The bronze warrior queen on Westminster Bridge is a Victorian invention. The historical Boudicca is harder to find. This book goes looking.

In 60 CE, Roman officials annexed an East Anglian kingdom, flogged its widowed queen, and raped her two daughters. Within months, Boudicca of the Iceni had assembled a coalition of British tribes, burned Colchester, London, and St Albans to the ground, killed tens of thousands, and brought Rome's grip on Britain closer to collapse than any rebel before or since. Less than a year later, the rebellion was over and Boudicca was dead.

This book follows both stories ? the rebellion and its long afterlife. The historical reconstruction draws on Tacitus, Cassius Dio, and the latest archaeology, including the Bloomberg writing tablets and the Crossrail discoveries beneath modern London. The cultural history traces what later ages did with her: the medieval silence, the Renaissance recovery, the Elizabethan parallel queen, the Boadicea of Cowper and Tennyson, the Westminster statue, suffragette pageantry, modern feminist scholarship.

Strip away the layers and what remains is a real Iron Age queen ? and a national myth that has often had remarkably little to do with her.