In the sixth and final chapter, I consider the late poems and the curious prose work On the Boiler (1939), which includes the play Purgatory. I emphasize Yeats’s bardic sensibility, which is defined by relations of testament and bestowal and the double burden of witnessing the past and handing down bequests. Generational temporalities characterize the poetry in this period, inaugurated by the historical sequences in The Tower (1928). Yeats’s revivalist attitude toward time, future-oriented by way of a rectifying gaze cast on prior attitudes and achievements, continues to mature in the testamentary poems of this period, in which the modernist bard recreates, because he cannot sustain, a doomed Anglo-Protestant social order. These poems submit the heroes of the literary revival to new conditions of recognition, in which their greatness becomes an inheritance that Yeats, as their bardic representative, both announces and embodies in the world of his work. The antithesis of this inheritance can be found in On the Boiler, specifically in the play that concludes it, Purgatory. The play, Yeats’s last, is a Gothic distortion of the covenant at the heart of the testament. It subjects time and history, personal and cultural inheritance, to a withering critique that highlights both the intellectual pleasures and the potential dangers of the logic of misrecognition.

This scene-setting chapter charts out the challenges Europe’s monarchies had to face in the wake of the French Revolution and the key means they employed to achieve their survival – among them an alliance with nationalism and imperialism, constitutional development and public relations techniques. It also introduces royal heirs as individual agents – and the process of succession more widely – as an essential part of this political arsenal. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the main contexts within which the lives and functions of a nineteenth-century heir had to unfold: the constitution, the royal family, the public sphere and the court.

While the defence of princely legitimacy had to respond to certain legal and social standards, this technical reality did not act as a fixed template for its eventual performance. This chapter examines the practical and rhetorical aspects of three components of Jeanne’s legitimacy over the course of her whole career: her status as the rightful heiress of Brittany, her exercise of princely rights and responsibilities, and her responses to the disunity of the duchy. Although Jeanne’s claims were rooted in broadly accepted social expectations, not only could her assertions of legitimacy diverge from those of her husband and her predecessors, but she foregrounded different aspects of her status before different audiences; at the same time, other aspects of her official position remained constant even across the major shifts in her political circumstances. Recognizing princely legitimacy as a moving target expands our understanding of what constituted an effective response to a position of weakness, and tempers the ‘ideal’ prince of medieval (and modern) theory with constructions of power more adaptive to the concurrent pressures of princely relationships and authority.