Milton, Buchanan, and King Arthur

Abstract

Abstract Arthur appears in a range of Milton’s works, including the late poetry, though his attitude to Arthur shifted drastically in the course of his career, from a heroic subject suitable for an epic in Epitaphium Damonis (1640) to a figure tainted by tyranny in Paradise Regained (1671). This shift is not simply the consequence of Milton coming to doubt the veracity of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae. Rather, his understanding of Arthur was shaped by an engagement with the works of humanist George Buchanan. Buchanan’s Rerum Scotiarum historiae, one of Milton’s sources for the History of Britain, was among a number of hostile rewritings of Arthur as illegitimate by Scottish historians and chroniclers to resist English claims of suzerainty over Scotland. Sympathetic to Buchanan’s theories of popular sovereignty and tyrannicide, Milton had to contend with his anti-Galfridian attacks while not wholly embracing a Scottish perspective. Milton’s reception of Buchanan is part of a longstanding Anglo-Scottish debate over Arthur.