William Forrest; ed. by William Dunn Macray
London: Whittingham and Wilkins at the Chiswick Press, 1875
Roxburghe Club 101
William Forrest (fl. 1530-1576) was chaplain to Mary Tudor and a prolific Catholic poet. He wrote the long metrical poem The History of Grisild the Second in 1558 and presented it in manuscript to Mary in thanks to her. To Forrest, the Reformation resulted from tyranny arising from Henry VIII’s infatuation with Anne Boleyn. His account of Katherine of Aragon’s divorce from Henry VIII is unambiguously sympathetic to Katherine, casting her as Grisild (from Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale’) on account of her great patience, and Henry as Walter, for behaving with ‘much wickedness’. Other participants retain their own names: ‘Thomas Wulsaye’; ‘Anne Bullayne’. This is the first printed form of the poem. Its editor is under no illusions about it: ‘Little as it can claim of regard for poetical merit, there is yet a quaintness and simplicity in the greater part of it that always redeem it from contempt, and often render it amusing. But it is in the illustrations of contemporary history which it affords that its chief value lies’. Forrest was an eye-witness to some scenes and includes some historical details not found elsewhere, such as attitudes to the divorce in Oxford.