Chapter 7 - John Gower: Prophet or Turncoat?

Summary

For an historian, particularly a political historian, one of the key questions about Gower relates to his consistency. Was he actually, as Chaucer called him, ‘moral Gower’? Did he stick to a consistent set of positions throughout his career? Or did he trim his views to suit the changing political wind? To be precise, was he a man of integrity? Or did he sink in his later years into the role of sad apologist for the Lancastrian monarchy?

The question which is raised here is hardly a new one. It is a quite old – not to say, a slightly old-fashioned – one. It was first raised in the early eighteenth century, when Thomas Hearne, the editor and antiquary, accused Gower very specifically of being a turncoat by switching the dedication of the Confessio Amantis from Richard II to Henry, earl of Derby, later King Henry IV. To Hearne, the rededication smacked of opportunism and ingratitude. In Hearne's view Gower went on to compound the evil after 1399 by turning out what amounted to crude Lancastrian propaganda (for example, the Cronica Tripertita). The notion of Gower as a political turncoat has generally been rejected by modern critics of his work: their emphasis is firmly on ‘moral Gower’. Yet the idea that in later life he compromised his integrity refuses to fade away. In recent years it has been given a new lease of life in the work of Terry Jones and Paul Strohm on the Lancastrian ‘propaganda machine’, which has demonstrated the sheer scale of the Lancastrian disinformation campaign after 1399. Terry Jones, for example, has argued that Gower, ‘the aging poet, wrote what he thought the usurper wanted him to say’; Gower, he argues, ‘went back into his past writings and tried, as best he could, to alter the record, so it would appear that his admiration for Henry and misgivings about Richard pre-dated the usurpation’.