Boudicca

Boudicca, or Boadicea, Romano-British Rulers, was wife of Prasutagus, king of the Iceni, whose territories were modern Norfolk. At his death, the local Roman officials treated the Iceni with contempt, flogging Boudicca and raping her daughters. Her response was to raise a terrifying insurrection, probably the greatest in British history, which came close to sweeping Roman rule out of Britain. Colchester, the Roman capital, was taken and burned, and its inhabitants put to the sword. Paulinus, the Roman governor, was campaigning in Anglesey but, in a desperate cavalry dash, tried to hold London. He reached it before the rebels but was obliged to withdraw to wait for reinforcements. Both London and Verulamium (St Albans) were sacked. In all three cities, ashes from the devastation survive below the surface, and 70,000 are reported to have been slain. Paulinus succeeded in gathering forces and, advancing to join his infantry from North Wales, gave battle at Atherstone, near Watling Street. Against all odds, he won a decisive victory, and Boudicca took poison to avoid capture.

Dio Cassius, writing more than one hundred years after the event, described Boudicca as ‘very tall, in appearance most terrifying…the glance of her eye most fierce, her voice harsh…a great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips’. For centuries, this vivid portrait, real or imaginary, seems to have unnerved male historians and their attitude to Boudicca was cautious. Gildas in the sixth century referred to her as ‘a treacherous lioness’, and Holinshed in the sixteenth century dwelt mainly on her atrocities. The emergence of Boudicca as a national heroine was largely Victorian. Thomas Thornycroft offered a large statue of her at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and his sculpture, after some vicissitudes, was placed on the Victoria Embankment opposite the Houses of Parliament in 1902.

The Kings and Queens of Britain. John Cannon and Anne Hargreaves. Oxford University Press, 2001