“Triumphs of English”: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court: New Essays in Interpretation

Citation

Day, A. (2001), "“Triumphs of English”: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court: New Essays in Interpretation", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 3, pp. 146-159. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.3.146.8

In view of his literary accomplishments, the first Tudor writer to translate Petrarch’s Trionfi and Plutarch’s Lives into English verse, who presented his translations to such exalted and eminent personages as Henry VIII, Mary Tudor, and Sir Thomas Cromwell, and performed a dextrous and sure‐footed balancing act on the outer fringes of Henry’s extended royal family, Henry Parker, Lord Morley, has been neglected for too long by our historians. The purpose of this scholarly collection of well‐documented essays is to rescue him from obscurity. Twelve academics, seven from the University of Cambridge, examine every imaginable aspect of Morley’s impact on early Tudor history and society. Their copiously annotated “interpretations” are arranged in five groups.

The introductory essay, David Starkey’s “An Attendant Lord”, places Morley firmly in the context of Henry’s extended royal family. Never one of the King’s inner circle of advisers, he was nevertheless a useful backwoodsman in the Great Council and proved a compliant ally in the tortuous religious and political conflicts of the period. “Writings”, the second group, comprises two essays, one a bibliographical survey of Morley’s writings, the other a conspectus of books associated with him or his family. The first includes a list of manuscripts by titles and giving details of date, what type of hand employed, if printed, the recipient, and its provenance. Texts attributed to Morley and references to lost works, together with notes on dating his works and on his hand and decoration are also included. The second is concerned with an attempted reconstruction of the literary materials he used and the books that can be circumstantially linked with Morley or his family.

The third group, “Politics and Religion”, also consists of two essays: “Morley, Machiavelli, and the Pilgrimage of Grace” and “Morley and the Papacy: Rome, Regime and Religion”. Between them they underline the delicate path Morley had to tread at a time when noble heads were falling because of actual or perceived threats to the Crown. His ambiguous family position, especially in connection with his daughter, who was beheaded because of her association with Catherine Howard, left no room for manoeuvre in such perilous times.

Although the five essays grouped under the heading “Courtly Maker” are literary in nature, they all display a keen awareness of their historical context. “The purpose of courtier‐writing generally was to express, albeit implicitly, the courtiers’ acquiescence in the state of current affairs. Instead of making big trouble … the courtiers were finding other ways to keep busy, for the most part ways that posed to no threat… Writing was a way for the courtiers to give evidence of the obviation of the threat that the courtier‐class had historically posed to the monarchy.” It is this interdisciplinary fusion that is the kernel of these interpretative essays.

For good measure an epilogue describes Lord Morley’s funeral based on an entry in the diary of a London Merchant Taylor, and on a heraldic miscellany in the Northamptonshire Record Office, which confirm that, for all the religious upheavals Morley had witnessed at first hand, his last rites “were perfectly conventional in both chivalric and Catholic senses”. And further, “everything about Morley’s funeral tallies with what is otherwise known of him: it was doctrinally conservative and, within the prescription of heraldic funerals, modestly sumptuous”. And, to sum up, “in view of the discussions earlier in this volume, there are no longer any grounds for thinking Henry Parker, eighth Lord Morley, anything but a staunch Catholic.” In that respect he embodies the recovery of a strife‐torn nation.

Nowhere in the book is there any hint or clue as to where the credit belongs for conceiving this publication. No doubt the joint‐editors were responsible for recruiting the contributors and, for the want of any alternative, we must presume that someone within the British Library’s publications division first got the project under way. In these days that’s an encouraging thought in itself. Certainly, this collection is a distinguished addition to its academic list.