1790 Henry James Pye (1745–1813) was made the king’s poet on the death of his predecessor in the post, Thomas Warton. Neither is memorable. But of all the 22 poets who have held the post, Pye is routinely cited as the prime example of the mediocrity associated with the laureateship – versifying flunkey to the monarch. He is, along with Thomas Shadwell and William McGonagall, famous for his sublime badness. A sad kind of immortality.
When offered the laureate’s post on Pye’s death in 1813 Walter Scott was advised to turn it down by his patron, the Duke of Buccleuch, because ‘it will stick to you like court [adhesive] plaister’. Scott took the advice and nominated Robert Southey – who went on to become the most ridiculed of laureates for his poem on the death of George III, ‘A Vision of Judgment’. Its sole virtue was to inspire one the great (republican) satires, Byron’s ‘A Vision of Judgement’.
Pye’s was – as laureateships have traditionally been – a political appointment. He was a friend to William Pitt, whose Whiggish-Toryish principles he shared. With revolution raging in France, a ‘safe’ laureate was desirable. The two greatest poets of the age – Robert Burns (radical, ‘low’, and Scottish) and William Cowper (barely sane) – were non-runners.
It was on Pye’s retiring from Parliament, in 1790, that he was given the consolatory appointment. He had prepared himself for it, years before, with a sycophantically loyal ode ‘On the Birth of the Prince of Wales’ (the poem headed his major collection, Poems on Various Subjects, 1787). Birthday poems were the principal task of the laureate and Pye did his worst in the genre.
Pye’s major achievement in the office of laureate was to abolish the annual ‘tierce of Canary wine’ (or ‘butt of sack’) that traditionally went with the post. He had it commuted to a cash remuneration of £27 to supplement the £100 honorarium. The payment continued well into the 20th century, although for nostalgic reasons the wine was also sometimes provided, ex gratia.
As a poet, Pye’s major effort as laureate was an epic on the greatest of English kings, Alfred (1801). Appearing as it did at the same period as Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, it gives a fair demonstration of Pye’s merits as a poet. The following is his description of Alfred burning the cakes:
The objects round him, like the viewless air,
Pass o’er his mind, nor leave an image there;
Hence oft, with flippant tongue, the busy dame
The reckless stranger’s apathy would blame,
Who, careless, let the flame those viands waste,
His ready hunger ne’er refused to taste.
Ah! little deeming that her pensive guest,
High majesty, and higher worth, possess’d:
Or that her voice presumptuous dared to chide
Alfred, her country’s sovereign, and its pride.
Pye’s Aerophorion (1794) is, it is claimed, ‘the first poem in English to celebrate hot-air ballooning’. Hot air would seem to be somehow appropriate.