Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No.394, August, 1848

In the year 1251, reign of Henry III., the King's versifier was requited by an annual pension of 100 shillings – not such a very niggardly stipend as it now sounds, if we compare the value of money in those times with the price of commodities. In the two following reigns we find a poet-royal of some repute in Robert Baston. He was a Carmelite monk, and attained the dignity of prior of the convent of that order at Scarborough. Bishop Bale (in his Illustrûm Majoris Britanniæ Scriptorum Summarium) says that Baston was a laureated poet and public orator at Oxford, which Wood denies. But Bale might have had access to information which could no longer be authenticated in Anthony's time; for Bale, though he lived to be Edward the Sixth's Bishop of Assory, and a prebendary of the Cathedral of Canterbury, where he died and was buried, had himself been a Carmelite friar. "Great confusion," observes Warton, "has entered into the subject of the institution of poets-laureate, on account of the degrees in grammar, which included rhetoric and versification, anciently taken in our universities, particularly at Oxford, on which occasion a wreath of laurel was presented to the new graduate, who was afterwards usually styled Poeta Laureatus. These scholastic laureations, however, seem to have given rise to the appellation in question. With regard to the poet-laureate of the Kings of England, he is undoubtedly the same that is styled the king's versifier in the thirteenth century. But when or how that title commenced, and whether this officer was ever formally crowned with laurel at his first investiture, I will not pretend to determine, after the researches of the learned Seldon have proved unsuccessful. It seems probable that at length those only were in general invited to this appointment who had received academical sanction, and had merited a crown of laurel in the universities for their abilities in Latin composition, particularly Latin versification. Thus the king's laureate was nothing more than a graduated rhetorician, employed in the king's service." Warton adds an opinion, which seems well founded, "that it was not customary for the royal laureate to write in English till the Reformation had begun to diminish the veneration for the Latin tongue, or rather till the love of novelty, and a better sense of things, had banished the pedantry of monastic erudition, and taught us to cultivate our native language." It is true, that neither before nor after the Conquest was there any lack of rhymers in the vulgar tongue, whether Saxon or Norman, or mixed; and they would be the popular poets, but not exactly the poets in fashion at court. At all events, the fashion of writing court poems in low Latin began early and continued long; and we suspect that the Anglo-Saxon gleemen, whom the monkish historians call joculatores regis, were for the most part mere merrymen, as their monkish sobriquet implies – jugglers, dancers, fiddlers, tumblers. Berdic, the king's fool, is styled Joculator Regis in Doomsday Book. Some of these retainers, no doubt, could both compose ballads and sing them, suiting the action to the word, and they might occasionally amuse the court with their songs; but the authentic poet for state occasions was the Latin verse-maker. We say this with all due love and regard for our ballad-singers, old and modern, from King Alfred to Alfred Tennyson; and remembering, too, that we have two good sets-offs against Harry Hotspur's sneer at "metre ballad-mongers," – one in Sir Philip Sidney's declaration that the ballad of the Percy hunt in Cheviotdale stirred his heart like the sound of a trumpet; and another, in the fact that one of the most illustrious of modern Percys, the Bishop of Dromore, owes his well-deserved popular reputation to nothing else than his industry, talent, and good taste in editing the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and Old Heroic Ballads.

Robert Baston, from whom we have digressed, was not a ballad-monger, but a Latin versifier ex officio. Edward I., in his expedition to Scotland in 1304, took Baston with him, that he might be an eye-witness of his triumph over this country, and celebrate it in Latin verse. Hollinshed comments on this fact as a strong proof of Edward's presumption and overweening confidence in himself; but the censure is not strikingly pertinent, for at this period a poet was a stated officer in the royal retinue, when the monarch went to war. The haughty old king's discomfiture, after all his successes in this favourite enterprise, was as mortifying, but not so comical as the disastrous issue of the campaign to his poet. The jolly prior had not done chanting one of his heroics in honour of Edward's siege of Stirling, when he was pounced on by a foray of Scots, and carried away into durance; nor was this the worst of the misadventure, for, with a shrewdly balancing humour, they obliged him to pay his ransom in verse, and only released him when he had recorded the praises of his captors and their cause. He does not appear to have been much inspired by the subject; for Hector Boece says that he made, "rusty verses" in praise of the Scots; and rusty enough they were, if they all resembled the initial line as it is quoted —

"De planta cudo metrum cum carmine nudo."

The poem must have stood in more awkward antagonism with "De Strivilniensi Obsidione," which is extant in Fordun, than Waller's panegyric on Cromwell does face to face with his eulogium on Charles II. We doubt whether the monk had so witty an apology for his double tongue as the courtier; but he had a better excuse, for he said, "Actus me invito, factus, non est meus actus." There is both rhyme and reason in that. The stubbornness of the Scots, which was at last a choke-pear to Edward, seems to have stimulated the poet almost as much as it exasperated the king. For, besides the siege of Stirling, we find on the list of Baston's productions one entitled "De Altero Scotorum Bello," and another "De Scotiæ guerris Variis." Baston survived his master, the broken Malleus Scotorum, only three years. It is uncertain whether he retained his office after the accession of Edward the Second; but, if so, death had released him from duty before that prince's invasion of this country in 1314. Otherwise he would probably have had to pay another visit to the ominous neighbourhood of Stirling Castle, at a risk, if he escaped a deadlier chance, of being captured by the Bruce himself, and of having a caged poet's leisure to meditate a threnodia for Bannockburn. Boece, in Bellenden's version, asserts that this was actually the case, – that it was "Edward the Second, who, by vain arrogance, as if the Scotch had been sicker in his hands, brought with him ane Carmelite monk to put his victory in versis; that the poet was taken in this field of Bannockburn, and commandit by King Robert the Bruce to write as he saw, in sithement of his ransom." There is also among the political songs published by the Camden Society, a wretched transcript (from the Cotton. MSS.) of a wretched piece of raving on this very battle, also attributed to Baston, – (and announced, we suppose by an error of the press, as written in the reign of Edward the Third.) But we are inclined to believe that Baston died about four years before that great day for Scotland. We do not, however, undertake to settle the point. We have no certain accounts of Baston's successor.

It is asserted by writers not incautious, that Gower and Chaucer were laureates; and we are unwilling to doubt it, though the authority is far from conclusive. Chaucer, born about 1328, the second year of Edward the Third's reign, died in 1400. It is certain that he was liberally patronised, and gratified with lucrative appointments by Edward. It is recorded, too, that he was employed on foreign missions of trust; that on one occasion he was an envoy to Genoa, and that he then visited Petrarch at Padua; and as the arguments for and against the probability of this interview are pretty nearly balanced, we are not bound to deny ourselves the pleasure of believing it. Froissart, as well as Hollinshed and Barnes, bears testimony to Chaucer's having been one of a mission to the court of France, in the last year of Edward's reign; but it is not clear, nor even at all deducible from the nature of the public employments, and the character of Edward, that it was his poetical merit which promoted him to the royal confidence in matters of business.

Gower, born, it is supposed, somewhat earlier than Chaucer, died two years later, in 1402, and had been blind for the last two or three years of his life. Bale makes Gower equitem auratum et poetam laureatum; but Winstansley says he was neither laureated nor hederated, but only rosated, having a chaplet of four roses about his head on his monumental stone in St Mary Overy's Church, Southwark. His "Confessio Amantis" is said to have been prompted by the command of Richard the Second, who, chancing to meet him on the Thames, invited him into his gilded barge, —

"While proudly riding o'er the azure realm,Youth at the prow, and pleasure at the helm,"

enjoined him to "book something new." In the three next reigns of the line of Lancaster, Henry the Fourth, Henry the Fifth, and Henry the Sixth, a period of sixty-two years, we hardly know what became of the court poets, or whether there were any. Musicians were liberally privileged as palace servants by Henry the Fourth, but his reign was unfavourable to the minstrel art. Henry the Fifth was partial to minstrelsy, and rewarded it generously; but we find no report of a laureat poet. In Henry the Sixth's time, boys were pressed into the minstrel service of the court; but it is not recorded that any one was made a poet by virtue of royal kidnapping. They were instructed in music for the solace of his majesty.

To Edward the Fourth, the first king of the line of York, John Kay, as "his Majesty's humble Laureate," dedicated a History of Rhodes.

The wars of the Roses seem almost to have silenced the nightingales. But no sooner was contention terminated by the union of Henry of Lancaster with the heiress of York, than a rivalry sprang up for the office of king's poet. In the year 1486, the next after the coronation of Henry the Seventh, and shortly after his marriage, that king, by an instrument Pro Poeta Laureato, of which a copy is preserved in Rymer's Fœdera, granted to Andrew Bernard, poet-laureate, a salary of fifteen marks, until he should obtain some equivalent appointment. This was no very munificent grant. But Henry the Seventh was not addicted to liberality out of his own exchequer. He afterwards found means to reward him with ecclesiastical preferments; and his prodigal, but still more selfish successor, gratified him in the same way. Bernard, who was a native of Toulouse, and an Augustine monk, obtained many preferments in England; and was besides not only poet-laureate, but historiographer to the king, and preceptor in grammar to Prince Arthur. The preceptorship, however honourable, was perhaps not worth much on the score of emolument. All the pieces now to be found in his character of laureate are in Latin. Among these are, "An Address to Henry the Eighth, for the most Auspicious Beginning of the Tenth Year of his Reign;" "A New-Year's Offering for the Year 1515;" and "Verses wishing Prosperity to his Majesty's Thirteenth Year, 1522." He left many prose pieces, written in his quality of historiographer to both monarchs, particularly a Chronicle of the Life and Achievements of Henry the Seventh to the taking of Perkin Warbeck. And here occurs a little difficulty in the reconcilement of dates, when we are told that Skelton also was poet-laureate to Henry the Seventh and his son: for it has been shown that Bernard was alive in 1522, if not later. Skelton was laureated at Oxford about 1489, three years after the date of the recorded grant to the poet-laureate, Andrew Bernard. We more than half suspect that Skelton, though a graduated university laureate, was never poet-laureate to either king at all, except as a sort of volunteer, licensed by his own saucy consent. Puttenham expressly says, that "Skelton usurped the name of poet-laureate, being indeed but a rude railing rimer, and all his doings ridiculous." It is stated that Skelton, having, a few years subsequent to his laureation at Oxford, been permitted to wear his laurel publicly at Cambridge also, was further privileged by Henry the Seventh to wear some particular dress, or additional ornament to his dress. Henry the Seventh was not much given to jesting, or we should infer that it was a badge appropriate to the king's fool; for Skelton, though an able man, was, like Leo the Tenth's arch-poet Querno, who was crowned laureate for the joke's sake, ambitious of the fool's honours. He was a buffoon even in the pulpit.

Skelton directed his ribaldry especially against the mendicant friars and the formidable Wolsey. We can easily imagine how these audacities were not intolerable to the "Defender of the Faith," even in the plenitude of the cardinal's power; and how he might have tolerated his assumption of the character of court-poet, so long as the spurious laureate's sallies did not trench on the sovereign's personal dignity. Skelton, like his quondam royal pupil, was already a reformer in his way, and not long before his death, which occurred June 21, 1529, just before the downfall of Wolsey, he used a strange argument against the celibacy of the priesthood; he excused himself for having openly lived with a concubine, because he considered her as his wife! Erasmus, the caustic censor of the vices of the clergy, praised Skelton's learning and wit, probably from sympathy with his application of them, bolder, though far less dignified than his own, to the same objects of satire; but "the glory of the priesthood and the shame," could hardly have admitted the validity of such an apology from the Vicar of Dallyng, a vowed celibate priest.

We must return for a moment to Bernard. This poet-laureate had a notable subject to begin with in the union of the Two Roses. How he treated it we have no means of judging, as the performance is not in existence; and though it has perished, it would be unfair, perhaps, to assume that his freshest effort on an event that might have quickened the slowest fancy, was not superior to his later exercises, on occasions of weaker interest, such as are preserved in the Cottonian Library, and that of New College, Oxford. Of all the events in the history of the British monarchy, there is one subject, and probably one only, of those that could come within the range of a court-poet's province, of equal national importance, and equally poetical quality with the marriage of Henry the Seventh – that is, the marriage of his daughter, Margaret, to James the Fourth of Scotland; and even those of our "constant readers" who, to their loss, may know nothing of William Dunbar but what they have read in former pages of this magazine, must know that the court of Scotland, at the time of the celebration of these nuptials, possessed a poet worthy of the subject, for they cannot have forgotten his inspired vision on the Thistle and the Rose. In the one case the wounds of England were closed after long wars of disputed succession, as desolating as any intestine wars on record: in the other, two nations, jealous neighbours, and till then implacable enemies, formed an alliance that promised to be lasting, and which finally effected more than it had promised, by the consolidation of the two thrones into one. On the head of the Scottish great-grandson of the English Margaret, the double crown was secure from the casuistry of jurists. Neither Elizabeth of York, nor her daughter, was a happy wife. Henry the Seventh proved cold and ungrateful as a husband; James the Fourth faithless; but we have nothing to do here with the domestic infelicity of those ill-used princesses, except as it shows that the court-poets, who predicted so much happiness for them, were not infallible Vates. Poets, on such occasions, are prophets of hope only. And as to the struggles and disasters that followed, the glowing vision of Dunbar was luckily as impassive to the shadows of coming events (Flodden Field, and Fotheringay, and the scaffold at Whitehall, and the rout on the Boyne water) as were the quondam visions and religious meditations of Lamartine in the days of Charles Dix to the shadows of the barricades, and the prestige of the Hotel de Ville.

We do not find that the young successor of England's royal Blue-beard had a poet-laureate. Queen Mary, though a learned and accomplished lady, had no such an appendage to her state. Heywood was her favourite poet; he had consoled her with honest praise in the days when it was the fashion of courtiers to neglect her. On his presenting himself at her levee, after her accession, "Mary asked him," says the chronicler of queens, "what wind has blown you hither?" He answered, "Two special ones – one of them to see your Majesty." "Our thanks for that," said Mary; "but the other?" "That your Majesty might see me." He used to stand by her side at supper, and amuse her with his jests – not a very dignified employment for a poet – but he was a player, and being accustomed to play many parts, did not decline that of Double to Mary's female Fool, Jane. He appears, however, to have been her life-long solace. He had ministered to her diversion in her childhood, with a company of child-players, whom Shakspeare calls "little eye-asses" – (callow hawks) – and in her long illness he was frequently sent for, and, when she was able to listen to recitation, he repeated his verses, or superintended performances for her amusement.

Malone insists that Queen Elizabeth, too, had no poet-laureate; yet Spenser is by other writers as confidently preferred to that post, and Daniel is said to have officially succeeded him. Spenser's "Gloriana" and "Dearest Dread," though abundantly shrewd and sagacious, and though somewhat of a scholar and a wit, and sufficiently vain of her own poor rhymes, had no true perception or appreciation of the art divine of poesy. The most eminent dramatic genius the world ever saw was as moderately encouraged as any inferior playhouse droll might have been. She could laugh at Falstaff and Dame Quickly, and stimulate that humour in the author: and, to use her sister's words to Heywood, "our thanks for that." Edmund Spenser, also, was less indebted to her own taste, or even to her enormous appetite for flattery, than to Sir Philip Sidney's enlightened friendship, and to his introduction to her by Sir Walter Raleigh, for such favours as he received. These, however, were not small; and neither the Fairy Queen herself, (gigantic fairy!) nor her sage counsellor Cecil, is justly responsible for the unhappiness of Spenser. His pension of £50 a-year was but a portion of the emoluments he derived from court interest. That pension, which he received till his death in 1598, was no doubt an annuity assigned him as Queen's poet, though the title of laureate is not given in his patent, nor in that of his two immediate successors, Daniel and Ben Jonson. So far Malone is accurate.

Daniel's laudatory verse, whether he volunteered it or not, was acceptable to King James, and rewarded by a palace appointment. He was Gentleman Extraordinary, and one of the grooms to Queen Anne of Denmark. He was on terms of social intimacy with Shakspeare, Marlow, and Chapman, as well as with persons of higher social rank; and he had the honour to be tutor to the famous Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, who caused a cenotaph to be erected to his memory at Beckington, near Frome, in his native county. He died in 1619.

The masques and pageants of his successor, Ben Jonson, prove that he held no sinecure from either of his royal masters; but in Charles the First he at least served a prince who could respect genius, and remember that the labourer is worthy of his hire. Jonson received, "in consideration of services of wit and pen already done to us and our father, and which we expect from him," £100 a-year and a tierce of Spanish canary, his best-beloved Hippocrene, out of the royal cellars at Whitehall.

On his decease, 1637, William Davenant was appointed poet-laureate, by patent, through the influence of Henrietta Maria, though her husband had intended the reversion for Thomas May. This man was so disgusted that, forgetting many former obligations to Charles, who had a high and just opinion of his talents, he soon after turned traitor, and attached himself to the Roundheads. Davenant proved himself worthy of the preference, not only by his poetry, but by his steadfast gallant loyalty. He was son of an innkeeper at Oxford, but is said to have rather sanctioned a vague rumour that attributed his paternity to Shakspeare. At ten years of age he produced his first poem, a little ode in three sextains, "In remembrance of Master William Shakspeare." The first stanza has some feeling in it, the other two are puerile conceits, clever enough for so young a boy. When his sovereign was in trouble, he volunteered into the army, and was soon found eligible to no mean promotion. He was raised to the rank of lieutenant-general of ordnance, under the Duke of Newcastle, and was knighted for his services at the siege of Gloucester. His "Gondibert," begun in exile at Paris, was continued in prison at Cowes Castle, though he daily expected his death-warrant. But he was removed to the Tower of London to be tried by a high commission; and it is believed that his life was saved by the generous intervention of Milton, whom he subsequently repaid in kind, by softening the resentment of the restored government against him. Davenant, though perhaps a man of irregular life, and though, as a dramatist and playhouse manager, he proved any thing but allegiant to Shakspeare, and was active in communicating a depraved taste, was yet a man of brave, honest, and independent mind. It is curious that he should not only have disappointed May of the laurel when living, but that it should have been his chance to take his place in Poet's Corner when dead. The Puritans had erected a pompous tomb to May, which was savagely enough removed by the returned royalists. Near the same spot, in Westminster Abbey, is the monument to Davenant.

The Usurpation was not without its poets of far loftier reach than May, though he, too, was no dwarf. It would have been ridiculous in Cromwell to appoint a poet-laureate. The thing was impossible, though the flatteries of his kinsman, Waller, show that it was not the want of a subservient royalist gentleman of station, as well of talent, that made it so. Andrew Marvel, though he wrote such vigorous verse on Cromwell's victories in Ireland, would hardly have accepted the office, and what other Puritan would? But without the form, the Protector of the commonwealth had the reality in his Latin secretary, to whom Marvel was assistant. The lineal heir of the most ancient race of kings might have been proud of such a poet. The greatness of Milton might be a pledge to all ages of the greatness of Cromwell, unchallenged even by those who most detest grim Oliver of Hungtindon for "Darwent stream with blood of Scots imbrued," and "Worcester's laureate wreath." Here it is the poet who confers on the conqueror a laurel crown, of which the imperishable leaves, green as ever bard or victor wore, mitigate, though they do not hide, the evil expression on the casque-worn brow of the senex armis impiger, and give it a dignity that might abate the stoutest loyalist's abhorrence, but for one fatal remembrance, which forbids him to exclaim,

"Nec sunt hi vultus regibus usque truces."

Sir William Davenant, who recovered the laureateship at the Restoration, and retained it till his death in 1668, was succeeded by Dryden. Glorious John, although he had hastily flattered Richard Cromwell's brief authority by an epicede on Oliver, was not rejected by the merry monarch, who could laugh at poets' perjuries as lightly as at those of lovers. During that disgraceful reign, the poet made it no part of his vocation and privilege to check the profligate humours brought into fashion by the court.

"Unhappy Dryden! in all Charles' days,Roscommon only boasts unspotted lays."

At the revolution of 1688, the laureate was discrowned, as well as King James; and he condescended to revenge himself by Macflecnoe on his substitute Shadwell, as if he had not beforehand administered sufficient chastisement to that miserable Og, in the bitter satire with which he supplied Tate for the second part of Absolom and Achitophel. One might pity Shadwell under the lash of such an enemy as Dryden, if his writings either in verse or prose entitled him to a grain of respect. Charles, sixth Earl of Dorset – himself an elegant wit and indifferent versifier, but the descendant and representative of a very illustrious poet, Sackville, the first Earl, author of the noble "Induction to a Mirror for Magistrates" – vindicated his recommendation of Shadwell to the poet-laureateship, "not because he was a poet, but an honest man." We suppose he meant that he had not oscillated between Popery and Reformation like Dryden, and that he was more honest, also, in a political sense, and less liable to suspicion as an adherent of the expelled monarch's heartless daughter, and her Dutch husband, the hero of the Boyne and Glencoe. But, in another and not unimportant sense, Shadwell was far from honest; for he was notorious for the ribaldry of his conversation. It has been asserted, while that fact was admitted, that, as an author before the public, he was a promoter of morality and virtue. Nothing can be more untrue. Of his many comedies, there is none which is not as rife in pollution as any of the grossest plays of the time. But their boasted humour is physic for the bane; for it is distilled "from the dull weeds that grow by Lethe's side." His comedies are five-act farces of wearisome vulgarity, and, though suffered in their day, were destined, as Pope leniently expresses it in the Dunciad,