The Spin Doctor: John Skelton And "A Ballade Of The Scottyshe Kynge"

Published in Touchstones: American Poets on a Favorite Poem. Edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini. Wesleyan University Press, 1995.



It's not surprising that in some of John Skelton's poems there is a kind of narrow nationalism. A professional man of letters, Skelton (1460 - 1529) was by most accounts a conservative in a conservative age. As tutor to the young prince Henry VIII, and later as both church rector and royal orator, Skelton was a true believer; he saw himself as responsible in part for the preservation of the English state. But if Skelton's political attitudes don't surprise us, if they reflect too well the orthodoxies of his late medieval times, many of his poems still manage to charm us. His metrical skill, his excited descriptions of historical events, his capacity for high drama combined with caricature, and, above all, his quick wit distinguish Skelton's poems from his contemporaries. More than five hundred years after his birth, Skelton still has something to teach us about the purposes and pleasures of poetry.

Skelton's poems aren't particularly complicated, but new readers need guidance. There's the fact of Skelton's middle English, of course, but beyond that there's the references, allusions, the quirky music. Skelton is a famously uneven writer: even his best poems have weak passages or sections. But when he's writing with all engines on, he's terrific. In poems such as "Colin Clout" and "Speak Parrot," in his long satires and lyric poems, Skelton employs and mixes in delightful ways what was then the high and common styles of speaking. Vigorous and inventive, his meter, too, has a natural ease. Many of his poems use what has come to be known as a "skeltonic" meter: rapid two- or three-stressed lines (though some lines have as many as five stresses) with frequent alliteration and a single-rhyme pattern repeated for as long as the poet pleases. In "The Garland of Laurel," a dream-allegory, Skelton uses the skeltonic meter to address Mistress Margaret Hussey:

Merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower:
Gentle as falcon
Or hawk of the tower.
With solace and gladness,
Much mirth and no madness,
All good and no badness,
So joyously,
So maidenly,
So womanly...

This rhythm to our contemporary ears may be a bit too whimsical, reminding us of a nursery rhyme or a jazz lyric by Cole Porter or even a more recent rap-inspired lyric. But the fact is that Skelton was there first. As critics have noted, there really wasn't any English verse quite like Skelton's until Skelton. In poems like "The Tunning of Elinor Rumming" and "Philip Sparrow" -- a mock-heroic poem that immortalizes the pet bird of a young neighbor -- Skelton's robust rhythms create a pacing that borders on the frantic. But Skelton's not a once-around-the track kind of writer; he's not a sprinter. His best poems, most of them, are over five hundred lines long, and many are over a thousand.

"A Ballad of the Scottish King," written in early September of 1513, is one of Skelton's shorter poems: a tidy seventy-five lines. But a revised and augmented version of the poem, "Against the Scots," runs more than twice as long. While neither poem is among Skelton's most reprinted, "A Ballad of the Scottish King" is representative of Skelton in ways that bear thinking about. Fiercely nationalistic, hectoring, sarcastic, the "Ballad" dispenses with the aureate style of the times which signaled a kind of detachment; the "Ballad" is a poem of involvement, and like many of Skelton's poems, its subjects are topical and historically specific.

In 1513, Henry VIII went to France to try his hand at war for the first time. Like many English kings before him, Henry believed it was his duty to unite the two countries under a single crown -- his own. What Henry didn't know was that even as he was preparing to conquer France, the Scottish king, James IV, was preparing to invade England. Having earlier signed a treaty with the French, James sent a message to Henry, demanding that Henry not go to France. But by the time Henry got the message, he had already embarked on his mission, and luckless, impatient James had invaded England and been killed near Norham Castle.

Skelton must have intended the "Ballad" to serve a number of functions -- some of them unfamiliar to readers in the late twentieth century. Poetry as the vehicle for news? The fact that the "Ballad" was turned out anonymously, in hundreds of copies only days after James had been defeated, suggests that the poem was indeed a way of circulating information in timely fashion. Of course, then as now, political news is never neutral. Thus while the poem is concerned with "Jamie's" undeniably inept challenge to the English king, the "Ballad" serves other purposes as well. For as royal orator, Skelton was necessarily a sometime propagandist -- a "spin doctor" in today's parlance -- and a number of his poems, whatever their many virtues, represented a kind of official correspondence meant to elicit support for the king and his policies.

Skelton is well-known for heaping abuse on his enemies; his most famous target was the arrogant, powerful Cardinal Wolsey. And as in the poems attacking Wolsey ("Colin Clout" and the less artful "Why Come Ye Not to Courte?"), the "Ballad" pulls out the stops.
Skelton, after all, was not yet certain at the time he wrote the "Ballad" whether James had been killed or was merely a prisoner --

Gyve up your game, ye playe check mate;
For to the castell of Norham
I understonde to soone ye cam,
For a prysoner there now ye be
Eyther to the devyll or the trinite.


Characteristically, then, Skelton is merciless in his mocking of James. The "Ballad" alternately questions his judgment ("Knowe ye not salte and suger asonder?), insults him ("Your wyll renne before your wytte") and admonishes ("Before the Frensshe kynge, Danes and other/Ye ought to honour your lorde and brother") -- all in exaggerated ways. The skeltonic meter offers Skelton a linguistic freedom and simplicity that make the poem both more powerful and more memorable than it might have been otherwise. And yet, readers will note, in most ways the poem is extraordinarily conventional.

It's difficult to fault Skelton for taking his contemporaneous commonplaces seriously -- even if, as is sometimes true, his positions are incompatible with our own sensibilities. For instance, the notion that political dissent is the same as heresy drives the "Ballad" and other Skelton poems; it's one of the ways, according to Skelton, that the here-and-now is intimately linked to the hereafter. Could Skelton be a verbal bully? Certainly. Did he sometimes proclaim instead of question? Yes. Did he moralize? Sure. Still, Skelton more often than not found a way to complicate things for himself (and his audience) as he explored the world of his time. About the faults of both the Church and court life, he could sometimes be unsparingly frank. In his elegy on Henry VII, Skelton asks: "Why were you shocked that you had accumulated great riches?" At other moments, however, he could only bluster.

Aware of the disparity between what he sees and what he wishes, between what happens and what he believes should happen, Skelton rails, complains and cries out. In the epigraph to "Against the Scots," he asks in Latin: "If I am telling the truth, why don't you believe me?" A defender of the faith, a late medievalist aware of corruption but not especially receptive to the changes the coming renaissance would bring, Skelton saw in the events of history a way of considering God's power.

Thanked be sanynte Gorge, our ladyes knythe,
Your pryd is paste, adwe, good nycht.
Ye have determined to make a fraye,
Our kynge than beynge out of the waye;
But by the power and myght of God
Ye were beten weth your owne rod.
By your wanton wyll, syr, at a worde,
Ye have loste spores, cote armure and sworde.

Other poems by Skelton may be richer in their dramatizations and less narrow in their approach, but "A Ballad of the Scottish King" finds Skelton as he often must have found himself: a poet at the end of an age. Caught in an enormous sea-change, fixed between feudalism and the coming reformation, Skelton was left clinging to poetry itself as his hope for salvation.

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