1. George Wither wrote what amounted to a masque for a wedding that took place there in 1610, of the parents of Francis Willughby.
21 Facts About George Wither
1. 2.
George Wither wrote an elegy on the death of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, and a volume of gratulatory poems on the marriage of the princess Elizabeth.
3.
Several scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries claimed that George Wither had offended Lord Chancellor Ellesmere with one of the verses in Abuses.
4.
Ben Jonson turned satire back on George Wither, portrayed as the Chronomastix of the masque Time Vindicated.
5.
George Wither avenged himself, by a reference to Jonson's drunken conclave.
6.
George Wither was obliged to print this book with his own hand, in consequence of his quarrel with the Stationers Company.
7.
George Wither had served as captain of horse in 1639 in the expedition of Charles I against the Scottish Covenanters, and his religious rather than his political convictions must be accepted as the explanation of the fact that, three years after the Scottish expedition, at the outbreak of the English Civil War, he is found definitely siding with the Parliament.
8.
George Wither sold his estate to raise a troop of horse, and was placed by a parliamentary committee in command of Farnham Castle.
9.
George Wither was present at the siege of Gloucester and at Naseby.
10.
George Wither had been deprived in 1643 of his nominal command, and of his commission as justice of the peace, in consequence of an attack upon Sir Richard Onslow, who was, he maintained, responsible for the Farnham disaster.
11.
George Wither became a political and religious writer using verse as his medium.
12.
George Wither is considered to stand out as a supporter of the Commonwealth who proposed a more egalitarian social vision.
13.
George Wither's Respublica Anglicana was a reply to the Anarchia Anglicana of Theodorus Verax, a Presbyterian opponent of the Independents.
14.
George Wither was involved in 11 court cases, from 1643 to 1661, including Onslow's libel suit over the poem Justiarius Justificatus.
15.
George Wither was a conforming Anglican; but by this time he had moved closer to the Quakers.
16.
George Wither wrote, generally, in a pure English idiom, and preferred the reputation of "rusticity".
17.
George Wither had figured as one of the interlocutors, Roget, in his friend William Browne's Shepherds Pipe, with which were bound up eclogues by other poets, among them one by Wither.
18.
In 1615, the year of his release from prison and admission to Lincoln's Inn, George Wither printed privately Fidelia, a love elegy, of which there is a unique copy in the Bodleian Library.
19.
George Wither had begun as a moderate in politics and religion, but his Puritan leanings became more pronounced, as he moved from an Arminian to a more Calvinist position.
20.
George Wither has been classified as a Spenserian, with Michael Drayton, Giles Fletcher, Phineas Fletcher, and Henry More.
21.
The early Jacobean Spenserians were generally republican rather than imperial, of the "country party" rather than the "court party", nostalgic for Elizabeth I, and in favour of the older ornateness rather than the plain style of James I, however George Wither is described by Joan Grundy as adopting a deliberate plainness of style.