[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 the treachery of powerful sovereigns, but from the communitarian frailties of the Britons themselves. In this account, intra-British rivalries open the door to Britain’s ultimate undoing. Such stories are common in national histories, texts that frequently recount how foreign invaders gain successful entry into a house divided against itself. In a prophetic text dating from a period of fractiousness like that of the Wars of the Roses, such a tale could provide a rationale for disciplining recalcitrant aristocrats.12
In emphasizing the barrenness of the Britons as community, yet also emphasizing the power of British resistance to Saxon invasion, the commentator negotiates the politically provocative implication that the Welsh Britons might have a future claim on British group identity. Unhooked from links with Welsh political claims on a future identity and rule, British resilience and endurance through loss can be activated for different set of sovereign fantasies. This negotiation demands that the Welsh figure as both Britain’s native and Britain’s past people be already imbricated in loss; as the vestige of a native history, the Britons can offer the promise of a direct insular lineage, but not a future of (Welsh) recovery. It is important for this commentator, in other words, that the power of British resilience remain tied to the loss of the British community’s future. And this returns us to the commentator’s anti-Welsh politics to which I alluded earlier.
In later portions of the text, the commentator explicitly denounces the possible implication that the resistant Britons in the Welsh mountains have any future claim to a centralized English throne. This claim, known as the “Breton Hope,” was a repetitive motif in Welsh vaticination. The commentator of the Prophetia Merlini omits the “Breton Hope” prophecy in his borrowings from Geoffrey’s Historia. Instead he recounts how the Saxon King Egbert “deposed the brasen image” of Cadwall that the Britons hoped would “chace away the Saxons.” And in the commentary to prophecy eleven, a “voice from hevyn” tells Cadwall’s successor, Cadwalader, the “last king of Bretons” that “it is not the will of god that brentons [sic] regne no lenger ne nevir recouer the lond til the tyme the reliques of thi body and of other seyntes be found and brought from Rome unto bretayn” (73).13 The commentary for prophecy eleven links the future of Welsh sovereignty with the pieties of pilgrimage, and not the politics of home rule. British restoration occurs not through magical sovereign resurrections or movements fueled by political ardor, but through the return of religious relics from the Holy See.
There is additional evidence as to the text’s orthodox politics. On the basis of details of the text’s penultimate prophecy (no. 37), editor Eckhardt surmises that the commentator may have “wished to avoid any association [with] the house of Percy … reputed to be seeking the throne” (Introduction, 28–29). The Percies, of course, were infamously allied with Glyn Dwr and Mortimer (and against Henry Bolingbroke) in stories of the Tripartite Convention; the Tripartite Treaty—purporting to divide the kingdom among Percy, Mortimer, and Glyn Dŵr—was historically (if spuriously) linked to the prophecies of Merlin.14
In his depiction of the Britons as both surviving insular subjects and historically conquered objects, the commentator of this Prophetia Merlini, tries to circumvent rebellious uses of the prophecies of British return. The Britons continually reemerge as a presence on the island, in the farthest reaches of Wales. Despite devastating and repeated losses, the remnant Britons remain together in the heart of the realm. Unlike many vanquished native peoples, they are assigned a stable and local identity, not a diasporic, peripatetic one spreading to the ends of the earth. Separated from the center of power, they are nonetheless deeply interior to the realm. They constitute a continuous insular presence. The Britons lose, but are not lost. A poor and defeated Welsh remnant inhabiting the mountains and borders of the island still dwell in an insular interior (however marginalized) withstanding famine, plague, and Saxon invasion.15
These vanquished Britons remain tokens of a beleaguered insular past. The version of the island’s early history available in the commentary to the Prophetia Merlini resists Welsh “oppositional” strategies at the same time that it heroizes an insular heritage that has proved resistant through loss.16 And yet this poignant tale of poverty, hunger, and defeat is only half the story: the prophecy also crafts a sweeping genealogy; it enumerates insular rulers one after the other, attesting to how doggedly kingship over the island has survived through the consistently disastrous and fractious past. A history of
