![]() Or at least that’s what they believed right up until Prasutagus died and all hell broke loose.īOUDICCA: my husband had a will, as all responsible adults shouldīOUDICCA: if you don’t have one yet, close this tab and go make one right now!īOUDICCA: anyway, he split his assets between our daughters and the Emperor NeroīOUDICCA: the Romans, being always fair and just, honored that agreementīOUDICCA: oh my god, I’m sorry, I can’t even say that with a straight faceīOUDICCA: but seriously, you need a will if you don’t have one already As long as the Iceni kept bootlicking paying their taxes, everything was going to be fine. They were apparently quite wealthy and prosperous, even as neighboring regions were gutted by invading forces. The Iceni had allied themselves with Rome and been allowed to live fairly autonomously with Prasutagus as their client king in the standard Roman model. ![]() All we know about her life are the scraps that Tacitus and Dio left us, and those are the highly biased Roman accounts describing an enemy they considered to be primitive and sub-human.īOUDICCA: I mean, the Romans barely consider their own women to be peopleīOUDICCA: even the ones they allegedly likeīOUDICCA: you know, the ones who’ve mastered the skills of shutting up and spinning woolīOUDICCA: neither of which are exactly my forte Then again, if there had been other children who had died or if, for some reason, she’d married later or hadn’t been able to conceive right away, she could have been in her 40s or even 50s. Did she come from Iceni nobility or was she a princess from another tribe who had married Prasutagus as part of an alliance? Was Boudicca her given name, or since it’s believed to come from a Proto-Celtic root word meaning victory, was it a title she adopted? We don’t even know how old she was in 60 AD - she had two daughters by Prasutagus who were probably in their tweens or early teens, and if those were her first and only children, she could have been as young as 30. The historian Tacitus, who gives us a near-contemporary account of Boudicca’s uprising, wrote that she was of royal blood, but beyond that we don’t know much about her. Her husband, Prasutagus, was the ruler of the Iceni, a British tribe whose territory included modern-day Norfolk and parts of Suffolk. In the chaos that ensued, Rome more or less ignored Britain for the next hundred years until the Emperor Claudius decided to invade again in 43 AD.īoudicca appears in the narrative about 17 years after Claudius’ invasion. After that Caesar had to put a pin in it due to other pressing business he had a republic to bring down, after all, and a back that needed stabbing. ![]() But it must have been a fun caper, because he returned the next year, this time managing to cross the Thames and score a few victories against the Britons. Caesar, who had been conquesting his way through Gaul for a few years, decided to take a break in 55 BC and invade Britain as a little treat, although “invasion” is probably a stretch since he didn’t do much more than visit Kent and then turn back. The Romans had first cast their eyes toward Britain back in the good old days before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and got himself murdered. At least, this is how historian Cassius Dio described Boudicca, a British tribal queen, over one hundred years after her death - every civilized man’s worst nightmare.īut before we dive into the revolt that literally burned London to the ground, we need some context. She was a bloodthirsty barbarian, devoted to a ghoulish religion, out to destroy the social order of the known world. ![]() She had a rabbit hidden in her skirt for occult purposes. ![]() She had spent the last weeks murdering and maiming her way across the British countryside, and now she led a force of hundreds of thousands of Britons in a standoff against the occupying Romans. She was dressed in a colorful tunic and cloak, her outfit completed by a giant fuck-off gold torc. Her tawny hair fell in a “great mass” to her hips. She was tall - terrifyingly large, in fact. If you love Queens of Infamy, consider becoming a Longreads member. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.Īnne Thériault | Longreads | May 2021 | 18 minutes (4,866 words)įrom the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past. ![]()
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