| Boadicea,
Warrior Queen
- ad 61 -
|
 |
Any British ‘king’
who lived under the Romans had to pay a price
for his protection. So when Prasutagus, the
leader of the Iceni people, died in ad 60 he
prudently left half his wealth and territories
to the emperor Nero as a form of ‘death
duty’. The Iceni occupied the flat fenlands
that stretched down from the Wash across modern
Norfolk and Suffolk and, like other Celtic peoples,
they accepted the authority of female leaders.
Dying without a son, Prasutagus had left his
people in the care of his widow, Boadicea (or
Boudicca), until their two daughters came of
age.
But women had few rights under Roman law, and
Nero’s local officials treated Boadicea’s
succession with contempt.
‘Kingdom and household alike,’ wrote
the Roman historian Tacitus, author of the first
history of Britain, ‘were plundered like
prizes of war.’
The lands of the Iceni nobles were confiscated
and Boadicea was publicly beaten. Worst of all,
her two daughters were raped. Outraged, in ad
61 the Iceni rose in rebellion, and it was Boadicea
who led them into battle.
‘In stature she was very tall, in appearance
most terrifying,’ wrote a later Roman
historian, Dio Cassius. ‘Her glance was
fierce, her voice harsh, a great mass of the
most tawny hair cascaded to her hips.’
Joined by other Britons, Boadicea with her rebel
Iceni fell on Colchester in fury, slaughtering
the inhabitants and smashing the white-pillared
temple and other symbols of Roman oppression.
Over eighteen hundred years later, in 1907,
a boy swimming in the River Alde in Suffolk,
deep in what had been Iceni territory, was astonished
to discover the submerged bronze head of the
emperor Claudius. Looking at the jagged edges
of the severed neck today, one can almost hear
the shouts of anger that have attended the satisfying
ritual of statue toppling over the centuries.
The rebels now turned towards Londinium, the
trading settlement that was just growing up
around the recently built bridge over the Thames.
The vengeance they wreaked here was equally
bitter. Today, four metres below the busy streets
of the modern capital, near the Bank of England,
lies a thick red band of fired clay and debris
which archaeologists know as ‘Boadicea’s
Layer’. The city to which the Iceni set
the torch burned as intensely as it would in
World War II during the firebomb raids of the
Germans.
Temperatures rose as high as 1000 degrees Celsius
– and, not far away, in the Walbrook Stream
that runs down to the Thames, has been found
a grisly collection of skulls, violently hacked
from their bodies.
Boadicea’s forces had wiped out part of
a Roman legion that had marched to the rescue
of Colchester. But the bulk of the Roman troops
had been on a mission in the north-west to hunt
down the Druids and destroy their groves on
the island of Anglesey, and it was a measure
of Boadicea’s self-assurance that she
now headed her army in that north-westerly direction.
Her spectacular victories had swollen her ranks,
not only with warriors but with their families
too, in a vast wagon train of women and children.
She laid waste to the Roman settlement of Verulamium,
modern St Albans, then moved confidently onwards.
Meanwhile the Romans had been gathering reinforcements
and the two forces are thought to have met somewhere
in the Midlands, probably near the village of
Mancetter, just north of Coventry.
‘I am fighting for my lost freedom, my
bruised body and my outraged daughters!’
cried Boadicea, as she rode in her chariot in
front of her troops. ‘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 want to.’
These fighting words come from the pen of Tacitus,
who describes the fierce showdown in which the
much smaller, but impeccably armed and drilled
Roman army wore down the hordes of Boadicea.
At the crux of the battle, it was the wagon
train of British women and children that proved
their menfolk’s undoing. The camp followers
had fanned out in a semicircle to watch the
battle, fully expecting another victory. But
as the Britons were driven back, they found
themselves hemmed in by their own wagons, and
the slaughter was terrible – eighty thousand
Britons killed, according to one report, and
just four hundred Romans. Boadicea took poison
rather than fall into the hands of the Romans,
and, legend has it, gave poison to her daughters
for the same reason.
It was only when some of Tacitus’ writings,
lost for many centuries, were rediscovered five
hundred and fifty years ago that Britain found
out that its history had featured this inspiring
and epic warrior queen. Plays and poems were
written to celebrate Boadicea’s battle
for her people’s rights and liberties,
and in 1902 a stirring statue in her honour
was raised in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament.
There on the banks of the Thames you can see
Boadicea thrusting her spear defiantly into
the air, while her daughters shelter in the
chariot beside her.
But the menacing curved blades on Boadicea’s
chariot wheels are, sadly, the invention of
a later time. Remains of the Britons’
light bentwood chariots show no scythes on the
wheels. Nor is there evidence of another great
myth, that Boadicea fought her last battle near
London and that her body lies where she fell
– in the ground on which King’s
Cross Station was built many years later. Her
supposed grave beneath platform ten at King’s
Cross is the reason why Harry Potter’s
Hogwarts Express leaves, magically, from Platform
Nine and Three-Quarters.
In fact, the bones of the great queen probably
do lie near a railway line – albeit more
than a hundred miles north of King’s Cross,
near Mancetter in modern Warwickshire. The trains
on the Euston line between London and the north-
west rumble through the battlefield where, historians
calculate, Boadicea fought her last battle.
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