Sovereign Fantasies. Patricia Clare Ingham
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the impoverished Britons turn inward, the English, with apparently more foresight, look across the seas for aid. This contrast between English and British will be important, and I will return to it shortly. But I wish first to note the insularity of this image of interior Britain. Hidden in the mountains, the Britons constitute a desolate yet intact interior; they occupy a remote, yet deeply intimate, insular geography, abiding in the heart of the island. A concealed remnant, they apparently do not join in the cultural mixing of Anglo-Saxon days. They constitute an insular population untouched by immigrant rulers. Yet they also signal the trace of conquest; they are the relics of a native history suffused with loss.
Despite their identification with loss, the Britons are also continually imagined as resistant to Saxon invasion. Unlike the English, they remain obdurate before Saxon seductions. Earlier in the Prophetia this resistance has been linked to impressive, male rule. Before Queen Sexburga and her people arrive, the British King Cadwall (in prophecies seven and eight) resiliently rebuffs the Saxon threat.11 Yet even, perhaps especially, at this moment of British victory loss links with resilience:
[7] Merlin seide also that ther schall be so greete tormentrie that ϸe childer schall be cut ovt of hir modir wombes. and straunge men schall be restored. And he seide soth. For king Cadwall was so sore annoyed with saxons that he thought vtterly to distroie hem. and to restore it a yet to bretayns. and he did slee man woman and childe for to performe his entencion and to enhaunce the bretons. (71–72)
Horrific loss, this time perpetrated by a British king, sponsors British restoration. Cadwall’s success and British restoration follow the most atrocious devastation. British loss and restoration are gendered here, moreover. “Strange men” are restored; women (and the children in their wombs) suffer catastrophically. The motif of the violent deaths of children ripped from their mothers’ wombs, indebted to biblical images of the Slaughter of Innocents, usually stands as testimony to tyranny. This common image of wartime loss gains poignancy through its gender strategies. It acutely expresses the horror of war through gendered images of slaughter. One obvious implication would be that the perpetrator of these deaths must be most excessively tyrannical, the fortunes he wishes to enhance as unjust as the methods used to enhance them.
In contrasting the image of victimized mothers with Cadwall’s violence the text emphasizes Cadwall’s tyranny as a function of his masculinity. A male sovereign forges restoration through a virile force of arms. Cadwall’s violence is imagined as productive for British restoration, but only temporarily and only by engendering catastrophic destruction on female reproductive bodies. This contrast resonates with the contrast between British and English we have just seen, where the English host join with Queen Sexburga and, in contrast to the insular British, offer the childless island a (re)productive future. This gendering of sovereign rule splits a British violent (male) sovereignty from a Saxon reproductive (female) one. From the long view, the point seems to be that for all Cadwall’s virile potency, British insularity, in contrast to English exogamy, is literally barren.
Yet if the commentator merely wishes to cast British insularity as impotent, he misses an opportunity to drive the point home. Indeed, following the description of slaughter in prophecy seven, the commentary seems unconscionably mild. Prophetic apocalypticism sits uneasily with the explanation that follows; in fact, the prophecy offers a gripping depth and texture to wartime loss, a texture that is then flattened out by the abstract nouns of the commentary. In place of castigations of a tyrannical victimization of the innocent, or of the uselessness of Cadwall’s unchecked aggression, the commentary forthrightly details Cadwall’s success against the Saxons. The commentary backs away from a castigation of war crimes in favor of what seems a more dispassionate historicism.
This may be because while the commentator wishes to suggest that British insularity has no future, he also remains fascinated by Cadwall’s restorative power for his people. Focusing on Cadwall’s desire to destroy the Saxons (mentioning his aggressive ambitions five different times in a single line), this ambivalent description combines desire and derision: a fascination with British resistance and a horrific image of British savagery. To be sure, the author may wish to link Cadwall to charges of tyranny; I will be arguing shortly that this commentary is not particularly pro-Welsh, despite a fascination with the fortunes of these “British” ancestors. Taken together, prophecy and commentary display horrible loss as a means to British restoration.
King Cadwall remains one of the most vivid images from the Prophetia. In prophecy eight, his dead sovereign body provides salvific powers that persist beyond war, beyond insular barrenness, beyond even his own treachery:
[8] Merlyn seyde also that he ϸat schall doo this Rigour schall be come a man of brasse. And he by a long tyme schall kepe london gatis vppon a brasen hors. And Merlyn seid soth. For king Cadwal after he had destroied Saxons he died and was beried in a brasen ymage made after his ovne stature. This ymage was set vppon a brasen hors. And put vp on the west gate of london in token that he had discomfited and dryven ovte the Saxons. and the bretons beleved that thei schuld neuir be put ovt as long as this ymage kepts the portes of london (72).
The massive materiality of a dead sovereign body shelters his people from their enemies. The statue, not unlike those used in Imperial Rome, both resembles the sovereign’s body and contains it. Cast in brass, a sovereign memento mori raised above the city gate magically grants the British people belief in their safety. Both triumphant and dead, Cadwall offers his people an apotropaic fantasy from beyond the grave; his brass body shields them and keeps them safe. In memorializing their sovereign, the Britons claim the magnificent space of London as theirs. This ancient sovereign artifact, the iconic relic of a dead British king, continues to safeguard belief in a sovereign British community in London—a British body politic—even as Cadwall relinquishes his own prodigious body to physical death.
The encryptment of Cadwall’s body in brass above the gates of London, moreover, is structurally similar to the earlier image of lost and surviving Britons encrypted deep in the heart of the island. The encryptment of these vanquished Britons, like the dead body of Cadwall in brass, combines desolation with survival. The future tense of such prophecy, furthermore, gestures toward the power of remembrance for the imagination of a future. I wish to pause here to note that the doubleness of Cadwall’s body, decaying and yet encrypted in protection of his people, anticipates the structure of loss and survival in the early-modern political theory of the King’s Two Bodies. The death of the sovereign, in both prophecy and in theory, does not mean the death of sovereignty. The fantasy of a people perpetually alive, of a sovereign body defying death, sits at the heart both of eerie visions of royal corpses contained in brass and of later political theories that rationalize sovereign sempiternity. In maintaining Cadwall’s special body, the Britons will not lose; they refuse to give up their victorious leader, and by implication, the moment of their victory. Cadwall’s victory over the Saxons makes him the token for a belief in insular power despite perils from without.
The ambivalent images of Cadwall (tyrannical yet powerful) mean, however, that Welsh oppositional claims to British restoration (the so-called “Breton Hope”) haunt the text of the Prophetia Merlini. And this may be why the commentary offers a puzzling (and contradictory) description of insular British history. As “strange men,” the Britons are nonetheless “restored” to rule. A restoration of British rule implies, of course, that the Britons are not strangers at all; it implies that they have already ruled; it implies (as well as represses) a prehistory of British claims to London’s crown. King Cadwall’s successful resistance to Saxon conquest in prophecy seven, furthermore, seems especially paradoxical in light of the text’s opening insistence, repeated just two dozen lines earlier, that all the Britons are already gone, having been forced to evacuate the island, “driven out” and “destroyed.”
I am arguing that the Prophetia offers an ambivalent image of the Britons: lost, destroyed, driven out, yet nonetheless resilient, resistant, enduring. The commentator shows an ambivalent fascination with powerful images of British restoration; yet he also works to circumscribe their symbolic power. The commentary tells a complicated history that links a (desirable) British resistance with a (deplorable) British tyranny. In the end, of course, Cadwall and the Britons are undone. The commentary makes clear that this undoing stems neither from the ferociousness of the enemy Saxons nor from