This story of Richard’s unquiet body indicates the difficulties the new Lancastrian dynasty had solidifying its position. Interestingly enough, the new court pressed into service Chaucer’s legacy following the poet’s death (possibly murder). The Lancasters needed strategies to legitimate their rule. Perhaps Chaucer’s prior royal connections made him the right choice for the Lancastrian court’s desire for connection with its predecessor; perhaps personalizing an English poetic sensibility in terms of progeny—“Father Chaucer”—could by analogy solidify the progeny of Lancastrian succession; perhaps the first two scions of the usurping Lancastrian line, Henry IV and Henry V, presciently figured that national poetic identity could soothe rebellious spirits or combat them with an ideological effectiveness newly suitable for written vernacular English’s growing promulgation. Fifteenth-century followers of Chaucer, Lancastrian apologists to the core, proclaimed Chaucer’s preeminence as England’s poet. It is not at all surprising that the poets who took up Chaucer’s mantle were Lancastrian supporters, allied to a political power structure, albeit an embattled one.
Thomas Hoccleve
The first of these Chaucerian disciples, Thomas Hoccleve (1368-1426), who was personally acquainted with Chaucer, began to frame the elder poet’s work, if not with tropes of overt English nationalism, then with covert national sentiment woven in his praise of Chaucer’s English writing. He calls Chaucer “England’s treasure and riches,” but more importantly he deems Chaucer his poetic father. He chose the metaphor of poetic paternity for his relationship to Chaucer’s work because paternity and legitimacy shaped every aspect of Lancastrian rule and propaganda. Chaucer’s Englishness, forged in linguistic, geographical, and genealogical terms, remains to this day the foundation of his iconic status.
Chaucer may have considered Troilus and Criseyde his poetic genius’s greatest accomplishment, yet even the manuscript record—copies of Chaucer’s works that predate the emergence of the printing press in the late fifteenth century—provide some 80 copies of Canterbury Tales but only some 20 of Troilus and Criseyde, whole or part. In the Ellesmere manuscript, the most deluxe of fifteenth-century manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, we find a portrait of Chaucer affixed in the margin of the tale the pilgrim Chaucer tells—the prose Tale of Melibee. Although we know that the portrait was produced after Chaucer’s death, it does include seemingly identifying features— forked beard, slight pudginess, hooded eyes. These same features also appear in another manuscript portrait of Chaucer from the early fifteenth century. London, British Library, Harley MS 4866, folio 88, includes an image of Chaucer very much like the Ellesmere’s—some have argued for tracing and copying work between the two manuscripts. But the Harley manuscript’s text is not by Chaucer: it is Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, wherein Hoc-cleve notes Chaucer’s paternity of Hoccleve’s poetic vocation. The torso portrait points at lines about this “fresh likeness,” calling it a copy of Chaucer’s image in Hoccleve’s mind. It is reproduced on the page, the lines aver, as a way for readers to find Chaucer in their own “thoughts and mind.” These two images in two fifteenth-century manuscripts, one of Chaucer’s work and one of the work of one of his fans, are our initial literal “icons” of Chaucer. Surprisingly, his portraiture remained remarkably consistent through the centuries in beard, eyes, and size—until we come to A Knight’s Tale, with its rangy blond Chaucer. Hoccleve’s own desire for preferment may have added to his adoration of Chaucer, whose courtly successes far outweighed Hoccleve’s own. But, more importantly, we detect a will to make Chaucer into England’s poetic icon within scant years of his death.
John Lydgate
Another of Chaucer’s Lancastrian promoters, John Lydgate (ca. 1370-ca. 1451), provides no portrait, but his paeans to Chaucer as “flower of English poetry” sound much like Hoccleve’s and reverberate throughout Lydgate’s voluminous corpus. Lydgate was a monk, but one who was supported by, and given to pleasing, noble patrons. Unstinting in his praise of Chaucer, he accords him the title “master” and reckons as immeasurable his debt to Chaucer as England’s poet. He considers Chaucer “peerless,” lauding his ability to made rude English beautiful: this judgment continued to be expressed throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Lydgate was a friend to Chaucer’s son Thomas (ca. 1367-1434), and the monk’s poetic ambitions perhaps got a boost from Thomas’s court and political connections: Thomas Chaucer served as chief butler of England and also Speaker of the House. Geoffrey Chaucer, like William Turner, could never claim nobility, but his son Thomas certainly rose up the food chain. Nor did the Chaucer family’s ascent stop there: Thomas’s daughter Alice (1404-1475) married William de la Pole, first duke of Suffolk.
Here, then, are the beginnings of Chaucer’s iconic status. Hoccleve and Lydgate recognize him for his stately poetry as well as his political connections— connections upon which Lydgate, for one, traded. Their invocation of their poetic father and master demonstrates the almost instant nature of Chaucer’s celebrity and the inextricable intertwining of his poetry with politics. Chaucer as icon served a legitimating purpose for a power structure newly cognizant of English literature’s nation-building potential—the poet’s inscrutability and irony notwithstanding.
Lydgate and Hoccleve’s praise of their master-father Chaucer and their shared English identity boosted Lancastrian egos and intertwined politics and poetry. But conflict and threat to Lancastrian hegemony followed the death of Henry V. Chaucer was used as icon not only by Lancastrian sympathizers but by the opposing Yorkist side in the bloody Wars of the Roses, England’s internecine conflict between the supporters of Lancastrian claims to the throne and those who supported the claims of the duke of York, one of John of Gaunt’s rival brothers, whose progeny contested the legitimacy of the original Lancastrian Henry. The divided loyalties that followed for aristocratic families well intermarried between Yorks and Lancasters, whose political alliances shifted with time and advantage, are not limited to polite arm-twisting. It has been estimated that, by the end of the fifteenth century, half of England’s male nobility had succumbed to battle, duel, or judicial execution. The end of the Wars of the Roses also saw the end of Chaucer’s literal progeny. Great-granddaughter Alice’s son John de la Pole, second duke of Suffolk (1442-1492) married the sister of Richard III (1452-1485, r. 1483-85), making Alice’s son brother-in-law to the eventual king. But John had been earlier affianced, as a child, to Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509). That arrangement was annulled in 1453, but Margaret went on to marry Edmund Tudor and gave birth, after Edmund’s death (ending a very brief marriage), to Henry Tudor, eventually King Henry VII (1457-1509, r. 1485-1509), scion of the regnant Tudors following Richard III’s defeat at the battle of Bosworth field. Ironically, John de la Pole, Chaucer’s great-great-grandson, had been named heir to the ill-fated Richard III. Neither Richard III nor John de la Pole ended up having children; Chaucer’s bloodline ran out at the same time that the new Tudor dynasty, with Henry VII as its progenitor, was minted. Richard III, like his distant relative Richard II, has been the subject of revisionist history to rehabilitate his reputation and kingly success (see the chapter on Richard III). But, in light of the vagaries of royal power-grabs epitomized by the Wars of the Roses and Chaucer’s iconic role in these conflicts, Sir John Harington’s epigraph seems as apt today as it was when printed in 1615:
Treason never prospers: what’s the reason?
If treason prosper, none dare call it treason.
World History
