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
