Devonshire Manuscript, 1536, Howard, Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid

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Devonshire Manuscript (c.1536). Douglas’s reputation was damaged seriously by her love affair with Howard since she was in line for the throne and, as Elizabeth Heale points out, among the ladies who were “at Henry VIII’s disposal as suitable counters in marriage negotiations”. She describes their verse conversation as expressing a “rhetoric of mutuality and shared passion”, whereby the “woman behaves ‘rightly’ by the rules of romantic love”, but violates the rules of court politics. ⁴⁰⁴ Bearing this in mind, it is notable that the couple choose Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as a model for discussing their illicit relationship rather than the archetypes of Petrarch and Laura. ⁴⁰⁵ Criseyde’s abandonment of Troilus for Antenor and her subsequent descent from courtesan to leper in Robert Henryson’s continuation of the story, The Testament of Cresseid (accepted at the time to be by Chaucer himself), made her the antitype of the chaste, inviolable Petrarchan heroine. ⁴⁰⁶ By opting for this model Howard and Douglas acknowledge implicitly their violation of sexual politics at court.

Lower down the social scale, Thomas Whythorne recounts in his autobiography an incident in which a maid at a house where he was employed as music master was dismissed for initiating an amorous verse exchange with him. When her actions became household knowledge he recalls that the master and mistress of the house “finding that she waz so loving withowt provoking or entysing thervnto, shee waz discharged owt of that hows and

⁴⁰⁴ Heale (1995), p.305 and p.298.
⁴⁰⁵ In one of Howard’s verses (“And now my pen, alas, wyth wyche I wryte”, no. 14), found among his exchanges with Douglas, he lifts Bk IV. ll.288-308 and ll.323-9 directly from Chaucer and simply omits Criseyde’s name. On the extracts taken from Troilus and Criseyde in the manuscript see Ethel Seaton, ‘‘The Devonshire Manuscript’ and its Medieval Fragments’, RES, n.s. 7 (1956), 55-6 (p.55). On the use of Troilus and Criseyde as models for illicit courtly love at Henry’s court see Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). For Lerer’s discussion of Howard and Douglas see pp.153-7.
⁴⁰⁶ See, for instance, Lerer (1997), p.136.

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