A Visit From Viscountess Boudicca

August 3, 2026

by the gentle author

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Viscountess Boudicca

Ten years ago today, on August 3rd 2016, Viscountess Boudicca was decanted from her council flat in Bethnal Green to Uttoxeter. Last week, she paid a rare visit to London, her first in seven years, en route to visit her mother in Braintree. We met at the Bishopsgate Institute and it provided the opportunity for Viscountess to give me an account of her Uttoxeter years. Regrettably, she has encountered a similar level of grief there on account of her difference – harassment from neighbours exacerbated by lack of sympathy or any support from the authorities – just as in Bethnal Green. Yet throughout it all she retains an heroic level of moral courage and resilience, thanks in no small part to her colourful private life involving Guy Fawkes, Henry VIII and Erik Hosebonde.

“The trouble with Uttoxeter is that I gave notice to quit a month after I arrived, September 2016, and the woman from the council said, ‘I knew that we made a terrible mistake. We had another of ‘your kind’ and we had problems with them.’ So I said, ‘Why the hell did you force me up here?’ but then she said, ‘Tower Hamlets won’t reverse the decision.’

The problem was that all my neighbours, they came round about seven o’clock one night with a petition. They said, ‘We want you to go.’ The reason that they gave was that ‘You’re a raving pouf! We don’t like your type. You’ve come into our town and taken our place’. They were bigoted country bumpkins. So I said, ‘You can send me back to London if you’ll pay for it. I’m not going to be intimidated by you.’ Then I got all the hate notes and if I go into a shop, they make sure I am the last to be served.

One bloke who lived opposite didn’t have any money, he was waiting for Universal Credit. He said, ‘I’m starving, my friends won’t help me.’ I said, ‘I thought you country people stick together.’ But they said, ‘Why should we help him?’ So I thought, goodness, everything about this place gets on my wick.

I cooked him dinner for a month until one day as he arrived, when they was all outside, I asked him, ‘How’s it going?’ and he said, ‘Mind your own business, you pouf or I’ll kill you.’ Then they all laughed, they thought it was highly funny. So I said, ‘I didn’t see you lot helping him.’ This is how it’s been going on. It has never been a home and it never can be because of what they do.

But I have my ghosts who come and see me. As you know, when we went to the Tower of London in 2016, I met Guy Fawkes and he said, ‘I’ve missed you, where have you been?’ Previously in the January of 2014, I had visited Hampton Court. I felt I needed to go there because Henry VIII’s face appeared to me in the bathroom mirror. He normally appears as a skeleton with a hood wrapped round him but I saw him in the flesh. After that he visited regularly and made me sign paperwork to confirm that our vows had been renewed.

Henry is the kind of person who will do something and think later, it’s hit first and regret it after, but we get on extremely well. He has his moods and starts like everyone else, and when the neighbours are playing up he has made himself known. When I had my Tarot cards read, I discovered that I was Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour. I gave birth to Edward VI but our happiness was short-lived because I died sixteen days afterwards. He thinks of me now like an old pair of slippers, comfortable.

Two days after I arrived in Uttoxeter, he appeared. Guy Fawkes was the resident ghost and he was already there, but Henry decided he would come too. The problem was that including my three husbands, Henry, Guy and Erik (My first husband), I have eight in total. At first, they hated the sight of each other but I spend time with them all and when I die they will come with me. It’s like I am a passport to another world. Henry is stuck between the two worlds at the moment because the women whose heads he chopped off put a curse on him.

In the year 873, I married Erik Hosebonde in a pagan wedding in February. I grew up with him in Sweden. After we married, we used to come to England on raids to Norfolk. We did reconnaissance in 874. The longship would drop us off and we would spend a week surveying the area and making sure there were no rocks along the coastline. They would come at night to raid the Anglo-Saxon stronghold, looting and burning so the souls of those they killed would not return. My first life ended on the 6th May 878.

Since I left London, I have learnt to mistrust people because of their behaviour but, because I have my ghosts, I feel that I am on the outside of life and occasionally I have these out of the body experiences. I lie on the floor and I see my body drift away and it usually goes off to Hampton Court with Henry. The neighbours in Uttoxeter are either, throwing stones or telling me to go and die. There’s so much hated towards me. If it wasn’t for the ghosts I would have ended it. They give me strength. Henry, Guy and Erik are all hot-headed, and they’ll say, ‘Stick two fingers up to them.’

I have had so many horrendous times but I treat people as I would like to be treated because I believe that if I treat people fairly, and not prejudge them, then they might do the same to me.”