The Chaucer Review

The Chaucer Review 36.4 (2002) 352-369

Thomas Hoccleve and the Politics of Tradition

John M. Bowers

Thomas Hoccleve worked the hardest to install Geoffrey Chaucer as the Father of English Poetry and to claim his own position as direct lineal heir in this literary genealogy. Chaucer's paternal title was not articulated in exactly these words until John Dryden's famous assessment in the Preface to the Fables (1700)—"he is the Father of English Poetry." ¹ But the notion of a patrilineal inheritance was already formulated within a generation of the poet's death in 1400 when Hoccleve sought to place himself in this family tree of immediate literary descendants in his famous commendation from The Regiment of Princes:

O maistir deere and fadir reverent,
My maistir Chaucer, flour of eloquence,
Mirour of fructuous entendement,
O universel fadir in science! ²

These stanzas mourning Chaucer's death served to dramatize Hoccleve's legitimacy as heir, according to the social logic that the one who grieves is the one with the right to inherit. He was also the first to set Gower alongside Chaucer as a principal contributor to this nascent vernacular tradition, but not its founder. ³

Yet despite his enterprise at establishing this right of descent—and despite his nearly ideal position as a civil servant in London, his staunch support of the new Lancastrian regime, and his connections with many of the mainstays of the royal court—he failed to secure this legacy. After the early success of his Regiment, Hoccleve gradually ceded his position to an altogether unlikely rival, the monk John Lydgate from Bury St. Edmunds, a writer whose religious vocation and provincial location in East Anglia otherwise seemed to disqualify him as a complete outsider. Hoccleve did not even seem to know that Lydgate was writing at the same time in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. ⁴ Eventually the trinity of writers Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. So why was Hoccleve, the total [End Page 352] insider, eventually locked out of the "House of Chaucer & Son"—that is, excluded from the literary tradition that he himself did so much to formulate? ⁵

Although we normally associate Hoccleve with the fifteenth century, he was born around 1367 and began work as a clerk in the office of the Privy Seal in 1387. This was a propitious time to have arrived on the scene in London, but it was also an ominous time. Chaucer had just completed Troilus and was embarking on the Canterbury Tales, and Hoccleve began moving in the circles of the literate civil servants who participated as members of Chaucer's first audience. ⁶ But it was also the time when the Appellants began their moves against Richard II and disaster befell some of the king's closest supporters, including the writer and political opportunist Thomas Usk, who moved in many of these same social and professional circles. ⁷ But the young Hoccleve managed to maintain his position safely throughout the 1390s, and he had good reason to transfer his loyalties to the Lancastrian rulers after the deposition of King Richard. Henry IV granted annuities of £10 to each of the four clerks at the Privy Seal in 1399, and in 1409 Hoccleve's annuity was increased to twenty marks. His begging poems really concern the normal difficulty in collecting an annuity, on time and in full, rather than the inadequacy of the actual grants. ⁸ Though he himself made some decisions that were detrimental to his career, such as his marriage, he had ample opportunity to prosper along with other Privy Seal clerks under the new regime.

When Hoccleve names himself in the Regiment, the Old Man immediately associates him with the preeminent writer of the previous generation —"Thow were aqweyntid with Chaucer, pardee" (line 1867). Claims of personal and artistic affiliation should not be too hastily dismissed. ⁹ Close similarities in metrical practices, especially the use of final -e aligned closely to the standards of the Ellesmere scribe (with whom Hoccleve collaborated on the Trinity College Cambridge R.3...