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63 3 Thomas Churchyard’s “Valiant Soldiers” and the “Public State” In his introduction to Churchyard’s Choice, Thomas Churchyard, one of the most prolific of Elizabethan soldier poets, declares that “before all other things (except the honoring of Prince and public state) a true writer ought of duty, to have in admiration and reverence the valiant soldiers.”1 This statement would seem to be in keeping with Churchyard’s reputation today (if he has one at all) as a venerable but dawdling moralist who represented war with a soldier’s eye but without much critical shrewdness , or, as one scholar has more graciously put it, as a “politically correct” Tudor writer.2 To his contemporaries, Churchyard was not politically correct.3 He became known as a gadfly of the state early in his career with a short poem called “Davy Dycar’s Dream,” first published in 1551 after Churchyard returned from the wars in Scotland.4 “Davy Dycar ’s Dream” is a lament upon the moral and social decay of modern times presented as a dream, but its flashpoint comes near the end when Davy imagines a day when “Rex doth reign and rule the roost, and weeds out wicked men.”5 The line was understood by many as an attack on certain unpopular ministers who ruled England in the name of the boy king Edward VI. Dozens wrote detractions against Churchyard, Thomas Camel chief among them, while others defended him. So rancorous was the controversy that Churchyard was questioned by Edward’s Privy Council, a situation in which Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford and renowned protector of radical authors, had to intervene.6 Churchyard never denied the allegations outright but turned the tables on those who made them, imploring them to state whom they thought he was criticizing and why. No one dared take that bait. The storm around Davy 64 English Mercuries Dycar continued to sell books into the 1580s, and Churchyard continued to earn fame as a literary malcontent until his death in 1604.7 The image of Churchyard as a politically correct Tudor writer is not a misreading, however. It derives from Churchyard’s stylized persona as a “small soldier” who told his war stories for whatever meager rewards they might bring, an uncomplicated man who, in his own words, “hath used both sword and pen with poet’s fortune .”8 The Churchyard I present in this chapter is not the politically correct Tudor writer but a critical observer of the Elizabethan war machine who used his authority as a veteran to question not only the state’s rationale for waging war but also the role of war in creating relations between the state and its subjects. Throughout Churchyard’s opus, the soldier emerges as a figure at odds not with the enemy but with the apparatuses of his own government, to the extent that Churchyard’s war literature seems to play a game of chicken with state authority at the same time it pretends to be a humble memoir of a humble soldier. Churchyard’s use of his old soldier persona to mask his biting commentary did not go unnoticed by his contemporaries. Edmund Spenser personifies him in “Colin Clout’s Come Home Again” as “Harpalus now woxen aged, / In faithful service of fair Cynthia,” but also as “old Palemon ,” whose “careful pipe” “may make the hearer rue.”9 Elizabeth herself noted the barbs hidden in Churchyard’s war stories: she was angered by some remarks in the Choice, and Churchyard was forced to flee the country for a time. As I am sure Churchyard’s life and work are unfamiliar to even the most experienced readers of Elizabethan literature, I stress two things before delving into his poetry and the relations he probes between soldiers and the state. The first point is that Churchyard is not an oddball among Elizabethan writers. His critically honed war stories, usually told in collections of rhyming iambic pentameter , were popular throughout his long career, despite his complaints to the contrary, and even late in life he was hailed as the forebearer of the “grandiloquentest” of English poets by Thomas Nash and as “the most passionate among us” by Francis Meres.10 I mention this aspect of Churchyard because, as I have argued in the introduction and first chapter, we must get around the centuries that stand between ourselves and the Elizabethan era if we hope to reconsider the place of war in the period. The idea of...

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