In AD 60, Britain and her people were very different. The Romans, the world's first superpower, occupied much of the British Isles. Those islands had been largely populated by Celtic peoples, this being before most of the incursions that Britain is known for; no Saxons, no Jutes, no Normans.
The Romans were not gentle masters. A member of the tribe of the Iceni, who lived in what is now Norfolk, Boudica was married to the Iceni's king, Prasutagus. Prasutagus was an ally of Rome, and left his lands in his will to his two daughters with Boudica and to the Roman Emperor; but when he died, the will was ignored, the Iceni king's lands seized. Boudica was whipped and her daughters raped when she objected. We know this from Roman records left to us by the Roman historian Tacitus.
This didn't sit well with Boudica. And here is where we must forestall any idiocy from the left who might claim that Queen Boudica was "non-binary" or any other such nonsense. She was a woman, she was a great leader, and that's that.
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To add insult to injury, a separate account by the Roman historian Dio Cassius informs us that all of the donations that Rome had made to influential Britons were confiscated. Rome determined that the lands of the Iceni were to be absorbed into the Roman province of Britannia, and sent an army to occupy the Icenia lands. The Roman army responded as they so often did, with pillage and rapine on the populace. Boudica gathered the Iceni chiefs and some neighboring tribes and harangued them to act. Dio Cassius, although he could not possibly have heard the speech or any first-hand accounts of it, wrote a speech on Boudica's behalf. That supposed speech reads in part:
Have we not been robbed entirely of most of our possessions, and those the greatest, while for those that remain we pay taxes? Besides pasturing and tilling for them all our other possessions, do we not pay a yearly tribute for our very bodies? How much better it would be to have been sold to masters once for all than, possessing empty titles of freedom, to have to ransom ourselves every year! How much better to have been slain and to have perished than to go about with a tax on our heads.
That has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it? This led to the Celtic people being primed for rebellion.
Between the Iceni and the Trinvantes, another Celtic tribe, they put together an army of 120,000. The army, with Queen Boudica leading, attacked and seized Camulodunum - now Colcester - where the Roman army had set up a temple and a sort of retirement home for discharged Roman troops. The Ninth Spanish Legion (Legio IX Hsipana) rode to the rescue of Camulodunum but were repulsed.
Then, a Roman commander, Suetonius, returned from the island of Mona to deal with the Iceni and their queen. The Celtic rebels had moved on from Camulodunum to sack Verulamium (now St. Albans) and were moving on Londinium (London) when Suetonius caught up with them.
Boudica had an army of nearly 230,000 at this point, according to Dio Cassius. The Roman forces were 10,000 strong, but they had better technology, greater discipline, and better tactics. They launched javelins at the advancing Celts and then, moving forward in a wedge formation behind their shield-wall, crushed the Celtic rebels.
Boudica, knowing what treatment she was liable to get from Rome, reportedly committed suicide; Tacitus claims she poisoned herself, while Dio Cassius only states that she grew ill and died. Thus ended the career of a Briton woman who, in terms of courage, determination, and guts, would shame the soft-shelled invertebrates that seem to make up much of the British male population today. Boudica knew, in her defeat, a strange victory, the victory of one who refused to submit, and in time, the Romans withdrew from Britannia.
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Here's my question: How long will it be before the gender-theory types figure out who Boudica was and try to erase her unique role in the history of Britain by claiming she was "non-binary" or some other such horse squeeze? It's as though they don't believe a woman can be as strong, as determined, and as courageous as Boudica. They seem determined to erase women from the history books, to somehow convince those of dubious intelligence that someone like Queen Boudica was just another symbol of a weird social agenda.
So how do we fight back against that? By putting out the facts. Informing people of great women of history, like Queen Boudica, who had a bigger pair swinging than most men, even then.
