Boudica

Real Name: Unrevealed - Boudica may have been a title rather than her name

Identity/Class: Normal human

Occupation: Tribal leader, warrior

Group Membership: Iceni tribe

Affiliations: Trinovantes tribe

Enemies: Roman army

Known Relatives: Prasutagus (husband, deceased), two unidentified daughters

Aliases: Various variations on the spelling of her name, including Boudicea

Base of Operations: The region of Britain that is now Southern England

First Appearance: (born) circa 20-30 A.D. (see comments);

Died: circa 60-61 A.D.

Powers/Abilities: Apparently a skilled warrior and tactician.

Height: "Very tall"
Weight: Unrevealed
Eyes: Unrevealed
Hair: "Tawny"

Summary: Boudica was a queen in ancient Britain who led her tribe in rebellion against the Roman invaders.

History: Boudica was the wife of Prasutagus, the leader of the Iceni tribe who lived mostly in the region that is now known as Norfolk. The Iceni had a contentious relationship with the Roman invaders; during Emperor Claudius' invasion in 43 A.D. they had been allies, but only four years later had risen up in revolt when the Roman governor threatened to disarm them. Though they lost that conflict, they were allowed to retain nominal independence. However, after Prasutagus died in 60 A.D. the Romans ignored his will, which left his kingdom to his daughters, and forcibly annexed the Iceni kingdom into their province of Britannia. The pillaged the kingdom, confiscated Prasutagus' property, and when Boudica objected they flogged her and raped her two daughters. However, rather than forcing her to submit, this prompted Boudica to lead her people in a violent uprising. Allied with the neighbouring Trinovantes an army of 120,000 men captured Camulodunum (modern Colchester), and decimated the first Roman Legion that came to retake it. They then moved on Londinium (modern London), and burned it to the ground, taking no prisoners but instead slaughtering any Roman they captured. However, having heard of the rebellion, Roman general Gaius Suetonius Paulinus caught Boudica's forces in an ambush after they had sacked Verulamium (modern St. Albans), and though Boudica's army had superior numbers, they were wiped out, and Boudica was reportedly slain.

   After her death her uprising was recorded by the Roman scholar Tacitus in his histories, ensuring her actions were not lost to the mists of time. These were expanded on about a century later by Cassius Deo, who also provided the first description of her, albeit of debatable veracity given he wrote it so long after her demise. From these two accounts Boudica was rediscovered by English scholars during the Renaissance, leading to some of her earliest fictionalised appearances in Edmund Spenser's poem The Ruines of Time (1591) and the play Bonduca (1612). Her fame continued to grow in the 18th century, where she came to symbolise British nationhood and defiance against potential invaders. The 1782 poem by William Cowper, Boadicea: An Ode, cast her as "the British warrior queen," and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 1864 poem Boädicéa reinforced this. George Alfred Henty's 1893 novel Beric the Briton featured a fictionalised (and slightly sanitised, since it was aimed at children) account of Boudica's rebellion, and while seen through the eyes of the titular Beric featured Boudica prominently, and she has continued to show up in a variety of fictional tales, some more closely based on actual history than others, ever since.

Comments: Since Boudica translates literally as Victorious Woman, it may be an description/honorific applied to her after the fact rather than her given name. The first account of her life and rebellion was written decades after the fact by the Roman scholar Tacitus, though his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, was a military tribune in Britain at the time of her rebellion and so Tacitus at least had access to someone with first hand knowledge of events.

   We don't really have any details about when Boudica was born. However, since she died circa 60 A.D. and was old enough to have had two daughters who seemed to have reached their teens, she was at least in her twenties when she died and more likely in her 30s or 40s, placing her birth probably somewhere between 20 and 30 A.D. - certainly not later than 40 A.D. and highly unlikely to be earlier than 10 A.D.

   Boudica is often associated with riding into battle on scythed chariots (ones with blades sticking out of the wheels to cut opponents as they raced past), and has been since at least 1812 when painter Thomas Stothard depicted her riding in one; despite this apparently being inaccurate (Britons of the era had war chariots, but scythed chariots were Roman weapons), the image stuck, not least because a bronze statue of Boadicea and Her Daughters at one end of Westminster Bridge in London, just across the road from the Palace of Westminster, has depicted them aboard just such a chariot since it was installed in 1902.

Appearance checklist (not including reprints): There are various common spelling variations of Boudica's name, most frequently Boudicca and Boadicea, and many of the appearances below used one or other of these variations. Boadicea in particular was long the most common spelling, until it seems people began to feel that was a Romanisation of her name, and Boudica was closer to how the Britons would have spelled it. I've tried to list what version of the name was used in each instance below, but might have missed a few or listed the wrong one on occasion.

In prose

In comics

The earliest appearance of "Boadicea" in comics that I can find was in Famous Funnies#50 (Eastern Color, 1938), which included a half page summary of her story; it should be noted that while generally accurate, the details of her demise (shown below) aren't as certain as the strip suggests. While some accounts do claim she died from drinking poison to avoid capture, others state she was killed by a spear. Next came Jumbo Comics#63 (Fiction House, 1944), wherein time traveller Stuart Taylor and his friends went back in time from World War II to see "England's first WAC," and experience"how the tradition started" of "British women aiding their country's war effort." This version, unlike pretty much every other one, shows Boadicea as a fairly helpless damsel who has to be rescued from the Romans by the American time travellers. In Sensation Comics#60 (DC, 1946) it was the time-hopping Wonder Woman's turn to meet Boadicea and assist in her war; this time, though she does require the visiting heroine's aid, she was also depicted as returning the favour when Wonder Woman was in trouble and being a warrior in her own right. Boadicea was again assisted by people from another era when she met the titular Time Travelers in ACG's Operation Peril#12 (1952).

   British weekly Knockout (IPC, 19th-26th March, 3rd April 1960) hosted Boadicea next in three episodes of the comedy strip Space Age Kit (though she only appears in one panel of the first episode); definitely a warrior again, this depiction of the queen is also the most physically unattractive. Boadicea then got a single panel on the cover of Valiant (IPC, March 16th 1963) as part of a cover feature on ancient Britons, and a more suburban housewife version appeared in Pilote (1965- not sure of exact issue, but between #307-334) in one of the episodes of the Asterix story later collected as Asterix in Britain; though Asterix is set during the reign of Julius Caesar, around a hundred years prior to Boudica's revolt, the Asterix strip has never worried about letting historical accuracy get in the way of a good joke. The British comic Tornado featured Boadicea's uprising in #13-19 (1979) in the strip Blackhawk, about a Nubian slave turned Roman soldier; the queen herself appeared in #16 and 18, with her death announced but not shown in #19.

   It was Boadicea's turn to be the time traveller in Fantagraphic's Metacops#1 and 3 (1991), part of the titular team composed of famous historical figures recruited to protect the timelines. The French series Vae Victis! ("Woe to the Vanquished") told the tale of a Celtic slavegirl, Amber, who escaped her Roman captors and became a rebel leader in Briton, taking on the alias of Boadicae; though this story is set during Julius Caesar's time, making it questionable that author Simon Rocca intended Amber to be the historical Boudica questionable, she has a daughter who she also gives that name to, implying that the queen who led the Iceni to war in 61 A.D. might be one of her descendants.

   Yet another time traveller, this one an ancient Celtic warrior traversing the centuries via mystical means, joined Boudica's campaign against the Romans in the Slaine series in 2000AD#855-859 and #889-896 (1993-1994), then legendary artist retold her story, minus any visitors from other times, in Frank Frazetta Fantasy Illustrated#6 (1999). League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910 (2009) had a one-panel cameo from Boudica, spotted as the temporally displaced Andrew Norton skipped around London's history. Dark Horse's House of Night#2 (2011), set in the universe of the similarly named novels by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast, reveals that two of the book series' background characters, the vampires Una and Morain, are the daughters of Boudicca, and tells their history, which naturally features their famous mother.

   2000AD#1792-1799 (2012) again features Boudicca (see image, right), this time featuring the immortal warrior Aquila coming to aid her war. In Wonder Woman: Future's End#1 (2014) and a world where history had been fractured, she was one of Wonder Woman's generals, while in Hellboy: The Witch Tree (2015) she made another single-panel cameo in a flashback to her era. In Baker Street Peculiars#2 (Boom! 2016) her (real world) statue was imbued with her spirit to bring it to life, while the story in Last Gang in Town#2 (Vertigo, 2016) opened with a flashback to Boudica as an example of the U.K.'s history of rebellion against tyranny. Most often merely a guest star in other people's stories, Boudicca was the protagonist of Markosia's 2017 graphic novel (also called Boudicca) which again purported to tell her entire story. 

In film &TV

The history of Boudica in film goes at least as far back as 1927 and the British silent historical movie Boadicea which starred Phyllis Neilson-Terry in the title role. Several decades later Hammer made the movie The Viking Queen (which, despite the title, has no Vikings in it, at least in the most common usage of the word), which featured Queen "Salina" of the "Icena" tribe during the Roman occupation of Britain; clearly inspired by Boudica, with Salina riding around in a scythed chariot, it transformed her tale into a love story between the queen and a Roman. In 1978 the U.K.'s Thames Television produced Warrior Queen, six half hour episodes chronicling Boudica's life as played by Sian Phillips. A much more fanciful interpretation of Bodecea (sic) came in Xena: Warrior Princess' season 3 episode The Deliverer (20th October 1997), where the titular Xena visited Britain to assist Jennifer Ward-Lealand's Bodecea in battling Julius Caesar. It was Alex Kingston's turn to play the part in the 2003 TV movie docudrama Boudica, released in the States as Warrior Queen. Many years later Kate Nash portrayed the rebel leader as part of the ensemble cast of  Horrible Histories: The Movie - Rotten Romans (2019).

In audio & radio

Circa 2007 Emma Samms voiced the spirit of Queen Boudicea in the BBC's computer-animated webseries Ghosts of Albion, while the Doctor and Leela ran into Ella Kenion's Boudica in the Big Finish audio drama The Wrath of the Iceni in 2012.

CLARIFICATIONS:
Boudica should not be confused with:

• anyone with a similar name

First Posted: 27/04/2023
Last updated: 27/04/2023

Any Additions/Corrections? Please let me know.

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