ROYALTY

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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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006