SOURCE: Kinsman, Robert S. “The Voice of Dissonance: Pattern in Skelton's Colyn Cloute.” Huntington Library Quarterly 26, No. 4 (August 1963): 291-313.

[In the following essay, Kinsman contends that in Collyn Cloute Skelton achieves a structure and enlivens “the conventions of medieval satire by the deliberate and controlled use of ‘dissonant voices’,” which include that of the poet as “hero-prophet,” Collyn Cloute as a defender of the Church, and the tyrant Cardinal Wolsey.]

I do not intend to revive the well-flogged issue of who, historically, is the first English formal satirist. There are signs, nonetheless, that we no longer need to take seriously the boast of Joseph Hall: “follow me who list, and be the second English satirist,” if indeed the readers of his Virgidemiae (1598) ever really accepted his proud assertions. As scholars of satire re-examine medieval and renaissance poems of purposive attack or “satire” in one sense, they find there far greater rhetorical skill, more readily discernible structural patterns, more conscious “fictiveness” than has previously been acknowledged. As a result of the investigations of Peter, Kernan, and Heiserman, for example, we need no longer judge all English satire of the earlier times as rough, unlicked, brutish anticipations of the true and singular perfection of Augustan satire.¹ The medieval mode of satire, we are rediscovering, had its own conventions, its own personae, its own sense of structure—its own satiric art.

To Peter we are indebted for the working distinction between “complaint” (marked by a lack of “personal” imprint, limited in rhetorical range, heavily schematic in content, excessively general in attack) and “satire” (marked by the sense of a “personal” imprint, wide in rhetorical range, incorporating a sense of the concrete particularities of “real” life). To Kernan we owe such critical concepts as “the scene of satire” (a dense humanity in a grotesque world of decaying matter or decadent morality, responsive only to physical force and denying the ideals which once molded buildings into a city and people into a society); “the satirist in scene” (the mild, simple man who suffers an agonized compulsion to appraise the ills of the scene); and “the satiric plot” (in which the satirist alternates endlessly between his corrective purpose and the passion which brings it on). Heiserman, on the other hand, presents a detailed critique of each of Skelton's major satires, accompanying them with a finely analytical account of the traditions of medieval satire in which they were formed. In making his analyses, true to recent trends, Heiserman does not begin with a definition of satire, but rather arrives at one. He starts by defining the object of each poem's attack, next describes its structural devices, then analyzes its persona and diction and, at last, presents the “manifest fiction” which emerges from the pattern formed by the devices used.

All this should be salutary for the reputation of John Skelton as a satirist, for while he is enrolled in Calliope's household as a vigorous oddity, he has long had to defend his wearing of her livery and scarcely has been praised for his “artistry” in her service. Among literary scholars, only A. R. Heiserman has recently dared to take the flat-footed stand that Skelton generally is “masterfully in control of his literary traditions and of ‘that supposicyon that callyd is arte’” and has wrought his best known satire, Colyn Cloute [CC], in such a fashion that it may be called “materially well-organized.”² This is a minority view; witness C. S. Lewis' insistence that in Skelton “there is no building … no planning …,”³ a palpable echo of S. M. Tucker's edict in 1908 that Skelton's subject matter, specifically in Colyn Cloute, “shows no unity of treatment, the form no progress and no organism.”⁴ Even the perceptive John Peter, in his recent work on early English satire, passes over Skelton's ecclesiastical satires (including Colyn) as “purely personal attacks,” while H. L. R. Edwards believes a detailed examination of Colyn would throw little light on its true nature, for “There is no particular order in Colin's complaints.”⁵

Since the form of Skelton's Colyn Cloute still seems a matter of disagreement, I should like in this essay to assert that Skelton does achieve a structure and does enliven the conventions of medieval satire by the deliberate and controlled use of “dissonant voices” so arranged that one can dramatically understand what the dimensions and qualities are of the object attacked, can hear voices directly or indirectly sketching a pattern of desired conduct, and as the poem nears its end can recoil from the raging voice of the prelate who could most easily effect, but who most arrogantly opposes, reform. The reader first hears the heroic voice of the poet in the first person, then the documentary drone of Colin Clout⁶ (close kith and kin to the poet, and of his blood and bone, but still another “voice”). He then hears, in Colin's reports, the grudging, jangling voices of the baffled and discontented laity, notes the opaque oracular utterance of “Ptholome,” the clattering and carping of Lutheran and Wycliffite heretics, observes the significant voicelessness of the great nobles, the angry outcry of a queen. The reader should notice, too, largely by implication, what the dignified utterance might be of prelates as they preach (very few do) opposed to the babble of the many falsely-credentialed “doctors” who fill the pulpits. As the poem nears its end the listener hears, most depressing of all, the testy, haughty tones of that primate-by-presumption among the prelates, who should reform and restore the church—Wolsey.

In a way, I seek to reinforce in a fresh manner Heiserman's verdict that Colyn Cloute, as the result of Skelton's arrangement of subject matter (and also of attitude), is a poem “remarkably well-organized” (Skelton and Satire, p. 205). At the same time I shall attempt to modify Heiserman's judgment that the poem is an interesting failure (but failure, nonetheless), first, because Skelton's fiction of Colin as a neutral reporter forces “this embodiment of virtue to make a mock defense of the vicious clergy” (p. 240) and, second, because not even the “vivacity of [his] language” (p. 310) can conceal the fact that the poet has not enriched “anti-clerical satire by adding profound dimensions to the object or by introducing a fresh structure … to … revive the conventions of the species” (p. 309). I shall try to answer the first objection by showing that Colin is clearly conceived as an interested third party, distressed that misunderstanding should have arisen between the temporal and the spiritual, acknowledging that something is wrong with “eche degre” but clearly aware of the hierarchy of obligation in the same way that John Colet, dean of St. Paul's and Skelton's contemporary, at the convocation of February 6, 1511/12, is aware that “if prestes and bysshops, that shulde be as lyghtes, ronne in the darke way of the worlde, howe darke than shall the secular people be?”⁷ The demonstration of a pattern of dissident voices will, I trust, dispose of Heiserman's second objection.

To establish the fact that Colyn Cloute is similar in thesis to “complaint” and yet goes beyond it in the complexity of its structure and in its “fictionality” it would be useful, since we have it in mind, to compare the poem with Colet's convocation sermon, delivered before the bishops assembled to discuss how best to handle the Lollard heresy. In both poem and sermon approximately the same matter is presented. Although delivered a decade earlier than the poem was written,⁸ the sermon shares with it many attitudes toward contemporary ecclesiastical problems. Yet, while their “statements” or “theses” may be similar, the structures and modes in which these kindred outlooks are presented vary strikingly. Colet is presenting a sermon. lucidly and directly argued, daring for the occasion. He does not begin with the expected announcement of a biblical text but resorts to a brief exordium to proclaim his unworthiness: “for sothe I came nat wyllyngly, for I knewe myne unworthynes. I sawe besyde howe harde it was to please the precise jugement of so many men” (p. 293). He invokes divine aid and closes his exordium with: “Let us all saye Pater noster.” He then introduces his text from St. Paul's letter to the Romans (xii.2): “Be you nat conformed to this worlde, but be you reformed in the newnes of your understandynge …” (p. 294); interprets the text, and divides his topic into the two main headings of “confirmation, than after of reformation” (p. 295) and launches into his attack with his first sub-topic, “pride of lyfe.” Next he reminds his listeners of their carnal concupiscence, covetousness, and continual occupation as servitors of men rather than servants of God. As a result of these failings (Colet informs his hearers) priests were despised, the order of the church confused, and the unguided laymen presented with the occasion to lapse into error.

In the second part of his sermon Colet calls upon the bishops to reform themselves, to enforce canonical laws and ecclesiastical constitutions already in existence rather than make new ones, eliminate simony and absentee residence, make careful selection of priests, live chastely and frugally, and guide all by the light of their own good example. He closes with a brief peroration in which he asks forgiveness “if paraventure it be thought that I have past my boundes in this sermon” (p. 303). All this was preached in terms of apostrophe and tones of exhortation.

If the first part of the sermon, or “thesis” of attack, alone were to be paraphrased, Skelton's Colyn Cloute says essentially the same things that Colet's sermon states. The poet even uses the same image of light and illumination that was at the heart of Colet's utterance. The dean of St. Paul's had told the episcopacy, “Sayde our Saviour: You are the lyghte of the worlde. … If the lyghte that is in the be darkenes, howe darke shall the darkenes be?” If priests and bishops relinquish the light, “howe darke than shall the secular people be?” (p. 294). Skelton proclaims that the prelates “of ryght / Shulde be lanternes of lyght” (CC 441-442) and elsewhere in the poem suggests they should come forth

Lyke lanternes of lyght,
In the peoples syght,
In pullpettes awtentyke,
For the wele publyke
Of preesthode in this case.

(CC 696-700)

On the other hand, as we shall see, Skelton does not try to develop a full and overt program of reform to correspond to the second part of Colet's sermon. His is essentially a poem of attack, which nonetheless goes beyond the specific, ad hoc quality of the sermon, beyond direct complaint and immediate didacticism.

In offering a full comparison of the poem with the sermon, let me place in italics those features of the poem that distinguish it from the sermon, even as I present in ordinary type its similarities in “thesis.” The poem begins with a two-line epigraph.⁹ In an exordium (at CC 1-74) in which the poet pronounces how hard it is to please not Colet's “precise jugement” but the imprecise judgment of the many and offset the callousness of the multitudes, we are introduced to Colin Clout (CC 48 ff.), a mask for the poet, who tells us of his simple yet sincere concern for the state of affairs. We are then confronted with the first attack on the deficiencies and derelictions of the clergy (CC 75-487). The first specific charge is that the higher clergy are too ambitious for promotion (CC 75-114), precisely the first charge Colet made—“pride of lyfe,” “hygh lokes … in the high lordship and power of the worlde” (Lupton, p. 295). As a result, Colin shows, the rest of the clergy are confused (CC 115-120). Bishops, Colin has heard the people say, are too eager to batten within the king's halls and too reluctant to feed their flocks the Word (CC 121-178). They are guilty of hunting and gluttony for the flesh, animal or human (CC 179-221), corresponding to Colet's “seconde secular evyll … [of] carnall concupiscence,” or “sportes and playes,” “huntynge and haukynge,” “Procurers and fynders of lustes” (Lupton, pp. 295-296). “Totus mundus” speaks of the bishops' failure to enforce learning among their clergy (CC 222-265).

The next main charge is that the bishops are concerned with secular show and simony, interesting themselves far more in the acquisition of wealth and power through “taxyng and tollage” than in the well-being of the commons or even the spiritual discipline and physical well-being of the cloistered (CC 287-487). This section roughly corresponds to Colet's third and fourth charges of covetousness and “continuall secular occupation” including preoccupation with tithes and rents, neglect of the ecclesiastical courts, and “the superstitious observyng of al those lawes that sounde to any lucre” (Lupton, p. 296). Skelton concludes this section with an appeal to Jesus to support the poet's efforts and a reminder to the prelates of His example. The poet underscores this reminder with a prophecy of the fate of one prelate in particular who is ignoring Christ's pattern of humility and instead seeking to rule “all thynges alone” (CC 477).

This done, the poet sharpens his pen and wrests up his harp against “all suche rebelles / That laboure to confounde / And bryng the Churche to the grounde” (CC 494-496): first, the laity who are heterodox interpreters of Christian doctrine and the sacraments or have become Lutheran sectarians, Wycliffites, Hussites, or Pelagians (CC 488-555), and, second, the clergy who are pluralists (CC 557-594). In this section, Heiserman would have it (p. 203), Skelton is caught in “a fatal dilemma,” for the poet explains that the heretical tendencies spring from one of two causes: “eyther ye [the bishops] be to bad, / Or els they [the lay fee] ar mad” (CC 504-505). He promises to proclaim to his dying day, with the support of the bishops, that the laity are wrong thus to defame them. This he will do because it saddens him to see the church abused and her sacraments degraded. Then, within a few lines, he returns to attack the prelates who lend credence to the claims of the heresy-prone by their upstart behavior as they barter their way up from low degree (CC 585-594). At this point, claims Heiserman, the satire breaks down, for it

contends that both its parts are true. … Nor is the final subsection (ll. 542-94) ironic, for here the dangers of a Lutheran heresy's arising in the commons are held up as possible punishments of the clergy's sins, especially those of prelates who themselves “come of low degre.”

(p. 203)

There is actually little danger that, in Heiserman's words, “the critic tends to ignore the very real satire on the laity included in the work” (p. 309). The dilemma is only an apparent one. Skelton is aware, in Colet's words, that “We are also nowe a dayes greved of heretykes, men mad with marveylous folysshenes” (Lupton, p. 298). He uses the sarcastic figure of drunkenness¹⁰ to characterize those who have had a “smacke / Of Luthers sacke (CC 542-543)” or who chop logic “And in theyr fury hop, / When the good ale sop / Dothe daunce in theyr fore top” (CC 531-533). The figure of speech suggests that heresy is a “folysshenes”—that is clear—but not so severe a threat to the church as corrupt clergy. In this he is in accord with Colet that “the heresies of them are nat so pestilent and pernicious … as the evyll and wicked lyfe of pristes; the whiche, if we beleve saynt Barnard, is a certeyn kynde of heresye, and chiefe of all and most perillous” (Lupton, p. 298). What heretics do by evil teaching, the corrupt clergy do through evil example: “And so moche they are worse than heretyckes, howe moche theyr workes prevaile their wordes” (Lupton, p. 299; Colet quoting St. Bernard). This is precisely Skelton's point.

In a fourth section (CC 595-672), the poet pursues more intensively the formidable menace, as he sees it, of lowly upstarts who in the pride of place seek to rule “kynge and kayser” (CC 606); bully the lords (who are much too concerned with hunting and hawking and too little concerned with politics); and have alienated the commons with their excesses and forgetfulness of the conditions from which they have sprung. One such upstart in particular, warns Colin, ought to beware of his imminent fall.

A fifth section (CC 673-981), takes on a more positive tone and is a counterpart to two separate recommendations in the second main division of Colet's sermon, the affirmative “Of Reformation.” In them the good dean had urged that the laws of residence of bishops in their dioceses be rehearsed and those of the good-bestowing of the patrimony of the church. The first would force the bishops to “sowe the worde of God” and to “shewe them selfe in their churches at the leest on greatte holye dayes” (Lupton, p. 301). The second would ensure that the goods of the church be spent “nat in costly byldyng, nat in sumptuous apparell and pompis, nat in feastyng and bankettynge” (Lupton, p. 301), but in things necessary to the church. Making virtually the same points but with far more extensive “documentation” and indirection, Skelton counsels the bishops to heed the widespread reports of dissatisfaction and dissent and take up anew their preaching function. Only by becoming “lanternes of light” can they dispel heresy and preserve the ancient liberties of the church. The poet advises against leaving the pulpit to the friars and lesser clergy only, for a few words from a bishop in the pulpit would be worth a “thousand thousande other” (CC 778). Doctors or even bachelors of divinity might help out in the dearth of proper preaching; they would certainly be better than the illiterate clergy now everywhere found, often with false credentials, or the feigning friars, who falsely claim powers as sacerdotes “To shryve, assoyle and reles / Dame Margeries soule out of hell” (CC 877-878). With equally heavy sarcasm, again based on “reports” that Colin has found everywhere circulating, the poet underscores the fact that the bishops have the obligation not only to set an example but also to correct the situation; but, alas, they are too occupied with consuming the patrimony of the church, “Buyldyng royally / Theyr mancyons curyously” with “Arras of ryche aray, / Fresshe as flours in May” (CC 936-937; 944-945).

Lines 982-1056 single out, as a monstrous example of the unhealthy secularization of the higher clergy, one prelate who has assumed far too much secular power and is trying to rule both king and realm. Such a one should beware of Fortune's changeable chances and a “quenes yellyng” (CC 989). At this juncture, Colin advances a three-line Latin monitory “preposycyon” (CC 1000-1002). Yet so domineering has this one prelate become, it is reported, that no one can approach the king without his consent or that of his substitute. This has set the people's tongues wagging, for they blame all spiritual men for the tyrannical behavior of one offending spiritual.

As a direct result of the menacing illustration just cited, Colin Clout calls on the bishops to stand fast and take good footing (CC 1057-1146). In a small way this corresponds to Colet's appeal to the episcopacy that they reform themselves. Colin takes special pains to ask his listeners' indulgence, for his plain, rough style is directed at no virtuous man. At the same time, nonetheless, he calls our attention once more to that sinister, singular figure behind it all. Four times he repeats that he has blamed or named “no man” (CC 1091, 1111, 1113, 1130). Only the vicious and incorrigible will refuse “To refourme theyr neglygence” (CC 1140). The poet, however, makes no attempt to suggest, systematically and sustainedly, the positive steps whereby such reformation can be accomplished. He is Skelton, satirist, not Colet, preacher. He must dramatize the evils besetting the church and leave it to his listener to measure their enormity against a proper moral standard of conduct implied within the poem.

And dramatize the problem he does in a passage (CC 1151-1228) in which we hear in action those (and particularly that one) who will not reform and who accuse those who would of insubordination, meddling and prating—for all of which they will be thrown into the Fleet or the Tower, be beaten or hanged.

At long last, the poet, having brought us to fever pitch with the tirade of the tyrant ringing in our ears, reminds us of his own heroism as he recites how those “whiche hate to be corrected / … wyll [not] suffre this boke / By hoke ne by croke / Prynted for to be” (CC 1237, 1239-1241). Then he withdraws his pen and prepares to rest. One thing only remains to complete this exordium—a prayer to “Our Savyour Jesu” to rectify and amend things that are amiss. In just such a vein Colet brought his sermon proper to a close, although more strongly and more confidently: “And, to make an ende, as saynt Paule saythe: Be you reformed in the newnes of your understandynge, that you savoure those thynges that are of God; and the peace of God shall be with you” (Lupton, p. 303). There is one last flare-up, however. In eleven lines of Latin, appended to the poem in manuscript, the poet returns to Colin once more as the dedicated and outspoken honest man and resumes the heroic despair of the poet-prophet.

From the very outset of the poem, with its biblical epigraph, through the general presentation of his “thesis” down to the conventional prayer-ending, Skelton appears to be thoroughly in the pulpit tradition of homily and complaint, which provided a ready vocabulary and an arsenal of applicable stereotypes, to be freshened and remolded as the particular occasion excited the sensitive preacher. I trust, nonetheless, that the italicized items in the summary of Colyn Cloute show that it is more than a sermon in verse, that it has a certain fictive quality that deepens it into a literary work. The most noticeable of these deepening elements are the voices in conflict: the voice of the poet as hero and prophet; the voice of Colin Clout, itself a composite, now serving to rehearse complaint, now serving as the mask for the poet; the voice of a blustering prelate, unidentified and yet clearly recognizable, that of Wolsey, in Skelton's eyes the impeder of reform. Upon the way these voices—and other lesser voices—succeed and reinforce one another or are in sharp discord, the success of the poem as a fictive structure largely depends. In the voice of the poet as hero-prophet, Skelton resorts to rhetorical pathos to stir his hearers to sympathy for his stand: in the voice of Colin he creates an ethos that makes his original stand credible—we believe good men like Colin more fully and more readily than others; in the final and overweening voice he shifts to a direct and dramatic realization of the formidable adversary whose own discordant voice reflects the cause for all the discord in the kingdom.

As we have seen, the heroic voice of the poet is heard at the very beginning of the poem. The “text” or epigraph, with its question “Quis consurget mecum adversus malignantes? aut quis stabit mecum adversus operantes iniquitatem?” and its answer “Nemo, Domine!” clearly establishes the poet's role. Unaided he must stand against the doers of evil.¹¹ From the very outset of the poem to its end, the poet clearly indicates that he knows most people will seek to ignore, revile, or even suppress those who point out unpleasant realities. They will say “The devyll … is dede / The devell is dede” (CC 36-37). They will not “suffre this boke / By hoke ne by croke / Prynted for to be” (CC 1239-1241). To be sure, with l. 49 of the poem the poet introduces us to Colin Clout, who will become the main speaker in the poem, committed to the defense of the church and yet apparently objective. As such he becomes a persona for the poet, the cautious yet honest man: “Take me as I intende, / For lothe I am to offende …” (CC 186-187). Nonetheless, from time to time, the poet steps from behind the mask of Colin. After Colin emerges as the voice of the people, after many-mouthed complaint has been heard, and after the example of the suffering Christ has been offered in contrast to the examples provided by the gluttonous prelates, the poet as prophet possesses Colin. He calls on “mercyfull Jesu” (CC 435) to direct his style; he presents in translucent opacity the prophecy of Ptholome, told to him, of “A fatall fall of one / That shuld syt on a trone” (CC 475-476). As if recognizing the dual personalities of vates and sense-talker, the poet in first person refers to Colin in the third person and warns his listeners

Your teth whet on this bone
          …
And let Collyn Cloute have none
Maner of cause to mone.

(CC 478, 480-481)

Having reached prophetic heights, Skelton refuses to let the oracular tones die completely away. Thrice more in the poem we hear echoes of the fatal prediction. In lines 626-636 he reminds the man now humbling the great lords that Fortune so turns the ball that “honoure hath a great fall.” In lines 666-672 he warns ambitious prelates, risen from the shovel and seeking now to manipulate the scepter, “qui se existimate stare / Let hym well beware / Lest that his fote slyp …” (CC 666-668). Finally, in a lengthy passage about three-fourths of the way through the poem (CC 990-1021), the prophetic voice for the last time repeats the imagery of the fall from fortune and the danger that besets the man who seeks to rule a king. Twice in the passage we are referred to Fortune's notorious flightiness (CC 996 and 1005). In the middle of the passage the poet reads a three-line Latin “preposycyon” warning what it is “Cum regibus amicare” (CC 1000).

One should note more than the spaced recurrence of the prophetic voice. One should become aware that a very specific and formidable foe is emerging from the ranks of the higher clergy so generally attacked. An actual and grammatical singular, as it were, is more and more clearly discerned among the blurred plurals of Skelton's general comments. He is readying us for the grating voice of that swelling but hitherto voiceless presence.

As prophet-hero in the dramatic interplay of voices within the poem, the poet “opens to us a world where the discernment of evil is accompanied, as it is not always in the real world, by the courage to strike at it,”¹² even in the obliqueness of prophecy. Less indirect, however, is the poet's final proclamation of heroism, echoing the attitude struck at the outset of the poem. In the mask of Colin and writing in the Latin hexameter, the poet, solitary, allies himself with God. One last time he acknowledges that his blunt warnings are ignored by the many, even though among the few he has achieved renown. With a sense of heroic despair, he ends by contrasting his own integrity with the torpor and decay of the nation:

Colin Clout: “Although my songs seem foolishly base to the many, they are rare inspirations to the cultivated, those infused with the divine breath of the Spirit from on high. Whence, it matters to me so much the less, although the envious tongue prepares to harm, for although I sing rustic songs, I shall nonetheless myself be sung everywhere and celebrated everyplace so long as the English race remains famous. Once the very crown of honor, the queen of kingdoms and the glory of kings, now, alas, the nation dwindles and wastes, torpidly languid. Oh how shameful! how distressing! Yet, for sighing and weeping I can say no more; may the pain warrant the rewards.”¹³

The second “voice” of the poem is that of Colin Clout, a voice presenting not only his own “objective” observations but, through his reports, the utterance of the sullen, confused, and complaining laity. Colin's voice, by and large, provides an effective counterpoint to the heroic and prophetic tones of the poet proper. He is the ethos of the poem, the voice of good sense, good character, and good will; he is heard against the pathos of the poet, whose lonely, lofty veiled utterance has forced his listeners to penetrate beyond appearances, to be sorry with him and take part with his tears. Colin's is the voice of the levelheaded man of patient goodwill: “I speke not nowe of all, / But the moost parte in generall” (CC 246-247). His mode of expression may be clumsy: “Rudely rayne beaten, / Rusty and moughte eaten” (CC 55-56), but his motives are good: “Alas, they [the accusing laity and the complaining spiritualty] make me shoder! / For in hoder moder / The Churche is put in faute” (CC 68-70).

While Colin proclaims himself to be a passive observer: “I wot never how they warke, / But thus the people barke” (CC 119-120), as the quotation just cited above clearly shows, he is a committed person, not an absolute neutral.¹⁴ He is devoted to the defense of Holy Church. He fears the bishops concern themselves very little “In the Churches ryght” (CC 104-105). He knows that it is boldness “to seke / The Churche for to defend” (CC 184-185). Colin's position as defender of the church is best illustrated in lines 255-256 of the poem where both MS and the Woburn Abbey unique copy of the earliest printed edition of the poem¹⁵ agree in reading: “I speke not of the good wyf [i.e, mater ecclesia] / But of her apostles lyfe” [other eds. read theyr]. From other references throughout the poem (CC 489, 496, 501, 515, 710 ff., 917, 983), it is more than evident that Colin is committed to her.

This commitment accounts for Colin's deliberately canted role. He is the good man, forced to speak the truth from conscience, yet he blames “no man” so often that he is evidently blaming some man. He is distressed that laity and clergy alike are “hynderyng and dysavaylyng / Holy Churche, our mother, / One agaynst another” (CC 1106-1108). But the bulk of his indictment is directed against the clergy. We shall have to return to Colet's sermon to understand this apparent paradox. When it is a question of general spiritual decay, he reminds us, the burden of blame rests on the spiritualty even though the laity in saying ill of all the clergy may well malign some. The reminder is couched in two significant metaphors: in one of these the clergy are likened to the soul, the laity to the body; in the other the clergy are compared to the rulers of a city, the laity to its dwellers. Notice, too, Colet's insistence on the just order of things: “The clergies and spirituals part ones reformed in the churche, than may we with a juste order procede to the reformation of the lays part. … For the bodye foloweth the soule; and, such rulers as are in the cite, like dwellers be in hit” (Lupton, p. 302). In times of spiritual confusion, when secular and religious alike seem far astray, there is a hierarchy of responsibility, nonetheless, and clearly the onus of blame rests on the religious. Again in Colet's words: when “the beautiful ordre and holy dignite in the churche is confused, whan the highest in the churche do meddle with vile and erthly thynges” (Lupton, p. 297), then the lay people have great occasion for wrongdoing offered them and they fall the harder, taught by the example of the religious to love this world. Thus Colin is constrained to blame the bishops for forcing the laity into extreme positions: “And thus they hurte theyr soules / In sclaunderyng you for truthe” (CC 343-344).

In the presentation of Colin's observations, Skelton arranges his elements in a crude, “documentary” plot, in itself sufficient to distinguish his poem from Colet's sermon. For much of the poem, the poet pretends that he is merely presenting complaints overheard by the humble wanderer, Colin Clout. Speaking through the mask of Colin, the patient, reasonable, yet (as we have seen) dedicated man, Skelton adds an extra authority to his “thesis” or indictment of the clergy. As we give ear to Colin, moreover, we soon learn that he is more than a reporter, for we perceive a direct association between him and the laity in name and in mode of expression. With his humble name he is one of the people. From his lips comes a flow of popular utterance—plain speech in a roughened verse marked by popular alliteration and seasoned with proverbs. Even as the poem opens we are met with a proverb that illustrates ironically the poet's impossible task, for who can drive a snail or make a sail of an herring's tail?¹⁶ Of the major politico-ecclesiastical satires from Skelton's pen, none has quite as high a proportion of proverbs or proverbial phrases. According to my count there are 47 such utterances in Colyn Cloute in its 1270 lines. Colin's favorite type of proverb seems to refer to situations in which men are forced to do childish or trivial or belittling things out of selfishness, fear, or ignorance. Thus the bishops are afraid to bell the cat (CC 163), they indulge in the game of shoeing the mare (a reference to graft and simony) (CC 181), they “Can say nothynge but mum” (CC 907), they prefer low cards in little games to the big facts of high affairs (CC 166). The ignorant clergy “make a Walshmans hose” (CC 780) out of a scriptural text as they present distorted and threadbare sermons; they are as drunken as mice (CC 803) and as wise as Robin Swine (CC 808) who was made a divine by notary seal and not by book, ring, cap, and kiss as at Oxford or Cambridge; as stupid as Waltom's calf (CC 811) that ran a mile to suck a bull: the effect is to see through Colin's wise eyes the reductive power of bureaucracy, be it political or religious, and to hear through him the echo of other voices which had pronounced these old saws time after time, as men buckled under the morally debilitating effects of organized systems of power.

Another more obvious but still oblique sense of social solidarity behind Colin comes through the dissident voices he records in his own utterance—now in indirect discourse, now in direct. Down to the time we hear the third voice speak out blatantly (down to lines 1183 and following), we are told seventy-five times that Colin reports what men say, “… thus the people barke …,” “thus … the lay fee people rayles …,” “some … clatter and carpe …,” “theyr tongues thus do clap …”

And surely thus they say,
Bysshoppes, if they may,
Small houses wolde kepe
But slumbre forth and slepe,
          …
Within the noble walles
Of the kynges halles. …

(CC 121-124, 126-127)

Against the steady drone of Colin's report, the dissonant voices sound the sharper; a hubbub of petty complaint becomes major in the aggregate and swells to a huge dissonance, which in turn justifies the poet's heroic fears and counterpoints the terrifying tones of the tyrant.

On the other hand, Colin's refusal to report more or to make any comment whatsoever is a deliberate use of the “non-voice,” to use an awkward phrase. For example, Colin complains that the monasteries are being broken up and the monks turned out to sing from place to place like apostates. The nunneries also are being dissolved, with the result that the nuns must cast off their robes and—here he breaks off, having suggested that they must turn to dissolute lives (CC 400-401). Or when talking about the more serious consequences of the suppression of religious houses, he wonders aloud what will happen to the souls of those who had founded them or endowed perpetual masses for their souls, only to have the proceeds spent among wanton lasses, their dirges forgotten, their bodies lying there rotten. “But where theyr soules dwell, / Therewith I wyll not mell” (CC 429-430). At times, to heighten the effect of what he is reporting, he indicates that he is reluctant to tell all (CC 638) or wishes no further to wade “in this broke” (CC 784).

It is as “non-voices” that the nobility are heard, in a noticeably brief passage (CC 610-636). For one thing, they have been bullied into silence by low-born but high-placed prelates who lord it over them. On the other hand, the nobility are themselves to blame, largely because they refuse to realize how learning might advance their cause or “They wold pype you another daunce” (CC 620). Rather than sounding off in the council chambers (they “Set nothyng by polytykes” in CC 625), they sound hunting horns and leap over ditches, pursuing the hunt. As an ironic result, over the wheel the great lords crouch and kneel and break their hose at the knee, humbled by clerical upstarts who have seized political power. Only the poet, as a single voice, and Colin, as a composite voice, dare assert the truth against the power-mad who “face” and “crake” (CC 604) (note the tone of their voices) and undertake “To rule bothe kynge and kayser” (CC 606).

There is one more special effect gained from Colin's “voice.” As the medieval proverb runs, “Vox populi, vox Dei” and, as we have seen, Colin reflects the voice of the people.¹⁷ Skelton uses this fact to weave into his poem implied standards of conduct rather than to proclaim them openly, as from a pulpit. Then again, through Colin's comments, Skelton works in, indirectly, this “anti-thesis,” this means of implying desired patterns of moral conduct to be held up against the evil practices assailed in the “thesis.” For example, Colin observes that a bare palmful of bishops do look after their pastoral duties but are loath to correct the many who do not, out of fear of some superior. They are unwilling to bell the cat. In their reluctance, remarks Colin, they have forgotten the lessons that “Becket them gave” (CC 171). “Saynt Thomas of Canterbury” as the manuscript reads here, vigorously defended the church, no wrong detouring him as he reformed it and cleansed it. Assuming the poet's vaticinal voice, Colin intones in Latin that Becket “manum mittit ad fortia, / Spernit damna, spernit opprobria, / Nulla Thomam frangit injuria (CC 172-174). But that strong hand has long since failed. Colin is silently inviting us to make a comparison between the earlier Thomas who had gladdened the church and all England with it, and the present Thomas, Thomas Wolsey, false (by implication) to the church. As we are reminded in a contemporary attack on Wolsey, found in the same commonplace book with the manuscript version of Colyn Cloute, “Then Thomas was & nowe Thomas ys: / Where he dyd well, thow dost amys.”¹⁸

At long last we come to the third major voice of the poem—an actual voice, or a very good fictional representation of it. It is the voice of Cardinal Wolsey. Recently, to be sure, scholars have questioned that Wolsey is necessarily to be found as the object of Skelton's every attack. It may be a bit too much to say that the poet nourished suspicions of Wolsey as early as 1511.¹⁹ One must admit that there are many difficulties in making Wolsey the villain of Magnyfycence (1516), compounded from the roles of six separate “vices.”²⁰ One can readily concede that Colyn Cloute (1522) is a nice compromise between general attacks on the clergy and specific attacks on certain clergymen, between attacks on the pride of the bishops and the pride of one singular man—one who seeks to rule the state. But to argue, as has been recently argued, that “if Wolsey had not existed, the poem would have had to invent him”²¹ is to exaggerate the extent to which Skelton is bound to the conventional objects and modes of satiric attack. Such an argument too much minimizes the importance of occasion and the strength of the personal point of view that prompts a poet skilled in the conventions to refashion them.

There is ample reason to believe that Skelton wishes us to hear the raging voice of an overweening bureaucrat, fearful because it reproduces a type, the more fearful because the type was confirmed in reality. One way we can be sure of this, interestingly enough, comes from the outcry of a dissident voice. Eleven lines before Skelton's prophetic voice had read the “preposycyon,” Cum regibus amicare, we had heard the report that the people had noticed some of the prelates were interfering too much; “Yet softe and fayre for swellyng, / Beware of a quenes yellyng” (CC 988-989). Soft though her flesh may have been, Catharine of Aragon did not hesitate to raise her voice in council on questions that deeply concerned her. Although it has never been pointed out before in connection with this poem, we know that in the spring of 1520, in council, Catharine launched “a daring and well-reasoned criticism of the whole negotiations with France and a vigorous argument against any French alliance.”²² His French policy so strongly attacked, Wolsey was alarmed and shaken, reported one foreign observer, De Mesa. In a letter dated Easter Eve, April 7, 1520, De la Sauch to Chievres, we learn the following:

Some days ago the Queen assembled her council to confer about this interview [scheduled between Henry VIII and Francis I], and while she was holding it the King arrived. On his asking what was going on, the Queen told him why she had called them, and finally they said that she had made such representations, and shown such reasons against the voyage, as one would not have supposed she would have dared to do, or even to imagine. On this account she is held in greater esteem by the King and his council than ever she was.²³

We know, again from dissonant voices, that it is finally and clearly Wolsey that we are to confront. In a passage immediately following the one just cited, we hear the people complain that they can not approach the sovereign without the assent of Wolsey, as president of the council,²⁴ or speak to the king in private “Without his presydent be by / Or els his substytute” (CC 1044-1045). We hear their indignation:

Neyther erle ne duke
Permytted? by saynt Luke
And by swete saynt Marke,
This is a wonderous warke!

(CC 1047-1050)

Although he has clearly singled out for us the object of his final attack, the poet pauses to urge the well-intentioned to rally, and through Colin to warn the bishops in their assembly to “stande sure, and take good fotyng” (CC 1074). In the reasonable voice of Colin he seeks to heal over the smarts and gouges he may have inflicted:

I do it for no despyte.
Wherefore take no dysdayne
At my style rude and playne;
For I rebuke no man
That vertuous is. …

(CC 1088-1092)

He speaks of “no good bysshop … nor good preest” but only of them that do amiss. He hinders no man and has in fact named no man. If any there be who feel themselves sick in conscience,

Suche grace God them sende
Themselfe to amende
For I wyll not pretende
Any man to offende.

(CC 1127-1130)

Within the space of 35 lines we have “no man” repeated, with variation (no good friar, no good canon, monk or clerk) eleven times. Besides making the ironic suggestion that the good are scarcely to be found in any religious organization, the poet's rhetorical device is preparing us for one bad man, someone who will refuse to “refourme … [his] neglygence” (CC 1140).

In a grand finale, we hear that man. From l. 1151 to l. 1183 Skelton dramatically presents the strident voice and harsh arrogance of the adversary in the full imperiousness of the first person plural:

Shall they [the preachers] daunt us prelates
That be theyr prymates?
Not so hardy on theyr pates!
Herke, howe the losell prates,
With a wyde wesaunt!

(CC 1152-1156)

Or, immediately following,

Avaunt, syr doctour Deuyas!
Prate of thy matyns and thy masse,
And let our maters passe:
          …
Howe darest thou, losell,
Allygate the gospell
Agaynst us of the counsell?

(CC 1159-1165)

On the heels of these expletives and curses, we hear the ranting voice order the warden of the Fleet to bind his prisoner and command the lieutenant of the Tower (where great offenders lay) to

Make this lurdeyne for to loure;
Lodge hym in Lytell Ease,
Fede hym with beanes and pease!

(CC 1170-1172)

The same offender, twice threatened by the raging primate, is also ordered to be confined in the prison of the King's Bench or Marshalsea. In indiscriminate wrath (we hear it, we hear it), the president of the council has brought to bear upon one offender the whole penal structure, all because he “precheth openly, / And declareth our vyllany” (CC 1175-1176). According to the subtle pun in the Woburn Abbey text, that offender has criticized the prelate for his illegal land acquisitions: “… of our fee symplenesse / He sayes that we are rechelease.” The MS, however, omits the adjective, and the later editions, including the one cited here (CC 1177-1178) read “fre symplenesse.”

We know from similar passages in Skelton's Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? [WCYNC] written a few months after Colyn Cloute and written quite openly as an attack on Wolsey, that this is Wolsey raving. There we hear him shout:

Wardeyn of the Flete,
Set hym fast by the fete!
And of his royall powre
Whan him lyst to lowre
Than, have him to the Towre,
Saunz aulter remedy. …

(WCYNC 422-427)

The contemporary reader would know from common report that Wolsey's foes complained that he overbore them in council and browbeat them into submission.

Within a hundred lines Skelton is to conclude his poem. He has strategically postponed to the place of final impression a direct auditory encounter with the Grand Foe. This is the adversary with whom the poet as hero-prophet has to contend. He is the one who proves the documentary reasonableness of Colin, for those who preach openly against him will be “yawde” and “sawde,” some will be hanged and some beaten to the brain—“And we wyll rule and rayne” (CC 1214). Skelton forces us to realize dramatically the validity of his “thesis” as he counterpoises this brutal voice against the murmurings of the people and the restrained but comprehensive utterance of Colin, the devoted son of the church. Above all, I believe, he wishes us to hear these tyrannical tones as they set off echoes of his own prophecy of the eventual fall of such a proud prelate.

If Colyn Cloute came home again to make an impression on the Elizabethans and if it remains a minor but recognized mark in English literature, it did so and does so largely because “inventive”²⁵ Skelton attacked significant wrongs by “fayning notable images of vertues [and] vices.”²⁶ Somewhat clumsily at times, to be sure, Skelton went beyond sermon and rose above verse complaint to write a structured poem on the spiritual decay in the laity and in the clergy (who were more responsible for it) caused by a conformation to this world and a secularization that paved the way for one supremely indifferent to the need for spiritual reformation—the tyrannus pseudo-rex. We are moved to accept the poet's “thesis,” or sustained attack, and to be guided to the models of proper conduct in the “antithesis” through the counterplay of three major voices—the poet as hero-prophet; Colin Clout as the compellingly reasonable defender of the church; and the proud prelate and primate, Wolsey.

Notes

1. John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford, 1956); Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven, 1959); A. R. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire (Chicago, 1961).

2. Skelton and Satire, p. 312, p. 208. The quotation within single quotes is from Skelton's Speke, Parrot, l. 202.

3. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), p. 142.

4. Verse Satire in England before the Renaissance (New York), p. 151.

5. Peter, Complaint and Satire, p. 11 and cf. p. 195; Edwards, Skelton, the Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet (London, 1949), p. 211.

6. Here let me note that I shall refer to the poem as Colyn Cloute and to the persona as “Colin Clout” for the sake of clarity.

7. J. H. Lupton, A Life of John Colet, D.D. (London, 1909), p. 294. All quotations from Colet's “Sermon … made to the Convocacion at Paulis” are from App. C, pp. 293-304, in this edition. All quotations from Skelton are taken from The Poetical Works of John Skelton, ed. Alexander Dyce (London, 1843).

8. The accepted date for Colyn Cloute is that established by William Nelson, John Skelton, Laureate (New York, 1939), pp. 189-190, as being 1522.

9. As we shall see, my interpretation of this epigraph differs markedly from Heiserman's. I should like to make it the first proclamation of the poet as unaided hero; for Heiserman, it implies that all men, clerical and lay, are unclean, so that the poem starts with the corruption of society in general. To this I agree, except that I should exclude the poet himself. For Heiserman's point of view see p. 201.

10. Heiserman, p. 203, finds no sarcasm in “the drunken theologizing of the commons.”

11. See my comments in footnote 9.

12. The phrase is Maynard Mack's, found in his most fruitful article “The Muse of Satire,” Yale Review, XLI (Autumn, 1951), 91. The article has since been reprinted in Studies in the Literature of the Augustan Age, ed. Richard C. Boys (Ann Arbor, 1952), p. [230]; to this article I am indebted for the concepts of “thesis” and anti-thesis” and the varying voices to be found in satire (although we all know that the terms used are elsewhere derived).

13. Written in Latin hexameters, the poem (for which I have provided my own translation) is found only in the MS version of Colyn Cloute (B.M., Harley 2252, fol. 153^v). It seems to have been set down by a scribe who was not too sure of his hand or of his Latin. I shall present it, nonetheless, clinging as much as possible to the MS text, accepting the following emendations by Dyce and Edwards: mea for mori (l. 1), Dyce; pneumatus altisoni (l. 3), Edwards, correct reading of the words read by Dyce as Pue vinatis altisem; flamine flatis for flamina faltis (l. 3), Dyce; refert for referte (l. 4), Dyce; laurus for lauruus (l. 7), Dyce; torpet for tropet (l. 9), Dyce. I reject the following emendations: stultis for stulte (l. 2), Dyce; pneumatisant for pneumata sunt (l. 2), Edwards, read by Dyce as puevinate; bene for rara (l. 2), Edwards (despite his strong argument in TLS, XXXV [1936], 1052 for bene). I have inserted minimum punctuation and have followed the scribe in capitalizing only Colinus Cloutus and the two A h's (with his spacing). I am grateful for the assistance so willingly provided me in these matters by Philip Levine, Department of Classics, UCLA.

    Colinus Cloutus, quanquam mea carmina multis
    sordescunt stulte, sed pneumata sunt rara cultis,
    pneumatis altisoni divino flamine flatis.
    unde mea refert tanto minus, invida quamvis
    lingua nocere parat, quia, quanquam rustica canto,
    undique cantabor tamen et celebrabor ubique,
    inclita dum maneat gens anglica. laurus honoris
    quondam regnorum regina et gloria regum,
    heu modo marcescit, tabescit, languida torpet!
    A h pudet, A h miseret! vetor hic ego pandere plura
    pro gemitu et lacrimis: prestet peto premia pena.

14. Heiserman, p. 240, believes that “as an innocent wanderer, Colyn can pretend to be a neutral reporter of what he discovers; as a person who has already completed his journey, he can condemn explicity [sic] the evils he has observed. But Skelton wanted him to do more than this; he wanted him also to make a pretense of defending a principal object of his attack—the clergy. Skelton's attempt to enrich his conventional speaker met with failure.” In five other places on the same page Professor Heiserman uses “neutral” or “neutrality” in discussing Colin's role.

15. Unlisted in Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue, but made available to me in photostatic form through the kindness of the duke of Bedford. Its colophon indicates that it was “Imprynted at London, by Thomas Godfray.” The date of printing is presumably 1533.

16. Cf. Gentylnes and Nobylyte (1529?), sig. Cii, lines 1004-1005 as edited by Partridge and Wilson for the Malone Society (1950 for 1949): “In effect it shall nomore avayle / Than with a whyp to dryfe forth a snayle.”

17. For Colin as “vox populi,” see my essay “Skelton's ‘Colyn Cloute’: The Mask of Vox populi,” in Essays Critical and Historical Dedicated to Lily B. Campbell (Berkeley, 1950), pp. 17-23. The poem “Vox populi, vox Dei,” has been printed in Dyce, II, 400-413 and in Ballads from Manuscripts, ed. F. J. Furnival (London, 1868-72), I, 124-146.

18. These lines, found in John Colyn's commonplace book (B.M., Harl. MS. 2252). dating from the 1520's and early 1530's, are taken from the fifth stanza of the poem, printed as “An Impeachment of Wolsey,” in Furnivall, I, 352.

19. F. M. Salter, in his edition of Skelton's Speculum principis for the young Henry, as refurbished and sent for a sort of reminder to the still youthful Henry VIII in 1511, believes the warning phrase “tolle Ishmael” refers to Wolsey, then royal almoner and counsellor to the king. See Speculum, IX (1934), 29-30.

20. So argues William O. Harris, “Wolsey and Skelton's Magnyfycence: A Re-evaluation,” Studies in Philology, LVII (April, 1960), 99-122. Harris questions the argument, first fully advanced by Robert L. Ramsay, ed. Magnyfycence: A Moral Play, by John Skelton, Early English Text Society (London, 1908; repr. 1925), Extra Series, XCVIII, cx-cxxviii.

21. Heiserman, p. 207; cf. also p. 217.

22. Garrett Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon (Boston, 1941), p. 207.

23. Letters and Papers … of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, III (London, 1867), Pt. 2, 256, No. 728.

24. See William H. Dunham, Jr., “The Members of Henry VIII's Whole Council, 1509-1527,” English Historical Review, LIX (1944), 187-210; note particularly p. 204, where he states “After he became chancellor in December 1515, Wolsey made the Council his. … Wolsey … practiced Fortescue's advice that ‘the chancellor, when he is present, may be president, and have the supreme rule of all the council.’ The Acta Consilii from 1516 to 1527 make it perfectly clear that Wolsey was in fact, though not in name, ‘president’ of the council, and that over it he enjoyed a transcendant supremacy.”

25. He was so designated as early as 1513 by his contemporary Henry Bradshaw, a Benedictine monk of St. Werburge, Chester, in the epilogue to that worthy's Life of St. Werburge (written ca. 1513, although not published until 1521). Citation from Beatrice White, The Eclogues of Alexander Barclay, EETS, CLXXV (1928 for 1927), xxx.

26. This quotation, slightly edited, is from Sir Philip Sidney's account of “the right describing note to know a poet by” in his Defence of Poesie (1595), as printed by Hyder Rollins and Herschel Baker, The Renaissance in England (Boston, 1954), p. 609.