The Palace of Pleasure | Page 9

likely to be experimental in life as in literature. Altogether then, we must discount somewhat Ascham's fierce denunciation, of the Italianate Englishman, and of the Englishing of Italian books.
There can be little doubt, I think, that in the denunciation of the "bawdie stories" introduced from Italy, Ascham was thinking mainly and chiefly of Painter's "Palace of Pleasure." The whole passage is later than the death of Sir Thomas Sackville in 1566, and necessarily before the death of Ascham in December 1568. Painter's First Tome appeared in 1566, and his Second Tome in 1567. Of its immediate and striking success there can be no doubt. A second edition of the first Tome appeared in 1569, the year after Ascham's death, and a second edition of the whole work in 1575, the first Tome thus going through three editions in nine years. It is therefore practically certain that Ascham had Painter's book in his mind[9] in the above passage, which may be taken as a contemporary criticism of Painter, from the point of view of an adherent of the New-Old Learning, who conveniently forgot that scarcely a single one of the Latin classics is free from somewhat similar blemishes to those he found in Painter and his fellow-translators from the Italian.
[Footnote 9: Ascham was shrewd enough not to advertise the book he was denouncing by referring to it by name. I have failed to find in the Stationer's Register of 1566-8 any similar book to which his remarks could apply, except Fenton's Tragicall Discourses, and that was from the French.]
But it is time to turn to the book which roused Ascham's ire so greatly, and to learn something of it and its author.[10] William Painter was probably a Kentishman, born somewhere about 1525.[11] He seems to have taken his degree at one of the Universities, as we find him head master of Sevenoaks' school about 1560, and the head master had to be a Bachelor of Arts. In the next year, however, he left the p?dagogic toga for some connection with arms, for on 9 Feb. 1561, he was appointed Clerk of the Ordnance, with a stipend of eightpence per diem, and it is in that character that he figures on his title page. He soon after married Dorothy Bonham of Dowling (born about 1537, died 1617), and had a family of at least five children. He acquired two important manors in Gillingham, co. Kent, East Court and Twidall. Haslewood is somewhat at a loss to account for these possessions. From documents I have discovered and printed in an Appendix, it becomes only too clear, I fear, that Painter's fortune had the same origin as too many private fortunes, in peculation of public funds.
[Footnote 10: See Haslewood's account, reprinted infra, p. xxxvii., to which I have been able to add a few documents in the Appendix.]
[Footnote 11: His son, in a document of 1591, speaks of him as his aged father (Appendix infra, p. lvii.).]
So far as we can judge from the materials at our disposal, it would seem that Painter obtained his money by a very barefaced procedure. He seems to have moved powder and other materials of war from Windsor to the Tower, charged for them on delivery at the latter place as if they had been freshly bought, and pocketed the proceeds. On the other hand, it is fair to Painter to say that we only have the word of his accusers for the statement, though both he and his son own to certain undefined irregularities. It is, at any rate, something in his favour that he remained in office till his death, unless he was kept there on the principle of setting a peculator to catch a peculator. I fancy, too, that the Earl of Warwick was implicated in his misdeeds, and saved him from their consequences.
His works are but few. A translation from the Latin account, by Nicholas Moffan, of the death of the Sultan Solyman,[12] was made by him in 1557. In 1560 an address in prose, prefixed to Dr. W. Fulke's Antiprognosticon, was signed "Your familiar friend, William Paynter,"[13] and dated "From Sevenoke xxii. of Octobre;" and the same volume contains Latin verses entitled "Gulielmi Painteri, ludimagistri Seuenochensis Tetrastichon." It is perhaps worth while remarking that this Antiprognosticon was directed against Anthony Ascham, Roger's brother, which may perhaps account for some of the bitterness in the above passage from the Scholemaster. These slight productions, however, sink into insignificance in comparison with his chief work, "The Palace of Pleasure."
[Footnote 12: Reprinted in the Second Tome of the "Palace," infra, vol. iii. p. 395.]
[Footnote 13: In his own book, and in the document signed by him, the name is always "Painter."]
He seems to have started work on this before he left Seven Oaks in 1561. For as