Skelton, Writers, printers, publishers, disseminators, proclamation, Wilfred Holme, Fulle and Evill Successe of Rebellion, 1536, Five Articles, Pilgrimage of Grace
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47
like Skelton’s response to his unknown assailant, provided a means of threatening publicly detractors who evaded identification. Writers, printers, publishers and disseminators of anti-government literature were particularly likely to make an effort to conceal their identities and this meant countering their influence without having any recourse to prosecution. Where such pieces appeared en masse the typical official response was the issuing of a proclamation, and these were occasionally seconded or substituted by verse answers in which respondents presented themselves as the agents of the government. In other instances monarchs themselves saw fit to issue proclamatory verses to their subjects rather than commissioning more formal or official statements of their displeasure. Skelton’s proclamatory poem is slightly different in that he appears to make his own quarrel the king’s, rather than the king’s quarrel his own, a trait that has more in common with the flytings examined in Chapter Two than with the proclamatory answers examined here. The following examples from the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I are part of an enduring relationship between proclamations and verse responses to subversive literature.
Wilfred Holme’s Fulle and Evill Successe of Rebellion (1536) is in many ways a progenitor of such substitutes and seconds. Written in response to the Five Articles of the Pilgrimage of Grace and other anti-government propaganda in ballads and prophesies challenging Henry’s right to dissolve the Roman Catholic Church, the poem lifts verbatim parts of Henry’s proclamations against the rebels.
83
It is not a true answer-poem in the sense of addressing a particular poetic statement or statements but addresses disseminators of seditious literature generally. It might, however, be seen as representing the emergence
83 See, for instance, Madeleine Hope Dodds and Ruth Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536-1537: and the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538, 2 vols (Cambridge: CUP, 1915), I. pp.63-88 and A. G. Dickens, ‘Wilfred Holme of Huntington: Yorkshire’s First Protestant Poet’, YAJ, 39 (1956-8), 119-35 (p.124).
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