Blood of the Isles

by Bryan Sykes

  The mythology surrounding the arrival of the Saxons was completely transformed in later centuries, but for Geoffrey of Monmouth it began through an act of treachery and betrayal. It is against this background that the greatest hero of the History, Arthur, makes his appearance. The wretched Vortigern retreats to the Welsh hills, but his attempts to build himself a fortress are frustrated by the collapse of each day’s work during the following night. He is told by his court bards that only by mixing the blood of a child with no father into the mortar will this nightly collapse be avoided. His men are despatched to all parts of Wales to discover such a boy; in Carmarthen they find one and bring him, with his mother, to Vortigern. But this is no ordinary boy: it is Merlin. He challenges Vortigern’s bards as to why they think it necessary to sacrifice him to build the castle. What is it, he demands, that lies beneath the site to make it unstable? They cannot answer. Using his own magic powers to see into the ground, he tells Vortigern that if he excavates the soil beneath the castle site he will discover a subterranean pool. Vortigern’s men dig down and, sure enough, there is the lake. Drain the pool, Merlin prophesies, and you will find two hollow stones, each containing a sleeping dragon. The pool is drained and the dragons, one red, one white, awake and begin to fight. At first the White Dragon prevails but is eventually overcome by the Red Dragon. The White Dragon symbolizes the Saxons, the Red Dragon the Britons. The message is clear. Fight back against the treacherous Saxons and you will prevail. Even today the Red Dragon, and all it stands for, is prominent on the Welsh flag and other national emblems – a direct legacy from Geoffrey of Monmouth.

  The ultimate victory of the Britons over the Saxon invaders is a recurring theme throughout the History and no character symbolizes this resistance more than King Arthur. But his birth is not without its own dark side. If Vortigern’s infatuation with Rowena sowed the seeds of his downfall and the invasion of the Saxons, it was infatuation that led to Arthur’s birth.

  Merlin, who is by now living by his uncannily accurate prophecies, foretells that Uther, the younger of Constantine’s two surviving sons, will become the next King of the Britons. Returning from exile in Brittany (and landing at Totnes – always a good start), Uther and his brother beat back the Saxons, killing both Vortigern and Hengist in the process. But the elder of the two is poisoned, again as prophesied, and on his death a comet appears, at the head of which is a ball of fire resembling a dragon. Merlin, conveniently on hand, interprets this as a sign that the younger brother must be crowned king. Thus Uther becomes Uther Pendragon, Uther of the Dragon’s Head, and King of the Britons at the same time.

  At Uther Pendragon’s coronation and victory celebration in London arrive Gorlais, Earl of Cornwall, and his wife Eigr, the most beautiful woman in Britain. That is when the infatuation begins. Tired of the attention that his wife is getting from Uther, Gorlais takes her from the palace and sets out home for Cornwall and his newly built castle at Tintagel among the high sea cliffs. Uther commands that Gorlais return to London at once and when he refuses Uther follows him to Tintagel. The only entrance to the castle is over a narrow and easily defended causeway, along which only one man can pass at a time. Uther appeals to Merlin for help and Merlin transforms him into Eigr’s husband, in which disguise he enters both the castle and her bed, where Arthur is conceived. That same night, Uther’s soldiers capture and kill the real Gorlais.

  In Arthur, Geoffrey’s History has constructed the most enduring of British mythical heroes. With scant reliable historical material to go on – or, it must be said, to get in the way of a good story – Arthur’s exploits are so familiar that they scarcely need repeating here. But it was the extravagance of Arthur’s adventures that sowed the seeds of the History’s eventual demise.

  Following his father’s death (another poisoning), Arthur is crowned at the age of fifteen. Immediately after the coronation, he sets off on a spree of military conquest, first in Britain, then abroad. At first he defeats the few remaining Saxons, then pushes the encroaching Picts back to northern Scotland before invading in turn Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark and the French territories of Normandy and Aquitaine – all in the space of nine years. At the celebrations to mark his return to Britain, Arthur receives a message from the Roman Emperor demanding his submission and the payment of tribute. Incensed by this insult, he sets off for Italy at once to demand his own tribute from Rome, taking the city in the process. While he is away, he is betrayed by his treacherous nephew, Mordred, who seizes both the crown and Arthur’s queen, Guinevere. Arthur returns and kills Mordred at the battle of Camlan, in Devon, but is himself wounded – though not killed.

  At this point, Geoffrey’s History becomes strangely cloudy. While he is perfectly content to detail the death of the other ninety-eight kings in his account, when it comes to Arthur himself the ending is left deliberately vague. According to Geoffrey, Arthur is taken to the idyllic Isle of Avalon to have his wounds tended. Then comes the briefest of statements: ‘This is all that is said here of Arthur’s death’, though the year AD 542 is noted – the only date in the entire History. After giving over almost a third of the book to every detail of Arthur’s life, an ending so abrupt and so inconclusive may come as a surprise. But this kind of ending is nowadays very familiar, especially where there is even the remotest possibility of a sequel. Could it be that Geoffrey of Monmouth found it impossible to kill off his most important creation? Like so much about Arthur, we will never know. In fact, Geoffrey did write another book on his other famous creation, Vita Merlini – The Life of Merlin – and in this he does elaborate a little on Arthur’s arrival at Avalon accompanied by his entourage:

  After the battle of Camlan we took the wounded Arthur to Avalon. There Morgen [Morgan La Fay] placed the king on a golden bed, and with her own noble hand uncovered the wound and gazed at it long. At last she said that health could return to him if he were to stay with her for a long time and wished to make use of her healing art. Rejoicing, therefore, we committed the king to her, and returning gave our sails to the favouring winds.

  As Geoffrey’s book became more and more popular, the ambiguity about Arthur’s uncertain fate became a problem for the Plantagenet kings who so cleverly used the History to link themselves to the ancient line of British kings. What if Arthur were still alive, even after 700 years? And if he were, could he return? Not long after Geoffrey’s History appeared, King Henry II, in his campaigns to subdue the Welsh, became so concerned that the slightest possibility of Arthur’s miraculous reappearance would encourage resistance that he decided to do something about it. It was Henry who arranged for the remains of Arthur and Guinevere to be ‘discovered’ when Glastonbury Abbey was being rebuilt after a fire. And it was Henry who, in a move to reinforce the genealogical connection to the mythical dynasty which the Plantagenets claimed, had his own grandson christened Arthur in 1187. Not only that, when the boy attained the throne he was to be known not as Arthur I but Arthur II. His uncle, King John, put an end to that when he arranged young Arthur’s murder in France when he was sixteen.

  A century later, Henry’s great-grandson, Edward I, played the Arthurian connection for all it was worth, letting it be known during his campaigns in Wales that he was personally fulfilling Merlin’s prophecy that Arthur would be reincarnated. Annoyingly for Edward, exactly the same claim was being made by his principal adversary in Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd.

  The legends of Arthur and Merlin have always been particularly popular in Wales. At the end of the fifteenth century, Henry Tudor, later Henry VII, used the myth very effectively in his campaign for the crown and his defeat of Richard III. To emphasize the connection, he campaigned under the banner of the Red Dragon and christened his eldest son Arthur. But alas, like Henry II’s grandson of the same name, this Arthur never made it to the throne either. He died of consumption at the age of fifteen, seven months after marrying Catherine of Aragon, who later became the first of his younger brother Henry VIII’s many wives.

  Eventually
, through repetition and royal patronage, Geoffrey’s History became the foundation for the myth that sustained and defined racial aspirations and ambitions for half a millennium. Even now, the division between Saxon and Briton (for which also read Welsh or Celt) that is such a feature of the History is still not far beneath the surface. The Britons, personified by Arthur, are the truly indigenous people of the whole of Britain and the Saxons are treacherous impostors. The reign of Henry VIII saw this mythology begin to undergo at first a subtle and then a dramatic and sinister transformation.

  At first, the legacy of the History went from strength to strength, becoming under Henry VIII a vital argument in his struggle with the Pope to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry his second, Anne Boleyn. Henry’s ambassador to the papal court, the Duke of Norfolk, used the genealogical claims to the ancient line of kings to assert Henry’s supreme jurisdiction in his own realm and to back the claim that he did not need Rome’s permission for anything. Norfolk told the bemused court that the History recorded how a British king, Brennius, had once conquered Rome, that the Roman Emperor Constantine himself was also on the list of kings, and that Arthur had been Emperor of Britain, Gaul and Germany. These arguments made little impression in Rome, which continued to resist the divorce, but they featured strongly in the laws passed by Henry to enact the break with the Roman Catholic Church and to establish the Church of England with Henry at its head. Sovereigns today still assume that title.

  But even at this moment of triumph for the myth, it was being undermined. Henry VII, eager that his new dynasty should appeal to the long-established monarchies of Europe, had commissioned an Italian scholar, Polydore Vergil, to write a new history. Henry VII died before it was finished but Henry VIII allowed work to continue and it was finally completed in 1513. As a Renaissance scholar, Polydore Vergil was trained to do what few historians had done before – look for the evidence. When he came to scrutinize Geoffrey’s History, it was soon very clear that there was hardly any. His main source, the mysterious book that Geoffrey had been given by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, was never found. Even worse, there was no mention of Geoffrey’s principal hero, Arthur, in any other histories.

  One of these, The Ruin of Britain, a sixth-century polemic by the Breton monk Gildas, was always thought to be extremely shaky, but another, Bede’s History of the English Church and People, published in AD 731, is a far more serious and reliable account – and does not mention Arthur at all. Surely, argued Polydore Vergil, it is inconceivable that a serious history such as Bede’s could have failed even to mention a king who had not only regained territory from the Saxons and Picts but had also conquered Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark and much of France only 200 years previously. This was, it had to be admitted, a strong and rational argument. But myth and reason do not necessarily concur. So closely was the court of Henry VIII wedded to, even dependent on, the antiquity of their dynastic claims as ‘authenticated’ by Geoffrey of Monmouth, that the King refused to allow Vergil’s work to be published for a further twenty years. That it was published at all was a sign, not of the triumph of reason, but that the myth itself was beginning to lose its political usefulness to the King. The ancient Britons and their affinity to the Catholic Church were becoming an embarrassment.

  But the popularity of Geoffrey’s History was still sufficient for the publication of Polydore Vergil’s alternative Anglica Historica to be greeted with outrage and the author condemned as an unscrupulous papist who had set out to undermine the new self-confidence of the English Church. Even during the reign of Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, the History was still a source of inspiration to poets like Edmund Spenser, whose Faerie Queene links Elizabeth and Arthur, and, of course, to Shakespeare, whose King Lear draws its characters straight from Geoffrey of Monmouth.

  Nevertheless, the currency of the myth among scholars continued to decline, even though it enjoyed a brief revival of royal enthusiasm in 1601 when the Stuart King James VI of Scotland/I of England cast himself as the embodiment of Merlin’s prophecy and the restorer of the ancient unity of England, Wales and Scotland first won by Brutus and Locrinus. Eventually, the Stuarts were overthrown and the crown passed to William of Orange. Though he, one would have thought, could not possibly claim a link to the myth, coming as he did from Protestant Holland, this did not stop the poet R. D. Blackmore from portraying William as the Christian Arthur. Even more bizarrely, he managed to twist the myth to the point where William became the champion of the true religion of the ancient Britons (Protestantism!) against the heathen Saxons (Catholic!). That shameful episode was the last bow of the myth on the political stage, though its popularity even today is witness to its continuing fascination.

  The real reason for the slow decline of the myth of a united, essentially Celtic Britain with ancient foundations, as elaborated in the History, was that, following the Reformation, it no longer suited the English Church. After Henry VIII’s acrimonious break with Rome, the newly established Protestant Church of England looked back into history to provide it with the historical legitimacy to set itself apart from Roman Catholicism. To do this, scholars seized on a remark made in the sixth century by Gildas in The Ruin of Britain that, in what became England, the original Britons had been completely wiped out by the Saxons. The natural conclusion was that the English were the linear descendants of the Saxons, not the Britons at all. This was an undiluted and direct genealogical connection, not with the defeated Britons and the mythical Arthur, but with the victorious Saxons. In this version of events the Saxons were not the malicious and unprincipled opportunists whose foothold in Britain came about only through Vortigern’s treachery. Far from it: the Saxons were strong, self-confident and adventurous pioneers who had triumphed against the weak-willed Britons through the intrinsic superiority of their moral character and their love of freedom. The English Church no longer looked west and north to the mountains of Wales and Scotland for its natural affiliations, but across the North Sea to the Teutonic Germans whose stout spirit of Protestant independence had triumphed against the corruption of the Roman Church.

  To recreate the myth of an Anglo-Saxon golden age before the Norman Conquest, Protestant historians needed a hero to replace Arthur. They found one in King Alfred, and the PR campaign began: ‘the great and singular qualities in this king, worthy of high renown and commendation – godly and excellent virtues, joined with a public and tender care, and a zealous study for the common peace and tranquillity . . . his heroical properties jointed together in one piece’, wrote John Foxe in 1563. It clearly worked: even today, Alfred is the one Saxon king that most children have heard of – even if all they remember is that he burnt the cakes. Unlike Arthur, there is no doubt that Alfred existed, but how close the glowing tributes to both his military genius and his humble and scholarly character are to reality is still an open question. He reigned from 871 to 899 and was, as we shall see later, instrumental in preventing the Danish Vikings from overrunning the whole country.

  At the same time that Alfred was being resurrected in England, Protestant scholars, including Martin Luther in Germany, were creating their own origin myths for the same reason. To reinforce their independence from the Catholic Church, they drew heavily on classical writers for their justification. One of these was the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote in AD 98, ‘For myself I accept the view that the people of Germany have never been tainted by intermarriage with other peoples and stand out as a nation peculiar, pure and unique of its kind.’ Luther himself even managed to concoct a genealogy for the Germans right back to Adam, who for Christians like Luther was the father of the human race.

  What began as a declaration of religious independence from Rome transformed over the years into a virulent doctrine of Saxon/Teutonic racial superiority over the other inhabitants of the Isles that has had immense and far-reaching political and social consequences. The reinvention of a glorious English past gathered pace. The Magna Carta, in essence an unimportant concordat bet
ween King John and his Norman barons, was reborn as a declaration of Saxon independence every bit as important to the English as the US Bill of Rights is to Americans. The Puritans appealed to the myth in their bitter struggle with the Crown during the English Civil War when John Hare, one of the leaders of the Parliamentarians, wrote about his side in 1640, the first year of the war:

  our progenitors that transplanted themselves from Germany hither did not commixe themselves with the ancient inhabitants of the country of the Britain’s, but totally expelling them, they took the sole possession of the land to themselves, thereby preserving their blood, laws and language uncorrupted . . .

  Gradually the monarchy changed allegiance to suit the new origin myth. James VI/I even switched sides during the course of his own reign. Having at first asserted his entitlement to rule over both Scotland and England, based on his claim to be Merlin’s Arthur reborn, he very soon afterwards basked in the appellation of the ‘chiefest Blood-Royal of our ancient English-Saxon kings’, according to a dedication in the influential book Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, written in 1605 by Richard Verstegen.

  In the context of the genetics we will come to later, Verstegen was the first author to point out the potential embarrassment that the purity of the Saxon line must surely have been ‘diluted’ or ‘contaminated’ by the later arrival of large numbers of Danes and Normans. He countered this by claiming, first, that their numerical contribution was slight and, second, that both the Danes and the Normans were themselves of Germanic origin anyway, so they could have no effect on the essential racial purity of the Teutonic English.

  As the myth gained momentum, the voices raised against it became fewer and further between. The writer Daniel Defoe was one exception, parodying the whole idea of English racial purity and superiority in his poem ‘The True-Born Englishman’, written in 1701: