It may be well to raise here the further question: Had not Chaucer already met Petrarch on an earlier Italian journey, which would relegate this of 1372-3 to the second place? In 1368, Lionel of Clarence was married for the second time to Violante Visconti of Milan. Petrarch was certainly an honoured guest at this wedding, and Speght, writing in 1598, quotes a report that Chaucer was there too in attendance on his old master. This, however, was taken as disproved by the more recent assertion of Nicholas that Chaucer drew his pension in England “with his own hands” during all this time. Here again, however, Mr. Bromby’s researches have reopened the possibility of the old tradition.[54] He ascertained, by a fresh examination of the original Issue Rolls, that the pension was indeed paid to Geoffrey Chaucer on May 25th, while the wedding party was on its way to Milan, but the words into his own hands are omitted from this particular entry. The omission may, of course, be merely accidental; but at least it destroys the alleged disproof, and leaves us free to take Speght’s assertion at its intrinsic worth. Chaucer’s own silence on the subject may have a very sufficient cause, the reason which he himself puts into the Knight’s mouth in protest against the Monk’s fondness for tragedies—
| ... for little heaviness Is right enough to many folk, I guess. I say for me it is a great dis-ease, Where as men have been in great wealth and ease, To hearen of their sudden fall, alas! |
Few weddings have been more tragic than that of Chaucer’s old master. The Duke, tallest and handsomest of all the Royal princes, set out with a splendid retinue, taking 457 men and 1280 horses over sea with him. There were great feasts in Paris and in Savoy by the way; greater still at Milan on the bridegroom’s arrival. But three months after the wedding “my lord Lionel of England departed this world at Asti in Piedmont.... And, for that the fashion of his death was somewhat strange, my lord Edward Despenser, his companion, who was there, made war on the Duke of Milan, and harried him more than once with his men; but in process of time my lord the Count of Savoy heard tidings thereof and brought them to one accord.” This, and another notice equally brief, is all that we get even from the garrulous Froissart about this splendid and tragic marriage, with its suspicion of Italian poison, at which he himself was present.[55] Why should not Chaucer have been equally reticent? Indeed, we know that he was, for he never alludes to a tragedy which in any case must have touched him very nearly, just as he barely mentions two other far blacker chapters in his life—the Black Death, and Wat Tyler’s revolt. It is still possible, therefore, to hope that he may have met Petrarch not only at Padua in 1372-3, but even earlier at the magnificent wedding feast of Milan.
CHAPTER V
THE MAN OF BUSINESS
“Oh! that any muse should be set upon a high stool to cast up accounts and balance a ledger.”—Times
The Italian journey of 1372-3 was far from being Chaucer’s last embassy. In 1376 he was abroad on secret service with Sir John Burley; in February of next year he was associated on another secret mission with Sir Thomas Percy, afterwards Earl of Worcester, and Hotspur’s partner at the battle of Shrewsbury; so that our poet, if he had lived only three years longer, would have seen his old fellow-envoy’s head grinning down from the spikes of London Bridge side by side with “a quarter of Sir Harry Percy.”[56] In April of the same year he was sent to Montreuil with Sir Guichard d’Angle and Sir Richard Stury, for no less a matter than a treaty of peace with France. The French envoys proposed a marriage between their little princess Marie, aged seven, and the future Richard II., only three years older; a subject upon which the English envoys seem to have received no authority to treat. So the embassy ended only in a very brief extension of the existing truce; the little princess died a few months afterwards, and Chaucer lived to see the great feasts in London twenty-one years later, when Richard took to second wife Marie’s niece Isabella, then only in her eighth year. In January 1378, our poet was again associated with Sir Guichard d’Angle and two others on a mission to negotiate for Richard’s marriage with one of poor little Marie’s sisters. Here also the discussions came to nothing; but already in May Chaucer was sent with Sir Edward Berkeley on a fresh embassy to Italy. This time it was to treat “of certain matters touching the King’s war” with the great English condottiere Sir John Hawkwood, and with that tyrant of Milan who was suspected of having poisoned Prince Lionel, and whose subsequent fate afforded matter for one of the Monk’s “tragedies” in the “Canterbury Tales”—
| Of Milan greatë Barnabo Viscount, God of delight and scourge of Lombardye. |