‘The Bishop is a reasonable man, and he sees that he must accept my protection. Now what I propose is this: I shall give a great feast at Christmas to all the comitatus and as many of the citizens as I can feed. (That is why I want to consult you, Sergius.) At the proper time, when plenty of beer has been drunk, you, Maximus, will raise the cry, “Long live Eleutherus Rex”, and the citizens ought to join in if the feast has been good enough. Then the comitatus will raise me on that old legionary shield with the embossed decoration, and you, Paul, come forward, bless me, and sprinkle me with holy water. The drinking will presumably have sent Father John off to bed before that. He is the only man who might make a fuss; he wants us to join up with Noviomagus, but he would prefer the Bishop to be the head of the new state. If he is still there, that’s where Coroticus comes in. Keep near him, my boy, and have a group of your young friends round; if he begins to speak in favour of the Bishop, jostle him and shut him up. I suppose I can rely on all our comrades of the comitatus, Maximus? You, Sergius, build up the stores so that I can give a really lavish feast. Has anyone anything else to suggest?’
I was still very young, young enough to want to show myself cynical and disillusioned; also I wanted to make a speech of some kind in my first council. Foolishly I broke in:
‘What exactly do you expect to gain, Father, by this interesting ceremony, which may very likely go wrong if someone has too much to drink? Will you wield any more power than you do now? It seems to me nothing but a waste of good food.’
Constans took me up at once, and I have always remembered his words. ‘You must understand, little brother, that names are real things. Our father will continue to rule Anderida and Noviomagus as he does now, and so far you are right. But at present any of the honestiores might take it into his head to start opposition, and it would look bad to have him murdered; also the Bishop has never said publicly that he will take our orders. When King Eleutherus has been proclaimed, things will be very different; everyone knows that it is rebellion to disobey a King. I am sure that you yourself will feel more powerful when you are Prince Coroticus, although the only change will be in your name.’
‘There is another point also,’ said Sergius. ‘Noviomagus would not be willing to take orders from Anderida. But they will not be insulted if they obey the King of the Regni, which I suppose will be your title, sir. I am all in favour of the change. I myself shall be a greater man when I am a King’s minister, than I am now as the steward of an honestioris.’
‘One thing we haven’t discussed so far’, said Constans, ‘is the effect this will have on our neighbours. Nothing comes from the sea except pirates, and the Saxons to the north and east don’t know or care what we call ourselves; but there must be some ruler to the west. Will he acknowledge you as his equal?’
‘There is no ruler immediately west of our territory,’ answered my father. ‘The lands round Portus were so ravaged by the Irish that they still lie desolate, though that was more than fifty years ago. King Constantine of Dumnonia is our nearest neighbour in that direction; he is a powerful monarch, but there is a wide belt of no-man’s-land westward from Noviomagus before you come to the first of his subjects. I shall send him an envoy, of course, but I don’t anticipate any trouble from him.’
At Christmas everything passed off as had been planned, and my father was now a King. The title of the new state was Civitas Regnorum, from a people who had been under a foederate King of their own in the days of the Emperor Claudius; it was purely an antiquarian name, for we had been Roman citizens for two hundred years, and our ancestors had come from all over the Empire. But it was a natural unit, all the same; the two cities, Anderida and Noviomagus, are separated by a stretch of open, well-drained country, two long days’march in extent but of no great width, hemmed in between the Forest and the sea; the coast is defended by cliffs for most of its length, and the only harbours are at the mouths of the short rivers that flow south from the Forest; there is always a fishing village and a hill-fort at each of these harbours, so that the Channel pirates usually pass us by, and try their luck on the open beaches farther west; our only dangerous frontier was the passage along the western coast, where the Forest does not quite reach down to the sea. For this reason, and also because the citizens might otherwise try to set up a leader of their own, Constans and half the comitatus were sent to garrison Noviomagus, with sentries in the hill-forts round about.
I must explain about these hill-forts. They were made by our forefathers before the Emperor Claudius civilized the land, and were deserted when the Romans built walled towns in the valleys; but the earthen ramparts remain, and a wooden palisade on the bank and a little spadework in the ditch make them as good as new. Of course, they cannot stand a long siege, for as a rule they have no water supply; but pirates don’t like long sieges, they are always anxious about their ships and in a hurry to catch the next tide; these forts can be defended for a couple of days, which is usually long enough.
To my extreme annoyance, this foundation of the Kingdom seemed actually to decrease my importance. Constans was heir-apparent, with a territory of his own to rule; presently the Bishop of Noviomagus would die, when Constans would come back to Anderida, and Paul would take his place as guardian of the city and Bishop as well; but what future was there for me? I could not even poison Constans, the obvious solution, as long as he lived at the other end of the country.
However, I was only sixteen, and there was plenty of time, for somehow I always seemed to know that I would live to a great age. Meanwhile my mother died of the illness that had kept her so long in bed, which gave me rather more scope in my private life. No man is quite without affection for his mother, and I was slightly sorry; but she had been ill for so long, and kept such a careful watch over my morals, that I chiefly associated her with lengthy moralizings on the subject of chastity and sobriety.
My great support at this rather objectless period of my life was the sympathy of old Ursula. She was convinced that one day I should be a great King, and she was willing to help me against Constans. I had decided not to plot against my father’s life; he was thirty years my senior, and British Kings do not live long.
I settled down to make myself popular with my fellow-citizens, and to learn all I could about the fortifications of the countryside and its strategic points. I also practised hard with my Saxon weapons; I did not bother about drill, for I never intended to wage a regular campaign against my brother when he succeeded to the throne, but rather to seize his person by surprise. For this I needed, more than anything else, faithful followers; but I did not seem able to win anyone to my side, and of course I could not be too open in my efforts at persuasion. Looking back now, I see that there was no reason why the comitatus should have preferred me to Constans, who was handsome and gallant, cheerful and amusing; while I was rather solitary and introspective, and preferred lording it over the peasants to being the life and soul of the party with my father’s war-companions. I think, also, that even the stupidest people divine more of our motives and characters than we ever allow for, and in my secret heart I was not the type of man these tough soldiers admired. Ursula impressed on me that it was no use attempting any move until I had at least three companions who would follow me in anything, even to murdering my father. As yet there was no one I could rely on utterly, so there was nothing for it but to bide my time.
All these years while I was growing up the Saxons were still raiding Britain. From a mere stupid hatred of civilization, and to increase the terror of their name, they killed every man, woman or child that they could catch. North of the Forest, as far as the upper Thames, not a field was sown and not a hut left unburnt, and the rulers round the headwaters of the river had to hire other Saxons, enemies of Hengist, to garrison the riverside villages; farther north all was a blank from which no news came, though we heard in a roundabout way that the sons of Vortigern and the descendants of Cunedda of the Otadini had chased the Irish out of the land beyond the Sabrina, and were ruling ther
e with strong armies. To increase our feeling of isolation, we could learn nothing about what was going on in Gaul; when I was five years old a delegation of Gallic churchmen came to tell us about the new method of fixing Easter that had been decided on at the Council of Arelatum; but since then the pirates have made their lairs on the Gallic coast opposite us, and that was the last news we had from overseas. I don’t even know whether a Bishop reigns in Rome.
At seventeen I was in a rut. I never had an opportunity of distinguishing myself, for my father kept me always in his household, and I was given no troops of my own. When raiders were off the coast I would have to ride in his following, and keep behind him when we dismounted to form our ranks. When they saw us, as a rule the pirates made off; they wanted plunder, not battles. Very occasionally they stood, but that is not my sort of fighting, in close ranks where a comrade can so easily let you down, or make sure on purpose that you are killed; I would not lead a charge to win glory for my father.
There was very little else I could do to increase my reputation. My father, who saw that I was at a loose end, offered to turn over to me the management of the estate, but I have never been interested in farming, and in those days we could not plan ahead; we grew everything possible, reaped what we could, and the raiders took the rest. I was allowed to judge a few lawsuits, but an appeal lay from me to my father and no one was ever satisfied with my judgement, so it did not save him as much time as he had expected. Presently he stopped it, for I was making him unpopular; I suppose this was because I took bribes, for that has always seemed to me the obvious function of a judge; the silly fools of litigants did not realize that my father took bribes also.
If I just hung about my father’s court with nothing to do, an obvious focus for any discontent that might arise, Constans would see to it that I ate something that disagreed with me; he was a well-behaved young man, but he wanted to make sure of the succession. There was only one field of activity that my family had left clear the sea. Fishing was carried on all along the coast, but with little coracles and rowing-boats that could only carry two men; these took out the nets in a semicircle, and were beached while the net was drawn in from the shore. No one went more than a few hundred yards out to sea, for fear of the pirates. Now I reasoned that pirates at sea would behave like raiders on land; they would not be particularly anxious to attack a boat filled with armed men, which would cost them loss and yield very little plunder. So I had a big boat built for me, and made it long enough to hold twelve armed men. It was a difficult thing to construct, but even in this Ursula helped me; she had come over from Germany in a war-boat, and remembered what the inside of it was like; she said that she had only to feel her ribs to recall the pattern of its timbers, and she insisted on coming out with us to see if it felt the same. The boat had a mast and a big sail, and the first time we went out I nearly drowned us all; but here again Ursula gave me her advice, and once I had learnt the force of the wind, which no landsman can ever appreciate, I picked up enough seamanship to be able to get about safely. Of course, we could only go out when there was a steady breeze, for the pirates in their oared boats would have caught us in a calm, but even so we were able to bring in more plentiful and more palatable fish than Anderida had enjoyed for many years.
From my point of view, the great advantage of this perilous occupation was that I was able to pick ten comrades of the comitatus to accompany me; naturally I always chose the same ten and I had a chance to get them accustomed to taking my orders.
By the autumn of 469, when I had passed my eighteenth birthday, I had a definite position in the state. I was the recognized authority on everything connected with the sea, and my little comitatus of ten men would probably follow me if I was attacked, though not if I began the quarrel. It was such a convenience to have a sea-going boat that my father became ambitious, and put his carpenters to building a real long warship; but they had no experience of such work, the tree that they chose for the keel was not strong enough, and the new ship broke its back as it was being launched. Then the new developments which I will relate in a moment put it out of his head, and I never had the chance to command a British-built warship.
For in December of that year a message came from Constans in Noviomagus, to say that envoys had reached him from the west, and that he would bring them with him to Anderida for the Christmas feast. My father gave out the news in open court, and it caused tremendous excitement; we had been isolated for more than ten years, but this meant that there was a Roman ruler somewhere who wanted at least to trade with us, and perhaps to make an alliance. Father John was the most excited of us all, for now he might get good wine from Gaul; at present he was using the produce of a little vineyard outside the walls, which for lack of sunshine had a most vile taste.
Two days before Christmas Constans arrived with half his comitatus; there was no great danger in weakening the garrison of Noviomagus at this season of the year, since the Saxons keep a mid-winter feast called Yule, and during that time they get just as drunk as Christians do in honour of the Nativity. We were pleased to see our friends again, but the crowd thronged and stared round the three envoys, forgetting to cheer my brother as loyal subjects should. The messengers were people very like ourselves, and obviously understood both Celtic and Latin; but though they were very like us, they were not quite the same. They wore tunics of unbleached wool, as we did, but instead of the sleeved and hooded cloaks of thick felt which we used in bad weather, they had loose garments of white wool wrapped round them, and they were bareheaded. My father welcomed them in a rather bad Latin speech, for as the peasants and most of the soldiers spoke nothing but Celtic he rarely had to use grammatical Latin with the correct case-endings. Then they all three were brought into the private office at the far end of the house; my father, Constans, Paul and I came with them, and Maximus and two comrades stood behind with drawn swords, in case of treachery. The senior envoy drew a rolled-up paper from the breast of his tunic, and my father gave it to Paul to read aloud.
‘To Eleutherus, King of the Regni, Greetings from Ambrosius Aurelanius, Comes Britanniarum,’ he began; and then came to a full stop, as we gasped in astonishment. For we all knew what that resounding title meant; the Count of the Britains had been commander of the field army in the old days, but as far as we knew the last one had been deposed when the cities rose against Constantine III sixty years ago. Had the Emperor sent an army from Italy, and if so how could it have landed without us hearing about it? The envoys said nothing, but motioned for Paul to continue.
‘Next spring, by the first of May, I shall be with my troops at the source of the Thames. I know you have the Saxons on your frontier, and I congratulate you on your stout resistance to their encroachments; but bring to my muster all the men you can spare, and we shall free Britain of these barbarous invaders once and for all. My messengers will give you the details, and bring back your answer.’ That was all that was written in this laconic despatch.
Obviously the first thing to do was to find out more about this mysterious Count, and we all began asking questions at once. The questioning was a slow business, for everything had to be translated into Celtic, so that the comrades should know what was going on; it is most important that your comitatus should not get the idea that you are planning a campaign behind their backs, but dignity demands that negotiations should be carried on in Latin. At first the envoys merely repeated that Ambrosius was Count of the Britains, and that it was the duty of loyal citizens to obey his lawful commands. They were reluctant to tell us how he had risen to that exalted position; in fact, Maximus had to suggest the advisability of torturing them to get at the truth before they would tell us about his origin and appointment. Eventually the chief envoy promised to answer all our questions.
The story he had to tell was not as romantic as we had hoped. The Count had not brought an army from oversea; in fact, he had been born the son of a curialis of Corinium, in the uplands between the source of the Thames and the lower course of the Sabri
na, and had assumed command of the militia of that city when the raiders first appeared from the east. Apparently he had done well in some small engagements, and his comitatus thought highly of him; then he had entered into an alliance with the Kings of Dumnonia and Demetia, and supported by their contingents he had done even better; now he had given himself this splendid title, and was issuing orders to all the Kings of Britain. It seemed to me a very impudent proceeding, but I had never forgotten what Constans had said at the time our father assumed his crown; undoubtedly names are things, and quite possibly the self-promotion of Ambrosius would make him the ruler of Britain.
The envoys were dismissed, and the five of us crowded round the table to discuss what answer we should make. Of course, it would be very nice indeed if the Saxons were finally driven out of Britain. Yet that meant putting ourselves under the rule of Ambrosius, and naturally my father, and Constans as his heir, did not wish to lose their independence. Maximus also was not anxious to serve under a stranger. At first those three were in favour of sending a refusal, though a polite one.
Paul, however, begged us to answer yes; he made a little speech about the duty of all Christians to defend their religion against the pagans, and how St. Germanus had set us the example at the Alleluia Victory. They had been speaking in order of age, and now my father asked for my opinion, which was only fair, for I would have to risk my life if we fought, and as a King’s son I would be in the forefront of the battle. I did some quick thinking; on the one hand, if Britain came under the rule of one man, there would be no chance of the independent position I longed for, and I did not like what I had heard about the pettifogging restrictions of Imperial rule; on the other hand, if Ambrosius succeeded in gathering all the Christian forces of Britain he might very possibly beat the Saxons; if he was to be our future ruler it was only common sense to join his side while our support was still valuable. I began to speak very politely, in a humble voice.
Conscience of the King Page 3
