Wherefore he suffred payn,
Was hedyd, drawen, and quarterd,
And dyed stynkingly marterd.
Lo, yet for all that
He ware a cardynals hat,
In hym was small fayth . . .

Such in substance is Skelton's indictment against the great
Cardinal, poured forth in lines that tumble over one another with-
out order. He returns to the charge, repeats accusations, his
allusions refer to events in an unchronological order, and there is
no regular procedure. The probability is that the various sections
of the poem were composed at quite different times. Thus at
line 393, only a little beyond one quarter of the completed work,
he remarks:

Thus wyll I conclude my style,
And fall to rest a whyle,
And so to rest a whyle, &c.

The natural result is that the poem is powerful only in detail. As
a whole it has the incoherence of anger. It is not worth while,
therefore, to discuss the historical accuracy of the accusations;
in fact, with the able championing of Brewer, the modern reader
in his admiration for the great qualities of Wolsey is apt to forget
that there may be another side. What concerns us here is purely
literary. As literature, its main characteristic is its audacity.
In an age of privilege, the boldness with which the poet dares to
express his scandals and the vigor of the expression are astounding.
It is no wonder that half apologetically he shields himself behind
the example of Juvenal. Its great merit is that it is a scathingly
frank expression of personal opinion. And that, too, is its great
weakness,--that it is the expression of merely personal opinion.
This way explain why Wolsey could afford to overlook, provided
he ever saw it, this attack upon his foreign policy and the personal
invective accompanying it. The first was misunderstood and the
second greatly exaggerated. And neither much interested the
country at large. The average Englishman had not the materials
at hand to enable him to discuss matters of state polity, and the
vices of rulers tend toward enhancing their popularity with the
common man by making them more human. In any case Wolsey's

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