(ca. 1390–ca. 1475)
Like Geoffrey CHAUCER and Thomas HOCCLEVE, George Ashby was a government employee who also became known as a poet. For more than 40 years, by his own testimony,Ashby worked as clerk of the signet under King Henry VI and his queen, Margaret of Anjou (his job was to write out bills to be sent to the secretary of state for signature). A Lancastrian during the turbulent Wars of the Roses, Ashby’s fortunes rose and fell with those of his royal patrons: He wrote his Prisoner’s Reflections while imprisoned at Fleet, and wrote The Active Policy of a Prince while charged with the education of Henry and Margaret’s son, Edward of Lancaster, the prince of Wales.
Ashby’s early life is obscure, but he implies in his poetry that he was associated with the royal household from an early age, and that he was educated there by royal tutors (rather than in the church). He is known to have owned land in Middlesex. He was a favorite of Queen Margaret, and after the resounding defeat of her army by the Yorkist Edward IV at Towton in 1461, Ashby was incarcerated.While at Fleet Prison (ca. 1461–63), he wrote a poem of some 50 RHYME ROYAL stanzas, displaying the influence of Chaucer not only in its verse form, but also in the reflection of BOETHIUS in the tone of the consolation.
He acknowledges this debt to Chaucer in his other major poem, The Active Policy of a Prince, in which he calls himself an “apprentice” of Chaucer, GOWER, and LYDGATE. That poem, also in rhyme royal, is intended as a book of instruction in the art of statecraft for Prince Edward.Writing in about 1470, the 80-year-old Ashby addresses the 17-yearold prince as the hope of the realm. In it Ashby emphasizes Edward’s lineage (likely a reaction to Yorkist rumors of the prince’s bastardy). He then advises Edward to study the examples of history to learn what kinds of behavior to emulate and what to eschew.He chides the contemporary noble class for its greed, and advises Edward to keep the common people prosperous to avoid rebellion, not to allow other nobles to become richer than the king, and not to show mercy to traitors.Much of this advice, as Scattergood points out, seems to be designed to keep Edward from committing the same mistakes his father had made (1971, 284). The single manuscript version of The Active Policy of a Prince is followed by a long series of rhyme royal stanzas (1,260 lines) that loosely translate Latin maxims. Generally entitled the Dicta et opinions deversorum philosophorum (Sayings and opinions of diverse philosophers), this has generally been considered a separate text. Scattergood, however, considers it an appendix to The Active Policy, comprising further advice for the young prince. Prince Edward, killed the following year in the Battle of Tewkesbury, was never given a chance to put any of Ashby’s advice into practice. After this final Lancastrian defeat, the aged Ashby must certainly have lost his position in government, and doubtlessly died shortly afterward. His poetry has been generally abjured as dull, pedestrian, and uninspired, though it does give us an interesting view of the mind of a middle-class bureaucrat during a tumultuous time in English history.
Bibliography
■ Bateson, Mary, ed. George Ashby’s Poems. London: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1965.
■ Green, Richard Firth. Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980.
■ Scattergood, V. J. Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971.
■ ———.Reading the Past: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Blackrock, Ireland: Four Courts Press, 1996.