[In the essay below, Fox examines Barclay's motivations for writing the Eclogues as well as for translating Brandt's Ship of Fools.]

The patronage system affected different people in different ways, and these differences conditioned the kind of literature they contrived. Skelton wrote from within the court, having enjoyed the benefits that the system could impart. His problems were not ones of frustration at being excluded from court, but of insecurity and anxiety arising from the need to maintain his position and moral integrity once there. Consequently, he used the fiction of The Bowge of Courte to analyse and objectify the sources of that anxiety as a preparation for taking steps to resolve it. The case of Alexander Barclay is quite different, since at the time when he confronted the issue in his Eclogues, he had conspicuously failed to gain court patronage, and this is reflected in the nature and function of the work. Whereas The Bowge of Courte is an instrument of analysis preparatory to future action, the Eclogues are a retrospective justification of Barclay's failure, designed to make a virtue out of necessity; while Skelton narrows the distance between the action in his poem and his personal situation, Barclay seeks to distance it by placing it clearly in the past; and whereas Skelton seeks to involve the reader in deciding what he might do, Barclay instructs him or her on the merit of what he pretends he has already done. The rhetorical strategies of the two works are thus quite different.

There are, nevertheless, striking similarities that show The Bowge of Courte and the Eclogues to be characteristic of their age. Both seek to confirm their author's viewpoint by exploiting conventional anti-court themes, yet handle them in ways that are innovative in form. Both seek to ‘establish the will’ of the author,¹ by dramatizing the process through which he evolves towards his final attitude; and both end up being ambivalent in that attitude because of divided impulses in each author that belie his fictional stance. Though a much maligned writer, therefore, Barclay takes his place as a genuine contributor to the early Tudor literature of complexity.

Barclay's early career explains the frustration and disappointed expectations that eventually moved him to write the Eclogues. Like so many others who sought a literary career, Barclay went to either Oxford or Cambridge, and certainly gained a degree from one of them.² From his various references to foreign universities and foreign scholars (particularly French ones), it can be inferred that he travelled to the continent where he may have undertaken further study. Up to this point, Barclay's career is remarkably similar to that of Skelton or Stephen Hawes, and Barclay might well have expected that it would lead to advancement similar to theirs.

On his return to England, Barclay entered holy orders, being ordained by Thomas Cornish, titular bishop of Tyne, and suffragan bishop of Bath and Wells. Cornish was also provost of Oriel College, Oxford (1493-1507), and warden of the College of Saint Mary, Ottery, in Devonshire, between 1490 and 1511,³ and it was probably through his offices that Barclay gained his first preferment as chaplain at Saint Mary, Ottery, where he combined the duties of librarian and instructor to the choirboys.⁴ Saint Mary's was a college of secular priests, and would therefore have given Barclay plenty of scope for further advancement, had he sought it.

There are, indeed, plenty of signs that Barclay wanted to secure promotion to higher positions at this time. The main evidence is provided by the Ship of Fooles, the translation of Sebastian Brandt's satire which Barclay completed in 1508, while at Saint Mary's, Ottery. Barclay's verse translation vastly expands on the original, and his periphrastic additions often reveal a great deal of self-projection on his part.

Two specific themes emerge in these additions: resentment at the numbers of unsuitable people gaining promotion, and an implicit assertion of Barclay's own suitability for advancement. Barclay seems particularly resentful of the advantages that those with wealth, noble birth, or powerful connections have over other more worthy aspirants in the competition for promotion. For instance, in the section ‘of unprofitable study’ he asserts that he dare not let on board ‘all the fooles promoted to honours … of hye progenitours’ because, together with the servants of Cupid and Venus, these would cause the ship to sink.⁵ These are the scholars that make good not because of mind or talent, but because of noble lineage. The problem, however, is general in England:

Eche is not lettred that nowe is made a lorde,
Nor eche a Clerke that hath a benefice:
They are not all lawyers that plees do recorde,
All that are promoted are not fully wise.(6)
This is the speciall cause of this inconuenience,
That greatest fooles, and fullest of lewdnes,
Hauing least wit, and simplest science
Are first promoted, and have greatest reuerence.
For if one can flatter, and beare a Hauke on his fist,
He shalbe made Parson of Honington of Clist.(7)
The company of men that lacketh witte,
Is best exalted (as nowe) in every place,
And in the chayre or hyest rowme shall sit,
Promoting none but suche as sue their trace.(8)

In the expanded phrasing of passages like these one can detect Barclay's envy at the promotion of others less worthy than he is to positions he feels he is better equipped to occupy. The phrasing with which he proposed the remedy for England's ills (in a section marked ‘Anglie defectus’ in the margin) also implies Barclay's belief that he should be among those who are advanced to an honourable office:

If the noble realme of Englande would aduance
In our days men of vertue and prudence,
Eche man rewarding after his gouernaunce,
As the wise with honour and rowme of excellence,
And the ill with greeuous payne for their offence,
Then should our famous laude of olde obtayned,
Not bene decayed, oppressed and thus distayned.
If men of wisdom were brought out of the scoles,
And after their vertue set in moste hye degree,
My ship should not haue led so many fooles.(9)

The phrasing with which he translated the Latin here creates an unnecessary repetition, betraying Barclay's conviction that he would benefit from such a reform. He is the wise man from the schools that might very profitably be advanced to a ‘room of excellence’.

Even though Barclay professes that he translated the book ‘neyther for hope of rewarde nor laude of man’,¹⁰ there are indications that his motives were rather more practical than he pretends. The work contains a number of strategically placed panegyrics praising the English king, which were manifestly composed with Henry VII in mind. Henry is praised as ‘the red Rose redolent’ who has quelled insurrection, expelled war and shown exemplary qualities of meekness, chastity, justice and pity, to whom Englishmen are to do obedience ‘with faythfull heart’.¹¹ These encomiastic passages offer exactly the same kind of flattery through which other writers, such as Skelton, Hawes, or More, sought to attract the attention, and hence the patronage, of the current monarch. Having embedded these encomia in the work, Barclay may have hoped that his mentor, Bishop Cornish, to whom The Ship of Fooles is dedicated, might bring it to the king's notice to procure him advancement. Henry VII, however, died in 1509 before the work appeared in print. Hasty emendations to the text confirm the idea that Barclay had patronage from the king in mind. In the case of one encomium, a marginal note simply substitutes Henry VIII for Henry VII as the subject of praise:

But ye proude galants that thus your selfe disguise,
Be ye ashamed, beholde vnto your prince:
Consider his sadness, his honestie deuise,
His clothing expresseth his inwarde prudence
Ye see no example of such inconuenience.
In his highnes, but godly wit and grauitie,
Ensue him, and sorowe for your enormitie.

The marginal comment reads: ‘Laus summa de grauitate eximia Henrici Anglorum regis, viij’ (‘a high commendation of the extraordinary seriousness of Henry VIII, King of England’).¹² Whatever else Henry VIII may have been in the early years of his reign, he was not the epitome of gravitas and sober dress—but his father was. Another sign of hasty reworking occurs later in the work when Barclay, forgetting that he has already praised Henry VII as the ‘red rose redolent’ who has been leading England into a state of millenial peace, inserts a long panegyric of the new king who is just beginning a reign of unprecedented glory:

One hope we have our enemies to quell,
Which hope is stedfast if we our selfe do well,
For Henry the eyght replete with hye wisedome,
By iust title gideth our scepter of kingdome.
This noble prince beginneth vertuously,
By iustice and pitie his realme to maynteyne,
So that he and his without mo company,
May succour our sores by his manhode souerayne,
And get with his owne hande Jerusalem agayne,
He passeth Hercules in manhode and courage,
Hauing a respect vnto his tender age.(13)

Much of this is simply drawn from Brandt's original praise of the Emperor Maximilian as the leader who will defeat the Turks, liberate Jerusalem, and recover the holy cross, as the marginal note makes clear: ‘Mutatur laus Maximiliani Romanorum regis, in laudem Henrici octaui anglorum regis’ (‘the praise of Maximilian, King of the Romans, is changed into a praise of Henry VIII, King of the English).’ However, Barclay praised the young Henry for a virtue that is not mentioned in the source—liberality:

He passeth Achilles in strength and valiaunce,
His fame here as great, but as for his larges
And liberalitie, he showeth in countenaunce
That no auarice can blinde his righteousnes,
Couetice hath left behinde him his riches,
Unto the high possession of liberalitie,
Which with the same shall kepe our libertie.(14)

These lines show Barclay hastening to ingratiate himself with the new regime by (like so many others) attacking the old. He implicitly personifies Henry VII as Covetousness, whose wealth his liberal son, Henry VIII, has inherited, to the happiness of potential beneficiaries—like himself. It is all rather cynical, as Barclay had earlier praised the old king as ‘one who spared no expence upon the poore’, when it looked as if the father and not the son would be the source of liberality for him.¹⁵ At any rate, these inconsistencies and emendations prove that Barclay was not as disinterested in putting forth his work as he pretended. He hoped to gain preferment and, if he had observed the careers of scholars such as André, Skelton, and Hawes, he might justifiably have expected that it would come his way.

In this hope, however, he was to prove disappointed. Just at the point when Barclay could look to see his literary efforts rewarded, his intended patron, Henry VII, died, and his successor, Henry VIII, favoured a style of man and writing which was far removed from anything Barclay had to offer. The new king was interested in disguisings and joustings, not in didactic treatises—he had enough of those inflicted on him by his tutors—and in poets who would entertain, not instruct him. To add to this misfortune, Bishop Cornish, Barclay's old patron, retired from the wardenship of Saint Mary, Ottery, in 1511 and died shortly after, thus depriving Barclay of any intercessor with the new regime. And to cap Barclay's bad luck, just at this time John Skelton decided that he had had enough of country life as a parish priest, and energetically sought to return to court.¹⁶ Skelton had the advantage over Barclay in every respect. He was already personally acquainted with the king, having been his tutor, and in spite of a deeply serious vein of morality, had the wit and racy style to provide Henry with what he wanted, as his bawdy lyrics and colourful invectives show.

For a number of reasons Skelton became a particular bête noire for Barclay, even before he added insult to injury by gaining the court patronage Barclay would have liked. Barclay's first attack on his rival came at the end of The Ship of Fooles:

Holde me excused, for why my will is good,
Men to induce vnto vertue and goodnes,
I write no iest ne tale of Robin Hood,
Nor sowe no sparkles ne sede of viciousnes,
Wise men loue vertue, wilde people wantonnes,
It longeth not to my science nor cunning,
For Philip the Sparowe the Dirige to singe.(17)

This reference to Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe reveals not only Barclay's disapproval of the frivolity and sexual lubricity displayed by his rival in that poem, but also the difference between them as poets. Barclay is unwilling, and unable, to write jests of fiction for entertainment's sake, preferring instead to write didactically; Skelton, on the other hand, is both willing and able, and Barclay despises him for it.

Such an attitude was bound to disqualify Barclay in the eyes of the boisterous and pleasure-loving young king, and so it eventually proved. Yet Barclay nevertheless appears to have been given a chance to prove his worth at court. One of Skelton's first tasks as newly appointed court poet was to stage a ‘flytyng’ or ritual exchange of verbal abuse, with Sir Christopher Garnesche, one of Henry VIII's gentleman ushers, for the entertainment of the court in late 1513 or early 1514.¹⁸ Although Garnesche's side of the flytyng does not survive, we can infer from Skelton's, which does, that Garnesche called upon the services of another poet, whom Skelton alludes to sarcastically as ‘gorbellyd Godfrey’ with ‘that grysly gargons face’.¹⁹ There is every reason to suspect that this other poet is not Stephen Hawes, as has been claimed,²⁰ but Alexander Barclay himself. Gordon adduced that ‘gorbellyd Godfrey’ was Hawes because of the similarity between that name and the name of a misshapen dwarf, ‘Godfrey gobylyue’ who occurs in Hawe's Passetyme of Pleasure.²¹ ‘Godfrey’, however, is an ironic name that is frequently applied, in various alliterative combinations with adjectives beginning with ‘g’, to other nefarious types in the early Tudor period. Barclay himself uses it in his Eclogues to refer, I believe, to none other than Skelton. Replying to Cornix's assertion that ‘a ribaudes blame is commendation’, Coridon says:

Nowe truely my heart is eased with the same,
For Godfrey Gormand lately did me blame.
And as for him selfe, though he be gay and stoute,
He hath nought but foly within and eke without.
To blowe in a bowle, and for to pill a platter,
To girne, to braule, to counterfayte, to flatter,
He hath no felowe betwene this and Croydon,
Saue the proude plowman (Gnato) of Chorlington.
Because he alway maligneth against me,
It playne appereth our life doth not agree.
For if we liued both after one rate,
Then should I haue him to me a frendly mate.(22)

In late 1513-early 1514, when the Eclogues were worked up, the most likely recent occasion for vituperation would have been the Garnesche-Skelton flytyng, and in this passage Barclay seems to be reliving the encounter. Godfrey Gourmand, he says, is unmatched in his dubious ability

To blowe in a bowle, and for to pill a platter,
To girne, to braule, to counterfayte, to flatter.

This picks up the level of Skelton's own vituperative manner when, for example, he abuses Garnesche:

Ye bere yow bolde as Barabas, or Syr Terry of Trace.
Ye gyrne grymly with your gomys and with yor grysly face.(23)

Barclay is thus purloining Skelton's style and adapting the sobriquet Skelton had given him in order to throw both back in his face. He even alludes to the idea that must have formed the main line of his attack on Skelton, when he declares that his opponent's life-style and his own do ‘not agree’. Skelton's own verses confirm that this was one of the main tactics used by his opponent to slander him. Warning Garnesche that he, Skelton, has detected the hand of his ‘skrybe’ behind his letter, Skelton adds:

I caste me nat to be od
With neythyr of yow tw[ey]ne:
.....Lewedely your tyme ye spende,
My lyvyng to reprehende.(24)

This implies that Garnesche and his poet have singled out improprieties in Skelton's personal life (he kept a concubine) as ammunition for an ad hominem attack, which is entirely consistent with the attitude Barclay displays towards Skelton elsewhere. In the Eclogues he refers to him in thinly veiled terms as having been ‘decked as Poete laureate, / When stinking Thais made him her graduate’,²⁵ and in The Life of Saint George he asserts that ‘he which is lawreat / Ought nat his name with vyce to vyolate’, implying that at least one notable laureate (that is, Skelton) had done so.²⁶

One final piece of evidence exists to clinch the identification of Barclay as the poet Garnesche hired to counter Skelton. John Bale attributes to Barclay a work to which he gives the Latin title Contra Skeltonum.²⁷ In the light of the other evidence, it would seem probable that this work, no longer extant, is the missing side of the flytyng, the counterblast to Skelton's Agenst Garnesche.

Time has obliterated any further traces of the quarrel between Barclay and Skelton, but we do know that it left him with an abiding detestation of his rival, and resentment at his success. He had good reason to be perturbed. Skelton, the charismatic court wit, was in tune with the times, and Barclay, the sage and serious moralist, was not. If he were indeed the rival poet in the Garnesche flytyng, the whole experience must have shown him that he could not expect to find advancement at court, far less fit comfortably into it. He was left with no option but to seek a living elsewhere, and he found one by becoming a Benedictine monk at the cathedral house of Ely. It was here that he drew breath, and chose the moment to reflect on the meaning of his experience in his next major literary work, his five pastoral Eclogues.

The first three of Barclay's five Eclogues were printed separately by Wynkyn de Worde at an unknown date, and form a discrete group on their own. They may have been written earlier in Barclay's career, for he says in the ‘Prologe’ that he had first compiled the Eclogues in youth; then, having rediscovered them accidentally, has worked them up, ‘adding and bating where I perceyved neede.’²⁸ This protestation closely imitates the Dedicatory Epistle of Mantuan's Eclogues,²⁹ and as such may be largely convention, but references to Henry VII as recently dead and Dudley and Empson as traitors suggest that there may have been some truth in it.³⁰ Also, whereas Mantuan refers to himself as ‘quinquagenarius’, Barclay declares that he is ‘fortie yere saue twayne’.³¹ The more specific age of 38 suggests a particular occasion for the work and, given other internal references dating the Eclogues to 1514, it seems likely that the occasion was Barclay's entry into the Benedictine monastery at Ely after his encounter with Skelton in the Garnesche flytyng. Such circumstances would explain the bitterness Barclay still shows towards Skelton, as when he sardonically contrasts his own black monk's robes with the green robe Skelton had been given as orator regius:

No name I chalenge of Poete laureate.
That name vnto them is mete and doth agree
Which writeth matters with curiositee.
Mine habite blacke accordeth not with grene,
Blacke betokeneth death as it is dayly sene,
The grene is pleasour, freshe lust and iolite,
These two in nature hath great diuersitie.
Then who would ascribe, except he were a foole,
The pleasaunt laurer vnto the mourning cowle.(32)

While Barclay disavows any ambition to gain the reputation and position that Skelton has, the ironic tone and his insistence on the blackness of his cowl, with its symbolism of mourning, nevertheless betrays more than a hint of sadness and self-pity.

Eclogues I-III translate the De Curialium Miseriis by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, but in the course of doing so transforms the original.

Piccolomini's satire on life at the imperial court is written in the form of a Latin prose letter to John Aich. Barclay recasts it as three pastoral dialogues spoken between two shepherds—Cornix, who is old and experienced, and Coridon, who is young, inexperienced, and eager to escape his life of poverty in the country by finding a place at court. Cornix gradually talks him out of this plan by describing to him all the miseries of courtiers.³³

Barclay's decision to present this anti-court satire in the form of the pastoral dialogue has been denounced as ‘ideally unfortunate’.³⁴ It is no such thing, for the associations inherent in the pastoral conventions meant that Barclay could exploit them as a metaphor for his own situation as a self-imposed exile in Ely. The device of ‘shepherds’ perfectly suggested the religious vocation of Barclay and his fellow monks, and the traditional setting of the countryside accurately signified his location. Moreover, the countryside had conventionally been attributed with greater innocence, happiness, and virtue than the city, and so the pastoral genre helped Barclay justify his failure to gain preferment at court, on the grounds that his current situation was in any case superior.

The pastoral genre, therefore, helped Barclay to turn Piccolomini's satire into a vehicle for self-projection and self-assertion. The original attack is an extended literary paradox in which Piccolomini proves that all who dwell at court are fools because, in seeking honour, praise, power, wealth, and pleasure, they end up with the opposites of these things. Barclay dutifully reproduces the substance of Piccolomini's proof, while suppressing the element of facetiousness in the original, so that it becomes a serious statement of his own fictionalized reaction to court. ‘Eclogue 1’ proves that the honour to be found there is false honour because it arises neither from virtue nor merit—and itemizes the disadvantages of power and riches.³⁵ ‘Eclogue II’ describes how any pleasures offered to the five senses are outnumbered by unpleasant experiences, such as drinking out of cups ‘in which some states or dames late did pis’, or eating fish that is ‘corrupt, ill smelling, and fiue dayes olde’.³⁶ ‘Eclogue III’ expands the catalogue of miseries: having to put up with the farting, snorting, and stinking breath of unwelcome bedfellows; the difficulty of getting stipends paid; and the horrors of a troubled conscience.³⁷ Barclay deliberately obscures the careful structure of the original by introducing Coridon as an interlocutor, who breaks in to voice doubts and queries. His interruptions add a verisimilitude that helps to disguise the rhetorical character of the original, so that its points may be taken more seriously.

The dialogue form of the Eclogues was just as useful to Barclay as the generic conventions of the pastoral, for he needed not only to justify a life away from court, but also to reconcile himself to his rural existence. By changing Piccolomini's epistle into a series of dialogues, Barclay turned the Eclogues into an instrument for ‘establishing his will’, through confronting doubts in order to overcome them. By personifying his own divided impulses as two separate characters, Barclay was able to dramatize as an external action, an internal process of self-persuasion.

Cornix and Coridon both reveal traces of their creator. In a passage that has no source in Piccolomini, Cornix who is old and experienced, says that in youth he dwelt in Croydon, and often brought coals to sell at court, where ‘none regarded me’.³⁸ Barclay mentions Croydon so often that his biographers have supposed that he resided there as a boy. The fact that he was buried in Croydon in 1552 lends some credence to this supposition.³⁹ In some respects, therefore, Cornix is likely to embody aspects of Barclay's older, disillusioned self. Coridon, on the other hand, the young man who is tired of country life and does not want to live in poverty any longer, shows the same belief in his own worthiness and capacity that Barclay had projected in The Ship of Fooles. ‘I were a man mete to serue a prince or king’, he declares, and later adds:

If I had frendes I haue all thing beside,
Which might in court a rowme for me prouide.(40)

Coridon may therefore represent some of Barclay's own earlier expectations. By setting the two together in a debate, during which Cornix talks Coridon out of seeking a place at court, Barclay attempted to allay doubts about his chosen course that still troubled his mind.

The youthful Coridon acts as the devil's advocate. When Cornix asserts that a life at court is merely vile and full of shame, Coridon asks why, if that is really so, have there been so many ‘worthy shepheardes’ such as ‘the riche shepheard which woned in Mortlake’ (John Morton, Archibishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor), or John Alcock (the ‘cock in the fens’), Bishop of Ely, Master of the Rolls, and also Lord Chancellor.⁴¹ All that Cornix is able to reply, is that things have got a lot worse since they died, and that any good shepherds who resorted to court went there against their will.⁴² Here we see Barclay struggling against his fear that virtue and a life at court may not, indeed, be incompatible, as the worthiest churchmen have always enjoyed high rank there. To admit this would be to deprive himself of the comforting thought that it was his virtue that had prevented him from getting court patronage. However lame Cornix's reply, it does show Barclay using the dialogue to confront the sources of lingering perturbation in his mind.

Another instance occurs when he makes Coridon catch Cornix out on an inconsistency over his attitude to wealth:

Cornix, thy promise was not to preache,
But me of the courtiers misery to teache.
Against thine owne selfe thou speakest nowe perdie,
For first thou grutched against pouertie.
Agayne, thou blamest plentie of riches nowe,
But fewe men liuing thy saying will alowe.
For without riches, thou sayest openly
Uertue nor cunning nowe be nothing set by.(43)

The terms in which this paradox is put are not in the source, and reflect Barclay's awareness that he is making Cornix protest too much. In reply, Cornix havers: it is not wrong for a man to possess riches, but for riches to possess the man. The idea is commonplace, but its inclusion at this point dangerously threatens the premise of the case Cornix has been trying to maintain—that a life of poverty in the country is preferable to a wealthy one at court. For the rest of his life Barclay tried energetically to touch money, which exposes a degree of disingenuousness in the attitude propounded in the Eclogues.

Indeed, many traces of regret and resentment remain in the Eclogues, as when Cornix claims that the kind of power gained at court is worthless:

There none hath honour by vertue and cunning,
By maners, wisedome, sadnes nor good liuing.
But who hath power, hye rowmes or riches,
He hath moste honour and laude of more and lesse.
For what poore man, a playne and simple soule,
Though he were holy as euer was Saint Powle,
Haste thou euer seene exalted of a king
For all his maners and vertuous liuing.
These be the wordes of Shepherde Siluius,
Which after was pope, and called was Pius.(44)

Even though the words italicized in this passage are a fairly close translation from Piccolomini's Latin,⁴⁵ Barclay's need to remind the reader that the words are Piccolomini's and not his own suggests that he felt their relevance to his own personal situation was in danger of becoming rather too apparent. Passages in other works too enhance the probability that Barclay was investing these lines with more than a little self-interest. In The Mirrour of Good Maners, for example, he wrote:

When from this wretched life at last thou must depart,
And come to heauen gates to see the eternall king,
It shall not be asked what countrey man thou art,
Frenche, English, Scot, Lombard, Picard or Fleming,
But onely shalbe asked thy merite and liuing,
A poore Scot of good life shall find him better then,
Then some riche Lumbarde, or noble English man.(46)

Barclay, who was a Scot,⁴⁷ seems to have thought that his nationality, as well as his poverty, had acted as a barrier to preferment. In spite of the homiletic platitudes Barclay utters in the Eclogues, therefore, he was sufficiently honest to allow his grievances and regret to show through.

As a result of Barclay's fictive strategy, a final, perhaps unintended paradox emerges: whereas Barclay wrote the work to warn those seeking court patronage that they were better off without it, his fiction betrays his own ambivalence on that score. Predictably, Cornix ends up voicing the conventional exhortation:

Flee from the court, flee from the court I crye,
Flee proude beggery and solemne miserye.(48)

Coridon accepts this as wise advice, but in a passage of Barclay's own invention, he asks about the alternative:

But tell me Cornix one thing or we departe,
On what maner life is best to set my harte?
In court is combraunce, care, payne, and misery,
And here is enuy, ill will and penury.(49)

In this passage Coridon is altering the terms on which the attack was predicated: that a life in the country is preferable to one at court. Coridon's words let slip a realization that rural life has its own miseries. All that Cornix can offer, ultimately, is the necessity for stoical endurance:

CORNIX.
Sufferaunce ouercommeth all malice at the last,
Weake is that tree which can not bide a blast,
But heare nowe my counsell I bid thee finally,
Liue still a shepheard for playnly so will I.
CORIDON.
That shall I Cornix thy good counsell fulfill,
To dye a shepheard established is my will.(50)

Coridon concurs, but it takes an effort of will, suggesting that he, like Barclay, is making the best of a bad deal.

The ambivalence generated in Eclogues I-III, shows why fiction was so useful to those who had to confront the realities of early Tudor politics. Because of its capability for representing or figuring forth experience, it could be used as a device for dramatizing and objectifying tensions that arose from personal predicaments such as Barclay's, or Skelton's (as was shown in the previous chapter). The distinctive complexity of early Tudor literature arises from its need to confront such predicaments.

The other one of Barclay's Eclogues to have a political bearing, the fourth, serves a completely different function. It is a skilfully contrived bid for patronage which makes the protestations of the first three eclogues seem all the more disingenuous.

Based on Mantuan's fifth eclogue, Barclay's ‘Eclogue IV’ treats of ‘the behavour of Rich men agaynst Poetes’, in the form of a dialogue between Codrus, who has riches but lacks wisdom, and Minalcas, a poet ‘with empty belly and simple poore aray’.⁵¹ In the course of their talk Minalcas laments the difficulty of attaining the kind of financial support that would enable him to write, and then, when he agrees to sing a song for Codrus in exchange for a fee, discovers that even he finds a pretext for putting off the promised payment. The effectiveness of the work depends upon its function as an indirect means of negotiation between Barclay as suppliant and the second Duke of Norfolk as prospective patron.

As in Eclogues I-III, Barclay makes sure that the details of the pastoral context reflect his personal situation. In a long autobiographical insertion of 140 lines he projects his discontent with monastic life at Ely, through the unhappiness of Minalcas with his pastoral lot. Minalcas is ‘wery of shepheardes company’, hates the isolation, mud, and stink of the fens, and resents being poor when other shepherds are rich:

Seest thou not Codrus the fieldes rounde about
Compassed with floudes that none may in nor out,
The muddy waters nere choke me with the stinke,
At euery tempest they be as blacke as inke:
Pouertie to me should be no discomforte
If other shepheardes were all of the same sorte.
But Codrus I clawe oft where it doth not itche,
To see ten beggers and halfe a dosen riche,
Truely me thinketh this wrong pertition,
And namely sith all ought be after one.(52)

Minalcas, in fact, has suffered a rude shattering of his expectations:

When I first behelde these fieldes from a farre
Me thought them pleasant and voyde of strife or warre,
But with my poore flocke approching nere and nere
Alway my pleasour did lesse and lesse appeare,
And truely Codrus since I came on this grounde
Oft vnder floures vile snakes haue I founde.(53)

However unpleasant the physical environment may be, ‘yet the dwellers be badder then the place.’ Minalcas has encountered brawling and envy amongst the shepherds, who have shown hatred and malice towards him because he is a newcomer whose learning they resent. As a result Minalcas is determined ‘to seke a newe pasture’, so long as he can be assured that it will improve his conditions.⁵⁴ If these details are translated into the autobiographical facts they signify, one can infer that Barclay was highly disillusioned with life in the monastery at Ely, and was seeking to change it for something better. In particular, he wanted leisure and material support. When Codrus asks him why he no longer ‘endites’, Minalcas replies that being a shepherd absorbs all his energy in tending his flock, whereas ‘a stile of excellence / Must haue all laboure and all the diligence’; Minalcas cannot do both. Also, a poet needs material comfort to produce good work, for

… without repast who can indite or sing:
It me repenteth, if I haue any wit,
As for my science, I wery am of it.
And of my poore life I weary am, Codrus,
Sith my harde fortune for me disposeth thus.(55)

Barclay's piety, however genuine, was evidently not strong enough to expunge the wordly ambition that he had earlier shown.

When Codrus advises several remedies, the terms in which Minalcas rejects them imply the particular frustrations Barclay had felt. Codrus suggests, first, that he seek to join the service of a rich prelate:

Thou well perceyuest they be magnificent.
With them be clerkes and pleasaunt Oratours,
And many Poetes promoted to honours,
There is aboundaunce of all that men desire.(56)

Minalcas laments, however, that all the former bounteous ecclesiastical patrons such as Morton, are dead and ‘They, nor their like shall neuer returne agayne.’ Minalcas, therefore, has given up any idea of finding that kind of patronage, and has now trimmed his sights so that he is prepared to accept a more modest kind of advancement:

Graunt me a liuing sufficient and small,
And voyde of troubles, I aske no more at all.
But with that litle I holde my selfe content,
If sauce of sorowe my mindes not torment.(57)

The fact that these passages are more particular than anything in Mantuan's original makes it probable that they describe Barclay's actual experience.

Barclay also seems to have given up hope of gaining any preferment at court. When Codrus proposes that he seek a place in a prince's court, Minalcas observes bitterly that ‘the coyne auaunceth’ so that only the rich get promotion, and apart from that, all the ‘iugglers and Pipers, bourders and flatterers / Baudes and Ianglers, and cursed aduoutrers’ who infest the court ‘do good Poetes forth of all courtes chase.’⁵⁸ Barclay/Minalcas's special resentment is reserved for the ‘rascolde poets’ who pander to the vices of princes and get decked as Poet Laureate in return. As usual, he has Skelton in mind, and seems to feel that Skelton's success has hindered his chances:

Thus bide good Poetes oft time rebuke and blame,
Because of other which haue despised name.
And thus for the bad the good be cleane abiect,
Their art and poeme counted of none effect.(59)

As if to illustrate his point, Barclay has Codrus offer Minalcas a payment if he will recite ‘some mery fit / Of mayde Marion, or els of Robin hood, / Or Bentleyes ale which chaseth well the bloud.’ Minalcas refuses to speak about vice or wantonness, but launches instead into a ballad on the moral maxims of Solomon. Eventually Codrus intervenes to shut him up.⁶⁰ The whole episode serves as a dramatic exemplum of the claims Barclay has just made. Princes and courtiers want ‘vicious’ entertainment—the kind of thing Skelton could produce with gusto—while Barclay was only prepared to offer them poetry ‘sownynge in vertu’, as Chaucer might have said. In Barclay's own mind, and he was probably right, this essential difference between the two poets had barred him unjustly from court promotion.

Up until his ballad on Solomon's wise saws, Barclay had followed Mantuan's fifth eclogue quite closely, because it served admirably as a disguised representation of his own dilemma. Nevertheless, the fourth Eclogue was calculated to remedy the dilemma, not just depict it, and to that end Barclay boldly inserts into his source an elegy on the death of Edward Howard, second son of the Duke of Norfolk, who, as Lord High Admiral, was killed in a naval engagement with the French off Brest in 1513. The elegy itself, ‘The Towre of Vertue and Honour’, is a chivalric allegory of the Franco-Flemish kind, in which Howard contends with the monster Minerva in order to ascend the Tower of Vertue. By writing the poem, Barclay is offering to immortalize the fame and honour that Howard should have attained, had Fortune not maliciously cut him off at the very moment of his success.

The elegy is an elegant compliment in its own right, but it is even more important for its function within the whole Eclogue. Being set into a work complaining of the niggardly behaviour of rich men towards poets, it implicitly invites the Duke of Norfolk, to whom it is explicitly and flatteringly addressed, not to imitate them.⁶¹ The ending is designed to make it even more difficult for Norfolk to withhold his bounty, for Codrus, having promised to reward Minalcas for the poem he has just recited, reneges on the agreement and earns Minalcas's parting curse. In the course of his fiction, Barclay has thus managed to depict his need, offer a sample of the flattering panegyrics he can provide for his intended patron, and give a cautionary exemplum of the obloquy which that patron could suffer should he withhold patronage. In this way, ‘Eclogue IV’ is not merely a plea for patronage, but also a kind of fictional blackmail by proxy.

It worked. Several decades later William Forrest declares, in dedicating his History of Joseph the Chaiste to the fourth Duke of Norfolk, that Barclay had commended The Mirrour of Good Maners to his great-grandfather, the second Duke, ‘withe other workes mo’. These books, continues Forrest, were received ‘in acceptation’ for their worthiness and noble fame.⁶² We know what some of the other works were. Barclay dedicated both his translation of Sallust's Jugurthine War, published by Pynson in the early 1520s, and his Introductory to Wryte and to Pronounce Frenche, published in 1521 by Copland, to the second Duke of Norfolk, at whose command he says they were compiled. In the prologue to his French primer, Barclay drops hints that it was the Duke's munificence that had stimulated him to write. He explains that whereas he had once used to write diligently to alleviate the dullness of mind of his native countrymen, some time before he had ceased his literary activity; now, however, he has picked up his pen once more:

lyke as the naked trees depryued of fruyt and leaf stoppeth
the byrdes tune: & al that wynter depryueth ye somer
restoreth agayne / ryght so though dyuers causes have
withdrawen my pen from my olde dylygence / the mocyon of
certayne noble gentylmen hath renued and excyted me agayne
to attempt my accustumed besynesse.(63)

Although Barclay does not say explicitly what the diverse causes of his silence had been, they can be inferred from the symbolism he uses. The images of naked trees deprived of fruit and leaf because of the deprivations of winter suggest the poverty and lack of patronage of which he had complained in the Eclogues. Likewise, the idea of summer restoring the dearth of winter suggests that the poet has received new bounty, and that that is why his song has resumed.

Other evidence strengthens the likelihood that Norfolk secured for Barclay some of the advancement he desired. It was probably Norfolk who promoted Barclay's interests at court. In April 1520 Sir Nicholas Vaux wrote to Wolsey from Guisnes begging him to send over ‘Maistre Barkleye, the Blacke monke and poete, to devise histoires and convenient raisons to florisshe the buildings and banquet house withal’ for the meeting of Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of Cloth of Gold.⁶⁴ For Barclay to have been given this important assignment proves two things: first, that he was not as averse to supplying the offices of a court poet as he had pretended in the Eclogues, and, second, that his reputation at court had risen considerably.⁶⁵ For that to have happened, he would have needed a mediator, and his patron, Norfolk, was undoubtedly the man. Barclay, in fact, ultimately arrived where he had wished to go all along—at court—if only in a rather minor way. As a final piece of corroborating evidence, we have William Forrest's statements in The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary that ‘Alexander Barkeleye … to the Cowrte dyd eke beelonge’, and that ‘hee in Courte had manye freynde.’⁶⁶ So much for Barclay's disingenuous assertion of the miseries of courtiers.

Barclay's literary output ceased when the second Duke of Norfolk died. He fell out of favour with the administrations of both Wolsey and Cromwell by managing both to flirt with the new religion and also to oppose the royal supremacy.⁶⁷ These attitudes, plus his uncompromising moralism, probably cost him his chance of any further advancement. In any case, it had been the problem of gaining patronage that had excited his literary imagination; once he had tasted it, he abandoned both political aspiration and the literary impulse together.

Notes

1. I use Barclay's phrase. See The Eclogues of Alexander Barclay from the Original Edition by John Cawood, ed. Beatrice White, Early English Text Society, Original Series, 175 (London, 1928), Eclogue III, p. 139, l. 820. All references are to this edition.

2. He has been claimed for Oriel College, Oxford, by Wood, and for Cambridge by Watson; see Beatrice White, ed. cit., p. viii.

3. DNB, I, p. 1077.

4. Ibid., I, p. xiv.

5. Stultifera nauis, qua omnium mortalium narratur stultitia … The Ship of Fooles, Wherein is shewed the Folly of all States. … Translated out of Latin into Englishe by Alexander Barclay Priest (London 1570), fo. 54^v. All references are to this edition.

6. Ibid., fo. 2^r, paraphrasing ‘Seu studiam, seu non, dominus tamen esse vocabor’ (fo. 1^v).

7. Ibid., fo. 2^v. There is nothing in the Latin to suggest this passage, which may refer to an actual incident (See White, p. xix).

8. Ibid., fo. 235^v, paraphrasing ‘Ascendit celebres stultorum turba cathedras, / Stultitia mentes quae violare solet’ (fo. 234^r).

9. Ibid., fo. 235^v, based on: ‘Si modo prudentes aleret Germania pugnax, / Et daret ingenuis praemia digna viris: / non sic deserta fluerent praeconia fama, / Parta quidem, quae nunc Theutona terra premit. / Si gradus insignis sophiae cultoribus esset, / Non veheret fatuos tot modo nostra ratis’ (fo. 234^r). My italics.

10. Ibid., sig. ¶¶ 1^v.

11. Ibid., fo. 127^r.

12. Ibid., fo. 9^v.

13. Ibid., fo. 205^r.

14. Ibid., paraphrasing ‘Viribus Alcidem superat, praecellit Achillem, / Caesaris hoc vno est principe, fama minor’ (fo. 200, misnumbered 100).

15. Ibid., fo. 127^r.

16. See Edwards, [H. L. R.], Skelton,[Lodon: Cape, 1949,] pp. 129-32.

17. Ship of Fooles, fo. 259^r.

18. See Helen Stearns Sale, ‘John Skelton and Christopher Garnesche’, Modern Language Notes, 43 (1928), pp. 518-23.

19. Agenst Garnesche (ii), Skelton, [John. John Skelton: The complete English] Poems, ed. [John] Scattergood, [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983,] p. 123, ll. 29-36.

20. By Ian Gordon, ‘A Skelton Query’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 November 1934, p. 795.

21. The Passetyme of Pleasure, ed. William Edward Mead, Early English Text Society, Original Series, no. 173 (London, 1928), p. 141/3746.

22. Eclogues, I, ll. 837-48. My italics.

23. Agenst Garnesche, (ii), ll. 11-12.

24. Ibid., (iii), ll. 1-16. My italics. Scattergood prints ‘tewyne’.

25. Eclogues, IV, ll. 685-6.

26. The Life of Saint George, ed. William Nelson, Early English Text Society, Original Series, no. 230 (London 1955), p. 14/113-19.

27. John Bale, Index Britanniae scriptorum, ed. Reginald Lane Poole, Anecdota Oxoniensia (Oxford, 1902), p. 19.

28. Eclogues, I, ll. 65-79.

29. Quoted by White, Eclogues, p. 220, n. 7.

30. Ibid., p. lvii.

31. Eclogues, I, l. 69.

32. Ibid., I, ll. 104-12.

33. Aeneae Sylvii Piccolominei … opera quae extant omnia (Basel, 1557), pp. 720-36.

34. Berdan, [John Milton,] Early Tudor Poetry, [Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1961,] p. 242; cf. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, [London: Oxford University Press, 1973,] p. 131.

35. Eclogues, I, ll. 719-910, 911-1072, 1073-308.

36. Ibid., II, ll. 642, 783.

37. Ibid., III, ll. 82-112, 265-74, 620-42.

38. Ibid., I, ll. 389-93.

39. See T. H. Jamieson (ed.), The Ship of Fools (Edinburgh, 1874), I, p. xxxi; White, p. viii.

40. Eclogues I, ll. 328, 353-4.

41. Ibid., I, ll. 494-550.

42. Ibid., I, ll. 545-6, 557-9.

43. Ibid., I, ll. 1123-30.

44. Ibid., I, ll. 729-38. My italics.

45. ‘Nam quem vnquam pauperem, tametsi praestanti virtute praeditum, Regum aliquis sublimauit?’ (White, p. 25).

46. Stultifera nauis … The Ship of Fooles … Translated out of Latin into Englishe by Alexander Barclay Priest (1570), ed. Cawood, sig. F6^v. My italics.

47. For the evidence of Barclay's Scottish origins, see Jamieson, pp. xxv-xxx. It seems not to have been noticed that Skelton corroborates this disputed point. In Collyn Clout he criticizes the monks for being slack in refuting heresy, and lists those who could effectively do so. Having scanned the other three orders, when he comes to the black friars he makes the following observation, unquestionably with reference to Barclay:

    Or elles the poore Scot,
    It must come to his lot
    To shote forthe his shot.

    (Skelton, Poems, ed. Scattergood, p. 265, ll. 749-51.) Either this is an allusion to the passage quoted from The Mirrour of Good Maners, or else Barclay's complaint at the discrimination he suffered because he was a Scotsman had become sufficient of a mannerism for Skelton to be able to mock it thus.

48. Eclogues, III, ll. 779-80.

49. Ibid., III, ll. 811-14. My italics.

50. Ibid., III, ll. 815-20.

51. Ibid., IV, l. 26.

52. Ibid., IV, ll. 52, 93-102.

53. Ibid., IV, ll. 103-8.

54. Ibid., IV, ll. 123, 124-33, 134-5.

55. Ibid., IV, ll. 179-80, 226-30.

56. Ibid., IV, ll. 498-501.

57. Ibid., IV, ll. 515-18.

58. Ibid., IV, ll. 545-52, 665-9.

59. Ibid., IV, ll. 711-14.

60. Ibid., IV, ll. 720-2, 791.

61. Ibid., ll. 1079, 1120, 1132.

62. Quoted by White, pp. xxxi-xxxii.

63. The Introductory to Wryte and to Pronounce Frenche, (London, 1521?), sig. A2^r.

64. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer and others (London, 1862-1932), III, i, no. 737. Hereafter cited as LP.

65. Significantly, Skelton had fallen into disfavour at this time (see Chapter Fox, Alistar. Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.).

66. Quoted by White, pp. xxxiii-xxxv.

67. See White, pp. xlii; xlviii.