Commuters on the omnibus from Brixton would have encountered a strange sight as they crossed Westminster Bridge and approached the Houses of Parliament on the morning of 17 January 1898. There had been nothing of note across the road from Big Ben on the previous evening, but by morning, a statue of Boudica, ancient queen of the Iceni, and her two daughters, had come to occupy the site on the Embankment. The three women could be seen riding in a scythe-wheeled war chariot pulled by two thundering steeds. Standing ten feet high, with her arms out-stretched and her spear clasped firmly in one hand, the warrior queen Boudica would have cut a fearsome silhouette (see Figure 1) – despite being a plaster model painted to look like a bronze. As the city of London slowly came awake that winter morning, it found ‘itself possessed of one of the finest historical monuments’.Footnote 1 Throughout the following days and weeks, hurrying pedestrians stopped to gaze up at the statue. Even Queen Victoria and her retinue paid a curious visit to the Embankment a few weeks after Boudica and her daughters appeared.Footnote 2 The plaster model stood on the site for over a month before it was removed; the bronze was to arrive belatedly, in the summer of 1902, when it was placed in the same spot quietly and without ceremony.
Thomas Thornycroft's ‘Boadicea Group’ on Westminster Bridge. © Michael Ciancia.
The bronze ‘Boadicea group’, the work of Thomas Thornycroft (1815–85), remains one of the most widely recognized portrayals of Boadicea, or Boudica,Footnote 3 queen of the Iceni.Footnote 4 This ancient figure has been and continues to be celebrated as the leader of a collection of British tribes that fought an abortive rebellion against the Romans in 60 or 61 ad. Fuelled by anger at the cruelty shown towards Boudica and her daughters – the two children, whose ages go unrecorded, were raped by Roman solders and Boudica was brutally beaten – the Britons banded together under the command of their injured queen and sacked the towns of Camulodunum (Colchester), Verulamium (St Albans), and Londinium (London), before finally being routed by the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus. The Roman historian Tacitus recorded that Boudica and her daughters took poison rather than be captured alive, while the Greek historian Dio Cassius asserted that they died from illness.Footnote 5 Tacitus's record of the event has become the foundational account of Boudica's deeds, but its influence was a long time in the making. The pertinent texts were lost to British scholars until Polydore Vergil rediscovered them and published his new account of ancient British history, the Anglica historia (1534), which revolutionized understandings of the early British past.Footnote 6
Since her reappearance roughly five centuries ago, Boudica has been a fascinating figure for the British public, as well as for scholars in a variety of disciplines. In recent years, archaeological studies have sought to recover the ‘real’ Boudica,Footnote 7 while her posthumous reputation has captivated students of drama and literature. Some writers, such as Richard Hingley and Christina Unwin, have engaged with both the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’ Boudicas by examining archaeological finds as well as representations and imagery.Footnote 8 Work by literary scholars has largely been confined to written material dating from the period before 1800. Much of this research has argued that Boudica's reception and representation furnish striking instances of early modern gender anxiety: as a powerful woman, Boudica represented a threat to a discourse of expanding colonial and military prowess and, especially after the accession of James I and VI in 1603, to male hegemony in those spheres.Footnote 9 Students of the eighteenth-century dramatic works in which Boudica featured have reached similar conclusions.Footnote 10 But by seeking evidence that Boudica was maligned as an uncivil woman, or vilified by early modern writers and audiences, scholars have overlooked the subtle ways in which other ideologies, debates, and contemporary discourses served to complicate, promote, and maintain the figure of Boudica with which present-day audiences are familiar.
There has yet to be a serious scholarly account that gives the same sustained attention to Boudica's reputation after 1800 as in the earlier period. But, as a female monarch with rich representational and synecdochical potential, the Victorian Boudica has been the subject of some general comment. In her eloquent study of allegory and femininity, Marina Warner argues that Boudica, and particularly Thornycroft's ‘Boadicea group’, presented the Victorians with a convenient ‘imperial icon’ – a volte face that required either a gymnastic reinterpretation of the facts or simple wilful ignorance on the part of contemporaries. Warner's view is that the Victorians employed the latter technique, blinding themselves to the contradiction between Boudica's historical identity as a rebel against imperial conquest and their own idea of her as an icon of imperial triumph.Footnote 11 Moreover, Warner claims that the Victorians ‘rediscovered’ and ‘invented’ the idea of Boudica for use in their own period.Footnote 12 Taking a somewhat different approach, but one which imposes similar problems, Sharon MacDonald emphasizes the gendered aspects of the Thornycroft statue, and identifies what is, in her view, a dichotomy between Boudica's ‘mother’ and ‘warrior’ personas in Victorian culture.Footnote 13 Like Warner, MacDonald views Thornycroft's portrayal of Boudica as revealing attitudes particular to the late nineteenth century. Virginia Hoselitz, in a recent book, summarizes the approach to the Victorian Boudica typical in today's scholarship: the warrior queen was reimagined ‘to best suit the symbolic requirements of contemporary events’.Footnote 14
Beyond these brief treatments, there is little historical work on the subject of Boudica in the nineteenth century. In some ways, the relative dearth of interest among historians today is surprising. After all, historians have recognized this period as one in which the past was a subject of unprecedented scholarly and lay interest. Several informative works have focused on the first generation of professional historians in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and concomitant markers of disciplinary development, such as the appearance of the English Historical Review in 1886.Footnote 15 Characteristic of this move toward professionalization was an increasing interest in method. Historians of the modern historical profession have detailed the nascence of ‘scientific’ history in Victorian Britain; a trend exemplified by some English followers of the German historian Leopold von Ranke.Footnote 16 Scholars have placed this ‘scientific’ variety of historical practice in juxtaposition with the ‘romantic historicism’ of the early nineteenth century, thereby making as much a chronological as a generic distinction between two forms of engagement with the past. The earlier period has been cast as one in which the past was portrayed in a fictionalized form for the entertainment benefit of a wide readership, exemplified by the works of Walter Scott.Footnote 17 As Ian Hesketh has put it, ‘The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a general blurring of the boundaries between the historical and the fictional.’Footnote 18 By recasting historical work as scientific work, later Victorian historians could assert the epistemological autonomy of their subject matter against the incursion of poets, dramatists, and novelists.
However, this was not a new border dispute, merely the most recent skirmish. It could be argued that the ‘romantic history’ of the early nineteenth century had precedents in historical dramas, and even popular multi-volume histories, of earlier periods.Footnote 19 Eighteenth-century periodical literature had been weighted with critical discussion of the extent to which poets and playwrights could comfortably deviate from accepted historical fact.Footnote 20 Neither did ‘romantic’ history die out in the middle of the nineteenth century; it continued to operate in another, not entirely separate, sphere, much as it had before the advent of professionalization. In recognition of this, historians of the Victorian and Edwardian periods have employed phrases such as ‘the place of the past’, ‘culture of history’, or ‘historical culture’, to designate this non-specialist engagement with the past. For example, Paul Readman explores ‘the place of the past’ in English culture during the Victorian and Edwardian periods.Footnote 21 By employing the phrase ‘the place of the past’, Readman implicitly acknowledges that his is not a study of the history of history – that is, the sub-discipline of intellectual history, which includes the narrative of professionalization – but rather of ordinary people's engagement with the local and national pasts, evidenced by, among other things, the popularity of historical pageants.Footnote 22 In a focused study of the portrayal of the past in images and illustrations, Rosemary Mitchell notes that a novel ‘historical culture’ began to emerge in Britain in the period after 1800, but one, she argues, which was increasingly focused on the ‘authenticity’ of history.Footnote 23 Most recently, and most informatively, Billie Melman has begun to contemplate the extensive range of historical media that became available to audiences from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and has pointed to a distinction between the study of the history of history and what she calls the ‘culture of history’ in the nineteenth century.Footnote 24
Although the past permeated Victorian and Edwardian culture in an unprecedentedly comprehensive way, it is problematic in a case such as Boudica's to privilege the study of her representation in one period over another. There should be no barriers to viewing the whole of her posthumous reputation in the longue durée. After all, as we have seen, professionalized historical scholarship is of relatively recent origin. Indeed, one might go so far as to call it an aberration in a much longer pattern of engagement with popular, public history by non-specialists – be they artists, amateur antiquaries, or dramatists. To write about the past in the period before the development of professional history was to engage with many reticulated strands of thought, including what we would today call geography, literature, history, politics, and theology. Put simply, in an era before disciplines and, subsequently, interdisciplinarity, there was erudition.Footnote 25 Thus, historians of approaches to the past in the early modern period have focused on intellectual history in various iterations, and especially on the transformation of historical practice into an autonomous sphere of activity – a development that culminated in the formation of the profession in the nineteenth century.Footnote 26
In Boudica's case, this has meant that her reputation in the earlier period has largely been studied by scholars of literature and drama, rather than historians of history. While this has its benefits, there is also something to be gained from viewing Boudica, not as a malleable character in drama, but as a historical individual. In his recent work, Daniel Woolf has argued that historians of early modern historical practice must move beyond intellectual histories of history and broaden out from studies of ‘canonical’ writers in the genre, such as Camden, Coke, and Selden. Woolf's expansive approach would include non-written sources, such as images, material culture, and oral traditions. But it would also focus on lesser-known written works of the period, even if these works do not fit with the modern understanding of what ‘history’ is. Woolf calls the study of this body of material ‘historical culture’, which he defines as
the complete matrix of relations between past, present and future including but not limited to writing, that includes elite and popular, narrative and non-narrative modes of representing the past … and that, even more importantly, is subject to social and commercial forces that, as much as the traditionally-studied intellectual influences, conditioned the way in which the early modern mind thought, read, and wrote about the past.Footnote 27
In its capacious definition of what constitutes ‘history’, Woolf's suggested approach to early modern ‘historical culture’ sounds very similar to that taken by historians of the place of the past in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The remainder of this article will investigate Boudica's place in the Victorian period, and the potential implications of studying historical culture – or all the multiform sources which engage with the past, from Victorian sculptures to Jacobean manuscripts – in the longue durée. It will argue that by providing a historiographical bridge between the early modern and modern periods, the study of historical culture can reveal the lengthy, discursive process by which historical ideas are passed down through generations. By doing so, historians will be more able to see beyond the proximate political or cultural context of a commemorative event. One means of recovering interactions between past and present is to investigate minutely the circumstances of individual writers, artists, and other producers of historical material in order to understand in detail the approach they took to the past and its sources. When focusing, for instance, on a single statue of a historical individual, it seems pertinent to ask not only how it appeared in its present position, but who the artist was, what his/her motivations were, and how, or whether, the depiction fits with an inherited idea of the historical figure in question.
The first section of this article will detail the story behind Thomas Thornycroft's conception and execution of his Boudica statue. It will be clear from this discussion that he was, in some sense, responding very directly to his contemporary situation, but that he did not ‘invent’ his image of Boudica to suit his times – even though he was pressured to do so. His depiction of Boudica corresponds with the Roman source base and with long-held perceptions of the warrior queen. Far from being a specifically Victorian Boudica, the Boudica commemorated by Thornycroft's statue is the culmination of years, even centuries, of conversation between historians, poets, artists, and audiences, as well as a response by the artist to his contemporary situation.
Also significant to Boudica's eventual placement on Westminster Bridge is her role in the history of London. The second section will relate the story of the erection of Thornycroft's landmark statue in its present position. This occurred nearly fifteen years after the sculptor's death. The inscription chosen to adorn Boudica's statue would seem to support a view of the work as celebrating the triumph of the British empire. Taken from William Cowper's Boadicea: an ode of 1782, the inscription reads: ‘Regions Caesar never knew/They posterity shall sway.’Footnote 28 Perhaps the placement of the statue does speak to triumphalist late nineteenth-century imperialist attitudes, but this begs some questions. By focusing on the machinations of local government, as well as on the circumstances of the individuals involved – not on national or imperial questions – a more complex picture becomes evident. When examined closely, it emerges that the statue's placement was the result of local effort by Londoners who responded to Boudica's specific connection to the city: first by investigating the life and death of Boudica, and then by publicly memorializing her actions.
Boudica's commemoration in bronze was a milestone in the warrior queen's long relationship with the history of London. The third section will shift to the seventeenth century in order to explore the ways in which Boudica's connection to London aroused interest in that period. The work of the seventeenth-century antiquary, Edmund Bolton, and the symmetry between his own interest in Boudica and that evident in the nineteenth century will show how the historical culture of the distant past can illuminate our understanding of more recent engagement with Boudica.
This article has two purposes. First, it explores, within the confines of Boudica's posthumous life, the possibilities for historical culture. Historical culture is an approach to the history of history which is both chronologically and generically expansive, and which allows historians to make connections between works which, although not contemporaneous, are nonetheless engaged with the national or local past. Boudica's story fascinated successive generations, despite changing circumstances, and this must be considered if one is to fully appreciate her reputation in a given period. Thus, the second, resultant aim of this article is to show that, by taking this expansive view, historians of history will necessarily complicate the place of the past in the present – whether it is the Victorian present or another period. Interpreting and representing the past can, of course, be a means of responding to contemporary problems, but the historian of history should not be satisfied with explanations that bury the significance of the past under the needs of the present.
I
Thomas Thornycroft was by no means the most successful, or even one of the more talented, sculptors of his day. He is perhaps best known as the father of the prolific late Victorian sculptor Hamo Thornycroft (1850–1925).Footnote 29 Unlike his more successful son, Thomas struggled to obtain the commissions which were the lifeblood of all artists, but especially of sculptors.Footnote 30 Even Thomas Thornycroft's most successful work, which he called the ‘Boadicea group’, had roots in failure: the Boudica statue was created as a conscious response to professional disappointment and to a broader concern for the state of British sculpture in the mid-Victorian period. To understand this, we must look to the events of 1851, and the Great Exhibition of that year, for which Thomas had produced an equestrian statue of Queen Victoria.
The sculptor harboured high hopes for his Victoria statue; these hopes were encouraged by the prince consort's evident enthusiasm for the work. Thornycroft dared to believe that a coveted royal commission was imminent. ‘My fortune’, Thornycroft wrote to his friend and mentor, the sculptor W. B. Dickinson, shortly before the Great Exhibition, ‘vibrates in the balance’.Footnote 31 But no commission came and in some powerful circles, opinion was against Thornycroft's Victoria. According to Thornycroft, a review published in The Times asserted that the equestrian statue was ‘not sufficiently ideal’ for its majestic subject.Footnote 32 This was an especially painful assessment for Thornycroft. He had portrayed Victoria in a close-fitting riding habit, which marked the statue as adhering more to portraiture than to the ‘ideal’ or imagined, classical approach which, in the reviewer's opinion, would have been appropriate for the sovereign.Footnote 33 Thornycroft saw this not merely as an attack on the Victoria statue, but on his entire artistic world view. He sensed, rightly or wrongly, that his work has been condemned because it did not conform to classical, ‘foreign’ characteristics. He wrote to Dickinson shortly afterward: ‘It would be folly to shut one's eyes to the fact that sculpture illustrating our own history and poetry is coldly received; that English opinion and English art as yet exists not.’Footnote 34
Thomas was not alone in his alienation. The mid-Victorian period was a fraught one for sculpture in Britain, as many British practitioners of the art perceived themselves being shunted aside in favour of continental competitors, of whom the Italian Baron Carlo Marochetti, was the most reviled.Footnote 35 Thornycroft and others like him condemned the practice of awarding public commissions to foreign artists.Footnote 36 Marochetti, who was responsible for, among others, the statue of Richard Coeur de Lion (1860) outside the Palace of Westminster, was a particular thorn in Thomas's side. When he received the news that Marochetti had been awarded the commission for a statue of Queen Victoria (erected 1854) in Glasgow – the very commission, it seems, that he had dreamed of for his equestrian Victoria – Thornycroft vented his anger to Dickinson: ‘English art has been sacrificed to foreign interests; and a most successful agent in that offer is Baron Marochetti, a second rank artist, but one of mighty pretension and consummate intrigue.’Footnote 37 Even so, Thomas professed to believe that ‘There is in England, nevertheless, the germ of a more hopeful state; there are men who believe that art may grow here, founded on our age and philosophy, accepting the Greek only as its keynote, its tone.’Footnote 38
It was in the aftermath of this frustrating episode that Thornycroft conceived of his statue of Boudica. He approached his subject as a work of historical portraiture intended to express the character of the nation to whom the warrior queen Boudica belonged, rather than as a classicized or ‘idealized’ figure.Footnote 39 The group exemplifies what W. M. Rossetti called at the time ‘national character’ sculpture, or:
the rendering of whatever is beautiful, suggestive, and sculpturally available in the character, type, costume, employment, or intellectual purposes of the various nations of the earth. This has truth, like portraiture; an open field for all differences of feeling and perception in the sculptors; no restriction as to the number or quality of phases of beauty which it may include; and a real demand upon the artist's mind in seizing and presenting his subject. This range of the art is much more pursued by foreign sculptors, and especially the French, than by our own.Footnote 40
In other words, sculpture of a ‘national character’ allowed for both faithful, realistic representation, and imaginative or reflective elaboration. This was the area of sculpture which Thornycroft intended to appropriate for his own nation.
Even in an atmosphere potentially unfriendly to British sculptors, Thornycroft's efforts did not go unnoticed. By 1860, the large plaster model of Boudica had begun to garner wide attention. In June of that year, Thomas wrote to Dickinson that ‘Boadicea’ ‘has been much talked of at the Court this last week and I feel confident if providence grants me health to finish the work, that I shall have their countenance in a public subscription for erecting it’.Footnote 41 Indeed, Prince Albert himself took a personal interest in the work as early as 1859, and the two horses shown careering in advance of Boudica's chariot are modelled on the prince's own, which he had lent to the artist for the purpose. The prince even suggested that the finished statue might fittingly adorn the top of the arch at Hyde Park Corner.Footnote 42 Given the extensive interaction between prince and sculptor, it is unsurprising that historians have assumed that Albert had a degree of influence on substantive matters of representation. Virginia Hoselitz argues that Thornycroft ‘emphasized the symbolic nature of Boudica at the insistence of Prince Albert’.Footnote 43 But Thornycroft's correspondence reveals that the prince's influence was limited, and there is no evidence that the two men were of one mind as to the group's appearance.
Thornycroft's discomfiture in the face of persistent royal meddling is clear from his many letters to Dickinson. On one occasion, Thomas wrote, the prince consort pronounced that Boudica's chariot should be evocative of modern royalty, ‘the throne upon wheels’;Footnote 44 he even suggested adding a third horse. Thornycroft fretted to Dickinson that doing so would ‘absolutely condemn, nay destroy my composition.’Footnote 45 Thomas reported a conversation between himself and the prince in which they had discussed ‘the comparative advantages of realistic treatment … against artistic and poetic views; and [Prince Albert's] decision was decidedly to the latter.’Footnote 46 But Thornycroft's work was not intended to be a tribute to Queen Victoria; not, at least, to the extent that the prince would have liked. Nor was Thornycroft willing to assent to royal interpolations which contravened his own vision for the statue.
To the contrary, Thornycroft concerned himself with modelling a chariot that corresponded to the qualities of the object which could be determined by research into the classical sources. Thornycroft consulted Julius Caesar's account of ancient Britain in the Gallic Wars in which detailed descriptions of British war chariots could be found. In light of the information he gathered, the sculptor rejected the prince's majestic, throne-like chariot in favour of a plain, flat platform on wheels:
the advantage of a different form of car has grown upon me. Caesar says the British ran along the pole of their charrriots [sic] [and] leaped down in front of their horses[.] [H]ad there been a high point to the vehicle this would have been inconvenient. A flat platform is the probable shape and this suits me best as it permits the figure to be seen down to the feet.’Footnote 47
This question continued to occupy him a month later, when Thornycroft wrote to Dickinson: ‘With regard to the war chariot of Boadicea Caesar's description supplies as much as I want to know. It warrants the view I want to take.’Footnote 48 In this instance, historical accuracy and artistic intent were in harmony.
In addition to designing a British war chariot based on classical descriptions, Thornycroft concerned himself with the spectrum of feeling which his three human subjects might conceivably have experienced. He discussed this with Dickinson, as he seemed to do with most things, and wrote
I am pleased that you concede the justness of the emotion by which young barbarians would be moved, in the circumstances of Boadicea's Daughters. Further the necessities of art composition demand that the majestic fury of the Queen should be supplemented in the daughters. The vehemence of her movement would be impotent did it not excite sympathetic disturbance in the figures clinging to her garment. Unity of purpose, is the grand element of the quality described as breadth in art.Footnote 49
The sculptor reflected deeply on the emotional beings his subjects may have been, and by doing so, added another facet of historical and human realism to the work.
Despite never receiving a commission for the group, Thornycroft continued to work on it well into his old age, and never lost sight of it as a response to an earlier failure. His earlier disappointment was somewhat ameliorated when, in 1871, a critic visited Thomas's studio unannounced and published a review of the unfinished ‘Boadicea group’ in The Times. The reviewer enthused that the group was ‘the most successful attempt in historical sculpture of this barren time … which we would fain hail as the hope of better things and better days for an art which, on English soil at least, is sadly degenerate’.Footnote 50 Thomas was delighted with the praise, although he could not resist a reference to the group's antecedent circumstances:
I rejoice very much to find my aim in the treatment of this subject so completely understood and appreciated by a critic entertaining more realistic views of sculpture than I have found practicable. Twenty years ago I made a realistic equestrian statue. This was condemned by the ‘Times’. But you have now made ample amends.Footnote 51
Thornycroft's Boudica statue was intended as a statement of defiance against the pernicious criticism that, the artist believed, oppressed native talent in Britain in the 1850s and 1860s. The ancient queen, a resistor of foreign influence in her own right, was a poignant articulation of Thornycroft's stance. Thus there is a sense in which the statue constituted a direct response by the artist to contemporary events. However, these events were personal, and have not been sufficiently understood by those who view the statue as a highly contrived celebration of empire. Far from conforming to the needs of the Victorian present, Thornycroft produced a more well-researched, historically accurate statue than the political and cultural establishment of the time found palatable.
This renders the statue's straightforward association with either Victorian imperialism or Victorian monarchy highly questionable. A more complex picture can be revealed by looking into the lives of the individuals directly involved in historical-cultural production. While authors and artists should not be divorced from their context, by eschewing the assumption that the present has primacy in the production of historical culture – or that the needs of the present will necessarily nullify the impulse to faithfully recover and represent the past – the historian is free to view the author or artist in question as a complex individual actor, not simply a synecdoche for a period or position.
II
Thomas Thornycroft did not live to see his model cast in bronze. After his death in 1885, the plaster ‘Boadicea group’ became the property of the sculptor's elder son, John Isaac (1843–1928), whose success as a naval engineer was one of the great joys of his father's latter years.Footnote 52 The statue was housed on the site of John Isaac's factory, in the same shed where a prototypical steam-powered van was being assembled – the front legs of Boudica's horses had to be temporarily removed to allow more room during construction.Footnote 53 The colossal model of Boudica and her primitive war chariot reposed amidst the experimental vehicles at John Isaac Thornycroft & Co. in Chiswick for almost a decade, until the 1890s, when events began to turn, quite by accident, in the statue's favour.
In the autumn of 1894, the London County Council (LCC) approved a decision to excavate the spot on Hampstead Heath's Parliament Hill Fields in north London, which had come to be known as ‘Boadicea's Mound’ or ‘Boadicea's Grave’.Footnote 54 The origin of this name has proven impossible to determine, but it reflected a notion which appealed particularly to members of the local community, and one of relatively modern origin. The impetus to open the tumulus came from the LCC's Parks and Open Spaces Committee, specifically the Northwest District Subcommittee. This body was responsible for the parks and commons of north-west London, including the location of the tumulus.Footnote 55 The motivation behind the subcommittee's effort to open the tumulus remains unclear, but it seems likely that the subject was discussed at the behest of one of the subcommittee members, or perhaps at the request of a member of the community with ties to local antiquarian societies. In October 1894, the LCC assented to the subcommittee's request. Work began on 29 October 1894 under the superintendence of Charles Hercules Read (1857–1929), who undertook the project and waived his right to a fee.Footnote 56
Read was a self-taught antiquarian, archaeologist, and close friend of A. W. Franks, Keeper of the British Museum's Department of British and Medieval Antiquities. He eventually replaced Franks as head of the collections when the latter retired in 1896. Read excavated ‘Boadicea's Grave’ from 29 October to 6 November, and his final report of the excavation was ready in time for the November meeting of the Society of Antiquaries. In his report to the Society, Read concluded that, as he had always believed, there was no link between the barrow and the ancient warrior queen. Read noted: ‘It is scarcely necessary, however, to bring forward evidence to prove that popular nomenclature is seldom supported by historical fact.’Footnote 57
Boudica's remains were not unearthed on Parliament Hill, yet Read and his team of helpers were watched ‘with an interest so keen that it may almost be called feverish … there is undoubtedly a fascination even for the untutored mind in respect to the places of sepulchre, whether authentic or suppositious, of historic personages whose deeds have been handed on to us’.Footnote 58 One of the interested members of the public to see coverage of the excavation in the newspapers was John Isaac Thornycroft, whose steam-powered van had met with such great success that he would require the whole of his Chiswick shed for the second, larger model.Footnote 59 This left no room for Boudica and her daughters. Rather than discard the plaster statue, it was John Thornycroft's hope to see it cast in bronze and presented to the public. He approached his near-neighbour, Sir William Bull (1863–1931)Footnote 60 with the suggestion that Thomas's statue might serve as an appropriate gravemarker if the ancient queen's resting place was indeed uncovered during the course of the excavation in north-west London.Footnote 61
William Bull could not have been better placed to advocate on behalf of the Thornycrofts. In addition to being MP for the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, Bull was a member of the LCC, and even sat on the Parks and Open Spaces Committee's North-West District Subcommittee. Bull was enthusiastic about the statue, and brought Thornycroft's offer before the LCC. Without awaiting his colleagues’ approval, Bull ordered the plaster model to be taken to the bronze foundry of John W. Singer and Sons in September 1896. The foundry agreed to keep the model until the money could be raised to complete the bronze work, at last freeing John Isaac from his unwieldy burden.Footnote 62 However, the LCC rejected Bull's pleas for the council to raise funds for the statue on the grounds that no tomb had been found in Parliament Hill Fields, which had been the proposed home of the finished piece. In addition, casting the bronze model was estimated to cost a hefty £6,000.Footnote 63 The real figure was in fact much less, although still substantial at £1,995, by the foundry's calculation.Footnote 64 Bull's own estimate for the whole project – from casting to placement – was £3,000, and he promptly formed the Boadicea Fund Committee to appeal to the public for subscriptions.Footnote 65
Aside from the crucial question of how to pay for the ‘Boadicea group’, there was the equally pressing matter of where to place the finished work. As the LCC had pointed out, Hampstead Heath no longer seemed appropriate given that the tumulus had been proven once and for all to have no recoverable connection to Boudica. Various alternatives were debated, but the north-eastern corner of Westminster Bridge, across from parliament's clock tower, eventually won the day. By Bull's efforts, the funds were finally assembled, and the the LCC agreed to provide a pedestal.Footnote 66 But the many delays to the project, coupled with the prominence of the site, led to the LCC's decision that the plaster model should be temporarily placed on the proposed site to undergo a trial period during which the public could voice its opinion on both the site and the work itself.Footnote 67
The arrival on Westminster Bridge of a 10-foot-tall mock bronze woman understandably created some stir. A week after the placement, it was reported that ‘thousands have made a pilgrimage to the Embankment, and submitted Mr. Thornycroft's great work to critical examination … an observer would be justified in pronouncing the general verdict a favourable one’.Footnote 68 The positive public response to the statue led the LCC to agree that, when it was finished, the bronze ‘Boadicea group’ should be placed on Westminster Bridge. But the passage of almost four years between the trial period and the completion of the bronze meant that the LCC rejected Bull's pleas for a formal unveiling, citing the numerous previous delays to the project.Footnote 69
Previous accounts of the Boudica statue have collapsed Thornycroft's design of the statue into the moment of its placement on Westminster Bridge, casting two distinct efforts as a single example of the Victorian impulse to celebrate empire. The story related here – from Thomas Thornycroft's disappointment in 1851, to John Isaac's space allocation problems and the lucky coincidence of this with the excavation on Hampstead Heath in 1894 – seems somewhat bathetic in light of arguments that map the statue's significance onto Victorian or Edwardian ideas of empire.Footnote 70 Its erection was in fact part of the train of events set in motion by the excavation at Hampstead Heath and the publicity generated by that project. As one newspaper commentator noted of the plaster model
The vain search made a few years ago by the London County Council for the grave of Boadicea, was productive of much interest and amusement, and now the almost forgotten quest is brought to the memory of the public by the erection on the embankment of a model of a statue of this queen.Footnote 71
By 1902, the fervour which had surrounded the excavation in 1894 had lost all immediacy, and even the public's enthusiastic reception of the plaster model was a distant memory. Perhaps the ‘Boadicea group’ could have done the cultural work of uniting the British people in celebration of the wider British empire, but the final arrival of the finished bronze in 1902 was greeted with silence.
The connection between Boudica and the history of London emerges as the most crucial factor in the statue's successful placement, with the link between Boudica and Victoria, or between Boudica and the wider British empire being less important. After all, it was only through the efforts of a London County Councilman, pitted against an obstructive imperial parliament, that the statue came to be in its present position. Given the course of this narrative, it seems likely that the North-West District Subcommittee and the archaeologist Sir Charles Hercules Read were driven by a genuine sense of curiosity and pride in London and its antiquities, Boudica's connection among them. Boudica's relationship with London and Londoners comes directly from the classical source base which, as we have seen, also provided Thomas Thornycroft with the raw material for his work and allowed him to imagine Boudica in her context. But Boudica's final resting place, the appearance of her chariot, and her significance to the story of London's greatness were not new preoccupations. One important point to draw out from a discussion of historical culture is that, unlike fictions, representations of the past must adhere to certain accepted ‘matters of fact‘Footnote 72 which correspond to available evidence: Boudica's sacking of London is one of those matters of fact, and for that reason, even after the passage of many centuries, she remains firmly associated with the city. That association played a significant role in encouraging interest in her story amongst Victorian commentators, but it also had a long genealogy.
III
The Victorian interest in Boudica's life, death, and burial was preceded by generations of speculation, beginning in the seventeenth century with Edmund Bolton (fl. 1574–1634) – antiquary, historical writer, and firm London patriot.Footnote 73 But Bolton also had interests in Boudica beyond her connection to London. Indeed, it was he who first speculated about her burial, and the form of car on which she would have led her troops to battle.
While there is some symmetry, exploring the relationship between Boudica's association with London in the Jacobean and Victorian periods is not, of course, a matter of straightforward comparison, and certainly not a matter of comparing like with like. The main focus for the Victorian-era account was a statue of Boudica, while the focus here will be on Bolton's written work, and especially his historical/antiquarian book, Nero Caesar; or monarchie deprav'd (1624). Unlike Thornycroft's statue, which required the consent of the LCC for its placement, Bolton's books involved the labour of only one man; neither could Nero Caesar have captured the attention of a popular press nor, for that matter, passing pedestrians, as Thornycroft's ‘Boadicea group’ would do centuries later. Nevertheless, the 160-year-old statue and the 400-year-old book both worked to immortalize the same woman. Because the historical-cultural approach takes into account all the generic complexity of historical production across time, we can situate these two very different sources in relation to each other, and view them as part of the longue durée of engagement with the past.
Like his Victorian counterparts, Bolton came to the subject of Boudica through the classical record, specifically the accounts by Tacitus and Dio Cassius. Boudica's long association with the environs of the metropolis stemmed from the tradition that, after her troops had left London in ashes, there occurred a final, definitive battle between the Britons and the Romans somewhere near the city. Tacitus's histories provided the original narrative for this, but the connection between Boudica and London was made most emphatically by Edmund Bolton, who, as early as the 1620s, did more than any other writer to bring Boudica into the story of London's, and hence Britain's greatness. By thoroughly investigating Boudica's story, Bolton was able to conclude that Britain's ancient inhabitants lived in an advanced society that had suffered rather than thrived under Roman direction – a very convenient argument, to be sure, but not one devoid of evidence. Although he relied more heavily on conjecture than modern historians would tolerate, Bolton's work had a firm foundation in the classical source base.
Bolton's role in understanding and promoting Boudica's story as a singular episode in British history has never been fully acknowledged. He undoubtedly had other goals for writing about Boudica aside from simply recovering the ‘true’ story behind her rebellion; these will be discussed below. However, by examining closely Bolton's interest in Boudica, we see that apart from his concerns about the political climate at the court of James I, his works also addressed serious historical problems and matters of evidence.Footnote 74 Thus, Bolton's fascination with Boudica is in some degree comparable with that of his Victorian counterparts discussed above. This in turn suggests that it was Boudica's existing story which drew the attention of successive generations of writers and artists, and calls into question the idea that Boudica could be successfully ‘invented’, given the continued significance of the classical source base.
Bolton lived and worked in London in an integrated community of courtiers and scholars, and he had a lifelong enthusiasm for the history of the city. The history of London often entered into Bolton's other work, and as the earliest mention of the city in history, Boudica's rebellion was of particular interest to him. Bolton's major publication, and the longest sustained analysis of Boudica's rebellion before the work of professional archaeologists in the twentieth century, was his Nero Caesar of 1624. As the title suggests, the work was an account of the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero (37–68 ad). As a staunch monarchist and a supporter of James I, part of Bolton's motivation for writing Nero Caesar was undoubtedly to combat the influence of Lipsian Neostoicism at court.Footnote 75 Boudica's rebellion during Nero's reign also furnished an example on which Bolton could draw to make one of his most cherished arguments: that no matter the cruelties a monarch might wreak on his subjects, to resist the monarch's will was an affront to God, and would only serve to embroil the resistors in an unwinnable conflict. The British tribes, formerly enemies, had banded together ‘under a most glorious title, the recoverie of common libertie’.Footnote 76 But by taking ‘common cause’ against one of God's elect, the ancient Britons had condemned themselves to defeat.
But this warning against rebellion and ‘common cause’ was only the most overt of Bolton's reasons for writing Nero Caesar. Bolton was invested in the art and craft of writing history, and he devoted nearly half of the work to a treatise on Boudica, her time, her people, and her actions, as well as on the historical situation of the city and its inhabitants. When Bolton was forced during the course of his narrative to relate Boudica's massacre in London, his instinct was to describe the immense suffering of the ancient inhabitants, abandoned to their fate by the Roman General Suetonius Paulinus. But Bolton resisted, noting that, ‘Offices of invention, and imagination, are the property of other Muses; those of reason, and consequent discourse the onely ones of historie.’Footnote 77
Working within the parameters of his historical method, Bolton was eloquent on the subject of ancient London in Nero Caesar. It was his desire to restore the city to its deserved place as the most cultivated, advanced metropolis in Britain at the time of the Roman invasion. He framed this as a historical problem for which enquiry into the past was the remedy: ‘[t]he clearing of such savage deformitie, by competent proofs, and reasons, would be an office of honour well bestowed upon the most noble of lands’.Footnote 78 Although Bolton saw Boudica's role as relatively minor, he firmly linked her history to that of London:
Here [Boudica's rebellion] the name of London is first found in antient authenticke writings, and that for the calamities sake which at this time it suffered most extreame [sic]. But that violence which could abate, and desolate happiness for the time, advanced the name thereof to immortal remembrance by Cornelius Tacitus, her principal historian and witnesse.Footnote 79
Relating the story of Boudica's attack on London gave Bolton the opportunity to glorify the city:
The faithfull town sitting utterly desolate in cinders, and ashes, among the dead trunckes, and bloodless bodies of the late children and inhabitants thereof, had no other comfort but the honourable conscience of constant loialtie; and the noble hope to rise again more happie, and majesticall; which afterwards proved so true … The nature of the merit immortal in the same, and the imitation perpetuall to the people.Footnote 80
Bolton confined the subject of London's honourable antiquity to two chapters in Nero Caesar, but he treated it more thoroughly in his prose treatise, Vindicae Brittanicae or, London righted by rescues or recoveries of antiquities of Britain in general and of London in particular, against unwarrantable preiudices, and historical antiquations among the learned. This treatise is most illustrative of the antiquarian rationale for Bolton's interest in Boudica and her attack on London. Vindicae Brittanicae was written sometime after 1624, and exists in a single manuscript copy written in Bolton's preternaturally neat handwriting, which Bolton had entrusted to John Selden. Having disappeared for some time, Vindicae Brittanicae was thought to have been destroyed, but it was recovered by the present author during the course of this research.Footnote 81
Echoing Nero Caesar in Vindicae Brittannicae, Bolton noted that the occasion of Boudica's ‘firing’ London had given him cause to write on the subject of the antiquity of city and to ‘rescue’ it from the abuses levelled against it by previous writers. These abuses amounted to the demotion of London to little more than an encampment that owed all its later prosperity to the industry of the Roman settlers, not to the native Britons. To vindicate the city and its native inhabitants from these charges of primitivism, Bolton presented evidence that the Britons had built the city of London and cultivated it as a metropolitan centre long before the Roman invasion. Much of his criticism was directed at Caesar's firsthand account of ancient Britain in the Gallic Wars. But Bolton was a canny critic: he understood that to dismiss Caesar's account as wholly inaccurate would shake the fragile foundations of ancient British history, which relied on the scant Roman source base. With this in mind, Bolton cast the problem as one of translation: Caesar had translated the word ancient British word ‘caer’ to the Latin ‘oppidum’, rendering the bustling settlement of London a mere fortified encampment. However, in Bolton's learned opinion, the Romans had not occupied the place long enough to transform it from a savage outpost to a populous, cultivated centre of economic activity, which it must surely have been at the time of Boudica's rebellion. According to the Roman sources, Boudica's troops entered London and ‘expugnae castra’ – a phrase Bolton translated as ‘forced the castles’. In Bolton's summation, the ‘castle’ referred to here was none other than the Tower of London, the original construction of which Bolton attributed to the ancient Britons. This, the antiquary insisted, was surely proof that London was of ancient British origin.
As Nero Caesar and Vindicae Brittannicae show, Boudica's rebellion presented an opportunity for the antiquary and historian in the seventeenth century. Bolton's work on the subject served to cement Boudica's place in London's history. However, with little written or material evidence to rely on, Bolton was induced to hypothesize on some points. One of Bolton's most notable conjectures was that Stonehenge marked the place of Boudica's burial. In his opinion, the rude grandeur of Stonehenge betokened both an ancient British origin and a desire by its makers to glorify the memory of some illustrious person, and Boudica seemed the obvious candidate.Footnote 82 Bolton's own questions about Boudica's burial continued to play on the minds of Charles Hercules Read and members of the LCC in the autumn of 1894. However, it is crucial to emphasize that neither Bolton nor Read was occupied solely with the needs of his present – arguably, pure curiosity drove each man alike to conjecture and, in Read's case, to test his conjecture by excavation. Bolton's work was written against the backdrop of a Jacobean court beset with questions of power relations between the monarch and his people, but this did not mean that Bolton's sole motive was to defend his king. He used Nero Caesar as an opportunity to test his antiquarian mettle. Similarly, Read's excavation might have uncovered the grave of an ancient warrior queen while a modern-day ‘Boadicea’ occupied the throne. But this possibility did not motivate him; Read did his work out of professional interest, and his notebooks are full of similar archaeological endeavours carried out in towns and villages all over England.Footnote 83
Despite generic and temporal distance, the work of Thomas Thornycroft and Edmund Bolton had much in common. Although they lived in very different times and performed very different tasks, both the antiquary and the artist sought to understand Boudica through the investigation of Roman sources, and both were particularly interested in how Boudica's war chariot might have looked. In Nero Caesar, Bolton stated with some conviction that the chariot on which Boudica and her daughters rode must have been fitted with scythed wheels. Bolton gave his source for this as the Roman geographer Mela, who claimed that chariots from the Romano-British period were thusly outfitted.Footnote 84 Bolton concluded that if some ancient chariots were of that design, this was sufficiently convincing evidence that Boudica's specific chariot must also have followed that pattern. He described the scene in Nero Caesar: ‘Before the head of this huge, and wide-spread battle of the Brittans, the chariots of warre were planted, which had sharpe sithes standing out, wherewith to mow down enemies.’Footnote 85 Like Thornycroft's statue, Bolton's portrayal of Boudica was a combination of thorough research and judicious, if somewhat imaginative, interpretation.
According to one recent writer, the scythe-wheeled chariot was Thornycroft's own invention,Footnote 86 but the scythes had been part of Boudica's appearance since Edmund Bolton first wrote about them. Thomas Heywood reiterated the addition in his account of Boudica in The exemplary lives and memorable acts of nine of the most worthy women in the world (1640), but did not attribute it to Bolton by name, only calling him ‘that worthy English author’.Footnote 87 After Heywood, many historians and the artists who illustrated their books continued to include the scythes, as in the frontispiece to Tobias Smollett's Complete history of England (1757).Footnote 88
IV
Although the scythes were unmoored from their original – Edmund Bolton's Nero Caesar – they became part of the ‘adapted stereotype’ of Boudica, on which Thomas Thornycroft drew in the design of his statue.Footnote 89 The Boudica commemorated on Westminster Bridge is an iterative image, indebted to Julius Caesar, Tacitus, Bolton, Heywood, Smollett, and countless others over many centuries. Given the processual nature of Boudica's presence in British historical culture, it is drastically misleading to argue that she ‘is inherited from the Victorians and is redolent of selective myth making, a real figure colonized to become a symbol of British greatness in a Victorian myth of Empire’.Footnote 90
Undoubtedly, Boudica served the respective purposes of Thomas Thornycroft and Edmund Bolton. Thornycroft chose her to represent his artistic stance: as a British historical figure with a basis in established sources, he could use her to articulate his firm belief that British artists had the ability and imagination to compete with foreign talent, and could do so using material garnered from their own history. For Bolton, Boudica's example served two purposes. First, her story supported his ideological point that monarchy would always be the most successful form of government. But her story served a second, more important, purpose, in that it provided the material with which Bolton could challenge his own skills as an antiquary and historian. Thus, Boudica's historicity was crucial to both Thornycroft, the Victorian artist, and Bolton, the Jacobean antiquary. By uncovering the necessity of Boudica's historicity to the respective antiquarian and artistic purposes of Bolton and Thornycroft, we see that it is not the malleability of the past, but its essential sameness, which renders it significant to successive generations.
Of course, it has not been the intention of this article to argue that Jacobean and Victorian historical cultures should be considered as identical. Nor can one conflate in any sense the generic range or the broad nature of public engagement with the past that existed in different forms in the two periods. Victorian historical culture reflected the more sophisticated means of mass communication that prevailed during the period, and as a result was more accessible and varied than seventeenth-century historical culture. Rather it has been my intent to encourage historians of history to look beyond the established intellectual and chronological horizons of their subject to question more robustly the idea that the heroic figures like Boudica were ‘rediscovered’ or ‘invented’ in their modern form in the nineteenth century. It is both striking and important that Boudica remained a subject of fascination for writers and artists from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century and beyond. At the heart of their fascination lay Boudica's story itself, and in this particular case-study, her bond with the city of London. Her actions in the city proved its antiquity, and this made her reputation a subject of enquiry, and, in the nineteenth century, organized commemoration.
A sense of continuity is key to the study and understanding of historical culture. Unlike fictions, historical figures and events are the product of more than a single mind and moment and must appeal to more than just the imagination – they must rest on some static foundation. Edmund Bolton's retelling of Tacitus's Boudica story, the subsequent repetition of that story over the course of centuries, as well as the continued importance of the primary source base, formed the basis for later understandings of the warrior queen. Given this foundation, it becomes possible to view what are, on the surface, very different bodies of work as part of the same continuing, discursive process by which historical ideas develop – and persist – over time.
The study of historical culture asks historians to look beyond the immediate cultural context in which a historical character or event is being recapitulated – to see the past as more than merely epiphenomenal to the present. By eschewing explanations that rely on the perfect coincidence of cultural moments with artistic or authorial intent, we distance ourselves from the idea that the past is endlessly malleable, or even fictional, to paraphrase Hayden White and similar twentieth-century critics.Footnote 91 The emphasis in the study of historical culture should be on the ‘historical’ – that is, the historicity of the subject and the source base from which the subject originates – not solely or primarily the political and cultural context in which the subject is being recapitulated.Footnote 92 This may necessitate taking a longue durée approach, especially to subjects from classical antiquity such as Boudica. It may also compel historians to reassert the importance of individual authors and artists in portraying the past, and to focus not on how the past has been manipulated or corrupted, but on how the past maintains integrity throughout time.
