Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: A Biography

by Kenneth Hotham Vickers

A Page from the Duke of Gloucester’s copy of “Le Songe du Vergier,” once part of the Library of Charles I of France.

GLOUCESTER’S LITERARY POSITION

Just as Humphrey was a great student so was he a great personality in the life of England, the Mæcenas of the new learning, and the friend of all scholars. A considerable portion of his books were presents from various people, and he seems to have been always approachable by any one who could take an interest in any branch of knowledge. Those who gave books to him were drawn from various classes of the community. Men who would earn his patronage presented their work to him as did Capgrave;[1386] his friend Wheathampsted cemented their friendship in the same way.[1387] Frenchmen as well as Englishmen knew of his tastes, and approached him with literary gifts, whether it were the learned Bishop of Bayeux,[1388] or an insignificant Canon of Rouen.[1389] The Duke of Bedford chose a choice treasure from the library of Charles VI. as a gift for his brother,[1390] and the Earl of Warwick, the ‘Father of Courtesy’ and the tutor of the young King Henry VI., offered a French translation of the Decameron as a mark of friendship and esteem for the man under whom he had served.[1391] Men of less mark followed the lead of the princes of the land. Sir Robert Roos, a public servant of some eminence, gave yet another French work to the then Protector of England,[1392] and Sir John Stanley, possibly the Sir John Stanley who was king of the Isle of Man, hastened to add his tribute of homage in the shape of a French Bible.[1393]

It is hard to say whether these gifts were in all cases indications of literary esteem, or merely means towards securing the favour of a powerful prince. At least they show that Humphrey’s interest in all kinds of literature and learning was not assumed as a pose, but was a veritable passion, ministered to by all who desired his friendship. To no other man of his time were such gifts in such profusion given, gifts, moreover, which came not only from the needy scholars who desired his support, but from prince, noble, priest, and humble gentleman alike. There is, too, a remarkable absence of party politics in the literary friendships which these gifts manifest. Bedford not once nor twice was compelled to condemn his brother’s action. Warwick was a member of the Council of Regency which withstood the Protector’s ambitious claims. Sir Robert Roos, though he accompanied Beckington on his embassy to the Court of Armagnac, was prominent in carrying out the peace policy which Humphrey opposed, and in 1445 was intrusted with bringing Henry VI.’s Queen over to England. Sir John Stanley may possibly be the man to whom the Duchess of Gloucester was intrusted when she was confined in Leeds Castle, and when we look further afield we find that Piero del Monte, the friend of Duke Humphrey, did not hesitate to give the papal blessing to the union of Margaret and Henry VI. when they were married by proxy at Tours.

GLOUCESTER’S LITERARY UNDERSTANDING

Humphrey therefore was more than a mere patron of scholars, and more than a mere literary dilettante. He was known to be more devoted to literature of all kinds than to anything else, and the subtle monks of St. Albans knew well how to win his favour by enlarging his library. His powers of criticism and appreciation are, however, hidden from us. Beyond the nature of the books he collected and a few words of formal appreciation of the works of Plato, we have nothing to guide our judgment, for though a patron and a student, he was not himself an author, in spite of statements to the contrary.[1394] There still exists a copy of certain astrological tables entitled Tabulæ Humfridi ducis Gloucestriæ in judiciis artis geomansie, but this was merely a compilation made at his command.[1395] He was content to encourage learning, and to qualify himself for this rôle by study. Thus the Duke of Gloucester devoted a large amount of his superfluous energy to the really great work of encouraging learning in England; yet at first sight it may seem that he laboured in vain. England did not at once adopt the new doctrines that were paving the way to modern methods of study, and it has been thought that Humphrey simply worked in the spirit of the mediæval scholar, and did not in any way appreciate the importance of his actions. England had lagged behind other nations in accepting the doctrines of the Renaissance scholars. Men imbued with the scholastic spirit had journeyed to Italy before the days of Duke Humphrey, but they had not understood the message which the Italians taught them. Richard of Bury had been the friend of Petrarch, but had entirely failed to understand his point of view, and when the future Duke of Gloucester was but five years old, a certain Augustinian monk, known in Italy as Thomas of England, was lecturing in Florence, but was said by Leonardo Bruni to have loved Humanism only so far as an Englishman could understand it.[1396] The Italian scholar therefore had been contemptuous of his English contemporary, but a new era dawns when Humphrey begins to take an interest in Italian scholarship. The Italians who wrote to him showed clearly in their letters that they understood their patron’s interest to be intelligent and quite different to the mediæval conceptions of his predecessors, and in some cases we can see the genuine appreciation of the scholar peeping through the adulation of the retainer. His love for Plato, and his clear understanding of the contrast between his philosophy and that of Aristotle, show how entirely he had thrown off the intellectual fetters of the Middle Ages, and in his selection of books we clearly see that he understood that the progress of the future must be based on an understanding of the past. In Humphrey, too, we see traces of that critical faculty which characterised the new movement. He did not look on the classics as an allegorical commentary on the Scriptures, and as a basis for Christian Theology; he studied them from the literary and philosophical point of view, and refused to accept the system laid down by the mediæval schoolmen. He was the first great Englishman to introduce these new ideas into England, though there were other scholars of the period who understood the new doctrines, if they did not preach them; men like Andrew Holles, who after long study in Italy retired to a country benefice, and did nothing towards spreading the new ideas he had acquired.[1397]

GLOUCESTER’S LITERARY INFLUENCE

Herein lies the importance of Duke Humphrey’s career. He not only understood the meaning of the new doctrines, but he paved the way towards their fuller appreciation by the nation as a whole. As a layman and a man of affairs he was able to take a more comprehensive view of the significance of the new learning than the churchmen who hitherto had held the monopoly of English knowledge, and he laid the foundations on which others were to build. In the first place he taught men that it was to Italy that they should look for direction in their studies. He himself had not visited that country as so many of his contemporaries had done, but he had brought himself into nearer touch with its intellectual life than any other Englishman. The man who was the patron of Leonardo Bruni, the constant correspondent of Pier Candido Decembrio, the friend of Piero del Monte, and the literary acquaintance of Alfonso of Aragon, the man who more than once was picked out by Æneas Sylvius for literary appreciation, was far more in sympathy with Italian aspirations than such a one as Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter, who showed no signs of having been influenced in any way by his sojourn at the University of Padua.

Yet the interest of Humphrey’s Italian sympathies lies not so much in his connection with Italy as in the fact that he never set foot in the country. He did not take himself and his energies to be expended in a selfish pursuit of learning in Italy, like his contemporary Holles, but he helped to bring the intellectual aspirations of the Italians over to England. He not only taught men to study Italian wars, but also led them to bring the results of that study home to their own doors. And he was not without disciples. It is customary to believe that the humanistic aspirations of the ‘Good Duke’ received no echo in the England of his day, but we cannot but think that his example helped to inspire the exertions of that devoted band of scholars which included the princely ecclesiastic, William Grey, poor students such as John Free, Fleming, and Gunthorpe, and the notorious but scholarly John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester. Indeed there is much to suggest this, and perhaps the most curious of all our evidence centres in the name of Guarino da Verona, the great schoolmaster of Ferrara, who was intrusted with the education of Lionello and Borso d’Este. Every one of this band of English students studied under the direction of this famous scholar. Grey attended his instructions while living in princely state at Ferrara; Free journeyed from his home in Bristol to get the benefit of his teaching; Tiptoft turned aside during his wanderings in Italy to visit him in his adopted home; all at one time or another joined that ever-increasing band of English scholars who flocked to the Ferrarese school in such numbers as to be specially mentioned by Lodovico Carbone in his funeral oration over the dead scholar.[1398] Humphrey’s influence is to be traced here, for it was he who had first pointed to Guarino as the fountain of true learning. When commissioning Zano of Bayeux to buy him books in Italy, he had laid special stress on his desire to possess anything that had been written by this teacher.[1399] By selecting Guarino as the mentor of his intellectual aspirations, he had pointed out the road for future scholars to tread.

All these scholars followed in the steps of the Duke of Gloucester, and had all grown up before he passed from the scene of his activities. They, however, failed to carry out his theories to the full. Though they submitted themselves to the desire for the new learning, they did but little to bring it home to the great mass of Englishmen. They studied, but they did not teach. They had all learnt the earliest lesson of the new ideas under the shadow of the University of Oxford; all were Oxonians, and thus were direct products of Duke Humphrey’s patronage of that home of learning, and they so far followed in his footsteps as to give or bequeath the books they collected either to the University itself, or to some College within it. It was in this way that Gloucester had most conspicuously prepared the high-road to learning. By his gifts of books he had given Oxford students the opportunity of further researches into the human mind, he had thrown open the doors which had hitherto barred the way to Englishmen who desired a knowledge of what the past had thought of life and its component elements. For the first time in England men were able to know something of what the ancients had written. In the book-chests of Oxford lay the seeds of the English Renaissance. The immense importance of access to these books may easily be misunderstood at the present day; it is hard to realise completely the limitations which surrounded the mediæval scholar, but once this is achieved, the presence of these works, which reflected, if they did not very accurately represent, the ideas of classical writers, will be fully appreciated.