Kings and Queens of England: Arthur

Of all the monarchs of the British Isles, real or imaginary, few have stirred the imagination as much as Arthur, the saviour and perpetual protector of the British people. The reality of Arthur is difficult to identify, although there have been suggestions that he was a chieftain at the tail end of the Roman occupation of Britain at the end of the C4th CE who was a cavalry leader perhaps leading troops from the far south of the Empire. He then became a kind of proto-king as the Romans departed and the British, such as they then were, started to develop methods of self-governance.

Perhaps more interestingly, the legend of Arthur has him as the son of Uther Pendragon, in the south-western country of Cornwall, who emerged from obscurity as the result of drawing the sword from the stone, the tutelage by the wizard Merlin who lived his life backwards in time, the gift of the magical sword Excalibur by the Lady in the Lake, the Round Table and the valiant Knights, the nemesis of his half-sister Morgana Le Fay and her demonic son Mordred. Along the way, Arthur rallied armies to defeat the invading Saxons and established the first independent states of free Britons for centuries, while at the same time his knights of the Table Round dealt with damsels in distress, fought horrible monsters and eventually partook of the quest for the Holy Grail. Many of these legendary activities, of course, represent common desires and aspirations of the British people through the years: the Round Table indicates that all regional barons are treated as equal, irrespective of family or personal following; the defeat of monsters indicated the spread of peaceful governance across more and more of the country, while the Holy Grail represents both the desire of the upper classes for legitimization through religions acts and the capture of overseas lands in the Crusades (the capture of overseas lands having subsequently become a big part of British foreign policy, which then needed some justification in the face of all the murder, theft and so forth).

Eventually, the death of Arthur was followed by his entombment in an unknown resting place reputed to be near the sacred site of Glastonbury, where he sleeps through the centuries awaiting moments of terrible peril for the British people, at which point he will emerge to save the day. The peoples of all countries, of course, have their own myths that generally mark them out as special in some way and particularly moral compared to other people and this is one of the British ones. Quite why so many people continue to cling obviously invented myths of the past hundreds or thousands of years later remains an issue surrounded by controversy.