THE MAN OF BUSINESS
"Oh! that any muse should be set upon a high stool to cast up accounts
and balance a ledger."--_Times_
The Italian journey of 1372-3 was far from being Chaucer's last embassy.
In 1376 he was abroad on secret service with Sir John Burley; in February
of next year he was associated on another secret mission with Sir Thomas
Percy, afterwards Earl of Worcester, and Hotspur's partner at the battle
of Shrewsbury; so that our poet, if he had lived only three years longer,
would have seen his old fellow-envoy's head grinning down from the spikes
of London Bridge side by side with "a quarter of Sir Harry Percy."[56] In
April of the same year he was sent to Montreuil with Sir Guichard d'Angle
and Sir Richard Stury, for no less a matter than a treaty of peace with
France. The French envoys proposed a marriage between their little
princess Marie, aged seven, and the future Richard II., only three years
older; a subject upon which the English envoys seem to have received no
authority to treat. So the embassy ended only in a very brief extension of
the existing truce; the little princess died a few months afterwards, and
Chaucer lived to see the great feasts in London twenty-one years later,
when Richard took to second wife Marie's niece Isabella, then only in her
eighth year. In January 1378, our poet was again associated with Sir
Guichard d'Angle and two others on a mission to negotiate for Richard's
marriage with one of poor little Marie's sisters. Here also the
discussions came to nothing; but already in May Chaucer was sent with Sir
Edward Berkeley on a fresh embassy to Italy. This time it was to treat "of
certain matters touching the King's war" with the great English
_condottiere_ Sir John Hawkwood, and with that tyrant of Milan who was
suspected of having poisoned Prince Lionel, and whose subsequent fate
afforded matter for one of the Monk's "tragedies" in the "Canterbury
Tales"--
Of Milan greate Barnabo Viscount,
God of delight and scourge of Lombardye.
During this journey Chaucer appointed for his agents in England the poet
John Gower and another friend, Richard Forrester, of whom we shall hear
once more. He was home again early in February of the next year; and this,
so far as we know, was the last of his diplomatic missions.
It would take us too far afield to consider all the attendant
circumstances of these later embassies, important as they are for showing
the high estimate put on Chaucer's business talents, and much as they must
have contributed to form that many-sided genius which we find fully
matured at last in the poet of the "Canterbury Tales." But they show us
that he travelled in the best of company and saw many of the most
remarkable European cities of his day; that he grappled, and watched
others grapple, first with the astute old counsellors who surrounded
Charles the Wise, and again with the English adventurer whose prowess was
a household word throughout Italy, and who had married an illegitimate
sister of Clarence's Violante Visconti, with a dowry of a million florins.
These journeys, however, brought him no literary models comparable to
those which he had already found: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio reigned
supreme in his mind until the latest and ripest days of all, when he
became no longer the mere translator and adapter (with however fresh a
genius) of French and Italian classics, but a classic himself, master of a
style that could express all the accumulated observations of half a
century--Chaucer of the English fields and highways, Chaucer of English
men and women, and no other man. The analysis and criticism of the works
which he produced in the years following the first Italian journey belongs
to literary history. It only concerns me here to sum up what the literary
critics have long since pointed out; how full a field of ideas the poet
found in these years of travel, how busily he sucked at every flower, and
how rich a store he brought home for his countrymen. For a hundred and
fifty years, Chaucer was practically the only channel between rough,
strong, unformed English thought and the greatest literature of the Middle
Ages. More still, in him she possessed the poet whom (measuring not only
by beauty of style but by width of range), we must put next to Dante
himself. He was to five generations of Englishmen that which Shakespeare
has been to us ever since.
It is delightful to take stock of these fruitful years of travel and
observation, but more delightful still to follow the poet home and watch
him at work in the dear busy London of his birth. From the time of his
return from the first Italian journey we find him in evident favour at
court. On St. George's day, 1374, he received the grant of a pitcher of
wine daily for life, "to be received in the port of London from the hands
of the King's butler." Such grants were common enough; but they take us
back in imagination to the still earlier times from which the tradition
had come down. St. George's was a day of solemn feasting in the Round
Tower of Windsor; Chaucer would naturally enough be there on his daily
services. Edward, the Pharaoh at the birthday feast, lifted up his head
from among his fellow-servants by a mark of special favour for services
rendered during the past year. But the grant was already in those days
more picturesque than convenient; we soon find Chaucer drawing a
periodical money-equivalent for the wine; and in 1378 the grant was
commuted for a life-pension of about L200 modern value.
Shortly after this grant of wine came a far greater stroke of fortune.
Chaucer was made Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidies, with the
obligation of regular attendance at his office in the Port of London, and
of writing the rolls with his own hand. Those which still exist, however,
are almost certainly copies. Presently he received the grant of a
life-pension from John of Gaunt as well as from the King. His wife also
had pensions from both, so that the regular income of the household
amounted to some L1000 a year of modern money. To this must be added
considerable windfalls in the shape of two lucrative wardships and a large
share of a smuggled cargo of wool which Chaucer had discovered and
officially confiscated. Yet with all this he seems to have lived beyond
his means, and we find him forestalling his pension. In 1382 Chaucer's
financial prosperity reached its climax, for he received another
comptrollership which he might exercise by deputy. Two years later, he was
permitted to appoint a deputy to his first comptrollership also; and in
this same year, 1386, he was elected to sit in Parliament as Knight of the
Shire for the county of Kent. He had already, in 1385, been appointed a
justice of the peace for the same county, in company with Sir Simon
Burley, warden of the Cinque Ports, and other distinguished colleagues.
Indeed, only one untoward event mars the smooth prosperity of these years.
In 1380, Cecilia Chaumpaigne renounced by a formal deed, witnessed among
others by three knights, all claims which she might have against our poet
"_de raptu meo_." _Raptus_ often means simply _abduction_, and it may well
be that Chaucer was simply concerned in just such an attempt upon Cecilia
as had been made upon his own father, who, as it will be remembered, had
narrowly escaped being married by force to Joan de Westhale for the
gratification of other people's private interests. This is rendered all
the more probable by two other documents connected with the same matter
which have been discovered by Dr. Sharpe.[57] It is, however, possible
that the _raptus_ was a more serious affair; and Professor Skeat has
pointed out the coincidence that Chaucer's "little son Lowis" was just ten
years old in 1391. It is true that the poet would, by this interpretation,
have been guilty of felony, in which case a mere deed of renunciation on
Cecilia's part could not legally have settled the matter; but the wide
divergences between legal theory and practice in the Middle Ages renders
this argument less conclusive than it might seem at first sight. It is
certain, however, that abductions of heiresses from motives of cupidity
were so frequent at this time as to be recognized among the crying evils
of society. The Parliament of 1385-6 felt bound to pass a law exacting
that both the abductor and the woman who consented to abduction should be
deprived of all inheritance and dowry, which should pass on to the next of
kin.[58] But medieval laws, as has long ago been remarked, were rather
pious aspirations than strict rules of conduct; and it is piquant to find
our errant poet himself among the commissioners appointed to inquire into
a case of _raptus_, just seven years after his own escapade.[59]
During the twelve years from 1374 to 1386 Chaucer occupied those lodgings
over the tower of Aldgate which are still inseparably connected with his
name. This was probably by far the happiest part of his career, and (with
one exception presently to be noticed) the most productive from a literary
point of view. Here he studied with an assiduity which would have been
impossible at court, and which must again have been far less possible in
his later years of want and sordid shifts. Here he translated Boethius, of
whose philosophical "Consolations" he was so soon to stand in bitter need.
Here he wrote from French, Latin, and Italian materials that "Troilus and
Cressida" which is in many ways the most remarkable of all his works. In
1382 he composed his "Parliament of Fowls" in honour of Richard II.'s
marriage with Anne of Bohemia; then came the "House of Fame" and the
"Legend of Good Women." These two poems, like most of Chaucer's work, are
unfinished, and unequal even as they stand. We cannot too often remind
ourselves that he was no professional _litterateur_, but a courtier,
diplomatist, and man of business whose genius impelled him to incessant
study and composition under conditions which, in these days, would be
considered very unfavourable in many respects. But his contemporaries were
sufficiently familiar with unfinished works of literature. Reading was
then a process almost as fitful and irregular as writing; and in their
gratitude for what he told them, few in those days would have been
inclined to complain of all that Chaucer "left half-told." So the poet
freely indulged his genius during these Aldgate days, turning and
returning the leaves of his French and Italian legendaries, and evoking
such ghosts as he pleased to live again on earth. Whom he would he set up,
and whom he would he put down; and that is one secret of his freshness
after all these centuries.
This period of quiet and prosperity culminates, as has been said, in his
election to the Parliament of 1386 as a Knight of the Shire for Kent. His
contemporary, Froissart, has left us a picture of a specially solemn
parliament held in 1337 to declare war against France, "at the palace of
Westminster; and the Great Hall was all full of prelates, nobles, and
counsellors from the cities and good towns of England. And there all men
were set down on stools, that each might see the King more at his ease.
And the said King was seated like a pontiff, in cloth of Rouen, with a
crown on his head and a royal sceptre in his hand. And two degrees lower
sat prelate, earl, and baron; and yet below them were more than six
hundred knights. And in the same order sat the men of the Cinque Ports,
and the counsellors from the cities and good towns of the land. So when
all were arrayed and seated in order, as was just, then silence was
proclaimed, and up rose a clerk of England, licentiate of canon and civil
law, and excellently provided of three tongues, that is to say of Latin,
French, and English; and he began to speak with great wisdom; for Sir
Robert of Artois was at his side, who had instructed him two or three days
before in all that he should say." Chaucer's Parliament sat more probably
in the Great Chapter House of Westminster, and certainly passed off with
less order and unanimity than Froissart's of 1337, though the main theme
was still that of the French War, into which the nation had plunged so
lightheartedly a generation earlier. In spite of Crecy and Poitiers and a
dozen other victories in pitched battles, our ships had been destroyed off
La Rochelle in 1372 by the combined fleets of France and Castile; since
which time not only had our commerce and our southern seaport towns
suffered terribly, but more than once there had been serious fears for the
capital. In 1377 and 1380 London had been put into a state of defence;[60]
and now, in 1386, it was known that the French were collecting enormous
forces for invasion. The incapacity of their King and his advisers did
indeed deliver us finally from this danger; but, when Chaucer and his
fellow-members assembled on October 1, "it had still seemed possible that
any morning might see the French fleet off Dover, or even at the mouth of
the Thames."[61] The militia of the southern counties was still assembled
to defend the coast, while twenty thousand from the Midlands lay round
London, ill-paid, starving, and beginning to prey on the country; for
Richard II. had wasted his money on Court pleasures or favourites. The
Commons refused to grant supplies until the King had dismissed his
unpopular ministers; Richard retired in a rage to Eltham, and Parliament
refused to transact business until he should return. In this deadlock, the
members deliberately sought up the records of the deposition of Edward
II., and this implied threat was too significant for Richard to hold out
any longer. As a contemporary puts it, "The King would not come to
Parliament, but they sent for the statute whereby the second Edward had
been judged, and under pain of that statute compelled the King to
attend."[62] The Houses then impeached and imprisoned Suffolk, one of the
two unpopular ministers, and put Richard himself under tutelage to a
Council of Reform. Supplies having been voted, the King dismissed his
Parliament on November 28 with a plain warning that he intended to
repudiate his recent promises; and he spent the year 1387 in armed
preparations.
Meanwhile, however, other _proteges_ of his had suffered besides the great
men of whom all the chronicles tell us. The Council of Reform had exacted
from Richard a commission for a month "to receive and dispose of all crown
revenues, to enter the royal castles and manors, to remove officials and
set up others in their stead."[63] Sir Harris Nicolas shows from the rolls
of this Parliament that the commission was issued "for inquiring, among
other alleged abuses, into the state of the Subsidies and Customs; and as
the Commissioners began their duties by examining the accounts of the
officers employed in the collection of the revenue, the removal of any of
those persons soon afterwards, may, with much probability, be attributed
to that investigation." It is not necessary to suppose that Chaucer had
been specially negligent as a man of business, though it may have been so,
and his warmest admirer would scarcely contend that what we know of the
poet's character points to any special gifts of regularity or punctual
order. We know that the men who now governed England made it their avowed
object to remove all creatures of the King; and everything tends to show
that Chaucer had owed his offices to Court favour. At this moment then,
when Richard's patronage was a grave disadvantage, and when Chaucer's
other great protector, John of Gaunt, was abroad in Spain, flying a
wild-goose chase for the crown of Castile--at such a moment it was almost
inevitable that we should find him among the first victims; and already in
December both his comptrollerships were in other men's hands. Even in his
best days he seems to have lived up to his income; and this sudden reverse
would very naturally drive him to desperate shifts. It is not surprising,
therefore, that we soon find him assigning his two pensions to one John
Scalby (May 1, 1388).
But before this Philippa Chaucer had died. In 1386 she was at Lincoln with
her patron, John of Gaunt, and a distinguished company; and there she was
admitted into the Cathedral fraternity, together with Henry of Derby, the
future Henry IV.[64] At Midsummer, 1387, she received her quarter's
pension as usual, but not at Michaelmas; and thenceforward she disappears
from the records. Her death, of course, still further reduced the poet's
already meagre income; but, as Professor Skeat points out, we have every
indication that Chaucer made a good literary use of this period of
enforced leisure and straitened means. In the years 1387 and 1388 he
probably wrote the greater part of the "Canterbury Tales."
Next year came a pleasant change of fortune. The King, after a vain
attempt to reassert himself by force of arms, had been obliged to
sacrifice many of his trustiest servants; and the "Merciless Parliament"
of 1388 executed, among other distinguished victims, Chaucer's old
colleagues Sir Nicholas Brembre and Sir Simon Burley. Richard, with rage
in his heart, bided his time, and gave plenty of rope to the lords who had
reduced him to tutelage and impeached his ministers. Then, when their
essential factiousness and self-seeking had become manifest to the world,
he struck his blow. In May, 1389, "he suddenly entered the privy council,
took his seat among the expectant Lords, and asked, 'What age am I?' They
answered that he had now fulfilled twenty years. 'Then,' said he, 'I am of
full age to govern my house, my servants, and my realm ... for every heir
of my realm who has lost his father, when he reaches the twentieth year of
his age, is permitted to manage his own affairs as he will.'" He at once
dismissed the Chancellor and Treasurer, and presently recalled John of
Gaunt from Spain as a counterpoise to John's factious younger brother, the
Duke of Gloucester.
With one patron thus returned to power, and another on his way, it was
natural that Chaucer's luck should turn. Two months after this scene in
Council he was appointed by Richard II. "Clerk of our Works at our Palace
of Westminster, our Tower of London, our Castle of Berkhampstead, our
Manors of Kennington, Eltham, Clarendon, Shene, Byfleet, Chiltern
Langley, and Feckenham, our Lodges at Hathebergh in our New Forest, and
in our other parks, and our Mews for falcons at Charing Cross; likewise of
our gardens, fish-ponds, mills and park enclosures pertaining to the said
Palace, Tower, Castles, Manors, Lodges, and Mews, with powers (by self or
deputy) to choose and take masons, carpenters and all and sundry other
workmen and labourers who are needed for our works, wheresoever they can
be found, within or without all liberties (Church fee alone excepted); and
to set the same to labour at the said works, at our wages." Our poet had
also plenary powers to impress building materials and cartage at the
King's prices, to put the good and loyal men of the districts on their
oath to report any theft or embezzlement of materials, to bring back
runaways, and "to arrest and take all whom he may here find refractory or
rebellious, and to cast them into our prisons, there to remain until they
shall have found surety for labouring at our Works according to the
injunctions given in our name." That these time-honoured clauses were no
dead letter, is shown by the still surviving documents in which Chaucer
deputed to Hugh Swayn and three others his duties of impressing workmen
and impounding materials, by the constant petitions of medieval
Parliaments against this system of "Purveyance" for the King's
necessities, and by different earlier entries in the Letter-Books of the
City of London. Search was made throughout the capital for fugitive
workmen; they were clapped into Newgate without further ceremony; and one
John de Alleford seems to have made a profitable business for a short
while by "pretending to be a purveyor of our Lord the King, to take
carpenters for the use of the King in order to work at the Castle of
Windsor."[65]
We have a curious inventory of the "dead stock" which Chaucer took over
from his predecessors in the Clerkship, and for which he made himself
responsible; the list ranges from "one bronze image, two stone images
unpainted, seven images in the likeness of Kings" for Westminster Palace,
with considerable fittings for the lists and galleries of a tournament,
and 100 stone cannon balls for the Tower, down to "one broken cable ...
one dilapidated pitchfork ... three sieves, whereof two are crazy."[66]
For all this, which he was allowed to do by deputy, Chaucer received two
shillings a day, or something like L450 a year of modern money.[67]
Further commissions of the same kind were granted to him: the supervision
of the works at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, which was "threatened with
ruin, and on the point of falling to the ground;" and again of a great
scaffold in Smithfield for the Royal party on the occasion of the
tournament in May, 1390. Two months earlier in this same year he had been
associated with his old colleague Sir Richard Stury and others on a
commission to repair the dykes and drains of Thames from Greenwich to
Woolwich, which were "so broken and ruined that manifold and inestimable
damages have happened in times past, and more are feared for the future."
A marginal note on a MS. of his "Envoy to Scogan," written some three
years later, states that the poet was then living at Greenwich; and a
casual remark in the "Canterbury Tales" very probably points in the same
direction.[68] Either in 1390 or 1391 a Geoffrey Chaucer, who was probably
the poet, was appointed Forester of North Petherton Park in Somerset.
But here again we find one single mischance breaking the even tenour of
Chaucer's new-born prosperity. In September, 1390, while on his journeys
as Clerk of the Works, he was the victim of at least two, and just
possibly three, highway robberies (of which two were on one day) at
Westminster, and near "The Foul Oak" at Hatcham. Two of the robbers were
in a position to claim benefit of clergy; Thomas Talbot, an Irishman, was
nowhere to be found; and the fourth, Richard Brerelay, escaped for the
moment by turning King's evidence. He was, however, accused of another
robbery in Hertfordshire, and attempted to save his life by charging
Thomas Talbot's servant with complicity in the crime. This time the
accused offered "wager of battle." Brerelay was vanquished in the duel,
and strung up out of hand.
It is difficult to resist the conviction that Chaucer was by this time
recognized as an unbusiness-like person; for the King deprived him of his
Clerkship in the following June (1391), at a time when we can find nothing
in the political situation to account for the dismissal.