Previous Posts In This Series:

1. “Uther Was A Black-Bearded Madman” Part 1

2. “Uther Was A Black-Bearded Madman” Part 2

3. “Uther Was A Black-Bearded Madman” Part 3

4.  A Bloodstained Map of Britain

(As with other posts in this series, I am taking the brief mentions of Uther Pendragon by the Gaelic pirate Cormac Mac Art, in REH’s “Tigers of the Sea” and “Temple of Abomination”, as a basis for further speculation, and treating them as fundamental.  Tie-ins with actual history are being treated as secondary to Howard’s fictional background.)

Eutherius the Gallo-Roman military commander had made Gaul too hot to hold him at last, as described in the posts linked above, paricularly #3. Having murdered Aegidius in an ambush, and later killed the Visigothic king Theodoric II in an assassination at Toulouse, he had certainly been instrumental in the death of Aegidius’s strongest supporter Count Paul, while Paul battled the Saxons at the town of Angers. Then young Syagrius, the son and successor of Aegidius, had become aware of his treachery and beaten him in battle, with the help of the Salian Franks under their ruler Childeric. While they were allies as fickle, treacherous and ready to turn as Eutherius himself, and would destroy the realm of Soissons in the end, they gave good service on that occasion. It was one of the few times Eutherius met defeat. He fled into lesser Britain (Armorica) as other defeated rebels had done before him, like the insurgent peasant Bacaudae he had trounced and butchered in his time.

The Britons of the Second Migration (458-460) had lost their leader, Riothamus, in a battle with the Visigoths. Badly wounded, he had retreated, with the remnant of his forces, to the Burgundian kingdom in south-eastern Gaul. After that he vanishes and no more is heard of him. Riothamus undoubtedly died of his wounds, and his disappearance later became part of the legend of King Arthur, wounded in a battle he lost through treachery, taken into a magical realm for healing, and prophesied to return.

Eutherius made capital out of this event in Armorica. He told the Britons there that Riothamus had died because the rulers of Soissons had used him and his forces to take the brunt of a Visigothic invasion, and failed to support them. (That probably held some truth.) Winning the alleigance of about two thousand restless expatriates, he learned much of conditions in Britain. He decided to make a bid for kingship and power there.

It was possibly at this point in his career that his new Celtic supporters abbreviated his Roman name to Uther.

He decided, with characteristic daring, to cross the sea direct from the northern coast of Brittany to the southern coast of Britain, aiming for Dorset. The Britons of Armorica had already begun to copy the Saxons and engage in piracy; they had their own tradition of seafaring. Their chiefs possessed both longships and merchant craft. Uther had brought gold from Soissons. (He had probably buried his payment for assassinating Aegidius and Theodoric II in the earth rather than risk having to explain it. Now it would be useful to finance his bid for conquest.)

He was able to hire enough ships to carry two or three hundred picked men for a beginning. Two hundred fighting men was a large force for the times in Britain; a lot could be accomplished with it. He probably took them east along the Breton coast and then north to the tip of the Cherbourg peninsula, where he made his temporary base at Cherbourg (ancient name Coriallo) and waylaid any vessels that came his way until he had enough to send back to Armorica for other fighting men.

The following spring, in the first spell of good weather and favourable winds, he crossed from Cherbourg to the Dorset coast. Four hundred soldiers went with him — his toughest and most experienced. They would have been a mixed bunch, Gallo-Romans, Britons and Franks. This would have been in 471 A.D.

They crossed the Channel — then called the Narrow Sea — successfully, but landed further west than they had planned, in the kingdom of Damnonia, then ruled by Gorlois. (REH doesn’t mention either Gorlois or Igraine when he has Cormac talk of Uther, but they are so strongly a part of Uther’s legend that I assume they would have been mentioned if Cormac had thought it relevant.) Uther let his followers have their heads and plunder the town of Isca (Exeter), which won him their further approval. Plunder and sack was considered acceptable behaviour by most seamen in that age, even the ones who were not full-time pirates, and by all soldiers. Uther doubtless enjoyed the looting and raping himself.

After that he led his men eastwards to the destination he had originally aimed for, Weymouth on the Dorset coast, and marched them north to Durnonovaria (Dorchester). That town was located in a sort of no-man’s land between Damnonia (Cornwall and Devon) and the realm of the Britanno-Jute Cerdic. Like most others in Britain, especially those easily placed for Saxons to raid, the town had become feeble and half-abandoned. Probably more than half, empty except for aimless squatters. Still, it was fed by a functioning Roman water-course nine miles long and surrounded by former Roman villae. People might return to them if they had some guarantee of safety. Uther looked the region over. Satisfied, he announced himself its new lord and sent back to Cherbourg and Brittany for more men, giving glowing reports of the prospects in Britain to lure them across.

Two hundred came before the summer’s end. A Saxon chief with three keels and one hundred and fifty men tried to plunder the land, but Uther was an able soldier for all his ferocity and hard drinking. He’d already established watchers and signal beacons. He caught the Saxons and slaughtered them in a fight that spread his name down the coast. The three Saxon keels he captured were welcome; he could use ships. Chopping the hands and feet from those Saxons he captured alive, he sent them to Cerdic as a gentle hint to stay out of Uther’s realm. The British, even those ruled by Gorlois, considered that well done, but Gorlois remained Uther’s enemy because of his sacking Isca.

Over the next three years, Uther established his power solidly from Lyme Bay on the coast up to Salisbury Plain, with its ancient sacred site of Stonehenge, and north to the former Roman civitas of Aquae Sulis (Bath). He had twice destroyed fairly serious Saxon incursions up the valley of the Thames, which increased his fame. Gerinth, the able and intelligent, even noble-hearted, British king to the north, saw Uther’s violent and unbridled nature clearly enough, but viewed him with guarded and conditional approval because Uther was proving an effective war-leader against the Saxons. Uther at least had enough sense not to make too many enemies at once. He cultivated Gerinth’s friendship and co-operated with him — as he was willing to continue doing once he had increased his power, at least while it suited him. He had nothing against Gerinth except that the Romano-British lord held a greater kingdom than he did.

So far, so good. However, Uther was strategist enough to know that his position was vulnerable. Cerdic’s realm lay to the east of him, that of Gorlois to the west, and neither was friendly. It was like being between two millstones that could grind him like corn. For his own safety, he had to break one of them.

He chose Gorlois. Cerdic, despite his British blood, was aligned with the Germanic sea-wolves and could call on allies from Sussex and Kent. That was too much power for one small king to buck, even one with allies in Armorica. Gorlois was isolated in the south-western peninsula and in any case was Uther’s established foe.

Uther prefaced his warlike intentions with a call for a peace conference and request for a treaty. Gorlois took this as evidence that Uther feared him, just as Uther had expected. The Damnonian king came to a feast at Bath — neutral ground, belonging to neither king — bringing a strong troop of warriors. He also brought his queen, Igraine.

The legends and stories are unanimous that Igraine was beautiful. Malory says in Le Morte d’Arthur that “she was called a fair lady, and a passing wise” and that Uther “desired to have lain with her.” But perhaps there was more to it than the kind of horny lust that doesn’t bother to take off its armour first, as in John Boorman’s classic 1981 movie. Igraine, or Ygerna as she’s called in some versions, may have been her husband’s co-ruler, or even the widow of a former king of Damnonia when she married Gorlois. Marriage to her could have been a necessary qualification for a man to rule Damnonia, or at least something that would greatly strengthen his claim.

Igraine may not have been the kind of woman Malory represents, either. Possibly she was a Celtic queen in the mould of Cartimandua in the first century, or Medb of Connacht — a bit of a hellcat. (To hang onto her kingdom, Cartimandua played ball with the Romans, and when the rebel Caractacus came to her for refuge, she handed him over. She also dumped her husband and co-ruler in favour of his armour bearer.)

Besides, as a Celtic woman living in half-pagan times, Igraine was probably not a bleating virtuous ewe such as Malory depicts, in the best medieval tradition of faithful queens. “I suppose we were sent for that I should be dishonoured, wherefore, husband, I counsel that we depart from hence* suddenly, that we may ride all night unto our own castle.”  (Le Morte d’Arthur, Book I, Chapter I.) Uther, at thirty-three, might have been ten or a dozen years younger than Gorlois, and Igraine might have been no older than twenty-five, even if she had been once widowed before. If she decided she liked the look of Uther, she might have felt an urgent wish to ride all night in quite a different sense.

Celtic women weren’t shy about coming forward. Deirdre, most beautiful of all the women in Ireland, was betrothed to King Conchobar of Ulster, and there was a curse on her that she would bring about immense bloodshed. It didn’t keep her from giving an unmistakeable message to Naoise at their first encounter.

“Between you and the king, I’d pick a strong young bull like you,” she says frankly.

Igraine may have been just as direct with Uther, for all we can tell across the centuries. This certain; that yarn about Uther coming to her disguised as her husband by a magical illusion is one that many a realist must have doubted. Even in those days, when the supernatural was taken for granted as part of life, there’d have been cries of “Pull my other leg!” Or as Malory put it, “Then he [Arthur] is a bastard, said they all.”

Gorlois may well have intended to murder this Gallo-Roman upstart at the peace meeeting anyhow. There was solid precedent for it in the murder of British nobles by Hengist on the “Night of the Long Knives”, and in some of Vortigern’s behaviour, not to mention the actions of various Roman emperors. As Conan observed in “The Vale of Lost Women”, “What would be blackest treachery elsewhere, is wisdom here.”

Just what happened and how is hard to reconstruct now. Even in the fifth century, a dozen different versions would have circulated later. Which ones survived and became accepted would depend on who wrote the accounts, whose side they took, and whether their writings were destroyed or preserved.

Perhaps, there at the conference and banquets that accompanied it, Gorlois caught Uther and Igraine together and attacked him. If that had happened, it would have been characteristic of Uther to rip out Gorlois’s throat bare-handed.

Gorlois might have controlled himself, alternatively, and gone away to arouse his men to attack Uther’s. With Uther distracted by adultery with the no doubt gorgeous Igraine, it would have been an excellent time. The black-bearded madman could have heard the ruckus, seized breeches, sword and shield, clapped a helmet on his head and brawled slaughterously through the fray until Gorlois lay lifeless. After which he’d have claimed both Igraine and Damnonia.

Gorlois was — I presume — an older man, though, seasoned in kingcraft and other forms of criminal activity. To survive in fifth-century Britain, he’d have to be. Another possibility is that he controlled himself further yet. Warning his most trusted men to be ready to leave swiftly in the dead of the next night, he might have pretended to know nothing, and waited. At the feasting, he would have kept Igraine beside him, retired to their quarters with her — and, once the hall was quiet, horse-whipped her soundly. Dragging her outside, he mayt have thrown her across his saddle-bow and ridden hard with his men for his own country. Uther, not oblivious to these developments and always alert for sudden events himself, would have gone in pursuit with his own men, and there would have been a desperate race to Gorlois’s border. Assuming Gorlois won the race, he’d have prepared for battle, and then, as Malory says, “held war against him [Uther] long time.”

That’s the version I favour. But at this long and unrecorded — except by contradictory legends and literature — distance in time, I can’t say for certain. Nor can anybody else. It’s one of the things that makes the King Arthur mythos such an endless mine, so rich in paydirt, for endless writers.

*So even Thomas Malory, writing in late medieval times, made that teeth-gritting error “from hence”, which is a subliterate redundancy like saying “bestest”,  “weather conditions” or “outside exterior”. “Hence” in itself means “from here”, just as “whence” means “from where”, as in “Whence do you come?” Sorry about the pedantic particularity, but I’m not having any reader think that blunder is mine!

*Art by Angus McBride and Jeffrey Jones.

Subsequent Posts In This Series:

6. “Uther Was A Black-Bearded Madman” Part 5