From The Story of Poetry II: From Skelton to Dryden
|
From The Story of Poetry II: from Skelton to Dryden
A Mirror for Magistrates
Who builds stronger than a mason, a shipwright, or a carpenter?…And when you are asked this question next, say 'a gravemaker'. The houses he makes lasts till doomsday. Go, get thee in, and fetch me a stoup of liquor.
In youth when I did love, did love
Methought it was very sweet…
Clown Gravedigger (Hamlet, Vi, 1600-1601)
In November 1558 Mary Tudor was dying. Calais and the infidelities of her Spanish husband were etched upon her miserable heart. One poet of her reign, the first woman poet in the English tradition, was at Hatfield House, seat of the Cecil family, quietly studying the classics in a seclusion shaded – we must imagine – by English oaks. Earlier in Mary’s reign this poet, who was also the Queen's half-sister Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, had been detained at Woodstock where, with a diamond, she had scratched a tiny verse into a window pane:
Much suspected by me,
Nothing proved can be;
Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.
She may have wanted for paper, because she also wrote a longer poem on a shutter:
Oh, Fortune, thy wresting, wavering state
Hath fraught with cares my troubled wit,
Whose witness this present prison late
Could bear, where once was joy’s loan quit.
Thou caused’st the guilty to be loosed
From bands where innocents were enclosed,
And caused the guiltless to be reserved,
And freed these that death had well deserved.
But all herein can be nothing wrought,
So God send to my foes all they have taught.
Elizabeth’s vengeful prayer was answered: Mary’s life was an intense punishment, for herself and her country, and her death was sorrowful.
In his History of England Keith Feiling gathers the reigns of Edward VI and Mary Tudor into a single chapter entitled ‘Anarchy’, where he recounts how Edward, who was crowned as a boy, died just as he was coming into his own. During his seven-year reign the Reformation hurried forward, partly because Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was no longer braked by the conservative instincts of Henry VIII. When Edward died of consumption, the succession to the Roman Catholic Mary was briefly contested but nevertheless she had five years on the throne.
In his play Queen Mary (1875), Alfred, Lord Tennyson drives the fictionalised queen to the brink of madness and, perhaps, comes close to the truth of her bizarre tragedy. In the text, after Mary discovers the treachery of her beloved young husband, Philip of Spain (‘My star, my son!’), after all her supports are gone and she is dying, and Elizabeth is come triumphantly to see her, she says to a maid in waiting in a moment of lucidity, 'What is the strange thing happiness? Sit down here. / Tell me thine happiest hour.' Happiness was something Tennyson's Mary experienced only briefly, more as promise than on the pulse itself, at the beginning of her political marriage.
Set between Henry VIII's reign, during which English lyric poetry was re-born, and Elizabeth’s, which saw the great flowering of English literature in all its kinds, Mary’s five years are lean in verse. There is a Henrican period – Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey and others – and an Elizabethan age. But there is not a Marian interlude or, indeed, a single major poet who stands out in her reign. Later poets regard her, if they regard her at all, as a bigot, a dumpy, self-deluded caricature of a queen, and as a monster, the author of 300 autos da fe – the burnings of Protestants. Ted Hughes evokes her in an early poem, ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ as ‘Bloody Mary’. He quotes Farrar’s words: ‘If I flinch from the pain of the burning, believe not the doctrine that I have preached.' The poem begins
Bloody Mary’s venomous flames can curl:
They can shrivel sinew and char bone
Of foot, ankle, knee and thigh, and boil
Bowels, and drop his heart a cinder down;
And her soldiers can cry, as they hurl
Logs in the red rush: ‘This is her sermon.’
Whether Mary's flames were venomous or fearful, their consequences were the same. She came to the throne tentatively; there was time for a number of the leading Protestants and reformers to emigrate, but as fear and zeal overtook the Queen, those who stayed behind found retreat cut off. Cranmer, in Tennyson’s play, reflects:
To Strasburg, Antwerp, Frankfurt, Zurich, Worms,
Geneva, Basle – our bishops from their sees
Or fled, they say, or flying – Poinet, Barlow,
Bale, Scory, Coverdale; besides the deans
Of Christchurch, Durham, Exeter and Wells –
Ailmer and Bullingham, and hundreds more;
So they report. I shall be left alone.
No; Hooper, Ridley, Latimer, will not fly.
Later, Tennyson’s Cranmer foresees his death:
Last night I dreamed the faggots were alight,
And that myself was fasten’d to the stake
And found it all a visionary flame,
Cool as the light of old decaying wood;
And then King Harry look’d from out a cloud,
And bade me have good courage; and I heard
An angel cry, ‘There is more joy in Heaven’–
And after that the trumpet of the dead.
|
|
Cranmer's difficulties were political and theological. He couldn’t credit the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Mass. ‘No man can make his Maker,' he said.
The great writing of Mary’s reign was ecclesiastical and political. It consisted of mighty sermons, homilies, tracts and pamphlets from the Protestant and Catholic sides, as well as from the conflicting sides of protestantism, and of speeches either actually delivered at the stake or invented later as propaganda. The Word was a force in the land, censors were busy, and books, like men, women and children, were burned. In 1554 many Protestant ears were, in Feiling's phrase, literally ‘nailed to the pillory’. In 1555, the burnings began in earnest. Thomas Cranmer, whose turn was to come, saw the flames that consumed Latimer and Ridley from the window of his cell at Oxford. At the stake, Latimer declared to Ridley that in the conflagration, Mary had lit a candle that would not be put out.
I begin this history with Mary not because her five years mark a distinct period in themselves, but because during them the energies of a new poetry were gathering and two key anthologies were assembled. The first of these, Tottel's Miscellany, brought together in summary form many of the great lyric poems from her father's fruitful reign and defined the Silver Age of English poetry. The other, A Mirror for Magistrates, was a long-term project begun by George Ferrers when he was Henry VIII's Master of Pastimes. The book was licensed in the first year of Mary's reign, partly printed by John Elder, and brought to fruition by William Baldwin of Oxford in Mary's last year. It was first published in full in 1559, a few months after her death, not under the imprint of the Roman Catholic John Wayland, who had taken it on but was no longer in business, but of Thomas Marsh. Marsh later invited John Higgins and later still, Thomas Blenerhasset, to extend the book with their own and others' work, but although the publishing history of A Mirror in its varous different extensions is complex, the work itself is of limited poetic interest today. It did,. however, shape the reading tastes of three generations and fed strongly into the development of the drama, as well as into verse and prose narrative. Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, the Shakespeare of The Rape of Lucrece and many others either imitated or were inspired by it.
A Mirror grew and grew until it occupied 1,400 tightly-printed pages. The 1610 edition was left to Richard Niccols who, following a suggestion of Thomas Sackville, omitted the prose passages between the poems and handed the whole book over to a single Muse. Though in the first printing the stories begin with Richard II, in subsequent editions they have a much wider base; they constitute a world history in verse told through the sorrowful lives and in the sorrowful voices of great men. The anthology first led and then followed public taste, helping to redefine and popularise the genre of historical narrative. It renews the debt to Boccaccio (Bochas) whose Fall of Princes was cherished in Lydgate's version and with which, initially, the Mirror was to be bound up in a single volume. It also diluted some, at least, of the systematically allegorical features which had deadened the English fifteenth century. The title may allude respectfully to Gower's huge poems, the French Mirour de l'Homme (Speculum Meditantis). Baldwin's contributors, with differing degrees of competence, tell not only how princes fall, but how they respond to their fates. The rudimentary psychology of the better tales foreshadows the greater penetration of the dramatists of Elizabeth's reign. The handling of verse at its best shows, if not inspiration, at least a growing competence in extended forms. Like Tottel's Miscellany, A Mirror was reprinted and expanded time after time. One novel element is the way in which the tragic figures retell their tragedies in their 'own voices’. These narrators are monarchs and great men (and even women) whose fates are cautionary; this is an age when even rulers such as Mary and Philip require instruction: ‘our queen because she is a woman, and our king because he is a stranger’. Those who read the entire Mirror in its various editions find not a single spark of humour in it: the tone is doggedly and often tritely moralistic. All the same, it affected and reflected its age and passed into bibliographical history.
The poets of Mary's reign were understandably much concerned with reversals of fortunes, such as those displayed in A Mirror, as well as with death. They had lived through Henry's reign, and Mary herself had toppled some substantial personages. The most powerful voice in her Court was that of Thomas, Lord Vaux, who died in the middle of her reign.1 Notably, one of his poems – 'I loathe that I did love' (see XXX) – is dramatically mis-remembered by the Clown digging Ophelia's grave in Hamlet, proof of how popular Tottel's book remained half a century after its first publication.
Lord Vaux may strum too insistently on a single note, but it was the note that everyone heard and harkened to, and his vivid emblematic images and clear expression are exemplary. They extend the lyric tradition that had come into focus under Henry VIII, a time in which wise men kept their counsel. 'Companion none is like unto the mind alone'. Contentment came not from secular preferment and success but from thought and reflection in solitude. Here is a stanza from another poem by Lord Vaux (see XXX):
Our wealth leaves us at death, our kinsmen at the grave;
But virtues of the mind unto the heavens with us we have.
Wherefore, for virtue’s sake, I can be well content
The sweetest time of all my life to deem in thinking spent.
‘Our wealth leaves us at death, our kinsmen at the grave’. That and the lines ‘And tract of time begins to weave/Grey hairs upon my head’ and ‘For age with stealing steps/Hath clawed me with his crutch’ are a keynote to the elegiac mood of the time. Lord Vaux’s poems are quiet, strong and complete.
Another contemporary was Nicholas Grimald, who survived like Tottel well into Elizabeth’s reign. His inventive dialogue poem, often entitled ‘A Description of Virtue’, is ‘true’ in the way that Lord Vaux’s poems are. If the language is conventional, the precisions are not.
What one art thou, thus in torn weed yclad?
Virtue, in price whom ancient sages had.
Why, poorly 'rayd'? For fading goods past care. arrayed
Why double-faced? I mark each fortune's fare.
This bridle, what? Mind's rages to restrain.
Tools why bear you? I love to take great pain.
Why, winges? I teach above the stars to fly.
Why tread you death? I only cannot die.
|
|
Grimald wasn’t always lugubrious. He wrote of his garden in ways Andrew Marvell might relish, evoking ‘Bees, humming with soft sound (the murmur is so small)’. And he says, ‘The garden, it allures, it feeds, it glads the sprite;/From heavy hearts all doleful dumps the garden chaseth quite.’ He concludes, ‘O, what delights to us the garden ground doth bring;/Seed, leaf, flower, fruit, herb, bee, and tree, and more than I may sing.’ The abundance breaks the bounds of metre and can’t be contained (see XXX). Some sense in Grimald's verse the first tremor of metaphysical wit, but if this is the case, it is very frail.
Less exuberant, more dogged and thorough in detail, is Thomas Tusser. Kipling loved his long aphoristic poem, A Hundred Good Points of Husbandry, which was written largely during Mary’s reign. It is a kind of almanac, describing, at a time of tribulation, the arts of peace, and Tusser's advice is very English and sound. C.H.Sisson quotes some charming passages.
Where stones be too many, annoying the land,
Make servant come home with a stone in his hand.
By daily so doing, have plenty ye shall,
Both handsome for paving and good for a wall.
It is not exactly good verse, but it is sufficient for what it sets out to do. Don’t overwater new plants, he says:
Now sets do ask watering, with pot or with dish,
New sown do not so, if ye do as I wish:
Through cunning with dibble, rake, mattock, and spade,
By line, and by level, trim garden is made.
Who soweth too lateward, hath seldom good seed,
Who soweth too soon, little better shall speed…
The most famous poet to write would-be major work under Mary and to collaborate with Thomas Norton on the tragedy Gorboduc under Elizabeth was Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, who survived Mary and Elizabeth and died under King James. A man of law, he wrote the ‘Induction’ to A Mirror for Magistrates. He also contributed, later on, the melancholy voice of Buckingham, though the tradition that he actually assembled the book no longer holds. Sackville is verbose. The sound of his language and its flow blur and dissipate sense. Alexander Pope praised him for 'a propriety in sentiments, a dignity in the sentences, an unaffected perspicuity of style, and an easy flow of numbers'. He was certainly fluent, and there are moments of beautiful writing in the Induction, for instance, where nature is evoked and comes alive in a way that takes us beyond allegory.
The soil, that erst so seemly was to seen,
Was all despoiled of her beauty’s hue;
And soote fresh flowers, wherewith the summer’s queen
Had clad the earth, now Boreas’ blasts down blew;
And small fowls flocking in their song did rue
The winter’s wrath, wherewith each thing defaced
In woeful wise bewailed the summer past.
There is more of the alliterative tradition alive and well – or at least alive – in Sackville than one might expect after the Petrarchan broom had swept out the cobwebs in English poetry during Henry’s reign. His work is further evidence of the atavism that led to the reprinting of Piers Plowman.
Thus musing on this worldly wealth in thought,
Which comes and goes more faster than we see
The flickering flame that with the fire is wrought,
My busy mind presented unto me
Such fall of peers as in this realm had be,
That oft I wished some would their woes descrive,
To warn the rest whom fortune left alive.
In Sackville, a wonderful lyric poet may have been struggling to escape from the treacle of conventionalised poetic language. But when Edmund Spenser invokes him for protection and approval, and Pope summarises his qualities as 'chaste', we sense how far our age is from his, and indeed from Pope's. My favourite stanza of Sackville's Induction is excessive, even silly, but also moving in unexpected ways:
Not worthy Hector, worthiest of them all,
Her hope, her joy; his force is now for nought.
O Troy, Troy, Troy, there is no boot but bale;
The hugy horse within thy walls is brought;
Thy turrets fall, thy knights, that whilom fought
In arms amid the field, are slain in bed,
Thy gods defiled and all thy honour dead.
|
|
That is as good as Sackville gets. He is verbose, mechanical in unpacking the nuances of conventional metaphor: what's Hecuba to him? Yet the closing couplet is not remote in cadence or impact from Alexander Pope's 'Eloise and Abelard'. It is a moment of prosodic definition, drawn from a rather rumbustious mess of language.
Mary presided over a dark kingdom: even the weather during her reign was unusually English. Spiritually and politically, she stopped the clocks but could not turn them back. The Roman Catholic faith she tried to restore was too unpopular, the lands that had been confiscated too valuable to return. The intelligentsia – apart from the great Catholic musicians who returned under her promising protection – was dead or exiled. Her death was lamented mainly by Catholic factions. There is a telling elegy by George Cavendish, the apologist-biographer of Cardinal Wolsey, written in a broken form where the caesura is expressed by a gap, as it was in Old English. It is sympathetic and genuinely grieves: it seems Mary could inspire such emotions. Indeed, Cavendish risks conflating the unhappy monarch with the Holy Virgin. In part, the poet says:
Descend from heaven O muse Melpomene,
Thou mournful goddess with thy sisters all.
Pass in your plaints the woeful Niobe;
Turn music to moan with tears eternal.
Black be your habits, dim and funeral,
For death hath bereft, to our great dolour,
Mary our mistress, our queen of honour.
Our Queen of honour, compared aptly
To veritas victrix, daughter of time,
By God assisted, amassed an army,
When she a virgin clear, without crime,
By right, without might, did happily climb
To the stage royal, just inheritor,
Proclaimed Mary our queen of honour…
And as a victrix valorous endued
With justice, prudence, high mercy and force,
Dreadless of danger with sword subdued
Her vassals rebellious, yet having remorse
With loss of few she saved the corse:
Such was thy mercy surmounting rigour,
O Mary mistress, O queen of honour!
To a virgin’s life which liked thee best
Professed was thine heart, when moved with zeal
And tears of subjects expressing request,
For no lust but love for the common weal,
Virginity’s vow thou diddest repeal,
Knit with a king co-equal in valour,
Thine estate to conserve as queen of honour.
The Rose and Pomegranate joined in one,
England and Spain by spousal allied.
Yet of these branches blossoms came none
Whereby their kingdoms might be supplied;
For this conjunction a comet envied,
Influence casting of mortal vapour
On Mary the Rose, our queen of honour.
Then faded the flower that whilom was fresh…
…High Priest of Rome, O Paul Apostolic,
And College Conscript of Cardinals all,
And ye that confess the faith Catholic
Of Christ’s Church in earth universal,
O clerks religious, to you I call:
Pray for your patron, your friend and founder,
Mary our mistress, our queen of honour.
Which late restored the right religion
And faith of our fathers observed of old,
Subdued sects and all division,
Reducing the flock to the former fold;
A pillar most firm the Church to uphold…
When sacred altars were all defaced,
Images of saints with outrage burned;
Instead of priests apostatas placed;
Holy sacraments with spite down spurned;
When spoil and ravin had all overturned,
This chaos confuse, this heap of horror
Dissolveth Mary, as queen of honour…
Elizabeth excellent of God elect,
With sceptre to sit in seat imperial,
In throne triumphant where thou art erect,
Have death alway in thy memorial.
Death is th’end of flesh universal.
The world is but vain: make for your mirror
Mary thy sister, late queen of honour…
Mary will be a mirror for Elizabeth: Cavendish alludes to that most popular book of the day and obliquely contributes to it. Elizabeth certainly read A Mirror and took it to heart., but no doubt she also took to heart the experience of her half-sister; the religious choice she made, and the dreaful political marriage that resulted from it.
1 There is disagreement on the date of his death: 1556 or 1562?
|
|
|
|
|
|
