POETS IN OFFICE

The Official English Laurel

By HILARY SPURLING

We thought it fit to let thee know it, Thou art a damned insipid poet.

CONTEMPORARIES have generally taken a dim view of Oxford's taste in Professors of Poetry. The...only thing of which they have con- sistently taken a dimmer view is England's taste in Poets Laureate. From a line of laureates un- broken for over three and a half centuries, how many are remembered today? Shadwell, perhaps, as the heir Dryden chose for the Throne of Dullness; Cibber, certainly, as the monarch Pope placed upon the throne itself; Alfred Austin, possibly, for a single stroke of in- spired buffoonery. . . .

The lines above are part of a poem addressed to Sir William Davenant, England's second laureate and Shakespeare's godson (according to Aubrey, Davenant did not deny the rumour that Shakespeare was his father—his mother was the witty and agreeable hostess of the Crown Inn at Oxford where Shakespeare lay on journeys to Warwickshire). Suckling once foretold that Apollo would withhold his laurel from Davenant because he had no nose (having lost it, Aubrey says, when 'he gott a terrible clap of a Black handsome wench that lay in Axe-yard, West- minster'), but this is a mild gibe compared with the tide of lampoons which submerged the laureateship during the eighteenth century. In 1757 Thomas Gray refused the post: 'For my part I would rather be sergeant-trumpeter or pin- maker to the palace,' he wrote, 'nevertheless I . rather wish somebody may accept it that will retrieve the credit of the thing, if it be re!tievable or ever had any credit.' Half a cen- tury later, on the death of a certain H. J. Pye ))e had been laureate for twenty-three years, Si. Walter Scott also refused. His patron, the 1)u:se of Buccleuch, advised Sir Walter that he would be frankly mortified to see him accept.

The origins of the laureateship were hap- hazard. Petrarch had been crowned Poet Laureate by the Pope in Rome, and Ben Jonson, who had antiquarian tastes and a justly high opinion of his own merits, thought King James should do the same for him. He never got his official English laurel, but he had a royal pension of a hundred marks (and another from the City of London--`a chanderly pension for verjuice and mustard,' as he said when they withdrew it). King Charles changed the pension into pounds at Jonson's urgent plea and added a butt of sack yearly (prudently converted into cash by Henry James Pye; both emoluments continue today).

But Jonson quarrelled with Inigo Jones, stopped writing the royal masques, and died wretchedly, whereupon his pension passed to one of Inigo Jones's young men who had just pro- duced the lyrics for a particularly sumptuous Christmas entertainment. This was Will Davenant, who later fought at Naseby, was knighted after the siege of Gloucester, escaped to France, and was captured in the Channel by the Parliamen- tarians on his way to found a colony in Vir- ginia with a shipload of French convicts disguised as weavers. He was committed to the Tower on a charge of high treason, and released, according to legend, on the personal inter- cession of John Milton, whom he saved in turn from the king's displeasure at the Restoration. Charles II naturally reinstated Sir William (he couldn't afford the pension, so he gave him a patent to found Drury Lane Theatre instead) and on his death, by a masterstroke, appointed

Dryden who was the first official laureate, one of the two great holders of the office, and the only one ever to have his post taken from him.

Dryden wrote so well in support of various Tory causes that, though he had changed his coat so adroitly and so often, he couldn't change again at the Whig triumph of 1688; and lost the laurel to his notorious and otherwise unhappy rival, the Whig Shadwell. Shadwell may have been a competent playwright, but he was an ignominious laureate. It was rumoured that his sudden death was caused by reading an abusive lampoon, which may well have been true since the wits did not spare him. For the next hundred years and more coffee houses were littered with luridly titled pamphlets : 'A Lash at the Laureate,' A Blast upon Bays, or a New Lick

at the Laureate.' Each new official ode was swamped by a host of parodies.

The post had become a minor political appoint- ment held mostly by needy dramatists with Whig sympathies—men like Nahum Tate, who added a happy ending to King Lear. wrote the words of 'While shepherds watched,' and died inside the Mint at Southwark where he had taken refuge from his creditors; Laurence Eusden, an obscure Lincolnshire parson, of whom Pope said: `Mr. Eusden's writings rarely offended but by their length and multitude'; and Colley Cibber, a great actor, wit and pillar of Drury Lane, but perhaps the most abject of all our laureates. He

wrote, as most of them did, 'more to be fed than to be Famous,' and freely admitted that his official verses were trash. No wonder, when he had to produce two odes a year for twenty-seven

years, all in praise of King George II: In merry old England it once was the rule, The king had his poet and also his fool. But now we're so frugal, I'd have you know it, That Cihber can serve for both fool and poet, sang the wits. Cibber's successor relieved his feelings in a poem : 'A Pathetic Apology for all Laureates, Past, Present, and to Come.'

The eighteenth-century laureate was obliged to write two annual odes to be set to music and sung in the drawing-room before the assembled court. This custom was introduced by George (who spoke no English and paid the Master of his Music double his Laureate's salary), and was only abandoned when it became undesirable to continue celebrating the survival of the aged and insane George 111. A resumption was threatened on the accession of his son, to the great dismay of the current laureate. Robert Southey, who wrote from Keswick desiring that 'upon great events I might either write or be silent as 'the spirit moved.' His wish was granted, but the spirit moved often and copiously, gener- ally in irregular metres which sorely tried the Master of the King's Music, who had been accustornet to set the rhyming stanzas which Pye had sent him always six weeks in advance.

It was Southey who gave the laureateship a respectability which it hadn't had before and has never entirely lost. He made it so respectable that when he died it was offered to Wordsworth, who accepted, though under protest and on con- dititin that he need write nothing in return (which he did). Seventy years later W. B. Yeats was canvassed and might have accepted if the post had been offered him; Thomas Hardy was also suggested, but was felt to lack a laureate's optimism, and Kipling was in eclipse for the opposite reason. Some backed Mr. Masefield, then in his early thirties, and all were startled when Mr. Asquith appointed aged Robert Bridges on the eve of the First World War. Questions were asked in the House as to the suitabily of Mr. Bridges and the quality of his patriotism. The post still basked in the aftermath of Tennyson's glory when Laureate and Prime Minister were twin stars beneath the Queen and Mr. Gladstone had declared that when his name was forgotten the laureate's would remain for ever graven on the hearts of his countrymen.

When Tennyson died. Queen Victoria is said to have remarked to Mr. Gladstone, 'I am told that Mr. Swinburne is the best poet in my dominions.' Mr. Gladstone was appalled. His- tory does not relate what the Queen said, if she was ever told, about Mr. Swinburne's politics. But Mr. Harold Wilson shouldn't have any trouble if he is ever placed in a similar situation : names in plenty spring to mind, all damned insipid poets, eminently worthy of the true, ignoble laureate tradition.