Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  Dio’s claim is based more modestly on the fact that although there are traces of his having read Tacitus’ account, he does not simply reproduce it. On the contrary, so far as can be judged from Xiphilinus’ selection, Dio had access to other independent material which has since vanished. It is known that he spent ten years taking notes on the work of other historians.37

  Mercifully, this paucity of written sources concerning the Boudican episode is counteracted by the burgeoning discoveries of archaeology. Since the Second World War new methods of ploughing and above all the development of aerial reconnaissance in course of such pastoral duties as crop-spraying have led to fresh and exciting finds, even if the increasing demands of the American NATO bases upon East Anglian airspace are beginning to act restrictively.38 Nevertheless, the fact that the actual date of the rebellion remains the subject of controversy – with dedicated proponents of both AD 60 and 61 – does illustrate the undeniable problems caused by this dearth of evidence.

  The argument arises over Tacitus’ own placing of the rebellion in 61, a date which does not fit with other information he supplies concerning the governors in Britain and the consulates in Rome. His narrative however makes sense, if the rebellion is put back to 60; the other events such as the change of governors then follow naturally. As against that, Tacitus’ care as an historian casts doubt on such a mistake in dating. It is not however a controversy which is of vital interest to the present study of Boudica. Since the preponderance of historians still appear to favour 60, despite some strong contenders in the 61 party, this is the date which without prejudice will here be adopted.39

  At least the fact of King Prasutagus’ death is incontrovertible. What else is certain? He died in 60 – or maybe 59 – having been longa opulentia clarus – long renowned for his wealth. He died as a client-king of the Roman Empire, a position which at least from the point of view of the Romans, made his dominions an integral part of that empire – membra partesque. He died, we must assume, without male heirs, since the will he made did not mention them, and did mention two daughters. He did not leave the kingdom to his wife, Boudica, but he did entrust her with the regency on behalf of these girls.40

  The clause in Prasutagus’ will which was however to stir up the most trouble at the time, and prove the undoing of his family thereafter, was not to do with the regency. It was to do with that wealth for which he had long been renowned. Prasutagus left his lands and personal possessions partly to the Emperor, and partly to his wife in trust for his daughters (although the exact proportions of the inheritance due to each are not known).41 He must have hoped that by so doing he had provided for a peaceful hand-over. It was an idle hope.

  * In local British terms, the river name Itchen may be related to the tribal name Iceni, but Ixworth or Ickenham are not thought to be so related.2

  * A collection of torcs can be seen in the British Museum (from the Snettisham hoard) and in the Ipswich Museum (from the finds made locally).

  CHAPTER FIVE

  RUIN BY A WOMAN

  Moreover, all this ruin was brought upon the Romans by a woman, a fact which in itself caused them the greatest shame.

  Dio Cassius

  Boudica, the widow in whom King Prasutagus of the Iceni had placed such trust, was of royal birth. This much we know from the Agricola. But Tacitus, with his eponymous taciturnity, actually leaves open the question of whether she belonged to the royal family of the Iceni or another one. He simply says that Boudica was generis regii femina, a phrase that can be (and has been) variously translated as ‘a woman of the Royal house’ and ‘a lady of royal descent’. The Greek of Dio Cassius reads less equivocally: ‘A Briton woman of the royal family.’1

  It is theoretically possible, therefore, that Boudica was actually a princess from a neighbouring tribe. It would be romantically fitting, for example, to derive Boudica from the Brigantes, where that strong female leadership was being exercised from the 40s onwards. Making Boudica the sister, daughter or niece of Cartimandua has, however, no evidence to support it, beyond the vaguely comforting feeling that the only two known Warrior Queens of the period must have been related to each other. (But this is to treat a Warrior Queen as a rarity: as has been pointed out in Chapter Four, this was not necessarily so.) Nor is there any proper evidence for the equally pleasing tradition which has Boudica hailing from Ireland. (The known existence of Irish queens in later centuries and the similarity of the Norfolk torcs to those found in Ireland does not seem quite enough.)2 In the absence of such evidence, it seems far more likely that, as Tacitus implies and Dio Cassius states, the royal house to which Boudica belonged was that of the Iceni: the tribe she would now successfully stir to action.

  Neither Dio nor Tacitus helps us with Boudica’s exact age at the time of the rebellion. It is a fair guess that she was somewhere in her thirties. In 60 we know that Boudica had two living daughters who had reached the age of puberty, who were not married and who needed their mother’s regency. If these daughters were in their teens, and thus born some time around 45 or 46, a rough calculation brings Boudica’s birth to AD 26 or 27, and at latest AD 30. It is this calculation, incidentally, which makes it virtually certain that she was married to Prasutagus at the time of the first rebellion of the Iceni in 49, a mere eleven years previously; otherwise this was a remarkably short period in which to cram marriage and the birth of two children who had reached a nubile age. But if Boudica is not likely to have been under thirty in 60, she could of course have been quite a bit older; supposing these daughters were merely the youngest survivors of a large family, Boudica could have been forty or more. Her precise age, like so much else about her, remains guesswork.

  Dio, unlike Tacitus, does give a physical description of the British Queen. She had red hair – a mass of ‘the tawniest hair’ hanging to her waist – and she was very tall, ‘in appearance almost terrifying’, with a fierce expression. These attributes were not unusual for her sex and race, at least according to the Classical writers. The proverbial Celtic colouring has been mentioned. The size and indeed strength of Celtic women was also something on which they were prone to comment: Diodorus Siculus went further and complimented them on being the equals of their husbands in courage as well. A celebrated anecdote of Ammianus Marcellinus has a Gaul’s wife, even stronger than her husband, battling with swelled out neck and grinding teeth, flaying her arms like a windmill, and delivering kicks at the same time ‘like missiles from a catapult’.3

  Boudica also had a notably harsh voice, according to Dio. This is a comment which has an additional interest in a study of the Warrior Queen at various periods, since again and again the question of the voice will arise. Condemnation of a female leader very often throws in the fact that her voice is harsh or strident. In 1400 Leonardo Bruno instructed Battista Malatesta that ‘if a woman throws her arms around whilst speaking, or if she increases the volume of her speech with greater forcefulness, she will appear threateningly insane and requiring restraint. These matters belong to men, as war, or battles …’. As will be seen, allusions to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘fishwife’ voice have been frequent in the 1980s.4

  At the same time approval for a given Warrior Queen frequently takes the form of endowing her with a persistently dulcet tone, in spite of circumstances when any voice, male or female, might be pardoned for being raised. Thus Matilda of Tuscany, although both tall and strong, retained ‘a wonderfully sweet voice’, in the account of an admiring monastic chronicler. The Rani of Jhansi, on the other hand, who led the Indian sepoys following the mutiny of 1857, was allowed a remarkably fine figure by the British, but ‘what spoilt her was her voice’. The best kind of voice for a female leader, achieved by few, was that allowed to the third-century Queen Zenobia of Palmyra by a contemporary commentator: vox clara et virilis – ‘clear and like that of a man’ (which Gibbon however translated as ‘strong and harmonious’ – in the eighteenth century, women were not allowed to have manly voices).5

  Maybe, then, Dio Cassius, who w
as not after all present to hear Boudica haranguing the Iceni, endowed her with her harsh voice because it was in keeping with what might be expected of a Celtic Warrior Queen; maybe his informants made the same assumption for him. It is even possible that Dio knew nothing of her appearance and merely granted Boudica the likely attributes of such a person. Leaving aside these imponderables, it is sufficient to state that it is from this, Dio’s short but vivid account of the strapping, red-haired Warrior Queen, that all other descriptions of her, to say nothing of later impersonations, have flowed.

  Dr Johnson once described this world as one in which ‘much is to be done and little to be known’. That certainly stands for the narrower world of Boudican research. But the nebulous nature of the information available about Queen Boudica should not cause too much dismay; at least, not in terms of the period in which she lived. It has been pointed out that in a revolt which involved perhaps as many as one hundred thousand people, only ten names are known, all from Tacitus.6 (Dio added none.) Two are British – Prasutagus and Boudica – and the rest Roman. One more name, that of a Roman woman, Julia Pacata, emerged when the tombstone she commissioned for her husband, Julius Classicianus, was discovered.

  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.7

  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.’8

  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 l
ess 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 shortsighted 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