The Ship of Fools, Volume 1-2 - Sebastian Brant (thriller books to read TXT) 📗
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1806, p. 5), who promotes him to be Suffragan Bishop of Bath and Wells, and
Bale, who, in a slanderous anecdote, the locale of which is also Wells,
speaks of him as a chaplain of Queen Mary’s, though Mary did not ascend the
throne till the year after his death. As these statements are nowhere
confirmed, it is not improbable that their authors have fallen into error
by confounding the poet Barclay, with a Gilbert Berkeley, who became Bishop
of Bath and Wells in 1559. One more undoubted, but tardy, piece of
preferment was awarded him which may be regarded as an honour of some
significance. On the 30th April 1552, the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury,
London, presented him to the Rectory of All Hallows, Lombard Street, but
the well-deserved promotion came too late to be enjoyed. A few weeks after,
and before the 10th June, at which date his will was proved, he died, as
his biographers say, “at a very advanced age;” at the good old age of
seventy-six, as shall be shown presently, at Croydon where he had passed
his youth, and there in the Church he was buried. “June 10th 1552,
Alexander Barkley sepult,” (Extract from the Parish Register, in Lyson’s
Environs of London).
A copy of his will, an extremely interesting and instructive document, has
been obtained from Doctors’ Commons, and will be found appended. It bears
in all its details those traits of character which, from all that we
otherwise know, we are led to associate with him. In it we see the earnest,
conscientious minister whose first thought is of the poor, the loyal
churchman liberal in his support of the house of God, the kind relative in
his numerous and considerate bequests to his kith and kin, the amiable,
much loved man in the gifts of remembrance to his many friends, and the
pious Christian in his wishes for the prayers of his survivors “to
Almightie God for remission of my synnes, and mercy upon my soule.”
Barclay’s career and character, both as a churchman and a man of letters,
deserve attention and respect from every student of our early history and
literature. In the former capacity he showed himself diligent, honest, and
anxious, at a time when these qualities seemed to have been so entirely
lost to the church as to form only a subject for clerical ridicule. In the
latter, the same qualities are also prominent, diligence, honesty, bold
outspokenness, an ardent desire for the pure, the true, and the natural,
and an undisguised enmity to everything false, self-seeking, and vile.
Everything he did was done in a pure way, and to a worthy end.
Bale stands alone in casting aspersions upon his moral character,
asserting, as Ritson puts it, “in his bigoted and foul-mouthed way,” that
“he continued a hater of truth, and under the disguise of celibacy a filthy
adulterer to the last;” and in his Declaration of Bonner’s articles (1561,
fol. 81), he condescends to an instance to the effect that “Doctoure
Barkleye hadde greate harme ones of suche a visitacion, at Wellys, before
he was Quene Maryes Chaplayne. For the woman whome he so religiouslye
visited did light him of all that he had, sauinge his workinge tolas. For
the whiche acte he had her in prison, and yet coulde nothing recouer
againe.” Whether this story be true of any one is perhaps doubtful, and, if
true of a Barclay, we are convinced that he is not our author. It may have
arisen as we have seen from a mistake as to identity. But apart from the
question of identity, we have nothing in support of the slander but Bale’s
“foul-mouthed” assertion, while against it we have the whole tenor and aim
of Barclay’s published writings. Everywhere he inculcates the highest and
purest morality, and where even for that purpose he might be led into
descriptions of vice, his disgust carries him past what most others would
have felt themselves justified in dealing with. For example, in the chapter
of “Disgysyd folys” he expressly passes over as lightly as possible what
might to others have proved a tempting subject:
“They disceyue myndes chaste and innocent
With dyuers wayes whiche I wyll nat expres
Lyst that whyle I labour this cursyd gyse to stynt
I myght to them mynyster example of lewdnes
And therfore in this part I shall say les
Than doth my actour.”
Elsewhere he declares:
“for my boke certaynly
I haue compyled: for vertue and goodnes
And to reuyle foule synne and vyciousnes”
But citation is needless; there is not a page of his writings which will
not supply similar evidence, and our great early moralist may, we think, be
dismissed from Court without a stain on his character.
Indeed to his high pitched morality, he doubtless owed in some degree the
great and extended popularity of his poetical writings in former times and
their neglect in later. Sermons and “good” books were not yet in the
sixteenth century an extensive branch of literature, and “good” people
could without remorse of conscience vary their limited theological reading
by frowning over the improprieties and sins of their neighbours as depicted
in the “Ship,” and joining, with a serious headshaking heartiness, in the
admonitions of the translator to amendment, or they might feel
“strengthened” by a glance into the “Mirrour of good Maners,” or edified by
hearing of the “Miseryes of Courtiers and Courtes of all princes in
generall,” as told in the “Eclogues.”
Certain it is that these writings owed little of their acceptance to
touches of humour or satire, to the gifts of a poetical imagination, or the
grace of a polished diction. The indignation of the honest man and the
earnestness of the moralist waited not for gifts and graces. Everything
went down, hard, rough, even uncouth as it stood, of course gaining in
truth and in graphic power what it wants in elegance. Still, with no
refinement, polish or elaboration, there are many picturesque passages
scattered throughout these works which no amount of polishing could have
improved. How could a man in a rage be better touched off than thus (“Ship”
I. 182, 15).
“This man malycious whiche troubled is with wrath
Nought els soundeth but the hoorse letter R.”
The passion of love is so graphically described that it is difficult to
imagine our priestly moralist a total stranger to its power, (I. 81).
“For he that loueth is voyde of all reason
Wandrynge in the worlde without lawe or mesure
In thought and fere sore vexed eche season
And greuous dolours in loue he must endure
No creature hym selfe, may well assure
From loues soft dartis: I say none on the grounde
But mad and folysshe bydes he whiche hath the wounde
Aye rennynge as franatyke no reason in his mynde
He hath no constaunce nor ease within his herte
His iyen ar blynde, his wyll alwaye inclyned
To louys preceptes yet can nat he departe
The Net is stronge, the sole caught can nat starte
The darte is sharpe, who euer is in the chayne
Can nat his sorowe in vysage hyde nor fayne”
For expressive, happy simile, the two following examples are capital:—
“Yet sometimes riches is geuen by some chance
To such as of good haue greatest aboundaunce.
Likewise as streames unto the sea do glide.
But on bare hills no water will abide.
… …
So smallest persons haue small rewarde alway
But men of worship set in authoritie
Must haue rewardes great after their degree.”—ECLOGUE I.
“And so such thinges which princes to thee geue
To thee be as sure as water in a siue
… … .
So princes are wont with riches some to fede
As we do our swine when we of larde haue nede
We fede our hogges them after to deuour
When they be fatted by costes and labour.”—ECLOGUE I.
The everlasting conceit of musical humanity is very truthfully hit off.
“This is of singers the very propertie
Alway they coueyt desired for to be
And when their frendes would heare of their cunning
Then are they neuer disposed for to sing,
But if they begin desired of no man
Then shewe they all and more then they can
And neuer leaue they till men of them be wery,
So in their conceyt their cunning they set by.”—ECLOGUE II.
Pithy sayings are numerous. Comparing citizens with countrymen, the
countryman says:—
“Fortune to them is like a mother dere
As a stepmother she doth to us appeare.”
Of money:
“Coyne more than cunning exalteth every man.”
Of clothing:
“It is not clothing can make a man be good
Better is in ragges pure liuing innocent
Than a soule defiled in sumptuous garment.”
It is as the graphic delineator of the life and condition of the country in
his period that the chief interest of Barclay’s writings, and especially of
the “Ship of Fools,” now lies. Nowhere so accessibly, so fully, and so
truthfully will be found the state of Henry the Eighth’s England set forth.
Every line bears the character of truthfulness, written as it evidently is,
in all the soberness of sadness, by one who had no occasion to exaggerate,
whose only object and desire was, by massing together and describing
faithfully the follies and abuses which were evident to all, to shame every
class into some degree of moral reformation, and, in particular, to effect
some amelioration of circumstances to the suffering poor.
And a sad picture it is which we thus obtain of merrie England in the good
old times of bluff King Hal, wanting altogether in the couleur de rose
with which it is tinted by its latest historian Mr Froude, who is ably
taken to task on this subject by a recent writer in the Westminster Review,
whose conclusions, formed upon other evidence than Barclay’s, express so
fairly the impression left by a perusal of the “Ship of Fools,” and the
Eclogues, that we quote them here. “Mr Froude remarks: ‘Looking therefore,
at the state of England as a whole, I cannot doubt that under Henry the
body of the people were prosperous, well-fed, loyal, and contented. In all
points of material comfort, they were as well off as ever they had been
before; better off than they have ever been in later times.’ In this
estimate we cannot agree. Rather we should say that during, and for long
after, this reign, the people were in the most deplorable condition of
poverty and misery of every kind. That they were ill-fed, that loyalty was
at its lowest ebb, that discontent was rife throughout the land. ‘In all
points of material comfort,’ we think they were worse off than they had
ever been before, and infinitely worse off than they have ever been since
the close of the sixteenth century,—a century in which the cup of
England’s woes was surely fuller than it has ever been since, or will, we
trust, ever be again. It was the century in which this country and its
people passed through a baptism of blood as well as ‘a baptism of fire,’
and out of which they came holier and better. The epitaph which should be
inscribed over the century is contained in a sentence written by the famous
Acham in 1547:—‘Nam vita, quæ nunc vivitur a plurimis, non vita sed
miseria est.’” So, Bradford (Sermon on Repentance, 1533) sums up
contemporary opinion in a single weighty sentence: “All men may see if they
will that the whoredom pride, unmercifulness, and tyranny of England far
surpasses any age that ever was before.” Every page of Barclay corroborates
these accounts of tyranny, injustice, immorality, wretchedness, poverty,
and general discontent.
Not only in fact and
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