An Occult History of Britain

An Occult History of Britain is a recurring account of the legendary past through which the characters understand the Tudor present. Its tales connect the island’s origins to giants, Trojans, serpentine ancestors, and dynastic succession; their importance lies not in establishing a single reliable history, but in showing how stories of descent can authorize or unsettle political claims. As Thomas Wolsey tells these histories to Thomas Cromwell, inherited myth becomes a way to assess the king, Anne Boleyn, and the dangers of the choices being made at court.

The Island’s Legendary Origins

The account begins with Albina, eldest of thirty-three Greek princesses cast adrift after they rebel against and kill their husbands. After six months at sea, they reach an unnamed island and give it Albina’s name. With no men there, the sisters mate with demons; their offspring are giants, whose descendants spread across Britain. For eight centuries, this imagined people inhabit a land without priests, churches, laws, or even a means of measuring time. Their dominion ends when Trojan Brutus arrives and defeats the giants, led by Gogmagog, throwing their leader into the sea.

The story’s beginnings are therefore marked by violence and displacement: the princesses are exiled, the giants are overthrown, and the victorious newcomers claim the land. Brutus is himself a displaced figure, born in Italy, driven from his birthplace after his father’s accidental death, and leading former Trojan slaves north. Before London is called Lud’s Town, the account says, it is New Troy; the people of Britain, in this story, are Trojans. The legendary genealogy offers a foundation for belonging, but it begins in conquest rather than an uncontested inheritance.

Dynasties, Inheritance, and Uncertain Descent

The narrative links the Tudors to this older past through a line running from Brutus through Constantine, son of Saint Helena, and then to Arthur, High King of Britain. Arthur’s story is itself unstable: he has up to three wives, all named Guinevere, and is said to lie at Glastonbury, not truly dead but awaiting a return. The legendary king’s suspended death makes inheritance a promise that can remain unsettled, rather than a closed chapter.

That promise takes on immediate political force in the figure of Prince Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII. Born in 1486, Arthur marries Katherine of Aragon and dies at fifteen. Had he lived, he would have been king; his younger brother Henry might instead have become Archbishop of Canterbury. This counterfactual redirects attention from the reigning Henry VIII’s pursuit of Anne Boleyn to the succession that might have been. The story places the king’s marriage and the question of legitimate rule inside a history where dynasties are shaped by deaths, marriages, and competing accounts of descent.

Wolsey’s Political Reading of Myth

When Cromwell questions what Anne Boleyn can offer Henry, Wolsey answers not with a conventional list of diplomatic advantages but with a history of England. He traces the island back before the Romans, to New Troy and the legends of Arthur, including tales of women who emerge from the sea or are born from eggs. Against that unstable archive, Anne’s suitability appears less exceptional. Wolsey does not claim that everyone believes the old stories; he stresses that some people do, and that belief itself matters to political judgment.

He then turns to the Plantagenets. Edward IV’s rise is set against a portent: on Saint Blaise’s Day, three suns appear over the battlefield, and the exhausted troops interpret the spectacle as a sign. Edward wins at Mortimer’s Cross, becomes king, and is later associated with a series of uncertain marital promises. One woman is said to descend through the female line from a swan; another, Elizabeth Woodville, is connected to the serpent woman Melusine. In Wolsey’s telling, such ancestry turns marriage into a political force that may redirect a dynasty beyond the plans made for it. His own intended match of Edward to a French princess is the counterpoint: the king chose differently, and that choice altered what followed.

The three suns acquire a political interpretation as well as a legendary one. Wolsey associates them with England, France, and Castile, reading Edward’s marriage as a route toward a claim to Castile. He then places Henry’s marriage to Katherine within the same framework of ancient rights and multiple kingdoms. The stories do not function as neutral records: they are arguments about what a marriage means, what a ruler may claim, and how far a dynastic past can be made to serve the present.

Cromwell’s Skepticism and the Power of Stories

Cromwell listens to Wolsey’s account but tests its claims against political realities. He points out that Edward’s grandfather beheaded his Tudor great-grandfather, exposing the violence beneath the language of royal continuity. When Wolsey asks whether the Boleyns might have serpent fangs or wings, Cromwell treats the suggestion as a question about the information he needs to judge the situation, not as proof of supernatural ancestry. His skepticism does not make the stories irrelevant; it makes their political use more visible.

The account also shifts into Cromwell’s dreamlike reflection. He considers rumors that Edward IV was not the Duke of York’s son but the child of an English archer called Blaybourne, and sets that disputed paternity beside the tale of the serpent-descended Elizabeth Woodville. If both stories were entertained, Edward’s descendants would carry a compound and unreliable inheritance. The passage makes the instability explicit: royal identity depends not only on blood, but on stories about blood—stories that can join an archer, a serpent, a Welsh lineage, and foreign financial dependence in a single imagined genealogy.

That reflection is anchored by Cromwell’s memory of a wager in Italy, when he held a snake until the count reached ten and was bitten before releasing it. The remembered incident does not verify the royal legends; it supplies a personal image through which the serpent story enters his imagination. The mythic and the material remain in tension elsewhere too: thinking of Edward’s battles and conquests, Cromwell recalls that Medici credit supported them. Portents may make history legible, but money and political decisions also shape what kings can accomplish.

Myth as a Political Instrument

The book returns to legendary history at moments when power is being negotiated. In 1529, while considering whether to serve Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, Cromwell remembers Wolsey’s account of the kingdom’s past and his own promise of continuing loyalty to the cardinal. Later, Anne Boleyn observes that Cromwell appears to work for himself, while he recognizes the resemblance between them. Such courtly calculations do not displace the myths; they show the practical politics that coexist with them, as factions compete over service, access, and the future of the monarchy.

The same contest moves into law. In 1531, Katherine of Aragon insists on her history as Princess of Wales, wife of Prince Arthur, and Queen of England, while Mary invokes the Pope’s authority. Their claims draw legitimacy from marriage, status, and religious jurisdiction. By 1532, parliamentary work targets church courts and Rome’s revenues; in 1534, Cromwell presents Henry with arguments that locate authority in the secular ruler and in legislation through Parliament. The shift from inherited and sacred histories to laws, taxation, and administration does not erase the old stories. Instead, it exposes a continuing struggle over who may define England and the sources from which its government derives authority.

An Occult History of Britain therefore holds legendary ancestry beside finance, marriage, and law, without resolving the contradictions among them. Its giants and serpent women belong to a history in which national origins are inseparable from conquest and uncertain descent; its portents offer patterns for interpreting political change, while Cromwell’s attention to credit and institutions supplies another account of power. Myth matters because people use it to make claims about the present. It can strengthen a dynasty’s story, reveal the violence beneath that story, or make the future seem as unsettled as the past.