CHAPTER IV. COURT OF HENRY VIII. SKELTON.-REVELS ALL HALLOWEEN. HAWKING. AT HAMPTON COURT.WOLSEY.-HENRY.-WILL SOMMERS.-ANNE BOLEYN. -WYATT; THE RISK HE RAN. HIS PASSION FOR ANNE BOLEYN. WYATT A POET OF SOCIAL LIFE; WARTON'S OPINION OF HIM. - HIS RETIREMENT AT ALLINGTON CASTLE. - WYATT'S LOVE POETRY INTRODUCES HIM TO SURREY. ALL HALLOWEEN-HENRY VIII. 69 CHAPTER IV. To do justice to the 'Literature of Society' in the day of Henry the Eighth, we must identify ourselves with his time, in manners, in amusements, and in the knowledge of those individual peculiarities, which were strongly marked in the monarch and in those around him. It is a holiday Let us take one day as a type of many. All Halloween, perhaps. The king and Court have been setting out on a hawking party on this wintry morning. This 'princely delight,' as it was then styled, has been attended by the lords and ladies of the Court, and by them and their sovereign alone; for hawking, until the days of Elizabeth and James, was too expensive an amusement for young gallants of poor estate to attain to. Since, in our own age, hunting often furnishes, nay, monopolizes the whole talk at the tables of country squires, so, in the days of the Tudors, the young gentry, we are told, rang changes upon these sports, as if their whole reading were in them.' And so, perhaps, it was, until Henry, monster and tyrant as he was in his later years, mixed the pleasures of intellect with those of out-door diversions, and put down the 'hawking coxcombs of the Court, who could talk of nothing but a falcon gentle, and a tercel gentle,' for these were birds of the highest cast, and fit only for a prince; and these high flyers,' as they were called, affected nothing lower. The looks of these young gentlemen are abashed, no doubt, as they ride into the court-yard, and observe Henry, after allowing his gerfalcon to be unleashed from his arm, address, in familiar tones, a churchman, in his skull-cap and canonicals, near him. It is Skelton, poet laureate, who had, as some say, the tutorship of Henry; and it cannot be from respect to his cloth, for that he had somewhat disgraced, but in honour of his wit and poesy that Henry thus honoured the versifier.' The king passes on, and the ladies in groups separate. They have taken lately to Italian customs, and, whilst riding, have covered their faces all over with velvet masks, with holes in them for the eyes. 'So,' says old Stubbes, in his 'Anatomie of Abuses,' ' if a man that knew not their guise before, should chance to meet one of them, he should think he met a devil; for face he can shew none, but two broad glasses against their eyes, with glasses in them.' Let us suppose that we are following the king into the banquetting hall of Hampton Court, in the days of Wolsey; long before that grand intellect, to which we owe, in this country, so much that was noble, and useful, and enduring, had been chafed by adversity, or enthralled by despotic sway. It is whilst Wolsey is still in his zenith that we picture King Henry in all his greatness also; for, with all the censures levelled against Wolsey, it is remarkable that Henry committed his most frantic acts of oppression and cruelty, after the remains of the Cardinal had been consigned to the grave. : Wolsey is still in all vigour-that butcher's son of Ipswich tall, portly, with marked features: with a comely, perhaps a somewhat vulgar, physiognomy. Look at him again : no, his countenance is not vulgar, though it is not refined. It has not elevation of features, but it has symmetry. We can imagine that face, lighted up, to be engaging; and there is a grandeur in his mien: the churchman, splendid in all his conceptions, has the majesty of intellect on his brow. He descends to the very threshold of his hall-door to wel |