The Forgotten King Who Invited Rome to Conquer Britain Might Have Actually Been… A Woman

Ancient coins suggest a forgotten queen helped change British history, but not everyone is convinced.

In 43 CE, the Roman Emperor Claudius sent legions across the English Channel, launching an invasion that permanently reshaped the history of Britain. For generations, historians partly credited the success of this campaign to an exiled Iron Age prince named Verica. Ousted from his throne in southeastern England three years earlier, Verica fled to Rome, begged Claudius for military intervention, and offered vital tactical intelligence in return, such as where best to land ships or how the tribes fought.

Now, a closer examination of ancient coins, linguistic clues, and the ever-present Roman political scandals reveals a major flaw in this narrative. In a new analysis published in Current Archaeology, Miles Russell, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University, argues that historians misidentified the ruler’s gender for at least two centuries. Verica, the monarch of the Atrebates tribe in modern-day Hampshire and West Sussex, was a woman.

“Verica is assumed to have been male because of the patriarchal mindset of 19th-century classical historians,” Dr. Russell said. “Verica was not only critical to the special relationship between Britain and Rome in the early first century [CE] but was indisputably female.”

This re-evaluation places a powerful woman at the center of one of antiquity’s greatest geopolitical shifts. While history remembers Boudica, the Iceni queen who led a bloody, failed rebellion against Rome in 60 CE, and Cartimandua, the Brigantian ruler in Yorkshire who handed resistance leader Caratacus over to imperial agents around 51 CE, Dr. Russell contends that Verica wielded far greater influence.

Why would a British queen invite a foreign empire onto her own shores? In European Antiquity, client kingdoms acted as buffer states along Rome’s borders. Rulers paid tribute and supplied grain, metals, and enslaved people to Rome; in exchange, the empire provided luxury goods and military protection. When aggressive neighbors seized her shrinking territory around Chichester, Verica turned to her imperial patron to survive.

Reading the Clues on Ancient Coins

Because Iron Age Britons left no written records of their own, scholars must reconstruct Verica’s life from physical artifacts and flawed Roman texts. For this reason, it’s forgivable that nineteenth-century scholars misread the evidence for so long, although one cannot overlook their biases.

First, historians overlooked the grammar of her name. In Iron Age Britain, male names typically ended in “-us” or “-os” — such as Caratacus or Commios — whereas female names ended in “-a,” like Boudica and Cartimandua. Writing in Attic Greek two centuries after the invasion, the Roman historian Cassius Dio referred to an exiled British leader as “Berikos.” Either Dio or a medieval scribe likely mangled the unfamiliar Celtic name when forcing it into Greek, creating a masculine form that never once appears on actual British artifacts.

Second, historians misinterpreted the Latin inscriptions on Verica’s currency. Her gold and silver coins feature the title rex (king) alongside the abbreviation COM F. Classicists traditionally read COM F as Commios filius (son of Commios, a Belgic king allied with Julius Caesar), ignoring that the exact same letters abbreviate Commios filia—daughter of Commios. Furthermore, the title rex did not exclusively apply to men, although most absolute rulers were indeed men.

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“People also assume she was a ‘he’ because of the term ‘rex’ on coins, but rex is a nongender specific title, both male and female kings were recognised by Rome, Cleopatra of Egypt being the most famous,” Dr. Russell said.

“The use of the Latin title rex on coins shows that Verica ruled with the full authorisation of the emperor.”

The portraits stamped onto the coins circulating during Verica’s rule offer the most striking proof. While rival British leaders minted coins displaying muscular, overtly male warriors, Verica’s coins feature a slender, bare-breasted figure riding a horse and holding a spear.

Russell believes this is a deliberate representation of female power.

“We should take the archaeological evidence at face value,” Russell said, “and remember Verica as a female-king and one of the earliest and most important of British female leaders.”

However, the interpretation remains controversial.

Still Highly Contested

Roger Tomlin, an Oxford University archaeologist who specializes in ancient Latin inscriptions, told The Guardian that the evidence is far from conclusive. Although Verica’s name could be feminine, some Latin men’s names also ended in a. Tomlin also challenged Russell’s reading of rex. While Rome certainly recognized female rulers, Russell has yet to show conclusively that Romans actually used this particular title for women.

The coins themselves present another problem. Archaeologist and Iron Age coin specialist Daphne Nash Briggs pointed out that not all coins bearing Verica’s name show feminine figures. Some depict clearly male horsemen, while others feature a person dressed as a male priest. One portrait even appears to show a prominent Adam’s apple.

Russell counters that the supposedly male portrait might actually depict the Roman emperor, rather than Verica. But identifying the figures on ancient coins is notoriously difficult and sometimes downright impossible as the portraits can be so generic in most cases. A ruler’s coins can many times feature gods, mythical heroes or symbolic figures rather than the ruler’s own likeness. As Tomlin noted, Queen Victoria’s gold coins depicted a male horseman slaying a dragon, but nobody would mistake that figure for the queen herself.

Matrilocal Roots and Imperial Politics

To Roman writers like Tacitus and Julius Caesar, who barred women from formal roles in politics or the military, the idea of female commanders seemed bizarre and barbaric. Yet across the Channel, there was a different society, and modern bioarchaeology confirms that women held deep institutional power in ancient Britain.

Since 2009, Dr. Russell has co-directed excavations of a Late Iron Age cemetery at Winterborne Kingston in Dorset. In a 2025 study published in Nature, researchers from Bournemouth University and Trinity College Dublin analyzed DNA from 50 skeletons at the site. They discovered that 24 of 34 related individuals shared a rare mitochondrial lineage passed down through the mother’s side, while Y chromosomes varied widely.

This genetic pattern — which was confirmed at sites across Somerset, Oxfordshire, Cornwall, and Yorkshire — proves that Iron Age Britons practiced matrilocality: husbands moved to join their wives’ communities, and land likely passed down the female line. Women also occupied the richest, most elaborately furnished graves at Winterborne Kingston.

Recognizing Verica as a woman would solve a lingering puzzle about some Roman political satire from the period.

A Shifting Balance of Power

Roman biographers like Suetonius and Cassius Dio routinely mocked Claudius as an inept, weak-minded ruler controlled by his wives and formerly enslaved advisors.

“The story of Claudius committing to something only because a woman told him to, fits the trope of this emperor as being submissive and henpecked,” Dr. Russell. “In effect, Dio was saying that the campaign was undertaken solely because of the whisperings of a barbarian femme fatale.”

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In reality, the alliance served shrewd political calculations on both sides. Archaeological excavations at Fishbourne, near Verica’s stronghold in Chichester, uncovered Roman military-style granaries, defensive ditches, a Coolus-type helmet, and imported pottery dating between 10 CE and 30 CE — decades before the 43 CE invasion. Rome had likely stationed a garrison there under Augustus or Tiberius to protect Verica and secure trade routes, securing a foothold that they likely intended to use for a full-blown invasion of Britain.

When Rome withdrew those troops around 30 CE, rival rulers from the Catuvellauni tribe pounced. First Epaticcus, and later his nephew Caratacus, seized Verica’s northern stronghold at Calleva (Silchester). They even mocked her on their own coins. Epaticcus placed the wings of the Roman goddess Victory onto a male body, and Caratacus minted a gold coin replacing Verica’s bare-breasted horsewoman with a naked, javelin-wielding male rider.

When Caratacus drove Verica across the Channel around 40 CE, Claudius — newly installed after his predecessor’s assassination and desperate for military glory — seized the excuse to intervene. Verica provided the legitimacy and local intelligence Rome needed to conquer the island. Though written records never mention whether Claudius restored her to her throne, her influence remains unmatched.

The research for Verica was also presented in a new book, ‘Caratacus: Great King of Britain’, published by Bloomsbury in January.

Caratacus: Great King of Britain

• Hardcover Book

$34.00
Buy on Amazon