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at the hands of Roman soldiers was later to wreak terri- Colchester. He might be considered as the first of the
ble vengeance on the conquerors and archaeology is royal line, though his own pedigree is taken back in
still uncovering the charred evidence of her wrath. Her bardic tradition to Caractacus and Beli the Great and ul-
connections, if any, with the Catuvallaunian dynasty timately to Brutus. Coel's daughter Vala married
are not known. Cunedda, a Prince from southern Scotland who came to
Wales in about A.D. 430 and their posterity ruled in
The genealogy of Caractacus must be taken on trust but Gwynnedd (the ancient kingdom of North Wales). The
it is likely to be largely true. Geoffrey of Monmouth, generations are misty and depend upon oral traditions
writing in 1138 in his History of the Kings of Britain carefully remembered and recited by the Welsh bards,
gives an account of kings going back to Brutus the Tro- though it is not until King Rhodri Mawr (killed in 877)
jan in about 1100 B.C. and ending with Cadwallader. that we are on surer ground.
This has been denounced by eminent historians, but as
history it deserves fairer consideration. Certainly it is The principal male line of Vala ended with Llewellyn the
full of monsters, giants, fairy tales and improbable Great (died 1240) whose daughter married Ralph Mor-
events, but Bede, after all, piously filled his works with timer, and the Coel blood entered the Plantagenets with
miracles of saints but this does not invalidate his accu- the marriage of Lady Anne Mortimer to Richard Earl of
racy as an historian. Archaeology has proved that as Cambridge, an ancestor of the wife of Henry VII, so the
long ago as 1600 B.C. great chieftains were buried in Tudors and Stuarts could claim descent from Coel.
kingly state accompanied by symbols of their royal
authority. Who they were and what their names were we Fergus the Great led the Scots from Ulster to colonise
will probably never know for this was long before writ- Caledonia, afterwards Scotland, in the 5th century. He is
ten records, but they existed and were kings of a kind reckoned as first King of Scots and died about A.D. 501.
and there can be hardly any doubt that our Queen is de- His descendants in direct line ruled Scotland until James
scended from them as indeed we probably all are. VI became James I of England. As James' descendants
have ruled Great Britain since then, the present Queen is
The legend of our Phoenician or Trojan origins is a long Queen of Scots in direct descent from Fergus -- the old-
and persistent one and although once again profes- est continuing dynasty in the Christian world.
sional historians regard it as pure fancy, the evidence is
too much to ignore and is admirably set out in L.A. The Queen also descends from 'Niall of the Nine Hos-
Waddell's The Phoenician Origin of Britons, Scots and tages,' King of Ireland in about A.D. 400 whose father
Anglo-Saxons. So there may well be a basis of truth in was Eochu, king of Tara, living in about A.D. 360. The
the old assertion that our monarchy began with King O'Neills are considered by Sir Ian Moncreiffe of that Ilk
Brutus from Troy, descendant of Aeneas, who arrived to be the oldest traceable family left in Europe and Sir
at Totnes in Devon (where a stone to this day proclaims Anthony Wagner has described the High Kings of Ire-
the event) eleven centuries before the birth of Christ. land as the oldest Western European dynasty.

It is a pity that for most schoolchildren knowledge of Everyone knows the lovely stories of Joseph of Arimat-
our monarchy starts with William the Conqueror. The hea and Glastonbury. Old Jewish tradition states that
Norman Conquest, though important, was but a dynas- Joseph was uncle of the Virgin Mary and Celtic tradi-
tic incident in an already ancient kingdom. Earlier than tions have it that Joseph left descendants who intermar-
William is usually confined to children's stories or nurs- ried with the ruling families of Britain so that the British
ery rhymes. The tale of Alfred burning the cakes is a royal family can claim kinship with the holy family. A
charming one but often the only fact (probably apocry- 10th century pedigree in Jesus College Cambridge
phal) remembered by millions about one of our greatest states that Beli Mawr (mentioned above as ancestor of
kings who ranks with Arthur as a national hero. Coel) was the son of Anna -- quae dicuntur esse conso-
brina Mariae Virginis, the word consobrina meaning a
'Old King Cole was a merry old soul...' runs the nursery cousin on the female side.
rhyme whose origin is lost in the mists of history. But
King Coel the Old did exist. His Welsh name means -- Robert Innes-Smith
'Coel the old adulterer' -- a merry old soul indeed! He
lived round about A.D. 400 ruling somewhere in the
north, though sometimes wrongly ascribed to
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