Why Did the Romans Invade Britain?
For someone who was, to a large extent, simply making things up as he went along, Augustus had some very good ideas, especially when it came to empirical tyranny, at which he proved to be a dab hand. Perhaps his greatest asset was his ability to think on the hoof, switching allegiances as much as he switched his socks (which, according to Suetonius (Aug. 78), he wore in his old age while resting after lunch), stabbing just about everyone in the back at some point during his rise to power, as he saw fit.
His daftest idea, however, was almost certainly the notion that the reins of power could simply be handed down the generations to younger members of his family; a silly idea made even more ridiculous when he adopted Tiberius as an heir, thus meaning that you didn’t even have to be related by blood to him in order to become emperor. In effect, this meant that any old rich boy with a vague relationship to Augustus could be emperor if they had enough men with pointy things hanging around who were willing to stick those pointy things into the squishy parts of senators who would rubber-stamp their application to become emperor.
By the time the line of succession got to Nero, there were so many powerful and rich men who were distantly related to Augustus hanging around, thanks in no small part to social rules that meant all the rich people could only marry each other, that it's little wonder that Nero himself went a bit bonkers with the paranoia of seeing people as equally qualified, and hungry, to be emperor as he was, literally, around every corner of the imperial palace.
It also meant that there were no checks or balances in place for who could be in the line of succession. One didn’t quite know what one was going to get as a ruler until the little bastard had been installed in power at the head of a huge army of men with pointy things.
Tiberius turned out to be the grumpy curmudgeon that everyone already knew he would be, but at least he buggered off to Capri for most of his reign and never came back. Caligula, though, despite a cracking start, turned out to be even worse, and so it was with little surprise that the praetorian tribune Cassius Chaerea, having had enough of Caligula being extraordinarily rude to him, hatched the plot which saw him hacked to pieces in AD 41.
All this is very good, but what does it have to do with the central question of why Rome invaded Britain? For that, we have to go back a few months.
Rome’s intentions to formally annexe the island of Britain can be traced back to when King Cunobelinus of the Catuvellauni tribe, which occupied the area roughly north of the Thames and what is now London, fell out with his own annoying son, a ‘prince’ by the name of Adminius (or Amminus, depending who you ask). Adminius was given the smaller satellite kingdom of the Cantiaci (from where we get the name Kent) to rule over. For an unspecified reason, Cunobelinus, who was on good terms with the Romans, expelled his son in either late 39 or early 40 (Suet. Cal. 44) and the prince then fled across the sea to Gaul, seeking refuge with the Romans.
About the same time, Cunobelinus died, leaving his kingdom to be divided between two more sons, Caratacus (who would go on to become one of Rome’s greatest enemies in Britain) and Togodumnus. Quite how the kingdom was divided isn’t entirely clear, but the stability Cunobelinus brought, and the Romans could benefit from, was broken and with sons seemingly all over the place, the pretext for an invasion was in place.
Caligula, who was militarily inept, to say the least, leapt at the opportunity to make it seem as if he was coming out of this as a mighty conqueror and promptly celebrated Adminius’ ‘surrender’ to him as though he had conquered the British despite never leaving Gaul or fighting anyone and promptly wrote to the senate, detailing the magnificence of his victory and claiming a triumph.
He mustered his troops on the shores of northern Gaul and, when they refused to budge, ordered them to pick up sea shells as booty and went home again (Suet. Cal. 44). The army had refused for several reasons, not least because the weather was stormy and the crossing was dangerous, but because Britain was a mysterious and potentially dangerous island set ‘across the sea’. To the Romans, there were two seas — the internal Mediterranean and an external one which surrounded everything else, and Britain lay on the other side of this external sea, apart, almost, from the ‘real’ world — a land of magic, monsters and terror. Julius Caesar, before he had invaded many decades before, had at least had the sense to have the way forward scouted (Suet. Caes. 58) and so had some idea of what to expect. All Caligula had was the word of Adminius and no idea about the strength of the Catuvellauni.
To cap it all, the neighbouring Atrebates (from south of the Thames) had thrown out their king, whose name is either Berica or Verica, and who was also a friend of the Romans. He, too, fled across the sea to Rome, where he sought refuge and, crucially, expected some form of return for his continued support of the Romans. It’s possible that his expulsion was the result of Catuvellaunian aggression, but either way, it left Rome with a choice to make. Verica had come expecting the Romans to do something about his problem. Where Adminius had simply turned up looking for sanctuary, Verica wanted his kingdom back and he was calling in the supposed ‘protection’ that Roman support had promised him.
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But Rome itself was also in turmoil. In 41, the plot to murder Caligula was carried out with the expectation, albeit somewhat fancifully, that Rome would be returned to a republic. Caligula, however, had an uncle, Claudius, someone who is portrayed in the sources as a malformed halfwit, marginalised from power and ridiculed by his nephew, but also as a formidable academic. In the murderous rampage through the imperial palace that followed in the immediate aftermath of Caligula’s murder, the praetorians, realising that a return to the republic didn’t suit their own interests in the slightest, found Claudius cowering behind a curtain and hoiked him unceremoniously into their own camp for protection overnight. Claudius took the opportunity to save his own skin by negotiating furiously with the praetorians, doubtless offering them enormous sums of gold, thereby confirming their support.
Rome thus ended up with a leader who was a ridiculed scholar but also one of fierce intellect and leadership qualities that have been largely ignored by mainstream history. That someone of no military and little political skill could then conceive of and plan the invasion of Britain in the middle of such political chaos showed his great skill in being able to seize an opportunity. An ability that hadn’t been seen since the time of Augustus.
Above all, Claudius needed to stamp his authority on the new regime. Republic sentiment was still strong in the senate, which could be easily capped by the threat of the praetorian guard and their pointy things, but only as long as he could make good on his promise to pay them extraordinary sums of money and for that, he needed gold, silver, slaves and land, all of which could be found in Britain. With the tribes of southern Britain also in chaos, the opportunity presented itself on a plate. A grand invasion also had the benefit of providing a great chunk of the Roman army with something to do other than mull over its own part in the potential return of the republic. A challenging external enemy was a great distraction from an ageing, academic, yet ambitious emperor. When another coup, in 42, was foiled and Verica arrived in Rome seeking redress, Claudius had an entirely suitable pretext for intervention in British affairs, much as Adminius had presented the same opportunity for Caligula.
Claudius was well aware, naturally, that he would be following in the footsteps of the Deified Julius, an association that could do him no harm in the eyes of the Roman people. But even so, nothing was left to chance.
The command was organised by the procurator of northern Gaul, Graecinius Laco, and overall military responsibility was put in the hands of the vastly experienced governor of Pannonia, Aulus Plautius. He was given four legions plus auxiliaries, some 40,000 men in total. Like Caligula’s men, they at first refused to embark, and for much the same reason, too. It took the intervention of Claudius’ freedman, the hugely influential Narcissus, who had to be summoned from Rome before they would be persuaded to cross. This led to the ribald cries of “Io Saturnalia!” from the troops, a humorous allusion to the winter festival when slaves dressed up in their masters’ clothes.
The invasion force was divided into three to make landing such a huge force easier. Where they landed is a matter of conjecture, but there is some archaeological evidence that Richborough in Kent was one of the sites chosen. Military buildings of roughly the same period have been discovered at Fishbourne, where another Roman client king, Cogidubnus (or Togidubnus, depending on which sources you read) may have later lived and where an enormous palace was built as part of the deal he struck with the Romans in return for his support.
Whoever was ruling the southern part of Britain in AD 43, and it isn’t clear, they would appear to have been largely pro-Roman, and the initial path of the invasion was clear. Caratacus and Togodumnus were soon driven back and defeated at a major battle at a river crossing, possibly the Medway. They fell back to the Thames, where Togodmunus was killed in a smaller battle, and with that, the conquest of Britain was largely completed, even if it would take decades more to effectively subdue the rest of the island.
Claudius was called for on what would be his last journey outside of Italy. He spent just sixteen days in Britain and, in the great tradition of Hellenistic warfare in the Mediterranean and even though they were by now largely used in symbolic roles rather than in actual warfare, he brought with him elephants to both terrify the locals and glorify his victory.
He witnessed the submission of the British ‘capital’ at Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester) and an inscription on a triumphal arch erected in Rome in 51 (which remains only in fragments) records how he received the surrender of eleven British kings, including one from the distant northern islands of Orkney. The measure of the infrastructure in Britain, which has sometimes been assumed to be a civilisation made up of disparate warring tribes, can be seen by the fact that a king was summoned to surrender from an island the Romans barely knew even existed. News of the Roman victory spread around Britain with incredible speed, and seemingly, these eleven kings thought it wise to kneel.
Far from being absolutely remote from the Roman empire, Britain was well connected, and they knew exactly who the Romans were and what their reputation was. They would have been only too aware of the fate that had befallen Carthage and Corinth, the destruction of Numantia by Scipio Aemilianus, or the destruction of Vercingetorix’s forces at the hands of Caesar in 52 BC.
The Roman military machine was not to be trifled with, and the Britons knew it.
Suetonius, Twelve Caesars.
Goodman, M. The Roman World, 44BC — AD 180, Routledge.
Wells, C. The Roman Empire, Fontana.
