The Court: Castiglione's Ideal and Tudor Reality; Being a Discussion of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Satire Addressed to Sir Francis Bryan

The Court: Castiglione's Ideal and Tudor Reality; Being a Discussion of Sir Thomas Wyatt'sSatire Addressed to Sir Francis BryanAuthor(s): David StarkeySource: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 45 (1982), pp. 232-239Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/750980 .

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232 NOTES AND DOCUMENTS

APPENDIX C

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A'B is Cos.3o or I.I1547, and the L A'CB is 49- 1'

(see Appendix A).

A' -1-

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THE COURT: CASTIGLIONE'S IDEAL AND TUDOR REALITY

BEING A DISCUSSION OF SIR THOMAS WYATT'S SA TIRE ADDRESSED TO

SIR FRANCIS BRYAN

N THE early sixteenth century the courts of kings and princes dominated both politics

and culture. This dominance was nothing new in northern Europe, but it was a novelty in Italy. Hand in hand with this change south of the Alps went another in the great European monarchies themselves: their courts became much more alike. France set the new fashion with the household reforms of about 15 15; Eng- land copied her example in September 1518 and the Emperor - it would appear - at roughly the same time.1 Courts were now universal and their internal organizations were very similar. This institutional change was complemented by a change in personnel - not of the courts themselves but of diplomacy. For from the Treaty of London of September 15 18 it became

more and more usual for leading courtiers to be employed as resident ambassadors.2 Not merely, therefore, was the courtier a member of an international institution; he was himself an international figure.

It is thus no accident that the early sixteenth century saw the appearance of an international philosophy of the courtier,3 whose supreme flowering was Castiglione's Book of the Courtier. Philosophy of course implies coherent, systema- tic thought - not qualities which have tradi- tionally been ascribed to the Courtier; but an important recent article offers a compelling argument for taking the Courtier as a serious and unified work - that is, potentially at least, as a philosophy.4 The author sees the Courtier as a translation into sixteenth-century terms ofAris- totle's theory of politics and Plato's theory of the good. These elements are indeed there, but they are present, I think, chiefly because they are

1 David Starkey, The King's Privy Chamber, 1485-1547, unpublished Cambridge Ph.D dissertation, 1973, pp. 97 f.; R. J. Knecht, 'The Court of Francis I', European Studies Review, VIII, 1978, pp. 6 f.

2 David Starkey, 'Representations through Intimacy', in loan Lewis, ed., Symbols and Sentiments, London 1977, pp. 201-02; and cf. Knecht, op. cit., pp. 8-9. 3 For the term 'philosophy of the courtier', cf. Edward M. Wilson, 'A Cervantes Item from Emmanuel College Library: Barros's "Filosofia Cortesana", 1587', Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Iv, 5, 1968, pp. 363 f

4 L. V. Ryan, 'Book Four ofCastiglione's Courtier: Climax or Afterthought?', Studies in the Renaissance, xxx, 1972, pp. 156-79-

Journal ofthe Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Volume 45, 1982



SIR THOMAS WYATT TO SIR FRANCIS BRYAN 233

embedded in Castiglione's main source: his beloved Cicero. The Courtier begins with a para- phrase of the opening of the Brutus, and thereafter there is scarcely a page in which a phrase, a sentence, or even whole paragraphs are not deftly adapted from the same writer.5s The effect of such inspired plagiarism is (in the elegant phrase of the editor of the 1727 London edition) as though Castiglione had 'treasured up.. . in a single cabinet the richest jewels of antiquity'.6 But Castiglione not only, as it were, taught Cicero to speak Tuscan; he also translated his ideas. Cicero's own teachings had been firmly based on Aristotle. The latter - following the dominant republican tendencies of Greek city states - saw political activity as the essential attribute of the citizen. Cicero retained the idea but he gave it a new twist by the emphasis he placed on rhetoric. In his scheme - which, as Castiglione's was to be, was at once didactic and theoretical, a programme of education and a political philosophy - all the arts and all learning are made handmaidens to rhetoric, since in a free society rhetoric or persuasive speech is the key to politics itself.7 Despite the altered emphasis, though, Cicero remained just as republican as Aristotle. Castiglione's achievement was all the greater therefore, for he successfully transplanted Cicero from the forum to the Renaissance court; and he did so by a single stroke of genius. For Cicero's quest for the perfect orator, he substituted his own search for the perfect courtier. The former exhorts his fellow citizens to virtue; the latter coaxes his prince to the same goal. The means to be employed are the same as well: rhetorical or honest speaking, in which the honesty is made palatable by persuasiveness. To this end, Castiglione's courtier was to be equipped not only with the already formidably wide intellectual attributes of Cicero's orator, but also with the social graces and physical skills of the late medieval knight. Thus universally gifted in mind and body, the courtier could begin to emulate Castiglione himself as a 'master in the art of pleasing'. But whereas the common

reading of the Courtier sees 'the art of pleasing' as an end in itself, Castiglione makes clear that it was only a means. Just as the role of Cicero's orator was to persuade to virtue, so too was the task of Castiglione's courtier. This is stated succinctly and forcibly by Ottaviano Fregoso at the beginning of Book Iv: the end of the perfect courtier ... is, by means of the accomplishments attributed to him by these gentlemen, so to win for himself the mind and favour of the prince he serves that he can and always will tell him the truth about all he needs to know, without fear or risk of displeasing him.9

This passage is the axis of the Courtier. It explains its purpose; it is also the keystone of its architecture, linking the educational programme of the first three Books with the broader political and moral speculations of Book iv itself. So the Courtier is no mere courtesy book. Instead it is a supreme syncretic achievement, in which the irreconcilables of sixteenth-century culture - humanism and the court, book-learning and military prowess -

are reconciled. From this impressive undertaking and its

dissemination, England, though remote, was by no means excluded. Fregoso heaps lavish praise on Henry VIII,10 and England itself enters into the narrative; for by an elegant fiction the dia- logues in the Courtier are made to take place during Castiglione's absence in this country on embassy (where indeed he had been sent in 1506 to participate in the Garter ceremonies on behalf of his master, Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino, who had been newly created KG).11 England returned the compliment. The Courtier was finally published in Venice in April 1528.12 Within eighteen months Edmund Bonner was begging Thomas Cromwell - as he had pro- mised to make him a good Italian - to send him the Cortegiano in the original language;13 and within three years Sir Thomas Elyot had borrowed heavily from Castiglione's work for

s These borrowings are traced, more or less exhaustively, in the notes to B. Castiglione, II Libro del Cortegiano, ed. V. Cian, Florence 1947.

6 B. Castiglione, II Cortegiano or The Courtier, ed. A. P. Castiglione, London 1727, n.p.

7 The doctrine is most fully developed in De Oratore. 8 Julia Cartwright, Baldassare Castiglione ... His Life and

Letters, 1478-1529, 11, London 19o8, p. 439 (citing the Preface to the second Venetian edition of 1533).

9 B. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. and ed. George Bull, Harmondsworth I967, p. 285.

o10 Ibid., p. 312. 11 Loc. cit. and Denys Hay, trans. and ed., The Anglica

Historia of Polydore Vergil, A.D. 1485-1537, Camden Series LXXIV, London 1950, p. 143. 12 Cartwright, op. cit. n. 8 above, n, pp. 373 f. 13 H. Ellis, ed., Original Letters Illustrative ofEnglish History, 3rd series, nii, London 1846, p. I77 (calendared in J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie, eds, Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, ofthe Reign ofHenry VIII, 1509-47, London 1862-1932, hereafter cited as LP, IV. ii. 6346).

16




his own Book of the Governor.14 A further seven years, however, were to elapse before the weightiest (and hitherto unrecognized) con- temporary English critique of the Courtier, Sir Thomas Wyatt's Satire addressed to Sir Francis Bryan.

The Satire was just as much an inside job as the Courtier itself. Like Castiglione, Wyatt was born a courtier. His father, Sir Henry, was a Privy Councillor and Treasurer of the Cham- ber; Thomas himself was Clerk of the Jewels and an Esquire of the Body before he was twenty; at twenty-two he had distinguished himself on embassy in France. Soon after (probably) began his involvement with Anne Boleyn: at her coronation in 1533 he was Chief Ewerer; at her fall in 1536 he came within a hair's breadth of the axe also. Thereafter he was abroad on embassy - in France, Spain, Ger- many and the Low Countries - almost conti- nuously until his early and much lamented death in 1542.s15

Again like Castiglione - but most unusually for an Englishman of his standing at so early a date - Wyatt was a scholar and a humanist as well as a courtier and a gentleman. Quite how he obtained his learning is not clear; for while he certainly went up to StJohn's College, Cam- bridge, that new and fashionable foundation, in 1515 there is no evidence (contrary to what used to be thought) of how long he stayed or whether he took a degree.16 Of the fact of his familiarity with the new learning there can be no doubt. It was already sufficiently notorious by about 1527 for Catherine of Aragon to ask him to translate for her Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae. He began the task but abandoned it -

characteristically - because he felt Petrarch palled 'by superfluous often rehearsing of one thing'. Instead therefore he substituted a translation of Plutarch's Quiet of Mind (from Guill- aume Bude's Latin version), which he claimed said all Petrarch did and more briefly.17 The finished work was published in 1528. A decade later we see him trying to transmit his lively,

practical commitment to letters to his son, to whom he recommended the moral philosophers Seneca and Epictetus - the latter's work 'because it is little to be ever in your bosom'."s

These two elements (the court and humanism), equally present in Wyatt and Castiglione, were the twin poles of sixteenth-century culture. Castiglione's supreme achievement had been to join them; but for other, and no less sensitive minds, the two were at perpetual war.19 This war dominates More's Utopia, for example: it appears most obviously in Book I (the dialogue on counsel); it is also the source of the irony that permeates the whole text.20

Wyatt felt the conflict too: though himself a courtier, bitter rejection of the court is the theme of many of his shorter poems and of the first two Satires.21 In all of these works (includ- ing most of Utopia itself) the incompatibility between the court and humanism is treated in terms of the old polarities: the active versus the contemplative life; urbs or aula against rus. The opposition could produce marvellous poetry -

like the end of the Second Satire, 'Mine own John Poyntz', when Wyatt trumpets simultaneously the virtues of the country and contemplative lives, and boasts:

But here I am in Kent and Christendom Among the Muses where I read and rhyme Where if thou list, my Poyntz, for to come,

Thou shalt bejudge how I do spend my time.22

In a sense, however, Castiglione had undercut this whole mode of debate. Wyatt, of course, had read the great Italian and had signposted the fact in his usual way by translating directly from him, and doing so, piquantly enough, in this same Second Satire.23 But in the Third Satire - almost as it were with Castiglione still open in front of him - Wyatt goes further and, instead of translating him, confronts (as I hope to show) his arguments directly.

The Satire24 begins with a brief introduction that will be discussed later. It then immediately establishes the freshness of its approach. Wyatt asks Bryan why he wears his body down to the bone when he 'mightst at home sleep in thy bed

14 As, for instance, in his discussion of the relationship of virtue and nobility of birth, for which see Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England, Cambridge I1967, p. 154. 1s Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds, Dictionary of National Biography, reissue of i9o8-o9, hereafter cited as DNB, sub 'Wyatt'.

16 Ibid., and Kenneth Muir, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Liverpool 1963, pp. 3, 263.

17 Ibid., p. 440 f., and cf. H. A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period, London

959, p. i8o.

18 Loc. cit. 19 Ibid., p. 86. 20 Ibid., pp. I04 f 21 Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Reb-

holz, Harmondsworth 1978, nos LXXI, CXLIX, CL. 22 Ibid., no. CXLIX. 23 H. A. Mason, 'Wyatt's Greatest Adventure?', The Cam-

bridge Quarterly, VII, 2, 1977, p. i68. 24 Wyatt, ed. cit. n. 2 1 above, pp. 192-94.



SIR THOMAS WYATT TO SIR FRANCIS BRYAN 235

of down'. Bryan's reply is a devastating rejection of the ease of retirement:

.. . For swine so groins In sty and chaw the turds moulded on the ground

So sacks of dirt be filled up in the cloister That serve for less than do these fatted swine'.

In four lines, then, the country (the pigs in the sty) and the contemplative life (the sacks of dirt in the cloister) are dismissed as possible alter- natives to the court. Wyatt accepts the dismis- sal with enthusiasm: 'By God, well said'. Nor was this acceptance a merely rhetorical posture. As Wyatt's own life (or More's for that matter) showed, for anyone who wished to do anything, there was no choice. 'It was the court or nothing.'25 The real question therefore was: 'how should I behave at court?', and this is what the substance of the Satire is about.

The issue is tackled by a stream of ironical advice. First and most important, be dishonest:

Thou know'st well, first, whoso can seek to please Shall purchase friends where truth shall but

offend. Flee therefore truth: it is both wealth and ease.

For though that truth of every man hath praise Full near that wind goeth truth in great misease.

Use virtue as it goeth now-a-days In word alone to make thy language sweet And of the deed yet do not as thou says.

Next, get money by servility to old men; or marry a widow; or prostitute your sister or your daughter; and so on. This advice is firmly rejected by Bryan:

'Wouldest thou I should for any loss or gain Change that for gold that I have t'en for best -

Next godly things, to have an honest name? Should I leave that? Then take me for a beast!'

Faced with so total a rejection Wyatt makes no attempt to continue the argument further; instead the Satire ends with a warning of the consequences of the course that Bryan has set for himself:

Nay then, farewell, and if you care for shame, Content thee then with honest poverty, With free tongue, what thee mislikes, to blame,

And, for thy truth, sometime adversity. And therewithal this thing I shall thee give - In this world now, little prosperity

And coin to keep, as water in a sieve.

What are we to make of all this? The form is the most important indicator. The Satire is not a

sermon but a dialogue. This means that it is of the type of the satires of Horace's Second Book, in which the actual historical character of the satirist's interlocutors is of the great impor- tance.26 Sojust as it is impossible to understand Horace n. I without knowing that Trebatius was a distinguished lawyer,27 we cannot interpret Wyatt's Third Satire without real knowledge of both Bryan's career and his character.

Sir Francis Bryan was one of the most distinguished of Henry VIII's Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber - that inmost circle of the court set up in 1518.28 He was a polymath: soldier, sailor, linguist, belles-lettrist, poet, diplomat, jouster, masker.29 In addition he was a notable character, with a European reputation for two things. First, for a conspicuous immorality that earned him the title of 'Vicar of Hell'.30 Second (and this point has not previously been noted) for an astonishing plainness of speech that was pri- marily directed at the King. The examples are legion. Our first shows the trait at its most straightforward. Saunders reports that

On one occasion the King asked [Bryan] what sort of sin he thought it was to know first the mother and then the daughter. To which Bryan replied: 'Exactly the same, sir, as first to eat the hen and then the chicken!' The King laughed heartily and then said, 'You really do deserve your title of my Vicar of Hell!'31

Saunders is - it goes without saying - a tainted source. All the same, the rhetorical balance of Bryan's alleged witticism is very like his undoubted request to his 'loving brother of old', Lord Lisle, 'to make more ready for me a soft bed than an hard harlot'.32 But of course Bryan could use this boldness and flair with

25 Mason, Humanism and Poetry (n. 17 above), p. 86.

26 W. S. Anderson, 'The Roman Socrates: Horace and his Satires', in J. P. Sullivan, ed., Critical Essays on Roman Literature: Satire, London 1963, pp. 29-30.

27 Ibid., p. 30. 28 Starkey, King's Privy Chamber (n. i above), p. 97 f. 29 Cf., DNB sub 'Bryan'. 30 British Library, Add. MS 25114, fols i6o-6i (LP x.

873). 31 'Ab illo Rex quondam tempore quaesivit, quale pecca-

turn videretur matrem primum, deinde filiam cognoscere. Cui Brianus, "Omnino", inquit, "tale, o Rex, quale galli- nam primum, deinde pullum ejus gallinaceum comedere". Quod verbum cum Rex magno visu accepisset, ad Brianum dixisse fertur. "Nae! tu merito meus es inferni Vicarius" '; Nicholas Saunders, De Schismate Anglicano, Rome 1586, p. 24, cited in G. F. Nott, ed., The Works of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, ii, London 1815, P. LXXXIV. 32 Muriel St Clare Byrne, ed., The Lisle Letters, i, Chicago

and London 1981, pp. 595-96 (LPvI 1218, 1338).




words not merely to amuse or pander to the King, but also to help his friends. Or rather he could help his friends by amusing the King. Here Florentius Voluscenus is our reporter: When Christmas Day is celebrated there is lengthier play at dice among the English. Now luck had been out (as Fortune now and then will be hostile) for a certain William Pickering, a proper gentleman and deservedly dear to the King. The King, when he saw how bitter this was to him, said that he was pained at Pickering's misfortune. Then Bryan, who was accus- tomed to speak familiarly to the King... spoke: 'The task of showing sympathy falls to us - who cannot help even though we would - not to you. You, on the other hand, should take the misery caused by his losses on yourself, since you could so easily make him another Croesus. Reward him richly and the cause of his sadness is removed.' The King, as was most wise, approved Bryan's wit, and soon after most gen- erously raised Pickering to both honour and wealth.33

Again the precise incident cannot be verified. But the trait to which both Voluscenus and (more dubiously) Saunders testify was real enough. It was also exercised in much weightier ways, as Lord Lisle's court agent knew when he wrote to his master on 17 June I537 to assure him that if Cromwell continued to delay over his lordship's suit, 'I will set Mr Bryan unto him, who I trust if need be will not let to speak to the King.'34 The result was that Bryan's boldness with the King made him a marked man at court: marked by suitors and their court agents, for whom he was the obvious means to circum- vent Cromwell; and marked in a very different sense by Cromwell himself, whose aim, coolly but ruthlessly pursued, was to prevent all such forms of direct, unregulated access to Henry.

So our exhumation of the historical Bryan has revealed a complex character, in which moral laxity was strangely blended with a remarkable and very attractive freedom of speech. With this grasp of the real Bryan the Satire begins to yield up its meaning as a supreme exercise in ambiguity or (to use Wyatt's own word) doubleness. The fundamen- tal ambiguity is the most obvious: the glaring contrast between the real, flawed Bryan and the uniformly upright Bryan that appears in the poem (where, as one too literal critic puts it, he figures as 'the exemplar of the statesman and man of integrity').3 This ambiguity is further intensified by the fact that Roman rectitude was not merely a persona ascribed by Wyatt;36 it had also been affected by Bryan himself in his own output of didactic, aphoristic verse.37 Wyatt alludes to this twice: indirectly in the pair of 'proverbs' (his own word) that open the poem:

'A spending hand that alway poureth out Had need to have a bringer-in as fast'; And 'On the stone that still doth turn about

There groweth no moss'...

(the last of these actually appears in a poem by Bryan);38 and directly when he addresses himself to 'Bryan, to thee, who knows how great a grace/ In writing is to counsel men the right'. So to the gap between reality and persona is added the gulf between doer and writer. This double chasm (inconsistency is too weak a word) is the source of the irony that gives the poem its power. But the irony - to pile complexity on complexity - is unevenly distributed. On the one hand, on most points the 'Vicar of Hell', far from rejecting Wyatt's devil's advocacy, had followed it to the letter: he had married one wealthy widow and was to marry another;39 his two sisters had made stunning matches (both with future Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber) that had been the foundation of Bryan's own career;40 while as Gentleman of the Privy Chamber he performed - ex officio - the vilest of services for one old or oldish man, Henry VIII: he waited on him at table; he dressed and

33'Cum Christi celebratur Natalis die luditur alea apud Britannos prolixius, lam fors ipsa (ut interdum sit aduer- sante Fortuna) Guilielmo cuidam Picringo, homini sane generoso, et qui regi ipso merito charus erat, perierat. Hoc Rex ubi rescuit aegre sibi esse, atque se Picringi dolere uicem dixit. Tum Briarnus, qui cum rege familiarite collo- quor consueuerat . . . "Nostrum", inquit, "o Rex, est, qui cupientes subuenire non possumus, non tuum condole- scere. Neque tibi ob aurum illi deperditum tristitia ulla suscipienda est, cui in promptu sit ilium uel Croesum quendam iam nunc efficere. Aurum ubi illi largitus fueris, sublata erit aegritudinis causa". Probat Rex, ut est pruden- tissimus, Briarni ingenium, et Picringum paulo post munificentissime et ad honos et opes euexit'; Florentius Voluscenus, De animi tranquillitate dialogus, Lyons 1543, PP. 94-95. I owe this reference and the identification of 'Picringus', like so much else in this paper, to the kindness of Professor D. Baker-Smith. 34 Public Record Office, London SP3/4, no. io6 (LP

xu.ii. Io5).

3s Wyatt, ed. cit. n. 21 above, p. 449. 36 My discussion of Wyatt's use of persona depends heavily

on D. Baker-Smith, Thomas More and Plato's Voyage, an inaugural lecture given on i June 1978 at University Col-

lege Cardiff, 1978.

SH. E. Rollins, ed., Tottel's Miscellany, II, Cambridge, Mass. 1965, pp. 82-83n. 38 Ex. inf H. A. Mason, n. 23. 39 DNB, sub 'Bryan'. 4o Starkey, King's Privy Chamber, n. I above, pp. 86-87.



SIR THOMAS WYATT TO SIR FRANCIS BRYAN 237 undressed him; and he probably even - as Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber in 1536-38 - wiped the royal bottom.41 But on one point, and that crucial, the real Bryan had followed his persona and repudiated the Satire's wordly wisdom: he had not masked his speech. Instead he had 'with free tongue what him misliked to blame', which meant that he was not wholly dishonest. This doubleness in Bryan is conveyed not only by the broad juxtaposi- tions of the poem; it is also concentrated (as so often in Wyatt) in two little words. For at the climax of the Satire the Bryan persona protests his determination to preserve his 'honest name' at all costs. Here the economy is as total as it is telling: Bryan's (nick)name, the 'Vicar of Hell', was the most dishonest possible; at the same time he did indeed have a name (or reputation) for honest speaking.

Bryan's honest freedom of speech leads to the next level of the poem - for Wyatt not only used Bryan as an ironic and thoroughly individual persona; he also employed him as a symbol or type of the courtier in general and Castiglione's idealization in particular. This was a role for which Bryan was peculiarly suited. His polymathy immediately suggested the array of qualities which equipped the perfect courtier to please; while his reputation for freedom of speech cut straight to the heart of Castiglione's intellectual achievement, to the crucial passage where Fregoso proclaims that pleasing leads to favour and favour leads to truth. So as symbol Bryan has led to Castiglione; his last task is as exemplum to serve as a vehicle for Wyatt'sjudge- ment on the Courtier.

Here the dating of the poem is crucial. Its ostensible theme is Bryan's shortage of money. This is referred to in the opening lines of the Satire:

'A spending hand that alway poureth out Had need to have a bringer in as fast';

in the middle: How to bring in, as fast as thou dost spend;

and at the end where, in lines I have already quoted, penury is held out as the penalty for freedom of speech. Moreoever, Wyatt had found a partial model for the Satire in Horace 11.5, which offers cynical advice on how to make quick money in Rome.42 It could be of course

that Bryan had a general reputation for feck- lessness with money; but I think there is more to it than that, as certain words in the introduction to the Satire suggest. Wyatt says he wrote the poem 'When I remember. .. the case/Wherein thou stands'. This would seem to point to a specific incident - and one is to hand. Wyatt and Bryan met in June 1538 at Nice.43 The occasion was the interview between Francis I and Charles V. Bryan was the English ambassador to the former; Wyatt to the latter. At the interview Bryan lost a large sum of money - so large that (it was alleged) it disturbed hisjudge- ment and led to disastrous distortions in his despatches.44 Wyatt lent him ?200 to tide him over. Subsequently Cromwell (always Wyatt's good friend) picked up the pieces: with one hand he reimbursed the money; with the other he administered the mildest of rebukes, as he complained that he had very often to repay what others had borrowed. Wyatt in reply defended himself hotly, protesting that 'If the King's honour more than [Bryan's] credit had not been afore mine eyes, he should have piped in an ivy leaf for ought of me'.45 This last letter was written some six months later in January 1539, when the full implications of Bryan's problems at Nice were manifest. Not only had Bryan been temporarily straitened for cash; he was also tottering politically. His plain- spokenness to the King had incurred Crom- well's enmity; his mingled ill-luck and blunders on the embassy provided the minister with the means to undo him. Bryan returned to England in August 1538 and received an appalling reception from the King. The shock was too much for one so highly strung, and he lay near to death for several weeks. By Christmas he had recovered and was partly restored to favour -

but only at a price: the loss of his major office of the Chief Gentlemanship of the Privy Cham- ber.46 In these events, I would suggest, lies the key both to the content of the poem and to its dating. Wyatt's Satire addressed to Sir Francis Bryan was (that is) a product of the poet's involvement with Bryan during these crucial months of June 1538 to January 1539. It was almost certainly written then, hot from the forge of events.

This date is mid-way between the two which literary historians have ascribed to the Satire.

41 Starkey, 'Representation through Intimacy', n. 2 above, pp. 203-o7. 42Mason, Humanism and Poetry, n. i above, p. 23 1.

43LP ximi.i.I 135, 1221 etc. 44 Ibid., ii. 31420. 4s LP xIv.i. i. 46 LP xII.ii.28o, 312, 430, 431, 591, 1 120, i i63-




Mason, looking to a crisis in Wyatt's life as the source of the Satire, dates it to the time of the poet's second imprisonment in 1541 ;47 Muir on the other hand assigns the Satire to the earlier critical period in Wyatt's life in 1536-37 when he was enmeshed in the Boleyn affair.48 This latter dating is more or less supported by the poem's appearance in the Egerton MS, which almost certainly belongs to the period of Wyatt's Spanish embassy of 1537-39.49 Once again, however, Bryan's own biography is deci- sive. The poem is addressed to him as an active (too active) ambassador:

*. .that

trots still up and down And never rests, but running day and night

From realm to realm, from city, street, and town.

This immediately rules 1541 out of court. Fol- lowing the d6bacle of 1538 Bryan was employed on no further diplomatic business for fully five years.s50 Nor does 1536-37 look much more promising, as Bryan spent only one month of the twenty-four on a brief embassy to France in April 1537.51s In 1538 in contrast (as we have seen) came the major embassy at whose climax Wyatt and Bryan met. So Bryan's diplomatic activities alone make 1538 much the most likely date. What is most important of all, though, is that another observer looked long and hard at Bryan's career in this same year and came to a strikingly similarjudgement to Wyatt. This was the Abbot of Woburn who under interrogation in May 1538 admitted that he,

considering the great journeys which the said Sir Francis [Bryan] manifoldly hath taken in the King's business into the parts beyond the seas, hath often- time wished that the King's Grace would pardon him and give him licence now growing in age to tarry at home and wait upon his grace and at time of his pleasure to repair into his country to make merry among his loving friends. Which liberty the said Abbot doth think he might soon obtain of the King's Highness, if there were not an object to the contrary to put him forward with such journeys, considering (as it is said) that the said Sir Francis dare boldly speak to the King's Grace the plainness of his mind and that his Grace doth well accept the same.52

Almost all of the elements of the Satire are here: ambassadorial activity and country retreat;

freedom of speech, royal favour and political uncertainty. The coincidence of matter seems too great for there not to have been a coincidence of time as well.

And so we come full circle. For the dating of the Satire also brings us to the most direct level of the poem. Wyatt and Bryan had not only met at Nice; lent and borrowed money; and played bit parts on the European stage; they must have talked as well. It is these, perhaps heated, exchanges that underlie the Satire. As in the opening of Utopia,3 we are listening to a real dialogue, to a heightened version of a conversa- tion that actually took place.

The machinery of the Satire is now fully laid bare. Most simply, it reflects the advice that Wyatt no doubt gave Bryan at this climacteric of his career: watch your tongue; otherwise you'll come unstuck. On the other hand, the device of the Bryan persona and its mismatch with the real man also enables Wyatt both to explain and to moralize Bryan's predicament. Bluntly (as I would read it) the Satire says that in most respects Bryan's character was bad enough for him to be a thoroughly successful courtier. Unfortunately, though, he spoke his mind, and this glimmer of virtue - this simula- crum of the 'honesty' which Wyatt saw as the key to practical morality54 - would destroy him. So there is a personal irony, in terms of Bryan and his career. But there is also an intellectual irony in terms of Castiglione's philosophy of the courtier, of which Bryan (I would argue) is made both symbol and exemplum. Bryan the polymath (as well as Bryan the immoralist) was supremely equipped to please - and 'please' echoes contemptuously through each article of the catalogue of prostitution that 'Wyatt' recommends in the poem. But the jus- tification of pleasing (according to Castiglione) was the exercise of free speech. Bryan also claims and exercises this right; but instead of redeeming him it undoes him. By confronting, therefore, the never-never land of an idealized Urbino with the reality of the Tudor court, Wyatt has destroyed Castiglione's smooth moralization.

Or rather Wyatt has destroyed it by implica- tion. For the confrontation takes place not in the poem but in the reader's mind. Whether Wyatt intended such a confrontation cannot of course be proved; but - bearing in mind that the

47 Mason, Humanism and Poetry, n. i above, pp. 202--06. 48 Muir, Life and Letters, n. i6 above, pp. 251, 256. 49 Rebholz, ed. cit. n. 21 above, p. 438. 50so LP xvmIII.ii.253. s51 LPxii.i.865, 1235. s2 Public Record Office, London, SPI/I32, fols 96 f. (LP

xIII.i.981 ).

53 Sir Thomas More, Utopia, ed. E. Surtz andJ. H. Hexter, New Haven and London 1965, pp. xxx f. s Muir, Life and Letters n. i6 above, p. 41.



BRONZINO'S ALLEGORY 239

poem's whole machinery depends on just such another extra-textual juxtaposition between the Bryan persona of the Satire and the reader's knowledge of the real Bryan - it seems more than likely.

So Castiglione (probably) and any pseudo- humanist moralization of the court (certainly) disposed of, Wyatt offers his own bleak alterna- tive advice on how to use oneself at court. It is given in the last lines of the Satire (which we have already quoted) and reads like an elabora- tion of Loyola's 'labour and do not ask for any reward': serve honestly but expect nothing. The advice is hard, but Bryan - like Wyatt himself - probably found it curiously palatable. For under the modish affectations of civic humanism the values of the Tudor courtier remained firmly anchored in a much more ancient

indigenous tradition: that of service. The Tudor courtier was, supremely, the King's servant, and the bond was heavy with a weight of emo- tion. This we find hard to comprehend, let alone express. But Wyatt gives it voice when, as he bade 'Tagus, farewell' in 1539, he rejoiced in the journey home and prayed

My King, my country, alone for whom I live, Of mighty love the wings for this me give.55ss

High-flown perhaps, but unquestionably sincere.

DAVID STARKEY

LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

55 Wyatt, ed. cit. n. 21 above, p. 98.

BRONZINO'S ALLEGORY IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY

B RONZINO'S FAMOUS Allegory in the National

Gallery (P1. 38a) is commonly associated with a passage in the 1568 edition of Vasari's Lives, where it is reported that 'Fece un quadro di singolare bellezza, che fu mandato in Francia al re Francesco; dentro al quale era una Venere ignuda con Cupido che la baciava, ed il Piacere da un lato e il Giuoco con altri amori, e dall'al- tro la Fraude, la Gelosia, ed altre passioni d'amore'.1 Vasari's description, of course, does not correspond exactly to the painting in Lon- don. He fails to mention the figure of Time, who is shown at the upper right with his wings and hourglass; while the 'altri amori' and 'altre passioni d'amore' are missing from the compo- sition. Since its provenance cannot be traced back beyond the last century there is a possi- bility that Vasari was not referring to the picture in London at all.2 But its probable date, around 1545, is consistent with his reference to Francis I, who died in 1547, so the discrepan- cies in his description are more likely to be due

to a failure of memory.3 The mistakes are easy enough to understand, particularly as there is another painting by Bronzino of a similar character, which does indeed contain 'amori'. This picture (P1. 38b), now in Budapest, is not mentioned by Vasari at all. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is safe to say at least that the National Gallery Allegory had a great deal in common with Francis's painting, and that the figures immediately surrounding Venus and Cupid can loosely be described as 'passioni d'amore', even if it remains doubtful whether this term is also applicable to the woman at the upper left.

The variety of interpretations proposed for Bronzino's picture reflect differences of opinion about the identity of individual personifications. That there should be a problem here is not surprising. Bronzino was working at a time when the repertoire of personifications was rapidly expanding, but before it had been stan- dardized in the handbooks of Cartari (I556) and, above all, of Ripa (1593).4 Scholars have often used these convenient texts to interpret

1 G. Vasari, Le Vite de'piui eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architet- tori, ed. G. Milanesi, Florence 1878-81, vii, pp. 598 f.

2 For the provenance, see C. Gould, National Gallery Cata- logues: the Sixteenth-Century Italian Schools (excluding the Vene- tian), London 1962, pp. 21-24.

3 The only dissenting note about the chronology is provided by Stella Mary Newton, who suggests that the hair- style of one of the figures belongs to the early 1550os (Gould, op. cit., p. 23); but the exact date of the picture has no bearing on the present argument. 4 V. Cartari, Le imagini con la spositione de i dei de gli antichi, Venice 1556, and later editions; C. Ripa, Iconologia, Rome 1593, and later editions.

Journal ofthe Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Volume 45, 1982



Documents

The Court: Castiglione's Ideal and Tudor Reality; Being a Discussion of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Satire Addressed to Sir Francis Bryan