satire, pastoral, dream vision, 1553, anti-government, political satire, 1550s, court

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anti-government satire, presented as a pastoral dream vision presumably to distance the author from its inflammatory content. Written during the minority of Edward VI (d. 6 July, 1553), Churchyard’s dreamer looks forward to a time when “Rex doth raigne and rule the rost, and weedes out wicked men”, and catalogues a list of the clichéd vices that will pervade society until Edward comes of age and an end is brought to Dudley’s tyranny (sig. Ai^r). Although, as St. Onge argues, the poem “criticizes a number of abuses common to almost any society”, it is doubtful that it would have been interpreted as anything other than a controversially topical political satire in the early 1550s. ²³³

The poems first began to appear in print within a year of when Dudley conspired successfully to depose Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, from his office as Protector. Churchyard had some reason to be discontented with the protectorate under Somerset, ²³⁴ but it is definitely Dudley’s, rather than Somerset’s, supremacy against which he complains here. It is also possible that the poem reflects some level of disaffection resulting from Churchyard’s general lack of recognition at court, something from which he suffered for almost the entirety of his career. ²³⁵

The dream exhibits distinct affinities with Somerset’s liberal attitude towards complainants against enclosure in 1549; especially with his taxation of sheep, intended to

“inoffensive little piece of moralizing” and “a slight piece of social satire so gentle and inoffensive it seems hardly credible that it could have aroused any reaction at all”, p.122 and p.830.

²³³ St. Onge (1966), p.36.

²³⁴ According to St. Onge (1966), Churchyard was pressed into military service and captured by the enemy in 1548 during the Western Rebellion and, similar to Gray at the time of his flyting with Smyth, had recently lost his patron, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to the gallows (p.30). See also, Merrill Harvey Goldwyn, ‘Notes on the Biography of Thomas Churchyard’, RES, n.s. 17 (1966), 1-15 (p.7).

²³⁵ A verse dispute in which he became involved in 1566 focuses precisely upon this issue (see Cat. C 93a-b, G 139, J 187, R 234 and W 318).

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