Boudicca: The Warrior Queen Read online

  Boudicca

  The Warrior Queen

  M. J. Trow &

  Taliesin Trow

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © M. J. Trow 2003, 2015

  First published 2003 by Sutton Publishing Ltd

  This edition published in 2015 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  www.thistlepublishing.co.uk

  This book is dedicated to

  Carol of the Corieltavi,

  with love and gratitude

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to everyone who has helped in the production of this book: to Andrew Lownie, friend and agent; to David Haviland of Thistle; to Philip Crummy of the Colchester Archaeological Trust; to David Thorold of Verulamium Museum; to Dick Barton of Colchester Museum; to Ann Reed for preparing for digitising; and most of all, as always, to Carol Trow who typed the manuscript, took the photographs, dotted all the ‘i’s and crossed all the t’s.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE: MARTIA VICTRIX

  CHAPTER TWO: A LANDING OF EAGLES

  CHAPTER THREE: ‘UNDER A DIFFERENT SKY….’

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE WICKER MEN

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE LAST OF THE CELTS

  CHAPTER SIX: ‘TALL AND TERRIBLE’

  CHAPTER SEVEN: CAMULODUNUM

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE CITIES OF SACRIFICE

  CHAPTER NINE: MARS ULTOR

  CHAPTER TEN: ‘THE ROAR OF OUR THOUSANDS’

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Notes

  CHAPTER ONE

  MARTIA VICTRIX

  ‘What chariots, what horses

  Against us shall bide,

  While Stars in their courses

  Do fight on our side?’

  ‘An Astrologer’s Song’ from

  Rewards and Fairies, Rudyard Kipling

  Boudicca of the red hair stood on her chariot platform, her daughters by her side. She noticed how still they were and pale. All around them the warriors chanted and whooped in the summer sun; tall, fierce men with their lime-streaked hair and their blue painted bodies. The women trilled behind them from their positions on the wagons and the children scampered and played. Boys and girls no higher than a Celtic sword acted out their games of war, rolling and laughing under the wagon wheels, sliding on the dry grass of summer.

  Still her girls were silent, their eyes at once hard and vacant. They had not been the same since that night, the night the Procurator’s men came. She could still smell the sour, watered wine on their breath and the stink of olives. They had laughed at her when she had screamed at them. Even when she knew what they were going to do and had slashed the cheek of one of them with her dagger, they still laughed. One of them had slapped her backwards so that she sprawled on the earth floor. Two more had grabbed her arms, twisting the knife from her grip. A third had ripped her tunic, taunting her in the guttering firelight, fondling her breasts for a moment before throwing her forward to be hauled upright onto her knees. Her arms were wrenched outwards, her long unbraided hair thrown over her face so that her back was bare. She could hear her girls crying, screaming as the caligae dragged them away. She was crying now, not for herself, but for them and she did not hear the soft thud as the sticks drove home, biting through her flesh and spraying the ground around her with her blood. All she could hear was her daughters’ screams coming from the hut. All she could imagine was their little naked bodies side by side, jerked up and backwards by the caligae’s thrusts. She heard the men laughing as they grunted, egging each other on as the rods rained down on her spine. Each time she twisted to release her wrists, they drove their boots into her ribs and spat all over her long tresses, wet with her sweat and blood.

  She did not know how long it lasted, the scourging of a queen and the raping of princesses. All she knew was that she had to move, to force her tortured body off the bloody ground and find her girls. She could barely stand and every breath was agony. Before her in the darkness the huts stood silent, the royal palace bereft of her people. Only a flaming torch guttered. Only a stray dog whined. The caligae had gone, their broken rods lying bloody near the strewn dresses of the girls.

  The little ones huddled in the darkest corner, their red hair matted across their faces, streaked with tears. They shivered in their nakedness, infants on the verge of womanhood, hugging each other in their desolation and their fear. She pulled her dress around her so that they shouldn’t see the bruising and the blood and she wrapped them in her arms, all three of them sobbing in the watches of the night. There were no words, for who could find them? No reasons, for who had them? Only a mother, hushing her raped babies and kissing their tears.

  She looked at them now, on her chariot on that broad, sunlit field. It had been … how long? Only since Beltane when the caligae had come with their incomprehensible tongue and their leering. Boudicca had heard those accents many times since and knew that when she had, they had always been screaming for mercy. She could not speak their language, but she understood every word - at Camulodunum, where the veterans had gone down before her warriors’ swords; at Londinium where their harlots’ breasts had been hacked off; at Verlamion where heads had bounced through the dripping marshes. And over all the screaming, the roar of fire and the roar of her thousands.

  Boudicca looked beyond her spearheads to the hills and the dark mass of trees. This would be it, the final test. There, drawn up in a glittering mass on the edge of the sacred oaks, was the army of the legate, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus.

  The legate shielded his eyes from the fierceness of the noonday sun. In the flood-plain of the river below him, the army of the Iceni was huge. What was it … four, five times his own? Since Minerva’s month this army had been at his back, chasing him northwards. Back home, the farmers would have been pruning the vines and sowing the three-month wheat. Through all the weeks that followed, when the weak British sun was in the sign of Aries and his people sacrificed to Sarquis, that army had haunted him. They had attacked the veterans’ colony at Colonia Claudia, burning to the ground the great temple of the deified Claudius, slaughtering in their frenzy all that crossed their path. While he and his legions had been tramping through the mountains of the Ordovices, following the gold road to the west, the Horse People had struck south, looting and pillaging as they went. Under the protection of Apollo though he was, Cerialis and IX Hispana had been cut to pieces. At home the sheep were shorn, the wool was washed and sacrifices made to Mercury and to Flora. Cerialis had ridden north, lucky to have a command, lucky to be alive.

  While the farmers at home mowed the hay and sacrificed to Hercules and Fors Fortuna, she of the red hair had taken Londinium, burning its shops and its houses, impaling and disembowelling the citizens that he, Paulinus, had had to leave behind. Even before he’d left Mona, with its terrifying women and its chanting Druids, he knew that the Horse People and their terrifying queen were on the march. With a tiny cohort of cavalry with him, what could the legate do but ride north to meet the rest of his army and choose his ground? Under Jupiter in the sign of Cancer, when barley and honey were harvested and feasts held to honour Apollo and Neptune, the Iceni had marched on Verulamium, burning its streets, crucifying its people. And they weren’t even Romans.

  So here he was, squinting into the sun under the scorching brim of his helmet, sitting his mare in the centre of his legions. The month was under the protection of Ceres and in the fields beyond the river, he could see the corn unharvested, flattened by the great army that shifted and writhed below him like some terrifying monster. At home, he knew, there would be sacrifices to Diana and, with a sudden realization that wrenched
his heart, Hope and Safety. The feast of Volcanalia.

  Boudicca knew where the legate was. She knew it by the plain scarlet flag in the centre of his ranks. His troops were spread out in a long solid line against the screen of trees. In the centre were the legions, hard men under their iron helmets, their javelins pointing skywards, their shields scarlet and gold with their wings and lightning flashes. She could hear the barked orders from the centurions standing ahead of their cohort lines. They were wearing full battle gear as if in honour of the day, silver phalerae dangling on their scarlet tunics. She could even see the torcs on red ribbons around their necks, the trophies of the Celtic dead. She knew their battle standards by heart – the boar of XX Legion, copied like so much else Roman, from the Celts. She knew the signifiers with their wolf pelts around their shoulders and the aquilifers with their flashing eagles. In the centre, near the legate’s flag, she could see above the heads of the bristling cohorts the image of their emperor, the lyre player who some men said was mad.

  On the legion’s flanks the auxiliaries stood, their mail shirts and many-coloured shields a reminder that they were not from Rome. These men were Gauls and Iberians, Pannonians and Batavians, crossing the sea no doubt for women and loot. Beyond them the cavalry on their tough little horses, circular shields catching the sun as their bearers twisted in the saddle, holding their animals steady in readiness for the word.

  The barked commands had stopped. The only sound that Boudicca could hear was the rising roar of the Iceni around her and the harsh, clacking tongues of the boar-headed carynxes. She tapped the shoulder of her charioteer and gripped the rail as they lurched forward, the wheels grumbling over the short yellow grass and she swung in an arc to the right, to face her people.

  Paulinus saw her go. He glanced along his line, the grim faced tribunes of XIV Gemina and XX watching him, waiting for his command. He sensed the cohorts shifting, the bolt-headed pila in their hands wavering as they saw the Iceni mob surge and writhe around their queen. The front rank could hear snatches of her harsh, rasping voice haranguing them, driving them into a frenzy. Paulinus knew his men had faced all this before – on Mona with the sea crashing around their ankles and the blazing torches of the Druids driving them back. They had faced that down; they could do it again. But he also knew that IX Hispana had gone, swallowed up by that monster that vaunted in the field now. And he remembered his father’s tales of the Teutoburger Forest and the annihilation of three whole legions. This one was going to take careful timing.

  He lashed his horse forward, yelling at the top of his voice, ‘Ignore their roar. They’re just empty threats.’ He reached over and clapped a centurion on the shoulder. ‘Look, there are more women than warriors!’ He heard the rear ranks chuckle. ‘When we get in among them, they’ll break. They’ll run. We’ve seen it all before, eh, lads?’ His silent legions were laughing now, the metal of their tunic plates rattling in the sun. He wheeled his horse to face them. ‘Keep in close order. Use your javelins, then march on. Bring them down with your shield-bosses, kill them with your swords.’ He swung back to the front of his line so that all could see him. ‘When you have won,’ he bellowed, ‘you will have everything!’

  Boudicca’s chariot hurtled over the rough ground. As her warriors leapt and whooped and roared their battle chants, she yelled at them, ‘I am descended from mighty men! But today I am not fighting for my wealth or my kingdom. I am fighting as a wronged woman, with my bruised body,’ she held her shaking girls to her, ‘and for my outraged daughters.’ She hauled at the reins to spin the chariot round to the right as her people danced around her, clashing their swords on their great wooden shields. ‘Old people are killed,’ she growled, ‘virgins raped. But the gods will give us the revenge we deserve. The ninth legion is destroyed and others cower in their camps, afraid to face us. Afraid even to face our noise and the roar of our thousands.’ She swung back along the battle line, unable to hold them much longer. ‘Remember what you’re fighting for. You will win or you will die. This is what I plan to do!’ she laughed with her warriors with their flashing eyes and skyward-pointed swords. ‘Let the men live in slavery if they will.’

  For a moment, perhaps two, the XIV Gemina flinched, the javelins wavered as the Iceni launched their attack. They came in their thousands, men who stood a head taller than the legions, running forward up the slope ahead of them. The dogs ran too and the boys, eager for their first blood, their first kill. The high-pitched bray of the Roman trumpets called the commands now, for no one would hear Paulinus again above the noise. The ground was shaking with the thunder of feet and the Iceni horsemen and the charioteers galloped on the wings, outstripping the runners in the centre. At the trumpets’ command, the legions slid sideways, extending their line to let the mixed cohorts through to take the centre.

  Ahead of them, the centurions’ vine sticks were in the air and they hissed down as one, each man in every unit launching his javelin through the blue.

  The Iceni met the shock running, the iron-headed pila thudding through their shields and thumping into their unarmoured bodies. The crash of the onslaught was broken, the charge was slowed as the warriors fought to hold their feet and wrench the twisted javelins out of their shields.

  As one, the legions’ shields swung sideways across the soldiers’ chests. As one, the swords slid clear of the scabbards and the trumpets sounded again. The air was full of hissing stones as the Iceni slingers pelted the front line, pebbles bouncing off the tough shields and denting the helmets. Here and there a Roman went down, his eye gone, his head streaming with blood. On the flanks the cavalry moved out against the Horse People, but they had left it late and the Iceni speed jolted them backwards, mailed horsemen crashing into the trunks and branches of trees.

  A chariot clattered against the auxiliaries, then another and another, probing for weaknesses, picking off the front ranks who were too slow or inexperienced. Then the legions formed their wedges, the cohorts of XIV with XX behind them marched down the slope into the teeth of the still ongoing charge. Boudicca was with her warriors, shaking her spear at the advancing legions, screaming support for her people. Her daughters clung to the chariot’s rim, shouting out in imitation of their mother.

  The crash of arms carried far behind the deep woods behind Paulinus and far beyond the river at Boudicca’s back. A cohort was held here, another knocked sideways there by the impact of the Iceni charge. But the Romans were making ground. Paulinus could tell, watching from the forest’s edge, that the Celts had outrun themselves. Pushing forward on aching and exhausted legs, the warriors’ long swords bounced and clashed on the moving shield wall. The legate knew what it was like in the centre of all that; the iron shield-bosses smashing ribs and crippling lungs, the two-edged swords thudding into the naked bodies, the iron-shod caligae stamping sweating faces into the mud, slippery with the blood of the dead and the dying.

  Now the auxiliaries pushed forward too, eight of Paulinus’ ten thousand driving their murderous wedges through the tossing, struggling Iceni ranks. The slaughter went on.

  Boudicca did not know how long her people had held their ground before they broke. Was it one hour? Two? Nor could she tell who ran first, but the right was breaking, crumbling like bread at Beltane too long in the fire. The legions gathered pace as they sensed the moment, driving the Iceni back and into the arms of the Roman cavalry, pushing in now from the flanks. Boudicca’s own horsemen were in disarray, a thousand individual contests going on all over the slope of the ground.

  Now the Romans were silent no more. They were smashing their curved shields with their bloodied swords, shouting out in a language that was not their own the alien war cries stolen from a thousand battlefields. Warriors hurled themselves onto the wedges, hacking at the helmeted heads below, sliding to their deaths on the moving caterpillars of the enemy. And now, the legions had reached the wagons. The women and the children snatched up the swords and the spears and the slings of their husbands and fathers. They stood with
their wagon circle at their backs and died before the eagles. Still the shield bosses went in, the swords hacking into flimsy bodies, boots grinding children to the dust. The oxen, still yoked, were hacked down and the legions overturned the wagons as they marched, unstoppable, to the river.

  Only then did the trumpets call them back. Only then did the Iceni melt away. Only then did Boudicca of the red hair hold her daughters to her and bury their tear-streaked faces into the folds of her dress. The day belonged to Paulinus. The Iceni were no more, and the guttering torch of freedom had gone out forever.

  Boudicca’s last battle with the Romans has passed into legend. Like the life of the queen herself, we have only the briefest of accounts, the most passing of shadows. The account above is probably as close as we are ever likely to get to what happened in that distant past. Such is the infuriating nature of ancient history that we do not know exactly where or when the battle was fought. We cannot be sure of the season or even the year. But our speculation on it, like everything else in this book, is based as closely as possible on the written and archaeological evidence that we do have.

  To begin with, we must realize that there are no Iceni or Celtic accounts of the battle. The Celts had no written language in the conventional sense and although their priests, the Druids, might have used a form of Greek in certain circumstances, they did not compile histories or chronicles of events. As we shall see in a later chapter, their traditions and their culture were at once verbal and closely guarded. We therefore have to rely on the only written accounts available and that means the inevitably biased versions of the Romans.

  History, they say, is written by the winners. And in this case we have two – Tacitus and Cassius Dio. Of these, Publius Cornelius Tacitus is the more reliable and for two reasons; he had served as a legionary commander himself, somewhere in the provinces, probably between 89 and 93 and his father-in-law was the renowned Julius Agricola, one of Britain’s ablest governors and himself a tribune there at the time of Boudicca’s rebellion. That said, there are three problems with reliance on the record of Tacitus. Several of his books have been inevitably lost, and he has the obvious bias of an historian overly influenced by events of his own day. His terse style of writing has lent his name to a sulky lack of communication – taciturnity. We know little about the man’s early years. He was probably born in Vasio or Forum Julii (today’s Vaison or Fréjus in southern France) part of the Roman province of Gaul, some three or four years before the Iceni took on the might of the empire. His father may have been the procurator (essentially a tax collector) at Augusta Treverorum (Trier) and paymaster of the Roman armies along the Rhine. He wrote: