chapter 5
Mémoires d’outre-tombe: love, rhetoric
and the poems of Stephen Hawes
In his study of thegrands rhétoriqueursof France and the Low Countries,
Paul Zumthor recurs regularly to the metaphor of clothing. Therhétoriqueur
works in a“costume of language...made out of the fabric of a protocol
woven from ancient, exhausted feudal traditions”:healsowearsthepoetic
robes which are the prince’s gift. However, both garments conceal the pains
of economic vulnerability and constraint; the poet as court servitor is literally
a sign of monarchic magnificence, no one regarding the miserable body
beneath.^1 The point is not new to Zumthor; theCurialsimilarly remarks
that“Oftymes the peple make grete wondrynges of the Ryche robe of the
courtyour / but they knowe not by what labour ne by what dyffyculte he
hath goten it.”^2 However, it provides an apt point of entry into the life of
Stephen Hawes, who belongs among those poets about whom little is
known outside the sources that document such matters as royal donations
of garments. In 1503 he received an allowance of four yards of black cloth
for mourning on the occasion of the funeral of Henry VII’s queen.^3 His
name does not, however, appear among the list of those officers who
received mourning for Henry VII’s funeral, a fact to which I will return.
One other record, in the accounts of John Heron, treasurer of the
chamber, shows for January 10 , 1506 apaymenttoHawesoftenshillings
“for a balett that he gave to the kings grace in rewarde.”^4
Other details about Hawes may be gleaned from the prints of his poems,
all of which came from Wynkyn de Worde’s press. The introduction to
his religious allegoryThe Example of Virtuestates that it was written in
the nineteenth year of the reign of Henry VII, placing it between August
1503 and August 1504 ; by the same token, a similar note inThe Pastime of
Pleasure, his best-known poem, puts its composition between August 1505
and August 1506. All the Hawes poems published in the reign of Henry VII
designate him“groom to the chamber,”but there is no evidence to corrob-
orate John Bale’s later assertion that he was among those attendants closest
to the king in the“secretum cubiculum”or Privy Chamber.^5 And in the
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