Vortigern, Rowena, and the Ancient Britons: Historical Art and the Anglicization of National Origin

On 2 April 1796, Vortigern, An Historical Tragedy, appeared for the first and last time at Drury Lane, in the guise of a lost play by William Shakespeare. The manuscript had been “discovered” by twenty-year-old William-Henry Ireland, assisted perhaps by his father, Samuel Ireland, a printer not known for his honesty. ¹ In his Confessions, William-Henry relates his “first idea” for Vortigern:

When the idea of writing a play first took possession of my mind, I continued for some days undecided as to the subject most appropriate to the purpose; when a large drawing by Mr. S. Ireland (being a copy from a design of Mortimer’s) representing Rowena in the act of presenting wine to Vortigern, and which hung over the chimneypiece in Mr. Ireland’s study, suddenly attracted my attention. In consequence, when alone I took down Mr. Ireland’s edition of Holinshed’s Chronicle, and referred to the story of Vortigern as relating by that historian; when conceiving it apt to my purpose, I immediately planned the outline of the play. ²

The history depicted in John Hamilton Mortimer’s painting and in Holinshed’s history was that of Vortigern, the fifth-century British king, who invited the Saxons into Britain to serve as mercenaries against the Picts and the Scots.

Led by the brothers Hengist and Horsa, the Saxons ostensibly entered the island as allies to the Britons, but soon determined to conquer them and acquire the riches of their isle. As part of their strategy, Hengist and Horsa instructed their beautiful daughter and niece, Rowena, to seduce Vortigern with wine and kind words at a banquet. Vortigern, infatuated, traded Kent for Rowena. From their new stronghold, Hengist and Horsa made league with the Picts and the Scots and exiled Vortigern and his people to the wilderness of the western mountains—what is now Wales—or over the sea into Brittany. The surviving Britons deposed Vortigern in favor of his son Vortimer. At this point, the legend fragments into different endings, depending on the version: most notable are an incestuous relationship between Vortigern and his daughter from a previous marriage, a meeting at Stonehenge at which Hengist slaughtered three hundred British nobles (an incident known as the Treason of the Long Knives), and a meeting between Vortigern and Merlin. But the best-known moment of the legend was the banquet, which in history writing and history painting became representative of the fall of Britain.

Mortimer’s painting of the banquet scene, the image sketched by Samuel Ireland, had appeared posthumously at the Royal Academy exhibit of 1779. William-Henry later expressed astonishment that no critic pointed to the sketch as the obvious inspiration to the manuscript:

It is extraordinary to observe how willingly persons will blind themselves on any point interesting to their feelings. When it was known that a play on the subject of Vortigern was coming forward, every person who inspected the manuscript admired the strange coincidence of Mr. Ireland’s having so long possessed a drawing on the very subject of that drama; yet do I not recollect, even in one instance, that the drawing in question excited the smallest suspicion.

(p. 134)

Considering the recent flood of painted Vortigerns and Rowenas at that time, however, the educated gentlemen who came to the Ireland home to inspect the Shakespeare papers might well have looked past the drawing above the chimney-piece.

Between the years 1770 and 1800, the banquet scene was the subject of no less than five major history paintings, three of which were presented at the Royal Academy, and all of which were reproduced as popular prints. In addition to Mortimer’s painting, we know of the following: Francis Hayman’s Vortigern and Rowena (for Smollett’s History of England, 1758–60, engraved by Simon Ravenet), Nicholas Blakey’s Vortigern and Rowena; or the Settlement of the Saxons in England (engraved by Louis-Gerard Scotin, 1752), Angelica Kauffman’s Vortigern Enamoured with Rowena, at the Banquet of Hengist, the Saxon General (R.A. 1770, engraved by Thomas Ryder...