SOURCE: Gaudet, Paul. “William Baldwin and the ‘Silence’ of His Last Years.” Notes and Queries 25 (October 1978): 417-20.

[In the following essay, Gaudet speculates on what happened to Baldwin after he disappeared from public view and ceased to write.]

William Baldwin was a man of diverse interests and occupations, and one of the most productive and experimental writers in England from 1547 to 1564. In his lifetime he was scholar, printer, writer, theatrical jack-of-all-trades, and perhaps schoolmaster. In his writings, Baldwin was an active sampler of various literary forms. His dedicatory verse for a work on physiology is probably the first sonnet published in English.¹ His Treatise of Morall Phylosophie, a collection of moral commonplaces from the classical philosophers, was one of the most frequently printed books in English during the second half of the sixteenth century.² He became the first poetic translator of “The Song of Songs” in England when, in 1549, he composed and printed The Canticles or Balades of Salomon, a work remarkable for its precocious experimentation with some twenty-five verse forms. In addition, he wrote a well-developed prose satire, Beware the Cat, a long allegorical poem, The Funeralles of King Edward the Sixt, at least two non-extant plays for presentation at Court, and supervised and contributed to the collaborative Myrroure for Magistrates.³

What we know of Baldwin indicates a vital career which comes to an abrupt halt with the printing of the revised Treatise in 1564.⁴ It is curious that such an active and diversified figure suddenly disappeared from public view and that such a prolific writer suddenly ceased to write. It is also curious that to date we have had no clear evidence to explain why.

There are two lines of response to the problem of Baldwin's last years. The traditional view, that Baldwin entered the ministry in 1559, is the more substantial of the alternatives. Thomas Churchyard is responsible for two references to Baldwin as a minister in the 1587 edition of the Myrroure. In the new prose link which introduces her history, Jane Shore speaks of “One Baldwine a Minister and a Preacher”; and the prose introduction to the tragedy of Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey begins “As Baldwine indeede being a Minister”.⁵ Anthony Wood claims that after leaving Oxford Baldwin “became a Schoolmaster and a Minister, and a Writer of divers Books”.⁶ This is probably the William Baldwin who was ordained a deacon by Archbishop Grindal in 1559, became Vicar of Tortington in Sussex, and on July 3, 1561, was appointed Rector of St. Michael le Querne in Cheapside.⁷ What strengthens the identification of Baldwin the author and Baldwin the deacon is the date of ordination, 1559. This coincides with Baldwin's claim in the 1563 edition of the Myrroure that he was called to “an other trade of lyfe” in “the fyrst yeare of the raygne of this our most noble and vertuous Queene”.⁸ Further, the assumption of pastoral duties is consistent with the clear strain of moral comment and encouragement which pervades Baldwin's major works. The ministry would have given him the opportunity to combine his theoretical knowledge of ethical wisdom with practical implementation, a fusion which Baldwin thought essential for the humanistic social amelioration which he had been espousing in print.

By December 20, 1563, Baldwin had either died, adopted another charge, or relinquished pastoral duties entirely, for on that date he was succeeded by a Baptist Willoughby.⁹ Eveline Feasey opts for Baldwin's death and his burial in St. Michael le Querne which was consumed in the Fire of London, although she has no evidence other than Baldwin's literary silence. Anthony Wood was uncertain about the author's later years:

As for Baldewyn he lived, as 'tis said, some years after Qu. Eliz. came to the Crown, but when he died it appears not.

A printed marginal note accompanying Wood's biographical summary suggests that Baldwin flourished through 1564 at least.¹⁰

There is other contemporary evidence, rather more tenuous, which associates Baldwin with the Inns of Court. In a letter to Sir Thomas Cawerden, dated December 24, 1555, Baldwin mentioned that certain Inn members were interested in producing his morality play, Love and Lyve. Jasper Heywood in his preface to The Second Tragedie of Seneca referred to the currency of Baldwin's fame at the Inns of Court:

There heare thou shalt a great reporte
          of Baldwyns worthie name,
Whose Myrrour dothe of Magistrates,
          proclayme eternall fame.(11)

Although these references do not establish Baldwin's actual enrolment in the society of lawyers, the records of the Middle Temple show that a William Baldwin was admitted to residence on May 20, 1557 and that his legal career continued to 1577, at which time he still maintained his chambers in the Temple.¹² There is no indication that this Baldwin is the one mentioned by Heywood; nor does Lily B. Campbell state that the William Baldwin of the Middle Temple is William Baldwin of the Myrroure, although her unqualified presentation seems to imply this. It is more likely that William Baldwin, the author, was not a lawyer, since the 1563 dedication to the Myrroure has established 1559 as the earliest date for Baldwin's change of vocation, some two years after the Middle Temple entry.

Arthur Freeman has provided the latest discussion of Baldwin's career beyond 1560. On the basis of four printed remarks about Baldwin, he asserts that Baldwin was alive in 1586-87, that he was still a minister, and that he had abandoned literature. Thomas Churchyard made two vituperative allusions to Baldwin in The First Part of Churchyard's Chips (1575) and in the introductory prose link to the tale of Jane Shore which appeared for the first time in the 1587 Myrroure. As Freeman notes, these references seem to imply that Baldwin was alive to be criticized and that he had stopped writing in favour of an “inactive laureatship”.¹³

The possibility that Baldwin lived well into the 1580s seems to be further supported by a passage in the anonymous Legend of Mary, Queen of Scots. The ghost of the dead Queen is appealing to Baldwin to resume writing so that the public memory of her might be revived:

Baldwyn awake, thie penn hath slept to longe;
Ferris is dead; state cares staie Sackvill'e ease.

Mary's spirit has chosen Baldwin because he was the medium in the Myrroure, but she also seems to posit a distinction about the three names mentioned. George Ferrers died in 1579 and is therefore unable to write the tragedy; and Sackville's political responsibilities preclude the use of his services. That leaves only Baldwin:

But Baldwyn since thou haue the course begone
To register the plaints that Princes make,
Whose restles life a haples race hathe runne,
As fittest theame thie worthie witt coulde take;
I praye thee once againe thie penn awake,
And sitt thee downe in mournfull blacke to write,
The ruthfull haps that on a wretche did lighte.(14)

The inference seems to be that Baldwin was alive, but for some unexplained reason had ceased to write when this poem was composed, sometime after 8 February 1586, the date of Mary's execution, and before 10 July 1601, the general date of the manuscript source.

To accept Freeman's later date for Baldwin's death is to leave unanswered the question why Baldwin abandoned writing during the twenty or so remaining years of his life and why there is no record of his ministry after 1563. It is unlikely that Baldwin would have simply turned away from writing, since it was much more than a pastime for him. In spite of their formal variety, his works display a consistent integrity and a strong vocational thrust. Whether he was observing the immoral follies of his day in Beware the Cat and the Funeralles, objecting in his preface to the Canticles to the vogue of “baudy balades of lecherous loue” that had been imported from the Continent, or admonishing his readers to shun the vices which they could find reflected in the Myrroure, he was intent on a literature of ethical instruction. At the centre of these descriptive works, which only implicitly set forth standards of ethical behaviour, is A Treatise of Morall Phylosophie, his first major work. It is here that he enunciated in prescriptive terms his firm commitment to a moral wisdom which is lived. It is this work alone which Baldwin repeatedly saw through the press and twice revised substantially to protect its humanist concept and form from being obscured by the rival editions of Thomas Palfreyman.¹⁵ If Baldwin remained alive after 1564, it is difficult to understand why he should have suddenly left off the dispute with Palfreyman which seems to have been so important to him.

If we are to accept Feasey's date of 1563 for Baldwin's death, we must first account for Freeman's argument. There is no direct explanation for the passage in the Legend. However, the fourth contemporary reference to Baldwin, which Freeman cites incompletely, contradicts the other evidence. There is a strong indication in Cardinal Wolsey's introduction, also by Churchyard, that Baldwin is dead by 1587:

As Baldwine indeede being a Minister, had bene most fit to set forth the life of a Cardinall and Byshop (for causes belonging to his knowledge and ministrey) so to encourage a writer now aliue to play the part of a Pasquill … I thought it necessary in a kinde of beneuolence and curtesy of minde, to bestow some credit on that person.¹⁶

Baldwin's fitness to tell the tale of a cleric is mentioned in the past tense, “had bene most fit”, not in the present tense; and there is a clear distinction between Baldwin and “a writer now aliue”, a point of contrast which would not have made sense had Baldwin still been living. This textual evidence at least puts an equivocal cast to the other references by Churchyard and to the comment in the Legend.

If, as Freeman agrees, Baldwin the author and Baldwin the minister are synonymous, then Feasey's conjectured date of 1563 for Baldwin's death was apparently correct. Two previously unmentioned entries in the Churchwarden's Accounts of St. Michael le Querne indicate that the parson died before 1 November 1563. And there is no indication that Baldwin had left his charge before this date. The Accounts, which deal with receipts and payments for a one-year period from the Feast of All Saints, 1562, record two exchanges of money for the parson's knell. The first entry is under Receits:

Rs for the psons knyll—iij^s iiij^d

while the second entry is a payment from the Churchwardens to the sexton:

Item pd to y^e sexton for the psons knyll—iiij^d17

This document offers the only clear evidence to date which can explain why Baptist Willoughby was appointed Rector in Baldwin's place on 20 December 1563 and why no new or revised work by Baldwin appeared in print after the 1564 edition of the Treatise.¹⁸ Were it not for Baldwin's death, it is unlikely that he would have ceased his strongly characteristic experiments with moral education through the use of diverse literary forms. It is even more unlikely, if Baldwin had been alive in 1567, that Richard Tottel would have allowed Palfreyman's third revision of the Treatise and that Baldwin would have let it stand unanswered.¹⁹

Notes

1. Baldwin's sonnet appears in Christopher Langton, A Very Brefe Treatise Ordrely Declaring the Principal Partes of Phisick (Edward Whitchurch, April 1547), sig. *1^v. Wyatt and Surrey, at least, had written sonnets well before 1547, but I have been unable to find in print a sonnet in the vernacular which predates Baldwin's.

2. From 1548 to 1600 there were sixteen editions of the Treatise. This total reached twenty-four by 1651.

3. For accounts of Baldwin's life and works, see W. F. Trench, “William Baldwin”, Modern Quarterly of Language and Literature, ii (1898-99), 259-67; Eveline I. Feasey, “William Baldwin”, M.L.R., xx (1925), 407-18; Lily B. Campbell, ed., The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge, 1938), 21-25.

4. Arthur Freeman, “William Baldwin: The Last Years”, Notes and Queries, ccvi (August 1961), 300, erroneously states that Baldwin's literary career ended in 1561.

5. Campbell, 372 and 495.

6. Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (1691-92), sig. I, col. 114.

7. The ordination list appears in John Strype, The History of the Life and Acts of the Most Reverend Father in God, Edmund Grindal, the First Bishop of London (London, 1710), sig. L. The pastoral references are in Rev. George Hennessy, Novum Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense, or London Diocesan Succession from the Earliest Time to the Year 1898 (1898), p. clxvii, n. v266, and 436.

8. Campbell, 66, n. 64-69.

9. Hennessy, 436.

10. The note reads: “Clar.[uit] 1564” (sig. I, col. 114).

11. For the text of the letter to Cawerden, see Albert Feuillerat, ed., Documents Relating to the Revels at Court in the Time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary (Louvain, 1914), 215. See also H. de Vocht, ed., Jasper Heywood and His Translations of Seneca's Troas, Thyestes and Hercules Furens (Louvain, 1913), 102.

12. Campbell, 24, n. 2.

13. Freeman, 301.

14. In Freeman, 301.

15. The revised editions of 1555 and 1564 are a direct response to editions of [1553-54?] and 1557 prepared by another editor, Thomas Palfreyman, and issued by a rival printer, Richard Tottel. Palfreyman borrowed much of Baldwin's material without acknowledgment, discarded the prefatory matter and discursive chapters, thus indicating his insensitivity to Baldwin's original concept, and established his own structure based on a wholesale rearrangement of Baldwin's category headings and on a free transposition of sayings from chapter to chapter. In the controversy which followed, Baldwin insistently restated his humanist intent and refined the work's structure as a vehicle of that purpose. This led to the compromise edition of 1564, supervised by Baldwin and printed by Tottel.

16. Campbell, 495. Freeman, 300, quotes only “Baldwine … Byshop”.

17. St. Michael le Querne, Churchwardens' Accounts, 1515-1604, Guildhall Library, MS. 2895/1, fol. 177^r and 179^v. The heading on fol. 177^r reads:

    Thaccovnts of Iohn Browne and Nahū Doryng/Churchwardeyns concernyng all the Receits & payments/Rs and payde from the ffeaste of all Sayntes 1562 vnto/the ffeaste of all Sayntes. 1563, made and geven by the[m].

18. It is impossible on the basis of current information to say exactly when Baldwin died, but the autumn of 1563 is a reasonable conjecture. Baldwin had to have time to prepare new material for the second edition of the Myrroure (1563) and to undertake a very substantial reworking of the Treatise for Richard Tottel. This edition was eventually issued on 1 December 1564. The frequent incidence of printer's errors in relation to the rather careful printing of the other Baldwin editions suggests that Baldwin did not personally supervise the printing of this edition. Also, one can only assume that St. Michael le Querne would have been left without a Rector for as short a time as possible.

19. Palfreyman had self-righteously and adamantly defended his authorial role in the Treatise on the title page and in the preface of the 1557 edition. However, at the instigation of his printer, Tottel, Palfreyman did make certain concessions which restored the work to the status of a treatise, even though they failed to realize the humanist spirit of the original. It is interesting that the partially conciliatory note of the 1557 edition seems to have originated with Tottel and not with Palfreyman, especially since Tottel assumed publication of the fifth and last edition prepared for the press by Baldwin. Presumably, Tottel was uneasy about the “editorial” controversy between Baldwin and Palfreyman. By seeking the authority of the original author for a compromise edition, Tottel could forestall further recriminations and, at the same time, establish his printer's rights to all subsequent editions of the Treatise. The fact that Palfreyman, not Baldwin, revised the 1567 edition for Tottel is another indicator that Baldwin was no longer alive to complain about Palfreyman's inept meddling.