Two Henrys and Two Poets.
That Henry IV. who appears now upon the throne, and who was not a very noticeable man, save for his kingship, you will remember as the little son of John of Gaunt, who played about Chaucer’s knee; you will remember him further as giving title to a pair of Shakespeare’s plays, in which appears for the first time that semi-historic character—that enormous wallet of flesh, that egregious villain, that man of a prodigious humor, all in one—Jack Falstaff. And this famous, fat Knight of Literature shall introduce us to Prince Hal who, according to traditions (much doubted nowadays), was a wild boy in his youth, and boon companion of such as Falstaff; but, afterward, became the brave and cruel, but steady and magnificent Henry V. Yet we shall never forget those early days of his, when at Gad’s Hill, he plots with Falstaff and his fellows, to waylay travellers bound to London, with plump purses. Before the plot is carried out, the Prince agrees privately with Poins (one of the rogues) to put a trick upon Falstaff: Poins and the Prince will slip away in the dusk—let Falstaff and his companions do the robbing; then, suddenly—disguised in buckram suits—pounce on them and seize the booty. This, the Prince and Poins do: and at the first onset of these latter, the fat Knight runs off, as fast as his great hulk will let him, and goes spluttering and puffing to a near tavern, where—after consuming “an intolerable deal of sack”—he is confronted by the Prince, who demands his share of the spoils. But the big Knight blurts out—“A plague on all cowards!” He has been beset, while the Prince had sneaked away; the spoils are gone:
“I am a rogue, if I was not at half a sword with a dozen of them two hours together; I have scaped by a miracle; I am eight times thrust thro’ the doublet—four thro’ the hose. My sword is hacked like a hand-saw. If I fought not with fifty of them, then am I a bunch of radish. If there were not two or three and fifty on poor old Jack, then am I no two-legged creature.”
“Pray God, [says the Prince, keeping down his laughter] you have not murdered some of them!”
Falstaff. Nay, that’s past praying for; for I peppered two of them—two rogues in buckram. Here I lay, and thus I bore my sword. Four rogues in buckram let drive at me.
Prince. What, four?; thou said’st two.
Falstaff. Four, Hal; I told thee four.
And Poins comes to his aid, with—“Ay, he said four.” Whereat the fat Knight takes courage; the men in buckram growing, in whimsical stretch to seven, and nine; he, paltering and swearing, and never losing his delicious insolent swagger, till at last the Prince declares the truth, and makes show of the booty. You think this coward Falstaff may lose heart at this; not a whit of it; his eye, rolling in fat, does not blink even, while the Prince unravels the story; but at the end the stout Knight hitches up his waistband, smacks his lips:—
“D’ye think I did not know ye, my masters? Should I turn upon the true Prince? Why thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules; but beware instinct: I was a coward on instinct.”
So runs the Shakespearean scene, of which I give this glimpse only as a remembrancer of Henry IV., and his possibly wayward son.
If we keep by the strict letter of history, there is little of literary interest in that short reign of his—only fourteen years. Occleve, a poet of whom I spoke as having painted a portrait of Chaucer (which I tried to describe to you) is worth mentioning—were it only for this. Lydgate,[57] of about the same date, was a more fertile poet; wrote so easily indeed, that he was tempted to write too much. But he had the art of choosing taking subjects, and so, was vastly popular. He had excellent training, both English and Continental; he was a priest, though sometimes a naughty one; and he opened a school at his monastery of St. Edmunds. A few fragments of that monastery are still to be seen in the ancient town of Bury St. Edmunds:—a town you may remember in a profane way, as the scene of certain nocturnal adventures that befel, in our time, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller.
Notable amongst the minor poems of this old Bury monk, is a jingling ballad called London Lickpenny, in which a poor suitor pushing his way into London courts, is hustled about, has his hood stolen, wanders hither and yon, with stout cries of “ripe strawberries” and “hot sheepes feete” shrilling in his ears; is beset by taverners and thievish thread-sellers, and is glad to get himself away again into Kent, and there digest the broad, and ever good moral that a man’s pennies get “licked” out of him fast in London. Remembering that this was at the very epoch when Nym and Bardolph frequented the Boar’s Head, Eastcheap, and cracked jokes and oaths with Dame Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, and we are more grateful for the old rhyming priest’s realistic bit of London sights, than for all his classics,[58] or all his stories of the saints.
But at the very time this Lydgate was writing, a tenderer and sweeter voice was warbling music out of a prison window at Windsor; and the music has come down to us:[59]
“Beauty enough to make a world to doat,
And when she walkèd had a little thraw
Under the sweet grene bowis bent,
Her fair freshe face, as white as any snaw
She turnèd has, and forth her way is went;
But then begun my achès and torment
To see her part, and follow I na might;
Methought the day was turnèd into night.”
There is a royal touch in that, and it comes from a royal hand—that of Prince James of Scotland, who, taken prisoner by Henry IV., was held fast for sixteen years in the keep of Windsor Castle. Mr. Irving has made him the subject of a very pleasant paper in the Sketch-book. Though a prince, he was a poet by nature, and from the window of his prison did see the fair lady whose graces were garnered in the verse I have cited; and oddly enough, he did come to marry the subject of this very poem (who was related to the royal house of England, being grand-daughter of John of Gaunt) and thereafter did come to be King of Scotland and—what was a commoner fate—to be assassinated. That queen of his, of whom the wooing had been so romantic and left its record in the King’s Quair—made a tender and devoted wife—threw herself at last between him and the assassins—receiving grievous wounds thereby, but all vainly—and the poor poet-king was murdered in her presence at Perth, in the year 1437.
These three poets I have named all plumed their wings to make that great flight by which Chaucer had swept into the Empyrean of Song: but not one of them was equal to it: nor, thenceforward all down through the century, did any man sing as Chaucer had sung. There were poetasters; there were rhyming chroniclers; and toward the end of the century there appeared a poet of more pretension, but with few of the graces we find in the author of the Canterbury Tales.
John Skelton[60] was his name: he too a priest living in Norfolk. His rhymes, as he tells us himself, were “ragged and jagged:” but worse than this, they were often ribald and rabid—attacking with fierceness Cardinal Wolsey—attacking his fellow-priests too—so that he was compelled to leave his living: but he somehow won a place afterward in the royal household as tutor; and even the great Erasmus (who had come over from the Low Countries, and was one while teaching Greek at Cambridge) congratulates some prince of the royal family upon the great advantage they have in the services of such a “special light and ornament of British literature.” He is capricious, homely, never weak, often coarse, always quaint. From out his curious trick-track of verse, I pluck this little musical canzonet:—
“Merry Margaret
As midsummer flower;
Gentle as falcon
Or hawk of the tower:
With solace and gladness
Much mirth and no madness,
All good and no badness,
So joyously,
So maidenly,
So womanly
Her demeaning
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:
Stedfast of thought
Well-made well-wrought;
Far may be sought
Ere you can find
So courteous—so kind
As merry Margaret
This midsummer flower.”
There is a pretty poetic perfume in this—a merry musical jingle; but it gives no echo even of the tendernesses which wrapped all round and round the story of the Sad Griselda.