Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (12 page)

It is the contrast between this nebulosity, characteristic of the first century
AD
and Boudica’s – or rather Boadicea’s – subsequent transcendent fame, which makes the lack of information so tantalizing. (Although it has to be admitted, from the point of view of myth rather than history, that the fire of popular interest often burns all the more brightly for the lack of dampening facts to pour upon it: Boadicea’s lively leaping myth being no doubt a case in point.)

The local Roman administration reacted immediately and unfavourably to the will of King Prasutagus. The latter’s intention in dividing his estate and treasure was presumably to placate the Emperor and safeguard his family’s inheritance at one and the same time. In the event Prasutagus succeeded in doing neither. But this is not to say that the expedient of sacrificing part of the inheritance in order to ensure the safe bestowal of the rest was a wild or even an original plan. Not only did the Roman nobility of this period often resort to the same device to protect the terms of their wills, but the range and number of royal wills involving Rome has recently been shown to be far greater than is sometimes supposed.
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Unfortunately in this case the officials on the spot were either unsympathetic or rapacious – or both. They ignored the will of the King. Representatives of the Procurator Catus Decianus – the chief financial administrator of the British province – seized all
the King’s estate and the total of his treasure. That was not the end of the depredations. Not only did the Iceni nobles find their own hereditary estates treated as though forfeit to the Romans – for no crime except the death of their king – but members of Prasutagus’ own court were humiliated and maltreated. It is obvious that the Iceni nobility, a free-born and independent caste, suffered an extraordinary and unwelcome change in their status. In Tacitus’ menacing words: ‘Kingdom and household alike were plundered like prizes of war.’
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The first step taken by the Procurator’s representatives was however in a different class so far as sheer inhumanity and public insult was concerned. Brutally, Boudica, the new Queen of the Iceni, was flogged. Her two daughters, those princesses designated as heiresses by their dead father, were raped.

The names of these young girls, like so many other women’s names throughout history, are unknown. Rape, equally, is a fate which has been shared by countless women down the ages, both named and nameless; victims of a male aggression, at once casual and horrifying, simply because, historically speaking, they happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. That Roman conquest was not altogether free from this can be seen from the speech made by the Caledonian Calgacus, facing Agricola in battle some twenty years after the Boudican revolt, and reported to Tacitus. He urged on his men by castigating the enemy: ‘They rob, kill and rape and this they call Roman rule.’ In this case however it is impossible to regard the violation of Boudica’s daughters as in any way mindless. This was a deliberate act of policy and as such it was symbolic: this act of rape was what Susan Brownmiller has called ‘the vehicle of
his
victorious conquest over
her
being’: he in this case being a Roman and she an Iceni royal princess.
⁹

Symbolic too was the flogging of the Queen: or scourging, to be exact, for Tacitus’ words are
verberis adfecta
– literally, to put to the rods. In principle, the Romans were not merciless or brutal to their captive royal women. One would not expect Cleopatra to have suffered such a fate, nor did she herself anticipate it: for the
proud spirit of the ‘Queen of War’ the prospect of exhibition in a Roman triumph was humiliation enough. The wife and daughter of the British Caratacus were shown clemency once they had performed their own part in Claudius’ triumph. On the other hand, the rape of the royal female as a ritual act to signify the suppression of a people is one with obvious psychological connotations.

The young Cesare Borgia held Caterina Sforza, then in her late thirties, incommunicado for a period after he had finally succeeded in storming her stronghold of Ravaldino in 1499; he then committed ‘injustices’ to her body. This was not lust, nor was she acquiescent (despite Cesare Borgia’s coarse joke to his officers afterwards that Caterina had defended her fortress better than her virtue).
¹⁰
Cesare Borgia’s act of rape was intended to signify the collapse of Caterina Sforza’s spirited political and military campaign for independence.

It is generally assumed by historians that some act of defiance on the part of the Iceni must have preceded this brutality of the Romans towards their royal women.
¹¹
Certainly this is perfectly possible, given the natural temperament for resistance the Iceni had displayed in 49 and would shortly display again. But as a matter of fact Tacitus does not say so. On the contrary he lists the cruelties of the Romans (starting with the flogging of Boudica and the rape of her daughters) and then moves to the consequences: ‘These outrages and the fear of worse … moved the Iceni to arms.’ So perhaps an unconscious assumption has been made by these historians, in view of the bestiality of the Romans’ behaviour, that some gesture or gestures of dissent
must
have taken place to provoke it.

Tacitus, writing shortly after the event, shows proper understanding of the way subject peoples are frequently handled. Given his order of events, the Romans’ pitiless treatment of Boudica and her daughters was intended not so much to punish the Iceni for defiance but to emphasize their subordinate status and the uselessness of resistance to Roman rule. The fact that the royal family of the Iceni contained, coincidentally, two young
females gave the Romans a nice opportunity for that extra-symbolic violence of rape. As for the scourging administered to the Iceni Queen, the Romans happened to believe that women as a whole were incapable of rule because they were incapable of discipline: ‘Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal, and it is no good giving her the reins and expecting her not to kick over the traces’: these were the supposed words of Cato the elder in 195
BC,
as reported by Livy two hundred years later on the eve of the Boudican period.
¹²
To be able to ‘control’ a woman and figuratively control the Iceni at the same time was another fitting coincidence.

If it was just this symbolic Roman brutality which touched off the Iceni revolt, demonstrating that a Warrior Queen can personify her people to the oppressed as well as the oppressor, that was not its sole cause. For such an intense conflagration as now threatened to destroy the whole basis of the Roman occupation could hardly be set off by that brutality alone, however shocking. It was Boudica who led her people in the general uprising, Tacitus noting at this point that lack of distinction between the sexes in the Britons’ appointment of commanders referred to earlier. Furthermore Tacitus had Boudica allude to the outrages performed upon her own body and those of her daughters in the speech he put into her mouth to encourage her warriors on the eve of battle. Nevertheless the rebellion itself had deeper underlying causes. The mere fact that the other tribes to whom Boudica’s wrongs would be less personally shocking joined in with the Iceni under Boudica’s leadership, shows that this was in fact a widespread as well as dangerous protest against the excesses of Roman rule.

Financial exploitation and land appropriation, two slow-burning fuses liable finally to cause an explosion in any society, were at the centre of the problem. According to Dio, the rebels found ‘an excuse for the war’ in the fact that certain sums of money granted to leading Britons by the Emperor Claudius and believed to have been gifts were now declared to be mere loans. The Procurator, Catus Decianus, he who was also responsible for
the confiscation of that part of Prasutagus’ estate willed to his daughters, proceeded to demand the return of these ‘loans’. At the same time, Dio accused Seneca, the celebrated Roman philosopher and politician, of first imposing an unwanted financial loan upon the Britons (attracted by the good rate of interest) and then suddenly recalling it in a series of severe measures.
¹³

Whatever the truth of these particular exactions – perhaps Dio’s cases merely serve to illustrate the general Roman use of short-sighed exploitive methods – the picture which emerges of the Roman administration of its new province is not a pretty one. The Romans were certainly not pursuing that policy of conciliation towards and co-operation with the local magnates most likely to ensure the long-term pacification of ‘Roman’ Britain. The tribal men of property began by resenting this treatment and ended by rising up against it, since they no longer had anything to gain by backing the Roman cause.
¹⁴

The case of the Roman temple at Camulodunum (Colchester) exemplifies this process of exploitation. The situation in and around Camulodunum was already disturbing for the native Trinovantes in view of the arrogance with which the Roman occupation was carried out. The Roman town of Camulodunum had been founded about twelve years previously. It was designed not as a military stronghold, but as a
colonia
, that is to say, a settlement of Roman army veterans who had received grants of land in the surrounding
territorium
administered by the town, in place of gratuities at the end of their period of service. The term
colonia
also meant that an existing town or city was accorded special municipal status. (Camulodunum was in fact the first town in Britain to receive it.)

The establishment of a
colonia
was always a matter of explicit imperial policy and it was a direct decree from the Emperor Claudius which had brought into being Roman Camulodunum. The intention, obviously, was the ‘Romanization’ of the new province; civilizing loyal veterans would gradually spread and multiply among the rude British.
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The native Trinovantes, of
course did not see it quite like that; in particular their reactions were not helped by the manner in which the ex-soldiers possessed themselves of their grants. According to Tacitus, ‘the settlers drove the Trinovantes from their homes and land, and called them prisoners and slaves’. Furthermore, excavations at Colchester have revealed the cruel conditions in which the native workers were kept, as they were obliged to carry out the construction works of their conquerors.
¹⁶
When the ex-soldiers helped themselves to more land than was legally granted, their comrades still in arms turned a blind eye, hoping for the same licence themselves. With all this in mind, it is not difficult to see how the oppressed Trinovantes, whether the tribal aristocrats or their humbler followers, might brood upon their wrongs.

The temple, erected to the Emperor Claudius at Camulodunum, may have been intended by the Romans to imbue the native Trinovantes with loyalty to their new masters, but that was very far from being the effect it had upon them. On the contrary, the temple appeared, according to Tacitus, as the ‘blatant stronghold of alien rule’. The whole concept of civic monument was alien to Celtic society. Moreover the sylvan temples of the Celtic religion had a very different air. This edifice proposing the godhead of a foreign emperor had nothing sublime about it to the indignant eyes of the Trinovantes. What was more, they were expected to pay for it.

It is not clear exactly how much of the temple of Claudius had already been erected by
AD
60, since it is no longer thought that construction was begun during the Emperor’s lifetime.
¹⁷
It would therefore have been building costs, rather than the maintenance of a priesthood to service the temple, which fell upon the Trinovantes. A series of discoveries, beginning in the late seventeenth century when the existing Norman castle (erected in the eleventh century) was demolished, have, however, given some idea of how the hated temple must have looked.

In 1683 the contractor found vaults below the Norman floor; in 1919 Sir Mortimer Wheeler and P. G. Laver revealed that the castle actually enclosed the
podium
or platform of the temple;
further excavations have followed in 1950 (the 1,900th anniversary of the foundation of the
colonia
) and 1964. Calculations made from the surviving walls and piers suggest that the temple itself measured some 150 feet by 80 feet, that it was surrounded by a colonnade of columns, thirty-five feet high and over three feet in diameter, and fronted by a sweeping flight of steps where there would have been a series of statues.
^f1
18
Enough of this was already completed to provide a clear and imposing focus for the resentful eye: enough, as it turned out, was already completed to provide a target for destruction.

According to Tacitus, the town of Camulodunum gave out its own desperate but unheeded warning of what lay ahead. The portents were many and various. The statue of Victory fell down with its back turned as though it was fleeing the enemy. Outlandish yells were heard in the senate-house and shrieks in the local theatre (the Romans had indeed gone for those amenities which made their civilization so agreeable to them while ignoring the prime need of maintaining walls round the town). A phantom settlement in ruins was glimpsed at the head of the River Thames. Most troubling of all was the blood-red colour of the sea, and the shapes like human corpses found abandoned at the edge of the shore by the ebb-tide.

Gazing on all these things, the native Britons began to hope – and the Roman settlers began to tremble.

Elsewhere in Britain, there were other frenzied women to be found. These women were not merely chanting, they were delivering their chants as war-cries against the Romans. For as the Iceni rose in revolt, led by the outraged Queen, and the subjugated Trinovantes planned to join them, the Governor of Britain, Suetonius Paulinus, was on the faraway island of Mona
(Anglesey). Here, in the celebrated sanctuary of the Druids, numbers of rebels against Roman rule had taken refuge. Suetonius’ mission was one of search and destroy. Moreover the destruction was intended to encompass not only the rebels, but also the host of Druids as well.