The Queen has returned:

Boudicca (also known as Boadicea and Boudica) is back... on a movie (but of course):


There are some lines of William Cowper inscribed on the plinth of the bronze statue of Boadicea near Westminster Bridge in central London: "Regions Caesar never knew/Thy posterity shall sway." The words have never been truer. Hollywood has four films in development about the British warrior queen. One of them, Warrior, is being produced by Mel Gibson, partly with money from the proceeds of his film The Passion of The Christ (a rare example of fundamentalist Christian money backing a project with a pagan heroine). Along with a DreamWorks project called Queen Fury, Paramount's Warrior Queen and another called My Country, the race is on to get what Variety magazine called "Braveheart with a bra" to the screen first.

What Hollywood will make of the life and times of the flame-haired, 1,950-year-old rebuffer of Romans is anyone's guess. A Celtic Madonna, perhaps, with great muscle tone and a weirdo religion? A proto-feminist as ballsy as Germaine Greer but handier with spears? A skimpily attired, anti-slavery Xena, Warrior Princess, with cross-demographic appeal to rad-fems and FHM soft-porn fetishists? The legend can flourish so richly because we know so little about the real-life warrior queen. We're not even sure how to spell her name: is it Boadicea, Boudicca or Boudica?

What we know about her is confined to a few pages of triumphalist Roman history by Tacitus and some equally tendentious stuff by another historian, Dio Cassius. But every British schoolchild knows (one might hope) that Boadicea was the warrior queen from present-day East Anglia who rose against her Roman oppressors after they appropriated her Iceni tribe's estates and then flogged her and raped her two daughters for good measure. She mobilised her subjects, galvanised other British tribes in anti-imperialist war, sacked Rome's greatest British city (present-day Colchester), routed a well-trained legion, barrelled down the A12 with a huge army of spear-wielding tribal British toughs and burned London, then laid waste to St Albans before finally being crushed by the Romans in AD62.

Beyond this, however, things get sketchy. How did she die, and where? Did she fight in battle? Was she responsible for war crimes? What were the names of her raped daughters? Was she gay, straight, bi, lusty and/or busty? Did she really wear a bra? These are the questions preoccupying Hollywood.

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