When Reggie the time travelling heroine of The Little Dog Laughed comes face to face with Boadicea, the deposed queen turned terrorist, has just thrown a massive tizzy! It's not hard to understand why the Queen was peeved. Only days after her husband’s death, Rome’s representative in Briton, Decianus Catus, a career bureaucrat with an eye to the main chance, arrived at the Iceni court with a couple of hundred Roman troops. He immediately confiscated her crown and proceeded to catalogue the estate which he declared was now Roman property. And that was just for starters!
When Boadicea objected she was stripped and whipped in front of the tribe’s noblemen, and her teenage daughters were pack-raped by the soldiers. This drove Boadicea into a murderous rage of epic proportions. Swearing to get even, the vengeful queen turned warrior, painted her body with blue paint and delivered an impassioned speech exhorting her countrymen to wreak vengeance on hares and foxes that attempt to rule over wolves. In a flood of righteous rage her followers, 200,000 men, women and children, demolished the Roman cities of Colchester, St Albans and London, pulling the buildings apart brick by brick and massacring the entire civilian population, some 70,000 people.