TO A.D. 1422.]

JAMES I. OF SCOTLAND.

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upon his voyage to France, whither he was being sent for education. In the following year King Robert died, and the boy of twelve became King James I.; but the Duke of Albany, aged sixty-seven, with a son, Murdoch, to leave in his place, was actually reigning sovereign of Scotland. Thus the boy-king, James I., received his education as a prisoner at the English court, and was a young man of about nineteen, with some genius as a poet and much energy of character, when Henry IV. died and bequeathed the care of him to his son Henry V. Henry V. was also counselled by his father to divert the attention of the English from domestic griefs by foreign war.

Before the death of Henry IV. in England, the northern districts of the Scottish Lowlands were, in 1411, threatened with a descent of Highland marauders in unexampled force, under Donald, the Lord of the Isles. There was a hasty gathering of defenders under Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, who checked the advance of the Highlanders at the Battle of Harlaw. Poems were written on this battle; Scottish schoolboys took sides, and played at it. Harlaw remained the name of a tune in the beginning of the seventeenth century.

6. During the reign of Henry V. (1413-1422), James I. of Scotland remained prisoner at the English court; well educated, trained in English laws and customs, and to be released when further bound by marriage with a lady of the royal family of England. Nature assisted Henry's policy, for a true affection sprang up between King James and the Lady Jane Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset, niece to King Henry IV., and first cousin to Henry V. The love was celebrated in a poem known as The King's Quair, that is, "King's Little Book," from the old French quayer or cayer, modern French cahier. This is a graceful piece of court poetry, inspired by love and a study of Chaucer, and written in Chaucer's own seven-lined stanza, which long remained a favourite with his successors. It has been called rhyme royal, because this particular disciple used it. The "King's Quair" is in six cantos. It begins with (1) the poet in his bed at midnight reading Boëthius, thinking of the wheel of fortune, and likening his own life to a ship among black rocks with empty sail; proceeds (2) to tell of his capture in boyhood, his listening from his prison window to the love-songs of the birds, his wonder what love is, till looking down he saw walking under his tower, newly come to make her morning orisons, the lady whose thrall he became. When she was gone

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he lamented, till at evening he lay with his head against a stone, half sleeping, half in swoon with sorrow. Then (3) a dazzling light seemed to come in at the window whereat he leant, and a voice said, "I bring thee comfort and heal; be not afraid." The light went out, and he rose through sphere and sphere to Venus, with her allegorical court, and made his plaint to her. She sent him to Minerva. He went then (4) to Minerva, who bade him base his love on virtue, be true, and meek, and steadfast in his thought, doing fit service to his lady in word and work, and so abide his time. The poet declared in three stanzas that his love was pure as his desire was great.

"Desire,' quod she, 'I nyl it not deny,

So thou it ground and set in Christin wise.''

Then at the bidding of Minerva the poet went (5) to Fortune, whose dwelling is, of course, allegorically described. Fortune placed him on her wheel, bade him take heed, and took him by the ear 66 so earnestly that therewithal I woke." The next and last canto (6) tells how the poet rose from his uneasy sleep and went to the window, where a white turtle-dove, the bird of Venus, alighted on his hand, and turning to him showed him in her bill a fair branch of red gilly-flowers with their green stalks, which had written in gold on every leaf a message of glad comfort to the lover. King James I. ended his poem with a strain of true love, thanked the prison wall from which he had looked forth and leaned, and rejoiced in the unfading flower of his love. An epilogue, or excusation of the author," represents James, king though he be, acknowledging his "masters" in three poets, whose royalty was more than the inheritance of worldly rank, Gower and Chaucer, and next to these John Lydgate, who, when the young king wrote his poem, was first in repute among men of the generation after Chaucer.

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7. John Lydgate was born not later than 1370, in Suffolk, at the village of Lydgate, six or seven miles from Newmarket. In the Benedictine Monastery of Bury St. Edmunds he was ordained subdeacon in 1389, deacon in 1393, and priest in 1397. After studying at Oxford, Paris, and Padua, he opened a school of rhetoric at his monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, where Dan (that is Dominus) John Lydgate, the Monk of Bury, became a famous teacher of literature and the art of versifying. He was well read in ancient lore, mathematician also and astronomer as well as orator and poet; a bright, pleasant, and earnest man,

TO A.D. 1422.]

LYDGATE.

OCCLEVE.

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who wrote clear fluent verse in any style then reputable, but who was most apt at the telling of such moral stories as his public liked. Sometimes he was as prolix, and he always was as musical, as the old romancers who had been satirised by Chaucer in Sir Thopas; but he preferred to take his heroes and heroines out of the Martyrology, and he could write pleasantly to order for the library of any monastery the legend of its patron saint. Since he wrote so much (there are not less than 250 works bearing his name), and almost always as a story-teller, he found many readers, and his rhyming supplied some of the favourite tales of his time. He turned into smooth English verse the tales of Troy and Thebes. He elevated into an English poem that best of the Latin works of Boccaccio which tells and moralises tales of the mutations of affairs of men from Adam downward. These were his three chief works; but they were written in the reign of Henry VI. Lydgate wrote for Henry V. the “Life of our Lady;" he sang the tale of St. Alban, the English protomartyr, of his own St. Edmund, and of many a saint more. He could catch the strain of popular song, and satirize the licking up of money which leaves the poor man hopeless of justice in his London Lickpenny, whereof the measure is enlivened with the street-cries of his time. He could write morality in the old court allegorical style; he could kneel at the foot of the Cross and offer to his God the sacrifice of a true outburst of such song as there was in him. John Lydgate was not a poet of great genius, but he was a man with music in his life. He was full of a harmony of something more than words, not more diffuse than his age liked him to be, and, therefore, with good reason, popular and honoured among English readers in the fifteenth century.

8. Thomas Occleve, the other chief poet of the generation after Chaucer, was of the same age as Lydgate, and, like Lydgate, about thirty years old when Chaucer died. He was a Londoner, and knew Chaucer; evidently he refers to a personal relation between them when he speaks of himself as Chaucer's disciple. In his earlier years he lived in the Strand, at Chester's Inn, one of the buildings pulled down for the site of Somerset House. He says that his life was ill regulated in his youth, but says this in a poem designed for moral counsel to young men-La Male Regle de T. Hoccleve—of which the purpose doubtless led to a half-artistic exaggeration of self-censure. We know Occleve tolerably well through his chief poem, for the long original

introduction to his version of the De Regimine Principum, or "Governail of Princes" (ch. iv. § 43), consists wholly of moral reflections on the manners of his time, interspersed with references to his own position in a government office as clerk of the Privy Seal. He was married, had a household to provide for, and could not get his salary paid, or an annuity for life of twenty marks which had been nominally granted him. Therefore he took a melancholy morning walk and met an old man, who asked what was his trouble. Was it love, was it care of abundance, was it care of poverty, was it heresy?—and here six stanzas are given to a recollection of the burning of John Badby, at which Henry V., then prince, showed his humanity. When Badby was brought to the stake, and a barrel was prepared in which to burn him, the prince spoke to him kindly and urged recantation. Badby, remaining firm, was put into the barrel, and the burning fuel was heaped round it. The prince, moved by his cries of agony, caused the fuel to be cleared from about him, and again, when he was half dead, spoke to him, offering to procure pardon and even a pension. Badby still was firm; the prince, with some anger, ordered the fuel to be heaped round him again, and he was burned to ashes as a hopeless heretic. When the old man had preached upon the sin of heresy, Occleve answered that this was not his trouble. The old man was pleased, and urged next that his counsel was not to be despised for his poor habit; this text giving occasion for much moral satire on extravagance of costume in Henry V.'s time. Then the moralist turned from his poverty to his age, and found occasion to touch on the riotous excesses of the young. Finally he got from the poet a full account of the cause of his trouble. A lively dialogue followed on that, giving occasion, as that was taken throughout, for earnest words upon all evils of the time, from the self-seeking churchmen to the length of side sleeves. The old man's advice was that Occleve should write to the prince something in English, but "write to him no thing that sowneth to vice,” and show himself to be a man who deserved payment of arrears of salary. In obedience to this counsel, he translated for Henry V. the book "De Regimine Principum," digested into practical counsel, not without reminder of the unpaid annuity, and towards the end with deprecation of the wars between the Kings of France and England, and an invocation of peace for the land. "Let Christian kings," he says,

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war only on the enemies of Christ."

Were they the men accused of heresy? Occleve-earnest

TO A.D. 1422.]

THE LOLLARDS.

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and liberal in many things, and in this lighter poem, written in English and in Chaucer's stanza, seeking to find out the wrong and get it undone, with as much earnestness as Gower in his "Vox Clamantis," while he pointed to the corruption of the clergy-was, like Gower, an orthodox maintainer of Church doctrine. We find, therefore, that he assented to the new endeavour to save as it was thought many from the everlasting fire by giving some to be burnt publicly in this world.

9. In the second year of Henry V., in 1414, a new law passed against the Lollards, which ordained that they should forfeit all the lands they had in fee-simple, and all their goods and chattels, to the king. The same Act decreed that whatsoever they were that should read the Scriptures in their mother tongue, they should forfeit "land, catel, lif, and godes from their heyres for ever, and so be condempned for heretykes to God, enemies to the crowne, and most errant traitors to the lande."

On Christmas morning, in 1417, Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, a brave knight of unblemished life, who held the tenets of Wiclif, and had opened his doors at Cowling Castle to the persecuted teachers of the Lollards, was hung up by the middle in an iron chain upon a gallows in St. Giles's Fields, and burnt alive while thus suspended. The last words heard from him were praise of God, into whose hands he resigned his soul.

Chichele was then primate, violent as Arundel in vindictive dread of Lollard attacks on the Church temporalities. It was he who led his clergy when they urged the ready King Henry V., who was twenty-five years old and had a military genius, to follow his father's counsel, and divert attention of the people from domestic needs by foreign war. The war was based upon unjust claims of dominion over France; claims which the English primate and his party declared to be just and lawful.

Henry V., although essentially a soldier and intemperate in war, was temperate in life, well taught, and had respect for scholars. His ambassador in Spain in 1422 was William Lindwood, an Oxford divinity professor, who wrote the Constitutions of the Archbishops of Canterbury, from Langton to Chichele. Lindwood was made Bishop of St. Davids in 1434, and died in 1446. He had been preceded in his bishopric by an astronomer, named Rocleve, who had been among the friends of Henry V., and to whom the king gave that see. But most closely attached to Henry V. was the most famous English theologian of his day, Thomas Netter, of Saffron Walden, in