Composing the King, 1390–1391: Gower’s Ricardian Rhetoric

In accounts of the middle years of Richard II’s reign, contemporary chroniclers record a lively series of encounters between the king and those who had become increasingly concerned about the conduct of his rule and the future of the realm. John Gower may have shared those concerns, but in the Prologue of the original Confessio Amantis his report of meeting the king on the Thames does not touch on them. Gower sets the scene: “As I be bote cam rowende,” he writes, “My liege lord par chaunce I mette; / And so befell, as I cam nyh, / He bad me come in to his barge” (Prol. 40*, 42–44*).¹ Having already declared his intention to “make / A bok for king Richardes sake” (Prol. 23–24*), Gower not surprisingly centers this account on the “kinges heste”:

And whan I was with him at large, Amonges othre thinges seid He hath this charge upon me leid, And bad me doo my besynesse That to his hihe worthinesse Som newe thing I scholde boke, That he himself it mihte loke After the forme of my writynge.

(Prol. 46–53*)

In this meeting, the conversation, as far as we are told, was not political, but literary, and the poet provides no evidence that among “othre thinges seid” he repeated his own earlier advice—from the epistle to a younger Richard that he had incorporated in the Vox clamantis—about conduct supporting or detracting from effective rule. Nor does he hint that the king encouraged him to do so, to speak his mind or elaborate on what he had previously written. Richard simply wants “som newe thing.” That sets the poet’s task, and Gower responds deferentially, exactly as is expected of him: “And elles were I nought excused, / For that thing may nought be refused / Which a king himselve bit” (Prol. 73–75*). This is a case of hard patronage. The poet has no choice but to comply, and comply with grace.

The story of the poet being thus engaged by his king does not end with this narrative, of course, but extends through the entire work to its closing, the presentation of the “povere bok” unto the king’s “hihe worthinesse” (8.3050–51*), and before Gower finishes with it, he adroitly comments on Richard’s history. Many stories informed the content and rhetorical strategy of his response. Possibly included in that number is the famous report—in part another Thames narrative—preserved in the Westminster Chronicle and elsewhere, of a day in March 1385, when Archbishop Courtenay upbraids Richard for his complicity in the plot to murder his uncle, John of Gaunt. Richard’s action has weakened accepted laws and imperiled the kingdom, the archbishop argues, because it sets a precedent, enabling a king, whenever he wishes, to murder in secret anyone toward whom he bears ill will. Richard’s response tells us what he thinks: first, at Westminster, he “leapt to his feet with a volley of threats” at the archbishop, and later that day, when they meet on the Thames and Courtenay, unwilling to let the earlier matter rest, repeats his charges, he “drew his sword and would have run the archbishop through on the spot.”² Although Gower does not rise to this level of drama in his own report, it is precisely on stories of this kind—with speeches detailing political conflict, and Richard’s reactions disclosing aspects of character—that he will build his case, his invention, regarding the king. This brings us back to his Thames narrative. Never, in his literary career, has Gower sought merely to please. He speaks truths to power, and he does not forget truths he has spoken. On this occasion Gower remains political, and though his “herte is . . . glad” (Prol. 55*) to do the king’s bidding, he may have more to say than he is prepared to disclose in the opening report. If the archbishop, powerful in his own right, has failed with the king in his strategy of truth telling, how then might the poet, a man of humbler status but...