[In the following essay, Brownlow argues that Skelton uses the allegory of Speke, Parrot to attack Cardinal Wolsey, often in a subtle and cryptic manner.]

Skelton's satire Speke, Parrot is not the complete mystery that it once was; indeed we now know a great deal about the poem. It is generally accepted that it was written in 1521, and that it is for the most part an attack upon Cardinal Wolsey for his foreign, ecclesiastical, and educational policies, and for his influence on the King.¹ Nonetheless, recent exegeses suggest that as far as the poem's form and art are concerned, there is still much that is not known. The reasons for our difficulties are not hard to find. First, the poem seems to belong to a kind of cryptic satire intended to defy comprehension, and this has led readers into attempts to understand it as a collection of apparently random allusions and remarks whose unity would be found in some personal intention of the author's. It was suggested, for instance, that he wished to avoid prosecution for attacking Wolsey; and the most recently advanced view is that the poem is a model of the poet's délaissement in a world where coherent action is impossible.² There is also a quite simple historical reason for our difficulties. For four hundred years, English has been the language of a Protestant people, and we find it hard to recover a pre-Reformation poet's habits of thought. We have been brought up, at whatever distance from its source, in a tradition whose origins are humanist, neoclassical, and secular. Skelton was antihumanist, and intellectually he was a citizen of Western Christendom.

Speke, Parrot is obviously a difficult poem, but it is demonstrably not a random poem. Whatever eccentricity there may be in its art, it can be shown, I believe, that it is organised according to a system of ideas, which are not at all eccentric or complicated in themselves, and which would have been perfectly comprehensible, even commonplace, to Skelton's educated contemporaries. In fact, surprising though the suggestion may seem, it is doubtful whether Speke, Parrot was ever an “endarkyd scripture” for an informed reader. No special inwardness with Skelton's privacies is intended here by the word “informed”—merely the kind of cultivated understanding that any poet has a right to expect of a literate audience. In the case of Speke, Parrot, it is necessary to know something of Cardinal Wolsey and English politics circa 1521, and something of the system of ideas according to which Skelton planned his satire. The first is now easily come by; the second is the subject of this article.

The poem begins with a charming and comparatively plain-spoken announcement by Parrot of his origins, his learning, and his loyalty. At line 52 (stanza 8) it begins to appear that he is a satirical bird, and with line 59 (stanza 9) the modern reader's problems begin in earnest:

Besy, besy, besy, and besynes agayne!
          Que pensez voz, Parrot? What meneth this besynes?
Vitulus in Oreb troubled Arons brayne,
          Melchisedeck mercyfull made Moloc mercyles.(3)

The word Vitulus (a calf) early alerted commentators to the presence of Wolsey, here presented as the inordinately rich, splendid counsellor who was misleading his sovereign. That Wolsey was reputed to be the son of a butcher made him an obvious mark for references like this. Again, Melchisedech is obviously intended for Henry VIII, whose merciful dealings have made Wolsey's rise possible. (Skelton compared Henry with Melchisedech in Against the Scots, line 115: “In him is fygured Melchisedec.”)⁴ Moloch, like Vitulus, is presumably another name intended to brand Wolsey as a monstrosity. It is at this point of the poem, however, where Skelton is laying down the premises of his attack, that the informed contemporary would have the advantage over the modern reader. In Skelton's allegory, the question, “Who is Melchisedech?” has more than one answer, as indeed does the question, “Who is Henry VIII?”

St. Paul provides the answer. In Genesis 14:18-24, Melchisedech the priest-king of Salem goes out to meet Abram, taking bread and wine. Abram tithes himself for Melchisedech. Hebrews 6:20 (assumed by Skelton, of course, to be by St. Paul) interprets this as prefiguring Christ, “the forerunner for us,” who “was made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchisedech”:

For this Melchisedech … first being by interpretation King of Righteousness, and after that also King of Salem, which is, King of peace; without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of day, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually.

(Heb. 7:1-3)

To be a priest after the order of Melchisedech is to be neither after the order of Aaron nor of Levi, but after the order of one “who is made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life” (Heb. 7:16). Melchisedech then is the type of Christ, king and priest of justice (i.e. righteousness) and peace. Peter Lombard, quoting St. Chrysostom, spells out the reading in his commentary on Hebrews:

Quis homo est rex justitiae et pacis, nisi Christus?
Nullus.(5)

The implication of Skelton's line, then, is first that Henry VIII, as sovereign by divine right, is the historical embodiment in England of the order of Melchisedech, and second, that his opponent Moloch, realised in Cardinal Wolsey, is Antichrist.⁶ The commentators have missed the implications of the line, perhaps through concentrating on the word “merciful.” Moloch occurs frequently in the Bible, always, like Baal, as the very embodiment of God's adversary. He is in particular the “abomination of the Ammonites” (I Kings 11:5-7). It is tempting for a modern reader, knowing of Moloch as a bull-god, to see Skelton continuing the “calf” insult of the preceding line. However, the biblical Moloch was a god to whom children were sacrificed, and that this was Skelton's understanding of Moloch seems indicated by a stanza in Parrot's “Complaint,” one of the addenda to the poem proper.⁷ Here the “adversary” is again Moloch, but also Saturn:

Iupyter for Saturne darre make no royall chere.

(l. 392)

The parallels among Henry, Jupiter, and Melchisedech are obvious. The parallel between Moloch and Saturn is that both were invariably associated in Skelton's time with infanticide. When an orthodox Christian spoke of Antichrist as Moloch or (to give another exemplar) Herod, he was being peculiarly literal, not vaguely figurative. The murdered children become, symbolically, humanity in general; and this is why an evil ruler is indeed Antichrist. The latest and most powerful expression of this pattern of thought as an indictment of an evil ruler is probably Shakespeare's in Macbeth: “The firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand” (IV.i.147). Skelton is making no jokes about Wolsey-Moloch; the creature is merciless, destructive, an idol, a devil.

The idea that the war begun in heaven between good and evil continues in space and time on earth among men is, of course, a commonplace of Christian thought. It provides a theory of history and of human action, but it only makes sense of human life if it is understood as the precursor of the final event, the Last Judgment, when the King of Justice and of Peace at last returns to take up His kingdom. All lesser wars and judgments are prefigurings of the last things. Without the Last Judgment, the war of Christ and Antichrist dwindles into a recurring squabble of opposites, and the view of history that it engendered mutates from the providential to the fatalist. The modern reader must remember that for a Christian of Skelton's time, to think of Antichrist was to think of the Last Judgment. With this qualification in mind, we can proceed to an explanation of the second appearance of Antichrist at line 115 (stanza 17) of this first half of the poem:

Ulula, Esebon, for Ieromy doth wepe!
          Sion is in sadnes, Rachell ruly doth loke;
Madionita Ietro, our Moyses kepyth his shepe;
          Gedeon is gon, that Zalmane vndertoke,
          Oreb et Zeb, of Judicum rede the boke;
Now Geball, Amon, and Amaloch,—harke, harke!
Parrot pretendith to be a bybyll clarke.
O Esebon, Esebon! to thee is cum agayne
          Seon, the regent Amorræorum,
And Og, that fat hog of Basan, doth retayne,
          The crafty coistronus Cananæorum;
          And asylum, whilom refugium miserorum,
Non fanum, sed profanum, standyth in lyttyll sted:
Ulua, Esebon, for Iepte is starke ded!

The references here are to the wars by which the Children of Israel conquered and kept the Promised Land. The events themselves are narrated in the Old Testament, but Skelton is using them exactly as he used Melchisedech; he is not referring to the primary sources so much as to later interpretations of them. He directs his readers to the Book of Judges, but the cluster of names comes immediately from Psalm 83 (Vulg. 82); and the references to Heshbon and to Sihon its Amorite king, whose defeat is related in Numbers 21, are taken from Jeremiah 48 and 49, including a direct quotation of 49:3, “Howl, O Heshbon.” The reader is therefore directed to consider the significance of the events, rather than the events themselves.

Skelton's commentators have clearly perceived the relevance of his references. The most important text for our purposes is Numbers 21:27: “Wherefore they that speak in proverbs say, Come into Heshbon, let the city of Sihon be built and prepared.” William Nelson, in his excellent pioneering study of the poem, established by means of biblical commentaries that Heshbon signified London as (1) a city of the heathen, (2) the city rebuilt, reclaimed by Israel, and (3) the Church. Only this last reading seems to me doubtful, even though A. R. Heiserman develops it as meaning “the sinful Church” that Parrot “hath no fauour to”⁸ (l. 113). The “Sion” who is in sadness is clearly the Church, presumably the Church Militant; and Rachel, according to Nelson, also represents the Church. More specifically, she is the “Sorrowing Church.”⁹ As Nelson demonstrates, Heshbon could symbolise the Church, and often did; but in this case it seems more likely that Skelton is using it in its simpler sense of “the earthly city” (hence London), once redeemed, but always liable to backslide. This fits perfectly the joining of Jeremiah, Zion, and Rachel in sorrow over its fall, whereas to read Heshbon as the Church introduces unnecessary complication and illogicality into the allegory.

The allusions that follow explain the cause of “Heshbon's” fall. They are mainly from Psalm 83, described by the Authorised Version as “A prayer against them that oppress the church.” This description does not really help a reader of Skelton. For one thing, it led Nelson into his interpretation of Heshbon as the Church. For another, the word “oppress” is very specific, suggesting an entirely historical enmity; if Skelton is denouncing Wolsey as the one enemy throughout, it provides him with more enemies than he needs. A commentator who uses the Authorised Version has two alternatives: either to attempt an identification of each separate enemy (a hopeless job) or to assume that Skelton is merely “amplifying.” In the Douay Bible, the psalm (numbered 82) is described as “A prayer against the enemies of God's Church.” The wording is significantly different; it opens the way to a kind of allegorical reading that the Authorised Version's description seems designed to exclude, but that Skelton's poem depends on. The exact significance of Skelton's references is to be found in the Vulgate text and in the commentaries upon it. For the time being, it is only necessary to observe that the phrase “God's Church” had a universal significance before the Reformation that it lost after it, and that the Church's enemies were conceived on a scale suitable to it.

The section of the psalm relevant to the poem is contained in the first thirteen verses, here reproduced in the Douay translation:

1 A canticle or a psalm for Asaph.

2 O God, who shall be like unto thee? hold not thy peace: neither be thou still, O God.

3 For lo, thy enemies have made a noise: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head.

4 They have taken a malicious counsel against thy people, and have consulted against thy saints.

5 They have said: Come and let us destroy them so that they be not a nation: and let the name of Israel be remembered no more.

6 For they have contrived with one consent: they have made a covenant together against thee, 7 the tabernacles of the Edomites, and the Ishmaelites:

Moab, and the Agarenes, 8 Gebal, the Ammon, and Amalec: the Philistines, with the inhabitants of Tyre.

9 Yea, and the Assyrian also is joined with them: they are come to the aid of the sons of Lot.

10 Do to them as thou didst to Madian and to Sisara: as to Jabin at the brook of Cisson:

11 Who perished at Endor: and became as dung for the earth.

12 Make their princes like Oreb, and Zeb, and Zebee, and Salmana.

All their princes, 13 who have said: Let us possess the sanctuary of God for an inheritance.

Skelton's quotations from the psalm become luminously clear when referred to the allegorical commentaries; the following readings are taken from St. Augustine, whose commentary was perhaps the best known and most influential.¹⁰ The saint begins by explaining that Asaph, in whose name the psalm is spoken, signifies “the congregation” or the Church, and that the Church is to be understood as “the Christian people.” In verse 2, the people's address to God is to be taken as applying to Christ “because, being made in the likeness of men, he was thought by those who despised him, to be comparable to other men.” The events of verse 3 signify the last days (novissimos dies), and the curious expression “have lifted up the head” refers expressly to the coming of Antichrist, “that head which is exalted above all that is called God, and that is worshipped.” With this reading established for the psalm as a whole, the meaning of the names under which the psalmist lists the enemies of God becomes clear. Using etymology, Augustine produces the following readings for the names borrowed by Skelton: Gebal—an empty valley, i. e. false humility; Ammon—a confused people or a sorrowing people; Amalec—a people licking, “whence it is elsewhere said, and his enemies lick the earth”; Oreb—dryness; Zeb—wolf; Salmana—the shadow of commotion. Finally, the opening of the comment on verse 10 is important: “Now let us see what the prophetic spirit prays may fall upon them, rather foretelling than cursing” (my italics).

Skelton's borrowings from what was generally understood in his time to be an eschatological psalm prove that his indictment of Wolsey was intended “prophetically.” Whether we are intended to read the names of stanza 17 etymologically is not now clear; but the poem at one time probably included marginalia that gave the etymologies.¹¹ The technique is plain. Just as in Magnificence the evil that misleads the hero is analysed into more than one character, so here it is presented as a teeming army. Yet the multiplicities resolve themselves into one, “the head,” Moloch-Wolsey.

The Commentary explains other things in the poem, too, such as Skelton's reason for giving pride of place in the opening section of his attack to a line derived from verse 9 of the psalm:

The lynage of Lot toke supporte of Assur.

(l. 68)

According to Augustine, Assur (the Assyrian) represents the Devil himself, who works his will by means of the weak and mistrustful, i. e., “the lynage of Lot,” the “declining one” (declinans). Most important of all, the commentary explains Skelton's attitude to the woeful events he reveals. Evil seems triumphant; Melchisedech-Henry is too merciful, the spirit of Gideon is “gone,” i. e., doesn't live in him, and as Moses, he “kepyth [Jethro's] shepe,” i. e., he is asleep. “Jepte is starke ded,” and the poem ends in resignation. Nonetheless, as lines 438-39 put it, “… the date of ower Lord / And the date of the Devyll dothe shrew[d]lye accord.” That is both the prayer and the prophecy of Psalm 83 as the mediaeval commentators interpreted it. What looks to a modern reader like fatalism and resignation in Speke, Parrot is in fact Christian patience and a faith in larger hopes than any offered by this world. Augustine, commenting on verse 3 of the psalm, quotes Romans 8:31: “If God be for us, who shall be against us?”

To attend upon hopes of another world does not necessarily inhibit action in this one, and this brief comment on the poet's attitude to his revelations leads to a consideration of a third actor in the drama who has so far been ignored. He is the prophet, the witness, the sufferer, even the martyr (in potentiality at least), and he appears for the first time in the poem in that early section where Skelton lays down the basic pattern of his allegory:

Aram was fyred with Caldies fyer called Ur;
          Jobab was brought vp in the lande of Hus.

(ll. 66-67)

Aram, as Nelson and Edwards point out, is a clear misprint for Aran.¹² Aran was the third son of Terah, and the brother of Nachor and Abram; according to Genesis 11:28, he “died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.” Skelton's “fyer” is derived from a traditional rendering of “Ur of the Chaldees” as “fire of the Chaldees.” As a commentary quoted by Nelson puts it:

Ur means fire … that is, [they were burned] in the fire of the Chaldees. And the Chaldees reverence fire as God … In this fire, Haran was consumed.

As Nelson concluded (John Skelton, p. 176), “Haran, then, died in the fire called Ur because he would not worship a false god.” The sufferings of Job need no gloss. The faithful witness turns up again as Jeremiah, weeping over Heshbon in line 115 already quoted. Just as the other names examined fuse into allegorical representations of Wolsey and Henry, so these names fuse into allegorical versions of the poet-prophet himself. Yet the poet is constantly present in allegory, in the voice of the parrot who speaks the poem.

Parrot is too complex a creation to be dealt with here. For a good part of the poem he pretends not to be an actor in the drama at all; he reminds us that he enjoys the secular charms of the good life, and acts much of the time as if his pronouncements were the babblings of a clown. Nonetheless, the compelled witness of the truth is one aspect of his nature, and it illuminates some of his statements. At line 87 (stanza 13), occurs one of the passages where Parrot becomes more “birdlike” and seems to retreat into parrot's babble:

Moryshe myne owne shelfe, the costermonger sayth;
          Fate, fate, fate, ye Irysh water lag;
In flattryng fables men fynde but lyttyl fayth:
          But moveatur terra, let the world wag;
          Let syr Wrigwrag wrastell with syr Delarag.

Of this and the following stanza it has been observed that “Parrot withdraws into the pose of the cynic … Let the world go to hell if it wishes” (A. R. Heiserman, p. 144). S. E. Fish reads these lines as “tolerant fatalism,” and sees in them Parrot's “refusal to accept the burdens of morality” (p. 147). These readings would seem entirely convincing were it not for the phrase moveatur terra. It appears in various forms in several places of the Bible, and always in passages bearing an eschatological significance, such as that in Psalm 99:

The lord reigneth; let the people tremble: he sitteth
between the cherubims; let the earth be moved.

(v. 1, A. V.)

The phrase also turns up in the Office for the Dead, in the responsory Libera me:

In die illa tremenda, quando coeli movendi sunt, et terra.¹³

The little phrase carries a dreadful burden of meaning, and Parrot's paraphrase of it as “let the world wag” is surely fiercely ironic. The prophet's voice is here changing to the satirist's, and Parrot's point seems to be not that the world may go to hell, if it wishes, but that it will, despite all warnings. The next three stanzas (ll. 94-114) where Parrot describes his delight in “solas, pleasure, dysporte, and pley” have been read as a declaration of hedonism and detachment.¹⁴ But the lines are complicated by the fact that the first, and perhaps the most important, statement that Parrot makes about himself is that he comes from Paradise. Hence, whatever his duties may be in a fallen world, “solas and pleasure” are his birthright. Even his knowledge of the precepts of “auncyent Aristippus” (l. 95) seems to involve more than a simple relapse into hedonism, since out of those precepts he claims to “bring forth learned problems in the sacred school of the poets”:

                                                                                                              unde depromo
          Dilemmata docta in pædagogio
Sacro vatum, whereof to you I breke.

(ll. 97-100)

That this is the correct approach to these “wanton” passages seems to be borne out by an interesting example from later in the poem, line 188 (stanza 27):

Now a nutmeg, a nut-meg, cum gariopholo,
          For Parrot to pyke vpon, his brayne for to stable,
Swete synamum styckis and pleris cum musco!
          In Paradyce, that place of pleasure perdurable,
          The progeny of Parrottis were fayre and fauorable;
Nowe in valle Ebron Parrot is fayne to fede:
Cristecross and saynt Nycholas, Parrot, be your good spede!

The “hedonism” of the third line is clearly a reminiscence of, and a longing for, his original home, and it is explained by his situation in the last lines. Parrot's remark that he is forced to feed in the vale of Hebron has always been taken to mean merely that he is an exile; but it has a more precise meaning. Hebron was one of the Hebrew “cities of refuge.” Joshua 21:13 describes how it was given to the children of Aaron “to be a refuge for the slayer.” Although the Catholic Encyclopaedia (s. v. “Sanctuary”) warns the reader that the custom of sanctuary originated in the “inviolability of sacred things,” and had nothing to do historically with these Hebrew cities, it is clear that “in valle Ebron” stands allegorically for sanctuary. Hence the literal, or historical significance of the passage must be that Parrot-Skelton was actually in sanctuary at the time of the poem's composition. William Nelson (pp. 118-22) has proved that at the time of his attack on Wolsey, Skelton was living in the sanctuary of Westminster; both he and Edwards, however, doubted whether Skelton was living there out of necessity. An older tradition asserted that he died in sanctuary, and one of the Merry Tales speaks of him as “at Westminster in prison” (Works, I, lxxii). These stories support a literal reading of “in valle Ebron.” The case is clinched by the second of the two lines. St. Nicholas is invoked because he is the patron of captives.¹⁵

Parrot, then, is sufferer as well as prophet, and his rôle in the drama is heroic. Jepthah may be “starke ded,” but Jeremiah is alive, even if he speaks through the beak of a rather unlikely and eccentric bird. Finally, Parrot offers one further comment on this aspect of his rôle in the poem when he remarks:

When Parrot is ded, she dothe not putrefy.

(l. 218)¹⁶

Neatly enough, the elucidation of this line returns us to the psalm that lies at the basis of the poem's structure. Whatever source Parrot's incorruptibility may have as a comment on parrots in general, as an allegorical statement it refers to verse 11 of Psalm 83, where it is said of the enemies of God that they “perished at Endor: and became as dung for the earth.” Augustine comments:

Endor, where they perished, is interpreted as the fountain of generation, but of the carnal kind, however, to which they were given over, and so perished; not heeding the regeneration that leads into life … Therefore it is deservedly said of these people: they became as the dung of the earth, from whom nothing came forth, save earthly fruits.

Parrot's incorruptibility is a gift that comes of his birth in Paradise; allegorically, it is both the sign and the cause of his allegiance to the truth.

Skelton's poem, then, is a prophetic reading of contemporary history according to an old, sufficiently commonplace, and thoroughly Christian scheme of interpretation. The account of it given here is much simplified, mainly through the omission of any detailed consideration of the character of the parrot who speaks the poem. That in itself is a complicated literary-historical problem. Yet a reading of a difficult poem that begins with simplicities is probably in itself desirable. In the case of Speke, Parrot, an understanding of the simplicities of the allegory is a necessary first step for the critic who wishes to do justice to the poem's art.

The allegory of Speke, Parrot, once expounded, will be immediately comprehensible to a modern reader as a poetic strategy chosen by Skelton to order his attack on Wolsey. It is the theme whose statement and development provide the poem's structure. Its simplicity and clarity contrast remarkably with the cryptic and spasmodic parrot-talk that reveals it; and one can see just how thoroughly intended this effect is by observing that Parrot is only cryptic when he is developing the allegory. Both at the beginning and the end of the poem, he speaks plainly and eloquently about his own character, a subject intrinsically much more complicated and abstruse than the poem's allegory. As a formal strategy, the allegory undeniably succeeds. One discovers that the kaleidoscopic changes of mood and tone serve a structural principle; the versification, which is handled with the panache of the last master of accentual verse, imitates perfectly, with its heavy stresses and alliterations, the simple antithesis the poem is based on. Everything is calculated for brilliance and energy. Yet a reader who observes and delights in the poem's formal significance is not necessarily the fittest of readers.

Speke, Parrot is a typically mediaeval work of art in that the system of ideas on which it is based is external to it. It is not, in the language of Coleridgean criticism, an organic whole; on the contrary, it is manifestly incomplete without the co-operation of an audience of informed readers. It is designed for a community of Christian readers, and like most mediaeval art, it cannot be wholly alive apart from such a community. This may or may not seem a drawback to a modern reader; but the poem's dependence on its readers offered Skelton an artistic opportunity of which he took full advantage. Had he spelled out his equation of Wolsey with Antichrist, the result would have been merely denunciatory, even platitudinous; but by basing the poem on an allusive use of materials traditionally understood as revealing the doctrine of Antichrist, he was able to invite his reader into a conspiratorial rediscovery of the old doctrine in a new guise. As it is, Antichrist is writ large all over the poem. Yet no matter how commonplace the idea, the reader who discovers it for himself, alone with the poem, cannot but feel that he is being initiated into secret and dangerous matters. This would be so, even if five thousand others were simultaneously undergoing the same initiation. The meaning of the poem is an open secret, and intentionally so. Open, it is commonplace; secret, it is dangerous.

It is also, presumably, meant to be true. Wolsey, as he appears in the poem, may be quite properly described as an “Antichrist-figure”; but Antichrist itself is not a figure of anything. Like Christ, it simply is. But where Christ is comprehensible in Himself, in His incarnation, Antichrist is comprehensible only in allegories. His incarnations are anybody's guess; but the guess of a poet-priest has a special authority. For this reason, it is not really satisfactory to describe Skelton's allegory as an aesthetic strategy, and leave it at that. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was quite common, even conventional, for preachers and poets to foist the name of Antichrist on to anyone whose actions could be taken as hostile to the Church; but this is not really relevant. Saying one's prayers in the morning was equally conventional, but nevertheless seriously intended.

To consider the allegory as “simply and sadly” meant seems at first to reveal obvious weaknesses in it. For instance, in the second half of the poem, Skelton attacks Wolsey for educational policies which were reforming the very educational system that provided for the continuity of the traditions by which Skelton was attacking him. Yet less than ten years after Skelton's death, Moloch-Wolsey had himself fallen, and Melchisedech-Henry had not only continued his educational policies, but had severed himself from the Church and divorced the Queen so eloquently praised in stanza 6 of Speke, Parrot. Yet the very theory of reality on which the allegory is based provides for such historical surprises. Had Skelton lived, his comment on Henry's later years would have been that Wolsey did his work well. Henry can only be taken as Melchisedech by virtue of his office. Already in Speke, Parrot, he is merely a necessary term in the allegory, a passive spectator of Wolsey's actions. There are anti-kings as well as anti-popes, and by separating himself from the Church, Henry, according to Skelton's allegory, ceased to be a Melchisedech. By 1535, “Jepthah” was indeed “starke ded” in England (l. 128); according to one reading of the allegory that Skelton adopted, it could be said that he died on the scaffold with Sir Thomas More. The historical truth of Skelton's allegory is to be found in the fact that it enabled him accurately to assess Wolsey as an historical phenomenon, the embodiment of a reality of power before which Skelton's tradition was finally to weaken and disappear, leaving Speke, Parrot incomprehensible to later readers. The final historical irony is that on his deathbed, Wolsey himself came to see the world as Parrot sees it. “… If I had served God,” he is reported to have said, “as diligentlie as I have doone the king, he would not have given me over in my greie haires.” According to Holinshed, Wolsey was “never happie till this his overthrow.”¹⁷

The terms of Skelton's allegory fit Wolsey's career and its consequences very well, even if Wolsey, in his downfall, finally eluded definition in those terms. Skelton was even prepared for that. A fragment of Colyn Cloute foretelling Wolsey's fall is preserved with the title “Skelton's prophecy.”¹⁸ It had come true—not that this reveals clairvoyance on Skelton's part. What it does reveal is that Wolsey and Skelton lived in the same intellectual world. Both were scholars, both clerics, both royal servants. Both were bound by the same laws and beliefs. This explains the ferocious persistence of Skelton's attack on Wolsey; in the cardinal's career the poet saw as if in a magnifying mirror the possibilities and temptations of his own. The real unknown in Speke, Parrot, the stranger whom the poet never comprehended, is the shadowy Melchisedech-Henry.

The irreducible reality of Speke, Parrot, that element in the poem that provokes either belief or disbelief, is not therefore to be found in the indictment of Wolsey itself, so much as in the view of history that it is based on. This is the poem's raison d'être, the content that its formal organisation communicates. If one wished to sum up in a sentence the significance of Skelton's allegory, Numbers 21:31 would serve very well: “Thus Israel dwelt in the land of the Amorites.” It is the premise of the poem that “God's church” is built in a place that is at best reclaimed and besieged, and that is at worst under enemy occupation. It is nobody's home, and certainly not Parrot's.

The literary critic as such can only describe Parrot's world, but the reader must either accept it or not accept it, knowing it for what it is. Speke, Parrot, like all Mediaeval and Renaissance art of lasting value, refutes our aestheticisms. It originates in a belief, and it is therefore utterly serious in its demand of the reader. It is not an allegory of the artist's life, nor a poem about poetry; it reminds us that art imitates life, and that works of art belong to the history of mankind, not to the history of art.

Notes

1. See in particular William Nelson, John Skelton, Laureate (N. Y., 1939), pp. 158-84, and H. L. R. Edwards, Skelton, the Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet (London, 1949), pp. 182-99. These two excellent studies are the basis of all modern criticism of Skelton.

2. S. E. Fish, John Skelton's Poetry (Yale, 1965), pp. 135-76.

3. Skelton, Works, ed. Alexander Dyce (London, 1843), II, 1-25. The quotations and line numbers are from this edition.

4. Works, I, 185.

5. J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, CXCII, col. 448. [“What man is King of Justice and Peace, except Christ? None.”]

6. S. E. Fish (p. 144) equates Wolsey with Antichrist, but he does not press the Christian significance of the term, seeming to use it as being in itself a figurative expression—a usage to which the divergence between our readings of the poem is probably traceable.

7. Dyce's text of Speke, Parrot is a conflation of two widely differing versions of the poem, that of the first printed texts, and that preserved in B. M. MS. Harl. 2252, ff. 133-39. The latter consists of ll. 1-59 of Dyce's text, followed by a series of shorter poems, mainly envoys, written in chronological order and dated by Nelson from Oct. 1521 through Dec. 1521 or early 1522. Recent criticism has assumed that these addenda are to be read as a part of the poem itself. It is assumed in this article that the poem proper as designed and completed by Skelton ends, save for some characteristic flourishes, with l. 233 in Dyce's edition. Interesting and lengthy as the envoys are, they do not form a coherent whole.

8. Skelton and Satire (Chicago, 1961), p. 146, n. 45.

9. Walafrid Strabo, Expositio in Quatuor Evangelia in Migne, Pat. Lat., CXIV, col. 867, “Rachel, Ecclesia qui plorat in valle lacrymarum.” [“Rachel, the Church that weeps in the vale of tears.”] This illustration is particularly apt, because it occurs in the exposition of Matthew 2:16-18 (the slaughter of the Innocents): “In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”

10. Enarrationes in Psalmos in Corpus Christianorum (Series Latina), XXXIX, 1140 ff. Quotations are referred to the verses where they apply, as in the Commentary.

11. B. M. MS. Harl. 2252 preserves Skelton's marginalia to ll. 1-59. No doubt the marginalia extended throughout the poem in Skelton's holograph.

12. A. R. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire, p. 138, retains Aram and assumes that Skelton intended a reference both to Aran (Genesis 11:26) and to Aram (Genesis 10:23) who was a son of Shem and the father of Uz. Once one leaves the clear significance of Skelton's line, such readings become a matter of arbitrary choice. There are in the Vulgate Bible three Arans, five Arams, two Jobs, and five Jobabs.

13. “In that dreadful day, when the heavens and the earth are shaken.”

14. Heiserman, p. 144.

15. H. Thurston and Donald Attwater (eds.), Butler's Lives of the Saints (N. Y., 1956), IV, 505-6. Should this reading of “Ebron” be accepted, it will also provide an historical interpretation (hitherto lacking) for the allegory of Parrot's being in a cage throughout the poem.

16. “She” is the reading of STC 22598 (Here after foloweth Certayne bokes … by mayster Skelton, Richard Lant for Henry Tab,?1545), which is the only authoritative text. Later prints concur. Although recent criticism has taken up Edwards's suggestion (Skelton, p. 190) that “she” may signify that Parrot is an allegory of the soul (anima, f.), it is evidently a misprint. Parrot is otherwise masculine in the rest of the stanza. Edwards himself emended to “he” (loc. cit.).

17. Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, III (1587), 917.

18. B. M. MS. Lansdowne 762, f. 75; see Works, I, 329.