King Arthur: Who the Heck is Germanus?

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Clive Owen, David Franzoni, Germans of Auxerre, Ivano Marescotti, King Arthur, Linda Malcor, Medieval Europe, Pelagianism, Pelagius, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, St. Augustine

The first time I watched King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by David Franzoni), one of the more hopeful elements was the decision to include Germanus of Auxerre in it. Germanus was a real person, and his appearance early in the film led me to think that perhaps the film was going to do something fresh and interesting by tying the Arthurian legends into a genuine historical event that most people haven never heard of. “Maybe this film has something interesting to offer,” I thought to myself. Boy, was I wrong.

Germanus of Auxerre

Germanus, also known as St. Germaine and Garmon Sant, was a Gaulish (proto-French, to simplify) bishop of Auxerre in the early 5^th century. One of the most important events that we know about during his life was a visit he paid to Sub-Roman Britain sometimes around 429 or 430 AD.

A statue of St. Germanus in Paris

In 410, the Roman Emperor Honorius withdrew the last Roman troops from Britain, and in response, the local authorities essentially seceded from the Roman Empire, expelling the Roman civil authorities. For the next half-century, the Britons sought to maintain a degree of Roman civilization even as the economic, military, and civic underpinnings of the civilization were breaking down. This period is generally known as the Sub-Roman period, and traditionally it lasts down to 449 AD, when the Saxons began to overrun lowland Britain (although historians may occasionally disagree about the end date for this period, arguing that it lasts down to 597).

The motive for Germanus’ visit was the emergence of a theological movement that eventually came to be branded as a heresy, Pelagianism. The founder of this movement was a monk known as Pelagius; he’s usually thought to be a Briton, although by the time of the Pelagian Controversy, he was living in Rome, where he was a respected theologian. Very little of Pelagius’ thought has actually survived; early Christian authors had little interest in preserving the writings and doctrines of people they deemed heretics. In fact, it’s not even clear that Pelagius actually taught Pelagianism; it may well be that his supporters developed his thought beyond what he taught. Regardless, Pelagianism maintained that humanity is a capable of avoiding sin because we have free will, and that includes the choice to sin or not sin. Humans were capable of doing good deeds on their own, and in fact God required them to do so. Otherwise, how could God justly punish sin? If a person is incapable of not sinning, it seems perverse of God to expect them to not sin. Pelagius seems to have objected to people using human sinfulness as a justification for failing to live morally.

A 17th century drawing of Pelagius

Unfortunately for Pelagius and his followers, the most influential churchmen of their generation included St. Augustine and St. Jerome, both of whom were among the giants of the early Latin theologians and both of whom opposed them. Augustine, arguably the most influential Western theologian after St. Paul, articulated the doctrine of Original Sin, which holds that all humanity fell when Adam and Eve sinned. Because humanity is permanently tainted by the inherited stain of their sin, it is impossible for humans to do good works or avoid sinning without God’s grace and assistance. The doctrine of Original Sin was in complete opposition to Pelagianism, and in 411, the Council of Carthage condemned Pelagianism as heretical and affirmed Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, which subsequently became a fundamental teaching in the Catholic and many Protestant Churches (such as Lutheranism). Pelagius himself died naturally in 418, but Pelagianism continued to circulate.

St Augustine

It was to confront the reported spread of Pelagianism in Britain that Germanus and another bishop, Lupus of Troyes, traveled to Britain in 429 or 430. Some sources claim that he made a second visit sometime over the next 15 years, although some scholars have argued this is a confused report of his trip in 429 and that he only made a single visit. This visit has loomed large in scholarship on the Sub-Roman period for the simple reason that it’s virtually the only major event we have clear documentation for in the sources. As I mentioned in my first post on King Arthur, the Sub-Roman period is part of the British Dark Age, because we have so little information about the period. Between 410 and 600, we have precisely one written document that scholars uniformly agree was authentically written in Britain in this period (although the two letters of St. Patrick may have been written either in Britain or Ireland). That one invaluable document is Gildas’ letter that mentions the battle of Mt. Badon.

The story of Germanus’ visit is recorded in the Life of St. Germanus, written by Constantius of Lyon, a Gaul. He tells us that Germanus went to Britian and debated a group of Pelagian bishops and disproved their beliefs, with all the witnesses being persuaded to abandon the heresy. While there, Germanus took time to cure a blind girl, have a dream about St. Alban, break his foot, miraculously divert a fire, and defeat an invasion of Saxons and Picts by getting lots of people to shout “Alleluia!” so loudly that the echoes made the invaders think they were facing a much larger force than they actually were. I guess the Saxons and Picts back then were kind of dim. What he didn’t do, so far as Constantius tells us, is meet anyone named Artorius.

Germanus in King Arthur

After an intro sequence featuring Artorius as a young boy, the film starts in 467, with the arrival of Bishop Germanus (Ivano Marescotti). Bad guys attack the wagon he’s traveling in, and Arthur (Clive Owen) and his men kill the bad guys, but not before they’ve killed the bishop and most of his retinue.

But surprise! The dead guy in the wagon isn’t actually the bishop. Instead Bishop Germanus has cleverly disguised himself as the captain of the bishop’s guards. Because no one would try to kill the leader of the bishop’s bodyguard when they were trying to kill the bishop. That’s the sort of logic this film operates on.

Germanus pretending to be the captain of the guards

Although Arthur and his men and supposed to receive their magical discharge papers after escorting the bishop to the Roman fort, Germanus decides to jerk them around by insisting they undergo that great cinematic cliché, the One Last Mission, because somehow he’s in charge because the pope has taken control of the Roman Empire because…well, just go with it.

Arthur, as it turns out, is a follower of Pelagius. The film gets Pelagianism entirely wrong, because it seems to think of it as some sort of political movement revolving around every historical action figure’s favorite value, “freedom”. (Evidently, William Wallace was a Pelagian.) As Arthur insists, his people “were free from your first breath!”, conveniently forgetting that he and his knights were born into servitude, as the prologue has shown us. There is no discussion of the issue of Original Sin or the theology of Free Will at all. And Arthur is upset to eventually learn from Germanus that Pelagius was recently executed.

Germanus being a dick to Artorius

So the film makes the intriguing choice to introduce an important historical figure and a major theological debate, and then makes the mind-numbing decision to do nothing even remotely intelligent or even interesting with these details. Ok, I get that 5^th century theological debates are a hard sell to a modern action film audience, SO DON’T MENTION THEM.

The Dating of the Film

Simply put, the film’s chronology is a complete mess. The historical Lucius Artorius Castus was in Britain sometime between 175 and 235 AD, so well over 200 years before the time of the film. But that problem gets fixed easily, by making this Arthur a descendant of the original one.So that piece of chronology isn’t a problem (relatively speaking). Instead, everything else about this film’s dating is just wrong.

The events are set in 467 AD, when the Roman Empire is beginning to collapse. But Roman Britain hadn’t been part of the Empire for more than a half-century, since it seceded in 410. Bishop Germanus’ visit was around 429; granted, he may have made a later second visit, but that happened by the 440s at the latest, because Germanus died in 448. The film opens with a visit from a dead man to a part of the Roman Empire that’s hasn’t been a part of the Empire for longer than he’s been dead.

But there was still an emperor in the West in 467, because the last Western Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, wasn’t deposed until 476. So the idea that the pope is running the Empire because there’s no emperor is just silly.

Arthur (right) wearing what the film imagines Roman armor would look like.

And, as I noted in my first post on this film, the “historical” Arthur (if there was such a man) didn’t fight his battle of Mt. Badon for probably another 20-30 years, around 495 AD, give or take a decade. There is simply no way to massage the dates in the film to get them into even a remotely coherent order. And why the hell did David Franzoni settle on 467 as the date for the film? Did he mean to write 476 and just transposed two digits and no one else involved in the filming caught the typo? That makes about as much sense as anything else having to do with this film.

Why set the film in the waning years of the Roman Empire, why set “Artorius” in his proper century, if you’re not actually going to fight the battle of Mt. Badon? Why not just go with Malcor’s claim that Arthur belongs in the late 2^nd to early 3^rd century (when there’s actually an emperor to give him orders) unless your intention is to fit him into Dark Age Britain? If you want to set him in Dark Age Britain, why not get the dating at least partially right? Why get literally every chronological detail wrong?

This wouldn’t be so bad if they hadn’t made the film’s supposed historical accuracy a major selling point of the publicity campaign. They went to the trouble of recruiting a genuine scholar (granted, a folklorist with a rather half-baked theory, rather than a historian, but still…), but apparently Dr. Malcor didn’t bother to point out to them that the dates in the script are just so much word salad. Either that or she did point it out and they felt it didn’t matter, which seems equally likely, given that this is a Jerry Bruckheimer picture.

The film’s jumbled chronology is sort of like a Dan Brown novel, filled with clever clues to form a message that only the historically literate can parse out. But the message they form is “screw you, suckers! This makes no sense!”

Update: A reader tells me that in the closing narration, there is a mention that the final battle is Mt. Badon. I apparently missed that. But it makes absolutely no sense, since Badon seems to be modern Bath, which is nowhere near Hadrian’s Wall, where the battle is definitely taking place. This is sort of like claiming that the Battle of New Orleans took place in New Jersey.

Want to Know More?
King Arthuris available on Amazon.

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King Arthur: The Sarmatian Theory

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Bad Prologue Texts, C Scott Littleton, Clive Owen, King Arthur, Linda Malcor, Lucius Artorius Castus, Roman Britain

King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by David Franzoni) opens with a prologue text, narrated, we eventually learn, by one of Arthur’s knights.

“By 300 AD, the Roman Empire extended from Arabia to Britain. But they wanted more. More land, more peoples loyal and subservient to Rome. But no people so important as the powerful Sarmatians to the east. Thousands died on that field and when the smoke cleared on the fourth day, the only Sarmatian soldiers left alive were members of the decimated but legendary cavalry. The Romans, impressed by their bravery and horsemanship spared their lives. In exchange, these warriors were incorporated into the Roman military. Better they had died that day. For the second part of the bargain they struck indebted not only themselves but also their sons and their sons and so on, to serve the empire as knights. I was such a son. Our post was Britain, or at least the southern half. For the land was divided by a 73-mile wall, built three centuries before us to protect the Empire from the native fighters of the North. So as our forefathers had done, we made our way in the cortege of the Roman commander in Britain, ancestrally named for the first Artorius, or Arthur.”

This opening signals that the film is drawing off the so-called Sarmatian Theory about King Arthur. This theory has two parts, one focused on Lucius Artorius Castus and the other involving an ancient people called the Sarmatians.

Lucius Artorius Castus

Artorius is primarily known from two large fragments of a late 2^nd or early 3^rd century sarcophagus that were used in building a wall of a church in Croatia at some point prior to the late 19^th century. (This is less strange than it sounds; pre-modern peoples frequently re-used stonework like this.) The two surviving fragments commemorate Lucius Artorius Castus by describing his military career. According to the inscription, Artorius served in Syria, Judea, the region around modern Budapest and Romania, Italy, either in Armorica (modern Brittany) or more probably Armenia, and most importantly (for this theory) in northern England, before eventually being named governor of modern Croatia. The inscription does not explicitly say he served in Britain; rather it says that he served as Prefect of the Sixth Legion Victrix, a legion that during the period in question was stationed at Eboracum (modern York). The exact dating of his career is unclear; dates range from the mid-2^nd century (with his governorship occurring sometime between 167 and 185) to the period between 215 to 232 AD.

One of the fragment’s of Artorius’ sarcophagus. The first line reads “L Artori…”

In 1924, a medieval scholar named Kemp Malone pointed out that a man with the name of Artorius serving in northern England could in theory have inspired the character of King Arthur. As we saw in my last post, if Arthur was a historical person at all, he probably acted as a general in at least one major battle in southwestern England around 495 AD. Artorius, however, is at least 250 years too early to be that man, and as Prefect of the Sixth Legion Victrix would not actually have participated in battles, since a Legion’s Prefect was an administrative officer and usually an older man rather than a leader of troops.

So What About the Sarmatians?

The Sarmatians were a confederation of Iranian peoples who initially occupied Sarmatia, the region north of the Black Sea, but who gradually migrated westward during the Roman period. They were primarily known as cavalry warriors. In 175 AD, the emperor Marcus Aurelius stationed 5,500 Sarmatians in Britain. This unit may have remained there for generations; a 5^th century Roman document mentions a ‘Sarmatian formation’ serving in northern Britain, although by that point it may well have been manned by men with no ethnic connection to the Sarmatians who founded the unit.

In 1975, Helmut Nickel floated a theory that perhaps Artorius led a unit of Sarmatians and somehow formed the basis for the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. In 1994, two scholars of folklore, C. Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor, proposed an entirely hypothetical reconstruction of Artorius’ career, apparently independently of Nickel’s ideas. They proposed that Artorius had fought against the Sarmatians during his time in eastern Europe and that because he had experience with Sarmatians, the emperor assigned him to command a unit of Sarmatians that fought a campaign around Hadrian’s Wall against a group of invading Caledonians. His unit being destroyed, he then returned to Eboracum and was subsequently sent with a cavalry unit to Armorica.

Dr. Linda Malcor

The primary evidence Littleton and Malcor offer in support of this hypothesis is that certain elements of the late medieval Arthurian legend have parallels in legends that derive from the Caucasus region, not far to the east of Sarmatia. These ‘Nart Sagas’ are of uncertain dating, being only recorded in the 19th century AD, although elements of them seem to go a long way back into the Ancient period. The most interesting parallels include

• A Nart warrior’s sword must be thrown into the sea when he dies. One particular character asks a friend to undertake this task for him, but the friend twice lies about doing it before finally throwing it into the sea. This same scenario occurs in Thomas Malory’s 15^th century description of the death of Arthur at the battle of Camelot, in which Bedivere is ordered to throw Excalibur into a lake.
• Two Nart heroes collect the beards of their foes to make into cloaks. Different versions of the Arthurian legends describe him fighting an enemy who does the same thing.
• The Cup of the Narts appears at feasts and grants each person what they most like to eat. It can only be touched by a warrior without a flaw. The Holy Grail does this when it appears at Camelot. It is finally attained by the pure Sir Galahad.
• A magical woman dressed in white and associated with water appears both in the Nart Sagas and in Arthurian legend (where she is called the Lady of the Lake).
• The Sarmatians are closely related to the Alans. Various names containing ‘alan’ occur in various Arthurian stories, including Alain le Gros, Elaine, and most importantly Lancelot, which according to Littleton and Malcor could be a corruption of Alanas a Lot (“Alan of Lot River’).
• The Sarmatians were noted cavalry warriors, and so too were Arthur’s knights.

So here essentially is the Sarmatian Theory. Artorius led a group of Sarmatians in northern Britain briefly. At some point after his death, he was fused with various Sarmatian heroes and acquired a collection of stories and characters around him that ultimately evolved into the character of King Arthur. And that’s basically what King Arthur claims is the historical truth behind Arthur.

So Does the Sarmatian Theory Actually Work?

No. It’s riddled with problems. The biggest problem is that Littleton and Malcor offer literally no evidence connecting Artorius to the Sarmatians sent to Britain. It’s unlikely that Artorius commanded Sarmatian troops in battle, since by the time he was stationed with the Sixth Legion Victrix he was old enough to not be leading troops in battle, and they would have been with a different unit anyway.

Dr. C. Scott Littleton

In addition to not offering any actual evidence to connect Artorius and the Sarmatians, they also don’t explain why Artorius should have become the focus of an enduring legend. In their hypothetical reconstruction of Artorius’ career, the Sarmatians are eventually destroyed, so if he did lead them, he wasn’t a successful general. Nor did he die in Britain. He died years later in Croatia. Nor do they explain why his legend would have been passed down for centuries from Romanized Sarmatians to Romanized Celts to Anglo-Saxons and eventually to Norman English, other than a general tendency of people to repeat old stories.

Additionally, this theory ignores the story about Arthur leading troops at the battle of Mt. Badon. Why would a long-dead unsuccessful commander from the 3^rd century become attached to a battle fought two centuries later in an entirely different region of Britain?

Another huge problem is that the various motifs Littleton and Malcor cite are comparatively late additions to the Arthurian legends. Arthurian stories were circulating in Wales at least by the 8th or 9th century, and they remained Welsh story-matter until the mid-12th century when Geoffrey of Monmouth incorporated Arthur into his History of the Kings of Britain, thus bringing Arthur to the attention of the Anglo-Norman nobility. Since the Anglo-Normans were Frenchmen who had conquered England in 1066, this meant that the ‘Matter of Britain’ crossed over to France and began to circulate there, and French stories about these characters eventually crossed back to England and embedded themselves definitively in the corpus of Arthurian stories.

Most of the details that Littleton and Malcor cite as supposed evidence of Sarmatian influence don’t occur in the Welsh stories or in Geoffrey’s History. Instead, they trace back to late 12th century French stories or later English works. The Grail first appears in the late 12^th century in a work by the French author Chretien de Troyes, where it is a serving platter, not a cup at all. “Elaine” is a French variant on “Helen”, and it traces back to ancient Greece (Helen of Troy, y’all). Lancelot first appears in another of Chretien de Troyes’s French works. The stories about Excalibur being thrown into a lake at the end of Arthur’s life and the various characters called the Lady of the Lake are 13th and 14th century additions. The first appearance of the beard-collecting foe is Geoffrey’s Historia, where he’s a giant. The Sarmatian Theory claims that these details are part of the core Arthurian story, but doesn’t explain why the earliest stories about Arthur don’t make any mention of these details, nor does it do a very good job of explaining how they eventually got folded back into the Arthurian legends after being absent for the better part of a thousand years. It makes far more sense to see these elements as having been independently created in the 12^th through 15^th centuries, as scholars traditionally think.

Early Welsh warfare emphasized fighting on foot far more than fighting on horseback, since Wales is quite hilly terrain, which would make things like cavalry charges extremely difficult. And the Welsh Arthur seems to be fighting more on foot than on horseback. It’s only when the cavalry-using Anglo-Normans conquered England that Arthur and his ‘knights’ begin using horses. But the Sarmatian Theory holds that all the emphasis on cavalry warriors is an echo of Sarmatian cavalry warfare a millennium earlier rather than a reflection of the cavalry warfare employed by the culture in which the stories were being written down and favored by the men who were the patron of those authors. This is sort of like saying that the popularity of Cop Films in American culture is due to medieval stories of law enforcement; after all, the Sheriff of Nottingham is a famous late medieval character, so he was obviously the inspiration for 20th century Buddy Cop pictures.

Finally, the Nart Sagas were only written down in the 19th century. Exactly how old they are is unprovable. While some parts of them do seem to draw on ancient Iranian material, there’s no way to be certain that the stories were actually composed during the Roman period; 19th century nationalists were definitely not above fabricating supposedly old texts to support their claims of cultural identity. One could, in fact, argue that any similarities between the Nart Sagas and Arthurian legend are because whoever composed them borrowed from Arthurian literature. And the Nart stories aren’t actually Sarmatian or from Sarmatia; they’re from Ossetia, on the eastern side of the Black Sea.

As for ‘Lancelot’ originating from ‘Alanas a Lot River’…excuse me, I can’t actually type that with a straight face. Malcor and Littleton demolish a fringe theory that ‘Lancelot’ is a Welsh name, but ignore the far more common theory that it is a French diminutive of  ‘Lanzo’. Their evidence that it might actually be from ‘Alanus’ is, and I AM NOT JOKING, an email from somebody who suggested it to them.

So the Sarmatian Theory suffers from a complete lack of genuine evidence; it’s entirely speculation. It fails to explain why this obscure career military officers would have become the focal point of a group of legends borrowed from an ethnically unrelated people and why those stories would have managed to survive for a thousand years. It takes fairly obvious facts (like the idea that Chretien de Troyes invented both Lancelot and the Holy Grail) and replaces them with far more complex scenarios in violation of Occam’s Razor, and it relies on an undatable collection of stories being almost 2000 years older than their first actual documentation and being used by a people only indirectly connected to those stories.

The Sarmatian Theory in the Film

In Fuqua’s King Arthur, the main characters are descendants of the original 3^rd century Sarmatians (although no effort is made to make them look ethnically different from the Romans and Romanized Celts around them). The opening narration says that after their defeat, the Sarmatians agreed to bind their descendants to perpetual military service to the Roman Empire, so that they are sort of hereditary military serfs, of a type that actually never existed in Roman society. But, in true Hollywood fashion, these last Sarmatians are due to get their discharge papers, ending their centuries of servitude, until the asshole bishop Germanus (Ivano Marescotti) tells them that they have to go (say it with me now) on One Last Mission to rescue some Roman citizens inexplicably living north of Hadrian’s Wall. This is sort of like a Cop Film where the cop is on his last day of service, only he’s actually a vampire who’s been serving on the force since the American Revolution; you just know he’s going to get staked by the villain early in the film so his buddy can avenge him. (Spoiler: don’t expect all of Arthur’s men to make it to the closing credits.)

Arthur (Clive Owen, looking very Clive Oweny) is not the original Artorius Castus. Rather, he is the descendant of the original Artorius Castus “ancestrally named for the first Artorius or Arthur”. Like every other time Hollywood tries to use Roman names, this film doesn’t understand Roman naming conventions, because it thinks that ‘Artorius’ is a given name and ‘Castus’ is a family name, when in reality ‘Artorius Castus’ is a pair of inherited family names and Owen’s character’s given name is never mentioned. But it’s the 5^th century and the whole damn Empire is breaking down, so it’s ok that people are forgetting how to name their children. If I had to spend my time frantically trying to rescue Roman citizens living in other countries while my entire government was falling into the hands of douchebag clergymen, I’d probably forget my given name too.

Arthur and his men have become world-famous, or at least world-famous in Britain, because Guinevere (Kiera Knightley), living to the north of Hadrian’s Wall and not even being part of Roman society, has heard stories of Arthur and his men. So these Sarmatian troops are real bad-asses, even though they never actually fight from horseback the way that Sarmatians are supposed to.

So the film has nicely solved one of the Sarmatian Theory’s problems. The famous Artorius Castus is not the 3^rd century Roman but his 5^th century Sarmatian descendant, and it’s the distorted events of his life that we remember today. It’s a sign that your scholarly theory isn’t very strong when a Hollywood film can actually improve on it.

But that’s pretty much the only thing this film manages to do right. The rest of the film, as we’ll see next time, is just a mess.

Want to Know More?

King Arthuris available on Amazon.

If you really want to dig into the Sarmatian Theory, you’ll find it in From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail (Arthurian Characters and Themes). I don’t recommend it, unless you’re especially interested in alternative theories about the Matter of Britain.

Elizabeth: the Golden Age: All Romance, All the Time

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16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Abbie Cornish, Bess Throckmorton, Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Geoffrey Rush, Kings and Queens, Sir Walter Raleigh, Tudor England

Like Elizabeth, Elizabeth: the Golden Age (2007, Shekhar Kapur) is as much about Elizabeth’s (Cate Blanchett) lack of a love life as it is about the plots swirling around her. In this film, the object of her erotic fixation is Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), the famous soldier, explorer and pirate.

Raleigh was something of an adventurer. He fought for the Huguenots in France, helped suppress a rebellion in Ireland, explored the Atlantic Coast of North America (and later on, South America) and founded the ill-fated Roanoke colony in Virginia. He acted a privateer against Spanish ships in the Caribbean, played a minor role in the defense of England during the Armada War, and eventually helped capture Cadiz. He served in three Parliaments and served as governor of Jersey. Perhaps because of his exploits, he became a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, but after Elizabeth died, he was implicated in a plot to prevent her cousin, James Stuart, from inheriting the throne. He was tried and sentenced to death, but James initially spared him. Later on, he participated in an attack on a Spanish colony, and the Spanish ambassador persuaded James to reinstate the death sentence, with the result that Raleigh was executed in 1618. Overall, he lived a life filled with colorful incidents, and his inclusion in EtGA is a reasonable one.

As I noted in my previous post, the film substantially misrepresents his contribution to the Armada War, but since I’ve already discussed that, I’ll focus in this post on the romantic sub-plot.

Early in the film, Elizabeth is being courted by various suitors, including a young Austrian prince who is obviously not a good match for the queen. (Historically, this happened much earlier in Elizabeth’s reign). Raleigh returns to court and immediately attracts the queen’s attention because of his rather more blunt and bold personal style. Unlike the Austrian prince, Raleigh is a real man, and the queen quickly finds herself being fascinated by his stories of adventure. He clearly represents a life she might have had under different circumstances.

Raleigh being typically studly.

Her intermediary with Raleigh is her lady-in-waiting, Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish). The coincidence that the queen and her handmaiden both have the same name allows the film to create a love triangle in which Elizabeth is infatuated with Raleigh, who is interested in her in return but cannot make headway with her because she refuses to marry. So instead he becomes attracted to Bess. Elizabeth herself encourages this, seeing Bess as a stand-in for herself. So in one scene, she orders Bess to practice dancing the volta with Raleigh, despite his protestations that he doesn’t know the steps. (This is clearly a call back to Elizabeth, in which the queen dances twice with the earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes), in two rather erotically-charged scenes.) But Elizabeth’s voyeuristic impulses unwittingly encourage Bess to fall in love with Raleigh. Bess gets pregnant and the couple quickly marry.

Elizabeth getting her voyeuristic freak on with Bess and Raleigh

The problem with this as that since Bess is legally Elizabeth’s ward, it is illegal for her to marry without Elizabeth’s permission. When Elizabeth learns the truth, she furiously beats Bess, expressing both her sexual jealousy and her sense of betrayal. “My bitches wear my collars!” she shouts. The queen imprisons Raleigh, only agreeing to let him out to help fight the Spanish. By the end of the film she has forgiven them. She visits them after the birth of their son, giving him her blessing in a scene that makes it clear she thinks of the baby as the son she cannot have.

The facts here are basically correct, but the chronology is wrong. Raleigh and Throckmorton only married in 1591, three years after the events of the film. Their son died in infancy, and the clandestine marriage remained secret for about another year before Elizabeth got word of it. Both were imprisoned, and Raleigh was released to help in a different campaign against the Spanish.

Overall, this is probably the most accurate portion of the film. All the basic facts are right, and the adjustment of the chronology to make it coincide with the Armada War is not too outrageous. The major problem is that the film assumes that he was Elizabeth’s favorite because she was sexually attracted to him. While that’s certainly possible, there isn’t any special reason to assume that it is so, and it’s another example of Hollywood films reducing the complexities of history to simple romantic relationships. Given that Elizabeth was in her mid-50s by the time of the film, the prospect of a romantic relationship between Elizabeth and Raleigh is a bit unrealistic (although, obviously, older women can certainly develop romantic or sexual fixations), but the fact that Blanchett was in her late 30s when she made this film helps get around that. Presumably Kapur concluded that no one wanted to see a woman in her mid-50s playing a woman in her mid-50s.

Blanchett at Elizabeth, in one of many great, if somewhat improbable, gowns

Just Because She’s a Queen Doesn’t Mean She Knows How to Govern

In a previous post, I pointed out the ways that Elizabeth undermines the historical Queen Elizabeth I’s agency. It pretty much attributes most of her success to the efforts of Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) while suggesting that her historically-accurate indecisiveness about her marriage was a result of a personal inability to make decisions about her husband. And EtGA unfortunately does the same thing. Elizabeth spends much of the film mooning over Raleigh and then getting viciously angry when another woman beds and marries him. On one level it’s an interesting exploration of the conflicted feelings Elizabeth might have felt about her situation, but on another level it’s demeaning to suggest that one of the most powerful women of her day (perhaps the most powerful) spent most of her time acting like a lovesick cheerleader. The film makes even less effort than Elizabeth to explain that Elizabeth’s decision to remain single was the result of political factors at least as much as personal ones. It’s not especially clear in this film why she can’t marry Raleigh, so the viewer is left to assume that she’s just a fussy woman.

Elizabeth in a stunning gown

On its own, this might not be too serious an issue. As I said, this is an interesting exploration of the feelings the historical Elizabeth might actually have experienced. But Kapur again combines this plot with a political plot in which Elizabeth is almost entirely reliant on men. The main plot is the Babington Plot, the execution of Mary Stuart, and the Armada War, and Elizabeth is almost entirely passive in this plot. She is the object of the assassination plot, and survives purely because actually killing her is not the true goal of the plot. Walsingham is the active figure in that part of the plot, ferreting out what’s going on and then working to persuade the queen that she owes a duty to her people to execute Mary. During the Armada War, Elizabeth is wracked with fears about her death, and Raleigh has to teach her how to be courageous, after which point she mans up, dons her armor and delivers the film’s rather weak version of the Tilbury Speech, which strips out most of the speech’s stony determination. Elizabeth spent her formative teen years under constant threat during her sister’s reign and was a periodic target of assassination plots for much of her life; the idea that she didn’t know how to manage her own fear is absurd, but that’s what the film is telling us.

Elizabeth in another stunning gown

The historical Elizabeth was definitely indecisive. She spent years refusing to decide who she would marry, and spent years after that refusing to formally designate her heir (in fact, she may never have made an explicit statement on the subject). She was deeply reluctant to execute Mary Stuart and Walsingham was smart enough to recognize that she needed help taking that step. But while indecision may have been a personal trait, there were also very powerful political reasons for her to not want to take decisive action on issues where there could be no turning back once certain actions had been taken. EtGA hints at the complexity of issues around Mary Stuart when Raleigh observes “Kill a queen and all queens are mortal.” But even here the film implies that the issue is Elizabeth’s inability to acknowledge her own mortality, rather than her understanding that her political position was stronger when her subjects saw her as being more than human.

Elizabeth in yet another stunning gown

The film offers one other moment intended to reveal her personal feelings. After being out in public all dressed up, she sits in front of a mirror, takes off her wig, and contemplates the fact that she’s aging and starting to have wrinkles. I think this was intended to explore the contrast between her glamorous political persona and the reality of her humanity, but it has the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing the notion that women are primarily concerned about their physical appearance and not growing old. And the fact that Blanchett looks remarkable good for a woman who’s supposed to be in her mid-50s just reinforces the unreasonable beauty standards Hollywood forces on women.

Elizabeth in a stunning..fairy cosplay outfit?

Most films about historical leaders take at least some effort to explore the political issues they dealt with. Imagine, if you will, a film about George Washington in which his only motive for fighting the British was his love for Martha, or a film in which Winston Churchill was fighting World War II out of a sense of sexual rivalry with Adolf Hitler. In Braveheart, Wallace at least claims that his rebellion is about “freedom”, whatever he means by that. And yet, in this film, with its female leader, the politics virtually vanish or are given into the hands of men, and the queen is mostly driven by personal motives revolving around her frustrated sexual desires and her inability to make up her mind about anything that matters.

After watching this film, I think one could be forgiven for assuming that Elizabeth’s primary historical significance is that she had really great fashion sense and knew how to get the best camera angles, and not that she was one of the most effective and consequential rulers in British history. Second-wave feminists insisted that the personal is political, but in this film, the political is all personal.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth: The Golden Ageis available on Amazon.

Elizabeth has been the subject of dozens of biographies, many of them not very good. For a current scholarly view of her, try David Loades’ Elizabeth I.

If you’re interested in Sir Walter Raleigh, you might think about getting Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life and Legend(Kindle edition).

Elizabeth: the Golden Age: Nobody Expects the Spanish Armada!

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16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Battle of Gravelines, Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Military Stuff, Sir Walter Raleigh, The Spanish Armada, Tudor England

Well, except everyone actually. Contrary to a line in Elizabeth: the Golden Age (2007, dir. Shekhar Kepur), the preparations for the Spanish Armada were well-known across much of Europe, and the timing of the invasion was actually a subject of considerable public debate. So when the Armada finally set sail for England, very few people were surprised.

Philip II was not only the king of Spain; he was also the ruler of the Spanish Netherlands. But the Dutch Protestants there had rebelled against Spanish rule in the 1570s, with the active aid of the English government. Elizabeth recognized that it was to her advantage to disrupt Spanish control of a territory that was, after all, directly across the English Channel from southern England; it would be a comparatively easy thing for Spanish forces in the Netherlands to launch an invasion of England.

The plan of the Armada when it finally set sail in 1588 was to sail a fleet of 130 ships up the English Channel to the Netherlands, where the Armada would act as protection for a small fleet of barges that would carry about 30,000 Spanish troops across the Channel to act as an invasion force. Since the English army was mostly composed of new recruits, once the Spanish army landed on English soil, a Spanish victory was almost assured. The English correctly realized that the only opportunity to defeat the invasion was to prevent the Armada from meeting up with the Spanish troops in the Netherlands and thereby prevent a crossing.

When the Armada reached English waters, it had a brief opportunity to trap the much larger English navy in Plymouth harbor (because the tide was against the English), but the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who was in charge of the Armada, passed up the chance, which proved to be the great mistake of the campaign.

The English navy, led by Lord Howard and Sir Francis Drake, led two minor skirmishes, in which they were able to capture a few ships before the Spanish reached Calais and took up a tight formation. But they were unable to meet up with the Spanish army before the English sent in a number of fireships, burning ships filled with explosives. The Spanish cut their anchors to avoid the fireships, and the result was that their formation was badly disrupted.

The next morning, the two navies engaged at Gravelines. Although the Spanish ships had more powerful guns, they were so tightly packed with supplies that once the guns were fired, it was nearly impossible to pull them in for reloading. So in the battle, the Spanish tended to fire once and then seek to close in to board the English ships. But this was thwarted by the superior maneuverability of the English ships, who were able to stay just out of range and repeatedly fire their guns. When the wind changed, Medina Sidonia was able to escape to the north-east, with the result that the Armada, which had only lost a few ships, was unable to meet up with the Spanish land forces. So the battle of Gravelines entirely defeated the strategic goal of the Armada.

The Armada Portrait

Instead, the Armada was forced to begin the circumnavigation of the British Isles. Without anchors, however, the fleet proved vulnerable to the remarkably stormy weather; a number of ships were lost off the Orkneys, and due to a navigation error, a large portion of the Armada was driven onto the rocks of the western Irish coast. Only about half of the Armada returned home. The war itself continued on until 1604, but the major battle of the war had already been fought, and the Spanish had lost.

The Armada in Elizabeth: the Golden Age

The film quite drastically distorts the Armada Campaign. The basic strategy of the Armada is explained relatively accurately. But once the Armada shows up in the English Channel, events start to diverge. The English fight a couple of minor skirmishes with the Armada, but the result is a loss of English ships, not Spanish ships. The film emphasizes that the English ships are outnumbered, and cannot afford any losses, when in fact the English navy was considerably larger than the Armada.

The Spanish drop anchors to maintain a tight formation, and then conduct a massive religious ceremony, which means that they don’t notice the fireships being sent against them. As a result, many of this ships are lit on fire (instead of mostly evading the fireships). Then a large storm sets in, and that’s pretty much the end of the conflict. The actual battle of Gravelines is not shown, although there is fighting before the fireships are sent in. There is no explanation that most of the Armada survived the battle of Gravelines, nor is there a depiction of the Armada circumnavigating the British Isles.

Elizabeth watches the Armada burn

The film inverts the roles of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen). In reality, Drake was the Vice-Admiral of the English navy and fought at Gravelines, while Raleigh acted as an advisor to the queen but did not actually participate in any of the fighting. In the film, Drake stands in the background and barely speaks during council meetings, while Raleigh is one of the leading captains of the battle and personally (and more or less single-handedly) sails a fireship into the Spanish Armada, leaping off and swimming to safety when it explodes.

When word reaches Philip that the Armada has been defeated, he is immediately abandoned by both his daughter and the clergy around him, and he begins to lament his pride and beg God’s forgiveness. The suggestion is that the war was immediately over, instead of lasting for another 16 years.

The Tilbury Speech

Almost two weeks after the battle of Gravelines, after the Armada had been driven northward, Elizabeth gathered an army at Tilbury, near the mouth of the Thames, in case the Spanish army in the Netherlands found a way to cross over. At Tilbury, she gave what has become the most famous speech of her life, the so-called Tilbury Speech. She was wearing a white dress with a breastplate over it, and was mounted on a white horse.

Three different texts of the speech survive, but most scholars accept that the latest copy of the text, dating from 1624, is likely to be the most accurate one, and this is the version that widely known. Here is a fairly close (though not exact) version of the speech, from a BBC miniseries The Virgin Queen (2005, dir. Coky Giedroyc).

In EtGA, Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett) delivers a speech before the battle of Gravelines. Here the breastplate has become a full suit of armor.

As you can see, EtGA’s version of the Tilbury speech bears almost no similarity to the actual speech, with the exception of Elizabeth’s statement that she is resolved to live and die with her troops. In particular, the speech omits what is probably the single-most famous thing Elizabeth ever said, “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king”. This is an example of how Elizabeth frequently maneuvered herself across the dividing line between male and female, variously presenting herself in masculine or feminine terms as she found useful. It’s possible that they omitted this line because she makes a similar statement in Elizabeth, but it seems unlikely that the audience would have remembered that.

Instead, the screenwriters have simply invented a new speech for Elizabeth, one that sounds more than a little like the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. It’s not a very good speech; it reeks of the sort of machismo that has become so common in contemporary action films, and has nothing of the grace of the original speech. Part of the problem here is that the film wants the Spanish threat to end with the defeat of the Armada, doesn’t want to have to point out that the war continued after Gravelines, and and doesn’t want to deal with the problem of the Spanish army sitting in the Netherlands. So instead of showing us the Tilbury Speech in its proper context, the film relocates the speech to before the defeat of the Armada, and uses it as a way of building up anticipation for the coming battle. But the result is a little clumsy, since it prepares us for a land battle that never happens.

What the film’s version of the Tilbury Speech chiefly emphasizes, I think, is a tendency for modern screenwriters to not recognize good historical material when they see it. It’s a little like a film about Abraham Lincoln and rewriting the Gettysburg Address because modern audiences would probably find the original speech dull.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth: The Golden Ageis available on Amazon.

If you want to know more about the Spanish Armada, you could start with The Spanish Armada: Revised Edition, which combines history with the insights offered by maritime archaeology.