evocative phrase–is the author’s own project before it is that of a
post-Reformation interest in associating Catholicism with the stigma of
sodomy.^11
privy spacesThe Bowge of Courte, printed in 1499 ,^12 brings together these different
versions of Skelton, embracing the royal household and print. Its readers
have admired the artifice by which it translates the standardtopoiof
anticourt satire into the subjective mode of dream vision.^13 They have
also, however, detected within the artifice an authentically autobiographical
fear and disgust.^14 While the poem shows all too convincingly the terrors
that presumably did beset medieval and Renaissance court men, we perhaps
do well to remind ourselves, obvious though the point may be, that the
poem’s effect of terror is the measure of a poet-rhetorician’s mastery and
resourcefulness as well as of a real and vicious court world. Its self-reflexive
removal of ground from beneath the reader’s feet seems aimed, not solely to
document the courtier’s“real”paranoia, but to participate in the discursive
production of paranoia–rather, in fact, as if paranoia were itself some form
of commodity. I shall argue here thatThe Bowgepromotes not a critique of
secret royal power, but its very replication.
Having rejected the more lurid tints in Bacon’s picture of an avaricious
monarchic spymaster and his“new men,”^15 and looked rather to continu-
ities with Yorkist and earlier government, the recent historiography of
Henry VII’s reign has nevertheless perceived a distinctive style of rule. In
the 1490 s the monarch was shaken by the perceived betrayal of his lord
chamberlain Sir William Stanley, in a household conspiracy that itself
appears at least in part to have been fabricated by the informers of whom
the understandably insecure new king was making extensive use.^16 David
Starkey, in one of the major early Tudor historiographic shifts of the last
decades, has argued that as a result the Privy Chamber was sequestered from
the rest of the household, and Henry retreated there attended by men“too
humble to play politics.”^17 While the magnificence of Henry VII’s court is
not in question, there are grounds for diagnosing a perceptible split between
the monarch’s position as head of thedomus magnificenciae, and some
displacement of power into less visible and more privy areas, centered, in
the most literal of ways, on the royal body natural (from these years dates the
post of Groom of the Stool). An act passed after the victory at Stoke also
reveals much about the temper of the household. It decreed that“when
compassyng of the deth of such as were of the Kynges trewe Subgiettis was
The Bowge of Courteand the paranoid subject 45