Thomas Hoccleve

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The King's Two Voices: Narrative and Power in Hoccleve's Regement of Princes

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SOURCE: Scanlon, Larry. “The King's Two Voices: Narrative and Power in Hoccleve's Regement of Princes.” In Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530, edited by Lee Patterson, pp. 216-47. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

[In this essay, Scanlon considers Hoccleve's Regement of Princes in terms of medieval English thought on kingship and authority. Drawing from Ernst Kantorowicz's work on political theology, The King's Two Bodies, Scanlon looks at how Hoccleve's poem constructs and critiques the voice of the king. For Scanlon, the Regement reflects the increasing power of vernacular literature to influence and disseminate political ideology.]

PROLOGUE: THE DEPOSITION OF RICHARD II

Thomas Hoccleve's Regement of Princes, written between 1410 and 1412 for the future Henry V, is something of a forgotten masterpiece.1 A witty, subtle, and relentlessly self-conscious poem, its language is magisterial, modulating effortlessly between the philosophical and colloquial with a Chaucerian fluency. Its numerous exempla and extended autobiographical petitions to the prince make it predominantly narrative, but it draws on nonnarrative philosophical genres as well—the complaint, the dialogue, and chiefly, the Fürstenspiegel, or Mirror of Princes. Indeed, it takes its title, as well as some of its content, from Aegidius Romanus's widely influential De Regimine Principum. The poem situates these philosophical genres narratively, producing both a coherent moral vision of kingship and an examination of the rhetorical means by which that vision has been itself produced.

The work has been forgotten because the ideology of kingship is not a problem modern scholarship has considered very interesting. Literary scholars have been particularly remiss in this respect, despite the constant preoccupation of medieval poets with the subject.2 Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio all wrote major works dealing with kingship, which modern scholars routinely ignore: respectively, De Monarchia, De Viris Illustribus, and De Casibus Virorum Illustrium. In addition, Petrarch also wrote a short Fürstenspiegel, De Re Publica Optime Administranda.3 The last major treatment of Chaucer and kingship appeared in 1945.4 It is generally acknowledged that the three major poets following Chaucer in the Chaucerian tradition, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate, remain underexamined, and it seems hardly accidental that the chef d'oeuvre of each, the Confessio Amantis, the Regement of Princes, and the Fall of Princes, centrally concerns kingship.

Why was kingship such a dominant concern in later medieval literature? At first glance, the answer to this question seems straightforward and not particularly interesting. Secular literature needed to differentiate itself from the discourse of the Church without directly challenging ecclesiastical authority. In the figure of the king, secular writers found a single, central source of authority analogous to the figure of God in ecclesiastical discourse and yet fully secular.

There is, however, much more to say about the matter than this. Secular authority, political or literary, was an extremely fluid category at this time, dependent on the very ecclesiastical traditions from which both secular rulers and secular writers were attempting to wrest it. Throughout this process of secularization the political and the literary interpenetrated—kings were as ideologically dependent on their writers as the writers were politically dependent on kings. For as poets like Hoccleve staked out the claims of a new vernacular tradition, what they encountered in kingship was not some fully formed and uncontested institution. Rather, they encountered a dynamic political structure in the midst of defining itself ideologically in order to maintain and extend its power politically.5 The representation of kingship in works like the Regement of Princes was part of this larger ideological project. For this reason consideration of the formal integrity of such works will continue to be impossible until it is grounded in an understanding of kingship as an ideological structure. We cannot hope to understand the discursive strategies whereby kingship was represented in literature until we understand the ideological strategies whereby its power relations were reproduced within the social structure.

On this point historians have been as remiss as literary scholars. While they have hardly ignored kingship, they have generally kept its ideology separate from its practice. Perhaps as a reaction to the teleological excesses of constitutional history, regnal biographers and administrative historians have tended to view the administrative growth of medieval kingship in preponderantly local terms (a series of practical solutions to immediate problems) while resisting any appeal to larger theoretical conceptions. On the other hand, comprehensive accounts of medieval theory, such as the classic works of Ernst Kantorowicz and Michael Wilks, treat their subject as an intellectual drama in which the only actors are ideas, and in which the primary motivation is the purely ratiocinative desire for ever clearer solutions to logical dilemmas. The agency that is always missing is power. Because these scholars are interested in ideas rather than ideology, they have little to say about the way medieval ideas about kingship functioned culturally, how they maintained the power structure they conceptualized.

A particularly striking illustration of this point can be found in one of the central political documents of Hoccleve's time: the Articles of Deposition of Richard II. One of the most famous articles defines the problem of royal power as precisely a problem of representation.

33. ITEM, the same King, did not wish to preserve or protect the just Laws and Customs of his Reign, but to make whatever decision occurred to him according to the judgment of his own will. Whenever the Laws of his Reign were explained and declared to him by the Justices and others of his Council, and according to these Laws justice for the suitors exhibited, he would say expressly with a stern and shameless countenance, that his Laws were in his mouth, and several times, in his heart, and that he himself alone was able to change or institute the Laws of his Reign …6

This story is usually read as a simple denunciation of tyranny, consistent with the standard constitutionalist view of the Deposition as “one more step in the transference of the centre of political gravity from ruler to people.”7 Indeed, more recent historians, who have been suspicious of this Whig teleology, also treat Article 33 as an essentially accurate depiction of Richard, even though, as Anthony Tuck concedes, there is no proof of its truth.8 But the crucial point about this article is not its accuracy but its rhetorical debt to medieval conceptions of kingship and the practical power they lend to its ideological mission.

Before the article is a constitutional claim it is a narrative, and as a narrative it convinces fictively rather than referentially. For it recapitulates the complex of corporate and organological fictions that Kantorowicz's classic study has shown ultimately issue in the notion of the “King's Two Bodies.” “The Prince (or Pope) has the laws in the shrine of his breast” was a maxim the canonists adopted from Roman law.9 But in its earlier instances, the intent of the fiction seems to have been, at least in part, to constrain the royal voluntas by counsel. Thus, the jurist Cynus of Pistoia interpreted “shrine of his breast” to mean “Doctors of Law through whose mouths the most law-abiding Prince himself speaks.”10 Similar formulations occur in French jurists, and Bracton exchanges the terms of the trope so that the Prince becomes the “mouth of the council,” making laws “as he pleased” after hearing their advice.11 In Article 33, however, this intent seems to have been reversed. Richard is depicted as claiming the law is in his breast or mouth precisely in order to free himself from counsel. This apparent inconsistency can be resolved by reconsidering the intent of the earlier instances and reinserting the missing term “power.” A product of Roman thought, the fiction's first major instance occurs in Livy, where the patrician Menenius Agrippa uses it to quell a plebeian revolt.12 Though it passed into the Middle Ages via the Pauline concept of the Church as corpus Christi, it was not actively applied to medieval institutions until the later growth of the papacy, when papalists began casting the pope as caput of the ecclesia.13 It was soon taken up by royal apologists, as a way of both resisting the claims of the papacy and defining their own. In both cases its political value was the same: to reduce an aggregate of individuals to a single entity, imagined in one way or another as a single person, or a single body. It reinforced the unity and the preeminence of a central institution undergoing a massive administrative expansion. Accordingly, the point of the fiction is not to democratize a unitary form of power, but to enable that power to maintain its ideological unity as it is being institutionally diffused. And even as the fiction occurs in Bracton and earlier writers its point is not so much to neutralize the prince as it is to empower his council. In other words, the point of the metaphor is not to disperse power but to solidify it, not to hedge it about with constraints but to reinforce its stability and dominance. And the crucial line of demarcation is thus not between prince and his council but between the governing class and everyone else.

In more complex fashion, the same sort of empowerment is at work in Article 33. Appealing to the expanded notion of the king's council as embodied in Parliament, the narrative employs an expanded version of the corporate fiction.14 It retains the ideal of a unified royal voice, even in disavowing Richard's right to it. For at the very moment Richard voices his ostensibly discredited claim, the narrative focuses not on the specific legal results of the claim, but on his body, on what his face looked like as he spoke: “with a stern and shameless countenance.” The narrative returns to his merely physical body in order to dissociate him from the institutional royal body. Ironically, then, for the story to make its case against Richard it must concede to him the very power to embody the law it accuses him of illicitly claiming. In those cases so vaguely cited here, where Richard made this claim, his voice did have the force of law. He was able effectively to void precedent and nullify counsel simply by announcing, according to his own voluntas, that he wished to do so. If the story makes Richard out as a tyrant it is not because he violated some explicitly established constitutional principle. It is because he declined to live up to the ideal of the corporate fiction. He refused to embody counsel and legal precedent in a single unifying voice: he literalized the body politic and thus revealed monarchical theory to be a metaphor—that is, a fiction.

The story is also vague about the constitutional issues it raises. Which were the cases where Richard claimed his prerogative? What specific legal issues were at stake? How specifically should he have been limited by precedent and counsel? Should any prerogatives have been open to him at all? The article does not begin to address these questions. Instead it is entirely focused on the power of the king's voice. The article does not wish to do away with royal voluntas, but rather desires a voluntas at one with the law. If the law is imagined as the property of the realm as opposed to the king (which is what the phrase Leges & Consuetidines Regni implies), then what the article desires is a royal voice that is spoken by the realm, a king whose voice unifies the nobility's interests. The article resorts to narrative because any attempt to define this ideal juridically or constitutionally—that is, to conceptualize it—would destroy it. If the king is to be a living embodiment of the law, a lex animata, he must be so naturally and spontaneously. A lex animata produced entirely by prior external constraint is by definition not a lex animata. By presenting its case narratively, the article can dispose of Richard and yet retain the ideal it would have had him embody. And Richard must be disposed of, because his literalization of the metaphor has rendered it unavailable to the nobility as a whole.

In the first instance, the ideal was crucial to Bolingbroke and the other architects of the deposition. A usurper rather than a revolutionary, Bolingbroke wanted to replace Richard but not alter the structure of kingship. Indeed, he rejected out of hand the one tentative suggestion that he accept a parliamentary title.15 But the practical value the ideal of a spontaneously lawful voluntas had for Henry was matched by its ideological value to the rest of the ruling class. In respect to those below him, the legislative and juridical prerogative of a nobleman was not essentially different from the royal prerogative to which Richard here lays claim.16 In the main, medieval justice was indeed what the nobility said it was. It was instituted by them, interpreted by them, and administered by them as, in Maitland's phrase, “a proprietary right.”17 In the Middle Ages, justice was something the nobility owned. While one may not wish to go as far as Perry Anderson when he claims that medieval justice “was the ordinary name of power,” it is hard to argue with Alan Harding's observation that medieval courts served a double function: “first, the maintenance of social peace by the settlement of disputes between individuals, and second, the maintenance of the social dominance of the king and noble who held the court. Practically, the two are inseparable.”18 While seigneurial justice was, by the end of the fourteenth century, being gradually displaced by royal justice, the manner of this displacement was such that it made the unity of the royal voluntas that much more attractive.19 For the decline of seigneurial courts coincided with the advent of the justices of the peace. Though nominally an officer of the king, the justice of the peace was invariably a local landowner who would follow the local interests of his class. So what the nobility gave up in direct juridical control it regained through its alliance with the bureaucracy of the crown. As Harding has said, “the sessions of the Justices of the Peace replaced the manorial courts as a means of social control as the relationship of peasant to landlord changed from a legal subjection to a purely economic subjection.”20

The juridical power the nobility once exercised purely in its own name it now exercised in the name of the king. Though the form had changed, the fundamental ideological presumption had not. Legal authority was still the property of a single class, and the immediate effect of the change of form was to bring the prerogative of the nobility even closer to that of the king. When a justice of the peace spoke, he spoke with the king's voice. The result of this institutional diffusion of the king's voice was a more efficient concentration of the legal power of the ruling class as a whole. It also meant that the ruling class as a whole had a greater stake in defining how royal power was to be exercised. While this condition certainly does not explain Richard's deposition by itself, it does help explain the particular form the deposition took. The nobility was not likely to call for structural changes in the status quo, because the status quo was precisely the prize they were gaming for. By giving them control of Richard's voice the narrative of Article 33 helped them take control of the power structure without having to change it.

The power of this narrative thus inheres neither in its referential fidelity to some actual statement of Richard's, a correspondence that seems vague at best and an outright fabrication at worst, nor in its articulation of some constitutional principle. Its power inheres instead in a formal capacity that modern criticism has identified as one of narrative's central features: the capacity to speak convincingly in the voice of another. Older Anglo-American accounts of narrative treat this capacity, also identified as narrative's shifting point of view, as their primary object of study.21

More recently, under the influence of Continental narratology, Anglo-American criticism has moved from considerations of narrative voice to more theoretically rigorous considerations of the various forms of narrative discourse. I retain the older term here for two reasons. First, as Jonathan Culler has pointed out, the modes of inquiry are not that dissimilar.22 To begin, as narratology does, with the distinction between the way a story is told (“discourse,” or sjuzhtre) and the sequence of events it records (“story,” or fabula) is in fact to study the problem of point of view. Indeed, narrative's capacity to speak convincingly in the voice of another is simply the most extreme instance of the more general capacity narratologists identify as narrative's power to make events “seem to tell themselves.”23 When a narrative shifts into the voice of one of its characters it is presenting that voice as pure event, as if an entirely distinct entity were now speaking. Narrative thus has the ideological power not only to present events neutrally, as if they were actually unfolding, but also to present equally neutrally other ways of viewing these events, as if the other viewpoints were speaking directly for themselves.

This is my second reason for retaining the term “voice”: to foreground precisely this power to coopt other points of view. Despite its theoretical rigor, narratology's emphasis on event threatens to conceal narrative's ideological power rather than expose it. Unfortunately, it is a short step between observing with Roland Barthes that narrative “is simply there, like life itself,” to assuming (as he later does in the same essay) that in its purest form, narrative is ideologically neutral.24 On the contrary, narrative's ideological power inheres precisely in its illusion of neutrality, an illusion narrative produces as assiduously as a Petrarchan sonnet produces the illusion of artifice. Analyzing narrative as a matrix of voices penetrates the illusion at its most mystifying moment, the moment when it turns a point of view into an event.

In Article 33, the voice that the narrative constructs for Richard becomes his voice, which is how Article 33 makes moot the issue of its referential accuracy. The Lancastrian narrator can reproduce Richard's voice without needing Richard actually to have spoken the words assigned him. Were the issue sheer referential accuracy, then the question who is speaking here, Richard or his Lancastrian accusers, would have to be settled before the story could be of any use. But as the reaction of Tuck and other modern historians illustrates, whether Richard actually spoke these words is not finally the crucial question. What is more important is that the article gives Richard a voice that plausibly explains what the article perceives to be the basis of his actions, a plausibility that depends upon, and reproduces, the dominant ideology of kingship.

The plausibility thus produced is itself a fictional effect. The voice assigned to Richard is plausible because it recapitulates previous fictions of the royal voice. It is the very essence of these fictions to present a voice at once itself and the voice of others. The royal voice is thus incipiently narratorial in that it defines itself by its capacity to speak for others without losing its own specificity. The king both speaks the communal voice and is spoken by it. This broad structural similarity between the medieval ideology of kingship and narrative may well explain medieval political theory's preponderant dependence on fictions. This dependence has usually been viewed in teleological terms as a weakness. Medieval theorists are seen to have resorted to fictions and metaphors as stopgaps because they had not yet arrived at adequate conceptualizations. It may be, however, that the opposite is true, that medieval theorists preferred fiction because it was better suited to the ideological task at hand, a positive means of empowerment, rather than a stopgap.

Such certainly seems the case with the narrative of Article 33. To be able to tell this story of the royal voice was quite literally to usurp its authority. Narrative becomes a species of political power. Yet despite this convergence, the two categories are not completely interchangeable. Within medieval ideologies of kingship, narrative was precisely that species of power that could never know itself as such. The ideological fictions of kingship had always to be subordinated to the form of power they maintained. Article 33's story of Richard's voice, though primarily the product of previous traditional fictions, works precisely by suppressing its fictionality and presenting itself as the truth.

At the same time, this fiction was public in a way that its predecessors hadn't needed to be. The quasi-parliamentary status of the Articles of Deposition testify to the increased dispersion of the ruling class they were attempting to unify. For the Lancastrians this dispersion meant that kingship's dependence on public modes of legitimation was greater than ever before. They could not be satisfied simply to commission works in Latin; they needed legitimation in the vernacular. Here the needs of political authority and the needs of the newly emergent Chaucerian tradition converged, and royal patronage of vernacular poetry was an important item on the Lancastrian ideological agenda, particularly for Henry V.25

As an early example of this trend, the Regement of Princes emerges as a remarkable meditation on the relation between the literary and the political. Narrative, the rhetorical form common to both, provides the meeting ground. Like many Fürstenspiegel, the work consists of a series of moral discussions interspersed with exempla. But if these moral discussions constitute kingship's other voice—that is, the voice of counsel—they are framed by the larger narrative of Hoccleve's autobiography. The autobiography exposes Hoccleve's material dependence on Henry, subjugating the voice of counsel he embodies to the very power it would constrain. The effect of the narrative, then, is to present the Prince as at once constrained by the voice of counsel and independent of it.

The autobiography further complicates matters by introducing Chaucer into the poem as Hoccleve's “maister deere,” an independent source of literary authority.26 This complication is necessary to the legitimation of Henry even as it seems to transcend it. The vernacular legitimation of Henry requires a vernacular moral authority, and this is what the canonization of Chaucer provides. In effect, the very thoroughness with which Hoccleve pursues the celebration of Henry leads him to canonize Chaucer. Both aims are offered to an expanding ruling-class audience as complementary aspects of the same general project of cultural empowerment. I have already sketched this project's largest ideological outlines. It is now time to examine Hoccleve's text, and the specific models of authority with which it grapples, to see how he works out the project in detail.

THE VOICES OF TRADITION: CHAUCER AND THE FüRSTENSPIEGEL

The Regement brings together the primarily Latin tradition of the Fürstenspiegel with the vernacular tradition presided over by Chaucer. Hoccleve's interest in kingship was anticipated by both Chaucer and Gower as well as by poets in the alliterative tradition. Wynnere and Wastoure, the early passus of Piers Plowman, and Mum and the Sothsegger all treat the king as society's moral center.27 Gower returns to the problem of kingship throughout the Confessio Amantis, and he presents the seventh book of that work as a recapitulation of the Secretum Secretorum, perhaps the most popular Fürstenspiegel in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. The issue surfaces in the Canterbury Tales as well. Like Lydgate's Fall of Princes, the Monk's Tale is a De Casibus collection, a genre related to the Fürstenspiegel. And the tale Chaucer presents in his own voice, the Tale of Melibee, while not explicitly concerned with kingship, is a “serious and thoughtful address to the powerful on how to save their power.”28

Many scholars still view the political concerns of these writers as regrettable concessions to public taste. What this view fails to recognize is that the audience that supported the tradition's explicitly political work, though perhaps larger, was basically the same audience that supported the putatively apolitical Chaucerian tales modern scholarship has found more to its liking. This audience came from the newly empowered strata of the ruling class, the gentry and the richest of the urban bourgeoisie, who looked to the royal court as the source of cultural as well as political authority.29 For this audience, the growing consumption of vernacular literature was no less an exercise in cultural entitlement than the growing participation in political discourse.

Chaucer's participation in this project was not restricted to Melibee and the Monk's Tale. The entire Canterbury collection is built around the dialectic between narrative voice and social position. As Jill Mann has shown, the General Prologue is an estates satire.30 As the frame tale, it thus locates each of the many narrative voices of the Tales within a social totality, a solidarity within which the apparently inexhaustible capacity of Chaucerian narrative for shifting voices is played out. This fact alone would seem to call into question the formalist assumption that Chaucer's shifting perspectives signal his desire to transcend the communal demands of his audience.

Mann herself reserves judgment on this point, preferring to see the Prologue as a detached exercise in ethnography, rather than the reinforcement of the moral values associated with estates satire. As the narrative voice shifts from one character to the next, demonstrating that each character's point of view is conditioned by his social position, within which it is perfectly coherent, the reader recognizes the impossibility of any totalizing judgment.31 But this view will produce an apolitical reading of the Tales only if one assumes a complete separation between the discursive and the political. If not, then to the extent that the shifts in voice are rendered intelligible by the social categories the frame tale imposes, the categories are themselves validated. It may be impossible to judge the value of the Knight's point of view in relation to the Miller's, but the very fact that the estates frame enables one viewpoint to be recognized as a “noble” tale and the other as a “cherles” tale gives the frame a heuristic validity that depends ultimately on its social content. For this reason, Chaucer's ethnography is not ultimately any more detached from estates ideology than the more explicitly evaluative claims of earlier estates satires.32

This is particularly true when one considers the function Chaucer's ethnography would have had for his original audience. To an audience of the lesser nobility, the frame tale presents figures who are mostly inferior in social status. The estates frame is precisely what enables this audience to have access to these less privileged voices. It is politically empowering in that it assigns these voices their social meanings. As Article 33 gave the same audience access to the voice of the king, the Canterbury Tales gives it access to the voices of the socially excluded.

I am not suggesting that the contemporary political value of the Tales exhausts their meaning. But I am suggesting that this political value underlies the Chaucerian tradition's reading of Chaucer, and that it makes that reading of Chaucer as valid as any other. The modern cliché that the fifteenth-century's version of Chaucer was narrow or distorted is a purely ideological preference presented as an indisputable poetic law. That version of Chaucer is certainly no narrower than the modern view that celebrates Chaucer's romances and fabliaux and discards the Melibee, the Monk's Tale, and the devotional works. Modern commentators are as entitled to their ideological preferences as the fifteenth century was to its, but when they make those preferences the basis of their literary history, they have failed as historians. The fifteenth century was not a period of cultural decline. It was a period that carried on the cultural expansion that had begun in the last half of the fourteenth, an expansion about which texts like the Regement of Princes were entirely self-conscious.

The dialectic between narrative voice and social position that Chaucer achieved through estates satire, Hoccleve achieves through a generic mutation of another sort. In a “Prologue” that accounts for almost half the work's total length, he presents an extended dialogue with a beggar, whom he clearly intends as a surrogate (at one point the Beggar offers an autobiography reminiscent of the one Hoccleve himself offers in “La Male Regle” [596-742]). At the end of the “Prologue” the Beggar suggests Hoccleve write the Regement as a way of petitioning for an annuity. The next day Hoccleve sits down to write and places in the middle of the work the request for an annuity the Beggar suggested he make (1842-2016).

Framing his Fürstenspiegel in this way counters the discursive authority Hoccleve assumes within the text with his social subordination to the prince outside of it. In fact, this framing breaks down the distinction between inside and outside, self-reflexively bringing into the text the projected exchange of the text itself for an annuity. This narrative in turn suggests Henry's actual presence, an impression Hoccleve reinforces throughout the poem by continually presenting his moral instruction in the second person. At least one of the manuscripts takes the fiction a step further still, inserting between the text of the “Prologue” and the text of the “Proem,” at the very point where Hoccleve begins to address Henry directly, an illustration in which a small, kneeling poet presents his book to a larger standing figure wearing a crown.33

The begging poem was a comparatively late genre, emerging in France in the fourteenth century.34 It presupposes a court in transition from the personal to the bureaucratic, one sufficiently bureaucratized that petitions for small sums of money have become routine, but still sufficiently invested in the personal to want to see the granting of such petitions as the whimsical response to a jeu d'esprit. The begging poem postulates a royal voluntas that acts entirely at its own pleasure, and thus stands as a striking counterpoise to the didactic presumptions of the Fürstenspiegel, which posits a king who relies on counsel.

Nevertheless, yoking the two genres together simply underlines a tension already long established within the Fürstenspiegel itself. The compilers of Fürstenspiegel almost invariably display their dependence on a particular ruler. These works were customarily dedicated to a prince or ecclesiastical magnate on whom the compiler was dependent or from whom he wished preferment. Often, as in the Regement of Princes, the second-person address would continue within the body of the work. Fürstenspiegel also served as public celebrations of their dedicatees, appearing at moments of opportunity or dispute. For example, John of Salisbury's Policraticus, which commences the high medieval tradition, was dedicated to Becket while he was still chancellor to Henry II. The work is strenuously theocratic, arguing the king should be subject to the pope and should heed clerical counselors.35 Similarly, the equally relentlessly royalist De Regimine Principum, one of the three sources Hoccleve names in his opening address to the prince (2038-2128), was compiled by Aegidius Romanus for Philip the Fair, whose later arrest of Boniface VIII would mark the beginning of the end for papal absolution.36 And the source that Hoccleve names first and seems to take as the model of the genre is the Secretum Secretorum: presented as if authored by Aristotle for Alexander, it opens with Aristotle's lavish praise of Alexander and frames the philosophical instruction to come as a means of inducing his subjects to obedience and lawful activity.37 Widely circulated and translated in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, both these works stage the paradox of an omnipotent ruler who nonetheless requires advice, a royal voluntas from which proceeds reward and yet a royal ear eager to listen and so acknowledging its own insufficiency.

The Fürstenspiegel was a discrete generic expression of the larger medieval discourse of sovereignty. This discourse is generally seen as moving from theocratic absolutism to secular and constitutional monarchism, a movement through which, in the words of Wilks, “the Ages of Faith become transmuted into an Age of Reason.”38 As I have suggested, this Whig teleology ignores the deep attraction absolutist arguments had for both secular monarchs and their noble cohorts, the very attraction that in fact made the transition from the theocratic to the secular possible in the first place. The theocratic argument for papal sovereignty was not simply an argument for faith against reason, or the eternal against the temporal. It was an argument that wanted, on the basis of mutual consent (that is, shared belief in Christ), to center all communal authority in a single figure.

As medieval monarchy became increasingly institutionalized, this conception of authority became increasingly attractive, because it provided a way of intellectually concentrating the power that was being institutionally dispersed. The Fürstenspiegel enacted this concentration by its rhetorical celebration of its dedicatee. But it also acknowledged the fact of dispersion by its performance of public instruction. This may explain the popularity of the genre among an English ruling class continually seeking a greater share in royal power. It may also explain both the Regement's specific political motivation and its ostentatious exploitation of the tradition's paradoxes.

For all of its ideological shrewdness, Bolinbroke's accession to the crown left him in a precarious position. The basis for his title was not and could not be made entirely clear. He faced revolts in 1400 and 1402, and by 1410 his ailments had forced him to leave the overseeing of the kingdom to councillors who were openly feuding with the prince.39 Against this background the Regement of Princes can be seen as a direct attempt to secure the continuity of Lancastrian rule. By addressing a Fürstenspiegel to the future Henry V, Hoccleve effectively settles the question of dynastic rights by treating it as if it were already settled. He reinforces the point by scattering through the poem favorable invocations of the prince's patrimony: his father, the king (816-26, 1835, 3347-67), his grandfather, John of Gaunt (3347-67), and his great-grandfather, Henry of Lancaster (2647-53). This rhetorical representation of Henry as dynastically legitimate with a long, honorable patrimony and about to receive a Fürstenspiegel can appropriately be described as a narrative positioning. It is narrative because it historicizes: it not only locates the persona it produces within a preexistent social totality, indeed, but produces the persona precisely by so locating it.

The projected dynastic succession is thus implicit in the projected acceptance of a Fürstenspiegel, and both are framed by the projected exchange of begging poem for royal grant. These evocations of Henry concretize the abstract set of moral lessons the text contains as the property of a specific, already established figure of supreme social authority. This narrative entails both idealization and coercion. There is the ideal of royal voluntas in general and Henry in particular as the personal embodiment of the text's commonly held moral principles. But there is also the coercion inherent in precisely this capacity of narrative to concretize: to present the ideal as if it were already embodied. In the equivocation between idealization and coercion lie both the risk and the aim of the Regement of Princes.

Hoccleve uses narrative's capacity for continually shifting point of view to resolve or bypass (to resolve by bypassing) the constitutional tensions surrounding the Lancastrian monarchy. Because of the severity of these tensions, he exploits his shifting point of view to the fullest, and thereby continually risks exposing its arbitrary, propagandistic aim. Yet he takes the risk precisely to convert it to his goal, which is to make his rhetorical construction of Prince Henry not simply a construction but the truth.

THE VOICES OF AUTHORITY: CHAUCER AND THE PRINCE

One measure of the risk Hoccleve takes is the care he devotes to the frame tale that makes the Regement a begging poem. The “Prologue” is 2016 lines long, accounting, as I said before, for almost half the poem. It opens with an autobiographical detail that ties Hoccleve's fate to the prince's. “Musyng upon the restles bisynesse / Which that this troubly world hath ay on honde” (1-2) the poet spends a sleepless night at the Chester Inn. His reflections on the “brotlynesse” of Fortune (15-21) quickly become generalized:

Me fel to mynde how that, not long ago,
ffortunes strok doun threst estaat royal
Into myscheef; and I took heed also
Of many anothir lord that had a falle.

(22-25)

Obviously this allusion to Richard is risky. Besides the more general presumption involved in comparing his situation to a king's, the allusion raises other awkward questions as well. Is he sympathizing with Richard? Is he presenting Richard as an unwitting victim of Fortune, when the logic of deposition assumes that Richard brought his fate entirely upon himself? Doesn't this recollection of the uncertainty of Richard's position call attention to the fragility of Henry's? All of these implicit questions give the passage an indefinite charge that stops just short of indecorous confrontation. For the topicality of the allusions is quickly absorbed into the conventional status of its context. This opening is similar to the moment of psychic disturbance that often opened dream visions. It is particularly close to the insomnia that opens the Book of the Duchess: what Chaucer finds in the Book of Ceyx and Alcyone, Hoccleve will find in the addition of another voice, the Beggar's.

In the place of a vision, the Beggar will provide the solution to Hoccleve's dilemma that addresses both its personal and its global dimensions. The appeal to Henry through the composition of a Fürstenspiegel will solve Hoccleve's financial problem at the same time it strengthens a threatened “estaat royal.” The “Prologue” comes to this solution indirectly yet deliberately. After a long dialogue on Fortune and the many ways to protect oneself against it, and after several other suggestions, the Beggar finally broaches the appeal to Henry:

“O my good sone, wolt þou yit algate
Despeired be? nay, sone, lat be þat!
Þou schalt as blyue entre into þe yate
Of þi comfort. now telle on pleyn and plat:
My lord þe prince, knowyth he þe nat?
If þat þou stonde in his benevolence,
He may be salue vnto þin indigence.
No man bet, next his fadir, our lord lige.”
“Yis fadir, he is my good gracious lord.”
“Wel sone, þan wole I me oblige,—
And god of heuen vouch I to record,—
Þat if þou wolt be ful of myn accord,
Thow schalt no cause haue more þus to muse,
But heuynesse voide, and it refuse.
“Syn he þi good lord is, I am ful seur
His grace to þe schal nat be denyed;
Þou wost wele, he benying is and demeur
To sue vnto; naght is his goost maistried
With daunger, but his hert is ful applied
To graunte, and nat þe needy werne his grace;
To hym pursue, and þi releef purchace.”

(1828-48)

This suggestion comes much more easily via the Beggar than it would have had it been made in Hoccleve's own voice. The Beggar's praise of Prince Henry would have had the appearance of crass flattery had it been addressed to Henry directly by Hoccleve. But because it arises in the course of a conversation where the prince is not present, it acquires the givenness of an objective truth. When the Beggar offhandedly concludes, “No man bet, next his fadir,” his very offhandedness increases the impression that Henry's virtue is a matter of both lineage and simple common knowledge, both now standing beyond any possible dispute.

Hoccleve links this assertion of Henry's virtue to the granting of his suit, leaving the onus of proof deftly and almost imperceptibly on Henry, but making such proof, by the very imperceptibility of the link, a matter of course. The suit is at once a test of Henry's generosity and a ratification of his future. For as Hoccleve's projected redeemer, Henry becomes a moral force standing outside the cycle of Fortune, impervious to the instabilities that undid Richard.

The Beggar enforces this impression with the specific suggestion that the appeal take the form of a Fürstenspiegel:

“looke if þou fynde canst any tretice
Groundid on his estates holsumnesse;
Swych thing translate, and unto his hynesse
As humbely as þat þou canst, present.”

(1949-52)

Hoccleve will appeal not simply to Henry's grace, but to his presumed enthusiasm for moral instruction. The Beggar precedes this final suggestion with a warning against flattery: “But of a thyng be wel waar in al wise, / On flaterie þat þou þe nat founde,” adding that advisors are afraid to tell their lords the truth, and instead “thei stryuen who best rynge shal þe bell / Of fals plesance” (1912-13, 29-30). Lords are so continually surrounded by such flattery that it is impossible for them to learn their true condition, and therefore the greatest service Hoccleve can perform for Henry is to tell him the truth (1933-46).

The Beggar so firmly associates pleasant news with flattery that the measure of the truth becomes virtually its unpleasantness to princely ears. At this point the narrative frame for Hoccleve's authority has been fully articulated, providing the prince with moral grounds for granting his suit. By accepting the Fürstenspiegel Hoccleve offers, the prince will demonstrate that he is a ruler who prefers the truth to flattery—a virtue with which, of course, the Beggar has already endowed him. The Beggar's intervention transforms a self-interested petition into a fully moral exchange between a model ruler and a loyal subject. In return for moral instruction, Henry will award an annuity, not as mere compensation, but as a sign of his devotion to morality. The “Prologue” has transformed its terms of address, pretending all the while to have changed nothing.

Both the pretense and the transformation are specifically narrative products; both result from the addition of the Beggar's voice. Like the voice of any narrative figure, the Beggar's is at once his author's and his own, but Hoccleve intensifies the effect of this resemblance in difference precisely by identifying this voice as a Beggar's. This diffuses the begging position from which he himself speaks, making it more general and thus enabling him to present it favorably. The Beggar resembles Hoccleve in that both are beggars; he differs from Hoccleve in that Hoccleve is his social superior. This difference means that when he speaks to Hoccleve, and through Hoccleve to Prince Henry, both Hoccleve and the prince are now in the same position: social superiors being addressed by a subordinate.

Also, of course, Hoccleve uses this social positioning to affirm the Beggar's moral authority. When the Beggar first offers his assistance Hoccleve scoffs at his infirmity and meager appearance, concluding that “it moste be a greter man of myght / þan þat þou art, þat scholde me releue” (176-77). In the long dialogue that follows, as the Beggar breaks down Hoccleve's resistance he implicitly breaks down the prince's as well. When he suggests the appeal to the prince at the end of the dialogue, the suggestion comes as if it were completely external. The considerable presumption involved in both begging poems and Fürstenspiegel is diffused, for the suggestion that the two are in fact one is made by a figure who has just demonstrated the independent moral authority beggars can possess.40 And this independent authority has been produced by Hoccleve himself through his narrative, an act of production that has also, by means of the manipulation of narrative voice, been disguised.

This elaborate representational strategy is an extension of the begging poem's central ploy, the construction of a conceit whose intricacy will distract attention from the crassness of the request. The implication is that what the prince pays for is the elegance of the poetic structure: a begging poem always pays its patron the compliment of making him the arbiter of poetic value. In the Regement of Princes, the poetic structure is also a moral one. By being a Fürstenspiegel and begging poem at once, it defines Henry as the repository of moral as well as poetic value. This combination allows Henry to have it both ways. Accepting the Regement as a begging poem will certify his moral rectitude; acceding to it as a Fürstenspiegel will not diminish his social authority.

The tension this combination produces is one to which Hoccleve can return again and again. When after the “Prologue” ends Hoccleve finally addresses Henry directly, he can do so in the language of compliment, for that language now carries moral weight.

Hye and noble prince excellent,
My lord the prince, o my lord gracious,
I, humble servant and obedient
Vnto your estate hye & glorious,
Of whiche I am full tendir & full ielous,
Me recomaunde unto your worthynesse,
With hert entier, and spirite of mekenesse.
Right humbly axyng of you the license,
That with my penne I may to you declare
(So as that kan my wittes innocence,)
Myne inward wille that thursteth the welefare
Of your persone; and elles be I bare
Of blisse, whan þat the cold stroke of deth
My lyfe hath quenched, & me byraft my breth.

(2017-30)

The tension between producing an effect and disguising it recurs here in the abandonment of will Hoccleve wants his writing to signify. As the very ornateness of these introductory lines make clear, direct address does not merely locate a persona but constitutes it as well. Hoccleve is not simply addressing a prince all of whose attributes are immediately available outside the text, but a prince whom he makes high, noble, and excellent by so addressing. To the extent this persona is perceived as simply Hoccleve's invention, the project fails. Asking for “license” from the very persona being produced at once acknowledges and disclaims the inventiveness, which is effaced under the sign of the real Henry. The textual persona of the model prince becomes an unnecessary recreation of virtues already embodied in Henry's actual personality.

As I have already noted, Hoccleve keeps his moral instruction in the second person, maintaining the fiction of Henry's personal presence throughout the poem. Hoccleve cannot assert his own independent moral authority without simultaneously reiterating his status as a dependent addressing a prince. His authority is always dependent on the central fiction of Henry's presence. This frame intensifies the personal component in the already heavily personalized conceptions of royal authority that Hoccleve inherits from the Fürstenspiegel tradition.

The poem proper is divided into fifteen sections with an envoy. The first four deal with the royal voluntas: royal dignity, the coronation oath, justice, and the observance of the laws. Next are five personal virtues: piety, mercy, patience, chastity, and magnanimity. After three on the management of wealth and two on counsel, there is a concluding section on peace. The emphasis throughout is on the power of the royal example, the social order that Henry will produce by assuming these virtues. Upon occasion Hoccleve explicitly invokes Henry's absolute freedom, making his acceptance of moral constraint an act of grace:

Who-so þat in hye dignite is sette,
And may do grevous wrong & cruelte,
If he for-bere hem, to commend is bette,
And gretter shal his mede and meryte be.

(2843-48)

But even where this freedom is not made explicit, the aspect of Henry's personal moral restraint Hoccleve stresses most is the awe and respect it will arouse in his subjects. When moral restraint meets royal power, the result is social control, and the moral shades into the ideological.

The transaction is most evident where the personal and political are hardest to distinguish: royal speech. The discussion of coronation oaths returns this issue to a locus classicus of medieval tradition. The coronation oath was a symbolic instrument for finessing the ambiguities surrounding the problem of royal prerogative. In taking the oath, a monarch voluntarily constrains his own prerogative to the laws of his predecessors. Thus the oath was a ceremonial recognition of the practical constraint on royal prerogative that nonetheless left it theoretically absolute. Hoccleve trades on this ambiguity by stressing the performative aspect of oath-keeping, its prescription of internal consistency rather than its assertion of simple conformity to an external standard.

And syn a kyng, by wey of his office,
To god I-likned is, as in manere,
And god is trouthe itself, þan may the vice
Of vntrouthe, naght in a kyng appeere,
If his office schal to god referre.
A besy tonge bringeth in swiche wit,
He þat by word naght gilteþ is perfit.
A! lord, what is fair and honurable,
A kyng from mochil speche him refreyne;
It sitte him ben of wordes mesurable,
ffor mochil clap wole his estate desteyne.
If he his tonge with mesures reyne
Governe, than his honur it conserveth.

(2409-21)

To what extent is the God-like king “trouthe itself”? Obviously royal speech is not absolutely performative in the way of divine speech; it cannot call truth into being simply by articulating it. And yet Hoccleve strongly implies that so long as “untrouthe” is avoided, royal speech may become God-like.

In this paradoxical formulation royal speech is performative within certain bounds, bounds that become clearer as the passage proceeds. The advice against speaking too often follows directly the warning against “untrouthe,” as if the two were equivalent. To view royal speech as capable of excess is to assume that royal prerogative is safest when least evident, as if ultimately it were incapable of justifying itself in purely linguistic terms. It is to assume a status quo that operates best when least observed. “For mochil clap wole his estate desteyne”: a king who speaks too much is likely to expose himself as no more in control of language than its other users.

A king can control his estate by controlling his tongue; the status quo provides the reference point against which “untrouthe” is to be judged. Royal speech becomes performative precisely by not seeking to be, by always seeking to submerge its effects in its preservation of royal power. It is as if the ideal of royal speech were silence. This is the reason kingship always needs another voice, like Hoccleve's. Justification spoken in another voice will always make royal authority seem to be a power beyond language, which it must always be in order to be justified at all.

This view of political authority is both profoundly conservative and yet self-consciously constructive at the same time. Contradictory as the combination may seem to a modern consciousness, the two tendencies are actually mutually reinforcing. Hoccleve's often spectacularly self-conscious poetic mastery continually serves his political conservatism, but just as significantly the conservatism is also what motivates the poetry. The Shelleyan view of poetry as politically redemptive runs extraordinarily deep in twentieth-century literary studies. It persists mutatis mutandis in the deconstructive tenet that a text's representational strategies will always subvert its explicit ideology. The Regement presents a strong counterexample to this view, demonstrating instead the capacity that Terry Eagleton has called “the cunning of the ideological”—the capacity of an ideological position to strengthen itself precisely by exposing its assumptions.41

Hoccleve's conservatism is so intertwined with his poetry that it motivates his most poetic of moments: his canonization of Chaucer. This canonization is another way in which Hoccleve makes authority narrative. Chaucer's is an authorizing voice more historically and linguistically continuous with Hoccleve's than those of classical or ecclesiastical authors. And Hoccleve consistently locates Chaucer's authority biographically. There are three discussions of Chaucer, which all follow essentially the same pattern. After a celebration of Chaucer's authority there is a lament for his death. In the last two discussions, there is also a prayer that he rest in peace. In several of the manuscripts this final invocation is accompanied by a portrait. The portrait in British Museum Harleian Manuscript 4866 (leaf 91) is the earliest known of Chaucer and is probably the source of most later portraits, including the equestrian portrait of the Ellesmere manuscript.42 This fact, though it may seem no more than a charming bit of antiquarianism, signals a crucial change. It signals an increasing historicization of discursive authority, an increasing desire to locate authority within a personage historically and linguistically immediate.

The literary canonization of historically proximate, vernacular authors has traditionally been taken as the hallmark of Renaissance humanism. Though the trend predates Hoccleve, beginning in Italy with Boccaccio and Petrarch, Hoccleve is the first to articulate it fully in English. If, as A. C. Spearing argues, Chaucer invents “the possibility of a history of English poetry,” Hoccleve makes that possibility actual by establishing Chaucer as the source of such a history.43 Of course, this canonization is not so much a break with older notions of authority as an attempt to recuperate them in a more usable way.

Hoccleve clearly presents Chaucer as the most immediate source of his own authority. The first invocation occurs in the “Prologue” directly after he agrees to write the Regement (1954-81) and begins with the regret that Chaucer is not available to lend “consail and reed” (1960). The second occurs in the discussion of his sources, where he makes it clear his access to these authorities, meager though it is (“Simple is my goost, and scars my letterure” [2073]), comes through Chaucer, who “fayn wolde han me taght” (2078). In both passages he is the center of traditional authority, like Cicero in rhetoric, like Aristotle (whom Hoccleve has just named as author of the Secretum Secretorum) in philosophy, and like Virgil in poetry (2085-90). This displacement of Latin authority into the vernacular authority of Chaucer is obviously meant to make the authority of tradition more accessible to Hoccleve's audience. But this broadening of textual authority has as its larger goal the solidification of royal authority.

For to the extent that the textual is historicized, immediate political authority is strengthened. As Hoccleve elevates Chaucer to the status of an auctor, his insistence on the biographical makes the textual even more dependent on the actualities of historical existence. Chaucer's authority inheres most fully in his person; it does not survive complete in his texts alone. Though he is “universel fadir of science” (1964) and “first fyndere of our fair langage” (4978), what Hoccleve learned from him he learned personally. The implication of the lament that Chaucer is no longer available for “consail and reed” is that once Chaucer is no longer alive and producing, the power of his texts to put the cultural world in order begins to fade. The final portrait, which abandons language altogether in favor of pictorial representation, takes this idea to its logical limit.

Vernacular authority is thus tied more directly to historical actuality than either the classical or the sacred. If authorizing the vernacular means a greater freedom from the past, it may also mean a greater subordination to the immediate status quo. These two tendencies are not necessarily opposed, for freedom from the past may be enabled by an increase in political empowerment. This was the case for Hoccleve's audience, and his canonization gave them a new, vernacular authority in the guise of the old. As the “Mirour of fructuous entendement,” the “universal fadir in science” (1963-64), Chaucer becomes the Aristotle to Henry's Alexander, the source of the communally held moral values to be embodied in the ideal prince.

The legitimacy of Henry is the cost of this new, vernacular access to discursive authority. Without an immediately available embodiment of moral order, Hoccleve cannot grant any moral privilege to the historically immediate. And if historical immediacy is without moral value, then so too is the vernacular. Hoccleve's celebration of the nascent English tradition embodied in Chaucer and the political authority embodied in Henry are the twin faces of the same moral vision. As this vision empowers itself by exposing the assumptions of the Latin traditions it inherits, it also solidifies its empowerment in the figure of Henry. Henry must become the guarantor of moral order because it is he who will become king. This is perhaps the one assumption of which the Regement can never become fully self-conscious. Like any Fürstenspiegel, it must assume that there is moral value in the very structure of kingship, regardless of the moral status of the individual who occupies it. Without this assumption, the Fürstenspiegel has lost its raison d'être.

NARRATIVE POWER

I have already discussed many of the ways in which the Regement expresses this central tenet of the ideology of monarchy. Perhaps its most extreme expression occurs in the one aspect of the work I have not yet discussed: the exempla. In the exemplum medieval thought explicitly recognized the persuasive power of narrative. Early discussions of preaching recommended the use of exempla on the grounds that narrative was more immediately persuasive than doctrine. The first medieval exemplum collection was Gregory's Dialogues; Gregory remarks on several occasions that exempla touch the heart more directly than doctrine or rational argument.44 Not surprisingly, the form was viewed as particularly suited to persuading the uninstructed or the unconverted. The sermon exemplum achieved its zenith during the great preaching campaigns of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the urban lower classes were being proselytized for the first time.45

The exemplum had a similar rhetorical profile in the Fürstenspiegel, though obviously its audience was different. John of Salisbury, whose Policraticus became a dominant repository of exempla both within and without the tradition, comments extensively on the form. In book 4, he buttresses the claim that the prince is an inferior minister of the priests with classical exempla, then justifies his appeal to the classical by asserting Paul used such exempla to preach to the Athenians.46 This characterization of the form achieves a double purpose. It places John's royalist opposition in the position of uninstructed pagans, and then suggests that like Paul, John can convert them by his superior handling of their own forms. In a more general discussion elsewhere, he describes exempla as strategemma and strategemmatica, sites of polemical conflict.47

The exemplum thus came to secular writers like Hoccleve as a form charged with ecclesiastical authority, but also as a form suited to polemic. The latter capacity enabled these writers to turn the form against the Church and put it to the service of secular authority. Many of Hoccleve's exempla turn on a ruler's voluntary restraint of some power or prerogative otherwise freely avaialbe to him. While occasionally these are stories of self-sacrifice, such as that of Regulus, the Roman commander who convinced the senate to return him to execution in Carthage rather than complete an unfavorable exchange of prisoners (2248-96), more typically the restraint redounds to the ruler's advantage. For instance, there are two similar stories of Roman generals Camillus (2584-2646) and Scipio Africanus (3676-3710). A schoolmaster in a city Camillus is besieging kidnaps the children of the wealthy citizens who employ him and offers them to Camillus to use as a bargaining chip. Camillus refuses, and when the citizens discover this, they decide to surrender in recognition of his great virtue. In the other story, Scipio is offered a virgin betrothed to a lord in Carthage, and his refusal brings about the same result, the surrender of the city. In both cases moral restraint effects a significant gain in political power, producing a sovereignty that has not existed before. Camillus and Scipio bend a hitherto refractory population to their will through the ideological power of example, through their personal enactment of a public moral narrative, acts of virtue that cannot be separated from the political positions they reinforce.

An even greater interdependence of the moral and the political occurs in two successive exempla, Lycurgus and his Laws (2948-89) and the Phalarean Bull (3004-38), which end the section on Justice and begin the section on Piety. Both of these exempla were widely circulated in the later Middle Ages, both within the Fürstenspiegel and outside it. Both occur in the seventh book of the Confessio Amantis, which was probably Hoccleve's most immediate source.48 He does all that he can to intensify the representation of kingship as the source of moral value already implicit in both exempla. He juxtaposes them, and adds dialogue to what had been primarily plot summary. He makes their protagonists anonymous, as if to focus attention on their political position. Private personal virtue is either moot, in the case of Lycurgus, or nonexistent, in the case of Phalaris. Moral order is something they produce simply through their manipulation of political authority.

In Hoccleve's version, Lycurgus becomes an anonymous knight who devises a new code of law. After his “sharp lawes” are read to the “froward peple,” they are “wondir wroth,” and “wold han artyd [compelled] þis knyght hem repele, / Makyng ageyn hym an haynous querele” (2950-61). The knight assigns the authorship of the laws to Apollo: “I mad hem naght, it was god appollo; / And on my bak … þe charge he leyde / To kepe hem; sires, what sey ye here-to?” (2963-65). But the people are unimpressed and still demand their repeal. He promises to ask Apollo about the matter, on the condition that no changes be made until he returns. Going off to Greece but not to Apollo, he stays there until his death, thus insuring that the code will remain unchanged.

While the story never calls into question the independent existence of Apollo, his introduction into political life as moral authority is purely the invention of the knight. The knight's position as the sole voice of law puts divine authority entirely at his disposal, and makes him the source of moral truth. He produces this truth through the narrative about Apollo, a narrative that is wholly fictitious. Moral truth is thus produced not merely through but as narrative fiction, with the single constraint that the fiction can never acknowledge itself as such. The knight must always keep the referential accuracy of his story an open question. He must leave his state never to return. In exchange for this sacrifice of day-to-day control he gains an ideological control that is absolute. In effect, he replaces his person with his story, and controls the state not simply through the imposition of the story, but by having constructed a story that will always maintain the distance between the story and the reality it claims to represent—a story, that is, that will always maintain its fiction. The referential accuracy of the story is neither affirmed nor denied; it is always held in reserve. This holding in reserve enables the status quo, also the product of the knight (through his new laws), to remain in force. Indeed, the truth the story holds in reserve is precisely the truth of the status quo, and the story maintains the status quo precisely by holding it in reserve.

The same power is depicted in the next exemplum in a manner that corresponds even more closely to the ideological structure of medieval kingship. The exemplum of the Phalarean Bull presents an attempt to construct kingship's other voice. The wicked counselor of a cruel tyrant makes a brass bull as an instrument of torture. Victims are placed within it and roasted alive. Moreover, the device is so constructed that their cries of pain always sound like the lowing of a bull. The cruelty of this machine so offends God that he causes the counselor to be the first to use it:

ffor whan þe kyng, his cruel werk had seyne,
Þe craft of it commendith he ful wele;
But þe entent he fully held a-gayne,
And seyde, “þou þat art more cruel
Than I, þe maydenhede of this Iuel
Shalt preve anone; þis is my Iugement.”
And so as blyue he was þer-in I-brent.

(3032-38)

While the counselor's cruelty is punished, the tyrant's is simply accepted as a given, providing the ground that gives the counselor's crime meaning. The building of the bull is an attempt, however misguided, to satisfy the tyrant's appetite for cruelty; the bull is a response to the prevailing standard of cruelty the tyrant has already established. The bull monumentalizes this standard precisely by depriving resistance to tyranny of its own voice. It destroys the tyrant's enemies by forcing them to speak their resistance in the voice he has ordained for them. The logic of this machine is so remorseless in its perfection that it can bring benefit to the tyrant alone, and accordingly destroys its maker. If the counselor is punished for his cruelty, he is also punished for his presumption, that is, for attempting to become more cruel than the tyrant. The structure of kingship makes it impossible for the tyrant to be surpassed in cruelty. The voice of evil counsel concretized in the bull is always subject to the modification of the tyrant's own voice. In this case the absolute privilege of the tyrannical voice has a restraining effect, producing moral order even as it aims at tyranny.

With this exemplum we are a far cry from modern platitudes about the bland morality of medieval Fürstenspiegel. The story defines a wholly arbitrary yet inevitable balance between ideology and power. The monarch's unconstrained political power gives him an unlimited control over ideological forms, yet the ideological and the political are still mutually constraining. Ideology's prior dependence on royal power will always give it a predetermined shape; monarchy's need to maintain the integrity of its ideology will influence its mode of action. The tyrant's need to be recognized as the cruelest restrains the cruelty of his ministers.

A society where tyranny is possible is by definition also a society where the politically empowered can impose ideological forms by fiat. In return for acquiescence to the authority of Henry's voluntas, Hoccleve's audience gets their own ideological empowerment. This exchange of royal prerogative for ideological control is not so much a logical unity as it is two divergent tendencies the narrative holds together. Like all the other reconciliations Hoccleve offers between royal interests and the common interests of the ruling class, it must remain implicit, half hidden within the manipulations of his narrative.

Yet implication does not lessen the power of ideological reconciliations; rather it enhances them. The exempla of Lycurgus and the Phalarean Bull are narrative expositions of the ideological power of narrative. To a lesser extent so are the other exempla, with their continual emphasis on the monarch's exemplary status. Like the larger narratives that frame them—the genealogy of Henry, the canonization of Chaucer, the placement of Hoccleve's Fürstenspiegel within his own autobiography—the knowledge they convey must remain within its narrative form. To this narrative knowledge the Regement's moral teaching is always tied. Indeed, the work's most practical lesson may well have been its continual narrative framing of the moral. With this framing it showed its audience how moral authority could be submitted to ideological control.

For modern scholars, the Regement may still hold a similar lesson. Works like the Regement present a challenge both to our view of the past and to our sense of our own present. First there is the challenge to the sense that the past lacked the critical sophistication of the present. Where one expects piety, Hoccleve offers a shrewd meditation on the political value of moral authority. Where one expects bland didacticism, Hoccleve offers a complex set of narratives that make the ideological and the moral interdependent, producing the very authority by which they claim to be governed. And here Hoccleve indirectly challenges our view of ourselves. For his example shows that literary self-consciousness is itself historically variable, and that far from being proof against an ideological status quo, a self-consciously critical stance may often be its most powerful instrument. This is a particularly chastening lesson at a time when critical self-consciousness is next to Godliness—not that such self-consciousness should be abandoned, just that it should never be complacent about the power of the status quo.49

Notes

  1. Since the work is addressed to Henry as the Prince of Wales, it would have to have been written before 21 March 1413, the date of his coronation. Its allusion in the “Prologue” to the 1 March 1410 execution of the Lollard John Badby places it after that date. Furnivall settles on 1412 because the Court Rolls seem to indicate an interruption in Hoccleve's annuity in that year (Hoccleve's Works: I. The Minor Works [London: pub. for the Early English Text Society by Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner & Co., 1892], xiii). This date, however, depends on a strictly literal reading of the poem's begging stance.

  2. One recent exception to this trend is David Lawton's excellent article, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” ELH 54 (1987): 761-99.

  3. Wilhelm Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel des hohen und späten Mittelalters (Stuttgart: Hiersemann Verlag, 1938), 352-53.

  4. Margaret Schlauch, “Chaucer's Doctrine of Kings and Tyrants,” Speculum 20 (1945): 133-56.

  5. That ideology reproduces relations of power is a Marxist truism. Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), esp. 42-68; Gyorgy Lukács, “What is Orthodox Marxism?” in History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), esp. 15-18; and Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127-86. For a succinct, incisive history of the term “ideology,” see Stuart Hall, “The Hinterland of Science: Ideology and the ‘Sociology of Knowledge,’” in On Ideology (Birmingham: Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1977; London: Hutchinson, 1978), 9-33. The concept of ideology I use throughout this essay is drawn mainly from Althusser.

  6. Rotuli Parliamentorum, ed. J. Strachey (London, 1767-83), 3:419: “33. ITEM, idem Rex nolens justas Leges & Consuetudines Regni sui servare se protegere, set secundum sue arbitrium Voluntatis facere quicquid desideriis ijus occurrerrit, quandoque & frequentius quando sibi expositi & declarati fuerant Leges Regni sui per Justic' & alios de Consilio suo, & secundum Leges illas petentibus justiciam exhiberet; Dixit expresse, voltu austero & protervo, quod Leges sue erant in ore suo, & aliquotiens in pectore suo: Et qd ipse solus posset mutare & condere Leges Regni sui …” (the translation is mine).

  7. B. Wilkinson, Politics and the Constitution 1307-1399, vol. 2 of Constitutional History of Medieval England 1216-1399 (London: Longmans & Green, 1952), 298. In fairness I should say that as constitutional history has become less fashionable, more recent accounts have become less explicitly teleological. Nevertheless they still treat Richard's deposition as primarily a matter of resisting tyranny and to this extent are guilty of a similar form of anachronism. By modern standards, all of the medieval nobility were tyrants in the sense that most of the populace lacked adequate redress against them. In this context to single out Richard's tyranny is to ignore the larger issue of class relations within which his relation to the rest of the nobility was played out. Even recent accounts do not address the issue of class and tend to reduce Richard's “tyranny” to personal traits: according to Anthony Tuck, he was arrogant and petulant (Crown and Nobility 1272-1461 [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986], 222); to May McKisack, vindictive and possibly insane (The Fourteenth Century [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959], 496-98); to A. B. Steel, definitely on the verge of insanity (Richard II [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1941], 278-79).

  8. Anthony Tuck, Richard II and the English Nobility (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 204.

  9. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 153.

  10. Cynus de Pistoia, Commentarium in Codicem et Digestum vetus (Frankfurt, 1578), 6, 23, 19. Cited in Kantorowicz, King's Two Bodies, 154.

  11. See Kantorowicz, King's Two Bodies, 152-55.

  12. Livy, Ad Urbe Condita, 2.32, 8-33, 2.

  13. M. J. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 15-64, 455-78.

  14. Parliament was originally conceived as an extension of the royal council. For a brief discussion and additional bibliography see Bryce Lyon, A Constitutional and Legal History of Medieval England (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 408-30.

  15. The suggestion was made by Archbishop Arundel. See McKisack, Fourteenth Century, 494-96; K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 54-58.

  16. Record remains of at least one case in which the prerogatives of a lord were denounced in the same terms that the Articles of Deposition used to denounce Richard. In the 1320s Hugh Despenser was accused of voluntrif seigneurie by the English community of Glamorgan. See Alan Harding, “Political Liberty in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 55 (1980): 441, and William Rees, Calendar of Ancient Petitions Relating to Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), 279.

  17. Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederick William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 2nd ed., reissued with a new introduction and bibliography by S. F. C. Milsom (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 527.

  18. Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1974), 153; Alan Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), 13. I might add that when Harding claims in the next sentence that “kings, princes, and also priests, come onto the scene as the chosen arbiters of society,” he comes perilously close to the kind of anachronism I noted above. For the vast majority of those who faced medieval justice, the judge was in no way chosen.

  19. See Alan Harding, “The Revolt Against the Justices,” in The English Rising of 1381, ed. R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 167-68, for a brief discussion and additional bibliography.

  20. Law Courts, 116. Harding observes somewhat earlier on that “a striking feature of English social history from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth century is the combined use of civil and criminal law by the members of the gentry class in order to gain local advantage” (93-94).

  21. See Wayne Booth, “The Author's Many Voices,” in The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 16-20.

  22. “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative,” in The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 170-71.

  23. The phrase is Benveniste's. For a brief discussion, see Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 3-4.

  24. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 252. For example, Barthes declares that “‘what happens’” in narrative “is language alone, the unceasing adventure of its coming” (295).

  25. G. L. Harriss, “Introduction: The Exemplar of Kingship,” in Henry V: The Practice of Kingship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 1-29.

  26. Thomas Hoccleve, Regement of Princes, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: 1897), 1961. All subsequent citations are from this edition and will hereafter be given in the text.

  27. Indeed, discussions of kingship are so prevalent in fourteenth-century poetry of complaint that Janet Coleman has suggested such works “be classified thematically as mirrors for princes” (“English Culture in the Fourteenth Century,” in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 60).

  28. Stephen Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 139.

  29. For a general overview of the reading public in late medieval England, see Janet Coleman, Medieval Readers and Writers 1350-1400 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); and Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53 (1978): 94-114. For Chaucer's audience, see Paul Strohm, “Chaucer's Audience,” Literature and History 5 (1977): 26-41, and “Chaucer's Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the Chaucer Tradition,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982): 3-32.

  30. Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

  31. Ibid., esp. 187-202.

  32. Mann as much as concedes this when she characterizes Chaucer's ethnography in the following way: “This is how the world operates, and as the world, it can operate no other way. The contrast with heavenly values is made at the end of the Canterbury Tales, but it is made in such a way that it cannot affect the validity of the initial statement—the world can only operate by the world's values” (201). The very force with which this apparent tautology (the world operates as the world operates) asserts the indisputability of the status quo conceals the validation of a particular status quo. So far as the General Prologue is concerned the claim “the world can operate no other way” always assumes “no other way” means “no other way than according to these categories, the categories of medieval estates satire.” There are in fact lots of other ways to understand the way the world operates—as the teacher of Chaucer rediscovers each time he or she attempts to explain what a manciple is to a survey class of college sophomores.

  33. Furnivall, ed., Regement, 73.

  34. A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), III.

  35. For the position of the Policraticus within the tradition, see Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel, 3-8. For John's relation to Becket, see Beryl Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools: A Study of Intellectuals in Politics (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), 87-108.

  36. For a good, brief discussion and additional bibliography, see Richard Jones, The Royal Policy of Richard II (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973), 154-59.

  37. Secretum Secretorum as edited and glossed by Roger Bacon, ed. Robert Steele, fasc. 5 of Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi (Oxford: Clarendon, 1920), 40-42. The third source Hoccleve names, Jacob de Cessolis's Libellus super Ludo Schachorum, is the most important of the three for sheer bulk of material borrowed. (See William Mathews, “Thomas Hoccleve,” in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050-1500, ed. Albert E. Hartung, vol. 3 (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1972), 749-50.) Though not dedicated to an actual monarch, it begins with a fictionalized scene of public instruction. The game of chess, it claims, was devised by a philosopher who needed an indirect stratagem to correct a tyrannical king. This work is generally considered an estates satire. However, Raymond D. Di Lorenzo, on the basis of this scene, argues it should be considered a Fürstenspiegel (“The Collection Form and the Art of Memory in the Libellus super Ludo Schachorum of Jacobus de Cessolis,” Medieval Studies 34 [1973]: 206-9).

  38. Sovereignty, 529.

  39. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings, 106-12. See also Lawton, “Dullness,” who reads the situation somewhat differently (776-77).

  40. Of course there was a powerful cultural precedent for this position in Langland's begging persona in Piers Plowman.

  41. Terry Eagleton, “Text, Ideology, Realism,” in Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978, ed. Edward Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 153.

  42. Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century English Poetic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), 110-15.

  43. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, 34.

  44. See J.-Th. Welter, L'exemplum dans la littérature religieuse et didactique du Moyen Age (Paris: Occitania, 1927), 14-15.

  45. On the class significance of the preaching campaigns, see Barbara Rosenswein and Lester K. Little, “Social Meaning in the Monastic and Mendicant Spiritualities,” Past and Present 63 (1974): 18-32.

  46. Policraticus 4.3.

  47. Policraticus 8.14, 2. Cited and discussed in Peter von Moos, “The Use of Exempla in the Policraticus of John of Salisbury,” in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 227-28.

  48. John Gower, Confessio Amantis 2917-3021, 3295-3332.

  49. This essay grew from an MLA talk to its present length in large part because of the possibilities others saw in it. I would like to thank Winthrop Wetherbee, Charles Blyth, and Seth Lerer both for their helpful comments and for their bibliographical suggestions. I would also particularly like to thank Lee Patterson, whose extensive commentary in the later stages of the essay's preparation greatly strengthened it.

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