King Lear

They might have lived a thousand years apart, but there are several connections between my two main subjects: Arthur and Shakespeare (Art & Will - geddit?).  One of them is the legendary King Lear.

Like a great deal of Arthurian source material, the Lear legend has been ignored or overlooked because, on the face of it, it has nothing whatever to do with Arthur.  The problem is one of names.

Historically, names are a problem.  Let's take an individual from the lifetime of William Shakespeare.  Sir Robert Cecil was the deformed, diminutive son of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who served as chief minister and adviser to Elizabeth I.  Robert succeeded his father, and went on to serve James I.  Together, William and Robert Cecil were among the most ruthless and rapacious statesmen this country has ever known.

In 1603, Sir Robert Cecil became Baron Cecil of Essenden.  The following year, he was made Viscount Cranborne.  The year after that, he was elevated to the earldom of Salisbury.  Over a period of just a couple of years, Cecil's name changed more than once. It was proper to refer to him as Lord Cranborne and, later, the Earl of Salisbury.

He also had nicknames, and plenty of them.  Robertus Diabolus, the Toad, King James's 'little beagle' ...

Now, if we were to apply the "only one name per historical individual" rule which is routinely applied to Arthurian studies, then Sir Robert Cecil ceased to exist in about 1603 (he actually died in 1612).  Out of nowhere appeared another person altogether, known as Salisbury.

And Will Shakespeare, of course, was not indicating Robert Cecil in the impish character of Robin Goodfellow ('Puck') or the malignant and deformed Richard 'Crookback' of Richard III.  No way.  Shakespeare would never have done such thing (except that he did).

You see the problem?  If we insist that everybody in history only ever had the one name, and the one name only, we're not going to make much sense of history, are we?  (In The King Arthur Conspiracy I also cite the example of General Schwarzkopf, who commanded the allied forces in the first Gulf War: he was also known as "Stormin' Norman" and "The Bear" - which would appear to have made him three different people.)

The character of Llyr (Irish: Lir) occurs in British tradition.  His name meant "Sea".  If we approach this character with our modern-day heads on, pretending that everyone throughout history has only ever had one name (so that Margaret Thatcher and the Iron Lady were obviously not the same person), then we are stuck.  Who was Llyr, or Lir?  No idea.  Probably a myth.

Or maybe he was a lord of the sea-kingdom of Dalriada, the homeland of the Scots on the "Coastland of the Gael" (Argyll).  Which would have made him, effectively, Arthur's father.  Aedan mac Gabrain, the father of the historical Arthur, did become King of Dalriada in 574.  He was renowned for his powerful navy.

Now, let's take this further.  In the traditional legend of King Lear, as used by one William Shakespeare, the king has three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia.  During the course of my Arthurian researches, I found three women intimately connected with Arthur's father.  They were:

Gwenhwyfar - Arthur's wife (and therefore Aedan's daughter-in-law)
Muirgein - Arthur's half-sister (Aedan's first daughter)
Creiddylad - Arthur's mother (Aedan's lover)

The second of these was not exclusively known as Muirgein.  Several of her alternative names derive from rigan, an Early Irish word for a "princess", which obviously developed into the more familiar "Regan".  Creiddylad also had other names.

According to the Welsh sources, Arthur's last battle was brought about by a quarrel between two sisters, Gwenhwyfar and Gwenhwyfach.  These can be identified as Arthur's wife and his half-sister, Gwenhwyfar ("Goneril") and Muirgein ("Regan"), who did end up on opposing sides.

The Lear legend suggests that two of the King's daughters betrayed him while the third remained constant.  In the case of Arthur - or rather, his father - it could be argued that Aedan's two daughters, Gwenhwyfar and Muirgein, brought about the cataclysmic battle which claimed the life of his son, although his lover Creiddylad appears to have played no part in that. 

The lovely Creiddylad was essentially subordinate - a "daughter" - to Aedan, the lord of the isles and King of Dalriada.  The earlier, pre-Shakespearean versions of the legend have King Lear reunited with his beloved Cordelia after his other two daughters very nearly ruined the kingdom: in fact, Aedan did live for another fourteen unhappy years after the quarrel between his two daughters brought about the death of his son by Creiddylad.

This is a quick summary, of course, but the basics are there: the legend of King Lear and his three daughters corresponds with the historical situation of Aedan, the father of Arthur, who had two squabbling daughters (one being his daughter-in-law) and a third princess, whom he truly loved.  The names of Lear's daughters can all be derived from the original princesses in Aedan's immediate family circle, while the name of Lear himself relates to Aedan's role as the lord of the sea.

(While we're on the subject, in Shakespeare's King Lear, Goneril marries the Duke of Albany - another name for Scotland.  Regan marries the Duke of Cornwall, a place frequently, and mistakenly, associated with south-west Britain in Arthurian lore - in the book, I explain what "Cornwall" really meant.)

What, then, of Arthur?  Well, British - i.e. Welsh - tradition preserves several legends of the Children of Llyr.  And in my next blogpost, I'll explain where Arthur fits into that tradition, albeit under another name.

High Five

Well, an interesting 24 hours or so.  A lovely interview about The King Arthur Conspiracy with Sean Moncrieff on Newstalk, Ireland's independent talk radio station.

And then, History Today magazine sent through the proofs for an article they'll be publishing in next month's edition.  It's entitled "Arthur and the Church", and with the fantastic illustrations the whole thing runs to seven pages.  New territory for me, and all very exciting.

First, though, I came across my first Amazon review for the Arthur book.  John, who wrote it, is an American author and post-graduate researcher.  He put out a shout a few months ago for somebody to mentor him through a university paper on the subject of Arthur and Sustainability.

I was intrigued straightaway.  But I also knew that the other Arthur enthusiasts on the site would simply see his request as an excuse for some nitpicking and squabbling.  That's why the "experts" haven't found Arthur - they're too busy arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I saw John's request as a fascinating opportunity, a chance to explore what the history and legends of Arthur might have to tell us about sustainability, which is surely the biggest issue of our age.  John and I communicated by email, and after a while I suggested he have a look at the manuscript of my Arthur book (then with the publishers) so that he knew where I was coming from.

John, I have to say, is a great reader.  He read the Arthur manuscript twice, to my knowledge, and had many kind, encouraging and thoughtful observations to make about it.

So, he had a bit of a headstart.  And his 5-Star review on Amazon is a lovely tribute.  I'll share it with you here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/0752476858/ref=dp_db_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

Hope to post a link to the History Today article when it makes it onto the 'net.  Till then, best wishes to all!!

First Press Piece

Just thought I'd share this.  It's the first newspaper article about The King Arthur Conspiracy, courtesy of Jim McBeth and the Scottish Daily Mail:

To Kindle Interest

It's out!  On Kindle, that is.

The real books will be on their way soon.  But for those who Kindle, or those who just fancy a taster, Amazon is the place:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-King-Arthur-Conspiracy-Scottish/dp/0752476858/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340102692&sr=1-2

I'll also provide updates on the publicity as it happens.  A couple of magazine articles are pending, including a big piece in History Today (August edition).  We'll keep you posted.

But that's enough about The King Arthur Conspiracy.  I'd also like to draw your attention to another new book.  Not one that I've been involved with in any way.  It's the first of a trilogy.

The Chronicles of Iona: Exile by Paula de Fougerolles is a novel about "the two men who laid the foundations of the Scottish nation" - Aedan mac Gabrain, King of the Scots, and St Columba.  The author describes them as "a real-life sixth-century Merlin and King Arthur".

The similarities between St Columba and the literary invention that is Merlin had occured to me whilst I was researching and writing my history of Arthur.  Aedan mac Gabrain was Arthur's father (the first man on record to be known as Arthur, that is).  The original Merlin (a name of later date) was fairly close in age to the historical Arthur.  He also did not look much like the Merlin we have come to know and love.

Arguably, St Columba did look a bit more like the traditional Merlin.  Hair cut in the Druidic tonsure (shaved at the front, long at the back), with a blackthorn staff and stained eyelids, Columba might have passed for a Merlin figure.

But the "real" Merlin was an enemy of Columba.  I've even wondered whether their antipathy had anything to do with Geoffrey of Monmouth's invention, in the twelfth century, of the name Merlin.

You see, Columba's adoptive name meant "Dove".  And the hunting bird known as the merlin is scientifically known as Falco columbarius.  Merlin, you could say, was the raptor who hunted the Dove.

Anyway, that's all by the bye.  Please feel free to check out The King Arthur Conspiracy on Amazon.  And then, when you've done that, and ordered copies for everyone you know, check out this page:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Chronicles-Iona-Paula-Fougerolles/dp/0615602541/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340103057&sr=1-1

The Chronicles of Iona - potentially, a companion-piece to The King Arthur Conspiracy: How a Scottish Prince Became a Mythical Hero.

Why History Matters

Watching the endless succession of images from the Queen's Diamond Jubilee over the long weekend, I was reminded of the importance of history.

Part of the disconnect I felt had something to do with the fact that I was writing up the section on the Gunpowder Plot in my book about William Shakespeare.  (For the uninitiated, the Gunpowder Plot was apparently an attempt by certain Catholic fanatics to destroy the King and the Parliament in a massive explosion in 1605; the exposure of this diabolical conspiracy is still celebrated every year in the UK on 5 November.)

If you were able to watch the TV images of the Jubilee with the sound turned down, you would have enjoyed a remarkable spectacle.  But the incredibly asinine commentary throughout ruined the occasion.  Or maybe it didn't - for some, at any rate, it would have been a fitting narrative on the last 1,000 years of British history.

It all depends, of course, on what narrative you believe in.  Take Scotland, for instance.  Only 60 street parties were held in Scotland to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee.  Of those, 20 were organised by the extreme Unionists of the Orange Order, with funding from Glasgow City Council.  So, apart from a few hard line Protestants, the whole of Scotland managed just 40 street parties.  The rest of the UK held some 9,500 street parties.  What does that tell us about the state of the Union?

Well, you could say that it merely reflects a different view of history.  In Scotland, the narrative of British history is largely one of cruelty and repression.  England, of course, sees things differently, and continues to spin myths about the Scots being subsidy-reliant whingers.  The spectacle of David Starkey weeping on Sky TV was symptomatic of the English view of their own history: simplistic, imperialist, and about as realistic as Downton Abbey.

The Gunpowder Plot is a good example of how history gets skewed, then and now, to shore up a certain set of prejudices.  Going through the contemporary accounts and records, one thing really stands out: there is, in fact, more evidence that there never really was a Gunpowder Plot, and that the entire thing was manufactured and manipulated as a propaganda coup for a harsh and corrupt State, than that the plot was genuine and was opportunely discovered by a hyper-efficient government, with a little help from God.  Even so, every fifth of November we light bonfires and burn effigies in memory of a plot which, in all likelihood, wasn't anything like what we were told it was.

What we celebrate, in other words, is a phantom conspiracy which in fact allowed the King and his ministers to round up and execute a whole range of "enemies", real or imagined, and to impose even more stringent and unpleasant laws against Catholics (who were merely remaining true to the religion which had prevailed in these isles for a thousand years).  Even senior Anglican churchmen came to doubt the government's story of the plot.  No one challenged the official account more than Shakespeare.  But Shakespeare, too, has been the victim of ongoing historical revisionism.  You think we don't know very much about William Shakespeare?  Well think again.  We know a great deal about him.  But to maintain the fiction that he was a good little Protestant patriot and well-behaved family man, we have to pretend that we know nothing.

The BBC commentators over the Jubilee weekend didn't have to pretend that they know nothing: it was abundantly clear that they had no idea what they were talking about.  A historic river pageant involving a thousand boats was ruined by a gormless soundtrack of ignorance and sycophantic nonsense.

The problem, at least in part, was a woeful lack of historical knowledge.  Even the BBC's own Radio Times magazine has run a piece in next week's edition, bemoaning the frantic dumbing-down of history on TV.  "Celebrities" who have little or no grasp of history are set the task of presenting history sections -  including a hairdresser who was invited to comment on the execution of King Charles I!  History, in that sense, has become a pointless section of a magazine-type show, a kind of endless soap opera of trivia and falsehoods.

Even a slightly more intelligent history programme this week managed to muddle up the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 with the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  Women achieved a visibility in London as a result of the Restoration of King Charles II to the throne which was promptly denied them in 1688, when parliament overthrew the legitimate King - Charles's brother James - and brought in a foreign monarch.  James was Catholic, so he had to go.  William, a Dutchman, was Protestant, so he was appointed King in a remarkable coup d'etat which ushered in another Reformation.  But much of this detail was lost in the programme.  Why?  Well, we need to maintain the fiction of hereditary succession of the monarchy, and to overlook the fact that the freedoms achieved by the Restoration of a legitimate monarch were sacrificed in order to bring in a monarch of the Protestants' choosing!  Somehow or other, the Restoration of a popular monarch and a political coup designed to bring in an alternative monarch - one more acceptable to the puritanical fanatics - became the same thing!

This trivialisation of history, and the perpetuation of nationalist myths, has a political purpose.  It means that we are all encouraged to wave a flag, the history of which we simply do not know.  We do not know that the monarchy is a political construct.  We do not know the crimes that have been committed in its name.  We simply cheer a woman in her eighties, even if we're not sure why.

Those long-term job-seekers who were bussed into London to act as unpaid stewards at the river pageant, and were then abandoned to spend the night under London Bridge, were as much a part of the history of these isles as the current inhabitants of Buckingham Palace.  They are, if you like, the flipside of the bejewelled dream of British history - they are the serfs, the slaves, the underclass whose exploitation keeps the dream alive.

Which makes Scotland's ambivalence towards the weekend's celebrations rather encouraging.  For King Arthur is as much a part of the dream of British history as anything.

If you buy into the centuries of propaganda which have sustained the English crown, then you'll probably think of him as being essentially English, and certainly a Christian.

But then, when you get down and dirty with real history, you find that he wasn't.  His enemies were the English, or their ancestors, at any rate.  His legend was stolen from Scotland, just as an English king stole Scotland's royal Stone of Destiny.

The Scots were right to look askance as England celebrated its faked and fictionalised history.  Whether or not Queen Elizabeth II is the true sovereign of the United Kingdom is irrelevant.  It is the mass amnesia of the English, the ongoing process of forgetting and the creation of myths, which made the Jubilee distasteful.  With the sound turned down, the whole event was a fantastic advertisement for Britain.  But when the commentary was audible, it was a foolish, tabloid misrepresentation of almost everything that has ever happened.

And for as long as august bodies like the BBC are allowed to wreak havoc with history, turning it into the silliest of subjects, then many, many people will continue to buy into the dream - even though it is, in reality, a travesty based on a nightmare.

For the sake of national sanity and the good of our children, it is high time we jettisoned these propagandist myths, delved deeply into the historical evidence, and recognised the reality of our national past.  And that includes restoring Arthur to his proper place and time and no longer kidding ourselves that Shakespeare was a Protestant conformist.  Those myths hold us all in check.  They prevent understanding.

Worse, they encourage the continuation of atrocities.  Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.  We need to reclaim our history.  Otherwise, we will never be free.

Chaos is Come Again

There's a problem with history.  It's like quantum physics, in that the results you get tend to depend on where you happen to be standing.

In other words, history is all about perspective.

The historian Michael Wood wrote an interesting piece for the BBC News Magazine to accompany his new series about the history of Britain.  Like many historians, Wood starts his history with the Romans.

There is something of a perception among historians that the ancient Britons were useless.  They just sat around in the mud, scratching their backsides and waiting for the Romans to come along and show them how to do things.

Of course, the Britons rejected the advances of Julius Caesar in 55 BC.  But ninety years later, there were a fair few British chieftains - mostly in the south and east of Britain - who were familiar with life on the Continent and who saw the potential of being clients of Rome.  For the chieftains, this could mean new, undreamt-of levels of luxury, just as long as they consented to Roman domination.  So when Claudius mounted his invasion, there were some tribes who effectively welcomed them in and no doubt stood in awe as a squadron of elephants entered the country.

The Romans were less welcome in the west and the north, and they failed to subdue the Scottish Highlands.  The Roman soldiers coined a name for the tattooed tribesmen of the far north: they called them pictii - the Painted Ones.  In fact, the native Britons as a whole seem to have had a preference for tattoos, and for two or three centuries it is probable that the native population was divided into those who shaved (in the Roman style) and those who decorated their bodies.

In his piece for the BBC, Michael Wood compared the collapse of Roman rule, and the withdrawal of the legions - a process that was more or less completed by 409 AD - with the current economic crisis in Europe.  He made some salient points, one of them being about social inequality: 'in the 300s the big land-owning aristocrats who often had fantastic wealth, contributed much less than they had in the past to defence and government.'

There is indeed evidence that the wealthier members of Romano-British society resented paying for the privileges which their ancestors had sought.  A phenomenon we have seen much of in more recent times.

The Roman Empire collapsed - but rumours of Britain's demise were a tad premature.  Yes: hard times lay ahead.  As Wood points out, the population of Britain shrank from a high of about four million to just one million in the 500s, as a result of climate crises, famines, plague and warfare.  But Britain would remain Britain until many years after the Romans left.

Even in the south, which fell first to the waves of Germanic immigrants known, collectively, as the Saxons, the decisive blow didn't fall until the Battle of Dyrham in 577, when the Saxons fought their way through to the River Severn, cutting off the Britons of the south-west from those of the Midlands.  That was nearly 170 years after the last Roman legion withdrew from British shores.  It was also right in the middle of the lifetime of Arthur.

However, Arthur was not in the south (no matter how hard many scholars want him to have been).  He was in the North.  And the Men of the North were fighting back against the Anglian settlers of what is now Northumberland.

When the Saxons were breaking through to the Severn in the south, Arthur was battling against the Ulaid warriors of Ulster in central Scotland.  Three years later, he won a major victory over the southern Picts.  And by 590, his alliance of British and Irish warrior-princes had driven the encroaching Angles back to the sea.  A British army had the Germanic warriors pinned down at Lindisfarne while, a little further down the coast, an Irish contingent was besieging the Anglian stronghold of Bamburgh.

That was when treachery struck from within Arthur's own ranks.

Four years later, in 594, Arthur fought his last battle and was betrayed by those he trusted.  By the following year, the resurgent Angles had overrun much of the North.  Britain was finished.

This happened almost 200 years after the Romans departed - and so we should be wary of any claims that Britain descended into absolute chaos the moment the well-organised, militarised and bureaucratic Romans left us to our own devices.

One point Wood makes in his BBC piece is of enormous interest.  He refers to Edward Gibbon, the Victorian author of the classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and notes that Gibbon - rather unusually, given the age he lived in - blamed the collapse of British society, not only on the barbaric invaders from across the North Sea, but on Christianity.  In Gibbon's view, by focussing on a better world, a future paradise, Christianity undermined the Britons' attempts to deal with the crisis they were actually caught up in.

There is something in that.  You will still hear those who - speaking from a rather imperialistic perspective - praise the Roman occupation and imagine that Christianity was thoroughly settled as the one and only religion in Britain by the time the Romans left.  This is the simplistic view of history: the Romans came, dragged us up out of the filth, and then Christianity finished off the job by making us civilised.  But it wasn't really like that.

At least where Arthur was concerned, the belligerence, intransigence and ambition of the early Church caused his downfall.  There is evidence that the early Church destroyed anything it could find relating to the Celtic intelligentsia - the 'Druids' - and rewrote history to make its own triumph seem inevitable.

The supporters of the early Church were, in many ways, the same people who had so admired the Roman Empire.  The antagonists of the early Church were, by and large, those who preferred the native traditions and saw Britain's future, not as a far-flung province of the reborn Empire (the Church of Rome) but as an independent nation in its own right.  As we know, the Church won.  It certainly played dirty, and then did everything it could to cover its tracks.

Hence, the Dark Ages - a period in British history when nobody really knows what was going on, because the Church controlled the information.  But the problem goes much further back than that.  The Roman occupation distorts our view of ancient Britain, and the rise of the Church distorts our view of post-Roman Britain.  Both have a tendency to silence the voices of the Britons.  And so we still have historians who believe that Britain was nothing until the Romans came, and then collapsed into nothingness again until the Church got a grip in the sixth and seventh centuries. What the average Briton actually thought, felt and believed is irrelevant - all that matters is that we celebrate the triumph of institutions (the Roman Empire, the Church of Rome) at the expense of the people.

So where does that leave us today?  Is Michael Wood right to see the Fall of the Roman Empire echoed in Europe's contemporary crises?

Let us first of all remember that trade existed between Britain and Continental Europe before the Romans marched into the land and imposed their own ideas on the Britons.  Maybe Julius Caesar had been right when he argued that Druidism - not so much a 'religion' as an intellectual system and a repository of knowledge - originated in Britain.  There are those who like to believe that the Romans stamped out Druidism when they destroyed a major college on Anglesey in AD 60, but that view is profoundly unrealistic.  Why should a centuries-old system of learning and wisdom vanish just because it was told to?

If there is a contemporary European parallel with the post-Roman Britain of Arthur's time, it is perhaps the appalling effect of 'Anglo-Saxon' economics, a kind of slash-and-burn policy which benefits the greedy.  This proved as attractive to certain individuals, mostly in the south and east of Britain, as the advent of Roman rule did nearly 2,000 years ago.  It offered a get-rich-quick opportunity, and the price we're paying is the destruction of local services (a phenomenon which, according to Michael Wood, matches the situation in post-Roman Britain).

The emergence of Scottish independence as a political issue in recent times is another reminder of the original Arthur, the son of the King of the Scots.  Arthur son of Aedan was born exactly 150 years after the departure of the last Roman legion, and at the very moment when the Germanic settlers were launching their conquest of North Britain.  By his example, he showed how the Britons could unite with their Celtic allies to mount a counterattack that, until it was brought down by treachery, proved remarkably successful.

The south had fallen, first of all to the attractions of Roman luxury, and then to the consequences of 'Anglo-Saxon' economics.  But the North held out, true to its traditions.  The problem, when it came, took the form of religious fundamentalism.

If we want to prevent the complete collapse of Britain - as happened in the immediate aftermath of Artuir mac Aedain's death in 594 - then we have to guard against the rise of religious intolerance and its attendant right-wing politics.  That was what destroyed Britain the first time around.  The apparent collapse of the European dream - symbolised by the Treaty of Rome - is not what will cause Britain's demise.  It is the (southern) love affair with easy money, and the consequent imposition of Germanic austerity, that has caused the problem which we now face.  Hard times lead to strange beliefs, and all it will take is the appearance of an ambitious and unscrupulous 'prophet' to plunge Britain back into the Dark Ages.

That's what happened in Arthur's day, and it could happen again.  But now, as then, the Scots (whose land includes much of what was British territory in Arthur's day) might be able to show us the way.

By remaining true to themselves, the Scots have been able to grow their economy (they currently contribute almost twice as much to the British Treasury as they get back in services), while England's economy is contracting, thanks to the southern fondness for Roman-style luxury and, latterly, the Germanic obsession with austerity.  There is, then, a Light in the North, very much as there was in Arthur's day.  What might snuff it out is religious fanaticism, selfishness, paranoia and intolerance.  Maybe even a figure like Donald Trump.

Arthur's New Jacket

I'm thrilled to be able to announce that one of my own photos has been incorporated into the jacket design for The King Arthur Conspiracy.  It was taken a little to the west of Arthur's grave and forms the main image on the rear of the dust jacket, as well as appearing on the inside of both flaps, above the book blurb and my own potted biography.

I can't take much credit for the jacket design, but I can point to the photo and say "I did that!"

The History Press have added this quote from the book to the rear of the dust jacket:

'The facts are that Arthur did exist and the island of his burial can be visited.  That is the good news.  The bad news is that all this was hidden for so many years because of a conspiracy: a conspiracy which began during Arthur's lifetime, and which led directly to the fall of Britain.'

If that has whetted your appetite, please feel free to pop over to the Amazon page (http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-King-Arthur-Conspiracy-Scottish/dp/0752476858/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335979347&sr=1-2), where The King Arthur Conspiracy is already bobbing about in the charts.

It'll be out in the bookshops in a couple of months.