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for example, will be hotly contested. Bernard is used to raising controversy, and no doubt this book will produce a storm of it among the usual suspects. Partly despite this, and partly because of it, the book is a superb achievement. In particular, its recasting of Henry as ‘God’s lieutenant’ on the road to reform is the most enlivening

contribution to an ancient debate that has appeared in years. It advances an extraordinarily skilled understanding of the intricate relationship of religious belief, religious life, political necessity and political opposition. It will infuriate a great many people, but inspire a great many more. To order this book at £23.95, see order form on page 78

P AUL J OHNSON

FIRST AMONG FEMINISTS

B OUDICA : I RON A GE W ARRIOR Q UEEN

★

By Richard Hingley and Christina Unwin (Hambledon and London 293pp £19.99)

T HERE ARE MANY books about Boudica, and more continue to appear. Most are bad. This account, by two archaeologists, is a good one, and gives us all that we know for sure about this interesting figure, and all the myths and fantasies which have been built up around her. She was a contemporary of the emperors Claudius and Nero, and led a surprisingly successful British revolt against Roman rule in AD 60–61, that is at the time when St Paul was writing his epistles to the Corinthians and St Mark composed his Gospel. We have three literary sources for Boudica, two by Tacitus (c AD 56–117). In Agricola, the life of his father-in-law, later Governor of Britain, which was written within living memory of the revolt, Tacitus says that while the then Governor, Suetonius Paulinus, was conquering Anglesey, the oppressed Britons (‘the whole island’) rose ‘under the leadership of Boudicca, a lady of royal descent – for Britons make no distinction of sex in their leaders’. Tacitus, say the authors of this book, misspelt her name, putting two ‘c’s instead of one. In the Middle Ages, copyists compounded the error when the ‘u’ was replaced by an ‘a’ and the second ‘c’ by an ‘e’. This is how we ended up with Boadicea, the name by which she was known until recently. But what’s in a name? We know Tacitus’s middle name was Cornelius, but his first name may have been Publius or Gaius. We are unsure both of his birth-date and his death-date. These are reminders of how many lacunae there are in our knowledge of such distant times. Tacitus’s second account of Boudica, in his Annals, is fuller. It says that Prasutagus, King of the Iceni, a rich man, had made the emperor Nero co-heir with his two

War-like matron

daughters, hoping thereby to preserve his kingdom and family fortune. But his will was ignored, his widow Boudicca (again misspelt) flogged and his two daughters raped. The dead king’s estates were seized by Roman officers and his family treated like slaves. As a result, says Tacitus, the Iceni rose in revolt, backed by the Trinobantes, who had grievances of their own, and other tribes. They destroyed the colony at Colchester, which was unwalled, annihilated ‘the ninth Roman division’, which tried to relieve the town, and forced Governor Suetonius to evacuate London, which was also destroyed. He adds that ‘Verulamium suffered the same fate’. Contradicting his account in Agricola, which claims that the Britons stormed Roman forts, Tacitus says that ‘forts and garrisons were bypassed’, the Britons going ‘for where loot was richest and protection weakest’. He gives Roman losses of 70,000, explaining: ‘The Britons did not take or sell prisoners … They could not wait to cut throats, hang, burn and crucify – as though avenging, in advance, the retribution that was on its way.’ In reply, Suetonius collected 10,000 troops and invited the Britons to a pitched battle at a place Tacitus does not identify. The Britons congregated in such numbers, on foot and on horseback, and ‘their confidence was such that they brought their wives with them to see the victory, installing them in carts stationed at the edge of the battlefield’. He says that Boudica ‘drove round all the tribes in a chariot with her daughters in front of her’, and addressed to them a fighting speech with marked feminist overtones, showing her bruised body and outraged daughters, and concluding: ‘You will win this battle or perish. That is what I, a woman, plan to do. Let the men live in slavery if they will.’ However, Tacitus writes in the Annals, the outcome was an easy Roman victory over a British army of which more than half were women. Some 80,000 Britons fell, at a cost of 400 Roman dead and ‘a slightly larger number of wounded’. Boudica, he says, ‘poisoned herself’. The rebellion ended in a famine among the Britons. These accounts are supplemented by Cassius Dio’s

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report of the invasion and occupation of Britain, written in Greek about 150 years later, but probably based on works which have not survived. Dio describes the revolt as ‘a terrible disaster’ and gives Roman losses as 80,000 dead, two cities sacked, and ‘the island lost’. He adds: ‘Moreover, all this ruin was brought upon the Romans by a woman, a fact which in itself caused them the greatest shame.’ One cause of the revolt, he claims, was the recalling of loans made to the Britons by the emperor Claudius and the chief minister and Stoic philosopher Seneca, a man of enormous wealth who, after Boudica’s death, was forced to commit suicide (in AD 65) for political offences. Buduica, as he calls her, was chosen leader by the tribes and ‘directed the conduct of the entire war’. He says she had ‘greater intelligence than is generally found in women’, was ‘very tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce, and her voice was harsh; a great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips; around her neck was a large golden necklace; and she wore a tunic of many colours over which a thick mantle was fastened by a brooch … [She] grasped a spear to aid her in terrifying all beholders.’ The speech Dio ascribed to Boudica in spurring on her followers is much longer than Tacitus’s version but follows the same lines: freedom or death – better to perish in battle than live under Roman rule as slaves. It does, however, contain the added note that the Britons were a special people, separated from the rest of mankind by a sea, and enjoying, until the Romans came, a liberty unknown elsewhere. She also, according to Dio, engaged in divination and magic, concealing a hare in her garments, which at a key point in her speech she let escape to see how it would run. Dio also has her displaying considerable knowledge of Mediterranean deities, and explaining ‘we have by now gained much learning from the Romans’. Much of what Dio writes seems to us fantastic, especially his description of the obscene cruelties inflicted by the Britons on Roman captives, and his statement that Boudica led an army of 230,000 men. His description of the final battle is more detailed than that of Tacitus, and he makes it a close-run thing. He says many Britons escaped and were preparing further resistance, but ‘Buduica fell sick and died’. The Britons ‘mourned her deeply and gave her a costly burial; but, feeling that now at last they were really defeated, they scattered to their homes’. These foreign accounts are supplemented by a brief reference made in the sixth century by the British author Gildas, writing after the Roman withdrawal and the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, by which time the Romans were seen as ‘goodies’. He says: ‘A treacherous lioness butchered the governors who had been left to give fuller voice and strength to the efforts of Roman rule.’ This is clearly a reference to the warrior

queen and, since Gildas had not read Tacitus or Dio, suggests that her folklore memory was still strong half a millennium after her death. The authors of this book devote a detailed chapter to the archaeological evidence. They show that it confirms beyond much doubt that a disaster occurred in Colchester, London and Verulamium (St Albans) at a level which fits with the literary evidence showing that these three towns were burned. It is what archaeologists call a ‘destruction layer’, thirty to sixty centimetres thick and black or red in colour, and it shows clearly that these towns, which were made mostly of wood, were put to the torch. But specific physical evidence of the revolt and of Boudica herself does not exist, or has not so far been found, despite strenuous efforts which still continue. Hingley and Unwin give a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of all that has been done, but it does not tell us very much. Hard facts about the queen are virtually non-existent. In their absence, fantasy reigns. There was the belief, current in the seventeenth century, that Stonehenge was the burial place. In the years 1609–14 the Jacobean playwright John Fletcher wrote a play entitled Bonduca, which brought in all that was then known about the ancient Britons, from Caractacus to the Druids, and which was repeatedly revived in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (why not today?). To please James I, Boudica was presented as a witch and an anti-heroine, a fashion followed by many authors until nineteenth-century antiquarianism made a fuss about the distant origins of England’s ‘unwritten constitution’ and gave Boadicea (thus called) a prominent and praiseworthy role in it. In the age of Gladstone, the sculptor Thomas Thornycroft worked on a massive representation of Boadicea in her chariot, with her two daughters. He began work in 1856, during the Crimean War, and followed the advice of the Prince Consort, who urged him to stress regality and make the chariot ‘a throne upon wheels’. The work was unfinished at Thornycroft’s death in 1885, after which it was cast in bronze, presented to the nation in 1896, and finally put in place near Westminster Bridge in 1902. In my view it is a splendid piece of work, exactly what monumental sculpture should be. Children love it and so do feminists. Placed as it was, it inspired the Suffragettes, always anxious to engage in highly publicised activities near Parliament. It is a fitting memorial to a woman, part fact, part fiction, who has inspired countless drawings and a fair number of plays and novels. Boudica was almost certainly illiterate, and a savage in many ways. Sellar and Yeatman summed it up accurately: ‘The Roman conquest was … a Good Thing, since the Britons were only natives at that time.’ Today, however, with opinion turning against immigrants, asylum-seekers and other foreigners, Boudica may enjoy a popular revival.

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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