Excerpt from Skelton's Satirical Poems in Their Relation to Lydgate's Order of Fools, Cock Lorell's Bote, and Barclay's Ship of Fools: Inaugural-Dissertation In 1498 Skelton took holy orders, and became priest after having been ordained sub-deacon and deacon. We then hear of two other poems now lost, composed at the creation of the Prince of Wales (arthur, eldest son of Henry the Seventh), and of the Duke of York (prince Henry, afterwards Henry the Eighth). These events took place in 1489 and 1494 respectively. Henry the Eighth was then a mere infant, and Skelton cer tainly was not appointed tutor to that prince till some years later. This appointment is another proof of the high cousi deration in which the post stood with his contemporaries, and we may infer from this fact that Skelton was not that ludicrous character he is often represented to be. The tutor devoted himself seriously to the instruction of his royal pupil, and wrote for his best a treatise called speculum Principis which also has perished Mrs. Thomson in her Memories of the Court of Henry the Eighth says that the instructions bestowed upon Prince Henry by his preceptor, Skelton, were calculated to render him a scholar and a churchmen, rather than an enlightened legislator For it is to be noticed that Prince Arthur, Henry's elder brother, then was still alive and Henry originally destined by his father to be an archbishop of Canterbury. There is little doubt that this first ecclesias tical education influenced upon Henry the Eighth's church reform and his peculiar views in the reformatory movement. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.