The Warrior Queens Page 7

  Whatever these distinctions, certain it is there followed in the first century BC and the years up to the Claudian invasion of AD 43, that flowering of Iron Age civilization and British Celtic art to which recent archaeological finds bear such eloquent witness. Many of the most significant finds have been made in Iceni territory: the Brecklands, for example, an area of forestry and heather and marsh lying between Bury St Edmunds and Norwich, and in northern coastal areas near the Wash. (It is the pattern of archaeological finds, following the cleavage in the terrain, and in its turn providing the pattern of Iceni settlement, which gives some substance to the idea that there may have been two Iceni tribes, the greater and the lesser.)14

  Many of these finds testify to the fact that this was a society dominated by the horse and, by extension, the chariot: the rich bridle-bits and bronze nave-bands, a charioteer’s cap found at Snettisham. The coins of the Iceni are stamped with galloping horses, legs prancing, manes flowing wildly (like the luxuriant locks of their masters enshrined in Classical sculpture). As a result this society, ruled over by the horse-mad, as well as war-mad, chieftains, has been compared to that of other ancient chivalric orders, such as the Samurai of Japan or even the warriors of Homer.15

  Not only the arts of war – enamelled scabbards and shields – called for the skills of the Celtic craftsmen: a style of living which may even be termed gracious, is revealed by the appearance, both intricate and exquisite, of certain domestic artefacts. Much fine metalwork including dolphin and thistle brooches was discovered in a hoard at Santon in north Norfolk. Moreover if nothing else of late Iron Age society had survived except its decorated bronze mirrors, its sophistication and artistic sense would still have been amply demonstrated. Sir Cyril Fox wrote lyrically of the ‘perfection of harmony between hand and eye’ which these north Celtic craftsmen displayed in the creation of the mirrors, their ‘masterly and apparently effortless technique’16 – words which are even outstripped by the objects themselves. Once again, Iceni graves have provided richly of these mirrors.

  It is however in the massive gold torcs or necklaces (from the Latin torquis) that the confident and aristocratic nature of Iceni society is perhaps best understood. Unlike the bronze mirrors, the powerful beauty of these magnificent objects is ill conveyed even by photographs, let alone in words. Gold – the Celtic favourite – is by far the most popular material, although torcs of bronze and even silver are known. Their precise function will probably never be perfectly understood: Boudica will be described as wearing one round her neck as she harangued her troops on the eve of battle. Yet those who have tried on a torc, even very briefly, speak of the extraordinary weight (those in the Snettisham hoard, to be discussed below, vary between 1,000 and 858 grams).17 Some are more flexible than others – some are made of gold strands, some tubular with the external diameters between nine and seven and a half inches; but none is flexible and light enough to make long-term wearing anything but a burden. In particular, the possibility of actually fighting in torcs, at any rate those such as have survived in the Norfolk and Suffolk hoards, must be seriously called in question.

  Did the torc then have some more ritual function? That is to say, did the Iceni chiefs merely wear them on state occasions when the weight would have to be endured in the interests of majesty, as a British sovereign endures the heavy weight of the Coronation regalia – the crown weighs over 2,000 grams – once in his or her lifetime? A declaration of war on Boudica’s part would count as such a state occasion. Perhaps the torc was in fact a votive object which was housed in a sacred place, round the neck of an idol, when not in public use.

  Two separate sets of torcs have been exposed by chance since the Second World War either within the main area of late Iron Age Iceni settlement at Snettisham near Hunstanton on the north-west Norfolk coast (1948/50) or contiguous to it, at Ipswich (1968/70).f2 The Snettisham Treasure, five hoards deposited some time between 25 BC and AD 10, was possibly the stock-in-trade of a metalsmith plying his wares from the south, or possibly Iceni loot after a profitable visit to their neighbours, the Trinovantes. The Ipswich torcs, whose extent suggests a goldsmith’s workshop, are so similar in style that it has been suggested they originally came from north-west Norfolk.18 If the precise significance of a torc is mysterious, the general significance of such a resplendent and indeed ostentatious object is not: a wealthy local dynasty.

  In contrast to the torcs, the houses of the Iceni would indeed have a ‘barbarous’ look to modern eyes. But this is to misunderstand the nature of Celtic society, where domestic comfort, as for example the incoming Romans understood it, was simply not an objective. The houses of the Iceni would have been those circular Iron Age structures with high, sloping roofs which to us now have an African look. (However, a 1973 experiment in reconstruction, the Butser Ancient Farm Project – the ‘Maiden Castle’ House – has revealed the durability of these round-houses compared to an African hut: their skilful building methods surviving the storms and rigours of British winters in a way the latter could never do.)19 An ordinary house would be about fifty feet across, with a central fire. The palace of the Iceni would have consisted of a much larger dwelling – a great hall – constructed along the same lines and smaller outlying round-houses.

  But no trace of Prasutagus’ palace, and by extension that of Boudica herself, has yet been found. The most likely area for such a discovery is around Thetford. Excavations in the early 1980s at Gallows Hill, near Thetford, raised hopes, before the absence of all domestic detritus inevitable on the site of a palace dashed them again. The Thetford site is now thought to be some form of temple.20 In the absence of a reliable finding, it is not only the particular situation of Boudica’s palace which remains in doubt, but also, more generally, the pre-Roman tribal centre of the Iceni.

  When the Roman soldiers were asked to take part in the Claudian invasion of 43, they waxed indignant. This was asking them to carry on a campaign ‘outside the limits of the known world’.21 It was actually true that the world they encountered within Britain both looked and was very different from their own – thatched round-houses in contrast to the Roman house of brick and tile. The lives of Celtic women were also very different from those of the Roman ladies who increasingly accompanied the occupying troops: while the notion of actual Celtic matriarchy has been dismissed, the women of the Iceni who looked into those exquisitely decorated bronze mirrors led the freer kind of tribal life in which the constraints imposed upon women by Roman law were quite unknown. A Roman female, having no rights at law herself, was from birth to death the property of her male relations.22

  Roman society has been described as ‘essentially a man’s world’.23 This was certainly not true of Celtic society. Not only law but religion, and religious attitudes to the sexes, were important areas of distinction. Women were excluded from the Mithraic religion which was spreading via the Roman armies across the empire. No such exclusion was ever contemplated where the Celts were concerned, a society still haunted by the powerful goddesses discussed in Chapter Two. There is every reason to believe that the priestly caste of the Celts, the Druids, included women as well as men.24 Boudica’s ability to summon up the character of priestess – or even goddess – on the eve of battle was to be an important factor where her war leadership was concerned: a capacity quite outside the experience of a Roman woman, however grand her status.

  Caesar describes the entire Celtic people as being ‘exceedingly given to religious superstition’: that again was written from the Roman point of view. Another way of putting it would be to stress the profoundly religious nature of Celtic society, with every grove and stream and well inhabited by its own deity, and the ‘otherworld’ ever present in the Celtic mind. In particular the human head in every form, from ornamental depiction to the skull of the enemy, has been described as being as central to the Celtic religion as the sign of the Cross (referring to the central act of the Crucifixion) in Christian contexts.25

  To the Celts, the head was literall
y the godhead, the symbol of divinity or the centre of the human soul. The heads of their enemies, decapitated, took on symbolic importance. Livy wrote of the Gallic horsemen ‘with heads hanging at their horses’ breasts, or fixed on with their lances, and singing their customary song of triumph’. According to Strabo, the heads of ‘enemies of high repute’ were then embalmed in cedar-oil and exhibited to strangers; even if ‘an equal weight of gold’ was offered to ransom them, the Celts would refuse.26 It is clear from this alone that the Celtic pre-occupation with the head cannot be equated, for example, with the mediaeval display of executed criminals’ heads and limbs. It was numinous, not admonitory, in origin.

  To the Romans, however, the zest with which Celts exhibited these severed treasures was not so much symbolic as revolting. It aroused the kind of disgust in the Roman breast which so-called superior civilizations have always reserved for the religious practices of those they designate – by right of conquest – to be inferior. Nevertheless, for all the Roman repulsion, this – deified groves, chanting priestesses as well as priests, and decapitated heads – was the religion which animated Boudica, as the Romans would discover to their cost when the conquerors were abruptly transformed into the conquered.

  With the Iceni successfully subdued – as it seemed – the Roman action after 49 moved away from East Anglia back to the north and west. Here Caratacus still posed a threat: ‘his many undefeated battles – and even many victories’, wrote Tacitus, ‘had made him pre-eminent among British chieftains’. His were the classical resources of the guerrilla leader, since ‘his deficiency in strength was compensated by superior cunning and topographical knowledge’.27

  The more northerly Brigantes were however soon defeated, as the Iceni had been, and after the deaths of a few ‘peace-breakers’ the rest were pardoned. Not only did this obviate the danger of a combination between the Brigantes and the ‘exceptionally stubborn’ Silures of modern Wales, it also presented Rome with a large and friendly client-kingdom across a wide spread of northern territories. Ironically enough, in view of subsequent events among the Iceni, this client-kingdom was ruled not by a client-king but by a queen: Cartimandua. The name Cartimandua, appropriately enough in this horse-haunted world, means ‘Sleek Pony’ – the kind of pony used to draw a chariot. This particular ‘Sleek Pony’ may well have been among those unnamed tribal monarchs who submitted to Claudius in 43, since she was clearly an established client-leader by the date of Caratacus’ defeat.28

  Even Caratacus could not hold out forever against the Roman legions. Vanquished at last in 51, he fled north to Cartimandua and the Brigantes (or else was captured by the Queen’s trick – there are two different accounts). ‘But the defeated have no refuge’, wrote Tacitus. He might have added: when that refuge is under Roman protection. Caratacus was duly handed over by Queen Cartimandua, bound hand and foot, in order to appear as the centrepiece of Claudius’ triumph at Rome. The client-queen had thus successfully ‘furnished what was needed’ by the Romans.29

  Brigantian peace-at-a-price did not last long. Cartimandua’s consort Venutius, also of royal blood, headed a revolt against her.30 At first Cartimandua was able to survive by another of her cunning tricks, for she ‘astutely trapped’ Venutius’ relatives. But then Venutius organized outside support. Tacitus is frank about the reason for this support: Cartimandua’s enemies ‘infuriated and goaded by fears of feminine rule, invaded her kingdom with a force of picked warriors’. Rome was obliged to come to her support, and it was with Rome’s help that Cartimandua was able to remain upon her client-throne.

  There is a parallel to be drawn here between Cartimandua and Queen Dynamis of Bosphorus. (But Cartimandua’s capacity for survival in troubled times allied, not coincidentally, to a capacity for intrigue entitles her to be considered as the first-century Queen Elizabeth, if Boudica’s dramatic end qualifies her perhaps to be its Mary Queen of Scots.) It is evident that whatever the Brigantian nobles may have felt, the Romans had no objection to ‘humiliating feminine rule’ so long as it suited their particular brand of power politics. The next stage of Cartimandua’s story was however closer to that of Cleopatra then Dynamis. Some nine years after Boudica’s rebellion, Cartimandua exercised what she clearly thought to be a queen’s right to change her mind and acquired a new consort. She swapped the semi-royal Venutius for his armour-bearer Vellocatus. Tacitus, implicitly making the Queen part of the Voracity Syndrome, presents this as being due to lust: ‘libido reginae’. But it has been suggested that Cartimandua may actually have lusted after something very different: political support against Venutius. Once again Cartimandua was rescued by her Roman allies, although this time she did not survive on the throne itself, but was peacefully retired in favour of the de facto rule of Venutius.

  It had been a long reign. In the extent of her territories and the power she wielded, Cartimandua can be compared to that celebrated southern client-king, Cogidubnus, builder of Fish-bourne Palace, near Chichester. It is interesting therefore that Tacitus feels obliged to reflect on Cartimandua’s ‘libido’ and to treat the episode as a moral issue. (I. A. Richmond pointed out the irony of this in a lecture to Somerville College in 1953 – then as now an all-female institution – ‘when the matrimonial experiments of the Julio-Claudian house and senatorial families in general are recalled’.)31

  Furthermore the subsequent popular reputation of Cartimandua, obeying that rule which links sexuality to the Warrior Queen where possible, has concentrated on her adulterous aspect. Ubaldini, in that history of illustrious women presented to Queen Elizabeth I, referred to Cartimandua in this fashion: ‘she was a warlike woman and her way of acting was an example to the women of her country of how to be licentious, even if they were not born princesses’. Milton, writing a hundred years later in his History of Britain (when there was no queen regnant on the throne) was coarser. Cartimandua’s military action was described as ‘the Rebellion of an adulteress against her husband’. Her subjects were praised for siding with Venutius, since they thus displayed their detestation of ‘so foul a fact’ (the adultery); at the same time they rid themselves of ‘the uncomeliness of their subjection to the Monarchy of a Woman’.32

  This is to anticipate. The contemporary relevance of Cartimandua’s lofty position and long reign with regard to Boudica is of a different nature. Tacitus described female leadership as something known among the Britons as opposed to the Romans, for example, where of course it was not: neque enim sexum in imperiis discernunt (they make no distinction of sex in their appointment of commanders).33 Although no other names of reigning queens are known beyond those of the celebrated duo, Cartimandua and Boudica, these constitute one-third of the total of all the known names of sovereigns/chieftains. When King Prasutagus of the Iceni died in about AD 60, there was an established client-queen presiding over the vast Brigantian territories, a client-queen already supported once by the Romans in difficult circumstances. On grounds of gender alone, Prasutagus had no reason to suppose that his wife Boudica would be unacceptable to the Romans as regent of the kingdom after his death.

  With the death of King Prasutagus, the pace of Boudica’s story quickens; at the same time the areas where speculation must substitute for certainty by no means diminish. Sir Ronald Syme once wisely observed that conjecture cannot be avoided: ‘otherwise history is not writing, for it does not become intelligible’.34 This is undoubtedly a comforting maxim for the student of Boudica.

  Speculation as opposed to certainty gets off to a spanking start in view of the fact that there are only three written sources for the Boudican rebellion which have any claim to be regarded as primary; and one of these survives in an edited form made nine hundred years later. Two of these sources come from the pen of Tacitus, who touched upon the Boudican rebellion both in his Agricola, the life of his father-in-law published in about AD 98, and in his Annals written fifteen to twenty years later. The third comes from Dio Cassius, who was born in Nicaea, where his father was a senator, in about 163; a monk
called Xiphilinus of Trapezus produced ‘epitomies’ of his work, selections for public reading which included his passage about Boudica, in the second half of the eleventh century.35

  None of these three accounts is very long. And at first sight each of the three claims to be regarded as a primary source may seem rather tenuous in view of the fact that Dio was born a hundred years after the revolt and even Tacitus a mere five years before it. Fortunately Tacitus, quite apart from his diligent researches in the imperial archives, was able to benefit from the first-hand testimony of his father-in-law. For Agricola as a young man was present in Britain, a member of the Governor’s staff, at the time of these stirring events; whatever old men forget, they do not forget the campaigns of their youth. There were other survivors he might have interviewed: the widow of Ostorius Scapula lived on for many years, Tacitus being consul in the same year as his grandson. He has also increased his store of knowledge between writing the Agricola and the Annals.36

  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.