Christopher Garnesche or Garneys [q. v.], a gentleman usher to Henry VIII, were written, according to his own account, by the king's command. Sir Christopher challenged Skelton to the contest, which seems to have resembled the literary encounters which were familiar among the Scottish poets Dunbar and Kennedy, the Italian poets Luigi Pulci and Matteo Franco, and the French poets Sagon and Marot. Garneys's contributions are not extant. Skelton's four poems are full of angry personal abuse. Among Skelton's lost works was ‘The Recule ageinst Gaguyne,’ that is an attack on the French scholar, Robert Gaguin, who had, he says, frowned on him ‘full angerly and pale;’ while Bale notices an invective (now lost) against William Lily, who retorted in some extant hendecasyllabics impugning Skelton's title to be regarded either as a poet or a man of learning (cf. Camden, Magna Britannia, s.v. ‘Diss’). Skelton also incurred the enmity of Alexander Barclay, who enumerated Skelton's ‘Phylyp Sparowe’ among the ‘follies’ noticed at the end of his ‘Ship of Fools;’ Barclay renewed the attack in his fourth eclogue.
Despite Skelton's bitter tongue, many noble patrons remained faithful to him till the end. The Countess of Surrey (Elizabeth Stafford, daughter of Edward, third duke of Buckingham [q. v.], second wife of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, and mother of Surrey the poet) was one of his latest admirers. In her train he seems to have visited Sheriff-Hutton Castle, then the residence of her father-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk. At the suggestion of the countess a party of ladies made and presented to the poet a garland of laurel. The compliment inspired Skelton to compose, mainly in Chaucerian stanza, the most elaborate of his pieces, which he entitled ‘The Garlande of Laurell.’ It is largely allegorical, but supplies a catalogue of Skelton's favourite authors, who included, besides the chief classical writers, Poggio, Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. The poem's main aim was to glorify the author, of whose works it set forth a long list. A coarser effort in humour was devised for the delectation of Henry VIII and his courtiers. It was called ‘The Tunnynge [i.e. brewing] of Elynour Rummyng,’ and describes in Skeltonian metre the drunken revels of poor women who frequented an alehouse kept by Elynour Rummyng on a hill by Leatherhead, within six miles of the royal palace of Nonsuch. Skelton is said to have fashioned this coarse production on a poem by Lorenzo de' Medici (Spence, Anecdotes, p. 173). About 1516 he wrote an attractive ‘lawde and prayse’ of Henry VIII, of which the manuscript, beginning ‘The Rose both white and rede,’ is in the Record Office (Dyce, i. ix; Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, vol. ii. pt. ii. p. 1518).
Skelton at length invited an encounter which ended in fatal disaster. In the early years of Henry VIII's reign he enjoyed the patronage of Wolsey as well as of the king. To the cardinal he dedicated in obsequious terms ‘A Replycacion agaynst certayne yong scolers,’ where he attacked students of Cambridge for arrogant criticism of currently accepted theology. ‘An Envoy to the Garland of Laurel’ was addressed to both king and cardinal. ‘The envoy’ of another poem on the Duke of Albany's unsuccessful raid on the borders in 1523 was similarly inscribed to ‘My Lord Cardinal's right noble grace,’ while the ‘Three Fools,’ according to the full title, was presented to Wolsey. But Skelton's attitude to the cardinal was only speciously complacent. The cardinal probably scorned his advances. Anyhow, Skelton soon found in the cardinal's triumphant career a tempting target for his satiric shafts.
The chronicler Hall relates that when, in 1522, Wolsey, in the exercise of his legatine power, dissolved the convocation summoned to St. Paul's by the archbishop of Canterbury (Warham), and ordered it to meet him at Westminster, Skelton circulated the couplet—
Gentle Paul, laie doune thy sweard,
For Peter of Westminster hath shauen thy beard.
In his ‘Colyn Cloute,’ written throughout in what Bishop Hall, a later satirist, called his ‘breathless rhymes,’ Skelton incidentally attacked Wolsey while satirising the corruptions of the church. Every obstacle was placed in the way of the publication of the piece, but these were overcome, and many copies were circulated. In ‘Why come ye not to court?’ (in the same metre as ‘Colyn Cloute’) he turned upon Wolsey the full force of his invective, and denounced the cardinal's luxurious life, insatiate ambition, and insolence of bearing. The confused and fantastic ‘boke’ called ‘Speake Parrot’ (in Chaucer's seven-line stanza) is also largely aimed at Wolsey. ‘Bo-ho doth bark well, but Hough-ho he ruleth the ring,’ is the burden of the poem—Bo-ho being the king, and Hough-ho Wolsey. According to popular tradition, Wolsey retaliated by sending Skelton more than once to prison. Skelton disliked the experience, and on the last occasion that Wolsey sent out officers to apprehend him took sanctuary at Westminster. The
