Boudicca Was Actually a Horrible Person

The first-century AD Celtic warrior queen Boudicca is widely seen a British folk hero. She has been so admired for so long that her image has literally become national personification of Britain. Outside of Britain, she is seen as an icon of female empowerment and her revolt against the Romans has been interpreted as a rebellion against both foreign and patriarchal oppression.

Despite how she has been portrayed in modern culture, however, the historical Boudicca was certainly not a feminist. In fact, for what it’s worth, Boudicca makes a frankly very disturbing hero for modern feminists, given the horrible atrocities that she committed—not just against men, but also against women as well.

Boudicca’s reputation in modernity

Boudicca first became a beloved national symbol of the United Kingdom during the reign of Queen Victoria (ruled 1837 – 1901) because Boudicca’s name comes from the Proto-Celtic adjective *boudīkā, meaning “victorious” and Boudicca was therefore seen as Queen Victoria’s spiritual ancestor.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (lived 1809 – 1892), who became Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1850, wrote a poem about Boudicca, which was published in 1864. Meanwhile, between 1856 and 1883, the English sculptor Thomas Thornycroft (lived 1815 – 1885) created the famous bronze sculptural group titled Boadicea and Her Daughters, which still stands to this day at the west end of Westminster Bridge in London.

In more recent times, Boudicca has become even more greatly admired for having been a female leader in a time when women had very little power. In modern popular culture, Boudicca is usually portrayed as a sort of “proto-feminist” fighting for the rights of women and oppressed peoples everywhere. The revolt she led against the Romans has been adapted several times for the screen; for instance, it was the subject of the 1978 British television series Warrior Queen and of the 2003 British television film Boudica.

Boudicca has even won admiration outside the United Kingdom; for instance, a 2018 segment from the American comedy television series Adam Ruins Everything gives a retelling of Boudicca’s famous revolt that portrays Boudicca as a glorious hero and icon of female empowerment. The segment also implies she deserves much greater recognition than she has received.

As we shall see in a moment, though, this widespread admiration for Boudicca may be a bit misplaced. While it would be impossible to deny that she was very brave and it would be hard to deny that she had every right to be furious towards the Romans, her sheer brutality makes her a very questionable hero.

ABOVE: Boadicea and her Daughters, statue of Boudicca in her chariot sculpted by Thomas Thornycroft, located near the British Houses of Parliament

Sources for Boudicca’s revolt

Before we talk about the reasons why Boudicca should not be seen as a feminist hero, let’s talk about the historical sources pertaining to her life. The most reliable surviving account of Boudicca’s revolt comes from the Annals, a historical work written in Latin by the Roman senator and historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (lived c. 56 – c. 120 AD), who was writing only a few decades after the revolt happened and probably had direct access to at least several eyewitnesses of the revolt.

Tacitus may have also been sympathetic to Boudicca’s cause, since he regularly portrays the Roman Empire as corrupt and rebels against Roman imperial rule as heroic. He often puts his own words criticizing the Roman Empire into the mouths of rebel leaders. For instance, he puts the following words into the mouth of the Caledonian chieftain Galgacus:

“Raptores orbis, postquam cuncta vastantibus defuere terrae, mare scrutantur: si locuples hostis est, avari, si pauper, ambitiosi, quos non Oriens, non Occidens satiaverit: soli omnium opes atque inopiam pari adfectu concupiscunt. Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.”

Here is how the passage is translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb:

“Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.”

Ouch.

We also have a surviving epitome of another account of Boudicca’s revolt written by the Greek historian Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 AD). Kassios Dion’s account relies heavily on Tacitus’s, but it also includes some details that Tacitus does not mention. Unfortunately, no one knows where Kassios Dion got this extra information from and his other sources may not be reliable. Unlike Tacitus, Kassios Dion was definitely not sympathetic to Boudicca in any way.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a modern imaginative statue from outside the Austrian Parliament Building in Vienna that is supposed to represent Tacitus

Background of Boudicca’s revolt

According to Tacitus, Boudicca was the wife of Prasutagus, the king of the Iceni. The Iceni were independent allies of the Romans. Prasutagus stated in his will that, upon his death, his kingdom was to be inherited jointly by his two daughters and the Roman emperor. He believed that, by giving the emperor a share in his kingdom, he would ensure his kingdom and his family’s protection.

When Prasutagus died, though, the Romans ignored his will and annexed his kingdom. They attacked Boudicca’s village and confiscated the properties of the leading men of her tribe. Boudicca herself was publicly flogged and her two daughters were brutally gang-raped by Roman soldiers.

The Romans inflicted just about every injustice on Boudicca that it is possible for human beings to inflict. She had every reason to be angry towards them. For this reason, in around either 60 or 61 AD, Boudicca led the Iceni, the Trinovantes, and other Celtic British tribes in a massive rebellion against the Romans who had so brutally wronged her. This is the revolt that has been memorialized so often in statues, paintings, novels, films, and television.

What is often left out of the story is the absolute brutality that Boudicca and her forces unleashed upon the Romans inhabiting Britain and their Celtic allies, who had nothing to do with her or her daughters’ mistreatment. During her bloody rampage, she brutally tortured and massacred tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

ABOVE: Illustration of Boudicca by Joseph Martin Kronheim by 1868

Boudicca’s bloody rampage

Tacitus and Kassios Dion both record that Boudicca’s forces utterly massacred the populations of the cities of Camulodunum (modern Colchester), Londinium (modern London), and Verulamium (modern St. Albans)—which, combined, had an estimated population of between 70,000 and 80,000 people.

Even if we ignore the potentially biased Roman sources documenting her life, the archaeological evidence clearly shows that Boudicca razed these three cities to the ground, leaving nothing but a thick layer of ash behind. This strongly suggests that the account of total devastation that we find in the Roman historical sources is accurate.

According to both Tacitus and Kassios Dion, Boudicca did not spare the women, children, or the elderly from her cruelty. In fact, Kassios Dion records that she had a particularly cruel method of treating prominent Roman noblewomen. Supposedly, she had her men hang them up, cut off their breasts, and sew them to their mouths so that it looked like they were eating them. Then she had them impaled on spikes and their mutilated bodies displayed to incite fear.

Kassios Dion’s Roman History E62.7 declares, as translated by Earnest Cary for the Loeb Classical Library:

“Those who were taken captive by the Britons were subjected to every known form of outrage. The worst and most bestial atrocity committed by their captors was the following. They hung up naked the noblest and most distinguished women and then cut off their breasts and sewed them to their mouths, in order to make the victims appear to be eating them; afterwards they impaled the women on sharp skewers run lengthwise through the entire body. All this they did to the accompaniment of sacrifices, banquets, and wanton behaviour, not only in all their other sacred places, but particularly in the grove of Andate. This was their name for Victory, and they regarded her with most exceptional reverence.”

Kassios Dion was writing much later than Tacitus, who does not mention anything about Boudicca cutting off women’s breasts and sewing them to their mouths, so this account must be considered suspect, but it is still plausible based on what we know from the archaeological record. Given Tacitus’s known tendency to glamorize rebels against Roman imperial rule, it is possible that he intentionally left out mention of Boudicca’s worst atrocities in order to make her seem less monstrous to his Roman readers.

Now, before anyone starts talking about how we can’t judge ancient historical figures by contemporary standards, let me point out that, first of all, I don’t think that is an entirely fair objection. As I explain in this article I wrote in November 2019, if slaughtering civilians is wrong, then it has always been wrong. Even if something was seen as acceptable in some historical time period, that doesn’t automatically make it right.

Second of all, even by the standards of ancient warfare, what Boudicca did was incredibly brutal. She went beyond the usual level of cruelty in ancient warfare. That is the reason why Kassios Dion reacts to her treatment of the Roman women with such horror and revulsion.

As I discuss further in this article I wrote in December 2019, the ancient world was a pretty violent place by contemporary standards, but, contrary to what some people have been led to believe, people didn’t just go around committing atrocities like the ones described above on a daily basis and, when someone did commit an atrocity, other people tended to recognize it as such.

In short, Boudicca wasn’t a feminist; she was just really angry. There’s a difference.

ABOVE: Illustration from an 1860 edition of David Hume’s The History of England in Three Volumes showing Boudicca haranguing her troops