Nearly 2,000 years ago, the queen of a Celtic tribe in Britain led a bloody revolt against the Romans. Queen Boudica, a ruler of the Iceni tribe of Celtic Britons in the first century A.D., challenged the Roman occupiers and was later celebrated as a British national heroine.
But where was Boudica (also spelled Boudicca, Boadicea or Boudecia) buried? Over the years, several locations were said to have been her burial place, including beneath a platform in one of London’s busiest train stations.
Boudica “was very, very pro-British, and very much a freedom fighter,” Miranda Aldhouse-Green, a professor emerita of archaeology at Cardiff University in the U.K. and the author of “Boudica Britannia” (Routledge, 2021), told Live Science.
Her conflict with the Romans originated in about A.D. 60, after they brutally denied joint rulership of the Iceni to her daughters and Boudica resolved to free the whole island from Roman rule.
“She decided that she was going to get an army together and push the Romans out of Britain, which she very nearly did,” Aldhouse-Green said.
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Clash of cultures
Boudica was the wife of the Iceni ruler Prasutagus, a wealthy client king of the Romans, who ruled lands on Britain’s east coast until his death in about A.D. 60. According to historical records, his will left partial rulership of the Iceni tribe to his two daughters, whose names are unrecorded. The rule of the rest of his territories was to go to the Romans, who had successfully invaded Britain in about A.D. 43.
But under Roman law, women were forbidden from inheriting any type of rule, although it is unclear if Boudica or her daughters were Roman citizens, Caitlin Gillespie, a classical historian at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and the author of “Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain” (Oxford University Press, 2018), told Live Science.
This clash of cultures, and perhaps raw politics, led the Romans to deny the claim that Boudica’s daughters could rule any part of the Iceni lands. And they were brutal in their denial. “There was sort of a muck-up with the Romans, who treated Boudica very badly,” Aldhouse-Green said. “They came storming in, confiscated all the assets, flogged Boudica, and raped her two daughters.”
After that, “Boudica decided that was it,” Aldhouse-Green said, and she established a rebel army with her own people and Britons from other tribes who had also been treated badly by the Romans.
Boudican revolt
The Boudican revolt lasted for several months and caused the destruction of several important Roman settlements in Britain, including their capital, Camulodunum (Colchester in Essex), and the town of Londinium (now London). But it ultimately failed, and Boudica’s rebellious forces were defeated in A.D. 61 at the Battle of Watling Street, a later name for the ancient road that led northwest from Londinium.
Boudica herself either died in the battle or took her own life when it was clear that she had lost. Despite her defeat, she was later fêted as a national heroine, especially during the reign of Queen Victoria, and she is often conflated with Britannia, the nation’s mythical warrior queen.
The idea that Boudica was buried beneath what’s now a platform at London’s King’s Cross train station seems to have originated in the 19th century. The station was built in an area called Battle Bridge, and according to legend, Boudica had been defeated there. But historians now think the name “Battle Bridge” was a corruption of “Broadford Bridge” and that it had nothing to do with Boudica. The idea gained strength with the discovery of Roman-era remains at the site when the station was built in the 1850s, but there is nothing to suggest Boudica was ever buried there.
Rumors of Boudica’s burial place abounded in the 19th century, due in part to her symbolic association with Britain’s Queen Victoria. Some speculated she was buried beneath Parliament Hill on the southeastern side of Hampstead Heath, which loomed prominently in the north of early London near the southern end of Watling Street. (Historians now think, however, that the battle happened hundreds of miles north along the same road, perhaps in Warwickshire.)
Other antiquarians and writers, eager to connect Boudica to significant landmarks, proposed she had been buried at Stonehenge (already thousands of years old by Boudica’s time), while others suggested she might have been buried in one of the many Iron Age tombs in southern Britain, especially in what had been the Iceni territories in the East.
But Aldhouse-Green cautioned that Boudica’s grave, wherever it is, will probably never be found.
“The Romans decided when she died that they would prevent any kind of memorial, because they were afraid that it would be a rallying point for rebellion,” she said. “So they made absolutely certain that there was nothing to show where she was buried.”
