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
