Still, the Britons _would not_ yield. They rose again and again, and
died by thousands, sword in hand. They rose, on every possible
occasion. Suetonius, another Roman general, came, and stormed the
Island of Anglesey (then called Mona), which was supposed to be sacred,
and he burnt the Druids in their own wicker cages, by their own fires.
But, even while he was in Britain, with his victorious troops, the
Britons rose. Because Boadicea, a British queen, the widow of the King
of the Norfolk and Suffolk people, resisted the plundering of her
property by the Romans who were settled in England, she was scourged,
by order of Catus a Roman officer; and her two daughters were
shamefully insulted in her presence, and her husband’s relations were
made slaves. To avenge this injury, the Britons rose, with all their
might and rage. They drove Catus into Gaul; they laid the Roman
possessions waste; they forced the Romans out of London, then a poor
little town, but a trading place; they hanged, burnt, crucified, and
slew by the sword, seventy thousand Romans in a few days. Suetonius
strengthened his army, and advanced to give them battle. They
strengthened their army, and desperately attacked his, on the field
where it was strongly posted. Before the first charge of the Britons
was made, Boadicea, in a war-chariot, with her fair hair streaming in
the wind, and her injured daughters lying at her feet, drove among the
troops, and cried to them for vengeance on their oppressors, the
licentious Romans. The Britons fought to the last; but they were
vanquished with great slaughter, and the unhappy queen took poison.
Still, the spirit of the Britons was not broken. When Suetonius left
the country, they fell upon his troops, and retook the Island of
Anglesey. Agricola came, fifteen or twenty years afterwards, and retook
it once more, and devoted seven years to subduing the country,
especially that part of it which is now called Scotland; but, its
people, the Caledonians, resisted him at every inch of ground. They
fought the bloodiest battles with him; they killed their very wives and
children, to prevent his making prisoners of them; they fell, fighting,
in such great numbers that certain hills in Scotland are yet supposed
to be vast heaps of stones piled up above their graves. Hadrian came,
thirty years afterwards, and still they resisted him. Severus came,
nearly a hundred years afterwards, and they worried his great army like
dogs, and rejoiced to see them die, by thousands, in the bogs and
swamps. Caracalla, the son and successor of Severus, did the most to
conquer them, for a time; but not by force of arms. He knew how little
that would do. He yielded up a quantity of land to the Caledonians, and
gave the Britons the same privileges as the Romans possessed. There was
peace, after this, for seventy years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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