A Famous Prediction of Merlin, the British Wizard

Summary

Headnote

Published 1709; copy text 1709 (see Textual Account).

A Famous Prediction of Merlin, the BritishWizard; Written above a Thousand Years Ago, and Relating to this Present Year. With Explanatory Notes. By T. N. Philomath was published in February 1709, in the popular format of a single sheet headed with a woodcut portrait (see Textual Account). Like Predictions in the previous year, it prompted unauthorised reprints, identifiable in part by their imperfect attempts to copy the woodcut. The piece consists of what is alleged to be a prophecy by Merlin, with commentary by one T.N. Philomath: the prediction, in verse, is set in black letter while the ‘Explanatory Notes’ are in roman. T. N.'s declared purpose is to support Partridge against Bickerstaff, and the piece presents significant connections with the print culture of the late seventeenth-century crises in which Partridge's career had taken shape.

The woodcut block (originally including some features excised before its use by Swift) had been used by Partridge in two attacks on his high-church Tory adversary John Gadbury (1627–1704): the anonymously published Gadburies Propheticall Sayings: or; The Fool Judged out of the Knave's Mouth (1690), and Nebulo Anglicanus: or, The First Part of the Black Life of John Gadbury (1693) which Partridge published under his own name. Like Swift's Famous Prediction, Gadburies Propheticall Sayings carried a Baldwin imprint: it exemplifies the crude but visually striking Whig propaganda that was Richard Baldwin's stock-in-trade. The caption to the portrait reads ‘Multi multa Sciunt, sed ego nihil’ (Many people know many things, but I know nothing: Gadbury, in his joy at the birth of an heir to James II, had signally failed to foresee the Revolution). Partridge, intent on convicting Gadbury of covert Roman Catholicism, ridicules his claims to be a loyal member of the Church of England (which he in any case habitually vilified as papist); and the portrait seems calculated to accuse Gadbury of trying to hide his treachery under a hat, bands, and clean-shaven visage suggestive of Protestant innocence and humility. In this original form of the woodcut, however, the beads and cross around his neck are supplemented by a large cross in the space to the right of the image, and the insinuation thatGadbury is awolf in sheep's clothing is underlined by a speechscroll in which he declares himself ‘a special Protestant’.