Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/339

 named Joan Skelton, believed to be the poet's mother, was fined 3l. 6s. 8d. for an unspecified offence. Skelton was no conventional courtier, and from the first avowed his contempt for the insincerities of court life. His plain speaking may account for a temporary fall from favour. Among his early poems of note was one entitled ‘The Bowge of Court’ (i.e. the ‘bouche’ of court, or the right to rations at the king's table), in which seven sins incident to the atmosphere of the court were depicted allegorically. Signs are not wanting that Skelton owed many hints for this poem to Alexander Barclay's version of Sebastian Brandt's ‘Narren-Schiff,’ short extracts from which he paraphrased in prose in his ‘Boke of Three Fooles’ (Works, i. 199 seq.;, Literary Relations of England and Germany, pp. 350 seq.). But, despite Skelton's frankness, Henry VII fully recognised his abilities, and marked his appreciation of his poetic skill by bestowing on him a dress, apparently of white and green, on which was embroidered, in letters of silk and gold, the word ‘Calliope’ (Works, ed. Dyce, i. 197–8).

In 1504–5 the university of Cambridge again granted to Skelton the rank of laureate, with permission to wear the dress given him by the king. Some doubt rests on the frequently repeated statement that Skelton was officially nominated poet-laureate not only at the universities, but at the court either by Henry VII or by his son, the poet's pupil. Skelton described himself repeatedly both as poet laureate and as ‘regius orator.’ The historian Carte is said to have sent to the Abbé du Resnel, author of ‘Recherches sur les Poètes Couronnez’ (1736), a copy of a patent dated the fifth year of Henry VIII's reign (1513–14), in which Skelton was described as poet laureate of the king. No known official record of the date mentions the office. It seems to have been in any case a titular and honorary dignity.

Meanwhile, in 1498, Skelton was admitted to holy orders, with a title from the Abbey of St. Mary of Graces near the Tower of London. In 1504, as ‘Master John Skelton, laureat, parson of Diss in Norfolk,’ he witnessed a parishioner's will. It is doubtful if he were often in residence at the rectory at Diss, but he apparently held the benefice till his death. Although his absence from London was only occasional, he was no longer in constant attendance at the court, and henceforth his verse took a wider range. Not till he was instituted to his rectory does he appear to have adopted (possibly from the French) the irregular metre of short rhyming lines which is chiefly identified with his name. He first employed it in a playful ‘Boke of Phylyp Sparowe,’ in which Jane Scrope, a pupil of the Black Nuns at Carrow, near Norwich, laments in half-burlesque fashion the slaughter of a pet sparrow by a cat. The poem immediately won popularity. The nursery rhyme ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ is possibly an adaptation of Skelton's account of the sparrow's funeral. The whole topic may have been suggested by Catullus's famous dirge on a sparrow's death (‘Luctus in morte passeris’). ‘Ware the Hauke’ was a savage attack on ‘a lewde curate and parson benefyced’ who went hawking in Skelton's church at Diss, and in an extant ‘epitaph of two knaves,’ written partly in Latin and partly in English, Skelton scurrilously assailed the memory of two of his parishioners. To this ‘epitaph’ was appended the statement that it was copied out by the curate of Trumpington on 5 Jan. 1517, the sole foundation for the suggestion that Skelton was himself beneficed at Trumpington. He speaks of himself as for many years a welcome visitor at the well-ordered college of the Bonhommes at Ashridge, near Berkhampstead (cf., i. 419). But there is no reason to contest Wood's statement that ‘at Diss and in the diocese Skelton was esteemed more fit for the stage than the pew or pulpit.’ Many stories were current of the irregularity of Skelton's life in Norfolk and elsewhere, and of his buffoonery as a preacher. It seems undoubted that he was called to account by Richard Nix, the bishop of Norwich, for living at Diss in concubinage with a woman by whom he had many children. It was said that when his parishioners complained to the bishop that he was father of a boy recently born in his house, he confessed the fact in the pulpit next Sunday, and, exhibiting the naked child to the congregation, asked them what fault they had to find with the infant, who, he declared, was ‘as fair as is the best of all yours.’ The charge was brought, he complained, through the hostility of the Dominicans, with whom he was always out of sympathy. Towards the end of his life he stated that he was lawfully married to the woman with whom he lived, but that he had been too cowardly to plead the circumstance in his defence.

An uncontrollable satiric temper is the chief characteristic of Skelton's poetry, and the self-indulgent clergy and laity alike came incessantly under the lash of his biting verse. But his royal patrons were only displeased when they themselves were the objects of his satire. No less than four poems directed ‘against Garnesche,’ i.e. Sir