him—one of the priests being himself, and another his favourite horse. He was so fond of this horse that he was going to make him Consul or chief magistrate of Rome, when happily the horse died. You may suppose that such a man was not likely to conquer Britain or to do any other great thing. All that he did was to take an army to the coast of Gaul, near the town of Boulogne. There he set sail in a ship, but at once came back again. The story says that he gave out that he had conquered the Ocean, and ordered his soldiers to fill their helmets with shells and to take them home by way of plunder. This was in the year A.D. 40, ninety-five years after the great Cæsar had first come over to Britain.

It was in the time of the fourth Emperor Claudius that any part of Britain was first really conquered. Claudius himself came over in the year A.D. 43, and after him his generals, Plautius and Ostorius, went on with the war. There were then many tribes in Britain under different chiefs, and sometimes some submitted while others still held out. The British chief who held out the longest and the most bravely was Caradoc, whom the Romans called Caractacus. He was King of the Silurians, who lived in South Wales and the neighbouring parts. Caradoc and his people withstocd the Romans bravely for several years, but at last he was defeated in a great battle, and he and his family were taken prisoners and led to Rome. When Caradoc saw that great and splendid city, he wondered that men who had such wealth and grandeur at home should come and meddle with him in his poor cottage in Britain. He was taken before the Emperor, who received him kindly and gave him his liberty, and, according to some writers, allowed him still to reign in part of Britain as a prince subject to Rome. The Romans had very often before this put captive Kings and generals to death, so that Claudius' kind treatment of Caradoc was really much to his honour.

The whole of Britain was never conquered by the Romans, and it was not till after more than twenty years more of fighting that they got full possession of what was afterwards the Roman Province. But perhaps this chapter is already long enough; so, as the submission of Caradoc makes a good break in the story, I will keep the rest for another chapter.

CHAPTER III.

HOW BRITAIN WAS A ROMAN PROVINCE.

AFTER the time of Caradoc the war between the Romans and the Britons went on. Many parts of the island were still not conquered, and in those that were conquered, the ill-treatment of the Romans sometimes made the people revolt; that is, they took up arms to try and drive the Romans out of the country. In particular there was one Boadicea, the widow of a King of the Icenians, who lived in what is now Norfolk and Suffolk, who made a great revolt against the Romans in the year 61, in the reign of the wicked Emperor Nero. The Roman governor Suetonius was then at the other side of the island, fighting in Mona or Anglesey. Boadicea and her people were thus able to defeat the Romans for a while, and to destroy several of the towns where they lived. Among these was London, which was already a place of much trade; others were Verulam, near Saint Albans, and Camalodunum, now called Colchester. You will understand that the Romans lived chiefly in towns, while the Britons, like all wild people, kept to the open country. So to attack and destroy the towns was to do the Romans the greatest harm that they could. Boadicea was a brave woman; she stood with a spear in her hand and a gold collar round her neck, and with her long hair streaming down, telling her people to fight well and to avenge all that they had suffered at the hands of the Romans. But though they were successful for a while, they could not stand long against the Roman soldiers, who knew how to fight so much better than they. When Suetonius came back there was a great battle near London; the Britons were quite defeated, Boadicea killed herself, and so the war in that part of the island came to an end.