The Ship of Fools, Volume 1-2 by Sebastian Brant (novels in english TXT) 📕

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 chaplainship 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 title of the

Bishop of Tyne, “meorum primitias laborum qui in lucem eruperunt,” to whom,

doubtless out of gratitude for his first appointment, he dedicated “The

Ship 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,” (Ship of Fools,) has misled biographers, who were

ignorant of Cornish’s connection with S. Mary Otery, to imagine that

Barclay’s use of “Capellanus 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 passage:—

 

“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 God 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 Devonshire 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

gratitude. The whole allusion, however, might, without straining be

regarded as a merely complimentary one. The tone of the passage affords at

any rate a very pleasing glimpse of the mutual regard entertained by the

poet and his Devonshire 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.—Ship, 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 Devonshire histories, and it may therefore be fictitious.

 

The ignorance and reckless living of the clergy, one of the chief objects

of his animadversion, receive also local illustration:

 

“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 Ship, except the

passage in praise of his friend and colleague Bishop, quoted at p. liii.

 

“Softe, fooles, softe, a little slacke your pace,

Till I haue space you to order by degree,

I haue eyght neyghbours, that first shall haue a place

Within this my ship, for they most worthy be,

They may their learning receyue costles and free,

Their walles abutting and ioyning to the scholes;

Nothing they can, yet nought will they learne nor see,

Therfore shall they guide this our ship of fooles.”

 

In the comfort, quiet, and seclusion of the pleasant Devonshire retreat,

the “Ship” 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 “Ship” was published, probably

proceeding to London for the purpose of seeing it through the press.

Whether he returned to Devonshire we do not know; probably not, for his

patron and friend Cornish resigned the wardenship 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 title, 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 assumed 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 Essex, by the

presentation of Mr John Pascal, to which he was instituted 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 astonishing had one who was so unsparing

in his exposure of the flagrant abuses of the Romish Church done otherwise.

Though personally disinclined to radical changes his writings amply show

his deep dissatisfaction with things as they were. This renders the more

improbable the