Kings and Queens of Legend

1

IN 55 B.C., JULIUS CAESAR CROSSED THE CHANNEL. In the thousand years or so before that, seventy-six monarchs are reputed to have reigned over Britain. We know the names of most of them. They are all imaginary.

Britain owes her pre-Roman dynasties to a book which was widely supposed, through the Middle Ages and after, to be true. Even in modern times it still has the power to influence historical writing, however often historians may say otherwise. As for its impact on literature, that can never be undone. Malory's story of King Arthur has its ancestry in this book. Spenser wove a summary of it into The Faerie Queene. Shakespeare, directly or indirectly, took the plot of King Lear from it. Milton planned to base an epic on it, before he embarked on Paradise Lost instead.

It is called The History of the Kings of Britain. Out of scanty materials it created a complete legendary scheme for the island's past. Its author was Geoffrey of Monmouth. He was a cleric, probably a Welshman, perhaps a Breton born in Wales. His date of birth is unknown, but from 1129 to 1151 he was living in Oxford and seemingly teaching there. He died in 1155. When still fairly young he had begun collecting, and embellishing, ancient British traditions. Over the years he wrote much about Merlin, the prophet and enchanter. Some of the Merlin matter went into his masterpiece on the British kings, and helped to give it its fascination.

He finished it in 1136 or thereabouts, writing in Latin, then the international medium of scholarship. It is a work of genius, and a puzzle. In the preface he asserts that he translated it from 'a certain very ancient book written in the British language' which was given him by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. Walter existed, and his signature appears with Geoffrey's on one or two documents. The question is whether the book existed. The 'British language' could mean Welsh or Breton, but there is no trace of any work in either which could have been Geoffrey's original. He shows himself to be a person of wide reading. He certainly draws on passages in earlier authors, such as a Welsh monk at Bangor named Nennius, who, early in the ninth century, compiled a History of the Britons (in Latin, not Welsh) containing a little history and a great deal of legend. There are indications also that Geoffrey used a Breton history which has been lost sight of. However, this can hardly have covered all the ground he covers himself. The main credit for the immense imposture — if 'credit' is the right word — is never likely to be taken away from him.

Nor does he confine himself to royal phantoms in an undocumented epoch B.C. After the seventy-sixth of them he has to face the reality of Caesar. But he plunges boldly on into centuries where he can be checked. The intertwining of his imagination with history has bizarre results. These too belong to the story of British kingship, because they help to show how even rulers who did exist could take on legendary aspects, and pass into poetry and romance. Geoffrey of Monmouth is an entertaining and memorable companion, so long as one never believes anything he says. His fictitious Ancient Britain claims our attention first, and even after it fades away we shall not be parting company with him — not altogether. At the outset he must be allowed to hold the stage almost alone.

2

Britain (Geoffrey informs us) is named after its first king, Brutus, who was a great-grandson of the Trojan prince Aeneas. Surprisingly perhaps, while almost everything he says about Brutus is his own invention, the bare original notion is not. It is found with a few family details in the earlier book by Nennius. The inspiration behind it is patriotic, a wish to give the Britons a pedigree linking them with aristocratic antiquity. In Homer's Iliad, the god Poseidon foretells that Aeneas will save the royal house of Troy from extinction after the city falls. The Romans took up that prophecy. They claimed that Aeneas had sailed to Italy with a party of Trojan refugees, that their own early kings were his descendants, and that the basic Roman stock was Trojan. Virgil turned the belief into poetry in his national epic the Aeneid, interweaving it with ideas about divine providence in the genesis of Rome and the glories of the Empire.

The Welsh fable of Brutus the Trojan, built up by Geoffrey into a full-blown pseudo-history, becomes in his hands a postscript to Virgil. He makes out that the ancient Britons shared in an august destiny and had a cousinly relationship to the Romans themselves. By 'Britons' he means the ancestors of the Welsh, not those of the English who came later; one purpose of his book is to exalt the forbears of his own fellow-countrymen. In Virgil's epic, Aeneas has a son named Ascanius who settles in Italy with the rest of the Trojan party. Geoffrey takes the line a step further, to Ascanius's son Silvius.

When Silvius's wife was pregnant, he says, soothsayers foretold that the child would be a boy who would cause the deaths of both his parents, wander in exile, but finally rise to high honour. This was Brutus. His mother died giving birth to him, and when he grew up, he accidentally shot Silvius with an arrow while hunting. Driven to leave home, he went to Greece and discovered that the Greek king, Pandrasus, had several thousand slaves descended from Trojans carried off when the Greeks captured Troy. He organized a revolt and took Pandrasus prisoner. The king agreed to let Brutus marry his daughter Ignoge and lead the Trojans away to a land of their own.

After sailing for two days the expedition put ashore on an island. It was deserted, but had once been inhabited, and had a temple of Diana. Brutus prayed to her to tell him where the migrants should go. He lay down to sleep in front of her altar, and she appeared to him in a dream and spoke:

'Brutus, beyond the setting of the sun, past the realms of Gaul, there lies an island in the sea, once occupied by giants. Now it is empty and ready for your folk. Down the years this will prove an abode suited to you and to your people; and for your descendants it will be a second Troy. A race of kings will be born there from your stock and the round circle of the whole earth will be subject to them.'

Greatly heartened, they sailed on. In the neighborhood of Gibraltar they picked up more Trojans, whose leader was Corineus. Having spent some time in Gaul, where they founded the city of Tours, they disembarked in the promised land at Totnes. (For some reason Geoffrey is much interested in Totnes. In the course of the History a whole series of people land there.)

Britain was then called Albion. Brutus re-named it after himself, and called his companions Britons. Corineus was allotted the south-west promontory for his domain, and called...