Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: A Biography

by Kenneth Hotham Vickers

No period of English history is less romantic than that in which Humphrey of Gloucester’s life was cast. Apart from the fleeting glories of Agincourt, there is no outstanding event of transcendent interest, no episode of which Englishmen may be honourably proud. A disastrous and ill-conducted war abroad, bitter political dissensions at home, a feeble regency followed by a still feebler King, personal ambitions rampant, patriotic and unselfish action lost under the enervating influence of a false idea of foreign conquest, a nation that had outgrown its strength, a nobility that knew not the meaning of honour or disinterestedness—such was the state of England during the first half of the fifteenth century. This chaotic state was only to be wiped out by a long and disastrous civil war, yet working underneath all this seething mass of lost ideals there were forces which were to influence the formation of modern England as it emerged from this state of transition. It may be said that in one sense every age is one of transition, that the history of the world is the story of a great development, in which the old order is ever changing, giving place to the new; nevertheless we can note the spirit of change more clearly in some periods than in others. Gloucester lived at a time when the mind of man was broadening into a new phase of intellectual development. Already Petrarch had lived and died, declaring that he stood on the confines of two eras, looking back and looking forward; already Italy had realised that the long sleep of the Middle Ages was over; already that movement, which for lack of a better name we call the Renaissance, had begun. The traditional scholarship and the hereditary superstition which had dominated the Dark Ages was being superseded; a new field of human knowledge had been opened for Western Europe when Greek ceased to be an unknown tongue with the advent of Chrysoloras; the true meaning of that prophecy which had sprung from the lips of Joachim of Flora was dawning on men’s minds—‘the Gospel of the Father is past, the Gospel of the Son is passing, the Gospel of the Spirit is yet to be.’ A spirit of uneasiness was abroad, a spirit which proclaimed the emancipation of man from the bonds of ignorance and tradition, a spirit which was to proclaim his individuality, and to break down the trammels which had restrained the assertion of self. Morally, as well as legally, man was passing from status to contract.

INFLUENCE ON GLOUCESTER

Humphrey felt the full force of this movement; his life was moulded thereby. His activity and many-sided energy found their origin in this new spirit. His fervid imagination, which led him into impossible projects, his love of display, above all, his desire to stamp his individuality on the politics of his country, all sprang from the new realisation which was vouchsafed to him—the realisation of his own individuality. In England, the new spirit was more manifest politically than in isolated individuals; the country was throwing off the feudal system, her merchants and traders were demanding the acknowledgment of their importance, peasants and townsmen alike were preparing for that long, uphill struggle which has culminated in the parliamentary system of the nineteenth century. Humphrey, with all his senses ready to receive the message of the Renaissance movement, did not, however, grasp its true significance in England. The friend of the struggling masses, he nevertheless had no real sympathy with the popular movement; he was cast far more in the Italian than in the English mould. Though devoid of the cunning, the lack of scruple, and the conscienceless criminality of Machiavelli’s Principe, he nevertheless in his ambitions anticipated the type. He practised the art of popularity; he tried to make the nation feel that he, and he alone, was essential to the welfare of the kingdom, that the success of his policy was the only safeguard of the state. He failed, and failed egregiously, but the idea was the same as that which inspired the Florentine secretary; he had the idea, but in that he had not the weight of personality necessary for the typical tyrannus, he failed. More than this, the Italian type was not suited to English methods of thought; England had not progressed far enough along the road of new ideas to welcome despotism as the salvation of the nation. What the Tudors accomplished was impossible to Humphrey, both on account of his nature and on account of the temper of the people.

STATE OF ENGLISH SCHOLARSHIP

The comparison of Humphrey to the Italian despot must not be followed on the same lines, as in the case of his great successor, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester. The tyrannus who passed gaily and naturally from cold-blooded murder to the society of the philosophers and poets of his court, found no parallel in his career; violence and determined cruelty were not among his characteristics. Indeed these are later manifestations of the Renaissance movement, bastard products of a too self-centred individuality. In Humphrey the Renaissance was manifested in its first youth, and even then incompletely; it was not till after his death that the new ideas began to be fully understood in England; he led the van of the army which set out to conquer the realms of knowledge, and perished before possession was assured. In no other Englishman of the time do we find the same love of the ancient classics which characterised Gloucester. His father had given books to the University of Oxford, but only such as dealt with mediæval lore;[1163] the Duke of Exeter had studied at an Italian University, but there the traditions of mediævalism, based on a study of law, lasted long after Petrarch and Boccaccio had pointed to the past as the teacher of the future. Henry V. showed considerable interest in literature, and possessed numerous books.[1164] Not once, however, is there mention of a work of classical origin. That prolific versifier Lydgate translated the Psalms of David into ‘heroicall English metre’ for him, and thus they were sung in the royal chapel;[1165] the same writer dedicated his poem The Death of Hector to him, and it was at his request that this work was undertaken;[1166] the same is true of the Booke of the Nativitie of our Lady from the same unskilled pen.[1167] Hoccleve, too, wrote at the King’s bidding, and bore testimony to his master’s love of books, and his enjoyment of a ‘tale fresh and gay,’[1168] tastes which never extended beyond the ephemeral literature of a decadent age, though Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, which was dedicated to Henry when Prince of Wales, might boast of a distant classical ancestry.[1169] To Henry also Walsingham dedicated his Ipodigma Neustriæ[1170] and at his death we find him in possession of three books, the Chronicles of Jerusalem, the Voyage of Godfrey of Bouillon, and a copy of the Works of St. Gregory.[1171]

Henry V., however, had no interest in the new learning which heralded the Renaissance; his interests were confined to the productions of inferior court poets, and works on theological questions. Indeed theology, together with law, was the staple diet of the mediæval scholar. Humphrey’s originality lay in the fact that he looked to the works of the Greeks and early Romans for his mental food, and therein showed the distinction which lay between the old and new learning. It was to Greece and her literature that both Petrarch and Boccaccio had stretched out their hands, to the literature of an age which had passed out of the ken of the mediæval scholar. Students during the Dark Ages had known of Aristotle only through incomplete and erroneous Latin translations, Plato was to them but a name, most of the works of Cicero were lost, and only the later writers of decadent Rome were really familiar to them. The new movement taught that the secret of progress was to be found by enlarging the mental horizon, and by looking back to the great writers who had written before the advent of Christianity, and who taught the gospel of the goodliness of humanity—a gospel entirely unknown under the sway of the scholastic theologians. As by degrees a knowledge of Greek philosophy spread over Europe, men began to realise that there was a goodliness in life which they had not hitherto imagined. A love of beauty, a love of nature, a respect for humanity, were all found in the works of the Greek authors, and these were the ideas that revolutionised the mental attitude of the Western world. All this realisation of self, which we have found so strongly developed in Humphrey, was borrowed from ancient Greece; modern individualism is but a reversion to an earlier civilisation. All the grandeur and the joy of life and its surroundings flooded the imaginations of the new scholars; a definite basis from which to leap into the future was secured; the past was invoked to give birth to the future.

Thus the encouragement of scholars and the patronage of authors was not the distinguishing mark of the Renaissance; it was the nature of the studies thus encouraged which gave a tone to the movement; the Humanists—the students of the litteræ humaniores—were the heralds of the new era. Humphrey stood almost alone amongst the Englishmen of his time in encouraging the new kind of learning. Cardinal Beaufort, it is true, brought back Poggio Bracciolini, famous as a Humanist, and as a diligent searcher after the lost writings of classical days, from the Council of Constance, but he did not show any real appreciation of the movement which was mirrored in his great follower, and though he supplied books for the Cathedral Library at Canterbury, he himself seems to have had but little respect for classical studies.[1172] Poggio, though he soon tired of the somewhat chilling atmosphere of England, did not sever all connection with his English patron, and during the last year of the Cardinal’s life wrote to him two letters calling himself his ‘servitor et antiquus familiaris.’[1173] However, his impression of the intellectual life of England was not very favourable, and in later life he was accustomed to descant more on the wealth and the wonderful eating power of Englishmen, than on the men of learning he met during his sojourn in this country. As to the scholars, such as they were, he declared that they showed their learning in dialectics and disputations such as the old schoolmen had loved, not in a love of the doctrines of the new learning.[1174]

Nor was Bedford any more imbued than his uncle with the spirit of the new learning, though he showed considerable taste for artistically adorned manuscripts, and collected a library at Rouen, of which the basis was the fine collection of books which Charles V. had made at Paris. His tastes were almost entirely confined to works studied by the old schoolmen, and to French translations of Latin or late Greek authors. Thus we find a treatise by the Greek medical writer Galen on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, another man of medicine, and a work by the Arabian astronomer Aboo-l-Hassan on the stars—both translated into French—amongst his books, not to mention that most beautiful Salisbury Breviary, which will always rank amongst the marvels of fifteenth-century French art.[1175] The only book of genuine classical interest which we find in his possession was a French translation of Livy, and this he presented to his brother Humphrey as more suited to his tastes than to his own.[1176]

GLOUCESTER’S EDUCATION

Gloucester therefore struck out a new line of thought when he turned to the study of the Humane as well as the Divine letters, and laid posterity in England under an obligation, which it is slow to acknowledge. The impulse which led him to this course is impossible to discover. His natural endowments were not calculated to produce a scholar. His early active life was spent in camps and sieges, his lightness of character and volatile nature promised to make him a courtier and a politician, not a student; his many-sided political ambitions would presuppose an absorption which would forbid a cult of letters and learning, yet even amidst the distractions of court life, the tumults of war, and the disturbances of an eventful political career, he found time for study, and the encouragement of scholars.[1177] The fact that he was in many ways the typical Renaissance prince does not necessarily presuppose a natural aptitude for this rôle; his actions in this respect are more the result of the new influences to which he resigned himself, than the causes which led him to become a patron of letters. On the other hand, it is probable that in his early years his education was not neglected. We have shown reason to believe that Bale’s statement that he was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, is founded on fact, and that there he imbibed a love of learning, which later blossomed out into the cult of the new forms of study then spreading over Europe. His brother Henry was also a student at this University; indeed, all the four sons of Henry IV. were carefully educated, and showed an aptitude for learning.[1178] There are many circumstances, too, which point to the likelihood that Humphrey was destined for a less active career than his brothers. Though only three years younger than Thomas, and by one year the junior of John, he took no part in the active life of the kingdom in which they largely shared during the reign of Henry IV. Both these brothers held important administrative posts under their father, and the eldest of all, Henry, played no insignificant part before he succeeded to the throne. Humphrey alone of the four is never mentioned either in official document or by contemporary chronicler; he passed his time in seclusion and retirement far from the gathering storm which was even then threatening the safety of the House of Lancaster. Henry IV. was by no means lacking in interest in scholastic studies, and it is possible that he had destined his youngest son for an ecclesiastical career, in which these studies would rightly play a large part. In no other way can the absence of Humphrey from public life, long after the age for beginning an active career, be explained. Henry may have learnt the lesson of the dangers which had resulted from the long list of royal princes who descended from Edward III., and he may have wished to prevent a similar danger arising from his offspring by devoting one son to a career in which descendants were an impossibility. Certainly Humphrey, during this enforced seclusion, had ample opportunity for study and reflection, his education was more probably that of a scholar than of a politician.