British Brennus
(Emblem 51)

Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

How can a single alphabetic letter collapse time? In this poem, Pulter draws from the story of the Gallic conquest of Rome (and the Romans’ subsequent overthrow of its captors) to stridently protest the Cromwellian regime while also plaintively imploring God to enact a political restoration of monarchy. Rather than merely creating an analogy between the Gauls’ invasion of Rome and the republicans’ victory in the English civil war, however, Pulter creates a kind of temporal vertigo. By insisting that the tyrannical Brennus is a British foreign invader of Rome (seen in her term “British Brennus”), Pulter makes the conquering English of the present seem the brutal villains of an ancient story. Secondly, Pulter allows the emblem to refer at once to past and present times by creating ambiguities around historical players whose names begin with the letter “C.” Can C refer to Camillus, the Roman hero, and Charles II, the exiled English king, simultaneously? But elsewhere refer to Cromwell? And to Christ? If names are withheld, can the reader make the present and past (and future, at the end of the poem) co-exist?

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When British Brennus sacked that noble city1
,
To age, nor sex, nor infants he shewed pity2
;
Then those which did the capital defend
Weighed out their gold3
 to have their suff’rings end,
On which the Briton4
 bold his sword did lay;
“Woe to the conquered,” then the people say5
.
Then came C_______6
, banished long before,
And made the Britons pay the Romans’ score.
So let all impious7
, sacrilegious men
Have lex talionis8
: Heaven, say Thou “Amen”!
If any underneath the sun may cry
“Vae victis,”9
 reader, it is thou and I.
C.C.10
 killed and banished, we with sad hearts deplore11
;
O, let a C.12
 come and our joys restore.
For C. his sake13
, dear God, I Thee implore,
Or we are slaves to C.14
 evermore.