A Childs History of England | Page 6

resolved to
fight to the death. Of these brave men, the bravest was CARACTACUS, or CARADOC,
who gave battle to the Romans, with his army, among the mountains of North Wales.
'This day,' said he to his soldiers, 'decides the fate of Britain! Your liberty, or your eternal
slavery, dates from this hour. Remember your brave ancestors, who drove the great
Caesar himself across the sea!' On hearing these words, his men, with a great shout,
rushed upon the Romans. But the strong Roman swords and armour were too much for
the weaker British weapons in close conflict. The Britons lost the day. The wife and
daughter of the brave CARACTACUS were taken prisoners; his brothers delivered
themselves up; he himself was betrayed into the hands of the Romans by his false and
base stepmother: and they carried him, and all his family, in triumph to Rome.
But a great man will be great in misfortune, great in prison, great in chains. His noble air,
and dignified endurance of distress, so touched the Roman people who thronged the
streets to see him, that he and his family were restored to freedom. No one knows
whether his great heart broke, and he died in Rome, or whether he ever returned to his
own dear country. English oaks have grown up from acorns, and withered away, when
they were hundreds of years old - and other oaks have sprung up in their places, and died
too, very aged - since the rest of the history of the brave CARACTACUS was forgotten.
Still, the Britons WOULD NOT yield. They rose again and again, and died by thousands,
sword in hand. They rose, on every possible occasion. SUETONIUS, another Roman
general, came, and stormed the Island of Anglesey (then called MONA), which was
supposed to be sacred, and he burnt the Druids in their own wicker cages, by their own
fires. But, even while he was in Britain, with his victorious troops, the BRITONS rose.
Because BOADICEA, a British queen, the widow of the King of the Norfolk and Suffolk
people, resisted the plundering of her property by the Romans who were settled in
England, she was scourged, by order of CATUS a Roman officer; and her two daughters
were shamefully insulted in her presence, and her husband's relations were made slaves.
To avenge this injury, the Britons rose, with all their might and rage. They drove CATUS
into Gaul; they laid the Roman possessions waste; they forced the Romans out of London,
then a poor little town, but a trading place; they hanged, burnt, crucified, and slew by the
sword, seventy thousand Romans in a few days. SUETONIUS strengthened his army,

and advanced to give them battle. They strengthened their army, and desperately attacked
his, on the field where it was strongly posted. Before the first charge of the Britons was
made, BOADICEA, in a war-chariot, with her fair hair streaming in the wind, and her
injured daughters lying at her feet, drove among the troops, and cried to them for
vengeance on their oppressors, the licentious Romans. The Britons fought to the last; but
they were vanquished with great slaughter, and the unhappy queen took poison.
Still, the spirit of the Britons was not broken. When SUETONIUS left the country, they
fell upon his troops, and retook the Island of Anglesey. AGRICOLA came, fifteen or
twenty years afterwards, and retook it once more, and devoted seven years to subduing
the country, especially that part of it which is now called SCOTLAND; but, its people,
the Caledonians, resisted him at every inch of ground. They fought the bloodiest battles
with him; they killed their very wives and children, to prevent his making prisoners of
them; they fell, fighting, in such great numbers that certain hills in Scotland are yet
supposed to be vast heaps of stones piled up above their graves. HADRIAN came, thirty
years afterwards, and still they resisted him. SEVERUS came, nearly a hundred years
afterwards, and they worried his great army like dogs, and rejoiced to see them die, by
thousands, in the bogs and swamps. CARACALLA, the son and successor of SEVERUS,
did the most to conquer them, for a time; but not by force of arms. He knew how little
that would do. He yielded up a quantity of land to the Caledonians, and gave the Britons
the same privileges as the Romans possessed. There was peace, after this, for seventy
years.
Then new enemies arose. They were the Saxons, a fierce, sea-faring people from the
countries to the North of the Rhine, the great river of Germany on the banks of which the
best grapes grow to make the German wine. They began to come, in pirate ships, to the
sea- coast of Gaul and Britain, and to