For nearly a thousand years there had been no poetry in the Saxon life, there had never been on British soil. Beauty and harmony were missing in their speech and deeds. The history they had made was devoid of sentiment, hence the almost universal disinclination to read the history of those years. As soon as there was sentiment in their life it was poetized.
Chaucer was merely a beautifier of thought. He originated little, he glorified whatever he voiced. He breathed life into the thought and language of the people, making them living souls, the Adam and Eve of English life. It is too much to ask that the primal poet who has to create language, create thought also. He did for the language of England what no other man was ever privileged to do for any nation. He took the chaotic speech and gave it beauty and rhythmic symmetry. He took foreign thought and made a home dress in which to clothe it. He took a language that foreigners despised, and of which the countrymen were ashamed, and christened it into the triune of strength, beauty and melody, so that it promises to be the universal tongue. He made a language that has the elements of perpetual youth, such as is possessed by no words but the Saxon’s.
In speaking of Chaucer as the initial laureate, it is with full knowledge that a century earlier, before there was a poet worthy the name, Henry III., of Magna Charta fame, had a “Versificator Regis,” whom he allowed £100 per year, but since it is impossible to find his name, or a line he ever wrote, it has not seemed wise to discount the honor so justly due him who wrote the first classic English verse.
After Chaucer there was no inheritor of his wreath for nearly a century, when, in the reign of Edward IV., who died 1485, John Kay was laureate, but he left no verse to show whether or not he adorned his position.
The growth of the custom into dignity and permanence was through the universities. Each of the large classic institutions had the established degree of poet laureate bestowed upon those who graduated with honors from the courses in grammar, rhetoric and versification. It was a requisite for all graduates who presented themselves for this honorable degree, to write a hundred creditable Latin verses on the glory of the university—though sometimes another subject was assigned. Upon graduation, and the acceptance of the Latin verses, he was publicly crowned with a wreath of laurel, and styled “poeta laureatus.” If he was ever selected by the king to rhyme his praise he might style himself the “king’s humble poet laureate.”
John Skelton is the first whom we know to have taken all these honors. He was a graduate of Cambridge in 1484, and nine years later was wreathed poet laureate of Oxford, and soon after of Lauvain, and in 1504, twenty years from graduation, Cambridge gave him the same honorary title and wreath. He also won the regal versifier’s crown, writing a poem when Henry VII.’s eldest son, Prince Arthur, was created Prince of Wales, and Latin verses when the infant Prince Henry (VIII.) was created Duke of York in 1494. Skelton is spoken of by his contemporaries as a special light and ornament to British literature.
Bernard André, of whom nothing is known except that he was a tutor of Prince Arthur, was poet laureate.
It was left to popular Queen Bess, among the many good things of her fickle reign, to establish the rank of regal laureate by conferring the laurel upon Edmund Spenser, since whom there has been no vacancy except when Cromwell took the poetry out of high life in England. Her reign is justly famed for its abundance of literary, poetic and dramatic talent. It was then that for the first time “Men of Letters” were a prominent feature in national life, and in that galaxy of artists the most brilliant star was her poet laureate.
Edmund Spenser was a charity boy, struggling for all his opportunities, supported at school by a benevolent Londoner, Robert Newell, but despite circumstances he was head boy. While a grammar school boy his benefactor died, and in the list of funeral expenses, still extant, is an item of two yards of cloth given Edmund Spenser to make a gown, that he might attend the funeral. This was the boyhood of the author of the “Faerie Queen.” There were multitudes in England whose parents, rolling in wealth, urged their children to study, but it was left for a charity student to lead his age and rank as one of the five great poets of the English tongue.
Pope Pius V. attempted to bring recreant England under the sway of the Church of Rome, and issued a bull of deposition against Elizabeth, attempting to enforce it by rebellion in the counties of the north. But he underestimated the grit and popularity of the queen, in whose interest the nation rose as one man. It was in the fervor of this patriotic ardor that Spenser published his first poems, awaking a sense of expectancy in the public mind, which he gratified later with his matchless glorification of Queen Bess in the “Faerie Queen.”