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Rome thought Britain was broken.

In this third episode of the Roman invasion of Britain, we ride straight into fire, blood, and fury with Boudicca, the warrior queen who very nearly destroyed Roman rule on the island.

This is not the neat legend of school textbooks. This is the raw story of humiliation, revenge, and absolute rage. A widowed queen flogged in public. Her daughters violated. A people pushed beyond endurance. What follows is one of the most terrifying rebellions the Roman Empire ever faced.

We move from the burning of Camulodunum (Colchester) to the annihilation of a Roman legion, through Londinium (London) abandoned to the flames, and on to the final, brutal reckoning where tens of thousands die in a single afternoon.

This episode charts Boudicca’s astonishing rise, her command of mass rebellion, and the moment everything turns. Triumph gives way to catastrophe, and a woman who shook Rome to its foundations is erased from the battlefield, but never from history.

This is the fall of Boudicca, and the moment Britain’s fate is sealed under Roman steel. Dark, dramatic, and utterly gripping, this is Rome at its most ruthless, and Britain at its most defiant.

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This episode opens with the bizarre and unsettling prelude under the mad emperor Caligula, when invasion looms like a dark cloud, only to dissolve into mockery and chaos. But the threat doesn't vanish—it festers. Then comes Claudius, an unlikely emperor desperate for legitimacy, who does what Caligula could not: he unleashes his legions across the Channel in a gamble for glory and power.

We plunge into the clash of worlds—Rome's iron discipline crashing against the wild, fractured tribes of Britain. Local rulers face an impossible choice: bend the knee and survive, or resist and be annihilated. Forts rise like scars across the landscape. Land is seized. Veterans are planted like seeds of empire. Roman law, cold and unyielding, begins to suffocate the old ways of life.

But conquest is never clean. Beneath the surface, rage simmers. Resentment festers. And then it explodes.

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In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we return to the moment Julius Caesar steps onto the shores of Britain in 55 BC, a bold gamble at the very edge of the Roman world. Britain is not yet a conquest but a rumour, a place of shifting tribes, chariots on the beaches, and uneasy diplomacy. Caesar’s landings are about prestige and intelligence as much as warfare, and they bind Britain, loosely but permanently, to Rome’s ambitions.

From there, we trace how Britain becomes entangled in the long collapse of the Roman Republic. Alliances are made, hostages taken, and client kings cultivated, while Rome turns inward through civil war, assassination, and the rise of emperors. Augustus hesitates, Caligula blusters, and Britain remains an unresolved question, known now, but not yet claimed.

We end on the threshold of change. By AD 43, Britain is no longer beyond Rome’s reach, merely awaiting the moment when Claudius will finally act. Episode two begins there, when Rome returns, not to visit, but to conquer.

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For books written and published by Keith Hocton

www.entrepotpublishing.com