Concocting a Seat at the Round Table: Arthurian Legend, Historical Genealogy, and the Making of Empire in Tudor and Stuart England

By Alexander Lowe McAdams

What to the contemporary medieval scholar is the historical truth of King Arthur? For better or worse, this question has galvanized academics for generations. Much like the recurrent retellings of Arthurian romance across mass media, arguments over the titular king’s historical existence refuse to die, even as academic publishers have spilled barrels of ink in an attempt to lay it to rest. Tom Shippey rather famously began his 2018 review of Nicholas Higham’s King Arthur: The Making of the Legend in the London Review of Books with, ‘Modern academic historians want nothing to do with King Arthur.’ Medieval scholar Brian David similarly writes that ‘few topics in late antique and medieval history elicit scholarly groans quite like the idea of a supposedly “factual” King Arthur,’ preferring instead to leave the mythical figure to ‘popular books, video games, and movies.’ This position is not new. Critics of the twentieth century treat the topic of Arthur’s veracity with similar acridity; for example, in 1986, J. N. L. Myres proclaimed that ‘no figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’[1]

These bitter critiques—aggravated, it seems, by this legend’s refusal to die—have since bled into heated debates around British cultural heritage sites in the twenty-first century. In 2016, when English Heritage unveiled its intentions to erect a likeness of the mythological king at Tintagel Castle—Arthur’s supposed birthplace—and likewise carve Merlin’s face into a nearby cliffside, Cornwall councilor Bert Biscoe criticized the decision. ‘If we start carving comic book characters into the geology, where do we stop?’ he wrote in a letter to the English Heritage’s chief executive. ‘This is not Disneyland, it’s Cornwall.’ Regardless of one’s opinions about the legend of King Arthur, this brief survey of scholars’ opinions on the legendary ruler illustrates one noteworthy commonality: arguing over the mythical king’s authenticity is not only a fool’s errand, but also a fanciful waste of one’s time, intellect, and research library credentials.

At the risk of inviting similar rancor, this essay enters the contested fray. In an effort to answer the ‘so what?’ question, this essay adds a contextual layer by surveying how early modern writers, intellectuals, and monarchs conceived of the ancient king and his legendary adventures. I highlight the early modern movement surrounding the ‘political Arthur’ in Tudor- and Stuart-era England to show that early moderns not only substantiated Arthur’s existence in the historical record, but also deployed that very record to legitimize monarchical power and absolutism, as well as the birth of the British Empire.[2] Specifically, this short piece demonstrates how the legitimacy of the Tudors’ and Stuarts’ rights to the throne hinged on the nations acceptance of Arthur’s factual existence—specifically, that his lineage could be traced to the Tudor and Stuart monarchs who established sovereignty. Early modern understandings of Arthur reveal the potency of the legend’s political cache and, I argue, its centrality to establishing the British Empire in the subsequent centuries—the effects of which are still evident today in the tatters of our postcolonial world. Whether or not we as contemporary scholars understand King Arthur as historical fact is not the thrust of this essay. Rather, the fact that early moderns in the Tudor and Stuart eras conceived King Arthur and his lineage as not just incontrovertible truth, but also how Tudor- and Stuart-era apologists deployed Arthur as an icon to consolidate monarchical power, remains my goal. As we will see in the pages that follow, this so-called ‘political Arthur’ provided a burgeoning nation-state with a national identity that eventually cohered into a mercantile and maritime engine of dominance that ultimately subjugated countless indigenous peoples across the globe.

Notions of King Arthur’s famed genealogical line in early modern England began with the reign of Henry VII and played a substantial role in creating England’s national identity. As the War of the Roses drew to its traumatic close, Henry VII ascended to the English throne in 1485. The first monarch in the Tudor dynasty, Henry knew that in order to restore stability to the nation after 30 years of bloodshed, he needed to unite a divided country with a potent symbol of national identity. Henry VII claimed he could trace his lineage back to Cadwallader, one of the last ancient British kings and a proclaimed descendent of Arthur’s. Therefore, through this genealogical daisy chain, Henry established the primacy of his claim to the English throne. Subsequent monarchs, from Henry VIII to Charles I, would claim absolute rule for well over a century based on what they believed to be historical, genealogical fact—namely that they could trace their lineage to Arthur.

Nearly a century and a half earlier, the legend of King Arthur had solidified into a fantastical lore of romance and chivalry, thanks in part to Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian romances in the twelfth century and the 1485 publication of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. In addition to these medieval romances, Arthur appeared in several early chronicles of Britain’s pre-history. Nennius’ Historia Brittorum (circa 800) had already established the mythical Arthur as a dux bellorum (leader of war); and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pseudohistory Historia Regnum Britanniae (circa 1139) catalogued the lineage of Brutus (Aeneas of Troy’s great-grandson), his founding of the British nation, the Roman conquest of Britain, the fall of Rome and rise of British kings, and eventually, the legend of King Arthur himself. Monmouth’s Arthur set the tone for early modern chronicler Raphael Holinshed to frame Arthur as a king who ‘unites the British under a monarchy,’ as scholar Hugh MacLachlan writes.[3] Henry VII’s coup was not just an ideological framework to seize control of the country; it also involved a heavy dose of fanfare. Henry VII, Roberta Florence Brinkley writes, ‘march[ed] triumphantly from Wales under the red-dragon banner of Cadwallader and assumed the British throne in the name of the ancient British.’[4] It was potent, safe imagery during a perilous, uncertain time.

So began the propagandistic era of this ‘political Arthur.’ Emerging from the trauma of a violently contested civil war, Henry VII realized the potency of a ‘political Arthur’ to unite a war-torn nation. Further, Henry instructed his historian, Italian-born Polydore Vergil, to trace the Tudor line back to Arthur. Geoffrey’s Historia had already predicted a time when, MacLachlan writes, ‘the British (i.e., Welsh and Cornish futures) … would once again rise, led by Arthur, the once and future king (rex quondam rexque futurus) who would bring peace to the land.’[5] The savvy Henry VII astutely traded on the currency of this secular prophecy—already well-known in the popular consciousness—to assume the throne in 1485 by making ‘astute political use of the myth’ and consolidate his power.[6] This was not just a convenient tool to cynically grab power, either. The monarch bought into his own lore. So taken was the king with this genealogical-cum-propagandistic project, Henry VII named his first-born son Arthur—consequently the first Prince of Wales—to inaugurate his legendary bloodline.

Henry VII’s conscious consolidation of monarchical authority continued with his son Henry VIII, who was next in line for the throne when Prince Arthur died. Henry VIII ascended to the English throne in 1509 and, informed by his father’s political project, the new king consciously fashioned himself as Arthur redivivus (Arthur reborn). Henry VIII’s self-fashioning was a clever move in the game of political chess. Geoffrey of Monmouth, following William Malmesbury’s 1125 chronicling of the so-called ‘Breton Hope,’ had famously foreshadowed Arthur’s messianic return to British rule when he chronicled the magician Merlin’s fabled prophecy, and similar to his father, the king knew how to harness it.[7] Henry VIII’s self-fashioning was not merely a vanity project; it was also a means to extricate himself from the claws of what he characterized as the Pope’s authoritarian overreach. When Henry found himself in the awkward position of wanting to divorce Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn, he deployed historical justification, based almost entirely on his Arthurian genealogy, to sever ties with Rome. As the Act of Restraint and Appeals (1533) states, Henry VIII’s imperial lineage as a Tudor had long ago paved the way for England’s ecclesiastical independence from Rome. In Henry’s eyes, another prophecy had come to pass.

Henry substantiated this dramatic break from the Catholic Church by claiming that the ‘divers and sundry old authentic histories and chronicles’ had already established the ‘realm of England’ as ‘an empire’ outside papal jurisdiction. By reifying these ‘authentic histories’ in legislative language, Henry could lay claim to ‘whole and entire power, pre-eminence, authority, prerogative and jurisdiction’ outside the scope of the Holy See. Henry’s move here was rather adept, for he exploited the lore of Arthur, mythical savior-king, that already held a tight grip on certain regions around the nation;[8] Henry VIII merely tapped into this regional fervor for his own national purposes. In a way, it was a poetic bookend to Arthur’s supposed refusal to pay fealty to the Romans in antiquity. With Polydore’s genealogy, Henry VIII accelerated what his father had already begun. Just one year after Henry declared independence from the Catholic Church, Polydore published his Anglica Historia, confirming, in MacLachlan’s words, that ‘the imperial crown was the inheritance of all British monarchs from the time of Constantine the Great.’[9] Polydore’s Historia made both Henry VIII and King Arthur, by genealogical association, the sole inheritors of a British empire that had always-already existed and was just now being realized.

The Nine Heroes: Arthur, Charles the Great (Charlemagne), Godfrey of Bouillon, 1515–1517. Lucas van Leyden (Dutch, 1494–1533). Woodcut; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Dudley P. Allen Fund 1926.262.3

Visions of imperial dominance swelled during the age of Queen Elizabeth I, Henry VIII’s eventual successor.[10] When she ascended to power in 1559, Elizabeth harnessed the Arthur redivivus prophecy with particular prowess by declaring her reign the Golden Age.[11] As Brinkley argues, Elizabeth’s era was one of ‘security’ because her position on the throne was ‘rooted in an ancient glorious past,’ which her cult-like followers effected with an ‘almost intense ardor.’[12] One such fanatic was John Dee—Elizabeth’s astrologer and one of her most trusted advisors—who is often credited as the first to coin the phrase ‘British Empire.’ Dee’s surviving writings demonstrate how prominently he advocated for the nation’s imperial future, then in its infancy.[13] Dee used King Arthur’s legendary exploits as a ‘recovery project’; the very idea of empire itself had historical precedent, if not prophecy, that would eventually lead to a ‘dramatic rebirth of the British Empire,’ otherwise known as ‘a second Age of Brutus.’[14] As Brutus fled the Trojan empire to create Britain, so would Elizabeth push Britain’s boundaries to create an even larger empire.

We see this precedent-setting treatment in Dee’s manuscript Brytanici Imperii Limites, where the author describes the historical basis for the queen’s right to New World expansion. Dee’s precedents ‘depende cheiflie vppon our kinge Arthur,’ even if his story is a mix of fact and fiction. For Dee, the ‘aboundance of … fables, glosinges, vntruthes, and Impossibilities”—which had been “incerted in the true historie’—is for scholars to sift through, separating real, historical precedent from fictionalized fancy. Once Arthur had been purged of these ‘preposterous legends,’ Dee writes, ‘real learning, ingenious arguments, and an intense emotional patriotism’ would soon follow.[15] Such ‘intense emotional patriotism’ becomes the lynchpin of Arthurian historicity in the Elizabethan era, and both literary and historically-based texts relied heavily on Arthurian symbolism to galvanize a country by way of nationalistic propaganda. Chroniclers such as Raphael Holinshed had already portrayed Arthur as ‘a king who unites Britain under a monarchy,’ and this fairly new ‘political Arthur’ was crucial to Dee’s imperial aspirations.

Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is perhaps the most famous of such Arthurian-inspired propaganda. An allegorical epic fashioned in the medieval romance tradition, first published in 1590, the tale follows the misadventures of a rag-tag series of knights errant, who consistently require the intervention and assistance of the mythical Arthur to escape life-threatening situations. Not yet king, this version of Arthur functions as a deus ex machina of sorts whenever the knights need saving. In Spenser’s ‘Letter of the Authors’ to Sir Walter Raleigh—notably one of Elizabeth I’s famed sea-dogs in the age of New World piracy and colonial expansion—Spenser justifies the epic as a ‘historye of king Arthure … made famous by many mens former works,’[16] Arthur’s mythos functioning as a heuristic for the glory of ancient Britain. Furthermore, the poet avows his heroic choice precisely because Arthur’s existence is so deeply rooted in antiquity and is thus the “furthest from the daunger of envy and suspition of present time.”[17] In addition to the frequent martial slaughter Arthur enacts and encourages, Spenser heralds the young prince’s prophetic return, the Arthur redivivus, throughout The Faerie Queene’s 1590 and 1596 editions. The most noteworthy of this heraldry occurs in Book 2. After rescuing knight-in-training Guyon, Arthur leads his ingénue to Alma’s Castle where the two discover an antiquarian library containing the all the books in the history of the world.  One such volume, an ‘auncient booke, hight Briton moniments,’ captures Arthur’s attention.[18] Inside, the document recounts the mythical origins of Britain, including Brutus’s founding of the island and Prince Arthur’s own feats of strength and bravery. Here, Spenser places special emphasis on Briton moniment’s (British monuments) age and disrepair, regaling readers at several points on the text’s ‘decrepit,’ ‘ruinous and old’ condition as a chronicle of ‘Antiquitee’ (2.955.6, 55.1, and 60.2). Though ‘worm-eaten, and full of canker holes,’ these ‘old records from auncient times deriud’ bear the ‘immortal scrine … for euer incorrupted’ by the annals of time (9.57.9 and 56.6-7). Spenser’s allegorical intentions here are clear. Despite the tatters of history marring the text, their contents—the chronicles of Britain’s history and Arthur’s prophetic return through his offspring—remain pristine, untouched, and vaunted, much like the Virgin Queen ruling in Spenser’s present. Her empire, however, remained a nascent prophesy yet to be wholly realized.

As Elizabeth’s health declined at the dawn of the seventeenth century, the near-constant panic regarding her successor reached a fever pitch. The queen’s refusal to marry and produce an heir presented an anxiety-inducing question mark for the nation’s future. Who else could fill the role of Arthur’s primogenitor if the Tudor line ended with Elizabeth? England found the answer in Elizabeth’s half-nephew, King James I of Great Britain, formerly James VI, king of Scotland.[19] During James’s reign, cultural literary production produced its own Arthurian propaganda. For one, James’s self-proclaimed divine right of kings hinged upon his claim to Arthurian lineage, an absolutist power move that pitted the British monarch against his Saxon-sympathizing parliament.[20] Secondly, as the first monarch to unite England and Scotland under the moniker Great Britain, albeit in name only, James relished his role as Arthur redivivus, especially when it came to maintaining the peace.[21] King James understood the importance of linking his power to Arthurian lineage, and like Elizabeth, he began ‘associating himself with British prophecy.’ [22] As king of Great Britain, James fulfilled Merlin’s ancient prophecy, a narrative that writers were eager to promote with praises. John Speed, for example, dedicated his Historie of Great Britaine to James, ‘the most high and most potent monarch … Inlarger and Uniter of the British Empire and Restorer of the British Name.’[23] In this capacity, James was not only ‘like Arthur,’ in Brinkley’s words, ‘he was also considered to be Arthur returned to life again through his descendant.’[24] Moreover, as an offspring of Tudor and Stuart lineage, James could claim that his Arthurian lineage coursed through both of his bloodlines, giving him ‘double British pedigree.’[25] Celebratory poetry and prose of James-as-Arthur resurrected abounded in this new age of reunification, from Ben Jonson’s Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers[26] and William Camden’s Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine, to Anthony Munday’s Triumphes of Re-Vnited Britania, which drew further parallels between the king and Brutus as ‘legendary settler of the island.’[27] There are countless other examples, but perhaps the most sycophantic can be found in John Harington’s Tract on the Succession of the Crown. In the closing epigram, Harington waxes poetic about ‘how England might be reformed,’ with James at the helm: ‘Might some new Officer mend old disorder, / Yes, one good Stewart might sett all in order,’ he opines.[28]

However, the age of monarchic fanfiction would soon give way to a more skeptical, less flattering view of the monarchy. As the Jacobean era came to a close with James’s death in 1625, monarchical apologists would continue to draw parallels between the Stuart line and Arthur, though with less fervor than in its heyday during James’s, Elizabeth’s, and Henry’s reigns. Over time, justifying monarchical sovereignty under the guise of Arthurian genealogical descent fell out of fashion and gave way to pro-republican political movements. Similarly, cultural attitudes about the facticity of such genealogies succumbed to an overwhelming skepticism borne from movements in the new sciences. We see this trend paralleled in John Milton’s literary career. Originally hoping to follow Spenser’s lead, the poet-turned-polemicist axed his plans for an Arthurian epic when his growing distaste for the monarchy could no longer be ignored.[29] As Milton’s Puritan convictions grew, so too did his aversion to bolstering absolutism. England, meanwhile, had begun to realize its imperial destiny. While Milton instead turned to Paradise and Satan, British ships aimed their sights toward the Americas by way of West Africa and the Middle Passage. For the victors, it was Camelot, but for the trafficked and enslaved, let us not forget it was anything but.

Author Bio:

Alexander Lowe McAdams is a specialist in early modern literature, the history of the new astronomy, and classical reception and adaptation. Her dissertation, Theophanic Reasoning: Science, Secrets, and the Stars from Spenser to Milton, is a comparative literary project that investigates the covert through line of Giordano Bruno's heretical philosophy vis-à-vis classical reception in the English poetry and prose of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and John Milton. After receiving her Ph.D. at Rice University in 2020, Alexander served as a Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice's Humanities Research Center before transitioning to work in public-facing civic engagement and education in the Greater Houston metropolitan area. Prior to relocating to Houston, where she has resided for more than a decade, Alexander received her master’s from the University of Massachusetts Boston and her bachelor’s from the University of Mississippi. Her peer-reviewed publications range from tracing gender dynamics via thalassological studies in Shakespeare’s Pericles, a climate-focused excavation of temperance in Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and a book chapter on her qualitative approach to accessible pedagogy in the edited collection, Scholars in COVID Times, published by Cornell University Press in 2023.

Notes:

[1] J. N. L. Myres, Oxford History of England: The English Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 16.

[2] Hugh MacLachlan, “Arthur, legend of,” Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 65 [64-66].

[3] MacLachlan, “Arthur, legend of,” p. 65.

[4] Roberta Florence Brinkley, Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1967), p. 2

[5] MacLachlan, “Arthur, legend of,” p. 65.

[6] MacLachlan, “Arthur, legend of,” p. 65.

[7] Christopher Berard, Arthurianism in Early Plantagenet England: From Henry II to Edward I (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2019), p. 5. Berard speculates that this “Breton Hope” (expectare Arthurum) might appear even earlier in Ekkehard of Aura’s chronicle, published in 1106 (see p. 32).

[8] Mary Bateman, Local Place and the Arthurian Tradition in England and Wales, 1400-1700 (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2023), p. 11.

[9] MacLachlan, “Arthur, legend of,” p. 66.

[10] After Henry VIII’s death, England underwent three monarchs in the span of two decades and flip-flopped between Protestant and Catholic until Queen Elizabeth I ascended to power and united the nation by instituting Protestantism as the national religion. For a complex, magisterial overview of this traumatic era, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

[11] Brinkley writes, “The Tudors held that the correct interpretation of Merlin’s prophecy concerning the return of King Arthur [Arthur redivivus] was to be found not in the actual restoration of Arthur, but in the return of his line” Arthurian Legend, p. 1.

[12] Brinkley, Arthurian Legend, p. 3.

[13] John Dee writes extensively of his vision for the “Brytish Impire” in his work General and Rare Memorials. See Dee, General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Nauigation Annexed to the Paradoxical Cumpas, in Playne: Now First Published: 24. Years after the Inuention Thereof (London: Iohn Daye, 1577); Early English Books Online digital collection, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A20020.0001.001 (accessed October 31, 2024).

[14] William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 181.

[15] John Dee, Brytanici Imperii Limites; quoted in Sherman, p. 188. For an in-depth treatment of Dee’s manuscript, see Ken MacMillan, “Notes and Documents: John Dee’s ‘Brytanici Imperii Limites,’” Huntington Library Quarterly 64, no. 1/2 (2001): pp. 151-59.

[16] Edmund Spenser, “Letter of the Authors expounding his whole intention in the course of his worke,” in The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 715 [714-18].

[17] Spenser, “Letter,” p. 715.

[18] Spenser, The Faerie Queene, book 2, canto 9, stanza 59, line 6. Subsequent references to The Faerie Queene are from this text and appear hereafter parenthetically by book, canto, stanza, and line numbers.

[19] Parliament did not officially ratify Great Britain until the Act of Union in 1707, but James I would continue to proclaim himself monarch of a united kingdom throughout his lifetime.

[20] Brinkley contextualizes this divide as a battle over the historical record. James, in his claim to Arthurian lineage, clung to the British line of thought, while Parliament found justification to undercut the king’s absolutism with their own interpretation of history through the Saxon conquest of the island; see Brinkley, Arthurian Legend, pp. vii-iii, 1-25, and 26-88.

[21] Brinkley writes, “In James lay the possibility of a peaceful healing of the division which had caused rancor in the heart of the nation since Brutus first divided the nation among his three sons.” Arthurian Legend, p. 6.

[22] Brinkley, Arthurian Legend, p. 6. James’s decision to fashion himself as an Arthurian monarch is especially potent considering that Henry VIII specifically wrote in his will that Mary Stuart, James’s mother and one-time wife of Henry VIII, and her offspring be excluded from England’s line of succession.

[23] John Speed, The Historie of Great Britaine under the Conquests of the Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, 2nd edn. (John Beale: London, 1623), p. 273, ¶3r.

[24] Brinkley, Arthurian Legend,  pp. 9-10.

[25] Brinkley, Arthurian Legend, p. 17.

[26] Ben Jonson, Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers (1609); qtd. in Brinkley, Arthurian Legend, p. 23.

[27] Brinkley, Arthurian Legend, p. 20. William Camden makes liberal use of his era’s non-standardized English to create the anagram, “Charles Iames Steuart / CLAIMES ARTVRS SEATE” (Camden, Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine [London: G. E., 1605], p. 153). See also, Anthony Munday, The Triumphes of Re-Vnited Britania (London: W. Haggard, 1605).

[28] John Harington, “Epigram Shewing How England Might be Reformed,” in A Tract on the Succession to the Crown (A.D. 1602), ed. Clements R. Markham (London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1880), p. 123; Hathi Trust, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo1.ark:/13960/t88g96h3c (accessed October 31, 2024).

[29] For a magisterial overview of Milton’s perspectives on Arthur, see Brinkley, Arthurian Legend, pp. 126-41.