Chariots of Faux

An aristocratic heiress who used family connections in an unsuccessful squabble over an inheritance has been invoked as a feminist icon. Boudicca, the widow of a chieftain in first-century Roman Britain, was cheated out of her rights by the minions of the emperor Nero, and supposedly used some inflammatory libertarian rhetoric in enlisting the voters to her cause. Her tribe inflicted considerable damage on the occupier, and the fact that their leader was a woman seems to have horrified the Romans much as a later generation of free Englishmen was horrified by Jeanne d'Arc. No doubt the sack of Camulodunum was carried out with all British decency and female good sense, the extent of civilian casualties and the atrocities inflicted being self-evidently exaggerated by the lesser breeds for partisan effect. Even so, the image of a rabble-rousing leader who inconvenienced a great many people before being defeated by some better organised Europeans has unarguable resonance as a modern British icon.