Colonial histories would, in subsequent centuries, continue to contest and disavow Welsh oppositional sovereign fantasies. They will, in fact, continue to disavow some versions of Arthur’s story as fable, fancy, or mad ravings. Such a complicated literary history should, however, give us pause before charges of truth or fable, charges that will recur throughout the Middle English corpus. Through such charges Arthurian traditions, widely known and widely used for centuries, became increasingly tied to the pleasures of Europe’s conquerors. Yet oppositional uses of Arthurian traditions will also persist for some time. The interpretive pleasures of Welsh separatists will face repetitive insistence that they are mad, utterly false, and thus unreal.
This history of disputes and contests over interpretive legitimacy, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, also structures what I am calling Arthur’s national fantasy. In later chapters of this study I will argue that this contentious narrative history renders Arthur a king for all Britons, and helps explain the diversity, the seeming contradictions, and the impressive expansiveness of the Middle English tradition. A Middle English tradition of political prophecy, propaganda, and genealogy built upon a textual futurism borrowed from Welsh poetry means that Welsh poetic practice becomes a way of encoding England’s doubled history as both conquered space and conquering sovereignty (see Chapter 2). Monmouth’s tale of Merlin and Arthur offers a set of differential readings of British destiny and how it might be legitimately fulfilled. In the late medieval period, and in a century marked at one end by the Glyn Dwr rebellion and at the other by Tudor succession, these versions of Arthur constitute a crucial—and crucially contested—account of British sovereignty.
CHAPTER TWO
Arthurian Futurism and British Destiny
The Cat, the Rat and Lovel our dog,
Rule all England under a hog
—Quoted by V. J. Scattergood, 211
IN 1484 this couplet, posted on the door to St. Paul’s Cathedral and aimed at deriding Richard III and his intimates, cost its author, William Collingbourne, his life. Collingbourne was executed for treason, “put to the most cruel deth at the Tower Hylle, where for hym were made a newe payer of gallowes” (Scattergood 21).1 In his analysis of fifteenth-century political poetry, V. J. Scattergood makes clear the political dangers of such poetic license, even when efforts were made (as in Collingbourne’s case) to keep the identity of the poet a secret. Political poetry borrowed the ambiguity of animal symbolism from prophetic texts; these kinds of prophetic traditions became, in the words of Rupert Taylor, a “potent factor in [late medieval] English affairs” (104). Political poetry that deployed prophetic metaphor would prove a dangerous medium.2
The English crown took Collingbourne’s resistant act of writing very seriously. The textual ambiguity that produced, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s day, state-sanctioned political coalitions was, in the fifteenth century, disconcerting for the crown. The disciplinary prohibition evident in Collingbourne’s execution also obtained in the strained relations between England and Wales, especially in the years following the Glyn Dŵr rebellion. As early as 1402 Henry IV would decree against Welsh vaticinative poetry, arguing that Welsh bards were by “divinations and lies … the cause of the insurrection and rebellion in Wales” (Rotuli Parliamentorum, as cited by Taylor 105). English fears about Welsh vaticinatory poetry were long-standing, and linked to Welsh prophetic accounts of their recovery of rule over a British totam insulam, the prophecy known as the “Breton Hope.” The writer of the Vita Edwardi Secundi, for example, links Welsh rebellious “madness” with such prophecies. His rhetoric recalls Malmesbury’s castigation of the raving Welsh, focusing upon the power of prophecy for armed insurrection: “The Welsh habit of revolt against the English is a long-standing madness … And this is the reason. The Welsh formerly called the Britons, were once noble crowned over the whole realm of England; but they were expelled by the Saxons and lost both name and kingdom … But from the sayings of the prophet Merlin they still hope to recover England. Hence it is that they frequently rebel.”3 Merlin’s prophetic dictums, as Malmesbury might have put it, kindle the spirits of the Welsh to war. The link between “oppositional discourses” and Welsh revolt corroborates Glanmor Williams’s assertion that Merlin’s texts were widely popular among various groups in Wales throughout the period: like Christian apocalyptic literature, vaticination was not confined to the aristocracy, but spread to the free population (108–10). The Crown’s response to politically charged prophetic fictions throughout the century would be swift, if not altogether sure. A charge made against Lollardy in a law of 1406, for example, cites the publication of false prophecies as an explicitly seditious act. Prophetic texts would continue unabated despite such legislation; and interdictions against prophecy would be repeated into the Tudor Period, under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I; and the punishments in such cases could be quite severe (see Taylor, 105).
Prophetic fantasies of insular recovery were not limited to those in conflict with the realm, however. English sovereigns and aristocrats likewise harnessed Merlin’s power to support future claims to sovereignty. Yorkist King Edward IV used genealogical and prophetic texts from Monmouth’s Historia to bolster his sovereignty, claiming Yorkist rule a legitimate recovery of an originally “British” kingship. Manuscripts replete with diagrams of Edward’s “British” genealogical pedigree were commissioned, used as a means to contest rival claims to legitimate rule over England.4 Yorkist political propaganda worked with the same ancient genealogical traditions and prophecies as did Welsh vaticinative poets, though of course to different effect.
A number of scholars have detailed the importance of Arthurian prophetic material for English historiography and sovereignty in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Allison Allan documents Edward IV’s use of fictional genealogies in a series of texts she has named the “Long” and “Short English Pedigrees.” Caroline Eckhardt lists chronicles that include “official” versions of Merlin’s statements: Robert of Gloucester’s Rhymed Chronicle, Thomas Castleford’s Chronicle, Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Rhymed Story of England, The Short Metricle Chronicle of England, and Nicholas Trevisa’s translation of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon (an edition of which would later be published by William Caxton’s press).5 Eckhardt catalogues Yorkist miscellany collections including texts of Merlin’s dictums extant in the Bodleian and British Libraries.6 David Rees shows the utility of prophetic Arthurian symbolism for Henry Tudor’s triumph over Richard III. In the decades that followed Henry VII’s succession, his heir apparent will be named Arthur. Scotland’s James IV will also name his eldest son Arthur at a time when that child stands directly in the line of succession.7 Finally Sydney Anglo’s analysis in Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy explores the indebtedness of Tudor dynastic propaganda to the forms and figures of the Arthurian tradition.
The tendentious (and contentious) uses made of the Merlin prophecies during the time suggest the problematic nature of Merlin’s claim to “truth.” Authors of such ambiguous texts could gain authority for prophecy, however, by emphasizing the durability of a particular text’s link to Merlin. During a turbulent political time, moreover, Merlin’s value lies precisely in the ambiguity of his statements that, as Allan puts it, “could be applied and re-applied with impunity to fit new