Arthur Uther Pendragon

Pendragon was born John Timothy Rothwell to a working-class family on 5 April 1954.[1] His mother, May Victoria Rothwell (née Barratt), was from London; his father, Wilfred Rothwell, was from Liverpool. The latter had served as a sergeant in the York and Lancaster Regiment of the British Army during the Second World War and on returning to civilian life became a lorry driver.[1] Rothwell—who was nicknamed "Johnny" by his family[2]—had an older brother and two younger siblings, one male and one female.[3] Wilfred was a heavy drinker and this exacerbated tensions in his marriage, leading to a separation; the couple never officially divorced.[4]

Rothwell was raised largely around the area of Aldershot and Farnborough,[5] spending much of his time on military bases and council estates.[6] He later described being a rebellious child and a regular truant from school who was caught engaging in arson on one occasion.[7] As a teenager, he read up on Druidry, occultism, and Zen Buddhism.[8] He obtained a BSA C15 motorbike and began associating with biker gangs.[9] In this period, he had multiple run-ins with the law and on one occasion was charged with affray against a policeman.[10]

Rothwell joined the British Army, being trained in Exeter before serving in the Royal Hampshire Regiment, where he was stationed in Hong Kong.[11] During parachute training, his arm was injured and he was subsequently discharged from the military.[12] He moved back to Farnborough, working for his cousin as a paint-sprayer and then as a roofer and fence erecter.[13] He moved to Liverpool, where he shared a flat with his father,[14] before relocating to Lancashire, where he worked as a supervisor on a country park project.[15] There, he was initiated into a witchcraft group and joined the Universal Free Church.[15] He married one of his co-workers, Liz, and they moved to Farnborough, where he became senior supervisor on the Basingstoke Canal Restoration Project, foreman for Ash Parish Council's parks and gardens, and finally general foreman for Laing Management Contracting.[16] Dissatisfied with this lifestyle, after several years he and Liz separated and returned to more counter-cultural activities; Liz moved to Tintagel while Rothwell moved into a caravanette and re-embraced the biker subculture.[17]

As a biker, Rothwell identified as a greaser;[18] he rode a custom-built Triumph Thunderbird.[19] Rothwell and his friends formed a biker club, varyingly known as the Gravediggers and the Saddletramps.[19] This group engaged in a feud with a rival biker gang, with Rothwell carrying a gun in case of altercations.[20] He attended various free festivals around the country, at which he mixed with hippies, New Age travellers, and Druids.[19] He was given the nickname "King John", because he held parties at the ruined castle at Odiham, also known as "King John's Castle".[21] Rothwell took various jobs, including as a gardener; through this job he met and began a relationship with a woman named Angela, securing a divorce from his wife shortly after.[22]

Pendragon moved to Glastonbury and attended one of his earliest Druidic rites at Glastonbury Tor (pictured)

After reading a book on King Arthur by the occultist Gareth Knight, Rothwell saw similarities between himself and the legendary king and came to believe that he was King Arthur reincarnated.[23] On 11 June 1986, he officially changed his name to Arthur Uther Pendragon by deed poll.[24] Shortly afterward, he bought a sword called Excalibur in a Farnborough shop; its seller stated that it had been the prop in the 1981 film Excalibur.[25][26] He designed a white robe with a red dragon on it and began regularly wearing it.[27]

Pendragon moved to Glastonbury in Somerset.[28] He disbanded his biker club,[29] and formed a group he called the Arthurian Warband, divided into three sections: the Shield Knights, Quest Knights, and Brother Knights.[30] To attract interest for this organisation, he put adverts in magazines like Back Street Heroes, a biker magazine.[31] Through this, he gained his first member, a black East Ender whom he called "Parsival" or "Parsley" after the legendary Arthurian knight.[32] Pendragon had also passed the test allowing him to join Mensa, and he gained another recruit by advertising in the organisation's magazine.[33] Membership of the Warband grew;[34] however, his relationship with Angela ended and she returned to Farnborough.[35]

Pendragon began writing poetry,[28] assembling a collected volume of writings by himself and other Warband members, The Latter Day Book of Arthurian Bards, which they privately published.[36] He began to attract interest around Glastonbury.[37] He came into contact with the Druid Rollo Maughfling, attending a Beltane ritual that Maughfling's Glastonbury Order of Druids held on Glastonbury Tor.[38]

The archaeological site at Stonehenge in Wiltshire was important to Pendragon; he had visited it to seeking spiritual confirmation of his decision to change his name.[39] He was angered that English Heritage, the state body responsible for managing the site, charged visitors entry, believing that everyone should be able to visit the site for free. At the time, he referred to English Heritage as "English Heretics".[40] Between September 1990 and January 1991 he held a daily protest outside the entrance to the Stonehenge visitor's centre, holding up a placard stating: "Don't Pay, Walk Away".[41] During this period, he moved out of his caravan and lived in an area of woodland around two miles from Stonehenge;[40] he survived largely on donations of food from his sympathisers.[42] Many visitors to Stonehenge had their photograph taken with him and he attracted the interest of local press, being the subject of an article in the Salisbury Journal.[43] English Heritage threatened to serve an injunction against him unless he desisted, but as of 2003, had never carried out the threat.[44]

Pendragon protested against the admission fees English Heritage charged visitors to Stonehenge, and in particular the fact that it was closed to Druids and New Age travellers on the summer and winter solstices

After his Stonehenge picket, Pendragon began identifying as a Druid and renamed his Arthurian Warband as the Loyal Arthurian Warband (LAW).[45] He established good relations with several other Druid groups, being appointed "Honoured Pendragon" of the Glastonbury Order of Druids (GOD) and "Official Swordbearer" of the Secular Order of Druids (SOD).[46] Around this time, he was brought before a magistrates court for his refusal to pay the recently introduced poll tax and found guilty;[47] he paid off the moneys owed with the finances gained after a successful case that he brought against Wiltshire police for wrongful arrest and unlawful imprisonment.[48] In January 1993, he was crowned as King by a group of supporters at the Coronation Stone in Kingston upon Thames, London.[49]

Ever since the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, English Heritage had banned open access to Stonehenge on the solstices to prevent revellers damaging the monument. In protest at this decision, every solstice a large group of New Age travellers, modern Pagans, hippies, and bikers assembled outside the police cordon surrounding the site. Each year, Pendragon was amongst the protest and every year he walked past the cordon and was arrested, after which he would spend the night in a cell of Salisbury Police Station.[50] He joined the Council of British Druid Orders (COBOD), a group campaigning for open access to the site, and pushed for reform within the group. He successfully urged them to switch from a mandatory to a voluntary annual membership fee and encouraged the adoption of direct action tactics to push their cause.[51]

At the 1994 solstice protests outside Stonehenge, he brought a documentary crew from BBC Radio 4 with him to publicise his actions in pushing through the cordon and getting arrested.[52] That same year, he send other LAW members to squat in Winchester Cathedral to raise awareness and to demand that the Church of England give support to their cause.[53] At the 1995 solstice, while he was again trying to breach the police cordon around Stonehenge, he sent other LAW members to lock English Heritage staff out of their London office to demonstrate their point.[54] In 1996, he was joined in the protest by Shelly, his recently discovered teenage daughter; she was arrested alongside him for breaching the police cordon.[55]

The 1990s saw the growth of a new environmentalist protest movement geared at opposing the expansion of the road system through woodlands and other rural areas.[56] In 1993, Pendragon appeared at a Beltane ceremony on St Catherine's Hill for the eco-protesters fighting the proposed M3 motorway expansion. After the ritual, he joined the protesters in getting in the way of diggers on Twyford Down.[57] Over the coming years he would visit various other eco-protests against road expansion, often bringing with him media publicity for their cause.[58] He also supported campaigns for workers' rights, attending protests by striking dockers in Liverpool.[59]

In 1996, he joined an eco-protest camp in Newbury, where he climbed a tree to stop it being cut down, remaining there until being pulled out by police.[60] He then established his own camp further along the proposed track of the Newbury bypass with other members of the LAW, calling it "Camelot".[61] They were aware that the longer they remained there, the costlier it would be for developers and the less likely that such projects would be commissioned in future.[62] In April 1996, contractors sought to evict the protesters from the camp.[63] In one incident, a chauffeur-driven Jaguar was driven into Pendragon and other protesters in a hit and run attack; the owner was later revealed as a wealthy local with a financial stake in the development. Following the attack, the car was damaged when one Druid smashed its window with an axe.[64] The chauffeur and its owner claimed that the attack was unprovoked and police decided to press charges. Pendragon and two other Druids were charged with violent disorder over the incident, with the case being tried at Reading Crown Court. Over the course of the case, the judge instructed the jury to find Pendragon not guilty on all charges; the jury also found the other two defendants not guilty.[65]

Pendragon is best known for his legal battles with English Heritage regarding the monument of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, a site of great religious significance to Neo-Druids. Throughout the 1990s, he campaigned for the removal of the four-mile exclusion zone which was established each year during the summer solstice.[26][66] On 19 October 1998, with assistance from organisations such as Liberty who acted as his counsel, Pendragon had his case heard by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. He claimed that the exclusion zone around Stonehenge was restricting his freedom of thought, conscience, religion and freedom of expression, in contravention of Articles 9, 10 and 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights. The court decided in favour of the UK government. However, the exclusion zone was lifted the following year, after an unrelated case brought before the House of Lords ruled that the public have a right to assembly on a public highway.[67][68]

In June 2008, Pendragon set up a protest camp on a byway near the monument, demanding free access to Stonehenge for everyone. He insisted that the fences surrounding the site should be removed, and that the two nearby A roads (the A344 and A303) should be closed or redirected. He occupied the byway for ten months, and obtained 8,000 signatures in support of his petition. On 24 April 2009, he was ordered by Salisbury County Court to dismantle his camp and leave, following complaints from Wiltshire Council that he was obstructing traffic.[69] Pendragon defied the order.[70] He finally ended his protest on 19 May,[71] after English Heritage announced plans to move a section of the A303 underground, and to create a new visitor centre about a mile-and-a-half away from the stones.[72]

In August 2011, Pendragon filed a High Court appeal calling for the cremated remains of more than forty bodies to be immediately reburied. The remains had been exhumed from a burial site at Stonehenge in 2008, to be studied at Sheffield University. The appeal was rejected.[73][74] Pendragon has also voiced his opposition to English Heritage's plan to display three more sets of human remains at the new visitor centre, claiming that out of respect to the ancient British ancestors, replica bones should be on view instead.[75]

In 2020 English Heritage and the authorities controlling access to Stonehenge agreed along with members of the Druid and pagan communities that the Summer Solstice would not be physically observed as it used to be due to lockdown conditions imposed by the Coronavirus emergency. In an interview with the BBC Arthur Pendragon stated his understanding for this decision, noting that the Spring Equinox had also been cancelled.[76] On the evening preceding the Solstice and on the morning following Arthur Pendragon, along with author C. J. Stone and around fifty revellers as well as other Druids held gatherings involving ritual and protest in the publicly accessible area just outside Stonehenge and past the Heel Stone, part of the protest involved a placard making a statement against the proposed road tunnel under Stonehenge, this being the latest development in protest against a tunnel.[77] Arthur has stated publicly that he intends to bring legal challenges against Wiltshire Police, Wiltshire Council and English Heritage for refusing to allow him to park on any of the roads near Stonehenge as parking in the Stonehenge lot caused him to miss the Solstice sunrise.[78]

On 24 January 1994, Pendragon was summoned to magistrates' court after refusing to pay two years' worth of poll tax. His case was presided over by Lord Tenby, who allowed Pendragon to wear his robes and sword in court, and allowed him to swear oath on his sword. At the end of the hearing, the case went against Pendragon and he was ordered to pay the money owed.[79][80]

Pendragon has been arrested, mainly for trespass, over 30 times.[81] Whilst in prison on remand, he has been denied his right to wear his own clothing – his Neo-Druidic robe – and ordered to wear prison uniform. Pendragon, refusing to comply with these orders, has then been left without clothing and put in solitary confinement.[81]

• Pendragon, Arthur Stone, C. J. The Trials of Arthur revised edition Big Hand Books 31 October 2012 ISBN 978-0956416315
• Hemming, Henry In Search of the English Eccentric, John Murray 2 April 2009 ISBN 978-0719522222
• Worthington, Andy Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion Alternative Albion 21 June 2004 ISBN 978-1872883762