The Romans had so easily overcome the resistance of the natives that they were soon lulled into a feeling of security. For an uninterrupted space of sixteen years Colonia grew and prospered. It became a pleasant town, inhabited by veteran soldiers grown grey in the service of the Empire, and spending their later years in retirement. The Emperor Claudius, flushed with his success, had assumed the dignity of a god and had caused a Temple to be erected in the market-place to his honour, with attendant priests and altars. The governors and consuls were lesser gods, and treated with contempt and ill-judged severity the natives who had been overcome with such ease. The soldiery were uniformly brutal. Degeneracy and luxury flourished together with this attitude of oppression, and the town wholly lacked defences. It is not surprising that these colonists were bitterly hated by their vassals, who in especial looked upon the priests as so many harpies living upon their substance, and were so in fact, just as all priesthoods and all clergy have been from the beginning, and will be to the end. In this last respect these poor Trinobantes, these wretched barbarians, exhibited a quite surprising discernment, not equalled by the priest-ridden centuries of culture and enlightenment that have since passed.
These down-trodden natives were already ripe for revenge when a more than usually unjust proceeding of the Roman officials precipitated a rising. The Iceni, who inhabited Norfolk and Suffolk, and whose frontiers marched with those of the conquered province, had been ruled over by a certain King Prasutagus. Dying, he had hoped to propitiate the goodwill of the Roman officials by dividing the vast wealth he had accumulated, leaving one half to the Roman Emperor and the other moiety to his two daughters. But he was no sooner dead than his country was invaded. His widow, the famous Boadicea, resisted. She was publicly scourged, her daughters suffering the worst indignities, and her relatives sold into slavery. The whole nation rose in arms at these outrages, and their cousins, the Trinobantes, on the hither side of the Stour, joined them. The Romans saw their folly when too late. No more eloquent account is possible than that given by Tacitus of the premonitions of evil. The statue of Victory fell to the ground, and turned its back where the face had been, as if it fled before an enemy. Women were seen and heard singing mad, wild songs, prophesying disaster. Strange and unaccountable noises were heard in the house of assembly, and loud howlings in the theatre. In the estuary of the river the buildings of the city appeared reflected upside down, and ghastly remains of human bodies were seen in the ooze when the tide ebbed. The sea assumed the colour of blood, and the strangest whisperings stirred the air. Many of the wealthier colonists, alarmed at these portents, discovered that their health needed a change of air, and went for a holiday into Gaul, on the other side of the Channel, and those who remained applied for military help. In answer to this appeal, a meagre force of two hundred men was sent, and immediately employed to fortify the Temple. But before these measures could be completed, the town was surrounded and taken; the houses burnt and the inhabitants all slain, the little garrison in the Temple meeting a like fate after a defence of two days.
Meanwhile, Petilius Cerealis, commanding the Ninth Legion, which had been stationed on the Icenian frontier near where Mount Bures now stands, advanced to the aid of the doomed city. He, however, had moved too late, and met the victorious natives at Wormingford, where they almost entirely annihilated his forces. The evidences of that great disaster were discovered in 1836, when parallel rows of funeral urns, placed in order like streets, were unearthed, containing the bones of the lost legion gathered and burnt after the Roman sway had been reasserted.
These events happened in A.D. 61. Suetonius Paulinus, the then Commander-in-Chief, was at that time vigorously prosecuting a war with the Druids in the Isle of Anglesey, but on hearing of these disasters he hurried back through Verulamium and Londinium, collecting an army of ten thousand as he went. The whole of the south was aflame, and a numerous enemy hung on his flanks. The Roman citizens of both those towns piteously begged for protection, but were left to their fate, which was not long in doubt, for no sooner had the flying column passed than the tribes fell upon and utterly destroyed them. Seventy thousand citizens perished in that general massacre.
It is uncertain where the Roman army met the hordes commanded by that heroic Amazon, Boadicea, whom we should perhaps more correctly style "Boduoca." The British Queen is a deadly dull subject in the hands of the uninspired, who fail to render her "convincing." No one has done so well as Dion Cassius, who singularly resembles modern writers of "personal paragraphs" in what recent slang would term his "actuality." He says, "she was very tall, grim in appearance, keen-eyed, harsh-voiced, with a wealth of exceedingly yellow hair falling below her waist" (her golden hair was hanging down her back!), "wearing a highly-embroidered tunic and a thick cloak fastened with a buckle over it."
Tacitus describes the scene of battle as flanked by two woods, on a site resembling a stretch of country at Haynes Green, near Messing; but the great fight must have raged on many miles of ground, and no doubt included Lexden Heath.
The Britons were so sure of victory, that they had brought their women and children as spectators, and ranged them, seated in waggons, in a great semi-circle commanding the battlefield. The Roman historian says they were an "innumerable multitude." The British Queen, addressing her warriors from her chariot, called upon them to conquer or to die, resting her hopes on the strength of her forces and the justice of her cause; while Suetonius, on his part, urged his troops not to be dismayed either by the numbers of the enemy or their furious shouts. The British attacked, the Romans at first remaining on the defensive. When the fury of the first onslaught was exhausted, the foot soldiers of the Empire advanced in a wedge-like formation, the cavalry closing in on the flanks, driving the speedily disorganised enemy back upon the semi-circle of waggons, which cut off their retreat. Penned up in this way, the battle degenerated into a massacre, in which eighty thousand Britons were slain, including the women and children who had come out to witness the fortunes of the day. The unhappy queen, seeing all lost, poisoned herself.
Thus ended the British rule over Norfolk and Suffolk. From this time date the existing walls of Colchester. The conquerors were determined not to risk a repetition of the destruction of their first colony, and, choosing a new site, one mile to the east of the former city, they planted their walls on the ridge on which Colchester now stands, overlooking the valley of the Colne. These walls, enclosing an area of 1000 by 600 yards, still remain, after the passing of more than eighteen hundred years, the most perfect Roman fortifications in Britain. Even in that wide space of time the town of Colchester has not extended very greatly beyond them. In some directions, indeed—notably to the north and north-east and on the west—the ramparts still look out upon the open country. The walls have a thickness of from seven to eight feet, and are built of red Roman tiles, alternating with courses of stones, brought with great labour from the coast near Harwich; the neighbourhood of Colchester, and Essex in general, being quite innocent of stone of any kind. Harwich and the seashore even to this day supply the boulders of limestone from which the building-stones of Colchester's walls were cut.
Colchester was never again attacked during the period of more than three hundred years, in which the Romans ruled. In the events of A.D. 61, they had learnt the double lesson of being armed and of treating a foe, once conquered, with generosity. In the period between these events and the year 410, when the Imperial forces were withdrawn from Britain to help save the heart of the Empire from ruin, conquered and conquerors had to live together, and made the best of the necessity. Roman colonists intermarried with the gradually Romanised British, and the race of Romano-Britons thus created, during three centuries, gradually grew to look upon Britain as their home and themselves as a nation. Thus, towards the end, usurpers of the Imperial authority are found setting up as independent sovereigns, and civilised British princes treating on equal terms with Roman statesmen. In this way the British in some measure came into their own again, and to these circumstances we owe the wild legends of that mysterious monarch, "old King Cole," who is to Colchester what King Arthur is to Cornwall, the great local hero. "Colking's Castle," on Colchester's walls, and the earthworks near Lexden known as "King Cole's Kitchen"; nay, the very name of Colchester itself—"Cole's Chester," or castle, derive, according to legends, from this scarce more than mythical personage. Those stories make him one Coel, or Collius, the last of a line of semi-independent British kings who were allowed to retain a nominal sovereignty after Cunobelin's death and the Roman conquest. The story goes on to tell how, on the death of the usurper Carausius, in A.D. 293, Coel surrendered the country to the Emperor Constantius Chlorus, on that successor of the Cæsar's marrying his daughter Helena, who became the mother of Constantine the Great, and was also the discoverer of the true Cross at Jerusalem. The arms of Colchester still bear a ragged cross between four crowns, in allusion to this tale of the Empress Helena; and in earnest that this is a distinction which Colchester will not willingly lose, an effigy of her, holding a cross very plain to see, is newly set up on the very topmost point of the gorgeous new Town Hall, recently completed.
To that most untruthful of chroniclers, Geoffrey of Monmouth, the legend of Coel is chiefly traced. He may either have imagined it, or have woven the story out of existing legends, which had in turn derived from the Saxons, who, after the departure of the Romans, had wrested the country from the Romanised British. They captured and burnt the town of Colonia, and wondering at its massive walls, took them to have been the work of some great king, after whom the place had been named. Legends of Cole soon sprang up, and by the time the Saxons themselves had been converted to Christianity he was fully provided with a history.