By A.D. 47, when Plautius went home to enjoy a well-merited triumph, the whole south and east of the island appeared to be passing with little apparent effort into the form of a Roman province. The frontier probably followed for the most part the lines of the Lower Severn, Avon, and Welland, but in the centre it bulged outwards around Ratæ (Leicester). Here it would have been well for Rome to have halted. The territory already occupied was fairly settled, capable of great development, and the frontier was easily defensible. But a forward policy invariably brings trouble in its train. In the North Midlands the Coritani and Cornavii were restless, and behind them the great Brigantian tribe, which held the whole breadth of the North from Humber to Tyne, was ever raiding. Still greater was the danger in Wales, where the Silures of the south and the Ordovices of the north were the fiercest warriors of Britain, where was the Druids’ sacred home of Mona, and where King Caradoc, the last warrior of Caswallon’s famous line, had taken refuge.
Publius Ostorius Scapula, the new governor, had perhaps no alternative to the ‘forward’ policy; at any rate, he committed himself to it. He conquered the weak Coritani and Cornavii with slight difficulty, stationed Legio IX. at Lindum (Lincoln) to keep guard over them, and established a colony of time-expired veterans as a garrison for Camulodunum. Then he turned upon Caradoc. Legio II. moved forward from Glevum (Gloucester) to Isca Silurum (Caerleon), while Scapula with the XIVth and XXth established himself with his base at Viroconium, the camp, afterwards the town, beside Wrekin, whose ruins have been laid bare in our own days. The men of Cambria were thrown on the defensive by the great force directed against them. Caradoc manœuvred among the mountains, harassed the Roman line of march, cut off detachments, but was at last brought to bay in A.D. 50. All that could be suggested to counterbalance the superiority of the Romans in everything but mere numbers he did. He posted his army behind a roaring mountain torrent, with both flanks protected by craggy heights, and his centre covered by ‘sangars’ of piled stones. The wild warriors of Wales swore by their gods to conquer or die. Caradoc rode up and down the line, bade them save themselves and those they loved from slavery and death, told them (with justifiable stretching of truth) how his ancestors had repulsed the mightiest of the Cæsars, and besought them to do their duty to the last. They did not fail him, but fortune was against them. The battle was furiously contested, but the entrenchments were stormed at last; and after bravely rallying in the face of the legions and renewing the fray, the Britons finally broke and fled. Caradoc’s wife and daughter were taken captive in the camp, and the king, fleeing for aid to the Brigantes, was surrendered to the Romans by the Queen Cartimandua. The story of how he and his family were dragged in chains through Rome to make a holiday for its cosmopolitan populace, and released by the kindly Emperor, is well known. One could wish that the old ruler, whose character has suffered so much at the hands of detractors, had spared a brave man and two helpless women the cruel humiliation of public exposure as well. But probably no Roman was capable of such generosity. Aurelian treated Zenobia as Claudius treated Caradoc, and from the bas-reliefs on the column of Arcadius we see that the Christian Romans of the fourth century were capable of dragging female captives, pinioned like criminals, in triumphal procession.
Undismayed by the fate of their King, the Silures fought on desperately. Again and again they gained considerable guerrilla successes. Foraging detachments were attacked; two cohorts destroyed; a strong brigade of legionaries surrounded, severely defeated, and only saved from destruction by the arrival of reinforcements. Scapula died of vexation and fatigue, and the Silures just afterwards attacked and defeated a whole legion. Scapula’s successor, Didius, was threatened by the Brigantes, who were growing angry at the ignominious part to which Cartimandua’s policy condemned them, and the Cambrians, despite constant warfare, remained unsubdued.
In A.D. 59 C. Suetonius Paulinus, one of the best soldiers of the Empire, took command in Britain, and at once initiated a vigorous offensive. He determined to turn the flank of Wales, as it were, and strike a staggering blow by uprooting the Druid stronghold in Mona. Didius appears to have fortified Deva (Chester), and now Paulinus enlarged it, moving the XIVth and XXth Legions there from Viroconium, and making it his base for the advance. In A.D. 60 he arrived on Menai Strait with flat-bottomed boats for the transport of his infantry. The Ordovician warriors were massed on the shore of Mona to oppose the landing; frantic women, clothed in black and bearing blazing torches, with wild eyes and tossing hair, like the Furies, as the superstitious soldiers muttered, rushed about exhorting the men and screaming curses at the hated Romans. Behind the Druids were engaged in their dreadful rites, and the shrieks of the perishing victims rang over the Strait. For a while there was something like incipient panic among the Romans, but the fierce adjurations of their officers steadied them, and when they had effected a landing, burning with rage at their hesitation, there was small hope for the Britons. The fighting men were cut down in thousands, women and children involved in the hideous massacre. The Druids were slaughtered at their rites, or tossed upon their own flaming pyres. The sanctuaries were destroyed, the sacred groves cut down, and Paulinus might hope that he had dealt a decisive blow, when jaded messengers dashed into camp with the stunning tidings that all Roman Britain was in a flame of revolt.
The rebellion had been long brewing, and for it the Roman civil and military administration, above all the Roman capitalists, were to blame. To create farms for retired veterans the military chiefs had recklessly evicted native landowners. The military settlers insulted and oppressed their British neighbours. The discipline of the legions, relaxed by years of guerrilla warfare, was probably bad, and it would seem that Paulinus, a soldier before all, was not the man to trouble himself about the rights of civilians, especially if they were also barbarians. The Imperial procurator (i.e., practically financial agent), Decianus Catus, was calling for the repayment of various loans advanced by Claudius to chiefs; presumably Nero needed money for his expensive pleasures. The British chiefs were careless and ostentatious, and, now that they could not enrich themselves by plunder in war, were apt to borrow heavily—of course, from Roman capitalists. Many of them were hopelessly embarrassed, unable to pay the iniquitous interest, much less the principal; and the greedy usurers were only too ready to drag them further into the toils. Nero’s famous minister, the Stoic Seneca, was one of the worst offenders. Usury was a chief source of his vast income. Now, as if to add fuel to the smouldering fire, he suddenly called in his British loans, 40,000,000 sesterces (£360,000). Cherchez la femme! say the French when trouble threatens. No doubt the saying is not without truth, but a study of history, and especially of Roman history, leads rather to the conclusion that the greed of the speculator has been responsible for a great deal of the world’s misery.
Just at this juncture died Prasutagus, King of the Iceni. He made the Emperor heir to his kingdom, and joint inheritor of his vast personal wealth, evidently in the hope that his widow Boudicca and her two daughters would thereby be assured of protection. Paulinus and Catus must share the blame for what followed. The country of the Iceni was treated like conquered territory. Military violence went hand in hand with civil spoliation. The widowed queen was actually whipped by the scoundrels who dishonoured the Roman name; her orphaned daughters were foully outraged. One can only hope that the vile deeds were committed by one or two especially degraded creatures; but neither their associates who looked on, nor those who sent them, can escape blame.
It was the last straw. The Iceni rose as one man at the call of their outraged Queen. Tall and stately of presence, with bright eyes and thick, flowing, red-gold hair, was the sorely wronged widow of Prasutagus, and as, splendid in the barbaric magnificence of a British queen, she harangued her liegemen, told of violence and lashes, and insults unmentionable, pointed to the shame-bowed forms of her violated children, the rage of the Iceni rose to fever heat. Out from the bounds of their country poured the wild barbaric host, and ill fared it with the Roman who strayed across its path. News of the rising came all too late. Quintus Petilius Cerealis at Lindum called in all that he could of the IXth Legion and marched southward, but the Iceni had a long start. On they rushed across Suffolk towards doomed Camulodunum, the Trinobantes rallying to them with fierce unanimity. ‘Colonia Victrix’ had no walls; only the temple of Divus Claudius and some neighbouring buildings formed a sort of citadel. Catus sent what soldiers he could—only two hundred—to help the colonists in the defence; but time was lacking wherein to raise entrenchments, and little had been done when the Britons were at hand, and swept through the city in a whirlwind of vengeance and destruction. Some of the defenders held out for two days in the temple, then it, too, was taken. There were hideous scenes. The outrage-maddened princesses were little likely to restrain their furious tribesmen. The innocent perished with the guilty, without distinction of age or sex; women were stripped, scourged, horribly mutilated, and left to die a lingering death of agony impaled on stakes. Such was the harvest of the seed sown by military oppression and capital-owning greed.
Now followed a great but obscure campaign. Tacitus is a little less vague than usual, but gives not a hint as to chronology. The main point is that London was already the most important place in the island. This is clearly indicated, but everything else is exceedingly difficult to follow. So far as can be ascertained, the sequence of events was this: Boudicca, having destroyed Camulodunum, faced round to meet Cerealis, who was approaching from Lindum. His force was attacked by the raging horde of Britons and practically annihilated. Some 3,000 legionaries and many auxiliaries perished; only the remains of the cavalry, with Cerealis, cut their way out and escaped.
Paulinus meanwhile was hastening to the scene of operations. He left, perforce, a strong garrison in Deva, and marched for London with the XIVth Legion, some picked cohorts of the XXth, some auxiliaries, and cavalry. He sent off orders to the IInd and IXth Legions to join him. A glance at the map of Roman Britain will show that London was the natural place of concentration.
We may assume that Cerealis’s action in marching from Lindum had, at any rate, drawn the Britons away from the vital point. Paulinus reached London before Boudicca. Then the blow fell. No troops were there. The IXth Legion, we know, had been destroyed. Pœnius Postumus, the temporary commander of the IInd, paralyzed by the responsibility, perhaps thought fit to transmit the order to his absent superior, and at any rate stood fast on the Lower Severn. London was not fortified—it must have been crowded with fugitives—and Paulinus’s entire strength, according to Tacitus, was but 10,000 men. There is really no reason to believe, as has been suggested, that he had outpaced his army and had only his escort with him. The position is quite clear. He had ordered a concentration at London, and it had failed. Instead of 20,000 men or more, he had only 10,000 wherewith to defend an open town crowded with refugees. He decided that London must be abandoned. Of its population, swollen, probably, by much of that of Verulam, those who had most to fear—i.e., the Continental residents—followed the march. Some, doubtless, escaped on shipboard, but many, probably those of British birth, remained.