24 - Hoccleve, Lydgate and the Lancastrian court

Summary

Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate staged their lives and careers in complex relation to the Lancastrian court, and were consciously and deliberately Lancastrian in their sympathies and proclivities. Each temporarily enjoyed what might be considered an official or ‘laureate’ status as publicist or celebrator of Lancastrian values and activities – Hoccleve for several years before and after the 1413 accession of Henry V and Lydgate during the 1420s and 1430s. Yet neither was a court-poet, in the sense either of continued residence within a court’s precincts or of consistent financial reward for specifically literary activities. If terms like ‘court-poet’ or ‘patronage’ are to be applied to their situations, considerable redefinition is demanded, with respect to the complex filiations of expectation, attachment and belief which may operate between a poet, a prince, and that prince’s programme.

Neither poet actually lived within the court’s physical ambit, although each conducted his career at its margins. Hoccleve was a clerk and stipendary in the office of the Privy Seal and commuted to his Westminster post from residences in the Strand. Despite occasional sojourns in the households of the Duke of Bedford and others, Lydgate retained his connections with the monastery of St Edmund at Bury and he began and ended his career there. Although each wrote certain works in the hope of pleasing the royal heir or sovereign, each also sought more varied patronage and undertook some works with no certain patronage at all. Hoccleve wrote as often to impress his superiors in Chancery and other well-placed royal servants as the king or the nobility of the realm. Lydgate addressed works to a host of potential patrons, including his Troy Book to Henry V and Fall of Princes to the Duke of Gloucester, as well as translations for the earls of Salisbury and Warwick, occasional pieces for a gentlewoman of Norfolk, pageants for the clerk of London, mummings for London gilds, and many other sponsors. Yet both poets also composed major works on speculation, as when Hoccleve started his ‘Series’ in the hope but not the certainty of interesting the Duke of Gloucester. Although Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes was implicitly patriotic with regard to English ambitions in France, he wrote it without apparent patronage.