Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

The civyll weir, the battell intestine;

How that the sonne, with baner braid displayit,

Agane the fader in battell come arrayit.^29

The subsequent years had been marked by multiple cross-border invasions
in both directions, including James’s support of Warbeck in 1496 and the
siege of Norham in 1497 , undertaken while English forces were preoccupied
with the Cornish rebellion on which André’sVitafades out. The marriage
was, ironically, a sequel to the unpopular policy of alliance with England
formerly pursued by James III, not least matrimonially. It was also intended
to consolidate the Peace of Glasgow, itself a fragile alliance. The treaty had
been urged by the English to deflect the dangers posed by Scotland’s French
ally, though the sudden deaths of Prince Arthur and Henry’s queen
Elizabeth brought into play the real risk that the English succession might
pass to a Scottish heir. Hostility was acute on both sides; as Norman
Macdougall remarks,“the councillors of Henry VII who had advised against
the Scottish match can hardly have enjoyed the pageantry of Margaret
Tudor’s progress north.”^30
The Thrissill and the Rois,^31 in which Dunbar anticipates the union, has
echoed such divided apprehensions in its modern critical reception.
Division is inescapable in the poem itself. The marriage is foretold through
a dazzling landscape of heraldic allegory, expansively rendered; it is in turn
framed by a dreamer who can trace a clear ancestry toThe Parliament of
Fowlsand French love-dit. At the poem’s end, infive abrupt lines, the
imaginary court vanishes, and the dreamer awakens in something like terror
to write the poem down. Critic have asked how far the poem might be
understood as a critique of the royal language it inhabits. Spearing offers the
fullest compromise position, suggesting thatThe Thrissill“genuinely cele-
brates an ideal, while at the same time admitting, with poise and toughness,
that reality often diverges from it.”^32 I argue here that Dunbar’s poem
echoes André’s work in its concerns–with the transfiguring power of
language, with the visibility offigures, and with the imagining of imperial
temporality–but to very different ends.The Thrissillis haunted by anxieties
that embrace Dunbar’s own style and its relation to the herald’s twinned
properties of ekphrasis and memory. The outcome is a poem to whose
representations the poet himself isfinally alien. Royal desire plays through
the poem as a series of prohibitions that in the end are not easily deciphered.
To illuminate this aspect of the poem, I draw on Dunbar’sThe Goldyn
Targe, often viewed as a companion piece toThe Thrissill, and imbued with
its ceremonial and spectacular allegorical quality.

32 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland