Gower on Henry IV's Rule: The Endings of theCronica Tripertitaand Its Texts

Abstract

When in late 1399 Henry Bolingbroke (1367–1413) took the English throne as Henry IV from his cousin Richard II (d. 1400), the deposed king's poet John Gower (ca. 1330–1408), who had been long in Henry's favor too, wrote extensively in support of the revolution by which the Lancastrian regime was installed. Aged and probably infirm, Gower had been quiet since finishing with theConfessio amantisin the early thirteen-nineties: “A bok for king Richardes sake” (∗24), Gower had called it, written “upon his comandynge” (∗54). Then came suddenly the substantial body of Gower's Lancastrian apologetics, within a period of a few weeks or months, between late 1399 and early 1400: the some three-hundred line inaugural panegyric, in rhyme royal stanzas, now usually called “In Praise of Peace” —re vera, “ad laudem et memoriam serenissimi principis domini Regis Henrici quarti'” — the LancastrianCarmen saeculare, celebrating Henry's installation, and Gower's last writing in English; possibly some of the shorter Latin verse as well; and, most grand, his account of the revolution's advent in theCronica tripertita, in three books, 1062 Leonines, covering precisely the chronological span embedded in the official “Record et proces del renunciacion du roy Richard, le second apres Ie conquest, et de lacceptacion de mesme la renunciacion, ensemblement oue la deposicion de mesme le roy Richard,” enrolled in the rolls of parliament in late 1399, on which Gower based his verse enarration.