ruling line–or perhaps under vigorous cross-questioning from such people
to ascertain where his own true loyalties stood (“by theyr tuggynge, my lyfe
was nere spent”)–Hawes professed disloyalty (“I dyde disprayse”)inorderto
find out how the land lay. We perhaps need, however, to abstract more
positivist perspectives from a broader sense of the cultural symbolism sur-
rounding thefigure of the royal patroness. There is evidence for a form of
courtly cult centered on Mary Tudor in the last years of Henry VII’s reign.
In 1506 a Greenwich tournament challenge took the form of a letter sent to
the Princess Mary by the Lady May, claiming“free licence”from“my Ladye
and Soveraigne Dame Sommer...during the tyme of my short Raigne...
and a fortnight in the moneth of my sister June”to spend her time as it shall
be to her“comfort and most solace.”^60 More material survives for the“Justes
of the Moneth of May”of 1507 , in the form of an invitation to this tourna-
ment at Kennington–also a letter sent by the Queen of May,“yeven vnder
our signet at our castell of Comphorte in our citie of Solas.”^61 Here wefind,
in Kipling’swords,“an allegorical cast of characters and a romanticmise en
scènefor the essentially dramatic show.”^62 Several of the realm’s most noted
knights, Charles Brandon, Thomas Knyvet, Giles Capell and William
Hussey, entered the lists dressed in green, wearing their queen’sbadges
about their necks; the role of May Queen during these jousts was played
by Mary Tudor, wearing a green andflorally adorned dress. She presided
over the month-long tournament from a stage built beside a hawthorn tree
“tymberde with our armes offflowres of all sortes,”which bore upon its
branches“a shyld of whyt and grene, whyche collours be moste comfortable
and plesande for all seasons.”^63 Henry VII’s symbolic hawthorn bush with its
shield of Tudor green and white transformed the Queen of May into a
Tudorfigure of dynastic renewal and continuity. Here Mary’sbodyfigures
the body politic, as she oversees a chivalric“flowering”of“thys noble realme
of Englonde”;^64 a verse account of the jousts printed by de Worde at the time
refers to“This confortable blossome named Mary,”^65 and amplifies the
imagery of May and the red and white Tudor rose.
This, if the 1506 reference to a“ballett”given to the king tells us anything,
is the kind of activity in which Hawes may well have been involved. If Hawes
indeed lost his post after 1509 and was seeking some form of restoration to
court, Mary Tudor, with her probable relation to cultic amatory verse, may
have appeared a self-recommending potential intercessor. However, we do
not know–and at this remove probably never will–whether the poet may
have become entangled in all too real political difficulties, or whether he was
called to account for transgression in a courtly“game of love”of the kind so
memorably described by John Stevens.^66 Hawes in any case touches on the
132 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland