Part 2 (1/2)
Thou might haue brought one and set by our village.
CORNIX.
What man I might not for lacke of cariage.
To cary mine owne selfe was all that euer I might, And sometime for ease my sach.e.l.l made I light.”
ECLOGUE I.
Returning to England, after some years of residence abroad, with his mind broadened and strengthened by foreign travel, and by the study of the best authors, modern as well as ancient, Barclay entered the church, the only career then open to a man of his training. With intellect, accomplishments, and energy possessed by few, his progress to distinction and power ought to have been easy and rapid, but it turned out quite otherwise. The road to eminence lay by the ”backstairs,” the atmosphere of which he could not endure. The ways of courtiers--falsehood, flattery, and fawning--he detested, and worse, he said so, wherefore his learning, wit and eloquence found but small reward. To his freedom of speech, his unsparing exposure and denunciation of corruption and vice in the Court and the Church, as well as among the people generally, must undoubtedly be attributed the failure to obtain that high promotion his talents deserved, and would otherwise have met with. The policy, not always a successful one in the end, of ignoring an inconvenient display of talent, appears to have been fully carried out in the instance of Barclay.
His first preferment appears to have been in the shape of a chaplains.h.i.+p in the sanctuary for piety and learning founded at Saint Mary Otery in the County of Devon, by Grandison, Bishop of Exeter; and to have come from Thomas Cornish, Suffragan Bishop of Bath and Wells under the t.i.tle of the Bishop of Tyne, ”meorum primitias laborum qui in lucem eruperunt,” to whom, doubtless out of grat.i.tude for his first appointment, he dedicated ”The s.h.i.+p of Fools.” Cornish, amongst the many other good things he enjoyed, held, according to Dugdale, from 1490 to 1511, the post of warden of the College of S. Mary Otery, where Barclay no doubt had formed that regard and respect for him which is so strongly expressed in the dedication.
A very eulogistic notice of ”My Mayster Kyrkham,” in the chapter ”Of the extorcion of Knyghtis,” (s.h.i.+p of Fools,) has misled biographers, who were ignorant of Cornish's connection with S. Mary Otery, to imagine that Barclay's use of ”Capella.n.u.s humilimus” in his dedication was merely a polite expression, and that Kyrkham, of whom he styles himself, ”His true seruytour his chaplayne and bedeman” was his actual ecclesiastical superior. The following is the whole pa.s.sage:--
”Good offycers ar good and commendable And manly knyghtes that lyue in rightwysenes But they that do nat ar worthy of a bable Syns by theyr pryde pore people they oppres My mayster Kyrkhan for his perfyte mekenes And supportacion of men in pouertye Out of my shyp shall worthely be fre
I flater nat I am his true seruytour His chaplayne and his bede man whyle my lyfe shall endure Requyrynge G.o.d to exalt hym to honour And of his Prynces fauour to be sure For as I haue sayd I knowe no creature More manly rightwyse wyse discrete and sad But thoughe he be good, yet other ar als bad.”
That this Kyrkham was a knight and not an ecclesiastic is so plainly apparent as to need no argument. An investigation into Devons.h.i.+re history affords the interesting information that among the ancient families of that county there was one of this name, of great antiquity and repute, now no longer existent, of which the most eminent member was a certain Sir John Kirkham, whose popularity is evinced by his having been twice created High Sheriff of the County, in the years 1507 and 1523. (Prince, Worthies of Devon; Izacke, Antiquities of Exeter.)
That this was the Kirkham above alluded to, there can be no reasonable doubt, and in view of the expression ”My mayster Kyrkham,” it may be surmised that Barclay had the honour of being appointed by this worthy gentleman to the office of Sheriff's or private Chaplain or to some similar position of confidence, by which he gained the poet's respect and grat.i.tude. The whole allusion, however, might, without straining be regarded as a merely complimentary one. The tone of the pa.s.sage affords at any rate a very pleasing glimpse of the mutual regard entertained by the poet and his Devons.h.i.+re neighbours.
After the eulogy of Kyrkham ending with ”Yet other ar als bad,” the poet goes on immediately to give the picture of a character of the opposite description, making the only severe personal reference in his whole writings, for with all his unsparing exposure of wrong-doing, he carefully, wisely, honourably avoided personality. A certain Mansell of Otery is gibbeted as a terror to evil doers in a way which would form a sufficient ground for an action for libel in these degenerate days.--s.h.i.+p, II. 82.
”Mansell of Otery for powlynge of the pore Were nat his great wombe, here sholde haue an ore
But for his body is so great and corporate And so many burdens his brode backe doth charge If his great burthen cause hym to come to late Yet shall the knaue be Captayne of a barge Where as ar bawdes and so sayle out at large About our shyp to spye about for prayes For therupon hath he lyued all his dayes.”
It ought however to be mentioned that no such name as Mansell appears in the Devons.h.i.+re histories, and it may therefore be fict.i.tious.
The ignorance and reckless living of the clergy, one of the chief objects of his animadversion, receive also local ill.u.s.tration:
”For if one can flater, and beare a Hauke on his fist, He shalbe made parson of Honington or Clist.”
A good humoured reference to the Secondaries of the College is the only other streak of local colouring we have detected in the s.h.i.+p, except the pa.s.sage in praise of his friend and colleague Bishop, quoted at p. liii.
”Softe, fooles, softe, a little slacke your pace, Till I haue s.p.a.ce you to order by degree, I haue eyght neyghbours, that first shall haue a place Within this my s.h.i.+p, for they most worthy be, They may their learning receyue costles and free, Their walles ab.u.t.ting and ioyning to the scholes; Nothing they can, yet nought will they learne nor see, Therfore shall they guide this our s.h.i.+p of fooles.”
In the comfort, quiet, and seclusion of the pleasant Devons.h.i.+re retreat, the ”s.h.i.+p” was translated in the year 1508, when he would be about thirty-two, ”by Alexander Barclay Preste; and at that tyme chaplen in the sayde College,” whence it may be inferred that he left Devon, either in that year or the year following, when the ”s.h.i.+p” was published, probably proceeding to London for the purpose of seeing it through the press.
Whether he returned to Devons.h.i.+re we do not know; probably not, for his patron and friend Cornish resigned the wardens.h.i.+p of St Mary Otery in 1511, and in two years after died, so that Barclay's ties and hopes in the West were at an end. At any rate we next hear of him in monastic orders, a monk of the order of S. Benedict, in the famous monastery of Ely, where, as is evident from internal proof, the Eclogues were written and where likewise, as appears from the t.i.tle, was translated ”The mirrour of good maners,” at the desire of Syr Giles Alington, Knight.
It is about this period of his life, probably the period of the full bloom of his popularity, that the quiet life of the poet and priest was interrupted by the recognition of his eminence in the highest quarters, and by a request for his aid in maintaining the honour of the country on an occasion to which the eyes of all Europe were then directed. In a letter of Sir Nicholas Vaux, busied with the preparations for the meeting of Henry VIII., and Francis I., called the Field of the Cloth of Gold, to Wolsey, of date 10th April 1520, he begs the cardinal to ”send to them ... Maistre Barkleye, the Black Monke and Poete, to devise histoires and convenient raisons to florisshe the buildings and banquet house withal” (Rolls Calendars of Letters and Papers, Henry VIII., III. pt. 1.). No doubt it was also thought that this would be an excellent opportunity for the eulogist of the Defender of the Faith to again take up the lyre to sing the glories of his royal master, but no effort of his muse on the subject of this great chivalric pageant has descended to us if any were ever penned.
Probably after this employment he did not return to Ely; with his position or surroundings there he does not seem to have been altogether satisfied (”there many a thing is wrong,” see p. lxix.); and afterwards, though in the matter of date we are somewhat puzzled by the allusion of Bulleyn, an Ely man, to his Franciscan habit, he a.s.sumed the habit of the Franciscans at Canterbury, ('Bale MS. Sloan, f. 68,') to which change we may owe, if it be really Barclay's, ”The life of St Thomas of Canterbury.”
Autumn had now come to the poet, but fruit had failed him. The advance of age and his failure to obtain a suitable position in the Church began gradually to weigh upon his spirits. The bright hopes with which he had started in the flush of youth, the position he was to obtain, the influence he was to wield, and the work he was to do personally, and by his writings, in the field of moral and social reformation were all in sad contrast with the actualities around. He had never risen from the ranks, the army was in a state of disorganisation, almost of mutiny, and the enemy was more bold, unscrupulous, and numerous than ever. It is scarcely to be wondered at that, though not past fifty, he felt prematurely aged, that his youthful enthusiasm which had carried him on bravely in many an attempt to instruct and benefit his fellows at length forsook him and left him a prey to that weakness of body, and that hopelessness of spirit to which he so pathetically alludes in the Prologue to the Mirror of good Manners. All his best work, all the work which has survived to our day, was executed before this date. But the pen was too familiar to his hand to be allowed to drop.
His biographers tell us ”that when years came on he spent his time mostly in pious matters, and in reading and writing histories of the Saints.” A goodly picture of a well-spent old age. The harness of youth he had no longer the spirit and strength to don, the garments of age he gathered resignedly and gracefully about him.
On the violent dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, when their inmates, the good and bad, the men of wisdom and the ”fools,” were alike cast adrift upon a rock-bound and stormy coast, the value of the patronage which his literary and personal popularity had brought him, was put to the test, and in the end successfully, though after considerable, but perhaps not to be wondered at, delay. His great patrons, the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Kent, Bishop Cornish, and probably also Sir Giles Alington, were all dead, and he had to rely on newer and necessarily weaker ties. But after waiting, till probably somewhat dispirited, fortune smiled at last. Two handsome livings were presented to him in the same year, both of which he apparently held at the same time, the vicarage of Much Badew in Ess.e.x, by the presentation of Mr John Pascal, to which he was inst.i.tuted on February 7th, 1546, holding it (according to the Lansdowne MS. (980 f. 101), in the British Museum) till his death; and the vicarage of S. Mathew at Wokey, in Somerset, on March 30th of the same year. Wood dignifies him with the degree of doctor of divinity at the time of his presentation to these preferments.
That he seems to have accepted quietly the gradual progress of the reformed religion during the reign of Edward VI., has been a cause of wonder to some. It would certainly have been astonis.h.i.+ng had one who was so unsparing in his exposure of the flagrant abuses of the Romish Church done otherwise.