ABSTRACT
The rhetorical strategies that the courtier adopts, as part of the inclusive polity of the court, as shown in David Lyndsay's verse, are distinctly different from those of the excluded writer who writes from a position outside of the court. Sir Francis Bryan is further cynically counselled to align himself to a rich old man, to pander and please him in the hope of becoming his 'Executor'. He denies any connection between happiness and traditional virtue and delineates how survival and the acquisition of wealth require behaviour at variance with civic humanist morality and that the courtier must be prepared to abandon such morality if he is to maintain the minimal condition for happiness, material wealth. Though within different genres, pasquinade and satirical verse, the two writers similarly juxtapose the civic humanist ideal against the stark reality of court service. In the early sixteenth century, patronage affected all aspects of English and Scottish social and political life.
