By the time he began to write The History of Britain (1671) in the late 1640s, John Milton had come to view the historical reality of the legendary exploits of King Arthur as dubious at best. As he says in The History, “But who Arthur was, and whether ever any such reign’d in Britain, hath bin doubted heertofore, and may again with good reason.” Milton was not alone in this assessment. Polydore Vergil, the sixteenth-century Italian humanist commissioned by Henry VII to write the history of England, was the first “humanist” historiographer to call into question the veracity of the Arthurian legends. By the seventeenth century, eminent English antiquarians such as William Camden, John Selden, and John Speed had also joined the ranks of Arthurian skeptics. However, unlike the antiquarians who went beyond written sources to investigate even material artifacts, Milton bases his skepticism on a methodology rooted in the comparison of written sources, though his comparisons in no way results in a simple conflation of narratives in the fashion of sixteenth-century chroniclers like Raphael Holinshed. Instead, Milton applies rational criteria to test, and even exclude, sources that do not measure up to his standards. I would like to delineate some of these criteria by examining Milton’s presentation of the episode known as the Battle of Badon Hill. Furthermore, I would like to argue that Milton’s methodology is tantamount to a form of iconoclasm, what I will identify as “historiographical iconoclasm,” a term I derive from the “iconoclasm” discussed by critics with regard to Milton’s Eikonoklastes, but, to date, not The History of Britain.

In the third book of The History of Britain, Milton takes up a thread of narrative from the end of book 2 which tells how the Romans relinquished jurisdiction over Britain after 462 years of imperial rule because of circumstances surrounding the collapse of Rome (127). The year was 409. Book 3 then relates how the Britons attempted to fill the void left by the Romans and to establish sovereignty for themselves over the various foreign peoples who subsequently invaded Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries, peoples such as the Picts, the Scots, and, most importantly, the Saxons.

In recent years scholars have called attention to the seeming discrepancy between John Milton's memorable arguments against licensing in Areopagitica and the fact that he was himself employed as a censor. “That in 1649 the newly formed Council of State enlisted Milton's aid in regulating the book trade has troubled modern readers,” observes Stephen Dobranski; “we presume that the author of the Areopagitica would have refused on principle to work as a government censor.” Nevertheless, most of us would agree that the principles set down in the Areopagitica, and the contributions they have made to the development of modern civil liberties, cannot be ignored. Here I would like to make a similar claim about the writings of another early-modern censor, the Italian Jesuit Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621).

Perhaps because of his involvement in the censuring of Galileo in 1616, the portrait of Bellarmine passed down often depicts him as a villain, an opponent of free thinking, a Counter-Reformation zealot eager to destroy anyone who veered from the beliefs of the Roman church. However, in the wake of the 1998 decision of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) to give scholars free access to the archives of both the Congregation of the Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index, a new understanding of Bellarmine, at least with respect to his involvement with Galileo, has begun to emerge.

IN the year 1565 the Roman Catholic priest and scholar Thomas Stapleton (1535–1598) published the History of the Church of Englande, the first translation into modern English of the Venerable Bede's eighth-century work the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum. Stapleton's History is by no means a sheer translation but is buttressed by an interpretive apparatus that makes a pronounced argument for the Roman Catholic origins of the English Church and its filial relationship to the bishop of Rome. For example, in the preface to the History, Stapleton singles out a legend told by Bede in which the future Pope Gregory encounters pagan English slaves for sale in a market in Rome and then decides at once that a Christian mission must be sent to England. Similarly, in his massive supplement published concurrently with the History and entitled A Fortresse of the Faith First planted amonge us englishmen (1565), Stapleton again calls attention to the legend of Gregory and the English slaves: “S. Gregory as it appeareth in the history, before he was avaunced to the high dignite of Christes vicar on earthe, by occasion of certain english young men brought then to Rome to be solde for slaves, uttered his great desire and most godly zele to have the ghospell preached unto us.” The legend holds great significance for Stapleton and is practically the linchpin of his thesis that the Church of England traced its origins to Rome.