Generations of people fed even small helpings of British history are likely to know one thing about Boadicea, now more accurately called Boudicca: she was an early indigenous tribal leader who fought and defeated the formidable Romans. As a result, she has been transformed into a very vaguely outlined national heroine.
As Elodie Harper’s brief introduction to her novel points out, at the west end of Westminster Bridge stands a huge statue of Boudicca in her chariot. Half hidden behind her are her two daughters, one of them holding the horse’s reins. They were mentioned but left nameless by the handful of Roman chroniclers who provided the scanty surviving evidence for Boudicca’s story.
Harper conjures them up as Solina and her younger sister Bellenia. Brought up as well-trained, elite warriors of the Iceni tribe, they can decide which of the well-born young men around them they will take to bed, and whether to end the relationship or continue it, meaning they are then regarded as married. (The historical accuracy of this detail is hazy, but it’s believed that Iceni culture was matriarchal; it sounds good.)
Catia, their mother, brought her own powerful connections to her alliance with her prominent Druid husband, Iceni leader Prasutagus. He has worked hard to maintain the Iceni’s precarious status as independent allies of Rome; but after his death, the ruling Roman legate drives home the lowly standing of this barbarian family by having Catia flogged and her daughters raped. She launches an initially successful uprising and is acclaimed as Boudicca, bringer of victory.
There’s nothing hagiographic about Harper’s complex depiction of her. By the later first century, Britain under its Roman colonisers was a confusing patchwork of constantly shifting alliances and internecine rivalries, prefiguring the chaotic power struggles soon to engulf the heart of the empire itself.
Harper skilfully and shockingly shows that Boudicca and her followers fiercely attacked not just Roman soldiers and settlers, but also those British tribes who had sought protection and wealth by accommodating the invaders. When she leads an attack on the colony of Camulodunum (Colchester), fleeing Romans and Britons, including many women and children, lock themselves into the huge Temple of Claudius. Boudicca has it encircled by stacks of wood and burnt to the ground. Her specific order to leave no Romans alive in the city leads to the death of her younger daughter.
We learn all this, and much of what follows, as it is experienced first hand either by Solina’s mother, both as Catia and as Boudicca, or by Solina, as she struggles to come to terms with what is happening and who her mother has become. The skill with which Harper creates these two intelligent women, beset by conflicting emotions, affections, ambitions, loyalties and the horrors of war, ensures that they and their lives are deeply engaging and impressive.
Equally compelling are the later chapters featuring either Solina or Suetonius Paulinus. He is the new legate whose disciplined Roman reinforcements, despite being massively outnumbered by the Britons, bring about Boudicca’s defeat and death. As the victor, Paulinus is responsible for bringing Solina to Rome, where Emperor Nero holds increasingly erratic and appalling sway. The difficult, shifting relationship of Paulinus and Solina is brilliantly built up, as is the dangerous political context in which it evolves.
During recent years, there has been a surge of excellent historical novels combining thoroughly credible research and finely judged writing that centre on women of the ancient world. Some, like Boudicca and her daughters, did exist, though very little is known about their lives. Others, like Amara, the Greek woman forced into prostitution in Pompeii who stars in The Wolf Den, Harper’s earlier trilogy, are wholly imagined. Though their stories are largely fictional, the authors illuminate their times in ways beyond the scope of most earlier work, mainly focused as it was on the lives and achievements of men.
