“Wo is the coutrey, where the ruler is wanton”
Sir Thomas Elyot, The Bankette of Sapience
Sir Thomas Elyot (1490?-1546) is remembered as an eminent English humanist, and pioneer in the use of English instead of Latin for literary purposes. He was a copious and earnest scholar who strove mightily to “augment our Englyshe tongue”[i] and uplift society by readings in and translations from ancient and modern authors, and his own writings on subjects ranging from education and health to morals and statesmanship. It is less often remembered that he was also a man of affairs, with a public career motivated by the Renaissance humanist ideals of imparting learning and virtue, and leading an active Christian life.
The Encyclopædia Britannica observes, “The aim of all Elyot’s works was usefulness”[ii] – and he sought to realize this ambition with translations of texts from the fifth century BC rhetorician Isocrates[iii], the first century philosopher Plutarch[iv], the third century Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, and the fifteenth century Italian philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola[v]. Elyot also produced anthologies of Biblical and classical aphorisms like The Bankette of Sapience (1534)[vi], health hints in The Castel of Helth (1539)[vii]., and religious exhortations in Preseruative agaysnte deth (1545)[viii].
Although for the most part Elyot adhered to the medical ideas of his day (the Hippocratic ‘four humours’ that needed to be kept in balance), his health hints were occasionally strikingly unorthodox. He recommends, for example, “lusty synginge” for those confined to sick beds, and blowing into sackbuts not so much to make music as to exercise “the entrayles…undernethe the myddreffe”[ix]. The Castel was derided by the faculty, but publicly popular because written in unaffected English rather than the doctors’ mystificatory Latin (often really dog-Latin). It went into several editions during Elyot’s lifetime, and was probably no more injurious to health than more conventional sixteenth-century medicine.
Of greater long-term utility is his monumental 1538 work, The Dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot knyght[x], which was twice revised by him and reissued in his lifetime, and several times posthumously. This compendious book, containing more than 413,000 words, was the first systematic English dictionary of Latin; indeed, it was the first book ever to be called a ‘dictionary’[xi]. The Dictionary familiarized English readers with some 27,000 Latin headwords, either consolidating or introducing many words into English, including audience, coral, epitome, gorge, habit, ignorant, linear, maturity, murmur, scissors, ululate, and zodiac. In its range, and richness, it was almost (to use another of his words) an ‘encyclopaedia’ (which he defined as “that lernynge whiche comprehendeth all lyberall science and studies”). Elyot and other ‘neologizers’ felt strongly that English was a limited, ‘rude’, even ‘barbarous’ language, that urgently needed new coinages to express new and sophisticated concepts – or old and sophisticated concepts, recovered from the ancient world.
The Dictionary met with some nativist resistance, prominently from Sir John Cheke of King’s College, Cambridge (ironically, a classicist), who believed the language would be adulterated by such wholesale importation. This dispute has become known as the ‘Inkhorn controversy’, with Elyot and others accused of artificiality and pretentiousness – essentially, of making words up out of inkwells[xii]. But Elyot was ultimately able to reassure English readers that although new words might at first seem “strange and darke”, they would soon “be as facile to understande as other wordes late commen out of Italy or France”[xiii].
The book had shortcomings, for example refuting many legendary medieval notions about the origins of England while credulously retaining others, such as the former existence of a race of British giants[xiv]. Nevertheless, the Dictionary’s publication has been called “the chief event of not only this year [1538] but perhaps of the whole period of [Thomas] Cromwell’s dominance”[xv]. Elyot’s “great contribution”, says another, “was as a popularizer of the culture of classical antiquity. No one did more to bring the ideas of the Ancient Greeks and Romans to Tudor England”[xvi]. The Dictionary was also crucial in codifying Elyot’s philosophical and political outlook, an integrated and unifying philosophy of politics and statecraft which still resonates today. It is curious that this extraordinarily fecund lexicon was long overlooked by historians of the English language[xvii].
As if his Dictionary were not a sufficient claim on national remembrance, seven years earlier Elyot had produced another book that would never be forgotten.
The Boke Named the Gouernor was first published in 1531, thrice more during its author’s lifetime and severally afterwards, going into at least seven editions by 1580. It has ever since been an influence on manners and statecraft, and on English letters generally, attracting such admirers as Shakespeare and James II.
Elyot’s Boke is a philosophical primer and a kind of handbook for the governing class, designed to introduce them to the ideals of Renaissance humanism, and so make them worthy of their privileged positions. These governors were not just monarchs, but also nobles and gentry, “inferior governors” without whom no prince could rule.[xviii]
It is one of the most famous of the many ‘courtesy books’, a didactic genre known in England since at least the twelfth century. Sometime in the latter part of that century, a Suffolk monk, Daniel of Beccles, issued Urbanus Magnus, ‘Book of the Civilized Man’[xix], which advocated civility and good morality in all things – saying thank you, avoiding loud laughter, eating (relatively) elegantly, and – an especially refined touch – avoiding attacking one’s enemy while he was defecating. Ever since, clerical and lay moralists had issued admonitory and edificatory books, aimed at uplifting all adults and children, but particularly princes and nobles, frequently through irony or satire. These became known generically as specula principium – ‘mirrors for princes’.
The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw many such specula – famously, Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494), Desiderius Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1511), Education of a Christian Prince (1516) and On Civility in Children (1532), Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513), and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). There would be powerful later courtesy books – Hugh Rhodes’s Boke of Nurture (ca. 1550), Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, which was published in English in 1561, Galateo of Manners and Behaviour by Giovanni della Casa (published in English in 1576), La Civile Conversazione by Stefano Guazzo (published in English in 1581), and Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman (1622), to name just some – but the Gouernor has long been regarded as a classic of its kind. It is, concludes one modern historian, “the definitive English guide to princely education and conduct”[xx].
Elyot origins and connections
The Elyots were themselves gentlefolk – excellently connected rural gentry capable of rising to high offices, and holding them with distinction. Elyots owned wide estates mostly to the west of London (and in Cambridgeshire, where the surname goes back to at least the twelfth century), in Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire. Their holdings stretched as far as Somerset and incorporated the hamlet of East Coker – long afterwards, the ethnic fons et origo of T. S. Eliot and immortalized in his ‘Four Quartets’, a distant yet suggestive commonalty between extended family members divided by four centuries. Eliot was proud of this imaginative connection, and incorporates text from The Gouernor evocatively in the second Quartet, ‘East Coker’ –
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie –
A dignified and commodious sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Which betokeneth concord.[xxi]
Elyot’s father, Richard (1450?-1522) was a judge who would become attorney-general and judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and was summoned to the first three parliaments of Henry VIII’s reign. Elyot’s mother, Alice Delamere, was one of the Finderns of Derbyshire, a family both locally eminent and meriting a fragrant footnote in botany, because one of her returning Crusader ancestors supposedly brought the first daffodils (Narcissus poeticus) to England. Elyot was their only son, although he had at least two sisters, Marjorie and Susan. When Alice died, around 1510, Richard Elyot married again – this time, Elizabeth Besilles, from a prominent Berkshire family of landowners, shrievalty holders and Papal knights.
Elyot himself seems to have been born and to have lived his early life in either Oxfordshire or Wiltshire. Details of his education are unclear, but he seems to have been educated, first at home, then at Oxford (although Cambridge claims him too). Certainly, one Thomas Eliett – also rendered Eyllyett, Elyett and Elyott! – was admitted to Oxford in 1516, took his BA in 1519, and received a law degree in 1524[xxii].
He and his future wife Margaret (née à Barrow, or Aborough, 1500-1560), were both exposed at a precocious age to the ‘New Learning’ – the classically-informed humanism deriving from Italy and the Low Countries, just starting to register on English intellectual horizons.
According to Thomas More’s biographer Thomas Stapleton[xxiii], both were intimates of More’s, and Margaret may even have been educated in More’s house. This was a rare distinction for anyone, especially a woman. But More was a strong believer in the education of women, and in this he would be emulated by Elyot, who devoted a 1540 book to the subject, In Defence of Good Women[xxiv]. Earlier courtesy literature, probably borrowing from Pauline mistrust of women, had often either ignored women completely, or treated them as mentally less proficient, prone to unpredictable mood-swings and dangerous libidinousness. More rational humanists asserted that Plato’s cardinal virtues (courage, justice, prudence, temperance) could be shared equally by women.
Hans Holbein the Younger did separate watercolour drawings of Elyot and Margaret around 1532, probably at More’s house in Chelsea, studies for oils either never completed, or later lost; the drawings are preserved at Windsor Castle[xxv]. The keenly alert-looking Margaret would retain a reputation for scholarship even after Elyot’s death, carrying on learned correspondences with jurists and politicians. In 1551, she took as her second husband Sir James Dyer (1512-1582), Speaker of the House of the Commons under Edward VI, and chief justice of England’s Court of Common Pleas between 1559 and 1582, who originated the modern system of recording legal verdicts to set future precedents.[xxvi]
There were no children of Elyot and Margaret’s alliance, but Elyot seems always to have taken an avuncular interest in his nephews, dedicating his 1535 book, The Education of Children, Translated out of Plutarch, to the two sons of his sister, Marjorie Puttenham. One of these, George Puttenham (1520?-1590), is generally agreed to have been the anonymous author of The Arte of English Poesie (1589)[xxvii], the first book to examine the national poetic tradition systematically, and highly influential in shaping the future course of English verse – another faint echo of the author of ‘East Coker’.
As well as being exposed at a young age to the wisdom of Thomas More, the youthful Elyot also knew the pioneering physician (later, priest) Thomas Linacre (1460?-1524) – almost certainly the “worshipfull phisition” who first read him the writings of Galen and Hippocrates, which would later feature in The Castel of Helth. He may also have known other leading thinkers friendly with Linacre or More – John Colet (1467?-1519), the theologian and Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, William Lily (1468?-1522) the grammarian, Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540), the Spanish-born advocate of inductive reasoning who became an Oxford lecturer and tutor to the Tudors, and the ‘Prince of the Humanists’ himself, Erasmus, who was Professor of Divinity at Cambridge between 1510 and 1515.
Elyot was admitted to London’s Middle Temple in 1510 (one of the Inns of Court), and between 1511 and 1522 helped his father as clerk of the assizes on the western circuit. He continued in that role after his father’s death, until 1528. Elyot came to the attention of Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England, who would intervene personally to help Elyot in an inheritance dispute, and approved his appointment to the Privy Council, where Elyot would serve between 1523 and 1530, combining these commitments with those of the western circuit and being a magistrate in Berkshire. Elyot was closely involved with the Star Chamber court which had been founded around 1515 as a means of streamlining legal administration (the courts then regarded as corrupt and inefficient), but which would later become resented as a means of enforcing royal will to the detriment of Common Law and Parliament[xxviii]. (In one of the Tudor age’s many tergiversations, Elyot would later be a member of the commission set up to examine Wolsey’s affairs, following his old ally’s downfall in 1529.)
In 1528, he became the legal guardian of his cousin Erasmus Pym, an ancestor of the celebrated 17th century Parliamentarian. In 1530, he was knighted, and went to live in Carlton in Cambridgeshire, around ten miles southeast of Cambridge. In 1531 came the Gouernor, and royal attention.
Elyot’s usefulness
With its emphases on decorum, education, etiquette, and noblesse oblige, the Gouernor was strongly supportive of the Henrician status quo – insofar as it can be called a status quo. The Tudors had of course only been the ruling house for forty-six years, Richard III’s death in battle at Bosworth upturning the 331 years old Plantagenet succession. Although Henry VII was descended from the Lancastrian branch of the Plantagenets, and thrones had changed hands violently before, the Tudors were long afterwards seen in English aristocratic circles as Welsh upstarts, possibly even usurpers.
Henry VII was nevertheless generally successful at stabilizing his new realm and consolidating his dynasty. When his son acceded in 1509, at just eighteen years of age, he seemed an auspicious inheritor of a settling-down kingdom – handsome, highly-cultured, fondly seen as a chivalrous and open-hearted prince. The romantic resonance of Arthurian legend[xxix], the resounding triumph of English arms over the Scots at Flodden in 1513, after which there would be a prolonged period of peace at home, and the famously sumptuous 1520 summit at Balinghem with France’s King Francis I which became known as the “Field of the Cloth of Gold”, helped give the youthful king the air of a conquering hero, bedizened in late medieval glamour.
As the world knows, increasingly goaded by his inability to produce a male heir, the princely preux chevalier became arbitrary and cruel, and increasingly centralizing power; the Privy Council, which had had 227 members during his father’s reign, had just nineteen members by the mid-1530s. In his bullish urge for a son, admixed with seemingly genuine concern for national continuity, Henry seemed rashly willing to alienate all of Europe’s other ruling houses, and risk potentially disastrous war.
Even more radically, he seemed to many in England to be blithely indifferent about ancient understandings of religion that were deeply rooted in English identity and everyday observances. Elyot, an instinctive conservative and unusually eloquent as an advocate for authority and tradition, unluckily found himself serving a capricious, impatient, and paranoid monarch during a period whose tumultuousness is evoked by Sir John Harington’s later epigram, ‘On Treason’ – “Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason? / For if it prosper, none dare call it treason”[xxx].
Helpfully for Henry, The Gouernor asserted the ‘naturalness’ of monarchy as ordained by the Bible, and exampled in the animal kingdom by bee colonies – common tropes for such literature[xxxi]. In the four years since 1527, when Henry had instituted annulment proceedings against Catherine of Aragon (the ‘King’s Great Matter’, courtiers called it), there had been growing concern at the highest levels about Henry’s behaviour, and where it might lead. Henry would therefore have been gratified by a new book from a respected intellectual which asserted that monarchs were divinely intended to rule over societies made up of “sundry estates and degrees of men”, united by custom and tradition. The dedication to Henry VIII, and the imprimatur of the King’s printer Thomas Berthelet, would have added to a contemporary perception that the Gouernour was politically ‘safe’ – and a later, unfair idea that Elyot endorsed Henry’s excesses.
But the Gouernor, and Elyot’s other writings, need to be read carefully, considering the political constraints of the time, and the multiple possibilities of allusions and irony, which were often lost on audiences even then, and are even more likely to be lost now. ‘Mirrors’, after all, are not true reflections, but inversions of reality. Elyot’s images show not so much the King as he was, but as he ought to be. Those who assume Elyot was an apologist for tyranny forget that even panegyrical phraseology may mask grave reproaches.
Although the Gouernor sanctions the prerogatives and rights of kingship, it exhorts all ‘governors’ always to merit their eminence, by setting examples of affability, compassion, self-restraint, urbanity and wisdom. As Elyot writes,
…they which excel other in this influence of understanding, and do employ it to the detaining of other within the bounds of reason, and show them how to provide for their necessary living, such ought to be set in a more high place than the residue where they may see and also be seen, that by the beams of their excellent wit, showed through the glass of authority, other of inferior understanding may be directed to the way of virtue and commodious living.[xxxii]
Henry must have seen himself as such a model monarch; it is abundantly clear Elyot did not. The Gouernor was plainly written with Henry VIII’s correction in mind – intended, as a later, greater Tudor was to write, “to catch the conscience of the King”[xxxiii].
The Gouernor is divided into three parts. Book I sets out the sort of education that ought to be expected of young men marked out for future leadership – the classical texts and Biblical chapters they must absorb, their physical training, and their attitudes to the arts. Books 2 and 3 concern the virtues governors ought to possess, illustrated by well-chosen Greek and Roman anecdotes.
It is impossible to divide up his thought thematically. His philosophy is holistic and integrated, with authority, benevolence, dignity, learning, liberality, prerogatives, and rights all equally important and mutually interdependent. While monarchy and inequality may be divinely ordained, society’s inherent stresses need to be assuaged by shrewd and kindly self-management.
Some of his precepts may have seemed pompous, even unintentionally humorous. For example, he recommends princes be taught dancing, to teach them control and grace – in statecraft[xxxiv]. While dancing, moreover, it was important not to exchange “unclean motions of countenances” for fear of arousing “venereal lusts”[xxxv]. He cites Philip of Macedon’s rebuke of Alexander, for being able to sing too well, because “inordinate delight” in music could lead to “wantonness” and loss of gravity[xxxvi]. He is however willing to tolerate some artistic bent – mostly because knowing how to carve, draw or paint could be useful for military map-making[xxxvii]. By contrast, hunting was a “necessary solace and pastime, for therein is the very imitation of battle”[xxxviii], running, swimming, and wrestling were all to be recommended[xxxix], and the decline of the longbow was personally as well as nationally emasculating[xl].
As well as the Bible (particularly Ecclesiastes and Proverbs) and the Greek and Roman greats, any aspirant governor ought to study cosmography, geography, history, human nature, law, poetry, and rhetoric – because England’s present ills were largely to do with a decay of learning[xli]. The governor ought to submit himself to stern discipline, so that he had the moral right to discipline others, starting with his own children. Those given rights by custom or heredity must constantly replenish their legitimacy by being always more principled and wiser than those over whom they rule, governing their own inclinations to better govern others.
He needed to be charitable, dignified, discreet, honest, merciful, observant, open-minded, and respectful of even the poorest of his subjects – although being generally benevolent did not mean he should be politically naive[xlii], or unable to be ruthless when dealing with irreconcilable (or unpolished) enemies[xliii]. The best – in fact, the only – way of ensuring virtuous and wise behaviour, and so a contented body politic, was for governors always to listen to the counsel of advisers who needed not fear repercussions for speaking even unwelcome truths.
Elyot wrote powerfully later of
…that kynge, whiche gouerneth for the weale of his countreye, beholdynge benygnely them that be studyouse, or occupyed aboute thynges that be vertuouse, he not onely doth animate or gyue lyfe to theyr courages, but also rendreth to theyr wytt […] more sharpnesse, with a prompt dexteritie armed with hardines. It is ther […] […] meruayle, that great kinges haue in their counsayles moste wytty person […], seinge that the makyng of great wyttes is in theyr puissaunce, although vertue procedeth immedyately from god, and sapience lykewyse.[xliv]
The criticisms in the Gouernor are often implicit. What is not said sometimes matters as much as what is. Elyot has been criticised for not saying more about the dangers of autocracy; on the other hand, he nowhere endorses royal supremacy over the Church.
Other criticisms were more overt. Elyot cites approvingly the examples set by Kings Henry IV and Henry V. The latter, when still Prince of Wales, had confronted the Chief Justice in a rage, brandishing a weapon, and demanding the release of one of his household servants, who had been arrested. The judge had bravely refused, and ordered the Prince to go to prison, and await the King’s pleasure. The Prince, suddenly realising that he was wholly in the wrong, and abashed at “the marvellous gravity of that worshipful Justice”, laid down his weapon, and did as he was bid. Hearing the news, the King said, “O merciful God, how much am I bound to your infinite goodness, specially for that you have given me a judge, who feareth not to administer Justice, and also a son who can suffer semblably and obey Justice”[xlv].
This is clearly tendentious. Elyot’s praise of Henry’s own father, who
…by his most excellent wit…in few years not only brought this realm in good order and under due obedience revived the laws, advanced justice, refurnished his dominions, and repaired his manors, but also with much circumspection treated with other princes and realms…that during the more part of his reign he was little inquieted with outward hostility or martial business[xlvi]
is also a commentary by contrast on Henry’s lack of circumspection. Elyot’s emphases on the necessity of abstinence, constancy and continence[xlvii] must have given rise to knowing nods or private smiles among in-the-know readers.
It may seem perverse that a man with such unedifying experiences of kingship could believe in the efficacy or moral legitimacy of monarchy. But Elyot felt himself morally obliged to offer counsel, despite the fast-moving politics and moral complexity of the times, and the serious perils of speaking out. He was also a realist.
Elyot was less radical than other Tudor commentators like Sir Thomas Smith[xlviii] or maybe even More, the straightforwardness of whose satire is sometimes still debated.[xlix] Whereas others were inspired by Italian civic republicanism, and chiefly concerned with the “commone weale”, Elyot always emphasised the “publyke weale” instead (society as a whole, not just the poorest classes). “[Elyot] had…a great dislike of democracy – even of Athenian democracy. Elyot was no revolutionary: his universe is the conventional medieval universe, and more than one of his paragraphs could be used as locus classicus for the idea of the ‘Great Chain of Being’”[l]. Elyot regarded democracy “a monster of many heads…never certain or stable”[li]. His ideal king may have been a liberal king, but he was still a king. Whatever its generic problems, whatever the shortcomings of individual incumbents like Henry, monarchy at least offered the possibility of order and structure. “Take away order from all things, what should then remain?” Elyot asks readers rhetorically, answering his own question, “Certes, nothing finally, except some man would imagine eftsoons Chaos”[lii].
For Elyot, monarchy was sacral but even more importantly it was practical, the only conceivable system of government for a society made of innately unequal classes. He used homely metaphors to argue that everything had its place – “The pots and pans garnisheth well the kitchen, and yet should they be to the chamber none ornament”[liii]. Any diminution of kingly authority and lawful governance could entail an anarchy, when “the persons most strong in body should by violence constrain them that be of less strength and weaker to labour as bondsmen or slaves”[liv]. The throne was at the centre of everything, under God. Where there were conflicts, between the king and the courts or the king and parliament, the disputants were not irreconcilable opposites, but different aspects of rightful royal power. Monarchy had weaknesses, but far worse weaknesses were to be found in democracies and oligarchies.
Elyot was no Machiavelli; he rejected force as much as fraud. His strong practical sense was always uplifted by the humanists’ kindly belief in the essential goodness and reasonableness of men, who had after all been made in the likeness of the Lord.
Diplomatic efforts
Henry, if he ever read the Gouernor all the way through, must have elected not to notice those sections that reflected poorly on his own character and judgement. It was largely on the strength of the book that Elyot was appointed the same year as ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, charged with the most delicate of missions – to persuade Charles to agree to Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
That Elyot failed in this is no reflection on his abilities; Catherine was Charles V’s aunt, and probably no-one could have succeeded. The Emperor indeed admired the English envoy’s intellect, remarking to his courtiers after Elyot’s recall that he “wold rather have lost the best city of our dominions than have lost such a worthy councellour”[lv]. Elyot was nevertheless replaced in 1532, and although he may have been privately glad to be relieved of so bootless a mission, was for a time humiliatingly forced to accompany his successor, Thomas Cranmer – later Archbishop of Canterbury – as part of an English delegation trailing in the wake of the Emperor up and down the Rhine, and ending up in Nuremberg and Regensburg.
Elyot, despite being opposed to Lutheranism in principle, disgusted by the tumults of Protestantizing towns like Worms and Speier, and probably hearing tales of Anabaptist extremism, was reassured by Lutheran Nuremberg’s order and prosperity, and the relatively conservative new liturgical arrangements – although this did not stop him and the French ambassador once walking out of church rather than partake in communion.
Less elevatedly, Elyot also admired the Nuremberg clergy’s wives, whom he called “the fairest women of the town”[lvi]. Cranmer went further than Elyot in amatory admirations, eventually feeling impelled to renounce his vow of clerical celibacy. Not long after Elyot left Germany, Cranmer would marry the niece of a prominent local Lutheran – a dangerous liaison under canon and English law, which would remain so for several years yet.
Elyot always had deep doubts about the King’s divorce. He may have been responsible for a spirited anonymous attack on the Censurae academarium (which had been Englished by Cranmer)[lvii] – part of the Collectanea satis copiosa dossier of academic and theological documents produced by Cranmer and others in 1530-1 to justify Henry’s supremacy over the Church within England. For the rest of his life, he would be dogged by suspicions that he had lacked real commitment to Henry’s cause – “marked unwillingness”, concludes Christopher Morris[lviii].
Elyot had nevertheless been entrusted with another mission while still in Holland and Germany, to capture the loose-cannon Reformer, William Tyndale, whom Henry had once tried to co-opt as an intellectual ally, but who had since publicly denounced the royal divorce. Elyot laid out some of his own money in bribes to pay would-be abductors, but also failed at this endeavour – again attracting Henrician suspicions of half-heartedness, but ironically also accusations of heavy-handedness from Tyndale’s supporters. By the time he returned to England, he was out of favour – and out of pocket, like all emissaries having had to finance most of his mission personally.
He said to the Spanish ambassador to England, Eustace Chapuys, that he had told Henry certain things which had been “greatly to his benefit” – although the shrewd Chapuys did not take this implication of audacious outspokenness on trust. In any case, whatever Elyot had or had not said to the King, Chapuys knew well that “a smile or a tear from the lady [Anne Boleyn] has been enough to undo any good that might have been done in that quarter”.[lix]
Elyot was choleric at his treatment, the elevation of Cranmer, and the looming triumph of the Boleyns. In December 1532, he repined to Thomas Cromwell (Henry VIII’s Chief Minister, Elyot’s friend since 1519) about his efforts on Henry’s behalf, “…in [whose] unthankful travail I no thing got but the colic and the stone, debilitation of nature and almost continual distillations of rheums…”[lx]
On 6 April 1533, he wrote to his friend Sir John Hacket, English envoy to the Low Countries, that the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine was “a great cloud which is likely to be a great storm when it falleth”, and the compliant clergy had “digged the ditch that they be now fallen in, which causeth many good men the less to pity them”.
He went on defiantly,
I beseech God…that truth may be freely and thankfully heard. For my part I am finally determined to live and die therein; neither mine importable expenses unrecompensed shall so much fear me nor the advancement of my successor the Bishop of Canterbury so much allure me that I shall ever decline from truth or abuse my sovereign Lord unto whom I am sworn.[lxi]
It seems Elyot even suggested to Chapuys that royal ministers were intent on causing political unrest to give them an excuse to raise an army to crush Catherine’s supporters – and that the Emperor should send “men of influence” to argue Catherine’s case in the English Parliament. These were perilous things to say to a foreign plenipotentiary, potentially treasonable[lxii].
The same year, in a pointed satire, Pasquil the Playne, Elyot portrays himself as Pasquil, “an olde Romane…rude and homely”, outspoken foil to two other characters, the smooth-talking sycophant Gnatho who carries a Bible ostentatiously but Chaucer’s saucy Troilus and Criseyde inside his coat (a parody of Henrician evangelicals) and the habitually silent priest Harpocrates (almost certainly a caricature of Cranmer). The reader is asked to identify with Pasquil notwithstanding his unpolished exterior, as opposed to the contemptibly complicit Gnatho and Harpocrates, and “defende hym ageynste venemous tunges and ouerthwart wittis”. Pasquil condemns religious innovations which may upturn empires –
Germany shulde not haue kicked agayne her mother: Emperours and princis shuld not haue ben in perpetual discorde & often tymes in peril, prelates haue ben laughed at, as disardes: saynctes blasphemed, and miracles reproued for iougglynges [jugglings] / lawes and statutes contemned / and officers littell regarded.
Gnatho and Harpocrates are complicit in ultimately subversive sophism – “after noone is tourned to fore noone, vertue into vice, vice into vertue, deuocion into hypocrisie, and in some places men saye, faythe is tourned to herisye” – but is pessimistic to the point of bleakness about whether this can be avoided. At the end, the discussants part in the street, Pasquil back to his sardonic street viewpoint, the others resuming their journey to court and preferment[lxiii]. Pasquil may have been the first ever English pasquinade – and the expression ‘Pasquil the plain’ passed into common parlance, signifying an honest man.
In the same year’s Of The Knowledge which Maketh a Wise Man, Elyot thought it prudent to insert an disclaimer about potential parallels with current events. This is despite it being a subtler work than Pasquil, framed as a dialogue between Plato and his sometime enemy, the hedonistic philosopher Aristippus of Cyrene, who famously lived at the court of the tyrant Dionysus of Syracuse. Unlike Pasquil’s Gnatho and Harpocrates, Aristippus is not completely condemned for his ability to adapt to circumstances. His most remembered line, “I possess, I am not possessed”, after all carries connotations of honesty and independence. “While Plato wins most of the arguments,” one expert observes, “Aristippus appears the more amiable, decent, and ultimately more humane of the disputants”[lxiv]. In a strange way, he may even be the victor of this argument. The overall import is certainly more accepting, as if Elyot is adjusting to an unattractive but inescapable new reality – his new knowledge making him wiser.
Returning yet again to his public-spirited task, 1533 saw yet another attempt by Elyot to alter kingly conduct, with a translation of The Doctrinal of Princes by the Athenian educator Isocrates (436-388 BC). Isocrates was popular amongst those who sought to influence princes, because of his long experience of educating rulers, and through his renowned schools giving policymakers the rhetorical skills they required to shape the courses of their cities. Elyot may have been the first translator of the Doctrinal, originally written around 378 BC for Isocrates’ former pupil Nicocles, upon the latter’s accession to the throne of Salamis[lxv]. As well as lending intellectual credibility and moral authority to what were Elyot’s own views, Isocrates was arguably a good model for Elyot at that time, recently out of office, probably for good. Isocrates had after all been a pure philosopher, an elegant reasoner who had never held any political posts, or been compelled to make messy compromises, or even been expected to address audiences.
The Doctrinal counselled Nicocles to be benevolent, forgiving, honest, virtuous and wise, and allow his advisers freedom of expression without fear of repression. Nicocles was to be essentially pacific, like the ‘king’ bee of the Gouernor to have “no prick or sting”[lxvi]. This was blandly generic advice, but Elyot made subtle alterations to make it more applicable to his King and times, for example removing Isocrates’ recommendation that Nicocles seek out foreign advisers; Elyot had seen how destabilising foreign Protestant enthusiasts could be. Elyot’s simple insistence on the necessity of kings to hearken to good (conservative, national) counsel was political in those charged times, the obvious implication being that Henry was not doing so.
Also implicitly political was his Preface to 1534’s translation of Bishop Cyprian and Mirandola, which he dedicated to his sister Susan Kingston and two other women, all of whom had links with the monastery of Syon in Middlesex, whose priest had just been imprisoned for refusing to take the new Succession Oath. Cyprian’s sermon had originally been made to comfort true believers at a time of persecution and tragedy, and Elyot’s choice of this seems to have been an allusion to present-day persecutions.[lxvii]
Elyot was much less religiously-inspired than More and others, but defended traditional religion for mostly pragmatic reasons. He quotes St. Augustine in Bankette of Sapience –
In thynges wherof holy scripture hath determined no certaitye, the use of goddes people, and statutes of fathers are to be holden for lawes, and likewyse as transgressors of goddes lawes are to be punished, so contemnours of ecclesiasticall customes ought to be chastised.
However, he was not wholly reflexive. In the same section of the Bankette, he calls again on Augustine, this time saying almost the opposite: “In truthe whiche appereth openly, custome must geve place to veritie”[lxviii]
He never stopped believing in fundamental doctrines, like transubstantiation and the Miracle of the Mass. He denounced the idea of predestination, and valued religious ceremony as “expedient for the augmentation of reverence”[lxix]. As he noted, “Lyke as fayre legges be in vayne to a cryple, so unsemely is doctryne in the mouthes of fooles”[lxx].
However, he accepted some reform was needed to curb what in a 1536 letter to Thomas Cromwell he called “abusions of Christ’s Holy doctrine and laws”. Two years later in the Dictionary, he would define the Latin term struppi thus – “lyttell wrethes made of leaues put on the heades of ymages in the temples, as now superstitious foles do set on ymages heades in the churches.”[lxxi]
He (and his sisters) would later accept the Succession Oath, keeping any doubts more and more to himself, conforming outwardly in the interests of a quiet life (and the interests of society). In all his thinking and writing about religion, he was always “hoping to remain a conservative, but sound like a radical”[lxxii] – a rational course when every orthodoxy was suddenly being questioned.
Sapience, and survival
1534’s Bankette of Sapience begins with an invitation[lxxiii], which soon becomes a plaint:
Sapience hath buylded a howse for hir selfe, she hath prepared hir wyne and layde forth hir table. She calleth out aloude in the stretes, and in the chiefe asseblye of people, and at the gates of the citie she speaketh with a loude voice: Ye babyes, howe longe wyll ye delyte in your chyldishenes, and howe longe wyll fooles couete those thynges, whyche shall hurte them?[lxxiv]
The Bankette serves up health foods – authors from Euripides, Seneca and Plautus to Julius Caesar and the Church Fathers, waxing wise on such subjects as Abstinence, Apparaile, Babblyng, Bosting, Crueltie, Curiositee, Faythe, Foly, Lecherie and Vayneglorie. These are recipes to improve national and personal wellbeing – created to cure readers (among whom might have been a certain King) of Inordinate Appetites: “There are three thynges specially, whyche menne bee wonte to desyre inordinatelye, rychesse, bodily pleasures, and great auctoritee”[lxxv]
1534 was the year of Thomas More’s downfall[lxxvi], a dangerous time for Elyot, who felt the need to dissociate himself from his old mentor. He wrote urgently to Thomas Cromwell, asking him to “…lay apart the remembraunce of the amity betweene me and Sir Thomas More…consydering that I was never so moche adict unto him as I was unto truthe and fidelity towards my soveraigne lord.”[lxxvii]
Cromwell was able to protect him on this occasion, and later, because allegations of Elyot having secret Catholic sympathies, and maybe even treason, were still swirling around several years later. Elyot would serve as one of Cromwell’s commissioners prior to Dissolution, and eventually bought former monastic lands from him. He also dedicated the Castel of Helth to Cromwell, and presented him with a copy of his Dictionary.
Elyot clearly combined intellectualism with social adeptness, because he would also survive Cromwell’s downfall, and execution, in 1540 – a third defenestration of one of his friends. He somehow also weathered an over-hasty dedication of that year’s In Defence of Good Women to Ann of Cleves, who was Henry’s fourth wife between January and July of 1540 – a fortunate escape, especially as the whole book was a cryptic tribute to the late Catherine of Aragon[lxxviii].
Elyot seems to have become increasingly engrossed in his Dictionary and Castel after 1534, which must have occupied much of his time. But he could not escape the obligations incumbent on men of his class, working as a magistrate and Sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. In 1539, he became MP for Cambridge, although he seems rarely to have attended Parliament. But he never lost his sense of conscience, and contrived to shoehorn exhortations and reflections about the nature of kingship into almost everything he wrote, even the foreword to the Castel.
The Dictionary played a central part in expressing his outlook, and shaping opinion for centuries to come. Along with the many objective terms he made familiar to English readers were others loaded with more subjective significance. In his vocabulary, there are inextricable associations between notions of authority, dignity, generosity, God-givenness, goodness, and learning.
“Aristocratia” is described as “the fourme of gouernaunce of a weale publyke, where they do rule, whiche are of moste vertue.” He defines “Augustae” as “nobly, with a maiestie.” Meanwhile, “Beneficentia, is not onely liberalitie in gyuing of money, or possessiōs, or other like thinges, but also in helpyng a man with counsell, sollicitation, or other labour.”
He dwells inevitably on majesty, “the greatnes, dignitie, or excellent estimation or honour of a kynge”, and the various cognates of regal. He decries their opposites, like “Laedere maiestatem, to derogate any thynge of the kynges auctoritie or prerogatiue”, and “Maiestas imminuta”,
…where any man goth about to derogate any thing of the kinges authoritie royal, as also of the empire and high power of the people of Rome. It may be taken for treason. Si maiestas est amplitudo ac dignitas ciuitatis, is eam minuit, qui exercitum hostibus Pop. Ro. tradidit, If maiesty be the honour and authoritie of this citie, he goeth about to appayre it, whiche hath deliuered the hoste to the ennemies of the people of Rome. Also de partitione oratoria. Maiestas est in imperij at (que) Pop. Ro. dignitate, quam minuit is qui per uim multitudinē ad seditionem uocauit, Maiestye is in the authoritie of the empyre and people of Rome, agaynst whom he plainly committeth treason, who so euer he be that violentely prouoketh people to a sedition.
This last could be read as especially barbed, because in 1536, there had been armed “sedition” reacting to Henry’s ‘prouokation’ of the “empyre and people of Rome”, with the Lincolnshire Rising swiftly followed by the even more dangerous ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ that convulsed much of the North. Henry by now had all too obviously slipped into “Tyrannis, nidis, a cruell or vyolent rule or gouernaunce for a priuate commoditie, and not for a publyke weale”.
Even a king divinely ordained needed to learn to control himself, and to listen to the learned; as the Dictionary would also have reminded Henry, had he ever read it, only a “Moderator” could be really be a “gouernor”, and “Modestè” meant “temperately, soberly, aduisedly” (emphasis added). All this excellent advice was already probably too late for Henry, who was by now well on his way to becoming a grossly bloated voluptuary, with thousands of deaths already to his discredit – but Elyot’s insistent ideals would percolate into the chivalric Elizabethan age, and ensconce themselves in everyday language.
His 1541 publication, Image of Governance, compiled of the Actes and Sentences notable of the most noble Emperor Alexander Severus, is sometimes seen as a kind of sequel to the Gouernor – albeit a less considerable work. It uses the life of the 3rd century Roman Emperor Alexander Severus[lxxix] as a model of good rulership. The Image’s reputation has been diminished by doubts about the trustworthiness of Elyot’s sources – he mistakes the name of Severus’s secretary, and had to return the borrowed original manuscript before he had time to translate it all. Severus was in any case a militarily incompetent and weak ruler, who was eventually murdered by the army.
Greg Walker of the University of Leicester counter-intuitively calls the Image “the most daringly oppositional of all his political treatises”[lxxx] – and suggests Elyot’s deviations from the facts of Severus’s life are either immaterial, or may have been deliberate, to point up Henry’s faults – particularly what he had done to Thomas Cromwell. He discerns an “ironic strategy”[lxxxi] behind the text’s apparent endorsement of the suppression of “detestable heresies” and the burning of doctrinal “chaff”.
Severus’s very name may be a reproach to Henry – although it should be remembered that for Elyot, severity did not carry today’s uniformly negative connotations. As he defined it in the Dictionary: “Seueritas, tatis, grauitie, constantnesse, properly in ministringe iustice.”[lxxxii] Severus had after all been tolerant of Christianity, and Walker sees this as an oblique attack on Henry’s lack of tolerance of those who disagreed with him[lxxxiii]. Severus had also set up a powerful council of advisers with important executive powers[lxxxiv], in marked contrast to Henry’s coterie of camp-followers and yes-men. When Severus eventually falls at the hands of his own soldiery, it is not because of his rigour, but because he had fallen afoul of special interests[lxxxv]. This could be an overly subtle reading, but whatever the truth, it is clear Elyot never lost his fascination with the complications and contradictions of kingship.
1545’s Preservative agaynste Deth[lxxxvi] was his last book, produced when he may have been ill, and aware his time was short. There is a kind of feverish quality when he writes thus of the world, the ‘deuil’s sister’ with all her temptations –
She cometh agaynste the with hir pappes open, fulle of serpentyne poyson: and with hir handes decked with ringes of golde and riche stones, the proffereth to imbrace the: And with a loude voyce and a dilectable, she saieth: Lo, I am come for to mete the, And nowe haue I found the, I haue decked my bedde with clothes of Aegypte, my bedde haue I made to smelle of myrre, aloes, and cynamome, leat vs lye together and take our pleasure. And therwith she offereth to the hir pappes. But beware of theim: the one of theim is Auarice, the other Ambicion. If thou sucke muche of theim, they will make the drunke, and take thy wyttes frome the.[lxxxvii]
Whatever about his corporeal decline, Elyot’s “wyttes” were at least never taken from him. According to his friend Roger Ascham[lxxxviii], not long before he died Elyot was writing a history of England, to be entitled De rebus memorabilibus Angliae. This work, if it was ever completed, was probably never printed – a considerable loss to historiography.
After Elyot’s death in 1546, he was buried in the parish church at Carlton, with a handsome memorial brass to mark his sepulture place. This disappeared sometime afterwards, very likely melted down during the Civil Wars at the hands of the fanatical iconoclasts who were the spiritual inheritors of the Reforming enthusiasts he had decried a century before.
He left his property to Margaret for her lifetime, and thereafter to his nephew Richard Puttenham, brother to George of later Arte of English Poesie fame. His library was not bequeathed to his nephews[lxxxix], but broken up and sold on his orders, with the proceeds to be given to poor scholars. It was a last liberal gesture – a final act of generosity to humane learning, closing the book on a life of scholarship and service.
The above essay was first published in Aristocratic Voices: Forgotten Arguments About Virtue, Authority and Inequality (eds. Richard Avramenko & Ethan Alexander-Davey), Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2025, and is reproduced with acknowledgements
Select bibliography
Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England, London: Jonathan Cape, 1986
Jessie Childs, Henry VIII’s Last Victim: The Life and Times of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, London; Jonathan Cape, 2008
Sir Thomas Elyot, Biblioetheca Eliotae Eliot’s Librarie, 1538. Published online by Oxford University Press
Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouernor, 1531. Published online by Renascence Editions (The Boke named The Governour (luminarium.org) My edition (modernized spelling) – London: Everyman’s Library, 1962
Sir Thomas Elyot, The Bankette of Sapience, 1534, my edition London: Forgotten Books (facsimile), 2002
Nina Epton, Love and the English, London: Cassell, 1960
John Guy, Tudor England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Austin, 1988, my edition 1990
Stanford E. Lehmberg, Sir Thomas Elyot: Tudor Humanist, Texas University Press, 1960
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996
Sir Thomas More, Utopia, 1516, my edition London: Folio Society, 1972
Christopher Morris, Political Thought in England: Tyndale to Hooker, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953, my edition 1965
Stuart Piggott, Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination, London: Thames and Hudson, 1989
‘W. S.’ (Sir Thomas Smith), A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, 1565, my edition Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929
Gabriele Stein, Sir Thomas Elyot as Lexicographer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014
Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018
Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005
[i] Thomas Elyot, Of the Knowledge Which Maketh a Wise Man, 1533, Proheme
[ii] Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Sir Thomas Elyot’, Sir Thomas Elyot | British author | Britannica
[iii] The Doctrinal of Princes, made by the noble oratuor Isocrates, translated out of Greke in to Englishe by syr Thomas Eliot knight (1533 or 1534). See Isocrates. The doctrinal of princes made by the noble oratour Isocrates, [and] translated out of Greke in to Englishe by syr Thomas Eliot knight – Folger Shakespeare Library – Digital Asset Platform
[iv] The education or bringinge vp of children, translated oute of Plutarch by syr Thomas Eliot knyght (1532?). See The education or bringinge vp of children, translated oute of Plutarche by syr Thomas Eliot knyght (umich.edu)
[v] A swete and devoute sermon of holy saynct Ciprian of mortalitie of man. The rules of a christian lyfe made by Picus erle of Mirandula, bothe translated into Englisyhe by syr Thomas Elyot knight (1534)
[vi] See The Bankette of Sapience (1545 edition) | Open Library
[vii] See The castell of health, corrected, and in some places augmented by the first author thereof, Sir Thomas Elyot Knight (umich.edu)
[viii] See A preseruatiue agaynste deth (umich.edu)
[ix] See W. S. C. Coperman, Doctors and Disease in Tudor Times, London: Dawson, 1960, 131, quoted in Robert Hutchinson, The Last Days of Henry VIII, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005, 132
[x] See Bibliotheca Eliotæ Eliotis librarie. (ox.ac.uk)
[xi] The second and subsequent editions would however instead be entitled Bibliotheca Eliotae: Eliots Librarie, presumably to make its usefulness more obvious, and the book more saleable, by using a more familiar word
[xii] See Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, 125 & 139
[xiii] Thomas Elyot, Boke Named the Gouernor, 1531, 80
[xiv] See Stuart Piggott, Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination: Ideas from the Renaissance to the Regency, London: Thames & Hudson, 1989, 49
[xv] James Kelsey McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics Under Henry VIII and Edward VI, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965, quoted in Gabriele Stein, Sir Thomas Elyot as Lexicographer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 11
[xvi] Stanford E. Lehmberg, Elyot, Sir Thomas (c. 1490–1546), humanist and diplomat | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (oxforddnb.com)
[xvii] Stein, op. cit., 2014, 11-16
[xviii] Elyot, Gouernor, 13
[xix] Latin text of Urbanis Magus downloadable here https://archive.org/details/urbanus-magnus
[xx] Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 128
[xxi] See T.S. Eliot – Four Quartets: East Coker | Genius
[xxii] Elyot, Sir Thomas (c. 1490–1546), humanist and diplomat | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (oxforddnb.com)
[xxiii] Thomas Stapleton, Tres Thomae, 1588. The relevant section rendered in modern English may be seen at https://essentialmore.org/wp-content/uploads/Stapleton-Biography-4-27-2020.pdf. More never mentions Elyot in any of his correspondence, which has led some to doubt their purported closeness. See Walker, op. cit., 128-130
[xxiv] In Defence of Good Women does not appear to be available gratis online
[xxv] See Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8-1543) – Sir Thomas Elyot (c.1490-1546) (rct.uk)
[xxvi] Previously, court judgements had been spasmodically recorded in rarely consulted yearbooks
[xxvii] The Arte of English Poesie is downloadable here The arte of English poesie : Puttenham, George, d. 1590 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
[xxviii] The Star Chamber was abolished in 1641
[xxix] Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur was first published around 1470, and long remained popular. At some stage during Henry VIII’s reign, the enormous 13th century round table that had long hung in the nave of Winchester Cathedral was painted with King Henry depicted as King Arthur. See https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/winchester-round-table
[xxx] It seems oddly appropriate that the cynical Harington (1561-1612) also invented the flushing toilet
[xxxi] It was not until Charles Butler’s 1609 treatise, The Feminine Monarchie or the Histori of Bees, that Englishmen began to realise bee colonies were led by queens rather than kings – less of a shock, perhaps, after Elizabeth I’s 45 years on the throne. See The feminine monarchy, or, the history of bees | St John’s College, University of Cambridge
[xxxii] Elyot, Gouernor, 4
[xxxiii] Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2
[xxxiv] Elyot, Gouernor, 78-88
[xxxv] Ibid., 70
[xxxvi] Ibid., 22
[xxxvii] Ibid., 23-4
[xxxviii] Ibid., 65-7
[xxxix] Ibid., 60-65
[xl] Ibid., 91-4
[xli] Ibid., 40-60
[xlii] Reconcile thee not too soon to thine enemy without good advisement”, Thomas Elyot, The Education or Bringinge Up of Children, 1533, 43
[xliii] Elyot advocated reading Caesar’s Commentaries “that thereof may be taken necessary instructions concerning the wars against Irish men or Scots, who be of the same rudeness and wild disposition that…the Britons were in the age of Caesar”
[xliv] Elyot, Dictionary, preface
[xlv] Elyot, Gouernor, 114-5
[xlvi] Ibid., 84-5
[xlvii] Ibid., 200-8
[xlviii] Sir Thomas Smith, 1513-1577, author of Discourse of the Common Weal of England (1565)
[xlix] See, for example, Paul Turner, Introduction to Sir Thomas More, Utopia, London: Folio Society, 1972, 13
[l] Morris, op. cit., 24
[li] Elyot, Gouernor, 6
[lii] Ibid., 2
[liii] Ibid., 5
[liv] Ibid., 167
[lv] See William Roper, Life of Sir Thomas More, 1626, 103
[lvi] Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, 14 March 1532, quoted in Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996
[lvii] See R. Rex, The Theology of John Fisher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, doi:10.1017/CBO9780511520211, 179 & 266
[lviii] Christopher Morris, Political Thought in England: Tyndale to Hooker, London: Oxford University Press, 1953, my edition 1965, 23
[lix] Eustace Chapuys, letter to Emperor Charles V, 5 June 1532, quoted in Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation, 2005, 124
[lx] Letter to Thomas Cromwell, 8 December 1532, quoted in Walker, 187
[lxi] Public Records Office, State Papers 1/75 f.81, quoted in Diarmaid MacCulloch, op.cit., 79
[lxii] Walker, op. cit., 124/5
[lxiii] See Pasquil the playne (umich.edu)
[lxiv] Walker, op. cit., 207
[lxv] Salamis was the principal city of ancient Cyprus, situated north of present-day Famagusta – supposedly named after the Attic island that was home to the city’s legendary founder, Teucer
[lxvi] Gouernor, 7
[lxvii] Walker, op. cit., 227-9
[lxviii] Bankette of Sapience, ‘Custome’
[lxix] A preseruatiue agaynste deth (umich.edu)
[lxx] Bankette, ‘Doctrine’
[lxxi] Elyot, Dictionary
[lxxii] Pearl Hogrefe, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Elyot Englishman, Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1967, cited in Walker, op. cit., 132
[lxxiii] Echoing Proverbs 9: 1-5: “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars: / She hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table. / She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest places of the city, / Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither: as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, / Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled.”
[lxxiv] Bankette, Introduction
[lxxv] Ibid., ‘Inordinate Appetite’
[lxxvi] More was executed the following year
[lxxvii] British Library, Cotton MS Cleopatra E. IV, fol. 260
[lxxviii] Catherine had died four years earlier
[lxxix] Alexander Severus reigned from 222 to 235, succeeding the deposed tyrant Heliogabalus
[lxxx] Walker, op. cit., 239
[lxxxi] Ibid., 247
[lxxxii] Elyot, Dictionary
[lxxxiii] Walker, op. cit., 244
[lxxxiv] Ibid., 271
[lxxxv] Ibid., 267
[lxxxvi] See A preseruatiue agaynste deth (umich.edu)
[lxxxvii] Ibid.
[lxxxviii] Roger Ascham (1515?-1568), author of Toxophilus, 1545, the first English-language book on archery
[lxxxix] George Puttenham, who was only 26 when his uncle died, may already have been exhibiting the rash character traits which would later land him in prison for indebtedness, and see him charged with conspiring to murder the Bishop of London and insulting Elizabeth II’s counsellors