ii. Date and Circumstances.—The Confessio Amantis in its earliest form bears upon the face of it the date 1390 (Prol. 331 margin)[D], and we have no reason to doubt that this was the year in which it was first completed. The author tells us that it was written at the command of King Richard II, whom he met while rowing on the Thames at London, and who invited him to come into his barge to speak with him. It is noticeable, however, that even this first edition has a dedication to Henry earl of Derby, contained in the Latin lines at the end of the poem[E], so that it is not quite accurate to say that the dedication was afterwards changed, but rather that this dedication was made more prominent and introduced into the text of the poem, while at the same time the personal reference to the king in the Prologue was suppressed. If the date referred to above had been observed by former editors, the speculations first of Pauli and then of Professor Hales, tending to throw back the completion of the first recension of the Confessio Amantis to the year 1386, or even 1383, would have been spared. Their conclusions rest, moreover, on the purest guess-work. The former argues that the preface and the epilogue[F] in their first form date from the year 1386, because from that year the king (who was then nineteen years old) ‘developed those dangerous qualities which estranged from him, amongst others, the poet’; and Professor Hales (Athenæum, Dec. 1881) contends that the references to the young king’s qualities as a ruler, ‘Justice medled with pite,’ &c. certainly point to the years immediately succeeding the Peasants’ revolt (a time when Gower did not regard him as a responsible ruler at all, but excuses him for the evil proceedings of the government on account of his tender age)[G], that the reference to Richard’s desire to establish peace (viii. 3014* ff.) must belong to the period of the negotiations with the French and the subsequent truce, 1383-84, though Professor Hales is himself quite aware that negotiations for peace were proceeding also in 1389, and finally that the mention of ‘the newe guise of Beawme’ must indicate the very year succeeding the king’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382, whereas in fact the Bohemian fashions would no doubt continue to prevail at court, and still be accounted new, throughout the queen’s lifetime. It is on such grounds as these that we are told that the Confessio Amantis in its first form cannot have been written later than the year 1385 and was probably as early as 1383.
All such conjectures are destroyed by the fact that the manuscripts of the first recension bear the date 1390 at the place cited, and though this does not absolutely exclude a later date for the completion of the book, it is decisive against an earlier one. Moreover, the fact that in the final recension this date is omitted (and deliberately omitted, as we know from the erasure in the Fairfax MS.) points to the conclusion that it is to be regarded definitely as a date of publication, and therefore was inappropriate for a later edition.
This conclusion agrees entirely with the other indications, and they are sufficiently precise, though the fact that one of these also has unluckily escaped the notice of the editors has caused it to be generally overlooked[H].
The form of epilogue which was substituted for that of the first recension, and in which the over-sanguine praise of Richard as a ruler is cancelled, bears in the margin the date of the fourteenth year of his reign (viii. 2973 margin), ‘Hic in anno quarto decimo Regis Ricardi orat pro statu regni,’ &c. Now the fourteenth year of King Richard II was from June 21, 1390, to the same day of 1391. We must therefore suppose that the change in this part of the book took place, in some copies at least, within a few months of its first completion.
Thirdly, we have an equally precise date for the alteration in the Prologue, by which all except a formal mention of Richard II is excluded, while the dedication to Henry of Lancaster is introduced into the text of the poem; and here the time indicated is the sixteenth year of King Richard (Prol. 25), a date which appears also in the margin of some copies here and at l. 97, so that we may assume that this final change of form took place in the year 1392-93, that is, not later than June 1393.
Having thus every step dated for us by the author, we may, if we think it worth while, proceed to conjecture what were the political events which suggested his action; but in such a case as this it is evidently preposterous to argue first from the political conditions, of which as they personally affected our author and his friends we can only be very imperfectly informed, and then to endeavour to force the given dates into accordance with our own conclusions[I].
It will be observed from the above dates that we are led to infer two stages of alteration, and the expectation is raised of finding the poem in some copies with the epilogue rewritten but the preface left in its original state. This expectation is fulfilled. The Bodley MS. 294 gives a text of this kind, and it is certain that there were others of the same form, for Berthelette used for his edition a manuscript of this kind, which was not identical with that which we have.
In discussing the import of the various changes introduced by the author it is of some importance to bear in mind the fact already mentioned that even the first issue of the Confessio Amantis had a kind of dedication to Henry of Lancaster in the Latin lines with which it concluded,
‘Derbeie comiti, recolunt quem laude periti,
Vade liber purus sub eo requiesce futurus.’