She is one of the most famous figures in British history — a warrior queen on a chariot, red hair streaming, spear raised against the might of Rome — yet the historical Boudicca is glimpsed only through the accounts of her enemies. Tacitus, the Roman historian whose father-in-law served in Britain in the following generation, provides the most detailed account of her rebellion. The picture he paints is of a towering woman of fierce intelligence, driven to rebellion by Roman brutality and the Roman refusal to recognise that the rules that governed dealings between civilised peoples should apply also in a province they regarded as barely human.
The immediate cause of the revolt was the treatment of Boudicca and her daughters following the death of her husband Prasutagus, king of the Iceni tribe in present-day Norfolk and Suffolk. Prasutagus had ruled as a client king under Roman oversight, and had bequeathed his kingdom jointly to the Roman Emperor and to his two daughters. The Roman procurator Catus Decianus ignored this arrangement entirely. Roman administrators seized the kingdom as if it had been conquered territory. Iceni nobles were dispossessed of their estates. And — in an act of contemptuous brutality that guaranteed revolt — Boudicca herself was flogged and her daughters assaulted.
The Iceni rose under Boudicca's leadership and were quickly joined by the Trinovantes of Essex, who had their own grievances against the Roman colony at Camulodunum. The colonial city, once the Trinovantian capital of Camulodunum — modern Colchester — had been settled by Roman veterans who had seized the lands of the local inhabitants and whose temple to the deified Claudius was regarded as a symbol of permanent foreign occupation. When Boudicca's army approached, the colony appealed urgently for military help but received only 200 ill-equipped reinforcements from Catus Decianus.
The sacking of Camulodunum was total. The colony was destroyed, the temple burned and its defenders slaughtered after a two-day siege. The Ninth Legion Hispana marched to relieve the city and was ambushed — its infantry destroyed, its commander fleeing with his cavalry. Boudicca's army then turned to Londinium, the commercial capital that the Roman governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, returning from a campaign against the druids on the island of Anglesey, concluded he could not defend with the forces available. He abandoned it. The city was burned, its population massacred.
The final battle — its location unknown, the subject of centuries of speculation — pitted Suetonius's disciplined Roman legions and auxiliaries, perhaps 10,000 men, against Boudicca's army, which ancient sources put at 230,000, though this figure is certainly exaggerated. Suetonius chose his ground carefully: a narrow defile with forest behind and open ground in front, eliminating the numerical advantage of the British force by channelling the attack into a narrow front where Roman discipline could be brought to bear. The battle was a massacre in reverse: the British charge was absorbed by Roman lines and counter-attacked; as the Britons broke and fled they were impeded by the wagons of their own families, drawn up behind them to watch the expected victory. The defeat was catastrophic. Tacitus records 80,000 British dead.
Boudicca's fate is unknown. Tacitus says she took poison; Cassius Dio says she fell ill and died. She left no more certain legacy than her name, but the name has endured with extraordinary tenacity — the warrior queen who dared to say no to empire, who nearly succeeded, who has been claimed by every generation since as a symbol of something about British character that the island has always wished to believe in itself.
