The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson
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of what was to become a grand London tradition of female leaders. There is evidence that the early Britons were accustomed to strong female figures: Cartimandua, queen of the Brigantes, gave her menfolk a very tough time.
Then look at Elizabeth’s great pre-Armada speech at Tilbury, all about having the body of a poor weak woman but the heart and stomach of a man. It’s pure Boudica. Or look at Victoria, with her tartan cloak and brooch. There is more than a hint of the queen of the Iceni.
Or look, dare I say it, at Margaret Thatcher, with her blonde hair, staring eye, harsh voice and firm views about national sovereignty. These days we identify Boudica so closely with London-based national heroines that we get into a muddle about what actually happened.
If you go to Westminster Bridge, you can see the famous 1884 sculpture of the outraged bare-breasted battleaxe and her poor raped daughters, framed against the sky in their scythe-wheeled war chariot. On the pediment are some lines from ‘Boudica an ode’, a popular poem by the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper:
‘Regions Caesar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway,
Where his eagles never flew,
None invincible as they’
Cowper’s point is that Boudica had the last laugh on Rome. It was her ‘posterity’ – her British descendants – who went on to found an empire vaster than Caesar’s. Which is all very patriotic and consoling, but completely untrue.
After she had sacked St Albans, Boudica went off to the Midlands where on some as yet unidentified plain she was finally and decisively routed by Suetonius Paulinus, whose troops, disciplined and refreshed, overcame odds of 20–1.
Boudica either died of dysentery or poisoned herself; and no, she is not buried under a platform at King’s Cross station. Contrary to what Cowper says, her defeat was so total that her language was almost completely wiped out, and her Celtic posterity was driven very largely to the fringes of Britain, while the British Empire was eventually ruled in a language that owed much more to that of Suetonius Paulinus than to that of Boudica.
The greatest thing Boudica did for London was so to shock and infuriate the Romans that it became a matter of prestige to win the province back and to assert Londinium’s status as an ever more glorious and important centre.
It was thanks to Boudica’s banker-bashing aggression that the Romans rebuilt London – to an extent that archaeologists have only recently begun to appreciate – as one of the biggest and most populous cities of the northern part of the Empire. It was Claudius’ quest for prestige that led to London’s foundation, and one of the most impressive spurts of construction began when it was announced that the Emperor Hadrian was on his way.
He made London the capital
Clonk. They were rebuilding London Bridge in 1834 when workmen hit something on the bed of the river. It was green and slimy, but after they had got the mud off they could see it was a fine Roman head, 43 centimetres high and slightly over life-size.
It was an emperor, with a long straight nose and a slight frown and – aha – a beard and well-trimmed moustache. He wasn’t as fleshy as Nero, and the beard was less bushy than Marcus Aurelius. It was a delicate sort of beard. It belonged to a Hellenophile aesthete and intellectual, one of the greatest administrators the world has ever seen.
He was called Publius Aelius Trajanus Hadrianus Augustus, or Hadrian. Born in 76 AD of Spanish/Italian descent, he had spent his career touring the Empire and bequeathing us some of the most colossal ruins of the ancient world – from the rebuilt Pantheon in Rome to the Temple of Zeus in Athens to the British wall that bears his name.
Someone had made this fine bronze head in his honour and stuck it in the marketplace; and then someone else had come and chopped it off and chucked it in the river. They didn’t melt it down to make saucepans. They wanted to show active contempt. They wanted to humiliate the emperor and his sneer of cold command.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is probably almost 1700 years since this crime was committed, but I am going to produce for you individuals who had the motive, and the opportunity, to carry out this macabre offence …
To understand the mystery of the decapitation of Hadrian, you must grasp that this bronze object was actually divine. It was the head of a god. Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, had instituted the cunning system of the imperial cult, by which the emperor himself personified the majesty and divinity of Rome. If you were an ambitious local, and you wanted to get on in the Roman Empire, you became a priest in the imperial cult. That was why the first important temple of Roman Britain was the temple of the deified Claudius, and that was why Boudica took such pleasure in burning it down. It was a seat of local government, a symbol of power.
So when in 121 AD it was announced that the emperor – the living god – was actually coming to Britain, the news broke over London like thunder.
The Romans had almost panicked when Boudica torched the early settlements. Nero came close to abandoning the province altogether. But once she had been defeated, they decided it must not happen again. They poured money into the place, and from 78 to 84 AD the governor Agricola subsidised the building of squares and temples and grand housing of one kind or another. There were still uprisings, and pressure from the Celtic fringe, but in a sense the very threat of revolt was good for London. Thanks to the bridge, London was the centre of military operations, and that meant soldiers flush with cash.
The Londoners built baths at Cheapside and then at Huggin Hill, where they shocked purists by enjoying mixed bathing. There is an amphitheatre under the Guildhall, and you can go and have the spooky experience of standing on the spot where men and beasts were slaughtered, and you can inspect the bones of a female gladiator. In the sixty years between the Boudica revolt and the arrival of Hadrian, the Londoners Romanised fast.
They steadily took off their trousers and put on togas and started to get rather good at Latin – Tacitus says they spoke it better than the Gauls. They invited each other round to their dining rooms, painted a fashionable arterial red, to eat turbot on expensive Mediterranean silverware and to toast each other in Bordeaux or Moselle. It was the beginning of the London dinner party. ‘The native Britons described these things as civilisation,’ sneers Tacitus, ‘when in fact they were simply part of their enslavement.’
London was already a loyal and growing outpost. But when they heard the Emperor was on his way, the citizens went into overdrive. It was like being awarded the right to host the Olympics: the place had to look its best – and that meant infrastructure investment. The Emperor was known to like sleeping in the barracks with the troops, so the London authorities seem to have erected a new barracks for his visit – a big square fort at Cripplegate – complete with the living quarters that he famously liked to inspect.
What looks like a governor’s palace was constructed, a splendid place of courtyards and fountains, on the site of what is now Cannon Street station. They built a new forum, far grander than the patch of gravel on which Suetonius Paulinus had addressed the first Londoners, in an area partly now occupied by Leadenhall market. At the north end of this vast space they built a basilica – a mixture of a shopping centre and law courts.
If you go downstairs at the barbers at 90 Gracechurch Street you can see that this wasn’t any old basilica. Look at that great chunk of brick and masonry that formed one of the piers of the structure and you get a sense of the scale. This was the biggest forum and basilica north of the Alps. The building was 164 yards long, and when you look at the model in the museum of London you are forced to adjust your preconceptions about our city’s place in the Roman world.
When Hadrian arrived in AD 122 he found a big, bustling place, with a population of perhaps 100,000 and a ruling elite in a state of sycophantic ecstasy. They installed the emperor and his retinue in the smart new barracks and governor’s palace. They showed him