Chapter XXXV HOW A POET COMFORTED A GIRL

PERHAPS the best Morality of which we know the author’s name is Magnificence, by John Skelton.  But, especially after Everyman, it is dull reading for little people, and it is not in order to speak of this play that I write about Skelton.

John Skelton lived in the stormy times of Henry VIII, and he is called sometimes our first poet-laureate.  But he was not poet-laureate as we now understand it, he was not the King’s poet.  The title only meant that he had taken a degree in grammar and Latin verse, and had been given a laurel wreath by the university which gave the degree.  It was in this way that Skelton was made laureate, first by Oxford, then by Louvain in Belgium, and thirdly by Cambridge, so that in his day he was considered a learned man and a great poet.  He was a friend of Caxton and helped him with one of his books.  “I pray, maister Skelton, late created poet-laureate in the university of Oxenford,” says Caxton, “to oversee and correct this said book.”

John Skelton, like so many other literary men of those days, was a priest.  He studied, perhaps, both at Oxford and at Cambridge, and became tutor to Prince, afterwards King, Henry VIII.  We do not know if he had an easy time with his royal pupil or not, but in one of his poems he tells us that “The honour of England I learned to spell” and “acquainted him with the Muses nine.”

The days of Henry VIII were troublous times for thinking people.  The King was a tyrant, and the people of England were finding it harder than ever to bow to a tyrant while the world was awakening to new thought, and new desires for freedom, both in religion and in life.

The Reformation had begun.  The teaching of Piers Ploughman, the preaching of Wyclif, had long since almost been forgotten, but it had never altogether died out.  The evils in the Church and in high places were as bad as ever, and Skelton, himself a priest, preached against them.  He attacked other, even though he himself sinned against the laws of priesthood.  For he was married, and in those days marriage was forbidden to clergymen, and his life was not so fair as it might have been.

At first Wolsey, the great Cardinal and friend of Henry VIII, was Skelton’s friend too.  But Skelton’s tongue was mocking and bitter.  “He was a sharp satirist, but with more railing and scoffery than became a poet-laureate,"* said one.  The Cardinal became an enemy, and the railing tongue was turned against him.  In a poem called Colin Cloute Skelton pointed out the evils of his day and at the same time pointed the finger of scorn at Wolsey.  Colin Cloute, like Piers Ploughman, was meant to mean the simple good Englishman.

George Puttenham.

    “Thus I Colin Cloute,
    As I go about,

    And wandering as I walk,
    There the people talk. 
    Men say, for silver and gold
    Mitres are bought and sold.”