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
