[In the following essay, Grady argues that “In Praise of Peace” shows Gower's loyalty to the Lancastrian dynasty at a time when its existence seemed very tenuous.]

Giving advice to Henry Bolingbroke was a pastime that could be very rewarding or very dangerous. Consider the following two cases. In May 1401, a little over nineteen months after Henry had deposed his cousin Richard and ascended the throne, his friend and confessor Philip Repyngdon, at that time the abbot of St. Mary de Prè in Leicester and chancellor of Oxford, sent Henry a long letter about the condition of the realm. Henry had personally requested such a report, according to the version of the letter preserved in Adam of Usk's Chronicle.¹ “Whereas your singular serenity did require of me, the least of your servants, when last I went out from before you with heavy heart, that, if I should hear aught adverse, I should make it known unto your excellency without delay, now, as your most obedient servant, do I take my pen in hand to show what I have heard and seen.” And Repyngdon had apparently heard and seen a lot, as he claimed that “law and justice are banished from the realm; thefts, murders, adulteries, fornications, extortions, oppressions of the poor, hurts, wrongs, and much reproach, are rife; and one tyrant will doth serve for law.”²

Henry's supporters had hoped that his return to England, which Repyngdon describes as “the work of the hand of God” and a Christlike return to “redeem Israel,” would restore peace and justice to the realm, but that restoration has not occurred.³ Instead “the commons, like wild beasts … rage like the brutes, without the balance of reason, against those who are above them, those who are equal with them, and those who are below them”;⁴ Repyngdon fears that this world-turned-upside-down will soon produce a bloodbath, in which twenty thousand of Henry's liegemen will be put to the sword before justice and equity are restored. The only hope is that Henry remember the pledges he made upon his accession to protect “all and every the dwellers in the realm, poor and rich, great and small.”⁵ “Therefore,” he writes to Henry, “may my God, the sun of justice, take away the veil from your eyes, that you may clearly see with the eyes of your mind what, at your happy coming into the kingdom of England, you did vow in public and in private. … And may the Blessed Trinity … give to you a teachable and a yielding heart, easily led to all good, to fulfill with faithfulness the bounden duty of kingly rank, and to understand in your heart and thoroughly, and to heal the sufferings of your people; and may the Lord open your heart in his law and in his commandments, and stablish peace in the kingdom of England for ever and ever!”⁶ This sternly worded rebuke to Henry concerning his governance of the realm did not produce any regal volte-face according to Adam of Usk, who simply moves on to later events. But neither did it seem to cause any trouble for Repyngdon, who four years later became bishop of Lincoln, a post that he held until his resignation in 1419.

Chris Given-Wilson has commented that the letter “is remarkable not only for the close relationship between Henry and Repyngdon which it demonstrates, but also because it is yet another example of Henry's ability to take criticism without bearing grudges.”⁷ But this observation seems a little ingenuous—Henry was not always so generous with those who offered him advice. The continuation of the Eulogium historiarum describes how a certain hermit of the north—Walsingham gives his name as William Norham—came to Henry after the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 and told him “multa secreta.” This hermit was not without credentials: according to the chronicles he had warned Richard II before his departure for Ireland in 1399 that if he did not restore the lands of those he had disinherited, he could expect “magna mala in brevi.” Richard had him sent to the Tower; Henry had him beheaded.⁸

The contrast between these two episodes is instructive. Repyngdon's letter—public, textual, aristocratic, its allegedly pointed advice mediated not only by its Latin but also by its rhetorical flourishes—looks at best occasional and at worst contrived next to the oral, unmediated, unauthorized words of the hermit. Norham's secreta, on the other hand, seem at once genuine and almost apocryphal, the contents of his message apparently deemed too volatile for inclusion in the chronicle. Taken together these stories point to the mutually reinforcing fictions involved in publicly giving advice to one's monarch (and keeping one's head): the presumption that the king's subordinate has worthwhile advice to give, and that the monarch virtuously desires to follow it. As Derek Pearsall has recently remarked about medieval mirrors for princes, “Princes welcomed them and on occasion commissioned them, not because they specially desired to have instruction in the business of government from clerks, nor because they would much appreciate being told things that they did not wish to hear, but because it was important that they should represent themselves as receptive to sage counsel.”⁹ Repyngdon's letter, which for all its excoriation is nevertheless careful to invest Henry with the sole power to amend the kingdom, thus contributes to Henry's royal self-representation, to borrow Pearsall's term; Norham's fate exposes that pose for what it is.

Somewhere between the case of Repyngdon, “clericus specialissimus regis,”¹⁰ and that of the nearly anonymous, prophetic hermit lies the case of John Gower, less intimate with Henry than the former, but more conventionally recognizable as an adviser to princes than the latter by virtue of his verse. Gower's Lancastrian connections are well known: he was the recipient of a collar from the then earl of Derby in 1393—perhaps a reward for a copy of the Confessio Amantis dedicated to Henry—and he was granted an annuity of two pipes of Gascony wine soon after Henry's accession in 1399.¹¹ However one interprets the rededication of the Confessio from Richard to Henry, as a principled act of admiration for a respected aristocrat or as Gower's opportunistic (and amazingly foresightful) switching of horses in midstream, it is clear from the evidence of the vehemently anti-Ricardian Cronica that by early 1400 Gower's adherence to the Lancastrian cause was wholehearted. And although Gower was never connected to the political events of the day through civil service, as his fellow poet and fellow esquire Geoffrey Chaucer was, there is abundant other evidence throughout his career of his close and partisan interest in the issues of the day: the fervid denunciation of the Peasant's Revolt in the opening dream sequences of the Vox clamantis; the anti-Lollard sentiments of the “Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia” of 1397; the editorial changes at the beginning and end of the later recensions of the Confessio, prompted by Gower's loss of confidence in Richard; the poem “O Deus immense,” which George Coffman associated with the events between May and October 1399;¹² the dedicatory epistle to Archbishop Arundel in what is presumably a presentation copy of the Cronica, the Vox, and other poems, given to Arundel after his restoration;¹³ various short Latin pieces, monitory and congratulatory, directed to Henry; and even the seven-line “Presul, ovile regis,” also addressed to Arundel, which takes note of the comet of March 1402 and the dangers it presaged for the kingdom.¹⁴

It is this Gower, an engaged and political poet rather than a detached, conventional moralist, whom I wish to invoke in my analysis of his “other” Middle English poem, the late pacifist lament entitled by G. C. Macaulay To King Henry the Fourth, in Praise of Peace.¹⁵In Praise of Peace, fifty-five rhyme royal stanzas that condemn the folly and disruption of war, extol the virtues of peace, and recommend its pursuit to Henry, has long been viewed as an inert, if elegant, piece of Lancastrian propaganda; it was the poem that prompted John Fisher to ask, half rhetorically, of Gower, “Has there ever been a greater sycophant in the history of English literature?”¹⁶ In what follows I propose to analyze Gower's poem with full (and overdue) attention to its historical context—the turbulent first years of Henry's reign, when, in an environment of wars, rebellions, tax revolts, administrative incompetence, inflation, and Lollardy, the prospect of a Lancastrian dynasty looked anything but certain. Repyngdon's letter, florid as it is, evidently did not exaggerate, and the hermit of the north was one of many to go to the Tower, and then to the block, in the first years of the fifteenth century. It is testimony to Gower's control of his medium and his facility at mediation that we have been for so long mesmerized by the smooth surface of a poem whose very syntax, as we shall see, encodes the anxieties of its historical moment and hides multa secreta of its own.

Recently Paul Strohm, in an essay about what he calls the “textualization” of the Lancastrian claim to the throne, has shown how Gower depends in In Praise of Peace on the language of the “Record and Process,” the “official” Lancastrian account of the usurpation.¹⁷ Strohm's observation implies two things for Gower and his poem: first, Gower's willingness to adopt the language of that document confirms—as if we needed further confirmation—his closeness and loyalty to the Lancastrian circle after 1399; and second, Strohm's own analysis of the “uneasy amalgam” within the “Record and Process” of multiple strands of Lancastrian apologetics suggests that Gower's poem may have absorbed the document's suppressed unease along with some of its language. That is, Gower's reliance on the “blurred and contradictory but ultimately reassuring formulations” of the “Record and Process” is likely to have produced something other than an inert piece of propaganda.

Strohm's analysis shows how the themes of the “Record and Process,” in the hands of different chroniclers and poets, helped create an aggressive, if not always coherent, legitimating discourse, combining and recombining such disparate elements as Henry's claim by descent (from Edmund Crouchback, who according to legend was really the elder brother of Edward I and thus the rightful heir—a story not even Henry's closest supporters seemed to put much weight in); the voluntary resignation or deposition of Richard (Strohm claims that “a clear-cut decision between these two alternatives was never made; whether through thoroughness on the one hand or disorganization on the other, the Lancastrians simply pursued both at once”);¹⁸ the consent of the assembled commons, clergy, and lords (which soon mutated into the idea of election cherished by some modern constitutional historians); the exercise of divine grace; and—for Gower the most troubling and profoundly consequential of these ideas—the notion of Henry's succession by conquest. As Strohm puts it, “Everyone knew by mid-August [1399] that Henry would be king; the question was whether the blunt fact of conquest could be brought to bear argumentatively in order to rationalize Henry's accession” (emphasis in original).¹⁹

The blunt fact proved to be inescapable throughout the first years of Henry's reign, although it was somewhat softened in his “chalange” of September 30, in which the claims of descent and divine grace were connected to Henry's professed intention simply to “recover” the realm, “whych reme was in poynt to ben undoo for defaute of governance and undoying of the good lawes.”²⁰ The conquest is here depicted as a rescue—although Henry's use of the word “chalange,” as K. B. McFarlane has noted, invokes martial rather than legislative protocol: “Henry was offering to fight any rival claimant, not submitting his claim to the impartial examination of the assembly; of course no one answered the challenge.”²¹ A similar challenge was offered at the coronation feast in October, when Sir Thomas Dymock rode into the hall fully armed and vowed to fight any man who should say that Henry “was not of right crowned king of England.” Henry is said to have replied, “If need be, sir Thomas, I will in mine own person ease thee of this office.”²²

This response is certainly in keeping with the reputation of a man hailed as the flower of English chivalry in the 1390s,²³ and we should not be surprised to find Henry willing to defend chivalric prerogatives, or royal ones, after 1399. But neither was he insensitive to the difficulties of reliance on the right of conquest, which “would have put a premium on rebellion,” as McFarlane notes.²⁴ Indeed, many of Henry's English opponents—to say nothing of the Welsh, the Scots, or the French—later showed little hesitation to turn to armed insurrection. But Henry did attempt to reassure them at the beginning, in remarks made after Arundel's collation at the September gathering. “To putte his subgettes in Reste,” says one chronicle, Henry “seyde opynly thanne thes wordes”: “Sires, I thanke god and yow Spirituell and Temporell and alle the States off the lande. And I do yow to vndirstonde that hit is nat my wille that no man thynk that by wey off conquest I wolde disherite eny man off his heritage, ffraunchises, or other Rihtes that him ouht to have, ne to putte him oute off that he hath and hath hadde by goode lawes and custumes off the Rewme: excepte thes persones that haue ben ageyns the goode purpos and the comvne profyte off the Rewme.”²⁵ Henry's “excepte” captures perfectly the double-edged nature of his claim by conquest, and reveals the ambiguity of his renunciation of it. On the one hand the speech provides comfort by restricting the king's aggression to only those evildoers who act contrary to the good of the nation. Clearly Richard's government is meant here, including Richard, who literally and illegally “disherited” Henry when he seized the Lancaster inheritance in February 1399. A sympathetic listener could doubtless conclude that Henry's personal experience of the loss of rights lay behind this professed disdaining of conquest. Thus the implied return to the status quo ante is made to include the usurpation: just as with the fiction of Henry's “recovery” of the realm, his accession to the throne is made to seem like the natural and inevitable consequence of Richard's mismanagement, and his claims in this statement the logical and honest extension of the principles that led him to invade—or rather, return to—England.

But at the same time the vagueness of “thes persones” (“those persones” in the Stowe manuscript)²⁶ and the empty, if resonant, conventions of “goode purpos” and “comvne profyte” show just how much of a prerogative Henry reserved to himself. There is an inevitability about that “excepte” and the royal exceptionalism it implies, and while it would be a mistake to suggest that Henry's reservation represents a theoretical problem for late-medieval kingship—clearly it does not—it does present a philosophically minded Lancastrian apologist like Gower with practical and poetical difficulties. For when in In Praise of Peace Gower moves beyond the borrowed language of the “Record and Process” in an attempt to illustrate his admonitions with some examples—the poetic practice, of course, on which the Confessio Amantis (his other Middle English poem) is predicated—he begins to expose both the difficulties inherent in imagining a pacific Lancastrian monarchy and the problem at the heart of his own historical method.

The success of both practices ultimately depends upon the suppression of certain well-known historical facts. On one level such selective omission would not have been a problem to Lancastrian partisans, who understood, according to Strohm, that “an argument can accomplish its purpose without necessarily being plausible, that a text can be powerful without being true.”²⁷ And Gower himself had lately engaged in such textual management—the account of the Epiphany Rising of January 1400, which he included in the Cronica tripertita, does describe the spectacular deaths of the four principals at the hands of the patriotic English citizenry, but it makes no mention of the executions of lesser participants authorized by Henry. Indeed, David Aers has recently described the “paratactic moralism” that enabled Gower to advise a prince to be Christlike in one passage and warlike in the next, reproducing unself-consciously and unironically the “fundamental contradictions within medieval … Christian traditions.”²⁸ But In Praise of Peace is a poem that insists upon self-consciousness and ultimately, I would argue, shows us an ironic Gower. His chief examples in this poem are examples he has used before, in the Confessio Amantis, here reshaped for their new circumstances, reinterpreted for their new exemplary function, but retailed to a not-so-new reader. The dedication of the Confessio and the address of In Praise of Peace to Henry force the two poems into a hypotactic relation; in adapting his illustrative tales for Henry's royal status, Gower implicitly challenges both Henry's memory of the Confessio and his understanding of history and historical writing. We know that Gower was “acutely conscious of the differences between the contexts of his source texts and of his own narrative”;²⁹ whether Henry was equally acute is the question posed by In Praise of Peace. Caveat lector.³⁰

In Praise of Peace begins by implying that, far from having conquered England, Henry has had the rule of the kingdom thrust upon him:

O worthi noble king, Henry the ferthe,
In whom the glade fortune is befalle
The people to governe uppon this erthe,
God hath the chose in comfort of ous alle:
The worschipe of this lond, which was doun falle,
Now stant upriht thurgh grace of thi goodnesse,
Which every man is holde forto blesse.
The highe god of his justice allone
The right which longeth to thi regalie
Declared hath to stonde in thi persone,
And more than god may no man justefie.
Thi title is knowe uppon thin ancestrie,
The londes folk hath ek thy riht affermed;
So stant thi regne of god and man confermed.
Ther is no man mai seie in other wise,
That god himself ne hath thi riht declared,
Whereof the lond is boun to thi servise,
Which for defalte of help hath longe cared:
Bot now ther is no mannes herte spared
To love and serve and wirche thi plesance,
And al is this thurgh godes pourveiance.

(1-21)

In the opening stanza the trope of divine election, which informs the first seventy lines, disarms any suspicion of Lancastrian ambition. Henry is virtually a passive instrument of God's will—indeed, the last lines suggest that he is a sort of divinity himself, whose “grace” and “goodness” must be blessed by every faithful Englishman. “Worschipe,” with its religious as well as chivalric connotations, is a word advisedly chosen here. In the second and third stanzas the familiar motifs of royal descent and popular consent are woven into the melody of divine ordination; the counterpoint of conquest remains subordinated in its familiar disguise as rescue—the land's “defalte of help.” And the poem's opening movement concludes with a hymn to national unity that, given the disturbances of the early years of the reign, must have seemed like rhetorical excess any time after October 1399.³¹

In the fourth stanza Gower takes up a familiar moral position and states that God can be depended upon to defend Henry's reign if it remains reasonable and good:

In alle thing which is of god begonne
Ther folwith grace, if it be wel governed:
Thus tellen thei whiche olde bookes conne,
Wherof, my lord, y wot wel thow art lerned.
Axe of thi god, so schalt thou noght be werned
Of no reqweste which is resonable;
For god unto the goode is favorable.

(22-28)

The evocation of those who know “olde bookes,” a group that includes the learned Henry according to the poet's direct address, forcefully recalls the bookish Confessio Amantis, dedicated (sometimes) to the bookish Henry Bolingbroke.³² And the advisory stance of the poet recollects not only the generally monitory structure of the Confessio, but in particular the Fürstenspiegel of book 7.³³ As I have suggested, though, when Gower turns to exempla in this poem, they prove much more difficult to manage.

As an example of a king whose “reqweste” was evidently reasonable, Gower cites Solomon:

Kyng Salomon, which hadde at his axinge
Of god what thing him was levest to crave,
He ches wisdom unto the governynge
Of goddis folk, the whiche he wolde save:
And as he ches it fel him forto have;
For thurgh his wit, whil that his regne laste,
He gat him pees and reste unto the laste.

(29-35)

This story is familiar from the Confessio, too, but here it is oddly incomplete. In fact, the ending is completely rewritten. In book 7 the account of Solomon's wisdom (lines 3891-3942) is soon followed by the story of his corruption and downfall, his descent into promiscuous idolatry, motivated by lust, which leads to the dissolution of his kingdom (lines 4469-4573). Solomon becomes one of Gower's chief examples against fleshly indulgence in book 7, and his intemperate behavior is immediately contrasted with the salutary advice of Aristotle to Alexander upon the same topic:

O, which a Senne violent,
Wherof so wys a king was schent,
That the vengance in his persone
Was noght ynouh to take al one,
Bot afterward, whan he was passed,
It hath his heritage lassed,
As I more openli tofore
The tale tolde. And thus therfore
The Philosophre upon this thing
Writ and conseileth to a king,
That he the surfet of luxure
Schal tempre and reule of such mesure,
Which be to kinde sufficant
And ek to reson acordant,
So that the lustes ignorance
Be cause of no misgovernance …

(Confessio Amantis 7.4551-66)

The contrast between Solomon's excesses and Alexander's evident restraint is further pointed by Gower's marginal gloss, which gives Aristotle's advice in apothegmatic form: “Aristotiles. O Alexander, super omnia consulo, conserua tibi calorem naturalem”—“Above all, I advise you, conserve your natural warmth” (or, to paraphrase Dr. Strangelove, “Deny them your essence”).³⁴

But in In Praise of Peace Solomon's “blinde lustes” are replaced by “pees and reste unto the laste,” and the scandal of idolatry is entirely suppressed. What in the Confessio Amantis was an example of moral failure turned into political failure, leading to the dissolution of a kingdom, Gower here turns into its opposite, a model of divinely approved kingship, before the very eyes of his “lerned” patron, a reader (we assume) of the Confessio.³⁵ And he does so specifically in order to contrast Solomon with Alexander again, as the next stanza makes clear—although this time the moral poles are reversed:

Bot Alisaundre, as telleth his histoire,
Unto the god besoghte in other weie,
Of all the world to winne the victoire,
So that undir his swerd it myht obeie.
In werre he hadde al that he wolde preie,
The myghti god behight him that beheste,
The world he wan, and had of it conqweste.

(36-42)

This is a familiar position for Alexander in late-medieval accounts; his conquests are often represented as allowed and approved by God.³⁶ But the “bot” that introduces the stanza implies that the poet means to contrast the bellicose conqueror with the sagacious, peaceful Solomon. At least, that is what we might naturally expect; however, the comparison breaks down in the third line of the next stanza:

Bot thogh it fel at thilke time so,
That Alisandre his axinge hath achieved,
This sinful world was al paiene tho,
Was non which hath the hihe god believed:
No wondir was thogh thilke world was grieved,
Thogh a tiraunt his pourpos myhte winne;
Al was vengance and infortune of sinne.

(43-49)

Gower suddenly proves incapable of condemning Alexander, choosing instead to indict the world in which he existed, as if it deserved to be subdued and conquered. Instead of appealing to the timeless perspective of the “hihe god,” which would have invited an ubi sunt moralization on Alexander's mistaken choice in the divine scheme—a strategy he does adopt later in the poem³⁷—Gower elects to historicize human devotional practice. The world was pagan then, he asserts,

Bot now the feith of Crist is come a place
Among the princes in this erthe hiere,
It sit hem wel to do pite and grace.

(50-52)

This new contrast—an ultimately Augustinian distinction between ancient pagan times and the modern, enlightened Christian period—tries to draw attention away from both Gower's problematic chronology (in the universal chronicles, the devout Solomon precedes Alexander in time—wasn't his era “paiene” too?)³⁸ and his inability to make Alexander hear the responsibility for the consequences of his belligerence. By making the times the arbiter of princely behavior—the Christian era demands “pite and grace”—Gower temporarily avoids having to adjudicate between Alexander the exemplum of warmongering and the exemplary philosophical Alexander of the seventh book of the Confessio, whose presence is constantly evoked by the address to the poem's royal reader, Henry IV—himself imagined, we may infer from Gower's caution, as a combination of aggressive ambition (given the conquest theme) and sagacious governance (given his presumed interest in fictions of advice like this one).³⁹

This inference is confirmed in the following stanzas, for the poem has not yet found its equilibrium. The new era thrives for only three lines before another “bot” reestablishes the conditions under which the “lawe of riht” and its attendant militarism can legitimately supersede the exercise of pity and grace:

Bot yit it mot be tempred in manere:
For as thei finden cause in the matiere
Uppon the point, what aftirward betide,
The lawe of riht schal noght be leid aside.
So mai a kyng of werre the viage
Ordeigne and take, as he therto is holde,
To cleime and axe his rightful heritage
In alle places wher it is withholde;
Bot other wise if god himsilve wolde
Afferme love and pes betwen the kynges,
Pes is the beste above alle erthely thinges.

(53-63)

Gower's ambivalence about Alexander as a figure of conquest has here forcibly called to mind his poem's patron: peace has hardly a moment to establish itself thematically before it is being qualified by the realistic Gower's own acknowledgment of his Henry's historically and morally justifiable war of conquest and deposition of Richard. The realistic Gower speaks directly to Henry, once again recalling the language of the “Record and Process,” in lines 57-60, quoted above. The analogy between Henry's “excepte” and Gower's “bot” could not be clearer. Gower's introduction of the “lawe of riht” here foreshadows the introduction of crusade rhetoric later in the poem, as does yet another adversative “bot” that tries to yank the poem back to its ostensible subject in line 61 by placing the responsibility for peace in God's hands. But the poet does not yet feel he has been thorough enough on the subject. In one last effort Gower rewrites these two stanzas into a final, concise attempt to escape from the thematic whirlpool into which he has been drawn:

Good is teschue werre, and natheles [one more adversative]
A kyng may make werre uppon his right,
For of bataile the final ende is pees.
Thus stant the lawe, that a worthi knyght
Uppon his trouthe may go to the fight;
Bot if so were that he myghte chese,
Betre is the pees, of which may no man lese.

(64-70)

With language that may seem to us Orwellian (“For of bataile the final ende is pees”), but is in fact, as R. F. Yeager has noted, thoroughly Augustinian,⁴⁰ Gower here offers one last justification for the chivalric way of life as a morally legitimate course of action. And with this latest “bot”⁴¹ we have returned to the question of choice, the original distinction between Solomon and Alexander: the one chose wisdom, and the other conquest through the sword. What is clear now, though, is the cloudiness of that original dichotomy as it pertains to the real world of real historical princes (and poets); although it is better to choose peace, conditions do not always allow it, and a knight or king must occasionally fight for his right. The difficulties of the real choice mirror those of the formal poetic choice: Gower cannot paint Henry as a new Alexander in a poem advising the king to establish a rule of peace, but neither can he accurately characterize him as a modern Solomon, because of Henry's route to power (which, if it is not to be ignored, must be legitimized). At the same time—“natheles”—Alexander's success, as described in In Praise of Peace, recalls nothing so much as Bolingbroke's success, the divinely justified seizure of “this lond, which was doun falle” (line 5), by the prince Gower regularly describes as strenuissimus, “most vigorous.”⁴²

Having once flirted with this implicit and dangerous analogy between Macedonian conquest and Lancastrian usurption, Gower does the only sensible thing for a poet writing to his king—he ignores it, backs away from it, and tries to distract his audience from its manifest contradictions by plunging ahead on the theme of peace. Over the next two-hundred-plus lines he lauds the rewards of peace, decries the ravages of war, identifies the law of peace as the establishment of Christ himself, outlines the duty of the king to uphold the faith and defend Holy Church (despite the church's own evident corruption and internal division), and commends the utility of crusade as a culturally sanctioned outlet for irrepressible chivalric violence—an appropriate topic, considering Henry's “crusading” expeditions to Prussia and his trip to the Holy Land in the early 1390s as earl of Derby:

Thus were it good to setten al in evene
The worldes princes and the prelatz bothe,
For love of him which is the king of hevene:
And if men scholde algate wexe wrothe,
The Sarazins, whiche unto Crist be lothe,
Let men ben armed ayein hem to fighte;
So mai the knyht his dede of armes righte.

(246-52)

Northrop Frye has called the decision to become a crusader “the normal remedy for neurosis in medieval romance,”⁴³ and here Gower applies that romance prescription to his vision of political conditions in the late fourteenth century. He carries out this work with a resolutely international focus, as if all issues of war and peace were European ones alone, as if kings existed in a world populated only by other kings and lords of the church (and perhaps their adviser-poets). England, “this lond, which was doun falle,” has completely fallen away as an ostensible setting for the admonitory transactions of ruler and sage.

When Gower returns to argument by exemplum thirty-one stanzas later, the troublesome Alexander reappears, but this time it is in the presumably tame, conventional context of the Nine Worthies:

See Alisandre, Ector and Julius,
See Machabeu, David and Josue,
See Charlemeine, Godefroi, Arthus,
Fulfild of werre and of mortalite.
Here fame abit, bot al is vanite;
For deth, which hath the werres under fote,
Hath mad an ende of which ther is no bote.

(281-87)

In book 7 of the Confessio Alexander loses his voice—he serves only as the passive recipient of Aristotle's advice. Here he loses his individuality; although his fame abides, it abides colorlessly, in the form of a generalized worthiness, with that of his eight companions. But while the standard groupings obtain, differentiating between pagan, Hebrew, and Christian worthies, the stanza ultimately denies any difference in these categories by the uniform application of death, “an ende of which ther is no bote.” Christianity, and the advent of the Christian dispensation that had earlier marked the boundary between the age of “vengance and infortune of sin” and the age of pity and grace, in fact serves no such function here; it is a “distinction without a difference,” as Lee Patterson has remarked in his analysis of a similar passage in the Alliterative Morte Arthure.⁴⁴ Earlier Gower's willingness to historicize devotional practice, his distinction between pagan and Christian epochs, had called into question the validity of the simple choice he had staged between the way of Solomon and the way of Alexander; here his refusal to historicize the virtue of the worthies problematizes that choice once again.

And once again, having brought his royal reader to the verge of a moral rebuke—“live by the sword, die by the sword,” or perhaps “once a conqueror, always a conqueror”—Gower backs away, descending it seems from the conventional to the banal and domestic. Life, he says, is like a game of tennis:

Of the Tenetz to winne or lese a chace,
Mai no lif wite er that the bal be ronne:
Al stant in god, what thing men schal pourchace,
Thende is in him er that it be begonne.
Men sein the wolle, whanne it is wel sponne,
Doth that the cloth is strong and profitable,
And elles it mai nevere be durable.

(295-301)

The connection between the tennis game and the wool analogy at first seems obscure, but Macaulay's note helps elucidate the stanza: “The question of winning a ‘chase’ at tennis is not one which is decided at once by the stroke that is made, but depends on later developments.”⁴⁵ A successful game is built on a foresightful strategy in the early going—though of course God knows the outcome in advance—and strong durable cloth depends on the proper treatment of its raw material, well-spun wool. The immediate application of this proverbial wisdom to Henry is fairly straightforward, a sort of neo-Boethian admonition to prepare warily and carefully for a world ruled by Fortune but to put ultimate trust in God. And preparing well, of course, means choosing peace with pure motives:

The worldes chaunces uppon aventure
Ben evere sett, bot thilke chaunce of pes
Is so behoveli to the creature,
That it above alle othre is piereles:
Bot it mai noght be gete natheles
Among the men to lasten eny while,
Bot wher the herte is plein withoute guyle.
The pes is as it were a sacrement
Tofore the god, and schal with wordes pleine
Withouten eny double entendement
Be treted, for the trouthe can noght feine:
Bot if the men withinne hemself be veine,
The substance of the pes may noght be trewe,
Bot every dai it chaungeth uppon newe.

(302-15)

The many adversatives in these stanzas do not arise out of any syntactical anxiety, but the stanzas themselves admit of a “double entendement” if one considers them as describing Henry's past as well as his potential future. The wool—the centerpiece of the English economy—is thus no idly chosen metaphor but a means of alluding to the precarious foundation of Henry's reign, which will endure only if it was “well spun” in the beginning, only if Henry acquired the throne with a heart “plein withoute guyle.” The next line quickly dispels any suggestion that this may not have been the case, assuring us that “who that is of charite parfit” (316) can achieve a lasting (and virtually sacramentalized) peace. But the hint of difficulty, the undercurrent of doubt, has returned. And although charity leads Gower to pity, and pity to his last exemplum, that story, too, turns out to have a “double entendement.”

At the end of the poem Gower turns to the story of Constantine, whose leprosy is cured by the intercession of Pope Sylvester after the emperor out of pity rejects the course of treatment suggested by his pagan physicians: bathing himself in the blood of young children. The story explains not only Constantine's conversion, but Rome's; and as it did earlier in the poem, “pite” marks the boundary between a pagan state and the age of grace:

To se what pite forth with mercy doth,
The croniqe is at Rome in thilke empire
Of Constantin, which is a tale soth;
Whan him was levere his oghne deth desire
Than do the yonge children to martire,
Of crualte he lafte the querele,
Pite he wroghte and pite was his hele.
For thilke mannes pite which he dede
God was pitous and mad him hol at al;
Silvestre cam, and in the same stede
Yaf him baptisme first in special,
Which dide awai the sinne original,
And al his lepre it hath so purified,
That his pite for evere is magnified.
Pite was cause whi this emperour
Was hol in bodi and in soule bothe,
And Rome also was set in thilke honour
Of Cristes feith, so that the lieve of lothe,
Whiche hadden be with Crist tofore wrothe,
Resceived weren unto Cristes lore:
Thus schal pite be preised evermore.

(337-57)

Once again Gower is borrowing here from the Confessio Amantis, where the story of Constantine and Sylvester is told at the end of book 2 as a final caution against envy.⁴⁶ And once again some of the details of the Confessio's version have been suppressed in order to clean the tale up for the king's consumption: Constantine's pity overcomes him only after he has caused the required children to be rounded up (it is the pitiful cries of the mothers and babes that finally move him to relent—like becoming a vegetarian after moving next to a slaughterhouse); his earlier persecution of Christians, noted in the Confessio, is glossed over in In Praise of Peace; the conversion of all Rome, which takes place under pain of death in the earlier version, here occurs naturally, without any coercive application of state military force; and finally, the end of the Confessio story, which describes both the Donation of Constantine and the angelic lamentation which follows that deed—a voice cries “To day is venym schad / In holi cherche of temporal, / Which medleth with the spirital” (2.3490-92)—is, like Solomon's unfortunate end, written completely out of In Praise of Peace.⁴⁷

But for the Middle Ages Constantine was an even more complicated figure than that, because throughout the Middle Ages there circulated not one but two stories of Constantine's conversion: the legend of his leprosy and baptism by Sylvester, and the account of Eusebius describing how a vision on the eve of battle taught the pagan emperor to put an image of the cross at the head of his troops and thus guaranteed his victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312, after which he became a Christian and began to promote Christianity in the empire.⁴⁸ Both stories are told in the Legenda aurea, which Gower certainly knew—the first in the legend of Sylvester, and the second as part of the tale of the Invention of the Cross. “In this sign shalt thou conquer”: in trying to present Henry with an exemplary figure of Christian kingship, Gower has once again implicitly compromised the ostensibly clear distinction between the law of pity and grace and the law of right by unearthing yet another figure of conquest.

The next stanza, by returning us to the specific context of Gower's monitory act—Henry's England—makes plain the surface connection between past and present that Gower wishes Henry to acknowledge. Each ruler demonstrates great pity, and each receives great signs of divine favor:

My worthi liege lord, Henri be name,
Which Engelond hast to governe and righte,
Men oghten wel thi pite to proclame,
Which openliche in al the worldes sighte
Is schewed with the help of god almighte,
To yive ous pes, which longe hath be debated,
Wherof thi pris shal nevere ben abated.

(358-64)

But implicit in the analogy also lies the deeper connection of the pursuit of princely rule through military means, the derogation rather than the praise of peace. Indeed, both Henry and Constantine engage in this pursuit under the sign of Christianity, which points us back to the futile chivalry of the Worthies. Finally, though, what each prince has in common is Gower's strategy for describing, and selectively omitting, the events of his reign. We know from the Confessio what Gower leaves out of his account of Constantine; it is significant that while he praises Henry's pity, he produces no concrete contemporary example of its exercise anywhere in the poem—with the paradoxical exception of his rescue of “this lond, which was doun falle.”

We might attribute this strategy to the triumph of hope over experience or, given the genre, advice over history. But I would suggest that it is precisely Gower's twenty-five years' hard experience as a poet writing to kings about kingship that makes him simultaneously so conventional in his praises and so subtle in his exasperation. For that is what I take In Praise of Peace to be, in the end—a poem of exasperation and a valediction to the mirror-for-princes genre, in which Gower's great fidelity to the genre's formal demands and deep grasp of its philosophical premises produce a text that is always on the verge of revealing the intractable paradoxes of that form and the incoherence (or tendentiousness) of that philosophy. In Praise of Peace is a kind of fugitive art, constantly fleeing from the contradictions it is incessantly uncovering.

This process continues through the final stanzas of the poem, where Gower draws a profound distinction between the heavenly rewards of proper Christian rule and the celebration of such regal deeds on earth:

My lord, in whom hath evere yit be founde
Pite withoute spot of violence,
Kep thilke pes alwei withinne bounde,
Which god hath planted in thi conscience;
So schal the cronique of thi pacience
Among the seintz be take into memoire
To the loenge of perdurable gloire.
And to thin erthli pris, so as y can,
Which everi man is holde to commende,
I, Gower, which am al thi liege man,
This lettre unto thin excellence y sende,
As y which evere unto my lives ende
Wol praie for the stat of thi persone
In worschipe of thi sceptre and of thi throne.

(365-78)

From the “croniqe” of Constantine's Rome, through the celestial “cronique” of the saints, Gower moves in the penultimate stanza of the poem to a statement of what seems like utter partisanship. The stanza could not be more laudatory had Henry commissioned it himself. And he might as well have, Gower seems to say as he moves from advice to admiration. As his letter mediates between Henry's “erthli pris” and his “excellence,” it creates a closed circulation of “worschipe” that is not only cut off from the saintly “cronique” of patience in the previous stanza but which is itself potentially enjoined by and dependent upon the coercive power of princely authority: just as in the opening stanza of the poem “every man is holde forto blesse” Henry's “goodnesse,” here “everi man is holde to commende” Henry's prowess and his person. The moral force of “holde” is supplemented throughout by the implication of a legislative imperative, which is clearly visible in the records of the first years of the reign—a steady stream of letters, proclamations, and occasionally pardons concerning treason, sedition, and “evil words … spoken against the king's person.”⁴⁹ None of that is permitted to show here, of course, and Gower, in nearly fetishizing the accoutrements of kingship, the scepter and the throne, simply goes farther than most in his obedience to what he intimates is an inescapable injunction for a “liege man.”

Surprisingly, this act of approbation does not end the poem. In the last lines Gower extends his scope from Henry's duty to that of all Christian princes:

Noght only to my king of pes y write,
Bot to these othre princes cristene alle,
That ech of hem his oghne herte endite,
And see the werre er more meschief falle;
Sette ek the rightful Pope uppon his stalle,
Kep charite and draugh pite to honde,
Maintene lawe, and so the pes schal stonde.

(379-85)

This expanded audience permits the poet to recuperate his genre and resume the advisory persona that he had shed in the previous stanza, but the specificity of address he thus sacrifices leaves him more a voice crying in the wilderness than a voice hoping to influence England's new monarch. At the end as at the beginning of this English poem, Gower once again elects to look away from contemporary England toward a broader application of his ethical program. He does this not, I think, in the political interests of a pan-European harmony, though he would certainly not have rejected such a utopian result; John Gower is not an English Philippe de Mézières. His concern to end the schism does not extend so far as to name the “rightful Pope.” Rather, Gower widens his rhetorical scope in reaction to the difficulty of offering his particular advice to his particular sovereign: Gower is no Philip Repyngdon either. Even if we take Constantine and Solomon as examples of monarchs whose reputation for probity ultimately overcomes the darker side of their histories, their appearance in In Praise of Peace nevertheless constantly recalls for us, and for Gower, the least appealing side of Henry's career, and the most difficult side to write about.

Chaucer's “Complaint to His Purse” has long served as evidence that being a Lancastrian apologist didn't necessarily pay very well; I now offer Gower's In Praise of Peace as evidence that it wasn't necessarily easy work either. The poem has traditionally been dated to the first year of Henry's reign—Eric W. Stockton suggests it was occasioned by the coronation⁵⁰—although Strohm has recently suggested 1401-4 as a possible range.⁵¹ I favor an earlier date, certainly before the Percys' revolt of the summer of 1403 and probably before Henry's troubles with the Franciscans of Leicester in 1402. In either case we can see Gower's task of praising peace and extolling Henry's “pite” growing more difficult virtually month by month. The domestic discord that characterized the early part of the reign renders much less striking the absence in the poem of immediate topical allusions: there simply wasn't much peace or pity to describe.

Consider the following. January 1400 saw the Epiphany Rising, which involved not only Richard's degraded dukes but also several clergy, including the former bishop of Carlisle; Richard's archbishop of Canterbury, Roger Walden; and the abbot of Westminster.⁵² The heads of several of the conspirators were displayed on London Bridge, testifying to the severity of the response by Henry and his partisans. The plot was accompanied by uprisings in Chester and Devonshire and doubtless led to the death of Richard at Pontefract Castle by early February. Gower completed the Cronica tripertita sometime after Richard's death. In late summer Henry invaded Scotland for the first time, and September marked the start of Owen Glendower's rebellion in Wales, which would continue in one form or another for the next eight years. February 1401 brought more incursions into Scotland under Henry Percy and the earl of March; in the month of March the burning of William Sawtre for heresy was followed by the execution of one William Clerk, “a writer of Canterbury, but born in the county of Chester” for saying “wicked words” against the king.⁵³ In the March parliament the complaint of the Commons led to the dismissal of Henry's chancellor and three of his household officers, the steward/controller, the keeper of the wardrobe, and the treasurer—the last three presumably for incompetence.⁵⁴ In May—the month of Repyngdon's letter to Henry—there were tax riots at Bristol, Dartmouth, and Norton St. Philip, according to Adam of Usk.⁵⁵ Later in the summer the first stirrings of anti-Lancastrian Franciscan sentiment became visible, as a minorite of Norfolk was disciplined by his order for speaking against the king and spreading rumors that Richard was still alive.⁵⁶ Walsingham refers to a “murmur in populo contra Regem” at this time, and also describes an unsuccessful poisoning and another failed attempt to assassinate Henry by means of a trident device hidden in his bed.⁵⁷ The fighting in Wales and Scotland continued, with the English decisively defeating the Scots at Homildon Hill. In September wheat prices rose precipitously, doubling or even tripling according to Adam of Usk.⁵⁸

We know Gower was still writing in 1402, since he mentions the comet seen in March of that year in a short Latin poem to Archbishop Arundel decrying the dangers facing the realm. Letters purportedly written by the still-living Richard circulated throughout the kingdom (and would continue to do so for at least two years); the Eulogium describes how the people found the king's levies hard to bear and longed for Richard,⁵⁹ and in one place at least Henry was being blamed for the unseasonable weather.⁶⁰ In Wales Glendower captured both Lord Grey of Ruthin, who had been a member of Henry's council, and Edmund Mortimer, whose taking would ultimately lead to the Percys' revolt in 1403. And in June Henry finally had his showdown with the Franciscans. Earlier in the year a minorite of Aylesbury and a secular priest had been executed for maintaining that Richard was alive; in late May nine friars of the Leicester convent were arrested for the same offense, and in June they were hanged along with the Augustinian prior of Laund, Sir Roger Clarendon (a bastard brother of Richard II), and others. It took two juries to impeach them: the first group of Londoners refused to offer an indictment; a second group from Islington and Highgate had to be impaneled and, according to one chronicle, intimidated, since “aftirward, men of thenquest that dampned thayme, cam to the freris prayying thayme of foryifnesse, and saide, ‘but yf thay hadde said that the freris were gilti thay sholde haue be slayne.’”⁶¹

In concluding with this incident, I would like to call to mind one last time the theme of conquest, which surfaced in a unique but unsurprising way in Henry's own interrogation of the Franciscans. Concentrating his attention on the leader of the accused group, a master Roger (or Richard) Frisby,⁶² Henry once again moved from the fiction of Richard's resignation to the fantasy of his own free election to the inescapable truth of conquest that had made possible his accession.

Thanne saide the king to the maister, “… saist thou that king Richard livith?” The maister ansuerde, “I say not that he livith, but I say yf he live, he is veray king of Engelonde.” The king saide, “He resigned.” The maister ansuerde, “He resigned ayens his wil in prison, the whiche is nought in the lawe.” The king ansuerde, “He resigned with his good wille.” “He wolde not haue resigned,” saide the maister, “yf he hadde be at his fredoum; and a resignacion maad in prison is not fre.” Thanne saide the kyng, “He was deposid.” The maister ansuerde, “Whanne he was kyng he was take be force, and put into prisoun, and spoyled of his reme, and ye haue vsurpid the croune.” The king saide, “I haue not vsurpid the croune, but I was chosen therto be eleccioun.” The maister ansuerde, “The eleccioun is noughte, livyng the trewe and lawful possessour; and yf he be ded, he is ded be you, and yf he be ded be you, ye haue loste alle the righte and title that ye myght haue to the croune.” Thanne saide the kyng to him, “Be myn hed thou shalt lese thyne hed.”⁶³

Frisby's logical and methodical refutation of each of the king's propositions leads finally to the brute fact of power that underwrites Henry's possession of the throne, and that power is exercised by the king with capital consequences. As they do in the chronicles and in Gower's poem, the conflicts embedded in the “Record and Process” manifest themselves in Henry's interactions with one of his more recalcitrant lieges. Frisby's testimony is one more text symptomatic of a discursive environment that produced, out of the same materials, controversialist poems like Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger and statist apologies like the Cronica tripertita and In Praise of Peace. A Lancastrian partisan like John Gower would not have agreed with Frisby's conclusions, but he certainly would have understood the friar's reasoning.

Notes

1. All translations and quotations from Repyngdon's letter are taken from E. M. Thompson's edition, Chronicon Adae de Usk, A.D. 1377-1421 (London, 1904), where it appears in Latin on pp. 65-69 and in translation on pp. 231-66. This passage is from p. 232; the Latin is on p. 65: “Et quia vestra unica serenitas mihi, vestro servulo minimo, in ultimo recessu meo a vobis corde tristissimo, demandavit quod, si qua sinistra audirem, vestre excellencie ea significarem indilate, ut servulus vester obedientissimus, pennam sumpsi in manibus que audieram et videram ostensurus.”

2. Ibid., pp. 233/66: “… lex et justicia sunt exules a regno; habundant furta, homicidia, adulteria, fornicaciones, extortiones, ac pauperum oppressiones, injurie, injusticie, et diverse contimelie; et nunc pro lege sufficit tirannica voluntas.”

3. Ibid., pp. 233/66: “Nos autem sperabamus quod vester miraculosus ingressus in regnum Anglie, non dubito quin manu Dei peractus, fuisset redempturus Israel, et omnium peccatorum et malorum contemptuum reos reformaturus. …”

4. Ibid., pp. 234/67: “… plebeos, tanquam feras bestias … erga superiores, equales, et inferiores, sine discressionis libramine, bestialiter desevire.”

5. Ibid., pp. 234/67: “… omnes et singulos regni vestri incolas, pauperes et divites, majores et minores. …”

6. Ibid., pp. 235-36/68: “Auferat ergo Deus meus, sol justicie, velamen ab oculis vestris, ut clare intueamini oculis mentis vestre quid in vestro ingressu felici in regnum … promisistis publice et privatim. … [E]t benedicta sancta Trinitas … det vobis cor docile et tractabile et ad omne bonum ductile ad peragendum fideliter injunctum vobis officium regie dignitatis, et ad intelligendum memoriter et efficaciter et ad remediandum miserias populorum; adaperiatque Dominus cor vestrum in lege sua et in preceptis suis, et faciat pacem in regno Anglie per dies sempiternos.”

7. The Royal Household and the King's Affinity: Service, Finance and Politics in England, 1360-1413 (New Haven, Conn., 1986), p. 192. See also A. L. Brown, “Commons and Council in the Reign of Henry IV,” English Historical Review 79 (1964), 11-12, on Henry's capacity to take blunt advice calmly.

8. Eulogium historiarum, ed. F. S. Haydon, Rolls Series (London, 1863), 4:380-81 and 397; Thomas Walsingham, Annales Ricardi Secundi, ed. H. T. Riley, Rolls Series (London, 1866), pp. 231-32, 372-73. Walsingham's more detailed account of the first interview describes not only the hermit's injunctions to Richard but also his rebuke of Roger Walden, whom Richard had made archbishop of Canterbury after Thomas Arundel's exile in 1397; the hermit advised Roger to give up his see, which he held unjustly. Walsingham also includes some details about the personal habits and piety of the hermit, who went about shoeless in a hair shirt and who never ate meat, but who “nevertheless died a traitor's death.”

9. Derek Pearsall, “Hoccleve's Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation,” Speculum 69 (1994), 386.

10. A contemporary epithet cited by Given-Wilson, Royal Household, p. 192.

11. For these grants see John H. Fisher, John Gower, Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York, 1964), p. 68; see also The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1899-1902), 4:345, where the poem “O recolende, bone, pie rex” refers to both the chronicle and the wine.

12. George R. Coffman, “John Gower, Mentor for Royalty: Richard II,” PMLA 69 (1954), esp. 58-64.

13. This is the All Souls manuscript; see Macaulay, Complete Works, 4:lvii-lxii.

14. Macaulay, Complete Works, 4:368 and 420. After his death Gower was certainly remembered by the Lancastrian faction as a devoted partisan, to judge by the appearance of his portrait—ten times!—in the Bedford Psalter-Hours made for Henry IV's third son, John; see Sylvia Wright, “The Author Portraits in the Bedford Psalter-Hours: Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve,” British Library Journal 18 (1992), 190-201.

15. Macaulay, Complete Works, 3:481-92.

16. Fisher, Gower, p. 133.

17. Strohm, “Saving the Appearances: Chaucer's Purse and the Fabrication of the Lancastrian Claim,” in Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt, Medieval Studies at Minnesota 4 (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 21-40; for Gower see esp. pp. 33-34.

18. Ibid., p. 24.

19. Ibid., p. 23.

20. From London, British Library, MS Stowe 66, quoted in G. O. Sayles, “The Deposition of Richard II: Three Lancastrian Narratives,” Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research 54 (1981), 66, and Strohm, “Saving the Appearances,” p. 28.

21. Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972), p. 57.

22. Adam of Usk, pp. 188/34: “et per unum herowd in quatuor aule partibus proclamare fecit quod, si quis dicere vellet quod suus dominus ligius presens et rex Anglie non erat de jure rex Anglie coronatus, quod ipse erat corpore suo paratus ad probandum contrarium ad statim, seu quando et ubi regi placeret. Tunc rex dixit: ‘Si necesse fuerit, domine Thoma, in propria persona te de hoc relevabo.’”

23. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings, pp. 37-38, describes Henry's reputation and cites the praises of several French chroniclers; see also the portrait in Mum and the Sothsegger, which is entirely concerned with Henry's prowess:

    But he himself is souurayn, and so mote he longe,
    And the graciousist guyer goyng vppon erthe,
    Witti and wise, worthy of deedes,
    Y-kidde and y-knowe and cunnyng of werre,
    Feers forto fighte, the felde euer kepith,
    And trusteth on the Trinite that trouthe shal hym helpe;
    A doughtful doer in deedes of armes
    And a comely knight y-come of the grettist,
    Ful of al vertue that to king longeth,
    Of age and of al thing as hym best semeth.

    Mum and the Sothsegger 211-20, in The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. Helen Barr (London, 1993), p. 145.

24. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings, p. 57.

25. This version of Henry's words is preserved in London, British Library, MS Cotton Julius B.II, and printed in Chronicles of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1905; repr. 1977), p. 46. See also the version in Sayles, “The Deposition of Richard II,” p. 66, quoted in Strohm, “Saving the Appearances,” p. 29.

26. Sayles, “The Deposition of Richard II,” p. 66.

27. Strohm, “Saving the Appearances,” p. 27.

28. David Aers, “Gower: Poet of Political and Social Unrest Par Excellence,” paper delivered at the Twenty-Eighth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Mich., May 6-9, 1993. I am grateful to Professor Aers for permission to quote him and to Prof. Lynn Staley for a copy of the paper.

29. Andrew Galloway, “Gower in His Most Learned Role and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381,” Mediaevalia 16 (1993 [for 1990]), 336. Galloway is referring here to the Vox clamantis; I would argue that the principle remains true even when Gower's source is himself.

30. The perceived effect on the kingdom of Henry's use of the conquest theme can be illustrated by examining the aftermath of the Epiphany Rising of January 1400. When the plot had been compromised, perhaps by the defection of the earl of Rutland, several of the principals fled London, only to be captured and executed by citizens elsewhere: the earls of Kent and Salisbury were beheaded by the townspeople of Cirencester, the earl of Huntingdon at Pleshey in Essex, and Thomas, Lord Despenser, in Bristol. One might think that such a display of grassroots support for the new regime, from east to west, would have been gratifying to those of the Lancastrian party, and indeed, the archbishop of Canterbury did go so far as to describe the Cirencestrians as “sancta rusticitas” (quoted in J. L. Kirby, Henry IV of England [London, 1970], p. 89). However, others—particularly Henry's council—were not so sanguine about this popular outburst, and they were further spooked by an uprising in Devonshire and Chester that may have been timed to coincide with the earls' plot (on which see P. McNiven, “The Cheshire Rising of 1400,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 52 [1970], 375-96, and for Devon, A. L. Brown, “The Reign of Henry IV,” in Fifteenth-Century England, 1399-1509: Studies in Politics and Society, ed. S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross, and R. A. Griffiths [Manchester, Eng., 1972], p. 3). Throughout the month of February, starting perhaps around the time of Richard's death, a series of ordinances and recommendations were issued that aimed at ensuring domestic tranquillity: an order to guardians of the peace throughout the realm forbidding the kind of summary justice provoked by the uprising (see Calendar of the Close Rolls, Henry IV, 1: 1399-1402 [London, 1927], p. 110) and advice to Henry “that in each county of the kingdom a certain number of the more sufficient men of good fame should be retained by the king … and charged also carefully and diligently to save the estate of the king and his people in their localities,” that he grant these retainers annuities, and that he draw his personal bodyguard from every county in the kingdom (Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, ed. H. H. Nicholas, 2 vols. [London, 1834], 1:109-10, quoted in Given-Wilson, The Royal Household, p. 219). The council, according to M. H. Keen, “were frankly frightened by the way in which Richard's friends had died; at this rate the judges would not be able to enforce order ‘for fear of the unruliness and pride of the commons who do not wish to be under any governance’” (Privy Council, 1:107-8, quoted in Maurice H. Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages: A Political History [London, 1973], p. 305). Here we see one of the themes that Repyngdon would articulate in his May 1401 letter already affecting the actions of Henry's council; they evince no sense of irony about the fact that the vigorous popular support so desirable and so crucial in August 1399 had become by February 1400 a source of anxiety and a target for aristocratic and legislative suppression. The other side of conquest, no matter how fervently invited, is this necessary recourse to control, a lesson as true for Henry as it would be for Machiavelli. For a modern account of the Epiphany Rising and its consequences see Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 86-95.

31. The poem has traditionally been dated to the first year of Henry's reign, but see p. 572 below.

32. For the possibility that the Ellesmere manuscript of the Confessio was owned successively by Henry IV and Henry V, see A. I. Doyle, “English Books in and out of Court from Edward III to Henry VII,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (New York, 1983), pp. 169-70, and Carol Meale, “Patrons, Buyers and Owners: Book Production and Social Status,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375-1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, Eng., 1989), p. 203.

33. In using the Confessio as a context for Gower's later work I am drawing primarily on its status as a mirror for princes and allying myself with those who argue for the priority of its political theme of kingship and the structural and thematic importance of book 7, Gower's version of the education of Alexander the Great by Aristotle. I am very interested in Gower's use of Alexander, but space does not permit me to offer the full case for a revisionary account of Alexander's reputation in late-medieval English literature. Suffice it to say that in employing the legend of the well-educated Alexander Gower was choosing from among the many positive evaluations of Alexander available in late-fourteenth-century English literary culture. Contrary to George Cary's claim that the tradition of his education by Aristotle “had no apparent effect upon the current conception of Alexander,” and that “the most living side of the English late medieval conception of Alexander is represented by the thorough condemnation of him by Gower and Lydgate” (The Medieval Alexander, ed. D. J. A. Ross [1956; repr. Cambridge, Eng., 1967], p. 257), I would argue that Gower did his best to mitigate Alexander's moral culpability in earlier episodes in order to prepare the way for book 7, and that he used the tradition precisely so as to take advantage of the prestige associated with this archetypal pairing of ruler and sage. What aristocratic or royal reader of the Confessio could object to an implicit comparison to Alexander the Great?

    Relevant studies of book 7 include George R. Coffman, “John Gower in His Most Significant Role,” in Elizabethan Studies and Other Essays in Honor of George F. Reynolds, University of Colorado Studies, ser. B, 2/4 (Boulder, Colo., 1945), pp. 52-61; Fisher, Gower, pp. 196-98; Russell A. Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower's Confessio Amantis (Carbondale, Ill., 1978); A. J. Minnis, “John Gower, Sapiens in Ethics and Politics,” Medium Ævum 49 (1980), 207-29; M. A. Manzalaoui, “‘Noght in the Registre of Venus’: Gower's English Mirror for Princes,” in Medieval Studies for J. A. W. Bennett (Aetatis Suae LXX), ed. P. L. Heyworth (Oxford, 1981), pp. 159-83; and Elizabeth Porter, “Gower's Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm,” in A. J. Minnis, ed., Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments (Cambridge, Eng., 1983), pp. 153-60.

34. Although Solomon was a conventional figure for wisdom in the Middle Ages, the story of his idolatry and polygamy was also a well-known moral tale. Lydgate uses it as one of many examples of the immorality of princes at Fall of Princes 3.1191-97 and 1590-96, while Chaucer's Wife of Bath reflects on the pleasurable aspects of Solomon's experience at the beginning of her prologue. Sometimes both Solomons were enlisted by the same poet, though none are as thoroughgoing as Gower. Langland, for instance, who cites Solomon's authoritative saws throughout Piers Plowman, nevertheless notes that the church considers him to be in hell; see B 10.384-91 and C 3.323-31. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the poet names Solomon as the one who first framed the pentangle depicted on Gawain's shield, and at the end of the poem Gawain includes Solomon on his list of those who, like the much-aggrieved Gawain himself, were betrayed and brought low by women. Stephanie Trigg (“The Romance of Exchange: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Viator 22 [1991], 257, n. 25) briefly explores the consequences of this second citation for the first.

    My argument about Gower's conception of Alexander—see the previous note—asserts that Alexander, like Solomon, had a double exemplary meaning for the medieval imagination, “rapacious ambitious conqueror” and “philosophically adept prince.” For another comparison of these two figures, see Alexandre Cizek, “La rencontre de deux ‘sages’: Salomon le ‘Pacifique’ et Alexandre le Grand dans la légende hellénistique et médiévale,” in Images et signes de l'Orient dans l'Occident médiéval: Littérature et civilisation, Senéfiance 11 (Aix-en-Provence, 1982), pp. 77-99.

35. Peter Nicholson, following Macaulay, suggests that the Confessio's rededication led to its rerelease late in the decade, specifically so as to attract Henry's attention: “… only after Henry's accession were the revised prologue and epilogue, originally written only for private presentation, first released for general circulation with the rubrics and colophon explaining how they came to be composed. At the same time, Gower was able to remind Henry, as he presented him with a new copy of the poem, of the time earlier in the decade when the Confessio was first dedicated to him, and in that way to underscore his long friendship and early devotion to the king”: “The Dedications of Gower's Confessio Amantis,” Mediaevalia 10 (1988 [for 1984]), 174.

36. One particular episode in which the Christian God is represented as hearing the prayers of the pagan Alexander is the story of Alexander's imprisonment of the Lost Tribes, or, alternatively, Gog and Magog. This story appears in the Middle English Alexander romances, in Mandeville's Travels, and even in a sermon in the Northern Homily cycle. A condensed account of the origin and transmission of the tales can be found in Cary, Medieval Alexander, pp. 130-32, 295-97, and a full treatment in Andrew Runni Anderson, Alexander's Gate, Gog and Magog, and the Inclosed Nations, Medieval Academy of America Publications 12 (Monograph 5) (Cambridge, Mass., 1932). I think it likely that Gower, who was particularly well acquainted with the wide variety of Alexander material in circulation in the later Middle Ages, here plays upon his audience's familiarity with the tale. On Gower's knowledge of the Alexander material, see Cary, Medieval Alexander, pp. 35-36; George L. Hamilton, “Some Sources of the Seventh Book of Gower's Confessio Amantis,” Modern Philology 9 (1912), 323-46, and “Studies in the Sources of Gower,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 26 (1927), 509-11; F. Pfister, “Auf den Spuren Alexanders des Grossen in der alteren englischen Literatur,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 16 (1928), 85-86; and R. F. Yeager, John Gower's Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), p. 55.

37. See, for instance, lines 99-105 and 281-87.

38. Isidore of Seville, for example, puts Solomon's construction of the Temple in 4204 and Alexander's visit to Jerusalem in 4868.

39. Gower was not the only one reminded of Alexander by Henry's exploits. Creton's account of Henry's triumphant arrival at London describes how the “simple and over-credulous” commons, impressed with “how that he had conquered the whole kingdom of England in less than a month,” “said, that he would conquer one of the great portions of the world, and compared him even to Alexander the Great.” See Jean Creton, Histoire du Roy d'Angleterre Richard, ed. and trans. John Webb in Archaeologia 20 (1823), 178-79.

40. Yeager, “Pax poetica: On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987), 97-121.

41. The next “bot” does not appear until line 139, after the poem has safely established some momentum away from the vortex of these stanzas.

42. In the late colophon to the Confessio Amantis (Macaulay, Complete Works, 3:480) and in the incipit to the third part of the Cronica tripertita (ibid., 4:329).

43. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 148-49.

44. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, Wis., 1987), p. 226. Gower had faced this very problem decades before in the Mirour de l'Omme and had solved it, oddly enough, by denying that there were any pagan worthies. At Mirour 23869-80 he describes the six worthies: “Six knights are called ‘The Worthies’: King Charles, Godfrey, Arthur, Dan Joshua, Judas, David. I find prowess in all their deeds, full of praise and virtues towards God and towards the world also. Pride was not cherished by them nor covetousness either, and (I can tell you) this was the reason they were never overcome by their enemies. And this is the reason why their names are still remembered” (Mirour de l'Omme, trans. William Burton Wilson, rev. Nancy Wilson Van Bank [East Lansing, Mich., 1992], p. 312):

    Sisz chivalers sont dit des prus,
    Roys Charles, Godefrois, Arthus,
    Dans Josue, Judas, Davy:
    En tous leur faitz prouesce truis
    Plain des loenges et vertus
    Vers dieu et vers le siecle auci:
    Par ceaux n'estoit orguil cheri
    Ne covoitise, et tant vous dy,
    C'estoit la cause dont vencuz
    N'estoiont de leur anemy;
    Et pour ce qu'ils firont ensi
    Leur noun encore est retenuz.

    (Complete Works, 1:263)

    The omission of the pagan worthies permits a satisfactory negotiation between “dieu et … le siecle,” which the complete list in “In Praise of Peace” renders impossible.

45. Macaulay, Complete Works, 3:554.

46. Confessio Amantis 2.3187-3496.

47. This conventional moralization of the apocryphal Donation also appears at Mirour de l'Omme 18637-48.

48. For medieval and Renaissance historians' ways of reconciling these two accounts and others, see Diana M. Webb, “The Truth about Constantine: History, Hagiography and Confusion,” in Religion and Humanism: Papers Read at the … Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Keith Robbins (Oxford, 1981), pp. 85-102.

49. Calendar of the Close Rolls, Henry IV, 1:229; other relevant letters and orders, dated from January 1400 to June 1402, appear on pp. 45, 110, 157, 222, 229, 233-34, 469, 525, 527-29, 533, 536, 548, 570, 577. See also Thomas Rymer, Foedera, Henry IV, part 1 (The Hague, 1742), pp. 27-30, 32. The most interesting of these proclamations may be those issued during Henry's troubles with the Franciscans of Leicester in the early summer of 1402. A June 18 proclamation (Calendar of the Close Rolls, p. 577) aimed at suppressing seditious rumors in the aftermath of the scandal makes an unusual distinction between those recently condemned for treason and those “lieges” who, familiar with the condemned men's claims, might now be innocently spreading lies and who should not be punished for it. Strohm's assertion of the Lancastrians' “keen and precocious awareness of the value of textualization, of the sense in which a written account placed in the right kind of circulation can generate its own kind of historical truth” (“Saving the Appearances,” p. 27) seems very much confirmed in this instance: ignoring the crisis of intentionality implied in the innocent spreading of treason by rewriting any liege's malice as mere ignorance, the document simply declares that treason no longer exists after the execution of the first conspirators.

50. The Major Latin Works of John Gower (Seattle, 1962), p. 42.

51. Strohm, “Saving the Appearances,” p. 34.

52. See n. 30 above. All of these clerics were eventually pardoned.

53. Adam of Usk, pp. 222/58: “quidam Wyllylmus Clerk, scriptor Cantuariensis et oriundus in comitatu Cestrie … in regem … verba maledicta protulerat. …”

54. See Brown, “The Commons and Council,” esp. pp. 1-6, and A. Rogers, “The Political Crisis of 1401,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 12 (1968), 85-90.

55. Adam of Usk, pp. 227-28/62.

56. Eulogium, p. 389.

57. Walsingham, Annales, pp. 322-23, 337-38.

58. Adam of Usk, pp. 238/70, says that prices went from one to two or even three nobles for a quarter of wheat (160/240d.); the English Chronicle reports sixteen shillings (192d.) (An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI …, ed. J. S. Davies, Camden Society, ser. 1, 64 [London, 1856; repr. 1968], p. 23).

59. Eulogium, p. 389.

60. The accusation is recorded in the treason case of one John Sperhauke in the coram rege rolls and reprinted in I. D. Thornley, “Treason by Words in the Fifteenth Century,” English Historical Review 32 (1917), 559: “[L]a femme du dit Taillour disoit a luy John [Sperhauke], veez coment il pluiue et quelle troublouse tempest est y cestes jours et tout temps du Roy qorest as este, qar par tout son temps nad este pur sept iours bone ne seisinable temps.”

61. English Chronicle, p. 26. All of the chroniclers—Usk, Walsingham, the Eulogium—describe the execution of the Franciscans, with varying degrees of accuracy and sympathy. For an accurate (and very sympathetic) modern account, see D. W. Whitfield, “Conflicts of Personality and Principle,” Franciscan Studies 17 (1957), esp. 326-35. The incident is also mentioned at Mum and the Sothsegger 415-22.

62. On Frisby's first name see Whitfield, p. 328, n. 21. Both Richard and Roger Frisby, brothers, had been arrested.

63. English Chronicle, pp. 24-25.