Anne Boleyn's Faith

(theanneboleynfiles.com)

In my last article, I looked at Anne’s role in the Reformation and today I continue the theme of religion by looking at Anne Boleyn’s personal faith and the clues and evidence which give us an idea of what she truly believed in her heart.

One of Anne Boleyn’s Book of Hours is on display at Hever Castle and it is in that book that we can see not only Anne’s signature but the inscription “le temps viendra“, “the time will come”, under an illumination of the Last Judgement. Eric Ives, in “The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn”, writes of how these words are an abbreviation of the proverb “a day will come that shall pay for all”, a precis of part of “The Ecclesiaste”, an illuminated manuscript produced for Anne, which says “the judgement of God shall be general and universal where as all things shall be discovered and nothing shall abide hidden, whether it be good or evil.” The fact that Anne wrote this inscription in her own Book of Hours shows that these words had real meaning to Anne and it was something that she was pondering deeply.

But before we look at the clues to Anne’s faith, let’s consider the people who had influence on her when she was growing up:-

Thomas Boleyn

Joanna Denny describes Anne Boleyn’s father, Thomas, as a “firm advocate of the New Religion” and writes of how he used his diplomatic missions to import heretical tracts into England. This was a dangerous thing to do as he could easily have been caught and condemned for heresy. Denny also writes of how he translated one of these heretical publications and dedicated it to Anne, an act which suggests that Anne was interested in these works.

In 1513, at around the age of 12, Thomas Boleyn sent Anne Boleyn to the continent to become one of Archduchess Margaret of Austria’s maids of honour. She stayed on the continent for nearly 9 years so it is important that we look at the people she spent time with, the people who may have influenced the teenage Anne and shaped her mind and her faith.

Archduchess Margaret of Austria

The Court of Margaret of Austria

The Habsburg court of Margaret of Austria at Mechelen in Brabant, in the Lowlands, was a sophisticated Renaissance court. Here, Anne Boleyn learned a multitude of skills and vast knowledge: the language of French, the tradition of courtly love, music, dance and culture. Eric Ives writes of how Flanders and its adjacent lands had, for a century, been the cultural heart of Europe, it must have been culture overload for Anne’s young mind! It is likely that Anne’s love of illuminated manuscripts came from her time with Margaret, who had a huge collection.
A Move to France

It is not known exactly when Anne Boleyn left the Lowlands for France. Her father, Thomas Boleyn, wrote to Margaret of Austria in 1514 asking for Anne to be released to go to France as a member of Mary Tudor’s entourage for her marriage to Louis XII of France, but a list in the French archives makes no mention of Anne in this group, only of her sister, Mary. Ives wonders if there was some delay with Thomas Boleyn’s message, or Margaret of Austria delayed sending Anne, and Anne was unable to get back to England in time to escort Mary Tudor from England to France and so met the group in Paris for Mary’s coronation on the 5th November 1514. What we do know is that in 1515 Anne Boleyn joined the household of Queen Claude, daughter of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, and wife of Francis I who became King on the death of Claude’s father.

Queen Claude of France (1499-1524) with her daughters

Queen Claude

Anne Boleyn was a member of Claude’s household for nearly seven years and although some historians like to make out that her time at the French court corrupted Anne they do not take into account the fact that Claude’s court was not as public as her husband’s and was actually sophisticated, cultural and chaste. Claude actually had strict moral codes for her household and Anne would have been expected to follow them and remain chaste and virtuous. It is at Claude’s Renaissance court that Anne would have had her mind further opened, not just to culture but to religion.

Eric Ives writes of how Anne may have met Renaissance giants like Leonardo da Vinci and how she may well have accompanied Claude and Louise of Savoy on their ceremonial journey to welcome Claude’s husband, the King, back from his victory at Marignano. This journey also took them to Lyons where they undertook a pilgrimage to Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, the location of the supposed tomb of Mary Magdalene – did Anne visit this tomb? Perhaps so, but we have no idea what Anne thought of this pilgrimage.

Renée, Duchess of Ferrara, as a girl

Renée of France

Renée of France was Queen Claude’s younger sister and we know from the way that she spoke affectionately of Anne Boleyn to Nicholas Throckmorton in the 1560s that she had great respect for Anne. She knew Anne through her sister Claude but also because Anne was her companion for a while. The interesting thing about Renée is that during her time in Ferrara (she was married to the Duke of Ferrara) she was arrested as a heretic. She was in regular correspondence with Protestants abroad and had also been known to have taken the Eucharist in a Protestant manner. The introduction of a special court of Inquisition at Ferrara led to many Protestants being executed but Renée escaped from any serious punishment when she recanted and received the Eucharist at mass.

The death of Renée’s husband allowed her to return to France in late 1559 and following the death of her great nephew, Francis II, she established Protestant worship at her estate at Morntargis and supported Protestants in the area by turning her castle into a refuge.
Marguerite d’Angoulême

Marguerite of Angoulême was Queen Consort of Navarre and sister-in-law to Claude of France, being the sister of Francis I. She was a famous Renaissance figure and is known for her patronage of the arts, her strong religious views and her religious poem “Le Miroir l’âme pécheresse” (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul), the same poem which Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth, translated as a gift for her stepmother, Catherine Parr. This poem is a mystical poem which combines evangelical protestant ideas with Marguerite’s idea of her relationship with God as a familial one, God as her brother, father or lover.

Marguerite d'Angoulême (Margaret of Navarre)

It is not known exactly what Anne’s relationship with Marguerite was. Marguerite was said to be close to Claude and Renée, who Anne served, and some even believe that Anne served Marguerite herself. What is clear is that Anne knew Marguerite intimately enough to write in 1535 “that her greatest wish, next to having a son, was to see you again” (quoted in Ives P33) and Ives also writes that in 1534 Anne had written to Marguerite about the 1532 meeting between Henry and Francis I, saying that although there had been “everything proceeding between both kings to the queen’s grace’s singular comfort, there was no one thing which her grace so much desired…as the want of the said queen of Navarre’s company, with whom to have conference, for the more causes than were meet to be expressed, her grace is most desirous.” This sounds like more than polite flattery, it sounds like Anne really missed Marguerite’s company. Anne also wrote to Marguerite in 1534 confiding that she was pregnant and so wanted to postpone a meeting between Henry and Francis until around April 1535.

Could Marguerite have influenced Anne’s faith? Possibly. What is clear is that Anne Boleyn spent her formative years, the years where we question what we believe in, surrounded by what Ives terms as “aristocratic women seeking spiritual fulfilment” and that must have had some effect on her, her outlook and her faith.
Anne Boleyn’s Personal Faith

So, here we have a woman who lived for many years in Renaissance Europe with women searching for spiritual fulfilment and who then moved back to England where, some would suggest, that she was the catalyst of the English Reformation, but what was her personal faith?
Le Temps Viendra

As I said earlier, Anne inscribed the phrase “le temps viendra“, “the time will come”,in her personal Book of Hours, along with an astrolabe and her signature. The phrase “the time will come” suggests that Anne is looking to the future and perhaps to a future of reformation and new ideas. The astrolabe, or armillary sphere, was a popular Renaissance symbol and can be seen in Renaissance paintings, such as Holbein’s “The Ambassadors”, and was used to symbolise time, wisdom, cultural excellence and knowledge. It is hard to understand what exactly Anne Boleyn meant by this inscription but it suggests that she was passionate about new ideas and knowledge, particularly in religion, seeing as she wrote it in her Book of Hours.

Although G W Bernard sees Anne’s faith as more political than personal and Ives writes:-

“Self-interest and ambition – which Anne had in plenty – each pointed to reform as the cause that would serve her best”

Ives also points out that “Anne’s evident interest in French reform cannot be dismissed as a posture taken up for the occasion.”

It seems that Anne’s passion for reform was real, not just a convenient, political move.
George Boleyn

We also have to consider another influence on Anne, that of her brother, George Boleyn, a man who was a zealous reformist and who “spoke the language of Zion” (Ives p278) at his execution on the 17th May 1536. Like his father, George used his diplomatic missions to France, as ambassador, to smuggle back to England reformist literature and he shared this literature with one of his best friends, his sister Anne.

How do we know this?

Because of the collection of French evangelical books which were found amongst George and Anne’s belongings when their possessions were seized after their executions and also because George presented Anne with manuscripts he’d transcribed from the works by Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples (“Les Epistres et Evangiles” and “L’Ecclesiaste”), dedicating them to her and signing them her “moost lovyng and frynddely brother”. If Anne had not been interested in such works then George would not have spent time working on these manuscripts and translating the commentary which was full of Lutheran ideology, such as having a living faith in Christ, rather than relying on ritual, and the idea of justification by faith alone.

Anne and George were bound by more than blood, they were also bound by their shared faith and ideology.
A True Faith

Anne Boleyn may have been ambitious but, as Ives says, “why should we not allow her genuine religious experience?”, why do we have to explain away her faith by blaming her actions on politics?

Yes, she had a lively court and a sexual magnetism; yes, she enjoyed luxuries and the good life, but does that mean that her faith was not true? No. Eric Ives writes:-

“It is, indeed, hard to deny Anne a personal faith. Apart from the Bible in which, significantly, we know she had an interest in Paul’s epistles, the works she read and collected are certainly redolent of a Christianity of commitment and not of routine observance.”

In the words of George Boleyn’s translation of Lefevre’s “Ecclesiaste”:-

“There is nothing better than by true faith to take Jesuchrist of our side for pledge, mediator, advocate and intercessor. For who that believeth in him and doth come with him to this judgment, shall not be confused” (quoted in Ives p280)

and, as Ives points out:-

“If this was Anne Boleyn’s experience of faith, then she was evangelical by conviction and not just policy.”

But what about her actions in the Tower, the way that she made an oath on the bread and wine and spent her last night praying before it?

This does not mean that Anne was a conservative Catholic deep down, nor does the sermon in which her almoner, John Skip, defended the value of the ceremonies and rituals of the church. The fact that Anne did not completely reject established religion and the rituals associated with it, does not mean that Anne’s reformist faith was not a true faith. As Ives explains, the writings that Anne read were not necessarily challenging the belief in the bodily presence of Christ in the consecrated host, they were challenging “the late medieval focus on the miraculous mechanism of the mass rather than its significance” and Skip’s famous sermon defending church rituals was not defending their sacred power but defending them as aids to memory:-

“holy water…to put us in remembrance that our sins be washed away by the sprinkling and shedding of Christ’s blood; holy bread [to remind us] that all we that have professed Christ’s faith be one body mystical and ought to be one in mind in spirit in Christ our head…”

In my last post, I also mentioned how G W Bernard uses Anne’s refusal of Tristram Revell’s translation of “Farrago Rerum Theologicarum” as evidence of her conservative ideology but Ives argues that:-

“Her attitude would be characteristic of all shades of English evangelical reform for at least a decade more: real spiritual experience, yes; the priority of faith, yes; access to the Bible, yes; reform of abuses and superstition, yes; but heretical views on the miracle of the altar, no.”

Anne was reformist but did not go as far as some on the continent, but she was not a closet conservative.
The Ambassadors – A Clue to Anne’s Lutheran Leanings?

In his biography of Anne Boleyn, “The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn”, Eric Ives ponders if Anne Boleyn actually commissioned Hans Holbein’s famous painting “The Ambassadors”. Anne was a patron of Holbein and had already commissioned “Mount Parnassus” and the fact that “The Ambassadors” must have been painted during the weeks when Anne was preparing for her coronation, combined with the fact that the “shepherd’s” or pillar dial in the painting shows the date of the 11th April, the exact date when the royal court was informed that Anne was queen, does imply that Anne commissioned this work too.

The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein

Like many of Holbein’s works, this painting of ambassadors Jean de Dinteville (a secular landowner) and Georges de Selve (a bishop) is rich in symbolism. As well as objects symbolising the seven liberal arts that were popular at the time – grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy – the painting also includes religious symbols, here are a few of them:-

* The lute with the broken string – a symbol of discord
* A case of flutes with one instrument missing – more discord
* A pair of dividers and an arithmetic book open at a page on division – more discord and division.
* A hymnal open to show the “Veni Creator Spiritus” (“Come Creator Spirit”) and the Ten Commandments – Ives points out that although these were “basic anthems of the Latin Church, Holbein shows them in a vernacular Lutheran version.
* Crucifix and set square – According to Ives, these symbols, along with the Lutheran vernacular and texts, “together express the conviction of evangelicals that the way to unity in the Church was a response to Christ by the Holy Spirit, leading to a life of everyday obedience to the commandments.

If Anne was indeed involved in commissioning this painting, it shows her interest in Lutheran ideology and her recognition of the religious divisions that were around her and which lay in the future.
Conclusion

It is impossible for us to know what was in Anne’s heart, but I think the evidence points towards her having a true faith rather than her using religion for political motives. The Catholic Church at the time was full of corruption, such as the sale of indulgences, and what is unclear is whether Anne was seeking to get rid of this corruption, while remaining in the Catholic Church, or whether her views were even more radical.

Anne Boleyn's Letter

Sire,
It belongs only to the august mind of a great king, to whom Nature has given a heart full of generosity towards the sex, to repay by favors so extraordinary an artless and short conversation with a girl. Inexhaustible as is the treasury of your majesty's bounties, I pray you to consider that it cannot be sufficient to your generosity; for, if you recompense so slight a conversation by gifts so great, what will you be able to do for those who are ready to consecrate their entire obedience to your desires? How great soever may be the bounties I have received, the joy that I feel in being loved by a king whom I adore, and to whom I would with pleasure make a sacrifice of my heart, if fortune had rendered it worthy of being offered to him, will ever be infinitely greater.
The warrant of maid of honor to the queen induces me to think that your majesty has some regard for me, since it gives me means of seeing you oftener, and of assuring you by my own lips (which I shall do on the first opportunity) that I am,
Your majesty's very obliged and very obedient servant, without any reserve,
Anne Bulen.

(here, Anne signs her surname as Bulen)

Personality of Anne Boleyn

A Renaissance woman who loved the New Learning and Arts
A highly intelligent woman who could hold her own in debates with her husband, Henry VIII
A woman of style – Her “Frenchness” made her stand out at the English court
A woman who was not a classical beauty or English rose, but someone who had sexual magnetism and made people’s heads turn
A passionate reformer – Someone who was interested in religious reform and the ideas coming from the continent and who hated the superstition that seemed to have taken root in the Church
A woman of faith – It is clear that Anne had a true personal faith
A hot-tempered and outspoken woman
A charitable woman who was concerned about poverty and education
An ambitious woman who loved the limelight
A woman ahead of her time
A loving mother who wanted her daughter close by her and to see her as often as she could
A stubborn woman – Her role of “Perseverance” was spot on
A woman who was not afraid to upset people and make enemies
A feisty woman who was not afraid to take risks and who lived life to the fullRead more: http://www.theanneboleynfiles.com/anne-boleyn-the-myths-and-bad-history/6046/#ixzz192YT3xr5

Anne Boleyn's Necklace

The “B” necklace was Anne Boleyn’s favourite piece of jewellery and can be seen in the few portraits of her that still exist today. It was her signature piece and was passed down to Elizabeth I, along with her “A” necklace and “AB” brooch.

The origins of the distinctive Anne Boleyn B necklace are not known, but it is thought that it may have been a gift from her father, Thomas Boleyn. Personalised jewellery, with initials on it, was very popular at the time and it is said that Henry VIII had a brooch with his initials on it.
Some say that Anne Boleyn wore her trademark necklace to cover a wen or mole on her neck, but there is no evidence of this and, like stories of her having three breasts and six fingers, it was probably a rumour spread by the Catholic Conservatives to fuel the story that she was a witch who cast a spell over Henry VIII.

The Anne Boleyn B necklace has become popular today with people who have admired it in “The Tudors” or on Betty Suarez in “Ugly Betty”. It is a beautiful necklace and will look good with an Anne Boleyn costume , t-shirt and jeans or a little black dress.
Our Anne Boleyn B necklace has been made by British jeweller, Steve Millingham, who has supplied pieces of jewellery for “The Tudors”, “The Other Boleyn Girl”, the West End production of “A Man For All Seasons”, Hampton Court Palace, The Tower of London, English Heritage, the National Trust and various museums. Steve’s Tudor jewellery has also been featured on special 500 Year Henry VIII Anniversary postage stamps.Read more: http://www.theanneboleynfiles.com/anne-boleyn-b-necklace/537/#ixzz192XsNNFo

Geoffrey Chaucer

GEOFFREY CHAUCER, English poet. The name Chaucer, a French form of the Latin calcearius, a shoemaker, is found in London and the eastern counties as early as the second half of the 13th century. Some of the London Chaucers lived in Cordwainer Street, in the shoemakers' quarter; several of them, however, were vintners, and among others the poet's father John, and probably also his grandfather Robert. Legal pleadings inform us that in December 1324 John Chaucer was not much over twelve years old, and that he was still unmarried in 1328, the year which used to be considered that of Geoffrey's birth. The poet was probably born from eight to twelve years later, since in 1386, when giving evidence in Sir Richard le Scrope's suit against Sir Robert Grosvenor as to the right to bear certain arms, he was set down as "del age de xl ans et plus, armeez par xxvij ans." At a later date, and probably at the time of the poet's birth, his father lived in Thames Street, and had to wife a certain Agnes, niece of Hamo de Compton, whom we may regard as Geoffrey Chaucer's mother.

In 1357 Geoffrey is found, apparently as a lad, in the service of Elizabeth, countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, entries in two leaves of her household accounts, accidentally preserved, showing that she paid in April, May and December various small sums for his clothing and expenses. In 1359, as we learn from his deposition in the Scrope suit, Chaucer went to the war in France. At some period of the campaign he was at "Retters," i.e. Rethel, near Reims, and subsequently had the ill luck to be taken prisoner. On the 1st of March 1360 the King [Edward III] contributed £16 to his ransom, and by a year or two later Chaucer must have entered the royal service, since on the 10th of June 1367 Edward granted him a pension of twenty marks for his past and future services. A pension of ten marks had been granted by the king the previous September to a Philippa Chaucer for services to the queen as one of her "domicellae" or "damoiselles," and it seems probable that at this date Chaucer was already married and this Philippa his wife, a conclusion which used to be resisted on the ground of allusions in his early poems to a hopeless love-affair, now reckoned part of his poetical outfit. Philippa is usually said to have been one of two daughters of a Sir Payne Roet, the other being Katherine, who after the death of her first husband, Sir Hugh de Swynford, in 1372, became governess to John of Gaunt's children, and subsequently his mistress and (in 1396) his wife. It is possible that Philippa was sister to Sir Hugh and sister-in-law to Katherine. In either case the marriage helps to account for the favour subsequently shown to Chaucer by John of Gaunt.




Chaucer in an initial from British
Library Lansdowne MS 851 fol. 2.
In the grant of his pension Chaucer is called "dilectus vallectus noster," our beloved yeoman; before the end of 1368 he had risen to be one of the king's esquires. In September of the following year John of Gaunt's wife, the duchess Blanche, died at the age of twenty-nine, and Chaucer wrote in her honour The Book of the Duchesse, a poem of 1334 lines in octosyllabic couplets, the first of his undoubtedly genuine works which can be connected with a definite date. In June 1370 he went abroad on the king's service, though on what errand, or whither it took him, is not known. He was back probably some time before Michaelmas, and seems to have remained in England till the 1st of December 1372, when he started, with an advance of 100 marks in his pocket, for Italy, as one of the three commissioners to treat with the Genoese as to an English port where they might have special facilities for trade. The accounts which he delivered on his return on the 23rd of May 1373 show that he had also visited Florence on the king's business, and he probably went also to Padua and there made the acquaintance of Petrarch.

In the second quarter of 1374 Chaucer lived in a whirl of prosperity. On the 23rd of April the king granted him a pitcher of wine daily, subsequently commuted for an annuity of 20 marks. From John of Gaunt, who in August 1372 had granted Philippa Chaucer £10 a year, he himself now received (June 13) a like annuity in reward for his own and his wife's services. On the 8th of June he was appointed Comptroller of the Custom and Subsidy of Wools, Hides and Woodfells and also of the Petty Customs of Wine in the Port of London. A month before this appointment, and probably in anticipation of it, he took (May 10, 1374) a lease for life from the city of London of the dwelling-house above the gate of Aldgate, and here he lived for the next twelve years. His own and his wife's income now amounted to over £60, the equivalent of upwards of £l000 in modern money. In the next two years large windfalls came to him in the form of two wardships of Kentish heirs, one of whom paid him £104, and a grant of £71,4s,6p; the value of some confiscated wool. In December 1376 he was sent abroad on the king's service in the retinue of Sir John Burley; in February 1377 he was sent to Paris and Montreuil in connexion probably with the peace negotiations between England and France, and at the end of April (after a reward of £20 for his good services) he was again despatched to France.

On the accession of Richard II Chaucer was confirmed in his offices and pensions. In January 1378 he seems to have been in France in connexion with a proposed marriage between Richard and the daughter of the French king; and on the 28th of May of the same year he was sent with Sir Edward de Berkeley to the lord of Milan and Sir John Hawkwood to treat for help in the king's wars, returning on the 19th of September. This was his last diplomatic journey, and the close of a period of his life generally considered to have been so unprolific of poetry that little beyond the Clerk's "Tale of Grisilde," one or two other of the stories afterwards included in the Canterbury Tales, and a few short poems, are attributed to it, though the poet's actual absences from England during the eight years amount to little more than eighteen months.

During the next twelve or fifteen years there is no question that Chaucer was constantly engaged in literary work, though for the first half of them he had no lack of official employment. Abundant favour was shown him by the new king. He was paid £22 as a reward for his later missions in Edward III's reign, and was allowed an annual gratuity of 10 marks in addition to his pay of £10 as comptroller of the customs of wool. In April 1382 a new comptrollership, that of the petty customs in the Port of London, was given him, and shortly after he was allowed to exercise it by deputy, a similar licence being given him in February 1385, at the instance of the earl of Oxford, as regards the comptrollership of wool.

In October 1385 Chaucer was made a justice of the peace for Kent. In February 1386 we catch a glimpse of his wife Philippa being admitted to the fraternity of Lincoln cathedral in the company of Henry, Earl of Derby (afterwards Henry IV), Sir Thomas de Swynford and other distinguished persons. In August 1386 he was elected one of the two knights of the shire for Kent, and with this dignity, though it was one not much appreciated in those days, his good fortune reached its climax. In December of the same year he was superseded in both his comptrollerships, almost certainly as a result of the absence of his patron, John of Gaunt, in Spain, and the supremacy of the Duke of Gloucester. In the following year the cessation of Philippa's pension suggests that she died between Midsummer and Michaelmas. In May 1388 Chaucer surrendered to the king his two pensions of 20 marks each, and they were re-granted at his request to one John Scalby. The transaction was unusual and probably points to a pressing need for ready money, nor for the next fourteen months do we know of any source of income possessed by Chaucer beyond his annuity of £10 from John of Gaunt.

In July 1389, after John of Gaunt had returned to England, and the king had taken the government into his own hands, Chaucer was appointed clerk of the works at various royal palaces at a salary of two shillings a day, or over £31 a year, worth upwards of £500 present value. To this post was subsequently added the charge of some repairs at St George's Chapel, Windsor. He was also made a commissioner to maintain the banks of the Thames between Woolwich and Greenwich, and was given by the Earl of March (grandson of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, his old patron) a sub-forestership at North Petherton, Devon, obviously a sinecure. While on the king's business, in September 1390, Chaucer was twice robbed by highwaymen, losing £20 of the king's money. In June 1391 he was superseded in his office of clerk of the works, and seems to have suffered another spell of misfortune, of which the first alleviation came in January 1393 when the king made him a present of £10.

In February 1394 he was granted a new pension of £20. It is possible, also, that about this time, or a little later, he was in the service of the Earl of Derby. In 1397 he received from King Richard a grant of a butt of wine yearly. For this he appears to have asked in terms that suggest poverty, and in May 1398 he obtained letters of protection against his creditors, a step perhaps rendered necessary by an action for debt taken against him earlier in the year. On the accession of Henry IV a new pension of 40 marks was conferred on Chaucer (13th of October 1399) and Richard II's grants were formally confirmed. Henry himself, however, was probably straitened for ready money, and no instalment of the new pension was paid during the few months of his reign that the poet lived. Nevertheless, on the strength of his expectations, on the 24th of December 1399 he leased a tenement in the garden of St Mary's Chapel, Westminster, and it was probably here that he died, on the 25th of the following October. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and his tomb became the nucleus of what is now known as Poets' Corner.

The portrait of Chaucer, which the affection of his disciple, Thomas Hoccleve, caused to be painted in a copy of the latter's Regement of Princes (now Harleian MS. 4866 in the British Museum), shows him an old man with white hair; he has a fresh complexion, grey eyes, a straight nose, a grey moustache and a small double-pointed beard. His dress and hood are black, and he carries in his hands a string of beads. We may imagine that it was thus that during the last months of his life he used to walk about the precincts of the Abbey.

Henry IV's promise of an additional pension was doubtless elicited by the Compleynt to his Purs, in the envoy to which Chaucer addresses him as the "conquerour of Brutes Albioun." Thus within the last year of his life the poet was still writing. Nevertheless, as early as 1393-1394, in lines to his friend Scogan, he had written as if his day for poetry were past, and it seems probable that his longer poems were all composed before this date. In the preceding fifteen — or, if another view be taken, twenty - years, his literary activity was very great, and with the aid of the lists of his works which he gives in the Legende of Good Women (lines 414-431), and the talk on the road which precedes the "Man of Law's Tale" (Canterbury Tales, B. 46-76), the order in which his main works were written can be traced with approximate certainty,1 while a few, both of these and of the minor poems, can be connected with definite dates.

The development of his genius has been attractively summed up as comprised in three stages, French, Italian and English, and there is a rough approximation to the truth in this formula, since his earliest poems are translated from the French or based on French models, and the two great works of his middle period are borrowed from the Italian, while his latest stories have no such obvious and direct originals and in their humour and freedom anticipate the typically English temper of Henry Fielding. But Chaucer's indebtedness to French poetry was no passing phase. For various reasons — a not very remote French origin of his own family may be one of them — he was in no way interested in older English literature or in the work of his English contemporaries, save possibly that of "the moral Gower." On the other hand he knew the Roman de la rose as modern English poets know Shakespeare, and the full extent of his debt to his French contemporaries, not merely in 1369, but in 1385 and in 1393 (the dates are approximate), is only gradually being discovered.

To be in touch throughout his life with the best French poets of the day was much for Chaucer. Even with their stimulus alone he might have developed no small part of his genius. But it was his great good fortune to add to this continuing French influence, lessons in plot and construction derived from Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseide, as well as some glimpses of the higher art of the Divina Commedia. He shows acquaintance also with one of Petrarch's sonnets, and though, when all is said, the Italian books with which he can be proved to have been intimate are but few, they sufficed. His study of them was but an episode in his literary life, but it was an episode of unique importance. Before it began he had already been making his own artistic experiments, and it is noteworthy that while he learnt so much from Boccaccio he improved on his originals as he translated them. Doubtless his busy life in the service of the crown had taught him self-confidence, and he uses his Italian models in his own way and with the most triumphant and assured success. When he had no more Italian poems to adapt he had learnt his lesson. The art of weaving a plot out of his own imagination was never his, but he could take what might be little more than an anecdote and lend it body and life and colour with a skill which has never been surpassed.

The most direct example of Chaucer's French studies is his translation of Le Roman de la rose, a poem written in some 4000 lines by Guillaume Lorris about 1237 and extended to over 22,000 by Jean Clopinel, better known as Jean de Meun, forty years later. We know from Chaucer himself that he translated this poem, and the extant English fragment of 7698 lines was generally assigned to him from 1532, when it was first printed, till its authorship was challenged in the early years of the Chaucer Society. The ground of this challenge was its wide divergence from Chaucer's practice in his undoubtedly genuine works as to certain niceties of rhyme, notable as to not rhyming words ending in -y with others ending -ye. It was subsequently discovered, however, that the whole fragment was divisible linguistically into three portions, of which the first and second end respectively at lines 1705 and 5810, and that in the first of these three sections the variations from Chaucer's accepted practice are insignificant. Lines 1-1705 have therefore been provisionally accepted as Chaucer's, and the other two fragments as the work of unknown translators (James I of Scotland has been suggested as one of them), which somehow came to be pieced together. If, however, the difficulties in the way of this theory are less than those which confront any other, they are still considerable, and the question can hardly be treated as closed.

While our knowledge of Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose is in this unsatisfactory state, another translation of his from the French, the Book of the Lyon (alluded to in the "Retraction" found, in some manu******s, at the end of the Canterbury Tales), which must certainly have been taken from Guillaume Machault's Le Dit du lion, has perished altogether. The strength of French influence on Chaucer's early work may, however, be amply illustrated from the first of his poems with which we are on sure ground, the Book of the Duchesse, or, as it is alternatively called, the Deth of Blaunche. Here not only are individual passages closely imitated from Machault and Froissart, but the dream, the May morning, and the whole machinery of the poem are taken over from contemporary French conventions. But even at this stage Chaucer could prove his right to borrow by the skill with which he makes his materials serve his own purpose, and some of the lines in the Deth of Blaunche are among the most tender and charming he ever wrote.

Chaucer's A.B.C., a poem in honour of the Blessed Virgin, of which the stanzas begin with the successive letters of the alphabet, is another early example of French influence. It is taken from the Pelerinage de la vie humaine, written by Guillaume de Deguilleville about 1330. The occurrence of some magnificent lines in Chaucer's version, combined with evidence that he did not yet possess the skill to translate at all literally as soon as rhymes had to be considered, accounts for this poem having been dated sometimes earlier than the Book of the Duchesse, and sometimes several years later. With it is usually moved up and down, though it should surely be placed in the 'seventies, the Compleynt to Pity, a fine poem which yet, from its slight obscurity and absence of Chaucer's usual ease, may very well some day prove to be a translation from the French.

While Chaucer thus sought to reproduce both the matter and the style of French poetry in England, he found other materials in popular Latin books. Among his lost works are renderings of "Origenes upon the Maudeleyne," and of Pope Innocent III on "The Wreced Engendring of Mankinde" (De miseria conditionis humanae). He must have begun his attempts at straightforward narrative with the Lyf of Seynt Cecyle (the weakest of all his works, the second Nun's Tale in the Canterbury series) from the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, and the story of the patience of Grisilde, taken from Petrarch's Latin version of a tale by Boccaccio. In both of these he condenses a little, but ventures on very few changes, though he lets his readers see his impatience with his originals.

In his story of Constance (afterwards ascribed to the Man of Law), taken from the Anglo-Norman chronicle of Nicholas Trivet, written about 1334, we find him struggling to put some substance into another weak tale, but still without the courage to remedy its radical faults, though here, as with Grisilde, he does as much for his heroine as the conventional exaltation of one virtue at a time permitted. It is possible that other tales which now stand in the Canterbury series were written originally at this period. What is certain is that at some time in the 'seventies three or four Italian poems passed into Chaucer's possession, and that he set to work busily to make use of them. One of the most interesting of the poems reclaimed for him by Professor Skeat is a fragmentary "Compleynt," part of which is written in terza rima. While he thus experimented with the metre of the Divina Commedia, he made his first attempt to use the material provided by Boccaccio's Teseide in another fragment of great interest, that of Quene Anelida and Fals Arcyte. More than a third of this is taken up with another, and quite successful, metrical experiment in Anelida's "compleynt," but in the introduction of Anelida herself Chaucer made the first of his three unsuccessful efforts to construct a plot for an important poem out of his own head, and the fragment which begins so well breaks off abruptly at line 357.

For a time the Teseide seems to have been laid aside, and it was perhaps at this moment, in despondency at his failure, that Chaucer wrote his most important prose work, the translation of the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius. Reminiscences of this helped to enrich many of his subsequent poems, and inspired five of his shorter pieces (The Former Age, Fortune, Truth, Gentilesse and Lak of Stedfastnesse), but the translation itself was only a partial success. To borrow his own phrase, his "Englysh was insufficient" to reproduce such difficult Latin. The translation is often barely intelligible without the original, and it is only here and there that it flows with any ease or rhythm.

If Chaucer felt this himself he must have been speedily consoled by achieving in Troilus and Criseyde his greatest artistic triumph. Warned by his failure in Anelida and Arcyte, he was content this time to take his plot unaltered from the Filostrato, and to follow Boccaccio step by step through the poem. But he did not follow him as a mere translator. He had done his duty manfully for the saints "of other holinesse" in Cecyle, Grisilde and Constance, whom he was forbidden by the rules of the game to clothe with complete flesh and blood. In this great love-story there were no such restrictions, and the characters which Boccaccio's treatment left thin and conventional became in Chaucer's hands convincingly human. No other English poem is so instinct with the glory and tragedy of youth, and in the details of the story Chaucer's gifts of vivid colouring, of humour and pity, are all at their highest.

An unfortunate theory that the reference in the Legende of Good Women to "al the love of Palamon and Arcyte" is to a hypothetical poem in seven-line stanzas on this theme, which Chaucer is imagined, when he came to plan the Canterbury Tales, to have suppressed in favour of a new version in heroic couplets, has obscured the close connexion in temper and power between what we know as the "Knight's Tale" and the Troilus. The poem may have been more or less extensively revised before, with admirable fitness, it was assigned to the Knight, but that its main composition can be separated by several years from that of Troilus is aesthetically incredible. Chaucer's art here again is at its highest. He takes the plot of Boccaccio's Teseide, but only as much of it as he wants, and what he takes he heightens and humanizes with the same skill which he had shown in transforming the Filostrato. Of the individual characters Theseus himself, the arbiter of the plot, is most notably developed; Emilie and her two lovers receive just as much individuality as they will bear without disturbing the atmosphere of romance. The whole story is pulled together and made more rapid and effective. A comparison of almost any scene as told by the two poets suffices to show Chaucer's immense superiority. At some subsequent period the "Squire's Tale" of Cambuscan, the fair Canacee and the Horse of Brass, was gallantly begun in something of the same key, but Chaucer took for it more materials than he could use, and for lack of the help of a leader like Boccaccio he was obliged to leave the story, in Milton's phrase, "half-told," though the fragment written certainly takes us very much less than half-way.

Meanwhile, in connexion (as is reasonably believed) with the betrothal or marriage of Anne of Bohemia to Richard II (i.e. about 1381-1382), Chaucer had brought to a successful completion the Parlement of Foules, a charming sketch of 699 lines, in which the other birds, on Saint Valentine's day, counsel the "Formel Egle" on her choice of a mate. His success here, as in the case of the Deth of Blaunche the Duchesse, was due to the absence of any need for a climax; and though the materials which he borrowed were mainly Latin (with some help from passages of the Teseide not fully needed for Palamon and Arcyte) his method of handling them would have been quite approved by his friends among the French poets. A more ambitious venture, the Hous of Fame, in which Chaucer imagines himself borne aloft by an eagle to Fame's temple, describes what he sees and hears there, and then breaks off in apparent inability to get home, shows a curious mixture of the poetic ideals of the Roman de la rose and reminiscences of the Divina Commedia. As the Hous of Fame is most often remembered and quoted for the personal touches and humour of Chaucer's conversation with the eagle, so the most-quoted passages in the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women are those in which Chaucer professes his affection for the daisy, and the attack on his loyalty by Cupid and its defence by Alceste. Recent discoveries have shown, however, that (besides obligations to Machault) some of the touches about the daisy and the controversy between the partisans of the Flower and of the Leaf are snatches from poems by his friends Froissart and Deschamps, which Chaucer takes up and returns to them with pretty compliments, and that he was indebted to Froissart for some of the framework of his poem.2 Both of the two versions of the Prologue to the Legende are charming, and some of the tales, notably that of Cleopatra, rank with Chaucer's best work. When, however, he had written eight and part of the ninth he tired of his scheme, which was planned to celebrate nineteen of Cupid's faithful "saints," with Alcestis as their queen. With his usual hopefulness he had overlooked the risk of monotony, which obviously weighed heavily on him ere he broke off, and the loss of the other ten stories is less to be regretted than that of the celebration of Alceste, and a possible epilogue which might have exceeded in charm the Prologue itself.

Chaucer's failure to complete the scheme of the Legende of Good Women may have been partly due to the attractions of the Canterbury Tales, which were probably taken up in immediate succession to it. His guardianship of two Kentish wards, his justiceship of the peace, his representing the county in the parliament of 1386, his commissionership of the river-bank between Greenwich and Woolwich, all make it easy to understand his dramatic use of the merry crowds he saw on the Canterbury road, without supposing him to have had recourse to Boccaccio's Decamerone, a book which there is no proof of his having seen. The pilgrims whom he imagines to have assembled at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, where Harry Bailey was host, are said to have numbered "wel nyne and twenty in a company," and the Prologue gives full-length sketches of a Knight, a Squire (his son), and their Yeoman; of a Prioress, Monk, Friar, Oxford Clerk, and Parson, with two disreputable hangers-on of the church, a Summoner and Pardoner; of a Serjeant-at-Law and a Doctor of Physic, and of a Franklin, or country gentleman, Merchant, Shipman, Miller, Cook, Manciple, Reeve, Ploughman (the Parson's brother) and the ever-famous Wife of Bath. Five London burgesses are described in a group, and a Nun and Priest3 are mentioned as in attendance on the Prioress. Each of these, with Chaucer himself making the twenty-ninth, was pledged to tell two tales, but including one second attempt and a tale told by the Yeoman of a Canon, who overtakes the pilgrims on the road, we have only twenty finished stories, two unfinished and two interrupted ones. As in the case of the Legende of Good Women, our loss is not so much that of the additional stories as of the completed framework. The wonderful character sketches of the Prologue are carried yet farther by the Talks on the Road which link the different tales, and two of these Talks, in which the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner respectively edify the company, have the importance of separate Tales, but between the Tales that have come down to us there are seven links missing,4 and it was left to a later and weaker hand to narrate, in the "Tale of Beryn," the adventures of the pilgrims at Canterbury.

The reference to the Lyf of Seynt Cecyle in the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women gives external proof that Chaucer included earlier work in the scheme of the Canterbury Tales, and mention has been made of other stories which are indisputably early. In the absence of any such metrical tests as have proved useful in the case of Shakespeare, the dates at which several of the Tales were composed remain doubtful, while in the case of at least two, the Clerk's tale of Grisilde and the Monk's tragedies, there is evidence of early work being revised and supplemented. It is fortunately impossible to separate the prologue to the charmingly told story of "yonge Hugh of Lincoln" from the tale itself, and, with the "quod sche" in the second line as proof that Chaucer was here writing specially for his Prioress, we are forbidden to limit the new stories to any one metre or tone. There can be no doubt, however, that what may be called the Tales of the Churls (Miller, Reeve, Summoner, Friar, &c.), and the conversational outpourings of the Pardoner and Wife of Bath, form, with the immortal Prologue, the most important and distinctive additions to the older work. In these, and in the Pardoner's story of Death and the Three Revellers, and the Nun's Priest's masterly handling of the fable of the Cock and Fox, both of them free from the grossness which marks the others, Chaucer takes stories which could have been told in a short page of prose and elaborates them with all the skill in narration which he had sedulously cultivated. The conjugal reminiscences of the Wife of Bath and the Reeve's Tale with its abominable climax (lightened a little by Aleyn's farewell, lines 316-319) are among the great things in Chaucer, as surely as Troilus, and Palamon and Arcyte and the Prologue. They help notably to give him the width of range which may certainly be claimed for him.

In or soon after 1391 Chaucer wrote in prose for an elevenyear-old reader, whom he addresses as "Litel Lowis my son," a treatise on the use of the Astrolabe, its short prologue being the prettiest specimen of his prose. The wearisome tale of "Melibee and his wyf Prudence," which was perhaps as much admired in English as it had been in Latin and French, may have been translated at any time. The sermon on Penitence, used as the Parson's Tale, was probably the work of his old age. "Envoys" to his friends Scogan and Bukton, a translation of some balades by Sir Otes de Granson, and the Compleynt to his Purs complete the record of his minor poetry. We have his own statement that in his youth he had written many Balades, Roundels and Virelayes in honour of Love, and the two songs embedded respectively in the Parlement of Foules and the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women are charming and musical. His extant shorter poems, however, whether early or late, offer no excuse for claiming high rank for him as a lyrist. He had very little sheer singing power, and though there are fine lines in his short poems, witness the famous "Flee fro the prees and dwell with soothfastnesse," they lack the sustained concentration of great work. From the drama, again, Chaucer was cut off, and it is idle to argue from the innumerable dramatic touches in his poems and his gift of characterization as to what he might have done had he lived two centuries later. His own age delighted in stories, and he gave it the stories it demanded, invested with a humanity, a grace and strength which place him among the world's greatest narrative poets, and which bring the England of his own day, with all the colour and warmth of life, wonderfully near to all his readers.

The part played by Chaucer in the development of the English language has often been overrated. He neither corrupted it, as used to be said, by introducing French words which it would otherwise have avoided, nor bore any such part in fixing it as was afterwards played by the translators of the Bible. When he was growing up, educated society in England was still bilingual, and the changes in vocabulary and pronunciation which took place during his life were the natural results of a society, which had been bilingual with a bias towards French, giving an exclusive preference to English. The practical identity of Chaucer's language with that of Gower shows that both merely used the best English of their day with the care and slightly conservative tendency which befitted poets. Chaucer's service to the English language lies in his decisive success having made it impossible for any later English poet to attain fame, as Gower had done, by writing alternatively in Latin and French. The claim which should be made for him is that, at least as regards poetry, he proved that English was "sufficient."

Chaucer borrowed both his stanza forms and his "decasyllabic" couplets (mostly with an extra syllable at the end of the line) from Guillaume Machault, and his music, like that of his French master and his successors, depends very largely on assigning to every syllable its full value, and more especially on the due pronunciation of the final -e. The slower movement of change in Scotland allowed time for Chaucer to exercise a potent influence on Scottish poetry, but in England this final -e, to which most of the earlier grammatical forms by Chaucer's time had been reduced, itself fell rapidly into disuse during the 15th century, and a serious barrier was thus raised to the appreciation of the artistic value of his verse. His disciples, Hoccleve and Lydgate, who at first had caught some echoes of his rhythms, gradually yielded to the change in pronunciation, so that there was no living tradition to hand down his secret, while successive copyists reduced his text to a state in which it was only by accident that lines could be scanned correctly. For fully three centuries his reputation was sustained solely by his narrative power, his warmest panegyrists betraying no consciousness that they were praising one of the greatest technical masters of poetry. Even when thus maimed, however, his works found readers and lovers in every generation, and every improvement in his text has set his fame on a surer basis.


Bibliography. - The Canterbury Tales have always been Chaucer's most popular work, and, including fragments, upwards of sixty 15th-century manu******s of it still survive. Two thin volumes of his minor poems were among the little quartos which Caxton printed by way of advertisement immediately on his return to England; the Canterbury Tales and Boethius followed in 1478, Troilus and a second edition of the Tales in 1483, the Hous of Fame in 1484. The Canterbury Tales were subsequently printed in 1492 (Pynson), 1498 (de Worde) and 1526 (Pynson); Troilus in 1517 (de Worde) and 1526 (Pynson); the Hous of Fame in 1526 (Pynson); the Parlement of Foules in 1526 (Pynson) and 1530 (de Worde) and the Mars, "Venus" and Envoy to Bukton by Julyan Notary about 1500. Pynson's three issues in 1526 almost amounted to a collected edition, but the first to which the title The Workes of Geffray Chaucer was given was that edited by William Thynne in 1532 for Thomas Godfray. Of this there was a new edition in 1542 for John Reynes and William Bonham, and an undated reprint a few years later for Bonham, Kele, Petit and, Toye, each of whom put his name on part of the edition. In 1561 a reprint, with numerous additions, edited by John Stowe, was printed by J. Kyngston for J. Wight, and this was re-edited, with fresh additions by Thomas Speght, in 1598 for G. Bishop and again in 1602 for Adam Islip. In 1687 there was an anonymous reprint, and in 1721 John Urry produced the last and worst of the folios.

By this time the paraphrasers were already at work, Dryden rewriting the tales of the Knight, the Nun's Priest and the Wife of Bath, and Pope the Merchant's. In 1737 (reprinted in 1740) the Prologue and Knight's Tale were edited (anonymously) by Thomas Morell "from the most authentic manu******s," and here, though by dint of much violence and with many mistakes, Chaucer's lines were for the first time in print given in a form in which they could be scanned. This promise of better things (Morell still thought it necessary to accompany his text with the paraphrases by Betterton and Dryden) was fulfilled by a fine edition of the Canterbury Tales (1775-1778), in which Thomas Tyrwhitt's scholarly instincts produced a comparatively good text from second-rate manu******s and accompanied it with valuable illustrative notes. The next edition of any importance was that edited by Thomas Wright for the Percy Society in 1848-1851, based on the erratic but valuable British Museum manu****** Harley 7334, containing readings which must be either Chaucer's second thoughts or the emendations of a brilliantly clever scribe. In 1866 Richard Morris re-edited this text in a more scholarly manner for the Aldine edition of the British Poets, and in the following year produced for the Clarendon Press Series a school edition of the Prologue and Tales of the Knight and Nun's Priest, edited with the fulness and care previously bestowed only on Greek and Latin classics.

In 1868 the foundation of the Chaucer Society, with Dr Furnivall as its director and chief worker, and Henry Bradshaw as a leading spirit, led to the publication of a six-text edition of the Canterbury Tales, and the consequent discovery that a manu****** belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere, though undoubtedly "edited," contained the best available text. The Chaucer Society also printed the best manu******s of Troilus and Criseyde and of all the minor poems, and thus cleared the way for the "Oxford" Chaucer, edited by Professor Skeat, with a wealth of annotation, for the Clarendon Press in 1894, the text of which was used for the splendid folio printed two years later by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, with illustrations by Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

A supplementary volume of the Oxford edition, entitled Chaucerian and other Pieces, issued by Professor Skeat in 1897, contains the prose and verse which his early publishers and editors, from Pynson and Thynne onwards, included among his Works by way of illustration, but which had gradually come to be regarded as forming part of his text. The reasons for their rejection are fully stated by Professor Skeat in the work named and also in The Chaucer Canon (1900). Many of these pieces have now been traced to other authors, and their exclusion has helped to clear not only Chaucer's text but also his biography, which used (as in the "Life" published by William Godwin in two quarto volumes in 1803) to be encumbered with inferences from works now known not to be Chaucer's, notably the Testament of Love written by Thomas Usk. All information about Chaucer's life available in 1900 will be found summarized by Mr R. E. G. Kirk in Life-Records of Chaucer, part iv., published by the Chaucer Society in that year. See also Chaucer; a Bibliographical Manual, by Eleanor P. Hammond (1909).

(A. W. Pollard)