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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 and contemporary political situations ad infinitum and with ever greater respect for their growing antiquity” (178). With this in mind, it is perhaps unsurprising that by the late fifteenth century, English sovereigns will be increasingly anxious to foreclose subversive accounts of Merlin’s words.

Prophetic texts link history’s imagination of the past with its claim on the future, a fantasy of what will be as a return to a past now gone. Because of this recursiveness, scholars tend to emphasize the nostalgia of these texts. Yet I would describe them as melancholic. For all their utopian impulses, these prophecies strain toward the apocalyptic, offering little view of a longstanding British golden age; instead they depict loss and devastation as an historical inheritance of Britain. Why, at a turbulent time like that of the later fifteenth century in England, would solemn and fatalistic texts depicting the end of British sovereignty be so popular?

I will argue in this chapter that melancholy prophecies inspire late medieval British fantasies of insular recovery by signaling a melancholy British endurance through loss rather than despite loss. They link cultural recovery to the work of mourning. To demonstrate this, I turn first to a Middle English commentary of the Prophetia Merlini dating from the fifteenth century.⁸ Images of a small remnant of conquered Britons clinging to life in the recesses of the island and on the edge of Wales stand as a synecdoche for a specific insular history: an ancient Britain suffering catastrophic ruin yet nonetheless remaining poised for wholeness. In its representation of the remnant and surviving Britons, the commentary on the Merlin prophecies appropriates the survival and endurance of a conquered insular people for a future of insular stability.

A similar analysis applies to the popular prophecy of the end of British sovereignty known as the “Last Six Kings” or the “Six Kings to Follow John.” Widely attributed to Merlin, but not found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, versions of the “Six Last Kings” circulated during the fifteenth century as part of the most popular Middle English history, the Prose Brut or Chronicles of England. The text’s melancholy refrain, “‘alas’ shall be the common song of fatherless folk,” encodes common loss and mournful longing as unity. Through the figure of Merlin this account of insular loss nonetheless alludes to the contentious political history that produced it, and thus to disagreements over its legitimate fulfillment. I will argue that this commentary and these prophecies deploy what Michael Taussig has called “the magic of mimesis,” borrowing the resources of recovery and loss from a conquered Welsh in order to imagine a future English sovereignty. The image of a lost and desolate insular British sovereign past becomes a means for mourning losses to English sovereignty, and predicting a future beyond dire accounts of England’s last days.

Prophetic Historicity and the Prophetia Merlini

An English commentary on the Prophetia Merlini of Geoffrey of Monmouth constitutes the sole text of a fifteenth-century manuscript held by the Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University.⁹ As its editor Caroline Eckhardt notes, the manuscript offers “the longest medieval translation of [Monmouth’s] Prophetia Merlini into English prose” and “the sole continuous medieval commentary on the Prophetia Merlini in English” (19). In its special concentration of prophecy and commentary, this text establishes an historical specificity for, and an orthodox interpretation of, Merlin’s prophetic words, implicitly challenging the provocative ambiguity so important to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia.

The two parts of this text, prophecy and commentary, are framed by a double formalistic repetition: the prophecies are introduced with the formula “and Merlyn said”; their respective commentaries begin, “and Merlyn seid sooth.” This double structure recurs throughout the text’s 490 lines, alternating between Merlin’s speech act and its fulfillment, between distant past (written in what seems an eternally imminent future tense), and the more recent (although equally past) corresponding fulfillment. The commentary’s doubled structure attempts to foreclose interpretive ambiguity. Claims to Merlin’s words and to their truth testify first to the prophet’s authenticity and then to the commentator’s accuracy. The two parts, prophecy and commentary, are thus mutually defining. The precision of the latter proves the truth of the former.

The historical interpretations cover the period of British history from Saxon conquest through Norman invasion to the period of Norman and Angevin rule. The text omits some prophecies given in Geoffrey’s Historia, specifically the prophecy of the “Breton Hope” and the prophecies of the Apocalypse. It includes the prophecies of the Red and White Dragons, another group called the Norman Conquest prophecies, the succession of the two dragons, the lion of justice, the eagle, the Sextus, the lynx, all related to Norman and Angevin rule. At the point in Geoffrey’s text where the prophecy of the “Breton Hope” begins, the fifteenth-century commentary turns instead to the first prophecy in the series on the “Six Last Kings,” material not included in Geoffrey. The text ends abruptly with the first of the last kings and a brief mention of Henry III.

The following excerpt (a version of Merlin’s famous twelfth prophecy) details and explicates the battles between red and white dragons. (In Monmouth’s text, the dragons fight beneath Vortigern’s crumbling tower.)¹⁰ This is an episode, we recall, that A. O. H. Jarman identifies with Welsh vaticination. The excerpt below exemplifies both the repetitious structure of the Prophetia Merlini and one of the Commentator’s most persistent concerns, British loss and disinheritance:

Merlyn seid … that the whight dragon schall [rise] ayen. and he schall calle to him ϸe doghter of Saxonie. Than schall oure gardeyns be replenished with straunge seede, and ϸe Reede dragon schall langwyssch and moorne in the boordis of a water.

Merlyn seide sooth. For the Englissh peple that were left o lyve aftir the greete derth and deth sent in to saxonie. where thei were boore for men wymmen and childre to stuffe cities and townes with peple a geyn. Than come the saxons and multiplied wondir thik and used the langage of hir oune contree. and chaunged the names of cities and townes and castels and held the countries baronages lord-shcippes as bretons had compaced hem be forne. And among hem that come from saxonie to Englond came ϸe noble quene sexburga with men and wymmen with ovte nombre. and arrivid in Northumbrelond. and toke the lond from Scotland in to Cornewaille for hir and for hir peple. for al that lond was desolate and voide of peple except a fewe powre bretons that were left in mountayns and in woodis. Than began saxons for to reigne. and departed the lond be twix hem and made kinges by dyuerse contries. The first was of westsex. The second of Estsex. The thrid of Estangle called Northfold and Southfold be iiij king of Merchlond with many oϸer as king of Northumbrelond & cetera. And the bretons sum of hem fled into walis. vnto ϸe boordis of the see. (ll. 125–35)

The vague symbols of what is to come, in the short space of a few lines, are transformed into a forthright historical narrative: red dragons signify the Britons driven by invaders “into Wales unto the borders of the sea.” The strange seeds in “our” gardens are said to signify the progeny of Saxon conquerors who multiply “wondrously thick.” The commentary offers an orthodox English interpretation of the two dragons’ fate, with the White Dragon standing as a figure for the English, now united with the Saxons, and the Red Dragon as the newly conquered Britons. The dragon symbolism follows the prophecy of insular devastation from famine (told in prophecy ten), the land “desolate and voide of peple”: “ϸe feeldes shall disceyve the plowman. And the peple schall suffre hungre and greete deeth, and tho ϸat be lefft o lif schall forsake ϸer natif contre … And ϸan schall bretayn be nere hand desolat” (ll. 93–95). Queen Sexburga and her people, a Saxon (re)population, come onto British territory at the invitation of the English, usefully repopulating what is here described as a nearly vacant countryside. These Anglo-Saxon bodies quickly move in on British territory (“changing the names of cities and towns and castles and taking ownership of the baronages and lordships”), gesturing in this moment to the links between territorial acquisition and linguistic change.

The image of a new people settling and (re) naming a vacant countryside is a common trope of narratives of migration and conquest. Desolation from conquest is here specifically named British: “Bretayn” was “nere hand desolat”; the vacant land offers only the trace of a “fewe powre bretons” remaining “in mountayns and in woodis.” The pleasures of Saxon repopulation contrast with an explicitly British poverty and ruin. While the commentator identifies two insular groups predating Saxon arrival, he links intense devastation only with the “few, poor Britons” left on the land. While the impoverished Britons turn inward, the English, with apparently more foresight, look across the seas for aid. This contrast between English and British will be important, and I will return to it shortly. But I wish first to note the insularity of this image of interior Britain. Hidden in the mountains, the Britons constitute a desolate yet intact interior; they occupy a remote, yet deeply intimate, insular geography, abiding in the heart of the island. A concealed remnant, they apparently do not join in the cultural mixing of Anglo-Saxon days. They constitute an insular population untouched by immigrant rulers. Yet they also signal the trace of conquest; they are the relics of a native history suffused with loss.

Despite their identification with loss, the Britons are also continually imagined as resistant to Saxon invasion. Unlike the English, they remain obdurate before Saxon seductions. Earlier in the Prophetia this resistance has been linked to impressive, male rule. Before Queen Sexburga and her people arrive, the British King Cadwall (in prophecies seven and eight) resiliently rebuffs the Saxon threat.¹¹ Yet even, perhaps especially, at this moment of British victory loss links with resilience:

[7] Merlin seide also that ther schall be so greete tormentrie that ϸe childer schall be cut ovt of hir modir wombes. and straunge men schall be restored. And he seide soth. For king Cadwall was so sore annoyed with saxons that he thought vtterly to distroie hem. and to restore it a yet to bretayns. and he did slee man woman and childe for to performe his entencion and to enhaunce the bretons. (71–72)

Horrific loss, this time perpetrated by a British king, sponsors British restoration. Cadwall’s success and British restoration follow the most atrocious devastation. British loss and restoration are gendered here, moreover. “Strange men” are restored; women (and the children in their wombs) suffer catastrophically. The motif of the violent deaths of children ripped from their mothers’ wombs, indebted to biblical images of the Slaughter of Innocents, usually stands as testimony to tyranny. This common image of wartime loss gains poignancy through its gender strategies. It acutely expresses the horror of war through gendered images of slaughter. One obvious implication would be that the perpetrator of these deaths must be most excessively tyrannical, the fortunes he wishes to enhance as unjust as the methods used to enhance them.

In contrasting the image of victimized mothers with Cadwall’s violence the text emphasizes Cadwall’s tyranny as a function of his masculinity. A male sovereign forges restoration through a virile force of arms. Cadwall’s violence is imagined as productive for British restoration, but only temporarily and only by engendering catastrophic destruction on female reproductive bodies. This contrast resonates with the contrast between British and English we have just seen, where the English host join with Queen Sexburga and, in contrast to the insular British, offer the childless island a (re)productive future. This gendering of sovereign rule splits a British violent (male) sovereignty from a Saxon reproductive (female) one. From the long view, the point seems to be that for all Cadwall’s virile potency, British insularity, in contrast to English exogamy, is literally barren.

Yet if the commentator merely wishes to cast British insularity as impotent, he misses an opportunity to drive the point home. Indeed, following the description of slaughter in prophecy seven, the commentary seems unconscionably mild. Prophetic apocalypticism sits uneasily with the explanation that follows; in fact, the prophecy offers a gripping depth and texture to wartime loss, a texture that is then flattened out by the abstract nouns of the commentary. In place of castigations of a tyrannical victimization of the innocent, or of the uselessness of Cadwall’s unchecked aggression, the commentary forthrightly details Cadwall’s success against the Saxons. The commentary backs away from a castigation of war crimes in favor of what seems a more dispassionate historicism.

This may be because while the commentator wishes to suggest that British insularity has no future, he also remains fascinated by Cadwall’s restorative power for his people. Focusing on Cadwall’s desire to destroy the Saxons (mentioning his aggressive ambitions five different times in a single line), this ambivalent description combines desire and derision: a fascination with British resistance and a horrific image of British savagery. To be sure, the author may wish to link Cadwall to charges of tyranny; I will be arguing shortly that this commentary is not particularly pro-Welsh, despite a fascination with the fortunes of these “British” ancestors. Taken together, prophecy and commentary display horrible loss as a means to British restoration.

King Cadwall remains one of the most vivid images from the Prophetia. In prophecy eight, his dead sovereign body provides salvific powers that persist beyond war, beyond insular barrenness, beyond even his own treachery:

[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 the stability of sovereign power through loss to British community can console a culture anxious about the instability of its changing identity.

The symbolic riches of this Welsh survival through devastating defeat become fantasmatically useful to sovereigns and aristocrats in Britain anxious about their own futures. By the second half of the fifteenth century, images of British restoration become a strategic feature of Yorkist claims to legitimate succession.¹⁷ In Edward IV’s Long Pedigree, for example, succession becomes a recovery of a native identity, a return to a British sovereignty untainted by non-insular culture.¹⁸ Manuscript Bodley 623 gives a particularly striking view of such a genealogy and the prophecies it deployed. This manuscript contains “a chronology of the world from Creation to 1464 in the form of a chart” that juxtaposes prophecies with specific interpretations of them. The “Breton Hope” is included, followed by an explanation that from Cadwalader’s time, “the rule of the Britons has lapsed, but that it has now descended ead Edwardum 4 verum heredum britanie” (58); an adjacent diagram records Edward IV’s link to Cadwalader in genealogical form. One portion of the manuscript depicts the details of succession from the fifth century to the fifteenth, noting a dramatic shift in insular identity during Edward IV’s reign. Eckhardt describes the genealogy:

At A.D. 448 in the chronology, there appears an entry for Merlin’s prophecy to Vortigern, just below the entry for the accession of Marcianus as emperor. At A.D. 530, there occurs the statement that in this year Merlin told Arthur about the Six Last Kings to come; … [An] angel’s prophecy to Cadwalader (another version of the “Breton hope,” from the end of Geoffrey’s Historia) occurs at A.D. 680, with a reference there to its fulfillment in 1460. After 680, the column that has been labeled “Britannia” is labeled instead “Anglia,” in recognition of the Germanic conquest. It continues to be labeled “Anglia” until the accession of the new “British” King Edward IV, at which point, in tacit fulfillment of the prophecy that “nomine bruti vocabitur insula” (from the Prophetia Merlini), the column is labeled “Britannia” once more. (58)

With Edward’s succession “Britannia” reclaims the island as its home; the reign of “Anglia” explicitly gives way to the return of the “British” that Merlin had prophesied long before.¹⁹ From the long view of history, Edward IV did not finally supply the native pedigree sufficient to render him a believable redeemer returned. The Yorkists would lose the throne in the “readeption” of the Lancastrian Henry VI. And yet in Edward’s attempt to fabricate such credentials he identifies the legitimate crown with an insular British past rather than a continental Plantagenet one.

When English kings craft genealogies based upon older Welsh forms and popular Welsh political hopes, they deploy what Michael Taussig calls, with reference to a later colonialism, “the magic of mimesis.” In copying those forms English sovereigns “share in or acquire the property of the represented” (46). English sovereigns and English devotees of the Merlin prophecies revel in the rich magic of a past of British return, or borrow the poignancy and energy of British loss, while continuing to gain the political and economic riches of a Welsh colony. Such uses point to the dependencies of the conquerors upon the people they rule.

The Prophetia Merlini imagines a heritage of British people hidden within the island’s interior, and implies that changes in particular sovereign bodies do not unrecognizably, or devastatingly, change the heart of Britain. Such a “native” insular past evokes a powerful British identity. To consider further the nature of this identity, imbricated both in loss and in restoration, I turn to the most popular (and melancholy) prophecy of English sovereignty, the Middle English Prose Brut version of the prophecy known as the “Six Kings to Follow John.”

Apocalyptic Warnings: The Six Last Kings

According to Lister M. Matheson, the Middle English Prose Brut chronicle was “the most popular secular work of the Middle Ages in England,” the abundance of its manuscripts in Middle English “exceeded only by that of the manuscripts of the two Wycliffite translations of the Bible” (210). Until such time as a comprehensive comparative analysis of the 172 manuscripts listed in the Manual of Writings in Middle English is finished, Matheson’s current catalogue of variants remains authoritative. He designates four basic versions, as follows: the Common Version (based on the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut, usually ending with the Battle of Halidon Hill in 1333, but with continuations, some of which bring the chronicle up to 1461); the Extended Version (adding details taken from the Short English Metrical Chronicle); the Abbreviated Version (a shortened account with elements from both the Common and Extended versions); and what he calls “Peculiar Texts and Versions” (a miscellaneous category including Latin Bruts translated into English, idiosyncratic reworkings of English texts, and smaller texts based on the Brut).²⁰ The first volume of Brie’s EETS edition of the Brut offers the Common Version, a chronicle up to 1333. The prophecy of the “Six Last Kings” occurs here, first as Merlin’s prophetic utterance to King Arthur, and later in specific interpretations linked to the English kings Henry III, Edward I, and Edward II. Because of a modern unfamiliarity with this prophecy so very familiar to nearly all fifteenth-century English chronicle writers, I quote a lengthy (abridged) version from the Prose Brut text:

How Kynge Arthure axede of Merlyn ϸe aventures of vj the lastekynges ϸat weren to regne in Engeland, and how ϸe lande shulde ende.

[The lamb] “Sire,” quod Merlyn, “in ϸe Ʒere of Incarnacioun of oure Lorde M CC xv ϸere shal come a lambe oute of Wynchestre ϸat shal haue a white tong and trew lippis and he shall have wryten in his hert Holynesse. This lambe shal… haue pees ϸe most parte of his life, & he shal make one of ϸe faireste places of ϸe worlde ϸat in his tyme shal nouƷt full ben made an ende…. And in ϸe ende of his lif, a wolf of a straunge lande shal do him grete harme … And ϸe lambe shal leue no while ϸat he ne shal dye. His sede ϸan shal bene in strange lande, and ϸe lande shal bene wibout gouernoure a litill tyme.

[The dragon] And after him shal come a dragoun mellede wiϸ mercy and ek wodenesse, ϸat shal haue a berde as a good, ϸat shal Ʒeve in Engeland shadewe, and shal kepe the lande from colde and hete … He shal vnbrace iii habitacions, and he shal oppen his mouϸ toward Walys…. This dragoun shal bene holden in his tyme ϸe best body of al ϸe worlde; & he shal dye besides ϸe Marche of a straunge lande; 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.

[The goat] And after ϸis dragone shal come a gote … ϸat shal haue homes & berde of siluer; and ϸere shal come out of his nosbrelles a drop ϸat shal bitoken hunger & sorw, & grete deϸ of ϸe peple; and miche of his lande … shal be wastede… In ϸat same tyme shal dye, for sorwe and care, a peple of his lande, so ϸat many shal bene oppon him he more bolder afterward…

[The boar] Aftre ϸis goote shal come out of Wyndsore a Boor ϸat shal haue an heuede of witte, a lyons hert, a pitouse lokyng; … his worde shal bene gospelle; his beryng shal bene meke as a Lambe. In ϸe ferste Ʒere of his regne he shal haue grete payne to iustifien ham ϸat bene vntrew; and in his tyme shal his lande bene multipliede wiϸ Aliens…. And he shal whet his teiϸ vppon be Ʒates of Parys, and vppon iiii landes. Spayne shal tremble for drede of him; Gascoyne shal swete; in Fraunce he shal put his wynge; his grete taile shal reste in Engeland softely; Almayne shal quake for drede of him…

[The second lamb]²¹ After ϸis Boor shal come a lambe, ϸat shal haue feete of leede, an heuede of bras, an hert of a loppe, and a swynnes skyn and herde; and in his tyme his land shal bene in pees…. ϸis lambe shal lesein his tyme a grete parte of his lande ϸrouz an hidouse wold; but he shal recouer it, an Ʒif an Lordeship to an Egle of his landes…

[The mole] After ϸis lambe shal come a Moldewerpe acursede of Godes mouϸ, a caitif, a cowarde as an here. he shal haue an elderliche skyn as a goot; and vengeance shal fall vppon him for synne…. Than shal arisen a dragoun in ϸe North, … and shal meve werre aƷeyens ϸe forsaide Moldewerpe … ϸis dragoun shal gadre aƷeyne into his company a wolf hat shal come oute of the West, ϸat shal bygynne aƷeynes he Moldewerp in his side;

ϸan shal come a lyon oute of Irlande, ϸat shal fal in company wiϸ ham; and ϸan shal tremble ϸe lande ϸat ϸan shal bene callede Engeland, as an aspe lef… and after he shal leue in sorw al his lif-tyme; and in his tyme ϸe hote babes shullen bicome colde; and after ϸat shal ϸe Moldewerp dye aventurly and sodenly—alias, ϸe sorwe!—for … his seede shal bicome pure faderles in straunge lande for euer-more, and ϸan shal the lande bene departede in iii parties, ϸat is to seyn to the Wolf, to ϸe dragoune, and to ϸe lioun; and so shal it bene for euermore. And ϸan ϸis lande bene callede ‘ϸe lande of conquest,’ & so shal ϸe riƷt heires of Engeland ende.”

The prophecy catalogues England’s fall from glorious sovereign wholeness: beginning with a utopian scene of rule (indebted to images of the Lamb and New Jerusalem from the book of Revelation) the text devolves to a recurring vision of a desolate, fatherless folk. Occasional moments of peace always give way to misery, England overflowing with loss; held by strangers; overrun with “Aliens”; shaking like an aspen leaf; under shadow; turned cold; a land of hunger and sorrow; a wasted land; the land of conquest. Animal-kings allegorize English monarchs of the Plantagenet dynasty of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, beginning with Henry III. Amid his narration of the events of Henry III’s reign, some hundred pages after Merlin’s audience before Arthur, the Brut author (following the Anglo-Norman text) identifies Henry as the lamb of Winchester, Edward I as the dragon, and Edward II as the goat. None of the continuations of the chronicle included in Brie’s text (taking us from 1333 variously into the fifteenth century) continue the prophecies through to their end. By logical extension, however, the remaining three animal-kings, the boar, the second lamb, and the mole must follow as Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV as the last of England’s kings.

Any chronicler or member of his audience in the years beyond the death of Henry IV knew, of course, that Henry was not the final monarch. Like many unfulfilled prophecies, this one should have lost its power once the events it foretold failed to transpire. And thus Henry V’s succession should perhaps have put an end to the “Prophecy of the Six Last Kings”; this may explain why the interpretations of the last three prophecies are omitted from the Brut continuations. Yet the prophecies of “the end of this land” did not, in fact, die out even after events had proven England’s survival.

Scholars analyzing the use and purpose of the “Prophecy of the Last Six Kings” have focused attention on the historical story of the “Tripartite Convention,” or the “Tripartite Indenture” an account of which is found in a chronicle of the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV.²² The Tripartite Convention was, as mentioned earlier, the name given to the possible alliance between Percy, Mortimer, and Glyn Dwr against Henry Bolingbroke. This story (most famously told in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV) purports that this rebel alliance was inspired by the “skimble-skamble stuff” of prophecy. Scholars had long assumed an historical link between the “Prophecy of the Six Kings” and the prophecy putatively used by the Glyn Dŵr faction; those links, however, have been compellingly called into question. In a subtle analysis of the manuscript and textual history of “Prophecy of the Six Kings,” T. M. Smallwood argues that, in its Middle English version, the text was not used for the propagandistic purposes so many scholars have assumed. Smallwood compelling argues, in fact, that unlike their Anglo-Norman sources the Middle English versions of the “Six Last Kings” display a particularly striking lack of propagandistic interpolations.²³ She questions whether the history of the “Tripartite Convention” is itself authentic, remarking that it might be “no more than a fantasy, … suggested by the ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’ itself” (592).²⁴

Smallwood argues that Welsh vaticination (which she calls the “common currency” of medieval Welsh politics) not this Middle English prophecy supplied Glyn Dŵr’s prophetic material. Even as she points to the dubious nature of the “Tripartite Convention,” Smallwood documents the longstanding power of Welsh vaticination for imagining an alternative to English insular sovereignty. “Propagandistic and hortatory use of prophecy had been a feature of native Welsh culture for many centuries before Glendower’s time…. It is to this enduring Welsh tradition of political prophecy that we should [look] for an understanding of an outburst of propagandistic prophecy, evidently hostile to the English crown, in the “rebel” areas of Wales early in Henry IV’s reign” (592). Given these traditions, what are we to make of the inclusion of a prophecy recounting the end of England’s sovereignty in the most popular English history of the fifteenth century? The fact that Caxton and other scribes and printers did not remove the prophecy as archaic, flawed, or out dated 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.