Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Sir John Mennes (1599–1671) and James Smith (1604/5–1667) were Royalist soldiers who collaborated to write and edit a series of poetic miscellany publications that they titled ‘drolleries’: Musarum deliciae (1655), Wit and drollery (1656), and Wit restor'd (1658). Their collections demonstrate a popular royalism and provided a means by which the supporters of the king might express their political identity through song, ballad, riotous drinking, and witty poetry. In the manner of John Cleveland, Smith and Mennes used vulgar, popular ballad forms to express their political identity. Mennes was born into a prominent Kentish family in 1599. There is no record of his having attended university. Certainly by the 1620s he was in the navy and he went on to command several ships; in 1642 he was entrusted to take Queen Henrietta Maria to safety in the Netherlands. After serving in the Royalist army in the 1640s he joined the exiled Stuart court, with which he remained until the Restoration, when he was made comptroller of the navy, a post he still held when he died in 1671. Mennes probably met James Smith, who had been educated at Oxford and ordained in 1627, in the mid-1620s when Smith was serving as chaplain to Henry Rich, earl of Holland, leader of the disastrous expedition, in which Mennes was involved, to raise the siege of French Protestants at La Rochelle. In 1639 Smith gained ... log in or subscribe to read full text