Roman Conquest and English Legal Identity in Cymbeline

JEMCS 3.1 (Spring/Summer 2003) Roman Conquest and English Legal Identity in Cymbeline Brian Lockey At the beginning of the third act of Cymbeline, the British royal family confronts the Roman envoy, Caius Lucius, and King Cymbeline makes a contradictory argument for Britain's independence from Rome. On the one hand, follow ing his wife's previous bellicose expressions of island nativism, Cymbeline declares that the purpose of his rebel lion against Roman rule will be to restore the kingdom to the state which existed before the Roman conquest. In the process, he will revive the ancient British laws, "whose repair and franchise/ Shall by the power we hold be our good deed,/ Though Rome be therefore angry"(3.1.55-7).1 On the other hand, later in the same crucial scene, in the midst of a polite exchange of diplomatic niceties, Cymbeline offers Caius Lucius a very different justification for his rebellion against Rome. He recalls his education at the court of Augustus Caesar, where he was knighted, and explains that Caesar's own valorous example "Behooves me keep at utterance [to fight to the death]" (3.1.71). In this second short speech, Cymbeline views himself as the new incarnation of Roman heroism and honor, the inheritor of a translatio imperii from Rome which obliquely promises to transform Cymbeline into a new Caesar and Britain into a new Roman empire. Cymbeline's conflicted justification for his rebellion against Rome reflects two competing English legal ideologies. 114 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies Similar to Cymbeline's initial desire to restore the ancient British legal customs, many English common lawyers were able to admit that changes in English law occurred by main taining that, at some point subsequent to the alterations, prior law was always restored. Using this reasoning, the prominent jurist Sir Edward Coke grudgingly granted in his Third Report that William the Conqueror's conquest may have resulted in changes in English law by assuring his readers that his son King Henry I had "restored the [prior] an tient Laws of England " (B4).2 In arguing this point, Coke was relying on an entire legal tradition which denied that major alterations in English law had occurred. Sir John Fortescue's De Laudibus Legum Angliae was the most signif icant influence on Coke and subsequent English jurists. According to Fortescue's original fifteenth-century claim (to which many later common law jurists subscribed), every sin gle conquest of England or Britain, including the original Roman conquest, had had no permanent effect on English customary law (F3-F3v).3 Against the nativist view, revisionist antiquarians and historiographers such as William Camden confidently dis missed mythical tales of valiant ancient Britons and described the true ancient inhabitants as illiterate barbar ians ("Of the Diversity" T3, T4). Civil lawyers often went fur ther, claiming that the Roman introduction of civil law into Britain constituted the very advent of legal codes on the island. Needless to say, they also dismissed the notion of an unbroken history of common law as pure myth. In the process, they created a historical basis for the civil law and thus their own professional presence within the island's complex legal system.4 Cymbeline's description of himself as a sovereign educated and reared in the Roman court is sim ilar to this revisionist view which saw the Roman conquest as having introduced civility itself into Britain. These two views of legal history were in conflict through out the period. At the same time, a related series of explosive legal battles was underway between common law and civil law courts over competing jurisdictions. As a result of such battles, seventeenth-century common law jurists tended to view the civil law courts as well as the closely aligned eccle siastical courts as the latest "foreign" threats to the common Lockey 115 law's immemorial integrity. For common lawyers, these alternative courts and the civil lawyers who worked in them became a contemporary incarnation of the ancient foreign invaders who had threatened and failed to abolish native English legal traditions through conquest.5 As I show in this essay, Cymbeline reflects this conflict between the two...