 1988), suggesting that the British Queen must lie buried under Platform 8 of the station itself, a story which may at least divert the weary traveller, causing him or her to ruminate on the possible advantages of the chariot over the train as a means of conveyance.¹³ The discovery of a mid-first-century British burial place, containing the bones of a woman of royal rank, would be exciting enough in its own right; it would also, for better or for worse, put an end to such innocent local fantasies.

Whatever the truth of the costly burial and its precise situation – and as with the royal palace of the Iceni, one must not give up all hope of finding it within the tribal area – it is reasonable to assume that Queen Boadicea took her own life. Let us suppose that the Emperor Nero did choose to exercise clemency towards this barbarian princess, once she had served her purpose in the triumphal procession (as Claudius had exercised clemency towards Caratacus). Let us suppose that the offer was made, and the Iceni Queen believed that the promise would be kept. She would not have wished to live out her days a slave. Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra not wishing to see ‘some squeaking Cleopatra … boy her greatness’ on the Roman stage would surely have been paralleled by Boudica’s own profound wish not to experience further humiliation.

There were royal ‘slaves’ who settled down in Rome – Queen Zenobia of Palmyra will provide an interesting example of such in the following chapter; there were also the barbarian captives described by Gibbon: ‘taken in thousands by the chance of war, purchased at a vile price, accustomed to a life of independence, and impatient to break and revenge their fetters’.¹⁴ Everything we know about Boudica, one certainly accustomed to a life of independence, suggests that she would have fallen proudly into the latter category. As for slavery, there is of course also no guarantee that she would have been offered that option. It is true that the womenfolk of Caratacus had been well treated following his ritual exhibition in a Roman triumph. But Caesar earlier had executed Vercingetorix after a similar display. Caratacus’ womenfolk were also women who had acted within the Roman meaning of the word: they had not challenged the might of Rome successfully. Boudica, who had already experienced Roman brutality before ever she rebelled, had no reason to suppose that the penalties which followed it would be any less severe. As the Queen herself was made to exclaim by Tacitus: for her as a woman it was a case of winning this battle or perishing. She had not won; we must therefore believe that she kept her word and perished.

The vengeance of Suetonius against the Britons was every bit as frightful as that of the rebel Britons had been towards Rome. (A further convincing argument for the death of Boudica shortly after the end of the battle lies in the fact that she would otherwise surely have featured in it.) The British must have suffered shockingly, and not all of the victims had taken part in the rising. For not only those who were judged hostile but those who were deemed to be ‘wavering’ were ‘ravaged with fire and sword’: the latter category, being in the eye of the Roman beholder, could encompass almost everybody and justify many a retributive cruelty. Even more terrible were the Britons’ sufferings from famine, for the Iceni in particular had neglected to sow their own fields before departing on their victorious rampage, taking everyone with them: the cheerful intention had been to seize the Roman supplies.

Some of the Britons went on fighting. Confusion has arisen about their desperate continuance of the struggle which was manifestly lost, and there is a suggestion that it was bound up with the implacability of Suetonius towards those who had recently humiliated him by ravaging the province under his command.¹⁵ This is Tacitus’ story in the earlier of his two accounts, the Agricola: ‘Excellent officer though he [Suetonius] was, it was feared that he would abuse their surrender and punish every offence with undue severity, as if it were a personal injury.’ So some of them fought on, feeling that at this point they had nothing to lose.

In the later Annals, however, Tacitus linked this ultimate British stand to the mischievous influence of the new Procurator, Julius Classicianus, he who came to replace the fugitive Catus Decianus. Julius Classicianus disloyally hinted that it was in the Britons’ own interest to prolong their activities until a new or less personally involved – and thus milder – governor should be sent out from Rome. Whether Tacitus’ slur on Julius Classicianus’ loyalty is justified, or whether he was merely seeking to defend the reputation of his father-in-law’s old commander, it is true that a ‘milder’ governor was finally sent out from Rome: Publius Petronius Turpilianus, who had just finished being Consul. This followed a report by the Emperor Nero’s emissary, the former slave Polyclitus, who tried to reconcile Governor and Procurator, and ended by criticizing Suetonius for not terminating the war. Peace was finally restored. With peace however came repression.

If the execution of the Roman vengeance lacked those picturesque atrocities depicted by Dio (so far as we know) it partook of the equally grim nature of long-drawn-out persecution including whatever brutal measures were thought necessary under the circumstances. Fresh troops were brought from Germany to fill out the ranks of that legion brought low by the first British onslaught; auxiliaries, both infantry and cavalry, were also imported. The Iceni paid dearly for their crowded hour of glorious life, and were condemned to live out instead that traditional alternative to it, a dismal age without a name. Excavations of the post-Boudican age reveal that a detailed policy of repression was enacted towards the guilty tribe, including slavery and transportation. Temporary Roman forts were put up at strategic sites for the control of the population, such as Great Chesterford north of Saffron Walden, Coddenham near Ipswich and Pakenham near Ixworth on the borders of Suffolk and Norfolk.^{f2 16}

Farms were burned, sanctuaries such as that of Arminghall desecrated; some of the buried hoards of torcs, coins and other precious golden objects referred to in Chapter Four, such as that at Santon, may owe their origins to this terrible time. The draining of hitherto unoccupied territories in the Iceni area and the conversion of them into fertile land was probably carried out by deported Iceni slave labour (using Roman drainage systems). So the Iceni, proud and independent of yore, were made subject, and this time they did not revolt again. The evidence is that in punishment for their rebellion the Iceni lands remained wasted into the next century. To the Caledonian leader Calgacus, via the pen of Tacitus, went the last word, when he was raising his own rebellion (put down by Agricola) in the 80s. Of the Romans, he said ‘they create a desolation and call it peace’.¹⁷

So Britain as a whole settled down to be a Roman province: or as the unknown but free-spirited Briton inspecting from an observation point some excavations of the Roman period at Leadenhall Court in the City of London observed to the present writer in 1986, ‘That’s the Romans for you – four hundred years of occupying our country.’

Were these four hundred years of occupation inevitable (leaving aside the question of whether they were desirable)? How far did Queen Boudica of the Iceni really progress in the direction of eliminating that occupation? The Romans in Britain trembled and with good reason, but what about the imperial power itself? Did Rome tremble? Should it have done so? The answers to these questions, fascinating if finally imponderable, are linked in part to Tacitus’ own estimate of Suetonius’ achievement.

Tacitus quoted the last battle as being ‘a glorious victory’ for the Roman side, ‘comparable with bygone triumphs’. Poenius Postumus, that senior officer who had failed to answer Suetonius’ summons to a rendezvous, subsequently fell on his sword because he had robbed his own legion of the possibility of sharing in all this glory. If Suetonius really triumphed with great difficulty over Boudica – against overwhelming odds as well as overwhelming numbers – then the Iceni, and the other tribes who joined with them, must have nearly succeeded in their objective, the overturning of odious Roman rule.

Against this picture of Boudica having suffered a last-minute reverse due to the military cunning of Suetonius and the experienced, courageous brilliance of his Roman legionaries – so that it was indeed in Roman terms ‘a glorious victory’ – has to be put a more cynical picture. It has been pointed out with truth that the southern tribes, notably the ever friendly, ever powerful King Cogidubnus and his Atrebates of Silchester, showed no signs of joining in the fun with their more northerly fellow tribesmen and women.¹⁸ If some disaffected Brigantes probably rallied to Boudica’s side, her fellow Queen Cartimandua certainly did not: hence the grateful support the latter would receive from Rome at the time of her own tribulations around AD 70.

On the military level, it is perfectly true, as Suetonius was made to point out by Dio in his speech, that the Britons never had to besiege a city which was actually defended properly by the Romans, since Camulodunum’s defences were pitiful, and Londinium’s non-existent. Their defeat of Petilius was due to the success of the ambush: when the experienced Roman legionaries lured the wild Britons into their trap, they were able to cut them down without much difficulty.

And yet this is a part of the story … the force of a patriotic flash flood (as Boudica’s rebellion is most plausibly seen) should never be underestimated. If positive hindsight, the explaining of why what did happen absolutely had to happen, is one enjoyable historical occupation, then the negative rather more dream-like dwelling on the what-might-have-been is another. Personalities come into play. The Procurator Catus Decianus fled from Londinium at the news of the fall of Camulodunum; Petilius’ recklessness led to his vanquishing; it would also have been perfectly possible for Suetonius to flee from Glevum (Gloucester) and reach the continent if things had turned out differently or if he had been of a different nature. As to Queen Boudica’s tactics and the potency of surprise, it was Mao Tse-tung in his brilliant and demonstrably effective essay on guerrilla warfare who advocated seizing the initiative whenever possible so that a small band of poorly equipped guerrillas could cause havoc and defeat a well-equipped army.¹⁹

The more victories the Britons clocked up, the more allies among their fellow tribesmen they would have gained. It was the winning side which was seductive to those with an eye to a profitable future. The Roman rule in Britain in AD 60, seventeen years after the invasion, was clearly neither so extensive nor so settled as it was afterwards to become; the memory of the people concerned is an important element where any occupation is being considered, an element not always sufficiently regarded. Many of the Britons in AD 60 – certainly Queen Boudica herself – could remember a time before the Romans came, and before the Romans ruled, and being blissfully unaware of the ‘historical inevitability’ of the four hundred years of Roman occupation, may have genuinely believed that they could enjoy freedom in the future.

What kind of freedom was envisaged? The answer to that question surely lies in the Roman maladministration which provoked the Iceni in the long term, as the Roman maltreatment of the Queen and her daughters provoked them in the short. The indignation of the native inhabitants of Camulodunum, compelled to labour and pay for an imperial cult, an imperial temple, alien to their religion and to their way of life, falls into the same category. It was as a patriot – of the Iceni cause – and a partisan that Queen Boudica rose. It is as a challenge to the Roman might by tribes generally termed inferior – ‘nothing to fear from the Britons who are too weak to cross the sea and assault us’, Strabo had written in an age before the invasion – that her uprising is best seen.

Had Queen Boudica continued her rout, challenged the army of Suetonius at a place of her own choosing – with her numbers and her desperate courage – she might have presented the picture of the winning side to the other tribal leaders. The ‘glorious victory’ might just conceivably have gone the other way. But this is to make her a prudent calculating Roman leader as Suetonius was. She remained and remains a Celt, bold, inspiring, but not, so far as we know, calculating.

And in this manner her story ends. Or so it must have seemed to those who knew her, with the enforced ‘pacification’ of the Iceni by just that fire and sword which Boudica herself had temporarily and bloodily employed. But Boudica’s story did not end there. The death of this obscure British queen, buried in an unknown grave, was in fact only the beginning of the story. The phoenix Boadicea would rise from the ashes of Boudica. What happened to this phoenix later, why Boudica/Boadicea did not rest forever forgotten, is one theme of the rest of this book. The other interwoven theme is the multiple fascination exercised by the Warrior Queen, illustrated in so many different civilizations, including those where the Roman writ never ran and where the name of Boadicea was never known, each story contributing to the mosaic.

The first story – that of Zenobia – is however given as a dramatic coda to that of Boudica, because she too in her time challenged the might of Rome.

¹ Nowadays the London–Manchester InterCity railway line passes through the site of the battle; the historically minded traveller may salute the memory of the Queen of the Iceni from the windows of the train.

² From time to time traces of these forts, symbolic of the repression of the Iceni, emerge as a result of drought and aerial photography: in this way the Roman camp at Pakenham was shown up in 1976, and excavated in 1985 before being engulfed by a bypass.