Britons were slain almost 80,000, of our men about 400, with not many more wounded.” That Boadicea’s defeat was gloried in as being such a triumph to the Roman arms is in itself a witness to her prowess. The numbers of the slain did not likely represent warriors alone. The carriages with their wives and children lined the field. The Romans thought that the defeated Britons _could not_ fly past these. They _would not_. Husbands, wives, and babes were slain together, and reckoned together, perhaps the very beasts of burden among the heaps of the slain were reckoned too. Anything to increase the Roman “glory.” There is no picture more touching in the history of our country! The forces of oppression and lust, the spirit of Nero himself, then Emperor, were ranged against this woman. With superhuman energy, as patriot, as mother, and as _individual_, she struggled against these in defence of country, home, and honour. And _she failed_! Had circumstances been but slightly altered, had the brave Caractacus been but able to hold out a little longer, and take shelter with her, instead of trusting the rival Queen Cartismandua, how differently might our British history have read to-day. Cartismandua was a Queen, too, in her own right, wedded freely to the neighbouring Prince Venutius, but nevertheless personally elected as the supreme ruler and leader of the united tribes of the Brigantes, making contracts and treaties for all. Caractacus, after his nine years’ struggle, had fled for shelter and for help to her in the year 50 A.D. But as Elton says in his “Origin of English History,” “she was farseeing enough to see the hopelessness of contest with the Romans.” Already Romanised in heart and spirit, she betrayed her countryman, cast off her husband, forfeited her honour, and finally lost the crown of her inheritance. The blameless Boadicea suffered for her sins twelve years later, in that sad year of 62 A.D. That defeat rang the death-knell of the freedom of British womanhood, and of the spirit of British manhood. In such a crisis it is _not_ the fittest who survive. They who lived to tread upon her grave were born of lower possibilities. Yet she _has lived_, the typal woman of the British past. I know that I may be expected to speak of the Empress Helena, claimed by Camalodunum (now Colchester) as the only daughter of its Coel II., the wife of Constantius, the mother of Constantine, the Christian convert, the finder of the true cross. Good as she was, refined and cultivated too, she was, nevertheless, but a Romanised Briton, a Roman wife, a Roman mother, under Roman Law. And the Roman Law was a meaner foster-mother for feminine virtues than the free old British Law.