The real King Arthur was gay
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This article is an exploration of who Britain's greatest hero really was, and where he liked to slip his meat when he had the Royal Horn. A consensus appears to have been reached on the whole King Arthur issue- that the whole Camelot/Round Table stuff is just a load of old crap invented in medieval times, embellished by the Victorians and practically fetishised by every git with an opinion since. However there almost certainly was a leader called Arthur around 500AD who defeated the Saxons and established a strong and united kingdom, harking back to the presumed golden age of the Roman civilisation in Britain. It's a good compromise that avoids all the fairy-tale nonsense about Merlin and Guinevere, while still keeping the door open on the attractive (and lucrative) story of Arthur the man.
There's just one flaw with this consensus. It's bollocks.
The "evidence" in support of Arthur's existance hinges on just three things- vague references in a couple of heroic poems and the Welsh Annals, the fact that there was a degree of concerted resistance against the Saxons in Western England, and that "Arthur" was a popular royal name in the centuries after 500AD.
To annihilate these points, consider the following. The poems mentioning Arthur (such as Aneirin's "Gododdin") were written hundreds of years after the events (as were the Welsh Annals). The resistance was probably organised by other well-known kings, and "Arthur" or "Artiur" was being used as a royal name even before Arthur's time.
More damningly, none of the comtemporary historians of Arthur's time, or directly after, mention him. Gildas certainly mentioned the battle of Mons Badonicus, but never mentioned Arthur. If he was so great, why was he ignored? No proof whatsoever.
My theory is that Arthur is a composite. He's a creation based on two seperate kings- Ambrosius Aurelianus (an obscure Southern English king) and Maelgwyn of Gwynned. We know very little about Ambrosius except that he was supposedly a rival of Vortigern and his descendants, and that he is supposed to have founded a kingdom based on the pseudo-Roman model of the earlier Magnus Maximus. For what it's worth, he's usually described as "good".
Maelgwyn is a very different matter.He's just about the best-known 5th century ruler in Britain, and he was the Big Swinging Dick of the Dark Ages. From next to nothing, he created the biggest kingdom in Wales by slaughtering everyone who stood in his way. As his borders extended eastwards he came up against the encroaching Saxons, and promptly kicked the crap out of them. Even Cerdic (conqueror of Wessex and founder of the royal house of Wessex- from which our current royal family trace their lineage) got horribly scragged when he pushed his luck against Maelgwyn.
So there you have it. If you're looking for the real British success against the Saxons, Maelgwyn's your boy. So why don't we celebrate him, instead of some mythical substitute? Here's why....
Even by the standards of Dark Ages kings, Maelgwyn was a complete bastard. The evidence suggests that he was too young to succeed to the throne on his father's death, but the teenager got the crown anyway by killing all contenders (his family). Those killings haunted him to the extent that he relinquished the throne and became a monk. However it seems that refraining from shagging and killing people wasn't to Maelgwyn's tastes, for he soon turned his back on the church. He was clearly a tall and handsome man, and spread his royal seed liberally around his lands. When he found himself geting a stiffie for an unobtainable woman (his nephew's new bride) he murdered his nephew and took the young widow as his latest conquest. However that's just scratching the surface....
Gildas didn't care for many of the kings he wrote about, but he really, really hated Maelgwyn. As far as he was concerned, Maelgwyn was a cross between Marilyn Manson and the Anticrist, doused in HIV+ semen and the Ebola filovirus. He calls Maelgwyn "The dragon of Britain" (the source of the later name "Pendragon"?), "Greatest in evil" and "tyrant". He also, in one section, accuses Maelgwyn of being "drunk on wine pressed from the vines of the sodomites". Interesting...
What did Gildas mean by that? He was a bit of a ranty old God-botherer, to be brutally frank, and he tended to steer clear of matters of the moistened loins. Murders and tyranny were fine as topics of discussion, but where his hated kings chose to poke their veiny bits was off the record. Except for that metaphorical line where Maelgwyn was concerned.....clearly this was a big deal for Gildas, but one he chose not to address directly. However the slightly later historians clearly weren't as coy and described Maelgwyn taking male and female lovers. By the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the official line was pretty much "Fiendish Whoopsie. Plays extended improvised solos on the pink oboe".
So why do we circle-jerk over the memory of a fictitious Arthur? Because certain people have a problem with the fact that our greatest Dark Ages hero was a vicious, unprincipled nymphomaniac who'd shag anything with a pulse, even if they were packing a big pair of hairy knackers under their kilt. Now anyone who's familiar with "Historical Filth" will know that this is just par for the course where great leaders are concerned, and that Maelgwyn was just another example of the archetypal hero-king sinking his poxy wick into anything that twitches. He's got "hero" written all over him. Let's sink a noggin of mead in memory of King Maelgwyn and his Knights of the Gaping, Splayed Arsehole!
