The Bunkhouse Chronicle: Boudica still matters

It is fashionable to suggest that violence doesn’t solve problems, although the history of the world suggests otherwise. It might be better to say that violence doesn’t always solve problems, because it was only violence that cemented the American Revolution, it was violent resistance that carved out what little indigenous Americans have left, it was violence that finally solved Hitler, and at least for a little while it allowed schoolgirls in Kabul to learn how to read without having acid thrown in their faces.

It was fleeting, to be certain, and perhaps even a fool’s errand, but there can be little doubt that it was the violence of the American military that once-upon-a-time made space for little Afghan girls to attend school.

Which somehow brings me to Boudica, warrior queen of the Iceni. Not well known in America, Boudica remains a national hero in England, precisely for the violence of her resistance to Roman colonizers, and notwithstanding the fact that it was finally a losing fight—a cultural apocalypse ending with the destruction of everything that Boudica — and her people — were fighting to preserve.

Which is always the principal risk of armed resistance to tyranny.

The Roman proposition — wherever they went — was simple. First, and most importantly — and what remains to this day the primary and most obvious requirement of subjugation—the tribe must disarm. Second, the tribe must give the Romans most of whatever it produced — from grains to wool to metalwork. And third, the tribe must buy it all back from the Romans at double its value.

This was the best bargain possible for those indigenous Britons who allied to Rome, on the theory that conditions would someday improve as Roman wealth, technology, and cultural influence took root. The alternative was continuous fighting, probably starvation, and finally a grim death under the weight of the Roman war machine.

Boudica’s father, Prasutagus, had taken the first option, though enthusiasm for the bargain among the Iceni, a confederacy of smaller tribes including the Trinovantes, seems to have been thin. Prasutagus, who remained loyal to Rome, somehow survived the Roman reprisals after the earlier Iceni revolt of AD 47. His was a delicate balancing act, until he died, when the Romans marched into the remote Iceni redoubt in roughly AD 62 demanding even more, and expecting to get it from his daughter, the newly minted Queen Boudica.

But Boudica refused. For her trouble she was publicly flogged and forced to watch her daughters violated by Roman legionnaires in a ritual of public humiliation. What followed was, perhaps, the greatest gathering of indigenous Britons in history, and a march into infamy.

Here, in much of North America, we have Mazama ash, which allows scientists to reliably date events before and after the eruption that formed Crater Lake. In many parts of England, they have something similar — the ash and scorched ruins left behind as Boudica and her army of farmers and war chariots marched on London from the north. From Colchester — where the Temple of Claudius was sacked and not a single colonizing soul was left alive — to London itself, Boudica and her outraged tribes laid waste the country, seeking to drive the Romans entirely out of their homeland.

And they nearly succeeded, erasing a Roman Legion that had marched in relief of beleaguered cities and the streams of refugees fleeing Boudicean vengeance.

It isn’t difficult to imagine the motivating animus, thanks largely to the historian Tacitus who, albeit writing later and for a Roman audience, puts words in the mouth of Calgacus — a tribal Chieftain — succinctly summarizing the view of many contemporary Britons toward all things Rome: “They rob, kill and plunder and deceivingly call it Roman rule, and where they make a desert, they call it ‘peace.’”

In the end Boudica would lose. Lured into bad ground by the Roman General Paulinus, her army was crushed and as many as 80,000 were killed in a single disastrous attack. Many tens of thousands of Iceni would die in the following years from famine, and retributive blows by the Legions.

And so Boudica faded into history, the precise circumstances of her death a mystery, her burial place forgotten. But by fighting she was spared, at least, the dismal fate of Vercingetorix, the Gaul, who was forced to his knees, clapped in chains, and paraded through the streets in a Roman Triumph — a scene that would have looked very much like those horrific images of Israeli hostages paraded through the streets of Gaza.

And so what if, as the archaeologist Duncan McKay asks in his masterful book “Echolands: A Journey in Search of Boudica,” she had simply “taken her beating and accepted the rape of her daughters, handed over the tribal treasury, watched her nobles lose their estates to belligerent colonists and her farmers made into slaves, and meekly slipped away to hide in the shadows, abandoning her people to their fate—what should we think of her now? Would we admire her?”

McKay thinks the question answers itself. History seems to agree. Boudica matters not because she was a woman — gender is incidental to leadership and heroism — but because she rallied her tribes and, at least for a brief and shining moment, they fought for something worth preserving — which is always, first, last, and down through the known and recorded history of the world — the dignity of human freedom.