[In the following essay, Gustafson claims that Skelton's earliest English verse, the Dolorous Dethe, is more politically and poetically sophisticated than most critics have allowed, arguing that it demonstrates Skelton's concern with the court poet's “place—and complicity—in a world of political subterfuge,” which became one of Skelton's preoccupations in his later career.]

When he first praised John Skelton for having “dronken out of Elycons well,” William Caxton may have had in mind what is now generally accepted as the poet's earliest extant work in English: a 200-odd-line lament occasioned by the murder in 1489 of Henry Percy, fourth Earl of Northumberland, at the hands of an angry mob.¹ Since then, however, the Dolorous Dethe has had few admirers. Skelton did not list it among his works in the Garland of Laurell (1523), and the lament was first printed only in 1568, when Thomas Marshe retrieved it from the unique extant manuscript copy.² The eighteenth-century antiquarian Bishop Percy did praise the poem, perhaps out of family loyalty.³ But as nineteenth-century critics began to value Skelton as satirist and metrical innovator, his deliberately traditional poetry fell into disfavor. Isaac D'Israeli, for example, wrote of the Dolorous Dethe, “Whenever his muse plunges into the long measure of heroic verse, she is drowned in no Heliconian stream.”⁴ In 1935 W. H. Auden echoed this view in a more general dismissal of what he called the poet's first phase, his imitation “of the ‘aureate’ poetry of Lydgate and similar fifteenth-century verses.”⁵ Indeed, the still-dominant view of Skelton's career is to treat the Dolorous Dethe and other early efforts as mere examples of late fifteenth-century poetic inertia, apprentice works in a decadent tradition from which the real Skelton eventually freed himself. As C. S. Lewis claimed more than forty years ago, Skelton's early poems “reveal nothing of his later quality.”⁶

It is unlikely that the Dolorous Dethe will ever be considered a great poem. But it does deserve greater attention, both as an example of poetic self-promotion and as a work that introduces Skelton's recurring anxieties about being a court poet. These anxieties are familiar from his later works, where he not only writes about political figures and events but also makes us aware of his precarious position in doing so. He is, as the character Drede in the Bowge of Court, conscious of the poet's need to reveal and conceal. And it is generally assumed that much of his later innovation—and obscurity—are designed at least in part to navigate the treacherous world of Henry VIII's court. My claim is that even in this, his earliest English poem, Skelton is already profoundly concerned with the poet's place—and complicity—in a world of political subterfuge. I will begin by considering the broadly medieval roles that Skelton adopts to invent himself as a court writer. But my main focus will be on the ways in which Skelton uses the rebellion, and medieval lament, to advance both royal policy in the North and his own position. The Dolorous Dethe is often taken at face value and treated as just another historical document. I will show that Skelton's account of the rebellion is in fact quite idiosyncratic, and that its idiosyncrasies are part of his attempt to understand not just the nature but also the limitations of his role as rhetorical servant. How, in a world of intrigue, can the poet comprehend motives and thus advise? And since traitors hide their motives with pleasing speech, how can the poet—who is, after all, the master at concealing defects—expect to be trusted? The Dolorous Dethe does not provide easy answers to these questions. But the problems, and thus the poem, do anticipate Skelton's later quality as a political writer, especially his development of a poetic that analyzes and reflects the obscurities of court life.

Poets, especially public and political ones, do not create themselves so much as take on recognizable social roles, which they then perhaps modify. The position of poetic servant was perhaps the most familiar such role in the later fifteenth century, and in the Dolorous Dethe Skelton adopts it easily, both through direct reference to a potential patron and through the conventions of his chosen literary form, the lament.⁷ Skelton is up front about his interest in patronage: “Mea pagina,” he claims, should speed to the young Percy, about whom he writes, “Ad libitum cuius ipse paratus ero.” And Skelton's lament is a primary example of this service. Laments were considered a species of epideictic rhetoric, in which one extolled virtue and castigated vice, and Skelton closely follows the pattern.⁸ He praises the fourth Earl's ancestry, deeds and virtue, while denouncing the “falshode” of those responsible for his death. And though the poet mourns the loss of life, he also offers hope (and prayers) that this worthy man will be saved. These thoroughly medieval conventions are notable for the way in which they blur distinctions between the personal and the official—much as such roles were blurred in the feudal world depicted in the poem. Skelton as servant offers a highly formalized though personal response to death: “I wayle, I wepe, I sobbe, I sigh ful sore” (1). Yet he is also quite conscious of grieving as something distinctly social, an act of public duty in a shame culture: “What man, remembring how shamfully he was slayn, / From bitter wepinge hym self kan restrayne?” (111-12). Nor does lament restrict the poet's role to that of mourner. He is also an adviser. Like much medieval and Tudor poetry, lament tends towards moral generalizations, usually Boethian in nature. In the Dolorous Dethe, the voice of public and private mourner is juxtaposed with a quite different one, which soberly moralizes on that most timeless yet topical of medieval commonplaces, the changeability of fortune and the instability of worldly power: “Ast ubi perlegit, dubiam sub mente volutet / Fortunam, cuncta que malefida rotat.” Skelton, like Gower in the Confessio Amantis, underscores this difference in voices by writing in different languages. The mourner's English verses on “dedely fate, the dolefulle destenny” (2) read like the cries of an unreformed Boethius; by contrast, the Latin distich at the end of the poem—“Non sapit humanis qui certam ponere rebus / Spem cupit: est hominum raraque ficta fides”—is academic and incisive, but also detached, much like Lady Philosophy. The poem contains what Michel Foucault calls a “plurality of self.”⁹ It does so not as a matter of poetic originality, but because the literary conventions of lament presume an attempt to synthesize the personal and the public, the emotional and the didactic.¹⁰

Skelton does complicate this role, however, by making other, much bolder authorial gestures, ones that are also medieval (or at least Chaucerian) but which are generally associated with the Renaissance.¹¹ The most obvious of these is Skelton's willingness to name himself. This act appears to be rare among medieval laments. Of the dozens that John Scattergood cites in his article “Skelton and Elegy,” for example, all but one is anonymous. Nor is the poet named in great elegies such as Pearl or The Book of the Duchess, even though in each case the role of the “I” is crucial to the dramatic development of the poem.¹² Skelton's references to his name in the Dolorous Dethe seem calculated to transcend a merely official role and present the poet as a seeker of fame. Indeed, the Latin incipit suggests that he has already bestowed fame upon himself: “Poeta Skelton Laureatus Libellum Suum Metrice Alloquitur.” The claim to be a “poeta” is particularly ambitious; Chaucer, for example, reserved the term for classical auctores or Dante, never for himself. “Laureatus” is somewhat less prestigious, since it refers merely to an advanced degree in rhetoric. Yet these terms, taken together, indicate Skelton's goal as well as his means of attaining it. He will inhabit the poem not just as servant or mourner but as poet, and he will assert his poetic reputation through a highly self-conscious display of rhetorical learning.¹³ Or, to put the point in terms of authority and submission: in his move to define himself as a poetic subject, Skelton will do more than make himself subject to potential patrons; he will also make himself subject to poetic tradition.

This fact explains in part why the Dolorous Dethe, to use Auden's phrase, “smells of the study.”¹⁴ But rather than merely disparaging Skelton's rhetorical displays as examples of poetic inertia or bad taste, we should recognize their social function as markers of professional identification. (They might in this sense be seen as analogous to the pen-case in early portraits of Chaucer, which is at once highly conventional and individualizing.)¹⁵ Much of this conspicuously poetic language can be traced to Roman rhetoric, either directly or through medieval artes poetriae such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova. Skelton's use of apostrophe presents a good example. Apostrophe was a chief figure of emotional appeal in Latin rhetoric, and Quintilian for example defined it with reference to judicial contexts: “a diversion of our words to address some person other than the judge.”¹⁶ Since judicial oratory was effectively dead by the thirteenth century, Geoffrey of Vinsauf recast apostrophe as an ornament for expressing grief in epideictic verse.¹⁷ Indeed, for him the trope became at heart a mark of poetic skill, just as it does for Skelton in this passage from the Dolorous Dethe:

O cruell Mars, thou dedly god of war!
O dolorous Teusday, dedicate to thi name,
When thou shoke thi sword so noble a man to mar!
O grounde ungracious, unhappy be thy fame,
Whiche wert endiyd with rede blode of the same
Mooste noble Erle! O fowle mysuryd grounde,
Wheron he gat his fynall dedely wounde.
O Atropos, of the fatall systers iij,
Goddes mooste cruell unto the lyfe of man,
All merciles in the ys no pite!

(113-22)

There are plausible audiences for apostrophe in the poem, notably young Percy (162), Christ (190) and the Blessed Virgin (204). But in the above lines the trope seems designed to foreground poetry itself. The appeals to Mars, Tuesday and Atropos are preeminently examples of literary language—rather than, for example, evidence of astrology or part of an elaborate chronographia. And in Skelton's exclamations to the ground, apostrophe has become what Jonathan Culler aptly calls the “pure embodiment of poetic pretension.”¹⁸ Skelton is making a conspicuous display of the power of the rhetorician—the laureatus—to call into order a fictionalized world of sympathy and antipathy.

Skelton's manipulation of apostrophe, like his use of Latin, is no doubt designed to present the native-born poet as an international man of learning, comparable to more illustrious figures at Henry VII's court such as Bernard André.¹⁹ But Skelton is probably also presenting himself as heir to an English poetic tradition, for his version of the high style and poetic ambition is also modeled on, if not directly derived from, Chaucer and Lydgate. Skelton's later works are preoccupied with poetic ancestry. Yet even here the influence of his great English precursors is evident. We can see it, for example, in his use of rhyme royal, a verse form that may have originated in ceremonial functions, but which in Chaucer's hands became a standard form for serious poetry throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.²⁰ Equally suggestive are the affinities of the Dolorous Dethe with Chaucer's most ambitious work in rhyme royal, Troilus and Criseyde. Some of the parallels are minor. Skelton's apostrophe to Atropos has its counterpart in Book IV of Chaucer's poem (itself a kind of sustained medieval lament), where she is successively called on by Troilus and Criseyde. Other parallels suggest that Skelton may have turned to Chaucer's poem for a heightened sense of poetic purpose. Like Chaucer—and unlike the writers of most other Middle English laments—Skelton invokes Clio, the muse of history (8; cf. Troilus, II.8). He also imitates Chaucer's historical narrator in following the Horatian dictum that poets should express the pain that they would have the reader feel.²¹ Chaucer develops the figure of the emotional narrator of tragedy at length in the opening of Book I, though it is the more standard example at Book IV, lines 8-14, that may have provided an English model for the Dolorous Dethe. Finally, Skelton follows his precursor's strategy for seeking poetic afterlife. Chaucer tries to immortalize his vernacular masterpiece by commending his “litel bok” so that it might “subgit be to alle poesye,” “poesye” here being identified with a classical literary pantheon.²² Skelton makes a similar gesture to preserve his “sorwefulle ditis” by addressing them—significantly, I think, in Latin—as “libellum suum metrice.” These parallels involve rhetorical commonplaces, and it is unlikely that Skelton expected his readers to see specific allusions. But for an audience generally familiar with Chaucer and Lydgate, these features would do more than conjure a vision of the poet as something greater than a servant; they would also, in a poem about political rupture and continuity, suggest Skelton's role as heir apparent to an English tradition of court poetry.²³

Poetic service and literary fame are the foundations of Skelton's poetic identity, but if the Dolorous Dethe were only about service or rhetorical display the poem would not be especially noteworthy. What does make the work interesting are the ways in which Skelton develops and complicates the role of servant-rhetorician in his treatment of the Yorkshire rebellion and Northumberland's murder. Here the comparison with Troilus and Criseyde is once again useful. Chaucer writes about ancient history, and the learned style of his poem, which he claims to translate out of Latin, is part of his attempt to capture the grandeur of the classical world: translatio, translatio studii, translatio imperii. Skelton, by contrast, brings his rhetorical learning directly to bear on contemporary events for readers who have very practical interests in them—explicitly the young Percy, though also, it seems likely, Henry VII and the court at Westminster. It is through his distinctive treatment of the main players, the rebels and Northumberland's retainers, that he reflects upon the political implications of his own work.

Modern historians trace the Yorkshire uprising of 1489 to a general weakening of royal authority to collect taxes in later medieval England.²⁴ Indeed, the North was already restless in January of 1489, when Parliament reluctantly granted Henry a subsidy of £100,000 to support his wars against the French. The new tax met with immediate resistance; as Skelton baldly states, “The commonns renyyd ther taxes to pay / Of them demaunded and asked by the kynge” (78-79). Frustrated collectors then turned to the fourth Earl, who tried to mediate with the King. But when Henry refused to compromise, Percy faced a mob and was killed, possibly after making the mistake of reading aloud the King's blunt reply.²⁵ The murder ignited a larger movement, and Henry VII led forces north, eventually entering the city of York on May 24th. But by then the force of the rebellion had dwindled. Its initial leader, John a Chambre, was captured and subsequently executed at York, while the chief figure of the second and larger movement, Sir John Egremont, fled to sanctuary on the Continent. For twentieth-century scholars, the uprising is an obscure and ultimately minor incident in Henry VII's reign. Commentators closer to the event were, understandably enough, much more worried. They sought to comprehend the rebellion and Northumberland's death as much more than a tax revolt, as symptoms or even causes of further challenges to royal power. One common explanation was regional. Polydore Vergil, for example, characterized those in the North as “wild and readier than others for rebellion.” He, along with Hall's Chronicle and the writer of Kingford's Chronicle, considered the uprising as part of a regional rejection of centralized rule.²⁶ A similar point underlay a letter written by William Paston, who actually quoted a rebel document calling on all “northern people,” on pain of death or loss of land, to defend themselves “on behalf of such points of law as the Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered for.”²⁷ But perhaps the most striking articulation of the regional subplot was in Henry VII's own proclamation, issued shortly after Northumberland's death. The King promised the “subduyng of his grete rebelles and traitoures of the north parties of Yorkshire,” for they

Intende not only the distruccion of the kynges most noble person and of alle the nobles and lordis of this realme, but also the subuersion of the poletique wele of the same, and to robbe, dispoyle and distroye alle the southe parties of this his realme, and to subdue and bring to captiuite all the people of the same.²⁸

The North was a predictable source of trouble because of its distance from London and because of the power of families like the Percys and the Nevilles—power that Henry VII was trying to reduce.²⁹ The proclamation also hints at another frequent explanation for the rebellion: dynastic politics. The North was commonly suspected of Yorkist sympathies, and it may have been out of fear of these that Henry VII decided to lead a force against an otherwise minor insurrection.³⁰ Several early writers emphasize these dynastic undercurrents among the commons. But it was Francis Bacon, writing more than a century later, who found the most striking image. For him, the uprising

proceeded not simply of any present necessity, but much by reason of the old humour of those countries, where the memory of King Richard was so strong, that it lay like lees in the bottom of men's hearts, and if the vessel was but stirred it would come up.³¹

Bacon's conspiracy theory, like those of other early writers, is somewhat vague: we do not learn, for example, which “men's hearts” contained resentment and thus plots. The point is that for all of these writers the uprising was ultimately explicable as a product of longstanding political tensions and rational self-interest. William Paston may not have enumerated or commented on the “points of law” mentioned in the rebel proclamation, but by quoting them he nonetheless introduced a logic of rebellion.³² Henry's decree also acknowledged causes, albeit ones that were more a matter of realpolitik than of law. According to his political manicheeism, the “north parties” were utterly comprehensible (if unlawful) in their desire to conquer “the south parties” and establish themselves as a central authority. (One suspects that the rebels' exploits made political sense to the King in part because they bore an uncanny resemblance to his own act of usurpation four years earlier.)

Historians of the rebellion typically treat the Dolorous Dethe as simply another historical source to be collated with letters, chronicles and official documents. Yet upon closer inspection, the poem is perhaps all the more striking for its divergence from other accounts, most notably in its treatment of the rebels themselves. Far from searching for political motivations, Skelton demonizes the King's enemies, depicting them not as partisan or even self-interested so much as insane:

I say, ye commoners, why wer ye so stark mad?
What frantyk frensy fyll in youre brayne?
Where was your wit and reson ye shuld have had?
What willfull foly made you to ryse agayn
Your naturall lord? Alas, I kan not fayne.
Ye armed you with wille and left your wit behynd;
Well may ye be cald commons most unkynd.

(50-56)

Skelton uses the concept of reason in several senses here and elsewhere in the Dolorous Dethe. On the one hand, it refers to the intellectual faculty, common sense or even motivation of the rebels, and by drawing on these associations he effectively pathologizes the commons, so that they no longer possess the kind of rational motivation attributed to them in Paston's letter or Henry's proclamation.³³ Like animals, to which they are compared, they merely act: “Bluntly as bestis withe boste and with cry / They saide they forsede not nor carede not to dy” (83-84). Such a representation is neither neutral nor original, and Skelton may well be imitating a strategy found in accounts of earlier rebellions, such as the Peasants' Revolt. Indeed, Steven Justice's excellent work on writing in and about the 1381 uprising seems particularly relevant to the Dolorous Dethe. For him, “the story of how the rising was remembered is the story of how it was forgotten.”³⁴ Monastic chroniclers and other writers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries “forgot” the Peasants' Revolt in part by denying the possibility that the insurgents really knew what they were doing. Skelton achieves a similar effect by staging a mock interrogation of his “madmen” (60), directing a series of unanswered questions in a tone of increasing exasperation and incredulity: “What movyd you agayn hym to war or to fight? / What aylde you to slo your lord ageyn all right?” (62-63). Because the questions are never answered—his point is that they cannot be satisfactorily answered—the poet is left to throw up his hands (“I kan not fayne”) before an event that is beyond, or rather beneath, rational understanding. The denial of rebel articulateness is connected to the other main meaning of “reason” in the poem: ratio, the divinely established order. In political theory, this first principle of cosmic order was typically invested in the king, so that to rebel against him could thus be considered tantamount to rejecting reason itself—to be, in other words, “stark mad” (50).³⁵ Such a notion underlies Skelton's claim that the rebels, by arming themselves “with wille,” have left their “wit behynd” (55). And because human rationality is related to the reason that informs the nature of social and even religious order, Skelton finds the rebels not only mad but also godless and even unnatural. The commons are “most unkynd,” which is to say bestial rather than rational, for rising up against Percy, their “naturall lord.” He was, after all, merely “demaundinge soche dutes as nedis most acord / To the right of his prince which should not be withstand” (66-67).

We should not be surprised that a priest would subscribe to this providential model as a justification for aristocratic rule. Yet the deployment of that model is not the inevitable and unpremeditated product of “Skelton's radically unified universe.”³⁶ Rather, it is a deliberate choice made for distinctly political ends. Other writers were perfectly able to see the uprising in more pragmatic terms and with reference to immediate political causes, and even King Henry did not rely on divine right to denounce the insurrection, but instead claimed that rebels were defying his authority to collect taxes levied by Parliament. Rather, Skelton chooses this model because it suits the need for personal and political consolation. By rendering rebellion illegitimate and irrational, Skelton is, on the one hand, able to place the murder within a redemptive framework: the Earl, who was sacrificed on earth, will obtain a greater reward in heaven. Such language also provides political consolation to the King by suppressing details that would tend to indict him. Skelton's contemporaries traced the rebellion to Henry Tudor's weak claim to the throne or even his avarice. Skelton effectively preempts such criticism by rendering the uprising fundamentally inexplicable, a kind of chaotic political “other” to wise and legitimate governance. He accomplishes this feat in part by using the providential model, in part by omitting key topical references. We have already seen that he does not give the rebels a voice, even as he interrogates them. In fact—and contrary to what seems to have been well known about the uprising—the rebels seem to have no organization or leader at all. Nor does he mention the rights, notably those of sanctuary, for which the rebels fought. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, he does not mention Henry Tudor by name, instead referring simply to “the king” or “the soveraygn”—the official person, that is, who has rights that “shold not be withstand.” Henry's own role (or lack of a role) in the poem may, ironically, be the best evidence that Skelton was writing with an eye as much to court preferment as to patronage from young Percy. For the King was the prime mover of the policies that led to the rebellion in the first place: he convinced a begrudging Parliament to pass the subsidy, and he pressed for it to be paid, despite Northumberland's reservations. Skelton's putatively topical poem systematically decontextualizes the rebellion, perhaps in order to exculpate Henry from a bad policy.³⁷ Or the poet's generic references to “the king” may be designed to present the ideal of a strong monarch without raising the embarrassing question of Henry's claim to the throne. Whatever Skelton's specific goals, the poem reveals his skill as a distinctly political laureatus. For by suppressing details he asserts an unquestioned moral center of sovereignty that Henry, by virtue of possession, can silently occupy. This regal serenity is, of course, the counterpart to the bestiality of the commons, and both portraits underscore the “unreason” of the uprising.

One way Skelton promotes himself as a political writer is by skillfully presenting the rebellion from a court perspective. Equally important is his treatment of the other main actors in the rebellion, Percy's followers. Skelton was not alone in suspecting that the murder was motivated by revenge for Northumberland's half-hearted support of Richard III in 1485.³⁸ But whereas other accounts associate the commons with Yorkist sympathies, Skelton adamantly blames Percy's own retainers; they were, the poet maintains, “linked with a double chain”—that is, both to the Earl and to Richard III, whom many had served at Bosworth Field.³⁹ Skelton's animus may in part be dictated by his portrayal of the rebels. He is clearly contemptuous of the latter for their violence, though their stupidity also exculpates them, since they cannot be reasoned with—“They sayde they forsede not nor carede not to dy” (84). Percy's followers, by contrast, abandoned their lord out of calculated self-interest (36-40, 73-74). They had made a pledge, becoming Northumberland's “awne servauntis of trust,” but the actual rebellion found them running away out of “falshode or fere” (91). Even more sinister, Skelton suggests, is that they engaged in systematic deception. He suspects that there was “fals packinge” (71) and that they “held with the commonns under a cloke” (76). It is hard to determine the truth of these charges, and that may be part of Skelton's point. Behind the obvious threat of rebellion is a subtler but ultimately more destructive breakdown of order within the aristocracy.

As figures of patronage gone awry, the retainers play an important role in the moral economy of the poem and in Skelton's self-presentation as political servant-rhetorician. Their treachery, like the madness of the commons, provides a foil for the aristocratic virtue of truth, as exemplified by the fourth Earl. The latter was “trew to his prince in word, in dede, and thought” (7); “innocent of trechery and trayne” (86), he fell by “trustinge in noble men that wer with hym there” (90). And Skelton, writing to the young fifth Earl at Henry's court, is careful to emphasize this lesson of truth, especially to one's king (169-75). The retainers are also a means by which Skelton defines himself as a true servant. They engage in “fals packinge,” whereas Skelton claims that he will not deceive simply to avoid making enemies: “What, shuld I flatter? What, shulde I glose or paynt? / Fy, fy, for shame, ther hartis wer to faynt” (41-42). Such servants are coldly calculating; Skelton is overcome by true grief (111-12). Yet the very fact of such protestations also suggests an underlying uneasiness that the methods of traitors resemble those of the poetic servant. It is particularly revealing, for instance, that Skelton's metaphors for treachery have strong associations with rhetoric and poetry: the retainers hid their meaning under a “cloke” and used “false packinge” even though “the mater was evident and playne” (72). Treachery originates from the fact that all servants, poetic or otherwise, are constantly negotiating the public and private, as they present a face to their lord, often through a careful manipulation of highly formalized language. It is perhaps in this light that we should understand the modesty topos that immediately follows Skelton's series of apostrophes on Percy's death:

Mi wordis unpullysht be nakide and playne,
Of aureat poems they want ellumynynge;
Bot by them to knoulege ye may attayne
Of this lordis dethe and of his murdrynge.

(127-30)

As David Lawton has shown, the protestation of dullness is a common stance for the fifteenth-century public poet.⁴⁰ In this case, Skelton seems to undermine his more obvious gestures of self-aggrandizement for distinctly ethical purposes. Faced with the story of false servants who use words cunningly to promote division, he seeks to link his own rhetoric to public service and the common good.⁴¹

Such anxiety is only part of the larger way in which the traitors haunt the Dolorous Dethe. For this poem of consolation and political advice ends without resolving serious problems of trust and perception raised by Northumberland's murder. The fourth Earl believed that his retainers were loyal, and they seemed so until they abandoned him. Even within the poem, however, their actions and motives remain a matter of speculation. Skelton accuses them because the fourth Earl died in such improbable circumstances, but it remains uncertain whether they fled “for falshode or fere.” Such ambiguity is underscored by the contradictory advice at the end of the lament. Skelton pledges his service to young Percy and counsels him to practice truth and value it in others, but the Latin distich that concludes the work is deeply skeptical: “Non sapit humanis qui certam ponere rebus / Spem cupit: est hominum raraque ficta fides.” His platitudes about loyalty are equally dissatisfying given the account of the murder:

I pray God sende the prosperous lyf and long,
Stabille thy mynde constant to be and fast,
Right to maynten and to resist all wronge.
All flatringe faytors abhor and from the kast.
Of foule detraccion God kepe the from the blast.
Let double delinge in the have no place,
And be not light of credence in no case.

(169-75)

How does one distinguish between true servants and “flatringe faytors”? When is one “light of credence”? The fourth Earl was unable to make such judgment, and one might reasonably argue that Skelton is merely tactful in not accusing him of gullibility. Yet one also senses that the poet has reached essentially intractable problems, and that at the heart of all of the advice are stark lessons about the uncertainty of political allegiance and the inscrutability of motives.

Although it has not found critical favor, or even much critical attention, the Dolorous Dethe is in fact an effective and interesting piece of political rhetoric, especially when placed next to other accounts of the Yorkshire rebellion. Skelton promotes himself as servant-rhetorician through a highly wrought style and Chaucerian imitation. But his distinctly polemical treatment of the rebellion is the young poet's real advertisement. Skelton demonstrates an ability to frame and contain rebellion, both to console a young child and, perhaps more importantly, to advance Tudor policy in the North. Indeed, we know that Henry VII was intent on solidifying his power in the region, and Northumberland's death did in the end help that cause, since the young Percy was brought to London as a ward and the King was able the region through lieutenants.⁴² Skelton's emphasis on unruly commons and treacherous barons makes a powerful argument for these policies. Perhaps the King is the only safe ally for a young lord. Even the seemingly banal meditations on fortune and the instability of worldly power serve Henry's interests. But if Dolorous Dethe shows Skelton's ability to shape contemporary events, its depiction of the retainers also reveals the limitations of the court poet. These limitations are in part epistemological: how can the poet divine motives in a world in which everyone is an actor, in which everyone is a rhetorician? They are also a matter of credibility: how can one trust the servant whose primary job is to conceal the truth? The pious and monologic world of the medieval lament raises but cannot satisfactorily resolve such contradictions. Skelton can demonize the retainers, but he cannot escape the fact that he, as a political poet, also hides motives under a cloak. If there is a failure in the Dolorous Dethe, it is a failure of form—or, rather, of Skelton's attempt to write about the treachery of servants in a genre that relies so heavily upon sincerity. Skelton's greatness as a writer results in part from the fact that he never does provide a solution to these problems, that his later poetry instead embraces the limitations of the political poet. Once he decides that treachery is in fact an aristocratic value, he turns to drama and obscure language in order to depict, if not penetrate, the secrecy and deception that lie at the heart of court life.

Notes

1. The full title of the poem is Skelton Laureat Upon the Dolorous Dethe and Muche Lamentable Chaunce of the Mooste Honorable Erle of Northumberlande. All quotations are from John Skelton, The complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (Yale UP, 1983). Caxton's passage, which is from the prologue of his Eneydos (1490), is reprinted in A.S.G. Edwards, Skelton: The Critical Heritage (Routledge, 1981), 43.

2. The preservation of this single manuscript version may owe more to the personal and genealogical value of the poem than to its artistic merits. British Museum Royal 18.Dii, which dates from between 1516 and 1523, was made for the fifth Earl (the “yonge lyon” of line 162), and the Dolorous Dethe is included among other works of a decidedly genealogical bent: a workaday poem on the burial places of the kings of England, illustrations of the heraldic arms of all the Christian kings, an account of the lineal descent of the Percys.

3. Quoted in The Poetical Works of John Skelton, ed. James Dyce, 2 vols. (Thomas Rodd, 1843; rpt. AMS, 1965), 2: 89.

4. In Edwards, 93.

5. In Edwards, 180.

6. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford UP, 1954), 134. For a similar emphasis on the difference between the Dolorous Dethe and Skelton's later poetry, see Stanley Fish, John Skelton (Yale UP, 1965), 3-8. Other discussions include Ian Gordon, John Skelton, Poet Laureate (1943; rpt. Octagon, 1970), 47-49; A. R. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire (U of Chicago P, 1961), 286-87; Michel Pollet, John Skelton (J. M. Dent, 1971), 13-19; Nan Carpenter, John Skelton (Twayne, 1967), 38-41; John Scattergood, “Skelton and Elegy,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 84c (1984): 333-47.

7. For basic attitudes towards the court poet and a detailed consideration of the fifteenth-century court milieu, see Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (U of Toronto P, 1980), and Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Princeton UP, 1995).

8. On the relation of poetry to epideictic rhetoric, see E. R. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton UP, 1953), 154-59, and O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (U of North Carolina P, 1962), 24-42. John Scattergood (“Skelton and Elegy,” 335-43) provides a detailed discussion of the Dolorous Dethe as medieval lament.

9. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” trans. Josué V. Harari, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Cornell UP, 1973), 141-60; rpt. The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Pantheon, 1984), 101-20, 112.

10. I have taken this point from David Lawton's excellent essay “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” ELH 82 (1985): 761-99, 773. Lawton argues that fifteenth-century poets were politically quite astute, and that we as readers need to be more sensitive both to subtle variations in commonplaces and to the relation of the commonplace to the topical. In the Dolorous Dethe, the division of voices is further complicated by the poet's relation to his potential patron, who was an eleven-year-old boy in 1489. Skelton initially addresses the young Percy in the vocative but then uses the third person when offering service: “Ad libitum cuius ipse paratus ero.” One explanation for this shift is suggested by the end of the poem, where Skelton includes four lines of Latin in commendation of Doctor William Rukshaw, who was employed by Northumberland and may have been young Percy's tutor or adviser. These verses are collegial but deferential, and Skelton may be acknowledging the need to be a servant to Percy's servant. Skelton is not unusual in offering political advice to a child. See Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton UP, 1993), 14-16; Ferster, 23.

11. On the rise of Chaucer as an auctor for later English writers, see especially Alice Miskimin, The Renaissance Chaucer (Yale UP, 1975); A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge UP, 1985), especially Chapters 1 and 2; and, more recently, Lerer.

12. I do not mean to suggest that the original audience for these poems did not know the identity of the writer, and it is generally thought that Chaucer was rewarded by John of Gaunt. But it does seem significant that Chaucer, who probably wrote the French-influenced Book in the early 1370's, did not name himself as its author until the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, in which he imitated the more ambitious authorial stances he no doubt had encountered in Italian writers.

13. Lerer notes that Skelton is insistent about naming himself, and that “his presentation as a writer, right down to the attributions of his works, carries the laureate epithet inseparably from his name” (193-94).

14. In Edwards, 180.

15. Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Basil Blackwell, 1992), 285-305.

16. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols., Loeb Classics (Harvard UP, 1921), IV.i.63.

17. See Poetria nova, in E. Faral Les Artes Poétiques du XIIe et XIIIe siecle (Paris, 1923), lines 367-430. Skelton clearly knew of this popular treatise, which he mentions in both Speke Parrot and the Garland of Laurell. Geoffrey's discussion of apostrophe may in turn be based on the Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classics (Harvard UP, 1954), IV.xv.22.

18. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Cornell UP, 1981), 143.

19. There is no hard evidence about how Skelton was viewed by other poets at Westminster. Older scholars tended to assume that he was a luminary. But Greg Walker (John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s [Cambridge UP, 1988], 38) has suggested that the English writer may have been systematically ignored in a kind of poetic closed shop.

20. Martin Stevens, “The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature,” PMLA 94 (1979): 62-76.

21. Horace on Poetry: The “Ars Poetica”, ed. C. O. Brink (Cambridge UP, 1971), lines 106-7. See also Scattergood, “Skelton and Elegy,” 337

22. Troilus, V.1786, 1790. All quotations are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al., 3d ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 1987). On this tradition, which goes back at least as far as Ovid's Tristia, see Stephen A. Barney's note on the line and the references listed there.

23. Although BM Royal 18.Dii is a late manuscript, its contents suggest that the Dolorous Dethe might have been read in light of the courtly tradition. The manuscript opens with Lydgate's Testament and Siege of Thebes, and Skelton's poem is immediately followed by Reason and Sensuality.

24. A general treatment of the uprising can be found in J. D. Mackie, The Earlier Tudors (Oxford UP, 1957), 90-91. There are also a handful of articles devoted to the rebellion: M. E. James, “The Murder at Cocklodge, 28th April 1489,” Durham University Journal 57 (1964-65): 80-87; M. A. Hicks, “Dynastic Change and Northern Society: The Career of the Fourth Earl of Northumberland, 1470-89,” Northern History 14 (1978): 78-107, and “The Yorkshire Rebellion of 1489 Reconsidered,” Northern History 22 (1986): 39-62; Michael J. Bennet, “Henry VII and the Northern Rising of 1489,” English Historical Review 105 (1990): 34-59.

25. Francis Bacon (The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh, ed. Jerry Weinberger [Cornell U. Press]) describes the letter in his History: “The King wrote back peremptorily that he would not have one penny abated of that which had been granted him by Parliament; both because it might encourage other countries to pray the like release and mitigation; and chiefly because he would never endure that the base multitude should frustrate the authority of the Parliament, wherein their votes and consents were concluded” (80).

26. Polydore Vergil, Anglica historia, in English Historical Documents, ed. and trans. C. H. Williams (Oxford UP, 1967), 132. See also Hall's Chronicle, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (1809; rpt. AMS, 1965), 442-43; The Great Chronicle of London, ed. A. H. Thomas, in English Historical Documents, 114.

27. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, 2 vols. (Clarendon, 1971), 1:659.

28. Quoted in A. F. Pollard, The Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary Sources (Longmans, 1913), 71.

29. See Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: The Making of the British State (Clarendon, 1995), Chapter 1; S. J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government, 1485-1558 (St. Martin's, 1995), 62-71.

30. Bennett, 50-51.

31. Bacon, 79-80. Earlier statements are found in The Great Chronicle of London and Hall's Chronicle. As I note below, Skelton's poem also makes oblique reference to Yorkist sympathies (e.g. 71-77), though he attributes them to the fourth Earl's own followers rather than to the commons.

32. They may refer to the King's attempt to curtail sanctuary rights; see Bennett, 49. This seems to be the gist of the comment in Hall's Chronicle that the rebels “published and declared that they would byd battail to the kynge, onely for the tuicion and defence of their common libertye and fredome, which he would plucke, and by his extreme power take and bereue from hem” (443).

33. Oxford English Dictionary, ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 2d ed., 20 vols. (Clarendon, 1989), 13: 288-390. See also Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Clarendon, 1978), 7.

34. Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (U of California P, 1994), 193.

35. Jean Dunbabin surveys late-medieval theories of reason and kingship in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge UP, 1988), 482-98.

36. Fish, 3.

37. The traditional interpretation, and the one best supported by the evidence, is that Henry miscalculated initial resistance to the subsidy and subsequently felt unable to back down. See Hicks, “Dynastic Change,” 78-79.

38. Pollet, 10.

39. Anthony Fletcher (Tudor Rebellions, 2d ed. [Longman, 1973], 14) notes that William Peersis' Percy chronicle makes the same accusation. Though Skelton is the only source for this theory in the articles by James and Bennett, Hicks (“Dynastic Change,” 103-7) provides some circumstantial evidence.

40. Lawton, 771-73.

41. Whether such a position is in keeping with the more polemical elements of the poem is another question.

42. James (86-87) suggests that Henry, to this end, intentionally put Percy's life in danger, though Bennett (52-53) finds no evidence for such a view and instead claims that the King simply took advantage of opportunities presented by the murder.