Roger Ascham and His Sixteenth-Century World (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History) 9004382275, 9789004382275

Table of contents :
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and References
Note on the Text
Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Part 1 Cultures of Scholarship
Chapter 1 Roger Ascham and the Idea of a University in Sixteenth-Century England
1 True Religion
2 True Obedience to the Prince and Magistrates
3 All Human Society
4 Conclusion
Chapter 2 Ascham & Co: St John’s College, Cambridge, in the 1540s
Chapter 3 Patristic Scholarship and Ascham’s ‘troubled years’
1 Introduction
2 The Beginning of Ascham’s ‘troubled years’
3 Ascham’s Translation of ‘Oecumenius’s’ Commentary on Philemon
4 Ascham’s translations of ‘Oecumenius’s’ Commentary on Titus
5 Lee’s Response to the Scholia on Titus
6 The Context and Motivation of Ascham’s Translations of ‘Oecumenius’
7 Patristic Scholarship after the ‘troubled years’
8 Conclusions
Chapter 4 Ascham, Coins, Cambridge and Beyond
1 Ascham and Coins
2 Cambridge
3 Beyond Cambridge and to the Continent
4 Conclusion
Part 2 Broader Horizons: Connections and Influences
Chapter 5 ‘The Scholer of the Best Master’: Ascham and John Cheke
1 Teacher and Student, Patron and Client
2 ‘My dearest frend, and best master’: the Personal Relationship
3 Two Humanists
4 Similarities with Differences
5 Conclusion
Chapter 6 Roger Ascham’s Diplomatic Training and Mid-Tudor Diplomatic Careers
1 Introduction
2 Diplomatic Writing
3 A Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany
4 Transferable Skills Acquisition in the Diplomatic Household
5 Diplomatic Secretaries and Diplomatic Careers
6 Conclusion
Chapter 7 The Special Relationship: Ascham and Sturm, England and Strasbourg
1 principium amicitiae: Johannes Sturm and His Relationship with England and Ascham
2 Classical Learning, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy
3 Protestant Outlook
4 Cooperation between Strasbourg and England
5 Conclusion
Chapter 8 Ascham and Queen Elizabeth’s Religion
1 Ascham’s Connections and His Apologia
2 Ascham’s Apologia and Edwardian Evangelical Theology
3 Queen Elizabeth’s Religion
4 Elizabeth and Ascham
Part 3 Language, Literature and Learning Reassessed
Chapter 9 Ascham as Reader and Writer: Greek Sententiae and Neo-Latin Poetry
1 Sententiae in the Renaissance
2 The Annotations
3 Ascham’s Poetry
4 Conclusion
Chapter 10 The Bow and the Book: Ascham’s Toxophilus
1 Publishing Toxophilus and Authorial Self-Fashioning
2 The Role of Dialogue
3 Conclusion: Commonweal and the Honesty of ‘Commoning’
Chapter 11 The Scholemaster’s Memories
1 ‘That Golden Age’: Memories of Cheke
2 ‘Examples for Art to Follow’: Memory and Rhetoric
3 ‘Roasting Chestnuts’: Memories of Absent Friends
Chapter 12 Ascham and Sturm on imitatio: Ethical and Ludic Attitudes to a Literary Technique
1 Sturm on Imitatio in Nobilitas Litterata
2 Ascham on Imitation in The Scholemaster
Appendices
Appendix 1 Roger Ascham: a Biographical Sketch
Appendix 2 Ascham’s Bookshelf
Handlist of Books
St Ambrosius, De vocatione omnium gentium libri duo (Geneva: Michel du Bois, 1541, ustc 450218). Oxford, Bodleian Library, 8° Rawl. 169 (2)
Aristophanes, Κωμωιδίαι ἕνδεκα. Comoediae undecim, ed. Simon Grynaeus (Basel: Johann Bebel, 1532, ustc 612851). Hatfield House, 7923
Aristotle, Ἀριστοτέλους ἅπαντα. Aristotelis … opera, 2 vols. (Basel: Johann Bebel, 1531, ustc 555012). Hatfield House, 7927–7928
Aristotle, Ἀριστοτέλους ἅπαντα. Aristotelis … opera, 2 vols. (Basel: Johann Bebel & Michael Isingrinus, 1539, ustc 612986). Cambridge, University Library, Bury 1.12–13
Bible (Greek, New Testament), Τῆς καινῆς διαθήκης ἅπαντα. Novi testamenti omnia (Basel: Johann Bebel, 1531, ustc 696184). Hatfield House, 7522
Callimachus, Ὕμνοι μετὰ τῶν σχολίων, Γνώμαι ἐκ διαφόρων ποιητῶν φιλοσόφων τε καὶ ῥητόρων συλλεγεῖσθαι … Hymni, cum scholiis … Sententiae ex diversis poetis oratoribusque ac philosophis collectae (Basel: Hieronymus Froben and Nikolaus Episcopius, 1532, us
Demosthenes, Λόγοι Ὀλυνθιακοί. Orationes Olynthiacae (Louvain: Thierry Martins, 1521, ustc 437173). Shrewsbury School, H.viii.23 (2)
Demosthenes, Orationes quatuor contra Philippum, trans. Paulus Manutius (Venice: [Paulus Manutius], 1551, ustc 826510). Queens’ College, Cambridge, C.9.15 (2)
Diogenes Laertius, Περὶ βίων, δογμάτων, καὶ ἀποφθεγμάτων τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων … De vitis, decretis, et responsis celebrium philosophorum (Basel: Hieronymus Froben and Nikolaus Episcopius, 1533, ustc 637619). Hatfield House, 8058
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, De Thucydidis historia iudicium, trans. András Dudith (Venice: apud Aldi filios, 1560, ustc 827000). Queens’ College, Cambridge, C.9.15 (1)
Ἐπιστολαὶ διαφόρων φιλοσόφων ῥητόρων σοφιστῶν. Epistolae diversorum philosophorum, oratorum, rhetorum, ed. Marcus Musurus (Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1499, ustc 760833). Hatfield House, 8082
Hermogenes, Τέχνη ῥητορικὴ τελειοτάτη. Ars rhetorica absolutissima (Paris: Christian Wechel, 1530–1531, ustc 185002). Shrewsbury, H.viii.23 (1)
Hesychius, Λεξικόν. Dictionarium (Hagenau: Thomas Anshelm, 1521, ustc 662434). Cambridge, St John’s College, Aa.1.51
Isocrates, Λόγοι ἅπαντες, καὶ επιστολαί … Orationes partim doctorum virorum opera (Basel: Michael Isengrin, 1550, ustc 668343). Hatfield House, 8366
Nonnus, Μεταβολὴ τοῦ κατὰ Ιωάννην ἁγίου εὐαγγελίου … Tralatio Sancti Evangelij, secundum Ioannem (Hagenau: Johann Setzer, 1527, ustc 678300). London, British Library, G.8895 (1)
Plato, Ἅπαντα Πλάτωνος μεθ᾽ ὑπομνημάτων Πρόκλου εἰς τὸν Τίμαιον, καὶ τὰ Πολιτικὰ … Platonis omnia opera cum commentariis Procli in Timaeum et Politica (Basel: Johann Walder, 1534, ustc 661590). Hatfield House, Cecil Papers 344
Scriptores aliquot gnomici, iis, qui Graecarum literarum candidati sunt, utilissimi (Basel: Joannes Froben, 1521, ustc 692619). London, British Library, G.8895 (2)
Σχόλια των πάνυ δοκίμων … Scholia in septem Euripidis tragoedias ex antiquis exemplaribus, ed. Arsenios, Archbishop of Monemvasia (Venice: Lucantonio Giunta, 1534, ustc 810067). Manchester, Chetham’s Library, Rr.4.7
Thucydides, Δημηγορίαι. Conciones (Paris: Christian Wechel, 1531, ustc 185189). Shrewsbury School, H.viii.23 (3)
Thucydides, Συγγραφῆς Β. Historiae liber secundus (Paris: Christian Wechel, 1535, ustc 182117). Shrewsbury School, H.viii.23 (4)
Seyssel, Claude, De republica Galliae et regum officiis libri duo … adiecta est summa doctrinae Platonis, de repub. et legibus (Strasbourg: Josias Rihelius, 1562, ustc 622810). London, British Library, C.45.a.7
Trithemius, Johannes, Liber octo questionum (Cologne: Melchior von Neuss, 1534, ustc 667673). Glasgow, University Library, Special Collections, Ferguson Af-f.60
Bibliography
Manuscript Sources
Primary Printed Material
Secondary Works
Electronic Resources
Unpublished Dissertations/Papers
Index

Citation preview

Roger Ascham and His Sixteenth-​Century World

St Andrews Studies in Reformation History

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​sasrh

Roger Ascham and His Sixteenth-​Century World Edited by

Lucy R. Nicholas and Ceri Law

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Signature of Roger Ascham at St John’s College. Photograph: Paul Everest. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nicholas, Lucy R., editor. | Law, Ceri, editor. Title: Roger Ascham and his sixteenth-century world / edited by Lucy R. Nicholas and Ceri Law. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: St Andrews studies in reformation history, 2468-4317 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020036631 (print) | LCCN 2020036632 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004382275 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004382282 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ascham, Roger, 1515-1568. | Educators–England–Biography. | Scholars–England–Biography. | Humanism–Europe–History–16th century. Classification: LCC LB475. A72 R64 2020 (print) | LCC LB475. A72 (ebook) | DDC 342.08/522–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036631 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036632

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 2468-​4 317 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​3 8227-​5 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​3 8228-​2 (e-​book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations and References viii Note on the Text ix List of Illustrations x Notes on Contributors xi



Introduction 1 Ceri Law and Lucy R. Nicholas

part 1 Cultures of Scholarship 1

Roger Ascham and the Idea of a University in Sixteenth-​Century England 23 Ceri Law

2

Ascham & Co: St John’s College, Cambridge, in the 1540s 41 Richard Rex

3

Patristic Scholarship and Ascham’s ‘troubled years’ 61 Sam Kennerley

4

Ascham, Coins, Cambridge and Beyond 82 Andrew Burnett

part 2 Broader Horizons: Connections and Influences 5

‘The Scholer of the Best Master’: Ascham and John Cheke 103 John F. McDiarmid

6

Roger Ascham’s Diplomatic Training and Mid-​Tudor Diplomatic Careers 124 Tracey A. Sowerby

vi Contents 7

8

The Special Relationship: Ascham and Sturm, England and Strasbourg 145 Lucy R. Nicholas Ascham and Queen Elizabeth’s Religion 165 Cyndia Susan Clegg

part 3 Language, Literature and Learning Reassessed 9

Ascham as Reader and Writer: Greek Sententiae and Neo-​Latin Poetry 189 J. S. Crown

10

The Bow and the Book: Ascham’s Toxophilus 208 Cathy Shrank

11

The Scholemaster’s Memories 226 Micha Lazarus

12

Ascham and Sturm on imitatio: Ethical and Ludic Attitudes to a Literary Technique 248 Mike Pincombe

Appendices Appendix 1 Roger Ascham: a Biographical Sketch 269 Lucy R. Nicholas Appendix 2 Ascham’s Bookshelf 297 Micha Lazarus

Bibliography 321 Index 346

Acknowledgements The fons et origo of this volume was a ‘Roger Ascham Conference’ held in 2016 to mark –​rather contrivedly, as these things tend to be –​the 500th anniversary of the (generally) accepted year of Ascham’s birth, 1516. We would like to register our fulsome thanks again to St John’s College for hosting that splendid event, to Mark Nicholls for his aid in obtaining this venue, and to Cambridge University History Faculty for all their support in organising the conference. We are particularly grateful to the Society for Renaissance Studies and the Royal Historical Society for their generous financial support of the event. As the volume took shape we incurred other debts. We are grateful to Gareth Williams for his lynx-​eyed reading of several contributions, to Francis Knikker at Brill for her assistance at many stages of the project, and to Kim Plas and her typesetting team for their patient and careful work in bringing the beast to life. Ceri would also like to thank young Teddy, whose naps occasionally facilitated the editing of this volume. Our final words of acknowledgement are dedicated to John McDiarmid, one of the contributors of this collection and a stalwart of the entire endeavour, who sadly and unexpectedly passed away in February 2020. John was an inspirational scholar: deeply learned, fastidious to an admirable degree, and a formidable breaker of new ground in the field of early modern studies. We also both remember him as an unstintingly generous individual, so supportive of juniors just cutting their teeth in the academic world, and, perhaps most importantly, as a friend.

Abbreviations and References This volume contains a full bibliography (pp. 321–345). It contains details of the archives, manuscripts, primary and secondary printed works referred to in each chapter. It does not, however, itemise the books identified as Ascham’s own in appendix 2 (‘Ascham’s Bookshelf’). All bibliographical references are also set out in full in the footnotes of each chapter, except for the following, which are abbreviated as follows: ‘Giles’ refers to J. A. Giles (ed.), The Whole Works of Roger Ascham (3 vols., London: John Russell Smith, 1865–​1867). References to this edition are intended to assist as much as possible with navigation, and include the volume and page number/​s. In the case of letters, the place and date are provided and the Giles letter number (in Roman numerals). ‘Hatch’ refers to Maurice Addison Hatch, The Ascham Letters:  An Annotated Translation of the Latin Correspondence, unpublished dissertation, Cornell University (1946). ‘Hatch and Vos’ refers to Letters of Roger Ascham, trans. Maurice Hatch and Alvin Vos, ed. Alvin Vos (New York: P. Lang, 1989). odnb refers to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ‘Ryan, Ascham’ refers to Lawrence V. Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963). Where electronic resources have been used, authors provide the website address in full, except for individual entries from the online edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (‘odnb’) at . Individual entries from odnb are not included in the combined bibliography.

Note on the Text Many of the chapters quote directly from early modern English sources. In such cases, individual authors have determined the extent to which original spelling, punctuation and abbreviations have been retained or regularised. Some chapters contain Latin for which a translation is always supplied. Wherever this applies, the layout has been slightly adjusted and standardised according to modern conventions. The medial s, ſ, has been replaced by s, and j by i, and y by i; ligatures such as æ and œ have been written as two letters ae and oe, ‘u’ and ‘v’ have been regularised and abbreviations expanded. Additionally, ampersands have been converted to et. Some authors have put expanded manuscript abbreviations in italics. Quotations from Ascham are provided in translation only, unless the original is of consequence to the argument being made. A few chapters refer to classical Greek. Early modern layout of Greek has also been regularised, including the uses of sigmas. Greek accentuation is provided. Where Greek script is used, it has not been transliterated, but some authors preferred to use transliterations only.

Illustrations Figures 4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4

9.1 9.2 9.3

‘I bought also at Augusta, a strange old face, with long hair; on the other side, in Greek ΠΥΡΡΟΥ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΟΣ’ [sic]: Letter 134. Silver tetradrachm of Pyrrhus, King of Epirus (306–​272 bc), minted at Locri, during his expedition to southern Italy. Head of Zeus, with oak wreath/​Dione seated left with sceptre. bmc 6. © Freeman and Sear ii, 2011, lot 56. 30mm 85 ‘The fourth a goodly face, and about it M. Brutus Imp.; on the other side, two daggers, and in the midst a thing like a bell, having written underneath, Fide Martis’: Letter 134. Silver denarius of M. Brutus, ca. 42 bc. rrc 508/​3. © Numismatica Ars Classica 62, 2011, lot 2005. 19mm 86 ‘The man of his gentilness gave me an Augustus, having on one side Divus Augustus Pater, and on the other Providentia’: Letter 116. Copper as in the name of the Deified Augustus, minted by Tiberius (14–​37 AD), showing an altar of Providentia (‘foresight’). bmc 146. © Bertolami Fine Arts, Auction 15, 2015, lot 514. 27mm 88 Altera parte insculpta est, optima post hominum memoriam femina helena augusta; altera parte, dulcissima felicissimae principis, et felicissimorum temporum vox, Securitas Reipublicae (‘Stamped on one side is the best woman in the memory of mankind, Helena Augusta; on the other side is the sweetest motto of the happiest princess from the happiest of times: The Safety of the State’): Letter clxv. Gold solidus of the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great (306–337 AD), about 325 AD. The reverse is Securitas Reipublicae [‘the Safety of the State’]. Source © Numismatica Ars Classica 38, 2007, Lot 236. 20mm. 89 Ascham’s copy of Callimachus 205 Ascham’s annotations to Euripides under the section ‘praise of life’ 206 Ascham’s annotations to Antiphanes and Menander under the section ‘blame of wealth’ 207

Tables 2.1 The Master, Fellows, and Fellows-​Elect of St John’s in March 1542 59 10.1 Greek and Roman authors named in Ascham’s Toxophilus 224

Notes on Contributors Andrew Burnett retired from the British Museum in 2013. He has been President of the Royal Numismatic Society, the Roman Society and the International Numismatic Commission. His publications focus on Greek and Roman coins and the history of their reception in the early modern period. He recently published ‘The Hidden Treasures of this Happy Island’. A History of Numismatics in Britain from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (2020). Cyndia Susan Clegg is Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Pepperdine University, where she teaches courses in English Renaissance literature and culture. Her publications include three books from Cambridge University Press on press censorship between 1558 and 1649, a facsimile edition of Holinshed’s Chroni­ cles for Elizabeth I’s reign, Shakespeare’s Reading Audiences (2017) and several essays on religion and early modern print culture. J. S. Crown completed her doctoral dissertation on Renaissance humanism in early sixteenth-​century England at Cambridge University in 2017. Since then, she has worked both at the University and the British Library. Her article ‘Rhetorical virtue, theology and “womens wyttes” in an early Tudor dialogue: Thomas Lupset’s A treatise of charitie (c.1529)’ is forthcoming with the journal Renaissance Studies. Current projects include a book chapter on the context of the Hebraist Robert Wakefield’s inaugural orations at Cambridge and Oxford, and an article examining Lupset’s philosophical meditations on the good life and death. Sam Kennerley is a Research Fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. His research interests are in classical and patristic scholarship between 1400 and 1650, and the interaction between different churches during and after the Council of Trent. With Andreas Ammann, he co-​edited ‘The Reception of the Church Fathers and Early Church Historians in the Renaissance and the Reformation, c.1470–​ 1650’, which appeared in International Journal of the Classical Tradition (2020). Ceri Law is the author of Contested Reformations in the University of Cambridge (2018) and has published a number of other essays on the history of universities,

xii 

Notes on Contributors

reformation and memory. She worked on the ahrc-​funded research project ‘Remembering the Reformation’ from 2016 to 2019 and has taught at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London. She has recently co-​edited volumes on Remembering the Reformation and Memory and the Eng­ lish Reformation (both 2020) and is working on essays on sermons and biography and on the memory of early modern converts. Micha Lazarus is Frances A. Yates Research Fellow at the Warburg Institute and Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He works on classical reception in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, and in particular on the influence of Greek poetry and literary theory in Renaissance England. He is the author of Aristotle’s Poetics in Renaissance England (forthcoming), and a second book on Alexander Nowell’s life and library is forthcoming from the Bibliographical Society. He has published extensively on the history of criticism in Renaissance Europe, as well as on Greek learning and literacy in England, Reformation tragedy, Neo-​ Latin drama, and the literary history of centaurs. His work in book history was awarded the Gordon Duff Prize from the Bodleian Library, and he has held fellowships at the Harry Ransom Center, Dumbarton Oaks, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. John F. McDiarmid was a renowned scholar who published widely on history, literature and mid-​ Tudor humanists and their classical learning. Much of this work centred on the figure of John Cheke and his circle. He was Professor Emeritus of British and American Literature at New College of Florida in Sarasota, and in retirement he became a pillar of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. He was editor of and contributor to The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England (2007) and at the time of his passing was completing another edited volume, The Cambridge Connection: Humanism, Reform, Rhetoric, Politics, which will be published by Brill. Lucy R. Nicholas is Lecturer in Latin and Ancient Greek at the Warburg Institute and Classics Teaching Fellow at King’s College London. She is Ascham-​mad, and has published extensively on Roger Ascham, including Roger Ascham’s ‘A Defence of the Lord’s Supper’: Latin Text and English Translation (2017). Her research centres on Neo-​Latin, particularly that written during the mid-​to late sixteenth century, and her attentions are currently focused on the Latin output of a motley range of figures, including Walter Haddon, Johannes Sturm and Gabriel

Notes on Contributors

xiii

Harvey. She has recently co-​edited two Neo-​Latin anthologies published by Bloomsbury in 2020, is a participant in the ahrc funded network ‘Baroque Latinity’ and Latin Editor on the Thomas Nashe Project. Mike Pincombe is now almost retired, but remains an Emeritus Professor at his former university of Newcastle, whilst helping out as a Visiting Professor at his new university in Germany in Erlangen-​Nürnberg. He has written books on John Lyly and also on Elizabethan humanism, and was the co-​editor, with Cathy Shrank, of the Oxford handbook of Tudor literature. Current projects revolve around minor mid-​Tudor Neo-​Latin poetry and anarcho-​structuralist poetics. Richard Rex is Professor of Reformation History in the University of Cambridge and Polkinghorne Fellow in Theology at Queens’ College, Cambridge. His research career has focused on two themes:  religious change in England in the late medieval and early modern era, in particular during the reign of Henry viii; and the relationship between humanism and the early Reformation in Europe. He has published several books, including a searching study of Martin Luther. His penchant is for turning a question round in order to get a fresh angle on it. Cathy Shrank is Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is author of Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–​1580 (2004) and co-​editor, with Mike Pincombe, of The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Litera­ ture, 1485–​1603 (2009). With Raphael Lyne, she co-​edited Shakespeare’s Poems (2018). Current projects include a monograph on dialogue in late medieval and early modern England, funded by a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and editions of William Tyndale’s Mammon (funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities) and the works of Thomas Nashe (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council). Tracey A. Sowerby (University of Oxford) is the author of Renaissance and Reform in Tudor Eng­ land: The Careers of Sir Richard Morison c.1513–​1556 (2010) and the co-​editor of Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c.1410–​1800 (2017), Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Culture in the Early Modern World (2019), and English Diplomatic Relations and Literary Cultures in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Cen­ turies = Huntington Library Quarterly, 82.4 (2020). Her research interests focus

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on early modern political, cultural, religious, and intellectual history and the interactions between them. She is currently finishing a monograph, The Tudor Diplomatic Corps, and completing a major study of Tudor diplomatic culture for Oxford University Press.

Introduction Ceri Law and Lucy R. Nicholas Roger Ascham (1515/​16–​1568) is a figure who is curiously both well and little known. He has, in modern times, given his name to the wooden case or cupboard in which archers store their gear. Ironically, this reflects the problem we face with Ascham:  the outward packaging is now the Ascham we know. Particularly familiar to scholars of English Literature, he is often classified as ‘a mid-​Tudor humanist’ and acclaimed for his role as tutor to Elizabeth i. His most famous works, The Scholemaster and Toxophilus, have been extensively quarried and quoted in studies of vernacular prose style and English humanism. His abundant letters are routinely mined for insights into sixteenth-​ century culture. Yet there are many aspects of his life and multifaceted career that are simply omitted from literary critiques and historical accounts. Those of his works which have not been translated from Latin are almost completely unknown. Even Ascham’s better known works, such as The Scholemaster, have not been comprehensively contextualized. Interpretative frameworks for assessing Ascham have been considerably narrower than the full sweep of his activities, interests, concerns and networks warrant. This collection of essays seeks to address Ascham afresh. By investigating this one particular life, our volume also aims to throw a broader light on the world in which Ascham lived and worked. His career spanned a diverse range of arenas, from Cambridge University to foreign courts. He lived through the turbulent reigns of four Tudor monarchs. In person, and through his correspondents, he witnessed the repercussions of seismic shifts in international alliances, the death of Luther and the Council of Trent. His friends and contacts included some of the most powerful and influential men in Europe. His works engaged with the most important intellectual concerns of the sixteenth century, including humanism, educational reform, religion and politics. The study of Ascham and his world demands a truly interdisciplinary approach, offering an invaluable opportunity to find new contact points between these traditionally separate sub-​areas of the Renaissance and Reformation. 1

Ascham and His Work

Ascham’s oeuvre is highly diverse, ranging from dialogic and educational tracts, to letters, poetry, historical and theological works, and annotations. By

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_002

2

Law and Nicholas

far the best known nowadays are Ascham’s works in the vernacular, above all his Toxophilus, a work on archery, and The Scholemaster, generally classified as a manual of educational theory. The bulk of scholarship on Ascham has emanated from scholars of English literature, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a primary focus has been the English language and its development. Many of these approaches are helpful and summarised in the following section, but there remain many omissions, and a certain imbalance, in modern understandings of his oeuvre as a whole. The neglect of some parts of Ascham’s corpus can be attributed, at least in part, to the relatively poor and scattered state of available resources. Like many early modern authors, Ascham did not tend to publish his works.1 Most remained in manuscript form, at least during his lifetime. Many have sought to rectify this, at least for his English works, which have enjoyed several publications, including James Bennet’s in 1761 and John George Cochrane’s in 1815.2 Thanks both Ascham’s contemporary Edward Grant and the nineteenth-​century clergyman J. A. Giles, the majority of Ascham’s works are now available in printed form.3 Yet such publications were more often celebratory than scholarly. Even his most celebrated works, his Toxophilus and The Scholemaster, have only one modern critical edition apiece.4 This means that there has been no single study which could rationalise technical discoveries such as M. F. Vaughan’s attribution of an extensive passage in The Scholemaster to Desiderius Erasmus.5 Most glaringly, Ascham’s abundant letters, which could and should constitute an invaluable primary source, desperately want for a more up-​to-​date format. The problem is not a lack of editions per se. Ascham’s letters were repeatedly published during the centuries after his death, reflecting a serious and sustained interest in Ascham’s correspondence and the art of rhetoric more broadly. Following Grant’s publication of his letters in 1576, there were editions 1 Two exceptions were the Toxophilus, the schole of shootinge conteyned in two bookes (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1545, ustc 503581) and the Epistolae duae de nobilitate Anglicana, two letters of Sturm and Ascham published within Conrad Heresbach, De laudibus Graecar­ um literarum oratio (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1551, ustc 622756). 2 The English Works of Roger Ascham, ed. James Bennet (London: printed for R. and J. Dodsley, and J. Newbery, 1761); and The English works of Roger Ascham: Praeceptor to Queen Elizabeth, ed. John George Cochrane (London: White, Cochrane, 1815). 3 On the shortcomings of Giles’s editions, and their indebtedness to Grant, see Hatch and Vos, pp. 20–​21. 4 The two modern editions are:  Roger Ascham, Toxophilus, ed. Peter. E.  Medine (Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002) and Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967). 5 M. F. Vaughan, ‘An Unnoted Translation of Erasmus in Ascham’s Schoolmaster’, Modern Phi­ lology, 75.2 (1977), pp. 184–​186.

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in 1578, 1581, 1590; as Lawrence Ryan notes, no other Tudor writer, with the possible exception of Thomas More, received such acknowledgement.6 Abraham Fleming, the clergyman, translator and fervent Protestant, would include a number of Ascham’s letters in his Panoplie of Epistles, a work published in 1576 alongside letters by Cicero, Seneca, Pliny, Erasmus and Walter Haddon.7 Of interest too, though barely commented on, is the fact that editions of Ascham’s epistles were also published in Lutheran Hanover in 1602 and 1610 and in Calvinist Geneva in 1611.8 These were followed in the next century by William Elstob’s 1703 edition.9 Yet for all this, we lack a comprehensive modern edition. The most complete collection of his correspondence dates from 1864, but even this suffers from gaps, omitting many of the letters which Ascham wrote while secretary to Queens Mary and Elizabeth. Remarkably, many of the pieces in these letter-​books remain in manuscript, untranscribed and untranslated.10 Moreover, the majority of Ascham letters are in Latin, and translations can only be found in partial compilations or in an American PhD thesis of 1948.11 Similarly, Ascham’s theological works in Latin can only boast a single edition (1577/​8) and one of Ascham’s Latin works, the Apologia pro Caena Dominica (‘Defence of the Lord’s Supper’), was made available in English for the first time in 2017.12 Two of his theological works and his Latin verse still have no corresponding English versions.13 We thus know less than we should about what Ascham wrote. We know even less about what he read. In this respect our volume aims to offer a significant

6 Ryan, Ascham, p. 7. 7 Abraham Fleming, A panoplie of epistles, or, a looking glasse for the unlearned (London: Ralph Newbery, 1576, ustc 508168). 8 Dissertissimi viri Rogeri Aschami (Hanover: G. Antonius, 1602, 1610, no available ustc); and Dissertissimi viri Rogeri Aschami (Coloniae Allobrogum:  P. Rouserianus, 1611, no available ustc). 9 Editio novissima prioribus auctior, ed. William Elstob (Oxford:  Typis Lichfieldianis, 1703). 10 The letter-​books from the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth are held at the British Library: for Mary, Add ms 35840; and for Elizabeth, Royal ms 13 B I and Lansdowne ms 98/​12. 11 Hatch and Vos; and Hatch which can be accessed on microfilm at the British Library. 12 Lucy R. Nicholas, Roger Ascham’s ‘A Defence of the Lord’s Supper’: Latin Text and English Translation (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017). 13 Ascham’s other theological works are:  Themata quaedam theologica; Expositiones anti­ quae in epistolas Divi Pauli ad Titum, et Philemonem, ex diversis sanctorum Patrum Graece scriptis commentariis, ab Oecumenio collectae, et Cantabrigiae Latine versae. These are included in Roger Ascham, Apologia doctissimi viri Rogeri Aschami … commentariis ab Oecumenio collectae, et a R. A. Latine versae, ed. E. G. Grant (London: H. Middleton, 1577, ustc 508290).

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intervention. The surviving identifiable books from Ascham’s own collection are now held in disparate libraries and archives; in an appendix to this volume, Micha Lazarus provides for the first time a handlist of these volumes. It is hoped that both this and the essay by J. S. Crown, which demonstrates the rich possibilities of Ascham’s marginalia, will stimulate new interest in these almost entirely unknown sources. More widely, the essays in this volume address some of the gaps that have emerged in our current appreciation, understanding and analysis of Ascham’s works. Both obscure and familiar works are considered, and contextualised, anew. 2

Ascham and His Biographers

The mystery deepens as we move from the works to the man. This volume does not constitute a new biography of Ascham, but it certainly purports to supplement and revise the existing biographical material. In an effort to bring a diverse range of material together and to represent advances in scholarship and recent discoveries, Lucy Nicholas offers in appendix 1 an updated version of Ascham’s life and career. This discussion makes apparent how inadequate the simplistic labels often applied are in describing this unique life and intellect. A  more rounded approach, embracing the multi-​dimensional, cross-​border nature of sixteenth century intellectual, religious and political exchange, is necessary when it comes to delving more deeply into Ascham and, through him, his world. Ascham has been understood and appropriated by many different people, in many different ways, ever since his death. Unpicking this is a vital step to developing a new and deeper comprehension of this complicated and sometimes contradictory man. Ascham was celebrated almost from the moment of his death. It was said that Queen Elizabeth, upon hearing of his passing, exclaimed ‘I would rather have cast ten thousand pounds in the sea than parted with my Ascham’.14 Eulogies quickly followed, and commemorative verses were composed.15 Grant’s Latin poem praised, in elegiac couplets, Ascham’s unimpeachable morals, his dedication to Scripture, his learning, and an eloquence which was extolled not just in Cambridge and England, but also across Europe.16 Thomas Wilson, the 14 Grant, Oratio in Giles, vol. iii, p. 342. Ryan quotes this at the start of his biography on Ascham but is unsure of its sincerity: Ryan, Ascham, p. 1. 15 A number of these were included in Giles, vol. iii, pp. ci–​ccxvi. None of these has been translated from Latin. 16 Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. cii–​civ.

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Cambridge administrator and scholar responsible for works on logic and rhetoric, composed a Carmen encomiasticum (‘An Honorific Poem’) in which he claimed Ascham was the son of Cicero and a Cicero for the English.17 An epigram was also written by George Buchanan, the Scottish humanist and Protestant, which again affirmed Ascham’s high standing and reputation.18 Subsequently, William Camden, the English historian, wrote in verse a long elegy which glorified Ascham’s learning, credited him with both knowledge and eloquence, and placed him on a par with continental scholars such as Erasmus, Aldus Manutius and Pietro Bembo.19 These commemorative efforts also prompted the earliest biographical sketch of Ascham, which is contained in Edward Grant’s Latin Oratio de vita et obitu Rogeri Aschami (‘Oration on the Life and Death of Roger Ascham’) (1576).20 This is a panegyric oration and Grant himself states that it is largely based on anecdotal reports from members of St John’s College. Yet the interest in Ascham shown by Grant –​another student of St John’s, the Headmaster of Westminster School and the holder of various ecclesiastical positions –​is in itself telling, as are the aspects of Ascham’s life emphasised in his biography. Grant’s oration seeks to establish Ascham as a man of extraordinarily diverse talent whose reputation inevitably catapulted him into posts at university, Court and overseas. However, what emerges most strongly is Grant’s view of Ascham as an inspiration for others. The life was ostensibly presented as an exhortation to ‘a purity of diction’ for studious young men.21 In Ascham’s writing Grant perceived a piety and purity of eloquence that was matched in his life by a morality and complete dedication to God. In fact, this was for Grant a combination that constituted an exemplum which could profit not just scholars at Westminster School but also the English commonwealth and Christianity itself. Grant’s life of Ascham was both biography and rhetorical tool. This does 17 Ibid., pp. civ–​cv. 18 ‘Aschamum extinctum patriae Graiaeque Camoenae /​Et Latiae vera cum pietate dolent. /​Principibus vixit carus, iucundus amicis, /​re modica; in mores dicere fama nequit’. (‘The Greek and Latin Muses of our fatherland mourn with true piety Ascham now dead. He was dear to princes and pleasing to his friends, while he lived modestly. Reputation can say nothing against his morals.’), trans. Lucy Nicholas. For another translation and a parody, see Ryan, Ascham, p. 331. 19 Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. cv. The Latin text and translation are set out in George Burke Johnson, ‘William Camden’s Elegy on Roger Ascham’, Studies in Philology, 70 (1973), pp. 160–​171. 20 In 1576 this was included in an edition of Ascham’s letters (Disertissimi viri Rogeri Aschami … Familiarium epistolarum libri tres) and is also included in Giles (vol. iii, pp. 302–​355). A translation can be found at:  . 21 Grant, Oratio, Giles, vol. iii, p. 306.

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not render it useless. It may not fall squarely into what we like to call ‘fact’, but it reflects the overlapping intersections between letters, politics and religion of the early modern world: a world within which we can seek to understand Ascham. Such celebration of Ascham continued into the seventeenth century. William Camden’s Annals offered another brief biography, entered for 1568, the year of Ascham’s death. Camden often referred to the deaths of certain individuals at the end of a year, but in Ascham’s case, he unusually begged the reader’s pardon for embarking on a ‘short digression in memory of this good man’. He referred to Ascham’s well-​known proclivity for gambling, but also highlighted his linguistic ability, crediting him as ‘one of the foremost of our countrymen’ in Latin and Greek.22 Yet Ascham’s contemporaries and near-​contemporaries were not unanimous in their praise for him. Writing around the same time as Camden, Francis Bacon, one of the most influential thinkers of the early Enlightenment, discussed Ascham’s approach in his seminal work the Advancement of Learning.23 In book 1, Bacon divided knowledge into two types –​‘proud’ and ‘pure’ –​both of which had implications for religion; the former leading to atheism and the latter affording a proper understanding of God. Bacon included in the same section Luther, Johannes Sturm, Erasmus, and Ascham.24 Bacon, having credited Luther with ‘awakening all of antiquity’ in his theological mission to oppose the Bishop of Rome, proceeded to criticise what he understood to be Ascham and others’ over-​emphasis on words not matter. For Bacon, then, Ascham should be located within a broader movement which had negatively impinged on the path to true knowledge and ultimately God. Bacon’s inclusion (and denunciation) of Ascham in this seminal work about learning was important, and arguably attests to not just Ascham’s impact through the years, but his connection with the spheres of philosophy and religion. It also demonstrates a powerfully different way of interpreting Ascham’s significance and work than the praise offered by so many others. Two centuries later, Ascham continued to be thought and written about but again in many diverse, sometimes contradictory, ways. A manuscript one page summary of Ascham’s life, probably written by the bishop, antiquarian and 22 23 24

William Camden, The Annals or the Historie of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princesse Elizabeth, Late Queen of England, trans. R. N. Gent (third ed., London: Thomas Harper for Benjamin Fisher, 1635, ustc 3018114), p. 103. Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, ed. W.  A. Wright (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1873). This was first published in 1605. Ibid., pp. 28–​30 (in section iv, book 1).

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anti-​Catholic polemicist White Kennett (1660–​1728) placed great emphasis on Ascham’s religious activities, such as his involvement in the Mass disputations at Cambridge in the late 1540s.25 For another, much more well-​known, biographer, however, Ascham should be lauded not primarily as a zealous Protestant, but as a literary innovator. Samuel Johnson, in an account of Ascham penned in 1763 to be included in a wide-​ranging work entitled ‘Eminent Lives’, was highly critical of Grant’s one-​sided and scantily-​supported account, charging him with prioritising oratory over history.26 And yet Johnson, too, elevated Ascham’s achievements, suggesting that his service to the English language and philological acumen ‘may justly call for that reverence which all nations owe to those who first arouse them from ignorance, and kindle among them the light of literature’.27 Johnson may here have been inaugurating an enduring tradition of closely associating Ascham with the development of English prose. Ascham’s reputation continued to endure into the nineteenth century. Isaac Disraeli, son of the former British Prime Minister, declared in 1864 that for anyone concerned about the progress of taste and opinion in the history of England, no library is complete without a volume of Ascham.28 Shortly afterwards, Reverend Dr Giles, the man responsible for collating much of Ascham’s corpus into a form we still use today, assembled a biographical essay on Ascham to preface his publication of the Whole Works of Roger Ascham in 1865.29 A good portion of his outline simply lifts long passages from Johnson’s earlier essay. Giles echoes Johnson’s criticism of Grant’s Oratio, commenting that it fails to provide proper insight into Ascham’s life and character.30 His response (and where he diverges from Johnson) was to emphasise the importance of using Ascham’s own letters, a number of which he translated from Latin and quotes at length, as evidence for his life. This marked a helpful step forward; in this volume we will also argue that Ascham’s letters constitute a mine of information that remains insufficiently tapped. However, in his exposition, Giles tends 25 This comprises a previously unidentified manuscript held in the British Library (Lansdowne ms 981/​41, fol. 68). 26 Samuel Johnson, ‘Lives of Eminent Persons’ in The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. A. Murphy (2 vols., New York: Alexander V. Blake, 1840), vol. 2, pp. 379–​384. Johnson’s Life of Ascham was also appended to Bennet’s 1761 edition of Ascham’s work. 27 Ibid., p. 384. 28 Isaac Disraeli, Amenities of Literature:  Sketches and Characters of English Literature (2 vols., New York: Hurd & Houghton; Boston: William Veazie, 1864), vol. 1, pp. 409–​419, at p. 419. 29 Giles’s life of Ascham is set out in Giles, vol. i pt. 1, pp. ix–​c. 30 Giles also criticises the historicity of Grant’s outline as giving little clear insight into Ascham’s life and character (ibid., pp. ix–​x).

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to let Ascham’s letters speak entirely for themselves, and feels the need neither to place them in context nor to examine their frames of reference. Other nineteenth-​century scholars offered different but equally important insights. In 1879, Alfred Katterfeld published a biographical monograph on Ascham (Sein Leben und seine Werke, ‘His Life and Work’), which offers a rare focus on Ascham’s ambassadorial trip to Germany in the early 1550s. In fact, Katterfeld translates and comments on large portions of the Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany Ascham wrote as part of the trip.31 Untranslated in English, Katterfield’s work received much less attention than it deserved –​and indeed, as Tracey Sowerby argues in this volume, Ascham’s time and experience in diplomatic service remains an understudied part of his career and thought. In 1963 Lawrence Ryan rationalised the biographical material on Ascham into a full biography which remains the most recent one published in English.32 This constitutes a useful reference work, on which many essays in this volume draw, but Ryan’s survey is limited by its approach. A primary (stated) aim for Ryan is to trace the generation of Ascham’s three principal English works,33 a focus which means Ryan values the vernacular over Ascham’s Latin, neglecting other works such as his theological pieces in Latin and his Latin letters. Just as fundamentally, Ryan’s biography tends to stress Ascham’s conventionality and second-​rank status. It lingers on the dependency of Ascham on others, his relative passivity and his disappointments, and for Ryan, Ascham is a figure more interesting for his typicality, as a mirror of his times, than as a subject of study in his own right. These same tendencies are on display in the first port of call for any twenty-​first century researcher interested in Ascham’s life, namely his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.34 This volume diverges sharply from this approach. It presents an Ascham who was not only a pioneer in his prose and philology, but who was at the forefront of many political, religious and intellectual developments of his time. Throughout this, Ascham remains an ambiguous, even confusing figure. A  zealous Protestant who made Catholic friends and served Mary i; an educational reformer who both disdained the rise of the gentry in universities and yet wrote his most famous work as a guide for the teaching of aristocratic youth; a passionate promoter of the vernacular and famous denouncer of the influence of the Italianate upon the English, yet someone who derived many 31

Alfred Katterfeld, Roger Ascham:  Sein Leben und seine Werke: mit besonderer Berücksi­ chtigung seiner Berichte über Deutschland (Strasbourg and London:  Karl J.  Trübner & Comp, 1879). 32 Ryan, Ascham. 33 Ibid., p. 7. 34 Rosemary O’Day, ‘Roger Ascham, ca. 1515/​16–​1568’, odnb.

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of his most deeply-​held ideas from his many contacts from outside England; a courtier who wrote of his fear of the court. Ascham was a complex man, and pragmatism and ideology coexisted and sometimes collided across his career. Ascham, then, was not a perfect exemplum, as earliest biographers would have it, but he was far from as ordinary as his more recent accounts have claimed. Studying Ascham, as this volume hopes to demonstrate, can open up the sixteenth century in new and important ways –​but it is his uniqueness, not his typicality, that affords us this opportunity. 3

Situating Ascham: Contexts and Themes

The essays in this volume are by scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines. Their contributions have been organised into three broad themes which are intended to capture, as far as possible, the complex and diverse range of Ascham’s activity and world. These themes are: (i) cultures of scholarship, (ii) connections and influences, and (iii) language, literature and learning reassessed. Though not always possible, the chapters seek to follow the chronology of Ascham’s life. (i) Cultures of Scholarship Ascham spent a significant portion of his adult life in Cambridge, and his time there was formative for him both personally and intellectually. Ascham became an important participant in a circle formed at the University in the 1530s and 40s that was the subject of a study by Winthrop Hudson.35 Hudson suggested that this group, gaining the name ‘the Athenians’ from their shared interest in reforming the pronunciation of Greek in the University despite official opposition, formed a power bloc within the mid-​Tudor court. The ‘Cambridge connection’, he argued, bound together a powerful group of men who proved politically dominant upon the accession of Elizabeth i, and thus crucially shaped the religious politics of this new regime:  men such as Ascham.36 Letters from his time there reveal the degree to which he invested 35 36

Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1980). Hudson identified John Cheke as the ‘leading light’ of this group within Cambridge, and named Thomas Smith and Ascham as two of its leading members. We should note here a recent and very welcome revival of scholarly interest in this circle: conferences were held on Thomas Smith in 2013 and Sir John Cheke in 2014; a volume, John F. McDiarmid and Susan Wabuda (eds.), The Cambridge Connection in Tudor England: Humanism, Reform, Rhetoric, Politics (Brill), is forthcoming.

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both intellect and emotions in the University and the strong sense of identity his college, St John’s, gave him. Yet, we need to probe beneath the nostalgia in order to appreciate more precisely the nature of this establishment, which would prove to be so central in Ascham’s life. The four essays in this section aim to explore in more depth the nature of the atmosphere and dynamics of the University, and the forms of scholarship being pursued there. They do not limit their discussions to narrow academic concerns, but consider more fully the implications of being at Cambridge and St John’s in the sixteenth century, including its role in broader society, the religious tensions that beset and shaped it, and the opportunities it offered for spiritual and intellectual growth. In ­chapter 1, Ceri Law uses Ascham’s career and works as a case-​study for the function, both notional and actual, of a Tudor university. Law argues that Ascham’s writings reflect a distinct tension between the university as a centre for incubating and inculcating right religion on the one hand, and, on the other, the university as a place of moral learning and a creator of virtuous office-​holders who would serve the commonwealth. Such contradictions, she suggests, became more acute as the Reformation progressed and with the onset of rapid social change. The competing priorities of religion, morality and civic duty would become imprinted on Ascham’s outlook and (as we see in later sections) continue to have a bearing on him beyond Cambridge, a phenomenon which can yield helpful insights into the attitudes of early modern scholars and the deeper complexities and contradictions of Tudor politics and religion. Richard Rex’s contribution in ­chapter 2 expands on one of these strands, casting religion as a fulcrum of college life. He examines one particular phase of Ascham’s time at the University, the early 1540s, a time when Ascham was still a junior fellow. Examining Ascham’s letters alongside source material from the college archives, Rex puts the spotlight on a disputed fellowship election of 1542. This event, he argues, presents a considerably more complex picture of college life than has traditionally been offered. Rex paints a picture of an institution divided by factional religious strife and incipient confessional allegiances that had to be negotiated by its members, including Ascham. Integral to this seat of learning were religious upheavals which would continue to blight the University and which had a lasting impact on the individuals involved. Cast in this light, Rex’s chapter is a powerful demonstration of the degree to which ideas about religion and its management could become intertwined with all levels of academic business and thought. A specific example of this ferment of college politics, scholarship and religion is found in ­chapter 3. Here Sam Kennerley investigates one aspect of Ascham’s academic life at Cambridge and indeed one he hoped would take

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him beyond it: his engagement with the Church Fathers. Ascham has long been associated above all with the classical learning of humanism. This focus has done much to emphasise the merits and importance of Ascham as a scholar, but it has also proved limiting and has often obscured the full range of his intellectual endeavours. Kennerley addresses one such gap by discussing one of the most unfamiliar parts of Ascham’s portfolio: his translation into Latin of the commentaries of various Greek Church Fathers on two letters of Paul attributed to the early Greek bishop Oecumenius. In this first full study of these, Kennerley highlights the importance of this project, which Ascham completed during the first part of the 1540s. He shows how Ascham was profoundly shaped by both the transformative insights of humanism, and the upheaval of religious change, and in so doing demonstrates that to separate out the humanist and the scholar of religion is to fundamentally misunderstand not just Ascham himself, but his age. More specifically for Ascham, these translations from Greek to Latin have a dual significance: they played a profound role in the formation of Ascham’s own scholarly development, but were also a strategic response on his part to the religious politics of St John’s College, a tactic for navigating this, and ultimately for escaping it through pitches for patronage directed at men of the cloth. Kennerley’s research further deepens our understanding of the atmosphere of Tudor Cambridge its residents like Ascham experienced, the skills it equipped him with, and the pioneering nature of the innovative and patristic scholarship he would become involved in, and would continue to turn his hand to during the full sweep of his career. Chapter 4 of this volume similarly draws attention to another of Ascham’s intellectual interests, presenting him again as a scholar in a context deeply rooted within and yet separate from his formal education. Andrew Burnett here discusses Ascham’s long-​standing involvement in numismatics. Ascham’s coin collecting offers rare and valuable evidence of a previously ignored practice in England in the mid-​sixteenth century, and Burnett, through a careful reading of Ascham’s letters, casts Ascham as a knowledgeable and scholarly leader in this pursuit. He shows how Ascham’s collecting activities can be placed in a wider context of contemporary Cambridge, and argues for a ‘Cambridge connection’, or even a ‘St John’s connection’ in Tudor numismatics. Burnett’s analysis goes further than a reconstruction of coin collecting. By focusing on the practices associated with these coins, and above all the exchange of these objects as gifts, he gives an insight into the powerful bonds forged and maintained within a shared culture of scholarship. While it has been long acknowledged that some of the most crucial connections that Ascham formed were cultivated during his time in Cambridge, this chapter offers new insights into the complex webs of social and political relationships in which Ascham was firmly enmeshed.

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(ii) Broader Horizons: Connections and Influences The ties and affiliations Ascham established at Cambridge and the training he received afforded a vital springboard from which to develop his career; they also provided a template that would govern his interactions and conduct throughout his life. In this section, authors investigate some of the most important and enduring networks and spheres of activity in Ascham’s life in and beyond the academy, ranging from close relationships with individuals such as John Cheke and Johannes Sturm, to the political settings of the Elizabethan court and ambassadorial circles overseas. In considering Ascham in not just a local but an international context, then, these chapters reveal a sixteenth century intellectual and social world that defied national borders. The value Ascham placed on friendship has long been acknowledged. Jennifer Richard’s entry for Ascham in the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Litera­ ture identifies friendship as a constant feature of Ascham’s life and works.37 As Richards and other scholars of amity suggest, Ascham’s friendships also entailed important moral and political dimensions.38 These are key themes in this section, which begins, in ­chapter 5, with Ascham’s deep and constant bond with John Cheke. John McDiarmid shows that this was a relationship that loomed large in Ascham’s life from Ascham’s earliest years in Cambridge, when he first encountered Cheke as a mentor, to long after he left the University. Here, then, we are able to see the detail of a very familiar early modern pattern, of the scholar turned courtier, and to begin to unpick the shared connections that drew together this powerful Protestant faction at the mid-​Tudor court. Yet, as McDiarmid also argues, their friendship was also part product, part driver of a shared intellectual project: a commitment to linguistic reform as a path to the realisation of Protestant humanist ideals. Cheke, McDiarmid suggests, was 37 38

Jennifer Richards, ‘Roger Ascham’, in David Scott Kastan, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (5 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), vol. 1, pp. 76–​77. Ibid.; Rachel McGregor, ‘Making Friends with Elizabeth in the Letters of Roger Ascham’, in James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, eds., Women and Epistolary Agency (Oxford and New  York:  Routledge, 2016), pp.  151–​166; and Alan Stewart, Close Readers:  Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), ch. 3. They demonstrate the ‘constructed’ and calculated nature of Ascham’s friendships. Fred Schurink has located The Scholemaster within a changing literary landscape under Elizabeth, identifying it primarily with an intimate manuscript culture in which counsel, patronage and amity coalesced, a genre that continued to have purchase even during an age of print: ‘The Intimacy of Manuscript and the Pleasure of Print: Literary Culture from the Schoolmaster to Euphues’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature: 1485–​1603 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 671–​686.

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a central factor in Ascham’s promotion and analysis of ideas that informed his work, The Scholemaster. In this respect, Cheke’s influence over Ascham did not end with his death in 1557: he would, on some level, always continue to be his guide and teacher. Cheke would also help Ascham to secure a number of posts, including Ascham’s appointment as secretary to Sir Richard Morison on a diplomatic mission to Germany in the early 1550s. In ­chapter 6 Tracey Sowerby examines this role, and arguably the most curiously understudied parts of Ascham’s career. In her survey of this period, Sowerby places new emphasis on Ascham’s archive and the Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany. In focusing on this part of Ascham’s career, Sowerby is able to shed light on a rich quarry of information for a still long-​ignored area of sixteenth-century politics. She is also able to use Ascham’s trip as a window into the world of diplomatic education. Ascham was appointed as Morison’s secretary in large part because of his academic accomplishments, but the post was also intended as a new kind of training:  a practical and relatively informal introduction to the complex and highly ritualised world of the diplomat. His appointment depended on an elaborate web of contacts, and in turn exposed him to new associations that could be cultivated. It also provided a forum in which Ascham could continue to pursue and apply the scholarship he had acquired at Cambridge. Sowerby thus reminds us that, when considering the contexts of Ascham’s intellectual formation, we must look beyond national borders, and consider forms of scholarship that took place outside the academy. That Ascham was an international figure is a point again brought home in Lucy Nicholas’s chapter, which explicitly addresses this previously underestimated aspect of his life and thought. In ­chapter  7 Nicholas puts the spotlight on one of Ascham’s less familiar friendships, an epistolary relationship Ascham developed with a man that he never met, but who was one of the most profound influences on his outlook: Johannes Sturm. While the influence of events and ideas outside England is now better acknowledged,39 we still have much to learn about their means and modes of transmission. Nicholas 39

See, for instance, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s comments in ‘Putting the English Reformation on the map’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 15 (2005), pp. 75–​95; Carrie Euler, Couriers of the Gospel: England and Zurich, 1531–​1558 (Zurich: tvz Theologischer Verlag Zurich, 2006); W. J. Torrance Kirby, The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Polly Ha and Patrick Collinson (eds.), The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010); Dorothea Wendebourg (ed.), Sister Reformations:  The Reformation in Germany and England (Tübingen:  Mor Sieback, 2010); and David Scott Gehring, Anglo-​German Relations and the Protestant Cause: Elizabethan Foreign Policy and Pan-​Protestantism (London: Routledge, 2015).

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traces their exchanges, which demonstrated a shared understanding of education, and above all the role of rhetoric and dialectic, which were indivisible from their commitment to Protestant and humanist ideals. There are some important thematic resonances between this and ­chapter 5. Just as McDiarmid reveals for Cheke and Ascham, so too Nicholas is able to show a richly textured friendship between Sturm and Ascham. Nicholas also deepens our understanding of Ascham’s Protestantism by setting it within its European context and –​crucially –​integrating Ascham’s underexplored religious beliefs with his much better known and understood pedagogical activities. In doing so, this chapter contributes a new perspective to an important historiographical impetus to understand better the vibrant cross-​border exchanges of ideas and ideology that marked the sixteenth century. Nicholas argues that by considering Ascham and the range of contacts that he developed through Sturm, we can deepen our grasp of the nature and significance of such connections, and particularly the mid-​Tudor engagement with Strasbourg. Perhaps one of the most important aspects of a process of re-​evaluation that this volume continues and expands is Ascham’s religious involvement. In the final chapter in this section we turn to Ascham’s own distinctly and politically charged Protestant influence on his most famous student: the young Elizabeth i. Ascham’s religious identity has rarely been fully acknowledged and contextualised. With only a few exceptions, studies of Ascham have tended towards the dismissive on this topic.40 Indeed, it has been questioned whether Ascham had any real religious convictions at all, pragmatism and humanism being thought to be his main priorities.41 The depiction, best articulated by Richard Rex, of Ascham as a fair-​weather friend to Protestantism has strong historiographical purchase.42 Yet more recent work has challenged this view. Through her translation of Ascham’s all but ignored Latin tract, the Apologia 40

41

42

For one exception, see an article by Ryan Stark which identifies possible theological overtones present in Ascham’s The Scholemaster and tried to situate it within the English Reformation: Ryan J. Stark, ‘Protestant Theology and Apocalyptic Rhetoric in Ascham’s Scholemaster’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69.4 (2008), pp.  517–​532. Melanie Ord also connects Ascham’s humanism and Aristotelianism with Protestant fervour:  Travel and Experience in Early Modern English Literature (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), ch. 1. James K.  McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); O’Day, ‘Ascham’, ODNB; and Ryan, Ascham, introduction. Hudson comments that Ascham was ‘less sturdy’ in his religious views than the others in the Cambridge group (Cambridge Connection, p. 58). Richard Rex, ‘The Role of English Humanists in the Reformation up to 1559’ in N. Scott Amos, Andrew Pettegree and Henk F. K. van Nierop, eds., The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands (Aldershot: Ashgate,

Introduction

15

pro Caena Dominica (‘Defence of the Lord’s Supper’), Nicholas returned this work to scholarly attention, arguing that it showed Ascham to be a more committed and polemical Protestant than previously acknowledged.43 Building on this and her own discovery of new evidence, which shakes some long-​held assumptions about the religious settlement of 1559, Cyndia Clegg examines in ­chapter 8 the evidence for Elizabeth’s religious views, especially for her understanding of Eucharistic theology. This, she suggests, reveals a close overlap with one Edwardian text in particular: the aforementioned Apologia of Ascham (who would, shortly after this text’s composition, become Elizabeth’s tutor). This therefore recasts both tutor and tutee. It reveals Elizabeth not as the ‘conservative’ she is so often claimed as, but as an essentially Edwardian Protestant, whose most important guiding principle was the centrality of Scriptural authority. It also re-​characterises and broadens the importance and influence of Ascham. If he was a formative influence upon a future queen then, in this reading, he was also an important, almost entirely unacknowledged, shaper of the Elizabethan Church itself. (iii) Language, Literature and Learning Reassessed These days Ascham’s reputation mainly rests on two areas: his prose style, and his role as an educator. The authors in this section interrogate and add nuance to these projects by reviewing them in within the broader parameters of Ascham’s life and culture. This is done both by bringing lesser studied material to the fore and through re-​evaluations of some of the more familiar works, the Toxophilus and The Scholemaster. Individual chapters help to make greater sense of these works, showing how Ascham’s scholarship, religion, personal connections in England and abroad, and political and pedagogical imperatives, were intrinsic to Ascham’s vernacular productions. They also contextualise not just the physical layout of these works, but also the aims and ideas that underpinned them, in particular, Ascham’s theory and practice of imitation. Collectively, these essays attest to the originality and ambition of Ascham. It is within such expanded structures that Cathy Shrank re-​assesses Ascham’s Toxophilus (1545), the only work that Ascham saw published in England during his lifetime. It warrants close scrutiny as a repository of Ascham’s self-​representation and aspirations. It is now one of Ascham’s better known works (and it is still held in reverence by many modern archery clubs), but in ­chapter 9, Shrank considers afresh the many layers and competing motivations of this famous work on ‘the

43

1999), pp. 19–​40. Rex uses Ascham as a key example of the contingency of the relationship between humanism and Reformation. see n. 12 above.

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bow and the book’. Shrank is especially attentive to the format of the work, a dimension of the Toxophilus that has previously generated little comment. Her sensitive commentary on the modes of printing and the work’s paratexts connects with ground covered in other chapters, as she describes how these reflect Ascham’s social, political, scholarly and religious allegiances. Shrank also addresses the dialogic form of the Toxophilus, and her reflections on the centrality to this work of dialectic and rhetoric, and the influence of Cheke and Sturm, pick up on themes discussed in ­chapters 5 and 7. This concrete manifestation of the fusion of dialectic and rhetoric is identified as an important element of the stylistic as well as the instructional thrust of Ascham’s Toxophilus. Throughout this chapter, Ascham’s bravura and innovation are made evident, whether in his use of the vernacular, his methodology, or in his modes of disseminating the work. While Shrank acknowledges a high degree of self-​promotion behind this work, she also identifies in it a more outward-​looking vision with the commonwealth firmly at its heart. Scholars have previously commented on Ascham’s aspirations to improve contemporary life, in particular connecting Ascham’s prose style with broader societal concerns, including Richards’s incisive discussions about Ascham’s cultivation of ‘civil conversation’, a linguistic and social phenomenon that aimed to resolve a tension between personal ambition and civic duty, and made the virtue of honestas a priority.44 However, Shrank takes this further, arguing that Ascham’s Toxophilus constitutes one of the first and most influential manuals of instruction in what would become a long tradition of ‘how-​to’ dialogues. On display in the Toxophilus, Shrank suggests, are key humanist theories of knowledge and pedagogy, including imitation, aiming to educate, in the broadest possible terms, the commonwealth.

44

Janel Mueller discussed the overlap between Ascham’s prose style and morality in The Native Tongue and the Word:  Developments in English Prose Style 1380–​1580 (Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 1984). Peter Medine argued that underlying Ascham’s Toxophilus are sincere ambitions to improve national welfare through the development of language: P. E. Medine, ‘The Art and Wit of Roger Ascham’s Bid for Royal Patronage:  Toxophilus 1545’ in P.  E. Medine and J.  Wittreich, eds., Soundings of Things Done:  Essays in Early Modern Literature in honour of S.  K. Heninger, Jr, (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1997), pp. 23–​51. In a far-​ranging audit of Elizabethan humanism, there is a similar attestation to the relevance of Ascham’s style to the larger issues of ongoing reformation:  Michael Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism:  Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century (Harlow: Routledge, 2001). See also Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Introduction

17

The Toxophilus is of course a work written in the vernacular, and it would be easy, following previous patterns of scholarship, to connect Ascham’s aspirations to enhance life purely with the promotion of English. However, Ascham was a classicist as well as a great pioneer of English, and his classical learning cannot be divorced from analysis of his broader missions. Up until now, only isolated studies have discussed Ascham’s attempts to recover the ideas of the ancients and the ways in which he assimilated the classical writers into his work.45 However, one of the key aims of this volume is to weave Ascham’s classical knowledge and his appreciation of the Graeco-​Roman world into his own ambitions to improve the present. In ­chapter  10, Ascham’s Greek learning is once again discussed. Breaking new ground, J. S. Crown examines a set of annotations –​never reviewed before  –​made by Ascham in a copy of Callimachus’s Hymns accompanied by selections (or sententiae) from Stobaeus’s Greek Anthology. They represent a wonderfully vivid glimpse into Ascham’s response to ancient texts. They also, as Crown suggests, provide a lens through which to better view Ascham’s assimilation of Greco-Roman literature. Crown’s observations on the selectivity of Ascham’s reading and the nature of his reactions lead to some interesting conclusions about Ascham’s ultimate agenda. While in ­chapter  3 Ascham’s Greek was set to the task of understanding and improving religious knowledge, in this chapter Crown suggests counsel was the overriding goal. She further makes a connection between this Greek gnomologia and some of Ascham’s poems to, for example, Elizabeth I and Mary Cecil, in which he applied the ancient sentiments he harvested. Crown’s chapter offers an eloquent demonstration of the profound relevance of classical language and literature in Ascham’s vision which was far from simply focused on the vernacular. Further, by slotting these annotations into a broader aim of providing guidance based on deep wisdom, Crown allows us to see Ascham’s reading in relation to his overarching educational programme, a central theme of this section.

45

Gertrude Noyes, ‘A Study of Roger Ascham’s Literary Citations with Particular Reference to his Knowledge of the Classics’, unpublished dissertation, University of Yale (1937); this comprises a full survey of Ascham’s classical references. On Cicero and Plato in particular, see:  A. Vos, ‘The Formation of Ascham’s Prose Style’, Studies in Philology, 71 (1974), pp. 344–​370, and ‘Form and Function in Roger Ascham’s Prose Style’, Philological Quarterly, 55 (July 1976), pp. 5–​18, and ‘ “Good Matter and Good Utterance”: The Character of English Ciceronianism’, Studies in English Literature 1500–​1900, 19 (1979), pp.  3–​18; Thomas M. Greene, ‘Roger Ascham: The Perfect End of Shooting’, English Literary History, 36.4 (1969), pp.  609–​625; and K.  J. Wilson, ‘Ascham’s Toxophilus and the Rules of Art’, Renaissance Quarterly, 29 (1976), pp. 30–​51.

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In ­chapter 11 Micha Lazarus re-​examines Ascham’s The Scholemaster. Lazarus’s assessment, like that by Shrank, highlights the importance of viewing Ascham’s work within the parameters of his own life and the people he knew. Analysing this work, Lazarus is able to identify evidence of the impact both Cambridge and Cheke had on Ascham, intellectually and culturally. However, Lazarus argues, it is not the case that these merely signify records of the past, but rather that they are memorialised and then resurrected within the narrative as living examples to follow. This is a tendency that Lazarus sees running through the work, whereby the linguistic and literary precepts Ascham expounds are personified, and the title of the book becomes less a description than a reality. To the extent that this book proffers living models, we can perhaps take more seriously some of the contemporary eulogies of Ascham referred to at the start of this introduction which attested to the examples for imitation that Ascham’s own life left behind. Lazarus contends that Ascham’s approach puts a very new gloss on the fundamentally educational function of The Scholemaster, and prompts him to grapple, as Shrank does with the Toxophilus, in novel ways with the question of the genre of this work, in which elegy, example and pedagogy could co-​exist. Lazarus shows us an Ascham who stands at the cutting-​edge of Renaissance literature and whose work in its complexity and depth of aspiration must be considered as part of under-documented but broader genre of commemorative writing that developed at that time. Insofar as The Scholemaster is concerned above all with imitation, it is vital that we understand this central feature of Ascham’s educational theory. This work has understandably been viewed as a culmination of Ascham’s ideas and experience. However, when it comes to the theory and practice of imitation, The Scholemaster (of which one section is dedicated to imitatio), was, Mike Pincombe argues, never intended to be the last word on the matter. Ascham always planned to compose a more comprehensive guide to imitation, but died before he could complete this project. Ascham’s ideas about imitation are nevertheless in an advanced state in The Scholemaster, and given the importance of imitation in his writings and future plans, the final chapter of this volume is devoted to the subject. Pincombe for the first time sets out a full exposition of the main tenets, as well as the limitations, of Ascham’s theory of imitation. He also brings to the fore the vital influence of Sturm on Ascham, demonstrating yet again the fluidity of ideas across borders that was so much a feature of early modern circles of learning. Pincombe discerns a tight nexus between theory and practice in Ascham’s The Scholemaster in which the resources necessary for imitation are set forth for the reader, suggesting that this is education for anyone who reads his book.

Introduction

19

This volume concludes with two appendices, both intended to aid both readers of this volume and future researchers. Nicholas, in the biographical appendix, and Lazarus, in the bibliographical appendix, both consolidate existing knowledge, while also offering new and important insights into underexplored areas of Ascham’s life, and record. Nicholas provides an overview of Ascham’s life but lingers particularly on the years of the reign of Mary i. As she shows, this is a lacuna in our knowledge of the man, with much of the evidence still to be fully explored. Lazarus, meanwhile, shows us how much more we still have to discover about Ascham as a reader, and the rich possibilities this offers to understand him better as a writer. In this first handlist of surviving books known to have been owned by Ascham, Lazarus provides a scholarly resource that it is hoped will do much to stimulate further research using this important evidence. In this way and many others, it is hoped that this volume will do something to uncover a more complex and nuanced Ascham –​the contents within that cupboard with which we began –​and to inspire others to continue this project. We hope that it also does something to illuminate a little further the world in which Ascham and his friends lived. This study of Ascham allows us to cross geographical borders and to transcend disciplinary and linguistic boundaries. We believe that the result sheds new light not only on Ascham, but on scholarly, religious, political and cultural networks in mid-​Tudor England and beyond.

pa rt 1 Cultures of Scholarship

∵

­c hapter 1

Roger Ascham and the Idea of a University in Sixteenth-​Century England Ceri Law In 1546 the seniors of the University of Cambridge were, as they so often were, indignant, and Roger Ascham was the man who had to commit that indignation to paper.1 The issue at stake touched on a familiar problem: the tussle between the University and the town of Cambridge over their respective rights and obligations. The townsmen insisted that the University should be contributing to the costs of troop-​raising imposed on Cambridge. Ascham, on behalf of the University and in his role as Public Orator, was writing to the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, to ask for his help in procuring an exemption from this.2 It seems a somewhat petty issue, one of many such squabbles over privileges and payments.3 Yet, in Ascham’s telling, the demand that the University contribute to the musters was an assault not just upon the institution, but on all learning and piety –​and on the Tudor state. He wrote that: they [the townspeople] want to lead us away from our devotion to learning and entangle us in matters of war, but they do not understand how 1 Ascham wrote extensively on behalf of the University: from June 1546, he did so as Public Orator, but he had seemingly been doing so in a less official capacity for some years, for in 1544 he claimed that ‘the letters that were sent from the University to his Royal Majesty or other noble men for the last twelve years were written by me’: Roger Ascham to Sir William Paget, [London], [June-​July 1544], letter xii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 50–​53, at p. 52. Speculative place and date from Hatch. All translations from Latin in this chapter are my own; Hatch’s translations have, however, been consulted as a guide and finding-​aid. On Ascham’s appointment as University Orator see Ryan, Ascham, pp. 82–​83. 2 Ascham to Wriothesley, Cambridge, letter liv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 105–​107. Giles dates this letter simply to 1546, while Hatch suggests the more specific date of June. 3 For other examples just from 1546 see letters xlix–​liii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp.  98–​105; these letters all concern ways in which men from the town of Cambridge and elsewhere were perceived to have infringed the liberties and privileges of the University. On the ‘town-​gown’ relationship see Alexandra Shepard, ‘Contesting Communities?: “town” and “gown” in Cambridge, c.1560–​1640’, in Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington, eds., Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 216–​234.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_003

24 Law large an injury they will inflict on the whole commonwealth. And indeed if they saw … how great the force of learning is for preserving true religion, for procuring true obedience to the prince and magistrates, in fact for all human society (humanae vitae societatem) … they would under no circumstances draw us away from devotion to learning by any concern for war; indeed without that learning it cannot be understood how war can justly be waged.4 In this letter, then, Ascham articulated the most powerful arguments for learning in general, and for university education in particular, within early modern society. It upheld religious piety, civil obedience and, indeed, all civilisation. There is some bathos in the employment of this high rhetoric for the noble cause of avoiding taxation. Yet the ideas here are conventional, even if not always expressed in such heightened language. Later in the same letter Ascham deploys one of the most clichéd sixteenth-​century metaphors for a university: it is a fountain (fons) from which ‘pure religion, the order and description of all duties, and habit and goodness of virtue’ will flow to the nation. These ‘common goods’ of the university are taken to be mutually reinforcing, indeed indivisible. As Ascham articulates it: good learning comes with good religion, good morals and good social order as one complete, neat package. This chapter seeks to interrogate and complicate this assumption, using Ascham himself as a case study and means to do so. There was probably no single institution that was more central or formative in the life of Roger Ascham than the University of Cambridge; as we shall see, it occupied his thoughts and affections long after he had physically left Cambridge. This continued concern created a rich body of evidence, and Ascham’s writings, letters and his own career help to highlight some of the fractures hidden within his generic claims for the university’s purpose. Examining these sources, this chapter argues that the sixteenth century saw important shifts –​religious, social, cultural –​that threw the relationship between, ‘true religion’, ‘true obedience to the prince and magistrates’ and the health of ‘all human society’ into question. By focusing on Ascham and his work, then, this chapter explores some of the issues that become apparent when we ask what might seem a very simple question: what was a sixteenth-​century university for?

4 Ascham to Wriothesley, Cambridge, letter liv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 106.

Roger Ascham and the Idea of a University

1

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True Religion And being a boy, new Bacheler of arte, I chanced amonges my companions to speake against the Pope: which matter was than in euery mans mouth, bycause D. Haines and D. Skippe were cum from the Court, to debate the same matter, by preaching and disputation in the universitie. This hapned the same tyme, when I stoode to be felow there [St John’s College]: my taulke came to D. Medcalfes [master of St John’s] eare: I was called before him and the Seniores: and after grevous rebuke, & some punishment, open warning was geven to all the felowes, none to be so hardie to geve me his voice at that election. And yet for all those open threates, the good father himselfe privilie procured, that I should even than be chosen felow.5

In The Scholemaster Ascham recounts these events from some distance: he was elected fellow of St John’s in 1534 and composed the work around thirty years later, in the 1560s.6 He was looking back across a stretch of time that encompassed the reigns of four monarchs and just as many different, indeed sharply contradictory, religious settlements. There may thus have been an element of hindsight in Ascham’s claim that in the mid-​1530s papal authority was the ‘matter in every man’s mouth’: by the 1560s he knew what came next. We know that Ascham’s recollection of such turbulent years was not always perfect or impartial.7 But there is no doubt that the period reflected upon here was a formative one not just for Ascham but for the University of Cambridge itself. The connection between learning and religion was taken as axiomatic, for it was the primary rationale for the very existence of universities. The foundation of colleges was seen as an act of piety and, as Alan Cobban has noted, they inherently had an ‘affinity with chantry foundations’ as benefactors sought prayers for their own souls through their bequests.8 Beyond this direct 5 Roger Ascham, The scholemaster or plaine and perfite way of teachyng children, to vnderstand, write, and speake, the Latin tong … (London: John Day, 1570. ustc 507056), sig. Q2v. 6 For these suggested dates of composition for The Scholemaster, published in 1570, see Rosemary O’Day, ‘Ascham, Roger (1514/​5–​1568)’, odnb. 7 On Ascham’s depiction of St John’s, and its accuracy, see Richard Rex, ‘Such a Company of Fellows and Scholars: Roger Ascham’s Picture of Humanism at St John’s College, Cambridge’, in James Willoughby and Jeremy Catto, eds., Books and Bookmen in Early Modern Britain: Essays Presented to James P. Carley (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018), pp. 335–​351. 8 Alan Cobban, The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1998), p. 113.

26 Law spiritual benefit was a wider expectation that to support education was to promote godliness. By the start of the sixteenth century universities across Europe had two vital religious functions: they were centres of theological knowledge and debate, and they educated a sizeable proportion of the clerical elite. The break with Rome in the 1530s –​‘the matter’, as Ascham puts it, that was ‘in every man’s mouth’ –​impacted upon both, but by heightening rather than diminishing the importance of Oxford and Cambridge. Henry viii’s decision to seek the opinions of universities on first the legality of his marriage and then the legitimacy of papal dispensation was both an endorsement of their role as doctrinal arbiters and, at the same time –​given the pressure brought to bear on both Oxford and Cambridge from the regime over the matter –​a challenge to it.9 Religious change similarly both increased demand for new clergy and underlined the importance of such men receiving the ‘correct’ training: supplying preachers and teachers was the most obvious way in which the ‘fountains’ of Oxford and Cambridge could cleanse the nation. In a confessionally charged age this took on new meaning. In a letter on behalf of St John’s College during the early heady days of the reign of Edward vi, Ascham powerfully evoked this: If you wish to know: who are we? We answer: the whole company of those who study at the college of St John the Evangelist in Cambridge. And where are we from? We flow together freely from all parts of England to this college. To what end? So that we may study. To what ultimate end (potissimum finem)? Foremost, to disperse the Lord’s Gospel to the people. Then to destroy, as far as possible, the teaching of men (humanam doctrinam): that is, papistry, with all hypocrisy, superstition and idolatry.10 This was surely a calculated statement, for the letter was to Protector Somerset, one of the chief drivers of the radical and rapid turn to Protestantism under Edward. In suggesting that the men of St John’s could be soldiers in the war against popery, Ascham was rationalising their utility to a regime that saw

9

10

For the appeal to the universities see Gerald Skelly, ‘Henry VIII Consults the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge’, in Guy Bedouelle and Patrick Le Gal, eds., Le ‘Divorce’ du roi Henry VIII: études et documents (Geneva: Droz, 1987), pp. 59–​75. I have elsewhere written in more detail about this, and the way in which it enhanced the status of the universities: Ceri Law, Contested Reformations in the University of Cambridge (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), pp. 24–​27. Ascham to Protector Somerset, Cambridge, 21 November 1547, letter lxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 137–​144, at p. 138.

Roger Ascham and the Idea of a University

27

itself locked in battle with antichrist.11 The ‘end’ of study was the destruction of papistry. Ascham was here writing on the behalf of the college, but he reiterated this idea in works that were more clearly written in his own authorial voice. His description of the disastrous impact of the reign of Mary i upon St John’s in The Scholemaster shows a similar equation of knowledge and Protestantism, and thus, conversely, of ignorance and Catholicism. In a lengthy passage Ascham recounted the many ways in which learning was damaged in this time of, as he saw it, false religion. Religious persecution was the persecution of erudition, and vice versa. Referring to the Protestant martyrs of Mary’s reign, Ascham declared that, ‘the fairest standers of all, were rooted up, and cast into the fire, to the great weakning even at this day of Christes Chirch in England, both for Religion and learning’.12 Yet this high rhetoric hid a more complex truth, the truth that Ascham himself revealed in that description of his election in the same text, The Scholemaster. As Richard Rex shows in chapter 2 of this volume, St John’s was not a united evangelical army, but a community divided and tested by religious reform and the demands it made.13 That Ascham had been elected a fellow in spite of his embrace of an anti-​papal position that the college seniors rejected suggests some of the fault lines in the assertion that good learning and true religion were indivisible. This can be seen further in Ascham’s comments in the same passage of The Scholemaster on Nicholas Metcalfe, the master who had engineered his election: Doctor Nico. Medcalfe, that honorable father, was Master of S. Iohnes Colledge, when I came thether: A man meanelie learned himselfe, but not meanely affectioned to set forward learning in others … There was none so poore, if he had, either wil to goodnes, or wit to learning, that could lacke being there, or should depart from thence for any need. … In which doing this worthy Nicolaus followed the steps of good old S. Nicolaus, that learned Bishop. He was a Papist in deede, but would to God, amonges all us Protestants I might once see but one, that would winne like praise, in doing like good, for the advauncement of learning and vertue. And yet, though he were a Papist, if any yong man, geven to new learning (as they 11

On the Edwardian regime’s self-​identification as a bastion against popery, see Catharine Davies, A religion of the Word: the Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), esp. ch. 1. 12 Ascham, The Scholemaster, sigs. Q3r–​Q4r, quotation at sig. Q3r. 13 See Richard Rex, ch. 2 in this volume.

28 Law termed it) went beyond his fellowes, in witte, labor and towardnes, even the same, neyther lacked, open praise to encorage him, nor private exhibition to mainteyne hym14 Such praise for Metcalfe, despite his status as a ‘Papist indeed’, complicated the relationship between learning and religion, for Ascham recognised that Metcalfe could advance the former even while clinging to what Ascham saw as an outdated and dangerous position in the latter. Ascham suggests that Metcalfe, too, could separate the two in his mind. He could support and foster those who followed ‘the new learning’ (meaning not, as scholars have sometimes assumed, humanism, but reformed religion),15 recognising their worth as scholars even across a religious divide. Indeed, Ascham noted that in this regard Metcalfe had surpassed those of purer faith: ‘amonges all us Protestants I might once see but one, that would winne like praise, in doing like good’. Good learning and good religion were certainly linked in this description, then, but not in the straightforward way we find elsewhere in Ascham’s writing. Here, too, we see a more complex picture of confessional conflict: present and important, but less all-​encompassing. Even ‘a Papist’ could promote the light of learning. Ascham’s life provides many other examples of such cross-​confessional contact and mutual support, both within and outside Cambridge. Several essays in this volume demonstrate such collaboration, often in ways centred on shared, humanist learning, just as Ascham describes for Metcalfe. Ascham also proved pragmatically undiscriminating on the grounds of religious views in his search for patronage: Metcalfe was the first in a long line of men who would foster him not because of, but despite, his apparently early embrace of evangelical teachings.16 Such fluid relationships across doctrinal lines accord with much recent scholarship on religious change in England, which has emphasised the quotidian interactions between Catholics and Protestants and the space these created for more complex relationships than the simple binaries of confessional conflict.17 That Ascham and Metcalfe could, under certain circumstances, separate their doctrinal and intellectual positions in their interactions with 14 Ascham, The Scholemaster, sig. Q2r-​v. 15 On this see Richard Rex, ‘The New Learning’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44:1 (1993), pp. 26–​44. 16 See Rex, Kennerley, Sowerby and Shrank in chs. 2, 3, 6 and 10 in this volume. 17 From a large literature see particularly:  Anthony Milton, ‘A Qualified Intolerance:  the Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-​Catholicism’, in Arthur F.  Marotti, ed., Catholicism and Anti-​Catholicism in Early Modern Texts (Basingstoke:  Palgrove, 1999), pp. 85–​115; Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–​1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Nadine Lewycky and Adam

Roger Ascham and the Idea of a University

29

others probably makes them not exceptional but typical. But it complicates considerably the assumption that ‘true learning’ and ‘pure religion’ were natural and inevitable correlates. Ascham’s ideals of learning and piety were not, then, as indivisible as they might first appear. Indeed, they might, at times, actually clash. The contribution of the scholarly techniques of humanism to Protestant thinking, and particularly to biblical scholarship, are well-​known. There is no doubt that the relationship between the two was often mutually constructive; much of Ascham’s work was devoted to promoting the blending of the two as part of the broader project of Protestant humanism. As Richard Rex has shown, however, the religious energies of English humanists were actually more varied and diffuse than commonly acknowledged. ‘Humanist scholars played their part in every aspect of the early English Reformation … But they played their parts on both sides’.18 But while the assumption that humanism went inevitably hand-​in-​hand with Protestantism has been interrogated and rejected, the assumption that, just as Ascham suggested, good learning fostered good religion, and therefore that reformers supported humanism, has been left both more implicit and more intact. However, there were ways that the educational programmes, and particularly the emphasis on classical languages and philology, that Ascham, his revered tutor John Cheke, and many others of their circle advocated, could be seen as detracting from rather than enhancing religious devotion. This was demonstrated in a controversy in which Ascham was heavily involved: Cambridge’s ‘collegiate crisis’ of 1546.19 Victor Morgan and Christopher Brooke have suggested that the threat to Cambridge during this ‘crisis’ was on such a scale that ‘the very survival of the university –​or at least, of the colleges –​was in question’.20 This danger, rooted in potential royal acquisitiveness, originated with the Chantries Act of 1545, which listed the colleges among the institutions liable to suppression.21 The University’s response was to reach out for help from its powerful friends at

18

19 20 21

Morton (eds.), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Richard Rex, ‘The role of English humanists in the Reformation up to 1559’ in N. Scott Amos, Andrew Pettegree and Henk van Nierop, eds., The Education of a Christian society: Humanism and Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 19–​40, quotation at p. 39. J. Andreas Loewe, ‘Cambridge’s Collegiate Crisis: King Henry VIII and the Suppression of Colleges, 1546’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 11.2 (2009), pp. 139–​164. Victor Morgan and Christopher Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge: Volume II, 1546–​1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 1. 37 Hen. viii, c. 4.

30 Law court –​and since Ascham was Public Orator, it was he who did most of the reaching, and it was largely his old circle that proved the most obvious source of aid.22 Appeals penned by Ascham went out to Cheke, Sir Thomas Smith, Sir William Paget, and Sir Anthony Denny; of these, it was Smith that proved the most useful for he brought the matter to a very powerful figure indeed: Katherine Parr, since 1543 Henry’s sixth (and to be final) wife. In a letter to the University of February 1546, Parr noted that she had received the University’s letters, ‘presentyd on all your behalfes by master doctour smythe, your discrete and lernyd advocate’. She reported that she, in turn, had broached the matter with the King and that Henry, ‘notwythstandyng hys majesties propertye and interest’ in the University’s possession –​which, she reminded them, had been confirmed by parliament –​would advance the University rather than strip its assets, ‘hys hyghenes beyng shuche a patrone to good lernyng’.23 She hinted here at a promise that would be fulfilled later that year by the foundation of Trinity College, Cambridge. For Ascham and his compatriots in the University, it was doubtless the reassurance that the colleges were safe that was the most noteworthy feature of this letter. Yet Parr’s comfort came with a warning. Following a conventionally modest declaration of her own limitations in Latin, she noted that ‘(as I do heare) all kynde of lernyng dothe florishye a mongest you in thys age as yt dyd amongest the greecks at atthens long ago’.24 This might initially have sounded like music to the ears of Cheke’s circles, the most enthusiastic promoters of such Athenian learning in Cambridge. But the letter went on: ‘I dyssyre you all not so to honger for the exquisyte knowlege of profane lernyng that yt may be thought, the grecks unyverstye was but transposyd, or now in england agayne forgetyng our chrystianytye’. Parr pressed the point again later in the letter. Warning the University not to be ‘a shamed of christys doctryne’, she insisted that they should strive to ensure ‘that cambryge may 22

23

24

For much more detailed discussion of the events of January and February 1546, see: Loewe, ‘Cambridge’s Collegiate Crisis’; Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.  164–​169; Morgan and Brooke, History of the University of Cambridge, pp. 1–​12. Queen Katherine Parr to the University of Cambridge, Greenwich, 26 February [1546], Corpus Christi College Cambridge, ms 106, pp.  508–​509. This letter is printed in John Bruce and Thomas Thomason Perowne (eds.), Correspondence of Matthew Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Parker Society, 1853), pp. 36–​37, at n. 1. Quotations here are from the Corpus Christi manuscript. Her modesty was conventional but entirely false:  Parr was an accomplished enough Latinist to prepare translations for press. See Susan E.  James, ‘Katherine [Kateryn, Catherine] [née Katherine Parr] (1512–​1548)’, odnb on her learning.

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be acomityd rather an unyversity of devyne phylosophye than of naturall or morall as athens was’. This unfavourable comparison of Cambridge to Athens, and the suggestion that the emulation of ancient learning in this way might prove a distraction from divine truth, contrasts sharply with the views of Ascham, who considered it high praise indeed to declare that ‘M. Cheke, and M. Smith, with their scholers, had brought [classical learning] to florishe as notable in Cambrige, as ever they did in Grece and in Italie’.25 Yet others shared Parr’s concern that classical learning might distract from, rather than aid, the pursuit of religious truth. Thomas More had felt the need to defend the value of such secular learning, and its potential value to theological understanding in his 1518 Letter to the University of Oxford as a direct response to similar doubts.26 The rebuke of an evangelical like Parr shows that, just as humanism was not the sole preserve of Protestants, nor was concern over its influence the sole preserve of Catholics. It also points again to cracks in that edifice of true religion and true learning as indivisible and united. Ascham saw his classical learning and his work for religious reform as not just mutually compatible but necessary companions; each search for ancient truth aided the other, Yet there were those who believed that the learning that Cheke, Ascham and their circle so actively promoted and attempted to practise was not a natural handmaid to the pursuit of true religion, but a potential distraction from it. 2

True Obedience to the Prince and Magistrates

The relationship between religious truth and classical learning proved, therefore, to be much more complex than the frequent rhetorical equation of the two suggested. This tension was only heightened when another potential purpose of learning is considered: the ability of universities to bring about what Ascham called ‘the order and description of all duties’, or ‘true obedience to the prince and magistrates’; that is, the role of universities and university education in furthering and underpinning the work and aims of the early modern state, and in thus maintaining civic and social order. When Ascham congratulated his mentor John Cheke on his appointment to Edward vi’s Privy Council in 1553, he noted ‘state, learned, and Christian matters’ as the ‘three matters whose good state was always so greatly your concern’. 25 Ascham, The Scholemaster, sig. Q3v. 26 The Complete Works of Thomas More, Volume 15:  In Defence of Humanism, ed. Daniel Kinney (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 139–​141.

32 Law He noted, too, that Cheke would now be better able to serve Cambridge, for he would now be the University’s ‘best and most powerful patron’.27 Again we see this easy elision of learning, religion and the good of the commonwealth, and the assumption that all three could both serve and be served by the University. Others of Ascham’s friends and colleagues shared this assumption: Walter Haddon, for instance, also wrote of the need for scholarship to serve public life and the public good.28 This belief that both individual scholars and universities as institutions should serve the state and the nation in this way was far from unique to Ascham’s circle, or even controversial. As Helga Robinson-​Hammerstein has argued, the idea that universities should further the ‘common good’ was widely shared across early modern Europe, and this went beyond mere rhetoric. Robinson-​Hammerstein shows this idea was not just a way in which universities justified themselves (as Ascham so frequently did for Cambridge), but also a major motivator for secular authorities who supported such institutions, and founded new ones.29 But for Ascham and many of his circle this was an idea that aligned closely with many of the other ideals that shared, and so which formed part of a shared programme. ‘Civic humanism’ rested on the assumption that classical learning could both inspire and inform a life devoted to active political engagement in pursuit of the common good.30 In early modern England, and for many of Ascham’s contemporaries, applying this philosophy, most often associated with Florentine republicanism, might be a spur to royal service, and such engagement could be seen not as a diversion or alternative to a life of a learning, but a natural part of it. Yet these widely shared rhetorical endorsements of the necessary and mutually beneficial co-​dependence of learning and the early modern state frequently began to falter under the pressure of political reality, and particularly of the post-​Reformation political reality, and they did so in the university that Ascham knew best. We have already seen one such case in Cambridge’s fears over Henry viii’s potential appropriation of collegiate land. Under his son and heir, Edward vi, this issue came to the fore again, though in a rather 27 28 29 30

Ascham to Cheke, Brussels, 7 July 1553, letter cl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 362–​367, at 363. As cited in Ryan, Ascham, p. 12. Helga Robinson-​Hammerstein, ‘The “common good” and the University in an Age of Confessional Conflict’, in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds., British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 73–​96. For an overview of this term and its historiographical origins (and the subsequent preoccupation with its links to republicanism) see James Hankins, ‘Introduction’, in idem, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism:  Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–​13.

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33

different way. Again, the issue was royal intervention in the colleges, but this time the plan was for redirection of not the lands but the purposes of two colleges: the nub of the issue was whether they should be producing theologians or the civil lawyers that the state so badly needed. It was thus a struggle over finite resources and, as such, it forced secular and spiritual priorities into direct competition. In May and June 1549 royal commissioners visited the University of Cambridge on Edward’s authority. Ascham himself does not seem to have been directly involved in this visitation. His wider circle, however, played major roles. His mentor John Cheke, identified in the commission as the King’s tutor, was one of the visitors, and their close associate Sir Thomas Smith, now a royal secretary, was another.31 Their primary task was both securing and publicly demonstrating the University’s endorsement of royal religious policy.32 However they were also given another more specific task to perform in the name of the crown: to work towards the amalgamation of two colleges, Trinity Hall and Clare Hall, to make one college dedicated to civil law.33 This project, too, was a product of the Reformation in its own way, for it was the abolition of canon law in England that made the need for trained civil lawyers so acute. The visitors duly commenced this work, canvassing the fellows both of Trinity Hall (who were apparently ‘well contented’ with the plan) and of Clare Hall (who most decidedly were not, and who were judged wanting in many other ways by the visitors). In both colleges, the fellows had apparently been preparing by appropriating college assets for their own use: in Clare Hall ‘no thing is left but bare walles’.34 The college fellows, then, were evidently expecting this proposed reform to go through. However, one of the visitors expressed concern, and he did so in ways that touch on this fundamental question of the purpose of a university

31 32

33 34

J. Lamb (ed.), A Collection of Letters, Statutes and Other Documents from the MS. library of Corp. Christ. Coll (London: Parker, 1838), p. 107. A diary of this visitation is preserved in the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (ms 106, fols. 490a–​490e), and is printed in Collection from Corp. Christ. Coll., pp. 109–​120. For more details of this visitation see Law, Contested Reformations, pp. 45–​47 and 52–​57. See the letter of the visitors to Protector Somerset, Cambridge, 18 May 1549, The National Archives, Kew [tna], sp 10/​7, fol. 49r, where this project is described as part of their ‘Instruccons’ and as ‘the kinges majesties pleasure’. See the letters of William Rogers to Sir Thomas Smith, Cambridge, 14 and 15 May 1549, tna, sp 10/​7, fols. 39r-​41r at 40r and 41r. The Master of Clare Hall, Roland Swynborne, was ejected along with one of the other fellows on 17 June: Collection from Corp. Christ. Coll., p. 113.

34 Law and, more precisely, whether they should serve the needs of men –​of princes –​ or whether they should always remain entirely devoted to a higher purpose. Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of Rochester, sent a letter to Protector Somerset twelve days after the visitation commenced in which he specifically addressed the proposed amalgamation, declaring ‘the privats of my hart & consciance in that matter’. He confessed that ‘I can not but thynk it to be a very sore thyng [...] & a dangerouse example to the wordle to cum, to tak a colleg funded for the study of goddes word [Clare Hall] & to apply it to the use of studentes in mannes Lawes’. Ridley gave several reasons for this belief: the objections of the college fellows, the thwarting of the original intentions of the college foundress, but above all his belief that the production of preachers was the most central work of the University.35 When Somerset replied to this letter he was forced to tread a fine line. On the one hand, Somerset sought to demonstrate that the fine details of the changes meant they would result in more divinity scholars, not fewer, and he concurred with Ridley that this was both necessary and desirable: ‘wee wold [i.e. would favour] thencrease of divynes aswell as you’. On the other hand, he also reiterated the importance of a college of civil law: ‘we are sure ye are not ignorant, how necessarye a studye that studye of Civill lawe is, to all treates with foreine princes and straungers, and how few there be at this present to do the kinges majestes seruice therin’.36 Again, it seems that it was the specific triangulation of ‘good learning’, ‘good religion’, and ‘good statecraft’ that was at the heart of this conflict, as both Ridley and Somerset considered the other to have given sufficient consideration to only two of the three. This was not a confessional issue:  neither side disagreed on the desirability of a Protestant university, a Protestant state and a Protestant national church. Yet, while these three priorities were shared, what came to light here was a disagreement over their relative priority. It has been suggested that this plan for a new college of civil law –​which never actually came to fruition –​may have been Smith’s own.37 We might suspect that Ascham agreed with his friend on this. Several years later he wrote that ‘universities be instituted only, that the realm be served with preachers, lawyers and physicians’.38 Yet the issue raised by Ridley posed questions that Cheke, Smith and their friend Ascham struggled to answer in 35 36 37 38

Ridley to Protector Somerset, Cambridge, 18 May 1549, tna, sp 10/​7 fols. 51r–​52r. Protector Somerset to Ridley, Richmond, 10 June 1549, tna, sp 10/​7, fols. 83r–​84r. Paul Swope Needham, ‘John Cheke at Cambridge and Court’, unpublished dissertation, Harvard University (1971), p. 258. Ascham to Cecil, Brussels, 24 March 1553, letter cxlv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 349–​355, at p. 353.

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35

their own lives: what was the ultimate end of learning? How could the pursuit of knowledge, including divine knowledge, for its own sake be balanced with the very practical needs of the post-​Reformation English state? And how could the University of Cambridge, an institution that all these men had invested so heavily in, further either or both of these? As we’ll see, these were questions that Ascham struggled with throughout his life, and which heavily influenced his own choices. They were also problems heightened further by changes within the University and its membership, changes that called into question not only what a university was for, but who a university was for. 3

All Human Society

Ascham was one of the earliest and most persistent voices in pointing to a significant social change in the University of Cambridge. In 1545 he complained that ‘almost all those who are now streaming here into Cambridge are boys (pueri) and the sons of the rich; and furthermore it never enters the minds of those boys to polish their abundant and perfect learning (ut abundanti aliqua perfectaque eruditione perpoliantur), but rather they make themselves more ready for exercising state offices (reipublicae munera obeunda) with their light and incomplete understanding’.39 In this, Ascham visits the key theme we saw in the 1549 dispute over the civil law college –​the question of whether training men to be of service to the state might be to the detriment of other, purer forms of learning –​but with an important additional complication. For Ascham the problem is not just the prioritisation of obtaining state offices, but the influx of a group of students more likely to do this: the sons of the rich, who gained at the expense of the poor. The question of whether this really was a new problem, or indeed a problem, in the 1540s remains open. As Rosemary O’Day has pointed out, such statements considerably predate the records that allow for statistical evaluation of the social composition of the universities, making it difficult to gauge the accuracy of Ascham’s claim that there were now more ‘sons of the rich’ in Cambridge.40 Certainly, though, Ascham clearly continued to consider this a significant issue, for in his praise of Nicholas Metcalfe (see

39 40

Ascham to Thomas Cranmer, Cambridge, ca. January 1545, letter xxvii, Giles, vol. i. pt. 1, pp. 63–​70 at p. 69. Rosemary O’Day, Education and Society 1500–​1800: the Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain (London: Longman, 1982), p. 88.

36 Law above) Ascham listed the support of poor but deserving scholars as one of Metcalfe’s foremost virtues.41 For Ascham, however, this was not merely concern about the poor but talented being pushed out by the rich but idle. To him these young gentlemen in the universities represented a quality that he seems to have regarded with deep ambivalence throughout his life: ‘courtliness’. As Mike Pincombe has argued, we see his distaste for the court particularly clearly in Ascham’s condemnation of the state of learning in Cambridge under Mary in The Scholemaster.42 During this time, he recalls, ‘than began simplicitie in apparell, to be layd aside: Courtlie galantnes to be taken up’.43 That this decline is pinned to the restoration of Catholicism is telling: moral conduct is implicitly linked to religion, and both are fundamental components of good learning. At the same time, Ascham presents courtliness and learning as inherently opposed. Yet a more complicated truth underlay this apparent dichotomy. Ascham, of course, was far from inherently opposed to the education of the elite. The full title of his The Scholemaster declared that it was ‘specially purposed for the priuate brynging vp of youth in Ientlemen and Noble mens houses’. As Lucy Nicholas shows in ­chapter 7, the education of the elite (indeed, of course, even the education of princesses) was one of the many shared pedagogical interests which underpinned the relationship between Ascham and Johannes Sturm, and both men may have seen such tutoring and opening of noble minds as an essential step in furthering Protestantism. Courtliness might be the enemy of virtue, but cultivating courtiers, and their children, was a route to that very virtue. The further irony here is that Ascham’s dislike of courtliness was informed by his own extensive service as a courtier. As James McConica puts it, Ascham was ‘both attracted and frightened’ by the successive Tudor courts in which he served, and he was similarly ambivalent on the relationship between learning and courtly service, and the role that each should play in his own work.44 In a letter to William Cecil of 1552 Ascham listed his career options at that point, in order of preference: the first, which was ‘most my wish to enjoy’ was that he teach Greek at St John’s College, though with the caveat that he be exempt from the university statutes while doing so. The second was that he ‘have some corner in [an] office in the court’, and the third, to be contemplated only if 41 Ascham, The Scholemaster, sig. Q2r-​v. 42 Michael Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Late Sixteenth Century (Harlow: Longman, 2001), pp. 75–​76. 43 Ibid., sig. Q3v. 44 James McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 213.

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37

‘neither of these two ways may be sped’, was ambassadorial service in a foreign court.45 Over the following months Ascham repeatedly reiterated that his foremost desire was to return to Cambridge.46 Yet the University and the court were not such starkly different paths as this might initially suggest. If he did end up at court, Ascham wrote, then ‘that kind of learning which sometime was most pleasant for my study in Cambridge, shall now be most necessary for my duty in the court’.47 As Cathy Shrank shows in ­chapter 10, this was a tightrope that Ascham was well used to treading, for even in his Toxophilus of 1545 he had attempted the tricky task of promoting himself as both a scholar and a potential courtier simultaneously.48 Learning and courtliness, then, were not necessarily opposites; or, at the least, pragmatism might lead Ascham and his circle to make a virtue of the necessity of their move from university scholars to royal servants. This ambivalence extended far beyond Ascham, and can be seen where we first began: with disquiet about the presence of rich students and the influence of the court in the University. Discourse around this often focused on outward expression, and it is telling that Ascham’s critique of the intrusion of ‘courtliness’ in the university in his Scholemaster focused on dress, and the replacement of ‘simplicitie in apparell’ with ‘Courtlie galantnes’.49 Dress frequently served as a lightning-​rod for this issue. In 1578 William Cecil, Ascham’s friend and now the Chancellor of the University, wrote of his concern over just this problem: there had, he wrote, been a decay in ‘the ancient modesty’ of the University, of which the foremost cause was the ‘very costly and disguised manner of Apparrell’ that had been adopted by ‘the children of gentilmen and men of welth’. This, Cecil wrote, was not only ‘unsemly for students in any kynd of human lerning’, but also might lead their less wealthy fellow students into debt as they attempted to emulate this excess.50 This anxiety about

45

Ascham to Cecil, Speyer, 27 September 1552, letter cxl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 330–​334, at pp. 332–​333. On the final option see Tracey Sowerby, ch. 6 in this volume, where she shows that Ascham was a much less reluctant diplomat than this suggests. 46 See Ascham to Cecil, Speyer, 28 November 1552, letter xcliii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 341–​ 344, at p.  343; Ascham to Cecil, Brussels, 24 March 1553, letter cxlv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 349–​355. 47 Ibid., p. 342. 48 See Cathy Shrank, ch. 10 in this volume. 49 Ascham, The Scholemaster, sig. Q3v. 50 Charles Henry Cooper (ed.), Annals of Cambridge (5  vols., Cambridge:  Warwick and Co, 1842–​1908), vol ii, pp.  360–​361. See the comments on this of Mark Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558–​1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), ch. 3 and especially pp. 54–​57. Ascham’s writings about sartorial excess under Mary, however, call into

38 Law students striving for social betterment rather than learning was clearly also shared within the University, for the following year the Vice-​Chancellor and heads of houses complained that young men now sought ‘to solicit courtiers in every way’, distracting them from their studies.51 The link between this and dress is made clear in a report from 1582 of men within the University who were flaunting their links to the court: ‘some of them have openly worne their Masters cloths’.52 Again, just as in Ascham’s time in Cambridge and in Ascham’s writings, the influence and culture of the court are seen as antithetical, even dangerous, to learning. Yet again, as for Ascham, this belief was undergirded by a continuing, if in some ways contradictory, belief of the importance of a university that served the state. In his decree regarding dress Cecil reiterated that the universities should produce men ‘to serve in all the plaices of publick Government, as well in the Chirch, as in the Civill estate’.53 Educating the sons of the rich came with many advantages for a university that was inherently and deeply reliant on its patrons, and producing men to serve the state could be seen as one of Cambridge’s most central purposes. As Ascham demonstrated, courtly patronage could also bring significant rewards (and significance risks) for individual scholars. The relationship between learning, the court and statecraft was thus a very complex one. Ascham’s life and writings stand as testament to this. 4

Conclusion

One of Ascham’s many useful qualities was his adaptability. As a letter writer, he was skilled at guessing what his correspondent might want to hear; this, indeed, may have been one reason why both the University of Cambridge and the college of St John’s used him to compose their missives. The ‘collegiate crisis’ of 1546 discussed above showcases this talent, for Ascham adjusted his pitch depending on whose aid he was seeing in protecting the colleges from the threatened appropriations of their resources. Writing to Cheke and Smith, he reminded them of their own deep debts to the University, noting that both

question Curtis’s claim that this was a ‘new note’ in the ‘late quarter of the sixteenth century’ (p. 54). 51 Vice-​Chancellor and Heads of Houses to Cecil, Cambridge, 22 March 1579, British Library, Lansdowne ms 29, fol. 116r; Law, Contested Reformations, p. 131. 52 William Fulke to Cecil, 10 October 1582, tna, sp 12/​155, fol. 127r-​v; Law, Contested Reformations, p. 122. 53 Cooper, Annals, vol ii, p. 360.

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their current high positions at court could be traced to their learning in Cambridge.54 For Sir William Paget, however, he invoked a more general rhetoric in praise of universities, much like those with which we began this essay: ‘a university (universitas)’, he wrote, was so called because it served ‘almost the whole (universa) of human life’: obedience to both God and secular rulers, and good order and morality. He again used that hackneyed Tudor cliché, the idea of the university as the ‘pure fountain of learning’.55 Yet in his letter to Sir Anthony Denny Ascham invoked an entirely more pragmatic argument: As you know, learning has its beginning with unlearned parents: they entrust their children to schools of learning not having been exercised by excellence in learning, but having been lured by the hope of a prosperous life to follow. If you remove that prize then it destroys parental hope, and thus the road for the progression of all learning is blocked. The financial prizes for learning thus must be maintained, Ascham argued, in order for this parental sponsorship of learning to continue.56 Here, then, Ascham was endorsing just the kind of student, the sort that used the university to seek social advancement, that he criticised elsewhere. Rather than a distraction from the true purpose of the university, here such students (and their parents) are a necessity, supporting the entire system of learning. Across these letters, then –​all ostensibly on the same subject, and probably written within a few months –​Ascham presented many different views of Cambridge, and indeed of all universities: as the nurseries in which men like Cheke and Smith, with their towering intellectual abilities and glittering court careers, might grow; as a generic, pure and perfect force for the common good; as a place where men might seek their fortunes. These different, even contradictory, views could be ascribed to both duty and cynicism:  Ascham was writing on the University’s behalf, not his own, and he had one very clear task, to secure the aid of these men by whatever 54

55 56

Ascham (for the University) to Smith, Cambridge, [early 1546], letter lvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 108–​109; Ascham to Cheke (for the University), Cambridge, [early 1546], letter lvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 109–​111. I have followed Hatch and Vos in dating these and the following letter to Paget to early 1546 rather than 1547 (the date that Giles gives them): their suggestion that these letters related to the specific issues surrounding college lands in 1546 seem plausible. See Hatch and Vos, p. 79. Ascham to Paget (for the University), Cambridge, [late 1545/​early 1546], letter lxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 119–​120, at p. 120. Ascham (for the University) to Denny, Cambridge, [early 1546], letter lxv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 121–​122.

40 Law means might prove effective. Yet I  would argue that these letters point to a deeper ambivalence that we have seen across Ascham’s work, and which was therefore truly his own –​but which also represented a wider, and specifically post-​Reformation moment in university history. As new religious and social realities increasingly impacted upon the universities, it brought into question what exactly their purpose was, and therefore what their highest priorities should be. This idea of what the university was for came under new pressure because this was a time when the universities themselves were increasingly scrutinised and, indeed, frequently forced to justify their own existence. As Roger Ascham himself discovered across his career, scholarship could be combined with many other pursuits, but, perhaps, never entirely easily. This essay, and this volume, show that there were many different Aschams, and across his life they sometimes clashed, as circumstances forced lofty ideals and rhetoric to collide into the pragmatic realities of making a living as a kind of scholar in Tudor England. Scholarship and the necessities of survival could not always easily coincide without at least a little compromise. In this Ascham reflected a deeper divide in the institution that did more than any other to shape him, the University of Cambridge. Here, too, there was a compromise, and it took rhetoric as skilled and charming as Ascham’s to paper over these cracks, and to present the purpose of the university as a unified, seamless whole. The reality was more complicated. The question of what a university, or learning itself, was for was a question with many different answers, depending on who exactly was doing the asking.

­c hapter 2

Ascham & Co: St John’s College, Cambridge, in the 1540s Richard Rex In a letter to John Cheke early in 1544, Roger Ascham ruefully called to mind his late father’s low opinion of the internecine contentions that plagued St John’s College, his Cambridge home: You will recall, my dear Cheke, that shortly before Christmas I received a letter from my father (alas, the last I ever received from him) in which he admonished me, and as if by some solemn blessing adjured me, to leave Cambridge as quickly as possible and betake myself to some honest way of life, given that we here provoke the weightiest wrath and displeasure of God with our quarrelling.1 Later that year he hinted a little more at the broils in college, giving a lengthy account of how his hopes of securing a college office for his pupil, William Grindal, had been frustrated by an unholy alliance of colleagues and rivals. This unlooked for check was almost the last straw: And to sum it all up, although all the insults and sore wounds with which I or our little republic have been afflicted might be borne easily enough, there is, however, no way I can bear so much fraud from people, so much treachery, calumny, arrogance, and intolerance, which, not quashed now and quieted, but rather, further inflamed by this unworthy act, as if taking from it fresh fuel and renewed vigour, flare up at length to a still worse state, as is always the case with evils.2 The exasperation of Ascham and his father was not without foundation. St John’s was convulsed by a series of sundering quarrels in the early 1540s, 1 Ascham to John Cheke, [Cambridge], [Lady Day, i.e. 25 March, 1544], letter xxi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 46–​49, at p. 48. The translations are mine. 2 Ascham to Cheke, [Cambridge], [ca. 13 September 1544], letter xxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 53–​ 57, at p. 55.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_004

42 Rex partly because of the impact of the Reformation, and perhaps partly also because of a certain instability in governance. It had four masters through the years 1534–​1549 (excluding Nicholas Wilson, who was elected in 1537, but wisely declined the honour, having only just been pardoned for misprision of treason), and the Henrician regime took an unusually close interest in its affairs. Ascham’s surviving correspondence captures some of the tense moments in St John’s, and thereby opens a rare window onto Tudor college life. Bringing his letters into relation with the more routine records in the college archives allows us to see a little more deeply into these quarrels, and to set them in the wider context of the political and religious tensions arising from the innovative ecclesiastical policies of Henry viii, which provided the sparks that ignited the college’s troubles. As Ethan Shagan has shown, the agenda of high politics could play itself out on the humbler stages of local communities and institutions as individuals sought to align themselves with the emerging polarities of national politics in such a way as to place their rivals or enemies at a disadvantage.3 But the correspondence also reveals the personal dimension, as religious tensions strained old friendships, and friends sought to mitigate the risks of faction and division. The first of these quarrels concerned the fellowship election of 1540. The college had 40 fellows at the start of the year, and there was only one vacancy. It was filled by John Thompson, a pupil of Ascham’s who owed his success to his tutor’s assiduous lobbying, evidence for which is to be found in his surviving letters.4 But one of the college’s most senior fellows, Dr John Redman, was promoting a pupil of his own, a contemporary of Thompson’s called Richard Burton –​they had both taken their bas in 1539. Other candidates included one Henry Fisher, who had proceeded ma that year, and an unnamed student who had not even attained his ba, whose cause was being urged by another senior

3 Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 4 For the fellowship in 1540, see St John’s College Archives (hereafter ‘SJCA’) sjca/​D/​106/​17, fols. 46r–​47v. The college accounts, kept on a calendar year basis, list the fellows each year by surname, with the President first, followed by the rest, ranked firstly by degree and then in order of election. Thompson is added to the list in the second quarter. Fellowship elections at St John’s were held on the fifth Monday in Lent. See J. E. B. Mayor (ed.), Early Statutes of the College of St John the Evangelist (Cambridge 1859), p. 52. This usually fell in March (in 1540, on 15 March; in 1541, 4 April; in 1542, 27 March). For Ascham’s lobbying, see Ascham to John Taylor (the Master), [Cambridge], 9 March 1540; to one Cordingley (perhaps James Cordingley, who had graduated ba, probably from St John’s, in 1538), [Cambridge], 1540; and to Henry Cumberford, [Cambridge], undated, letters v–​vii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 6–​15. (The date ‘1539’ on the first two letters is evidently ‘old style’.)

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fellow, Thomas Crosley.5 Another letter of Ascham’s, four years later, shows that Redman took this setback extremely badly. After Redman had left to become Warden of King’s Hall, Ascham wrote to him recalling their former friendship and regretting the bad blood between them since the episode of the fellowship election. He sought to mend fences by pointing out that they had each merely been doing their best for their own pupil.6 Back in 1540, however, as a fully-​ fledged Doctor of Divinity, Redman ranked after only the Master and the President. He was probably not accustomed to being baulked, and the discomfiture evidently rankled. It can hardly explain his departure from St John’s at the end of 1541, but it may have made him less sorry to leave. The likeliest explanation for the clash in 1540 is religion. The spring of 1540 was a moment of heightened religious tension in England, as pulpit and pamphlet wars raged in London amid machinations that would end in the fall of Thomas Cromwell. Both Redman and Crosley were religious conservatives, and may have neutralised each other by dividing the conservative vote, enabling Ascham to outmanoeuvre them despite the fact that they were both some years his senior. The Master, Dr Taylor, was a notorious evangelical, and presumably supported Ascham’s pupil.7 Two years later the college was to be almost equally divided between conservatives and evangelicals, so the scenario proposed here would account for Thompson’s success against candidates with more influential backers. The contest of 1540 was but a prelude to that of 1542, when a storm blew up over the elections of four fellows –​or, to be precise, over the disputed election to one of the four fellowships available that year. In the college accounts all seems straightforward. The four new fellows were Thomas Dobbe, John Christopherson, William Grindal, and Henry Eland.8 What the accounts only hint at is that this election split the college down the middle. For they report costs paid out in the second quarter of the year to Henry Cumberford, Henry Sanderson, John Cheke, and William Bill ‘in the appellation’ –​in modern parlance, the ‘appeal’.9 All that we know of the substance of this appeal is what can be learned from the adjudication made by the college’s Visitor –​the Bishop 5 Ascham’s three letters identify the other candidates. See Mary Bateson (ed.), Grace Book Beta (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903–​1905), part ii, p. 219, for graduations in 1539. 6 Ascham to John Redman, [Cambridge], 25 March 1544, letter xx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 37–​46, at p. 38. 7 For the religious sympathies of the fellows discussed here, see the discussion below and the summary in the table at pp. 59–60. 8 sjca/​D/​106/​17, fols. 119r–​120v (forenames supplied from other sources). 9 sjca/​D/​106/​17, fol. 137v. See also fol. 136, for the expenses of Cheke and Cumberford in riding to Ely.

44 Rex of Ely, Thomas Goodrich. This judgment shows that twenty fellows had lodged an appeal against the Master for declaring that Thomas Lever, rather than John Christopherson, had been elected to the vacant fellowship on the foundation of Hugh Ashton. Twenty was an absolute, if narrow, majority: there were thirty-​ nine fellows at the time of the election.10 Goodrich upheld the appeal, ruling that Christopherson had been duly elected, and should therefore take up the Ashton fellowship, while Lever should be elected to the next vacancy arising (as indeed he was, next year).11 What was it all about? What could have possessed the Master to declare in favour of Lever when the election, to judge by the appeal, had resulted in a narrow victory for Christopherson? Thomas Baker detected a North-​South divide at work.12 When the college statutes were revised in 1545, the original bias of the foundation in favour of the North was specifically neutralised, to ensure that the nine counties north of the Trent should no longer, as hitherto, prevail in college counsels.13 However, the Ashton fellowships were reserved for northerners, and both Lever and Christopherson were from the North. Of the thirty-​nine fellows in March 1541, nineteen were definitely from the North and nine from the South (see the table on pp. 59–60 for a summary of the key data on the fellows). Of the twenty Appellants, four or five can be assigned to the South, while twelve can be assigned to the nine Northern counties. Of the nineteen other fellows, whom we shall label the Non-​Appellants (though it should be noted that, unlike the Appellants, they do not necessarily constitute a coherent grouping), six were from the South, and six from the North (with seven of unknown origin). Geography does not look as though it was the decisive consideration, though the Appellants probably had a higher proportion of northerners. An examination of the careers of the five candidates for the four positions in 1542 offers a solution to the puzzle. Thomas Lever himself would later be a 10 11 12 13

sjca/​D/​106/​17, fol. 119v. Cambridge University Library, Ely Diocesan Records G/​I/​8, fols. 8v–​10v. The hearing began in Queens’ College on 5 April 1542, with Henry Cumberford and Henry Sanderson appearing as proctors for the Appellants. Thomas Baker, History of the College of St. John the Evangelist, Cambridge, ed. J. E. B. Mayor (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1869), vol. 1, p. 118. Early Statutes of St John’s College, pp.  32–​3. In the 1530 statutes, at least half (i.e. four) of the seven Seniors, though never all seven, were to be from the North; from 1545, the number of Seniors was raised to twelve, of whom six, but no more, were to be from the North. The nine counties were Durham, Northumberland, Westmoreland, Cumberland, Yorkshire, Richmondshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire (see Early Statutes, pp. 48–​49).

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famous Protestant preacher in the reign of Edward vi, and a Protestant refugee under Mary. William Grindal, closely associated with Cheke and Ascham, was deputed late in 1544 to serve as tutor to the young Lady Elizabeth, Henry viii’s second daughter, and is generally taken as of evangelical inclinations.14 Thomas Dobbe died in prison soon after being arrested early in the reign of Edward vi for protesting against the elevation of the consecrated host during a Mass in St Paul’s Cathedral.15 Henry Eland, another friend of Ascham, seems also to have been evangelical. Certainly he was made a Senior in 1547, when the evangelical grip on the college was almost complete.16 John Christopherson is very much the odd man out. A refugee from England for reasons of religion in the reign of Edward vi, he returned under Mary to become Bishop of Chichester and a zealous persecutor of Protestants.17 Ascham had been Grindal’s tutor, and was a friend of both Lever and Eland. He barely mentions Christopherson in his letters and never names him in The Scholemaster, despite the fact that Christopherson, who wrote a Latin verse tragedy on Jephthah, was one of the most talented humanists in the college in the 1540s. The one possible reference to him in The Scholemaster is to the unnamed author of a tragedy which Ascham and others reckoned was marred by several false quantities in the versification. The comments that this author was ‘well loved of many, but best liked of himself’, and was on friendly terms with Watson, hint that he was no friend of Ascham’s.18 If the Master’s coup had been successful, and 14 15 16

17

18

For Lever and Grindal, see Ben Lowe, ‘Lever [Leaver], Thomas (1521–​1577)’ and Stephen Wright, ‘Grindal, William [d.  1548]’, odnb. Grindal’s religious inclinations are inferred from the company he kept and the friends he had. For Dobbe’s fate, see John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London: Day, 1563, ustc 506141), p. 685. Henry Eland is mentioned a few times in Ascham’s letters to Edward Raven (letters civ, cv and cxvi, 1550–1551, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 209, 210, 247 and especially 263, 281, and 329). He died in summer 1551, and Ascham regretted the passing of ‘good Eland’ (Ascham to William Cecil, Villach, 12 July 1552, letter cxxxix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 329). Administration of his effects was granted to his brothers William and John, citizens of London, on 8 August 1551. See Cambridge University Archive [cua], VCCt Probate Register I, fol. 89v. Eland’s election as a Senior is recorded in his fine italic hand in the Register of Fellows, Officers & Scholars, sjcr/​s jar/​6/​1/​1, p. 11, as ‘Henricus Ailand’, 25 February 1547. Only the first of the eighteen Seniors elected in Edward’s reign can be definitely labelled a religious conservative: Christopher Browne, elected that same day. Jonathan Wright, ‘Christopherson, John (d. 1558)’, odnb. For more light on this figure, see David McKitterick, ‘John Christopherson, Humanist and Benefactor’, in Goran Proot et al., eds., Lux librorum:  Essays on Books and History for Chris Coppens (Mechelen:  Flanders Book Historical Society, 2018), pp. 53–63. Ascham names him only as a carrier of letters (Ascham to Redman and Cheke (respectively), 1544, letters xx and xxi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 46 and 47). For the incompetent tragedian, see Giles, vol. iii, p. 241. As Watson was one of those who shared Ascham’s view, he

46 Rex Christopherson had been kept out, then the evangelicals would have achieved a clean sweep that year. This perhaps explains the vigour and speed with which the conservative grouping launched its appeal. That it was a conservative grouping becomes apparent from an analysis of the religious affiliations of the twenty Appellants. Most of the information assembled for this purpose is drawn from later in their careers, because it was only as increasingly stark religious choices were presented to the people of England that commitments became apparent in the historical record. So the bearing of this evidence is open to question. People could change their minds, more than once. However, the cumulative tendency of the evidence is plain and persuasive. Those whose later religious commitments were conservative or Catholic are found almost entirely among the Appellants. Those whose later religious commitments were Protestant or evangelical are found almost entirely among the Non-​Appellants. The Appellants were a weighty group, including six of the college’s seven ‘Seniors’:  John Seton, Thomas Crosley, Henry Cumberford, Alban Langdale, Thomas Watson, and Thomas Peacock. The Seniors were an elected council who assisted the Master in the governance of the college, and their almost unanimous opposition to the Master in this matter must have been damaging to his cause. The appeal was led by Henry Cumberford and Henry Sanderson.19 Cumberford, who rose to be precentor of Lichfield Cathedral under Mary, was investigated by Elizabeth’s Privy Council for ‘lewde preaching’ in 1559, and was dispossessed of all his benefices during the visitation that followed the Elizabethan Settlement.20 Subsequently he was a notoriously busy recusant in

19

20

cannot have been the butt of this anecdote. Christopherson is the only other member of the college in that generation known to have written a tragedy. See John Christopherson, Jephthah, ed. and trans. F. H. Fobes (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1928). See ‘The Replication of Henry Saunderson ayenst the answere of Mr Dr Taillor’, bl Harleian ms 7039, fols. 86r–​87v, at fol. 87v. Sanderson’s ‘Replication’ apparently survives only in this transcript made by Thomas Baker (in vol. 12 of his antiquarian collections). The text seems authentic, but Baker does not say where he found it. In it, Sanderson states that he was elected a college preacher by the unanimous vote of the Seniors, whom he then names (first among them Thomas Ashton, the only Senior not party to the appeal). As Sanderson first appears as a preacher in the college accounts for 1543 (sjca/​D/​106/​17, fol. 165r), he must have been elected shortly before Ashton’s departure from the college at the end of 1542 (for which compare fols. 120v and 157r). For the role of the Seniors, see Early Statutes of St John’s College, pp. 30–​35. Acts of the Privy Council: Volume VII: 1558–​1570 (London: hmso, 1893), pp. 60 (summonsed, 23 February 1559), 64 (‘lewde preaching’, 9 March) and 87 (bound over for 100 marks, 17 April). For Cumberford’s preferments and deprivations, see the Clergy of the Church of England Database:  (hereafter cced), under Person ids 25446 and 139002.

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Yorkshire until his arrest in November 1570. When Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, sent a report on recusants in his diocese to the Privy Council in 1577, he observed: moste of them haue ben corrupted by on[e]‌Henry Comberforde, a most obstinate popishe prieste, now prisoner at Hull.21 In the return itself, Cumberford was characterised as ‘verie wilfull and a great perverter of others’.22 He died a prisoner for his faith in Hull Castle on 4 March 1586.23 That the Appellants were led by a man with such a future ahead of him speaks volumes. Three of the Appellants were targets of Taylor’s particular ire after the disputed election. For he deprived Henry Sanderson, Richard Becke, and Richard Fawcett (for whom see below) of their fellowships, though his decision was soon overturned by the Visitor on appeal.24 There is no direct evidence for the religious leanings of Sanderson and Becke, both of whom were dead within three years of these events. Becke was appointed to the college living of Aldworth (Berkshire) in 1542, left the college in 1543, and died in 1544.25 Sanderson was promptly appointed his successor, but himself held the benefice only a year, dying intestate in September 1545, by which time he had become a fellow of King’s Hall.26 King’s Hall had been associated with opposition to evangelicals since the mid-​1520s, and under the wardenship of John Redman its religious character was still conservative. Sanderson, who pursued a vendetta against Taylor, had perhaps made St John’s too hot to hold him and therefore transferred to a more congenial environment.27 His prominence in the appeal 21

22 23 24 25 26

27

Sandys to the Privy Council, York, 28 October 1577, in P. Ryan (ed.), ‘Diocesan Returns of Recusants for England and Wales, 1577’, Miscellanea XII (London: Catholic Record Society, 1921), pp. 1–114, at p. 4. For more on Cumberford, see J. C. H. Aveling, Catholic Recusancy in the City of York, 1558–​1791 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1970), pp. 41–​46. Ryan, ‘Diocesan Returns of Recusants’, p. 18. J. H. Pollen, English Martyrs 1584–​1603 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1908), p. 192. cul, Ely Diocesan Records G/​I/​8, fol. 9v, notes their restoration upon promise of due obedience to the Master. Their names are given in a marginal note. sjca Thin Red Book, sjcr/​s jes/​7/​1, fol. 230r, for Beck’s presentation (14 June 1542); and cced (Person id 119697). sjca Thick Black Book, sjcr/​s jes/​7/​5, p. 100, for Sanderson’s presentation (28 October 1544); and cced (Person id 60459). See cua VCCt Probate Register i, fol. 71r for the administration of his goods, granted on 22 September 1545 to a group that included Thomas Crosley (of St John’s) and Robert Truslow (of King’s Hall). See ‘The Replication of Henry Saunderson ayenst the answere of Mr Dr Taillor’, bl Harleian ms 7039, fols. 86r–​87v, for Sanderson’s continuing complaints.

48 Rex and his choice of friends and billet probably indicate conservative religious sympathies. But, at the risk of some circularity in argument, the fact that Sanderson and Becke seem to gave been targeted as ringleaders among the Appellants, a profoundly conservative group, is probably enough to place them in the conservative camp. The position of the most senior of the Appellants, John Seton, is more clear cut. A former protégé of John Fisher’s, he became a chaplain to Stephen Gardiner, appearing as a defence witness at the latter’s show-​trial under Edward vi. In the reign of Mary, he published Latin verses in defence of Catholic eucharistic doctrine and in celebration of the Queen, who rewarded him with canonries at Winchester and York –​of which he was deprived under Elizabeth. Noted early in her reign as ‘settled in papistry’, he fled to Rome, where he died at the English College in 1567.28 Thomas Crosley disappears from history towards the end of Edward’s reign, perhaps a victim of the influenza epidemic of 1551. But two years beforehand he was picked out for censure on account of his religious beliefs, along with two other Appellants (Alban Langdale and Christopher Browne), by the royal commissioners who conducted a visitation of Cambridge in 1549.29 Thomas Watson was, like Seton, a chaplain to Gardiner and a witness for him in his show-​trial. Appointed Bishop of Lincoln by Mary, he was an active preacher in defence of Catholic teaching. Refusing to accept the Elizabethan Settlement, he spent the rest of his life under house arrest.30 Alban Langdale, as we just noted, was censured for religious conservativism under Edward. When he left St John’s in 1551, Ascham regretted his departure ‘although he did dissent from us in religion’ –​a revealing turn of phrase, suggestive of a ‘them and us’ religious division within the college.31 Seton, Watson, and Langdale, together with John Young (see below) were among the eight Cambridge scholars who went to Oxford in 1554 to take part in the show-​piece disputation against Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley.32 Langdale published a lengthy polemic against 28 29 30 31 32

Glyn Redworth, ‘Seton, John (1508/​9–​1567)’, odnb. See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series … Addenda, 1547–​1565, ed. M. A. E. Green (London: Longman, 1870), p. 522, for the comment on ‘John Ceaton DD’. William Rogers to Sir Thomas Smith, Cambridge, 14 May 1549, tna sp10/​7, fol. 39v. Kenneth Carleton, ‘Watson, Thomas (1513–​1584)’, odnb. Ascham to Edward Raven and William Ireland, Innsbruck, 17 November 1551, letter cxxxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 315–​318, at p. 316. Ascham describes Langdale as ‘once my faithful friend’, perhaps a hint that their friendship was over. C. W. Boase (ed.), Register of the University of Oxford (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 1885), p.  224, notes the incorporation of these four as dds at Oxford on 14 April 1554, together with William Glyn (Queens’), Richard Atkinson (King’s), Cuthbert Scott (Christ’s) and Thomas Sedgwick (Peterhouse). See also Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), p. 932.

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Ridley in 1556 and received substantial promotions, of which he was stripped in the Elizabethan visitation. Regarded as ‘learned, and very earnest in papistry’, he ended his days as household chaplain to the Catholic Montagues in Sussex.33 The last of the Appellant Seniors was Thomas Peacock, who left St John’s at the end of 1546 to become a founding fellow of Trinity College. There, he was identified during the 1549 visitation as one of a ‘neste’ of fellows who were evidently disaffected in religion. Under Mary, he became a canon of Norwich and President of Queens’ College. Ejected from both after the Elizabethan Settlement, he spent the rest of his life in recusancy.34 Richard Fawcett’s religious position was equally uncompromising. Although he stayed at St John’s until late in Edward’s reign, he came into his own under Mary, who presented him as a royal chaplain to a canonry at Canterbury. There he played a leading role in the prosecution of Kentish Protestants. His character emerges in an exchange during the trial of John Bland, the vicar of Adisham near Canterbury, and himself a former fellow of St John’s. Fawcett appealed to their shared background at college and back home in the North: Maister Blande, for as muche as you and I  were broughte uppe bothe in one house, and borne bothe in one parishe [Sedbergh], I  would be as gladde as any man alyve to doo you good; but ye may not thus stand against the church. … But when Bland replied, ‘I do not beleve any suche transubstantiation, nor never will, God willinge’, Fawcett’s reply was brusque and to the point: ‘Then (quod he) I have done with you: I will no more praye for you then for a dogge’! The crisp shift from gentle entreaty to damning dehumanisation of someone who had once, as Bland observed a little later, been his tutor suggests a fiery temperament.35 Deprived of his preferments after the Elizabethan Settlement, Fawcett retreated to his native Yorkshire.36 33

Jonathan Wright ‘Langdale, Alban (fl. 1532–​1580)’, odnb. See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series … Addenda, 1547–​1565, p. 523, for the comment. 34 Richard Rex, ‘Peacock, Thomas (d. in or after 1581)’, odnb. See Rogers to Smith, Cambridge, 14 May 1549, tna sp10/​7, fol. 39v, for the ‘neste’. For more on this, see Ceri Law, Contested Reformations in the University of Cambridge, 1535–​1584 (Woodbridge:  Boydell, 2018), pp. 53–​54. 35 John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), pp. 1225–​1226 (for their exchange) and 1227 for the tutorial role: ‘for though I was never able to do him good, yet once I was his Tutor’. 36 See Calendar of Patent Rolls. Philip and Mary. Vol. I, 1553–​1554 (London:  hmso, 1937), pp. 233 (Canterbury, 23 March 1554) and 407 (Herne, 18 April 1554), where he is described as a Queen’s Chaplain. For his persecution of Protestants, see Foxe, Actes and Monuments

50 Rex John Young was another noted conservative in the reign of Edward, and wrote an account of the deathbed of John Redman which sought to correct a report that Redman was inclining at the last towards evangelical beliefs.37 Under Mary, Young was prominent in the restoration of Catholicism in Cambridge, serving as Master of Pembroke, Vice-​Chancellor, and Regius Professor of Divinity. Deprived of all preferments under Elizabeth, he too survived many years of house arrest or imprisonment as a recusant, writing a treatise against attendance at Church of England services.38 Christopher Browne and George Bullock were stalwart conservatives through the reigns of Edward and Mary. Browne had been censured for his religious conservatism in 1549, and died in college in 1558, leaving a will that testifies amply to his religious convictions.39 Bullock fled the country for the last years of Edward’s reign, matriculating at the University of Louvain in 1552. Returning promptly under Mary, he became in due course Master of St John’s and Lady Margaret Professor. Deprived of all preferments under Elizabeth, he returned to the Netherlands, ending his career as divinity lecturer in the abbey of St Michael’s Antwerp.40 William Blaxton is a little harder to pin down. He left St John’s in 1546 to become vicar of Aldworth, where he died in 1557.41 His will gives no immediate indications of his religious views. There are no distinctly Catholic bequests, only some gifts to the poor, and the soul is bequeathed to ‘Almyghte god trustyng in his most gracious mercy … christes death & pascion to haue lyffe euerlastyng’, a provision compatible with Catholic or Protestant beliefs. But while he might seem a mere conformist, ensconced in his parish under both Edward and Mary, the bequest of a book (along with ‘my best clocke’) to Philip

37 38 39

40 41

(1563), pp.  1225–​1227, 1249, and 1470. For his deprivation, see Calendar of Patent Rolls. Elizabeth. Vol. I, 1558–​1560 (London: hmso, 1939), p. 429. See also cced (Person id 65623). I owe this point to the unpublished work of my friend Colin Armstrong, ‘The Deathbed of Dr Redman’. See John Young to John Cheke, London, 4 November 1551, in John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), pp. 870–​872 (Latin) and 872–​874 (English translation). Judith Ford ‘Young, John (1514–​1581)’, odnb. See also Law, Contested Reformations, pp. 53–​ 54 and 58–​59. cua VCCt Wills, 1, no. 158 (Browne). For further comment on Browne’s will, see Richard Rex, ‘Such a Company of Fellows and Scholars: Roger Ascham’s Picture of Humanism at St John’s College’, in James Willoughby and Jeremy Catto (eds.), Books and Bookmen in Early-​Modern Britain (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018), p. 345. See Richard Rex, ‘Bullock, George (1520/​21–​1572)’, odnb, and cced (Person id 39438). bl Harleian ms 7039, fol. 103r transcribes a notarial instrument of 20 September 1553 recording his presence at the admission of Thomas Watson as Master of St John’s. sjca Thick Black Book, sjcr/​s jes/​7/​5, p. 153, for his presentation to Aldworth, 2 October 1545 (cced, Person id 119696, notes his institution on 13 October 1545); and fol. 367v for that of his successor on 26 October 1557.

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Edwards, the vicar of nearby Hampstead Norris (‘Haystyd norres’), enables us to locate him more precisely. That book is described as ‘Wysellyan postylle’.42 This opaque phrase can be decoded as a reference to the sermons on the epistles and gospels published by the German theologian Georg Witzel. Translated into Latin as Postilla, haec est, Enarratio D. Georgii Wicelii (Cologne: Quentell, 1545, ustc 685043), it also had the words Postillae huic Wicelianae accesserunt on its title page, which makes the identification with Blaxton’s book conclusive. Witzel was a convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism, and his Postilla has a consistent polemical edge. Its place as a prized possession among Blaxton’s meagre effects suffices to demonstrate his Catholic credentials. William Manley left St John’s later in 1542, having been appointed rector of Tempsford (Bedfordshire) in 1541, which he gave up for Hamstall Ridware (Staffordshire) in the late 1550s. His Catholic sympathies are suggested by the fact that he was collated in 1556 to a canonry at Lichfield Cathedral by Ralph Baynes, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (himself a former fellow of St John’s College who had fled the country rather than accept the royal supremacy in the mid-​1530s). And he seems to have lost his benefices through deprivation following the Elizabethan Settlement.43 Of the remaining six Appellants, three have left no obvious further traces. The Cantrells, Thomas and Ralph, left the college respectively at the end of 1542 and the start of 1544, while George Wheatley did so in autumn 1543. Our final three seem all to have been pure conformists. Robert Hebblethwaite retired from his fellowship early in 1544 to become the Headmaster of Sedbergh School, and went on to hold a canonry at Chester from 1559 until his death in 1570.44 There is nothing in his career to suggest that he was a committed Catholic, but neither is there anything to indicate firm Protestant convictions. William Leaper likewise conformed throughout the Reformation, as rector of Middleton (Essex) from 1549 until 1567, and of Braintree (Essex) from 1562 until the mid-​1570s. His long service under Elizabeth tells heavily against Catholic commitment but, again, there is no evidence of firm Protestant convictions. Finally, John Rawlinson (or Rawlyngson) held three Buckinghamshire rectories (Haversham, Wolverton, and Woughton on the Green) from the mid-​1540s until around 1570.45 None of 42 43 44 45

Blaxton’s undated will is found in the Berkshire Record Office, D/​A1/​2, fol. 102. The opening lines of the will are damaged, so some words of the soul bequest are missing. For Manley’s preferments, see cced (Person ids 148325 and 27590); and for his deprivation at Hamstall Ridware, see the appointment of his successor (Record id 109634). That he was collated by Baynes is a reliable inference: only his installation is recorded. John Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1541–​1857. XI:  Carlisle, … and Sodor and Man Dioceses (London: ihr, 2004), p. 52. For the preferments of Leaper and Rawlinson, see cced (Person ids 61571 and 150654).

52 Rex these three made any known stand or gesture against the Marian regime. In summary, analysis of the twenty Appellants finds fourteen conservatives, three conformists, and three of unknown affiliations. Not a single one of the Appellants subsequently made any mark as a committed evangelical or Protestant. With the Non-​Appellants, the case is quite the reverse. They include such notorious evangelicals as John Cheke, William Bill, Richard Alvey, Robert Horne, and James Pilkington, all of whom fled the country rather than conform under Mary.46 Ascham himself may or may not have been involved in the disputed election, as sickness kept him away from college for an extended period (he calls it two years, biennium) that cannot have commenced earlier than January 1541. But he was certainly back at St John’s for the appeal proceedings.47 Although he had friends in both camps, he was not, as we have seen, at all close to the figure at the centre of the dispute, John Christopherson. Ascham’s religious position at this time was not yet firmly fixed, but his later religious sympathies were decisively Protestant, even if he temporised in Mary’s reign. Among the rest of the Non-​Appellants, Thomas Ashton, senior fellow after Redman’s departure, himself left St John’s at the end of 1542. After a mysterious gap of nearly twenty years, he resurfaced in 1561 as Headmaster of Shrewsbury School. Evidently a thoroughgoing Protestant, he was valued by the new Bishop of Lichfield, Thomas Bentham, as the only competent preacher in the Shrewsbury district. He corresponded occasionally with William Cecil (whom he would have known at St John’s in the 1530s) about the progress of the Reformation in the region. After retiring from Shrewsbury in 1571, he went on to serve in the household of Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex, whose own Protestant credentials seem clear.48 John Madew, the long serving President of St Johns, and from 1545 the Regius Professor of Divinity, was one of six of the Non-​Appellants who in summer 46 47

48

For the religious convictions of these men see: Alan Brydon, ‘Cheke, Sir John (1514–​1557)’; C. S. Knighton, ‘Bill, William (d. 1561)’ and ‘Alvey, Richard (d. 1584)’; Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘Horne, Robert (1513x15–​1579)’; and David Marcombe, ‘Pilkington, James (1520–​1576)’; all in odnb. In the dedication to Thomas Goodrich of his translation of Oecumenius on Paul, Ascham mentioned having had private discussions with him in college when the Bishop was staying there ‘for a few days to quell certain controversies’. 2 May 1542 was the day on which Goodrich seems to have formally commenced his visitatorial intervention in response to the appeal (Cambridge University Library, Ely Diocesan Records G/I/8, fol. 9r), and Ascham refers to that very date (ad sextum nonas Maias) in his dedication. I am very grateful to Sam Kennerley for bringing to my attention the dedication to Goodrich, which fixes a terminus ad quem for Ascham’s return to college (though he may well have returned earlier). See Kennerley, ch. 2 in this volume, p. 68. Martin E. Speight, ‘Ashton, Thomas (d. 1578)’, ODNB. See SJCA/​D/​106/​17, fol. 120v, for the final payment of Ashton’s fellowship stipend, in the last quarter of 1542.

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1547 were among eighty preachers granted a royal licence to preach anywhere in England (not a single one of the Appellants appears on this list, though six of them were very experienced preachers).49 He was named on the royal commission appointed to conduct a visitation of the dioceses of London, Norwich, and Ely in 1547, and in June 1549 he disputed against transubstantiation during the royal visitation of the university. He was made Master of Clare Hall after the dismissal of Roland Swynburne during that same visitation, only to be himself ejected in favour of the returning Swynburne in October 1553. He was deprived of all his preferments in 1554 on the grounds of marriage.50 Robert Banks (or Bankes), who left St John’s in 1546 to become a founding canon of Christ Church, Oxford, was another of the eighty preachers licensed in 1547. He was deprived of his canonry, and of the rectory of Moreton (Essex), for marriage in 1554, but restored to both in 1559.51 Roger Tonge, an experienced preacher, was complained of by Stephen Gardiner in May 1547 for having preached against the observance of Lent earlier that year. He was later sent to Winchester on royal instructions in a deliberate attempt to rile Gardiner, and was appointed to a canonry at Winchester Cathedral in the king’s name in 1548.52 William Porter left a seemingly evangelical will at his death towards Christmas 1545, making no Catholic bequests and leaving his soul simply to ‘Allmyghty god’. Perhaps most significantly, he made Thomas Lever and John Thompson his executors.53 John Thompson was presented by the college to the living of North Stoke (Oxfordshire) on 22 May 1554, and held it until his death in 1571. Although he evidently conformed under Mary, a string of preferments under Elizabeth, culminating in appointment as a royal chaplain and a canon of Windsor, shows more than mere conformity to the Protestant Church of

49

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Edward VI, ed. C.  S. Knighton (London: hmso, 1992), no. 74, p. 23. The list included ten fellows of St John’s. 50 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), p. 689 for the 1547 visitation; and p. 1000 for his ejection from Clare. See cced (Person id 148264) for his ejection from the parish of Mablethorpe St Mary (Lincolnshire). See John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (2 vols. London: Day, 1583, ustc 509757), vol. ii, pp. 1376–​1381, for the Cambridge disputation of 1549. 51 See cced (Location id 11362)  for Moreton (London diocese). For Christ Church, see John Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1541–​1857. VIII:  Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford and Peterborough Dioceses (London: ihr, 1969) pp. 100 and 105. 52 See cced (Person id 108351) for the canonry. See Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), p. 790 for Gardiner’s complaint; and p. 866 for Giles Ayre’s account of his mission to Winchester with Tonge, which notes that Tonge was dead by the winter of 1550–​1551. 53 cua VCCt Probate Register I, fol. 74r. The will is undated, but probate was granted on 20 February 1546. Porter received his last stipend in the final quarter of 1545 (sjca/​D/​106/​17, fol. 248v).

54 Rex England.54 Thomas Fawden (or Fawding) held benefices until his death in the mid-​1570s, and was one of three men to whom Matthew Parker gave custody of the spiritualities of Chichester diocese in 1568 after the death of Bishop Barlow. He was presented by Queen Elizabeth to the rectory of Buxted (Chichester diocese) in 1559, on the deprivation of his fellow Johnian Alban Langdale.55 John Dawlings (or Dawlynge) was appointed rector of Westbourne in Sussex in 1552, and was unexplainedly replaced there in 1554, presumably ejected on the grounds of marriage.56 There is no evidence that he resumed ministry until 1560, when he was appointed rector of Lullingstone in Kent. From this it is probably legitimate to infer that he would not minister under Mary.57 Of William Lewis, nothing useful is known, though one of his name had a couple of vicarages in Salisbury diocese in the mid 1550s, dying around the new year 1556. Nor is much known about Thomas Conyers, Richard Cumberford, or Richard Swayne. The anomalous figure among the Non-​Appellants is William Barker. Barker had enjoyed the support of Anne Boleyn for his studies in the mid-​1530s, but his name abruptly disappears from the stipend lists at the start of 1549.58 He displayed strong Catholic sympathies in the reign of Elizabeth i.59 The final analysis for the nineteen Non-​Appellants therefore shows thirteen apparently committed evangelical Protestants, two conformists, and three of unknown sympathies, along with one who would later emerge as a committed Catholic. It is possible that the evidence of the later religious divergence between the Appellants and the rest has no bearing upon the division that 54

sjca Thick Black Book, sjcr/​s jes/​7/​5, fol. 343v and cced (Person id 15656) for North Stoke. Calendar of the Patent Rolls. Elizabeth I. Vol. III: 1563–​1566 (London: hmso, 1960), p. 85, no. 366, records that Elizabeth I presented him as a royal chaplain to the benefice of Algarkirk (‘Alderkyrke’, Lincolnshire) on 5 March 1564; and to a canonry at Windsor on 29 June 1565 (p. 322, no. 1804). S. L. Ollard, Fasti Wyndsorienses: the Deans and Canons of Windsor (Windsor: Oxley, 1950), p. 75, misdates the Windsor presentation to 1563. cced (Person ids 91069 and 60333) and the Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1541–​1857 record other preferments of his. 55 See Calendar of Patent Rolls. Elizabeth. Vol. I, 1558–​1560, p.  46, 9 October 1559; E.  M. Thompson & W. H. Frere (eds.), Registrum Matthaei Parker Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis (3 vols., London: Canterbury & York Society, 1927–​1933), vol. i, p. 262. 56 cced (Person id 75063) notes the institutions of Mr John ‘Dawlyn’ on 20 August 1552 and of his successor, Dr Richard Marshall, on 10 Nov. 1554. Westbourne lies on the River Ems, less than two miles upstream from Emsworth, immortalised in one of P. G. Wodehouse’s most delightful characters, Clarence, 9th Earl of Emsworth. See, e.g., his Lord Emsworth and Others (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1937). 57 See cced (Person id 2382) for Lullingstone, in the diocese of Rochester. The last sighting of Dawlings recorded there is in 1565. 58 sjca/​D/​106/​18, fols. 66v (still there in 1548) and 134r (gone in 1549). 59 Kenneth R. Bartlett, ‘Barker, William (fl. 1540–​1576)’, odnb.

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occurred in 1542. But it is not at all probable. All the known conservatives, bar one, were on one side. All the committed evangelicals were on the other, though there were a few Appellants who came to terms with the Elizabethan Church. Two thirds of those involved can be placed firmly in one or other camp. It is, incidentally, remarkable that of the forty men who constituted the senior membership of St John’s College in March 1542, fifteen have entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, as do three of the five men who were elected to the fellowship that month. The college of the 1540s, for all its tensions, was home to one of the most striking concentrations of talent in sixteenth-​century England. Further unrest broke out in 1543 when a vacancy arose among the Seniors, thanks to the departure of Thomas Ashton. Henry Sanderson thought the honour should go to him. But his leading role in the appeal in 1542 doubtless explains the Master’s preference for a Non-​Appellant candidate: the place went to the evangelical Richard Alvey on a casting vote. Alvey was perhaps a relatively moderate candidate, given that he secured three votes from a group that was markedly conservative in religion. There were some potential evangelical nominees of longer standing in the fellowship, notably Ascham, but his recent ill health and absence may have counted against him (he joined the Seniors when their number was raised to twelve by the revised statutes issued in 1545). Sanderson once more appealed to the Visitor, arguing that the Master had no right to a casting vote, but the Bishop of Ely had no difficulty in vindicating Dr Taylor on this occasion. The statutes did not explicitly provide for the contingency of a split vote among the Seniors, but the Master had acted reasonably under the circumstances.60 The quarrels kept on coming. In 1544 Ascham fell foul of these continuing tensions in an unsuccessful campaign to secure the appointment of his pupil, William Grindal, as one of the college’s four ‘examiners’ (a teaching role remunerated at forty shillings a year). He sets out the facts of the case with regrettable obscurity in a letter to Cheke of September 1544.61 In the text that has survived, names have been reduced to initials. The editor of Ascham’s letters,

60

61

‘The Replication of Henry Saunderson’, bl Harleian ms 7039, fols. 86r–​87v. The college accounts show that Sanderson had been a fellow longer than Alvey, and had served at least two years as senior bursar, which may explain his resentment. But Alvey had been made a college preacher at least three years before Sanderson, and this role was often a stepping stone to higher things in college. Ascham to Cheke, [Cambridge], ca. 13 September 1544, letter xxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 53–​57. Ascham writes of ‘lectoribus’, but must mean the ‘examinator’ role, as argued in the next note.

56 Rex J. A. Giles, was able to identify only the first two of the parties, ‘M’ and ‘B’, as John Madew and William Bill. It is now possible, with the aid of the college accounts, and with knowledge of the wider context in St John’s, to offer some further, though sometimes tentative, identifications. And this is worth the effort because of the additional light it can cast on the internal politics of the college. Ascham tells us that he had started lobbying ‘M’ (Madew), ‘B’ (Bill), and ‘A’ just a day or two before the elections (held on 11 September).62 This A is certainly Richard Alvey, as the only other A among the fellows was Ascham himself. He reports with some bitterness on what happened next: Lo and behold, F and your B, according to some treacherous plan of his own, or of H’s or both, joining forces with S and his lot, threw down M, P, and all of us from our old authority. And although they could have achieved that very thing which has now happened through us, nevertheless they so prettily scorned M, A, me, and M –​which he himself admits –​ that they openly boasted that they could and would appoint whomsoever they pleased without our help.63 This contorted report seems to identify up to four groups: Ascham’s own (‘us’), and a faction led by S, and perhaps also one or two led by F and H, who at least appear to be figures Ascham believes capable of college politicking. There is no difficulty in identifying ‘F’ as the rebarbative Fawcett: it cannot be Thomas Fawden, whom Ascham later called his ‘most reliable old friend’.64 As for ‘your B’, there were several possibilities: Bill, Browne, Blaxton, Barker, and Bullock. But Bill has already appeared earlier, while Browne, Blaxton, and Bullock, all former Appellants, are unlikely to have seemed to Ascham to ‘belong’ to Cheke in the way suggested by the words ‘your B’. This usage distinguishes this B from the earlier one, and perhaps indicates that the person in question had been Cheke’s tutorial pupil. The likeliest candidate is therefore William Barker, a considerable Greek scholar. But ‘your B’ had evidently acted against the form-​ book, and in cahoots with H –​presumably Robert Horne, the only H of any

62

63 64

Early Statutes of St John’s College, Cambridge, pp. 246 and 250. The four ‘examiners’ were elected annually on 11 September (p. 246). While the Hebrew and Greek lecturers were subject to annual performance review that day (p. 250), Grindal, a mere ba, was not senior enough to be considered as Hebrew lecturer, nor was Ascham showing any signs of wishing to vacate the Greek lectureship. Ascham to Cheke, [Cambridge], ca. 13 September 1544, letter xxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 54. Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, [1547], letter lxxix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 148–​149, at 148, where he appears as ‘T. F’.

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authority remaining on the fellowship.65 Ascham’s description of B and H as pursuing ‘some treacherous plan’ tends to corroborate these identifications, because he might have expected the support of two former Non-​Appellants, one of them (Horne) an evangelical. S is most probably Henry Sanderson, the premier malcontent under Taylor’s regime, and evidently a faction leader.66 The M, A, and M whose authority this ramshackle alliance had spurned are most plausibly identified as the Master, Alvey, and Madew, because there was no other M of any weight on the fellowship at that time.67 The M and P whose authority Ascham believes had been overthrown with that of ‘the rest of us’ are therefore presumably the Master (Taylor) and either William Porter or James Pilkington (Non-​Appellants and evangelicals).68 These identifications are necessarily conjectural, and dependent on the accurate transmission of the initials. But they can be advanced as a plausible interpretation because they fit so well with what is known of college politics at St John’s in the 1540s. Richard Fawcett was to haunt Ascham even in the reign of Edward vi. Early in 1547, under the new Master, William Bill, Ascham wrote another plaintive letter to Cheke, this time about the dashing of his hopes of securing Cheke’s former rooms in college –​evidently prestigious rooms. To add insult to injury, they were allocated to Fawcett. Ascham could not bear losing out to him, given that Fawcett had been so inimical formerly to Taylor and lately to Bill, and that Ascham himself had secured (presumably through the good offices of Cheke, who was now at Court as Edward vi’s tutor) a letter from the Lord Protector (Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset) urging the college to give the rooms to him.69 Roger Ascham had returned from recuperation in Yorkshire in spring 1542 to an increasingly divided college. Before long he was evidently feeling some 65 66 67 68 69

Robert Hebblethwaite had left early in 1544. Roger Hutchinson was a fellow, but as a ba elected only in March 1543, he would hardly have been prominent in college politics. The only other S on the fellowship in 1544 was John Seton. He was the senior fellow, but seems not to have been as factious as Sanderson. sjca/​D/​106/​17, fol. 157v shows the election in March 1543 of Reginald Middleton and Richard Mitch. As recently elected ba s, they had no authority whatsoever. There are other possibilities for ‘P’. First would be Thomas Peacock, but it is unlikely that this conservative figure would be on Ascham’s side. Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, [1547], letter lxxix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 148–​149, at p. 149. In 1548, Ascham wrote a letter to his friend William Ireland in which he sent greetings to many fellows –​including Fawcett, as well as other conservatives such as Langdale and Crosley. Ascham to Ireland, Cheshunt, 8 July [1549], letter xc, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 166–​170, at p. 168. But this show of good will perhaps owed more to the need to secure his college stipends while absent (he was by this time tutor to the Lady Elizabeth at Cheshunt) than to genuine affection.

58 Rex disenchantment with Cambridge, and his correspondence shows a yearning for new and greener pastures. The idea of being a household tutor to the sons of the rich did not appeal. Public service did, in particular travel on diplomatic business.70 He also had hopes of patronage from some great figure in church or state, which he sought with multiple dedications of his Toxophilus.71 Notwithstanding his evident sympathies with the ‘new learning’ of evangelical religion, these dedications targeted potential patrons on each wing of the Henrician Church of England: Stephen Gardiner and Thomas Wriothesley (the Lord Chancellor), as well as William Parr (Earl of Essex) and Sir Anthony Denny. (Perhaps his religious compass was as yet not decisively set.) The hopes he had pinned on Toxophilus were in vain, though he did get away. He ended up first as tutor to Elizabeth in the later 1540s, and then as secretary to Sir Richard Morison on his embassy to the Holy Roman Emperor in the early 1550s. In those years, however, when he was away from St John’s, his memories of the college came to be bathed in a roseate glow, and his letters back send greetings not only to old friends but to the entire society, even to former rivals. Absence made his heart grow fonder, and old wounds to some extent healed over. The nostalgic reminiscences of St John’s that are scattered through The Scholemaster twenty years later tell a very different story from his letters at the time: more Goodbye Mr. Chips than Tom Brown’s School Days. But Ascham’s correspondence of the 1540s, fleshed out with the archival record of St John’s College itself, offers an unparalleled glimpse into the intricate and often intense politics of a new and rapidly growing educational foundation in a context of dramatic cultural and political change, and a reminder that change of such scope and nature is rarely brought about without institutional and personal costs. 70 71

For more on Ascham’s diplomatic service, see Tracey Sowerby, ch. 6 in this volume. See Kennerley, ch. 2, pp. 75–78, in this volume for further observations on Ascham’s pursuit of patronage.

59

Ascham & Co: St John’s College, Cambridge, in the 1540s table 2.1 The Master, Fellows, and Fellows-​Elect of St John’s in March 1542

Name

County or Diocese

Origin Appeal Religion Preacher Humanist

John Taylor (Master) John Madew (President) Thomas Ashton* John Seton* John Cheke Thomas Crosley* Henry Cumberford* Thomas Watson* Alban Langdale* Roger Tonge Roger Ascham Thomas Peacock* Richard Cumberford Richard Swayne William Bill Henry Sanderson Richard Becke Richard Fawcett Robert Banks John Young Richard Alvey Christopher Browne William Blaxton Robert Horne William Manley William Barker William Porter Thomas Fawden George Bullock

Staffordshire

S

E

P

Lancashire

N

E

P

Cov. & Lich. Yorkshire Cambridgeshire Yorkshire Staffordshire

S N S N S

E C E C C

P P

Durham Yorkshire Lancashire Yorkshire Cambridgeshire Staffordshire

N N N N S S

C C E E C ?

P P P

Cambridgeshire S Hertfordshire S Yorkshire N

A A A A A A

Yorkshire York diocese Yorkshire

N

A A A

N

A

Lincolnshire

S

A

Durham Durham

N N

A

Norfolk

S

Durham

N

A

A

? E C C C E C E C C E C C E E C

P P

P

P P P P P P P P

H H H

H H H H

H

H H H H H

60 Rex table 2.1 The Master, Fellows, and Fellows-​Elect of St John’s in March 1542 (cont.)

Name John Dawlings Thomas Cantrell Robert Hebblethwaite William Leaper James Pilkington Thomas Conyers John Thompson Ralph Cantrell George Wheatley William Lewis John Rawlinson Elected 1542 Thomas Dobbe William Grindall Henry Eland John Christopherson Thomas Lever

County or Diocese

Origin Appeal Religion Preacher Humanist

Derbyshire N Richmondshire N

A A

Yorkshire Lancashire

N N

A

Yorkshire Norfolk

N S

Lincolnshire

S

Cov. & Lich. Cumberland

S N

Lancashire Lancashire

N N

A A A

c ? c c E ? E ? ? c c E E E C E

H P

H

P

P P

H H H H

Note: Names marked with an asterisk are the names of the college’s seven Seniors in 1542. The second column gives each fellow’s county (or, failing that, diocese) of origin, where known; and the third column divides the fellows on that basis into those defined by the college statutes as ‘northern’ (N), or, by default, southern (S). The Appellants of 1542 are indicated by the letter A in the fourth column. The fifth column offers an assessment of the religious position of the fellows on the basis of evidence from their later careers. The letter C denotes broadly Catholic religious sympathies (whether ‘Henrician’ or Roman Catholic). The letter E denotes evangelical (or Protestant) religious sympathies. The lower case ‘c’ is for ‘conformist’, indicating those whose subsequent careers are characterised by nothing more definite than conformity to the religion by law established; while a question mark in this column marks those for whose religious position no evidence is known (by me, at least). In the sixth and seventh columns respectively, P indicates known preachers, and H indicates those who can be definitely identified as ‘humanist’ scholars.

­c hapter 3

Patristic Scholarship and Ascham’s ‘troubled years’ Sam Kennerley 1

Introduction

Patristic scholarship can be defined as the study of the works of the ‘Church Fathers’, a term now broadly used to refer to early Christian authors between the end of the Apostolic period and the seventh century. In the early Reformation, however, patristics was conceived of as a significantly broader field, incorporating a vast body of texts written between the time of Philo of Alexandria (c. 15bc–​50ad) and the thirteenth century. The works of the Church Fathers were common currency in the early Reformation. They were cited by theologians, preachers, poets, and even playwrights, and played an important role in the devotional lives of clergy and laity alike. But like its cognate discipline of biblical studies, patristic scholarship was deeply contentious in the Reformation. Generations of scholars debated whether the works of the ancient church best supported their confession, and occasionally whether this debate was useful at all. Matters were even more complex in the study of the Greek Church Fathers, where an unfamiliar theological tradition combined with limited linguistic knowledge to generate further possibilities for interpretation and misinterpretation.1 As this summary suggests, it was difficult for any scholar of the Reformation to entirely avoid the works of the Church Fathers.2 Patristics was indeed a central concern during what have been called Ascham’s ‘troubled years’ between 1540 and 1544.3 In this period, fellowship elections at St John’s in 1540 1 See in general Irena Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists (Leiden: Brill, 1997); and Arnoud S. Q. Visser, Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–​1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 2 See William P.  Haaugaard, ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship and Theology in Sixteenth-​ Century England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 10:3 (1979), pp. 37–​60; Arthur Tilley, ‘Greek Studies in England in the Early Sixteenth Century’, English Historical Review, 53 (1938), pp. 221–​ 239, pp. 438–​456. 3 I borrow the term ‘troubled years’ from John Hasel Smith, ‘Roger Ascham’s Troubled Years’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 65 (1966), pp. 36–​46. Throughout this chapter I will be drawing on Smith to date and locate Ascham’s correspondence, leading to information that sometimes differs from that in Giles and Hatch.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_005

62 Kennerley and 1542 disrupted Ascham’s early career, in one case causing him to leave Cambridge for his parental home in Yorkshire. Yet each election also had the unintended consequence of leading Ascham to the commentaries on Paul by the Greek exegete that he knew as ‘Oecumenius’. The result is a paper trail that offers valuable insight into an otherwise murky period in Ascham’s life. The following chapter will use this trail to explore the methods, aims and implications of Ascham’s patristic scholarship between 1540 and 1544, connecting these conclusions to the wider world of late Henrician England. It will argue that while undeniably a convinced Protestant, Ascham’s patristic scholarship shows that he actively courted the patronage and advice of individuals of a more conservative outlook during his ‘troubled years’. In turn, I will propose that the fact that this story is mostly recoverable through unpublished material has ramifications for how we understand Ascham’s early career, and the way that this stage of his life has been remembered by his literary heirs and early biographers. This article will then close with an exploration of a recently discovered source for Ascham’s work in the reign of Queen Mary i, carrying the conclusions of the first part of this study into another obscure period of Ascham’s life. 2

The Beginning of Ascham’s ‘troubled years’

Roger Ascham’s ‘troubled years’ began in 1540, when the fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge sought to elect a new scholar to their number. With conservative leaders in the college like John Redman and John Seton split between rival candidates, Ascham exploited an opening to secure the unlikely election of his pupil John Thompson.4 This may however have been a pyrrhic victory. It appears that Ascham’s skilled canvassing for Thompson had so alienated his opponents in the competition that he left Cambridge in the winter of 1540/​1, an exile spent at his parents’ home in Yorkshire.5 Back in Yorkshire, Ascham picked up his pen and began to court local magnates with the manner of a man planning to build a new life in the north. He wrote to Robert Holgate, Bishop of Llandaff and President of the Council of the North, and sent letters in both Greek and Latin to Edward Lee, the former adversary of Erasmus, who was then serving as Archbishop

4 See Richard Rex, ch. 2 in this volume. 5 For the impact of this election on Ascham’s friendships in college, see, for instance, his letter to Redman [Cambridge], ca. April 1543, letter xx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 38–​39.

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63

of York. Ascham’s letters to Holgate and Lee mark a shift from his previous correspondence. Whereas his earlier letter to another potential ecclesiastical patron, the Bishop of London, was devoid of Scriptural citations, those to Holgate and Lee were larded with citations from the Old and New Testaments.6 Ascham’s letter to Lee offered similarly pious services to the Archbishop: I’d happily expend and devote my little efforts to the translation of Greek … There are scholia to all the letters of Paul and the other canonical epistles, called the Graecania, gathered from the best and most ancient fathers, which are currently unknown, to my knowledge, to Latin ears. It is an ancient work and full of learning, in which one might exercise one’s pen to great private gain and public reward.7 Earlier in this letter, Ascham had declared that he wished to dedicate himself to the study of Scripture, having left ‘Egypt’ (that is, Cambridge) carrying the ‘spoils’ of classical learning.8 This echoed an educational commonplace derived from humanist work on the Church Fathers, which asserted that the classics were propaedeutic ‘spoils’ with which the mature scholar departed into the Israel of Scriptural studies.9 The quote above contains similarly strong patristic overtones. Ascham offered to provide Lee with a translation of an unquestionably orthodox Greek text that he hoped would appeal to this conservative prelate. It seems therefore that Ascham was ‘self-​fashioning’ himself as a pious scholar, engaged in the study of the Church Fathers and Scripture in order to better appeal to clerical patrons like Holgate and Lee. Lee was apparently open to Ascham’s overtures. He awarded Ascham an annual pension of 40 shillings,10 and Ascham soon got to work on fulfilling his part of the bargain, namely his translation into Latin of Oecumenius’s commentary on Philemon and Titus.

6

Compare Ascham’s letter to Thomas Watson, Cambridge, 1539, letter iv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 4–​5; with that to Lee, Yorkshire, not much before September 1541, letter ix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 17–​21. 7 Ascham to Lee, Yorkshire, 1541, letter ix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 19. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine. 8 Ibid., p. 18. 9 For this background, see Nicholas Naquin, ‘On the Shoulders of Hercules: Erasmus, the Froben Press and the 1516 Jerome Edition in Context’, unpublished dissertation, Princeton University (2013), pp. 157–​158. 10 Ryan, Ascham, p. 33.

64 Kennerley 3

Ascham’s Translation of ‘Oecumenius’s’ Commentary on Philemon

After the award of the pension, Ascham appears to have considered himself a member of Lee’s household, conventionally referring to the Archbishop as his ‘lord’.11 He however needed to prove himself worthy of his pension. The need to impress Lee perhaps explains why Ascham sought feedback from a colleague before sending anything to the Archbishop. He offered the first fruits of his patristic scholarship to John Seton, a respected scholar and fellow of St John’s who was one of his opponents in the 1540 election controversy.12 Ascham’s first piece of patristic scholarship survives today as ms Cambridge, St John’s College Library, L 3. This manuscript, copied in Ascham’s flowing cursive hand, is prefaced with a letter to Seton dated 1 January 1542. Uncertainty about whether Ascham dated his letters by the new style (where the New Year fell on 1 January) or the old style (where the New Year fell on 25 March) has meant that this letter has sometimes been dated according to the latter style, that is to say 1 January 1543.13 However, Ascham’s letter to Seton declares that the manuscript was intended as a New Year’s gift. If the manuscript were sent to mark a New Year beginning on 1 January 1543, it would have been exceptionally odd for him to date the letter to 1542, as though the year had not changed. For this reason, it seems most likely that the letter should be dated according to the new style, namely 1 January 1542. This date in turn suggests that Ascham had completed the manuscript during his exile in Yorkshire, and the content of the volume is indeed recognisable from Ascham’s correspondence with Lee during that period. In the letter to Lee quoted above, Ascham had offered to translate what he called the Graecania, a set of scholia on Paul extracted from the Greek Church Fathers.14 Ascham had clearly settled on this text as an appropriate area of concern. ms Cambridge, St John’s College Library, L 3 contains Ascham’s Latin translation of part of the ‘Graecania’, namely the scholia on the letter to Philemon. Yet in his letter to Seton prefacing the St John’s manuscript, Ascham no longer referred to these scholia as Graecania. He instead attributed the collection to a certain ‘Oecumenius’, who Ascham claimed had assembled scholia on Paul from earlier Greek Church Fathers like John Chrysostom, 11 12 13 14

Ascham to Richard Brandesby, Cambridge, October 1542, letter xii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 24. For Seton as an adversary of Ascham in the 1540 elections, see Hatch, p. 25. Earlier scholarship in favour of this date is summarised in Smith, ‘Roger Ascham’s Troubled Years’, pp. 40–​41. Ascham to Lee, Yorkshire, not much before September 1541, letter ix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 17–​19.

Patristic Scholarship and Ascham’s ‘troubled years’

65

Theodoret of Cyrus, and Cyril of Alexandria.15 Ascham erred in identifying ‘Oecumenius’ as the author of this work. The sixth-​century writer Oecumenius to whom he attributed the entire collection was in fact just one authority in a chain of scholia assembled centuries later.16 Nonetheless, Ascham’s error in identifying Oecumenius as the overall author of these scholia has its utility for modern scholars, as it points to the Greek text that he used for his translation. The first Greek or Latin scholar to have attributed these scholia to Oecumenius was Bernardino Donato, whose Greek edition of ‘Oecumenius’s’ commentaries on Paul was printed in Verona in 1532.17 Indeed, the list of authorities like Chrysostom, Theodoret and Cyril that Ascham claimed ‘Oecumenius’ had used was identical with that given by Donato in his Greek preface to the 1532 edition.18 Ascham had evidently read Donato’s preface to the 1532 edition and, in turn, this material shaped how he understood the age and content of the text that followed. A copy of the 1532 Verona edition of ‘Oecumenius’ was recorded among the goods of the professor of Divinity, Edward Wygan (d. 1545), and Thomas Smith (1513–​1577) –​Regius Professor of Civil Law from 1540 –​owned a copy that is still extant in Cambridge.19 ‘Oecumenius’ was not therefore an unknown author in late Henrician Cambridge, and it is possible that Ascham too owned a copy of the Verona edition. In addition to his Greek source, we can be equally sure of the inspirations behind the style of Ascham’s Latin translation of the Bible. Remarking on his treatment of biblical translation in his prefatory letter to Seton, Ascham claimed that: 15

ms Cambridge, St John’s College Library, L 3, fols. 8r–​8v; printed as letter xi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 23. For the use of the term ‘Graecania’ to refer to the scholia by ‘Oecumenius’, see for instance Desiderius Erasmus, Annotationes in Novum Testamentum:  Pars Sexta, ed. M.  L.  van Poll-​van de Lisdonk [Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, vi.10] (Amsterdam: Brill, 2014), p. 188. 16 Marc De Groote, ‘Oecumenius’, in Hans Dieter Betz et  al., eds., Religion Past & Present (Leiden: Brill, 2011), vol. ix, p. 278. 17 For Donato as the first scholar to make this error, see Karl Staab, Die Pauluskatenen nach den Handschriftenquellen untersucht (Rome: Verlag des päpstlichen Bibelinstituts, 1926), p. 94. 18 Oecumenius, Expositiones antiquae ac valde utiles brevitatem una cum perspicuitate habentes mirabilem, ex diversis sanctorum patrum commentariis ab Oecumenio et Aretha collectae in hosce novi testamenti tractatus (Verona: Stephano de Sabio and brothers, 1532, ustc 802611), p. 3. 19 Cambridge, Queens’ College Library, M.11.3 (Thomas Smith); for Wygan’s copy, see Elisabeth S.  Leedham Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1986), vol. ii, p. 579.

66 Kennerley I have followed Erasmus in all regards in the version of this letter, except that for rogo I translate deprecor, having as my authority the great Marcus Tullius Cicero, who says that we use deprecor not so much when we prevent something from happening, as when we ask forgiveness for an affront.20 Consultation of the Latin text in ms Cambridge, St John’s College Library, L 3 bears most of Ascham’s claim out. Besides preferring deprecor (‘I pray for’) to rogo (‘I ask’), Ascham’s Latin translation of the Bible closely followed the text in Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum. When it came to translating the Greek of ‘Oecumenius’s’ scholia on Philemon into Latin, however, Ascham had much less help at hand. His version of the commentary on Philemon was the first time that ‘Oecumenius’s’ complete scholia on a letter of Paul had been translated into Latin. It indeed antedates by three years the complete Latin translation of ‘Oecumenius’ by the Dominican Johannes Henten, an exegete and critic whose version –​like many other sixteenth-​century translations of the Greek Fathers  –​is still that printed in standard resources like Migne’s Patrologia Graeca.21 By comparing Henten and Ascham’s translations of a scholium on Philemon 1:2 with the Greek source text, certain characteristics of each version come to light:22 1532 edn. (p. 794): Ὅρα καὶ ταπεινοφροσύνην, ὅτι καὶ τούτοις παρακαλεῖ συλλαβέσθαι τῆς ἱκεσίας. Henten (fol. clxxiiir):  Considera vero animi modestiam. Nam hos etiam exhortatur ut simul opitulentur in precatione. Ascham (15v):  [V]‌ide et animum eius summissum admodum atque humilem quod et hos adhortaretur, ut deprecationem suam adiuvarent.

20 21 22

ms Cambridge, St John’s College Library, L 3, 9v; 1 January 1542, letter xi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 24. Enarrationes vetustissimorum theologorum, in acta quidem apostolorum et in omnes divi Pauli ac catholicas epistolas ab Oecumenio:  in Apocalypsim vero, ab Aretha … collectae (Antwerp: Johannis Steelsii, 1545, ustc 404096); see also ustc 195691, 149371. 1532:  ‘See too [his] humility, since he also encourages them to help in the prayer’; Henten: ‘Consider too [his] modesty of soul. For he also encourages them to assist in the prayer’; Ascham: ‘You see too his utterly lowly and humble soul, in that he also urge them to help his prayer’.

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As this example shows, Ascham pursued a more copious style than Henten in his translation, multiplying single words into synonyms and even adding pronouns and adverbs that had no foundation in his source text. For instance, Ascham’s rendering of ταπεινοφροσύνην (‘humility’) as animum eius summissum admodum atque humilem (‘his utterly lowly and humble soul’) stands in striking contrast with Henten’s pared-​down translation of animi modestiam (‘modesty of soul’). The two translations also differed in their vocabulary. Where Henten used exhortari (‘to encourage’) to translate παρακαλεῖ (‘he encourages’), for example, Ascham preferred adhortari (‘to urge’). Significantly, adhortari is attested in Cicero, while exhortari is not. From this example and others like it, we can see that Ascham’s translation of ‘Oecumenius’ therefore pursued a full, rounded style, rich in Ciceronian diction. This suggests that just as Ascham saw Cicero’s Latin as an authority in the accurate translation of the Bible, so too did he approach the language of this Roman orator as a model to be imitated when translating works of the Greek Fathers. Ascham’s attempt to render a collection of Greek scholia on Paul into the Latin of a pagan orator might seem ambitious or even inappropriate, but it had solid intellectual foundations. As Alvin Vos has explained, for Ascham, eloquence and good doctrine were inseparably linked.23 Elegant language was therefore the supreme sign of an orthodox text, making Cicero the natural model for a Ciceronian like Ascham to follow when translating orthodox Greek authors such as ‘Oecumenius’ into Latin. Ascham’s choice of text to translate was as carefully thought out as his method. In the letter to Philemon, Paul discusses his baptism of the slave Onesimus, who had fled from his owner, the eponymous recipient of the letter. The letter to Philemon thus discusses topics like forgiveness and reconciliation, allowing Ascham to riff on these themes in the bulk of his prefatory letter to Seton.24 The scholia on Philemon were therefore singularly appropriate as a vehicle to dispel any ill-​feeling that may have remained between Ascham and Seton after the 1540 fellowship elections. They were apposite in another way, too. As noted above, Ascham was eager for Seton’s opinion about his translation of ‘Oecumenius’s’ scholia on Philemon. If Seton approved, Ascham claimed, he would send Lee a Latin version of ‘Oecumenius’s’ commentary on the Epistle to Titus that he had seemingly also prepared while in Yorkshire in 1541.25 The commentary on Philemon was a suitable choice for such a preliminary test of 23 24 25

Alvin Vos, ‘ “Good Matter and Good Utterance”: The Character of English Ciceronianism’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 19.1 (1979), pp. 3–​18. ms Cambridge, St John’s College Library, L 3, 5r–​7v; letter xi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 22–​23. ms Cambridge, St John’s College Library, L 3, 9r; letter xi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 24.

68 Kennerley skill. It was the briefest of the commentaries in the collection, just about long enough to provide a sample of Ascham’s skill as a translator, but short enough for Ascham to take pains over another key ornament of his scholarship, his fine cursive hand. In form and content, Ascham’s manuscript of the scholia on Philemon was meant to be a showcase of his scholarly qualifications. Seton’s reaction to this gift is unknown. He likely approved, as Ascham continued with his patristic scholarship. These studies however took a different turn to the one that Ascham had imagined, once more as a consequence of fellowship elections at St John’s. 4

Ascham’s translations of ‘Oecumenius’s’ Commentary on Titus

After the troubles of 1540, 1541 saw six new fellows elected to St John’s without any apparent controversy. But as Richard Rex details more fully in this volume, the fellowship elections of March 1542 caused an uproar that dwarfed the controversies of 1540.26 Religious tensions bubbled to the surface as college evangelicals claimed that an evangelical candidate, Thomas Lever, should have been elected to a fellowship instead of the conservative John Christopherson. The college Visitor, Bishop Thomas Goodrich of Ely, was called in to settle the dispute. On 5 April 1542, an appeal was lodged at Queens’ College with Goodrich’s vicar William May. Goodrich then visited St John’s in person on 2 May 1542, issuing a judgment that confirmed Christopherson’s election, while holding out an olive branch to evangelicals by stipulating that Lever was to be elected the following year.27 Unlike his active role in 1540, Ascham’s absence from the college meant that he played no part in the initial disputes of March and early April 1542. He however appears to have returned to Cambridge soon after, as he met Goodrich on 2 May 1542 when the Bishop visited St John’s ‘to quell controversies’ in the college, quite likely quarrels over the election dispute that remained in the wake of William May’s judgment. We are aware of this meeting as Ascham mentioned it in a letter to Goodrich that prefaces his second patristic translation: a Latin version of ‘Oecumenius’s’ commentary on the letter of Paul to Titus.28 26 27 28

See Rex, ch. 2 in this volume. See Rex, ch. 2 in this volume, pp. 42–44, 52; also Richard Rex, ‘The Sixteenth Century’, in Peter Linehan ed., St John’s College Cambridge: A History (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. 5–​93 at pp. 38–​39. [C]‌um tu nuper ad [ad here almost certainly stands for ante diem] sextum nonas Maias, aliquot dies apud nos ad quasdam in nostro Collegio controversias tollendas, sis commoratus … me ad privata cum Dominatione tua colloquia … admisisti’ (‘Recently, when you stayed with us on the 2nd May for a few days in order to quell controversies in our college ...

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Ascham’s dedication of this commentary on Titus to Goodrich survives in a single manuscript, which is held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.29 Like the copy of the scholia on Philemon dedicated to Seton, this manuscript is an example of Ascham’s fine penmanship. And just as in this earlier example, Ascham also appears to have vested as much energy in the content as he did the appearance of his gift to Goodrich. Once more, Ascham pursued copiousness and a distinct preference for Ciceronian diction when translating ‘Oecumenius’s’ scholia on Titus into Latin. His choice of the word ansa to render ἀφορμή (‘opportunity’), for instance, follows a usage found only in Cicero among classical authors.30 However, Ascham departed from his earlier practice in one important respect. We saw earlier that his version of the Bible in the scholia on Philemon closely followed Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum. By contrast, Ascham’s translation of the Bible in the scholia on Titus was a composite entity, in many cases following the Vulgate over Erasmus, and even incorporating what are apparently his own conjectures.31 The difference in Ascham’s handling of the Bible in his versions of the scholia on Philemon and those on Titus suggests that his thoughts about how best to translate Christian texts were still developing in the early 1540s. Indeed, his studies of ‘Oecumenius’s’ scholia on Paul were not quite over. Ascham eventually carried out his plan to dedicate the commentary on Titus to Lee, probably offering it to the Archbishop at some point between January 1542 and March 1543.32 Unlike the previous examples, Ascham’s letter dedicating his translation of ‘Oecumenius’ to Lee survives only in a printed version. It was first printed in Edward Grant’s 1576 posthumous edition of Ascham’s letters,33 and one year later Grant further published Ascham’s version of the commentaries on Titus as part of a broader collection of Ascham’s theological writings.34 However, the translation of ‘Oecumenius’ printed by Grant shows small but noticeable you admitted me to a private meeting with your Lordship’), ms Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson D 1317, [no foliation]. 29 ms Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson D 1317. 30 See the entry ansa in Charlton T.  Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 127. 31 For a comparable case of Ascham’s use of an eclectic translation of the Bible, see Lucy R.  Nicholas, Roger Ascham’s ‘A Defence of the Lord’s Supper’:  Latin Text and English Translation (Leiden: Brill, 2017), passim. 32 That is, between the dedication to Seton and the latest date for this dedication given in Smith, ‘Roger Ascham’s Troubled Years’, pp. 41–​42. The dedication letter to Lee is printed as letter xiii in Giles vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 27–​29. 33 Disertissimi viri Rogeri Aschami … familiarum epistolarum libri tres (London:  Francis Coldock, 1576, ustc 508129), pp. 51–​52. 34 Apologia doctissimi viri Rogeri Aschami, Angli, pro caena Dominica … Cui accesserunt themata quaedam Theologica … Expositiones item antiquae, in Epistolas Divi Pauli ad Titum et Philemonem (London: Francis Coldock, 1577, ustc 508290), pp. 247–​279.

70 Kennerley changes from the manuscript version, especially in Ascham’s version of the Bible. An example can be drawn from the translation of Titus 1:6, a passage that, as we’ll see shortly, would prove significant to the future of Ascham’s patristic scholarship:35 ms Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson D 1317, pp. 14–​15 Si quis sit inculpatus, unius uxoris vir, liberos habens fideles, non luxus crimini obnoxios, non inobedientes.

Grant 1577, p. 254 Si quis sit criminationis expers, unius uxoris vir, liberos habens fideles, non in accusatione luxuriae, aut inobedientes.

It was noted above that Ascham’s translation of the Bible in the manuscript copy dedicated to Goodrich had a composite quality. The comparison above shows that the version printed by Grant was even more of a patchwork entity. It for instance prefers the Vulgate reading in accusatione luxuriae (‘in an accuation of luxury’) to the manuscript’s luxus crimini obnoxios (‘liable to the charge of luxury’) which had simply re-​arranged the word-​order of Erasmus’s translation. There is also an increase in what are apparently conjectures, such as the replacement of inculpatus (‘blameless’) with the more Ciceronian criminationis expers (‘free from accusation’). There is therefore a question of to whom to attribute these variants in the scholia on Titus. Humanists, most famously Erasmus, were masters of the art of doctoring texts in order to present the best possible image of themselves or their allies.36 Grant’s publications of the letters and theological works of Ascham fall into a category especially liable to such emendation, as they were printed in order to commemorate Ascham as a Ciceronian stylist and to boost the career chances of Ascham’s son Giles.37 There is as such the danger that the variants observed in the manuscript and printed translations of the scholia on Titus should be attributed to Grant rather than to Ascham. Yet a comparison of the manuscript of Ascham’s translation of the scholia on Philemon to the text of this translation printed by Grant shows the latter to have been faithful

35

ms Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson D 1317, pp. 14–​15: ‘If any are blameless, the husband of one wife, having dutiful children, not in accusation of excess, or disobedient’; Grant 1577, p. 254: ‘If any be free from accusation, the husband of one wife, having dutiful children, not in an accusation of luxury, or disobedient’. 36 See Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters:  The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 37 See the prefatory material to Rogeri Aschami … familiarum epistolarum libri tres.

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to his exemplar. Since Grant reproduced the letter to Lee rather than that to Goodrich, it therefore appears that Grant’s edition is based on a now-​lost manuscript dedicated by Ascham to Lee. Attributing the variants in the printed edition to Ascham in turn permits some conclusions about his scholarship on ‘Oecumenius’. Rather than being witnesses to the same version, the manuscript and printed text of the scholia on Titus should be treated as two different versions: the first a draft presented to Goodrich, the second a revised copy offered to Lee. The variants between these two versions in turn highlight the development of Ascham’s thought between 1542 and 1543, particularly his treatment of the Bible. The draft copy dedicated to Goodrich maintained Erasmus as its base, and the variants added to this base were weighted more in favour of the Vulgate than Ascham’s own conjectures. While the revised version dedicated to Lee also includes new readings from the Vulgate, it shows Ascham to have been increasingly confident in adding his own conjectures. The overall effect was that the influence of Erasmus on Ascham gradually waned, replaced by a Latin version of Scripture of Ascham’s own making. Indeed, these changes may well be the fruit of the studies of Scripture that Ascham declared he wished to pursue in his 1541 letter to Lee.38 5

Lee’s Response to the Scholia on Titus

Although Ascham recycled the content of his prefatory letters to Lee and Goodrich, he seems to have thought carefully when selecting the commentary on Titus as a gift for these two men. The letter to Titus discusses the qualities of the ideal bishop, which permitted Ascham to laud Goodrich and Lee as contemporary examples of this model prelate in his dedications. Ascham’s choice of a patristic commentary on the Bible was certainly a good one for these two churchmen. Goodrich and Lee were learned prelates, who had been tasked with the editing of the Old Testament by a convocation in early 1542.39 But for all this preparation, there are hints that Ascham had neglected to fully investigate the scholarly past of his patrons. His version of the Bible in the scholia on Titus, for instance, totally ignored the observations on the

38 39

[Cambridge], 1541, letter ix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 18. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, eds. James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1900), vol. 17, pp. 78–​79.

72 Kennerley Vulgate that Lee had issued in his controversy with Erasmus.40 In this respect, Ascham’s closing request in his dedication letters that Goodrich or Lee point out any errors was more than a convention of humanist correspondence. It was potentially dangerous, as Ascham would find out to his cost. Goodrich’s reaction to the scholia on Titus is not known, so it would only be possible to speculate about his role in the changes that Ascham made to this translation. However, Ascham’s letters preserve Lee’s response to the dedication. They show that the text wasn’t received quite as Ascham had anticipated. As Ascham remarked to Lee: I never believed it would be that those commentaries, which Oecumenius had collected from Basil, Gregory, and mostly from Chrysostom, as though from the purest garden clear of hemlock and noxious herbs, actually contained more fatal poison and immediate plague than whole and healthy sap … Your wisdom was of the opinion that I took up this plan foolishly: that I had begun the task of translating in such weighty matters, before testing the strength of my intellect in other topics of lesser importance or danger.41 Ascham’s translation of the scholia on Titus had therefore seriously offended Lee, appearing in this letter as a wasteland of noxious plants rather than a bouquet of patristic flowers. His standing with the Archbishop soon deteriorated further. From another letter to Lee written around April 1543, we learn that certain people with the Archbishop’s ear had represented Ascham as a reader of heretical books.42 Ascham moved to extinguish these fires. In a flurry of activity around April 1543, he sought not just to personally reconcile himself to Lee, but also to corral support from his conservative contacts associated with St John’s, Cambridge, who might carry weight with the Archbishop. Ascham convinced Thomas Watson and Seton to act as character witnesses,43 and attempted to clear the air with influential conservatives from the college that he had previously offended. A key target in this respect was Redman, the one-​time fellow of St John’s who 40 41 42 43

Edward Lee, Annotationum libri duo, alter in annotationes prioris aeditionis novi testamenti Desiderii Erasmi, alter in annotationes posterioris aeditionis eiusdem (Paris: G. Gourmont, 1520, ustc 145174). Ascham to Lee, [Cambridge], shortly after 25 March 1543, letter xvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 31–​32. Ascham to Lee, [Cambridge], April 1543, letter xviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 34–​35. Ascham to Redman, [Cambridge], around April 1543, letter xx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 43.

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had since become Warden of King’s Hall, Cambridge. As noted above, Redman and Ascham had supported rival candidates during the fellowship elections of 1540.44 Ascham’s letter to Redman indicates how deeply these disputes had rankled. He acknowledged rumours that he and Redman had not been close for the past three years, but sought to quash them by nodding to their earlier friendship and rationalising his conduct during the election controversy. With this ground for reconciliation prepared, Ascham set out his cause for writing: Last year, as you know, I translated the Greek commentaries on the letter to Titus, which I decided to offer to the most reverend Archbishop of York as though an indication of my respect. After I had come to his house, but not into his presence, since poor health then kept him in bed, I committed the book to his brother Geoffry Lee to be handed over to him. He [Geoffry Lee] handed it over, and he [Edward Lee] read it, and he found something there that offended him. He gave the book back, not without the charge, that I check the passage. The passage was this: ‘A man of one wife, he says, let him know only his legal wife. He shuts the mouths of those heretics who despise marriage, as even married men are able to exercise the episcopacy’.45 The exact cause of offence, which Ascham had left vague in his letter to Lee, is explained in this complaint to Redman. The passage that offended Lee was a scholium on Titus 1:6, in which Paul requested that Titus find in suitable candidates in Crete for consecration to the clergy. As seen in the analysis of Ascham’s translation of this verse, one condition of suitability was that these candidates be ‘the husband of one wife’ (unius vir uxoris). ‘Oecumenius’s’ scholium on Titus 1:6 therefore had the unfortunate effect of approving clerical marriage and implying that those who rejected it were heretics, charges that Ascham’s translation preserved in both cases.46 It is little wonder that a conservative prelate like Lee was offended. Clerical marriage was then illegal in England, and would remain so until 1549.47 44 45 46

47

See above (p. 62). Ascham to Redman, [Cambridge], ca. April 1543, letter xx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 43. Unius uxoris vir, ipsam inquit legitimam solam cognoscat. Os vero Hereticiis illis, qui nuptias abhorrebant, praecludit, quasi fieri possit, ut una cum nuptiis, quis Episcopatum curam gerat (see inset quotation above for the translation). ms Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson D 1317, p. 17. See also Apologia … Expositiones, p. 255. Helen L. Parish, Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 27–​38.

74 Kennerley As the letter to Redman states, Lee charged Ascham to look again at the text of ‘Oecumenius’. Ascham correctly surmised that the fateful passage had come from Chrysostom, and he duly asked both Redman and Cheke about their access to a copy of Chrysostom in Greek.48 Although it is difficult to be certain, Ascham’s initial inclusion of this controversial passage indicates his subconscious faith in the orthodoxy of the Church Fathers. It is unlikely that he meant to offend his patron, and where what Lee perceived to be an error arose, Ascham appears to have hoped that further reading of the Church Fathers would prove the text of his exemplar wrong. He would have found little solace in his return to the sources, however. Chrysostom’s exegesis of Titus 1:6 was even more direct in its defence of clerical marriage than the summary of these words provided by ‘Oecumenius’.49 Chastened by Lee’s rebuke, Ascham promised the Archbishop that he would follow the advice to stick to matters of ‘lesser importance or danger’. In other words, he promised to avoid theology and stick to classical texts, as befitting his academic status in the arts rather than the theology faculty. Ascham showed obedience of Lee’s command by sending the Archbishop a now-​lost translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes.50 The damage, however, had already been done. After Lee’s death in September 1544, Ascham complained that he was the only member of Lee’s household not to have been fully paid. A pension that began with an offer to translate the Fathers was apparently terminated by the execution of this deed.51 6

The Context and Motivation of Ascham’s Translations of ‘Oecumenius’

Ascham didn’t keep his promise to Lee for long. Even during Lee’s lifetime, he offered to the Archbishop what was probably a manuscript of Cheke’s Latin version of two homilies by John Chrysostom.52 A little later, Ascham asked John Ponet about a Greek copy of Gregory of Nyssa in a letter where he also requested Ponet’s help in obtaining a licence to eat meat on fast days from

48 49 50 51 52

Ascham to Redman, [Cambridge], ca. April 1543, letter xx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 43; Ascham to Cheke, [Cambridge], ca. April 1543, letter xxi, ibid, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 47. Patrologia Graeca (Paris: J.-​P. Migne, 1857–​1866), vol. 62, col. 671. Ascham to Lee, Cambridge?, shortly after 25 March 1543, letter xvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 32. Ascham to a friend in York, [Cambridge], after 25 May 1543, Giles, vol. I, pt. 1, p. 58. Ascham to Lee, [Cambridge], April 1543, letter xviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 34–​35.

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Thomas Cranmer. Perhaps Ascham aimed to translate this patristic author as a gift to Cranmer, thereby bolstering his suit with the Archbishop.53 There can therefore be little doubt that the works of the Greek Church Fathers were significant for Ascham. Indeed, his two translations of ‘Oecumenius’ were distinctly avant-​garde in the intellectual context of early Reformation England. Latin translations of the Greek Fathers by scholars in England or English scholars abroad were exceptionally rare before 1542. Duke Humphrey’s secretary, Antonio Beccaria, had translated works by Athanasius in Greenwich at some point between 1438 and ​1446/​7, the English scholar John Free translated two texts by Synesius in Italy between 1460 and 1462, and the prior of Canterbury William Selling translated two homilies of John Chrysostom, one in 1488, and another at an unknown date before his death in 1494. Later on, John Fisher completed a version of two of Chrysostom’s Homilies on I Corinthians, which were first printed in 1530.54 After 1542, however, scholars from St John’s, Cambridge such as Cheke and Christopherson, and Oxford-​trained figures like George Etheredge and John Shepreve, began to establish an English presence in Greek patristics.55 Ascham’s translations of ‘Oecumenius’ anticipated the increased prominence of Latin translations of the Greek Fathers in English scholarship. Yet they stood apart from later works. Cheke, Christopherson, Etheredge and Shepreve focussed on authors from the canonical fourth and fifth centuries of the Church. By contrast, Ascham translated what he knew to be a much later text, noting as he did that ‘Oecumenius’ had compiled his commentaries from earlier authors like Chrysostom, Theodoret and Cyril.56 It is therefore necessary to ask why Ascham created these avant-​garde translations. These causes have already been hinted at above, but exploring them fully is relevant as early modern scholars had a host of motivations for reading or citing patristic texts. The Church Fathers could be drawn on not just for 53 54

Ascham to Ponet, [Cambridge], 1545, p. 71. David Rundle, ‘From Greenwich to Verona:  Antonio Beccaria, St Athanasius, and the translation of Orthodoxy’, Humanistica, 5 (2010), pp.  109–​119. For Free and Selling, see their entries in the odnb (although read 1488 for 1486 in Selling’s). Selling’s translations are to be found in MS London, British Library, Add. 15673; ms London, British Library, Add. 47675; ms Oxford, Bodleian Library, University College 40. Fisher’s version of homilies 43–​44 of Chrysostom’s Homilies on I Corinthians was first printed in D. Ioannis Chrysostomi archiepiscopi Constantinopolitani opera, quae hactenus versa sunt omnia (Basel: Froben, 1530, ustc 626163), vol. 1, pp. 374–​383. 55 Haaugaard, ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship and Theology in Sixteenth-​ Century England’, pp.  37–​60; Tilley, ‘Greek Studies in England in the Early Sixteenth Century’, pp. 221–​39, pp. 438–​456. 56 Ascham to Seton, Yorkshire, 1 January 1542, letter xi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 23.

76 Kennerley reasons of commentary and polemic, but also for prayer or consolation. When recalling advice that his father had given to him before his death, for instance, Ascham processed this memory through a quote from Gregory Nazianzen.57 To get a sense of why Ascham translated ‘Oecumenius’, it is helpful to look beyond these translations and to his wider work. Ascham’s treatise against the Mass, the Apologia pro Caena Dominica (‘Defence of the Lord’s Supper’) (1547), shows that he had a thought-​out approach to the use of the Fathers. In the Apologia Ascham made sparing use of patristic sources, adducing them only to support arguments from Scripture.58 This approach to patristic evidence can be contrasted with the use of the Church Fathers in another contemporary work on the Mass, Cuthbert Tunstall’s De veritate corporis et sanguinis domini nostri Iesu Christi in Eucharistia (‘On the Truth of the Body and Blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ, in the Eucharist’) (1551), which cited strings of patristic sources as stand-​alone witnesses to the truth of the Mass and transubstantiation.59 To observe that Ascham used the Church Fathers less often than Tunstall is not to suggest that his patristic scholarship was somehow of a lower quality. It is simply to state that Ascham was less invested than Tunstall in the concept that the Church Fathers were self-​ sufficient theological authorities. Instead, Ascham’s translations of ‘Oecumenius’ sprang from causes besides an interest in patristic authority, which are in turn illustrative of broader aspects of his character. Despite the health of his career under Mary i, Ascham appears to have been a committed Protestant.60 Yet his dedication of the scholia on Philemon to Seton reminds us that Ascham’s friends included many men who were conservative under Henry and Catholic under Elizabeth. Seton, whose opinion we have seen Ascham respected, died a Catholic exile at the English College in Rome in Elizabeth’s reign.61 Ascham may not have courted the friendship or favour of Seton because Seton was a conservative, but he still took pains to publicly maintain these relationships, and thought nothing amiss in building his career plans around them. Indeed, throughout his ‘troubled years’ between 1540 and 1544, Ascham most intensely courted the favour of conservative prelates such as Lee and Stephen Gardiner, and supported his suit with references from equally conservative contacts like Seton, Redman and Watson. If the cause of Ascham’s translation of the scholia on Philemon was to nurture his friendship with a known conservative and obtain their opinion on 57 Ascham to Cheke, [Cambridge], ca. April 1543, letter xxi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 48. 58 Nicholas, Roger Ascham’s ‘A Defence of the Lord’s Supper’, pp. 44–​47. 59 Cuthbert Tunstall, De veritate corporis et sanguinis domini nostri Iesu Christi in Eucharistia (Paris: Michaëlis Vascovani, 1554, ustc 151491). 60 Lucy Nicholas, ‘A Translation of Roger Ascham’s Apologia pro Caena Dominica and Contextual Analysis’, unpublished dissertation, University of London (2014), p. 21. 61 Glyn Redworth, ‘Seton, John’, (1508/9–1567)’, odnb.

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his work, his versions of the scholia on Titus had a different motivation. As Ascham wrote in his earliest extant letter to Lee: If you want to know in what matters and business your lordship can use my help (although it may not be suitable for weighty matters, since I scarcely dare to promise modest assistance), if your lordship wishes to pass down something to eternity, or to leave a testament of your great erudition to positerity, I can relieve your lordship of some bothers and labours in this matter, or in the comparison, re-​reading, and annotating of passages, or in summarising a book which it’s not possible for you to pore over due to business.62 ‘Patronage’ can be an unsatisfactory way of explaining what a giver hoped from gain from dedications or gifts. However, this letter reminds us that early modern scholars could have concrete plans for their presents. In his address to Lee, Ascham offered to translate something that would broadcast the Archbishop’s name, or to compare, re-​read and annotate books to lighten his workload. In other words, Ascham was offering to provide proof that he could serve as a capable secretary.63 The version of Titus was an ideal way to prove Ascham’s competence in this regard. A good translation of an orthodox Greek text would show that Ascham had the piety, linguistic knowledge and fine hand appropriate to an archbishop’s secretary. The concept of becoming a secretary seems to have preoccupied Ascham after his unhappy experience in the fellowship elections at St John’s in 1540 encouraged him to seek a life beyond the university. Once his overtures to Lee had hit the wrong note, Ascham wrote to Redman that ‘if the option were given to’ him, he would choose to accompany an ambassador abroad, fulfilling such secretarial tasks as reading texts and writing correspondence.64 Ascham’s translations of ‘Oecumenius’ therefore arose from his pursuit of friendship and patronage, rather than the confessional motivations that were more commonplace in Reformation patristic scholarship. Although these translations failed to secure the position that he desired, Ascham’s future plans were later fulfilled on all counts. He acted as secretary on Richard Morrison’s 62 63 64

Ascham to Lee, Yorkshire, not much before September 1541, letter ix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 19. The existence and duties of the scholar-​secretary are a key theme of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action”:  How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present, 129 (1990)’, pp. 30–​78, esp. pp. 33–​35. Ascham to Redman, [Cambridge], ca. April 1543, letter xx, Giles vol. i, pt. 1, p. 45.

78 Kennerley embassy to Europe in 1550–​1553, and then served in the same role to two successive queens.65 His ‘troubled years’ were over. Nonetheless, it is worth remarking that the text that kick-​started Ascham’s career, the Toxophilus, was finished shortly after the debacle over ‘Oecumenius’. Might Ascham’s disappointment in patristic studies have indirectly inspired the work that sealed his fame? 7

Patristic Scholarship after the ‘troubled years’

To date, the versions of ‘Oecumenius’ on Philemon and Titus are the only Latin translations of the Greek Church Fathers securely attributable to Ascham’s pen. Yet it may be possible to add another work to this corpus. ms Hatfield, Hatfield House Library, 268.1 is a small, scruffy manuscript, containing a Latin translation of the liturgy attributed to St James. This translation is based on one of the so-​called ‘western’ group of Greek manuscripts of this liturgy, most of which were copied in early sixteenth-​century England and France by a Greek scribe named Constantine Palaeocappa who added textual emendations meant to please his Catholic audience.66 The manuscript is helpfully signed off with a place and the date, ‘London, 8 December, 1555’, thereby preceding the first printed Latin translation of the liturgy of St James by five years.67 The interest of this manuscript grows further on the line below. There, the scribe has signed their initials ‘R. A’.68 Might this be Roger Ascham? Ascham was likely present in London when this manuscript was written. He was then at court as Latin secretary to Mary, and as recently as 8 September 1555 had sent a letter to Sturm from London.69 Nonetheless, the Hatfield House manuscript has little in common with Ascham’s other patristic translations. The script, for instance, bears no comparison with the majestic cursive that Ascham used in translations of ‘Oecumenius’. But this comparison can only be pushed so far. The format of a book is indicative of its purpose, and the Hatfield House manuscript is more like a workbook than the dedication copies that surviving manuscripts of Ascham’s

65 66 67 68 69

For Ascham’s participation in the Morrison embassy, see Tracey Sowerby, ch. 6 in this volume. B.-​Ch. Mercier, ‘La liturgie de saint Jacques. Edition critique du texte grec avec traduction latine’, Patrologia orientalis, 26 (1946), p. 147. ibid., p. 157. ms Hatfield, Hatfield House, 268.1, p. 71. Ascham to Sturm, London, 8 September 1555, letter cxci, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 443–​448.

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Latin ‘Oecumenius’ clearly are. In the same way, early modern scribes varied their style of writing dependent on the occasion. Ascham was no different in this regard, and the hand of the Hatfield House manuscript resembles the style used in more informal works like his Latin letters to friends much better than it does the formal hand of his dedication copies or official letters.70 The attribution of the translation of the Mass of St James to Ascham can only be speculative. Yet the intersection of time, place and script is such that more is needed to refute than to assert this conjecture. It appears, however, that Ascham did not work on this text alone. At several points in the margin of the manuscript, annotations have been added that are attributed by another hand to Tunstallus. This was undoubtedly a reference to Cuthbert Tunstall, a possible kinsman of Ascham’s who was present in London for the Parliament that sat there between 21 October 1555 and 9 December 1555.71 Tunstall’s emendations lead to the likely context for the creation of this manuscript. Since bishops like Tunstall were already present in London for Parliament, Cardinal Reginald Pole decided that the time was ripe to call a legatine synod, which met for the first time on 2 December 1555.72 The lack of comprehensive acta means that very little is known about the day-​to-​day business of the synod, but its discussions are hinted at in the legatine constitutions issued by Pole in 1556. There, we see that Pole and the bishops were concerned with issues relating to the nature and practice of the Mass.73 A translation of the liturgy of St James would have been singularly apposite in this context, offering proof of the Mass from the hand of the brother of Christ. Despite the appeal of this work to Catholics looking to defend the reintroduction of the Mass, it appears that the translation of the liturgy attributed to St James had little impact. It is nowhere mentioned in Pole’s constitutions, nor in sermons or polemical material about the Mass produced after December 1555.74 For present purposes, however, this manuscript is important not for its contemporary impact but its nature as an interesting new source for a murky period in Ascham’s life. Ascham’s biographer, Lawrence Ryan, observed 70 71 72 73 74

For instance, ms London, British Library, Lansdowne 3, 61r. Charles Sturge, Cuthbert Tunstal. Churchman, Scholar, Statesman, Administrator (London: Longmans, 1938), pp. 308–​309; for his possible family connection to Ascham, see Ryan, Ascham, p. 9 and p. 296, n. 5. My thanks to Lucy Nicholas for this reference. Richard Watson Dixon, History of the Church of England. Volume IV: Mary, A.D. 1553–​1558 (London: Routledge, 1891), pp. 455–​457. ‘The Legatine Constitutions of Cardinal Pole, 1556’, in The Anglican Canons 1529–​1947, ed. Gerald Bray (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1998), pp. 85–​87, 92–​93. For instance, Thomas Watson, Holsome and catholyke doctryne concerning the seven Sacramentes of Chrystes Church … (London: Robert Caly, 1558, ustc 505527).

80 Kennerley that very little evidence survives for Ascham’s intellectual interests in the period between 1554 to 1558.75 The Hatfield House manuscript might provide one such source, which shows Ascham working with conservative divines in the new world of Mary’s Catholic England. We have already seen above that scholars like Erasmus were expert at crafting their reputation for posterity by careful management of their literary remains. In the same way, perhaps it is no coincidence that so little evidence of Ascham’s intellectual interests exists from the period of Mary’s reign, where Protestants like Ascham were forced to make hard decisions about outward displays of their religious identity. Such texts as the Hatfield House manuscript may have found less sympathetic readers after the crisis had passed, justifying the veil of silence placed over this manuscript by Ascham and his literary heirs. Perhaps future investigation will uncover additional manuscript evidence of Ascham’s work under Mary that has been omitted from the printed corpus of his writings. 8

Conclusions

The evidence assembled in this chapter indicates the inescapability of the Church Fathers in the Tudor period. Even after his scolding by Lee, Ascham launched into new patristic projects, and interpreted the world through the writings of saints of the ancient church like Gregory Nazianzen. The importance of the Church Fathers for Tudor scholars, even for Protestant ones like Ascham, is undeniable. Conversely, another conclusion is the underestimated importance of Tudor scholars in the reception of the Fathers in the early modern period. Despite older research by Haaugaard, Tilley and Vessey, and more recent articles by Madeline McMahon and Andrew Taylor, Tudor scholars like Ascham are still peripheral figures in a story centred around continental protagonists.76 It is hoped therefore that future research will integrate into this 75 Ryan, Ascham, pp. 218–​219. 76 Haaugaard, ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship and Theology in Sixteenth-​ Century England’; Arthur Tilley, ‘Greek Studies in England in the Early Sixteenth Century’; Mark Vessey, ‘English Translations of the Latin Fathers, 1517–​1611’, in Irena Backus, ed., The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West:  From the Carolingians to the Maurists (Leiden:  Brill, 1997), vol. 2, pp.  775–​835; Madeline McMahon, ‘Feuding Fathers:  How John Jewel Read Erasmus’s Jerome on the Origenist Controversy’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 27 (2020), pp. 379–402; Andrew Taylor, ‘Humanist Philology and Reformation Controversy: John Christopherson’s Latin Translations of Philo Judaeus and Eusebius of Caesarea’, in Fred Schurink, ed., Tudor Translation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 79–​100.

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narrative figures such as John Morwen, George Etheredge and Laurence Humphrey, whose manuscripts, editions and translations of the Church Fathers still await scholarly attention. This chapter has sought to show what can be learned by contextualising the patristic scholarship of one such Tudor scholar. It has located Ascham’s version of ‘Oecumenius’s’ scholia on Philemon in the academic politics of St John’s College, Cambridge, and that of ‘Oecumenius’s’ commentary on Titus in his search for patronage from two English bishops. It has considered the impact of early printed editions on the reception of Ascham’s works, and suggested that a third text be added to his translations of the Church Fathers, a version of the liturgy of St James that had the immediate goal of bolstering his Catholic patrons’ arguments for the Mass. From these sources, we can glean fascinating details about Ascham as well as the period that he lived in. For Ascham, patristic scholarship was political and, ideally, profitable. He was not the first person to draw on the Church Fathers for these purposes. His study of the Fathers in pursuit of fame and fortune has its precedent in the careers of Italian humanists of the fifteenth century, such as Francesco Griffolini or Lelio Tifernate. Where Ascham was remarkable was in his use of patristic scholarship to further his political or economic contact with figures with whom he might have been expected to disagree on religious grounds, such as Lee or Tunstall.77 The mercenary nature of Ascham’s patristic scholarship need not diminish the value of his work, however. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that his versions of Oecumenius and the liturgy of St James were bold translations of texts that had never been rendered into Latin before, carried out in a nation where such translations were as yet rare, and informed by a well-​thought out approach to the interpretation of patristic texts. While assessment of Ascham’s career might vary, it is hoped that, in drawing attention to a neglected aspect of this life, this chapter has shown Ascham’s incontestable value as a witness to an ever-​growing variety of themes in the early Reformation. 77

For other examples, see however Jean-​Louis Quantin, ‘A European History of Patristic Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 27 (2020), pp. 300–331.

­c hapter 4

Ascham, Coins, Cambridge and Beyond Andrew Burnett Coin collecting began in the fourteenth century with Francesco Petrarch, and by the late Quattrocento, it had become well established in Italy. During this period, we know of several substantial collections belonging to members of the Italian elite such as the Barbo or the Medici. Soon, however, coin collecting was no longer the prerogative only of popes and princes. By 1563 Hubert Goltz was able to list an astonishing total of 977 collections which he claimed to have visited, in Italy, Germany, France and the Low Countries.1 Yet it did not occur to Goltz to include Britain, and probably rightly so. Numismatics got off to a slow and faltering start there. It was only at the beginning of the sixteenth century that we hear of collections owned by Cuthbert Tunstall and Thomas More. It seems likely that their interest was invigorated by their joint diplomatic mission to the Low Countries, where they became acquainted with Erasmus and, in turn, met his friend Jerome de Busleyden, whose coin collection they saw at his grand house at Mechelen. More was so impressed that he even wrote a poem about it: De nummis antiquis servatis apud Hieronymum Buslidianum (‘On the ancient coins kept by Jerome de Busleyden’).2 Thomas Elyot also had interest in ancient coins, and provided modern equivalent values in his Latin dictionary of 1538, perhaps deriving the idea from his friend More.3 Tunstall also responded to the visit to Mechelen, and the publication at the same time, in 1515, of Guillaume Budé’s De asse et partibus eius (‘On the As and its Parts’) (a text that drew widespread praise all over Europe) prompted him to include a short excerpt from Budé’s work in Many thanks for their help to: Ceri Law, Gloria Mora, Lucy Nicholas, Keith Rutter, Richard Simpson, Tracy Sowerby and Tim Wilks. 1 Hubert Goltz, C. Julius Caesar sive historiae Imperatorum Caesarumque Romanorum (­Bruges: H. Goltzius, 1563, ustc 401143), with C. E. Dekesel, Hubertus Goltzius: The Father of Ancient Numismatics (Ghent: Bibliotheca Numismatica Siliciana, 1988), pp. 5–​7. 2 Clarence H. Miller, Leicester Bradner, Charles A. Lynch and Revilo P. Oliver (eds.), The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of Sir Thomas More, vol. 3.2 The Latin Poems (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 262–​263, no. 250. 3 Thomas Elyot, The Dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot, Knyght (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1538, ustc 502989). Elyot also knew Roger Ascham: see Ryan, Ascham, pp. 61–​62. But the absence of any mention of him by either Ascham or Smith suggests that their numismatic paths did not cross.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_006

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his own book on arithmetic of 1522.4 But this all came to an end. In Tunstall’s case, he ‘thought it right to put far away all profane writings’ and, when he was appointed Bishop of London in 1522, concentrated on theological and religious matters;5 while for More, a man of greater principle than Tunstall, his interest was cut off, with his head, in 1535. Until recently, mid-​sixteenth-​century Britain seemed something of a numismatic desert. Almost nothing was known about the collection or study of coins until the revival of the subject in around 1600 by William Camden and Robert Cotton as part of their drive to create a new history for Britain. In the wake of the jettisoning of the mythical history of Britain, typified by the writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth, new sources of information had to be found for writing the early history of Britain, and they included coins. Before them, we had heard of only isolated figures, one of whom was Roger Ascham, whose interest in coins can be documented mostly from his letters.6 In this chapter I  first look at what we can glean from these letters about Ascham and his collection and interests, and then show how his activity was not so isolated; indeed, it can be situated in a wider Cambridge, British and European context. 1

Ascham and Coins

Graham Pollard has described Ascham as ‘a keen student and collector of Roman coins’.7 However, it is not easy to document his interest, and this aspect of his life has never attracted much attention; it receives, for example, only a few passing mentions in Lawrence Ryan’s biography.8 The evidence comes from Ascham’s own writings, and especially from his letters, eight of which refer to coins. All these letters date between 1550 and 1554, the majority written during 4 Guillaume Budé, De asse et partibus eius (Paris: Badius, 1514, ustc 183526); Cuthbert Tunstall, De arte supputandi (London: Richard Pynson, 1522, ustc 501709), sigs. [z4]–​&3. 5 Tunstall, De arte supputandi, sig. [aiii]. 6 Ascham’s letters are cited from Giles, with translations from Hatch and Vos. 7 J. G. Pollard, ‘England and the Italian Medal’, in Edward Chaney and Peter Mack, eds., England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990, repr. 1994), pp. 191–​202. Ascham’s interest was discussed by Tim Wilks, in a still unpublished paper given in 2013 at the conference held to accompany the exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery to mark the 500th anniversary in 2012 of the death of Henry, Prince of Wales: see his remarks in Catharine MacLeod, The Lost Prince. The Life and Death of Henry Stuart (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2012), pp. 118–​139. 8 Ryan, Ascham, pp. 18, 118, 125, 127, 150 and 197.

84 Burnett Ascham’s time abroad, when he was secretary to Richard Morison on his embassy to the imperial court.9 These letters, though few in number, fall into different categories, each of which tells us something different about Ascham and his interest in coins.10 The first category is that of the ‘travelogue’, the factual report, written in English, of his activities in Germany during 1551, and addressed to his friends Edward Raven and William Ireland back home in Cambridge.11 Ascham gives a narrative account of all the things he had seen on his travels. We learn how ‘in every town I came in, as leisure would serve, I went in to see all abbeys, friaries, churches, libraries, stationers for books, goldsmiths for old coins’,12 and he made a similar remark to in a letter to John Cheke the year before.13 He first got lucky, he tells us, in Maastricht, and, at various stops between there and Augsburg, he saw a variety of coins, some of which he acquired. They were mostly Roman, both Republican and Imperial, including some of the later Roman empire (of the emperors Diocletian and Maximian). He also saw two Greek coins. He says he bought one of King Pyrrhus which depicted ‘a strange old face, with long hair’ (presumably the bearded head of Zeus) and ‘on the other side, in Greek ΠΥΡΡΟΥ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΟΣ’ [sic] (‘of King Pyrrhus’)’ (­figure 4.1).14 He goes on to mention that he also saw another one, a coin of Philip of Macedon.15 This is something of a landmark for the history of coin collecting in England, since the coin of Pyrrhus is the first Greek

9 10 11 12 13 14

15

On this see Tracey Sowerby, ch. 6 in this volume. The limit on length for this volume precluded the inclusion of the relevant extracts (and translations) of the letters, and a detailed commentary on their numismatic content. I hope to return to them on another occasion. Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551 and Ascham to Raven and Ireland, Augsburg, 17 November 1551: letters cxvi and cxxxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​271 and 315–​318. Letter cxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 247. ‘Monasteries, temples, libraries, old books and coins: when I return home, I shall give you the most elegant and ancient ones’. Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 11 November 1550, letter cviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 216–​222, at p. 217. Ascham to Raven and Ireland, Augsburg, 17 November 1551, letter cxxxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p.  318. A  coin of Pyrrhus, King of Epirus (297–​272 bc), minted at Locri in southern Italy during Pyrrhus’s invasion. See P. Gardner and R. S. Poole (eds.), A Catalogue of the Greek Coins in the British Museum: Thessaly to Aetolia (London: British Museum, 1883), p. 111, no. 8, The inscription on the coin is not given quite correctly, as it would have had ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ. Ibid., ‘Mr REM showed me also a coin, with a rude face in silver. thick, and about it, in Greek, ΦΙΛΙΠΠΟΥ’.

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Figure 4.1  ‘I bought also at Augusta, a strange old face, with long hair; on the other side, in Greek ΠΥΡΡΟΥ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΟΣ’: Letter 134. Silver tetradrachm of Pyrrhus, King of Epirus (306–​272 bc), minted at Locri, during his expedition to southern Italy. Head of Zeus, with oak wreath/​Dione seated left with sceptre. bmc 6 source: © freeman and sear ii, 2011, lot 56. 30mm

coin that we can document as being acquired by an Englishman. Ascham’s interest in non-​Roman coins extended back to an even earlier period of history: in his Toxophilus of 1545 he had already described Persian darics and sigloi, which were made in the fifth and fourth centuries bc. His interest in archery is well known, but, even so, his awareness of these coins at such an early date is remarkable: … the coyne of the Persians, both gold & silver, had the Armes of Persie upon it, as is customably used in other realmes, and that was bow and arowes; by which feate they declared, how moch they set by them.16 Most of the coins he mentions were Roman, both Republican and Imperial. From the details Ascham gives in the letters, we can now see that some of the coins he acquired were not authentic, such as the gold Jewish coin he 16

Roger Ascham, Toxophilus, the schole of shootinge conteyned in two bookes (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1545, ustc 503581), Book i, fol. 31r. I owe to Keith Rutter the suggestion that this is probably derived from Plutarch, Agesilaus 15.6, where Plutarch has Agesilaus say that ‘Persian coins were stamped with the figure of an archer’. Ascham is more likely to have known Plutarch than to have owned a specimen of his own and known what it was; indeed, the marginal note refers to the passage of Plutarch.

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Figure 4.2  ‘The fourth a goodly face, and about it M. Brutus Imp.; on the other side, two daggers, and in the midst a thing like a bell, having written underneath, Fide Martis’: Letter 134. Silver denarius of M. Brutus, ca. 42 bc. rrc 508/​3 source: © numismatica ars classica 62, 2011, lot 2005. 19mm

discusses.17 But this is not surprising since we know forgery was rife at the time, and detection had not by then yet progressed very far. Of particular interest is Ascham’s description of, and failure to recognise, an example of one the most famous coins of antiquity, that of Brutus celebrating his liberation of Rome following the assassination Julius Caesar on the Ides of March 44 bce (­figure 4.2).18 Ascham describes it thus: the fourth a goodly face, and about it M. Brutus Imp.; on the other side, two daggers, and in the midst a thing like a bell, having written underneath, Fide Martis.19 We must, of course, avoid anachronistic criticism. The ‘Ides of March’ (eid mar), misread by Ascham as fide martis, were perhaps less well-​known 50 years before Shakespeare’s play. On the other hand, Ascham should surely have known about them from Plutarch’s Caesar and Brutus. He could also have 17 18 19

‘A fine ancient Hebrew gold coin, with very fine Hebrew lettering’:  Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 11 November 1550, letter cviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 218. There are no authentic ancient gold Jewish coins. Michael H.  Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1974), no. 508/​3. Ascham to Raven and Ireland, from Augsburg, 17 November 1551, letter cxxxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 315–​318, at pp. 317–​318.

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read a description of the coin in the text of Cassius Dio, a passage which is one of very few from antiquity to describe a coin.20 He would then have realised that the ‘thing like a bell’ was actually a pilleus, or cap of liberty. The type had first been explained in print by Angelo Poliziano in 1489,21 and was already well-​known in continental Europe, being copied on medals made in Italy in 1537 and France in 1552.22 The second category identifiable in Ascham’s letters is the exchange of coins in letters with academic colleagues, namely, with Johannes Sturm and Cheke.23 Such exchange of coins, or impressions of coins, was an established practice between scholars since at least the time of Erasmus. Ascham sent Sturm a coin of Caesar to see if Sturm too was fascinated ‘by this monument of antiquity’, but, from Sturm’s rather ungrateful reply, it seems that he was not, though of course he expresses his thanks.24 To Cheke Ascham was more generous, sending him two Republican coins (one of Caesar) and also a gold coin of Antoninus Pius.25 The third category is the elaborate presentation letter, in the tradition of presenting a coin with a moral lesson to a ruler. The topos goes back to Petrarch’s presentation of some coins depicting Roman emperors to Charles iv in 1354, urging him ‘to imitate and admire his predecessors’.26 We do not know if Ascham knew this story, but we have two examples of how he acted in a 20 21 22 23

24

25 26

Dio 47.25.3:  ‘Brutus did these things, and on the coins, which were being minted, he stamped his own image and a pilleus and two daggers, showing by this and by the inscription that he and Cassius had liberated the fatherland’. (The translation is mine). Angelo Poliziano, Miscellaneorum Centuria Prima (Firenze:  Antonio Miscomini, 1489), cap. 70. Vera-​Simone Schulz, ‘Vom Tyrannenmörder zum Souverän’, in U.  Peter and B.  Weisser, eds., Translatio Nummorum. Römische Kaiser in der Renaissance (Cyriacus. Studien zur Rezeption der Antike 3, Mainz: Rutzen, 2013), pp. 327–​344. See Ascham to Johannes Sturm, Cambridge, 4 April 1550; Sturm to Ascham, from Strasbourg, 5 September 1550; and Ascham to Cheke, from Brussels, 7 July 1553: letters xcix, cii and cl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 181–​192; vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 195–​207 and 362–​367. On these relationships, see John McDiarmid, ch. 5; Micha Lazarus, ch. 11 in this volume for Cheke; and Lucy Nicholas, ch. 7 in this volume for Sturm. Ascham to Sturm, Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. I, pt. 1, pp. 181–193, at p. 193. (‘Although I had heard before from many people about your King and his sister, I took more pleasure in learning their glories than in receiving Caius Caesar, whom I had not previously seen in this way upon coins’); Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg, 5 September 1550, letter cii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p.  207. On this exchange, see R.  McGregor, ‘Making Friends with Elizabeth in the Letters of Roger Ascham’, in James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, eds., Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–​1690 (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 151–​166, at pp. 158–​159. Augsburg, 11 November, 1550, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 217. Cheke’s reply is not extant. Francesco Petrarch, Rerum Familiarium Book xix.3:  Ugo Dotti, ed., Pétrarque, Lettres familières, Vol. v, Livres XVI–​XIX (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2005), pp. 323–​337, at p. 331.

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Figure 4.3  ‘The man of his gentilness gave me an Augustus, having on one side Divus Augustus Pater, and on the other Providentia’: Letter 116. Copper as in the name of the Deified Augustus, minted by Tiberius (14–​37 ce), showing an altar of Providentia (‘foresight’). bmc 146 source: © bertolami fine arts, auction 15, 2015, lot 514. 27mm

similar way, though perhaps rather less tastefully. The first letter (which was never sent in the full form in which he originally drafted it)27 was for William Cecil, and the other for Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. Cecil was originally to have been sent two coins: ‘a bronze god’ and ‘a golden devil’ (hunc aereum deum … illum aureum diabolum). Ascham passes quickly over the gold coin, perhaps of the Roman emperor Tiberius or Nero, but he launches into an elaborate story about the bronze Augustus (­figure 4.3), reporting a discussion he had had with Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1504–​1575), a well-​known Spanish diplomat, historian, poet and collector.28 The story allows him to make a flattering, indeed sycophantic, comparison of Cecil with the emperor Augustus and with King Edward vi.29 The letter is so contrived that one wonders if he may have invented the story, or at least part 27

28

29

I had assumed that this was because Ascham thought better of the coin ‘offer’; but I learnt at the Ascham conference (held in Cambridge in 2016) that Edward vi died on the day before Ascham wrote this letter; so presumably when he found out he realized the comparison with Edward was inappropriate and omitted it out of sensitivity. R. Foulché-​Delbosc, ‘Un point contesté de la vie de don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’, Revue Hispanique 2 (1895), pp.  208–​303, at pp.  297–​298 for ‘monedas antiguas’; F.  J. Sánchez Cantón, Inventarios Reales. Bienes muebles que pertenecieron a Felipe II, vol. 2 (Archivo Documental Español, vol. xi, Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1956–​1959). pp. 166–​ 171, nos. 3498–​3514, and p. 172, nos. 3539–​3541. Many thanks to G. Mora for the references. Ascham to Cecil, Brussels, 7 July 1553, letter cxlix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 360–​362.

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Figure 4.4  Altera parte insculpta est, optima post hominum memoriam femina helena augusta; altera parte, dulcissima felicissimae principis, et felicissimorum temporum vox, Securitas Reipublicae (‘Stamped on one side is the best woman in the memory of mankind, Helena Augusta; on the other side is the sweetest motto of the happiest princess from the happiest of times: The Safety of the State’): Letter clxv. Gold solidus of the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great (306–337 AD), about 325 AD. The reverse is Securitas Reipublicae [‘the Safety of the State’]. SOURCE © Numismatica Ars Classica 38, 2007, lot 236. 20mm.

of it. Our view of Ascham’s generosity is also tempered by the information he gives us elsewhere that he had actually been given the coin by a goldsmith in Esslingen.30 The coin is anyway common, and that it should have been given to him by a goldsmith does not speak highly of its value. The letter to Bishop Gardiner follows the same formula as the letter to Cecil, presumably self-​consciously.31 Ascham offers Gardiner a gold coin of the empress Helena, the mother of Constantine and the finder of the true cross (­figure 4.4). This is a puzzling choice, creating a bizarre comparison between a male bishop and a female empress. A coin of Constantine might seem a more natural gift. In the letter he also makes what seems to be a further comparison between the male bishop and, this time, the female Queen Mary, to whom he says he had originally thought of presenting the coin, repeating the topos from the other letter when he had told Cecil that the Augustan coin was worthy of King Edward. Once again, our attitude to this transaction is coloured by

30 31

Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 11 November 1550, letter cviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 216–​222, at p. 218. Ascham to Gardiner, London, 1 January 1554, letter clxv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 399–​402.

90 Burnett the considerations that the coin may not have been genuine, and that, again, Ascham tells us that it had been given to him.32 However, it seems that he had no qualms about sending such a letter. There is no record of Gardiner’s reaction. Later in 1554, on 19 May, Ascham sent Francis Alan, Gardiner’s Secretary, a copy of Iacopo de Strada’s brand new book on coins, with an elaborate dedicatory letter.33 The book and letter were recently found by Lucy Nicholas in the library of Lichfield Cathedral.34 The letter was known from Edward Grant’s edition of Ascham’s letters (no date given),35 and from the translation given by Abraham Fleming in his Panoplie of Epistles,36 but not with the context of Strada’s book or the correct date: Londini. Decimo nono Maii. mdliiii (namely, London, 19 May 1554).37 We should see Ascham’s gift of the book to Alan in the same light, as part of his ‘relationship management’ of Bishop Gardiner. Their reaction to his overtures seems not to have been unfavourable, since it 32

33 34 35

36

37

Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, letter cvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​81, at p. 261: ‘The man [a goldsmith in Esslingen] of his gentilness gave me an Augustus, having on one side Divus Augustus Pater, and on the other Providentia’. Gold coins of Helena are, and were, very rare, and I suspect this may have been a gilded specimen of the more common bronze pieces with the same inscriptions and designs. Ascham knew about gilding silver coins: Ascham, Toxophilus, Book i, fol. 19v. Iacopo de Strada, Epitome Thesauri Antiquitatum, hoc est, IMPP. Rom. Orientalium et Occidentalium Iconum, ex antiquis numismatibus quam fidelissime deliniatarum (Lyon: Jacobus de Strada and Thomas Guerinus, 1553, ustc 151288). I am very grateful to her for drawing it to my attention. Edward Grant (ed.), Disertissimi viri Rogeri Aschami … familiarium epistolarum libri tres (London: Francis Coldock, 1576, ustc 508129), Book iii, no. 14, fols. 134v–​136r.; letter cxxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 290–​292 (here dated to 1551). The original shows that Giles’s text has some minor mistakes or omissions. Abraham Fleming, Panoplie of Epistles (London:  Ralph Newbery, 1576, ustc 508168), pp. 440–​444. Fleming comments: ‘A worthie and learned epistle, deseruing to be read, and to be borne in remembraunce, written by M.  R. Aschame, to a Gentleman of his acquaintance:  wherein firste he sheweth that there be three thinges, wherein the life and estate of man consisteth: to whiche three (after he hath spoken his minde accordingly, as he thought good vpon circumstances) he ioyneth two more, no lesse necessarie, then the three first, which he declared. The occasion of writing this Epistle, was a booke which he made and sent to M. F. Alane. The specialties whereof the whole letter (from the beginning to the ending) doth treate, are these: Beautie, Richesse, Dignitie, Learning, and Freendeshippe. In this Epistle, he sheweth fine inuention, proper disposition, and sweete eloquence’. There is another translation in Hatch (dating it to Autumn 1553). Lichfield Cathedral Library, R49A. The book is signed on the title page by a later owner ‘E. (or possibly F.) Hartford’. This might be Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford (1539–​ 1621), the grandfather of William, 2nd Duke of Somerset (1588–​1660), whose wife Frances, Duchess of Somerset, gave his books to the library in 1673: another volume in the same library has one of his bindings.

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was Gardiner who was instrumental in securing Ascham his position as Mary’s Latin secretary, and thereby getting him a much-​needed salary. Ascham was appointed on 7 May 1554, and his letter is likely an elegant ‘thank you’, with a valuable gift, the very latest publication to have come out. Whether or not Alan was interested in coins, the implied comparison of Alan with Roman emperors is in the same vein as his ‘warming’ gift of the gold coin to Gardiner, a few months earlier.38 Passing on gifts from others may seem to us an ungenerous activity, but probably reflects Ascham’s chronic shortage of money. He probably could not afford to buy many coins, and this is, no doubt, the reason why it seems to be the same few coins that recirculate, as it were, in the letters. He obviously loved coins, but it seems unlikely that he owned many. We are also lucky that in the course of these letters he explains, and indeed defends, his love of coins. He tells Sturm that they evoke antiquity for him: Because I am myself so fascinated by these relics of antiquity, I wanted to send this coin to you, and shall send you more later if I learn that you are delighted by this memento of ancient times and of my old friendship.39 In his affected letter to Gardiner, he repeats his view of the importance of coins as reliable evidence of the past, and then proceeds to make a more romantic characterisation of them as metaphors for permanence in a changing world: I am delighted by these ancient artefacts, not only because they give a reliable record of antiquity, but because they come closest to the nature of eternity itself; for coins alone, especially gold ones, cannot be ruined by long periods of time, although time consumes everything else.40 He is obviously slightly embarrassed by his love of numismatics (as we all are today), and so he tries to hide behind the enthusiasms of a friend, writing that: ‘Some of you will jest at my diligence in seeking thus old monuments: but

38

39 40

The ‘implicit’ comparison is virtually explicit in the letter: ‘Indeed, how may a greater honour and dignity be placed before you, whether for imitation or for admiration than that of all the Caesars and the Augustuses’, trans. Lucy Nicholas. For the date, see Rosemary O’Day, ‘Ascham, Roger (1514/​15–​1568)’, odnb. Ascham to Sturm, Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 181–​192, at p. 193. Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg, 5 September 1550, letter cl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 362–​367, at p. 366.

92 Burnett I do it for the remembrance veteris et amici et praeceptoris nostri (‘our old friend and teacher’) Mr pember, whom I do not forget’.41 From these letters Ascham emerges as an enthusiastic numismatist, but one who probably had only a small collection of his own. He seems to know Roman Republican and Imperial coins well, despite his lapse with the Ides of March, and he claims a knowledge of the whole Roman Imperial period ‘down to the Gothic barbarism’, by which he seems to mean until the Gothic invasions of the fifth century AD.42 His awareness of Greek and Persian coins is also remarkable for the time. It is not clear how he came to acquire his numismatic knowledge, since we do not know if he had any coin books (apart from the copy of de Strada which he gave to Francis Alan).43 In any case, however, there was little to look at: the main period for the publication of important coin books was the 1550s.44 Ascham’s life also reveals a series of near misses with famous numismatists –​ he went to Mechelen, but there is no mention of Busleyden, or his coins or house; he went to Bruges, but there is no mention of Goltz; he went to Augsburg, but there is no mention of Adolphus Occo.45 But the famous books of the latter two had not by then been published, so they may have been comparatively little known. If Ascham had met men such as Busleyden, Goltz and Occo, then his interest in and knowledge of coins would surely have been even greater. 2

Cambridge

It is in Ascham’s base, Cambridge, that we have most evidence for an interest in coins in the sixteenth century. This evidence has been discussed in the recent edition of Thomas Smith’s On the Wages of the Roman Footsoldier (owrf).46 Smith’s 41 42 43

44 45 46

Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, letter cxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt.2, pp. 243–​271, at p. 261. Ascham to Sturm, Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i. pt. 1, pp. 181–​192, at p. 193. Ascham knew ‘that excellent learned man’ Budé, and said in The Scholemaster (Giles, vol. iii, pp. 92 and 222) that he wrote ‘roughly and obscurly’, but he is referring to Guillaume Budé, Commentarii linguae Graecae (Paris: Badius, 1529, ustc 146015), and does not mention his De asse et partibus eius. C. E. Dekesel, Bibliography of 17h Century Numismatic Books (London: Spink, 2003), p. xl, confirming a proposition of F. Haskell. Occo was a doctor in Augsburg who published Imperatorum. Romanorum Numismata (Antwerp: Plantin, 1579, USTC 401781), the standard handbook for Roman coins for many years. Andrew Burnett, Richard Simpson, and Deborah Thorpe, Roman Coins, Money, and Society in Elizabethan England. Sir Thomas Smith’s On the Wages of the Roman Footsoldier

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work, which was never published, was finalised in ca. 1562, and is the first treatment of Roman coins and money to have been written in Britain. From some clues in it, together with Ascham’s letters and one or two other sources, we can now identify what has been called the ‘Cambridge Numismatic Club –​16th century’.47 From owrf, we learn that Smith himself was an eager collector, information that was not previously known. We learn that he had a collection of Roman Republican and Imperial coins, perhaps quite a large one of several hundred pieces, some of which he describes in great detail.48 He was principally interested in two things: the pay of the Roman soldier (a matter that remains controversial even today) and the issue of the equivalents in monetary value of Roman and contemporary English coins (the sort of exercise that had, since the time of Budé, occupied many scholars, such as Tunstall and Elyot in England). Although his book was completed in ca. 1562, Smith’s interest was a long-​ standing one, possibly stretching as far back as the 1520s (Smith went to Cambridge in 1525, aged 11): When I  was a yonge man and scholler in Cambridge of curiositie and desire to knowe the value of olde coyne in comparison to ours I travailed to gette allwaies as I coulde into my handes such olde auncient coines as neither semed clipped nor washed and had their inscription faire.49 owrf was dedicated to Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520/​1–​1598), the great statesman of Elizabethan England. We learn from owrf that Cecil too had a good collection: ‘I thincke ye be not without a good nomber of these auncient coines of all sortes that at your pleasure you maie trie this to be true that I saie’.50 Cecil thus probably had a substantial collection of coins,51 and we learn from Smith of two further Cambridge collectors:52 I remember D. Redman and Mr Pember had greate store of those auncient coines both in silver brasse and gold when I was in Cambridge which you

47 48 49 50 51 52

(New York: American Numismatic Society, 2017). The publication includes an up-​to-​date biography of Smith’s life. Ibid., pp. 133–​137. His coins, together with some other possessions, were valued at £200 on his death, a sum that suggests a total quantity of upwards of one thousand. owrf, ch. 15, p. 176. Ibid., p. 178. The evidence is assembled by Burnett, Simpson and Thorpe, Sir Thomas Smith’s On the Wages of the Roman Footsoldier, pp. 133–​134. For the evidence for this and the two next paragraphs see discussion in ibid., pp. 134–​137.

94 Burnett have seene and which it were pitie but thei should remaine in some mans handes who hath a love to learninge.53 Smith is here referring to John Redman (1499–​1551), the theologian and fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and, from 1546, the first master of Trinity College, Cambridge. ‘Mr Pember’ (also referred to above) was, of course, Ascham’s tutor and good friend Robert Pember (d. 1560), a fellow of St John’s and later of Trinity. As Smith says, they both ‘had greate store of those auncient coines both in silver brasse and gold’. This group of Cambridge ‘coin friends’ included several other scholars: John Cheke (1514–​1557); Andrew Perne (ca. 1519–​1589), to whom Pember left ‘all my brasse antyckes’; William Fulke (1536/​7–​1589), whose collection was later bought for Henry, Prince of Wales; John Caius (1510–​1573); and perhaps Thomas Chaloner (1521–​1565). From such evidence we can trace a network of as many as nine or ten Cambridge men at the time who either collected coins or were interested in them: 1. William Cecil, St John’s 2. Thomas Smith, Queens’ 3. Robert Pember, St John’s 4. John Redman, St John’s; later master of Trinity 5. Roger Ascham, St John’s 6. Andrew Perne, St John’s 7. William Fulke, St John’s 8. John Cheke, St John’s 9. Thomas Chaloner, possibly at St John’s 10. John Caius, Gonville and Caius Apart from Smith, and Caius, they are all connected with St John’s. Why should this be so? Chance? Or something else? Was an interest in coins a shared part of the intellectual life of the community at St John’s? Was Redman the ring-​ leader, deriving his enthusiasm from Tunstall, to whose niece he was married? Or was it Pember, as his interest is the earliest we know of, and he was rather older than most of the others? 3

Beyond Cambridge and to the Continent

Ascham’s numismatic web spread wider, beyond Cambridge. Several members of the ‘Cambridge Numismatic Club’, as it has recently been called, left 53

owrf, ch. 15, p. 178.

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Cambridge for careers in politics and court (Cecil, Smith, Cheke, Chaloner and Ascham himself). Smith and, above all, Cecil were the most powerful, and their interest in numismatics may have been shared by others in such political circles. One may be Richard Morison (ca. 1513–​1556), Ascham’s principal on the embassy to the imperial court, since he is probably the ‘Richardus Morosinius, Anglus’, who is mentioned as a collector by Goltz in his great list of 1563. This Cambridge group’s interest in coins was not unique in Tudor England. Perhaps surprisingly Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1532/​3–​1588) may also have been interested in coins. He certainly knew Smith’s work, since he was one of the people to whom Smith had sent a copy of owrf.54 Even Queen Elizabeth herself had a coin collection, inherited from her father, although she does not seem to have been very interested in it, despite having had Ascham as a tutor.55 In Oxford, we know that John Claymond (1467/​8–​1538), the first President of Corpus Christi College, had some interest in Roman coins, and in his massive (unpublished) commentary to Pliny’s Natural History, he made a number of references to Budé’s De asse.56 We also hear there of a certain Edward Beaumont of Oxford, who made provision for ‘the other halfe of his antiquities, being certain strange coynes in silver’ in his will of 1552.57 A Dutch scholar resident in London, Emanuel van Meteren (1535–​1612), had a collection of coins in London, and it is likely Richard Garth (fl. 1554–​1593) and the painter Lucas van Heere (1534–​1584) (if he has been correctly identified) also did. So too did the antiquarians William Harrison (1535–​1593) certainly, Henry Twyne (ca. 1505–​1581) and Daniel Rogers (ca. 1538–​1591) probably, living in Essex, Canterbury and London respectively, though they were perhaps not active till the 1570s.58 54 55 56 57

58

Letter from Thomas Smith to William Cecil, 22 April 1576: Burnett, Simpson and Thorpe, Sir Thomas Smith’s On the Wages of the Roman Footsoldier, pp. 143–​144. Andrew Burnett, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Twelve Caesars’, in F.  de Callataӱ, ed., Numismatic antiquarianism through correspondence (16th-18th c.) (New  York, American Numismatic Society, forthcoming). Jonathan Woolfson, ‘John Claymond, Pliny the Elder, and the Early History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford’, English Historical Review, 112.448 (1997), pp. 882–​903, at pp. 892–​893. J. Grafton Milne, ‘A sixteenth-​century Oxford collector’, Oxoniensia, 4 (1939), p.  199:  ‘he bequeathed to Ser Bridges the other halfe of his antiquities, being certain strange coynes in silver’. Milne interpreted them as ‘foreign’ coins, or ‘contemporary European’ (‘Oxford Coin-​ collectors of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Oxoniensia, 14 (1949), pp. 53–​62, at p. 53). The other half of his collection went to the antiquarian and Anglo-​Saxon scholar Laurence Nowell, a protégé of Burghley’s (see Retha M. Warnicke, ‘Nowell, Laurence (1530–​ ca. 1570)’, odnb). Milne suggested that Bridges may have been another student at Oxford; ‘Bridges’ and ‘Brydges’ are common names at the time, even among the knighted. They will all be the subject of a future study.

96 Burnett Ascham’s travels in the Low Countries and Germany with Richard Morison demonstrate that the coin collectors did not live in an English silo. The numismatic links via men like van Meteren and van Heere also brought English numismatists into contact with the Low Countries, that most fertile of all contemporary countries for the collecting and study of coins. But there were also visits to England by distinguished collectors and scholars, although the evidence is frustratingly scanty. The young Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, whose meeting with Ascham has already been discussed, was in England for a time in 1537–​1538, and then again in 1553 and 1558.59 But we do not know if he had any contact with any Englishmen who were, like him, interested in coins. The most intriguing such visit took place in 1555, when the great scholar and numismatist Antonio Agustín came to England. He had been sent by the Pope to congratulate Mary on her marriage to Philip and for helping England return to the true religion. Agustín had spent most of his early life in Rome, working on Roman and canon law, inscriptions and latterly coins. His widely admired Dialogos de Medallas, Inscriciones y otras antiguedades (‘Dialogues on Coins, Inscriptions and other Antiquities’) was published in 1587, just after his death. But he was interested in coins much earlier, and the ‘1550s is a period, as the letters [of Agustín] show, of increasing interest in the iconographic evidence provided by coins and indeed reliefs’.60 Agustín was accompanied by Jean Matal (or Metellus), another fine scholar,61 and the two of them arrived in March. The Papal gifts were presented to the King and Queen at the end of the month. They stayed at Lambeth Palace, then the home of the Archbishop Cardinal Pole, who had organised the presentation ceremony and who mentions them several times in his letters.62 They stayed until the end of the year: Matal says 59

60

61

62

Ángel González Palencia and Eugenio Mele, Vida y obras de Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (3  vols., Madrid:  Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan. 1941–​1943). The English embassy is described in vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 71–​86; E. Spivakovsky, Son of the Alhambra: Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, 1504–​1575 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), pp. 60–​66. For Mendoza’s later visits in 1553, in connection with the proposed marriage of Philip and Mary, and again briefly in 1558, see Spivakovsky, Son of Alhambra, pp. 324–325, 337–339). Michael H. Crawford, ‘Introduction’ in Michael H. Crawford, ed., Antonio Agustín between Renaissance and Counter-​Reform (London:  Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts xxiv, 1993), p. 3. For the letters, see Antonio Agustín, Epistolario de Antonio Agustín, ed. Cándido Flores Sellés (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1980). For the visit, see R. Truman, ‘Jean Matal and his relations with Antonio Agustín, Jerónimo Osório da Fonseca and Pedro Ximenes’, in Crawford, Agustín between Renaissance and Counter-​Reform, pp.  247–​263, at pp.  251–​254; Peter Arnold Heuser, Jean Matal: Humanistischer Jurist und europäischer Friedensdenker (um 1517–​1597) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), pp. 130–​148 (‘Die Englandreise von 1555 als biographische Zäsur’). On Pole’s manuscript ‘Sopra la Rosa et la Spada et il Capello’, see Thomas F. Mayer, A reluctant author:  Cardinal Pole and his manuscripts (Philadelphia:  American Philosophical

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for eight months, but Agustín seems to have left in September or October, returning to Rome via Brussels. Frustratingly, we have almost no information about what they did for the rest of the visit, after the royal presentation.63 Given their interests, one is bound to speculate that they made contact with other scholars. But the only English scholar whom we know had contact with either of them was Ascham.64 Did they talk about coins? We don’t know, but surely it seems possible. Ascham admired Matal greatly, and Matal continued to correspond with him for many years thereafter.65 Matal may not, as far as we know, have been interested in coins, but his companion certainly was, and if either he or Agustín met any of the Englishmen with a similar interest in Cambridge one would have expected that Smith would have mentioned him. Of course, they were out of favour during the reign of Mary, but it would still seem be surprising if Agustín and Matal had not met any other humanist English scholars, or visited Oxford and Cambridge, as they spent so long in the country. 4

Conclusion

What are we to make of all this? Firstly, the evidence outlined above suggests that Britain was less of a numismatic desert than has been previously thought. But this should perhaps not surprise so much. Numismatics was starting to become fashionable, even in Britain. A few years after the correspondence discussed in this chapter, Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (‘The Courtier’) (1561), a book much admired by Ascham,66 set out for the English reader how ‘it is a helpe to him [the courtier] to iudge of the excellencye

Society, 1999), pp. 80–​81, no. 13. Agustín or Matal are mentioned briefly in Pole’s letters, as mentioned in the calendar of Pole’s letters by Thomas F. Mayer, The Correspondence of Reginald Pole (4 vols., Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002–​2008), vol. ii, no. 1018 (December 1554); vol. iii, nos. 1038, 1046, 1120, 1152, 1172, 1182, 1197, 1289, 1345, 1436 (January–​November 1555). 63 The fullest modern account I have found of the visit is Henry Kamen, ‘Antonio Agusti y la presencia española en Inglaterra, 1555’, Jornades d’Història: Antoni Agustín i el seu temps (1517–​1586), vol. i (Tarragona:  Hemeroteca Caixa de Tarragona, etc., 1986), pp.  151–​161. Kamen points out how little the sources tell us. 64 Ryan, Ascham, p. 219. 65 Matal is the ‘travelling companion and counsellor’ to Agustín; he is ‘a very learned man … as erudite a man as he was a really keen friend of you and me’. Ascham to Sturm, Greenwich, 14 September 1555, letter cxci, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 443–​448, at p. 444. For their later contacts, see Heuser, Matal, pp. 138–​148. 66 Ryan, Ascham, p. 220.

98 Burnett of ymages both old and new, of … old coins, cameoes, grauings and such other matters’.67 In 1589, Philip Jones published a translation of a list by Albrecht Meyer of the Certaine briefe, and speciall instructions for gentlemen, merchants, students, souldiers, marriners, &c. employed in seruices abrode, or anie way occasioned to conuerse in the kingdomes, and gouernementes of forren princes: these included, naturally enough, ‘The money and coyne, with the value, bignes (sic),68 stampe, and mettall, eyther gold, siluer, or copper’, but also ‘Ancient coynes, as those of the Romanes, or others, with their stampe, signe, posies,69 and sentences’.70 A working knowledge of Roman coins had become a requirement of polite conversation for an Englishman abroad.71 Ascham’s interests are an embodiment of these principles and the way that these continental practices were also being introduced into England. An educated gentleman was expected to have a general interest in coins and be aware of their value as part of the array of personal and diplomatic gifts. Yet there was also a wider political and social significance to coins and their study. Coin forgery was a perennial concern, and Ascham takes a learned as well as a literary (and no doubt a practical) interest in it. Ascham knew that the most severe penalties for forgery go back to ancient history, to the time of Demosthenes,72 and in his own writing he used coin forgery as a simile for the corruption of the mass.73 England in the sixteenth century was beset by the additional and related problem of the debasement of the coinage, which was thought to have caused the severe inflation of the times. Smith and Cecil had been instrumental in persuading Elizabeth to replace the old base coins with new purer ones, and her recoinage of 1561–​1562 was later regarded as one of 67

Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtyer, trans. Thomas Hoby (London: William Seres, 1561, ustc 505873), ‘The first booke of the Courtyer’, unpag. I thank T. Wilks for the reference. 68 Presumably a misprint for ‘signes’. 69 i.e., weights. 70 Philip Jones, Certaine briefe, and speciall instructions for gentlemen, merchants, students, souldiers, marriners, &c. employed in seruices abrode, or anie way occasioned to conuerse in the kingdomes, and gouernementes of forren princes (London: John Woolfe, 1589, utsc 511306), pp. 15, 18. 71 Jones’s work was cited by Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time. Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 146–​148. It is a translation of Albrecht Meyer, Methodus describendi regiones, urbes et arces & quid singulis locis praecipue in peregrinationibus homines nobiles ac docti animadvertere, observare et annotare debeant (Helmstadt:  Jakob Lucius, 1587, ustc 675903), which gives a list of 186 things which a noble and learned traveller should notice, enquire about and note! 72 Ascham, Toxophilus, Book i, fol. 23v. 73 Lucy R. Nicholas, Roger Ascham’s ‘A Defence of the Lord’s Supper’: Latin Text and English Translation (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 37–​38.

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the principal achievements of her reign. In relation to the problem, Smith was conscious of the Roman precedent: ‘a man maie see the decaie of thempire even in their coine’.74 Ascham too remarks on the reform, in exaggerated and strong language, in a letter to Sturm in 1562: ‘she [Elizabeth] made the coinage, which was wholly depraved and made completely out of bronze, perfectly pure silver’.75 While the problems of the contemporary currency naturally fostered an interest in coins, we should, however, not exaggerate the scale of interest in coins and their history. The general lack of information tells its own story: in England, numismatics was still only an interest of a few. The royal family did own some coins, but there was no grand royal collection on a European scale. In England, coin collecting was to become a serious royal pastime only at the beginning of the seventeenth century, with the collection of Prince Henry. Henry’s immediately became the principal collection in England, and continued to be so through the century in the hands of his younger brother, King Charles I and his successors, even after the ravages of the Interregnum. But that was later, and there was less interest during sixteenth century, except among humanist scholars such as the ones we have discussed here. Nor was there much serious writing, apart from Smith’s unpublished owrf. William Harrison was writing a Chronology, to be illustrated with coins, but the cost of engraving the plates was too much for him, and the book never appeared;76 this is a real loss as it would have been one of the earliest illustrated coin books produced anywhere, the fashion for such books in Europe having started only of the 1550s.77 There was little significant publication of numismatic books of any kind in England during the century, compared with the continent:78 Germany France Low Countries Italy Britain

74 75 76

170 130 120 58 10

owrf, pp. 137–​140; cf. p. 25. Ascham to Sturm, London, 11 April 1562, letter xxxiv Giles, vol. iii, pp. 59–​68, at p. 62. Raphael Holinshed, The first volume of the chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland … gathered and set forth by Raphael Holinshed (London: John Harrison, 1577, ustc 508389), ch. 2.17. 77 Dekesel, Bibliography, p. xl. 78 Ibid., p. xxxi.

100 Burnett The group we have discussed in the middle of the sixteenth century comprised a mixture mostly of statesmen (Dudley, Cecil, Smith, Morison: Ascham and Chaloner too were at court) and academics, the latter all at Cambridge and, curiously, mostly associated with St John’s College: part of the ‘godly crop’ of scholars at St John’s who made the University famous.79 It seems that the members of the ‘Cambridge connection’, so important in the politics of the day, also shared a common interest in numismatics. One cannot pretend that this would have been anything more than one of a group of mutual interests, but it increases our appreciation of the common ground between them. Such things could have been part of the cement that bound men together in other aspects of their lives. Perhaps it would be a little over-​bold to claim that a love of coins helped the ‘Cambridge connection’ to ensure a smooth transition to Elizabeth’s rule in 1558. But why not? 79

Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham N. C.: Duke University Press, 1980), p. 54, following Ascham.

pa rt 2 Broader Horizons: Connections and Influences

∵

­c hapter 5

‘The Scholer of the Best Master’: Ascham and John Cheke John F. McDiarmid John Cheke (1514–​1557), Roger Ascham’s Cambridge mentor, is mentioned by name fifteen times in Ascham’s The Scholemaster, written in the 1560s and printed in 1570 after its author’s death. In the preface, in Ascham’s account of a conversation with Sir Richard Sackville at Windsor in 1563, Sackville says he had heard Ascham say that he ‘thank[ed] Syr Iohn Cheke, for all the learninge’ he had, and Ascham was fortunate to be ‘the Scholer of the best Master’. References to Cheke are especially concentrated in the treatment of imitatio at the end of the second book. Ascham calls Cheke ‘the cunningest Master … that euer England bred’, the ‘teacher of all the … learning I haue’, ‘my dearest frend, and best master that euer I had or heard in learning, soch a man, as if I should liue to see England breed the like againe, I feare, I should liue ouer long’.1 Clearly the only figure whose influence on The Scholemaster rivals Cheke’s is Johannes Sturm, whom Ascham calls ‘the dearest frende I haue out of England’.2 Ascham often says he is repeating Cheke’s actual words from the ‘goodlie talke’ ‘I haue had oftentymes’ with him; near the very end of the book he relates in a miniature dialogue how Cheke once gave him a ‘lesson for Salust’, explaining how that difficult author should be approached.3 Cheke was not a prolific writer. His influence mostly came to Ascham orally, through their personal interactions as teacher and student that began at Cambridge in the 1530s but did not end there; their talks continued on and off through their lives up to 1550. (Sturm’s influence, by contrast, came through his books).4 1 Roger Ascham, English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904; rpt. 1970; hereafter cited as English Works), quoting pp. 178, 268, 283, 297, other references to Cheke in The Scholemaster on pp. 179, 192, 219, 275, 278–​279, 281–​282, 284, 289, 301. See also Toxophilus (1545) in English Works, pp. 45–​46; many of Ascham’s numerous references to Cheke in his letters will be cited in notes below. 2 The Scholemaster, p. 268; cf. pp. 179, 271–​272. For more on Ascham and Sturm, see Lucy Nicholas, ch. 7 in this volume. 3 Ibid., pp. 283, 297, cf. pp. 275, 286. 4 Ibid., pp. 271–​272.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_007

104 McDiarmid Ascham’s and Cheke’s relationship was close.5 It also had complexities. Ascham certainly had a high regard and affection for Cheke, but there appear to have been more difficult aspects of their personal connection left out of Ascham’s glowing memory of it in The Scholemaster. Their Renaissance humanistic understandings and commitments were overwhelmingly similar, down to small details, but there were still nuances of difference. This chapter explores professional, personal, and intellectual dimensions of their relationship, aiming for a rightly balanced view. 1

Teacher and Student, Patron and Client

John Cheke was born in Cambridge in 1514. In 1526 he matriculated in St. John’s College, becoming a fellow in 1529 and m.a. in 1533.6 In the 1530s he gathered around him a group of Cambridge fellows and scholars many of whom, like him, went on to careers at court and in the church; the circle included Ascham, William Cecil (Cheke’s soon-​to-​be brother-​in-​law), Thomas Smith, John Ponet, Walter Haddon, and others.7 In 1540 Cheke became Cambridge’s first Regius Professor of Greek. In 1542, over the course of several months, Cheke engaged in an epistolary controversy with Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, then Chancellor of the University, over the reconstructed ancient pronunciation of Greek that Cheke and Smith had brought to Cambridge. Pronunciation was an important enough aspect of eloquence in Renaissance humanists’ eyes to have merited a succession of studies over the preceding half century, culminating in Erasmus’s De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione dialogus (1528).8 The 1542 controversy had a religious subtext: the religiously conservative Gardiner regarded Cheke’s pronunciation as an innovation comparable to 5 On this, and Ascham’s memorialization of this friendship, see Micha Lazarus, ch. 11 in this volume, especially pp. 228–235. 6 For Cheke’s life, see Paul Needham, ‘Sir John Cheke at Cambridge and Court’, unpublished dissertation, Harvard University (2  vols., 1971); Alan Bryson, ‘Cheke, Sir John (1514–​1557)’, odnb; however, for Cheke’s life during the reign of Mary i, use instead John F. McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie”: The Troubles of Sir John Cheke under Queen Mary’, in Elizabeth Evenden and Vivienne Westbrook, eds., Catholic Renewal and Protestant Resistance in Marian England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 185–​227. On the group around Cheke, see John F. McDiarmid, and Susan Wabuda (eds.), The Cambridge Connection in Tudor England: Humanism, Reform, Rhetoric, Politics (Brill, forthcoming); Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1980). 7 See also Micha Lazarus, ch. 11 in this volume, who discusses the centrality of Cheke to the Cambridge circle, pp. 228–235. 8 See below n. 55.

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ones in religion that Gardiner opposed, and saw Cheke fomenting advocacy of further religious reform at the University –​significantly, Gardiner compared Cheke to Melanchthon.9 Cheke had to give way, but despite this setback, in 1544 he was appointed one of the tutors of the Prince of Wales. After the Prince succeeded to the throne as Edward vi in 1547, Cheke took on additional roles. He wrote against the rebels of 1549 in The hurt of sedicion, and worked with Archbishop Cranmer to advance religious reform, especially in the Second Prayerbook (1552).10 Cheke became a royal secretary in 1553, just in time to take part in the attempt to make Lady Jane Grey queen. He was briefly imprisoned by Mary, and deprived of his offices and most of his lands. He went abroad in 1554, though probably not mainly in order to practise his reformed religion freely –​he would have gladly remained in England as a nicodemite, as did Ascham, Cecil and most of their colleagues. Rather, Cheke probably hoped that in his absence the Queen would look with more favour on suits for relief from Cheke’s wife, who was stepdaughter of the Queen’s councillor, Sir John Mason. After sojourns in Padua and Strasbourg, Cheke was seized while on a visit to the Low Countries, brought back to the Tower, and there induced to recant his faith. He died in September 1557. Ascham gives vignettes of his time together with Cheke at Cambridge not only in The Scholemaster but also in Toxophilus, where he speaks of ‘the great commoditie that we toke in hearyng hym reade [Greek authors] priuatly in his chambre’.11 In a letter of 1542 Ascham speaks of Cheke reading publicly Homer,

9

10

11

On the pronunciation controversy, see McDiarmid, ‘Recovering Republican Eloquence: John Cheke versus Stephen Gardiner on the Pronunciation of Greek’, History of European Ideas, 38.3 (2012), pp. 338–351; Richard Simpson, ‘Disputed Sounds:  Thomas Smith on the Pronunciation of Ancient Greek –​Representing the Evanescent in Sound and Image’, in McDiarmid and Wabuda, eds., The Cambridge Connection. Cheke had his and Gardiner’s letters printed as De pronuntiatione Graecae linguae … disputationes … (Basel: Nikolaus ii Episcopius, 1555, ustc 667475; facsimile rpt., Menston: Scolar Press, 1968; translations from this work are mine). The reference to Melanchthon comes at p.  332. Smith’s contribution to the controversy was printed as De recta et emendata linguae Graecae pronuntiatione (1568); I refer to the edition in Sir Thomas Smith, Literary and Linguistic Works, ed. Bror Danielsson, 3 vols., vol. ii (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1978). For details on Cheke and his cohort’s role in the Edwardian Reformation, see McDiarmid, ‘The Cambridge Humanists and the Edwardine Reformation’, unpublished paper, and ‘Introduction’ to McDiarmid and Wabuda, eds., The Cambridge Connection. Cf. e.g. John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 195–​196, 224–​225, 253–​254; Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 8, 133–​134; Stephen Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 61–​62, 125–​135, 142–​143, 148–​153. English Works, p. 45.

106 McDiarmid Sophocles, Euripides, and Herodotus –​lectures cut short when Gardiner banned the Greek pronunciation Cheke was using.12 Beyond Cheke’s teaching, Ascham mentions with special pleasure his talks with him, including conversations among Cheke, Ascham, and Thomas Watson about the metres of tragedy and the possibility of writing quantitative, ‘trew’ verse in English.13 Ascham’s portrayal of Cambridge in the 1530s, when the ‘two worthy stars’, Cheke and Smith, were promoting the ‘best way of studies’, is an academic idyll.14 At Cambridge and later, Ascham would become an ardent partisan of Cheke’s Greek pronunciation, though in the 1542 letter that mentions the controversy, he displayed a certain deftness: he says of Gardiner’s support for the Byzantine pronunciation ‘No one could more learnedly defend such a barbarous pronunciation … than my Lord of Winchester does’.15 Ascham mentioned the pronunciation in his first letter to Sturm in 1550, and when he went to the continent in that year he offered to get Cheke’s letters printed and debated the topic with Heidelberg scholars.16 Already at Cambridge an informal patron/​client relationship between Cheke and Ascham was developing. Ascham claimed to have Cheke’s approval when he sought a St. John’s fellowship for a friend in 1540.17 The relationship gained significance after Cheke went to court in June 1544. A letter of about that time from Ascham to Sir William Paget may appear to indicate Ascham was seeking the succession to Cheke’s Regius professorship; since Cheke officially retained the professorship for years to come, more likely what was in 12 13 14 15

16

17

Ascham to Richard Brandesby, Cambridge, ca. 1542–​1543, letter xii, Giles, vol. i pt. 1, p. 26; trans. Hatch, p. 56. All English translations from letters in Giles are by Hatch unless otherwise indicated, and page numbers are provided. English Works, pp. 284, 289. On the two stars see English Works, p. 281, and cf. pp. 278–​282; for ‘the best way of studies’, Ascham to Cranmer, [Cambridge], January 1545, letter xxvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 68–​69; Hatch, pp. 119–​120. On Ascham’s support of the pronunciation at Cambridge, see Cheke [and Gardiner], De pronuntiatione, 106; Smith, De … pronuntiatione, pp. 172–173, 176–177. Ascham’s comment on Gardiner is in Ascham to Brandesby, Cambridge, ca. 1542–​1543, letter xii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 27; the English translation in this case is mine. Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 190; Hatch, p. 333. For Ascham’s suggestion in 1550 that he could get the letters on pronunciation printed, see Ascham to Cheke, [Augsburg], 11 November 1550, letter cviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 220;​Hatch, p. 395; for the exchanges with scholars in 1553: Ascham to Hubert, Brussels, 6 March 1553, letter cxliv, to Cisner, Heidelberg, 18 July 1553, letter cli, Hubert to Ascham, Heidelberg, 9 August 1553, letter cliv, all in Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 344–​349, 367–​370, 373–​377; Hatch, pp. 489–​497, 519–​524, 530–​536. Ascham to John Taylor, Cambridge, 9 March 1539, letter v and to Cordingley, Cambridge, March 1539, letter vi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 8–​10;​Hatch, p. 18–​21.

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question was substituting for Cheke in his absence. Ascham gives Cheke as a reference on his own behalf this time; however, nothing came of this effort.18 In the mid-​1540s Ascham repeatedly called on Cheke for help and counsel in dealing with wrangles within St John’s. Ascham complained to Cheke when his young friend William Grindal did not get a readership, and when he himself did not inherit Cheke’s room, to which he believed he was entitled.19 A more official facet of Cheke’s and Ascham’s relationship arose from Cheke’s position as a friend in high places of the University of Cambridge and Ascham’s role as a University spokesman. Thus in 1547, when that year’s Chantries Act seemed to threaten all collegiate institutions, Ascham wrote to Cheke and others seeking their support.20 Even as he wrote for the University, Ascham was aspiring to follow in Cheke’s footsteps to the court. In March 1548 he was a candidate for the tutorship of Princess Elizabeth, in succession to Grindal who had died. Ascham knew that the Queen Dowager Katherine Parr and her new husband Thomas Seymour, in whose household Elizabeth was living, favoured another candidate. Cheke as the King’s tutor clearly also had a role in the Princess’s education. Ascham wrote to Cheke lavishly protesting his reliance on Cheke’s good will and counsel, and mentioning that he expected the Queen and Seymour would do nothing ‘without consulting you’.21 Ascham got the job. However, his tenure was 18 19

20

21

Ascham to William Paget, place unknown, ca. 1544, letter xxii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 50–​53;​ Hatch, pp. 91–​95. For the complaints about Grindal (1544), see Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, ca. 13 September 1544, letter xxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 53–​57; Hatch, pp. 96–​102; about Cheke’s room (1547), see Cambridge, end of 1547, letter lxxix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 149;​Hatch, p. 267. Cf. Ascham to Cheke, place unknown, Lady Day 1544, letter xii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 48–​49;​ Hatch, pp. 89–​90. Ascham to Cheke, [Cambridge], ca. 1547, letter lvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 109–​111;​Hatch, pp. 163–​165. Hatch dates this and adjacent letters to Smith, Paget and Denny to 1545, and associates them with the first Chantries Act in that year. Giles more plausibly dates them to 1547. (Pace Hatch p. 163, for instance), Smith did not become a clerk of the council until 1547; see bl, Sloane ms 325, fol. 3r, cited in Richard Simpson, ‘Sir Thomas Smith (1513–​ 1577): An Overview of His Life and Works’, in Richard Simpson and Andrew Burnett (and Deborah Thorpe, Roman Coins, Money and Society in Elizabethan England:  Sir Thomas Smith’s On the Wages of the Roman Footsoldier (New  York:  American Numismatic Society, 2017), p. 9, n. 54. See also Ascham to Cheke, [Cambridge], 28 December 1547, letter lxxviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 147–​148; Hatch, pp. 269–​270; writing for the College, Ascham thanks Cheke for supporting its interests with the Lord Protector Somerset. [Cambridge], 12 February 1548, letter lxxxv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 160–​162;​Hatch, pp. 283–​ 285. Ascham had previously been ‘sent for many times to teach the King to write’ in the italic hand for which Ascham was especially noted, including before the King’s eleventh birthday (12 October 1548); see Ascham to Gardiner, place unknown, end of 1553, letter clxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 398. Ascham says these earlier calls to teach writing were ‘with

108 McDiarmid remarkably brief. By January 1550 he had lost the position, as a result, he believed, of the machinations of the Princess’s steward. In a letter written back at Cambridge, Ascham says he understands accusations against him had been made to Cheke, to which he understands Cheke had responded with ‘the silent testimony of your judgement on my behalf’.22 Evidently the episode did not in fact damage Ascham’s standing with Cheke, since Ascham credits Cheke with getting him the post in 1550 of secretary to Sir Richard Morison in the latter’s ambassadorial mission to the Emperor. ‘Your efforts alone sent me here’, Ascham wrote to Cheke from Augsburg the following year.23 A few months after the mission began, Ascham had begun to think about what might come next: he angled for a commission to journey on to Italy and other countries;24 in 1552 he wrote to Cecil hoping for a post at Cambridge, or one at court, or ‘to serve my country abroad’. ‘You and Mr Cheke be the only stays to whom I do lean’.25 Far fewer of Cheke’s than of Ascham’s letters survive; one he sent Ascham in 1552 promised to try to ‘doe you good in great matters’.26 When Ascham was promised the Latin secretaryship to the King, his letter to Cecil expresses gratitude to ‘Mr Morysin, Mr Cheke and to you, for moving, furthering and obtaining [Ascham’s] suit’.27 In a letter of July 7 1553, Ascham congratulated Cheke on his accession to the council as a royal secretary, an event that took place on June 2.28 He was not aware, of course, of the dramatic reversal of fortunes already under way. King Edward had died on July 6, Queen Jane would be proclaimed on July 10, and Mary was rallying the forces that would dissolve Jane’s government in less than two weeks. Cheke would be sent to the Tower by July 28.29 After that: radio silence. In the spring of 1554, Mary gave Ascham the post of Latin secretary which he had hoped to win, with Cheke’s help, from Edward; Cheke, on the other hand, having been stripped of lands and offices, departed

22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

Master Cheke’s means’; see Ascham to Cecil, Spires, 27 September 1552, letter cxl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 332. Cf. Ryan, Ascham, p. 107. Place unknown, 28 January 1550, letter xciv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 175;​Hatch, p. 312. 14 January 1551, letter cxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 237;​Hatch, p. 423. Ibid., p. 237;​Hatch, p. 424; Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, letter cxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 269. Spires, 27 September 1552, letter cxl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 332–​333. Cheke to Ascham, Westminster, 26 February 1552, cul, ms Dd ix 14, item g, fol. 82a. Spires, 28 November 1552, letter cxliii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 341. However, Ascham’s patent for the office was temporarily stayed, and he had still not definitively obtained it when Edward vi died; as noted below, he finally did so under Mary. Ryan, Ascham, pp.  153, 197–​199. Brussels, letter cl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 362–​363;​Hatch, pp. 510–​511. McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie” ’, pp. 187–​190.

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for the continent. No evidence survives of communication of any kind between them in the Marian years; for Ascham perhaps it would have been risky. It is a depressing thought that Ascham may well have been a witness when Cheke, after being captured and hauled back to the Tower in 1556, was brought before the assembled court to make his final, humiliating recantation.30 2

‘My dearest frend, and best master’: the Personal Relationship

Beneath the career interest, Ascham’s solicitation of Cheke’s patronage and Cheke’s willingness to provide it, there is some, though of course not enough, evidence about their personal relationship. In a letter from 1544, Ascham begins by mentioning a career opportunity, to enter the service of Lord Mountjoy, but then says he writes this letter ‘overwhelmed … by sorrow’ because his father has died. His mother is gravely ill. Cheke is away, and Ascham is ‘deprived of … your comforting words … I wish you were here, my Cheke, so that I could pour out my tears to you’.31 There is no surviving letter like this from Ascham to any other recipient on this occasion. Ascham was acquainted with Cheke’s family. In 1548, writing to a friend at Cambridge, he asks to be remembered to ‘that venerable woman Mistress Cheke’, Cheke’s remarkable mother Agnes, and to Cheke’s sister and brother-​in-​law Alice and John Blythe.32 Ascham wrote a Latin epitaph on another sister, Mary, who married William Cecil and died in 1544.33 Throughout his letters, Ascham makes reference to private conversations he had with Cheke, at Cambridge but also later. In Toxophilus he lets it be known that Cheke ‘would haue me very ofte in his chamber [at Cambridge], and, for the familiaritie that I had wyth hym, more than manye other, woulde suffer me to reade’ the Latin translation Cheke was writing of the Taktika of the 30 Ryan, Ascham, pp.  215, 218. On the recantation, see McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie” ’, pp. 212–​217. 31 [Cambridge], ca. March 1544, letter xxi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 47;​Hatch, p. 87. 32 Ascham to William Ireland, Cheshunt, 8 July [1548], letter xc, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p.  169;​ Hatch, p. 299. See Hatch, p. 300 for his convincing reasons for dating this letter to 1548, not 1549 as Giles does. ‘Venerable’ (Venerandam) fits Agnes better than Cheke’s wife Mary (whom Hatch at p.  301 misnames ‘Elizabeth’), who was probably under 20 and not in Cambridge at the time of the letter. See Susan Wabuda, ‘ “We walk as pilgrims”: Agnes Cheke and the Religious World of Cambridge, ca.  1500–​1549’, and Cathy Shrank, ‘Civil Instruction: Ordering the Godly Commonweal in John Cheke’s Marital Correspondence’ both in McDiarmid and Wabuda, eds., The Cambridge Connection. 33 Giles, iii, pp. 284–​286.

110 McDiarmid Byzantine Emperor Leo vi, presented to Henry viii in 1544.34 In the letter of 1550 where Ascham hopes the debacle of his loss of Elizabeth’s tutorship has not lost him Cheke’s favour, Ascham invokes Cheke’s ‘singular and abundant love for me’ and recalls the days and nights … which I enjoyed with you at the University, … those talks which we had sitting apart in your room, in which you most often declared your particular interest towards me.35 When Ascham passed through London in September 1550 on his way to embark on the embassy with Morison, he visited Cheke in the latter’s apartment, and he recalls the visit not only in a later letter to Cheke but also in one to Ascham’s friend Raven: Ascham tells Raven he and Cheke were together from noon all the way to nine o’clock, talking of many things including ‘matters of religion, the court, the nation and [St John’s] College’.36 At the beginning of Cheke’s ‘lesson for Salust’ that Ascham quotes in The Scholemaster, he calls Cheke ‘my dearest frend’.37 But I think the relationship was not altogether easy. Paul Needham rightly says that Ascham’s … letters to Cheke almost all have the same air of slight reserve and conscious dignity about them; an atmosphere probably encouraged by Cheke, for Ascham was in general far from a reserved man. He relied on Cheke for the advancement of his own career, and yet he was not always entirely certain of Cheke’s good will.38 In every letter Ascham sends to Cheke while with Morison abroad, he brings up a difficulty: there is much he could tell, but if he wrote to Cheke about ‘light matters’, he fears Cheke would think him lacking in judgement. Or, in another letter, he would be showing little ‘consideration for your dignity, prudence and judgement’.39 So Ascham includes in his letters accounts of books and libraries he has seen, learned men he has encountered, ancient coins he is sending back 34 35 36 37 38 39

English Works, p. 45. [Cambridge], 28 January 1550, letter xciv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 174;​Hatch, p. 311. Ascham to Raven, Gravesend, 21 September 1550, letter civ, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 209; see also p. 220;​Hatch, pp. 374–37​5, 395. English Works, p. 297. Needham, ‘Sir John Cheke’, vol. i, p. 330. [Augsburg], 11 November 1550, letter cviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p.  216, 236, cf. Ascham to Cheke, Brussels, 7 July 1553, letter cl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 364;​Hatch, pp. 389–​390, 422–​423, cf. 512.

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to Cheke, and his own continuing studies. The contrast is striking with a letter of the same period that Ascham sent to his friend Raven, full of vivid sights and interesting people, food, drink, and clothes, lively details –​that strange bird he saw at Mechelen, ‘fair lusty young ladies’ in Brussels, loaves of bread twice as big as those for sale in Cambridge –​homely comparisons and personal reactions; relaxed communication with a friend, and still eminently readable.40 Cheke inspired affection, and he may have been one of those teachers who are less kind on paper than they are in person. But strain and anxiety are part of Ascham’s attitude; all those references to private conversations may seek to establish a sense of ease and a personal bond, an amicitia, that Ascham actually never felt quite sure of.41 3

Two Humanists

In their intellectual range and attitudes, Cheke and Ascham were very close. The most striking feature of the intellectual relationship is the extent to which they shared and similarly applied a particular set of major humanistic conceptions.42 A starting point here is again The Scholemaster’s section on imitatio, and an understanding there about Latin eloquence. Beginning his main treatment of Latin authors, Ascham writes The Latin tong, concerning any part of purenesse of it, from the spring, to the decay of the same, did not endure moch longer, than is the life of a well aged man, scarse one hundred yeares from the tyme of the last Scipio Africanus and Laelius, to the Empire of Augustus. And it is notable, that Velleius Paterculus writeth of Tullie, how that the perfection of

40 41

42

Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, letter cxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​271, references are to 244, 245, 250. Cf. Ascham to Raven, Antwerp, 1 October 1550, and Cologne 12 October 1550, letters cv and cvi, Giles, vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 210–​214. It is interesting to compare Thomas Wilson’s reminiscence of Cheke in Padua in 1554–​ 1555: ‘the remembrance of him was deare vnto me … [and] the care he had ouer all the Englishe men there, to go to their bokes: and how gladly he did reade to me and others, certaine Orations of Demosthenes’. Demosthenes, The Three Orations in Fauour of the Olynthians, trans. Wilson (London: Henrie Denham, 1570, ustc 507094; facsimile edn., Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1968), [sig. π4r ff.]. Cheke here sounds like a man who loved being a teacher, and who could be exacting and inspire awe, but also regard, for himself and his subject. Cf. McDiarmid, ‘Perfecting Eloquence, Perfecting England:  a Pattern in the Cambridge Athenians’ Thought’, in McDiarmid and Wabuda, eds., The Cambridge Connection.

112 McDiarmid eloquence did so remayne onelie in him and in his time, as before him, were few, which might moch delight a man, or after him any, worthy admiration … . This is one of those places in The Scholemaster where Ascham says he is passing on what ‘I haue heard Syr Ihon Cheke many tymes say’.43 Ascham in The Scholemaster keeps some distance from the advocates of loyalty to Cicero alone as a model for Latin style, whom Erasmus criticized in his Ciceronianus (1528).44 Cheke similarly had distinguished himself from those who are ‘over-​scrupulously, over-​assiduously Ciceronian’.45 Ascham is pointing not to a single author but to a time or stage of the language at which ‘the perfection of eloquence’ was achieved. Cheke had identified the comparable time for Greek, in his exchange of letters with Gardiner. The age of Demosthenes, Cheke writes, was that of ‘completeness and perfection’ (absolutionem perfectionemque) in Greek, ‘most perfect and highest’ (perfectissimum cumulatissimumque).46 Passages in Cheke’s De pronuntiatione make it clear he also sees Cicero’s time as the perfect time of Latin. The concept of the perfect form or stage of Latin or of Greek was essential to both Ascham’s and Cheke’s work, with many ramifications, analogues and corollaries. It was related to Renaissance humanism’s core characteristic: its orientation to the active life. Humanists apprehended language as a mode of action in the world, a means of ‘inducing assent in readers or listeners and, when appropriate, stirring them to action’ –​and thus effecting a result at which the humanist orator aimed.47 Humanists wanted to find the forms of language that could best produce the results they desired, and in the learned tongues they searched for existing exemplars of effective speech. Searching for the perfect language was searching for one that was perfectly effective. Cheke situates the best age of Greek as the culmination of a sequence of stages. Greek speech (and, clearly, Latin too) was characterised in its first 43 44

45 46 47

English Works, p. 286. Ibid., p. 271. Dialogus Ciceronianus, ed. Pierre Mesnard, in Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi i-​2 (Amsterdam: North-​Holland Publishing Co., 1971). For a nuanced reading of Ascham’s relation to the Ciceronians, see Thomas M. Greene, ‘Roger Ascham: The Perfect End of Shooting’, English Literary History, vol. 36.4 (1969), pp. 609–​625. For more on Ascham and imitation, see Mike Pincombe, ch. 12 in this volume. Cheke [and Gardiner], De pronuntiatione, pp. 280–​283. Ibid., quoting p. 49. On Latin, see pp. 49–​54 passim; Latin earlier or later than Cicero is treated as inferior to that of his time. Ronald Witt, ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’:  the Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden; Brill, 2000), p. 393.

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beginnings by ‘roughness’ (horriditas). Gradually, there arose a capacity for speech that was more and more ‘embellished and cultivated’.48 Clearly the criterion by which Cheke measures the language is its capacity to serve as a medium for expressive, effective oratory. Who can doubt that Greek reached its high point when orators and philosophers such as Plato and Demosthenes flourished, when Demosthenes with his persuasive eloquence reigned alone in the law courts and the public forum?49 As De pronuntiatione goes along Cheke specifies elements of the Greek speech of Demosthenes’s time that made it such a superb medium for eloquence: its multiple distinct vowels creating clarity; the fully sounded diphthongs, robust, manly sounds giving speech a ‘forcefulness’ (vis) capable of arousing an audience in public debate.50 Once the language had reached its perfect form, ideally it should not change. The best linguistic medium for oratory had been achieved; then, ‘provision should be made, so that [the language] does not lapse into a corrupt or defective condition’.51 In fact however, of course, both Greek and Latin had been allowed to decline, into their Byzantine and medieval versions. The goal humanists set themselves with regard to the classical tongues was to return to their perfect forms. Thus we see the emergence of enterprises like Cheke’s and Thomas Smith’s 1542 campaign for Greek pronunciation at Cambridge, and texts like the second book of The Scholemaster, culminating in the lessons for imitating Latin of the perfect age.52 The concepts of the perfect time and its place in the sequence of a language’s stages had been part of Italian humanism since at least the early Quattrocento, as Ronald Witt showed in ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’.53 (It is worth noting that almost fifty years ago now Thomas M. Greene found affinities between Ascham and the early Quattrocento humanists.)54 The progression in the classical languages from rough beginnings to a perfect age became standard humanism. Cheke and Smith would have read it in Erasmus’s De recta … pronuntiatione

48 Cheke [and Gardiner], De pronuntiatione, pp. 48–​52, 241–​246; quotations from p. 49. 49 Ibid., p. 50. 50 Ibid., pp. 60–​96; see for instance pp. 60–​63, 75–​76. 51 Ibid., p. 52; cf. pp. 245, 247, 248. 52 The sequential account of classical language is not as developed in Ascham, but there are clear traces of it, as when Ascham refers to the ‘vnperfit’ writing of the elder Cato, about a century and a quarter before Cicero’s time, and to the fact that after its high point Latin ‘began to fade and stoupe’. English Works, pp. 286, 294 cf. 288. 53 Witt, ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’, pp. 324–​266, 401–​402. 54 Greene, ‘Roger Ascham: The Perfect End of Shooting’, pp. 623–​624.

114 McDiarmid It is beyond dispute [Erasmus says] that in [Cicero’s] time the [Latin] language was at its highest and purest. Roman speech had lost the roughness (horror) of its early days and acquired a polish that was still untarnished. ‘Nevertheless’, Erasmus adds, ‘I should not make Cicero my only source’, distinguishing this view from the narrow Ciceronians.55 Smith acknowledges the influence on his and Cheke’s efforts of the early Cinquecento humanist Adriano Castellesi, who, Ann Moss says, was important for diffusing north of the Alps the idea of the rise of Latin to ‘the perfect’ (‘perfectum’), in the age of Cicero.56 The concepts of perfection shaped Cheke’s and Ascham’s whole approach to the classical languages. They also instigated and shaped work on English. Renaissance humanists varied in their thought about the vernacular languages. But many believed that, although so far only the classical languages had been perfected, this did not mean other languages could not be. All languages could rise to equal the classical languages in the capacity to support eloquence, especially with the help of learned men who worked to cultivate and improve their native tongue.57 At the end of his life Ascham was writing to Sturm that the English language ‘could sustain every kind of embellishment, both of modes of speaking and modes of thought’.58 The aspiration to raise the modern tongues to their own perfection inspired vernacular reform efforts in Italy and France in the sixteenth century, including spelling and prosodic reform campaigns. Smith and Ascham were respectively the leading protagonists of

55 Erasmus, The Right Way of Speaking Latin and Greek: A Dialogue /​De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione dialogus, trans. and annotated by Maurice Pope, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 26 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 471. For the original Latin, see De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione dialogus, ed. J.-​C. Margolin, in Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi i-​4 (Amsterdam: North-​Holland Publishing Co., 1973), p. 99. 56 Smith, De … pronuntiatione, pp. 44/​45, 54/​55; Ann Moss, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 61; Adriano Castellesi, De sermone Latino et modis Latine loquendi opus (Paris: Simon de Colines, 1534, ustc 182056; first printed ca. 1514), fols. 2–​8. For another instance of the humanist idea of the rise to perfection, see Etienne Dolet, Dialogus, de imitatione Ciceroniana … (Lyon:  Sébastien Gryphe, 1535, ustc 146891, facsimile edn., Geneva: Droz, 1974), p. 58. 57 On humanists’ attitudes to the vernaculars, see Hans Baron, ‘The Querelle of the Ancients and Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship’, in Paul Oskar Kristeller and Philip P. Wiener, eds., Renaissance Essays from the Journal of the History of Ideas (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), pp. 109–​112; Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1987), ch. 4; Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–​1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 40–​42, 121–​123, 189–​192. 58 Place unknown, ca. December 1568, letter xcix, Giles, vol. ii, p. 176.

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English spelling reform and of the effort to introduce unrhymed quantitative meters, ‘trew versifying’, into English poetry.59 In the passage in The Scholemaster, mentioned above, in which Ascham recalls his discussion of the topic with Cheke and Watson, he repeatedly calls true verse an aspect of linguistic ‘perfitnes’, contrasted with ‘rude beggerly rhyming’.60 Cheke did not write on English spelling or prosody, but he did practise a reformed spelling, and on prosody, besides the passage in The Scholemaster, we have as evidence of his views the few English poems he wrote, almost all of which do not rhyme.61 While Ascham, Cheke and Smith believed that English could be perfected, as the classical tongues already had been, they also saw that English’s perfection would differ in form in some ways from that for Latin or Greek. This was because of distinctive characteristics of our tongue. Thus Ascham knew that English has ‘in vse chiefly, wordes of one syllable’, and accordingly dactyls ‘co[n]‌teining one long and two short’, so essential to classical verse, were not well suited to English. For Ascham, this means we should rely on quantitative iambics instead.62 (The possibility that perfect English poetry might take the form of accentual verse does not appear in Ascham; as Derek Attridge observed,63 Ascham seems simply not to have conceptualized accentual metre). Due regard for the character of English also appeared in the spelling reformers. Smith argued that English had different sounds than Latin, and needed different letters.64 Another way of propelling English towards perfection was to augment the lexicon so that English could express all the meanings that the classical and some modern languages could. This reform was under way before members of the Cambridge circle came to prominence, notably in the work of Thomas 59

See McDiarmid, ‘Perfecting Eloquence, Perfecting England’ and sources cited there on Italian and French vernacular reform campaigns, and on English spelling reform and Smith’s role in it; on English spelling, see also Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), ­chapter 5; Shrank, Writing the Nation, pp. 145–​154. 60 English Works, pp. 288–​292. 61 For Cheke’s spelling, see Cheke, trans., The Gospel according to St. Matthew and the first chapter of the Gospel according to St Mark, ed. James Goodwin (Cambridge:  J.  and J.  J. Deighton, 1843); for Cheke poems, Ruth Hughey (ed.), The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1960), vol. i, pp. 332–​335. 62 English Works., pp. 289–​290. 63 Attridge, Well-​ Weighed Syllables:  Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 89, cf. pp. 93–​100. 64 Smith, De recta et emendata linguae Anglicae scriptione, dialogus [1568], in Smith, Literary and Linguistic Works, Part iii, ed. Bror Danielsson, (Stockholm:  Almqvist and Wiksell, 1983), pp. 46–​47, 66–​67, 78–​79, and 136–​137 to 142–​143.

116 McDiarmid Elyot, who announces at the beginning of The Book Named the Governor (1531) that he has borrowed ‘words … from the Latin tongue’, ‘for the insufficiency of our own language’,65 a practice he continues to call attention to throughout the book. Cheke relates lexical augmentation to the concept of perfection in his prefatory letter to Thomas Hoby’s translation of The Book of the Courtier, where he says that English is ‘vnperfight’ in its vocabulary. Because of this, he concedes, English must borrow sometimes, but Cheke takes the argument in a somewhat different direction, arguing against excessive borrowings that will swamp the language and cause it to lose its distinctive character. He favours instead adding words by coining new ones from native English roots.66 Ascham in his preface to Toxophilus similarly criticises importing foreign words indiscriminately, which will produce an unintelligible and unwholesome mix.67 This attitude to borrowings embodies the same regard for the distinctness of the language manifest when Ascham says English will accept iambs more readily than dactyls, and Smith says English writing must match English, not Latin sounds. Ascham says his approach follows the way ‘Cicero … increased the latine tounge’, and Cheke may have regarded Cicero as an authority for his preference for coinages.68 The intellectual construct comprising the rise to perfection, its possible loss and, in that event, the need to recover it, informed Cheke’s and Ascham’s classical humanism and their important advocacy of the capacities of English. They applied it to matters beyond language as well. Specifically, they shared the Christian humanist conception of the life of Christ and the primitive church as embodying the perfect form of Christianity, which should have provided the ‘forme to lyue after’ for all Christians.69 In the event, perfect Christianity 65 66 67 68 69

Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1962), quoting p. 2 and see e.g. pp. 80, 194, 234. Cf. Elyot, Of the knowledeg [sic] whiche maketh a wise man (London: Thomas Berthelet, [1533], ustc 502500), sig. A3r–v. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby [1561], introduction by W. H. D. Rouse (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1928), pp. 7–​8. English Works, p. xiv. See Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, iii 3–​5, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (New York: Macmillan, 1914); De Fato, i 1, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942). Quoting Erasmus, Paraclesis [1516] in the English translation by William Roy and printed as An exhortacyon to the dylygent study of Scripture (London:  Robert Wyer, 1534; ustc 502614), sig. c iiir. For the original Latin, see Paraclesis, ed. Ch. Béné, in Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi v-​7 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 279–​298, quoting 294. For a concise account of Erasmian Christian humanism, see James McConica, ‘Desiderius Erasmus’, in Hans J. Hillerbrand, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), vol. ii, pp. 55–​59.

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had been lost through medieval corruption; it was now beginning to be recovered by reformers. In Cheke’s long preface to his Latin translation of Plutarch’s Περὶ δεισιδαιμονίας (De Superstitione, or ‘On Superstition’) (?1545), addressed to Henry viii, Cheke with optimistic fervour praises ‘Your Majesty, who day by day summons parts of religion that have been obliterated and suppressed back to the light’ ‘so that … true religion, gradually growing up, may at last reach a full and perfect maturity (perfectam expletamque maturitatem)’ –​ the same words appear here as Cheke used in describing perfect Greek.70 Ascham in his Apologia pro Caena Dominica (‘Defence of the Lord’s Supper’) (?written 1547) calls on his hearers to turn away from idolatrous medieval religious practices: ‘Leave off your excessive piety which most often displeases, and follow Christ’s perfected arrangement (perfectam Christi institutionem) …’. In Christ’s priesthood ‘everything has been perfected, completed and concluded (perfecta, impleta et conclusa sunt)’ in such a way that not only the Old Testament priesthood that preceded it came to an end, but also that no new priesthood should succeed it in future: it is a perfection that rightly was to remain unchanged forever (though of course in fact decline had come).71 The idea of perfection is central to the entire range of Cheke’s and Ascham’s humanistic activities, and makes the most important intellectual connection between them. Their work shared other humanistic features as well, and their Latin and English styles will be considered shortly. One further, vital link was that they were both Protestants. Cheke’s earliest surviving letters, from the early 1540s, strike recurrent notes of Protestant piety, urging his mother and his dying patron Dr. Butts to rely only on faith and providence and God’s favor to ‘his chosen and forepointed people’, his elect.72 The involvement of Cheke and Ascham in the Edwardian Reformation was referred to earlier. The humanistic activities and approaches of both fit within a Reformed Protestant framework. Early Reformed leaders from Zwingli onwards professed the Reformation doctrine of justification

70

71 72

Oxford, University College ms 171, p.  75; my translations. On this text see McDiarmid, ‘John Cheke’s Preface to De Superstitione’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 48 (1997), pp. 100–​120 (p. 117 on the date). Compare the wording quoted with Cheke [and Gardiner] De pronuntiatione, pp. 49, 52, 54, 245, 248. See Lucy R. Nicholas, Roger Ascham’s Defence of the Lord’s Supper, Latin text and English translation (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 74–75, 152–​153. The letters to Cheke’s mother are in bl, Additional ms 46367, fols. 19–​20; the letter to Butts is in bl, Harley ms 417, fols. 177–​178. On the letters’ dates see McDiarmid, ‘John Cheke’s Preface’, pp.  109–​110. ‘Forepointed’ is a coinage Cheke uses in preference to ‘predestined’.

118 McDiarmid by faith alone, and faith as a gift freely given by divine grace, but combined it with varying versions of a belief that grace further gives the faithful the ability to lead good Christian lives.73 Cheke, Ascham and others like them whose Protestantism was heavily inflected by the humanist tradition could see learning, eloquence, wise political action, active charity and the right conduct of worship as modes of the good active life in service to true religion and the commonwealth, which were ultimately made possible only by the grace of God. All the humanist imperatives that preoccupied Cheke and Ascham could be fulfilled by grace alone. Thus Ascham in a letter to Sturm praises Edward vi’s love of the best ‘literae’ and all his studies, but then corrects himself: rather to be praised, ‘as it befits a Christian man to say, [is] the manifold grace of God’ working within the King.74 The patterns of perfection were also related to grace. In both the De Superstitione preface and in his unfinished Marian treatise De Ecclesia, Cheke says the times when religious practices rise towards perfection or (in the time of Christ) reach it, also times when practices fall away and times when perfection is recovered, are all to be understood as solely the work of God. At times men’s sins lead God to let them fall into error and corruption; truth may then be restored not through ‘human wisdom’ but only through ‘the beneficence of his grace’: ‘when God again opens the storehouse of his mercy, then the light of knowledge shines forth’. The granting or withholding of grace similarly accounts for the rise and falls of commonwealths.75 For Cheke and Ascham, humanist conceptions articulate with Protestant ones. 4

Similarities with Differences

Ascham was to a very large degree Cheke’s intellectual heir. Other members of the Cambridge circle of Cheke and Ascham also thought about the fields that have been discussed here and others in terms of the construct of perfection, 73

74 75

See John K. Yost, ‘Protestant Reformers and the Humanist via media in the Early English Reformation’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 5 (1975), pp.  187–​202; A.  E. McGrath, ‘Humanist Elements in the Early Reformed Doctrine of Justification’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 73 (1982), pp. 5–​20; Ian Green, Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), esp. pp. 110–​114. [Augsburg] 14 December 1550, letter cx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p.  226;​Hatch, p. 405 (using Hatch’s English version with small variations). De Superstitione preface, p. 51; quotations are from De Ecclesia (ca. 1555) in bl, Harley ms 417, fols. 186r-​v.

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and combined humanism with the new Protestant insights. Still, Ascham and Cheke particularly belong together intellectually as well as in their biographies. Smith, who wrote about Greek (as did Cheke) and English (as did Ascham), differs from them in that he was more continuously and intensively engaged in political activity, including economic reform efforts, and in thinking and writing about politics than either of the other two. Cheke was more engaged with and important for religious reform than some other members of the group, and Lucy Nicholas is showing us that religious questions mattered more deeply for Ascham than previous scholars have recognised. The careers of both these men were built more on their expertise in the classical languages than was the case with other members of the group, and their approaches in this area were especially congruent.76 Cheke and Ascham were an intellectual pair within the larger Cambridge set. However, they were not intellectually identical. I will point out two areas of difference between them, minor when balanced against the overwhelming similarities, but still important to the whole picture. Both areas seem related to some of the suggestions earlier in this chapter about their personalities. The first area of difference is literary style. Both Cheke and Ascham, in both their Latin and English writing, reach for concinnitas, sentences made up of segments balanced with each other grammatically, in length, and/​or in sound, often presenting antitheses  –​the style Alvin Vos showed they would have thought of as Ciceronian.77 Here are Latin and English examples from Cheke, laid out on the page so as to highlight the balanced members, the first from his preface to his Latin translation of Plutarch: Sic scientiae domini ignorantia cedet, pietati caro minus resistet … sic res magnae pro magnis habebuntur, res leves et abiectae pro vilibus existimabuntur … .78

76

77 78

On the common features and multiple interests of the Cambridge group as a whole, including such figures as Ponet, Haddon and Wilson, see McDiarmid, ‘Perfecting Eloquence, Perfecting England’. Nicholas calls attention to Ascham’s religious commitments in ‘New Perspectives on Cambridge’s Role in the Religious Reformation: Roger Ascham and the Early Edwardian Religious Debates at the University’, in McDiarmid and Wabuda, eds., The Cambridge Connection, and other recent publications. Vos, ‘The Formation of Roger Ascham’s Prose Style’, Studies in Philology, vol. 71 (1974), pp. 344–​370. De Superstitione preface, p. 75 (‘So ignorance will give way to knowledge of the Lord, the flesh will offer less resistance to holiness … so great things will be regarded as great, trivial and low things will be considered base …’.).

120 McDiarmid And from The hurt of sedicion: Ye have sente out in the kinges name, against the kinges will, precepts of all kinds and without commandment commanded his subjects, and unrulyly have ruled.79 Ascham is capable of such sentences too: ‘now, commonlie, in the best Scholes in England’, he says, for words right choice is smallie regarded, true proprietie whollie neglected, confusion is brought in, barbariousnesse is bred vp so in yong wittes, as afterward they be, not onelie marde for speaking, but also corrupted in iudgement.80 The difference is that in Ascham such structures are an occasional outcropping; in Cheke they appear over and over again. Janel Mueller rightly refers to the ‘sustained, highly wrought schematism of the sentence forms’ ‘from end to end’ of The hurt; Cheke is relentless.81 And they appear in all kinds of his writing, as if this rigid form is the proper way to write and Cheke will stick to it. I find remarkable a letter he wrote to his wife from exile, hoping for news: This self same daye haue I written by the post, and yet I can not but wryte you againe, not measuring by matter but by messenger, thinking everie mans going a iust cause of wryting … . An unschematized sentence near the end reveals the pressure of emotion Cheke was feeling: ‘ … Bidd god order all things well, and send me home againe …’.82 But even in extremis Cheke largely maintained concinnitas. The second area concerns the project of leading the English language towards perfection by augmenting its lexicon. As has been mentioned, Ascham and Cheke were basically in agreement that excessive borrowings from other languages should be avoided, a caution for which they found authority in 79

The hurt of sedicion, how greuous it is to a Commune welth (London: John Day and William Seres, 1549, ustc 504217; facsimile edn., Menston: Scolar Press, 1971), sig. Bviiv. 80 English Works, p. 185. 81 Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style 1380–​1580 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 313–​317, quoting pp. 314, 317. 82 Cheke to Lady Cheke, Padua, [ca. 1554], bl, Additional ms 46367, fol. 15r-​v.

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Cicero. Both use images to make their case. Ascham in one of the prefatory letters to Toxophilus says: Ones I  communed with a man whiche reasoned the englyshe tongue to be enryched and encreased [by borrowings], sayinge:  Who wyll not prayse that feaste, where a man shall drinke at a diner, bothe wyne, ale and beere? Truely quod I, they be all good, euery one taken by hym selfe alone, but if you putte Maluesye and sacke, read wyne and white, ale and beere, and al in one pot, you shall make a drynke, neyther easie to be knowen, nor yet holsom for the bodye.83 Cheke writes in his prefatory letter for Hoby’s translation of The Courtier: our own tung should be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges, wherin if we take not heed by tijm, ever borowing and never payeng, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tung naturallie and praisablie utter her meaning, when she bouroweth no counterfeitness of other tunges to attire her self withall, … and if she want at ani tijm (as being unperfight she must) yet let her borow with suche bashfulnes, that it mai appeer, that if either the mould of our own tung could serve us to fascion a woord of our own, or if the old denisoned wordes could content and ease this need, we wolde not boldly venture of unknowen wordes … .84 There is a telling contrast. For Ascham, the right approach to linguistic borrowing is like that of a sensible drinker, who likes ‘wyne, ale and beer’ but not all mixed together ‘in one pot’. Cheke’s comparison is to a frugal housewife who has no use for fancy clothes, and borrows a cup of sugar only when she must. Cheke’s approach to borrowing in practice is correspondingly strait-​laced. He coins words from English roots so as to avoid foreign borrowings, famously in his incomplete Gospel translation writing ‘frosent’ for ‘apostle’, ‘crossed’ for ‘crucified’ and ‘mooned’ for ‘lunatic’. This is easy to caricature, and the effect of reading Cheke’s translation is actually rather refreshing.85 But coinages such as Cheke’s do not catch the eye in Ascham’s texts. Cheke certainly did things in order to adhere to Cicero’s strictures on borrowing that Ascham did not do.

83 84 85

English Works, p. xiv. See n. 65 above. See n. 61 above.

122 McDiarmid Cheke’s will to engage in a more rigidly systematic practice in both style and vocabulary appears to constitute a salient difference between his and Ascham’s intellectual characters. It seems congruent with the personal contrast Needham suggests, between Cheke’s relatively formal, even rigid personality and Ascham’s capacity for a more relaxed approach, which shows up more in his relations with others than with Cheke. There are other facets to this. Cheke’s texts can be seen to follow, very closely, argumentative outlines, often involving symmetrical sections of text (like the parts of his sentences).86 Ascham’s texts can also be outlined, but are famous for their digressions. In the midst of his discussion of imitatio in The Scholemaster, by a ‘small mention of Cambridge’, Ascham is ‘caryed into’ elegiac ‘remembrance of my tyme spent there’:87 that is a sentence Cheke would never have written. The contrast should not be overdone. Cheke and Ascham are deeply and widely united in their Protestant humanism. There is a difference of personal intellectual style. 5

Conclusion

The relationship of Roger Ascham with John Cheke had intellectual, professional, and personal aspects. The relationship also needs to be seen as a prime instance of the network of connections among the members of what Winthrop Hudson named ‘the Cambridge connection’, a major presence in English intellectual life and the life of church and state from the 1540s through to the 1580s. What Ascham and Cheke together stand for historically is above all the continuing strength of humanism in mid-​Tudor England, but contained now within Protestant belief. They were close allies in promoting at Cambridge the ‘two-​fold course of learning’ that Ascham attributed to Cheke, combining comprehensive study of literae with Christian doctrine, with special care to avoid any Pelagian taint.88 Their movement on to court met the humanistic demand that learning be put to use in active participation in the life of the state and the church, and also exemplified how humanistic learning provided an entrée to higher status in sixteenth-​century England. They were major exponents of the Renaissance humanist construct of perfection, which they

86 87 88

See McDiarmid, ‘John Cheke’s Preface’, p. 120. I have constructed similar outlines for The hurt of sedicion and De Ecclesia. English Works, p. 278. Ascham to Cheke, [Cambridge] 28 December 1547, letter lxxviii, Giles, vol. I, pt. 1, pp. 148–​149;​ Hatch, p. 266.

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importantly applied to their own language, asserting its capacity to rival Latin or Greek. Thinking in terms of rising to perfection seems associated with the energy of their cohort’s work for the many-​faceted Edwardian reform and for reforms of English. They were different in personality and style. Ascham had a high regard for Cheke’s high standards, though he was not always at ease with them. Ascham’s flexible and humane intelligence contrasts with, and for most of us is more attractive on the page than, Cheke’s typical insistent order and thoroughness. Between them personally, even after they left Cambridge, it remained clearly understood that Cheke was the master, Ascham his scholar. But this picture comes down to us to a very large extent through The Scholemaster. Ascham called attention to his intellectual debt. But Cheke in another sense is Ascham’s debtor, since Ascham’s lively and engaging writing, in English, has done more than anything else to keep Cheke’s memory alive.

­c hapter 6

Roger Ascham’s Diplomatic Training and Mid-​Tudor Diplomatic Careers Tracey A. Sowerby 1

Introduction

In The Scholemaster Roger Ascham suggests that Baldessare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano ‘aduisedlie read, and diligentlie followed, but one yeare at home in England, would do a yong ientleman more good, I witte, then three yeares trauell abrode spent in Italie’.1 Elsewhere in the text Ascham outlined that contemporary Italy was immoral and corrupting, unlike ancient Rome.2 This contrasts sharply with Ascham’s attitude in the early 1550s, while serving as secretary to Sir Richard Morison, the English ambassador to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles v. During this time, Ascham frequently expressed his wish to visit Italy and he carefully recorded the monuments, artefacts, and people he encountered while travelling to, and with, the Emperor’s court. Although it is clear that Ascham’s time abroad in diplomatic service shaped his ideas and his career, it has not excited the interest of many scholars. Melanie Ord, writing about travel in early modern England, chose to analyse the parallels between travel and education in Ascham’s The Scholemaster rather than examine his activities or writing when serving as ambassadorial secretary.3 Meanwhile Ascham’s modern biographer spent almost as much time discussing Morison’s mission as Ascham’s activities. When Lawrence Ryan did turn his attention firmly to Ascham’s travels, his interests were predominantly focused on Ascham’s scholarly and antiquarian pursuits.4 Ascham travelled for a particular purpose: diplomatic service. He is a particularly useful case study for examining diplomatic secretaries. Thanks to 1 Roger Ascham, The scholemaster or plaine and perfite way of teachyng children, to vnderstand, write, and speake, the Latin tong (London: John Day, 1570, ustc 507056), sig. G4v. 2 Ibid., sig. H3r–​v. 3 Melanie Ord, Travel and Experience in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 24–​25, 29–​52. 4 Ryan, Ascham, esp. pp. 127–​162.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_008

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both his roles first as tutor and later as Latin secretary to Elizabeth i and his reputation for exceptional Latinity, considerably more material survives that allows for a discussion of Ascham’s secretaryship than for the majority of those who served Tudor ambassadors as secretaries, even if there are still significant gaps in the record. Indeed in many other cases, particularly in the reigns of the first two Tudor monarchs, it is not even possible to identify who the secretary was. Two trends in recent scholarship speak to a need to better understand diplomatic secretaries. On the one hand, diplomatic historians have highlighted the importance of those below the level of accredited ambassador in initiating and maintaining relationships between princes and polities5 and, on the other, there is a growing recognition of the importance of secretaries not only within domestic politics, but also in foreign policy and diplomacy.6 Yet, to date, the diplomatic secretary has received scant attention.7 Taking an actor-​centred approach, this essay uses Ascham’s experiences while serving as secretary to Richard Morison as a prism through which to analyse the role and prospects of diplomatic secretaries in the mid-​Tudor period.8 First it examines diplomatic writing, including one of Ascham’s books (his Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany) which grew out of his diplomatic writings, before discussing the other forms of training and education that Ascham received as Morison’s secretary. Finally, Ascham’s own musings upon his career provide the basis of an analysis of the ‘profession’ of diplomatic secretary.

5 For a discussion of this and other recent trends in diplomatic history see Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic History’, History Compass, 14.9 (2016), pp. 441–​456 and Jan Hennings and Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Introduction: Practices of Diplomacy’, in Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings, eds., Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c.1410–​1800 (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 1–​21. 6 Paul M. Dover, ed., Secretaries and Statecraft in the Early Modern World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (London: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 7 For a rare exception see Christine Vogel and Florian Kühnel, eds., Zwischen Domestik und Staatsdiener:  Botschaftssekretäre in den frühneuzeitlichen Außenbeziehungen (Cologne: Böhlau, forthcoming). 8 On the actor-​centred approach to diplomatic studies see Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler, eds., Akteure der Außenbeziehungen: Netzwerke und Interkulturalität im historischen Wandel (Cologne: Böhlau, 2010). On Morison’s embassy see Tracey A. Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England: The Careers of Sir Richard Morison c.1513–​1556 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 6.

126 Sowerby 2

Diplomatic Writing

Writing at the turn of the seventeenth century, the French legal scholar and diplomat Jean Hotman explained that among the officers in an ambassador’s house ‘the most necessary, and in choyce of whom hee ought to be most carefull, are, the Secretaries’, for they ‘assist and ease him in the businesses of his charge, to dispatch causes that concerne the same, and to hold a good register therof, to keepe faithfully the scroles, cyphers, and other papers of importance, (which neuerthelesse would be better vnder the maisters locke)’.9 Mid-​Tudor ambassadors usually had only one secretary. The way in which Ascham was chosen is suggestive: he was recommended for the post by John Cheke and, despite a lack of prior experience, successfully obtained it.10 Several Tudor ambassadors chose their secretaries themselves, or at least were able to request individuals. For example, when John Mason needed a new secretary in 1554, he requested ‘one Petoo’ be sent if he was ‘disposed to go abrode and be nott otherwyse there employed’.11 In Ascham’s case, however, it seems that Morison was happy to trust the judgement of his friend Cheke.12 Hotman paints a good picture of some of the duties that Ascham was expected to undertake. Certainly Ascham spent much of his time copying the ambassador’s reports and letters.13 If he kept a distinct register or copybook of the ambassador’s correspondence, it does not appear to have survived.14 Ascham also became intimately acquainted with different encryption techniques, not 9

10

11 12 13 14

Jean Hotman, Ambassador (London:  Valentine Simmes for James Shaw, 1603, ustc 3001358), sigs. C6v–​C7r. Hotman recommended equal diligence when appointing the embassy steward. Other writers also advocated caution. See, for example, James E. Dunlop, trans., ‘Etienne Dolet of Orleans, France on the Office of Legate, Most Commonly Called Ambassador’, Journal of International Law, 27.1 (1933), pp. 82–​95, at p. 86. Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 14 January 1551, letter cxiii, Giles, vol. i., pt. 2, pp. 235–​239, at p. 237. This was perhaps in response to Ascham’s petition that Cheke help him study overseas (Ascham to Cheke, 28 January 1550, letter xciv, Giles, vol. i., pt. 1, pp. 173–​176, at p. 176). The transcriptions provided in Giles’s edition of Ascham’s letters are in places inaccurate. For this reason references to the original manuscripts have been given wherever possible, and the quotations given follow these rather than Giles where the two differ. Translations of the Latin have been taken from Hatch and Vos. Mason to Petre, Brussels, 20 June 1554, tna sp 69/​4, fol. 149r. On Morison and Cheke see Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform, pp. 150–​153, 225–​232. Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 14 January 1551, letter cxiii, Giles, vol. I, pt. 2, pp. 235–​239 at p. 236;​Hatch and Vos, p. 142; and Morison to Cecil, Speyer, 7 October 1552, tna sp 68/​10, fol. 87v. The letter books of the official correspondence of Peter Vannes, Morison’s equivalent in Venice, demonstrate that some mid-​Tudor embassy secretaries did keep such records. See bl Harley ms, 5008–​5009.

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least as Morison appears to have been over-​cautious in that regard at the start of his embassy. Morison used a polygraphic substitution cipher that included blank characters and symbols or groups of symbols that replaced specific words; this type of cipher was common in Mid-​and Late-​Tudor diplomacy.15 The ambassador also utilised English transliteration into Greek as a means of encryption, a system that would have been easy for an avid Grecian such as Ascham to deploy, just as it would have been easy for William Cecil, the junior principal secretary at the English court, to decode.16 Ascham was sensitive to the mechanics of ciphering, even warning Cecil in 1552 that employing the cipher could occasionally alter the meaning of the text being sent, for instance there were cases where two words might be separate words or might be combined to form a single word, or a single word could be inadvertently rendered as two separate words, but in doing so the meaning of the passage might be changed.17 Embassy secretaries practised the art of writing different types of diplomatic documents, learning by example what they should contain, how they should be structured, and how the material should be analysed. Letter writing manuals discussed both general precepts and reproduced numerous exemplary letters that readers could copy, suggesting that it was expected that the rules of letter-​writing would be learned in large part through example.18 While Ascham was already well-​versed in many aspects of domestic and academic epistolary etiquette his role as embassy secretary brought insights into the expectations attached to letters addressed to foreign potentates.19 Acting as Morison’s amanuensis also showed Ascham how diplomatic intelligence was digested and arranged in a manner that the Privy Council would find useful. He would have experienced, along with Morison, a steep learning curve at the beginning of the embassy as the ambassador worried about striking the correct balance between leaving too much out and reporting every rumour he encountered.20 The secretary claimed to be an avid consumer of news, writing that ‘there is 15

See for instance Morison to Cecil, Augsburg, 30 December 1550, tna sp 68/​5, unfoliated; Morison to the Council, Brussels, 28 February 1553, tna sp 68/​11, fol. 79r-​v. 16 Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform, p. 195. 17 Ascham to Cecil, Villach, 12 July 1552, bl Lansdowne ms 3, fol. 2r; letter cxxxix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 328–​330, at p. 329. 18 For example, William Fulwood, The enimie of idlenesse teaching the maner and stile how to endite, compose and write all sorts of epistles and letters (London: Henry Bynneman for Leonard Maylard, 1568, ustc 506772). 19 See letter cxv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 242–​243. This letter from Ascham on behalf of the ambassador is undated and to an unknown recipient. 20 See Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform, pp. 194–​195.

128 Sowerby nothing small, big, or in between that comes into my hands, whether pertaining to religion or to the private or public sphere, which I do not eagerly and attentively examine’.21 Later he would claim that ‘no wieke almost hath past in the which there hath not commonly come to my hand for the most part of the notable thynges that haue bene attempted in Turky, Hungary, Italy, Fraunce, and Germany’.22 An attentive embassy secretary, then, might learn much about current affairs not only at the court at which he was based, but also further afield. The impact that working with Morison had on Ascham’s writing becomes clear if we examine the marked contrast between Ascham’s earliest personal letters from embassy and those he wrote later. Those written during his first few months in post scarcely touched on political affairs and more closely resemble travel writing than political analyses. For instance, when writing on 1 October he claimed to have perambulated Calais and gave brief descriptions of that town and Antwerp; in a letter of 14 October he described Mechelen. He pledged that he would visit any ancient monuments in the towns he visited during his employment and in November outlined his activities as an academic tourist, which included taking in as many lectures as he could during brief stays in Louvain and Cologne, as well as seeking out libraries, bookshops, and antiquities in every town at which the ambassador’s retinue had stayed on their journey to the emperor’s court.23 Admittedly, Ascham described seeing the Landgrave of Hesse in captivity and made a few brief comments about the Interim, but on the whole his earlier letters shy away from engagement with the major political events of the day.24 The largely apolitical nature of Ascham’s early letters may, in part, have arisen from an appreciation of the sensitivity of his position. Certainly he believed that his role ‘doth in a manner forbid me to send any [news] … bicause I know so muche and beinge in this rowme yt I am, I must nedes kepe them close bicause thei be credit unto me and althoughe I knew them otherwise yet I must 21 22 23 24

Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 11 November 1550, letter cviii, Giles, vol. i pt. 2, pp. 216–​222, at p. 217 /​Hatch and Vos, p. 132. Roger Ascham, A report and discourse written by Roger Ascham, of the affaires and state of Germany and the Emperour Charles his court, duryng certaine yeares while the sayd Roger was there (London: John Daye, 1570, ustc 507052), sig. A4v. Ascham to Edward Raven, Antwerp, 1 October 1550; to the same, Cologne, 12 October 1550; and to Cheke, Augsburg, 11 November 1550:  letters cv, cvi, and cviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 210–​214, 216–​22. See for example Roger Ascham’s extensive description of his journey to the imperial court which he sent to Edward Raven from Augsburg on 20 January 1551, bl Lansdowne ms 98, fols. 50r–​57r, letter cxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​271.

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and will let them alone’.25 Ascham recognised the virtue of discretion very early in his diplomatic career. Although he had been hopeful as he set out for Germany that he would be able to report on all matters to his friends, by January 1551, he apologetically explained to Cheke that ‘there are sound reasons and definite considerations why I do not’. On the one hand important matters were covered in Morison’s letters to Cheke and the Privy Council, on the other if Ascham were to repeat ‘the most important things which are happening here’ in his private letters ‘I should betray trust committed to me and take on a task as useless to me as it would be troublesome to you’.26 Nevertheless at this time he also hoped that he would be sent to Trent, where he believed he would be able to report on the General Council and have access to other ambassador’s letters.27 Ascham was also concerned that his letters might not arrive in England without being read along the way.28 By mid-​1551, however, Ascham was seemingly more confident of what he could and could not write, as he was including more political news and analysis in his personal letters than before alongside the more ethnographic material that marked his earliest correspondence, for instance relaying news of the Turks’ campaigns and the religious politics of the Empire.29 From this point onwards, Ascham’s letters frequently relayed news –​ and provided analysis –​of developments in the Empire that would not have been considered sensitive information by the ambassador, suggesting that he had absorbed the key principles of diplomatic reporting. 3

A Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany

The development in Ascham’s analysis is most evident in his Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany.30 David Potter judged that this text was ‘pre-​ eminent as a work both of historical and political analysis’, placing it among longer important analytical tracts written by other mid-​Tudor humanist 25 26

Ibid., fol. 56r. Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 14 January 1551, letter cxiii, Giles, vol. I, pt. 2, pp. 235–​239, at p. 236;​Hatch and Vos, p. 141. 27 Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, bl Lansdowne ms 98, fol. 56v; letter cxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​271, at pp. 268–​269. Ascham went on to describe the layout of Protestant churches in Augsburg and their practices (fols. 56v–​57r/​ pp. 269–​270). 28 Ascham to Martin Bucer, Augsburg, 7 January 1551, letter cxi, Giles, v0l. i pt. 2, pp. 229–​232, at p. 230. 29 For example, Ascham to the fellows of St John’s, Augsburg, 12 October 1551, bl Lansdowne ms 98, fols. 63r–​65v; letter cxxxiii, Giles, v0l. i pt. 2, pp. 307–​315. 30 Ascham, Report, sig. B2v.

130 Sowerby diplomats. Indeed it formed part of Potter’s argument that the diplomats of the mid-​Tudor period were increasingly engaging in dispassionate analysis of affairs of state in a way that marked them out from their Henrician forebears.31 Certainly the Report appears as something of a tour de force, providing an in-​ depth analysis of the politics and religious complexion of the Holy Roman Empire in the light of internal and external political pressures. Ascham’s work included an analysis of the conflict between the Emperor and the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman. Although he depicted the Turks as cruel and untrustworthy, Ascham stressed that the Christian princes with whom Suleiman had dealt had also broken their word and resorted to extreme violence, thus providing context for Suleiman’s actions against Christian prisoners of war. From a geo-​political stand point, Ascham surmised that Dragut Rey’s successful siege of Tripoli was an important strategic loss for Charles, as would have been his attack on Malta had it been successful.32 Ascham ascribed Charles’s Italian woes to the meddling of the Pope, Julius iii, whom Ascham depicts as playing Charles off against Henry ii of France in order to reduce the Emperor’s power in Italy.33 However, Ascham asserted that underlying the Emperor’s political woes was one consistent factor: his own shortcomings. He persistently attributed the desertion of Charles’s subjects and former allies to the Emperor’s ‘unkindness’, by which he usually meant Charles’s inability to appoint good governors (for example failure to appoint a virtuous viceroy in Naples) or his failure to bestow adequate rewards and patronage on his lieges.34 The Report is as much a recent history of political alliances within and threats to the Empire as a comment on current affairs. Although Ascham’s analysis at times dates back to late 1550, the point at which he began to have access to diplomatic correspondence about the Empire, the text takes as its departure point the state of alliances in the summer of 1553. As the end of the printed text makes clear, what survives of the Report was intended as a prologue to a more extended historical analysis. Consequently, it sketches the character of the main protagonists and their responses to the key events that Ascham suggests he will describe in more detail in subsequent chapters. These, Ascham claimed, would ‘lead you the same way that I went euen to the Emperours Court beyng 31

David Potter, ‘Mid-​ Tudor Foreign Policy and Diplomacy:  1547–​ 63’, in Susan Doran and Glenn Richardson, eds., Tudor England and its Neighbours (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 106–​138. Quotation at p. 119. 32 Ascham, Report, esp. sigs. B2v–​B4v. 33 Ibid., sigs. C2r–​D1v. 34 Ibid., sigs. B1v–​B2r, C2r, D1v–​D2v, E4v–​F3r, G3r.

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at Augusta. an 1550’ and end when the Emperor’s court moved to Brussels in 1553; in the text (now lost) that followed, he ‘might better marke thynges dayly’.35 Elsewhere he referred readers to ‘my whole Diarium’ which ‘shall at full instruct you’.36 Ascham claimed that he had started keeping a daily journal of political affairs after the Emperor’s court had been attacked at Innsbruck in May 1552 until the following January.37 This does not appear to have survived, but there is no reason to doubt Ascham’s assertion and this record likely informed his Report. By the end of the century, several ambassadors were keeping journals of their embassies, as Robert Cecil did during his special mission to France in 1598.38 However, it was much rarer for embassy secretaries to keep such texts. Other English diplomatic actors certainly kept journals of their time overseas, although these tended to be more a record of their travels and/​or negotiations than extended abstract political analyses. The herald Thomas Wall, for example, kept a daily account of his mission accompanying Sir Nicholas Carew and Richard Sampson to Charles v’s court in 1529–​30.39 At one point in the Report Ascham claimed that he was writing it on 23 June 1553, which places him in Brussels with Morison.40 There is evidence, however, that he continued to work on it beyond this date. In July 1553, he claimed that he was engaged in writing the real reasons why Parma, Salerno, Brandenburg, and Saxony had deserted the Emperor; this was one of the key themes he had identified as the purpose of the Report.41 The printed version of the Report is presented as a delayed response to a request for political news from John Astley, Elizabeth’s household attendant and husband of Katherine Astley, whom Ascham had befriended while tutoring the Princess.42 He claimed that

35 36 37

Ibid., sig. I4v. Ibid., sig. H4v. Ascham to Johannes Sturm, Speyer, 20 October 1552 and same to Cheke, Brussels, 7 July 1553, letters cxlii and cl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 337–​341, at pp. 338 and pp. 362–​367, at p. 365. 38 Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, 1/​171. For the letter books and journals that English diplomats composed see Elizabeth Williamson, ‘Before “Diplomacy”: Travel, Embassy and the Production of Political Information in the later Sixteenth Century’, unpublished dissertation, Queen Mary University of London (2012). 39 Robert J. Knecht, ‘Sir Nicholas Carew’s Journey through France in 1529’, in David Grummitt, ed., The English Experience in France c.1450–​1558: War, Diplomacy, and Cultural Exchange (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 160–​181. 40 Ascham, Report, sig. D1v. 41 Ibid., sig. A3v; Ascham to Cheke, Brussels, 7 July 1553, letter cl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 362–​ 367, at p. 365. 42 Ascham, Report, sigs. A2r–​A3r.

132 Sowerby he would ‘homely and rudely (yet not altogether disorderly) part priuately vnto you … the greatest matters that were to be marked in all these affaires’.43 The Report contains valuable information about how Ascham gathered the intelligence upon which he based it. Some he claimed to have heard over the dinner table in Brussels from imperial agents who had business in Italy and other of the Emperor’s dominions or from other ambassadors at the Emperor’s court.44 Others had apparently been imparted to him by Christopher Mont, especially the information about the German princes, which was Mont’s specialist area, or from his fellow English diplomats.45 Others came from friends and acquaintances he had made during his time in Morison’s household, such as The Fugger librarian Hieronymus Wolf or the Duke of Saxony’s preacher, John Aurifaber.46 Ascham summarised his sources as coming from ‘such notes of affaires as I priuately marked for my selfe: which I either felt and saw, or learned in such place and of such persons as had willes to seeke for, and wayes to come by, and wittes to way’ the intelligence.47 In other words, Ascham drew upon many of the same sources that the ambassador used when compiling his despatches. Another important source, both for Ascham’s journal and the Report, was the diplomatic correspondence that he spent so much of his time writing and copying and his own correspondence which drew upon the information he learned while writing for the ambassador. His discussion of the Turk even repeated an incident that he had reported in a letter to the fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge in the summer of 1552.48 Indeed, the analysis in the Report closely resembles Morison’s reports to the Privy Council.49 Ascham ordered his analysis by prince, as the ambassador often did. The secretary gave more historical detail and included more locally-​specific information than Morison might –​for instance describing some of the political figures by likening them to men that Astley knew. But for the most part, his methods in analysing the political and religious situation are very close to the longer reports that Morison was compiling during the confusing days of the summer and autumn of 1552 as Charles’s court fragmented and the Emperor sought to deal with internal and 43 Ibid., sig. A4v. 44 Ibid., sigs. C1v, I2v. 45 Ibid., sigs. C2v, D1v. See also references in n. 81 below. 46 Ascham, Report, sigs. C1v, G1r, H2v. 47 Ibid., sig. A4v. 48 Compare Ascham, Report, sigs. B3v–​B4v and Ascham to the fellows of St John’s, Augsburg 12 October 1551, bl Lansdowne ms 98, fol. 63v, letter cxxxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 307–​315, at pp. 308–​309. 49 These can be found in tna sp 68/​5–​12, bl Harley ms 523, Cotton ms Galba B xi–​x ii.

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external military threats.50 Seen from that perspective Ascham’s Report is less remarkable as a piece of political writing and more emblematic of the training that Ascham received on embassy. It married diplomatic acumen and scholarly prowess, demonstrating that the secretary had mastered the skills necessary for further diplomatic preferment. Ascham appears to have been influenced by two diplomat-​writers when composing the Report: the infamous Italian politician and commentator Niccolo Machiavelli and the French historian Philippe de Comines.51 His direct invocations of Machiavelli were not necessarily positive, for instance criticising those who employ ‘Machiauelles doctrine to thincke say and do whatsoeuer may serue best for profite or pleasure’, yet it seems likely that the organisation of the work owed something to the Florentine’s historical works. Ascham initially appears to have formed a favourable opinion of Machiavelli’s style of analysis, even if he warned that ‘to many good men he seems to disparage impudently the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ and to mock impiously’.52 Ascham was not unusual in turning to such authors for inspiration. Comines was an author who found favour among several Tudor diplomats; references to events that Comines discussed even became a form of shorthand for several ambassadors when they wished to comment obliquely on contemporary matters.53 Machiavelli’s influence is more easily traceable to Ascham’s diplomatic service, for Morison had been teaching Ascham Italian using unnamed works by the Florentine. Morison claimed that the work was chosen merely for the tongue, but, coming from a man who used ‘Machiavelist’ as a complimentary term to indicate high powers of political analysis at a time when ‘Machiavellian’ and its synonyms were becoming pejorative terms indicating dishonesty or dissimulation, one could be forgiven for doubting his word.54 Ascham was also in good diplomatic company when it came to invoking classical authors. Many other Tudor diplomats used classical authors to make political points, whether to suggest the course that affairs might take or to comment on the character of political actors.55 Indeed the link between classical 50

On the workings of the embassy at this time see Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform, pp. 207–​209. On Charles’s military efforts see James Tracy, Charles V, Impresario of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 229–​248. 51 Ryan, Ascham, pp. 165–​171, 185–​187. 52 Ascham, Report, sigs. H1v, I2v, I4v; Ascham to William Petre, no place given, 7 April 1555, letter clxxxviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 436–​439, at p. 438. 53 tna sp 70/​14, fol. 104v; 70/​39, fol. 11r. 54 Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform, p. 25. 55 See Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Francis Thynne’s Perfect ambassadour and the Construction of Diplomatic Thought in Elizabethan England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 82 (2020), pp. 539–557.

134 Sowerby works and diplomatic analysis strongly suggests that Ascham was contemplating the nature of diplomatic service in the first few months of his posting –​of all works he could have chosen, he recommended that Cheke turn his attention to translating Demosthenes and Aeschines’s On the False Legation, a dispute in five orations about whether Aeschines had betrayed Athens during a mission to Philip ii of Macedonia. This debate between the two Athenian ambassadors discussed key principles regarding the duties of an ambassador and the loyalty he owed his state, as well as integrity (and dissimulation) in diplomacy.56 4

Transferable Skills Acquisition in the Diplomatic Household

Gary Bell claimed that ‘it was in the embassy secretaryships that the most thorough training for later diplomatic assignments came’ and even went so far as to describe the embassy of Nicholas Throckmorton to France in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign as ‘an approximation of a school for ambassadors’, but he did not go into any further detail about the training that a secretary might receive.57 On this issue, Ascham again provides ample insights, in this case into how serving as a diplomatic secretary might expose an individual to a range of opportunities to acquire and practise transferable skills far beyond the technical ability to compose suitable diplomatic documents. It is clear that he and others in Morison’s ambassadorial household benefitted from a linguistic education while there. While Ascham believed that a posting to the Emperor’s court brought opportunities that a man might ‘hav learnide in a manner’ various languages, particularly ‘duche [i.e. German], frenche and italian’,58 the linguistic studies he undertook went beyond the opportunities that Charles v’s multilingual court offered individuals to become familiar with a new language

56

57

58

Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 11 November 1550, letter cviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 216–​222, at p. 220. On broader interest in these texts in political circles see Guillaume Coatelen and Fred Schurink, ‘A Tudor Translator at Work: John Osborne’s Manuscript Translations of Demosthenes’s Against Leptines (1582) and Aeschines’s On the Embassy (1583)’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 80 (2017), pp. 257–​275. On the importance of Demosthenes see Alastair J. L. Blanshard and Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Thomas Wilson’s Demosthenes and the Politics of Tudor Translation’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 12 (2005), pp. 46–​80. Gary M. Bell, ‘Elizabethan Diplomacy: the Subtle Revolution’, in Malcolm R. Thorp and Arthur J. Slavin, eds., Politics, Religion and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of De Lemar Jensen (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994), pp. 267–​286, at pp. 271–​272. Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, bl Lansdowne ms 98, fol. 56r; letter cxviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​271, at p. 266.

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or two by absorption. The secretary read Greek and –​more pertinently for European diplomacy –​Latin with the ambassador.59 He claimed that ‘for understandinge the Italian I am mette well’ and seemingly received regular lessons in the language. By January 1551 he could claim ‘some diligence’ in it, boasting ‘I am almost an Italian my self’.60 His Italian instruction continued, and at the very least, Ascham was introduced to Italian works by Machiavelli and Morison’s friend, the Protestant reformer and exile Bernardine Ochino.61 This was particularly important at Charles v’s court, where Italian was both a common language among courtiers and one that the Emperor preferred over Latin.62 It also strengthened Ascham’s credentials to undertake a short independent diplomatic mission to Italy. Ascham learned ‘dutch’, though apparently with less initial success, for he joked that ‘suerlie I drinke duch better than I speak dutch’.63 The linguistic education to which Ascham –​and some other members of the ambassador’s household –​was exposed, then, reflected the practical demands of the court at which he was based. It might seem odd that an ambassador might have a secretary who was not fluent in the different vernaculars of the host court, but this was not the only occasion when the linguistic skills of the appointee did not perfectly match the linguistic demands that the embassy faced, for in 1554 John Mason was forced to request ‘one that hath french langage’ to assist him at the Emperor’s court while it was based in the Low Countries.64 Ascham’s practical training extended beyond languages. His observations of the ambassador’s behaviour will have given him cues as to the political utility of certain types of information. As Morison’s secretary, Ascham would have observed that there were occasions on which the ambassador included maps 59

60 61 62 63 64

See for example Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 11 November 1550 and 14 January 1551, letters cviii and cxiii, Giles, vol. i pt. 2, pp. 216–​222, at p. 220 and pp. 235–​239, at p. 237; Ascham to Raven, Augsburg 20 January, Augsburg, 23 February, Augsburg 18 May 1551, bl Lansdowne ms 98, fols. 55v–​56r, 57v, 61r–​v; letters cxviii, cxx, and cxxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​271, at p.266; pp. 278–​280, at p. 280; and pp. 281–​288, at p. 285. Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January, Augsburg, 18 May 1551, bl Lansdowne ms 98, fols. 56r, 61r–​v; letters cxviii and cxxiii Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​271, at p. 266 and 281–​288, at p. 285. Morison to Cecil, Villach, 13 July 1552, tna sp 68/​10, fol. 52v. On Morison and Ochino see Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform, pp. 152, 196. On Charles’s linguistic preferences see Joycelyne G.  Russell, Diplomats at Work:  Three Renaissance Studies (Stroud:  Alan Sutton, 1992), p.  8. On Charles’s Latinity see Jason Powell, ‘The Emperor’s Bad Latin’, Notes and Queries, 49.2 (2002), pp. 207–​209. Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 18 May 1551, bl Lansdowne ms 98, fol. 61r–​v; letter cxxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 281–​288, at p. 285. Mason to Petre, Brussels, 20 June 1554, tna sp 69/​4, fol. 149r.

136 Sowerby in his reports when the information was felt to be useful.65 Ascham appears to have had a strong interest in cartography; certainly numerous of his letters mention recent maps. Some were gifts, some purchases that he shared with friends, others he sent back to patrons in England in the hope of winning further favour.66 Cartographic knowledge was highly prized, so much so that even bad maps were considered useful.67 Other of Ascham’s interests made him well-​suited to diplomacy; simultaneously, serving as embassy secretary gave him greater opportunities to indulge his interests. His early letters reveal a good eye for military and geographic intelligence, including the strength of town walls, defensibility of waterways, and other important features of the towns he visited.68 Navigating courtly ceremony was key to successful diplomatic representation.69 Crucially, diplomatic secretaries gained greater insights into diplomatic ceremonial than lower-​ranking members of the embassy. As the embassy travelled to court in 1550 and when Morison travelled (somewhat in disgrace) in the summer of 1551, Ascham had a front row seat to witness the civic rituals for entertaining visiting diplomats.70 During the journey to Augsburg Ascham was also exposed to various aspects of Habsburg protocol. At the Regent’s court in Brussels he observed the protocol for religious services when the French Queen dowager, Charles v’s sister Eleanor, was present, but the Regent was 65 66 67

68 69 70

For example, Wotton and Morison to the Council, Augsburg, 25 August 1551, tna sp 68/​8, fol. 126v. For example Ascham to Cecil, Speyer, 27 September, Speyer, 28 November 1552, Brussels, 9 July 1553, bl Lansdowne ms 3, fols. 3r, 5v, 61r; letters cxl, cxliii, and cxlix Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 330–​334, at p. 330; pp.341–​344, at p. 344; and pp. 360–​362, at p. 362. Peter Barber, ‘ “Procure as many as you can and send them over”: Cartographic Espionage and Cartographic Gifts in International Relations, 1460–​1760’, in Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox, eds., Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 13–​29. Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, bl Lansdowne ms 98, fol. 50v; letter cxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​271, at p. 247. On the opportunities that diplomatic travelling presented for coin enthusiasts see Andrew Burnett, ch. 4 in this volume. See for example André Krischer, ‘Ein nothwendig Stück der Ambassaden: zur politischen Rationalität des diplomatischen Zeremoniells bei Kurfürst Clemens August’, Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein, 205 (2002), pp. 161–​200. E.g. Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, letter cxvi, Giles, vol. i pt. 2, pp. 243–​ 270. Morison had offended the Emperor in his second audience, when he was tasked with discussing the English Book of Common Prayer and whether Princess Mary could hear Mass in private. See Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform, pp.  201–​206. On the importance of diplomatic hospitality to Imperial cities see André Krischer, Reichsstädte in der Fürstengesellschaft. Politischer Zeichengebrauch in der Frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).

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not; he even observed the ceremonies used in the dowager’s chamber.71 Every time Ascham attended upon the ambassador during an audience he witnessed ordinary diplomatic ceremonial practice at the Emperor’s court. He also had opportunities to observe more specific protocols such as that used in Prince Philip’s privy chamber and some of the more extraordinary ceremonial moments in the imperial ritual calendar, such as the celebrations of the Order of the Golden Fleece.72 Such occasions gave Ascham a detailed, nuanced knowledge of Habsburg court ceremony. This placed him in a strong position to be able to navigate such ceremonies successfully were he to participate them in the future (for example as an ambassador in his own right) and to use them as a source of political information about relative status at court, decoding their meaning and any variations in procedure for the Privy Council.73 Ascham also engaged directly with the duty of English diplomats to uphold their monarch’s place in the host court’s ceremonial order. For instance in September 1552 he was despatched to Charles’s court because Morison was objecting that the Portuguese ambassador had been allowed an audience with the Emperor ahead of the English ambassador.74 As far back as the earliest protocols of the Papal court, the English and Portuguese kings had vied for precedence.75 Morison therefore needed to establish that his rival’s access was an exceptional matter that did not create a precedent, which Ascham was assured was the case.76 There were other occasions on which it was not suitable for the ambassador to discuss matters in person; on such occasions his secretary would be sent to broach the topic first. Ascham therefore gained experience in minor negotiations with important officials such as Antoine Perrenot sieur de Granvelle, Charles v’s chief minister.77 Morison trusted Ascham with further diplomatic duties, including delivering important letters to German potentates. At the very least Ascham couriered letters to the Count Palatine in Heidelberg for the ambassador in September 1552.78 71

Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, bl Lansdowne ms 98, fol. 50r–​v; letter cxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​271, at pp. 245–​246. 72 Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, Augsburg, 18 May 1551, bl Lansdowne ms 98, fols. 56r–​v, 62r; letters cxiv and cxxii Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​271, at pp. 267–​268 and pp. 281–​288, at p. 288. 73 It might also have been useful during Philip’s stays in England when King Consort. 74 Morison to Cecil, Speyer, 3 October 1552, bl Cotton ms Galba bxi, fol. 102r–​v. 75 Catherine Fletcher, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome: The Rise of the Resident Ambassador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 71. 76 Ascham to Morison, Landau, 1 October 1552, bl Cotton ms Galba bxi, fol. 103r–​v; letter cxli, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 334–​337. 77 Morison to Cecil, Speyer, 3 October 1552, bl Cotton ms Galba bxi, fol. 102v. 78 Ascham, Report, sigs. C1v, C4r.

138 Sowerby The secretary’s place alongside the ambassador during audiences, at court entertainments, and in the less formalised environment of hospitality among diplomats exposed him to the full range of scenarios in which an accredited ambassador might find himself, even if the secretary only played a supporting role. Consequently, secretaries, more than any other member of the ambassador’s household, had ample opportunities not only to observe the conduct of negotiations but also to meet people of varying degrees of influence. Ascham became acquainted with a range of courtly figures, from the Venetian ambassador and the emperor’s physician to Hubert Thomas Leodius, the secretary of the Elector of Trier, whom Ascham regarded as ‘my very good friend and associate at the Emperor’s court’.79 Moreover, the intellectual networks that Ascham cultivated might also prove to be useful information networks for an aspiring diplomat.80 5

Diplomatic Secretaries and Diplomatic Careers

Ascham’s surviving letters provide rare evidence of a junior diplomat reflecting upon his future prospects. In September 1552 he wrote to William Cecil outlining three potential employments that he desired when Morison’s mission came to an end.81 One was teaching Greek at St John’s College, or at least returning to an improved position in Cambridge; the second was to ‘help forward with some piece of lerning in the Corte’ –​apparently in a capacity that Morison had previously discussed with Cecil. If neither of these options were open to him, then Ascham wanted ‘to serve my contry abrode, in this Corte, or in venice, or in maximilians Corte in hungarie, or some other place’. Having seemingly prioritised scholarly service in the University or court, Ascham asserted his ‘good will to do service abroad’ and proceeded to tell Cecil how effective he could be as an agent or ambassador: ‘I wold not doubt but mark as warelie and write home as diligentlie soch occurentes t[hat] do happen as som of theis strangers 79

80

81

Ascham to Sturm, Speyer, 20 October 1552, Ascham to Gardiner, London, 1 January 1554, letters cxliii and clxv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 337–​341, at pp. 339–​340 and pp. 399–​402, at p. 401 /​Hatch and Vos, pp. 205, 247. Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, May 14–​18 1551, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 281–​288, at pp. 286–​287. For an overview of Ascham’s intellectual activities and networks at this time see Ryan, Ascham, ch. 7. For the potential of intellectual networks to aid diplomatic efforts see Ruth Kohlndorfer-​Fries, Diplomatie und Gelehrtenrepublik: die Kontakte des französischen Gesandten Jacques Bongars (1554–​1612) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009). Ascham to Cecil, Speyer, 27 September 1552, bl Lansdowne ms 3, fols. 3r–​4r; letter cxl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 330–​334.

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do whiche have so good stipendes out of the realme’ and stressed that he could be of personal assistance to Cecil.82 Here Ascham was suggesting that he could be as useful as the foreign agents who served the English crown, such as Christopher Mont, who served Henry viii, Edward vi, and later Elizabeth in the Holy Roman Empire.83 Concurrently, Ascham was pushing his candidature for a major ambassadorial posting by suggesting that he was suitable to serve at the imperial court, the archducal court, or in Venice. His choice of these three courts is telling. Ascham had befriended the Venetian ambassador at the Emperor’s court; this and his acquisition of Italian may have recommended him for a mission to the Seignory. Through his many years of experience as a diplomatic secretary at the Emperor’s court Ascham acquired unparalleled knowledge of the local political landscape, how the court functioned, and numerous networks that left him well-​placed to serve as ambassador there one day. However, this very experience could have undermined his status had he succeeded Morison directly, as members of the court would have been familiar with him in a subordinate position and not as the symbolic stand-​in of his prince. That would not have been a problem at Maximilian’s court, which is perhaps the least obvious of Ascham’s suggestions. There is some evidence that rather than thinking in terms of regional specialisation per se, those involved in English diplomacy thought of dynastic specialisation. In other words, it was believed that serving at one Habsburg court might prepare an ambassador for service at the court of another member of the dynasty.84 By that logic, Ascham was excellently placed to take up an embassy to Charles v’s nephew. Ascham persistently wished for a prestigious position at Cambridge when his time serving Morison came to an end. Yet he also consistently suggested that he was open to other options, including future diplomatic postings, 82

Ascham to Cecil, Speyer, 27 September 1552, bl Lansdowne ms 3, fol. 3v; letter cxl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 330–​334, at pp. 332–​333. 83 On Mont, who was at times an accredited ambassador, see Esther Hildebrandt, ‘Christopher Mont, Anglo-​German Diplomat’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 15 (1984), pp. 281–​ 292; Christian Sepp, ‘Christopher Mont und die deutsch-​englischen Beziehungen im 16. Jahrhundert’, in Heidrun Kugeler, Christian Sepp, and Georg Wolf eds., Internationale Beziehungen in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ansätze und Perspektiven (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2006), pp. 69–​101. 84 This is certainly suggested by the career of Thomas Chaloner. For a brief overview see Clarence H.  Miller, ‘Chaloner, Sir Thomas, the elder (1521–​1565)’, odnb. A  problematic argument for regional specialisation has been put forward by Bell (‘Elizabethan Diplomacy’, pp. 276–​278).

140 Sowerby despite claiming in March 1553 that he had his heart set on a university career.85 For instance when he wrote to the Chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, seeking patronage in October 1553, Ascham once more outlined three potential positions that he desired: a post at Cambridge remained his first choice and serving as the queen’s Latin secretary, a position he would receive in the following year, his third. But his second choice was now overseas service, either as a scholar-​ intelligencer or as an ambassador. He promised Gardiner long, detailed letters of intelligence ‘with everything completely reliable, careful and considered’ just as he had once promised Cecil. On this occasion, however, Ascham emphasised that his time in Morison’s household qualified him for such service, as he had witnessed ‘the great confusions of alliances’ in Germany and Maurice of Saxony’s opposition to the Emperor.86 It was not unusual for men who served in an ambassador’s household to receive a more prestigious diplomatic posting at a later date. An early Henrician diplomat, Richard Pace, progressed from diplomatic secretary to a career that saw him intersperse spells as the King’s secretary with various diplomatic missions.87 Several mid-​Tudor diplomats had also held positions in earlier embassies. John Mason, Edward’s ambassador to France from 1550 and Philip Hoby, Morison’s immediate predecessor at the imperial court, had both served as embassy secretaries in the 1530s.88 This pattern continued across the century: Elizabethan ambassadors such as Henry Killigrew and Thomas Edmondes cut their teeth as secretaries to Nicholas Throckmorton and Edward Stafford and Henry Unton respectively.89 There was no reason why Ascham could not have followed this route. Morison frequently praised Ascham’s diligence and worked for the secretary’s preferment, using his connections at court in Ascham’s favour.90 Cecil, too, 85 86 87 88 89

90

Ascham to Cecil, Brussels, 24 March 1553, bl Lansdowne ms 3, fol. 77r; letter cxlv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 349–​355, at pp. 352–​353. Ascham to Gardiner, [Cambridge], 8 October 1553, letter clviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 381–​ 385, at pp. 383–​384 /​Hatch and Vos, pp. 240–​241. See Jervis Wegg, Richard Pace (London: Methuen, 1971). See P. R. N. Carter, ‘Mason, Sir John (ca. 1503–​1566)’, odnb; Gary M. Bell, ‘Hoby, Sir Philip (1504/​5–​1558)’, odnb. See Luke MacMahon, ‘Killigrew, Sir Henry (1525x8–​1603)’, odnb; Mark Greengrass, ‘Edmondes, Sir Thomas (d. 1639)’, odnb. Indeed Bell was right to point out that many Elizabethan ambassadors had previously served as embassy secretaries; some of his other assertions about diplomatic secretaries are however, more problematic:  ‘Elizabethan Diplomacy’, p. 272. For example, Morison to Cecil, Speyer, 7 October 1552, tna sp 68/​10, fol. 87v; Ascham to Cecil, Speyer, 28 November 1552, bl Lansdowne ms 3, fol. 5r–​v; letter cxliii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 341–​344.

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apparently believed that Ascham was a good embassy secretary, exhorting him to ‘contynewe in that diligence wt the K.[ing’s] Embassador that it semeth you doe verie well’.91 As early as November 1550 Ascham hoped that Morison would help him travel in the Mediterranean, possibly in a diplomatic capacity. More pertinently, Morison apparently sent Ascham to northern Italy at some point in the summer of 1552.92 Diplomatic secretaries had no guarantee, however, that they would progress much further through the diplomatic ranks. For some men, such as Henry Middlemore, who served his cousin Nicholas Throckmorton and Throckmorton’s successor, Thomas Smith, at the French court, no fully-​fledged embassy was forthcoming.93 In Ascham’s case, a full embassy never materialised, but his work with Morison added to his qualifications for his later position as Latin secretary to Mary and Elizabeth, which involved substantial amounts of inter-​princely correspondence. Ascham’s career highlights that diplomacy was yet not envisioned as a distinct arena of service. Junior diplomats could easily contemplate multiple avenues after their missions ended. For scholar-​diplomats such as Ascham, working in a university or school remained a desirable option. Equally, progression through royal bureaucracy or court service was a common route for many diplomats, some of whom were later posted overseas once more. Ascham was perhaps unusually forthright in setting out his thoughts on the topic, but he was far from alone in recognising that there were multiple options open to talented diplomats. In March 1553 Ascham claimed to have been offered an opportunity to travel further afield by the Venetian ambassador at Charles v’s court, Marcantonio Da Mula; this incident is revealing about the permeability of diplomacy and diplomatic careers. Da Mula had apparently offered to help him spend a year in Constantinople, Damascus, or Cairo, ‘in [a]‌place where I shold be partaker 91 92

93

Cecil to Ascham, Basing, 7 September 1552, Cambridge University Library, ms Dd ix. 14, fol. 76v. Ascham claimed to have spent nine days in Italy, including some time in Venice: Ascham, The Scholemaster, Kir, Kiv; Ascham to Sturm, Speyer, 20 October 1552, letter cxlii, Giles, vol. i. pt. 2, pp.  337–​341, at p.  337. Peter Vannes does not mention Ascham by name, but on 16 July he claimed to have inside knowledge of the Emperor’s decisions from a friend (Venice, bl Harley ms 5008, fol. 118v). By Vannes’s estimate it would have taken the Emperor four days to travel from Villach to Venice (Vannes to the Council, Venice, 26 June 1552, ibid. fol. 113r); the journey would have been quicker for an independent traveller such as Ascham. For previous discussions placing Ascham’s trip in June see Ryan, Ascham, pp.  151, 315; Alfred Katterfeld, Roger Ascham:  sein Leben und seine Werke:  mit besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Berichte über Deutschland (Strasbourg and London: Karl J. Trübner & Comp, 1879), pp. 185–​186. Middlemore did, however, serve the queen as a trusted diplomatic agent. See the papers relating to Middlemore in tna sp 52/​15, sp 70/​54, and sp 70/​60.

142 Sowerby of weightye affaires’. Indeed, he claimed that had Da Mula known of Ascham’s wanderlust before Bernardo Navagero had been sent to Constantinople, he would have arranged for the English humanist to join the new Venetian ambassador or bailo and have time to study. Ascham thought nothing of writing this news to Cecil, but presented it as an opportunity: if he were to receive such a position he claimed he would use it to furnish Cecil with intelligence.94 In the first half of the sixteenth century it was not unusual for foreign nationals to serve in embassies, even in quite prominent positions such as secretary or ambassador. Even the subjects of rival monarchs might be welcomed into a foreign diplomatic corps.95 Henry viii used various foreigners in his diplomacy, including the Casali family who represented his interests in Italy in the 1520s and early 1530s.96 In Elizabeth’s reign, several members of the Italian Protestant diaspora served as diplomatic agents and negotiators for the Queen  –​men such as Horatio Palavicino and Guido Cavalcanti.97 Ascham’s presence in a Venetian embassy would have been more unusual, however, as it would have crossed confessional boundaries. The Venetians would no doubt have had strong opinions about just how much intelligence Ascham could send to an English councillor. But it worth stressing that even as confessional lines began to harden, both the English and, apparently, the Venetians, took a permissive view towards diplomatic personnel, with the Venetians seemingly willing to welcome an English Protestant into one of their Mediterranean missions. In March 1553 Ascham appealed to Cecil to ‘not iudge me unconstant for this diversitie in choice of my living, but rather one that wold levest live as i find my self fittest to serve my prince and my contrye’.98 Despite the appearance that he was ‘unconstant’, there were consistencies in Ascham’s varied petitions. One animating theme was his desire to do ‘good service ther in the commonwelthe’

94 Ibid. 95 Christine Isom-​Verhaaren, ‘Shifting Identities: Foreign State Servants in France and the Ottoman Empire’, Journal of Early Modern History, 8 (2004), pp. 109–​134. 96 See Catherine Fletcher, ‘War, Diplomacy and Social Mobility:  The Casali Family in the Service of Henry VIII’, Journal of Early Modern History, 14.6 (2010), pp. 559–​578. 97 On these two diplomats see F. J. Levy, ‘A Semi-​professional Diplomat: Guido Cavalcanti and the Marriage Negotiations of 1571’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 35 (1962), pp. 211–​220; Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan:  Horatio Palavicino (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1956); Ian W. Archer, ‘Palavicino, Sir Horatio (ca. 1540–​1600), merchant and diplomat’, odnb. More broadly see Diego Pirillo, The Refugee-​Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). 98 Ascham to Cecil, Brussels, 24 March 1553, bl Lansdowne ms 3, fol. 78r; letter cxlv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 349–​355, at p. 355.

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and ‘good will to do diligent service a brode’.99 Certainly a commitment to the commonwealth was manifest throughout Toxophilus, which Cathy Shrank argues should be read as Ascham’s attempt to fashion himself as a desirable, talented client to potential political patrons.100 Shrank further argues that Ascham used Toxophilus to display his classical erudition, eloquence, and commitment to humanist learning in a manner that would maintain his scholarly reputation among his Cambridge peers, should his bid for external patronage prove unsuccessful or insufficient. In simultaneously pursuing three different possible career routes when seeking preferment from patrons back in England, Ascham was keeping his options open in a manner that seems perfectly consonant with this earlier attempt at self-​promotion. We could interpret the letters that Ascham penned at the Emperor’s court to his friends at St John’s in a manner that complements Shrank’s analysis of Ascham’s earlier work. The references to the intellectuals he met, lectures he attended, recent imprints he read, antiquities he encountered, vernacular languages he learned, and classical works he dissected with the ambassador all served to remind his friends at St John’s of his continued intellectual prowess. Styling himself as a cosmopolitan academic in both his letters to Cambridge and to possible patrons served a dual purpose. It helped to further his scholarly reputation at a time when talented humanists were prized state servants, and simultaneously enhanced the possibility that Ascham might be seen as a suitable candidate for a prestigious position in the university in the future. 6

Conclusion

When Ferry Carondelet, ambassador from the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I to the Pope (1510–​1512), had his portrait painted by Sebastiano del Piombo during his mission, he chose to be portrayed with his secretaries. Just over two decades later, when the French ambassador Georges d’Armagnac sat for Titian in Venice, he was likewise joined by his embassy secretary.101 These paintings serve as a lasting testimony to the important role that embassy secretaries played in early modern diplomacy. Surviving portraits of Tudor ambassadors do not depict the secretaries who served them, but such figures were just 99

Ascham to Cecil, Speyer, 27 September 1552, bl Lansdowne ms 3, fol. 4r; letter cxl, Giles, vol. i, pt 2, pp. 330–​334, at pp. 333, 334. 100 See Cathy Shrank, ch. 10 in this volume. 1 01 For a discussion see Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries, pp. 155–​160. The portraits are now in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-​Bornemisza, Madrid and the Louvre Museum, Paris.

144 Sowerby as essential to the effective running of a Tudor embassy. Their place in ambassadors’ households left them well-​prepared to take on more substantial diplomatic roles in the future. As Ascham’s career amply demonstrates, the practical skills and empirical knowledge embassy secretaries gained and developed were those needed to fulfil many of an ambassador’s duties. Some of these were practical, centred on the writing practices that were central to so much diplomatic activity. Others were cultural, indicative of the importance of local courtly –​and more specifically ceremonial –​knowledge in early modern diplomatic practice. Such expertise was essential to effectual diplomatic sociability and was one factor that recommended those of aristocratic status as ambassadors to the key European courts, such as those of the Habsburgs, which placed a particularly strong emphasis on social rank.102 Ascham himself was aware that ‘marking so divers manners’ was an important feature of his work with Morison.103 He was probably also aware that even close immersion in the English court would not necessarily have prepared a man for all that an embassy to another European court entailed. Equally, Ascham’s experiences demonstrate that there was no notion of a diplomatic career per se: rather diplomatic service was seen within the broader context of service to the state. It did not preclude a future role either in a foreign diplomatic corps or in a domestic position (whether at the court, in the state bureaucracy, or even in a university). The boundaries which diplomatic figures had to negotiate were permeable and the course of their careers was often fluid. 102 See for example Hillard von Thiessen’s discussion of type ancien diplomacy: ‘Diplomatie vom type ancien:  Überlegungen zu einem Idealtypus des frühneuzeitlichen Gesandtschaftswesens’, in von Thiessen and Windler, eds., Akteure der Außenbeziehungen, pp. 471–​503. 103 Ascham to Cecil, Speyer, 28 November 1552, bl Lansdowne ms 3, fol. 5r; letter cxliiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 341–​344, at p. 341.

­c hapter 7

The Special Relationship: Ascham and Sturm, England and Strasbourg Lucy R. Nicholas Roger Ascham wrote many letters during his lifetime. However, there was one individual with whom he corresponded more than anyone else. This was Johannes Sturm (1509–​1589), pedagogue, diplomat and Protestant reformer from Strasbourg. Their body of correspondence spans a period of 18  years (1550–​ 1568) and comprises 27 extant letters, all in Latin.1 Many of the other letters Ascham wrote to and received from third parties also mentioned Sturm. Although the two men never met in person, deep bonds developed, ties that were rooted as much in affection and admiration for each other as in the exhilaration of intellectual interchange. A year into their correspondence Sturm published in Strasbourg their two inaugural letters;2 Ascham named his third child after Sturm and appointed Sturm as the child’s godfather;3 rather touchingly, the last (and longest) letter Ascham ever wrote was addressed to Sturm.4 It is curious then that the content and contexts of the exchanges between Ascham and Sturm have received so little attention, and that the nature of their association remains so unexamined. Theirs was a ‘special relationship’ 1 All translations of Latin are mine. Ascham’s letters are set out in Giles. We can be certain, however, that many more were written: in a letter to Edward Raven of 1551, Ascham wrote that he heard from Sturm every week (14–​18 May, Augsburg, letter cxxii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 284); a letter from Sturm to Ascham referred to ‘many letters’ (15 June 1551, Strasbourg, letter cxxv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 292). More specifically, some years later, a letter of 1562 from Ascham to Sturm commented that he (Ascham) had not written for three years (11 April 1562, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. ii, p. 59), yet the last extant letter Ascham wrote to Sturm prior to that is dated September 1555. There are slightly more (extant) letters from Sturm to Ascham, but the division is broadly equal. 2 See n. 34 (below). 3 Ascham to Sturm, 20 October 1562, London, letter xxxviii, Giles, vol. ii, p. 71; and Sturm to Ascham, 13 November 1563, Frankfurt, letter liii, Giles, vol. ii, p. 94. 4 Ascham to Sturm, December 1568, London, letter xcix, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 174–​193, in response to Sturm’s letter of 16 December; Ascham died on 23 December 1568, and appears to have written this to Sturm during the week of his death. Ascham’s very long letter in English to Raven in 1551 (Augsburg, 20 January 1551, letter cxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​271) may be counted more as a prelude to his Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_009

146 Nicholas that can help supplement our current understanding of Ascham, his concerns, priorities, and outlook over a period of almost two decades. In the spirit of trust and amity, Ascham and Sturm covered much ground in their letters  –​ family news, updates on health, thoughts about career promotions, books they had read, and gossip about others: in short, sinewy human details that can help bring these long-​departed figures to life. This chapter will focus on the areas that seemed most central and urgent to these intellectually voracious friends who were both immersed in and engaged by the most significant academic, religious and political issues of the day. These include the role of classical learning, pedagogy, religion and Protestant reform, which, as their correspondence clearly demonstrates, were not unrelated matters, but closely interwoven. Standing back a little, the cross-​border friendship between Ascham and Sturm has further historical value: it locates Ascham within an international framework, one in which Ascham may be viewed as an initiator, conduit for, and recipient of approaches and ideologies that were influential throughout Europe. In many ways, their correspondence typifies a sixteenth-​century tendency for transnational flows of ideas (which almost always utilised the European lingua franca of the time, Latin). More interestingly, it may also stand as a barometer of a lively religious cooperation between England and Strasbourg, an international axis which has been insufficiently investigated in modern studies of the Reformation. 1

principium amicitiae: Johannes Sturm and His Relationship with England and Ascham

Ascham himself hardly needs an introduction. However, a little background for Sturm will not go amiss, since, despite his prodigious output and undoubted influence both in Strasbourg and elsewhere in Europe, he is a figure relatively unknown in anglophone scholarship.5 The religious revolution Luther unleashed in 1517 was still in its infancy when Sturm was growing up, but at an early stage he became a committed Protestant. Although he drew immense inspiration from Luther, his main religious mentor was Martin Bucer, one of the leading Protestant reformers in Strasbourg. After his university education, where he developed a thorough knowledge of Latin and Greek, he was invited to run the Strasbourg Gymnasium, an educational foundation established

5 The vast majority of his work has not been translated from Latin to English, and studies of Sturm are largely confined to French and German scholarship.

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by the Protestant council of Strasbourg. This appointment testified to Sturm’s commitment to teaching, and he subsequently devoted much of his life to lecturing, and to curriculum organisation and development.6 Many of his ideas about education and its delivery are recorded in his ample written corpus. Additionally, though less written about, were Sturm’s duties as a Protestant diplomat, often in partnership with Bucer, Philip Melanchthon or Johannes Sleidan, and his tireless work over the decades to unite an ever-​fragmenting Christendom. Presumably in part because of his strong ties with England, Sturm replaced Christopher Mont in 1572 as the diplomatic agent of the English Crown. Despite the fact that Sturm is not now such a familiar figure, there was every reason for men in Tudor England, particularly those operating in academic milieux, to have encountered this Strasbourgian’s name and works. In 1538 Richard Morison, an enthusiastic adherent of Protestantism and the ambassador Ascham would accompany to Germany, translated into English Sturm’s response to the report commissioned by Pope Paul iii on contemporary abuses in the Church and had it published.7 Sturm had written the preface to Melanchthon’s work on dialectic that was widely used in Cambridge during the 1540s.8 Book inventories for the University in the sixteenth century also indicate a good level of ownership of Sturm’s writing.9 In his opening letter to Sturm, Ascham commented that he had read all the works of Sturm to which he had access.10 Ascham and Sturm may in the fullness of time have initiated contact with each other of their own accord, but in 1550 a third party put them in touch. This was the aforementioned Bucer, who was by then in exile in England, serving as Regius Professor of Divinity in Cambridge. Ascham got to know Bucer well. He first met him at Lambeth Palace when Bucer first arrived in England and was staying with Archbishop Cranmer. When Bucer settled in Cambridge, the

6 7

8 9 10

For more on this, see Lewis W. Spitz and Barbara Sher Tinsley eds., Johann Sturm on Education (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1995). Johannes Sturm, Epistola de emendanda Ecclesia (Strasbourg:  Kraft Müller, 1538, ustc 624944) and Richard Morison, The epistle sent to the Cardynalles and prelates that were chosen and appointed by the Bysshop of Rome, to serche out the abuses of the churche (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1538, ustc 503021). Philip Melanchthon, De dialectica libri quatuor (Antwerp: Merten de Keyser, 1535, ustc 437749). Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–​1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 134. Elisabeth Leedham-​Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: book lists from Vice-​Chancellor’s Court probate inventories in the Tudor and Stuart periods (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), vol. ii, pp. 724–​725. Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 183.

148 Nicholas available evidence suggests that he and Ascham met very regularly and forged a genuine attachment.11 No precise reason is given in the surviving letters for Bucer’s recommendation that Ascham make contact with his colleague in Strasbourg; we can only conjecture that Bucer thought the two men had much in common. Given his own aims at the time –​he was composing his de Regno Christi (‘On the Kingdom of Christ’) for Edward vi12 –​it is likely that Bucer was keen to establish an additional channel of communication which could help cement the allegiance between the two centres and, in turn, possibly buttress his programme of reform in England. In the mid-​sixteenth century England was still a relative parvenu on the European stage; Strasbourg, by contrast, was a major player and at the apogee of its cultural, intellectual and religious influence which extended across Europe. It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that Ascham considered and presented himself as the junior partner, at least in his initial letters, to Sturm. That notwithstanding, the early correspondence reflects two men attempting to identify common ground. Ascham, in his initial missive, accentuated the sense of commonality through repeated reference to his own ‘goodwill’ and to the ‘beginning of our friendship’.13 In response, Sturm commented emphatically ‘And so your judgement and mine are as one; we want the same, we follow the same; we pursue the same’.14 Ascham and Sturm engaged with each other as friends, but also as classical scholars, educators, Protestants and enthusiasts for further reform. It was these areas that dominate the substance of their letters, and to which we now turn. 2

Classical Learning, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy

Ascham and Sturm were thoroughly steeped in the languages and literature of the classical world. In the very first two letters they sent each other in 1550, classical learning was established as fundamental to their collaboration. Both referred glowingly to the singular achievements of the Greco-​Roman world, 11 Ryan, Ascham, p. 116. Ascham to Sturm, Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 183. 12 Bucer, De Regno Christi: libri duo (1550) in Martini Buceri Opera Latina, vol. 15, ed. François Wendel (Paris and Gütersloh: Presses Universitaires de France and Verlag, 1955). 13 Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 181–​193. Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 5. For more on humanist amicitia, see Micha Lazarus, ch. 11 in this volume. 14 Strasbourg, 9 September 1550, letter cii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 197.

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and in these two letters alone, the catalogue of ancient authors named and discussed includes Aristotle, Cicero, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Livy, and Plato. An irrepressible excitement about such literature is discernible, when, for example, in 1552, Sturm animatedly reported on the recent rediscovery of Cicero’s Republic, a work that had long been considered the holy grail for many humanists, but had been lost till then.15 A  profound emotional connection with classical literature is reflected in Ascham’s recollection that Bucer had likened Sturm to Cicero, and in a later letter, his expressed hope that he himself had become ‘a second Cicero’.16 Such devotion to Cicero was surely in part due to the quality of the Latinity to which both Ascham and Sturm aspired. Both men also looked to this Roman’s far-​reaching knowledge of and commitment to Greek, and the moral self-​formation Cicero could provide. The letters of Ascham and Sturm are peppered with references to broader contemporary efforts to assist the promulgation of the classical corpus, alluding too to their own individual and shared endeavours on this front. Several letters, for example, mentioned Sturm’s work-​in-​progress composition of a series of classical dialogues,17 in which Sturm even promised to include Ascham (and others from England).18 In Ascham’s final letter to Sturm, Ascham outlined the structure and content of his magnum opus on imitation, The Scholemaster.19 Its central aim, he explained, was the perfection of language through an assimilation of the best authors in Greek and Latin and the promotion of Greek style through Latin. At the same time, Ascham made it abundantly clear that Sturm was a major influence for this tract’s inspiration and operation.20 Ascham referred to the

15

16 17

18

19 20

Strasbourg, 30 January 1552, letter cxxxvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 324. This work only exists in fragmentary form today. Ascham indicates in a letter of three years later that Cardinal Pole was also searching for this work (Ascham to Sturm, Greenwich, 14 September 1555, letter cxci, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 446). Cambridge 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 183; and December 1568, London, letter xcix, Giles, vol. 2, p. 181. Something he terms Dialogi Aristotelici, and evidently a dialogic commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but now lost. Schmidt’s list of Sturm’s works does not mention the work: Charles Schmidt, La Vie et les travaux de Jean Sturm (Paris and Leipzig: Librairie Fischbacher, 1855). Re. Ascham:  this is alluded to in Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg, 30 January 1552, letter cxxxvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 324 (as surmised by Hatch, p. 474) and explicitly in Strasbourg, 9 May 1553, letter cxlvii, Giles, vol. i, pt.2, p. 358. Re. Cheke and Morison: Ascham to Sturm, London, 11 April 1562, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. ii, p. 64 and Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg, December 1568, letter xcviii, Giles, vol. II, p. 173. Sturm also promised to mention Edward vi in these dialogues: Strasbourg, November 18, 1550, letter cix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 223. Ascham to Sturm, London, December 1568, letter xcix, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 174–​193. See also Mike Pincombe, ch. 12 in this volume.

150 Nicholas mastery of Sturm’s methods of imitation as set out in Sturm’s Nobilitas litterata (‘Liberally Educated Nobility’) and his De amissa dicendi ratione (‘on the Lost Art of Speaking’), lauding in particular, Sturm’s approach to the imitation of Cicero as ‘perfectly’ posited in his Nobilitas litterata and his Quinctiana explicatio (‘Quinctian Explanation’).21 He even intimated that the work could not be fully completed until he had seen what Sturm had to say on the same topic in his De imitatione oratoria (‘On Oratorical Imitation’).22 He added that if there was anything profitable in The Scholemaster, it was entirely to Sturm’s credit, writing: ‘I have really tried to make the whole thing Sturmian’, and registering his hope that when students (young boys) read it, ‘they may enter that famous Gymnasium of Sturm’.23 In many ways, Ascham’s The Scholemaster may be viewed as the formational primer to Sturm’s finishing school: the calm before the Sturm.24 A close review of their letters also reveals a more specific concern, namely the Greek author, Aristotle, and the relationship between logic (or dialectic, or the discovery (inventio) of arguments) and rhetoric (or eloquence) his writing broached.25 Ascham actually opened his first letter by extolling the twin notions of ratio and sermo, ‘discursive reason’ and ‘language /​conversation’ respectively.26 Sturm in his response instantly and explicitly picked up on this dyad. Congratulating Ascham on his learning in the arts of dialectic and rhetoric, he commented that dialectic could not be divorced from rhetoric, emphatically adding: ‘We both wish to be dialecticians and rhetoricians’.27 Sturm, evidently with Aristotle’s (now famous) first sentence in his Rhetoric that rhetoric was the counterpart (antistrophon) to dialectic at the forefront of his mind, bemoaned the current tendency to separate these disciplines of discourse.28 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Ascham to Sturm, London, December 1568, letter xcix, Giles, vol. ii, p. 178 and 184. Sturm, Nobilitas litterata ad Werteros fratres (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1549, ustc 667642) and De amissa dicendi ratione libri duo (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1538, ustc 667644); it is not entirely clear what the Quinctiana explicatio was –​it is not listed in Schmidt’s La Vie –​ but was almost certainly some sort of commentary on Cicero’s pro Quinctio (the earliest of Cicero’s speeches to have survived). Ascham to Sturm, London, December 1568, letter xcix, Giles, vol. ii, p.  175. Sturm’s De imitatione oratoria libri tres, (Strasbourg: Bernard Jobin, 1574, ustc 667900). Ibid. pp. 176–​177. Ascham also indicated that Sturm’s work wanted for examples (which he provides in The Scholemaster), ibid., pp.  178–​179, suggesting exempla (‘examples’) were so much more effective than praecepta (‘theory’). This marriage was established essentially in two of Aristotle’s works: Rhetoric and Topics, and also applauded by Cicero. Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 181–​182. Strasbourg, 9 September 1550, letter cii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 197. Ibid., p. 197 and passim.

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Sturm, as his letters indicate, was then involved in a larger project to edit Aristotle’s works on rhetoric along with all existing Aristotelian commentaries.29 Ascham likewise held Aristotle in the highest esteem, stating: ‘Aristotle in learning and judgement surpasses not only all others, but in my opinion even himself, in those books where he explained the art of eloquence with the most beautiful erudition’.30 Although he expressed some reservations about the paucity of examples (exempla)31 available for those teaching Aristotle, he nevertheless observed that ‘the discipline of dialectic ought not by this failing to be defective (literally ‘limp’)’; again, he praised Aristotle’s explanation of eloquence and the divine discipline of reason.32 This union of rhetoric and dialectic was a theme to which both to return repeatedly in their letters, and one that Ascham himself would explore in his some of his most important works, notably Toxophilus and The Scholemaster.33 If Ascham and Sturm were of similar minds when it came to the ancient world, the same was true regarding their approaches to pedagogy. Both were involved in and committed to teaching students of schools and universities. Yet both were also deeply invested in the instruction of the nobility and ruling elite. Their initial letters were dominated by this theme, and when Sturm arranged for them to be published in 1551, they appeared under the title Epistolae duae de nobilitate Anglicana (‘Two Letters concerning the English Nobility’).34 Perhaps mindful of Sturm’s work of instruction for the Werther brothers of 1549,35 a significant portion of Ascham’s first letter to Sturm was devoted to the education of Princess Elizabeth, whom, Ascham explained, he had been tutoring in Latin and Greek for two years, using a range of authors, including Cicero, Livy and Isocrates.36 Sturm had responded enthusiastically to such efforts. After lamenting a lack of enthusiasm for erudition among the German nobility, he conveyed his own interest in Elizabeth’s instruction and a keenness to help

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Ibid., p. 198. Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 184. As per The Scholemaster, Ascham understood examples to be predicated on Aristotle’s Topics. Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 186. For a fuller discussion of the union of dialectic and eloquence in Ascham’s Toxophilus, see Cathy Shrank, ch. 10 in this volume; re. The Scholemaster, see later in this chapter. Included in Conrad Heresbach’s De laudibus Graecarum litterarum oratio (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1551, ustc 622756). Spitz and Tinsley, Sturm on Education, p. 30. Sturm would also compose De institutione principis (‘On the Education of a Prince’) in the same year of 1551 (see below). Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 191–​192.

152 Nicholas augment it: he indicated that he had sent to Elizabeth a copy of his 1550 manual on the periodic style entitled De periodis unus liber (‘A book of the Periods [of the Orators]’).37 A mark of the trust that existed between these two is Sturm’s suggestion that Ascham should act as the chief mediator of this work and explain its contents to the Princess.38 Over the years, Ascham and Sturm would discuss other nobles, including Edward vi, Lady Jane Grey and Mildred Cecil.39 In their devotion to Latin and Greek, wisdom of the ancients and promotion of classical precepts, Ascham and Sturm may unequivocally be counted as humanists, yet it is also clear that a weightier and more textured manifesto underlay such commitments. In Ascham’s initial letter to Sturm, he unambiguously yoked together Sturm’s classical scholarship and his religious commitment: ‘… since you, most illustrious John Sturm, have drunk from Plato, Aristotle and Cicero that wholesome spirit of eloquence, … [you] have marshalled the whole of that (learning) to a more sound (saniorem) doctrine of Christ’.40 This close linkage between classical works and religion was further conspicuous in Ascham’s declaration that ‘To the reading of sacred Scripture on which I  have, with Christ’s benevolence, resolved above all to erect the tabernacle of my life and studies, I intend to conjoin Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes and Marcus Cicero along with the rest of my labours’.41 In response, Sturm called Ascham ‘a literate man’ but also an ‘evangelist’.42 Sturm also explicitly linked the study of literature and language with the state of religion: ‘What can the condition of literature be, and what can the condition of religion be in such a foulness of speech, language and eloquence?’43 The broader projects each discussed were not without a religious complexion. Ascham’s The Scholemaster in effect adhered to a model of classical instruction promulgated at the Protestant Gymnasium of Strasbourg. In this work, pedagogical strictures were framed within an explicitly confessional set of parameters, and Ascham regularly used the labels ‘Protestant’ and ‘papist’ as 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Strasbourg, 9 September 1550, letter cii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 195–​196. Libri Duo Ioannis Sturmii De Periodis Unus (Strasbourg, 1550 no USTC). Strasbourg, 9 September 1550, letter cii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 204. See also Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg, 18 November 1550, letter cix, Giles vol. i, pt. 2, p. 223. Ascham to Sturm, Augsburg, 27 September 1551, letter cxxxi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 305; Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg, 18 November 1550, letter cix, Giles vol. i, pt. 2, p. 223; Ascham to Sturm, Augsburg, 14 December 1550, letter cx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 225–​228. Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 182. the term sanus also denoting something ‘correct’ or ‘safe’. Ibid., p. 183. Strasbourg, 9 September 1550, letter cii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 196. Ibid., p. 201.

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a means to disassociate England from Rome theologically and philosophically.44 The synthesis of eloquence and dialectic that the two men so energetically pursued also had religious implications. In the very first paragraph of his introductory letter to Sturm, Ascham averred that rationally based rhetoric may take one’s life ‘furthest from monstrous and savage custom’ and ‘most closely to the divine nature’.45 In The Scholemaster he associated a failure to subscribe to the union of eloquence and logic with a lack of religious orthodoxy: For he that can neither like Aristotle in logic and philosophy nor Tully [Cicero] in rhetoric and eloquence will from these steps likely … mount higher to the misliking of greater matters; that is, either in religion to have a dissentious head, or in the commonwealth to have a factious heart. I knew … a student in Cambridge who for a singularity began first to dissent in the schools of Aristotle, and soon after became a perverse Arian against Christ and all true religion … .46 More generally, Ascham and Sturm agreed that a full grasp of the union of logic and rhetoric could instil a deeper comprehension of the Church Fathers and the Bible, and help nurture a purer religious doctrine. In composing such works, they were in effect recalibrating forms of training to which the brightest and the best would submit. They were also developing a set of resources that could re-​direct thinking, reading and speaking, behavior and the ability to differentiate true from false. However, the methodology that Ascham and Sturm conferred about in their letters had still broader ramifications. For one, it brought them into the same orbit as another contemporary thinker and writer, Peter Ramus.47 Ramus had been an early disciple of Sturm, but in the 1540s he had begun to question the use of certain ancient frameworks, particularly Aristotelian logic, and had even voiced qualms about the vehicle of the Latin language itself. In his opening 44 45 46 47

Ryan J. Stark, ‘Protestant Theology and Apocalyptic Rhetoric in Ascham’s Scholemaster’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69.4 (2008), pp. 517–​532. Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 182. The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. iii, pp. 176–​177. Ramus converted to Protestantism ca. 1561, and was killed in the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. By then Ramus had collided with certain Reformed theologians: Melanchthon was profoundly worried by Ramus’s ideas (Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden, New  York and Köln:  Brill, 1993) p. 334) and Theodore Beza also objected to his conceptions of the term usus (Jenny Ingemarsdotter, Ramism, Rhetoric, and Reform: An Intellectual Biography of Johan Skytte (1577–​1645) (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2011) p. 132).

154 Nicholas letter to Sturm, Ascham had criticised Ramus’s outlandish approach to Aristotle, prompting some sort of public remonstrance from Ramus, that Ascham also discussed at length.48 Ramus, it seems, had objected to a conjoining of inventio and the art of eloquence.49 Ascham also pointed to the religious charge of Ramus’s stance: ‘I suspect that certain Englishmen in Cambridge who differ somewhat from us in matters of religion, have turned Ramus against us for the same reason they have themselves abandoned England and withdrew to Paris’.50 Ascham and Sturm’s engagement with such themes situated them in a tradition of pioneers like Agricola, Erasmus, Daniele Barbaro and Melanchthon all of whom had, in their different ways, theorized and endorsed the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic.51 Melanchthon’s dialectic and his other work that embodied the marriage of dialectic and rhetoric, his Loci Communes, were designed not simply to displace scholasticism but to also aid Biblical exegesis and thereby prop up Protestant theology.52 It is telling that Sturm’s De amissa, which was an express affirmation of the synthesis of rhetoric and logic and a work to which Ascham made frequent reference, was subsequently placed on the Catholic Index of prohibited books.53 The pedagogical programmes that Ascham and Sturm developed were likewise not unrelated to their reform agendas. As much can been gleaned from Ascham’s descriptions of his sessions with the Princess Elizabeth.54 He 48

Ascham to Sturm, Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 186: Ascham referred the ‘excessive effrontery of Cephas Chlononius’, an erudite linguistic play on Peter Ramus’s name in Latin using Hebrew and Greek. Ascham also disparaged Ramus in The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. iii, p. 176. Halle, 29 January 1552, letter cxxxv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 318–​322. It is not clear what form Ramus’s opposition took: Hatch, p. 472. However, by the early 1560s, Ramus and Ascham were corresponding on more amicable terms: see, for example, Ramus to Ascham, Paris, 27 February 1564, letter lv, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 96–​97. 49 Ramus maintained that the rules of logic may be better learned from observation of the way in which Cicero persuaded his hearers than from a study of Aristotle’s works on logic, the Organon: Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th edn.: . 50 Halle, 29 January 1552, letter cxxxv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 319. 51 Mack, Renaissance Rhetoric, pp. 132–​135. Ascham eulogised the efforts of Daniele Barbaro and Pietro Vettori who wrote commentaries (appearing in 1544 and 1548 respectively) on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 184). 52 For more on the way in which Melanchthon’s pedagogy was embedded in his theology, see G. R. Schmidt, ‘Foundations of Melanchthon’s View on Education’ in Reinhard Golz and Wolfgang Mayrhofer, eds., Luther and Melanchthon in the Educational Thought in Central and Eastern Europe (Münster: lit, 1998), pp. 16–​21. 53 Sturm’s De amissa was number 255 on the proscribed list on the Spanish Index Librorum Prohibitorum. 54 See also Cyndia Clegg, ch. 8 in this volume.

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began by pointing out that: ‘Aristotle’s excellence is wholly poured into her’. He then asserted that from Cicero and Livy ‘she drew her knowledge of the Latin tongue’; from the New Testament in Greek, the orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles he hoped ‘she would derive complete purity of speech, the most suitable teaching of the mind, and a subsequent manner of an elevated life …’.55 Finally, she would read Cyprian, the Commonplaces of Melanchthon and the Scriptures, from which ‘she could taste the purity of learning together with elegance of speech’.56 This was no inert regimen, but rather a carefully calculated diet of classical and sacred texts, offering a dialectical and rhetorical symbiosis that would help engender a particular mental disposition, and ultimately help steer this future Queen of England towards the sort of intellectually-​grounded Protestantism that Ascham and Sturm were both so passionate about. It seems likely that Sturm and Ascham viewed their instruction of the nobility not simply as an educational duty, but also a responsibility that would have a direct bearing on the shape of national religious reform. The religious dimension of Sturm’s instruction of the noble brothers, Philip and Anton Werther, likewise emerges in a letter Ascham sent to Sturm in 1552. Here Ascham touched on Sturm’s teaching in a way that captured a clear allegiance between literature and faith: I love Philip Werter much because he loves you, and cultivates the study of literature …; but I love him more because he himself is so eager to hear you speak at some length about the religion of Christ … .57 Sturm in his De educatione principis (‘On the Education of a Prince’), had observed that a royal tutor needed more than just learning –​he must have a correct religious outlook, and be ‘a fountain from which the prince may draw the heavenly waters of life’.58 Towards the end of his Nobilitas litterata Sturm again acknowledged the momentousness of such training:  ‘If our Germany were governed by such men, we would not have to fear any dangerous revolutions, barbarous custom or any deformity of church and religion’.59 As far as Sturm

55 56 57 58

59

Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 191–​192. Ibid., p. 192. Halle, 29 January 1552, letter cxxxv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 322. Spitz and Tinsley, Sturm on Education, p.  54. Ascham refers to this in book i of The Scholemaster. In a separate letter to Sturm, Ascham, describing Cheke’s tuition of Prince Edward wrote: ‘Cheke taught Edward sound learning and true religion …’ (Augsburg, 14 December 1550, letter cx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 226). Spitz and Tinsley, Sturm on Education, p. 173.

156 Nicholas and Ascham were concerned, pedagogy was wholly germane to their Protestant allegiance.60 3

Protestant Outlook

The humanism and educational methodologies that Ascham and Sturm jointly espoused certainly had religious and even theological contours. Yet their correspondence also betrays a more obvious confessional heft. While neither Ascham and Sturm strictly aligned themselves to a particular theological stance within the intra-​Protestant debates –​both were primarily concerned with the Gospel and God’s Word –​their letters nonetheless engage with some of the fundamental doctrinal positions of the day. Ascham, in his first letter to Sturm, located himself within the debate on free will, writing: ‘We have some adversaries who … differ from us somewhat in extolling the strength, capacities and unanimity of men beyond usual limits …’.61 In another letter, he made plain his subscription to the doctrines of clerical marriage and justification by faith alone.62 In 1562 Ascham referred to the Eucharist, a subject on which he himself had penned a treatise in 1547,63 and recorded his joy that Sturm had written a book on the controversy of the Supper (De controversia caenae).64 Ascham and Sturm were also fully cognizant of and sensitive to the religious upheavals then being played out in Europe, and each took a lively interest in the key personnel and textual battles of the European Reformation. Ascham regularly alluded to Catholic controversialists, often exhorting Sturm to respond directly to them. For example, in a letter of 1551, Ascham urged Sturm to rebut two Germans, Johann Eck (1486–​1543) and Eberhard Billick (1499/​ 60

Investigations into the intersection between the Reformation and education can be found in: N. Scott Amos, Andrew Pettegree and Hank van Nierop (eds.), The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands (London and New  York:  Routledge, 1999); and Ian Green, Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 61 4 April 1550, Cambridge, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 189. 62 Augsburg, [18/​22 June/​July] 1551, letter cxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 294–​295. 63 Ascham, Apologia pro Caena Dominica (in Apologia doctissimi viri Rogeri Aschami, Angli, pro Caena Dominica … Cui accesserunt themata quaedam Theologica … Expositiones item antiquae, in Epistolas Divi Pauli ad Titum et Philemonem (London: Francisco Coldock, 1577, USTC 508290).). 64 London, 11 April 1562, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. ii, p. 66; and London, 20 October 1562, letter xxxviii, Giles, vol. 2, p. 72. It is likely that Ascham was referring to Sturm’s preface to a treatise by Bucer on the Lord’s Supper: Nova Vetera Quatuor Eucharistica Scripta Summi et Acutissimi Theologi, Doctoris Martini Buceri Argentoratensis (Strasbourg: Thiebold Berger, 1560, ustc 708765).

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1500–​1557).65 The former, the Chancellor of Ingolstadt University, had been a notorious opponent of Luther; the latter, a Catholic theologian and outspoken opponents of Protestantism in Cologne, had written against Bucer in 1543.66 As it transpires, Billick was a figure with whom Ascham could himself claim variance; according to Ascham, Billick (whom Ascham rather waspishly labelled a ‘Popistant’) had refused to meet him in Germany on the grounds that Ascham was a ‘Protestant’.67 In a separate letter of a decade or so later, Ascham remarked that he was thrilled that Sturm had written on behalf of Melanchthon against the Catholic convert Friedrich Staphylus.68 This was presumably a reference to a pamphlet of 1558 by Staphylus entitled Theologiae Martini Lutherani trimembris epitome (‘An Abridgement of the tripartite theology of Martin Luther’)69 which attempted to expose the lack of unity within Protestantism, attacking at the same time Melanchthon and certain Lutheran positions. Ascham and Sturm also commented upon the fortunes of European Protestantism. In the early 1550s Ascham sent Sturm frequent reports of the flourishing evangelical climate in England when there was every reason for excitement. Ascham exuberantly described the ‘care of true faith’ being promoted by ‘our Josiah’ in England, and in response Sturm wrote: ‘… may the true faith be renewed, may the voice of the Gospel resound profitably, may the dominion of Christ have the highest authority in the English kingdom’.70 Again under Elizabeth, Ascham would update Sturm on how she had ‘purged religion which she found desperately polluted’.71 The situation on the continent was less congenial. In a letter Sturm dispatched to Ascham in 1551, Sturm made reference, 65 66

67 68 69 70 71

Augsburg, [18/​22 June/​July] 1551, letter cxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 295. A little-​referenced manuscript letter held in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, ms 119, documents the controversy triggered by Billick: Epistola Ioannis Mey ad Bucerum in qua multa narrat de disputatione orta de natura sanctae caenae et de moribus flagitiosis cuiusdam Billici monachi Coloniensis, 1546 (no. 74, p. 209). In his annotations on a printed text by Ambrose text (Divi Ambrosii … de vocatione omnium gentium libri duo (Geneva 1541, no ustc: see appendix 2, *St Ambrosius, 1541), Ascham made a note in the margin about a dispute between and Melanchthon; the note read ‘Edward Billick ista refutat contra Melanct [sic]’, p. 14; this is held at the Bodleian Library (8° Rawlinson, 169 (2). It is likely that Ascham’s reference here relates to a dispute which arose pursuant to the Diets of Hagenau, Worms and Regensburg during the 1540s when Melanchthon and Billick were on opposite sides. Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, letter cxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 254–​255. London, 11 April 1562, London, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 65–​66; and see also London, 20 October 1562, letter xxxviii, Giles, vol. ii, p. 72. Staphylus abandoned his early loyalty to Luther and re-​converted to Catholicism. (Nysa: Johann Cruzinger, 1560, ustc 240203). 4 April 1550, Cambridge, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 188; and Strasbourg, 5 September 1550, letter cii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 207. London, 11 April 1562, London, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. ii, p. 62.

158 Nicholas albeit somewhat delphically, to Magdeburg –​‘What more agitated and excited than Magdeburg?’ –​and to the ‘critical times’ for international Christendom.72 It is probable that Sturm was here alluding to the plans of two pro-​Lutheran Princes (Duke Maurice of Saxony and the John, Margrave of Brandenberg) to launch a holy war, with English assistance, against the Catholic Charles v, and to the publication of the Magdeburg Confession of 1550, which was essentially a statement of disobedience regarding imperial law.73 In November 1562, Sturm wrote to Ascham ‘in haste’, full of anxiety and sleeplessness, concerning the latest news from France.74 Although Sturm would not have realised it when he wrote this, his bulletin effectively announced the start of the French Wars of Religion, which would prove to be one of the greatest trials for Protestantism, and in which thousands of men and women would lose their lives for their faith. Here Sturm informed Ascham about rumours of setbacks under ‘Duras’ (Durassius) and ‘Andelot’ (Andelottus) and of terrible developments in Rouen (Rotomagum) ‘that might also impinge on your countrymen’.75 As it happens, the rumours were true: Rouen had, until recently, been successfully occupied by Huguenot forces, but by May–​October 1562 was besieged by the French crown, despite the English reinforcements sent to assist; and Protestant leaders like Symphorien de Duras and François d’Andelot suddenly found themselves under threat from the Catholic Guises.76 Sturm’s letter was in effect ‘hot off the press’ reportage, and the fact that Ascham assured Sturm in the same year that Elizabeth was bent on ‘crushing the tyrant of Guise’ and urged Sturm to compose a history of the confederacy of Guise, suggests that the significance of Sturm’s news was not lost on Ascham.77 As significant a blow for international Protestantism, and one that would very directly affect both Ascham and Sturm, was the sudden death of Bucer in Cambridge in 1551. In several letters of this time they expressed their grief, and discussed the best ways to commemorate Bucer’s life. Ascham told Sturm that a series of verses composed by his circle in honour of Bucer was on its way to Sturm, and further informed him of plans for a collective commemorative 72 73

Strasbourg, 15 June 1551 letter cxxv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 292–​293. It included some of the most advanced Lutheran resistance theories of the day: John Witte, The Reformation of Rights:  Law, Religion and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 106. 74 Frankfurt, 13 November 1562 (Giles incorrectly dates this 1563), letter liii, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 94–​95. 75 Ibid., p. 95. 76 James Thompson, The Wars of Religion in France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, repr. 2018), pp. 99–​105. 77 London, October 1562, letter xxxviii, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 71–​72.

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volume for Bucer to be assembled in England by John Cheke.78 In turn, Sturm conveyed his resolve to write a life of Bucer, indicating that he would append to that vita the works that Bucer had composed for Edward vi of England, and also the epigrams that he had been sent of Cambridge men.79 Ascham remarked that the commemoration projects reflected ‘a mutual feeling of friendship and goodwill both of England towards Germany, and Cambridge towards Strasbourg … as well as a zeal for the true religion, literature, and the most holy and learned Bucer by both each nation and city’.80 The Bucerian connection Ascham and Sturm shared adds an undeniably religious complexion to their bond. It may even be possible to locate the outlooks Ascham and Sturm within a broader religious vision promoted by Bucer, a figure long-​recognised for his non-​doctrinaire Christian beliefs, his constant quest for unity, and insistence on religious truth and purity through Scripture.81 Bucer had also placed a high value on the reforming power of education within a Christian state (himself playing a fundamental role in Sturm’s Gymnasium).82 Diarmaid MacCulloch has shrewdly pointed out that Bucer, unlike other reformers, did not give his name to a worldwide Bucerian Church, and as a result his vision for reform has been neglected in accounts of the Reformation.83 This notwithstanding, it may still be possible to discern a real appreciation of the Bucerian model and continuum of sorts through acolytes like Ascham in England and Sturm in Strasbourg. During the course of their correspondence, both Ascham and Sturm mentioned Bucer regularly in terms which capture the extent and range of his influence. In his first letter to Sturm, Ascham described Bucer as that ‘that reverend father and my teacher’, adding: ‘Dr Martin Bucer, that man of God, energetically arouses the glory of Christ in us; his grounding in doctrine is so thorough and his life is so temperate that his opponents themselves are unable to find any fault’.84 Following the death of Bucer, Ascham described how Bucer had helped him ‘in doctrine’: he recalled the ‘frequent conversations with me about the

78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Augsburg, [18/​22 June/​July] 1551, letter cxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 295–​296. Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg 6 July 1551, letter cxxvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 296–​297. Augsburg, [18/​22 June/​July] 1551, letter cxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 294. D. F. Wright (ed.), Martin Bucer: Reforming Church and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 2 and passim. Spitz and Tinsley, Sturm on Education, p.  26; Basil Hall, ‘Martin Bucer in England’, in Wright ed., Bucer, p. 147. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation:  Europe’s House Divided (London:  Penguin, 2004), p. 180. 4 April 1550, Cambridge, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 183 and p. 189.

160 Nicholas foundation and business of religion and of the state, [and] about the right course of literature …’.85 Like Bucer, Ascham and Strum were committed to dialogue and building bridges. Sturm’s irenicism emerges forcefully in the letters: in the closing words of his first letter to Ascham, he expressed his wish that ‘peace and concord would blossom again’.86 With reference to the abovementioned tract by Sturm on the Eucharist, Ascham described it as ‘not at all angry but full of argumentation’.87 Ascham likewise conveyed to Sturm his own conciliatory approach to religious detractors, in one letter writing: ‘because many commend themselves … on account of the excellence of their learning and the probity of lives, we can only follow them in love …’.88 Ascham’s continued friendships with Catholics in Cambridge,89 his subsequent cordial correspondence with Peter Ramus following their earlier affray (see n. 48), and his conformity under the Catholic Mary i are all suggestive of an irenicism that he shared with Sturm and Bucer. 4

Cooperation between Strasbourg and England

The letters of Ascham and Sturm can be read within a broader matrix of cooperation and reciprocity between England and Strasbourg during the sixteenth century. Prominent reformers from Strasbourg settled in England, the most obvious examples being Bucer and Paul Fagius, both of whom took up posts at Cambridge University.90 Peter Martyr Vermigli also travelled to England from Strasbourg where he had been an intimate of Bucer and had taught in Sturm’s Gymnasium, and was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity in Oxford in 1547. During Mary I’s reign, many English Protestants sought exile in Strasbourg, including John Foxe, the architect of what was arguably the most seminal Protestant text of the Reformation (Acts and Monuments). In this final part of the chapter I draw attention to the vibrant religious confederation to which Ascham and Sturm bear witness in their letters, and which they supported and undoubtedly helped to promote. The letters of Ascham and Sturm reflect a passionate appreciation of the other’s nations to the point that one would be hard pressed to encounter in 85 86 87 88 89 90

Augsburg, [18/​22 June/​July] 1551, letter cxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 296. Strasbourg, 9 September 1550, letter cii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 207. Ascham to Sturm, October 1562, London, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. ii, p. 66. 4 April 1550, Cambridge, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 189. On this, see Richard Rex, ch. 2 in this volume. Fagius was appointed Hebrew lecturer in the same year as Bucer.

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modern Europe that degree of unrestrained deference and admiration, even in the most committed Europhile. In 1550 Sturm wrote: ‘As far as I can, I should want to do my utmost to please England; for I  love this people for its faith and the reputation of such a great King’.91 He referred to England as ‘a refuge not only for the immediate receiving and protecting, but shortly also for the sending forth and equipping of angels and messengers of freedom, learning, religion and worth in the Christian state’.92 During his diplomatic trip to Germany, as discussed in ­chapter 6, Ascham visited Strasbourg. During that visit, although he kept missing Sturm, Ascham established ties with several Strasbourg reformers with whom he developed his own relationship: these included the Werther brothers, the Protestant historian Johannes Sleidan, and three professors at the Strasbourg Gymnasium:  Valentin Erythraeus, Immanuel Tremellius and Michael Toxites.93 The majority of their letters include injunctions to ‘send love’ to a third party in England or Strasbourg. Ascham and Sturm also encouraged one another to consolidate their respective cross-​border relationships. Ascham cajoled Sturm to write to Edward vi, to the Princess Elizabeth, to Lady Jane Grey, and to William Cecil, who, he informed Sturm, was ‘thoroughly sound in religion’.94 Such exhortations were not unheeded. Over the years, Sturm would assiduously liaise with leading figures in the English establishment, including Elizabeth herself, Cheke, Cecil, John Hales, and Anthony Cooke.95 In 1561 Sturm dedicated his preface to Bucer’s work on the Lord’s Supper (see above) to Cooke, also sending a copy of the published tome to Elizabeth.96 In 1553 Sturm suggested Ascham write up his experience in Germany (a task upon which Ascham had in fact already embarked).97 91 Strasbourg, 9 September 1550, letter cii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 205. 92 Ibid. 93 Including in:  Ascham to Cecil, Spires, 27 September 1552, letter cxl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 331; Ascham to Raven, London, 17 September 1550, letter ciii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 208 and Sleidan to Ascham, Trent 28 February 1552, letter cxxxviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 325–​ 328; Ascham to Sturm, Augsburg, 24 January 1551, letter cxvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 274, Augsburg, [18/​22 June/​July] 1551, letter cxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 294; Stephen Cirler to Ascham, Heidelberg, 16 February 1568, letter xciii, Giles, vol. ii, p. 166. In 1549 Tremellius succeeded Fagius as Regius professor of Hebrew at Cambridge. 94 Re. Cecil: London, 11 April 1562, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. ii, p. 61. For the others, see earlier in this chapter. 95 There are too many to list here, but see Giles vol. ii. 96 Schmidt, La Vie, p. 125. 97 viz. Ascham’s Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany. Strasbourg, 22 July 1553, letter cliii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 372.

162 Nicholas When Edward vi died in 1553, Sturm wrote to Ascham to express his shock.98 A sense of the shared stakes in Edward’s reign is effectively conveyed in Sturm’s grief-​stricken ejaculation: ‘… he seemed to be not only your King but ours, and a ruler of all men’.99 More intriguing still was the way in which Sturm helped to ameliorate Ascham’s return to England from Germany at the start of Mary’s reign, a time when it was becoming rapidly clear that the Edwardian Protestant settlement would soon be overturned. Evidence points to the fact that it was perhaps in part (or even largely) thanks to Sturm that Ascham secured the post of Latin secretary to Mary. Sturm, availing himself of pre-​existing contacts, primarily William Paget, recommended Ascham and pursued the issue over some months.100 This was a fascinating example of the kind of subtle and layered manoeuvering across geographical boundaries that Protestants at the time could benefit from, even in the face of an ostensibly hostile regime. Yet there were further overt bids for aid bandied between Strasbourg and England. This was a motif particularly stressed during Mary’s Catholic reign that would prove a time of wilderness for many Protestants. Ascham identified a Cambridge scholar, one Thomas Lakin, as someone who had fled the country and that Sturm might look out for in Strasbourg.101 In return, Ascham pledged assistance to any of Sturm’s acquaintances if they needed asylum in England.102 During Elizabeth’s reign, Sturm and Ascham corresponded frequently about Protestant refugees, especially those fleeing persecution in France. Sturm, a self-​appointed guardian for many, made pleas for succour on behalf of several young men, including someone called ‘Gamatius’ whose reception by Elizabeth, Robert Dudley and Cecil Sturm asked Ascham to facilitate.103 In Strasbourg too, the atmosphere was becoming increasingly intolerable for many Reformed Protestants, as Lutheran hardliners had started to entrench their power in a serious way. Indeed, several exchanges during 1568 pertain to requests by Sturm for financial and political support for Sevenus, 98 Ibid., pp. 372–​373. 99 Sturm to William Paget, Strasbourg, 17 September, letter clvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 379. 100 Sturm to Paget, Strasbourg, 17 September 1553, letter clvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 379–​381; and Strasbourg, 23 June 1554, clxxii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 414. Ascham thanked Sturm for his interventions with Paget in an epistle from Greenwich, 14 September 1555, letter cxci, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 444–​445. Concerning the problematic classification of Paget’s religious convictions, see Sibyl M. Jack ‘William Paget, first Baron Paget (1505/​6–​1563)’, odnb. 101 Christina Hallowell Garrett, The Marian Exiles. A Study in the Origins of Elizabeth Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 214. Ascham to Sturm, Greenwich, 13 September 1555, letter cxci, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 448. 102 Ibid., p. 447. 103 Strasbourg, [ca. July–​August 1564], letter lxxxviii, Giles, vol. ii, p. 162.

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one of his Gymnasium teachers, and letters in response indicate that this aid was indeed forthcoming.104 Sturm also wrote to Cooke about a ‘master Albert’, appealing to a ‘common cause’ and calling for Cooke’s patronage:105 this Albert had come to England apparently to raise money for the international Protestant effort.106 Finally, Sturm also fired off a series of letters to a number of senior English figures concerning the plight of Alessandro Citolini, a prominent scholar, who had been forced to flee his native Italy because (according to Sturm) of ‘papist cruelty’, taking refuge first in Geneva and then in Strasbourg.107 The cross-​border cooperation outlined above is important, not least because it captures an age and climate in which religious beliefs could still trump nationality. Sturm’s comment in his second letter to Ascham in 1550 that religious union (religionis consociatio) ought to be more valuable than any political treaty eloquently encapsulates a still current mid sixteenth-century confidence in the notion of religious internationalism.108 Their exchanges certainly justify a reappraisal of the ties between England and Strasbourg, and the data marshalled above is surely emblematic of a far more widespread network of communications between the two centres. 5

Conclusion

The protracted correspondence between Ascham and Sturm over two turbulent decades of the sixteenth century is a highly fruitful repository of material that can yield many fresh insights into Ascham’s world. It would be wrong to present this relationship as one in which humanist pen pals (so to speak) 104 For example, Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg, 1 May 1568, letter xciv, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 167–​ 168; Strasbourg 26 July 1568, letter xcv, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 168–​169; Strasbourg 16 December 1568, letter xcviii, Giles, vol. ii; and Ascham to Sturm, December 1568, letter xcix, Giles, vol. ii, p. 174. Mike Pincombe discusses Sevenus and Sturm and their approach to imitatio in ch. 12 in this volume. 105 Sturm to Cooke, Frankfurt, 12 November ca. 1562, letter lii, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 93–​94. Albert is also mentioned in Sturm’s dispatch to Ascham of the same year: Frankfurt, 13 November ca. 1562, letter liii, Giles, vol. ii, p. 94. 106 Hatch, p. 734. 107 Sturm to Cooke, Strasbourg, 1 October 1565, letter lxviii, Giles, vol. ii, p. 116–​117; to Cecil, Strasbourg, 1 October 1565, letter lxix, Giles, vol. ii, p.  118; to Elizabeth, Strasbourg, 1 October 1565, letter lxx, Giles, vol. ii, pp.  118–​120; to Hales, Strasbourg, 1 October 1565, letter lxxi, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 120–​121; and to Cooke, Strasbourg, 3 December 1565, letter lxxii, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 121–​122. 108 Strasbourg, 18 November 1550, letter cix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 223.

164 Nicholas simply share their ideas about education and classical study, or as little more than social networking. Their letters are rife with tantalising contemporary references, and with fearlessly postulated ideas about cutting edge scholarship and its high-​level dissemination: they are replete with the main dramatis personae of the sixteenth century, and can shed much light on European tensions. Every letter, without exception, also probes into the urgent matter of religious reform and, in their methodologies and their high-​minded thirst for the absolute truth, they could even be said to be straying into the jurisdiction of theology. Ascham and Sturm were crucial agents not just in the international transmission of Protestant ideology, but also in the development of ideas that pertained directly to it. They were also instrumental in helping to forge important ligatures between two centres, England and Strasbourg, whose complex interaction played a significant role in the Reformation. Indeed, the letters of Ascham and Sturm may reveal that England and Strasbourg were in fact closer than previously thought, thereby calling into question a common historiographical tendency to associate mature English Protestantism with Calvinism and Geneva and/​or Bullinger and Zurich. We ignore the Ascham-​Sturm relationship to our detriment.

­c hapter 8

Ascham and Queen Elizabeth’s Religion Cyndia Susan Clegg As one of the Cambridge humanists, Roger Ascham’s achievements in his capacity as a master of ancient Greek and Latin, as an educational theorist and English prose stylist, even as a government servant, have secured him a favorable reputation. The same cannot be said for his impact on the English Reformation. Indeed, he is generally regarded as a lukewarm Protestant with little influence, even on Princess Elizabeth, whom he tutored in Latin and Greek in the household of Catherine Parr and whose Latin Secretary he became once she was Queen. Ascham became Elizabeth’s tutor in early 1548 upon the death of William Grindal, his student and good friend at St John’s College, Cambridge. The Elizabeth-​Ascham-​Grindal connection, however, was about much more than Elizabeth’s proficiency in Latin and Greek. Grindal and Ascham were part of the ‘Cambridge Connection’ that Winthrop S.  Hudson has argued shaped the Elizabethan Settlement.1 Hudson is not singular in looking to the formative influence men from St John’s, Cambridge, had on English Protestantism. His impact is affirmed by many historians, including Diarmaid MacCulloch, John McDiarmid, and David Harris Sacks. By placing Ascham’s religious views within the context of this ‘Connection’, which McDiarmid refers to as the ‘Cambridge Humanists’, and appreciating Ascham’s enduring relationship with Elizabeth, we can, I  think, better understand Elizabethan Protestantism itself. For over five and a half centuries Elizabeth’s religious Reformation has proven problematic: first for contemporary reformers, and later for ecclesiastical historians. In 2013 Simon Adams and David Scott Gehring suggested that debate over the Elizabethan Settlement continues because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence of the 1559 Parliament’s proceedings.2 One of the central issues of this debate is the intentionality of Queen Elizabeth 1 Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1980). 2 Simon Adams and David Scott Gehring, ‘Elizabeth I’s Former Tutor Reports and the Parliament of 1559: Johannes Spithovius to the Chancellor of Denmark 27 February 1559’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), pp. 35–​54.

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166 Clegg and her chief ministers. As MacCulloch reminds us, ‘In much traditional historical writing about English religion, the emphasis has been on the religious compromises which Elizabeth made in the 1559 religious settlement’.3 Some historians allow an enthusiasm for evangelical Protestantism among some of Elizabeth’s ministers, especially William Cecil, but the Queen is usually seen as having religious allegiances closer to her father’s toward the end of his reign. In his recent book on Elizabeth i, John Guy is somewhat typical in his view that Cecil ‘coaxed the then highly-​inexperienced twenty-​five year old into a decidedly more Protestant Religious Settlement than she would later have countenanced’.4 Guy, like so many other historians of Tudor England, is reluctant to admit that rather than being a compromise between ‘enthusiastic’ Protestants and Catholics (a via media, as it is often termed), the Elizabethan Reformation instituted a church polity that was entirely consistent with Elizabeth’s own religious views. Why, one might ask, should I  be revisiting this question yet again? In a recent article, ‘The 1559 Books of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Reformation’, I discussed an important and newly discovered piece of evidence –​a 1559 Book of Common Prayer –​that casts considerable light on the religious reform Elizabeth and her government intended to propose to parliament after the Queen’s coronation.5 The library at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, has among its holdings a 1559 Book of Common Prayer, printed by Richard Grafton with the Queen’s privilege. This copy, which is bound together with an Elizabethan ordinal, dated 1559 on Grafton’s colophon, contains the signatures of seven privy councillors, all of whom were appointed to Elizabeth’s Privy Council in the first month of her reign. The presence of these signatures, on a blank verso leaf of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer after which there were no further changes designated by the 1559 Act of Uniformity, offers a clear blueprint for Elizabethan religious reform. This copy of the Book of Common Prayer contained all of the changes the 1559 Act of Uniformity would call for, including in the preliminaries a new Proper of Psalms and Lessons expanded to meet the Act’s demand for an ‘addition of certain lessons to be used on every Sunday in the year’. It also incorporated alterations in the Litany, the addition of ‘two changes only added in the delivery of the sacrament to the

3 Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Putting the English Reformation on the Map’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 15 (2005), pp. 75–​95, at p. ​87. 4 John Guy, Elizabeth I: The Forgotten Years (New York: Viking, 2016), p. 13. 5 Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘The 1559 Books of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Reformation,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 67 (2016), pp. 94–​121.

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communicants’, and the new ornament rubric advancing the Act’s demand ‘that such ornaments of the church, and of the ministers thereof, shall be retained and be in use, as was in the Church of England, by authority of Parliament, in the second year of the reign of King Edward vi’.6 This copy of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, which was dismissed before I began my research in 2012, thus suggests that the Elizabethan restoration of Edwardian Protestantism was more a matter of consensus than of confrontation or compromise (or ‘coaxing’), especially within the inner circles of Elizabeth’s government, including the Queen. Indeed, Elizabeth’s religious views –​well documented in Susan Doran’s study of her letters –​reflected evangelical ideas consistent with those of her ministers. In this chapter I seek to develop this by demonstrating in particular that the religious opinions the Queen expressed throughout her reign were consonant with those of her Latin Secretary and former tutor, Roger Ascham. Although his views on religious reform have been patently dismissed until very recently, Ascham was a central figure among the Cambridge humanists, men whose evangelical religious views forged Edward vi’s Protestant state, which Elizabeth’s 1559 Act of Uniformity restored.7 Ascham’s Apologia pro Caena Dominica (‘Defence of the Lord’s Supper’) (1547/​8) not only places Elizabeth among a circle of committed evangelicals, but it also sheds light on Ascham’s theology, which can be seen to resonate with the views Doran finds in the Queen’s letters.

6 Ibid., p. 114. The signatures, ‘N[icholas] Bacon, C[ustos] S[igli]; F. Clynton [Edward Clinton, otherwise Fiennes, Lord High Admiral]; W. Howard [William Howard Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord Chamberlain and]; [Sir] T[homas] Parry [Comptroller]; [Sir] F[rancis] Knollys [possibly as Vice-​Chamberlain]; W. Cecill [Principal Secretary]; and Ambrose Caue [Cave]’ were of men Elizabeth trusted so well that she called them to her Privy Council immediately after her accession. This copy accurately represents the changes that would be specified by the Act of Uniformity, the rubrics, and the Proper of the Psalms and lessons that are incorrect in the first Book of Common Prayer printed by Richard Jugge and John Cawood after the 1559 Act of Uniformity was passed. 7 Hudson, The Cambridge Connection, traces the evangelical associations of the ‘Athenians’ at Cambridge who assumed important roles in the government and reformation of Edward vi. Cecil was, of course, part of this group, but there was also a second generation who assumed important roles in Elizabeth’s government. In addition to Cecil, were Nicholas Bacon, Francis Russell, William Parr, and Francis Knollys, whom Hudson describes as ‘kindred spirits’, ‘allies and friends’, and, above all, ‘earnest Protestants’ (p. 99). Ambrose Cave was a kinsman of Cecil and ‘a committed Protestant’ (Sybil M. Jack, ‘Cave, Sir Ambrose (ca. 1503–​1568)’, odnb). Stephen Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), sees a similar pattern of personal and religious alliances working together at the onset of Elizabeth’s reign to assure a thoroughly Protestant restoration of religion.

168 Clegg 1

Ascham’s Connections and His Apologia

Ascham wrote his Apologia pro Caena Dominica on the nature of the Eucharist pursuant to a series of religious disputations at Cambridge early in the reign of Edward vi. He intended it to be circulated at the highest levels of government. This text, which repudiates the Catholic Mass in favor of the ‘true religion’s’ Lord’s Supper, observes that ‘Even in these times’ the Lord has roused men of God to purge the foulness of the Mass and to restore the religion of Christ to its former splendour. To this end our Josias [King Edward VI] is inclined. To this end the noble Somerset entirely leans with the whole of the King’s counsel. To this end the very noble Princesses, Catharine [Parr] and Elizabeth, the very distinguished ladies of Somerset and Suffolk, and very many other excellent noble women have contributed more care and zeal than all sacrificers [Mass priests] in England …8 The ladies of Somerset and Suffolk, Anne Seymour and Katherine Brandon respectively, were at the centre of the court circle surrounding Katherine Parr who, in Susan Wabuda’s words, ‘helped to shape a new protestant culture’ in England during the reign of Edward vi.9 That the Princess Elizabeth is counted among those with such ‘care and zeal’ for the true religion –​and that Ascham is fully cognizant of the young Princess’s religious views –​invites us to look more closely at the connections between Ascham and Elizabeth. Ascham was, of course, Elizabeth’s tutor between 1548 and 1550, taking up the position shortly after he had written his Apologia. His appointment was at the young Princess’s insistence and against the wishes of her guardians, Katherine Parr and Lord Thomas Seymour, brother to Protector Somerset. In the mornings Ascham taught Elizabeth Greek using the New Testament, Sophocles, Isocrates and Demosthenes for instruction, and in the afternoons, Latin using Livy, Cicero, and the early Church Fathers.10 Given the curriculum’s attention to Scripture and the Church Fathers, it is difficult to imagine that Ascham and Elizabeth would not have discussed theology. 8 9 10

Nicholas, Lucy R., Roger Ascham’s ‘A Defence of the Lord’s Supper’: Latin Text and English Translation (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 94–​97, and all further references to Ascham’s Defence are to this. Susan Wabuda, ‘Bertie, Katherine, duchess of Suffolk (1519–​1580)’, odnb. O’Day, Rosemary. 2004 ‘Ascham, Roger (1514/​15–​1568), author and royal tutor’, odnb. See also Lucy Nicholas, ch. 7 in this volume.

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Ascham’s biographers have privileged his interest in humanism over his religious views, which have been regarded as conservatively traditional and therefore rather unimportant.11 This is to misunderstand Ascham and the circle to which he belonged, a closely-​knit group formed at Cambridge University, mostly at St John’s College. John McDiarmid describes it as ‘the first prominent humanist circle in England’.12 The Cambridge humanists, many of whom came to occupy important positions in the government, embraced the idea of reform –​certainly of language, but also of religion and the state. A  unifying factor among this group were the teachings of John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith that the Greek language and pronunciation should be restored to classical Greek usage (a proposition that Erasmus had also made). In his De recta et emendata linguae Graecae pronuntiatione (‘On the Correct and Improved Pronunciation of the Greek Language’), Smith argued that in ancient Greek each letter represented a distinct sound and that in current teaching Greek pronunciation should correspond with the ancient pronunciation.13 Cheke and Smith were part of a scholarly tradition that associated language and educational reform. According to David Harris Sacks, These figures treated alterations in the sound of letters and syllables alongside the corruption of texts as undermining eloquence and good letters and sought to restore the moral force of texts through acts of purification. For Erasmus and his followers like … Smith and Cheke, the purification of language  –​the correction of error  –​was critical to the purification of religion and the cure of the soul. These language reformers sought to do this in part by restoring ancient texts –​most especially Scripture –​to their original state, in so far as this was possible, so that they could speak clearly to those who read them or heard them read and expounded.14

11

In her odnb article on Ascham, Rosemary O’Day accepts the authority of Ryan’s Ascham on this. 12 John F.  McDiarmid, ‘Common Consent, Latinitas, and “The Monarchical Republic” in Mid-​Tudor Humanism’ in John F. McDiarmid, ed., The Monarchical Republic of early modern England: Essays in response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 55. 13 David Harris Sacks, ‘States, Nations and Publics’, in Paul Yachnin and Marlene Eberhart, eds., Forms of Association: Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), pp. 19–​41, at p. 14. 14 Ibid., p. 16.

170 Clegg This interest in recovering the best custom became a template for the Cambridge humanists, who sought not only to restore ancient Greek, but also to recover the purest forms of Latin, English, politics, and Christianity. The Cambridge humanists also embraced the Ciceronian ideal of learning in service to the state: in ancient Rome, we should remember, state and religion were one. Ascham described the Cambridge humanists’ ideal as a ‘scholer, that might becom … a good minister in Religion, or a Ciuill Intleman in service of his Prince and countrie’.15 The study of classical grammar and rhetoric led the Cambridge circle into public occupations where rhetorical skill could be put in use to guide the affairs of Church and commonwealth. These men, according to McDiarmid, saw England as a community with governing structures peculiarly appropriate to its character. Also integral to their thought was the perception that a community and its structures may change. Change could be for the better, and the Cambridge humanists often saw themselves in the role of reformers, capable of guiding the English polity as to ways in which it might improve.16 Their humanism thus embraced not only civic religion, but civic religion firmly dedicated to the principle of political and religious reform –​but reform that took the form of restoration. That Sacks identifies Roger Ascham as ‘the most important of the Cambridge Athenian tribe’,17 and that the ‘Athenian’ agenda was to reform the Church by restoring it to its early state, suggests that we should take Ascham’s religious views seriously. In a recent essay, Lucy Nicholas calls Ascham ‘a serious religious thinker with a high stake in the theological reform movement’.18 Her close reading of Ascham’s Apologia identifies strong parallels with Luther’s De Abroganda Missa privata (‘On the Necessary Abolition of the Private Mass’),19 which, she suggests, should command our respect for Ascham’s theology. Nicholas’s essay, however, does not overtly address Lawrence Ryan’s influential view that Ascham was a conservative Protestant based on both the Apologia and his Themata theologica (‘Theological Topics’), a tract written 15 McDiarmid, ‘Common Consent, Latinitas, and “The Monarchical Republic” ’, p. 56. 16 Ibid. 17 Sacks, ‘States, Nations and Publics’, p. 21. 18 Lucy Nicholas, ‘Sin and Salvation in Roger Ascham’s Apologia Pro Caena Dominica’, in Jonathan Willis, ed., Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 87–​99, at p. 88. 19 De Abroganda Missa privata Martini Lutheri sententia (Basel, 1522, ustc 628878).

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concurrently with the Apologia and likewise unpublished in his lifetime.20 Ryan dismissed the Apologia as merely a rhetorical exercise that refused to engage in theological disputation, but in this Ryan misses something Nicholas implicitly recognises: early Protestant writing, including Luther’s, was highly rhetorical –​indeed, often stridently so –​and its fundamental ground for rational proof lay in the absolute sufficiency of Scripture. It was uninterested in the kind of theological disputation that had prevailed in the Church since the triumph of scholasticism. In dismissing the Apologia because it did not engage with theological debates on transubstantiation, Ryan misses Ascham’s point.21 Ascham’s Apologia, indeed, employs sophisticated rhetoric, but it does so to advance a distinctively evangelical theological position on the difference between the Lord’s Supper and the Catholic Mass: that only the Lord’s Supper has Biblical authority. For Ascham, any learned theological disputation on transubstantiation becomes irrelevant. Before looking more closely at Ascham’s religious viewpoint, it is worth considering the relevance of his rhetorical approach. To be so dismissive of Ascham’s use of rhetoric, as Ryan is, is to misunderstand a fundamental tenet of the Cambridge humanists, that the end of good rhetoric is good men and the perfection of church and state. According to Sacks, ‘to “perfect” in this case means more than simply to “complete” or “accomplish”; it also conveys the idea of “fulfillment”, that is, of achieving a final end and bringing things to an ideal condition’. Fulfillment in this sense means, ‘restoring universal ideals through the recovery of ultimate truths and common standards of excellence’.22 Even if Ascham’s Apologia were only a rhetorical exercise, its method cannot be fully separated from its religious or theological seriousness. Nicholas finds the Apologia’s attention to the Ten Commandments to be consistent with their use in the Edwardian programme of religious reform. While she argues for parallels between Luther’s theology and Ascham’s, Nicholas concedes that ‘the English Reformation began to diverge from specific Lutheran positions on the Eucharist’.23 This divergence might explain why Ascham’s Apologia, while

20 Ryan, Ascham, pp. 95–​101. 21 Ryan Ascham, p. 90. here envisions the kind of theological disputation that was scholasticism’s legacy in the Catholic Church, a tradition in which Ascham has no interest in engaging. Instead Ascham simply avoids the doctrine of transubstantiation because it cannot be proved by the words of Scripture. 22 Sacks, ‘States, Nations and Publics’, p. 21. 23 Nicholas, ‘Sin and Salvation in Roger Ascham’s Apologia’, p. 98.

172 Clegg resembling Luther’s Abroganda, also takes some distinctively English theological positions. The nature of the Eucharist was a central point of contention between Catholics and early Protestant reformers, and indeed among the different reformers themselves, some of whom subscribed to Luther’s understanding of Christ’s ‘real presence’, and others to forms of memorialism. Ascham’s Apologia repudiates the Catholic view of the Eucharist as a propitiatory act –​the sacrifice of the Mass. In Catholic theology Christ’s one-​time sacrifice of his body on the cross at Calvary removed the taint of original sin. In each and every Mass, the priest offers to God a sacrifice of the sacramental elements of bread and wine that have become body and blood to propitiate individual, continuing sins. The sacrifice of the Mass is distinct from the communion of the people (the distribution of the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine) and could be –​and was –​performed by priests without communicants present. In Protestant objections to the Mass, Masses without communicants were referred to as ‘private’ Masses. Besides taking exception to private Masses, Ascham’s Apologia objected to the sacrifice of the Mass on three grounds: it was Levitical, pagan, and unscriptural. The first two grounds relied on the Old Testament and classical literature. At the end of the Old Testament book of Exodus (40:29), God commanded Moses to convey His covenant to the Israelites which required, in exchange for His protection of them, that they make sacrifices and burnt offerings (animal and grain) in atonement for their transgressions. The early chapters of Leviticus detail the requirements for these sacrifices to be performed by the Levites (the Jewish Priests). According to Ascham, these sacrifices became so excessive that the Prophets spoke against them. (Indeed, Micah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah went so far as to say that Temple sacrifices were not pleasing to God). Hence, for Ascham, the sacrifice of the Mass was ‘Levitical’, but he also saw it as pagan. Ascham includes the example, taken from Euripides’ play Hecuba, of Pyrrhus (Neoptolemus) offering prayers and wine ‘as appeasing drink offerings’ to ‘draw forth the dead’.24 Finally, from Ascham’s perspective, the sacrifice of the Mass was unscriptural because it violated Christ’s institution of the Lord’s Supper in the New Testament, especially when it was part of a ‘private’ Mass. According to Ascham, ‘We recognise only the Lord’s Supper which is handed over to us in Scripture by the Lord’ in a ‘perfect arrangement’.25 The Lord’s Supper is an act of community with 24 Ascham, Defence, pp. 56–​57. 25 Ibid., pp. 48–​49.

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Christ sitting with his disciples with such great humility and with such great simplicity, delivering an open and plain speech, breaking the bread, dividing it up between individuals, offering a drinking cup to each person, and directing that they also act thus, to preserve this his last testament, and not to alter it by taking it apart and adding to it as if they were makers of wills.26 Instead, in the Mass the priest rushes ‘alone from chapel to altar’. He stands ‘there alone with his back to the people … mumbling … in utmost secrecy’, and he alone consumes the sacramental elements.27 Ascham asks his audience to make the comparison between the Mass ​priest and Christ instituting the Lord’s Supper and then says that he is certain that any ‘reasonable kind of man would respond: “Look, everything that has been done is novel. Assuredly these Mass-​ makers … are forgers of the testament, they add to the testament of the Lord, they take it apart and change it so that they might introduce their own” ’.28 2

Ascham’s Apologia and Edwardian Evangelical Theology

Ascham’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper and his objections to the Mass are consistent with the vanguard of English reform at the time that he wrote the Apologia. A few years later, after Edward vi’s first Act of Uniformity, Archbishop Cranmer would write his Defence of the English Reformation’s Eucharistic theology, which, in turn, was the basis for the 1552 Book of Common Prayer’s liturgy for Holy Communion. In his consideration of Cranmer’s Defence, Diarmaid MacCulloch insists that ‘For Cranmer, repetition of the propitiatory sacrifice was inconceivable’ in Eucharistic liturgy since it was inconsistent with Scriptural accounts of Christ’s institution of the sacrament.29 Cranmer’s own view of the Eucharist, according to MacCulloch, relied upon Gospel and Pauline texts. Christ referred to the bread as his body, this was precisely to be understood as a signification “of Christ’s own promise and testament” to the one who truly eats it “that he is a member of his body, and receiveth the 26 27 28 29

Ibid., pp. 48–​49. Ibid., pp. 50–​51. Ibid., pp. 50–​51. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 465.

174 Clegg benefits of his passion which he suffered for us upon the cross”; likewise Christ’s description of the wine as his blood was a certificate of his legacy and testament, that he is made partaker of the blood of Christ which was shed for us.30 The notion of ‘truly eats’ is a nuanced theological point. According to Cranmer, ‘the spiritual eating is with the heart, not with the teeth’.31 Ascham’s view of the Lord’s Supper resonates with Cranmer’s. According to Ascham, the Lord’s Supper is ‘a sign and a memorial of redemption and the whole of our salvation. … The founder is Christ. The essence is Christ. The use is Christ. The purpose is Christ. Everything is Christ … Only the Supper recognises Christ alone’.32 In an extended passage Ascham carefully spells out the relationship between the English conception of the Eucharist and Christ’s single sacrifice of himself. Look at Christ on that night when he was handed over, any minute about to die, that is, about to bring to pass for the human race a thing long awaited. He sat with his disciples in order to establish his testament and in order to bequeath his gifts. … He did not bequeath kingdoms of the world and riches because He did not possess such things. … What did he have? He had a body to give. He had blood to shed. He gives his body and he gives his blood. He could not have given clearer gifts, and we could not have hoped for greater. In his blood was the price of redemption which he would pay, and in his body the gift of life which he would give. He gives and orders us to accept. … Christ orders that we receive and he orders that we eat and drink. This should be an affair not of the teeth, but of the mind, not of the stomach but of faith. Let your mind prepare itself and your body will duly follow. Why will we eat; why will we drink? So that we may be at one with Christ and, having become bones from his bones, we may unite in the body of Christ and, in this (way) not only be joined together in a certain spiritual grace, but also joined together in a natural bodily participation. How this can happen reason does not find out. However, what it is, faith easily comprehends.

30 31

Ibid., p. 463. Thomas Cranmer, A Defence of the true and Catholike doctrine of the sacrament of the body and bloud of our saviour Christ (London, 1550, ustc 504417), sigs. Ciiiiv–Dir. 32 Ascham, Defence, pp. 18–​21.

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… If you ask your reason, it responds what is sensed and does not attend to what is understood. If you ask your faith, it asks Christ, and what Christ says, faith believes, nor does it seek reason among sensible things from the realm of the senses, but discerns the a mystery among intelligible things in the realm of understanding.33 ‘The fruits of the Lord’s Supper’, according to Ascham, ‘surpass my understanding. If we eat his flesh and drink his blood, we will dwell in him and he in us’.34 Ascham here effectively describes Cranmer’s theology of ‘spiritual eating’ and agrees that receiving the sacramental bread assures membership in the body of Christ and receiving the wine as Christ’s ‘legacy and testament’ assures salvation. Besides advancing the theology of spiritual communion, what MacCulloch sees as ‘One of the crucial sections’ of Cranmer’s Defence ‘was the definition and discussion of sacrifice’. According to MacCulloch, Basing his definitions on the Old Testament sacrifices as viewed through the prism of the Epistle to the Hebrews, Cranmer set up the contrast between the propitiatory sacrifice to pacify God’s wrath, and the sacrifice of thanksgiving, “to testify our duties unto God”. After the prophetic shadow sacrifices of the Old Testament, there has only been one propitiatory sacrifice in human history, that of Christ on the cross.35 As we have already seen, like Cranmer, one of Ascham’s chief objections to the sacrifice of the Mass is that it is Levitical, that is, a rote sacrificial ritual of atonement. But he also concurs with Cranmer’s insistence on Christ’s death as the sole, propitiatory sacrifice: ‘He gives his body as an offering just once in order that you might eat, not so that you can offer it again. That there is a receiving, Scripture orders. That there is an offering, Scripture does not order, but forbids’.36 The only acceptable offering in the liturgy for both Cranmer and Ascham is the people’s ‘sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving’. This sacrifice, according to Ascham, … is common to all Christians. This happens and is undertaken by men as a means to present themselves grateful for and mindful of that ultimate 33 Ibid. pp. 24–25.   34 Ibid., pp. 26–​27. 35 MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 464. 36 Ascham, Defence, pp. 26–​27.

176 Clegg sacrifice of Christ. This sacrifice is very widely accessible and belongs to every part of Christian life. It is particularly perceived in praises of God and in the act of giving thanks.37 To Cranmer, ‘the offering of thanksgiving and the offering of the whole Church’ are ‘ “one and the same” ’.38 The question of the conservatism of Ascham’s theology is a complicated one. Denying the theology of the Canon of the Mass in 1548, as Ascham does, was a fairly radical position. Indeed, it was even more radical than the 1549 Book of Common Prayer (the first English Protestant liturgical work) which, by retaining some material from the old Sarum missal (although translated into English), suggested some connections between the English Holy Communion liturgy and the Latin Mass. Ascham’s theology on the Lord’s Supper is well-​ grounded in two principal theological points that both the German and the Swiss churches shared: the sufficiency of Scripture and justification through faith alone (rather than Rome’s emphasis on faith and works). As we have seen, Ascham’s entire argument for the Lord’s Supper against the Mass depends, jot and tittle, on the Bible. That this is and should be the only grounds upon which Christianity should be based may be seen in Ascham’s repudiation of theological debate: If the Mass really is the most divine of institutions, it should be found in divine decrees. If it is not there … let men leave off defending it. … When the Lord orders that man ought not to do what seems right to him, no reasonable person will think that I speak unjustly because I testify in this disputation that I scorn all human doctrine which always attributes too much to man’s inventions. Therefore, let us settle this matter with the Word of God alone.39 Ascham says that the Father speaks but once in the Gospel, and his command, ‘This is my chosen Son; hear him’, means ‘that we should follow nothing else in every doctrine’. ‘What is it’, he asks, ‘to hear Christ?’ It is ‘To hear his Word’. Hear what Christ says. He says “He who hears my words is from God. He who does not hear, is not from God”. It is on account of this that we recognise the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. Therefore, those who rely 37 Ibid., pp. 122–​123. 38 Cranmer, Defence, quoted in MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 413. 39 Ascham, Defence, pp. 42–​45.

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upon the Word of God follow the spirit of truth. Those who have placed their faith in human doctrine follow the spirit of error.40 What has happened in the Church, instead, according to Ascham, is that ‘man and his doctrine take the place of Christ and the Gospel’. ‘For what else is it’, he asks, ‘than to raise human works up against the free justification of faith?’41 From this perspective, Scripture assures that man is justified by faith, while human doctrine, that is, Papal doctrine, teaches salvation by works. The nature of justifying faith Ascham had explained earlier. By Adam’s disobedience humans fell from grace and became totally incapable of saving themselves, creating a need of ‘something with which to cleave closely to God’: Pay heed at this point to the way in which I describe the justifying goodness of God. The only son of God gazes upon the enemy and has compassion for him as a friend. Somehow he leaves behind his Father and heaven in order to survey man and earth. He takes on himself every human weakness in order to transfer his power to man. He renders himself wretched in order to make you blessed. He loses himself in order to find you. He gave himself up to death in order to restore you to life. He endured death with humanity in order to free man through his death from the sentence of his Father. He gave dignity back to life in order to re-​unite man, through his resurrection, with the benevolence of the Father.42 He asks how we know this. His answer –​that this knowledge comes through the sign of the Lord’s Supper’s gifts, the bread and wine which signify the body and blood –​brings him back to his argument against the Mass. Ascham’s position on the Lord’s Supper and his concurrence with these central tenets of Protestant thought (justification by faith alone and the sufficiency of Scripture) may, I suppose, be seen as ‘conservative’, but only if one looks back on them from, say, 1604. To be ‘liberal’, then, would be to be more Swiss than German, more like Calvin and Zwingli than Luther. To be liberal would be to have a church governed by elders (presbyters) rather than priests and bishops. To be liberal would be to follow Zwingli’s view that the Lord’s Supper was merely an act of remembering, void of any sacramental aspect. Or it might be to adopt Calvin’s predestinarian theology with its doctrine of 40 41 42

Ibid., pp. 34–​37. Ibid., pp. 34–​35. Ibid., pp. 20–​21.

178 Clegg double predestination  –​that is, that before time began, God decreed who would be saved and who would be damned. To seek a memorial Lord’s Supper, a presbyterian polity, or predestinarian theology, though, is to look to the wrong Reformation moment. As MacCulloch reminds us, ‘Calvinism could have nothing more than a marginal effect on the major official texts of liturgy and doctrine which Cranmer had created under Edward vi’. The ‘alternative Reformed influences … central in the days of Edwardian theological creativity’ were Peter Martyr Vermigli, Martin Bucer, and Heinrich Bullinger.43 Peter Marshall provides a useful summary of what this earlier Reformation theology looked like: ‘The defining element of evangelicalism was the belief that men were saved only through their faith in Christ, and not through their own works’. Faith, bestowed by God’s Grace through holy Scripture, understood that ‘Justification’ was an ‘unmerited verdict of acquittal’, and ‘Sanctification’ was ‘the complementary process whereby the Holy Spirit brought about the regeneration of the elect, and a visible and outward holiness which was the consequence not the cause of salvation’.44 MacCulloch has identified as one of the distinctive features of Edwardian Protestantism an emphasis on doing good works, though not as a means to salvation –​and certainly not as a product of human will alone.45 Indeed, the Article on Free Will (article nine) in the 1552 Edwardian Articles of Religion says, ‘we have no power to dooe good workes pleasaunte and acceptable to God, without the Grace of God in Christ preventing us that we maie have a good will, and work in us, where we have his will’. Ascham’s justification theology, then, rather than being ‘conservative’, very much advances the views of his English evangelical peers. So, too, as I have shown, does his doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, in which, rather than aligning with either Luther’s ‘real presence’ or Zwingli’s mere ‘remembrance’, he is closer to Bucer (and Cranmer) when he says: I eat the body; I  drink the blood. I  do everything in remembrance of Christ. I  willingly omit nothing which Christ instituted. I  rashly admit nothing which Christ has not ordered, and I keep myself totally within the bounds of his Word.46

43

Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547–​1603 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), pp. 58–​59. 44 Peter Marshall, ‘Evangelical Conversion in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie, eds., The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 14–​37, at p. 22–23. 45 MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, pp. 58–​59. 46 Ascham, Defence, pp. 74–​75.

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Ascham’s theology is the theology of the Edwardian Reformation, a Reformation that earned Bucer’s praise: ‘It much refreshed us that everything in the churches is read and sung in the vernacular tongue, that the doctrine of justification is purely and soundly taught, and the eucharist is administered according to Christ’s ordinance, private masses having been abolished’.47 3

Queen Elizabeth’s Religion

For many historians, Edwardian Protestantism as reflected in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer is what Elizabeth I wished to disavow when she initiated her Settlement of Religion in 1559. Her religious preference is often seen as decidedly conservative. In studying Elizabeth I’s correspondence, Doran acknowledges these conservative tendencies, evidenced by ‘strict conformity to the 1559 Prayer Book and Royal Injunctions’, but she also finds Elizabeth’s religious views to be consistent with the ‘evangelical humanist environment’ in which she was brought up.48 I would like to suggest that some of what MacCulloch describes Elizabeth as ‘disconcertingly inconsistent’ about religion, her religious views regularly align with those of her tutor and Latin Secretary, Roger Ascham. Doran finds the centre of Elizabeth’s conservativism in her attitude towards royal authority. The nature and precedent for this authority seems to be key in understanding the Queen’s religion. ‘Certainly’, Doran says, ‘as most historians have pointed out, it was the challenge to her authority that angered and alarmed the queen: ‘ “none,” she warned Archbishop Parker by letter, “shall be suffered to decline either on the left or on the right hand from the direct line limited by authority of our said laws and injunctions” ’.49 Many historians regard Elizabeth’s invocation of her authority over the Church, based on the Act of Supremacy, and her refusal to consider any further reformation beyond the Act of Uniformity as a measure of her conservative theology. The first Act of Supremacy in 1534, which the Elizabethan Act reinstates, suggests something else. The 1534 Act begins, ‘Albeit the king’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England’ and is ‘so recognized’. Even so, ‘for corroboration and confirmation thereof, and for increase of virtue in Christ’s religion within this realm of England … be it enacted, by authority 47 MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 412. 48 Susan Doran, ‘Elizabeth I’s Religion: The Evidence of Her Letters’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51 (2000), pp. 699–​720, at p. 702. 49 MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, p. 25.

180 Clegg of this present Parliament, that the king, our sovereign lord, his heirs and successors, kings of this realm, shall be taken, accepted, and reputed the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England’.50 The Henrician argument for Supremacy relies on historical precedent where the king ‘is and ought to be the supreme head’. The 1534 Act of Supremacy does not establish something new but instead confirms that the monarch’s supreme authority over the Church in England had always existed and would continue for posterity. The Act’s language here offers a singular view of the monarch’s authority with respect to the Church: the monarch is ‘the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England’-​-​the key word here being ‘only’. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign, efforts to promote religious change beyond the parameters of the 1559 Acts of Uniformity and Supremacy arose outside the locus of the Queen’s proper powers. Elizabeth’s resistance to religious change –​to efforts brought forth in Parliament and among her clergy to further the reformation of the Church of England –​reflects her clear understanding of her responsibility as the monarch of England to be the Church’s ‘only supreme head’. For Elizabeth to admit any authority other than her own over the Church (either Parliament’s or Convocation’s) denies the historical precedent confirmed by her father’s 1534 Act of Supremacy. Furthermore, since the Henrician act denies any other entity’s sovereign authority in England, for Elizabeth to allow Parliament or Convocation to alter the Church would not only be inconsistent with the legal precedent but would undermine her political authority in England –​something a woman already in a precarious political position would be entirely unwise to do. As for Ascham, looking back from a later perspective, this may be seen merely as conservatism, but that is to misunderstand the grounds of Elizabeth’s political and religious authority. As for the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity, it does not create a new ecclesiastical polity, but, instead, restores the Church to its Edwardian purity. The 1559 Act of Uniformity’s language does not create something new. Instead, it repeals the Marian legislation that ‘to the great decay of the due honor of God, and discomfort to the professors of the truth of Christ’s religion’ had nullified Edward VI’s 1552 Act of Uniformity. The Edwardian Act had instituted ‘one uniform order of common service and prayer, and of the administration of sacraments, rites, and ceremonies in the Church of England, which was set forth in one book, intituled: The Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of Sacraments, and other rites and ceremonies in the Church of England’ (the 1552 Book of Common Prayer). By nullifying the Marian Act, the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity restored the Edwardian Reformation in all its purity –​a purity consonant with 50

Act of Supremacy, 1534, 26 Henry viii, c. 1.

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the early Christian Church, as indicated in the preface to the 1552 Book of Common Prayer (reprinted in the 1559 Grafton edition). These prayer books’ identical prefaces assert that liturgical practices have fallen away from the time of the early Church, but in the Book of Common Prayer, the reader is told: You have an order for prayer (as touching the reading of holy scripture) muche agreeable to the mynd and purpose of thold fathers, & a great deale more profitable and commodious then that which of late was used. It is more profitable because here whereof are left out many thynges, whereof some be vntrue, some vncertain, some vain and supersticious, and is ordeyned nothing to be redde but the very pure worde of God, the holy scripture, or that whiche is evidently grounded vpon the same … .51 The 1552 and 1559 Books of Common Prayer thus sought to restore religion to ‘the mynd and purpose’ of the early Church Fathers by including in worship the ‘pure worde of God’ and those ceremonies ‘evidently grounded vpon the same’. An important point here is that in 1559, by returning the English Church to the 1552 Act of Uniformity and its Book of Common Prayer, Elizabeth aligns herself with Ascham, Cranmer, Cecil and the rest of the Cambridge humanists who insisted upon restoration as a pattern for gradual and meaningful change. To them perfection resides in that which is restored, whether classical Greek pronunciation, a Republica Anglorum (an ancient English commonwealth), or early Christianity. Along with this comes Elizabeth’s and Ascham’s repudiation of ‘novelty’ and ‘diversity’. From Elizabeth’s perspective, ‘diversity, variety, contention, and vain love of singularity, either in our ministers or in the people, must needs provoke the displeasure of Almighty God.’52 If, as Thomas Smith contended, England was a perfected commonwealth, why should it be changed? Likewise, if Edwardian Protestantism restored early Christianity, what further change was required? 4

Elizabeth and Ascham

Like Ascham, Elizabeth resisted novelty and innovation because they derived from man rather than from Scripture. In a defence of the religion of the Book 51 See The boke of common prayer, and administracion of the sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies in the Churche of Englande (London: Grafton, 1552, ustc 516523) and The boke of common praier, and administration of the sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies in the Churche of Englande (London: Grafton, 1559, ustc 518068), sigs. aiir–​aiiir. 52 Doran, ‘Elizabeth I’s Religion’, p. 703.

182 Clegg of Common Prayer, Elizabeth said, ‘England embraced not new or strange doctrine, but the same which Christ commanded, and what the primitive and catholic church had received’.53 The English Church’s practices, Elizabeth firmly believed, were consistent with early Christianity. According to the Queen, there is no manner of thing stablished by law to be used in the churches of England either for prayers or use of sacraments, but that which is expressly conteyned in the very Scriptures … so as no person of any sort of religion being a Christian, can mislyke any part of the same or can upon any iust cause refuse to be present at th’exercise therof.54 This emphasis on Scriptural authority is entirely consistent with Ascham’s argument for the nature of the Lord’s Supper. According to Doran, Elizabeth likewise relied on Scripture as the ground for her dislike of preaching. The Queen found acceptable, ‘preaching by persons learned, discreet, conformable and sound in religion’ but objected to ‘public exercises by preachers who “dayly devise, imagin, propound and putt in execution sundrie new rites and forms in the church” ’.55 Her objections to public preaching are entirely consistent with Ascham’s emphasis on the sufficiency of holy Scripture. ‘Edification of the unlearned sort’, she informed [Archbishop] Parker, ‘could be better served by their hearing biblical passages read aloud in churches on Sundays and holy days’.56 Besides relying on Scripture as the grounds for all theological views and liturgical practices, for Elizabeth, as for Ascham, Scripture was the foundation for objections to papal authority. According to Doran, ‘Elizabeth’s denial of papal authority was firmly rooted in her understanding of the Scriptures; and the text “Our saviour Christ paid His tribute unto Caesar as the chief superior” was cited by her as justification for the Act of Supremacy’.57 She also regarded the Mass as a violation of Scripture. She responded negatively to Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand’s request that England tolerate Catholic worship ‘on the grounds that the celebration of the Mass in England would be “wrong to her own honour and conscience”, as it was a practice which “contradicted the truth and the gospel” ’.58 53 Elizabeth i, quoted in ibid., p. 705. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., p. 703. 56 Ibid., pp. 703–704. 57 Ibid., p. 705. 58 Ibid., p. 709.

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Elizabeth’s expression of her own understanding of the Lord’s Supper bore an uncanny resemblance to Ascham’s assertion that the Lord’s Scriptural institution theologically sufficed. According to Doran, Elizabeth is credited with having written this short verse during Mary’s reign. Twas God the Word that spake it He took the Bread and brake it And what the Word did make it That I believe and Take it.59 While Doran suggests that this is very like the theological position in 1551 of her chaplain, Edmund Allen, the echo of Ascham is unmistakable. Ascham said, ‘We recognise only the Lord’s Supper which is handed over to us in Scripture by the Lord’;60 he also writes ‘He gives his body and he gives his blood … He gives and orders us to accept … Christ orders that we receive and he orders that we eat and drink’.61 Doran identifies Elizabeth’s view as affirming the corporeal or ‘real’ presence, but all the examples she cites likewise chime with Ascham’s view of the sacrament as sacred mystery and his strict emphasis on the words of Christ. Essentially, then, Elizabeth’s Eucharistic theology aligned with Ascham’s. But this was not all. Her 1559 statement to the bishops on religion rejected ‘three Catholic beliefs and practices: private masses; the doctrine that the mass was “a propitiatory sacrifice … a means to deliver souls out of purgatory”; and communion in one kind’. All these positions were ones articulated in Ascham’s Apologia. Besides these theological resonances, Elizabeth shared with Ascham a personal predilection: both found theology and debate on issues that could not be resolved by Scripture unprofitable. Late in her reign, when Archbishop Whitgift put forward the Lambeth Articles to clarify the English Church’s stance on predestination, Elizabeth blocked the Articles on the grounds ‘that the Scriptures provided no clear answer to the mysteries of predestination and the Lord’s Supper, and that consequently they were “questiones contentiosas et inutiles” (‘contentious and useless questions’)’.62 While this might be perceived as theological conservatism, what is more important, I believe, is the perception shared by Elizabeth, Ascham, and the Cambridge humanists, that restoring language, the state, and religion to their purest –​in the case of Christianity, biblical –​forms constituted the best of all possible worlds. 59 Elizabeth i, quoted in ibid., p. 711. 60 Ascham, Defence, pp. 48–49. 61 Ibid., pp. 22–​23. 62 Doran, ‘Elizabeth I’s Religion’, p. 707.

184 Clegg I began here with the observation that the nature of the Elizabethan Reformation remains contested, even for those who subscribe to its essential Protestantism, and even for those who accept Norman Jones’s Faith by Statute as the basis for their understanding of a contingent Elizabethan Reformation.63 The problem arises because what many Reformation historians derive from Jones is not his unequivocal assertion of the clear evangelical intentionality of the 1559 ‘Settlement’ of religion, but rather a sense of factional contention and compromise that more closely resembles J. E. Neale’s highly speculative narrative about Protestant ‘wolves’ and an almost-​Catholic queen.64 The sticking point, though, for both Neale and Jones is what particular prayer book would be enacted. Neale’s complicated narrative –​of Elizabeth, who, he says, intended no liturgical change in the first Parliament, preferring a more Catholic 1549 Edwardian Prayer book, the Protestant wolves pushing for a book on the Genevan model, and a compromise resulting in a revised 1552 Edwardian Book of Common Prayer65 –​gives way in Jones’s careful analysis of the parliamentary proceedings. Jones argues that not only was it probable that from her accession Elizabeth intended to revive the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, but also that the 1552 prayer book ‘would be the vehicle for the new uniformity’.66 Jones, however, suggests that the changes to the 1552 Book of Common Prayer specified by the Act of Uniformity –​the ornaments rubric and the addition of sentences from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer in the administration of Communion –​ came late in the Parliament and may reflect alterations to the uniformity bill made to ‘improve its chance of passage’ and to gain support in the House of Lords.67 I believe that it is time to set aside altogether any view that Elizabeth and her ministers did not desire a thoroughly Protestant Church in England, and further, that the liturgy set forth in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer was a compromise. The existence of a 1559 Book of Common Prayer signed by Elizabeth’s Privy Council before the opening of Elizabeth’s Reformation Parliament 63

Norman L.  Jones, Faith by Statute:  Parliament and the Settlement of Religion 1559, (London: Royal Historical Society; New Jersey: Humanities Press Inc., 1982). Jones argues that both the Act of Uniformity and the Act of Supremacy were proposed at the beginning of the 1559 Parliament, and although some political manoeuvering took place, were passed as intended. This counters J. E. Neale’s argument that Elizabeth intended only that the Act of Supremacy would be passed immediately, and that religious reform closer to what had existed under her father would proceed later. 64 J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1559–​1581 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953), p. 59. 65 Ibid., pp. 33–​84. 66 Jones, Faith by Statute, p. 187. 67 Ibid., pp. 136–​7.

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suggests otherwise, but so does the Queen’s religion. Elizabeth i’s religious views, as we have seen here, were consistent with those of Roger Ascham, an important Cambridge humanist. Ascham’s Protestant theology aligned with the foremost English Protestants of his time. As Elizabeth’s tutor, but also as her Latin Secretary and confidant, Ascham’s influence on the Queen is unmistakable. This makes it highly unlikely that Elizabeth was ‘coaxed’ (by Cecil or any other of her ministers) into ‘a decidedly more Protestant Religious Settlement than she would later have countenanced’.68 The Elizabethan Settlement, in the spirit of Ascham and his Cambridge connections, was intended to ‘restore’ English Protestantism to its Edwardian (and thereby its early Christian) purity. 68 Guy, Elizabeth I, p. 13.

pa rt 3 Language, Literature and Learning Reassessed

∵

­c hapter 9

Ascham as Reader and Writer: Greek Sententiae and Neo-​Latin Poetry J. S. Crown Ascham is a central figure in the story of Greek in England. In a biographical eulogy, Edward Grant emphasised his youthful facility, quoting the judgement of his Cambridge tutor, Robert Pember, that one of his letters ‘could seem to have been written even at Athens.’1 Samuel Johnson observed that Ascham studied the language with ‘diligence and success equally conspicuous’ and that ‘many resorted to his chamber to hear the Greek writers explained.’2 His correspondence offers a number of anecdotes about the progress of Greek studies in England, and the achievements of its various adherents. King Edward, he proudly informed Johannes Sturm, was translating Cicero’s philosophical works into Greek and imbibing moral principles from Aristotle’s Ethics, whilst Lady Jane Grey could speak and write Greek ‘so well that one can hardly give her the credit she deserves.’3 He advised Sturm to befriend Mildred Cecil, Lady Burghley, since she could speak and understand Greek ‘about as well as English.’4 Ascham’s former pupil Queen Elizabeth apparently read more Greek

I would like to thank Lucy Nicholas for bringing Ascham’s annotations to my attention and Richard Rex for insightful comments on an early draft. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Wells for allowing me access to the archives at Westminster School and generously sharing her knowledge about the volume. 1 Edward Grant, Ad Adolescentulos Latinae Linguae Studiosos, Edvardi Grant, Oratio de vita et obitu Rogeri Aschami Giles, vol. iii, pp. 302–​355, at p. 311. I have offered a modified version of Dana Sutton’s translation at . 2 Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Ascham’, in The Works of Samuel Johnson LL.D., Together with his Life, and Notes on his Lives of the Poets, vol. 4, ed. John Hawkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1787), pp. 617–​637, at pp. 619–​620. 3 Roger Ascham to Johannes Sturm, 14 December 1550, [Augsburg], letter cx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 224–​229, translation from Hatch and Vos, pp. 179–​185, at pp. 181–​183. See also The Scholemaster, in English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), pp. 171–​302, at p. 201, for his report of Lady Jane Grey reading Plato in the original Greek. All further references to Ascham’s English works will be to Wright’s edition. 4 Ascham to Sturm, 14 December 1550, letter cx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 224–​229, trans. Hatch and Vos, p. 183.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_011

190 Crown every day than most churchmen did Latin in a week, with the result that her skills in these languages were equalled by very few at the universities or anywhere else in England.5 His 1542 letter to his Cambridge contemporary Richard Brandesby is an evocative testimony of the disquiet occasioned by Stephen Gardiner’s edict proscribing the ancient prounciation of Greek.6 Gardiner had ‘utterly extinguished practically all the fire we had for learning the Greek language’; their suffering paralleled the experience of the ‘weak and subdued and thin’ Greek letters ‘enslaved’ by the iota.7 In all his Latin and vernacular prose works, Ascham had something to say about the superiority of Greek. He claimed that he wrote Toxophilus in English not to ‘hinder ani parte either of the pleasure or profite of manie’, though it would have been ‘more easier & fit’ for him to have written in Greek or Latin.8 In The Scholemaster, he declared that rehearsing the worthy deeds of Athenians would be ‘irksum’ only to those who cared nothing for virtue or learning.9 In the Report ... of the Affairs and State of Germany, he found that his objectivity was reminiscent of Xenophon, the first to write about his ‘owne actes so wisely, and so without all suspicion of parcialitie.’10 Lucy Nicholas has demonstrated that Greek was an essential component of his theology, since he buttressed his criticism of the Mass and the priesthood in the Apologia pro Caena Dominica through references to Isocrates, Plato, Aristophanes and Lucian.11 Ascham declared that he used Greek not to ‘show off’ but to ‘show the truth’, whilst ridiculing the Greekless who attempted to participate in this theological debate 5 Ascham, The Scholemaster, p.  219. For a modern perspective on Elizabeth’s Greek, see Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel (eds.), Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–​1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 11–​14, 338. 6 For this dispute, see John F. McDiarmid, ‘Recovering Republican Eloquence: John Cheke versus Stephen Gardiner on the Pronunciation of Greek’, History of European Ideas, 38.3 (2012), pp. 338–​351, at p. 341. 7 Ascham to Richard Brandesby, [after October 2, 1542], Cambridge, letter xii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 24–​27, trans. Hatch and Vos, pp. 31–​33, at pp. 32–​33. 8 Roger Ascham to Henry viii, dedicatory letter in Toxophilus, pp. ix–​xi, at p. x. I was directed to this reference by Peter E. Medine, ‘The Art and Wit of Roger Ascham’s Bid for Royal Patronage: Toxophilus (1545)’, in Peter E. Medine and Joseph Wittreich, eds., Soundings of Things Done: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of S. K. Heninger Jr. (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1997), pp. 23–​51, at p. 28. 9 Ascham, Scholemaster, p. 213. 10 Ascham, Report ... of the Affairs and State of Germany, pp. 121–​170, at pp. 127–​128. 11 Lucy R. Nicholas, ‘Exploring Polemical Theology in Humanism Through a Little-​Known Tract on the Eucharist by the Great Tudor Humanist, Roger Ascham’, in Svorad Zavarský, Lucy R.  Nicholas and Andrea Riedl, eds., Themes of Polemical Theology Across Early Modern Literary Genres (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), pp. 67–​84, at pp. 72–​74, 76–​80.

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as undertaking ‘an unusual and ineffectual task.’12 His elaborate English prose style moreover owed much to Isocrates and the fifth-​century orator Gorgias of Leontini as well as to Cicero, in its liberal use of antitheses, parallels, clauses of equal length, and wordplay.13 Yet for all his association with Greek studies, Ascham did not produce any textbooks or commentaries on Greek authors, and very little survives to substantiate his enthusiasm and aptitude. This chapter will examine a rare survivor: his annotations to the Greek sententiae (or γνῶμαι) that accompanied the 1532 edition of Callimachus’s Hymns (­figure 9.1).14 This edition, produced by the Czech scholar Sigismund Gelenius (1497–​1554), was a desirable item for a Hellenist, since it offered a more accurate rendering of the text than the Aldine edition of 1513.15 Held at Westminster School since 1586, Ascham’s copy has been almost entirely overlooked.16 Henry Richard Tedder, the late nineteenth-​ century cataloguer of the school’s old library, remarked excitedly that it was of ‘great interest … Ascham has added a number of notes to the Sententiae in his large and beautiful hand.’17 For all Tedder’s eagerness, these annotations have attracted more attention in connection with Lady Burghley, the volume’s next owner, than with Ascham. In spite of the distinctiveness of his handwriting and his autograph on the title page, Caroline Bowden tentatively suggested that they might belong to Lady Burghley.18 Though Gemma Allen has since 12

Lucy R. Nicholas, Roger Ascham’s ‘A Defence of the Lord’s Supper’: Latin Text and English Translation (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 126–​127. 13 Ryan, Ascham, pp.  280–​284; Alvin Vos, ‘Form and Function in Roger Ascham’s Prose’, Philological Quarterly, 55 (1976), pp. 305–​322, at pp. 307–​310. Though see also Alvin Vos, ‘The Formation of Roger Ascham’s Prose Style’, Studies in Philology, 71 (1974), pp.  344–​ 370, at pp.  345–​348 and 368–​369, and idem, ‘ “Good Matter and Good Utterance”:  The Character of English Ciceronianism’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 19.1 (1979), pp. 3–​18, for Cicero as the chief influence on Ascham’s style. 14 Callimachi Cyrenaei hymni, cum scholiis nunc primum aeditis. Sententiae ex diversis poetis, oratoribusque ac philosophis collectae, non ante excusae (Basel:  Johann Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius, 1532, ustc 669641):  see appendix 2, *Callimachus (1532), London, Westminster School Archives, pr/​2/​8. Hereafter Callimachi Cyrenaei hymni. All further references will be to this copy. 15 Pindar, Olympia, Pythia, Nemea, Isthmia, Kallimachou hymnoi … (Venice: Aldus Manutius and Andrea Torresano, 1513, ustc 848778). For the value of the 1532 edition, see Thomas Frognall Dibdin, An Introduction to the Knowledge of the Rare and Valuable Editions of the Greek and Latin Classics, 4th edition, vol. i (London: Harding and Lepard, 1827), p. 366. 16 Lady Burghley’s gift is recorded on the title-​ page of the work (fig.  1):  ‘Liber Westmonasteriensis ex dono nobilissimae Heroinae D. Burghleiae, Novem: 17, 1586.’ 17 H. R. Tedder, Catalogue of the Old Library of Westminster School (1889). This catalogue is unpublished and held in the school library. 18 Caroline Bowden, ‘The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley’, The Library, 6 (2005), pp. 3–​29, at p. 20.

192 Crown identified Lady Burghley’s hand and confirmed that these are not her annotations, she did not credit them to Ascham.19 Since Tedder, only Nicholas has commented on their relevance for understanding the depth of Ascham’s interest in classical literature.20 This chapter will briefly rehearse the context of sententiae in the Renaissance, before addressing the content of the annotations and their significance for his largely neglected Neo-​Latin poetry. Ascham’s poetry comprises tributes to his friends and patrons: an encomium for Henry viii, a birthday ode for Prince Edward; two funeral dialogues, for (i) Mary Cecil (d. 1544), John Cheke’s sister and William Cecil’s first wife, and (ii) the prominent courtier Anthony Denny (d. 1549); two poems upon the death of the theologian Martin Bucer (d. 1551); another poem for William Bill, later Dean of Westminster, and a New Year’s poem for Elizabeth i, written shortly before Ascham’s own death in 1568. Ascham’s annotations are clearly related to two of the most complex and interesting poems in his output, the funeral dialogue for Mary Cecil and the New Year’s poem for Elizabeth. This chapter will argue that Ascham’s annotations to the sententiae are of importance for understanding his interest in Greek and his practices as a scholar. Their interpretation furthermore offers insights into the construction of Neo-​Latin poetry and exemplifies the methodological challenges inherent in the history of reading. 1

Sententiae in the Renaissance

In his prefatory letter to the politician and fellow humanist Karl von Utenhove (ca. 1500–​1580), Gelenius describes the gnomologiae as ‘chosen out of each of the most famous poets, orators, and philosophers, from before the utter destruction of the libraries’.21 All of them had a ‘wonderful utility’, and most had ‘no lesser majesty than those which were uttered and recorded in the Delphic shrine’.22 Gelenius’s extracts included over a hundred Greek authors, ranging from the famous –​Lysias, Aristotle, and Homer –​to the obscure, such as Bion of Borysthenes and Theognis of Megara, grouped together under headings such as ‘on shamelessness’, ‘blame of Aphrodite’, ‘conjugal precepts’, ‘on knowing 19

Gemma Allen, The Cooke Sisters: Education, Piety and Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 29. 20 Lucy R.  Nicholas, ‘A Translation of Roger Ascham’s Apologia pro Caena Dominica and Contextual Analysis’, unpublished dissertation, King’s College London, 2014, p. 55. 21 Callimachi Cyrenaei hymni, sigs. 2r– v. ex celeberrimis quibusque poetis, oratoribus ac philosophis ante bibliothecarum panolethrian excerptae (panōlethria being a Greek word for ‘utter destruction’). 22 Ibid., At hic mira in omnibus sententiis utilitas: in plerisque haud minor maiestas, quam in illis quae in Delphico sacrario scriptae memorantur.

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yourself’, ‘on tranquillity’, and ‘on war.’23 Gelenius selected these headings and extracts from the vast anthology of excerpts, anecdotes and maxims compiled by Stobaeus (John of Stobi) in the fifth century.24 Sententiae, brief wise sayings, were enormously popular during the Renaissance.25 Their combination of pithiness and morality made them particularly apt for pedagogical purposes, whilst the act of collecting them strengthened the faculty of memory and provided material for future eloquence. Juan Luis Vives’s Satellitium animi (‘Escort of the Soul’) (1524) and Introductio ad sapientiam (‘Introduction to Wisdom’) (1527) were highly popular works directed towards these ends.26 Yet the prevalence of sententiae went beyond the schoolroom. Thomas Elyot recommended that plates and cups should be ‘ingraved with histories, fables, or quicke and wise sentences, comprehendyng good doctrine or counsailes’, to educate those present and encourage learned conversation, ‘wherby some parte of tyme shall be saved, whiche els by superfluouse eatyng and drinkyng wolde be idely consumed’.27 Michel de Montaigne went further, having the wooden beams of his library and study inscribed with over sixty Greek and Latin phrases including ΟΥΠΟΤΕ ΦΗΣΩ ΓΑΜΟΝ ΕΥΦΡΑΙΝΕΙΝ ΠΛΕΟΝ Η ΛΥΠΕΙΝ (‘never say that marriage brings more joy than tears’) and nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas (‘no new delight is forged by living on’.)28 Lady Burghley and her sisters Anne and Elizabeth regularly deployed sententiae to reinforce the epistolary counsel they offered their male relatives, whether it was their unwise choice of friends, their 23

Gnomologiae, Callimacho in hac aeditione subiunctae … Varietas vero tanta, ut plus centum authores habeant …, ΠΕΡΙ ΑΝΑΙΔΕΙΑΣ, ΨΟΓΟΣ ΑΦΡΟΔΙΤΗΣ, ΓΑΜΙΚΑ ΠΑΡΑΓΓΕΛΜΑΤΑ, ΠΕΡΙ ΤΟΥ ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ, ΠΕΡΙ HΣΥXIAΣ, ΠΕΡΙ ΠΟΛΕΜΟΥ, Callimachi Cyrenaei hymni, sigs. 2r–​v, pp. 71–​72, 95–​99, 127–​135, 155–​156 and 219–​221. 24 For a helpful discussion of Stobaeus and his Anthologion, see J. Mansfeld and D. T. Runia, Aëtiana: The Method and Intellectual Context of a Doxographer, vol. 1: Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 196–​271. 25 See Elizabeth McCutcheon, ‘ “Your daughter, most devoted”:  The Sententious Writings of Mary Arundel, Duchess of Norfolk, Given to the Twelfth Earl of Arundel’, in Matthew Dimmock, Andrew Hadfield, and Paul Quinn, eds., Art, Literature and Religion in Early Modern Sussex: Culture and Conflict (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 147–​168, at pp. 155–​156, for a useful overview of the importance of sententiae to contemporaries. For Ascham’s connection to another highly influential (but less socially widespread) aspect of Renaissance culture, imitatio, see Mike Pincombe, ch. 12 in this volume. 26 Carlos G.  Noreña, Juan Luis Vives (The Hague:  Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), p.  204; Charles Fantazzi, ‘Vives and the emarginati’, in Charles Fantazzi, ed., A Companion to Juan Luis Vives (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 65–​112, at p. 69. 27 Thomas Elyot, A critical edition of Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Governour, ed. Donald W. Rude (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), pp. 119–​120. 28 Euripides, Alcestis, 238–​239; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 3.1081, Alain Legros, Essais sur Poutres: Peintures et Inscriptions chez Montaigne (Paris: Klincksieck, 2000), p. 317 and 425.

194 Crown predilection for swearing, or excessive grief after a bereavement.29 Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and Lady Burghley’s brother-in-law, had a series of sententiae painted in the long gallery of his country estate Gorhambury, which he presented to Lady Lumley as an illuminated manuscript.30 Ascham’s copy of Greek sententiae is thus a marker of his engagement with both the rarefied milieu of Greek scholarship, and an aspect of contemporary intellectual and cultural life that crossed the divides of education and gender. 2

The Annotations

Unlike Gabriel Harvey, who noted when he read and reread a text, Ascham did not date these annotations.31 From the relationship their content bears to his poetry, it is likely that he was using his copy throughout his life, and so Lady Burghley may have been invited to select it from among his books after his death.32 Aside from his occasional corrections of Greek, Ascham notes Latin translations of Greek sayings from Aeschylus, Homer, Antiphanes, Euripides, Timocles and Menander.33 As Nicholas has observed, Ascham’s annotations demonstrate a preoccupation with ageing, death, reputation, health, and money, difficulties he experienced at a number of points in his life.34 A complete list of his annotations, grouped together under Gelenius’s headings with my translations from Latin into English, is as follows: ΠΕΡΙ ΤΟΥ ΒΙΟΥ óτι βραχὺς καὶ ἐυτελής (‘on life, which is short and paltry’): 29 Allen, The Cooke Sisters, pp. 105–​111. 30 The maxims are printed in Elizabeth McCutcheon, Sir Nicholas Bacon’s Great House Sententiae (Amherst, Massachusetts:  English Literary Renaissance Supplements, 1977), pp. 66–​91. 31 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present, 129 (1990), pp. 30–​78, at pp. 41–​42; eadem and William Sherman, ‘Pragmatic readers: knowledge transactions and scholarly services in late Elizabethan England’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts, eds., Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain:  Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 102–​124, at pp. 122–​124. 32 A common practice among scholars: see Richard Rex, ch. 2 in this volume. 33 I have numbered Ascham’s annotations for ease of reference and preserved his lineation. Some of these follow a metrical scheme. Letters in square brackets represent those which were cropped after the volume was rebound, most likely during the tenure of Richard Busby as Headmaster (1639–​1695). 34 Nicholas, ‘A Translation of Roger Ascham’s Apologia pro Caena Dominica and Contextual Analysis’, p. 55; Ryan, Ascham, p. 33, 38, 203–​204; Ascham, The Scholemaster, p. 180.

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1. Caduca molitur genus m[or] talium neque certa res est [ulla] nec tuta, haud magis atq[ue] umbra fumi The race of mortals sets in motion what is transitory, and is no more certain or secure than the shadow of smoke. Based on Aeschylus, fragment 399

2. frondibus arboriis similes nunc ubere foetu exuperant, laetique satïs vescuntur agrorum nunc rursum intereunt, evanescuntque caduci… Like leaves upon the trees, they now burst forth with abundant fruit, and copiously they eat the crops of the fields, and once more they die, and as something transitory, vanish. Based on Homer, Iliad, 21.464–​46635

ΨΟΓΟΣ ΓΗΡΩΣ (‘blame for the elderly’): 3. heus, heus vetustum ut recte h[abet] proverbium nil aliud atque turba nos se[nes] sumus umbraeque verum ­serpi[mus] imitamina insomniorum caeterum [mens] haud inest quamquam videmur sape[re] nobis adprobe Alas, alack, how accurately runs the ancient proverb that we old men are nothing other than a crowd and as shadows, we in truth creep along as imitations of dreams. Although we think we are very wise, there is no intelligence in us. Based on Euripides, fragment 25, from Aeolus36

ΕΠΑΙΝΟΣ ΖΩΗΣ (‘praise of life’, ­figure 9.2): 4. Aspectus huius lucis est mortalibus Dulcissimus verum profunda manium Haud ullus [est] qui concupiscat cernere neque mente sana est quisquis exoptat mori male vivere autem satius ac mori bene 35 Callimachi Cyrenaei hymni, pp. 109–​110. 36 Ibid., p. 135.

196 Crown The appearance of this light is very sweet for mortal men, but there is no one who desires to see the depths of the lower world. Whoever hopes for death is not of sound mind; indeed it is better to live badly than to die well. Based on Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, 1250–​1252

ΠΕΡΙ ΙΑΤΡΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΙΑΤΡΙΚΗΣ (‘on doctors and medicine’): 5 unus homo medicus multis aequandus honore est one doctor is a man who must be thought worthy of many in repute. Based on Homer, Iliad, 11.514

ΕΠΑΙΝΟΣ ΠΛΟΥΤΟΥ (‘praise of wealth’): 6 pecunia ingens generis humani bonum cui non voluptas matris, aut blandae potest par esse prolis, non sacer meritis parens tam dulce si quid Veneris in vultu micat merito illa amores coelitum atque hominum movet Money, the human race’s great blessing, which the delight in a mother, charming children, nor a parent venerable for their services can equal. If anything so sweet glimmers in the face of Venus, she justly provokes the passions of gods and men.

Based on a fragment from Euripides’s Bellerophon, preserved in Seneca, ‘On the Superficial Blessings’, letter 115.1437

7 argentum et anima et sanguis es[t] mortalibus, hoc qui caret ne[c] sibi paravit sedulo, vivos hic inter mortuus circumambulat Money is both blood and soul for mortals. He who lacks it, nor has diligently acquired it for himself, wanders as a corpse among the living. Based on Timocles, fragment 3538

37 38

Ibid., p. 153, 162 and 189. Ibid., p. 189 and 191.

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ΨΟΓΟΣ ΠΛΟΥΤΟΥ (‘blame of wealth’): 8 Opes enim nos sicuti medi[cus] malus ubi ceperint reddunt uidentes ilico [caecos] For wealth, like a wicked physician, when they have taken hold of us sighted, and immediately make us blind. Based on Antiphanes, fragment preserved in Stobaeus

9 Caecae divitiae, atque e[os] (­figure 9.3) qui se intuentur, caecos reddunt Riches are blind, and those who admire them, they make blind.

Based on Menander, fragment from The Self-​mourner, preserved in Stobaeus

10 Nimis insolens tum redditur (figure 9.3) lascivia quoties opes qui possidet, mores repens muta[t] in ali[en]os pristinis contrari[os] Then indeed wantonness too excessive is imparted whenever he who possesses wealth suddenly changes former habits into their opposite. Based on Menander, fragment preserved in Stobaeus39

Our entire perspective on these annotations is changed once we realise that they are translations Ascham systematically culled from Erasmus. His translation of lines from Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis was taken from Erasmus’s Latin version of the play (first published in 1506).40 All his other translations derive from Erasmus’s Adagia (‘Adages’), a monumental collection of classical sayings. In it, each adage is accompanied by an explanation of its origin and meaning, accompanied by various literary examples or his personal reflections. In compiling the Adagia, Erasmus made use of Stobaeus’s Anthology, first via a manuscript and perhaps also Raffaele Maffei’s Commentaria Urbana (‘Commentaries of the City’ of 1506, and later the same edition of Callimachus Ascham owned 39 Ibid., p. 203 and 205. 40 See fig. 2. Euripides, Euripidis Tragici poetae nobilissimi Hecuba et Iphigenia: latinae factae Erasmo Roterodamo interprete (Paris: Josse Bade, 1506, ustc 143156), fol. 77v.

198 Crown and annotated.41 Erasmus included the examples from Aeschylus and Homer in the adage homo bulla (‘Man is but a bubble’), which taught that ‘there is nothing so fragile, so fleeting and so empty as the life of man’. The lines from Euripides in praise of life can be found in Erasmus’s explanation of the adage Vivum cadaver. Vivum sepulcrum (‘A living corpse, a living tomb’), ‘used of those who live in a way that does not justify their existence’.42 Homer’s observation about doctors was derived from the Greek adage Nec uno dignus (‘Not worth a one’) which signified something worthless: as Erasmus explained, it was ‘ordinary and plebeian to be valued solely as one individual’, rather than being worth many other men as a doctor was.43 The lines from Seneca derived from the adage pecuniae obediunt omnia (‘everything bows to money’): Erasmus pointed out that the fragment from Euripides’s Bellerophon is preserved in Seneca’s account of the play in his letters.44 The lines from Timocles can be found in pecuniae vir (‘money makes the man’).45 The sententiae from Antiphanes and Menander came from the Greek adage argenti fontes (‘the springs of silver [speak]’), used ‘in criticism of men whose talk was stupid and ignorant, but full of arrogance and self-​confidence, because they could rely on their wealth’.46 It seems surprising that the great advocate of double translation, and of translating Doric and Ionic into ‘pure Attic’ Greek, would lift all his translations of Greek excerpts from Erasmus.47 Ascham was decidedly less enamoured of sententiae than most of his contemporaries. He and Sturm detested the use of adages rather than the original classical texts in teaching: Sturm declared that Cato’s Distichs was among the works that were ‘simply not suitable’ for the purpose

41

Collected Works of Erasmus, 30, Prolegomena to the Adages, trans. and ann. John N. Grant (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2017) (hereafter CWE), p.  33 and  47; CWE, 37: Apophthegmata, trans. and ann. Betty I. Knott and Elaine Fantham, ed. Betty I. Knott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. xxi–​xxii. Erasmus owned the 1532 edition of Callimachus published by Froben:  Fritz Husner, ‘Die Bibliothek des Erasmus’, in Gedenkschrift zum 400. Todestage des Erasmus von Rotterdam, herausgegeben von der Historischen und Antiquarischen Gesellschaft zu Basel (Basel:  Braus-​Riggenbach, 1936), pp. 228–​259, no. 314. 42 CWE, 33: Adages, II i 1 to II vi 100, trans. and ann. R. A. B Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), ii.iii.48, pp. 156–​160, at pp. 157–158; ii.iv.3, p. 191. 43 CWE, 32: Adages, I vi 1 to I x 100, trans. and ann. R. A. B Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), i.viii.13, p. 133. 44 CWE, 31: Adages, I i 1 to I v 100, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips and ann. R.  A. B Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), i.iii.87, pp. 305–​307, at pp. 306–​307. 45 Erasmus, CWE, 34:  Adages, II vii 1 to III iii 100, trans. and ann. R.  A. B Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), ii.viii.35, pp. 62–​63, at p. 62. 46 CWE, 33, ii.iii.13, pp. 136–​137, at p. 137. 47 meram Atticam, Ascham, The Scholemaster, pp. 243–​246 and 251.

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of helping boys to acquire pure Latin.48 When Ascham described the results of using the ‘best authors’ with Elizabeth –​Cicero, Livy, Isocrates, and the New Testament in Greek –​he praised her distaste for ‘these foolish imitators of Erasmus, who have tied up the Latin tongue in those wretched fetters of proverbs’.49 Ascham moreover seems to be remarkably uninvested in what he reads.50 He does not pass judgement on the sententiae, whether Iphigenia’s attachment to life, or the lines from Euripides’s Bellerophon extolling money, which were, as Seneca reports, deeply controversial to contemporaries: … the whole audience rose with one accord to hiss the actor and the play off the stage. But Euripides jumped to his feet, claiming a hearing, and asked them to wait for the conclusion and see the destiny that was in store for this man who gaped after gold … to pay the penalty which is exacted of all men in the drama of life.51 His annotations appear to be a prime example of William Sherman’s observation that these forms of evidence ‘have a tendency to frustrate disciplinary expectations and personal hopes  –​usually telling us something different from what we expected and often less than we need to do much with them’.52 Although Ascham’s annotations do not offer us unmediated access to his thoughts, they become more interesting when we recognise that they signify structured scholarly activity. This is evident through an analysis of their topical and verbal connections with his funeral dialogue for Mary Cecil and his 1569 New Year’s poem for Elizabeth, to which we will now turn. 48 49 50

51 52

Sturm to Ascham, 9 September 1550 [Augsburg], letter cii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 195–​207, trans. Hatch and Vos, pp. 168–​177, at p. 174; Ryan, Ascham, p. 146. Ascham to Sturm, 4 April 1550, Cambridge, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 181–​193, trans. Giles, p. lxiv. For examples of more emotional responses, see Anthony Grafton’s examination of Guillaume Budé’s annotations to Pliny in ‘Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise?’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 91 (1997), pp. 139–​157, at p. 151, or David Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 110, which examines Henry viii’s Psalter (bl Royal ms 2 A xvi.) Seneca, ‘On the Superficial Blessings’, 115.15. Seneca, Epistles, vol. III: Epistles 93–124, trans. Richard M. Gummere. Loeb Classical Library 77 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925). William Sherman, ‘What did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?’, in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2002), pp. 119–​137, at p. 133. See also idem, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. xiii.

200 Crown 3

Ascham’s Poetry

Ascham’s creation of the form of a funeral dialogue (dialogus epitaphios) to memorialise Mary Cecil –​and separately Denny –​seems to have been inspired by the Attic custom of a yearly funeral oration (logos epitaphios) in praise of the city and those who had died in battle.53 Whilst Ascham’s Greek and Latin tribute to Denny of 1549 adopted a rather more uncomplicated conceit, whereby the figure representing England explained her sadness at Denny’s death to a receptive stranger, his Latin dialogue commemorating Mary is a more multifaceted offering.54 The arguments of the three interlocutors –​Life (Vita), Death (Mors) and Mary herself –​are redolent of the topics ‘on life, which is short and paltry’ and ‘praise of life’ in the sententiae, and the adage homo bulla. The figure of Life echoes Iphigenia’s initial belief that ‘the appearance of this light is very sweet for mortal men, but there is no one who desires to see the depths of the lower world’. She is ‘blessed … happy, sweet’, whilst Death ‘stirs up all evils … is grievous, fierce and horrible’.55 After exhorting Mary to remember her learned brother, devoted husband, venerable parents and siblings, Life again borrows from Iphigenia. Life’s assertion that ‘since so many advantages accompany me/​if you are wise, don’t leave behind such good things’ is essentially a rewording of Iphigenia’s exclamation that ‘whoever hopes for death is not of sound mind’.56 Death’s rebuttal of Life’s arguments draws upon Aeschylus’s sentiments in the adage ‘man is but a bubble’: ‘What Life promises, it will not 53

The most famous of these is Pericles’s funeral oration in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.34.1–​46.2. Ascham vaguely follows their usual format (an introduction, a lengthy section of praise and an address to the survivors, which ends either with the orator’s instruction to his hearers to mourn the dead, or to depart having mourned them) in his poem for Denny. For these orations, see Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, revised edn., 2006); Vassiliki Frangeskou, ‘Tradition and Originality in Some Attic Funeral Orations’, Classical World, 92 (1999), pp. 315–​336, and Julia L. Shear, ‘ “Their Memories will Never Grow Old”:  The Politics of Remembrance in the Athenian Funeral Orations’, Classical Quarterly, 63 (2013), pp. 511–​536. 54 Ascham, Dialogus ἐπιτάφιος in Obitum Clarissimi Viri Antonii Dennes, Giles, vol. iii, pp. 281–​282 (Greek), pp. 283–​284 (Latin). 55 Ego beata; cuncta mors miscet mala/​Ego laeta, suavis; mors gravis, trux, horrida: Ascham, Dialogus Ἐπιτάφιος In Obitum Lectissimae Mulieris Mariae Cecillae, Uxoris Clarissimi Viri Gulielmi Cecilli et Joannis Checi Sororis, in Giles, vol. iii, pp.  284–​286, at p.  284, translation mine. 56 Quum tanta me sequuntur ergo commoda/​Ne tu relinquas tanta, si sapis, bona: Ascham, Dialogus In Obitum Mariae, p. 285.

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give to you. What could a shadow, dust, a bubble or smoke give?’57 The figure of Death also references Menander, ‘he is beloved to God who is taken away from his mother’s sweet lap on the first day of his life’, a tag which Ascham may have derived either from Erasmus’s Adagia or the section on ‘praise of death’ in the sententiae.58 Commanding both interlocutors to be silent, Mary assents to Death’s arguments. Her judgement endorses the concept of life as a bubble: For Life is not life, this life was but a light bubble gliding on blown air. What Life offers, power, wealth, glory of the year are mere playthings of this deceptive life. Christ alone is my life … Thus I want to live, thus it is a great profit to die. Nor will care for this transitory life detain me. I have lived enough, Christ, because I have lived enough for you.59 Though Ascham regarded the overuse of sententiae as the hallmark of an inferior scholar (and commended those who shared his antipathy), his verses for Mary demonstrate that they still had their uses. Sententiae enabled him to contend with the difficulty of comforting his friends (as well as himself) over her untimely death, and Greek references must have seemed particularly appropriate for memorialising the sister and wife of two Greek scholars. Known to us as ‘the only romantic episode’ in Cecil’s life, since her family association with trade made her an unsuitable match, Ascham’s moving epitaph casts her in a different light.60 Mary is not merely the relative of two brilliant men, but an authoritative judge and a pious Christian, who surpasses Iphigenia in being entirely without fear of death. The fuller analysis which Ascham’s annotations 57 58

59

60

Quae pollicetur Vita, non dabit tibi/​Quid umbra, pulvis, bulla, quid fumus daret?: Ascham, Dialogus In Obitum Mariae, p. 285. Ergo sapiens Menander:  “Hic curae est Deo/​Quem prima dulci lux sinu matris rapit”; ΕΠΑΙΝΟΣ ΘΑΝΑΤΟΥ, ὃν οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν, ἀποθνῄσκει νέος, Callimachi Cyrenaei hymni, pp. 160–​162, at p. 160. Erasmus refers to Menander in his explanation of the adage optimum non nasci (‘not to be born is best’), CWE, 33, ii.iii.49, p. 161. Nam Vita non est vita, vita quae fuit/​Sed bulla in aures lapsa flatiles levis/​Quae Vita dat, vires, opes, anni decus/​Fallacis aevi mera sunt ludibria/​Mihi vita solus Christus est … Sic vivere iuvat, grande sic lucrum mori\/​Nec me fugacis cura vitae detinet/​Vixi satis, quod, Christe, sat vixi tibi: Ascham, Dialogus In Obitum Mariae, p. 286. i have offered a modified version of Sutton’s translation at . Mary’s mother Agnes ran a successful wine business in Cambridge. The quotation comes from G. Ravenscroft Dennis, The Cecil Family (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), p. 17; it is repeated in Ryan, Ascham, p. 114.

202 Crown afford us therefore does much to counter Ryan’s judgement that it is ‘of the same mediocre quality as his other efforts in verse’.61 We can again see the influence of Ascham’s reading of sententiae in his warnings about the dangers of money in his New Year’s poem for Elizabeth. Before offering this counsel, he sensibly seasoned it with trenchant praise of the superiority of female rule. His poem is the first evocation of Elizabeth’s imagery as the Virgin Queen, nine years before the entertainments idealising chastity that were put on at Norwich during her 1578 progress: This present age is so superior to the past that, if you reflect on the thousand years of our history when England was subject to masculine rule, the glory of men must yield to that of a woman, and our present virgin queen surpasses many male ones to the same degree that the sun outshines all else, or that you, as the moon, outshine the lesser lights.62 In his remarkable positivity about female rule, Ascham was well ahead of his contemporaries. A  more representative attitude about the unsuitability of women as rulers, particularly single women, is epitomised by Cecil’s fervent wish ‘God send Our Mistress a husband and by him a son that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession’.63 Nor was it currently fashionable to celebrate Elizabeth’s virginity. In Thomas Smith’s dialogue on Elizabeth’s marriage (ca. 1561), the character of Francis Walsingham was amazed to hear that Smith had met someone who was ‘so foolish and so wicked’ that he advocated for Elizabeth remaining unmarried. Whoever voiced such an opinion could expect that ‘every man would spit at him in the streets’.64 As Helen Hackett has noted, Elizabeth herself still gave the impression that she might

61 Ryan, Ascham, p.  312. For a similarly harsh judgement of Ascham’s poetic ability, see Leicester Bradner, Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-​Latin Poetry, 1500–​1925 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1940), pp. 21–​22. 62 Giles, vol. iii, pp. 288–​293, trans. Sutton, . For these entertainments, see Susan Doran, ‘Juno versus Diana: The Treatment of Elizabeth I’s Marriage in Plays and Entertainments, 1561–​1581’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), pp. 257–​274, at pp. 270–​272. 63 William Cecil to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, 14 July 1561, British Library Additional ms 35830 fols. 158–​159, cited in John Guy, Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years (London: Penguin, 2016), pp. 11–​12. 64 Smith’s dialogue circulated in manuscript, though it has since been printed in John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1820), pp. 60–​64 and 184–​259.

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wed despite her preference for virginity.65 In November 1566 she rebuked Parliament for failing to trust her assurances on the matter, reiterating that she would marry ‘as soon as I  can conveniently, if God take not him away with whom I mind to marry, or myself, or else some other great let happen’.66 Ascham’s astute flattery of Elizabeth’s mercifulness and popularity as a ruler segued into a warning about dangers of war and discord abroad, and above all the threat represented by the influx of gold from ‘that impious nation India’ (i.e. the Indies.)67 His references to Elizabeth’s imperial imagery were a means of introducing his real concern about overseas expansion: Oh how many men your prosperity has impoverished, how many your wealth turns into wretches! For the fraud of your gold is great, it deceives the world: if there is anything upright or useful, your gold either saps its strength, or diminishes it, or tears it asunder … The halls of great men, what is not sold for gold, wherever gold can penetrate? O happy the palace, in which gold does not hold sway or work its deception, in which a queen stores up wealth for humane purposes … Now gold has much too much power, now it throws everything into confusion, it disturbs public affairs with anxious cares, it destroys all the good joys of private life, and fills the hearts of many a man with wretched torments.68 This passage elucidates Ascham’s preoccupation with the sections praising and blaming wealth in the sententiae. Its tenor owes much to the sentiments of Euripides and Timocles that mankind’s desire for money was endless and universal. Ascham’s exclamations that gold destroyed or weakened ‘anything 65

Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), pp. 72–​74. 66 Cited in ibid. The full text of Elizabeth’s speech is in Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (eds.), Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 94–​98. 67 … quod nunc gens impia mittit/​India: Ascham, Ad Divam Elizabetham, . 68 Ascham, Ad Divam Elizabetham, trans. Sutton, . O tua quam multos inopes opulentia reddit/ Quam multos miseros facit et tua copia rerum!/ Auri namque tui nimia est fraus, decipit orbem/ Si quid sit rectum, si quid siet utile, vires/ Vel tollit, vel diminuit, vel distrahit aurum … Aulae magnatum, quid non divenditur auro/ Aurum quo penetrare potest? O regia foelix/ In qua non aurum regnat, nec decipit, in qua/ Usibus humanis regina pecunia servit... Nunc nimium nimiumque potest. Nunc omnia turbat/ Publica sollicitis permiscet tempora curis/ Omnia privatae tollit bona gaudia vitae/ Cordaque multorum miseris cruciatibus opplet.

204 Crown upright or useful’ moreover bear the influence of Antiphanes’s comment that money was ‘a wicked physician’, and Menander’s remarks that it rendered men blind and ruined their character. Greek wisdom on the power, deceptiveness and immorality of wealth was a crucial element in his efforts to alert Elizabeth to the new danger represented by Spanish overseas expansion. 4

Conclusion

Ryan may be correct to observe that Ascham’s familiarity with classical authors went beyond ‘mere tags and stock quotations culled from volumes of florilegia.69 Yet even a scholar as capable and knowledgeable as Ascham made use of such shortcuts, particularly when working to important deadlines. His reliance on Erasmus for his translations, and the absence of any comments on the text of Callimachus, might seem to diminish our sense of the importance of Greek to him. Yet when his misleadingly simple annotations are set alongside his Neo-​Latin poetry, it becomes apparent that they offer a window onto his creative processes as a scholar. The fact that he derived his translations from Erasmus, who had used the same copy of Greek sententiae to compile the work that would assist Ascham, gives us a noteworthy example of extensive, conversational reading between the ancients and their Renaissance admirers. Although his annotations lack immediacy and introspection, they show that Greek wisdom informed his personal and political concerns. Ascham’s copy of Greek sententiae was at the more erudite end of this widespread enthusiasm, but his use of it was outward-​looking. Indeed, these ambitious and subtle poems for Mary Cecil and Elizabeth i encapsulate the purposes of sententiae in the Renaissance to educate, console and persuade. 69 Ryan, Ascham, p. 4.

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­f igure 9.1  Ascham’s copy of Callimachus. Reproduced by the kind assistance of the Governing Body of Westminster School.

206 Crown

­f igure 9.2  Ascham’s annotations to Euripides under the section ‘praise of life’. Reproduced by the kind assistance of the Governing Body of Westminster School.

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­f igure 9.3  Ascham’s annotations to Antiphanes and Menander under the section ‘blame of wealth’. Reproduced by the kind assistance of the Governing Body of Westminster School.

­c hapter 10

The Bow and the Book: Ascham’s Toxophilus Cathy Shrank This essay analyses how Roger Ascham used Toxophilus (1545) to try to position himself strategically in the mid-​1540s, when he was looking for patronage beyond the University of Cambridge, but equally could not afford to compromise his reputation in –​or sever his ties with –​the institution on which his livelihood still depended. The essay breaks into three sections. The first examines how Ascham’s choice of printer, innovative mise-​en-​page, orthography, and display of Greek learning reflect these dual concerns and seek to advertise Ascham’s political, religious, and scholarly allegiances. The second considers how his chosen form –​dialogue –​also helps negotiate these conflicting aims. The third, concluding section explores Ascham’s relationship to –​and subsequent influence on  –​the tradition of ‘how-​to’ dialogues (namely, dialogues teaching a specific skill), and in particular the ethos of ‘commonweal’ that such works often articulate. 1

Publishing Toxophilus and Authorial Self-​Fashioning

Edward Whitchurch was a striking choice of printer for Ascham’s Toxophilus.1 Whilst not the King’s Printer (a post Thomas Berthelet still held), Whitchurch had nonetheless acquired the privilege to print a series of ‘official’ publications, including, with his partner Richard Grafton, ‘the sole right to publish church service books’ (granted 1541; renewed 1543), and in 1545 (the year Toxophilus was printed), he and Grafton ‘became printers attached the household of Prince Edward’.2 Whitchurch was also an ambitious and risk-​taking printer. In the late 1530s, Whitchurch had been involved, with Grafton, in Thomas Cromwell’s

Quotations are in original spelling and punctuation, except i/​j and u/​v are regularised, the y-​thorn transcribed ‘th’, and abbreviations and brevigraphs (including tildes for n/​m) silently expanded. Greek characters have been transliterated into Roman; within quotations, such transliterations appear in square brackets. 1 Roger Ascham, Toxophilus (London:  Edward Whitchurch, 1545, ustc 503581). The work is divided into two ‘Books’. 2 Meraud Grant Ferguson, ‘Grafton, Richard (1506/​7–​1573)’, odnb.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_012

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project to publish an authorised English Bible. After various false starts –​working with printers in Antwerp and then Paris –​Grafton and Whitchurch were forced to return to England and print it themselves; the first edition of the ‘Great Bible’ (as it would be known) appeared in 1539. Whitchurch’s interest in printing an English Bible was more than commercial: it was also ideological. In summer 1540, he was arrested in what Alec Ryrie has called ‘a general round-​ up of London evangelicals’.3 Whitchurch was subsequently released without charge, but three years later he was imprisoned in the Fleet for three and a half weeks (along with Grafton and four others) for printing heretical books: ‘such bokes as wer thowght to be unlawful, contrary to the proclamation made on that behalf’.4 He was freed on ‘the king’s pleasure’ on 2 May 1543.5 When selecting a printer for the only sole-​authored book that appeared in print during his lifetime, Ascham therefore chose someone who shared his religious convictions; who was connected through patronage to circles of power; and who was seemingly undaunted by intricate and innovative printing ventures.6 All these factors are relevant to Toxophilus. Toxophilus is self-​evidently not on the scale of the Great Bible (over 1,000 pages long). Nonetheless, the layout of Ascham’s volume is complex, eye-​ catching, and unusual. Its decorative frontispiece –​depicting the royal coat-​ of-​arms, flanked by a bow and a book, atop a plinth –​not only serves unconventionally as a title-​page, it also displays a high level of skill, with its attempt to capture perspective in the banderols (the ribbon-​like scrolls), the ellipse of the crown, and the tilting of the book to show its fore-​edge. Setting the final lines of the dedicatory epistle as tapered text –​so that it resembles an arrow-​ head –​creatively uses a printing convention to transform Ascham’s words into the weapons his work describes, as does the layout of the table of contents for Book 2: whilst the table of contents for Book 1 is laid out conventionally, that for Book 2 abandons functionality. There are no page references; instead

3 Alec Ryrie, ‘Whitchurch, Edward (d. 1562)’, odnb. 4 Acts of the Privy Council, vol. 1, 1542–​1547, ed. J. A. Dasent (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1890), p. 107. 5 J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (eds.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. 18, pt. i: 1543 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1901), p. 297. 6 Ascham’s inaugural letter to Sturm was published in Strasbourg as Epistolae duae de nobilitate Anglicana in Conrad Heresbach’s De laudibus Graecorum litterarum oratio (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1551, ustc 622756), but all of Ascham’s other works were printed posthumously: Apologia pro Caena Dominica (London: Francis Coldock, 1577, ustc 508290); A Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany (London: John Day, 1570, ustc 507052); The Scholemaster (London: John Day, 1570, ustc 507056).

210 Shrank it prioritises visual effect, using braces so that the list of contents resembles a bent bow, an arrow fitted, ready to fire. The attention-​grabbing frontispiece also speaks to the evangelical beliefs that Ascham and Whitchurch both espoused, as it celebrates Henry viii’s rejection of the Church of Rome: the closed imperial crown symbolises the English king’s claim to imperium, or sole jurisdiction over his territories, whilst the accompanying text exalts over the ‘fall’ of the Pope, who is derided in the Latin banderol as that ‘Babylonian plague’, language taken straight from Reformation polemic.7 The frontispiece additionally claims divine favour for Henry’s victories over the Scots at Solway Moss (in 1543) and the French (through the capture of Boulogne in 1544): ‘Through Christ, King Henry, the Boke and the Bowe’, England will ‘All maner of enemies, quite overthrowe’, the verse at the bottom of the page announces. The ‘Boke’, inscribed veritas (‘truth’), thus becomes the Bible, the English translation of which Henry had finally authorised, which Whitchurch had printed, and which is here portrayed as being as much a weapon against England’s enemies as the English longbow that graces the other side of the royal coat-​of-​arms. Together, bow and book complete the sentence veritas vincit (‘truth conquers’), a motto associated with the proto-​Protestant martyr Jan Hus (ca. 1369–​1415). Ascham may well have encountered the maxim in the opening lines of a prefatory poem to Richard Morison’s Apomaxis Calumniarum (‘the Wiping away of Lies’), a defence of Henry’s break with Rome and an attack on the papacy, printed by Berthelet ca. 1537, and dedicated to Henry’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell, then also Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.8 From the first page onwards, Ascham’s Toxophilus is thus designed to display its author’s usefulness to the Henrician regime, and its imperial and anti-​papal projects. Aside from the copy given to its dedicatee, Henry viii, copies were also distributed to a panoply of influential people, including Prince Edward; the King’s brother-​in-​law William Parr; Thomas Wriothesley, the Lord Chancellor; the evangelical-​leaning Bishop of Rochester, Nicholas Heath; and the 7 See, for example, the paraphrase of Jeremiah 50:29 (‘Deale with Babylon as she hath deserved’) on the title-​page of John Bale, The epistle exhortarye of an Englyshe Christyane (Antwerp: [Catherine], widow of Christopher Ruremond [1544], ustc 410457). 8 Richard Morison, Apomaxis Calumniarum (London: Thomas Berthelet, [1537], ustc 502894), sig. A1v. I owe this reference to Tracey Sowerby; for the association of the motto with Hus, see Thomas A. Fudge, The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Basingstoke: Routledge, 1998), pp. 245–​246. Cromwell replaced John Fisher as Chancellor in 1535 and held that position until his execution in 1540; injunctions issued during Cromwell’s tenure promoted the ‘new’ humanist learning –​including the study of Greek literature and dialectic –​over scholasticism.

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conservative Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who –​importantly for Ascham  –​was also Cromwell’s successor as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.9 Toxophilus was clearly intended to attract a powerful patron. The time and attention that Ascham consequently devoted to it is evident from his eagerness to keep perfecting the work. Although it was already in press before Henry viii sailed for France on 14 July 1544, Ascham –​having missed the opportunity to present the finished work to the king before his departure –​ recalled the manuscript to revise it further.10 Ascham’s target readership was not wholly comprised of men near the centre of power, however; nor is the Bible the only book that he couples with the bow. Throughout, Toxophilus advocates the compatibility of scholarship and shooting, bookishness and bowmanship. Again, Ascham’s aims are strategic. After a promising start at Cambridge, by the early 1540s, Ascham risked falling foul of both college and university politics. In 1540, he alienated many of his colleagues at St John’s by manoeuvring to secure a fellowship for one of his former pupils, John Taylor (a process he tried repeating –​unsuccessfully –​four years later, when attempting to get his friend and pupil, William Grindal, elected to a lectureship).11 His position was further weakened by a protracted absence from Cambridge between 1541 and 1542 due to a serious illness contracted whilst visiting his parents in Yorkshire. During that hiatus, the academic climate at Cambridge became less favourable to those of Ascham’s intellectual and ideological bent, as Gardiner (Chancellor of the University) banned the reformed pronunciation of Greek championed by Thomas Smith and Ascham’s mentor, John Cheke.12 Ascham was given further impetus to try to leave Cambridge by Cheke’s departure for court in July 1544 (when work on Toxophilus was well-​advanced) and by the death of his parents earlier that same year; as Ascham reports in a letter to Cheke (written late March or early April 1544), his father had written to him shortly before his death, urging him to leave Cambridge and take up ‘some worthy manner of living’.13

9 10 11 12 13

For Ascham’s cultivation of men from both the ‘old’ and ‘new system’, see Hatch and Vos, p. 14. Ascham describes his book ‘On the Art of Shooting’ (De re sagittaria) as being ‘now in press’ in a letter to William Paget in June/​July 1544, letter xxii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 52; Hatch and Vos, p. 58. For further discussion of Ascham and St John’s in the 1540s see Richard Rex, ch. 2 in this volume. For Smith’s account of the issues at stake, see Thomas Smith, De recta et emendata linguae Graecae pronuntiatione (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1568, ustc 140542). Ascham to John Cheke, Cambridge, late March-​early April 1544, letter xxi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 48; Hatch and Vos, p. 54.

212 Shrank Yet Ascham could not afford to burn his scholarly bridges with Cambridge, on which his employment and income mainly depended: he had been left little by his father, and the annual pension from his patron, Edward Lee, Archbishop of York, was not large and was often late in coming; Lee then died in September 1544.14 Moreover, as Ascham’s letter to Cheke reveals, despite the filial duty imposed by a father’s ‘last words’, he was reluctant to depart from Cambridge. Instead, he tries reinterpreting his father’s instruction. ‘If peace and unanimity can be wholly restored to us, I shall then think that I have virtually left Cambridge according to my father’s warning’, he cavils: ‘If my course fail, I shall leave the University as soon as I can’.15 Even as he uses Toxophilus to angle for patronage beyond the university, therefore, Ascham was required to tread a careful line, so that its production and publication did not further undermine him in the eyes of his fellow-​scholars. There were classical precedents for manuals on sports and pastimes, including Xenophon’s ‘On Hunting with Dogs’ (Cynēgeticus) and ‘On Horsemanship’ (Peri hippikēs), as well as more recent humanist exempla on military skills, not least of which were Cheke’s Greek-​to-​Latin translation of Leo vi’s De apparatu bellico (‘On Preparation for War’) (printed posthumously in 1554) and Peter Nanninck’s Dialogus de milite peregrino (‘A Dialogue about a Foreign Soldier’) (1543), both of which Ascham explicitly acknowledges.16 Nonetheless, Ascham’s book departs significantly from its humanist predecessors because it was written not in Latin, for learned readers, but in English. The risk Ascham took in producing a vernacular work about sport was exacerbated by the fact that some of his fellow-​scholars felt his enthusiasm for archery (which he had resumed during his convalescence) denoted a lack of intellectual seriousness. As he explains in a letter to Gardiner in 1545, ‘There are many reasons why I wrote this book. First I wanted certain well-​known men who thought I was distracted too much from more serious matters by my interest in archery to have some knowledge that not all of my time has been shot away, to use Aristophanes’s words’.17 Citing approving 14 Ryan, Ascham, p. 35. Claire Cross, ‘Lee, Edward (1481/​2–​1544)’, odnb. Ascham cites Lee’s death –​which has left him wanting ‘quiet and pleasant means for the life of a studious man’ –​as a motivation for writing Toxophilus: Ascham to Gardiner, Cambridge, 1545, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 81; Hatch and Vos, p. 72. 15 Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, late March-​early April 1544, letter xxi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 49; Hatch and Vos, p. 55. 16 Toxophilus/​Ascham also cites Thomas Elyot’s De rebus memorabilibus Angliae (unpublished, now lost) as a work which supports Toxophilus’s potted history of English archery (sig. K3v). 17 Ascham to Gardiner, Cambridge, 1545, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. i. pt. 1, p. 80; Hatch and Vos, p. 71. Ad hunc vero librum scribendum plurimae me rationes cohortatae sunt; vel ut aliquibus praeclaris viris, qui me nimio sagittandi studio a gravioribus rebus distineri putabant,

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authorities from classical and Biblical sources and English chronicles, Book 1 of Toxophilus does not simply mount a defence of archery, therefore: it also seeks to vindicate Ascham’s scholarliness. From the outset, Ascham uses various means to flaunt his learning. The book comes endorsed with a Latin poem by one of Cambridge’s most promising scholars  –​ Gualterus Haddonus [Walter Haddon] Cantabrigien  –​ extravagantly praising Ascham’s accomplishments.18 Ascham, we are told, has been ‘made great’ with the skill of both Apollo –​patron, amongst other things, of archery –​ and Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom.19 Haddon repeatedly stresses Ascham’s erudition: ‘A learned hand, a learned mind has produced this book’, he asserts in elegantly balanced Latin.20 As Ascham himself writes in the dedicatory epistle to Henry viii, ‘to have written this boke either in Latin or Greke … had bene more easier & fit for mi trade in studie’ (sig. A3r). That he chose not to –​and instead elected to ‘have written this English matter in the Englishe tongue, for Englishe men’ –​is presented as further proof of what he earlier calls ‘my … zeale towarde mi countrie’ (sig. A2r). The orthography glimpsed in these quotations is also evidence of another ‘zeale’, since it too signals Ascham’s allegiances. Ascham’s spelling is not consistent across the volume as a whole, and certain orthographic practices –​such as the choice of ‘-​i’ over the more usual ‘-​y’ in words such as ‘mi’, ‘bi’, and ‘ani’, or leaving ‘Vertu’ without its habitual terminal ‘e’ –​ only occur in the dedicatory epistle.21 Nonetheless, these distinctive spellings accord with Cheke’s programme to reform the English language, not only stripping it of loan words, so that it might be ‘written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges’, but also standardising its spelling along phonetic lines, so that each letter captures one particular sound and silent letters are eradicated, a programme also promoted by others in the Cambridge group around Cheke, most notably Smith (Cheke’s co-​partner in reforming

18 19 20 21

aliquis ex parte cognitum esset, non omne tempus meum [tō toxeuein ektetoxeusthai] ut Aristophanis verbo utar. This quotation reveals Ascham showcasing his Greek. Haddon would become Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in 1549, and was later praised by John Strype as ‘one of the great and eminent lights of the Reformation in Cambridge under King Edward’; Gerald Bray, ‘Haddon, Walter (1514/​15–​1571)’, odnb. Aschamus est author, magnum quem fecit Apollo/​Arte sua, magnum Pallas et arte sua (sig. A1v). Docta manus dedit hunc, dedit hunc mens docta libellum. Prefatory material is often the last thing to be set: the collation of Toxophilus, where there are two gatherings respectively signed ‘A’ and ‘a’, suggests that the prefatory material post-​dated the setting of the main text (the first gathering of which is also signed ‘A’) and exceeded the printer’s expectations regarding the amount of prefatory material that would be supplied. The composition of the prefatory material is therefore almost certainly composed separately from, and after, the main text.

214 Shrank Greek pronunciation).22 Smith himself records Ascham’s membership of that intellectual group in his dialogue De recta et emendata Anglicae scriptione dialogus (‘Dialogue on the correct and improved writing of English’), published in Paris in 1568, when the interlocutor Quintus mentions refers to ‘Haddonum, et Ascanium’ (Walter Haddon and Ascham), alongside Smith, as suitable authorities when arguing with Obstinatus about the need to reform English spelling.23 The attention to detail, seen here in Ascham’s nod to Chekeism, is similarly found in the numerous strategies used to flag the learning that underpins his book. Even the sub-​title on the internal title-​page, ‘The schole of shootinge’ (sig. A3r), contributes to this endeavour by affiliating the acquisition of a practical skill with academic study. In this period, as both the Oxford English Dictionary and a keyword search of eebo-​t cp attest, ‘school’ was predominantly used of institutions for education and –​less frequently –​of ‘a group of people who follow or are influenced by the teaching of a particular person, or who share similar principles, ideas, or methods’.24 It is possibly due to Toxophilus that the term came to figure, in a less academic sense, in the ‘titles of manuals of instruction’ of practical skills, such as Christopher Clifford’s Schoole of Horsmanship (1585).25 Certainly ‘school’ is not found in this meaning on title-​ pages before Toxophilus, but it becomes much more frequent in that sense by the end of the sixteenth century. The layout of the table of contents discussed earlier, when I suggested that it resembled a bow and arrow, can also be read another way, as another strategy highlighting Ascham’s learning. By 1540 (before his illness and long recuperation), Ascham had delivered three courses of lectures at Cambridge, one of which was on dialectic.26 The use of binary trees –​in which the structure of an art is displayed by breaking it down into dichotomies –​is strongly associated with the method of Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée), whose works were first printed in 1543.27 Nevertheless, by the 22

John Cheke, letter to Thomas Hoby (London, 1557), appended to Hoby, The courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio (London: William Seres, 1561, ustc 505873), sig. 2Z5r. See also Thomas Smith, De recta et emendata linguae Anglicae scriptione dialogus (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1568, ustc 140541) and John McDiarmid, ch. 5 in this volume. 23 Smith, De recta, sig. A2r. Smith’s dialogue places the origins of that work in the early 1540s, contemporaneous with the quarrel with Gardiner about Greek pronunciation (sig. A3v). 24 ‘school, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary, , senses 5a, 8. When conducting this search (using ‘school’, ‘schools’, and variants), circa 34% of Early English Books Online was searchable via eebo-​t cp (Phases i and ii). 25 , senses 5a, 8.  Christopher Clifford, Schoole of Horsmanship (London: [Thomas East] for Thomas Cadman 1585, ustc 510254). 26 Ryan, Ascham, p. 25. 27 Peter Ramus, Aristotelicae animadversiones (Paris:  Jacques Bogard, 1543, ustc 116824); Dialecticae partitiones (Paris: Jacques Bogard, 1543, ustc 140868).

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late 1520s, similar tables were appearing in some editions of Rudolf Agricola’s De inventione dialectica (‘On Dialectical Invention’), a work which –​from 1535 –​was prescribed reading for Cambridge students.28 The table of contents in Toxophilus thus shows Ascham attempting to speak to two different audiences: the uninitiated might see a bow and arrow (particularly coming so soon after the arrowhead at the end of the dedicatory epistle, four leaves earlier); the university-​educated might perceive the influence of Agricola. That, here at least, there is subtlety to Ascham’s self-​fashioning conversely lends it further force, as it gathers the learned readers whom he needs to impress into a select band who recognise the scholarly method behind what otherwise looks like visual play. Ascham similarly deploys layers of learning –​ accessible to different readers –​in the work itself: a dialogue in which Toxophilus (‘lover of shooting’) first endeavours to persuade Philologus (‘lover of words’) that archery is a worthwhile pursuit for all men, including scholars (the subject of Book 1), and then instructs him in the art (Book 2). Many of the learned allusions are obvious; others strive to flatter readers’ sense of their own learning. The work begins with Philologus encountering Toxophilus, who is walking in the fields outside Cambridge, intently reading one of Plato’s dialogues: Phedro Platonis (sig. 2A1v). This foregrounding of Greek literature at the outset of their conversation pervades the ensuing text, in the prominence given to Greek writers in particular (see Table 10.1). The Greek authors whom Ascham namechecks far outweigh the Romans in both the range cited and number of individual citations. Only Cicero comes close to any Greek counterpart. This preference for –​and highlighting of –​the Greeks is not accidental. As seen elsewhere in this volume, Greek was a crucial language for Ascham. Here, it is linked to a systematic display of his erudition and academic reputation. Knowledge of classical Greek required a greater level of learning than Latin; it was also as a Greek scholar that Ascham (when still an undergraduate) had first caught the eye of the Master and fellows of St John’s, who in 1532 formally allowed Ascham to start giving lessons in Greek to other students.29 Further to that  –​like the orthography of the dedicatory epistle  –​the self-​conscious Hellenism of Toxophilus signals Ascham’s membership of the circle around Cheke, now elevated to a court position, as Prince Edward’s tutor: as Ascham’s spokesperson and alter ego Toxophilus recalls, ‘we toke [great commoditie] in hearyng [Cheke] reade privatly in his chambre, all Homer, Sophocles, and 28

See Rudolf Agricola, De inventione dialectica (Paris: Simon de Colines, 1529), ustc 181173, sig. C4v. A digital version of the copy held by University of Ghent is available via ustc, . 29 Ryan, Ascham, p. 18.

216 Shrank Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Isocrates and Plato’, and –​when Cheke departed from Cambridge –​they had been looking forward to him sharing ‘Aristotle and Demosthenes’ (sig. I1v). 2

The Role of Dialogue

Considering the suspicion with which some of Ascham’s colleagues viewed his zest for archery, it is clearly important that his spokesperson –​his fellow shooting-​enthusiast Toxophilus –​be portrayed as an unambiguously accomplished and conscientious scholar, and the ostentatious scholarship that permeates Toxophilus is thus shared by its dominant and eponymous speaker. Care is taken in the opening pages to stress his diligence. Even the bookish Philologus thinks his friend might ‘studie to[o]‌sore’ (sig. 2A1r). Ascham also demonstrates Toxophilus’s learning –​not just through his proxy’s erudite allusions  –​but also through how he interacts with Philologus. ‘You know we scholars have more ernest & weightie matters in hand, nor we be not borne to pastime & play’, Philologus asserts (sigs 2A1v–​2A2r), attempting –​through the shared first-​person pronoun and assumption of what Toxophilus ‘know[s]’ –​to coerce Toxophilus into agreement. Toxophilus not only resists these rhetorical tricks: he also identifies the unacknowledged origin of Philologus’s words and turns that source against him. ‘The same man in the same place … doth admitte holsome, honest and mannerlie pastimes to be as necessarie to be mingled with sad [serious] matters of the mind, as eating and sleping is for the health of the body’, Toxophilus counters (sig. 2A2r). This act of withholding the identity of the source indicates that Philologus and Toxophilus share a set of cultural referents: they are learned men talking amongst themselves. It also subtly flatters readers that this is knowledge they too possess, even as the printed marginal note –​‘M.Cic. i.off.’ –​tactfully provides the answer (Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, Book 1).30 Toxophilus is no dunce or slacker. He might enjoy a turn at the butts, but he is an astute reader of texts, able to spot when quotations are being wrenched out of context or misapplied, as when he rebuffs Philologus’s use of Euripides’s Hercules Furens in ‘disprayse of shotyng’ (sig. G3v). ‘Euripides doth make those verses, not bicause he thinketh them true, but bicause he thinketh them fit for the person that spake them’, Toxophilus observes, before citing another speech

30

Since the printed marginalia frequently cites sources with much more specificity than the main text, these notes are probably authorial.

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from that play lauding ‘the wittie gifte of shotinge in a bowe’. Ascham’s argument is thus aided by his choice of dialogue, which allows him to showcase the sophistication of his spokesperson, thus demonstrating in practice –​as well as asserting in theory –​that ‘honest shoting may well ynough be companion with honest studie’ (sig. D1r). The compatibility of shooting and scholarship are further endorsed by the bipartite structure of the work: the first book (justifying shooting) allows Toxophilus-​the-​scholar to take the floor; the second book never shucks off its erudition (that would be counter-​productive to its message), but as it provides a practical account of how to shoot, Toxophilus-​the-​archer comes to the fore. The dialogic form also shows Philologus’s conversion, as the lover of words becomes a lover of shooting, again proving the compatibility of the two disciplines. As Toxophilus notes, the goose serves both scholar and archer:  ‘even as her fethers be onely [i.e. peerless] for shootynge, so be her quylles fytte onely for wrytyng’ (sig. R2r). In selecting the dialogue form, Ascham no doubt had Nanninck’s Dialogus de milite peregrino in mind.31 As Alvin Vos shows, Ascham had a ‘complex relationship’ with this work:  as a source, it is  –​in Vos’s words  –​‘at once both valuable [as a model] and objectionable’, with Nanninck’s dismissive comments about the efficacy of English archers in an age of artillery being at least partly responsible for goading Ascham into taking up his pen on the subject.32 Nonetheless, Ascham was doing something much more innovative than Nanninck. Dialogue was central to humanist pedagogy: as a mode of teaching-​and-​ learning; as the form in which numerous school-​textbooks were written; as a genre, exemplified by Lucian and Cicero, which pupils were required to translate and imitate. However, the language of these dialogues was, of course, Latin and to a lesser extent Greek. In the 1540s, the use of dialogue to teach more ‘adult’ skills in the English vernacular was as yet undeveloped. By the end of the century, there would be numerous dialogues imparting skills and bodies of knowledge as diverse as fishing and music, medicine and horsemanship, but Ascham’s Toxophilus is one the earliest ‘instructional’ dialogues in English.33 31 32 33

Petrus Nannius [Peter Nanninck], Oratio de obsidione Lovaniensi. Adiunctus est dialogus de milite peregrino (Louvain: Servaes Sassenus, 1543, ustc 403071). Alvin Vos, ‘The Humanism of Toxophilus’, English Literary Renaissance, 6 (1976), pp. 187–​ 203, 201–​202. [William Samuel], The Arte of Angling (London: Henry Middleton, 1577, ustc 516824); Thomas Morley, A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke (London:  Peter Short, 1596, ustc 513465); William Bullein, Bulleins bulwarke (London:  John Kingston, 1562, ustc 505938); Clifford, Schoole of horsemanship. The only earlier instance I have yet located is Robert Recorde’s Grounde of Artes Teachynge … Arithmeticke (London: Reyner Wolfe, 1543, ustc 503450).

218 Shrank The usual model for these ‘how-​to’ dialogues is that of pupil-​and-​teacher, where one interlocutor –​perhaps after some initial reluctance –​eagerly learns from a more knowledgeable and experienced authority figure. The ‘pupil’ feeds their ‘teacher’ questions, eliciting an explanation of the art or discipline in a logical order and in easily digestible chunks. The relationship between the speakers in Toxophilus is much more finely balanced. For one thing, they are more equal than is usual in this type of dialogue, where there is often a discrepancy in age, learning, and  –​on occasion (as in Clifford’s Schoole of Horsmanship or John Norden’s Surveyors Dialogue) –​of social status.34 Philologus and Toxophilus are peers. Nor is Jennifer Richards entirely fair when she states that ‘the dialogue is dominated by Toxophilus, who imposes his views on [Philologus]’.35 Toxophilus talks more than his companion, but Philologus is no pushover. Unlike the standard interlocutor of instructional dialogues, he does not accept Toxophilus’s claims unquestioningly. Rather, his responses push Toxophilus into sharpening his argument. ‘That such princes and such commune wealthes have moche regarded shoting, you have well declared’, Philologus acknowledges, for example: ‘But why shotinge ought so of it selfe to be regarded, you have scarcely yet proved’ (sig. B2v). The learning is thus two-​way: Toxophilus instructs Philologus in the value, and then the mechanics, of shooting, but Philologus also trains Toxophilus to argue more effectively, to ensure that his reasoning is watertight. Yet K. J. Wilson overstates the case when he contends that ‘in the field of rhetoric it is the bow-​lover who is the amateur’.36 It is not so much eloquence that Philologus teaches as dialectic, or the logical arrangement of an argument. As Toxophilus concedes, ‘you knowe the orderynge of a matter better than I’ (sig. N2v). Philologus encourages Toxophilus to match the passion of his eloquence with the acuity of his logic. He warns Toxophilus against ‘blinde’ and partisan affection for his chosen sport, challenging him to refine his reasoning. ‘If you can prove this thing [that archery is ‘most fit and agreeable with learning and learned men’] so plainly, as you speake it earnestly’, Philologus promises, ‘then wil I, not only thinke as you do, but become a shooter and do as you do’ (sig. C1r). When Ascham promotes Toxophilus in his correspondence with Gardiner, he distinguishes his work from others in the vernacular, which lack ‘dialectic 34 35 36

John Norden, The surveyors dialogue (London: Simon Stafford for Hugh Astley, 1607, stc [2nd edn.] 18639). Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 78. K. J. Wilson, ‘Ascham’s Toxophilus and the Rules of Art’, Renaissance Quarterly, 29 (1976), pp. 30–​51, at p. 31.

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for reasoning and rhetoric for adornment’ (Dialecticam ad ratiocinationem, aut Rhetoricam ad exornationem).37 This fusion of rhetoric with dialectic which Ascham here highlights –​and which Philologus champions when he encourages Toxophilus to marry his ‘earnest’ speech with ‘plain’ proof  –​resonates with Johann Sturm’s De amissa dicendi ratione (‘On the Lost Art of Speaking’) (first printed in 1538), in which he argues that ‘dialectic should be rightly joined with the skill of an orator’.38 Sturm, as Lucy Nicholas discusses earlier in this volume, certainly became an important figure for Ascham in the years immediately after the publication of Toxophilus; as Lawrence Ryan notes, ‘next to Cheke [he] exerted the strongest intellectual influence of any contemporary upon Ascham’, and Ascham would later praise Sturm for the ‘perfect rules’ set out in his treatise.39 The purpose of Ascham’s dialogue thus goes beyond the defence and rudiments of archery; it simultaneously demonstrates a rather more scholarly skill: the art of oratory, when rhetoric and dialectic meet. Further to that, Philologus induces Toxophilus to raise his ambitions. As Wilson points out, throughout Book 1, Toxophilus tends to talk about ‘excellence’ in shooting; Philologus encourages him to think, instead, about ‘perfyte knowlege’ as the first and necessary step towards attaining ‘perfyte workyng’.40 Philologus reminds Toxophilus that: Tullye … doeth playnly saye, that yf he teached any maner of crafte as he dyd Rhetorike he would labor to bringe a man to the knowledge of the moost perfitnesse of it … . Whych way in al maner of learning to be best, Plato dothe also declare in Euthydemus, of whom Tullie learned it as he did many other thynges mo. And thus you se Toxophile by what reasons and by whose authorite I do require of you this waye in teachynge me to shoote. (sig. N2r) In the process, Ascham aligns his project not only with Cicero’s De oratore (which sought to outline the ideal model of perfect eloquence), but also with a much longer literary and philosophical tradition of imitatio (discussed in more detail in later chapters) and translatio, in which ideas shift across cultural, 37

Ascham to Gardiner, Cambridge, 1545, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p.  80; Hatch and Vos, p. 71. 38 Dialectica, quae cum oratoris arte recte coniungitur:  Johann Sturm, De amissa dicendi ratione (Strasbourg: Wendel Rihel, 1543, ustc 667643), sig. E3v. On the fusion of rhetoric and dialectic, see Lucy Nicholas, ch. 7 in this volume. 39 Ryan, Ascham, p. 60; Ascham to Sturm, London, late 1568, letter xcix, Giles, vol. ii, p. 178; Hatch and Vos, p. 269. 40 Wilson, ‘Ascham’s Toxophilus’, pp. 31–​32.

220 Shrank linguistic, chronological, and generic boundaries.41 This little book about shooting –​‘Englishe matter’, ‘written […] in the English tongue, for Englishe men’ (sig. A3r) –​is actually a manifestation and demonstration of the humanist method. This larger, wider ambition on Ascham’s part, and the greater scope that he envisages for his work, has led Thomas Greene to state that ‘in the end Toxophilus often seems not to be so much a treatise on shooting as on learning any skill or body of knowledge, of which shooting is merely the aptest example’.42 I would go further than this: Toxophilus is not just about teaching and learning a skill; it is also intended to inculcate an attitude and cultivate certain kinds of behaviour. Above all, it is intended to show its readers how to be constructive, productive members of the commonweal. 3

Conclusion: Commonweal and the Honesty of ‘Commoning’

The term ‘commonweal’ gained purchase in the fifteenth century and, by the later Henrician period, when Ascham was writing, it had become the dominant ideological framework, which conceived the polity as participatory unit in which all members were required to play their part.43 As Jennifer Richards highlights, archery is a particularly apposite skill through which to explore the idea of commonweal since it ‘makes apparent or plain [to use Ascham’s term] the co-​dependence of the estates. The noble order is shown to be dependent on the skill of his craftsmen’.44 If it was the function of artificers to produce useful commodities, then within the commonweal it was the role and duty of the educated and virtuous to share their wisdom and offer counsel. Here Toxophilus promotes Ascham’s friend and mentor Cheke as the exemplary citizen. ‘I perceyve that sentence of Plato to be true’, observes Toxophilus, at the end of a passage remembering Cheke’s tutelage, ‘which sayeth that there is nothyng better in any common wealthe, than that there shoulde be always one or other, 41

‘But since it is “The Orator” we are seeking, we have to picture to ourselves in our discourse an orator from whom every blemish has been taken away, and one who moreover is rich in every merit’: Crassus, in Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, revised edn., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), i. xxvi, p. 118. 42 Thomas Greene, ‘Roger Ascham: The Perfect End of Shooting’, English Literary History, 36.4 (1969), pp. 609–​625, at p. 619. 43 John Watts, ‘ “Common weal” and “commonwealth”:  England’s Monarchical Republic in the Making, c.1450–​1530’, in Andrea Gamberini et al. eds., The Languages of Political Society: Western Europe, 14th–​17th Centuries (Rome: Viella, 2011), pp. 147–​163. 44 Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness, p. 76.

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excellent passing man, whose lyfe and virtue shoulde plucke forwarde the will, diligence, laboure and hope of other’ (sig. I1v). Cheke’s impact on the commonweal is not simply through his actions: it ripples outwards through those he teaches and inspires. A sense of duty to the commonweal –​of Ascham’s ‘zeale towarde [his] countrie’ (sig. A2v) –​ pervades Toxophilus. Expressions of public utility were almost de rigeur in publications of this period. Yet in Ascham’s Toxophilus, this concern goes beyond the prefatory matter, where such protestations –​that works have been undertaken for a common profit –​generally occur. It surfaces in the book’s frequent digressions from the apparent topic in hand: for example, on the benefits of an Anglo-​Scottish union (sigs K2r–​K3r), on the misguidedness of parents steering sickly sons towards academic and ecclesiastical careers (sigs X1r–​X2r), or in Toxophilus’s frequent attacks on gambling.45 On one level these three digressions appear to belong to very different categories: the first about international relations, the second about domestic affairs, the third about how to spend one’s leisure time. Nevertheless, all three are conjoined by a concern for the well-​being of the nation, be that on the macro-​scale of war and peace, or the micro-​scale of judicious parenting or how best to divert oneself. The decisions individuals take have ramifications for the wider polity just as much as the manoeuvrings of monarchs and statesmen, and it is the duty of educated and virtuous citizens to proffer advice on both. As Toxophilus says of gambling, drawing as a good humanist should on his reading of history: ‘loke throughoute all histories written in Greke, Latyne, or other language, and you shal never finde that realme prosper in the whiche suche ydle pastymes are used’ (sigs F3r–​v). Ascham’s Toxophilus might be unusual for an instructional dialogue in the parity awarded to its speakers, but this interest in commonweal is entirely in keeping with the genre as it developed. Instructional dialogues frequently stray into socio-​political commentary. A chapter on hemp in Bulleins Bulwarke (on health and healing) digresses into a diatribe against idleness (sigs E3v–​E4v). John Tapp’s otherwise dry account of subtraction pauses to expound on neighbourliness.46 William Samuel’s Arte of Angling veers into an anthropomorphic vision of the world beneath the water, where carp feature as ‘stout needy upstarts’, ‘bear[ing] such sway in the River, that all other fish are almost gone’, and where minnows resemble ‘covetous inclosers’, ‘eatyng up of [their] felowes’ (sig. C8r). These are only three of many such moments that reveal the way in which these ‘how-​to’ dialogues are imbued with a wider concern about what 45 46

See, for example, sigs. D4r–​F3v, N3v–​N4r. John Tapp, The Path-​way to Knowledge, containing the whole art of arithmeticke (London: Thomas Purfoot for Thomas Pavier, 1613, stc [2nd edn.] 23677), sig. C2v.

222 Shrank holds society together and allows it to function, and the threats –​such as idleness, selfishness, and greed –​which risk pulling it apart. That awareness of socio-​political issues should ripple just below the surface of these works is closely connected to the choice of dialogue. These writers have elected to ‘deliver’ their material after the ‘common maner’, as Thomas Morley puts it in his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (sig. 2A4v), or in the words of Ascham’s dedicatory epistle to Toxophilus: ‘He that wyll wryte well in any tongue, muste folowe thys councel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to thinke as wyse men do’ (sig. A4r). It is not simply that these dialogues are written in an accessible register, however: the conversational form they adopt encapsulates multiple senses of the verb ‘to common’. As the interlocutors talk, they communicate their expertise, a process by which they participate in the public domain, by sharing knowledge (which Robert Recorde tellingly calls ‘counsel’, framing it in political terms) and by making overt socio-​political comment.47 As Recorde notes, ‘excellent giftes are not lent unto men to be hidden’ (sig. A2v). Monologic treatises could be equally public-​ minded, but dialogue goes further, in depicting that ‘commoning’ process. The significance of ‘commoning’ also helps explain the way the concept of ‘honesty’ recurs not only in Ascham’s Toxophilus but in instructional dialogues more generally. Toxophilus is more extreme than most: the word and its related terms occur more than a hundred times across the volume (twenty times before we even reach the start of Book 1), but many of the ‘how-​to’ dialogues that followed are similarly preoccupied with the notion.48 Richards’s Rhetoric and Courtliness has done much to enhance our understanding of how important, and how nuanced, the term ‘honesty’ was in sixteenth-​century discourse. Her book reveals the way in which it indicates not merely plain-​spokenness and fair dealing (meanings which came to dominate), but their seeming opposite: namely, the tact and decorum that place necessary restraints on how people interact (curbing self-​interest or unbridled expression), and the ‘utilitas or profit’ that results.49 Seen this way, honesty is a publicly manifested –​rather than privately held –​virtue, its earliest usages focusing on the external signs of honour which establish social credit.50 It is in that outward sense that we see Ascham deploying the term in the preface ‘To all gentle men and yomen 47 , senses 6a, 2a, 3, 1; Recorde, Grounde of Artes, sig. T6r. 48 See, for example, Norden, Surveyors dialogue (25 instances over 264 quarto pages); Toxophilus is 192 quarto pages. Page-​counts include illustrations, tables, indexes, and blanks. 49 Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness, p. 77. 50 , senses 1a-​c, 2, 3: ‘reputation’ (first citation ca. 1382), ‘respect’ (ca. 1384), ‘status’ (1418), ‘decorum’ (ca. 1398), ‘liberality’ (ca. 1400).

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of Englande’ (sig. A4r) when he explains that it would have been ‘bothe more profitable for [his] study, and also more honest for [his] name’ to ‘have written [the work] in an other tonge’ (sig. A4v). Yet, at a time when the term could mean different –​and potentially conflicting –​things, Ascham’s dialogue fuses this external, socially efficacious resonance of ‘honesty’ with its more internal, moral one. Throughout the work, honesty is associated with openness and a lack of anxiety about scrutiny. Archery is commended as a pastime that ‘us[es] the day & open place for Honestie to rule it, not lurking in corners for misorder to abuse it’ (sig. A4v), whilst ‘honest fletcher[s]‌… getting theyr lyvynge truly’ will not be ‘angry’ with Ascham for teaching readers how to judge ‘good bowes and shaftes’ because they, unlike their ‘unhonest’ peers, are not trying to palm off fraudulent products on unsuspecting customers (sig. a2r). A work setting out knowledge ‘plainly’ and making it ‘common’ to all is thus ‘a thinge Honest … to write’ (sig. A3r): that is, it is honourable, virtuous, and –​by educating its readers –​of public utility. Ascham’s choice of dialogue consequently works on a number of levels. First, as a form steeped in scholarly credentials, it offered Ascham a way of seeking patronage beyond the increasingly inhospitable intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge without alienating his academic colleagues. Further to that, the patently erudite persona of the work’s toxophilite demonstrates –​as well as asserts –​the compatibility of scholarship and shooting, a union of bow and book epitomised (from the outset) by the volume’s visual effects. The learnedness of Ascham’s work –​and particularly its foregrounding of a then more recherché Hellenic scholarship  –​distinguishes it from other instructional dialogues (a sub-​genre that blossomed in the ensuing decades). Nonetheless, it shares with them a deep concern with ideas of commonweal: a commitment to ‘commoning’ knowledge that is encapsulated in the work’s conversational form.

27 28

21 12 12 10 6 7 7 3 5 5 4 3

Homer Herodotus Euripides Leo vi Xenophon Sophocles Galen Plutarch Julius Pollux Demosthenes Isocrates Arrian

in text

11 16 7 8 7 5 4 6 3 1 2 3

10 8

in marginalia (author or work)

Times named

Plato Aristotle

Greek

32 28 19 18 13 12 11 9 8 6 6 6

37 36

total

table 10.1 Greek and Roman authors named in Ascham’s Toxophilusa

Cicero/​Tully

Roman (classical)

33

in marginalia total (author or work)

11 + 12 = 23 10

in text

Times named

newgenrtpdf

224 Shrank

106

Total authors = 24 162

268

1

4 4 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 42

Claudian Propertius Sallust Seneca Caesar Collumella Terence Livy P. Mela Total authors = 16

1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 31

4 3 3 2 2 1

2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 73

6 5 5 4 4 3

a  In-​text references counted using eebo-​t cp full text (with variants generated by both eebo-​t cp and the author, to catch mistranscriptions such as ‘Thurydides’ and ‘Ifocrates’); marginal references counted manually.

1

0

Diodorus

2 2 1 1 2 3 1 1 1

2 2 2 2 1 0 1 1 1

Callimachus Hippocrates Procropius Thucydides Hesiod Strabo Aeschylus Herodian Nymphodorus

2 2 2 2 2 2

Pliny Vegetius Virgil Ovid Tacitus Q. Curtius

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­c hapter 11

The Scholemaster’s Memories Micha Lazarus oro te recrea me tuis literis1

∵ Ascham’s Scholemaster almost died of grief. The book opens at dinner in Sir William Cecil’s chambers at Windsor, on the tenth of December, 1563. Cecil and Ascham were present, as were William Petre, John Mason, Nicholas Wotton, Richard Sackville, Walter Mildmay, Walter Haddon, John Astley, Bernard Hampton, and Nicasius Yetswert, statesmen, privy councillors, and their clerks; several of them Cambridge men of Ascham’s generation from the turn of the 1540s; all veterans of the Edwardian court who had successfully navigated the squalls of the mid-​century; ‘so many wise and good men together, as hardly then could have been picked out again out of all England beside’.2 After a spirited debate about pedagogy, Sackville, taking Ascham by the hand and leading him to a window in the Queen’s privy chamber, commissioned him to take charge of the education of ‘little Robert Sackville, my son’s son’ along with Ascham’s own boy, and to set out his theories in writing; in return, Sackville would be ‘as fast a friend to you and yours’ as any Ascham had.3 Yet as Ascham drafted the work over the next two years, Sackville died, and the book almost died with him. When he was gone, my heart was dead; there was not one that wore a black gown for him, who carried a heavier heart for him than I: when he 1 ‘I pray you, recreate me in your letters’; Johannes Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg, 16 December 1568, letter xcviii, Giles, vol. ii, p. 173. Dates, places, and translations of Ascham’s letters (which I have quoted in place of the original Latin) follow Hatch. All other translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. For that part of true imitation, I thank Ted Tregear, Aaron Kachuck, and Andrew Taylor for the many pleasant talks we have had together. 2 Preface to The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. iii, p. 78. Cecil, Ascham, Sackville, Mildmay, Haddon, were Cambridge men; among them, Cecil, Haddon, and Mildmay had been Ascham’s contemporaries. On their Edwardian roots see Stephen Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 197. 3 Preface to The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. iii, pp. 81–​82.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_013

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was gone, I cast this book away; I could not look upon it but with weeping eyes, in remembering him who was the only setter on to do it …4 Almost two years the book ‘lay scattered and neglected’ before Cecil gave Ascham the financial security to finish it.5 This anecdote could be read as a conventional appeal to patronage, a flattering restatement of Ascham’s debt to the support of powerful men who would respond with gifts of money or favour in return. Lawrence Ryan, Ascham’s biographer, saw it as honey to the pedagogical medicine, crediting The Scholemaster’s popularity and place in ‘the rise of English formal prose’ to ‘the lively contemporary anecdotes and the flavor of his own personality that Ascham provides while treating what are largely commonplaces of humanistic ethical and educational theory’.6 Yet the relationship this passage establishes, between Ascham’s book and the living people that inspired it, bears a freight of meaning throughout The Scholemaster that is more than simply pragmatic. The book becomes –​in Ascham’s eyes –​a metonym of Sackville, at once a work of educational theory and a memorial object inalienable from its ‘only setter on’. ‘When he was gone, I cast this book away’: as Sackville dies, so dies the book. Careful detail deepens the intimacy of the scene, such as Sackville’s taking Ascham ‘by the hand’, the acceptance of Ascham’s son into his own familia, the promise of fast friendship, the nesting of their private conversation in ‘her Majesty’s privy-​chamber’ within the privy setting of the dinner itself.7 Many of the diners are men who either appear in The Scholemaster or moved, as we shall see, in its extended social circle, a community forged in 1540s Cambridge and invested in its memorialisation. And above all the Sackville passage, conflating man and book, introduces the central literary conceit of the work, that ‘the Scholemaster’ is both a manual, standing in for a living teacher, and also itself that teacher, referred to as ‘him’ in this preface and repeatedly throughout:  ‘I do appoint this my Schoolmaster then and there to begin, where his office and charge beginneth’.8 Still more vivid in Latin, the book is Ascham’s Praeceptor –​a personal office, the embodied agent of precept.9 I propose to take such anecdotes, which make up a remarkable portion of Ascham’s treatise, seriously. The Scholemaster is suffused with memories and

4 Ibid., p. 85. 5 Ibid. 6 Ryan, Ascham, p. 251. 7 Preface to The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. iii, p. 81. 8 Ibid., p. 87. 9 Ascham to Sturm, London, December 1568, letter xcix, Giles, vol. ii, p. 177.

228 Lazarus their personae, far in excess of what a rhetorical handbook should need. Even the most technical of its precepts are embedded in personal writing, intimate and heartfelt memories of the exemplary lives of Ascham’s friends and teachers. Yet this book has so shaped our understanding of Elizabethan rhetoric and pedagogy that we have lost sight of how much of it is not precept, how as a piece of writing it is as much memoir as manual.10 Ascham’s opening scene at dinner with Sackville sets the tone of the book: its plangent habit of memorial, its reflection of Ascham’s life and the cares of his final years, the locality of its appeals to a bygone time, place, and fellowship of scholars, and the strange, complex relationship it establishes between ‘precept’ and ‘example’, books and bodies. My purpose in this chapter is to assess the role of such writing in The Scholemaster and in Ascham’s wider literary career. I will look at three aspects of Ascham’s writing of memory. First, I locate memories of Cheke at the centre of The Scholemaster and the wider literary output of Ascham’s generation in the years around its publication in 1570. Second, I examine the technical role those memories play in Ascham’s rhetorical system of precept and example, and how the resulting integration of memorial writing into rhetorical exercise places The Scholemaster within a literary tradition of humanist elegy incubated at Cambridge, and St John’s College in particular, in the 1540s, when so many of the relationships on view in the preface were formed. Finally, I relate Ascham’s efforts to re-​embody relationships abstracted by time, place, and confessional schism  –​relationships that consisted remotely or in memory alone  –​to the writing of friendship. In each of these areas The Scholemaster is the final statement of Ascham’s lifelong memorial project of witnessing past fellowship, constituting present fellowship, and reproducing that fellowship through the rhetorical education it enshrines. How it does so is a question of literary technique to which I will return throughout, the question of how this book works as writing; the question, in short, of The Scholemaster’s excess personality. 1

‘That Golden Age’: Memories of Cheke

If The Scholemaster thinks itself a teacher, that teacher was more than ten years dead by the time Ascham remembered him as ‘one of the worthiest 10 Recent work on Tudor education has begun to move in this direction:  see for example Lynne Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom:  Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), which discusses how Ascham’s ‘recommended technique for good language teaching moves literally and imaginatively between text and persons’ (pp. 12–​13).

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gentlemen, that ever England bred’: John Cheke.11 Sackville remembers, in the preface, hearing Ascham thank Cheke ‘for all the learning’ he had; by the end of that preface Ascham himself has traced the origins of his book to ‘that little, that I  got at home by good Sir John Cheke, and that that I  borrowed abroad of my friend Sturmius’, alongside Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.12 Memories of Cheke, who features in The Scholemaster more than Christ, ripple through the volume.13 No sooner does Ascham outline ‘all the necessary tools and instruments’ of true imitation, than he confesses them ‘not of mine own forging, but partly left unto me by the cunningest master … Sir John Cheke’; his selection of classical models is guided by what ‘I have heard worthy Mr. Cheke many times say’.14 Indeed Cheke’s voice is rendered more and more personally in The Scholemaster, as early digests of his teachings develop into the reported speech of his ‘goodly talk’ with Ascham, which in turn become, by the end of the book, the direct speech of his views on Sallust.15 Just as its preface begins with an account of Sackville only to become somehow coterminous with him, The Scholemaster proper begins as an abstract of Cheke’s teachings and ends as an exercise in ethopoeia, a memorial re-​embodiment of the man himself.16 Cheke’s mentorship, friendship, and example were the touchstones of Ascham’s life and career. Soliciting support for a candidate for fellowship in early 1540, Ascham refers the Master of St John’s College to ‘Cheke’s judgement –​who is always impartial’, and writes to another fellow on ‘the advice of that wonderful man Cheke’; letters of 1544 and 1545 direct William Paget and Anthony Denny to Cheke for an account of Ascham’s own character.17 It 11

The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. iii, p.  216. For more on Ascham and Cheke, see John McDiarmid, ch. 5 in this volume. 12 Preface to The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. iii, pp.  83–​84. On Sturm’s influence on The Scholemaster, see Lucy Nicholas, ch. 7 in this volume, p. 150. 13 Herbert Patterson, ‘The Humanism of Roger Ascham: A Quantitative Study of Classical References in Ascham’s Scholemaster’, The Pedagogical Seminary, 22.4 (1915), pp. 546–​551, at p. 547. 14 The Scholemaster, pt. 2, Giles, vol. iii, p. 227, 244. 15 Ibid., pp. 215–​216, 227, 239ff. 16 On ethopoeia in rhetorical education see Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, pp. 120–​ 152; on its literary possibilities, see Gavin Alexander, ‘Prosopopoeia’, in Sylvia Adamson et al., eds., Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 96–​112. 17 Ascham to Dr Tailer, Cambridge, 9 March 1540, letter v, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 8; Ascham to Cordingley, [Cambridge], March 1540, letter vi, Giles vol. i, pt. 1, p. 9; Ascham to Sir William Paget, [London], 1544, letter xxii, Giles vol. i, pt. 1, p. 52; Ascham to Sir Anthony Denny, [place unknown] 1545, letter xxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 82; Ascham to Cecil, Spires, 27

230 Lazarus was to Cheke that Ascham recommended William Grindal to be Elizabeth’s tutor, to Cheke that Ascham deferred when Grindal died and he was asked to take over, Cheke who made him Edward’s writing master, and Cheke who informed him of his appointment as secretary to Sir Richard Morison.18 Yet Cheke was far more than merely a senior colleague. ‘How unhappy I am, now deprived of the most desired solace of your comforting words!’ Ascham wrote when both his parents had died just a small time apart; ‘I wish you were here, my Cheke, so that I could pour out my tears to you and deliver my groans and sighs to your most sympathetic sweet counsel’.19 He may even have sought (unsuccessfully) ‘a new bond of relationship and affinity’ through marriage to Cheke’s niece.20 This mixture of the heartfelt and the strategic was characteristic of Cheke’s role in the Cambridge set. Among the ambitious young St John’s cohort his name alone acted as a kind of imprimatur, as is clear from one of Ascham’s letters to his college friend Edward Raven, written during his service abroad in the early 1550s. Ascham reports a visit to Cheke at his London home shortly before taking ship. The pair sat talking for nine hours, ‘treating many pertinent matters of religion, the court, the nation, and the College’, and Ascham made a point –​both in his conversation with Cheke and in his report of that conversation to Raven –​of reinscribing the web of professional and personal goodwill that sustained the fellowship of St John’s: In our talk I commended all our friends to him [Cheke] by name –​the Pilkingtons, Levers, Wilsons, Elands, and the others; I was eager to hurt none, to profit all. I commended you particularly, my Edward …21

18 19 20

21

September 1552, letter cxl, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 332; Ascham to Cecil, Spires, 28 November 1552, letter cxliii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 341. Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, September 1544, letter xxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 55; Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, 12 February 1548, letter lxxxv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 160–​161; Ryan, Ascham, p. 119. Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, March 1544, letter xxi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 47–​48. Ascham ‘to a friend’, letter xci, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 170–​172; the latter is undated and the addressee anonymous, but Paul Needham, ‘Sir John Cheke at Cambridge and at Court’, unpublished dissertation, Harvard University (2 vols., 1971), vol. i, pp. 333–​334, argues that it was sent in the spring of 1551 and that ‘A. B’. indicates Cheke’s niece, Ann Blythe. Ascham to Raven, Gravesend, 21 September 1550, letter civ, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 209; cf. Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, 28 January 1550, letter xciv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 173–​176, where Ascham recalls the meeting to Cheke himself, and Ascham to William Ireland, Cheston, 8 July 1548, letter xc, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 168, for a similar roster of the Cheke circle.

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Likewise, a poem Ascham gifted William Bill for the New Year triangulates their friendship through Cheke’s intimacy: ‘Both of us love Cheke, Cheke loves us both; this I would place among our greatest goods’.22 Cheke was an elementary particle in the physics of Cambridge fellowship, a Higgs boson that gave other relationships their mass. The alliance of friendship and profit here reveals the substructures of classical amicitia, so important to humanist epistolary community.23 More locally, however, these anecdotes associate The Scholemaster with a boutique genre flourishing in England at precisely this time, for Ascham was not the only old Johnian to contribute in the years around 1570 to a body of writing we might call ‘memories of Cheke’. Many of the texts in this small but influential corpus had been written some time earlier, but all were published, in quick succession, in the decade spanning the late 1560s to the late 1570s. Walter Haddon’s Latin epitaph for Cheke, for example, must have been written on Cheke’s death in 1557, but it was printed a decade later in Haddon’s Poemata aliquot (1567): Doctrinae lumen Checus, morumque magister, Aurea naturae fabrica, morte iacet. Non erat e multis unus, sed is omnibus unus Profuit, et patriae lux erat ille suae. Gemma Britanna fuit, tam magnum nulla tulerunt Tempora thesaurum, tempora nulla ferent.24 (Cheke, light of learning and master of manners, Golden work of nature, lies in death. He was not just one among many, but he alone benefited all, and was the light of his fatherland. He was the jewel of Britain; so great a treasure no age has brought, no age ever will.) 22 23

24

Guilielmo Billo sodali suo candidissimo, Giles, vol. iii, pp. 286–​287. For an overview of the classical models available, see Reginald Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship (Leiden:  Brill, 1994), pp.  1–​41; on their intersection with patronage, see Guy Fitch Lytle, ‘Friendship and Patronage in Renaissance Europe’, in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. F. W. Kent et al. (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 47–​61. Walter Haddon, Poemata aliquot (London:  William Seres, 1567, ustc 516669), pp.  99–​ 100; it appeared again with minor differences in Haddon, Poematum … libri duo (London:  William Seres, 1576, ustc 508209), sig. K1r. The epitaph is also quoted in Ascham’s manuscript draft of The Scholemaster (composed before 1564), which identifies its author as ‘of mr chekes schole’: see George B. Parks, ‘The First Draft of Ascham’s Scholemaster’, Huntington Library Quarterly 1.3 (1938), pp. 313–​327, at p. 321.

232 Lazarus In the same year a long letter of 1545 thanking Cheke for his translation of Chrysostom’s Orationes sex was published in Haddon’s Lucubrationes (the companion volume to his Poemata), attesting the centrality of Cheke to the St John’s circle even in absence: although your body has been snatched away from us, nevertheless your humanity, intelligence, study, eloquence, letters, are present in our common studies of all things, as well as the private, intimate thoughts of each and every one of us. Bill imitates your study and humanity; Carr, the eloquence of your words …25 Already Haddon’s terms share much with Ascham’s: the dual emphasis on private intimacies and public influence, Cheke’s physical absence balanced by his presence as a model for imitation. And just as The Scholemaster’s voice is at last revealed to be Cheke’s own, so to Haddon, writing to Cheke, it seems ‘not only Chrysostom’s voice that sounds in this disputation’, but Cheke’s.26 As the The Scholemaster was published three years later, England’s presses reached peak Cheke. Thomas Wilson’s English translation of Three Orations of Demosthenes (1570) featured liminary verses by Haddon, Thomas Bing, and others, praising Cheke as ‘that rare learned man, and singular ornament of this lande’, and itself recalled warmly and in some detail Cheke’s lectures at Padua: ‘I founde him such a friende to me, for communicating the skill and giftes of hys minde, as I cannot but during my life speake reuerentlye of so worthie a man, and honor in my hart the heauenly remembrance of him’.27 In the same year Bing dedicated to Wilson a Latin translation of Demosthenes by Nicholas Carr (Cheke’s successor as Regius Professor of Greek), praising ‘those outstanding lights of Cambridge, Cheke and Smith, and … the most honoured Haddon’, and a vita of Carr in the same volume praised Cheke, ‘the man by far most learned of all, and most exceptional in probity of character’.28 And around the same 25 Haddon, Lucubrationes (London: William Seres, 1567, ustc 506652), p. 165: Et quanquam corpus tuum abreptum nobis est, tamen humanitas, ingenium, studium, eloquentia, literae, nostris intersunt communibus omnium scholis, et privatis singulorum intimis cogitationibus. Studium, et humanitatem tuam Billus imitatur, Carrus verborum eloquentiam … 26 Ibid., p.  163:  … ut non tam mihi vox in hac disputatione Chrysostomi, quam tua sonare videatur. 27 Thomas Wilson, The Three Orations of Demosthenes (London: Henry Denham, 1570, ustc 507094), first page of dedication. 28 Nicholas Carr, Demosthenis, Graecorum oratorum principis, Olynthiacae orationes tres, et Philippicae quatuor (London: Henry Denham, 1571, ustc 507302), sig. A2v (praeclarissima illa Cantabrigiae lumina, Checus, & Smithus, et … ornatissimus Haddonus); p. 59v ( … viro

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time Sir Humphrey Gilbert took inspiration from ‘that famous knight Sir Iohn Cheeke’ in his remarkable plans for ‘an Achademy in London for educacion of her Maiestes Wardes’.29 Memories of Cheke work here as they did in Ascham’s poem to Bill, as the sutures of a community founded on literary endeavour as much as on friendship, advancement, and shared history. Haddon prints an epitaph and a letter, remembering Cheke; Haddon and Bing contribute to Wilson’s volume, remembering Cheke; Bing dedicates Carr’s work back to Wilson, remembering Cheke; Haddon is at dinner with Ascham in The Scholemaster, remembering Cheke and many of the others besides. All this in just three years. Though the pace of publication slowed down after 1570, the generic conventions of ‘memories of Cheke’ had been established. Amid a caustic oration on the ‘paucity of British writers and the impediments to studies’, delivered in the mid-​1550s but again only printed (posthumously) in 1576, Nicholas Carr lapses into reminiscence: ‘this university once held great men’, he recalls, and ‘it is scarcely credible by what crowds, what throngs their lectures were celebrated’.30 Yet soon thereafter: not only did many in their pride, while these men were alive, disdain their diligence –​one in Greek letters, the other in civil law –​but even now, in their absence, they are vexed to hear others speak their praises.31 Carr’s aside identifies Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith respectively, renowned as the twin pillars of 1530s Cambridge in this and many other works of this time.32 longe omnium doctissimo, et morum probitate praestantissimo D. Ioanni Checo). The vita is dated 1 November 1570, Bing’s dedication 6 November 1570. On this volume in general, see J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990), pp. 231–​235. 29 Humphrey Gilbert, Queene Elizabethes Achademy, ed. F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society extra series 8 (London: N. Trübner & Co, 1869), p. 2. 30 Nicholas Carr, De scriptorum Britannicorum paucitate, et studiorum impedimentis oratio (London:  Thomas Marsh, 1576, ustc 508146):  sigs. 6v–​7v:  Tenuit haec schola aliquando claros viros … Est enim vix credibile, qua frequentia, quo concursu illorum quotidianae operae celebrabantur …. On dating, see Binns, Intellectual Culture, pp. 196–​202. 31 Carr, De scriptorum Britannicorum paucitate, sigs. 6v–​7v: Quorum cum aderant, diligentias, unius in Graecis literis, in iure civili alterius, non modo propter fastidium multi respuebant, verum etiam nunc illorum laudes absentium ab aliis praedicare moleste ferunt. 32 See, for example, Bing in Carr, Demosthenis … orationes, sig. A2v; Edward Grant, Oratio de vita et obitu Rogeri Aschami (1576), Giles, vol. iii, p. 310; The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. iii, p. 237; Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, September 1544, letter xxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 55; Ascham to Sturm, London, December 1568, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 190; Ascham to Sturm, Augsburg, 22 June 1551, letter cxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 294; and Ascham to the Fellows of St John’s, Augsburg, 12 October 1561, letter cxxxii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 306.

234 Lazarus Gabriel Harvey’s Ciceronianus takes the same tack in 1577: both in William Lewin’s prefatory letter and in the oration itself, Smith and Cheke are preferred above ‘any number of Italians’, and the Cambridge of their time described in relation to Britain as Athens was to Greece.33 Indeed in the next decade such tropes became well-​worn enough for satire. Thomas Nashe sketched his old college in 1589 as ‘that most famous and fortunate Nurse of all learning’, having ‘more candles light in it, euerie Winter Morning before fowre of the clocke, than the fowre of clocke bell gaue stroakes’ –​not sparing its great monument, ‘the Exchequer of eloquence Sir Ihon Cheeke, a man of men, supernaturally traded in al tongues’.34 Nashe’s mock encomium marks the sedimentation of ‘memories of Cheke’ into the literary bedrock. Legends of Cambridge’s Henrician splendour offered the St John’s cohort of 1540 –​many of them now risen to high influence –​fuel for the recovery of English learning and culture in a once-​again propitious climate of post-​Marian stability. But even at the time, Cambridge intellectual life had to it, as Alec Ryrie puts it, a ‘slightly mythic feel’.35 Ascham described Prince Edward’s patronage of learning at Cambridge as an ‘aurea secula’, a ‘golden age’, and only a few years later Carr –​‘the one who remained’ at the University into Mary’s reign –​was already lamenting its lost excellence.36 In The Scholemaster, 33

Gabriel Harvey, Ciceronianus (London: Henry Bynneman, 1577, ustc 508377), sig. a.iiiv, Nunquis Italus aut Checum nostrum linguarum scientia: aut Smithum cum hac ipsa, tum multiplici rerum atque artium cognitione:  aut Carrum suavitate vicit, et copia orationis? (‘Has any Italian surpassed either our Cheke in knowledge of languages, or Smith as much in that as in the complex understanding of many matters and arts, or Carr in sweetness and abundance of speech?’); p. 43, addamus etiam, si placet, duos nostrates, duos, inquam, Academiae istius oculos, et duorum Regum duas manus, Smithum, atque Checum: (nam de Carro, Bingoque alias):  eosque vel sexcentum Italis, non solum opponamus, verum etiam anteponamus (‘Let us also add, if you please, two of our own, the two, I say, eyes of this university, and the two hands of two rulers, Smith and Cheke (for of Carr and Bing I shall speak elsewhere): and these let us not only place against six hundred Italians, but place above them’); p. 65, ut quemadmodum olim Athenae Graecia Graeciae dicebantur: sic aliquando Cantabrigia possit suo merito Britannia Britanniae nuncupari:  idemque sit apud nostros: esse Cantabrigiensem; quod erat apud Graecos; esse Atticum (‘Just as, once, Athens was called the Greece of Greece, so some day Cambridge might in its own right be called the Britain of Britain: and among us to be a Cantabrigian may mean what it meant among the Greeks to be an Athenian’). 34 Thomas Nashe, ‘To the Gentlemen Students of both Uniuersities’, in Robert Greene, Menaphon: Camillas alarum to slumbering Euphues (London: Thomas Orwin, 1589, ustc 511254), sigs. **3v–​ **4r. 35 Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII:  Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 170. 36 Ascham, In anniversarium natalem diem Edvardi principis, Giles, vol. iii, pp. 279–​280; Carr, De scriptorum Britannicorum paucitate, and thus described by Bing in Carr, Demosthenis … orationes, sig. A2v: Reliquus erat unus Carrus.

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mention of ‘these men of worthy memory’ triggers a Proustian digression on Cambridge which distils the tripartite structure adopted by so many of these accounts: first, into a sweet remembrance of my time spent there; then, into some careful thoughts for the grievous alteration that followed soon after; lastly, into much joy, to hear tell of the good recovery and earnest forwardness in all good learning there again.37 Ascham’s anecdotal preface, his passages of threnody and praise, his appeals to friendship and personal history, are neither mere ornament nor conventional appeals for patronage. They are central to a broad and self-interested ­programme of cultural recovery advanced early in Elizabeth’s reign by the Henrician class of 1540. 2

‘Examples for Art to Follow’: Memory and Rhetoric

In The Scholemaster these anecdotes also fulfil a more technical purpose. When Ascham insists that he writes ‘not so much to note the first or praise the last, as to leave in memory of writing for good example to posterity’ the virtues of this golden age, ‘example’ bears a technical freight, proper to rhetoric, that suggests how integral his Cambridge memories are to The Scholemaster’s pedagogical system.38 ‘Good example’ in this book is not just idle storytelling. It is designed to work, and The Scholemaster tells us how. Examples, Ascham tells us, are ‘the best kind of teaching’.39 He censures Sturm for using too few, and sees a gap in the market for a ‘very profitable book’ De imitatione oratoria (‘On Oratorical Imitation’), ‘containing a certain few fit precepts, unto the which should be gathered and applied plenty of examples, out of the choicest authors of both the tongues’.40 The Scholemaster lays the ground for this work by both selecting, and also teaching the principles of selecting, textual examples. Ascham will suffer his Praeceptor to be sparing of rules, he tells Sturm, ‘provided only that he shows himself liberal and generous

37 38 39 40

Giles, vol. iii, p. 232. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid, p. 222, p. 226; cf. Giles, vol. iii, p. 231, p. 239, and Ascham to Sturm, London, December 1568, letter xcix, Giles, vol. ii, p. 178.

236 Lazarus not only in the producing of examples, which is a task of labor and attention, but also in their treatment, which is a task of learning and judgment’.41 Yet for Ascham textual imitatio is never wholly without an ethical dimension, a dimension whereby a memory of Cheke could itself become an example for imitation. His theory of imitation persistently blurs the distinction between rhetorical precept and the example of a person following that precept. ‘I must have Cicero the imitator as my example’, Ascham writes to Sturm, ‘not the imitator of Cicero’, and explains what he means in a passage densely describing Cicero’s own imitative behaviour: Whoever has been not only a diligent observer, but even one skilled in learning, prudent in judgment, of what path Cicero himself followed, and what steps Cicero himself ascended, when he followed, neared, and preceded the Greeks; and whoever notices wisely in which passages and by what method our model left the Greeks themselves behind, frequently equal, most often superior to them; he, and only he, would arrive safely and by a right road to the imitation of Cicero himself. For who perceives intelligently how Cicero followed others will himself see most happily by far the manner in which Cicero is to be followed.42 In order to write like Cicero we must learn to imitate not Cicero’s writing, but Cicero’s own practices of reading. True, Cicero’s reading can only be reconstructed from his surviving texts, and thus remains resolutely textual. Yet The Scholemaster insists nevertheless that by a process of critical reverse-​ engineering our ‘example’ should be Cicero himself, Cicero the reader rather than an aggregate of stylistic features in Cicero’s text. ‘If I should desire to become another Cicero’, Ascham puts it to Sturm, ‘how should I rather than by that same system which made a Cicero out of Cicero?’43 Good writing in The Scholemaster is achieved not through imitation of textual characteristics, but through impersonation of ‘how Tully’s wit did work at divers times’.44 Counter-​ intuitively, that is, Ascham locates ‘Ciceronianism’ not in the particulars of Ciceronian style, but in a kind of imitatio Ciceronis. In order to write like Cicero, one must be like Cicero. This alliance of rhetoric and ethics owes much to Quintilian’s description of the perfect orator as vir bonus dicendi peritus, ‘a good man skilled in speaking’, a 41 42 43 44

Ascham to Sturm, London, December 1568, letter xcix, Giles, vol. ii, p. 179. Ibid., p. 180. Ibid., p. 183, translation slightly modified. Giles, vol. iii, p. 191.

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formula in which eloquence and character are indivisible.45 It was a formula that clearly informed both these humanists’ comportment  –​Ascham himself was praised by Michael Toxites for ‘uniting virtue and piety with erudition’ –​and also explains the easy associations we have seen (in Carr’s De scriptorum Britannicorum paucitate (‘On the Paucity of English Writers’), for example) between England’s decline in learning and the corruption of its religion and morals.46 Continuing a long line of works including Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Castiglione’s Courtier, and looking ahead to Sidney’s Defence of Poesie, The Scholemaster understands that rhetorical education is inseparable from character formation, and thus that the ‘example’ of a man like Cheke is separable from rhetorical precept in name alone. ‘All the works of nature, in a manner’, writes Ascham, ‘be examples for art to follow’; beside ‘good precepts in books’, the court ‘also never lacked many fair examples for young gentlemen to follow: and surely one example more valuable, both to good and ill, than precepts written in books’.47 Among those ‘better and nearer examples’ at court was ‘our most noble Queen Elizabeth’, while at university Cheke is, as ever, the prime example.48 Concluding a lengthy section of book I with a comparison of ‘hard and rough wits’ with ‘quick and light wits’, therefore, it is to Cheke that Ascham turns, not this time for wisdom but as an example of the best disposition itself, ‘such a wit as is quick without lightness, sharp without brittleness, desirous of good things without newfangleness’, and so on.49 The technical language of ‘example’ is attached to Cheke throughout Ascham’s writings. Many at Cambridge, Ascham told Sturm in 1550, have come to learn languages ‘stimulated by the example, the precepts, and the counsel of John Cheke and Thomas Smith’; Cheke and Redman raised up learned men at Cambridge ‘by their only example of excellency in learning, of godliness in living, of diligence in studying, of counsel in exhorting, of good order in all things’; Ascham thanked Cheke in 1550 for ‘your great intellect giving me precept, example, and advice’; in 1551, he confided in Thomas Smith that ‘only you and Mr Cheke have pulled forward by the example of your diligence, learning, conscious, counsel, good order, not only of studying but of living, all such as in Cambridge have since sprung up’.50 Ascham appears in these passages to 45 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, xii.i.1; see Ryan, Ascham, pp. 263–​266. 46 Michael Toxites to Ascham, Strasbourg, 22 August 1551, letter cxxix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 299. 47 Giles, vol. iii, pp. 210, 142. 48 Ibid., p. 180. 49 Ibid., p. 103. 50 Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, 28 January 1550, letter xciv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 174; Ascham to Sturm, Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 190; Giles, vol. iii, p. 142; Ascham to Thomas Smith, April–​November 1551, letter cxxxii, Giles I, pt. 2, p. 306.

238 Lazarus sustain at least a nominal distinction between ‘precept’ and ‘example’. But if Cheke is deployed as an example of his teaching of precepts –​if the central precept of rhetoric is to follow Cicero’s behavioural example –​it is a distinction without a difference. Indeed example takes over at the limits of Ascham’s system, where articulable precept gives up. Describing a style perfect by every formal measure except that it is ‘overfull’, the language of precept fails Ascham, and his disapproval can only be expressed through example: when his talk shall be heard, or his writing be read of such one, as is either of my two dearest friends, Mr. Haddon at home, or John Sturmius in Germany: that nimium [too much] in him, which fools and unlearned will most commend, shall either of these two bite his lip or shake his head at it.51 Faced with the writer who has done everything right, has followed every rule and internalised every precept, Ascham can only frame the problem unsystematically, through the idiosyncratic disapprobation of exemplary men. When, therefore, in perhaps the most famous passage of The Scholemaster, Ascham describes ‘for that part of true imitation’ the ‘pleasant talks’ he had at St John’s with Cheke and Thomas Watson, ‘comparing the precepts of Aristotle, and Horace de Arte Poetica with the examples of Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca’, he does indeed mean by ‘true imitation’ the imitation of classical drama, and the principles of that imitation conveyed by Aristotle and Horace.52 Yet ‘true imitation’, if we follow the texture and the logic of The Scholemaster, is also crucially imitation of the ‘pleasant talks’ Ascham remembers between Watson, Cheke, and himself, at Cambridge around 1540. One moment a memorial to exemplary men invested in abstracting their behaviour into precept, the next a programme of precepts re-​embodying its lost examples, Ascham’s Scholemaster persistently dissolves the boundary between memoir and manual. There was a model for this kind of writing, which emerged from the same Cambridge circles and anticipated the genre of The Scholemaster: Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553). Though a member of King’s College rather than St John’s, Wilson fell firmly in with Cheke’s circle soon after his arrival in 1541; Ascham lists him in that company, and thirty years later he would make important contributions, as we have seen, to the commemoration of Cheke.53 He 51 52 53

Giles, vol. iii, p. 203. Ibid., pp. 241–​242. Wilson is listed by Ascham to Raven, Gravesend, 21 September 1550, letter civ, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 209.

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was also a seminal figure in a genre of memorial anthology developed by the mid-​century St John’s community. The first work in this genre was probably compiled by Cheke himself, following the death of Martin Bucer in late February 1551. Wilson contributed to this collection of memorial writings alongside Cheke, Carr, Haddon, Sir Anthony Cooke, Alexander Nowell, Nicholas Udall, and the brothers Henry and Charles Brandon, Dukes of Suffolk, young stars in the Cambridge firmament.54 Yet just six months later the Brandon brothers caught the sweating sickness and died within hours of one another, and this time it fell to Wilson to edit Cambridge’s memorial volume Vita et obitus duorum fratrum Suffolciensium (The Life and Death of the Two Suffolk Brothers’), contributing in his own right a consolatory letter, an account of the Brandons’ life and death, and several more poems.55 These volumes on Bucer and the Brandons were the earliest memorial anthologies to be printed in England, a new genre and an early instance of the self-​referential literature through which the Cambridge circle constituted itself, later so apparent in the sudden efflorescence of ‘memories of Cheke’.56 The Brandon volume already recognised itself as participating in a local tradition of St John’s memorial, elegising those who had themselves elegised others only six months earlier. It was Wilson’s reworking of material from the Brandon memorial volume into his Arte of Rhetorique that most closely parallels the techniques of The Scholemaster.57 Twice in this major English rhetorical manual Wilson redeploys his earlier material in order to provide examples of the rhetorical ‘precepts’ he sets out. On the first occasion, four pages of rules for the ‘Oracion demonstrative’, the category of epideictic rhetoric governing funeral oration, are illustrated by an English paraphrase of material Wilson had composed at greater length in Latin for Vita et obitus: ‘because examples geue greate lighte, after these preceptes are set furthe, I  will commende two noble gentlemen, Henry Duke of Suffolk, and his brother lorde Charles Duke with hym’.58 In the 54 55 56

57 58

John Cheke (ed.), De obitu doctissimi et sanctissimi theologi doctoris Martini Buceri (London: Reyner Wolf, 1551, ustc 504587); Ascham appears to attribute the volume to Cheke in a letter to Sturm, Augsburg, 22 June 1551, letter cxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 295. Thomas Wilson (ed.), Vita et obitus duorum fratrum Suffolciensium, Henrici et Caroli Brandoni (London: Richard Grafton, 1551, ustc 504667). See G. W. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 53; John F. McDiarmid, ‘Classical Epitaphs for Heroes of Faith: Mid-​Tudor Neo-​Latin Memorial Volumes and Their Protestant Humanist Context’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 3.1 (1996), pp. 23–​47, at p. 26; Binns, Intellectual Culture, pp. 40–​43. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London: Richard Grafton, 1553, ustc 504926). Ibid., fols. 6v–​9v. On funeral oratory see John M. McManamon, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press,

240 Lazarus second case, he inserts a very long letter to the Brandons’ mother to ‘serue for an example of comforte’, parts of which translate material directly from Vita et obitus.59 ‘The rather to make preceptes plaine’, he explains, ‘I haue added examples at large both for counsel geuyng, & for comfortynge’.60 Wilson’s explicit awareness in his Arte of Rhetorique that these funerary compositions, however local and authentically felt, were also exemplary rhetorical ­exercises –​his structuring of the relationship between precept and example, rhetorical instruction and memory –​fixes The Scholemaster’s descent from the memorial literature of the 1550s.61 Ascham’s elegies for Cambridge around 1540 invoke not only a golden age of learning or a particular fellowship of people, but also the genre of Cambridge elegy itself, the engine of affirmation and reaffirmation of a community constituted in part by its participation in local practices of literary memorial. The Scholemaster’s roots in this long, local elegiac tradition are most visible when it comes closest to elegy proper, in a three-​page digression on the death of young John Whitney.62 In this anecdote about ‘a young gentleman’ who ‘was my bedfellow’, Whitney represents, despite his tender years, the exemplary commitment to learning that The Scholemaster hopes to inculcate. ‘We began after Christmas’, Ascham recalls; ‘I read unto him Tully de Amicitia, which he did every day twice translate, out of Latin into English, and out of English into Latin again’. The choice of text here complements, once again, the closeness of the scene: the privy space between tutor and student which is filled with their mutual incantations, passing Cicero’s words back and forth from mouth to mouth. From there the two progressed according to The Scholemaster’s plan, and Whitney showed such talent that ‘some in seven year in grammar schools, yea, and some in the university too, cannot do half so well’. Yet to the ‘great lamentation’ of Ascham, the court, and Queen Elizabeth herself, John Whitney ‘departed within few days out of this world’, and Ascham proceeds to insert eleven couplets in English fourteeners in his memory.

59 60 61

62

1989), and Menander Rhetor, ed. and trans. D.  A. Russell and N.  G. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981). Ibid., fols. 36r–​47r. Ibid., fol. 47r. For further remarks on biography as rhetoric in this period see Timothy J. Wengert, ‘ “With Friends Like This …”: The Biography of Philip Melanchthon by Joachim Camerarius’, in Thomas F.  Mayer and D.  R. Woolf, eds., The Rhetorics of Life-​Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 115–​131, at pp. 116–​119. Giles, vol. iii, p. 172, is the source of all the quotations in this paragraph.

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Perhaps because the poem on John Whitney is no masterpiece, the place of this passage in the larger project of The Scholemaster has not attracted much comment.63 Yet Whitney’s anecdote rehearses in miniature many of the memorial devices typical of St John’s elegy –​‘a court full of such young gentlemen’, gentlemen such as the Brandons and the fellows of St John’s, ‘were rather a paradise than a court upon earth’.64 Moreover, Ascham’s lament for Whitney looks to a locus classicus of elegy on a boy’s death much imitated among the St John’s circle, Virgil’s passage on Marcellus at Aeneid 6.860–​886. Designated heir of Augustus, Marcellus’s death ‘pointedly symbolizes the death of the future’, as Stephen Tracy has put it, and the roots of Virgil’s passage in the formal oratorical genre of epicedion (funeral oration) frame this loss in curricular terms, emphasising the boy’s excellence in the several virtues of a Roman education in order to lament his lost promise.65 Parallels to Marcellus were commonplace in the St John’s circle during this period of literary mourning. Richard Brandesby cites ‘that verse of Vergil about Marcellus’ to Ascham to express his grief at the death of King Edward in early 1553, and John McDiarmid has pointed out that at least seven poets in Wilson’s memorial volume for the Brandon brothers use variations on the Virgilian phrase abstulit atra dies (‘that black day took him away’), several turning it to abstulit una dies (‘a single day took [them] away’), since the Brandons died on the same day.66 It is thus in Ascham’s ‘Marcellus’ episode on the death of young John Whitney that the complex relationship between instruction and memorial local to St John’s College in the mid-​century is most resonant. Marcellus, Whitney, the Brandons, King Edward, the shining generation at St John’s: all are emblems of broken succession, a whole generation’s promise cut short by early death and the ‘grievous alteration’ of Mary’s accession. By channelling their examples into instructional literature, both Wilson and Ascham preserve them for rhetorical replication –​preserve, to adapt Ascham’s remarks on Cicero, ‘that same system which made a Whitney out of Whitney’. The Arte of Rhetorique and The Scholemaster sit at the intersection between pedagogy and funeral oration, a genre of oratory both governed by rhetorical precept and, in Ascham’s and 63

An exception is Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 23–​24, in which the episode is taken to embody the circulation of Ciceronian amicitia. 64 Ibid. 65 Stephen V. Tracy, ‘The Marcellus Passage (Aeneid 6.860–​886) and Aeneid 9–​12’, The Classical Journal, 70.4 (1975), pp. 37–​42, p. 38; I paraphrase here the argument of Nicholas Horsfall, ‘Virgil and Marcellus’ Education’, The Classical Quarterly, 39.1 (2009), pp. 266–​267. 66 Brandesby to Ascham, Malines, 18 July 1553, letter clii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 370; McDiarmid, ‘Classical Epitaphs’, p. 28.

242 Lazarus Wilson’s hands, constitutive of it. They belong, at last, to a kind of humanist elegy: an attempt to preserve a scholarly life in precept, to remedy loss in words. 3

‘Roasting Chestnuts’: Memories of Absent Friends

Perhaps this many-​faceted generic identity is a natural consequence of writing about, and for, a collegiate community. A college is not just a place of work, but home and society as well. Fellows move through life together; careers and affections, learning and character, friendship and profit, are intertwined. Reading The Scholemaster as collegiate literature may thus be the key to its elision of the difference between textual and personal examples. It may also suggest, at last, how the instructional manual proposed itself to Ascham as the natural form for a kind of writing that permeates his literary output:  the writing of friendship.67 I have already cited many examples of this kind of writing from Ascham’s letters. It was a mode he refined over many years of correspondence from the 1540s onward. To William Grindal in late 1544 he recalls ‘how closely we were associated in a firm and almost religious union of friendship during the past few years’, mentions sending letters to ‘the great Cheke’, urges Grindal, in their separation, to ‘tell each other our longing’, and underlines ‘how bitter is my grief because of my longing for you’.68 I  believe Ascham first develops here a trope of intimacy he would return to in The Scholemaster, the retreat into privy chambers: ‘Conyers and I’, he confides to Grindal, ‘retired into our little room, into our studies, miss you and the pleasure of your studies’.69 This trope appears again in letters of 1550–​1551 on his visit to ‘my good friend John Cheke at his home’, reminding Cheke of ‘those talks which we had sitting apart in your room’, and was redeployed, as we have seen,

67 Humanist amicitia is a well-​tilled field with deep classical roots; I focus here on Ascham’s writings in particular. For the wider context see Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship, and for an overview of subsequent scholarly developments see Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson, eds., Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–​1700 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 68 Ascham to William Grindal, Cambridge, November–​December 1544, letter xxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 62–​63. 69 Ibid.; Conyers, an undergraduate, was Ascham’s cousin and roommate, sleeping on a trundle-​bed stored beneath the fellow’s bed during daytime. On the Elizabethan rhetoric of privy spaces, see Patricia Fumerton, ‘ “Secret” Arts:  Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets’, Representations 15 (1986), pp. 57–​97.

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in The Scholemaster, in Sackville’s taking him ‘by the hand’ to the window of the Queen’s privy chamber, and in the ‘many pleasant talks’ he enjoyed with Watson and Cheke at college.70 On these occasions intimacy is not only declared explicitly, but generated metaphorically through small spaces and close bodies. The purity of these friendships sequesters them, for Ascham, from the calamities of mid-​century politics. Time and again he makes sure to emphasise the tenacity of his friendships across confessional and political borders; personal qualities such as generosity, warmth, and kindness mattered more to him than ideological commitments. Ascham himself, though firmly in the evangelical camp, was flexible enough to benefit from the patronage of the conservative Chancellor of Cambridge, Bishop Stephen Gardiner, and to speak well of him and of other conservatives when the chance arose. ‘We have adversaries among us still’, he writes in his first letter to Sturm in 1550, but ‘because many of them [oppose us] without bitterness and vituperation … we cannot but follow them in love’; John Redman differs ‘about justification by faith alone’, a later letter reports, yet ‘always modestly and without harsh words’, and Redman and Bucer alike, respectively conservative and evangelical, outweigh ‘the integrity of all the Babylonians, Ecks, Billicks, and the rest’.71 George Park has conjectured that passages praising Thomas Watson, Ascham’s friend and a rigid conservative, were removed from the final draft of The Scholemaster in the interests of political prudence, but Ascham is eager elsewhere to disregard religious confession in favour of qualities such as learning and probity of character. Of Nicholas Metcalfe, Master of St John’s in the 1530s and ‘a Papist in deed’, Ascham exclaims: ‘would to God, among all us Protestants, I might once see but one that would win like praise, in doing like good, for the advancement of learning and virtue’.72 Concerning the Catholic polemicist Jerónimo Osório Ascham was still more explicit. Notwithstanding Osório’s ‘lustiness in striving against St. Austin, and his over-​rank railing against poor Luther, and the truth of God’s doctrine’, Ascham scruples, ‘there hath passed betwixt him and me, sure tokens of much good will and friendly opinion, the one toward the other’. True, ‘the greatest matter of all’ does ‘in certain points separate our minds’:

70 71 72

Ascham to Raven, Gravesend, 21 September 1550, letter civ, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p.  209; Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, 28 January 1550, letter xciv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 173–​176. Ascham to Sturm, Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 189; Ascham to Sturm, Augsburg, 22 June 1551, letter cxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 295. Giles, vol. iii, p. 234; Park, ‘The First Draft of Ascham’s Scholemaster’, pp. 321–​322.

244 Lazarus And yet for my part, both toward him and divers others here at home, for like cause of excellent learning, great wisdom, and gentle humanity, which I have seen in them, and felt at their hands myself, where the matter of difference is mere conscience in a quiet mind inwardly, and not contentious malice with spiteful railing openly, I can be content to follow this rule, in misliking some one thing, not to hate for any thing else.73 ‘Mere conscience in a quiet mind inwardly’: again, Ascham situates goodwill in privy spaces, in small, intimate refuges from public turbulence in which friendship is the only law. Ascham’s tales of Cambridge around 1540 are not only examples of scholarly and cultural flowering, but also recall a period before confessional differences hardened on both sides, examples of religious accommodation fervently to be desired within living memory of Mary’s reign. As he composed The Scholemaster late in life, blighted by poor health and the slow winnowing of his friends, Ascham turned ever more to his personal relationships. His letters in these last years fret constantly over the security of his wife and children. And his correspondents, likewise, adopt an elegiac tone. The last letter Ascham received was ‘from a very old friend, Thomas Smith’, and invoked the long solidity of intellectual friendship: ‘it surely is nothing new for friends who are philosophers by the same discipline to have the same theories, just as those who have fought on the same battlefield or have been imprisoned in the same gaol’.74 A touching letter of late 1566 from Christopher Mount speaks of their ‘most pleasing and customary intimacy’, and out-​Prousts Ascham himself: ‘I remember how much you enjoyed roasting chestnuts according to your custom; whenever I eat them they always revoke my memory and desire of you’.75 Increasingly it becomes clear that throughout Ascham’s life the writing of friendship was a substitute for present friends themselves.76 Ascham recognises as much in a letter from abroad to his friends at St John’s College, in 1551: ‘I take pleasure in writing this letter, that is, in talking with you, in being at home for a while in St John’s, from whence my heart can never be absent’.77 Absent writing substitutes for present talking, voices the location of the heart. As he lived on, Ascham’s writing had more and more

73 74 75 76 77

Giles, vol. iii, pp. 204–​205. Smith to Ascham, Hautmont, 20 December 1568, letter c, Giles, vol. ii, p. 192. Mount to Ascham, Strasbourg, 24 December 1566, letter lxxiv, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 123–​124. Compare Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, London:  University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 162, on ‘the familiar letter as a token of the friend’s body’. Ascham to the fellows of St John’s, Augsburg, 12 October 1561, letter cxxxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 307.

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to absorb the absence of his friends; to constitute friends and their intimacies in words alone. One relationship in particular proved a site of rehearsal for this writing of friendship, loss, and remembrance, for though Ascham’s long correspondence with Sturm records one of the defining friendships of his life, the two never met in person.78 Their letters become more personal as they go on. Ascham named his son ‘Sturm’ in October 1562; Sturm agreed to be godfather to the boy a month later, and sent him his picture, ‘so that if I should die before he see me, he may see something of me after my passing’.79 And Sturm, at last, provides a final analogue for The Scholemaster’s hybrid genre of rhetorical instruction and memorial. Over the full sweep of their correspondence, Ascham and Sturm discuss Sturm’s much-​anticipated Dialogi Aristotelici (‘Aristotelian Dialogues’), a commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric in dialogue form, now lost. Sturm is working on it in November 1550, when he tells Ascham that he has ‘picked out a place for his Majesty in my Aristotelian Dialogues’; the following November, Cheke has seen the first book, and Ascham, expecting delivery, is planning to show it to Walter Haddon.80 In a letter of April 1562 Ascham offers a glimpse of the work: Sturm had told John Hales that the book was finished, and that ‘all of you are mentioned in the book, as also Morison and Cheke’.81 In Sturm’s final letter to Ascham, two weeks before Ascham’s death on 30 December, 1568, he is revising the Aristotelian Dialogues again, and his closing remarks echo Ascham’s understanding of the relationship between their lives, their correspondence, and their pedagogical works: I hope that I shall speak with you after my life, whose end is assaulted by my sixtieth year; I do not dread the bridge and I wish to be relieved of the burdens of living. Morysin, dead now, delights me very much, speaking in these dialogues: but behold, I have forgotten my friend’s case. I pray you, recreate me in your letters; when I talk to myself, I see the wife of a most friendly man, his most dear children; I see the ashes of a man departed, good, learned, a teacher of many men who are yet alive –​to him your most thankful benefice is forthcoming.82 78 79 80 81 82

For more on this relationship, see Lucy Nicholas, ch. 7 in this volume. Ascham to Sturm, London, 20 October 1562, letter xxxviii, Giles, vol. ii, p. 71; Sturm to Ascham, Frankfurt, 13 November 1562, letter liii, Giles, vol. ii, p. 94. Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg, 18 November 1550, letter cix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p.  223; Ascham to Raven and Ireland, Innsbruck, 17 November 1551, letter cxxxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 315–​316. Ascham to Sturm, London, 11 April 1562, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. ii, p. 64. Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg, 16 December 1568, letter xcviii, Giles, vol. ii, pp. 173–​174.

246 Lazarus Feeling death approach (though in fact he would live over two decades longer), Sturm recreates Morison in words in the Aristotelian Dialogues just as Ascham recreates Cheke in words in The Scholemaster. And Sturm understands that he, likewise, consists in words to Ascham. Divided by geography rather than by death, their relationship throughout their lives was textual, a substitute for bodily presence. Recrea me tuis literis, Sturm begs Ascham, ‘recreate me in’ or ‘by your letters’. The Latin ablative preserves the dual aspect of this kind of writing that bridges the familiar letter and the rhetorical manual:  a kind of writing that was at once the repository of memory and its agent. Sturm, in many ways his closest friend, existed to Ascham solely in writing, and writing, for Ascham, was concomitantly a property of absence. For all its assiduous cultivation of modes of literary friendship and warm effusions of affection, humanist correspondence nonetheless here and there registers a kind of loss, an epistolary history of absent lives. The throb of that loss found expression in the literary and pedagogical endeavours of the Cambridge set and its correspodents. It appears in the conversation of Morison, Cheke, and Ascham, and their refiguration in Sturm’s Aristotelian Dialogues; in the mid-century funerary volumes and their refiguration in Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique; in the ‘memories of Cheke’ of the 1560s and ’70s and their refiguration in Ascham’s Scholemaster. These were attempts to capture in words the shape of a humanist life, a life in which to learn was to live and to live was to teach. Perhaps there is a broader affiliation between life-​writing of this oblique kind and instructional literature. In his personal copy of Thucydides, Ascham left detailed annotations on Pericles’s funeral oration which attest his intense scholarly interest in that wellspring of Greek epideictic rhetoric. This was an instructional book, designed for learning and for teaching. Yet Ascham’s copy was also a memorial object that he inherited from his dear friend and colleague John Redman, and still bears the trace of his living hand.83 Ascham’s own funeral oration, delivered by his young St John’s friend Edward Grant ‘to youthful students of the Latin tongue’, explicitly accompanies ‘an exhortation to purity of diction, after the example of the same Roger Ascham’.84 Erasmus’s De copia simultaneously teaches rhetorical variation and enshrines Erasmus’s friendship with Thomas More. Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, the classic text of 83 84

See appendix 2, *Thucydides (1535). Grant’s original title, not fully transcribed by Giles, reads: Ad adolescentulos latinae linguae studiosos Ed. Grantae oratio, de vita et obitu Rogeri Aschami, ac eius scriptionis laudibus, cum adhortatione ad dictionis puritatem, eiusdem Rogeri Aschami exemplo. See Edward Grant (ed.), Disertissimi viri Rogeri Aschami … familiarium epistolarum libri tres (London: Francis Coldock, 1576), sig. Y3r.

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courtly humanism, purports to be a conduct manual –​and is a conduct manual –​but is really a memoir of a golden time at the court of Urbino, just as The Scholemaster purports to be a rhetorical handbook –​and is a rhetorical handbook –​but is really a memoir of a golden time at ‘that most worthy college of St John’s in Cambridge’.85 Translated by Thomas Hoby, a scion of St John’s, Il Cortegiano was praised by Ascham for joining ‘learning with comely exercises’; perhaps there is, too, an inherent connection between these conduct manuals and the logic of precept and example, ‘demonstrations of … practice’, as Sir Philip Sidney puts it, and ‘the contemplations therein’.86 But such questions push beyond the scope of this essay. I have attempted here to look at The Scholemaster as a kind of writing, to treat what Ryan calls ‘lively contemporary anecdotes’ not as mere ornament but as a load-​bearing element of the whole work. Recalling the lost golden age of 1540s Cambridge and its dramatis personae, shaping his young students’ words and characters, and embodying in words the examples of absent friends were for Ascham, I  think, essentially one endeavour. That endeavour took the literary form of the rhetorical manual, which in Ascham’s hands becomes an organ of memory and its reproduction in new bodies. When scholars pass over the texture of Ascham’s writing in this way it seems to me that they read his work against his own instructions, rifling it for precept at the expense of example. Yet rhetorical theory ‘also is part of practice’, Simon Goldhill has observed, and in rhetorical handbooks, ‘theory performs too’.87 If The Scholemaster does mark ‘a new stage in the rise of English formal prose’ it is not at last for Ascham’s repackaging of commonplace educational principles, but rather for the literary fabric of this sad and beautiful book. 85

For comparison of Il Cortegiano to the The Scholemaster, see Linda Bradley Salamon, ‘The Courtier and the Scholemaster’, Comparative Literature 25.1 (1973), pp. 17–​36; Wyman H.  Herendeen, William Camden: A Life in Context (Woodbridge, Rochester, NY:  Boydell Press, 2007), p. 118. 86 Giles iii.141; Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London:  William Ponsonby, 1595, ustc 512995), sig. Br. 87 Simon Goldhill, ‘What Is Ekphrasis For?’, Classical Philology, 102.1 (2007), pp. 1–​19, at p. 8.

­c hapter 12

Ascham and Sturm on imitatio: Ethical and Ludic Attitudes to a Literary Technique Mike Pincombe The concept of literary imitatio was a major talking-​point for litterati across sixteenth-​century Europe. There were any number of treatises on the topic –​ and Roger Ascham seems to have read them all: those by Desiderius Erasmus, Christophe de Longueil, Guillaume Budé, Philip Melanchthon, Joachim Camerarius, Johannes Sambucus, Paulus Cortesius, Politian (Poliziano), Pietro Bembo and Gianfrancesco Pico, and also Bartolomaeus Riccius. All of these scholars are mentioned, if only in passing, in Ascham’s remarks on imitation in his important and influential educational treatise The Scholemaster (1570).1 But for Ascham one person stood out from the crowd of European men of letters jostling for attention:  Johannes Sturm.2 Other scholars, he says, have done well enough in their various ways: … but Ioan. Sturmius de Nobilitate literata, et de Amissa dicendi ratione, [is] farre best of all, in myne opinion, that euer tooke this matter in hand. For all the rest, declare chiefly this point, whether one, or many, or all, are to be followed: but Sturmius onelie hath most learnedlie declared, who is to be followed, what is to be followed, and the best point of all, by what way & order, trew Imitation is rightlie to be exercised.3 Sturm’s distinction, then, is to have explained the compositional techniques that writers need to master if they wish to become good imitators, and this is what impressed Ascham.4 1 See Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London: John Day, 1570, ustc 507056), sigs. P1r−P2r [image 57]. For this and all other texts consulted using Early English Books Online in the preparation of this chapter, the eebo image number is given in square brackets after the signature or page number. 2 For a broader review of Ascham’s relationship with Sturm, see Lucy Nicholas, ch. 7 in this volume. 3 Ascham, The Scholemaster, sig. P2r [image 57]. 4 Sturm very briefly touches on material relating to imitatio in the De amissa, when he says it is a good thing for children to be taught how to vary text verborum praepositione, postpositione,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_014

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In The Scholemaster, after he has spelt out the basic techniques of imitation in a passage lifted directly from Sturm, Ascham is very quick to acknowledge his debt to the German scholar as well as to his English mentor, sir John Cheke: In thies fewe rude English wordes, are wrapt vp all the necessarie tooles and instrumentes, wherewith trewe Imitation is rightlie wrought withall in any tonge. Which tooles, I openlie confesse, be not of myne owne forging, but partlie left vnto me by the cunningest Master, and one of the worthiest Ientlemen that euer England bred, Syr Iohn Cheke: partelie borowed by me out of the shoppe of the dearest frende I haue out of England, Io. St. [viz. Johannes Sturm].5 His debt to Cheke can only be noted, because there is no documentation to help us measure how much Ascham owed.6 Perhaps the two men only talked about imitation when they were colleagues at St John’s.7 On the other hand, the debt to Sturm is crystal-​clear, as we shall see in the pages that follow.8 Be that as it may, Ascham felt strongly enough about the right exercise of imitation to offer very gentle criticism of his friend and mentor: And although Sturmius herein [in discussons of imitation] doth farre passe all other, yet hath he not so fullie and perfitelie done it, as I do wishe he had, and as I know he could. For though he hath done it perfitelie for precept, yet hath he not done it perfitelie enough for example: which he did, neither for lacke of skill, nor by negligence, but of purpose, contented

interpositione, appositione, commutatione (by placing words before, after, or in between, or next to, or by changing them’). See Johannes Sturm, De amissa dicendi ratione (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1538, ustc 667644), fol. 71r. Cf. Johannes Sturm, Nobilitas litterata ad Werteros fratres (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1549, ustc 667642). 5 Ascham, The Scholemaster, sigs. O3v–​O4r [image 55]. 6 But it does seem as if Ascham’s idea of a useful book showing where Cicero had imitated a range of Greek orators might have come from Cheke, who apparently recommended the project to him. See Ascham, The Scholemaster, sig. P4v [image 59]. 7 For more on Ascham’s relationship with Cheke, see John McDiarmid, ch. 5 and Micha Lazarus, ch. 11 in this volume. 8 There is a good essay on Ascham and Sturm by Marion Trousdale, ‘Recurrence and Renaissance:  Rhetorical Imitation in Ascham and Sturm’, English Literary Renaissance, 6 (1976), pp. 156–​179. See also the two classic essays of the 1980s: G. W. Pigman iii, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980), pp. 1–​32; and JoAnn DellaNeva, ‘Imitating Lesser Lights:  The Imitation of Minor Writers in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989), pp. 449–​479.

250 Pincombe with one or two examples, bicause he was mynded in those two bookes, to write of it both shortlie, and also had to touch other matters.9 In fact, Ascham himself gives no examples at all in The Scholemaster, but even as he wrote these words, he was already planning a separate treatise on imitation in particular, rather than education in general; and this is no doubt where all the detailed examples would have been set out.10 But the point is made here of the importance of examples, and, ideally, plenty of them. Examples were important because Ascham agreed with Sturm’s emphasis on the practical acquisition of the techniques of imitation.11 As an experienced teacher himself, Ascham knew his business, after all. However, this practical emphasis on more or less professional teaching led to a real problem in Sturm’s programme of imitation which Ascham, who follows it closely, could not solve in The Scholemaster. Nobilitas litterata was written by Sturm for two of his well-​born pupils, Philip and Anton Werther, who had asked their teacher to lay out the sort of things a noblemen ought to know in order to reach an appropriate level of literary accomplishment, ‘fit and apt for [their] yeres, familie, and nobilitie’.12 Sturm was to prepare a book on the ‘waye, order, and trade of studie’ that was appropriate for a young nobleman of good family. Ascham’s The Scholemaster was likewise advertised on its title-​page as ‘specially purposed for the priuate bryging vp of youth in ientlemen and noble mens houses’. And we may note also that when Thomas Browne translated Nobilitas litterata in 1570, he called it A Ritch 9 Ascham, The Scholemaster, sig. P2r [image 57]. 10 More precisely, Ascham gives no examples of imitation at the verbal level, but he does give a very good account of Cicero’s imitation of Plato at the level of res, or things, as opposed to verba. See Ascham, The Scholemaster, sigs. O8v−P1r [image 56]. It is because, in his De imitatione (1545), Bartolomeo Ricci (Riccius) gives examples of the imitation of things –​scenes, situations –​that Ascham is able to praise him almost warmly. But, of course, that is because ‘his whole doctrine, iudgement, and order, semeth to be borowed out of Io. Stur. Bookes’ (Ascham, The Scholemaster, sig. P2r [image 57]). Ricci does not in fact mention Sturm, so perhaps Ascham thought he had dishonestly appropriated Sturm’s ideas. 11 See also Lucy Nicholas, ch. 7, n. 24 in this volume. 12 Thomas Browne, A Ritch Storehouse or Treasurie for Nobilitye and Gentlemen, which in Latine is called Nobilitas litterata, written by a famous and excellent man, Iohn Sturmius (London: Henry Denham, 1570, ustc 507220), sig. B1r [image 5]. Reference to Browne’s translation will be given as: ‘Sturm, Ritch Storehouse’; and, if the Latin text is also quoted, the reference will be made thus:  ‘cf. Nobilitas’. There is a modern translation of Sturm in Lewis W.  Spitz and Barbara Sher Tinsley (eds.), Johann Sturm on Education:  The Reformation and Humanist Learning (St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1995). Reference is made to this text by page number.

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Storehouse or Treasurie for Nobilitye and Gentlemen; and he, too, applied himself to the task in the context of producing useful teaching materials for one of his own well-​born pupils, Philip Howard, earl of Arundel. Sturm was awkwardly aware that the level expected of the noble amateur was much lower than the one on which he himself operated as an expert, and that imitation, at least as he saw it, was really a practice that could only be truly appreciated by the professional man of letters. So his remarks on the techniques of imitatio in Nobilitas Litterata seem somewhat half-​hearted, and his examples appear jejune and trivial. Sturm lowered his sights presumably because he did not expect Philip and Anton Werther to become professional men of letters like himself, but, rather, to take up their positions in the political life of their German homeland; and for this life another kind of learning was really more important: ‘I see not what may more become you, or better set forth your nobilities, than the vnderstanding of ciuill policie, which the Grecians terme Politiken’.13 A degree of literary accomplishment –​enough to turn nobilitas into nobilitas litterata –​had a mainly decorative value, then, compared to this more substantial and practical knowledge. Moreover, ideally, well-​born students would retain their love of literature once they had left the classroom and entered public life, not necessarily by carrying on with an hour spent each morning imitating Cicero, but by supporting their old teachers and the profession of letters more generally. In other words, young noblemen like the Werthers were valuable insofar as they might play the role of Maecenas. Ascham was very aware, too, of the relative dependence of the man of letters on the good offices of the rich and powerful, as was Thomas Browne. The mere fact that the titles of their books advertise themselves as useful to gentry and nobility points to desire on the part of the authors –​and their printers –​to appeal to the interest of the upper class which they served. They were providing a commodity to a buyer, and Ascham, particularly, is very alert to the question of what we now call ‘intellectual property’. It is not only modesty that makes him so quick to confess that his ideas on imitation are all taken from Cheke and Sturm; he also wished to avoid the charge of misappropriation. And this leads us back to the theory and practice of imitatio. Sturm, as we shall see in the following section, positively revelled in the furtive aspect of imitation, in which one writer stealthily appropriated material from another writer, then covered his tracks, so that only the true expert could see what he had done. It was all a game for Sturm. Ascham, however, was much less happy about stealth, which he saw as a kind of stealing; and it was his reservations about 13 Sturm, Ritch Storehouse, sig. B5v [image 10], p. 158.

252 Pincombe the borrowing of material, however playful, that led him to make his most important amendment to Sturm’s basic procedures. Ascham emphasises the primary importance of highlighting what is retained in the process of imitation, as well as what is changed and thus to some extent disguised. This innovation is perhaps the most significant and far-​reaching point he has to make about imitation, the one in which he not only imitates his master, but surpasses him, in a perhaps unconscious act of emulation. However, a more detailed discussion of this point will be found at the end of this essay, and we shall start with Sturm’s very interesting comments on imitatio in Nobilitas litterata. 1

Sturm on Imitatio in Nobilitas Litterata

As we have noted, Sturm published the Nobilitas litterata in 1549 at the request of two students at his Gymnasium in Strasbourg: Philip and Anton Werther. They had come to Strasbourg in 1544, on the orders of their elder brother, Wolfgang, born in 1519, and now the head of the family after the death of their father, Dietrich Werther, in 1536. The family was a learned one: Dietrich was awarded the degree of doctor of civil and canon law at Bologna in 1495; and he impressed the value of learning on his sons. Wolfgang continued the tradition, and supervised the education of his younger brothers; all three of them studied under the scholars Philip Melanchthon and Georg Fabricius, before Wolfgang decided he wished to make the acquaintance of Sturm in 1546, and took himself and his brothers to Strasbourg. Wolfgang left in 1548, but Philip and Anton stayed on until 1554, and they continued to support Sturm in his literary endeavours for at least another decade. Wolfgang, too, remained in close touch with Sturm for many years.14 When he wrote Nobilitas litterata, Sturm does not seem to have actually taught the Werther brothers, at least, not as their tutor. That role was taken by Gerhard Fink, or ‘Sevenus’, as he called himself in Latin, which Sturm expressly states in Nobilitas litterata.15 Sturm only knew how far they had progressed in literary studies from the work they had written for Sevenus, and from the report of their brother, Wolfgang, whom he knew much better. However, Sturm was aware that they had attended his own lectures the previous summer on Virgil’s first Eclogue, as he reminds them when he explains his complicated but original diagrams for understanding the

14 See Historia von dem Uhralten Geschlechte derer … Grafen und Herren von Werthern (Leipzig: Augustus Martini, 1716), p. 49. 15 Sturm, Ritch Storehouse, sig. B3v [image 8], p. 137.

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syntactic structure of the poem.16 Still, Sturm granted the wish of Philip and Anton Werther to compose this work, and this is why the full title of his book reads: ‘Nobilitas litterata ad Werteros fratres’. Nobilitas litterata is not only about imitation, but we shall concentrate on his remarks on imitatio, and particularly on his insistence –​uniquely emphatic amongst writers on imitation –​on the desirability of stealth.17 This secretive kind of imitation requires a great deal of skill, and cannot be simply picked up along the way: ‘it is necessarie and needeful to haue a maister and teacher, and without Arte the secret (furtiva) image of an Imitator is not perceiued’.18 This term furtiva says it all: the imitator is a kind of fur –​‘a thief’. So good imitation is very hard to spot unless you have been trained to detect it by a clever teacher. Not surprisingly, given that he was a teacher himself, Sturm makes this point quite often. His initial empasis, however, is on the general distinction between two Greek terms: phainomenon, ‘that is to say, apparent or evident’, and kekrymmenon, ‘that is as much as hidden, close, or secret’.19 The former, the ‘phenomenal’ order, includes everything that can be easily apprehended, ‘as words are, and the polishing of them, and the ioyning of them togither, as the order, placing and framing of those things that be invented’. The latter, the cecrymmenal order, as we might render the Greek term, is naturally much harder to define. It includes, for example, the ‘signification of an amiable honestie in the Orator’, which points towards the misty ethico-​psychological world beyond the text. And how curious, therefore, that Sturm should tell Philip and Anton Werther that behind the texts they study they will find the furtiva imago imitatoris (‘stealthy image of the imitator’) grinning back at them in complicity. It is if all this amiable honesty is just a front for thievery. But there are also more formal considerations to this process, such as ‘the leauing out of some wordes, reasons, and sentences that might haue bene put in’, and also ‘beautifications and polishings omitted, which might haue bene vsed’. Sturm presumably means that the practised eye can still spot all the things that the author might have done but chose not to. Sturm insists very strongly on the existence of this ghostly cecrymmenal world, and the need to train the critical faculty to pierce the veil of the phenomenal. These invisible things ‘are of so great weight that whomsoeuer passeth them, and see them not, shall neuer worke any excellent feate’. Of course, 16 17

Ibid., sigs. E1r−E3v [images 29–​32], pp. 151–​154. Pigman notes that he was the most insistent of all the Renaissance theorists on the need for occultation. See ‘Versions of Imitation’, p. 11, n. 18. 18 Sturm, Ritch Storehouse, sig. H3v [image 56], p. 170; cf. Nobilitas, fol. 50v. 19 Ibid., sig. G3v [image 48], p. 165.

254 Pincombe most of us do pass them by, because we are not experts. And finally: ‘it is the dutie of an Imitator not only to vewe that which is manifestlye shewed and plainly vttered, but also to consider what is secret, and is not expressed’. This the key point for Sturm: it is only by following the hidden path laid out by earlier imitators that the novice can hope to learn the trade. The occultation of this type of textual content –​whatever it might be –​ means that the imitator needs ‘skilfull eyes’ to see what is not exactly invisible but certainly not obvious: ‘for that these secret poyntes are not espied till they be reuealed’. How does the imitator, especially the tyro, know they are there at all, if they are not immediately obvious, not perceptible as phenomena? Because he has the help of ‘a quick sighted workeman, and a skilfull maister’ –​his tutor. The apprentice imitator has to accept his master’s assurance that the secret points of the text he reveals by his art really do exist, and are not invented by the process of analysis; and then he is in a position to be a teacher himself: ‘to teache vs, to correct vs, to shewe vs howe we maye hide and couer lyke thinges by vnlike vsing and handling the same’. In other words, it seems as the division between phenomenal and cecrymmenal worlds is at least partly motivated by Sturm’s professional insistence on the mystery of his craft, the skills and techniques of the expert which take years to acquire and remain forever beyond the grasp of the uninitiated. But we seem to have moved here from divination to something more shifty. We are not inventing things, but taking over things from other writers, and hiding our debt by disguising this cecrymmenal content at the phenomenal level of words and sentences. It is at this point that Sturm checks himself a little, and recalls an incident in his life which made him realise that it was sometimes acceptable to imitate in such a way as to be detected. He relates an incident from his own student days, one which evidently made an impression on him. When news came to the senate of Venice, he tells Philip and Anton, of the death of the duke of Urbino, in 1508, Bembus (Bembo) wrote a piece in which he imitated the opening of Cicero’s treatise on eloquence, the Brutus, in a way which Sturm felt was perhaps too obvious. He wondered ‘whither Bembus for some purpose woulde haue it perceiued, that his writing was like to Tullies [Cicero’s], or whether he though it coulde not be spied’.20 He was still puzzled years later, and he recalls to the two young men:  ‘while I  considered it [the question of imitation], I remembered this practise, which I nowe speake of’.21 The anecdote told, Sturm moves on to his detailed discussion of the technical 20 Sturm, Ritch Storehouse, G6v [image 50], p. 166. 21 Ibid.

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aspects of imitation, but, as we shall see, he soon returns to the troubling little epiphany of many years earlier. The point he wants to make at this juncture is that ‘an Imitator must hide all similitude and likenesse: which is neuer praysed but when it is comparable with the patterne [model], and yet cannot be perceiued by what meanes and in what places, and examples it commeth to passe’.22 Cecrymmenal orthodoxy is asserted, then, but the doubt remains: does the imitator always have to cover his tracks? Bembo did not do so, after all, and it is this example of maverick imitation that Sturm uses in his more detailed comments on how to imitate a text, as if he is still trying to reconcile himself with its implications for his own furtive theory. He begins thus: ‘this meanes of hyding standeth in three things: in addition, ablation, alteration and chaunging: wherein is contained, coniunction, figuration, commutation, and transformation, both of wordes and sentences, of members, and periods’.23 So all of these techniques –​Sturm’s additio, ablatio, mutatio (the last term expressed as a doublet of synonyms) –​ deal with the phenomenal world of words. They are arranged in a hierarchy of professional expertise. Addition and ablation, says Sturm, are ‘but childishe’, if they are not combined with the wealth of devices contained in alteration. They can be ‘easily vnderstood by themselues’, after all, so anybody can spot them, even beginners like Philip and Anton Werther. Sturm’s own description, however, does not entirely justify this claim. Here it is, presented by Sturm as an example of addition and ablation: The Greekes call the one prosthesin [prosthesis, ‘an addition’] the other aphairesin [aphairesis, ‘a taking away’]: and oftentimes a word or a littell peece, or a member, and the sentence contained therein being eyther added, or taken away, causeth a new forme or ymage of speach. As for example, Tullie sayth thus: I conceiued greater griefe of mind than any man would haue supposed. But Bembus thus: He conceyued verily great griefe and sorowe.24 In the Latin, the quotations read: opinione omnium maiorem animo coepi dolorem (Cicero) and magnum sane dolorem coepit (Bembo).25 How does the example demonstrate addition and ablation? Only one word, dolorem, remains unchanged; but what has been taken away from Cicero? It is only when we treat words as lexemes, that is, in all their different forms, such as coepi and coepit, or magnum and maiorem, that we can isolate the relevant 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Sturm, Ritch Storehouse, G7r [image 50], p. 166. 25 Sturm, Nobilitas, fol. 46r. I have silently omitted Sturm’s inquit Cicero inserted in the quotation from Tully. The words coepi and coepit used here would more commonly be cepi and cepit.

256 Pincombe element of the example. Cicero says animo dolorem, but Bembo uses ablation to reduce this to dolorem. Perhaps we should also include the complete ablation of Cicero’s opinione omnium, which has no counterpart in Bembo. This is easy enough, we feel. Mutatio, Sturm’s third and more mature and capacious technique, is dealt with thus: I call alteration alloiōsin [alloiōsis, ‘a change’], one part of the which is syzygia (‘coupling’) or synthesis (‘combination’), which consisteth in the diuers placing of wordes and things, and is wrought by putting of wordes, members, sentences, and other things necessarie either before, or after, or in the middest.26 These devices also belong to the phenomenal world, but they are considered by Sturm to be less childish than addition and ablation. It is not obvious why rearranging words should be more difficult than leaving them out, or adding new ones, and one feels that a little more explanation would have been useful here. But we note that the example just given is also an example of alteration, since Bembo changes the order of the lexemes dolor and magnus. Finally, we come to a great banquet of devices, which will be passed over for want of space, but also because Sturm has drifted into a catalogue of variation devices which really belong to rhetoric in general, not just imitation: schēmatismos (‘figurative speech’), katallaxis (‘exchange’), sunōnumia (‘synonomy’), sunaitia (‘contributory causes’) and metaskeuē (‘alteration’) –​‘which containeth all the figures of Rhetoricke’.27 He stops short only when he seems to realise that he has wandered off the point and into a thicket of minutiae. So he feels obliged to warn Philip and Anton not to dismiss these strangely-​named devices as too far removed from the path which leads to the mastery of the sharp-​ sighted art of detection: ‘And these are the things which hide Arte & similitude, which although they seeme but trifles: yet are they the onely dooers of that, which the eares of the learned desire to heare, neyther is it knowne what force is in them vntill wee haue tryed it by vse and practise’.28 The ears of the learned, of course, are the ears of Sturm and Sevenus, the teachers whom the Werther boys are encouraged to impress. Moreover, and more curiously, Sturm seems to offer ‘trifles’ to the Werther brothers because he has taken their request seriously. We recall that they asked for advice on literary studies, a book ‘fit and apt for [their] yeres, familie, and nobilitie’. Sturm then produced a book which would help them achieve a level 26 Sturm, Ritch Storehouse, sig. G7r [image 50], p. 167. 27 Ibid., G8r [image 51], p. 167. 28 Ibid., G8v [image 51], p. 167.

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of education which might serve them well as nobiles. He gave them a three-​ year plan of study which would turn them into nobiles litterati: ‘learned noblemen’. As noblemen, they were to be statesmen, and learn ‘ciuill policie, which the Grecians terme Politikēn’. But as statesmen, they could not be scholars, or, at least, not professional scholars, like Sturm himself. This meant he could only teach them so much about imitation: ‘I doe not teach what is requisite for all Imitators to doo: but what way you ought to take: who both in noblenesse of birth, and in state and calling differ from other learned men (litteratis viris), that purpose onely to spend their lyfe in learning’.29 But this in turn meant that, though Sturm might be able to give them a glimpse of the cecrymmenal world, the promised land of all imitators, they could never really hope to reach it. This perhaps explains why the example, which we find in the practical discussion of techniques where Bembo imitates Cicero, seems so weak and bloodless. It came to his mind because the imitation was so easy to spot, so much so, in fact, that Sturm evidently worried lest Bembo should have given the game away too easily. Sturm’s advice to Philip and Anton von Werther, then, is designed specifically for nobiles litterati, not just any kind of litterati. Sturm regarded the nobilis as a man of good family who played an active role in the political life of the larger community, and but at the same time as someone who could never become a true expert in literature. In fact, Anton Werther did later decide to turn his back on a political career in order to pursue his studies in retirement at his estate in Brücken for the rest of his life. On the other hand, Wolfgang, who led a very active political life, was all the same counted as ‘one of the best orators in all Germany’.30 Although Sturm mentions oratory often enough in Nobilitas litterata, as, for example, in his remarkable allusion to the ‘signification of an amiable honestie in the Orator’, the sort of imitation he has in mind is not well suited to public speech. Sturm says: ‘an Imitator must hide all similitude and likenesse: which is neuer praysed but when it is comparable with the patterne, and yet cannot be perceiued by what meanes and in what places, and examples it commeth to passe’.31 So yes, in the course of the oration itself, as it is spoken by the orator, all we may catch here and there is a phrase or sentence which reminds us irresistibly of the ancient orators Demosthenes or Cicero, but we cannot quite put our finger on it. We are caught up in the flow of the speaker’s words, yet a certain glamour hangs about them nonetheless, and we praise the speaker 29 Ibid., E8v [image 37], p. 157; cf. Nobilitas, fol. 33r. 30 See Historia, p. 50. 31 Sturm, Ritch Storehouse, sig. G5v [image 50], p. 166.

258 Pincombe for impressing us in this way, however vaguely. The expert practice of imitatio, on the other hand, relies on the mastery of a multitude of tiny processes, which produce a work of art –​or artifice –​designed to please ‘the eares of the learned’. True, there may be nobiles litterati amongst the political assemblies addressed by well-​lettered noblemen such as Wolfgang Werther. But most will not be, and, in any case, the type of imitation Sturm has in mind seems to belong not to deliberative but to epideictic oratory, in which the orator displays his skills as an artist. In short, unless we are dealing with the hyper​sensitive antennae of a tiny minority of highly-​trained imitatio-​spotters, the technical aspects of imitation relate only to the written word, to literature (from the Latin littera, or letter of the alphabet) –​and not to speech and speeches. These brief remarks do not, of course, cover all that Sturm has to say about imitation in Nobilitas litterata, but they point to an important tension between his emphasis on the cecrymmenal aspect of imitatio as a secret art and its practical exclusion of all but the most learned, including the generally less learned Maecenas on whom the professional man of letters to some extent depended. The scholar played, and the Maecenas paid. It was this that forced Ascham to part ways with Sturm. It was not quite as simple as that, but there was room for anxiety, and Ascham was anxious to be thought more honest than clever. 2

Ascham on Imitation in The Scholemaster

Ascham and Sturm became acquainted by means of the good offices of Martin Bucer, who was exiled from Strasbourg in 1549.32 Bucer came to Cambridge, where he met Ascham, who was already an admirer of Sturm’s work. Bucer suggested that Ascham write to Sturm, which he duly did, on 4 April 1550.33 Sturm wrote back on 9 September 1550, and the following year arranged for the two letters to be printed as an appendix to a composite volume that included his own essay De educatione principium, which followed Conrad Heresbach’s oration De laudibus Graecarum litterarum oratio. The two letters appeared as: Epistolae duae de nobilitate Anglicana (‘Two Letters concerning the English Nobility’). This was graciously done on Sturm’s part, for this is how the name of a relatively obscure Englishman called Roger Ascham

32 33

For more on the Ascham and Sturm’s connection with Bucer, see Lucy Nicholas, ch. 7 in this volume. See Conrad Heresbach, De laudibus Graecarum litterarum oratio (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1551, ustc 622756), fols. 33r−51r.

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first become known to a wider European audience. The two men never met, though Ascham did in fact call on Sturm when, in September 1551, he happened to pass through Strasbourg as part of the English embassy to Charles v. Sturm was away, unfortunately, but Ascham was entertained instead by the two brothers Werther.34 Returning to this first letter to Sturm, we note that Ascham took occasion, amongst other things, to urge Sturm to gather together his work on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, sections of which had been circulating in manuscript amongst the learned men of Europe. The problem was the risk of theft, Ascham explains, and he adds that he himself, some three years ago, had acquired ‘transcripts’ of Sturm’s lectures on Plato’s Gorgias.35 Sturm is warned of ‘the huge crowd of note-​takers’ who are always ready to sell their notes to the ‘greedy printer’.36 It is not quite clear that we are dealing here with plagiarism, the evil twin of imitation, for Ascham does not say that other people are putting their name to Sturm’s work; but we are certainly in the realm of the dishonest appropriation of other men’s intellectual property. Sadly, this sort of breach of property rights was eventually entangled with the Werther brothers. However, their fault lay not in making another man’s work available to others against his will, or without his knowledge, but by taking it away from him and actually withholding it from other people. In a letter from Augsburg to Sturm of 27 September 1551, Ascham notes how the brothers are somehow involved in the Aristotle project: ‘I applaud the immortal glory of the Werters since by virtue of your design and their own merit they dialogue with you in your Aristotelian Rhetoric’. Sturm, he says, will make their family famous not only for its nobility but its erudition; and he says that he uses the example of the brothers ‘as models for stirring up the English nobility to the same zeal and a similar excellence’.37 The problem with misappropriation came later. Ascham also knew of another very large project planned by Sturm about now, this time on Aristotle’s Roman counterpart, Cicero. The brothers Werther were also involved in this project. In a letter of 17 November 1551, written from Augsburg to his friends Edward Raven and William Ireland, Ascham notes that Sturm was busy with his Analaysis Ciceroniani, with help from his students: ‘Nobilissimi werteri 34 Ryan, Ascham, p. 152. 35 Ascham to Sturm, Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 183; Hatch and Vos, p. 158. 36 Ibid., p. 184; p. 160. 37 Ascham to Sturm, Augsburg, 27 September 1551, letter cxxxi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 305; in Hatch and Vos, p. 197.

260 Pincombe fratres do give him to find him writers 400 crowns a-​year, for four years’.38 Here, then, is evidence of maecenatic support of a more material kind on the part of the two Werther brothers. However, Sturm habitually overstretched himself. The years passed, and, although parts of Sturm’s work had been in circulation amongst scholars, the brothers Werther saw no return for their investment. On 27 May 1561, Anton wrote to Sturm pressing him to honour their earlier agreement with regard the Cicero project, and by June he had sent them the manuscript such as it was at that point to Beichlingen in Thuringia.39 Ascham was outraged when he heard about this transaction, as he reports in a letter to Sturm from London on 11 April 1562. He had learnt in an earlier letter from Sturm that the book on Aristotle was done: ‘And I was thrilled when you add: “All of you [viz. Ascham and other English scholars] are mentioned in the book, even Morison and Cheke” ’. But Ascham was very displeased to hear ‘that the Werter brothers had taken (deportasse) all those books with them into Thuringia’.40 Whatever exactly Ascham had heard, and he may not have known that money was involved, these words clearly refer to the migration of Sturm’s book from Strasbourg to Beichlingen. Ascham’s deportasse –​‘to have carried away’ –​suggests that he thought the brothers had come to Strasbourg and removed these books by main force  –​not quite theft, but still not quite right. He continues: ‘They ought to take care lest they become more notorious for this misdeed than they are noted for their birth and learning’. We may take it, then, that in 1562, the year before he started thinking about The Scholemaster, Ascham no longer blazed the fame of the Werther brothers as models of literary patronage. We should not make too much of these biographical events, perhaps, but nor should we ignore them. Ascham came from a relatively humble background, and, throughout his life, relied on the good offices of patrons, which is surely one of the reasons why he was (in the words of C. S. Lewis) ‘everyone’s friend’.41 His interest in money matters, everywhere apparent in his personal correspondence (and other writings), extends to the finances of friends like Sturm as well.42

38 39 40 41 42

Ascham to Raven and Ireland, Augsburg, 17 November 1551, letter cxxxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 316. See Charles Schmidt, La Vie et les travaux de Jean Sturm (Paris and Leipzig:  Librairie Fischbacher, 1855), p. 262, n. 3. Ascham to Sturm, London, 11 April 1562, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. ii, p. 64; Hatch and Vos, p. 217. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 279. For more on Ascham’s financial concerns, see J. S. Crown, ch. 9 in this volume.

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Ascham’s openness about his debt to Sturm (and Cheke) is symptomatic of this concern with the exchange value of the products of literary and intellectual labour, and Ascham’s own desire to be considered honest, that key-​value in mid-​ Tudor ethics.43 This avowedly straightforward approach to the extent and character of his debt to Sturm makes it easy to spot the borrowing. Ascham takes Sturm’s comments on addition and ablation and so on, and reproduces them in this passage of The Scholemaster, even using the same Latin terms as Sturm does in Nobilitas litterata. The teacher of imitation, he says, should lay two passages side by side, in which one author has imitated another, and then he must take care: … to marke what is kept and vsed in either author, in wordes, in sentences, in matter:  what is added:  what is left out:  what ordered otherwise, either praeponendo, interponendo, or postponendo: And what is altered for any respect, in word, phrase, sentence, figure, reason, argument, or by any way of circumstance.44 This is very similar to Sturm, then, but earlier in The Scholemaster Ascham presents the same material, almost, in a more visually arresting form. Here is his first draft of six points, which are to be read as if a teacher had placed before his pupil a passage in Greek from Demosthenes and an imitation in Latin by Cicero. The teacher then draws attention to the following processes: 1. Tullie reteyneth thus moch of the matter, thies sentences, thies wordes: 2. This and that he leaueth out, which he doth wittelie to this end and purpose. 3. This he addeth here. 4. This he diminisheth there. 5. This he ordereth thus, with placing that here, not there. 6. This he altereth and changeth, either, in propertie of wordes, in forme of sentence, in substance of the matter, or in one, or other conuenient circumstance of the authors present purpose.45 This way of proceeding, I think, would be a very useful practical exercise, and Ascham presumably did use it in his own teaching. The step-​by-​step method 43

Much has been written about the discourse of ‘honesty’ in the period. See, for example, Jason Powell, ‘Thomas Wyatt and Francis Bryan:  Plainness and Dissimulation’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485−1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 187−202. 44 Ascham, The Scholemaster, sig. P2v [image 58]. 45 Ibid., sig. O3v [image 55].

262 Pincombe may seem mechanical and pedestrian in comparison with Sturm’s cecrymmenal rhapsodies, but you could actually use this list from Ascham to teach imitatio from scratch, whereas there is nothing so useful in Sturm. Moreover, though Ascham would no doubt have been alarmed to think that he departed so radically from Sturm in his exposition, in fact, he goes far further than his friend in his point 1: ‘Tullie reteyneth thus moch of the matter, thies sentences, thies wordes’. There is nothing about retention in Sturm, and it is easy to see why: Sturm wants to teach his students how to cover their tracks, not to draw attention to their borrowings from their model. But Ascham insists on retention, and rightly, too. This is because he seems to be more genuinely concerned to set out the basic rules of imitation, whereas Sturm seems more interested in discussing them in terms of variation exercises. Ascham’s ‘teacher’ in The Scholemaster quite sensibly starts with what the two passages by Demosthenes and Cicero have in common, not with where they differ. For how can we tell that two texts are different versions of each other if they are not in some way similar? To return to Sturm’s example from Bembo, it is clear that the sentence opinione omnium maiorem animo coepi dolorem is similar to the one magnum sane dolorem coepit.46 Even if you cannot read Latin, the similarities in the words are still obvious; and this is because words –​or parts of words –​from the first are retained in the second. Perhaps this was so obvious to Sturm that he thought it was not worth mentioning; but Ascham recognised the fundamental importance of establishing the similarity before exploring the dissimilarity of the two texts. A good structuralist instinct is at work here. It is a pity that Ascham got no further than he did with his aim of explaining how imitation was done. His emphasis on retention is so much more promising than Sturm’s emphasis on alteration, which inevitably gets lost in a celebration of copiousness. Retention lays bare the debt to the other author, and here he follows the mainstream classical tradition. Seneca the Elder, for example, says that Ovid took things from Virgil ‘not to pinch them, but to borrow openly, with the intention of being recognised’.47 And D. A. Russell explains that this was done ‘by making it clear by the tenor of your writing that you are working in a certain tradition, and are fully aware of the resources of your medium’.48 The idea of tenor is still too vague, to my mind, but we will not pursue the matter here. The point which Russell makes is valuable in that it emphasises the more broadly communal aspect of the practice of imitation. Sturm’s imitator looks 46 47 48

See n. 25 re. coepit. Seneca the Elder, Suasoriae, iii.7: D. A. Russell, ‘De imitatione’, in David West and Tony Woodman, eds., Creative Imitation and Latin Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 12. Ibid., pp. 1–​16, at p. 12.

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very much like a ‘geek’, a person rather eccentrically absorbed in a practice which others regard as relatively trivial –​and we recall that moment where, after a breathless cavalcade through the terms of rhetoric, Sturm has to stop and remind the Werthers that katallaxis and sunaitia and so on are not merely ‘trifles’. But Russell’s imitator is a person who wants to be recognised publically as a member of a literary tradition, as a member of an ancient and worthy institution. This is much more in line with the English way of thinking to which Ascham was heir, in which emphasis was placed not so much on the complexity of the process of imitation, but on its ultimate reward: the successful imitator was able to claim membership of an exclusive club of writers who had achieved literature. A contemporary example may help to make the point clear. Seneca the Elder had a son, Seneca the Younger, who was the author, amongst many other works, of a tragedy called Thyestes. This was translated into English by Jasper Heywood in 1560, with a long visionary poem as a preface, in which Heywood meets Seneca and talks to him. At one point, Seneca takes him to the palace of the Nine Muses, and shows him a banqueting ​hall, where paintings of the great poets hang: There Homere, Ouide, Horace eke full featlye purtred bee, And there not in the lowest place, they haue described mee. There Uirgyle, Lucane, Palingene, and rest of poetts all Do stande, and there from this daie foorthe. full many other shall.49 It seems they have just built a wing, to ‘paynte the pyctures more at large, of hundreds, englysshe men’. Heywood has earlier given Seneca a list of all the contemporary English poets he thinks could translate Thyestes better than he could, and no doubt there was a place on the wall for each of these now long-​forgotten poets. Imitation in the mainstream tradition, I suggest, both ancient and modern, was a form of initiation not so much into the arcane mysteries of a technical process, as Sturm suggests, but into the ranks of a roll of honour, achieved by proving that you had read the works of those already enrolled, and accepted their value by acknowledging them worthy of imitation. You joined the club by

49

See Jasper Heywood, trans. The Seconde Tragedie of Seneca Entituled Thyestes (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1560, ustc 505785), sig. η6r [image 14]. Ascham alludes in passing to Barnabe Googe’s translation of Palingenius’s Zodiacus vitae (1561−1565) in his own list of worthy English poets in The Scholemaster, sig. R4r [image 66].

264 Pincombe openly displaying your debts, not by trying to be cleverer than the next man, which is where Sturm’s insistence on difficulty leads. So one of the reasons why Ascham insists on retention as the primary note of imitation is that he wants his teacher to remind students that they are writing for a wider audience, not just a few friends and rivals, the furtive mirror-​ images of their own imitative selves. What is retained is the most obvious mark of belonging to a tradition of writing. But Ascham’s concern with intellectual property and with the ethical or non-​ethical dimension of the literary world must also be considered. Just as he himself confessed what he had taken from Cheke and Ascham in his remarks on imitation, so he expected an honest acknowledgement of debt on the part of other writers. In his remarks on epitome, he says that those who compile books by cutting out bits and pieces of other books are like ‘those poore folke, which neyther till, nor sowe, nor reape themselues, but gleane by stelth, vpon other mens growndes’.50 For Sturm, the stealthy character of imitation was never a problem, for the whole point of the game was to be clever at imitation, not clever at writing, so that you had to expose your borrowings to win applause. It was only if you tried to pass off an imitation as your own writing that you crossed the line into plagiarism, which was much more likely to happen in the adult world of literary commerce than in the juvenile world of literary exercises. But Ascham, always short of money, always on the look-​out for patronage, lived very firmly in the world of transactions, where honesty and the reputation of being honest was so important. We began by noting the importance of imitatio to sixteenth-​century men of letters across Europe. It was, after all, the lynch-​pin of any programmatic attempt to achieve what we now call the ‘Renaissance’, in the sense of the ‘rebirth’ of contemporary literature along the lines of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Without the imitation of model authors, carefully selected according to a standard of excellence, there could be no literary Renaissance in the Europe of Ascham and Sturm. But we have seen that attitudes towards imitatio could vary quite greatly. Sturm, writing for school boys, sees it as part of the ludus litterarum, the ‘game of letters’, as the grammar course was often called by its teachers; and so he presents imitation as a game of hide-​and-​seek. But Ascham took it far more seriously, for he seems genuinely to have believed that style –​and that is what imitatio is meant to teach –​was an ethical issue. His opening comments on imitation include the following well-​known statement: ‘Ye know not, what hurt ye do to learning, that care not for wordes, but

50 Ascham, The Scholemaster, sig. N3r [image 50].

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for matter, and so make a deuorse betwixt the tong and the hart’.51 He goes on to argue that when people pay less attention to their means of expression, then thought itself becomes slipshod, prone to error, and even to heresy. In practice, imitation involves countless tiny decisions as to what words to use and in what order to place them, and, for Sturm, this practice was an exercise in mental agility, rather like the modern crossword puzzle. But, for Ascham, these decisions involved a moral element, because good style was an expression of an honest disposition towards the reader or listener –​and perhaps he has a point. Imitation can be seen as a technique, but it remains merely a technique, controlled by an apparatus of self-​serving technicians, unless it can be assigned a proper social value. Sturm did not care very much about that, but Ascham did. 51 Ascham, The Scholemaster, sig. O2v [image 54].

Appendices

∵

Appendix 1

Roger Ascham: a Biographical Sketch Lucy R. Nicholas This volume shines a spotlight on a range of episodes, phases and aspects of Ascham’s fifty-​three year life. Much of Ascham’s life will always remain unknown. However, to the extent possible, this appendix will attempt to offer the reader a broader biographical canvas upon which individual chapters may be mapped and more easily stitched together. It also provides some further fleeting glimpses into the day-​to-​day dealings, imagination and emotions of the man himself, someone who tasted success but also knew disappointment, one who enjoyed the thrill of a cockfight, but who also felt the pressure to feed a family, a man who managed to negotiate the schizophrenia of religious flux, but who suffered from a weak digestive system. An additional motivation for such an undertaking is to supplement the currently available accounts of Ascham’s life (as outlined in the introduction) which, while not without their merits, arguably do not do full justice to the multifaceted nature of Ascham’s career and spheres of activity. ‘You can always tell a Yorkshireman, but you can’t tell him much’. Ascham hailed, as does the author of this appendix, from the North of England. This fact was suggested by his very surname ‘Ascham’ (or sometimes spelled ‘Askham’ or ‘Askam’ and pronounced as such).1 He was born in 1515/​16, and spent his early youth in Kirby Wiske, a small village (even now) in the north of Yorkshire. Ascham may have moved South quite early in his life, but Ascham probably must always in some senses have felt himself a northerner. He may well, for example, have benefited from the very favourable statutory provisions made for northerners by Cambridge colleges, especially St John’s.2 At the same time, Ascham must also have carried a sense of detachment and distance. Following his admission to Cambridge, he would not

1 The most common location for this surname was Yorkshire:  see Patrick Hanks, Richard Coates and Peter McClure (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 87. 2 Helen M. Jewell, The North-​South Divide: The Origins of Northern Consciousness in England (Manchester and New  York:  Manchester University Press, 1994), p.  140 and Richard Rex, ‘The Sixteenth Century’ in Peter Linehan, ed., St John’s College, Cambridge: A History (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. 5–​93, at pp. 15 and 20.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_015

270 Nicholas return to Yorkshire, even to visit, for seven years.3 Unlike his parents and at least one of his siblings,4 Ascham would not make Yorkshire his home (though he may have briefly toyed with this in the early 1540s –​see below). Ascham, as we shall see, not only left Yorkshire behind, but would also go against the native grain in some dramatic ways. At least one of Ascham’s parents was socially well-​connected.5 Almost certainly owing to a series of favours, handshakes and networking, Ascham was placed in his early teens in the household of Humphrey Wingfield, a Suffolk lawyer, Justice of the Peace and Royal Commissioner. Wingfield was not just a prominent public servant but also an ardent believer in education; he had formerly been involved in Wolsey’s Cardinal College, and subsequently established a school within his own home.6 During his time in Suffolk, Ascham would have received some of the best education money could buy.7 In 1530, at fifteen, the standard age at that time to move into tertiary education, Ascham moved to the University of Cambridge and became a student at St John’s. Though a centre often connected with Renaissance humanism, this college was as much a religious community as an academic institution. Statutes of the college promulgated by one of the chief architects behind the college’s foundation, John Fisher, prescribed Dei cultus, morum probitas et Christianae fidei corroboratio (‘A worship of God, an honesty of habits and a strengthening of the Christian faith’).8 The college was to be trilingual, and within the college precincts only the sacred tongues of Latin, Greek and Hebrew were to be used.9 St John’s College was, in fact, a school of practical theology, and one of the overriding reasons for its establishment was to produce a more competent clerical body.10 In this quasi-​monastic setting, each day would begin with hearing Mass, chapel attendance was frequent and compulsory, and preachers would declaim the works of the 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

He visited in 1538: Ascham to a friend, Cambridge, 1538, letter ii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 3. His brother Anthony Ascham would return to Yorkshire after his studies at Cambridge: Bernard Capp, ‘Anthony Ascham (ca. 1517–​1559)’, odnb. Probably his mother Margaret: Ryan, Ascham, pp. 8–​9. P. R. N. Carter, ‘Sir Humphrey Wingfield (b. before 1481, d. 1545)’, odnb. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County, 1500–​1600 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 146–​147. J. E. B. Mayor, (ed.), Early Statutes of the College of St John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1859), p. xxi. As Rex observes, Fisher did his best to translate such aspirations into reality: Richard Rex, ‘John Fisher, ca. 1469–​1535’, odnb. M. Underwood, ‘John Fisher and the promotion of learning’ in Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy, eds., Humanism, reform and the Reformation:  the career of Bishop John Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 25–​46, at pp. 28–​29 and 31; and Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 30.

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Church Fathers during meal times.11 Master, fellows and scholars all wore clerical dress and were required to take vows of celibacy.12 Statutes for the college stipulated that theology was the goal to which all other studies led.13 At St John’s, Ascham would quickly come to learn how politically combustible the issue of religion could be. Cambridge was on the front-​line during the political and religious tumult of Henry viii’s reign. In 1534 the University was asked directly whether they supported the royal supremacy, and Henry hand-​picked Cambridge men to preach at Cambridge against papal despotism in 1534.14 The founder of St John’s, John Fisher, publicly defied the King, and was beheaded in 1535; all traces of him were expunged in what must have seemed a terrifyingly immediate exhibition of royal power for a twenty year old Ascham.15 Another high-​profile college casualty, on account of his close association with Fisher and his papal affiliation, was the then Master of the college, Nicholas Metcalfe, who was forced to resign in 1537.16 Such episodes tested loyalties in a serious way. They certainly galvanized the conservatives at St John’s.17 One might expect to find a Yorkshire man like Ascham cleaving to this end of the spectrum. The North was predominantly conservative in outlook: the Pilgrimage of Grace, a popular protest against Henry viii’s break with Catholic Rome, had begun in Yorkshire under the leadership of one Robert Aske; and Ascham’s own (younger) brother, Anthony (1517–​1559), was a fervent champion of the Catholic faith.18 Yet Ascham took a strong stand in the opposite direction, and threw his lot in in with a formidable clique of scholars, including John Cheke and Thomas Smith, who believed in a restoration of ancient values and actively supported a break with Rome and the reform of Christianity advocated by Luther.

11

Stephen Alford, Burghley:  William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 2008), p.  16; and David Loades, The Cecils: Privilege and Power behind the Throne (Kew: National Archives, 2007), p. 20. 12 Mayor, Statutes, p. 134. 13 Mayor, Statutes, pp. 51, 111 and 125. 14 The appointed preachers were John Skip, Doctor of Theology at Gonville Hall, and Simon Heynes, the then Vice-​Chancellor of the University. 15 On occlusion of Fisher, see Rex, ‘The Sixteenth Century’, pp.  37 and 43; and Richard Rex ‘Such a Company of Fellows and Scholars:  Roger Ascham’s Picture of Humanism at St John’s College, Cambridge’, in James Willoughby and Jeremy Catto, eds., Books and Bookmen in Early Modern Britain (Toronto:  Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018) pp. 335–3​51, at p. 339. 16 Ryan, Ascham, p. 31. 17 Rex, ‘The Sixteenth Century’. 18 As a member of the clergy, Anthony used his writings to promote Catholicism: for example, his Marian almanacs are also remarkable for their Catholic polemics, including a condemnation of the Protestant assault on the Mass (Capp, ‘Anthony Ascham’, odnb).

272 Nicholas Whether or not Ascham actually exemplified the radical spirit of revolt that he himself was keen to convey in his own accounts of this stage in his career is a moot point. Ascham recollected, in a somewhat gratuitous digression of his much later The Scholemaster, how he almost jeopardised his fellowship promotion by speaking out against the Pope in a disputation de quaestione potestatis Romani Pontificis (‘about the Roman Pope’s power’).19 The truth of Ascham’s actions here cannot be verified, and it may be a story that is more relevant when it comes to thinking about Ascham’s frame of mind at a point in Elizabeth’s reign when there was a renewed call for reform (see later). While we can be sure of his deep sense of allegiance to the reform movement, it is perhaps important to stress the reflection and thoughtfulness as opposed to sheer impetuosity that underlay these commitments. In another quarrel that erupted in Cambridge just a few years later in 1542, ostensibly over the pronunciation of the Greek language, but which scholars now unanimously agree served as a proxy for religious division, Ascham initially supported Stephen Gardiner’s ban, only then to switch his support to the reformed usage recommended by Erasmus, John Cheke, and Thomas Smith.20 Ascham’s subsequent dedication to the new pronunciation is clear, and he would, for example, discuss and defend it well into the next decade;21 but it is also evident that he was a man who had to be lured to the feast through a careful process of consideration and investigation. Even if he didn’t follow his mind entirely herdlessly, Ascham was not one to follow the herd mindlessly. While still a relatively junior fellow Ascham began to taste the joys of amicitia,22 but he also collided with the realities of inimicitia. Joint interests could and did forge the most enduring bonds, but, by the same token, strong convictions could generate animosity. A highly contentious fellowship election in 1540 that split St John’s College down religious lines and in which Ascham took a vocal and partisan role evidently caused tensions and friendships to founder.23 Ascham was clearly shaken by the carping, caviling and fallings-​out that ensued, not least with one of the major players in the college, John Redman.24 Some three years later, the row clearly still rankled, as is clear 19 Ascham, The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. 3, pp. 234–​235. See also Rex ‘Such a Company of Fellows’, p. 335, n. 2. 20 Ryan, Ascham, pp. 36–​37 and 310, n. 25. See also John McDiarmid, ch. 5 in this volume, p. 104. 21 Ascham to Hubert Leodius, Brussels, 6 March 1553, letter cxliv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 344–​ 349. See also letters to Ascham from Nicholas Cisner (Heidelberg, 18 July 1553, letter cli, Giles, vol. i. pt. 2, pp. 367–​370) and Leodius (Heidelberg, 9 August 1553, letter cliv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 373–​377). 22 The secondary literature on Ascham and friendship is too extensive to list here. Many of the chapters in this volume engage with the theme of amicitia. 23 This appendix will not rehearse Ascham’s support of Protestant candidates in the college elections of 1542, as this is covered in excellent detail in Richard Rex, ch. 2 in this volume. 24 Many took their bearings from Redman’s conscience: Alec Ryrie, ‘Paths not taken in the British Reformations’, The Historical Journal, vol. 52.1 (2009), pp. 1–​22, at p. 16.

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from a letter he wrote to Redman in which he discussed the episode in detail (now with a view to building bridges). It seems likely that the bad blood that followed this election was a major reason for Ascham’s departure from Cambridge. Acrimony in a close-​knit community is never pleasant, and in December 1540 or January 1541, Ascham withdrew to his parental home in Yorkshire, not to return until late April or May in the following year.25 Evidence suggests that Ascham was also struck down with a fever during this period, but, as John Hazel Smith also comments, one is also left to wonder whether this illness was also used in part as a psychosomatic excuse not to go back.26 One can also ponder on the degree to which this period of almost two years with his parents back in the North had an influence on Ascham’s thoughts about the future. At this stage in his life, as is the case with most people in their early to mid-​ twenties, Ascham was still maturing, finding his way in the world, not entirely sure of his direction. At the same time, he was becoming increasingly aware of that sobering life lesson –​the importance of an income. It is interesting that Ascham now began to contact a series of powerful clerical figures, many of them based in the North, such as Edward Lee, Archbishop of York, and Robert Holgate, President of the Council of the North. It is notable that these were mainly religiously conservative figures, and again this may be attributable to family pressure.27 His younger brother, as has already been noted, took a staunchly Catholic path, and after university, would pursue a career in the Church. It may also be that his parents hoped Ascham would settle in Yorkshire with them, a hope that became more of an expectation upon the death of another of his brothers around this time.28 We also learn from a letter Ascham wrote that his father had been cautioning him about the ‘angry wrath and indignation’ of God that university quarrels could provoke, and had exhorted him to leave Cambridge. These were conservative and cautionary voices that Ascham would always carry with him, well after the death of his parents.29 But Ascham would not stay in his home county. Something told him his fortunes lay elsewhere, and he returned to Cambridge in 1542. He had perhaps been buoyed up by certain successes in his efforts to secure some income. He had, for example, won a pension from Archbishop Lee. Ascham’s ba, ma and subsequent research at St John’s were in the arts, but many who went through the Cambridge system would later switch to a different faculty, such as law or theology, and many would opt for 25

See John Hazel Smith, ‘Roger Ascham’s Troubled Years’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 65.1 (1966), pp. 36–​46 for a discussion of the precise dating of this absence, and some of the reasons for it. 26 Ibid., p. 37. 27 For more on this, see Sam Kennerley, ch. 3 in this volume. 28 Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, 1544, letter xxi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 47. 29 Ascham says as much in this letter to Cheke. His parents almost certainly died in 1543 and, as Smith surmises, even on the same day (Smith, ‘Ascham’s Troubled Years’, p. 44).

274 Nicholas ordination.30 In modern scholarship, Ascham is almost uniformly associated with the Arts, and of course, this was the professional path he ultimately opted to follow. However, it was not the only route he countenanced. During his time at St John’s, Ascham would have been unavoidably and constantly involved in religiously-​related activities. There are certainly indications that from the late 1530s Ascham was inclining towards a theological course, perhaps with a view to working closely with a man of the cloth, possibly even with the intention of taking holy orders.31 He voluntarily embarked on a number of more spiritual projects at this time. The Psalms in particular seem to have attracted him. In 1538 he undertook an edition of the Psalms, though this is not now extant,32 and in the following year offered his assistance to the Bishop of Chichester, Richard Sampson’s project of arranging the Psalms.33 In another letter he enclosed what he referred to as a ‘Psalm against the Turk’ metaphrased into Latin senarian verse.34 Evidence also suggests that Ascham was very serious about Scripture generally. Ascham owned a copy of a Greek New Testament which contained a preface by Johannes Oecolampadius.35 The extensive underlinings and annotations Ascham made in this book point to a profound philological engagement with the original words of the Gospel.36 His theological interests became more marked as his 30

A typical Cambridge undergraduate in the sixteenth century took their ba and ma in the Faculty of Arts and would then move to superior Faculties of Theology, Medicine or Law, or remain, like Ascham, in the Faculty of Arts: Damien Riehl Leader, History of the University of Cambridge: the University to 1546, vol. i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 89. 31 Ryan, Ascham, p. 38. 32 G. Noyes, ‘A Study of Roger Ascham’s Literary Citations with Particular Reference to his Knowledge of the Classics’, unpublished dissertation, Yale University (1937), p. 105. 33 Ascham’s letter to a friend, place unknown, ?1539 (though Giles dates it 1543), letter xvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 33. This was probably Richard Sampson’s Latin commentary on the Psalms which was produced in two parts, 1539–​1548. 34 Ascham to Bishop Day (though (surely correctly) Hatch believes it was to Richard Sampson, p. 52), place and date unknown, (though probably 1542 as per Hatch, p. 52), letter cxxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 323–​324. A ‘Psalm against the Turk’ could be a reference to Psalm 28; Erasmus had produced a commentary on Psalm 28 in 1530 under the title ‘Most useful advice on the war against the Turks’: E. Rummel, ‘Textual and Hermeneutic work of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam’ in M. Saebo, ed., Hebrew Bible, Old Testament: The History of its Interpretation (Gottingen, 1996), pp.  215–​30. Senarian (iambic) verse is a form of metre, often used in the genre of tragedy. 35 New Testament in Greek (Basel: Johann Bebel, 1531, ustc 696184), held in the archives of Hatfield House (archive number 7522) –​see also Micha Lazarus, appendix 2. 36 At one point, he even amended the original Greek of Matthew’s Gospel (7:13) by changing the location of a comma in the following: ὅτι πλατεῖα ἡ πύλη εὐρύχωρος, ἡ ὁδὸς ἡ ἀπάγουσα εἰς τὴν ἀπώλειαν (‘for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction’); Ascham moved it from after πύλη to after εὐρύχωρος. In fact, Ascham’s change here did not work, but he was correct to identify a potential ambiguity, and later editions of the

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attention turned to the Church Fathers. The aforementioned approach to Lee centered on a Latin translation of the Greek commentaries of Oecumenius, a tenth century Thessalian bishop, on the Pauline Epistles to Titus and Philemon.37 This entailed translating large extracts of the Epistles themselves but also Oecumenius’s collated insights into Paul’s meaning and message. As Sam Kennerley observes in ­chapter 3, this was a radical foray in contemporary patristic studies and reflects an eye-​catching independence of thought. Ascham’s Oecumenius commission did not end happily. Oecumenius’s scholium on Titus 1:6 endorsing clerical marriage offended Lee, and Ascham was stood down. Although Ascham would, in a spasm of remorse and bewilderment, inform Lee that he would now stick to ‘other things either of lighter weight or less danger’, this was patently not borne out in practice.38 It is evident that Ascham continued, for example, to participate in theological disputations at the University. A Latin composition by Ascham is his Themata Theologica (‘Theological Topics’), dating approximately to the mid-​1540s, and almost certainly written, as the title suggests, pursuant to a series of debates that Ascham would take or had taken part in.39 These mainly comprised a compendium of short commentaries of Scriptural verses (both Old and New Testament) and several expositions on difficult theological concepts, such as the Augustinian proposition about sin constituting not the act but the intention, and the notion of the felix culpa (literally, ‘happy fault’). This is a little-​ known text, but one which allows us to trace many aspects of Ascham’s intellectual and religious maturation. It is the work of an individual developing his command of Scriptural navigation and familiarisation with some of the most intractable theological issues of the day, including the nature of sin, justification and free will.40 His utilisation of the concept adiaphora (‘matters of indifference’) to assess certain religious practices at this stage in the

37

38 39

40

Greek New Testament include καὶ (‘and’) after πύλη and before εὐρύχωρος. The point is reiterated in Micha Lazarus, appendix 2, pp. 305–306. Expositiones antiquae in epistolas Divi Pauli ad Titum, et Philemonem, ex diversis sanctorum Patrum Graece scriptis commentariis, ab Oecunienio collectae, et Cantabrigiae Latine versae. These were printed and bound in the same volume as Ascham’s Apologia and Themata (see note below). Ascham to Lee, place unknown, 1543, letter xvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 32. Apologia doctissimi viri Rogeri Aschami, Angli, pro Caena Dominica … Cui accesserunt themata quaedam Theologica … Expositiones item antiquae, in Epistolas Divi Pauli ad Titum et Philemonem (London: Francisco Coldock, 1577, ustc 508290). References to disputations within the Themata itself further support this (pp. 174, 176, 187 and 229), as does the fact there are some signs of repetition (for example between two themata on pp. 185–​187 and 194–​195). Ryan provides a brief outline of this work, but he is generally dismissive of the work’s significance, commenting that it ‘smacks of a school copy book’ and that ‘it is not one of his more important works’: Ryan, Ascham, pp. 99–​100.

276 Nicholas English Reformation is especially striking, as this was a notion that would assume considerable significance as the Reformation developed, influencing the nature of debate within the Protestant movement over the next century.41 It appears, furthermore, that by this time Ascham’s interest in religious projects carried a much more pronounced confessional thrust. In 1547 Ascham was involved in a controversial college disputation on the issue of the Eucharist, which –​relative to the theological climate in England –​pitted in radically stark terms the Lord’s Supper against the Catholic Mass. It was Ascham who wrote up the account in his Apologia pro Caena Dominica (‘Defence of the Lord’s Supper’) (discussed below). It is even possible that a Marian translation of the Mass of St James can be attributed to Ascham,42 another indication, perhaps, of his continued preoccupation with this particular sacrament. Nor would Ascham’s passion for patristics be quashed. A copy of Ambrose’s treatise on election and justification that Ascham owned was carefully marked-​ up, and his diligent annotations, dating probably to around the 1550s, demonstrate an interest in several important theological themes, including the issue of freedom of the will.43 It was Ascham’s linguistic skill in Latin and Greek that made all the projects described above possible, and indeed it was these that would also give definition to the rest of his career. He had an excellent facility with Latin44 and composed several works in this language, as well as the majority of his letters; he even composed some in Greek.45 Ascham was evidently an extremely accomplished classical scholar. He was one of the first at St John’s to lecture in Greek after Richard Croke’s initial lectureship in Greek. One of the areas he concentrated on in these lectures was the rhetoric of the Greek orators and, more especially, Isocrates.46 In choosing Isocrates, Ascham was 41

Themata, pp. 181ff. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), pp.  15–​16 and 71. See also Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound. Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–​1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 10 and ch. 1. 42 See Sam Kennerley, ch. 3, pp. 78–80 in this volume. 43 Ascham’s annotations to Divi Ambrosii … de vocatione omnium gentium libri duo (Geneva: Michel du Bois, 1541, ustc 450218: see Micha Lazarus, appendix 2 *St Ambrosius, 1541). The title page inscribed with Ascham’s initials and dated 1555 makes it likely that his annotations belong to that date. In multiple places his notes reflect a full subscription to the notion of justification by faith alone. There has been very little discussion of these annotations since Ryan’s initial discovery of them (Ryan, Ascham, pp. 211–​213) and Lucy R. Nicholas, ‘A Translation of Roger Ascham’s Apologia pro Caena Dominica and Contextual Analysis’, unpublished dissertation, King’s College London (2014). 44 A fascinating contemporary judgement on Ascham’s Latin can be found in letter from Richard Brandesby to Ascham, Malines, 11 June 1553, in which he sets out the Peter Nannius’s praise for the pleasing rhythm, structure and diction of Ascham’s Latin: letter cxlviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 359–​360. 45 Pember thanks Ascham for the letter he wrote to him in Greek (appearing as a fragment in Giles, vol. iii, p. 311, but translated by Hatch, p. 1). 46 Ryan, Ascham, pp. 25–​26.

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anticipating (or possibly influencing) the Henrician Statutes of 1545.47 His acquaintance with first editions, including the editio princeps of the Juntine Orpheus of 1500 (which contains his autograph in Greek)48 and his annotated copy of Callimachus’s Hymns and selections from Stobaeus’s Anthology of 1532, locate him at the forefront of early modern Greek scholarship.49 Letters make it clear that Ascham, during his time in Cambridge, also embarked upon (or considered doing so) a series of difficult and enterprising classical projects, such as a verse translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes into Latin from Greek in imitation of Seneca,50 and a translation of Herodotus which, had it survived, would have been the first translation in England of this ‘Father of Greek History’.51 He also requested to borrow a copy of the very rare Greek rhetorician, Hermogenes, with a view, perhaps, to undertaking some scholarly exposition on him.52 It would be a mistake, though, to deem Ascham’s classical and theological (or patristic) interests discrete phenomena. There are many clues to their relatedness in Ascham’s writing. In his Latin translation of Oecumenius on two Pauline letters, Ascham relied on Cicero as a philological authority as much as on Erasmus or the Latin Vulgate.53 But for Ascham, classical literature was more than a purely lexcial resource; it contained a nobility of thought that was wholly germane to a true comprehension of Christian piety. In his Themata, for instance, Ascham would adduce Cicero alongside the Old Testament and St Paul in order to posit a definition of the ‘righteous man’ and an ethical model to follow: Socrates offered one such model, in an attempt to determine the boundaries of Christian piety, and Ovid another, in a discussion of a verse from Timothy about endurance of persecution under Christ.54 Ascham’s annotations on the many books he owned also demonstrate the extent to which he viewed the

47 Mayor, Statutes, p. 251: these stipulated that a Greek lecturer must lecture daily in Plato, Demosthenes, Isocrates, Xenophon or other author of note. For more on Ascham’s interest in Isocrates, see Micha Lazarus, appendix 2. 48 Held in the Ionides Collection of Greek Classics, Yale University Library. 49 Held in Westminster School Archives. For more on his use of this, see J. S. Crown, ch. 9 in this volume. 50 And in doing so, according to Ryan, anticipated the Elizabethan predilection for Seneca (Ascham, p.  30). Ascham to Lee, place unknown, [1543], letter xvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 32: Ascham indicated he might do this, though it is not clear whether this was executed. 51 Ascham to William Grindal, place unknown, 13 February [1545], letter xxx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 75, where he mentions ‘set aside Herodotus for the time being’ and see also Hatch, p. 123, n. 3. 52 Ascham letter to a friend, place unknown, [1539/​1543], letter xvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 33. For Ascham’s ownership of Hermogenes, see Micha Lazarus, appendix 2, pp. 311–312. 53 Ascham to John Seton, place unknown, 1 January 1542, letter xi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 24. See also Kennerley, ch. 3 in this volume. 54 Themata, p. 161 and p. 185, p. 184, p. 233. 2 Timothy 3: ‘Everyone who wishes to live dutifully in Jesus Christ will endure persecutions’.

278 Nicholas profound compatibility of pagan thought and sacred literature.55 For Ascham, classical ideas and models were not pagan distractions but part of the fuller picture, a sort of textual John the Baptist. When it came to written assignments, Ascham was guilty, as many academics are, of expatiation without execution. Part of this was attributable to the simple factor of time: Ascham was, first and foremost, a teacher. He was also a very meticulous, even fussy, man. Evidence suggests that he would draft different versions of letters before deciding which to send.56 Works such as The Scholemaster were drafted over a period of years, and would be substantially revised along the way, an approach which, over time, of course resulted in a less prolific output.57 This profile of someone who prized polish and finesse may be further witnessed through a consideration of Ascham’s handwriting. His hand, of course, varied depending on the occasion, but in the presentational manuscript productions, the flow of nib and ink is breathtakingly exquisite.58 The quality of his calligraphy is so fine that one might easily mistake it for a printed text.59 If Ascham’s perfectionist streak slowed him down, so too did his health. Ascham’s constitution was far from robust. He describes, as outlined above, how he succumbed in ca. 1540/​1 to ‘quartan fever’ (a malarial condition which entailed a debilitating fever every fourth day). But, it seems, this affliction also took a considerable long-​term toll on his body, one of the side-​effects being a form of ‘melancholy’, what we might today call ‘depression’.60 Over three years after he initially reported being struck down, Ascham sent a request to Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for an exemption from eating fish.61 Here Ascham (in almost ‘too much information’ mode) devoted several pages to his now enfeebled state on account of quartan fever, placing 55

This is similarly reflected in Ascham’s annotations:  see Micha Lazarus, appendix 2, passim. 56 See Ascham to William Cecil, Brussels, 7 June 1553, letter cxlix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 360–​ 362 and Giles, vol. I, pt. 2, pp. 457–458. 57 G. B. Parks ‘The First Draft of Ascham’s Scholemaster’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 1 (1937–​1938), pp. 313–​327. 58 For example, Bodleian, Rawlinson ms D.1317 and St John’s College ms L.3 (James, 360). Ascham’s handwriting is considered a model of the italic style in J. S. Dees, ‘Recent Studies in Ascham’ English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980), pp. 300–​310, at 305. There is also Ascham’s beautifully engraved autograph above the fireplace in the room at the top of staircase A in St. John’s College, Cambridge, an image of which appears on the front cover of this volume. 59 Ryan, Ascham, p. 301. Ascham was also appointed tutor in handwriting: see, for example, Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 11 November 1550, letter cviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 222. 60 Ascham himself discusses this in a letter to John Ponet, Cambridge, [January] 1545, letter xxviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 70–​71. 61 Cambridge, [January 1545], letter xxvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. i, pp. 63–​70. We cannot discount the fact that this request to break a fast may also have had religious significance:  see Nicholas, ‘A Translation of Roger Ascham’s Apologia pro Caena Dominica and Contextual Analysis’, p. 27.

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particular focus on his stomach.62 Ascham would, in fact, live with digestive problems and health worries throughout his life. It was only when Ascham was in his thirties that he must have sensed that his talents were finally beginning to be recognised; he was placed on a more secure financial footing, and his career prospects looked rosier. In 1545 Ascham published a tract on archery, the Toxophilus, for which he was awarded a handsome pension. The date of the Toxophilus coincided with the year that Wingfield, Ascham’s childhood host, died, and Ascham mentions him in the work, recalling that great man’s commitment to shooting. As indebted as Ascham felt towards this figure, his Toxophilus was a work that was far more forward –​than backward-​looking, and the work’s outward focus which, as Cathy Shrank convincingly argues in ­chapter 10 of this volume, was so bound up with commonwealth concerns, provides an accurate index of Ascham’s mindset at the time. Indeed, a much more likely motivation driving the composition and publication of this work was a raft of recent Henrician legislation concerning archery as well as the religious revolution that Henry’s break with Rome had set in train.63 The main dedicatee of the Toxophilus was the King himself and, no longer so focused on bishops in northern provinces, Ascham also despatched the tract to a host of senior establishment figures. Ascham’s sights, like many of his Cantabrigian peers, were now firmly set on the court as a source of promotion, social and financial advancement. Ascham was also composing poetry during these years. Much of his verse was written in honour of some of the most powerful people in the land, once again reflecting ambitions that lay beyond Cambridge. In 1544 he composed poems for Henry viii and Prince Edward.64 Both poems were highly laudatory and simultaneously functioned as a celebration of the royal supremacy and religious reformation. In the following year, 1546, Ascham was appointed to the prestigious office of Public Orator of Cambridge University, a post previously held by luminaries like Cheke, Smith and Redman. This office would involve inter alia writing letters on behalf of the University to the great and the good, a duty that surely helped open his eyes to the dynamics between university and court, and equipped him with a much greater insight into the dark arts of networking and lobbying.65

62 63

64 65

He also discusses his stomach in his letter to Ponet: Cambridge, [January] 1545, letter xxviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 70–​71. Peter E. Medine, ‘The Art and Wit of Roger Ascham’s Bid for Royal Patronage’ in Peter E. Medine and Joseph Wittreich, eds., Soundings of Things Done: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of S.  K. Heninger Jr. (Newark:  University of Delaware Press, 1997), pp. 23–​51. Ascham’s Latin poems (eight in total) are set out in Giles, vol. iii, pp. 277–​293. Although as Law discusses in ch. 1 in this volume, Ascham had communicated on behalf of the University for some years before this.

280 Nicholas It was at the start of Edward’s reign in 1547 when we see Ascham at his most confident. With the establishment of an openly Protestant regime consonant with his own religious convictions, and now a senior and respected member of the University, he must have been filled with a sense of opportunity, even bullishness. Just a few months after Edward’s accession, a series of theological disputations about the Mass were held at St John’s College. It is unclear whether these were organised as a matter of course and part of the regular disputational round, or pursuant to a more disruptive agenda. We do know that these were held under the watch of Ascham who was, at that time, it seems, serving as acting Master of the college.66 The main quaestio posed was ‘whether the Mass was the same as the Lord’s Supper or not’.67 These debates caused a real stir and there was a ‘common demand’ in the college that they be transferred to the public schools of the University, though before these could get going, they were in fact prohibited outright by the Vice-​Chancellor.68 In the months that followed, Ascham produced a stridently anti-​Mass tract which appeared to represent the Protestant side in these disputations. The treatise was in Latin and was entitled Apologia pro Caena Dominica.69 It makes explicit reference to the Duke of Somerset, the Lord Protector during Edward’s minority, and it was, it appears, ultimately intended for him.70 One has to exercise some caution about the extent to which we take this tract as fully reflecting Ascham’s own theological position at the time; it seems probable that the work was intended to constitute a collective effort, but it is unlikely that Ascham would have spent so much time on this –​there are 150 pages of it –​had it not been an issue in which he was keen to invest. It is also a work that bears all the hallmarks of an Aschamite approach: it was a rhetorical piece that flexed its epideictic muscles at every stage, but was also rooted in a close philological analysis of Scripture that Ascham was so expert in. More significantly, this treatise in its unequivocal distinction between the Mass and the Lord’s Supper, its unreserved attack on priestly sacrifice and attestation of a spiritual and commemorative sacrament, was running far ahead of the official line. It may be going too far to suggest that at the beginning of this hopeful era for Protestants, Ascham was responsible for spearheading a theological campaign which, he hoped, would have some impact on governmental policy; but it is not out of the question.

66

Ascham’s correspondence is by far the best source for their substance, in particular, Ascham to the Master of St John’s, Cambridge, January 1548, letter lxxxii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 153–​156 and to Cecil, Cambridge, 5 January 1548, letter lxxxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 156–​158. 67 Ascham to Cecil, Cambridge, 5 January 1548, letter lxxxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 156. 68 Ibid, pp. 156–​158 and letter lxxxii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 153–​156. 69 Lucy R. Nicholas, Roger Ascham’s ‘A Defence of the Lord’s Supper’: Latin Text and English Translation (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017). 70 Nicholas, Defence, pp. 46–​47 and 96–​97. See also letter lxxxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 157.

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The Apologia, like many projects, was left incomplete.71 One important reason may have been that early in 1548 Ascham was summoned to court as tutor to the Princess Elizabeth. By all accounts, she herself had insisted on his appointment.72 Not enough has been made of the nature of Ascham’s carefully designed programme of instruction for the future Queen of England.73 It was no neutral diet, and it seems to have reflected a deliberate policy to steer her in a very particular intellectual and religious direction, a policy that was all the more striking for the fact that at this stage no one imagined that Elizabeth was actually being prepared for rule. Royal pupil and tutor evidently enjoyed working together; Ascham would read with Elizabeth well into her reign as Queen, and Ascham wrote in glowing (some might say overly glowing)74 terms about the nature of instructing such an nimble-​witted and gifted learner. In parallel with this, Ascham held another post at court: the keeper of the King’s Library.75 Oddly, just two years into his post as Elizabeth’s tutor, Ascham quite suddenly left it and returned to Cambridge. Again, this turn of events is scarcely broached in historical accounts, perhaps because there exists nothing beyond scraps of evidence to explain it. In a letter, Ascham seems to blame one of Elizabeth’s stewards and to allude to certain rumours spread by ‘ill-​wishers’ about him;76 in another he points to some sort of temporary ‘estrangement’ from Elizabeth,77 and it still remains unclear whether the episode had anything to do with the scandal involving Thomas Seymour’s indiscretions with Elizabeth or the broader political manoeuvering of the time, which saw Somerset committed to the Tower at the start of 1549.78

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It was posthumously published in 1577 during Elizabeth’s reign and dedicated to Robert Dudley. It appears that there was some competition for this role, but that Cheke helped secure it for Ascham: Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, 12 February 1548, letter lxxxv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 160–​162. Ascham to Sturm, Cambridge, 4 April 1550, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 191–​192. This is further discussed by Lucy R.  Nicholas and Cyndia Clegg (chs. 7 and 8 in this volume). ‘Mr Ascham’s admiration (was it perhaps sometimes something more? ...’,): Hatch, p. 315, quoting Margaret Irwin, who had private access to the papers of the Seymour family. Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 14 July 1551, letter cxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 238. Bartholemew Traheron, another Protestant and later Marian exile, took over from him when Ascham was away in Germany. Ascham to Cheke, Cambridge, 28 January 1550, letter xciv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 174–​176. Ascham to Bucer Augsburg, 7 January 1551, letter cxi, Giles, vol. I, pt. 2. p. 231. Ryan steers clear of implicating Ascham in either episode (Ascham, pp. 112–​113). Cf. Alan Stewart who comments on Ascham’s ‘undeniable proximity’ to the key players in this drama: Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p.  131. For more on the Thomas Seymour-​Elizabeth episode, see

282 Nicholas Whatever the case, the episode must have worked to reinforce any reservations he already had about the perils and pitfalls of courtly service.79 Year by year, Ascham’s horizons broadened. Ascham was by the late 1540s and early 1550s enthusiastically and actively developing international points of contact. In 1549 he met and spent time with Martin Bucer, the Strasbourg reformer, who had been invited to England and appointed Regius Professor of Divinity in Cambridge. When Bucer, a mentor to many, unexpectedly and prematurely died in 1551, Ascham participated in the collective mourning that followed, and two of Ascham’s Latin poems commemorated Bucer’s passing.80 In 1550 Ascham had also made initial contact with Johannes Sturm, another Strasbourgian, who was at the time running the Gymnasium there (a school established by the Protestant city council) and was also involved as a diplomat in some of the major peace talks that were being held between Protestants and Catholics. In 1551 their unanimitas on education of the nobility, on the union of dialectic and rhetoric, and on the congruence of classical literature and Protestantism was advertised to the rest of Europe when Sturm published their inaugural letters to each other.81 As discussed in more detail in ­chapter 7, this long-​distance friendship would endure and deepen over many years, and the degree to which Sturm and other reformers from Strasbourg both shaped and reflected Ascham’s intellectual and religious approach should not be underestimated.82 Over the years, Ascham’s name has been associated with a confusing gamut of confessional labels ranging from ‘relatively conservative Protestant’ to ‘Puritan’.83 It does not seem, however, that those formulations have taken into account a Sturmian or Bucerian dimension. Few now would question the Protestant credentials of either Sturm or Bucer, reformers who placed a greater emphasis on unity and building bridges than on division and theological dogmatism. Their overtly ‘irenic’ approach is sometimes difficult to grasp, and mistaken for a lack of religious conviction; but, as Luc Racaut and Alec Ryrie have convincingly argued, such moderation was more a matter

G. W. Bernard, ‘The downfall of Thomas Seymour’ in G. W. Bernard, ed., The Tudor Nobility (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 212–​240. 79 For more on Ascham’s ambivalence about a career at court, see Ceri Law, ch. 1 in this volume. 80 Giles, vol. iii, pp. 287–​288. 81 Epistolae duae de nobilitate Anglicana in Conrad Heresbach’s De laudibus Graecarum litterarum oratio (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1551, ustc 622756). 82 See, for example, Mike Pincombe’s demonstration of the Sturmian thrust of Ascham’s The Scholemaster in ch. 12 of this volume. 83 Ryan, Ascham, pp.  99–​100. Also ‘supporting cautious religious reform’ in Rosemary O’ Day, ‘Roger Ascham, 1515/​16–​1568’, odnb; ‘a learned and grave Protestant’ in J. Strype, Life of the learned Sir Thomas Smith (Oxford, 1820), p. 50; ‘of Reformist outlook’ in Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: a life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 325.

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of mood than doctrine.84 Moderates were not lacking in beliefs, but chose not to confront those with whom they disagreed. Racaut and Ryrie also point out that there were tactical motives behind moderation (which were not necessarily moderate), and that ‘moderation’ itself became a contested phenomenon, a common-sensical centreground which individuals would rhetorically claim for themselves.85 Their analytical framework is helpful, and in Ascham’s own theological writings one can witness this paradoxical combination of doctrinal resolve and pleas for balance.86 For men like Ascham, Bucer and Sturm, espousal of theological positions had to be coupled with socially moral etiquette, and that included a simple creed of having to rub along with others rather than alienating them. It did not mean their subscription to the Protestant cause was less robust than those now classified as ‘the hotter sort of Protestant’, but simply that they also placed a high premium on human interaction and accommodation. When it came to his religious opponents, Ascham’s approach is effectively captured in the following statement from a letter he wrote in 1551: ‘I am sorry Mr Langdale is gone from that college, although he did dissent from us in religion; yet we know that God calleth men at divers hours at his pleasure. He was learned, virtuous, diligent and was once my faithful friend, and therefore I cannot but be sorry for his departing’.87 By the early 1550s, one can detect a certain restlessness in Ascham. He was, it seems, keen to explore pastures new, and to seek employment beyond the Cantabrigian cupulas. It is possible that Ascham was drawn to London and the temptations of the big city, a place where he would, in fact, settle later in life. More specifically, evidence points to some flirtation with the law and the Inns of Court. As a layman, he would be well-​qualified to embark on the legal route,88 and a ‘Roger Askam’ is listed among those admitted to the lodges of Middle Temple between 1524/​5 and 1550/​1.89 However,

84 85 86 87 88

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Luc Racaut and Alec Ryrie, ‘Introduction:  Between Coercion and Persuasion’ in idem., eds., Moderate Voices in the European Reformation (Oxford and New  York:  Routledge, 2005), pp. 1–​12, at p. 5. Ibid. See also Ethan H.  Shagan on the degree to which ‘moderation’ dominated early modern discourse and was bound up with power politics:  The Rule of Moderation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For example, in his Themata, his attacks on ceremonies sit alongside exhortations for a ‘middle way’: pp. 174, 183, and 221. Ascham to Edward Raven and William Ireland, [place unknown], 17 November 1551, letter cxxxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 316. At Cambridge University there were strict stipulations that a man who wished to practise law in church courts had to be a layman: Victor Morgan and Christopher Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge:  Volume II, 1546–​1750 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 25. H. F. MacGeagh and H. A. C. Sturgess (eds.), The Register of Admissions to the Honorable Society of the Middle Temple (London:  Butterworth, 1949); and C.  H. Hopwood (ed.), A Calendar of the Middle Temple Records (London: Butterworth, 1903). Unfortunately, the

284 Nicholas in September 1550 a much more meaningful international opportunity presented itself. Ascham was appointed secretary to Sir Richard Morison, the royal ambassador to the Imperial Court of the Holy Roman Emperor and Spanish King, Charles v. His affinity for Latin may have secured him the role, or perhaps a broadening web of contacts, or both.90 It involved a journey across Belgium to Germany and Italy and lasted for three years, until the death of King Edward. Ascham’s time on the continent has attracted little attention in the history books. Yet, as ­chapter 6 contests, this was a commission of genuine significance: a new Protestant regime was doing diplomatic business with a Catholic Emperor, and at the same time shoring up official contacts in Germany. The ambassadorial visit was even recorded in Johannes Sleidan’s History of the Reformation.91 Ascham’s role was, moreover, no minor one: when, for example, in 1552 Morison was ill, it was Ascham who deputised for him. The regular bulletins Ascham sent back to England were detailed, and can provide important insights into the risks, demands and diversions of travel around mainland Europe at a time of critical geopolitical upheaval. This aspect of Ascham’s life that has up until now been woefully under-​appreciated, and the valuable light his placement can shed on the early modern diplomatic service, and more particularly, the post of diplomatic secretaries, are explored in depth in ­chapter 6 by Tracey Sowerby. Yet Ascham’s despatches from the continent also offer a more personal window onto the mind and disposition of a man abroad for the first time. Ascham evidently found the experience of travel a thrilling one, and early letters written in diaristic form are replete with animated observations about buildings, coins,92 local food, dress, forms of religious worship, descriptions of people they met, and the quality of German wine. Although the official schedule of visits was fairly circumscribed, Ascham evinced a curiosity about seeing other places: he hoped to visit ‘the courageous race of the Swiss’ in Basel, and expressed a desire to visit Italy and report on proceedings at the Council of Trent.93 A conspicuous and constant focal point was his interest in books and libraries, and letter after letter reports on particular texts he has come across, or the reading material of a person he has met. Such a preoccupation was perhaps natural for one who had formerly held the post of the King’s Librarian and for a Cambridge academic, but the degree of his interest is perhaps more evocative of someone determined to build up a picture of the current state of international

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volume containing the records for the years of Ascham’s membership has been lost for a long time, and it is not now possible to narrow down the precise date of his admission, but records indicate he was still there in 1554. See more in Tracey A. Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England: the Careers of Richard Morison c. 1513–​1556 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 152. Ibid., p. 217. On Ascham’s passion for numismatics, see Andrew Burnett, ch. 4 in this volume. Ascham to Froben, Augsburg, 10 June 1551, letter cxxiii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p.  289; and Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, letter cxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 269.

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scholarship. Ascham was also all too aware that he was travelling in one of the most politically and religiously charged regions of Europe, and no less conspicuous are his comments on religious developments in Germany. Many letters, for example, dwell on the fate of Magdeburg, a Lutheran stronghold, which had resisted Emperor Charles v and refused to accept the Augsburg Interim, consequently being besieged by Imperial forces in 1550–​1551. There can be no doubt too that during his time on the continent, Ascham identified as a Protestant, often applying that label to himself and ‘papist’ to others.94 For an Englishman, this was very distinctive, and studies show that (in England) Ascham’s sincere and incorporative use of ‘Protestant’ was unique in the period before its more common utilisation in the 1580s.95 This tendency was almost certainly the direct result of his time abroad and his interactions with friends there. Although Ascham used the Latin verb protestor in his Apologia of 1547,96 which was almost certainly a semantic nod to the Lutheran ‘protest’ of 1529 when the term ‘Protestant’ was first coined, he began to utilise the label in a more systematic way during his time in Germany. Towards the end of the trip, Ascham wrote up a fuller version of his German travels in an historical essay written in the vernacular entitled A Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany,97 a work possibly intended for Edward’s Privy Council. In this essay, history and Protestantism came together in what legitimately counted as one of the first Protestant histories of the period. Indeed, Ascham’s Report is comparable to an historical account being composed at around the same time by Sleidan, the officially appointed historian of the Schmalkaldic League.98 The marginalia in books owned by Ascham further reveal the extent to which this work was almost certainly constructed pursuant to a deep and highly critical approach to historiography;99 relative to the times, he had a highly advanced historical awareness. When news came through of Edward vi’s death and Mary’s accession to the throne in July 1553, Ascham was still in on the continent (in Brussels). Ascham himself made no comment publicly about these dramatic changes of events, though others at the

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Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, letter cxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 248 and 255. P. Marshall, ‘The naming of Protestant England’, Past & Present, 214 (2012), pp.  87–​128, n. 58; he refers only to Ascham’s Report and The Scholemaster and not the 1551 letter to Raven (above). Apologia, p. 24. It formed part of a very long letter to John Astley, but was left incomplete. It was first published posthumously in 1570, the same year as The Scholemaster, and is set out in Giles vol. iii. Giles suggests that it was first printed in 1552 (Giles, vol. iii, p. iii), but it is not clear what the evidence for this is. Johannes Sleidan, De statu religionis et reipublicae, Carolo Quinto, Caesare, commentarii (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1555, ustc 667350). Micha Lazarus, appendix 2.

286 Nicholas time wrote to Ascham expressing their grief.100 There is no surviving evidence of any involvement that Ascham may have had in the attempts being made back in England to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne, albeit it is likely that one of his closest friends and personal mentor (as Ascham often described him), Cheke, had thrown his lot in with Northumberland. In fact, however, many evangelicals did not support attempts to alter the succession, especially as that would also have entailed denying Elizabeth’s royal claims. By the beginning of September 1553 Ascham was back on English shores, but it is far from clear that Ascham envisaged he would remain in England. There is nothing to suggest that Ascham ever contemplated exile, a choice pursued by others, including a significant number from St John’s who would seek refuge, notably in Strasbourg where Ascham had good contacts. All the same, Ascham’s movements at this time and his correspondence point to a certain disorientation. In the Autumn, Ascham wrote to Stephen Gardiner, his erstwhile Cambridge colleague, and Mary’s newly appointed Lord Chancellor, setting out a range of possible avenues: he offered his services either at the University, at court as Mary’s Latin secretary, or as a foreign-​office holder in an ambassadorial capacity.101 As its transpired, Ascham was eventually appointed as Mary’s Latin secretary, but the process was a slow (and presumably excruciating) one for Ascham, compelling him to take on some tutoring work in London while he waited.102 Gardiner is often credited with clinching the deal, but others also played an important part: for example, William Paget and two continental scholars, Peter Nannius and (the abovementioned) Sturm, who wrote enthusiastically to Paget in support of Ascham.103 If Ascham had some qualms about the new incumbent and her regime, so too it seems did they about him. Even with a firm promise of the secretarial appointment in November 1553, it took until May the following year for the actual patent to come through. This was in part owing to some technical issues related to the payment of an additional pension,104 but evidence also points to Catholic opposition in Mary’s court. One of Ascham’s most vocal detractors was Sir Francis Englefield (or Inglefield), who had left the country during Edward’s reign. It appears that Englefield called for Ascham’s writings and religious opinions to be vetted, accusing Ascham of being a ‘heretic’ and ‘fit to be rejected and 100 Brandesby to Ascham, Mechlin, 18 July 1553, letter clii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 370–​371; and Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg, 22 July 1553, letter cliii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 372–​373. 101 Discussed by Sowerby in ch. 6 in this volume. See also Ascham to Gardiner, [Cambridge], 8 October 1553, letter clviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 381–​385. 102 Hatch, p. 583. 103 Peter Nannius to Ascham, Louvain, 17 August 1553, letter clv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 377–​378; Sturm to Ascham, Strasbourg, 17 September 1553, letter clvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 378–​ 379; and Sturm to Paget, Strasbourg, 17 September 1553, letter clvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 379–​381. 104 Ryan, Ascham, pp. 197–​198.

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punished’.105 It is difficult now to establish quite what Englefield had in mind. Ascham had authored some overtly Protestant pieces, and many highly evangelical letters, but at the start of Mary’s reign these were hidden away or in the hands of sympathetic individuals. The only writings of Ascham that were at this stage in the public domain were his Toxophilus of 1545 and his Epistolae duae de nobilitate Anglicana (‘Two Letters concerning the English Nobility’) of 1551, but these were perhaps controversial enough for Englefield and others.106 There is a high likelihood that practical considerations were central in Ascham’s appointment as Mary’s secretary. A smooth administrative transition was a priority, and it must have made good pragmatic sense to appoint the former Latin secretary to Edward vi. The range of European dignitaries and foreign sovereigns to whom Ascham was entrusted with writing made this a task that required someone with both experience and nous. The fact that Ascham had gained so much experience abroad at the Court of Charles v must also have counted in his favour, especially given that Philip ii, Mary’s consort, was Charles’s son.107 The demands of this post were surely considerable. As Ascham’s biographer, Grant, observed, in the space of three days he drafted ‘forty-​seven different epistles to various princes of whom the very least were cardinals’.108 More significantly, we also have Ascham’s own manuscript letter-​book (all but ignored by historians), which is brimming with drafts of letters, and notes about appropriate preambles and forms of address.109 We can be in no doubt that Ascham did conform under Mary, at least outwardly. He would, for example, translate Reginald Pole’s first Parliamentary address for onward despatch to Pope Julius iii;110 in a move that must have felt anathema for a Protestant, he also drafted (and countersigned) a letter sent on behalf of Mary and Philip to the 105 D. M.  Loades, The Reign of Mary Tudor:  Politics, Government and Religion in England, 1553–​1558 (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 18 and 24, and also referred to by Ascham in a letter to the Earl of Leicester, [London], 14 April 1566, letter lxxv, Giles, vol. ii, p. 129. See also A. J. Loomie, ‘Sir Francis Englefield (1522–​1596)’, odnb; and J. Strype, Life of Smith (Oxford:  Clarenson Press, 1820), p.  50. To Sturm, Ascham alluded to others attempting ‘to impede the course of his [Gardiner’s] goodwill for me on account of my religion’: Greenwich, 14 September 1555, letter cxci, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 445. 106 The confessional toxicity of the latter can perhaps be gauged from Ascham’s own words: ‘You write … that both our letters are published. You shall see, most distinguished Sturm, how to your peril you have brought into the light a man thus far lurking in the shadows’ (Augsburg, 24 January 1551, letter cxvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 271). 107 On the importance of pragmatism to Mary, see also Elizabeth Evenden, ‘Introduction’, in Elizabeth Evenden and Vivienne Westbrook, eds., Catholic Renewal and Protestant Resistance in Marian England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 1–​16, at p. 2. 108 Grant’s, Oratio de vita et obitu Rogeri Aschami, in Giles, vol. iii, p. 332. 109 Add. ms 35840, 1554–​1558, held at the British Library. To my knowledge, this has not been transcribed or translated. 110 Thomas F. Mayer, The Correspondence of Reginald Pole (4 vols., Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002–​ 2008), vol. 3, p. 82.

288 Nicholas Pope, requesting the restoration of Pole’s legation at Rome. This letter stated (inter alia): ‘We had nothing more in keeping with the past than that we should … restore reverence for the apostolic see to the pristine dignity and splendour which was once in us’.111 To criticise is misplaced, and to ask why and how Ascham conformed yields a far more interesting story. Recent studies have shown an increasing sensitivity to the phenomenon of conformity, with the focus gradually shifting away from the minority who chose exile or martyrdom to the vast majority of Protestants who opted to stick it out. Historians have, for example, probed the degree to which twin loyalties to monarch as well as to God might have jostled in the conscience of many.112 Such a consideration was certainly relevant in the case of Ascham, a keen advocate of the royal supremacy,113 and Mary’s appeal to the primacy of the law may also have resonated with him. A letter Ascham penned just three years prior to Mary’s accession affords a telling insight into Ascham’s views concerning obedience to temporal rulers: paraphrasing the thrust of the Magdeburg Confession, he wrote: ‘… if the superior magistrate exercise force against his subjects contrary to either natural or divine right, the inferior magistrate should be allowed to resist. I myself, however, do not approve of this proposition’.114 In parallel, there has been an increasing emphasis by historians, notably by Ethan Shagan, on the themes of religious collaboration and negotiation.115 Notwithstanding the reintroduction of the Mass, many Protestants might have sustained hopes for reform under this new monarch, and scholars have convincingly highlighted the continued focus on education and humanist reform that took place in this reign.116 For Ascham, an important point of contact was with Pole. Such a connection was in many ways surprising, as Ascham had in the past been highly critical of Pole for his defection to Italy, his disloyalty to Henry, and his subscription to the Pope.117 Yet in his capacity as Latin secretary, Ascham spent much time with Mary’s Archbishop of Canterbury, and it is fascinating to observe how, despite the obvious differences in broad religious outlook,118 common ground was identified and actively cultivated. One example of shared 1 11 Westminster, 21 May 1557, letter cxciv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 452–​423. 112 A point developed under the banner of ‘politique’ by Racaut and Ryrie in the introduction to their Moderate Voices, where they suggest the compulsion to obey monarch as well as God is a difficult one to measure, and indeed one that has not been sufficiently factored into the Reformation model. 113 This is a theme that emerges strongly in, for instance, his Apologia. 114 Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 11 November 1550, letter cviii, Giles, vol. 1, pt. 2, p. 219. 115 Ethan H.  Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003). For more on Ascham’s pragmatic approach, see Ceri Law, ch. 1 in this volume. 116 Evenden, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–​2. 117 Ascham, Themata, p. 228. 118 It should be noted that Pole’s own religious views defy tidy classification, and that there were aspects of his outlook that seemed more in line with Protestantism than Catholicism:

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interest was the writing of the Portuguese humanist and bishop, Jerónimo Osório, and in 1555 Ascham dedicated a copy of Osório’s De nobilitate civili (‘On Civil Nobility’) of 1542 to Pole.119 This was a shrewd choice: it was a work which found favour with Catholics and Protestants alike. It was composed in a fine Ciceronian Latin, it affirmed the importance of an educated nobility and the promotion of eloquence, areas on which both men could completely agree. According to Ascham, the two men also discussed themes that Ascham had previously reflected on with his Protestant friend Sturm, such as Sturm’s work on Aristotle and the whereabouts of Cicero’s De Republica.120 Recent historical analysis of Pole argues for a greater need to acknowledge Pole’s intellectual leadership in the Marian Reformation,121 and indeed it may be that Pole’s relationship with Ascham might have flourished in interesting ways had Mary not died when she did. Other approaches open to Protestants during the Marian years were dissimulation and ‘nicodemism’ (a tendency to publicly misrepresent one’s actual religious convictions). Recent scholarship has very effectively highlighted how pervasive nicodemism was, and the range of ways in which nicodemites could operate so as to further their own beliefs while avoiding trouble.122 Such strategies may, with the benefit of hindsight, seem rather craven, and indeed they attracted considerable

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see, for example, Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). De nobilitate civili, eiusdem nobilitate Christiana (Lisbon: Luis Rodrigues, 1542, USTC 352788). Ascham to Cardinal Pole, London, [7/​9] April 1555, letter clxxxix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 440–​442. See also manuscript dedication at St John’s College Cambridge: Aa. 6. 20/​AsR 3.9. For more on Ascham and Osório see L. Bourdon, ‘Jerónimo Osório et Roger Ascham (1553–​1568)’, Revista da Faculdade de Letras (Universidade de Lisbon, 1957), pp.  27–​47. Ascham also sent copies of the work to Paget, William Petre and Cuthbert Tunstall. Ascham to Sturm, Greenwich, 14 September 1555, letter cxci, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 445–​446. Eamon Duffy and David Loades, eds., The Church of Mary Tudor (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2006), passim, who comment that ‘the priorities of Reginald Pole … are central to any understanding of the Marian Church as a whole’. See also Thomas F.  Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). This is a well-​trodden area, and useful literature includes: Peter Matheson, ‘Martyrdom or Mission? A Protestant Debate’ Archiv für Reformationgeschichte, 80 (1979), pp. 154–​171; Perez Zagorin, ‘The Historical Significance of Lying and Dissimulation’, Social Research 63.3 (1996), pp.  863–​912; Andrew Pettegree ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’ in Marian Protestantism:  Six Studies (Aldershot:  Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 86–​117; Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII:  Evangelicals in the Early Modern English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 69–​89; Susan Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and Recantation during the English Reformation:  The “Subtle Shadows” of Dr.  Edward Crome’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), pp.  224–​242; and M.  Anne Overell, Nicodemites. Faith and Concealment between Italy and Tudor England (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018) who also adds ‘Nicodemites were legion’ and she expertly attempts to distinguish the constructed polemical label from the quotidian dealings of ordinary men and women (pp. 6 and 8).

290 Nicholas opprobrium at the time.123 Yet the contemporary view was not monolithic, and many Protestants did see merit in it, and actively advocated it, perceiving it as a religious duty and emphatically not as a dilution of their faith.124 There are some tantalising hints that Ascham continued to support the reform movement where he could. It appears, for instance, that Ascham, while Mary’s Latin secretary, also penned a number of semi-​official letters that comprised petitions of clemency for those who had been punished for opposing Mary’s regime:  he wrote on behalf of Edward Rogers (and family) who had been taken to the Tower in the aftermath of Wyatt’s Rebellion of 1554, and also for another supporter of Thomas Wyatt, about the remission of his fine.125 There were also two letters penned for Lady Elizabeth Talboys, the wife of Ambrose Dudley, son of the Duke of Northumberland: the first requesting the release of Ambrose from prison; the second asked for the restoration of her estates that had been confiscated.126 Finally, there was one on behalf of the wife of William Stafford asking for mercy for her husband, who had gone into exile without permission in 1555 after falling out of favour with Mary.127 One wonders too about the codes and ‘sign language’ Protestants developed during this time. We know that Ascham, in conjunction with his secretaryship, resumed lessons with Elizabeth. In a description for Sturm of such sessions, Ascham indicated that he and Elizabeth were reading the Greek speeches of Aeschines and Demosthenes’s On the Crown which, according to Ascham, Elizabeth ‘understands at first glance so knowingly’.128 We cannot know for sure, but there may be an interesting subtext to this: these classical orations encapsulated the famous Athenian dispute about how to respond to the Macedonian (i.e., foreign) aggression of Philip of Macedon. Was this code for the issue of coping

123 Most notably by Calvin: see, in particular, Carlos M. Eire, ‘Prelude to Sedition? Calvin’s Attack on Nicodemism and Religious Compromise’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 76 (1985), pp. 120–​145 and War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For the most recent insights on the nature of Calvin’s anti-​nicodemism, see Kenneth J. Woo, Nicodemism and the English Calvin 1544–​1584 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019). 124 Nicodemism was advocated by Bucer, for example, in his unpublished ca. 1540 Consilium theologicum privatim conscriptum and Cheke in his unpublished De Ecclesia, begun in 1555; see also John F. McDiarmid, ‘ “To Content God Quietlie”: The Troubles of Sir John Cheke under Queen Mary’ in Evenden and Westbrook, eds., Catholic Renewal and Protestant Resistance in Marian England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 185–​227. See also Overell, Nicodemites, who argues that nicodemites were not liberals or moderates (p. 4). 125 Ascham to King Philip, [London], 23 November, 1554, letter clxxviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 421–​422; and 14 December, 1554, letter clxxix, pp. 422–​423. 126 Ascham to King Philip, London, 8 November, 1554, letter clxxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 419–​ 420; and 22 February 1555, letter clxxxiv, pp, 429–​430. 127 Ascham to King Philip, [1555], letter clxxx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 423–​424. 128 Greenwich, 14 September 1555, letter cxci, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 447.

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with Mary’s marriage (of the previous year) to Philip of Spain and her increasing allegiance to continental Catholicism?129 Silence was another option available to nicodemites. Indeed, one is struck by the lack of available information about Ascham’s life between the years of 1553–​1558 relative to other periods. For every other phase of Ascham’s adulthood, we have records of his ideas, observations on events, scholarly activities, and other academic projects, but there is scarcely anything for this period. Ascham was ordinarily a prodigious letter-​ writer, but there are remarkably few extant private letters (practically none) written during these years. Even in the case of Sturm, with whom he was formerly in touch so regularly, there is just one (extant) letter of 1555. This was categorically not a time to lay oneself open to accusation. One of his closest contemporaries, John Cheke, was, in 1554, imprisoned in the Tower, subsequently arrested in 1556, imprisoned again and publicly made to recant his Protestant views.130 Bucer, another of Ascham’s main spiritual guides, though already dead by 1553, had his bones exhumed and publicly burnt as a public demonstration against his ‘heresy’ in 1557. One wonders how many letters and documents were destroyed during this period. It was fortunate too that Ascham’s theological works had not been published, especially if we bear in mind that a significant reason identified by the authorities for Cheke’s transgression was his subscription to a figurative interpretation of the Eucharist, a view which Ascham had advanced in his Apologia.131 It is possible too that such refuge in secrecy had some interesting, even positive by-​ products. In a work called the Captive Mind written in 1953, the Pole, Czesław Miłosz, explored the psychology of long-​term concealment by intellectuals living under totalitarianism.132 Inter alia, he argued that the very act of disguising one’s own feelings brought its own pleasures, and that the elaborate mental acrobatics such subterfuge involved could in fact sharpen the intellect and give rise to its own form of nimble creativity.133 It may well be the case that Ascham did derive some satisfaction from quiet survival, and even that his experience during the Marian period and his (enforced) dealings with Pole and Osório were instrumental in honing thoughts about his final work, The Scholemaster (see below), which combined instruction with the nostalgic 1 29 McDiarmid ‘ “To Content God Quietlie” ’, p. 197, where he thanks Anne Overell. 130 For more detail on Cheke’s fate during Mary’s reign, see McDiarmid, “To Content God Quietlie”. This must have been a truly agonising time for Ascham especially when Pole with whom he was working so closely was closely involved in extracting Cheke’s recantation (McDiarmid, “To Content God Quietlie”, p. 214). 131 Ibid., p. 215. Ascham, Apologia, passim. 132 Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (London:  Secker and Warburg, 1953). He harnessed a term from early Islamic theology, ‘ketman’, to describe the process. I thank Gareth Williams for introducing me to this work. 133 He described it as ‘self-​realization against something’, ibid., p. 80.

292 Nicholas reconstruction of an earlier age.134 Furthermore, as Anne Overell suggests, we must keep in mind the very layered religious experience that so much overwhelming change forged, and the possibility that people might become (at least in part) what they pretended to be.135 Ascham’s conformity might not, as he saw it, have involved either a volte-​face or dissimulation, but just a different mode of being. A range of theories concerning the nature and extent of Ascham’s conformity are possible, but there is an additional, more prosaic mode of analysis.136 This was Ascham’s inclination to settle down and start a family. In 1554 Ascham married. Now in his late thirties, he committed himself to a well-​born woman named Margaret Howe.137 She had in fact been previously married (widowed in 1552), but was nevertheless over a decade younger than Ascham. Nor was this Ascham’s first romantic encounter. Letters indicate that he had been engaged before: he refers to an ‘Alice’ as my ‘uxor’ in a letter of 1551, though, as Hatch surmises, this almost certainly here denoted an ‘affianced bride’ rather than a wife.138 But just a few years later, Ascham became a father with Margaret. Their first child died in 1555, a loss that caused much heartache,139 but over the following decade or so they would have seven or eight children together.140 Ascham’s family duties must have been all-​consuming, and he must have felt acutely the responsibility to support an ever-​burgeoning brood, and the costs of being resident in London.141 Such 1 34 For more on such nostalgia, see Micha Lazarus, ch. 11 in this volume. 135 Overell, Nicodemites, p. 12. 136 As Pettegree comments, obligations to family may in truth have been a principal motivation for conformity: ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, p. 106. 137 She was the daughter of Sir Clement Harleston and niece of Sir John Wallop. Sturm congratulated Ascham in writing in a fragment of a letter:  Strasbourg, 24 June 1554, letter referred to at Giles, vol. iii, p. 333. 138 The likelihood is that Ascham became engaged just after his post with Princess Elizabeth terminated, but before his trip to Germany:  Ascham to Lady Jane Grey, Augsburg, 18 January 155 1etter cxiv, Giles, vol. I, pt. 2, p. 241; Hatch, p. 432. He wrote to the woman’s guardian (uncle) proposing marriage, sometime before September 1550 (Ascham to a friend, place unknown, letter xci, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, pp. 170–​172). There is little to point towards Ascham’s (early) homosexuality, and the image of Ascham and John Whitney reading De amicitia together as set out in The Scholemaster, seized upon by scholars who focus on male homosexuality, seems, I would contend, to slot more naturally into a framework of synthesised friendship and instruction. 139 Ascham’s letter to his wife, Margaret, place unknown, letter xcvii, Giles, vol. 2, pp. 170–​173. Giles conjectures a date of November 1568, but Rosemary O’ Day, ‘Roger Ascham’ odnb, which give a date of 1555 seems far more probable. 140 Including three sons, Sturm (named after Johannes) in 1562, Dudley (named after Robert Dudley) in 1564, and Thomas born posthumously in 1568. 141 By 1557 Ascham was based in Walthamstow, leasing Salisbury Hall: his name now appears on the Walthamstow Library (and I thank Fiachra Mac Góráin for alerting me to this). In a letter to Gardiner of 1553/​4 he mentions the expense of life in London: [November] 1553, letter clix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 386.

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financial pressures would have been all the more acute if, as both William Camden and Thomas Smith intimated, Ascham did indeed have a weakness for gambling, cockfighting and dice-​play.142 We can be rather more certain that any worries Ascham did have would only have been exacerbated by his ongoing health issues: he reported to Sturm in 1555, for example, that he had tertian fever, and it looks likely that he had to take time out of his secretarial duties.143 Elizabeth’s accession to the throne in 1558 must for many have marked a wonderful release from the tensions and compromises of the Marian years, Ascham included, despite the fact that he was incapacitated with fever for the first two years of it.144 Some sense of delight is on display in his first letter to Sturm following his recovery, much of it comprising an effusive eulogy of the new Queen.145 It is perhaps with this reign that Ascham has become most associated. He certainly continued to read Latin and Greek with the Queen. He was also retained as Latin secretary.146 Ascham’s wheels of operation during this reign were, without a doubt, also appreciably oiled by his close relationship with William Cecil, whose intercessions Ascham relied upon more than once.147 It was also at this point that Ascham would compose his most famous work, The Scholemaster.148 Chapters in this volume help to complicate standard views of this work, which has, over the years, been much anthologised but insufficiently studied in the round. This volume sets the work within the broader context of the Protestant Sturm’s educational programme in Strasbourg and Cheke’s spiritual leadership; but this initiative may be just the start of a broader reassessment of this multifaceted text. There are, in addition, finer strands of Ascham’s final years that deserve consideration and can help make a little more sense of his life’s trajectory. At court Ascham 142 Re. Camden, see Ryan, Ascham, pp. 229–​230; re. Thomas Smith, see his letter to Walter Haddon in Walter Haddon, Lucubrationes (London: William Seres, 1567, ustc 506652), p. 307. 143 As the autographs on some of the letters of Ascham’s letter book indicate, some were by John Boxall, appointed as one of Mary’s principal secretaries in March 1557. Strype reports on the quartan epidemic during the late 1550s, commenting too that the ague was particularly deadly for those who had already suffered from the fever before. See also Ascham to Sturm, London, 11 April 1562, letter xxxiv, Giles, vol. ii, p. 60. 144 In his letter to Sturm of 1562, he refers to having been laid low with fevers for three years (ibid. pp. 59–​60). In 1560 Ascham was so ill that Cecil had to temporarily take over from him as Latin secretary and transcribe his letters, as per Ascham’s own manuscript margin annotation in his letter book (see note below). 145 He wrote ‘I have not that to write which I reckon I would rather write about, other than the Queen’ (ibid. pp. 61–​62). 146 This letter book is held at the British Library: Royal ms, 13 B. i., 1558–​1568. 147 Ryan, Ascham, pp. 230, 234–​235, 237 and 253. It was also Cecil that Ascham’s wife, Margaret, would chiefly look to as a benefactor following her husband’s death: see Margaret’s dedication of the The Scholemaster to Cecil (Giles, vol. iii, pp. 76–​77). 148 Begun in 1563, but left incomplete at his death. The work which went through five editions between 1570 and 1590.

294 Nicholas went out of his way to develop relations with Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. A  bond of sorts already existed:  Ascham had been Dudley’s Latin tutor,149 but the intimacy only grew. The two began to work closely together: Ascham referred to his being ‘every day in your [Leicester’s] Lordship’s chamber’.150 Ascham even named one of his sons ‘Dudley Ascham’ and made Leicester his godfather.151 Dudley was by now one of Elizabeth’s leading statesmen,152 and Ascham, always an assiduous seeker of patronage, was perhaps keen to make use of any credit he still had with his former pupil. The fellowship that Ascham and Dudley shared is imbricated in other episodes of Ascham’s life. In 1559 Ascham had agreed to accept a nomination by Cecil to the canonry and prebend of Wetwang in Yorkshire, a lucrative sinecure. Yet a dispute arose, and Ascham did not gain legal rights to it till 1566 because the new incumbent to the Archbishopric of York, Thomas Young, had blocked Ascham’s appointment.153 The man Ascham turned to help was Dudley, and Ascham ‘referred the whole matter only to your lordship’.154 In 1562/​3 Ascham was nominated to run as a Member of Parliament for Preston in Lancashire.155 Again, this may have been with Dudley’s encouragement. Ascham was formally nominated by Sir Ambrose Cave, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a kinsman of Cecil, but also a main player on close terms with Dudley.156 As it happens, Ascham’s political ambitions in Preston came to naught. Ascham’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, which states that Ascham was an mp, seems to be mistaken, as records suggest that his political career never got beyond the stage of nomination, and a man called Hodgkinson was returned for Preston in 1563 instead of Ascham.157 The more intriguing aspect of this political foray, however, was the reason for Ascham’s deposition. It appears likely that the grounds for this were almost certainly confessional, for the figure backing the alternative candidate was none other than the third Earl of Derby, Edward Stanley, a known opponent to the Protestant cause. It may be that a religious agenda underlay Ascham’s gravitation towards Dudley. 1 49 150 151 152 153 1 54 155 156 157

Simon Adams, ‘Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1532/​3–​1588)’, odnb. Ascham to Leicester, London, 5 August, 1564, letter lix, Giles, vol. II, p. 101. Ascham to Leicester, [London], 14 April, 1566, letter lxxv, Giles, vol. II, p. 131. Promoted to Earl of Leicester in 1562 and Master of the Horse in 1564. It is not clear why. Ascham to Leicester, [London], 14 April, 1566, letter lxxv, Giles, vol. II, pp. 124–​130. Ascham to Leicester, [London], 14 April, 1566, letter lxxv, Giles, vol. II, p. 131. W. Dobson, History of the Parliamentary Representation of Preston (Preston and London, 1856), p. 11. Ascham’s motives must have been political rather than financial; members of Parliament were not paid. History of Parliament for Preston at ; Sybil M. Jack, ‘Sir Ambrose Cave (ca. 1503–​1568), odnb. History of Parliament for Preston.

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Dudley was a well-​known supporter and patron of Protestants.158 He was also a sounding board to those who harboured frustrations about the incompleteness of reform under Elizabeth’s watch.159 Zealots like Thomas Lever and James Pilkington, for example, directed their petitions to him in the mid-​1560s during the vestiarian controversy.160 We cannot discount the possibility that Ascham was impatient for reform during this reign in the way he seems to have been at the start of Edward’s. A Latin poem Ascham dedicated to Elizabeth in 1568 was carefully laced with compliments, but it also contained a strong and trenchantly antipapal message about the need for further action.161 Dudley was central to the backlash ‘phase of reforming purification’ during Elizabeth’s reign in which the reign of Edward and its reform tracts were held up as an example,162 and the posthumous dedication by Grant of Ascham’s anti-​Rome Apologia to Dudley in 1577 is perhaps a nod to a sharedness of outlook.163 Various apologetic passages in Grant’s Oratio de vita et obitu of Ascham concerning the firmness of Ascham’s religious convictions under Mary justify further inferences about the extent of Ascham’s stake in the religious ructions of Elizabethan England: aspersions about Ascham’s nicodemism would only have pertinence if he was actively involved in debates about reform. In his final years, further problems would blight Ascham’s equanimity. We read in a hitherto untranslated letter written by Walter Haddon ca. 1565/6 that Ascham’s letter-writing had all but ceased, and that he had heard that Ascham was ‘at this time much vexed by law suits’.164 This notwithstanding, we can be sure that Ascham, now in his

158 His father (the Duke of Northumberland) had led the campaign to alter Mary’s succession. See also Simon Adams, Leicester and the Court:  Essays on Elizabethan Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 228. 159 Collinson, Puritan Movement, p.  25; Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 1; and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Allen Lane, 1999), p. 213. 160 Ben Lowe, ‘Thomas Lever (1521–​1577)’ odnb; and David Marcombe, ‘James Pilkington (1520–​1576), odnb. Ascham considered Lever and the Pilkington brothers (Leonard and James) part of his close circle. 161 The poem is printed in Giles, vol. iii, pp.  288–​293. It was never actually delivered to Elizabeth. Foxe’s 1570 edition of Acts and Monuments bore eloquent testimony to these some of these fears for an antipapal diatribe was specially added to this edition as an appendix: Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 140. 162 Aston, The King’s Bedpost, p. 159. She observes how Foxe also devoted himself to a single-​ minded eulogy of Edward’s commendations and virtues, stressing, in the way the 1563 edition had not, his role as Josiah in purging the Church. 163 Nicholas, Defence, pp. 212–​217. 164 Haddon, Lucubrationes, p. 311: audio ipsum hoc tempore litibus iuris permoleste exerceri. Haddon does not provide further explanation.

296 Nicholas early fifties, was still looking to the future. He had plans for further written projects: he indicates, for example, that he would also like to compose a further tract on imitation and something he referred to as ‘the book of the cockpit’.165 Margaret, his wife, was expecting another child. However, at the very end of December 1568, the malarial fevers that had plagued him all his life proved fatal. That Ascham, a normally careful man, had not written a will, adds to this impression of a sudden demise,166 and on 30 December 1568 Ascham made clear his wishes orally before witnesses, leaving all to his wife, Margaret, and at the same time bidding her to be a good mother to their children.167 Ascham was buried in St Sepulchre-​without-​Newgate Church in the City of London, where he had worshipped as a parishioner during his time in London.168 Alexander Nowell spent time with Ascham on his sickbed, and also delivered Ascham’s funeral sermon at St Paul’s Cross.169 It is difficult to know whether we can attribute any significance to the fact that, when the final hour came, it was marked by the presence of Nowell, a Protestant at the radical end of the spectrum and a Marian exile.170 Sic Aschamus vixit? This appendix in no way purports to provide a definitive version of the complex existence of a man who lived half a millennium ago. Rather, the main hope has been to provide the reader with a succession of images that can help keep all the pieces of his biographical jigsaw in play and mobile. This appendix has deliberately foregrounded aspects of Ascham’s life which have, over the years, been overmuch side-​ lined. It depicts a figure who was far more of an independent-​minded pioneer than previously thought, highlighting his trailblazing activities in an array of areas from the scholarly to the diplomatic and the religious. At the same, however, this codicil has attempted to reanimate a sixteenth-​century life characterised as much by quotidian demands as by high ideals. Ascham was a many-​sided individual. His time on this mortal coil can, if we search carefully enough, yield the most compelling and stirring window on to the psyche and mores of an era that often feels so incontrovertibly gone. 165 Ascham, The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. III, p. 140. It is impossible now to know whether this was actually going to be about cockfighting or something else (he elsewhere referred to various places as ‘cockpits’ –​see Ryan, Ascham, p. 229). 166 His nuncupative will was sworn by his widow on 3 January 1569: nra: prob 11/​51/​2. 167 The witnesses included his wife, ‘[daniell?] Marcye Lane wife’, Thomas Lane ‘mercer’, Robert Waldo and Brian Waldo. 168 A plaque displayed in the church advertises Ascham’s burial there. 169 Stanford Lehmberg, ‘Alexander Nowell (ca. 1516/​17–​1602)’ odnb; and Grant, Oratio de vita et obitu Rogeri Aschami, Giles, vol. III, pp. 340–341. I have not (so far) been able to locate the content of the sermon. 170 Lehmberg, ‘Nowell’, odnb; Christina Hallowell Garrett, The Marian Exiles. A Study in the Origins of Elizabeth Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 237; and Collinson, Puritan Movement, p. 69.

Appendix 2

Ascham’s Bookshelf Micha Lazarus Writing in 1963, Lawrence Ryan knew of one book owned and annotated by Ascham, a 1541 edition of St Ambrose’s theological treatise De vocatione omnium gentium (‘On the Call of All Nations’).1 Ryan was wary of drawing conclusions about Ascham’s theology from a single source alone. But this was no ordinary source:  ‘because the annotations and underscorings were written in private for his own convenience and as an expression of his spontaneous reaction to what he was reading’, Ryan judged that ‘they quite probably reveal Ascham’s real convictions’. In the decades since, growing attention to the history of reading has born out Ryan’s instinct that annotated books preserve a kind of private writing otherwise hard to find in the sixteenth century, and offer unique insights into the intellectual history of the period.2 In fact, Ambrose is one of twenty-​two works which can be traced to Ascham’s study, in sixteen volumes now dispersed among libraries in London, Cambridge, Shrewsbury, Manchester, Glasgow, and Hatfield House. Collectively they contain an extraordinary wealth of information about Ascham’s life and thought. Most are annotated, and several betray provenance more complex and various than Ascham’s alone, having been passed around his scholarly community or put to communal use in group reading. They provide a window into Ascham’s mental granary, his knowledge of and reflections on subjects such as Greek comedy, the history of philosophy, rhetoric and humanist counsel, prosody, civic oratory, historiography and its relationship to fiction, the culinary arts, the structure of knowledge, predestination and baptism, the authority of Scripture, the text of the New Testament and its parallels in pagan literature, and divine punishment

I have normalised letter forms such as u and v, i and j, σ and ς, and recorded the names of authors and printers in their local language. Greek accents are provided where necessary for printed text, but transcribed as they appear for manuscript. I have refrained from numbering entries in the handlist below to make future discoveries easier to incorporate. Entries are cited in bold and marked with an asterisk, for example: *Isocrates (1550). 1 Ryan, Ascham, pp. 211–​213; cf. Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, (hereafter celm), *AsR 4, and *St Ambrosius (1541). 2 The large literature on this subject from Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present 129 (1990), pp. 30–​78, through, for example, William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), is now being expanded via digital projects such as Archaeology of Reading, .

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382282_016

298 Lazarus and the power of the devil –​as well as a host of textual comments on individual authors such as Plato, Isocrates, Hesiod, Euripides, Hermogenes, and many more. Yet even this substantial archive can represent only a fraction of what must have been a handsome library, and it is certain that more of Ascham’s books remain to be found. The purpose of this appendix is not to give a full account of these books, but simply to provide an initial handlist of Ascham’s working library as far as we can currently trace it, fixing the provenance of the books and giving an indicative digest of the kinds of annotations they contain. Making these resources more widely known will, I hope, stimulate additional discoveries in years to come. The handlist is limited to concrete surviving exempla, and does not attempt to reconstruct Ascham’s library by other means. For example, no presentation volumes, books inscribed by Ascham as gifts for his friends and patrons, are listed here. Eight of these are listed in Peter Beal’s Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, to which two more –​ Carlo Sigonio’s De republica Atheniensium (‘The Constitution of the Athenians’), given to Bartholomew Dodington in 1566, and Dioscorides, given to Henry Eland or his brother William –​may be added, and doubtless more survive.3 Such books certainly passed through Ascham’s hands, but did not sit on his bookshelf for long; they were not ‘his’ in the sense that this appendix adopts. Nor do I attempt here to reconstruct Ascham’s library through the dozens of references to books that his writings contain. One of his earliest letters acknowledges receipt of an Isocrates and requests a volume of commentaries on Hermogenes; in 1544 one letter mentions his Chrysostom, another his search for a book called Decem rhetores (‘Ten Orators’); in 1550 he writes of a copy of Johannes Sturm’s lectures on Plato’s Gorgias acquired three years earlier. Whole passages of his letters to Cheke and Edward Raven from Germany are devoted to news of the book markets of northern Europe.4 In one of them, sent to Raven in 1551, Ascham confirms that he was travelling with copies of 3 Carlo Sigonio, De rep. Atheniensium (Venice:  Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1565, ustc 856338), Cambridge, St John’s College, Aa.6.74, inscribed Liber B. Dodington ex dono doctissimi viri M. Rogeri Aschami. Anno 1566; Dioscorides, De materia medica (Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1499, ustc 760278), Oxford, Bodleian Library, F.2.25. Art. Seld, inscribed Rogerus Aschamus dedit Ailando. Heavy annotation in the Sigonio is unquestionably Dodington’s, by comparison with his annotated copy of Hermogenes (Cambridge, University Library, Adv.d.4.4); though a couple of pages (91v–​92r) bear notes in a different hand which it might be argued is similar to Ascham’s, the case is not clear enough for the volume to merit inclusion in this appendix. For further presentation copies see celm, *AsR 3.3–​9, and *AsR 5. 4 Ascham to a friend, 1543 (dated 1539 by Hatch), letter xvii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 33; Ascham to John Redman, March 1544, letter xx, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 43; Ascham to a friend at York, about November 1544, letter xxiv, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 59; Ascham to Sturm, London, December 1568, letter xcix, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 183; Ascham to Cheke, Augsburg, 11 November 1550, letter cviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 216–​222; Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, letter cxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, pp. 243–​271.

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Herodotus, several Greek tragedies, Isocrates, and Demosthenes; since this *Isocrates (1550) can be identified, the others may well remain to be found.5 In any event, books circulated freely through the Cambridge set and the scholarly community more broadly. Ascham begs a Gregory of Nyssa of John Ponet, is sent a copy of Philo by John Christopherson, and has an unwelcome copy of a book entitled De rusticitate morum (‘On the Coarseness of Morals’) thrust upon him by a Carmelite friar in Brussels.6 References such as these offer reliable primary evidence of Ascham’s book collection, but since the books they identify have not yet been located, they are not included here. Finally, I omit books of which Ascham’s ownership can, one way or another, be inferred. For example, Ascham’s letter to Raven mentions ‘seventeen orations of Demosthenes’ and an Isocrates that he read with Sir Richard Morison. Since the *Demosthenes (1551) listed below shows far less evidence of annotation than the surviving *Isocrates (1550) he refers to here, and the other *Demosthenes (1521) below contains too few orations to be the volume in question, it seems likely that yet another Demosthenes, more fully annotated, remains to be found. Likewise, Ascham’s internal cross-​references in the volumes that survive can on occasion be used to reconstruct his ownership of still further volumes. Cross-​references to Herodotus in three independent volumes can be matched with Joachim Camerarius’s edition (Basel: Johannes Herwagen, 1541, ustc 662248).7 A citation of three lines of Sophocles’s Antigone (453–​455) as ‘Soph ἐν Αντιγ. 177.9’ in his *Thucydides (1535) indicates the Aldine editio princeps of the Greek Sophocles (Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1502, ustc 857020).8 And page numbers inscribed in the inner margin of Ascham’s copy of the ancient *Scholia (1534) on Euripides track the text of a Greek Euripides (Basel: Johannes Herwagen, 1537, ustc 654573), which Ascham owned and paginated using the same method he applied to his Sophocles, omitting prefatory material and blank pages between the plays.9 These books lay open 5 6 7

8

9

Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 14–​18 May 1551, letter cxxii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 285. Ascham to John Ponet, about January 1545, letter xxviii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 1, p.  71; John Christopherson to Ascham, Louvain, 23 April 1553, letter cxlvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 356; Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 20 January 1551, letter cxvi, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 247. *Bible (1531), p.  219v, citing the Pythian priestess ‘ἐν ηροδ:  188.43’ (Herodotus, Histories, vi.86 in modern editions); *Thucydides (1535), p. 29 (ii.42), comparing Pericles’s use of the noun ἐλπίς to ‘Herod. 107.15’ (iii.119); *Hesychius (1521), col. 267, referring the word Εξειρήσας to ‘Herod. 102.12’ (iii.87). *Thucydides (1535), p.  26 (ii.37 in modern editions), glossing καὶ ὅσοι ἄγραφοι ὄντες (‘and those laws which are unwritten’). The cross-​reference corresponds to the Aldine Sophocles, sig. ξiir; Ascham’s pagination included plays and their prefatory materials, but omitted the preliminaries to the volume as a whole, blank pages between plays, and half-​title pages. It was common practice to paginate this edition from the first page of Ajax: compare Oxford, Bodleian Library, Auct. 1 R 5.8 and Auct. 1 R 5.9. Though this edition closely resembles subsequent Basel editions (1544, ustc 654574; 1551, ustc 654575), its printing of Alcestis differs in two respects: the 1537 edition splits the

300 Lazarus on Ascham’s desk, landmarks amid the ruined cities of ancient learning. There is every reason to believe that they survive to this day on the shelves of a library or stately home, waiting to be discovered. The most important single archive, containing no fewer than seven of Ascham’s surviving books, is Hatfield House, the ancestral home of the Cecil family.10 William Cecil was Ascham’s younger contemporary at St John’s College in the 1530s, arriving just as the humanist set was finding its voice in the heady atmosphere of Cheke’s reform of Greek pronunciation. Cecil sealed his membership of its inner circle through his first marriage to Cheke’s sister Mary; his second wife Mildred was a serious scholar in her own right, one of the brilliant and learned daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke. Ascham remained close to the Cecils as they climbed to the top of Elizabeth’s court, more than once benefiting from William’s intercession on his behalf. Two of Ascham’s books passed to Mildred, his heavily-​annotated *Bible (1531), and a copy of *Callimachus (1532) bequeathed to Westminster School in accordance with Mildred’s dying wishes.11 On Cecil’s death in 1598 his library split in two. The larger part went to his eldest son Thomas, Earl of Exeter, and was ultimately dispersed in a celebrated sale in 1687.12 The smaller but more scholarly part, including Ascham’s and several of Mildred’s books, went to his second son Robert, afterwards Earl of Salisbury and his father’s successor as Lord High Treasurer to James i. Robert Cecil acquired and began expanding Hatfield House in 1608, though he died in 1612 shortly before construction was completed. The library was meanwhile kept at Salisbury House, his London home, before being

10 11

12

hypothesis and dramatis personae over two pages where the later editions print them on a single page, and it squeezes an extra line of text (i.e. 31 lines instead of the 30 lines standard in all three of these editions) onto pp. 270, 272, 274, and 275. As a result, a sample of Ascham’s page-​references for the scholia to Alcestis on p. 278v match only the 1537 edition and not its successors. It is worth noting that the 1544 edition was itself published in two volumes, the second of which reproduced Arsenios’s edition of the scholia; Ascham may have acquired this volume and his Euripides before they became available as a pair in 1544. I am grateful to Carla Suthren for her expert help identifying Ascham’s Euripides. A number of these were first discussed in Lucy R.  Nicholas, ‘A Translation of Roger Ascham’s Apologia pro Caena Dominica and Contextual Analysis’, unpublished dissertation, University of London (2014). On Mildred’s books and their donation see Caroline Bowden, ‘The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley’, in Elaine V. Beilin, ed., Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–​1700, Volume 1:  Early Tudor Women Writers, (Farnham:  Ashgate, 2009), pp. 399–​425; Pamela Selwyn, ‘An Armorial Binding of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley’, in William Marx, ed., The Founders’ Library, University of Wales, Lampeter: Bibliographical and Contextual Studies, (Lampeter:  Trivium Publications, University of Wales, 1997), pp. 65–​78. Recorded in Bibliotheca illustris., sive, catalogus variorum librorum (London: T. Bentley & B. Walford, 1687).

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removed to Hatfield in 1700; 85% of the titles in a manuscript booklist, compiled in 1614, remain in the library to this day.13 We cannot be sure how Ascham’s books made their way to Cecil. In Ascham’s simple will, delivered orally before four witnesses on 30 December, 1568, he bequeathed everything he owned to his wife Margaret, enjoining her to care for their children.14 Within a year of his death Margaret had sent the manuscript of The Scholemaster to print, dedicating it to William Cecil, whose chambers at Windsor are the scene of the book’s famous opening. Though it was common practice for humanists to offer their friends a choice of books after their death, it is also possible that Margaret sent them on to Cecil in the same spirit that governed her dedication:  remembrance of ‘how happily you have spent your time in such studies’ with Ascham at Cambridge in the past, ‘trusting of the continuance of your good memory of Mr. Ascham and his’ in the future.15 Ascham’s annotations often served as the first drafts of his published works. Notes in the margins of his *Plato (1534) made their way directly into The Scholemaster; dated references to current events in his *Isocrates (1550) were inscribed precisely as he was composing his Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany. I have been able here to do no more than gesture towards the rich detail these volumes afford, and have no doubt that closer investigation of the books listed below, augmented by future discoveries, will yield further correspondences to Ascham’s work, and a window onto the intellectual world of sixteenth-​century humanism. The last word of this preface belongs to The Scholemaster, which translates and explains the meaning behind the Greek motto Ascham chose to inscribe in so many of his books, Ἐὰν ᾖς φιλομαθής ἔσῃ πολυμαθής. ΦΙΛΟΜΑΘῊΣ Given to love learning:  for though a child have all the gifts of nature at wish, and perfection of memory at will, yet if he have not a special love to learning, he shall never attain to much learning. And therefore Isocrates, one of the noblest schoolmasters that is in memory of learning, who taught kings and princes, as Halicarnassseus writeth; and out of whose school, as Tully saith, came forth more noble captains, more wise counsellors, than did out of Epeus’s horse at 13

14 15

On the library at Hatfield House see Robert Gascoyne-​Cecil Salisbury, ‘The Library at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire’, The Library s.5, xviii.2 (1963), pp. 83–​87, and The Hatfield House Library:  A Family Collection of over Four Hundred Years (New  York:  Spiral Press, 1967). I am grateful to Robin Harcourt Williams for granting me access to the collection and for his deep knowledge of its history. London, National Archives, prob 11/​51/​2; see also Lucy Nicholas, appendix 1, p. 296. Margaret Ascham’s dedication to The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. iii, pp. 76–​77. On humanists’ distribution of their books, see Richard Rex, ch. 2 in this volume.

302 Lazarus Troy: this Isocrates, I say, did cause to be written at the entry of his school in golden letters this golden sentence, Ἐὰν ᾖς φιλομαθὴς, ἔσῃ πολυμαθής: which excellently said in Greek, is thus rudely in English, “If thou love learning, thou shalt attain to much learning”.16



Handlist of Books



St Ambrosius, De vocatione omnium gentium libri duo (Geneva: Michel du Bois, 1541, ustc 450218). Oxford, Bodleian Library, 8° Rawl. 169 (2)

‘On the Call of All Nations’, an Augustinian treatise in Latin on grace and predestination, today ascribed to St Prosper of Aquitaine.17 Bound between Juan Luis Vives, Epistolarum … farrago (‘Miscellaneous Letters’) (Antwerp:  Guillaume Simon, 1556, ustc 404263), and Xenophon, Xenophons treatise of house holde, trans. Gentian Hervet (London: John Allde, 1573, ustc 507725). Since Ascham’s inscription appears only on this item, and the others are inscribed by different owners, this group of items almost certainly did not travel together in Ascham’s lifetime. The title page is inscribed ‘ra. 1555 at wicheford. 22o Ianuarii’. Ryan identifies the place as Whittelsford or Wicklyford, ‘a town about seven miles south of Cambridge, where [Ascham’s] wife’s parents held the lease of the rectory’, and analyses Ascham’s annotations throughout the first book of the treatise for his ‘real convictions about original sin, imputed merit, justification by faith, and special election’.18



Aristophanes, Κωμωιδίαι ἕνδεκα. Comoediae undecim, ed. Simon Grynaeus (Basel: Johann Bebel, 1532, ustc 612851). Hatfield House, 7923

A Greek edition of Aristophanes’s eleven comedies, with a Latin preface by Simon Grynaeus recommending the study of Greek comedy. The title page bears the inscription R. Aschamus, Ascham’s Greek motto, Ἐὰν ᾖς φιλομαθὴς ἐσῄ πολυμαθης, a further Latin motto, Boni non invidendi sed imitandi sunt (‘good men are not to be envied but imitated’), and two brief notes referring to the contents. The volume was rebound for the Cecils by Joseph Pomfret in 1712. Ascham’s notes in the preface, somewhat cropped, approve Grynaeus’s arguments for the linguistic value of old comedy in spite of its Corrupti more[s]‌(‘corrupt morals’, 16 17

Giles, vol. iii, pp. 108–​109. On its authorship see St Prosper of Aquitaine, The Call of All Nations, trans. Prudent de Letter (Westminster, md: Newman Press, 1952), pp. 7–​9. 18 Ryan, Ascham, pp. 211–​213.

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sig. a2r). The first play, Plutus, is extensively annotated, sometimes in Latin but mostly in Greek, with glosses, translations, plot points and sententiae, and references to commentaries. Endpapers contain short lists of vocabulary. This volume may bear some relation to the performance of Aristophanes’s Plutus at St John’s College in winter 1535/​ 36, where the actors implemented the revised principles of Greek pronunciation introduced by Cheke and Thomas Smith around that time.19



Aristotle, Ἀριστοτέλους ἅπαντα. Aristotelis … opera, 2 vols. (Basel: Johann Bebel, 1531, ustc 555012). Hatfield House, 7927–​7928

Aristotle’s complete works in Greek, edited by Simon Grynaeus with a preface by Erasmus. The title page of volume I  bears Ascham’s Greek motto, Ἐὰν ᾖς φιλομαθής ἐσῂ πολυμαθής; a further inscription at the top has been defaced, but perhaps originally began Joannes. Volume ii is inscribed Rogeri Aschami liber et Amicorum (‘this book belongs to Roger Ascham and his friends’); and τῶν καλων ουδεὶς πόρος /​Bonorum nulla Sacietas (‘never too much of a good thing’, adapted from Cassiodorus, Variae 12.2.4). Both volumes were rebound for the Cecils by Joseph Pomfret in 1712. Some annotations have been left, not necessarily by Ascham, in Historia animalium, i.259–​263, and in Problemata, ii.205. The text is otherwise clean.



Aristotle, Ἀριστοτέλους ἅπαντα. Aristotelis … opera, 2 vols. (Basel: Johann Bebel & Michael Isingrinus, 1539, ustc 612986). Cambridge, University Library, Bury 1.12–​13

Aristotle’s complete works in Greek, edited by Simon Grynaeus with a preface by Erasmus; the second edition of *Aristotle (1531). The provenance of these volumes is unusually complex. Both are bound using tools that have been placed in London no later than the date of the book’s publication.20 Their spines display the title and ‘Schol: Bur:’ as is standard for the old library of King Edward vi School at Bury St Edmund’s (now the Bury collection at Cambridge University Library), where the book resided since the late sixteenth century. Both volumes bear the ex dono note of Thomas Oliver, Medici peritissimi, et scholae huius quondam alumni (‘expert physician, and one-​time alumnus of this school’), the inscription of one henricus with the motto Amicorum omnia sunt communia (‘friends hold all things 19 20

Thomas Smith, De recta et emendata linguae Graecae pronuntiatione (Paris:  Robert Estienne, 1568, ustc 140542), p. 42r. See J. Basil Oldham, English Blind-​Stamped Bindings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949): the outer roll corresponds to sw. b (3), the inner to fp. a (7), a combination which Oldham records as London, [1516]–​1539.

304 Lazarus in common’, a ubiquitous Erasmian formula), and a macaronic motto reading ‘κοινη ἡ τυχη /​Cωrtes /​chaunce is pereles’.21 The primary owner of these volumes, however, was Thomas Conyers, a young cousin of Ascham’s on his mother’s side, who shared his rooms in St John’s College in the years around 1540, and it is from the disarticulated scrawls of this daydreaming undergraduate that we can reconstruct the volume’s circulation and its link to Ascham.22 The front endpapers of volume i are inscribed ουτω δὲ την γνωμην διατιθηναι τὸν μη πολλων καὶ καλῶν ακουσματῶν πελπληρομενον (sic) (a mangled version of Isocrates, Ad Demonicum 12.4, ‘it is not possible for thought to be thus disposed without being full of many good teachings’); ‘Courtinge is costlie, master Coniers’; and bear numerous pen trials in a melange of secretary, italic, and blackletter hands, such as ‘Ryght worthy syr conyers’, ‘Thomas Coniers’, and ‘Rygthe wyrshipfull and my especiall’. Several more names appear on the front endpapers of volume ii alongside ‘Thomas Conyers /​ tomasus /​θωμας κονιερς’ and his incisive observation that homo natus de muliere (‘man is born of woman’): these include ‘thomas wittin london’ and ‘Richardus Whyton’, the two perhaps related. Richard Whyte, who matriculated at St John’s in Michaelmas 1544, is confirmed as the owner of the volumes after Conyers by a faint inscription between columns of manuscript text on the rear pastedown of volume ii: ‘Richardus /​Whyte is /​trewe /​posesser /​of ys boke /​baughte /​off Mastr /​coniers /​price /​xiijs’. Among all these names on the endpapers of volume ii appears ρωΓερός Ασκαμώς (‘Rogeros Askamos’), and on the front pastedown, the words hoc mihi dolet /​dolet mihi /​ rogerus Askhamus (‘this saddens me /​saddens me /​Roger Ascham’). Though little more than a scribble, this Latin inscription of Ascham’s name is a fairly good match for known instances of Ascham’s autograph signature;23 it may have been written by him personally, but could equally have been inscribed by the hypergraphic Conyers under his supervision. Further Latin inscriptions within the book are clearly in the early secretary hand of Richard Whyte (e.g. vol. ii, pp. 18–​19) rather than the careful Cambridge italic of Ascham and his students, while the Greek in which most of the very extensive student annotations are recorded is blockier than Ascham’s florid, ligatured Greek hand.24 It

21

22 23 24

The Greek portion of this motto means ‘chance is common/​shared’, which does not quite correspond to the English portion, ‘chance is perilous’ (or perhaps ‘peerless’). If the ‘C’ form in ‘Cωrtes’ were to be read as a lunate sigma, it would extend the theme of ‘chaunce’ or τυχη into Latin, sortes. On Conyers see Ryan, Ascham, p. 296, n. 4. Ascham’s casual inscription of his name on the rear flyleaf of *Hermogenes (1530–​1531) is especially close to his signature in this volume. Annotated treatises include, in vol. i, works of natural philosophy (Physics, On the heavens, On generation and corruption, Meteorology, On the soul, On sleep, On dreams, and Parts of animals); in vol. ii, Nicomachean Ethics, Magna moralia, and Politics, with only sparse notes in the Eudemian Ethics and Problems. For a student volume in Cambridge

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may be that Whyte was mostly responsible for the Latin annotation, Whyte or perhaps Conyers for the Greek. In sum, the two volumes of this richly-​annotated Greek Aristotle were owned and studied by Ascham’s relative Thomas Conyers, in Ascham’s rooms at St John’s around 1540, shortly after they were printed. Ascham probably did not annotate their contents himself, but the volumes lived with him and very likely bear the trace of his teaching. In the mid-​’40s they were sold by Conyers to Richard Whyte and passed through a few more hands (‘thomas wittin’ and the enigmatic henricus) before being acquired by Thomas Oliver, a student at Christ’s College at the turn of the 1570s. By the mid-​ 1590s Oliver was practising medicine in Bury St Edmund’s, and donated this set, along with several other books, to King Edward vi School.25 There it remained until it was returned to Cambridge in 1970 with the deposit of the school’s collection in the University Library.



Bible (Greek, New Testament), Τῆς καινῆς διαθήκης ἅπαντα. Novi testamenti omnia (Basel: Johann Bebel, 1531, ustc 696184). Hatfield House, 7522

A Greek New Testament, introduced by a lecture on sacred letters by Johannes Oecolampadius. The title page is inscribed Rogerus: Aschamus, and bears Ascham’s Greek motto, Ἐὰν ᾖς φιλομαθὴς ἐσῂ πολυμαθης. At the top of the title page is also visible, despite cropping, η βιβλος του ρογερου του ασχαμου και των φιλων (‘the book of Roger Ascham and his friends’). The following page (sig. ij) is inscribed ‘Mildred Burghley’.26 The final page, bearing the printer’s device, has been annotated with what appear to be two more mottoes:  Vigilandum est semper, multae insidiae sunt bonis (‘be ever vigilant; there are many traps for good men’, from the tragedian Accius, fr. 214), and Aperte magis

25

26

at this time, it is striking that the logical and rhetorical works go largely unremarked. On the Cambridge italic hand championed and taught by Ascham, see Alfred J. Fairbank and Bruce Dickins, The Italic Hand in Tudor Cambridge (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1962), and Aysha Pollnitz, Princely Education in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Oliver’s bequest also included at least Ambrogio Calepino, Dictionarium (Lyon: Compagnie des libraires, 1586, ustc 138220), Bury 5.9; Euclid, Geometricorum elementorum libri xv (Paris: Henri Estienne, [1516], ustc 144539), Bury 9.5; Galen, Opera omnia (Basel: Andreas Cratander, 1538, ustc 602615), Bury 10.3–​7, previously owned by Martin Bucer and Thomas Cranmer. No further books of Ascham’s survive in the Bury collection. For the history of the school library and Oliver’s donation see A.  T. Bartholomew and Cosmo Gordon, ‘On the Library at King Edward VI. School, Bury St. Edmunds’, The Library s.3, i.1 (1910), pp. 1–​27. This volume may be added to the list of Mildred Burghley’s books in Bowden, ‘The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil’.

306 Lazarus ingenuum odisse quam fronte occultare sententiam (‘it is better for a noble man to hate openly than to hide his feelings with his face’, adapted from Cicero, De amicitia 65). Ascham has annotated the volume in great detail throughout, in Greek, Latin, and English. Most of his notes are philological in nature, glossing or otherwise commenting on the language of the Greek New Testament, but blank space is as often as not filled with more substantial passages, neatly transcribed from Greek and Latin authors. Remarkably, Ascham makes frequent reference in these notes to the extended canon of Greek poetry, and in longer quotations can be seen reaching for pagan analogues to Christian literature. At the foot of p. 140v, for example, Ascham copies out the Greek text of one of the Sybilline Oracles (8.275–2​78) as a gloss to John 6:13, on the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and a note inserted into the following opening adjudicates a contested reading in John 6:11 –​whether it should read ὅσον ἤθελον or ἤθελεν, (‘as much as they would’ or ‘he would’) –​by comparison to uses of the Greek verb in Cyril, Augustine, Erasmus, Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, and Didymus. Extended quotations are concentrated in the blank spaces at the front and rear of the book, though their application is not always immediately obvious. The title page verso bears passages on piety from Xenophon’s Memorabilia (4.6.2) and Cyropaedia (1.6.2, 1.6.3), while the colophon page and following endpapers are inscribed with sententiae from Menander (Hymnis, fr. 1, line 7), Horace (Epistles 3.1), Euripides’s Children of Hercules (fr. 853, lines 1–​4), Hercules (lines 774–​76), and Bacchae (lines 386–​388), as well as a gloss by Theophylactus on St Paul’s Epistle to Titus 1:15. Elsewhere Ascham cites Aristotle on banishing indecent talk from the state (Politics 1336b4–​5, cited on p. 49r), and inserts ten English verses enjoining the reader to prayer, beginning ‘Thow man that sore for sin doth moue’ and presumably of his own composition (p. 343r).



Callimachus, Ὕμνοι μετὰ τῶν σχολίων, Γνώμαι ἐκ διαφόρων ποιητῶν φιλοσόφων τε καὶ ῥητόρων συλλεγεῖσθαι … Hymni, cum scholiis … Sententiae ex diversis poetis oratoribusque ac philosophis collectae (Basel: Hieronymus Froben and Nikolaus Episcopius, 1532, ustc 669641). London, Westminster School Archives, pr/​2/​8

A Greek edition of Callimachus with a collection of Greek sententiae from various sources, edited and collected by Sigismund Gelenius.27 Bound prior to Nicander, Θηριακὰ … Theriaca (Köln:  Johann Soter, 1530, ustc 678146), but this latter item is inscribed only ‘B. W.’ on the title page, and with the name ‘John’ on p. 74. The binding is typical of a school volume, and there is no reason to imagine that the two works travelled together in Ascham’s lifetime. 27

Listed in Bowden, ‘The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil’, p. 422, no. 10; see also J. S. Crown, ch. 9 in this volume.

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The title page is inscribed R. Aschamus and bears Ascham’s Greek motto, Ἐὰν ᾖς φιλομαθὴς ἐσῂ πολυμαθής, as well as a note of its donation to Westminster School by Mildred Burghley: Liber Westmonasteriensis ex dono nobilissimae Heroinae. D. Burghleiae. Novem: 17. 1586.28 In addition it bears the inscription of Joh. Dolbenus, probably to be identified with Dr John Dolben (1625–​1686), who was educated at Westminster in the late 1630s and later served as Dean from 1662. Numerous further pen-​trials and inscriptions, such as ‘John’ and ‘Thomas’, are presumably the work of Westminster students through the ages, and one precisionist has calculated that sixteen years passed between the book’s donation and his perusal of it in 1602. It was likely one of these later readers, rather than Ascham or Mildred, who filled in lines wanting from the printed edition on pp. 44–​45. Ascham left Callimachus’s poems untouched, but supplied translations from Erasmus’s Adagia to accompany several of the sententiae, which have been transcribed and analysed by J. S. Crown in this volume.



Demosthenes, Λόγοι Ὀλυνθιακοί. Orationes Olynthiacae (Louvain: Thierry Martins, 1521, ustc 437173). Shrewsbury School, H.viii.23 (2)

A Greek edition of Demosthenes’s political orations exhorting the Athenians to war against Philip ii of Macedon in defence of their ally Olynthus. For details of the volume in which this is bound, see *Hermogenes (1530–​1531). The first twelve pages of Demosthenes’s orations bear dense annotation (sigs. a3r–​ b4v, covering the first oration and sections 1–​11 of the second in modern editions), sometimes Latin but overwhelmingly Greek. Unusually, these notes record Ascham’s own thoughts in Greek rather than simply replicating extant text or making lexical observations. Ascham keeps close track of the historical narrative –​ἡ τοῦ φιλιπ. πανουργία (‘the villainy of Philip’, sig. a3v); κουφοτερὸν ἔχων ἐκ τοῦ νοσήματος (Philip ‘feeling more nimble after his sickness’, sig. a4v)  –​and marks sententiae such as ἡ τῶν ἄργων καὶ ῥαθύμων φύσις (‘the nature of lazy and indifferent men’, sig. a4r) and ex eventu semper iudicat vulgus (‘the common folk always judge on the basis of the outcome’, sig. a4v). He also adduces context from his wider reading. A reference to Amphipolis, for example, is glossed εἰς τὸν περὶ ἀμφιπολὶν πόλεμον, διακόσια τὰλαντα ἀνηλώθὴ. Ulpianus in fine huius orationis (‘on the war of Amphipolis two hundred talents were expended: Ulpian, on the end of this speech’, sig. a4r), and Ascham gathers similar data elsewhere from Pollux, Columella, Thucydides, Hesychius, and Budé. A closer look suggests the complexity of Ascham’s engagement with Demosthenes’s speeches, from rhetorical strategy and Greek vocabulary to historical fact 28

On this donation see Bowden, ‘The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil’, and Selwyn, ‘An Armorial Binding of William Cecil’.

308 Lazarus and commonplacing. On the work’s title page Ascham records the headings of four of Erasmus’s Adagia: versuram facere vorsuram solvere (‘To pay by a switching-​loan’, Ad. i.x.23); Atheniensium inconsulta temeritas (‘Thoughtless and headstrong like Athenians’, Ad. i.viii.44); thessalorum commentum (‘A trick of the Thessalians’, Ad. i.iii.10); and Asinus apud Cumanos (‘An ass at Cumae’, Ad. i.vii.12).29 What unites these adages is that Demosthenes’s Olynthiacs is cited in each. Yet whereas in *Callimachus (1532) Ascham relied on Erasmus’s translations, here he glosses each of the places cited in the Adagia with his own Greek and Latin paraphrases, sources, and comments. Demosthenes’s comment that ‘the Thessalians were always born traitors’ (Olynthiac 1.22), for example, translated semperque infidae fuerunt by Erasmus (Ad. i.iii.10), is summarised by Ascham as Thessasi (sic) semper perfidi (‘Thessalians always perfidious’, sig. b2r). A more complex example surrounds Demosthenes’s criticism of taking on a high-​ interest loan to alleviate immediate debts (Olynthiac 1.15, sig. b1r), which Erasmus quotes in Ad. i.x.23. Ascham is also intensely interested in Demosthenes’s remarks, but they remind him instead of a source not cited by Erasmus, namely Cicero, In Catilinam 2.18, Qui magno aere alieno maiores etiam possessiones habent (‘those who, with great debts, have even greater capital’). When Demosthenes then completes his parallel between these unwise debtors and the Athenians –​‘just so, we may find we have paid a heavy price for our indolence’  –​Ascham explains the extended metaphor: ἐπὶ πολλῷ τόκω, ἱνα τόκον λάβωμεν τὴν ἀργάιαν καὶ ῥαθυμίαν, ἀρχαῖον δὲ ἀυτὴν τὴν πόλιν (‘with much interest: that is, as “interest” we receive laziness and indifference, the “principal” being the city itself’). For this unusual sense of ἀρχαίον (here ‘principal/​capital’) Ascham notes vide diligenter apud Budeum et grecos commentarios (‘look diligently in Budé and Greek commentaries’), and at the foot of the page records a long list of specialist financial vocabulary with definitions from Pollux and Columella. Ascham’s reading of Demosthenes, that is, moves easily and independently through the landscape of learning, accompanied by but by no means reliant upon intermediaries such as Erasmus, and shows him as comfortable writing and expressing himself in Greek as he was reading it.



Demosthenes, Orationes quatuor contra Philippum, trans. Paulus Manutius (Venice: [Paulus Manutius], 1551, ustc 826510). Queens’ College, Cambridge, C.9.15 (2)

A Latin translation of four orations of Demosthenes, bound after *Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1560). Ascham inscribed only the title page of Dionysius and did not annotate

29

For these adages, see Erasmus, Adages, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips et  al., Collected Works of Erasmus 30–​36 (Toronto, London: University of Toronto Press, 1982–​2017).

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this latter part of the volume, but the binding gives no reason to believe the two items did not travel together in his lifetime.



Diogenes Laertius, Περὶ βίων, δογμάτων, καὶ ἀποφθεγμάτων τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων … De vitis, decretis, et responsis celebrium philosophorum (Basel: Hieronymus Froben and Nikolaus Episcopius, 1533, ustc 637619). Hatfield House, 8058

A Greek edition of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers, prefaced by a letter to students by the printers, Hieronymus Froben and Nikolaus Episcopius. The volume was rebound for the Cecils by Joseph Pomfret in 1712. The title page is inscribed with Ascham’s Greek motto, Ἐὰν ᾖς φιλομαθὴς ἐσῄ πολυμαθής. Though much has been lost through cropping of the top and side edges, Ascham has left substantial notes in Latin and Greek on the first eleven pages of the Greek text, which contain Diogenes’s προοίμιον (‘introduction’) and the beginning of his life of Thales. He pays close attention to Diogenes’s overview of Greek philosophy’s pre-​history, from his insistence that Philosophia a Graecis inventa (‘Philosophy was invented by the Greeks’) through Musaeus, Linus, Orpheus, and the Gymnosophists (pp. 2–​3), the Chaldeans and their Magi (p. 4), the Jews (p. 5), the Greek poets Homer and Hesiod (p. 6), their Ionic and Italic successors (p. 7), and Pythagoras and Clitomachus (pp. 8–​9), before making preliminary notes on Θάλης πρῶτος σόφος (‘Thales the first wise man’, p. 10). Among these historical notes he summarises philosophical beliefs and principles. For example, on pp. 4–​5 he notes (following Diogenes) Magorum dii, Ignis terra et aqua (‘the gods of the Magi: fire, earth, and water’), magi putabant aerem plenum esse Demonibus (‘the magi thought that the air was full of demons’), quo modo vivendi et quibus cibariis usi sunt magi (‘how the Magi lived and what food they ate’), and that Judaei ex magis iuxta opinionem quorundam (‘certain opinions of the Jews come from the Magi’). He also defines unfamiliar vocabulary, such as τὸ τέμενος quodcumque Dijs dicatum (‘a temenos [temple/​shrine] is whatever is dedicated to the Gods’, p.  5), and τερθρεία conflictatio verborum (‘terthreia [hair-​splitting]: conflict of words’, p. 8). On occasion Ascham notes philosophical arguments directly without making explicit the attribution Diogenes gives them. One instance of this appears among his notes on the Magi, whose belief that omnes homines iterum revicturos et immortales fore (‘all men again will be resurrected and immortal’), is remarked without their name attached. Further instances occur on p. 6, where Pythagoras’s claim that ‘no man is wise, but God alone’ is simply reported as solus Deus sapiens (‘only God is wise’), and Cratinus’s bestowal of the name ‘sophist’ on Homer and Hesiod becomes Poetae sunt sophistae (‘Poets are sophists’). Closer analysis may reveal that Ascham distinguished in his annotations between opinions he viewed as merely historical

310 Lazarus and those he recorded as corroboration for his own beliefs. Marginal sigla organising Diogenes’s text, as they do for *Plato (1534), may also suggest a systematic method of annotation.



Dionysius of Halicarnassus, De Thucydidis historia iudicium, trans. András Dudith (Venice: apud Aldi filios, 1560, ustc 827000). Queens’ College, Cambridge, C.9.15 (1)

A Latin translation of Dionysius’s critical essay on Thucydides, translated by the Croatian-​Hungarian nobleman and humanist András Dudith (Andreas Duditius Pannonius). Bound before *Demosthenes (1551). Ascham acquired this volume less than seven months before his death, according to his title-​page inscription: Est hic liber, mea opinione, summae doctrinae, magnae diligentiae, gravissimi Iudicii, sine quo, Graecus Thucyd. recte et facile intelligi non potest. /​ R.  Aschamus. 1568. 7o die Junii. Londini in Aedib. Meis. (‘This book exhibits, in my opinion, the height of doctrine, great diligence, and the most weighty judgement. The Greek Thucydides cannot be understood correctly or easily without it. Roger Ascham, 7 June, 1568, in my home in London’). Just under thirty pages are annotated, mostly in Latin, towards the beginning of the volume: ten pages of Dudith’s letter of dedication to Nicolaus Olahus, Archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of Hungary, and the first sixteen pages of the translation. In the dedicatory letter Ascham lists Latin and Greek historians, makes notes on the utility of reading history, and adduces critical judgements of Thucydides by other classical writers, such as Quintilian and Cicero. As the treatise proper begins, he is excited by Dionysius’s invocation of his earlier work De imitatione, laments Utinam extaret Liber de Imitatione Demosthenes (‘if only Demosthenes’s book On imitation survived’, sig. C3r), and tracks comparisons between Thucydides and other historians such as Herodotus. In both cases these notes made their way into Ascham’s published works: the loss of Dionysius Halicarnasseus περὶ Μιμήσεως is mourned in The Scholemaster, and Dionysius may well have informed Ascham’s comparison of Herodotus and Thucydides in the Report.30 Of particular interest are moments at which Ascham engages with Dionysius’s reflections on the relationship between history and fable, or fiction. He shifts into English to furnish a local example, remarking ‘Fabulis, vetustas ipsam fidem adfert /​as Morte Arthur’ (‘antiquity put their faith in stories, as Morte Arthur’, sig. D3r); elsewhere, he notes that while Prisca Historia fabulosa (‘the earliest histories

30

The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. iii, p. 220; Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany, Giles, vol. iii, p. 61. Ascham also cites Dionysius’s judgement of Thucydides in The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. iii, p. 270.

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were fictional’, sig. D4v), Thucyd. vera, non fabulosa:  cognita, non audita, scribit (‘­Thucydides writes true, not fictional things; things known, not things heard’, sig. E1r).



Ἐπιστολαὶ διαφόρων φιλοσόφων ῥητόρων σοφιστῶν. Epistolae diversorum philosophorum, oratorum, rhetorum, ed. Marcus Musurus (Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1499, ustc 760833). Hatfield House, 8082

The Aldine anthology of Greek epistolography, a genre of writing central to the Byzantine curriculum and thus to Greek education in the early sixteenth century.31 The volume was rebound for the Cecils by Joseph Pomfret in 1712. The title page is inscribed, in Ascham’s elaborate hand, both R. Pemberus and ‘R.A.’; the colophon page reads Rob. Pemberus in a different hand, presumably Pember’s own. Robert Pember taught Ascham Greek at St John’s College in the early 1530s, and the two remained close until Pember’s death in 1560.32 The text is otherwise untouched.



Hermogenes, Τέχνη ῥητορικὴ τελειοτάτη. Ars rhetorica absolutissima (Paris: Christian Wechel, 1530–​1531, ustc 185002). Shrewsbury, H.viii.23 (1)

A set of four tracts, printed individually by Wechel over the course of 1530–​1531, comprising the rhetorical corpus of the second-​century Greek rhetorician Hermogenes of Tarsus: On Issues, On Invention, On Types of Style, and On the Method of Forcefulness. These tracts are bound prior to (2) *Demosthenes (1521); (3) *Thucydides (1531); and (4) *Thucydides (1535). The volume was thus compiled as a makeshift textbook of Greek oratory, containing Hermogenes’s rhetorical theory and analysis, Demosthenes’s political speeches, a short anthology of speeches from Thucydides, and the book of his History containing the famous funeral oration of Pericles. Each of the items is discussed in situ; here I attend to Hermogenes and to features of the volume as a whole. The volume is bound in brown calf featuring a blind-​tooled roll associated with the W.G.-​I.G. workshop, a family bookbinder that operated over two generations from 1478, initially in Cambridge and in London after 1520.33 Activity in this workshop has not

31

See Nigel Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy:  Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (London: Duckworth, 1992), pp. 116, 150. 32 Ryan, Ascham, pp. 17–​18. 33 See Oldham, English Blind-​Stamped Bindings, pp.  16–​17; the roll corresponds to no.  46 (plate x). The centrepiece is formed out of eight blind-​stamped fleur de lys ornaments, though the tool is not the same as that associated with the W.G-​I.G. workshop.

312 Lazarus been recorded after 1537, however, and the tool may have been purchased by another London bookbinder, in operation between c.  1511 and c.  1540.34 A  bookplate on the front flyleaf identifies the volume as the possession of John Taylor (bap. 1704, d. 1766), grandson of the third master of Shrewsbury School, who proceeded to St John’s College, Cambridge, and became a fellow there in 1526. This volume was an apt acquisition for Taylor, himself a Johnian and scholar of Greek oratory, and was bequeathed to Shrewsbury, with the rest of Taylor’s handsome library, on his death in 1766. The title page is inscribed ‘J*** Redman’, and bears a note in Ascham’s hand defining the Greek verb φιλιππίζειν according to Cicero’s translation, cum Philippo facere (to be of Philip’s party), a reference to Demosthenes’s Olynthiac orations against Philip of Macedon. The rear flyleaves confirm the volume’s provenance: they are annotated rogerus Ascham and Joannes Redmannus, in Ascham’s and Redman’s hands, respectively. John Redman (1499–​1551) was Ascham’s friend and older colleague at St John’s College, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity from the late 1530s, and first Master of Trinity College from 1546; despite his staunch defence of traditional religion, he remained on good terms with leading evangelical scholars to the end of his life.35 When the book passed from Redman to Ascham is unknown, but the extensive annotations within are entirely in Ascham’s hand. Of Hermogenes, however, only the last tract (On the Method of Speaking Effectively) is annotated, and even then Ascham is mostly concerned with the rhetorical light it sheds on Isocrates: he notes Hermogenes’s identification of the phrase he selected as his Greek motto as Πὰρισον ισοκρατ. (‘Parison. Isocrates.’) and a quotation from the ‘προοίμιον Ισοκράτους πρὸς Δημόνικον’ (‘prologue to Isocrates’s Ad Demonicum’), and traces a couple of loci to Isocrates’s orations ad Demo. and περι εἰρηνῆς (Ad Demonicum and On Peace, sigs. BBBB3v, CCCC2r, CCCC3r).



Hesychius, Λεξικόν. Dictionarium (Hagenau: Thomas Anshelm, 1521, ustc 662434). Cambridge, St John’s College, Aa.1.51

The lexicon of Hesychius, a Greek grammarian of the 5th–​6th century. Although this book passed between members of the St John’s circle in the mid-​sixteenth century, it 34

35

Oldham records it in operation until 1533; Mirjam Foot extends that date to 1537, in The Decorated Bindings in Marsh’s Library, Dublin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 15. Oldham records unsigned examples, however, at least as late as 1540. I am grateful to Mirjam Foot for her help with this binding. See Micha Lazarus, ch. 11 in this volume for his relationship to Ascham. Another example is Alexander Nowell, Westminster’s evangelical Headmaster, who asked another traditionalist, John Christopherson, to pass on his best wishes to Redman at Trinity in 1545–​ 1546: see Micha Lazarus, ‘The Dramatic Prologues of Alexander Nowell: Accommodating the Classics at 1540s Westminster’, Review of English Studies 69.288 (2018), pp. 32–​55 at 35.

Ascham’s Bookshelf

313

entered the college only in 1888 as a gift of John E. B. Mayer, President and historian of the college. A long manuscript note by Mayer on the front flyleaf traces its provenance back to Dr Samuel Knight (1675–​1746), author of the lives of Colet and Erasmus; Mayer himself acquired the book at auction some time after 1861, and deposited it in the college library in 1888. The title page is inscribed Joannes Chaekus ὁ Πάνυ (‘the excellent John Cheke’ –​the Greek suffix may have been added by another hand). Cheke subsequently gave the book to Ascham, as his inscription on the second front flyleaf attests: Joannes Cheekus Rog. Aschamo. S. D. P. Amicitia lucrum non quaerit, sed amicitiam utilitas saepe consequitur. Ego vero tui erga me studii et labωris recordatus, hunc librum ad te mitto, non laboris tui mercedem, sed voluntatis meae significationem. Arbitror enim minime te illud tuum erga me beneficium vendere cogitasse, ne cauponariam exercere videremur, sed aliquam amicitiae tuae partem mihi commodasse, quam postea tibi repωnere deberem. Hunc igitur36 librum pro testimωniω a me accipe me multa tibi debere, et si quam habilis sum, ea velle, omnia cum studio compensare. Vale. John Cheke sends Roger Ascham warmest greetings. Friendship seeks no profit, but profit often follows friendship. I send you this book, however, in memory of your efforts and labours for me, not as reward for your labours but as a sign of my good will. For I judge that you have least of all imagined yourself to have sold your kindness towards me, lest we appear to act like shopkeepers, but to have put some part of your friendship at my disposal, which I ought to return to you thereafter. Therefore accept this book from me as testimony that I owe you many things, and that I desire to compensate you with all the zeal of which I am capable. Farewell. The same leaf is inscribed ‘S: Knight 1770’, son of the aforementioned, and a later hand traces Cheke’s opening sentiment to the last line of Cicero, De amicitia 51, non igitur utilitatem amicitia, sed utilitas amicitiam consecuta est (‘friendship does not, therefore, follow utility, but utility follows friendship’). Long lists of Greek words in the margins of columns 3 and 122 are clearly in Cheke’s distinctive hand, rather than Ascham’s. A  note on the title page verso insisting (against the passage of Suidas which it glosses) that Hesychius was a Christian, and quoting Romans 11:33, is more likely to be Ascham’s, as is a cross-​reference

36

The manuscript abbreviation of igitur is very unclear and could alternatively read ergo.

314 Lazarus pointing the word Εξειρήσας to ‘Herod. 102.12’ (col. 267), again citing Joachim Camerarius’s 1541 edition, where the related participle ἐξείραντα does indeed appear in the location indicated.37



Isocrates, Λόγοι ἅπαντες, καὶ επιστολαί … Orationes partim doctorum virorum opera (Basel: Michael Isengrin, 1550, ustc 668343). Hatfield House, 8366

A Greek collection of the orations and letters of Isocrates. Among the most fascinating of Ascham’s surviving books, the title page is inscribed ‘R. Ascham καὶ των φίλων’ (‘Roger Ascham and his friends’). At least two of the ‘friends’ with whom Ascham shared this book can be identified as Sir Richard Morison and Queen Elizabeth, thanks to Ascham’s inscriptions of the date and place on which he read particular texts. This volume accompanied Ascham from at least the early 1550s to his death in 1568, and records two distinct phases of use. Ascham first annotated his Isocrates in the summer of 1551, which he spent in Augsburg in the train of the diplomat Sir Richard Morison. Extensive notes, in Greek and occasionally in Latin, have been left on eight of the orations that occupy pp. 1–​ 534 of the volume. Each oration is followed by a date and place of reading: On Peace, the earliest, is inscribed Deo gratias. 30 Aprilis Augustae vind. 1551 (‘Thanks to God. Augsburg, 30 April, 1551’, p. 377); Areopagiticus, the latest, is dated 7 September, 1551 (p. 210). Most of the notes are philological in nature, recording close scrutiny of the texts for the purpose of studying the Greek language. Others flag political concerns, for example Tyranni et optimi principis descriptio (‘description of a tyrant and of the best prince’, Encomium to Helen, p. 82). One or two make explicit reference to political events of the moment, for example in Plataikos, where Ascham glosses a passage with summa calamitas exulantium (‘the highest calamity of exiles’), and adds a further note at the foot of the page: ‘I red this place at Augusta 1551o. 26o Augusti vpon which day the preachers of Augusta were banisshed out of the hole Empire bi Ch. Emp. the fift.’ (p. 184). Ascham’s letters of this period reveal that he and Morison took ‘long excursions daily into the Greek language’ throughout their embassy to Augsburg, reading this volume of Isocrates together as well as Herodotus, five tragedies, and the orations of Demosthenes.38 Ripe for further investigation, Ascham’s Isocrates is an extraordinary record not only of the nuts and bolts of Greek learning, but of Ascham’s alignment of Reformation politics with classical analogues precisely as he

37 38

See the preface to this list, above, for Ascham’s ownership of this edition. Ascham to Raven, Augsburg, 14–​18 May 1551, letter cxxii, Giles, vol. i, pt. 2, p. 285. See also Tracey Sowerby, ch. 6 in this volume.

Ascham’s Bookshelf

315

was composing his Report … of the Affaires and State of Germany (London: John Daye, 1570, ustc 507052). The second of Ascham’s ‘friends’ is identified at the beginning of one of Isocrates’s letters (‘to Philip’ in this edition; epistle 4, Ad Antipatrum, in modern editions). At the top of p. 546 Ascham has written ‘An Epistle most worthie for a Prince to reede’, followed by an inscription in Latin: hunc elegantiss. Epistolam Legi, vnà cum Regina Elisabeta. Hampton courte. 1568. 14 noue[*] (‘I read this most elegant epistle together with Queen Elizabeth. Hampton Court, 14 November 1568’). In fact, six epistles have been annotated (pp.  534–​554), in a hand recognisable as Ascham’s but less elegant than usual, suggesting perhaps infirmity so close to the end of his life. In common with the orations earlier in the volume, these epistles are annotated in Latin and Greek with a mixture of sententious and philological remarks. There are also notes in English, however, such as those in the letter Ascham read with Elizabeth, which emphasise Isocrates’s advice to rulers concerning counsel: how to distinguish good counsel from flattery, toleration of ‘free speakers’, ‘trewest counselers worst rewarded’ (pp. 547–​548). Further English annotations in the surrounding letters also relate to the humanist education of princes, for example ‘Eloquens and Ciuil knowledge fit for Princes’ (epistle 5, Ad Alexandrum, p. 551). This volume thus uniquely records Ascham’s ongoing tuition of Elizabeth up to the very end of his life, and further attests the imprint of Isocrates on English humanist circles, from St John’s College to the highest levels of the Elizabethan polity.



Nonnus, Μεταβολὴ τοῦ κατὰ Ιωάννην ἁγίου εὐαγγελίου … Tralatio Sancti Evangelij, secundum Ioannem (Hagenau: Johann Setzer, 1527, ustc 678300). London, British Library, G.8895 (1)

‘Paraphrase of the Holy Gospel according to St John’ in Greek hexameters by Nonnus of Panopolis, an epic poet in Egypt who probably lived in the 5th century. Bound before *Scriptores aliquot gnomici (1521). The title page is inscribed ἡ βίβλος τοῦ ῥογέρου τοῦ ἀσχαμου καὶ τῶν φιλῶν (‘the book of Roger Ascham and his friends’), as well as by a later owner, ‘Matt: Postlethway[te]’. The two items united in this volume travelled together in Ascham’s lifetime, since his inscription is found at the beginning of the first and the end of the second. Manuscript notes in a later hand draw attention to the fact of Ascham’s ownership. Ascham has annotated Nonnus minutely through p. 13 in Greek and with occasional manicules thereafter, marking important episodes, unusual words, and commonplaces. Much of the annotation draws attention to vocabulary, and several words are glossed by reference to Suidas.

316 Lazarus

Plato, Ἅπαντα Πλάτωνος μεθ᾽ ὑπομνημάτων Πρόκλου εἰς τὸν Τίμαιον, καὶ τὰ Πολιτικὰ … Platonis omnia opera cum commentariis Procli in Timaeum et Politica (Basel: Johann Walder, 1534, ustc 661590). Hatfield House, Cecil Papers 344

Cecil Papers 344 comprises six sheaves from a dismembered copy of Plato’s works in Greek, individually bound in limp vellum and amounting to less than a complete edition. No individual gathering displays Ascham’s name or motto, though more parts likely once existed. It is unmistakably Ascham’s hand, however, that is responsible for detailed annotation in Greek, Latin, and English in the parts that survive. A note in Republic, moreover, found its way directly into The Scholemaster. Identifying the source of Socrates’s speech (393D–​394A, p.  394 in this edition) as Ιλ. α. (Iliad  1), Ascham’s marginal comment that this was ‘a peece of Homer turned excellentlie in to prose, by Socrates’, was transferred almost verbatim into The Scholemaster’s analysis of metaphrasis (‘metaphrase’), which features this passage as an example.39 Gorgias bears numerous and varied marginal notes on rhetoric. Ascham tracks the action of the dialogue as the characters respond to one another:  ‘Polus is offended with Socrates’, ‘Socrates scoffith with Polus’ (p. 308). He is also interested in the organisation of knowledge, commenting that ‘euery craftes Master can gyue best counsel in his crafte’ (p. 306), and striving to rationalise the culinary arts (p. 309). Several references point to the readings and translations of Scaevola, Aretino, and Sturm (pp. 304, 306, 309). Sparse notes on Republic include political commonplaces, such as how ‘a learned Prince’ combines ‘Power with Wisdom’ and ‘Rewlethe with Felicitie’ (p.  422), and a comment that Deus non est Author mali (‘God is not the author of evil’, p. 390). Ascham has extensively annotated the dialogue Eryxias, now considered spurious but published in this edition under the title Περί πλούτου (On Wealth). In addition to the usual lexical comments he remarks Ἀνθρώπου βούλη πρός μοχθηρὰ ἑτοίμη (‘man’s ready advice concerning hardship’, p. 660) and indexes the Χρηματα τῶν Καρχηδονιῶν /​ λακεδαιμονιῶν /​Αιθιόπων /​Σκύθων νομάδων (‘property of the Carthaginians /​Spartans /​ Ethiopians /​Scythian nomads’, p. 661). Ascham also annotates the following dialogue, Clitophon, keeping track of Socrates’s views on politics and justice, and leaving a beautiful example of his three hands –​Greek, Latin (italic), and English (secretary) –​in a single polyglot note: ‘ἀυτοὶ ἀυτῶν φαυλότατα διακείμενος ἀυτὸς ἀυτοῦ βελτίστα ἔχων cum morbo quo possunt maximo laborant. Angli expressius dicunt. when thei ar at there worst he is at his best yt euer he was’ (p. 664). Finally, Ascham annotates several of Plato’s epistles, now mostly considered spurious. In the Second Letter he notes pairings of exemplary Greeks (e.g. Periandros and 39

The Scholemaster, Giles, vol. iii, pp. 193–​195.

Ascham’s Bookshelf

317

Thales, Pericles and Anaxagoras, Creon and Tiresias, and so on); he indexes the argument that the dead are still aware of mortal affairs under ΨΥΧΗ ΑΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ (‘the soul immortal’), and identifies Plato’s statement that ‘all things turn on the king of all things; all things are for him and he is the cause of all good’ as a description of ὁ ΘΕΟΣ (‘God’) (p. 670). In the Third Letter, he takes notes on ‘Pilgrimage’, lists the ‘fructe of Pleasure’, namely δυσμαθία /​λήθη /​ἀφροσύνη /​ὕβρις (‘stupidity /​forgetfulness /​folly /​ insolence’), and observes that, on the contrary, there is ‘neyther pleasur, nor payn in God’ (p. 671). This brief account is inadequate to describe the bountiful variety of Ascham’s notes on Plato. As well as scrutinising the Greek text in detail, he was also clearly drawn (as in his *Bible (1531) and in *Nonnus (1527), and perhaps in *Thucydides (1535)) to parallels between pagan and Christian doctrine. Throughout these gatherings he also leaves a wide range of marginal sigla (cf. *Diogenes (1533)), from which further study might deduce a systematic method of annotation.40



Scriptores aliquot gnomici, iis, qui Graecarum literarum candidati sunt, utilissimi (Basel: Joannes Froben, 1521, ustc 692619). London, British Library, G.8895 (2)

A collection of Greek fables and sententiae by the ‘gnomic poets’, including works by (or attributed to) Aphthonius, Philostratus, Aesop, Agapetus, Hesiod, Theognis, Pythagoras, and Phocylides. Bound after *Nonnus (1527), with which it travelled in Ascham’s lifetime. The final flyleaf of the volume is inscribed, in Ascham’s hand, Quisquis amat dictis aliorum rodere vitam /​Hanc mensam vetitam noverit esse sibi (‘whoever loves backbiting at the lives of others should know that he is forbidden from this table’), a phrase inscribed, according to Possidius of Calama, on the dinner table of St Augustine of Hippo, and circulating widely thereafter.41 Four Latin elegiac couplets on the penultimate flyleaf, though uncharacteristically messy, are probably also Ascham’s work. Ascham has left underlining, manicules, and sparse annotations in Latin and Greek on Hesiod’s Theogony, keeping track of figures such as Χάος and ἔρος (‘Chaos’ and ‘Eros’, p. 216), Nymphae (‘Nymphs’, pp. 220, 224), and aetiological episodes such as Generatio fluviorum (‘the birth of the rivers’, p. 223).

40 41

Ascham’s system might be compared to that of Gabriel Harvey:  see Harold S.  Wilson, ‘Gabriel Harvey’s Method of Annotating His Books’, Harvard Library Bulletin 2.3 (1948), pp. 344–​361. In the later middle ages the couplet attained the status of Solomonic wisdom after it was cited by Rabanus Maurus as a gloss on Proverbs 24:23, and was popularised through the thirteenth-​century Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine.

318 Lazarus

Σχόλια των πάνυ δοκίμων … Scholia in septem Euripidis tragoedias ex antiquis exemplaribus, ed. Arsenios, Archbishop of Monemvasia (Venice: Lucantonio Giunta, 1534, ustc 810067). Manchester, Chetham’s Library, Rr.4.7

An edition of the ancient Greek scholia, or commentaries, on seven of the tragedies of Euripides. The title page is inscribed Rogerus. Aschamus. Much annotation has been lost through cropping, especially along the top edge (on p.  4 the height of at least one whole line of prose has been lost). Nonetheless, extensive notes survive in Ascham’s hand on the scholia to every play other than Orestes: Hecuba is most fully annotated, but Phoenissae, Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis, and Andromache all contain notes. Most of these track the glosses that the scholia themselves provide; others make metrical observations (p. 5r), list the legendary figures who feature in the plays (p. 37v), and refer to Erasmus’s translations of Euripides (pp. 20r, 21r). Ascham also inscribed running numbers along the inner margins of most pages, consistent throughout the volume, which clearly co-​ordinate the ancient scholia with an edition of Euripides’s plays in his possession. Comparing Ascham’s pagination of individual scholia with the plays as they appear in sixteenth-​century editions of Euripides’s Greek reveals that Ascham owned and worked from the 1537 edition of Euripides’s plays printed by Johannes Herwagen.42



Thucydides, Δημηγορίαι. Conciones (Paris: Christian Wechel, 1531, ustc 185189). Shrewsbury School, H.viii.23 (3)

One of the earliest sixteenth-​century anthologies of speeches excerpted from Thucydides’s History. For details of the volume in which this is bound, see *Hermogenes (1530–​1531). Despite the convenience of such anthologies and their orientation toward ‘didactic and rhetorical uses’, Ascham largely overlooked this work in favour of the next in the volume, *Thucydides (1535), which he annotated in depth.43 Here Ascham has left only a single lexical comment on the word ἀμετόχως (p. 8).



Thucydides, Συγγραφῆς Β. Historiae liber secundus (Paris: Christian Wechel, 1535, ustc 182117). Shrewsbury School, H.viii.23 (4)

A Greek edition of the second book of Thucydides’s History. For details of the volume in which this is bound, see *Hermogenes (1530–​1531). 42 43

See the preface to this list, above, for Ascham’s ownership of this edition. On these anthologies see Juan Carlos Iglesias-​Zoido, ‘The Speeches of Thucydides and the Renaissance Anthologies’, in Christine Lee and Neville Morley, eds., A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), pp. 43–​60, at pp. 52–​53.

Ascham’s Bookshelf

319

Ascham has annotated Pericles’s funeral oration, a model of Greek oratory, in great detail (pp. 26–​32, corresponding to Hist. ii.35–​46 in modern editions), much as he did his *Demosthenes (1521): notes are sometimes in Latin but mostly in Greek, and display fluent command of Greek as a language of composition rather than merely comprehension. Some of Ascham’s labours were spent on lexis, such as his notes on the ethical vocabulary with which Pericles analyses the Athenian character (p.  27, on Hist. ii.40): φιλοκάλειν (‘to love beauty’), φιλοσοφεῖν (‘to love wisdom’), πλοῦτος (‘wealth’), πενεσθαι (‘to toil’), τολμᾶν (‘to have courage’), ἐκλογίζεσθαι (‘to compute’), ἀμαθία φέρει θρασός (‘ignorance brings courage’), λογισμος φέρει οκνον (‘deliberation brings hesitancy’). He also marks items of historical interest, observing that διόλου τοῦ ἔτους θύουσι οἱ ἀθηναῖοι καθ’έκαστην πλὴν μιᾶς ἡμέρας (‘each Athenian offers sacrifices throughout the year except for one day’, p. 26), and in the few annotations that follow Pericles’s speech (p. 32, on Hist. ii.49) follows with morbid curiosity not only how λοιμός ἐξ ἀιθιοπίας ἐς ἀθήνας καταβη (‘the plague came down to Athens from the Ethiopians’), but also its gruesome συμπτώματα κέφ. θερμαι /​όφθ. ἐρωθήμα /​φλὸγωσις … γλωσσα αἰματώδε … πταρμος /​βραγχος (‘symptoms: heating of the head, reddening of the eyes, fever … bloody throat … sneezing, hoarseness’, and so on). At two points Ascham inserts cross-​references from which we can infer his ownership of other works. He points Thucydides’s reference to ‘unwritten laws’ to Antigone’s appeal to divine or natural law in Sophocles’s tragedy, which can be traced to the Aldine edition (Venice, 1502). Elsewhere he refers a particular use of the word ἐλπίς (‘hope/​expectation’) to the same 1541 edition of Herodotus as is cited in his *Bible (1531).44 As Pericles goes on, however, Ascham becomes increasingly attentive to the rhetorical fashioning of this renowned oration.45 He identifies rhetorical features such as bellica Laus pro Patria, perditissimos commendat (‘praise of patriotic war, commends even the worst’, p. 29, on Hist. ii.42), and translates into Latin some of Pericles’s final ringing phrases (p. 30, on Hist. ii.44), such as at haec doloris acerbitas est non si quis orbetur etc. (‘but this bitterness of sadness is not felt if someone is deprived’, i.e. of good things).



Seyssel, Claude, De republica Galliae et regum officiis libri duo … adiecta est summa doctrinae Platonis, de repub. et legibus (Strasbourg: Josias Rihelius, 1562, ustc 622810). London, British Library, C.45.a.7

A Latin translation of Le grant monarchie de France (‘The Great Monarchy of France’) by Claude Seyssel (d. 1520), Archbishop of Turin. Seyssel’s treatises recommended that

44 45

See the preface to this handlist, above, for full discussion of these inferred volumes. For Ascham’s interest in Greek funeral oratory, see Micha Lazarus, ch. 11.

320 Lazarus a monarch adopt a three-​tiered hierarchy of political counsel, a system which Elizabeth appears to have employed as queen.46 The title page is inscribed R. Aschamus:~’, but the text itself has been left untouched.



Trithemius, Johannes, Liber octo questionum (Cologne: Melchior von Neuss, 1534, ustc 667673). Glasgow, University Library, Special Collections, Ferguson Af-​f.60

Theological disquisitions in Latin by Johann Tritheim (1462–​1516), abbot of a Benedictine monastery at Würzburg, in response to questions put to him by Emperor Maximilian. The title page is inscribed R. Aschamus. Bookplates on the front pastedown indicate that the volume was bequeathed in 1719 to University College, Oxford, in the will of John Hudson (1662–​1719), fellow of the college, Bodley’s librarian from 1701, and principal of St Mary Hall from 1713. It later passed into the library of John Ferguson (1838–​ 1916), Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, and thence into the University Library as part of the Ferguson collection. Ascham has annotated four quaestiones, three of them extensively. In the first of these, the discourse ‘On the Faith Necessary for Salvation’, Ascham is interested in divine punishment, in the problematic status of Infantes Paganorum et iudaeorum (‘the children of pagans and Jews’), and in the hard question of theodicy, Cur Deus creavit quos praescivit damnandos? (‘why did God create those whom he knew must be damned?’) (sigs. B5r–​B7v). In the fourth discourse ‘On Sacred Scripture’, he takes notes on the necessity and sufficiency of holy Scripture, its authority and interpretation, and its relationship to the Church (sigs. D4r–​E1v). The sixth quaestio, ‘On the Power of Evil’, bears only some marginal barring (sigs. F5r–​v), but the seventh, ‘On Divine Permission’, contains extensive notes on the devil, for example how Diabolus ex nostris peccatis vires capit (‘the devil takes strength from our sins’), but is ultimately powerless in his own right: Diabolus velle a se, posse a Deo habet (‘what the Devil wants comes from himself, but what he can do comes from God’) (sigs. F8r–​G2v). 46

Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 85–​86.

Bibliography

Manuscript Sources

Berkshire Record Office British Library, London

Bodleian Library, Oxford Cambridge University Library Cambridge University Archives, Cambridge Hatfield House Lichfield Cathedral Library Parker Library, Cambridge St John’s College Archives, Cambridge

St John’s College Library, Cambridge The National Archives, Kew Westminster School Archives



D/​A1/​2 Additional mss 35840, 35841, 46367 Cotton ms Galba bxi–​x ii Harley mss 417, 523, 5008–​5009, 7039 Lansdowne mss 3, 29, 98 Royal Ms 13 B I Rawlinson mss D 1317, 8° 169 (2) University College ms 171 Dd ms i.43, ix.14 Ely Diocesan Records G/​I/​8 VCCt Probate Register I VCCt Wills 1 Cecil Papers, 1/​171 ms 268.1 R49A ms 106, 119 D/​106/​17 sjcr/​s jar/​6/​1/​1 sjcr/​s jes/​7 sjcr/​s jes/​7/​5 Aa.6.20 L.3 sp 10, 12, 52, 68–​70 prob 11 pr/​2/​8

Primary Printed Material

Acts of the Privy Council:  Volume I:  1542–​1547 (London:  Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1890). Acts of the Privy Council: Volume VII: 1558–​1570 (London: hmso, 1893).

322 Bibliography Agustín, Antonio, Epistolario de Antonio Agustín, ed. Cándido Flores Sellés (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1980). St Ambrose, Divi Ambrosii … de vocatione omnium gentium libri duo (Geneva: Michel du Bois, 1541, ustc 450218). Ascham, Roger, Apologia doctissimi viri Rogeri Aschami, Angli, pro Caena Dominica … Cui accesserunt themata quaedam Theologica … Expositiones item antiquae, in Epistolas Divi Pauli ad Titum et Philemonem (London:  Francisco Coldock, 1577, ustc 508290). Ascham, Roger, Disertissimi viri Rogeri Aschami … familiarum epistolarum libri tres, ed. Edward Grant (London: Francis Coldock, 1576, ustc 508129; Hanover: G. Antonius, 1602, 1610, no ustc; Coloniae Allobrogum: P. Rouserianus, 1611, no ustc). Ascham, Roger, Editio novissima prioribus auctior, ed. William Elstob (Oxford:  Typis Lichfieldianis, 1703). Ascham, Roger, English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904; rpt. 1970). Ascham, Roger, The English Works of Roger Ascham, ed. James Bennet (London: printed for R. and J. Dodsley, and J. Newbery, 1761). Ascham, Roger The English works of Roger Ascham: Praeceptor to Queen Elizabeth, ed. John George Cochrane (London: White, Cochrane, 1815). Ascham, Roger, Letters of Roger Ascham, trans. Maurice Hatch and Alvin Vos; ed. Alvin Vos (New York: P. Lang, 1989). Ascham, Roger, A report and discourse written by Roger Ascham, of the affaires and state of Germany and the Emperour Charles his court, duryng certaine yeares while the sayd Roger was there (London: John Daye, 1570, ustc 507052). Ascham, Roger, The scholemaster or plaine and perfite way of teachyng children, to understand, write, and speake, the Latin tong (London:  John Day, 1570, ustc 507056). Ascham, Roger, The Scholemaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967). Ascham, Roger, Toxophilus, the schole of shootinge conteyned in two bookes (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1545, ustc 503581). Ascham, Roger, Toxophilus (London: Abell Jeffes, 1589, ustc 511132). Ascham, Roger, Toxophilus, ed. Peter. E. Medine (Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002). Ascham, Roger, and Johannes Sturm, Epistolae duae de nobilitate Anglicana, two letters of Sturm and Ascham published within Conrad Heresbach, De laudibus Graecarum litterarum oratio (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1551, ustc 622756). Bacon, Francis, Advancement of Learning, ed. W. A. Wright (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1873).

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342 Bibliography Simpson, Richard, ‘Sir Thomas Smith (1513–​77): An Overview of His Life and Works’, in Richard Simpson and Andrew Burnett, and Deborah Thorpe, Roman Coins, Money and Society in Elizabethan England: Sir Thomas Smith’s On the Wages of the Roman Footsoldier, (New York: American Numismatic Society, 2017). Skelly, Gerald, ‘Henry VIII Consults the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge’, in Guy Bedouelle and Patrick Le Gal, eds., Le ‘Divorce’ du roi Henry VIII: études et documents (Geneva: Droz, 1987), pp. 59–​75. Smith, John Hazel, ‘Roger Ascham’s Troubled Years’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 65 (1966), pp. 36–​46. Sowerby, Tracey A., Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England: The Careers of Sir Richard Morison c.1513–​1556 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Sowerby, Tracey A, ‘Francis Thynne’s Perfect ambassadour and the Construction of Diplomatic Thought in Elizabethan England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 82 (2020), pp. 539–557. Spivakovsky, E., Son of the Alhambra: Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, 1504–​1575 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970). Spitz, Lewis W. and Tinsley, Barbara Sher (eds.), Johann Sturm on Education (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1995). Staab, Karl, Die Pauluskatenen nach den Handschriftenquellen untersucht (Rome: Verlag des päpstlichen Bibelinstituts, 1926). Stark, Ryan, J., ‘Protestant Theology and Apocalyptic Rhetoric in Ascham’s Scholemaster’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69.4 (2008), pp. 517–​532. Stewart, Alan, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Stone, Lawrence, An Elizabethan: Horatio Palavicino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). Starkey, David, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (London: Vintage, 2002). Strype, John, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1820). Sturge, Charles, Cuthbert Tunstal. Churchman, Scholar, Statesman, Administrator (London: Longmans, 1938). Taylor, Andrew, ‘Humanist Philology and Reformation Controversy: John Christopherson’s Latin Translations of Philo Judaeus and Eusebius of Caesarea’, in Fred Schurink ed., Tudor Translation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 79–​100. Thiessen, Hillard von, ‘Diplomatie vom type ancien: Überlegungen zu einem Idealtypus des frühneuzeitlichen Gesandtschaftswesens’, in Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler, eds., Akteure der Außenbeziehungen: Netzwerke und Interkulturalität im historischen Wandel (Cologne: Böhlau, 2010), pp. 471–​503. Thiessen, Hillard von, and Windler, Christian (eds.), Akteure der Außenbeziehungen: Netzwerke und Interkulturalität im historischen Wandel (Cologne: Böhlau, 2010). Thompson, James The Wars of Religion in France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, repr. 2018).

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Unpublished Dissertations/​Papers

Hatch, Maurice Addison, ‘The Ascham Letters: An Annotated Translation of the Latin Correspondence contained in the Giles Edition of Ascham’s Works’, unpublished dissertation, Cornell University (1948). McDiarmid, John F., ‘The Cambridge Humanists and the Edwardine Reformation’, paper presented at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, San Antonio, TX, 2002, unpublished. Naquin, Nicholas, ‘On the Shoulders of Hercules: Erasmus, the Froben Press and the 1516 Jerome Edition in Context’, unpublished dissertation, Princeton University (2013). Needham, Paul, ‘Sir John Cheke at Cambridge and Court’, 2 vols., unpublished dissertation, Harvard University (1971). Nicholas, Lucy R., ‘A Translation of Roger Ascham’s Apologia pro Caena Dominica and Contextual Analysis’, unpublished dissertation, University of London (2014). Noyes, Gertrude, ‘A Study of Roger Ascham’s Literary Citations with Particular Reference to his Knowledge of the Classics’, unpublished dissertation, Yale University (1937). Williamson, Elizabeth, ‘Before “Diplomacy”:  Travel, Embassy and the Production of Political Information in the later Sixteenth Century’, unpublished dissertation, Queen Mary University of London (2012).

Index People, places and topics Works by Ascham are indexed separately and marked with *, but all other early modern works can be found under their author. Classical and patristic works are indexed separately; see below. Act of Supremacy  1534 179–​180 1559 179–​182, 184 (n. 62) Act of Uniformity  1549 173 1552 180–​181, 184 1559 166–​167, 179–​180, 184–​185 Agricola, Rudolf 154, 215 De inventione dialectica 215 Alan, Francis 90–​91 Allen, Edmund 183 Alvey, Richard 52, 55–​57, 59 Antwerp 50, 128, 209 *Apologia pro Caena Dominica 3, 14–​15, 117, 156, 276, 280–​281, 285 classical references 190 patristic sources 76 publication 209 (n. 6), 275 (n. 37), 295 radicalism of 176, 178–​179 rhetoric of 171–​172 royal supremacy theme 288 (n. 113) theology of 167–​168, 170–​179, 183, 280–​281, 291 archery 2, 15, 85, 212–​213, 215–​220, 279 commonwealth and 220 compatibility with scholarship  216–​217 honesty and 223 legislation on 279 Arianism 153 Ascham, Anthony (brother to Roger) 270 (n. 4), 271 Ascham, John (father to Roger) 41, 211, 273 see also Ascham, parents death of 75–​76, 109 Ascham (Howe), Margaret (wife to Roger) 292, 293 (n. 147), 295–296, 301 Ascham, Margaret (mother to Roger) 109, 270 (n. 5) see also Ascham, parents

Ascham, Roger  career  at the University of Cambridge 9–​11, 23–​24, 27–​28, 36–​37, 41–​58, 59, 61–​63, 68, 106–​107, 138–​140, 211–​212, 215, 271–​279 in the Tudor courts 12, 36–​37, 77, 108, 138, 230, 279, 281–​282 as tutor 1, 15, 107–​108, 281, 286, 290–​291, 315 at Middle Temple 283 in diplomacy 13, 36–​37, 58, 77, 83–​84, 108, 124–​144, 284–​286 as Latin secretary 78, 91, 108, 125, 140–​141, 162, 165, 286–​288, 290, 293 under Mary i 3, 19, 78–​80, 91, 107, 160, 162, 285–​292 under Elizabeth i 3, 244, 293–​295, 315 children 145, 245, 292, 294, 301 cockfighting 293, 296 (n. 165) death and will 295–​296 early life 269–​270 Greek learning of 17, 189–​191, 215–​216, 276–​277, 314–​315 hand writing 64, 68, 78–​79, 107 (n. 21), 191, 278 health 273, 278–​279, 293 Italy (attitude to) 108, 124, 284 language learning 134–​135, 314–​315 linguistic reform 111–​116, 120–​122, 213–​214 marriage 292–​293 see also Ascham (Howe), Margaret motto 301–​302 parents 62, 211, 230, 270, 273 see also Ascham, John and Ascham, Margaret pedagogy 36, 151–​153, 198–​199, 248–​265 poetry of 192, 200–​207, 231, 295 preservation of books belonging to 300–​301 as reader 3–​4, 17, 198–​204, 236, 246, 274, 277–​278, 297–​320

Index religious conformity under Mary i 8, 52, 285–​290 religious identity 8, 14–​15, 26–​29, 36, 52, 58, 76, 282–​283, 285 reputation 4–​8, 15, 143, 165, 264 theology 25, 117–​118, 152–​160, 165, 169, 170–​179, 181, 183, 271–​276, 283, 302, 320 as translator 11, 61–​81, 197–​198, 275–​277 writing style 66–​67, 69, 84, 87, 110–​111, 119–​120, 122, 127–​129, 247, 264–​265 Ashton, Hugh 44 Ashton, Thomas 46 (n. 19), 52, 55, 59 Astley, John 131–​132, 226, 285 (n. 97) Astley, Katherine 131 Augsburg 84, 92, 136, 314 Interim 285 Agustín, Antonio 96–​97 Dialogos de Medallas 96 Aurifaber, John 132 Bacon, Francis  Advancement of Learning 6 Bacon, Nicholas 167 (n. 6 and 7), 194 Banks, Robert 53, 59 Barbaro, Daniele 154 Barker, William 54, 56–​57, 59 Basel 284 Baynes, Ralph 51 Beccaria, Antonio 75 Becke, Richard 47–​48, 59 Bembo, Pietro 5, 248, 254–​257, 262 Berthelet, Thomas 208, 210 Bible  copy owned by Roger Ascham 300, 305–​306, 317 English Bible 208–​209 see also Scripture Bill, William 43, 52, 56–​57, 59, 231, 232 *Ascham’s poem for 192, 231 Billick, Eberhard 156–​157 Bing, Thomas 232–​233, 234 (n. 33, 36) Bland, John 49 Blaxton, William 50–​51, 56, 59 Blythe, Alice and John 109 Blythe, Anne 230 (n. 20) Book of Common Prayer  1549 176, 184 1552 173, 179, 180–​181, 184 1559 166–​167, 180–​182, 184–​185

347 Brandesby, Richard 190, 241 Brandon, Charles and Henry 239 memorial volume for 239, 241 Brandon, Katherine 168 Browne, Christopher 45 (n. 16), 48, 50, 56, 59 Browne, Thomas 251 A Ritch Storehouse 250–​251 Bruges 92 Brussels 97, 111, 131, 132, 285, 299 court at 136–​137 Bucer, Martin 146–​149, 157, 178, 243, 258, 305 (n. 25) *Ascham’s poetry for 192 death and commemoration 158–​159, 192, 239, 282, 291 De Regno Christi 148 irenicism 159–​160, 282–​283 relationship with Ascham 147–​148, 282 Buchanan, George 5 Budé, Guillaume 92 (n. 43), 248, 307–​308 De asse et partibus eius 82–​83, 95 Bullinger, Heinrich 164, 178 Bullock, George 50, 56, 59 Burton, Richard 42 Busleyden, Jerome de 82, 92 Butts, William 117 Caius, John 94 Calais 128 Calvinism 164, 177–​178 Calvin, Jean 290 (n. 22) ‘Cambridge connection’ 9–​11, 29–​30, 100, 104 (n. 6), 106, 118–​119, 122, 165, 167 (n. 7) centrality of John Cheke 230–​235 memorialised in The Scholemaster  226–​227, 234–​235 Cambridge  town of 23–​24 see also University of Cambridge Camden, William 5, 83, 292–​293 Annals 6 Camerarius, Joachim 248, 299, 314 Cantrell, Ralph 51, 60 Cantrell, Thomas 51, 60 Carr, Nicholas 232–​234, 239 De scriptorum Britannicorum paucitate 233–​234, 237 cartography 136

348 Index Castiglione, Baldassare  Il Cortegiano 97–​98, 124, 237, 246–​247 Cave, Ambrose 167 (n. 6 and n. 7), 294 Cecil (Cheke), Mary 109, 201–​202, 300 *Ascham’s funeral dialogue for 17, 109, 192, 200–​202 Cecil (Cooke), Mildred 152, 189, 191–​194, 300, 305, 307 Cecil, Robert 131 Cecil, William 52, 93–​95, 98–​100, 105, 127, 161, 162, 166–​167, 181, 185, 202, 300–​301 Chancellor of the University of Cambridge 37–​38 relationship with Ascham 36, 88–​89, 108, 138–​139, 140–​142, 293, 294 relationship with Cheke, John 104, 109 in The Scholemaster 226–​227, 293 (n. 147), 301 Cecil family  preservation of Ascham’s books 300–​301 Chaloner, Thomas 94–​95, 100, 139 (n. 84) Cheke, Agnes 109, 117, 201 (n. 60) Cheke, John 30, 31, 38–​39, 43, 52, 57, 59, 75, 84, 94, 161, 239, 245, 260 author and translator 103, 105, 109–​110, 119–​120 book owned by 313–​314 career 104–​105, 108–​109, 211, 215, 279, 291 citizen 220–​221 Courtyer, The, preface to 116, 121, 214 De Ecclesia 118, 290 (n. 124) English linguistic reform of 114–​116, 120–​122, 213–​214 Hurt of sedicion 105, 120 intellectual comparisons to Ascham 111–​122 memorialisation of 228–​234 moral exemplar, presentation as 237–​238 De pronuntiatione 105 (n. 9), 112–​113, 169 relationship with Ascham 12–​13, 87, 103–​123, 126, 129, 215–​216, 228–​230, 242, 249, 271–​273, 281 (n. 72), 286, 291, 313 religious views 104–​105, 116–​118, 286, 291 De Superstitione, preface to 117–​119 see also friendship, pronunciation controversy (1542) Cheke, Mary see Cecil (Cheke), Mary Christopherson, John 43–​46, 52, 60, 68, 75, 299, 312 (n. 35) Jephthah 45

Church Fathers see patristics Citolini, Alessandro 163 Clare Hall, Cambridge 33–​34, 53 classical authors  as moral exemplars 277 as stylistic models 66–​67, 69, 70, 112, 114, 116, 120–​121, 149–​150, 191, 200 (n. 53), 217, 236, 254–​257, 261–​262 for individual authors see separate index classical learning  early modern reverence for 30–​31, 112–​114, 148–​149, 169–​170, 190, 215–​216, 234 see also Ascham, Roger, Greek learning of; humanism Claymond, John 95 clerical marriage 73–​74, 156, 275 Clifford, Christopher  Schoole of Horsmanship 214, 217 (n. 33), 218 Clinton, Edward 167 (n. 6) coins see numismatics Cologne 128, 157 Comines, Phillipe de 133 commonwealth 5, 10, 16, 23–​24, 32–​35, 118, 142–​143, 153, 170, 181, 220–​223, 279 Conyers, Thomas 54, 60, 242, 304–​305 Cooke, Anthony 161, 163, 239, 300 Cooke, Mildred see Cecil (Cooke), Mildred Cortesius, Paulus 248 Cotton, Robert 83 Council of Trent 129, 284 Cranmer, Thomas 48, 75, 105, 147, 178, 181, 278, 305 (n. 25) Defence of the ... Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ 173–​176 Cromwell, Thomas 43, 208–​209, 210 Crosley, Thomas 43, 46, 47 (n. 26), 48, 57 (n. 69), 59 Cumberford, Henry 43–​44, 46–​47, 59 Cumberford, Richard 54, 59 Dawlings, John 54, 60 death see mortality *Defence of the Lord’s Supper see Apologia pro Caena Dominica Denny, Anthony 30, 39, 58, 229 *Ascham’s funeral dialogue for 192, 200 dialectic 150–​151, 153–​154, 210 (n. 8), 214–​215, 218–​219 rhetoric and 151–​154, 218–​219

Index diplomatic secretaries 124–​144, 284 career prospects 138–​143, 144 duties of 125–​129, 284 training of 133–​138 Disraeli, Isaac 7 Dobbe, Thomas 43, 45, 60 Dodington, Bartholomew 298 Donato, Bernardino 65 Doran, Susan 167, 179–​183 Dudith, András 310 Dudley, Ambrose 290 Dudley, Robert 95, 100, 162, 281 (n. 71), 295 relationship with Ascham 292 (n. 140), 294–​295 Eck, Johann 156–​157, 243 Edmondes, Thomas 140 Edward vi 33, 88–​89, 105, 118, 149 (n. 18), 152, 159, 161, 168, 210, 279 death of 162, 241, 285–​286 education of 57, 105, 107, 189 see also Reformation Eland, Henry 43, 45, 60, 230, 298 Eland, William 45 n. 16, 230, 298 Elizabeth i 4, 14–​15, 95, 161, 162, 237 *Ascham’s New Year poem for 192, 202–​204 book read by 314–​315 education of 45, 151–​152, 154–​155, 165, 168, 189–​190, 199, 281, 290–​291 marriage 202–​203 recoinage under 98–​99 religious policy 165–​167, 184–​185 religious views 165–​166, 179–​185 see also Reformation Elyot, Thomas 82, 93 Boke named the Governour, The 116–​117, 193 encryption techniques 126–​127 Englefield/​Inglefield, Francis 286–​287 English, use of 2, 8, 190, 213 linguistic reform 12–​13, 114–​116, 120–​122, 213–​214 *Epistolae duae de nobilitate Anglicana 2 (n.1), 151, 209 (n. 6), 258–​259, 282 Erasmus, Desiderius 2, 5, 6, 70, 72, 80, 82, 87, 112, 154, 197, 248, 274 (n. 33), 277, 303, 306, 318 Adagia 197–​199, 201, 204, 307, 308

349 De copia 246 Novum Instrumentum 65–​66, 71 Paraclesis 116 (n. 69) De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione 104, 113–​114, 169, 272 Erythraeus, Valentin 161 Esslingen 89 Etheredge, George 75, 81 Eucharist 156, 160 compared to the Mass 172–​173 Lutheran position on 171–​172 theology of 171–​176, 291 see also Apologia pro Caena Dominica; Mass exiles, Protestant 135, 160, 162–​163, 286, 296, 314 Fabricius, Georg 252 Fagius, Paul 160 Fawcett, Richard 47, 49, 56–​57, 59 Fawden, Thomas 54, 56, 59 Fink, Gerhard see Sevenus Fisher, Henry 42 Fisher, John 75, 210 (n. 8), 270–​271 Foxe, John 160, 295 (n. 161) Free, John 75 French Wars of Religion 158 friendship 12, 14, 67, 76–​77, 92, 111, 230–​231, 246–​247, 313 cross-​confessional 28, 42, 48, 72–​73, 76, 160, 243–​245, 283 in The Scholemaster 227, 242–​246 Fulke, William 38, 94 Gardiner, Stephen 48, 53, 212 Greek pronunciation and 104–​106, 112, 190, 211 relationship with Ascham 58, 76, 88–​91, 140, 210–​211, 243, 286 Gelenius, Sigismund  Callimachi Cyrenaei hymni  191, 192–​193, 306 gift-​giving 64, 71, 77, 87–​91, 298, 313 Gilbert, Humphrey 233 Giles, J.A. 2, 7–​8, 55–​56, 107 (n. 20) Goltz, Hubert 82, 92, 95 Goodrich, Thomas 43–​44, 52 (n. 47), 68–​69, 71–​72 Grafton, Richard 166, 208–​209

350 Index Grant, Edward 2, 4, 295 Disertissimi viri Rogeri Aschami  69–​71, 246 Oratio de vita et obitu 5–​6, 7, 189, 287 Grey, Lady Jane 152, 161, 189 attempted accession of 105, 286 Griffolini, Francesco 81 Grindal, William 41, 43, 45, 55, 60, 107, 165, 211, 230, 242 Guy, John 166 Haddon, Walter 3, 32, 104, 119 (n. 76), 213 (n. 18), 214, 226, 232–​233, 238, 239, 245 endorsement of Toxophilus  213 Lucubrationes 232 Poemata aliquot  231 Hales, John 161, 245 Hampton, Bernard 226 Harrison, William 95, 99 Harvey, Gabriel 194, 317 (n. 40) Ciceronianus  234 Heath, Nicholas 210 Hebblethwaite, Robert 51, 57 (n. 65), 60 Heere, Lucas van 95–​96 Heidelberg 106, 137 Henry viii 110, 142, 192, 279 dedication of De Superstitione to 117 dedication of Toxophilus to 210–​211, 213 see also Reformation Henten, Johannes  Enarrationes vetustissimorum theologorum 66–​67 Heywood, Jasper 263 Hoby, Philip 140 Hoby, Thomas  The Courtyer  97–​98, 116, 121, 247 Holgate, Robert 62–​63, 273 Horne, Robert 52, 56–​57, 59 Howard, Philip 251 Howard, William 167 (n. 6) Hudson, Winthrop S. 9, 14 (n. 41), 122, 165, 167 (n. 7) humanism 11, 29, 30–​31, 63, 70, 111–​118, 148–​151 civic humanism 32, 118, 170 language and 104, 112–​114, 169–​170 Protestantism and 29–​31, 116–​117, 122, 152–​156, 277–​278, 306, 314–​315

see also classical learning; pronunciation controversy (1542) Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego 88, 96 Hus, Jan  motto of 210 imitatio  18, 103, 111–​112, 122, 235–​236, 248–​265 European discussion of 248 plagiarism and 259–​260 see also Scholemaster, The, imitatio and Imperial court 136–​137, 138, 140–​142, 284, 287 Ireland, William 57 (n. 69), 84, 259 Johnson, Samuel 7, 189 Jones, Norman 184 Jones, Philip  Certaine briefe, and speciall instructions  98 justification by faith see salvation Katterfeld, Alfred 8 Kennett, White 6–​7 Killigrew, Henry 140 Knollys, Francis 167 (n. 6 and 7) Lakin, Thomas 162 Langdale, Alban 46, 48–​49, 54, 57 (n. 69), 59, 283 Leaper, William 51, 60 Lee, Edward 62–​64, 67–​74, 76–​77, 80, 81, 212, 273, 275 Leo vi 224 De appartu bellico  212 Taktica 109–​110 Lever, Thomas 44–​45, 53, 60, 68, 230, 295 Lewis, William 54, 60 logic see dialectic Longueil, Christophe de 248 Louvain 50, 128 Luther, Martin 1, 6, 146, 157, 177, 243, 271 Abroganda Missa privata 170–​172 Maastricht 84 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 159, 166, 173–​176, 178–​179, 282 (n. 83) Machiavelli, Niccolo 133, 135 Madew, John 52–​53, 56–​57, 59

351

Index Maffei, Raffaele  Commentaria Urbana  197 Magdeburg 285 Magdeburg Confession 157–​158, 288 Manley, William 51, 59 Manutius, Aldus 5 Marshall, Peter 178, 285 (n. 95) Martyr Vermigli, Peter 160, 178 Mary i 89–​90, 105 Protestant conformity under 288–​292 see also Reformation Mason, John 105, 126, 135, 140, 226 Mass  Ascham’s depiction of 172–​173, 175, 183, 280 disputations on 7, 168, 276, 280 restoration under Mary i 79 see also Apologia pro Caena Dominica; Eucharist Matal, Jean 96–​97 Mechelen 82, 92, 111, 128 Melanchthon, Philip 105, 147, 153 (n. 47), 154, 157, 248, 252 Loci Communes 154, 155 Metcalfe, Nicholas 25, 27–​28, 35–​36, 243, 271 Meteren, Emanuel van 95–​96 Middlemore, Henry 141 Mildmay, Walter 226 money see numismatics; wealth Mont, Christopher 131, 147 Montaigne, Michel de 193 More, Thomas 3, 82–​83, 246 Letter to the University of Oxford  31 Morison, Richard 13, 58, 84, 95, 96, 100, 108, 110, 124–​144, 147, 230, 245–​246, 260, 284, 314 Apomaxis Calumniarum  210 books read by 133, 299, 314 translator of Johannes Sturm 147 mortality 195–​196, 200–​202 Mount, Christopher 244 Mula, Marcantonio da 141–​142 Nanninck, Peter  Dialogus de milite peregrino  212, 217 Nashe, Thomas 234 Neale, J. E. 184 Nicholas, Lucy 90, 119, 170–​171 Norden, John  Surveyors Dialogue  218, 222 (n. 48)

Nowell, Alexander 239, 296, 312 (n. 35) Nowell, Laurence 95 (n. 57) numismatics 11, 82–​100 Greek coins 84–​85, 92 Hebrew coins 85–​86 links between England and Europe 96–​100 Persian coins 85, 92 Roman coins 84, 86–​89, 92 Occo, Adolphus 92 Oecolampadius, Johannes 274, 305 Ord, Melanie 124 Osório, Jerónimo 243–​244, 291–​292 De nobilitate 288–​289 Pace, Richard 140 Padua 105, 111 (n. 41), 232 Paget, William 30, 39, 106, 162, 229, 286, 289 (n. 119) papal authority 25–​26, 177, 182, 210, 271–​272 see also Act of Supremacy (1534), royal supremacy Paris 154, 209, 214 Parliament of 1559 see Act of Uniformity (1559) Parr, Katherine 30–​31, 107, 165, 168 Parr, William 58, 167 (n. 7), 210 Parry, Thomas 167 (n. 6) patristics 11, 61–​81, 168, 274–​278 study by English scholars 75, 80–​81 see also separate index of patristic authors Peacock, Thomas 46, 49, 57 (n. 68), 59 Pember, Robert 92–​94, 189, 276 (n. 45), 311 Pericles  funeral oration 200 (n. 53), 311, 319 see also Thucydides Perne, Andrew 94 Petrarch 82, 87 Petre, William 226, 289 (n. 119) Pico, Gianfrancesco 248 Pilkington, James 52, 56–​57, 60, 230, 295 Pole, Reginald 79, 96, 149 (n. 15), 287–​289, 291–​292 Poliziano, Angelo 87, 248 Ponet, John 74–​75, 104, 119 (n. 76), 299 Porter, William 53, 56–​57, 59

352 Index Preston  Ascham nominated as mp 294 pronunciation controversy (1542) 9, 104–​106, 113, 169–​170, 181, 190, 211, 213–​214, 272, 300, 303

*Scholemaster, The 1, 2, 12–​13, 18, 25, 27–​28, 31, 36–​37, 45, 92 (n. 43), 151, 154 (n. 48), 189 (n. 3), 190, 226–​247, 292 (n. 138), 301–​302 Cheke within 103–​104, 110, 115, 123, 155 (n. 58), 228–​229, 231–​233, 238, 243, 246 Ramus, Peter 153–​154, 160, 214 composition and publication 25, 149–​150, Raven, Edward 84, 110, 111, 230, 259, 298–​299 278, 291–​292, 293, 301, 310, 316 Rawlinson, John 51–​52, 60 examples, use of 150 (n. 24), 227, Redman, John 72–​74, 77, 93–​94, 237, 246, 235–​238, 250 279, 312 imitatio and  18, 103, 111–​113, 229, 236, book owned by 246, 312 238, 248–​250, 261–​265 disputes in St John’s 42–​43, 60, 72–​73, Italy (depiction of) 124 272–​273 linguistic reform and 115 religious conservatism 43, 47, 50, 76, memory within 25, 58, 103–​110, 122–123, 243, 312 226–​247, 291–​292 Reformation 10–​11, 25–​29, 40, 41–​43, 61–​62, purpose of 149, 226–​247, 250–​251 157–​158 religion and 14 (n. 40), 27, 36, 152–​153, as recovery of the past 116–​117, 181, 183 243, 272 under Henry viii 25–​26, 42, 210, 271 rhetoric and 151, 153 under Edward vi 26–​27, 178–​179, 280 Sturm and 103, 149–​150 under Elizabeth i 165–​167, 184–​185 Scripture 4, 63, 71, 155, 159, 168, 181, 213, 274, internationalism of 146, 157–​159, 162–​163 275 refugees see exiles, Protestant classical authors and 67, 152 *Report … of the Affairs and State of Germany  New Testament 155, 168, 172–​173, 199, 8, 13, 129–​134, 161, 190, 209 (n. 6), 285 274, 275, 277, 297–​298, 305–​306 sources for 131–​133, 145 (n. 4), 301, 310, Old Testament 71, 117, 172, 175, 275, 277 314–​315 patristic authors and 61–​81 Riccius, Bartolomaeus 248, 250 (n. 10) philology 29, 30–​31, 169, 274, 280 Richards, Jennifer 12, 16, 218, 220, 222 rhetoric and 153–​154 Ridley, Nicholas 34–​35, 48–​49 Scriptural authority 15, 159, 171–​178, Rogers, Daniel 95 181–​183, 210, 297, 320 Rogers, Edward 290 specific books and passages of  royal supremacy 51, 179–​180, 210, 271, 279, 288 Exodus 40:29 172 see also papal authority; Reformation Leviticus 172 Russell, D. A. 262 Philemon 63, 64–​68, 275 Russell, Francis 167 (n. 7) Philemon 1:2 66–​67 Ryan, Lawrence 8, 124, 170–​171, 201–​202, 2 Timothy 277 204, 227, 247, 275 (n. 40), 297 Titus 63, 68–​74, 275 Titus 1:6 70, 73–​74, 275 Sackville, Richard 103, 226–​227, 229, Titus 1:15 306 242–​243 translation 65–​67, 69–​72, 274 (n. 36) salvation 117–​118, 156, 174–​179, 243, 275–​276, Selling, William 75 302, 320 sententiae  Sambucus, Johannes 248 Ascham’s use of 189–​207 Sampson, Richard 131, 274 form and purpose 192–​194, 201–​203 Sanderson, Henry 43, 44 (n. 11), 46–​48, Seton, John 46, 48, 59, 62, 64, 67, 69, 72, 76 55–​57, 59 Sevenus 162–​163, 252, 256

Index Seymour, Anne 168 Seymour, Edward, Duke of Somerset 26, 33–​34, 57, 168, 280 Seymour, Edward, 1st Earl of Hertford 90 (n. 37) Seymour, Frances 90 (n. 37) Seymour, Thomas 107, 168, 281 Seyssel, Claude  Le grant monarchie de France 320 Shepreve, John 75 Sidney, Philip  Defence of Poesie 247 Sigonio, Carlo  De republica Atheniensium  298 Sleidan, Johannes 147, 161, 284, 285 Smith, Thomas 30, 34, 38–​39, 65, 95, 98–​99, 141, 202, 232, 233, 237, 244, 272, 279 and English linguistic reform 114–​116, 213–​214 De recta et emendata linguae Anglicae scriptione 115, 214 De recta et emendata linguae Graecae pronuntiatione  105 (n. 9), 169, 303 On the Wages of the Roman Footsoldier  92–​94 see also pronunciation controversy (1542) Socrates 277, 316 Stafford, Edward 140 Stafford, William 290 Stanley, Edward 294 Staphylus, Friedrich 157 St John’s College, Cambridge 25–​29, 94, 100, 106, 110, 230–​231, 270–​271, 280, 304–​305 fellowship disputes in 10–​11, 41–​60, 61–​62, 68, 107, 211, 272–​273 Strada, Iacopo de  Epitome Thesauri Antiquitatem  90–​91 Strasbourg 14, 105, 148, 161, 252, 258–​260, 286 Gymnasium of 146–​147, 150, 152, 159, 160, 161–​163, 252, 282 relationship with England 146, 159, 160–​163, 164, 282 Sturm’s work in 146–​147, 282, 293 Sturm, Johannes 6, 145–​164, 248–​265, 286, 316 De amissa dicendi ratione  149, 154, 219, 248 career 146–​147, 282

353 Dialogi Aristotelici  149 (n. 17), 245–​246 De educatione principis 155, 258 De imitatione oratoria 150 Nobilitas litterata  150, 155, 250–​258 pedagogy 146–​147, 151–​153, 198–​199, 248–​265 De periodis unus liber  152 Quinctiana explicatio  150 relationship with Ascham 13–​14, 87, 91, 103, 114, 145–​164, 219, 229, 237, 245–​246, 249, 258–​259, 282, 286, 289, 290–​291, 292 (n. 140) religious views 152–​160, 282–​283 reputation in England 147 see also Epistolae duae de nobilitate Anglicana Suleiman i, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire 130 Swayne, Richard 54, 59 Swynborne, Roland 33 (n. 34), 53 Talboys, Elizabeth 290 Taylor, John 42–​43, 47, 55–​57, 59, 211 Tedder, Henry Richard 191–​192 *Themata theologica 3 (n. 13), 170–​171, 275–​277, 283 (n. 86) Thompson, John 42, 53–​54, 60, 62 Throckmorton, Nicholas 134, 140, 141 Tifernate, Lelio 81 Tonge, Robert 53, 59 Toxites, Michael 161, 237 *Toxophilus 1, 2, 15–​16, 37, 58, 85, 105, 151, 190, 208–​225, 279, 287 Ascham’s motivations for 78, 143, 208–​223, 279 Ascham’s self-​fashioning within 37, 143, 208–​223 Cheke in 105, 109–​110, 215–​216, 220–​221, 238, 249 classical scholarship in 190, 215–​216, 224–​225 commonwealth and 143, 220–​223 dedicatees 58, 210–​211, 279 dialectic and 151, 214–​215, 218–​219 dialogue form 216–​220 English language and 17, 116, 121, 190, 212, 213–​215, 217–​218, 223

354 Index *Toxophilus (cont.) instructional manual 214, 217–​218, 221–​222 paratexts 209–​210, 213, 214–​215, 223–​225 Philologus (character) 215–​218, 219 precedents 212 printing and publication 2 (n.1), 15, 208–​210, 279 Toxophilus (character) 215–​218, 219 see also archery transubstantiation 49, 53, 76, 171 see also Mass Tremellius, Immanuel 161 Trinity Hall, Cambridge 33–​34 Tritheim, Johann  Liber octo questionum 320 Tunstall, Cuthbert 79, 81–​83, 93, 94, 289 (n. 119) De arte supputandi  82–​83 De veritate corporis et sanguinis 76 Twyne, Henry 95 Udall, Nicholas 239 University of Cambridge 23–​40, 210–​211 1545 and 1547 chantries acts and  29–​30, 107 Ascham’s career within see under Ascham, Roger break with Rome and 26, 210 (n. 8), 271 Chancellors of 37–​38, 104–​105, 140, 210–​211, 243 coin collecting in 92–​94, 100 controversy over Greek pronunciation see pronunciation controversy (1542) gentrification of 35–​38 networks within see ‘Cambridge connection’ Vice-​Chancellors of 38, 50, 213 (n. 18), 271 (n. 14), 280 visitation of (1549) 33–​34 see also Clare College, Cambridge; St John’s College, Cambridge; Trinity Hall, Cambridge

University of Oxford 31, 48 coin collecting in 93 Unton, Henry 140 Venetian embassies 139, 141–​142 Venice 138, 141 (n. 92) vernacular see English, use of Vettori, Pietro 154 (n. 51) Vives, Juan Luis  Introductio ad sapientiam 193 Satellitium animi  193 Watson, Thomas 45, 46, 48, 63, 72, 76, 106, 115, 238, 243 wealth 196–​197 criticism of 35–​38, 197, 203 Werther family 151, 155, 161, 250–​253, 255, 256–​260 Wheatley, George 51, 60 Whitchurch, Edward 208–​210 Whitney, John 240–​241, 292 (n. 138) Whyte, Richard 304–​305 Wilson, K. J. 218 Wilson, Nicholas 42 Wilson, Thomas 4–​5, 119 (n. 76), 232–​233, 238–​239 Arte of Rhetorique 238–​242 Three Orations of Demosthenes 232 Vita et obitus duorum fratrum Suffolciensium  239–​240 Witzel, Georg  Postilla, haec est, Enarratio D. Georgii Wicelli 51 Wolf, Hieronymus 132 Wotton, Nicholas 226 Wriothesley, Thomas 23, 58, 210 Wygan, Edward 65 Yetswert, Nicasius 226 Yorkshire 62, 64, 211, 269–​271, 273, 294 Young, John 48, 50, 59 Young, Thomas 294 Zwinglianism 117–​118, 177–​178

355

Index

References to classical and patristic authors and works Entries marked with * in this section of the index refer to works owned by Ascham, as identified in Appendix 2 Classical Aeschines 134, 149, 290 Aeschylus 194, 195, 198, 200–​201, 225 Aesop 317 Agapetus 317 Antiphanes 194, 197, 198, 203, 207 Aristophanes 190, 212 *Eleven Comedies 302–​303 *Plutus  303 Aristotle 149, 150–​154, 192, 216, 222, 224, 229, 238, 289, 306 Ethics 189 Rhetoric 150, 259 *Works  303–​305 Aphthonius 317 Arrian 224 Bion of Borysthenes 192–​193 Caesar, Julius 225 Callimachus 225, 277 *Hymns 17, 191, 205, 300, 306–​307 Cassius Dio 87 Cato  Distichs  198–​199 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 3, 17 (n. 45), 149, 151–​155, 168, 189, 199, 215, 224, 229, 249 (n. 6), 259–​260, 277, 310 Ascham compared to 5, 149 De amicitia 240, 305–​306, 313 Brutus 254–​257 In Catilinam 308 as moral exemplar 236, 277 De officiis 216 De oratore 219–​220 De re publica 149 as stylistic model 66–​67, 69, 70, 112, 114, 116, 120–​121, 149–​150, 191, 217, 236, 254–​257, 261–​262 Claudian 225 Columella 225

Demosthenes 98, 112–​113, 134, 149, 152, 168, 216, 224, 232, 257, 261–​262, 277 (n. 47), 290–​291, 299, 310, 314 *Olynthiacs  111 (n. 41), 307–​308, 311, 319 *Philippics 308–​310 Diodorus 225 Diogenes Laertius  *Lives of the Philosophers 309–​310 Dionysius of Halicarnassus  *De Thucydidis historia iudicium  310–​311 Dioscorides  De materia medica  298 Euripides 105–​106, 194, 215–​216, 224, 238, 298–299, 306, 318 Aeolus  195 Alcestis 193 Bellerophon 196, 198, 199, 203 Hecuba 172 Hercules Furens 216–​217 Iphigenia at Aulis 195–​200 Galen 224, 305 (n. 25) Gorgias of Leontini  as stylistic model 191 Hermogenes 277, 298 *Rhetorical Treatises 304 (n. 23), 307, 311–​312, 318 Herodian 225 Herodotus 105–​106, 215–​216, 224, 277, 299, 310, 314, 319 Hesiod 225, 298, 309, 317 Hesychius 307 *Lexicon  312–​314 Hippocrates 225 Homer 105–​106, 192, 194, 215–​216, 224, 309, 316 Iliad  195–196, 198 Horace 263, 306 De arte poetica 238

356 Index Isocrates 151, 155, 168, 190, 199, 216, 224, 298–​299, 301–​302, 304, 312 Ascham’s lectures on 276–​277 *Orations and Letters 299, 301, 314–​315 as stylistic model 191 Livy 149, 151, 155, 168, 199, 225 Lucian 190, 217 Lysias 192 Menander 194, 197, 198, 201, 203, 207, 306 Nonnus of Panopolis  *Paraphrase of the Gospel of St John 315, 317 Nymphodorus 225 Ovid 225, 262, 277 Philo 299 Philostratus 317 Phocylides 317 Pliny the Elder 3, 225 Natural History 95 Plato 17 (n. 45), 113, 149, 152, 189 (n. 3), 190, 215–​216, 219, 220–​221, 224, 229, 250 (n. 10), 277 (n. 47), 298 Gorgias  259–​260, 298, 316 *Works  301, 310, 316–​317 Plutarch 85 (n. 16), 89, 117, 119–​120, 224 Pollux, Julius 224, 307, 308 Pomponius Mela 225 Procropius 225 Propertius 225 Pythagorus 309, 317

Quintilian 236–​237, 310 Quintus Curtius 225 Sallust 103, 225, 229 Seneca the Elder 263 Suasoriae 262 Seneca the Younger 3, 196, 198–​199, 225, 263, 277 Thyestes  263 Sophocles 105–​106, 155, 168, 215–​216, 224, 238 Antigone 299, 319 Philoctetes 74, 277 Stobaeus 17, 193, 197 Strabo 225 Tacitus 225 Terence 225 Theognis of Megara 192–​193, 317 Thucydides 216, 225, 307, 310–​311 *Anthology of his Speeches  311, 318 *History of the Peloponnesian War 200 (n. 53), 246, 299, 311, 317–​319 Timocles 194, 196, 198, 203 Vegetius 225 Virgil 225, 252–​253, 262 Aeneid  241 Xenophon 190, 216, 224, 277 (n. 47), 302, 306 Cynēgeticus  212 Cyropaedia  237, 306 Memorabilia  306 Peri Hippikēs  212

Patristic Ambrose  *De vocatione 157 (n. 66), 297, 302 Athanasius 75 Chrysostom, John 64–​65, 72, 74–75, 232, 298 Cyprian 155 Cyril of Alexandria 64–​65, 75, 306 Gregory of Naziansus 76, 80 Gregory of Nyssa 72, 74–​75, 299

Oecumenius, works attributed to 11, 62–​65, 74–​79, 81, 275, 277 St James, Liturgy of 78–​80 Synesius, 75 Theodoret of Cyrus 64–​65, 75