'MANLY COWARDYSE': THOMAS HOCCLEVE'S PEACE STRATEGY

Abstract

Critics have often noted the unsure boundaries of political discourse in Hoccleve's work. Charles Blyth says of The Regiment of Princes: 'the Prologue is just as didactic as the Regiment proper, and the latter just as subjective', so that 'the entire work needs to be seen as a series of interactions ... between private and public'.1 This mixed quality is even more evident in the Series itself, an alternation of personal and didactic pieces which Roger Ellis, James Simpson, and others argue has strong structural parallels to the Regiment? Yet despite continuing interest in Hoccleve's poetry of identity, many have seen him as a tame political counsellor. In a recent book, Nicholas Perkins refers to 'the (relatively few) critics who find elements of resistance or threat in [the] Regimenf'.3 Since the Regiment is not an open critique of Lancastrian policy, as Hoccleve himself admits,4 it has often been thought to offer little significant political counsel. In Paul Strohm's words, Hoccleve 'altogether abandons the stance of admonitory critic, assuming instead that of wholehearted ally determined in no respect to offend'.5If the personal and the political are agreed to mix freely in Hoccleve's work, it is mainly because, in one way or another, he has a 'practice of using his own predicaments to illuminate general issues'.6 His self-presentation as poet, especially in relation to Chaucer, has been understood to his discredit as an independently minded writer. Strohm writes:The place of the Lancastrian king was one of profound doubt and unease, marked by guilty concealment and by fitful hope of definitive self-legitimation. And do not these terms also describe the place of the Lancastrian poet? ... beset by doubts about legitimacy and mandate, and bedeviled by the need for secure insertion in a legitimate and legitimizing literary succession.7Similarly, Hoccleve's comparisons, intended or unconscious, of his own state to that of the country or the new monarchy have been frequently read as anxious attempts to ally himself uncritically with the Crown, or to abase himself as an embodiment of how riot and rebellion should be dealt with.8 Derek Pearsall suggests that Hoccleve's frank admissions about his own misrule, taken to be true confessions, constructed him as a plain speaker, the kind of counsellor a good prince would have, and so formed part of an act of prince-pleasing for reward.9 The strongest defences of Hoccleve as a political poet have come from James Simpson and Nicholas Perkins, who find a more valuable contractual relationship between the impoverished writer and his interpreting addressee.10 In Simpson's view, the likeness of the poet's situation to his prince's exercises some restraint on the ruler, despite their unequal power, precisely because through it 'the bodily presence of the articulate subject, along with the needs of the larger body politic, loom unpredictably large'.11 Simpson's contractual interpretation rests mainly on Hoccleve's holding of the king to financial accountability, and to the keeping of his coronation oaths, rather as parliaments tried to do:Hoccleve's psychic and economic straits are made to resonate throughout the whole public sphere. Hoccleve seeks to win payment from the future king, but the Prince is also taught how he might win 'the peples voice' (1. 2885) by attending to the needs of the body politic.12Whilst I agree with this reading, I shall argue here for another kind of positive link between Hoccleve's critical self-constructions and his political poetry. I suggest that the unusually active personality effect maintained over several poems (the 'Male regle', the Regiment, and the Series) strengthens Hoccleve's hand as counsellor by helping to set up a clerkly counter-discourse to the norms of chivalric masculinity, and so to redefine the kind of political behaviour suitable to those rulers he addresses. In particular, I shall suggest that the often comic 'confessional' strain in his poetry outlines a sustained personal antipathy to violence which is transformed within the Regiment into a strategic persuasion against war. …