Sir Thomas Wyatt, cart's arse, libel, Cicero, De Oratore, defence, retorts, reputation, death, defence

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30

with individuals when it came to preserving their good name.

A cultivated aptitude for riposte could prove a highly advantageous personal accomplishment. It was an admired faculty that could sometimes prove essential to survival in a culture of defamation. When defending himself against accusations of treasonous speech brought against him by his enemies, a quick-witted rejoinder actually saved Sir Thomas Wyatt’s life as well as his reputation. Upon being accused that he had wished a thief’s death upon the king, or that he be “caste owte” of a cart’s arse, Wyatt countered with the rejoinder that his statement had been misconstrued and that he had actually said that he hoped the king would not be “lefte owte of the cartes ars”; that he hoped Henry’s interests were not being passed over. ⁴⁴ Wyatt’s pithy defence, which secured his acquittal, follows succinctly Cicero’s recommendation for effective retorts whereby a defendant ought to apply the same commonplaces or topoi turned to a difference sense than that intended by the plaintiff. ⁴⁵ This is, in fact, a general principal of verse responses to libel which characteristically turn the libeller’s words back upon him in the most economical fashion possible, paying like for like.

⁴⁴ ‘Wyatt’s Defence to the Iudges after the Indictment and the Evidence’, in Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1963), p.197 and p.198 (for a fuller account of this episode see pp.196-9).

Iam illud perspicuum est, omnium rerum in contrarias partes facultatem ex eisdem suppeditari locis. Sed argumento resistendum est aut eis, quae comprobandi eius causa sumuntur, reprehendendis, aut demonstrando, id, quod concludere illi velint, non effici ex propositis nec esse consequens.

By this time it is plain that the power to argue both sides of every question is abundantly furnished from the same commonplaces. But your opponents’ proof must be countered, either by contradicting the arguments chosen to establish it, or by showing that their desired conclusion is not supported by their premisses and does not follow therefrom. (De Oratore, II. liii., 215-16)

Castiglione was later to make the same point (see II. p.150), and see also Quintilian (V. 13).

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