The Caesar Constantius died in Britain in 306, and the York garrison straightaway proclaimed Constantine his son as his successor. Constantine was thirty-two – a proven leader with military experience in both East and West and a deep thinker whom the joint-Emperors of the time looked upon with a blend of wariness and admiration. He was a Man of the Sun – a devotee of Sol Invictus – and radiated in his demeanour the glowing intensity of that invincible, unquenchable Light. Though no one alive had seen it, his face was like unto the visage of Apollo that Brutus the Trojan, Britain’s founder, had drawn upon his mainsail, under a goddess’s instruction, centuries before. This was why the soldiers had been so quick to acclaim him. His presence and vitality set sparks of the sun ablaze in their souls too.
Constantine streaked across Europe like a comet and marched on Rome to confront Maxentius, the tyrant who controlled the heart of the Empire. He approached the Milvian Bridge, outside the city, where the Maxentian forces were billeted. It was a warm, russet-red afternoon. Sensing an extra brightness above him, Constantine looked up and beheld a Christian cross – two rays of golden fire – sining through and beyond the sun. He raised his hand to shield his eyes, but the cross came hurtling down at him at mighty speed, flinging him from his horse and engulfing him in light. ‘Who are you, Lord?’, Constantine called out. And a voice of majesty and authority replied: ‘BY THIS SIGN CONQUER.’
That night, the God behind the gods – Christ himself – came to Constantine in a vision, and the Emperor knew him as that High One he had felt drawn to and compelled by all the years of his life. He recognised now that the Sun god he had worshipped – Sol Invictus – was real and true but that he was contained within this new and greater deity. Christ had come not to erase Sol – these were the God’s very words – but to fulfil him and give him extra levels of potency and meaning.
Inspired by this encounter, Constantine surged to victory the next day and Maxentius slew himself in despair. The conqueror received a blessing from Pope Miltiades, then sailed back to Britain to honour the land that had first raised him to the purple. He named the square in York where he had been acclaimed as Paternoster Square, then rode to Glastonbury and spoke with the Grail Priest and King, before kneeling in a night-long vigil before the Grail. He commissioned the building of chapels and shrines throughout the country, but rumours spread that he had also commanded the fashioning of tunnels deep beneath these sites. They were said to connect not just the sacred power points of Britain, such as Glastonbury and the White Tower, but to link as well to holy places overseas – Mount Olympus and Mount Sinai, and even the subterranean realm of Agartha in Tibet, where Melchizedek, God’s High Priest, celebrates the Mysteries continually. The entrances to these tunnels, so the tales run, are guarded by invisible angels and sealed until the times of the end when they will be reopened to play their part in the final destiny of Britain and the world.
Constantine returned to Rome, and order and justice flourished. In 324 he defeated the Eastern Emperor, Licinius, and became master of the entire Roman Imperium. The following year, he summoned a ground-breaking council of Christian bishops at Nicea, before his mother, Helena, embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she rediscovered the cross upon which Christ had been crucified. Then in 330 – seven years before he died – Constantine ordained the ancient city of Byzantium, near where Troy once stood on the Asia Minor coast, as his new capital. Many in Britain took great pride in this. The wheel, it seemed to them, had come full circle – from Aeneas’s voyage to Italy and Brutus’s journey to Britain to the Emperor proclaimed by British troops in York and now back again to the Trojan heartland.
Britain’s position was more perilous than it appeared though. Constantine’s successors in the West did not possess his stature and the menace of barbarian incursion swiftly returned. In 368 a grand alliance of tribes – Saxons, Picts , Scots, Franks, and Attacotti – launched a multi-pronged assault, overturning the country’s defences, burning towns and villas to cinders, and inflicting physical and mental scars that lasted for generations.
Rome sent Count Theodosius to restore order, and he succeeded most emphatically, pursuing the tribes into their homelands and exacting a merciless retribution. Fifteen years later, one of his junior officers who had remained in Britain, Magnus Maximus, grew impatient at the incompetence of the Western Emperor, Gratian, and crossed over to Gaul with the British army, where he defeated and slew his rival. Maximus saw himself as a second Constantine, and he followed in his footsteps, marching on Rome after he had summoned the best troops still stationed in Britain to join him in his adventure. Gratian’s successor, Valentinian II, panicked at his coming and fled to the court of Theodosius, Emperor of the East and son of the man who had saved Britain in 368. Magnus was now Western Roman Emperor, but his Constantinian dream soon evaporated as Theodosius raised a mighty army out of the East and crushed the British at Aquilea on the Adriatic shoreline.
The men withdrawn from Britain by Magnus were never replaced and the island lay vulnerable and exposed to predators from without and inertia from within. The beacons were extinguished, the barrack rooms sparsely inhabited, and the wild grass began to grow over camp and road, fort and store room. Yet Magnus has always been regarded as a hero by the British people – a conqueror in the mould of Constantine – who stormed through Europe, overthrew one Emperor and sent another packing as a refugee. As long as there is a Britain, he will be celebrated – as will Constantine – in story, song and legend.