harmonie is on all sides so great among the elements, that it is no marvell if in their proper places … they maintaine and repose themselves with very great and friendly Concord. Whereby it appeareth, that none can induce a goodlier reason, why the water doth not overflow the earth … then to say, that it will not swerve from this agreement.

(Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academie)

          One fayre Par-royall hath our Iland bred
          Wherof one is a live and 2 are dead
Sidney ye Prince of prose & sweet conceit
Spenser of numbers & Heroick Ryme
Injurious Fate did both their lives defeate …
          Camden thou livest alone of all ye three
          For Roman stile & English historye;
Englande made them thou makest Englande knowen
So well art thou ye prince of all ye payre
Sithence thou hast an Englande of thine owne
Lesse wealthy, but as fruitful and more fayre.

(Joseph Hall, “To Camden”)

Camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe
          All that I am in arts, all that I know …
What name, what skill, what faith hast thou in things!
          What sight in searching the most antique springs!

(Jonson, “To William Camden”)

and justly might the stream of his commendations run broader whence meeting with a confluence of desert and friendship in the same party.

(Thomas Fuller, The Holy State and the Profane State)

Leland's death in 1552 left a complex legacy to his nation. Among other things, it initiated the proliferation of his various literary and historical designs, officially installed “antiquarian” in the vocabulary, and set the strenuous standard that would inspire that peculiarly English being. On his death, his friend and publisher, Reginald Wolf, acquired his notes and manuscripts while also inheriting his unyielding obsession with grand topographical and historical projects which, like something Proustian, could not be finished before his death. It was, in fact, some years before Leland's death, about 1548, the time of his insanity, that Wolf began work on his “Universal Cosmography”; the notes acquired from Leland in 1552 were put to use on the sections dealing with the British Isles.

Wolf continued work on his master plan for twenty-five years before failing beneath the burden in 1573. Among those in his employ at this time were Raphael Holinshed and William Harrison who, much to the regret of the latter, took the task upon their own shoulders, eventually, however, reducing its scope to a description and history of Britain—ironically, the compass of Leland's original scheme. The final product is no doubt largely a posthumous edition of the Itinerary.

The first edition of the Description of Britain appeared in 1577, and we know that by 1580 Spenser had made particular use of it in organizing his “Epithalamion Thamesis.” Spenser, “setting forth the marriage of the Thames,” and describing “all the Rivers throughout Englande” and “their right names, and right passages,” derives as much from the Genethliacon and the Cygnea Cantio as it does from Harrison, although as a sign of the changing sensibility of the times, Leland's neo-Latin yields to the reformed meter.

By 1580, then, Leland's influence was consecrated by the publication of the extremely popular work of Harrison and Holinshed, and by the announcement of a major river poem, the publication of which would keep readers like William Vallans expectant ten years later. Wolf and his assistants were not alone in their antiquarian pursuits; Lambard was busy on his perambulations before 1570, the date of the completion of the manuscript, Humphrey Lhuyd was working on his Breviary of Britain, and other topographical works less dominated by the river were also in progress. Lambard evidently originally intended to write a larger, nationwide description, and one reason for not continuing with the project was that even at this early date Camden's Britannia was taking shape. The two friends worked simultaneously on their separate projects, and the cult of the perambulating antiquary following the rivers was well established.

By the end of the first generation after Leland the contours of the modern, post-Reformation landscape were already familiar as the process of describing national and regional geography evolved and became more popular. This does not mark the age of the discovery of Britain, as modern critics describe the period, but a new phase in the evolution of perceptual myths, one which is greatly influenced by the Dissolution. Furthermore, the process of literary shaping of landscape after classical models, which combines accurate topographical description with a transforming moral vision—conventions which literary critics commonly associate with the second quarter of the seventeenth century—was not only well developed by the 1580s, it was also recognized as part of the classical tradition. If we see more of such topographical writing after the middle of the sixteenth century, it is largely stimulated by the heightened awareness of landscape and history after the Dissolution and the revival of learning, which taught authors how to impose their classical ideals (and literary forms) on the landscape.

All the literary devices usually found in seventeenth-century “loco-descriptive” poetry are conspicuously present, for example, in a rough but genuine chorographical poem by Thomas Churchyard called The Worthines of Wales (1587), a modest work but very interesting from a historical point of view. Old Palemon (as Spenser called him) illustrates how fragile the humanist's vision of the animated historical British landscape was and how soon these contrasts that Leland described were turned into static emblems of mortality in a world of novelty and change. His is not a vision of the glories of the past matched by those of the present; he looks on the ruins of Wales with a more modern nostalgia. But interestingly, his descriptions, which are mainly river scenes, impose moral archetypes upon carefully observed physical reality, so that they are alive and contemporary. Organizing his chorography and his moral sententiae around the rivers, he invests his perambulation with ideas familiar to us from Botero's analysis of the modern landscape. With his Renaissance eye for commerce and trade, he perceives the unifying effects of internal and coastal trade and describes the organic unity of the realm which links inland ports such as Shrewsbury with London and the rest of the nation.¹

But Churchyard's theme is destructive time; the grandeur that is nurtured by the rivers is also eroded by them. His method is to use his chorography to link contrasting landscape tableaux which juxtapose modern prosperity with scenes of medieval ruins, and to set them off by the ceaseless flow of the rivers:

The walls wereof, and towers are all to torne,
(With wethers blast, and tyme that weares all out)
And yet it hath a fayre prospect about;
Trim Meades and Walkes, along the Rivers side,
With Bridge well built, the force of flood to bide.

(p. 99)

His imagination is more visual than literary, but he repeatedly uses contrasts found in the historical landscape to juxtapose art (both new and medieval) and nature, and to show the vanity of human efforts “the force of flood to bide.” His technique is as old as the Iliad. His tower-capped river is an emblem of vanity very different from Leland's. But what is interesting is that this topothesia (to use a sophisticated phrase for his unsophisticated moral landscapes) is joined to a thoroughly modern world in a way that might be compared with Denham's Cooper's Hill. For him, British history has lost its novelty: the myth contained in the national landscape is one of loss, and it reflects a rather facile “world-weariness” that distances him from Leland.

Thus, within twenty years of Leland's premature death, his literary projects and his interest in history and topography had pervaded English thought, although his moral perspective on the past had already evolved. Indeed, his notes and manuscripts travelled the nation like a spirit in search of rest. When Reginald Wolf died, John Stow bought his entire library, and shortly thereafter Camden, no doubt with a touch of jealousy, offered him an annuity of eight pounds in exchange for a copy (in Stow's own hand) of Leland's Itinerary. For about twenty years, this first generation of scholars, such as Stow (b. 1525), Harrison (b. 1525), and Lambard (b. 1536), fervently set about realizing his projects. Although his influence was soon felt, it was thirty-four years after his death before his ghost was finally put to rest, and the Britannia, the legitimate heir to his plans, was ready for its first edition in 1586. The Britannia, already years in the making, would occupy Camden for some forty years altogether, and its ambitious scope would have made Leland's heart swell for it conforms almost perfectly to the format set out in the New Year's Gift:

And this Worke I entende to divide yn to so many Bookes as there be Sheres, yn England, and Sheres and greate Dominions yn Wales. So that I esteme that this Volume will enclude a fiftie Bookes, whereof eche one severally shaul conteyne the Beginninges, Encreases, and memorable Actes of the chief Tounes and Castelles of the Province allottid to hit.

But in the Britannia Camden moved beyond his somewhat older contemporaries, set the pace for further historical ventures, and began a new wave of antiquarian enthusiasm. In it he also goes far beyond Leland's original plan for national portraiture. He adapts the loose descriptive and historical design and the general patriotic objectives of his mentor, but he turns them to a more coherent and sophisticated view of history which, in turn, reveals very different ideas about antiquarian pursuits and history itself. Similar as their projects are, they show how radically the historian's relation to the nation had changed over those thirty-four years. While we do not know what the completed Itinerary would have looked like, it is clear that it would have been a vision of history through landscape, artistically combining prose and verse, and probably integrating the Cygnea Cantio somewhere in its midst. Beyond this enlarged image of the nation, it seems unlikely that Leland had planned a very comprehensive organization for the Itinerary, and it is probably for this reason that it remained unfinished.

At every stage Camden is informed by Leland's spirit, although his understanding of the objectives of historical writing is far more complicated. He also perceived his mentor's interest in balancing prose and verse and understood how he used the river motif as a means of locating his conception of the nation and its history. Just as in the Cygnea Cantio Leland fuses the individual voices of history, landscape, and encomiastic, and (through the syllabus at its conclusion) uses prose commentary to set off his verse, so too Camden employs different voices to harmonize his national image, although to different ends. The Britannia is a highly structured work whose divisions, mixture of prose and verse, and narrative line interact to create a complex image of concord between English history and geography, or art and nature. Throughout the Britannia Camden develops the river's potential, not only thematically, but also as a structural device, using it in his verse (in the de Connubio Tamae et Isis in particular) and in his prose to reinforce the theme of concord and unity, and in his success, he fully identifies one of the river's most important themes in the Renaissance.

Camden's technique is to interweave the geographical and political influences in the nation's development. Thus, although he treats each county individually, and follows classical models for chorography by beginning in the west and moving east, his design is also topographical—in that the narrative is shaped by the landscape—and it is historical, based on the ancient kingdoms that divided the nation. These multiple structures are coordinated by the river. Instead of simply moving from county to county, then, there is a subtle combination of influences at work in the narrative. The overriding pattern of his description traces historical and demographic growth, beginning in the west with that area inhabited by the Danmonii—“that tract, which, according to geographers, is … the first of all Britain”—and heading toward Kent. Thus he establishes a counterpoint between history and geography which transcends the modern political county divisions. Narrative divisions are geographically and demographically intact, although they go beyond the county borders. By the time he has gone as far east as Kent, he has defined an area that is both historically and geographically unified, and like an explorer, he uses his rivers to strike out into new territory:

Having gone over all the counties of the British Ocean on one hand, to the Seven sea and the Thames on the other, I proceed to take a view of the rest in the intended order; and crossing the river, and returning to the source of the Thames and the mouth of the Severn, shall visit the DOBUNI who formerly occupied the present Gloucester and Oxford shires.²

Camden uses his rivers as a geographer and a narrator, and here they carry us back over three and a half counties without causing narrative or geographical disorientation. The rivers give order and meaning to history, and therefore to the structure of his description. Throughout the Britannia, the rivers provide us with the needed frame of reference for understanding such transitions. For example, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire were both occupied by the Dobuni. Gloucestershire is divided between the Severn's influence in the west, and that of the Isis in the east, and as we cross the territory of the Dobuni from west to east, the narrative follows the two rivers, shifting from Severn to Isis, and thus from Gloucester to Oxford. In this way, the rivers unify geographical, political, and historical divisions: the ancient domain of the Dobuni, the modern counties, and the geography itself, a subliminal natural unity thus keeps the whole together.³

Camden cannot always put the rivers to such methodical and symmetrical use, where the reader portages so conveniently from stream to stream, county to county, nation to nation, but with rare exception he uses the river to order his narrative method. Sometimes the technique is quite simple, as in the chapter on Hertfordshire, where one river leads the prose in a straight line from border to county capital to border. Treating a coastal county such as Devonshire, Camden follows the coast, striking inland at each river outlet, so that one is hard put to follow the narrative without a map. But throughout the work, as we pass from county to county, there is a clash between England and the past, which refuses to be aligned with the modern landscape, and the discord is resolved by nature's own evolving and flexible divisions.

The movement through these counties, along the various rivers, and past the ancient kingdoms is characteristic of Camden's narrative method. What stands out in these examples is the interplay between the kinds of unity, or geopolitical division that are at work in Camden's narrative. The rivers are the natural and narrative sinews which cross—and thereby reconcile—ancient and modern political divisions. Camden's technique calls attention to the discrepancies between the modern and historical borders. His is certainly not the most likely approach to the material, and the territorial disputes that are implicit in his narration are harmonized by the natural topography.

This structural organization establishes a strong political undercurrent in the Britannia. The author's principal concern is historical description, a reconstructed, primarily Roman landscape containing accounts of heroics, human folly, and achievement. This same prevailing sense of tension and resolution rises naturally from the structural strata into the history itself. In this sense, then, it is important to remember that the Britannia is not exactly history, but history seen through descriptive topography, so that the landscape establishes an enduring context for the human events.

Thus, Camden too presents us with an encomiastic image of the nation, but it is one in which the descriptive topography is used to clarify our political and historical perspectives. He does this by using the landscape to make us reassess our knowledge of the past. The landscape and authentic historical documents are used to recreate an image of prehistoric Britain, that is, the Britain that the Romans saw when they travelled up the Thames, much as Aeneas and Carmentis made their voyages of discovery up the Tiber. Historical and literary texts and verifiable empirical and geographical evidence are the two methods he uses to test our understanding of the myths and history of the British past. His is a re-creative methodology meant to question our myths in order that we may understand them better. Far removed from Leland's objectives, Camden's Britannia is concerned with the relation between myth and history and the kind of knowledge provided by each. Historians have recognized it as the first historical work in Britain to use such methods. More important, though, is its place in an intellectual tradition that includes The Defence of Poesie and The Faerie Queene and that compares the kinds of understanding available through history and myth, and assesses the place of each in our cultural identity.

Throughout the Britannia Camden uses verse to focus his view of Britain, and he does so in such a way that he reinforces the structural harmony of the whole. The poetry is interspersed irregularly but densely through the chapters. Seldom does a page pass without the prose being elevated by fragments of verse, so that the tone rises and falls in a rhythmic reminder of the de casibus theme, and the texture of the whole becomes a verbal mirror of the landscape with its architectural fragments. The incomplete passages adorning the historical and topographical descriptions serve as brief phrases emphasizing the importance of historical verse, much as the nymph of Verulam calls for a poetic memorial in The Ruines of Time. Camden's point is underscored by the poets he quotes. Of the many verses, the only modern poets cited with any frequency are Alexander Neckham (if he qualifies as modern), John Leland, John Johnston of Aberdeen, and Camden himself—poets of the cities and rivers. The effect is a sharp awareness that the nation is better served by the poets of the past than by those of the present. Camden shores up this poetic legacy against oblivion; his objective is to revitalize poetic interest in Britain's history and topography, as we can see from his commission of city poems from John Johnston, and as he frequently tells us in the course of the Britannia. As we will see, his desire is to restore the spirit that is voiced in Leland's often-quoted and praised verses. However, the distance between the two, and the difference in their historical perspectives, is suggested by the very fact that Leland serves Camden as an exemplum.

The narrative function of the verses is to concentrate the structural pattern established by the geographical rivers in the prose, and not only are a large number of them about the rivers, but the most important ones are from his own de Connubio Tamae et Isis, which appears and disappears Arethusa-like throughout the Britannia. It is in these poetic shards that Camden gives us a compressed view of ancient Britain, and that we discern the difference between his and Leland's image of the nation. Camden is far more concerned than Leland to put the landscape and its history into a moral perspective—he shows us history, rather than presents us with it—and if the whole of the Britannia is organized to accentuate these lessons, the verses locate them and carry them beyond the limits of history alone. Indeed, they stand in contrast to the history, for Camden uses verse to accentuate the points where our historical knowledge ends and our intuitive and mythic understanding begins. Thus, unlike any other historian in England Camden uses the juxtaposition of history and poetry to emphasize the relation between our empirical knowledge and that which comes from within. In this, Camden is even more emphatic than Leland about the importance of establishing a national poetic which will preserve our moral perspective. This is particularly clear in Camden's use of his own de Connubio Tamae et Isis, which identifies his prevailing concern with the theme of unity, and provides its most important illustration outside of Spenser. In fact, both structurally and thematically, Camden's use of the river resembles Spenser's own during this period.

While Camden's lines are themselves merely competent, they are integrated into the fabric of the work with considerable skill, and to dismiss them as mere fragments or as the triflings of an antiquarian is to be insensitive to the ways in which Renaissance history and verse served one another. Although it cannot be stated whether the de Connubio Tamae et Isis was completed in 1586 (before the first edition of the Britannia) or only by 1607 (when the last revisions and additions were made) or even if it was ever “completed” in the usual sense of the word and then perhaps dismantled for use in the Britannia, William Vallans had seen “it,” whatever “it” was, by 1590, liked it, and deemed it fit for publication in its own right. Possibly Camden meant it to be an allusive, discontinuous poem whose fragmented nature paradoxically holds the large work together. It would not be the first Renaissance work designed as a fragment complete in itself. But what we can be certain about is that we have what Camden wanted us to have and in the form that he wanted us to have it.⁴

The poem, of some two hundred lines, is interspersed through those chapters dealing with counties crossed by the Thames and describes the source of the Isis, its union with the Tame, and their descent as the Thames to London. If Leland's Cygnea Cantio was Camden's immediate source, which seems most likely, then the imposition of the marriage motif on the basic design of the river description was done to good purpose, for it establishes the theme of geographical and social unity. It is also quite possible that Spenser's “Epithalamion Thamesis” was an important influence; the relation between these two works will probably never be known. Nevertheless, both Camden and Spenser adapt the basic format of the river passage, developing it in terms of the common metaphor of the river marriage, and even more important, making it the organizing theme of an entire poem, and the locus communis for a larger, encompassing work. For Camden the marriage poem concentrates his political themes in nature, in the rivers; by stressing their inevitable confluence, it forces its order and by extension its political vision on the historical material, and in so doing it transcends the history itself.

Camden's technique creates a reciprocity between history and nature similar to that which he develops in the structural patterns of the prose. We have seen how the historical and geographical materials interact there to effect shifts from county to county and to call attention to the relation between society and the physical environment. As a result, the segments of the de Connubio Tamae et Isis do not appear in the proper order of the rivers' descent. Reading through the Britannia, we come upon the poem in medias res. We encounter it first in Berkshire; the rivers, already united to form Thames, enjoy the prosperity of their union in the form of Reading. The prose then leads us farther downstream to the next verse excerpt, describing Windsor's Thames-side beauties and praising Elizabeth; we then continue down the river to Richmond and more lines from the poem, praising both river and town. Knowing as we do that all of these excerpts are part of a poem on the marriage of Tame and Isis, we see the verse and the peerless structures that Camden describes not as the creations of any single monarch, but as the product of England's natural history and the union of Tame and Isis. The effect thus produced is that history and its monuments seem to be part of the ongoing present rather than of the foregone past; they are abstracted from a particular historical context and are seen within the dimension of time itself. Camden's objective here is to extricate the nation from history's confines and to give vitality to the nation's self-image by freeing it from the worship of the past, as we can see from the description of Windsor:

Cease Windsor, cease to boast, and cease to paint
The honour of Saint George, thy patron saint …
Yet cease thy joy and wonder at the past;
All yield to one; by one is far surpast
Thy every boast; for, now thy greater pride,
Thy greater honour is, that here beside
One banke with thee Eliza deigns reside.

(1:219)

Elizabeth, herself a figure of unity and concord, is the true descendant of England's genius loci, who carries the past into the future. In Camden's need to extricate himself from the cult of history, we see the striking difference between his and Leland's relation to the past and present.

After the description of Richmond, the prose takes us on to Kent, and from there, as we have seen, we are transported to Gloucestershire, where there is “subjoined from the marriage of Tames and Isis a poetical description” of the source of Isis (1:384). Thus, we arrive at the beginning of the poem and the natural origins of the cultural bounty we have beheld on the banks of the Thames. From Gloucester we move on to Oxford, where the poetic marriage takes place, and then on to Middlesex and the verses on London, which is down-river from Richmond.

The geographical dislocation of the verses creates a cyclic order suggestive of natural union and increase, and in which human history participates. In a sort of mythopoeic circularity which imitates nature, we have been sent toward the sea and returned to our narrative beginnings. Thus, the de Connubio, in its very structure, asserts a topographical unity for the origin and development of the political and demographic organization of the chapters; it implies a natural order for history which supercedes all human motives. It acts on the reader in two ways. First, it calls attention to the human relation to nature simply by the presence of a river poem in the midst of the historical material, and by suggesting an organic unity which at least seems to relate contrapuntally to human history. The prose seems to lead one way, the river poem another; in fact, we learn that the river marriage not only leads in the same direction as the history, but, in a sense, gives it direction. And second, because the poem is conspicuously out of order, it forces the reader to reconstruct the fragments, so that natural order imposes itself on the political disorder, thus unifying the landscape in a way that the human geography appears, perforce, as a product of nature. The rivers' confluence seems to exist in a distant past—we meet the rivers already united as Thames and then go back to the time of their union. As the prose tells us of political and historical struggles and divisions, and of the evolving state of the nation, the rivers stay the same, remain fixed, the unmoved mover. As in Spenser's use of the motif, the reader must integrate the river poem into the larger work, and in so doing, come to terms with Camden's conception of history.

The structure of the poem, then, resembles in small that of the whole work, and thus enables us to perceive Camden's larger design more clearly. It is this obtrusive tour de force between the history and the poem that defines the cyclic interaction between human society and nature. The natural order of the poem emphasizes growth, and works against the regressive attitude which looks to the past and denies the future. Such a design is not as complicated as it sounds—the rivers have an implicit and undeniable order, and must take their own course. Camden simply excerpts from their description as his historical narrative requires—at Windsor, London, or wherever. And it should be said that such a literary adaptation of the nations' riverine unity is a perfect analogue to the geographer's conception of England and its network of rivers; Camden has simply used the geographer's schemes to support his view of history.

Camden's use of the river as a topos for concord and unity, then, draws on literary and geographical sources. In the de Connubio the river is the elemental beginning of all things. In it all elements meet in harmonious opposition. Camden stresses the river's symbolic role as the harmonizer of art and nature, and thus as a basic paradigm for history itself. The opening lines of the poem—which we encounter only after having read the descriptive praises and moral admonitions associated with such noble sites as Windsor and Richmond—describe the groom's (Isis's) source as the cavernous home of all rivers, where earth and water mingle in fruitful opposition, and where nature is most artificial. Here, at nature's androgynous center, is the source of history and knowledge, the secret of all earthly order:

Where spacious Coteswold feeds her fleecy care,
Rising in gentle hills, and from mid air,
O'er Dobuni looks, a cavern lies
Siding the Foss; the broken tops that rise
By the hill's margin the recess disguis'd
With gilded tophus shines the door, the halls
Resplendent iv'ry boast upon their walls,
Glitters the pendent roof with British jet,
Alternate piles of pumice-stone are set.
Yet Art with Nature's rich materials vies,
Tophus, jet, pumice, iv'ry yield the prize.
Queen of the glassy realm, the silver moon
Art here has painted in the highest noon;
Ocean and Earth in close embrace confin'd,
Art here in endless wedlock has combined.
Here rise in streams of common brotherhood,
Nile, Ganges, and the Amazonian flood,
Ister with double name, and neighbour Rhine;
While interwove with their streams does shine
Britain whom Phrixus' golden spoils adorn
Victorious over Gaul, and crown'd with corn.

(1:384-85)

This is the cave that Sannazaro's Ergasto visited to resolve the problem of the poet's relation to the mutable world of public affairs. Camden, however, visits it to capture an image of concord in nature, where opposites are bound “in endless wedlock” and streams rise “in common brotherhood.” This theme of “fide concordia sancta” lies at the center of the marriage of the English rivers. There, as “Zephyr cloaths the verdant flow'ry meads,” we see the union of the ethereal and mundane in a symbolic marriage of heaven and earth, offering the possibilities of a new Golden Age in a united, sea-girt Britain. It is nature's womb, containing the seeds of the civilized arts which the “poet-historical” has already described for us.

The de Connubio does not celebrate any mortal's marriage, and Camden's lines, unlike Leland's, are not directly associated with a patron or monarch. His stylized hymeneals never lose their contact with the crucial historical themes of his Britannia. In his image of confluence or concord, he reduces the course of history to its elemental beginnings, bringing the springs of our sacred arts into contact with their origins in nature. As the bride, Tame, descends the Cattechlanian Hills to Dorchester, the river nymphs, the “British bridesmaids,” in procession cast upon the couple their blessings and gifts. Instead of flowers and herbs which grow upon their banks, they offer the blessings of a turbulent but honorable legendary history. The lines are an effective adaptation of the conventions of the epithalamion to the historical themes of the Britannia:

For here each nymph in beauteous order throws
From Greece what Brutus and what Brennus won,
From Ireland Gurmond fierce, our Amazon
From Rome, the English spoils,
Our Arthur bore memorials of his toils,
From Scotland what victorious Edward bore,
And British valour from the Gallic shore.

(2:10)

All the ambiguous history, the doubtful legends, the violence, treachery, and heroics, are seen as the natural product of this marriage, as the nymphs celebrate the union with the flores historiae of Britain's mythical identity. Their offerings are part of an evolving pageant which constitutes the single stream of British history:

And in one connected stream,
With hearts united now, Isis and Tame
Arose exulting in united name;
And onwards moving in harmonious boast
Join Father Ocean in the Eastern Coast.

(2:10)

Unity through myth and geography is Camden's reiterated theme. Here more conspicuously, Camden's history forms the perfect complement to the national geography. The bridesmaids sing of “Britannia sever'd from the world,” and the literary topos and the geographical image of the nation come together as the landscape is shaped by Camden's coherent and transforming imagination. In Camden's mythologizing view, past and present, myth and geography join; history is not idealized, but is placed in a natural perspective. The legendary national image is as British as the waters of its rivers.

But in a related sense, in this marriage song Camden is suggesting to his readers the proper place of history and myth in the national consciousness. Thus, when the poem is reconstructed in its proper geographical order, there emerges an impression of orderly decline and deterioration that gives more pointed meaning to Camden's lesson about history and nature. For example, the verses before and during the marriage ceremony present nature in terms of stylized images of a golden age and the reconciliation of opposites. The bridal songs treat events and heroic deeds of antique legendary Britons. Nature and the mythical past are in harmony: nature is “primitive” and people are heroic. In the lines following the marriage, nature is richly adorned with the civilizing arts—it is almost lost beneath the cities, palaces, ruins, and other monuments which are the products of human history. There is also a sense of being brought up to date: “Now to the right is lofty Richmond seen, / Call'd in past ages for its lustre shine. / Its modern name to the sage prince it owes / Whose ancient style and title that name shows.” Complex personalities rather than deeds are presented, and simple nobility yields to more ambiguous motives, pastoral otium to urbane negotium:

Then Thames to Hampton runs, whose stately space
A city sees. The founder of the place
Was Mitred Wolsey, a great ill-fated priest
For whom his fate prepared in honey'd feast,
Mingled with gall. Such were her Treacherous gifts.

(2:85)

Camden's design here is unmistakable; the lines, simple and sententious as they are, become more significant when we are aware of their relation to the whole poem in its proper order. Nature and human affairs are put in a moral context and are perceived quite differently when they are measured against the world of the bridal song. Thus, as the rivers descend to the sea, so human nobility declines from its first estate; nature is obscured and at odds with human achievement. Quite literally, the rivers rise from their source and descend to the sea in a course which is followed by the rest of nature and human history. Both, however, like the river, have the restorative power to return to their beginnings in nature and myth, as is suggested by the circular structuring of the river poem, which does actually send us back to the recreative beginning. The technique is identical to that used later by Ralegh in The History of the World.

Thus, in pointing to this common theme of the decline from virtue, Camden is not just denouncing the times; nor does he idealize the past, which is also a rather ambiguous affair. But by first showing the origins of history in nature, in Isis's cave, Camden identifies human character and potential in its undiminished state, and it is from this beginning that all events flow. They are all one continuous water, unbroken from its source, affirming the same paradigm of unity and oneness that informs Ralegh's image of the river of history, and Sidney's river of divine unity in his trewnesse of the Christian religion. Thus, for Camden, the inspiriting waters which feed Tudor Britain are those which fed Albion—all history is unified, one, corruptible, but renewable. In thus basing his myth of history in geography, Camden has, in fact, adapted a common river motif to his own culture, as Plato did for his, and as the exegetes and Neo-platonists did for theirs. He has turned its teleology to history, rather than to myths of creation or metaphysics.

Camden uses the river poem to teach us to read and shape the landscape. It is, in fact, a unique and essential part of the Britannia, for its treats history as the larger work does not, and in a way that transcends the historian's methods. Camden, “nourrice of simple verity,” renowned among his peers for his sensible, down-to-earth view of history, takes on the more exalted role of poet here, and addresses higher truths beyond the scope of the Britannia itself. Thus in the cave of Isis, and in the songs of the British bridesmaids, he invokes the full array of questionable myths of British ancestry—Albion, Brutus, Ulysses, Arthur—and he allows them a veracity which he could not give them as an historian. He gives them a legitimate place in British culture and the development of the nation, but it is the place of myth, not history. The poem, then, offers them as exemplars which history itself does not (and perhaps cannot) provide; they are as important and as legitimate genii of the realm as any historical figure is, and in this Camden, like Spenser and Sidney, perceives a creative means of defying time through myth. It is in the marriage poem that Camden attempts to establish a creative relation between his reader, time and history, and it is one which involves poetry itself. Poetry transforms history in order to urge us to virtuous action; through it, society frees itself from the past, renews itself, and this is what Camden's poem does for the Britannia. Camden is warning against the lugubrious complaints about the decline of the times which are popular in every age and which we have seen in Thomas Churchyard's Worthines of Wales, and in this respect he looks at landscape with a more discerning eye than most of his contemporaries.

Notes

1. See, for example, Thomas Churchyard, The Worthines of Wales (London, 1587), p. 82; further page references will be contained in the text.

2. Camden, Britannia, 4 vols., trans. and ed. R. Gough (London, 1806), 1:379. See 1:clxxv, for Camden's important explanation of the organizing principles of the Britannia, and his objectives in combining regional, political (and demographic), and linguistic divisions of the country. While I use the Gough edition in discussing the prose and the verse, a convenient edition of the verse alone has recently been published by George Burke Johnston: “Poems by William Camden, with Notes and Translations from the Latin,” Studies in Philology 72 (1975). This is particularly useful, not only because it contains Camden's Latin verse, Holland's translation, and Basil Kennet's translation of the De Connubio for the Gibson editions, but also because Johnston has tried to reconstruct the fragments of the De Connubio in their “proper” geographical order, and this makes his edition especially helpful for following my commentary.

3. See also Camden, Britannia, 2:3, 37, 47, for additional examples of Camden's use of the rivers to organize the landscape and the narrative. Camden repeatedly calls attention to these structuring devices and to the presence of multiple political and historical influences dividing the country, so that we are often reminded of his use of the geography as a underlying unifying principle.

   The implications of how Renaissance authors use historical materials, and particularly how they put historical data into different combinations in order to test our knowledge of history, become more suggestive the more we look at Shakespeare's plays. Camden's method of looking at historical periods from several points of view is very similar to Shakespeare's.

4. For a general discussion of the convention of the river marriage, see J. B. Oruch, “Spenser, Camden, and the Poetic Marriages of Rivers,” Studies in Philology 69 (1967), 606-20, and Herendeen, “Spenserian Specifics,” pp. 159-66.