wit-combats, Civil War, Interregnum, Ben Jonson, John Skelton, Puttenham, William Elderton, orator regius, Henry VIII, Order of the Fancy
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wit-combats, including the composing of competitive verses and answers to them.
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Jonson perceives Skelton as the king’s champion who employs his combative verse in Henry’s service, and this is perhaps due to what was an implicit association of wit combats with cavalier verse. This association continued during the Civil War, and an interest in Skelton remains perceptible among Interregnum Royalists. James Smith, a member of the Order of the Fancy and a combatant in the Civil War, remembered Skelton alongside another patriotic flyter and boisterous answer-poet, William Elderton, in a verse beginning “Skelton some rimes; good Elderton a ballett”.
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Thus Puttenham’s dismissal of Skelton as “a rude rayling rimer” is certainly an inaccurate reflection of his enduring influence upon the poetics of response. He provided a model for those who found hostile verse answering suited to their literary personas and personal interests, and showed that fervent loyalty to the Church and Crown need not be at odds with indulging in boisterous bouts of socially abusive behaviour. As Henry VIII’s orator regius, moreover, Skelton was ideally placed to present himself as the king’s mouthpiece and to adopt a proclamatory tone in his private verse quarrels.
In his ‘Against Venemous Tongues Enpoysoned with Sclaunder and False Detractions’ (c.1515), Skelton portrays an unknown detractor’s defamation of him as potentially damaging to the commonwealth as well as to his own reputation, and responds in the guise of the government’s agent and mouthpiece rather than as a fractious and quarrelsome individual. From this pseudo-official position Skelton asserts with confidence
81 Timothy Raylor examines one of these groups in Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy (Newark: Delaware UP; London and Toronto: Associated UPs, 1994). Several of the scurrilous yet affable verses exchanged between Sir John Mennes and John Smith have been preserved in Wit Restor’d in Severall Select Poems not Formerly Publish’t (printed for R. Pollard, N. Brooks and T. Dring, 1658), pp.3-9 and pp.43-8, Wing M719. Earlier clubs such as the Mermaid Club have also been associated with men such as Jonson who were well known for their verbal sparing. The club's possible membership is interrogated by Shapiro (1950), 6-17.
82 ‘Mr. I Smith of Christ Church vpon the Same’, Raylor (1994), pp.245-6.
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