George Cavendish is one of the great forgotten figures of mid-Tudor poetry. His so-called Metrical Visions is a long visionary poem containing a sequence of tragic complaints spoken by the phantasmal apparitions of a series of mid-Tudor personages from Cardinal Wolsey (d. 1530) to Lady Jane Grey (d. 1554).110 Cavendish probably wrote the main sequence of the poem between 1552 and 1554, when he started work on his Life of Wolsey, and he wrote out a fair copy of the two works, together with a final epitaph on Mary, in a single manuscript (BL, Egerton MS 2402), dated 24 June 1558. Since then, the fortunes of the two works could hardly have been more different. The Life was copied many times in the early modern period; it supplied the Elizabethan chroniclers with material for their histories; and it found print as early as 1641. But the Metrical Visions had to wait until 1825 before it was printed, and hardly anybody— perhaps nobody—seems to have consulted the manuscript before that date. Why have the Metrical Visions been overlooked for so long? They surely provide one of the most fascinating texts for scholars and critics interested in ‘poetry and politics’, and easy and reliable access to the text was made possible as long ago as 1980 by A. G. S. Edwards. Yet this chapter may be the first to give serious attention to the Visions as well as to the relatively familiar Life ofWolsey.
It is especially surprising that the current revival of interest in A Mirror for Magistrates has not led to the rediscovery of the Metrical Visions. After all, many scholars are attracted to the Mirror because its tragedies, especially those which appear to have been written around 1554 for the first version of the text, known as the ‘Memorial’, seem to offer an allegorical commentary on recent historical events. So, for example, Scott Lucas (2003) has recently deciphered George Ferrers’s tragedy of the fifteenth-century Duke of Somerset, Edward Beaufort, as a covert allusion to the fall of his sixteenth-century counterpart: Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and Lord Protector in the early years of the reign of Edward VI. Lucas is particularly interested in the way Ferrers’s poem may seek to explain to Somerset’s Protestant supporters how the ‘good duke’ had fallen because that was his destiny, rather than because God wished to punish him for his complicity in the political murder of his brother Thomas, the Lord Admiral. All this, he ingeniously argues, is set forth allegorically in Somerset’s tragedy in the Mirror (see also Lucas, Chapter 21 in this volume). But the Tudor Somerset openly laments his rise and fall in the Metrical Visions, as does his brother—indeed, as do all the other phantasmal speakers who tell their stories to Cavendish in his vision.
It is quite possible that the team of poets working on the ‘Memorial’ were at least aware of the existence of the Metrical Visions and the basic form of the poem. The 1559 and 1563 editions of the Mirror were ‘sponsored’ by the bookish minor nobleman Henry, Lord Stafford, who was a neighbour, friend, and colleague of George’s younger brother William Cavendish (A. Anderson 1963: 233). If the connection goes back to the 1554 ‘Memorial’, as seems to me very likely, given Stafford’s almost proprietorial interest in the Mirror, then the probability of influence is even stronger (his friendship with William Cavendish dates to the 1540s). The compiler of the Mirror, William Baldwin, on the other hand, tells his readers that there was not ‘any alive that meddled with like argument’ (Mirror 1938: 69)—but this coy denial may hide a modicum of knowledge of the very similar work that Cavendish was finishing off even as the ‘Memorial’ team sat down to their own project in 1554.
One feels that a great resource for historically minded critics of Tudor literature lies unappreciated between the pages of Edwards’s edition of Cavendish’s poem. However, my aim in this chapter is not to illustrate how the Metrical Visions open up a rich field of topical allusion to mid-Tudor political history, but, rather, to explore certain elements of the formal structure of Cavendish’s poem in the light of the English de casibus tradition. The main current of this literary genre—or, rather, genre complex— was transmitted to Tudor readers and writers by John Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes, a verse ‘translation’ (via a French intermediary) of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium. Cavendish is likely to have read the poem in the most recent edition, which was printed by Richard Pynson in 1527, when Cavendish was still in the service of Cardinal Wolsey. He certainly knew the poem well: ‘Nearly two hundred lines in the Metrical Visions are borrowed from Lydgate’ (A. Edwards 1980b: 10). And he also used his material intelligently.
For example, Cavendish’s tragedies of the two Seymour brothers borrow largely from the tragedies of Thyestes and Atreus in the first book of the Fall.111 The fratricidal context makes the comparison obvious enough; but Cavendish’s poetical instincts allow him to appreciate the special quality of this episode in Lydgate’s vast poem. Very few of the phantasms who appear to Boccaccio, or ‘Bochas’, as he sits among his books in his study, are permitted to tell their own stories; Bochas prefers to tell them all himself—which means that he merely rewrites the stories as he finds them written in his histories and chronicles. The three or four who do speak are betrayed by their own accounts as partial and unreliable witnesses, and roundly berated by Bochas for their mendacity. But for the modern reader of Tudor literature, de casibus tragedy is marked precisely by the fact that it takes the form of a complaint spoken in the first person, as in A Mirror for Magistrates. It was Cavendish who introduced this innovation, not Baldwin and his co-writers.
Moreover, the Mirror, for all its excellent qualities, is less true to the de casibus tradition than the Visions. Although the title of Cavendish’s poem is not his own, but the invention of its early nineteenth-century editor, it very neatly captures the two elements that matter most in our appreciation of the poem. Sadly, Cavendish does not score highly as a versifier, and the little criticism of his poetry that does exist—all negative, nearly all worthless (see A. Edwards 1980b: 11-12)—has focused on this deficiency (it is motivated by same spirit of trivial and tiresome critical malice that makes jest of the fourteener and poulters’ measure). But as a visionary poet, Cavendish was a long way ahead of William Baldwin and his colleagues on the original Marian version of A Mirror for Magistrates. Baldwin, the compiler, abandons all pretence to the visionary framework that supported the earlier examples of de casibus tragedy from Boccaccio onwards. There is only one dream in the entire original sequence, the rest of the tragedies being performed by their composers as a kind of charade in the 1559 version, or simply read out by Baldwin in the additions made in the 1563 version. But when Thomas Sackville attempted to take over the project in the early 1560s, and when John Higgins added new poems to the sequence in 1574, both men reverted to the visionary framework in which a solitary narrator is privileged to ‘see’—and hear—what really happened to the fallen princes of Anglo-British history.
Cavendish’s contribution to de casibus tragedy, then, was to defy Bochas and his impatiently authoritarian attitude towards the act of individual memorial witness. For Bochas, to tell one’s own story is tantamount to lying; but Cavendish listens patiently and sympathetically to all those who come and make their moan to him. After Thyestes and Atreus have spoken to Bochas, he tires of their endless dispute, and ‘Put up his pen, and wrote not more a word, | Of their fury, ne of their false discord’ (Lydgate 1924-7: 22v; 1. 4212-14).112 But Cavendish records the complaints of Thomas and Edward Seymour with equanimity, allowing them to deny being guilty of the crimes for which they were sentenced and executed—he even agrees that Somerset was abused ‘most shamefully with cruelty’ (line 1749). He piously concludes: ‘God’s works, which be known to none, | For his judgements be secret, till they be past and gone’ (lines 1751-2).
Despite his privileged access to the voices of the recently deceased, then, Cavendish does not claim to penetrate the secret world of divine providence. He sees God’s hand at work in the lives of the Seymours, but he does not know exactly what it means. Thus, though he may as a visionary poet see things that other men have not been permitted to see, he does not present himself as a fully fledged vates, or ‘prophet’. Prophetic poetry was a crucial complex of genres in the Edwardian period, when the Roman Catholic Cavendish, former servant of a despised cardinal, was writing his tragedies.113 Generally speaking, Protestant prophet-poets presented the rise of their own Church as a fulfilment of the book of Revelation, as the final instalment of universal history. Cavendish was hardly likely to have time for such a view; but he does not reject prophecy outright, and it is my purpose in the pages that follow to give an account of his work—both the Metrical Visions and the slightly later Life ofWolsey— in the light of a particular prophecy, uttered by Wolsey on his deathbed, to which only Cavendish and one or two others were privy. In the momentous final episode of his modest public career, on 6 December 1530, Cavendish denied all knowledge of this prophecy before Henry VIII and his council. But later, as Wolsey’s prophecy seemed to be coming true, his conscience urged him to write—and this is what made him a poet.
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