Their avarice covering with fained devotion.
Yet daily they preache, and have great derision
Against the rude lay men, and all for covetise.
Though, their own conscience be blinded with that vice."
The reign of Henry VIII. was distinguished chiefly by satirists: and it says much for the courage of poets that they were almost the only men in that terrible period who dared open their mouths on the crying sins of Government. Skelton, Heywood, and Roy were men who amused themselves with the follies and vices of their contemporaries. When the sun of poetry rose in a more glowing form in Surrey, the ferocious king, so ready with the headsman's axe, quenched it in blood. Skelton was a clergyman, educated at Oxford, and that with high distinction. Erasmus declared him to be "Britannicarum Literarum Lumen et Decus"—the light and ornament of Britain. He became Rector of Diss, in Norfolk; but, like Sterne at a later day, Skelton was overflowing with humour and satire rather than sermons, and so fell under the resentment of Nykke, Bishop of Norwich. He lashed with all the wonderful power of his merry muse the licentious ignorance of the monks and friars; and, soaring at higher game, attacked the swollen greatness of Cardinal Wolsey in a strain of the most daring invective. The incensed cardinal endeavoured to lay hold on him, and assuredly he would not have escaped scathless out of his hands, but the venerable John Islep, Abbot of Westminster, opened the sanctuary to him; and there Skelton lived secure for the remainder of his days, neither stinting his stinging lashes at the cardinal, nor suppressing his overflowing humour, which welled forth in a torrent of the most wild, sparkling, random, and rhodomontading character. His amazing command of language, his never-failing and extraordinary rhymes, remind us of one man only, and that of our own day—Hood. The airiness and irregularity of his lyrical measures equally suggest a comparison with that most untranslatable Swedish poet, Bellman.
His friend Thomas Churchyard, in a eulogium on him, enumerates a number of poets of that and preceding times, some of them now little known:—
"Peirs Plowmer was full plaine,
And Chaucer's spreet was great;
Earl Surrey had a goodly veine,
Lord Vaux the marke did beat.
And Phaer did hit the pricko
In things he did translate,
And Edwards had a special gift;
And divers men of late
Have helped our English tongue.
That first was base and brute.
Oh! shall I leave out Skelton's name?—
The blossom of my fruit!"
The "Pithy, Pleasant, and Profitable Works of Maister Skelton, Poet Laureate to Henry VIII.," contain "The Crowne of Laurell," by way of introduction; "The Bouge of the Courte," in which this unique poet laureate attacks the vices of the Court without mercy; "The Duke of Albany," a poem equally severe on the Scots; "Ware the Hawk," a castigation of the clergy; "The Tunning of Eleanor Rumming," a wild rattling string of Thymes on an old ale-wife and her costume; and "Why come ye not to Court?" an unsparing satire on Wolsey. There is no part of the cardinal's history or character that he lets escape. His mean origin, his puffed-up pride, his sensuality, his lordly insolence, his covetousness and cruelties, run on in a strain of loose yet vivid jingle that was calculated to catch the ear of the people. His gentlest word of him is that—
"He regardeth lords
No more than potsherds;
He is in such elation
Of his exaltation
Of our sovereign lord
That God to record,
He ruleth all at will,
Without reason or skill,
Howbeit they be primordial
Of his wretched original
And his base progeny,
And his greasy genealogy.
He came of the sink royal
That was cast out of a butcher's stall.
But however he was born,
Men would have the less scorn
If he could consider
His birth and room together."
He tells us that the king,
"Of his royal mind,
Thought to do a thing
That pertaineth to a king—
To make up one of nought,
And made to him be brought
A wretched poor man,
With his living wan,
With planting leeks,
By the days and by the weeks;
And of this poor vassal
He made a king royal!"
We cannot afford space for the wild riot of Skelton's description of old Eleanor Rumming—
Droupy and drowsy,
Scurvy and lousy,
Her face all bowsy;
Comely crinkled,
Wonderfully wrinkled,
Like roast pig's car,
Bristled with hair.
But Skelton has shown that he could pen strains worthy of the fairest and noblest, and buoyant with music of their own. Such is his canzonet to
MISTRESS MARGARET HUSSEY.
Merry Margaret
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as falcon,
Or hawk of the tower.
With solace and gladness,
Mirth and no madness
All good and no badness;
So joyously,
So maidenly,
So womanly,
Her demeanour
In everything
Far, far passing
That I can indite,
Or suffice to write
Of merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower.
Gentle as falcon,
Or hawk of the tower, &c.
A far more grave and not less vengeful satirist of Wolsey and the clergy, was William Roy, the coadjutor of Tyndal in the translation of the Bible. He was originally a friar, but joining the Reformers, he wrote
