doubt their loyalty, but so that they may be more eagerly aroused to the task in
hand. The most conscientious and victorious Julius Caesar did so before the
campaign of Pharsalus; so did Pompey the Great, so did Lucius Catiline, so did
every great general of whom we read...Forgive me, best of princes, I ask, if I take
on the office of this reply before all others. For since you ordained mefirst
centurion and chief of the battle-line, as Laelius was to Caesar, so I am constrained
to reply to your excellence in this way, in his words. O true successor and heir to the
empire of Britain, since you ask us to speak the truth, we complain that your
patience has restrained your powers for so long. Did you not trust us?]
Oxford’s speech here leans on a source highly ambivalent in its view of
imperial power. André rehearses the key scenes in his models, Lucan and
Sallust, and Oxford’s“jubeor”[“I am constrained”] trembles with a larger
compulsion, as if Oxford is ordered into action by Lucan’s source text, and
is driven into the role of Lucan’sfictional Laelius by a kind of intertextual
pressure. Atfirst glance, André’s text seems to follow earlier examples in
which Lucan’s critique of Caesar is assimilated to a Virgilian framework and
so partially neutralized.^26 Though Oxford is allowed to retain Laelius’s
defense of civil war, the Tudor Caesar is no Lucanian force of nature or
avenging destroyer, but an evidently honorable commander moved solely
by the plight of his tyrannized and suffering land; he later orders his soldiers
on no account to plunder the civilian population, a decree which, along
with its accompanying threat of punishment, they cheerfully accept.
Later, however, just before the battle of Stoke, the same episode is about
to repeat itself, but is truncated when the king intervenes. Henry has again
encouraged his army:“Finierat cum jam respondere parato ut ante comiti
Oxoniensi rex quia tempus urgebat silentium indicit ac temporis angustiae
consulendum imperavit”“When he hadfinished the earl of Oxford was
ready to reply as before, but the king cut him off because time was pressing,
and ordered that the limited time be taken into account”. This is
remarkable for a narrative that has been so far given to creating expansive,
andfictional, rhetorical spaces. The king calls for silence, as if the real peril
to be avoided is repetition itself. And at the end of the narrative, which
breaks off abruptly with Henry’s harangue to the Cornish rebels, silence, in
one way, is what we are left with, as if the darkness from which Henry’s
blind poet seeks to recall history has closed in once more.
Such disquiet speaks even louder if we consider what the work’s recep-
tion, if any, may have been. Recent accounts of André’s role in the new
poetic economy have often, on limited evidence, pictured a“literary sys-
tem”in which he measured the terms of possible success for Skelton and
others, and important distinctions between vernacular and Latin poetic
30 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland