The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson
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all cost money, and they had got badly into debt; and that, at root, was the cause of the disaster that was about to enfold them.
I’m sorry, Suetonius said to the hand-wringing deputation, we can’t stay; we can’t risk it. He just didn’t have the numbers. The Roman general’s troops were knackered, their feet flayed by the march from Wales. He could call upon a maximum force of about ten thousand from the whole island. Boudica and the Iceni already had about one hundred and twenty thousand and more were flocking to the banner of revolt.
These legionaries were no wimps, mind you: Germans, Serbs, Dutch, capable of going for days on nothing but hard tack and water, and then throwing a pontoon bridge across a river. But they knew how Boudica’s troops had carved up Petilius Cerealis and the 9th Legion, and understandably they didn’t fancy it themselves. So Suetonius did what it pained a Roman to do more than anything else.
He ordered a strategic retreat, back up what is now the Edgware Road, taking with him everybody who could walk and who wanted to come. Those who stayed included the old, the infirm, and women who were scared of marching through the forests, and merchants who just couldn’t face abandoning their investments.
For a few hours London had that eerie feeling of a Wild West town awaiting revenge: flapping awnings, and people peering through the casements at the deserted streets. We have some archaeological vignettes of the panic. In Eastcheap it looks as though someone grabbed a pot made in Lyons and then stuffed it with four finger-ring intaglio gems before grubbing it into the earth.
In a house in what is now King William Street, someone took seventeen coins, mainly bearing the head of Claudius, put them in a little red-glazed bowl and stuffed them in a corner. Others no doubt prayed, and sacrificed animals (we have the bones of a goat) and fondled the sooty little clay figurines of their household gods.
At length there was a rumble in what is now the Bishopsgate area.
Whooping down the branch-strewn track in their wickerwork horse-drawn war chariots came the Iceni warriors and their queen. She was a tremendous sight, according to Dio Cassius: very tall, with a harsh voice, and always wearing a multicoloured tunic, and with a great big one-kilo necklace – a torc – made of thick twisted strands of gold. She had a bosom so big that she was capable of using it to conceal her prophetic hare, an animal she would whisk out at the end of her bellicose speeches, and which she would invoke, depending on whether it ran to the left or the right, to foretell the outcome of battle. Within that bosom was a heart set on mayhem.
Far below the streets of modern London we are still unearthing the traces of the Boudican holocaust – a red layer of burned debris about forty-five centimetres thick. They set the first fires somewhere near Gracechurch Street, where Suetonius met the Londoners; and as the defenceless citizens ran from their homes the Celts chopped off their heads or slaughtered them in the Walbrook, the malodorous stream that ran between the two low hills – now Cornhill and Ludgate – that comprised early London.
They hanged, they burned and they crucified with a headlong fury, says Tacitus; while according to Dio Cassius they took the noblest and most beautiful women, stripped them and cut off their breasts and then sewed these breasts to their mouths so that they appeared to be eating them. They even profaned the graveyards, and evidence from excavations in the City of London seems to indicate that they exhumed the corpse of an old man and stuck the head of a young woman between his legs.
They went over the bridge and burned the buildings in what is now Southwark, while in the centre of town the buildings collapsed together in a single conflagration and a column of smoke rose to the heavens. Barely seventeen years after it was founded, London was destroyed.
By the time she had finished doing the same to St Albans, Boudica had killed seventy thousand people, claims Tacitus. That may be on the high side, but in proportional terms she was still more destructive of London and Londoners than the Black Death, the Great Fire, or Hermann Goering. In an act of incredible nihilism, she attacked the entire commercial infrastructure of Britannia – the very trade nexus the Iceni needed themselves.
They sold horses to the invaders; they depended on Roman custom. Boudica’s late husband Prasutagus was almost certainly a Roman citizen – and so, by extension, was Boudica. You have to wonder why she was so furious as to act in this apparently self-defeating way. The answer is that the Romans had behaved with diabolical stupidity.
When Prasutagus died, he had hoped to keep his East Anglian kingdom in the family, by leaving half to his daughters and half to the Emperor Nero. Whether or not they were following the orders of Nero the matricidal despot, the Roman administration decided to expropriate all Iceni possessions. The chief tax collector or procurator was one Catus Decianus – an arrogant twerp – who sent his centurions to Thetford, where Prasutagus and Boudica had lived in their kraal of concentric ditches and ramparts.
They laid hands on the queen of the Iceni; they cudgelled her milk-white Celtic skin and raped her daughters, and then, most stupidly of all, they humiliated the Iceni elite by robbing them of their property and enslaving the relatives of the dead king. It was this humiliation, and the Roman greed, that enraged the Iceni, and the next question, therefore, is why did the Romans behave so badly? It is all there, surely, in the text of Tacitus. It was primarily an economic fiasco.
When Claudius invaded Britain in AD 43, he was a stuttering pedant in search of military glory, and he was going against historic Roman advice. Britain, said most Roman experts, was a dump, and a scary dump at that. When Julius Caesar had led his first inconclusive expedition, a century earlier, he had found the place so poor and wretched that there was nothing worth taking. Don’t bother going beyond the existing northern boundaries, said the Emperor Augustus, it’s like fishing with a golden hook: the prize isn’t worth the tackle.
The Brits were said to swim in mud, and to have weird Maori-style tattoos of shapes and animals which they liked to exhibit on their half-naked bodies – like modern football fans – for all to see. Ovid said they were green. Martial said they were blue. Some said they were half-human and half-animal. Going to Britain was like a moon shot, in other words: you did it for glory rather than as an investment.
So when Claudius arrived on his elephants, and found himself accepting the surrender of British kings – with hardly any Roman losses – it must have been a tremendous moment for Roman pride. His general Aulus Plautius had expertly solved the problem that had defeated all previous inhabitants of this country, and built the bridge.
The bridge opened up the rest of Britain to people coming from the south coast, and soon London was a boom town. The population shot up; prices rose; people needed to finance the houses they wanted to build and the shops they hoped to open. So they turned to the financiers, and the bankers piled in.
Nero’s tutor Seneca made a loan of forty million sesterces for commercial development in Britain, and when you consider that a legionary was paid only nine hundred sesterces a year, you can see that this was a huge sum of money. The trouble was that the British investments did not pay off – or not fast enough for the bankers. It cost a lot to build the gleaming white temple of Claudius at Colchester, and to finance the port and shopping arcade of London.
The repayments weren’t enough; the loans were going bad and Catus Decianus the procurator started behaving like a real swine: whacking up the taxes on local people, kicking the natives out of their homes, and ultimately trying to despoil the Iceni of their land and property.
The position of the Britons is well summed up by the first ever image we have of Britannia, a carving from Aphrodisias in Turkey. It shows a bare-breasted woman being subdued from behind by Claudius in helmet and cuirass. She has a faintly cross-eyed expression, and in the words of Professor Miranda Aldhouse-Green of Cardiff University, ‘one has the disturbing feeling that he is about to bugger her’.
To put it in today’s language, the ordinary people of Britain were paying the price for a series of unwise property speculations, in which the borrowers and the bankers were both culpable. It wasn’t the first time it had happened in the Roman Empire, and it wasn’t the last time it was to happen in London.
In her own way, and at one remove, you could say that