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XXV: Skelton's Quarrel with Wolsey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William Nelson
William Nelson*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

Passages from Colin Clout, Speak, Parrot, and Why Come Ye Not To Court sprinkle the pages of every account of England in the time of Henry VIII. As illustrative material for historical texts these satires of Skelton are unsurpassed. They are not vaguely general, condemnatory of times and manners in the all-inclusive fashion that must have rendered so many medieval diatribes innocuous reading even to those evil ones to whom they were primarily addressed. Colin Clout, indeed, masquerades as a member of this type: “It is wronge with eche degre. …” But the disguise is thin. Prelates who build noble mansions royally, adorn their walls with unseemly tapestries, give evil counsel, rule both king and kaiser, ride on gaily caparisoned mules—these are “prelates,” but the plural is transparently a singular. It is this singleness of objective, together with the acute danger in which that singleness must have placed the satirist, that provides the historian of politics with contemporary comment with which to annotate his discussion, and the historian of letters with a character of consuming interest.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 1936 , pp. 377 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1936

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References

1 Magnyfycence, edited by R. L. Ramsay, EETS, Ex. Ser., xcviii.

2 The Poetical Works of John Skelton, 2 vols. (London, 1843), ii, 1.

3 Ibid., i, 311.

4 Ibid., ii, 26.

5 Ibid., i, 361.

6 Ibid., i, 424.

7 Ibid., ii, 83–84.

8 Ibid., i, 206.

9 Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytannie (Basle, 1559 [?]), pp. 651–652.

10 Skelton, Works, i, xliv.

11 Ibid., i, xliii-xliv.

12 J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, i, 607 and n., 608.

13 Arno Thümmel, Studien über John Skelton (Leipzig, 1905), pp. 44–45.

14 Friedrich Brie, “Skelton Studien,” ESt, xxxvii (1907), 13.

15 “The Dating of Skelton's Satires,” PMLA, xxix (1914), 499–516.

16 Ibid., p. 516.—It is clear from Berdan's argument that he considers the hyphenated dates not as limits within which the poems must have been written, but as representative of the beginning and ending of the composition.

17 Ibid., passim.

18 Op. cit., i, xliii-xliv.

19 Op. cit., pp. 12–13.

20 Zur Charakteristik John Skelton's (Stuttgart, 1904), p. 140. Koelbing believes the Albany dedication is genuine and correctly placed, but declares he cannot account for it.

21 Op. cit., p. 44. Thümmel follows Koelbing. He produces in tentative explanation Mullinger's theory cited above (p. 378).

22 Op. cit., pp. 514–515.

23 Ibid., p. 515.

24 Op. cit., p. xxv.

25 “Skelton's Speak, Parrot,” PMLA, li, 59–82.

26 Ibid., pp. 62–63.

27 Side Note: Quis stabit mecum adversus operantes iniquitatem? Pso. Arrident melius seria picta jocis: In fabulis Aesopi.

28 PMLA, xxix (1914), 508–509.

29 Ibid., p. 509.

30 Ibid., pp. 509–510.

31 Ibid., pp. 510–512.

32 Ibid., p. 512.

33 Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII (London, 1867); iv (3), no. 6184.

“6 pieces of triumphs, counterfeit arras lined with canvas …”

“Hangings bought of the executors of my lord of Durham, 14 Henry VIII., containing the triumphs of Time, Death, Chastity, Eternity, Cupid and Venus, and Renown or Julyus Cisar, …”

“Six pieces of triumphs bought of Richard Gresham, Dec. 16 Hen. VIII.”

Tapestries representing the Triumphs seem to have been quite common in the early sixteenth century. See Histoire Générale des Arts Appliqués à l'Industrie, vi: Les Tapisseries du XIIe à la fin du XVIe siècle, by Jules Guiffrey (Paris, n.d.), pp. 77–78.

34 “Londini vero interim Volsaeus, cui ab initio deliberatum fuerat provinciam quaestui habere, monachos omnium ordinum ad se vocat, simulansque bonitatem eos ad pedes jacentes in multis reprehendit, quod aliam longe degant vitam, atque à principio professi fuissent, quod in literis & artibus bonis se non exerceant, sed admirabili quodam studio ad divitias augendas concitentur, ac idcirco suum officium esse affirmat talia corrigere, quo eorum religio ne prorsus labefiat. Et ut fidem verbis majorem habeant, ex improviso coenobium Westmonasterium adit, ibique de statu monachorum severe cognoscit, intemperanterque omnia agit, miscet, turbat, ut terreat caeteros, ut imperium ostentet, ut se terribiliorem praebeat. Ista omnia eo pertinebant, uti monachi ad censuram vocati sua sponte pecuniam dare, quam statum suum mutare mallent.” Historiae Anglicae Libri XXVII Autore Polydoro Virgilio, ed. Ant. Thysus (Lug. Bat., 1651), bk. 27, p. 47.

35 F. A. Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (London, 1888), i, 63–65.

36 Letters and Papers, iii, no. 2080.

37 Ll. 112–128. See my interpretation in PMLA, li, 77–80.

38 PMLA, xxix, 505.

39 Helen Stearns (MLN, 1928, 314–316) is the most recent investigator of the date of the Garland. She concludes the poem was written in the Spring of 1523. Her most cogent argument depends on the fact that Skelton declares the work was written at Sherriff Hutton Castle to celebrate the laurel chaplet woven for him by the Countess of Surrey and ladies of her court. Miss Stearns finds by examination of “State Papers” and the “Catering Book” that the Countess had been in Ireland from 1519 to April, 1522, whence she had gone to Tendring Hall. Her residence at Sherriff Hutton therefore began in the Fall of 1522 or later, and the composition of the poem must have followed her move to the northern seat orpreceded 1519. I should be happy to accept this evidence which agrees well with the results of my own searches, but I can find nothing in State Papers to indicate that the Countess remained with her husband throughout his stay in Ireland. In fact, on August 3, 1520, Surrey wrote to London to ask that his wife and children be permitted to return home until the sickness infecting Dublin had abated (State Papers, vol. 2, p. 29). I have been unable to trace the “Catering Book” covering the movements of the Howards in these years beyond Nott's description of it in his edition of the younger Surrey's poems. Miss Stearns alleges further a calculation of the retrogradations of Mars for this period similar to that done for me by Dr. Wolf, and recorded on page 387 here. In orderto define the season of the year in which the poem was composed, Miss Stearns points to the lines in which Skelton says that he walked and dreamed in the leafless woods, and concludes that such an exploit was possible only in the Spring. But allegorical strolls and swevens do not depend on physical temperature. One cannot get around the reference to Janus and the new year which appears at the end of the poem.

40 Albohazen Haly, De iudiciis astrorum libri octo (Basle, 1571), p. 260.

41 MLN, xliii, 316.

42 The dates given are according to the Julian Calendar.

42 a There is further evidence that the poem was written in December or January. Skelton, describing the circumstances in which he had his vision, declares:

Thus stode I in the frytthy forest of Galtres,

Ensowkid with sylt of the myry mose,

Where hartis belluyng, embosyd with distres,

Ran on the raunge so longe, that I suppose

Few men can tell now where the hynde calfe gose;

Faire fall that forster that so can bate his hownde! (22–27)

The “harts' bellowing” refers to the noise made by stags during the rutting season. The mating period may last as late as December, though the height of the rut occurs in late October or November. Skelton seems to say that the deer have “run on the range”—rutted—for a particularly long time. The last two lines are obscure to me, unless the emendation “Fewmes” for “Few men” is allowed. “Fewmes”—the droppings of deer—were once highly valued by hunters as marks of the age and sex as well as the whereabouts of the animals. The passage would then mean: the harts have rutted for a long time this season, and the hunter may now begin to hunt hinds. Such an interpretation definitely places the dream vision in December or January.

43 “Cacosinthicon” is an error for “cacosyntheton”: something badly put together.

44 Op. cit., ii, 313.

45 Ed. by Eleanor Prescott Hammond (Duke University Press, 1927), p. 516.

46 Migne, Patrologia Latina, cxiii, 1298.

47 The one bit of verse written after the date assigned to the Garland of Laurel that might be construed as an attack on Wolsey is a couplet, recorded by Hall (op. cit., p. 657) and ascribed by him to Skelton, which has as its subject the Convocation of May, 1523:

Gentle Paule laie doune thy sweard:

For Peter of Westminster hath shauen thy beard.

The point is that Convocation, which had met originally at St. Paul's, was transferred to St. Peter's so that it would be under the direction of Wolsey instead of Archbishop Warham. But the couplet need not be taken as a blow at Wolsey. It sounds more like a topical jest of the sort that must have given the poet his reputation as a maker of “quick answers.”

48 Polydore Vergil, op. cit., pp. 65, 66.

49 Letters and Papers, iii, nos. 634, 647, 676.

50 PMLA, xxix (1914), 505.

51 MLN, xxviii, 244–245.

52 That the names “Skelton” and “Shelton” are distinct and not readily interchangeable has recently been demonstrated by H. L. R. Edwards, in John Skelton: A Genealogical Study, RES (1935), pp. 406 fi.

53 Illustrium Maioris Brilanniae Scriptorum, (Ipswich, 1548), fol. 254 v.

54 Index Brilanniae Striptorum, edited by R. L. Poole and Mary Bateson (Oxford, 1902), p. 253.

55 The editors of the Index are of the opinion that the notice there found constitutes a careless abstract of that in the 1559 edition. That the notebook material has priority is sufficiently proved by the fact that, unlike the edition, the Index keeps the matter contributed by Horman and Braynewode separate, and credits them as donors.

56 Bale seems to believe that Skelton's prophecy of the fall of Wolsey was made on his deathbed. The passage referred to is probably ll. 461–480 of Colin Clout. See Works, i, xlvi.

57 Index, p. 253.

58 Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytannie (Basle, 1559 [?]), pp. 651–652.