Manuscripts

Queens’ MS 24

Thomas Hoccleve (1368—c. 1450?), Regiment of Princes
In English, with Latin
England, ?London, c. 1420–40

During a lengthy career as a clerk for the Privy Seal, Thomas Hoccleve (an associate and disciple of Chaucer) achieved distinction as a poet of some renown. Having fallen into obscurity soon after his death, Hoccleve’s poetry has recently undergone positive reassessment, not least, on account of its many autobiographical passages. Their colourful descriptions of, for example, youthful dissipation, his mental illness, and pecuniary difficulties have informed recent research into the formations of subjectivity in early modern literature.

Hoccleve gained greatest fame for The Regiment of Princes, a lengthy poem addressed to the future Henry V. In the long prologue Hoccleve describes a conversation in which he is advised by an old man to seek the good lordship of Prince Henry by addressing a poem to him, after which the poem’s second half accordingly advises the Prince of the virtues necessary to a good ruler. Once Henry became King in 1413, Hoccleve continued to write for and about him, for example, celebrating the King’s triumphal return from France in 1421.

Queens’ MS 24 is one of forty-three extant manuscripts of the poem dating from around Hoccleve’s lifetime (another in the same hand is held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford). It has been suggested that the absence of leaves from this copy is due to the removal from it of a picture of Chaucer (eulogised by Hoccleve in the text), whose image is sometimes found in other contemporary copies.

Included with the volume is a printed indulgence (Caxton, 1489) granted by Johannes de Gigliis, Papal Nuncio in England, ad impugnandum infideles (1490 crusade). Various annotations dating from the sixteenth century record debts relating to previous owners, and indicate that the volume resided in Shropshire at that time. Queens’ MS 24 was given to the College in the eighteenth century by a Queens’ alumnus, the Revd Mascie Malyn (1688–1727).