Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  The voluptuous European conception of Cleopatra; an engraving by J. Chapman of 1804. (ill. 10)

  Ptolemaic votive plaque believed to depict Cleopatra as a goddess. (ill. 11)

  Judith beheads Holofernes in a nineteenth-century engraving by Schnorr von Carolsfeld. (ill. 12)

  The romantic European image of Zenobia; an eighteenth-century engraving by William Sharp from a drawing by Michelangelo. (ill. 13)

  Semiramis, the legendary Queen of the Assyrians (based on Sammuramat, Babylonian widow of a ninth-century BC Assyrian king), seen in an engraving c.1800. (ill. 14)

  The sisters Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, Vietnamese heroines who led the first rising in their country against the Chinese, in AD 39; from a popular Vietnamese print. The characters on the flag give the family name ‘Trung’ and above the sisters (right) their own names; at lower left is Su Ding, the Chinese governor, and top left the legend ‘Queen Trung drives out the Han.’ (ill. 15)

  Vietnamese print of Trieu Au, who raised a thousand troops to liberate her country from the Chinese in AD 248; like the Trung sisters, Trieu Au is regarded as a patriotic heroine in modern Vietnam. (ill. 16)

  The rightness of the Roman cause is indeed one of the major themes of Dio’s Suetonius: ‘the gods are our allies’, he goes on to say to his third division, ‘for they almost always side with those who have been wronged’. His other theme is the natural superiority of their heritage: ‘we are Romans and have triumphed over all mankind by our valour’. Lastly Dio’s Suetonius does at least envisage the possibility of defeat, if only to allow the author to dwell once again on those British atrocities which he had already described so vividly apropos the women sacrificed to Andate. If the Romans did not triumph and were captured, they could expect to be impaled, to look upon their own entrails cut from their bodies, to be spitted on red-hot skewers, to be melted in boiling water … In a word, ‘to suffer as though … thrown to lawless and impious beasts’.

  In the event Suetonius’ confidence was justified: except that the courage was found equally on both sides, the skill and experience solely on that of the Romans. Even before battle was joined, the two armies drawn up for battle would have presented an extraordinary contrast in their equipment and the manner of their array, a contrast which only became more intense as the conflict proceeded.

  Here were the Britons, a vast concourse of them it is true, but in no sense a standing army: the fact that they were farmers, that they had literally come off the land, would be cruelly emphasized in the aftermath to the battle. The Celtic sword was the traditional weapon of such people, a sword with a long history, a sword such as the sword with which ‘the wild deer’, Cúchulainn, had been able to despatch all fourteen soldiers sent after him by the wicked Queen Medb. They wore no body armour of any sort, except perhaps a pair of loose trousers (if we judge by the Gauls depicted on the Roman sculptural reliefs). The fine helmets and decorated shields which this civilization has left behind were for the aristocrat–warriors among them: these too would have been mounted on the light wickerwork chariots, like to their queen’s, from which they habitually dismounted to fight. (The chariot was however already slightly old-fashioned and had vanished altogether from the British/Celtic host by the second century AD.)9

  We may believe that this concourse had the noisy, shambling quality of the Celtic array, with its music and its shouting and some hoarse amalgamation of the two. Perhaps the most significant difference of all between the British army and the one which faced it within the defile was that the Britons had brought along their families to see the fun. There they were, women and children, in a series of wagons stationed at the edge of the battlefield – which meant, given the lie of the land, at the back of it. One imagines a certain boastfulness in the mounted warriors of the Britons, and in their foot followers too, as beneath the eyes of their dependants they ‘seethed over a wide area in unprecedented numbers’. The presence of these innocent camp followers, in a position which might well and in fact did prove extraordinarily dangerous, illustrates perfectly how war for the Britons, with its joy of fighting, its hope of plunder, was a serious but also a tribal business.

  For the Romans on the opposite side, war was not only a serious business but the only business. It was for this that the legionaries had been trained, trained in many cases over long years and in the hard school of continental warfare; above all it was for this business of fighting that they were equipped, and equipped in a manner which was developed further each decade with the sole aim of making every legion a superb fighting machine. Against their naked or near naked opponents, they wore helmets including neck protection, light body armour to the waist, broad leather belts with metal-tipped leather thongs falling below it, and studded open boots like hobnailed sandals.10

  When it came to weaponry, the Roman cavalry had their lances, while the infantry, as well as curved wooden shields with bosses, had a pair of javelins per man. These javelins were seven feet long with a three-foot iron point, difficult to remove once embedded: but their long wooden shafts made them easy to throw. With the aid of his javelin, the legionary could render his opponent’s shield useless, or even pin the two of them together. Furthermore a legionary also had a shorter two-foot sword (his gladius, hence gladiator) and a dagger. It was the long hero’s sword of Cúchulainn against a battery of professional weapons. But the legionaries of Rome were not to be equated with the soldiers of Queen Medb. Alas, this was not a contest which the epic hero – or heroine – was destined to win.

  At the first charge of the Britons towards the defile which contained their enemy, the Roman legionaries deliberately held their ground without counterattacking, as they had been trained to do. But when the order finally came to burst forward with their lethal javelins, they did so in wedge formation and to murderous effect, accompanied by the infantry of the auxiliaries. Finally it was the cavalry’s turn to demolish all resistance. We do not know how long the battle raged – all day? less than that? The duration was of less significance than the final result.

  The Britons, by dreadful irony, found themselves pinned in against this fierce counterattack by their own wagons, those wagons brought along so blithely for their families to see the show. It was in this way, in this death-trap, that the Romans were able to put to death the British women, as well as the British baggage animals (which were transfixed) at the same time as they despatched their menfolk. ‘According to one report’, says Tacitus carefully, eighty thousand of the Britons died, compared to four hundred Romans killed, and others wounded.

  Was Queen Boudica herself to be numbered among the eighty thousand British dead? The indications are that she did not actually die on the battlefield, but shortly afterwards and by her own hand: Tacitus tells us that she took poison. (Dio’s story that Boudica fell sick and then died is not incompatible with this, since poison would obviously have brought about sickness, however short-lived, and it may have been this aspect of the story which Dio picked up.) As for the Queen’s daughters, their fate, like their names, remains unknown to history since it is not mentioned by Tacitus, while their very existence is ignored by Dio.

  For once, however, the many fictional accounts of Boadicea’s life, be they plays or novels, which have her administering poison to her daughters as well as to herself, are not straining credulity too far. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s play, for example, the heroine’s younger daughter momentarily shrinks back from the mystery of death – ‘O but if I knew but whither …’ – as her mother offers her the fatal draught. The Queen comforts her and issues her last rallying cry:

  Keep your minds humble, your devotions high

  So shall ye learn the noblest part, to die.11

  For if the Iceni princesses did survive the wanton slaughter at the end of the battle, it is surely not likely that their mother, having decided to poison herself, would have risked them falling into the hands of the Romans – a second time.

  As it is, myth surrounds Queen Boudica’s burial place as with everyth
ing else about her. Dio tells us simply that the British gave her a costly burial, Tacitus nothing. The seventeenth-century story that Boadicea (as she now becomes) was given this ‘costly burial’ at Stonehenge has a great deal to commend it of neatness and romance – if nothing of historical truth – since two mighty legends are disposed of together, the immemorial stones and the woman. The celebrated if equally unhistorical connection of the Druids with Stonehenge only dates in fact from the later years of the seventeenth century: in 1624 for example, the antiquary Edmund Bolton, believing Stonehenge to be the work of Britons (‘the rudeness itself persuades’), concluded that here was to be found the tomb of Boadicea. This theory was rebutted in 1655 in a posthumous publication from notes by Inigo Jones. He pointed out that ‘a mighty Prince may be buried with great Solemnity, yet no material Monument be dedicated to his memory’; adding that it was unlikely the Romans would have permitted ‘an everlasting Remembrance of Boadicea’.12 (Although the Romans had in fact a tradition of allowing their enemies to carry away their dead for burial – to avoid evil spirits – so that the erection of ‘an everlasting Remembrance’ was not out of the question in Iceni country.)

  To many other neighbourhoods and many other monuments, however man-made or otherwise, clings obstinately the tradition that ‘Here lies Boadicea’. Counted among them are a mound on Hampstead Heath known as Boadicea’s Tomb (in reality more likely to be a Roman burial place); various sites around Parliament Hill, following the legend of the London King’s Cross battle; Warlies Park, Waltham Abbey, in Essex; the Bartlow Hills in the same county; and a tumulus known locally as The Bubberies in the grounds of a parsonage at Quidenham in Norfolk – the name being hopefully regarded as a corruption of Boadicea or Boudica. The legend of the King’s Cross battle is also responsible for periodic bursts of enthusiasm (most recently in 1988), suggesting that the British Queen must lie buried under Platform 8 of the station itself, a story which may at least divert the weary traveller, causing him or her to ruminate on the possible advantages of the chariot over the train as a means of conveyance.13 The discovery of a mid-first-century British burial place, containing the bones of a woman of royal rank, would be exciting enough in its own right; it would also, for better or for worse, put an end to such innocent local fantasies.

  Whatever the truth of the costly burial and its precise situation – and as with the royal palace of the Iceni, one must not give up all hope of finding it within the tribal area – it is reasonable to assume that Queen Boudica took her own life. Let us suppose that the Emperor Nero did choose to exercise clemency towards this barbarian princess, once she had served her purpose in the triumphal procession (as Claudius had exercised clemency towards Caratacus). Let us suppose that the offer was made, and the Iceni Queen believed that the promise would be kept. She would not have wished to live out her days a slave. Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra not wishing to see ‘some squeaking Cleopatra … boy her greatness’ on the Roman stage would surely have been paralleled by Boudica’s own profound wish not to experience further humiliation.

  There were royal ‘slaves’ who settled down in Rome – Queen Zenobia of Palmyra will provide an interesting example of such in the following chapter; there were also the barbarian captives described by Gibbon: ‘taken in thousands by the chance of war, purchased at a vile price, accustomed to a life of independence, and impatient to break and revenge their fetters’.14 Everything we know about Boudica, one certainly accustomed to a life of independence, suggests that she would have fallen proudly into the latter category. As for slavery, there is of course also no guarantee that she would have been offered that option. It is true that the womenfolk of Caratacus had been well treated following his ritual exhibition in a Roman triumph. But Caesar earlier had executed Vercingetorix after a similar display. Caratacus’ womenfolk were also women who had acted within the Roman meaning of the word: they had not challenged the might of Rome successfully. Boudica, who had already experienced Roman brutality before ever she rebelled, had no reason to suppose that the penalties which followed it would be any less severe. As the Queen herself was made to exclaim by Tacitus: for her as a woman it was a case of winning this battle or perishing. She had not won; we must therefore believe that she kept her word and perished.

  The vengeance of Suetonius against the Britons was every bit as frightful as that of the rebel Britons had been towards Rome. (A further convincing argument for the death of Boudica shortly after the end of the battle lies in the fact that she would otherwise surely have featured in it.) The British must have suffered shockingly, and not all of the victims had taken part in the rising. For not only those who were judged hostile but those who were deemed to be ‘wavering’ were ‘ravaged with fire and sword’: the latter category, being in the eye of the Roman beholder, could encompass almost everybody and justify many a retributive cruelty. Even more terrible were the Britons’ sufferings from famine, for the Iceni in particular had neglected to sow their own fields before departing on their victorious rampage, taking everyone with them: the cheerful intention had been to seize the Roman supplies.

  Some of the Britons went on fighting. Confusion has arisen about their desperate continuance of the struggle which was manifestly lost, and there is a suggestion that it was bound up with the implacability of Suetonius towards those who had recently humiliated him by ravaging the province under his command.15 This is Tacitus’ story in the earlier of his two accounts, the Agricola: ‘Excellent officer though he [Suetonius] was, it was feared that he would abuse their surrender and punish every offence with undue severity, as if it were a personal injury.’ So some of them fought on, feeling that at this point they had nothing to lose.

  In the later Annals however Tacitus linked this ultimate British stand to the mischievous influence of the new Procurator, Julius Classicianus, he who came to replace the fugitive Catus Decianus. Julius Classicianus disloyally hinted that it was in the Britons’ own interest to prolong their activities until a new or less personally involved – and thus milder – governor should be sent out from Rome. Whether Tacitus’ slur on Julius Classicianus’ loyalty is justified, or whether he was merely seeking to defend the reputation of his father-in-law’s old commander, it is true that a ‘milder’ governor was finally sent out from Rome: Publius Petronius Turpilianus, who had just finished being Consul. This followed a report by the Emperor Nero’s emissary, the former slave Polyclitus, who tried to reconcile Governor and Procurator, and ended by criticizing Suetonius for not terminating the war. Peace was finally restored. With peace however came repression.

  If the execution of the Roman vengeance lacked those picturesque atrocities depicted by Dio (so far as we know) it partook of the equally grim nature of long-drawn-out persecution including whatever brutal measures were thought necessary under the circumstances. Fresh troops were brought from Germany to fill out the ranks of that legion brought low by the first British onslaught; auxiliaries, both infantry and cavalry, were also imported. The Iceni paid dearly for their crowded hour of glorious life, and were condemned to live out instead that traditional alternative to it, a dismal age without a name. Excavations of the post-Boudican age reveal that a detailed policy of repression was enacted towards the guilty tribe, including slavery and transportation. Temporary Roman forts were put up at strategic sites for the control of the population, such as Great Chesterford north of Saffron Walden, Coddenham near Ipswich and Pakenham near Ixworth on the borders of Suffolk and Norfolk.*16

  Farms were burned, sanctuaries such as that of Arminghall desecrated; some of the buried hoards of torcs, coins and other precious golden objects referred to in Chapter Four, such as that at Santon, may owe their origins to this terrible time. The draining of hitherto unoccupied territories in the Iceni area and the conversion of them into fertile land was probably carried out by deported Iceni slave labour (using Roman drainage systems). So the Iceni, proud and independent of yore, were made subject, and this time they did not revolt again. The evidence
is that in punishment for their rebellion the Iceni lands remained wasted into the next century. To the Caledonian leader Calgacus, via the pen of Tacitus, went the last word, when he was raising his own rebellion (put down by Agricola) in the 80s. Of the Romans, he said ‘they create a desolation and call it peace’.17

  So Britain as a whole settled down to be a Roman province: or as the unknown but free-spirited Briton inspecting from an observation point some excavations of the Roman period at Leadenhall Court in the City of London observed to the present writer in 1986, ‘That’s the Romans for you – four hundred years of occupying our country.’

  Were these four hundred years of occupation inevitable (leaving aside the question of whether they were desirable)? How far did Queen Boudica of the Iceni really progress in the direction of eliminating that occupation? The Romans in Britain trembled and with good reason, but what about the imperial power itself? Did Rome tremble? Should it have done so? The answers to these questions, fascinating if finally imponderable, are linked in part to Tacitus’ own estimate of Suetonius’ achievement.

  Tacitus quoted the last battle as being ‘a glorious victory’ for the Roman side, ‘comparable with bygone triumphs’. Poenius Postumus, that senior officer who had failed to answer Suetonius’ summons to a rendezvous, subsequently fell on his sword because he had robbed his own legion of the possibility of sharing in all this glory. If Suetonius really triumphed with great difficulty over Boudica – against overwhelming odds as well as overwhelming numbers – then the Iceni, and the other tribes who joined with them, must have nearly succeeded in their objective, the overturning of odious Roman rule.

  Against this picture of Boudica having suffered a last-minute reverse due to the military cunning of Suetonius and the experienced, courageous brilliance of his Roman legionaries – so that it was indeed in Roman terms ‘a glorious victory’ – has to be put a more cynical picture. It has been pointed out with truth that the southern tribes, notably the ever friendly, ever powerful King Cogidubnus and his Atrebates of Silchester, showed no signs of joining in the fun with their more northerly fellow tribesmen and women.18 If some disaffected Brigantes probably rallied to Boudica’s side, her fellow Queen Cartimandua certainly did not: hence the grateful support the latter would receive from Rome at the time of her own tribulations around AD 70.