Cartimandua, on the other hand, whose political skills and influence were probably considerably greater than Boudica’s in her own time, and whose generalship in battle was probably also superior to Boudica’s, is now a far more obscure figure. While Boudica has become a symbol of heroic resistance, like Vercingetorix, Cartimandua is remembered, if at all, as a traitor; like Vortigern. In part, ironically, it was Roman historians who helped to perpetuate these simple images. The Roman mother or matron held a place of high honour in Roman culture. Boudica, Rome’s implacable enemy, came to represent matronly honour because she was fighting on behalf of her defiled daughters, while Cartimandua, Rome’s political and military ally, was a shameless adulteress. For many years, Cartimandua’s story was told to Roman girls by their mothers as an example of where unbridled lust would lead them.
Unlike Boudica, Cartimandua was the regent of her tribe, and her husband, Venutius, was merely her consort. The tribe was the Brigantes, whose territory was very extensive: in fact, it was the single largest Celtic kingdom in Britain, covering most of modern Cheshire, South and North Yorkshire, Lancashire, North Humberside, Cumbria, County Durham and Tyne and Wear.
Britain had been subdued as far north as the area of modern Lincoln (Roman Lindum) by the commander Aulus Plautius, who had returned to a triumphal retirement in Rome in AD 47. By AD 51, his successor, Ostorius Scapula, was still wrestling with the problem of subduing the rebellious tribes of the far north, including the powerful Brigantes, but he was presented with a more immediate problem in the shape of King Caradoc or Caratacus, son of Cymbeline. Caradoc summoned to war the Silures, a fiercely independent tribe, probably originally of Celto-Iberian stock, whose territory was in what is now south Wales. The Silures were joined by the Ordovices from the northwest. Caradoc’s intention was to mobilize the Silures, Ordovices and Brigantes as one supra-tribal unit against the Romans. It was an ambitious plan, but not unworkable, given the huge numbers of warriors who could be assembled if all three tribes worked in concert. In the meantime, Queen Cartimandua had grown tired of her husband, Venutius. She fell in love with a younger man, Vellocatus, the king’s arms-bearer. She was in an awkward position. She could not conduct an open love affair with her husband’s servant: the insult would have been unforgivable. So Cartimandua had to devise some method to get rid of her husband. The method she chose was extreme, to put it mildly. She sent envoys to Ostorius Scapula, offering him the whole of the Brigantian tribal area as a Roman protectorate. Ostorius Scapula, who must have been scarcely able to believe his good fortune, accepted immediately.
The divorce was so acrimonious that it triggered intratribal warfare. Cartimandua, obviously an astute tactician, captured Venutius’s brother and other relatives and held them hostage. Venutius, infuriated, responded by raising a force against his former queen. Within weeks, a full-scale Brigantian civil war was in progress. Inevitably, the Romans took advantage of the situation. Since Cartimandua had offered the Brigantian territory as a protectorate, they naturally sided with her and against Venutius.
In the meantime. King Caradoc engaged in battle with Ostorius Scapula, as Tacitus describes:
After a reconnaissance to detect vulnerable and invulnerable points, Ostorius led his enthusiastic soldiers forward. They crossed the river without difficulty, and reached the (Celtic) rampart. But then, in an exchange of missiles, they came off worse in wounds and casualties. However, under a roof of locked shields, the Romans demolished the crude and clumsy stone embankment, and in the subsequent fight at close quarters the natives were driven to the hill-tops. Our troops pursued them closely. While light-armed auxiliaries attacked with javelins, the heavy regular infantry advanced in close formation. The British, unprotected by breastplates or helmets, were thrown into disorder. If they stood up to the auxiliaries they were cut down by the swords and spears of the regulars, and if they faced the latter they succumbed to the auxiliaries’ broadswords and pikes. It was a great victory. Caratacus’s wife and daughter were captured. His brother surrendered.
Caradoc fled for his life, and he naturally fled to the place he thought safest: Cartimandua’s palace. He obviously had received no news of her divorce from Venutius, nor of her offer to Ostorius Scapula. Instead of receiving Caradoc as a fellow Celtic monarch, Cartimandua had him put in chains and thrown into a prison to await collection by the Romans. While in prison, Caradoc learned that Cartimandua had colluded with Ostorius Scapula in planning the battle at which his wife and daughter had been captured and his brother had been forced to surrender. We can imagine how deep his grief and sense of betrayal must have been.
Ostorius Scapula sent Caradoc to Rome, as Tacitus explains:
The reputation of Caratacus had spread beyond the islands and through the neighbouring provinces to Italy itself. These people were curious to see the man who had defied our power for so many years. Even at Rome his name meant something. . . . There was a march past, with Caratacus’ petty vassals, and the decorations and neck-chains and spoils of his foreign wars. Next were displayed his brothers, wife, and daughter. Last came the king himself. The others, frightened, degraded themselves by entreaties. But there were no downcast looks or appeals for mercy from Caratacus.
Tacitus then proceeds to give us a speech for Caradoc which clearly was an appeal for mercy, and a very eloquent one. Although the defiant, heady speech is almost certainly pure invention by Tacitus, it has captured the imagination of Celtic scholars over the centuries, and there are many versions of it, most of them in Welsh, and most of them much more windbaggish. Here is Tacitus’s original:
‘Had my lineage and rank been accompanied by only moderate success, I should have come to this city as friend rather than as prisoner, and you would not have disdained to ally yourself peacefully with one so nobly bom, the ruler of so many nations. As it is, humiliation is my lot, glory yours. I had horses, men, arms, wealth. Are you surprised 1 am sorry to lose them? If you want to rule the world, does it follow that everyone else welcomes enslavement? If I had surrendered without a blow before being brought before you, neither my downfall nor your triumph would have become famous. If you execute me, they will be forgotten. Spare me, and 1 shall be an everlasting token of your mercy!’
Unless Caradoc had learned Latin with remarkable ease, we must assume that this speech was given in Celtic and translated for the emperor. Claudius spared Caradoc and his family, who lived on in Rome as famous prisoner-guests, presumably for some years.
Meanwhile, back in Britain, the Silures were proving to be, as Tacitus says, ‘exceptionally stubborn’. Ostorius Scapula had repeatedly and publicly promised not just to defeat them in battle, but to exterminate them as a tribe and people. For Celts, there could be no greater insult or affront to their dignity. At this point, ‘exhausted by his anxious responsibilities’, Ostorius Scapula died. He was replaced by Aulus Didius Callus (‘Didius the Gaul’), who, despite his name, was neither a Celt nor a friend of the Celts. Didius immediately confirmed his predecessor’s deal with Queen Cartimandua, and sent her Roman reinforcements when rebel tribes tried to invade Brigantian territory.
In the end, however, it was her own people who defeated Cartimandua. Her abrupt divorce of Venutius and hasty marriage to the much younger Vellocatus was certainly a scandal to Roman eyes, and it appears that even for her own people it was a challenge to the prestige of the royal family. Venutius, campaigning with all the fury of a cuckolded husband as well as the natural anger of a deposed king, persuaded the druids, and through them the rest of the huge tribe, that the ageing Cartimandua was no longer fit to govern. Eventually, she was forced to flee the kingdom, taking Vellocatus with her. They escaped to Camulodunum, where they lived, and finally languished, under Roman protection. We can picture the couple, she now having lost her looks, and he having lost all his ambition to be king, declining into bitterness and regret, virtually confined to the Colchester barracks and its immediate surroundings, perhaps bickering through the long nights over glasses of cheap army wine, a burden and embarrassment to their Roman hosts.
(Just to tidy up the story, Venutius did not have long to glory in his revenge. When Vespasian became emperoi; he appointed Petillus Cerealis governor of Britain. Cerealis was dispatched from Rome with an extra legion, n Adiutrix, which joined IX Hispana and XX Valeria Victrix, already stationed in the island. The legions marched northwards to defeat and kill Venutius at a battle site near modern Stanwick in Leicestershire.)
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