chapter 1
Beginnings: André’sVita Henrici Septimi
and Dunbar’s aureate allegories
Narratives of origin, in particular dynastic or regnal origin, may not bear
very much looking into. Henry of Richmond’s’s accession to the English
throne was based in a tenuous claim and military violence. The marriage
of James IV with Henry’s eldest daughter Margaret Tudor sealed the mis-
named Treaty of Perpetual Peace between England and Scotland of 1502 ,
but in the event marked only a brief cessation in a history of hostility
that had included James’s clash with his own royal father James III at
Sauchieburn in 1488. Both Bernard André’sVita Henrici Septimi, along
with the writings of his fellow Latinists at Henry VII’s court, and William
Dunbar’sThe Thrissill and the Roisrepresent these crucial scenes as matters
of sight, with André’s self-projection as blindvates, and his role as humanist
historiographer, mirrored by Dunbar’s investment in stylized image and
heraldic display. Both texts, while revealing of their contrasted court cul-
tures, seek authority in blindness, absence and the unnamed spacesbetween
figurations of presence, andfind it a precarious formation indeed.
“ut caecus in tenebris”: bernard andre ́
and the blindness of originsBetween 1489 and 1490 some important Anglo-French negotiations took
place in London. The subject was the control of Brittany, laid open by a
Breton ducal minority to the marital designs of the French king, Charles
VIII, and the diplomatic standing of the new English regime was highly
visible. Henry VII, who had spent much of his exile in Brittany, sought to
keep it independent, both to maintain an asylum for sympathetic refugees
from the French court and to limit French hegemony along the Channel
seaboard. The French ambassador and noted humanist^1 Robert Gaguin,
incensed by what looked like diplomatic dilatoriness, wrote a bad-tempered
epigram, published in Paris, which attacked the English and their king. This
stirred up a quick response at the English court, where rhetoricians both
19