Five historical figures

I found this via Martyn and Alex - "list 5 historical figures you'd like to meet and have a chat with." Now, I'd be terrified to meet any of these people, so I'll take a wider interpretation and list five historical figures I'd like to know more about. In chronological order:

1. Cartimandua, Queen of the Brigantes, 1st century AD. Overshadowed in popular history by her dramatic contemporary Boudica, Cartimandua ruled the Brigantes (a federation of tribes occupying roughly the area of modern Yorkshire) from some time before AD 51 to AD 69. She handed the British king and guerilla leader Caratacus over to the Romans after his defeat in AD 51, an action for which she was still remembered and vilified in medieval Wales if the identification with Aregwedd Foeddawg in Triad 26 is secure. At some time after this, Cartimandua's husband Venutius rebelled against her. Cartimandua won the first round, then Venutius invaded with allies from another tribe and Cartimandua kept her throne only with Roman military aid. In 69 AD, Cartimandua divorced Venutius (one wonders what took her so long) in favour of his armour-bearer Vellocatus. Venutius rebelled again, reasonably enough in the circumstances, and this time he won. Cartimandua was rescued by the Romans but deposed from her throne. Her end is not recorded. Traitor, adulteress, or skilful politician - or indeed a mixture of all three - she successfully rode tribal and Roman politics for at least 18 years in a turbulent time. She must have been a remarkable lady.

2. King Raedwald of East Anglia, 7th century AD. Raedwald is one of the more likely candidates for the occupant of the magnificent Sutton Hoo ship burial, and Bede lists him among the Bretwaldas (approximately, over-king of Britain south of the Humber, although there is much scholarly argument over what the title meant in practice). Bede disapproved of Raedwald, who converted to Christianity in Kent, reverted to worship of the pagan English ('Anglo-Saxon') gods on the advice of his wife and councillors, and maintained a temple containing altars to both Christ and the pagan gods. So Raedwald is usually seen as a vacillator under his wife's thumb, a weathervane who tried to have his cake and eat it. I rather think there may have been more to him than that (although of course we will likely never know). His kingdom was very rich - the Sutton Hoo grave goods attest to that - and he himself was the most powerful king in southern Britain for a while (usually guessed to be from around 617 to the mid 620s). The legendary upper reaches of his genealogy list Caesar immediatey after Woden - did Raedwald have, or pretend to have, a dual heritage? And, given the popularity of alliterative naming in noble families, the king sequence Wuffa, Tytilla, Raedwald makes me wonder if there were rival dynasties contesting the throne of East Anglia. Was Raedwald chased out of his kingdom by a rival and his conversion was the price of Kentish political support? How did he regard the religious question? I have my doubts as to whether a pagan convert would necessarily have seen religious conversion in the same absolute terms as Bede does (More about this in a future post).

3. Archbishop Wulfstan of York, 10th century. Between 939 and 954 AD the Anglo-Danish kingdom of York had seven different kings, in more or less constant warfare with the West Saxon kings further south. Archbishop Wulfstan was the central power broker in these troubled times; kings in York came and went so often one wonders if the citizens had a noticeboard proclaiming the incumbent of the day, but Archbishop Wulfstan remained. His lifestyle was that of a prince-bishop, riding with the army, leading York's witan (council), negotiating diplomatic settlements with foreign powers, making and breaking kings, languishing in prison and finally dying in embittered political exile.

4. Earl Thorfinn of Orkney, 11th century. To find out if Dorothy Dunnett was right in her novel King Hereafter and he was also the historical Macbeth.

5. Mirza Shuja, one of the elite group of Indian spies and surveyors who worked for the British Raj in 19th-century India and were known as 'The Pundits'. These explorers surveyed the Himalayas and the hostile lands beyond India's frontiers - Afghanistan, Turkestan, Tibet - in secret and in peril of their lives, often disguised as Buddhist pilgrims. They measured distances by taking paces of a precise length and keeping count on a modified Buddhist rosary, fixed positions using a sextant hidden in a false-bottomed travelling chest, and surveyed direction using a compass hidden in the lid of a prayer-wheel. Many were away for years. Some never returned. Mirza Shuja himself was murdered in Bokhara. Why did they undertake such hazardous work for a foreign imperial power? How did they cope with the strain of maintaining a false identity for months or years at a time? How accurate is the portrayal of their world shown in Kipling's Kim?

5a. Ulf the Unwashed, Leader of the King's Spies, 10th century Norway. I put him in as 5a because I don't know if he's actually a historical figure or merely a flight of fancy on the part of the unknown author of Njal's Saga. But how can I resist a name like that?


What historical figures would you like to meet, and why?