Court Politics, Culture and Literature in Scotland and England, 1500-1540

Jon Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351125802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The focus of this study is court literature in early sixteenth-century England and Scotland. The author examines courtly poetry and drama in the context of a complex system of entertainment, education, self-fashioning, dissimulation, propaganda and patronage. He places selected works under close critical scrutiny to explore the symbiotic relationship that existed between court literature and important socio-political, economic and national contexts of the period 1500 to 1540. The first two chapters discuss the pervasive influence of patronage upon court literature through an analysis of the panegyric verse that surrounded the coronation of Henry VIII. The rhetorical strategies adopted by courtiers within their literary works, however, differed, depending on whether the writer was, at the time of writing the verse or drama, excluded or included from the environs of the court. The different, often elaborate rhetorical strategies are, through close readings of selected verse, delineated and discussed in chapter three on David Lyndsay and chapter four on Thomas Wyatt and Thomas Elyot.

Chapter 1
Poet, Court and Culture

For the world and princes are no longer made as they should be, but as they are.

Francesco Guicciardini¹

In 1537, the Tudor ambassador, courtier and poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, wrote a solemn letter of advice to his fifteen year old son in which he spoke of the ‘thousand dangers and hazardes, enmyities, hatrids, prisonments, despits and indignations’ he had experienced.² This was a reflection on the time he had spent in the Tudor court, a perilously unstable world in which power, honour and life were always at risk.³ A world in which Wyatt recognised, like Guicciardini, that the reality was far removed from the ideal.

The assumption, as Greg Walker points out, that literature exists as an apolitical sphere of activity, divorced from the immediate political and moral concerns of the elite is inordinately inaccurate, whichever period we consider, but perhaps none more so than when we consider the early sixteenth century and the literature produced for the English court of Henry VIII and the Scots courts of James IV and V.⁴ Tudor literature was predominantly written for the court, by the court and the literary discourse of writers outside of the court was heavily influenced by the political and moral reality of an England not only under the control of the, at times, tyrannical Henry VIII, but an England also experiencing the turmoil of the Reformation. The court was a place in which the decorum and display of the royal entourage, the outward courtesy, splendour and idle pastimes, concealed a vigorous, vicious world of intrigue inspired by personal jealousies, guilty secrets and salacious scandal-mongering.⁵ The Tudor court in particular was a place which was ruled by a king about whom Thomas More, the king's Lord Chancellor until his resignation in 1532, would remark to his son-in-law William Roper after he had expressed his pleasure at the king's friendship towards his father-in-law:

I find his grace my very good lord indeed; and I believe he doth as singularly favour me as any subject within his realm. Howbeit, son roper ... if my head could win him a castle in France (for then there was war between us) it should not fail to go.⁶

This was especially the situation during the last two decades of Henry VIII’s reign, when the whole atmosphere at court underwent a radical transformation as the ageing king finally despaired of having a son by Katherine of Aragon and, obsessed with providing for the succession, decided to look elsewhere.⁷ The king’s quarrel with Pope Clement VII over his divorce, his marriage to Anne Boleyn and repudiation of papal authority, created enormous tensions both at home and abroad.⁸ The court, like that of many of its European neighbours, was always an arena of ceaseless competition for the rewards of favour and power. It increasingly became a place of bitter factional politics that were driven by the king’s fear of treason from within and invasion from without by a Catholic coalition on the continent.⁹ Historians such as David Starkey, Eric Ives, and more recently George Bernard, may disagree with each other over the exact degree to which factions were an influence upon the king’s political decision-making concerning the realm, but as Robert Smuts astutely reminds his colleagues, the royal court, and in particular the king, was the epicentre of English politics and the ultimate source of power from which all patronage flowed and towards which all politically and personally ambitious men were drawn.¹⁰ The court was not only the natural habitat of those whose ancient right it was to attend upon the king, the nobility, it was the place towards which both men of newly acquired wealth or men of mere ability were inevitably attracted.¹¹ Those who visited the court did so in a search for influence, patronage, privilege and wealth, and the most influential individual in the realm was the king. As a result, the prestige and ultimate success of courtiers depended largely upon their nearness to the king or someone who could possibly influence a king who was prone to constantly changing shifts of policy and enthusiasm.¹²

The insecurity of courtiers was further heightened during Henry VIII's reign by extensions made to the Treason Act in 1534.¹³ It became an act of treason to convey, even if only in spoken words, a desire to harm the king, his queen or his heir. Of the 883 of the king's subjects who were convicted of treason between 1532 and 1540, there were 394 who were charged with treason by words, 63 of whom would pay the ultimate price of a traitor's execution.¹⁴ Lacey Baldwin Smith has succinctly remarked that 'trial for treason was the instrument by which the king struck down both high and low'.¹⁵ The statutes regulating the nature of treason were in fact so vague that they could be construed to include almost any word, expression or deed. As Sir Thomas More discovered to his cost, even silence could not protect a man from being charged with treason. At More's trial in 1535 it was argued by Christopher Hales, the Attorney General, that 'though we should have no word or deed to charge upon you, yet we have your silence, and that is a sign of your evil intention and sure proof of malice'.¹⁶ The fear of being charged with high treason was a constant threat from which no man was free and this was a period studded with the fall of such great ministers as Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and the destruction of such noble families as the Boleyns, Poles and Howards.¹⁷ The closer the proximity to the crown, the greater the danger, for the Treason Act was not only used to remove those who committed overt acts of rebellion, it was used as an instrument to remove those who had become too powerful or dangerous in an era in which the king would tolerate no rival for his throne.¹⁸

No individual or relationship could be allowed to flourish that might threaten the king’s dynastic interests.¹⁹ Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s niece, discovered this to her cost when she contracted a secret marriage to Lord Thomas Howard in July 1536. The two lovers were imprisoned and Howard died a year later from the rigours of his incarceration.²⁰ In the same year Sir Henry Norris, one of the king’s closest friends and Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber was, with several others of the royal household, including Anne Boleyn’s brother, beheaded for adultery with the queen.²¹ At times members of the Tudor court must have lived in an atmosphere of fear and anxiety as the ageing king became increasingly paranoid and his actions progressively more bloodthirsty.²²

Any written or verbal critique of the court or the king's policies during Henry VIII's reign was extremely perilous. William Tyndale earned the lasting enmity of the king and was branded both a traitor and heretic. This was not simply due to his Lutheran views but in part because he had dared to criticise, in The Practice of Prelates, both the political and immoral reality of the Henrician court and the king's attempt to divorce Katherine of Aragon. John Fisher, bishop of Rochester and newly created Cardinal, a prince of the Church and a man of fiery disposition and dangerous eloquence, was executed in 1534 for his written and spoken opposition to Henry's divorce and religious policies.²³ Cardinal Reginald Pole also earned the king's enmity and was denounced as a traitor for his opposition to Henry's repudiation of papal authority in his De Unitate Ecclesiae.²⁴ Pole, Henry VIII's cousin and a Yorkist claimant to the throne through his grandfather George, Duke of Clarence, had been granted a licence to live and study abroad in 1532. His stance against Henry gave the king the opportunity to virtually annihilate the Pole family in 1539, a family who may have threatened the king's dynastic ambitions.²⁵

Elizabeth Barton, the so called ‘Holy maid of Kent’, was perhaps the best known of Henry’s ‘popular’ critics. She was a woman with a long, locally distinguished history of prophetic utterance and induced by a group of clergy led by Dr Bocking, Cellarer of Christ’s Church Canterbury, to declare that she had seen in a vision:

… that the king should not continue king a month after that he were married; and within six months after God would strike the realm with such a plague as never was seen, and then the king should be destroyed.²⁶

These were dangerous words, designed to transform animosity against Anne Boleyn into a political weapon for the reversal of royal policy. Manuscripts and printed copies of the young nun’s stories and prophecies circulated among prominent individuals during the late 1520s and early 1530s, and in 1534 the nun was denounced by the council as a fraud and harlot.²⁷ She was hanged along with Dr. Bocking and four others at Tyburn. Even confidential conversation could be construed as treasonous: the vicar of St. Clemens was denounced to Cromwell for calling the king a ‘despoiler’ of the church when he was talking to a companion in a tavern.²⁸ As David Loades has pointed out, the records of the King’s Bench during Henry’s reign are liberally sprinkled with indictments and trials of those who were charged with treasonous verbal attacks upon the king.²⁹

The politics of court faction, the jostling between courtiers for eminence and privilege, the split with Rome over the king’s divorce and the introduction of the Treason Act created an era of invasive censorship and intrusive surveillance.³⁰ The French prelate and ambassador to England during 1538–43, Charles De Marillac, wrote in 1540 of how Henry was tainted with three vices, which:

… in a king may be called plagues. The first is that he is so covetous that all the riches in the world would not satisfy him …

Thence proceeds the second plague, distrust and fear. The King, knowing how many changes he has made, and what tragedies and scandals he has created, would fain keep in favour with everybody, but does not trust a single man … he makes alliances which last as long as it takes for him to make them.

The third plague, lightness and inconstancy, proceeds partly from the nature of the nation, and has perverted the rights of religion, marriage, faith and promise, as softened wax can be altered to any form.

The subjects take example from the Prince, and the ministers seek only to undo each other to gain credit, and un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Conventions
• Introduction
• 1 Poet, Court and Culture
• 2 Patronage and Panegyric Verse
• 3 The 'Inclusive and Exclusive' Rhetorical Strategy of David Lyndsay's The Dreme and The Complaynt
• 4 Counsel, Service, Kingship and the Moral Reality of the Court
• 5 The 'Honestye' of Thomas Wyatt's Court Critique and the Unstable 'I' of his Verse
• 6 The Murky Waters of Court Politics and Poetic Propaganda
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index