Just north of London’s Westminster Bridge stands a nineteenth-century sculpture of Boudica and Her Daughters. The warrior queen rides in the rear of a scythed chariot, her arms aloft, a spear pointing to the sky. Her daughters crouch down on either side, bare-breasted and exposed, shielding themselves in her shadow.
The statue encapsulates both chaos and composure. Nobody is holding onto the reigns of the horses, which are rearing up as if about to bolt. But Boudica strikes a figure in complete control. Her posture is that of a priestess summoning the gods to her side, her steely gaze is focused, and she harnesses the superhuman strength of a mother whose children are in jeopardy.
Since taking up arms against the Romans in the first century CE, Boudica has come to represent many things. The exoticism of a foreign queen. The noble savage. The destructive wrath of a woman scorned. But how much of what we know about Boudica is based on evidence, and how much is the stuff of myth and legend?
Who Was Boudica?
Roman authors, our main source of evidence, tell us that Boudica was the wife of Prasutagus, the king of the Iceni, a Celtic tribe from the modern region of East Anglia. Of Prasutagus’ existence, we have more than just ancient texts. We also have coins bearing his name and image.
When Prasutagus died in 60 CE, he left half of his estate to his two prepubescent daughters and half to the emperor Nero. This was common practice under bad emperors as it hedged against them dispensing with the late king’s will and seizing everything for themselves. But the Roman administration ignored Prasutagus’s bequest and claimed his entire estate for the empire. In Tacitus’s version of events, Roman centurions ravaged Prasutagus’ lands while slaves pillaged his property, flogged his widow Boudica, and raped their daughters.
Even by Roman standards, this treatment was abhorrent. And to make matters worse, Boudica and her daughters were probably also Roman citizens by proxy. To avenge the injury she and her daughters had suffered, Boudica rallied the Iceni, the Trinovantes, and several other British tribes and started a revolt. First they marched on Camulodonum, modern-day Colchester. Sacking the town and its temple to Claudius was simple enough given that it lacked a single fortification. Its inhabitants, mainly retired Roman veterans and native pro-Roman sycophants, were put to the sword.
Then they moved on to Londinium, modern-day London. It had briefly been garrisoned by a small Roman army under the command of Suetonius Paulinus who, upon hearing of the revolt, had marched down from his garrison in Anglesey. However, realising his forces were outnumbered and unprepared, Paulinus retreated from the city before the arrival of Boudica’s army. Her army razed Londinium to the ground, along with the town of Verulamium (modern-day St. Albans), torching the cities and massacring their inhabitants.
If we believe the ancient figures, the death toll was staggering: some 70,000 – 80,000 dead Romans and Britons. More shocking still was the manner in which those taken captive were murdered. Cassius Dio tells us that the noblest women strewn up and had their breasts cut off and sewn inside their mouths to make it appear as though they were eating them. Other women were impaled on sharp stakes that ran the length of their bodies and left to rot in the open air while the victors indulged in revelries, banquets, and sacrifices.
The revolt needed putting down immediately. Allowing atrocities of this kind to go unpunished was a grave affront to Rome and undermined the securitas that the Empire promised its subjects. The man entrusted with this task was none other than Suetonius Paulinus, who marched his heavily outnumbered legionaries to meet Boudica’s army in battle.
The Battle of Watling Street
We do not know where – or indeed when – the Battle of Watling Street took place. But following Tacitus’ description, modern historians place it near Mancetter in Warwickshire in 60/61 CE. The Britons must have been confident that the day would be theirs. If ancient figures are to be believed — and we should always be sceptical — Boudica stood at the head of 230,000 Britons against just 10,000 Romans. Paulinus’ only hope was that the Britons would be foolhardy enough to engage them in pitched battle, where training and experience would count in their favour.
The Britons made a fierce display as Boudica paraded before them in her chariot. She railed against the Romans, decrying how she and her daughters had been defiled and promoting the justness of their cause. Across the field of battle, Suetonius Paulinus gave a much more measured speech. “Point and thrust. All barbarian bravado will shatter when it meets Roman steel.” Paulinus had been tactically astute in deploying his dramatically outnumbered forces, making them face out onto a narrow defile with dense woodland protecting their rear.
Bravado did indeed prove to be the Briton’s downfall. The Britons charged the Romans head-on, but as they funnelled through the defile, volleys of javelins cut them down. Once morale started to waver the Romans formed a wedge formation and charged. And that was essentially that.
The crushing defeat suffered by Boudica’s forces was compounded yet further by their families, whose wagons encircled the battlefield and impeded their retreat. By the end of the day, Tacitus tells us, 80,000 Britons and 400 Romans lay dead. Boudica fled but perished soon after. Some say she poisoned herself, others that died from grief. But it was not how she had died, but how she had lived that would long haunt the Romans.
Evidence for Boudica’s Existence
Boudica’s rebellious spirit is central to her story. And it is story, rather than history, that may well be the optimal word. For when we begin to scratch around for any tangible historical traces of this warrior queen, even her very existence becomes more a question of conviction than corroboration.
Let’s start with the archaeological evidence. Problematically, we have nothing that links any figure called Boudica with the events described in the written sources. The closest thing we have is a coin issue with the inscribed letters SUB ESUPRASTO ESICO FECIT: something that may or may not refer to Boudica’s late husband, Prasutagus. There’s an archaeological layer of burnt deposits showing that St. Albans was sacked around the time of the events described. But while they might say something of a battle—though not the final battle, the site of which has yet to be found—they say nothing of Boudica herself.
Without any strong archaeological traces, we must lean heavily on our written evidence. We have three ancient sources for Boudica’s reign, none of which were contemporary. Two come from the great Roman historian Tacitus: the first appearing in his work the “Agricola” (a biography about his father-in-law who was stationed in Britain) and the second appearing in his later work the “Annals” (which gives us most of our information about the early emperors).
Tacitus was writing around half a century after the events described. But he is still far more reliable than Cassius Dio, who wrote his history in Greek about 150 years after Boudica’s revolt. Cassius Dio doesn’t give us much context about the British queen. We don’t know who he went to when looking for information about Boudica, though it’s safe to assume that he based much of his account on Tacitus’s. What he does give us, however, is the only physical description we have of Boudica — or of any ancient Briton for that matter:
In stature, she was very tall; in appearance, most terrifying; in her glance of the eye, most fierce, and her voice was harsh. A great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips and around her neck was a large golden necklace. She wore a tunic of diverse colours over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch. This was her invariable attire.
Cassius Dio, Roman History (62.1-2)
Cassius Dio’s description is very evocative. It portrays someone who is aggressively masculine and, for a Roman, captivatingly alien. But it also raises a lot of questions, the most pressing of which is how he possibly could have known what Boudica looked like. There were no coins with her image; no statues, mosaics, or any other type of artwork that have been found. True, he could have based it on an eyewitness source, but it’s difficult to imagine any Roman would have seen or heard her addressing her troops from a chariot, nevermind identifying what she had been wearing (and indeed always wore).
We arrive closer to understanding the true Boudica when we think about how the ancients viewed history. History writing in the ancient world was more of an art than a science, and when it came to crafting artworks Tacitus was a master. One of Tacitus’s signature techniques was to use what was happening in the provinces as a foil to events unfolding in Rome to further his overall agenda: showing how corrupt and decadent the Romans had become. If we take the reign of the emperor Nero for example, we can see how Tacitus juxtaposes the vain, artistic pretensions of the emperor with the loyalty, nobility and militarism (all good honest Roman values) of his general Corbulo in Armenia.
But Nero was not Tacitus’s most odious character. If there was one thing a member of the Roman elite hated more than a powerful man, it was a powerful woman, and up until her murder in 59 CE Nero’s mother, Agrippina, had been the most powerful person on the planet. She’d achieved such power through sex, firstly with her uncle, the former emperor Claudius, and then allegedly with her son, Nero. She then wielded it through secrecy and manipulation. It was even said that she would listen in on senatorial meetings—something unthinkable for a woman to do—from behind a curtain.
Where does Boudica tie into this? The answer, I’d suggest, is that she becomes a lot more comprehensible when we think of her as a literary device — as an antithesis to Agrippina — rather than as an accurate historical figure. I’m not suggesting that Boudica didn’t exist. To do so would be to advance a hypothesis based solely on a paucity of material evidence: bad historical practice, as I’ve written about in the case of Jesus.
What I am saying is that the Boudica we think we know — i.e. the Boudica of our ancient sources — is too much the antithesis of Agrippina to be real.
The contrasts are quite striking. Boudica went to war to avenge her children; Agrippina would ultimately be murdered by hers. Boudica led from the front, spear-in-hand like a true warrior; Agrippina plotted behind the closed doors of the palace. Boudica gave a rousing speech exhorting freedom over slavery; Agrippina was at the helm of a political institution that enslaved the Romans to a series of capricious emperors. Boudica ruled over an army of warriors; Agrippina ruled over decadent imperialists; too focused on their warm baths, unmixed wine, and perfumes to care about proper Roman military values.
To reiterate, I have little doubt that a British queen did exist who rose up against the Romans and came close to removing their foothold from the island. However, in terms of conduct, beliefs, even appearance, she would have borne little resemblance to the figure that has come down to us today. The Boudica we know is too Roman, too much a literary caricature. A foil to the manipulative Agrippina or the all-singing all-dancing Nero (who is so effeminate that Boudica herself calls him a woman).
Yet short of any new and illuminating archaeological discoveries, Queen Boudica is likely to remain just that: a mythical figure, a noble savage, and a vessel for romantic preconceptions of that exotic, virtuous nobility found only on the fringes of the Roman Empire.
