E. 4.—­A convulsive outburst of popular rage and despair followed.  The wrongs of Boadicea kindled the Britons to madness, and she found herself at once at the head of a rising comprising all the clans of the east and the Midlands.  Half-armed as they were, their desperate onset carried all before it.  The first attack was made upon the hated Colony at Camelodune, where the great Temple of “the God” Claudius, rising high above the town, bore an ever-visible testimony to Rome’s enslavement of Britain,[173] and whence the lately-established veterans were wont, by the connivance of the Procurator, to treat the neighbourhood with utterly illegal military licence, sacking houses, ravaging fields, and abusing their British fellow-subjects as “caitiff slaves."[174]

E. 5.—­These marauders were, however, as great cowards as bullies, and were now trembling before the approach of vengeance.  How completely they were cowed is shown by the gloomy auguries which passed from lip to lip as foreshadowing the coming woe.  The statue of Victory had fallen on its face, women frantic with fear rushed about wildly shrieking “Ruin!”, strange moans and wailings were heard in Courthouse and Theatre, on the Thames estuary the ruddy glow of sunset looked like blood and flame, the sand-ripples and sea-wrack left by the ebb suggested corpses; everything ministered to their craven fear.

E. 6.—­So hopeless was the demoralization that the very commonest precautions were neglected.  The town was unfortified, yet these old soldiers made no attempt at entrenchment; even the women and children were not sent away while the roads were yet open.  And when the storm burst on the town the hapless non-combatants were simply abandoned to massacre, while the veterans, along with some two hundred badly-armed recruits (the only help furnished by their precious Procurator, who himself fled incontinently to Gaul), shut themselves up in the Temple, in hopes of thus saving their own skins till the Ninth Legion, which was hastening to their aid, should arrive.

E. 7.—­It is a satisfaction to read that in this they were disappointed.  Next day their refuge was stormed, and every soul within put to the sword.  The Temple itself, and all else at Camelodune, was burnt to the ground, and the wicked Colony blotted off the face of the earth.  The approaching Legion scarcely fared better.  The victorious Britons swept down upon it on the march, cut to pieces the entire infantry, and sent the cavalry in headlong flight to London, where Suetonius Paulinus, the Governor of Britain, was now mustering such force as he could make to meet the overwhelming onslaught.

E. 8.—­When the outbreak took place he had been far away, putting down the last relics of the now illicit Druidism in the island of Mona or Anglesey.  The enterprise was one which demanded a considerable display of force, for the defenders of the island fought with fanatical frenzy, the priests and priestesses alike taking part in the fray, and perishing at last in their own sacrificial fires, when the passage over the Menai Straits was made good.