by Robert Lacey
THE STANDARD-BEARER OF
THE 10TH
55 BC
SO FAR IN OUR STORY ALL THE DATES HAVE been estimates - much better than guesses, but not really precise. Radiocarbon dating, for example, measures the rate of decay of the radioactive isotope carbon 14, which is found in all living things but which starts to decay at the moment of death at a precisely predictable rate. Using this method, scientists have been able to calculate the age of Cheddar Man to an accuracy of one hundred and fifty years.
But now, in 55 BC, we can for the first time set a British date precisely in months and days. Two centuries after the travel jottings of Pytheas, our history finally collides full tilt with the culture of writing - and what a writer to start with! Gaius Julius Caesar not only shaped history - he also wrote about it. Reading his vivid account of his invasion of Britain, we can feel ourselves there with him in the early hours of 26 August 55 BC, rocking in the swell in his creaking wooden vessel off the white cliffs of Albion - and contemplating the unwelcome sight at the top of them.
‘Armed men,’ he wrote, ‘could be seen stationed on all the heights, and the nature of the place was such, with the shore edged by sheer cliffs, that javelins and spears could be hurled onto the beach.’
The Roman force had sailed from France the previous night, cruising through the darkness with a fleet of eighty ships bearing two battle-hardened legions - about ten thousand men. Trying to control the western corner of Europe for Rome, Caesar had found his authority challenged by the Celtic peoples of Gaul, and he had a strong suspicion they had been receiving help from their cousins in Britain. He had tried to get to the bottom of it, calling together the merchants who traded with the Britons across the channel , but he had received no straight answers. His solution had been to spend the summer assembling his invasion fleet, and now, here at the top of the cliffs, was the reception committee.
Caesar ordered his ships to sail along the coast for a few miles to where the cliffs gave way to a sloping beach, somewhere near the modern port of Deal. But the Britons kept pace with him along the cliff top on horseback and in chariots, then coming down to mass together menacingly on the beach. The Roman legionaries faced the unappealing prospect of leaping into chest-high water in their heavy armour and battling their way ashore.
‘Our troops,’ admitted Caesar, ‘were shaken, and they failed to show the same dash and enthusiasm as they did in land battles.’
But then the standard-bearer of the 10th legion leapt down into the waves, brandishing high the silver eagle that was the symbol of the favour in which the gods held the regiment. Dressed in a wild-animal pelt, with the snarling head of a lion, bear or wolf fixed to the top of his helmet, the standard-bearer was guardian of the legion’s morale. While the eagle remained upright, the legion’s honour lived.
‘Jump down, men!’ cried the standard-bearer, ‘unless you want the enemy to get your standard! You will not find me failing in my duty to my country or my leader!’
According to Caesar, the Roman footsoldiers were transformed by the gallantry of the standard-bearer. Crashing down into the water after him, they fought their way up the shingle to regroup and form the disciplined lines of shields, spears and swords that made up the basic Roman battle formation. The Britons withdrew, and Caesar sent home news of a mighty victory. When his report reached Rome, the Senate voted an unprecedented twenty-day holiday of celebration.
But the Roman conqueror then spent less than twenty days in Britain. A storm wrecked many of his ships, so Caesar headed smartly back to France before the weather got any worse. Next summer, in July 54 BC, he tried again, with redesigned landing craft whose shallow keels could be driven through the waves and up on to the beach. With more cavalry than at their first attempt, the Romans were able to secure their beachhead, march inland and cross the River Thames, fighting off hit-and-run attacks. The Celtic chiefs that Caesar managed to corner offered the conqueror their allegiance. But once again the winter storms threatened, and the Romans had to hurry back to France. This time the Senate did not call a holiday.
Julius Caesar was one of the megastars of Western history. Tall and sharp-featured, with the thinning brushed-forward hairstyle immortalised in countless marble statues, he was a man of extraordinary charisma. A brilliant general, he fought off his rivals to gain control of the entire Roman Empire before being murdered by opponents of his absolute power. Later Roman emperors tried to borrow his glory by calling themselves Caesar, and his memory has been perpetuated into recent times by the German and Russian titles of Kaiser and Czar.
In 45 BC he reformed the Western calendar. Known henceforward as the Julian calendar, this used the device of the leap year to keep the earthly year in pace with the sun. The month of July is named after him, as is the Caesarean method of delivering babies, deriving from the story that his mother died while giving birth to him and that he had to be cut out of her womb. Ever the self-publicist, he is famous for his declaration ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ - ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ - after his victory at Zela in central Turkey in 47 BC, and he conveyed a similar message of triumphant conquest when writing the history of his two brief trips to Britain. Describing events in words had made the historical record more vivid and accurate in many ways - but words clearly provided no guarantee that history would now become more truthful.
AND DID THOSE FEET? JESUS CHRIST AND THE LEGENDS OF GLASTONBURY
AD 1-33
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
SUNG AT RUGBY MATCHES AND PATRIOTIC occasions like the Last Night of the Proms, the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ has become England’s unofficial national anthem. Its uplifting lines conjure up the wild idea that Jesus Christ himself, ‘the Holy Lamb of God’, set foot in England at some moment during his thirty-three years on earth. If Pytheas the Greek and Julius Caesar could make it from the Mediterranean, why not the Saviour?
It could not possibly be. If Christ had had the time and means to travel the five thousand miles all the way from Palestine across Europe to England and back again in the course of his brief life, it would certainly have been recorded in the Gospels. And would not Christ himself have referred to the great adventure somewhere in his teaching?
The myth has entered the folk memory sideways, through the fables inspired by Joseph of Arimathea, the rich disciple who provided the tomb for Christ’s body after the crucifixion. The Gospels tell us quite a lot about Joseph (not to be confused with Christ’s father, Joseph the carpenter). A well respected member of the Sanhedrin, or Supreme Council of the Jews, Joseph had kept secret his dangerous conversion to the message of Jesus. It was only a man of such standing who could have gone to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea, and asked for Christ’s dead body.
But over the centuries - and we are talking of more than a dozen centuries - extra exploits were attributed to this substantial and intriguing character. Joseph is said to have been one of the disciples who travelled to northern Europe preaching the gospel. He was credited with founding the first monastery in Britain. Other tales supposed that he had made his wealth in the metals trade, and had been in the habit of visiting the south-west in search of Cornwall’s tin and Somerset’s high-quality lead. It was even imagined that Joseph was the uncle of the Virgin Mary, and therefore the great-uncle of Christ, and so might have brought the boy along on one of his business trips to the region.
In 1502 came the first mention of a living relic that might lend some substance to these extraordinary tales - a hawthorn bush growing at Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset. Blossoming unusually around Christmastime, in the depths of winter and on Christ’s birthday, it was known as the Holy Thorn and was said to have been planted by Joseph of Arimathea himself when he stuck his staff into the ground and it took root. It was further said that Joseph had cut his staff from the same bush as Christ’s crown of thorns - and modern botani
sts have established that the Glastonbury thorn, a pinkish-flowered hawthorn known as Crataegus monogyna praecox, is indeed a plant that originated in the Middle East. It blooms in Glastonbury to this day and the first sprig of blossom is ceremonially cut and presented to the Queen, who keeps it on her desk over Christmas.
In 1808, at the height of Britain’s bitter wars against Napoleon, the artist and poet William Blake pulled together the elements of the various Jesus and Glastonbury legends to create the poem that we now know as ‘Jerusalem’. Blake was a mystic and a radical, then making his living in a grimy engraving workshop in the sooty slums of London, where he dreamed of angels. He abhorred what he memorably described as the ‘dark satanic mills’ of industrial Britain, and he nursed the vision that a shining new society might be built. Jerusalem in our own day may be a sadly afflicted and tragically unholy place, but to Blake it was something glorious:
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green and pleasant land.
Two centuries later during the horrors of World War I, when the flower of Europe’s youth was being slaughtered in the trenches of northern France, the composer Hubert Parry set the visionary words to music. The first time the stirring strains of ‘Jerusalem’ were heard in public was at a ‘Votes for Women’ concert in 1916, setting the note of reform and regeneration that the anthem retains to this day.
Let us say it one more time - we can be as sure as the sun rises that Jesus Christ did not set foot in Glastonbury, or anywhere else in England. The legend of Joseph of Arimathea is not history. But over the centuries the story would play its part in inspiring history. In words and music, ‘Jerusalem’ gives wing to the sense of hope and shared endeavour that a community needs if it is to believe in itself - the vision of a national spirit as clean and pure as England’s beautiful green countryside. Things may be good, but let us not get complacent - ‘better must come’.
THE EMPEROR CLAUDIUS TRIUMPHANT
AD 43
AFTER CAESAR’S HASTY DEPARTURE IN 54 BC, it was more than ninety years before the Romans tried to conquer Britain again - and when they eventually landed, they made the most of their triumph. In ad 43 the forty-thousand-strong army pushed resistance aside as it rolled up through Kent to the Thames, where the men were ordered to halt. The emperor Claudius wanted to catch up with them, and he duly arrived in splendour for the advance into modern Colchester, the principal British settlement of the south-east. The Roman victory parade featured a squadron of elephants, whose exotic appearance must have been greeted with amazement as they plodded through the Kent countryside.
Swaying a dozen feet above the ground, the club-footed but canny Claudius proudly claimed Colchester as the capital of Rome’s latest province. Straight streets were laid down, with a forum and amphitheatre, and the showpiece was a high, rectangular, white-pillared temple. Roman veterans were given land around the town, in the centre of which rose a statue of the emperor. With firm chin, large nose and slicked-down hair, the statue made Claudius look remarkably like Julius Caesar.
Claudius was considered a rather comical character by his contemporaries, who secretly mocked his physical handicaps. His dragging right foot was probably the result of brain damage at birth - his head and hands shook slightly - and he had a cracked, throaty and scarcely intelligible voice which, according to one of his enemies, belonged ‘to no land animal’. But as someone who had often found himself in the hands of doctors, he had a high regard for healing. He managed a soothing tone when dealing with the local chieftains of Britain, acknowledging that they had rights. He honoured them as ‘kings’ - which, in turn, boosted his own status as their emperor. Then in ad 54 Claudius died, to be succeeded by his stepson Nero, whose name would become proverbial for wilfulness and cruelty.
BOADICEA, WARRIOR QUEEN
AD 61
ANY BRITISH ‘KING’ WHO LIVED UNDER THE Romans had to pay a price for his protection. So when Prasutagus, the leader of the Iceni people, died in ad 60 he prudently left half his wealth and territories to the emperor Nero as a form of ‘death duty’. The Iceni occupied the flat fenlands that stretched down from the Wash across modern Norfolk and Suffolk and, like other Celtic peoples, they accepted the authority of female leaders. Dying without a son, Prasutagus had left his people in the care of his widow, Boadicea (or Boudicca), until their two daughters came of age.
But women had few rights under Roman law, and Nero’s local officials treated Boadicea’s succession with contempt.
‘Kingdom and household alike,’ wrote the Roman historian Tacitus, author of the first history of Britain, ‘were plundered like prizes of war.’
The lands of the Iceni nobles were confiscated and Boadicea was publicly beaten. Worst of all, her two daughters were raped. Outraged, in ad 61 the Iceni rose in rebellion, and it was Boadicea who led them into battle.
‘In stature she was very tall, in appearance most terrifying,’ wrote a later Roman historian, Dio Cassius. ‘Her glance was fierce, her voice harsh, a great mass of the most tawny hair cascaded to her hips.’
Joined by other Britons, Boadicea with her rebel Iceni fell on Colchester in fury, slaughtering the inhabitants and smashing the white-pillared temple and other symbols of Roman oppression. Over eighteen hundred years later, in 1907, a boy swimming in the River Alde in Suffolk, deep in what had been Iceni territory, was astonished to discover the submerged bronze head of the emperor Claudius. Looking at the jagged edges of the severed neck today, one can almost hear the shouts of anger that have attended the satisfying ritual of statue toppling over the centuries.
The rebels now turned towards Londinium, the trading settlement that was just growing up around the recently built bridge over the Thames. The vengeance they wreaked here was equally bitter. Today, four metres below the busy streets of the modern capital, near the Bank of England, lies a thick red band of fired clay and debris which archaeologists know as ‘Boadicea’s Layer’. The city to which the Iceni set the torch burned as intensely as it would in World War II during the firebomb raids of the Germans. Temperatures rose as high as 1000 degrees Celsius - and, not far away, in the Walbrook Stream that runs down to the Thames, has been found a grisly collection of skulls, violently hacked from their bodies.
Boadicea’s forces had wiped out part of a Roman legion that had marched to the rescue of Colchester. But the bulk of the Roman troops had been on a mission in the north-west to hunt down the Druids and destroy their groves on the island of Anglesey, and it was a measure of Boadicea’s self-assurance that she now headed her army in that north-westerly direction. Her spectacular victories had swollen her ranks, not only with warriors but with their families too, in a vast wagon train of women and children. She laid waste to the Roman settlement of Verulamium, modern St Albans, then moved confidently onwards.
Meanwhile the Romans had been gathering reinforcements and the two forces are thought to have met somewhere in the Midlands, probably near the village of Mancetter, just north of Coventry.
‘I am fighting for my lost freedom, my bruised body and my outraged daughters!’ cried Boadicea, as she rode in her chariot in front of her troops. ‘Consider how many of you are fighting and why - then you will win this battle, or perish! That is what I, a woman, plan to do! Let the men live in slavery if they want to.’
These fighting words come from the pen of Tacitus, who describes the fierce showdown in which the much smaller, but impeccably armed and drilled Roman army wore down the hordes of Boadicea. At the crux of the battle, it was the wagon train of British women and children that proved their menfolk’s undoing. The camp followers had fanned out in a semicircle to watch the battle, fully expecting another victory. But as the Britons were driven ba
ck, they found themselves hemmed in by their own wagons, and the slaughter was terrible - eighty thousand Britons killed, according to one report, and just four hundred Romans. Boadicea took poison rather than fall into the hands of the Romans, and, legend has it, gave poison to her daughters for the same reason.
It was only when some of Tacitus’ writings, lost for many centuries, were rediscovered five hundred and fifty years ago that Britain found out that its history had featured this inspiring and epic warrior queen. Plays and poems were written to celebrate Boadicea’s battle for her people’s rights and liberties, and in 1902 a stirring statue in her honour was raised in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament. There on the banks of the Thames you can see Boadicea thrusting her spear defiantly into the air, while her daughters shelter in the chariot beside her.
But the menacing curved blades on Boadicea’s chariot wheels are, sadly, the invention of a later time. Remains of the Britons’ light bentwood chariots show no scythes on the wheels. Nor is there evidence of another great myth, that Boadicea fought her last battle near London and that her body lies where she fell - in the ground on which King’s Cross Station was built many years later. Her supposed grave beneath platform ten at King’s Cross is the reason why Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Express leaves, magically, from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.
In fact, the bones of the great queen probably do lie near a railway line - albeit more than a hundred miles north of King’s Cross, near Mancetter in modern Warwickshire. The trains on the Euston line between London and the north- west rumble through the battlefield where, historians calculate, Boadicea fought her last battle.
