Aulus Plautius served as Britain’s first governor for four years. In that time he established a new province, Britannia, across the south-east corner of the island. The old nations became mere administrative units, civitates, within the Roman province. Camulodunum, once the capital of a Catuvellaunian empire, was made a colony of veteran troops, the first true Roman town in Britain, and renamed Colonia Claudia. The exploitation of the British began immediately, with the systematic extraction of the province’s surplus agricultural wealth. There were levies of corn and labour corvées, and soon a formalised tax system was imposed.

Caratacus, remarkably, continued to lead resistance in the west for eight years. As Nectovelin had understood, he became popular among all the nations of Britain as the one man who had not given up before the Romans - even if he never actually won a battle. Agrippina was shamed that his final betrayal was at the hands of her own queen Cartimandua, who was keen to cooperate with the Romans. She saw Caratacus brought to Rome and paraded through the city. The Romans rather liked his defiance, now that he was safely defeated, and they saw in him qualities they believed they had lost. Agrippina was dismayed that Caratacus would survive in memory not for who he was but only as an element in the Romans’ own story of themselves. His usefulness over, Caratacus was pardoned and pensioned off, and she never heard of him again.

As time passed, the tapestry of history was woven thread by thread. Secretary Narcissus eventually fell foul of the complicated internal politics of the imperial family. Agrippina, who had always feared the Greek might take revenge for the humiliation of that night in Camulodunum, quietly rejoiced in his fall. She was more saddened by the death of Claudius, said to have been poisoned by his manipulative new wife. She thought it was ironic that the frail Emperor had survived assassination in faraway Britain only to be murdered in his own bed by his family.

The British meanwhile chafed under the rule of their ‘two kings’, the governor and procurator who jointly managed the new province. When Agrippina was forty the brutal reign of Claudius’s stepson Nero provoked a revolt in Britain under an Iceni woman called Boudicca, who burned retired soldiers, lawyers, tax collectors and their families in their new temples. Her name meant ‘she who brings victories’ - if she had been Roman she might have been called ‘Victoria’. Braint had been right, Agrippina thought, that it would take a woman to give the Romans a real fight. Boudicca had no vision beyond destruction, and failed to concentrate her energies on military targets, and in the end she fell - but not before tens of thousands had died, and the Roman hold on Britain trembled, just for a moment.