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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