AMONG the figures that populated the historical consciousness of educated people in Stuart England, the Ancient Britons were a familiar presence. As stalwart primitives, they had an honoured role in the history of the nation for they were the first recognisable ancestors who could be credibly imagined and represented in literature and art. Since they were the first inhabitants of Britain – and it was always assumed that they were a single homogeneous people who had been long established in the island – they could be invoked to lend their authority to many modern causes, and this chapter attempts to review the ways in which writers of early Stuart times recruited the Ancient Britons to give colour and distinction to current affairs in the seventeenth century.

It was William Camden who first furnished an extended description of the island’s first inhabitants, based on historical evidence, in his Britannia of 1586. There he had drawn together all the surviving accounts of the British at the time of the Roman invasions to produce a highly detailed account of their appearance and manner of living. Inevitably he had drawn most fully from the first-hand observations of Caesar and the reliable reports of Tacitus, whose father-in-law Cnaeus Julius Agricola had been Governor of Britain from 78–85 A. D. But he also extracted as many remarks about the Britons that he could track down from Roman and late Greek writers, with the result that he was able to offer a large picture of British religious beliefs, customs, language, social life, and forms of government. Since the comments made by classical writers about Britain were on the whole admiring, even laudatory, Camden’s reader could feel a pleasurable satisfaction in these ancient appreciations of the native inhabitants of the land. A sturdy, warlike nation was displayed, barbarous in its dwellings and habits, but quick and spirited in action. Camden presented the native religion, under its Druid priests, as abhorrent in its practices but adventurous in its beliefs. The system of government, with petty kings and popular assemblies, was flexible though at times fractious.

This historically secure picture was vastly different from the colourful fable of Britain’s settlement by the Trojan prince Brutus in the diaspora after the fall of Troy.