Boudicca's Revolt — Britain's Fire
Boudicca burned three Roman cities in Britain in 60 or 61 and killed perhaps 70,000 people. Her husband Prasutagus had ruled the Iceni of East Anglia as a client king and had left his kingdom jointly to his two daughters and to the emperor, on the assumption that naming Nero would protect the arrangement. The Roman administration treated the death as an annexation. The estate was seized, the nobles' lands taken, loans that Seneca had made to British chiefs were called in, Boudicca was flogged and her daughters raped. The governor Suetonius Paulinus was at the other end of the province, destroying the druid centre on Anglesey. The rising took Camulodunum first, where a temple to the deified Claudius had been built at British expense and stood as a symbol of everything, and the veterans' colony was massacred; the Ninth Legion was ambushed and lost its infantry entirely. Londinium and Verulamium followed, and archaeologists still find a burnt layer under all three. Paulinus came back down Watling Street with about 10,000 men and chose a defile with woods behind him and a plain in front, where numbers could not be brought to bear. The Britons had brought their families in wagons and drawn them up at the rear to watch, which became the wall the rout broke against. Tacitus gives 80,000 Britons dead and 400 Romans. Boudicca took poison, and Nero considered abandoning the province. She was rediscovered in the sixteenth century and became a British national figure in the nineteenth, when a queen was again on the throne. The statue on Westminster Bridge shows a woman who fought Roman imperialism, erected by a country that had modelled its own empire on Rome.
- Year: 60 CE
- Category: Military
