This unsigned article titled A Satirical Laureate of the Sixteenth Century appeared in the ‘Dublin University Magazine’, LXVIII (1866), pp. 601–18. It has not proved possible to determine its authorship. The original footnotes have been deleted.
Swift sat in Rabelais' easy chair; but there is another English satirist whose pantagruelistic tendencies were still more evident, who was a contemporary of the French humorist, and whose virulent attacks against the corruptions of the Church do not yield in coarseness and energy to Luther's diatribes. John Skelton, Laureate, was the link between Chaucer and Surrey, Wolsey and Cranmer — the representative of the reformatory spirit of the first part of the sixteenth century. He wrote powerful invectives against the Church while Luther was still macerating himself in a convent cell; and he was an important agent in bringing about the English Reformation.
In Germany a monk stood against principalities and powers; but in England the evolution of the great change was still more curious and interesting. As Piers Ploughman had prophesied, the Crown alone could conquer the Church. And now was seen a young prince whose chief characteristic was an inexorable will; and it was by coming into collision with that will that the great hierarchy, which had cursed royal kings, was to fall, or to be absorbed by the crown. The King himself, had not in the early part of his reign, discerned the approach of this consumation, which More had foreseen; but he had often been offended by the pride and power of Churchmen, and was, accordingly, not inimical to attacks on the clergy. Without perceiving the results that would accrue from popularising a contempt of the hierarchy, he fostered Skelton's vigorous satire. Monarch and poet were tacitly allied together against Wolsey; and by this action against the common enemy, unconscious and intermittent though it often was, the one built up the Church of England, the other imprinted to England satire the political character which it retained in Butler, Dryden, Swift.
Before Skelton the clergy had not been attacked in England under such stirring circumstances, or in so merciless a fashion. Like other sublunary things, satire has its periods of evolution. It exists wherever there is a dead body, but, like the eagles, it flies down upon it in circles, the earliest of which are wide and circuitous; the fell swoop, the destroying attack, do not occur suddenly. It was thus with English satire. Directed chiefly against the Church, its attacks were at first timid and indirect. Piers Ploughman veiled his invectives under the mask of allegory. Chaucer is caustic, but courtly and moderate; he seems rather to reflect calmly the general opinion of his times than to attempt raising a tempest of his own. Lyndsay is too general, and his satire is but a feeble echo of Wycklyffe. There is an advance in William Roy's attack on Wolsey, in which invective is directed against the cardinal himself, and not merely the clergy in general; but literary talent is absent from that production, which is the offspring of misanthropical common sense rather than of poetical inspiration. In Skelton the satire of the age reaches its acme, and after him disappears. He raised it to intense poetry, melting and modelling it with the fire of his original genius. Rich with the knowledge of the ancients, zealous for the improvement of his own language, admitted at court, he had all the opportunities required for observing and portraying his age, and his aquafortis has left an indelible caricature of the great priest of the time.
Of himself scarcely any record remains; and his authentic portrait is not to be found. What fate attends inventors and fathers of arts, Homer, Piers Ploughman, Chaucer, Skelton, Shakespeare, that their persons should have this tendency to disappear from history? Is it because these men were too great to foster an egotistical fame; or that there is a law of compensation, a Nemesis in history, which orders that the sublimer a man's work the more indefinite shall his person remain? Skelton's mind may be studied in his writings, but information respecting his private life can only be reconstructed by means of scattered allusions. Born about 1460, educated at Cambridge, where he most probably took his M.A. degree in 1484, he began his poetical career by writing on the death of Edward IV.; a ‘Balade of the Mustard Tarte’ is also ascribed to that early period of his literary life. He bewailed the death of the Earl of Northumberland, a liberal and lettered nobleman, slain by an infuriated mob, which the poet thus apostrophizes —
[Quotes ‘The … Dethe … of the Erle of Northumberland’, lines 50–6.]
In 1490 Skelton probably corrected Caxton's version of the Aeneid; for the old printer, in the preface to his book, desires the assistance of ‘Mayster John Skelton, late created poete laureate in the Vnyversite of Oxen-forde.’ In this preface Caxton alludes to Skelton's classical learning, which so much transcended his own; the Laureate had translated ‘Tulle’ and Diodorus Siculus. Cambridge too made Skelton a laureate; the laureateship was then a university degree, and not a dignity corresponding to that of the modern poet laureate. There exists however, a document declaring Skelton Poet Laureate to Henry VIII.; and it is not improbable that the king should have created a royal laureateship. If so, the distinction was most likely honorary as well as honorable, for there is not a maravedi of evidence to show that a salary was attached to it. Henry was fond of being surrounded with literary men, especially if they humored his jovial character; besides, he must have liked to associated with Skelton, who had been his tutor, and have given him ‘drynke of the sugryd well of Elicony's waters crystallyne, aqueintyng hym with the Musys Nyne.’ In an ode to Prince Henry, when the boy was nine years old, Erasmus congratulates him on having in his house that ‘Skelton, who is the luminary and honour of British literature.’ No one was fitter than Erasmus to appreciate Skelton's wit and learning; his testimony is therefore especially valuable to confute the laureate's detractors; but, as Goldsmith has observed, great men generally understand and praise one another, while inferior writers endeavour to bring others down to their own level.
Skelton's appointment as tutor to a prince shows the esteem in which he must have been held by society in general as well as by Erasmus. The pupil himself not a little contributes to the master's credit; for in afterlife Henry proved to be imbued with real learning, and a fervent love of literature. He was vividly interested in the efforts made to improve the English language; he assembled artists and learned men around him. That strength of will, which was his characteristic, grasped the sweets of knowledge as eagerly as those of pleasure and power. Before students of history join in the ridicule and hostility which have been directed against that great king, they must investigate his titles to the gratitude of posterity. It must never be forgotten that he made England the arbiter of Europe, and founded the Anglican Church; he also greatly contributed to the edification of English letters. Skelton, whom Henry must have greatly respected as his former teacher, doubtless often conversed with the king on literary subjects and amused the merry monarch with satirical productions. The laureate's other associates at court, are Thynne, clerk of the royal kitchen, whom the king promised to protect in his attacks against the clergy; Sir Thomas Elyot, whose endeavours were notable in the work of creating a vernacular style; Parker, Surrey, Wyatt, literary favourites of the king; gentle Sir Thomas More, who was not without considerable pantagruelistic tendencies, who perhaps loved staying at home to read and dream, and examine his shells, his minerals, his Indian ape, his fox, and other animals, much better than coming to court, but was as it were compelled to yield to imperious Henry's will; Lily, the grammarian; most likely Dunbar, the Scottish poet, who often visited England; and officious Garnesche, the usher, who carried the Princess Mary through the surf on landing in France, and against whom the malicious monarch directed the shafts of the Laureate's satire. The pompous cardinal himself condescended to patronise Skelton, who probably did not object to be on good terms with the great man, at least while that dignitary was basking in the sunshine of royal favour.
Skelton was therefore a court poet; a man of learning and repute in his day, and not, as some seem to have thought, a poor, obscure priest, envious of Wolsey's splendour. Skelton had indeed taken orders in 1498, and held the title of Rector of Diss in Norfolk; but in those times clerical residence was not very rigidly enforced, and and it is not likely that the poet, generally in favour at court, would willingly have buried himself alive in the Norfolk parsonage. He doubtless preferred residing near the court, where he could observe the ways of the world, become as versed in the knowledge of men as he was in that of the ancient writers, and find materials for his satirical rhymes. Gifted with a sensitive and fervid temperament, he must have liked the excitement of society; and he must have felt that the best manner of improving the language — and this culture seems to have been the chief purpose of his life — was to imprint upon it the tints of that passion which springs from intercourse with the world, as the Geyser from the boiling lake. He knew that pedantry, coldness, affectation, were the defacement and ruin of tongues. From his musings over the decline of Greek and Roman letters, he must have learnt the great lesson that a real sentiment and not cold rhetoric is the vital principle of literature. He accordingly fired his mind with passion from the burning pile of the world, but with the passion of philosophers, which is satire, or rather the complex combination of sentiments of which satire is the effect. From the days of the Hebrew prophets, and the time when Juvenal thundered forth his invectives, to the bitter accents of Byron, and the mad Circean carnival of Shelley's irony, sublime discontent and satire has been the characteristic of the greatest men; and those who have never played the Quixote have not ascended to the highest degree among the immortal hierarchy.
Not being a stranger to the manners of the days when Henry VII. was king, Skelton must have been interested in observing the changes brought about by a new generation. That love for wealth and apparel which Andrew Borde, some years afterwards so shrewdly noted as being characteristic of the English, was, during the reign of Henry VIII., no longer repressed by the terroristic regimen of collectors. Under the late King, poverty and and avarice had spread far and wide throughout the realm. But now a golden age, in the literal sense, had dawned; luxury, as well as learning, was revived, and was displayed with almost oriental profuseness. Gold and silver, pearls of great price came from the coffers where they had been concealed, and sparkled on the breasts of ladies, on the vesture of noblemen. Clothiers, gold-beaters, weavers, had full employment. More bound his Utopian convicts in golden fetters. The adventure of the Field of the Cloth of Gold was but the climax of the pomp and pride of the time. Never were king and queen more brilliant than Henry VIII. and Catherine of Aragon. The festivities of their marriage lasted six months. They were but the royal gems of a parterre in which the white and green of Tudor mingled with the violet and miniver-purpled gowns of the Knights of the Bath, the crimson velvet robes of dukes set with pearls, and the lettice-edged scarlet trains of courtly beauties. Imagine the King and a dozen other maskers coming to Wolsey's palace disguised as shepherds, with clothes of fine cloth of gold and crimson satin, with beards of fine gold or silver wire, every hair of which sparkled in the glare of torches borne by satin-clothed attendants. Attracted by the lustre of royal splendour, literary men came forth, as, when the sun rises, crabs crawl from their beds of sand. Odes and dedications abounded. Mars, Jupiter, Hercules, were once more pitilessly dragged from their Olympus to do duty as ‘properties’ in the laudatory compositions of the age. Morus was bold enough to compare the new era with the preceding reign, and to rejoice that a happier time was come, when the people of England no longer stood in dread of spies and tax-gatherers, when the merchant again launched his vessel on the waters, and illiberal strong boxes no longer withheld the riches of the land. As Skelton's position enabled him to enjoy many social privileges, we can fancy him visiting the court, and greeting the Countess of Surrey, by whom he was patronised, and perhaps even the queen and maids of honour, according to that custom which so delighted Erasmus. He enters the presence-chamber, or is warned by the officer's trumpet to approach a supper-table covered with quaint devices of churches, castles, beasts, birds, fowls, and personages. Turning from the splendour of the court, he casts a somewhat cynical eye on the pomps and vanities of Wolsey, that modern Eutropius who would at the last have no Chrysostom to intercede for him; Skelton satirically marks the gorgeous vestments of the cardinalship, the torches, and the banquets, and the plaudits of the crowd, and the flatteries of courtiers; and what a poem on ‘Mutabilitie’ the old philosopher might have written had he lived to see what he foretold — the fall of this energetic priest — Wolsey's death in the quiet abbey, when his prestige had departed, and the velvet-clothed gentlemen, and the yeoman of the barge, and the pure wine ever flowing, and the crooks, and the heralds, and the cross-bearers, and the horses, and the pleasures devised for the King's consolation, had vanished away like unsubstantial dreams.
Although Skelton was not to see this consummation, he in the meanwhile contributed to it. His friend William Thynne, clerk of the royal kitchen, and himself not very friendly to the bishops, is said to have prompted the Laureate to attack Wolsey. Such satire was by no means un-uncongenial to Henry. His fiery spirit could not but feel the curb of the Church; like a young horse under a rider, he had a disagreeable sense of restraint. In vain had Wolsey endeavoured to tame him — now by enjoining the prince to read nineteen folios of Aquinas, then by making him go through a course of boisterous pleasure. The King's powerful organization was not to be subdued in either way. Wolsey, whose nose denotes more energy than meditative power, seems not to have understood that Henry's will was to be courted and complied with at all hazards; had he determined to retain Henry's favour at any price, at any risk of alienating the Pope, he probably would not have fallen; but not being satisfied with the height he had reached, he, like so many other great men, was at last conquered by fate. The beginnings of the end were, as in all other matters, slow and gradual. In Skelton's first attack, entitled ‘Colin Cloute,’ the allusions to Wolsey are few and delicate. That satire is directed against the clergy in general; Skelton's indignation rises against the luxury, pride, and ignorance of priests and monks. He tears the mask away wich such violence as almost to flay the faces of his victims. To read this poem is to evoke from the catacombs of the past, from the vaults of ruined convents and abbeys, a motley multitude of monks, Cistercians, Virginians, Benedictines; to see them burying their sensual faces in cups of hypocras, or discussing the masterpieces of the cooks, or consecrating the decaying bones of macerated saints in shrines radiant with pearls and precious stones, or winding through villages and cities to conciliate the people and arrogate sacerdotal privileges. An ill-concealed spirit of antagonism was diffused among the people; women, butchers, servants, apprentices, carpenters would read forbidden translations of the Scriptures, and scoff at Papistical ordinances. The general discontent converges in ‘Colin Cloute;’ in which no charge which could be laid on a graceless clerical corporation is forgotten; neither the ignorance which is unable to construe gospel and epistle, nor the neglect of midnight masses, the traffic in mitres, the yoke of citations and excommunications laid on the poor, the wearing singular garments of russet and hair. The satirist inveighs against the disputations, contentions, and heresies that corrode the Church; some members of which are tainted by Lutheran doctrines, or Wyckliffian errors, or Hussian, Arian, Pelagean tendencies. Skelton also refers to the political obnoxiousness of the clergy, in a passage which must have reflected the feelings of many a haughty nobleman, and perhaps of the King himself.
[Quotes ‘Colin Clout’, lines 595–7, 613–14, 629–31.]
All those invectives are hurled in short lines of five or six syllables, rhyming in couplets, triplets, quartets, falling and rattling down like hailstones in a storm; merciless, abrupt, and copious, the words strike and rebound till they take away the breath; wit flashes like lightning through that storm in which the thunder of indignation booms. Skelton's attempt to translate his passion into a vernacular form involves a struggle with an imperfect language; he fully appreciates the nature of the conflict, and acknowledges that he has not achieved so consummate a triumph as he would have wished.
[Quotes lines 53–8.]
Rugged as his language is, it can reflect the various moods of his valiant mind. Towards the end of the poem he relents, and declares that he decries no good bishop, no good priest, no good canon; and he concludes with a metaphor, in which he expresses his aspiration towards rest —
The somewhat mournful opening of the poem shows that he had a sense of the uselessness of casting too much truth abroad on the world —
[Quotes lines 1–5, 13–14.]
Cockneys who steam down the Thames, and captains who anchor off Erith, will be glad to recollect that Skelton wrote his ‘Colin Cloute’ in that town, while he was on a visit at his friend Thynne's father's ‘howse.’
In ‘Why come ye not to court?’ the Laureate threw off all restraint. Wolsey is personally attacked in that virulent satire, in which series of vituperative enumerations succeed one another like the waves of snakes in some serpents' cave, or after the Ophidian adventure in Pandemonium. Had the old rector — for he must have been nearly sixty when he wrote this — been soured by lack of promotion, or is the virulence of his language to be ascribed to the tone of satire in that age? As it is, the verse flows on like a rill of Tartarus, the fluid of which is molten metal, and evolves clouds of stifling vapours. The images arise like malicious imps attendant on furies; and all this rout of horrors is directed against the hapless Cardinal with the science of a Prospero waving his wand for the punishment of some obscene slave. Feature after feature, Skelton flays and dissects his antagonist's character; he shows that its primary element is an iron will, on which he insists with emphatic repetition:
[Quotes ‘Why Come Ye Nat to Court?’ lines 102–4.]
That will has brought Wolsey pomp and pride; he keeps himself in luxury and sensuality; he affects to rule the roast, to usurp speech at council, to mar all things in the ‘Chamber of Starres.’ Noblemen and barons cower before before the imperious priest, as sheep before a ‘bocher's dogge’
[Quotes lines 304–8.]
And it is a fact that in that age many noblemen were unable to sign their name.
Wolsey is also charged with ruling the King by craft and subtlety; laws melt like snow before the Cardinal's will, bland is his breath of flattery. Probably instituting in his mind a comparison between his own career and that of Wolsey, the Laureate asks what was this upstart? No doctor of divinity, no doctor of law, but a puny master of arts whom the King thought fit to endow with prelacy; a man who certainly knew the humanities, but was ignorant of the sciences, philology, philosophy, astronomy —
[Quotes lines 517–19.]
Does this reproach intimate that Skelton himself was conversant with those writers? did he suffer from the comparison between his acquirements and the lack of promotion he had to bear? did he remember the days when, more than any other man at court, he influenced the mind of Henry? did he chafe at being supplanted by this upstart Cardinal? To crown his grievances, had Wolsey's credit brought the author of ‘Colin Cloute’ into disfavour at court? He warns the King respecting the consequences of having so powerful a rival:-
[Quotes lines 582, 584–7.]
A gentle hint is thrown, intimating that the King must be bewitched to have such a favourite as Wolsey. Petrarch tells how Charlemagne was bewitched in a like fashion; but still further extending his researches on this point, the horrified Laureate finds it recorded in Gaguin that King Louis of France elevated a poor man, by name Balua, to splendour, to chancellorship, to cardinalship; until
[Quotes lines 734–7.]
Scarcely, however, has he uttered this significant warning, than he repents of so cruel an allusion:
[Quotes lines 743–6.]
He hints, however, at the existence of some real danger, by comparing the Cardinal to a mouse fearlessly dwelling in a cat's ear; and he indulges in an aspiration to the effect that Henry may retain a sound zoological knowledge:-
[Quotes lines 769–74.]
Again recurring to examples of traitors' deaths, he alludes to the punishment of Master Mewtas, the King's French secretary, who had informed the French king of Henry's designs:-
[Quotes lines 792–3.]
That secretary has, it seems, taken his
pasport to pas
To the devyll, Sir Sathanas,
To Pluto and Syr Belyall. [lines 800, 802–3]
Notwithstanding the manifold details given respecting the Cardinal, Skelton does not intend to leave that ‘matter mysticall’ completely aside.
[Quotes lines 823–8.]
Towards the end of the poem, he bemoans the sad state of the country:-
[Quotes lines 1021–4, 1027–37.]
He concludes with explaining how he came to write this satire:-
[Quotes lines 1199–202, 1205–8, 1222.]
Such is this extraordinary production, in which the indignation of a fine mind is clothed in such power, invention, and copiousness of diction. There is no better type of satire; Skelton's metre is all his own; the words spring from line to line like so many monkeys, pointing, grinning, chattering, howling, biting. The similes have that pitiless pungency which Butler afterwards evinced. The whole is breathless and fierce as a panther's attack. In ‘Colin Cloute’ there were but generalities; here the personality lends piquancy to the poem.
This great satire is a most valuable illustration of that period of Henry VIII.'s reign, which preceded the Reformation; it is the best poetical expression of the sentiments that then pervaded the minds of men — the pride of the Saxon fermenting against the haughty demeanor of Church dignitaries, the rebellion of the northern spirit against the dominion of a foreign hierarchy. Roy, Lindsay, declaim against the corruptions of the clergy; but in these writers the political element is not salient, as it is in Skelton's invective. The latter echoes the grievances of the court as well as those of the people; he complains that the Cardinal threatens to checkmate the King. The colours of Skelton's picture show his antagonist's character with more vividness than any chronicle. Pride and ambition were Wolsey's chief attributes; and although when viewed apart from other traits, the proportion of them which has been laid to his charge may appear exaggerated, the relations of other writers can furnish an equilibrium and compensation to the estimate of Wolsey's character; but it is not the less certain that Skelton's portrait of him is indispensable for a correct view of the Cardinal. Skelton's defects are those of reformers — a propensity to half truths, a violent adherence to one side of the question; but with the shortcomings of satirists he also had their virtues — the power and justice which differentiate a satire, however harsh, from a libel, the writings of Juvenal from those of Dennis. Good satire is, in earnest natures, the product of a strong sense of justice rather than an overflow of animal spirits; it is therefore essentially practical; and such was Skelton's invective. Before him, Piers Ploughman had cautiously given vent to his feelings in allegorical poems; Chaucer's caustic wit had ridiculed monks without any other purpose than to give the artistic representation of a class and furnish matter for boisterous merriment. Lindsay inveighs against the clergy in a far less vigorous and original manner than the Rector of Diss, his long cadences, more like a lamentation than a scourge, flows like tears which course one another down the cheeks. But in Skelton's writings English satire first bears the new characteristic which it has since presented, without making artistic effect his chief object; he devotes his energies to most powerfully impressing a practical purpose on the reader's mind; in this respect he resembles Luther, who, like him, uses popular invective with a sternly destructive end.
Indignation and loathing against corrupt things are the sentiments which Skeltonic satire fosters; in the same manner did Swift write his withering invectives on mankind, and Pope defend taste against the assaults of Grub-street writers. English satire is a conflagration, and not merely the lambent lightning flashes of a summer evening; it is differentiated by this characteristic from the satire of other countries. Folengo, whose poems have been erroneously considered as having influenced Skelton, ridicules monks without any earnestness, with the bantering indolence of a cook; so varied, unceasing, and purposeless is his laughter, that it very nearly wastes itself, becomes pithless and injures the satirical effect, as too numerous dishes impair, instead of consolidating, the nutritive powers. Rabelais, although presenting a similarity to Cocceius and Skelton, with respect to some characteristics of style, such as copiousness of language and long enumerations, is differentiated from the English satirist by his allegorical method of ridicule; for though his symbolical narratives, which he compares to a ‘medullary bone,’ convey a pithful and important meaning, he is far from personally denouncing ecclesiastical dignitaries; he is playful, and not burning with a sombre earnestness of purpose; his laughter, partaking of artistical rather than of practical irony, throws its brilliancy over the whole circle of human affairs. Skelton concentrates the rays of his irony on one point — the clergy and the cardinal are ever before him; he finally takes the latter as the type of the class and pitilessly analyses him, dissects him, as a microscopist some noxious insect. His satire has all the accuracy of a scientific study; he is not, like Rabelais, obliged to disguise himself for fear of being burned; the King is predisposed in his favour, if not exactly on his side. Skelton gives in his writings a reflection of the political wants of the age — the destruction of a power which stood in obnoxious rivalry to the Crown. He appeals to the people, prepares them for the Reformation which Henry was to accomplish; his writings are what Hudibras would have been had that poem been written before the downfall of the Puritans. Hence his denunciations of the grievances of the time — ‘So myche nobyll prechyng, and so lytell amendment’ — ‘so lytell care for the comyn weall, and so myche nede’ — ‘so myche pride of prelattes, so cruell and so kene.’ [‘Speak Parrot’, lines 445, 466, 468.] His indignation strings grievance after grievance together, like the beads on a chaplet; he enumerates the crossings and blessings performed by the clergy, the poverty of the people, the taxes, the wasteful banqueting, the hatred that prevails against the Church, the abundance of beggars, the boldness of vagabonds. He is too earnest for indulging in sceptical or frolicsome laughter. His copiousness of words is not intended to heighten buffoonery, but to strengthen the expression, present it under all its facets, with all available resources; he recruits words as a captain does men, in order to aggravate his attack; his clearness strikes like a sword, while the brilliant polygonal mirror of Rabelais merely reflects surrounding things. Skelton's similes are not rollicking and sprightly, like those of the French author, but fierce and abusive; he calls Wolsey —
So fatte a maggott, bred of a flesshe flye;
Was never such a ffylty gorgon, nor such
an epicure,
Syns Dewcalyon's flodde, I make the feste
and sure.[‘Speak Parrot’, lines 502–4]
Whenever he uses fable, as when he makes a parrot declaim against the evils of the age, it is to lend more variety to his denunciations, and not to disguise them. So circumstantial is he, that were it not for the variety of his imagery and the purpose running through his writings, he would have remained as realistic as Lydgate; and it is by this characteristic that he is linked to the middle ages. Like other branches of literature, satire has its periods of growth; it is at first cradled in myths and allegories; it then passes into the minuteness and detail of the chronicle; and at last some powerful idea is implanted into it, pervades it, links it to some great movement, organises it into a living form, which, however, like a hamadryad, may present some traces of the past. This latter stage, which, considered relatively to modern times, is but the first phase, is exhibited in Skelton's verse. As the fabric of civilization becomes more complicated, satirical writing becomes more refined, embraces more relations of social life, is impregnated with subtler thought, reflects more shifting and delicate hues of mind; this aspect it presents in Dryden, Pope, and Addison. But it is with satire as with poetry; although its processes may become more refined and complicated in highly civilized ages, its substratum, its essence is rather clouded than really improved by such refinement, as the highly-polished man of mature age has lost the freshness of youth. Pope's invective is to that of Skelton, what his translation of Homer is to the original. Swift's ‘Gulliver,’ the most profound work which the eighteenth century has produced, may be considered as a by no means unsuccessful attempt to revive the old pungency of satire; it is a pre-Raphaelite picture; and when Pope compared Swift to Rabelais, he could not more pointedly have hinted how closely Gulliver's coarseness, realism, and allegorical meaning approximate him to the old satirical creations. Skelton, compared with which even Butler is highly artificial, is a well of undefiled English satire in all is freshness. To him invective was an element of opposition and of popular instruction; he strove to rouse the passions of men by curt denunciations in the common dialect; his blows are at once vigorous, trenchant, and embarrassed, like those of a young soldier, still incumbered with armour. Skelton's satire was a most perfect expression of that wild age in which the stern will of the royal Comus presided over a riot of gushing wealth, portly Churchmen, whose fondness for wine was noted by Erasmus; dull barons whose great banquets included such delicacies as peacocks, seals, and porpoises. The people too had their revellings, for in all ages of irony, reformation, destruction, a thirst for the good things of this world pervades the children of men; the higher motives of human action, faith, enthusiasm, or even some noble superstition, having disappeared, the senses gain the upper hand, whether from a reaction against previous abstinence, or the direct influence of new tendencies, or both causes united. When, in the fifteenth century, irony prevailed in Italy, Pulci expressed, as his great aspiration, a desire to enjoy good game, good wine, and a soft couch; Teofilo Folengo revelled in visions of culinary dainties. At the period of the Reformation, libations were as widely indulged in throughout Germany, as theological discussions; and Piccolomini was aghast at the strenuous potations of the land. The conversaziones of the eighteenth century in France, assumed the forms of suppers, where champagne sparkled as well as wit; and when the crash had come, a liberal distribution of sausages was a prominent characteristic of the Feast of Reason. The roystering tendencies of the sixteenth century in merry England are reflected in Skelton's ‘Tunning of Elynoure Rumming.’ Before Rabelais' epic to wine-drinkers, and the creation of Sancho Panza, this curious poem gives a humorous picture of the sensual element of modern times. It presents the portrait of the queen of ale-wives, the idealization of the glories of beer. Redolent with the fumes of hops, and Saxon all over, like the immortal beverage quaffed by the heroes of the Walhalla, it is the epic of pot life; real as a picture of Teniers, it exhibits the forms of existence and scenes of the ale-house, the tapsters, the potboys, the ringing of the metal, and the overflowing of the cups. Here the peasant, if Wolsey's taxes have left him a penny, can have a full quart of ale, can steep his lips in the bitter froth of a sterling and unadulterated beverage, such as that described by a writer who added some lines to the opening of the poem —
Full Winchester gage
We had in that age;
The Dutchman's strong beere
Was not hopt over heere
To us ‘twas unknowne. (1)
This imitator also declared that there was no smoking in the tavern — Raleigh and his Virginian weed not having yet made their appearance; but notwithstanding this intercalation, there is no doubt that ‘Elynoure Rumming’ was written by Skelton. When the court was kept at Nonsuch, Skelton and other courtiers used to come to this ale-house for refreshment after fishing in the Mole; hence his delineation of the celebrated dame, some of whose descendants' names were to be seen in parish registers as late as the first part of the eighteenth century. (Dyce). That licensed victualler's appearance seems not to have been very inviting —
[Quotes lines 17–19, 27-8, 31–3.]
Her dress consists of a russet gown and mantle of Lincoln green; on Sundays she makes herself fine with ‘her kyrtel Brystow red,’ and a head-dress composed of a —
Whym wham,
Knit with a trym tram,
Upon her brayne pan
Like an Egyptian.[lines 75–8]
Although her ordinary occupation is that of brewing and dispensing beer; it must be owned that she may not be innocent of witchcraft —
She is a tonnish gyb;
The dewyll and she be syb. [lines 99–100]
Her more legitimate business, however, is to dispense ‘noppy ale,’ —
[Quotes lines 104–8.]
Slatternly girls also come to fetch beer
[Quotes lines 123–30.]
Some of the customers have no cash, and bring honey, spoons, shoes, stockings, in exchange for beer. Some timorous people, probably teetotal backsliders, come in at the back door —
Over the hedge and the pale
And all for the good ale.[lines 264–5]
Some thirsty women bring wedding rings, or a husband's cap, or instruments of labour, hatchets, spinning-wheels, needles, thimbles, which they recklessly pawn for ale.
[Quotes lines 301–6.]
In this manner does Elynour's house become a store of miscellaneous articles — skeins of thread, flitches of bacon, frying-pans, walnuts, apples, pears, puddings, sausages. The satirist exposes the pathological results of some of the customers' habits —
[Quotes lines 480–5.]
Nor were surgical diseases unknown to the frequenters of the tavern; there was an old lady who —
Had broken her shyn
At the threshold coming in …
She yelled like a calfe.[lines 494–5, 500]
But the most comical figure among all these customers is that of the prudish, affected woman —
[Quotes lines 582–5.]
She rises from the table, calls the hostess apart, and explains in a confidential manner that she has not a groat wherewith to pay; but she settles the account by giving up her amber beads. At last the poet exclaims:-
My fingers ytche,
I have written to mytche
Of this mad mummynge
Of Elynoure Rummynge.[lines 618–21]
Notwithstanding its humour, this satire is a bitter exposition of human weakness. It is, in its way, and in a lower sphere, almost as sardonic as the invectives of Swift and Juvenal. There is in it none of the boisterous gaiety of Rabelais. With the French satirist, drinking is associated with reckless jollity, if not with pleasure and knowledge; here it is a vice, productive of squalor and wretchedness, it has no attractive side, and all its sombre colours are displayed. Here again we see the character of English satire — always practical, and moral when not political; severe and straightforward, without any halo of illusive sprightliness around it. Pope ridiculing the poverty and dulness of Grub street writers, Swift hurling burning missiles from the depths of his troubled heart, are as different from Voltaire as Skelton is from Rabelais. Stern, pitiless, almost despairing reproof on one side, inexhaustible levity on the other — concentrated bitterness, diffusive merriment — such are the contrasts presented by the satirists of the two greatest nations in the world; the Germans and Italians respectively present analogous general characteristics, diversified only by secondary tints. Luther too was earnest and destructive, while Folengo was sceptical and light-hearted. ‘Elynoure Rumming’ is the saddest of Skelton's works; there is no relenting, no hope in it, as in the poems against the clergy, to the end the scene remains a ‘mad mummynge,’ the wretched actors of which sacrifice everything to their sensuality. Like Hogarth's ‘Progress,’ it pictures infatuated man under the sway of passion, recklessly sacrificing his all to morbid propensities. The frailties of human beings have ever been the theme of satirists and cynics, and Skelton was one of the most earnest of these; his view of the world pained him, and made him misanthropical. His invectives against the clergy are not to be ascribed to mere envy and disappointment; it is easy to see they were a natural product of his disposition, for what could disappointed interest have to do with a satire like ‘Elynour Rumming’? This poem only shows what cynicism, what sorrowful pity this old laureate's character contained. His frankness of expression well recalls his rich, sturdy, generous nature; his writings well represent the general character of his age. He stands alone in his time, as every great satirist usually does. Is it Swift, or Addison, or Pope, who will tell us most about the eighteenth century? In the same manner we glean more from Skelton than from More, who was a dreamer and ascetic, as well as a humorist; or from the inferior writers of the age, Heywood, Barclay; of from the polished and artificial Wyatt and Surrey.
Even in Skelton's time, began the transitionary period which was to prepare the way for the Shakespearean epoch; Wyatt and Surrey produced polished imitations of Italian poetry. Skelton forms an intermediate figure between those writers and the ‘barbaric pearl and gold’ of Lyd-gate, and some of his poems give a foreshadow of that Italian revival, under which the English language was to rise to its first perfection; he could doubtless have borne an important part in this great movement, had he not sacrificed poetry to political irony; like Swift, he was essentially a pamphleteer, and his writings enjoyed a widespread popularity. On the other hand, he incurred the contempt of some Elizabethan critics.
But even Puttenham, Meres, and in our age Hallam, who have depreciated Skelton's rude rhymes, could scarcely have objected to the graceful ‘Boke of Philip Sparrow.’ In this exquisite poem appears the best side of his character, his love for nature and the beautiful, his delicate sensitiveness, his genial humour. The language of this poem is quite different from that of Skelton's satirical writings; it flows easily, without unnatural contortions, like a brook which mirrors the flowers of a garden.
Nothing can be more graceful than the subject; as birds have ever excited much sympathy among human beings, the death of a bird is one of the most humorsome and melancholy themes which a poet can choose. Catullus wrote a sonnet upon it. The middle ages indulged in graceful imaginings on the relations between birds and men. A legend of the time describes an island tenanted by monks, in which birds joined the pious worshippers in singing the praises of God. St. Guthlac was said to have lived with swallows, who nested in his cell. Assisi was wont to preach the gospel to birds and butterflies, called swallows his sisters, taught a locust to sing hymns, and persuaded birds to fast on Fridays. But the winged tribes were seldom chosen to be the heroes of verse; and in the great Fox Satires of the thirteenth century, the actors were chiefly quadrupeds. The ‘Boke of Sparrow’ is not then derived from the literature of the middle ages; it is an original work, in which irony and burlesque have given place to humour and gentleness. It is a dirge for the soul of Philip Sparrow, who had been slain by one Gyb, a cat. After wishing the departed soul immunity from the attacks of Pluto, the Furies, and Cerberus, the poet invokes the aid of philosophy as an alleviation of his grief.
[Quotes ‘Philip Sparrow’, lines 98–107.]
After describing at length the various habits and capabilities of the deceased bird, he apostrophises the murderous cat in this wise —
[Quotes lines 282–91, 309–10.]
He then gives a long enumeration of birds, whom he convokes to the funeral ceremony —
[Quotes lines 387–8, 392–405, 420–1.]
And so on for nearly a hundred lines. Among those summoned to the obsequies is the phoenix —
The byrds of Araby
That potencially
May never dye.[lines 513–15]
The funeral ceremonies being concluded, the poet sheds his last tear over the grave —
[Quotes lines 587–93.]
The state of the English language precludes its being used ‘to write ornatly,’ so that the epitaph is composed in Latin —
[Quotes lines 826–9.]
Follows a ‘commendacion,’ in which Skelton's verse assumes erotic tendencies; he becomes a doughty knight and defender of womankind —
[Quotes lines 977–83.]
He then mentions his ‘maistres’ with some enthusiasm —
[Quotes lines 998–1001, 1031–2, 1041–58.]
The bird is forgotten in all these gallantries, until the end of the poem, when ‘here foloweth an adycion made by Maister Skelton’ against his critics. In those verses he complains of the attacks made on the ‘Boke,’ and argues that the critical ‘commendation’ is not out of place, inasmuch as it was intended to assuage the grief consequent on the Sparrow's interment; and he conjures the bird —
[Quotes lines 1324–7, 1330–6, 1367–70.]
And he concludes with wishing his detractors —
No worse than is contayned.
In verses two or thre
That followe as ye may se:
Luride, cur, livor, volucris pia funera damnas?
Talia te rapiant rapiunt quae fata volucrem!
Et tamen invidia mors tibi continua.[lines 1376–82]
From which it appears that in those times laureates were wont to reply somewhat vigorously to their reviewers.
Coleridge characterizes the ‘Boke of Philip Sparrow’ as ‘an exquisite and original poem.’ It evinces Skelton's powers as a humorist; the genial pleasantry of praying for the bird's soul, and summoning all manner of birds to the funeral, had not been equalled in the range of middle-ages poetry, and has perhaps not been surpassed in modern times, even by Sterne's celebrated ‘Ass,’ and Southey's ‘Maggot in a Kernel;’ such delicate flowers of fancy only belong to the most fruitful and genial minds; a special development is required for this humour, which can be produced by those men alone who have gone through the whole range of ideas, have beheld human nature under all its aspects. As, according to the ancient tradition, stags become youthful by feeding on serpents, such minds are led into humour by their habits of moral scepticism; which by acting and reacting on more delicate feelings, give rise to a gentle satire, which will not be found in the early stages of literature, which differs from the Fox Satires by its tenderness and from the early fables by a less glaring simplicity. Gresset and La Fontaine (2) have given examples of this spirit, which also appears in several passages of Shakespeare.
‘Speke Parrot,’ is another poem in which the hero is a bird, but it is a satirical rather than humorous work, as the parrot vehemently declaims against the clergy. In the ‘Bowge of Courte,’ and the ‘Garland of Laurell,’ Skelton displays his talent for serious poetry. The former is an allegorical poem, which he wrote after the example of the ancient poets.
[Quotes ‘Bouge of Court’, lines 8–14.]
His minor poems include a fierce invective against the ‘Scottes,’ an ode ‘On Time,’ and some hymns to the Persons of the Trinity. He also wrote several plays, of which the ‘Magnificence’ alone survives; it is certainly superior to the masques and mysteries of the time, and has been considered as entitling Skelton to rank among the fathers of the English drama.
Skelton had some literary quarrels in his day. He was no doubt the assailant in some of those squabbles, for according to Churchyard, he was inclined to talk as he wrote (Dyce); and Fuller observes that he had too much wit, and that his satirical spirit unfortunately lighted on ‘three noli me tangere's, viz., the rod of a schoolmaster, the cowls of friars, and the cap of a cardinal. The first gave him a lash, the second deprived him of his livelihood, the third almost outed him of his life.’ Henry no doubt encouraged Skelton to attack Garnesche, the poems against whom purport to have been written ‘by the kynges most noble commaundement.’ Garnesche had been the first assailant, as appears from the opening lines of the first poem against Garnesche:-
Sithe ye have me chalyngyd, Master Garnesche,
Rudely revilyng me in the kynges noble hall.[lines 1–2]
This Garnesche was a knight, gentleman usher to the king; he attended the Princess Mary to France in 1514, and performed a feat of gallantry when she was wrecked at Boulogne: ‘Her shippe with greate difficultie was brought to Bulleyn, and with great jeopardy at the entryng of the haven, for the master ran the shippe hard on shore, but the botes were redy and reseyved this noble lady, and at the landyng Sir Christopher Garnysche stode in the water, and toke her in his armes, and so caryed her to land.’ In these days vessels who go ashore near Boulogne go to pieces pieces immediately, and no lifeboats are ready.
Other adversaries of Skelton's were Gagwynne or Gaguin, the French ambassador, who was a good historian for the age; William Lily, the grammarian, who charged Skelton with having no knowledge and being no poet; Dunbar, the great Scotch satirist, wrote a ‘flyting’ against Skelton, to which the Laureate replied; but these compositions seem to have been prompted by rude and boisterous bantering rather than personal hatred. The most celebrated of Skelton's literary quarrels was that between the Laureate and Barclay. This writer, whose most widely known work is a translation of Sebastian Brandt's ‘Ship of Fools,’ attacked the dirge of ‘Philip Sparrow;’ but Skelton retorted in no harsher terms than the following allusion —
[Quotes ‘Garland of Laurel’, lines 1257–60.]
Barclay also left a poem ‘Contra Skeltonum,’ which has perished. In his fourth Eclogue, however, may be read some of the most scurrilous invectives which envy could devise. He classed Skelton among a ‘shamfull rabble’ of ‘rascolde poets.’
In subsequent ages, Skelton has been depreciated by Meres, Puttenham, Warton, and Hallam; on the other hand, he has been praised by Disraeli, Coleridge, Southey. Every one knows Pope's line, about heads of houses quoting Skelton; from which it would seem that Skelton was as popu-popular in the eighteenth century as Pope is in our age.
In the ‘Garland of Laurell’ Skelton gives a complete list of his writings. He wrote that poem in praise of himself, with the egotism of old age. He was at that time sojourning at Sherifhotten Castle, Yorkshire, then in possession of the Duke of Norfolk, the father-in-law of Lady Surrey, mother of the great poet, and patroness of the Laureate. It seems that some ladies had agreed to crown the old poet with a garland of laurel; and it is pleasant to think that he was honoured and befriended in his old age. Skelton seems to have resided for some years at Diss, as some short poems indicate, which he wrote at the expense of his parishioners. According to Fuller he was suspended from his ecclesiastical office through the influence of the monks, who were bent on retaliating for his attacks. ‘Such foul Lubbers,’ says Fuller, ‘fell heavy on all which found fault with them.’ The sly Laureate had run away with a lady, and married her secretly. His diocesan, Nix, Bishop of Norwich, a cruel and licentious man, prompted by the friars, availed himself of this adventure to suspend Skelton; in those days the marriage of a priest was considered a far greater crime than his having a concubine. The poet next succumbed in his unequal struggle with Wolsey, who had not forgotten the ‘Why come ye not to court?’ This Cardinal sent officers to capture Skelton, who, however, fled to the cloisters of Westminster, where he took sanctuary. There he was protected, and kindly treated by his old friend Abbot Islip; and the old Laureate thus spent the remaining years of his life in repose, amusing himself now and then with writing verses to the memory of Henry VII., his Queen, and other royal personages buried at Westminster. He died June 21, 1529, and was buried in the chancel of St. Margaret's.
His memory shared the fate which always befalls great writers whose satirical character has made a strong impression on their time. A great number of apocryphal pranks and comic writings were ascribed to him, as afterwards to Rabelais. Anthony Wood charges him with having in his living and throughout the diocese, been ‘esteemed more fit for the stage than for the pew or pulpit.’ The ‘Merie Tales of Skelton’ are a series of buffoonic stories composed after his death, relating singular antics as having been performed by him; thus he is described as coming to an inn, calling for drink, not being attended to, crying ‘Fire!’ in order to arouse the people, and pointing to his throat when asked by a terrified crowd where the conflagration was. Such are the traits which delighted the readers of the time, who sought for ‘pleasaunt recreacion of minde’ without caring much about the truth. Far other, however, is the man as he appears in his writings. He indeed appears, especially to our age, to have indulged in vulgarity and coarseness. The fastidious Elizabethan critics censured him for those faults; but they wrote when Italian polish had already profoundly leavened the English taste; Wyatt's satire had been diluted by a refined sentimentalism, and Surrey had imitated Petrarch. Skelton had not travelled, like the son of his patroness; he had not seen a Geraldine at Florence, or become imbued with the Italian spirit. He was the product of an earlier and coarser age, and must not be charged with the blemishes of his time. He performed the necessary work of his age — a work which Surrey, Wyatt would have had to perform had they lived under the same circumstances and had the same ability. Satire was sufficiently coarse as late as the eighteenth century; in this age there is no satire at all; and to charge Skelton with the faults of his age and vocation is to charge the ichthyosaurus with uncouthness. His instrument, the language, was very imperfect; his attempts to improve it, and his consciousness of its roughness, were weighty evidences of his literary penetration. His embarrassed phraseology is the result of his desperate endeavour to enrich the literary dialect by graftings from the vernacular tongue.
In writing he had two purposes to accomplish — to write as ‘ornately’ as possible, but especially to make his language popular, in order that his satire might be widely relished. Wyatt and Surrey, on the contrary, were mere court poets, comparative purists whose only care was to prune their language of ‘ragged’ words and imitate the flow of Italian verse. Had Skelton been less copious and popular he would have been more polished; but what he would have gained in elegance, he would have lost in power, candour, and variety of expression. Even his predecessors, such as Chaucer, and many of his contemporaries, Roy, Lindsay, Barclay, are not so tattered and rugged, merely because they did not make that effort to popularity of language, which Skelton did. He probably, like Sir Thomas More, studied the vernacular speech in streets and markets. It was he who gave the modern impulse to the fixation of the language, by exhibiting its vernacular power in its fullest aspect. and demonstrating the extreme ruggedness of that speech; he showed from what the language was to be purified before it could become a perfect vehicle of literary expression. In his writings are seen shoals of vernacular words such as fysgygge, flirt; blother, to gabble, tunning, brewing, &c. His writings are like Roger Bacon's optic tube, in which future events were discerned; in Skelton's verse is foreshown the excellence which a succeeding generation attained. But as for himself, he was not bent on writing agreeable sentimental verses inspired from Petrarch. He had studied Juvenal much more than Petrarch, and was bent on imitating the satirist and not the sonnet-poet. His mission was to express the rough, unsettled, and transitionary side of the age. The language presents both power and beatuy; Skelton expressed its power, and left the beauty to be evinced by his younger successors; but in casting his speech in the popular mould he was as great and useful a neologist as those who assumed the Italian manner. His works are like the great geological strata, which are the pillars of the earthly crust — the deposits where uncouth and gigantic creations, ichthyosauri, plesiosauri, pterodactyls, are found; these layers must not be expected to yield brilliant peals and precious stones, but the saurians are, to philosophic eyes, more valuable than many diamonds, because they bear witness to great evolutions in the history of the globe. Far above them are the alluvial fields that produce fruits and flowers, but each series of layers has its own importance, is a thought of God, intimately linked to the great whole. It is thus in literature, where every phase must be understood and nothing depreciated. Skelton was the ablest representative of the reforming and satirical spirit of his age; More, the only Englishman of his time who could have vied with the Laureate in learning and wisdom, adheres to a conservative and mystical spirit. Both those great men lived at court; both were humorists; but More was an ascetic and mystic; Skelton a cynic. That good-nature, which is often compatible with the most apparently severe cynicism, made him, however, always ready to regret the violence which his fervid temperament imprinted to his attacks; impulsive, but not virulent, his anger stings but does not fester in the wound; his pugnacity, as evinced in the quarrel with the Scotch poet, is often the effect of strength and buoyant spirits rather than deliberate hostility. He had no pride or undue vanity, but the amiable and harmless egotism of an aged literary man surrounded by a friendly coterie. That garland of laurel, which ladies wove for him in his time, has now been somewhat withered and forgotten in the rush of ages; Abbot Islip, Wolsey, Nix, the Benedictine friars, the old Laureate, have passed away; but Skelton's phantom can still be evoked from his writings, while his body is undergoing its changes under St. Margaret's Church; around which gin shops disperse their ‘tunning,’ and the tide of human nature flows continually.
1 These lines were appended to the 1624 edition of ‘Elynor Rumming’; they are reprinted in Dyce, II, p. 155.
2 Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset (1709–77), French satiric poet and dramatist, and Jean de la Fontaine (1621–95), author of ‘The Fables’.