Skelton was an ecclesiastic who was evidently among those who had adopted the principles of reformation before the Reformation. With equal levity and scorn he struck at the friars from his pulpit or in his ballad, he ridiculed the Romish ritual, and he took unto himself that wife who was to be called a concubine. To the same feelings we may also ascribe the declamatory invective against Cardinal Wolsey, from whose terrible arm he flew into the sanctuary of Westminster, where he remained protected by Abbot Islip until his death, which took place in 1529, but a few short months before the fall of Wolsey. It is supposed that the king did not wholly dislike the levelling of the greatness of his overgrown minister; and it is remarkable that one of the charges subsequently brought by the council in 1529 against Wolsey—his imperious carriage at the council-board—is precisely one of the accusations of our poet, only divested of rhyme; whence perhaps we may infer that Skelton was an organ of the rising party.
“Why Come you not to Court?”—that daring state-picture of an omnipotent minister—and “The Boke of Colin Clout,” where the poet pretends only to relate what the people talk about the luxurious clergy, and seems to be half the reformer, are the most original satires in the language. In the days when Skelton wrote these satires there appeared a poem known by the title of “Reade me and be not Wrothe,” a voluminous invective against the Cardinal and the Romish superstitions, which has been ascribed by some to Skelton. The writer was William Roy, a friar; the genius, though not the zeal, of Roy and Skelton are far apart—as far as the buoyancy of racy originality is removed from the downright earnestness of grave mediocrity. Roy had been the learned assistant of Tyndale in the first edition of the translation of the New Testament, and it was the public conflagration at London of that whole edition which aroused his indignant spirit. The satire, which had been printed abroad, was diligently suppressed by an emissary of the Cardinal purchasing up all the copies; and few were saved from the ravage;[5] the author, however, escaped out of the country.
In “The Crown of Lawrell” Skelton has himself furnished a catalogue of his numerous writings, the greater number of which have not come down to us. Literary productions were at that day printed on loose sheets, or in small pamphlets, which the winds seem to have scattered. We learn there of his graver labours. He composed the “Speculum Principis” for his royal pupil—
| To bear in hand, therein to read, |
and he translated Diodorus Siculus—
| Six volumes engrossed, it doth contain. |
To have composed a manual for the education of a prince, and to have persevered through a laborious version, are sufficient evidence that the learned Skelton had his studious days as well as his hours of caustic jocularity. He appears to have written various pieces for the court entertainment; but for us exists only an account of the interlude of the “Nigramansir,” in the pages of Warton, and a single copy of the goodly interlude of “Magnificence,”[6] in the Garrick collection. If we accept his abstract personations merely as the names, and not the qualities of the dramatic personages, “Magnificence” approaches to the true vein of comedy.
Skelton was, however, probably more gratified by his own Skeltonical style, moulding it with the wantonness of power on whatever theme, comic or serious. In a poem remarkable for its elegant playfulness, a very graceful maiden, whose loveliness the poet has touched with the most vivid colouring, grieving over the fate of her sparrow from its feline foe, chants a dirige, a paternoster, and an Ave Maria for its soul, and the souls of all sparrows. In this discursive poem, which glides from object to object, in the vast abundance of fancy, a general mourning of all the birds in the air, and many allusions to the old romances, “Philip Sparrow,” for its elegance, may be placed by the side of Lesbia’s Bird, and, for its playfulness, by the Vert Vert of Gresset.
But Skelton was never more vivid than in his Ale-wife, and all