libellous, seditious, Giovanni, Giglis, Pietro, Carmeliano, satire, deceitfulness, Vita Henrici VII, orators, monarchs

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the potential advantages for monarchs of surrounding themselves with competent orators who might respond on their behalves to libellous and seditious attacks. Most of these responses have perished, others are known only from their first lines as recorded by Bernard André who cites the first two lines of an answer by Cornelio Vitelli and the opening words of four of what are possibly his own contributions in his Vita Henrici VII. André is one among several laureates and would-be laureates who assumed the role of their monarch’s mouthpiece through the medium of verse answering.

Answers by two of the resident Italians at Henry’s court, Giovanni Giglis and Pietro Carmeliano, have been preserved and they both identify themselves specifically as Englishmen rather than as foreign guests. Giglis’s response is a point for point, line for line rebuttal of Gaguin’s poem. He deflects Gaguin’s satire upon the English back at the French in his first part (‘Egidius Anglicus contra prefatum Gallum’: ‘Egidius the Englishman against the Aforementioned Frenchman’) and answers the libel against Henry in the king’s name in the second (‘Rex Anglie ad Gallum’: ‘The King of England to the Frenchman’). According to Giglis it is the French rather than the English who are the aggressors and it is impossible to come to terms with them because of their deceitfulness:

Siccine tam crebra per te mendacia fiunt,
Galle, tibi quare credere nemo potest?
Credimus ut sanctam tendis disolvere pacem,
Cum nos Gallorum nullus amavit avus. (ll.1-4)¹⁷¹

Then, speaking in the voice of the king, Giglis, as Henry, stresses his probity and claims that he has always adhered to the terms of the treaties into which he has entered. Rather, it is his allies who have turned away from him, and broken the accord: “Abcessi nunquam sum quos amplexus

¹⁷⁰ See Cat. A 60a-d and V 290.
¹⁷¹ “Why is no one able to trust you, Frenchman, so often are lies thus put forth by you? We believe that your intention was to undo holy peace, since no ancestor of the French has loved us”, Carlson (1988), p.298. Carlson appears not to have translated the first line of this poem.

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