Sovereign Fantasies. Patricia Clare Ingham
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might suggest that prophecies of loss to English sovereignty, quite apart from particular propagandistic uses of them, had captivated cultural imagination in fifteenth-century Britain. How are we to understand an English fascination with a genealogy of losses, a train of sovereign fathers leaving their land behind?
The prophecy envisions catastrophic community, the death of “the people” and the loss of the sovereign as father. At the death of the rule of the Dragon we read: “And ϸe lande shalle duelle faderlesse wiϸouten a gode gouernoure; And me shal wepe for his deϸ; wherefore, “alias’ shal bene ϸe commune songe of faderles folc, ϸat shal ouerleuen in his lande destroiede” (73). In the reign of the Goat, “ϸere shal come out of his nosbrelles a drop ϸat shal bitoken hunger & sorw, & great deϸ of ϸe peple” (73). With the reign of the Mole, “ϸan shal tremble ϸe lande ϸat ϸan shal bene callede Engeland, as an aspe lef” (75). And at the death of the Mole, “sodenly – alias, ϸe sorwe! – for … his seede shal bicome pure faderles in straunge lande for euermore …. And ϸan ϸis lande bene callede ‘ϸe lande of conquest,’ & so shal ϸe riƷt heires of Engeland ende” (76).
In the previous section of this chapter, I argued that the commentator of the Prophetia Merlini linked loss with British community so as to negotiate the provocative implication that the Welsh, formerly the Britons (the past tense is crucial), had any right to a future of insular sovereignty. In the “Prophecy of the Six Kings,” loss resides in England; “England” becomes “the land of conquest.” These words offer a trace history of English Conquest, as both a colonial legacy suffered and a conquest forged. From one view, “ϸe lande of conquest” claims that England, shaking like an aspen leaf, is itself a conquered land, thus alluding to a history of Norman invasion. But England is also “ϸe lande of conquest” in another sense, since English boundaries (although differently at different historical moments) have been forged through the sword.
Positioned in a double, middle space, both conquered and conqueror, England’s sovereignty is fixed in the most mournful trajectory possible. As if in response to this history, the “Prophecy of the Six Kings” mourns the loss of a common sovereign English father as unpreventable, in need of the mournful cries of its folk community. England’s six last kings cannot provide the enduring power and symbolic protection that the Briton’s King Cadwall, even in death, offered to his people. Both conqueror and conquered, English sovereign death offers no fantasy of security. Yet consolations still follow English loss, returning in other formulations. The train of lost sovereigns offers hope for recovery, not through sovereign resurrections, but through the newly communitarian work of a mourning people. A unified song of mourning can compensate for sovereign imbecilities. Sovereign loss is thus transformed through a singular cultural production, a common song of longing created in response to this loss. Unlike the representation of the Britons in the Prophetia Merlini (who have powerfully resistant sovereigns, but are a painfully barren community), this account of sovereign endings promises that the end of a community of English sovereigns nonetheless forges a bond among a field of folk. The song of an English “folk” community rises amid the ashes of sovereign loss.
This image of newly common folk survival forged through loss would be powerfully resonant during times of English sovereign troubles. By the late fifteenth century, England’s loss of French holdings will urge a domestically circumscribed and insular “native” identity; yet by that time any notion of an historic, insular, surviving Britain will have already been troubled by Glyn Dŵr’s rebellious use of Welsh prophecy. Thus late medieval English relations vis-à-vis the “Britons” involve the most delicate and poignant kind of fantasy, one that joins the preciousness of “British” insular survival (and thus a history of Welsh resistance to Anglo-Saxon and to Norman colonialism) with a denigration of British resistance to a later English rule. “British” identity conjoins Welsh survival with Welsh loss, so as to separate the power of images of Welsh survival from the dangers of Welsh rebellion. Triumphant and angry predictions of Welsh revenge, predictions in Welsh vaticinative poetry that detail specific “oppositional” hopes for sovereign rule turn, in Middle English prophetic texts, into a melancholy apocalypticism.
Precisely because such efforts deploy prophecy for a productive English future, it is important to remember that, particularly during the early part of the century, some had more cause to mourn than others: the Welsh would remain under suspicion of sedition, their dealings with the English rigorously constrained. Legal discourse and statutes from the post-Glyn Dwr years describe the Welsh as a perfidious people like “the wild Irish, our enemies.” The infamous penal statutes of the early fifteenth century circumscribed the powers and activities of Welshmen as Welshmen. According to those laws no Welshman could buy land in England or in the “Englishries” within Wales; no Welshman, or Englishman married to a Welsh woman, could hold office in Wales; no Welshman could carry arms on the highway, or in any market or town; no Welshman could hold a castle or fortress, neither could men of mixed race; no Welshmen could bring legal suit against, or be used as a witness to secure the conviction of, an Englishman. R. R. Davies describes this body of legislation as both “more comprehensive by far than any other issued hitherto” and “more specifically racist in character” (Conquest, 458). While intermarriage between Welsh and English had long been a corollary of English and Anglo-Norman rule, in the wake of the Glyn Dwr rebellion such intercultural practices became illegal.25 This legislation was a distinct shift from earlier policies which had depended upon English and French-speaking Welshmen and Anglo-Welsh Lords for the governance of the area of the March.
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