2-651-911 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'Rowena and Vortigern', c1860, (c1860). Rowena is depicted in British legends as the daughter of the Anglo-Saxon chief Hengist and a wife of Vortigern, King of the Britons. Presented as a beautiful femme fatale, who won her people the Kingdom of Kent through her treacherous seduction of Vortigern, a 5th century warlord in Britain. He may have been the "superbus tyrannus" said to have invited Hengist and Horsa to aid him in fighting the Picts and the Scots. But they revolted, killing his son in the process and adding Sussex and Essex to their own kingdom. From "The Comic History of England, Volume I", by Gilbert A A'Beckett. [Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., London]