Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (11 page)

This is to anticipate. The contemporary relevance of Cartimandua’s lofty position and long reign with regard to Boudica is of a different nature. Tacitus described female leadership as something known among the Britons as opposed to the Romans, for example, where of course it was not:
neque enim sexum in imperiis discernunt
(they make no distinction of sex in their appointment of commanders).
³³
Although no other names of reigning queens are known beyond those of the celebrated duo, Cartimandua and Boudica, these constitute one-third of the total of all the known names of sovereigns/chieftains. When King Prasutagus of the Iceni died in about
AD
60, there was an established client-queen presiding over the vast Brigantian territories, a client-queen already supported once by the Romans in difficult circumstances. On grounds of gender alone, Prasutagus had no reason to suppose that his wife Boudica would be unacceptable to the Romans as regent of the kingdom after his death.

With the death of King Prasutagus, the pace of Boudica’s story quickens; at the same time the areas where speculation must substitute for certainty by no means diminish. Sir Ronald Syme once wisely observed that conjecture cannot be avoided: ‘otherwise history is not writing, for it does not become intelligible’.
³⁴
This is undoubtedly a comforting maxim for the student of Boudica.

Speculation as opposed to certainty gets off to a spanking start in view of the fact that there are only three written sources for the Boudican rebellion which have any claim to be regarded as primary; and one of these survives in an edited form made nine hundred years later. Two of these sources come from the pen of Tacitus, who touched upon the Boudican rebellion both in his
Agricola
, the life of his father-in-law published in about
AD
98, and in his
Annals
written fifteen to twenty years later. The third comes from Dio Cassius, who was born in Nicaea, where his father was a senator, in about 163; a monk called Xiphilinus of Trapezus produced ‘epitomies’ of his work, selections for public reading which included his passage about Boudica, in the second half of the eleventh century.
³⁵

None of these three accounts is very long. And at first sight each of the three claims to be regarded as a primary source may seem rather tenuous in view of the fact that Dio was born a hundred years after the revolt and even Tacitus a mere five years before it. Fortunately Tacitus, quite apart from his diligent researches in the imperial archives, was able to benefit from the first-hand testimony of his father-in-law. For Agricola as a young man was present in Britain, a member of the Governor’s staff, at the time of these stirring events; whatever old men forget, they do not forget the campaigns of their youth. There were other survivors he might have interviewed: the widow of Ostorius Scapula lived on for many years, Tacitus being consul in the same year as his grandson. He has also increased his store of knowledge between writing the
Agricola
and the
Annals
.
³⁶

Dio’s claim is based more modestly on the fact that although there are traces of his having read Tacitus’ account, he does not simply reproduce it. On the contrary, so far as can be judged from Xiphilinus’ selection, Dio had access to other independent material which has since vanished. It is known that he spent ten years taking notes on the work of other historians.
³⁷

Mercifully, this paucity of written sources concerning the Boudican episode is counteracted by the burgeoning discoveries of archaeology. Since the Second World War new methods of
ploughing and above all the development of aerial reconnaissance in course of such pastoral duties as crop-spraying have led to fresh and exciting finds, even if the increasing demands of the American NATO bases upon East Anglian airspace are beginning to act restrictively.
³⁸
Nevertheless, the fact that the actual date of the rebellion remains the subject of controversy – with dedicated proponents of both
AD
60 and 61 – does illustrate the undeniable problems caused by this dearth of evidence.

The argument arises over Tacitus’ own placing of the rebellion in 61, a date which does not fit with other information he supplies concerning the governors in Britain and the consulates in Rome. His narrative however makes sense, if the rebellion is put back to 60; the other events such as the change of governors then follow naturally. As against that, Tacitus’ care as an historian casts doubt on such a mistake in dating. It is not however a controversy which is of vital interest to the present study of Boudica. Since the preponderance of historians still appear to favour 60, despite some strong contenders in the 61 party, this is the date which without prejudice will here be adopted.
³⁹

At least the fact of King Prasutagus’ death is incontrovertible. What else is certain? He died in 60 – or maybe 59 – having been
longa opulentia clarus
– long renowned for his wealth. He died as a client-king of the Roman Empire, a position which, at least from the point of view of the Romans, made his dominions an integral part of that empire –
membra partesque
. He died, we must assume, without male heirs, since the will he made did not mention them, and did mention two daughters. He did not leave the kingdom to his wife, Boudica, but he did entrust her with the regency on behalf of these girls.
⁴⁰

The clause in Prasutagus’ will which was however to stir up the most trouble at the time, and prove the undoing of his family thereafter, was not to do with the regency. It was to do with that wealth for which he had long been renowned. Prasutagus left his lands and personal possessions partly to the Emperor, and partly to his wife in trust for his daughters (although the exact
proportions of the inheritance due to each are not known).
⁴¹
He must have hoped that by so doing he had provided for a peaceful hand-over. It was an idle hope.

¹
In local British terms, the river name Itchen may be related to the tribal name Iceni, but Ixworth or Ickenham are not thought to be so related.
²

²
A collection of torcs can be seen in the British Museum (from the Snettisham hoard) and in the Ipswich Museum (from the finds made locally).

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

B
oudica, 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.