by John Gardner
O prince, desyrë to be honourable,
Cherish thy folk and hate extorcioun!
Suffre nothing that may be reprevable
To thyn estat don in thy regioun.
Shew forth thy swerd of castigacioun,
Dred God, do law, lovë trouthe and worthinessë,
And wed thy folk agein to stedfastnessë.
Or one might mention Chaucer’s complaint against tyranny in the Legend of Good Women, apparently introduced for the sole reason that the work was to be read at the royal palace at Eitham or Sheen.18
In short, Professor Patch’s defense of Chaucer’s concern about social justice, his observation that Chaucer knows a good deal about the lower classes, goes nowhere near far enough. Whereas Langland rants at the evils of the age, threatening that soon God will take things into His own hands, and whereas Gower warns that society is sick and appeals to Richard to take some action—just what action he cannot say, except that the lower classes need “discipline”—Chaucer writes careful, philosophical poems in which, very often, a central concern is political theory. In early and middle-period poems like The Former Age, written sometime in the late seventies or early eighties, he takes positions not far from those of men like John Ball (except that Chaucer is never rabid), namely, that originally men were all made equal in Adam’s day and during the Golden Age, and that pride has wrecked order. In the late, so-called marriage group of the Canterbury Tales, he deals far more subtly and cautiously with the problem of rights against order and degree. Against the authoritarian position of the Man of Law, whose tale urges that the subject be “constant” in any adversity, women willingly submitting to men, vassals willingly submitting to lords, and so on, whatever the anguish they endure, he sets the tale of the Wife of Bath, who knows by personal experience the “wo that is in mariage” if the husband is a tyrant.
The debate which follows, down through and including the Franklin’s Tale, is much too complex to be fairly summed up by any brief discussion (the subject is one we’ll be forced to return to), but one can say without much oversimplification that the dim-witted but good-hearted Franklin comes to what is close to Chaucer’s own position: all classes must be ruled by “patience.” To both lords and vassals, husbands and wives, the Franklin’s advice is, “Lerneth [learn] to suffre [put up with things], or ellës, so moot I goon [loosely, “sure as day”], / Ye shul it lernë, wher so ye wole or noon.”
Chaucer of course hated the Peasants’ Revolt. He believed in degree, acceptance of duties, submission to authority, convinced to the soles of his feet that if authority became corrupt—as he knew it was during most of his life—it was not the business of peasants to correct things but the business of authority to correct itself. He hated peasants when they forgot what seemed to him their proper place, but in all other situations he liked them: he watched their antics, their sorrows and pleasures, with a perspicacious eye, and some while after their ferocious revolt, when his heart had calmed, he blamed not just the peasants but also, and even more strongly, the burgesses and lords for their tragic violation of what he saw as God’s right and proper system.
In fact, even in 1381 Chaucer may have had personal reasons for finding as much fault with lords as with peasants. Professor Williams has pointed out some curious facts about Chaucer’s fortunes in 1381-2. Gaunt’s power in government was badly shaken during the Peasants’ Revolt and in the months immediately following, and it remained shaky during his long absence in the north. His protector’s weaknesses may also have affected Chaucer. On June 19, 1381, just after the revolt, Chaucer sold his family home in London. On August 1, he asked for and received an advance of 6s.8d. ($80) on his annuity from the government. And he asked for and received a similar advance on November 16. In a record dated September 29, 1382, Chaucer and one John Hyde were paid for acting successively as controllers of the customs during the preceding year. Perhaps Chaucer was ill or incapacitated for a while in 1381, but that seems doubtful, since his absence on other occasions had never required the appointment of a new controller (he was usually given a deputy). It might be, again, that with John of Gaunt in political shadow, Chaucer voluntarily relinquished an office where, as a friend of Gaunt and as a man not closely allied with the faction of the collectors he supervised, he might be unsafe. Or it might be that Chaucer was removed by Gaunt’s enemies from an office that was not only lucrative to the controller but also an observation post from which a check could be made on where customs fees were going. Williams writes:
If Chaucer was removed because he was a friend of Gaunt’s, the enemies of Gaunt acted prematurely. Late in the year the Duke’s power seemed greater than ever. Not only was his candidate for Lord Mayor of London, John of Northampton, elected in the beginning of November, 1381, but the session of Parliament beginning about the same time saw Gaunt’s most powerful enemies forced to eat crow and beg his pardon for deserting him in the dark days of the Revolt. The following year, with Northampton as Mayor and Gaunt restored to his accustomed influence, Chaucer was reappointed to his controllerships (April 20 and May 8).19
Granted, we have no reason to believe that Brembre and company were Chaucer’s deadly enemies. But we may well believe that Chaucer was at this time as closely allied with Gaunt’s circle as with the circle of Richard’s most trusted advisers, and that Chaucer was affected by Gaunt’s eclipse. He may well have been glad to remove himself from what might easily turn out to be crossfire.
For a few years after Gaunt’s return to influence, Chaucer remained in London, living quietly up over Aldgate with his wife, for whom he frequently went down to the Exchequer to pick up her annuity check, and tended to his business at the customhouse. Richard was now happily married to Anne of Bohemia, so that Chaucer was no longer needed to work on marriage negotiations, and the peasants were temporarily quieted, so Chaucer was free to write poetry and pursue his studies. He translated Boethius’ Consolation and some of the short poems that work inspired, and he wrote and then endlessly tinkered over his tragicomic masterpiece Troilus and Criseyde, a poem in which one minor concern is the struggle of chivalric princes (Hector and Troilus) against parliament’s self-interest and ultimately tragic shortsightedness (in trading Criseyde for the traitor-to-be, Antenor).
During this period he wrote, besides, the House of Fame—his great burlesque of Dante and almost everything else, especially the idiotic self-importance of people who think reputation or place-in-history to be valuable (the magnates and Richard were now jockeying for power, as were all the courtiers in Richard’s court)—and he perhaps began thinking about the Legend of Good Women.20 When not writing he went over his collectors’ accounts, keeping the cheating to a minimum, let us hope, and possibly forcing the collectors to ingenious stratagems for fear of Gaunt, who might ask Chaucer for reports.
It was for the most part a peaceful time for Chaucer, or so it seems from this distance. Though the work was drudgery, he need not go to the office every day. Theoretically at least, he could put off his audits until a few weeks before the time he was required to turn them in, and if he was forced to work day and night sometimes to meet his deadlines, that was his own affair. As for any problems that might arise at the wharf, he could arrange to have someone like Richard Barrett cover for him. Barrett was an old-timer at the customhouse and a man in whom Chaucer had sufficient faith that he would later recommend him and promise to be responsible for him as his deputy.
When he did work at the office, he might sometimes step out to talk with loafing sailors waiting for their cargo to be unloaded and weighed, or he might watch and listen to the wool-quay carpenters at work. When he’d first taken office—by now that was nearly ten years ago—there had been three large houses down the length of the wharf, one for the wool custom (in the keeping of Barrett since October 1377), the second for the petty custom, the third used for storage and perhaps sometimes, lately, for the petty subsidy. The first house, and possibly the second as well, had a great dark tronage hall for the weigh
ing of goods, its heavy wooden walls lined with incoming woolsacks, each as hefty as a man, and bulky handtrucks and wagons—handles shiny from wear, wooden wheels worn crooked—and beside the iron scales, the large, shaped stones used for weighing. But in 1382-3 John Churchman had begun work on a new house on the quay, for the accommodation of merchants. It was originally planned as a tronage hall above cellars, with a countinghouse and small chamber for a latrine in the upper storey, but in 1383 the plan was expanded to include another storey with two chambers and a garret. That building was barely finished when in 1385 John Churchman began work restoring or replacing the house for the petty custom.
As we’ve said, Chaucer may have been the government official in charge of this work. He would later be sued by a John Churchman for debt—Churchman’s only recourse if the government refused to pay him. And besides his knowledge of the fourteenth-century building boom in Tuscany, Chaucer had seen, in his years as a servant to the crown, a fair amount of government construction. While the poet was in his household, Edward III had been constantly engaged in building—for instance, the round tower at Windsor, one of Edward’s triumphs, and the beautiful castle of Queensborough on the island of Sheppey, begun in 1361 as a gift for Queen Philippa. (There was a great deal more.) Chaucer must have watched with some attention, both then and now in the early eighties, since he would later be thought qualified to serve as clerk of the king’s works.
During this period, after 1382, Chaucer had more time for writing poetry—and for social climbing—than he had ever had before. Sometimes, in all probability, he would leave London for a few days, traveling north with Philippa to visit her sister Katherine or putting in an appearance at one of the king’s palaces, perhaps to read a poem. He was still associated with the royal court, as well as being a familiar presence in the court of Gaunt. In the last years of Edward III, after his appointment to the controllership, he continued to be styled Edward’s “esquire” in official papers, though he was not in regular attendance. And though we have no record of his having been called “esquire” during this period in Richard’s court—the records of the period are sketchy, however—we do have a record from 1380 about the Lombardy trip, in which Richard calls him “nostre bien ame Geffrey Chaucer,” and a record from 1385 in which his name is listed among the names of the king’s servants.
For all its tricky politics, Richard’s court was one in which Chaucer was at ease. Though his rank was not of the highest, he was a favorite there. Gentle Queen Anne, whom Chaucer had in all probability helped toward her happy marriage, had a great love of poetry, especially Chaucer’s, extraordinary at the time for its intelligent and sympathetic treatment of women; and there was no strong reason for an urbane, amusing poet to run foul of the court politicians surrounding the queen. Simon Burley, white-bearded and sagging of eye, was an old reactionary whose absolutist, divine-right theories and belief in stern discipline were probably a major influence on Richard’s policy,21 but Chaucer and Burley could get along and did so, well, for many years. They served on legal commissions together and had, of course, common acquaintances and interests. Burley was a great lover of books, and not just the saints’ lives which all knights read or anyway stared at for mortification, but poetry as well; and even if Burley’s opinions about books were narrow-minded and sometimes boringly pedantic, Chaucer was a man willing to listen to anybody, old or young, brilliant or dull, as the surviving comments of his friends and poetic disciples all show. There were perhaps some men in Richard’s court whom Chaucer must pretend to like more than he really did. There was—easily the worst of the lot—Richard’s young favorite Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, a stupid fop whom Richard advanced and coddled as Edward II had advanced and coddled Gaveston. De Vere hated Chaucer’s friend Gaunt and saw no reason to disguise his feelings. But all situations have disadvantages, and Oxford could be viewed as too inept to be really dangerous, even though he was undeniably difficult, forever plotting the murder of one great magnate or another (one of the magnates he repeatedly plotted to kill was John of Gaunt). Chaucer no doubt treated Oxford coolly, but he was in no position to make an enemy of a man so powerful.
As for Richard, whatever his faults he was the king. A handsome man with golden hair, overbearing at times (like an Oriental monarch, he liked men to grovel on the floor before him) but a generous patron, a man Geoffrey Chaucer could easily understand and sympathize with, even if he could not entirely agree with Richard’s policies. Admittedly, King Richard had not exactly fulfilled his early promise. No one knows precisely where he got his ideas on what kingship should be—perhaps before 1380 from old Guichard d’Angle, an unreconstructed admirer of Pedro the Cruel and of the Black Prince’s annihilation of Limoges (but no one held Guichard’s opinions against him; he had suffered much, and a man whose house has been struck by lightning is not a good judge of thunderstorms). Or the king may have received some of his ideas from Simon Burley, or Richard Abberbury, another apologist for tyrannical firmness. Or perhaps he got them from books on Roman law, or from one or more of the scholarly friars King Richard admired and had always at hand, as his father the Black Prince had done before him. (Chaucer’s ferocious though comic attacks on well-to-do friars in the Canterbury Tales had considerably more bite for his original audience than they have for us. When one recalls the jokes at the expense of friars by the democratic Wife of Bath, one wonders at Chaucer’s daring. He must have had in Richard’s court something of the immunity granted the traditional court Fool.)
But wherever he got his absolutist notions, Richard’s ideas on kingship were far from those of Gaunt, who favored a balance of the estates, and far from those Chaucer’s characters defend in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, and elsewhere. Given Richard’s genius—not as a military leader but as a plotter, political theorist, chess player, and manipulator—the king may have worked out much of his theory entirely by himself. His views had, of course, firm emotional grounding. May McKisack writes:
The effects of the coronation ceremony on an impressionable child of ten may well have been profound; and the king’s customary appearances at the opening of each parliament would have served to keep alive memories of a drama in which his had been a leading part. No doubt his mentors [Princess Joan, John of Gaunt, and others] tried to teach him that kingship implied responsibilities as well as privileges; but his whole environment in childhood and adolescence was such as to foster notions of himself as a unique personage; and such notions must have been strongly reinforced in 1381. Richard’s courage in the face of the rebel hosts is sufficient refutation of the calumny that he was by nature a coward or a weakling; but their astonishing readiness to follow him was heady flattery for his self-esteem. He alone, it seemed, could control them and it was for him alone to determine their fate.22
At Mile End, he’d watched the crowd of peasants go down on its knees, saying, “Welcome, King Richard! We wish for no other king but you.” He gave his pardon, as he would do again at Smithfield, saving the day when his advisers were helpless. Then, as if he were no king at all but some disobedient small boy, he was forced by those advisers to watch the humiliating betrayal of his promises—trials and executions of men to whom he had given his word. Never again would he be so open. More humiliations followed: councils controlling his every significant decision, parliament judging and frequently denying his every political suggestion. His grandfather, at fifteen, was running his own war; his father, at twenty, was hailed as the most brilliant soldier in all Europe. Richard became a solitary schemer, though one who could collect and make brilliant use of the best available advisers. He became a chess fanatic, a discerning art critic (one more mark of his independent mind), and a bearer of grudges whose most remarkable quality was that when he finally took his vengeance that vengeance was surprisingly moderate and controlled. He developed, in the first years Chaucer knew him as king, the tendencies of a classical neurotic—not of the psychopath most historians have thought him. His neurotic tendency showed
up in his compulsive, almost furious study of history, poring over old books, weighing, considering, theorizing, and in his intense veneration of his murdered great-grandfather, Edward II. Like his hero, Richard would be a pacifist—in which he was politically right, of course. With friends’ advice, he would choose as his wife Anne of Bohemia, aligning himself with the Pope and European peace. He would emulate Edward II in his scorn of parliament’s interference with his household, his favoritism, and his love of athletics; and he would see in his great-grandfather’s blunders a cunning and purpose old Edward II would have found amazing or, more likely, bewildering. Much of all this was not temperament but policy, which brought even Chaucer around at last. A supremely powerful king might well prove the only hope against the jockeying magnates, and the exoneration of Edward II might strengthen the position of the crown henceforth.
But the wise, balanced Chaucer cannot help having seen that Richard did have a tendency toward what was called in that day “melancholy.” It showed most plainly in the king’s occasional violent fits of temper and in emotionalism all but unexplainable except on a hypothesis that the king was drunk. The stories are probably exaggerations and in some cases have been shown to be lies, part of a plot by the usurper Henry IV and his fellow revolutionaries to make Richard seem, like Edward II, a homosexual and an incompetent, and like Queen Isabella, hopelessly insane. But the stories have probably at least a grain of truth in them, which is merely to say that Richard was capable of inexplicable behavior and terrifying rages. When Archbishop Courtenay ventured to remonstrate with the king on his choice of counsellors, Richard drew his sword and leaped forward to stab him through the heart, and when his faithful attendant Michael de la Pole, “the brains of the court party,” as McKisack says, intervened in Richard’s madness, Richard was prepared to fight Pole. Another time, when he heard the news that the English were about to take Gravelines, the king went galloping through the night from Daventry to Westminster, pausing only to change horses at St. Albans, and then, when he’d recovered from his ride, lost interest and did nothing. (There was nothing to be done.)