Sovereign Fantasies. Patricia Clare Ingham
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