In 1991, Queen Elizabeth II gave an address to a joint session of the United States Congress, the first address of its kind delivered by a British monarch. As part of her remarks, she reflected on the end of the American Revolution and eventual partnership between the United States and the United Kingdom. “Some people believe that power grows from the barrel of a gun,” said the Queen, her speech actually written by staff at the British Embassy in Washington. “So it can, but history shows that it never grows well nor for very long. Force, in the end, is sterile. We have gone a better way: our societies rest on mutual agreement, on contract and on consensus.”[1] The exhibition of anxieties about violent pasts was a strange choice, as if intended to absolve modern listeners of any connection to people who made war on each other. But these anxieties were not new; those who participated in the American Revolution possessed anxieties about their histories to that time, and grappled with them as the Revolution and wider imperial crisis unfolded.
In the eighteenth century, the British largely saw their ancient Britannic heritage as an embarrassment to their self-conception as a beacon of proper civilization. The history of the Iceni tribe and their last queen, Boudica, proved especially fraught. Polytheistic, influenced in large measure by Druids, and lacking a method of government that would have been recognized as enlightened, the eighteenth century Briton found little about the Iceni, or any other ancient Celtic tribe, worth emulating. To add to the complications of heritage, the Iceni revolted multiple times against the Roman Empire, whom the British were attempting to emulate.
Boudica led an Iceni revolt against the Romans in approximately 61 CE.[2] Responding to a litany of Roman offenses, the Iceni sacked the modern towns of Colchester, London, and St. Albans before being defeated in battle by Suetonius Paulinus somewhere in the British midlands, possibly near modern Wroxeter.[3] After the uprising failed, Boudica died, likely from self-inflicted poisoning.[4] The only detailed accounts of Boudica and her revolt come from Roman historians Tacitus and Cassius Dio. The Roman histories did not become widely available in Britain until the early 1500s.[5]
These early modern uses of Boudica presented the English with an identity crisis.[6] The Elizabethan period, by simple virtue of the Queen’s gender, necessitated a softening of gender norms, and authors portrayed Boudica more positively, drawing parallels with Elizabeth I.[7] When James I acceded to the English throne in 1603, he eagerly tried to reimpress upon the nation what he saw as the importance of strong, masculine rule; Boudica’s image suffered, being depicted in stage performances as a stereotype, a woman who, while noble, was too emotional to properly govern a nation.[8]
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, depictions of Boudica in works of history began to be applied more pointedly to contemporary political debates. Jodi Mikalachki argues Boudica’s presence in the historical record “threatened the establishment of a stable, masculine identity” during the Restoration period.[9] During Robert Walpole’s lengthy premiership, the professional writing of history more generally became important devices in understanding and critiquing the present. Whig historians like Paul de Rapin and Thornhagh Gurdon, authors of History of England (1725) and History of the High Court of Parliament (1731) respectively, cast Boudica and her revolt as courageous and an outstanding example of a “proto parliamentarian” government. On the other hand, Tory-leaning historians such as Thomas Salmon, author of the 1732 Modern History, or the Present State of All Nations, stressed the story of Boudica as evidence of the “inviolate nature of hereditary succession.”[10] The ambivalence regarding Boudica would persist in the following decades.
In the nineteenth century, Boudica became a celebrated symbol of British imperialism.[11] William Cowper’s 1782 poem Boadicea: An Ode, celebrated Boudica as an icon of British sovereignty. Taught to British schoolchildren throughout much of the nineteenth century, the poem gave Boudica lasting symbolic import within the framework of empire.[12] Moreover, in the 1850s, at the request of Prince Albert, Thomas Thornycroft began construction on the statue Boadicea and Her Daughters. Despite not being installed until 1902, a year after Victoria’s death, the statue was intended to resemble Victoria physically.[13] In the nineteenth century, despite lingering negative perceptions, Boudica’s image undoubtedly transformed into one of female heroism.
While significant scholarly attention has been given to the uses of Boudica throughout much of British history, virtually none has been paid to the uses of her surrounding the American Revolution. In the eighteenth century, both Anglo-Saxon and Roman histories became integral to Briton and American alike in understanding their morphing circumstances and still, to varying degrees, nebulous conceptions of nationalism. Boudica was not an especially popular historical figure during this period, and as noted above, was largely viewed with ambivalence. Nevertheless, Boudica played a role in these understandings of nationalism, on both sides of the Atlantic. Viewed as a savage heritage at the outbreak of the American Revolution, the loss of the American colonies prompted the British to increasingly embrace their ancient British roots to help redefine their empire.
Writing Boudica and the Revolution
“At present,” declared William Augustus Russel, a London historian, “no polite people are without their national history. Societies deficient in this respect are justly ranked as barbarous.”[14] Russel’s sentiment certainly aligned with the importance placed on the writing of history that emerged in eighteenth century Britian. But Boudica and Iceni history presented Russel with a problem: the perception that the “civilized” British traced their nation’s roots back to a history regarded as barbarous. As the British attempted to continue to assert themselves as a global empire, Anglo-Saxons were seen as an embarrassment, Rosemary Sweet indicates, as “barbarian destroyers of Roman civilization, who had an unfortunate taste for violence and intemperance.”[15] The ideas and perception of Rome had long influenced British politics. The idealized principles of the Roman republic served as something of a model, or at least contextualizing force, during the Glorious Revolution.[16] After the establishment of East India Company rule in India and the conquest of Quebec in 1759, the British began to imagine themselves more stridently as the heirs to Rome, and—with some cognitive dissonance—a superior Rome, an empire based on “commerce rather than conquest.”[17] Rather than embracing the history of their own isle, Britons favored the history of the people they sought to emulate.
While the American Revolution was ongoing, Russel wrote his history from a plainly pro-British position, one that could certainly be interpreted as being filtered through an affinity for Roman-British parallels. Russel began his history by briefly detailing the initial Roman conquest of Druids in ancient Britain, ascribing their success to “better discipline and more persevering fortitude” as opposed to the “fierce, warlike tempers” of the Britons.[18] In writing of the Boudican revolt, Russel acknowledges, using Tacticus’s account, the brutality suffered by Boudica and her daughters, but still clearly sees the Romans as the superior, civilized force. He described, not inaccurately, at least by Roman accounts, the Iceni sacking of towns and their lack of discrimination on inflicting violence on people regardless of age, sex, or condition as “depredations,” a “most savage cruelty.”[19] In describing the final battle between Boudica and Suetonius, he again favored the Romans, noting that the Iceni made crucial tactical errors while the Romans maintained excellent discipline. More saliently, though, Russel played to gendered depictions of Boudica, writing of her pre-battle speech—a likely invention by Cassius Dio—that she “addressed herself to the army with all the power of a female queenee [sic].”[20] Russel’s overall depiction of the Iceni revolt was that of female-led savagery against a much superior force.
Russel did not characterize the Americans as barbaric, but rather characterized them as unreasonable and ineffectual. He prominently cited the declaration by Adm. Richard Howe and Gen. William Howe, issued in New York on September 19, 1776, which Russel plainly agreed with. “The king being most graciously disposed,” went the declaration, “to direct a revision of such of his royal instructions as may be construed to lay an improper restraint upon the freedom . . . of his colonies . . . it is recommended to the inhabitants at large to reflect seriously upon their present condition and expectations”[21] Russel followed: “The Provincials were adverse to every mode offered by the government.”[22] If we compare this characterization to that of the Iceni, the British officials are portrayed as hierarchical and thus orderly, authoritative, but merciful. The Americans are portrayed as totally unreasonable, unable to fully comprehend the might of royal authority.
One page later, Russel triumphantly describes the British victory at the Battle of White Plains, noting the “great variety of military forces” that had successfully waged the battle and “taken many prisoners.”[23] Later, when describing the Battle of Monmouth, he characterized the stalemate as a great British victory, writing that General Clinton “was attacked on his march by the provincials, whose principal object appeared to be gaining possession of the British baggage; but in this they were disappointed, and everywhere repulsed, by the judicious manner in which General Clinton had disposed his troops. This failure occasioned a dispute between the provincial generals, Washington and Lee.”[24] Like his depiction of the Iceni in battle, Russel showed the Americans making tactical errors and, as a consequence, bickering amongst themselves, while the British forces maintained good discipline under their “judicious” leadership.
Both Iceni and Americans were depicted as unreasonable to varying degrees; that, despite possibly being justified in their anger, they overreacted in their impulse to violence. Their leadership, moreover, was depicted as “womanish,” either because the leader was a woman or because they engaged in petty disputes, whereas imperial leaders took strong, decisive action. If a Briton, engaged in the imperial imaginative process, read Russel’s account, it would not have been difficult to come to the same conclusion—that the Americans carried a part of the Iceni legacy while the British, bore the Roman.
Cowper’s Ode and the Imperial
As it happened, some British observers did regard the Americans as savages, ones who, from their perspective, had spent too much time associating with the “savages” who occupied all the land outside of the former colonies.[25] But the war’s outcome brought it all to an end. Failure to quell the rebellion and prevent American independence forced the British, for the first time, to reckon with the limitations of their empire. Some believed the loss of the American colonies threatened to undermine the integrity of the empire altogether, and that Ireland and other colonies would follow. Further, the success of the rebellion deeply wounded British national pride, with many, including King George, believing that the successful rebellion spelled the end of Britain’s respectability amongst other European powers.[26] Still, rather swiftly, as well as self-consciously, the British government set out to remake their empire, now promoting liberty and humanitarianism as its ethos.[27] The “Spirit of 1783” recast the British imperial mission, but did not, to state the obvious, deter imperial ambitions, nor the imagined connection between Rome and Britain.
The humiliation brought on by loss repositioned George III as a symbol of patriotism, and the political landscape shifted to reflect the empire’s new aims. Indeed, King George won what Linda Colley termed a “propaganda victory” over the Fox-North coalition with the appointment of William Pitt to the premiership, George being associated with Pitt, who was untainted by the Revolution.[28] This, in turn, strengthened the position of the crown as well as extant social hierarchies, limiting the potential successes of any future republican sentiments.[29] It is within this political context that William Cowper wrote his Ode to Boudica, published in 1782. The poem directly invokes the revolt as the creation of a British nation, and celebrates Boudica’s attempt to throw off Roman rule. Caitlin Gillespie highlights the final stanza as the most important portion of the poem, arguing that it reflected both strong imperial pride as well as a direct imagined link between Roman and British empire.[30] The final stanza goes as follows:
Ruffians, pitiless as proud,
Heavens award as the vengeance due;
Empire is on us bestow’d
Shame and ruin wait for you![31]
The extensive use of Cowper’s poem during the nineteenth century is well known, and nearly all scholarship concerning the poem concentrates on its nineteenth century significance. Only Richard Hingley and Christina Unwin mention the immediate context in which it was written, noting it was published during a comparatively relaxed period of “territorial expansion and political ambition following a period of lengthy conflict.”[32]
But the poem must be fully contextualized within the period in which Cowper wrote it. In its specific context, the poem reads as a reassertion of national pride, a defiant parting shot at the new United States, then it does an overt, victorious celebration of imperial triumph. Cowper lifted Boudica from defeat and raised her to victory not in her own time, but in the later, and indeed future glories of Britain. Cowper’s Ode anticipated the empire that was “on us bestow’d,” whereby the defeat in North America led the British to concentrate their imperial energies on the East. In a different stanza, Cowper wrote of a Druid who prophesized the fall of Rome:
Rome shall perish—write that word
In the blood that she has spilt,
Perish hopeless and abhorred,
Deep in ruin as in guilt.[33]
It is unlikely that any Americans prophesized that the British Empire would fall; quite the opposite, the new nation sought and to an extent needed its formal recognition.[34] But if the possession of the American colonies was integral to the British self-conception as heirs to the Roman Empire, then indeed this new Rome fell. At any rate, Cowper’s Ode is more than an eighteenth century work that found influence in the nineteenth. It directly reflects British anxieties about their position within global imperial contests, as well as anxieties that their only recently developed self-conception as a new Rome had nearly been shattered.
Taken together, the Ode is to an extent an exorcism of those anxieties, reminding readers that the rise and fall of empires were simply a part of the way the world worked. Yet, it is also defiant, reminding the reader that the British Empire had glories awaiting in its future. The poem is the supreme expression of ambivalence regarding Boudica, but also a key turn towards the embrace of ancient British heritage. Boudica leads the people who prophesize the fall of Rome. Within that invention is still an image of savagery, with a mystical, cunning Druid toppling the more advanced Romans. But Boudica herself becomes a national and imperial matriarch, an expression of freedom from foreign domination and the origins of Britain and, by default, its empire. If “Empire is on us bestow’d” is to be taken literally, Britain was still a successor to Rome, but rooted more firmly in its own heritage.
Boudica and Gendered Politics
George Washington, ever in reality something of a egotist, imagined himself—and successfully managed to get Americans to imagine him—as the modern Cincinnatus, the great paragon of virtue of the early Roman republic. In the eighteenth century, history, especially antiquity, functioned as “exemplar history,” whereby those who read histories would be provided with specific examples of virtue and vice, ones that made immediate and concrete the more abstract principles outlined by philosophers.[35] Men, Phillip Hicks notes, were both allowed and encouraged to imagine themselves as the warriors and statesmen, whereas, since the point of history was to educate men about these figures, women, by simply engaging in “historical role-playing,” transgressed against predominant gender norms.[36]
Of course, women across the Atlantic world had already begun to argue for female liberty. In Britain itself, historical examples provided by Roman matrons dominated concepts of female citizenship. The ideas of republican motherhood that predominated the early United States and, later, French Republic also appeared in mid-eighteenth century Britian. Indeed, some eighteenth century Britons warned against following the Roman model of empire-through-conquest, and, as British imperial conquests continued, held women responsible for not being able to curtain the “lust for empire” present in the men with whom they were associated.[37] Though Roman matrons were used, most often by men, to consign British women’s political activities to the domestic sphere, some, like Catharine Macaulay, herself a republican-leaning historian, determined to use the examples of Roman women to imagine themselves, as well as argue for a greater public political role for women.[38]
During the American Revolution, American women began to likewise use the exemplar Roman women to define themselves and their public roles. Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren, for instance, published essays under pseudonyms: Adams used Portia, not accidentally the wife of Brutus; Warren used Marcia, mistress of Roman emperor Commodus.[39] Despite its transgressive nature, American women frequently engaged in writing about, reading about, and acting out women exemplars, arguing that the historical record proved beyond question that women were capable of a patriotic engagement with government.[40] These exemplars were almost always Roman women from either the republican or imperial age. One notable exception to this, though, was Boudica.
In 1779, an essay entitled “Visions of the Paradise of Female Patriotism” was published in the United States Magazine by a woman herself using a pseudonym, “Clarissa, a Lady of this City,” a name likely not derived from antiquity but, possibly, from Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady.[41] In the essay, the author is transported to heaven, or some similar version of a paradise, where, guided by an angel, she meets several Roman women, including Portia, and then several women famous for their political activity, including Joan of Arc, Zenobia, empress of Palmyra and Egyptian queen in the late Third Century, and Boudica. Joan of Arc and Boudica, the angel tells the author, associate with one another because they were “martial in their tempers, and both headed armies,” indicating that the image of Boudica as barbarous or savage was still present, even when written by a woman.[42] After this encounter, Abigail and Elizabeth Adams appear to the author, the angel informing her that, behind the Adamses are women from “Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Virginia, and several states in the union of the empire.”[43] The essay ends with the angel promising the author that all American women, even those currently aligned with the Loyalist cause, could eventually gain entry into the paradise, should they switch allegiances.[44]
Here, the parallel between the American Revolution and Iceni revolt is made plain. Heroic female patriotism drove both the overthrow of British rule and the Iceni attempt to drive out the Romans (Zenobia likewise waged war against Rome, finding more success than Boudica but ultimately, too, met with defeat). Abigail and Elizabeth Adams, like Boudica, head an army, the Adamses’ army comprised entirely of patriotic women. The phrase “states in the union of the empire” seems operative and raises questions. Did the American colonists, not yet free of British rule, already see themselves as their own empire? It seems possible since, as Michael Hattem indicates, Americans themselves saw the Revolution as an effort against arbitrary rule rather than a war over specific grievances, thus not by any means eliminating the impulse for empire.[45] At any rate, the essay draws direct parallels not only between the American Revolution and Iceni revolt at large but also, significantly, imagines prominent American women as playing a role in the Revolution equal to that of Boudica’s—commander of the revolt. Eighteenth century women looking to exemplars of the past could find self-conceptions in Anglo-Saxon (and Assyrian) women, not only Roman.
The Aftermath of the Revolution
“Ungrateful children of a provident parent!” wrote, with huge bitterness, M. Beaty, a seemingly mysterious author, about the newly independent United States in a 1786 edition of The Monitor. “Your stubborn rebellious necks,” he prophesied, “shall feel the galling yoke you have drawn on yourselves.”[46] Beaty’s bitterness did not necessarily come from any special attachment to the former colonies, nor even their very act of rebellion. Rather, he lamented, as if smarting over a lost lover, that they had allied themselves with France. “What advantage do you reap,” he asked, “from all your ill-gotten liberty? Are you not become the dependents, not the allies, of France?”[47] Beaty’s bitterness was certainly not unique. Rivalry with France defining both “English-ness and British-ness” in the eighteenth century, the American alliance with France completely severed, in the British mind, any kinship with the Americans.[48] Beaty had sound reason to be concerned about potential French aggression. But his writing actually reveals a greater fear of the adversarial potential of the United States:
Yet [the United States’s] immense, improvable soil, in the space of twenty or thirty years, would certainly render her a powerful adversary, especially if her inhabitants could be duly united, or if she should continue so long at the command of her present master, the Gallic Monarch.[49]
British anxieties regarding French invasion were long-standing, and especially pronounced on a near-continuous basis since 1748.[50] Accurately recognizing the inherent value of resource-rich North America, the potential of an enduring Franco-American alliance threatened British sovereignty altogether.
With fear of the potential capabilities of the Franco-American alliance dominating his thought, Beaty turned to a consideration of domestic politics with a tone of panic and urgency. Pronounced political divisions between Whigs and Tories began during the Glorious Revolution, and were exacerbated further still by Jacobite rebellion and the lengthy period of Whig supremacy under Walpole.[51] The American Revolution and other activities during the imperial crisis once more worsened factionalism and led to a revolving door in government.[52] The apparent instability within British politics, an aberration at least to the position of the crown itself, was to some observers, including Beaty, an enormous threat, one that promised to undermine the integrity of the nation and empire in much the same way the rebellious Americans had done and threatened to do still.[53] “Want of unanimity in this country,” wrote Beaty, relying on Anglo and Roman history, “was ever the forerunner of its calamity. Caractacus should not have graced the triumph of Rome; nor Cassibellanus repeatedly sent hostages; nor Boadicea fallen by despair, had not opposition and disloyalty facilitated the road to foreign selfish invaders. What paved the way also to the Danish, the Saxon, and the Norman conquests?—ambition, jealousy, opposition, and faction!”[54] Fully casting Boudica as a symbol of British independence and the Iceni revolt as an example of political harmony, Beaty’s writing marks a decided shift in attitude towards Britain’s ancient history.
The contextualization, an accurate one from the British perspective, of the United States as traitorous in both rebellion and in choosing its allies creates a parallel between the Americans and Britons who sided with the Romans during the Iceni revolt. In this extended analogy, the French assume the role of the Romans, come to conquer Britain and impose themselves.[55] Boudica here is Britain and its empire, undermined by factionalism that threatens solubility, sovereignty, and the ability to expand empire further. Faced with the possibility of full-scale invasion, the example of rejection of foreign rule set by the Iceni meets the moment.
Conclusion
It seems likely that, though the process of rehabilitating Britannic heritage as the British Empire redefined itself certainly involved Boudica, she herself still remained too dangerous to fully adopt during this period. Precisely why Boudica was not widely invoked is difficult is to ascertain, though the simple fact that she was a woman seems the culprit in the broad sense. As Michele Cohen demonstrates, the late eighteenth century saw a preoccupation with masculinity within England, with much of the anxieties about masculinity tied to their rivalry with France.[56] The potential for French invasion and subsequent domination certainly carried with it the possibility for fracturing the masculinity of individuals as well as that of the body politic, and also certain sexual undertones that would have chipped away at masculine ideals. In that way, the use of Boudica as a defender of British independence may not have held as much appeal as may initially seem apparent. Though Beaty casts her as an asexual defender of Britain, other writers simply may have felt that it would have been inappropriate to have a woman symbolize the country at such a precarious time, reserving that role for any number of candidates from a stable of male exemplars.
Aside from that, the example set by Rome may have still intervened to prevent a total reinvention of Boudica. With many eighteenth century British elite well-versed in the classics, they followed the thinking of these writers, who held that “all systems degenerated.”[57] Tacitus himself, author of one of two accounts of the Boudican revolt, wrote on degeneration and the danger of tyranny. Ideas of civic virtue, designed to prevent a tyrannical outcome, became integral to British behavior and self-conception.[58] Still striving to be a beacon of civilization, the use of Boudica, so long cast as a symbol of the savage—degenerate—Iceni methods of government, may have simply been a bridge too far for some people.
The uses of Boudica surrounding the American Revolution, like nearly all of its uses throughout British history, were largely ambivalent and adapted for expediency’s sake. In writing the Revolution while it was still ongoing, parallels between the unreasonable colonists and the barbarous Iceni were useful, Britain disavowing its Anglo past in favor of imagined Roman connections. After the Americans won independence, a triumphant Boudica, representing defiant British nationalism, was suddenly a convenient, soothing image, Britain humiliated but paradoxically becoming more self-assured. In the United States, obvious parallels between the two revolts, waged to throw off imperial rulers, were drawn, but Boudica herself became a symbol through which female political participation could be both imagined and expressed. It would be incorrect to state that Boudica, as a symbol, loomed over the whole of the American Revolution, important figures invoking her at every turn. American elites, like George Mason, read Tacitus’s ideas on degeneration at the same time their British counterparts did, and feared decline into ruin.[59] Nevertheless, Boudica was not, as the lack of scholarship would suggest, totally irrelevant in delineating understandings of a fractured empire.
[1] Karen DeWitt, “Queen’s Address to Congress Celebrates Mutual Respect,” New York Times, May 17, 1991.
[2] I will refer to “Boudica” throughout the essay. Historically, her name has been spelled as Boadicea, Boudicca, Boudega, Boudica, Buddug, or Buducia, amongst other variants. “Boudica” is the accepted modern spelling.
[3] After the death of Boudica’s husband Prasutagus, the King of the Iceni, Roman authorities, among other actions, took land, called already-paid loans, and sacked the Iceni countryside. To further display their authority, Boudica was flogged, and her daughters were raped. See: Tacitus, The Annals, translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (London: Macmillan and Co., 1875), 14:270; Gil Gambash, “To Rule a Ferocious Province: Roman Policy and the Aftermath of the Boudican Revolt,” Brittania 43 (2012): 2.
[4] Martha Vandrei, Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain: An Image of Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 46.
[5] Richard Hingley and Christina Unwin, Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queen (London: Hambeldon Continuum, 2006), 61; Stephanie Lawson, “Nationalism and Biographical Transformation: The Case of Boudicca,” Humanities Research 19, no. 1 (2013): 109. Some British works from well before the sixteenth century allude to Boudica and the Iceni revolt. Because of the nature of the British isles at the time, use of the story for nationalistic purposes would have been near impossible. See: Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, c. 530; Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 731; Nemnius, Historia Brittonum, c. 830.
[6] Jodi Mikalachki, The Legacy of Boudica: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 16; Lawson, “Nationalism and Biographical Transformation,” 111-112.
[7] Carole Levin, “Boudicca and Elizabeth Rally Their Troops: ‘Two Queens Alike in Dignity,’” in Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France: Reputation, Reinterpretation, and Reincarnation, ed. Estelle Paranaque (Gewerbestrasse: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 16.
[8] Lawson, “Nationalism and Biographical Transformation,” 112.
[9] Mikalachki, The Legacy of Boudica, 301-305.
[10] Vandrei, The Legacy of Boudica, 88-91. Also see: Mark Knights, “The Tory Interpretation of History,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68, no. 1-2 (2005): 361.
[11] Maria Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (Berkley: University of California Press, 2001), 51-53.
[12] Richard Hingley and Christina Unwin, Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queen (London: Hambeldon Continuum, 2006), 150, 157.
[13] Vandrei, The Legacy of Boudica, 146-147.
[14] William Augustus Russel, A New and Authentic History of England (London: J. Cooke, 1777), p. 1.
[15] Rosemary Sweet, “The Recovery of the Anglo-Saxon Past, c. 1770-1850,” The English Historical Review 136, no. 579 (2021): 304
[16] Phillip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4-5.
[17] Eran Shalev, Rome Reborn on the Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 42.
[18] Russel, A New and Authentic History, 5-6.
[19] Ibid., 12.
[20] Ibid., 12-13.
[21] Richard Howe and William Howe, “Declaration of Lord Howe and Sir William Howe,” September 19, 1776. digital.lib.niu.edu/islandora/object/niu-amarch%3A96725.
[22] Russel, A New and Authentic History, 847.
[23] Ibid., 848.
[24] Ibid., 861.
[25] Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 191-192.
[26] John Cannon, “The Loss of America,” in Britain and the American Revolution, ed. H.T. Dickinson (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 1998), 234.
[27] Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 13, 143.
[28] Linda Colley, “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation 1760-1820,” Past & Present no. 102 (1984): 104.
[29] Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 14.
[30] Caitlin C. Gillespie, Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 134.
[31] William Cowper, Boadicea, An Ode, in Poems, William Cowper (London: J. Johnson, 1787), 356.
[32] Hingley and Unwin, Boudica, 150.
[33] Cowper, Boadicea, 355.
[34] Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge: University Press, 2012), 3.
[35] Phillip Hicks, “Portia and Marcia: Female Political Identity and the Historical Imagination, 1770-1800,” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2005): 268-269.
[36] Hicks, “Portia,” 271.
[37] Phillip Hicks, “The Roman Matron in Britain: Female Political Influence and Republican Response, ca.
1750–1800,” The Journal of Modern History 77, no. 1 (2005): 35-49.
[38] Hicks, “Matron,” 59-61.
[39] Hicks, “Portia,” 275.
[40] Ibid., 269-272.
[41] Clarissa, a Lady of this City, “Visions of the Paradise of Female Patriotism,” United States Magazine (Philadelphia), March 1779.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Clarissa, Cited in Hicks, “Portia,” 273.
[45] Hattem, Past as Prologue, 186.
[46] M. Beaty, The Monitor: or, an Address to the people of Great Britain, America, and Ireland, on the Present Situation of Affairs (London: Derbett, Ryan, Richardson, 1786), 27. I searched extensively for any information on M. Beaty, but found no biographical information, nor any evidence of the name being used as a pseudonym.
[47] Beaty, The Monitor, 28. Italics original.
[48] Stephen Conway, “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739-1783,” William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2002): 68, 94, 96.
[49] Beaty, The Monitor, 5.
[50] Conway, “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners,” 77-78.
[51] Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 682.
[52] John Havard Owen, “Literature and the Party System in Britain, 1760–1830,” (Chicago: University of Chicago, PhD dissertation, 2013), 6-7.
[53] Vandrei, The Legacy of Boudica, 103-106.
[54] Beaty, The Monitor, 21.
[55] It is unclear to me exactly who Beaty refers to when discussing Britons who resisted or opposed Boudica’s revolt, aside from those who simply sought to avoid being killed when towns were sacked. At any rate, there is no overt reference to any organized opposition to the Iceni amongst their fellow Britons in either Tacitus or Dio.
[56] Michele Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996).
[57] Philip Ayers, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 23-24.
[58] Ibid., 23-24.
[59] Shalev, Rome Reborn, 79-80.
One thought on “Boudica and the American Revolution”
One of the best articles I have read recently. Very interesting and well written, great job Liam.