Boudica

Boudica was a queen of the Iceni, a people of eastern Britain, who led the most serious revolt against Roman rule in the province's history, in AD 60 or 61. Her forces destroyed the Roman towns that later became Colchester, London and St Albans before being crushed in a pitched battle. Almost everything known about her comes from two Roman historians writing decades later, but she became one of the best-known figures in British history and a lasting national symbol.

Boudica left no writings, coins or inscriptions of her own, and no Briton recorded her story. The main accounts are by Tacitus, in his Agricola (around 98) and Annals (around 115), and by Cassius Dio, a Greek-speaking senator writing about 150 years after the events, whose text survives only in a shortened Byzantine version. Tacitus had a valuable link to the events: his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, served as a young officer on the governor's staff in Britain during the revolt. Dio's account is longer and more vivid, including a famous description of a tall woman with a mass of tawny hair, a golden torc and a thick cloak, but historians treat its colourful details with caution. The speeches both writers give her are literary inventions, written to make points to Roman readers about liberty, tyranny and barbarian courage.

Archaeology confirms the core of the story. Excavations in Colchester, London and St Albans have found a layer of burnt debris dating to around 60 or 61, sometimes called the Boudican destruction horizon. Her birth date, her early life and even her real name are unknown. The name means something like "victorious woman" in the British Celtic language and may have been a title rather than a personal name. Medieval copyists turned it into Boadicea, the form used for centuries.

The Iceni lived in what is now Norfolk and parts of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, and were part of the wider world of the Celts. Julius Caesar had raided Britain in 55 and 54 BC, but lasting conquest began only in AD 43 under the emperor Claudius. The Iceni became a client kingdom, nominally independent and allied to the Roman Empire, though they had already risen briefly in 47 when the Romans tried to disarm them.

Boudica was the wife of the Iceni king Prasutagus, and they had two daughters. When Prasutagus died, around 60, his will left his kingdom jointly to his daughters and to the emperor Nero, probably hoping to protect his family and people. Instead, Roman officials treated the kingdom as conquered territory. According to Tacitus, the agents of the procurator Catus Decianus plundered it, Icenian nobles were stripped of their estates, Boudica was flogged and her daughters were raped. Dio gives different causes, saying that money given to British leaders under Claudius was now reclaimed as a debt and that the philosopher Seneca, Nero's adviser, suddenly called in large loans he had made to the Britons.

With the governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus away attacking the island of Mona (Anglesey) in north Wales, Boudica raised the Iceni and their southern neighbours, the Trinovantes, who resented the veterans' colony planted on their land at Camulodunum (Colchester) and the temple to the deified Claudius built there at local expense. The rebels stormed the poorly defended colony; the last defenders held out in the temple for two days before they were killed. A detachment of the Ninth Legion under Quintus Petillius Cerialis, marching to help, was routed, and only its commander and some cavalry escaped. Catus Decianus fled to Gaul.

Suetonius rode ahead of his army to Londinium, a trading town founded less than twenty years earlier, but judged it impossible to defend and abandoned it. The rebels burned it, and then Verulamium (St Albans). Tacitus and Dio both put the number killed at around 70,000 to 80,000, a figure that cannot be checked and is probably exaggerated, though the destruction was clearly severe. Tacitus says the rebels took no prisoners, and Dio describes atrocities against captured Roman women in the sacred groves of a goddess he calls Andraste.

Suetonius gathered a force of around 10,000 men, made up of the Fourteenth Legion, part of the Twentieth and auxiliary troops, and chose a narrow position with woods behind him and open ground in front. The site of the battle is unknown; a location along the Roman road later called Watling Street, somewhere in the Midlands, is often suggested. Tacitus describes the Britons arriving in vast numbers, with their families watching from wagons drawn up at the edge of the field. Disciplined Roman javelin volleys and a wedge-shaped advance broke the British host, and the fleeing army was trapped against its own wagons. Tacitus claims 80,000 Britons died against about 400 Romans, figures most historians regard as unreliable.

Tacitus says Boudica took poison; Dio says she fell ill and died, and was given a costly burial. Her grave has never been found, and the popular story that she lies under King's Cross station in London has no basis. The revolt was followed by harsh reprisals against the rebel tribes, until a new procurator, Gaius Julius Alpinus Classicianus, reported to Rome that the punishments were prolonging unrest, and Suetonius was soon replaced. The biographer Suetonius, no relation of the governor, says that Nero at some point considered abandoning Britain altogether, but Roman rule was now secure and the province developed peacefully for most of the following centuries.

Boudica was almost forgotten in the Middle Ages. The British monk Gildas, in the sixth century, seems to refer to her as a treacherous lioness, but she reappeared fully only when the works of Tacitus were rediscovered during the Renaissance. Tudor and Stuart writers presented her as a native heroine, and comparisons with Elizabeth I, another queen defying a great foreign power, were natural. Her fame peaked in the reign of Queen Victoria, whose name was sometimes said to mean the same as Boudica's. Poems by William Cowper and Alfred Tennyson cast her as a forerunner of the British Empire, and Thomas Thornycroft's bronze of her in a scythed chariot, completed after his death and placed on the Victoria Embankment beside Westminster Bridge in London in 1902, became her best-known image. There was an irony in this, since Boudica had fought against an empire. Suffragettes later adopted her as a symbol of women's struggle, and she is honoured in Wales and in Colchester as well. She remains a central figure in the early history of the United Kingdom, though much of the popular picture of her owes more to later imagination than to the thin ancient record.