Conscience of the King

by Alfred Duggan

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  Contents

  Alfred Duggan 1903–1964

  PLACE NAMES IN THE STORY

  1. 451–469 Childhood in the Kingdom of the Regni

  My Brother Meets with Misfortune

  3. 474–476 Exile in Kent – Misfortunes of Gertrude – My Marriage in Germany

  4. 477–491 The Founding of Sussex – My Father Meets with Misfortune

  5. 491–515 The Founding of Wessex – My Wife Meets with Misfortune

  6. 515–519 My Only Failure – Artorius and Mount Badon – The Great Victory of Cerdics-Ford

  7. 519–531 King of the West Saxons – The Happy Ending

  Note on Authorities

  Alfred Duggan

  Conscience of the King

  Alfred Duggan

  1903–1964

  ‘There have been few historical imaginations better informed or more gifted than Alfred Duggan’s’ (The New Criterion).

  Historian, archaeologist and novelist Alfred Duggan wrote historical fiction and non-fiction about a wide range of subjects, in places and times as diverse as Julius Caesar’s Rome and the Medieval Europe of Thomas Becket.

  Although he was born in Argentina, Duggan grew up in England, and was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. After Oxford, he travelled extensively through Greece and Turkey, visiting almost all the sites later mentioned in his books. In 1935 he helped excavate Constantine’s palace in Istanbul.

  Duggan came to writing fiction quite late in his life: his first novel about the First Crusade, Knight in Armour, was published in 1950, after which he published at least a book every year until his death in 1964. His fictional works were bestselling page-turners, but thoroughly grounded in meticulous research informed by Duggan’s experience as an archaeologist and historian.

  Duggan has been favourably compared to Bernard Cornwell as well as being praised in his own right as ‘an extremely gifted writer who can move into an unknown period and give it life and immediacy’ (New York Times).

  PLACE NAMES IN THE STORY

  Anderida Pevensey

  Aquae Sulis Bath

  Arelatum Arles

  Armorica Brittany

  Augusta Treverorum Trier

  Calleva Silchester

  Corinium Cirencester

  Demetia South Wales

  Deva Chester

  Dumnonia Now Devonshire, but then including also Somerset,

  Cornwall and Dorset

  Durobrivae I Caistor-next-Norwich

  Durobrivae II Rochester

  Durovernum Canterbury

  Eboracum York

  Elmetia West Riding of Yorkshire

  Glevum Gloucester

  Lindum Lincoln

  Loidis Leeds and district

  Londinium London

  Noviomagus Chichester

  Otadini A tribe of the eastern lowlands of Scotland

  Portus Portsmouth

  Ratae Leicester

  Regni Name of the British tribe living in Sussex before the Romans

  came to Britain

  Regulbium Reculver

  Sabrina F. River Severn

  Sea of Vectis Solent

  Sequana F. River Seine

  Sorbiodunum Salisbury

  Valentia Uncertain, but probably in South Wales

  Vectis Isle of Wight

  Venedotia North Wales

  Venta Winchester

  Verulamium St Albans

  1.

  451–469

  Childhood in the

  Kingdom of the Regni

  I have attained a very great age, more than eighty years, and my exciting and various life is closing in great prosperity. It would be a pity if my adventures were entirely forgotten; but to preserve the memory of them will be a difficult undertaking, for my grandsons and their followers are quite uneducated, and I should be surprised if their children are ever taught to read. Yet learning is still preserved in the eastern parts of the world, and surely, after many generations, it will creep back to this island. Therefore I have decided to write the story of my life. When it is written down I shall seal it up in a stout metal box, and arrange to have it buried somewhere; not I think in my own grave, for my son will put a respectable amount of treasure there, and one day robbers will break into the mound; but in the foundations of a ruined church, for I think that these will presently be repaired.

  So here is the story of my life, told in Latin as accurate and elegant as I can make it after all these years of speaking another language; though here and there I have been compelled to use barbarian names for barbarian things.

  At the very beginning I am faced with a difficulty. At the present time we have no proper framework for dating events; our ancestors dated official documents by the names of the Consuls, though very often the year was quite old before we learnt here in Britain who the Consuls were. Or one could use the regnal years of the Emperors; I generally know who was reigning in Constantinople a few years ago, but I don’t know the date of his accession, and I might easily miss out some Emperor altogether; in my lifetime their reigns have often ended unexpectedly. There are other ways of naming the years, for example from the Creation of the World or the Foundation of the City; but people disagree about when the World was created, and I am not sure that the City is still standing. I shall reckon from the Incarnation of Christ, as I believe some holy men have done; if anyone wants to compare this system with his own different calendar, please note that the third Consulship of Aetius, which is still remembered in Britain, is the equivalent of 446 by my reckoning.

  I shall have to tell at some length the story of my family, for it explains how I am at the same time a citizen, descended from citizens, and yet quite genuinely Woden-born. My great-greatgrandfather was Fraomar King of the Buccinobantes, a tribe in the great confederation of the Alemanni of Germany; of course he was Woden-born, like all German Kings. Fraomar’s land had been so devastated in war that his people decided to emigrate, but they were too weak to win new fields by the sword; accordingly they petitioned the Emperor Valentinian I, who allowed them to settle in the southern part of Britain, about the year 370. Fraomar’s own estate was near Anderida, the great fortress on the Channel, which he helped to guard from pirates. His son, Fradogild, was Woden-born on both sides, but he was brought up a Christian, and married the daughter of a citizen. Their eldest son was my grandfather, Gaius Flavius Coroticus. His first two names are not important; no one uses the praenomen except in legal documents, and nearly every citizen in Britain is either a Julius or a Flavius; but it is worth noticing the cognomen. It came from his mother’s side of the family, and shows that they liked to think of themselves as descended from some ancient British chief before the coming of the Empire. In fact, there was quite a revival of old British names at that time, when everybody looked back regretfully to the good old days. My grandfather was a boy when the Germans crossed the Rhine on the ice and swept south-westward through Gaul; next year Constantine III was proclaimed Emperor in Britain, and invaded Gaul with all the troops he could collect. He too
k with him the garrison of Anderida, and my family began to treat that fortress as their private property. We have had no Emperor in Britain since; nor have we been able to attach ourselves to the Emperors in Italy, since the barbarians in Gaul cut us off from Ravenna.

  My grandfather grew up with one curious advantage; his grandparents, proud of their descent, had taught him to speak German as well as Latin. He realized that an educated man, who really knew both languages, would make a better interpreter than the average German who can grunt a few Latin words for things to eat, or the Roman officer who knows some barbarian war-cries. During most of his youth he was used by the governors of the different cities of south Britain to negotiate with German pirates about ransoms for prisoners and payments to make them go away, and when Vortigern King of Demetia was entrusted with the defence of the east coast he joined the King’s court as interpreter in German. He arranged the treaty by which King Vortigern settled Hengist and his three shiploads of Saxons on an island off the Kentish coast, where he was to protect south Britain from the pirates.

  You may think it odd that Vortigern should be a King, only forty years after the last Emperor had left Britain; but his office was quite regular. His ancestors had ruled a tribe of Britons north of the Wall, and had been brought down into Valentia to chase out the Irish. Unfortunately his splendid title set a bad example. All over Britain the municipalities had fallen under the rule of the local honestiores, the wealthy landowners whose evidence was officially regarded by the law courts as outweighing that of any number of coloni settled on the land; these men began to imitate his grandeur, more especially as Kingship is obviously a hereditary distinction, and they wanted their power to descend to their sons. Soon the whole country was a mosaic of little Kingdoms.

  When my grandfather Coroticus decided to follow the fortunes of Vortigern he turned over the management of the family estates to his only son Eleutherus, my father, who was three-quarters Roman and married to a Roman wife. So when I was born in the year 451, and christened Coroticus after my grandfather, the position of affairs was fairly complicated, but peaceful. My father Eleutherus was living with my mother on the family estate, between Anderida and the Great Forest; my grandfather Coroticus was with Vortigern, who lived mostly at Durovernum in Kent, where the danger from the barbarians was greatest; Hengist and his followers dwelt in their island and kept the pirates away; and considering the state of the world at that time we were on the whole prosperous. If you had asked a colonus in one of the villages who ruled him, the answer would have been my father Eleutherus, the owner of the fortress. If you had asked my father who ruled him, he would have said that he had to follow King Vortigern in war, but that in the lands round Anderida he had no superior. There were no law courts for the whole island, as there had been fifty years before, but each man did justice for his coloni, whether slave or free.

  I was the third child of my parents, and the third son. My eldest brother, Constans, was six years older, and my second brother, Paul, two years; my mother had thought it her duty to suckle my two brothers, but she went through a bad time at my birth, and I needed a wet-nurse. My grandfather found a healthy young Saxon woman; according to the laws of the barbarians she was unmarried, but she had been seduced by a chief; his wife, who was childless and jealous, murdered the baby, and the mother fled to my grandfather in fear of her life. I mention this to bring out several points about the Saxons; the lack of supervision of their virgins, the power of their married women, and the rather insulting habit of the chiefs, who insisted on marrying wives of their own race, though they would amuse themselves with captive Roman women. The result was that I was suckled and brought up by this Saxon woman, who had been christened at my mother’s orders and was always called by her Christian name, Ursula. My grandfather encouraged her to talk German to me, and gave me lessons himself when he was at home, so that I grew up bilingual in Latin and German, but with hardly any knowledge of Celtic; while my brothers spoke Latin to their parents and the other gentry, but Celtic to the servants. Three languages are too much for anyone to learn at once, and I have always spoken Celtic badly, with a strong German accent.

  Quite naturally, I grew up to dislike my brothers. There was no settled future for me; my father, who dreamt of turning Anderida into a Kingdom, was determined to leave everything to Constans; my mother had vowed Paul to the Church, and he was brought up with the idea of becoming a Bishop one day; it was frequently pointed out that I was an unwanted extra, and would have to make my own way in the world.

  My earliest memories are of the villa we lived in, north of Anderida. It was a great rambling place, with stables and granaries stretching on both sides of the dwelling house, and ranges of wooden cabins for the slaves. There had been an upper storey once, but only traces of it remained, for the whole establishment had been sacked and burnt in the great barbarian raids about eighty years before my birth. The ground floor of brick and rubble had survived the fire, and my great-grandfather had put a roof on it; every year we had to patch some part of the walls, so that the house had a curiously particoloured appearance, but so had all the other large villas in the neighbourhood. What is the use of building an expensive house when it will soon be sacked? In all my life I have never seen anybody begin to build in proper masonry from the ground up. But though the house was only the shadow of what it had been, it was still the largest and most impressive in the neighbourhood.

  We were all Christians, my mother especially so, and I was brought up to despise the western Britons who still sometimes propitiate Nodens of the Silver Hand; though looking back it seems to me that they have had more help from Heaven than my devout family ever received. There was a chapel in the villa, and occasionally Mass was said there; I know my mother would have liked to have a chaplain staying in the house, and my father would also have liked this extra dignity. But the Bishop of Noviomagus would not allow us to keep a private chaplain, on account of the great shortage that prevailed of secular clergy.

  That Bishop was rather a tiresome man anyway. He held the theory that although we were cut off from the Empire Roman law was still in force, and he was always expostulating with my father for arming his slaves. He pointed out that the fundamental regulation of the Empire was that workers on the land must stick to their hereditary task; it is an unattractive life, that no one would choose for himself if he had the chance of anything better, but we should all starve if no one ploughed. That of course is perfectly true, but we would never have gathered our harvest if we had not guarded the crops from raiders. My father could easily provide both plough men and armed guards; his following increased every year, as the poorer citizens of Kent fled through the Forest to escape from Hengist’s foraging parties or Vortigern’s tax-collectors.

  I suppose I can say conventionally that my childhood was the happiest time of my life. My brother Constans bullied me sometimes, but he spent most of his time out in the fields, while I chattered German to Ursula at home; Paul’s future was all mapped out; one day he would be Bishop of Noviomagus, and he was already preparing for the part, with his face fixed in a smile of neighbourly love. There was plenty to eat, and we were growing richer and more powerful every year. My father was at home most of the time, and was quietly engaged in recruiting his guard, so that one day he would have a real comitatus.

  I remember a long visit from my grandfather when I was six; he looked very grand and impressive, with his hair and beard worn long in the German fashion, and a beautiful silk cloak that was a present from King Vortigern. He was delighted to find how well I spoke German, and used to tell me in that language long stories about his dealings with Hengist. I remember another visitor about the same time, and a rather ominous one. This was Viriconius, who had been the largest landowner near Regulbium in northeast Kent, and in practice the ruler of the district. But King Vortigern had given his lands to Hengist, and he was now a pensioner at the court of Durovernum. I know that my father was depressed by this reminder of what might happen to us one day, b
ut he trusted to my grandfather’s influence at court.

  When I was seven, that would be in the year 458, there came the first sudden upset of my life of sudden upsets. One summer evening an excited messenger rode in from the Forest, we spent all that night packing our clothes and plate, and next morning I was sent to Anderida, with the rest of the women and children. The able-bodied men stayed behind to dig defences. What had happened was this: Hengist had quarrelled with King Vortigern, and the Saxons had attacked Durovernum. The King, who was more of a politician than a soldier, had fled to his hereditary dominions beyond the Sabrina, but his son Vortimer was trying to raise an army to keep the raiders in Kent. All this was happening just the other side of the Forest, which a man can cross in three days; but it is tangled and roadless, so we did not expect the main army of the Saxons to come our way. Nevertheless the women and children were safer behind walls.

  Of course, when we arrived in the fortress we children expected desperate and bloody fighting at once; Constans was allowed to carry a sword, though the hilt was kept sealed to the scabbard so that he could not draw it without the knowledge of the grown-ups; and I was disappointed that I was not given one too. Paul hung around the church, and carried doles to the poor; he never was a fighting man. But as long as there was a hostile army in the field the Saxons were afraid to plunge into the Great Forest. We heard very little accurate news of what was happening, though there definitely was a war, with pitched battles, not merely casual raiding. Perhaps I know more about it than anyone else, for I was told the Saxon side of the quarrel as well as the Roman. There were many stray Germans dotted about the countryside as slaves or hired guards, and they told the news to Ursula, who passed it on to me.

  This is roughly what caused the war, as far as I can make out from the abuse each side directed at the other. King Vortigern was a tough old politician, and his private life was pretty scandalous; one day he saw Hengist’s daughter, the child of his Saxon wife, and therefore a Saxon virgin of high lineage. She was attractive, at any rate to one used to seeing Saxons in the mass and the King asked her father if he might take her into his household. Hengist was quite agreeable, presents were exchanged, and the girl came to Durovernum. I have already told you of the high position the Saxons give to their well-born virgins, and Hengist thought that King Vortigern would make her his consort (of course there could be no question of Christian marriage); but King Vortigern kept a large establishment of concubines, and he installed this girl among them, in rather a lowly place. The new concubine managed to send a complaint to her family that she was being despised and insulted, and the Saxons flared up at once. They are always on the look-out for Romans to treat them as an inferior race. Hengist was in a strong position at the time, for not long before he had been joined by his son, Oisc, with sixteen shiploads of reinforcements; he sent a very rude message to the King, and marched on Durovernum with his whole army.