Machiavelli - The First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance (Oxford-Warburg Studies)

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Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy Sydney Anglo (Second edition) Giotto and the Orators Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350–1450 Michael Baxandall (Paperback) Joseph Scaliger A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship I Textual Criticism II Historical Chronology Anthony Grafton The Palazzo Vecchio 1298–1532 Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic Nicolai Rubinstein The Government of Florence under the Medici 1434–1494 Nicolai Rubinstein (Second edition) The Apocryphal Apocalypse The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment Alastair Hamilton Children of the Promise The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence 1427–1785 Lorenzo Polizzotto Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century A. D. Momigliano (Re-issued)

MACHIAVELLI–THE FIRST CENTURY Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance

SYDNEY ANGLO

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Sydney Anglo 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–926776–6

978–0–19–926776–7

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PREFACE Prefaces are very difficult to write and, like many authors, I tend to leave their composition until the last possible moment. I always hope, in vain, that inspiration will strike and that I shall be able to give some novel twist to what is customarily a dry recital of all the people who have in any way contributed to a work but who are in no way responsible for its shortcomings. Of course, I should greatly prefer to be able to blame my shortcomings upon others but, although this book has been decades in the making, on the whole I have worked by myself, in my own way, and at my own tempo. There are thus only a few individuals I should like to mention: but they have, in various ways, been important to me. One particular debt is to the late Nicolai Rubinstein who, over many years, never failed to stir my conscience at the tardy progress of this book and never failed to encourage me to bestir myself. I bitterly regret that he did not live to see the finished work, but hope that his many surviving friends and pupils will not think it unworthy of his memory. Another debt which I am anxious to record is to a far less famous scholar who died over seventy-five years ago. This was John Wesley Horrocks (1877–1930), whose unpublished thesis, ‘Machiavelli in Tudor Political Opinion and Discussion’ (1908), has been ransacked by generations of scholars—but only occasionally with due acknowledgement. After the Great War, Horrocks became a lecturer at Southampton College, where he remained until his early death at the age of 52, having published a volume in the Southampton Records Society, some papers on the voyage of the Mayflower, and a history of mercantilism. I do not know why he never revised and published his Machiavellian researches, but it was his thesis which first encouraged me to pursue Machiavelli’s fortunes and, although my own studies have gone in many directions not considered by Horrocks, I still regard his work with admiration and even affection. Now rather tattered, eccentrically typed on a variety of papers in different coloured and sometimes fading inks, the thesis is

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remarkable as a pioneering study of a vast range of English primary sources in their historical context. I am grateful to my brother Andrew who, aided and abetted by his wife Avril, followed up one especially tricky line of enquiry and saved me a good deal of time and energy. Two old friends have been very helpful over a long period: Rhys Robinson, who has a wonderful knack of finding unexpected historical items in unexpected places; and Cecil Clough, whose extraordinary command of Italian sources has often amazed (and sometimes dismayed) me. My greatest debt, though, is one which I hesitate to acknowledge— not because it is anything less than enormous, but because the debtor is my wife, Professor Margaret McGowan, who, like me, greatly dislikes fulsome, sentimental, personal tributes, and cringes when encountering them in other people’s books. For decades now we have scrupulously refrained from mentioning each other in our prefaces, but her help—turning up countless succulent references in obscure places, reading every version of every chapter of this book, commenting on and criticizing them bluntly and always to the point—has been so immense that I could not possibly feel at ease with myself if I did not record it with my thanks. And so I do. S.A.

CONTENTS Abbreviations

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Introduction: Problems Regarding Method

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part i. early readership 1. The Earliest Readers of Machiavelli: Miscellaneous and Military

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2. Creative Plagiarism: Agostino Nifo’s De regnandi peritia

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3. Early Readers of Machiavelli: Comment and Discourse

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4. A Hostile Cardinal: Reginald Pole and his Apologia

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5. Osorio and Machiavelli: From Open Hostility to Covert Approbation

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6. Machiavelli and the Index of Prohibited Books

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7. Machiavelli’s Keenest Readers: The Early Translators

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part ii. the rhetoric of hate 8. In Praise of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

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9. Innocent Gentillet and Machiavelli’s ‘Maximes tyranniques’

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10. In the Wake of Gentillet: Evolution of the ‘Machiavel’ Stereotype in France and England

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11. More Machiavellian than Machiavel: The Jesuits and the Context of Donne’s Conclave

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part iii. adaptation, attack, defence 12. Gentillet’s Final Assault: The ‘Contre-Machiavel’ of 1585

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13. From Sublime to Ridiculous: Some Serious Readers of Machiavelli

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14. Writers on the Art of War

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part iv. machiavelli and non-machiavelli 15. Paradoxes on the Reception of Machiavelli’s Military Thinking

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16. Systematic Immorality: The Courtier’s Art

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17. Systematic Fragmentation: The Vogue of the Political Aphorism

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Epilogue

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Bibliography Index

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ABBREVIATIONS Anglo (1969) Bertelli and Innocenti

BL BNF Bozza Cal. S.P. Foreign

Cal. S.P. Ireland Cal. S.P. Scotland

Cockle Contre-Machiavel (1576)

Contre-Machiavel (1602)

D’Andrea and Stewart

DBI DNB

Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli: A Dissection (1969) Sergio Bertelli and Piero Innocenti, Bibliografia Machiavelliana (Verona, 1979) British Library Bibliothe`que Nationale de France Tommaso Bozza, Scrittori politici italiani dal 1550 al 1650 (Rome, 1949) Calendar of State Papers, Foreign, Edward VI and Mary, ed. W. B. Turnbull (1861) Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, ed. H. C. Hamilton (1860–90) Calendar of State Papers Relating to Scotland, ed. J. Bain, W. K. Boyd, et al. (Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1898–1952) Maurice J. D. Cockle, A Bibliography of Military Books up to 1642 (1900) Innocent Gentillet, Discours . . . contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin (Geneva, 1576) Innocent Gentillet, A Discourse . . . Against Nicholas Machiavell the Florentine, trans. S. Patericke (1602) Innocent Gentillet, Discours contre Machiavel: A New Edition of the Original French Text, ed. A. D’Andrea and Pamela Stewart (Florence, 1974) Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome, 1960– ) Dictionary of National Biography, ed. L. Stephen and S. Lee (1885–1900)

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Fourquevaux

Raymond de Beccarie, Sieur de Fourquevaux, Instructions sur le faict de la guerre (Paris, 1548) E´mile Gasquet, Le Courant Machiave´lien dans la pense´e et la litte´rature anglaises du XVI sie`cle (Montreal, Paris, and Brussels, 1974) Adolf Gerber, Niccolo` Machiavelli: Die ¨ bersetzungen Handschriften, Ausgaben und U seiner Werke im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Gotha and Munich, 1912–13) John Wesley Horrocks, ‘Machiavelli in Tudor Political Opinion and Discussion’ (D.Litt. thesis, University of London, 1908) Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, R. H. Brodie, and J. Gairdner (1862–1932) Rodolfo de Mattei, Dal premachiavellismo all’antimachiavellismo (Florence, 1969) Tutte le opere . . . di Niccolo` Machiavelli, ed. Guido Mazzoni and Mario Casella (Florence, 1929) Public Record Office Giuliano Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna del Machiavelli (Rome, 1965) A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland. And of English Books Printed Abroad, rev. edn. by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and K. F. Pantzer (1986–91)

Gasquet (1974)

Gerber

Horrocks (1908)

LP

Mattei (1969) Mazzoni and Casella

PRO Procacci (1965) STC

Introduction: Problems Regarding Method In his book Great Pianists of Our Time, the German critic Joachim Kaiser refers to a certain kind of ‘trifling’ piano playing where performers ‘by arbitrarily accentuating particular notes in a richlyscored passage suddenly spell out quite new melodies, because wherever there are a hundred notes, it is naturally possible to pick out ‘‘baa-baa-black sheep’’ or a national anthem’.1 This arbitrariness is, I feel, analogous to certain kinds of writing about the history of ideas: especially when it concerns the ways in which a particular thinker was read, interpreted, and absorbed by later generations; or when it tries to establish such relative matters as influence and significance. It is all too easy to select, from the cyclopean mass of documentary evidence available to an assiduous searcher, numerous fragments which may be stuck together to make an imposing show both of completeness and of central importance. Yet often both the completeness and the centrality are as unconvincing as an emphasis on the notes of ‘baa-baa-black sheep’ would be in the midst of a Chopin Scherzo. When trying to make sense of the ways in which Machiavelli was read in the century following the first publication of his works, I have been deeply conscious of this danger, and of several other methodological difficulties which will be described in the course of this introduction. I have also been increasingly aware of the fact that intellectual abstractions (such as civic humanism, republicanism, rhetoric, and an arcana politica) which are commonly regarded as essential elements in the reception of Machiavelli, seem scarcely 1 Joachim Kaiser, Great Pianists of Our Time (1971), 90.

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to have mattered to the majority of the wide range of authors whose works I have trawled. It is as though, like C. P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’, there co-exist two wholly different kinds of intellectual history: immaculately organized expositions of the elevated ideas of Renaissance academics and philosophers by their modern counterparts; and an untidy, pragmatic, and almost entirely secular jumble of notions in which abstractions count for very little—if not for nothing. It is the latter which, I feel, corresponds more closely to the ways in which sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century people read Machiavelli or, just as important, the ways in which they pondered what are now categorized as Machiavellian topics, but without reading him. This book is an exercise in writing about the history of ideas, which tries to remain faithful to the surviving records relating to the first century of Machiavelli’s availability to a reading public. In the last analysis, my main concern is not with a single author and the reception of his work, but rather with some of the principal secular preoccupations of Renaissance Europe. Because Machiavelli’s themes were important to his own and to subsequent ages, and because he wrote in a manner which excited interest, anger, revulsion, or admiration, it is possible—by pursuing some of the ways in which his works were read or ignored within differing contexts—to illustrate how a wide range of people thought about these matters. For those to whom Machiavelli is a culture hero, it may seem improper to use him merely as a means of approaching the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. To others less given to Machiavelatry, and more concerned with the history of ideas, the method followed in this book may prove suggestive.

some g ener a l d iffic u l t ies Between 1513 and 1525 Niccolo` Machiavelli wrote a series of works dealing with political, military, and historical matters. One of these, the Arte della guerra, was published in 1521: but the rest of his major writings (Il Principe, I Discorsi, and the Istorie fiorentine), together with a number of lesser works, were not published until 1531–2, that is nearly five years after his death. That people were

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keen to purchase these books is clear, because several publishers found it worthwhile to reissue them with a frequency altogether unusual in the sixteenth century; and, while it is true that this traffic in Machiavelli waned somewhat in the latter half of the century, his works continued to be reissued regularly well into the early seventeenth century and far beyond the period with which this book is concerned. Not everybody who buys a book necessarily reads it: but there is irrefutable evidence that Machiavelli was being read because his works were, from time to time, cited with an accuracy only possible for those with first-hand knowledge. Moreover, he received considerable attention from enthusiastic translators into French, English, Spanish, and Latin; and it is difficult to translate an admired book without reading it thoroughly. It is evident that other people, too, had heard of these books because they alluded to them. And there were yet others who did not know the books at all, but had heard of their author, to whom they referred, generally with disapprobation. His name eventually became even better known than his writings, and this process was formalized when, in 1611, Randle Cotgrave defined the French word Machiavelisme as ‘subtle policie, cunning roguerie’. Machiavelli had entered the French and English languages (and the Spanish and German, too) and his subsequent career could, and frequently did, proceed quite independently of the books he had written. The number of editions and translations of Machiavelli’s books, the considerable range of interests shown by those who referred to them, the different contexts within which such references were made, and the fact that the author’s name not only entered the vocabulary of every European language but has also remained current to the present day—all make it worthwhile to enquire further into the nature of his reception. Unfortunately, this enquiry is not at all straightforward, and methodological difficulties arise the moment that any attempt is made to reduce the sources to order. For not only was there no single reception in Europe, there were not even separate receptions which can intelligently be considered within the confines of a single country. The problem is a common one in the history of ideas. An interesting subject of study undoubtedly exists—inasmuch as Machiavelli’s books were

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purchased, read, discussed, and commented upon—but the materials with which the historian has to work are disparate, confused, and even messy. They constitute nothing more than a large number of individual, and mostly discrete, responses ranging in magnitude from one-word insults to full-length treatises. The more one reads the clearer it becomes that there were no characteristically regional reactions to Machiavelli; that similar people reacted differently to him at different times; that they were frequently influenced more by the emotional context within which they encountered him than by anything intrinsic to his work; and that their views were sometimes influenced by the observations of other writers who were often not even their fellow countrymen. Such material can be rendered as a historical narrative only by doing it grave violence. To create, from the surviving records of Machiavelli’s Renaissance readers, an English face, a French profile, or even an Italian countenance, is merely an academic game. This is not a subject such as the administrative history of some government department, or a man’s life, or a war, or a monarch’s reign. There is no more or less continuous, more or less finite, series of records from which a coherent account may legitimately be constructed. Nor is there any single class of writing upon which the historian may concentrate, for Machiavelli wrote about a wide variety of issues: politics, war, ancient and modern history, morality, and religion. His readers were as diverse as his subject matter, and their uneven remains lie scattered about geographically, chronologically, and thematically. Careful scrutiny of such relics can reveal what may reasonably be described as ideas; and these ideas must have had a history. But it cannot be told as a simple, self-contained narrative; and, even where that approach may seem possible, the story can be extended only a little way before connections become blurred and irrelation sets in. With regard to the reception of Machiavelli, many modern treatments go astray in a variety of ways. Too much critical weight is imposed upon too limited, too select, and too disparate a body of evidence. Frequently connections are implied (by the simple process of juxtaposition) between materials which are not, in fact, related. Often there is an attempt to construct a finished picture from evidence which is, at best, fragmentary and which, however

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much it may be augmented by further research, must always remain so—rather like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle with many of the pieces missing and with no notion of what the completed image should look like. Unsatisfactory, too, is the method whereby scholars, confronted by the demands of a broad temporal span and a large number of texts, tend to reduce the art of pre´cis almost to absurdity: rendering down long and complex books to a few paragraphs. They offer what are said to be the principal themes and arguments, with little regard to language, imagery, and mental idiosyncracies. Intellectual history at this level is akin to literary history based primarily on plot summaries. Furthermore, many general studies of the reception of Machiavelli severely (and, in my view, arbitrarily) limit the fields within which they are prepared to seek their material so that, while attention is always devoted to conventional intellectual contexts involving philosophy and political thought, other contexts—such as military thinking or the literature of selfadvancement—are largely ignored. Few of these studies (Procacci and de Mattei excepted) suggest that Machiavelli’s abiding interest in the art of war was, in fact, the area in which serious readers throughout the sixteenth century most frequently cited him.2 Reluctance to accept that the history of Machiavelli’s reception, like the study of Machiavelli himself, is inadequate if divorced from military matters is bad enough: but worse still is failure to heed the emotional contexts within which Machiavelli was read and commented upon. There are certain important texts which cannot be understood without a close examination of the anger and hatred which engendered them. The results of all this may be seen in neatly organized monographs where neutered Renaissance readers of Machiavelli concern themselves with classical antecedents, political abstractions, legal theory, and—that comprehensive resource of the culture historian— rhetoric. We scarcely ever hear about the violence, pragmatism, irrationality, and stupidity which were as all-pervasive in the sixteenth century as they are in our own age, and just as intimately 2 Giuliano Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna del Machiavelli (Rome, 1965); Rodolfo de Mattei, Dal premachiavellismo all’antimachiavellismo (Florence, 1969).

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related to people’s thinking. We never hear the furious shouts of polemicists, the crash of battle, the shrieks of the massacred. The reception of Machiavelli takes place in an orderly world of books and of learned, if sometimes earnest, debate. Academic and sanitized, this kind of thing is the history of ideas without blood and guts. It never conveys the flavour of Machiavelli’s Europe; it systematizes the unsystematic; and it tidies up the irredeemably messy.

some specific examples All historians are subject to the vagaries of the survival or loss of evidence: but the historian of ideas is especially vulnerable. The problem may be illustrated by a specific statistical comparison. A scholar wishing, for example, to reconstruct the reign of Henry VIII can deploy (at a minimum estimate) more than 50,000 state papers, foreign and domestic; a mass of surviving personal and official correspondence; an incalculable quantity of local records; several hundred literary sources; and an array of architectural and pictorial evidence. But what of the historian of the reception of Machiavelli? Even if attention is confined to the earliest phase of that subject, one is faced with some curious facts and figures. Between the second edition of the Arte della guerra in 1529 and the placing of all Machiavelli’s writings on the papal Index of Prohibited Books in 1559, there were at least twelve further editions of the Arte della guerra, twenty-six of the Discorsi, seventeen of Il Principe, and fifteen of the Istorie fiorentine. In other words, there were some seventy-one separate issues of these books: a remarkable achievement by a secular author within a thirty-year span. Yet for that same period (even extending it back into Machiavelli’s own lifetime to take account of the early manuscript circulation of his writings) there is first-hand evidence for barely fifty readers of his works throughout Europe—and these include translators and plagiarists as well as those whose reading of Machiavelli is attested merely by some passing reference. Thus, for a period of more than thirty years, there is not even an average of one reader per Machiavellian edition. That the books were purchased and

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perused by more than this tiny group is a likely presumption: but, however imposing the materials left by these fifty readers may seem when heaped up together (especially when quoted, paraphrased, transmuted into the base metal of modern academic jargon, and augmented by largely irrelevant biographical information), they remain exiguous and disconnected. The difficulty may be illustrated in another way by posing a riddle. What do the following have in common: a Neapolitan Aristotelian; a Venetian historian; a Florentine administrator; a Pavian medical practitioner; a Parisian alchemist; a noble French soldier; a common English soldier; an English Protestant propagandist; an English educationist; a Welsh gambler, embezzler, and anti-Spanish conspirator; an English Catholic who admired Bishop Gardiner, supported the Spanish marriage, and advised Philip of Spain on how to govern England; a Catholic cardinal who became Archbishop of Canterbury; and a Holy Roman Emperor? The answer, of course, is that they are all among the select few whose early readership of Machiavelli is attested. Yet that common factor is wholly accidental. It only becomes essential within the context of what is, after all, a contrived enquiry. Some of these men are well known to historians on their own merits; but others survive solely because of their fortuitous reading of one famous author. By grouping together such people, the historian of ideas creates a link which, in itself, has little more intellectual significance than the discovery, say, that all of them may have been left-handed—and certainly less than would be the discovery that they had read several other authors in common. When the enquiry is pursued into the early seventeenth century, there is a far greater mass of evidence and the number of Machiavellian references greatly exceeds the number of Machiavelli editions. But they are still mostly discrete and nowhere suggest that there was ever a school or group of Machiavellians. There is more cohesiveness about anti-Machiavellians: but that is because many of them borrowed from each other and, with only a couple of exceptions, rehearsed the same arguments. Further difficulties arise when we enter those ill-lit intellectual areas where critics go about their trade of allotting ‘significance’ and determining ‘influence’. The attitude of historians, when confronted by the magical name of Machiavelli or by some

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recognizable fragment of his work, is often on approximately the same level of sophistication as the modish Citation Indexes. It is not illuminating to find Machiavelli’s name, or a few isolated phrases from his oeuvre, mentioned without evidence of knowledge or understanding. That citations occur in sixteenth-century texts does not automatically guarantee their worth. A majority of Machiavellian references are mere cant usages of his name to indicate disapproval and, individually, their intellectual content is negligible. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that, en masse, they have a contextual importance, providing a general background of hostility which might conceivably have affected anyone who did study the works of the man behind the term of abuse. Certainly, they should not be ignored: though how much weight they should be allowed is difficult to determine. There is yet another unpalatable fact to be considered. For the most part, the serious reception of Machiavelli (and, in conjunction with this, the serious ‘influence’ of his work) is, in the main, not the record of great minds and famous men. Much is hidden away in the lucubrations of obscure people whose writings either had only a fitful impact or none at all. Who, apart from specialists, is familiar with Atanagi, Cadamosto, Bombini, Garimberto, Girardi, Vintimille, Charrier, Otevanti, or Diego de Salazar? On the other hand, there were some really big names in intellectual history—Bodin, Montaigne, and Bacon, for instance—whose knowledge of Machiavelli is indisputable and whose observations show keen awareness of the implications of what they read. Inevitably, articles and books explicate Bodin and Machiavelli, Montaigne and Machiavelli, Bacon and Machiavelli: but it is not clear why the interest of such men in Machiavelli should be deemed remarkable since they all read hundreds of other authors, absorbed them, and used them for their own purposes. What has yet to be demonstrated is that the thinking of any one of these major figures would have been significantly different without Machiavelli, or that it was shaped by a reading of Machiavelli. As I have already suggested, there is something amiss with the technique of picking, from the crowded pages of such writers, only the scattered passages with a Machiavellian resonance, cementing them together, and then presenting the result as proof of ‘influence’.

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The selection of isolated scraps from a writer’s total oeuvre, in order to suggest a disproportionate (though not necessarily fictive) Machiavellian significance, is related to another fallacy whereby allusions to Machiavelli in a specific group of writings are picked out and accumulated. A prime example of this may be seen in studies of the polemic which spewed forth during the French civil wars in the closing decades of the sixteenth century. Some scholars have argued (correctly) that Machiavelli loomed increasingly large in people’s minds after the St Bartholomew massacres of 1572. They have, however, further argued (wrongly) that this was eventually consummated in a tremendous explosion of antiMachiavellism after the assassinations of the Guises and of Henri III in 1588–9. These views are based, first upon the publication of Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel and its undoubted popularity; and secondly, and more specifically, upon an analysis of some thirty pamphlets, issued between the assassinations and the end of the sixteenth century, in which Machiavelli’s name occurs. The argument has been widely accepted: but what has not been allowed for is the fact that between the years 1588 and 1599 there were published, in France alone, well over a thousand pamphlets. This polemical mass constitutes the context within which those references to Machiavelli must be set; and, within that context, his stature dwindles to something much smaller than has conventionally been estimated. References need to be evaluated one against another. Employing a man’s name as a term of abuse cannot be equated with serious discussion based upon first-hand knowledge of his writings; and even an informed passage, set within the context of a broader discussion of several other texts, is something very different from a work shaped primarily by reading a single author. If these criteria are applied to the mighty agglomeration of French polemic, it becomes apparent that only a few texts amount to serious comment on (or use of ) Machiavelli’s works. Thirty references in thirty pamphlets would be very impressive indeed. Thirty references in more than a thousand is considerably less so.3 3 This kind of distortive technique—leafing through the indexes of books in order to locate just those references which suit one’s purpose, while ignoring all others; collecting names of fine appearance, ‘sans regarder si c’est a` propos ou non’—was already being ridiculed by Franc¸ois Portes in 1574. See below, Ch. 8.

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The habit of concentrating only on those references which fit some preconceived pattern while ignoring all those which do not, brings me to what is, perhaps, the most knotty problem facing the historian of ideas. Without exception, studies of Machiavelli’s reception have ignored pregnant silences. It would be an instructive though wearisome task to compile a checklist of all those works (histories and controversies both political and religious, defences of the utility of Christian polity, attacks on atheism, recommendations of chicanery and worldly wisdom, treatises on the art of war, and treatments of Roman history) which might reasonably be expected to have included some reference to, or at least some echo of, Machiavelli—but which did not. What is to be done when, instead of a banquet of succulent Machiavelliana, there is little or no evidence for his presence? Or, to put it another way, what is to be done when there is a plethora of material which, though relevant thematically, does not suit the historian’s particular purpose? The usual method adopted in such cases is to ignore the embarrassing or ill-fitting topics, and to stress just those areas where Machiavelli’s presence is readily documented: a procedure which inevitably inflates the importance of the subject. Silence is a vital element in the history of ideas. It is analogous to musical interpretation which depends not only upon the accurate execution of printed notes but also on imaginative handling of the spaces between them. Fully to appreciate Machiavelli’s place in the first century of his reception, we need to understand why he is sometimes not where we think he ought to be.

strategies The tasks I have set myself in this book have been to find ways to articulate some of the awkward silences and to say things which may help towards an understanding of sixteenth-century attitudes towards Machiavelli’s work, but without inadvertently creating some spurious historical entity. My attempted solution is to combine a variety of approaches—textual, contextual, chronological, and thematic—in order to illustrate the limitations as well as the

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range of Machiavelli’s impact during the first century of the availability of his work to a reading public. I examine, therefore, a variety of contexts: some within which his books had a demonstrable though irregular relevance, such as military thinking or political morality; others, such as the polemic after the St Bartholomew massacres, where Machiavelli’s relevance is less than, or different from, that which has customarily been assumed; and yet others, such as the literature of self-seeking or hard-edged political aphorisms, which have been deemed especially Machiavellian but which, on closer scrutiny, prove not to have been so. I give detailed attention to a number of authors (such as Nifo, Pole, Osorio, and Gentillet) who are familiar but who seem to me to have been misinterpreted or inadequately commented upon; while equally I draw attention to other writers (like Beacon, Vigene`re, Cinuzzi, Baccellini, and Pichi) who are less familiar but who afford valuable insights into the ways in which Machiavelli’s work was read. I have also tried, in some chapters, to collect together material according to the seriousness with which the writers concerned actually studied Machiavelli, regardless of whether or not they fall within the conventional canon of ‘greatness’, and regardless (though not invariably) of issues of nationality. The history of ideas is not a very neat subject: and this is, accordingly, not a very neat book. It does, none the less, have as rational a structure as I could give it. In the first three parts, the contexts and topics are arranged in a roughly chronological order. The final section deals with themes which span the entire period under consideration, although much of the material used relates to the seventeenth century. Part I, ‘Early Readership’, consists of seven chapters dealing with the following: military writers; Agostino Nifo and his plagiarist, Lucio Paolo Rosello; some knowledgeable readers of Machiavelli such as Guicciardini, Lazarus von Schwendi, William Thomas, and George Rainsford; the hostility of Cardinal Pole; the comparable hostility of Bishop Osorio, who did, however, change his mind about Machiavelli; the papal Index of Prohibited Books and its limited significance; and finally Machiavelli’s translators, who were his keenest and most influential students. Part II, ‘The Rhetoric of Hate’, is introduced by a study of the polemic spawned by the St Bartholomew massacres

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and followed by three further chapters: on Gentillet’s ContreMachiavel; on the aftermath of this publication, together with the evolution of the Machiavel stereotype; and on the identification of Machiavellism with the Jesuits, especially as satirized by John Donne. Part III, ‘Adaptation, Attack, Defence’, is concerned with writers (both favourable and hostile) whose work takes Machiavelli seriously—though without necessarily revealing a comprehensive knowledge of his original texts. This section comprises three chapters. The first examines Gentillet’s revised Contre-Machiavel of 1585; and the second gathers together a number of readers, both enthusiastic and hostile, who knew Machiavelli’s works at first hand—including the oddities Barnaby Barnes and Gabriel Harvey, the analytical critic David Hume of Godscroft, and Richard Beacon, the brutal realist. The final chapter of this section discusses military thinkers and observers (Baccellini, Tarducci, Cinuzzi, and Vigene`re). Part IV, ‘Machiavelli and NonMachiavelli’, has three chapters each concerned with a context where Machiavelli’s relevance might be anticipated but where expectations are not fully realized. The first of these deals with paradoxes on the art of war, that is the way in which Machiavelli was reduced to a series of debating topics; the second with systematic immorality in the literature devoted to achieving success at court; and the last with the systematic fragmentation of political thought induced by an obsession with aphorisms. All these chapters are intended to be read as a series of overlapping views so that, sometimes, where several are superimposed, the picture becomes denser but more confused; while elsewhere, where the material is isolated, it is clearer in definition. It might be felt that on occasions—such as the chapter devoted to the St Bartholomew massacre—the contextual information is out of proportion to its Machiavellian content. But this is deliberate. I believe that summaries of abstract ideas convey nothing essential to readers unacquainted with the literature at first hand. In a battle of words, the words themselves and the tone in which they are used are at least as important as their arguments.4 4 Similarly, it may be thought that I have devoted excessive space to Agostino Nifo: but his De regnandi peritia is so complex, and has been so consistently

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Finally, given the intentional anti-orderly nature of this book, I feel that it would have been inappropriate to fabricate a ‘conclusion’ summarizing the biography of all the leading ideas—like a nineteenth-century novel rounding itself off by narrating the subsequent fate of its leading characters. Instead, I have chosen to pursue both the obsession with aphorisms and the first century of Machiavelli’s reception to their logical (if improbable) confluence. My Epilogue, therefore, deals with a version of Il Principe, rewritten in alphabetical order and published with the approval of the Inquisitor General of Florence. This is perhaps the most bizarre book in the history of Machiavelliana and a fitting end to a complex and paradoxical enquiry. In a book of this kind it is inevitable not only that primary sources will be in a variety of languages—particularly French, Italian, and Latin—but also that many of them must be cited frequently and sometimes at length. It is, however, no longer the practice simply to quote original texts and leave them to speak for themselves: but the demand for translation poses problems both of length and consistency; and, although by instinct and training, I should have preferred to provide readers with everything in full, I have instead followed the path of what I feel to be common sense. Thus I sometimes give lengthy passages from texts which seem especially important or typical, and explicate these with translations and paraphrases. At other times I offer the translations and paraphrases but draw attention only to particularly revealing words or phrases from the original sources. My aim has been to achieve both readability and comprehensibility, while retaining as much as possible of the original flavour of texts. In pursuance of that last aim, I have used—whenever possible, and when they are good enough— English translations contemporary with the Continental texts; and I have retained the original orthography for all primary sources because I feel that modern-spelling versions lose vastly more in quality than they gain in legibility. misrepresented, that a detailed analysis seems the only way both to show what the work is about and to establish its proper place in the history of Machiavelli’s reception.

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PART I

Early Readership

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1 The Earliest Readers of Machiavelli: Miscellaneous and Military ‘This poison is spread through the courts of princes in this man’s books which are circulating almost everywhere.’ That was how Reginald Pole, addressing the Emperor Charles V about the year 1539, referred to the spread of Machiavelli’s doctrines.1 A couple of years later, the Portuguese cleric Jeronimo Osorio was at pains to refute Machiavelli’s views on Christianity because he perceived that the number of those who, ‘either stirred uppe by his writings or of their voluntary motions, were partakers of his wickedness and fury, [which] were far and wide dispersed’.2 Machiavelli’s toxic qualities, wickedness, and fury remain matters of debate and doubt: but there is no gainsaying the rapid circulation of his writings, noted by these two early critics. Editions of his four principal books poured from the presses of Italy so that by the time Pole was writing there were already twenty-two different printings available; and, in the short period which then elapsed before Osorio’s attack was published, a further twelve Machiavelli editions had appeared. This extraordinary spate continued for more than a decade, with another twenty-six Italian editions augmented by two Spanish and five French translations up to 1555. And then something remarkable occurred. In 1556 there were Florentine editions of the Clizia and Mandragola, but then— even prior to the notorious Index of Prohibited Books which has 1 Apologia Reginaldi Poli ad Carolum V. Caesarem super quatuor libris a se scriptis de unitate ecclesiae, in Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli S.R.E. Cardinalis et aliorum ad ipsum collectio, ed. A. M. Quirini (Brescia, 1744–57), i. 137. 2 Jeronimo Osorio, De nobilitate christiana (Lisbon, 1542); trans. W. Blandie, The five bookes . . . of civill and christian nobilitie (1576), fo. 102.

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always been regarded as a watershed in the history of ideas— publication of Machiavelli ceased in Italy and did not resume until 1630, and then only in an expurgated version. Moreover, apart from a few translations between 1559 and 1563, there were no further editions of Machiavelli’s major works until 1571, which ushered in another period of publishing activity.3 This chronological distribution of Machiavelli editions is reinforced by another striking fact. As I have already indicated, there are about fifty overt or covert references to Machiavelli’s work up to 1560, most of which either reveal or at least suggest first-hand knowledge of the original texts. However, in the following fifteen years, although references continue, several now carry the hallmark of mere hearsay, and Machiavelli’s name begins to part company from the author’s original work and to assume a life of its own as a term of opprobrium. There is thus, I believe, a period which may reasonably be defined as the early reception of Machiavelli. Unfortunately, describing this early reception is much more difficult than defining it because much of the surviving evidence is inconclusive, fragmentary, or unconnected.

scraps a nd morse ls Charles V may not have been a sympathetic recipient of Pole’s diatribe. The Emperor, according to the Venetian Francesco Sansovino, had no high opinion of letters and delighted in only three books, which he caused to be translated into his own tongue: ‘one for instruction in civil life, and this was Il Cortegiano of Count Baldasar de Castiglione, the other for affairs of state, and this was Il Principe with the Discorsi of Machiavelli, and the third for the rules of warfare and this was the History with all the other things by 3 The translations referred to are as follows: in French, Les discours (1559) and Le Prince (1563); in Latin, De Principe (1560); and in English, The Arte of Warre in 1560. The outline of this publishing history is best studied in Sergio Bertelli and Piero Innocenti, Bibiografia machiavelliana (Verona, 1979); although Adolf ¨ bersetzung seiner Gerber, Niccolo` Machiavelli: Die Handschriften, Ausgaben und U Werke im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1912–13) provides much more detail on specific editions.

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Polybius’. If this statement were correct then the mighty Habsburg would have to be regarded as the most distinguished of Machiavelli’s early readers: though, as Sansovino points out, the Emperor took far greater pleasure in arms which he regarded as the ‘true foundation of kingdoms’. Sansovino’s testimony receives partial corroboration from the fact that the Emperor himself claims to have read and approved of the Discorsi and may well have been involved in initiating the Spanish translation of 1552: but sadly there is no evidence which would enable us to pursue further the extent of Charles’s knowledge of Machiavelli.4 Nor can we penetrate behind the fact that a copy of Gohory’s 1544 translation of the first book of the Discorsi—though in the royal binding of Franc¸ois Ier—was, nevertheless, presented by the translator not to the King but to Anne de Montmorency, Constable of France.5 And we know nothing about the Machiavellian knowledge of Franc¸ois’s son, Henri II, beyond the fact that he purchased a copy of Charrier’s 1546 translation of the Arte della guerra.6 Amongst the various scraps and morsels which constitute so much of the surviving evidence for Machiavelli’s early reception, those indicating ownership of a Machiavellian text are perhaps the least satisfactory. Possession of a book, while suggesting some kind of interest, implies neither knowledge nor opinion. There were others, besides Henri II and Anne de Montmorency, who owned Machiavelli editions. Jean Grolier, Treasurer of France, had copies of the 1540 Aldine Arte della guerra, Il Principe, and the Istorie fiorentine bound for him, but whether or not he ever peeked between the 4 Francesco Sansovino, Il simolacro di Carlo quinto imperadore (Venice, 1567), fo. 21: ‘Pero` si dilettava di leggere tre libri solamente liquali esso haveva fatto tradurre in lingua sua propria. L’uno per l’institutione della vita civile, e questo fu il Cortegiano del Conte Baldasar da Castiglione, l’altro per le cose di stato, e questo fu il Principe con Discorsi del Machiavello, e il terzo per gli ordini della militia, e questo fu la Historia con tutte le altre cose di Polibio.’ On the Spanish translation of the Discorsi, see below, Ch. 7 n. 32. 5 Le´opold Delisle, Chantilly: Le Cabinet des Livres. Imprime´s ante´rieurs au milieu du XVIe sie`cle (Paris, 1905), no. 1148. Delisle describes the royal binding but notes that the fact that Gohory offered his work to Montmorency is attested by ‘une de´dicace autographe soigneusement e´crite en regard du titre’. 6 Bibliothe`que Nationale de France, Re´serve, R.523. See Ernest QuentinBauchart, La Bibliothe`que de Fontainebleau et les livres des derniers Valois a` la Bibliothe`que Nationale (1515–1569) (Paris, 1891), no. 190.

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sumptuous covers remains a mystery.7 The same may be said of Claude Gouffier, Duke of Roannez, who had a copy of the 1540 Aldine Discorsi bound for him;8 of Pierre Basilhe and Jean Chauderon, who both owned copies of Il Principe; and of Antoine Du Prat, ‘pre´voˆt de Paris’, who owned one of the Venetian editions of the Istorie fiorentine, the 1548 Gohory translation of the Discorsi, and one of the two French translations of Il Principe published in 1553.9 Enigmas all: though less so than William Cecil, subsequently Lord Burleigh, for whom Sir William Pickering, English ambassador in France, procured several books including a Euclid and a ‘discourse’ of Machiavelli. Unhappily these two were ‘so buggerly bound’ that they were fit only for the bonfire; and the young Cecil can only be classified as almost-an-owner of a Machiavelli edition; while Pickering’s knowledge of the text cannot even be guessed at.10 On the other hand, Nicolas d’Herberay, Seigneur des Essarts, ‘commissaire ordinaire d’artillerie’, whose ownership of the Discorsi is recorded under the date 27 October 1552, cared sufficiently about Machiavelli to write a liminary poem for Gohory’s translation of that text.11 In England, William Lambard, later to become the acknowledged authority on Justices of the Peace, inscribed his name twice in a copy of Cappel’s French translation of Il Principe: once in 1560, and again in 1562, when he added a Greek inscription 7 For Grolier’s Arte della guerra, see Delisle, Chantilly, no. 1147. His Il Principe and Istorie fiorentine are in the British Library (press marks C.27.d.2 and C.27.d.3 respectively). 8 Delisle, Chantilly, no. 1145. 9 A. H. Schutz, Vernacular Books in Parisian Private Libraries of the Sixteenth Century According to the Notarial Inventories (Chapel Hill, NC, 1955), 55–6. 10 This episode took place in 1551 and it is a salutary reminder that one should not make too much of an isolated instance. It is obvious that the Machiavelli text was not thought to be of any special significance, and that the mere accident of ‘buggerly’ binding meant that it was not considered to be worth saving. See Cal. S.P. Foreign, Edward VI, 516, 520, 522. A manuscript, Certayne selected chapters translated oute of Nicholas Machiavell his 3 bookes of dyscourses upon the firste decade of Livie, survives at Hatfield House (Hatfield MS 273–3). But it is not known whether this was acquired by Sir William Cecil or his sons. See E´mile Gasquet, ‘Machiavelli’s Discourses: A Forgotten English Translation’, Notes and Queries, ns 5/4 (Apr. 1958), 144–5. 11 For d’Herberay, see Schutz, Vernacular Books; also see below, p. 597.

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to the effect that one should look before leaping.12 Even more politically pregnant was the inscription written by Edward Unton in his copy of Machiavelli’s Istorie fiorentine (Venice, 1537): ‘Machiavelli Maxima / Qui nescit dissimulare / nescit vivere / Vivere et vivas / Edw. Unton’.13 Another sympathetic owner, this time in Italy, was the literary jack of all trades Antonio Francesco Doni—well known to Machiavelli bibliographers for his edition of a version of Belphagor and for an ambiguous remark which has, mistakenly, been interpreted as expressing doubt about Machiavelli’s teachings.14 But Doni was also an enthusiast for La Mandragola; owned most of Machiavelli’s works; and lamented that their author was to be numbered amongst those who remained unappreciated.15 Indeed, says Doni, Machiavelli had, in his lifetime, suffered many injuries and vexations yet, ‘amidst the blows of fortune he had written these works, Discorsi, Historie, Il Principe, Mandragola Comedia, Clitia Comedia, Dell’arte della guerra, L’Asino d’oro, & altri capitoli, & novelle’—all of which the bibliographer characterizes as ‘molto nobile et honorate’.16 Four years later (in 1554), Girolamo Ruscelli, in the annotations to his edition of La Mandragola, showed that he, too, was acquainted with a variety of Machiavelli’s writings and had, moreover, an interesting stylistic comment to make. The play itself he praised for its pure Tuscan language, ‘like that of Boccaccio and the other good Tuscan writers’. Indeed, Machiavelli who was both ‘learned and judicious’, and who showed himself to be familiar with Boccaccio’s work, ‘never wrote anything other than fine 12 For Lambard, see the copy of Cappel’s translation in the British Library, press mark 523.d.30. 13 See The Unton Inventories, ed. J. G. Nichols (1841), p. xxxviii. Unton visited Italy in 1563–4, and a fragment of his itinerary survives in British Library, Sloane MS 1813. 14 The edition of Belphagor is in Doni’s La Seconda Libraria (Venice, 1551), fos. 89–97v. See Gerber, i. 44 ff.; and Machiavelli, Operette satiriche, ed. L. F. Benedetto (Turin, 1920), 9 ff. The ambiguous reference occurs in Doni’s I marmi (Venice, 1552), 81, when, in a dialogue concerning the various forms of criticism, one of the interlocutors observes that Machiavelli’s works are ‘belle’ but ‘they teach certain things which do not please me’. Giuseppe Prezzolini, Machiavelli (New York, 1967), 207, interprets this literally as Doni’s own critical judgement. 15 I marmi (1552), 52–3. 16 La libraria del Doni, nella quale sono scritti tutti gl’autori vulgari (Venice, 1550), fos. 34v–35.

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language’. In Ruscelli’s view this shows that, although Machiavelli’s Discorsi and many other things printed in Rome after his death often seem rough in style, this was not the author’s fault but resulted from the carelessness of those who had them printed and ‘corrected’. These interventions had actually spoiled Machiavelli’s work. Unless proper care is taken, transcription always introduces errors—especially when the work is undertaken by those who, unfamiliar with the author’s language, consider it corrupt and therefore do with it as they please.17 There were others who knew Machiavelli’s works, or are said to have known them, but whose comments are either exiguous or nonexistent. The tantalizing nature of such material is well exemplified in what is probably the earliest bibliographical reference to Machiavelli. This occurred in 1545 when Conrad Gesner briefly noted, under De re militari, that a certain ‘Nicolaus Florentinus’ had written on the subject.18 Three years later Gesner expanded this entry, referring to the seven books addressed to Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi by Niccolo` Machiavelli the Florentine, ‘very elegantly translated from the Italian into Latin by Jean Morel, Parisian’.19 17 Girolamo Ruscelli, Delle comedie elette novamente raccolte insieme, con le correttioni & annotationi di Girolamo Ruscelli, Libro primo (Venice, 1554), 181–2: ‘non iscrivesse mai d’altra lingua che buona, e per questo vedendosi che I suoi discorsi, e molte di quell’altre cose che furono stampate in Roma doppo la morte sua, sono in moltissime cose scorrette di lingua, non diremo che fusse perche egli non la sapesse, ma perche quegli che le fecero stampare e corressero, le guastessero, e scorreggessero in quella guisa; e perche il trascrivere porta sempre errori, quando non vi si ha molta cura, e cosı` lo stampare; o` ancor piu tosto perche quei che n’hebber cura, non sapendo essi la lingua, e trovando in quel libro alcune voci e modi diversi della lingua che essi havean per buona, li tenessero per corrotti, e li facessero parlare nel linguaggio loro, poi che l’havevan sotto, e potevano senza gabbia farli apparare; o` profrire a` lor modo’. 18 Bibliotheca Universalis (Zurich, 1545), 520: ‘Nicolaus Florentinus quidam scripsit de re militari’. 19 Conrad Gesner, Pandectarum sive Partitionum universalium . . . libri xxi (Zurich, 1548), fo. 324. The entry reads: ‘De arte militari. Petrus Lagnerius. Nicolai Machiavelli Florentini libri 7. Italici ad Laurentium Strossam patritium Philippi filium, per Janum Morelium Parisium Latine traducti elegantissime’. The allusion to Pierre Lagnier is to his edition of Cicero’s Sententiae and has nothing to do with the Machiavellian text. The entries for Machiavelli in Gesner are interesting. The Appendix Bibliothecae Conradi Gesner (Zurich, 1555), fo. 85, has ‘Nicolai Machiavelli Florentini de re militari li. 7. e Tusco in Latinum traducti per Ioan. Morelium Parisinum’. The fuller version in the Pandectarum Libri was

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This is potentially of immense interest, for Morel had been secretary to Erasmus and was subsequently the centre of a Parisian literary salon which included many of the most important scholars and poets of the time—Utenhove, Buchanan, Turne`be, Dorat, Du Bellay, and Ronsard.20 No Latin translation of the Arte della guerra prior to that of 1610 is known to survive: yet Gesner’s reference to Morel is so specific that it raises the possibility that there really had once been such a version amongst the first generation of Machiavelli translations. Another disappointment is John Bridges who, as Bishop of Oxford, was to achieve notoriety in the Marprelate controversy when he was lampooned as a ‘doctor of Divillitie’ whose ‘writings and sermons tend to no other end then to make men laugh’.21 In a dedicatory letter to Francis, Earl of Bedford, prefaced to his translation of Gualther’s sermons, Bridges claimed to have spent three or four youthful years in Italy and to have translated ‘the three bookes of Machiavelles discourses’ into English ‘more than fourtene yeares past’, which would have been about the year 1556. In 1572, when this dedication was published, he was still toying with the idea of offering his version of the Discorsi to the Earl although he had been given pause by a recent sermon at Paul’s Cross where the preacher had asserted that the book was ‘unworthy to come abroade into mennes handes’. Bridges remained unconvinced by the preacher and observed that ‘to confesse a truth, I heard no stronge reasons alleaged against the booke, but they might (as followed much later by Simmler’s enlarged edition of the Bibliotheca (Zurich, 1574), 522, where Silvestro Teglio’s Latin translation of Il Principe was added. Finally, in a further enlarged edition revised by Johan Jacob Frisius (1583), 628, there are additional references to the Clizia, Discorsi, and Istorie fiorentine. Morel crops up again in Jean Jacques Boissard, Icones quinquaginta virorum illustrium, Part III (Frankfurt am Main, 1598), 326. A strange transmutation of the whole story occurred in the Premier volume de la Bibliotheque de Sieur de la Croix-du-Maine (Paris, 1584), 186, where under the name of Jacques Gohory—who did indeed translate the Discorsi—it says, ‘il a traduit les sept livres de l’art militaire, de Nicolas Machiavel Florentin, escrits par luy en langue Toscane & depuis faits Latins par Jean Morel Parisien’: an error followed by later bibliographers. 20 On Morel, see La Croix-du-Maine, Premier volume, 250–1; I. D. McFarlane, Buchanan (1981), esp. 180–2. 21 Oh read over D. John Bridges, for it is a worthy worke (1588), title page, and sig. A.2.

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I thought) with ease ynough have beene answered, although the Inveigher was himselfe a discourser’. None the less, Bridges himself was not entirely happy with his ‘rude and unripe’ translation and, in the end, decided to suppress it—which he did so effectively that it cannot be found: and his subsequent works of religious dispute do not impress with Machiavellian resonance.22 No less disappointing is the knowledge that we glean from a letter written by G. B. Ricasoli in July 1547, noting that one Baccio del Bene was possessed of the keenest wit and was a student both of Machiavelli and Lucretius.23 Del Bene was a notable early sixteenthcentury Italian emigre´ in France; was the son-in-law of Biaggio Buonaccorsi, who was a colleague and close friend of Machiavelli himself; had connections with Jacopo Corbinelli (who certainly was a knowledgeable reader of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and other political writers); and eventually became a significant figure in the Palace Academy of Henri III. Yet there is little that one can do with this information. Davila, it is true, tells us that, every day after dinner, Henri III would withdraw in the company of Del Bene and Corbinelli to read Polybius, Tacitus, and especially Machiavelli’s Discorsi and Il Principe, to draw out rules for his political designs. But Davila was writing long after the death of all three men. We cannot know whether Del Bene and Corbinelli ever seriously discussed Machiavelli, with or without Henri III; and, if they did, whether such discussion in general, or Del Bene’s knowledge of Machiavelli in particular, ever made the slightest impact upon intellectual history. What we do know, however, is that Del Bene wrote a number of Latin poems, including an elaborate City of Truth dedicated to Henri III, and that this latter work was an allegory of the Nicomachean Ethics culminating in sublime mysteries. The zealous seeker after Machiavelliana might—without such texts—have imagined Del Bene’s time very differently employed.24 22 See Rudolph Walther, An hundred, threescore and fiftene homelyes or sermons uppon the Actes of the apostles, trans. John Bridges (1572), Dedication, sig. a.2v–3. The volume had been entered in the Stationers Register in 1570–1. 23 Cited by Lucien Romier, Les Origines politiques des guerres de religion (Paris, 1913), 164 n. 4. 24 On Del Bene, see the article in the Enciclopedia italiana. On his connection with the Palace Academy, see Frances Yates, The French Academies (1947), 33,

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The dangers of hypothesis on the basis of inadequate evidence may be further illustrated. Consider, for example, the case of Donato Giannotti, who is well known to historians as a personal friend of Machiavelli, a scholar, a political writer, and a practical administrator who was, in October 1527, appointed Secretary to the Dieci di Guerra—an office held long previously by Machiavelli himself.25 Giannotti was even described by one contemporary as ‘heir to his [Machiavelli’s] office and to his thought’; and we know, from his own letters and other references, that he had discussed the Istorie fiorentine with its author during its composition, that he possessed a manuscript of that work, and that he was acquainted with the Arte della guerra.26 Furthermore, we know that Giannotti—both before and after he entered the office once occupied by his old friend—was concerned with problems similar to those pondered by Machiavelli and, indeed, by all contemporary Italian political thinkers: the nature, strengths, and demerits of the Venetian constitution; the best constitution for Florence; the struggle between freedom and tyranny; and the advantages, or otherwise, of a native militia. Given all this, one might imagine— had Giannotti’s political writings not survived—that they must have been richly Machiavellian. But Giannotti’s political writings do survive: and they are not. Machiavelli and his ideas do occur in Giannotti’s work but, in general, the differences and distance between the two authors are considerably more marked than similarities or proximity. Or consider an allusion to ‘Nicolaus Machiavellus, historicus & secretarius Florentinus’ in the Catalogus of British authors 108, 214. On his reading with Corbinelli and Henri III, see Enrico Caterino Davila, Historia delle guerre civili di Francia (London, 1755), 410. 25 On Giannotti, see Roberto Ridolfi, ‘Sommario della vita di Donato Giannotti’, Opuscoli (Florence, 1942), 55–164; Randolph Starn, ‘Additions to the Correspondence of Donato Giannotti’, Rinascimento, 15 (1964), 101–21; Felix Gilbert, ‘The Venetian Constitution in Florentine Political Thought’, in Nicolai Rubinstein (ed.), Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence (1968), 490–500; Mattei (1969), 85–8, 296–7; Randolph Starn, ‘ ‘‘Ante Machiavel’’: Machiavelli and Giannotti’, in Myron P. Gilmore (ed.), Studies on Machiavelli (Florence, 1972), 287–93; Donato Giannotti, Republica fiorentina: A Critical Edition and Introduction, ed. Giovanni Silvano (Geneva, 1990). 26 Donato Giannotti, ‘Lettere inedite’, ed. L. A. Ferrai, in Atti del Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 4th ser., 3 (1884–5), 157 ff.

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published in 1557 by the notorious ‘Bilious Bale’. It occurs in an appendix to the entry devoted to another remarkable figure of the Henrician Reformation, the lawyer and controversialist Christopher Saint German. Bale is heaping dirt upon Pope Clement VII and notes how, in that Pontiff’s time, Machiavelli had revealed the evils which had befallen Christians through papal ambition. In particular, Bale alludes to two passages in the Istorie fiorentine exposing the base origins of the cardinals and the three ill-used techniques for papal aggrandizement—excommunication, indulgences, and force of arms. This reference suggests, on Bale’s part, a first-hand knowledge of Machiavelli. And so we might conclude were it not for the fact that his account is derived entirely from an entry in another Catalogus—this time devoted solely to anti-papal authorities—the compilation by Mathias Flacius Illyricus, which had been issued, only a year prior to Bale’s work, by the same printer, Johann Oporinus of Basle. Mathias is more detailed than his successor; and he provides the information that Machiavelli ‘floruit ante annos 30’. Moreover, in the second, and enlarged, edition of his Catalogus (1562), he uses Machiavelli as an authority against false Catholic miracles—with their spectres and other Satanic impostures. ‘I would add’, he says, ‘a few of his words’; and he quotes in Italian, though out of context, two sentences from the Istorie fiorentine. It is evident that Mathias really did know this text; and it is equally evident that Bale knew Mathias. What we do not know is whether Bale ever bothered to glance at the Istorie fiorentine himself.27 A few years previously, another anti-papal author, Charles du Moulin, the eminent French jurist, had cited Machiavelli’s opinion in the Istorie fiorentine concerning the origin of the name of Florence; and he accepted Machiavelli’s account of the rebuilding of Florence by Charlemagne 250 years after the city had been 27 Mathias Flacius Illyricus, Catalogus testium veritatis, qui ante nostrum aetatem reclamarunt Papae (Basle, 1556), 993; Catalogus (Basle, 1562), 567. Cf. John Bale, Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae . . . Catalogus (Basle, 1557), 662. The passages to which Mathias refers are Istorie fiorentine, I. ix, xi and then I. v; Bale refers to the first two of these passages. Another derivative from Mathias is Henri Estienne, De la conformite´ des merveilles anciennes avec les modernes (Paris, 1566), 565, where Machiavelli is cited to the effect that the popes aggrandize themselves ‘par excommunications, par pardons, et par armes’.

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destroyed by Totila.28 More significantly, Du Moulin also accepted Machiavelli as an authority on the ways in which the popes had downtrodden both the Empire and Italy itself: ‘comme dict Nicolas Marchianegli [sic] au livre I. de son Histoire Florentine, ou il attribue aux Papes tous les saccagemens advenuz en Italie, et quasi en toute l’Europe depuys la translation de l’Empire’.29 Du Moulin’s use of modern historians such as Machiavelli provoked swift reproof from ‘Raimondus Rufus’, who considered them unreliable.30 But did either of these learned French disputants ever think more deeply about Machiavelli once this exchange—itself only a microscopic fraction of their work—had taken place? And what of the unknown Englishman who wrote from Antwerp early in 1540, concerning the affairs of France and the Empire: ‘and mythynkyth that that proverbe of makiavelly which sayeth that, whan the Dawnger of a warre is over oon, it is better to prevene it than to deffarre it where verey Salutiffer ffor the ffraunche kynge. But God is the worker of all’? This is an allusion to the third chapter of Il Principe where Machiavelli notes that the Romans always considered the future implications of present difficulties and never deferred a necessary war, knowing that such delay is only to the advantage of others: ‘sapevano che la guerra non si leva, ma si differisce a vantaggio di altri’. Since the idea is only a detail in Machiavelli’s chapter, the fact that the anonymous writer 28 Charles Du Moulin, Commentarius ad edictum Henrici secundi contra parvas datas & abusus curiae Romanae (Paris, 1552). There was an augmented French version, Abus des petites dates, reservations, preventions, annates, et autres usurpations & exactions de la Cour de Rome, contre les Edictz & ordonnnances des Roys de France (Lyon, 1564), 292. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, II. ii (Mazzoni and Casella, 409b), discusses the rival testimony of Pliny, Tacitus, and the Pseudo-Frontinus (De coloniis). Du Moulin believed that, with regard to the name of Florence, Alciato had followed Machiavelli without acknowledgement: but, although Alciato’s opinion is the same as Machiavelli’s, he appears to have arrived at it independently. See his Cornelius Tacitus exacta cura recognitus et emendatus (Venice, 1534), fo. 253. 29 Abus des petites dates (1564), 439–40, 480, 560. The last reference is clearly to Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, I. ix—the same passage noted by Mathias and Bale. 30 In Molineum pro pontifice maximo, cardinalibus, episcopis, totoque ordine sacro: defensio (Paris, 1553), 141–4. This was published as the work of Raimondus Rufus but was attributed to Pierre Gregoire, first by Pierre Bayle and subsequently by Louis Moreri.

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picked it up suggests that he knew the text fairly well. But beyond that one cannot venture.31 Did Domenichi, when he quotes with relish an alleged statement by Giovanni de’ Medici that the only difference between himself and Machiavelli was that the latter knew how to write well whereas he knew how to do well, really know anything about Machiavelli’s work?32 Were Segni’s observations that Aristotle’s view of corruption in the Politics was used in Il Principe, and that Machiavelli distorts the notion of avarice from Aristotle’s Ethics, his only insights into the Florentine’s work?33 When La Perrie`re, in the early pages of his Miroir politique, mentions Machiavelli on three occasions, one of which involves a summary of an identifiable passage from the Discorsi, are we to assume that he was steeped in Machiavellian lore, or has he simply stumbled upon something relevant to his purpose in the course of reading several political treatises?34 Similarly, when Jean Nestor twice alludes to Machiavelli in the opening pages of his work on the Medici, are we to be impressed by his use of the Florentine secretary’s history or surprised that he uses it so little?35 Does the fact that Anselmo Turmeda wrote in imitation of the Asino d’Oro provide any basis for further speculation concerning the early penetration of Machiavellism into Spain?36 Is there more to say about the Machiavellism of Andrea Calmo’s polyglot comedy La potione, first published in 1552, other than that it was an unacknowledged abridgement of La Mandragola and was subsequently reissued thrice?37 And when Dionigi Atanagi discusses the nature, nobility, and status of history, its authors, and its laws; praises the primitive but diligent pioneering work of the Villani; and then goes on to single out 31 British Library, Cottonian MS Galba B.x, fo. 92 (calendared in LP, xv. 356). 32 Lodovico Domenichi, La nobilta` delle donne (Venice, 1549), 37. 33 Bernardo Segni, Trattato dei governi di Aristotele tradotto di greco in lingua vulgare fiorentina (Florence, 1549), 7, 290; L’Ethica d’Aristotele tradotta in lingua vulgare fiorentina (Florence, 1550), 180. 34 Guillaume de la Perrie`re, Le miroir politique (Lyon, 1555), 13, 20, 23. 35 Jean Nestor, Histoire des hommes illustres de la maison de Medici (Paris, 1564), 1, 3. 36 See Marcelino Mene´ndez Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos espan˜ola, ed. D. Enrique Sanchez Reyes (Santander, 1946–8), ii. 489–90. 37 For the editions of Calmo’s comedy, see Bertelli and Innocenti, Secolo XVI: 100, 129, 133; XVII: 1.

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Machiavelli for having both expanded the scope of historical writing and embellished it: what is there to do beyond taking note of the fact and remarking that this comment by a typical midsixteenth-century Italian literary hack is one of barely six references to the Istorie fiorentine surviving from the early decades of Machiavelli’s reception?38 I pose these rhetorical questions simply because that is the most realistic form in which such heterogeneous shreds of information may be presented. Brief, particularized, and disparate, they raise far more problems than they can ever solve and they are often more indicative of Renaissance reading habits than of a primary concern with Machiavelli. For example, the early relics of Machiavellian learning bequeathed by Remigio Nannini and Marco Cadamosto suggest preoccupation solely with eloquence. The former was a professional anthologizer of whose compilations one, the Orationi militari, includes material from the Istorie fiorentine—acknowledged with the author’s name in the first edition of 1557 but, in the editions subsequent to the Index of Prohibited Books of 1559, referred to simply as material taken from the eight books of the ‘historie di Firenze’. Nannini did the same in his Orationi in materia civile e criminale, first published in 1561, where Machiavelli appears anonymously as the ‘autore’ of the Florentine History. Much later, as we shall see, Nannini did more than merely copy stirring passages from Machiavelli: but, though normally scrupulous in listing sources, he never again refers to Machiavelli by name.39 On the other hand, in 1543, Cadamosto acknowledged no sources whatever in his little collection of modern bons mots.40 For him, Machiavelli 38 Dionigi Atanagi, Ragionamento de la eccelentia et perfettion de la historia (Venice, 1559), fo. 10v: ‘Nicolo` Machiavelli assai havrebbe aggrandita e abbellita la historia, se come propriamenta, e sensamente, cosı` piu` ornatamente havesse le sue narrationi spiegate, e distese.’ Atanagi was at least sufficiently well known to figure, more than forty years later, in Traiano Boccalini’s De’ ragguagli di Parnaso (Venice, 1612), I. xxxiii—an absurd hearing before Apollo. Perhaps the earliest reference to the Istorie fiorentine occurs in a letter written by Annibal Caro to Benedetto Varchi in 1533 (the year following the first edition), requesting that some sheets missing from ‘le Istorie del Machiavelli’ might be supplied to Giovambattista Guidacci. See Annibale Caro, Lettere familiari, ed. Aulo Greco (Florence, 1957–61), i. 10–12. 39 On Nannini, see below, Ch. 16. 40 On Cadamosto, see below, Ch. 17.

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was merely one of several effective writers and, accordingly, he incorporates sentences from Il Principe presumably to be used as striking quotations within a variety of literary contexts. Such concern for style rather than content, and for pithily expressed opinion rather than extended argument, may well represent the attitude of many of that undocumented public whose enthusiasm encouraged publishers to print edition after edition of the master’s works.

m a c h i a v e l l i a s a mi l i t a r y a u t h o r i t y The case was, however, rather different with regard to Machiavelli’s status as a writer on the art of war. Here it was not only his pithy style which excited interest but also his views which were often—though not always—regarded as authoritative. All students of Machiavelli are familiar with Bandello’s story that the author of the Arte della guerra was once challenged by the distinguished soldier Giovanni de’ Medici to drill 3,000 troops in the manner described in his book. After a couple of sweaty and frustrating hours, Machiavelli had still not managed to get the men organized: whereupon Giovanni took over and quickly put them into array. Whether or not the incident really took place, it has generally been interpreted as a comment upon the inadequacies of armchair soldiery; and other versions of the story make a similar distinction between theory and practice.41 However, the tale has another significance because it depends for its effect upon two assumptions: that Machiavelli fancied himself as an expert on the art of war; and that his reputation as a military theorist was well established. That war was important to Machiavelli himself is obvious. Military organization, military virtu`, and the dangers arising from military incapacity were his constant preoccupations. War filled his books and formed the core of his political thinking. Good arms lead to good laws; princes should devote all their attention to military matters; the 41 Matteo Bandello, La prima parte de le novelle (Lucca, 1554), Novella XL. Roberto Ridolfi, The Life of Niccolo` Machiavelli (London, 1963), 229–30 and note, seems inclined to accept the story as true. For analogous observations by Domenichi and Cardano on Machiavelli’s practical incompetence, see Mattei (1969), 296.

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greatness of Rome was founded upon military expertise and sound military institutions; and conversely the decadence of Italy, and of Florence in particular, resulted from military incompetence. Equally clear is Machiavelli’s standing as a theorist. Donato Giannotti, for example, when extolling the virtues of waging war with one’s own troops and avoiding the use of mercenaries, was content to refer his readers to Machiavelli’s treatment of these well-worn themes.42 Cornelius Agrippa, discussing the vanity of the art of war, listed those who had written on the subject— contrasting the multitude of ancient authorities (including Xenophon, Xenocrates, Onosander, Vegetius, Frontinus, and Aelian and ‘antiquiores multi’) with the moderns of whom only ‘Volturius, Nicolaus Florentinus, Jacobus comes Perliliarum et alii pauci’ are mentioned.43 Antonio Vacca, in a verse appended to Giovio’s brief biography of Machiavelli, refers to Machiavelli’s quality as a military authority who had rescuscitated the ancient arts of war; Gesner, as we have seen, noted the Arte della guerra in his bibliography; and the title page of the second edition of Fourquevaux’s Instructions sur le faict de la guerre stated that the work had been extracted from ‘Polybe, Frontin, Vegece, Cornazan, Machiavelle, et plusieurs autres bons autheurs’.44 Mutoni recorded the great men who had written on the art of war including, ‘de nostri tempi’, Valturio, Machiavelli, Porcia, and the ‘miraculous treatise’ of Giovan Giacopo Leonardi (a work of considerable reputation but which was never published).45 Finally, the French translation of Vallo similarly listed military authorities and included only five moderns: the Frenchman, ‘Guillaume de Langey’ (that is the 42 See Giannotti, Republica fiorentina, ed. Silvano, 217, 230. 43 Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, De incertitudine & vanitate scientiarum decla-

matio (Cologne, 1531), Cap. LXXIX, sig. r.6r–v. 44 For Vacca’s verse, see Paolo Giovio, Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita (Venice, 1546), p. LXVII; for Gesner, see above; for this edition of Fourquevaux, printed by Michel Vascosan (Paris, 1549), see The ‘Instructions sur le faict de la guerre’ of Raymond de Beccarie Sieur de Fourquevaux, ed. G. Dickinson (London, 1954), pp. cxiii–cxiv. 45 Stratagemi dell’arte della guerra, di Polieno Macedonio, Dalla Greca nella volgar lingua Italiana, tradotti da M. Nicolo Mutoni (Venice, 1552), sigs.* 2–6v— the dedicatory letter addressed to Giovan Jacopo de’ Medici, Marchese di Marignano. In addition to the authors named above, Mutoni also refers to several writers on the duel.

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author of the Instructions); Valturius who wrote in Latin; and the Italians, Cornazzano, Machiavelli, and Della Valle himself.46 These lists, though brief, are suggestive of the state of military literature up to the middle decades of the sixteenth century. The preponderance of ancient authorities is to be expected: but what is striking about the moderns is that there are only six of them (excluding the unpublished Leonardi, who dealt with fortification), and that all are heavily dependent upon the classical sources—even when, as is the case with Cornazzano, a specific interest in contemporary warfare is expressed.47 Valturio and Cornazzano wrote well before the end of the fifteenth century; Porcia is lightweight; Della Valle is rudimentary and mainly concerned with fortification; and the Instructions, based largely upon Machiavelli, is only a truly independent work when dealing with contemporary French military organization. Machiavelli was outstanding by default— although it should be recognized that the aspect of his work which he himself deemed most important (that is his juxtaposition of ancient and modern exemplars) was certainly anticipated by Cornazzano, who has received little credit for his efforts. Machiavelli’s status as a military authority is also attested by the numerous early editions and versions of his major works, all of which either wholly or in large part concern war. The Arte della guerra itself was not only the first of his serious books to be published but was also the first to be translated from the Italian when, in 1536, Diego de Salazar used it as the basis for his own Spanish Tratado de re militari.48 Ten years later, Jean Charrier published a French version which was shortly followed by Fourquevaux’s Machiavellian adaptation. Finally, in 1560, com46 Battista della Valle, Vallo. Du faict de la guerre et art militaire . . . Le tout nouvellement ordonne´ et augmente´ (Lyon, 1554), sig. B.3. 47 See Diego Zancani, ‘Antonio Cornazzano’s ‘‘De l’integrita` de la militare arte’’’, in S. Anglo (ed.), Chivalry in the Renaissance (Woodbridge, 1990), 13–24; Roberto L. Bruni and Diego Zancani, Antonio Cornazzano: la tradizione testuale (Florence, 1992), 115–22, 175–81. 48 According to Sergio Bertelli, there was another Spanish version of the Arte della guerra by Francesch de Pedrosa. See Niccolo` Machiavelli, Arte della guerra e scritti politici minori, ed. Sergio Bertelli (Milan, 1961), 323. The work is listed and described in Almirante—Francisco de Pedrosa, Arte y supplimento Re militar (Naples, 1541)—but I have not seen or located a copy.

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pleting the series, Peter Whitehorne issued his version, which was to remain the only published English translation of any of Machiavelli’s works until Bedingfield’s Florentine historie in 1595. There was plenty of opportunity for people to read Machiavelli’s words, ponder them, and make them their own: and the opportunity was evidently too good to be missed. For the period up to the inclusion of Machiavelli’s writings in the Index of Prohibited Books, there survive few critical discussions of his ideas and, of these, a majority concern war and are characterized by a recognition of what Machiavelli was trying to achieve by combining classical knowledge with modern experience. This point was made in the earliest comment of all, in a letter written in September 1521 by Cardinal Giovanni Salviati thanking Machiavelli for his gift of the first edition of the Arte della guerra. The Cardinal had delayed writing until he had read the text diligently; and the more he thought about it the more it pleased him, for it combined ancient perfection with the best of modern practice to form an invincible army. The disorders of modern forces—whether French, Imperial, papal, or Turkish—arise from their lack of the ‘ordini’ described by Machiavelli; and Salviati is grateful that there is at least somebody in Italy who understands what constitutes ‘il vero modo di militare’.49 The rigorous application of Machiavelli’s historical method, expecially with regard to warfare, is a feature of Agostino Nifo’s De regnandi peritia (1523), a complex and subtle reworking of Il Principe, which is the subject of my next chapter. But there was nothing complex or subtle about Antonio Brucioli who, in his Dialogo del Capitano, uses material from the Arte della guerra with lacklustre exactitude. All Brucioli’s borrowings from Machiavelli are, in fact, borrowings at one remove from Vegetius, Frontinus, and Polybius; and his little dialogue has no independent value for our knowledge either of the Renaissance art of war or its classical models.50 In this respect two later works, published in 49 The letter is printed in Pasquale Villari, Niccolo` Machiavelli e i suoi tempi, 2nd edn. (Milan, 1895–7), iii. 415–16. 50 For the Machiavellian passages, see Antonio Brucioli, Dialogi, ed. Aldo Landi (Naples, 1982), 233–59. Landi also prints the French translation by Traian Paradin (1551) at 527–49.

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France, have more to offer. The first of these, by Guillaume du Choul, is important in the history of the reconstruction of ancient military practice and is interesting because it uses Machiavelli not as an authority on modern warfare but as an authority on the ancients when, for example, Du Choul opposes Polybius on the nature of Roman arms and argues that modern cavalry is superior to that of the ancients.51 Du Choul inspired yet another student of Machiavelli, Gabriel Symeoni, to attempt his own analysis of military behaviour as exemplified in the career of Julius Caesar: though the intention here was not antiquarian reconstruction but rather to use Caesar as the basis for more general reflections. Thus Symeoni stresses the importance of arms for princes, and despises mercenaries. He is sympathetic to wars undertaken for revenge, though he advises princes to keep such intentions secret; strongly rejects criticism of the ancients; and even considers that they would have fared well against modern artillery. He argues that princes should observe the ancient laws of the subjects and allies of whom he has need; emphasizes the value of cruelty to strike fear into an enemy; and contrasts the brevity of the Romans’ wars, and the power of their armies, with corrupt modern practices. Few of Symeoni’s ideas are new: but his book remains interesting for its unusual combination of Machiavellian resonances with its use of epigraphical learning to point the way to military knowledge.52 Later in the sixteenth century there was a move against slavish respect for the ancient military writers and against authors such as Machiavelli who exemplified it. But this independence was not characteristic of many of Machiavelli’s early readers. One, Francesco Guicciardini, hinted at things to come in his Considerazioni sopra I Discorsi di Machiavelli, but this work remained in manuscript and exerted no contemporary influence. Guicciardini selected only four military topics for comment—whether passes should be guarded, whether money is the sinews of war, whether it 51 Guillaume du Choul, Discours sur la castrametation et discipline militaire des romains (Lyon, 1557), fos. 8v–9, 22, 24r–v, 25v. 52 Gabriel Symeoni, Cesar renouvelle´. Par les observations militaires (Paris, 1558), fos. 1r–v, 10, 12v, 18v–19v, 32–34v, 36v–37, 38v–39v, 46v–47, 50v–53v. On this curious Italian scholar, see Toussaint Renucci, Un aventurier des lettres au XVIe sie`cle (Paris, 1943).

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is better to await an enemy or attack him, and whether fortresses are harmful or useful—and, as was his wont, he subjects Machiavelli’s views to the harsh test of common sense and finds them wanting. His negative response is not because the views expressed in the Discorsi are necessarily wrong but because Machiavelli’s exaggeration, blind zeal for the Romans, and cavalier treatment of examples which do not fit his theories, make them only partially right.53 Guicciardini was among the first in a long series of commentators who responded to Machiavelli’s aphoristic and disjunctive manner by reducing his ideas to a series of debating topics.54 One of these questions, concerning the value of citadels to princes, was considered in two early works dealing with military architecture and, curiously, the first of these, by Pietro Cataneo, is largely sympathetic to Machiavelli’s arguments as set forth in Il Principe.55 Cataneo uses the same examples, and reaches the same conclusion that the best defence is to be loved by one’s subjects. He also elaborates on Machiavelli, pointing out that the building of citadels is especially harmful in those cities which have been long accustomed ‘a vivere libere’, because of the immense amount of civic destruction needed to make way for the fortifications. He insists, however, that circumstances vary according to time and place, so that there may be good reasons compelling princes to fortify not only their confini but also all the natural strongholds within their dominions—a satisfactory conclusion for an author embarking upon a treatise on military architecture. Cataneo did not acknowledge his source: but his debt to Machiavelli was noted by Girolamo Maggi when discussing the opinion of ‘alcuni’ who had maintained that citadels should not be built in cities.56 Maggi was writing shortly after the papal prohibition against the reading of Machiavelli, so he begins judiciously by 53 Francesco Guicciardini Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Cecil and Margaret Grayson (1965), 87–9, 109–12, 117–19. 54 See below, Chs. 15–16. 55 Pietro Cataneo, I quattro primi libri di architettura (Venice, 1554), I. xvi, fos. 18–19. For the controversy in general, see J. R. Hale, ‘To Fortify or Not to Fortify? Machiavelli’s Contribution to a Renaissance Debate’, in his Renaissance War Studies (1983), 189–209. 56 Girolamo Maggi, Della fortificatione delle citta (Venice, 1564), I. xvii, fos. 13v–16v.

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asserting that it was many years ago that he had read the books of the ‘Secretario Fiorentino’ where he had found his condemnation of the citadels and fortresses customarily built in cities.57 He points out that Pietro Cataneo, ‘huomo di molto diligentia’, had embraced Machiavelli’s views, which are then rehearsed and—although preceded by a cautious ‘s’io ben mi ricordo’—are given with a precision which suggests that Maggi had the text before him when he wrote.58 This is even more evident when he proceeds to other views expressed by the same author, which he identifies as ‘Nel cap. 24 del lib. 2 de Discorsi’, and refutes point by point. For the arguments deployed by those who do not agree with Machiavelli, Maggi cites the Discorsi militari of a certain Paolo Ligi whom I cannot identify.59 Then, at the end of his long refutation, he notes that Dionigi Atanagi (whom we have met as an admirer of the Istorie fiorentine) had referred him to a discourse against the ‘Secretario Fiorentino’ contained in certain letters by Giovan Francesco Lottini, ‘a man of much judgement’ who had expressed a similar view supported by very strong arguments.60 I do not know whether these letters have survived: but the arguments they contained were probably much the same as those later published in Lottini’s Avvedimenti civili, where those who deplored citadels were reprimanded because they had against them the authority of Aristotle, ‘un molto grand’huomo’.61 The tendency to fragment Machiavelli’s ideas, to pick and choose themes, and then paste them together to form an argument, became increasingly marked in the 1550s. We have already seen it in the writings of Pietro Cataneo, Du Choul, and Symeoni; and it is 57 Maggi (fo. 13v) writes: ‘sono molti anni, che leggendo io e’ libri del Secretario Fiorentino, trovai che egli danna le Rocche, Cittadelle, o` fortezze, che le vogliamo chiamare, quali si soglion fare nella Citta`’. 58 Ibid., fo. 13v, provides a marginal reference: ‘Nel Lib. Del Principe. cap 20’. 59 Ibid., fo. 14v, gives a marginal reference: ‘M. Paolo Ligi nel ca. 7. del lib. I. de’ Discorsi militari’. 60 Ibid., fo. 16r–v: ‘Di questo parere e` ancora M. Giovan Francesco Lottino Volterrano, huomo di molto giuditio, nel discorso, che egli contra il Secretario Fiorentino, fa in certe sue lettere, secondo che mi riferı` il virtuosissimo M. Dionigi Atanagi, che se lesse, nelle quali mi affermava, che si contenevano gagliardissime ragioni’. 61 Giovanni Francesco Lottini, Avvedimenti civili (Venice, 1575), cap. xxv, esp. 17–18.

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apparent in the dedicatory epistle prefixed to Niccolo` Mutoni’s translation of Polyaenus’ Stratagemi.62 Mutoni’s letter consists largely of an arrangement of several passages from Il Principe and the Discorsi to support a lofty opinion of warfare and an enthusiasm for military deceits. He begins by pointing out that great empires are built not only with religion and laws but also with arms, and he adapts the opening sentences of Discorsi, I. 10, to stress this point before moving on to a statement that princes should have no other object nor thought than the ordinances and exercises of war as the only means either to maintain those who are born to rule or to enable men to rise from humble fortune to the highest rank. This is taken verbatim from Il Principe, 14, and the rest of that same chapter follows almost complete: on the need to practise war in time of peace; to engage in hunting which is the image of war; to read histories which describe notable deeds, show how to gain victories, and avoid losses; and to imitate great soldiers. Above all, says Mutoni, the prince must study the use of fraud in military matters. And here he gently slips first into Discorsi, III. 40 (justifying, in war, behaviour which would be reprehensible in private life for it is as laudable to defeat an enemy by cunning as by force) before adding a postscript, from Il Principe, 18, that ‘where the skin of the lion will not suffice, one has recourse to that of the fox’. So, by Machiavellian degrees, Mutoni at last reaches his principal objective, which is to provide an elaborate definition of the stratagemi which form the subject of Polyaenus’ text. Mutoni is interesting both for his disingenuousness in referring to Machiavelli by name at one point while using him without acknowledgement elsewhere, and for the knowledge of Il Principe and the Discorsi demonstrated by his pastiche. But only a few years later military writers were avoiding Machiavelli’s name altogether while still plundering his works shamelessly. The pastiche technique is apparent in the strange book by Antonio Girardi which combined Machiavellian observations on war with a translation of an oration on peace by Reginald Pole, Machiavelli’s first significant literary adversary.63 It is apparent, too, in Ascanio Centorio degli 62 See above, p. 31. 63 Antonio Girardi, Discorso intorno alle cose della guerra, con una oratione della pace (Venice, 1558). Girardi despises mercenaries; argues that an army requires

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Hortensii’s Discorsi which began to appear in 1558.64 And it is even apparent in the Institution de la discipline militaire which, though critical of Machiavelli, still uses the Arte della guerra as the basis for its own examination of the rival merits of the phalanx, legion, and modern battle formations.65 This process of fragmenting Machiavelli’s ideas is especially striking in Girolamo Garimberto’s Il Capitano Generale of 1556. Garimberto was a cleric who ended his career as Bishop of Gallese but who, in his writings on government and on fortune, had already shown himself conversant with Machiavelli’s works.66 When he came to compose his book on warfare it was largely to the Discorsi and the Arte della guerra that he turned for inspiration, method, and subject matter—although he also makes effective use of Fourquevaux’s Instructions for more up-to-date information on modern battles.67 His style, too, like that of Machiavelli, favours disjunctive formulations, though Garimberto is more diffuse and repetitive. His procedure is to follow a general discussion of a particular issue with ancient examples, especially from the career both good captains and good soldiers; feels that artillery has not altered the really important method of killing—that is cold steel; recognizes the power of fortune especially in war, and laments modern Italian corruption in general, and the decay of military discipline in particular. It is not difficult to see where all this came from: although Girardi does strike an independent note by maintaining that money is the nerve of war. 64 Ascanio Centorio degli Hortensii, Il primo (– quinto) discorso sopra l’ufficio d’un capitano general di essercito (Venice, 1558–62) deals with such familiar topics as the rival merits of a good general with a poor army and a poor general with a good army; the need for a prince to introduce military discipline, which is the best way to achieve greatness; the value or otherwise of fortresses; the corruption of modern military discipline; the reasons why modern battles are less bloody than those of the ancients, and so on. 65 Institution de la discipline militaire au royeaume de France (Lyon, 1559), 64–9. The anonymous author names Machiavelli ‘with honour’ as one who, though inadequate on modern warfare, was valuable on the ancients, although he still concludes, ‘par lesquelles choses susdictes je pense estre assez apparent, que l’instruction de Machiavelle n’a la fermete´ de la phalange Macedonique’. 66 Garimberto is now known principally as a connoisseur of ancient art. See Clifford M. Brown, Our Accustomed Discourse on the Antique: Cesare Gonzaga and Gerolamo Garimberto. Two Renaissance Collectors of Greco-Roman Art (New York and London, 1993). On Garimberto more generally, see Mattei (1969), 135–42. 67 Girolamo Garimberto, Il Capitano Generale (Venice, 1556). There is a discussion of Garimberto’s mixed relationship with Machiavelli in Mattei (1969), 135–42.

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of Julius Caesar, and then add modern and contemporary instances. The plan is not slavishly executed. Individual examples are themselves subjected to further scrutiny; and Garimberto is not unwilling to challenge Machiavelli. On the other hand, he has little originality, and much of his material is derived from Vegetius and other classical authors, either directly or via the Machiavellian conduit.68 Certainly it is not difficult to recognize his deep involvement with Machiavelli’s ideas. He comments on how military virtu` has enabled men to rise from humble origins to high position; and he devotes a whole chapter to the preparations necessary to bring off a military coup. He condemns Italian dependence on cavalry, which he says is unsuited to local terrain, arguing that ‘l’anima d’una impresa e` la buona fanteria’; and, scorning ‘la moltitudine disarmata’, he cites the sorry case of Ludovico Sforza, who lacked troops of his own and died in prison.69 As for the conduct of war itself, Garimberto examines the relative advantages of taking the offensive or awaiting the enemy’s invasion and—rejecting the nice distinctions made by Machiavelli in Discorsi, II. 12—he argues in favour of carrying the war into the enemy’s territory, ‘perche (come si suol dire) huomo assaltato e` mezzo perduto’ (pp. 151–8).70 Similarly, when weighing the relative merits of attacking first in battle or awaiting the enemy’s assault, Garimberto again specifically rejects Machiavelli’s argument and supports vigorous aggression (pp. 448–54).71 For Garimberto, cruelty in war, and particularly in sieges, is blameworthy if used gratuitously, but excusable if used when necessity demands: just as physicians who have not succeeded 68 Thus we encounter many familiar observations: different provinces produce men inclined to different sorts of ‘milizia’; success in war depends upon training in peacetime; discipline, quick action, and ‘buon ordine’ lead to victory; auxiliaries are unreliable; troops fight best when victory is their only hope; skirmishes are a valuable preliminary to battle; generals require eloquence to encourage their men. All this, and much else, is the conventional pabulum of military writers within the classical tradition. 69 Il Capitano Generale, 36–8, 98–107. Further references are given in the text. 70 Cf. pp. 223–6, where Garimberto writes of the advantages of a swift invasion and conquest of enemy territory which not only confuses and terrorizes the adversary but also augments one’s own reputation. 71 The relevant passage under attack is Discorsi, II. 45, which is certainly one of Machiavelli’s silliest non sequiturs.

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with medicines and ointments must resort to ‘il ferro o` il fuoco’ (pp. 285–90). Stratagems, too, are recommended as a means of gaining victories in a less bloody and more humane way. Ruses may even be gainfully employed against one’s own troops as when, for instance, it is vital to restrain their ardour so that battle is not joined too soon. Here recourse to religion might be helpful, although, like Machiavelli, Garimberto fears that modern troops are without discipline and ‘in consequenza senza religione, o` con poca’. The Romans had the advantage of being able to manipulate auguries and superstitions whereas Christians lack such means. Nevertheless, says Garimberto, it remains possible to exploit religion and he makes the bizarre suggestion that an excess of zeal among the troops might be curbed by saying that on certain days Christians are not allowed to shed blood (pp. 354–9, 188–90). While Garimberto is at pains to introduce modern examples of leadership and battle into his text, recent technical developments in the art of war do not much concern him. They only arise when he discusses modern and ancient valour with special reference to the effects of artillery, and it is interesting here that he begins by saying that he cannot deal adequately with this subject without first distancing himself from Machiavelli’s opinions. The fact is that terrible slaughter had been inflicted by artillery and handguns at Ravenna, Marignano, and Bicocca—battles where blood was shed indiscriminately, ‘de i Capitani, i Condottieri, e de i privati soldati’—and Garimberto dismisses Machiavelli’s assertion that in twenty-four years of modern war in Italy fewer captains had been slain than in ten years among the ancients. Guns can reach anywhere and everybody; they penetrate military formations, and obscure the sight of men and horses with smoke and fire. The resulting disorder renders modern armies less effective as soldiers than were the ancients: but it certainly does not mean that they are intrinsically less valiant (pp. 118–31).72 These arguments against Machiavelli are well supported and sensibly organized. Yet elsewhere, when 72 In order to refute Machiavelli, Garimberto provides a long list of recent commanders who have been slain by firearms—culminating in Giovanni de’ Medici, ‘splendor dell’armi de’ tempi nostri’. Later (pp. 491–7) Garimberto argues that modern armies are courageous and well armed, but are ruined by lack of organization and discipline.

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explaining why the wars of the ancients were more bloody than those of the moderns despite the development of firearms, Garimberto not only repeats Machiavelli’s views that the wars of the Romans were short, decisive, and sanguinary, but also accepts his assertion that artillery was ineffectual in battle because it could only fire once, and that its shot generally passed harmlessly overhead (pp. 497–503). Garimberto is a good example both of the kind of influence exerted by Machiavelli’s military thinking in the midsixteenth century and of its limitations. Moreover, since his modest work is one of the most extended treatments of Machiavellian themes in this period, it reminds us how much we are at the mercy of inadequate, fragmentary, and uneven sources. We know that up to the middle decades of the century there were twelve editions and several translations of the Arte della guerra, and that Machiavelli’s other major works—all teeming with military observations—were even more frequently published and translated. Yet, for that period, the number of individuals whose reactions to Machiavelli’s military thinking have survived total fewer than one for every three Machiavelli editions published: and of those individuals only a bare handful were soldiers.73 Who were the others? Giannotti, like Machiavelli himself, was an administrator, diplomat, and man of letters. Nifo and Agrippa were philosophers; Vacca a poet; Du Choul and Symeoni antiquaries; Gesner a bibliographer; Brucioli a biblical scholar; and Salviati a cardinal. Garimberto, though thoroughly familiar with Machiavelli’s writings and greatly imbued with their spirit, was a cleric. His book reduces the art of war to academic debate about stylized topics; and no military man could gain much profit from reading such stuff. It is not unintelligent or ill-informed. It is simply bookish. 73 Salazar, Whitehorne, and Fourquevaux were all soldiers. Guicciardini had practical experience of warfare, and the same is probably true of the author of the Institution de la discipline militaire.

2 Creative Plagiarism: Agostino Nifo’s De regnandi peritia In 1521 Agostino Nifo, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pisa, published a treatise on the behaviour of the best princes, which he dedicated to the insignificant rulers of the insignificant town of Sessa. It dealt with the necessity of prudence, justice, modesty, clemency, piety, honesty, magnificence, liberality, fortitude, and temperance; the desirability of such skills as painting, music, athletics, and a knowledge of history; and with the worldly glory and eternal beatitude to be enjoyed by the ruler possessing these virtues and accomplishments.1 Nifo was aged about 48 and had long been esteemed as a scholar and teacher. His Aristotelian translations and commentaries were well known and were to remain in use for over a century; he had written on Averroes, astrology, astronomy, meteorology, medicine, physiognomy, and demonology; and he had engaged in a celebrated controversy with the formidable Pietro Pomponazzi.2 Nifo was, moreover, a man of the world and, despite an uncouth manner, was celebrated as a wit and Lothario, and was on good terms—or deemed himself to be on good terms—with the great and the powerful: hunting with Prospero Colonna; valued counsellor to 1 Agostino Nifo, Libellus de his quae ab optimis principibus agenda sunt (Florence, 1521); ed. by Gabriel Naude´: Augustini Niphi Suessani Opuscula Politica: cum G. Naudaei de eodem auctore judicio (Paris, 1645), 93–150. 2 For general information on Nifo’s career, see P. Tuozzi, ‘Agostino Nifo e le sue opere’, Atti e memorie della R. Accademia di scienze, lettere e arti di Padova, ns 20 (1904), 63–86; Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923–58), v. 69–86; Gennaro Monarca, Agostino Nifo vita ed opere: traccia per una riscoperta (n.p., 1975); Edward P. Mahoney, Two Aristotelians of the Italian Renaissance: Nicoletta Vernia and Agostino Nifo (Aldershot, 2000).

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the ‘Great Captain’, Gonzalo de Cordova; and certainly a prote´ge´ of Pope Leo X, who created him Count Palatine and gave him the right to use the name Medici. Despite these credentials, his Libellus of 1521 was a conventional speculum principis based solely upon ancient examples. From beginning to end there is not a single reference to a modern prince and, although the work may have interested some contemporary other than its author, no trace of such interest has survived.3

il principe a t s e c o n d h a n d Two years later Nifo returned to political theory with a remarkable volume unlike any other which had been published hitherto. Abandoning the microbic Italian princelings, he now sought the favour of the Emperor Charles V for a work devoted to the practical knowledge of ruling—De regnandi peritia—which, though less completely ignored than its predecessor, still attracted scant attention at the time.4 However, like a long-buried murder victim, it caused great excitement when, 350 years later, scholars exhumed it, conducted their post mortem, and pronounced the victim to be Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Il Principe.5 Nifo’s text, they declared, was merely 3 It has been argued by Carlo Dionisotti, Machiavellerie: storia e fortuna di Machiavelli (Turin, 1980), 133, that this conventional treatise was a direct response to Machiavelli’s Il Principe. This is just possible, although, in the light of what was soon to follow, highly unlikely. 4 Augustini Niphi de regnandi peritia ad Carolum V. Imperatorem Caesarem semper augustum (Naples, 1523): referred to hereafter as DRP. The text was edited by Gabriel Naude´, in Augustini Niphi Suessani Opusculorum politicorum pars prima (Paris, 1645), 1–88. There is a modern facsimile edition with French translation by S. Pernet-Beau and an introduction by Paul Larivaille, Une ree´criture du Prince de Machiavel: le De regnandi peritia de Agostino Nifo (Paris, 1987). There is a curious story, concerning Nifo and Charles V, told by Matthieu Coignet in his Instruction aux princes pour garder la foy promise (Paris, 1584), 159, to the effect that when the Emperor was in Naples (presumably in 1535) he sent for ‘un Nyphus grand Philosophe’ and asked him how to govern an empire well. To which the philosopher replied that the Emperor should keep about his person such counsellors and worthy men as the Emperor made show of thinking Nifo to be. 5 A clutch of eager scholars hastened to have their say, but the earliest were Luigi Settembrini, Lezioni di letteratura italiana, 2nd edn. (Naples, 1870), ii. 171; Jean Fe´lix Nourrisson, Machiavel: l’histoire du Machiave´lisme et de Machiavel

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Machiavelli’s masterpiece mangled; rendered into tedious Latin; brutally reordered; chopped up into four books; and, insult added to injury, followed by a fifth book full of princely platitudes claiming to serve as an ‘antidote’ to the preceding ‘poison’. Worse still, Nifo nowhere acknowledged his source, which could only have been a manuscript version of the as-yet-unpublished Il Principe. The villain’s crime was out. It was a ‘brazen’ and ‘daring’ plagiarism perpetrated by a thief who ‘prostituted his larceny’ by offering it to the Emperor.6 It was trash by a third-rate deformer and exploiter of a great man’s original creation. Nifo’s notoriety was assured and, henceforth, the abusive label plagiarist has been almost inseparable from his name. Of the many scholars who refer to the De regnandi peritia, perhaps only its two modern editors have attempted a dispassionate assessment, and even they do not (in my view) really understand what Nifo was doing; while Giuliano Procacci, usually a judicious critic, is unable to hide his distaste for a writer who, he feels, destroyed the very essence of Machiavelli’s work in creating his own, vastly inferior, treatise.7 Yet, closer attention to both context and text reveals that the matter is by no means as simple as the historical pathologists have suggested, for there is, running through Nifo’s varied writings, a rich vein of ambiguity and cynicism. In his early treatise, De intellectu, he had, as Lynn Thorndike pointed out, ‘played somewhat perilously with the Averroistic doctrine of the unity of the intellect, professedly opposing it but also overthrowing many arguments advanced by others against it’. His treatment of demons (Paris, 1875), 192–225; Francesco Fiorentino, ‘Del Principe di N. Machiavelli e di un libro di A. Nifo’, Giornale di filosofia e lettere, scienze e politiche, ns 1 (1879), 94–114; Oreste Tommasini, La vita e gli scritti di Niccolo` Machiavelli nella loro relazione col machiavellismo (Rome, 1883–1911), ii. 137–9. Many have since added to the ‘exposure’ of Nifo’s crime: among them Villari, Burd, Persico, Ferrara, Valletta, Prezzolini, Procacci, Firpo, and Dionisotti. 6 Giuseppe Ferrari, Corso su gli scrittori politici italiani (rev. edn., Milan, 1929), 250. Monarca, Agostino Nifo, 60–9, raises the possibility that it was Machiavelli who plagiarized Nifo! But this is not a hypothesis which can withstand close scrutiny of the texts. 7 Nifo, trans. and ed. Pernet-Beau and Larivaille, Une ree´criture du Prince; Procacci (1965), 3–27; and the same author’s Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’eta` moderna (Rome, 1995), 63–71. For Pernet-Beau’s mistranslation of the key words in Nifo’s work, see below, nn. 16, 17.

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is similarly equivocal, for he proposes to discuss them ‘according to natural reasons and physical causes’ but adduces magic as the sole ground of proof.8 His De immortalitate animae, dedicated to Leo X, was commissioned to oppose Pomponazzi: yet there is little fundamental difference between the two authors, and Nifo’s appeal to revelation as against natural reason carries no more conviction than does his adversary’s similar equivocation. Even less straightforward is his attitude (expressed in his influential work on the false prognostications) towards the reality of the biblical deluge said to be due in 1524; while the real intentions of his book on courtiers are deliberately obscure. This last work, De re aulica (in which Nifo modestly ranked himself among the foremost writers on ‘things natural’ of the last hundred years), is in two books, the first of which is a riposte to those who would fashion courtiers like scaled-down versions of the princes whom they are to serve. Nifo suggests that courtiers exist solely to please their masters; and his analysis of the techniques whereby ‘affability’ might be exercised includes observations on flattery which, in their moral neutrality, anticipate the cynical precepts of the later courtly Taciteans.9 He also discusses the role of women at court, and is critical of the fashion for erotic conversation—perhaps of the sort we may see reproduced in Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano— though it is evident that he himself revelled in such aulic titillation, delighted in dirty jokes, and ventured well beyond the confines of mere books in pursuit of his keen interest in sexual activities. Nifo was accorded a brief, and characteristically inaccurate, biography by Paolo Giovio, which included an epigram by Joannes Latomus celebrating the philosopher’s propensity for enlivening dry syllogisms with amusing stories.10 Furthermore, the ‘amoroso 8 Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, v. 82–5. 9 De re aulica (Naples, 1534); ed. Naude´, Niphi . . . Opusculorum, 240–358; Italian trans. by F. Baldelli (Genoa, 1560). In his treatment of affability Nifo includes a discussion of laughter, which is one means to gaining princes’ favour which he himself exploited to good effect. See his De re aulica, pt. I, chs. 35–44. On courtly cynicism, see below, Ch. 16. 10 Paolo Giovio, Le iscrittioni poste sotto le vere imagini de gli uomini famosi, le quali a` Como si veggiono (Florence, 1552). There is an amusing though wild translation of Latomus’s verse in the English version of Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical (London, 1737), iv. 379 n. 25: ‘Away ye fools, who

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Nifo’, as he was called, published treatises on feminine beauty and on the art of love; and is said to have been so besotted at the age of 70 with a young girl that, at the sound of music, he would forget the agony of his gouty feet and start to caper about the dance floor.11 In view of all this learned lubricity, it is odd that Nifo’s critics missed the opportunity to compare him with his idol Aristotle, who was vulgarly supposed to have made a fool of himself in sexual matters and was sometimes represented as a naked dotard being ridden and mocked by an equally naked lady.12 Nifo was a curious and complex intellectual personality—very different from the plagiarizing pedant depicted by his modern enemies.13 Of encyclopedic erudition, immense industry, keen intelligence, and great fluency, he was well able to absorb and adapt any material that appealed to his fancy. And here it is important to consider the more general context of authorial habits and conventions. The word plagiarism, so often associated with Nifo, has moral resonances inappropriate to much early sixteenthcentury scholarship, for it suggests that a scrupulous acknowledgement of sources was a normalcy which could be contrasted with the plagiarist’s unsavoury spoliations. But there was no such normalcy. Sometimes authors referred to the origins of their material; sometimes they did not; and Nifo’s adaptation of Machiavelli was no different in kind from Machiavelli’s own incorporation of classical think Philosophy / Too grave for jokes and wanton venery. / What, does not florid Niphus think it best / Midst dry syllogisms to crack a jest?’ 11 Nifo is described as ‘amoroso’ by Michel Angelo Biondo: first in his Angitia cortigiana (Rome, 1540), sig. B.1v; and then in his Angoscia, la prima furia del mondo (Venice, 1542), sig. C.4v. Since Biondo refers to Nifo as ‘mio maestro’ (Angoscia, sig. A.4v), perhaps his testimony should be heeded. See also Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana, Ill., 1956), 158. The English version of Latomus’s verse exclaims, ‘How wondrous pleasant must it be to see / This great Philosopher at seventy, / Inspir’d by love with shaking head advance, / And trembling knees to grace the airy dance?’ In the light of later slang usage, ‘trembling knees’ is an inspired mistranslation of ‘undulatis passibus’. 12 On this tradition, see George Sarton, ‘Aristotle and Phyllis’, Isis, 14, pt.1, no. 43 (May, 1930). 13 Nifo figures in Traiano Boccalini’s De’ ragguagli di Parnaso. Centuria prima (Venice, 1612), p. xliv—a dispute with the historian Platina (represented as a pastry cook) whom he has attacked with a rolling pin for the imputation of gluttony.

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authorities, without acknowledgement, in his Arte della guerra.14 To appropriate the work of another writer, living or dead—words, phrases, images, and ideas—was not unusual. Nor was it reprehensible, provided that such material was employed within a new structure and made to serve a different purpose. There were occasions, certainly, where one author merely took over the work of another, not only without acknowledgement, but with scarcely any alteration or new application. Nifo himself was, on several occasions, the victim of such treatment.15 In general, though, the application of modern notions of plagiarism to his De regnandi peritia is an unhelpful anachronism because Nifo’s book is not a mindless Latin butchery of Il Principe. It is an altogether more subtle concoction. Political Practicalities Addressing himself to Charles V, Nifo recalls that he had previously offered the Emperor a brief treatise on the false prognostication of a flood. Now he has something which, considering the extent of Charles’s empire, is far more necessary: that is the De regnandi peritia. Nifo’s choice of title is significant. He is not writing another conventional mirror for princes. His subject is, specifically, peritia—the skill, the practical knowledge, which is gained only by experience—and by that word we may judge the impact of Machiavelli’s Il Principe on Nifo who had, only two years previously, produced his idealized Libellus on the ‘Best Princes’, based on ancient philosophers and a limited number of classical exemplars.16 Now Nifo has shifted his emphasis to actualities. Such practical knowledge, he admits, is almost innate in the 14 There is a good discussion of the modern, anachronistic use of the word ‘plagiarism’ in Larivaille’s introduction to Une ree´criture du Prince, pp. iv–vi. 15 Nifo was treated by others with even less respect and no more acknowledgement than he had accorded to Machiavelli. On Brucioli’s use of Nifo’s De pulchro, see his Dialogi, ed. Landi, 352–7, 359–61; on Portinarius’s use of Nifo’s De demonibus, see Thorndike, v. 85–6. On Rosello’s ruthless adaptation of three of Nifo’s texts, see below, pp. 80–4. On Domenichi’s plundering of the second book of Nifo’s De re aulica, see Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady, 211. 16 Pernet-Beau, in her translation of Nifo’s work, renders De regnandi peritia as L’art de regner, which completely misses the point of the treatise.

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Emperor, who derives from a long line of rulers. Indeed, as Nifo sententiously remarks, in offering this book he is simply spurring a willing horse. Nevertheless, he does not fear to write about all these things which he has noted both in ancient and more recent histories and in the long wars waged in Italy; for in these the Emperor will find ‘tum tyrannica, tum regia facinora breviter explicata, veluti in Medicorum litteris venena & antidota’. Here, in conjunction with the word peritia, lies the key to Nifo’s treatise. He is explicating evil deeds (facinora)—sometimes tyrannical, sometimes kingly—just as, in the writings of doctors, are explicated ‘poisons and antidotes’, so that Charles may avoid the one and know how to use the other.17 Nifo, though consistently misrepresented by his modern commentators, could not be more clear. It is not the brief statement on the ‘honourable kind of ruling’ at the end of his treatise which constitutes the antidota. It is the evil deeds of kings which serve as the antidote to the evil deeds of tyrants. It is true that Nifo does not explain, either here or elsewhere in his book, precisely how this would work. The difference between the two kinds of ‘evil deeds’ can reside only in the authority of the perpetrators, and we must bear in mind that, for Nifo, tyrants may become kings by beneficent government, while the heirs of tyrants may also become kings simply through inheritance. In effect Nifo is making an impossible distinction which could resolve itself only into the proposition that the ‘evil deeds’ he describes are evil when committed by evil rulers for evil ends. When committed by legitimate and responsible monarchs, such as Charles V, they are not evil at all. This is an extraordinary position. But it is, I think, one which fairly represents Nifo’s thinking on the matter of political expediency after he had absorbed Il Principe. It is well known that Machiavelli’s Il Principe circulated in manuscript.18 Indeed, in December 1513, Machiavelli had himself 17 In translating the words ‘tum tyrannica, tum regia facinora breviter explicata’ as ‘les actions des tyrans, et d’autre part celles des rois’ Pernet-Beau similarly obscures Nifo’s meaning. The word ‘facinus’ could mean a deed (good or bad), but this was not its normal usage—and certainly the choice of such a word (ambiguous but carrying definite connotations of evil) rather than a more neutral noun fits perfectly with Nifo’s slippery mentality. 18 Larivaille, in his introduction to Une ree´criture du Prince, pp. viii–ix, discusses the question of which text of Il Principe was used by Nifo.

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been concerned, even before he let the text out of his hands, that Pietro Ardinghelli—personal secretary to Pope Leo X—might appropriate it and thereby gain honour.19 I doubt whether Nifo, philosopher and astrologer, aroused similar anxiety in Machiavelli: yet Nifo it was who first saw how to turn Il Principe to his own advantage. Here, very different from his own conventional exercise on how the best princes should behave, was a discussion of politics dealing almost entirely with the problems faced by new princes, and replacing the customary parade of academic wisdom with ancient and modern historical examples juxtaposed to lay bare the sempiternal realities of power. Moreover, although hereditary monarchs are specifically excluded from the discussion in Il Principe, it was evident that their difficulties would differ little from those analysed by Machiavelli. The possibilities offered by Machiavelli’s ruthless concentration on what is rather than on what ought to be, were not lost upon Nifo: but the material was, from his point of view, unsatisfactorily presented. Machiavelli’s argument, though not disorderly, is idiosyncratic; and single chapters often discuss widely divergent issues. Yet the overall structure of Il Principe moves relentlessly towards a violent denunciation of modern Italian princes and an appeal for messianic deliverance from the oppression of barbarian invaders. Unfortunately, the dedicatee whom Nifo had in mind, the Emperor Charles V, though himself one of those ‘stinking barbarians’, would certainly not enjoy being informed of that fact by an Italian professor. The last three chapters of Il Principe were thus useless to Nifo and were rejected along with the ironic comments on the Papacy in chapter 11. Similarly, and significantly, Nifo rejected Machiavelli’s fifteenth chapter. This dealt with the very issue which attracted Nifo’s attention in the first place—the gap between traditional political theory and normal political practice—but it was far too explicit for his deliberately oblique and ambiguous technique. The remaining twenty-one chapters form the basis of the De regnandi peritia: though many passages are deleted; examples are reordered; chapters are broken up into smaller sections; and the 19 Machiavelli, Lettere, 10 Dec. 1513 (Mazzoni and Casella, 886a).

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pieces redistributed according to Nifo’s own scheme.20 The material, he says, has been divided into five books. The first deals with the ways in which private persons may acquire kingdoms. The second is on the arms, soldiers, and methods whereby territories are protected from the invasion of enemies. The third examines the duties, crafts, and ingenuities (versutiae) which preserve them from insults, defections, and rebellions of subjects; the fourth treats certain ‘common matters’ useful for both; and the fifth is devoted to what Nifo is pleased to call the ‘honourable kind of ruling’. Throughout the work, Machiavelli’s historical evidence (particularly modern exempla) is heavily augmented. Nifo sometimes returns to Machiavelli’s own sources to expand particular points; incorporates comment from classical authorities, especially Aristotle; adds his own critical observations and glosses; and introduces new themes as they occur to him. Acquiring a Kingdom Apart from the enigmatic conclusion of the De regnandi peritia, it is the first book which is least dependent on Il Principe—though its structure is suggested by Machiavelli’s opening chapter, which mentions different kinds of principalities and how they are acquired. Nifo elaborates Machiavelli’s brief statement by suggesting that there are ten different modes of gaining power—by fortune, virtus, crime, arms, guile, faction, insurrection, the favour of citizens, election, and succession—to each of which he devotes a chapter. One of the shortest concerns men who gain their kingdoms through virtus which, in the context, means conventional moral virtue rather than Machiavellian virtu`. Even now, writes Nifo, as though astonished, ‘some come to royal authority through virtue, as did nearly all the kings who ruled in the Golden Age’. However, his only examples, Saturn and Numa Pompilius, do not suggest confidence in the present generation. This is all the more striking 20 Tommaso Persico, Gli scrittori politici napoletani dal 1400 al 1700 (Naples, 1912), 147–68, includes an analysis of Nifo’s use of Machiavelli; but Pernet-Beau and Larivaille, pp. ii–iii, are fuller and more precise.

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because the following chapter, the longest in the book, deals with those who obtain princedoms through crimes, and is largely a translation of two-thirds of Il Principe, 8, with its harsh truths about Agathocles and Oliverotto da Fermo. Here, Nifo is able to repeat his source’s uncharacteristically pious judgement on the Sicilian tyrant whose virtu` was not really virtu` at all, because ‘it cannot be called virtu` to kill fellow citizens, to betray friends, to be without faith, without pity, without religion’. Machiavelli had offered no similar moral comment on Oliverotto, so Nifo renders the original statement—that this thug had ‘made himself Prince’ (si fece principe)—by ‘tyrannus creatur’; adding that he might have reigned long but for the vengeance of God, carried out by Cesare Borgia, who himself meets a similar fate in Nifo’s third book. The rest of Book I is illustrated principally by ancient examples until, when discussing those who obtain power through the favour of citizens, Nifo makes an interesting observation on recent Italian history. There are those, he says, who come to power neither by crimes, nor force, nor other disgusting methods (‘nec aliis obscenis modis’), but by the favour of their citizens. These cannot absolutely be described as rulers or princes, for they do not hold sway openly, but by ‘requests and consultations’: though, to be sure, their requests and consultations may be more than commands to the citizens, for anyone who does not comply is pursued as an enemy. ‘Of this sort’, explains Nifo, ‘in our own time were Lorenzo de’ Medici, the father of Pope Leo X, a man most prudent among the Florentines, Giovanni Bentivoglio among the Bolognese, and Pandolfo Petrucci among the Siennese’.21 All these long upheld an ‘agreeable tyranny (iucundam tyrannidem) through popular favour’. This realistic assessment of citizen-based government is followed by a brief word on elected rulers, before the book closes with a pregnant statement on the succession of kings, which renders Nifo’s political morality more dangerously topsy-turvy than Machiavelli’s notorious upside-down catalogue of virtues in Il Principe. The sons of legitimate kings may themselves succeed legitimately. But even where the father had gained power by one of 21 DRP, I. 10. Nifo returns to this group (De’Medici, Bentivoglio, and Petrucci) in DRP, III. 10.

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the other nine dubious methods already described—and might on that account have been deemed a tyrant—‘his successor is called king by historians’ (qui tamen huic succedit, rex ab historicis dicitur). Moreover, continues Nifo, citing Diodorus, this is indeed how kingdoms originated. He does not develop the point further. He does not need to. If every kind of political extremism may ultimately be legitimized by a simple act of succession, then the amount of water in Nifo’s ‘watered-down’ Machiavellism is almost imperceptible; and his consistent use of the word ‘tyranny’ in the next three books of the De regnandi peritia, to indicate such behaviour, carries no moral weight. Warfare Nifo’s second book, dealing with the arms by which kingdoms are defended against enemies, is principally a reworking of the military chapters of Il Principe (12, 13, 14, 20), which included little that was ethically problematic. Nifo accepts Machiavelli’s classification of armies as either native, mercenary, auxiliary, or mixed troops, and closely follows his source both in hostility towards mercenaries and auxiliaries, in a lukewarm view of mixed soldiery, and enthusiasm for princes who rely on their own forces. In the group of chapters into which he divides Machiavelli’s discussion of fortresses (Il Principe, 20)—though he begins with a very close rendition of Machiavelli’s opening paragraphs (De regnandi peritia, II. 12, 13)—his use of his source becomes free, and he incorporates an increasing number of his own examples. Indeed, throughout this second book, Nifo is at pains to give the material a personal stamp. Sometimes his devices are truly shameless as when, translating Machiavelli verbatim, he blithely writes ‘it seems to me’ (II. 3); or renders Machiavelli’s ‘respondo’, in reply to some hypothetical question, by a grandiose ‘respondibimus’ (II. 4). More interesting are Nifo’s glosses on his text. For example, adapting Machiavelli’s comment that mercenaries fight only for their stipend, he writes that they desire neither glory nor victory, and cites Horace (Ep. II. 40): Ibit eo quo vis, qui zonam perdidit—‘He who has lost his purse will go whither you wish’. Similarly, where Machiavelli refers simply to the fact that the

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Swiss are completely armed and completely free, ‘armatissimi e liberissimi’, Nifo stresses that, though they are few in number, and hemmed in by great powers who might easily conquer them, yet— because the Swiss employ their own forces and aim at lasting freedom—they have not been subdued and have lived for a long time in the greatest liberty (II. 3). Sometimes Nifo likes to add a little rhetorical ornament: as when he heightens Machiavelli’s brief statement that the first who gave great renown to mercenaries was ‘Alberigo da Conio, romagnolo’, by likening this first occasion to the entry of the Trojan horse (II. 5). Sometimes Nifo provides a name or detail to enhance the original narrative. Machiavelli, for example, referred to Francesco Sforza’s having become Duke of Milan through being armed, and to his sons’ having lost power through neglecting arms. Nifo, however, makes specific allusion (II. 10) to Francesco’s son Ludovico, who, ‘when he was betrayed by the Swiss was foully captured by Louis King of France and died in a filthy prison’ (Ludovicus Sfortia Helvetiis prodentibus, a Ludovico Gallorum Rege turpiter captus, in carcere foede periit). Sometimes he adds a longer illustrative passage from literature, as at the end of the same chapter where he illustrates the importance of military studies for the prince by rehearsing Aesop’s fable of the Lion and the Fox.22 Elsewhere, Nifo augments Machiavelli with Aristotelian glosses, ancient and modern examples, and personal comment. A good example of this is in the chapter (II. 11) discussing the need for princes to devote themselves to military skills in time of peace— based upon Il Principe, 14. He begins with an allusion to Aristotle’s views on the relationship between war and peace and his observation that warlike deeds are not in themselves desirable.23 But Nifo then asserts, as though it were his own opinion (Nos autem . . . asserimus), Machiavelli’s advice that princes should prepare themselves for war in time of peace both by action and by study. Nifo stresses, as does Machiavelli, the value of hunting as military preparation; but, in addition, he alludes to the way in which the ancient Greeks with their Olympiads, and the Romans 22 Cf. Rosello, Il ritratto del vero governo del principe (Venice, 1552), fos. 75v–76. 23 This reference is probably to Aristotle, Politics, VII. 14. xiii; 15. I.

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with their public games, trained for war. In modern times, too, the Swiss and the Germans practised only those sports which would make them more teachable and apt for military activity. At this point Nifo cites a modern Italian example, Vitelozzo Vitelli, who drilled and trained his foot soldiers in peacetime, so that they were prepared, in time of war, to advance on even the most powerful adversaries, and were never seen to turn their back on the enemy. Machiavelli’s account of the value of hunting is again taken up to demonstrate how it teaches the general about different terrains, encampment, modes of attack, and siege work. Nifo follows his source closely although there are several interpolations, including a quick reference to Plato for the view that there is a great similarity between hunting and warfare.24 Machiavelli’s example of Philipomenes, Prince of the Achaeans, is used by Nifo, who precedes it with an interesting modern example of his own acquaintance. Years earlier, Nifo had completed his work on the helionoric figures of the stars while hunting in the Roman forests with Prospero Colonna, the noted condottiere, whom he had then described as most active (‘strenuissimus’).25 Now in the De regnandi peritia, again in the context of hunting, Nifo refers to Prospero Colonna, this time as ‘strenuissimus Dux’ who had only recently provided testimony to the usefulness of hunting when, with inferior forces and contrary to the expectation of many observers, he had gloriously defeated the French at Milan through his knowledge of the terrain and his experience of castrametation. It is ironical that Nifo should describe as ‘most active general’ a leader whose excessive caution earned him the name of ‘Cunctator’. Nevertheless, Prospero certainly had inflicted heavy defeat on Lautrec in the Lombard campaign of 152l–2, and this reference is the most topical in the De regnandi peritia. It shows that Nifo was content neither to translate Machiavelli, nor to adorn his source with classical exempla. On the other hand, Philipomenes’s habit of discussing hypothetical military situations with his friends, as described in Il Principe, does lead Nifo into a digression, only 24 Nifo may have had Plato, Laws, I. 633, in mind although there the idea is simply that hunting is one of various activities designed with war in mind. 25 De figuris stellarum helionoris praeclari libri duo (Naples, 1526), fo. xxxixr–v. See Thorndike, v. 73.

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marginally relevant, on the usefulness of private declamation and debate where, although learnedly referring to the orator Calvus, Nifo in fact transcribes part of the definition of Declamatio from Calepinus’s Dictionary which cites Calvus.26 Nifo bases two chapters in this second book of the De regnandi peritia on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, I. 4. In his chapter on the considerations necessary for those who wish to wage war (II. 9), he fills out Aristotle’s sparse references to military strength and weakness by alluding to the different types of army (native, mercenary, or auxiliary) and to whether troops are effeminate or warlike, novices or veterans. He also emphasizes a prince’s need to understand the problems of his commanders, citing a proverb—that an army composed of sheep but led by a lion is more powerful than an army of lions led by a sheep—which had been in Machiavelli’s own mind when he wrote on a similar issue in the Discorsi, III. 12. Then, at the end of this book, Nifo similarly expands Aristotle’s reference to national defence and the need to know the strength and quality of one’s forces, and the location of fortified places. One ought, says Nifo (II. 18), to know whether the troops are ‘proprii, an mercenarii, vel auxiliares, si experti, si fortes’. Clearly Nifo, generally condemned for having Aristotelized Machiavelli, was not averse to Machiavellizing Aristotle when appropriate. Nifo and Machiavelli’s Moral Problems It is in the third book of the De regnandi peritia—an examination of the techniques whereby both kings and tyrants preserve their territories against rebellion, popular uprisings, and civil commotion— that Nifo first has need to cope with some of the moral problems posed by Machiavelli, who continues to appear anonymously as ‘historians’ who assert or note things. Nifo’s fourteen chapters are based on material contained in Il Principe, 2–10, which are adapted extensively yet selectively; and Nifo is rarely content to translate without some adjustment, addition, or observation. 26 Ambrosius Calepinus, Dictionarium ex optimis quibusque authoribus (Strasburg, 1510), sig. Q4: ‘Declamationem esse domesticam exercitatione Calvus scribit’.

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Moral comment is reserved principally for the nefarious deeds of Cesare Borgia: though Nifo, discussing the ways whereby a new prince may hold down a state accustomed to live freely under its own laws, draws attention to the Roman technique of destruction and enfeeblement which is, he acknowledges, safer than other methods, but also more cruel and savage—‘tutior modus est, licet crudelior, ac truculentior’ (III. 5). Elsewhere, when treating princes who gain power by crime, he renders Machiavelli’s observation that injuries should be done at one blow, whereas benefits should be conferred little by little, very concisely as ‘ut malum totum simul, bonum paulatim fiat’ (III. 8)—but introduces it as a ‘tyrannicum praeceptum’. The rest of Nifo’s adjustments are mainly a matter of supplementary examples and descriptions both ancient and, more commonly, modern. Thus we have not only Caesar representing the elected rulers whose new and oppressive laws result in failure, but also Ferdinand of Aragon (the Catholic)—Charles V’s grandfather— whose recovery of the kingdom of Naples from France demonstrated the ease with which hereditary rulers, provided that they are popular, can reassert lost authority (III. 1). To illustrate the difficulties faced by new rulers, Nifo cites, in addition to Caesar, the career of Ludovico Sforza, the problems of the Venetians in Cyprus, and the deeds of his favourite name-dropee, Prospero Colonna. Following Machiavelli in his analysis of Louis XII’s errors, Nifo adds a citation from Aristophanes, refers to Alexander the Great, and expands Machiavelli’s detail concerning Ferdinand the Catholic (III. 3). On one occasion he cites a saying of Diocletian, misquotes some lines of Ovid en passant (III. 7), and adds Sulla’s activities to those who make acquisitions through crime.27 Considering rulers who obtain ‘civilis dominus’ by a combination of prudence and fortune, Nifo returns to the group of modern Italians who illustrated this genre in his first book, but adds Cosimo de’ Medici, and a reference to the government of Genoa.28 Debating 27 Ovid, Ars Amatoria, II, ll. 13–14: ‘Nec minor est virtus, quam quaerere, parta tueri. / Casus inest illic: hic erit artis opus.’ Nifo (III. 7) quotes this as ‘nec minor (ut Ovidius) virtus est parta tueri quam nova comparare, casus inest illic, hic erit artis opus’. 28 The group first appear in DRP, I. 10.

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the merits of the proverb that he who builds on the people builds on mud, Nifo alludes to Catiline, Caesar, the Aragonese monarchs, and Prospero Colonna; while the dangers which threaten civil authority are illustrated by reference to Caesar and to Dionysius the Younger of Syracuse (III. 13, 14). When dealing with those who gain principalities by taking advantage of opportunity to exercise their virtus, Nifo agrees with Machiavelli that Fortune must first provide that opportunity, and he uses four of Machiavelli’s examples—Romulus, Cyrus, Theseus, and Hiero of Syracuse—avoiding only Moses, whom Machiavelli himself had touched upon with cautious irony. However, in his discussion of Hiero, Nifo recognizes that Machiavelli had not only used Justin but had misquoted him, and he therefore goes back to the classical source, expands his discussion to include references to Hieroclytus and Pyrrhus, and corrects Machiavelli’s ‘quod nihil illi deerat ad regnandum praeter regnum’ (that he lacked nothing but a kingdom to be a king) by transcribing ‘prorus ut nihil ei Regium praeter Regnum deesse viveretur’, which is more accurate, though still not precisely in Justin’s order. This is noteworthy as an instance of Nifo’s tendency, from time to time, to penetrate behind Machiavelli—the sort of thing which, on a more superficial level, is manifested by completing a reference in Il Principe to the ‘duca di Ferrara’ with the name ‘Hercules’ (III. 1). On the other hand, the concluding chapter of Nifo’s third book is interesting as an elaboration of Machiavelli very much in the spirit of Machiavelli himself. Nifo has wandered from his point for, having considered the dangers which threaten ‘civiles Principes’, he moves on to the ways in which they might successfully defend themselves against external enemies. Basing himself on Il Principe, 10, Nifo suggests two methods. The first is for the prince to fortify his town and encourage his people in warlike activity—the technique practised by the German cities on their own behalf. And to those who object that people will not remain steadfast when they see their fields and towns devastated, Nifo replies, with Machiavelli, that the able prince will encourage his subjects. But he transforms the adroitness (‘destrezza’) of Machiavelli’s prince into precise manipulation: by ‘simulated messages, forged letters, and other stratagems always bringing hope of safety and victory to

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the people’. Nifo then proceeds to the second mode of defence, which has been ‘already set forth’: namely the creation of one’s own native army solely dependent upon the prince’s fortune. The Swiss are again the great example, and Nifo repeats his earlier observations on their merit, adding that other modes of defence, such as mercenary or auxiliary troops, are risky and uncertain. Details such as these are indicative of Nifo’s concern to personalize his text. But far more noteworthy is his treatment of Cesare Borgia, who is first considered in a chapter devoted to those who gain power by fortune (III. 7). Machiavelli’s own treatment of Cesare had been unsatisfactory. He had contrasted two modes of acquisition: by virtu` or by fortuna. Those who gain power by the former may experience many tribulations but, once successful, they can be overthrown only with the greatest difficulty. On the other hand, those who rise by fortune alone may certainly enjoy rapid success; but they tend to lose their principalities just as rapidly, unless they have sufficient virtu` to lay those foundations (after coming to power) that others are able to establish in advance. Machiavelli then provided two examples within living memory: Francesco Sforza and Cesare Borgia. Francesco was the man who, by the ‘requisite means and with his own great virtu`’, became Duke of Milan; and that which he acquired with a thousand anxieties he was able to maintain with little trouble. Borgia, however, acquired power through the fortune of his father and lost it in the same way. It is true that Machiavelli did go on to say that Cesare had done everything that could be done by a prudent and virtuoso man to build those foundations afterwards which should have been provided before. But it was to no avail, and Borgia power collapsed through an ‘extraordinary and extreme malignity of fortune’. Nifo simplifies this juxtaposition. For him, both rulers were aided by fortune but, whereas Francesco Sforza secured himself by seconding fortuna with his own virtu` and prudence, Cesare Borgia added only cruelty and crime and, when his father’s fortune failed, he lost his state. This is not, as has been argued by Procacci, diametrically opposite to what Machiavelli said: because it is not correct to argue that Cesare Borgia was for Machiavelli a prince not only fortunate but also ‘prudente e virtuoso’. Machiavelli did try to make it appear so, but his argument was weakly constructed and

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self-contradictory. He subsequently elaborated favourably on Borgia’s methods; but the fact remains that, in the passage under discussion, Machiavelli contrasted not only virtu` with fortuna but also Francesco Sforza with Cesare Borgia—and he cast Francesco unambiguously in the role of the virtuoso. In any case, modern scholarship, in its zeal to defend Il Principe at all costs, has exaggerated both the talent and significance of Cesare Borgia, whose dependence on fortune—in the shape of his papal father and French aid—had been perfectly well assessed by Machiavelli at the time of his legations both to Cesare and to Pope Julius II.29 Nifo, too, had observed Cesare’s career independently and had included a brief account of the young gangster’s crimes in his analysis of the Causes of our Calamities, published in 1505.30 He returns to this subject in the De regnandi peritia, III. 9, which deals with the taming of the Romagna by Ramiro d’Orco and the subsequent execution of Ramiro by his master, Cesare Borgia. It is, however, not clear whether Nifo’s account, which is more elaborate than Machiavelli’s, is merely an imaginative embellishment or is based on an alternative source. Both authors agree that Ramiro was cruel, expedite, effective, and unpopular; and that Cesare determined to eliminate him in order to suggest that Ramiro had been responsible for all injuries. According to Machiavelli, Cesare had set up a central court in the province, under a president, where every city would be represented by an ‘avvocato’. Then, as a separate issue, Machiavelli had observed that Cesare, wishing to demonstrate that the unpopular governmental rigour had not been his doing, had caused Ramiro to be cut into two pieces and displayed in the piazza at Cesena. In Nifo’s De regnandi peritia, Cesare summons to Cesena all the ‘advocati’ whom Ramiro had injured, in order to hear their complaints and to examine thoroughly certain writings—‘Cesenae itaque advocatis omnibus, quos ille iniuria affecerat, auditusque eorum querimoniis, perlictisque libellis’—so that he might make clear to everybody that the cruelty originated with the minister. 29 Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli: A Dissection (1969), 36–42. 30 Euthici Augustini Niphi Philotei Suessani de nostrarum calamitatum causis liber

(Venice, 1505), BNF Re´serve R.107 in fol., ‘Praefatio’, fo. 2r–v.

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Then with his own hand, in the sight of everybody, he ran Ramiro through with a sword. Thereafter, he showed such benevolence to those who remained his subjects that ‘his name is still celebrated up to our own time’. Thus by this trick, when he had destroyed his enemies and reconciled everybody else, he finally secured his principate only to lose it ignominiously when, like Oliverotto, he suffered the vengeance of God. The career of Cesare Borgia poses no problem for political moralists since, though he enjoyed brief worldly success, he soon suffered an unsavoury retribution—‘ulciscente Deo’.31 On the other hand, the central chapters of Il Principe (16–19) are far more perplexing because, in them, Machiavelli deliberately dislocated the political morality of his own and of preceding ages. For centuries, those who had written books of advice for princes had assured their pupils that it was necessary to practise virtues such as liberality, clemency, faithfulness, and so on. Now Machiavelli was telling his ‘new’ prince that such virtues would be admirable were the world an ideal place: but that, since it is not, moral behaviour of this kind can only lead the ruler to ruin. Machiavelli set tradition on its head. His intention was to shock; and Nifo, who had himself recently published a treatise on princes in which conventional values were extolled, could not let this challenge pass unheeded. Nor, since he was determined to write about the skills which rulers gain through practical experience, could he simply reiterate the ancient ideals.

31 Cesare Borgia’s career attracted the attention of poets in a manner quite independent of Machiavelli’s controversial treatment. Very shortly after his death he was the subject of a dull La historia dela morte del duca Valentino (Venice, 1507?). But much more interesting is Le lachrimevoli lamentationi del duca Valentino, figliuolo che fu di Papa Alessandro sesto (Venice, 1543), in which Cesare himself bemoans the unhappy results of his ruthless deeds, recognizing that he has fallen from the heights to the depths, not through the deeds of others but through his own mistake. Cruelty was his ‘prima gloria’; his hands were stained with the blood of his own family; he had driven the Colonna and Orsini from Rome; made himself great with sword and gallows; had raped women and violated sanctuary; despoiled the Church; and had poisoned, drowned, and strangled those who opposed him. Yet, as soon as his father died, fortune overthrew him in an instant.

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Nifo’s and Machiavelli’s Liberality To see in Nifo’s adaptation of this part of Il Principe nothing but a half-hearted moralization of something which he found too hot to handle is to exaggerate both the consistency of Machiavelli and the obtuseness of Nifo. Machiavelli, in setting forth his topsy-turvy catalogue of virtues, plays rhetorical tricks upon his readers; and Nifo should not be condemned for seeing through the hyperbole and perversions of his source. The fourth book of the De regnandi peritia is a revision of conventional political morality, undertaken by Nifo in response to Machiavelli’s violent challenge. It is not a plagiarism of Il Principe. It is a critique. Machiavelli’s basic contention was that, within a realistic political context, the traditional view of virtues and vices must be reversed. Thus the prince will do himself more good and less harm by niggardliness than by liberality; by cruelty than by clemency; by making himself feared rather than loved; and by breaking his word than by keeping faith amidst changing circumstances. Machiavelli did, however, lay great stress upon maintaining the appearance of conventional virtue to facilitate policy and, cautioning the prince to avoid being despised or hated, he briefly analysed the conspiracies hatched against rulers who had failed in this last endeavour. Nifo tackles these issues in the same order as Machiavelli, apart from deferring consideration of oath-breaking till after the question of hatred and conspiracies had been dealt with. Thus he opens his fourth book with a long chapter on liberality, incorporating from Machiavelli’s discussion only a few sentences principally on the modern examples of effective parsimony, Pope Julius II, Louis XII, and Ferdinand (‘your maternal grandfather’ Nifo adds for the benefit of his dedicatee, the Emperor). Princely liberality was a well-worn theme and, in essentials, Machiavelli’s treatment of it differed little from his classical sources. It had always been recognized that, while liberality was a virtue, it could easily degenerate into prodigality which might then force a ruler, intent on maintaining appearances, into becoming increasingly oppressive and demanding. Tacitus had put the matter succinctly: ‘Falluntur, quibus luxuria specie liberalitatis

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imponit’ (those with whom profusion passes for liberality are deceived).32 Machiavelli, by choosing to interpret liberality as something which must, in practice, always degenerate into prodigality, has no difficulty in maintaining that it is better to be parsimonious because, in the long run, it enables a prince to manage his affairs without burdensome taxation. By this simple dialectical device, Machiavelli can offer—under the guise of a shocking originality—a number of trite observations largely culled from Cicero’s De officiis. By contrast, stressing the important distinction which Machiavelli had recognized but chose to gloss over, Nifo notes two sorts of liberality: one as understood by the multitude but which, in reality, was nothing but prodigality; the other as comprehended by wise men, and which was fully discussed in Aristotle’s Ethics.33 Nifo’s chapter is built upon the contrasting vices, avaritia and luxuria, which, according to Livy (Decades, XXXIV. 4), were the two plagues which destroy all kingdoms. However, Nifo argues, by luxuria Livy did not understand immoderate debauchery, but rather prodigalitas, which is the liberality of the mob (vulgaris liberalitas). It is precisely this false virtue which drives princes to despoil their people; to become despised as indigent; and to become rapacious and robbers of their subjects. Some modern rulers who erred in this respect are Alphonso of Aragon, Virginio Orsini, and Fabrizio Colonna. The truly liberal prince will avoid such depradations and will, even when unable to be actively generous, attempt to gain good will by kindness. Cyrus is one ancient example of such a ruler; while a modern instance, with whom Nifo ends the chapter, is Prospero Colonna, who is especially skilled in this type of liberality and thereby has protected his subjects ‘even up to the present day’—though, in fact, this was not for much longer since Prospero died at the end of 1523. In the latter half of the sixteenth chapter of Il Principe, Machiavelli raised two possible objections to his own argument on the advantages of meanness. What, he asked, if someone were to 32 Tacitus, Histories, I. 30. 33 Nifo here alludes to his earlier work on the behaviour of the best princes (Libellus, ch. 18), where this point had been discussed. Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, IV. 1.

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point out that Caesar and others had gained power by the exercise of liberality? Or that there had been princes, highly successful with their armies, who had been deemed ‘most liberal’? In the first place, he replied, it is necessary to observe that liberality may be employed either to obtain power or to maintain it. Caesar had been successful on his way up, but would have destroyed his own authority had he long continued in the same lavish vein. Similarly, there is a distinction between liberality with one’s own resources and with resources taken from others. The former is harmful because, says Machiavelli—in words wrested from Cicero who had not, in fact, condoned making free with others’ belongings— ‘there is nothing which so consumes itself as liberality, for while you exercise it, you lose the power to do so’ (‘non ci e` cosa che consumi se stessa quanto la liberalita`; la quale mentre che tu usi, perdi la faculta` di usarla’).34 On the other hand, that prince acts wisely who is generous to his soldiers with the spoils of war—‘of that which is neither your own, nor your subjects’, you can be a bountiful giver’. All this Nifo accepts without a qualm.35 His only additions are to gloss Caesar’s putative fate—had he continued to be lavish—by referring to Nero; and to render Machiavelli’s ‘respondo’ with his customary royal ‘respondemus’ (De regnandi peritia, IV. 2). Cruelty, Clemency, Love, and Fear Machiavelli’s drastic revaluation of the relative merits of cruelty, clemency, love, and fear (Il Principe, 16, 17) next occupies Nifo, who divides the material into four chapters: the value of cruelty in the preservation of a principate; whether it is better for the prince to be feared or loved; the example of Hannibal and Scipio; and the question whether it is possible for a prince to be feared without being hated. Here, Nifo sometimes translates sentences directly from Il Principe, and sometimes paraphrases them; but, more often, he plays with these ideas in an attempt to offer a better 34 Cf. Cicero, De officiis, II. 15. 35 ‘Debet ergo & qui ad principatum aspirat, & qui in bellis a militibus beniuolentiam captare velit, liberalitate splendere, non ea omnino elargiendo, quae sua sunt, aut subditorum, sed quae ex praeda lucratur.’

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balanced, if less dynamic, evaluation than Machiavelli. Thus his discussion of cruelty and clemency weighs two views: the conventional one which favours the latter, and the opinion of ‘some’ (nonulli)—that is Machiavelli—to whom cruelty seems more efficacious. To substantiate the latter position, Nifo cites Cesare Borgia’s successful reduction of the Romagna; replaces Machiavelli’s reference to the harmful clemency of the Florentines in relation to Pistoia with a similar failure in the kingdom of Naples; translates Machiavelli’s opinion that the dangers which face new princes necessitate the use of cruelty; and cites the identical lines of the Aeneid in which Dido excuses the inhumanity of her reign. Nifo then largely abandons his source, offering two further ancient examples—Cambyses and Sulla—of the practical advantages of cruelty, before moving on to the opposite viewpoint with instances of politically effective clemency. He also distinguishes between plain cruelty and rigorous justice. The latter he regards as valuable, and expedient even when applied to those who have not themselves committed any crime but may cause political unrest—and here Nifo refers to the Greek use of ostracism against those so suspected. It is important, he continues, to consider the nature of the principate, for in some places peace can only be secured by cruelty whereas in others such procedure would be calamitous. Therefore both cruelty and clemency can be useful to the prince, provided that each is regulated by prudence and plain reason. At this point Nifo returns to Machiavelli. Clemency, arising from excessive trust, makes the prince careless and contemptible; cruelty, arising from excessive distrust, renders the prince intolerable. A balanced position is required; and Nifo concludes by combining this Machiavellism with a cynically pious reminder that God is called by holy men a ‘compassionate and just lord’, and that compassion is here placed before justice.36 The rival advantages gained by princes through being feared or loved are dealt with in similar fashion by Nifo, who gives first the view of nonulli, that it is far safer for a ruler to be feared. This 36 Machiavelli had himself been troubled by this point, and in the Discorsi, III. 22, he gave a view of clemency in a prince very different from that advanced in Il Principe, 17.

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would not be the case if all men were good and agreeable; but, since evil predominates, they are moved more by dread of punishment than by a sense of obligation for benefits rendered. Nifo adapts Machiavelli’s statement on this issue (Il Principe, 17), but slips in a sentence from the following chapter to round out the idea of flawed human nature.37 However, he glosses the argument with a wellknown classical tag, Oderint dum metuant—‘Let them hate me so long as they fear me’—which is not what Machiavelli counselled.38 On the contrary, he had stressed that the prince should always try to avoid being hated: though, as critics have frequently remarked, it is difficult to see how anyone acting in the manner suggested in Il Principe could possibly achieve this. Nifo adds to his mixture the example of Sulla (who had inspired both love and fear with excessive benefits to his friends and fierce punishment for his enemies) before making his own essential distinction between the practice of a king and that of a tyrant. For the latter, fear is the more potent weapon; whereas the love of his subjects, gained by benevolence, is more natural in a king. Unfortunately, Nifo then proceeds to cloud the issue by describing two kinds of love—one innate, such as the love of God; the other voluntary, such as the love of agreeable things—so that, on this view, we are moved to love a good king by natural compulsion but only esteem a tyrant if he bestows benefits. The difficulty is that, since Nifo has only just mentioned that kings win love through benevolence, the essential distinction between king and tyrant remains obscure. Like Machiavelli, Nifo not only attributes Hannibal’s success in retaining unity within a heterogeneous army to cruelty, but also attributes Scipio’s failure to prevent sedition in an homogeneous army to benevolence. Machiavelli had concluded that, since men love according to their own will but fear according to that of the ruler, a ‘wise prince’ should build upon that which is his own rather upon that which belongs to others. The idea is borrowed by Nifo with only one alteration: the ‘principe savio’ becomes 37 DRP, IV. 4. 38 Oderint dum metuant: Suetonius, Caligula, 30; Cicero; Seneca, etc. See Burton Stevenson, Stevenson’s Book of Quotations Classical and Modern, 3rd edn. (1937), under ‘Hate’, p. 867, col. 2.

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‘tyrannus’. This still leaves unresolved the problem raised by Machiavelli (Il Principe, 17) when, in pursuing this policy of being feared rather than loved, the prince must avoid being hated and can achieve this simply by abstaining from the property and womenfolk of his subjects. Machiavelli’s treatment was unsatisfactory, and Nifo devotes a short chapter (IV. 6) to this knotty problem. Can a prince be feared without incurring hatred? At first sight this may seem impossible: yet we have the example of God who, though feared by all, is hated by no one; and of sons who may fear their father without hating him. So it is possible, as in these examples, to feel both fear and love simultaneously. Equally one may experience fear unaccompanied by other emotions, as is the case with a flash of lightning; or experience both fear and hatred, as for a formidable enemy. Here Nifo returns to Machiavelli and the case of a prince who may inspire fear without hatred simply by acting mercilessly while yet refraining from injuring his subjects and their property, and by acting always according to law and reason. Such a ruler will not be loved, because he does not provide his people with the benefits which promote affection; he will not be hated, because he does nothing hateful; but he will be feared, because he is implacable towards malefactors. This is an interesting attempt by Nifo to meet the various objections to Machiavelli’s strategy but, like Machiavelli, he founders upon the rock of his own gloomy view of human nature. Stern, uncompromising rulers, however strictly they remain within the law, tend to be hated by an unappreciative and peccant populace. Machiavelli had considered the ways whereby princes incur hatred, and had listed these at the beginning of Il Principe, 19, together with the qualities which make them despised—fickleness, frivolity, effeminacy, pusillanimity, and irresolution—before discussing conspiracies and the way in which various rulers, especially Roman emperors, had met their deaths. Nifo divides the material into several chapters: the cause of conspiracies and the extent to which they should be feared or disregarded, with special reference to the Bentivogli of Bologna (IV. 7); the value of the French parlement in keeping both people and nobles loyal to the Crown (IV. 8); the reason why several Roman emperors met violent ends,

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despite their benevolence (IV. 9); and how princes might avoid assassination (IV. 10). In these chapters, on the whole, he preserves both Machiavelli’s ideas and words, though rearranged so that each chapter can end with a suitable aphorism. He also expands the classical information, especially concerning the death of Alexander Severus, and enlarges upon the impossibility of avoiding a dedicated, single-handed assassin. Here he cites two examples: Mutius Scaevola’s attempt on the life of the Etruscan king; and the modern parallel when Galeazzo Sforza was murdered in church during the sacred service.39 Further Moral Problems Nifo now (IV. 11) returns to the difficult eighteenth chapter of Il Principe and the problem of oaths and oath-breaking, which he introduces with some classical examples. Leaders such as Hannibal, Hamilcar, almost all the Africans, and Ptolomaeus Ceraunus, achieved greatness despite habitually breaking their word. Some historical writers, says Nifo, assert that there are two modes of combat: by force of arms, which appertains to beasts; and by laws and reason, proper to man. Unfortunately, the latter mode does not always suffice, so that the wise ruler must also know how to use bestial methods when required. Machiavelli’s reference to the education of Achilles by Chiron the centaur is repeated in the De regnandi peritia, as is Machiavelli’s gloss that the story indicates the need to act both as man and beast, to observe or violate faith, as circumstances demand. Nifo’s only addition is a shameless, ‘ut ego quidem interpretor’ (‘as I indeed interpret it’). Bestial behaviour would not be necessary were all one’s allies reliable; but, since the majority of men are evil and faithless, the prince will find himself constrained to break his word. Thus far Nifo follows Machiavelli. But he then asks a further question. To what extent may a tyrant carry out the kingly office, which is to speak the truth and to honour one’s promises? Apollonius is cited 39 Galeazzo Sforza was killed on his way into the church of Santo Stefano at Christmas 1476. This murder is referred to by Machiavelli in his chapter on conspiracies in the Discorsi, III. 6, and is discussed at greater length in the Istorie fiorentine, VII. 34–5.

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to the effect that lying is for slaves not free men; and Nifo points out that, according to Herodotus, even the Persians deemed lying unworthy of a king. Moreover, once the tyrant has been detected in falsehood how can he win other allies without whom he can scarcely preserve his kingdom? This is a good question—debated to the present day by students of Machiavelli—and Nifo was the first to pose it. The answer, says Nifo—‘as they say’—is that a tyrant may seem to act as a king if he simulates good faith; gives public assurances that he will observe religion in all things; punishes those who despise keeping faith; and acts like a zealot for truth, a defender of justice, and an enemy of undue severity. If he simulates in this way, the tyrant will be regarded as honest by the ignorant multitude, and his fraud will only be detected by the wise, who are very few in number. ‘I can tell you’, writes Nifo, once again assuming his Machiavellian mantle, ‘which kings and potentates, within our own memory and that of our fathers, have commonly been esteemed great and just by breaking treaties and violating the law; but I pass it over out of respect’. This was prudent, since the king in Machiavelli’s mind—and therefore presumably in Nifo’s—was Ferdinand of Aragon, grandfather to Nifo’s dedicatee. Nifo elaborates on Machiavelli’s concise statement that everyone sees what you seem to be, but few really know what you are. Simulation is a sensory matter, whereas truth is intellectual, and the vulgar herd, who are stirred more by the senses than by the intellect, are thus moved by appearances rather than by understanding—‘magis oculis quam mente’. Machiavelli had argued that it was necessary for the new prince to appear to have all the conventional moral virtues and, indeed, to practise them when it was safe to do so, but that he should also be able to act immorally ‘per mantenere lo stato’. Nifo is less explicit and far more cautious. In his opinion the tyrant ought to keep faith in most cases, and should only violate his oath on those very rare occasions when reason of state demands it—‘regnandi causa’—for if the tyrant does perjure himself, witnesses will never be lacking because, as Pliny observes, there is no lie so impudent that it passes unnoticed.40 40 Pliny, Nat. Hist., VIII. 34.

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At this point Nifo slides unobtrusively from Machiavelli’s Il Principe into Cicero’s De officiis, stressing that the Romans used to maintain that an oath was a religious affirmation witnessed by God and should, therefore, always be observed, and citing Cicero’s examples of keeping faith, even when this had involved supreme sacrifice.41 Moral philosophers, adds Nifo, do concede that princes may employ ambush or treachery (insidias) in just wars, provided that they do not break their word. In very difficult circumstances, Sertorius tricked his own soldiers, and Caesar himself, as Cicero testifies (De officiis, I. 8), maintained that the law might be broken, ‘regnandi causa’: though Nifo concludes lamely that Caesar’s dictum was tyrannical whereas Regulus’ action, in submitting to torture and death rather than break his promise, was religious and regal. Reputation In Il Principe, 21, Machiavelli had examined the ways whereby princes gained renown. The foremost of these was the achievement of great enterprises and acting in such a fashion as to be always remarkable. The prince should always be an outright friend or downright enemy and should never sit on the fence. He should appear as an admirer of ability and as one who rewards excellence. He should encourage commerce and agriculture. In addition, he should provide public shows to entertain his people but, while setting an example of ‘umanita` e di munificenza’, he must always maintain his dignity. Characteristically, Machiavelli devotes unequal space to these methods: making much of great enterprises; providing a miniature treatise on the dangers of neutrality; and cramming the rest into one short paragraph. Equally characteristic is Nifo’s treatment (IV. 12, 13). He divides his subject into four categories (derived from Aristotle, though with some relation to Machiavelli); reinterprets Machiavelli’s idea of neutrality, while reserving fuller discussion of this topic for the next chapter; ignores the idea of public shows altogether; but greatly expands other suggestions only touched upon in Il Principe. Also characteristic is the veil of ambiguity which Nifo casts over everything he writes. 41 Cf. Cicero, De officiis, I. 13; III. 29, 32.

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For the first method of gaining eminence, Nifo follows Machiavelli in discussing great deeds and in exemplifying these by Ferdinand of Aragon’s rise from insignificance to power, his conquest of Granada, and his hegemony over the whole of Spain. But whereas Machiavelli describes these actions as ‘extraordinary’, Nifo calls them ‘grandia facinora’—that pregnant term already encountered in his opening address to Charles V. Facinora was only rarely used to indicate deeds in general. Normally the word indicated crimes, and to qualify facinora merely as ‘great’ leaves their morality conveniently undefined. Nor is that the end of Nifo’s tricky treatment of Ferdinand. Machiavelli himself had been explicit for he described Ferdinand’s handling of the Marrani as ‘making use of religion’ and ‘pious cruelty’, and described the invasion of Africa as being ‘under the same cloak’. Nifo is more circumspect, commenting that, in his actions, Ferdinand omitted nothing which would ‘seem religious’—‘nihil quod religiosum videretur, praetermisit’. This may not be as outspoken as Machiavelli: but it is a vast distance from the ‘eulogy and panegyric’ detected here by one modern reader of the De regnandi peritia.42 Subsequently Machiavelli had launched into a long disquisition on the dangers of neutrality; but Nifo twists the argument to fit his second requisite for princely fame, which is for the ruler to be firm of faith. Like Machiavelli, he urges the prince to be either a true friend or a declared enemy, and he condemns neutrality as a mark of timidity which is usually disastrous. Unlike Machiavelli, who forgot that he had earlier advocated keeping treaties only when they are advantageous, Nifo more logically stresses that, to have the reputation of a good ally, it is vital to observe agreements. This is not conventional morality. It is common sense. Nifo is certainly prepared for his prince to transcend the ethical norms when occasion demands. This is made clear in the third mode of behaviour necessary for a great reputation: rerum honestarum ostentatio, & subditorum cura. Again Nifo’s choice of words is significant. Care of the prince’s subjects is a genuine concern which Nifo explains as promoting trade, agriculture, and commerce.

42 Procacci (1965), 24.

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By contrast, when it comes to honourable conduct it is only the ‘outward show’ (ostentatio) that matters. Machiavelli had said simply that the prince should show himself a lover of virtu`, giving shelter to virtuosi, and honouring those who excel in any art. Nifo says much the same, but draws attention to the artifice of the prince’s patronage by preceding it with ‘ostentatio quidem’, and by citing Dionysius the Younger, who often used to remark that he supported learned men not because he admired them but because he wished to be admired by others for their sake. This was not groundless, remarks Nifo, for a prince is generally considered to have as much wit as those with whom he is in constant companionship. He then cites Euripides to the effect that tyrants are made wise by familiarity with wise men; adding that, in his own time, the Florentine tyrant Lorenzo de’ Medici always had famous men about him, almost as attendant sycophants (‘quasi continuos asseclas’).43 Another effective cover is zeal for religion. Nothing renders a prince more worthy of respect. And antiquity regarded leaders such as Numa Pompilius, Hercules, Alexander, and Aeneas, who enriched religious worship, not only as worthy of praise, but numbered them amongst the gods. Nifo’s last mode of gaining reputation is facilitas: that is affability and approachability. This was not mentioned by Machiavelli, but Nifo feels that nothing is more agreeable to the people than that their ruler should always be ready to hear their complaints; and he cites the story of a jester who declared that he would sooner serve a blind master than a deaf one, because it mattered less for his deeds to pass unobserved than for his words to go unheeded. One ancient and one modern example serve to illustrate the value of facilitas. Philip of Macedon subdued more people with affability than by force of arms; while Ferdinand I, King of Naples, gained power by the exercise of easy and pleasant manners, never failing to appear, in all things, as a guardian and father—smiling, modest, and never harsh or bitter. A prince ought, therefore, to be easy-mannered, though never to the extent that he becomes contemptible, as did 43 The saying concerning familiarity with wise men is attributed by Sophocles, Plato, and then Nifo, to Euripides. Burton Stevenson, Stevenson’s Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Familiar Phrases (1949), 2405, no. 3.

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Commodus, who participated in public gladiatorial exhibitions and was despised by everybody.44 Nifo next asks whether a prince should, when discord arises between other states, declare himself for one side or remain uncommitted (IV. 13). Machiavelli’s own discussion of this topic was not one of his happier performances. He began by arguing that it is always more useful, when two of your powerful neighbours came to blows, to make a positive declaration of amity or enmity. Neutrality offers only two possibilities. The first is that, if the victor is very powerful, you will invariably fall prey to him because you did not offer support in time of need. The Achaeans, for example, who were requested by Antiochus to remain neutral in his projected war against Rome, were warned by the Roman envoy that such neutrality would leave them at the mercy of whichever side proved victorious. Machiavelli further suggested that, even when the victorious party is powerful enough to have you at his mercy, there will be a bond of amity between you if you have declared for him; and ‘men are never so dishonest that they will oppress you with a display of ingratitude’. This was an odd sentiment from the self-proclaimed realist who had just turned conventional morality upside down: but worse silliness was to follow. Victories, Machiavelli continued, are never so decisive that the victor can show no consideration, especially to justice. Even if your ally loses, you will be sheltered by him and you become companions in a fortune which may rise again—two vapid reassurances which Machiavelli leaves unexplained. The second possible result of neutrality, in Machiavelli’s view, occurs when neither of the combatants is sufficiently powerful to worry you, even when one of them triumphs. Here it is especially prudent to take one side and thereby assist in the destruction of the other; for then the victor, who could not have succeeded without your help, remains at your discretion. Conversely, Machiavelli argued, except under necessity a prince should never make an alliance with one more powerful than himself in order to attack others, because he will then remain the victor’s prisoner. An example of this was the Venetian alliance with the King of France 44 On the contemptible Commodus, cf. Il Principe, 19.

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against the Duke of Milan, which eventually led to the republic’s ruin. On the other hand, when such a combination cannot be avoided (as happened to the Florentines when the Pope and Spain attacked Lombardy) then the prince must choose one side or the other. Finally, Machiavelli declares that no polity can constantly play safe. Doubtful courses are inevitable; trying to avoid one danger leads to another; and prudence consists in judging these and choosing the lesser evil. This treatment could scarcely be less satisfactory. Apart from the simplistic trust in the prince’s good will which (as Machiavelli had already assured us) is worthless, there is nothing to indicate that the Venetians really acted more unwisely or less under constraint than did the Florentines. The caveat about not allying with a stronger power against a weaker flatly contradicts the exhortation to declare oneself. Nor is it clear how a ruler can remain uncommitted when aid is demanded by an extremely powerful state against one of the prince’s own enemies. Nifo pursues the question of neutrality, and resolves the difficulties by making the greater part of his chapter a commentary on the Roman envoy’s warning to the Achaeans, from which he derives his principal dictum that failing to take sides is dangerous and, for the most part, fallacious.45 For Nifo, the Venetians are yet another instance of the perils of neutrality for, in his opinion, they did not ally themselves with France but simply ‘permitted’ Louis XII to overthrow Ludovico Sforza. They tried to play safe. And not long afterwards, he says, they fell prey to the victor when the French defeated them at the River Adda: that is at the Battle of Agnadello. But Nifo, too, is at fault. It is not true that the Venetians refused to take sides against Ludovico Sforza, for they signed a treaty of alliance with France, promising financial and other support in return for a large piece of Milanese territory which they duly received. It is no more clear in Nifo than in Machiavelli either that the Venetians had much choice in the matter or that their mauling at Agnadello, ten years later, resulted directly from this misalliance with France. 45 Curiously, although Nifo refers back to Machiavelli’s source for the Achaeans (that is to Livy XXXV. 49), he actually quotes it rather less accurately.

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Nifo tampers with history simply to retain an appearance of dialectical consistency before ending the chapter with a very curious, tangential observation. He is convinced that neutrality in the face of armed conflict is a hazardous course, and he argues the case less equivocally than Machiavelli: but it raises in his mind the whole question of taking sides, both in external and internal disputes. In the latter case, is neutrality invariably harmful? Nifo thinks not, and he takes as his example Solon, the famous legislator, called to office to resolve the strife between the upper and lower classes of Athens, and who resisted the blandishments and threats of both parties. He might have made himself a despot by siding with one or the other faction; but he steadfastly refused, and tried always to maintain a balance between them. He sought concord; and it was advantageous to the state that he proved so brilliant at resolving contradictions and discords. His neutrality was intended not for the sake of war but for peace. The next chapter of the De regnandi peritia (IV. 14) is an adaptation of some remarks made by Machiavelli concerning how the quality of a ruler may be judged by the quality of those whom he chooses as servants. There are three types of intellect, according to Machiavelli: those who understand for themselves; those who can grasp what others comprehend; and those who understand neither by themselves nor with the aid of others. All of this Nifo repeats in portentous style, adding a saying of Cyrus and some lines from Hesiod, via Aristotle, which were probably the source for Machiavelli’s own observations.46 This is tepid fare: but Nifo does better (IV. 15) when he considers the qualities requisite in an adviser to princes and tackles the much more thorny problem of whether rulers should ever correct an error by revising orders, or should regard their decisions as immutable. Here Nifo borrows only two short sentences from Machiavelli, who had said little on these topics. For Nifo, however, the questions seem so crucial that they demand the longest chapter in his treatise.47 A king’s councillor, he suggests, should be prudent and not only knowledgeable in history, but also experienced in all 46 Hesiod, Works and Days, 293, cited by Aristotle Nic. Ethics, I. 4. 47 Only the Proemium of Book V is longer than this chapter.

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practical affairs. His task is threefold: first to investigate a problem; then to judge the merits of possible courses of action; and finally to offer advice. He should be devoted to his master, so that his counsel will be for the benefit both of prince and people. Here Nifo slips in a trite fragment of Il Principe to the effect that the prince should never trust advisers who think only of their own advantage; adding that they should be men famous for virtue and moral purity (‘virtute ac sanctimonia’), because wicked councillors lead the prince into danger.48 Therefore, the prince must enjoin his advisers to speak only the truth, even when it seems contrary to his opinion. None the less, it is not good for the prudence of the prince to derive from his council. Rather the council should derive from the prudence of the prince. This is the same sentiment with which Machiavelli had concluded his chapter on flatterers: but Nifo attributes it to Chilon, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece, and adds that decisions which stem from a prince’s own wisdom are firm with the force of law, whereas those which proceed from the councillors’ prudence are dangerous and unstable. Decisions should be taken only after thorough discussion, and Nifo emphasizes the importance of total secrecy until orders have been issued for executive action. If they are revealed before action has been taken, it becomes necessary to change them, and this is extremely harmful to the reputation of a prince. The whole question of changing policies, and the effect that this may have on the ruler’s authority, prompts Nifo into some of his most striking personal reflections. Kings, he boldly declares, must first take advice, then carefully deliberate, and finally put their decisions into effect ‘unalterably’—‘demum deliberata immutabiliter executioni mandare’ (IV. 15). ‘Mutability in deliberations’, he continues, citing Socrates, ‘displays want of foresight and the worthlessness both of counsellors and of the prince.’ Yet, supposing that, despite the utmost care, an error is made. Should the prince, knowing his mistake, revoke a decision? Some feel that, having taken every care in consultation, kings cannot err: but, to Nifo, this is no answer, for the hypothesis is that, even after 48 In Il Principe, 22, Machiavelli writes, ‘Quando tu vedi el ministro pensare piu` a se` che a te etc.’

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such consultation, they have indeed erred. Others argue that the king must revoke his order, for it is human to err and stupid to persist in a mistake. However, the problem remains that changing a policy may greatly vitiate regal authority. To illustrate this difficulty Nifo postulates the case of a nobleman who injures someone, but avoids giving satisfaction to the injured party in order not to blemish his own nobility. This, says Nifo, is for no other reason than because the nobleman considers mutability a dishonour. How much less, therefore, ought a king revoke his commands once they have been issued; and this is why some maintain that royal commands—just or unjust—should never be rescinded. Another approach to this problem is to concede that kings may rescind a command provided that they do not yield to persuasion. Instead, having allowed a sufficient time to elapse, they should pretend that certain new contingencies have arisen and blame these for any changes of policy. Ways are never lacking whereby princes are able to shift their ground while yet preserving authority. Nifo now summarizes his own position again. It is magnanimous and regal not to revoke orders issued after due deliberation, nor to yield to the arguments of those amongst whom the prince’s authority should be strong. On the other hand, it is pious and religious to rescind commands which are unjust and evil. This is a notable instance of Nifo’s trickiness for, since he has already established that the ruler must never yield to persuasion, who—apart from the prince himself—can ever determine the justice of his actions? The depravity of the princes of his own day, laments Nifo, is patent. Their councillors are neither philosophers nor jurisconsults. Nor are they noted for prudence, virtue, and benevolence. On the contrary, they are crooked, lack practical experience, and are concerned only with their own prerogatives. Villains, especially those greedy for money and advancement, can never be good advisers. A knowledge both of history and practical affairs is of paramount importance. Indeed, without these skills councillors are useless; and Nifo pours scorn on those who spend their lives studying commentaries by jurists such as Bartolus and Baldus, and who foolishly believe that these contain everything they need to know. Nifo’s independence of thought is even more surprising in his next chapter (IV. 16), which deals not merely with the avoidance of

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flatterers—which Machiavelli had discussed in Il Principe—but also with the ways in which flatterers might be useful to a prince. This is a great question, says Nifo. Should flatterers be permitted or should they be utterly eschewed? From one point of view they seem necessary. If men may speak freely in the presence of a prince and even contradict him, then the ruler’s authority is diminished. On the other hand, if he is advised only by flatterers then he may never perceive his errors. This is Nifo’s cue for a selection of apophthegms on the evils of sycophancy: Quintus Curtius on princes being more frequently overthrown by flatterers than by enemies; a similitude between crows devouring the eyes of corpses and flatterers blinding the living; and Demosthenes on the preferability of falling among crows who only eat the dead, to falling among flatterers who consume the living. Flatterers praise what is reprehensible, and blame what is praiseworthy. They say whatever is pleasing to a prince, clinging to him like a shadow, and laughing dutifully at his jokes. It may, therefore, seem obvious that such creatures should be excluded from a prince’s secret councils. Nevertheless, writes Nifo, once the prince has deliberated and has made a decision, then he should allow no one into his presence but flatterers. His decisions must be regarded as laws; and those who oppose them must be recognized as enemies detracting from his majesty. A ruler who wishes to maintain authority will never allow anyone to proffer advice uninvited. Thus flatterers, who praise their prince’s decisions, advance his authority. They show his subjects what they should believe. Nifo’s views on the value of yes-men are unusual and, some years later, in De re aulica, he developed his ideas on sycophancy not from the standpoint of the ruler’s advantage but rather from that of the toady himself. Writers from classical times to Machiavelli had inveighed against sycophants: yet Nifo can see practical merit in such public-relations officers who market politicians and policies regardless of their intrinsic worth or worthlessness. It sounds more modern than Machiavelli’s moralistic injunctions; and it is certainly more cynical. After this novelty, Nifo provides an anticlimactic final chapter to his fourth book. Returning to its opening theme of liberality and parsimony, he considers princely magnificence, observing that,

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while princes should certainly live splendidly, they should not carry such splendour to excess. Without magnificence princes appear niggardly; but if their lifestyle becomes extravagant and degenerates into debauched luxury, then their authority is jeopardized. Nifo again cites Livy to the effect that luxury and avarice are the two plagues which overturn states; refers to classical examples both of sumptuary laws and of the self-indulgence which had led to the assassinations of Nero, Caligula, Vitellius, and Commodus; and concludes with Aesop’s fable of the birds, when the peacock’s demand that he be elected king because of his beautiful raiment was countered by the jackdaw’s asking how he would help his subjects against a hostile eagle. Thus princes should be chosen not for outward appearance, but for fortitude and prudence. And with this platitude Nifo ends Book IV. ‘Honourable Methods’ of Government? The fifth, and final, book of the De regnandi peritia, professing to treat of ‘honourable methods’ of government, has always been regarded as Nifo’s pious ‘antidote’ to the preceding four books of poison. But, as we have seen from the opening address to Charles V, this is not so; and the falsity of this interpretation becomes even more apparent when the book itself is scrutinized. It begins with a vigorous preface concerning the rarity of absolute purity in princes who are, by their very position, exposed to forces of corruption far more powerful than those which assail ordinary citizens. Yet the desire to rule and to excel others is as natural as the desire for food, drink, and—typical of Nifo—for sexual love. Just as the latter appetites only become criminal when they are directed towards voluptuousness, so it is with political power when it is exercised beyond reason. A king may become a tyrant if he rules tyrannically: but, conversely, a tyrant may become a king if he changes tyrannical into kingly rule. The line between virtue and vice is, for Nifo, difficult to draw. One may easily shade into the other. Princes are born virtuous, but become evil if they govern badly, and Nifo can name only a few who always exercised their power honourably. And, very significantly, they are all ancients.

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The rest of this fifth book, comprising six brief chapters, distinguishes between rulers by succession, by just and unjust election, and those who have gained power by some extraordinary means; and it continues with a statement of the best education for princes, the model for which is to be found among the ancients. In Nifo’s opinion, the education of modern rulers is worthless, laughable, and trivial so that no one should be astonished if kings nowadays are most pernicious—‘Quaere nemo mirari debet, si Reges hodie sceleratissimi sint’ (V. 4). They should, therefore, devote no less attention to the education of their sons than the husbandman pays to the cultivation of crops and plants. The book then ends suddenly with two very strange chapters. ‘We now’, says Nifo, ‘expound the end of tyrants’: and he does simply that, listing a number of nasty obits with scarcely a critical comment. Finally, in contrast, comes the fate of the honourable king: respect, glory, fame, and eternal life. Here Strabo, Homer, and Isocrates, as well as Aristotle, are referred to; but Nifo, it seems, can think of no honourable modern princes, and the only ruler mentioned is Demetrius Phalareus, whose contempt for the statues erected to him by the Athenians is cited with approval, but whose misrule, exile, and death by snakebite are not alluded to. Nifo’s fifth book is a statement of the utmost cynicism. Its very platitudes, as elsewhere in this author’s oeuvre, turn out to be largely tongue in cheek; and it is nonsense to interpret this concluding section as some kind of alternative ‘moral’ strategy for the political activist. In fact, it offers no practical advice whatever. Its references are principally to classical philosophers. And it is totally divorced from Regnandi peritia—that is from practical government. It has, therefore, nothing to do with Nifo’s real subject matter other than to demonstrate, for those who take the trouble to think about what he says, that this ‘honourable type of rule’ is rarely related to ancient exemplars and never to modern. Conversely, for those who do not bother to think about it, Nifo has piously cleansed himself of all taint of worldly corruption.49 49 Nifo’s slipperiness and cynicism is underscored by his next work on politics, Augustini Niphi de Medicis philosophi suessani libellus de rege et tyranno (Naples, 1526); ed. Naude´, in Opuscula, 151–239. This is ostensibly a straightforward contrast between the activities and qualities of a tyrant and those of a king.

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a p o s t s c r i p t . il principe at third h and That Nifo’s unauthorized use of Machiavelli’s Il Principe did not go unnoticed is evident from the letter dated 8 May 1532 prefixed by Bernardo di Giunta to his edition of Il Principe. Addressing himself to Giovanni Gaddi of the Apostolic Camera, Giunta specifically requested the cleric’s protection for Machiavelli’s book against those who had translated it into Latin and had published it as their own work. This could only be a complaint against Nifo who, two decades later, was repaid in his own coin when in 1552 the Paduan jurist and poet Lucio Paolo Rosello published Il ritratto del vero governo del principe dall’essempio vivo del gran Cosimo de’ Medici and dedicated it to Cosimo’s eldest son, Francesco (then about fifteen years of age) in order to show how his father, the Duke of Florence, exemplified everything that a prince should be.50 In course of time, Francesco came to exemplify most of the things that a prince should not be: but that is another story. Rosello has long held a tenuous place in history by dint of being a correspondent of Melanchthon and an Italian supporter of the Reformation; but he merits greater recognition for his sheer effrontery. By comparison, Nifo (his victim) seems positively bashful. The Ritratto is divided into three parts: first a dialogue concerning the providence and prudence necessary for princes both in the government and the conservation of their states; then Some of the material in the first part (on the tyrant) overlaps that discussed in the De regnandi peritia: but the differences are more striking than the similarities and most of the section is derived from Aristotelian treatments of tyranny including a discussion of whether one may kill a tyrant ‘impune’. It is, however, worth noting that, whereas the forty-three chapters on the tyrant include (in addition to all the customary classical examples) several references to modern rulers, the section on the king has only one passing contemporary reference (to the poor quality of the successors of Francesco Sforza). Once again it seems that Nifo could not think of modern examples to illustrate good kingship. 50 On Rosello, see Tommaso Bozza, Scrittori politici italiani dal 1550 al 1650: saggio di bibliografia (Rome, 1949), 33; Andrea Del Col, ‘Lucio Paolo Rosello e la vita religiosa veneziana verso la meta` del secolo XVI’, Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia, 32 (1978), 422–59; Thomas M’Crie, History of the Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Italy in the Sixteenth Century (Edinburgh and London, 1832), 120–2; Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press 1540–1605 (Princeton, 1977), 102, 107.

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a discussion of the relative merits of arms and letters; and finally a translation from the Greek of two orations addressed by Isocrates to Nicocles King of Cyprus. Whether through pride in his translation from the Greek, or because he recognized the hopelessness of trying to pass off a classical text as his own creation, Rosello dutifully acknowledges Isocrates as the author of his third section. Elsewhere, however, he is less scrupulous and it is only close scrutiny which reveals that his Ragionamento primo is essentially a translation of large parts of the fourth and fifth books of Nifo’s De regnandi peritia: eked out with sections from other parts of the same work, together with linking passages of dialogue and some deft toadyism directed at Cosimo, Duke of Florence.51 Moreover, the Ragionamento secondo is virtually a complete Italian rendition of Nifo’s treatise on the relative importance of arms and letters, followed by further substantial borrowings from the De regnandi peritia.52 Nifo’s treatment of Machiavelli had been ingenious if disingenuous. Rosello’s treatment of Nifo shows little evidence of thought beyond what was necessary to translate Latin into Italian and to remain silent about his sources. Inevitably, given its provenance, Rosello’s Ritratto deals with such matters as the preservation of a state by a new prince; the uses of cruelty and clemency; the relative merits of being loved or feared; the extinction of one’s enemies; the danger of overmuch liberality; the proper employment of councillors; the importance of military knowledge to princes; arms as the basis for the security of the state; the decadence of modern soldiery; the inutility of mercenaries; the superiority of national forces; and the disadvantages of fortresses. All of this is familiar Machiavellian fare, but derived at third hand from Nifo complete with augmented examples, ancient and modern. I have set out Rosello’s borrowings in the 51 I first drew attention to Rosello’s use of Nifo in my ‘Crypto-Machiavellism in Early Tudor England: The Problem of the Ragionamento dell’advenimento delli Inglesi, et Normanni in Britannia’, Renaissance and Reformation, ns 2 (1978), 182–93 at 188–90, 192–3. I was then under the impression that Rosello had, on one occasion, gone back beyond Nifo to Il Principe itself. I now find that I was mistaken. 52 Rosello, fos. 43v–71, is a seriatim translation of Nifo’s De armorum literarumque comparatione commentariolus (Naples, 1526). However, as can be seen in the Appendix to this chapter, at the end he reverts to the De regnandi peritia.

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Appendix to this chapter, where the extent of his dependence on Nifo and, indirectly, the relationship of his work to Machiavelli’s Il Principe can easily be seen. As an original work, Rosello’s Ritratto is worthless. It is not even an especially intelligent adaptation of its source. But it is an extraordinary example not only of how controversial ideas may be transmitted unwittingly, but also how readers may be deluded by a simple change of language. Apart from Giunta’s complaint about Latin adaptations of Il Principe, we know nothing about contemporary responses to Nifo’s De regnandi peritia. Nor, apart from some borrowings in George Rainsford’s Ragionamento dell’advenimento delli Inglesi et Normanni in Britannia, is there more evidence relating to the reception of Rosello’s work. However, in Eton College Library there is preserved Jacques-Auguste de Thou’s copy of the 1538 Venetian edition of Il Principe.53 It is bound with Rosello’s Ritratto of 1552 together with Rosello’s edition of a work by Marco de la Frata et Montalbano.54 So there is a possibility that at least one important Renaissance reader recognized Rosello’s Machiavellian genealogy. But if others noticed the family resemblance their insights have not survived. 53 This edition is listed in Bertelli and Innocenti, 16 and Gerber, ii. 33–4. 54 Marco de la Frata et Montalbano, Discorsi de principii della nobilta (Venice, 1551).

APPENDIX ROSELLO, NIFO, AND MACHIAVELLI In this Appendix, I list the principal passages in Rosello’s two Ragionamenti (R), which are based on Nifo’s De regnandi peritia (N), and indicate their ultimate relationship to Machiavelli’s Il Principe (P). I have not listed Rosello’s use of Nifo’s De armorum literarumque comparatione commentariolus in the second Ragionamento because it has no Machiavellian resonances.

ragionamento primo R fo. 8r–v R fo. 9v R fo. 10 R fo. 10r–v

N IV. 8 N I. 2 N I. 5, 6, 7 N I. 11, 12

R fo. 10v R fo .11v R fo. 12

N V. 3 N II. 15, 14 N II. 16

P 20 P 20

R fos. 12v–13v R fos. 14–15v R fos. 15v–17 R fo. 17 R fo. 17v

N IV. 1, 2 N IV. 3 N IV. 4 N IV. 5 N IV. 6

P 16 P 17 P 18 P 17 P 19

R fos. 17v–18 R fo. 18r–v

N IV. 7 N IV. 9

P 19 P 19, 9

R fo. 19

N IV. 11

P 18

P 19, 9 P8

French parlement Origin of states Ways of gaining power Just monarchy introduced by election or succession Nature of election Factions Winning over those who are initially hostile Liberality Cruelty and clemency Love and fear Hannibal’s cruelty Can a prince be feared yet not hated? Conspiracies Violent deaths of many emperors Keeping faith

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R fo. 20 R fo. 20v R fo. 21

N IV. 12 N IV. 12 N IV. 14

R fos. 21v–23 R fos. 23v–25v R fos. 25v–26 R fo. 27v R fos. 28v–30

N IV. 15 P 22, 23 N IV. 16 P 23 N IV. 17 P 16 N V. 2 N V. Proemio

R fo. 30r–v R fos. 30v–31

N V. 1 N V. 4

R fos. 36v–37

N III. 1

P 21 P 22

P2

How princes gain reputation Accessibility Councillors and taking advice More on councillors Flatterers Splendour and its dangers Advice on good government Princes’ vices: difficulties of public life Honest government Education of princes’ children Hereditary princes

ragionamento secondo R fos. 71v–73 R fo. 73r–v R fos. 73v–74

N II. 2, 3 N II. 4 N II. 5

P 12, 13 P 12 P 12

R fo. 74r–v

N II. 6

P 13

R fo. 74v

N II. 7

P 13

R fo. 75 R fos. 75v–76

N II. 9 N II. 10

P 14

R fos. 76–77v R fo. 78r–v

N II. 11 N II. 13

P 14 P 20

R fos. 78v–79v R fos. 79v–80

N II. 17 N III. 4

P 20 P 4, 5

R fo. 80r–v

N III. 5

P5

R fo. 81r–v R fos. 81v–82

N III. 6 N V. 5

P6

R fos. 82v–83

N V. 6

Types of soldiery Florentines and Venetians Origins of mercenaries in Italy Weakness of mercenaries and auxiliaries Charles VII and Louis XI of France: different policies Army of sheep led by a lion Prince’s necessary preoccupation with war Military education and skills Arming or disarming the people Fortresses Alexander, Darius, and afterwards Governing cities that were formerly free Virtu` and opportunity Comparison between just prince and tyrant Virtue

3 Early Readers of Machiavelli: Comment and Discourse Given the rapidity with which Machiavelli’s writings were first disseminated, and the almost continuous stream of editions which followed thereafter, it is remarkable how little information has survived concerning their impact. Historical judgement must depend upon whatever evidence is available and, on that basis, Machiavelli’s works seem only infrequently to have stimulated general political speculation or to have been adapted to meet the requirements of a specific political situation. For the period up to the end of the 1550s, barely a handful of such instances remain and—since three of these relate to affairs in England—the distorting effects of random survival are apparent.

the ‘ discorsi ’ c o n s i d e r e d By far the most illustrious of these pioneers was Machiavelli’s younger contemporary and friend Francesco Guicciardini. In 1530, while exiled in Rome, Guicciardini evidently had access to a manuscript copy of the Discorsi (probably the autograph version published by Blado in the following year) and was moved to jot down a number of observations in a notebook.1 These notes remained unpublished until the mid-nineteenth century but are now an established part of the Guicciardini canon and, under the 1 For the dating, composition, and context of the Considerazioni, see Roberto Ridolfi’s introduction to his edition of Guicciardini’s Le cose fiorentine (Florence, 1945). See also Ridolfi’s The Life of Francesco Guicciardini (1967), pp. 206–8.

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title Considerazioni intorno ai Discorsi del Machiavelli, they are generally treated as a coherent, though unfinished, work.2 It is, however, unlikely that Guicciardini ever intended to pursue the project to any sort of ordered conclusion. The Considerazioni deal with only thirty-nine of Machiavelli’s total of 142 chapters and two prefaces; the distribution even of the selected chapters is extremely uneven; and much of the comment is concerned merely with odd details which have caught Guicciardini’s eye. Moreover, when one takes into account the fact that none of the individual Considerazioni ever exceeds the length of a short essay, while many run to only seventy words, and that they often deal with issues tangential to those discussed by Machiavelli, then it becomes clear that these jottings remain at a vast distance from constituting even an ‘unfinished work’. This is worth stressing because it has been claimed that Guicciardini’s omissions in the Considerazioni are ‘as revealing as his disagreements or qualifications’3—which would mean reading significance not only into his selective comments on selected passages in selected chapters of the Discorsi, but also into the fact that he excludes something like 70 per cent of Machiavelli’s work from any consideration at all. Omissions on such a scale are scarcely susceptible to any sort of interpretation. It is what Guicciardini says that is important: not what he does not say. And what he says constitutes the most cogent of all Renaissance attacks on Machiavelli. Part of his scorn, it must be admitted, is attributable to his aristocratic caste of mind—to his attitude towards the relative merits of nobility and populace— where he is diametrically opposed to Machiavelli who, in the 2 The Considerazioni intorno ai Discorsi del Machiavelli sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio were first published in Guicciardini’s Opere inedite illustrate da Giuseppe Canestrini e publicate per cura dei Conti Piero e Luigi Guicciardini, i (Florence, 1857), 3–79. A more correct version was edited by Roberto Palmarocchi, Scritti Politici e Ricordi, in Guicciardini Opere, viii (Bari, 1933), 1–65. My references are to the translation and edition by Cecil and Margaret Grayson, in Francesco Guicciardini: Selected Writings (1965). There are several analyses of the Considerazioni including Villari, Niccolo` Machiavelli e i suoi tempi, ii. 356–69 (Eng. trans., n.d., pp. 144–52); Mattei (1969), 124–33; Peter Bondanella, Francesco Guicciardini (Boston, 1976), 61–70. But I think that the discussion in Mark Phillips, Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft (Toronto, 1977), 81–93, could scarcely be improved upon. 3 Bondanella, Francesco Guicciardini, 68.

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Discorsi at least, professed a perverse confidence in the judgement of the lower orders. For Guicciardini, the multitude have neither discernment nor consistency: ‘they do not distinguish, and with the same ease they return to the decisions they first condemned, to hatred of what they loved, to love what they hated’. In short, he says, ‘one cannot deny that a people in itself is a treasury of ignorance and confusion’.4 This is certainly an important difference between the two thinkers; but the dissection of Machiavelli in the Considerazioni addresses issues more fundamental than the virtues and vices of social classes—more fundamental indeed than the general questions of virtue and vice which have bothered moralists throughout the ages. Guicciardini does not froth over with indignation in the manner of outraged defenders of Christianity; nor does he waste ammunition on political abstractions. He simply exposes Machiavelli’s incorrigible fondness for false dichotomies; his abuse of historical evidence (indeed his ignorance of what historical evidence really is); his flawed status as a purveyor of political fantasies rather than of practicalities; his love of sweeping generalizations; and his partiality for ‘extraordinary and violent methods’, especially on paper. Moreover, the Considerazioni reject the very assumption upon which the whole of Machiavelli’s Discorsi is predicated. The institutions and practices of the Roman republic do not, in Guicciardini’s view, constitute the ideal exemplar for modern political behaviour. ‘I do not think’, he notes, ‘that they were such that those seeking to establish a republic should take them as their model.’ He repeatedly indicates the defects of Roman government, and argues that these were so grave that it was only the excellence of Rome’s military discipline which averted disaster: which was all very well for a city dependent on ‘force of arms’, but far less satisfactory in cities ‘ruled by the struggles, ever-changing circumstances, and arts of peace’ (pp. 69, 103). It is not only Machiavelli’s constant harping on Roman superiority in general which irritates Guicciardini. He is also quick to take issue on matters of detail. With regard to fortresses, for 4 Francesco Guicciardini: Selected Writings, 104–5. Further references are given in the text.

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example, he is stung to observe that ‘one should not praise antiquity so far that one condemns all modern uses which were not current with the Romans’. We know by experience that many things familiar to us were unimagined by the ancients; and we know that states differ in nature and circumstances. Certain things may be required in one place and not in another: ‘thus if the Romans used not to build fortresses in subject cities, that is not in itself a reason why it should be wrong to build them today’ (p. 117). Repeatedly, Guicciardini castigates Machiavelli’s dogmatic assertions for their failure to take into account the significance of differing political contexts. Situations arise where decisions cannot be based on ‘a firm rule’. Conclusions must be drawn from ‘the mood of the city and from the state of affairs which changes according to the state of the times, and other mutable circumstances’ (p. 101). Inextricably bound up with his conviction that Roman examples are largely inapposite is Guicciardini’s recognition that Machiavelli’s handling of Roman history is itself defective. The Considerazioni abound in examples of ways in which material from Livy has been misinterpreted by Machiavelli or is at least susceptible to some alternative interpretation. This is the very heart of the matter.5 Machiavelli had specifically claimed that his great achievement was to reveal how political rules may be derived from a systematic juxtaposition of ancient and modern examples—and especially from the contrast between Roman virtus and modern corruption. This is a methodological bubble, and Guicciardini bursts it mercilessly. As Mark Phillips, in his analysis of the Considerazioni, observes: when confronted with the most powerful political theory of the day, Guicciardini did not so much respond to Machiavelli’s political conclusions as to his historical means. Over and over he subjects Machiavelli’s arguments to a sceptical critique focusing on the inadequacy of his historical evidence and the simplicity of his historical analysis. Thus the debate of the two Florentines assumes a wider character and becomes a debate over the uses of history.6 5 More than forty years later, Innocent Gentillet recognized this fundamental weakness in Machiavelli’s work and dwelt on it constantly. See below, Ch. 9. 6 Phillips, Francesco Guicciardini, 81–2.

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Assessment of that debate depends largely upon which of the two Florentine thinkers a critic happens to prefer. It is something of a tradition to acknowledge Guicciardini’s penetrating intelligence while criticizing him for lacking the sweep and imagination of Machiavelli. Villari, the most influential nineteenth-century commentator, accepted that, although Guicciardini’s observations ‘may more readily, and often more usefully, serve as guides in the daily practice of life and affairs’, Machiavelli’s precepts ‘open new horizons to the study of the logical and necessary connection of historical events, and to the study of human society and the action to be exercised upon it by the statesman’.7 A similar contrast was later drawn by Ridolfi, who recognized that, while Guicciardini’s critical remarks are ‘nearly all correct’, they reveal his limited vision. ‘He who knew how to see his friend’s weak points with such marvellous acuity’, Ridolfi exclaims, ‘had not observed that all those errors are merely rough stones on the surface of new roads opened up by his thought.’ One cannot deny that, by the process of fallacious reasoning, it is possible to reach correct conclusions from false evidence. But equally one cannot deny that, with regard to the Discorsi and the Considerazioni, the issue was essentially how historical sources were to be chosen with discrimination, reported accurately, and interpreted logically. And here Guicciardini, despite the fragmentary nature of his remarks, proved himself the master. Summarizing some of the reasons for the incomplete state of the Considerazioni, Ridolfi suggested that it would be impossible to say if the observations, which had arisen in Guicciardini’s mind while reading, ‘became fewer when he came to write, or whether as the work grew he felt a certain weariness in it, or if quite simply he lacked time to finish it’.8 The fact that the Considerazioni start off with a long run of nearly consecutive chapters from Book I of the Discorsi, and then become markedly rarer and increasingly random, suggests that the idea of ‘weariness’ is the most likely of these alternatives. It would not be surprising if Guicciardini had become thoroughly vexed by the fundamental differences between his conception of historical argument and what he regarded as the inept historical technique of 7 Villari, Niccolo` Machiavelli, Eng. trans., ii. 152. 8 Ridolfi, The Life of Francesco Guicciardini, 208.

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Machiavelli. To have pursued the matter further—pointing out error after error, and fallacy after fallacy—would only have resulted in unvarying repetition. And that would have been tedious both for Guicciardini and for posterity.

t h e ‘ di s c or s i ’ a n n o t a t e d Some eighteen years after Guicciardini had abandoned his Considerazioni, Lazarus von Schwendi, a young German soldier in the service of the Emperor Charles V, worked his way systematically through all three books of his brand-new copy of Gohory’s French version of the Discorsi in the composite edition of 1548, and, in a small, neat hand, adorned the margins of the entire text with copious Latin annotations. The volume has been preserved in the municipal library of Colmar where it was discovered by Lina Baillet, whose heavily documented analysis of the marginalia gives a very clear idea of the impact made by Machiavelli on one intelligent reader coming fresh to his political, historical, and military ideas.9 What we do not know—and never can know—is how typical Schwendi was as an early reader of Machiavelli. Later described by Jacques-Auguste De Thou as ‘famous for his great actions, his cleverness, and his courage’, Schwendi was to enjoy a remarkable career first as a gifted military commander and theorist, then as a diplomat, and finally as an irenic statesman seeking to resolve the religious discord in Germany.10 He entered 9 Lina Baillet, ‘Schwendi, lecteur de Machiavel’, Revue d’Alsace, 112 (1986), 119–97. It is a pity that Baillet never went on to publish a complete annotated edition of the marginalia: but her detailed analysis, extensive quotations, and translations provide an excellent basis for studying Schwendi’s reactions to Machiavelli. All my parenthetical references to Schwendi are to Baillet’s study. 10 Jacques-Auguste De Thou, Histoire universelle (London, 1734), v. 42. There is a considerable but elderly German literature on Schwendi, and there is no book-length study more recent than Johann Ko¨nig, Lazarus von Schwendi, Ro¨misch Kaiserlicher Majesta¨t Rat und Feldoberst, 1522–1585 (Schwendi, 1934). For his thinking on religious and ecclesiastical policy, see Kaspar von Greyerz, ‘Lazarus von Schwendi (1522–1583) and Late Humanism at Basel’, in Manfred P. Fleischer (ed.), The Harvest of Humanism in Central Europe: Essays in Honour of Lewis W. Spitz (St Louis, 1992), 179–95. The Allgemeine deutsche Biographie gives Schwendi’s date of death as 1584!

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the service of Charles V in 1545, and by 1548 had already distinguished himself in military affairs at Gotha and Grimmenstein; had written against the abuses of mercenary troops; and had been entrusted with the task of arresting the Landsknecht commander Sebastien Vogelsperger along with two other mercenaries who had sold their services to the King of France. There is some reason to suppose that the accused commanders had acted within the laws governing their profession: but they were arrested, tried, and executed. Sentence was carried out on 7 February 1548 when Vogelsperger made a bitter speech on the scaffold, accusing Schwendi of trapping him by false promises. For a while, Schwendi was under a cloud and—although publicly defended by the Emperor—he himself was left feeling uneasy about the incident and about the kind of political expediency which he was soon to encounter in the pages of Machiavelli’s Discorsi. Of Schwendi’s education we know almost nothing, but it is clear that his knowledge of both French and Latin was excellent. He was able not only to read Gohory’s translation but also to correct typographical and other errors in vocabulary and syntax; and he was a sufficiently fluent Latinist to be able to go through the text, pen in hand, writing notes with scarcely a slip or correction.11 One problem of which Schwendi, like many other readers, seemed unaware was that dependence upon a translation meant that he was always at one remove from Machiavelli’s own thinking (pp. 132–6, 140–1). This was especially the case in the first book of the Discours where Gohory often paraphrases very freely; and it is something which was to affect the work of a later and more influential reader of Machiavelli, Innocent Gentillet.12 Despite this, few significant aspects of Machiavelli’s thought are so compromised as to distort Schwendi’s reading, which proves to have been thorough, detailed, and consistent. He was not a radical thinker like Machiavelli and Guicciardini; nor did he have the latter’s sure hand in exposing the former’s 11 Baillet, ‘Schwendi’, 122, 125 n. 11, 142–7. Baillet (p. 142) points out that while Schwendi’s notes to the text are principally in Latin, he does use French to annotate Gohory’s own marginal notes. 12 On Gohory’s errors, see below, Ch. 7; and on Gentillet’s resultant misunderstandings, see below, Ch. 9.

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methodological flaws; and, while he shared their taste for aphorisms, he was much more prone to general moralization. But his comments still reveal an independent mind, engaging with Machiavelli and challenging him not only on ethical matters but also on details of history, politics, and the art of war. As one might expect, Schwendi’s greatest problem with Machiavelli arises in those chapters of the Discorsi which deal with the political use of religion and with the conflict between Divine Providence on the one hand and Fortuna on the other. When faced, for example, with praise for those who have founded a religion (Discorsi, I. 10), Schwendi complains that Machiavelli writes as though ‘religion were more a human invention than a unique gift of God’—thus correctly describing Machiavelli’s thinking while failing to recognize its accuracy. In the following chapter, when Numa is praised for duping the Roman people by pretending to have been inspired by a nymph, the political use of religion so shocks Schwendi that he can think of nothing more crushing to write than ‘Note here the judgement of the author on religion’ (pp. 152–3). And he is no less outraged by Machiavelli’s audacity in misrepresenting the Magnificat to establish how, when David became King of Israel, he had ruthlessly reorganized the kingdom from top to bottom (Discorsi, I. 26).13 ‘Note’, exclaims the horrified Schwendi, ‘how the author impiously applies Scripture to serve his purpose’—as though such selective deformation were not the pabulum of all religious controversy (p. 153). He is equally upset by the constant references in the Discorsi to the role of Fortuna in Roman history. To Schwendi this is a thoroughly pagan notion, and the fundamental difference between his view of the historical process and Machiavelli’s is well exemplified in an assessment of the relative importance of Fortuna and Virtu` to Rome’s acquisition of empire (Discorsi, II. 1). ‘Why’, asks Schwendi, ‘does not the author attribute the first cause to Divine Providence, which wished 13 The Discourses of Niccolo` Machiavelli, trans. Leslie J. Walker (1950), ii. 53; in his first note to this chapter, Walker explains that the words quoted by Machiavelli from Luke 1: 53 (qui esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes) are ‘not said of David but of the Lord’, nor does it begin with ‘qui’; and he adds that ‘Machiavelli would often have heard the Magnificat sung, but appears to have but a hazy notion of what it is all about’.

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the Roman Empire to come to such grandeur, as was predicted many centuries earlier by the Prophet Daniel?’14 The question is rhetorical: but the implied answer is that Machiavelli has no respect for biblical prophecies, and that this is reprehensible. Such issues find Schwendi at his most conformist, although he springs a number of interpretative surprises, particularly when refraining from adverse comment where conventional morality would seem to invite it. Pondering Machiavelli’s paradox that ‘those people who live closest to the Church of Rome, the head of our religion, have less religion’ (Discorsi, I. 12), Schwendi writes in the margin, ‘Je na¨her Rhom Je bo¨ser Christ’ (p. 142). This, the only German-language note in the entire volume, is wholly noncommittal (‘The nearer Rome, the poorer the Christian’) and it is impossible to say whether Schwendi would have endorsed Guicciardini’s remark on the same chapter: ‘One can never speak ill enough of the Roman court, for it is an infamy, a pattern of all the opprobrium and vituperation of the world.’15 We might, none the less, have expected other aspects of Machiavelli’s hostility towards Christianity to prompt some sort of reaction from Schwendi. Demanding why modern men are less fond of liberty than were the ancients, Machiavelli finds an answer in the same reason that makes him consider them less bold—that is in the difference between pagan religion and Christianity (Discorsi, II. 2)—and he sarcastically explains that ‘our religion, having taught us the truth and the true way of life, leads us to ascribe less esteem to worldly honour’. Christians have so exalted meekness, he sneers, and so disparaged military and civil honour that the world has fallen prey to the wicked: ‘our religion has glorified humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action’. The chapter in which this idea is set forth is one of Machiavelli’s worst thought-out and most meandering arguments.16 It includes his silly laudation of pagan blood sacrifices; an attack on the 14 Baillet, ‘Schwendi’, 149, 156. Cf. pp. 158–60, which examine in detail Schwendi’s responses to Discorsi, II. 29 where Machiavelli discusses Livy’s assertion that ‘Fortune blinds men’s eyes when she does not wish them to obstruct her designs’. 15 Francesco Guicciardini: Selected Writings, 81. 16 See Anglo, Machiavelli (1969), 111–13.

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effeminacy of the modern age; an awkward attempt to shift the blame from Christianity itself to those who have misinterpreted its values; and finally an even more awkward attempt to blame the Roman Empire which had wiped out the ancient republics. The whole section is a sitting target for any critic, and this very vulnerability may perhaps explain why Guicciardini chose not to bother with it. Yet Schwendi, despite annotating the chapter very heavily, neither alludes to the flaws in Machiavelli’s reasoning nor seizes the opportunity to defend the merits of his faith. Unlike Osorio, who rushed to the defence of Christianity as a military religion, Schwendi contents himself with merely summarizing, and even repeating, some of Machiavelli’s assertions: ‘why it should be that in our times men are not as ferocious and bold as formerly’; ‘the religion of the pagans placed beatitude in worldly glory and excellence, while ours, on the contrary, naturally requires a disregard for all worldly things’; ‘the world has become effeminated through our religion’; and ‘it has fallen prey to the impious and the wicked’. Did either Schwendi (who must have been familiar with the depravities of Protestants and Catholics alike in Germany) or Machiavelli (who was familiar with the brutality of the French, Spanish, and German troops in Italy) really believe that Christians were less bloodstained and less prone to violence than their pagan forebears? There is a similarly acquiescent response from Schwendi to one of Machiavelli’s most startling attacks on Christianity. Dealing with the problem of revivifying religion by constantly restoring it to its origins (Discorsi, III. 1), Machiavelli describes how the Christian faith had been rescued from extinction by St Francis and St Dominic, whose poverty and exemplification of Christ’s life had restored religion to the minds of men in whom it had already vanished. At this point Schwendi notes in the margin, ‘Our religion restored and affirmed by the examples of holy men’. But then Machiavelli gives the argument a devastating twist, for he goes on to say that the new religious orders founded by these saints were so powerful that they prevented the dishonesty of prelates and religious leaders from ruining Christianity. The holy men lived so frugally and gained such credit as confessors and preachers that they convinced people ‘that it is evil to speak evil of evil’, and good to live obediently under depraved prelates. Chastisement has been

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left to God. And so the heads of the Church behave as badly as possible, because they do not fear a punishment which they neither see nor believe in. To depict St Francis and St Dominic as facilitators of religious corruption is a daring conception, and Schwendi duly underlines the passage. He even adorns the margin with a hand pointing a finger at the underlined section, reinforcing this with two directional lines and the word ‘NOTA’ in capital letters.17 What he does not do is offer a word of criticism or doubt. In addition to such unexpected disinclination to take issue with Machiavelli, there is a more general omission to which Baillet draws attention. She cites a number of occasions where Schwendi recognizes that Machiavelli’s zeal for the military and freedomloving qualities of the German cities is based upon a lack of knowledge. When, for example, the Germans are praised for their refusal to countenance anybody to live like a ‘gentleman’ (Discorsi, I. 55), Schwendi notes laconically, ‘He speaks of the Swiss’ (p. 174). Yet at no point does Schwendi make any allusion to the religious problems which then plagued the Empire. He never refers to the Reformation, and the war of the Schmalkaldic League is seen solely from a military point of view (p. 184). Of course, as an aspiring military man, Schwendi would inevitably have been attracted to those parts of the Discorsi which dealt with the art of war: and such material looms very large indeed. Not only does nearly a quarter of Machiavelli’s book consist of chapters devoted specifically to the nature and purpose of war, or to armies, tactics, and leadership, but military matters also crop up regularly throughout the rest of the work.18 And, while on many matters of detail Schwendi is prepared to dispute, augment, or modify statements in the Discorsi, it is clear from his marginal annotations that he shared the general respect of early readers for Machiavelli as a military authority (pp. 188–9). Frequently, Schwendi simply summarizes or adapts the material in the text by citing recent events, often within his own experience. When, for example, Machiavelli discusses whether it is better, under 17 Baillet, ‘Schwendi’, 181, Illustration no. 5. 18 Walker’s edition of the Discorsi, 160–1, gives a convenient breakdown of the chapters specifically devoted to military matters.

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threat of attack, to strike first or await the enemy (Discorsi, II. 12), Schwendi notes that the aggressive advice given by Hannibal to Antiochus ‘ought to be applied against the Turk’, but also points out that the opposite counsel has been adopted by ‘the French of our time’. Commenting on Machiavelli’s assertion that modern artillery is of little advantage to those defending a fortified position against enemies whose artillery train is on higher ground or who arrive before the defences are complete (Discorsi, II. 17), Schwendi notes a contrary example ‘in the siege of the Emperor’s camp at Ingolstadt’ (August 1546)—but only as a matter of interest, not in order to refute Machiavelli (pp. 175, 182). He is similarly reminded of current affairs when reading Machiavelli’s argument that no general can avoid battle if his adversary is determined to force one on him (Discorsi, III. 10). Machiavelli postulates the case of a commander who has massed his army together but recognizes that, for lack of money or allies, it cannot be kept long in the field. In such circumstances the commander would be insane not to try his fortune before the army has to be disbanded, because delay will result in certain defeat whereas taking the initiative might yet lead to victory. For this short passage, Schwendi offers two marginal comments. One (‘When is it necessary for us to try the fortune of battles’) merely draws attention to Machiavelli’s content. But the other (‘This the leaders of the Schmalkaldian league do not know’) alludes to a contemporary shortcoming which Schwendi has himself observed (p. 182). There is one major issue where Machiavelli arouses in Schwendi an almost unreserved sympathy. Both are convinced of the gross inferiority of mercenary forces as compared with a national army. Already, in 1547, Schwendi had written two short works exposing the dubious practices of military hirelings: the first, dedicated to the Emperor Charles V, relating the tricks they use to make a fine but false show at a military inspection; the other dealing more generally with the abuses of such troops.19 Machiavelli’s contempt for hired soldiers, his admiration for the Roman army, and his 19 A treatise, Vom Betrug in der Musterung, and a satirical dialogue, Vasguillus. See Baillet, 129–30. The texts were published in Eugen von Frauenholz (ed.), Der erste deutsche Verku¨nder der allgemeinen Wehrpflicht (Hamburg, 1939), 25–69.

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insistence that the latter should serve as a model for contemporary rulers, all accorded perfectly with his annotator’s own estimate of modern armies and how they should be reformed. Many of Schwendi’s marginal maxims attest to this: ‘all people are apt for arms if they find a distinguished leader’; ‘foreign mercenary soldiers do not fight with good spirit’; ‘auxiliary soldiers are extremely dangerous, unless they are kept in our power’; ‘it is better to make peace with an enemy on unfavourable terms than to admit foreign auxiliaries into a city or kingdom’; ‘the security of all political states depends on the virtue and military skill of subjects and not on foreign auxiliaries’ (pp. 185–8). This theme was to remain of absorbing interest to Schwendi, who eventually devised his own scheme for the raising and training of a national army for the Empire. It is, however, impossible to determine to what extent, if any, he was influenced by Machiavelli on an issue where he had already made up his mind.

machiavelli and the henrician reformation After his retirement from military life, Schwendi devoted his energies to seeking a resolution of the religious conflicts which troubled the German states; and it is hard to imagine that his earlier reading of Machiavelli would have had any relevance to this ambition. In England, by contrast, there were men happy to use their Machiavellian knowledge to argue the case for politicoreligious exclusionism. As Henry Parker, eighth Baron Morley, pointed out to Thomas Cromwell in February 1537 (in a letter accompanying a gift of the Istorie fiorentine and Il Principe), the history was written for Clement VII, late bishop of Rome, but Youre Lordship will marvell moche when ye do reade yt, how he durst be so bolde to present suche a worke unto hym; ffor he so declaryth theyer petygrew, that yf one schulde reade a hundreth boks, he myght lake to know of theyere usurpacion which he schall fynde aparent in his fyrst Boke.20 20 Parker’s letter is printed in Henry Ellis, Original Letters Illustrative of English History (1824–46), 3rd ser., iii. 63–7, where it is assigned to 1537, although Gasquet (1974) suggests the year 1539, which is less likely.

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Parker declares that, while he has not had Cromwell’s first-hand experience of the affairs of Italy, ‘yf they use such frauds, myscheves, treasuns, and conspyrasys, as he wryttyth that they do, I do not skant account them amongest Chrysten men’. He singles out, as especially revealing, the unjust proceedings of the Popes against Florence. These deeds are so similar to their current treatment of Henry VIII that the resistance of the Florentines may serve the King as a wonderful example; and Parker begs Cromwell ‘to schew the very words’ to the King, ‘for I do think his Majestie shall take great pleasure to see them’. Finally, in order to save Cromwell much tedium, ‘in suche places as the Author touches anything concerning the Bysschop of Rome’, Parker has noted it ‘with a hand or with words in the margant to the intent it schuld be in a redynes to youe at all tymes in the redyng’. This, unlike Schwendi’s personal notes, was annotation for political purposes; and the recognition that Machiavelli’s Istorie fiorentine constituted an anti-papal thesaurus anticipated the similar insight of Mathias Flacius Illyricus and John Bale by twenty years.21 But, in this respect, Parker had himself been anticipated by another Englishman, Richard Moryson, who is the first adequately documented English student of Machiavelli. Moryson’s career as an official pamphleteer and apologist for the Henrician Reformation during the 1530s was a hectic one. He wrote in defence of the royal divorce and supremacy; attacked the rebels during the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536; vituperated against Reginald Pole whom he condemned as a traitor; and in 1539, under threat of a French invasion, not only patriotically exhorted the nation to take up arms but also prepared a translation of Frontinus’ military Stratagems as a contribution to the potential war effort.22 In several of his pamphlets Moryson found it useful to 21 This aspect of Machiavelli’s work was, of course, later to become a major focus of attention when the papal censors got busy. For a revealing example of such hostility, see William McCuaig, Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the Late Renaissance (Princeton, 1989), 257–8. McCuaig discusses the notes of an anonymous censor, in a dossier devoted to Sigonio’s De regno Italiae, complaining that Sigonio says that the ruin of Italy had been caused by the Popes—‘and aside from the fact that this is the opinion of Machiavelli in the Discorsi, it is a danger in these times’. 22 For Moryson’s career as a polemicist, see W. Gordon Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1948); David Sandler Berkowitz, Humanist

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refer to Machiavelli’s work and this has, inevitably, excited susceptible historians. How far might Moryson be considered a ‘Machiavellian’? On the one hand, he was familiar with the Florentine master; on the other, he was concerned with supposedly religious matters such as the number and nature of the Sacraments. A terrible conundrum! But the issue is—like many attempts at categorization and disjunction—intellectually sterile.23 Readers are not necessarily disciples. Selective citation neither demands nor precludes wholesale approbation. Different books may be studied, and a variety of notions may be entertained, simultaneously. Machiavelli himself read widely, wrote copiously, expressed divergent ideas, and adopted such conflicting political stances that, to this day, scholars cannot make up their minds about him. Was even Machiavelli a ‘Machiavellian’? With regard to Moryson, the truth of the matter is uncomplicated. An ambitious scholar, well versed in classical literature, he sought advancement by immersing himself in the murky waters of the English Reformation and plying his pen on behalf of Henry VIII’s policies. In this task he found Machiavelli useful in providing detailed evidence against the Papacy, helpful in illuminating difficult issues such as sedition, and congenial for an apparently realistic approach to worldly affairs.24 At the same time, however, there was a whole area of controversy, sparked off by the Reformation and relevant to the contemporary situation in England, which Machiavelli had not touched upon—nor could have touched upon since it was posterior to his own experience. Debate concerning the Sacraments was as much political as religious in motivation and Moryson could not ignore it: but his pragmatism and the limits of his Christian morality are strikingly illustrated in the ‘Epistle to the King’s Majesty’, prefacing his translation of Frontinus, where Scholarship and Public Order: Two Tracts against the Pilgrimage of Grace by Sir Richard Morison (1984); and G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1972). 23 For this debate, see Zeeveld, Foundations, 184–9; Christopher Morris, Political Thought in England: Tyndale to Hooker (1953), 65–7; Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (1964), 34–40; Berkowitz, Humanist Scholarship, 70–80. 24 Nevertheless, later in his career, Moryson clearly considered himself as somewhat unrealistic in political judgement as compared with the much more astute ‘Machiavellist’ Throckmorton. See below, pp. 101–2.

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he discusses the whole question of the relative efficacy of ‘Policy of mind’ and physical strength. Like Machiavelli, he favours policy while recognizing the need, in certain situations, to employ force. Everything depends on circumstances so that evil deeds may, at times, prove to be the best course of action, and political morality is reduced to a question of expediency.25 This seems reminiscent of Il Principe but is not necessarily (or even probably) derived from it. Certainly Moryson never cites that work. On the other hand, we do know that he read the Istorie fiorentine and the Discorsi with sufficient attention to be able to draw upon them for his own polemical purposes. On his return to England from Italy in May 1535, Moryson immediately began work on his Apomaxis calumniarum, a reply to Johann Cochlaeus on behalf of Henry VIII’s divorce. This includes a discussion, obviously drawn from the first book of the Istorie fiorentine, of the methods used by Popes Gregory III, Gregory V, and Nicholas II to augment their power; and, when Moryson reaches the pontificate of Alexander III, the debt is made explicit by a reference to ‘Nicholao Macchavello’, who wrote ‘very diligently’ concerning the affairs of Italy.26 However, before the Apomaxis could be put into print, the Pilgrimage of Grace provided Moryson with a more urgent occasion to deploy his propagandist skills, and he promptly produced two pamphlets against the rebels, of which one, A remedy for sedition, includes material from all three books of the Discorsi and again refers to Machiavelli by name.27 Three years later, 25 See below, Ch. 15, pp. 536–7. 26 Apomaxis calumniarum, convitiorumque (1537), fos. 80–1. The first scholar to notice this Machiavellian reference in the Apomaxis was John Wesley Horrocks, ‘Machiavelli in Tudor Political Opinion and Discussion’ (D.Litt. thesis, University of London, 1908), 43–5. It was Horrocks, too, who noticed that a Latin letter from Moryson to Cromwell in Aug. 1535 (LP ix. 198) included a discussion of English affairs which was in a ‘Machiavellian vein’, though not necessarily derived from Machiavelli. It concerns how, in well-ordered states—although provision has always been made for rewards and punishments—former merit is not allowed to outweigh present misdeeds. The case in point is the execution of Thomas More; and Moryson cites the Roman example of Manlius Capitolinus. The issue is certainly treated by Machiavelli, Discorsi, I. 24, but the example of Manlius is accompanied there by others, and all the details given by Moryson come directly from Livy, VI. x. 16. 27 See the edition of A remedy for sedition (1536) in Berkowitz, Humanist Scholarship, 112, 114, 122–3, 129, 133–4, 141, 147, 149, 154, 156, 159, 162.

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Moryson found further use for Machiavelli in his Invective against the great and detestable vice, treason, attacking Reginald Pole and demonstrating the futility of rebellion against a king who, like Henry VIII, is protected by God. In his preface, Moryson sets out the perils of all conspiracies, even against tyrants such as Nero; and his arguments here are derived from Machiavelli’s long discussion of conspiracy in the Discorsi, III. 6. It is true that Moryson uses Machiavelli very selectively and translates only odd sentences. But these passages are worth noting as the first recognizable part of a Machiavellian text to be printed in an English form.28 There is a certain irony about the preface to the Invective and, indeed, about Moryson’s career in general. In 1535, as a young impecunious scholar in Padua, clad in borrowed breeches, he had been befriended and encouraged by Reginald Pole whom he praised for rescuing him from ‘hunger, cold, and poverty’.29 Four years later, Moryson—by then official propagandist for the Henrician Reformation—was upbraiding his erstwhile patron as a traitor who wore a cardinal’s hat to cover his ‘bloody pate’; as the very ‘pole from whence is poured all this poison’; and as a ‘pole of little water, and that at a wonderful low ebb’.30 Moryson also declares that a conspiratorial letter, from Pole to his family in England, was written by the Devil himself: ‘author of al dissention, al rebellion, all treason’.31 It is curious to reflect that, while Moryson was writing this diatribe and its Machiavellian preface, Pole was busy composing his Apologia ad Carolum V which included the attack on Il Principe (a work written by ‘the finger of Satan’), destined to make Pole Machiavelli’s earliest significant moralistic adversary. Moryson’s later career—his various diplomatic missions, honours, and rewards under Henry VIII and Edward VI, and then exile under Mary—are of no concern here. But he was responsible for one other noteworthy Machiavellian ‘first’. In October 1551, after two years of fluctuating fortune, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and formerly Lord Protector, was arrested; and this prompted Moryson to ponder the difficulties of assessing political behaviour with any accuracy. Writing to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton on 18 November, 28 An invective ayenste the great and detestable vice, treason (1539), sigs. a.2–5v. 29 LP ix. 102. 30 Invective, sigs. B.8v, C.8. 31 Ibid., sig. E.5v.

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he felt obliged not only to confess his own failure to understand Somerset’s true character, but also to praise Throckmorton’s superior penetration in this respect. Moryson had been convinced that a man like Somerset would feel gratitude for having been forgiven a ‘throng of faults’ and for having recovered (through another’s benefits) ‘not only lost land but honour’. Throckmorton, by contrast, was a ‘Machiavellist’ and thought it best ‘to mistrust the worst’. Thus he saw deeper into the Duke of Somerset’s nature; ‘guessed rightlier of his doings’; and ‘thought he would not forgive displeasures’. E´mile Gasquet, in drawing attention to this letter, points out that it contains what is, perhaps, the first use of the word ‘Machiavellist’: and he notes that, at this stage of its history, it carried no pejorative overtones. A clear line was being drawn between Moryson’s own idealistic failure to understand political motivation and the realistic assessment thereof by a ‘Machiavellist’—and Throckmorton was expected to understand this distinction and to regard it as a compliment.32

machiavelli and the edwardian reformation Wilder and more adventurous than Moryson’s journey from rags to riches was the career of another student of Machiavelli, William Thomas—the first writer so far discovered, not merely in England but in Europe itself, to attempt topical political analysis on the basis of Machiavelli’s work. The salient features of his life are well known.33 He is generally thought to hail from Llanthomas in Breconshire although, as Adair laconically remarked, when trying 32 Gasquet (1974), 111–13. Another reference to Machiavelli in a letter of 13 July 1552 (Cal. S.P. Foreign, 1547–53, no. 550), sent by Moryson from the Imperial court to William Cecil, has been consistently misconstrued. It refers to a malicious story put about by a traitor servant that Moryson was in the habit of reading Bernardino Ochino’s sermons and sometimes Machiavelli to his household. Moryson may well have been reading such diverse literature: but the letter merely states that this is what has been said about him. 33 See E. R. Adair, ‘William Thomas: A Forgotten Clerk of the Privy Council’, in R. W. Seton-Watson (ed.), Tudor Studies (1924), 133–60; and the article ‘William Thomas’ by T. F. T. Baker in S. T. Bindoff (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1509–1558 (1982), 439–43. The pioneering study on Thomas’s

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to piece together the evidence for his life: ‘Thomas is so common a name, and Welsh genealogy so mystical a science, that William Thomas’s ancestry must remain a highly speculative problem.’34 He sought his fortune in the service of Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the Horse to Henry VIII; and for some time he prospered. Unfortunately, he also sought his fortune at the gaming table where he fared less well. ‘Folly and misfortune of play’ forced him to leave England hurriedly—with some of his master’s funds still sticking to his fingers. He got as far as Venice before being intercepted, in April 1545, by the English agent who reported what ‘pitiful moan the young man maketh, with incessable weepings for his trespasses which seemeth to grieve him no less than death’.35 Precisely what happened to Thomas, at this point, is unclear: but he was certainly able to tour Italy widely through the next four years. It was during this period that he wrote a number of books, including a vigorous defence of Henry VIII’s divorce and antipapal policies, incorporating a sharp denunciation of Pole’s treason;36 and a pioneering textbook, Principal rules of the Italian grammer, which enjoyed three editions between 1550 and 1567.37 It was also at this time that Thomas prepared his Historie of Italie (1549), which provides potted summaries of the history, antiquities, and sights of Rome, Venice, Naples, Florence, Genoa, Milan, and some of the smaller city-states.38 The compilation is little more interest in Machiavelli is Horrocks (1908), ch. 4. The fullest examination of Thomas’s work is the University of London MA thesis by Peter J. Laven, ‘The Life and Writings of William Thomas’ (1954), which is, sadly, also unpublished. Another slant on Thomas’s skill in adapting historical sources (Livy on this occasion) to topical issues is given by A. J. Carlson, ‘Mundus Muliebris: The World of Women Reviled and Defended ca.195 B.C. and 1551 A.D. And Other Things’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 24 (1993), 541–60. See also S. Anglo, ‘ ‘‘Our Extremest Shift is to Work by Policy’’: William Thomas and Early Tudor Machiavellism’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1984), 31–50. 34 Adair, ‘William Thomas’, 134. 35 LP xx, pt. 1, no. 515. 36 Il Pellegrino Inglese n’el quale si defende l’innocente, & la sincera vita de’l pio & religioso re d’Inghilterra Henrico ottavo (n.p., 1552). There also survives an English manuscript translation, not in Thomas’s hand, which was eventually published: first by Abraham D’Aubant in his The Works of William Thomas (1774); and then by J. A. Froude, The Pilgrim (1861). 37 Principal rules of the Italian grammer, with a dictionarie (1550). 38 William Thomas, The historie of Italie (1549); 2nd edn. (1561).

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than a guidebook for tourists although, decades later, it was admired by another English Machiavellian, Gabriel Harvey, who thought it comprised ‘Excellent Histories, and notable Discourses for every politician, pragmatician, negotiatour, or anie skillfull man’, and deemed it ‘A necessarie Introduction to Machiavel, Guicciardin, Jovius’.39 It also has some interest for the historian of the early reception of Machiavelli, because he is the only literary source specifically acknowledged by Thomas. ‘Conferryng’, says Thomas, ‘the discourse of divers authours togethers, toucheyng the Florentine histories, and findyng the effectes of theim all gathered in one by Nicolas Macchiavegli, a notable learned man, and secretarie of late daies to the common wealthe there: I determined to take hym for myne onely auctour in that behalfe.’40 In fact, his account of Florentine history is nothing but an abridgement of Machiavelli’s book, so boiled down that it degenerates into a mere recital of names, dates, and events—with nothing salvaged from the original’s historical reflections—though, from time to time, as in the summary of the lives of Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Thomas does reproduce his source in recognizable detail. In 1549 the gambling scholar returned to England where he made an astonishingly rapid rise to position and prosperity. By April 1550, he was sworn Clerk to the Privy Council, and was assigned sole care of the Council’s Register; and it was late in the same year (or early in 1551) that he offered himself to the boy King, Edward VI, as an instructor on political issues.41 Hitherto, wrote Thomas, the King had concerned himself with the study of tongues rather than with history or policy. But now Edward needed to gain ‘knowledge of such examples as in this and other regiments heretofore have happened’. Thomas, accordingly, feels that he can do no less than submit a list of political problems for the 39 This is part of the note written by Harvey at the beginning of the ‘Table’ of his copy of the 1561 edition of The historie of Italie. See Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford, 1979), 237. 40 The historie of Italie, fo. 140. 41 British Library, Cottonian MS Titus B. II, fos. 96–102: printed in Ellis, Original Letters, 2nd ser., ii. 187–95. Both Horrocks and, later, Peter Laven, attempted to identify the Machiavellian sources for Thomas’s questions, but had to concede that, in just a few cases, the ambiguity of Thomas’s phrasing was beyond resolution.

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King to ponder; adding that ‘though these be but Questions, yet there is not so small a one emongest them, as woll not mynister matter of much discourse worthie the argument and debating’. Eighty-five questions are appended: and, although Thomas claims to have gathered them ‘out of divers aucthors’, they are principally derived from the chapter headings either of Machiavelli’s Il Principe or Discorsi. Thomas is concerned that his offer of advice (and any fruit that might come of it) should be kept secret, so that Edward would be able to excite admiration when opportunity arose. This effective ruse is enlarged upon when—in response to the King’s immediate demand for an opinion ‘tooching the reformacion of the coyne’ (a matter not included in the list of questions)— Thomas sends his reply sealed as though it were some ordinary communication from the Council, ‘assuring your highnes that no creature lyving is or shalbe privie either to this, or to any of the rest through me’. The reason for this secrecy is that, ‘your Majestie may utter these matters of your own studie; whereby it shall have the greater creadite with your Counsaill’.42 This advice is reminiscent of Castiglione: both in the sprezzatura whereby the King is to display an expertise not actually his own, and in the good counsel offered by Thomas as a cortegiano trying to encourage his ruler along the right path. It is even possible that Thomas saw himself as one of those wise counsellors, described by Machiavelli in Il Principe, 22, as giving lustre to a prince intelligent enough to heed their advice.43 Apart from the short letter on the coinage—which itself displays an attitude towards human venality which might be deemed ‘Machiavellian’, and which includes a reference to ‘the daunger to be aucthor of a newe thinge’, prompted by Discorsi, III. 3544—there survive four of Thomas’s political discourses, of which three derive 42 Cottonian MS Vespasian D. XVIII, fos. 27v–28; Thomas, The Works, ed. D’Aubant, 170–1. There is nothing arcane about this, as is suggested by Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge, 1988), 41–4. It is merely a Castiglionesque ruse to help Edward seem cleverer than he really is. 43 Two of Thomas’s political questions derive from this chapter of Il Principe: No. 16, ‘What is to be observed in chooseng of Officers’; and No. 23, ‘Howe much good mynisters ought to be rewarded and the evill punished’. 44 The twenty-fourth of the series of questions, submitted to Edward VI, is ‘Howe daungerouse it is to be aucthor of a newe matter?’ See Ellis, Original Letters, 2nd ser., ii. 191.

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from his eighty-five questions.45 In one of these, he has altered the original problem propounded by Machiavelli, Discorsi, I. 5 (Whether the safeguarding of Liberty may better be entrusted to the People or to the Magnates), to something more likely to be intelligible to his royal Tudor audience: Weather it be better for a common wealthe, that the power be in the nobilitie or in the commonaltie.46 Guicciardini, too, had been perplexed by Machiavelli’s original formulation and had similarly modified it—for purposes of discussion—into a question concerning the whereabouts of political power.47 Like Guicciardini, Thomas shares neither Machiavelli’s enthusiasm for the common people, nor his hostility towards the upper classes—although he does condemn aristocratic ambition which may lead to ‘crewell handelinge’ of inferior persons: wherefore Macchiavegli in his discourses of the libertie of a common wealthe, determineth that in caces of extremitie, wheare the magistrates or nobilitie use this tyrannie, the commociones of the people are necessarie to mitigate thexcesse of the greate mennes ambicion.48

However—basing himself not only on Machiavelli’s historical examples, but going back to their Livian originals, and incorporating material from Froissart along with echoes of Il Principe— Thomas argues that, while Aristocracy is far superior to Democracy, Monarchy is better than either, and that even a Prince’s tyranny is more tolerable than the Commons’ power. Thomas’s discourse, Wheather it be expedient to varie with tyme, is based upon arguments and examples advanced both in Il Principe, 25, and the Discorsi, III. 9: although the material is considerably augmented by a quotation from Petrarch’s ‘tryomphe of tyme’, a scriptural reference, citations from Philippe de Commynes, Cicero, and Livy, material derived from Thomas’s own 45 British Library, Cottonian MS Vespasian D. XVIII, fos. 2–46. All five discourses were printed in John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (Oxford, 1822), II. ii, 365–91, but are better consulted in Thomas, The Works, ed. D’Aubant, 131–92. The transcription in both cases is inaccurate—but D’Aubant’s is markedly less so. A new, fully annotated edition of these discourses would be useful. 46 Cotton MS, fos. 19–26v; Thomas, Works, ed. D’Aubant, 159–69. 47 Guicciardini, Considerations, ed. Grayson, 70. 48 Cotton MS, fo. 24v; Works, ed. D’Aubant, 167. Thomas is clearly thinking here of Machiavelli, Discorsi, I. 4, 6.

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Historie of Italie, and a speech made by Edward III at Calais. Thomas concludes that no one can prosper in this world: that woll not varie in his proceadings according to the tyme: For as there is nothing more pleasaunt than the concorde of musicke: nor nothing more displeasaunt than the discorde therof; so whan doings and tyme agree, there is nothing more happie, nor whan they disagree, nothing more unhappie: having in them much more variacion than tewnes in musicke have.49

A third discourse considers What Princes Amitie is best, and takes as its starting point Machiavelli’s Discorsi, II. 11, though again Thomas—in writing of the ‘politike amitie’ (which is the only sort that he considers possible), as opposed to the ideal friendship extolled by Cicero—also has in mind Il Principe, 15. In addition, he incorporates material from elsewhere in the Discorsi (II. 23), refers back to Livy, cites both Cicero and English history, and argues the importance of allying with princes of like religion—a matter which Machiavelli had not anticipated.50 The remaining discourse, My private opinion toocheng your Majesties outwarde affaires at this present, is, in some ways, the most interesting of all; for here—abandoning his set questions— Thomas branches out to apply to current English problems the ideas already advanced in his studies of princely adaptability and alliances.51 The discourse was written between July and September 1551, and Thomas could see grievous dangers ahead. In the days of Henry VIII, England had been feared by all its neighbours. It had no need to esteem any of them. But now, ‘the cace is so altered that bicause we are both hated and contempned of them all, we for lack of our owne estimacion must either esteeme them and redeeme our estimacion or elles pearishe’. War threatens on every side. Yet England cannot undertake hostilities without falling prey either to the enemy or to some expensively ‘purchaced frende’. Only two possible remedies suggest themselves: ‘either frendeship to helpe us, or tyme to make ourselfes stronge’. The former is not feasible, because ‘we have no neighbour of uniforme religion’, so our only 49 Cotton MS, fos. 2–10v; D’Aubant, 131–44. 50 Ibid., fos.11–18; D’Aubant, 147–55. 51 Ibid., fos. 34–46; D’Aubant, 179–92.

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recourse is to gain time: ‘and bicause neither is our force so ordred, that we may trust thereby to wynne our tyme, nor our treasure such as we may purchase it: therfore our extreamest shifte is to worke by policie’. England is confronted by two powerful princes—‘the frenche King a doubtfull frende, and Themperor a dissembling foo’—and Thomas therefore advocates subtle diplomacy, working on the Emperor’s jealousy of France, and suggesting to him an alliance. This policy is to be pursued even to the point of promising to alter Religion although, of course, this would be mere dissembling for ‘the wynneng of tyme’. Thus the Emperor (hoping for changes in England) and the French King (fearing this Anglo-Imperial league) may refrain from hostilities against England, so that, ‘your Majestie shulde not only gett tyme more and more to establishe Religion within your Realme: but also to putt your subjectes in a readinesse, and to provide you of money against the tyme of hostilitie’. This study of England’s ‘extreamest shifte’ was, as far as we know, Thomas’s last political discourse in the Machiavellian vein. It is an adroit summary of the alternative policies available to a beleaguered England and, like the other discourses, has a clarity of structure and appropriate choice of examples ideally suited for the instruction of a youthful monarch. It is a great pity that Edward VI did not demand and receive more answers to Thomas’s Machiavellian questions, for the complete series would have constituted a minor masterpiece in the history of political pedagogy—especially since Thomas demonstrates an ability to use Machiavelli as a springboard for pertinent speculation rather than as mere fodder for plagiarization. It was not to be: although Thomas did, at about this period, prepare two more translations (Barbaro’s account of his travels to Tana and Persia, and Sacrobosco’s astronomical treatise De Sphaera), and continued to serve as Clerk of the Privy Council until some months after the death of Edward VI.52 The precise nature of his activities in the early part of Mary’s reign will probably remain a mystery. But it is evident that, as an ardent 52 The translation of Barbaro is in British Library, Royal MS 17.C.X, and was published by the Hakluyt Society in 1873. The Sacrobosco is in British Library, Egerton MS 837.

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anti-Catholic and staunch defender of Henry VIII, he was unhappy over the impending change in religion, and especially hostile to the projected marriage between the Queen and Philip of Spain. Despite his familiarity with Machiavelli’s warnings about the dangers of conspiracy, he was implicated in Wyatt’s rebellion; accused of plotting against the life of Mary herself; found guilty of high treason; and executed on 18 May 1554.53

machiavelli and the s panish marriage Two months after Thomas’s death, the Spanish marriage was celebrated and, with this in mind, another British student of Machiavelli applied his knowledge of Il Principe and the Discorsi (augmented by a few other sources) to prepare a work introducing Philip to the mysteries of British history and government and suggesting possible political procedures. The work, entitled Ragionamento dell’advenimento delli Inglesi, e Normanni in Britannia (Discourse on the coming of the English and Normans to Britain), survives in two Italian manuscripts—one intended for Philip himself, and the other for Charles V’s minister, Cardinal Granvelle.54 According to its title page, the text has been translated from English into Italian by a certain George Rainsford, and it caused a stir when finally published in 1975 because (again according to its title page) the English original had been composed by no less a personage than ‘il molto riverendo Signor Stephano Gardinero’—that is Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and Lord High Chancellor of England. The Ragionamento is cast in the form of a dialogue between ‘Stephano’ (who is unmistakeably identified as Gardiner) and ‘Alphonso’, and it makes extensive, first-hand use of Machiavelli— both of Il Principe and, more especially, of the Discorsi—although, 53 Machiavelli, Discorsi, III. 6 deals with conspiracies and must have been in Thomas’s mind when he framed his questions: No. 13, ‘What is th’occasion of Conspiracies?’; and No. 14, ‘Wheather the People commonly desire the destruction of him that is in aucthoritie, and what moveth them so to do?’ 54 The text was edited with an English translation, introduction, and notes by P. S. Donaldson, as A Machiavellian Treatise by Stephen Gardiner (Cambridge, 1975).

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unlike the more subtle Thomas, the author simply incorporates large chunks of these works into his text.55 The argument of the Ragionamento is sometimes awkward and contradictory: but it is certainly a striking attempt to apply extremist doctrines to a contemporary political situation and, were it indeed by the eminent Gardiner, we should have to admit that it demonstrates Machiavellian scholarship at a very high social level indeed. Unfortunately, it is highly improbable that it was written by the famous Bishop in English, and is much more likely to have been written by the obscure George Rainsford in Italian.56 The Ragionamento is a rare instance where consideration of a text’s authorship is more significant than a detailed examination of its content; and it is, therefore, worth reviewing the problem in some detail. There are several reasons for rejecting Gardiner’s authorship. In the first place, from internal evidence, it seems that the work was still being written after 25 October 1555; and its modern editor, Peter Donaldson, argues that ‘Gardiner worked on the treatise during the very last weeks of his life while confined, for the most part, to his bed’. However, we know that the Bishop was mortally sick by the beginning of October and that, in the fortnight before his death, he was in the kind of agony which, while not precluding the possibility of polishing up a political treatise for an absentee monarch, was scarcely conducive to it. Second, the Ragionamento is supposed to have been written in English and translated into Italian after Gardiner’s death: whereas, had it really been the case that Gardiner wished to offer a treatise to a Spanish monarch inexpert in English, he would certainly have used the Latin in which he had already composed the majority of his political and controversial works and in which Philip might be expected to have had at least a modest competence. Third, the work is quite unlike anything else in Gardiner’s known oeuvre. Fourth, there is no

55 These Machiavellian borrowings are, with one exception, fully elucidated by Donaldson in his edition and notes, and he conveniently summarizes them at p. 16 n. 1. The missing passage is noted in my ‘Crypto-Machiavellism in Early Tudor England’, 192 n. 6. 56 I first expressed scepticism in ‘Crypto-Machiavellism in Early Tudor England’. I am now even more convinced that Gardiner was not the author.

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evidence that Gardiner, although he had been in Italy as an ambassador during Henry VIII’s divorce proceedings, was either a reader or collector of works in Italian.57 Fifth, the Ragionamento puts into the mouth of one interlocutor, Alphonso, fulsome praise of the other, Stephano; and, since the latter is Bishop Gardiner himself, this would constitute a breach of decorum ill-befitting an author’s own pen.58 Sixth, decorum would have been violated even further had Gardiner used himself as the principal interlocutor in his own dialogue. Seventh, against all this, the only evidence for Gardiner’s authorship is the single declaration on the title page; and the reason for such a fiction is obvious enough. A political text attributed to the Chancellor of England was infinitely more likely to be read than if it were offered as the unaided work of a nobody of whom neither Philip nor anyone else had ever heard. There are also arguments which militate against the Ragionamento’s ever having been written in English. The use of Machiavelli’s Italian is sufficiently close to have suggested to Professor Donaldson that Rainsford revised Gardiner’s putative original with Machiavelli’s writings to hand.59 This may also be said of the treatment accorded another Italian political dialogue, Lucio Paolo Rosello’s Il ritratto del vero governo del principe, much of which consists of a translation of Nifo’s De regnandi peritia, which is, itself, a Latinized adaptation and expansion of Machiavelli’s Il Principe.60 Thus, if Donaldson were correct, we should have to 57 Furthermore, the author of the Ragionamento is not only knowledgeable about the much-published Machiavelli, he is also familiar with the minor Lucio Paolo Rosello: something which could only reasonably be expected of a very eclectic and up-to-date Italianist. 58 Alphonso says to Stephano that he has arrived at the court of ‘Philip, King of England, where I find that your authority (which shows the man), your singular prudence in public affairs, your firm constancy in the Catholic faith, and the incorruptible justice you minister to all, show me clearly that all your qualities merit no less praise (rather much more) than their public repute throughout Europe, however honourable’ (Ragionamento, ed. Donaldson, 106)—not a bad testimonial to write of oneself. 59 Ragionamento, ed. Donaldson, Introduction, 15 n. 1. The same point is made in the introduction to Donaldson’s edition of George Rainsford’s Ritratto d’Ingliterra, in the Camden Miscellany, XXVII (1979), 56. 60 On Rosello’s Ritratto, see above, Ch. 2. On Rainsford’s use of it, see my ‘Crypto-Machiavellism in Early Tudor England’, 188–90 and nn. 8–15.

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believe that Rainsford’s knowledge both of Machiavelli and Rosello was so intimate that he was able to recognize and locate wholly unacknowledged and unreferenced borrowings in an English adaptation before incorporating and revising them when turning them back into Italian. In this respect, we also have to take into account another work, a Ritratto d’Ingliterra composto da Georgio Rainsfordo appended by Rainsford to the Ragionamento so that ‘nothing might be lacking in this little book that might contribute to an understanding of the laws, procedures, customs, nature and humor of the people of Britain’.61 This, too, incorporates adaptations of Machiavelli (adding material from another piece, the Ritratto di cose di Francia, to the stock of Machiavellian knowledge) and, as in the similar passages of the Ragionamento, they are sufficiently close to the original Italian to suggest that the author had a text before him—but sufficiently different to suggest a conscious attempt to avoid verbatim transcription. Naturally, Donaldson does not suggest that Rainsford composed his Ritratto first in English, turned Machiavelli’s Italian into English, and then translated the whole thing back into Italian. But this would be scarcely more far-fetched than the notion that he identified a whole series of Machiavellian borrowings in an English text and then modified the originals in his Italian translation. However, all difficulties and absurdities disappear if we assume that the Ragionamento, as well as the Ritratto, was composed in Italian, and that both were written by somebody called George Rainsford who was anxious to address Philip but was unable to do so directly in Spanish or Latin.62 This assumption also helps resolve a number of legal and other blunders which would be 61 Ragionamento, ed. Donaldson, 103. 62 Donaldson nowhere gives serious consideration to the possibility that Rainsford might have been the author of the Ragionamento, but implies an argument against it by maintaining, in his introduction to the Ritratto, 59–64, that there are significant differences of opinion between the Ragionamento and the Ritratto: on the dissolution of the monasteries, class relations, and the question of war with France. These differences are superficial, and the arguments seeking to establish them are tendentious and—in the case of Rainsford’s alleged bellicosity—almost frivolous. Donaldson, in his Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge, 1988)—an attempt to turn Machiavelli’s political ideas (which remained completely accessible throughout the sixteenth century) into a ‘secret’ doctrine or Arcana politica—makes only one reference, and that in passing, to Rainsford (at p. 44).

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surprising in the Lord Chancellor, but less so in some lesser mortal.63 The argument of the Ragionamento is that if Philip were to rule wisely and with justice, he could establish a firm dynasty in England. The difficulty with the text is that, while it warns Philip against the deeds of Canute and the Danes, it encourages him to act like the successful William the Conqueror, who ‘fortified himself with his Normans against the natives’; killed off rivals in the royal line; deprived the English of their offices and dignities which he bestowed upon his own people; oppressed his subjects with ‘new tributes and taxes every day’; and built fortresses to subjugate the land.64 New princes, writes the author, cannot avoid cruelty, the use of force, and the practice of what might conventionally be deemed vices. William the Conqueror had to face continuous revolts and plots. None the less he conquered his enemies, pacified the revolts, transformed the kingdom, gave it laws and honours, and left it to his successors in peace and trust; and he did so by employing cruelty which was without doubt more praiseworthy than that harmful compassion and mercy of Richard II and Henry VI (fo. 111r–v). This belief in laudable cruelty, together with a long argument that it is safer to be feared than loved, obviously derives directly from Il Principe—with telling additions from Rosello—and, as with Machiavelli, the topsy-turvy morality leads to confusion. What precisely is being advocated? The efficacy of severity, perhaps? But then the author, having presented this case convincingly, remembers that he is advising the new King of England, and therefore suddenly asserts that such methods are only for those who have obtained a realm by force of arms. One who has obtained it ‘through favour of friends, hereditary laws or by matrimony must take a different course to keep his state’—‘mercy, affability, and generosity’ (fo. 123r–v). 63 There is a discussion of these legal blunders by Dermot Fenlon in his review of Donaldson’s edition of the Ragionamento in Historical Journal, 19 (1976), 1019–23. 64 Ragionamento, ed. Donaldson, fos. 99v–101. Further references are given in the text.

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That is comforting. But it becomes less so if we remember that to many Englishmen the Spanish marriage seemed not in the least like the ‘legitimate succession, confirmed by all orders’, that Stephano claimed it to be (fo. 135r–v). Wyatt’s rebellion, though successfully suppressed, had not been the trivial emotional outburst of an insignificant minority. Relations between Spaniards and Englishmen began badly with the very arrival of Philip and his entourage, and deteriorated thereafter. Few informed observers could have expected even an attempt at the soothing policies described in the Ragionamento; and the grim alternatives are set out there with stark clarity. The author certainly demonstrates facility in handling Machiavellian material. What he does not demonstrate is a concern for what would happen to the people of England should his suggestions be put into practice. But whether this is an indication of inadvertency, obtuseness, or ruthless intelligence is yet another matter which cannot now be determined. Apart from their irrelation, what is particularly striking about these early students of Machiavelli is their serious, and on the whole favourable, attitude towards his work. They read what he had written; thought about it; and absorbed it. Guicciardini, despite severe methodological misgivings, was clearly stimulated by the Discorsi and accepted the book on its own secular terms. Schwendi, however unhappy he may have been over Machiavelli’s disregard for Divine Providence, was sufficiently impressed by the Discorsi to give evidence of detailed scrutiny, and register general approval, on almost every page of his copy. Moryson, Thomas, and Rainsford all found Machiavelli useful and congenial, and had a command of his work which enabled them to adapt it for their own ends. However, there were other, very different readers of the early editions of Machiavelli’s works: men so shaken by his unconventional morality and his hostility towards Christianity that their only thought was to join battle immediately and destroy him. First in the field was Cardinal Reginald Pole, Moryson’s beˆte noire, who was determined to have Machiavelli ‘put down out of all remembrance’.65 But the task, as we shall see, was quite beyond him. 65 LP xv. 721.

4 A Hostile Cardinal: Reginald Pole and his Apologia From the end of 1538, well into 1539, Cardinal Reginald Pole was composing a work which he intended for the Emperor Charles V. It is known as the Apologia Reginaldi Poli ad Carolum V. Caesarem super quatuor libris a se scriptis de unitate ecclesiae—the title bestowed by its eighteenth-century editor—though, as far as we know, it was never actually presented to the Emperor; and it was not published until some 200 years after its composition.1 In the course of this Apologia, it became expedient to attack Il Principe in a section which has given Pole some claim to be considered as Machiavelli’s first serious adversary. But Pole’s views on Machiavelli are only incidental to the purpose of the work in which they occur. In order to understand the attack on Machiavelli, we must understand what the Apologia is about; and to understand that we must consider the sequence of events which led to its composition.2 1 Apologia Reginaldi Poli ad Carolum V. Caesarem super quatuor libris a se scriptis de unitate ecclesiae, in Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli S.R.E. Cardinalis et aliorum ad ipsum collectio, ed. A. M. Quirini (Brescia, 1744–57), i. 66–171. Gustave Constant, La Re´forme en Angleterre (Paris, 1930), i. 546 n. 258, 590 n. 405, says that the Apologia was published at Louvain in 1569: but I can find no trace of this and it is likely that Constant was confused by John Fowler’s edition of Pole’s De summo pontifice, which was published at Louvain in 1569. 2 The first serious critique of the Apologia was Paul Van Dyke, ‘Reginald Pole and Thomas Cromwell: An Examination of the Apologia ad Carolum Quintum’, American Historical Review, 9 (1903–4), 696–724; reprinted in his Renascence Portraits (London, 1906), 377–418. Horrocks (1908) includes a full description of Pole’s work, though with little critical comment. G. R. Elton, ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 6 (1956), 69–92, offers a few trenchant comments on the worthlessness of Pole’s testimony. The most recent interpretation of the Apologia, as a work full of arcane

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Reginald Pole’s education had largely been sponsored by Henry VIII and culminated in a protracted sojourn in Italy followed by a shorter visit to Paris. Like everybody else in England, Pole was sucked willy-nilly into the controversy arising from the issue of Henry’s divorce, but he obtained permission to leave England, and returned to Italy via Avignon early in 1532. Three years later he received an urgent request from the King to give his opinion on the Divine Law concerning two major issues: the validity of a marriage with a deceased brother’s widow; and the status of the papal supremacy. Pole set to work and his answers grew into a substantial book, the form and nature of which was determined by three factors: his abhorrence for the King’s concupiscence and shoddy treatment of Catherine of Aragon; by the news of the executions of Fisher and More for whose piety and learning his admiration was unbounded; and by the tendentious arguments of Bishop Sampson’s defence of Henry’s position.3 By the time that a manuscript copy of Pole’s Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione (generally now referred to as the De unitate) was sent to Henry, it had become not a gentle rebuke to his former patron and an earnest exhortation for him to mend his ways, but a meaning and prophetic imagery, by Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State, 1–35, is one that I cannot accept. My reasons will appear in the ensuing discussion and notes. 3 Richard Sampson, Oratio qua docet, hortatur, admonet omnes potissimum Anglos, regiae dignitati cum primis ut obediant etc. (1535?). Donaldson, Machiavelli (pp. 20–1) writes that ‘many of the arguments Pole uses in the Apologia against Henry’s self-exaltation are anticipated in the De Unitate, in which Henry’s corruption is traced not to Machiavelli, but to the inflated conception of the sacredness of kings proposed by Sampson in his Oratio’. This is true enough but, just a few pages later, at pp. 27–8 (in order to establish the pre-eminence of Cromwell in Pole’s view of English politics at the time of the composition of the De unitate) Donaldson argues that, since Sampson’s work was not the most significant of the books defending Henry’s supremacy, Sampson is merely a scapegoat. He further suggests that ‘Pole’s focus on Sampson makes face-saving easier, for counselors closer to the king are spared mention’. But, in fact, the entire argument of the De unitate is built upon a systematic refutation of Sampson’s work which, after all, had been specifically sent to Pole, who could not be expected to take a modern historian’s view of the relative importance of Henry VIII’s henchmen. In any case, it is hard to see why, in a work which consistently condemns Henry as a bloody, hypocritical, and fornicating tyrant, Pole should be at pains to spare the feelings of the King’s advisers.

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violent diatribe against a bloody tyrant and a call to Charles V to turn from his crusade against the Turks to the more serious threat of the English infidel. Pole asserted that the De unitate was meant only for the eyes of Henry VIII. But this claim was false. Pole’s own correspondence; the words and public tone of the treatise itself (including an impassioned address to the Emperor Charles V); and the fact that he prepared variant versions, with the more opprobrious passages concerning Anne Boleyn carefully pruned from the manuscript sent to the King: all testify to the author’s disingenuousness.4 At any event, a copy quickly made its way to the papal printer, Antonio Blado, at Rome and the work was probably printed, if not published, in 1536.5 Early in the following year, Pole assumed an unassailable position as England’s arch-traitor when his involvement in encouraging a foreign invasion of England to support the northern rebellion became known. It was probably at some time after this that he came across Machiavelli’s work (most likely the Istorie fiorentine) which so shocked him that he determined to do everything within his power to have it suppressed.6 The situation in England—from Pole’s point of view—further deteriorated with the increasingly violent campaign of iconoclasm, culminating in the destruction of the shrines of Thomas Beckett and the burning of the saint’s bones, and with the attack on Pole’s family. His brother Geoffrey was arrested in August 1538; and this was followed by the arrest and execution of his eldest brother Lord Montague and by the detention of his mother, Lady Margaret 4 Whether or not Pole originally intended to publish the De unitate remains, just possibly, open to question: but there can be no doubt about the work’s strident public tone with its frequent expostulations to the people of England and Pole’s own declaration that he wishes his voice to be heard throughout Christendom (De unitate, Lib. III, fo. cviiv). Nor is there doubt about Pole’s claim to be addressing, not merely the King but also the English nation (Epist. Reg. Pol., i. 434, 437). 5 I say ‘quickly’ made its way to Blado, because the printed version assumed that both Catherine of Aragon (died Jan. 1536) and Anne Boleyn (died May 1536) were still alive. 6 LP xv. 721: deposition of John Legh in 1540, in which he reports a conversation with Pole in Rome about two years earlier. Pole is said to have warned Legh against reading Machiavelli’s ‘story’ and to have been determined to have the work ‘dystinkyd and put down out of all remembrance’.

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Pole. All this was the immediate background to Pole’s mission to the Emperor, whom he visited at Toledo in February 1539. It was at this period that the Apologia was begun as an explanation or defence of the publication of the De unitate—though it was not completed until later in the year.7 Its bitter and violent tone is sufficiently explained by the combination of Pole’s own politicoreligious convictions about the wanton destruction of the unity of the Church by Henry VIII; by the personal tragedy of his own brothers and mother; and by the dreadful (because in some ways true) assertions of his erstwhile prote´ge´, Richard Moryson, that Pole himself had been instrumental in bringing ruin upon his family. ‘What greater tourmente can be wyshed unto the’, demanded Moryson, in his Invective ayenste the great and detestable vice, treason, ‘than al the world to knowe, that thou by these abhomynable treasons, hath cast away thy famylie.’8 One especially interesting feature of the Invective’s condemnation of Pole’s brother Lord Montague is the fact that its warning against the dangers of conspiracy is based upon Machiavelli’s Discorsi, III. 6, which is the earliest published translation into English of any part of Machiavelli’s work.9 Pole was not aware of this irony but, had he been, he might have made much of it.

t h e de unitate a n d t h e apologia The immediate political context of the Apologia is evident from its references to the fate of Exeter, Montague, and Neville, and from Pole’s specific answer to Moryson’s Invective which had defended these executions. Moreover, the relation between the Apologia and the De unitate is intimate. Pole summarizes and refers to his earlier work, and repeats some of its material: his initial reluctance to write against his former patron; the executions of Fisher, More, the Bridgettines and Carthusians; and the exhortation to the Emperor 7 I say that the Apologia was not completed until later in the year because of its references to Richard Moryson’s An invective. See the following note. 8 Richard Moryson, An Invective, especially at sigs. B.7v–8. 9 An Invective, sigs. a.2–5v.

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to take up arms against Henry, who is worse than the Turks. Less obvious, but more relevant to Pole’s attack on Machiavelli, was the repetition—or rather transmutation—of certain motifs which had first occurred in the De unitate. One of these is the repeated contrast between Henry’s vices and the conventional catalogue of princely virtues—justice, piety, clemency, and so on. Another is the insistence on Henry’s use of religion as a cover for the shameful truth. A third is the frequent reference to Satan: partly as a generalized personification of evil; partly as a way of abusing (by association) those whom Pole despises; and partly as a specific image deriving from the Gospels of Mark and Luke, when Satan takes Christ to the pinnacle of the temple and then to the mountain top, displaying all the kingdoms of the world and tempting him— ‘all these things will I give thee’.10 In the De unitate, the evil advisers are labelled ‘instruments of Satan’ whispering in the King’s ear, and all are anonymous with the exception of Richard Sampson, who is especially castigated as the author of a book which was itself the instrument of Satan leading the King into evil (‘qui instrumentum Sathanae fuit ad id tibi persuadendum’). But what remained concealed by these emissaries of evil is the fact that Satan himself placed the King on the pinnacle of the temple, showed him all the goods and possessions of the priests, and promised that they would be his if he declared himself head of the church. The Satanic book, the contrast between virtues and vices, the accusation that religion is being used as a cloak, and the image of Satan the tempter, all recur in the anti-Machiavellian section of the Apologia—but they have undergone a strange metamorphosis. About halfway through the Apologia, Pole writes that so many obstacles stood in the way of the King’s divorce that Henry had been on the brink of abandoning the scheme when the messenger of Satan had approached him with an irresistible temptation. In a long speech, this Satanic adviser had shown Henry how he could obtain his desires with a great increase of power, honour, and utility.11 10 For an apocalyptic interpretation of the Satanic images (based upon a literal reading of Pole’s metaphor), see Donaldson, Machiavelli, 27–30. 11 Apologia, 118–23.

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Men in private station, subject to the laws and to the prince’s command, were able to obtain what they wanted even when it was illicit. Should a king, who is above the law and indeed makes the law, not be able to achieve as much as a private citizen? Henry’s problem resulted from the timidity of his counsellors or, rather, from the evil will of those who were more concerned with the interests of his subjects than of the King himself. Not that Henry would ever wish to do anything dishonourable: but he should not be too strictly tied by the rules of those who disputed in schools about the nature of what was honourable or disgraceful. Such people maintained that there was a natural principle of honour from which no one, whether prince or private person, could deviate and so they placed the same yoke on both, despite their dissimilar conditions. Moreover, experience shows that opinions concerning honour vary from place to place and from one age to another; and, if honour may be altered by human will, who has a will superior to that of the Prince whose wishes must be accepted as laws and whose actions may not be judged by his subjects? In the matter of the divorce, Henry had not only the opinions of the universities but also the law of God on his side so that, if some external authority such as the Bishop of Rome refused to accept his position, the King might go his own way—and with great advantage. At this point Pole repeats the metaphor already used in the De unitate. The messenger of Satan took the King, ‘as it were’ (quasi), to the pinnacle of the temple or high mountain, showing him all the possessions of the Church which would be his if only he were to declare himself Head of the Church—a title which could easily be obtained if the King had suitable ministers, and which should be enforced by punishing those who resisted it as traitors. This was the substance of the arguments deployed by the messenger of Satan (nuncio Satanae), as reported by Reginald Pole who, while admitting that he was not present, declares that there is nothing of any significance in the speech which he has not either understood from the nuncio himself or from those who share his counsels. What Pole claims to have done is to gather together the sum of dispersed material uttered at different times. It is not, he is at pains to point out, in the least something he has invented

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himself, but only what he has drawn from these sources and now brings to the light as true.12

t h e me s s e n g e r o f s a t a n At any event, continues Pole, Henry was so impressed that he immediately admitted the speaker to a place among his intimate and principal advisers. And who was this messenger of Satan? ‘If you should ask for such a name’, Pole declares dramatically, ‘they call him Cromwell’, a low-born English commoner who served for a while as a soldier in Italy, then as a merchant’s clerk, and finally returned home to mix with advocates in order to advance himself in the field of law: ‘because he knew that he possessed a supple and clever intelligence to defend the wrong as well as the right—an intelligence he had greatly sharpened by associating with foreigners, for he always despised the ingenuousness of our people’. However, he did not prosper greatly in this profession, nearly coming to grief at the fall of Wolsey, ‘whose sycophant he was’, until the plight of the monasteries gave him the opportunity to display his natural aptitude for ruin and plunder (p. 127). There is a tendency among modern critics to assume that the demonic and apocalyptic fulminations of sixteenth-century controversialists are to be taken literally and are, therefore, susceptible to systematic interpretation. However, like most polemicists whose principal metaphoric repertory was scriptural, Pole has immense difficulty in keeping his abuse consistent either with itself or with the biblical material upon which he draws. He is so incensed against Cromwell that he ties himself into a knot (familiar enough to those who have trudged wearily through the literature of witchcraft and demonology) trying to establish that the minister was an instrument 12 Apologia, 123–4: ‘Neque enim sic dico, sed haec vere affirmo, si fortassis hoc ordine & modo, quae a nuncio Satana dicta sunt, non possum affirmare me expressisse, qui non interfui, amen hoc possum affirmare, nihil in illa oratione positum alicujus momenti, quod non vel ab eodem nuncio eo narrante intellexi, vel ab illis, qui ejus consilii fuerunt participes, sparsim quidem ab illis, & diversis temporibus dicta, quorum ego summam in unum collegi, quae minime ex meo ingenio excogitavi, ut verisimilia, sed ex illorum excepi, quae profero ut vera.’

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both of Satan and, simultaneously, of God’s anger against the King—God having made a present of Cromwell’s life to Satan so that he could ‘more grievously cast down the King’s spirit and hold him in tighter bonds for the destruction of both, and to be a scourge to all those others whom God’s providence had decided in some cases to punish, and in others to cleanse’. Nor does Pole’s imagery stand up to scrutiny when he suggests that Cromwell came forward ‘like the man possessed of the devil whose story is told in the Gospel, because he lived among the tombs and was very savage’ (p. 128). As a matter of fact, in the Gospel (Matthew 8: 28; Mark 5: 2–5; Luke 8: 27–9) the demons inhabiting this man (two men according to Matthew) were driven out by Christ into a herd of swine who thereupon dashed themselves into the sea (or lake) and were drowned. Pole uses this story to emphasize the extent of Cromwell’s own iniquity. How many legions, or rather armies, of demons is it conceivable dwell in this one man, who does not live among tombs, but overthrows all monuments and destroys temples, and the most holy places dedicated to God? From their ruins he sallies forth and attacks everybody. He does not drive a herd of swine into the sea, but drives a herd, or rather so many herds, of men down to Hell, since he rends and torments everybody. Can this be done by the violence of one legion? Or of two? Or of three? Or have not rather all the armies (agmina) of hell gathered here in him? The relationship between Pole’s vituperation and the story in the Gospel is desperately strained, and the accusation of demonic possession is nothing more than an emotional outburst against the man whom Pole blames for the destruction of monuments commemorating saints and for driving men from the ‘foundation of their faith into the sea of the dead’. It is true, Pole continues, that heretics and schismatics have done as much; but not even the worst of these has attempted to destroy the laws at their very base. Yet Cromwell does this by making human will the foundation and model of rightness. Some may ask, continues Pole, how it is possible to assert that Cromwell is destroying the foundation of the laws when he establishes all his actions in laws; when he does nothing except on the basis of the law and will not act contrary to it; when he gives ‘greater authority to the laws than is to be found anywhere in the

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world’, and attaches so much importance to them that they can exercise their power no less over past events than over future ones? Yet the truth of the matter is that Cromwell’s insistence on legality is nothing but a perversion. Under his guidance, laws are ‘the slaves of men’s will and the servants of their desires’; and the source from which this great evil arises is the conviction that rectitude derives not from nature but from the opinion of men: ‘for the foundation of the laws is in rightness and if this be removed, or rooted in men’s opinion as in the wind, what more is left for them or for rightness to survive?’ (p. 130). This is what Lucifer constantly strives to persuade men of: that rightness derives from no deeper source than the will of that very creature to whom knowledge of rightness has been granted. The question, says Pole, is whether these drastic ideas concerning the source of rightness and the law really are held by Cromwell. Surely he would not be so unwise as to say this kind of thing in public? Indeed, those who have heard his public utterances assure us that he has, on his lips, the teaching of Christ and of the Gospel. Nevertheless Pole protests that he would never make such assertions about the inner workings of another man’s mind without clear proofs; and these are forthcoming from Cromwell’s own words (in a private conversation with Pole) and his actions. The actions Pole deals with later; but first he reports the conversation which allegedly took place between himself and Cromwell at Cardinal Wolsey’s residence (p. 132–6).

the strange conversation between pole and cromwell The date of this conversation—if it ever occurred—can be surmised solely from the contextual information supplied by Pole himself. He tells us that he had only recently returned to England from Italy (‘recens ex Italia’) in the midst of the Divorce question which was just beginning to be openly debated; and that Cromwell, who was at that time Wolsey’s sycophant (assecla), had opened the conversation by taking the opportunity of congratulating Pole on his return (captata primum ansa me alloquendi ex gratulatione de

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reditu). Since Pole had returned to England in October 1526, we must assume that the meeting would have taken place either at the end of 1526 or very early in the following year.13 Cromwell, it is alleged, had turned the conversation towards the duties of a wise counsellor in a prince’s court, partly because of the disagreements at that time over the Divorce and partly to ascertain Pole’s own position in this matter. Pole’s answer was within the conventional De regimine principum tradition—where the counsellor must have regard, above all, to the prince’s honour and advantage—and he expounded rightness and expediency in terms of natural law and according to the ‘writings of pious and learned men’. Cromwell was not impressed. This sort of thing, he replied, was often loudly applauded in the schools or when uttered on the public platform, but in private counsels they carried little weight, received no applause, and (if reiterated) induced nausea and caused their author to be disliked and even ruined. The reason for this, continued Cromwell, is that such advice practically never fitted in with the will of princes and was completely alien to courtly practice. Wise and experienced men take careful note of the time, the place, and the company before proferring their advice; whereas learned but inexperienced men often make mistakes in this respect by rushing ‘headlong into unpopularity with princes, since they do not know how to adapt themselves and their remarks to the place, the time, and the person’. These are not things which can be learnt in the classroom, and those who ‘come fresh from the schools to the concerns of princes often run onto the rocks through inexperience’. According to Pole, Cromwell concluded that the function of the wise counsellor is primarily to discover the direction of his prince’s will—something which requires considerable skill because the words of princes, while necessarily full of religion, piety, and all the other virtues, are often at variance with their inner desires: In this, then, the wise eye of the counsellor must be on the alert to track down the inner will of the prince and, having found it, so to exert his intelligence and so to behave that the prince gains his desires and, at the 13 On the date of Pole’s return to England, see Erasmus, Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen and H. M. Allen, vi (Oxford, 1926), nos. 1627, 1761, 1817.

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same time, despite that, there shall not be visible any backsliding or schism in religion. He who knows how to adapt everything so that it agrees with religion and the prince does not appear to be neglecting any virtue (for this is what most pleases princes); has fulfilled all the functions of a wise counsellor; and in proportion as a man can, in his natural ability, approach this ideal: he will be regarded by all as wise. This is the readiest way to keep influence and authority among princes. Thus, in fact, a man who achieves this goal can be useful to himself and his family.14

Pole professes to have been appalled at this discourse, which he claims to have summarized on the spot—or at least as soon as he reached home.15 It was as though, had Cromwell lived in the time of Nero when that ruler had wished to murder his mother, he would have ‘thought out some reason of piety for doing it’.16 Certainly he would have discovered something, for ‘he knows no law contrary to the prince’s will, and makes it his religion to flatter the prince, and counts as all the other virtues to agree with him contrary to his own nature’. However, at the time, Pole held his tongue and merely suggested that Cromwell was taking up this position for the sake of argument. This Cromwell denied, declaring that Pole was as yet too inexperienced to understand political realities. A brief speech from a single experienced man had more value than many volumes from unworldly philosophers; while if the technique of politics had to be learnt from books then at least Pole should read ‘those which relied more on experience than on speculation’. He had such a work: written, admittedly, by a modern man, but a man who was very clever and sharp—one who did not pursue his dreams, like those which Plato writes about in his Republic, which has not, after all these centuries, found a place among men, but rather things which the daily experience of affairs approves and shows to be true.17 This book would help Pole 14 Apologia, 134. This passage is very similar to the systematic immorality advocated in later courtly literature by Taciteans such as Ducci and Du Refuge. See below, Ch. 16. 15 Ibid.: ‘e quibus ego hanc summam apud me de ejus animo, si ita, sit loqueretur. sentiret, statim feci’. 16 Cf. Tacitus, Annals, XIV. 7, which describes the trick devised by Anicetus, a freedman and former tutor of Nero, in order to justify the murder of Agrippina, the Emperor’s mother. 17 Apologia, 135.

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remedy the deficiencies resulting from his lack of experience, and Cromwell was prepared to send it to him.18 ‘What more need I say?’, writes Pole who promised to read the book if it were offered, and promptly departed. A little after this conversation is supposed to have occurred, Henry’s increasing concupiscence drove his advisers from him so that he came to rely upon the ‘mad wisdom’ (insana prudentia) of Cromwell, who feared neither God nor man; and at that point Pole, recognizing the full significance of the conversation at Wolsey’s, decided to leave England.

the bo o k wri tte n by the f i nge r of satan The promised text was never sent: but Pole claims to have seen it later. With information gleaned from those familiar with Cromwell’s private (or secret) studies (secreta eius studia), ‘when he had time for reading’, and with the persistence of one trying to intercept enemy dispatches, Pole had discovered the very work setting out all the enemy’s plans and the methods whereby religion, piety, and virtue could be more easily destroyed (p. 136). The author of this book was the ‘enemy of the human race’, a very ‘finger of Satan’, though bearing the name of a man: ‘Machiavelli, a Florentine who is utterly unworthy to have so noble a city as his fatherland’. Everything written by this ‘son of Satan’ reeks of evil; and among his books is one entitled De Principe. Were Satan a ‘king in the flesh’, he would give no other advice to his heir than that contained therein. The poison ‘was spread throughout the courts of princes in this man’s books, which are circulating almost everywhere’ (Sparsum est enim hoc venenum per Principum aulas in hujus 18 In pursuit of his thesis that such political realism constituted a sort of Arcana imperii, Donaldson, Machiavelli, 7, writes that ‘Pole’s story of his meeting with Thomas Cromwell is designed to reveal how Cromwell came to know about this doctrine, while at the same time demonstrating that Cromwell wanted to keep it a secret’. It was not much of a secret if Cromwell was prepared to share it with the squeamish Pole. And, I would add, it was not much of a secret when anybody could see it described in systematic accounts of tyranny readily available from Aristotle onwards. As Gentillet was later to observe, it was all in Bartolus. See below, Ch. 9.

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libris, qui ubique fere circumferuntur). Such doctrine threatens the safety not only of princes but also of their subjects for, by inducing madness in rulers, it makes them attack their people ‘as wolves and tigers attack sheep, or foxes attack poultry’ (pp. 137–8). Pole then exhorts his readers—who comprise not only the Emperor and princes but also ‘all the tribes, nations, and peoples’ (omnes gentes, universas nationes, & populos)—to consider Machiavelli’s advice concerning religion. Machiavelli urges the prince never to seem indifferent in this matter because, properly used, it enables him to achieve whatever his heart can desire. People are readily deceived by an appearance of religion, whereas genuine piety is likely to be harmful, ‘since religion itself can hardly ever conform to the interests of men, and can rarely be respected with profit’. No sincerely religious prince can escape without some loss ‘amid the trickery of the human mind’. Machiavelli’s recommendation, therefore, is to respect religion when it is in your interest to do so; and, even when it is not, to avoid rejecting it openly. According to Pole, Machiavelli advises those who would counsel a prince that the best place for their intelligence and prudence, and a ‘noble field’ for their abilities, is the seeking out of fine-sounding principles borrowed from religion or from some likeness of virtue. An adviser who could not transfer some appearance of virtue to any kind of desire conceived by his master was ‘completely unworthy to be summoned to the counsels of a prince’ (p. 139). Moreover, continues Pole, Machiavelli makes it clear that what he says about religion goes for all the virtues which religion extols: piety, good faith, justice, liberality, and clemency. Such virtues, if practised continually, are especially harmful to a prince; though they may, on occasion, be exploited to advantage. In any event, it is always useful to appear to practise them. Two animals, the lion and the fox, are to be taken as models and, since fear is more efficacious than love in governing a state, the force of the lion is essential especially when establishing power. On other occasions, however, when fraud may be more efficacious, the prince should emulate the fox for he must know how to use either mode as required since this, according to Machiavelli, is the method taught by practical experience. The other method of governing—following the conventional virtues taught by learned men—is a noble ideal, but the more it is

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adhered to the worse the prince fares. There is no place for virtuous rulers, especially when they live with men ‘full of treachery and guile, who can never be ruled without trickery’; and the better a prince knows how to simulate virtues and dissimulate his rejection of them the more readily will he achieve his aims (p. 140). This then, cries Pole, is the substance of Machiavelli’s teaching on the art of kingship; and he will not insult Charles V by refuting so impious a doctrine. Were the Emperor’s young sons to be infected with this sort of thing, the royal spirit would at once be extinguished in their breasts just as the vital spirit in their bodies would be extinguished by an infusion of poison. Machiavelli’s book has no other object than to corrupt in princes the quality of doing good; while particularly pernicious is its advice that piety and religion should be respected only when they are advantageous. This, says Pole, is atheism. It is: tantamount to teaching that you should regard no religion as true, that you should believe that there is no God, that you should reject divine providence from the world and shut out its force and power. He who, not because of frailty but of deliberate purpose and judgement, holds such a view of religion—that it can be rejected or retained according to a man’s personal advantage—by this very judgement is indicating that no account should be taken of God’s will, which is expressed in religion, without always making it subject to man’s interests: a consequence of which is that, in the mind of a man who has these opinions, there is no God. (p. 142)

Even the heathen would never have tolerated this. Yet Christians not only allow men to write these things with impunity, but also tolerate ‘such a pupil of such a teacher’, who carries out his precepts more vigorously than Plato carried out those of Socrates or the disciples those of Christ.

cromwell and henry viii as disciples of machi ave lli Pole is now able to return to Cromwell and to Henry VIII. We may best understand the pupil, he says, by observing how closely he follows his master. Machiavelli’s teaching has no other aim but to corrupt the whole kingly character and to ‘wipe out the spirit of

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God in all men’. This is truly inspired by Satan who rejoices the more that crimes and impieties are hallowed with a holy name— where religion is regarded not as a means of saving a man’s soul, ‘but as a mousetrap to catch the members of his family like mice, in order to mutilate and destroy them’. Such a man no longer sins through frailty; nor can he be restored in respect of the sins he commits, because he sees in religion (by which alone he could be saved) no other value than to deceive those beneath him. The impiety of all this is obvious but, in Pole’s view, what is even more abominable is that this teaching has been committed to writing, published abroad, and is now being translated into practice (pp. 143–4).19 Henry VIII’s deeds are cruel, monstrous, sacrilegious, impious, licentious, and filthy. Yet they have all been concealed beneath a pretence of religion. His lusts and desires have, from the very first, been covered with a great show of religiosity as, for example, when he complained that he was ‘compelled by God’s law to abandon his wife and unite with a concubine’. Seeing that this would not suffice, he then appealed to all the colleges of learning and, despite his bitter quarrel with the Pope, would not abandon the title Defensor Fidei. In that tragicomedy, in fact, what was done without the pretence of religion? But when he had turned from wilfulness to cruelty and had made of this mixed comedy a true tragedy because of his outstanding brutality, in which he excelled all tyrants and impious men, he could not have put his teacher’s precepts into practice better in this respect at least (and in it everything else is included) that he should serve his own desires and lusts under the pretext of religion. In this single conception the whole teaching of Machiavelli and Cromwell is included. (pp. 144–5)

Yet, according to Pole, in one respect the King made a mistake and departed from the precepts of his mentor. Henry wished to lay his hands on certain nobles whom he suspected ‘because of their virtue’ and, realizing that this would be difficult (because his cruelty had made them equally suspicious of him), he sent them letters of safe-conduct, ‘sealed with the royal seal and with every appearance of good will towards them’. Then, as soon as they 19 ‘Verum hoc magis abominandum, eandem non chartis solum tradi, & circumferri, sed ita ab ejusdem discipulis reipsa, & actionibus.’

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arrived, he encompassed their death—an action perfectly in accord with his training to ensnare his opponents by a pretence of good faith. However, when challenged by one of the noblemen, Henry made the error of boasting openly ‘as if marvelling at the fellow’s stupidity’ in believing the safe-conduct to have any value other than that of a trap. This reply was overheard by many people and was quite contrary to Machiavelli’s art, which recommends that the prince must always find means of making it believed that any broken agreement is entirely the fault of his adversaries: ‘but the King replied too quickly, before his pedagogue could prompt him’. Cromwell would not have been at a loss to find some suitable excuse, for he had deceived large numbers of people—always alleging that they were responsible for their own deaths because they had conspired anew after a promise had been given. Yet, with all his skill, even Cromwell had not been able to prevent one of the King’s victims, as he was being dragged away to execution, from producing Henry’s safe-conduct and showing it to the people, crying out that ‘the King’s good faith was dying with him; let them beware then, if they wanted to live, how henceforth they put their trust in their King’ (p. 146). The source of this anecdote is obscure. It may have no provenance beyond Pole’s own imagination working upon the events following the northern insurrections of 1536–7, when the King had promised pardons but used subsequent rebellion to justify a flurry of executions. On the other hand, the same idea (though represented as a bold stroke of Henrician genius) occurs in John Bale’s play Kynge Johan, when Sedition, fresh from his efforts in the North, is trapped by Henry VIII, who appears in the guise of Imperial Majesty. ‘Where is the pardon that ye did promise me’, demands the villain, only to be rebuffed by Imperial Majesty’s jest, ‘from doing more harm thou shalt soon pardoned be’.20 The coincidence between the two—one blindly hostile to the King, the other blindly approbatory—is striking and suggests some tradition which is now lost. For Pole, the story represents an unMachiavellian lapse on the part of Henry who was otherwise 20 John Bale, Kynge Johan, ed. Barry B. Adams (San Marino, Calif., 1969), ll. 2577–85.

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following the rules of his master ‘to the last detail’ and, inadvertently, was also demonstrating both the nastiness of the doctrine and its fatuity. Of course, gibes Pole, Machiavelli would doubtless rather be accused of impiety than of foolishness but, in fact, ‘nothing is more blind, nothing more stupid than impiety’. Moreover, Machiavelli’s ‘barbarous folly’ is revealed by his rejection of love as the foundation of a prince’s power, and his recommendation of fear while, at the same time, urging his prince not to incur hatred. Yet hatred always follows fear, ‘just as a shadow follows the body’, especially in the case of a man whose parade of virtue is false. Machiavelli warned the prince never to be detected in his imposture: but this lies not with man but with God and is, in any case, impossible for a prince whose every deed, words, sighs, and groans are noticed. Just how impossible it is successfully to maintain the deception is, in Pole’s view, proved by Henry VIII’s own failure. This King even had the advantage of a youthful reputation for religion and piety, and had used it to cloak his vices. Yet whom has he deceived? Do his family and those who live in his kingdom—‘where these crimes are committed as in a theatre’—not see the impiety in his heart? Do they not perceive the pretence and trickery of which hardly any foreign nation is unaware? (p. 148). No one has ever tried harder than Henry to conceal his wickedness. Yet the more he has attempted to hide his shame the more it has been revealed by divine providence. What an extraordinary spectacle it is to behold a king actually demanding that the learned of Europe should judge him to have been living an unchaste life for twenty years. If, to all this, is added his notorious cruelty, avarice, and sanctimony, then it becomes clear that God’s vengeance is already at work and only the final element remains: ‘that he be destroyed from the midst of the people’ (p. 150). It is true that Henry’s Machiavellian adviser had taken precautions by changing the foundation of the King’s rule from that of love and affection to one of fear. But, demands Pole—abandoning the arguments of ‘true reason’ (that is piety and conventional morality) and turning instead to the argument from ‘practical experience’ at which Machiavelli is supposed to be superior— where has he read in history that it is safer for a prince to rule

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with fear rather than affection? Even judging the matter according to results, ‘though they are a most unreliable criterion’, the theory is not supported by a single example (p. 131).21 Indeed, every prince who has become an object of terror has hastened his own destruction. What more can be said? Is impiety so blind that a man who claims to teach others has not seen what the consensus of all ages approves and ‘which all reason, and all experience which is consonant with reason, cries aloud and proves with daily examples’. Yet, adds Pole—referring to a visit he had made to Florence ‘last winter’ (superiori hyeme)—Machiavelli’s fellow citizens had attempted to excuse him when, in a conversation about Il Principe, Pole had accused him of impious blindness. These Florentines claimed that Machiavelli had himself answered precisely the same charge by alleging that, since the man for whom he was writing had a tyrannical disposition, it had been necessary to put things into the book which could not fail to please such a nature. However, if these ideas were put into practice then, said Machiavelli, his own opinion was just the same as that of everybody else who had written about the training of rulers, and as experience teaches: the prince’s reign would be short. This is what Machiavelli longed for, because in his heart he was ablaze with hatred for the tyrant and hoped that the advice in Il Principe would hasten his ruin. And this, jeers Pole, is how the Florentines excused such mental blindness (pp. 151–2).22 What of Cromwell? Well, says Pole, if he should wish to bring forward a similar excuse, then he must take responsibility for being a performer in the tragedy which Machiavelli set forth only in words, for this much is certain: anybody who intended to drag his 21 ‘Hoc quidem scio (ut ex eventis res judicetur, quo ipse maxime nititur, quamquam fallacissimo judice) nullius Principis exitum hoc confirmare.’ 22 This idea that Machiavelli was deliberately giving bad advice (so that the tyrant would ultimately destroy himself ) crops up from time to time in later works. See Matteo Toscano, Peplus Italiae (Paris, 1578), 92; Alberico Gentili, De legationibus libri tres (1585), 109; Andre´ Rossant, Les Meurs Humeurs et Comportemens de Henry de Valois representez au vray depuis sa Naissance (Paris, 1589), 10; Thomas Fitzherbert, The first part of a treatise concerning policy and religion (1606), 330. The passage in Toscano was later cited by Fabio Albergati, as noted by Mattei (1969), 228–9 n. 1.

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prince to destruction could never find a quicker route. Henry is on the verge of ruin. At home and abroad his behaviour has earned him the enmity of all virtuous men. The vengeance of God is at hand. And it is at this dramatic point that the Apologia turns, from an examination of Machiavellian theory and Henrician practice, to a more specific discussion of the political situation and a call for Christendom to unite against the enemy in its midst.

p o l e ’s v iew of machiavelli: its value and l imitations The ‘Machiavellian’ section of Pole’s Apologia has a threefold interest. First, it attempts to demonstrate that Il Principe exerted a direct influence upon Thomas Cromwell and hence upon English politics. Then it offers a nearly contemporary hostile reading of Machiavelli. And finally, this reading, if it did not influence later attitudes, none the less typifies the responses of those readers who, like Pole, could not stomach Machiavelli’s challenging aphorisms on what constitutes an effective (as opposed to a virtuous) political morality. Pole’s statements concerning Cromwell’s views—though sometimes taken seriously by historians—have no authority whatever. The conversation at Wolsey’s was, he says, his sole personal encounter with Cromwell so that, according to his own testimony, the only thing he ever heard Cromwell say about politics was that a counsellor should tell princes whatever they wished to hear and ensure that everything was done to make their acts appear religious and virtuous. It is not impossible that the conversation, or something like it, actually took place. The two men could have met at Wolsey’s and, had they done so, there might well have been some difference of opinion between the pragmatic Cromwell and the naively idealistic Pole who was about fifteen years his junior. On the other hand, the conversation is supposed to have occurred at least eleven (and perhaps twelve) years before Pole reports it, and the claim that he had mentally summarized it ‘on the spot’ looks suspiciously like an afterthought designed to give his circumstantial account some semblance of verisimilitude. It rings no more true

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than the clumsy rhetorical device in the De unitate when, after an emotional appeal to the Emperor Charles V to wage a crusade against England, Pole exclaims: ‘But what am I doing? I seem to have been carried away by fervour, I seem to have completely forgotten with whom I was conversing. For here I have addressed my treatise to the Emperor as if I was dealing not with you, my Prince [Henry VIII], but with him’.23 There is no reason to trust the accuracy of Pole’s account of the conversation, nor to accept his assertion that, in 1526–7, Cromwell was a reader of Il Principe. In so far as this issue has been a matter of historical debate the argument has always centred on whether or or not Cromwell could have read the text several years prior to its publication in Italy in 1532; and those who support this possibility have argued that manuscripts of Il Principe were plentiful and that ‘Cromwell had lived in Florence where the chances of hearing of this writer and acquiring a copy of his as yet unpublished work must have been better than in most other places’.24 The problem with this is that we do not know precisely when Cromwell lived in Florence. His earliest recorded visits to Italy antedate the composition of Il Principe by several years; and although he was in Rome early in 1514 and again in 1517–18 there is no evidence that he visited Florence on either occasion.25 In any case, Machiavelli was not a household name at this early period; and the little that we know about the circulation of manuscript copies of Il Principe does not suggest that they were so plentiful and fashionable in 1517 that a casual English traveller could have, or would have, purchased a copy. It is not quite impossible. Nor is it impossible that Cromwell might have obtained a Machiavelli manuscript after his return to England in 1518 and before 1527. But neither suggestion is plausible. All this is matter for conjecture and the exercise of common sense. But one thing is clear: however shocked Pole professes 23 De unitate, fo. CXIIII; trans. Joseph G. Dwyer, Pole’s Defense of the Unity of the Church (Westminster, Md., 1965), 278. 24 Donaldson, Machiavelli, 32. 25 On Cromwell’s earliest visits to Italy, see George B. Parks, The English Traveller to Italy (Rome, 1954), 366, 376. On his mission to Rome in 1517–18, see W. E. Lunt, Financial Relations of the Papacy with England 1327–1534 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 510–11.

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himself to have been he certainly did not immediately recognize in Cromwell the instrument of Satan so graphically depicted in the Apologia. He had still not been vouchsafed this insight into Cromwell’s infernal mission when, during 1536, he was composing the De unitate where, despite its bitter invective against Henry’s advisers, there is not a single reference to Cromwell and where, moreover, the ‘instrument of Satan’ is specifically identified as the book written by Richard Sampson. Even in the early months of 1537 Pole was still able to write to Cromwell in a seemingly friendly manner though—in view of Cromwell’s current standing in English affairs and especially his role in the events of 1536—it is hard to accept Pole’s hearty commendations to Henry’s VicarGeneral as any more genuine than his denials of complicity in the northern rebellions. Whatever Pole’s apologists may say to the contrary, he was not a frank writer. Nor was he a careful and retentive reader of his own words.26 Nor is his chronology to be relied upon. He argues that Cromwell came to the fore when he stiffened Henry’s resolve over the Divorce. He also argues that Cromwell came to the fore when he encouraged the attack on the monasteries. But several years separate these issues. He claims to have left England when Cromwell ousted Henry’s other ministers. Yet Pole departed at the very beginning of 1532 when Cromwell was far from being Henry’s sole, or even principal, counsellor. Equally unconvincing are Pole’s personal reminiscences. The alleged conversation at Wolsey’s is supposed to have taken place shortly after Pole’s return from Italy, which was late in 1526. A little later (paulo post) the King was deserted by his old counsellors and came to rely on Cromwell; whereupon (tunc) Pole took flight on what was, presumably, his final farewell to Henrician England in January 1532. A period of more than five years is thus glossed over. Pole’s adverbs of time are very approximate, and this becomes significant when we consider his account of his discovery that Il Principe was the book recommended by Cromwell. He had seen it, he says, ‘afterwards’ (postea). But how long afterwards? Certainly not prior to the composition of the De unitate in 1536, and perhaps not until 1538, by which time 26 See Van Dyke, ‘Reginald Pole’, 711, 716–17.

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there were five or six printed versions of Il Principe circulating in Italy.27 Whenever it was, Pole was both scandalized and excited by the revelation that, in the central chapters of Machiavelli’s book, there was a precise and virtually complete enunciation of the principles underlying the corrupt political practices against which he had inveighed in the De unitate—Henry VIII’s deliberate rejection of the Christian virtues and his cynical use of religion as a cloak for iniquity. In the De unitate there is neither a Machiavelli nor a Cromwell. In the Apologia there are both: and Pole’s interpretation of Il Principe in the latter work is determined by his view of English politics as set forth in the former.28 Thus for Pole much of Il Principe—the analysis of different kinds of state and their acquisition; the discussion of soldiery; the exhortation to the princes of Italy—would hardly have seemed relevant. It was only the deliberately topsy-turvy political morality which engaged his attention. Machiavelli’s little book was designed to shock strait-laced readers; and it succeeded. Everything we know about Pole’s background, career, and personality suggests that when, in the Apologia, he recommends traditional speculum principum wisdom, he was perfectly serious; and his convictions could only have been strengthened by the situation in England and by the fate of his family. He was bound to attack the argument advanced in the fifteenth chapter of Il Principe, that traditional ethics inevitably spell ruin for any prince attempting to practise them in a world where evil prevails. Similarly, he was bound to abhor Machiavelli’s advice that although, from the practical point of view, such virtues are disastrous, it is important to simulate them. This is precisely what Pole had already diagnosed as Henry VIII’s sinister habit. The alleged advantages of being feared rather than loved, together 27 Bertelli and Innocenti, nos. 18, 19, 24, 36, 37, 41. Van Dyke has some sensible remarks on the likely date of Pole’s ‘discovery’ of Il Principe, though he confuses the issue by accepting that there really had been a book offered by Cromwell to Pole, and that this book was Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano. 28 Donaldson suggests that Pole deliberately hid his views on Cromwell and Machiavelli in the De unitate as part of some arcane and prophetic strategy. But this is a very strained reading of the two texts, which ignores most of what they actually say in favour of apocalyptic and cryptic clues akin to the type of ingenuity which used to be deployed in the ‘Bacon is Shakespeare’ controversy.

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with the need to avoid being hated (Il Principe, 17, 19), were likewise pounced upon because they represented not only Henry’s practice but also his most signal failure; while the lion and fox metaphor (Il Principe, 18) comprised, for Pole, the whole truth about Henrician policy with its unsavoury amalgam of oppression and treachery. Above all, as befits a Cardinal of the Church of Rome, Pole discerns in Machiavelli’s wholly utilitarian treatment of religion the most reprehensible part of Il Principe and of Henry’s actions alike. To assert that religion has no validity beyond its political efficacy is tantamount to asserting that it has no validity at all. It is atheism. This is Pole’s inference from Il Principe; and it is a legitimate one. Nevertheless, Pole’s reading of Machiavelli is flawed not merely because his observations are confined to a few chapters of only one work whose context he ignores, but also because his moral indignation encourages him to go beyond the text. He attributes to Machiavelli specific advice that counsellors must be able to cover their master’s misdeeds with an appearance of virtue.29 But although Machiavelli does advise the prince to employ this cloak for all deeds, however evil, he does not say that this is what counsellors should advise. He offers no guidance whatever to underlings. They only figure in Il Principe when Machiavelli discusses the qualities that a prince should seek in them and, more especially, when he warns rulers to avoid flatterers by encouraging counsellors to speak the truth. The kind of toady discerned by Pole in Il Principe would, theoretically, have received short shrift from the Machiavellian prince. On the other hand, were counsellors to tell their prince that a particular course of action is disgraceful yet, at the same time, suggest how he might represent it as pious and honest, then they would be doing nothing different from Machiavelli himself in his role as adviser to the Medici in Il Principe; and Pole’s comment, though inaccurate, is not very wide of the mark. The fundamental question posed in the Apologia concerns the merit of counsel based upon scholastic traditions of good princely behaviour as against the pragmatism of men versed in the harsh verities of political intercourse. It was a question raised not only by 29 Apologia, 139.

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Machiavelli himself, in the fifteenth chapter of Il Principe, as the prelude to his deliberate reversal of Speculum principum norms, but also by other less reprehended authors. The position execrated by Pole, and which he attributes to a Machiavellian poison as yet unpublished in 1527, had been debated in print a decade earlier by the Englishman whom Pole revered and whose execution was the principal cause of the rage characterizing the De unitate and the Apologia. The Utopia, first published at the end of 1516, includes a long dialogue between Thomas More disguised as himself and More disguised as Raphael Hythlodaeus, the traveller freshly returned from the land of Utopia. Hythlodaeus’s knowledge and wisdom are so impressive that More urges him to find a place at some prince’s court where his advice would help the commonwealth. This Hythlodaeus refuses to do, pointing out that there are plenty of books full of precepts which princes might follow were they so inclined, and that to proffer prudent and virtuous counsel (recommending, for instance, peace and restraint to rulers bent on war and vice) would be to invite ridicule. More accepts that in the extreme examples cited by Hythlodaeus it would be no wonder if his words fell on deaf ears for—although this school philosophy is not unpleasant among friends’ familiar conversation—in the deliberations of kings, where great matters are debated with authority, ‘these thinges have no place’. That, says Hythlodaeus, is precisely his point. There is no room for philosophy in the courts of princes. More rejoins that although there is certainly no place for this ‘schole philosophie’ which thinks all things fitting for every occasion, there is, nevertheless, another kind of philosophy, more suitable for political life (alia philosophia civilior), which knows its own place and accommodates itself to the situation in hand. Even if it is impossible to root out evil opinion or to cure established vices, yet this is no more a reason to abandon the commonwealth than to forsake a ship in the midst of a tempest because one cannot command the winds. Nor is there any sense in trying to drive into people’s heads any notion which is patently inimical to them: But you must with a crafty wile and a subtell trayne studye and endevoure your selfe, as much as in yow lyethe, to handle the matter wyttelye and handsomelye for the purpose; and that whyche yowe can not turne to

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good, so to ordre it that it be not very badde. For it is not possible for all thynges to be well onles all men were good. Which I thynke wil not be yet thys good many yeares.

This subtlety is rejected as madness by Hythlodaeus, who protests that he is unable to speak other than the truth. Were he to take a place at court, then either he would perpetually and uselessly disagree with his colleagues, or else he would have to agree with them and thereby further their madness. Nor can he understand More’s suggestion that matters might be bent and handled so dexterously that evil, even if not eradicated, might yet be reduced. At court ‘noughtye counselles muste be openlye allowed and verye pestilent decrees muste be approved’. Mere faint praise is regarded as treachery; and so far from being able to do the slightest good, the evil company will sooner ‘perverte a good man, then be made good them selfes’.30 The argument put into Hythlodaeus’s mouth recalls that conventional medieval hostility which regarded courts and courtiers as mutually corruptive. On the other hand, the part More writes for himself is an adaptation of the defences of the vita activa which had occupied many Italian humanists from the late fourteenth century onwards, and which laid civic responsibility firmly upon the shoulders of those who had skill requisite for the service of their commonwealth. More also highlights the contrast between the philosophies of school and court, suggesting a compromise which might have offended Pole had he noticed the propinquity of More’s words to the doctrine attributed in the Apologia to both Machiavelli and Cromwell. There were other analogues, too. Roughly contemporary with Il Principe and the Utopia were the first three books of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano which, in its own way, confronts the difficulty of offering honest advice to unreceptive princes. Castiglione’s treatment of the issue is very slippery; and the courtier’s role is 30 For the original Latin text with an accurate but dreary translation, see the Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, iv (New Haven and London), 98–103. My quotations are from the translation by Ralph Robinson (1551), sigs. F.5–6v, which is in juicier English and, in this section at least, quite close to the original.

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uncomfortably akin to that of the sycophant—pliantly pleasing and regardful in his choice of time, place, and person for his every utterance. The question of what to do about serving an evil ruler is evaded by linking virtuous exhortation to abandon such a prince (rather than abet his wicked designs) with a cautious reminder that rulers may know more than their servants; that appearances of good and ill are deceptive; and that it is important to obey the commands of a superior rather than to trust to one’s own judgement. By the time that Il Cortegiano was published in 1528 (too late to be the work supposedly recommended by Cromwell)31 a final book had been added and, in it, Castiglione addressed the problem less evasively. Courtiers must employ their skills to gain the prince’s favour the more readily to induce him to virtue, for the advice to be given by these courtiers is within the Speculum principum tradition. It is further suggested that princes should select a number of wise men who may be relied upon to speak the truth; while it is recommended that courtiers should abandon a wholly evil ruler. Idealism is, however, again tempered by pragmatism when one of Castiglione’s interlocutors stresses the need for successful courtiers to know the nature of their prince so that they may select the most effective route to that favour which is necessary if they are to lead him to virtue. The prime example of this policy is Aristotle who, ‘practising the ways of a good courtier’, was able to exert a beneficial influence upon Alexander the Great; whereas Calisthenes—who wished to remain a pure philosopher without any admixture of courtiership—lost his life and brought infamy upon his prince. The problem was felt to be acute for, early in this final book, the interlocutor Ottaviano is made to say that modern princes are so corrupted by evil custom, ignorance, and selfesteem, and so suffocated by lying flatterers that, were some severe philosopher to lay before them the fearful face of true virtue (quella orrida faccia della vera virtu`), they would either abhor him or else make him a laughing stock.32 31 Van Dyke, ‘Reginald Pole’, 712–14, argues that Il Cortegiano was the book recommended by Cromwell. But apart from the unlikelihood that any such recommendation was made, Castiglione’s book was not published until at least a year after the alleged conversation. 32 Il Cortegiano, IV. viii.

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The issues at stake, and the difficulties associated with them, were real enough: but More and Castiglione could use the ambiguities of the dialogue form to explore the subject while masking their own opinions so effectively that, to this day, we remain uncertain of them. On the other hand, both Machiavelli in his treatise and Pole in his invective were absolutely clear on the status of traditional political morality; and both writers—Machiavelli implicitly and Pole explicitly—indicated the type of advice which they deemed necessary for princes. Later writers, too, addressed the problem and their solutions ranged from a reiteration of conventional pieties to open advocacy of courtly sycophancy. Pole, as we have seen, deprecates the latter course: yet his statement of the theory is almost a pre-echo of the systematic immorality subsequently advocated by cynics such as Lorenzo Ducci. In this, as in other respects, the Apologia anticipated subsequent developments. Pole was a well-educated, though only moderately intelligent man of a thoroughly conventional cast of mind, and his Apologia is the earliest surviving detailed critique of Il Principe. The methods he adopts for refuting Machiavelli have, therefore, a special interest irrespective of the fact that they can have exerted little influence. His exclusive concentration upon the issues of religion and political morality, and the way in which this resulted in his taking part of Machiavelli’s work for the whole, were to become commonplace. But there were other more important prophetic features of Pole’s approach. He was the first to recognize that, to argue effectively against Il Principe’s topsy-turvy political morality, it was necessary to undermine its very foundations; so that, despite his conviction that ‘true reason’ (applying the touchstone of Christian ethics) is the only serious test of any human activity, Pole was prepared to refute Machiavelli on purely utilitarian grounds. Machiavelli’s precepts do not work. This is the crux of Pole’s argument because, in Il Principe, he believed that he had found the theoretical justification and inspiration for the political practice of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. Machiavelli is analysed to reveal the underlying structure and purposes of Henrician policy; while Henrician policy is analysed to lay bare the futility of Machiavelli’s theories. The impossibility of carrying such policies to a successful conclusion is evidenced by Henry’s

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own deeds, which have resulted not in security and prosperity but in hatred, ignominy, and ruin. Pole’s argument is circular and simplistic. Nearly fifty years later, however, a similar approach was employed more comprehensively by Innocent Gentillet who, like Pole, believed that in Machiavelli’s writings he had discovered the intellectual source of corrupt contemporary policy, and similarly sought to refute both theory and practice on the grounds of their proven inutility. Gentillet resembled Pole in another respect. He, too, was not writing—as posterity has insisted—primarily to refute Machiavelli. Each polemicist was concerned, rather, to expose the evils of a particular regime which was translating Machiavellian precepts into practice. Gentillet’s attack, however, made a substantial impact on contemporary Europe. Pole’s unpublished diatribe did not.

5 Osorio and Machiavelli: From Open Hostility to Covert Approbation Long before Pole wrote his Apologia, the Emperor Charles V, for whom it was intended, had been offered Nifo’s De regnandi peritia. There is no evidence that Charles ever read that cynical manipulation of Machiavelli’s ideas, though he was later said to have been a devoted student of Machiavelli.1 On the other hand we do know that the Emperor had been deeply unimpressed by Pole’s diplomacy in 1539, and it is unlikely that the platitudinous political morality of the Apologia, written at the same period, would have pleased him better had it been presented to him. Yet, despite the fact that this critique remained in an unregarded manuscript version for more than two centuries, there is one tiny morsel of evidence to suggest that Pole was deemed knowledgeable concerning Machiavelli. He returned to England as papal legate towards the end of 1554; and on 7 April 1555 he received a book from a well-known scholar. The donor was Roger Ascham, who had for some time been seeking advancement at court and had already sent an identical present to Lord Paget, Cuthbert Tunstall, and Sir William Petre. The book, Jeronimo Osorio da Fonseca’s De nobilitate civili et christiana, includes a lengthy attack on Machiavelli and, although this was not the work’s principal attraction for Ascham, he refers to it in three of his covering letters.2 He notes 1 On Charles V’s alleged interest in Machiavelli see above, Ch. 1, pp. 18–19. 2 Roger Ascham, The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, ed. J. A. Giles (1864), ii. 390–1, 440–2, 436–7. And see L. V. Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford, Calif., 1963), 325 n. 27 on the order and dating of these letters.

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that Osorio writes against Machiavelli, who has been recognized by many good men to have wickedly disparaged and even impiously ridiculed the religion of Christ, ‘always with great cleverness, but frequently not with a healthy understanding’.3 The wording of this passage is virtually identical in each of Ascham’s three letters which mention Machiavelli: but there is one significant difference. In the letter to Pole, Ascham inserts the words ut scis—‘as you know’. I do not know how Ascham knew what Pole knew but, since he claims to have been on friendly terms with the Cardinal and to have enjoyed intellectual conversations with him, the most likely source is from direct contact. Pole’s response to Osorio’s treatment of Machiavelli is another unknown: though the vigorous denunciation of this beˆte noire, exposing depravity in a work other than Il Principe, is likely to have appealed to him. Jeronimo Osorio was born at Lisbon in 1506, and studied civil law at Salamanca, philosophy at Paris, and theology at Bologna. He lectured on Scripture at the University of Coimbra; and served as secretary to Prince Luiz, and as tutor to the Prince’s son. He enjoyed a long and fairly distinguished career in the Church, though the last years of his life were clouded by a conflict with the Portuguese King Sebastian and, more fundamentally, by the dramatic decline of Portugal itself.4 Such reputation as remains to him rests principally on three facets of his activity: the immense, but quickly fading, contemporary respect for his skill as a Latinist and historian; his letter to Queen Elizabeth suggesting that she return to the Catholic fold, and the ensuing controversy with Walter Haddon;5 and his attack on Machiavelli. These are 3 It seems as though Ascham had been reading Giovio on Machiavelli. 4 See Francisco Elias de Tejada, ‘Las doctrinas polı´ticas de Jero´nimo Oso´rio’, Anuario de Historia del Derecho espan˜ol, 16 (1945), 341–88; Francisco Leite de Faria, ‘As muitas edic¸o˜es das obras de Dom Jero´nimo Oso´rio’, Rivista da Biblioteca Nacional (Lisbon), 1 (1981), 116–35; Nair de Nazare´ Castro Soares, O Prı´ncipe Ideal no Se´colo XVI e a Obra de D. Jero´nimo Oso´rio (Coimbra, 1994). There is very little on Osorio in English apart from Aubrey F. G. Bell, ‘The Humanist Jeronymo de Osorio’, Revue hispanique, 73 (1928), 525–56. 5 On Osorio’s English connection, see L. V. Ryan, ‘The Haddon–Osorio Controversy (1563–1583)’, Church History, 22 (1953), 142–54; and, more fully documented, Le´on Bourdon, ‘Jeronimo Osorio et les humanistes anglais’, in L’Humanisme portugais et l’Europe. Actes du XXI e colloque international d’e´tudes

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disparate and incommensurable matters—a kind of historical flotsam—all that is left bobbing about after the vessel itself and the bulk of its cargo have been submerged by time. Yet, in his own day, Osorio was the ‘Portuguese Cicero’, valued both for his matter and manner; and his moral, political, and historical works circulated widely and were much reprinted throughout the sixteenth century. His debut as an author was made with the five books De nobilitate— two on civil nobility and three on Christian nobility—first published at Lisbon in 1542, and it is in the final book of this work that Osorio, having discussed justice and liberality, moves on to Christian fortitude and magnanimity. He feels obliged to treat these last two qualities at length because of the ‘peevish and perverse dealinge of them which cannot finde in theyr hartes to yelde unto Christian men the commendation of that Vertue’.6 And these peevish and perverse critics soon resolve themselves into the person of Machiavelli and those influenced by him. Osorio is clearly aware of a range of Machiavelli’s writings, for he introduces him as a ‘certaine malepert, saucye, and wicked writer in bookes in which he hath contayned the history of his owne Citty, and many questions pertaininge to the state of a commonwealth in the Hetruscan tongue’, and later makes an oblique reference to Il Principe, pointing out that Machiavelli is a ‘notable author that instructeth princes how to undoe their countrye which teacheth them to establish the wealth and estate of humanistes. Tours, 3–13 Juillet 1978 (Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Centre culturel Portugais: Paris, 1984), 263–333. 6 The five bookes of the famous . . . H. Osorius, contaynynge a discourse of civill and christian nobilitie, trans. William Blandie (1576), fo. 86. The 16th-c. editions of the De nobilitate Christiana were as follows: (Lisbon, 1542); (Florence, 1552); (Basle, 1571); (Basle 1573); (London, 1576); (London, 1580); (Basle, 1584); (London, 1589); (Antwerp, 1595); (Cologne 1595). It was included in Osorio’s Opera Omnia (Rome, 1592); while parts of the section against Machiavelli were reprinted in Antonio Possevino, Iudicium de Nuae militis Galli, I. Bodini, P. Mornaei, N. Machiavelli & Antimachiavelli scriptis (Rome, 1592), and subsequent editions (Lyon, 1593 and 1594). Parts of Possevino’s digest even found their way into Teglio’s edition of Machiavelli’s Princeps (Oberursel, 1600). With the exception of Blandie’s English translation (1576), all these editions are in Latin. My quotations, except where indicated, are from Blandie’s version, which has the virtue of being in lively Elizabethan English while remaining (for the most part) fairly true to the original.

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theire kingdomes not so much by equitie and curtesie, as by guilfull pollice and crueltye’. Osorio would willingly have compassion for the deceased author were it not for the fact that he continues ‘nowe to corrupte many more with his vile and pestilent writinge, then in time past with his lewd life most reprochfull and subjecte to contempt’. It is necessary to engage with the ‘spirite and ghoste of this wicked person’, for his mischief is ‘spreade farre and wide, and hath greately infected manye with pestilente contagion’.7 Osorio’s concern is not with general political theory but with the various virtues which together constitute Christian nobility. The hostile discussion of Christianity in the Discorsi particularly attracts his attention because, by countering its arguments, he can demonstrate the nature of Christian fortitude and its superiority over the pagan virtues. The offending chapter in the Discorsi (II. 2) comprises one of the feeblest of Machiavelli’s arguments. Its theme is the nature of the people against whom the Romans had to fight and, more particularly, the obstinacy with which these people had defended their liberty. This leads Machiavelli to ponder the contrast between ancient virtu` and modern corruption as exemplified by the diminished love of liberty and attenuated vigour of his contemporaries arising, he suggests, from the differences between ancient and modern education. These, in turn, depend upon differences in religion: ‘because our religion, having shown us the truth and the true way, makes us esteem less the honour of the world: whereas the Gentiles—esteeming it greatly, and having placed therein the highest good—were more fierce in their actions’. This can be appreciated by comparing the magnificence of their religion and its sacrifices ‘full of blood and ferocity’ with the humility of our institutions and their lack of vigour. The ancients did not consider men blessed unless they were full of worldly glory. Christianity, on the other hand, glorifies the humble and contemplative more than the active. It has ‘placed the highest good in humility, abjection, and in contempt for human things; the other [religion] placed it in greatness of spirit, in bodily strength, and in 7 Christian nobilitie, fos. 89v –90, 96. Cf. fo. 102, where Osorio notes wide dispersal of the ‘number of them which either stirred uppe by his wrytinges, or of theire voluntarye motion, were partakers of his wickednes and fury’.

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all the other things fitted to make men most powerful’. Christianity, Machiavelli concedes, demands fortitude: but this is a passive quality of suffering, not the active achievement of great deeds, and it has caused the world to become weak and fall prey to wicked men who can manage affairs securely because the generality, seeking only paradise, think more about bearing injuries than about avenging them. Thus far Machiavelli has laid the blame for modern decadence squarely upon the tenets of the Christian faith. Yet he suddenly adopts a different stance. Though it seems that the world has become effeminate, and that heaven is disarmed, this has without doubt come about through the baseness of men who interpret Christianity according to sloth, and not according to virtu`. Because if they had considered that it permits us to exalt and defend our fatherland, they would have seen how it wishes us to love and honour it, and to prepare ourselves to be able to defend it. So, he continues, this kind of education and the misinterpretation of Christianity have caused the lack of republics as compared with the past, and also resulted in there being less love of liberty. This ought to have been the end of Machiavelli’s case: but suddenly—in one of those tangential leaps which characterize his thought—he declares that he believes ‘rather that the reason for this is that the Roman empire with its arms and greatness wiped out all the republics and all self-governing communities’, and even though subsequently the Roman Empire disintegrated, its cities have never been able to pull themselves together again, nor restore their civic freedom. This is the paralogism which Osorio sought to confute. Its laxity and inconsequentiality provide easy targets; and Osorio makes things even easier for himself by inferring more than Machiavelli implies and by putting foolish words into his mouth. He accurately notes that Machiavelli had blamed Christianity for the decay of that greatness of spirit which flourished in ancient times, but he goes on to say that Machiavelli had also attributed the ruin of the Roman Empire to the Christian faith—and this is not what Machiavelli wrote. Nor, strictly speaking, did he even imply it. However, Osorio’s aim is better when he points out that Machiavelli had attempted to mitigate his offence by asserting that the decay of

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nobility came about not through the fault of Christianity itself but rather through those who had misinterpreted it—a feeble attempt at exculpation which Osorio scornfully dismisses as a ‘most inept medicament’ (ineptissimam illam medicinam). Osorio now moves on to the first phase of his refutation by citing against Machiavelli the vast numbers of men, women, and even children whose Christian fortitude enabled them to endure prodigious torments, and to choose a glorious and honourable death rather than to live ‘stayned wyth ignomye and shame’.8 This argument, of itself, would only serve to confirm Machiavelli’s opinion that Christianity was strong on suffering but weak on revenge; and Osorio later meets this objection. But first he disposes of the idea that the Roman Empire had been undermined by Christianity; and his arguments are interesting because they suggest that his reading of Machiavelli not only angered him but might also have exerted a positive, if unacknowledged, influence on his thought—something which becomes more apparent later in his career.9 Has not this ‘fine fellow’, demands Osorio, ‘which is so expert in all matters of pollecie’ read in learned authors that states follow a natural course of growth and decay? Nothing is immortal. Everything which has a beginning must eventually come to an end. So it is with states. The might of the Assyrians, the Persians, the Athenians, and the Macedonians have all been extinguished either by some other power or simply through old age. No wise man wonders at the destruction of commonwealths. Instead he considers nothing so worthy of admiration and study as the long continuance of a great state, and therefore supposes the question to be asked is rather ‘why Sparta so many yeares continued in the self same maner of governmente, and in the self same order of disciplyne; than why the glorye and wealth of the Athenians so soone decayed’. The greater the structure the more likely it is to fall by its own weight, so that the long survival of Rome is especially remarkable by reason of that city’s unequalled glory and dominion. Yet this Machiavelli fellow laments the decay and 8 Christian nobilitie, fo. 90v . 9 See below, pp. 156–63, for the Machiavellism of Osorio’s De regis institutione.

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fall of Rome as though it ‘shoulde have beene perpetuall, excepte it had beene hindered by the religion of Chryste’. Why, demands Osorio, does this madman not enquire ‘what other thing hath decayed the welth of the Romayne Empire?’.10 This gross misrepresentation of Machiavelli is a good example of what happens when a reader is so incensed by one detail of a text that he fails to pay attention to anything else. The whole of the Discorsi is precisely that rumination on the extraordinary durability of a great empire, which Osorio believes to be the concern appropriate to a wise man. Machiavelli himself notes the inevitability of political decay which may be temporarily delayed, as it was by Rome, but cannot be stopped.11 He likewise comments on the case of Sparta and compares it with Rome, demonstrating how the longevity of the former was gained by avoiding the expansion and widespread dominion of the latter, and acknowledging how Rome’s very greatness contributed to its eventual ruin.12 Machiavelli also has much to say about the internal discords which tore Rome asunder. He would have agreed with Osorio’s judgement that Rome’s decline began with the ‘bloudy broils’ between Sulla and Marius, the rise of imperial government, and the destruction of republican liberties.13 He would also have sympathized with Osorio’s impassioned cry that, after tyranny gained the upper hand at Rome, all the worthy qualities whereby the Roman people had earned their renown began to decay: frugality gave place to greed; hardiness in war was replaced by ‘tenderness and niceness’ of body and mind; and respect for the laws changed to impudent boldness and unbridled lust. And he would have endorsed Osorio’s comments on how the riotous behaviour of the emperors cut Rome off from all prosperity; how assassinations grew to a custom, with good rulers as likely to fall victims as the bad; how the army would make and break emperors for a ‘booty in ready money’; and how the rival rulers waged ceaseless wars, consuming all that remained of Rome’s wealth.14 Machiavelli would have agreed with all these observations because he had himself suggested them; though he would have been 10 Christian nobilitie, fos. 91v ---92. 11 Cf. Discorsi, I. 2, II. 1, III. 17; and Istorie fiorentine, V. 1. 12 Discorsi, I. 2, 5, 6. 13 Ibid. I. 37. 14 Cf. ibid. I. 10.

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astonished to find them set out against him in order to refute a theory he had never advanced. Osorio here scales the heights of ineptitude. Inaccurate and pleonastic, he labours his misreading for page after page; and it is not surprising that when Antonio Possevino included Osorio’s attack on Machiavelli in one of his own works he omitted the whole of this section on the alleged reasons for the fall of Rome, and resumed the text only when Osorio returned to more solid ground with his discussion of Machiavelli’s ideas on Christian fortitude.15 Machiavelli had argued that Christian glorification of humility makes men less likely to perform the great deeds undertaken by the pagans for the sake of worldly renown. Osorio rejects this, suggesting that desire for human praise is not the only inspiration for virtuous and courageous acts. Love of one’s country, concern for personal honour, reverence for the laws and for religion: all these are better spurs to great deeds and they are ‘most perfectly contayned in the rules and institution of Christians’. It is not terrestrial but immortal glory that the Christian seeks. Pride, insolence, cruelty, and brutishness have nothing to do with valour, and it is an error to believe that courage arising from fury is true fortitude. It is, rather, nothing but the ‘cruel egrenes of a savage beast’. Here, Osorio alludes to the perverted morality of Il Principe. Machiavelli, he observes, may apply any name he wishes to cruelty and perfidy, but the wise man recognizes that the humility extolled in the Scriptures (together with clemency and mildness) is the exemplar of true fortitude, and is certainly no impediment to it. All the virtues are, as it were, glued together, se conglutinae sint, so that it is no more the mark of a magnanimous spirit to be able to sustain the attack of an enemy than to be able to control anger and other passions. There has never been a man famous for his strength who has not also been praised for his gentleness—a dubious proposition which Osorio supports with the no less equivocal examples of Themistocles, Pericles, and Julius Caesar. Conversely, the meaner and more abject a spirit, the greater its propensity towards rage and cruelty. Look at the barbarians, says Osorio; and look at women, ‘than whom there is nothing more feeble and nothing 15 For Possevino, see above, n. 6, and below, Ch. 11, pp. 386–9.

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more vindictive’. Modesty is the light of virtue, and only a perverse madman would condemn Christian mildness as weakness, for it is the magnanimous who do not give way to wrath when ‘nipped with tauntes and provoked with injury’.16 That Christ taught men to requite insult with kindness and injury with benefits, Osorio is prepared to admit; and it might thus seem that gentle Christians would never drive back invaders or resist evil with force of arms. Yet whoever thinks this neither properly weighs the ‘distinctions of dutyes’ nor the differences of persons, places, times, and causes. Christians, who are moderate and patient in tolerating private offences, are most eager to uphold public safety and liberty, especially when it affects the dignity of religion. Then they adjudge mildness a disgrace, and patience a heinous crime. Characteristically, Osorio’s two prime examples of this Christian synthesis of gentleness and martial zeal in the cause of religion are Moses and David: though he adds vaguely that many Christian princes, too, have distinguished themselves in similar fashion, while Christ himself had shown the way by using a whip on those who had committed sacrilege and polluted the sacred ceremonies—the standard reference for those seeking to justify Christian violence.17 Osorio now turns to Machiavelli’s comparison between the ancient bloody sacrifices which stirred men to ferocity, and the bloodless ceremonies of Christianity which did no such thing. Such frenzy, blindness, and stupidity astound Osorio, who points out the folly of supposing that somebody inured to the ‘butcherly manglinge of beastes’ is likely to prove a valiant man. If this were true then why, he asks, do we not muster all the butchers and all the public executioners who, being used to blood and cruelty, would rush upon the enemy and keep us safe from every danger? Osorio enjoys his little touch of irony: but this seemingly bizarre notion was a commonplace among writers assessing the military potential of different civilian occupations, and its ultimate source is Vegetius, who had argued that there was some sense in recruiting practical men such as blacksmiths, carpenters, victuallers, and huntsmen. Machiavelli, in the Arte della guerra, follows Vegetius 16 Christian nobilitie, fos. 95v
96v .

17 Gospel according to St John 2: 15.

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and does, indeed, add butchers (beccai) to the list of skills favoured by some authors—though he is less committed to them than was Christine de Pisan a century earlier when she had valued butchers because they were accustomed to shedding blood and ‘to smyte with axes’.18 For Osorio this is manifest nonsense; and he moves on to demonstrate, with much force, that pagan sacrifices and ceremonies are more likely to have induced timorousness than courage in the hearts of the beholders. He pours scorn on the silliness of birdgazers and soothsayers to whom every natural phenomenon— the flight of birds, an earthquake, thunder, or even the dining habits of chickens—is portentous. Under the influence of such beliefs men live in constant fear and uncertainty: Wilt thou say that those ceremonies, those filthye and old wives superstitions did instruct men and trayne them up in prowesse and chivalrye? which make men stout of stomache and courage tremble, which misleade theyr myndes from constancie, which hinder their devises that tend to common safty? doest thou in this manner shew thy dutifull harte towards Almighty God, by whose meanes and gratious goodnes we are disburdened and delivered from so wicked, so uncleane, so frantick and mad superstition, that thou darest presume to preferre the same before the religion of Christ? (fo. 99r---v )

Christianity rejects these inanities. There is nothing which can ‘daunt or dismay’ a Christian because he knows that he is guarded by a mighty army of angels and, more important, because his constancy is maintained by the foreknowledge of immortality. Caesar reported that the Gauls were inspired by their druids to believe in life after death through the passage of the soul from one body to another; and, if this ‘vile fond superstition’ inspired them to perform great feats of courage, what then, demands Osorio, may be achieved through the true and assured convictions of the 18 Christian nobilitie, fo. 97v . Further references are given in the text. Cf. Vegetius, I. 7; Machiavelli, Arte della guerra, ed. Bertelli, 350; Christine de Pisan, The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyvalrye, ed. A. T. P. Byles (EETS, 1932), 38. Butchers are also recommended for front-line duty in Le Victorial. Chronique de Don Pedro Nin˜o Comte de Buelna par Gutierre Diaz de Gamez son Alferez, 1379–1449, trans. and ed. Comte A. de Circourt and Comte de Puymaigre (Paris, 1867), 8–9.

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Christian? Finally, in addition to this, there is the power of the love which inflames those who have truly entered the profession of Christ. Love and charity are the greatest of all inspirations to hazardous undertakings because nothing seems too difficult for those who are thus moved, and they are even prepared to suffer death through the most ‘exquisite torments of the body that can be devised’ (fo. 101v ). There is no comparison between the pagan and Christian faiths, and no purpose in piling up further arguments to establish Machiavelli’s wickedness and madness. Osorio concedes that he has, perhaps, spent longer on this matter than he should: but it was a necessary digression because his central purpose has been to set forth the honour and dignity of Christian nobility which Machiavelli had attempted to defame. This is the end of the formal refutation of Machiavelli: but the remainder of the De nobilitate christiana is a kind of epilogue to it. What, asks Osorio, of those who abhor all knowledge of warfare and who deem military skill opposed to Christ’s commands? He is almost as vehemently opposed to pacifism as to Machiavelli. War undertaken for the defence of religion is, he writes, wonderfully extolled in the Scriptures—a fact which cannot be denied by pacifists who, none the less, argue that it is merely another of those customs which belonged to the Old Law but are no longer admissable. In order to sweep such objections aside, Osorio rather begs the question by using the Old Testament figure of Deborah to demonstrate the curse which falls upon those who fail to do their utmost in the wars of the Lord. The holy ceremonies and mysteries, many of which were undoubtedly rendered obsolete when their prophetic purpose was fulfilled by the coming of Christ, can in no way be compared with warfare which was ‘ordayned for the preservation of the common wealth’, and which wholly appertains to ‘civill policie’. The state can only be maintained and ‘as it were propped up’ by strength and force of arms: ‘for as much as all thinges in time of peace to be practised and exercised, are under the tuition and defence of martiall prowesse: he that taketh away the knowledge of feates of armes, worketh the overthrowe of the common wealth’ (fos. 102v
103r ). Had such a situation truly resulted from Christian doctrine then a madman like Machiavelli might, with some reason, criticize it. But the truth of the matter is

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that Christ did not wish the civil state to be overthrown. Indeed, he wished it to be established and confirmed. Just as the magistrate is armed with the authority of the laws to suppress wickedness within the state, so the soldier, clad in armour, may with his sword repel danger. All of this, together with a citation of the words of John the Baptist to the soldiers (Luke 3: 14), are the conventionalities of Christian apologists for war.19 But Osorio’s recognition that war is occasioned by the intrinsic evil of human nature is more interesting. There is a gap between everyday reality and the Christian ideal, which Osorio highlights in a positively Machiavellian outburst: Truly nothing were more hartely to be desired of a Christian man, then that all men woulde refrayne themselves from wickednes and sinnefull luste. But forasmuche as that cannot alwayes fall oute, and in steede of continencie, unbrideled luste, in steede of justice either forraine force, or civil broyles use to aryse, then of necessitie either the force of the ennemye is wyth weapons and mayne strength to be beaten backe, or the outrage of oure citizens with sword to be repressed. (fo. 103r )

Pacifists condemn such a view as opposed to Christian charity: but Osorio repudiates their argument by stressing his distinction between private and public morality. Christ, he admits, commanded that we should not seek to avenge an injury—praecipit Christus ne illatam injuriam ulciscamur—a passage which, brilliantly mistranslated in Blandie’s edition as ‘Christ hath commanded that we should be revenged of our enemyes’, must have set many a bewildered English reader to scouring the Gospels in vain. The original Latin is more conventional, but Osorio contrives to give it a completely relativist gloss. No doubt, he says, it is the property of perfect and absolute virtue, when we suffer private wrongs and injuries, to show a ‘singular and wonderfull patience of the mynde’; but when either the safety of our country, or the honour and state of our religion is threatened, then it is proper to ‘take an invincible stomach’ against outrage and villainy. Christian peace does not subsist in idleness and repose. It has to be fought 19 See R. H. Bainton, Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace (Nashville, Tenn., 1960), 53–65.

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for. And the remainder of the De nobilitate christiana comprises a list, with suitable comments, of those who have fought zealously to maintain peace. First there are the Hebrews, Abraham, Gideon, Joshua, and Jephtha; then a series of Christians, Constantine, Theodosius, Charles Martel, Charlemagne, and Godefroy; and finally a miscellaneous selection of Iberian warriors, Ferdinand of Aragon, Alphonso I of Portugal, Sanchez, Emmanuel, and the contemporary John III, brother of Osorio’s dedicatee, Prince Luiz. The De nobilitate proved a popular work and there were at least nine further Latin editions, including that in Osorio’s Opera omnia, by the end of the sixteenth century. Blandie’s English translation was published in 1576; and the section against Machiavelli was thrice reprinted by Possevino in the 1590s, whence it found its way into the Oberursel edition (and others) of Teglio’s Latin translation of Il Principe, and thence into the apparatus of Hermann Conring’s own Latin version of Il Principe in 1660.20 The impact of this critique of Machiavelli is, none the less, impossible to assess. Although we know that, in addition to Pole and Ascham’s other chosen targets, the De nobilitate was owned by such dignitaries as Queen Elizabeth I and William Cecil, we have no knowledge of their reactions to it.21 Osorio’s arguments are rarely cited. Yet, despite their obvious limitation to only one point in one chapter of one work by Machiavelli, and despite the fact that even from this single point a false inference is drawn, his treatment of Machiavelli is not entirely negligible. He recognizes the unsatisfactory shiftiness of Discorsi, II. 2; effectively mocks Machiavelli’s enthusiasm for blood sacrifices; and offers a stout defence of Christian fortitude against the charge of pusillanimity. But especially noteworthy is his refutation 20 See above, n. 6. On the editions of Teglio’s translation with the section from Osorio, see Bertelli and Innocenti, Bibliografia, secolo XVII, nos. 2, 10, 24, 41, 48, 96; and for Conring, ibid., no. 54. 21 The copy of the De nobilitate (Florence, 1552) in the British Library, press mark 521.d.2, has a manuscript presentation letter from Johannes Spithovius. This letter was thought to be addressed to Queen Mary, but Bourdon, ‘Jeronimo Osorio’ dates it to 1559 and it is, therefore, written to Queen Elizabeth. The title page of the 1552 edition of the De nobilitate christiana which is preserved at Hatfield House is autographed ‘Gulielmus Cecilius 1553’, and is reproduced in E. M. Tenison, Elizabethan England (Royal Leamington Spa, 1933–61), i. 191.

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of those false interpreters of Christ’s attitude towards peace and war who had been alluded to by Machiavelli. Osorio, in fact, uses the very same arguments advanced by Machiavelli as the true interpretation of the Christian position which not only permits us to defend our native land, but exhorts us to prepare ourselves for this worthy task. Even Osorio’s suggestions concerning the underlying causes for the decline of Rome are, as we have seen, a selective simplification of Machiavelli’s own more extended treatment.

o s ori o as a machi ave lli an The assumption of Machiavellian arguments in the De nobilitate may have been unconscious. Nearly thirty years later, however, when Osorio wrote his own treatise on kingship, he found some of Machiavelli’s views valuable as a focus of debate, and made skilful though unacknowledged use of them. The De regis institutione et disciplina, offered by Osorio to King Sebastian of Portugal in 1571, is cast in that favourite dialogue form which served to hide the precise beliefs of so many Renaissance authors from contemporaries and posterity alike.22 Political arguments are advanced and then refuted by Osorio with equal facility and he handles the dialogue with great dexterity, cogently expounding positions which he may well have found personally distasteful. He confronts, for example, the idea that too zealous a regard for religion undermines the honour and dignity of princes. Evil advisers attack their ruler’s piety by telling him that religion encourages a man not to punish offences but rather to endure injuries patiently; and they argue that such an effeminate attitude has nothing of magnanimity, greatness, or honour about it.23 This ground had been covered in the De nobilitate, and Osorio’s 22 De regis institutione et disciplina Libri VIII ad Serenissimum et Invictissimum Portugaliae Regem Sebastianum (Lisbon, 1571). Other Latin editions appeared at Cologne in 1572, 1574, 1588. There was also a French translation by Pierre Brisson, L’instruction et nourriture du prince (Paris, 1583). My references are to the 1571 Lisbon edition. 23 De regis institutione, iii, fo. 72r--v .

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protagonists easily demonstrate the falsity of such iniquitous counsel. But there is greater subtlety in Osorio’s handling of a related, though more complex, political issue which reveals that he had read and seriously pondered Machiavelli. Should princes always keep faith and speak the truth? One of Osorio’s interlocutors, Menesius—who consistently advocates the middle way in all things—accepts that it is a great evil to lie ‘often’, to violate one’s word, and to break treaties. Yet there are times and circumstances when keeping a promise can seriously prejudice the whole nation; and it is then necessary for the king either to abandon the care of his state or to proceed by craft and cunning.24 Lysander’s defence of his own trickery in public affairs is cited here. Denounced, on the grounds that lying was unfitting for somebody descended from the line of Hercules, Lysander had replied that, on the contrary, Hercules had been the first to cover himself with the skins both of the lion and the fox. Moreover, Lysander had not merely said this but had shown, in his actions, that he believed nothing unworthy if it served to augment his state. Without doubt, continues Menesius, love of one’s native land is so important that we may sometimes be obliged to endure shame on its behalf. It is true that many princes behave like this simply to increase their personal power: yet even they do not incur infamy for lying, but are praised by prudent men and enjoy a reputation for virtue and industry. Conversely, those who refuse to violate their oath cannot wish to increase their empire and are mocked as stupid and guileless.25 It would be an infinite task, says Menesius, to number those princes, celebrated in the writings of learned men, who have achieved conquests more by fraud than by open warfare and 24 Ibid., fo. 36: ‘Fateor equidem facinus esse, plerumque mentiri, fidem datam fallere, et in conditione atque pacto non manere. sed incidunt saepe tempora, in quibus non possis stare promissis, sine magno Reipublicae detrimento. tunc igitur, Rex aut Reipublica curam abijciat opus est; aut multa subdole atque versute moliatur.’ 25 Ibid., fo. 36r--v : ‘Et profecto tanta est caritas patriae, ut omnis etiam interdum turpitudo, gratia illius subeunda videatur. quanquam multi Reges id non tam patriae amore, quam suae dominationis augendae causa faciunt: et tamen mentiendo, non solum nullam infamiam suscipiunt: verum etiam simul cum virtutis et industriae fama, ingenij atque prudentiae laudem consequuntur. illi vero qui ne fidem fallant, imperium augere nolunt, ut stulti, et nimis simplices irridentur.’

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who, considering profit rather than honesty, have thereby obtained riches and glory. Nor are examples confined to the ancient histories. How many treaties have been agreed by Christian rulers, and how many have endured when not confirmed and maintained by considerations of profit? Agreements have been broken the moment that peace threatened utility. And this is true not merely of Carthaginians, Turks, and other tyrants who have founded their empires upon evildoing; it is just as true of Christian princes whose names have nevertheless not been spotted by any opprobrium of impiety. Just consider how they have violated their oath in order to obtain the lands of others, and you will understand how virtually every king measures religion solely by the criterion of utility. Yet, despite this, their names are spread everywhere with admiration: ‘and so I say that those princes are most greatly to be praised who, when the safety of the state requires, disregard the promise they have given’ (Illud tamen dico, eos Principes qui cum Reipublicae salus postulaverit, fidem datam neglexerint, summis esse laudibus efferendos). Indeed, it might be argued that those who break a promise for the good of their land have not betrayed their faith at all but have, rather, preserved it by honouring a greater obligation. Conversely, anybody who ruins his homeland by keeping his word has committed the utmost crime of perfidy. Doctors frequently lie to alleviate the sickness they wish to cure, and princes must do the same to secure the preservation of their states. While seeking the glory of honesty, they must not lose their reputation for prudence and sanity; and they must beware lest, wishing to honour agreements with foreigners, they violate the trust of those whom they are supposed to protect. The entire matter is summed up in a neat paradox: ‘when the common good demands, in order to maintain faith a prince does not hesitate to break it’ (ita fidem conservare, ut cum id communis utilitas flagitaverit, fidem violare non dubitet).26

26 De regis institutione, iii, fo. 37v .

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The strain laid upon personal morality by necessity and responsibility was a standard political problem. It had been mooted by Aristotle, and examined by those who commented upon him. The issue was probed by medieval lawyers and philosophers; Aquinas pondered it; and the humanists added their own contributions to the debate.27 The propriety of choosing the lesser of two political evils had many reputable antecedents. Yet, for his arguments, Osorio resorted instead to Machiavelli. In Il Principe, the case for breaking faith when reason of state so demanded had been set out explicitly and without compromise; and Osorio must have had these passages in mind when he set about building a convincing argument for his mouthpiece, Menesius. We can recognize Machiavelli’s belief in the ultimate value of good faith in a prince (‘Quanto sia laudabile in uno principe mantenere la fede e vivere con integrita` e non con astuzia, ciascuno lo intende’); his regret that, nevertheless, circumstances generally make it impossible to act with perfect virtue; his recognition that princes must know how to employ the cunning of a fox in order to preserve their land; his view that blind adherence to conventional virtue can lead to the vice of political ruin; his revelation that a multitude of modern rulers, despite their having increased their dominions by lying and deception, continue to enjoy honour and praise (‘Facci dunque uno principe di vincere e mantenere lo stato; e mezzi saranno sempre iudicati onorevoli e da ciascuno laudati’). All these are adapted by Osorio, who does not simply transcribe them verbatim, but welds the ideas together; elaborates on them; intelligently extends Machiavelli’s lion/fox metaphor by identifying its origin in the story of Lysander; and, above all, draws out the key moral issue. The central problem for Osorio is a traditional one. Do considerations of the common good and of duty to their own subjects inevitably force princes to violate the ethical norms? And is such violation more apparent than real, because it results not merely in a lesser evil but also in a greater good? Into the mouth of Menesius, Osorio puts a sophisticated and cogent Machiavellian argument which he subsequently refutes in a 27 On all this, see Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State, 1100–1322 (Princeton, 1964).

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conventional but no less sophisticated manner by demonstrating both the corrupting tendency of habitual political dishonesty— when vices masquerade as virtues—and the instability of political life when devoid of trust. Osorio is no innocent. He comprehends the practical limitations imposed by human peccancy on rulers who pursue the paths of righteousness, and especially on those who wish to live at peace. These difficulties are debated in the De regis institutione; and the warrior ethic, which had been so prominent in the De nobilitate, is again defended in Machiavellian terms. The issue first arises near the beginning of the book in a discussion of the relative merits of Arms and Letters. One of Osorio’s interlocutors argues that, while letters and the sciences are all very well, they do not help princes in public affairs. Indeed, they may even prove dangerous. One does not want a prince who can subtly define manliness, but rather one who actively displays that quality.28 Cato the Censor is cited to the effect that love of letters had been the ruin of Rome;29 and Osorio’s speaker reinforces the argument by referring to the annals of Portugal itself. What sciences, he asks, had augmented the kingdom? Letters? Philosophy? Beautiful and eloquent speech? Certainly not! The people had been ignorant, and even the nobility had largely been illiterate; yet they had braved the tempests of war and won the trophies of virtue. By contrast the Portuguese of his own day are well educated but can scarcely hang on to the territories won by the courage of their ancestors. This argument, too, is challenged by another speaker who offers the conventional solution: recommending that princes should pursue the mean by combining skill in both arms and letters. But the issue was not so easily resolved, and it recurs in different guises elsewhere in the De regis institutione. There is, for instance, an elaborate treatment of the Liberal Arts in the fifth book where the arguments for their importance to princes are stated at such length and with such eloquence that there can be no doubt that the author’s own views are here on display. The difficulty for Osorio, however, is his abiding conviction that good arms are essential for the welfare 28 De regis institutione, fo. 21v : ‘Nec enim indigemus Rege, qui virtutem acute deffiniat; sed qui virtutis officio strenue fungatur.’ 29 Ibid., fo. 24r--v . Cf. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, V. 1. The passage in question is in Plutarch, Life of Cato the Censor, XLVI–XLVIII.

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of any state, and that Christians have a duty to respond to that need. We may see this in a tangential but critical discussion of whether money or virtus constitutes the ‘nerve of war’. In the De regis institutione the debate is won decisively on behalf of virtus with an argument derived from Machiavelli. Those who claim that money constitutes ‘belli nervos’ are quite mistaken, for military success is more a matter of character than of wealth. Virtus furnishes the money, but money does not provide the virtus (Bellum enim, non tam pecunia, quam virtute conficitur: et virtute pecunia comparatur, non virtus pecunia).30 The immense riches of Darius could not prevail against the military capacity of Alexander; whereas the converse was manifestly true. From this it follows that there can be no sure defence based on treasure where virtus is lacking.31 Even more strikingly Machiavellian is Osorio’s consideration of the significance of good arms not only for the protection of the body politic but also for its moral welfare. As in his discussion of good faith and the observation of treaties, Osorio does not cite Machiavelli’s texts but, rather, ponders their implications; and on this topic he seems wholly sympathetic to his source while remaining true to the muscular Christianity of his own earlier writings. Republics must be strong as well as rich because wealth, in itself, simply encourages predators. Dangers loom largest when a nation is lulled into a sense of security, for neither friendly agreements with kings nor alliances with foreigners suffice for the preservation of the state. Security can only be achieved by greatness of spirit and force of arms. Treaties are observed by hostile powers just so long as they are unable to harm you by overt or covert belligerence; but the moment that they perceive an opportunity to surprise you by some dirty trick (scelus) then there is no religion which prevents them from taking advantage of the stupidity of those who rely on treaties.32 To confirm this, Osorio cites the example of the 30 De regis institutione, ii, fo. 64. Cf. Machiavelli, Discorsi, II. 10; Arte della guerra, VII. 31 De regis institutione, fo. 64: ‘Darii gaza Alexandri Magni virtutem oppressit: Alexandri porro virtus omni Darij gaza potita est; ex quo sequitur nullum esse firmum praesidium, ubi virtus abest, in divitiarum affluentia constitutum.’ 32 Ibid., vii, fo. 234r--v : ‘Nec enim iunctae cum Regibus amicitiae, neque foedera cum Gentibus finitimis icta: sed animi virtus et armorum potentia

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Athenian commander Iphicrates who recognized that his enemies kept faith only when they were unable to wage war. Thus a good and wise prince who never breaks his word ought not to assume that others will behave in like manner. As long as he is strong in arms so will his allies keep faith with him; but if he relies on their benevolence he will be ruined the instant he relaxes his vigilance. Virtus and military strength protect the state, and a wise man gives attention to war in time of peace just as, in time of war, he strives to achieve a good peace: Sapientis igitur est, in summa pace de bello cogitare, et in bello omnem belli gerendi rationem ad pacem dirigere. A long period of tranquillity makes people forget what war is like, and it is necessary to exercise them in arms so that they can resist attack. Garrisons must be maintained regularly in frontier towns; and experts must be retained by the king and promoted according to merit, in order to train men to observe proper military discipline. Strength is vitiated by otiosity; industry languishes: men’s character is dulled; vices increase; crimes break out; and the spirit is oppressed. Any war, however hard and dangerous, is preferable to this insidious so-called peace. For that cannot be deemed peace which, by pestilential arms, undermines frugality, continence, and all the virtues, and which delivers up the entire state in fetters to its enemies. This empty name of peace deludes ignorant men as it suddenly deprives them of all fortune and liberty.33

Reipublicae statum tutum et incolumem praestare possunt, qui enim vel nimis cupiunt, vel nimis invident, tam diu foedus sancte percussum religiose conservant, quam diu nihil nec aperto Marte, nec ex insidiis se nocere posse confidunt. ubi vero primum sibi rei per scelus augendae occasionem oblatam vident, nulla religione impediuntur, quo minus eam confestim arripiant, et stultitia eorum qui in foederibus acquiescunt, ad suam praedam abutantur.’ 33 De regis institutione, vii, fo. 235r--v : ‘Otio namque et securitate franguntur vires; languescit industria, habescit ingenium; vitia crescunt; scelera prorumpunt: animi status opprimitur: flagitiorum omnium bellum inexpiabile concitatur; usque adeo, ut quodvis bellum quamvis durum et periculosum huic insidioso pacis nomini longe praeferendum sit. Nec enim pax illa dicenda est, quae frugalitatem, et continentiam, et omnes denique virtutes pestiferis armis evertit: universamque tandem Rempublicam constrictam hostibus tradit, nomen itaque pacis inane hominibus imperitis illudit, ut eos improviso fortunis omnibus atque libertate spoliet.’

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This had been Machiavelli’s message to his own countrymen fifty years earlier. He had castigated the corruption, soft living, and lack of martial virtue which had left them prey to more vigorous states, and had recommended continual military preparedness as the principal prophylactic against such degradation.34 It was natural that Osorio (confronted by a similarly enervated, otiose and failing nation) should have responded to these despondencies and especially to the despairing analysis of political effeteness in the Istorie fiorentine. Osorio’s De regis institutione may not be one of the ‘great books’ of the sixteenth century—as its only modern English critic has argued—but it merits serious attention.35 Its handling of dialogue is skilful and convincing; its arguments are eloquently expressed, crisply organized, and fully explored; its intellectual range and stylistic mastery are far beyond that of the better-known De nobilitate; and in some small measure that superiority is due to a reading of Machiavelli’s works and to a careful consideration of the political problems raised therein. It is ironic that it is his crude attack on Machiavelli, thirty years earlier, which has earned Osorio the tiny measure of fame which he still enjoys. 34 Cf. Machiavelli, L’Asino d’Oro, V, ll. 76–127, in Mazzoni and Casella, 830–1; Arte della guerra, ‘Proemio’; and especially the Istorie fiorentine, V. i—which is virtually a blueprint for Osorio’s lament. 35 This is the judgement of Aubrey Bell, ‘The Humanist Jeronymo de Osorio’, 539–45.

6 Machiavelli and the Index of Prohibited Books Listed among the authors used by Tommaso Porcacchi to elucidate his edition of Guicciardini’s La historia d’Italia (1574), there occurs, under the letter S, a certain ‘Secretario Fiorentino ne’ discorsi & altrove’. This ‘Secretario’ is, of course, Machiavelli; and Porcacchi’s marginal annotations to Guicciardini’s text include material from Il Principe, the Discorsi, and Istorie fiorentine. The finding references to these works, and the quotations themselves, are accurately given, despite Porcacchi’s frequent qualification (when providing a Machiavellian source), ‘if memory doesn’t deceive me’, and his claim not to have seen any of these works, nor to have been ‘permitted’ to see them, for more than twenty years.1 Those two intervening decades would take Porcacchi’s Machiavellian studies back to 1554, which saw the last Italian editions of all Machiavelli’s major works prior to the papal prohibitions of 1557

1 La historia d’Italia di M. Francesco Guicciardini Gentil’huomo Fiorentino, divisa in venti libri. Riscontrata con tutti gli altri historici & auttori, che dell’istesse cose habbiano scritto e ornata in margine con l’Annotationi de’ riscontri da T. Porcacchi (Venice, 1574), fos. 24v, 63v, 107, 131, 141v, 182v, 303. Porcacchi, fo. 32v, also has a recognizable quotation from Machiavelli’s Decennale Primo, ll. 34–6; and at fo. 148, where Guicciardini is dealing with Cesare Borgia’s dire deeds at Sinigaglia, Porcacchi writes: ‘Il Secretario Fiorentino in un suo particolar trattato descrisse gia` il modo c’haveva tenuto per opprimer molti Signori d’Italia.’ Although Porcacchi is disingenuous whenever he has to deal with Machiavelli as a writer, he is happy to cite him by name as a participant in Florentine affairs as, for example, at fo. 131v (‘Al Re furon mandati per querelarsi Francesco della Casa, e Nicolo Macchiavelli, che si trovarono in fatti’); and at fo. 479, where Porcacchi mentions a letter from Machiavelli to Bartolommeo Cavalcanti.

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and 1559.2 The coincidence is suspicious: especially since, after all that time, Porcacchi could still apparently quote from his sources verbatim. Both the coy circumlocution, ‘Secretario Fiorentino’, and the fact that Porcacchi obviously had the texts in front of him, tell us something about the nature and effectiveness of Machiavelli censorship in sixteenth-century Italy. Machiavelli’s inclusion, in the first papal Indexes, among those authors whose entire literary output was forbidden—Auctores, quorum libri et scripta omnia prohibentur—has generally been regarded as the natural culmination of early clerical hostility to his ideas; and, on the whole, this is a reasonable assumption. But the publication of the Index has also been represented as a watershed in the story of Machiavelli’s reception: and this is only partially true.3

early hostility Despite the immediate, and continuing, popularity of Machiavelli’s works there had always been some antagonists or, more precisely, talk about such antagonists. Even around 1514–16, when Il Principe was newly completed and circulating only in manuscript, one of the author’s friends, Biaggio Buonaccorsi, had declared that those who appreciated Machiavelli’s merit must be prepared to defend him fiercely against those who, through malignity or envy, might try ‘to bite and tear him’.4 Many years later, in January 1549, Giovanni Battista Busini, in a letter to the historian Benedetto Varchi, reflected on Machiavelli’s failure at the end of his political career and suggested that this had been due to an almost universal antipathy towards Il Principe: the rich believing that it taught the 2 Bertelli and Innocenti, Secolo XVI, nos. 104–13. In Italy, only the comedies Clitia and Mandragola were published subsequently (by Giunta in 1556). 3 This view was strikingly expressed by L. Arthur Burd in the introduction to his famous edition of Il Principe (Oxford, 1891), 49–51. Burd describes the Index of 1559 as the ‘great prohibition which was intended utterly to destroy the works of Machiavelli’; and he goes on to say, of the Index of 1564, that it ‘canonised and permanently fixed certain errors of criticism’ and ‘led to the publication of a very large number of books’ against Machiavelli. 4 Biaggio Buonaccorsi, dedicatory letter to Pandolfo Bellacci. See Gerber, i. 84–6; Bertelli and Innocenti, pp. xxx–xxxi.

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Duke to take away their possessions; the poor fearing that it encouraged the removal of their freedom; the Piagnoni (who still professed support for the long-dead Savonarola) deeming the author a heretic; the virtuous thinking him dishonest; and the wicked considering him even worse and more bold [piu valente] than they were themselves.5 It is inherently unlikely that, prior to publication, Il Principe had achieved the kind of widespread notoriety through every class of society that Busini suggests; but, whatever the rights or wrongs of these recollections of Florentine attitudes in 1527, it is clear that in 1532, when the Florentine publisher Bernardo di Giunta issued Il Principe—a few months after Blado’s Roman edition—hostility was in the air. Giunta felt obliged to exhort his dedicatee, Giovanni Gaddi, to defend the work against those who constantly attacked it furiously, ‘unaware that those who teach the use of herbs and medicines also give instruction in poisons so that, recognizing them, we may protect ourselves from them’. There is no art or science, adds Giunta, ‘which may not be put to evil use by evil men’.6 These ambiguous remarks have been productive of much debate concerning the real purpose of Il Principe: but they also intimate that for some contemporaries the work was decidedly controversial. Subsequently, the attacks of Pole and Osorio gave substance to such hints; and the work of two other writers—the historian Paolo Giovio and the theologian Ambrogio Catharino—must have added impetus to the process whereby Machiavelli’s vilification became institutionalized. Giovio’s observations were first published in 1546 in his Elogia— a series of brief biographies each originally written to accompany one of the portraits of famous men collected in his villa at Lake Como. The book was translated, rather freely, into Italian, and it was several times reprinted; and the account of Machiavelli, compounded of misinformation and damnation by faint praise, has been repeatedly quoted and questioned.7 Was Machiavelli really ignorant 5 Lettere di G. B. Busini a Benedetto Varchi, ed. G. Milanesi (Florence, 1861), 84. 6 Bernardo di Giunta, dedicatory letter ‘Al molto reverendo Monsignore Messer Giovanni Gaddi, Cherico della Camera Appostolica, et padron suo osservandissimo’, Il principe di Niccolo Machiavelli (Florence, 1532), sig. þ2r
v. 7 Paolo Giovio, Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita (Venice, 1546); Le iscrittioni poste sotto le vere imagini de gli uomini famosi, le quali a` Como

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of Latin letters? Did his knowledge of the classics really come from Marcello Virgilio, his superior in the Florentine administration? Did he really die from an unnecessary dose of quack medicine? For contemporaries, however, these biographical dubieties were far less significant than Giovio’s critical observations because, while acknowledging Machiavelli’s excellent Tuscan style and skill as a historian, he also accuses him of falsifying evidence and mixing ‘secret poison’ amidst the sweet ‘honey of his eloquence’. Worse still, he states unequivocally that Machiavelli had denied the existence of God and was a ‘mocker and an atheist’. Giovio’s views on Machiavelli were a mere jeu d’esprit: but they appeared at a critical moment and gained an authority quite out of proportion to their size and merit.8 The publication of the Elogia coincided with the opening of the Council of Trent—intended to stem the tide of heresy in Europe—and the acidulous little biography shows how easily Machiavelli’s views on policy and religion could be isolated from the rest of his work and how they might attract the attention of censors seeking to purge Christian Europe of dangerous ideas. Prominent at those early sessions of the Council of Trent was a trenchant Italian controversialist, Ambrogio Catharino, who might have remained in well-merited obscurity had he not found a cheap ticket enabling him to make the long journey into posterity: he had si veggiono, tr. H. Orio (Florence, 1552). Many authors cited Giovio against Machiavelli and were, in their turn, plagiarized, cited, or translated by others. Matthieu Coignet, for example, in his Introduction aux princes pour garder la foy promise (Paris, 1584), 184, writes about the way in which power gained by evildoers is of short duration; refers to Cesare Borgia and others ‘que Machiavel nous propose a` imiter’; comments that the said author is, not without cause, ‘depeint par Paul Jove des qualitez d’ignorant Dieu et les bonnes lettres, et censure´ par le Concile de Trente’; and adds a marginal note, ‘Machiavel autheur pernicieux’. Cf. the English trans. by Sir Edward Hoby, Politique discourses upon trueth and lying (1586), 120. It is noteworthy that the original treatise, both in manuscript (BNF MS fr. 643 and 644) and print, is dedicated to Catherine de’ Medici. Two years after Coignet’s publication, Pierre Le Loyer, IIII. Livres des Spectres ou apparitions (Angers, 1586), 47–8, says that Machiavelli is regarded by everyone as a ‘mocker and atheist’—‘ainsi que dit Paule Jove’. Cf. the English trans., Treatise of Specters or straunge sights (1605), fo. 22v. For more influential users of Giovio (Antonio Possevino and Joannes Molanus), see below, Chs. 11, 13. 8 On Giovio, see T. C. Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy (Princeton, 1995).

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the good fortune to denounce a famous man.9 His short diatribe against Machiavelli’s Discorsi and Il Principe is buried in a massive volume of miscellaneous, and largely disjunct, theological outpourings published at Rome in 1552 by Antonio Blado, Machiavelli’s first printer; and the relevant chapter itself forms part of a digression within a discussion of how expedient it is to translate the Scriptures into the vernacular tongues. The first part of this digression deals with books which ‘must be abhorred by the Christian and which should be wholly banished from Christendom’; the second part is the piece against Machiavelli; and there follows a consideration of the just punishment of heretics.10 These materials are scarcely integrated, but their significance within the climate of Trent and the mounting campaign against heretical and other dubious literature is obvious. Catharino deplores the poisonous and secret circulation of heretical books, scattered among the multitude and entrapping the minds of the inquisitive—spitting out every filth and impiety— just like the obscene books of the ancient poets. Man is easily corrupted by such lascivious and impious authors and, worse still, amongst the moderns there have been those who do not blush to imitate the pagans with impure verses. Even Petrarch 9 Born in Siena c.1484, Lanceloto Politi studied canon and civil law and entered the Dominican Order in 1517, whereupon he adopted the name Ambrosius Catharinus in honour of two Sienese saints. For an account of his works, see Louis Ellies Dupin, Histoire de l’e´glise et des auteurs eccle´siastiques du seizie`me sie`cle (Paris, 1701–3), v. 8–59. 10 The two subsections (De libris Christiano detestandis, & a Christianismo penitus eliminandis and Quam execrandi Macchiavelli discursus & institutio sui Principis) are tagged on to a Quaestio an expediat Scripturas in maternas linguas transferri which is itself added to De divinis et canonicis scripturis. All of this is contained in a volume entitled Disputatio pro veritate immaculatae conceptionis, which was printed by Blado at Rome in Apr. 1552 and has its own pagination and register of signatures. But, to complicate the matter even further, the material in this volume is listed at the head of another volume printed by Blado in Nov. 1551 (Enarrationes in quinque priora capita libri Geneseos), which is followed by a second work, Catharino’s Assertiones, which itself has a separate pagination and register of signatures. The digression (on books which should be destroyed and on Machiavelli) occurs in the Disputatio (1552) at sigs. K.3v–4v (cols. 339–44). The entire sequence was issued in a facsimile edition by Gregg Press (Ridgewood, NJ, 1964). I record these details in order to make clear that the attack on Machiavelli is a deeply embedded minor part of a minor part of a minor work by an author who, despite his contemporary reputation, may reasonably be classified as very minor indeed.

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and Boccaccio are condemned by Catharino because the sweet melodies of their stories about libidinous lovers captivate the minds of curious and stupid people. ‘Alas!’, he laments, ‘Woe is me! Who once as a boy sucked these poisonous sweets.’ Thanks be to God, though, through the intercession of a good angel, he had recognized ‘death in the vessel’, and begged that his youthful sins would not be recorded. At this point, having worked himself up to a suitable pitch of self-loathing and self-righteousness, Catharino at last arrives at his principal objective. He has recognized the malignity and damage wrought by this kind of study and the ways in which such works are spread abroad among the multitude by the printing press (a Typographo), and he demands that they should be consumed with flames. Yes indeed, the books of lascivious authors must be burnt for they serve no purpose other than to corrupt, and Catharino especially notes that Ovid was banished from Rome by Augustus Caesar on account of the De arte amandi.11 The need to combat the influence of such books now brings Catharino to another source of corruption no less worthy of correction. He is greatly astonished that in any land ruled by Christian princes there should have been tolerated and publicly sold certain books by an author ‘wholly destitute of religion and a contemner thereof ’. The name of this author is ‘Nicolaus Machiavellus’, who wrote several works, among which are two in his Tuscan tongue, one called Discursus and the other entitled Princeps. In these he reveals himself as both impious and atheistical: allowing nothing to the providence of God; and considering religion as wholly a matter of human opinion and persuasion. None the less, he wishes his prince to profess belief. Heretics, notes Catharino, use the same trick for, although they think nothing of the ceremonies of the Church, they pretend to retain some observances allegedly as an inducement to the weak. This man—‘if he merits the name of a man’—teaches the 11 This was, in fact, the reason given in the Imperial decree for Ovid’s banishment, but the truth of the matter remains in dispute. In the papal Index of 1564, Regula VII, prohibiting ‘without exception’ books treating of licentious and immoral matters, exception is made of ancient books, written by the Gentiles, because of the ‘elegance and quality of their language’. See Franz Heinrich Reusch, Die Indices librorum prohibitorum des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (Tu¨bingen, 1886), 249; Index de Rome 1557, 1559, 1564: Les premiers index romains et l’index du Concile de Trente, ed. J. M. de Bujanda (Quebec, 1990), 817.

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prince that, to be master of his dominion, he should rather seem a worshipper of religion and a lover of virtue than to be so in truth. Such doctrine, exclaims Catharino, defiles our age, and—finding it impossible to remain silent—he exhorts his reader to attend to what Machiavelli says in Il Principe concerning how far it is expedient for the prince to keep faith. ‘Listen, pious reader, I beseech you, and consider and deplore the unhappy condition of the times. This is his opinion faithfully expressed by me in Latin words.’ And there follows a close but selective translation of the first three-quarters of Il Principe, 18, encompassing some of Machiavelli’s most disturbing pronouncements: the idea that those princes who hold faith in slight esteem achieve great things and overcome those who keep their word; the metaphor of the centaur, ‘half man and half beast’; the metaphor of the lion and the fox; the idea that the astute prince will never lack ‘colours and subterfuge to excuse his perfidy’; and the example of Pope Alexander VI who did nothing else but deceive, and who promised much but performed nothing. Catharino then dwells further on Machiavelli’s assertion that, while it is not necessary for a prince to have the virtues of piety, faith, humanity, religion, and integrity, it is necessary to simulate them. Practising such virtues leads to ruin and, indeed, the ‘new prince’ will often have to act contrary to them, having a mind ready to turn whithersoever the winds may blow, to follow wherever fortune may direct, and to do evil whenever it is requisite so to do: These and other diabolic writings of the same type are published by this perfidious and extraordinary teacher of faithlessness; are read and defended with applause by certain people; and, what is more deplorable, it appears that there are not lacking those who carry out this impious and most wicked doctrine. When I think about it I am forced to cry out, Oh unhappy state of the times. (col. 342)

The Pagans themselves abhorred such notions, says Catharino, and he cites the famous lion/fox passage from Cicero’s De officiis to show just how diametrically opposed was the ancient philosopher to the modern monster.12 Even the powerful tyrant, Julius Caesar, deliberately left some doubt about whether one might violate the law for the sake of government; whereas ‘he of whom we are 12 Cicero, De officiis, I. xiii. 41.

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speaking, fearing neither God nor men, proposes and recommends in absolute terms that the law may be violated’.13 Furthermore, ‘whether or not the lovers of this world wish it’, Catharino feels that he must draw attention to the ‘enormous stupidity’ of Machiavelli, who proposes as his prime exemplars for imitation Alexander VI and his son Cesare Borgia, both of whom came to terrible ends and are regarded with horror. Finally, in a fervent coda, Catharino exhorts Christian princes to take heed as, with two largely irrelevant quotations from the Gospels, he winds up his passionate but dialectically feeble denunciation of Machiavelli.14 the index and machiavelli The immune system of corporate Christianity has often proved vulnerable to the virus of independent thought. But the confluence of the printing press and major doctrinal schisms within Christendom made political and religious authorities increasingly anxious to control the flow of ideas, both by prohibiting the inimical and by promoting the acceptable. Surprisingly, open debate and measured argument were briefly considered as options but soon proved too perilous. As a papal brief, dated 21 December 1558, sadly explained: A number of ecclesiastics, both regular and secular, who were hopeful of being able to combat the Lutherans and the other heretics of our time and to overthrow their heretical doctrines, and who secured for the purpose permission from the Apostolic Chair to read the works of these heretics, found themselves confused and influenced by these writings so that they were quite largely led astray and perverted into the acceptance of heretical errors.15 13 Col. 342. The phrase in question—‘Si violandum est ius, regnandi causa’— is derived by Catharino from Cicero, who explains that Julius Caesar (himself adapting it from Euripides) always had it in his mouth. See Cicero, De officiis, III. 21. Barnabe Barnes, Four bookes of offices (1606), 110–11, associates the idea with Machiavelli’s Il Principe, 17, and writes that ‘There is one imperious rule which the Machivellian politics have taught to colour their wickedness, according to that saying of Euripides cited by Cicero from the mouth of Julius Caesar: Namsi violandum est ius, regnandi gratia violandum est: aliis pietatem colas.’ 14 Catharino cites Luke 13: 31, 32 and John 19: 11. 15 Reusch, Die Indices librorum prohibitorum, 213; translated in G. H. Putnam, The Censorship of the Church of Rome and its Influence upon the Production and Distribution of Literature (New York, 1906), i. 171.

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It seemed safer, therefore, to limit such access and to concentrate upon a programme of rigorous prohibition. This issue had been very much in the air in the early sessions of the Council of Trent, although we do not know whether or not Catharino was personally involved in helping to formulate the policy of censorship.16 In fact, he died in 1553 and preparations for the papal Index of Prohibited Books were not fully under way until after the election of Gian Pietro Carafa as Pope Paul IV in May 1555, when it was entrusted to a commission of the Inquisition headed by its Commissioner General, Michele Ghislieri. Lists of opprobrious authors and books long predate the invention of printing, although—as Catharino had implied—it was the ease with which texts could now be reproduced mechanically that really agitated authorities, Catholic and Protestant alike. There had already been several compilations of works to be prohibited and/or destroyed, and some of these provided the foundation for the first papal Index of Prohibited Books, which was printed in 1557 by Blado, but was so full of errors, and aroused such controversy, that another two years were to pass before a corrected version was deemed fit for publication.17 Machiavelli—as scholars like to point out—was one of the authors whose entire works were condemned in the 1557 and 1559 Roman Indexes, and again when the list was revised and issued under the name of Pope Pius IV in 1564 (the Tridentine Index).18 However, the comprehensive condemnation of Machiavelli was not, in itself, the primary aim of Counter-Reformation literary policy; and it is important not to create an impression that the Indexes of Prohibited Books were conceived simply in order 16 Even less concerned in this process was Reginald Pole, whose name is sometimes loosely connected with the inclusion of Machiavelli’s works on the Index. He was present only at the earliest stages of the Council of Trent and was not involved with the preparation of the Index. 17 For more than a century, the standard collection of materials relating to 16th-c. indexes of prohibited books has been Reusch, Die Indices. However, this has largely been superseded by the excellent series of volumes published by Droz and the University of Sherbrooke, Index des livres interdits, under the general editorship of J. M. de Bujanda. 18 These volumes are now best studied in Bujanda’s edn., Index de Rome 1557, 1559, 1564.

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that he might be persecuted. In 1559, he was only one out of a total of just over 600 named authors whose complete works were deemed unacceptable; and, in the same Index, the lists of anonymous works, or works by authors only partially condemned, amounted to another 450 items or more. Under the letter N (buried amidst twenty-three other unfortunates called Nicholas), ‘Nicolaus Macchiavellus’ may just be discerned squeezed between ‘Nicolaus Krompach’ and ‘Nicolaus de Pelhrzimow’, neither of whom has ever been regarded as a celebrity or as a principal target for the censors’ rage. Machiavelli was in no way singled out. Yet he was singular. There was no other contemporary author who could so convincingly be regarded as an amalgam of atheist, despiser of Christianity, enthusiast for pagan religion, advocate of tyranny, admirer of force and fraud, and proponent of a topsy-turvy political morality. This was how he had been depicted by Pole, Osorio, Giovio, and Catharino; and if, in addition to this catalogue of misdemeanours, we remember that he was also being cited in England, France, and Germany as an authoritative anti-papal historian, then it is easy to see why Machiavelli should have earned his place amongst the authors prohibited by the wise men of Trent.

how effective were the indexes? In Protestant England, of course, papal prohibitions counted for nothing.19 But in Catholic France, too, little notice was taken of the condemnation of Machiavelli. Admittedly, a decade passed in which the only Machiavellian text issued was a reprint of D’Auvergne’s translation of Il Principe in 1563, but French versions of both Il Principe and the Discorsi reappeared in 1571 and continued in vogue thereafter. 19 There is a curious passage in Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli, 52, asserting that ‘the ban on Machiavelli in England in the sixteenth century seems to have taken the form of a refusal to license the printing of il Principe and I Discorsi’. But there is no evidence for such a ban—as E´mile Gasquet pointed out in his Le Courant machiave´lien.

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More noteworthy is the fact that Machiavelli was not named in the independent Spanish Cathalogus of proscribed books, issued in 1559 by the Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdes; and it has been suggested that this may have been a direct result of the Emperor Charles V’s enthusiasm for the Discorsi, which had been published in Otevanti’s Spanish translation in 1552 and 1555 under the Emperor’s privilege and with a dedication to his son Philip. Nevertheless, judging by results, there is little doubt that the various papal prohibitions effectively killed off further publication of Machiavelli’s works in the Iberian peninsula;20 and the same is true of Italy, where there were no indigenous Machiavellian editions after 1554 until the Discorsi politici e militari, ascribed to an anagrammatical author ‘Amadio Niecollucci’, was printed in Venice in 1630.21 There were, though, editions of the original texts of Machiavelli’s major works with false Italian imprints prepared by that enterprising Elizabethan printer John Wolfe, who recognized and seized the unique business opportunities offered by the hamstringing of native Italian presses.22 In much the same spirit, but 20 The Discursos de Machavello, en qualquer lingua are forbidden in the Portuguese Index of 1581; and Machiavelli’s works are prohibited in their entirety in the Index of the Inquisitor General Gaspar de Quiroga in 1583. See Reusch, Die Indices, 359, 422; Index de l’Inquisition portugaise 1547, 1551, 1561, 1564, 1581, ed. J. M. de Bujanda (Quebec, 1995), 476–7; Index de l’Inquisition espagnole (1583, 1584), ed. J. M. de Bujanda (Quebec, 1993) 480, 658, 960. On the Spanish position with regard to Machiavelli, see Helena Puigdome`nech, Maquiavelo en Espan˜a (Madrid, 1988), esp. 41–72. It is worth noting, though, that Machiavelli sneaked into Spanish (and probably into Spain) in a new edition of Diego de Salazar’s plagiarism, Tratado de re militari, hecho a manera de dialogo (Brussels, 1590). Similarly, a favourable allusion to Machiavelli’s name could slip into Spanish in a translation of a foreign book such as Tommaso Garzoni, La piazza universale (1576), 644: ‘Il Machiavello, nel primo libro de’ suoi discorsi, mostra che la milizia e` quella che con eterna gloria de’ suoi professori mirabilmente soggioga il mondo’; which reappears in Christoval Suarez de Figueroa, Plaza universal de todas ciencias y artes (Madrid, 1615), fo. 292v, where, after citing Cicero’s Pro Murena, ‘dize obedecer a las armas toda cosa’, he continues, ‘Muestroa el Machiavelo ser la milicia, quien con eterna lea de sus sequaces, llena de gloria el mundo.’ 21 Bertelli and Innocenti, Secolo XVII, no. 30; Gerber, ii. 106. 22 Wolfe also took advantage of the Italian ban on another naughty author, Pietro Aretino. On Wolfe’s activities, see Adolph Gerber, ‘All of the Five Fictitious Italian Editions of Writings of Machiavelli and Three of Those of Pietro Aretino’, Modern Language Notes, 22 (1907), 2–6, 129–35, 201–6; Harry Sellers, ‘Italian Books Printed in England before 1640’, The Library, 4th ser.,

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for a different audience, the Italian Protestant emigre´ from Forligni, Silvestro Teglio, prepared a Latin translation of Il Principe which was published by Perna at Basle in 1560, and went through another seventeen editions up to 1699.23 However effective the Indexes may have been in both Spain and Italy from the perspective of printing and publishing history, their impact on readership is less clear. Surviving records of a specifically Spanish response to Machiavelli are scattered and scanty until the seventeenth century.24 There were a number of writers who clearly had some first-hand knowledge of Il Principe or the Discorsi.25 But, on the whole, such evidence as there is does not 5 (1924), 105–28; Harry R. Hoppe, ‘John Wolfe, Printer and Publisher (1579– 1601)’, The Library, 4th ser., 14 (1933), 241–88; D. B. Woodfield, Surreptitious Printing in England, 1550–1640 (New York, 1973), 5–13, 95–102, 109–17. 23 Bertelli and Innocenti, Secolo XVI, nos. 130, 145, 166, 167, 186, 192, 197, 200; Secolo XVII, nos. 2, 10, 24, 41, 48, 54, 81, 96, 103. For Latin translations of the Discorsi, from 1588 to 1649, see Bertelli and Innocenti, Secolo XVI, nos. 184, 189, 197, 198; Secolo XVII, nos. 9, 21, 22, 40, 49. 24 The early reception of Machiavelli in Spain is a subject which has been much studied, although there is not really much to study. For bibliography, see Puigdome`nech; and Elena Cantarino, ‘Tratadistas politico-morales de los siglos XVI y XVII (Apuntes sobre el estado actual de la investigacio´n)’, El Basilisco, 21 (1996), 4–7. See also Patrizio Rigobon, ‘Le traduzioni spagnole de ‘‘Il Principe’’ di Niccolo` Machiavelli: appunti per un storia’, in Annali di Ca’ Foscari, 25 (1986), 143–62. 25 Sebastia´n Fox Morcillo, in his De regni regisque institutione libri III (Antwerp, 1556), shows that he was well acquainted with Il Principe although he refers neither to the work nor its author by name, and does not accept Machiavelli’s political morality. Also familiar with Il Principe was Fadrique Furio´ Ceriol, El concejo y consejeros del prencipe (Antwerp, 1559); trans. John Blundevill, A very briefe and profitable treatise declaring how many counsells, a prince ought to have (1589). On Fox Morcillo and Furio´ Ceriol, see Ronald W. Truman, Spanish Treatises on Government, Society and Religion in the Time of Philip II (Leiden, 1999), chs. 3 and 4. As Truman observes, neither of these works made much impact, if any, in Spain. Another, later writer on counsellors, Bartolome Felippe, includes Machiavelli in the list of some 220 sources cited in his treatise; and his work shows knowledge of both the Discorsi and the Istorie fiorentine and provides adequate marginal references. See Felippe’s Tractado del conseio y de los consejeros de los Principes (Coimbra, 1584), fos. 34v, 102–104, 107v–108, 112v–113v, 127–128v, 129v, 130v. There was a self-styled ‘segunda impression’ issued as from ‘Turino, 1589’: but this was, in fact, the work of the notorious London printer, John ‘Machiavel’ Wolfe, who also published an English translation (complete with the marginal Machiavellian references) by his friend John Thorius—The Counsellor a treatise of counsels and counsellers of princes, written in Spanish by B. Phillip.

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convey an impression of keen interest, apart from the furious hostility of Ribadeneira on the one hand, and the extensive borrowing by Balthazar Ayala on the other.26 Although Machiavelli’s works were not proscribed by Valdes, they were condemned in the next Spanish Index (published in May 1583), possibly through the implacability of the Jesuit Juan de Mariana; and thereafter Machiavelli’s reputation was officially doomed in Spain.27 There was, however, a proposal to prepare an expurgated edition of his works.28 On 9 November 1584, the Secretary of Antonio Folch de Cardona, Duke of Sessa, wrote to the Council of the Inquisition concerning Machiavelli’s four major works which, he said, contained much that was curious and erudite. He argued that, although there were some errors therein, these ‘could be easily expurgated and corrected’, and he recommended that Marco Antonio de Aldana should prepare a translation from Italian into Castilian. This overture met with no response and, in the following June, the Secretary again insisted that a translation of Machiavelli’s four principal books would have great practical value, and he added the name of another possible translator, Juan Bautista Cardona, Bishop of Vic. Nothing came of that suggestion either, and Machiavelli disappeared from the annals of Iberian printing until the mid-nineteenth century. In Italy, too, attempts were made to obtain permission for the publication of an expurgated version of Machiavelli’s major writings.29 Between February and September 1562—that is after the Englished by I.T. (1589). There is a copy of Wolfe’s ‘Turino’ edition in the British Library (press mark C.122.d.6) with manuscript notes—mainly linguistic—by Thorius. 26 Balthazar Ayala, a Spanish jurist based in Antwerp, incorporated, without acknowledgement, great tracts of the Discorsi in his De iure et officiis bellicis (Douai, 1582; 2nd edn., Antwerp, 1597). There is a modern text, ed. J. Westlake and trans. John Pawlry Bate (Washington, DC, 1912). On Ayala, see below, Ch. 15. 27 On Mariana and Machiavelli, see Guenter Lewy, Constitutionalism and Statecraft during the Golden Age of Spain: A Study of the Political Philosophy of Juan de Mariana, S.J. (Geneva, 1960), 95–101. 28 Puigdome`nech, Maquiavelo en Espan˜a, 58–61, 113–17. See also Bertelli and Innocenti, Secolo XVI, no. 172. 29 See Pio Paschini, ‘Letterati ed indice nella riforma Cattolica in Italia’, in Cinquecento Romano e riforma Cattolica (Rome, 1958), 239–73 (esp. 252–8); Bertelli

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Pauline Index, but before the Tridentine—the well-known jurisconsult and litte´rateur Girolamo Muzio wrote several letters to the Duke of Urbino—whom he described as a student and admirer of Machiavelli—explaining that he, Muzio, had been working on the texts of the Discorsi and the Arte della guerra, revising passages which denoted a lack of reverence towards God and, in general, removing anything which might be construed as hostile to ‘i frati’. The revised versions were certainly received in Trent for there is a letter from Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga referring to copies of the Discorsi and Arte della guerra which had been forwarded by the Duke of Urbino. Gonzaga notes that ‘that which was scandalous and against our religion has been removed’, and makes a parallel with the similar work done to clean up Boccaccio. He adds that the revisions are worth considering for the honour of the Florentine language and, more realistically, because there are those who will prefer to hold on to the books anyway and read them rather than take heed of the prohibition. None the less, the scheme failed and Machiavelli’s works were again condemned in toto in 1564. Muzio seems to have given up, but the battle was not over for, in February 1572, Eustachio Locatelli, Bishop of Reggio, wrote that he had been looking into Machiavelli’s career and could find nothing against him. He was therefore suggesting another examination of his works so that, as had been done with Boccaccio, the language might be suitably amended and the world could have the labours of this ‘valentuomo’. This project was supported by two surviving nephews of Machiavelli, Giuliano de’ Ricci and another Niccolo`, who wrote that such a writer should be restored to the world: Nor do we judge the enterprise to be difficult, because there is not much left to do, beyond removing those few places where the Pontiffs are spoken of with too much licence, which we impute more to the quality of those times than to the evil spirit of the writer who, in all his actions, showed himself always pious and observant of religion.30 and Innocenti, Secolo XVI, no. 134. More particularly on the attempted expurgation of the Istorie fiorentine, see Peter Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance (Princeton, 1998), 303–33. 30 Paschini, ‘Letterati’, 257.

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Easy or difficult, the work of expurgation dragged on. Locatelli died in October 1575, but the two nephews continued their work of emendation, which was acknowledged in 1578 by Pier Vettori, who also praised their ancestor as a man ‘of great wit and very practised in the affairs of the world’. However, this scheme, too, was eventually abandoned when Giuliano and Niccolo` refused to accept a proposal that the work might go forward for publication under a name other than that of their famous ancestor. And so Machiavelli remained firmly lodged amongst those authors ‘quorum libri et scripta omnia prohibentur’. There is, none the less, considerable evidence for an enduring preoccupation with the thoughts of Machiavelli, and for a continuing first-hand knowledge of his work, amongst Italians—though not always in Italy. Open praise was, of course, very rarely accorded the forbidden author: but this did happen in Dionigi Atanagi’s short treatise on the excellence of history, which acknowledged Machiavelli’s achievement in both enlarging the scope of historical writing and making it more eloquent. It is true that Atanagi’s work was published in 1559, but it was reprinted in the following year as a supplement to Giovio’s Istorie.31 Thirty years later, Michele Poccianti’s Catalogus scriptorum Florentinorum (1589) included a very brief biography of Machiavelli based upon Giovio, which, like its tainted source, alluded to Machiavelli’s lack of classical learning while praising his acuity of intellect and fine literary style.32 Significantly, though, Poccianti also pointed out that there is much that is inimical to Christianity in Machiavelli’s writings—which was why he had been condemned by the Council of Trent. Italians residing elsewhere in Europe felt less inhibited. Giovanni Michele Bruto, for example, a refugee from Medicean Florence, published a history of his native city at Lyon in 1562. It was, in part, conceived as a riposte to Giovio’s attacks on the 31 Dionigi Atanagi, Ragionamento de la eccelentia ed perfettion de la historia (Venice, 1559), fo. 10r–v; ‘Supplimento di Girolamo Ruscelli nell’Istorie di Monsignor Giovio’, in Paolo Giovio, Istorie (Venice, 1560), 79. 32 Michele Poccianti, Catalogus scriptorum Florentinorum, omnis generis (Florence, 1589), 137. Machiavelli’s name occurs twice in Poccianti’s index, once under poets and once under historians (sigs. M1v, M3v).

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Florentines and Bruto made considerable use of Machiavelli’s work, freely acknowledging his predecessor’s intelligence and fine style, while criticizing and correcting his carelessness; and the substance of Bruto’s praise of Machiavelli was reprinted by Federigo Alberti in 1566 at Lyon as part of his own Defence of the Florentines against the false calumniations of Giovio.33 Just as frank about their admiration for Machiavelli were three other expatriate Italian defenders of his reputation, all of whom wrote in response to Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel. Two of these, Paolo Mini and Matteo Toscano, published their works in France, the former again at Lyon, the latter at Paris.34 The third, Alberico Gentili, was a Protestant exile in England who—albeit an illustrious jurist and pioneering international lawyer—is today chiefly remembered for the short chapter in his De legationibus, in which he expressed his immense admiration for Machiavelli’s republicanism and ‘remarkable insight’.35 Very different was the situation in Italy itself where a relationship with, or use of, Machiavelli’s work was generally cloaked either by circumlocution or silence: and it is not always easy to determine whether such caution was designed to avoid criticism or conceal plagiarism. Francesco Sansovino, for example, in his treatment of the affairs of France and Germany (1561), mentioned ‘Vincenzo Lupono’ and ‘Thomaso Auths’ (that is Vincent de la Loupe and Philipp Ludwig Authaeus) in his list of sources, but scrupulously failed to acknowledge the pages of material he had filched from Machiavelli’s Ritratti.36 Remigio Nannini, too, who had happily cited and named Machiavelli in his Orationi militari of 1557, retained these citations in later editions, but no longer 33 Ioannis Michaeli Bruti Florentinae historiae libri octo priores (Lyon, 1562). On Bruto, see William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (1968), 171–82. Federigo Alberti’s Le difese de’ Fiorentini contra le false calunnie del Giovio (Lyon, 1566) is primarily a translation of the ‘Proemio’ of Bruto’s Historiae. 34 Paolo Mini, Difesa della citta` di Firenze contra le calunnie & maledicentie de maligni (Lyon, 1577); Giovanni Matteo Toscano, Peplus Italiae (Paris, 1578). See Mattei (1969), 228–9, 232–3. 35 On Gentili, see below, Ch. 10. 36 Francesco Sansovino, Del governo de i regni et delle republiche (Venice, 1561), fos. 20v–25, 26v–28v. Sansovino’s list of those sources he is prepared to acknowledge is at sig. *4v.

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identified their author. Similarly, in his Considerazioni civili, first published in 1582, Nannini discussed various political issues concerning Venice and took into account the views of Machiavelli, whom he described as a writer ‘certo, onorato e grave’, but identified only as ‘l’Autore de’ Discorsi sopra Tito Livio’.37 Corbinelli, too, identified material as deriving from ‘l’autore de Discorsi’; Ammirato, who often used the same formula, also favoured ‘alcuno’; and Canoniero settled for ‘un certo autore’, and even the minimalist ‘quidam’.38 It is, however, in treatises dealing with the art of war that we may most readily see the extent to which Italian writers remained conversant not only with Machiavelli’s politico-military ideas but also—judging by the exactitude of their citations—with the actual texts which were supposedly forbidden them. Very occasionally, an author even had the temerity (or absent-mindedness) to name Machiavelli directly as a source. Bernardino Bombini (1566), who often cited Machiavelli’s Arte della guerra and Discorsi with approval and with accurate references to the text, generally identified the author simply as ‘il Maestro di guerra fiorentino’ but, at one point, actually named the forbidden author—though whether through amnesia or defiance is unclear.39 By contrast, Francesco Ferretti (1568), condemning Italian military ineptitude, calmly explained that the reasons for this condition had been analysed ‘prudamente dal Machiavello’ in his Arte della guerra and especially towards the end of Book VII.40 Most writers were less bold; and evasion or suppression remained the norm. As early as 1564, Girolamo Maggi—citing both the Discorsi and Il Principe, and refuting Machiavelli’s arguments on fortresses point by point—referred only to ‘Il Secretario Fiorentino’. Furthermore, like Porcacchi, he not only claimed that it was many years since he had read this author’s books but he also prefaced an accurate quotation with an exculpatory ‘si io ben mi 37 See Mattei (1969), 142–5, 256–8. 38 See below, Ch. 17. 39 Bernardino Bombini, Discorsi intorno al governo della guerra et governo domestico (Naples, 1566); 2nd edn. (Venice, 1583). On Bombini, see Bozza, 41–2; Persico, Scrittori politici napoletani, 224–8; Mattei (1969), 298–9. 40 Francesco Ferretti, Della osservanza militare (Venice, 1568), 51–2. The passage is repeated unaltered in the edition of 1576.

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ricordo’.41 Cosimo Bartoli (1569), whose criticisms of Machiavelli reveal first-hand knowledge of the Discorsi, circumvented the censors by attributing such material to the ‘istorico fiorentino’ or ‘nostro istoriografo fiorentino’; and three decades later, Achille Tarducci (1597), while repeatedly providing precise marginal references to the Discorsi and the Arte della guerra, only acknowledged their author as ‘il Segretario’. In post-Tridentine Italy, owning up to a knowledge of Machiavelli’s work was regarded as something best avoided and there were, inevitably, many military writers who considered it prudent not to admit their debt to Machiavelli at all. An early instance of this is Centorio degli Hortensii (1558–62), who often formulated his arguments as answers to propositions with which he disagreed but never revealed that several of these were derived from Machiavelli. Equally silent about their use of the banned bogyman were Aureliano Cicuta (1566), Francesco Bocchi (1573), Pier’ Maria Contarini (1601) and, most striking of all, Lorenzo Capelloni (1576) and Imperiale Cinuzzi (1604), who incorporated or adapted large tracts of Machiavelli’s Discorsi into their own works while giving the impression that the words and ideas were their own.42 Yet the dodges and prevarications were as patchily ineffectual as the prohibitions themselves. In 1574 (when Porcacchi had been so coy about referring to Machiavelli) another historian, Orlando Malavolti, in his Dall’Historia di Siena, had occasion to quote the Istorie fiorentine, I. 5, on the early history of Italy and named Machiavelli, whom he praised as a ‘scrittore elegantissme e letterato’. In later editions, Machiavelli’s name was suppressed, and Malavolti gave his source merely as ‘another writer to whom at present it is not permitted to give name’ (altro Scrittore al quale non e` lecito al presente dar Nome). As a reference to the papal prohibition, this could scarcely be more explicit. Yet on the very next page Machiavelli is twice referred to by name, and twice again on the page after that. Nor is that all. In the ‘Tavola della prima parte’, under the letter N, ‘Nicolo` Machiavelli’ stands unashamed with a 41 Girolamo Maggi and Giacomo Castriotto, Della fortificatione della citta (Venice, 1564), fos. 13v–16v. 42 See these authors in my Index.

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reference to the very page where his name has been suppressed as well as to one where it has not.43 Even more remarkable is Paolo Paruta, whose Discorsi politici are largely built upon a direct confrontation and refutation of Machiavelli’s arguments, which are generally left unidentified. But not invariably. Discussing the unhappy fate of Venice after its success at the battle of Ghiaradada and the way this had revealed the state’s inherent weaknesses, Paruta remarks that he has found these things written in some authors, though chiefly argued by ‘Nicholas Machiavel, a name which hath formerly been very famous for the curiosity of the matter which he took upon him to write on in his discourses, but it is now so condemned to perpetual oblivion by the holy Apostolick Sea, as it is not lawful to name him’. But he has just done so and, like many other Italians, he has read him, too.44 The Indexes certainly made life more difficult for writers, printers, and booksellers:45 but Machiavellian erudition did not wither and die. 43 Orlando Malavolti, Dell’Historia di Siena (Siena, 1574), 19–20; Historia de’ fatti e guerre de’ Sanesi (Venice, 1599), fos. 4–5. 44 Paolo Paruta, Discorsi Politici, (Venice, 1599), II. 3. My quotation is from the translation, Politick Discourses; Written in Italian by Paolo Paruta, A Noble Venetian, Cavalier and Procurator of St. Mark . . . Rendered into English by the Right Honorable, Henry Earl of Monmouth (1657), 131. On Paruta, see Mattei, 145–7; and also see below, Ch. 15. 45 For a clear, well-documented study of the ways in which the Index and the Inquisition affected the book trade, and of the ways in which prohibited authors (including Machiavelli) were made available, see Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press.

7 Machiavelli’s Keenest Readers: The Early Translators A particularly mysterious feature of the history of ideas is the way in which the obvious is often ignored. Much, for example, has been written about an allegedly general hostility towards Machiavelli in the sixteenth century, despite the paucity of evidence both in quantity and quality. Conversely, much has been made of Machiavelli’s pervasive ‘influence’ on the basis of a few famous men who refer to him briefly and for whom he was by no means a central source. Yet comparatively little has been said about his keenest, most vociferous, and most effective proselytizers. Machiavelli’s opinions were disseminated throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries far less by the efforts of commentators or theorists than by the numerous editions of his own writings both in their original Italian and in translations or adaptations. In the century following Machiavelli’s death, there were at least 158 editions, issues, or versions of his four major works, of which well over half appeared after the first published papal Index of Prohibited Books of 1559. And, in France especially, his works were made readily available in translations—with thirty French issues of Il Principe, thirty-five of the Discorsi, five of the Arte della guerra, and five of the Istorie fiorentine—of which barely a handful were issued before the papal ban. These are astonishing statistics for any sixteenth-century author and they do not take into account material which has survived only in manuscript. Jacques Gohory’s translation of the Discorsi, the first book of which appeared in 1544, was to remain the vehicle through which most Frenchmen, until late in the seventeenth century, came to know that text. Jean Charrier’s Art de la guerre also remained popular

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throughout the same period: although, initially, Fourquevaux’s adaptation of Machiavelli’s Arte della guerra was even better known. Gaspard d’Auvergne’s Le Prince, from its first publication in 1553, remained the standard French version of Machiavelli’s most popular book for more than a century, and was generally reprinted along with Gohory and frequently also with Charrier. Moreover, since Innocent Gentillet, Machiavelli’s principal opponent in the sixteenth century, based his interpretation upon a reading of Gohory and D’Auvergne, and since he was frequently misled by their choice of language, it is evident that—in a very real sense—the most influential study of Machiavelli was accomplished by these translators. The same holds true, if to a lesser extent, in England, where Peter Whitehorne’s Arte of Warre, thrice issued in Elizabeth I’s reign, remained the only Machiavellian work available in print and in the vernacular until the publication of Bedingfield’s History of Florence in 1595. The translators are, in many ways, the key to our understanding of Machiavelli’s reception. Not only were their efforts instrumental in keeping his ideas in circulation after the cessation of native Italian editions; but their enthusiastic assessments of Machiavelli’s worth, constantly reprinted along with their translations, were far more widely circulated than any of the hostile criticisms. Yet, like so many of the writers with whom we are concerned, they are mostly obscure men whose own brief comments are often the principal remaining source for their lives and opinions. Consider, for example, the three early translators of the Arte della guerra. In 1536 the printer Miguel de Eguya of Alcala` published a work entitled Tratado de re militari. It is dedicated to Diego de Vargas de Carvajal: but the author’s name appears neither on the title page nor in the privilege. However, at the beginning of Book II, he is revealed as ‘el capitan Diego de Salazar’—a soldier about whom we know nothing except that he was also a scholar and poet.1 The only other works we have of his are a translation of 1 Diego de Salazar, Tratado de re militari (Alcala`, 1536), fo. 10. Another edition was published by Roger Velpius (Brussels, 1590). See Gerber, iii. 13–15; Bertelli and Innocenti, Secolo XVI, nos. 27, 188. The 1590 edition, issued under royal licence, is especially interesting in that the authorities failed to recognize that they were, in fact, promoting a book by the wholly forbidden Machiavelli. They were not the only ones to be deceived for, nearly a century later, Sir James Turner

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Appian’s Roman History, which was also published by Eguya in 1536; verses for the Spanish version of Boccaccio’s Laberinto de amor in 1546; and more verse for the Spanish translation of Sannazaro’s Arcadia in 1547.2 The Tratado is cast in the form of a dialogue between ‘el Gran capitan’, Gonzalo Ferna´ndez de Co´rdova, and Don Pedro Manrique de Lara, Duke of Najara—both of whom had died in 1515. But the work is, none the less, a rendering of Machiavelli’s Arte della guerra. Machiavelli’s protagonist, Fabrizio Colonna, is replaced by Gonzalo, while all the other parts are combined in the person of the Duke. There is little to note in the text itself which, though abridging many of Machiavelli’s linking passages, remains fairly close to the original. Even so personal a touch as the opening of Machiavelli’s first book—the observation that he cannot recall Cosimo Rucellai without tears—is appropriated by Salazar, who is overwhelmed by a similar emotion when he thinks about ‘el Gran capitan’. More interesting is Salazar’s ‘Prologo’: a faithful translation of the ‘Proemio’ of the Arte della guerra up to the point where Machiavelli laments the corruption of modern military behaviour which has led men to hate it and to avoid those engaged in it. Machiavelli goes on to claim that it is still not impossible to restore ancient virtu` so that, despite his own lack of professional practice, he has undertaken to write of these matters. Salazar, however, after the observation that men now avoid soldiers, continues thus: But judging that it would be impossible to prise modern warriors from the common usage, I have decided (because it seems that the time I have served in the wars has not left me ignorant of the things necessary for the military art) to collect from the ancient ordinances that which I have found written, and from the modern that which I have experienced; to compile the present treatise imitating many authors ancient and modern, (a critic especially hostile to what he regarded as Machiavelli’s armchair incompetence) wrote in his Pallas Armata (1683), 160: ‘I have heard that Gonsalvo di Corduba (who by his gallant Conduct recover’d the Kingdom of Naples from the French for the House of Aragon) wrote in Spanish, Trattado de re militari; if it be extant, it must be well worth the perusal, as the work of one who by his great actions had acquir’d to himself the Title of Il Gran Capitano, the Great Captain.’ If only he had known the truth! 2 See Pedro Salva´ y Mallen, Cata´logo de la Biblioteca de Salva´ (Valencia, 1872; repr. Barcelona, 1963), nos. 962, 1537, 2669, 2778.

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following more than the others the opinion of Machiavelli (because he follows Vegetius and is almost like the interpeter of the other authors); and to write in our Castilian language this dialogue between the Great Captain and the Duke of Najara, in which is treated and discussed all the things necessary for war.3

Salazar has generally been dismissed as a plagiarist whose work has no independent value. In mitigation one can say that he does have the merit of recognizing the Arte della guerra as itself primarily a reworking of ancient texts; and that he accords his source rather more acknowledgement than Machiavelli vouchsafes his. It was ten years before another translator published a version of the Arte della guerra. This was in 1546 when Jean Charrier—‘natif d’Apt en Provence’, and Secretary to Jean Bernard, President of the Parlement of Paris—offered his French rendering of Machiavelli’s work, together with that of Onosander’s account of the duties of a general, to Henri the Dauphin.4 The offering was, presumably, received since we know that Henri possessed the copy which is still preserved in the Re´serve of the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France.5 In his dedication, Charrier observes that, since the decline of the Golden Age, rulers have been constrained to take up arms for the exercise of their majesty and for the defence of their people. Human ambition is such that it is impossible to hold anything in one hand without a stick in the other to retain it. 3 ‘Mas juzgando por lo que he visto que seria impossibile apartar a los presentes guerreros de la comun usanc¸a he deliberado (porque no parezca que el tiempo que yo he militado se me ha pasado ignorando las cosas necessarias a la milicia) colegir de las ordenes antiguas parte de lo que he hallado escripto: y de las modernas parte de lo que he esperimentado: y copilar el presente tratado imitando a muchos autores antiguos y modernos, siguiendo mas que a los otros el parecer de Machavelo: porque imita el a Vejecio y casi como interprete de los otros autores, escrevir en nuestra Castellana lengua este dialogo entre el Gran capitan y el duque de Najara: en el qual se tratan y disputan todas las cosas necessarias a la guerra.’ 4 L’art de la guerre compose´ par Nicolas Machiavelli, Citoien et Secretaire de Florence. L’estat aussi et charge d’un Lieutenant General d’armee, par Onosander ancien philosophe Platonique . . . Le tout traduict en vulgaire franc¸ois par Jehan Charrier natif d’Apt en Provence (Paris, 1546). See Gerber, iii. 28–30. 5 BNF Re´serve, R.523. See Ernest Quentin-Bauchart, La Bibliothe`que de Fontainebleau, no. 190, pp. 117–18. Charrier’s translation of Contarini, Des magistratz et republique de Venise compose´ par Gaspar Contarini gentilhomme Venetien, et depuis traduict de Latin en vulgaire Franc¸ois par Jehan Charrier (Paris, 1544), is dedicated to the Constable.

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Without arms no city can avoid the yoke of servitude. This observation leads into a long paean to war, especially remarking that warlike ancients had conquered and remained free, whereas those devoted only to the arts of peace had been subjugated. Modern armies, Charrier laments, do not conform to the ancient models but have become disordered and rebellious; and this is why he is offering his two translations, from Machiavelli and Onosander, as the ‘ointments and cataplasms which will cure the old ulcers and ills in our armies so long corrupted’. In these works the Dauphin will find the correct method for attack, defence, march, encampment, and siege, and will thus recognize both the cause of the present malady, the location of the poison, and its precise remedy. In an address to his reader, Charrier explains the style and structure of his translation of the Arte della guerra; and he begs forgiveness for having divided Machiavelli’s book into chapters ‘contre l’ordre de ses dialogues’. But he has acted thus for a good purpose. When a work is lengthy and without pause from beginning to end it engenders boredom, particularly in those unaccustomed to long reading and who love brevity. Division, moreover, while helping the memory and understanding, gives greater pleasure. Thus wise men have developed a method of breaking up a text into subjects, and have applied this to the books of Aristotle, Vitruvius, Pliny, and many others who wrote in a ‘style continu et sans division’. Charrier has himself preferred to consider the comfort of his reader rather than timidly follow his author. And, in much the same spirit, he has not followed his source word for word. There are differences between his own and the original language, and he believes that in translation it is more important to represent faithfully the intention of writers ‘que de s’amuser au langaige nu des paroles’.6 However, he requests that, should readers find that he has either cut up the text excessively 6 L’art de la guerre, ‘Charrier au Lecteur’, sig. a.6v. Cf. Charrier’s argument for chapter divisions with an almost similar statement in Bosca’s introductory remarks for his Spanish translation of Castiglione, Libro llamado el cortesano (Salamanca, 1540), sig. a.1v: ‘El auctor no dividio estos libros por capitulos. Mas agora pareciendo algunos que leer un libro desde el principio hasta el fin: fin aver donde pare o repose el espiritu: trae consigo un cansancio o hastio: se acordo enesta impression de dividir cada uno de los quatro libros por sus capitulos para mas descanso del lector: come por el progresso del parescera.’

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or, on the other hand, run parts together, they would attribute this to the imperfection which afflicts every human endeavour. As a matter of fact, Charrier’s division of the text into chapters affords a considerable gain in clarity over the original: though it also emphasizes Machiavelli’s debt to Vegetius, which had been noticed by Salazar but is not specifically referred to by Charrier. Another noteworthy feature of Charrier’s edition is the evident embarrassment he felt at his own ignorance concerning Machiavelli. He assures his reader that, though it is customary to provide a biography of the author at the beginning of a work, he has decided against this procedure partly because it is not long since Machiavelli died and his writings are very recent, and partly because those who wish to know more about him could find plenty of people to satisfy their curiosity.7 This, unfortunately, we cannot do with regard either to Charrier or to the third of these early military enthusiasts, Peter Whitehorne, who Englished the Arte della guerra for his Elizabethan contemporaries. Whitehorne was, according to his own testimony, a student and ‘felow of Graies Inne’: but this cannot be corroborated from the records of that institution.8 In 1549 to 1550 he was in Italy, as we know from Sir Thomas Hoby—later himself to gain fame with a translation of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano—who tells us that he made his acquaintance there.9 Soon afterwards Whitehorne must have begun his career as a soldier, for in his Preface, written in July 1560, he tells us that about ten years previously he had served in the wars of the Emperor Charles V ‘against the Mores and certain Turkes beyng in Barberie, at the siege and winnyng of Calibbia, Monesterio and Africa’. The campaigns here mentioned must be those which opened in September 1550 in response to renewed activity by the Barbary pirates. The bombardment of Monastir is well documented, but the rest of Whitehorne’s allusion is obscure. It was during these ‘continuall broiles and unquietnesse’ that he 7 L’art de la guerre, sig. b.4v 8 The Arte of Warre written first in Italian by Nicholas Machiavell and set forthe in Englishe by Peter Whitehorne student at Graies Inne (London, 1560). At the end of Book VII Whitehorne refers to himself as ‘felow of Graise Inne’. 9 Thomas Hoby, A Booke of the Travaile and Lief of me, Thomas Hoby, ed. Edgar Powell, Camden Miscellany, 10 (1902), 19, 21, 25, 64, 61.

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had first translated the Arte della guerra of the ‘famous and excellente Nicholas Machiavell’; and it is this work which he is now offering to his illustrious dedicatee Elizabeth I, Queen of England. Whitehorne’s opinion of the military art in general is as elevated as that of Charrier and is expressed in similar terms; while his estimate of Machiavelli as a theorist is even more laudatory. Nothing is more ‘profitable, necessary, or more honourable, then the knowledge of service in warre, and dedes of armes’ because, due to worldly ambition, it is impossible for any ‘realme or dominion, long to continue free in quietnesse and savegarde, where the defence of the sweard is not alwaies in a readinesse’. That such liberty cannot be maintained where men neglect ‘warlike skilfulness’ is evident from the history of the ancients, and especially of the Romans who, so long as they cultivated ‘marciall feates’, prospered and increased but who, through long peace and devotion to ‘pleasure and delicatenesse’, fell suddenly into decay and utter ruin. Whitehorne can think of no better way to further the common utility than by setting forth something which would contribute to the defence of his native land. He has, accordingly, again perused his old translation of the Arte della guerra; and, since his own knowledge had been ‘marveilously holpen and increased’ by that work, he now wished to communicate it to his compatriots so that they might ‘no lesse in knowledge of warres become incomperable, then in prowes also and exercise of the same, altogether invincible’. His presumption in dedicating it to the Queen herself is justified because the ‘whole charge and furniture of warlike counsailes and preparacions’ is determined by rulers and thus, ‘under the passeport and safeconduite of your highnes moste noble name’, this foreign book would win better credit. Whitehorne boldly affirms that of many straungers, whiche from forrein countreis, have here tofore in this your Majesties realme arrived, there is none in comparison to bee preferred, before this worthie Florentine and Italian, who havyng frely without any gaine of exchaunge (as after some acquaintaunce and familiaritie will better appeare) brought with hym moste riche, rare and plentifull Treasure, shall deserve I trust of all good Englishe hartes, most lovingly and frendly to be intertained, embraced and cherished.

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Like many another author, Whitehorne apologizes for his literary style. The ‘grosse fasion’ of the ‘newe Englishe apparell’ with which he has clothed the original is more suitable to the camp than ‘in nice termes attired to the Carpet, and in course clothyng rather putte foorthe to battaile, then in any brave shewe prepared to the bankette’. His purpose, however, is to profit the interested warrior, not to delight the ears of the ‘fine Rethorician or daintie curious scholemanne’; and he humbly beseeches the Queen to accept this, the ‘first fruictes of a poore souldiours studie’. As a matter of fact, Whitehorne’s soldierly style is singularly effective for his appointed task. The taut muscularity of his English idiom matches that of the Italian original; and the flexibility both of his language and syntax enables him to follow his source with a literal accuracy denied to all subsequent translators. Whitehorne has never been given his due. He was the first translator of an entire work by Machiavelli into English and remains, in several respects, the best.10 Nor was his knowledge of Machiavelli limited to his chosen principal text. The Arte of Warre was first issued in 1560 and then reissued in 1573 and 1588: and to each edition was appended the translator’s Certain Waies for the orderyng of Souldiers in battelray, which he clearly regarded as a supplement to Machiavelli.11 He accordingly supplies miscellaneous information—much of it derived from very recent technical authorities such as Tartaglia and Zanchi12—on a variety of topics including fortification, the fabrication of gunpowder, saltpetre, and fireworks, and methods of signalling. In the midst of this largely pragmatic assemblage of materials, Whitehorne feels obliged to discuss the value of artillery and to test the assertion that the Romans would have fared ill against modern weaponry. And here he simply translates—unaltered and unacknowledged—the whole 10 Whitehorne is the first translator of Machiavelli into English if we except the passages incorporated by Richard Moryson, William Thomas, and George Rainsford into their works. 11 Peter Whitehorne, Certain Waies for the orderyng of souldiers in battelray, and settyng of battailes, after divers fashions, with their maner of marchyng . . . with other thynges apertaining to the warres. This work has a title page and foliation separate from the Machiavelli translation, and is dated Apr. 1562 on the colophon. 12 For Whitehorne’s use of Tartaglia and Zanchi, see J. R. Hale, Renaissance War Studies (London, 1983), 260–1, 452.

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of the relevant chapter of the Discorsi (II. 17).13 Then, at the end of his work, he assures his readers that: the most verteous lyfe, and government of Alexander Severus Emperour of Rome, with manie other Princes, and Comon weales, coulde not, being necligent in this kynde of studie and practis therof, save or defende theim selves, from moste shamefull endes, and miserable deathes: wherin fortune was not to be blamed, but only their folly and ignoraunce, for having never thoughte in tyme of tranquillity and pease, that it could chaunge into adversitie and trouble: the which is a comon faulte of men, not to make accompte in fayre weather of the tempest to come.14

This passage ingeniously combines an example culled from the nineteenth chapter of Il Principe with the harsh condemnation of modern pusillanimity and lack of foresight from the twenty-fourth chapter of the same work. Whitehorne certainly knew Machiavelli well: but it is also apparent that he gave some attention to Charrier’s version of the Arte della guerra and had taken advantage of the chapters into which that had been divided. Unlike his French predecessor, Whitehorne does not divide the text; but he does preface his translation with a list of ‘Certain principall thinges, contained in this woorke of Machiavel’, which, in effect, comprises an analytic table of contents. The headings are, with a number of additions, subtractions, and variants, incorporated as marginal notes throughout the printed text and, though much more numerous and precise, they do correspond to many of Charrier’s chapter headings.15 Whitehorne’s reading of 13 Whitehorne, Certain Waies, fos. 34v–38. Whitehorne entitles the chapter ‘How much the artillerie ought to be estemed of the armies now adayes, and whether the same opinion of them which is had universally, be trew’, which is a literal translation of Machiavelli’s chapter heading. 14 Ibid., fos. 49v–50. 15 For example, Whitehorne’s ‘Why a good man ought not to exercise warfare as his arte’ corresponds to Charrier’s ‘Comment un homme de bien ne doit point suivre les armes pour en faire mestier’; his ‘Oute of what Countrie is best to chuse Souldiers to make a good election’ to Charrier’s ‘De quel pays il fault lever des gens pour en faire une vraye election’; his ‘How to provid againste soche inconveniences as souldiours maie cause’ to Charrier’s ‘De pourveoir aux inconveniens que peuvent faire les gens qui suivent les armees’, and so on. There is one unusual marginal gloss in Book VI where Whitehorne illustrates Machiavelli by referring to recent English history, noting: ‘A policie that Alexander Magnus used to be assured of all Tracia, which Philip Kynge of Spaine did practise to be asured of England when he wente to sainct Quintens’.

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Charrier is also suggested, if not confirmed, by his only other published work. This was a translation which appeared in 1563, allegedly from the Italian text by Fabio Cotta, of Onosander’s Generall Captaine—the very work chosen by Charrier to complement his own translation of the Arte della guerra. Here, once more, Whitehorne is refurbishing a production which he had ‘longe agon’ translated out of the Italian tongue for his ‘owne exercise’ and for the great delight he has always had in studying the art of war. Again he is concerned with the ‘common utilitie’ of his countrymen but, on this occasion, he makes his offering to Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. His Preface expresses a consistent view of the profit which accrues to those states which have chiefly delighted in ‘warlike discipline’; and there is a Machiavellian ring to his recognition of the way in which men have risen from ‘vile and abject fortune’ to fame and renown by exercise of military aptitude. By such ‘science’, Whitehorne continues, foreign lands are subjugated, native lands are defended, and good laws ‘there establyshed, are quietly executed upon offenders, without rebellious disturbaunce’. The successes enjoyed by the Turks are proof of this because none of their opponents resemble or imitate antiquity to the same degree. This Whitehorne had himself witnessed when he had spent some time in Constantinople and had studied the ‘Marshiall affayres and doinges’ of the Turks—an episode which, like the rest of Whitehorne’s activities, remains shrouded in mystery.16

j acque s de vi nti mi lle Nor do we move from darkness into light when we turn to the earliest translators of Il Principe. If we except, for the moment, the Latin edition of 1560, there are three texts thus far known to survive: all are in French; and only the first is by somebody of wide repute among his contemporaries. This translator was Jacques de Vintimille—a Greek whose illustrious family had 16 Onosandro Platonico, of the Generall Captaine, and of his office, translated out of Greke into Italyan, by Fabio Cotta, a Romayne: and out of Italian into Englyshe, by Peter Whytehorne (London, 1563), sigs. a.2–4.

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been driven from their estates in Liguria and had taken refuge at Rhodes.17 The father had been killed at the siege of 1522 but Jacques, still a child, had the good fortune to be offered patronage by Georges de Vauzelles, a friend of his father. Jacques was educated first at Lyon and then at the University of Pavia; subsequently travelled in Spain, Africa, and Italy; served with the armies of France; and finally returned to Lyon where—equipped with a variety of languages, both classical and modern, and with a knowledge of jurisprudence, mathematics, music, architecture, and painting—he quickly took his place amidst a circle of savants and poets including Du Choul, Sce`ve, Marot, Voulte´, and Pontus de Tyard. He was asked by Franc¸ois Ier to prepare a translation of Xenophon’s Cyropedie, which was published by Groulleau in 1547; followed this with a translation of Herodian which appeared in 1554; may have contributed to the French verse edition of Theages in 1564; and finally published a Latin poem in 1572 to celebrate the defeat of the Turks. Vintimille’s versatility may be further deduced from his contributing designs for the decoration of the Chateau d’Anet.18 Already by 1546 this Castiglionesque all-rounder had given attention to Machiavelli for, in that year, he dedicated his French translation of Il Principe to the Constable of France, Anne de Montmorency, who was also the recipient of Gohory’s Premier livre des Discours and, incidentally, of Charrier’s Republique de Venise. According to Vintimille’s brief autobiography he also offered a translation of the Arte della guerra to the Constable: but this has not thus far come to light. In his dedication of Le Prince, Vintimille admits to some trepidation for he is, as he explains, himself a foreigner originating from the remotest part of Greece. He fears rebuke for his temerity in now working with three languages—Italian, French, and Latin—all of which differ from his native tongue; but a certain M. Rambouillet,19 to whom he had 17 On Vintimille, see Ludovic de Vauzelles, Vie de Jacques, comte de Vintimille, conseiller au parlement de Bourgogne, litte´rateur et savant du seizie`me sie`cle, d’apre`s des documents ine´dits (Orle´ans, 1865). E´mile Louis Jean Legrand, Bibliographie helle´nique (Leroux, 1885–1906), gives a list of Vintimille’s works. 18 Yates, The French Academies, 41, 138; Vauzelles, Vie de Jacques, 60. 19 Probably Jacques d’Angenne II, Seigneur de Rambouillet, who died in 1568. See Louis Moreri, Le Grand Dictionnaire historique, ou le me´lange curieux de l’histoire sacre´e et profane (Paris, 1759), under ANGENNES.

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long been obliged, had commanded that he should expose himself to the Constable’s judgement with his translation. This Vintimille now did. And the copy has remained in manuscript ever since.20

guillaume cappel Far better known are the labours of two Frenchmen, Guillaume Cappel and Gaspard d’Auvergne, who published independent translations of Il Principe in 1553. Cappel, born in 1530, was a member of a distinguished literary and professional family. He became a doctor and, almost fifty years after his Machiavellian venture, published a memorandum on dietary during time of plague, and edited various cases for his famous colleague Jean Fernel.21 Cappel’s father, Jacques, was a lawyer who became Avocat du Roi au Parlement de Paris and concerns us only because, in 1535, he made a speech praising Franc¸ois Ier for his religious zeal: observing that the ancient states had prospered despite the fact that their religion was false, and that they ‘lived in error and darkness’, because they believed it to be true and held it in reverence. This oration by Jacques Cappel, writes Innocent Gentillet, who records the occasion, ‘had truly a little of Machiavell his doctrine, to say that a false religion was cause that the Paynims prospered’.22 20 Chantilly, Muse´e Conde´ MS 693: Le Prince de Nicolas Machiavel, citoyen et secre´taire de Florence, traduict en franc¸oys, MDXLVI, par Jacques de Vintemille. See H. d’Orle´ans, Chantilly: Le Cabinet des Livres. Manuscrits (Paris, 1900), i, no. 315, pp. 254–5. Vintimille was clearly concerned about the value of translation in general and about his own skills in particular. Cf. his Advertissement et remonstrance aux censeurs de la langue franc¸oise which is appended to the 1580 edition of the Herodian. A century later, an apologist for Machiavelli, Louis Machon, doubted the existence of Vintimille’s translation. Machon did know of D’Auvergne—but thought that his work had been a translation of the Discorsi. See BNF MS fr. 19046, p. 82. 21 On Cappel, see the entry in Nouvelle biographie universelle. 22 Gentillet, Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner et maintentir en bonne paix un Royeaume ou autre Principaute´. Divisez en trois parties: assavoir, du Conseil, de la Religion & Police que doit tenir un Prince. Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin (Geneva, 1576), 242; A Discourse upon the meanes of wel-governing and maintaining in good peace, a kingdom or other principalitie. Divided into three parts, namely The Counsell, the Religion, and the Policie, which a Prince ought to hold and follow.

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It is not likely that Jacques knew much, if anything, about Machiavelli: but young Guillaume certainly did. His Le Prince, which was published at Paris by Charles Estienne, the King’s printer, was dedicated to Jean Bertrand, Lord Privy Seal; and it was accompanied with poems of praise by Jean Dorat, Marc-Antoine de Muret, E´tienne Jodelle, and Remy Belleau—all members of the Ple´iade with whom, it seems, Cappel was on more than nodding terms. The translation itself is very literal and sinewy. Yet, apart from the single issue of Gohory’s version, which is almost entirely based upon Cappel’s work, this excellent translation was never reprinted.23 Cappel’s Preface, addressed to his dedicatee, is a statement of considerable interest as a mid-century interpretation of Machiavelli’s text. It opens with the customary servilities and excuses for offering something which really belongs to another. However, the translator has always believed that nothing better becomes human nature than profiting others, so binding the community of men more powerfully than could nature herself. We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to those who, in their books—‘like shops of wisdom’—treated that knowledge which, reminding us of its origin, brings us nearer to God. Without such knowledge man would know little more than his name and form: with it he is constrained to employ Reason, ‘which is the mark of our excellence’. Man, driven by necessity, does not recognize where his own good really lies; but knowledge brings him closer to that goal for which God fashioned him. There are, naturally, diverse human aims but, just as the more worthy the goal the more worthy the man who pursues it, so ‘la politique’ is the very summit of that philosophy which is the Queen of our life. It is the goal of goals—‘la fin des fins’—which appraises all those who participate in the active life better than they are able to appraise themselves. Without political science, all other forms of knowledge, which are but handmaids or ornaments of ‘nostre grande Dame’, count for nothing. She stands in relation to them Against Nicholas Machiavell the Florentine, trans. Simon Patericke (1602), 135. Louis Machon, 78, alludes to this oration. 23 Le Prince de Nicolas Machiavelle secretaire et citoien de Florence. Traduit d’Italien en Franc¸ois Par Guillaume Cappel (Paris, 1553). See Gerber, iii. 33–4; Bertelli and Innocenti, Secolo XVI, no. 102.

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as the architect or master of a ship stands in relation to workmen or sailors, for the people can never carry on their work diligently if they are exposed as prey either to the tumult of the multitude or to the tyranny of the great (‘la mutinerie de la commune ou la tirannie des plus gros’). On the other hand, when the republic is well governed by magistrates, ‘the souls of its body’—through arms in time of war and through laws in time of peace—the whole state flourishes, and the handling of affairs conforms to that of ‘this mighty divine providence’ in the theatre of the universe. It is providence which brought men together and led them away from savagery to civilized society. Man is by nature gregarious but, more than any other animal, he is ungrateful to his governor, so that it is the lot of princes to sow good works and to reap a bad name for doing it: ‘de sorte que le propre des Princes est de semer bonnes oeuvres, pour recueillir mauvais bruict’. This ‘science’, says Cappel—if it may be so termed, and not rather a ‘Caballe’ handed down from father to son—was invented through necessity or was, perhaps, bestowed by heaven upon some divine spirit. As its use is so necessary, so knowledge of it is most honourable. This is a highly elevated view of political knowledge. ‘La politique’ is likened to Divine Providence. It is, indeed, God-given. And it is at this unlikely point that Machiavelli comes upon the scene. Cappel rebukes that majority of authors who have written more for show than for practical utility (‘plus pour la monstre que pour le prouffit’), indulging rather in wishful thinking than in describing a republic. If they had concerned themselves with what is feasible instead of setting up governments of which they are both lords and subjects, they might have acquired some reputation amongst princes rather than the hollow admiration of the sophists. Neither their eloquence nor all human learning can persuade a prince to consent to his own ruin, which would surely come about if anyone had followed their advice amidst so many who did not—‘si quelcun eust suivi leur institution entre tant qui ne la suivoient point’—a fundamental Machiavellism expressed in the fifteenth chapter of Il Principe and repeated (as we shall see) by D’Auvergne in the preface to his own translation. Machiavelli is a very different kind of writer. He discusses everything according to the manner of his own time, which, Cappel

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observes, is almost the same as that of contemporary France—‘qui est quasi la nostre’—a remark unlikely to commend itself to the ranks of Italophobes who were already gathering strength. Nevertheless, in Cappel’s view, Machiavelli’s approach is correct, for the true goal both of political writers and of rulers is to conserve and augment the state. Furthermore, Machiavelli had a complete, healthy, and unbiased judgement; a sound method (‘bon moien de proceder’); a style appropriate to his subject; a knowledge of history; and an assurance which derives from experience. He reprimands faults with severity; resolves difficulties with wisdom; and seeks out the causes of change. In short, writes Cappel— adapting a phrase from the historian Justin, which was itself used by Machiavelli in Il Principe—he lacks nothing to be a prince, save the power and name: ‘il ne luy deffaut rien pour estre Prince que la puissance et nom du Prince’.24 Indeed, in Cappel’s opinion, Machiavelli’s thoroughness has left nothing for his successors either to add to or subtract from his work, so that those who hold opinions contrary to his own simply do not hold good opinions. Cappel lays great stress on the thoroughness of Machiavelli’s work because he is aware that there are some who accuse the author of fashioning too rigorous a prince. Such people, he retorts, seem too rigorous themselves, for one can excuse Machiavelli by the example of the good doctor who pays less attention to the corrupt taste of an invalid than to the cure, and who applies to bad illnesses stronger medicines. So will the prince, continues Cappel—changing his metaphor—like a musician extend the rigour of his justice to create a harmonious accord with the sweetness of his humanity. This notion of the need for strong medicines is reminiscent of the remarks with which Bernardo di Giunta prefaced his edition of Il Principe in 1532; and it had already been used by Nifo in 1523 to introduce his own adaptation of Machiavelli’s works. For obvious reasons, even admirers considered Il Principe powerful medicine. It is, therefore, noteworthy that Cappel explicitly declines to refute those who asserted that Machiavelli was without religion. These 24 Machiavelli, in Il Principe, 6, discusses Hiero of Syracuse, saying that he lacked nothing to reign but a kingdom. His source is Justin, XXIII. 4. Cf. Nifo, De regnandi peritia, III. 6.

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folk, he believes, are more concerned with broadcasting their own opinions than with learning from others, seeing that they advance such an enormity without any reason that one can find in the book: ‘veu qu’ilz mettent en avant une chose si enorme sans aucune occasion, qu’on puisse apercevoir en ce livre’. This must be a reply to a gibe by Paolo Giovio which asserted that Machiavelli was a ‘mocker and an atheist’.25 But it remains a strange reading of the central chapters of Il Principe, which deliberately challenge the efficacy of traditional Christian morality in a violent, immoral world. For the rest, Cappel concludes, Machiavelli has dealt so well with every part of politics that he has already acquired as much praise in all of them as every other writer has for each single aspect. It is the general opinion that of all books this one is the best, not only because it is the most recently published, but because the matter and form of monarchical government is the most excellent: ‘Des livres duquel toutesfois au jugement d’un chacun. cetuy-cy est le mieux faict tant pour estre le dernier compose´ que d’autant que le subject & forme de Republique en monarchie est la plus excellente.’ This judgement may be proved by the example of France, which has never, in Cappel’s opinion, been better governed than at present—though he does not explain why, in that case, such strong medicines are now required.

g a s p a r d d’a u v e r g n e A somewhat similar view of Il Principe was advanced by its other French translator in 1553.26 This was Gaspard d’Auvergne, who remains a thoroughly obscure figure although he, too, like Cappel, was on friendly terms with members of the Ple´iade and was able to elicit a eulogistic liminary verse for his version of Il Principe from Marc-Antoine de Muret. According to a brief manuscript biography by Jean Falco, D’Auvergne was born in Limoges; had a good 25 Giovio, Elogia (1546), 194. 26 Le Prince de Nicolas Macchiavelli, trans. Gaspard d’Auvergne (Poitiers, 1553). See Gerber, iii. 30–3; Bertelli and Innocenti, Secolo XVI, no. 103.

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education both in the law and the classical authors; and spent some time travelling in Germany and Italy before returning to his native land and settling down as a lawyer in the duchy of Chaˆtellerault, where he died in 1569 as a result of an operation for the stone.27 D’Auvergne offered his translation to ‘James d’Ammilton, duc de Chastelheraut, comte d’Araines, tuteur unique de la roine d’Escosse, gouverneur et seconde personne dudit royaume’. James Hamilton, second Earl of Arran, had been chosen Regent and Governor of Scotland in December 1542 after the death of James V, when the Princess Mary was only a couple of weeks old. In the following March his appointment was confirmed and he was declared the second person in the realm; and it was in July 1548 that France granted him the duchy of Chaˆtellerault.28 D’Auvergne considers ‘this little work’ to be marvellously appropriate to so great a man of affairs as his dedicatee. The original author, he writes, deals with nothing other than the acquisition and maintaining of ‘his own’ in which he discerns the whole aim of that prince depicted for us: not wishing to follow in this the method of those who have written before him on a similar subject: who have delineated in their writings I know not what princely perfection inimitable to all human beings, given the fragile condition of human nature. On the contrary, this writer has wished to match the form of his precepts only to that which is subject to experience and the most common sort of action which wise princes have employed intending, as I have said, to conserve and augment their domain: considering it to be singularly inept to point out a road where no one goes, to avoid that which is trodden by the whole world.29

D’Auvergne himself recognizes that there are difficulties in thus facing up to the harsh realities of terrestrial affairs and, unlike Cappel, he acknowledges not only that Machiavelli’s language seems to be a little too free—‘un peu trop licentieux’—but 27 Gaspardi Arverni Elogium by Jean Falco, in BNF MS fr. 23045, fos. 91–2. 28 On Hamilton’s vacillating and ineffectual career, see the article by Robert Dunlop in DNB. Marcus Merriman, in his article on Hamilton in the new DNB, is a good deal more charitable. But I remain unconvinced that Hamilton was much better than a vacillating bungler. 29 Le Prince, trans. D’Auvergne, sigs. p.2v–3r.

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also that he has not ‘followed the most virtuous route’ in having authorized ‘in some places that which has an appearance of vice’. This is, however, excused on the grounds that Machiavelli, ‘wishing to keep to the nature of his subject, and pursue the ends he proposed’, could scarcely have spoken otherwise. It is difficult, without the express favour of God, for a prince to maintain himself and avoid the inconveniences to which he is prone—amongst such powerful and ambitious neighbours, and such evil and faithless subjects—if he wishes ‘never to relax the bridle from the severity of the rules of conscience’. It is the law of the world, naturally vicious, that one cannot prosper for long, even in sovereign dignity, ‘without knowing how to make use of vice in necessity and—when the occasion is at an end—knowing how to return immediately to the path of virtue’. Saintly folk, D’Auvergne argues, have often demonstrated for us the quality of this world by their desire to divorce themselves from that commerce with men and with mundane affairs which they deem wholly repugnant to the integrity of the evangelical life. Nevertheless, this notion of withdrawal would be extraordinarily pernicious were it to be adopted by everyone: for natural necessity constrains us to live one with another in a politic society ‘approved by the Scriptures’. We have had to invent laws for governing these mixed bodies of which there are as many varieties as there are kingdoms and communities. Yet they all have some logic founded on the appearance of divine law: ‘quelque raison fondee sur la semblance de la loy divine’. They differ from this divine law in many respects: but the nearer they approach it the more perfect they may be considered—for who can better provide the means by which to govern created beings than the creator Himself. Just as he has kept to himself his opinions concerning his sovereignty, as inscrutable secrets, from his creatures, so one must not be astonished if the manner employed by princes, God’s lieutenants in this world, to command men are most often not understood by their subjects, and seem sometimes far beyond common and ordinary laws (‘semble quelquefois exorbitantes des loix communes et ordinaires’). For which I can offer no other reason save that I believe that God has permitted a certain privilege to kings, given the weighty charge they have to bear in ruling a body composed of infinite people. To this the commandment of the Apostle

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well conforms, saying that we have no choice but to obey our princes even when they appear evil and impious.30

From all this, says D’Auvergne, we may silently (‘taisiblement’) infer that it is sometimes licit for our monarchs, according to their affairs, to range beyond the limits of virtue in order to right this wicked and corrupt world which is subject to them. In doing this their power is still approved by God: a paradox which is so analysed and discussed by our author, yet so ill-sounding at first acquaintance, that I thought it necessary to make use of this preface to ensure that your Majesty might be less offended when he encounters this bold, new discourse the reading of which I, nevertheless, hope will prove pleasurable as much for his manner of proceeding (not hitherto used by any similar author) as for his teaching which is entirely appropriate to the present time—revealing, as it does, the deceits and wickedness of men.

D’Auvergne’s special pleading is, in many ways, extraordinary. In the first place, he appears to have been acutely conscious that his translation was likely to arouse the ire of conventional readers. Next, in order to exculpate Machiavelli’s embarrassing political morality, he proceeds simply to paraphrase the very argument from the fifteenth chapter of Il Principe most likely to give offence. He then glosses this argument (based on the necessities imposed by an evil world) by pressing into service a traditional commonplace of Christian political thought which was heavily exploited throughout the sixteenth century: that kings must be obeyed because, as God’s terrestrial lieutenants, their behaviour is beyond the comprehension of common wits. Thus St Paul the Apostle is called upon to testify as a character witness for Niccolo` Machiavelli. And it is as well to remember two things about this curious justification for the Florentine’s topsy-turvy ethic. First, it was included in all subsequent editions of D’Auvergne’s translation, which, despite its pleonastic flabbiness and general inferiority to Cappel’s version, enjoyed some twenty printings up to the mid-seventeenth century. Secondly, as a result of this popularity, it must have reached a far wider audience than any of the writings against Machiavelli.31 30 Le Prince, trans. D’Auvergne, sig.
.4. 31 The printing history of D’Auvergne’s translation is most readily traced in Innocenti and Bertelli.

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jacque s gohory There were only two vernacular translations of Machiavelli’s Discorsi published in the sixteenth century. One of these, in Spanish, was by Juan Lorenzo Otevanti of Valladolid, who has otherwise left no record for posterity.32 The other was by Jacques Gohory, and this vied in popularity with D’Auvergne’s Prince—indeed for much of its history it was issued with D’Auvergne in a composite volume of French renderings of Machiavelli. Gohory is the best documented of all Machiavelli’s early translators, and his interest in the Florentine’s writings continued throughout the vicissitudes of nearly three stormy decades of French history and despite a host of conflicting claims upon his energies. For Gohory, like so many sixteenth-century writers, pursued a bewildering multiplicity of interests. He was born about 1520 and died in March 1576, having shown proficiency not only as a translator but also as an editor, poet, lawyer, doctor, alchemist, magician, and historian.33 He was especially absorbed by the problems of Paracelsian medicine; published an important Compendium on this complex topic, complete with notes and a biography and catalogue of Paracelsus himself; and, at the very end of his life, engaged in an alchemical 32 Discursos de Nicolao Machiaveli. Dirigidos al muy alto y poderoso Sen˜or don Philippe Principe de Espan˜a nuestro Sen˜or (Medina del Campo, 1552). This version, dedicated to the Prince of Spain, Philip, son of Charles V, came with a privilege, dated 15 Mar. 1550, from the Emperor himself. It was reprinted in 1555, again addressed to Philip, who was, by this time, King of England and of Naples as well as Prince of Spain: but thereafter the text seems to have fallen victim to the rigour of the Spanish Inquisition; and both editions are of the utmost rarity. See Gerber, iii. 4, 115–16; Innocenti and Bertelli, Secolo XVI, nos. 101, 116; and especially Puigdome`nech, Maquiavelo en Espan˜a, 97–111. 33 On Gohory see E. T. Hamy, ‘Un Pre´curseur de Guy de la Brosse: Jacques Gohory et le Lycium Philosophal de Saint-Marceau-le`s-Paris (1571–1576)’, Nouvelles Archives du Muse´um d’Histoire Naturelle, 4th ser., 1 (Paris, 1899); Enea Balmas, ‘Jacques Gohory traduttore del Machiavelli (con documenti inediti)’, Studi Machiavelliani (Verona, 1972), 1–52. See also the pioneering articles by W. F. Bowen, ‘ ‘‘L’histoire de la terre neuve du Peru’’: A translation by Jacques Gohory’ and ‘The Earliest Treatise on Tobacco’, Isis, 28 (1938), 330–63; ‘Sixteenth-Century French Translations of Machiavelli’, Italica, 27 (1950), 313–20; Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, v. 636– 40; D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958), 96–106.

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controversy with Alexandre de la Tourette. But his interests ranged even wider. He wrote a general study of the magical and divinatory arts; an excellent textbook on viniculture; and the earliest known treatise devoted entirely to tobacco. He translated not only Machiavelli but also Livy; a history of Peru; and Levinus Lemnius’s De occultis naturae miraculis. He wrote prefaces for the treatise on lute-playing by his friend Adrien le Roy and for various musical publications by Orlando di Lasso. And, in addition to all this, he found time to translate three books of the Amadis de Gaule, and to edit or comment upon La fontaine perilleuse and the Livre de la conqueste de la Toison d’Or: all of which he interpreted as alchemical allegories. Gohory was also very well connected. He claimed to be closely related to Emile Perrot, ‘Conseiller au Parlement’, and to Claude Fauchet, ‘President de la cour de la monnaie’; and he worked for a time both in England and in Rome with Odet de Selve, the French ambassador. He knew a flock of academic, artistic, and literary figures including the physicians Fernel, Pare´, Chapelain, Chastellan, and the royal doctors Botal and Renault Vigor. He was acquainted with the writers Joachim du Bellay, Olivier de Magny, Charles Fontaine, Estienne Tabourot, Jean Dorat, Remy Belleau, Jean-Antoine de Baı¨f, Jodelle, Muret, Denisot, Martin, Nicolas Herberay des Essarts, and Pasquier. Several of these authors provided liminary verses for Cappel’s translation of Il Principe, and it appears that Cappel, whom we know to have moved in similar circles, was also a friend of Gohory and a frequent visitor to his home—though he may have outstayed his welcome.34 According to his own testimony Gohory became the central figure of an informal academy, the ‘Lycium philosophal de SaintMarceau-le`s-Paris’, which used to meet to conduct alchemical experiments, perform music, and play bowls and ninepins. There was, none the less, a tetchy side to Gohory’s character, for he frequently signed himself Solitarius or le Solitaire; employed the motto Envie d’envie en vie, to indicate the jealousy endured by writers; and, towards the end of his life, ranted against the 34 See below, p. 211.

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‘abominable ingratitude’ of those literary courtiers who barred him access to the royal family—though they did not prevent his being commissioned to complete Paulus Aemilius’s history of France at a salary of 500 livres a year.

g o h o r y : m a c h i a v e l l i’ s g reat publicist It was on 12 April 1544 that Denys Janot completed his printing of Gohory’s translation of the first book of Machiavelli’s Discorsi. This was Gohory’s first published work, though he must simultaneously have been preparing a translation of the opening book of Livy’s first Decade. He presented the manuscript of the latter text to an unknown prince (probably Anne de Montmorency) on 6 August 1544:35 but it did not get into print until 1548, when it was published at Paris by Gilles Corrozet.36 On 28 September 1548 Estienne Groulleau reprinted the first book of Gohory’s Discours, together with the two remaining books; and in 1559 there were three further issues of the complete translation. Yet it was not until the next issue of the text by Le Mangnier in 1571 that Gohory’s name actually appears on the title page and in the preliminaries; and his name is similarly acknowledged in the only issue of his alleged translation of Il Principe published by Le Mangnier in the same year. All these issues constitute what may be termed ‘authentic’ printings of Gohory’s Machiavelli translations: that is editions in which the translator himself was probably involved.37 But there were, in addition, a long series of pirated issues which not only suppressed Gohory’s name but coupled his Discours with D’Auvergne’s Le Prince in a composite volume. This series was 35 Bibliothe`que de l’Institut, MS 677. The name of the dedicatee is missing from the MS but was almost certainly Montmorency. See the Preface du Traducteur in the 1548 printing of the Livy, sig. a.2, where Gohory claims to have done the translation more to obey the command of the Constable than in the hope of doing it well or obtaining honour. He also dedicated his L’histoire de la terre neuve de Peru` en l’Inde Occidentale (Paris, 1545) to Anne de Montmorency. 36 Le premier livre de la premiere decade de Tite Live de Padoue, des histoires depuis la ville fonde´e, traduit de Latin en Franc¸ois par Jacques Gohori Parisien (Paris, 1548). 37 Innocenti and Bertelli, Secolo XVI, nos. 65 (Janot, 1544); 75 (Groulleau, 1548); 76 (Janot, 1548); 127 (Groulleau, 1559); 148 (Mangnier, 1571).

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initiated by Marnef and Cavellat in 1571 and was continued by a variety of publishers well into the seventeenth century.38 The various editions of Gohory’s Machiavelli were accompanied by laudatory verses by divers hands and by a number of liminary letters in which Gohory dedicates his work, explains his method and purpose, and provides his estimate of Machiavelli’s worth— the whole series culminating in the Vie de Nicolas Machiavel, which precedes his Prince of 1571. Much of this is highly ingenious, for Gohory was an adroit flatterer of great men; and, though it takes us beyond the chronological limits of this chapter, the material merits consideration here not only to clarify Gohory’s position, but also to show the nature of what must be regarded as the best-informed critical comment on Machiavelli circulating in France up to the time of the St Bartholomew massacre. Apart from Gohory’s own observations, the most interesting preliminary—which accompanies every edition of the Discours— is the verse by the noted author Nicolas Herberay des Essars, addressed in all issues prior to 1571 ‘au traducteur des discours de Necolas Macchiavelli’, and referring to the translator as ‘Trescher amy’. It is only in the Le Mangnier printing of 1571 that this verse is addressed openly ‘a` Iaq. Gohory’, and the relevant line is revised as ‘Cher Gohory’. Herberay opens by saying that since, amongst wise men, the translator has the reputation of writing French as well or better than any other contemporary, he begs him—both for his own advancement and for the delight of illustrious minds—to finish this work which will completely reveal Titus Livy to them: Puis que tu as le bruit entre les sages D’avoir escrit en Franc¸ois proprement, Autant ou plus qu’autre ait fait de nos aages: Je te suppli’ pour ton avancement Trescher amy, et le contentement Des clairs esprits, paracheve cest oeuvre, Par qui du tout Tite Live on descoeuvre. 38 Innocenti and Bertelli, Secolo XVI, nos. 150, 151, 159, 164, 165, 175, 196; Secolo XVII, nos. 3, 8, 16, 16c, 29, 32, 33, 36, 45.

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And, continues Herberay, if heaven grants Gohory sufficiently long life, then he should go further and, writing night and day, make Livy live again as much in French as in good Latin. Making due allowance for liminary hyperbole, this does suggest that the young Gohory already enjoyed some reputation for stylistic facility and felicity amongst a literary coterie; that Machiavelli’s Discorsi were thought to provide valuable insights into the work of Livy; and that Gohory’s current translation of the Roman historian was itself eagerly anticipated. Gohory himself remarks, in the dedication of his Livy manuscript, that he was working day and night to ‘polish and shape’ his spirit and his pen. In fact, he never completed this translation although, twenty-five years later, he did publish a Latin edition of all forty-five extant books of Livy’s Roman History, with learned commentaries by a host of authorities ancient and modern, and his own Animadversiones on the first three books.39 In these Animadversiones, a brief reference to his work on Machiavelli occurs in a note to a passage in Livy III. 20: ‘Nor was there, as yet, that disregard of the Gods, which now prevails in the present age, nor did everyone adapt oaths and laws according to his own interpretation’—a passage cited in Latin by Machiavelli in Discorsi, I. 13.40 Gohory mentions that he had, in his youth, translated Machiavelli’s commmentaries on Livy, and that he had shown him to be not an interpreter of words, like grammarians, but rather a practical teacher who revealed the true fruit that may be had of history, providing patterns to be adapted according to our customs for daily use, ‘just as Livy advises in the preface of the work’.41 Gohory had made a similar point concerning Livy himself when, in the Preface to his original translation of the first part of the Decades, he had praised the Roman as the greatest of all historians as much for the ‘profound sense of his discourse as for the gravity 39 Titi Livii Patavini Historiae Romanae ab urbe condita, libri xlv. quotquot ad nostram aetatem pervenerunt, cum commentariis omnium interpretetum ad explicationem locorum difficilium, e` regione insertis (Paris, 1573). 40 ‘Nondum haec, quae nunc tenet saeculum, negligentia Deum venerat, nec interpretando sibi quisque jusjurandum et leges aptas faciebat.’ 41 Gohory, Animadversiones, fo. 34.

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and sweetness of his style’; adding that his work deals with the most important issues ‘de plus utile exemple’. If those who have the management of states would conform to these lessons and would follow this republic which, by its good government, ruled the world, then the waging of wars would be better conducted, and the rule of cities better established.42 It none the less remains apparent that, however valuable the exemplars contained in Livy, skilled exegesis is needed to reveal their practical application; and Gohory is deeply impressed by the way in which Machiavelli interprets his Roman source for the benefit of modern readers. In the letter ‘au lecteur’ which precedes Le premier livre des discours in 1544, Gohory praises Machiavelli, whom he describes metaphorically as a ‘Florentine merchant’ and as a completely sincere man with good wares to offer each and every one. He only sells gross, and his merchandise is neither painted nor decked out; but, with a word, he reveals things in clear daylight to whoever wishes to see. Gohory is sure that he will be well received by the French who, once they get acquainted with him, ‘would not wish for anything in the world not to know him’. Machiavelli has written on many matters such as the history of Florence, the prince, and the art of war: but here in the Discorsi he ‘will recount to you everything good that he has ever said’. Rome is his preoccupation: ‘its majesty, its empire, its excellent government in peacetime, its virtue and unrivalled prowess in war’. Do you know, Gohory asks his reader, Machiavelli’s manner of proceeding? First, in few words, he gives you the excellence of the Roman history as Titus Livy has described it: then on this basis he vigorously debates the deep problems from one side and the other; and finally resolves them with some profound political paradox. And, in doing this, he completely lays bare the secrets of this great government which conquered and subjected the world. But, when the matter requires it, he speaks also of the Egyptians, Greeks, Turks, French, Germans, Spaniards, English, and often of the Italian seigniories, expounding the perfections and 42 Livy (1548), sigs. a.2–3: ‘Auquel si ceulx se conformoient qui ont le maniment des estatz, et vouloient ensuivre ceste republique qui par son bon gouvernement a commande´ au monde, le fait des guerres seroit mieux conduit et la police des Citez mieux establie.’

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imperfections of all these famous kingdoms and republics: all this in such a way that these discourses are a true mirror of universal history which may greatly serve for the instruction of all manner of people.43

Gohory concludes his letter with an assurance that, if the reader gives this first attempt a good welcome, two other books (that is the rest of Machiavelli’s Discorsi) would follow. Four years later they did; and Gohory provided another preface. This time he claimed that Machiavelli should be no less prized by his contemporaries than Tacitus, Sallust, and even Titus Livy himself, for, without Machiavelli, we could collect little fruit from these writers and would not know to what use they should be put. ‘Thus all these historians avail us little without the aid of Machiavelli, nor all the bounty of good things to one who does not understand how to employ them’.44 Gohory’s conviction that Machiavelli was the essential interpreter of the greatest Roman historian was part of his generally exalted estimate of the Florentine’s worth. In the dedicatory epistle to Gabriel le Veneur, Bishop of Evreux—which preceded the 1544 edition of the Premier livre des discours to which it properly applies, and which accompanied every subsequent edition but one of the complete translation—Gohory explains his purpose in undertaking his great task.45 He had long wished to make some suitable gift to the Bishop but, being too young and tender to produce anything worthy, he had discovered that a Florentine, Machiavelli by name, could provide him with credit, ‘being one of the richest and most opulent in Europe in the merchandise with which he deals’. Gohory is confident that Le Veneur will be happy with the exchange when he gets to know this man who is ‘esteemed by everyone as sincere, loyal, and more solvent than I’. Anyone who would suggest that Machiavelli believed that one should not offer worldly princes such works of the spirit (‘teles oeuvres d’esprit’) 43 Le premier livre des discours (1544), sig. a˜.4. 44 Le Second livre des Discours (1548), sig. aˆ.2r–v. Cf. Gentillet for the opposite view that Machiavelli was a very poor interpreter of Livy. See below, Ch. 9, p. 304. 45 Le premier livre des discours (1544), sigs. a˜.2v–3v. Gohory also dedicated his De usu et mysteriis Notarum liber (Paris, 1550) to Le Veneur, whom he there calls his ‘Moecenas’ at sig. aˆ.4.

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wrongs the author, who fully understood that we owe such rulers the first fruits of our profit (which were formerly presented to God whose lieutenants they are) since it is to them ‘that the Muses and Letters owe their existence, just as earthly plants live on celestial heat and dew’. Virtue, Gohory continues, in order to gain advantage must, with all its might, pursue the favour and alliance of Fortune for fear that it might otherwise remain like a ghost without flesh and bone—‘de peur qu’elle ne demeure comme un phantosme sans chair et os’. In an extended eulogy of Virtue and Fortune, Gohory draws a striking contrast between ideals and their practical application. Virtue and Fortune are the two mistresses of the entire course of human life, and their union provides a soul for the body. If certain folk are more content with a collection of salutations and fine appearances than with facts, then sentence may be passed against them. The Muse to whom Gohory is wedded is of a different opinion—that of Plato, Aristotle, and Archimedes, her ancient husbands. Of these remarkable men, one remained with Dionysius the tyrant, another with Alexander the Great, and the third with Hiero: and today, regarding the spiritual monuments they have bequeathed to us, we can say, ‘O happy beings to have found such support for your virtue, without which your great reputation would have been interred with your bodies’. This is what happened to all those who preferred unfortunate virtue to virtuous fortune—‘Ainsi en est il pris a` tous ceux qui ont prefere´ la vertu infortunee a` la vertueuse fortune’—and who thought that they could fly without wings or achieve marvels by sheer effort of will destitute of all power. ‘But if they praise fortitude, liberality, and temperance in the man who has not advanced beyond the limits of a mere wish to struggle, to give, and to abstain from sensuality, I would dearly like to know if, in all their practices, they would thus patiently accept the mere intention as the effect.’ Gohory now ingeniously turns this discussion of the efficacy of Virtue allied with Fortune into an elaborate compliment to his dedicatee. Seeing that the Italian Machiavelli may have been presented to ‘I know not whom without reputation, dignity, and power’, then the French Machiavelli would in this case surpass him since he is received by a hand ‘sacred, magnificent, and

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honourable’ which would not deny to one who belongs to it the benediction it bestows on strangers. Such benediction could, simply by its favour, augment the mind and industry of a young artificer and serve as protection and safeguard for his first work. This work is, of course, Gohory’s translation of Machiavelli’s Discorsi, which he is sure the Bishop of Evreux will love and hold precious, not so much for its language, which is ‘simple et commun’, as for the profound secrets of its doctrine which conforms to the Bishop’s own singular prudence. Moreover, Gohory continues—with an astonishing gloss on Machiavelli—this Discours is most appropriate to the Bishop’s dignity since in this first book ‘he deals fully with religion and, even if he does speak of arms, he maintains that Rome owes more to divine Numa than to bellicose Romulus’. In 1571, when Gohory revised and reissued his translation of the Discorsi, Gabriel le Veneur was (though still alive) for some reason no longer deemed the most appropriate dedicatee: although the letter addressed to him continued to be printed by the pirates. For the authentic edition published by Robert le Mangnier, Gohory supplied a new dedication to a member of a powerful Cremonese commercial family, Giovanni Francesco Affaitati, Baron of Ghistelles, in which he praises Machiavelli as the most gracious spirit that had appeared in the world for centuries—‘le plus gentil esprit qui soit apparu au monde depuis les derniers siecles’.46 In the course of this dedication Gohory also discusses Il Principe, which he considers a book not only worthy to be read but rather to be known entirely by heart. As for the Istorie fiorentine? Well, his relative, Miles Perrot, Maıˆtre des Comptes—in his time one of the most learned men in the kingdom in divers languages and sciences—kept this text closer to hand than his Livy or Tacitus and ‘he told me that he considered that, since it is better accommodated to the humour of our times, there is more profit in reading 46 Discours (1571), sig. aˆ.2v. This point was subsequently taken up by La Popelinie`re in 1599 in a manuscript note headed ‘Le Contre-Machiavel’ (BNF MS fr. 20787, fo. 19) where he writes: ‘Latheisme sans doute fut le premier fondement des opinions bigarres et par consequent de malheur de Machiavel. Car envie´ des uns pour la beaute´ de son gentil esprit et net jugement en plusieurs choses: hay de plusieurs pour louverte profession de lAtheisme et en fin bani du pais au quel il attendoit plus de faveurs.’ See also below, Ch. 10, p. 356.

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it than in the great ancient historians so far removed from our customs, fashions, and present usage’.47 It was also in 1571 that Gohory published what he claimed as his own translation of Il Principe, prefaced by a dedication to Giovanfrancesco Caraffa (to whom he subsequently offered his treatise on tobacco), and by a Vie de Nicolas Machiavel.48 Gohory, in his letter to Affaitati, had poured scorn on the previous French translations published by ‘two different people’. One of these, he says—presumably D’Auvergne—was very inaccurate and a long way from the original. Moreover, reports that this person was intending to plagiarize the Discours had finally prompted Gohory to put his name to that work despite his preference for anonymity.49 The second translator was evidently the youthful Cappel, who had been Gohory’s ‘familier et domestique’ and who had never set foot within a hundred leagues of Italy. This was probably true. But Gohory does not point out that, at the time of his own Premier livre des discours, when he was himself only 24, he had not trodden Italian soil either. Nor does Gohory, incensed at the impending plagiarism of his own work, admit that his version of Il Principe follows that of Cappel almost verbatim, with merely orthographic changes and only the most trifling textual variants. Addressing himself to Caraffa, Gohory offers a dubious compliment by noting that a member of that illustrious family had been amongst the first to offer himself to Charles VIII when, as Machiavelli had remarked, that monarch had conquered Naples ‘with chalk’ (‘col gesso’)!50 Gohory does not, he says, intend to praise ‘our Machiavel’—who is sufficiently lauded by his own works— other than to state openly that he better described for us the secrets of the Microcosm in all its diverse humours, passions, and ‘fantaisies’ than Pliny had managed in his ‘histoire naturelle de tout le grand monde’.51 Man by his reason is able to frustrate celestial 47 Discours (1571), sig. aˆ.4. 48 Le prince de Nicolas Machiavel . . . avec la vie de l’auteur mesme (Paris, 1571). See Gerber, iii. 35–6. 49 Discours (1571), sig. aˆ.3v This accusation is repeated in the letter to Caraffa. 50 That is merely by making a chalk mark on the houses where his soldiers were to be billeted. The phrase is in Il Principe, 12, and is also in Commynes, Me´moires, VII. 14, who attributes it to Pope Alexander VI. 51 Le Prince (1571), sig. aˆ.4.

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influences and exert his free will; and there is no author in any language who tells us how this may be achieved more effectively than does Machiavelli, although his works—founded as they are entirely upon human wisdom—must be handled with discretion.52 This enthusiastic tone is continued in the biography which immediately follows.53 Machiavelli, says his translator, was born in Florence, the capital of Tuscany, which produced the clearest and most subtle spirits in the whole of Italy—just as Italy itself produces such spirits above every other nation.54 The Italians go abroad in the world bearing only pen and ink and, armed thus, they manage all the finances of Europe under the title of bankers. And in a few years, by industry, vigilance, and new inventions, they emerge from the countries whither they have been transported, ‘riches a` milliers’—a compliment subsequently turned inside out by one of Gohory’s most attentive readers, Innocent Gentillet.55 Machiavelli, however, preferred the goods and ornaments of the spirit, ‘sacred and incorruptible’, to those of temporal fortune; and Gohory goes far beyond D’Auvergne—who had only called upon St Paul to speak up for Machiavelli—by citing ‘l’exemple de l’evangelique Marie qui eleut le meilleur party de vie qui jamais ne luy peut estre tollu’. This paragon of virtue, so Gohory informs us, came from a middle-class, bourgeois family of no great wealth; and he was never supported by contemporary princes such as Clement VII to whom he dedicated his Istorie fiorentine, or Lorenzo de’ Medici to 52 ‘Voire est escrit que le sage domine sur les astres. Or de tous les auteurs que j’ay veu aux diverses langues, j’estime qu’il ne s’en trouvera point qui ayt basty comme un art de l’anatomie interieure des meurs humaines: ainsi qu’il vous apparoistra (Monseigneur) et a` tous ceux qui par vostre moyen jouiront de la lecture de ces livres. Vray est qu’il les faut manier avec discretion comme euvres totalement fonde´es sur la sapience humaine: quoy que quelqu’un ayt ose´ bien hardiment affermer le contraire.’ 53 Gohory’s La vie de Nicolas Machiavel is reprinted as an appendix to Balmas’s article cited above, n. 33. 54 Cf. Henri Estienne?, Discours merveilleux de la vie, actions et deportements de Catherine de Medicis (n.p., 1575), 6: ‘Catherine de Me´dicis est Italienne et Florentine. Entre les nations, l’Italie emporte le prix de finesse et de subtilite´; en Italie, la Toscane; en Toscane, la ville de Florence.’ 55 Le Prince (1571), sig. aˆ.1v. On Gentillet’s treatment of this idea, see below, Ch. 9, p. 293.

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whom he offered Il Principe. Of the ‘fort beaux livres’ bequeathed to us by Machiavelli, Gohory begins with the Discorsi—full of ‘traitz hardiz de Religion, de police, de guerre’—which he had long ago translated and has now diligently revised. The Istorie fiorentine, too, is full of ‘bons enseignemens’ and examples of worldly affairs which are nowadays esteemed by men of good judgement to be of greater utility in the management and conduct of our affairs than Thucydides, Appian, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, and all the other ancient historians. Machiavelli deals with things conformable and appropriate to us, whereas the Greeks and the Romans were very different and are difficult to adapt to our usage. The Arte della guerra, in Gohory’s opinion, in no way defers to the other works in every grace and subtlety; and it, too, is better able to serve modern military practice than its antecedents such as Vegetius, Valturius, or Frontinus, since their entire equipment and discipline is different from our own. Il Principe, in which Machiavelli described all the parts required of a ruler ‘tendant a` Monarchie’, is regarded by Gohory as a secret appeal to Charles V, on the basis of a belief that the Emperor is the contemporary monarch referred to ‘en un passage’—a peculiar misinterpretation of the final chapter of the book with its messianic exhortation for the salvation of Italy from the hands of foreign invaders. Gohory goes on to reveal his comprehensive familiarity with Machiavelli’s works by alluding to other ‘jolys petitz traittez’—the life of Castruccio Castracani, the account of the murders at Sinigaglia, and the summary of the affairs of France and Germany— before concluding with a moral lesson drawn from the fate which had befallen his chosen author. Machiavelli, so excellent in spirit and doctrine that his equal has not been seen on earth for centuries, provides a fine example of the ignorance, avarice, and ingratitude of many princes who consume their wealth in ostentation, luxury, and delights (‘pompes, bobans, et delices’) without honouring or rewarding the virtue of the elegant pens of which they make use, perhaps even after the death of the authors, as a toy and pastime when other recreations fail them.56 56 Le Prince (1571), sig. aˆ.7r–v.

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This may well be genuine indignation at the misfortunes endured by Machiavelli in his lifetime: but it sounds, also, a personal note since we know that, for some reason, Gohory felt both neglected and ill-used by the ungrateful princes of his own time.57 Gohory, it is clear, was a difficult character whose sense of grievance and fear of impending plagiarism did not prevent his appropriating Cappel’s work as his own. Nor did it prevent his unacknowledged copying from Arnoul de Fe´ron in the manuscript De rebus gestis francorum, which he intended as a continuation of the chronicles of Paulus Aemilius.58 Nevertheless, whatever misgivings may arise about Gohory’s scholarly integrity, there can be little doubt concerning the high seriousness with which he—like Cappel and D’Auvergne—regarded the work of translation. Indeed, nothing less could be expected of one who was so well acquainted with the most active literary circles of his day and, perforce, with the prevailing attitude towards translation as a means of enriching both the French language and, more significantly, French knowledge and culture.59 Already in August 1544, in the dedication of the manuscript translation of Livy, Gohory was drawing attention to the roughness (‘rudesse’) of the French language which could only inadequately furnish words for these ancient matters, so strange, new, and unknown to it. Four years later, addressing himself to his readers, Gohory introduced the printed edition of the same work by acknowledging his own temerity and ignorance in undertaking to comprehend the ‘haut sens’ of ancient authors and in attempting 57 This is evident in the Preface to Book XIII of his De rebus gestis Francorum, BNF MS lat. 5972, fos. 2v–3v. The work is addressed to Christophe de Thou and the manuscript was owned by Jacques-Auguste de Thou. See L. G. O. F. de Brequigny, ‘Notice de l’histoire de Charles VIII et de Louis XII par J. Gohory’, Notices et extraits des manuscrits, 7, pt. 2 (Paris, 1804), 16–39. 58 See Brequigny, and Louis Lacour’s article on Gohory in the Nouvelle biographie universelle, xxi. 85. Brequigny, p. 39, draws attention to the ‘me´pris’ affected by Gohory towards an author whom he never ceased to copy verbatim. 59 There is a considerable literature on the theory and practice of translation in Renaissance France although, apart from studies dealing with specific authors, the main focus of attention has been on translation from classical sources rather than on contemporary historical and political works. See, for example, Glyn P. Norton, The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France and their Humanist Antecedents (Geneva, 1984).

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to convey the natural grace of their rich language in his poor, sterile native tongue.60 In fact, he is only doing it to obey the command of the Constable of France rather than in any hope that he might accomplish it well or gain honour thereby; and he proceeds to praise the gravity and sweetness of Livy’s prose and to suggest some of the linguistic and stylistic difficulties confronting the translator who seeks to convey its qualities. Again in 1548, Gohory faced up to a similar problem when he began the second book of his version of Machiavelli’s Discorsi with a ‘Preface du Traducteur aux lecteurs’, in which he provides a fuller discussion of the topic.61 He has decided to take Quintilian’s advice and is, therefore, opening his literary career with a translation, since he is not as yet capable of inventing anything of his own worthy to be exposed to the light.62 He has chosen Machiavelli because, though an author absolutely necessary for an understanding of Livy, he is not so holy and august that faults committed in rendering him into French could be regarded as sacrilege or le`semajeste´. Gohory admits to having adopted two different modes of translation when dealing with Machiavelli. In the first book of the Discorsi he has, in various places, been quite free whereas, in the second and third books, he is somewhat more slavish and scrupulous—‘un peu plus serf et supersticieux’—and he has done this in order to demonstrate that he can manage both types. Each is open to criticism, but he does not fear the envious; his own conscience will be his judge; and he bears, like Themistocles, the device envie d’envie en vie.63 The French language, he concedes, is not as yet well regulated, and even its orthography is disordered. Some writers wish, therefore, to bring old words back into use, while others seek to enrich 60 Le premier livre de la premiere decade de Tite Live (1548), sig. aˆ.2. 61 Discours (1548), Book II, sigs. aˆ.2–3. Gohory’s longest discussion of the problems of translation is, perhaps, in the Amadis. But there his preoccupations are rather different. 62 Although the parallel is not exact, it is possible that Gohory is thinking here about Quintilian, Institutes, X. 5, which deals with the value of translation and paraphrasing. 63 I cannot trace the use of this device by Themistocles, who was, however, very much concerned with envy. See Alan Wardman, Plutarch’s Lives (London, 1974), 69–78.

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their tongue by stealing from vernaculars such as Italian and Spanish: but Gohory, like Plato, believes that we should not waste our time in such vain fastidiousness concerning words.64 Rather we should direct our spirits with fine discourses drawn from the very foundations of those sciences which are so beneficial to life. We should take Machiavelli as our example who, in his Discorsi, had employed a very simple language, enriched by rare and profound matter. Indeed, this is the very reason why Gohory fears that Machiavelli’s work may be ill received by the French, who seem to do nothing but sniff at the flowers of knowledge decked out in hats and nosegays, and do not use beneficial herbs in their nourishment or medicine. However, Gohory has done his best, and he offers the second and third books of the Discorsi to the public at the same time as his imperfect rendering of Livy, Machiavelli’s master. He regrets the lack of polish evident in his writings, but pleads that ‘ceste servitude ambulatoire’ of the court has not provided him with the leisure to revise his work eight times—as Thucydides managed with his history. In any case, Gohory’s concern is with the common good, not his own particular reputation; and he trusts that the flaws in his style may be outweighed by the excellence of his content.

gohory: the translator in action Gohory’s energy is beyond dispute. But how—after all the praise, promises, and puffs—does he actually discharge his obligations as a translator? He admits that the second and third books of his Discours are more literal and precise than his first. Yet this is disingenuous. There is, in fact, a vast difference in precision for (whereas the later books generally convey Machiavelli’s meaning effectively, accurately, and with reasonable economy) Book I is not merely, as Gohory would have it, somewhat free in places. It is often wildly irresponsible.65 64 Possibly Gohory is here thinking of the Cratylus, which had, in fact, been published by Gourmont at Paris in 1527 in a Greek text. 65 All my references in the following notes are to the Le Mangnier 1571 edition of Gohory’s Discours (British Library press mark 9041.aaa.14).

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In this first book, words, phrases, sentences, and even entire paragraphs from Machiavelli’s text are omitted. Sometimes these are simply passages where Machiavelli repeats an idea for emphasis (I. 25).66 Sometimes Gohory alters the effect of a passage by leaving out or altering odd words (I. 37).67 Or he will achieve a similar result by compressing phrases, as at the end of I. 44. In this last case, though the sense of Machiavelli’s statement on the fatuity of declaring one’s evil intentions is retained, its force is needlessly dissipated: ‘Pensez qu’il seroit bon veoir un homme qui viendroit demander a` un autre son espee pour l’en tuer luy mesme?’68 Sometimes the omission is more serious and may suppress an important idea. Machiavelli, for example, having discussed the Roman institution of short-term dictatorships, ends chapter 34 with a quotation, ‘let the consul ensure that the republic takes no harm’ (Videat Consul ne Respublica quid detrimenti capiat), and then observes that Rome’s neighbours, by seeking to crush her, made her take measures which enabled her not only to defend herself but also, ‘with more force, more counsel, and more authority’, to take the offensive against them. But all this is ignored by Gohory, who limply concludes with the Latin quotation.69 More striking still is Gohory’s treatment of the crucial twelfth chapter on the importance of religion and how Italy has been ruined by the Papacy.70 He blots his copybook immediately by altering the title of the chapter, which had placed responsibility for Italy’s degradation upon the Church of Rome: Di quanta importanza sia tenere conto della religione, e come la Italia, per esserne mancata mediante la chiesa romana, e` rovinata. Gohory’s rendering of this— Que c’est que ne tenir compte de la religion et ne l’entretenir en son poinct. Et comme l’Italia en est perdue—emasculates Machiavelli’s intentions. Moreover he opens the chapter by loosely paraphrasing, here as elsewhere, both of Machiavelli’s first two characteristic uses of the 66 Mazzoni and Casella, 93a; Discours, fo. 53. 67 Cf. the opening sentences in Mazzoni and Casella, 105b–106a with Discours, fo. 68. 68 Mazzoni and Casella, 115a; Discours, fo. 80v. 69 Ibid., 104a; Discours, fo. 66. The quotation represents the words used when the Romans invested a consul with dictatorial authority. They are given in Livy, III. iv, but Machiavelli slightly misquotes them. 70 Mazzoni and Casella, 78a–79b; Discours, fos. 31v–33v.

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word ‘incorrotte’, and deteriorates as he progresses. The ruin and flail (‘rovino e flagello’) which Machiavelli predicts must shortly result from the decline of Christianity, becomes ‘quelque grande punition divine’. Those who, according to Machiavelli, mistakenly attribute the prosperity (‘ben essere’) of the Italian cities to the Church of Rome become, in Gohory’s version, people who say that their very lives depend on the Holy See: ‘plusieurs d’Italie, qui dient qu’elle ne tient sa vie d’autre que du sainct siege apostolic’. Machiavelli goes on to reject any notion that the Papacy has been beneficial to Italy, on the basis of two reasons which he deems irrefutable. The first is that, through the evil examples of the court of Rome, Italy has lost all devotion to religion. This brings in its train infinite inconveniences and disorders because, just as where there is religion one may presuppose everything good, so where religion is lacking one may presuppose the contrary. Therefore, says Machiavelli, the Italians owe to the Church and the priests this first debt: that they have become without religion and are evil. But they owe the Papacy an even greater debt: and this is the second cause of their ruin. The Church has kept, and still keeps, Italy divided. Gohory, in his version, weakens the whole of this passage by reducing Machiavelli’s precise and bitter attack on the Roman curia and its priests into a mild and generalized rebuke that they haven’t kept to the tenets of the primitive Church—‘ceux qui en telles dignitez se sont oubliez et n’ont garde´ comme ils devoient les statutz, canons et saincts decrets de la primitive Eglise’—before passing on to a loose paraphrase of the accusation that the Church has kept Italy divided. Gohory, like many sixteenth-century translators, loved to multiply epithets; and this, though a failing common to all three books of his Discours, is especially marked in the first. Thus, while many Machiavellian essentials are pruned away in one direction, inessentials are energetically added elsewhere: a process which not only covers Machiavelli’s muscular style with a layer of fat, but can also modify his meaning. An example of this is in I. 3 where the original text cites the saying that hunger and poverty make men industrious, and laws make them good: ‘si dice che la fame e la poverta` fa gli uomini industriosi, e le leggi gli fanno buoni’. Gohory sensibly renders ‘industriosi’ by ‘ingenieux et actifs’; but, by adding that it is good

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laws which make men worthy (‘les bonnes loix rendent les gens de bien’), he introduces a distinction not only lacking in Machiavelli but also uncharacteristic of him.71 Then, in the following chapter (I. 4), occurs one of Machiavelli’s most fundamental statements on the importance of military virtu`. Where there is good military organization, he says, it follows that there is good order, and rarely will it come about that there should not also be good fortune: ‘dove e` buona milizia, conviene che sia buono ordine, e rade volte anco occorre che non vi sia buona fortuna’. Gohory, on the other hand, by writing that ‘le faict des armes ne se peut conduire sans bon ordre et police: et la police commune´ment est celle qui amene la bonne fortune’, gives primacy to good order and ‘police’ rather than to arms. This is precisely what Machiavelli did not mean.72 Equally enfeebling, if less wilfully inaccurate, is Gohory’s reading of another important Machiavellism in I. 9. Because, writes Machiavelli, men are more prone to evil than to good—‘perche`, sendo gli uomini piu` proni al male che al bene’—it is possible that a prince’s successor may use ambitiously something which the prince himself had used virtuously. Gohory breaks this sentence in two; puts the misuse of authority first; and ends, ‘Telle est l’imperfection naturelle des hommes’: thus conveying trite moral resignation concerning the human condition, rather than the dynamic malignancy diagnosed by Machiavelli.73 A similar reshuffling of phrases, together with more luxuriant pleonasm, may be seen in I. 11, where Machiavelli, considering the problem of establishing a republic in his own time, states that this would more easily be accomplished amongst mountain people in areas where there is no civilization at all than amongst those accustomed to live in towns where civilization is corrupt—‘chi volesse ne’ presenti tempi fare una republica piu` facilita` troverrebbe negli uomini montanari, dove non e` alcuna civilita`, che in quelli che sono usi a vivere nelle cittadi, dove la civilita` e` corrotta’. This process is likened by Machiavelli to the way in which a sculptor can more easily carve a fine statue from unworked marble 71 Mazzoni and Casella, 63a; Discours, fo. 10. 72 Ibid. 63b; Discours, fo. 11. Cf. Gentillet, Contre-Machiavel, III. 31, where Gohory’s error is followed. 73 Mazzoni and Casella, 73a; Discours, fo. 24.

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than from a piece already badly hacked about by somebody else. Gohory emphasizes the figure of the sculptor by placing it first: ‘aujourd’huy qui voudroit faire de mesme, faudroit qu’il fist comme l’imagier’. He makes the useful marble not merely ‘rozzo’ but ‘rude et non poly’; makes the useless marble not only ‘male abbozzato’ but ‘deja mal taille´e et esbauche´e’; and transforms Machiavelli’s uncultured mountain dwellers into savages, living in woods, deserts, and mountains, who know neither good nor bad: ‘gens sauvages, demourans es boys, desertz ou montaignes, qui ne sc¸avent ne mal ne bien’. He then ends this section with an ambiguous sentence—‘car avec ses fines gens de ville il perdroit son sens’—which, while conveying a sense of the insurmountable subtlety of the city-slickers, loses the important Machiavellian connotation of ‘corrotta’. Gohory here masks the original intention by allowing what had been a purely illustrative metaphor to assume primary importance.74 In general, it is difficult to discern any consistent logic determining Gohory’s alteration or expansion of passages. For example, Machiavelli ends I. 14—on the Roman use of divination from the entrails of dead beasts—with a terse summary to the effect that this divinatory mode had no other purpose than to make soldiers go confidently into battle: a confidence almost always resulting in victory—‘dalla quale confidenza quasi sempre nasce la vittoria’. This method, he adds, was used not only by the Romans but also by foreigners whose practice will be illustrated in his next chapter. Gohory drops the final sentence linking the two chapters, and replaces Machiavelli’s succinct conclusion with a long-winded free paraphrase which adds neither to the meaning nor to the effect of the passage: Now you must know that the Romans very well understood the value of such merchandise: but they made use of it solely for the purpose that their soldiers, when it was necessary to go into action, should have no doubt but should regard the matter completely assured as if God had told them expressly. Also one saw that, with this opinion and confidence, they performed miracles and nothing was impossible for them.75 74 Mazzoni and Casella, 77a; Discours, fo. 30v. 75 Ibid. 82a; Discours, fo. 37: ‘Or devez vous sc¸avoir que les Romains cognoissent assez qu’en valoit la marchandise: mais ils en usoient seulement a` ce que leurs gend’armes quand il faudroit mettre la main a` l’oeuvre ne doubtassent

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Again, at the end of I. 23, Machiavelli gives an extremely spare account of the Swiss failure in 1515 to prevent Franc¸ois Ier’s expedition into Italy, by blocking the mountain passes. Gohory, by contrast, is verbose. He qualifies every phrase; doubles epithets; and adds figures. Those who hoped to keep Franc¸ois out of Italy had relied on the Swiss, but ‘peu valut leur astuce’. The statement that the King entered through another, unknown pass is embroidered so that Franc¸ois is guided by ‘les villains du paı¨s’ through a winding route which no one suspected: ‘conduict par un chemin egare´ dont nul ne se doubtoit’. Not only is Franc¸ois in Italy and upon the Swiss before they anticipated him, but he himself brought the first news of his arrival: ‘en sorte qu’il porta luy mesme en Italie les premieres nouvelles de sa venue’. In Machiavelli, Franc¸ois’s opponents are frightened and retreat to Milan while all the people of Lombardy, who had mistakenly assumed that the French would be held in the mountains, now defect to the invaders. Gohory’s countryside is ‘estonne´ et confus’ by the entry which had not been expected in such a fashion; and the Swiss become ‘guardians of the snow’ who have awaited the French and who—having learned what had happened, and how he whom they hoped to have by the beard was now at their back—retreat to Milan, tail between legs: ‘Les beaux gardeurs de neige: cependant avoient au dos celluy qu’ils esperoient en barbe, tous esperduz se retirent a` Milan la queue entre les jambes.’76 Examples such as these may seem insignificant—and they are, indeed, sometimes quite trifling—but they are constant and, cumulatively, they alter the whole tone of the original text. This effect may be illustrated by a few further typical examples of Gohory’s method in this first book. Machiavelli begins I. 39 with a general statement that it may be easily understood, by those who de rien, mais tinssent la chose toute asseure´e comme si Dieu les leur eussent dit de leurs bouches [this phrase is botched and is corrected in the edition of 1586, p. 91, to ‘‘comme si Dieu leur eust dist de sa bouche’’]. Aussi voyoit on que avec ceste opinion et confiance ilz faisoient merveilles et rien ne leur estoit impossible.’ Although this passage does not occur in Machiavelli, it is echoed by Gentillet, Contre-Machiavel (1576), 184–5, who thinks he is referring to the Discorsi. 76 Mazzoni and Casella, 92b; Discours, fo. 51v.

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consider both current and ancient affairs, how in all cities and in all peoples there remain the same desires and humours as there have always been: ‘E’ si conosce facilmente per chi considera le cose presenti e le antiche, come in tutte le citta` ed in tutti i popoli sono quegli medesimi desiderii e quelli medesimi omori, e come vi furono sempre.’ Gohory ignores the ‘facilmente’; renders ‘antiche’ by ‘passees’; omits ‘tutte le citta`’; renders ‘tutti i popoli’ by ‘de tout temps les gens’; and augments ‘desiderii’ and ‘omori’ with ‘affections’. He then proceeds to compress Machiavelli’s assertion that it is easy for one who diligently examines past affairs to foresee the future in every republic—‘e` facil cosa, a chi esamina con diligenza le cose passate, prevedere in ogni republica le future’—into a general statement that it is ‘aise´ par la cognoissance de l’histoire prevoir les choses advenir’. He translates the next idea faithfully— that it is possible to apply the remedies employed in the past or, if remedies have not been used, to invent new ones based on the similarity of circumstances—but decides arbitrarily to alter the last sentence in Machiavelli’s paragraph. This explained that, because these considerations are neglected or not understood by those who read (or, if they are understood, are not noted by those who govern), it comes about that there are always the same scandals at all times: ‘perche` queste considerazioni sono neglette, o non intese da chi legge, o, se le sono intese, non sono conosciute da chi governa; ne se´guita che sempre sono i medesimi scandoli in ogni tempo’. Gohory renders this as follows: ‘Voila` d’ou vient que tousjours adviennent les malheurs, qui autrefois sont advenuz, parce que ceux qui ont le maniement des affaires ne tiennent compte de l’histoire, et s’ils en lisent n’entendent pas le sens moral et mystique.’ Thus he not only reverses the original order which, in itself, slightly modifies the sense and considerably diminishes the effectiveness of the point, but he also glosses the failure to understand what is being read as a failure to comprehend its ‘moral and mystical [or secret] sense’. This is well in accord with Gohory’s allegorical predilections, but is certainly an illegitimate extension of Machiavelli’s original intentions.77 77 Mazzoni and Casella, 109a–b; Discours, fo. 72r–v.

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The conclusion of I. 49 is another instance where a combination of pleonasm, compression, omission, and a reversing of Machiavelli’s order, completely distorts the original point. Machiavelli is stating the difficulties of maintaining liberty; and his last sentence is a summary of his position. Seeing that even in Rome—governed by a constitution of its own making (‘ordinata da se medesima’) and devised by so many prudent men—there arose every day new reasons for which it was necessary to provide new ordinances to support its liberty (‘nuovi ordini in favore del viver libero’), it is no wonder that in other cities which had more disorderly beginnings there should arise such difficulties that they are never able to reconstitute themselves. Gohory breaks this into two sentences, putting first the insoluble problems of ill-founded cities, with which Machiavelli had dramatically concluded. He then completely misses the point of Rome’s continual introduction of new institutions, by compressing the material until it becomes almost meaningless—‘puis que nous voyons Rome si empeschee a` vivre’—and proceeds to smudge Machiavelli’s precise reference to the wise men who drew up Rome’s constitution, with a plethora of redundant synonyms: ‘laquelle est toutesfois venue au monde franche et libre, et a este´ allaictee, seuree et nourrie par tant de sages et notables personnes’.78 A final example (I. 10) must suffice to illustrate the imprecision and flatulence of this first book of Gohory’s Discours. Here, even Machiavelli’s chapter heading, ‘That the founders of a republic or a kingdom are as praiseworthy as those who found a tyranny are worthy of vituperation’ (Quanto sono laudabili i fondatori d’una republica o d’uno regno, tanto quelli d’una tirannide sono vituperabili), was originally ignored by Gohory and replaced by a different title, ‘What sort of mirror may history provide for kings and all manner of people’ (De quel miroir peult servir l’histoire aux Roys & a` toutes manieres de gens.79 This change was required to introduce the first two and a half sentences of Gohory’s text, which are an addition to the original. Whereas Machiavelli immediately addresses himself 78 Ibid. 120b; Discours, fo. 88v. 79 Mazzoni and Casella, 74a. I have quoted this from Gerber, ii. 25–7, which reproduces the text of 1544.

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to his principal task by stating that of all praiseworthy men those are most lauded who have been the heads or founders of republics, Gohory only reaches this point after an insertion to the effect that in all history, kings, princes, knights, lords, and ladies find their image, virtuous or vicious, portrayed to the life without the loss of a single detail; and it would be as well were they to take as much trouble to look upon this as they devote to admiring their corporeal beauties, which pass so soon. In this spiritual mirror, clearer and purer than crystal, they would see everything which must be considered beautiful or ugly.80 It is only at this point that Gohory, at last, picks up the beginning of Machiavelli’s chapter—‘intra tutti gli uomini laudati’—and continues thereafter with approximate fidelity. He cannot, however, resist adding (in order to share Machiavelli’s praise of ‘gli uomini litterati’) those who have employed their lives not only in letters but also in the ‘profound contemplation of nature and her secrets’. He replaces Machiavelli’s simple construction (‘per lo contrario’), to introduce blameworthy men, with the other side of his introductory ‘miroir’—‘l’autre coste´ du miroir’—in order to keep his metaphor going. And finally, to round off his remodelled chapter, Gohory adds a concluding sentence of his own to demonstrate how useful the study of history is to all types of men whether they be captains, simple soldiers, men of letters, or common artisans. It is, perhaps, indicative of the disingenuousness later to be encountered in his treatment of Cappel’s work that, in 1548, when Gohory came to revise the translation of the first book of his Discours, although he deleted his original title to this tenth chapter and replaced it with something much closer to Machiavelli— Autant que sont louables les fondateurs des Republicques et Royeaumes, autant estre a` blasmer ceux de la tyrannie—he did not see fit to make 80 ‘En l’histoire grecque, latine, barbare quelle qu’elle soit, les Roys, princes, chevaliers, seigneurs, dames y trouvent leur image vertueuse ou vicieuse pourtraicte au vif sans qu’il y en ait un seul traict perdu. Ce seroit bien faict a` eux s’ilz prenoient autant de peine a` s’y regarder souvent (pour cognoistre, tant les dons & graces, que les taches et seingz de leur arme [sic] immortelle) comme ilz font a` se mirer et parer curieusement leurs beautez corporelles qui si tost passent. En ce beau miroir spirituel plus cler et pur que cristal, ilz verroient a` l’oeil tout ce qui doibt estre juge´ bel ou laid.’

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more than the most trifling alterations in the text itself, nor to delete his own inappropriate additions. Whatever their felicities and infelicities, achievements and limitations, the zeal of these early translators was impressive. It was also unambiguously laudatory, and their editions are of major significance in the history of Machiavelli’s reception because, for the majority of readers in France and in England, their words and turns of phrase were regarded as the authentic voice of Machiavelli himself. After the publication of Gohory’s completed text of the Discours in 1548, there was a gap of eleven years before the work was again issued, with three variant versions early in 1559. Another gap ensued—this time of twelve years—before the Discours was again published, now accompanied by Le Prince and Gohory’s biography of its author. For the intellectual historian these are stirring events, but for contemporaries the year 1571 was more remarkable in France for the reconciliation between Charles IX and Admiral Coligny the Huguenot leader, and for the negotiations concerning the marriage between Henry of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois, which was intended to heal, once and for all, the wounds of civil discord. A year later, though, the political situation in France was to take a very different turn, as a result of which Machiavelli’s reputation was so called into question that, in some quarters at least, ‘le plus gentil esprit’ degenerated into ‘un puant athe´iste’.

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8 In Praise of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre On Monday, 18 August 1572, after protracted negotiations, the Protestant Henri de Navarre was married to Marguerite, youngest sister of the French King Charles IX, at Notre Dame de Paris. The city was thronged with Huguenots, all intent on enjoying the wedding festivities which would, it was hoped, usher in a new age of religious concord. However, on Friday the 22nd, Admiral Coligny, the Huguenots’ leader, was severely wounded by an arquebus shot; and on Sunday the 24th, Saint Bartholomew’s Day, the Admiral was murdered as he lay in his lodgings, and the bells rang out signalling a general massacre of the Huguenots in Paris, which was soon answered by further massacres elsewhere in France. The extent of the atrocities and the question of their premeditation or spontaneity have provided matter for continuing debate among historians; and the Saint Bartholomew has passed into the mythology of European history. It has become the classic instance of political duplicity and an awesome example of cold-blooded extremism terminating in unbridled mob hysteria. The truth of the matter is of no concern here. It suffices that the massacre happened: because it spawned a pullulating mass of polemical literature bubbling with theories, prejudices, and phobias which together furnish an essential context for the study of Machiavelli’s reception.1 Amidst this ideological maelstrom, not only were 1 On the literature, see Henri Hauser, Les Sources de l’histoire de France, iii (Paris, 1912), 233–56; Robert M. Kingdon, Myths about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacres 1572–1576 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Robert O. Lindsay and John Neu, French Political Pamphlets 1547–1648: A Catalog of Major Collections in

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Machiavelli’s works read and pondered, but they were also smashed into pieces so that several distorted fragments of his ideas were separated—once and for all—from anything that the author himself had originally written. As we have already noted, just over a year prior to the mass murders, the royal privilege had been accorded to Robert le Mangnier for the publication in Paris of a revised version of Gohory’s Les discours de Machiavel together with his Le Prince and the Vie de Machiavel; while, at about the same time, there was a reissue of D’Auvergne’s Le Prince together with a pirated version of Gohory’s Discours. It is scarcely likely that these publications had much to do with subsequent events. Nevertheless, the increased availability of Machiavelli’s writings in France, together with the Italianate nature of a French court dominated by the Florentine Catherine de’ Medici, suggested to at least one Huguenot, Innocent Gentillet, that there was a connection between extremist theory and practice. And, being a man of letters, his anxiety to demonstrate this connection was inspired not simply by the bloody massacre itself but also, and more decisively, by the exultant, even ecstatic, literary justifications of it. Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel, whatever its imperfections, was the most extensive and systematic study of Machiavelli undertaken in the sixteenth century, and certainly the most influential. It is important, therefore, to understand why Gentillet wrote; and this cannot be done without first getting to grips with the literature which provoked him. And here there is no short cut. The structure, rhythm, and tone of pro-massacre polemic is clear enough to anybody who has the time, and takes the trouble, to read it all. The difficulty lies in conveying such things to modern readers for whom ‘political ideas’ might seem to have a greater claim upon their attention than immoderate language and extremAmerican Libraries (Madison, Milwaukee, and London, 1969); Myriam Yardeni, La conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion, 1559–1598 (Louvain and Paris, 1971); and especially the Catalogue de l’histoire de France (Bibliothe`que Impe´riale, De´partement des Imprime´s, Paris, 1855; repr. 1968) which gives the fullest lists of the relevant material. I provide the BNF press marks and the names of publishers in the notes to this and the two following chapters because the material is not always easy to locate and identify.

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ist imagery. Yet, the truth of the matter is that the significance of this material resides less in the arguments marshalled by its authors than in the fanaticism expressed in hysterical language and imagery. Argumentation arose out of fear and fanaticism, not vice versa. Writers felt impelled (either consciously or unconsciously) to cover extreme views with the garb of reasoned argument; to seek ad hoc justifications for prejudices; and to represent bloodlust as a virtuous response to troublous times. Their aim was to whip up resentment and anger, in order to legitimate widespread acts of brutality. Their manner was deliberately rhetorical. But the rhetoric was not that God-given, sweet, and pleasant ‘instrument of our understanding and key of conceptions’ beloved of the teachers of ‘Wysedome and Eloquence: the onelye ornamentes whereby mannes lyfe is bewtifyed’.2 It was nothing less than a rhetoric of hate and, unless we somehow come to terms with this, we will understand little.3 The polemic of the religious wars in France was not written by rational political philosophers, coolly assessing problems of toleration, the nature of the constitution, contractual theory, and similar abstractions. These writers plunged their pens into wells filled with blood and venom; and this chapter is an attempt to convey something at least of their style and fury and, in doing that, to set the scene for Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel.

the massacre as a catholic triumph Historians have, in general, been properly shocked by the Saint Bartholomew. They have expressed moral indignation, and have assumed that—on the whole—contemporary Europe would have felt the same abhorrence. But this is an error. Contemporary Protestant Europe was, of course, deeply distressed; and some Catholics, too, regarded both the treachery and the violence with horror. It is, none the less, clear that there was a good deal of rejoicing at the elimination of so many Huguenots. This is shown by private 2 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577), sig. A.2. 3 I used the term ‘A Rhetoric of Hate’ in a brief study of ‘Political Polemic in Late Sixteenth-Century France’, in Keith Cameron (ed.), Montaigne and his Age (Exeter, 1981), 1–13.

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letters exchanged at the time and by public celebrations and thanksgiving, especially at Rome, where the Pope not only had a commemorative medal struck but also commissioned Vasari to depict the massacre in a series of frescoes in the Sala Regia of the Vatican palace. These paintings became so notorious that, forty years after the massacre, they could be cited in a Paul’s Cross sermon as evidence of congenital papal bloodlust. If the Pope cannot have his enemies slain in his presence, ‘he will see it in picture, as the massacre of Paris on S. Bartholomewes night was pictured in the Popes Pallace to entertaine his holy eye with pleasure’.4 Even more indicative of enthusiasm for the massacres was the spate of apologetic literature which immediately poured from the presses. Such justificatory pamphleteering is customarily dismissed as ‘propaganda’ by historians who thereby imply that it was not possible for people to write honestly in defence of the atrocities. But this notion of an army of reluctant conscripts does not bear scrutiny. In the first place—given the embittered and extreme attitudes adopted by both Catholics and Reformers throughout the century, and the frequent persecutions, tortures, civil slayings, and open wars which characterized their relations— it is not difficult to understand why, to many observers, the mass murders of August 1572 would have been welcomed as a healthy purging of polluted elements from within the body of Christendom. Secondly, the view that apologists had to be coerced is scarcely tenable the moment note is taken of the exultant language in which most of their work is couched. It is not difficult to force writers to produce arguments, however specious, to justify extreme deeds. It is extremely difficult to compel in them a deep sense of joy, satisfaction, and triumph. It was the triumphal aspect of the massacre which absorbed the attention of Nicolas Favier, ‘Conseiller dudit Sieur, et general de ses Monnoyes’, who promptly prepared two designs for commemorative medals to be struck in 4 Thomas Adams, The Gallants Burden. A Sermon preached at Paules Crosse the 29 of March . . . 1612, sig. D.4v. Roman attitudes are documented in a brief but informative pamphlet by D. Hay Fleming, Illustrations of Antichrist’s Rejoicing over the Massacre of St Bartholomew (Edinburgh, 1912). On the paintings, see Philipp P. Fehl, ‘Vasari’s ‘‘Extirpation of the Huguenots’’: The Challenge of Pity and Fear’, Gazette des beaux arts, 84 (1974), 257–84.

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gold and silver.5 It was God, says Favier, who had revealed the Huguenot conspiracy and provided the means to snuff it out in just twenty-four hours—‘something which had not been possible for human forces in ten years and in four pitched battles’. The Admiral, having been wounded by an arquebus shot, was plotting vengeance in a conspiracy against the King, the Queen Mother, the King’s brothers, and other princes: but the plot had been discovered and prevented by the prompt execution of the principal conspirator and his accomplices. Favier was pleased that his designs had been acceptable to the King but, recognizing that such medals would only reach a limited number of princes and potentates, he was also anxious to set forth their meaning in writing.6 Claiming that he is emulating the ancient monarchs who used medals as witnesses to posterity, he describes his designs in detail. The first was to depict Charles, crowned and enthroned, sceptre in one hand, bare sword in the other; environed with the palm of victory; and with corpses of the rebels strewn at his feet. Virtue triumphs over the rebels, that is to say the enemies, conspirators, and authors of abominable sedition—VIRTUS IN REBELLES, seu perduelles, coniuratos hostes, aut nefarine seditionis authores. The obverse of this medal was to show the arms of France between two columns (the King’s device) with the motto pietas excitavit justitiam: ‘c’est a` dire que la Piete´ envers Dieu et la vraye Religion a esmeu le glaive de la justice Royalle contre les rebelles’. Above each column was an olive garland symbolizing peace obtained by the subjugation of rebels; while around the entire device were two laurel branches signifying triumph. Nor was this all the meaning which Favier had squeezed onto the obverse. The middle letter T of excitavit was exactly over the crown surmounting the arms of France; and this, said, Favier, 5 Lb33.310. Nicolas Favier, Figure et exposition des pourtraictz et dictons contenuz es medailles de la conspiration des Rebelles en France opprimee et estaincte par le Roy Tres-Chrestien Charles IX. Le 24. Iour d’Aoust 1572 (Paris: I. Dallier, 1572). 6 Ibid., sig. A.3: ‘J’ay considere´, Sire, que d’autant que ce nombre de pieces ne peult estre departi qu’en peu de mains de Princes et Potentats tant estrangers que de vostre Royaulme, qu’il estoit convenable, soit pour en faire entendre a` eux la signifiance, que pour aussi estandre a` tous peuples et siecles en suyvans la cognoissance d’un acte si memorable de le rediger par escript et s’il vous plaist le mettre en lumie`re publicque.’

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indicated the cross of Christ, and was likewise the final letter of the Hebrews just as we hope that this blow will be the end of the new sect. It has also been worn as a badge in the hats of good Catholics and true subjects of the King ‘as Ezechiel saw it marked by the angel on the foreheads of the faithful’.7 The second ‘medaille a` l’antique’ was more straightforward. It showed the King’s effigy with his arms and ‘dicton Franc¸ois, Charles IX. R.D.F. Dompteur des Rebelles le vingtquatriesme Aoust 1572’. The obverse depicted Hercules clad in lion’s skin—his ‘Massue ferree’ in one hand, and a torch in the other—defeating the hydra with many heads. This indicated that the rebels, despite the loss of their leaders, had renewed war thrice, and had been plotting a fourth campaign when they had finally been exterminated. The medallic form was much in vogue. It typified the Renaissance ideal of multum in parvo; and Favier had contrived to say most of what needed to be said on behalf of the massacre within the confines of his two medals. The greater part of the literature defending the Saint Bartholomew was really an amplification of the basic ideas contained therein; and, as we shall see, Gentillet summarized his own reply to these ideas in an emblem which was perhaps intended to challenge Favier’s first medal.8 The first official statement on the events of 24 August 1572 was the Declaration du Roy, sur la mort de l’Admiral, ses adherans & complices, which baldly declared that the King wished his subjects to know exactly why the Admiral and his accomplices had been put to death by royal command.9 His reasons were ‘to obviate and prevent the execution of a sinister and detestable conspiracy’ organized by the Huguenots against the blood royal; and this idea, that the Admiral and his adherents had been involved in a dangerous conspiracy, was sedulously promulgated by Charles’s apologists 7 Lb33.310. Nicolas Favier, Figure et exposition des pourtraictz et dictons, sig. A.4r–v. 8 See below, Ch. 9, pp. 310–11. 9 Lb33.341.b. Declaracion du Roy, de la cause et occasion de la mort de l’Admiral et autres ses adhe´rens et complices, dernie`rement advenue en ceste ville de Paris le XXIIII. Jour du pre´sent moys d’Aoust. M.D.LXXII (Paris: I. Dallier, 1572). Another edition was issued by Michel Jove at Lyon. The text was reprinted in L. Cimber and F. Danjou, Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France depuis Louis XI jusqu’a` Louis XVIII (Paris, 1835) 1st ser., vii. 162–4.

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and—though as sedulously denied by the Huguenots themselves—it served, at least, as a reasonable justification for the massacre. Much harder for the Huguenots to stomach were the gleeful tones of much Catholic writing of this period. The news of the massacres in France was received with public demonstrations of joy at Rome; and exultation characterizes Marc-Antoine de Muret’s oration delivered before Pope Gregory XIII in December 1572.10 The miseries endured by France in recent years were known everywhere, says Muret, as was the piety of the King of France and the success he had enjoyed in restoring things to their ancient estate. Nevertheless, the author believes that it is still worth elaborating on these matters, and he begins by relating how poison had already been spreading through the veins and entrails of France in the time of Henri II, whose untimely death—like that of his son, Franc¸ois II—had prevented any remedy. By the time that Charles IX came to the throne, the venom was everywhere and, just as the force of water held back by a dyke is especially violent once that rampart has been breached, so the violent men of France had burst the barriers of the laws and the authority of kings, running through the kingdom and, under guise of a supreme piety, taking exorbitant licence and confounding all things both human and divine by their murders and burnings: ‘tirans une licence exorbitante du milieu d’une souveraine piete´, et confondans toutes choses divines et humaines par leurs meurtres et bruslemens’. Charles IX came to the throne like a young Hercules facing a multitude of hellish serpents who sought to destroy both his life and the true religion. They had taken advantage of the King’s youth to trample underfoot the authority of the law, and had caused untold misery to France. Muret’s hair stands on end when he has to record what has happened ‘apres que ces pestes et furies infernales ont este´ envoyees par l’ennemy du genre humain’: temples have been ruined; altars have run with the blood of priests; virgins have been ravaged; and towns sacked. This was the state of France which had always defended the Church, propagated Christianity, and so often saved 10 Lb33.319. Oraison prononce´e devant le pape Gre´goire XIII, Par M. Antoine de Muret, I.C. touchant l’heureux et admirable succe`s de Charles IX. Tres-Chrestien Roy de France, en la punition des chefs des He´retiques rebelles (Paris: J. Ruelle, 1573). Another French edition was issued at Lyon by B. Rigaud; and there was a Latin edition issued at Rome by the heirs of A. Blado.

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Rome itself. These ‘endiablez’ had attempted to rob France of the obedience due to God and King and then, having failed in this, they sought to destroy the unity of the Catholic Church by offering the King new territories in return for his deserting the Holy See. But Charles was not to be distracted from righteousness by the pretext of utility. From his infancy he had been adorned with Piety and Justice—virtues which truly served for his device—and he had tried to win over these evil men by gentle methods. But, in the end, he had regretfully to resort to extremes and to do violence ‘to his own entrails’ like those who, having vainly tried all other remedies to cure poisoned limbs, burn and amputate them lest they infect the rest of their bodies.11 The King was victorious in the ensuing war and, wishing to lead his enemies back to the path of righteousness, he gave them a generous peace. Vain clemency! These people were so used to massacres that they again plotted against his life and estate, but the conspiracy was discovered, ‘divinement’, just as it was to be put into effect, and it rebounded upon the heads of the abominable traitors: Oh memorable night which, by the ruin of a few seditious people, has delivered the King from the peril of death and the kingdom from a perpetual fear of civil wars! I believe that on that night the stars shone with more than their accustomed clarity, and that the Seine was abnormally swollen in order to wash away the corpses more swiftly and discharge them into the sea.12

And what a happy day, cries Muret, so full of joy and gaiety when the news was brought to His Holiness. Could there have been a

11 Lb33.319. Oraison prononce´e devant le pape, sigs. A.3–4v. Cf. Lb33.308. De la religion catholique et foy chrestienne des roys de France. Oeuvre par lequel est monstre´e la devotion , et l’affection desdictz Roys envers les choses sainctes: et la punition par eux faicte des heretiques et des rebelles (Paris: P. Luillier, 1572), sig. H.1r–v. 12 Muret, Oraison prononce´e devant le pape, sig. B.1v: ‘O nuict memorable, laquelle par la ruine de peu de seditieux a delivre´ le Roy du peril de la mort presente, et le Royaume d’une perpetuelle crainte de guerres civiles! J’estime qu’en icelle les estoilles rendoient plus grande clairte´ que de coustume, et que la Seine s’enfla outre son ordinaire pour chasser plus vistement ses corps et les descharger en mer.’

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happier beginning to his pontificate than to see, in the very first months, the dissipation of such pernicious shadows? Muret’s laudation of the massacre was heard by the Pope, whose Secretary, Antoine Buccapadulius, replied briefly, stressing that Charles IX had confirmed his title of Tres-chrestien by the discomfiture and abolition of the heretical enemies of Jesus Christ.13 And it was to this theme that Muret returned less than two years later, again at Rome, when called upon to pronounce the funeral oration for the same Charles IX.14 Once more, he depicted France torn by civil wars and sedition; and again he dwelt on the new age of peace which was being inaugurated by the young king when death had suddenly ended his good works. Charles, said Muret, had spent his entire life trying to preserve the integrity of the Christian religion threatened by ‘this filthy and infamous race of lost and desperate men’ who hid their deceit under the name of Truth which was newly fallen from the heavens and revealed to them alone. These creatures had attempted to overthrow the royal authority and remove France from its allegiance to the Roman Church: but the King, though a mere youth, would rather have been hacked into pieces than allow such a schism, and had spent his reign amidst ceaseless war, fighting for his life and state. In view of these tremendous efforts, says Muret, even had his ancestors not handed down the title of Tres-chrestien, Charles would have earned it for himself and for his own successors.15 d u ha i l l a n a n d p i b r a c It was generally (though not unanimously) accepted by apologists for the massacre that the deed had been dire—one of those extre`mes advocated by Muret where gentle remedies had failed.16 This point 13 Ibid., sigs. B.3v–4. 14 Lb33.377. Oraison funebre faicte a` Rome, aux obseques de Tres-Chrestien Roy de France Charles IX. Par Marc-Antoine de Muret . . . Traduicte en Franc¸ois, et mise a` coste´ du Latin, par M. Jean le Frere de Laval (Paris: N. Chesneau, 1574). 15 A similar assessment of Charles IX’s achievements against the heretics was later offered by Giovanni Botero, La prima parte de’ prencipi Christiani (Turin, 1601), 118. 16 See e.g. Lb33.347. Sommaire Discours des Causes de tous les troubles de ce royaume, procedentes des impostures et coniurations des heretiques et des rebelles.

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was argued in several pamphlets, but especially in two officially inspired publications, both issued anonymously: the Discours sur les causes de tous les troubles de ce royaume (which has been attributed to Du Haillan), and Pibrac’s notorious letter addressed to Stanislaus Elvidius (that is Joachim Camerarius). The Discours was evidently regarded as an authoritative justification for the events of August, for it was published thrice in 1572.17 It tells how, for thirteen years, France has been troubled by civil wars arising principally through the diversity of two religions which could not possibly coexist within the state: especially when one of them, the Reformed Church, uses piety and a zeal for the common good as a cloak for attempts against the lives of princes, and against liberty and tranquillity. Those who were unable to penetrate behind fair words were easily duped by the Huguenots, whose behaviour, none the less, made manifest the hollowness of their concern with the glory of God and with public peace. The word of God, says the author, cannot be planted by force of arms. Nor can public repose be conserved by civil wars. It is as much as to say that, to preserve a healthy body, one should feed it poison or that, to preserve snow, it should be put before the fire (sigs. A.2–4). Despite the leniency of Franc¸ois II, who put an end to heretic-burning, and despite the peaceful negotiations of the Queen Mother during the minority of Charles IX, the rebels had repeatedly taken up arms, ruined towns, stolen the King’s finances, invited in foreigners, violated churches, massacred the clergy, and murdered Catholics—and all under the dual pretext of religion and public peace. They were full of complaints against the modifications of the Edict of Pacification of 1563; they made a great wailing (‘une grande querimonie’) that the honours and offices were given to people of low condition and Ensemble le fidelle et loyal devoir des Catholiques envers le Roy (Paris: P. L’Huillier, 1573), fo. 38. 17 Lb33.309. Discours sur les causes de l’Execution faicte e`s personnes de ceux qui avoient conjure´ contre le Roy et son Estat (Lyon: M. Jove, 1572). Further references are given in the text. According to Hauser, Les Sources, 241, the attribution to Du Haillan is based on a manuscript note appended to an edition in Dijon. On Bernard de Girard, Seigneur du Haillan, see Paul Bonnefon, ‘L’Historien du Haillan’, Revue d’histoire litte´raire de la France, 15 (1908), 642–96; 22 (1915), 453–92. The life of Du Haillan in Bayle’s Dictionnaire is characteristically wild but informative.

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quality; they reviled the Italians; attacked the King’s council; insisted that account be rendered of the finances since Charles’s accession; and demanded the convocation of the Estates to remedy the evils which had befallen France (sigs. B.2v–3). The fact of the matter, says Du Haillan, is that these people were interested neither in God nor in France. They wished merely to establish their own religion by force of arms. Thrice they had risen in rebellion; and thrice the King had shown clemency. Yet the Huguenots now plotted against the lives of the King and royal family, and sowed dissension in France—all inventions fashioned in the shop of the Admiral (‘forgees en la boutique de l’Admiral’), who, seeing that peace would not serve his ends, continually sought to stir his followers to active sedition. The Admiral even tried to get Charles to betray the King of Spain by sending help to the rebels in Flanders. It is no wonder that such a man, who had given offence to so many people, should have been shot by an arquebusier. Yet, despite all this, the King had been gravely concerned at that crime, attempted to discover and to punish the culprit, and visited the Admiral, making hourly enquiries concerning his health. But the Admiral grew increasingly bitter, ‘par sa blessure avoit d’avantage ulcere´ son courage et ses desseins’; his speech was full of menace; and he condemned the King’s concern as counterfeit (sigs. C.2v–3v). On the Saturday evening, the pamphlet continues, there had been a secret council of the Huguenots, who resolved to kill Charles and make the Admiral master of the kingdom: but the crime was so barbarous that some of the conspirators confessed the matter to the King, who at last saw that it was necessary to apply ‘un prompt, souverein et rigoureux remede’ to the imminent plot which was now unequivocally revealed. In such matters concerning the life and state of princes, and where no doubt remains, it is necessary to proceed without delay to execution and punishment without tarrying for further information or judicial procedures (sig. D.1).18 Accordingly, the King, Queen Mother, royal family, 18 ‘Car en matiere d’advertissemens qui concernent la vie, ou l’Estat des Princes, de´s qu’on est asseurement adverty, il faut venir a l’execution et punition, devant que venir aux informations, procedures et jugemens, ce qui ne se fait en autres matieres d’advertissemens, ausquelles les jugemens precedent les

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and their chief counsellors decided to inflict a ‘punition exemplaire’. The executions began at dawn on the Sunday morning and were accomplished with such ‘felicite´, diligence, et celerite´’ that by 7.00 in the morning, the Admiral, his chiefs, and the other conspirators were dead. It was a judgement of God. Had the conspiracy not been discovered for another hour the situation would have been beyond remedy: but God had inspired the King’s heart to administer an immediate antidote. It was surely remarkable that the heretics and rebels, despite their customary suspicion, had not the slightest inkling of what was in store for them. Obviously divine intervention had shut their ears, spirits, and eyes, rendering them insensible to the just retribution advancing upon them. God had chosen the King to be the minister of his wrath, and had given him both the will and the means to exterminate the Huguenots: ‘for if ever an enterprise was promptly, happily, and boldly carried out, this was it’. The good Catholic people of Paris could not restrain themselves from killing many Huguenots and pillaging their homes, thereby showing their love for the King: but one ‘must excuse the people’s fury moved by a laudable zeal which is difficult to restrain once it has been stirred up’. Paris, says the Discours, was always an example for the other towns of France, which followed suit in executing the Huguenots. Then on Monday the 26th the King and various dignitaries met in the Court of the Parlement, declared that everything had been done at the royal command, and briefly explained the necessity (sig. D.2r–v). Towards the end of 1572, Guy de Faur, seigneur de Pibrac— judge, diplomat, administrator, and poet—completed a treatise which was published in the following year at Lyon and Paris in both Latin and French versions.19 Pibrac may have been one of the executions, mais en celles cy, les executions doyvent marcher les premieres, quand la conjuration est manifeste, puis les jugemens font leur devoir et eclarcissent ce qui a este´ faict.’ 19 Lb33.322 and 323. Ornatissimi cuiusdam viri de rebus gallicis, ad Stanislaum Elvidium epistola (Paris: F. Morel, 1573). There was a French translation, Traduction d’une Epistre latine d’un excellent personnage de ce Royaume faicte par forme de Discours sur aucunes choses depuis peu de temps advenues en France (Paris: F. Morel, 1573). For a modern edition see L’Apologie de la Saint Barthe´lemy, ed. Alban Cabos (Paris, 1922); and for a detailed discussion of Pibrac’s treatise, its significance for Henri de Valois’s Polish venture, and for differences between the Latin

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less happy defenders of the massacre. Certainly he was regarded as such by Hubert Languet, who wrote, in a letter to Sir Philip Sidney, ‘you seem to me somewhat too hard on Pibrac’: adding that he ‘is a man of such genius, learning, and eloquence, that I do not believe his equal is to be found in France’. Indeed, says Languet, he had even denounced the bloodshed in a speech delivered before the Parlement of Paris in the presence of the King himself and had subsequently been compelled to save his life by the very letter which Sidney so severely condemns.20 Nevertheless, having been present in Paris during the massacre and having been forced to take refuge in the English embassy, Sidney was not likely to favour a pamphlet which offered an apology for Charles IX’s actions seemingly more measured and plausible, more theoretical and less tendentious, than many of its companions. Like the majority of Catholic apologists, Pibrac stresses the king’s repeated, though ill-appreciated, clemency towards the ceaselessly seditious Huguenots: but he provides a particularly full discussion of the problems posed by intransigent malefactors. Even when the Huguenots’ intentions were patent, says Pibrac, the King remained reluctant to act against them, though the elder statesmen believed that in very dangerous illnesses, it is necessary to employ extreme remedies. The King, his mother, and his brothers, all agreed that such an ‘execution soudaine’ had been merited by their enemies: but they still wished to follow the processes of the law, for Charles was concerned not merely with his life but with his good name, and was troubled by the possible reactions of other nations were he to act precipitately. One of the ‘vieillards’ argued that it would be impossible to avoid a fourth civil war were the King to attempt to take prisoners and bring them to trial, and he warned that in wishing to spare his avowed enemies the King might unintentionally act cruelly towards his fatherland and betray his loyal subjects. All equitable men would, in fact, consider that to take the requisite action against the rebels was and French texts, see Alban Cabos, Guy de Faur de Pibrac, un magistrat poe`te au XVIe sie`cle (Paris, Auch, 1922), 195–247. 20 The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. Steuart A. Pears (1845, repr. 1971), 87–8.

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praiseworthy according to both human and divine law: and the counsellor declared that he did not lack examples to the point—if the issue required long discourse rather than prompt execution. His peroration concluded with a dramatic appeal for the King to save himself, the Queen Mother, all those present, and France itself.21 Pibrac elaborates on the exigencies imposed by extreme danger. Despite the wishes of the royal family that the law should be followed, their advisers had stressed the need for swift action, fearing that, while the normal processes were being instituted, the King would find himself surprised and caught up in the toils of the conspiracy. Just as the Roman Senate had dealt with Lentulus, Cethegus, and their accomplices without waiting for the normal legal processes, so should France act now. Whatever was lawful for a consul in a republic must surely be admissable for a king in his kingdom? What need to allege examples when the law is certain and evident? France uses Roman law, and it is patent that, for the public interest, one can inflict prompt punishment— especially when the matter is of such extremity that the laws are, in effect, irrelevant. Expediency rather than legal subtlety is requisite for, as one Roman had put it, amidst arms the laws have no voice at all. If you are ambushed by brigands, then all means of saving your life may be regarded as good, legitimate, and honest (pp. 38–9). The King, writes Pibrac, was deeply disturbed but accepted the advice since it seemed the most expedient and consonant with the laws both human and divine—though he stressed that only proscribed conspirators should be touched and that there should be no popular tumult lest the innocent should suffer with the guilty. It is regrettable that, in the event, several conspirators escaped unscathed while other folk, who had not conspired, were slain, for the people were so enraged at the threat to the King’s life that they got out of hand. It was, of course, all against the King’s own edict; and no one was more upset than Charles himself, whose clemency and gentleness were innate. He had only donned the mask of severity under extreme necessity, and once that necessity had passed he immediately doffed this uncharacteristic raiment 21 Traduction d’une Epistre, 22–5. Further references are given in the text.

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(p. 50). The times were troublous, but Pibrac saw only good resulting from the massacre. After so many schisms and religious dissensions, he felt that the hearts of Frenchmen had never been more united than at the present time for the King had restored peace to France—a deed ‘semblable a` Dieu mesme’. Yet even now there were some who considered the King’s good qualities nothing but ‘une ruse, une cautelle, un fraude, et une malice’. Base ingratitude! Do we not live in an age which is enemy to the virtues? (p. 44). Muret, Du Haillan, and Pibrac represent the official position on the massacre which was alleged to have resulted from the preceding years of civil strife in which Coligny and the Huguenots were consistently the aggressors and were, as consistently, forgiven by a clement king. The massacre was only undertaken with the utmost reluctance by Charles, who had to be persuaded that France itself was in danger of imminent destruction before he would resort to extreme measures—‘ceste juste execution’, as the historian Belleforest was soon to describe it.22 The view was not implausible. The sanguinary events of Saint Bartholomew’s Day have tended to overshadow the atrocities perpetrated by both sides in the preceding years. The Huguenots’ own record for good citizenship, tolerance, and humanity was scarcely better than that of their persecutors. To many sixteenth-century observers, the Huguenots were rebels; two religions could not coexist; and the Huguenots were the usurpers, not the Catholics. popular polemics: the rhetoric of hate However, this official stance could easily shade off into something rather different, as is evident in the welter of popular polemics circulating after the massacre. Here there is a predominantly gleeful tone which makes the alleged Huguenot conspiracy almost redundant as a factor in the Saint Bartholomew. To argue that the killings were a regrettable necessity, in which the innocent suffered for the guilty, was one thing. To exult over it, is another. What, for 22 Franc¸ois de Belleforest, Les chroniques et annales de France (Paris, 1573), fos. 529v–30. This work was begun by Nicole Gilles, continued by Denis Sauvage, and augmented by Belleforest, who was responsible for the whole section on Charles IX. Belleforest’s dedicatory letter is addressed to Nicolas de Bauffremont and is dated 14 Dec. 1572.

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example, were the Huguenots to make of a poetaster such as Claude Nouvellet, who praised Charles for having erected his crown on the twin columns of Piety and Justice; enthused over the hymns that were being sung to celebrate the fine day when the King had avenged ‘la Divinite´ outrage´e’; and even has God express the view that Charles should finish what he has already begun.23 Or what were they to make of Legier du Chesne, who hailed Charles as a triumphant ‘David Franc¸ois’, and urged him not to desist from his good work which was still only beginning? Charles was to tread underfoot the leeches which are bloated with French blood; and he was no longer to tolerate the Calvinist plague which, like a serpent, was belching forth its poison. If one leaves a single caterpillar on a branch, it will soon produce a swarm which will eat between the very roots of the trees, destroying their fruit. Similarly, healthy people quickly expel a leper from their midst. Should we not, therefore, expel the Calvinist who is far more dangerous than any leper? And Du Chesne concludes with an appeal that the King should give these Huguenots to the executioner to be drowned en masse.24 More exultant still is the Allegresse chrestienne de l’heureux succes des guerres de ce royaume, arguing that the rebels had been punished according to divine justice and that it was right for the King to pursue those who had violated religion. Like many other pamphlets of the period it sees the strife as originating in Henri II’s death, which had opened a Pandora’s box of troubles compelling the King, from his youngest days, ‘to play a game which was by no means for children’. The Queen Mother, as usual in Catholic literature, is highly praised for her work in guiding the young monarch; while, conversely, the ills which affect France have come from the swamp of Calvin. It was God Himself who had at last decided to punish the heretics by inspiring the King to main23 Lb33.309.d. Claude Nouvellet, Ode trionfale au roy, sus l’equitable justice que sa majeste´ feit des rebelles, la veille et jour de sainct Loys (Paris: R. Granjon, 1572), sigs. A.3v–4. ‘Si a` mon vouloir il se range, / Ce que j’ay promis, il aura. / Mais que premier il extermine / L’erreur qui sa France ruı¨ne, / Ainsi qu’il a ja commence´.’ 24 Lb33.309.b. Legier du Chesne, Exhortation au Roy, pour vertueusement poursuivre ce que sagement il a commence´ contre les Huguenots, avec les Epitaphes de Gaspar de Colligny etc. (Paris: G. Buon, 1572), sigs. A.4–B.1v.

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tain France in its ancient faith and to uproot the heretic vermin. The author acknowledges that some politiques may say that it is not for the King to punish heretics: but there is an abundance of examples proving that kings must act to preserve religion. Was not Achab’s family exterminated by Jehu? Did not Josias command that not a life should be spared of the unfaithful? And may we not compare Charles IX to Charlemagne and to Charles Martel, who killed 325,000 Saracens? The author then addresses that most constant city of Paris which has now been rewarded by God with the glory, praise, and honour of the wonderful victory over the ‘rebelle moqueur’, and he rejoices in the sight of the Huguenots stretched out dead or drowned in the river. These enemies of the true Christian faith had thought to give the Catholics vespers ‘a` la Sicilienne’: but, by matins, the whole plot had rebounded on their own heads, though the author piously claims that Catholics would prefer the conversion of a single heretic to the death of 500 or even of a ‘million’. The work ends with a thanksgiving and a prayer that God will preserve the royal family, and that Justice and Piety will rule France and maintain the law, ‘Pour n’y servir qu’UN DIEU, UNE EGLISE, ET UN ROY.25 The idea of grim necessity was, as we have seen, very much the official line on the massacre: but it was more strikingly expressed by Franc¸ois de Chantelouve in his Tragedie de feu Gaspard de Colligny (1575), which glosses over the massacre itself and concentrates on the events which determined its fateful course.26 The tone of the work is evident from the moment when Coligny takes the stage, mouthing a volley of expletives and imprecations, coupling 25 Lb33.309.e. Allegresse chrestienne de l’heureux succes des guerres de ce royaume (Paris: Michel de Roigny, 1572), sigs. B.2v–C.3. This is the same poem as that printed by Roigny (but with different title page, pagination, and setting) as Discours sur les occurrences des Guerres intestines de ce royaume, et de la justice de Dieu contre les rebelles au Roy, et comme de droit divin est licite a` sa majeste´ punir ses subjets, pour la Religion viole´e. 26 Lb33.325.a. Franc¸ois de Chantelouve, La Tragedie du feu Gaspard de Colligny jadis admiral de France, contenant ce qui advint a` Paris le 24. d’Aoust 1572, avec le nom des personnages (n.p., 1575). On this play, see Charles Mazouer, ‘Chantelouve et le Saint-Barthelemy: ‘‘La Tragedie de feu Gaspard de Colligny’’ (1575)’, in Les E´crivains et la politique dans le sud-ouest de la France autour des anne´es 1580 (Bordeaux, 1982), 129–42.

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the dreaded names of Satan and Calvin, and alluding to his own brothers who are now grilling nicely in the fires of Hell. O Mort, oˆ rage, oˆ fer, oˆ Furies! Courez, accablez-moi soubz vos fureurs aigries; O Satan, oˆ Calvin! Ouvre-moi les Enfers, Ou` mes freres et toi grillent de feux divers.

The Admiral makes no bones about it: he wishes to be king; he recognizes no law; and he even feigns zeal for the Reformed Church to deceive his enemies. In all this he is abetted by Montgommery, who boasts that, having already killed one king (that is Henri II), he is now intent upon killing another.27 ‘Le Peuple Franc¸ois’ then tell us how the clement and liberal King has received nothing but base ingratitude; and we are shown Charles and his Council debating the matter of persistent rebellion, and deciding to make one last attempt at obtaining the peace so vital to France—this time by proposing a marriage alliance. The Huguenots are delighted at the opportunity of seizing this ‘prince idiot’, making Coligny King of France, and killing off the followers of the Guises. In the third act of the Tragedie, we meet Mercury receiving his orders from Jupiter and it becomes clear that the entire sequence of events is being planned in Olympus. The very arquebus shot which wounds the Admiral was conceived by Jupiter so that the Huguenots would have a ‘couleur’ to kill the King. Coligny is to be ensnared by heaven, and is duly shot; and the Huguenots lament a situation in which their leader has been outwitted by the King, whose visits to the wounded man they interpret as a mere ruse ‘ypocrisant sa mine’. The final act of the Tragedie opens with the King protesting his innocence of complicity in the shooting. An informer suddenly reveals the plot to kill Charles, who consults his Council and is told that extreme dangers demand extreme solutions—the unfailing 27 Montgommery killed Henri II in the famous Paris tournament of 1559. See C. D. O’Malley and J. B. de C. M. Saunders, ‘The ‘‘Relation’’ of Andreas Vesalius on the Death of Henry II of France’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 3 (1948), 197–213.

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advice, they say, of the most expert surgeons—and, in the present peril, the King must anticipate the enemy and make their assassination plot rebound against them. Charles is appalled and argues vehemently that monarchs are expected to uphold the virtues. But each of his objections is overcome by the Council: justice is more acceptable to God than mercy; to chastise evildoers is a greater virtue than to pardon one’s enemies: and finally, when Charles urges that the blood of his subjects must be dear to a king, he is given an irresistible answer. The blood of the fatherland is yet more dear.28 So, at last, Charles is convinced. He orders that the Huguenots should be punished, and the Tragedie ends very suddenly. A messenger reports the massacre to ‘Le Peuple’; the villains are defeated; and all is now well with France. That it was not merely necessary for the King to punish the Huguenots but was his bounden duty, was argued trenchantly in a short pamphlet issued at Lyon by Benoist Rigaud shortly after the massacre. This was the Brieve Remonstrance sur la mort de l’Admiral, et ses adherans, au Peuple Franc¸ois, which carries the grim subtitle, Il n’y a point de paix aux meschans, dit le Seigneur. Isaiae 48 & 57. The anonymous author demonstrates, to foreign princes and to others, the just causes for the killings. Although the King has explained that he was principally moved by the Admiral’s conspiracy, the Huguenots are accusing him of violating the peace. Yet really it was the other way around. Following the advice of Calvin and Be`ze, who had preached that their adherents should take up arms against their ruler, they have plotted against the blood royal. This was normal, for they were always trying to overturn political order; and at this very moment the Prince of Orange, using religion as his pretext, was trying to break from the service of his natural prince in the Low Countries. France had been prospering ever since the healing of the old factions between Orle´ans and Burgundy, until these people had started the troubles again—just as all the troubles in Germany, including the Turkish threat, were their responsibility! The Book of Kings (17 and 18) demonstrates that France was being punished for having pardoned its own ‘Syriens et Amelicites’ 28 Tragedie, 46. ‘Mais bien plus cher son sang aussi de sa patrie / Qui vengeance, vengeance a` sa Majeste´ crie.’

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and for having let them live among the faithful; and the pamphlet gives other examples of divine retribution incurred by forgiving those deserving of punishment. Saul, who had been told not to spare any Amelecite, had suffered for his disobedience; and just as God’s vengeance fell on Agag for the evils he had caused the Hebrews, so had it befallen the Admiral who had caused innumerable ills to France. There was no faith to be kept with the faithless, and no peace with evildoers; and the author emphasizes that the most heinous of all the Admiral’s crimes was to have committed le`se-majeste´ which, according to Ulpian, is akin to sacrilege. The standard example of David’s refusal to harm Saul is pressed into service to highlight, by stark contrast, the misdeeds of the Admiral who had taken arms against his King and had invited foreigners into France; while a host of German, classical, and French examples demonstrate how kings have always meted out the most severe punishment to rebels. The author apostrophizes the people of France who have seen how the rebels have tried to seize the kingdom. They must be punished immediately, openly, and without tarrying for due legal methods. Urgent dangers require urgent remedies; long-winded processes are useless; and it is important to make an example of the leaders so that the lesser people will shrink back from their follies. Moses was the first of the prophets to take up the knife to kill those who turned the Israelites away from God, and, ever since, his actions have been imitated by kings. The Church of God cannot be divided, and the King was right to have the Admiral and his adherents put to death.29

dissimulation and politic religion The opinion that the Huguenots had been conspiring against the King, and that this had been merely the culmination of more than a decade of insurrection, was advanced in the greater number of Catholic pamphlets which depicted the Huguenots as archetypal hypocrites (as the Jesuits were later to be branded by their Prot29 Lb33.530. Brieve Remonstrance sur la mort de l’Admiral, et ses adherans. Au Peuple Franc¸ois (Lyon: Benoist Rigaud, 1572), sigs. C.1–4v.

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estant enemies) who used religion and other ideals as the conscious instrument of a purely temporal policy. While continually asserting that they were the King’s servants and that they were acting in his defence, the Huguenots were really seeking to subvert the kingdom—an accusation most strikingly presented in the Sommaire Discours of 1573. It contains the usual catalogue of Huguenot crimes, but the main burthen of the work is that people wishing to execute any evil enterprise always cover it with some fine and specious pretext to dupe simple folk who only regard externals. Foremost among matters requiring such cover are conspiracies against the persons and estates of princes, when conspirators cloak their pernicious intentions with beautiful garments—most commonly the shadows of a false religion and of a public good. Led by Coligny, the Huguenots have consistently and consciously employed these simulated virtues as cover for their attempts at subverting the state and true religion.30 These accusations were repeatedly hurled at the Huguenots. The twin virtues to which they lay claim are degraded into ‘mauvais et dangereux pretextes’—a mere mantle to hide their malicious crimes, mask their ambition, and deceive the ignorant multitude.31 As Jean Le Bon, physician to the Cardinal of Lorraine, wrote: the Huguenots were originally few in number but, like a snowball which grows as it is rolled, they have gathered up thieves, desperadoes, and all those who wish to live off the work of others. They have, moreover, invited foreigners into France—and all allegedly in defence of the Evangile, that ‘beau et large manteau’.32 Even Coligny’s adherence to the reformed religion was generally deemed a fraud adopted in order to surprise the King: ‘Ainsi 30 Lb33.347. Sommaire Discours des Causes de tous les troubles de ce royaume, procedentes des impostures et conjurations des heretiques et des rebelles. Ensemble le fidelle et loyal devoir des Catholiques envers le Roy (Paris: P. L’Huillier, 1573), esp. fos. 2–3v. There was another issue of this work by Mesnier and Delacourt at Poitiers in the same year. 31 See e.g. Lb33.313.b. Discours contre les Huguenotz, auquel est contenue et de´clare´e la source de leur damnable religion (Lyon: Benoist Rigaud, 1573), sig. 4. This pamphlet was also issued in Paris by H. de Marnef. 32 Lb33.355. Jean Le Bon, Le tumulte de Bassigni, appaise et esteinct par l’auctorite´, conseil, et vigilance de Monseigneur le Cardinal de Lorraine. Etc. (Paris: D. Du Pre´, 1573), sig. B.3r–v. This text was reprinted in Cimber and Danjou, 1st ser., viii.

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ypochrisant je suis traistre a` toute l’heure, / Ainsi le vieux Regnard, toujours Regnard demeure.’33 His words are full of dissimulation; he humbles himself while beguiling the King with lies and sleights; his mouth speaks marvels, but his heart conceives unparallelled injuries;34 and he has caused the deaths of a million people, while his poison and ambition have remained hidden beneath the painted show of religion.35 An anonymous broadsheet of 1572, the Advertissement du Peuple de Paris aux Passans, is especially eloquent on Huguenot fraud. It analyses and lists the principal components of the Admiral’s overweening ambition: deceiving the King by trickery; doing nothing while seeming to do everything; nursing revenge under a benign expression; fawning upon enemies while wearing a painted visage; and beguiling, while secretly betraying, his friends. The Admiral and his brothers have perpetrated every kind of crime. Beneath their ‘masque feint’ they have deceived even the wisest folk; fashioned a new world; embraced the perjuror with their ruses; laid France open to its enemies; turned everything to mockery; soiled the sepulchres of the dead with their sacrilegious hands; and pretended to be cold while burning within their very souls with the fire of ambition. This was the subtle web woven at court till, at last, God inspired Charles, through the sage advice of his mother, to punish the monsters. They themselves had desecrated tombs: but now, unburied, their own stinking carcasses tumble about on the waters and serve only as fish-bait or carrion.36 Perhaps the most interesting of those works attacking the Huguenot leaders as dissimulators using religion for purely 33 Chantelouve, Tragedie, 6. 34 Lb33.336.e. Cantique general des Catholiques, sur la mort de Gaspard de Colligny iadis Admiral de France, advenue a` Paris, le XXIIIJ jour d’Aoust (Paris: P. Godec, 1572). 35 I.S.P., Discours sur la mort de Gaspart de Coligny, qui fut Admiral de France et de ses complices, le jour sainct Berthelemy Vingt quatriesme jour d’Aoust (Paris: M. Martin, ?1572), sig. C.1. 36 Lb33.309.f; Re´s.Ye.85. Advertissement du Peuple de Paris aux Passans: ‘Immortelz ennemis de l’honneur des tombeaux, / Et sans tombeaux aussi, vos charognes puantes / Roulent dessus les eaux, et ne servent errantes / Que d’amorce aux poissons et de gorge aux corbeaux.’

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political ends was the Lettre de Pierre Charpentier. It was also potentially the most damaging, because Charpentier was himself a Protestant of sorts and thus, apparently, writing with inside knowledge. Certainly his Lettre was considered good copy and was issued twice in 1572, once in Latin and once in French, and again in a French edition during the following year.37 It also elicited a violent reply from its addressee, the noted Professor of Greek at Geneva, Franc¸ois Portes, who was deeply incensed— partly, perhaps, by embarrassment at having the obnoxious letter addressed to him; partly by his personal dislike for the author; and partly by the dangerous arguments contained in the pamphlet. For Charpentier was an extreme apologist for the massacre. It was, in his view, a well-merited punishment for years of civil disobedience where secret sedition had been masked by the public pretext of religion; and Charpentier, like the Catholic writers, dwells on the royal clemency which had tolerated the Huguenots, allowed them to hold synods, and given them liberties without even demanding reciprocal benefits for Catholics in Germany or England. The peace had been violated not by the King but rather by ‘nostre propre vice’, and, though the majority of Protestants, were innocent, they had to suffer for the sedition of the Cause— extremists who stirred up dissension with inflammatory preaching and whose impiety was made manifest by their dreadful reading of ‘poetes lascifs et de Rabelais’. Those who supported the Cause execrated the Valois and were open enemies to France, intending to set up a new kingdom ‘en la barbe du Roy’. Naturally, this could not be tolerated indefinitely, especially since the Huguenot extremists not only satisfied their jaded palates with pornographic literature but also accumulated wealth to support unworthy people in magnificence. Charpentier especially notes the case of an impoverished Gascon, ‘un homme de neant et moindre’, who quickly became rich in the service of the Cause simply because he promised 37 Lb33.314–315. Lettre de Pierre Charpentier Jurisconsulte addresse´e a` Franc¸ois Portes Candiois par laquelle il monstre que les persecutions des Eglises de France sont advenues, non par faulte de ceux qui faisoient profession de la Religion, mais de ceux qui nourrissoient les factions, et conspirations, qu’on appelle la Cause (n.p, 1572). For bibliographical details, see Hauser, Les Sources, 247–8. On Charpentier and Portes, see also Kingdon, Myths, 112–18.

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to carry out any homicide they desired. There was a whole army of such ruffians, quick with their hands (‘prompts a` la main’) and ready to undertake any evil deed; and when Charpentier had asked what the Cause hoped to gain from such monsters, he was told simply ‘pour faire un beau coup’. Knowing that Charpentier intended to reveal their plots, they had attempted to assassinate him and he had, for a time, been frightened into silence. Under cover of religion the Cause sought war to destroy France itself: plotting to kill the King and preaching that even slight injuries should be avenged with blood and cruelty. Charpentier was opposed to all this. In his view Christians should live under the law; the Protestants should never oppose the King; and they should keep within the limits of the Edict of Pacification. Events had shown what happens when Christians act in a contrary fashion. The Huguenots have suffered for their sedition, and nobody feels pity because they got what they deserved. Persecution has come through our sins, says Charpentier, citing the words used by St Cyprian of the Christians persecuted by Decius. Consider the catalogue of Huguenot crimes. They had tried to create enmity between the King and his brother, the Duc d’Anjou; they had sowed calumnies against the King, Queen Mother, and the Council; and, when Charpentier had protested that it was ruinous to calumniate princes, he was told openly that the Cause intended to kill Charles. In times past, rulers such as Herod, Titus, and Licinius persecuted innocent Christians merely through false suspicions. What fate then must befall those who have openly plotted against the Catholics? It was terrible that innocents had suffered for the sins of the guilty but the Cause had been justly punished by the massacre. Even now their remnants, instead of begging forgiveness, were reforming themselves, like some serpent, to continue their mischiefs under their customary pretext of religion. The ancient Christians, when persecuted, had employed prayers, modesty, and patience, but the good shepherd of the Cause—who carries atheism engraved on his heart and Jesus Christ ‘au front’—does not think to imitate these holy exemplars, but is again trying to raise support from Germany, England, and Switzerland for further enterprises. And Charpentier concludes with a fervent wish that these extremists may be rejected by the greater number of Protestants who, with

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their faith purged of this contagion, might again make open profession of their beliefs.

the massacre as a premeditated stroke of genius The majority of Catholic apologists were of the view that Charles IX had been reluctant to countenance the massacre and only did so when years of Huguenot insurrection and duplicity were about to culminate in an assassination plot. There was, however, another school of thought which is hinted at in Jean-Antoine de Baı¨f ’s valedictory verses, Complainte sur le trespas du feu roy Charles IX, where the poet explained that—although the King had been a wonderful fellow, frank, open, and generous—he had known how to dissimulate, especially when dealing with two-faced enemies who would not let him behave normally.38 In other words Charles had contrived to deceive the deceivers. He had lured them into a trap, and then deliberately destroyed them. This was a view of the massacre accepted almost immediately, and with considerable enthusiasm, by several Italian commentators. A brief narrative, written at Lyon only a few days after the events and quickly published both at Rome and Florence, makes this position clear. It opens with an account of all that had happened in France to chastise this evil Huguenot generation, and declares it a true judgement of God. The whole affair began with the shooting of the Admiral; and the anonymous author tells how the prudent King had offered the injured Huguenot leader kind words and comfort while hiding his true intentions. The Admiral and other leaders were then killed; and the King subsequently addressed his parlement with ‘belle e ornate parole’, explaining 38 Lb33.371.a; Ye.1940. Jean-Antoine de Baı¨f, Complaincte sur le trespas du feu roy Charles IX (Paris: F. Morel, 1574), sigs. A.4v–B.1. ‘Comme de hauts discours capable, / Ainsi te montrois admirable / En responses: ferme a` parler: / Et tout ouvert et debonaire: / Toutefois en un grand affaire / Tu sc¸avois bien dissimuler. / Aussi ton regne enceint de troubles, / Par les cueurs de tes hommes doubles, / Sans foy, du vray bien e´garez, / Ne te permit d’une ame ouverte, / User de ta fac¸on aperte, / Vers des esprits tant bigarrez.’

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that the effusion of blood had been entirely according to his will, and that he had adopted this method because he had judged it impossible to proceed in any other way. There follows a general account of the massacre in various places throughout France, and the author notes the King’s alleged joy, which could ‘scarcely have been greater’.39 A similar point was made in another contemporary pamphlet issued at Rome. This praises Charles IX’s decision to use the marriage festivities at Paris to punish the Huguenot leaders for their assassination plot against him. The King, in order thoroughly to ensnare the Admiral, arranged that his enemy should have the greatest honour in all the jousts and tourneys, and it was during the festivities that there occurred the arquebus incident in which the Admiral was wounded. Charles, under the pretence of looking after Coligny’s interests and doing everything for his better security, in fact arranged that his own guards should have control of the house, the entrances to the street, and the square. When everything was ready, the Admiral was slain and hurled from his window and the people were raised in alarm and given licence to kill all the Huguenots. It was a great success and the author proudly records that—without a single Catholic casualty—five or six thousand Protestants had been slain and their houses ransacked, yielding infinite riches of gold, silver, and jewellery which had been pillaged from the churches. On the Tuesday the King claimed responsibility for the massacre. And the author hopes that, with God’s help, Charles’s actions might result in France being entirely freed from the Huguenot plague.40 The reductio ad absurdum of this view of the massacre as a premeditated masterstroke is to be found in a notorious discourse, 39 Lb33.427. Intiera relatione della morte dall’Ammiraglio & altri capi suoi complici. Con la mortalita degli Ugonoti, per ordine di sua Maesta Christianissima fatta in Parigi, Lione, & altri luoghi del Regno di Francia (Rome: gli Heredi di A. Blado, 1572), sigs. A.2, B.2. Another version of this text—Copia di una lettera venuta nuovamente da Lione. Nella quale si contiene il gran successo della morte del’Ammiraglio—was published in Florence but without the name of the printer (BL 9200.bbb.10). 40 Lb33.307. Ragguaglio degli Ordini, et Modi tenuti dalla Maiesta Christianissima nella distruttione della setta degli Ugonotti, Con la Morte dell’Ammiraglio, et altre particolarita non piu intese (Rome: gli Heredi di A. Blado, n.d.), sigs. A.2v–4.

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Lo stratagema di Carlo IX Re di Francia contro gli Ugonotti rebelli di Dio et suoi, written by Camillo Capilupi, a papal secretary, and printed (after a wide circulation in manuscript and many vicissitudes) early in 1574.41 The Capilupi were well known in their own time as dignitaries of the Church, diplomats, and men of letters: but their fame has survived principally in Camillo’s Lo stratagema and, to a lesser extent, in a volume of the collected Latin verse by five of the family. To the latter volume, Camillo and his brothers Alfonso and Ippolito contributed epigrams, odes, and other verse; while another brother, Laelio, and his nephew Julio added not only epigrams and the like but also the Vergilian centos upon which their own tenuous reputations have since rested.42 At the time of the massacre, Camillo had been in Rome with Pope Gregory XIII and was still there when the news reached the papal court on 3 September. Two days later Camillo wrote to his brother Alessandro, who was representing the Mantuan court at Madrid, telling him of the joy at Rome, where Te Deum laudamus had been sung. The deed was considered to be of the utmost 41 Camillo Capilupi, Lo stratagema di Carlo IX Re di Francia contro gli Ugonotti rebelli di Dio et suoi (Rome: gli Heredi di A. Blado, 1574). Later in 1574 another edition, accompanied by a French translation, was published by the Genevan printer Jacob Stoer. On the bilingual edition, see below, n. 50. Modern commentators have been misled by the fact that the dedicatory letter addressed by Camillo to his brother Alfonso is dated 18 Sept. 1572 in the Rome edition and 22 Oct. 1572 in the Genevan. However, the whole of the following year was spent trying to find a suitable printer. See Giovanni Battista Intra, ‘Di Camillo Capilupi e de’ suoi scritti’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 20 (1893), 693–735. See also Catalogo de’ codici manoscritti della famiglia Capilupi di Mantova illustrato dall’Abate Don Giovanni Andres (Mantua, 1797), 297–8 on manuscripts with autograph corrections. As well as the dating of the dedicatory letter, there are numerous differences between the two printed versions—but they do not affect the issue here. Between Apr. and June 1574, there are several references to Lo stratagema in The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, 57, 60, 70, 77–8. Languet was anxious to have ‘a copy or two’, but learns from Sidney that the book was not printed owing to objections at Rome by the French ambassador—‘the stupid Frenchman thought his master was being insulted instead of praised’. Languet does eventually receive the work and ponders on how the use of the word ‘stratagem’ has changed. Once it meant a ‘wise counsel’ used by a commander for the preservation of his own men or the overthrow of the enemy: ‘but now-a-days, after your Italian school, we give to vices the names of virtues, and are not ashamed to call falsehood, treachery and cruelty, by the names of wisdom and magnanimity’. 42 See Octave Delepierre, Tableau de la litte´rature du Centon (London, 1874–5).

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importance for Christendom and it was hoped that it would extinguish all suspicions (arising from the events in Flanders) which had existed between the kings of France and Spain. Another two days passed and Camillo, having obtained further details, again wrote to Alessandro. The news had been confirmed and thanks had been given to God for such a happy success. The Cardinal of Lorraine, ‘con viso molto allegro’, had imparted the good news to the other cardinals and had praised the King of France and the Queen Mother, whereupon many other cardinals spoke in similar fashion, dwelling upon the evil character of the Admiral and his followers, and expounding the evils they had inflicted upon France. Among those who spoke was a Frenchman whose comparison between the Queen Mother and Judith, and between the Admiral and Holofernes, gave his audience great pleasure. Subsequently the news was made public; solemn ceremonies were held; bonfires and festivals were arranged; and there was a procession and three masses praying that this beginning should have a happy end for God’s glory and for the increase of the Church. Camillo went on to report that more than 10,000 men and women, and twenty-seven principal leaders, had been killed. But what really impressed him was the skill with which the King collected together as many Huguenots as possible in order to exterminate them. He had been speaking to people in the know, and discovered how the King and his mother had deceived the Admiral over the marriage negotiations by forging the papal dispensation which had not really been forthcoming from the Holy See; how they had dissimulated the absence of the Duke of Guise, who had, in fact, been ready to re-enter Paris with his armed men at the appointed time; and how the Admiral had been duped by the armed guards allegedly positioned for his own better protection. In short, said Capilupi, all historians would have to write of the King’s deeds; and the court of Rome rejoiced at the recovery of France.43 So excited was Camillo by the massacre, that he determined to write a detailed account of the whole affair to celebrate Charles IX’s political brilliance. Few people had better access to the most intimate sources: he could read the reports of the nuncio, Salviati; 43 Intra, ‘Di Camillo Capilupi’, 703–5.

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he would know the notices sent from Paris to the Cardinal of Lorraine, with whom he was on familiar terms; he was able to discuss the affair at length with the ambassador sent from France to explain everything to the Pope; he had the reports of the courtiers of the Duke of Nevers, among whom were some of his Mantuan friends; and his own uncle, Ippolito, enjoyed the confidence of the most elevated personages at the papal court.44 He set to work with a will, and by 22 October 1572 his treatise was complete and, within a short while, was circulating freely at Rome and elsewhere. The work is addressed by the author to his brother, Alfonso, and in the dedicatory letter he explains how he is recording the deeds of Charles IX, who has restored France to its former health; and how he has taken great pains to establish the truth by collecting evidence from reliable witnesses. He will begin from the time of the last peace and will proceed in orderly fashion with everything that developed thereafter. The Huguenots, despite their having been defeated in four battles, still multiplied like a hydra’s head. Charles IX, seeing the impossibility of exterminating them in this way, and seeing his kingdom in ruins, decided to obtain by art what he had failed to gain by military force, and came up with an idea so profound and so much beyond his years that it could only have been inspired by God. In 1570, against all advice, Charles again gave peace to the rebels. The Huguenots were allowed to serve in office and follow their false religion; while their German troops were paid off by the King himself. Everything was sweetness and moderation, though the King was strengthened in his resolution to ensnare his enemies by the knowledge that they were themselves plotting against the lives of the entire blood royal in order to take over the kingdom. The proposal of a marriage between the King’s sister and Henri de Navarre gave Charles his opportunity to catch the Huguenots in their own toils, though there were two difficulties to be overcome. One was the reluctance of the Papacy to grant the necessary dispensation for marriage with a heretic despite constant assurances that everything was being done for the aggrandizement of the 44 Ibid. 706.

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Catholic faith, ‘as one would understand from the results’. The other difficulty was posed by the suspicions of the prospective bridegroom’s mother, a cunning lady, who refused to countenance festivities in a rabid Catholic stronghold such as Paris. However, Capilupi observes with engaging simplicity, it pleased God by His eternal providence and marvellous wisdom to offer an opportune remedy to both obstacles, for the Queen of Navarre died suddenly, leaving her son under the domination of the Admiral, who had been won over by Charles; and the Pope died, too. So God facilitated all things for the chastisement of the heretics. The King, assured by his theologians that there were good precedents for the requisite dispensation, now hoped for a more complaisant Pontiff and pushed ahead with the marriage plans, while, in the meantime, the Cardinal of Lorraine who was privy to the King’s scheme left for Rome in order not to arouse the jealousy of the Admiral, who continued to be beguiled with the King’s fair speeches. Indeed, the Huguenot leader thought Charles a mere pleasure-lover and quite without the subtlety to deceive an old man experienced in worldly affairs. So Coligny, entirely taken up with his own plots, pressed the King to join a Protestant league to aid William of Orange against Spain; and Charles, pretending to heed this suggestion, came to terms with the heretic powers. Naturally, says Capilupi, the King had no intention of waging war against Spain; but he played his role so well that he fooled not only the Huguenots but even true and loyal Catholics. The deception was exquisitely conceived and, to add a touch of verisimilitude, the Queen Mother pretended to discover and condemn the enterprise against Spain; while Charles so successfully pretended to be bitterly upset at this exposure that the Huguenots attributed his behaviour to weakness rather than artifice. Having asked the new Pope for the dispensation, the King despatched Montmorency to England because he feared lest the Marshal—who was an astute man and a councillor—might discover the design. He also set about raising an army under Filippo Strozzi, while convincing the Admiral that the force was for use against the King of Spain in the Low Countries. At the same time, Charles, by ‘a very beautiful stratagem’, pretended that his mother could not be swayed over war with Spain and that he himself could

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not trust Catholic leaders to fight a Catholic power, so that many Huguenot principals were persuaded to come to court to lend their weight to the King’s case. Similarly, the Admiral, seeing the King still doubtful about the enterprise, encouraged him with information about the numbers and disposition of his own forces. The marriage negotiations came to a head when news arrived of the crushing defeat of a Huguenot army under Genlis in the Low Countries. The Admiral was more insistent than ever that the marriage should be concluded; and the King himself could not imagine a better opportunity to dispatch ‘so many birds at one blow’. He pretended that neither the Queen Mother nor the bride would proceed without the papal dispensation and that he was, therefore, arranging for a letter to be forged (as though from his ambassador in Rome) to the effect that the Cardinal of Lorraine had elicited the dispensation which was on its way. Thus the marriage could take place before anyone was the wiser. The Admiral accepted the plan, while the King (who knew that he could not obtain the dispensation without disclosing his secret designs, and hoped that the end would justify his sin) decided to counterfeit the letter and presented it to his mother who, fully aware of the scheme, pretended to be convinced and thereby duped the brideto-be. The marriage accordingly took place on 18 August. The Admiral was again seduced when Charles feigned concern at the attitude of the Guises and wished to have arquebusiers in attendance. Coligny agreed, and the king arranged his men in various places throughout the city so that nobody could tell just how many there were at hand. It was at this time, says Capilupi, that the King discovered further details of the Admiral’s own plot to murder the royal family and to set up Conde´ as a puppet king to be removed when convenient. So Charles decided that the time had come to punish these diabolical schemes and had arranged for a certain ‘Morevel’ [Maurevert], a bravo very handy with the arquebus, to shoot the Admiral. This marksman had been employed once before for the same job, but Capilupi does not tell us how he slipped up. The fact of the matter, in Capilupi’s view, was that Coligny’s death had been reserved for an hour more propitious to Christendom and this hour was now almost at hand as Morevel, armed with an arquebus charged with three poisoned balls, was

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ensconced in a room overlooking the Louvre. Coligny appeared; Morevel fired; and the leader of the Huguenots—less a right thumb and a portion of elbow—fell to the ground, whence he was carried to his lodgings and placed in the care of his surgeons. Not unnaturally, the victim complained to the King who, evincing deep concern and under pretext of catching the culprit, closed the gates of Paris and raised the whole city in arms. Urging the Huguenots that they would be safer if concentrated together in one area, Charles persuaded them to lodge in the same quarter as their leader, ‘to ensnare them more easily so that not one should escape’. Coligny was well guarded by the King’s own men; Anjou and the Duke of Guise arranged to kill him during the following night; and the King, by a ‘singular artifice’, pretended to dismiss the Guises from Paris though, in fact, neither they nor their soldiers went outside the city. Charles now held a council of war; the trap was sprung; and, as Capilupi says, the King and his adherents took no rest throughout that night. The massacre is described in detail by Capilupi, who sees the hand of God in the fact that so many heretics were slain for the loss of only one Catholic. He notes, too, the extraordinary wealth revealed by the sacking of the Huguenots’ homes—all of it accumulated by their despoiling of churches during more than eleven years. The Admiral offered particularly significant booty for, apart from his hoard of treasure, the Catholics discovered a medal with his bust on one side and, on the other, the word extermine with the letters r.l.p., indicating ‘le Roy, Lorraine, Papaute´’. The massacre was carried on remorselessly because the King had made up his mind, ‘entirely to tear out this pernicious seed from his realm’; and, as the news spread to other cities throughout France, so did the killing. At Lyon, for example, things were managed so prudently that the Huguenots were captured without fuss—‘like poor sheep’—and put to death without exception. Capilupi reckons that about 25,000 had been slain altogether; describes both the public thanksgiving on Tuesday, 26 August, and the King’s explanation of the massacre to his parlement; and tells, with relish, how the common people flocked to see the Admiral’s remains ignominiously exhibited on the public gibbet at Montfaucon, and how his principal followers were cast onto the city’s dunghill.

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The Stratagema continues with the restoration of order in Paris, and the institution of normal legal processes not only against the few surviving Huguenots but also against those who had been slain. They were all declared rebels, deprived of office, and had their goods confiscated. Next Charles gave his attention to restoring friendly relations with the Papacy and Spain, who had both been deeply concerned by his feigned alliance with the Huguenots; and ambassadors were sent to explain everything in detail. Catholic forces triumphed in the Low Countries, and Capilupi is convinced that Charles IX had saved Christendom for, had Coligny’s evil design succeeded, both France and Flanders would have fallen prey to the heretics. As it turned out, inspired by God, Charles had delivered Spain from imminent peril and had even saved Italy from the Turkish threat by uniting Christendom; while, within his own realm, he could now concentrate upon reaffirming Catholicism as the only religion. France has been purged of its disorders by strong medicine. One would think that, after all this, Capilupi had sufficiently stressed that the entire massacre had been premeditated: but he was so anxious that his readers should miss nothing of the plot’s subtleties that he ended his work with an affirmation that the greatness of the deed must be carefully weighed in order to appreciate fully the virtu` of the King, his mother and councillors in having taken a ‘noble and generous’ course of action, their dexterity in managing it, their artifice in dissimulating it, their prudence in keeping it secret, and finally their boldness and courage in carrying it out. Capilupi was especially concerned that people might believe reports that the massacre had not been premeditated at all! It was even being alleged that it had been done on the spur of the moment under pressure of circumstances, and that the plan had been merely to kill the Admiral rather than to have a general massacre of the Huguenots. All these rumours were repudiated by Capilupi, who offered detailed evidence to justify his confidence in the King’s cunning.45 Indeed, he protests, if he were to give every 45 The most important of Capilupi’s proofs were: (1) the report of Cardinal Sainte-Croix to Pius V, more than four years previously, that the King and Queen

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proof that the massacre had been premeditated, he would merely bore the reader. Nevertheless, the ruse could not be passed over, for its equal in subtlety, acuity, and wit may not be found in all the histories ancient or modern. This is really the climax of the Stratagema, though Capilupi ends anticlimactically and inconsistently with ‘proofs’ that God had lent a hand in the success of the plot. These are anticlimactic because he has already established his principal point concerning premeditation, and inconsistent because, in order to establish God’s involvement, he has to stress that the King’s design could never have been kept secret without Divine intervention. After all, says Capilupi, the King himself nearly gave the whole game away by inadvertent references to the coming massacre: but luckily God stopped the Huguenots’ ears, just as he blinded their eyes when the King was organizing his troops for the kill. Charles Le´nient, the nineteenth-century historian, writing of Capilupi, characterized him as a ‘naive admirer of Machiavelli’, and describes the Stratagema as the ‘innocent panegyric of perjury, assassination and treachery, without restriction, without false shame; the imperturbable calm of immorality erected into a system; in short, the most crushing witness against the House of Valois issuing from the hand of a friend’.46 Le´nient’s characterization of the book is exact: but there is absolutely no evidence for his first assumption. We do not know whether or not Capilupi had ever read Machiavelli let alone admired him; and there is nothing in the Stratagema to suggest any Machiavellian learning on the part of its author. It is, of course—in its enthusiastic dwelling on premeditated political homicide, and on the efficacy of a combination of Mother wished to trap the Admiral and his adherents, and execute on them ‘a carnage and butchery memorable for ever’; (2) letters from the Queen Mother to the same Pope, assuring him that the King wished to exterminate the Huguenots but that his method could not be communicated to others; (3) the fact that she had revealed her intentions to the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Correro—as Capilupi had himself read in Correro’s report to the Senate; (4) the King and his mother had asked for special prayers to be said for the success of a great design— revealing not so much their piety but rather that they had long entertained the scheme; (5) the questions asked by the Cardinal of Lorraine, when he heard of the massacre, showed that he already knew all about it. 46 Charles Le´nient, La Satire en France ou la litte´rature militante au xvie sie`cle (Paris, 1866), 318.

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fraud and force—reminiscent of Machiavelli’s treatment of Cesare Borgia’s trapping and murdering of his captains at Sinigaglia. But there is no reason to suppose that this provided a model for Capilupi, whose detailed narrative seems to express a purely personal glee and malice. None the less, the book is valuable in providing part of the context within which anti-Machiavellism was soon to develop. So, too, is the early history of its distribution and publication.47 According to Capilupi’s own testimony, his book was so enthusiastically received that more than 300 manuscript copies were hastily transcribed and circulated. Indeed, the labour of preparing sufficient texts to meet the demand resulted in the author’s friends urging him to have it printed and, since publication in Rome might have seemed too obviously partisan, it was deemed better to seek licence for printing in a free republic. A copy was, accordingly, carried by a certain Giulio Romano to Venice in the hope that the Senate would countenance publication by Gabriel Giolito. However, Capilupi had reckoned without the meticulousness of the Venetian Signoria, who were by no means as enthusiastic about the massacre as were the Romans. In any case, since the French court was strenuously arguing that the whole affair had been an urgent response to a dire situation, the Venetians suggested that the content of Capilupi’s work (and even its title) seemed prejudicial to the French royal family. Nor would they permit citation from Correro’s reports, for their ambassadorial relazioni must remain secret. Licence to publish was, therefore, refused.48 Giulio Romano did not know what to do, despite assurances from Capilupi, who wrote on 24 March 1573 that the work had been seen by many significant persons such as the Cardinal of Lorraine, the French ambassador, and, indeed, several members of the French court including the Duke of Nevers, who had not only been delighted with the text but had also supplied fresh 47 For what follows, on Capilupi’s publication problems, see Intra, ‘Di Camillo Capilupi’, 706–18. 48 As a matter of fact, the relazione read to the Venetian Senate on 11 Nov. 1572 already reported that the Paris wedding was a deliberate trap set for Coligny and the Huguenots. See Eugenio Alberi, Relazione degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato, 1st ser., iv. 274–310.

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material. Nobody, says Capilupi, had found fault with his title and he could not understand why the Venetians found it displeasing— since the whole work celebrated a deed undertaken for the glory of God. It is true, he adds, that he had not been aware of the prohibition concerning Correro’s report but, as for the information cited from it, he had heard the same story elsewhere and had merely named Correro ‘to give more authority to my writing’. He would never have published such a matter during the course of negotiations but surely, since the deed was now accomplished, it was necessary to make everything known lest it be defrauded of honour; and, in short, he finds the Venetian Senate incomprehensible. Still the Signoria remained unmoved. They did not want trouble, and Capilupi’s book looked like nothing else. It could stir up passions; give offence to the King of France; and would certainly anger the Protestant nations with whom Venice had to deal. And so the matter dragged on until 28 September 1573, when the rejected author decided to make one more appeal. This time he wrote a long and earnest letter directly to the Signoria: protesting that he wished to have his book printed not for any personal desire of fame, but simply because it was being demanded by so many people that he could not cope with the labour. Only the Venetians had found fault; and, Capilupi added plaintively, if he could not prevail upon them to give licence for printing, at least they might return his manuscript. The Venetians remained adamant. Whether or not they returned Capilupi’s script, they certainly would not publish it and, in the end, it was issued by Blado at Rome in 1574 at the instigation of Gianfrancesco Ferrari, a poeticule hanger-on of the Capilupi, who argued that the text merited publication to ensure that the French King’s glorious achievement should not be robbed of due honour and that the efforts of the worthy author should not remain buried in oblivion.49 Later in the same year, a Huguenot had a parallel—though not identical—desire to give Capilupi’s masterpiece the widest possible circulation, and a bilingual text 49 Lo stratagema (Rome, 1574), sigs. A.ii, D.iiv: Ferrari’s introductory letter ‘Alli cortesi lettori’ and his concluding poem in praise of Camillo.

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was published by Jacob Stoer at Geneva for the edification of Protestant Europe.50 The Stratagema was left largely to condemn itself, but a subtle Avertissement was provided to nudge readers in the right direction. Passions, said the author, had led many to exceed the bounds of truth both in condemning and excusing the massacre. He was, therefore, publishing Capilupi’s text both in its original language and in French translation—for its author was well known, and ‘all Rome is witness to this writing’ which is in the hands of anybody who desired it. It had even been on the point of publication when the Cardinal of Lorraine, originally an enthusiastic admirer, had decided to prevent its appearance. Its author’s intention was notorious and conforms to the habits of his nation and religion in holding that there is no more laudable virtue than skilful dissimulation, especially when concealing a matter of revenge. As for the accuracy of Capilupi’s history? Well, is there any place on earth where the secrets of this tragedy were better known than in Rome? It was Divine Providence that there should exist so irreproachable a witness of an act which had been so resolutely hidden. Capilupi’s only falsehood concerns the Huguenot conspiracy which had been invented after the massacre to provide a specious justification; and the editor refers sarcastically to Pibrac’s ‘belle epistre’ and to other Catholic apologists, each of whom tells a different story. This falsehood apart, the Stratagema lays bare the dreadful truth of the Saint Bartholomew. Let the reader therefore receive this description of the lamentable tragedy and thereby recognize just what Satan can achieve when he puts his agents into action. 50 The French translation has a separate title page, Le stratageme, ou la ruse de Charles IX, Roy de France, contre les Huguenots rebelles a` Dieu et a` luy. Escrit par le Seigneur Camille Capilupi, et envoye´ de Rome au Seigneur Alphonse Capilupi. Traduit en Franc¸ois de la copie Italienne (Geneva: Jacob Stoer, 1574). On this edition, see Paul Chaix, Alain Dufour, and Gustave Moeckli, Les Livres imprime´s a` Gene`ve de 1500 a` 1600, 2nd edn. (Geneva, 1966), 80. The French text was reprinted in Cimber and Danjou, Archives curieuses, 1st ser., vii. 401–71: but Cimber does not include the description of the celebrations at Rome which was appended to the Stoer edition (pp. 84–7 of the Italian text and pp. 109–14 of the French). Stoer, it is worth noting, was also the printer responsible for the first Latin edition of Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel in 1577—see Chaix, Dufour, and Moeckli, 89.

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Despite the utility to the Huguenot cause of views such as Capilupi’s, at least one French Catholic writer was prepared not only to accept that the massacre had been premeditated, and that it was admirable for that very reason, but also to justify at considerable length Charles IX’s right to use every kind of weapon, including fraud, against his enemies. Arnaud Sorbin, preacher to Charles IX and subsequently to Henri III and Henri IV, was among the most violently partisan royalists in an age of violent polemic. It was he who pronounced the funeral oration for Charles IX at Notre Dame on 22 July 1574; he who wrote a circumstantial treatise on the King’s death; and it was he who quickly published a eulogistic biography of his late master.51 In this last work, Sorbin suggests that the massacre had been premeditated in the service of God and had been carried out with such prudence that everyone admired the way in which the King’s ‘froidure exterieure’ had concealed a heart so full of ardour. Indeed, says Sorbin, the whole thing was so thoroughly dissimulated that the King himself had remarked that his very hat had not known what he was going to do.52 More important than this brief history is Sorbin’s Le vray Resveille-matin, which comprises a full-length justification—in answer to the Huguenot Reveille-matin—of the methods employed by Charles IX.53 In this work (which is prefaced significantly by a Hymne a` la louenge de saint Barthelemy, Apostre de Jesus Christ) Sorbin argues that kings, when constrained by the necessity of conserving their states, must use the authority vested in them by God to chastise and even to slay rebels. The foundation of Huguenot malice, he says, is the justice executed on Saint Bartholomew’s 51 Arnaud Sorbin, Histoire contenant un abrege´ de la vie, moeurs et vertus du roy Charles IX (Paris: G. Chaudiere, 1574). 52 Ibid., fos. 37v–38. Cf. Machiavelli, Arte della guerra, Lib. VI (Mazzoni and Casella, p. 348b), who refers to Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius as saying that if his shirt knew what he was going to do the next day he would burn it. This story about Metellus is from Frontinus, Stratagems, I. i. 12; and it also appears in Valerius Maximus, VII. iv. 5. 53 Arnaud Sorbin, Le vray Resveille-matin pour la deffense de la majeste´ de Charles IX (n.p., 1574). Further references are given in the text. A second edition was published at Paris by G. Chaudiere in the following year under the title, Le vray Resveille-matin des calvinistes et publicains franc¸ois, ou` est amplement discouru de l’auctorite´ des princes et du devoir des subjects. For the original Huguenot pamphlet, see below, pp. 279–80.

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Day and he has, therefore, devoted the third book of his Vray Resveille-matin to discovering who is permitted to punish malefactors by subtlety and craft; who are the fitting victims of such chastisement; and when such deeds should take place. The basic issue is this: when force will not achieve one’s object, may ‘l’astuce et la cautele’ have their place? Sorbin refers to Lysander’s famous dictum that one may use the garb of the fox when that of the lion will not suffice: but, since such a profane source is insufficient, the Word of God itself is cited to show that, when defending the state, legitimate authority may use every kind of trick to punish its enemies (fos. 68v–72v). Sorbin stresses, against the Huguenots, that it is one thing to resist a ‘tyran invadeur’ and quite another to rebel against ‘le Prince possesseur’; and he continues with what the ancient jurisconsults called Bonum dolum—a ‘good fraud’—which magistrates could use against outlaws and with even greater reason against ‘les perturbateurs du repos public’. Legitimate authority, in a just cause, may use deceits as well as open war, and Sorbin declares that while the Huguenots have no such authority over the King, the latter certainly does have that authority over the Huguenots. It is the King’s responsibility to thwart extremists and hold his subjects in obedience, and all means to this end are permissible. Sorbin now raises the crucial question. How far should faith be kept with one’s enemies? It was on this point that the author of the Reveille-matin and other Huguenots based their attacks on Charles IX who, they alleged, had broken the treaties he had made with their leaders. But for Sorbin there is no duty whatever for superior powers to keep faith with heretics. There is no ‘proportion’ between a King and his subjects, and agreements cannot be made where the terms are prejudicial to God, the Church, or to the public utility, or where they have been exacted by force of arms. Furthermore, adds Sorbin, the heretics have practised every kind of deceit, first upon Charles IX and now upon Henri III, so that all agreements with them have been nullified. They misrepresent the late King and his mother as cruel, bloody, and perfidious tyrants but, in fact, the Huguenots themselves, by their own crimes and treason, merited punishment whether inflicted openly or by treachery. In any case, when used by authority, such deceit is

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better described as prudence. The Huguenots’ deeds cried out for vengeance and Charles IX’s handling of the situation is recognized by Catholics and true Frenchmen as wisdom, prudence, true magnanimity, and mercy. No unbiased judge could fail to appreciate the King’s prudence in bringing so holy an enterprise to completion; and posterity would judge whether or not the King had a just cause (fos. 77v–79). Sorbin continues with a telling comparison between the Huguenots’ use of the Scriptures as applied to themselves or to their enemies and, goaded beyond endurance by their sanctimonious self-righteousness, he is here at his most effective. When they invade the King’s lands and cities, they claim to be chastising the Amorites, Jebusites, and Canaanites: when the King acts against them, he and his supporters are labelled Pharoahs, Holofernes, or Nebuchadnezzars. When they violate churches, they are despoiling Egypt: if the Catholics, on the King’s authority, seize Huguenot property, they cry out against the sacrilegious robbers of the goods of the children of God. Their incests are marriages; while Catholic marriages are termed ‘les plus desbordez et lubriques du monde’. They never see themselves as rebels when they act against the King: though the King and his party are called rebels for punishing them. Their murders are works of mercy: but even Catholics’ good deeds are called impieties. They are permitted to wage treacherous war against the King; while if he, using the authority vested in him by God, ventures to censure them, he is abused as a tyrant (fo. 79v). So Sorbin returns to his main question—may legitimate rulers deceive rebels?—and his answer is unequivocal. The Huguenots have plainly revealed their intention to create a state within a state and Charles was fully justified in executing ‘prudemment’ that justice which he could not effect openly without putting his faithful servants and his state into grave peril (fo. 106v). Sorbin’s exposure of the tawdriness of the Huguenot position is marked by a certain shrewdness so that it comes as something of a shock to find that his final section—concerned principally with the duties of a king towards his subjects and with the qualities of a good prince—is conventional and intellectually flabby. He draws upon Agapetus’ precepts for the Emperor Justinian and then moves on to Aristeas’s answers to Ptolomaeus Philadelphus’

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seventy-two questions.54 We are back to the Speculum principis tradition to such an extent that, when Sorbin discusses the way in which princes should revere the truth which is loved by God, he writes as follows: If Machiavelli and his disciples (how far Christians, I know not) had weighed this question and its answer they would, with difficulty, have praised lies, dissimulations, and deceits, and other such tricks whereby they try to poison the generous spirits of good princes, to make them degenerate both from their nature and from the path of good and virtuous princes such as Ptolemy. But God will destroy the false and the liars, with all their lies and deceits.55

A sentiment such as this comes as no surprise within the context of traditional princely morality. But it is extraordinary that this royalist preacher, who so eloquently justifies both the deception and the violence of the Saint Bartholomew massacre, should so loosely associate the name of Machiavelli with political dissimulation which, only at this point in his argument, he wholly deplores. At the same time, the superficiality of this reference highlights the fact that the pro-massacre polemicists (even Sorbin himself ) did not, in fact, do what modern historians would expect them to have done. Despite the constant emphasis on the rebels’ bloody vengefulness, on their habitual combination of ‘force and fraud’, on their use of religion as an instrument of policy, and on their simulation of virtue as a cloak for the subversion of the state—all moral and political crimes which would eventually come to be labelled Machiavellian—there was virtually no systematic association between Machiavelli and Huguenot hypocrisy.56 Yet it was this polemic 54 Agapetus’ De officio regis ad Iustinianum Caesarem was composed in 527 and was first published in 1509. The pseudo-epigraphic letter attributed to Aristeas, De interpretatione septuagintaduorum interpretum, was first published in 1474. 55 Le vray Resveille-matin, fos. 128v–129r: ‘Si Macchiavel, et ses sectateurs (je ne sc¸ay combien Chrestiens) avoient pese´ ceste question, et sa response, malaise´ement pourroient ils louer les mensonges, dissimulations et feintises, et autres semblables tours, dont ils taschent d’empoissoner les ames genereuses des bons Princes, pour les faire degenerer, et de leur naturel, et de la trace des bons et vertueux Princes comme estoit Ptolome´e. Or Dieu ruinera les faux et mensongers avec tous leurs mensonges, et toutes leurs feintises.’ 56 One Italian, Tomasso Sassetti, commenting on the Huguenots shortly before the massacre, even went so far as to claim that the Admiral and his followers had

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which encouraged Innocent Gentillet to see the figure of Machiavelli standing at the elbows both of the perpetrators of the massacre and of their apologists. And it was Innocent Gentillet who gave form and substance to the bogeyman who was soon to haunt popular imagination and literature.57 not studied Machiavelli properly, for they should have known that injuries done to the ‘grandi’ are never forgotten and are always avenged at the earliest opportunity—an allusion to Il Principe, 7. Ludovico da Diaceto, the Florentine banker with whom Sassetti was travelling, believed that the Huguenots were too powerful for this to happen: but the massacre soon came about. See John Tedeschi, ‘Tomasso Sassetti’s Account of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’, in Alfred Soman (ed.), The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew: Reappraisals and Documents (The Hague, 1974), 105, 149. 57 Revisionist historians have sought to belittle Gentillet’s importance in the history of Machiavellism. I believe that the revisionist view needs revising and will attempt this task in the next chapter.

9 Innocent Gentillet and Machiavelli’s ‘Maximes tyranniques’ This king for a baite and allurement abused the mariage of his owne sister, and in a manner besprinkled hir wedding robe with blood. Which dishonour and indignitie no posteritie of al ages can forget.1

Posterity was to be allowed no lapse of memory. Indeed, the literary effusions of the Huguenots, who hastened to challenge the massacre and its defenders, have fared far better with the passage of time than those of their adversaries: though not through any intrinsic superiority. Intellectually as well as physically, opponents of the Saint Bartholomew had been driven on the defensive by pre-emptive accusations of duplicity, violence, and conspiracy; and much of their energy was consumed in unconvincing protestations of innocence. Nevertheless, the savage glee and pride in premeditated atrocity expressed by many Catholic pamphleteers gave an opening for hitting back: an opportunity most fully exploited by Innocent Gentillet, though he was not the only Huguenot to perceive some connection between Italian political vice and advice (especially as exemplified by Machiavelli), the Florentine Queen Mother, and the bloody practices of a degenerate court. On the other hand it is important not to fall into the trap whereby a few passing references make denunciation of Machiavelli ‘current’ in France at this time.2 Just how current was ‘current’? 1 A true and plaine report of the furious outrages of Fraunce (1573), p. lxviii. This text is an English translation of the De furoribus Gallicis. See below, n. 3. 2 Discours contre Machiavel: A New Edition of the Original French Text with Selected Variant Readings, ed. A. D’Andrea and Pamela Stewart (Florence, 1974), p. xiv n. 9. Does one example make an idea current? Already in 1566, Bodin had

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absences and appearances Machiavelli does not, for example, appear in the De furoribus Gallicis. This work, published under the name of Ernestus Varamundus but now generally recognized as the work of Franc¸ois Hotman, was issued within three or four months of the Saint Bartholomew, and was the first and perhaps most striking of the anti-massacre pamphlets.3 It was quickly translated into French, German, and English (A True and Plaine Report), and was used by later writers, who found it a storehouse of valuable polemic. Its author felt that the recent atrocities in France were a disgrace to the nation, and might be better obliterated from human memory were it not for the fact that court flatterers and certain hired rascals had been setting forth lies as truth and scattering little books in all directions. He would, therefore, describe exactly what had happened from his own experience and from eyewitness reports. The history of France from 1561 is briefly sketched in, stressing the evil roles played by the Guises and by Catherine de’ Medici. The marriage between Henri de Navarre and the King’s sister was supposed to inaugurate a new age of peace; but it was, instead, the occasion for bloodshed and cruelty covered with a veil of hypocrisy. After Coligny had been wounded by the arquebus shot, the King had proposed to preserve him ‘as the ball of his eye’ (p. xlviii). In fact, the Admiral was butchered, and his death was the signal for a general massacre when every street in Paris was ‘strawed with human carcases’ (p. lix). The De furoribus is especially severe on the travesty of justice which ensued. Captured Huguenots were condemned by picked judges and publicly executed. Cavaignes and Briquemaut were tortured before being condemned by a ‘shadowed form of law’. A straw figure of the Admiral was hanged with them ‘after a written that Machiavelli’s sayings were on everybody’s lips. But he does not suggest that they are being denounced. The implication is rather to the contrary. For the passage, see below, n. 50. 3 Lb33 :311: De furoribus Gallicis, horrenda et indigna amirallij Castillionei, nobilium atque illustrium virorum caede . . . vera et simplex narratio ([Basle], 1573). On the question of authorship and editions, see Hauser, Sources, iii. 248–9; Kingdon, Myths, 15–16, 118–19.

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preposterous order of lawe’ whereby he was first slain and then tried (pp. lxxvii–lxxxi). Fugitives, lured by promises of pardon, were promptly imprisoned, tortured, and put to death. The author is explicit in his condemnation of the court, and says that the whole outrage was thought by many to have been the fruit of the ‘cursed life’ of the courtiers whose whoremongering, ‘loose lewdnesse’, blasphemy, and swearing had spread from the King downwards to infect every level of society. Life at court was marked by such sexual licence that it was scarcely ‘convenient for noble yong Ladies chastitie’. And if there come any pandor or bawde oute of Italie, or any Scholemaster of shameful and filthie lust, he winneth in short time marvelous favour and credit. And such a multitude is there begonne to be of Italians, commonly throughout all Fraunce, specially in the court, since the administration of the realme was committed to the Queene mother, that many doe commonly call it Fraunce-Italian, and some terme it a Colonie, and some a common sincke of Italie. (p. xxxix)

There are many telling thrusts at the Italians. Why, for example, did the Queen of Navarre die so opportunely during the tortuous marriage negotiations? Was she murdered? The autopsy could find no evidence, but it was later revealed that she had been poisoned with a ‘venomed smell of a pair of perfumed gloves, dressed by one Renat the Kings Apothicarie, an Italian’. The venom was so subtle that it could not be detected by the physicians ‘which did not open the head nor loked into the brayne’ (p. xxxv).4 And why was the worst massacre at Lyon? The author does not tell us, but leaves us to draw our own inference from his story that, when the corpses were piled up, the people of Lyon, ‘specially the Italians, of whom by reason of the marte there is great store in the town, satisfied their eyes a while, and did such spites as they could to these heaps of carcases, and so exercised their cruelty not upon the living only, 4 I wonder whether this report inspired Wood—physician to Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury—in his attempt on the life of his master. Encouraged by the Earl’s brother Edward, Wood tried to eliminate the Earl by presenting him with a pair of poisoned gloves. The incompetent physician was sentenced to imprisonment and the loss of his ears, as ‘a most palpable Machivilian’. See John Hawarde, Les reportes del cases in camera stellata, 1593–1609, ed. W. P. Baildon (1894), 13–19.

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but also upon the dead’ (p. lxxxiv).5 Similarly, it had to be a ‘certain Italian of Gonzagues band’ who cut off the Admiral’s head and sent it, ‘preserved with spices to Rome to the Pope and the Cardinal of Lorraine’ (p. lvii). Yes indeed! For the author of the De furoribus Gallicis, the Italians were up to every fiendish trick though not, apparently, under instructions from Machiavelli. Even the Italians are absent from Pierre Burin’s interesting reply to Pibrac: the Response a une Epistre, commenceant, Seigneur Eluide.6 Burin claims to be a zealous Catholic who cannot but condemn the way in which the enemies of his faith have been oppressed, and the way in which these murders have been publicly defended. God must surely take vengeance for such horrible carnage? Burin admits that, in schools, in order to practise eloquence, youngsters are encouraged to attempt such paradoxical tasks as to write in praise of folly; but he can scarcely credit that anyone would defend the bestial cruelty which has dishonoured France, or seriously claim that it is condoned by worthy and virtuous men. One rhetorical figure especially angers Burin. Pibrac had said that in the massacre ‘some’ committed acts worthy of reprehension. This is ‘Appetissement’ (Meiosis), for Pibrac should more properly have written that the very devils of hell had broken their chains and committed ‘par sanglante malice des maux innumerables dignes de toutes les peines infernales’. Burin fears that he may himself fall into the same fallacy, because there are no words sufficient to express the horror of these inhuman deeds. He further accuses Pibrac of employing this figure from the very outset for, by admitting and condemning part of the evil, he had prepared the way to argue that all the rest was not evil at all, and condones it by referring to a supposed Huguenot conspiracy revealed by three anonymous informers. But what real evidence was there for such a conspiracy, and how would it have operated? Who were these informers, and 5 Cf. Lb33 :325, Discours du massacre de ceux de la R.P.R. fait a` Lyon par les Catholiques le 28 aoust 1572 et jours suivans (n.p., 1574), for similar remarks concerning the Italians. Also common to the two texts is the story of the apothecaries who rendered down the human fat for medicines. 6 Lb33 :324: Response a une Epistre, commenceant, Seigneur Eluide, ou est traitte´ des massacres faits en France, en l’an M.D.LXII. Par Pierre Burin, a` Messire Guillaume Papon (Basle: M. Cousin, 1574). For Pibrac’s original text, see above, pp. 240–3.

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why were they not named? Burin can save Pibrac the trouble. One was called ‘M. de Chimaire’, another ‘M. Hippocentaure’, and the last ‘M. Ventivole’. And why not a fourth—‘M. de Nugivende’. As for the conspiracy itself: who was supposed to have organized it? Was it the Admiral lying in bed with both hands crippled by the arquebus shot? Were the informers rewarded? Pibrac does not tell us: ‘a` delateurs de vent payement de fume´e’. The whole story is rubbish, and yet it is alleged as the reason why the kingdom flowed with rivers of blood: ‘sur meschant fondement, meschant edifice’. There never had been a Huguenot conspiracy until after the dreadful event, for it had been invented to palliate the most cruel massacre since the creation of the world. Burin concludes by taking up two fundamental issues raised by Pibrac’s defence of the massacre: and they are, I believe, two of the truly fundamental issues in the entire controversy. Pibrac had said that, as a result of the massacre, the kingdom had never been so united—as though, writes Burin in astonishment, massacres are desirable. Moreover, Pibrac maintained that necessity had demanded summary executions: but it could never be right to execute men without due process or without even giving them a hearing; and, in any case, how could such arguments justify the wholesale slaughter of people by the thousand?7 Another prompt riposte to a pro-massacre text was Franc¸ois Portes’s reply to Pierre Charpentier.8 This, too, was without Italophobia, though it did include one of Machiavelli’s cherished appearances. Portes was bursting with wrath, and he precedes and punctuates his refutation with a violent personal attack on the renegade Protestant. He does not accuse Charpentier of having bad breath or body odour, but gives the impression that he might have done so had he thought of it. Charpentier’s demerits are legion: he has incurred bad debts; behaved scurvily to his servants; ill-treated his wife; abandoned his faith; betrayed his co-religionists for lucre; shown himself to be an ignorant sot; and deliberately 7 Ibid. 10, 21, 26, 34, 41–3. 8 Lb33 :316: Ad Petri Carpentarii causidici virulentam epistolam, responsio Francisci Porti, Cretensis, pro causariorum quos vocat innocentia (n.p., 1573); French trans. Response de Franc¸ois Portus Candiot, aux lettres diffamatoires de Pierre Carpentier Advocat, pour l’innocence des fideles serviteurs de Dieu (n.p., 1574).

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falsified historical sources.9 His badly written letter is nothing but a malicious invective against good, innocent people; while his detailed account of the Cause—a vast and complex Huguenot conspiracy—is shown to be a tissue of lies invented to justify the massacre. Portes also elaborates on two other major issues: the massacre of Christians by the emperors, with special reference to Charpentier’s misinterpretation of St Cyprian’s comments on Decius; and Charpentier’s calumnies against Geneva as a sink of sedition and vice. Portes notes with pride that, far from encouraging a reading of poets ‘lascifs’ and the scabrous works of Rabelais, Calvin had expressly condemned them publicly both in speech and in writing.10 What about the ‘current’ denunciations of Machiavelli? Strangely, he is merely mentioned en passant during a discussion of the importance of religion to princes. Once people have conceived a bad opinion of their ruler’s religion, they will obey him only under constraint, and will frequently fail him completely. This is a ‘belle reigle de Diocletian’ which Charpentier has sung in the ears of kings who consider religion to be nothing more than a certain ‘police exterieure’, holding men under some obligation. It is thus that the ‘meschant Florentin Machiavel’ fashions his prince. All this, says Portes, is absurd since we are talking about the true religion; and can there be anything more impious than following a leader who is himself on the wrong path?11 Exit Machiavelli. That is scarcely a reference to feast upon: but there is even less sustenance elsewhere. The Discours du massacre . . . a` Lyon, for example, repeats the atrocity stories of the De furoribus—the choicest corpses are rendered down for their fat, while insults are heaped upon the dead—and in all this the Italians are, once again, especially blameworthy. But Machiavelli is not mentioned.12 9 Portes might have added yet another crime to Charpentier’s tally. According to De Thou, Charpentier was an enemy of Ramus and had, in fact, been responsible for Ramus’s murder. See Jacques-Auguste De Thou, Histoire universelle, vi. 409–10. For other, more recondite, examples of Charpentier’s dirty work, see Thorndike, History of Magic, v. 556; vi. 450. 10 Response de Franc¸ois Portus, 51–63. 11 Ibid. 29. 12 Discours du massacre de ceux de la R.P.R. See esp. pp. 44–5.

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Le siege de Danfronc vituperates Catherine de’ Medici, who so loves virtue that she persecutes it even in her own children. The author explodes at the way in which Montgommery was sacrificed simply at the command of a woman—not merely foreign, but Italian! Yet he, too, does not appear to have heard of Machiavelli.13 Two volumes of verse by various hands—recording their authors’ disgust at the murder of the Admiral, the massacres, the iniquitous Florentine Queen Mother, and the foreigners who were polluting France14—include an inspired anagram on carolus maximilianus rex franciae which becomes carnifex maximus larva asinocleri (‘greatest executioner, mask of the assinine clergy’) but offer nothing for the collector of Machiavelliana.15 Nor do two well-known works, sometimes attributed to Wolfgang Prisbach and Joachim Camerarius, written in response to the defenders of the Saint Bartholomew.16 And what of the famous Discours merveilleux de la vie . . . de Catherine de Medicis? This could scarcely be more rabidly antagonistic to Italians in general, to Florentines in particular, and to Catherine most of all.17 She is up to every kind of 13 Lb33 :368: Le siege de Danfronc, avec les occasions d’icellui, et de la captivite´ de tres-vertueux, et magnanime seigneur Gabriel, Conte de Montgommeri. Ensemble la mort d’icellui (n.p., 1574). See esp. 27–9. 14 Lb33 :318b: Illustrium aliquot Germanorum carminum liber, de immanissima christianorum laniena ab impius . . . Galliae tyrannis (Vilna, 1573); and Lb33 :336a: Epicedia illustri heroi Gaspari Colignio, Colignii comiti, Castilionis domino, magno Galliarum thalassiarchae . . . variis linguis a doctis piisque poetis decantata (Geneva, 1573). 15 Illustrium . . . carminum liber, 39. The anagram is not strictly translatable but it combines the words great executioner with spectre (or mask) of asinine clergy. 16 Lb33 :321: Wolffgang Prisbach, Responsio ad orationem habitam nuper in Concilio Helvetiorum, pro defensione caedium et latrociniorum quae in Gallia commissa sunt (La Rochelle, 1573) is a reply to an oration delivered by Pomponne de Bellie`vre, French ambassador to the Swiss, in defence of the massacres, and is sometimes attributed to The´odore de Be`ze. Lb33 :322: Joachim Camerarius the Elder, Ornatissimi cujusdam viri de rebus Gallicis, ad Stanislaus Elvidium epistola, et ad hunc de iisdem rebus gallicis responsio (Paris: F. Morel, 1573). On these two pamphlets see Kingdon, Myths, 93–4, 110–11. 17 Discours merveilleux de la vie, actions et deportemens de Catherine de Medecis, Reyne mere (n.p., 1575). This pamphlet, like so many other similar works published anonymously at this period, has been attributed to a variety of authors. Until recently the leading contender has been Henri Estienne, whose authorship was accepted by Kingdon, Myths, 255–6. Cf. Estienne’s Apologie pour Herodote (Geneva, 1566), which was already bitterly anti-Italian and brought its author

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deceit, violence, and cruelty; and she was responsible for the massacre at Paris, though she has attempted to pass the blame on to others whom she manipulates as executors of her vengeance.18 This was a trick learnt from her ‘Marchiavelli’ (sic): but seemingly the only one, since the rest of this frothing catalogue of Florentine iniquities (which makes extensive use of Guicciardini as a source for anti-Medici polemic) does not mention the ‘current’ villain; while the interpolation of a parenthetical allusion to him in the second and third French editions of the Discours merveilleux in 1576 and 1578 serves only to emphasize his absence from the original text.19 I do not wish to labour the point, but Portes has an apposite methodological caution for all historians of ideas when he chastises Charpentier’s ignorance of the very authors whom he cited simply on the basis of having leafed through the indices and abridgements of their books.20 Plus c¸a change.21 much grief. On Estienne’s attitude towards the Italians, see L. Sozzi, ‘La Pole´mique anti-italienne dans l’oeuvre narrative d’Henri Estienne’, in Henri Estienne, Cahiers, V. L. Saulnier, VI (Paris, 1988), 97–111. It must be noted, however, that Nicole Cazauran, in her critical edition of the Discours merveilleux (Geneva, 1995), 31–54, carefully reviews the evidence concerning both early editions of the work and attributes authorship, albeit guardedly, to Simon Goulart rather than Estienne. Her edition, pp. 55–109, also includes a valuable ‘Inventaire bibliographique’ compiled by Brigitte Moreau. The fulminations evidently pleased Catherine enormously. According to Pierre de L’Estoile, Me´moires-Journaux de Pierre de l’Estoile, ed. G. Brunet, A. Champollion, et al. (Paris, 1875–83), i. 27–8, she had the book read out to her and, screaming with laughter, declared that if the authors had got in touch with her beforehand she could have told them things they did not know or had forgotten. 18 Discours merveilleux (1575), 90. The English translation, A mervaylous discourse upon the lyfe, of Katherine de Medicis (1575), 114, is slightly different: ‘This is suche a practise as she hath perfectly learned of her Machiavellistes.’ 19 The second and third editions of the Discours merveilleux are described as plus correcte, mieux disposee que la premiere, et augmentee de quelques particularitez. The interpolation comes at pp. vi–vii. The passage remarks on the little concern shown by Florentines over their conscience, and how they wish to seem religious without actually being so. In 1576 there is a tiny parenthesis, ‘comme aussi Machiavel l’un de leurs premiers politiques le conseille a` son Prince’. This hardly constitutes the ‘Machiavellism’ referred to by J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975), 189. 20 Portes, Response, 10, 43–4. 21 This technique of extrapolating from a few isolated examples has produced distorted results in relation to Machiavelli’s reception in France. For such distortion in practice, see Donald R. Kelley, ‘Murd’rous Machiavel in France:

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As a matter of fact, the only important anti-massacre tract, prior to Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel, specifically linking Machiavelli to the dark deeds of Saint Bartholomew’s Day was the first of the two dialogues which together comprise the publication best known now as the Reveille-matin des franc¸ois—a work which went through several versions and vicissitudes. It originally appeared in 1573 in a Latin text published at Heidelberg and, more or less simultaneously, in a French version published at La Rochelle; and the author, according to one’s taste, was either Be`ze, Hotman, Hugues Donneau, Nicolas Barnaud, someone else, or a permutation of several of them.22 The 140-odd pages of this work—in addition to materials culled from the De furoribus, much anti-Italianism, and a discussion of Ronsard’s and Pibrac’s justifications of the massacre—include five references to Machiavelli. In the last of these, the author condemns the carnal subterfuges and worldly prudence of the Catholic politicians, and warns them that before God neither the ‘maximes de Machiavel’ nor those of his disciples have any value. This is the earliest specific reference to Machiavelli’s maxims that I have thus far located and, together with the other allusions in the text, it suggests that the Florentine’s work was already being fragmented in the manner soon to be systematized by Gentillet.23 Indeed, there are some distinct pre-echoes of the Contre-Machiavel in the Reveille-matin. There is nothing more miserable, says its author, than triumph in civil war where the victor is as enfeebled as the vanquished and is left prey to his neighbours: ‘que partant l’opinion de Machiavelli (que le conseil du Roy sembloit suyvre, A Post Mortem’, Political Science Quarterly, 68 (1970), 545–59; Edmond M. Beame, ‘The Use and Abuse of Machiavelli: The Sixteenth-Century French Adaptation’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 43 (1982), 33–54. On the most influential mistreatment of selected French sources (comprised by the seemingly heavily documented studies of Machiavelli’s reception in France by Anna Maria Battista), see above, p. 9 and below, p. 346 n. 49. 22 For summary information on the editions of this work, see Hauser, Sources, 249–51 and, for a fuller discussion, Kingdon, Myths, 70–87, 258. 23 Reveille-matin (1574), 141–2. Citations in the text are from this edition. Cf. Margue´rite de Valois, Me´moires, ed. Ludovic Lalanne (Paris, 1858), 18, where she accuses Le Guast of following ‘tels beaux preceptes machiavelistes’. However, although this allusion is entered under 1569, the work was certainly written after 1582, and probably long after.

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tenant ses sujets desunis) estoit une pernicieuse heresie en matiere d’estat’ (p. 21). Elsewhere, the Reveille-matin tells how the Queen Mother broke the edicts of peace and ruined the Huguenots, ‘avec la peau du lion, ou avec la peau du regnard’. Moreover, she had educated her son, the King, to swear, blaspheme, perjure himself, and whore; to dissimulate his faith, religion, and his thoughts; to be ‘maistre de son visage’; and, above all, to love the sight of blood—beginning with that of beasts and ending with that of his subjects. Beware! The King has been persuaded by the doctrine of Machiavelli to permit no other religion than that on which his state has been founded—‘de laquelle voire de ses faux miracles, il faut qu’il monstre faire compte’ (p. 37).24 Then in a discussion of princely perfidy, we encounter specific reference to ‘the eighteenth chapter of the Machiavelli’s Book of the Prince’ and the fact that the King’s ‘schoolmasters’—with as scant regard for his conscience as for his reputation—make additions and glosses even more dangerous than the text itself (p. 40).25 And finally, of the dealings of Catherine de’ Medici and Charles IX with the Huguenots, the author remarks that they practised one of Machiavelli’s ‘lessons’, which is to observe faith only when it is advantageous to do so.26 The second dialogue of the Reveille-matin is no more pleasantly disposed towards the Florentines (‘these buggers of Italians’); repeatedly refers to Charles IX as a tyrant; and argues that the massacre was part of a deliberate plan to exterminate the Huguenots. Nevertheless, Machiavelli has again disappeared. He was not, it seems, quite ‘current’ enough to take the centre of this particular stage, though his moment was not long delayed.27 24 This criticism of a state religion was central to the reformers’ attitude— when they were not themselves in authority and thus able to impose their own religion on others. 25 This passage is used by Goulart, Me´moires de l’estat de France sous Charles IX (Meidelbourg, 1578), i, fo. 255v. 26 Ibid., fo. 107. 27 There are other pre-Gentillet, hostile references to Machiavelli which, though trivial, should be noted lest it be thought that I am suppressing evidence. Le Chevalier Poncet, L’Antipharmaque (Paris, 1575), has much to say against the St Bartholomew massacres and includes a passing reference (p. 54) to ‘Aretin pour tourmenter l’ame et Machiavel pour tourmenter les corps’. The pairing of

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gentillet prepares for battle Innocent Gentillet, a refugee Huguenot lawyer who fled from Toulouse to Geneva at the news of the Paris massacre, announced his intention of combatting the ‘Machiavellistes’ in a Remonstrance addressed to Henri III towards the end of 1574.28 Here, once again, the villainous Italians hold sway, fomenting civil war, and relishing the spectacle of Frenchmen killing each other, just as the ancient Romans used to revel in gladiatorial combats. Gentillet ironically refrains from saying anything against the Pope, who ‘could not do evil, speak evil, nor think evil’ but merely encouraged celebratory bonfires and processions at Rome when he heard news of the Saint Bartholomew massacre. If these internecine wars continue they will give great pleasure and pastime to the foreigners, ‘and perhaps great profit also’, but they will prove the total ruin of France.29 A prerequisite for establishing peace, Gentillet argued, was to banish Machiavelli perpetually from France, for he was the greatest liar and impostor that had ever been.30 The ancient Romans, Greeks, and more recently the French, as well as every other wellordered monarchy or republic, governed themselves in a fashion completely contrary to his teaching; and the disciples who had Machiavelli and Aretino was to become quite common, and we see it in Gentillet’s Remonstrance au Roy Henri III (see below, n. 29), though Poncet’s division of their immoral labour (spirit and body) remains odd. The enticingly named Epistre aux delicats machiavelistes qui ne peuvent trouver bonne la prinse des armes contre la tyrannie des perturbateurs de l’estat du royaume de France (n.p., 1575) is disappointing because the only reference to Machiavelli is in the title. Pierre Fabre, Response au cruel et pernicieux conseil de Pierre Carpentier tendant a` fin d’empescher la paix (n.p., 1575), 81–2, criticizes Henri III for beginning his reign violently rather than with grace and sweetness, and blames his counsellors who are addicted to the ‘advice of Machiavelli who prefers the rigour and cruelty of a prince to all gentleness and humanity’. This is an interesting observation but is the only reference to Machiavelli in a text of 114 pages. 28 Lb34 :92: Remonstrance au roy Henri III sur le faict des deux edicts donnez a` Lyon, l’un du x. de Septembre, et l’autre du xiii. d’Octobre, touchant la necessite´ de paix et les moyens de la faire (Frankfurt am Main, 1574)—first recognized as the work of Gentillet by Jacques Le Long. The text was reprinted in 1576 by G. Jason at Aygenstain, and this is the edition to which I refer. 29 Remonstrance au Roy Henri III (1576 edn.), 78–9. 30 The following paragraph is based on Remonstrance au Roy Henri III (1576 edn.), 130–2.

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introduced his precepts into France had been the cause of the civil dissension and calamities which afflicted the kingdom. Perhaps, says Gentillet, Machiavelli’s precepts are suited to his own nation: for he teaches that religion is to be used for no other purpose than to hold people in superstitious fear and obedience—a method whereby the Turks are held in such thrall that they are prepared to kill themselves should their prince so command and thus take a short cut to Paradise. Furthermore, Machiavelli teaches that a prince should show an honest countenance to everybody, to promise much, but to observe his word only when it is to his advantage. From this the master’s disciples infer that it is useful for the King’s estate to ruin or exterminate this or that great family. But, says Gentillet, let us suppose that this is done. They do not advise what may follow after such crimes. The principal issue for Gentillet is this: those who have introduced into France the practice of Machiavelli’s precepts have not considered that the French are by nature a very different nation. The Frenchman is naturally religious and loves piety. He does not take pleasure in betraying his promises, nor in making light of his honour and reputation, nor in shedding blood without feeling (‘ny a` respandre le sang a` froit’). If the Italians have these fine gifts, let them keep them along with the advice of this ‘gentil docteur’ who, with his ‘compagnon’ Aretino, was the greatest atheist ever—as the writings of both men manifestly demonstrate.31 Gentillet hopes that their disciples will not defile the French nation with their abominable vices; and he will reserve for another more suitable occasion a much fuller discussion of these ‘messieurs les Machiavellistes’. He will then demonstrate that all their ‘suffisance’ is nothing but pure bestiality and ignorance, accompanied by an evil heart and malice; that they never read the good Greek, Latin, and French historians; or, if they do read them, then they understand them no better than ‘High German’—Gentillet’s equivalent of Double Dutch. On 18 September 1575, the King’s youngest brother, the Duke of Alenc¸on—who was at that time the Protestants’ great 31 Cf. Contre-Machiavel (1576), 212, where Gentillet places Machiavelli in the very first rank of ‘atheistes et impies aupres d’Aretin son compagnon’. And see below, p. 369.

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hope—issued a De´claration at Dreux. This was published in December ‘par les soins du jurisconsulte dauphinois Innocent Gentillet’, with a detailed exposition of its principal contents apparently by Gentillet himself. Again the ‘foreigners’ are berated for coupling Catholicism with atheism, for despising piety, and for giving currency to an evil and damnable book by ‘un Machiavel Italien’—full of contempt for Christianity—which they have caused to be translated and printed in France so that even ordinary folk may be infected with their poison.32 The envenomed writing was already in everybody’s hands; but Gentillet, as we know, had not been idle; and by October 1575 he appears to have completed his promised masterpiece. On the 21st of that month the council of Geneva noted that the text had been seen by Be`ze, and they duly granted permission for printing.33 The book must have been published around the beginning of March 1576, for its dedication to the Duke of Alenc¸on is dated the 1st of that month, and the work was already being referred to a few weeks later, though it bore neither the name of its author nor the place of publication. It was entitled Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner et maintenir en bonne paix un Royeaume ou autre principaute´. Divisez en trois parties: assavoir, du Conseil, de la Religion, & Police, que doit tenir un Prince. Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin; and it was sufficiently well received to warrant a further six French-language editions within the next four years, together with one German and two Latin translations within the same period.34 The Contre-Machiavel has come in for much critical abuse. It has been castigated as methodologically naive and unfair, and as being intemperate and unreasonable. It was also, for a long time, regarded as the principal stimulus for the stereotyped Machiavel figure which emerged in the later sixteenth century and, consequently, as the ultimate source for subsequent denigration of 32 Brieve remonstrance a la noblesse de France sur le faict de la Declaration de Monseigneur le Duc d’Alenc¸on, faicte le 18 de Septembre 1575 (Aygenstein, 1576), 149. 33 Pamela Stewart, Innocent Gentillet e la sua polemica antimachiavellica (Florence, 1969), 12. 34 For full bibliographical details, see D’Andrea and Stewart. The first French edition, it should be noted, was edited (misprints and all) by C. Edward Rathe´ as Anti-Machiavel. E´dition de 1576 (Geneva, 1968).

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Machiavelli.35 Later criticism dealt even more harshly with Gentillet who, while remaining fatuous, was denied the distinction of having had any influence at all.36 And although this extreme view has, in its turn, been modified, Gentillet has been kept firmly in place as a Huguenot of little brain whose sole significance is that he dared write against one of the great men of the Renaissance.37 Nevertheless, however much critics may carp, the ContreMachiavel remains the first known work devoted to a full-scale study of Machiavelli. It was, moreover, the only attempt in the sixteenth century to examine not only the content of Machiavelli’s political writings but also, and more illuminatingly, the methods employed therein. Of moderate ability Gentillet may have been— conventional, literal-minded, stolid, unimaginative, and even, from time to time, stupid—but (sadly for the Machiavelaters) the dull Huguenot is the only sixteenth-century political theorist of whom it may be said unequivocally that his thinking was shaped principally by a reading of Machiavelli. Despite his lack of brilliance, Gentillet set himself an extremely difficult and complex task; and, on the whole, he accomplished it— even when viewed from a modern critical standpoint—moderately well. From a sixteenth-century standpoint, his achievement must have seemed far more impressive, as is evidenced by the wide success of his book and the reputation it long enjoyed as a convincing expose´ both of Machiavelli’s doctrines and of the corrupt political state which must inevitably result from their practice.

35 This was the thesis of Edward Meyer, Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama (Weimar, 1897). Meyer’s argument rests upon a number of misconceptions and errors and has been easily refuted: although, in fact, he may have got something like the right answer for the wrong reasons. 36 Irving Ribner, ‘The Significance of Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel’, Modern Language Quarterly, 10 (1949), 153–7. The argument was repeated, with added errors, by Raab, English Face of Machiavelli, 56–7. A more sophisticated treatment is to be found in two articles by N. W. Bawcutt: ‘Some Elizabethan Allusions to Machiavelli’, English Miscellany, 20 (1969), 53–74; ‘Machiavelli and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta’, in S. Schoenbaum (ed.), Renaissance Drama, ns 3 (1970), 3–49. 37 An isolated attempt to take Gentillet seriously is Victoria Kahn, ‘Reading Machiavelli: Innocent Gentillet’s Discourse on Method’, Political Theory, 22 (1994), 539–60, which, unfortunately, places exaggerated stress on ‘rhetorical’ method and none at all on the rhetorical context of the Contre-Machiavel.

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g e n t i l l e t ’s i n t e n t i on s The aims of the Contre-Machiavel were complex. A critical reading may readily identify several different strands to the argument, but it is evident that they were conceived simultaneously and executed concurrently, and that their interdependence was both intellectual and emotional. These aims are largely set out in the Preface to the first book, though this is by no means a full statement either of Gentillet’s purposes or of what he actually does in the course of his very long work. On the other hand, it must be conceded that there is a greater relationship between what the author says that he is going to do and what he actually does than was often the case in contemporary historical and political writing. He is not, he stresses, setting out to write a comprehensive treatise on the ‘Politicke Art’: but my intent and purpose is onely to shew, That Nicholas Machiavell, not long agoe a Secretarie of the Florentine commonweale (which is now a Dutchie) understood nothing or little in this Politicke science whereof we speake: and that he hath taken Maximes and rules altogether wicked, and hath builded upon them, not a Politicke, but a Tyrannical science. Behold here then the end and scope which I have proposed unto myself, that is, to confute the doctrine of Machiavell, & not exactly to handle the Politicke science; although I hope to touche some good points thereof in some places, when occasion shall offer itselfe.38

In Gentillet’s opinion there are two fundamental reasons for Machiavelli’s incompetence. In the first place, he had no knowledge of real affairs—his experience being limited to the petty squabbles of Italian potentates, and the shifts and expedients of the citizens of Florence.39 Secondly, Machiavelli had scarcely any knowledge of histories; while those few which he does allege are 38 Contre-Machiavel (1576), 3; (1602), sig. A.2. Citations in the text refer to these two editions. 39 The idea that Machiavelli was a small-town nobody had an obvious appeal to citizens of a great nation state, and it is used to nice effect by Antoine de Laval, Desseins des professions nobles et publiques, contenans plusieurs traite´s divers et rares (Paris, 1613), fo. 339v, when he attacks Machiavelli’s advocacy of atheism, avarice, cruelty, and perjury—added to which ‘he speaks of these little princes of which Italy was full in his time, and who could see from their windows the four corners of their states’.

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handled badly. Gentillet’s challenge is therefore aimed at the very bases of Machiavelli’s political discussion; and he promises to make these charges stick in the course of his own work. In his first Preface, Gentillet also makes the striking assumption which underlies, and indeed provoked, his entire enterprise. He believes that Machiavelli’s doctrines are at the root of France’s present degradation, which has culminated not only in the Saint Bartholomew massacre but also in the glee of its perverted admirers. Doubtless, courtiers who deal with affairs of state will think it strange that he should find fault with their ‘great doctor Machiavell’ whose books they call the ‘courtiers’ Alcoran’—they have them in such great esteem. Yet, until the death of Henri II, Machiavelli had not even been spoken of in France and the kingdom had been ruled in the traditional French manner. It was only subsequently that government has been carried out according to the rules of Machiavelli, who is considered the wisest person in the world and the most cunning in affairs of state: and his books held dearest and most precious by our Italian and Italionized courtiers, as if they were the booke of Sibilla, whereunto the Paynims had their recourse when they would deliberate upon any great affaire concerning the common wealth, or as the Turkes hould deare and precious their Mahumets Alcaron, as wee have said above. (p. 8; 1602, sig. A.3v)

Gentillet is not surprised that the old modes of government have been abandoned, because now all principal offices are held by Italians who, doubtless, share their master’s contempt for French political customs. This, though bad enough, might have been supported in silence were it not for the fact that Machiavelli’s teaching hath changed the good and ancient government of France into a kind of Florentine government, whereupon we see with our eies, the totall ruine of all France: It infallibly followeth (if God by his grace doe not remedie it soone) that now it should be time, if ever, to lay hand to the work, to remit and bring France againe unto the government of our ancestors. (ibid.)

This political reformation is essential, and Gentillet appeals to the princes and nobility to consider their duty. How can they stand aside and watch their country contaminated and defiled with the

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‘contempt of God, with perfidie, with sodomie, tyrannie, crueltie, thefts, strange usuries, and other detestable vices, which strangers sowe here’? Jurisconsults rightly maintain that a person who allows another, ‘unto whom he oweth nourishment’, to starve to death is himself a murderer: And shall you not be culpable before God, of so many massacres, murders, and desolations of your poor France, if you give it not succours, seeing you have the meanes, and that you are obliged thereunto by right of nature? Shall you not be condemned and attainted of impietie, Athisme, and tyrannie, if you drive not out of France, Machiavell and his government? (pp. 9–10; 1602, sig. A4)

France is now governed according to those Machiavellian principles which it is Gentillet’s purpose to lay bare; and, if anyone doubts his assertion of contemporary French corruption, then a consideration of the ‘effects which we see with our eyes, and the provisions and executions of the affairs which are put in practise’ will take the doubter straight back to Machiavelli’s maxims so that ‘from the Maxims to the effect, and from the effects to the Maxims men may clearly know that France is at this day governed by the doctrine of Machiavell’. Are they not Machiavellists, ‘Italians or Italianized’, who handle the seals of France, issue edicts, send dispatches within and without the kingdom, and hold the best and most lucrative offices? Moreover—and this is crucial for Gentillet—it is notorious that, for the last fifteen years, Machiavelli’s books have become as ‘familiar and ordinarie in the hands of the courtiers, as the breviary in the hands of the village curate’; and he sarcastically thanks those who have made two or three different translations of the work of this ‘stinking atheist’, the better to poison the French nation (p. 185; 1602, p. 100). First Machiavelli; then Machiavellists; and finally corruption. That is the historical sequence assumed, and demonstrated, by Gentillet, who completes this as a circular structure by explicitly identifying Machiavelli’s own purpose as the establishing of tyranny, and by arguing that the present condition of France results from the deliberate practice of such tyranny. This, in turn, demands a further demonstration. Since the application of Machiavelli’s principles results in corruption, then Gentillet feels obliged

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to elucidate the precise nature of that corruption, the superior conditions which had formerly prevailed in France, and the reasons for that superiority. In other words, although Gentillet denies that he is writing a treatise on the ‘politicke art’, he is obliged to highlight the inutility of Machiavelli’s doctrines by showing the positive utility of an alternative set of precepts. The difference, he argues, between the ancient government of France and modern degradation is manifest. Formerly, the kingdom, free of civil discord, had been maintained in peace and prosperity. Now Italian domination has suppressed the ancient laws; civil war has ensued; the people are ‘destroyed and eaten’; and commerce has decayed to nothing. All of this is deemed self-evident: but it is none the less vital for Gentillet to demonstrate the superiority of the past. He therefore announces his intention that, after every single maxim derived from Machiavelli, he will prove by examples that ‘our ancient Frenchmen guided and governed themselves by good reason and wisdom, clean contrary from the way of Machiavelli’s precepts’ (p. 12; 1602, sig. A4v). These then are Gentillet’s explicit aims: to refute Machiavelli’s false tyrannical doctrines; to show how they have corrupted fair France; and to show how states should be governed. But, stated thus, these aims conceal the passionate core of the ContreMachiavel and, in any case, imply further intentions on the part of the author. Despite all the positive political advice offered by Gentillet in the course of his work, his claim not to be writing a political treatise is largely valid for he is, primarily, a polemicist. His principal target is not really Machiavelli at all. It is, rather, contemporary depravity; and every citation and every historical parallel, both ancient and modern, contains either explicitly or implicitly a reproof to the French court. It is this which provides much of the latent force and energy of the Contre-Machiavel and which must—at least for its contemporary readers—have supported the vast repetitious structure of historical citation. The conception, though not the execution, of the book was very similar to the anti-Machiavellian section of Pole’s Apologia ad Carolum Quintum. In 1539 it was the Catholic who had been in exile and whose co-religionists had suffered cruelty, privation, and death. Pole, like Gentillet, had experienced political repression

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which he could only characterize as tyrannical; and, like Gentillet, he was convinced that this tyranny was a practical application of Machiavelli’s precepts. To put it the other way round—and perhaps more exactly—each polemicist believed that, in Machiavelli’s writings, he had discovered the theoretical enunciation of the principles upon which a specific tyranny had been built. Both authors attacked the theory and its practice; and both have been remembered more for Machiavelli’s sake than for the tyrants they opposed. Yet in both cases the tyrants were the real objects of disgust. Their use, real or imaginary, of Machiavelli was simply the stick with which it seemed appropriate to beat them. As an exiled Huguenot, Gentillet was naturally obsessed by the recent atrocities, by the rejoicing which followed them, and by the relentless anti-Huguenot accusations which form the basis for the apologetics. He felt compelled to argue the case for his coreligionists and to show that the charges levelled against them by the defenders of the Saint Bartholomew—accusations based upon a show of conventional morality—were, in fact, themselves nothing but a hypocritical veil hiding the true villains of contemporary France. For the effete sycophancy of contemporary poets Gentillet has nothing but scorn and, though he does not identify either work or author, it is evident that Ronsard’s Le tombeau du feu Roy treschrestien Charles neufiesme had proved an especial irritant.40 The flattery and lies of such scribblers were designed to ‘hooke in some abbotship or priorship, or some other such gift in recompence for their adulations’. Poets, he admits, are entitled to greater licence in eulogy than either the orator or the historian: but gross hyperbole redounds more to the discredit than to the honour of the recipient. Consider, for instance, the epitaphs printed in Paris shortly after the death of Charles IX. Here the poets said that the King, in shedding the blood of so many rebels, overthrew more monsters than did Hercules. They said that, like Samson who pulled down the pillars of the house upon himself, so died the King when justice, piety and religion died with him. They said that France 40 Ronsard’s Tombeau du feu Roy . . . Charles neufiesme was published by Fre´de´ric Morel in Paris shortly after the King’s death. It is reprinted in Ronsard, Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Gustave Cohen (Paris, 1950), ii. 474–9.

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had been his stepmother; that he was wonderfully skilled in all the arts and crafts; that his brother succeeded him as Castor to Pollux, as one God to another; that he died a martyr of Jesus Christ; and that he should be ‘invocated as a Saint’.41 What rubbish! If these poets had taken the trouble to read the classical eulogists they would have seen that, although Virgil and Ovid had praised Augustus, it had been for his peace, justice, and his expansion of Rome’s empire. They had never mentioned the civil wars in which he had triumphed for, as Plutarch remarks, ‘they are piteous triumphs which are made upon civile bloud’. Gentillet ridicules the extravagant language of the toadies, but particularly pounces upon the conceit that piety and justice had died with the late King. In so saying do they not ‘plainely blame the kingdome at this present of impietye and injustice? as if justice were not now so good, nor religion in so good estate, as in the time of the dead king; or as if they were or could bee made worse’. But, on the contrary, everyone can see that justice and religion remain in France as they were before the King died, and that they are now ‘so well governed, as they cannot waxe worse’ (pp. 85–8; 1602, pp. 42–3). There are, however, more serious perverters of truth and apologists for evil than these poets. There are, for example, degenerate jurisconsults who not only excuse massacres but even promote them against all law, divine and human. And what of the Machiavellian magistrates who make process of law against men whom they have already slain? (pp. 60, 616; 1602, pp. 26–7, 361). Tyrants customarily cloak their wilful, arbitrary murders under some ‘apparent colour’, laying false accusations and blame against those whom they wish to kill, sometimes before and sometimes after the crime: 41 The following are the lines from Ronsard’s Tombeau du feu Roy . . . Charles neufiesme which gave offence to Gentillet. On Hercules: ‘Il se vit au berceau des serpens assailli / Comme un jeune Hercules, dont il rompit la force.’ On the death of justice, piety, and religion: ‘L’honneur et la vertu, la justice et la foy / Et la religion sont mortes avecq’ toy’. On France as Charles’s stepmother: ‘La France, a` son bon Prince une marastre terre, / Ou` depuis la mammelle il n’a vescu qu’en guerre.’ On Charles’s many talents: ‘Son esprit magazin de toutes sortes d’arts’. On Castor and God: ‘Resjouys toy la`-haut et sereines ta face, / Dequoy Castor, ton frere, est regnant en ta place, / Qui par succession est maistre de ton lieu: / Un Dieu doit heritier a` l’Empire d’un Dieu.’ However, Ronsard mentions neither Samson, nor Charles’s invocation as a saint.

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and there are none at this day, which cannot exemplifie this position with many late and fresh examples in our time. For the massacres of Paris, executed on S. Bartholomewes day, and the execution after, made of captaine Briquemaud, of Maistre Arnand of Carignes, of contie Mongomery, and of the lord of Monbrun, and other like, were all coloured with false imputations, by the Messers Machiavellists, and by the wicked judges their slaves, as every one knoweth. (p. 383; 1602, p. 221)

These creatures argue, along with their God Machiavelli, that cruelty for a good end is not reprehensible. But there never has been a murder or iniquity which was not covered with some goodly pretext by its perpetrators. Thus some affirm that their deeds are founded upon good reason and equity; that justice would have done no less than they had executed; and that their actions thus constituted an abbreviation of the usual process which would have taken too long. And why should these ‘abbreviators of justice’ feel shame, asks Gentillet, since the law is nowadays practised but as a ‘palliation or couverture, for all assassiments, murders, and vengeances?’ Some veil their murders with a different end—that is the public good—saying that their massacres are committed to avoid a greater evil which would have been perpetrated by their victims. Then there are others who make a ‘covering of peace and tranquilitie’, claiming that their murders are executed to establish peace and bring an end to troubles. Nevertheless, whatever the deceits and excuses, ‘the worke always shewes who was the workeman’. In the end they will outsmart themselves with their colours, ‘like the deceitfull painting of harlots’; so that, although they might beguile folk for a while, yet in the end they will ‘be always known for Foxes’. Furthermore, if princes permit men to commit murders under the colour of good intentions, then they break the order of justice and turn everything upside down. Murders and massacres never remain long unpunished. ‘And in our time’, cries Gentillet, ‘we see examples enough, and I beleeve we shall see more, in such as the hand of God hath not yet touched’ (p. 396; 1602, pp. 228–9). This foul web of duplicity and violence is not, in Gentillet’s opinion, indigenous to France. It comes instead from Italy: and he misses no opportunity for an attack upon these pestilent foreigners. Degenerate Italian, or Italianized, courtiers appear throughout the

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Contre-Machiavel as those very practitioners of Machiavellian principles who now govern by his evil books and recognize no other political wisdom (pp. 236, 277; 1602, pp. 132, 157). They have usurped authority, contaminate everything, grasp power, and advance only their own countrymen or certain ‘bastardlie and degenerous Frenchmen, which are fashioned, both to their humour and their fashions, and which may serve them as slaves and most vile ministers of their trecheries, cruelties, rapines, and other vices’ (pp. 138–9; 1602, p. 74). They nourish the partialities and divisions, especially between Catholics and Huguenots, which have destroyed France. However, Gentillet is at pains to point out, it would be a mistake to suppose that diversity of religion had caused the troubles, because this might have been resolved by preaching, disputation, and conferences. It was only when men came to ‘arms and massacres’, and attempted to enforce beliefs, that partialities arose. This was the real aim of the foreigners, ‘that thereby they might plant in France the government of Machiavel’. If only civil dissension had remained amongst the ‘Florentines and other Italians who doe love them and find them good, so that the French men had beene without them’ (pp. 224, 542–3, 554–5; 1602, pp. 124, 317, 324). Unfortunately, the only citizens who have been prepared to speak out against the foreigners are those very Huguenots now persecuted as ‘bad French subjects’ but who are, in fact, ‘at this day as good Frenchmen as ever were the ancestours, but they are not good Italians, neither meane to be subject under the yoke of strangers, no more than their ancestors’ (p. 57; 1602, p. 25).42 Italians are steeped in every vice. They are disloyal, perfidious, and cowardly. They dissemble, flatter, and change sides whenever they deem it profitable—‘resembling harlots which love every man, yet love no person’—and ceaselessly run hither and thither like spinning tops (pp. 131–2, 287–8, 508; 1602, pp. 68, 163–4, 296). It is no wonder that simple, honest Frenchmen who speak openly and expose their hearts are easily trapped in the nets of 42 Gentillet later cites the imposition of outlandish new taxes invented by the Italians against which only his co-religionists dared open their mouths to ‘complain of these horseleeches and blood-suckers’. See (1576), 173; (1602), 93.

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intrigue cast by these Machiavellists who never let a word fall from their mouths without premeditating its meaning, which is, in any case, ‘ordinarily contrarie to that which you thinke’ (p. 430; 1602, p. 251). Their intent is to impose a ‘Turkish servitude’. They are greedy, mercenary usurers who pillage France with new and arbitrary taxation which does not find its way to the Crown. Worse still, even their nobles handle trade and merchandise more commonly than the arms proper to their rank, and do not scorn to be reputed ‘mechanique’—provided that they can make money (pp. 173, 565, 567, and esp. 526; 1602, pp. 93, 331–2, 307). But worst of all is their implacable cruelty, lust for revenge, and sheer murderousness: and indeed, there is nothing wherein they take greater delectation, pleasure, and contentment, than to execute a vengeance; insomuch as, whensoever they can have their enemie at their pleasure, to be revenged upon him, they murder him after some strange & barbarous fashion, and in murdering him, they put him in remembrance of the offence done unto them, with many reprochfull words and injuries to torment the soule and the body together; and sometimes they wash their hands and their mouthes with his blood, and force him with hope of his life to give himselfe to the divell; and so they seeke in slaying the bodie to damne the soule, if they could. (p. 311; 1602, pp. 177–8)

Gentillet devoutly hopes that, infected though they are by other Italian vices, the French may yet escape this bloodthirstiness: though elsewhere he accuses the ‘Italianized courtiers’ of already grounding their advice to slay and massacre all such as they hate, upon the saying that the dead man makes no war; and he associates this sentiment with the massacre of Vassy in 1562 and with the Saint Bartholomew itself (pp. 467–8; 1602, pp. 271–2). The Italians, he laconically remarks, have always had a strong inclination to massacre Frenchmen. Their classic depravity had been known as the Sicilian Vespers: and it was in imitation of this that they had ‘complotted and executed not in Sicilie (but in France itself ) and through all the best townes of the kingdome, the horrible and generall massacre of the yeare 1572, which will ever bleed, and whereof their hands and swords are yet bloodie’ (p. 125; 1602, pp. 65–6). And, says Gentillet, they have incessantly boasted

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of this exploit, calling it the Matines parisiennes (the very phrase which occurs towards the end of Capilupi’s Lo Stratagema).43 In short, as far as Gentillet is concerned, the Italians have corrupted the French both in mind and body. Even venereal disease was imported from Italy at the time of Charles VIII’s Neapolitan campaign. And of whom have the Frenchmen learned ‘atheisme, sodomie, treacherie, crueltie, usurie, and such other vices, but of Machiavell and them of his nation’. Thus may the Italians well brag that they have avenged the wars that the French formerly waged in their land (pp. 308–9; 1602, p. 176). This last brief but pregnant lament may perhaps remind the modern reader of the heartfelt cry with which Machiavelli had ended Il Principe, demanding a saviour who would free his land from the barbarians who stank in every Italian’s nostrils. The relationship is, I believe, deliberate. Gentillet, though criticizing Machiavelli for describing the French as ignorant, barbarous, covetous, and disloyal, does not refer specifically to the closing pages of Il Principe (p. 9; 1602, sig. A.4). He does, however, echo their rousing sentiment in his appeals to his own countrymen. To encourage spiritual and political regeneration was perhaps Gentillet’s fundamental purpose in writing his Contre-Machiavel. He touches upon it in his first preface when challenging the French nobility to do their duty. They were not born, he says, simply to help in the destruction of their native land, or to stand aside coldly watching foreigners contaminate it with every filthy vice. In the penultimate paragraph of the entire work, Gentillet again asks the French nobility to consider well the points he has made against Machiavelli: for so may they know how wicked, impious and detestable the doctrine of that most filthie Atheist is, who hath left out no kind of wickednesse to build a tyrannie accomplished of all abhominable vices. They which know this, I beleeve will couragiouslie employ themselves to drive and banish from France, Machiavell and all his writings, and all such as maintaine and follow his doctrine and practise it in France, to the ruine and desolation of the kingdome, and of the poor people. (p. 637; 1602, p. 374) 43 Cf. also Allegresse chrestienne (L33 :309e), sig. C.1v.

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Gentillet regards the old French nobility and its chivalric traditions, together with all other traditional French values—moral, political, and legal—as immeasurably superior to the Italianate policies which have now almost destroyed them. His task is both to vindicate French civilization and to arouse his countrymen before it is too late. The French nation was once held in awe by foreigners. Where is that generosity of spirit now? Once Frenchmen had made other nations tremble: now they are forced to ‘take the yoke’ in their own country. Once they had been reputed frank, liberal, and far from all servitude: now their stupidity, carelessness, and cowardice has made them slaves to the most ‘dastardlie and cowardly nation of Christendome’. Once they had overwhelmed huge Italian armies in battle: now they suffer themselves to be overcome by a small number of Italians armed with but spindle, distaff, pen, and inkhorn. Are Frenchmen to remain thus bewitched? Can they not see that by secret means these foreigners overthrow and encompass the deaths by ‘treasons, poysonings and injustice’ first of one and then another of the greatest men in France; and that their sole purpose is to destroy the nobility and all worthiness? (pp. 139–40; 1602, p. 74).44 ‘Be sleepie no longer’, cries Gentillet, ‘for it is time to awake, and to thinke what we have to doe.’ France must not simply stand by as one great house after another falls to the ground. The disorders are already too deeply established and Frenchmen have too long tarried in providing for themselves and making a stand against the designs and machinations of these foreigners. Let us then stir up in our selves the generositie and vertue of our valiant great grandfathers, and shew that we are come from the race of those good and noble Frenchmen our ancestors, which in old time past have brought under their subjection so many strange nations, and which so many times have vanquished the Italian race, which would make us now serve. Let us 44 Cf. Gentillet’s Brieve remonstrance a la noblesse de France, 162: ‘ces Italiens s’en viennent en France, sans rien y apporter qu’un escritoire et une main de papiers, et de ce chastal ils accumulent incontinent grands deniers par leurs banques, puis font banqueroutte et emportent tout faisans comme les sauterelles, qui s’en vont apres avoir tout brotte´’. Gohory had noted the same phenomenon of Italian success, though from a very different viewpoint.

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not leave off, for a sort of degenerate Frenchmen, adherents to the pernitious purposes of that race, to maintaine and conserve the honors and reputation of loyaltie, integritie, and valiancie of our French nation, which those bastardlie Italians have contaminated and soiled by their cruelties, massacres and perfidies. Wee want nothing but courage to effect all this: for these Messiers would not stand one whit, if they once knew that it were in good earnest and with good accord, that the Frenchmen would send them to exercise their tyrannies in their owne countrey, and force them to make account of such as they have committed in France. (p. 140; 1602, pp. 74–5)45

This is the stirring conclusion Gentillet provides for the first part of his Contre-Machiavel. It is difficult to believe that these words could have been written without conscious, if tacit, reference to the conclusion of Il Principe: and written, moreover, by somebody who had read Machiavelli’s work with attention.

g e n t i l l e t’ s g eneral method Gentillet, despite the accusations of his modern critics, had read Machiavelli’s work (or what he considered to be Machiavelli’s work) with attention. It was not, however, the kind of attention now in vogue. He did not count the number of times Machiavelli employed this or that word. He did not read the texts in order to demonstrate their relation to classical and humanistic sources. He was not concerned to discover biographical evidence. Nor did he provide a critical appraisal of all Machiavelli’s writings, giving due weight to their historical context and to the particular problems which the author had faced. These were rarely the concerns of sixteenth-century readers. They were especially not the concern of those engaged in life-and-death polemic. I am not suggesting that 45 Cf. the end of the Brieve remonstrance a la noblesse de France, 218–23, which is a call to the great leaders of France to answer Alenc¸on’s appeal against the tyranny and usurpation of the foreigners: ‘Et si nous ne le faisons, nous serons reputez a` la posterite´ des lasches, desloyeaux et traistres a` celle qui nous a enfantez et nourris, et qui nous a fait voir la premiere lumiere du soleil. La race nostre qui viendra apres nous, auroit juste cause de blasmer et denigrer nostre memoire et reputation, si par nostre pusillanimite´ et couardise nous la laissons tomber en esclave servitude de ceux qui ne tendent a` autre but.’

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Gentillet’s work was unbiased, coherent, and wholly just to Machiavelli, or that it was executed without mistakes, inconsistencies, and many manifest absurdities. I am suggesting that his approach is not as dishonest or foolish as is often assumed. Within the context of sixteenth-century polemical evaluation of any adversary’s arguments, the violent circumstances of its genesis, the passions involved, and the speed with which it was produced— the Contre-Machiavel is by no means contemptible. That Gentillet went about his self-appointed task with high seriousness is shown by the method he adopted in attempting his refutation, and by the theoretical discussion of that method which prefaces the entire enterprise. This is the very heart of the ContreMachiavel and, with only one exception, has it been accorded more than a cursory glance by those who—quick to take offence on behalf of their culture hero—have nevertheless abused Gentillet for that very method.46 Villari criticized him for ‘reducing Machiavelli’s special maxims to maxims of morality in general’, so that he ‘found it easy to charge him with immorality and iniquity’. The erudite Burd, noting that Gentillet’s approach was to head each of his chapters with a maxim ‘purporting to be drawn from Machiavelli’s writings and to contain an impartial representation of his doctrine’, further observed that there are few writers to whom ‘such a method of treatment would not be fatal; but it is especially unfair in this case’—because the selection is made from only two of Machiavelli’s works, Il Principe and the Discorsi. Charles Benoist angrily denounced the ‘pole´miste qui n’a d’innocent que son pre´nom, Innocent Gentillet’ whose distortion of Machiavelli’s maxims constitute a ‘chef d’oeuvre de traduction-trahison’. J. H. Whitfield, lamenting that the bulk of Tommasini’s magnum opus has militated against its having exercised much influence, suggested that it is simpler ‘to write in the manner of Gentillet about Machiavelli: to cull the wicked maxims in a short and inaccurate excursus at the outset of a book, then trace to his immoral influence all that is rotten in the state of a nation’. In an incoherent and slovenly passage, Prezzolini described the Contre-Machiavel as ‘large in format but poor in essence’, and attacked Gentillet as ‘long-winded 46 The exception is Victoria Kahn in ‘Reading Machiavelli’.

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and a falsifier’ who ‘quotes fragments of Machiavelli out of their original context, puts together two passages giving a completely different meaning, and he also invents’. Short shrift is also accorded the Contre-Machiavel by Quentin Skinner, usually a model of sobriety, who states that Gentillet’s main aim is to ‘denounce the wicked ‘‘maxims’’ which he claims—often highly tendentiously—to have culled from The Prince and the Discourses’. And even Pamela Stewart, who has devoted a book to Gentillet’s life and work, ignores his method and instead demonstrates—with inevitable ease—that he often misrepresents or misunderstands Machiavelli, or is simply inaccurate.47 In attempting to assess Gentillet’s worth, there are two important truths to be faced at the outset. One is that, as far as the sixteenth century (and beyond) was concerned, the statement of political (and many other) views in the form of maxims, aphorisms, apophthegmata, and related forms of stylistic concision was both desirable and normal. Thus, to delimit a subject under aphoristic heads in order to marshal criticism and replication was a wholly admirable procedure: and it had not been systematically applied to Machiavelli prior to the appearance of the Contre-Machiavel. Secondly, Machiavelli adored aphorisms and maxims, and much of Il Principe and the Discorsi is little else but a stringing together of a wide selection of such gnomic utterances. That it is possible to build some sort of system from these fragments is evident. Historians of political thought have been doing it for centuries. But Machiavelli himself did not. He preferred to issue a stream of striking sayings which he would then embroider, illustrate, and play with. His contemporaries did the same in their collections of adagia and emblems; and although Machiavelli did not use so obviously a formalistic structure—aphorism, explication, and motto—he was not far away from it, as anyone can see by reading the titles and closing sentences of each chapter of the Discorsi. The fact remains that Machiavelli has never been—and can 47 P. Villari, The Life and Times of Niccolo` Machiavelli (n.d.), ii. 195; L. A. Burd, introduction to Il Principe (Oxford, 1891), 53–4; C. Benoist, Le Machiavellisme (Paris, 1936), iii. 22, 31; J. H. Whitfield, Machiavelli (Oxford, 1947), 6; Prezzolini, Machiavelli, 200–1; Q. Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), ii. 308.

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never be—left to speak for himself. His writings have to be explicated, glossed, and arranged in patterns for each generation of readers. Pieces from one part of a text have to be cobbled to pieces from another in order to fulfil the demands of the systematizers. Nor is this extraordinary. Machiavelli, for all his immense literary flair, still wrote in a sixteenth-century manner. Maxims, aphorisms, and bons mots, from the brilliant to the banal, flowed freely from his pen. And Innocent Gentillet, precisely because of his lack of flair, still read in a sixteenth-century manner so that maxims and aphorisms, for good or ill, leapt insistently to his eye and blinded him to everything else. He was a typical Renaissance reader and was so effective in systematizing this approach to Machiavelli that similar work was not freshly undertaken for another fifty years.48 The Contre-Machiavel opens with a discussion of the role of maxims in political thought. The section says nothing very profound, but it is none the less important for several reasons: first, because such views underlay a great part of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century political writing; then because such specifically methodological analysis of maxims, however primitive it may be, is rare in this period; and third, because this analysis is the foundation upon which the entire refutation of Machiavelli is erected. Aristotle and other philosophers, says Gentillet, teach us, and ‘experience confirmeth it unto us’, that there are two ways to achieve knowledge.49 One is when, from causes and maxims, men come to know effects and consequences. The other is the contrary when, by the effects and consequences, we come to know causes and maxims. Thus, when we see the ‘earth waxe greene and trees gather leaves’, we know that the Sun (which is the cause) approaches nearer; and we conceive the maxim that the Sun gives strength to the earth ‘to bring forth fruit’. Conversely, once we understand the maxim we would expect the earth to bear fruit when the Sun approaches. Mathematicians, as Gentillet points out, 48 I am thinking here of David Hume’s Apologia Basilica (Paris, 1626). See below, Ch. 13. On the habit of reading primarily to locate aphorisms, see below, Ch. 17. 49 Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric, I. 2; Prior Analytics, II. 23, 24; Posterior Analytics, I. 1; Topics, I. 1. xii.

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proceed from maxims: those ‘common sentences’ regarded as selfevidently true by the sense and judgement of all men. The other method, from the observation of effects to causes, and from particularities to general maxims, is proper to the sciences such as natural and moral philosophy, medicine, jurisprudence, and politics—although, in practice, these sciences make use of both methods, as can be seen in the ‘Politicke Art’. From the particular effects of a civil government men may comprehend maxims and rules: and vice versa. Thus, when we see an evilly functioning polity, or a good administration, we can grasp the correspondingly bad or good rules for government. Conversely, we may comprehend the evil or good effects which must follow from the application of evil or good maxims. There is, however, a caveat. Political maxims may well be of service in the running of a state: but they are not as certain as the maxims of mathematicians, and may prove extremely dangerous if men cannot apply them to changing circumstances but, instead, accommodate circumstances to the maxims. ‘For the circumstances, dependancies, consequences, and the antecedents of every affaire and particular businesse, are all for the most part divers and contrarie.’ It thus comes about that, although two situations appear similar, yet men must not ‘conduct and determine them by one same rule or Maxime, because of the diversitie and difference of accidents and circumstances’ (p. 2; 1602, sigs. A.1v–2). Experience teaches us that a certain action may be good on one occasion but harmful on another; and that what is suitable for one nation may prove unsuitable for another. It is vital, therefore, that men engaged in public affairs must not only know the rules of politics, but must also be wise, quick and sharp in judgement, able to weigh up every aspect of a problem, and prudently adapt the maxims, ‘yea, and sometimes to force and bend them to serve to the present affaire’. Wisdom of this kind is extremely rare because, in order for a man successfully to handle weighty business, three qualities are essential: he must be naturally endowed with sound judgement; he must be wise, temperate, dispassionate, unbiased, and devoted only to the public weal; and he must be thoroughly versed in a variety of practical affairs, which is only possible for those who have ‘handled or seen them handled’, or who have by

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‘great and attentive reading of choise histories’ developed a firm and practised judgement.50 This is the point at which Gentillet begins his attack on Machiavelli. Not everybody is suited to the management of public affairs. Nor should it be imagined that everybody who speaks or writes on these matters really knows what he is talking about. Gentillet himself would not dream of treating political science a` fond: but Machiavelli did so presume, and he validated this presumption on the basis of his knowledge both of affairs and of histories. Gentillet does not cite Machiavelli on this issue, though his implication is clear. Machiavelli had claimed special authority in Il Principe when he offered its dedicatee the benefit of his knowledge of great men’s actions ‘learnt from a long experience in modern affairs and a continual reading of the ancients’. He said something similar in the dedication of the Discorsi, the content of which he described as ‘all that I know, and all that I have learnt from long practical experience and a continual reading of the affairs of the world’. He claimed to derive rules for political behaviour from this combination of first-hand and vicarious experience; and this is why Gentillet is determined to show that Machiavelli’s firsthand experience was trivial and limited to the disgusting needs of petty Italian tyrants, and that his vicarious experience in histories was equally at fault. Bodin had hinted at a similar weakness ten years earlier in his Methodus:51 but Gentillet adds an extra dimension to his attack. The conclusions that Machiavelli drew from his two inadequate repositories of information were inept because he also lacked the other necessary quality of the political thinker— that is a ‘firm and solid natural judgement’. Machiavelli had, no doubt disingenuously, confessed as much in the Preface to the 50 Cf. Jean Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Paris, 1566), ch. 4, opening section. See the trans. by Beatrice Reynolds, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (New York, 1945), 43–4: ‘Machiavelli also wrote many things about government—the first, I think, for about 1,200 years after barbarism had overwhelmed everything. [His sayings] are on the lips of everyone, and there is no doubt but that he would have written more fully and effectively and with a greater regard for truth, if he had combined a knowledge of the writings of ancient philosophers and historians with experience. Jovius reports that he lacked this qualification, and the work speaks for itself.’ 51 Bodin, Methodus, trans. Reynolds, 153.

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First Book of the Discorsi, when he wrote that his efforts might prove defective and of slight utility due to his ‘poor intellect, scant experience of current affairs, and feeble knowledge of antiquity’. Gentillet was merely being scrupulously true to the letter of his sources. In a later, augmented edition of the Contre-Machiavel, Gentillet added material from the Arte della guerra and the Istorie fiorentine; but in the first edition (which was the basis for all but two of the subsequent issues) he refers only to Il Principe, which he regards as Machiavelli’s principal treatise replete with pre´ceptes tyranniques, and the Discorsi, which he describes simply as ‘commentaries on the other book’ (p. 5).52 From these two works he has extracted and collected together the material which he considers to be Machiavelli’s own; has summarized this under certain maxims; and organized these into three groups. He has done this in order to bring together each subject in one place so that he might better examine it because Machiavelli ‘hath not handled every matter in one same place, but a little heere, and a little there, enterlacing and mixing some good things amongst them’—a technique used by poisoners ‘which never cast lumpes of poyson upon an heape, least it bee perceived, but doe most subtillie incorporate it as they can, with some other delicate and daintie morsells’. If, says Gentillet, he had followed Machiavelli’s own order, it would have been necessary to treat any one point several times over, confusedly and not comprehensively. He has, accordingly, reduced the greater part of Machiavelli’s doctrines to maxims; has added the arguments by which these maxims were sustained by their author; and has provided references to the relevant passages in Machiavelli’s work so that those who so desire may verify the fidelity with 52 ‘Outre ledit livre intitule´ Le Prince ou De la Principaute´, Machiavel a aussi escrit des Discours sur la premie`re Decade de Tite Live, divisez en trois livres, qui servent comme de commentaires a` l’autre livre de la principaute´’. The translation (1602), sig. A.2v, is very clumsy here. Later, Gentillet came to know both the Arte della guerra and the Istorie fiorentine, and incorporated much new material from these two works in a revised edition of the Contre-Machiavel which was published at Lausanne in 1585 and reprinted at Leyden in 1609. D’Andrea and Stewart, p. lix, consider that this edition is so altered and revised that it could be ‘regarded as a different book’. There is much truth in this view, and I treat the work separately below, Ch. 12.

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which he has attributed to Machiavelli only that material which is properly his, and has not omitted any reasons which might support Machiavelli’s case. Gentillet’s strategy is to demonstrate and confute the results of his adversary’s threefold imperfection. Machiavelli’s superficial conception of modern political affairs is to be met not by reference to ‘small potentates and tyrannizers borne in one night like toadstooles (as Machiavell dooth)’, but by the great and notable examples of the Kings of France (p. 12; 1602, sig. A.4v). The inadequacies of Machiavelli’s classical citations are to be countered by Gentillet’s own references to the emperors, princes, captains, and Senate of ancient Rome, which will confirm his modern examples: since these two monarchies (France and Rome) together provide the true model worthy to be imitated by every prince. Finally, Machiavelli’s feebleness of judgement is to be countered by Gentillet’s own superior comprehension. This last is a tacit assumption throughout the Contre-Machiavel and is largely unfounded for, while Gentillet’s dialectic is, perhaps, not markedly worse than Machiavelli’s, it is certainly no better.

gentillet ’ s h i s t o r i c a l a r g u m e n t Fundamental to Gentillet’s refutation of Machiavelli is a determined and consistent appeal to historical example, and a refusal to cite the authority either of the Bible or of moral philosophers and theologians. Machiavelli had argued on the basis of real and vicarious experience. Gentillet will do no less. Machiavelli and his atheistical followers could all too easily be destroyed by an appeal to Holy Writ which would, however, be unnecessarily polluted in the process. So, instead, they will be assailed with their own arms—human reason and secular writings—which, in truth, serve only to confirm Christianity against the impious.53 Gentillet 53 Gentillet was evidently fond of this notion of taking on adversaries at their own game. In the dedicatory epistle to his Apologie or defence for the Christians of Fraunce which are of the evangelicall or reformed religion (1579), he proves the righteousness of the reformed religion not only from the Scriptures but also from the Canons: ‘I geve them yet this advantage further, that I enter the listes against

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adheres to this resolve despite the fact that some of Machiavelli’s absurdities are, in his view, so manifest that the ‘most rusticall idiots of the world’ could see through them; while a single passage of Scripture would prove them wrong (pp. 185–6, 247, 439; 1602, pp. 101, 139, 256). To demonstrate, for example, the fatuity and impiety of Machiavelli’s advice that cruelty which ‘tendeth to a good end is not to be reprehended’, one need cite only St Paul: ‘But I have alreadie said in another place, that I will not imploy the sacred armour of the holy scripture, to fight against this profane and wicked Atheist’ (pp. 396–7; 1602, p. 229). There is a certain grim justice in the historical technique employed by Gentillet to slay his adversary. His opinion of Machiavelli’s historical knowledge in general and the use to which it is put in the Discorsi is not high: Through all which discourses hee disperseth heere and there a few words out of Titus Livius, neither rehearsing the whole deede, nor hystorie of the matter, for which hee fisheth these words, and applyeth them preposterously, after his owne fantasie, for the most part forcing them to serve to confirme some absurde and strange thing. He also mixeth heerewith examples of small and pettie Potentates of Italy, happening in his time, or a little before, which are not worth the recitall, but are lesse worthie to bee proposed for imitation: Yet heerein is hee to bee excused, in that hee knew no better, for if hee had knowne better, I doubt not but would have brought them to light, to have adorned his writings, and to have made them more authentike and receivable. (pp. 5–6; 1602, sigs. A.2v–3)54

This is not an especially unfair or inaccurate view of Machiavelli’s wilful treatment of historical sources, which was quite uncritical and which thus allowed citation, from any place and any time, of examples which seemed to serve the argument. Quentin Skinner has suggested that some modern criticism of Machiavelli’s methodological assumptions displays a certain insensitivity since it ‘ignores the fact that Machiavelli repeatedly them with their owne weapons, which they take to be most for their own defence, and most hurtfull to us, that is to wit, the Canons, made or authorised by the very Popes themselves.’ 54 Gentillet’s view on Machiavelli’s selective misuse of Livy is very much that of Guicciardini in his Considerazioni. Cf. above, Ch. 3.

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qualified his supposed historical ‘‘rules’’ ’.55 But it is no less insensitive to ignore the fact that a gulf commonly exists between a writer’s caveat and its application. Machiavelli does occasionally (though not repeatedly) qualify the value of his historical evidence: but this does not prevent him from incessantly writing as though his particular examples have a universal validity quite divorced from changing contexts. Nor does it prevent him from consistently ignoring the fact that his examples are susceptible to a contrary interpretation: something which his acute contemporary, Guicciardini, was quick to point out. The whole edifice of his thought is, after all, built upon an unshakeable conviction that history is compounded of the deeds of men; that men have and ‘always have had, the same passions’; and that, therefore, the same effects recur, may be analysed, and afford one-for-one lessons. And surely not even a modern apologist would deny that Machiavelli rarely (if ever) questions the validity of the second-hand historiography he ransacks for his ‘evidence’. Livy’s Decades and similar compilations are, for Machiavelli, not merely writings about history but history itself. They have the force of revealed truth for him. He never stops to consider whether they might be submitted to assessment by collation, contrast, or the weighing of different types of evidence. Nor is it satisfactory to say, as did J. W. Allen, that ‘criticism of historical tradition or critical examination of historical evidence was little known or understood at the time’.56 There was, in fact, already a tradition of painstaking, if imperfect, accumulation of materials for the reconstruction of the classical past: though Renaissance products of this unglamorous antiquarian labour had as little appeal to Machiavelli as they have for most modern scholars. On the other hand, with regard to historical method, Allen was correct to point out, first, the severe limitations of any attempt to use the generalizations of secondary historical writing as a basis for immutable political laws; and secondly, that Machiavelli made very little real use of history since his conclusions were not, in fact, derived from his reading. 55 Skinner, Foundations, i. 169–70. 56 J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (1928), 486.

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Machiavelli simply found in classical and historical writings what had already been determined by his conclusions. It is true that, in this procedure, he differed little from most Renaissance readers. Gentillet’s own handling of historical evidence is possibly even more defective. It is certainly more clumsy. But it is not, on this account, reasonable to denounce the content of Gentillet’s attack on Machiavelli’s abuse of history. His own incompetence does not legitimize—much less does it deify—that of his famous predecessor. ‘In every science’, wrote Gentillet, ‘it seemeth to be the best (that men may well employ their time, which is deare and short) to read few bookes, to make good choise of them, and well to understand them’ (p. 206; 1602, p. 113). The Contre-Machiavel suggests that its author closely adhered to his own advice—at least within the limits imposed by his own ‘understanding’. He states that he has chosen the best and most authentic historians, and especially those who had written about events of their own time, and about affairs in which they had been participants. Among Latin writers he mentions Sallust, Tacitus, Suetonius, Dion, Herodian, Lampridius, Capitolinus, Josephus, and Livy; among the Greeks, Thucydides and Xenophon; and for French history, Froissart, Monstrelet, Paulus Aemilius, Commynes, du Bellay, and the Annales. In later editions of the Contre-Machiavel, an appended bibliography lists forty-three Greek, Latin, and French authors, ‘out of whom is extracted the Hystories and other things alledged in theese Discourses against Machiavell’.57 But, in fact, Gentillet leaned particularly heavily on only two sources, one each for Roman and French history. Livy is, naturally, his principal ancient: partly because it was necessary to demonstrate that Machiavelli had read this text ‘evilly’ and thus in no way provided that essential exegesis recommended by Gohory; and partly because for Gentillet, as for his opponent, the Decades of Livy were Roman history and not simply a generalized summary of it (pp. 439, 546; 1602, pp. 256, 319).58 For French history, Gentillet refers mainly 57 This list is given in the Latin translation of 1578 and included in the English translation (1602), sig. A.1. 58 For Gohory’s different view, see above, Ch. 7.

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to Philippe de Commynes, Louis XI’s Chamberlain—a man whose understanding of the government of a great kingdom was superior, in Gentillet’s estimation, to Machiavelli’s comprehension of the running even of a small ‘castleship’ (p. 13).59 How then are these ‘authentic’ histories manipulated in order to refute Machiavelli? Quite simply, they are pillaged for examples to illustrate that, on every occasion where a Machiavellian maxim is practised, disaster ensues; whereas whenever rulers eschew evil ways and follow the contrary path of conventional moral rectitude, then happy results inevitably accrue. Good princes have always been loved, have reigned long and peacefully, and have been ‘firm and assured in their estates’ (pp. 414, 529; 1602, pp. 240, 309). Tyrants, on the other hand, who govern by cruelty, always perish nastily, as is well depicted in stage plays where such rulers—‘which knit cordes, fasten gallowes in some prominent places, whet swords and daggers, and temper poisons’—in the end swallow down that very poison, stab their own bosoms, or hang themselves to the cheers and jeers of the onlooking world. Nor are such dramas mere poetic fictions, for ‘hystories are full of such tragicall ends of tyrants’. It is, moreover, a general rule ‘which hath seldome any exceptions’ that murderers are always murdered. Similarly, breach of faith almost invariably results in the ‘total destruction and ruin of the perfidious and disloyall person’ (pp. 348–9, 398, 453; 1602, pp. 200, 230, 264). The entire thrust of Gentillet’s argument is historical. Examples from the past, recent and remote, are amassed like knights in a cavalry charge where superior weight and numbers may overwhelm the opposition. Gentillet has two bands of warriors, highly contrasted but equally suitable for his purposes. First are all the ‘good’ emperors: Augustus Caesar, Vespasian, Trajan, Adrian, the Antonines, Alexander Severus, Constantine the Great, and Theodosius. Serving alongside these classical figures, and even more valuable, are the ‘ancient Kings of France: the great Clovis, the generous Charlemaigne, the good Saint Lewis, Philip August the conqueror, Charles le Sage, Charles the seventh, the victorious 59 ‘une simple chastellenie’ not ‘a simple towne’ as in (1602), sig. A.5. Cf. Bodin, Methodus, trans. Reynolds, 54, 56.

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Lewis the twelfth, father of the people, Francis the great restorer of letters, Henry the second, le Debonaire’. These are the rulers whom a prince must imitate. But Gentillet is just as well served by those evil rulers whose example princes must shun: such as Agathocles a potters sonne and usurper of the Sicilian tyrannie; or Oliver de Ferme, a barbarous and most cruell souldiour, who massacred his own parents & friends, to usurpe the tyrannie of the place of his nativitie; or that Caesar Borgia the popes bastard, full of all disloyaltie, crueltie, inconstancie, and other vices, and farre from all Royall vertues, which Machiavell proposeth for patternes to be imitated of princes. (p. 509; 1602, p. 297)

This second group is augmented elsewhere by the ‘bad’ emperors such as Caligula, Nero, Commodus, Bassianus Caracalla, Maximinus, and Heliogabalus, together with miscellaneous tyrants such as Denis of Sicily, and—head and shoulders above the rest in epic villainy—the mighty Hannibal who is very much a Livian monster of perfidy and cruelty throughout the Contre-Machiavel. Does Machiavelli dare to argue the success of cruelty on the basis of the career of the Emperor Severus? Then Gentillet will sweep him aside: first by showing that Severus was punished by God, who caused him to die of grief; and secondly by hurling his warriors into battle, for a single example avails nothing ‘against a million of others contrary: for men must make law of that which happeneth most often, and in many examples, not of that which seldome happeneth’ (p. 362; 1602, p. 208).60 Does Machiavelli cite the fates of Pertinax and Alexander to maintain that princes may be hated as much for their virtues as for their vices? Then Gentillet will show first that Machiavelli has misinterpreted his examples and secondly that, even if these be allowed, then his own forces are greater for such examples are exceptions and defailances of the rule, which notwithstandinge doe not cease to remaine alwaies true and certaine, no more nor no lesse, as philosophers say, that that rule is certaine and true, That the 60 In the augmented editions (1585 and 1609), III. 28, when refuting Machiavelli’s treatment of conspiracies in the Istorie fiorentine, Gentillet reinforces this point, stressing that a single example cited by Machiavelli does not constitute a general rule.

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Summer is hoter than Winter, although there be some daies in Winter more hot than there be other some daies in Summer. (pp. 418–19; 1602, p. 243)

Does Machiavelli uphold parsimony with the examples of Julius II and Ferdinand of Spain? Gentillet snaps his fingers in scorn. Neither illustration actually justifies Machiavelli’s position: and, even supposing that Machiavelli were accurate here, Gentillet can show that covetousness has always been pernicious to princes, while liberality without profusion has always been profitable. Against Machiavelli’s two ‘obscure’ instances, Gentillet can send cohorts both virtuous and vicious ‘which are farre more illustrious and notable’: Galba, Pertinax, Maurice, Phocas, Perseus of Macedon, Marcus Crassus, Vespasian, Louis XI, Caligula, Nero, Vitellius, Domitian, Commodus, Bassianus, Alexander the Great, Sulla, Augustus Caesar, Marcus Antoninus, Franc¸ois Ier, Trajan, and Charlemagne (pp. 511–27; 1602, pp. 298–308). Machiavelli is ridden down and trampled underfoot. Only very occasionally does Gentillet show mercy in battle as when, arguing against the simulation of virtues advocated in the eighteenth chapter of Il Principe, he decides that it would be an endless task to furnish all the relevant historical examples, and so limits himself merely to the most memorable for ‘in a notorious and evident thing, there is no need to insist more amply’ (p. 500; 1602, p. 291). Accordingly he lets Machiavelli, and his readers, off after only twenty-nine pages, and barely fifty assorted examples good and bad. These historical assaults are crude, repetitious, and prolix. Yet to Gentillet, and to the many readers whom he impressed, they must have seemed the most effective method of refuting an author whose appeal was largely to similar exemplars. Nor, despite his naivety, is Gentillet wholly ridiculous. Certainly he was sadly amiss in his conviction that good is always rewarded and evil always punished. Nevertheless, as he argued against Machiavelli’s penetrating gibe at model princedoms and republics, the philosophers who write about them never claim that they really exist. Their intention is ‘but to propose a patterne of imitation for monarchs, and government of commonweales: For when a man will propose a patterne to imitate, hee must forme it the most perfect, and make it the best hee can: and after, every man which

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giveth himselfe to imitate it, must come as nigh it as he can, some more nigh, others lesse.’ This is reminiscent of the terms in which Baldassare Castiglione excuses his attempt to describe the perfect courtier. If, says Castiglione, he errs, it is in company with Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero, who conceived the perfect commonwealth, king, and orator. His ideal courtier is but a mark such as archers shoot at; so that, if nobody hits the centre, the prize goes to the man who shoots nearest (p. 529; 1602, p. 309).61 It is unlikely that Gentillet was deliberately echoing Castiglione: but it is ironic that he should employ a similar defence of the ideal, since Castiglione was another Italian—polished to the point of slipperiness— whose subtleties were, arguably, responsible for the corruption of far more courtiers than Machiavelli’s straightforward and transparent pragmatism. The organization of Gentillet’s attack on Machiavelli is very simple. He has selected fifty tenets from Il Principe and the Discorsi, and arranged them under three heads, Council, Religion, and Policy—a scheme set forth in a vignette on the title page of the first edition, showing the Crown of France supported by three columns, with an unfurled label inscribed consilium pietas politeia coronam firmant.62 The distribution of chapters is very uneven, as is the space devoted to individual maxims. The first section contains 61 Cf. Castiglione, Libro del Cortegiano, ‘Lettera dedicatoria’, 3; Lib. II, 38; Lib. IV, 42. Cf. also Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, preface, 18–20, where the orator’s essential qualities are such ‘as perhaps no man ever was’. But Quintilian says that we are, nevertheless, to aim at perfection because those who ‘strive to gain the summit’ will get higher than those who simply despair and give up. 62 On this device, see Euge´nie Droz, ‘Fauces adresses typographiques’, Bibliothe`que d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 23 (1961), 574–83, where the three columns are interpreted as the three divisions of the Contre-Machiavel, Counsel, Religion, and Policy. D’Andrea and Stewart, pp. xxi–xxii, offer another, rather far-fetched interpretation of the device, as representing ‘the Salic law, the law of the Estates General, and the law of the inalienability of territories belonging to the crown’, which are discussed in the Contre-Machiavel (1576), 47–8. However, in the Brieve remonstrance a la noblesse de France, 208–10, Gentillet had already written that all the principal laws of the kingdom which uphold Religion, Justice, and ‘la Police’ were being violated and trodden underfoot since the foreigners had taken over the government of France: ‘De maniere que ces trois colonnes, estans des-emparees des bonnes loix qui les maintiennent, approcheroyent de leur ruine evidente, si Dieu n’y pourvoyoit: et icelles venans a tomber, le Royeaume par mesme moyen tomberoit par terre.’ It is also possible that Gentillet had in mind a riposte to

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only three chapters concerning the extent to which princes should take advice, and from whom such advice should be sought or avoided. The ten maxims of the second part comprise an attack on Machiavelli’s view of religion as a political arm, together with a defence of Christianity against paganism, and some anti-papal polemic. The final part, with thirty-seven maxims, is by far the most comprehensive and, according to Gentillet’s own summary, covers peace, war, faith, promises, oaths, clemency, cruelty, liberality, parsimony, constancy, deceit, justice, and other ‘virtues and vices, considerable in publike and politike persons’.63 This tripartite approach to French politics was conventional: but it does seem likely that Gentillet also had in mind Charles IX’s two columns (pietas and justicia) which had featured in the literature celebrating the Saint Bartholomew massacre, and to which Gentillet himself made oblique allusion when castigating the fulsome epitaphs for the late monarch. Each of Gentillet’s Machiavellian maxims is presented as a chapter heading, and is offered as a concise summary of Machiavelli’s thought rather than as a direct quotation—though there remains a strong implication that they represent Machiavelli’s own words. The maxim is next expanded by detailed reference to the relevant passages which are alleged to support the general statement. Then follows Gentillet’s own comment on the inevitable practical effects of such doctrine, together with the crucial historical refutation which is very loosely strung together. Finally, the closing sentences of each chapter generally incorporate some counter-maxim.64 The whole procedure is reminiscent of Gohory’s analysis of Machiavelli’s own method in the Discorsi where, said Nicolas Favier’s medal which celebrated the Saint Bartholomew massacre by depicting Charles IX’s column device. See above, Ch. 8. 63 Contre-Machiavel, Book III, Preface: (1576), 251; (1602), 142. 64 For example, the first maxim of all—‘le bon conseil d’un prince doit proceder de sa prudence mesme, autrement il ne peut estre bien conseille´’— ends, fifty pages later, ‘que le prince qui se gouvernera par le conseil des gens sages, entiers et idoines, prospera en tout bien: et celuy qui se gouvernera par sa teste se ruinera soy mesme’. Discussion of the maxim (II. 2) ‘Le prince doit soustenir ce qui est faux en la religion, pourveu que cela tourne en faveur d’icelle’, ends violently thus: ‘c’est chose damnable et detestable de soustenir le mensonge et faussete´ en toute chose, et singulierement en la religion: car c’est suivre la

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Gohory, he first expounds, ‘in few words some specific issue of Roman history according to Titus Livy’s description; then, in lively fashion, argues the matter profoundly from one side and then the other, in order at last to resolve it in some lofty political paradox’.65 Whether or not Gentillet consciously noted that observation on method, he can see no system in Machiavelli’s work other than that dictated by its primary purpose, which is to instruct rulers in the art of tyranny.66 It is this which gives Machiavelli’s writings such little homogeneity as they possess for, in Gentillet’s opinion, a good deal of Machiavelli’s ‘tyrannical science’ is derived directly from the fourteenth-century jurist Bartolus de Sassoferrato— though it is applied all topsy-turvy, ‘seeking that men should hold it for good, whereas Bartolus speaketh of it as of a damnable thing, which men ought to repulse and shun with all their power’ (pp. 251–4; 1602, pp. 142–3). In order to expose Machiavelli’s plagiaristic perversion, Gentillet summarizes Bartolus on tyranny, beginning with the oftrepeated bipartite division into evil usurpers and evil legitimate princes, before going on to the ten types of action which characterize tyranny: encompassing the death of powerful and excellent subjects so that they cannot rise against the tyrant; persecuting the ‘good and wise’ lest they should discover his vices to the people; religion du diable, qui est le pere des mensonges’. The first maxim of Book II, on religion—‘un prince sur toutes choses doit appeter d’estre estime´ devot, bien qu’il ne le soit pas’—ends up with an observation which might have come straight out of Il Principe: men are by nature more inclined to evil than to good and, if they see their Prince behaving as Machiavelli suggests, they will automatically follow him: ‘voila donc la consequence de ceste malheureuse et detestable doctrine de ce meschant atheiste, qui est d’amener tout un peuple a` mespris et moquerie de Dieu, de religion, et de toutes choses sainctes: et lascher la bride a` tous vices et desbordemens, pour parvenir a` une perfection de meschancete´’. And the maxim ‘Le prince ne se doit fier en l’amitie´ des hommes’ (III. 10) is sententiously answered with a French rendition of Euripides: ‘Prosperite´ rec¸oit amis bons et mauvais: / Adversite´ les bons, qui ne faillent jamais.’ 65 Gohory, Le premier livre des discours, sigs. a.4v–5 (address ‘au lecteur’): ‘en peu de parolles la singularite´ de l’histoire Romaine selon que Tite Live l’a descripte, puis sur icelle il debat les profondes matieres vivement d’une part et d’autre, pour enfin se resoudre en quelque haut paradoxe politique’. 66 Contre-Machiavel (1576), 3, 533, 540–1, 594; (1602), sig. A.2, 311, 316, 348.

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abolishing studies and good letters so that wisdom is suppressed; prohibiting honest assemblies for fear of revolt; employing spies, ‘fearing men speake evill of his evill actions’; maintaining divisions amongst his subjects, so that they cannot unite against him; keeping subjects so poor that they can barely scrape a living and can ‘machinate nothing against him’; maintaining war to ‘effeeblish’ his people, destroy studies, and make himself strong for his own purposes; trusting foreigners rather than natives; and, lastly, favouring one party rather than another amongst his divided people. Bartolus had concluded that to such tyrants no obedience is due, and they should be deposed. Now, demands Gentillet, is there a single point in all this which Machiavelli does not seek to apply to his prince? ‘All these tenne kinds of tyrannical actions, set down by Bartolus, are they not so many Maximes of Machiavell his doctrine taught to a prince?’ Who could doubt that Machiavelli’s intention was to fashion a real tyrant and that he had plundered Bartolus for this doctrine, which he has, of course, greatly augmented and enriched? Gentillet was neither the first nor the last critic to discern that much of what is most striking about Machiavelli’s thinking is merely an adaptation of earlier systematic analyses of tyranny. Bartolus’s De tyrannia was itself dependent on what Aristotle had said on this subject in the Politics: and, in fact, those who accused Machiavelli of plagiarism usually identified his victim as Aristotle. This had been the opinion of Bernardo Segni in 1549; it had been elaborated by Louis le Roy, whose commentary on the Politics was published in 1568; and the insight was repeated—or at least repeatedly experienced—by many later writers.67 Since Machiavelli employed the Speculum principum form in order to shock readers by the deliberate perversion of its hallowed catalogue of princely virtues, and since in Il Principe he did indeed suggest that tyrannical behaviour was the only answer to total political corruption, it is scarcely surprising that attentive readers, familiar with earlier authoritative statements on tyranny, should recognize a family resemblance. Yet, curiously, the most striking echo of Bartolus in Machiavelli is not mentioned by Gentillet in the 67 See Procacci (1965), esp. 45–75.

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chapter where it would have been most apposite: Crueltie which tendeth to a good end, is not to be reprehended (p. 393; 1602, p. 227). Gentillet takes Machiavelli to task for approving the sanguinary deeds of Romulus, and uses this example to establish his general rule that murderers are always murdered. He does not notice—or affects not to notice—an observation made by Bartolus when reviewing Plutarch’s definitions of tyranny. The very first point related to the murder of the nobility ‘and even brothers’: deeds described by Plutarch as tyrannical. ‘This is true’, says Bartolus, ‘unless it be for a just cause, as Romulus did to Remus.’68 Was this too close, for Gentillet’s comfort, to Machiavelli, who had argued that effects justify deeds and that, when the result is good, ‘as was the case with Romulus, then it will always excuse the deed’?69 Was it not easier for Gentillet to draw a clear distinction between the great Dr Bartolus, who was one of the ‘excellentest Lawyers of his time, and for one such is yet acknowledged’, and this beastly Machiavelli, ‘a simple burne-paper-scribe of the towne-house of Florence’ (pp. 253–4; 1602, p. 143)?

gentillet ’ s reading of machiavelli and his refutation In several respects Gentillet was an archetypal critic of Machiavelli: he saw only what he was looking for; did not understand everything that he found; and exaggerated much that he did understand. He has, however, not gone unpunished. In their turn, critics of Gentillet have treated him in similar fashion, especially by concentrating attention on the many occasions when 68 Bartolus of Sassoferrato, Tractatus de tyrannia, cap. viii: ‘Primum excellentes, et etiam fratres perimere est actus Tyrannicus; verum est, nisi ex iusta causa, ut fecit Romulus de Remo.’ The first writer to elaborate on this gloss by Bartolus on Plutarch, within the context of a discussion of Livy, was Antonio Ciccarelli, Discorsi sopra Tito Livio (Rome, 1598), 23. Ciccarelli is here, as elsewhere, certainly thinking of Machiavelli—but he does not name him. On Bartolus, see Ephraim Emerton, Humanism and Tyranny: Studies in the Italian Trecento (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), which includes a translation of the De Tyrannia. On Ciccarelli, see below, Ch. 13. 69 Machiavelli, Discorsi, I. 19.

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he gets Machiavelli wrong. Certainly, any attempt to evaluate the Contre-Machiavel must recognize its many weaknesses: especially the muddle-headedness which not only leads Gentillet to refute things which Machiavelli never said, but even inadvertently to agree with things that he did say.70 Such sillinesses are so patent that they are scarcely worth dwelling upon and it is, I think, more worthwhile to consider a quite different aspect of Gentillet’s achievement. To what extent had he read his chosen texts; and how far did he get them right? Gentillet was a zealous reader. Yet, in one sense, he did not read Machiavelli at all; for he is the first in a long line of critics to base his study on translations from the Italian. This procedure has certain drawbacks. Quite apart from any subtle changes of tone and emphasis, translators’ mistakes or idiosyncracies go unrecognized by the critic; and Gentillet, like many others, is thereby betrayed into errors of judgement. This is not to argue that, had he read Il Principe and the Discorsi in Italian, he would have interpreted Machiavelli in a fundamentally different fashion. But to be dependent on translators is to walk on crutches which may sometimes, of their own volition, march in directions not intended by the original author; and there can be no doubt that Gentillet’s crutches frequently carried him up wrong alleys. Some of his more notorious misinterpretations were, in fact, not his own fault. Gentillet’s handling of his Machiavellian texts may be studied with precision in the expansions following each of the maxims which constitute his chapter headings. Altogether, these expansions comprise approximately 10,500 words in which Gentillet seeks to explain, in what he deems to be Machiavelli’s own terms, both the implications of each maxim and the evidence upon which it is based. He also provides marginal references to the relevant chapters in Il Principe and the Discorsi so that, although these are sometimes incorrectly given or are omitted, it is possible in almost every case to identify the passages cited or paraphrased. Gentillet used either an early edition of 70 The prime example of Gentillet’s occasional lapse into agreeing with Machiavelli while trying to refute him is in his discussion of the maxim ‘A Prince which feareth his subjects, ought to build fortresses in his countrey, to hold them in obedience’ (III. 33).

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D’Auvergne’s Prince together with the 1571 Le Mangnier printing of Gohory’s Discours; or, as seems more likely, he used one of the pirated editions by Marnef and Cavellat (1571 or 1572) which combined the two translations in a single volume. The two sources are treated rather differently by Gentillet, who usually followed D’Auvergne’s words and phrases quite closely, but adapted Gohory with greater freedom and with more frequent resort to paraphrase—although with both authors Gentillet resorts to much cobbling together of passages which were not originally contiguous.71 Nevertheless, as far as he was concerned, these translations constituted the authentic voice of Niccolo` Machiavelli; and the fact that they were not resulted in many misconceptions. Some of these are merely matters of detail. Others have serious interpretative consequences. The polemical purpose of Gentillet’s enterprise determined that he should seek evidence for his own beliefs rather than seek to elucidate Machiavelli’s texts, and this resulted in two principal modes of misinterpretation: an excessively selective treatment of Machiavelli’s words, manifested in the maxims and their expositions; or simple incomprehension, revealed in the refutations. Yet there is, I think, only one occasion when Gentillet himself falsifies a crucial Machiavellian word as it had filtered down to him through the translators (p. 121; 1602, p. 63).72 The remainder of his verbal perversions are based upon the errors or stylistic vagaries of his French sources and, since these generate some of the misinterpretations for which Gentillet has been castigated, they are worth consideration. This is partly to ensure that the Contre-Machiavel is not blamed for anything other than its own shortcomings; and

71 A good example of such cobbling together of widely separated phrases and even sentences may be seen in Gentillet’s expansion of the maxim ‘L’homme est heureux tant que fortune s’accorde a` la complexion et humeur d’iceluy’ (ContreMachiavel, II. 10)—based upon D’Auvergne’s translation of Il Principe, 25. 72 This is in Maxim II. 1: ‘Le prince ne se doit fier aux estrangers.’ Machiavelli’s original maxim (Discorsi, II. 31) is ‘Quanto sia pericoloso credere agli sbanditi’—that is, the danger of trusting exiles or those who have been banished. Gohory renders the word correctly as ‘bannis’. But Gentillet ignores this and employs instead the word ‘estrangers’ (that is ‘foreigners’), which enables him to introduce a sustained diatribe against the Italians in France.

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partly to demonstrate the ways in which ideas may be distorted by faulty translation and then perpetuated by unsuspecting critics. Minor but revealing idiosyncracies deriving from D’Auvergne occur, for example, in Contre-Machiavel, III. 7, where the maxim A Prince ought to propounde unto himself, to imitate Cesar Borgia, is amplified on the basis of the seventh chapter of Il Principe. Machiavelli tells how Cesare’s cruel agent, Ramiro d’Orco, having served his purpose in quelling the Romagna, is brutally sacrificed by his employer as a sop to the populace. One morning, in Cesena, Cesare caused Ramiro to be ‘mettere in duoi pezzi’ (literally, ‘laid out in two pieces’) in the piazza, with a piece of wood and a bloody knife at the side. This phrase was rendered precisely by Cappel in his version of the text (‘il feir trencher en deux messir Remi d’Orque’) , whereas D’Auvergne writes that Ramiro’s head was cut off (‘il luy feit un beau matin couper la teste’): and it is the latter version which Gentillet follows (‘un beau matin il vous fit trancher la teste publiquement a Messir Remiro’). Later, at the end of the same exposition, Gentillet—writing of the collapse of Cesare’s plans on the death of his father, and the election of Pope Julius II—makes the remarkable observation that, seeing fortune turn her back on him, Cesare fell ill and died. Of course, he did nothing of the sort. The error is further embroidered when Cesare is made to say, on his deathbed, that he had thought of every inconvenience which could happen to him except death, but that he had never thought that he would have to die so soon : ‘et estant au lict de mort, il dit qu’il avoit pense´ et pourveu a` tous inconveniens qui luy pouvoyent advenir fors qu’a` la mort: mais qu’il n’eust jamais pense´ devoir si tost mourir’. All of this is wrong. What Il Principe says is that, on the day Julius II was elected, Cesare had told Machiavelli that he had thought of everything which might happen on the death of his father [Pope Alexander VI]: except that he had never thought that, when that did occur, he would himself be at death’s door. The culprit is D’Auvergne, who translates the crucial omission in Cesare’s planning, ‘excepte´ qu’il n’avoit jamais estime´, voire sur le poinct de la mort, devoit si tost mourir’. This is ambiguous save only in the respect that it leaves no doubt concerning Gentillet’s dependence. Two further, more serious, instances must suffice with regard to Gentillet’s unfortunate use of D’Auvergne. Machiavelli, in the

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nineteenth chapter of Il Principe, commenting on the failure of the emperor Pertinax despite his benevolent rule, had noted that hatred may be acquired as much by good deeds as by bad. This, as translated by D’Auvergne—‘la malveillance s’acquiert aussi bien entre les hommes par la vertu que le vice’—elevates a precise observation on human behaviour into a moral generalization; and it is in this form that it finds its way into the Contre-Machiavel as the sixteenth maxim of Book III: Un prince peut aussi bien estre hay pour sa vertu que pour son vice, which is expounded by Gentillet in D’Auvergne’s words, and then attacked on the grounds that Machiavelli makes no distinction between virtue and vice. It is certainly true that the simulation of virtue together with an ability to act, when necessary, contrary to all accepted virtues, is a matter at the very heart of the upside-down morality of Il Principe. In one of the eight maxims drawn by Gentillet from the eighteenth chapter of that text, the dread doctrine is set out: Le prince doit avoir l’esprit dextrement habitue´ a` estre cruel, inhumain et desloyal, pour se savoir monstrer tel quand il est de besoin (III. 23). In his exposition, Gentillet explains that Machiavelli had recommended not merely the appearance but even the reality of various virtues, provided that the prince had a spirit (or mind) sufficiently flexible and well-practised so that he knew, if need be, how to act completely contrary (‘il faut que le prince ait son esprit si doctile et dextrement habitue´, qu’il sache faire tout le contraire au besoin’). There follows a brief but vigorous rejection of the acquisition of such an ‘habitude’ through frequent exercise. This is tangential to Machiavelli’s argument, but arises from D’Auvergne’s translation of Machiavelli’s ‘stare edificato con l’animo’ (‘to be so framed in mind’) as ‘ton esprit soit si ductible et dextrement habitue´’. Though not especially inaccurate, this rendering has resonances of habit, use, and practice which are lacking in the original but readily impressed themselves on Gentillet’s imagination, already teeming with the dark, plotting royal schemers who had perpetrated the massacres of 1572. Gentillet’s use of Gohory’s Discours, though even freer than his handling of D’Auvergne, may be established with equal certainty, and its effects are interpretatively no less marked, ranging from purely figurative embroidery of Machiavelli’s style to serious

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distortions of his thought. Only occasionally does Gentillet indulge in lengthy verbatim transcription from Gohory; but one example, in the penultimate chapter of the Contre-Machiavel, based upon Machiavelli’s Discorsi, I. 55, will suffice to show Gentillet’s debt. I have italicized the words taken directly from Gohory. Les ligues et cantons d’Allemagne (dit Machiavel) vivent fort paisiblement et a` leur ayse, dautant qu’ils gardent esgalite´ entre eux, et ne souffrent qu’il y ait des gentilshommes en leur pays. Et ce peu qu’il y en a, ils les hayssent tellement, que quand quelques uns tombent d’aventure en leurs mains, ils les mettent a` mort, sans en prendre nul a` mercy: disans que ce sont eux qui gastent tout, et qui tiennent escolle de meschancete´. J’appelle (dit il) gentilshommes ceux qui vivent de leur revenu, sans s’adonner a` aucun mestier. Ce sont gens fort dangereux en une contree, et sur tout les hauts justiciers, qui tiennent chasteaux et forteresses, et qui ont nombre de vassaux et sujets qui leur doyvent foy et hommage. Le royeaume de Naples, la terre de Rome, la Romagne, la Lombardie, sont pleines de telle maniere de gens, et sont cause qu’on n’y a jamais peu dresser estat politique car ils sont ennemis formels de l’estat civil des republiques.

The dependence is highlighted by the perpetuation of one of the translator’s additions to the original Italian text. According to Machiavelli, the virtuous Germans kill any gentlemen who fall into their hands, ‘as the sources of corruption and the reason for every evil example’ (‘come principii di corruttele e cagione d’ogni scandolo’). In Gohory, the Germans kill the gentlemen, ‘saying that it is they who spoil everything, and hold the school of wickedness’ (‘disans que sont eux qui gastent tout et tiennent l’escole de meschancete´’); and this little non-Machiavellian flourish, along with all the rest, finds its way into Gentillet’s exposition of Machiavelli’s alleged words. A similar instance occurs when Gentillet is attacking Machiavelli’s attitude towards pagan religions. Machiavelli had discussed the way in which these ancient faiths, based upon oracles and auguries, had kept people devout until they realized that rites had been manipulated according to the wishes of the potentates. Men then lost faith and were inclined to disturb every good institution (‘atti a perturbare ogni ordine buono’). Gohory heavily adorns this passage. In his version, once the deception has been discovered, not only are the oracles abandoned, but people come to

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believe neither in God nor the Devil; they make no further conscience of anything; and are ready to break, burst, and spoil everything, like unchained slaves: Si tost qu’il vint a` faillir et que la tromperie et faucete´ fut descouverte, et qu’on conneut qu’ils respondaient a` l’appetit des grans seigneurs et de quiconque fournissoit a` l’apoinctement, lors on les laissa la` et vint on a` ne croire ne Dieu ne diable, en tel estat que les gens ne faisoient plus conscience de rien, estoient prests a` tout rompre, briser, gaster, comme serfz dechenez.

None of this is in Machiavelli: but it all finds its way into Gentillet, who deduces, from this translation, the fifth maxim of Book II, Quand on delaissa la religion payenne, le monde devint tout corrompu, et vint a` ne croire plus ny Dieu ny diable; and he elaborates this in words which obviously derive from Gohory—‘Et devindrent les hommes meschans a` outrance, prests et voulontaires a` tout rompre, briser et gaster, comme esclaves deschainez, sans plus faire conscience de rien.’ Gentillet was incensed not only by Machiavelli’s attitude towards Christianity but also by his seeming lack of respect for the Hebrew leader, Moses. The notion that Moses’s success derived from his military virtu` is specifically rejected in the ContreMachiavel, II. 7, where D’Auvergne’s faulty translation of the sixth chapter of Il Principe was the real source of irritation. But in the very next maxim, Gohory is the agent provocateur when Gentillet takes issue with Machiavelli’s alleged misrepresentation of Moses as a ‘brigand et usurpateur’ of other people’s lands without title or right: Moyse usurpa la Judee, comme les Goths usurperent partie de l’Empire romain. The coloured word ‘usurp’ is, however, not in the Italian text of the Discorsi, II. 8, upon which the statement is based. Machiavelli was here discussing people who are driven by necessity from their own land; invade other people’s territories; kill the inhabitants; take possession of their goods (‘possegono i loro beni’); and change the name of the country. This is what Moses did. So, too, did those people who took over the Roman Empire— place names being changed in Italy by the new occupiers (‘nuovi occupatori’). It is Gohory who translates possegono by usurpent, and occupatori by usurpateurs. Gentillet has been reprimanded for this:

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but he is merely leaning upon his crutches.73 It must, however, be conceded that Machiavelli’s sense is not badly rendered by the word usurp, and that Gentillet would certainly have been as outraged by Machiavelli’s original language at this point as by the more explicitly emotive translation of Gohory. Gohory’s Machiavelli here incurred Gentillet’s wrath by the use of a highly charged word. In the following instance it is an image peculiar to Gohory which stirred Gentillet’s imagination and elicited a spirited refutation. Contre-Machiavel, III. 29, concerns the man who, having always enjoyed a good reputation, wishes to become wicked to gain his purpose. He must, in such circumstances, colour the change in his behaviour with some apparent reason (‘doit coulorer son changement de quelque raison apparente’). This derives from the Discorsi, I. 41, where Machiavelli censures Appius Claudius for changing too rapidly from extreme virtue to extreme vice. Gohory, as is his wont in the first book of his Discours, renders the whole chapter very freely; and, having listed the various polarities of Appius’ behaviour, adds that the Roman was seen to change his garment so easily and pass from black to white (‘voire de tourner si legerement sa robe et passer du noir au blanc’). This image is seized upon by Gentillet in his exposition of the maxim, though he reverses the colours, ‘tournant sa robe comme de blanc en noir’; and he elaborates, in his refutation, this ‘comparison made by Machiavelli between the changing of manners and the changing of colours’. It is not Gentillet’s fault that Machiavelli never made this comparison. Nor did Machiavelli use the highly coloured word ‘seditions’ to qualify the opposition between the Roman plebs and the Senate, which, he claimed in the Discorsi, I. 4, made that republic free and powerful. He took issue with those who maintained that Rome was so disorderly that, had not good fortune and military virtu` compensated for such defects, its condition would have been inferior to that of other republics. On the contrary, argued Machiavelli, those who blame the tumults between the nobles and the plebs are blaming the primary cause of Rome’s retention of liberty. Gentillet joins battle with this chapter in Contre-Machiavel, III. 31, where he 73 Pamela Stewart, Innocent Gentillet, 55, 70.

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sets forth, as a Machiavellian maxim, that Seditions et dissentions civiles sont utiles, et ne sont a` blasmer. Modern criticism has remarked the way in which the introduction of the word seditions distorts Machiavelli’s meaning and leads Gentillet into a refutation of something which Machiavelli neither said nor meant. As Pamela Stewart puts it, the expression adopted by Gentillet is ‘troppo generica e troppo forte’.74 Gentillet, both in his maxim and in its exposition, completely alters Machiavelli’s position. He asserts that Machiavelli had maintained that seditions and dissensions are ‘bonnes et utiles’, and had been the cause of Rome’s greatness; and he completely ignores the point that the beneficial tensions noted by Machiavelli are specifically those between the nobles and the plebs. The malformation of the idea is patent. But it does not arise from Gentillet’s bad faith. The source is Gohory’s Discours, where the marginal annotation accompanying the first sentence of the relevant chapter is striking and unequivocal: Seditions cause de bien a` Rome. We have previously encountered Gohory’s mistranslation of another sentence from the same chapter, concerning the primacy of good military order: a mistake which Gentillet naturally follows. But Gohory continues that those who condemn the seditions of Rome blame the very thing which had been the cause of her liberty: ‘Je dy que ceux qui blasment si fort les seditions de Rome, reprennent a` mon avis ce qui a este´ cause de sa liberte´.’ Machiavelli had, in fact, written much more specifically: ‘Io dico che coloro che dannono i tumulti intra i Nobili e la Plebe, mi pare che biassimino quelle cose che furono prima cause del tenere libera Roma.’ Certainly, Gohory does subsequently refer to the ‘Seigneurs’ and to the ‘Commun’: but he has already provided sufficient misinformation to engage the wrathful mind of the Huguenot determined to uncover the rotten roots of sedition and dissension in contemporary France.

the gentillet effect This expose´ of French degradation was intended by Gentillet to be his principal achievement but, on the whole, it has met with little 74 Pamela Stewart, Innocent Gentillet, 58.

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critical sympathy. Historians no more regard Machiavelli as the determining factor in the massacre of Huguenots, or as the source of corruption in late-Valois France, than they consider Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel to comprise an accurate summary of Machiavelli’s political thought. Indeed, they do not even consider Gentillet to have been instrumental in encouraging that colloquial use of Machiavelli’s name as a term of opprobrium which became increasingly widespread in the closing decades of the sixteenth century. However, the argument advanced as proof of Gentillet’s insignificance is curious. First, it is asserted that accusations of atheism and political immorality were already being levelled at Machiavelli well before the appearance of the Contre-Machiavel; second, that Machiavelli’s books, either in the original Italian or in translations, were readily available to readers without Gentillet’s interpretative mediation; and thus, it is argued, the Contre-Machiavel was irrelevant. Nevertheless, while the premisses may be true, the conclusion is a non sequitur. Both the scale of vulgar, uninformed antipathy towards Machiavelli, and the nature of the language in which it was expressed, changed markedly after the appearance of Gentillet’s book and it still has to be determined whether or not this is mere coincidence—a problem which I shall examine in the next chapter. But, in any case, it is a form of intellectual suicide for scholars to suggest that the availability of a literary source obviates all desire for exegesis. To argue Gentillet’s irrelevance on such a basis is futile. Libraries are full of books explicating the works of authors perfectly able to explain themselves. Generations of academics have built careers on the foundation of single volumes containing, for example, the works of Shakespeare, Montaigne, or Machiavelli himself. Books engender books and, just as ingenious readers feel impelled to blazon forth their personal insights, so other readers enjoy the secondary literature, either to confirm their own prejudices, to enjoy the stimulus of disagreement, or perhaps to have their perceptions sharpened or enlarged. Often, too, it seems easier to have information predigested than to tease out meanings for oneself. With regard to Machiavelli, Gentillet’s work would have seemed a convenient, systematic treatment of difficult and unsystematic material. Everything appeared to be there—key notions,

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selected, categorized, summarized, and then refuted. Gentillet delivered to his readers a problematic author rendered down to a series of striking, easily quoted aphorisms; and between 1576 and 1655, there were twenty-four editions of the Contre-Machiavel in French, Latin, German, Dutch, and English. Whatever inferences we may draw from this statistic—contemporary indifference is not one of them. Moreover, the popularity of the Contre-Machiavel resulted in a remarkable paradox which has not, I believe, ever been commented upon.75 As we have seen, Gentillet’s chosen method of debate meant that he was himself publishing large chunks of Machiavelli in French and—making all due allowance for sixteenth-century taste—it is not unlikely that any reader, comparing their vigorous naughtiness with the laborious moralizing of the historical refutations, would be tempted to delve deeper into the writings of the exciting ‘puant athe´iste’. And that this is not merely an unhistorical gloss of my own is evident if we glance at the publishing history of these works. The Contre-Machiavel first appeared in 1576 and was followed by seven further editions or variant issues between 1577 and 1584. This may seem impressive until we note that, in the same period, there were seven issues of Le Prince, eight of the Discours, and two of the Histoire florentine. In 1585 there was a single issue of an enlarged edition of the Contre-Machiavel: but in 1586 there were four issues of both Le Prince and the Discours, with a considerable further Machiavellian flurry of at least thirteen issues (in various languages) around the turn of the century. The Contre-Machiavel appeared again in a single issue in 1609: but within six years there were another seventeen versions of the French translations of Machiavelli.76 It is, of course, impossible to draw infallible conclusions from such bare publishing statistics: but it does seem that, whatever else Gentillet achieved, he unwittingly encouraged the publication and distribution of his hated enemy’s books. 75 Although I have now alluded to it in my article, ‘ ‘‘Le plus gentil esprit qui soit apparu au monde depuis les derniers sie`cles’’: The Popularity of Machiavelli in Sixteenth-Century France’, in Pauline Smith and Trevor Peach (eds.), Renaissance Reflections: Essays in Memory of C. A. Mayer (Paris, 2002), 195–212. 76 D’Andrea and Stewart, pp. xvii–l; Bertelli and Innocenti, 59–80.

10 In the Wake of Gentillet: The Evolution of the ‘Machiavel’ Stereotype in France and England a s wift critical response The first edition of Gentillet’s masterpiece had been published anonymously in Geneva; and the earliest response came, appropriately, from the Italian community there. Not only had their Florentine compatriot Machiavelli been attacked (which probably did not bother them unduly) but their whole nation had been scorned and reviled. Gentillet had generously acknowledged the possibility that there were, among the Italians, some virtuous people: ‘for there is not so bad a ground, which amongst diverse and sundrie evill plants, bringeth not out some good’. Indeed, he continued, a virtuous Italian was to be especially praised ‘because they are rare, and for that it is no triviall and common thing in Italie to be a vertuous and good man’. None of this was calculated to warm the hearts of the Genevan Italians, who complained so bitterly and vociferously that Gentillet decided to publish (again anonymously) a Declaration, ostensibly ‘pour satisfaire aux plaintifs d’aucuns Italiens’.1 He claimed that it had never been his intention to attack those amongst the Italians 1 Declaration de l’Auteur des Discours contre Machiavel, pour satisfaire aux plaintifs d’aucuns Italiens (n.p., n.d.). This was published separately, shortly after the appearance of the first edition of the Discours, and was then included at the end of several subsequent editions. On this see Droz, ‘Fauces adresses typographiques’. My discussion and quotations are based on the ‘Troisiesme edition’ (1579), 631–6.

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who were decent fellows (gens de bien), but simply to refute the detestable, poisonous, and corrupting doctrines of Machiavelli. However, because those ideas had come from Italy and were ‘notoriously practised in our France by the Italians who are in authority there’, he had been obliged to write about certain vices which had for a long time been rife in Italy. Nevertheless, there were several reasons why decent Italians should not take offence. After all, he had declared in his Preface that such ‘gens de bien’ did exist, both in and out of Italy, and that they themselves detested Machiavelli. Secondly, he observed with admirable tact, he had not undertaken to write generally about the vices of the Italian nation, but only about some of them. Thirdly, and no less tactfully, he pointed out that he had said nothing about Italian vices beyond those directly relevant to his discussion of Machiavelli, and had never digressed to other depravities. Nor had he ever used a ‘cynical or biting’ manner but rather had written as ‘softly and as modestly as the subject permitted’—despite the extreme difficulty of writing about ‘villainous and filthy’ matters in gentle terms, and that language must inevitably be appropriate to its subject matter. Finally, everyone must realize that ‘all nations have their vices, some more, some less’, and they should not be hidden away but rather exposed and detested so that they may not take root. ‘Wherefore, for all these reasons’, Gentillet proclaims triumphantly, ‘decent Italians should not take it amiss that I have touched upon some of the vices of their nation.’ One might well feel that Gentillet’s studied tactlessness could go no further: but, once launched, he knew not when to stop. There were, he supposed, some who took it ill that he had said, in his Discours, that ‘gens de bien’ were rare in Italy; yet he was sure that if you actually asked them whether this assertion were true, they would agree. Moreover, their own historians bore this out— ‘Sabellicus, Volterannus, Jovianus Pontanus, Paul Jove’, and even Machiavelli himself—in comparison with whom his own words were mild indeed. Finally, in a grand peroration, Gentillet drew a parallel between Greece and Italy. In the former, not only had many valiant captains flourished in ancient times but, later, ‘the pure doctrine of the Gospel had first been preached and planted by the Apostles’. None the less, the Greeks had become polluted by all

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sorts of vices and errors and, having incurred God’s wrath, had fallen prey to the Turks and were now in the most miserable, servile, and detestable condition. Similarly, Italy had once been the most flourishing empire in the world and, thereafter, the true fountain and support of Christianity. But what had happened to all those excellent graces with which God had adorned that nation? Everything had changed into quite contrary vices, and they have been punished accordingly. All that Gentillet was doing, as a loyal Frenchman, was to demonstrate to his own people the source of their current evils. It is not surprising that this maladroit attempt to placate the Italians in Geneva failed miserably, but far worse for Gentillet was the fact that, despite the cloak of anonymity, his identity had somehow leaked out, with the result that an irate Italian reader named Francesco Lamberto beat him up in the street and thus earned a tiny footnote in history.2 Unfortunately, little else about the impact of the Contre-Machiavel is as uncomplicated as Lamberto’s forthright critical appraisal; and the subject is so vaporous that it can only be approached via a methodological digression.

hostile references to machiavelli b e f o r e ge n t i l l e t During the 1950s, the military historian Alfred Burne wrote a series of books on medieval and early modern battles, in which he sought to resolve the problems arising from inadequate contemporary sources by taking into account the factors which together constituted ‘Inherent Military Probability’. Such ‘probability’ was based upon a professional knowledge of military practice applied to matters such as terrain and other physical determinants which could be established with reasonable confidence.3 Although open to criticism, this approach has yielded 2 On this episode, see Droz, ‘Fauces adresses’; C. Edward Rathe´, ‘Innocent Gentillet and the First Anti-Machiavel’, Bibliothe`que d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 27 (1965), 186–225; D’Andrea and Stewart, pp. liv–lviii. 3 Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred H. Burne, The Battlefields of England (1950); More Battlefields of England (1952); The Crecy War (1955); The Agincourt War

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valuable insights and might usefully be adapted by historians of ideas: for there are issues where documentary evidence is equivocal but where intellectual and political contexts clearly indicate that some interpretations are more likely than others.4 A problem of this kind is posed by a feature of Machiavelli’s reception which has long attracted attention. During the closing decades of the sixteenth century, Machiavelli’s name, and such derivative forms as Machiavellism, Machiavellist, Machiavellian, Machiavellique, and a very Machiavel, became synonymous with various evils and were increasingly used as terms of abuse, especially in France and England. Yet their rapid dissemination and multiplication are difficult to explain, and their significance even more so. For nearly a hundred years after Robert von Mohl published his massive history of political thought (1855–8), there was general acceptance of his dictum that Gentillet’s ContreMachiavel constituted the ‘arsenal’ from which Machiavelli’s enemies took their weapons.5 Scholars were later also influenced (though less convinced) by Edward Meyer’s thesis that practically all the popular denigration of Machiavelli in England, together with the ubiquity of the Machiavel figure in Elizabethan literature, derived from the same source.6 However, from the middle of the twentieth century, there developed a contra-Contre-Machiavel movement seeking to establish that, since evidence for hostility towards Machiavelli may be found long prior to the book’s appearance, Gentillet’s work cannot be regarded as the principal source (1956). Although Burne never provided a full theoretical discussion of his concept of Inherent Military Probability, all the constituent elements were set out in his The Art of War on Land (1944). 4 The most outspoken recent attack on Burne’s approach to military history is Michael K. Jones, ‘The Battle of Verneuil (17 August 1424): Towards a History of Courage’, War in History, 9 (2002), 375–411. Many of Jones’s criticisms are well founded, but his enthusiasm for Verbruggen’s notion, that we can discover the attitudes of medieval soldiers during combat, is excessive and the results are certainly no less conjectural than Burne’s own. 5 Robert von Mohl, Die Geschichte und Literatur der Staatswissenschaften (Erlangen, 1855–8), iii. 549. A similar view concerning Gentillet’s influence in the 16th c. was advanced by Mohl’s contemporary Paul Alexandre Rene´ Janet, Histoire de la philosophie morale et politique dans l’antiquite´ et les temps modernes (Paris, 1858). 6 Meyer, Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama.

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for vulgar anti-Machiavellian sentiments. This is patently a non sequitur: but such pre-Gentillet antagonism is still worth examining. Despite Machiavelli’s popularity—indeed, partly because of it—there were inevitably some early readers who found his challenging opinions and trenchant language deeply disturbing. The observations not only of clerics such as Pole, Osorio, Catharino, and Giovio, but also of men such as Giunta, Busini, and Ascham, make this clear. However, as far as we know, it was not until 1565 that a derivative of his name was used to characterize morally dubious behaviour when, in the course of the ping-pong battle of words which began with Bishop John Jewel’s so-called ‘Challenge Sermon’, it was Thomas Harding’s turn to publish a Confutation of Jewel’s Apologia ecclesiae anglicanae.7 Attacking Jewel and the English Church for their encouragement of ‘carnal libertie and licentious lyving’, Harding explains that it is precisely this which has attracted evil men to the Reformation: What makes so many malepart prentises, pleasant courtiers, discoursing parlament machiavellists, and all other what so ever fleshwormes, Marchantes, idle artificers, to inbrace your gospell, rather than the graver and devouter sort of men which be weaned from the pleasure of this life: but that it was plausible to the world and pleasant to the flesh, from which that kind of man is most hardly drawen?8

Evidently, in this context, Harding intended the word ‘machiavellists’ to convey something unpleasant; and it is just possible that its association with ‘discoursing’ and ‘parlament’ had some political resonance.9 In 1550, Richard Moryson, a writer sympathetic to Machiavelli, had already used the word ‘Machiavellist’, to indicate 7 There were, in fact, a series of parallel controversies, comprising Answers, Replies, Rejoinders, and Defences, which ran the dreary course common to religious debate, enlivened solely by refreshing bursts of scurrility. For a detailed account of the ‘Great Controversy’ sparked off by Jewel, see A. C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose 1559–1582 (London and Glasgow, 1950), 59–118. For a convenient summary of the Jewel–Harding material, see Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (1978), 1–6. 8 Thomas Harding, A Confutation of a Booke intituled an Apologie of the Church of England (Antwerp, 1565), fo. 134v. 9 This was suggested by Gasquet (1974), 128–9, though I rather doubt it.

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political realism, but with no implication of moral impropriety.10 It seems unlikely that Harding’s reference, fifteen years later, could have been the first time that Machiavelli’s name had been employed in a hostile fashion, and Harding must have expected his readers to derive some meaning from his allusion: but whether or not he had anything specific in mind cannot now be determined. When Jewel responded once again, with his Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande, he cited this passage from Harding—in the prolix reiteration of an adversary’s words customary in this kind of controversy—and fell furiously upon the ‘flesh-worms’. But he made no comment on the ‘Machiavellists’.11 As a term of abuse the word seemingly conveyed nothing to him and, elsewhere in the Defence, he happily refers to Machiavelli as a helpful antipapal historian in a manner reminiscent of Charles du Moulin, Mathias Flacius Illyricus, and John Bale.12 At one point he even uses Machiavelli as a stick with which to beat Reginald Pole. Replying to allegations that Protestants teach people to rebel against their princes, Jewel declares that, on the contrary, this is something encouraged by the Papacy and, amongst several examples, he refers to Reginald Pole’s ‘imagined oration to Charles the emperor, calling back his majesty from the Turk, to leave all other affairs, and to bend his banners against England’. He then continues: ‘Nicolas Machiavel, in his Italian history saith, that the bishops of Rome themselves, through their ambition and cruelty, have raised such deadly discord and bloody wars between christian princes, as few the like have been seen in Christendom these many years.’13 10 See above, Ch. 3. 11 Jewel, Defence of the Apology, in Works, ed. John Ayre (Parker Society, 1845– 50), iii. 603–6. 12 See above, Ch. 1. 13 Jewel, Works, iii. 171. The Pole allusion is to the Oratio ad Caesarem towards the end of Book III of the Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione. The Machiavelli allusion is to the Istorie fiorentine, I. ix, which, however, refers specifically to the ruinous wars in Italy. Later in the Defence (Works, iv. 679), Jewel again refers to Machiavelli. Considering the dangers posed by papal legates at the courts of princes, Jewel writes, ‘as Machiavel saith: there hath been few wars or commotions inflamed these many late years but by the mean and whispering of these legates’. I do not know any passage where Machiavelli specifically refers to the papal legates.

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Apart from the fact that Harding was himself a religious turncoat and had been described by Lady Jane Grey as a ‘deformed imp of the devil’ and a ‘stinking and filthy kennel of Satan’,14 what makes his reference to ‘Machiavellists’ especially curious is its isolation from the only other contemporary sources showing a similar kind of disapproval. It has often been remarked that, in Scotland during the late 1560s and beyond, there were several references to Machiavelli using his name to indicate political cunning and unscrupulousness. But why this should have happened is yet another mystery. Mario Praz suggested that ‘given the close relations between Scotland and France, we would find it natural that the Machiavelli legend, hatched in France under the rule of Catherine de’Medici, should have first found its way to Scotland and the Scottish Reformers’. However—leaving aside the question-begging ‘Machiavelli legend’—this still does not explain why such references occur in Scottish Catholic (as well as Protestant) writing; nor why they should antedate anything of the same kind surviving in French sources.15 We know that, in 1553, Gaspard d’Auvergne’s translation of Il Principe had been offered to James Hamilton, second Earl of Arran: but Arran proved a politician of such refulgent fatuity that even his many enemies did not think to associate him with Machiavellian doctrines. That distinction was first accorded in Scotland to William Maitland of Lethington, whose devotion to his native land, unerring insight into the self-righteousness of both Catholics and Protestants, and ceaseless but unavailing attempts to preserve Mary Queen of Scots from the consequences of her own stupidity, 14 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. S. R. Cattley and G. Townsend (1837– 41), vi. 418. 15 Mario Praz, ‘The Politic Brain: Machiavelli and the Elizabethans’, originally a lecture to the British Academy (1928), revised and republished in The Flaming Heart (New York, 1958). The observation cited is at p. 94. See also Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation, ed. J. Cranstoun (Scottish Text Society, 1891–3), nos. IX, XXII, XXX, XLV; The Works of William Fowler, ed. H. W. Meikle, J. Craigie, and J. Purves (The Scottish Text Society, Edinburgh, 1914–40), iii, pp. xciii–c. The indefatigable Horrocks, p. 121 ff. noted the majority of the hostile Scottish references to Machiavelli. Bawcutt, ‘Some Elizabethan Allusions to Machiavelli’, 56–7, adds another pamphlet, Ane Discourse Touching the Estait Present in October Anno Domini 1571 (Saint Andrews, 1572), which criticizes Maitland as one who is ‘scholit’ in his ‘Maister Macheauillis principallis’.

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inevitably earned him the hatred of religious zealots. It is nevertheless noteworthy that denunciations of Maitland as a ‘faulse Machyvilian’ who tempted the Queen with ‘poisoned words’, and as ‘a scurvie Schollar of Machiavellus lair inventing wiles anointed kings to thrall’, should occur not in the diatribes of the erudite but in the scrofulous pages of balladers. Where, one wonders, did such people pick up the allusion? By contrast, when George Buchanan wrote a short treatise against Maitland in 1570 he did not use the contemptuous term. His work is entitled Chamaeleon, identifying that creature’s ability to assume a variety of colours with the constantly changing political hues adopted by Maitland, who ‘coverit himself with the Cloik of Religioun sa lang as it could serve’.16 This would have been a perfect opportunity to label the villain as a Machiavellian, but Buchanan—who in the following year was to berate ‘Machiavill Mockers of all Religioun and Vertew’17—did not take it. Yet, ironically, Maitland may well have had some acquaintance with Machiavelli’s work. In a letter to the Earl of Sussex in 1570, defending himself against the charge of gross inconsistency, he argues the necessity of adapting oneself to changing circumstances, and refers to ‘a good author, one who in his time was no prentice in the politic science, being from his youth brought up in that trade’.18 It is difficult to imagine who, apart from Machiavelli, that ‘good author’ could have been. There were others, though, for whom Machiavelli was very far from seeming a ‘good author’. One of the most peculiar Scottish political effusions of this period is a manuscript which circulated after the murder of the Regent, James Stuart, Earl of Moray in January 1570. Claiming to be the report of a conversation between 16 Chamaeleon, printed at the end of Buchanan, Opera (Edinburgh, 1715), i, separate pagination, p. 14. 17 Ane Admonition direct to the trew Lordis, Mantenaris of the Kingis Graces Authoritie (which is printed immediately before the Chamaeleon in the Opera, i, separately paginated, p. 2). This single adjectival use is, I think, the only occurrence of Machiavelli’s name in the entire length and breadth of Buchanan’s vast corpus. 18 PRO, State Papers Scottish, XIX, No. 51, fo. 8. Cited by Horrocks, 125–6. The need to ‘varie with tyme’ had been discussed on the basis of Machiavelli’s observations by William Thomas.

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the Regent himself, John Knox, and five other Protestant extremists, it was, in fact, a wholly fictitious concoction by Lethington’s younger brother, Thomas. It includes a statement that ‘Matcheivell is ane ewill buike, and I wold it had bene brunt’, and denounces ‘Matchiavellistis and thir bustard lordis’, and the ‘jolie wittis and polytick braines’ who are ‘Matchvellis discipilis’: but it is difficult to assess the value of this almost surrealist text in which the narrator claims not only to have been sleeping in the room where the meeting took place—‘sa weill hid that na man could perceave ma’—but also that he was provided with a convenient hole through which he could see the conspirators’ countenances and what they did.19 It does, none the less, confirm that Machiavelli was known in Scotland at this time and could be relied upon to induce a shudder of disapproval. Another leading contemporary Scottish political figure who may have had some first-hand knowledge of Machiavelli was John Leslie, Bishop of Ross and one of Mary’s staunchest supporters. A short manuscript treatise, written in 1569 and sometimes attributed to Leslie, attacks those who conspired against the Scottish Queen. It asserts that their claim to be ‘setting forward’ religion is merely a device extracted ‘out of Macivell of his discourse on Titus Livius’ where usurpers are advised to maintain some religion, even though this be feigned, in order to seduce the people.20 The passage could derive from the Discorsi, I. 11, where Machiavelli discusses Numa Pompilius and his pretended conversations with a nymph. The citation is not precise, but it is the kind of inattentive reading which might be expected of a cleric who elsewhere declared that he was ‘not of the college of fine witted clerks of Machiavel’s school’ who are never contented with the present estate but are always trying to 19 Various versions of this Copie of ane Adverteisment sent from the court to a freind of my lord have been printed. See Bannatyne Miscellany, ed. Sir Walter Scott and David Laing, i (Edinburgh, 1827), 37–50; Memorials and Transactions in Scotland, A.D.MDLXIX–MDLXXIII. By Richard Bannatyne, secretary to John Knox, ed. R. Pitcairn (Edinburgh, 1836), 5–13; The History of the Kirk of Scotland. By Mr. David Calderwood, ed. T. Thomson, ii (1843), 515–25. 20 Cal. S.P. Scotland, iii. 27: Ane brieiff declaratioun of the wikit and ungodlie proceedingis of certane inveterat conspiratoris aganis the quenis majestie. The attribution to Leslie was suggested by Horrocks (1908), 127, and has been tentatively accepted by Gasquet.

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alter commonwealths and ‘depriving and setting up of princes at their pleasure’.21 Nor does Leslie display a more exact knowledge of Machiavelli in either of the two editions of his Defence of the honour of Marie, quene of Scotlande. In the first he denounces the Earl of Moray’s ‘machiavells practizes’;22 and in the second he condemns not only ‘Machiavelian practisers’ who encourage rival claimants to the Scottish throne, but also their ‘Machiavellian policie’ of spreading infamous rumours—something which, in 23 fact, Machiavelli himself wholly deplored. Leslie evidently enjoyed the word Machiavellian and it crops up more interestingly in another work attributed to him, A treatise of treasons, where he denounces the ‘lawless faction of machiavellian libertines’ set up by a new ‘pretended’ religion, and castigates Elizabeth’s ministers, William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, as a pair of ‘plain Machiavellians’ or ‘Machiavel Catilines’ who are bent on turning Christian England into a ‘Machiavellian State and Regiment’.24 What he means by this kind of state is set out in a passage which, though well known since J. W. Horrocks first drew attention to it, is still worth citing as evidence of how far 21 Cal. S.P. Scotland, iii. 813: letter dated 22 June 1571 from Leslie to Queen Elizabeth. 22 A defence of the honour of the right highe, mightye and noble princesse Marie, quene of Scotlande (Rheims, 1569), fo. 38. A fragment of another version of this edition is listed in STC (2nd edn.), no. 15504. 23 A treatise concerning the defence of the honour of Marie of Scotlande (Louvain, 1571), sigs. **1r
v, *4. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I. 8, bitterly attacks ‘le calunnie’. 24 A treatise of treasons against Queen Elizabeth and the Croune of England, divided into two Partes (Louvain, 1572), Preface and fos. 83, 85–7. The references to Machiavelli were first noted by Horrocks, 129–31, who attributed the work to Leslie. Leslie’s authorship was accepted by A. C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 310–17, 444–7. Southern also discusses the French translation, L’Innocence de la Tresillustre, tres-chaste, et de´bonnaire Princesse, Madame Marie Royne d’Ecosse, and argues that it was probably prepared by Leslie himself and not, as is sometimes assumed, by Franc¸ois de Belleforest. STC (2nd edn.), no. 7601, remains equivocal about Leslie’s authorship. See also P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven and London, 1969), ii, no. 598. Cecil, as we know, was in the running for a copy of the Discorsi as early as 1551. See above, Ch. 1. In Jan. 1564 he was described by Cardinal Granvelle to Don Diego Guzman da Silva as being a new man and acting in accordance with the ‘discourse’ of Machiavelli: ‘hombre nuevo en los negocios, y que los lleva por discurso de Maciavello’. See Correspondence de Philippe II sur les affaires des PaysBas, ed. L. P. Gachard, ii (1851), pp. v–vi.

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hostility towards Machiavelli could go prior to Gentillet’s textbased denunciation. For Leslie, a Machiavellian state is one where religion is secondary to ‘civil Policie’ and is framed to serve a secular government. It is a state, unfettered by any rules of religious faith, where ‘both by word and example of the rulers’ the ruled are taught to alter their religion with every change of prince, and where religion is a mere outward pretence: ‘now one now another, they force not greatly which, so that at hart there be none at all’. Since, in this kind of polity, there is no belief in an afterlife, there is nothing either to restrain men from vice or to lead them to virtue. Instead, they are free to slaunder, to belie, to forswear, to accuse, to corrupt, to oppresse, to robbe, to invade, to depose, to imprison, to murther, and to commit every outrage, never so barbarous, that promiseth to advance the present Policie in hand, without scruple, feare, or conscience of hel or heaven, of God, or Divel. And where no restraint, nor allurement is left in the heart of man, to bridle him from evil, nor to invite him to good: but for vain fame only and fear of lay laws that reach no further than this body and life. (sig. a.5r–v)

It has been argued that this passage is evidence of a genuine, informed response to Machiavelli’s view of religion as a mere instrument of policy—a vision of the ‘spectre of the Secular State’.25 Certainly, a mind sufficiently overheated by religious fanaticism could torture such ideas from both Il Principe, with its transvaluation of all conventional moral values, and from the Discorsi, with its praise of pagan religious ceremonies. Moreover, since, as a young man, Leslie had studied in Paris and Poitiers from 1549 to 1554, he would have been able to read, then or later, those very translations of Machiavelli (by Gohory and D’Auvergne) which were to fuel Gentillet’s wrath. But whether or not the ‘secular’ state, indifferent to religious ‘truths’, was really more reprehensible than the bigotted ‘religious’ state is another matter.26 25 Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli, 60–1; Gasquet, 120–2. 26 Just as one might question whether this Christian view of human nature (so base that only the promise of reward and threats of punishment in some putative afterlife can make it behave responsibly) is not more cynical than any alternative. Cf. Pietro Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, trans. William Henry Hay II, in E. Cassirer, P. O. Kristeller, J. H. Randall (eds.), The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago, 1948), 360 ff.

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What upset both Papists and extremist Protestants in Elizabethan England (and elsewhere) was that, while the members of each sect felt oppressed, they also considered that their opposite numbers were not being persecuted rigorously enough; and one or two polemicists felt that this failure to practise Christian intolerance somehow derived from Machiavelli. In the Second Admonition to the Parliament (another work published in 1572), a spokesman for the advanced reformers—who were smarting under governmental severity no less than the Catholics—attacked the ‘politique Machevils of Englande’ who mistakenly thought that they could evade God’s wrath. Immediately, John Whitgift, who believed that the author of this work was Thomas Cartwright, demanded to know who was meant by these ‘Machevils’, since the reformers ‘envy all men of great authority, wit, and policy’.27 Perplexed piety in the face of religious tolerance received further expression in 1572 when Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury—writing to Lord Burghley about the ‘neutral’ policy in which ‘the papist is favoured as is the true protestant’—helplessly lamented that ‘this Machiavel government is strange to me, for it bringeth forth strange fruits’.28

g entillet and i nhe re nt hi stori cal probability So, even prior to the St Bartholomew massacre, there were people for whom Machiavelli’s name already carried sinister connotations, especially with regard to religious indifference. It is odd, though, that in France—where Politique rejection of religious extremism was more systematically propounded than in England or Scotland, 27 Second Admonition to the Parliament (1572), sig. A.2v; The Works of John Whitgift, ed. John Ayre (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1851–3), iii. 508–9. The exchanges continued in a Replye to an answere (which is certainly by Cartwright); a Defence of the Aunswere by Whitgift, and so on. Horrocks, 175–99, discusses Puritan responses to the Elizabethan Church Settlement and, as usual, misses few relevant passages. See also Bawcutt, ‘Some Elizabethan Allusions to Machiavelli’, 55–6. 28 Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. T. T. Perowne (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1853), 391. In a later letter to Burghley, Parker again mentions ‘Machiavel governance’ (ibid. 414).

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and where Il Principe, the Discorsi, and the Arte della guerra were readily available in printed translations—Machiavelli’s name was not yet pressed into service as a term of opprobrium. In fact, as we have seen, this scarcely occurred until the publication of the Reveille-matin des franc¸ois in 1573 and Gentillet’s Remonstrance au Henri III in the following year—and even then it was by no means common.29 Yet within fifteen years this tiny trickle of antipathy had swollen to a flood of ill-informed invective; and, by the end of the sixteenth century, the mechanical use of Machiavelli’s name, both in England and France, had become so commonplace and so divorced from the writings of the man himself that examples are scarcely worth noting. There can be no definitive explanation for this rapid development: but there is a good deal of circumstantial evidence to suggest that the most important factor was the ContreMachiavel.30 That the nature of this evidence should be circumstantial is inevitable. References to the Contre-Machiavel, the use of identifiable fragments from it, and allusions which may be second-hand (or still more remote), are generally made en passant and are rarely the main burden of an argument: although, of course, selecting them out could make them appear so. None the less, certain facts are inescapable. The vulgarization and distortion of Machiavelli’s name developed with astonishing speed after Gentillet’s attack and it is possible to produce several instances where the Contre-Machiavel was unequivocally responsible for such distortion. But the most compelling argument for Gentillet’s relevance is provided by what I would term the Inherent Historical Probability suggested by the political and ideological terrain of late sixteenth-century Europe. It is true that the Contre-Machiavel neither displaced Machiavelli’s own writings nor equalled their immense popularity, but a complex of interrelated forces and ideas ensured that the work 29 For some French sources which predate the Contre-Machiavel, but are later than Gentillet’s Remonstrance, see Portes (1574), 29; Poncet, L’Antipharmaque (1575); Epistre aux delicats machiavelistes (1575); Pierre Fabre, Response au . . . Charpentier (1575). 30 Within an exclusively French context, and using an approach very different from my own, Jean Balsamo has similarly reaffirmed the importance of Gentillet’s work. See his study, ‘ ‘‘Le plus meschant d’entre eux ne voudroit pas estre Roy’’: La Boe´tie et Machiavel’, Montaigne Studies, 11 (1999), esp. 9–16.

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could not fail to make an impact. In the first place, Italians were unpopular everywhere—except perhaps in Italy itself—and Gentillet’s expose´ of their manifold sins, along with those of an exciting arch-villain, Machiavelli, could scarcely have been timed more felicitously. Secondly, the Contre-Machiavel comprised the most detailed and circumstantial critical exposition of Machiavelli’s ideas available in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and thus provided that hermeneutic key to primary sources which readers so often demand. Thirdly, it comforted worried readers with the assurance that Machiavelli was a small-town upstart who lacked both learning and experience and was, therefore, wholly unqualified to give political advice to anybody. Fourthly, it offered a seemingly coherent demonstration of all the weaknesses in Machiavelli’s dialectic and, since Machiavelli’s writings were circulating widely, this was itself likely to command attention. Fifthly, it associated those writings directly, and plausibly, with a major political outrage—that is as both the inspiration for the St Bartholomew massacres and as the political thesaurus ransacked in order to justify them—and it is unlikely that the continuing arguments which raged over the atrocities would have ignored the longest and most systematic indictment of Valois culpability. Sixthly, it identified Machiavelli with a spectacularly unpopular regime dominated by an Italian Queen Mother and by Italian or Italianate courtiers; and—since there was already powerful hostility to Italian practices in both France and England, and since this was the period of bitterly contentious negotiations for an AngloFrench marriage alliance—this furnished a fertile compost for hatred to flourish. Seventhly, Gentillet was in perfect accord with contemporary reading habits when he reduced Machiavellism to a series of maxims, whose shocking nature was an added attraction. Thus, for those who believed his account to be a selfsufficient and accurate description of Machiavelli’s ideas, he was creating a ready-made villain. For polemicists who desired insults, arguments, and exemplars, he was not simply providing an ‘arsenal of weapons’ against Machiavelli (as Mohl thought), but one which could be used against any foe whatsoever. And for those who might be led on to explore Machiavelli for themselves, he was at the very

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least creating a predisposition to hostility. Once let loose, ideas, and prejudices in particular, gather a momentum of their own. The closing decades of the sixteenth century witnessed a series of major politico-religious conflicts—interspersed by, and overlapping with, many minor ones—which spawned wave after wave of polemic. The times were ripe for an all-purpose bogeyman symbolizing every kind of political and religious corruption. And here, like some pantomime demon king hurtling through a trapdoor, Gentillet’s Machiavel obligingly burst upon the European stage. In France there were the accusations and counter-accusations arising from the St Bartholomew massacres, and the virulent verbal exchanges prompted by the murders of the Guises and the assassination of Henri III. In England, arguments about the proposed French marriage were followed first by the Marprelate controversy and then by the Archpriest and Oath of Allegiance controversies. And there was much else besides. It was not simply that Catholic rulers were at odds with Protestant subjects, that Protestant rulers struggled both with Catholics and extremist reformers, or that Calvinists believed that everybody was wrong but themselves. Even within ostensibly homogeneous religious groups there were deep and deadly divisions. The mindless and destructive selfrighteousness of all this might seem incomprehensible were it not for the fact that, in our own time, similar attitudes threaten to engulf us. There was a constant round of repression, prosecution, persecution, rebellion, civil war, massacre, revenge, and perfidy. All of it was justified by appeals to the religious truth which each group regarded as its sole prerogative; and anybody who dared adopt a relativist and tolerant stance was condemned as having no religion at all. ‘Scribbling [l’escrivaillerie] seemeth to be a Symthome or passion of an irregular and licentious age’, wrote Florio, freely translating from Montaigne’s essay ‘De la vanite´’. ‘When writ we ever so much as we have done since our intestine troubles? or when filled the Romans so many volumes, as in the times of their ruine?’31 It was natural that the authors of such 31 ‘L’escrivaillerie semble estre quelque simptome d’un siecle desborde´. Quand escrivismes nous tant que depuis que nous sommes en trouble? quand les Romains tant que lors de leur ruyne?’ Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey, revised

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‘escrivaillerie’ should berate their enemies for sedition, cruelty, avarice, atheism, feigned piety, oath-breaking, reliance on force and fraud, promoting poverty, fomenting of factions, and animosity towards the Christian faith—the very crimes described in the Contre-Machiavel as rooted in the ‘maximes’ of Machiavelli whose books constituted ‘l’Alcoran des courtisans’ and comprised ‘non une science politique mais tyrannique’.32 t h e ‘m a x i m e s t y r a n n i q u e s’ and french polemic In France, the idea that Machiavelli was the principal repository of evil political aphorisms spread with astonishing rapidity and— while it would be naive to suggest that Gentillet was the direct inspiration for every subsequent occasion when an author denounced Machiavelli’s wicked maxims, precepts, or rules—a family resemblance is frequently evident. Only a few months after the first edition of the Contre-Machiavel had appeared, Jean Bodin—in the Preface to his Re´publique—lamented that Machiavelli was now in vogue among the courtiers of tyrants; denounced him as an atheist (citing Paolo Giovio on this point); and alluded sarcastically to ‘les belles reigles de Macciavel’, which proposed impiety and injustice as the two foundations of the state. In Bodin’s view, those who had seriously pondered affairs of state regarded Machiavelli’s knowledge of political science as superficial. Genuine political science did not reside in ‘tyrannical tricks’ gathered from all the corners of Italy; and Bodin condemns the ‘sweet poison’ contained in Il Principe, where Cesare Borgia is lauded as a model for princes despite the fact that, for all his cunning, he came to a sticky end. Here the tone of Bodin’s discussion of Machiavelli is not only different from the often-critical but unheated judgement expressed ten years earlier in his Methodus, but it is also at odds with the use V.-L. Saulnier (Paris, 1965), 946; The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne done into English by John Florio, with an Introduction by Thomas Seccombe (1908), 224. 32 The alternative ‘l’Evangile des courtisans’ was used by Catholics when denouncing what they perceived as Huguenot dependence on Machiavelli’s works.

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of Machiavelli elsewhere in the Re´publique. Whether or not Bodin had yet read Gentillet remains an open question, but prefaces are usually the last part of a book to be written, and the whole section is redolent of the Contre-Machiavel.33 It is suggestive to contrast the swelling fury aroused by the alleged maxims of Machiavelli with the reception accorded to the authentic aphorisms of another Florentine, Francesco Guicciardini, whose Ricordi were published in Paris in 1576. Guicciardini’s observations are more cynical than anything penned by Machiavelli; they expose the machinations of courtiers in a way that should have provoked howls of outrage among all Italophobes; and both the Italian edition and French translation were prepared by Jacopo Corbinelli, himself a Florentine, notorious as a Machiavellian scholar and henchman of Henri III—although, astonishingly, he is also one of the earliest recorded enthusiasts for Gentillet’s work.34 Corbinelli even used the Discorsi (without the author’s name) to gloss the Ricordi! Yet we hear few complaints about Guicciardini or the ways in which his pernicious maxims might have perverted the bluff old French nobility. It is true that his worldly sentences were 33 Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la re´publique (Paris, 1576), ‘Preface de l’autheur’, sig. aˆ.2v. The work appeared in Aug. 1576, that is five months after the first edition of the Contre-Machiavel. It is ironic that Bodin’s Preface is addressed to Pibrac, one of the most subtle apologists for the St Bartholomew massacre in which Bodin had nearly perished. G. Cardascia, ‘Machiavel et Jean Bodin’, Bibliothe`que d’Humanisme et Renaissance, iii (1943), 129–67, is still a valuable study, but does not consider the parallel with Gentillet. 34 It was probably Corbinelli who is referred to by the anonymous author of Contre les fausses allegations que les plus qu’Architofels, Conseillers Cabinalistes, proposent pour excuser Henry le meurtrier de l’assassinat par luy perfidement commis en la personne du tresillustre Duc de Guyse (n.p., 1589), 32. When describing how Henri III is imbued with ‘la religion de Machiavel’, the author claims that this is the result of having heard, in his privy chamber, ‘the readings of a blotchy old man thoroughly steeped in atheism’ (les lectures d’un vieillard bazanne´ conroye´ en l’Atheisme). We know that Corbinelli had in his possession (and had annotated) a copy of the Discorsi. See on this, G. Cardascia, ‘Un lecteur de Machiavel a` la Cour de France’, Humanisme et Renaissance, 5 (1938) 446–52; and Procacci (1965), 183– 91. This makes it all the more remarkable that, in Sept. 1577, Corbinelli should have written to his friend Giovan Vincenzo Pinelli enthusing over the ContreMachiavel. See R. Calderini de Marchi, Jacopo Corbinelli et les e´rudits franc¸ais d’apre`s la correspondance ine´dite Corbinelli-Pinelli (Milan, 1914), 175 n. 1; P. Simoncelli, La Lingua di Adamo: Guillaume Postel tra Accademici e fuorusciti fiorentini (Florence, 1984), 122–3.

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directed at courtiers not princes, and that they came out too late to be associated with the St Bartholomew massacres: but, most significantly, they had provoked no emotive Contre-Guicciardini.35 There are texts where the impact of Gentillet’s methodical denunciation of Machiavelli’s ‘maximes tyranniques’ is obvious. The earliest example (published in the latter part of 1576) is the Remonstrance d’un bon Catholique franc¸ois—although this particular ‘bon Catholique’ is clearly nothing of the sort.36 He dislikes the Clergy for their excessive wealth; deplores the massacre of the Huguenots, which has ruined France; and points to the example of Germany and England where toleration of opposing religions has led to concord.37 The King, he argues, is well obeyed in time of peace whereas the opposite is true in time of war. Those, therefore, who nourish wars inevitably promote disobedience and its evil consequences. The nobility must be on their guard against this and must not allow themselves to be persuaded by these ‘wicked foreign Machiavellists’ who do nothing but foment civil war. ‘We have been only too much abused by their villainous maxims’, exclaims the author, who proceeds to give some examples:38 A prince who under constraint uses gentleness towards his subjects hastens his ruin.39 A prince who would maintain partialities among his subjects will be better obeyed.40 The way to render subjects obedient is to 35 Usually, references to Guicciardini concern his role as a historian. Nicolas Vignier, however, sees him as one of an unholy trinity of Italian writers who sanction immoral political behaviour. Praising the kings of France who have always detested treachery, disloyalty, perfidy, and all sorts of deceits and evil simulations, such as are favoured in Italy and Spain, he adds that ‘such things Machiavelli calls virtues in his Prince, Guicciardini and Paolo Giovio call prudence in Frederick King of Naples, Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, and in several Popes of their nation’. See Nicolas Vignier, De la noblesse, anciennete´, remarques, & merites d’honneur de la troisiesme maison de France (Paris, 1587), 183–4. 36 Remonstrance d’un bon Catholique franc¸ois aux trois estats de France, Qui s’assembleront a` Blois, suivant les lettres de sa Majeste´ du VI. d’Aoust, presente anne´e M.D.LXXVI (n.p., 1576). 37 Ibid. 40–1, 62. 38 Ibid. 74–5. 39 ‘Un Prince qui par contrainte usera de douceur envers ses sujets avancera sa ruine.’ Cf. Gentillet, Contre-Machiavel, III. 20. 40 ‘Un prince qui maintiendra partialitez entre ses sujets se sera mieux obeı¨.’ Cf. Gentillet, Contre-Machiavel, III. 15 and 30.

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make them poor; better a kingdom ruined than lost.41 And they wallow in these fine maxims to make us kill and ruin one another.

These precepts, like the belief that the Machiavellists in France are foreigners and that the French nobility must be on their guard against them, derive from the Contre-Machiavel.42 And so, too, does the categorization of Machiavellism simply as a collection of amoral political maxims. It sometimes happened that works, affected by Gentillet, gained wide circulation in their own right, and then the effect was rather like the ever-expanding ripples caused by a stone thrown into a pond. A case in point is the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, generally attributed to Philippe du Plessis Mornay but published pseudonymously, as the work of ‘Stephanus Junius Brutus’, in 1579 and issued two years later in a French translation.43 The Preface, addressed to faithful Christian princes, is dated 1 January 1577 and—declaring itself to be by ‘Cono Superantius’—is written as though by someone other than the author. It has been suggested that this Preface may be the work of Gentillet himself, and it certainly has a familiar ring.44 The ‘questions’ propounded by Stephanus Junius Brutus are ‘contrary to the bad practices, perni41 ‘Le moyen de rendre les sujets obeissans, c’est de les faire pauvres.’ Cf. Gentillet, Contre-Machiavel, III. 32. I have not located a specific source for the phrase ‘Mieux vaut un Royeaume ruine´ que perdu’—although the idea itself follows easily from that of keeping subjects poor. 42 Sometimes a passing hostile reference to Machiavelli (while not directly attributable to a knowledge of Gentillet) still suggests the atmosphere of the Contre-Machiavel. See, for example, Jean de Le´ry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil (La Rochelle, 1578), which blames the present sickness of France on a variety of evil influences, notably Italians, Papists, usurers, atheists, Epicureans, Rabelaisian mockers who hold God in contempt, and ‘Machiavel et ses disciples, desquels la France, pour son malheur, est maintenant remplie’. 43 Stephanus Junius Brutus (Philippe du Plessis-Mornay), Vindiciae contra tyrannos (Edinburgh [Basle], 1579). For the still-inconclusive debate on authorship, see Stephanus Junius Brutus, the Celt. Vindiciae contra tyrannos: or, concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people over a prince, ed. and tr. by George Garnett (Cambridge, 1994), pp. lv–lxxvi. 44 See Salvo Mastellone, Venalita` e Machiavellismo in Francia (1572–1610) (Florence, 1972), 58–60. Garnett, p. lxvi, rejects this idea as being based solely on the anti-Machiavellian tone of the Preface. But, while I would not press for Gentillet’s identification with Superantius, there is a good deal more to be said in its favour than Mastellone suggested or that Garnett acknowledges.

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cious councils, and false, pestiferous maxims’ of Nicolas Machiavel Florentin and are likely to upset those people who take such precepts as their guide in the management of affairs of state. The perfect image of the government of kingdoms is like a ‘chaste, true and holy matron’ whereas that of these Machiavellistes is a form of administration, ‘bastard, painted, wanton, and evil’. Brutus and the author of the Preface (if, indeed, they are different) have for two years pondered the miseries of France and looked into their ‘origins, causes, and development’ and have concluded that, amongst other things: the books of Machiavelli have sharpened the spirits of certain persons to find ways to trouble the state, helping themselves with the authority of those who govern. Machiavelli has established the foundations of tyranny in his books, as is apparent to us from his precepts and detestable teachings which are sown hither and thither.

The Machiavellists and their writings are the cause of the state’s being divided by civil dissensions and partialities, and it is Brutus’s purpose to expose their wicked practices. That we are here in the groundswell of the Contre-Machiavel, especially with regard to Machiavelli’s supposed advocacy of partialities and discord, is confirmed by the fact that this Preface offers an outline of the method whereby Machiavelli’s doctrine will be refuted. Gentillet, it will be recalled, specifically refused to rely on scriptural evidence because he felt that this would give him too easy a victory.45 Brutus, however, has no such qualms and, as the Preface points out, he makes use of all legitimate weapons: ‘the holy Scriptures, moral and political philosophy, the laws and customs of peoples, and the examples furnished by historians’. On the other hand, the discussion of political maxims in the Contre-Machiavel has a relationship to the Preface of the Vindiciae, which explains to philosophers and disputants that Brutus follows the procedure of geometers who prove their case more clearly and more certainly by advancing from effects and consequences to ‘the causes and maxims or rules’, and thereby mount by degrees to the 45 Garnett does not consider the question of a relationship between Gentillet and the Vindiciae.

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summit of their argument. This methodological puff notwithstanding, the argument of the Vindiciae is specious and the work itself—although allegedly conceived as a riposte to the pestiferous and divisive doctrines of Machiavelli—is, in effect, a justification of rebellion and tyrannicide, so extreme that it legitimizes assassination by a single, self-righteous fanatic.46 How this would eliminate civil dissensions and partialities is obscure: but that did not prevent the issue of many further editions of the book. The Latin versions, in particular, are ideological (if not bibliographical) curiosities for not only are they accompanied by other writings contra Machiavellum but they are usually printed as an appendix to Teglio’s Latin translation of Il Principe—a tactic akin to, and as ineffectual as, the printing of government health warnings on packets of cigarettes, encouraging people to smoke themselves to death. Two other works which reveal the impress of the ContreMachiavel are Le secret des finances de France, published in 1581 under the name ‘Nicolas Froumenteau’, and Le miroir des Franc¸oys, which appeared in the following year under the name of Nicolas Montaud—though both are almost certainly the work of Nicolas Barnaud. The former reports a financial debate in which the King’s representative, Beranque, is accused of drawing his argument from the ‘l’Alcoran de Machiavel’, whence he, and those like him, seek to ruin ‘ceste pauvre France’. The text is also reminiscent of Gentillet in its references to the ‘accursed precepts, maxims, and institutions of Machiavelli’; its abuse of Italian userers, ‘that is to say our Machiavellists’; and its denunciation of the way in which the Third Estate is manipulated by ‘vostre cabale Machiavellitique’.47 Le miroir des Franc¸oys similarly denounces the Italians as the cause of all the ‘corruptions, usuries, and misdeeds springing out in the kingdom’, and laments that currently, instead of reading the works of Guicciardini, who wrote with gravity and 46 Of course, this is not how it is stated in the Vindiciae but (stripped of the customary quibbles about oppressive tyrants as distinct from usurping tyrants, and about divinely inspired action, and given the problem of who can finally decide such issues) this is what it comes down to. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I. 58, had himself argued that there is no remedy for a bad prince but the sword. 47 Le secret des finances de France en trois livres (n.p., 1581), 415–25.

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truth, people follow the ‘maximes corrompues’ of Machiavelli— based upon the career of the bastard Cesare Borgia.48 After Barnaud, there is a lull in the attack on corrupt Machiavellian maxims: but, with the series of polemical explosions in 1589 and thereafter, the idea becomes commonplace.49 We have the ‘preceptes de Machiavel’;50 ‘une belle maxime de ces Machiavelistes’;51 ‘le pernicieux conseil de Machiavel’, ‘deux preceptes sortis de mesme escolle, deux regles generalles en matiere d’estat forgees en mesme boutique’.52 We have the ‘pernicieuses lec¸ons de l’Ateiste Machiavel’; and the ‘blasphemes detestables des Machiavelistes’ who mask themselves with any religion in order to rule.53 We have a monstrous ruler, Henri III, who has studied ‘en l’escole de Machiavel Florentin’;54 who follows ‘la maxime de son bon 48 Le miroir des Franc¸oys, l’estat et maniement des affaires de France (n.p., 1582), 409–10. Another work by Barnaud, Le cabinet du roy de France dans lequel il y a trois perles precieuses (n.p., 1581, 1582), attacks the degeneracy and profligacy of the French court, pointing out that the King of France owes vast sums of money (debts run up by his ‘mignons’) and has had recourse to the ‘inventions’ of the ‘nouveau Tyran de Florence’—that is usury, borrowing money at ‘cent pour cent pour l’interest’ (p. 298). 49 See Anna Maria Battista, ‘Sull’antimachiavellismo francese del secolo XVI’, Storia e Politica, 1 (1962), 412–47, for a number of such references: although the inferences drawn from the material are often strained and do not support the conclusions offered. 50 Contre les fausses allegations que les plus qu’Architofels etc. (1589), 19, refers to the ‘preceptes de Machiavel’. Response aux justifications pretendues par Henri de Valois sur les meurtres et assassinats du feu messeigneurs le Cardinal et Duc de Guise (Paris, 1589), 18, mentions the ‘preceptes de Macchiavel’ with reference to the murder of the Guises and Henri III’s excuses; Response aux justifications pretendues par Henri de Valois sur les meurtres et assassinats du feu messeigneurs le Cardinal et Duc de Guise (Paris, 1589), 18, contrasts Machiavelli’s precepts with those of the Catholic religion. 51 Le faux visage decouvert du fin Renard de la France (Paris, 1589), 17: ‘Une belle maxime de ces Machiavelistes, qui luy servira d’echapatoire et de souverain antidot, que le prince n’est oblige´ a` garder ses promesses.’ 52 Les Causes qui ont contrainct les Catholiques a` prendre les armes (1589), 8–9. 53 De l’excommunication, et censures ecclesiastiques, encourues par Henry de Valois, pour l’assassinat commis e`s personnes de messieurs le Cardinal et Duc de Guyse (Paris. 1589), 55; Advertissement au Roy, ou sont deduictes les raisons d’estat, pour lesquelles il ne luy est pas bienseant de changer de religion (n.p., 1589), 3–4. 54 Les considerations sur le meurdre commis en la personne de feu Monsieur le Duc de Guise (Paris, 1589), 6. This text goes on to describe what purport to be key ideas in Machiavelli’s Prince as studied by Henri III: that the prince must pretend to be devout although he is not; must seem to be an ‘homme de bien’, while he is

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pedagogue Machiavel’ concerning the need to adopt first the clothing of the fox and then that of the lion;55 who is himself an atheist at heart, in accord with ‘le precepte de Machael [sic] son grand pedagogue’;56 and who has been taught ‘la maxime de Machiavel’ that it shows great dexterity in a prince, when he sees himself hated by his subjects, to throw all the blame for past faults on to those who serve and counsel him.57 This King has profited from reading ‘a book composed by the atheist Machiavelli, treating the manner of ruling with full licence, and managing a republic according to his own appetite’. ‘Taking his most impious maxims for the truth in as much as they represented the inclination of his own heart’, Henri has studied to put them into practice.58 We have Machiavelli’s nothing of the sort, in order to gain favour among his people; and must not worry about perjuring himself, provided that this works to his advantage. Machiavelli’s work, it is said, proposes as an example for the prince Alexander Borgia, ‘qui fut le plus scelerat du monde, et le plus abandonne´ a vices, lequel usoit de sermens execrables et abominables pour affronter ceux a` qu’il avoit affaire’. 55 Le martire des deux freres contenant au vray toutes les particularitez (n.p., 1589), 9. 56 Discours, en forme d’oraison funebre, sur le massacre et parricide, de Messeigneurs le Duc, et Cardinal de Guyse (Paris, 1589), 20. The pamphlet goes on to complain that Henri has pardoned those who have published books against the Catholic Church ‘pour la deffence de son Machiavelliste estat’ while punishing others who have refuted such scandalous works. 57 Memoires de Messire Philippe Hurault, Comte de Cheverny, Chancelier de France, in Michaud and Poujoulat, Nouvelle Collection des Me´moires pour servir a` l’histoire de France, 1st ser., 10 (Paris, 1838), 494. This could derive directly from Il Principe, 7; but is more likely to have come via Contre-Machiavel, III. 34. 58 Les meurs humeurs et comportemens de Henry de Valois representez au vray depuis sa naissance (Paris, 1589), 10–12. The extent of Henri III’s knowledge of Machiavelli, especially as gained through his studies with Corbinelli, is unclear: but there is some circumstantial evidence relating to 1573, the year following the St Bartholomew and preceding his accession to the throne of France. In the Me´moires ine´dits de Michel de la Huguerye, ed. A. de Ruble (Paris, 1877–80), i. 200, there is an account of Henri’s visit to the Landgrave of Hesse at Fach, in the course of his journey to Poland late in 1573. Apparently the Landgrave, who was very learned, had some strong things to say about what had happened in Paris, and Henri ‘defended himself with the arguments of Machiavelli’. At this the Landgrave became so angry that his voice could be heard outside in the street, saying that not much account could be made of someone who placed reliance upon the said Machiavelli—wholly contrary to the laws of Christianity. Then, seeing that Henri uttered not another word, the Landgrave changed the subject. Henri’s Machiavellian studies were still the subject of comment nearly a century later when Jacques de Callie`res, Histoire du mareschal de Matignon (Paris, 1661), 147,

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‘regles et conseils’ dismissed as ‘presques inutiles’;59 his ‘reigles perniceuses’ practised by Henri III;60 and the French nobles behaving according to the ‘maximes de leur maistre Machiavel’, whom they regard as their God and who make nothing more of Justice, Faith, and Religion than a mere show to deceive ‘les simples et les idiots’.61 We have ‘libertins et politiques’ who, having studied ‘la Philosophie de Machiavel’, declare that, in order to rule well, it is necessary to encourage civil war, to divide a country into two parties, and to fish in troubled waters—which is a tyranny rather than a true government.62 We have Charles IX’s sinister henchman, Le Guast: a man born to do evil; whose spirit was filled with a thousand ‘tyranniques maximes’, such as never to love or trust anyone other than oneself, ‘et autres beaux preceptes machiavelistes’.63 And we have ‘weedy little men’ (hommeles) who take the writings of Livy or Plutarch as their Gospel, and consider the glosses of Machiavelli as ‘maximes irrefragables’.64 Little of this material (and there is a great deal more of the same kind) suggests any serious reading of Machiavelli. What it does suggest is either a generalized response to Gentillet’s aphoristic bogeyman or an identifiable textual dependence upon the ContreMachiavel.65 Of the latter type, two further examples will suffice. remarked on how Henri—in his dealings with the Guises—‘fit son Breviere des ouvrages de Machiavel, et sa science de la Politique de Polybe et de Corbinelli’, from whom he learnt to dissimulate his resentment and to satisfy his malice. 59 Dialogue du Royeaume au quel est discouru des vices et des vertus des roys (Paris, 1589), 37. 60 L’estrange amitie´ d’Edouard second Roy d’Angleterre a` l’endroit de Pierre de Gaverston (n.p., n.d), 13–14. 61 Mirouer Catholique, representant les moyens pour retenir le peuple de la Bretagne au s. party de l’Union (n.p., 1590), 13. 62 Jean de la Mothe, Le reveil matin et mot du guet des bons catholiques (Douai, 1591), 22. This idea comes from Gentillet, III. 15, 30, 31. 63 Me´moires de Marguerite de Valois, 18. 64 Labyrinthe Royal de l’Hercule gaulois triomphant (Avignon, n.d.), 98. 65 There are occasions when such dependence, though almost certain, remains unprovable. For example, De Thou, describing the conduct of the Duke of Nemours at Lyon in 1593, says that he had nothing in his mouth other than ‘le he´ros de Machiavel’, and that, in public government, he followed the ‘maximes pernicieuses de ce Politique’: that is, to appear religious without so being; to make great promises and to keep them when our interest does not oblige us to violate them; and to break them when it brings us great advantages. See Jacques-Auguste

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In his Le theatre de France, Raynssant Deviezmaison not only cites from Machiavelli’s ‘doctrine’, ‘escholle’, and ‘maximes’, in words taken directly from Gentillet, but he even quotes ‘une maxime de Machiavel en sa troisiesme partie’: ‘Un tyran vertueux pour maintenir sa tyrannie doit entretenir partialitez entre ses subjets, et tuer les amateurs du bien public.’66 This is indeed taken verbatim from a ‘troisiesme partie’, but the book in question is the Contre-Machiavel: an error soon to be repeated, with more far-reaching consequences by the Jesuit Antonio Possevino. Deviezmaison also cites ‘une des maximes de Machiavel’—‘la guerre est juste qui est necessaire, et les armes raisonables quand on ne peut avoir esperance d’ailleurs’—which is taken verbatim from the Contre-Machiavel, III. 1. Another author who used Gentillet without acknowledgement was the Catholic polemicist Jean Boucher. In a violent diatribe against Henri de Navarre’s politically expedient conversion to Catholicism, he denounced Machiavelli as the ‘grand Docteur des atheistes’ whose followers maintain, among other ‘axiomes’, the detestable impiety that it is sufficient for a Prince to seem religious without actually being so, and that it is ruinous not to combine the lion and the fox: ‘that is to say, perfidy and cruelty together’. Naturally, he castigates Machiavelli’s alleged recommendation of the example of Alexander VI, whose treachery brought him to a miserable end; but, de Thou, Histoire universelle, XII. 52–3. A much later example—Claude Boitet’s Le Prince des Princes, ou l’art de regner (Paris, 1632)—shows how Gentillet’s work continued to influence moralistic writers trying to combat Machiavellism with a set of Christian precepts. Boitet, in his Livre second, explains how government is like a ship exposed to tempests, at the mercy of the winds and of pirates. Nevertheless, he intends to provide some guidelines amidst all these difficulties and, he says (p. 252), he will consider three principal matters: ‘le conseil d’un prince, l’estat de la religion, et la police tant civile que militaire’. These are the three divisions of the Contre-Machiavel: but Boitet is, in fact, unable to avoid being compromised by an indirect knowledge of Machiavelli. See below, Ch. 13. 66 O. Raynssant Deviezmaison, Le theatre de France, auquel est contenu la resolution sur chacun doubte, qui a retenu la Noblesse de se joindre a` l’Union Catholique (Paris, 1589), reissued with additional preliminary material in 1591. See fos. 6, 7v, 12v, 38; and cf. Contre-Machiavel, III. 15. Deviezmaison also cites ‘une des maximes de Machiavel’—‘la guerre est juste qui est necessaire, et les armes raisonables quand on ne peut avoir esperance d’ailleurs’—which is taken directly from the Contre-Machiavel, III. 1.

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ironically, his most obvious borrowing from the Huguenot comes in a comparison between Calvin and Machiavelli, who are, he believes, both of the same spirit. Just listen, he exclaims, to what ‘the gentle Secretary, and great man of State, says’—and there follows an unmistakeable transcription of Gentillet’s expansion of the Contre-Machiavel, III. 18.67 Inevitably, Gentillet’s aphorizations of Machiavellian doctrines were absorbed into the general thesaurus of political argument where they continued to exist independently. In many cases it is impossible to determine whether a familiar notion derives either directly or indirectly from Gentillet; whether it comes from a reading of Machiavelli himself, but refracted through the steamy atmosphere generated by the Contre-Machiavel; or whether it is a personal response which owes nothing to Gentillet, but has been conceived by a mind similarly hostile to political and religious unorthodoxy and similarly disturbed by the troublous times. Thus it is difficult to pin down the relationship between Gentillet and a writer such as Franc¸ois de Gravelle, whose Politiques royales was published in 1596. It is dedicated to Henri IV and includes several conventional allusions to Machiavelli and to Machiavellists, whose advocacy of a merely simulated good faith and integrity is blamed for the evils which have recently afflicted France. ‘Le discours de Machiavel’ is addressed to a tyrant, says Gravelle, as we can see from its ‘preceptes’ lifted and distorted from the fifth book of Aristotle’s Politics, and from Machiavelli’s exemplar, Cesare Borgia—the most ‘disloyal and abominable little tyrant ever endured by Italy’—who inevitably came to a bad end. The introduction of tyrannical behaviour under pretext of religion is, of course, blamed upon the ‘citoyens et compatriotes de Machiavel’, whose disciples are true atheists. They recommend the use of force without justice, a procedure which can only result in malice and deception. Without fear of God, they advocate doing anything which seems convenient to them—even ‘quelque beau coup a` faire comme des vespres Siciliennes’. They propound a maxim that one need not keep faith with heretics, under which name they include all those whom they wish to deceive. And they 67 Jean Boucher, Sermon de la simule´e conversion et nullite´ de la pretendue absolution de Henry de Bourbon (Paris, 1594), 15–16, 18–19, 43–4.

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attempt to persuade the King that taking counsel diminishes the royal authority.68 The accusations seem precise enough, and most of them may be found in the Contre-Machiavel.69 Yet they are substantially the same insults which had been heaped upon political enemies ever since the Saint Bartholomew and which, as we have seen, were initially only rarely linked with Machiavelli. That they become so quickly and so frequently associated with his name after the appearance of Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel may, of course, be merely coincidental: but inherent historical probability suggests otherwise. None the less, constant repetition of the equation—Machiavelli equals all political evils—resulted in a total loss of specificity not only in relation to Machiavelli’s own writings but also in relation to Gentillet’s interpretation of them. Gentillet had read Machiavelli’s works, had thought about them, and had grappled with the problems they posed: but this is something which may be said of few other French polemicists during the wars of religion. For writers such as Gravelle, Machiavelli’s name was a convenient short-hand symbol of disapprobation, and the more frequent the symbol’s use the more it betokened ignorance and lax thinking.70 Apart from a 68 Politiques royales, de Franc¸ois de Gravelle, sieur de Fourneaux & d’Arpentigny (Lyons, 1596), 25–7, 110–11, 123, 212–14, 222, 399–400. 69 Gentillet, oddly, does not associate Machiavelli’s tyrant with the analysis of tyranny in Aristotle’s Politics, although he does allege that Machiavelli gets his material on tyranny from Bartolus, who did, of course, derive his material from Aristotle. On the other hand, the recognition of a strong relationship between Machiavelli’s prince and Aristotle’s tyrant had become commonplace. On ‘Machiavelli Aristotelico’, see Procacci (1965), 45–75. 70 A great many examples relate, of course, to the systematic use of political deceit and feigned religion which had become inextricably tied to Machiavelli’s name and which inspired fervid asseverations from the righteous. The author of the Double d’une lettre envoiee a` un certain personnage contenant le discours de ce qui se passa au Cabinet du Roy de Navarre (Frankfurt am Main, 1585), explains (p. 54) that just as God is truth itself, so his image, the Prince, must always be ‘tresveritable’; and just as the sun cannot hide itself in shade, so is it impossible for the Prince (being exposed in so great a theatre) to use dissimulation. And, the author continues, if he had to dispute this matter against Machiavelli, he could very easily prove to him that ‘la plus seure finesse que puisse pratiquer un Prince, est de n’user jamais de finesse’. The jurist Louis le Caron (Charondas), in his De la tranquillite´ d’esprit (Paris, 1588), 66, attacks those who issue from ‘l’escholle des Atheistes, Libertains, ou Machiavelistes’ and maintain that to have peace and tranquillity in any state, it is necessary only to feign ‘exterieurement et par

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veneer of argumentation and citation, most of this material is little removed from the indiscriminate invective into which it quickly degenerated—especially in the turmoil surrounding the end of Henri III’s reign.71

criticism of gentillet in s i x t e e n t h - c e n t u r y f r a nc e The most striking feature of the reception of the Contre-Machiavel in France is that, despite the frequency with which it was plundered by polemicists, there survives little serious comment on the text itself—a situation which, albeit on a smaller scale, parallels Machiavelli’s own fate in the sixteenth century. Apart from prefatory remarks by translators, I know of only four authors— Pasquier, La Noue, Montaigne, and La Popelinie`re—who offer anything approximating to a critical judgement on Gentillet; and, in each case, their comments are brief and incidental. In a letter addressed to Monsieur Chandon and first published in 1586, Estienne Pasquier, lawyer and man of letters, had occasion to criticize Machiavelli’s recommendation that wickedness [la Sceleratesse] should be used by a prince in order to gain and maintain power. We know that, scattered about Pasquier’s oeuvre, there is evidence of first-hand acquaintance with Machiavelli’s writings: but it amounts to very little and is, on the whole, concerned with morally reprehensible behaviour.72 However, the letter to Chandon is more interesting for, in it, Pasquier expresses particular vexation at the false inferences drawn by Machiavelli from Livy, despite the fact that there was ‘never a man more nourished in the reading of apparence, qu’on ayt grande devotion a` la religion, et dans le coeur n’en apprehender aucune’. But Le Caron believes quite the opposite and declares that such people are full of disquiet and miseries. 71 For a very good evocation of this atmosphere, see Keith Cameron, Henri III: A Maligned or Malignant King? (Aspects of the Satirical Iconography of Henri de Valois) (Exeter, 1978). 72 For the letter to Chandon, see Les Œuvres d’Estienne Pasquier (Amsterdam, 1723), cols. 231–8. For some references to Machiavelli, see Pasquier’s Les Recherches de la France, ed. Marie-Madeleine Fragonard and Franc¸ois Roudart (Paris, 1996), i. 712; ii. 998–9, 1042–3, 1156, 1305, 1348.

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Titus Livy than he, witness the three books of discourses which he made on the first Decade’. Machiavelli’s observations are perverse and, what is worse, in Il Principe he offers as his prime exemplar for princely behaviour the abominable Cesare Borgia, whose botched attempt to poison his enemies resulted in the death of his own father, Pope Alexander VI. Men should recognize the crimes of evil rulers and the virtues of the good, and should not have before them this ‘unhappy author who I see is cherished and honoured by all courtiers whose condition is such that, just as they are born to be slaves, so they think of nothing else but to make others slaves, too’. All of this could easily have been derived from Gentillet, but it appears that Chandon must previously have declared his own approval of ‘l’autheur de l’Antimachiavel’, because Pasquier replies that there are ‘extremitez’ in both Machiavelli and his opponent. Where the latter ‘conforms to justice and to public order, I am willingly with him’, says Pasquier, ‘but if by erroneous propositions he wishes to excite subjects against their sovereign magistrate, then I condemn him utterly’.73 Gentillet made a better impression on the Huguenot military leader Franc¸ois de la Noue, who, in his Discours politiques et militaires (1587), reflected upon his own earlier enthusiastic reading of Machiavelli’s Discorsi and Il Principe, which, he freely confessed, had greatly delighted him for, in these works, Machiavelli ‘intreateth of high and goodly politike and martial affaires, which many Gentlemen are desirous to learne, as matters meete for their professions’. However, La Noue’s pleasure in reading these works lasted only as long as he remained ‘blinded with the glosse’ of Machiavelli’s reasons. But after I did with more ripe judgement throughly examine them, I found under the fayre shew many hidden errors, leading those that 73 Eighty years later, Charles Sorel, in his La bibliothe`que franc¸oise (Paris, 1664), 60, expressed similar reservations: advising that anyone who was curious to read ‘le Livre de Machiavel dont les opinions sont dangereuses’ should do so with circumspection. And he added that one could afterwards read a book which is usually called ‘l’Anti-Machiavel ’, although it has no other title than ‘Discours d’Estat contre Machiavel ’. None the less, one should be very careful when reading the works of this ‘Contradicteur’ because, being a Huguenot, he had not written according to true Christian and Catholic politics.

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walke in them into the paths of dishonour and domage. But if any man doubt of my sayings, I would wish him to reade a booke intituled Antimachiavellus, the author whereof I know not, and there shall he see that I am not altogether deceived.74

Evidently, La Noue considered the Contre-Machiavel a wholly convincing refutation of Machiavelli; and this view was shared, up to a point, by Michel de Montaigne. However, Montaigne approached the issue from a very different angle since, for him, a far more fundamental issue was involved. Reflecting upon the uncertainty of political opinions, and noting how they are ‘open to all motions, and to contestation’, he referred especially to the example of Machiavelli and his unnamed opponents, among whom we may presume would have been Innocent Gentillet. The Discorsi, said Montaigne, ‘were very solid for the subject’, yet it had been ‘very easie to impugne them, and those that have done, have left no less facilitie to impugne theirs’.75 Has the history of political thought ever been more succinctly cut down to size? A decade later, at the very end of the sixteenth century, another and more specific assessment of the Contre-Machiavel was offered by Lancelot Voisin, Seigneur de la Popelinie`re. The seventh book of his L’histoire des histoires is devoted to a catalogue of Italian historians, among whom Machiavelli makes a dishonourable appearance. Yes, Voisin admitted, one could not deny that he was ‘un homme judicieux’: but he misjudged human actions and his opinions were so extravagant that he loosened the very bonds of honour and faith which hold human society together. Indeed, Machiavelli’s attitude towards religion was in itself sufficient reason that his books should be publicly burnt; and princes and magistrates were very ill-advised to allow such dangerous lessons to be learned by the young. Once faith and true amity is banished from the state, nothing is left but private quarrels and these, in their turn, are the 74 Franc¸ois de la Noue, Discours politiques et militaires (Basle, 1587), 77–8, 159–60; ed. F. E. Sutcliffe (Geneva, 1967), 83–4, 160–1. I quote from the translation by Edward Aggas, The politicke and militarie discourses of the Lord de la Noue (1587), sig. G.4. 75 Montaigne, Essais, II. 17, ‘De la pre´somption’. I cite Florio’s translation. For Montaigne’s acquaintance with Gentillet, see Pierre Villey, Les Sources et l’e´volution des Essais de Montaigne (Paris, 1933), i. 149–50.

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source of public quarrels, which have proved the ruin of so many republics. Christian magistrates had actually been conniving at such damaging writings but, at that point, there arose among the French people, ‘un gentil esprit’ to refute the errors and impieties which he thought had become too commonly in favour. This can only be a reference to Gentillet, and it was with regret that Voisin (a Huguenot, like La Noue and Gentillet himself ) had to admit that this well-intentioned champion met with little success for he had built his case on nothing other than authorities and inappropriate examples, and was unprovided with ‘nimble arguments’ (vives raisons): the true arms with which to call the world to combat: And so the poor author did not know how to gain any recompense for such pains in the defence of the State, Religion, and Duty, other than injuries and menaces instead of the honours and other worthy rewards which such a well-intentioned and laborious work merited.76

A clue to this dissatisfaction with Gentillet may, perhaps, be found in a manuscript fragment by Voisin preserved at the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France.77 This chaotic little scribbling is headed ‘Le Contre-Machiavel’ but—beyond that title and a reference to Machiavelli’s ‘Maximes’ (which are decribed as fine on the surface but unable to withstand close scrutiny)—there is no suggestion that Gentillet is involved. The importance of the text lies in Voisin’s unconventional explanation of how Machiavelli came to write as he did. In order to understand a man’s purpose, says Voisin, it is necessary to know his nature and life, just as we best 76 ‘Le pauvre Autheur n’a sceu tirer pour recompense de tant de peines a` defendre l’Estat, la Religion et le devoir de tout ensemble: qu’injures et menaces au lieu des honneurs et autres dignes salaires que meritoit un tant affectionne´ et laborieux travail.’ For the whole of the passage discussed, see Lancelot Voisin, Sieur de la Popelinie`re, L’histoire des histoires avec l’ide´e de l’histoire accomplie. Plus le dessein de l’histoire nouvelle des Franc¸ois (Paris, 1599), 404–6; repr. (Paris, 1989), i. 330–1. 77 BNF fr. 20787, fo. 19r–v. This folio presents several problems to an unwary reader, not least the fact that it has been misbound back to front so that the heading and first paragraphs appear on what is, apparently, the second page. The manuscript was referred to by Donald R. Kelley, ‘History as a Calling’, in A. Molho and John Tedeschi (eds.), Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (DeKalb, Ill., 1971), 778, where he describes it as a ‘conventional Calvinist ‘‘Anti Machiavel’’ ’. It is not.

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know a tree by its fruit. Thus we must recognize that the foundations of Machiavelli’s ‘opinions bigarres’—and, in consequence, his misfortune—were Atheism and his dissatisfaction with the rulers of his time. Although he was admired by some for the beauty of his ‘gentil esprit’ and clear judgement in many things, he was hated by others for his open profession of atheism and was, in the end, banished from the land whence he expected most favour. Thus he conceived a contempt for his own people on account of the feeble judgement and other imperfections which he noted in them; and eventually he had the courage not only to comment in private against such ill-governed states, but also to make their faults known to all who took pleasure in reading the writings he bequeathed to posterity. If this really does represent Voisin’s considered, personal opinion of the evolution of Machiavelli’s ideas, then it becomes easier to see how Gentillet’s morally conventional refutation, so lacking in historical context, would have seemed inadequate.78

gentillet in england Evidence for the impact of the Contre-Machiavel in England, though less in quantity, is similar in kind to the evidence for France.79 Occasionally it is specific; sometimes it is discernible only in verbal or thematic echoes; but most frequently it can only to be guessed at, because traces of Gentillet’s influence were obscured by the zest with which English poets, playwrights, and pamphleteers seized on the name of Machiavelli—‘the great

78 Many years earlier Voisin, in his L’histoire de France (La Rochelle, 1581), ii, fo. 59v, had discussed dissimulation and deceit and had recognized that all princes and states were involved in this ‘and gained great advantage by practising the maxims of the Florentine secretary’. 79 Much of the relevant material is to be found heaped up in Edward Meyer’s Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama (Weimar, 1897) and augmented, with far greater awareness of historical contexts, in J. W. Horrocks’s thesis. There are also some additional references in two articles by N. W. Bawcutt, ‘Some Elizabethan Allusions to Machiavelli’ and ‘Machiavelli and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta’, and in Gasquet (1974).

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muster master of Hell’80—to gain a cheap effect. It is very rare for anyone to be as obliging as John Stradling, who provides a marginal reference, ‘Antimachiavel ’, to identify a book of which he particularly approved: ‘being by the Author therof very learnedly handled, and having a notable Subjette, to wit, matter of pollicie and governmente in peace and warre’.81 A further snare for future historians was laid in 1576 when William Blandie’s translation of Osorio’s De nobilitate appeared, some thirty-four years after the first Latin edition. Osorio’s attack on Machiavelli was limited in scope, but his disgust at the assertion that Christianity had effeminated the faithful, and that it compared badly with pagan religions, anticipated a similar point made in the Contre-Machiavel, II. 3, and must have aroused the sympathy of many a pious reader. The earliest connection between Gentillet and England was tangential but important. In 1577 at Geneva, the Calvinist minister Lambert Daneau published anonymously a Latin translation of the Contre-Machiavel prefaced with a dedicatory letter to two young English gentlemen, Francis Hastings and Edward Bacon; and in the following year the translation was reissued with the epistle slightly amended.82 Neither of the dedicatees was particularly 80 Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the divell (1592), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (1904–10), i. 183. Nashe refers to ‘Nicolao Malevolo’: but there is little doubt as to his meaning. Elsewhere, in Summers last will and Testament (1600), in Works, iii. 277, Nashe wrote, ‘the arte of murther Machiavel hath pend’. Nashe, as a matter of fact, did know something about Machiavelli but could never resist the literary effects of such nonsense. 81 Stradling makes this remark in the dedication of his translation of Justus Lipsius, Two bookes of constancie (1595). He later composed an epigram attacking Machiavelli’s poisonous precepts, Joannis Stradlingi epigrammatum libri quatuor (1607), Lib. II: ‘Principis ingenium praeceptis imbuis: istis ‘‘Mundi huius princeps’’ te prius imbuerat’ (‘With precepts you infect the prince’s nature: with them, the Prince of this World had first infected you’). On Stradling, see Glanmor Williams, ‘Sir John Stradling of St. Donats’, Glamorgan Historian, 9 (1973), 11–28. 82 Commentarium de regno aut quovis principatu recte & tranquille administrando, libri tres (Geneva, 1577); reissued with revisions in 1578. On Daneau as translator of the Contre-Machiavel, the two versions of the dedication, and the dedicatees themselves, see D’Andrea and Stewart, pp. lxi–lxv. Daneau, in the editions of his Politicorum aphorismorum silva (Leiden, 1591), 9, and in the Politices Christianae libri septem (?Geneva, 1596), sigs. g.2–5, attacks Machiavelli’s ‘precepts’, and refers to the Contre-Machiavel, again as an anonymous work which confutes the Florentine’s ‘political rules’. On Daneau’s aphorisms, and on other compilers of

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significant, although both came from distinguished families, were Puritan in sympathy, and are known to have spent time in Geneva.83 Daneau’s letter is an impassioned warning to England to beware the deadly danger which, having already engulfed France, now threatens her; and he explains how the current situation has arisen. Christian morality, long undermined by scoffers such as Rabelais and Agrippa, has now been subjected to open assault by Machiavelli, ‘a most pernitious writer’, with the result that faith has been taken from princes, authority and majesty from the laws, liberty from the people, and peace and concord from everybody. In order to infect France with this deadly Italian poison, Satan sent foreigners who so promoted their ‘Machiavellian bookes’ that now no one has any reputation in the French court, ‘which hath not Machiavels writings at the fingers ends, and that both in the Italian and French tongues, and can apply his precepts to all purposes, as the oracles of Apollo’. France is ‘swimming in blood and disfigured by subversion’, whereas England has been spared this terrible fate by a Queen who has preserved ‘wholesome unitie’ throughout the realm: not by guile, perfidy, and other Machiavellian villainies, but by true virtues such as Clemency, Justice, and Faith. Thus far Machiavelli’s infectious doctrine has not ‘breathed nor penetrated the intrails of most happy England’; and, should such an unhappy eventuality arise, Daneau has tried to provide an antidote:

condensed wisdom (such as Gregorius Richter and Waramundus de Erenbergk) who made use of Gentillet , see below, Ch. 17. 83 There is nothing to show that the dedicatees learned anything from Daneau’s labours and when, two decades later, Francis Hastings became embroiled in controversy with the Catholics he attacked the Spaniards as the true Machiavellians and denounced their ‘Machiavellian counsellors’ who had long before sought to gain absolute power over England by marrying Philip of Spain to Mary Tudor. Hastings then took on the famous Jesuit Robert Parsons, whom he vaguely described as a ‘Machivilian witted Romanist’ depraving God’s blessings with his ‘Machevilian wit and false interpretations’. None of this abuse required acquaintance either with Machiavelli or Gentillet. See Hastings’s pamphlets, A watch-word to all religious, and true hearted English-men (1598), 92–4; An apologie or defence of the Watch-word, against the Ward-word (1600), sigs. A4v, 5.

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For when I thought it meete and right (especially in such a confused disorder of matters and times) to impart as well to our French men, as to other nations these discourses, first written by a man of most singular learning and wisedome, I willingly undertooke this labour, which I have performed to the uttermost of my power, and now I wholy refer my selfe and my travaile, to serve for the benefit of publicke utilitie.84

Daneau’s letter, on its first appearance, was dated ‘Kalends Augusti. Anno 1577’, and when, in 1602, Simon Patericke published his English translation of the Contre-Machiavel, he prefaced it with a translation of the same dedicatory epistle, dated as in the original. Unfortunately, Edward Meyer, in his pioneering study of Machiavelli and the Elizabethan drama, assumed that the whole translation had been executed at that earlier date and that it had somehow circulated in manuscript for some twenty-five years, poisoning English minds and engendering the Machiavel stereotype. This error has long since been exploded but is, in any case, irrelevant. It was not abnormal for educated Englishmen to read material in Latin, French, or Italian; and we know that some, at least, became familiar either with the Contre-Machiavel itself or with ideas deriving from it long before Patericke’s translation appeared. The first English example of hostility towards Machiavelli based upon the Contre-Machiavel occurs in a sermon preached at St Paul’s Cross in 1578, appropriately on St Bartholomew’s Day, by John Stockwood, who is now mainly remembered as an 84 This quotation is from Patericke’s English translation, A Discourse upon the meanes of wel-governing and maintaining in good peace, a kingdom or other principalitie. Divided into three parts, namely The Counsell, the Religion, and the Policie, which a Prince ought to hold and follow. Against Nicholas Machiavell the Florentine. Translated into English by Simon Patericke (1602), sigs. g.3–4v. In 1580 there appeared a German translation, by the pastor Georg Nigrinus, of Daneau’s Latin version of the Contre-Machiavel, including versions of Gentillet’s letter to Alenc¸on and Daneau’s epistle to Hastings and Bacon. It also has a dedicatory letter to Johann Ludwig of Nassau in which Nigrinus points out that, although Machiavelli’s own writings are little known in Germany, his precepts have been introduced and spread abroad by counsellors and courtiers at the instigation of Satan. Now Germans may read this book where Machiavelli’s evil precepts are exposed in the same way that a doctor may describe a poison in order that it may be remedied. On this edition, see D’Andrea and Stewart, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv, lxv– lxvii.

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industrious translator of Latin texts written by Continental reformers such as Be`ze and Daneau himself. Stockwood, who was evidently in a bad mood because the English preferred plays to sermons, was quick to seize upon the perils posed by that ‘unpure Atheiste Machiavel’ who was not ashamed to teach that princes need ‘make no accounte of godlynesse and true religion, but onely to make an outwarde shewe of it: that (sayth he) is ynough, albeit in mynde they abhorre it’. Even more horrible was Machiavelli’s assertion that Christians’ religion ‘casteth them down into too much humilitie, abateth al courage and towardnesse, and maketh them fit to be wronged and spoiled’, whereas the religion of the Gentiles makes them ‘of stout courage, and emboldneth them manly to atchive great matters’. All this comes directly from the first three maxims of the second book of the Contre-Machiavel; and the derivation becomes clearer when Stockwood goes on to condemn the poison and filth spewed out by ‘this malaperte and pelting Town-cleark of Florence’, and to exclaim against the way in which this ‘vile beaste in many courtes of other nations be the only Court booke, nay the Alcoran and God of Courtiers, whose divellish precepts they put in dayly ure, learning to be godlesse’.85 Stockwood did not specify the French court as one of those where this ‘vile beast’ held sway, although the idea must have been in his mind. Feelings in England against the current negotiations for a marriage between Elizabeth I and Franc¸ois de Valois, Duke of Alenc¸on and youngest son of Catherine de’ Medici, were already running dangerously high—and in dangerously high places, too. Both Leicester and Walsingham were bitterly opposed to the French match and this encouraged the egregious Gabriel Harvey (who certainly knew and admired Machiavelli’s work) to assume the mantle of Gentillet and not merely to satirize the hated policy, heap scorn on the Italians, mock the Machiavellism of the Medicean French court, allude to the St Bartholomew massacre, and call Machiavelli to testify against his own doctrine, but to do all this in a volume of Latin 85 John Stockwood, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse on Barthelmew day, being the 24. of August 1578 (1578), 23–4, 59–61. Stockwood’s second point, concerning Christian humility, occurs in Osorio’s De nobilitate Christiana, as does a characterization of Machiavelli as a ‘malepert, saucye, and wicked writer’. But both these points, along with the other accusations (not in Osorio), are made by Gentillet.

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verses which he had the effrontery to dedicate to the Queen herself. Luckily for Harvey, his anti-Medici satire was so heavily veiled, and couched in a Latin so convoluted and pun-packed, that nobody understood it and nothing untoward happened to him.86 In the following year, however, John Stubbes, a Puritan lawyer, was less fortunate when he published his Discoverie of a gaping gulf.87 This notorious book, written in plain and unambiguous English, is a violent polemic against the marriage negotiations; and Stubbes made so thorough a job of it that the work was promptly prohibited and he himself put on trial, found guilty of sedition, and punished by the amputation of his right hand. The Discoverie berates the ‘strange Christianity’ of some contemporaries who, neglecting the Word of God, ‘do beat their brains in other books of wicked, vile atheists and set before them the example of Italian practices’. Like Gentillet, Stubbes believes that the French have contracted ‘this sickness of the mind’, along with venereal disease of the body, from the Italians; but, worse still, they are now seeking to infect England and are helped in this by some of our own countrymen.88 Only evil can result from the French marriage. Alenc¸on may well have been dedicatee of the Contre-Machiavel, but Stubbes despised him as ‘a good son of Rome, that anti-Christian mother city’, and as an emissary of France, ‘a den of idolatry, a kingdom of darkness, confessing Belial and serving Baal’. The French court is described as ‘that most Christian court where Machiavelli is their New Testament and atheism is their religion’. Apologists for the marriage are dismissed as ‘discoursers that use the word of God with as little conscience as they do Machiavelli, picking out of both indifferently what may serve their turns’. The dangers arising from marriage with a ‘wicked race’ are exemplified by ‘the match of France with the Italian Athaliah’ and the resultant ‘furies in that land’, especially after the marriage between 86 For Harvey’s Machiavellism, see below, Ch. 13. 87 The discoverie of a gaping gulf whereinto England is like to be swallowed by an other French mariage (1579). There is a modern-spelling edition of the text, with letters, relevant documentation, and a valuable introduction by Lloyd E. Berry (Folger Shakespeare Library: Charlottesville, Va., 1968). 88 Discoverie, sig. A.2. On the Italian corruption of both body and mind, cf. Contre-Machiavel, III. 5.

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Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre. The atrocities of St Bartholomew are briefly, but powerfully, evoked: for the memory of them should be quite sufficient, in Stubbes’s view, to deter any Protestant from expecting good from such a union. Certainly, Alenc¸on would never speak of visiting England unless ‘he had some extraordinary purpose and some Italian quintessence of mischief meant to be compassed against the Church of Christ’. It is impossible to say categorically whether or not Stubbes had been reading Gentillet, but he was certainly sympathetic to the Continental Reformers and was familiar with the French language, having translated, or been involved in translating, works by The´odore de Be`ze. Individually, most of his anti-Italian/antiMachiavelli/anti-French court ideas could have been gathered piecemeal from other sources: but there is one further criticism of Machiavelli which suggests that Stubbes found all these themes bound together within the covers of the Contre-Machiavel. Discussing the dangerous policy of bringing a foreign prince into England, Stubbes points out the folly of those who suppose that, because Philip of Spain was got rid of after he had married Mary, it would be possible to do the same with Alenc¸on: and this absurd manner of reasoning is very Machiavellian logic, by particular examples thus to govern kingdoms and to set down general rules for his prince, whereas particulars should be warranted by generals. But their master wrested his ungracious wit ever to the maintenance of a present state, and these foolish scholars put forth their gross conceits to the overthrow of this present in hope of I wot not future commonwealth of their own head.89

The discussion of method in the Preface to the first part of the Contre-Machiavel was unique for its time; and, although Stubbes’s remarks are not identical with Gentillet’s, their similarity makes a relationship seem likely.90 89 Discoverie, sig. C.8. Cf. Fitzherbert, The first part of a treatise concerning policy and religion (1615), 345: ‘For precepts are to be deduced of things that are most frequent, and ordinary (Which breede an experience) and not of things more rare , or seldome seene, which are commonly casual, and to be referred to chance.’ 90 For another 16th-c. refutation of Machiavelli on methodological grounds, in Philippe Canaye’s L’Organe of 1589, see below, Ch. 17.

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Much the same may be said of what is, without doubt, the bestknown appearance of Machiavelli in Tudor England, when the monster of iniquity enters as the Prologue to Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. Albeit the world thinke Machevill is dead, Yet was his soule but flowne beyond the Alpes; And now the Guize is dead, is come from France, To view this Land and frolicke with his friends.

Inevitably, since this is an Elizabethan play and since Marlowe has been canonized as a great author, a considerable quantity of ink has been expended on the thirty-five lines of Machevill’s speech and the hilarious violence which ensues. The play itself is unique: a bizarre black comedy; wildly inventive, witty, and full of moral ambiguities and bad-taste jokes; with a ‘Machiavellian’ anti-hero, Barabas, so inept and transparent in his fiendish machinations and murders, and so lacking in self-control, that he is outwitted at every turn by the lying, cheating, ruthless, and opportunist Christian hypocrite, Farneze. Barabas ends his life literally in the soup; while Farneze, who has proved himself an infinitely more successful hatcher of plots, sanctimoniously utters the play’s concluding couplet: So march away, and let due praise be given Neither to Fate nor Fortune, but to heaven.

Marlowe depicts neither the triumph of good over evil, nor of evil over good, but rather of the more consummate evil over the less consummate. But, although it is perfectly possible that he may have had some first-hand acquaintance with Machiavelli’s work, there is nothing in the play or Prologue to demonstrate it. The main ideas set out in Machevill ’s speech—the migration of the poisonous doctrines from Italy to France and thence to England, the infection of the Papacy, the contempt for religion, the recognition that might is political right, the view that tyrants should dominate their subjects from a ‘strong built Citadell’, and, above all, the emphasis on usury—are all characteristic of Gentillet’s

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view of Machiavelli, but whether derived directly or indirectly therefrom it is impossible to say.91 There are other instances where the relationship to Gentillet is similarly inexplicit but even more obvious. In A Treatise against Traitors the author, Samuel Cottesford, takes issue with ‘a most divelish conclusion of Machiavill (to whom our age I feare, is overmuch addicted)’. The devilish conclusion comes from ‘his booke intituled Machiavilli princeps’ and concerns the choosing of counsellors, the dangers arising from seeking advice from too many, and the need to spurn flatterers. The material appears to come directly from Il Principe, 23, but Cottesford gives himself away by referring to ‘another of his [Machiavelli’s] speculative contemplations for the avoiding of flatterers’ in which he ‘saith that Princes shall proclaime by publicke Edict, that no one of his freendes or counsellers shall perswade him to anything, neither conferre with him of any matter, unless it be of that whereof he himselfe shall offer voluntarilye to speake’. The whole section is, in fact, a conflation of the Latin translation of the first two maxims of Contre-Machiavel, Book I, together with Gentillet’s ‘Machiavellian’ expansions thereof.92 Similarly, it is likely that the Latin version of the ContreMachiavel was a decisive influence on Thomas Bowes when he came to write the two epistles (one dedicatory, the other ‘to the Reader’) which preface his translation of the second part of La Primaudaye’s French academie.93 For Bowes, ‘that monster 91 The emphasis on usury is provided by Machevill ’s allusion to Barabas’s pleasure at seeing ‘how full his bags are cramb’d, which mony was not got without my meanes’—together with a reference, later in the play (IV. i. 54) to his lending money at interest, ‘A hundred for a hundred’, which is an accusation made by Gentillet against the Italians. 92 Samuel Cottesford, A Treatise against Traitors (1591), sigs. A.7v–8. Bawcutt, ‘Elizabethan Allusions’, 61–2, thought that the material derived from a Latin version of Il Principe, but it really comes from the Latin translation of Gentillet, where there are several extra phrases not in Machiavelli’s original text—especially the reference to proclaiming by ‘publicke Edict’, forbidding friends of counsellors to initiate a discussion, which is a literal rendering of the Latin, ‘edicere . . . amicis & consiliariis’. 93 Pierre de la Primaudaye, translated T. B[owes], The second part of the French academie (1594), sigs. A.4–B.4. For the various editions of this translation, see STC, nos. 15233–41.

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Machiavel’ was the source of the atheism which he believed was so spread abroad throughout Christendom ‘that the whole course of men’s lives almost everywhere, is nothing else but a continual practice of his preceptes’. And these precepts, as summarized by Bowes, prove to be merely a selection of maxims from the second book (‘De la Religion’) of the Contre-Machiavel.94 The spread of atheism was also the concern of William Covell in his Polimanteia of 1595.95 He regarded the attacks by Puritan extremists on established religion as partly responsible for this development although, in his view, the teaching of Machiavelli was more fundamental. But what, in fact, was this view worth? ‘Profane Machiavel’ had obtained credit amongst the greatest statesmen in Europe, and Covell puts into the mouth of Religion a speech which not only summarizes this sorry state of affairs but also, quite inadvertently, encapsulates the hazards of trying to track the movement of ideas. According to Religion, Atheism has persuaded the world that she is dead. The pernicious counsels of Machiavelli are listed, and they are all familiar to us. Princes should rely wholly upon their own wisdom; should seem religious in appearance but with no intention of embracing the truth; should prefer paganism to Christianity; and should ascribe felicity to fortune and not to virtue or true religion. Counsels such as these, with others of similar impurity, have been presented by that ‘profane Atheist’ and have no sooner been imbibed by some European states than their ruin has ensued. One might assume that, since all the material in Religion’s speech is redolent of the ContreMachiavel, Covell must have been reading this work, especially since Gentillet (under the guise of ‘Anonymos’) appears in a marginal list of authors who are said to have exposed Machiavelli’s errors: Catharino, Molanus, Botero, Anonymos, Petrus Coretus, 94 The maxims are from the Contre-Machiavel, II. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. I think that the Latin version was used because Bowes’s imagery has two echoes of Daneau’s dedicatory letter. First, he says that ‘Machiavel first beganne to budde’ in Florence, whence he had subsequently ‘spreadde abroade his deadly branches of atheism’; and second, when he writes about ‘this bad fellowe whose works are no less accounted of among his followers then were Apollo’s Oracles among the Heathen’. 95 William Covell, Polimanteia, or the meanes lawfull and unlawfull to judge of the fall of a common-wealth (1595), sigs. Y.3–Bb.4v.

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Possevino, ‘and learned Puritans’.96 Unfortunately, that list does not represent wide reading on the part of Covell but is, instead, a shameless theft from Antonio Possevino’s Judicium—as are Covell’s four Machiavellian maxims. The interesting feature of this is that Possevino had no knowledge of Machiavelli other than what he had gleaned from the Latin version of the Contre-Machiavel—so that Covell had not only not read Machiavelli, he had not even read Gentillet.97 On the other hand, it was perfectly possible for people to read both Gentillet and Machiavelli:98 and a number of writers evidently did so, including two who admired the latter and despised his Huguenot adversary. The first adverse English reference to Gentillet crops up in the letter ‘al benigno lettore’, prefacing an Italian edition of the Discorsi dated 28 January 1584 and issued as the work of a Palermo press, ‘gli heredi d’Antoniello degli Antonielli’. In fact, there was no such press. The book, along with its preface, was the work of the daring London printer John Wolfe whose remarkable career—from young rebel against the printing establishment to ruthless and persecuting member of that same establishment— earned him first a reprimand for his ‘Machiavellian devices’, and subsequently the nickname Machivill.99 Wolfe makes no bones about greatly admiring Machiavelli’s sharpness of intellect and the novelty of his methods for drawing useful lessons from the reading of history. He freely admits that, like so many others, he had been prepared to accept an entirely negative assessment of this author unread and merely on the basis of other people’s opinions. Luckily, a few years back, he had encountered a ‘man, very wise and profound in political affairs’, who had encouraged him to read 96 The list is given in Polimanteia, sig. Bb3v. The ultimate sources for Covell’s maxims are Contre-Machiavel, I. 1; II. 1, 3, 10. 97 On Possevino see below, Ch. 11. 98 It was certainly possible to own both authors, as did a Cambridge reader named Bradshaw who, in 1583, spent 1s. 4d. on a copy of the ‘Discourse of Machiavel’; an unspecified sum on ‘Machiavelli Princeps’; and 1s. on ‘Antimachiavellus’. See Robert Jahn, ‘Letters and Booklists of Thomas Chard (or Chare) of London (1583–4)’, The Library, 4th ser., 4 (1924), 210–37, items 128, 129, 138. 99 There is a considerable literature on John Wolfe, on which see above, Ch. 6 n. 22. See also Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State, 86–110, which is a very clear and succinct account of Wolfe’s career although, as usual, I cannot accept the author’s general conclusions about a Machiavellian arcana.

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Machiavelli for himself and, Wolfe enthuses, ‘I have learned more in one day about the governments of the world, than I have achieved in the rest of my life, from all the histories I have read’. As he observes, there are few copies of Machiavelli’s works to be found and, more to the point—although he does not say so—since printers in Italy were forbidden to produce these books, there would probably be a lucrative market for ‘Italian’ editions. Furthermore, he continues, he was spurred on to carry out this enterprise by the slanders against Machiavelli’s works, and especially by his having recently read the writings of somebody he dubs ‘that Momus’—but who can only be Gentillet. Whoever, says Wolfe, ‘without prejudice’ (senza passione)’ perfectly examines the one and the other, will find Machiavelli worthy of eternal memory, while his enemy and all his followers—who are very powerful in injuries, insults, and false accusations—are ‘scarcely worthy to serve as purveyors of sausages and pilchards’ (a pena degni di servire a questi venditori di salciccie, e di sardelle).100 It is likely that Wolfe’s enthusiasm for Machiavelli and contempt for Gentillet had been stirred by his close acquaintance and business dealings with the illustrious Italian jurist and pioneer of international law Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), who was probably the ‘very wise man’ referred to in the printer’s letter ‘al benigno lettore’. Gentili’s family had been obliged to flee Italy for their religious beliefs and, in 1580, Alberico was welcomed in England, where he quickly established himself both in Oxford as a teacher and in London as a practising lawyer. He was also a productive author, and several of his books—including the De iure belli, upon which his fame now chiefly rests—were printed by John Wolfe. In 1583, the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, was implicated in the Throgmorton Plot against Elizabeth, and Gentili was consulted by the government on how best to deal with the situation. He was evidently fascinated by the topic, choosing it as the subject of an Oxford disputation in 1584, and then expanding it into the De legationibus—dealing with matters of law, policy, and expediency 100 I discorsi di Nicolo Machiavelli, sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (‘In Palermo, Apresso gli heredi d’Antoniello degli Antonielli a xxviij. di Gennaio 1584’): ‘Lo stampatore al benigno lettore’, sigs. *2–4.

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in relation to ambassadors—which was printed in the following year, not by Wolfe but by Thomas Vautrollier. In the course of this work, Gentili considers the skills necessary for an ambassador and, while believing that a knowledge of history is essential, he declares that it must be combined with ‘that branch of philosophy that deals with morals and politics’. This is the ‘soul of history’ for it explains the causes of words, deeds, and issues, and brings historical knowledge within the field of ‘well-defined and useful practical experience’. It is at this critical point—the practical application of historical study—that Gentili shows that he has read both Machiavelli and Gentillet, and has come to a very firm conclusion as to their relative merits: Nor in this connection shall I hesitate to speak of the most distinguished of his class, and to set up as a model for imitation Machiavelli and his precious Observations on Livy. The fact that some claim that he was a man of no learning and of criminal tendencies makes no difference to me. It is his remarkable insight that I praise; I do not defend his impiety or his lack of integrity, if he actually had such faults. And yet if I, reviewing the book issued against him, take into consideration his position, if I give a just estimate of his purpose in writing, and if I choose to reinforce his words by a sounder interpretation, I do not see why I can not free from such charges the reputation of this man who has now passed away. He was not understood by the person who wrote against him and he has been calumniated in many ways. There is no doubt that Machiavelli is a man who deserves our commiseration in the highest degree.101

Gentili then goes on to make a remarkable claim that Machiavelli ‘was a eulogist of democracy, and its most spirited champion’—a notion which has had its advocates ever since and which looms large in modern Machiavelli studies. Here, however, it is sufficient to note two things: first, the rejection of Gentillet as a writer who simply did not understand the works he was criticizing; and second, the fact that this negative view of Gentillet was extremely rare. Franc¸ois de la Noue, for example, whose Discours politiques et militaires appeared in an English translation by Edward Aggas in 101 Alberico Gentili, De legationibus libri tres, trans. Gordon L. Laing (New York, 1924), ii. 155–6.

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1587, had—as we have seen—found Machiavelli impressive and convincing until his eyes were opened by Gentillet’s critique. A year later, the Aristotelian Oxford philosopher John Case published his Sphaera Civitatis, a dropsical exposition of Aristotle’s Politics, which helped promote the critical stance of the ContreMachiavel amongst an academic audience. Inevitably when dealing with Politics V. 10–11, Case was obliged to discuss tyrannies, and he entangles his readers in distinctions between Aristotle’s virtuous treatment of tyranny on the one hand, and the Italian’s perversions on the other. Case had read both Machiavelli and Gentillet: but it is through the distorting lens of the latter that he views the former.102 Another writer who knew something of both Machiavelli and Gentillet was Richard Harvey, brother of the much more famous Gabriel. Gabriel was certainly familiar with Machiavelli’s works; and Richard was similarly knowledgeable if his Theologicall discourse of the Lamb of God (1590) is anything to go by. This diatribe, written in the midst of the Marprelate controversy, comprises a general attack on both sides of the pamphlet war, seasoned with some violent abuse of Thomas Nashe, the satirist who constantly penetrated beneath Gabriel’s thin skin.103 Like Gentillet, Richard Harvey intends to refute Machiavelli on the basis of his own works. Also like Gentillet, Harvey, while conceding that Italy was once ‘the true mirrour of virtue and manhood’, fears that it has more recently raised ‘infinite Atheists’ of whom Cesare Borgia, Aretino, and Machiavelli (‘this unchristian master of policie’) are the most prominent.104 The last-named is not afraid ‘in a heathenish and tyrannical spirit, L.2 of warly art, in the person of Fabricio, to accuse the gospel of Christ, and humilitie of the lamb of Gode, for the decay of the most flourishing and prosperous estate of the Roman Empire’. Yet, in fact, Rome fell ‘by its owne idleness and 102 John Case, Sphaera Civitatis (Oxford, 1588), and editions at Frankfurt in 1589 and 1593. On Case, see Bawcutt, ‘Machiavelli and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta’, 11–12, 15, 20–2, 30, 32, 36–7; Charles B. Schmitt, ‘John Case and Machiavelli’, in S. Bertelli and G. Ramakus (eds.), Essays Presented to Myron P. Gilmore (Florence, 1978), 231–40. 103 Richard Harvey, A theologicall discourse of the Lamb of God and his enemies (1590). On the background to this text, see G. R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (1962), 180–6. 104 Harvey’s refutation of Machiavelli is in Theologicall discourse, 94–9.

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follie’, as Machiavelli ‘himself confesseth L.7 ’. Machiavelli’s terrible accusation, Harvey continues, is in many men’s hands and, worse still, in many men’s hearts: Howbeit, the same is learnedly confuted, not only by a religious French Protestant [that is Gentillet] whose commentaries are extant, written ex professo, against Machiavelli and his antichristian ground of government, but also by no vile papist, much read and named among students, I mean Osorius in his Nobilitate Christiana L.3.

Harvey goes on to summarize very briefly the gist of Osorio’s argument for Christian valour, but wisely omits the discussion of military virtues (the necessity for war, and the use of extreme action in politics when under constraint) which had led his predecessor into such difficulties. Instead he stresses how: that secretary of hell, not only of Florence, is forced to confesse in some places L.I disc.c.11 upon Livy and elsewhere, but most emphatically in his proeme to L. Philipp Strozza, by vehement and zealous interrogation: In whom ought there to be more feare of God, then in a warriour, which everyday committing himselfe to infinite perils hath most neede of his helpe? A right Italian sentence, a notable word, a fit preserve against the other venims which this spider gathered out of old philosophers and heathen authors.

Harvey’s attack on Machiavelli has several obvious points of interest: his acceptance of Gentillet’s view of Italy as the source of modern atheism; his respect for Gentillet’s refutation; his use of Osorio; and his precise reference to the Discorsi (although this could have been taken from Gentillet’s marginal note in the Contre-Machiavel II. 9, rather than from the original source). However, he also makes three allusions to a work rarely cited by non-military authors—the Arte della guerra—and his quotation is taken from Peter Whitehorne’s popular translation, the third edition of which had appeared only a couple of years previously.105 An even more unusual example of familiarity with both Machiavelli and Gentillet is to be found in the work of Simon Harward—a divine and preacher with a ‘rambling head’—whose citations, from 105 The relevant ‘vehement interrogation’ in Whitehorne’s version of ‘The Proheme of Nicholas Machiavell . . . upon his booke of the Arte of Warre’ reads: ‘In whom ought there to bee more feare of GOD, then in him, which every daie commityng himself to infinite perilles, hath moste neede of his helpe?’

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Il Principe in Italian and from the Contre-Machiavel in French, were first noticed by N. W. Bawcutt.106 In The Solace for the Souldier and Saylour (1592), written to encourage English troops fighting on behalf of Protestantism, Harward describes Gentillet as ‘The Frenchman that hath answered all the Maximes gathered out of the workes of Machiavel’, and goes on to cite accurately from the Contre-Machiavel, III. 1, though on an issue with which he happens to disagree.107 Four years later, Harward published his Encheiridion morale—a collection of aphorisms, describing the four cardinal virtues, from ‘the most famous Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and French orators and poets’.108 At one point Harward cites an Italian proverb to the effect that you should offer a helping hand to an enemy who is up to his waist in water, but should tread on his head when he is already immersed up to his chin. He then observes that Machiavelli’s impious advice in the eighteenth chapter of Il Principe is the same kind of thing, and quotes two passages which, while demonstrating his acquaintance with the Italian text, display a lack of judgement since neither citation is relevant to the offensive Italian proverb.

the machiavel stereotype Neither Machiavelli nor Gentillet represented Harward’s primary concerns; and this is true of most of the authors, both French and English, cited in this chapter. I have assembled the material, not in order to suggest that there was any kind of school stimulated by Gentillet but simply to demonstrate a general awareness of the main substance of his critique of Machiavelli: that the Florentine was an atheist; that his foul anti-Christian doctrines had been expressed in a series of maxims; that these ideas, like a disease emanating from a plague-infested city, had been carried abroad by 106 Anthony a` Wood in Athenae oxoniensis, ed. P. Bliss, ii. 29; Bawcutt, ‘Some Elizabethan Allusions to Machiavelli’, 63–4. 107 Simon Harward, The Solace for the Souldier and Saylour (1592), sig. F3. Bawcutt suggested that this was the first quotation, by an English author, from Gentillet in the original French. 108 Simon Harward, Encheiridion morale (1596), 41.

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Italian courtiers and had corrupted France; and that the contagion was in danger of spreading (or already had spread) to England. All the authors I have referred to either had direct knowledge of the Contre-Machiavel, were aware of some of the maxims attributed by Gentillet to Machiavelli, or were at least familiar with Gentillet’s basic thesis that Machiavellism consisted of a series of tyrannical maxims.109 With this background in mind, it is easier to recognize the rapid evolution of the Machiavel stereotype as a phenomenon which does, in the main, stem from Gentillet’s concentrated assault on Machiavelli rather than from the scattered shots fired by earlier critics. The escrivaillerie, denounced by Montaigne, became increasingly frenetic after the Saint Bartholomew and exploded towards the end of the 1580s with the Marprelate and other controversies in England, and the outrage following the murders of the Guises and Henri III in France. Amidst this welter of contumely, Machiavelli’s name was finally debased and emptied of all meaning other than as a synonym for any perceived moral and 109 Evidence that the spread of this stereotypical view was often based on Gentillet, rather than on first-hand knowledge of Machiavelli, is discussed below, Ch. 11. But, en passant, two examples are worth citing here. In the dedicatory letter prefixed by Joannes Leunclavius [Johann Lo¨wenklau] to his edition of Belisario Aquaviva di Aragona’s De principium liberis educandis (Basle, 1578), sigs. *2r–v, *4, he describes Machiavelli as one who has written de Principe and commentaries on peace and war. Leunclavius acknowledges that Machiavelli—whom he describes as an archivist of the Florentine republic—was acutely intelligent, but condemns him as a deplorable and most pestilential master of depravity: Nicolaus quidam Machiavellus, Florentinae reipublicae tabularius, acuti quidem ingenii vir, sed intestabilis, & pestilentissimus improbitatis magister; and goes on to list the nefaria axiomata and nefandas & execribiles illas Machiavelli regulas— which are all reminiscent of Gentillet’s Machiavellian maxims. Equally derivative are the tiny handful of Machiavellian allusions buried in the 1,063 pages of a work formerly attributed to Guillaume Rose, Bishop of Senlis, but now thought to be by William Rainolds: De iusta reipublica Christiana (Paris, 1590); and another edition (Antwerp, 1592). Despite his antipathy towards Calvin, whom he regards as a pupil of Machiavelli, Rainolds is not averse to borrowing from the Huguenot Gentillet. In fact, his knowledge of the impius Machiavellus goes no further than the Contre-Machiavel—as is obvious from his belief that he is quoting (at fo. 459) Machiavelli’s own words, when, in fact, they are taken verbatim from the ContreMachiavel, Maxims III, 18, 23: Principi pejerare fallere, & dissimulare, sine ulla dubitatione licet; and Princeps ingenium versatile & arte usuque factum in saevitiam & perfidiam habere debet, ut re ipsa talem se praestet quoties expedierit.

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political evil. Anna Maria Battista noted many such references for France, and Edward Meyer painstakingly collected several hundred examples from English sources, particularly the drama. But even these are merely the tip of a very substantial rubbish-heap, and it would be fruitless to pile up further repetitious examples of opprobrious words and slogans.110 Such substitution for thought and knowledge by cliche´ and ignorance is familiar to us from the abuses of our own contemporary newspapers, radio, television, film, and misinformation technology. The real difficulty lies in assessing the effect of mass hysteria upon any serious attempt to face up to controversial issues. How far did the widespread abuse of Machiavelli’s name influence the way in which he was read by those who attempted to study his works seriously? I doubt that this is a question which can be satisfactorily answered: but it will, none the less, be addressed in the following three chapters, where it will also become clear that the effects of Gentillet’s work extended beyond helping to create a vague atmosphere of uninformed antipathy. The Jesuits and other Catholic opponents of Machiavelli found the Huguenot’s Contre-Machiavel a valuable compendium of arguments; and their writings undoubtedly added weight, if not substance, to the attack on Machiavelli. 110 One example, though, is too succulent to be passed over in silence. This is the Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp, 1587)—an illustrated account of the persecution of Catholics by Protestants in Europe. Perhaps conceived as a response to John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, which had recorded the sufferings of English Protestants under Mary Tudor, the Theatrum crudelitatum was the work of Richard Rowlands, an English Catholic of Dutch extraction, who moved to Antwerp and resumed his paternal name of Verstegen, by which he is best known. The Latin text of 1587 was followed by a French translation (Antwerp, 1588) and several further editions, all with powerful woodcuts depicting the tortures inflicted upon the Catholic faithful. The final section is devoted to ‘L’Inquisition Angloise’ and to descriptions of the ‘Cruautez Machiavelliques’ carried out in England and Ireland by the Protestant Calvinists, under the rule of Elizabeth ‘a` present Regnante’. These English atrocities are depicted in eight plates, each headed ‘Persecutions contre les Catholiques par les Protestants Machiavellistes en Angleterre’.

11 More Machiavellian than Machiavel: The Jesuits and the Context of Donne’s Conclave In 1611, when John Donne published Ignatius His Conclave, the Society of Jesus had been going strong for more than seventy years; and the literature concerning its virtues and vices, achievements and crimes, had swollen to a monstrous bulk. Indeed, eight years earlier Thomas Bell—whose ‘doleful knell’ was subsequently tolled by the Jesuit Robert Parsons—had already complained that the works produced merely in one area of controversy, relating to the activities of the Society in England alone, were so numerous that ‘to read all the said books is a labour both tedious and painefull. To buy them is too chargeable for manie. To understand them, as they are confusely published, is a thing not easie for the greater part.’1 I cannot, like Bell, confidently promise that the ‘defect herein, my annotations and compendious observations will supplie’: but I hope that an examination of Donne’s Conclave within what might be termed its penumbra of ideas may not only help towards our understanding of the pamphlet itself but may also illuminate the nature of contemporary attitudes towards Machiavelli and the farreaching, but often implicit effects, of Gentillet’s work. As far as clarifying the precise points of the controversy touched upon by Donne, and the numerous texts cited in the course of his This chapter is a revised and augmented version of my article ‘More Machiavellian than Machiavel: A Study of the Context of Donne’s Conclave’, in A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: Essays in Celebration (1972), 349–84. 1 Thomas Bell, The anatomie of popish tyrannie (1603), sig. B4r–v.

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work, are concerned there is little which could be added to the thorough annotations of Father Healy in his erudite edition.2 However, satirical pamphlets of a semi-popular kind make their effect not solely by such precise references. Their impact must also depend, in large part, upon a more general atmosphere of controversy within which an allusion—or even a word—might alert a reader to countless other, similar ideas. And this was certainly the case with the Conclave. The immediate context of Donne’s work was the paper war provoked, in May 1606, by the Oath of Allegiance imposed on the Roman Catholic community in England. The Oath was largely inspired by the hostility and fear aroused by the Gunpowder Plot, and Catholics were required to swear that the Pope had no authority to depose the King, or to interfere with his affairs in any way whatsoever; that they would remain loyal whatever attempts were encouraged by the Pope against the King; and that they did ‘abhor detest and abjure as impious and hereticall this damnable Doctrine and Position, that Princes which be excommunicated or deprived by the Pope may be deposed or murthered by their Subjectes or any other whosoever’.3 English Catholics were somewhat taxed by the situation. Their Archpriest, George Blackwell, was inclined to regard the Oath as a ‘civil’ document; advised that it should be taken: and himself set an example to that effect, which was followed by many of his co-religionists. On the other hand, Pope Paul V issued two breves forbidding the taking of the Oath, and subsequently engaged Robert Bellarmine, his ‘grand-master of controversies’,4 to set out the Jesuit position, which was to regard the Oath as no merely civil act, to recognize that it called into question the foundations of the Catholic faith, and to urge that it be utterly refused. Everybody who was anybody in the world of religious controversy joined in the fray, and volumes poured from the presses both in England and on the Continent, defending the Crown’s right to impose such an oath, and defending those 2 John Donne, Ignatius His Conclave, ed. T. S. Healy (Oxford, 1969). All references are to this edition, cited as ‘Healy’. 3 Act 3. Jac, c. 4. ix. 4 David Owen, Herod and Pilate reconciled: or, the Concord of Papist and Puritan . . . for the Coercion, Deposition, and Killing of Kings (Cambridge, 1610), 38.

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Catholics who accepted it: or attacking the whole affair root and branch. Among the first group were two works by King James himself, the Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus, and its later reworked form, An apologie . . . together with a Premonition; while outstanding on the Jesuit side were the Responsio and Apologia, in which Bellarmine sought to crush his royal adversary. Healy has shown that the arguments touched upon in Donne’s Conclave were intimately related to the whole Oath of Allegiance controversy in general, and to these four works in particular; and his general conclusion, that the pamphlet was devised as a ‘satirical mockery of Bellarmine’s two works against James’, is wholly convincing.5 However, a problem remains. How does this ‘satirical mockery’ really function? To understand this it is necessary to consider a wider context of controversy than that relating merely to the Oath of Allegiance. And here ‘Machiavel’ provides a clue.

innovation and innovators Controversialists have always relished the opportunity to take an opponent’s own words and use them against him. The technique was much favoured in the early seventeenth century by enemies of the Catholic cause who delighted in collecting, tabulating, and commenting upon damaging maxims drawn from the writings of Jesuits and Seculars. As one triumphant Protestant inscribed on the flyleaf of his copy of The Jesuites Catechisme: ‘Whin knaves fall out, the truth is discovered and honest men come into their own. Here is an unnaturall combat papist against papist.’6 Thomas Bell was but one of many who undertook to read the work of Catholic adversaries, draw out their principal points of contention, and enable readers to comprehend them with a minimum of labour and cost. Indeed, Bell was so impressed by one of his own efforts that he was convinced that his enemies dare not even name the work: ‘their hearts pant so often as they remember it’.7 5 Healy, p. xxvi. The controversy is summarized at pp. xix–xxix. 6 Estienne Pasquier, The Jesuites Catechisme (n.p., 1602). The copy referred to is in the British Library, press mark 860.I.4. 7 Thomas Bell, The Popes funerall (1605), sig. D2v.

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Donne’s Conclave is, I think, to be regarded partly as a work within this genre: that is, as a confutation of one’s enemies who are seen to condemn themselves out of their own mouths. However, instead of the customary tedious apparatus—generally set out in a profusion of typefaces, where points are cited paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, and even phrase by phrase, before being laboriously refuted—Donne has conceived a far more striking method. In an ‘Extasie’, the author’s soul wanders through the heavens; then it suddenly arrives in Hell, and proceeds to a secret place where Lucifer, accompanied by only a few great innovators, is enthroned. Boniface III and Mahomet contend for the ‘highest roome’, although it is clear that the latter is no match for his papal adversary, and has to be content ‘to sit (as yet hee doth) at the Popes feet’.8 Apparently the gates of this inner sanctum are opened but ‘once in an Age’, when all the contenders for admission come forward to plead their causes. The author’s soul has arrived at just the right moment, and he recognizes the first challenger as Copernicus, who impresses Lucifer, until Ignatius Loyola—who is already firmly ensconced—destroys his argument. This sets the pattern for the rest of the work. One after another the claimants come forward; and one after another each has his claim torn to pieces by Ignatius, who finally hurls Pope Boniface from his place next to Lucifer and occupies it himself. Donne’s vision of Hell is simply a means of bringing together all the standard accusations against the Jesuits within the compass of one small pamphlet; and the matter is very ingeniously handled. Apart from Machiavel, there are five principal aspirants whose pretensions are crushed by Loyola—and not one is allowed by Donne either to make out more than a token case for himself, or to occupy Ignatius much time in refutation. Only Machiavel makes a real speech on his own behalf, and Ignatius’s answer occupies just over a third of the entire pamphlet. The reason for this is patent: Machiavel is the only innovator who comes near to challenging Ignatius within the specific terms of innovation as defined in the Conclave. And one cannot begin to understand the Conclave

8 Healy, 9–13. Further references in text are to this edition.

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without considering precisely what Donne means by innovation and innovators. The greater part of the vision is taken up with a contest for admission to Lucifer’s secret place; and this admission depends entirely upon the extent to which a claimant can prove, or Ignatius can disprove, his right to be regarded as an innovator. Throughout the sixteenth century innovation and novelties had carried religious connotations—and invariably bad ones. In January 1536, when the English Reformers were getting out of hand, and when ardent preachers were moving on from attacking the Pope to more fundamental religious issues, Thomas Cromwell had sent a letter to the Bishops pointing out that the people should not be charged with ‘overmuch novelties’ which could breed ‘contention, division and contrariety of opinion in the unlearned multitude’.9 Such attempts to suppress novelties became a commonplace; and novelties simply became equated with views other than one’s own—the latter, by contrast, being regarded as long-established and hallowed by custom. It was such fear of change in any order, once established, which led Nashe to cite Machiavelli—‘a pollitick not much affected to any Religion’—as one who had exposed just ‘howe odious and how dangerous innovations of Religion are’; which led Richard Cosin to accuse factions within the reformed Church of mistaking ‘seditious innovation for lawfull reformation’, and to argue that it was a poison which would endanger both Church and Commonwealth; and, more specifically concerning the Jesuits, which led Anthony Copley to write that the Society had grown so haughty that ‘wheresoever in all Christendome it sets footing it straight seeks to innovate all, and to captivate as well the Laitie as the Cleargie to her hommage’.10 Thinking of this kind resulted in continual battling as to which Church was the more truly primitive, that of Rome or that of England, and induced controversialists such as Bell to set before the eyes of his readers ‘as cleerly as in a glasse of Cristall, the original and daily excrements 9 LP x. 46; printed in Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, ed. N. Pocock (Oxford, 1865), 394–5. 10 Thomas Nashe, The Returne of the renowned Cavaliero Pasquill of England (1589), in Works, ed. McKerrow, i. 79; Richard Cosin, Conspiracie for pretended reformation: viz. Presbyterial discipline (1592), sig. B2; Anthony Copley, Another letter of Mr. A. C. to his dis-jesuited kinsman (1602), 21.

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of Popery, and that it is not the Old but the New Religion’.11 New very clearly equalled illegitimate and unauthorized; and innovation was, therefore, unequivocally a bad thing. Something of these conventional attitudes are to be discerned in the Conclave. In particular, the question of the original state of the Church occurs when Ignatius is considering Lucifer’s proposal that he should go to establish his own Church on the Moon. Recalling that a woman governs there, Ignatius points out that those who have attempted any religious innovation have always profited from that sex. The only exception he can call to mind is Elizabeth of England; and even she was not free from all innovation, ‘for the ancient Religion was so much worne out, that to reduce that to the former dignity, and so to renew it, was a kinde of Innovation’. On the other hand, Ignatius hastily corrects himself, he dare not recognize this sort of thing as truly innovatory, lest he should thereby ‘confesse that Luther and many others which live in banishment in Heaven farre from us, might have a title to this place, as such Innovators’ (pp. 83–7). Elsewhere, on three occasions, Donne speaks of innovation in a more purely political sense: that is, as a revolution following a power struggle in Hell itself. Machiavel, prior to his own speech, considers the possibility of undermining Jesuitical influence by making Lucifer suspect that ‘Ignatius, by winning to his side, politique men, exercised in civill businesses, might attempt some innovation in that kingdome’; and subsequently Lucifer does indeed come to fear such a takeover bid and the introduction of innovations into Hell (pp. 25, 65, 71). However, such political interpretations of innovation are only incidental to the purpose of the Conclave. For the most part, Donne offers a highly idiosyncratic and circumscribed view of the matter, although his very first statement of the theme seems straightforward enough: only those have access to Lucifer’s secret place who have ‘so attempted any innovation in this life, that they gave an affront to all antiquitie, and induced doubts, and anxieties, and scruples, and after, a libertie of beleeving what they would; at length established opinions, directly contrary to all established

11 Thomas Bell, The tryall of the new religion (1608), sig. B1.

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before’ (p. 9). This suggests that innovation is to be equated with intellectual revolution and subversion of established beliefs. But the idea is quickly qualified by the short, sharp contest between Boniface III, who had ‘expelled an old Religion’, and Mahomet, who had founded a new one. Mahomet is overmatched because he had ‘attributed something to the old Testament’; whereas Boniface had destroyed the entire monarchical system established in the Old Testament and had ‘prepared Popes a way, to tread upon the neckes of Princes’. Moreover, Mahomet compares unfavourably because, since his time, his followers have lived in ‘idle concord’; whereas the successors of Boniface ‘have ever beene fruitfull in bringing forth new sinnes, and new pardons, and idolatries, and Kingkillings’. Thus, though both Turks and Papists daily come to Hell in droves, the latter have the more ready access to the innermost room, ‘reserved for especiall Innovators’ (pp. 11–13). Already innovation is assuming a rather unusual meaning, which is further defined when Donne points out that not only those who have innovated in matters directly concerning the soul attempt to gain access to the room but also those who have done so ‘either in the Arts, or in conversation, or in anything which exerciseth the faculties of the soule, and may so provoke to quarrelsome and brawling controversies: For so the truth be lost, it is no matter how’ (p. 13).12 Here, innovation is limited to the promoting of dissension and, above all, to the destruction of truth—which is a long way from merely upsetting established opinion. This is further emphasized by Ignatius when dealing with Copernicus’s claim based on having ‘turned the whole frame of the world’. How, asks Ignatius, has this theory affected men’s beliefs concerning God? What advantage is it to Lucifer whether the earth moves or stands still? Moreover—and this is a vital point—Copernicus’s right to entrance is derogated because his opinions ‘may very well be true’. Thus, if these astronomical questions give anyone the right to enter 12 Cf. Owen, Herod and Pilate, 42. Owen (having shown how, from the same example of Chilperic, the Papists argue for the Pope’s power to depose, and the Puritans argue for the people’s power to do likewise) writes: ‘Men cannot say (as it is in the proverbe) nimium altercando veritas amittitur, seeing that in this opposition the truth is not lost, but divided among them.’

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Lucifer’s room, the Jesuit mathematician Clavius—who had opposed Copernicus ‘and the truth’, and had caused ‘contentions, and schoole-combats in this cause’—had the better claim. Finally, Ignatius tells Copernicus that he must content himself with a less exalted place, with other philosophers, and not aspire ‘to this place reserved onely for Antichristian Heroes’ (pp. 17–19). This last would seem a very curious qualification for recognition as a great innovator; but it is, in fact, the sine qua non of the whole satire, and is even further stressed when Machiavel comes on the scene to acknowledge that ‘entrance into this place may be decreed to none but to Innovators, and to onely such of them as have dealt in Christian businesse; and of them also, to those only which have had the fortune to doe much harme’ (p. 29). Antichristian subversion of the truth, fomenting of discord, gratuitous harm—these are the criteria by which innovators are to be judged at the portals of Lucifer’s inner sanctum. And it is obvious that, given such criteria, neither Copernicus with his heavenly motions, Paracelsus with his uncertain medical experiments, Aretine with his pornographic pictures, Columbus with his geographical discoveries, nor Nerius with his sermons on the Saints, was likely to cause a stir in Hell, nor to present Ignatius with opposition much sterner than the motley crew of those who had ‘but invented new attire for woemen’, or had invented porcelain dishes, spectacles, quintains, stirrups, and Caviari. But Machiavelli could; and did. He came armed with excellent credentials: described by Pole as the ‘finger of Satan’; by Cosin as an ‘imp’ of Satan; and by Covell as ‘polluted Machiavel’, fashioned by Satan as an instrument to disgrace religion. Richard Harvey had even recommended him as ‘that secretary of hell, not only of Florence’.13 And his relevance can be comprehended not so much within the context of the Oath of Allegiance controversy which was the immediate occasion for the Conclave, but within the context of contemporary anti-Machiavelli literature and its relation to the far greater mass of anti-Jesuit polemic. 13 Reginald Pole, Apologia ad Carolum Quintum, I. 137; Cosin, Conspiracie, sig. B2; William Covell, Religions speech to Englandes children, in Polimanteia, sigs. Y3–Bb4v; Richard Harvey, A Theologicall discourse, 97.

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donne ’ s ma c h i a v e l ; a n d m a c h i a v e l l i Machiavel makes his appearance immediately after the discomfiture of Copernicus and Paracelsus; and, having observed how Ignatius has taken upon himself the ‘office of kings Atturney’ to destroy their case, he first prepares some ‘venemous darts, out of his Italian Arsenal ’ to cast against the foe. However, in view of the latter’s evident authority, Machiavel deems it more prudent to ‘sweeten and mollifie’ him—a tactic which would have the advantage of making Lucifer fear that his lieutenant might himself ‘attempt some innovation in that Kingdome’. Therefore, Machiavel addresses himself both to the ‘Dread Emperour’ and to his ‘watchfull and diligent Genius, father Ignatius’. He flatters their ‘stupendious wisedome’ and government; parodies the Trinity by likening Lucifer, Ignatius, and the Pope to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; and goes on to praise the ‘sonnes of Ignatius’ for having created a ‘new art of Equivocation’, and for having reintroduced the language of the Tower of Babel, whereby people have again been brought to misunderstanding. Compared with the work of the Jesuits, Machiavel admits, his own achievements are but childish. Nevertheless, he hopes that one honour will not be denied him: that he has ‘brought in an Alphabet, and provided certaine Elements, and was some kind of schoolmaister in preparing them a way to higher undertakings’. Machiavel is ashamed that he should have to sue for admittance in the company of such creatures as Copernicus and Paracelsus, although the latter is the more endurable, and the more likely to enjoy the Jesuits’ favour in that he was practised in the ‘butcheries and mangling of men’: for I my selfe went alwaies that way of bloud, and therefore I did ever preferre the sacrifices of the Gentiles and of the Jewes, which were performed with effusion of bloud (whereby not only the people, but the Priests also were animated to bold enterprises) before the soft and wanton sacrifices of Christians. If I might have my choyce, I should rather have wished, that the Romane Church had taken the Bread, then the Wine, from the people, since in the wine there is some colour, to imagine and represent blood. (pp. 28–9)

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This, Machiavel feels, should be a special attraction since Ignatius himself, having begun as a soldier, went on to wage spiritual war against the Church, and had even opened ways ‘into Kings chambers’ for his executioners. Though others outside the Society of Jesus might be involved in king-killing, Machiavel believes that the foundation and ‘nourishment’ of the doctrine is peculiar to Ignatius. Now, since only anti-Christian innovators, who have had the ‘fortune to doe much harme’, are allowed into Lucifer’s room, Machiavel insists that, after the Jesuits, his own claim must be regarded as the best: since I did not onely teach those wayes, by which thorough perfidiousnesse and dissembling of Religion, a man might possesse, and usurpe upon the liberty of free Commonwealths; but also did arme and furnish the people with my instructions, how when they were under this oppression, they might safeliest conspire, and remove a tyrant, or revenge themselves of their Prince, and redeeme their former losses; so that from both sides, both from Prince and People, I brought an abundant harvest, and a noble encrease to this kingdome. (pp. 29–31)

This is an interesting speech which poses several interpretative problems. Only two earlier English Machiavels have survived— Gabriel Harvey’s epigram, Machiavellus ipse loquitur; and Marlowe’s Prologue to the Jew of Malta—and neither of these had much to do with Machiavelli. What of Donne’s Machiavel? That Donne had some acquaintance with Machiavelli is apparent from his Pseudo-martyr, published in the year prior to the Conclave. There he discusses papal claims to jurisdiction outside Rome, and writes that, ‘as an Author which lived in profession of that Religion, informs us’, the citizens of Rome itself were always prepared to defend themselves against papal usurpations: ‘and this, at that time when England under Henry the second, and the remoter parts trembled at him, who trembled at his owne neighbours, and Subjects, as he pretended’. A marginal note cites Machiavelli’s Florentine History: ‘f. 34. Edit. Picen. An. 1587’. This is, in fact, the edition printed in London, with the false Piacenza imprint, by John ‘Machiavel’ Wolfe; and, since the reference is accurately given, we may, in this instance, presume

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first-hand knowledge on Donne’s part.14 Unfortunately, one can travel no further in this direction. Father Healy, suggesting that Donne was ‘no victim of the ‘‘myth of Gentillet’’ ’ and that he had not taken his knowledge of Machiavelli ‘from his critics, Catholic or Protestant’, adds that the original texts were easily available to Donne ‘in Italian, even in English printings’ (p. xxxii). But what does Donne’s Machiavel really amount to? He reveals cunning in attempting to create a rift between Lucifer and Ignatius. He claims to have provided elements for the Jesuits’ evil doctrines and practices, and emphasizes his preference for the ‘way of bloud’ through an unfavourable comparison between Christian and pagan sacrifice. He boasts that he has taught how, by dissembling religion, a man might usurp a commonwealth; and how, conversely, people might conspire to overthrow princes. Now it is certainly true that these few simple propositions could have been drawn from an uncritical reading of Machiavelli’s own writings; but it is obvious that Donne need not have read a single word by Machiavelli himself in order to write what he has written in the Conclave. Donne’s Machiavel expresses all the sentiments popular opinion would, at that time, have expected of him. And here once again it must be stressed that Gentillet’s importance in moulding such opinion was no ‘myth’.

gentillet and some jesuits There are several things which must be borne in mind when considering the extent of Gentillet’s relevance here. First, that up to and including the year 1611, his Contre-Machiavel had proved very popular and that an English translation, first published in 1602, had been reissued in 1608. Secondly, as we have seen, there is ample evidence to show that Gentillet’s systematization of Machiavelli did, in fact, become accepted by many of those who had occasion to discuss affairs of state (and especially the relationship 14 John Donne, Pseudo-martyr. Wherein out of certaine propositions this conclusion is evicted. That those of the Romane religion ought to take the oath of allegeance (1610), sig. B.4v.

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between policy and religion) as what Machiavelli had himself written; and this despite the availability in print of Machiavelli’s own writings. But, in addition to these general relevancies, there are two further factors which make Gentillet especially pertinent to a consideration of Donne’s Conclave. The seventh maxim of the third part of Gentillet’s Discours concerns Machiavelli’s advice that a prince should model himself on Cesare Borgia, but the greater part of the ensuing refutation consists of a tirade against the abuses of papal power. This, in itself, is unremarkable: but the chapter ends with a curious expansion of a Latin verse by George Buchanan, who, says Gentillet, ‘toucheth the white’ by pointing out that the worldly conquests by land and sea of the ancient Romans were as nothing compared with the ‘moderne dominators of Rome’. The first bishops of Rome, by their good and holy life, gained heaven and paradise; but the more recent have valiantly conquered hell and have made themselves masters and peaceable possessors thereof, notwithstanding all the forces and resistance of Pluto and all his sequell, which would not suffer, that Popes should dominier in hell, but would only receive them as his vassales: But the chance hath happened contrarie; for the Pope is at this day, and hath beene long time, a peacable dominator and lord of hell, and Pluto is no more but his vassale, and the simple executioner of his commandements, and as it were gaoler of the Popes prisons.

Do you imagine, continues Gentillet, that Pluto dare disobey a single word of the ‘Pope his soveraigne’? On the contrary, it is certain that he ‘durst not once grunt nor contradict him in anything’, but does everything he can to maintain his friendship and do him all the service he can. The parallel with the Conclave is striking, although there is no direct evidence to link Gentillet’s little jeu d’esprit, or Buchanan’s verse, with Donne’s vision of hell.15 On the other hand there can be no doubt about the final reason for Gentillet’s relevance. 15 Gentillet, Contre-Machiavel (1576), 344–5; (1602), 198. Buchanan’s verse, Fratres fraterrimi, XVII, is in Georgii Buchanani Scoti Poematum pars altera (Edinburgh, 1714), 22. For a later use of a similar conceit, see Cromwell’s Complaint of Injustice: or, His Dispute with Pope Alexander the Sixth, for precedency in Hell (1681).

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Among the most bitter, and most often published, late sixteenth-century attacks on Machiavelli were those by Antonio Possevino and Pedro de Ribadeneira; while the fullest native English denunciation of the Florentine was published early in the seventeenth century by Thomas Fitzherbert. This has a twofold interest. In the first place, Possevino had never read Machiavelli, but summarized and condemned his doctrines solely on the basis of what Gentillet had written; Ribadeneira, though citing Machiavelli thrice, derived many of his opinions very obviously, but without acknowledgement, from Possevino; and Fitzherbert derived many of his opinions, just as obviously, and also without acknowledgement, from Ribadeneira. In the second place, all three were Jesuits. In 1592 there appeared the first edition of a work which grimly serves to demonstrate the influence which crass, but self-confident, ignorance may exert upon the history of ideas.16 Published under the name of the Jesuit Antonio Possevino, this Judicium is a collection of attacks on authors deemed dangerous to Christianity because they were heretical, because they elevated the secular state over the Church, or because they subverted conventional views of political morality.17 Thus La Noue, Bodin, Du Plessis Mornay, and Machiavelli are all bitterly denounced, although the treatment accorded to each is unequal in length and uneven in kind. Possevino augments his own diatribes with relevant fulminations from 16 Antonio Possevino, Cautio de iis, quae scripsit tum Machiavellus, tum is, qui adversus eum scripsit Antimachiavellum, qui nomen haud adscripsit, in his Judicium de Nuae militis Galli scriptis etc. (Rome, 1592). A version of this Cautio was included in Possevino’s Bibliotheca selecta (Rome, 1593) of which there were several subsequent editions. Nearly a century later there was an Italian version of the Cautio alone: Discorso contra l’impieta, & perniciosissimi consigli del Machiavello ch’egli per sparger il suo veleno diede a’ prencipi, et contrapositione dell’ottimo libro del perfetto governo de’ prencipi scritto da s. Tomaso d’Aquino al re di Cipro (Venice, 1685). 17 The Judicium comprises the following sections: Theorema e cautio on La Noue; Consideratio e cautio on Bodin’s books; Judicium e cautio on Du Plessis Mornay; Cautio against Machiavelli and ‘eum scripsit Antimachiavellum’; an extract from Osorio; a list of writings against Machiavelli; a treatise, in its entirety, by Pierre Coret against La Noue; and finally Possevino’s Judicium on the Confessions of St Augustine, and other matters. For the view that G. B. Strozzi was responsible for this work and that Possevino merely supervised its preparation, see Silvio A. Barbi, Un accademico mecenate e poeta, Giovan Battista Strozzi il giovane (Florence, 1900), 43.

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other writers, including a long extract against Machiavelli from Osorio’s De nobilitate christiana. There is also inserted, after the material from Osorio, a brief list of ‘others’ who had written against Machiavelli—Catharinus, Molanus,18 and Botero—concluding with a reference to the ‘very recently’ published treatise by Petrus Coretus, which is then printed in its entirety although, apart from a passing sneer at a mysterious ‘Michaelem Machiavellum’, it is wholly devoted to La Noue.19 With regard to Machiavelli, Possevino was in a difficult position because, while desperate to denounce so infamous an atheist, he had never read any of his works. So trifling a hindrance was, however, easily circumvented: and Possevino confidently provides a summary of Machiavelli’s ‘pestilential counsel’. A prince acting on Machiavelli’s advice would, according to Possevino, ignore all counsel and rely wholly upon his own prudence; would parade piety and religion, though he has neither; would approve and confirm anything false in religion, if it served his purpose; would prefer pagan religion to Christianity; and would count as nothing the doctors of the Church. The Machiavellian Prince thinks ill of the Roman Catholic Church; believes that the authority and laws of Moses depended on force and arms not on faith and God; and attributes success to fortune and chance, not to virtue and religion. All this, says Possevino, is contained in the ‘first two books de Principe’. But there is more to come, it seems, from Book III, where Machiavelli declares that a war is just when it is necessary; that a Prince must make peace impossible by committing outrageous injuries upon his adversaries, and should, in conquered territories, establish colonies, drive out the native inhabitants, and destroy those who have suffered loss. He may also 18 On Molanus, see below, Ch. 13. 19 Petrus Coretus (Pierre Coret), a Belgian cleric, published the Defensio veritatis adversus assertiones Catholicae fidei repugnantes, libro domini de la Noue De politicis & militaribus rebus, aspersas (Antwerp, 1591). Coret later published an attack on Bodin, the Anti-Politicus (Douai, 1599). His reference to ‘Michaelem Machiavellum’ occurs in a discussion of oaths and perjury, when he rejects Machiavelli’s lion/fox metaphor. This eloquent error was not missed by Mattei (1969), 238 n. 1. Possevino’s inclusion of Coret’s work at the end of his list of antiMachiavelli writings misled William Covell—another critic of Machiavelli who had never read a word written by his victim.

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take revenge on his enemies by corrupting their provinces with evil manners. It is folly to think that new benefits will erase the memory of old injuries. Furthermore, the Prince should model himself upon some tyrant; care nothing about earning a reputation for cruelty, if this serves to keep his subjects in obedience; accept that it is better to be feared than loved; put no trust in friendship; and, should he wish to punish somebody, devise some specious pretext for so doing. He must cloak himself with the nature of both the lion and the fox; must exercise cruelty at one blow but, by contrast, give benefits gradually; and, finally, should maintain factions among his subjects, and drive away those who love the public weal. To anyone familiar with Gentillet, Possevino’s own vulpine procedure is obvious. His summary is based, without acknowledgement, upon twenty-two chapter headings drawn from Daneau’s anonymous Latin translation of the anonymous Contre-Machiavel.20 He even follows the order of their appearance in Gentillet’s work and, worse still, is so slovenly a reader that he betrays himself not only by declaring that Machiavelli’s Il Principe was divided into three books (as, of course, is the Contre-Machiavel ) but also by failing to recognize that half of the maxims he deplores derive from the Discorsi—something he should have grasped from the marginal references provided in his source.21 The irony is that Gentillet’s uncompromising Calvinism and wholesale criticism of the Papacy (which, he claimed, had been rightly condemned by Machiavelli but for the wrong reasons) made him no less obnoxious to Possevino than Machiavelli himself would have been. The antidote was as venomous as the poison itself and it was, in fact, not long before Gentillet joined Machiavelli in the Index of Prohibited Books.22 20 The maxims are taken seriatim from the Contre-Machiavel as follows: I. 1; II. 1–4, 6, 7, 10; III. 1–12, 14, 15. 21 Possevino, Cautio, 158, refers to the ‘first two books’ of Il Principe; and then provides a marginal reference to ‘lib. 3’ at 161. Procacci (1965), 280, notes that Hermann Conring—in the introduction to his Latin translation, Nicolai Machiavelli Princeps (Helmestadt, 1660), 8–9—was the first to notice Possevino’s blunder. 22 Possevino, Cautio, 162–3, discusses the book Anti-machiavellum. He says that it was published at Geneva, but with the author’s name concealed; and, although he approves of the way in which the anonymous author attacks Machiavelli with examples drawn from ancient history, he deplores his assault on the

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This is really all there is to Possevino’s Machiavelli. Yet the ramshackle compilation was enthusiastically taken up and republished not only independently but even as an appendix to Latin editions of Il Principe.23 More important, just three years later, Ribadeneira—friend and biographer of Loyola, hagiographer, and vituperative historian of the English Reformation—was able to expand Possevino’s Machiavellian maxims into an immense work rivalling Gentillet’s own Discours in magnitude and far surpassing it in prolix religiosity.24 Introducing his Tratado de la religion y virtudes to the Christian Reader, Ribadeneira writes that, though Machiavelli had devoted himself to the study of politics, he was an impious and godless fellow whose doctrines, like water flowing from an Catholic Church—which, he feels, exceeds even Machiavelli’s blasphemy. Indeed, heretics use antidotes not to relieve but rather to insinuate and hide poisons. The Annotatio librorum prohibitorum (Alessandria, 1580) had already included ‘Liber inscriptus, De Regno, & quovis alio principatu contra Nicholaum Machiavellum’; and the Index of Rome (1596) condemned Gentillet’s ‘opera omnia’. See Index de Rome 1590, 1593, 1596, ed. J. M. Bujanda (1994), 590, 750. 23 Material from Possevino was added to the Oberursel edition (1600) of Teglio’s Latin translation of Machiavelli, Princeps; and then again in later editions of Teglio in 1608, 1622, 1643, 1648, 1695. On these, see Bertelli and Innocenti, Secolo XVII, nos. 2, 10, 24, 41, 48, 96. For examples of Possevino’s continuing influence, see Mattei (1969), 239–48. For an enjoyable late Elizabethan denunciation of Possevino as a shameless liar and forger, see Matthew Sutcliffe, A Challenge concerning the Romish Church . . . thereunto also is annexed an answere unto certeine vaine, and frivolous exceptions taken to his former challenge (1602), 119, 230. 24 Pedro de Ribadeneira, Tratado de la religion y virtudes que deve tener el Principe Christiano para governar sus Estados. Contra lo que Nicolas Machiavelo y los politicos deste tiempo ensenan (Madrid, 1595). There were other Spanish versions: (Antwerp, 1597); (Madrid, 1601). It was included in Obras del Padre Pedro de Ribadeneyra, agora de nuevo revistas y acrecentadas (Madrid, 1605); and reprinted therefrom by Don Vicente de la Fuente in his edition Obras escogidas de Padre Pedro de Rivadeneira (Madrid, 1868). There were several translations: into Latin (Antwerp, 1603), (Cologne, 1604), Mainz (1603), (Mainz, 1604); into Italian (Genoa, 1598), (Brescia, 1599); into French (Douai, 1610). An abridged modern English translation by George Albert Moore was issued in a composite volume, Practical Politics by Giovanni Botero: Religion and the Virtues of the Christian Prince Against Machiavelli by Pedro Ribadeneyra (Washington, DC, 1946). Ribadeneira is discussed by Robert Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1990), 111–35; and by Truman, Spanish Treatises on Government, 277–314. Both these studies are valuable, but both (especially Bireley) accord Ribadeneira a respect he does not merit.

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infected fountain, were like to poison all those who drank thereof. Ribadeneira then enunciates what he considers to be the principal points of Machiavelli’s political theory by summarizing a selection of Possevino’s selection of Gentillet’s chapter headings. Furthermore, Ribadeneira argues, there are other authors similar to Machiavelli, who take as their oracle Tacitus’ account of the very worst of the pagan emperors, Tiberius; and he specifically condemns Bodin, La Noue, and Du Plessis Mornay—all of whom had been adversely judged, also in association with Machiavelli, by Possevino.25 Throughout the two books into which his work is divided, Ribadeneira sets out what he regards as the true criteria for a Christian prince; and these prove to be little different from the old catalogue of princely virtues familiar to every student of the genre de regimine principum. In particular, the Jesuit contrasts two methods of government. One, advocated by the ‘politici’, and founded merely on human prudence, is false and diabolical. It accommodates religion to the state; and assumes not only that God has no concern for human affairs but also that the world is governed by the malice and cunning of mortal men. On the other hand, the true mode of government derives from God Himself; accommodates the state to religion; and recognizes that divine providence watches over good rulers and punishes the bad (sig. þþ7r–v). All this could have come from almost any medieval treatise on kingship; but Ribadeneira’s aim is principally to establish that proper care for religion means the destruction of heresy since it is impossible, he says, that true Catholics can ever come to terms with the heretics, who must be completely extirpated as the prime cause of revolutions, the fall of states, and the death of princes (pp. 180–93). In his second book Ribadeneira discusses the virtues—justice, wise choice of advisers, clemency, liberality, prudence, and all the rest—which his Christian prince must possess. In this context, the classic advocacy of simulated virtue—‘the 25 Ribadeneira, Tratado, ‘Al Cristiano y piadoso lector’: (1595), sigs. þþ3–6. Further references are given in the text. Ribadeneira uses, and rearranges, fourteen of Possevino’s twenty-two maxims. The maxims, in the order adopted by Ribadeneira, derive originally from the Contre-Machiavel, II. 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10; I. 1; III. 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10.

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words of Machiavelli, come from hell, to destroy religion’—are cited from the eighteenth chapter of Il Principe, ‘translated faithfully from the Italian language into our Castilian’, and then refuted at considerable length. Inevitably, Ribadeneira is led to a consideration of Christian fortitude and to the dreaded Machiavellian maxims which had angered Gentillet, Possevino, and (before them) Osorio: that Christianity had corrupted pagan fortitude by demanding patience rather than activity, by forgoing blood sacrifice, and by emphasizing humility, abjection, and poverty, rather than human valour (pp. 468–89). Here, again, a passage is ‘translated faithfully from the Italian into the Castilian’—this time from the Discorsi, II. 2. In his refutation, Ribadeneira shows an acquaintance not only with Possevino, but possibly with Gentillet himself and, more especially, with Osorio’s De nobilitate christiana, the first important published attack on Machiavelli, which is heavily paraphrased in this section of the Tratado.26 There is little acuity of thought, no originality, and a real but severely limited knowledge of Machiavelli in Ribadeneira’s work. Nevertheless, the Spanish Jesuit was a historian of European reputation; and, up to the appearance of Donne’s Conclave, his Tratado de la religion y virtudes had been 26 There are also similarities between Ribadeneira’s work and the De justa reipublicae Christianae in Reges Impios auctoritate (Paris, 1590)—probably by William Rainolds but published under the name G. Guilelmus Rossaeus. These may be nothing more than the pabulum of religious and political polemic in the late 16th c., but they are still worthy of note. The De justa reipublicae Christianae declares that the massacre of Huguenots in 1572 was just and honest; that Henri III was a ‘cancer et pestis’, and that his murderer, Clement, was ‘innocentissimus et praeclarissimus juvenis’; that Henri’s courtiers were atheists and Machiavellists; that heretic monarchs were, by definition, tyrants; and that regicide is bad, whereas tyrannicide is good. Catholics and heretics alike believe in this last dictum but, although it is really quite easy to distinguish between real tyrants (whose killing is favoured by God) and virtuous rulers (whose killing is not), heretics are so stupid that they think that good kings are tyrants. Amidst all this froth, Machiavelli is condemned (but only en passant) for comparing Christianity unfavourably with pagan religion and for prescribing the rule that it is, without doubt, legitimate for princes to break their oaths, to deceive, and to dissimulate. Correct marginal references to the Discorsi, II. 2, and Il Principe, 18, are given, but both these and the Machiavellian dicta derive from Gentillet—another irony since Rainolds (if he is the author) asserts that Calvinists are disciples of Machiavelli. See De justa reipublicae Christianae, fos. 24v, 96v, 89v–90, 92v, 227r–v, 383–429v, 459r–v, 482v, 490v.

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through three Spanish, four Latin, one French, and two Italian editions. And at least one Englishman had read the work with close attention. In 1606 there appeared the First part of a treatise concerning policy and religion by the English Jesuit controversialist Thomas Fitzherbert. In 1610 the Second part appeared; and in the same year a Latin treatise, substantially similar in argument to his English works, was published by Fitzherbert at Rome.27 In these books Fitzherbert, like Ribadeneira, was concerned to demonstrate the fallaciousness of Machiavelli’s doctrines, both on religious and utilitarian grounds; and, like Ribadeneira, he sought to implicate Protestants as heretics and Machiavellians. These tasks had been in Fitzherbert’s mind as early as 1602 when, in his Defence of the Catholyke cause, he had argued that Protestants, following the ‘absurd and pestilent doctrin of Machiavel’, had sought to strengthen Elizabeth’s position by rigour, cruelty, and injustice; whereas reason and experience taught that it is the Christian virtues which preserve princes, so that ‘these most cruel and bloody devises of our persecutours, are not only impious, but also foolish in that very point wherein they will have them seeme most wyse’.28 His three long works of 1606 and 1610 constitute an immense expansion of these ideas. Human affairs are so complex and variable that it is beyond the wit of man to devise any system of politics capable of meeting every possible contingency; but, of all political doctrines, those of Machiavelli are the most ruinous to princes and to states alike.29 Fidelity is especially praised by Fitzherbert as the basis of successful government; and, naturally, Machiavelli’s advice concerning 27 Thomas Fitzherbert, The first part of a treatise concerning policy and religion, wherein the infirmitie of humaine wit is amply declared (Douai, 1606); The second part of a treatise etc. (n.p., 1610). Each of these then went into a second edition (Douai, 1615)—issued in facsimile by the Scolar Press in 1974 as part of their series English Recusant Literature—and there were further editions at London in 1652 and 1696. The Latin version is entitled An sit Utilitas in Scelere: vel de Infelicitate Principis Macchiavelliani, contra Machiavellum in politicos ejus sectatores (Rome, 1610). 28 Thomas Fitzherbert, A defence of the Catholyke cause (Antwerp, 1602), fo. 32. 29 Policy and religion, I (1606), 51; An sit Utilitas, 60.

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the efficacy of deceit comes in for heavy criticism: though this leads Fitzherbert into the difficulty faced by virtually every writer on princely virtue. There are inevitably occasions when rulers, bearing the heavy responsibility of their subjects’ welfare, cannot afford to be honest with their sworn enemies. What then are they to do? The answer had generally been to draw a hairline distinction between dissimulation and simulation: between white lies and nasty falsehoods. Ribadeneira had himself devoted a chapter to this knotty problem, and had come up with a crass distinction: between lying without cause and without profit (which, not unreasonably, he deemed always bad) and merely giving people to understand one thing when another is meant—and this only when necessity and utility require it! In the Spaniard’s opinion, the latter cause is justifiable; though he wisely refrains from trying to clarify what he means by necessity and utility.30 Fitzherbert was equally taxed over this matter, and largely borrows from Ribadeneira in order to reach his conclusion that there is a great difference to be noted ‘betwixt telling a lye, and concealing the truth’. Simulation, ‘or fiction’, is never lawful; but dissimulation ‘is both lawful and commendable, yea and some tymes so necessary in princes, that it may wel and truly be sayd; Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare’.31 Fitzherbert discusses, point by point, what he considers to be the principal tenets of the Machiavellist: to practise extremity in both virtue and vice; to foment factions; to divide and rule; never to trust those to whom offence has been given; to destroy all those likely to trouble the state; to take Cesare Borgia as a model for political action; and to regard Christianity unfavourably in comparison with the pagan religions.32 He claims to have obtained a faculty to read Machiavelli’s works which were on the Index 30 Ribadeneira, Tratado (1595), 283–92. 31 Policy and religion, I (1606), 342–8. On dissimulation in general, see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), especially ch. 8 on ‘Casuistry, Mental Reservation, and Dr. Navarrus’, 153–85; and Jean-Pierre Cavaille´, Dis/simulations . . . Religion, morale et politique au XVIIe sie`cle (Paris, 2002). 32 Fitzherbert’s refutation of Machiavelli’s view of Christianity is in Policy and religion, II (1610), 345–57.

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of Prohibited Books and therefore not normally available for consultation;33 but he never cites a text directly; his summaries of Machiavelli’s assumed positions are redolent of Gentillet; and the detail of his refutation is largely derived from Ribadeneira, whose very words are frequently pressed into service. Moreover, like Ribadeneira, and like Gentillet before him, Fitzherbert sees in history irrefutable evidence of Machiavelli’s incapacity in practical politics. Had Machiavelli and other contemporary ‘politikes’ been the first inventors of such notions, and had these never been put to the test, then, says Fitzherbert, there might have been some excuse for believing in their efficacy. But they have been practised by all tyrants; and they have almost invariably proved ruinous.34 I am not suggesting a simple, unilinear relationship between Gentillet, Possevino, Ribadeneira, and Fitzherbert. Ribadeneira’s work, though singularly obtuse, is extensive and learned, and draws upon a range of material far greater than was possible in Possevino’s slim pamphlet; while Fitzherbert, similarly, draws on material not employed by his Spanish colleague. There were, in addition, many other writers at this period condemning Machiavelli generally en passant, and generally without showing any firsthand knowledge of his writings—despite their availability. None the less, the three Jesuits are especially important in that their hostility towards Machiavelli goes beyond mere passing allusion. Possevino and, more notably, Ribadeneira and Fitzherbert were specifically concerned to combat a Machiavelli who bears strong evidence of Gentillet’s paternity; Possevino was popular in the period prior to the appearance of Donne’s Conclave; Ribadeneira was more popular still; and Fitzherbert was an Englishman whose books against Machiavelli appeared just prior to Donne’s own controversial works. Moreover, for Fitzherbert, Machiavelli— despite the staleness of his maxims—is an innovator almost within 33 An sit Utilitas, sig. þ3. On the benefits of the Index, see Robert Parsons, The Warn-word to Sir Francis Hastinges Wast-word (Antwerp, 1602), Part II (The second encounter about Falshood and Lying), fos. 67v–68. Parsons argues that Catholics are forbidden works such as ‘the Turks Alcaron it self, Machevile and Bodin tending to Atheisme, and baudy Boccace, with the most pestilent English Pallace of Pleasure’: all of which poison those not protected by the Index. 34 Policy and religion, I (1606), 384.

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the terms of reference subsequently specified by Donne. Machiavelli, he writes, to make good his new doctrin (which was devised, no dout by the divel for the destruction of men, and common welths) not onlie impugneth, the Christian religion, Which he him selfe professed, but also frameth another morall philosophy, then hath hetherto bene heard of in this world, all tending to the establishment of an inhumane barbarous, and tirannicall pollicy.35

It is possible that Donne had heard neither of Possevino’s Judicium nor of any of Fitzherbert’s three anti-Machiavelli treatises. It is likewise possible that he had not heard of Ribadeneira’s treatise on the virtues of a Christian prince, despite its numerous editions, and despite the fact that he used others of Ribadeneira’s writings in the course of his own controversial works. Such things are possible: but they are not very likely. In any case, to debate the question of Donne’s knowledge of these books would be to confine oneself merely to the possible intention of the Conclave; whereas if one considers probable effect, rather than possible intention, then it is obvious that many of Donne’s readers could well have known these current Jesuit anti-Machiavelli writings. Not to take them into account is to divest the Conclave of some of its choicest ironies. Donne’s Machiavel finds himself face to face not merely with Jesuits in general, but with the very father of all Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola; and this Machiavel, too, is torn to pieces by his irate antagonist. Like Fitzherbert, Donne’s Ignatius scorns Machiavel’s claims to originality, and tells him that his precepts are so stale and obsolete that Serarius had even called Herod, ‘who lived so long before Machivell, a Machiavellian’.36 Like Possevino’s Machiavelli, and those of Ribadeneira and Fitzherbert, Donne’s Machiavel is taken to task: for daring to extol the ‘way of bloud’; for comparing Christianity adversely with paganism; for advocating the dissembling of religion for political purposes; and for showing princes 35 Policy and religion, II (1610), 357. 36 Healy, 55. An even better example, from the Protestant side, is Thomas Bell, The anatomie of popish tyrannie, 72, where he exposes Parsons as a bastard, a drunkard, and as an incestuous, seditious traitor: ‘being thus qualified with supernaturall gifts, and extraordinarie graces proceeding from Beelzebub that notable Machivell’.

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how to usurp power. But here everything has been turned upside down. Jesuit scholars may write their highly moral books against Machiavelli; but they fool nobody. Here in Hell the truth is revealed. Machiavel is rejected not because he is evil but because he is not evil enough. Ignatius is too clever and too wicked for him. Donne’s Conclave is the apotheosis of a cliche´ of controversy: the Jesuit is more Machiavellian than Machiavelli.

mo re machi ave lli an than m achi avelli The first Jesuit mission to England had arrived in June 1580, and, less than seven months later, a Proclamation issued for their arrest accused them of deceiving and abusing simple folk under the ‘color of a holy name’; of entering the kingdom to corrupt and pervert the Queen’s subjects in ‘matter of conscience and religion’; of drawing them from their ‘loyalty and duty of obedience’; and of provoking them to ‘attempt somewhat to the disturbance of the present quiet’.37 A Proclamation of the following year put the finishing touches to the picture, when it accused the Jesuits not merely of ‘stirring up of rebellion within their natural countries’ but also of the ‘endangering of her majesty’s most royal person’.38 These, substantially, were to remain the principal elements of the Jesuits’ character reference, both official and popular: they were renegades who, under a pretended religion, sought to subvert the state, and even threatened the person of the sovereign. It was in vain that a Jesuit such as Campion protested that he was concerned with religion and nothing more. How could this be possible? demanded William Charke, voicing the incredulity of many. In England, religion and policy were one life and one spirit; and anybody taking away one inevitably procured the death of the other. No Jesuit could come to alter religion, ‘but he must attempt the change of the state, to the lamentable destruction of the lande’. Nor was it possible to reinstate papal authority, ‘but he must take awaye 37 Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, ii, no. 655 (p. 483): Proclamation of 10 Jan. 1581. 38 Ibid., no. 660 (489): Proclamation of 1 Apr. 1582.

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from her royall Maiestie, her just supreme soveraintie, and deprive her at one clappe of the authoritie shee hath over all persons and ordinances’. The Jesuit may say that matters of policy appertain not to his vocation, ‘yet it is so sayde onely to cover his purpose, which is to the contrary’.39 It was normal for one party to accuse its opponents of using religion for political ends. Indeed, as we have seen in French polemics of the late sixteenth century, this was the most common form of abuse. In England, too, the accusation was hurled by Anglicans at Catholics and Puritans; by Puritans at Anglicans and Catholics; and by Jesuits both at Protestants of all persuasions and at fellow Catholics less extreme than themselves—and it was frequently associated with a charge of Machiavellism. This was nothing new. As early as the mid-1560s Roger Ascham had heaped abuse on those Italianate Englishmen who counted the Christian mysteries as mere fables to serve civil policy, and had pointed out that such creatures were prepared to countenance either Papistry or Protestantism; whichever better served their turn. Nevertheless, he thought that they most commonly associated themselves with the ‘worst Papistes’ with whom they shared three fundamental opinions: open contempt of God’s word; a ‘secret securitie of sinne’; and a ‘bloodie desire to have all taken away, by sword or burning, that be not of their faction’. Anybody, said Ascham, who cared to read ‘with indifferent judgement Pygius and Machiavel, two indifferent Patriarches of thies two Religions’, would know that he was speaking the truth.40 These were strong words, often repeated, and with greater frequency towards the end of the century as the religious controversies grew increasingly complex and bitter. Most vindictive, perhaps, of all the controversies was the internecine struggle between Jesuit extremists and Catholic moderates. The Jesuits in England were immediately recognized as proponents of political revolution, seeking to restore Catholicism by subversion and force. They enjoyed some early success in stirring 39 William Charke, An answere to a seditious pamphlet by a Jesuite (1580), sig. C.2. Cf. Meredith Hanmer, The great bragge and challenge of M. Champion a jesuite (1581), fos. 17v–18. 40 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570), fos. 28v–29.

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their co-religionists; but the execution of Mary Queen of Scots gave pause to many Catholics, who began to wonder whether it might not be advantageous to come to terms with the establishment. Those Catholics who did seek toleration within the Anglican system were attacked for subordinating their religious duty to matters of secondary importance (either public interest or private commodity) and were dubbed ‘Politici in schola Mahiavelliana [sic]’.41 On the other hand, the Jesuits were regarded by their more patriotic co-religionists from a viewpoint similar to that of the government itself, and were condemned for seeking to overthrow Elizabeth by raising a Spanish claimant to the throne. With such goings-on, the moderates felt, how was it possible for Catholicism ever to be tolerated in England? A work such as Parsons’s A conference about the next succession, advancing the claims of the Spanish Infanta, sent patriotic Catholics into transports of wrath; and Parsons’s pious refutation of Machiavelli’s alleged dictum, that religion and piety hinder wise government, cut little ice.42 The constant accusations of being arch-politicians worried the Society, and in 1596 Thomas Wright complained of the difficulties faced by the Jesuits in convincing critics that they did not seek to promote foreign invasion, and that they did not seek to procure Elizabeth’s death. He wrote to the Jesuit Garnet, urging him to resist ‘any such Machiavelian treasons’, and to let the Queen know that ambition, covetousness, and pretence were ‘far from us, whose vocation is religion, and not suppressing of princes’; for, if she could not be convinced, Wright feared ‘lest all our priests be rather put to death for matters of state than religion’. The Jesuits, he says, in their last general congregation had decreed that, under pain of mortal sin, they should not deal in any affairs concerning the state.43 But the Jesuits could swear what they liked. Their opponents were not going to believe them, and, as Wright suspected, they 41 Thomas Stapleton, Oratio Academica: an Politici horum temporum in numero Christianorum sint habendi? (Munich, 1608), 28. Horrocks (1908), 157–8, showed that this work must have been written in 1589 or 1590. 42 Robert Parsons, A conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland (Antwerp, 1594), 41. 43 See Thomas Birch, Memoirs of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, from the year 1581 till her death (1754), 359–60.

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deemed the decree ‘rather a cover of craft and policy than a sincere rule and law’. Anger concerning Jesuitical activities, real and alleged, boiled up in the controversy over the appointment of an Archpriest to direct the Catholic mission in England.44 Was it not singular, demanded one Catholic writer, Anthony Copley, that the Jesuits sought not only to rule over the secular clergy but also to bring ‘armes and conquest into the Catholicke church’, thus managing affairs of state ‘more machiavelianlie then Machivell himselfe?’ The Jesuits, he said, used the sacrament of confession to probe into a man’s private conscience to see whether he was apt to serve their seditious turns: ‘could Machiavell himselfe have beene so prophane?’ Indeed, since they were capable of such sacrilege, it was no wonder that they scorned to come an ace behind ‘either Machiavell or his Maister’ in any other matter against either religion or morality. As for believing their protestations of honesty: how was it possible? They were the masters of deceit, and Copley would be ashamed to weary his reader with all that he knows concerning their ‘lying legierdemaines’ consisting of: infinite querks & quiddits; as mentall evasions in their speech, interpretative colloguings, halfe fac’d tearmes, tergiversations, tentative speeches, whole and demie-dublings, the vulpecular-fawne, detraction with sighes, buttes, and the shrugge, circular calumniations, holding it lawfull to be forsworne in too manie cases, intercepting, rasing, and forgerie of letters, and such like.45

Accusations such as these were commonplace: but one particular cluster of polemics may serve to distil the essence of this controversy. They are all, either wholly or in part, the work of William Watson (secular priest, bitter antagonist of all Jesuits but especially of the much-execrated Parsons, whom he accused of writing more spitefully than ‘Don Lucifer the wittiest fiend in hell’);46 and they are noteworthy for their identification of Jesuitism with a 44 See T. G. Law, A historical sketch of the conflicts between Jesuits and Seculars in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1889). 45 Anthony Copley, An answere to a letter of a Jesuited gentleman by his cosin, maister A.C. (1601), 79, 87–8, 92–3. 46 William Watson, A decacordon of ten quodlibeticall questions concerning religion and state (1602), 247.

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Gentillet-type Machiavellism. In ‘The Epistle to the Reader’, prefixed to Bagshaw’s Sparing discoverie, Watson denounces the Jesuits, who have become corrupted since their original foundation. Through their ‘haughtie-aspiring-towring-wits’ and their ‘prowde-ambitious-mounting-thoughts’ they are due for a ‘Luciferian fall’. The ‘Jesuiticall ghosts’ are wicked spirits who, ‘transforming themselves into angels of light’, lead more souls to Hell than the ugliest fiends acting under their own colours. Watson says that he could set forth a ‘triple alphabet intire of Machivilian practises used by the Jesuites’, setting down their ‘rules atheall in order of their platforme layd for a perpetuity of their intended government despoticon, and mock-weale publick oligarchicall’; and, in the text of the work which follows, Bagshaw (or Watson himself ) rails against their conception of religion as a mere political device upheld by human wisdom and ‘sleights of wit’. They are the men ‘that by Machivels rules are raysed up to mayntayne it by equivocation, detractions, dissimulation, ambition, contention for superioritie, stirring up of strife, setting kingdomes against kingdomes, raising of rebellions, murthering of princes, and by we know not how many stratagems of Sathan, comming out of hell, and tending to confusion’.47 These same ‘rules’ are likewise denounced in another work introduced by Watson—Thomas Bluet’s Important considerations—which protests that true Catholics wish to acknowledge that they really are the Queen’s subjects ‘without all Jesuiticall equivocation’; and warns against ‘novelties and Jesuitisme’ which are nothing but a ‘very vizard of most deepe hypocrisie’. The Jesuits, following their Spanish founder Loyola, ‘being altogether Hispaniated, and transported into those humours’, seek to establish a Spanish monarchy, and to this end they are ready to practise every mischief which they can devise, or learn in the ‘very schoole of Machiavellisme’.48 47 William Watson, A sparing discoverie of our English Jesuits (1601), sigs. a1v–2, 6–7, et al. It has been suggested that only the Preface is by Watson and that the main text may be by Christopher Bagshaw. 48 William Watson and Thomas Bluet, Important considerations which ought to move all true catholikes to acknowledge that the proceedings of Her Majesty have bene mild (1601), 3, 8, 37, 39, 42.

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The most striking work in this group is Watson’s own Decacordon of ten quodlibeticall questions, where his conventional views of Jesuitism and Machiavellism converge to give us a perfect focus for Donne’s Conclave. Within the pages of the Decacordon the Jesuits commit every one of their familiar crimes: they use religion as a mere ‘Atheall devise’; they practise equivocation and sedition; they set kings against kings, and states against states; and they murder princes. Can such creatures be called religious? ‘No, no’, cries Watson: ‘their course of life doth shew what their study is: and that how-so-ever they boast of their perfections, holinesse, meditations, and exercises . . . yet their platforme is heathenish, tyrannicall, Sathanicall, and able to set Aretine, Lucian, Machiavell, yea and Don Lucifer in a sort to school as impossible for him by all the art he hath to besot men as they do’ (pp. 61–2). Neither the foul fiend himself, nor all the infernal furies, nor the Devil with all his art, could have deceived people as the Jesuits have done while yet preserving their own seeming innocence. Was there anybody who could take precedence over the Jesuits in matters of policy and prudence? Well, says Watson, it all depends on what you mean by prudence. In true policy, which is derived from Christian prudence, there are many superior to the Jesuits; but take pollicie as it is now a dayes taken by common phrase of speech, in the subject wherein it is inherent: as we say that a right Polititian is a very Machiavell, a very Machiavell is an upright Atheist, and an upright Atheist, is a downeright dastardly coward, void of all religion, reason, or honestie: so by consequent it may be said, that in politicall government or Machivilean pollicie none goeth beyond the Jesuits at this day. (p. 64)

For the Jesuits, Politia is but a ‘nose of waxe’ which may be turned in any direction a man pleases, for it is always pliable and ‘fit to receive all impression: fresh and faire, or foule and filthie’. And in this kind of policy—‘slie, craftie, dissembling wilinesse, with a relation to Atheisme or to non religion’—then the Jesuits do ‘farre passe Machiavell, and I verily thinke any whomsoever of and in this age’ (p. 109).49 49 For further ‘Machiavellian’ references, see Watson, A decacordon, 59, 69, 70–3, 84, 91, 244, 247, 314–15.

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king-killing In 1602, the French historian Estienne Pasquier crowned a lifetime’s antagonism towards the Jesuits with a treatise which was immediately translated into English by William Watson and published in London as the Jesuites Catechisme.50 Like Watson, Pasquier identifies Jesuitism with Machiavellism, and even devotes a chapter to ‘Ignace his Machiavellismes, used to set his Sect afloate’ (fos. 63v–65), where he compares the disruptive influences of Luther, Calvin, and Loyola. Luther merely made ‘uproare’ in Germany, and Calvin only troubled France; but Loyola ‘hath made a pudder’ not only in Spain and the Spanish dominions, but in many other nations, too. Moreover, he had achieved this distinction without writing a word, but had simply feigned heavenly inspiration, like Minos, Lycurgus, Numa Pompilius, and Sertorius. These, writes Pasquier, are the ‘Machiavellismes of which the old world was delivered before Machiavell was borne’; just as, at the present time, there are a great many ‘Machiavells’ who have ‘never read his bookes’. ‘I think’, Pasquier continues, ‘the same devises glided through the soule of this great Ignace.’ The very vows taken by the Jesuits contained ‘heresie and Machiavellisme’ (fos. 99–100v); their deceit and hypocrisy proved them to be ‘brave schollers of Machiavell’; and, in their handling of affairs of state, and especially in their ‘murthers and killings’ of kings and princes, they had ‘intermingled’ a lesson from Machiavelli’s Prince—in the ‘chapter of wickedness’ (fo. 132). And Pasquier devotes several chapters to proving that, whatever the Jesuits may say to the contrary, they have specialized in king-killing, and have learnt to kill, or cause to be killed, ‘all such as stand not to their opinions’.51 This was the most constant and most serious of all the charges levelled against the Jesuits at this period. Already, as we have seen, in 1582 an English Proclamation had expressed fears for the safety 50 Estienne Pasquier, Le catechisme des Jesuites; ou examen de leur doctrine (Paris, 1602). The English translation of the same year is attributed to Watson in STC, no. 19449. 51 For further references, see Pasquier, The Jesuites Catechisme, fos. 132, 148–159v, 210v, 232.

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of Queen Elizabeth; and subsequent events, and the interpretation thereof, served to heighten alarm. The Jesuits were thought to have been implicated in the murder of William of Orange in 1584; while the assassination of Henri III of France in 1589—‘a murder written in Tymes forehead by the pen of aeternitie to astonish all posteritie’52—offered even more striking evidence to contemporaries that the Jesuits were the protagonists of a veritable doctrine of kingkilling. Henri’s character as an unmitigated tyrant was advanced by his Catholic detractors as sufficient justification for his slaying; and it was in these terms that Ribadeneira had condoned the act, denouncing the King as a detestable Machiavellist, and euphemizing the assassin as a poor, simple, and young religious.53 Even more startling was the stand taken by another Spanish Jesuit, Juan de Mariana, who devoted a chapter of his De rege to the defence both of the revolt against Henri III and of the assassination itself, and went on to enunciate more general principles concerning the right of subjects to depose and slay not only usurpers but even legitimate rulers who had degenerated into tyrants.54 Mariana was not alone in his views on the derivation of regal authority from the commonweal, his emphasis on the duties as well as the rights of kings, and his extreme solution to the problems posed by tyranny. There were other Catholic political theorists holding similar views; and, of course, there also existed a strong tradition of anti-Catholic political writing which placed great emphasis on contractual theory and on the dire consequences for rulers who violated their vows.55 Indeed, for some observers, the more violent views of Catholic and 52 William Covell, Polimanteia, sig. F.4. 53 Ribadeneira, Tratado (1595), 90. Cf. Fitzherbert, Policy and religion, I (1606), 338. On this issue, Adrian Behotte, Response a` l’anticoton de point en point (Paris, 1611), 9–12, defended Ribadeneira who, after all, had been writing against ‘l’impie Machiavel’; had not approved of the assassination of kings; and merely commented that, when tyrants are assassinated, it is a judgement of God. The passage in Ribadeneira was later singled out by David Hume of Godscroft in Le contr’assassin, ou response a` l’apologie des Jesuites (n.p., 1612), 37–8, where there is a slashing attack on Ribadeneira’s use of the phrase ‘un pauvre, simple, et jeune religieux’ to describe a foul murderer, and on the way in which the Jesuit described Henri III as a ‘machiaveliste’, in order to justify the assassination. 54 Juan de Mariana, De rege et regis institutione libri III (Toledo, 1599), chs. 6, 7. 55 On the evolution of these doctrines, see J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1959).

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Protestant alike were indistinguishable, and such hostility is well summarized in a small treatise, published in 1610, by David Owen, illustrating the concord between religious extremists on the doctrine of king-killing. Such opinions have spread like a ‘gangrene’; and daily the kings of Christendom are crucified, like Christ, between two thieves—Papist and Puritan—‘which have prepared this deadly poison for Princes whom they, in their own irreligious and traiterous hearts, shall condemn for tyrannie’.56 Nevertheless, in popular opinion, the Society of Jesus had almost exclusive rights to theories of political murder. Even before the accession of Henri de Navarre, Catholic pamphleteers had denounced him as a tyrant intent on filling the kingdom with ‘heretiques Machiavellistes et Athees’;57 and his career as King of France was punctuated by attempts on his life, commonly attributed to the encouragement of the Jesuits.58 In England, too, where the Queen was similarly subject to threats and plots, feeling against the Society of Jesus ran high. The Bull of Pope Pius V against Elizabeth was an especial irritant and led writers such as John Hull—yet another antagonist of Parsons, whom he describes as a ‘Machivillian Turkish practiser’—to regard the Society as a progeny issuing from a ‘murdering Spanish souldier Ignatius de Laoila’, and as traitors who laid their ‘bloody hands upon the Lords annointed’.59 The situation was further aggravated, early in James I’s reign, by the Gunpowder Plot, which was interpreted as the diabolical fruit of a league between Satan and the Jesuits— ‘or rather Jubusites and Satanical Seminaries’.60 This conspiracy was the immediate occasion for the drafting of the Oath of Allegiance, which resulted in those further tensions between moderate Catholics and Jesuit extremists, briefly alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, together with a reiteration of the whole complex of 56 David Owen, Herod and Pilate, 56. 57 Advis aux princes, seigneurs, gentilshommes, et autres Catholiques de France (Paris, 1589), 18. 58 See Roland Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV, trans. Joan Spencer (1973), 45–9, 55, 105, 112, 215–26, 300–15. 59 John Hull, The unmasking of the politique atheist (1602), sig. A4r–v, 53–4. 60 The Araignement and Execution of the Late Traytors (1606): passage cited, from the text reprinted in Lord Somers, A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, ed. Walter Scott (1809–15), ii. 115.

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abuse and counter-abuse, already evident in the last decade of the sixteenth century. The Society of Jesus was branded as a collection of ruthless villains who would kill anybody who stood in their way. The paranoid Thomas Bell even claimed to have irrefutable personal evidence for this. The Jesuits had been trying to silence him for his writings against their ‘rotten Poperie’: but, as so often, their pamphleteers cloaked themselves in anonymity. His latest adversary, who might well have been some ‘bloody cut throate’, had promised to provide Bell with a winding sheet for his ‘blacke Funerall’. Furthermore, Bell had received a ‘friendly letter (but without name)’, containing a silver packet; but the circumstances were so suspicious that neither he nor others ‘durst open the Packet’; as having apparent inducements to suspect ‘Poyson, Pestilence, or other like infection Diabolicall’.61 This was the way the Jesuits went about to eliminate their enemies! The last straw came on 14 May 1610, when the assassin Ravaillac struck down Henri IV. The uproar was colossal, and the Jesuits were regarded as instigators of the crime despite the murdered king’s well-known regard for the Society. So violent were the denunciations that Pierre Coton, one of Henri’s Jesuit confessors, felt obliged to issue a letter condemning the murder and attempting to show that the doctrine of tyrannicide and the murder of princes, far from being maintained by the Jesuits, had been peculiar to Mariana, who had been condemned by the Society itself. This defence was in vain, and provoked angry accusations that it was a mere colour to hide Jesuitical glee.62 In England, Coton’s 61 Thomas Bell, The catholique triumph (1610), 418. Cf. A discoverie of the most secret and subtile practices of the Jesuites. Translated out of French (1610), sig. C.2, which claims that the Jesuits employ ‘certaine murtherers and poysoners, to poyson the Principall Doctors of the Churches as well Lutherans as Calvinists’. 62 Pierre Coton, Lettre Declaratoire de la doctrine des Peres Jesuites conforme aux decrets du Concile de Constance (Paris, 1610). T. Owen, A Letter of a Catholicke man beyond the seas, written to a friend in England: including another of Peter Coton Priest, of the Society of Jesus, to the Queene Regent of France (n.p., 1610), which gives an English translation of Coton’s letter and adds an exculpation of the Jesuits from all imputations of the doctrine of king-killing—declaring, on the contrary (at p. 41), ‘Rebellious doctrine proper unto Protestants and condemned by Catholicks’. See also Anticoton, ou refutation de la lettre declaratoire de pere Coton (n.p., 1610); trans. as Anti-Coton, or a refutation of Cotton’s Letter Declaratorie (1610). The British Library copy of the French Anticoton (press mark 1192.g.9 [1]) is bound with

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letter was published; but it was swiftly followed by an English translation of the Decree of the Sorbonne against tyrannicide, and of the Paris Parlement’s sentence that Mariana’s work should be publicly burnt. A ‘Preamble’ to the translations argues that the majority of men are desirous of ‘novelties’, and that the Jesuits cunningly exploit this desire in order to engineer their dastardly plots. When the Oath of Allegiance was made and confirmed by Act of Parliament it was likely that ‘all the Recusants in England would willingly have taken it, as sundry of them began, had not the Jesuits opposed themselves, and procured the Pope to command the contrary’. As a result of this interference, even the moderate Catholics have refused the Oath because it describes the doctrine of deposing, or killing princes, as heretical. But, the author demands, why should this doctrine not be regarded as heretical? And he bitterly points out that such ‘false, lewd and traiterous’ opinions have been openly published by the Jesuits, and most especially by the iniquitous Mariana. In a postlude, a second author hastens to supply one point omitted from the ‘Preamble’. Ravaillac, who gave the accursed stroke which ‘hath made all France to bleed’, had confessed that he had long deliberated the question of assassination before he could resolve that it was lawful to kill the King; but ‘falling upon that booke of Mariana, he found his conscience (as he said) cleard of all scruple in that point’. Thus, whoever it was who put the knife into the assassin’s hand, it was evident that its ‘metall had been tempered in the forge of the Jesuits’, and that it was their books ‘gave edge unto it’.63 other pamphlets which include manuscript notes on the Contre-Machiavel (Leiden, 1609). 63 The copie of a late decree of the Sorbonne at Paris, for the condemning of that impious and haereticall opinion, touching the murthering of princes: Generally maintained by the Jesuites. And amongst the rest, of late by Joannes Mariana, a Spaniard (1610), sigs. B.1–2, B.3, E.3, E.4v. Two years later came the principal work against Coton, Le contr’assassin, ou response a` l’apologie des Jesuites (n.p., 1612). The author of this work has generally been identified as the historian, David Hume of Godscroft, whose Apologia Basilica we shall meet in a later chapter. However, the Contr’assassin, along with another polemic, L’assassinat du Roy (Paris, 1615), has recently been assigned to another David Hume (of Duras) by Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson (eds. and tr.), The British Union: A Critical Edition and Translation of David Hume of Godscroft’s De Unione Britannicae (Aldershot, 2002), Introduction, 50–1. Unfortunately, no sources are given for

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donne ’ s ignatius For John Donne—writing so soon after the assassination of Henri IV, amidst an increasing flood of anti-Jesuit invective, and within the context not only of the Oath of Allegiance controversy, but also of those longer-standing traditions described above—it was the doctrine of political revolution, to be accomplished by any means, which gave the Jesuits pre-eminence amongst evildoers. Father Healy has suggested that regicide provides the ‘unifying theme’ of the Conclave,64 but this is not exactly so. The unifying theme of the work is implicit in its very structure. Ignatius is, within the special limits of innovation enunciated by Donne, too powerful for a series of contestants; and he is too powerful not merely because of the Jesuits’ special distinction with regard to king-killing. Rather it is because the Jesuits are the arch-enemies of monarchies, and because they are prepared to enforce age-old papal claims against foreign states, by all means, fair or foul. King-killing is their most extreme shift—and is regarded as peculiarly theirs—but it is only one of a series of iniquities in their armoury. It is the rigorous application of these criteria which enables Donne’s Ignatius so easily to demolish rival claims to a coveted seat within Lucifer’s inner sanctum. Copernicus, for instance—who has put his hopes in the reorganization of the heavens and the added lustre thereby given to Lucifer’s namesake, the Morning Star—is sharply corrected by Ignatius. What honour, asks Ignatius, is to be derived from the star this reattribution. The Contr’assassin is a vigorous polemic which insists both that Mariana should be taken as the touchstone of Jesuitical attitudes towards assassination; that he was not the only Jesuit to advocate king-killing; and that, in any case, the Jesuits’ repudiation of his views is merely a matter of policy. Hume (whichever one it is) points out that, although the Jesuits pretend to be the most devout of all Christians, if one penetrates to the interior of their secret maxims, one can see that—under the colours of the Catholic faith, they practice the ‘precepts of the Abbe´ Trithemius, Cornelius Agrippa, Aladin Arsacide, and Machiavel the Florentine’ (pp. 2–3)—a strange list of villains. Elsewhere, he cites their maxim, Jesuita omnis homo, that is to say a man who accommodates himself to everything: ‘homme Turc, homme Juif, Machiaveliste, Anabaptiste, Payen, Chrestien, selon que ses affaires le portent’ (p. 238). On Hume, see below, Ch. 13. 64 Healy, p. xxxviii. Further references are given in the text.

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Lucifer, which is merely Venus? If one were going to have regard to namesakes then surely the work of Lucifer the ‘Calaritan Bishop’ must be recognized as far more valuable, because ‘he was the first that opposed the dignity of Princes’. Paracelsus is even more severely rebuked. His followers ‘abuse and prophane’ the precious minerals which belong to Lucifer himself. Their ‘physicke’ wastes resources which would be better employed by Lucifer’s brother and colleague, the Pope: gold and precious stones, to ‘baite and ensnare the Princes of the earth’; iron to make engines of war; minerals for poisons; and the elements of gunpowder to ‘demolish and overthrow Kings and Kingdoms, and Courts and seates of Justice’ (pp. 17, 23–5). Later, when Lucifer himself tentatively advances the claims of Nerius, he does so principally on the grounds that the Oratorian Friars have ‘used a more free, open, and hard fashion against Princes’, and have better provided for direct papal jurisdiction than have Jesuits such as Bellarmine, whose complexities are beyond ordinary men’s understanding. Ignatius’s reply is withering. What kingdom, he demands, have the followers of Nerius ever ‘cut up into an Anatomy’? If mere scholarly writings are to be deemed sufficient for entrance into this room reserved for innovators, then Reformers such as Beza and Calvin might equally well have qualified. However, their purpose was not to ‘extirpate Monarchies’; nor have their disciples ever ‘done any thing upon the person of his soveraigne’. A few Oratorians have followed the Jesuit example of disturbing the peace of some states; but since they have performed ‘nothing with their hands’, they can scarcely ever aspire to this ‘secret and sacred Chamber’. Lucifer intends to counter this argument by suggesting that, perchance, all those whose hands had been ‘imbrued in the bowels of Princes’ have not necessarily been armed by the Jesuits— an answer, Donne is quick to stress, which would have been made by Lucifer as ‘Father of lies’, in which capacity he might say anything—but he thinks better of it, and refrains from advancing Nerius’s slender claim against Ignatius and his bristling followers (pp. 75–9). Even Machiavelli cannot match Ignatius in such matters; though Donne does his best for the Florentine, who argues that he has armed the people against princely oppression, and shown them

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how to conspire against, and even overthrow, tyrants. This is the final point of Machiavel’s speech; but it does not, I think, represent a recognition on Donne’s part of any truly republican element in Machiavelli’s own writing, as Healy suggests (p. xxxiii). In so far as it represents anything more than an attempt by Donne’s Machiavel to vie with the Jesuits, it may be compared with a minority view of Il Principe, which was first tentatively advanced in the 1530s, when Reginald Pole had reported that some Florentines were defending Machiavelli as a lover of liberty who had written Il Principe to overthrow the Medici, who must inevitably be ruined when following his precepts. Pole’s work remained unpublished until 1744; but its interest lies in the suggestion that contemporaries were already seeking a hidden meaning in Machiavelli. The idea was repeated by Matteo Toscano in 1578, and, more important, by Alberico Gentili in his De legationibus of 1585, where he wrote that Machiavelli was a ‘eulogist of democracy and its most spirited champion’, and that, as the supreme enemy of tyranny, Machiavelli had devised Il Principe not to instruct tyrants but to expose them to the ‘suffering nations’. Fitzherbert, in his Policy and religion, though totally unconvinced by such a theory, cites some of Machiavelli’s own countrymen who confess that Il Principe is contrary to true reason of state, and assert that the author himself knew this but (desiring the downfall of the Medici) ‘published his pestilent doctrin, hoping that they wold embrace it and ruine theym selves by the practise therof, wherby the state of Florence might return to the ould Democracy’.65 Despite this tenuous tradition, it was difficult to identify Machiavelli with the monarchomachs; though it is true that he had devoted a long chapter of the Discorsi to conspiracies, which had been recognized as ‘fort bonne instruction tant pour les princes que pour les sujets’.66 Some interpreters went further. The idea, for example, of using religion as a cloak to win a people’s allegiance 65 Pole, Apologia, 151–2; Matteo Toscano, Peplus Italiae (Paris, 1578); A. Gentilis, De legationibus libri tres (1585), 109, and trans. G. J. Laing (Classics of International Law, New York, 1924), 156; Fitzherbert, Policy and religion, I (1606), 412. 66 Hierosme de Chomedy, L’Histoire de la conjuration de Catilin (Paris, 1575), sig. A.3v. The chapter is Discorsi, III. 6.

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in plots against their princes was regarded by John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, as ‘extractit out of the Discourses’; and he also thought that the ‘fyne witted clerkis of Machivellis scoole’ are never content with the present state, but ‘employ thair braynes for altering of commoun wealthes and depriving and setting up of Princes at thair plesour’.67 For Bishop Thomas Morton, even the theory that people might, in their primitive state, have lived without kings, tasted ‘too much of Machiavellisme’;68 and Pasquier, as we have seen, suggested that the doctrine of king-killing had been developed by the Jesuits from Machiavelli’s Il Principe. But these views, and especially the last, were scattered reflections, and were not generally taken up. Machiavelli was certainly identified with political murder, but generally at a different level. The Machiavellian prince might, it seemed, murder his opponents; but the merely Machiavellian opponent rarely murdered his prince. In popular estimation you needed to be something more than a Machiavellian to do that. You had, in short, to be a Jesuit. Donne’s Machiavel advances his claim as a deposer of princes without much conviction; and, like the rest of his arguments, it is relentlessly brushed aside, or rather totally disregarded, by Ignatius, whose speech in answer to Machiavel forms the core of the Conclave. Lucifer had been impressed by the Florentine, and was considering the possibility of using him as a counterpoise to Ignatius; but the latter is more subtle than the devil himself and sees through this stratagem. His first concern, therefore, is to castigate Machiavel for even daring to think that he might entrap Lucifer by flattery; especially when he had attributed ‘so much to his own wit’ that he never once acknowledged the Devil, nor even believed in the Devil’s existence. It had to be conceded that Machiavel had not believed in God either—nor in any other religion—and might on that account be deemed worthy of entrance. On the other hand, the very sincerity of Machiavel’s unbelief constituted a drawback; for, since he ‘beleeved that those things which hee affirmed were true, hee must not be rancked with them, which having beene 67 Cal. SP Scotland, iii. 27 and 813. See above, Ch. 10. 68 Thomas Morton, A full satisfaction concerning a double Romish iniquitie, hainous rebellion and more than heathenish equivocation (1606), 28.

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sufficiently instructed of the true God, and beleeving him to be so, doe yet fight against him in his enemies armie’. The Jesuits, Ignatius acknowledges, themselves speak ill of the Devil, but this is done ‘out of a secret covenant’ and out of ‘Mysteries’ which may not be revealed to a mere catechumen of their ‘Synagogue’.69 Machiavel is also indicted for the great injuries which he has inflicted on the Bishop of Rome. These injuries, in the topsy-turvy world of the Conclave, consist of ‘weake praising’. The feeble sins attributed by Machiavel to the Papacy cannot do justice to what are, in fact, truly colossal iniquities—a circumstance which enables Donne, through Ignatius’s mouth, to catalogue some choice papal peccancies, culminating in the story of the alleged rape committed on the venerable Bishop of Fano by Pier Luigi, son of Pope Paul III. In the face of such crimes, this ‘pratling fellow Machiavell doth but treacherously, and dishonestly prevaricate and betraie the cause’ if he considers it sufficient for papal dignity to accord them sins ‘common to all the world’. The characteristic and really noteworthy crimes of the Papacy are the ‘transferring of Empires, the ruine of Kingdomes, the Excommunications, and depositions of Kings, and devastations by fire and sword’; and it was precisely these which the Jesuits had encouraged and attempted to justify by distorting the ‘Canons and Histories’ (pp. 37–43). At last, having dwelt on Machiavelli’s failure even to recognize the true state of affairs in Hell and on earth, Ignatius moves on to examine the things which ‘this man, who pretends to exceed all Auncient and Moderne States-men’ boasts about. And here Ignatius is even more scathing. That the matters which have been ‘shoveld together’ by Machiavel are of no consequence is evident from the way in which they have been universally condemned and nowhere defended. Not, Ignatius hastens to add, that this would necessarily make his doctrine any the worse; but it does mean that it is ‘the lesse artificially caried’ and, therefore, the less able to achieve its desired ends. The Jesuits, by contrast, are subtle and effective, using historical and theological evidence in whatever way 69 Healy, 33–5. The problem posed by this section—that is the degree to which sincere atheists might be deemed less sinful than perverse believers—is illuminated in Anthony Raspa, ‘Theology and Poetry in Donne’s ‘‘Conclave’’ ’, Journal of English Literary History, 32 (1965), 478–89.

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best suits the needs of the moment. They can lull a kingdom, such as Britain, with their ‘Opium’ into believing that there is no danger of a deposition; and then, when the time is ripe, they will reinterpret their sources ‘to awake that state out of her Lethargy, either with her owne heat, intestine warre, or by some Medicine drawne from other places’. The security of princes is at the mercy of the Jesuits’ interpretation of the Canons, and may be ‘diminished, revoked, and anulled’ as the Society wishes. The Jesuits, unlike other religious orders, have rules which might be ‘applyed to times and to new occasions’; and, unlike Machiavel, whose ‘Mine’ has been perceived by the enemy, their own flexibility and cunning have enabled them to receive the Church ‘as a ship’, and to ‘freely saile in the deep sea’. It is not that Machiavelli’s work contains nothing of value. It is simply that the Jesuits do not require his advice. In particular, the business of dissembling, in which he glories, is as old as Plato and ‘other fashioners of Common-wealths’, and the Church Fathers themselves had allowed the liberty of lying. In any case, the Jesuits had gone beyond this ‘free lying’ with another less suspicious doctrine: ‘which is Mentall Reservation, and Mixt propositions’ (pp. 47–55). Machiavel is clearly not in the same class as Ignatius, who now delivers the final blow which will destroy his rival once and for all. Machiavel’s books have all been conceived for the sole purpose of ruining the Roman Church, removing people’s liberty, destroying ‘all civility and re-publique’, and reducing all states to monarchies. In truth, everywhere Kings have either withdrawn from allegiance to the Church or have damaged its power in some way. On the other hand, to the Jesuits the very name Monarch is ‘hatefull and execrable’; and, having done its utmost to undermine royal power, their Society has been termed the Sword of the Roman Church, as a name most apt for the ‘Jesuites Assassinates, and King-killings’. This is the greatest glory of the Society. They are prepared to murder kings ‘voluntarily, for nothing, and every where’; and their art of divination far exceeds in subtlety that of the ancient Romans, in that ‘wee consider not the entrails of Beasts, but the entrails of souls, in confessions, and the entrails of Princes, in treasons; whose hearts wee do not beleeve to be with us, till we see them’. In view of

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all this it would be better for ‘this pratling Secretary’ to hold his tongue, rest content that his work has enjoyed some temporary reputation, and recognize that he cannot compare with the Jesuits, whose achievements are world-wide. Indeed, in Ignatius’s estimation, poor Machiavel cannot aspire to anything higher than an honourable place ‘amongst the Gentiles’. This is the final thrust at Machiavel’s own claim to have merited recognition as an innovator who has ‘dealt in Christian businesse’; for, as Ignatius remarks, ‘in all times in the Romane Church there have bene Friers which have farr exceeded Machiavel ’ (pp. 55–63). So, in his vision, Donne sees Machiavel ‘often put forward, and often thrust back, and at last vanish’. The only serious contender for a place in the inner sanctum has been vanquished; and Ignatius, having quickly disposed of the other aspirants, turns his attention to the principal seat next to Lucifer’s own throne. Boniface is in possession. But not for long; and Donne’s last vision, before his soul returns to its body, is of the Pope being hurled down by Ignatius with eager assistance from Lucifer, who fears that otherwise ‘his owne seate might bee endangered’. If the Devil himself is so terrified of Ignatius, what chance could mere mortals stand—even if they be as cunning and as evil as Machiavel himself ? Overmatched by Ignatius, in dialectic as in villainy, Donne’s Machiavel simply fades away. But what, in the process, has happened to Niccolo` Machiavelli, historian, military authority, and political thinker? Has he not also evaporated amidst the wit and ambiguities of satire? We have grown so used to academic assurances that everybody was horrified by Machiavelli that it requires an effort to appreciate that, although the impact of any satire upon contemporaries is difficult to assess, the only way to take the Conclave seriously is as comedy. That Donne’s intention was to pillory the Jesuits (and that Machiavelli is used solely to give point to the mockery) is obvious; but, by making his villains so grotesque and idiosyncratic, Donne tames them. They become absurd rather than terrible—and this is especially the case with Machiavel, who is so hopelessly out of his depth in Hell. Doubtless, the Jesuits would have been mortally offended by the infernal buffoonery; but Machiavelli was himself a humourist and

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would probably have enjoyed the Conclave. He might, however, have been irritated by the fact that even the acute John Donne was content merely to use him as a symbol for ineffectual and transparent political chicanery, and that the satire depends for its effect precisely upon the fact that ‘Machiavel’ had, by this time, become a stereotype villain and not even a particularly dangerous one.

PART III

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12 Gentillet’s Final Assault: The ‘Contre-Machiavel’ of 1585 For unwary modern readers—surfeited by literary appraisal and reappraisal, but unfamiliar with Renaissance indifference to such matters—a perplexing feature of the early reception of Machiavelli must be its failure to produce much in the way of serious critical assessment. Single aspects of his work, such as historical technique, military theory, his attitude towards colonies, and even his skill as a writer, were sometimes evaluated; while instances where Machiavellian material was adopted, adapted, or distorted, were commonplace. Yet, Guicciardini and Schwendi excepted, only Gentillet has left us an attempt—albeit primitive and prejudiced—to treat Machiavelli’s ideas methodically and to test them against historical evidence. In the first edition of the ContreMachiavel Gentillet had drawn solely upon Il Principe and the Discorsi: but it seems that a subsequent discovery of the Arte della guerra and the Istorie fiorentine must have convinced him that there was scope for extending his attack. On 31 May 1585, the Genevan Registres du Conseil note a request by Innocent Gentillet to reprint his book against Machiavelli, ‘avec la revision qu’il y a faicte’. The request was granted on 15 July and, later in the year, the book itself appeared with a title page not only asserting that it was the ‘Derniere edition corrigee & augmentee de plus de la moitie´’, but also naming the hitherto anonymous author as ‘President Gentillet’. This was, in fact, the last French edition published in the author’s lifetime, and the text certainly fulfils his claim to have increased it by approximately 50 per cent.1 1 On this edition, and on the reprints published in 1609 and 1620, see ContreMachiavel, ed. D’Andrea and Stewart, pp. xxxiv–xxxv, xl, xlii, lix–lxi. I have not

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The Contre-Machiavel of 1585 is augmented with twenty-three new maxims (fifteen from the Arte della guerra and eight from the Istorie fiorentine) and is thus the only sixteenth-century treatise which, ostensibly at least, criticizes Machiavelli on the basis of all four of his principal writings.2 Unhappily, Gentillet’s own mental horizons have dwindled rather than expanded. He uses the new material merely to reiterate or reinforce the arguments he had advanced a decade earlier; and he is even less aware of Machiavelli’s aims as a military writer or historian than he had been of the purpose of Il Principe and the Discorsi. Worse still, he tries to make his new version relevant to the changed situation of the 1580s, when Huguenot fears were centred on the Guises, the Catholic League, and Spain, rather than on Italianized courtiers; and there is a consistent toning down of the rabid anti-Italian eloquence which had energized the first edition.3 This may have seemed a bright idea, but it proves to have been a disaster. The force originally generated by Gentillet’s fury over the St Bartholomew massacres is completely dissipated by these revisions. The rhetoric of hate is enfeebled when the entire cast of villains is replaced by new characters unrelated to the plot.

been able to consult the unique copy of the 1585 edition at Grenoble but have, instead, used the edition of 1609 at the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France which, according to D’Andrea and Stewart, uses the same typographical material. Like all scholars prior to the bibliographical labours of D’Andrea and Stewart, C. Edward Rathe´ was not aware of the 1585 edition and the circumstances of its publication, so that in the introduction to his Anti-Machiavel: Edition de 1576 (Geneva, 1968), 2, he considered the augmentations of the 1609 version to be spurious. The wide-ranging Mattei (1969), 279–92, was similarly unaware of the 1585 edition of the Contre-Machiavel, and considered the edition of 1609 to be by someone other than Gentillet. Mattei discusses all the additional material deriving from the Arte della guerra, but cites Gentillet’s expansions as though they are the maxims themselves. For convenience, I list all the additional maxims and the Machiavellian sources on which they are based in the Appendix to this chapter. 2 Excluding, that is, the lists given in bibliographical and biographical dictionaries such as Gesner and Boissard. It is depressing to reflect that even modern criticism from the mid-20th c. onward—which runs to a vast number of items— has been overwhelmingly concerned with Il Principe and the Discorsi, while the central importance of the Arte della guerra has been brushed aside. 3 The altered tone and revisions are remarked upon by D’Andrea and Stewart, pp. lix–lx.

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The arguments are now stale, stereotyped, and frequently inapposite. It may well be that Gentillet’s handling of the additional sources is not more obtuse than his treatment of Il Principe and the Discorsi, but it certainly seems so: for his sole concern has been to find further examples of the detested ‘maximes tyranniques’, regardless of context and even of sense. As in the earlier editions, each maxim is followed by an expansion based on Machiavelli’s own words (as provided in the available French translations), before being subjected to a dogged refutation. The maxims themselves are rather approximate citations from Charrier’s Art de la guerre and Brinon’s Histoire de Florence;4 the expansions, especially those based upon Brinon, are looser still; and the refutations are in Gentillet’s most laborious and moralistic mode. The net result is that the Contre-Machiavel—already an overweight, but intermittently mordant, book—has been blown up into a toothless monster of prolixity. The new material is not spread evenly: three maxims are added to Book I (‘le Conseil’); two to Book II (‘la Religion’); and eighteen to Book III (‘la Police’). There are, moreover, some curious excrescences. A maxim, declaring that man prospers as long as fortune is in accord with his nature and humour, had incurred the wrath of Gentillet in the first edition of the Contre-Machiavel (1576, II. 10) and had led him to conclude that ‘certaine it is that the haps which men call of Fortune, procede from God’. At this point, in order to ‘crown’ the second book of his new edition and to convince readers of Machiavelli’s impiety, Gentillet adds a ‘little discourse’—‘little that is according to its subject, but otherwise somewhat longish’— against ‘Atheists, Pagans, and other enemies of our Christian religion’, which rambles on for another forty-three pages. An even worse example of redundancy is Gentillet’s treatment of a maxim (II. 11), roughly derived from the Istorie fiorentine, to the effect that ‘after the Emperor Theodosius, civil discords brought about in Italy a change of government, laws, religion, language, customs, and names’. This, itself, is an imprecise version of an original Machiavellian sentence: but the expansion occupies nearly 4 Histoire de Florence de Nicolas Machiavel . . . traduict d’Italien en Franc¸ois. Par le Seigneur de Brinon (Paris, 1577).

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two pages, freely paraphrasing and summarizing several paragraphs of the Istorie fiorentine, before swelling out into a ninetyfive page diatribe (with citations from forty-six sources) merely to expose what Gentillet has taken to be an error of chronology in Machiavelli’s text.5 The flabbiness of Gentillet’s thinking is everywhere apparent, but especially in the way in which he uses the Arte della guerra. Few of the so-called maxims hacked out of this latter source deal with military issues, or, rather, they are not treated as such but serve simply as pretexts for attacking Machiavelli on familiar moral or Christian grounds. Thus the idea that well-regulated kingdoms never give absolute power to their rulers except in time of war (I. 3) is rejected as advice best calculated to invite a prince to love war and fly from peace;6 and a suggestion that, in order to enforce obedience, a military leader, whose men are too anxious to give battle at an inopportune time, should sacrifice some to the enemy (III. 11), provokes a sententious declaration that good military leaders love their soldiers and do not expose them to unnecessary dangers.7 Gentillet’s innate gift for misinterpretation is stimulated by the ambiguities of the dialogue form in which the Arte della guerra is cast. Matters of opinion or debate may thus be depicted as Machiavellian aphorisms even though they run completely counter to Machiavelli’s beliefs. An instance of this arises when one of the interlocutors, Cosimo Rucellai, replies to an accusation that his grandfather would have done better to imitate the austerity of the 5 Gentillet argues that the change of religion in the Roman Empire occurred in the reign of Constantine and not in the time of Arcadius and Honorius—a subject which, he acknowledges, has ‘made my pen fly rather a long way’ (le suject amplement beau a fait voler ma plume bien loing). 6 In his refutation, Gentillet cites Bartolus on suitable modes of government and notes that, according to Machiavelli, the Florentines were unable to settle in any of the major forms of government because they were naturally inclined to partialities, and ‘leurs espritz trop fretillans a` nouveautez’. For this point, he gives a marginal note to ‘Machiav. Hist. liv. 2, 3 & 4’: but the observation is more precisely matched in Book IV. 27 (Mazzoni and Casella, 492a). 7 Equally self-righteous and inaccurate is Gentillet’s treatment of III. 38, which he rejects as a ruse composed of perfidy, simulation, and cruelty, which would not, in any case, work. On the other hand, Gentillet rejects III. 39 as similarly perfidious but especially pernicious precisely because it does work.

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ancients rather than their luxury. Cosimo argues that the times in which his forbear lived were so corrupt that anyone leading an ascetic life would have been mocked and ridiculed. This incidental remark is seized upon by Gentillet as proof of Machiavelli’s belief that—because people mock anyone who attempts to break with the corruption of their own times—it is then ‘an honourable thing to follow the common error and the abuses and corruptions which are in vogue’. It is hard to conceive a more breathtaking travesty of Machiavelli’s views. But such a feat is not beyond Gentillet’s powers, as we can see in his treatment of another maxim: ‘In a well-regulated kingdom or republic subjects are never permitted to become accustomed to the art of war, because those who do are true ministers of tyranny’ (III. 4). What, in fact, Machiavelli is specifically discussing at this point in the Arte della guerra is the danger arising from men whose lives are bound wholly by warfare and who know nothing of the arts of peace. One might deem this unexceptionable, and Gentillet himself admits that it has an appearance of virtue. He knows, none the less, that this is merely illusory and that, in reality, Machiavelli is upholding tyranny for, as Plato points out, tyrants try to prevent their subjects from studying military discipline because it is a skill serving to maintain people in liberty and guaranteeing them ‘against oppression both internal and external’. That the need for a citizen (rather than a professional or mercenary) army is the main theme of the Arte della guerra and, perhaps, of all Machiavelli’s writings, has either eluded Gentillet or is wilfully ignored by him. He is also afflicted by a form of myopia arising from his intense patriotism. This provokes him into an angry response towards anything which may be interpreted, either directly or indirectly, as a slur on France. In the first book of the Arte della guerra, for example, Fabrizio Colonna (Machiavelli’s mouthpiece) declares that he would raise cavalry as a militia rather than as in France, where the gendarmerie is ‘dangerous and insolent, as is ours’. Then, at the end of the second book, Fabrizio condemns the Italian habit of allowing four horses to each man-at-arms, especially in view of the fact that the Germans, and the Romans before them, managed with only one. Gentillet conflates these two observations into a single maxim and its expansion (III. 5), which he refutes on the

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grounds that the French system (akin to the Italian) is more practical since a cavalryman would be useless once his single horse had been killed. He also declares that every nation has its own military customs and that the French have achieved great things by concentrating on cavalry, although, he hastens to add, his compatriots are also excellent foot soldiers. His ire is aroused, too, by an observation that ‘the Kingdom where cavalry is more valued than the infantry will always be weak and exposed to ruin’ (III. 6). This he reads as a blatant attack on France and refutes it on the grounds that, in the recent civil wars there, cavalry has achieved great feats in battles where it has broken the opposing infantry. In any case, Gentillet shrugs, ‘it is a waste of paper and ink to amuse oneself refuting such absurdities’.8 Repetitions of themes already treated in 1576 sometimes entangle Gentillet in very strange arguments. Christian military prowess was always a favourite topic among anti-Machiavellians, and Gentillet had said a great deal in praise of his co-religionists’ readiness to kill each other. Now a fresh opportunity was presented by a maxim drawn from the Arte della guerra: ‘the necessity for selfdefence having been taken from military men by the Christian religion, military virtue has, in consequence, also been withdrawn from them’ (II. 4) It is easy, says Gentillet, to refute this since Christians are compelled by necessity to wage war against the Turk. In any case, even when waging war against other Christians, the fear of losing honour, liberty, life, and goods encourages selfdefence, so that those who find themselves in battles, assaults, and other conflicts risk their lives just as much as pagans did in their wars. In fact, thanks to cannons, arquebuses, and pistols, Christian wars are even more murderous than those of the ancients, who did not have such weapons. And here Gentillet wildly affirms that the attacks on the Roman Empire by the Goths and Visigoths (who called themselves Christians) were worse than the deeds of the pagans because, had these people not been enemies of letters, we 8 This does not prevent Gentillet from bridling at a maxim to the effect that regions under ‘many and divers signories’ produce more men of valour in war than areas less divided (III. 8). This is naturally rejected by Gentillet, who defends the capacity of monarchies, and especially France, to produce great men in abundance.

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would have had the whole works of authors such as Livy, Tacitus, Trogus, and Sallust, instead of mere fragments.9 What is the score? Pagans 0, Christians 2 (bloodshed and barbarism)? But I doubt that this is really the result that Gentillet intended. Another favourite theme—indeed the central theme of the original Contre-Machiavel—is recalled but transmogrified by an observation ripped out of context from the Arte della guerra: ‘To ensure that governors of places or provinces do not commit disorders therein, it is necessary that no one has authority or government in a place where he was born; and that governors are frequently changed from one place to another’ (III. 13). This practical advice on military government is represented by Gentillet as a general doctrine tending to give authority to foreigners; and he complacently points out that he has already sufficiently exposed this evil. What he does not acknowledge, though, is that it was originally (but is no longer) associated with Italians at the French court. Gentillet’s use of additional material is ineffectual in all respects save one; and this exception may be found in a series of chapters in his Third Book where he mounts an attack on Machiavelli’s tendency either to build a case upon the basis of merely one or two examples, or to make false distinctions. The accusations do not always hit the mark: but they are close enough to constitute what amounts to an almost intelligent criticism. A case in point is a maxim derived from the Arte della guerra where Fabrizio indicates the dangers of providing fortifications with places for retreat since these tempt defenders to fight less obstinately than they would if constrained to hold their ground (III. 32). Noting that Machiavelli 9 Gentillet’s views on literature are confused. He finds himself in difficulties when considering a maxim (III. 10) to the effect that the valour of military men cannot be corrupted by a more ‘honneste’ idleness than letters; and that idleness cannot establish itself in well-governed cities with a greater and more dangerous deceit than by those means. Naturally, this offends Gentillet, who regards the maxim as mingling ‘la barbarie et l’ignorance avec la tyrannie’ for, if you drive out letters, you establish ignorance of laws divine and human. On the other hand, he concedes, good things may be ill used and he attacks the ways in which eloquence and dialectic have been employed to advocate things which are untrue, illicit, and unjust. And, as in the first edition of the Contre-Machiavel, he declares that in a well-governed state ‘Poe¨mes lubriques et lascifs’, which corrupt the young and promote vice, would be banned.

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here refers only to Cesare Borgia’s overrunning of Forlı` in 1499, Gentillet argues that a single instance is insufficient to prove a case—especially when one may cite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Again, dealing with the maxim that ‘Between those who aspire to the same grandeur an alliance may well be made, but not friendship’ (III. 22), he sneers that ‘our Florentine according to his custom, always bases his maxims upon one or two examples’, and the ‘malotru exemple’ is refuted with several others both ancient and modern.10 Similarly, the maxim that ‘great men deem it shameful to lose by trickery, but not to gain’ (III. 32) is exemplified for Machiavelli by Francesco Sforza, who made promises to the people of Pavia without any intention of observing them. The notion that princes can always find people whom they can deceive has, says Gentillet, already been sufficiently refuted in his previous chapter; and he will add only that Machiavelli is again making a general rule from a single instance while, in any case, Francesco Sforza cannot be ranked amongst the ‘grands personnages’. The inadequacy of Machiavelli’s evidence is certainly open to criticism; but sometimes, when pressing the argument, Gentillet gets himself into some very awkward positions, as in his treatment of a maxim (III. 28) from the Istorie fiorentine. ‘Conspiracies’, so the maxim runs, ‘most often bring about the ruin of those who make them; while eventually causing the downfall of those against whom they were aimed.’ The expansion of this statement is based on the assassination of Galeazzo Sforza of Milan in 1476 as narrated in the Istorie fiorentine; and Gentillet—asserting that Machiavelli uses this example both to reassure tyrants and to frighten tyrannicides—opposes him with a series of conspiracies which have succeeded without danger to the assassins. One must, he argues, make a rule of that which happens more not less frequently. This is reasonable enough: but Gentillet has assumed the role of an apologist for tyrannicide; and this was treacherous ground in contemporary Europe, and especially in France. 10 Machiavelli’s remark is prompted by the rivalry in Bologna between the Canneschi and the Bentivogli. Despite family alliances, this ancient enmity culminated in 1445 with armed riots and assassinations.

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More equivocal is the position Gentillet assumes when confronting other notions derived from a tendentious reading of the Istorie fiorentine. Machiavelli, reflecting on the history of his own city, had contemplated the impossibility of maintaining any republic entirely free from internal dissensions. Accordingly he had argued that factions headed by a public benefactor were more likely to be helpful to the state than those headed by men who seek their own interests. For Gentillet this results in a maxim to the effect that dissension caused by factions ‘made by public means’ are profitable, whereas those ‘made by private means’ are not (III. 48). Obviously, by posing the issue in this way, he is able to argue that the distinction is unrealistic. Unfortunately, he enlarges upon this by maintaining that all partialities are good if they have a good end (that is the public good), and that all are bad when they have a bad end. Very similar is the treatment accorded to the idea that those who promote war are either moved by the desire to enrich themselves or to impoverish their enemies (III. 2). According to Gentillet, everything depends on one’s intentions. Something which may appear good in itself is bad if done for a bad end while, on the contrary, things which are by nature evil may appear good (and may indeed be so) when pursued for a good end, like poisons which may be used therapeutically.11 Gentillet’s treatment of both maxims is dubious. Perhaps he had been reading too much Machiavelli? Certainly, for a self-proclaimed upholder of conventional morality and Christian virtue, the confusion over ends and means is as infelicitous as his inadvertent defence of tyrannicide and sanguinary Christianity. As a critic of other writers’ dialectic, Gentillet’s own credentials had been poor in 1576 but were far worse in 1585. His proneness to tear statements out of context, to build arguments upon selective misinterpretation, and to contradict himself has become more serious. The kinds of fatuity which I have already illustrated are encapsulated in one particular maxim (III. 7) where, combining two separate observations from the Arte della guerra, Gentillet wholly disregards both their context and the way in which they 11 The idea of poisons which need to be identified or which may be used therapeutically is well known in Machiavellian literature.

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were qualified by Machiavelli. ‘The Prince’, runs the maxim, ‘must be served by soldiers who are neither entirely volunteers nor entirely forced; and they ought to be chosen from temperate lands.’ The distinction, says Gentillet, is ‘une pure reverie’. In the first place, Machiavelli’s belief that voluntary recruitment must result in few soldiers is wholly refuted by the experience of France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, and other territories. Secondly, it is ridiculous of Machiavelli to say that warm climates produce men who are prudent but lack courage, whereas cold climates do the opposite—because, in Gentillet’s opinion, there is no relationship between climate and the way people fight.12 But then, having made his case, he proceeds to destroy it. Machiavelli’s suggestion (that men from warm climates are more prudent than those from cold) is rejected, not on the grounds that climate is irrelevant, but because the opposite is true. ‘Great heat’, Gentillet sagely observes, ‘dries up the brain [la grande chaleur deseche le cerveau] and consumes the humour which nourishes it’ so that, as a consequence, heat makes the brain less suitable for those functions which relate to prudence. Physiologically ingenious this may be: but it runs counter to Gentillet’s repudiation of the relevance of climate. He seems, here and elsewhere, unable either to read Machiavelli accurately or to follow the thread of his own discourse. Ill-conceived, badly researched, and sloppily argued, the ContreMachiavel of 1585 exposes and emphasizes the many flaws not of Machiavelli but of Gentillet himself. Yet, it is an unconscious irony which constitutes the most devastating weakness of all—although not until the reprinting of the revised edition in 1609, twenty years after the author’s death. It will be recalled that Gentillet’s fundamental objection to Machiavelli’s status as a political and military authority had been the fact that the ‘Secretarie or common Notarie 12 In his recommendation of men from temperate climes, Machiavelli is (without acknowledgement) drawing on Vegetius, De re militari, I. 4: but immediately points out that such a rule could only be followed by a prince who had the entire world at his command and could recruit from any area he wished. It is more practicable for the prince to select men from his own dominions and to remember that training will make good soldiers in any country and that industry may supply what is lacking in nature. Gentillet actually cites this in his expansion—‘Vray est que l’exercice fait par tout de bons soldats. Car la` ou` nature manque l’industrie supplee’—but typically chooses to ignore it in his refutation.

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of the Common-weale of Florence’ had no experience whatsoever either as a counsellor at the centre of public affairs or as a military commander on the field of battle. In 1576 this had not prevented Gentillet from discussing matters both of counsel and of warfare— with due apologies—while rebuking Machiavelli’s temerity in having done the same thing. In 1585 he persists in this selfcontradictory mode: berating Machiavelli for having ‘in his time wished to meddle in military affairs and matters of state, and to be historian and secretary all together’ (I. 2);13 and sneering at Machiavelli’s suggestions for arming light cavalry, which demonstrate ‘that he did not know what he was talking about; and it would have been better for his honour if, in all sciences other than tyranny, he had religiously observed silence, in imitation of the Persians’ (III. 9).14 Even when aware that he might be exceeding the bounds of his own competence, Gentillet cannot resist a thrust at Machiavelli’s lack of expertise. Thus, in the course of refuting Machiavelli’s views on fortresses (III. 12), he pulls himself up short and, in order not to ‘fall into the fault of our Florentine secretary, who fashions a warrior as if he were a lackey of Scipio or Hannibal’, he leaves the dispute to those experienced in the military art. In 1609, the crooked Genevan printer Jacob Stoer reprinted the 1585 edition of the Contre-Machiavel, using the same typographical material but with a false Leyden imprint, and adding a preliminary letter ‘Au lecteur debonnaire’.15 This letter is worth attention because, as a feat of incomprehension and selfdestruction, it is remarkable even when judged by the most stringent standards of incompetence. Within the space of a few pages, it reduces to rubble the entire massive structure which had been 13 This maxim concerns the type of advisers a prince should have about him— ‘neither too much lovers of war nor of peace’. Gentillet advocates a council of experts consisting of jurisconsults (by some strange chance, his own profession), captains, and historians. He asserts, without warrant, that Machiavelli would have preferred a council made up of people like himself: yet a single Machiavellist in the council of a prince could do more harm in one year than fifty ‘gens de bien’ could put right in ten. 14 ‘Tellement qu’il monstre bien qu’il ne sc¸ait ce qu’il dit: et eust mieux faict pour son honneur, si en toutes autres sciences que de la Tyrannie, il eust religieusement honnore´ le Silence, a` l’imitation des Perses.’ 15 See Droz, ‘Fauces adresses typographiques’, 582; D’Andrea and Stewart, p. xl.

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erected by Gentillet upon the foundation of Machiavelli’s alleged ignorance of practical affairs.16 Is it seemly, asks the well-meaning but hapless epistoler, for ‘un homme de longue robe’, accustomed to wielding a pen, to discuss affairs of state and treat of princes’ duty in times of peace or war? After all, it is the business of captains to make themselves heard in matters belonging to their military profession. Counsellors, too, are most beneficial to the state when they provide solid instruction for the future. But what if such men have neither the time nor the will to set down their knowledge in books? What if a military leader would rather carry arms for ten years than shut himself up for ten days in his study in order to write? What if a wise senator prefers to pronounce his mature advice in a ‘lively voice for the good of several provinces rather than in a work exposed to the censures of the audacious vulgar’? Surely, in such cases, men who may be of lesser rank but who have the ability to render service to others should not be inhibited from doing so? Admittedly the difficulty seems greater when a man of this sort has never done anything but turn over the leaves of books, ‘like Phormio who sought to hold forth on the exploits of war before Hannibal’. And this is the central issue. What are readers to think: either when they cast an eye over Nicholas Machiavelli, Secretary of Florence, or remember that the Antimachiavel (that is to say the author of the present ‘discourses of peace and war’) was a peaceable man, a lover of wide reading in all good writers, adroit with a pen, but not at all in playing with knives, and who has entered the councils of princes only via the door of books.

What! Do philosophers devoted to study presume to write about public affairs—especially those who have ‘never seen at close quarters enemies armed at all pieces, nor armies marching to combat, and have never had any relevant commission’. Well, why not? ‘If so be that they are grounded not on the aptness of their minds, or on the hilts of swords, but on the teaching of wise men’.17 16 The letter is printed at sigs. }.2–5. 17 Contre-Machiavel (1609), sigs. }.2v–3: ‘Et c’est ce qui vient en pensee a` plusieurs, soit qu’ils jettent l’oeil sur Nicolas Machiavel Secretaire de Florence; soit qu’ils se ramentoyuent que l’Antimachiavel, c’est a` dire l’auteur des presens

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As for the Contre-Machiavel: the epistoler emphasizes that the ‘author of the three books that we offer you has contributed nothing of his own but the order and assembling’; and the maxims, responses, sentences, and examples are all borrowed from men so acceptable that the most valiant and learned of the world would not disdain to embrace them. Many of these men have been found in councils, have handled great affairs, or commanded in wars. They have, in short, ‘in their times worthily fenced both with pens and with swords’. They have seen, heard, spoken, and performed. More than that (and this is the principal matter), they have judiciously noted the causes of things, have revealed the foundation of councils, and explained events. After all, the ‘lecteur debonnaire’ is reminded, Alexander of Macedon, great in war, had as his military adviser the poet Homer. Our author (that is, of the Contre-Machiavel ) has read the Greek and Roman histories, and others too; and historians, ancient and modern, tell us about all the wars that have ever been, right up to the present century. Furthermore, in their digressions they tell us many useful things about the management of affairs not only in peace but also in war. Our author has studied historians diligently, ‘sweetening, by polyhistoric exercise, the labours of the study of civil law’. Perhaps he has not been either a great councillor or a general: but he has scrupulously followed the detailed accounts of those who were, and has valuable things to say. Men, both of ‘longue et courte robe’, read with profit and pleasure the histories of Polybius, Thucydides, Titus Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch, and others who have come since. Infinite useful discourses have been published. These belong in their rank. And, as they have been worthily collected and printed many times before, in divers languages, I hope that this new edition, augmented by more than half by the author, will prove yet more discours de paix et de guerre, a este´ homme paisible, ami de lecture diverse de tous bons auteurs, adroit a` manier la plume, non point a` jouer des cousteaux, et qui n’est entre´ que par la porte des livres es conseils des Princes. Et quoy, dira-on, ces philosophez attachez a` l’estude osent-ils bien parler des affaires publics? sur tout eux qui n’ont jamais veu de pres des ennemis equippez de toutes pieces, ni des armees marchans au combat, et qui n’eurent onques commission qui s’y rapportast. Pourquoy non? moyennant que fondez non sur l’habilite´ de leurs esprits, ou sur des gardes d’espees, mais sur les enseignemens des sages.’

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praiseworthy than all the preceding ones. For nothing has been added beyond an exquisite judgement, in order to leave out nothing for the solid refutation of the maxims of Machiavelli.18

And here, with a final promise to bring out other pieces ‘no less agreeable and profitable’, the author of the letter ‘Au lecteur debonnaire’ blithely passes on his way, heedless of the ruin he has wrought upon Gentillet’s cherished masterpiece. 18 Contre-Machiavel (1609), sigs. }.4v–5: ‘Infinis discours ont este´ publie´s qui ont eu leur usage: ceux ci demeurent en leur rang: et comme ils ont este´ dignement recueillis et imprimez ci devant plusieurs fois, en diverses langues: j’espere que ceste nouvelle edition augmentee plus de moitie´ par l’auteur se rendra plus recommendable encore que toutes les precedentes. Car il n’a rien adjouste´, que d’un jugement exquis, afin de ne laisser rien en arriere pour la solide refutation des maximes de Machiavel.’

APPENDIX MAXIMS ADDED TO GENTILLET’S CONTRE-MACHIAVEL IN 1585 book i I. 2. ‘Un Roy ne doit avoir pre´s de soy gens trop amateurs ny de paix ny de guerre.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, Lib. I (Mazzoni and Casella, 274a–b). I. 3. ‘Les Royaumes bien reglez ne donnent jamais puissance absolue¨ a` leurs Roys sinon a` la guerre.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, Lib. I (Mazzoni and Casella, 272a–b). I. 6. ‘La Republique qui est agite´e par discorde d’entre les plus grands de la cite´, voulans reduire les moindres en servitude, et le populaire voulant user de trop de liberte´, a besoin qu’il s’esleve quelque bon, sage, et puissant citoyen, qui establisse bonnes loix, pour appaiser les humeurs d’entre les grans et le populaire, et les lier tellement qu’ils ne se puissent mal faire. Les bonnes loix estans establies, la Republique sera lors vrayment libre, et son Estat ferme, et n’aura plus besoin de la vertu d’un homme pour le maintenir.’ Cf. Istorie fiorentine, IV. 1 (Mazzoni and Casella, 472a).

b o ok i i II. 4. ‘La necessite´ de se defendre ayant este´ ostee aux gens de guerre par la Religion Chrestienne, la vertu militaire par consequent leur a aussi este´ ostee.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, II (Mazzoni and Casella, 302a). II. 11. ‘Les discordes civiles, apres l’Empereur Theodose, amenerent en Italie changement d’Estat. Et le changement de gouvernement, loix, coustumes, maniere de vivre, Religion, langage, habits, et noms.’ Cf. Istorie fiorentine, I. 5 (Mazzoni and Casella, 383b–384a).

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book iii III. 2. ‘Toujours a este´ et est raisonnable que le but de ceux qui meuvent une guerre, soit ou de s’enrichir, ou d’appauvrir leurs ennemis.’ Cf. Istorie fiorentine, VI. 1 ((Mazzoni and Casella, 530a). III. 4. ‘En un Royaume ou en une Republique bien reglee, on ne permet jamais aux subjectz d’user de la guerre par art: car ceux qui en usent sont vrais ministres de Tyrannie.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, I (Mazzoni and Casella, 270a). III. 5. ‘N’est bon de tenir gens d’armes d’ordonnances a` la maniere de France: ains comme faisoyent les anciens Romains.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, I (Mazzoni and Casella, 274a, 303a). III. 6. ‘Le Royaume ou` la cavalerie sera plus estimee que l’infanterie, sera tousjours foible et expose´ en ruine.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, II ((Mazzoni and Casella, 288a). III. 7. ‘Le prince se doit servir de soldats qui ne soyent ny du tout volontaires, ny du tout forcez: et les doit eslire de pays tempere´.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, I (Mazzoni and Casella, 275a, 277a). III. 8. ‘Les Regions submises a` plusieurs et diverses seigneuries, produisent plus de gens vaillans a` la guerre que celles qui sont submises a` peu.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, II (Mazzoni and Casella, 301b). III. 9. ‘Chevaux legers doivent estre Arbalestiers, avec quelque peu d’arquebusiers par dedans.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, II (Mazzoni and Casella, 303a). III. 10. ‘La valeur des gens de guerre ne se peut corrompre avec plus honneste oysivete´, que par celle des lettres. Et ne peut l’oysivete´ se nicher dans les citez bien reglees, avec plus grande et dangereuse tromperie, que par le moyen d’icelles.’ Cf. Istorie fiorentine, V. (Mazzoni and Casella, 499a). III. 11. ‘Le chef d’armee voyant ses gens de guerre trop encouragez au combat en temps importun, doit donner en proye une partie d’iceux a` l’ennemy, pour estre obey du reste.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, IV (Mazzoni and Casella, 325b). III. 12. ‘N’y a rien plus perilleux pour faire perdre une forteresse, que quand il y a moyen en icelle de se pouvoir retrencher.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, VII (Mazzoni and Casella, 354b). III. 13. ‘Pour eviter que les gouverneurs des places ou provinces ne commetent desordre en icelles, faut que nul n’ait authorite´ ny gouvernement au lieu ou` il a naturelle convenance; et que les gouverneurs soyent souvent changez d’un gouvernement en autre.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, I (Mazzoni and Casella, 282b).

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III. 22. ‘Entre ceux qui aspirent a` mesme grandeur se peut bien faire alliance, amitie´ non.’ Cf. Istorie fiorentine, VI. 9 (Mazzoni and Casella, 536b). III. 28. ‘Le plus souvent les conjurations oppriment subitement ceux qui les font: Et a` la longue ceux aussi contre qui elles se font.’ Cf. Istorie fiorentine, VIII. 1 (Mazzoni and Casella, 590b). The expansion of this maxim is, however, based on the assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan in 1476, as narrated in Istorie fiorentine, VII. 34. III. 32. ‘Les grands reputent a` honte de perdre, non d’acquerir par tromperie.’ Cf. Istorie fiorentine, VII. 17 (Mazzoni and Casella, 541b– 542a). III. 38. ‘Le Prince qui se veut asseurer d’un peuple, la foy duquel il a pour suspecte, luy doit communiquer quelque dessein simule´, et luy demander aide pour l’executer. Et sous ce pretexte il pourra a` l’improviste mettre ce peuple sous sa devotion.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, VI (Mazzoni and Casella, 348b). III. 39. ‘Le Prince voulant executer quelque chose utile a` soy, et dommageable a` son peuple, le doit tromper de telle fac¸on, que chacun particulier croye que le faict ne luy tombe en rien, afin que l’un ne subvienne a` l’autre.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, VI (Mazzoni and Casella, 347b–348a). III. 48. ‘La division par sectes faictes par voye publique est profitable: mais non par sectes faictes par voye privee.’ Cf. Istorie fiorentine, VII. 1 (Mazzoni and Casella, 562b). III. 55. ‘Celuy qui se voudra departir de la corruptelle et commune usance du siecle ou` il est ne´, en sera diffame´ et vilipende´.’ Cf. Arte della guerra, I (Mazzoni and Casella, 268b).

13 From Sublime to Ridiculous: Some Serious Readers of Machiavelli Henricus Cuyckius (Henri van Cuyck) is not now a name to conjure with: and it is doubtful that he ever was. Living out his life in the Low Countries as a scholar and cleric, he taught moral philosophy at Louvain and rose from service as Vicar General of the Archbishop of Malines to the Deanship of Saint Pierre at Louvain, and ended his days as Bishop of Ruremonde. Such fame as he has enjoyed is largely due to his Speculum concubinariorum sacerdotum whose naughty title, as Crevenna sadly noted, masks a work ‘tre`s-orthodoxe’.1 However, another of his effusions, the Panegyricae orationes duae (1595), is of particular interest to us and may serve as an introductory parable for this chapter.2 The first of these two orations concerns books to be shunned and proscribed, and includes a violent diatribe against impure heretical writings by Calvin and others; against Rabelais, who holds neither God nor man in reverence and despises everything both human and divine; against the Protestant poet Cle´ment Marot and romances such as Amadis de Gaule; and against Bodin, whose intermingling of reason and error repels even the Calvinists. Every day the presses bring forth ‘amatory, incestuous, and obscene books’ which should be prohibited in any well-ordered republic; and, from this 1 Speculum concubinariorum sacerdotum, monachorum ac clericorum (Cologne, 1599); Pietro Antonio Crevenna, Catalogue raisonne´ de la collection des livres de M. Pierre Antoine Crevenna (Amsterdam, 1775–6), vi, additions, p. 22—cited in Jacques-Charles Brunet, Manuel du libraire et de l’amateur de livres, 5th edn. (Paris, 1860–80), ii, col. 458. 2 Henricus Cuyckius, Panegyricae orationes duae. Prior de vitandis et a Republica proscribendis libris perniciosis. Posterior adversus politicos (Louvain, 1595).

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filth, Machiavelli is singled out for especially harsh treatment.3 His works, we are informed, were included in the first class of authors condemned by the Tridentine fathers; and he wrote a book, ‘de Republica’, in the Tuscan language—subsequently translated into Latin and German at Frankfurt and Basle (sic)4—in which he orders a Prince to be like the centaur, part human and part beast, and to combine the guile of the fox with the violence of the lion. Cuyckius then goes on to quote, from Il Principe, the passage which declares that, while it is not necessary for the Prince to have the virtues (faith, piety, humanity, religion, and integrity), he must be able to simulate them and to vary his behaviour according to the winds of fortune. Much of this, Cuyckius observes, is simply a distortion of Cicero; and he cites the relevant passage from the De officiis to prove his point. Such detailed information, while not wholly accurate, suggests not only an acquaintance with Machiavelli’s text but also some enquiry into its dissemination and sources. Or so one might think. Unfortunately, everything that Cuyckius writes about Machiavelli is taken (and botched) from the work of an earlier Netherlandish scholar, Joannes Molanus (Jan van der Meulen), who had preceded Cuyckius as Dean of Saint Pierre and, more significantly, had served as papal and royal censor of books.5 Molanus had died young in 1585, and several of his works were edited posthumously by Cuyckius, who also did him the honour of a brief eulogy.6 One of the last of his books to be issued in his lifetime was the De fide haereticis servando (1584)—a vigorous examination of how far (if at all) faith was to be kept with heretics, rebels, and tyrants—and, in the course of this, Molanus devoted several pages to a denunciation 3 Ibid., fos. 25–7. 4 Ibid., fo. 25v: ‘De Machiavello, in primam damnatorum autorum classem a PP. Tridentibus rejecto quid attexam? Scripsit ille de Repub. librum lingua Thusca; qui a Francofurtensibus postea & Basiliensibus in Latinum et Alemanicum sermonem transfusus est.’ See below, n. 8. 5 His epitaph styled him ‘sacrae theologiae professor apostolicus ac regius librorum censor’. See Louis Moreri, Le grand Dictionnaire historique, 20th edn. (Paris, 1759), vii. 600. Molanus is similarly styled on the title page of his De fide haereticis servanda. 6 This eulogy prefaces Cuyckius’s edition of Molanus, Medicorum ecclesiasticum diarium (Louvain, 1598).

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of Machiavelli’s ‘impious book’, de Principe.7 Here, quoted more accurately and at greater length than in Cuyckius, are the passages from Il Principe, 18, on the centaur, force and fraud, lion and fox, the perils of practising conventional virtues, the advantages of merely feigning them, and the need to trim one’s behaviour according to the winds of fortune. Molanus cited from Cicero’s De officiis to reveal how Machiavelli had distorted his source. He also provided a precise marginal reference to the Tridentine censors’ condemnation of Machiavelli (‘Litera N, classe 1’); and noted a Latin translation of Il Principe issued at Basle and a German version issued at Frankfurt. Unlike Cuyckius, he assigned each language to the correct town but, unfortunately, misled his plagiarist by mistaking the German translation of Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel for an edition of Il Principe.8 For good measure, Molanus also quoted from Catharino’s early attack on the pernicious influence of Machiavelli, and referred to Paolo Giovio’s dubious biographical sketch. Molanus, then, must have read at least one chapter of Machiavelli for himself, and done some elementary research on his text. Or so one might think. Yet, once again, this proves to be illusory. Molanus, as a censor himself, could refer authoritatively to the Tridentine Index and was aware of two recent, heretically printed texts with Machiavelli’s name somewhere on the title page, although only one was actually by him. But Molanus’s quotation from Il Principe, along with the material from Cicero, was taken verbatim from Catharino, whose work, though referred to, was not identified as the source for these 7 Joannes Molanus, D. Joannis Molani sacrae theologiae Lovanii Professoris, Pontifici et Regii librorum censoris, libri quinque. De fide haereticis servanda. De fide rebellibus servanda. De fide et juramento quae a tyranno exiguntur (Cologne, 1584), 5–8, 23. 8 The Latin version of Il Principe would have been Silvestro Teglio’s translation, probably in the last of the editions published at Basle by Peter Perna (1560, 1570, 1580). There is no record of a 16th-c. German translation of Il Principe published at Frankfurt or anywhere else. The work alluded to by Molanus is, in fact, Nigrinus’s German translation of the Contre-Machiavel, printed by Georg Rabe at Frankfurt in 1580: Regentenkunst, oder Fuerstenspiegel. Gru¨ndtliche erkla¨rung, welcher massen ein Ko¨nigreich und jedes Fu¨rstentumb rechtmessig und ru¨hsam koenne und solle bestellt und verwaltet werden. On this edition, see D’Andrea and Stewart, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv, lxv–lxvii. Curiously, Bertelli and Innocenti, Secolo XVI, no. 169, list this as ‘Testo di Il principe e commento’.

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passages.9 Thus we have Cuyckius revealed as one more of those moralists whose conscience allowed them to damn an author unread, on the unacknowledged basis of a colleague’s work; while Molanus was better only in so far as he was a more accurate plagiarist and possessed a little inside information, albeit garbled. And Catharino, who was the only one of the three to have seen a Machiavelli text, was interested in just one chapter of Il Principe. The point of this story is not to expose lax literary morality, but rather to highlight the problems facing anyone who attempts to trace the readership of Machiavelli in the later decades of the sixteenth century and beyond. Both Cuyckius and Molanus exemplify the deceptive genealogy of criticism but tell us nothing about the serious study of Machiavelli, while Catharino takes us back in time more than forty years and, from a critical point of view, gets us only slightly further. For an unwary historian, second-hand or even third-hand knowledge may easily be taken as first-hand; and hearsay and prejudice may be misconstrued as independent thought. Nor is this simply a matter of detectable plagiarism. Much that appears to indicate direct Machiavelli learning may simply have filtered, indirectly as well as directly, into the general reservoir of sixteenth-century thought—partly because, as was the case with his military thinking, many of Machiavelli’s classical sources themselves became widely known; or because his aphoristic style was so suited to the reading habits of his age that his striking formulations, both idealogical and verbal, increasingly assumed a life of their own. There are other problems, too. Often, material which strikes a modern reader as Machiavellian proves to be the offspring of other traditions, originally independent but so ramulose and so entangled with Machiavellism as to defy simple categorization.10 Machiavelli’s ideas, accurately transmitted or not, also became diluted and diffused—a tendency particularly marked in two 9 On Catharinus, see above Ch. 6. 10 I am, in particular, thinking here of the immense vogue for the study of Tacitus and its possible relationship with Machiavellism—interestingly, but too neatly, set out by Giuseppe Toffanin, Machiavelli e il ‘Tacitismo’: La ‘Politica storica’ al tempo della controriforma (Padua, 1921); 2nd edn. (Naples, 1972).

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groups of writers concerned, in very different ways, with the relationship between religion and affairs of state. On the one hand, there were the pious who regarded Machiavelli as no more than a symbol of anti-Christian iniquity and who rarely demonstrated any serious engagement with his writings. On the other hand, there were the writers on Ragione di stato who, while inevitably going over ground already covered by Machiavelli, only intermittently referred to him with any degree of specificity. Of the latter school, Meinecke wrote that ‘there are real catacombs here of forgotten literature by mediocrities’.11 But that comment, while not unfair, might even more aptly be applied to the dismal and voluminous writings of the self-righteously religious who, as Mattei observed, ‘did not hesitate to legitimize, even to encourage, the inexorable persecution and extermination of heretics and infidels, ad majorem Dei gloriam, that is to say in defence of the profit of religion and the Church’.12 Within these groups, and elsewhere, there were many writers (especially in Italy, where the Papal Index of Prohibited Books was generally, if unevenly, enforced) who drew upon Machiavelli when writing on military and politico-historical issues but would either refer to him by a circumlocutionary construction such as ‘il secretario fiorentino’, or avoid acknowledging him at all. Even the Protestant-hating, Jesuit-hating German scholar Caspar Schoppe—who made great efforts to have the papal ban on Machiavelli rescinded and was the author of an elaborate manuscript Apologia for Machiavelli—still avoided the provocative name when he published his Paedia Politices in 1623, although it was, as far as we know, the first general defence of Machiavelli’s political ideas to find its way into print.13 There are several examples of this evasive procedure among the military treatises and aphoristic collections to be discussed in later chapters: but something rather different, yet quintessentially 11 Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’e´tat and its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (1957), 67 n. 1. 12 Mattei (1969), 259. 13 Mario D’Addio, Il pensiero politico di Gaspare Scioppio e il machiavellismo del seicento (Milan, 1962) is a massive study of Schoppe. There is a discussion of the Paedia Politices at pp. 499–534.

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Machiavellian, is worth mentioning here. This is the Discorsi sopra Tito Livio published in 1598 by Antonio Ciccarelli of Foligno. Ciccarelli did not approve of Machiavelli and did not name him; but his work was to some extent conceived as a response to Machiavelli’s own Discorsi and, in commenting on Roman history, Ciccarelli had often to deal with issues which had been raised by his predecessor.14 However, he refers to Machiavelli only as ‘altri’ or ‘alcuni’—some say this, some say that, and some say the other—and his reticence is understandable since he was a censor officially engaged in the revision of doubtful literature and had been responsible for the gelded version of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1584).15 In his dedicatory letter, Ciccarelli explains that his commentary on Livy differs from that of the ‘altri’ in many ways, but principally because the latter had eschewed philosophy, had limited comment to Livy’s first Decade, and had aimed at forming a tyranny, ‘sometimes giving very impious precepts’. By contrast, claims Ciccarelli, his own work is animated by a philosophical spirit, deals with the third as well as the first of Livy’s Decades, is concerned with forming good states, and offers Christian and pious teaching. Happily, the book is less dull than this preliminary blurb suggests, and Ciccarelli proves to be an intelligent, learned, judicious, and, in some respects, even an independent thinker.16 In our age of the great Machiavelli industry it is important to remember that disapprobation is not necessarily a sign of ignorance and foolishness. It is also possible for a writer to disagree with Machiavelli on one issue while citing him, or even accepting his more extreme views, elsewhere. Franc¸ois Grimaudet, for example—although denying that it is sufficient for a Prince merely to appear religious ‘exterieurement’, and arguing that a Prince who is without God ‘en l’interieur’ will become a tyrant and an oppressor of his people— was perfectly happy to use Machiavelli as an anti-papal historian. 14 Machiavelli and Ciccarelli are bracketed together in Gaspar Facius, Politica Liviana (Altenburg, 1617), 4. 15 Il cortigiano del conte Baldassarre Castiglione. Rivedutoe corretto da Antonio Ciccarelli (Venice, 1584). There were further Venetian editions in 1593 and 1599. 16 Mattei (1969), 181–200, provides an excellent, concise discussion of Ciccarelli’s work and its relationship with Machiavelli’s Discorsi, together with bibliographical and biographical information.

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In another work, Grimaudet was clearly at one with Machiavelli concerning the need for varying with circumstances and, in times of great danger, being able not only to dissimulate but also to abandon those rules of behaviour which are deemed virtuous in times of peace; and he even condones using bad means to achieve good ends, and acknowledges that there are times when good deeds may ruin a state.17 Total disapprobation inspired David Hume of Godscroft, a Scot with French connections, to write the most meticulous early modern work devoted specifically to Machiavelli. We have already briefly encountered Hume—poet, controversialist, and historian—as the putative author of the Contr’assassin (1612) in which Pierre Coton and the Jesuit doctrine of king-killing are roundly denounced. In the course of that polemic there are a couple of hostile ‘Machiavel’ references which suggest no knowledge whatever of Machiavelli’s writings.18 Fourteen years later, however, Hume published a remarkable analytical work (this time undoubtedly his own), the Apologia Basilica, seu Machiavelli ingenium examinatum in libro quem inscripsit Principem, which is exactly what its title proclaims it to be—an examination of Il Principe for the purpose of establishing that Machiavelli’s cleverness (often conceded even by his enemies) was simply non-existent.19 Even judging Machiavelli by his own yardstick of practical utility, says Hume, it becomes obvious that his advice is worse than useless. The idea is similar to that which animated Cardinal Pole nearly a century earlier, and it had been taken up by Gentillet, and later by Hume’s contemporary Thomas Fitzherbert. But, more interestingly, it is also Hume’s intention to demonstrate that Machiavelli frequently confutes himself, and to this end he works methodically through Il Principe, 17 Grimaudet, De la puissance royalle & Sacerdotale (n.p., 1579), 56, 98; Les opuscules politiques (Paris, 1580), fos. 34v–35, 36, 43v–44, 74r–v, 75v–76. Grimaudet also notes (fo. 74r–v) that Machiavelli’s advice on dealing with newly acquired territories is derived from Aristotle. 18 See above, Ch. 11. 19 Apologia Basilica, seu Machiavelli ingenium examinatum in libro quem inscripsit Principem (Paris, 1626). The book is fairly rare and it is, therefore, unfortunate that the British Library’s copy looks as though somebody has stubbed out a fiercely burning Burmese cheroot on the title page, thus mutilating the Preface and first forty pages.

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chapter by chapter, not only commenting on its words, phrases, arguments, and general assumptions, but also juxtaposing contradictory material from the Discorsi.20 The whole critique is accomplished by Hume with a minuteness and textual exactitude vastly beyond the scope of earlier anti-Machiavellians, and it seems extraordinary that (as far as I know) only one scholar, John Wesley Horrocks, has ever given the Apologia Basilica serious attention: and his discussion has never been published.21 It must be admitted that the book’s seriatim procedure is laborious and makes brief summary almost impossible but, in addition to his exposure of contradictions, Hume’s attention to detail enables him to make a number of telling general methodological, stylistic, and even bibliographical points about Il Principe. One feature of his study is his knowledge of the original Italian texts. He frequently quotes Il Principe and the Discorsi in both Italian and Latin, and sometimes notes where Silvestro Teglio’s Latin version of Il Principe omits key sentences, as in chapter 18 on how far princes are to keep faith (p. 126). He even on occasion makes textual comparisons between different editions as, for example, when he corrects a misreading in Wolfe’s pseudo-Palermo edition of Il Principe by reference to one of the Venetian editions of 1537 (p. 88–9).22 He draws attention to Machiavelli’s stylistic extremism in which paradoxes are uttered simply to make the author seem smart (Paradoxa eum loqui juvat: ut acutus videatur): noting, for example, the assertion in chapter 14 that, in time of peace, a prince should concern himself with war more than in time of war (p. 79). Like Gentillet, Stubbes, and Fitzherbert before him, he seizes on Machiavelli’s habit of erecting a general rule on the basis of a single example 20 The technique of closely analysing Il Principe chapter by chapter was later used by Hermann Conring in his Animadversiones politicae in Nicolai Machiavelli librum de Principe (Helmstadt, 1661)—a commentary keyed (page by page, line by line) into his Latin translation of Il Principe published in the previous year. 21 Horrocks (1908), 235–50. I am preparing an article on the Apologia, providing an analysis of the text and due recognition of Horrocks’s perceptiveness. 22 Hume is commenting on the opening sentence of Il Principe, 16 (on liberality and parsimony), and he notes that in 1584 the reading is ‘dico, come sarebbe bene esser tenuto liberale, nondimeno la Liberalita usata in modo, che tu sei Temuto, ti offende’; and he asks how liberality may be used so that it makes one feared (Temuto)? The correct reading in 1537 repeats the word tenuto.

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(pp. 65, 155).23 Machiavelli’s exaggerations, too, are enthusiastically cited. His insistence that a prince, in order to learn about warfare, should read nothing but histories leads Hume to ask why books on the art of war itself are not mentioned and to demand whether his own age is so degenerate and effete that it must always follow in the footsteps of the ancients? Is the prince not to learn about machines and mechanics? (pp. 79–80). This is all very modern and up to date; but it is a pity that the only military author actually named by Hume should be Vegetius. Inevitably, Hume devotes a good deal of space to Machiavelli’s central chapters on topsy-turvy virtues (Il Principe, 15–19), and he pinpoints their fundamental weakness, which is the way in which conventional terminology is repeatedly twisted and distorted. In effect, these chapters are nothing more than a rhetorical trick. Thus when Machiavelli is allegedly discussing liberality, he gives the name to something which, as described in Il Principe, is really prodigality—and Seneca, Cicero, and Aristotle had all set out the same arguments long before (pp. 92–5). Similarly, when, in Il Principe, chapter 17, Machiavelli is supposed to be discussing clemency and cruelty, he deliberately confuses clemency with licence, and cruelty with justice, so that he is really commending and condemning qualities under the wrong names (pp. 106–21). Above all, the Apologia Basilica is concerned with the exposing of inconsistencies. When, for example, Machiavelli commends parsimony on the grounds that it enables a Prince to have the means to defend himself, Hume remarks that without men money can effect nothing, whereas without money men can often achieve a great deal: and he quotes Machiavelli against himself by referring to the argument in the Discorsi, II. 10, that money does not constitute the sinews of war. Similarly, Machiavelli’s recommendation of force and fraud can be contradicted by what he says in the Discorsi, III. 40, where he limits the use of fraud to war and even then rejects perfidy (p. 138).24 The acuteness of Hume’s reading may be seen when he is dealing with the confused 23 Cf. Stubbes, Discoverie of a gaping gulf (1579), sig. C.8; Fitzherbert, The first part of a treatise concerning policy and religion (1615), 345. See above, Ch. 10. 24 The reference to the Discorsi is wrongly given as ‘lib. 3. cap 10. cui titulum fecit [Come usare le fraude ne maneggiare la guerra, e` cosa gloriosa]’.

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treatment of Fortuna in Il Principe, chapter 25, where Machiavelli makes a curious concession to free will, stating that Fortuna controls about half of our actions but leaves the rest under human control. This, naturally, offends Hume, who believes that everything depends on Divine Providence, and he alludes to the Discorsi, II. 29, to show that Machiavelli himself appears to believe in the overall control of the Heavens (pp. 219–25). The process, whereby Machiavelli is shown to confute himself, culminates in the last chapter of the Apologia Basilica, which is divided into three principal sections: first, a microscopic analysis of the Discorsi, III. 5, to illustrate the nature of true prudence; second, a similar examination of the Discorsi, I. 10, to reveal true glory; and last, a collection of ‘little flowers’ (Flosculi) by way of a recapitulation (per Anacephalaeosin) listing fifty-four fundamentals of Machiavellian doctrine and forty precepts, followed by their antitheses, consisting of seventy-three fundamentals and fifty-nine precepts (pp. 235–58). The Apologia Basilica is an imposing work, and Horrocks, in his assessment, praised Hume’s careful comparisons both between Il Principe and the Discorsi, and between different passages within Il Principe itself. But he also pointed out that, in order to demonstrate that Machiavelli was wholly without intelligence, Hume becomes hypercritical and carping. Certainly, for every shrewd point that Hume makes, there are several banalities. The constant reiteration of Machiavelli’s alleged stupidity becomes wearisome and unconvincing. And at no point does Hume face up to the fact that, notwithstanding his own conventional praise of conventional virtues, rulers continued to behave in the fashion described by Machiavelli. Thus, despite the undoubted mastery of Machiavelli’s texts displayed throughout the Apologia Basilica, it remains a monument of pedantry and literalness, and it seems to have been ignored by its contemporaries as it has been by posterity.

dilution, diffusion, confusion The wide variety of responses to Machiavelli, and the different ways in which he was read, render most neat generalizations

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suspect; and, faced with these difficulties, I have chosen in the rest of this book to pursue several lines of enquiry in several different ways. More precisely, in this chapter and the next, I shall draw attention (and often no more than that) to a small selection of what I term serious readers of Machiavelli: taking serious to indicate at the very least some first-hand acquaintance with his writings.25 Then, in the three chapters which comprise Part IV, I shall examine a number of important areas where Machiavelli’s relevance has often been exaggerated or misunderstood. This is a somewhat paradoxical procedure, but it helps to clarify the different ways in which Machiavelli was read with regard to purpose, intensity, and knowledge. And these prove to be more diversified than the familiar simple registration of approval or disapproval on such issues as upside-down ethics, Christianity as a politic religion, and the separation of public from private morality. We know that Machiavelli’s works remained available to anybody who wished to consult them.26 There were various French, Latin, and English versions circulating in print, along with Wolfe’s spurious Italian imprints, and a number of manuscript translations, especially in England.27 It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that, 25 One writer whose knowledge of Machiavelli must have been comprehensive but who is not susceptible to critical discussion is the great translator and lexicographer John Florio. The list of ‘Authors and Books that have been read of purpose’ for his invaluable Italian–English dictionaries, A worlde of wordes (1598) and the enlarged Queen Anna’s new world of words (1611), includes ‘Tutte L’opere di Nicolo Macchiavelli’. Much more tantalizing than this, though, is the inclusion of ‘Nicole Florentin’ among the Latin authors cited by the medical authority Laurent Joubert for his study of laughter. See Joubert’s Traite´ du ris, contenant son essence, ses causes et mervelheus effais (Paris, 1579), sig. eˆ.6. Joubert (p. 191) also refers to Fracastoro ‘et avant luy Nicole Florentino, tous deux personages consume´s an savoir’. 26 This was a matter of concern for French anti-Machiavellians such as Hotman, who complained that, while Machiavelli was being suppressed in Italy, editors such as Stupanus and printers such as Perna were issuing his ‘impious and accursed books’. See Franc¸ois Hotman’s letter dated 25 Dec. 1580 (to Rudolph Walther) in his Epistolae (Amsterdam, 1700), 138–9. 27 For English translations, see Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’: An Elizabethan Translation, ed. Hardin Craig (Chapel Hill, NC, 1944). This apart, Tudor and Stuart manuscript translations of Machiavelli have not been given anything like the attention they deserve. The pioneering work of Napoleone Orsini was important but has borne little fruit. See Orsini, ‘Machiavelli’s Discourses, a MS translation of 1599’, Times Literary Supplement, 10, 17, 24 Oct. 1936; ‘Le

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while the Machiavel stereotype was spreading throughout Europe, there would still have been many readers with real knowledge of what Machiavelli actually wrote.28 We know, too, that some of these readers were themselves writers and thinkers of major significance, although it has to be said that the greater the reader the slighter was the impact of Machiavelli—a fundamental problem to which I have already alluded.29 If one examines the copious productions of Bodin, Montaigne, Raleigh, and Bacon, then evidence both for their first-hand acquaintance with Machiavelli’s work and for their having taken his ideas seriously is undeniable. That evidence has often been assembled and commented upon; yet the impact of Machiavelli upon these writers cannot be regarded as other than modest when considered as a proportion of the sum total of their encyclopedic learning and the scope of their investigations into human behaviour (social, political, and personal). Bodin borrowed material when it suited his purpose.30 Montaigne found some of Machiavelli’s insights stimulating.31 And both traduzioni elisabettiane inedite di Machiavelli’, in Studi sul Rinascimento italiano in Inghilterra, con alcuni testi inglesi inediti (Florence, 1937), 3–47; ‘Elizabethan MS translations of Machiavelli’s Prince’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1 (1937), 166–9. There is a useful table of Tudor translations in Gasquet (1974), 429–34. It is disappointing that the translation of the Discorsi by John Levytt (dated 7 Sept. 1599) in British Library, Add. MS 41162, has never been published in any form—let alone in a fully annotated edition. In France, perhaps because vernacular versions of Machiavelli’s works remained available in print, manuscript translations were less important: but BNF fr. 19018 is a late 16th-c. Histoire de Florence, de Nicolas Machiavel, traduite en franc¸ais par Louveau, which the translator undertook to avoid enforced inactivity. He had been looking for something worthwhile to translate from Tuscan into French and he had found this work: and, if the common saying is true—‘que la consolation des miserables est d’avoir des compagnons en ses miseres’—then there is plenty to console the modern Frenchman in this history of the afflictions of Florence (fos. 1–2). 28 Many such readers will be discussed in the rest of this book, but it should be noted that there is a mass of disconnected and fragmentary evidence where writers reveal a knowledge of Machiavelli in short notes or treatises, and cite odd examples and passages from his work as it suits their immediate purpose. 29 See above, Introduction. 30 See G. Cardascia, ‘Machiavel et Jean Bodin’, Bibliothe`que d’humanisme et Renaissance, 3 (1938), 129–67; H. Weber, ‘Bodin et Machiavel’, Actes du Colloque ‘Jean Bodin’ (Angers, 1985), 231–40; Diego Quaglioni, ‘Il machiavellismo di Jean Bodin’, Il Pensiero politico, 22 (1989), 198–207. 31 See Nicole Tre`ves, ‘Beyond l’utile et l’honneste: Or Some Pioneering Aspects of Machiavelli and Montaigne’, Bulletin de la socie´te´ des amis de Montaigne,

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Raleigh and Bacon were not only in sympathy with Machiavelli’s attempt to face up to the sordid realities of political life, but were also able to use several of his observations to sharpen their own analysis of specific contemporary issues.32 However, while it is valuable to seek out, collect, and annotate such allusions or resonances, it is misleading to go beyond that by suggesting that these men were specialist Machiavellians. In order to find readers whose encounter with the ‘Florentine Secretary’ was more decisive in the formation of their own ideas, we must often (though not exclusively) mingle with less lofty spirits ranging from eccentrics to conformists, pragmatists to pedants, originals to plagiarists, the moderately obscure to the wholly forgotten. We must be prepared to rub shoulders not only with the sublime but also with the ridiculous—and this brings me to Gabriel Harvey and Barnabe Barnes.

a pa i r o f e c c e n t r i c s There are some people whose impracticality, prickly disposition, preposterous behaviour, and delusions of grandeur make them uncomfortable colleagues, but who seem quite engaging when contemplated from a safe historical distance. Two Elizabethan 6th ser., nos. 15–16 (1983), 45–60; Malcolm C. Smith, ‘A Source of Montaigne’s Uncertainty’, Bibliothe`que d’humanisme et Renaissance, 50 (1988), 206–11; M. Dal Corso, ‘Montaigne e il Principe di Machiavelli: i primi contatti’, in E. Kanceff (ed.), Montaigne e l’Italia (Geneva, 1991), 145–56; M. Tetel, Pre´sences italiennes dans les ‘Essais’ de Montaigne (Paris, 1992), 75–96. Generally lost sight of, but characteristically provocative and stimulating, is J. H. Whitfield, ‘Machiavelli Guicciardini Montaigne’, Italian Studies, 28 (1973), 31–47. For the judgement of a late 17th-c. critic that Montaigne’s poison was worse than Machiavelli’s, see Mathurin Dre´ano, La Renomme´e de Montaigne en France au XVIII e sie`cle 1677–1802 (Angers, 1952), 72–3. 32 For Raleigh’s knowledge and use of Machiavelli, see Pierre Lefranc, Sir Walter Raleigh, e´crivain: l’œuvre et les ide´es (Paris, 1968), 68–70, 222–53, 614–35; Gasquet (1974), 371–90. For Bacon and Machiavelli, see Napoleone Orsini, Bacone e Machiavelli (Genoa, 1936); Vincent Luciani, ‘Bacon and Machiavelli’, Italica, 24 (1947), 26–40. However, in 1908, Horrocks (although misled by the Cabinet Council and Maxims of State) had already spotted most of the important Machiavellian allusions in the works of both Raleigh and Bacon.

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students of Machiavelli—Gabriel Harvey and Barnabe Barnes— were men of this kind. They were well acquainted one with the other, and both moved in the circle of John ‘Machiavel’ Wolfe, who printed some of their works—indeed Harvey once described himself as ‘a Sheepe in Wolfes printe’.33 And both were on friendly terms with another Wolfe associate, John Thorius, who translated the Machiavellian Counsellor of Bartolome Felippe. Gabriel Harvey was the older, more famous, and—as a drinking companion—by far the less dangerous. His detailed knowledge of, and admiration for, Machiavelli is something which remained unknown, buried amidst his manuscripts and marginalia, until unearthed centuries later by scholarly editors; and there is something sad about this undeniably ingenious and erudite, but increasingly embittered, academic—fully conversant with all the major works of Machiavelli, ‘the great founder and master of pollicies’—secretly annotating the books in his library with bold observations, trying to convince himself that he was a superman.34 Unfortunately, Harvey’s ambitions were blocked by his own acute sense of social inferiority, mocked by his modest practical achievements, and thwarted by the rejection of those whose favour he sought— especially dreary and jealous academics who found his adventurous notions unpalatable. Similarly, his posthumous reputation has been clouded by the drubbing he received in his wordy brawl with Thomas Nashe, whose fluency—greatly facilitated by a journalistic disregard for the truth—has won modern critical approval.35 33 Gabriel Harvey, Foure letters, and certaine sonnets (1592), sig. H.2v. 34 Harvey’s interest in, and knowledge of, Machiavelli has been too frequently commented upon to warrant detailed discussion here. References may be found in his Letter Book, ed. E. J. L. Scott (Camden Society, 1884), 79, 134, 135, 174; Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1913), 84, 90, 94, 96, 118, 119, 121, 122, 147–50, 153, 156, 183, 195, 201, 209 n., 221 n. The fullest treatment is by Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia, and Library. Stern reconstructs Harvey’s library and gives a systematic account of his habit of annotating his books. 35 For details of this acrimonious dispute, see Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction, 180–232; Stern, Gabriel Harvey, passim. Typically, Nashe is happy to exploit the most extreme type of Machiavel bogeyman when it suits his purpose, although he had some knowledge of Machiavelli’s work and was prepared to exploit that, too.

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It was Harvey’s great misfortune to be too clever by half, and a striking instance of this has already been mentioned in connection with the English reception of Gentillet. Harvey chose to make a public demonstration of his Machiavellian cunning by bitterly attacking a Machiavel figure in an elaborate set of Latin verses, celebrating the visit of Elizabeth I to Audley End in July 1578; and it is necessary now to examine aspects of this work, Gratulationum Valdinensium libri quatuor, a little more closely. The volume is dedicated as a whole to the Queen although, in fact, this applies only to the first book. The second book has a separate dedication to the Earl of Leicester, the third to Lord Burghley, and the fourth to the Earl of Oxford, Sir Christopher Hatton, and Sir Philip Sidney. Throughout, Harvey sails close to the political wind, covertly denouncing the proposed marriage alliance between the Queen and Alenc¸on even in the Epilogus of the first book which, though specifically aimed at the Queen, satirizes the Italians by heaping fulsome praise upon their alleged excesses. Far more extreme material is, however, contained in the second book dedicated to Leicester, the Protestants’ great hope, who is lauded as one who is ‘in all true virtue preeminent’ and who now ‘with ready hand grasps his destiny’. All the people hope that he will enjoy ‘kingly honours’ and wear a crown upon his head; and, while nobody knows the purposes of the Gods, everyone prays that Leicester will eventually be the royal consort. Here Harvey’s enthusiasm was especially disastrous because, besides the possibility of antagonizing the Queen, he was (albeit unwittingly) embarrassing his patron, who was already secretly married. Moreover, Harvey swings alarmingly from Queen to Earl and back again when bestowing his adulations. Elizabeth’s welcome at Saffron Walden is contrasted with what might have been the reception accorded to a Machiavellian prince: ‘Our sovereign has been shaped to a different mould; with eye serene, not terrible, she views her people.’ But it would be a very different story with the Machiavellian ruler: ‘Not in this way would your citizens behave, O cruel Machiavelli, at the coming of your Prince, your Fox or Lion or Boar: no pleasure we take in your awesome ceremonial, nor in your barbaric,

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Turkish-type savagery and slaughter.’36 Elizabeth, like Scipio, inspires love; and, lest the point of the whole exercise be lost, Harvey stresses that ‘a second Scipio we have among our Lords’, and makes great play with Leicester’s well-known badge, the ‘Bear, happy beyond measure’ [Faelix Ursa nimis]. In short, Machiavelli is wasting his time trying to contaminate England, whose white cliffs cannot abide his bloodshed and violence. At this point, Harvey introduces a wholly original touch by arranging for the sinister Florentine Secretary to condemn himself out of his own mouth. Headed Epigramma in effigiem Machiavelli. Machiavellus ipse loquitur, the poem is worth quoting in its entirety: You ask, who am I? King of kings: the supreme power of all the world rests wholly upon my finger. None is King who is not versed in Machiavellian doctrine: and do not think that you have wisdom if you are not versed in it. The rest are mere shadows, smoke, jokes, and mockery. I speak only of kingships and of sceptres. Children, ancient crones, and wretched old men may prefer peace; I talk only of camps and of wars. The people’s love is nothing; beggarly Virtue is less than nothing. Words I leave to others, it is notable deeds that I perform. Look into my eyes: rage dwells within them. One hand wields a stone, the other a sword. Within my mouth poisons lurk. My breath, this way and that, is charged with a thousand venoms. My brow is iron, my feelings worthy of the God of Hell. My device is, and always was, It is a delight to go to the top: Either Caesar or Nothing.37 That man [Cesare Borgia] was our disciple. Nothing ordinary pleases me: only the heights I ponder. Milk is food for children: blood is what I feed upon. The mob a thousand deaths may die, so long as I can grasp the sceptre. I care nothing for either blood or slaughter. Let abject minds go to utter ruin, let them be thrust down to Hell. I alone am wise, alive, and triumph. As for the rest, who does not know? Deceit is for me the greatest virtue, and the next is Force; other gods I know not. 36 Gratulationum Valdinensium libri quatuor (1578), 7–8: ‘Nostra aliam ad formam Princeps fabricata, sereno, / Non Tragico populos aspicit ore, suos. / Haud ita gestirent cives, veniente Tyranno, / Vulpe, Leone, Apro, trux Machavelle, tuo. / Terribilis tua pompa nimis, non Barbara nobis, / Turcica non rabies, non laniena placet.’ 37 Aut nihil aut Caesar was notorious as the device of Cesare Borgia and had been mocked by Porcacchi in his edition of Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia (1574), fo. 147, and by Gentillet, Contre-Machiavel (1576), 326.

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Contemplate the kingly monuments of my invention, and henceforth you will not ask again, Who was Machiavelli?38

This is the first time that a fictitious Machiavel figure had delivered a speech in England (if not in English) and its relationship to Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel is evident enough. But Harvey’s echoing of Gentillet is creative rather than slavish and, in this respect, is similar to the relationship borne by Marlowe’s Machevil (in The Jew of Malta) to Harvey’s own invention.39 More interesting is the fact that we now know that, while Harvey was outdoing in eloquence the Contre-Machiavel, he had already been—and was to remain—one of the most assiduous readers of Machiavelli in Elizabethan England. The whole thing is an elaborate pose to mask his diatribe against the marriage negotiations; and Harvey develops this even further by satirizing the French court of Catherine de’ Medici in a Medicaeorum Hymnus. Cosimo, Leo X, Clement VII, and ‘one and all the Medici’ sing in concert and heap fulsome praise upon the assumed excesses of Italians. From all this, Florence emerges as a sink of iniquity where Machiavelli is venerated as a God: So come along and worship him, all you robbers, merchants, tyrants severe, wandering advocates and purchasable lawyers, all you false38 Gratulationum Valdinensium, 8–9: ‘Quaeris, ego qui sim? Rex Regum: totius orbis / Imperium digito nititur omne meo / Nemo regat, qui non Machavellica dogmata callet: / Nec sapuisse putes qui minus ista sapit. / Caetera sunt umbrae, fumi, ludibria, risus, / Regna ego sola loquor, sceptra ego sola loquor, / Pacem optent pueri, vetulaeque, senesque miselli, / Castra ego sola loquor, bella ego sola loquor. / Plebis amor nihil est; nihilo minus, Indiga Virtus: / Verbo ego linquo aliis; facta ego mira patro. / Ecce oculos: Furor iis habitat: manus altera saxum; / Altra ensem torquet: toxica in ore latent. / Spiritus hinc, atque hinc perfusus mille venenis: / Ferrea frons, Orci pectora digna Deo. / Emblema est, semperque fuit: Juvat ire per altum: / Aut nihil, aut Caesar; noster Alumnus erat. / Nil mediocre placet: sublimia sola voluto: / Lac pueris cibus est: sanguine vescor ego. / Mille neces obeat vulgus, modo sceptra capessam; / Non flocci cruor est, non laniena mihi. / Dispereant abjectae animae; trudantur ad Orcum: / Solus ego sapio, vivo, triumpho mihi. / Caetera quis nescit? Fraus est mea maxima Virtus: / Proxima, Vis: alios non ego nosco Deos. / Ingenii monumenta mei Regalia volve: / Nec posthac quares; Quis Machavellus erat.’ 39 Contrast Meyer’s view, that Harvey’s Machiavelli figure was the source for Marlowe’s, with Bawcutt’s view that it was not. See Meyer, Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama, 22–3; Bawcutt, ‘Machiavelli and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta’, 4–6. The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in between: i.e. there is a creative relationship rather than a straightforward imitative one.

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swearers and old sly-boots, men two-faced like Janus, twisters, and cruel promise-breaking nobles, all you turncoats and slithery customers, crooks like Theodore and Diagoras,40 ruthless Sultans and dreadful Scythians, you savage Centaurs and giants, serpent-armed, hundred-eyed Arguses and hundred-handed Gyges, you merciless Moslems and monstrous Saracens—Styx, Acheron, Phlegethon, Tartarus, Avernus, Charon, all the lot, the powers of Hell—and all of you who throw God from his Heaven, and Right and Good from the earth: come along and bow down to this god.41

Machiavelli himself replies to this hymn, praising Fraud as a goddess by whose aid he has enjoyed divine honours among kings. ‘Ye mortals’, he exclaims, ‘burn the books of all other men: over kings and all your kingdome I alone bear sway.’ Thus he spoke: but Pallas ‘exempted the kingdom of Britain’. Good news for Britain and, of course, for Harvey’s hopes that the French marriage would come to nothing! T. H. Jameson long ago drew attention to Harvey’s love of irony and made clear that ‘the secret of the Gratulationes is a double irony’ which blatantly takes advantage of the current hostility to Machiavelli while simultaneously burlesquing it. But there is no evidence that anybody understood what Harvey was getting at. The complicated Latin jokes proved futile. And this, as Jameson justly remarked, was Harvey’s glaring weakness and why he ‘failed to do a deed commensurate with his dreams or his appetites’. He was simply too ‘suttle’.42 40 Theodore and Diagoras were two ancient philosophers who denied the existence of God: but the allusion seems deliberately abstruse. 41 Gratulationum Valdinensium, 10–11: ‘Hunc fures, mercatores, rigidique Tyranni, / Causidicique vagi, Juridicique leves; / Perjuri, veteratores, Janique bifrontes, / Perfidi, & immanes, faedifragique Duces. / Vertumni, Protei, Theodori, Diagoraeque, / Soldanique truces, horribilesque Scythae. / Centaurique feri, serpentigerique Gygantes, / Centoculique Argi, centimanique Gyges. / Crudeles Mahometigenae, saracenica Monstra, / Styx, Acheron, Phlegethon, Tartare, Averne, Charon. / Quique Deum e coelis, e terra fasque, bonumque / Tollitis, hunc omnes, hunc colitote Deum.’ 42 Thomas Hugh Jameson, ‘The ‘‘Machiavellianism’’ of Gabriel Harvey’, PMLA, 56 (1941), 645–56. This is an exemplary article and, unfortunately, the only published fruit of Jameson’s Yale University dissertation, ‘The Gratulationes Valdinenses of Gabriel Harvey’ (1938). I have not seen this dissertation, but it is used with due acknowledgement by Stern in her book on Gabriel Harvey.

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By contrast, subtlety is not something that one would readily associate with Barnabe Barnes—Bishop’s son, poet, dramatist, Machiavellist, and poisoner.43 Assessments of his status as a sonneteer range (as is so frequently the case with minor poets) from laudation to damnation. He was, as Mark Eccles put it, ‘something of a critic’s tennis ball, tossed first too high, then volleyed back and forth, and now and then smashed to earth’.44 But that is of no consequence here. What concerns us is his knowledge and treatment of Machiavelli; and to this must be added the question of his personal morality. Eccles, in his masterly researches into Barnabe Barnes’s misadventures, located a copy of Wolfe’s pseudo-Palermo edition of Il Principe with the poet’s signature boldly inscribed on the title page. And that Barnes actually read the volume, along with other works by Machiavelli, is readily seen in his own writings: especially in his Foure Bookes of Offices (1606), a work which also suggests a parallel with the anti-Machiavellian humbuggery of Harvey’s Gratulationes. The Offices is dedicated to King James I and, in a rambling discourse about allegorical animals symbolizing majesty, Barnes is moved to expostulate: Vile is that wretched analogie, which the corrupt Florentine Secretarie Nicolo Machiavelli servant to Duke Petro di Medici, did in his puddle of princely policies produce betwixt a true Prince and a mixt monster; resembling him (by the example of Achilles who was instructed by Chyron the Centaure) unto a lion and fox, importing his strength and caution in all affaires: whereas it is wel knowen, how no true Prince can aptly be compared to that unsavory curre, if the very royal minde (which amply possesseth every just King) bee respected.45

43 The best account of Barnes’s extraordinary career is still Mark Eccles, ‘Barnabe Barnes’, in Charles J. Sisson (ed.), Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), 165–241. Edward Meyer, in 1897, was the first critic to pay attention to Barnes’s Machiavellian knowledge, and in 1908 J. W. Horrocks took the investigation further. 44 Eccles, ‘Barnabe Barnes’, 239. More than seventy years on, this remains the case. 45 Barnabe Barnes, Foure Bookes of Offices: enabling privat persons for the speciall service of all good princes and policies (1606), sig. A.i. Further references are given in the text.

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The lion/fox idea, in association with Machiavelli, was by this time utterly commonplace, but Barnes self-consciously provides an accurate Italian marginal reference, ‘Il Prencipe cap. 18 comme se debbe osservar la fede’. There are other passages which sufficiently demonstrate that Barnes had read both Il Principe and the Discorsi, and that his handling of the sources was imaginative rather than servile. Sometimes his observations even seem tangential to Machiavelli’s own words: something particularly apparent in his moralistic denunciation of ‘one ambitious rule which the Machiavellian politics have taught to colour their wickedness’. This rule is that ‘if men will violate justice, the violation therof ought to proceed from the hopes or fruition of soveraignetie, which may depend theron; in all other things (saving in matters of Empire) let a man declare pietie’ (p. 110). Barnes refers here to Il Principe, 17: but his specific point occurs neither in that chapter nor in any of the others which propound a topsy-turvy morality. Barnes’s ‘ambitious rule’—which he piously rejects as ‘base and vulgar’—is akin to, but not precisely, what Machiavelli wrote. Again, when writing about the merits of liberality, Barnes explains that a reputation for this quality is commendable in a prince, ‘which some cunning and curious writers would have out of the purses of others’. He gives the marginal reference, ‘Nicolo Macc. il pren. Cap. 16, De liberalita & misera &c’, and is fully in accord with Machiavelli, but prefers to interpret the text rather than repeat it. When faced with a choice between liberality and parsimony, a wise prince should affect the latter. This would (in Barnes’s view) not only make him rich, powerful, and feared by foreigners, but would also please his subjects: ‘for that in sparing his treasurie, the subjects livings are likewise spared: which forbearance they willingly tearme an honest and vertuous liberalitie’ (p. 12). The sentiment is very much in the spirit of Machiavelli: but it is neither translation nor paraphrase. Much the same treatment is given to material from the seventh chapter of Il Principe. Considering the ways in which evil men, bent on mischief, ‘dive into the natures, humors, and inclinations of noble yong gentlemen, liberally and prodigally disposed’, and then tempt them with whores, horses, dogs, and anything else that takes their fancy, Barnes notes how Cesare

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Borgia (‘whom Nicolas Machiavell remembreth on like termes’) dealt with the Orsini and Baglioni by winning over their adherents (p. 106). What Machiavelli actually wrote was that Cesare gained the allegiance of these gentleman with financial and administrative rewards: but Barnes’s sexual baits and sporting allurements are much more colourful. Barnes also makes use of the Discorsi, another of the Italian books printed by John Wolfe. Two of his references (to the ‘short and sharp wars’ waged by the Romans, and to an incident concerning the Oddi and Baglioni factions in Perugia) are perfectly straightforward (pp. 174–5).46 So, too, is his discussion of the relative merits of mercenaries and native troops, which could have come from any of Machiavelli’s works or, indeed, from a host of other sources. But Barnes has the Discorsi very much in mind when considering the ways in which an empire is to be conserved or augmented: ‘points which have been formerly noted by the politicke Florentine Secretarie to Petro de Medici ’. In the ordering of precepts, Barnes follows a passage in the Discorsi (II. 19) fairly closely but is unable to resist translation by amplification which, qualitatively, results in both gains and losses. Machiavelli expresses his meaning in fifty-five words, while Barnes needs twice that number to cover the same ground: but there is something to be said for harming the enemy by ‘forraging and havocking upon their harvest and husbandrie’ rather than merely ‘con le scorrerie’.47 46 Cf. Machiavelli, Discorsi, II. 6, III. 14. 47 Machiavelli, Discorsi, II. 19 (Mazzoni and Casella, 169b), reads: ‘e crederebbono che lo accrescere la citta` sua di abitatori, farsi compagni e non sudditi, mandare colonie e guardare i paesi acquistati, fare capitale delle prede, domare il nimico con le scorrerie e con le giornate e non con le ossidioni, tener ricco il publico, povero il privato, mantenere con sommo studio gli esercizi militari’. Barnes, Offices, 172, reads: ‘to conserve and augment th’empire which he would have had him have sought for, consist in manning of the strong cities with souldiers, borne in the same provinces, in conciliating the friendship and societies of neighbours, in planting colonies for defence upon the skirt of their newly subdued provinces, in the spoiles of enemies, in forraging and havocking upon their harvest and husbandrie, in choosing rather to draw them together for battell in Campe, then to besiege them within their cities, in studious respect of the common cause and profit onely, in th’instructing and disciplining of souldiers in the knowledge and use of armes’.

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Barnes continues discussion of the augmentation of empire with the most striking of his adaptations from Machiavelli. He admits that, sometimes, such increase of territories may come about by God’s providence. On the other hand, there are princes who, ‘under counterfeit pretext’ and with an ‘unsatiate avarice’, force men to defend their lands: and the reason why so fewe free people and States are in comparison of former times, and such a defect of true lovers and of valiant champions of liberties in comparison of former ages (as a wily Commonwealths man hath noted) is that people in hope of beatitude, and towards the fruition of a second comfortable life, devise in these days how to tollerate and not to revenge injuries: as if that no salvation can come from above, but by keeping of their swordes and armes rustely sheathed and cased, when a vehement necessitie doth importune the contrarie; whilst they sottishly nuzzling themselves in sluggish securitie, utterly condemne the lawfull meanes and courses of warre, restoring that needfully by force of swords, which no law nor charmes of persuasive words can accomplish. (pp. 172–3)

This is a very free version of one of the most notorious passages in the Discorsi; and the extraordinary thing about it is that, despite the fact that Machiavelli’s contempt for Christian pusillanimity had enraged generations of commentators, Barnes was willing, in a work dedicated to King James I, to endorse its sentiments. Indeed, he does more than endorse the hostile view of Christianity. In describing eternal salvation as ‘a second comfortable life’, and denouncing Christian pacifists as ‘sottishly nuzzling themselves in sluggish securitie’, he employs language that far outsneers Machiavelli and makes one curious about Barnes’s real beliefs—if he had any.48 The Foure Bookes of Offices was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 3 February 1606. A year later, on 2 February 1607, Barnes’s melodrama The Divils Charter was ‘plaied before the Kings Majestie’.49 The piece was revised by its author before publication, 48 Horrocks (1908), 267, observed that Barnes’s handling of the theme stood alone in the literature of the period for its accurate discussion of the passage from the Discorsi. But I would go further, for Barnes’s language suggests a good deal more animosity towards Christianity than does Machiavelli’s. 49 The Divils Charter: a Tragaedie conteining the Life and Death of Pope Alexander the sixt (1607); ed. R. B. McKerrow, in W. Bang, Materialen zur Kunde des a¨lteren Englischen Dramas, 6 (Louvain, Leipzig, and London, 1904).

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but there is no reason to suppose that the surviving text is fundamentally different from what was performed at court: which means that King and courtiers would have been treated to the delights adumbrated by Prologus. Gracious spectators doe not heere expect, Visions of pleasure, amorous discourse: Our subject is of bloud and Tragedie, Murther, foule incest, and Hypocrisie. Behold the Strumpet of proud Babylon, Her Cup with fornication foaming full Of Gods high wrath and vengeance for that evill, Which was imposd upon her by the Divill.

Comprehensive though this programme of depravities may sound, Barnes easily fulfilled it and even augmented the promised attractions with a liberal admixture of sodomy and black magic. King James may have enjoyed the show on several counts, but critics have paid it only scant and contemptuous attention. It is true, perhaps, that the best that can be said of The Divils Charter is that it is a very bad play indeed. Yet it has a goodly number of succulent speeches: especially from the assassin, ‘Frescobaldy a ruffaine’, who boasts of the ‘three or foure score broken pates’ he has received ‘in the Burdelliaes and in other such houses of naturall recreation and agility’; from the sin-drenched Alexander VI, who lusts after the handsome young Astor Manfredi and prays for ‘fruition of those amorous pits, / Where blinded Cupid close in ambush sits’; and, of course, from the incestuous fratricide, Cesare Borgia, who hails Saturn as his natal deity, ‘propitious patron of assassinates / Of murthers, Paracides, and massacres’. In many ways, The Divils Charter is a remarkable creation: sired by The Jew of Malta out of Doctor Faustus, and with a bloodline extending far back, beyond the histories of Guicciardini and the politics of Machiavelli, to the excesses of Senecan tragedy. Where Marlowe merely uses Machiavel as his prologue and then drops him altogether, Barnes has his Francis Guicchiardine appear as a chorus throughout the play to provide both moral comment and historical narrative. Where Marlowe offers nothing by way of direct know-

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ledge of Machiavelli, Barnes displays not only first-hand reading of the Discorsi but also an easy familiarity with Fenton’s Historie of Guicciardin.50 And where Marlowe’s Faustus uses his pact with Mephistophilis to achieve nothing beyond a few childish conjuring tricks and a sapless glimpse of Helen of Troy, Barnes’s diabolical Roderigo Borgia gets himself elected as Pope Alexander VI, violates a few youths, commits incest with his only daughter, and poisons six cardinals before the devils claim his soul. There is a great deal of poisoning, and talk about poisoning, in The Divils Charter. Lucrezia is murdered by means of a phial of envenomed cosmetic; Astor and Philippo are sedated with drugged wine before being finished off with poisonous asps, ‘fed fat and plump with proud Egiptian slime’; the assassin Baglioni dies after drinking from a bottle containing a potion, prepared by the apothecary Brandino Rotsi, and already successfully tested at various strengths upon three condemned criminals; and, of course, Pope Alexander himself is fatally poisoned by mistakenly gulping down the wine with which he had intended to add another couple of Cardinals to his score. The irony of all this is that, early in 1598, Barnes had himself been hired as an assassin and had tried his hand at poisoning. The upshot was a prosecution carried out by no less an eminence than Edward Coke, Attorney General for the Queen, who described Barnes as a traveller in foreign parts where, ‘throughe the corrupcion and wicked disposicion of his owne mynde chieflie framed him self to learne and intertayne the vices 50 Barnes’s handling of Fenton’s translation is carefully documented by McKerrow in his notes. However, McKerrow, annotating Act IV, Scene iv (in which Cesare Borgia lays siege to Forlı` and has a long argument with the heroic defender Caterina Sforza), refers to the very short account by Guicciardini of Cesare Borgia’s attack on Forlı` when he forced Caterina Sforza to yield the town. This occurred in 1501: but the episode shown in the play relates to a siege of Forlı` ten years earlier—which had nothing to do with Cesare, and is described in terms similar to those used in The Divils Charter by Machiavelli, Discorsi, III. 6 (Mazzoni and Casella, 209a–b. Eccles, ‘Barnabe Barnes’, 238, was the first to note this use of Machiavelli. But McKerrow was quite right (note to lines 2385 ff.) when he observed that Cesare’s character in this scene ‘is curiously at variance with that which he exhibits in the rest of the play’. And he is also right to note that ‘the whole scene is somewhat of an excrescence upon the plot’.

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and abuses of other nations’. ‘Excessive drynkinge’ is one of these vices but, far worse, ‘he is growen moste expert and coninge in the mynistringe of poysons’. He then took a mortal dislike to one John Browne, who had refused to share in his ‘unreasonable maner of drynkinge’, and prepared a ‘taynted and venomed’ lemon which would kill ‘either by the eating therof or smellinge thereunto’. Browne unwittingly made a present of the lemon to a friend who, though only sniffing at it once or twice, had since been tormented with ‘exceeding great and strange pains in the head’. The lemon having failed, Barnes then purchased some mercury sublimate, ‘which he knewe to be verye like to suger and yeat a stronge and forcyble poyson’; invited Browne to drink with him; and surreptitiously mixed the poison into a cup of wine. Browne drank some of this, immediately felt very ill and, his suspicions aroused, pressed Barnes to taste the wine for himself: an invitation which, not surprisingly, was at first refused. Eventually Barnes was constrained to drink from the poisoned cup but ‘reserved the most parte . . . in his cheekes, and torninge his back to the said Browne did privelye spytt owte the same wyne again’. The whole episode—including Barnes’s ridiculous attempt at a defence, his flight from justice, and the proof that he was, in fact, acting as a hired assassin—was long ago reconstructed by Mark Eccles, and it is impossible here to do justice to his hilarious expose´ of the poet’s incompetence.51 But Barnes’s farcical futility is relevant to our own enquiries. First, it shows that, in The Divils Charter, he was (like Harvey) ‘compensating in literature what was denied him in life’, and it makes the play seem more ludicrous than ever. Second, it casts a lurid light on his personal morality, so that it is impossible to take his repugnance at the doctrines of the ‘corrupt Florentine Secretarie’ as anything other than the conventional disclaimer of a dedicated self-seeker. Pious platitudes come ill from the pen of a man prepared to serve as a hired agent of death, however maladroitly he may have performed his task. That Barnabe Barnes was a serious reader of Machiavelli is not open to doubt. How far we should take him seriously is quite another matter. 51 Eccles, ‘Barnabe Barnes’, 175–217.

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indirect machiavellism In their published works, neither Harvey nor Barnes—despite their impeccable credentials as students of Machiavelli—contributed anything to the spread of his ideas. There were, however, other writers whose use of Machiavelli was unacknowledged but extensive, and whose books served as concealed conduits enabling the Florentine poison (in varying degrees of concentration) to flow unnoticed into the future.52 One of the more unusual of these tacit Machiavellians was the Ligurian author Lorenzo Capelloni, whose biography of Andrea Doria went through several editions in the 1560s,53 and whose orations were well known to contemporaries, especially via the anthologies compiled by the industrious Francesco Sansovino.54 In 1576 Capelloni published his Ragionamenti varii—a collection of 121 political and military maxims each illustrated by examples drawn principally from sixteenth-century Italian history.55 The book seemed innocent enough and it was accordingly approved by the papal censors: but what these gentlemen failed to recognize was that at least a third of the work was based upon themes arising from, or suggested by, Machiavelli’s forbidden writings. Capelloni’s technique was deceptively straightforward. He would state a maxim as a chapter heading and proceed immediately to historical instances, each of which is dated in the margin. He sometimes uses exemplars familiar to us from Il Principe and the Discorsi, but the greater part of his material is posterior to Machiavelli and, unlike many Machiavellians, Capelloni never cites the master verbatim or refers to him by some easily decipherable circumlocution. Yet many of his themes are obviously stimulated by, if not dependent upon, Machiavelli’s approach to 52 This ‘Machiavelli effect’ is especially noticeable in matters concerning the art of war, which form the subject of my next two chapters. This matter of Machiavelli’s indirect influence is touched upon by Mattei (1969), 256–60. 53 La vita e gesti di Andrea D’Oria di Lorenzo Capelloni (Venice, 1562); other edns. (Venice, 1565 and 1569). 54 See Francesco Sansovino, Diverse orationi volgarmente scritte da molti huomini illustri (Venice, 1561) and other edns. (1562, 1569, 1575, 1584). 55 Ragionamenti varii di Lorenzo Capelloni, sopra essempii: con accidenti misti, seguiti, et occorsi non mai veduti in luce (Genoa, 1576). Mattei (1969), 258–9, comments briefly on this text.

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politics and it is strange that they did not raise at least some doubt in the minds of the censors.56 Capelloni observes, for example, that many men born to lowly estate have risen to greatness and political power by means of arms, while others have achieved the greatest dignities in Christendom by means of letters; and he notes the perils arising from offences given by one magnate to another, especially when the injured party rises to greater power than the offender. He explains that it is dangerous for a ruler to offend a neighbour by seeking aid from a foreign and powerful prince who can overcome both of them, as happened when Ludovico il Moro called Charles VIII of France into Italy. He complains that it is the Italians’ own fault that their land has become subject to foreign princes; and, like Machiavelli, alludes to the dangers of trying to oppose an army which has already proved victorious.57 Bad princes, he says, have committed deeds which seem evil but have proved useful and good for the greatness of the Papal State, as is evidenced by the careers of Alexander VI and his son Cesare Borgia; and he approves of cunning, especially when it is acute and used at an appropriate time. Like Machiavelli he condemns the ‘middle way’; asserts that a land is best defended by men, not by fortress walls, however great these may be (ch. 50); and praises the art of simulation, especially in matters of arms and warfare (ch. 42). It is true that he regards money as the nerve of war—something specifically rejected by Machiavelli—but he agrees on several other issues: that a people’s natural desire to maintain their liberty makes them prompt and courageous in defending themselves against attack; that a military enterprise is doomed if an army has too many commanders; that it is a mistake to defend mountain passes against an invading army, as the Italians found to their cost in 1515 when trying to prevent Franc¸ois Ier from crossing the Alps; and that great swiftness [la prestezza] is something to be generally admired, and especially in military actions (chs. 59, 60). With regard to fortresses, 56 But cf. below, Epilogue, for the much more extraordinary licence given to Picchi’s Avvertimenti politici (1641). 57 Ragionamenti varii di Lorenzo Capelloni, I. 10. Further references are given in the text.

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Capelloni is as sceptical as Machiavelli, declaring that, unless one also has an army in the field to oppose the enemy, such strongholds are not as advantageous as those who build them promise (ch. 81). He is also doubtful about the extent to which princes should keep their promises. Sometimes circumstances make them regret such good faith; and certainly it is not to be credited that a prince who has voluntarily broken a truce will keep a promise extorted by necessity (chs. 90, 100). The entire volume of Ragionamenti is characterized by its lack of any theoretical or speculative comment. The author’s personal views are demonstrated tangentially rather than directly; and his cynicism is implicit rather than explicit. Everything reads as flat reportage, and the overall impression is of a moral neutrality. Yet this somewhat subdued production was sufficiently well received to warrant two further Italian editions and two editions of a French translation.58 Such modest popularity was as nothing, though, in comparison with that enjoyed by another partially crypto-Machiavellian work, De la Sagesse (1601), by Pierre Charron, friend, disciple, and systematizer of Montaigne the unsystematizable. Like Machiavelli, Charron aroused admiration, contempt, fury, and condemnation (in 1605 he, too, was awarded the posthumous accolade of inclusion in the Index of Prohibited Books), but by the end of the century De la Sagesse had been through at least fifteen Frenchlanguage editions and seven editions of Samson Lennard’s English translation.59 It would be pointless here to attempt any critical evaluation of a work which now seems so intellectually alien, with its divisions and subdivisions, uncommitted pros and contras—often within the space of a single short chapter—and its selfconfessedly derivative, but anonymous, amassing of other writers’ 58 Ragionamenti . . . sopra varii essempii civili & militari (Milan, 1610); Varii ragionamenti historici e politici (Milan, 1623). The French translations by Pierre de Larivey: Les divers discours de Laurent Capelloni sur plusieurs exemples et accidens, meslez, suivis et advenus (Troyes, 1595); another edn., Livres et divers discours d’estat. Traduict d’Italien en Franc¸ois (Orle´ans, 1622). 59 This is a goodly number: but it is salutary to remember that it is still only about a third of the total of unadulterated issues of Machiavelli’s own works in the same period. In addition to Lennard’s translation, there was another English version by George Stanhope in 1697.

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words, phrases, and sentences.60 A case has been made for Charron’s method and even for his originality.61 But it is difficult, when comparing his work with the collections of aphorisms popular at the time, not to see it simply as another such agglomeration, though without even the saving grace of an index or an apparatus precisely identifying the various authors pillaged. Only a relatively minor proportion of the work concerns practical politics, and here, for once, Charron acknowledges a debt: ‘this matter is excellently handled by Lipsius, according as he thought good: the marrow of his booke is heere: I have not taken, nor wholly followed his method, nor his order . . . I have likewise left somewhat of his, and added something of my owne, and other mens’.62 What concerns us is that one of those other men proves to have been Machiavelli, whose name, however, appears only once when Charron, writing about conspiracies, tries to distance himself from the tainted author: ‘Machiavell setteth downe at large, how a man should frame and order, and conduct a conspiracie; wee, how it may be broken, hindered, prevented’ (p. 407). In Book 3 of De la Sagesse, the first four chapters are devoted to various aspects of political prudence, and it is here—especially in his discussion of justice—that Charron’s reading of Machiavelli (though concealed) is most evident, and his morality (though paraded) is most dubious. He introduces the subject by piously 60 There is a considerable literature on Charron but, for some orientation, see Rene´e Kogel, Pierre Charron (Geneva, 1972); Vittorio Dini and Domenico Taranto (eds.), La saggezza moderna: temi e problemi dell’opera di Pierre Charron (Naples and Rome, 1987); Michel Adam, E´tudes sur Pierre Charron (Bordeaux, 1991). Less pertinent than one might hope are Jean Dagens, ‘Le Machiave´lisme de Pierre Charron’, in Studies aangeboden ann Prof. Ge´rard Brom (Utrecht, 1962), 56–64; and Anna Maria Battista, Alle origini del pensiero politico libertino: Montaigne e Charron (Milan, 1966). 61 For a concise, informative, but too sympathetic account of this method, see Jean Lafond, ‘Le Centon et son usage dans la litte´rature morale et politique’, in Jean Lafond and Andre´ Stegmann (eds.), L’Automne de la Renaissance 1580–1630 (Paris, 1981), 117–28. 62 Of Wisdome (1612), 354. Further references are given in the text. Years later, Pierre Le Moyne, De l’art de regner (Paris, 1665), sig. oˆ.1v, dismissed Lipsius’s work as ‘un ouvrage de marquetrie’ composed of sentences from Greek and Latin authors which are held together only by tiny threads of particles (in the grammatical sense)—‘qui se tiennent les unes aux autres, que par les filets des particules’.

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stressing that rulers must ignore such worldly advice as the axiom ‘all is good and just that serveth their turnes’, and that they must always remember that those who have most power to break the law should take the most pains to observe it. This sounds righteous enough, except that Charron goes on to say that the justice, virtue, and probity of a sovereign ‘goeth after another maner than that of private men’ because his immense responsibilities give him greater licence: ‘for which cause it is fit to march with a pase, which seemeth to others uneasie and irregular, but yet is necessariee and lawfull for him’. He must sometimes step away from the path of virtue and, mingling prudence with justice, ‘cover himself with the skin of the Lion, if that of the Foxe serve not the turne’. Of course, quibbles Charron, the ruler should only do this on three conditions: when it is necessary for the good of the state, since ‘to procure the good of the Common-weale is but to do his dutie’; for defence and not offence; and to shield himself from deceits and wicked enterprises. It is lawful by ‘subtiltie to prevent subtiltie, and among foxes to counterfet the foxe’, and important to remember that ‘alwaies to deale simplie and plainly with such people, and to follow the streight line of pure reason and equitie, were many times to betray the State, and to undo it’ (pp. 357–8). Charron’s technique of strategic vacillation is even more exposed when he moves on to the ‘discretion’ with which a ruler has to employ his ruses. It is never permissable to abandon virtue and honour and follow vice and dishonesty, for there is no middle way between these two extremes: ‘And therefore away with all injustice, treacherie, treason, and disloyaltie’ (p. 359). So indignant is Charron at this point that he curses the doctrine of those who would give rulers free rein in all things: but he promptly qualifies this by explaining that it is sometimes necessary that the ruler should ‘mix profit with honestie, and that he enter into composition with both’. He should never turn his back on honesty, ‘but yet sometimes go about and coast it, employing therein his skill and cunning, which is good, honest and lawfull’. This is slippery stuff, and more is to follow for, when Charron now proceeds to the issue of dissimulation, he says that it is vicious in private persons, but ‘very necessarie in Princes, who otherwise could not know how to reigne, or well to commaund’. Indeed, not only must they

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frequently dissemble in war with their enemies but they must also dissemble in peace with their subjects—although, Charron adds a quantitive moral qualification that, in the latter case, it should be ‘more sparinglie’. Still the fact remains that, in his view, simple and open men are not really fit for command and frequently betray both themselves and their state: But yet he [the ruler] must play this parte with arte and dexteritie, and to the purpose, neither so openly nor so simplie as that it may be discerned. For to what purpose doest thou hide and cover thy selfe, if a man may see thee obliquely or sideways? Wilie deceipts and cunning subtilties, are no more deceits and subtilties when they are knowne and vented out. A Prince then the better to cover his arte, must make profession of loving simplicitie, must make much of free and open minded men, as being enemies to dissimulation; and in matters of lesse importance he must proceed openly, to the end he may be taken for such as he semeth. (p. 360)

Various examples of different types of ‘close and covert meanes’, equivocations, and subtleties (all of which have been approved by many great and wise men) are then noted by Charron, who argues that, in times of necessity and danger to the state, there is little or no fault in employing such tricks. None the less, a doubt remains about other situations ‘because they have a smell of much injustice in them’; and Charron explains that he has chosen the word ‘much’ rather than ‘wholly’ because, mingled with their injustice, are ‘some grains of justice’. The difficulty is that, while anything wholly unjust is reproved by everybody—even by the wicked ‘at leastwise in word and shew, if not in earnest and deede’—mingled actions are more problematic. There are so many reasons and authorities on one side and the other ‘that a man hardly knoweth how to resolve himselfe’. All the procedures described by Charron, together with his comments on them, reveal a political morality of egregious pliancy. For example, he recommends capital punishment, without form of justice, for somebody who menaces the state and deserves death but who cannot ‘without trouble and danger be enterprised and repressed by an ordinarie course’. In such an action nothing is violated but the form: ‘and the prince’, demands Charron rhetorically, ‘is he not above formes?’ (p. 362). Everything seems in the

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end to depend on whether dirty deeds ‘succeed well and happily’, and on how dangerous the issues are for, ‘in confused and desperate affaires a prince must not follow that which may be well spoken of, but that which is necessary to be executed’. On the other hand, princes who find themselves obliged to employ stratagems should do so with great ‘unwillingnesse and griefe of mind, acknowledging that it is an infelicity and a disfavour from heaven’. Charron concludes his discussion of the virtue of justice by explaining that the reason for his having dwelt so long on the issue is because it poses so many doubts and difficulties (p. 363). The reason for my dwelling on it is because it lays bare the way in which Charron flirts with Machiavellian naughtiness, twisting and turning, qualifying and defining, and mingling the constraints of necessity with the restraints of conventional morality. A similar, though less laboured, moralization of Machiavelli is evident elsewhere in these chapters of De la Sagesse. Discussing liberality, for example, Charron is careful to stress the dangers that accrue when it is practised without measure, and he argues that pleasing things should be done little by little, ‘that a man may have time to taste them’, whereas unpleasant and cruel deeds should be executed speedily. On the issue of raising revenue, he cites with approval the axiom ‘that all is just that is necessarie’; and, when considering armed power, he observes that it is an error to believe that one can long govern a state without arms, for ‘there is never any suretie betweene the weake and the strong’. Severity, too, is ‘better, more wholsome, assured, durable, than common lenitie’. The people are more moved to obedience by force and fear of punishment than by mildness which ‘ingendreth contempt’ although, once again, this severity must be tempered with some moderation ‘to the end that the rigour towards a few might hold the whole world in fear’ (pp. 366, 373, 376, 380–1). Charron’s uneasy union of ethics and raison d’e´tat reached something of a climax in Claude Boitet’s Le Prince des Princes (1632)—if one may use so exciting a word for so somniferous a production. Boitet’s purpose is to explicate the art of ruling, and to this end he devotes the seventeen chapters of his Book 1 to all the various skills and studies necessary to form a good prince: languages, sciences, history, philosophy, cosmography, and so on,

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culminating in the military art. Book 2 is largely concerned with ‘la Politique’, and the first chapter sets out the tremendous complexities of political life, how the people are unpredictable and fickle, and how the state is like a ship exposed to tempests. However, Boitet proposes to provide some guidelines and he follows Gentillet’s tripartite division of ‘le conseil d’un Prince, l’estat de la religion, et la police tant civile que militaire’.63 Especially interesting is a chapter entitled ‘Que les raisons d’estat ne repugnent point a` la Religion’ which explains that, although there are some authorities who hold that religion is contrary to reason of state, their opinion arises from a false impression in which religion is seen rather as a means to hold people in obedience than to instruct them in the service of God. It is not necessary here, says Boitet, to establish the maxims of Machiavelli. His impiety does not consider Heaven at all, ‘but makes religion serve the state which is awarded the crown, to the prejudice of religion which is the mother of piety and the daughter of God’.64 Boitet then considers the case of the ‘Politique’, first putting the argument that it is impossible to retain the purity of religion in affairs of state, and then refuting it. Is the Prince exempt from the law? No, answers Boitet. Is the love of his subjects more advantageous to the Prince than cruelty? Yes, but there should nevertheless be a judicious admixture of fear. Should one execute ‘coups d’estat’, and should stratagems be used? Here, says Boitet, we have the ‘masterpiece of the Politique and the quintessence of his maxims’; this is a ‘spring which moves a great machine, and the key which opens and shuts the outcome of a long process’.65 Like Charron, Boitet is very equivocal on this point but eventually accepts that stratagems may be employed. And what of outright 63 Claude Boitet, Le Prince des Princes, ou l’art de regner, contenant son instruction aux sciences & a` la politique. Contre les Orateurs de ce temps (Paris, 1632). On Boitet’s relationship to Gentillet, see above, Ch. 9. 64 Boitet, Le Prince des Princes, 284: ‘Il ne faut pas icy establir les maximes de Machiavel, son impiete´ ne regarde point le Ciel, elle fait servir la religion, a` l’Estat, et luy donne la Couronne au prejudice de celle qui est la mere de la piete´ et la fille de Dieu.’ 65 Ibid. 313: ‘C’est icy un chef-d’oeuvre de la Politique et la quintessence de ses maximes: c’est un ressort qui faict mouvoir une grande machine, et la clef qui ouvre et qui ferme des consequences d’une longue suite.’

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fraud and trickery in a state? Here again Boitet vacillates between both sides of the argument. Just as ‘coups d’estat’ are permitted for reasons of security, and stratagems are glorious in a military commander, so one may argue that it is not forbidden to use fraud against enemies: ‘reason must here hold the balance, and conscience must regulate actions’.66 As with Charron, the issue resolves itself into a question of political imperatives. Just as it is not forbidden to kill in order to save one’s life, so one may say that it is permitted in the extremities of necessity to equivocate the rules of virtue for the sake of the state and to the prejudice of its enemies. There is no need for further citation. Le Prince des Princes has no intrinsic merit, but it testifies to the pervasive image of the Machiavel moralise´ created by Charron. Despite all the quibbling and posturing morality, Machiavelli still remains recognizable: and that, in its way, is a triumph. But it is still a relief to turn from such feebleness to a reader of Machiavelli who, while never naming his master, really knew what Il Principe and the Discorsi were about and was not afraid to use them to justify substantive political action of the utmost severity.

a tacit disciple of machiavelli Despite Machiavelli’s popularity in the sixteenth century, and despite the number of writers who referred to his works, surprisingly few treatises used his writings in order to address specific political issues; and it is, perhaps, even more surprising that, of these, one should have been by a Welshman and two by Englishmen. William Thomas and George Rainsford have been discussed in an earlier chapter. They wrote in the middle decades of the century and, in both cases, their Machiavellian works remained in manuscript and (with the possible exception of the two rulers for 66 Ibid. 317: ‘Comme les coups d’estat sont permis pour s’asseurer, comme les stratagemes sont glorieux a` un Capitaine, de mesme on pourroit dire qu’il n’est pas defendu d’employer la fraude contre ses ennemis. La raison doit tenir icy la balance, la conscience doit regler ses actions.’

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whom they were intended) unknown to their contemporaries.67 But the third of these British students of Machiavelli committed himself to print, and on a subject of considerable concern to Elizabethan Englishmen. In 1594, Joseph Barnes, Printer to the University of Oxford, published Solon his follie, or a politique Discourse touching the Reformation of common-weales conquered, declined or corrupted. It is the only surviving book by Richard Beacon, a lawyer who had been appointed the Queen’s Attorney for the province of Munster in 1586 but surrendered the office in December 1591 after five years of disagreement, recrimination, and abuse.68 Released from burdensome duties, he brooded over his nasty experiences and, heavily influenced by a close study of Machiavelli, came to a number of dire conclusions concerning the measures necessary to reduce Ireland to peace, which he set forth in 114 violent and energetically argued pages.69 67 It seems likely that Thomas’s writings did, at least, find their way into Edward VI’s hands; there is nothing to show that Philip II even glanced at Rainsford’s effusions. 68 This section on Beacon is based upon my article ‘A Machiavellian Solution to the Irish Problem: Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie (1594)’, in Edward Chaney and Peter Mack (eds.), England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp (Woodbridge, 1990), 153–64, where full annotation, including a table listing Beacon’s use of Machiavellian material, may be found. Since the appearance of that article, Solon his follie has been edited, with an introduction and notes, by Clare Carroll and Vincent Carey (Binghamton, NY, 1996). The editors have identified some of the ‘ancient’ characters with Beacon’s contemporaries, and have sketched in the political background. But they do not pursue (nor, in my view, give adequate weight to) Beacon’s Machiavellism. 69 It is not surprising that the Irish problem aroused some Machiavellian resonances in the minds of some of those Elizabethans who were rash enough to suggest solutions to it. Naturally, the idea of establishing colonies was in the forefront of their thoughts and so, too, was a tendency towards political extremism. In a treatise written about 1588–9, but which remained unpublished for 300 years, Sir William Herbert advocated the establishing of large, well-fortified, strictly regulated colonies on the Roman model, and recommended that, should these fail, the indigenous population should be exterminated: and he cites Machiavelli (‘Acutissime et perspicacissime Italus’) to this effect. See Herbert’s Croftus, sive De Hibernia liber, ed. W. E. Buckley (Roxburghe Club, 1887), 35, 41; and D. B. Quinn, ‘Renaissance Influences in English Colonization’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 26 (1976), 73–94 at 84–5. Quinn also drew attention to similarly Machiavellian views expressed by Matthew Sutcliffe in his The practice, proceedings, and lawes of armes (1595). More famous than these is Edmund Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland, written about 1595 but not

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The treatise is cast in the form of a dialogue set in ancient Greece, where Solon and his friend Epimenides discuss the problems faced by Athens in its relations with the turbulent subject state Salamina. Athens is, in fact, England; and Salamina is Ireland—peopled by ancients sporting such classical names as O’Neale, O’Brian, O’Rourke, FitzGerald, and Desmond. But the text is far more complicated than this simple allegory might suggest. A special, spicy flavour is imparted to Solon by Beacon’s political philosophy, for all his ideas concerning the difficulties faced by any state seeking to absorb a neighbour are based upon Machiavelli’s Discorsi and, to a much slighter extent, Il Principe, both of which he quotes and paraphrases from Latin versions. The result is a strange, multi-tiered, historical structure. First there are the Greek examples suggested by the setting of the dialogue itself: and these are based principally upon Plutarch’s Lives in North’s translation, which had been published in 1579. Then there are illustrations drawn from Roman history: again often derived from North’s Plutarch, but considerably augmented by material taken from Machiavelli’s observations on Livy and, occasionally, from Livy himself. Thirdly, there are a number of biblical references which occur when Beacon discusses the portents and predictions of imminent political doom. However, all these ancients are balanced by modern parallels consisting principally of Italian material from Machiavelli, with a few additions from Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia as Englished by Fenton in 1579. There are, too, several clusters of material taken from Bodin’s Re´publique in one of its available Latin translations. And finally—equal in bulk and importance to Machiavelli—there is the most modern layer of evidence, provided by detailed allusion to Irish affairs based on Beacon’s own knowledge of recent history and of the relevant Tudor legislation. The whole mixture is a good, if unconscious, application of Machiavelli’s own method—that is a systematic comparison of what the author has read and what he has experienced—though published until 1633. Machiavellian influences in this work are clear, though less striking than in Solon, and there is one direct reference to Machiavelli by name. For a discussion of Spenser, Machiavelli, and Ireland, see Gasquet (1974), 343–53. None of these authors approach Beacon’s detailed knowledge of Machiavelli.

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the interplay of Greeks, Romans, Italians, and Irish sometimes stretches Beacon’s ingenuity to breaking point, and beyond. In places the text becomes congested and surreal. We read, for example, of the dangers which arose for Athens when it constituted Thomas FitzGerald Lieutenant of Salamina and he ‘did eftsoons revile that famous citie of Athens, and his lawfull soveraign’; moved rebellions against them; addressed letters to the ‘Bishop of Rome, & the Emperour, for the invading of Salamina’; and, amongst many others, put to death the Archbishop of Dublin, the ‘primate of Salamina’. The heaping up of examples sometimes results in bewildering juxtapositions as, for instance, when Beacon’s countrymen are exhorted, as Athenians: let us with the noble Romaines refuse the money of Spurius Cassius, Ne libertatem vendere ea pretio videamur; let us not give credit to his flattering orators the Jesuits, which bribed by Polycarphon laboure the destruction of Athens; let us not be infamous with the Neapolitanes for unconstancie; let us not be led this day to affect the French, and tomorrow with a new insinuation of Ferdinando. (Solon, 25, 99)

Historical allegory of this kind is neither orderly nor consistent although, paradoxically, confusion is minimized by Beacon’s other literary weaknesses. Despite several attempts at defining his terms, and at organizing his material according to these divisions, Beacon cannot avoid repeating himself. Moreover, he never succeeds in differentiating between his two protagonists, who remain throughout mere mouthpieces for his own opinions. Thus, despite its anachronisms—or rather its anarchochronisms—the argument of Solon his follie remains clear, and Beacon’s extreme views on how to deal with Ireland emerge forcefully and unambiguously. His purpose is to consider how to reform subject states which have become corrupt; and he defines the reformation of a commonweal as ‘nothing else but a happy restitution unto his first perfection’. Such a process may be nothing more than the correction of ‘particular mischiefs and inconveniences’, which can be accomplished by ‘profitable lawes’, properly administered and executed. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to undertake a thorough reformation of the whole body politic, its ancient laws, customs, and government: and this requires sterner measures.

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There are many different kinds of state but, in general, those which had ‘their first institution and foundation good’ may—provided that they are not too corrupt—not only be restored to their first perfection by wise legislation, but may even have their happy condition prolonged and augmented. Such was the commonwealth of Rome, ‘whose first institution and foundation was so well laid by Romulus and Numa’ (p. 67). On the other hand, there are commonwealths so declined from their first institution that it is no longer possible to reform them simply by legislation. Even Rome itself eventually sank into this pitiable condition which is, in fact, the present state of Ireland: and the latter can no more be reformed by the laws against captainship, coynye and livery, ‘or any other new lawe whatsoever’ than could Rome by the law ‘Sumptuari ambitus and such like’. In such circumstances, a ‘subtile writer’—and here Beacon is referring to Machiavelli—when discussing general and absolute reformation, had said that he ‘which shall attempt the same, must alter and chaunge all the ancient lawes and customes’ (pp. 19–20).70 And this, says Solon, evidently expressing Beacon’s strong personal conviction, ‘we there sometimes imployed in that service, were daily taught, rather by experience then by any learned or deep discourse that may be made therof ’ (pp. 20–1). Beacon acknowledges that it may sometimes be useful to retain a shadow of former laws and customs—as the Romans had done after the expulsion of their kings—for it persuades people that nothing substantial has been taken away or diminished. None the less, a thoroughgoing procedure is more relevant to present needs; and Ireland requires ‘an universal reformation’ along the lines pursued by King David—an allusion which Beacon derives from Machiavelli, not the Scriptures. Generally, politicians err in the handling of subject peoples by instituting only a partial reformation; and Beacon exemplifies this by the incompetence of the Florentines when suppressing the rebellion of Arezzo. They had dismissed some of the enemy leaders and banished others: but they neither resumed possession of the lands, nor destroyed the principal city; and thus they lost the opportunity of confirming their authority. Such half-hearted measures ‘hath never as yet beene 70 Cf. Discorsi, I. 18.

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founde happy and prosperous’. Yet it is precisely this feeble middle course which has been consistently pursued in Ireland where it has, just as consistently, failed (pp. 47–9).71 For Beacon, as for Machiavelli, corruption arises largely through the development of factions and internal discord which—again like Machiavelli—he believes to be of two kinds. On the one hand, once the Romans had degenerated through ‘peace, rest and security’, they could never ‘give an end unto their contentions, then raised for profitte and gaine’. This was the ‘final declination, not ad sanitatem but ad interitum’; and then there was only one possible solution— that is a ‘succession of severe magistrates’. Just as wild olive and fig trees can be trained, by a skilful husbandman, to become fruitful, so can a commonweal—‘overgrowne with a generall corruption of manners, and thereby become savage, barbarous, and barren’—be made obedient and profitable ‘by the continuall pruning and addressing of a skilful magistrate’ (pp. 52–3).72 In conditions of extreme political corruption, mild courses of government are futile and, as an instance of this, Beacon cites one of Machiavelli’s favourite targets, Piero Soderini, whose mildness and patience had remained profitable as long as the times themselves continued gentle. However, once an iron age had set in, ‘the same then required a greater severity than could be found in Peter Soderin’, who could not adapt his nature to suit the times, so that ‘he did not only overthrow himself, but did also perish his whole countrie’ (pp. 59–60).73 Machiavelli had stressed that, in dire circumstances, politicians must be ready to use both fraud and force. And Beacon agrees. Indeed, he makes Solon point out that the use of ‘faire promises and sweete wordes’ is, in the case of a public magistrate, ‘rightlie tearmed pollicie, but in private persons the same is not unjustly condemned by the name of deceite’. Whereupon, Epimenides promptly rejoins: ‘we have remembred the same, not as condemners, but as approvers of the fact, and therefore needelesse you have justified yourselfe therein’ (p. 12). The value of force for the politician is equally obvious. Whenever a thorough going reformation of a state is under way, says 71 Cf. Discorsi, I. 25, 26; II. 23. 73 Cf. ibid., III. 3, 30.

72 Cf. ibid., I. 4, 37; II. 3; III. 1, 22.

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Beacon, there will always be people plotting the overthrow of the ‘great and profitable actions’ of those attempting to put it into practice, and the problem that this poses is elucidated by one of Machiavelli’s most characteristic arguments—the uselessness of an unarmed prophet. Even Moses, before he could establish the laws delivered to him by God, ‘founde it necessarie, with forces to remove such, as being pricked forwarde with envie, did oppose themselves against his intended reformation’. By contrast, Savonarola, who lacked sufficient forces, ‘was soone oppressed by the envie of others, and fayled of his intended reformation, as it may appeare by his sermons, Contra sapientes huius mundi’ (p. 41).74 Beacon also cites Lycurgus as a leader who nearly came to grief, and was lucky to lose nothing more than one eye, through contending with persuasion rather than with force; and Soderini again appears as someone who tried to overcome his enemies by deploying benefits, justice, and honesty, ‘forgetting that which now is everie where in experience’—that such methods can never reconcile the envious and malicious (p. 42).75 Force may be required to effect any kind of political reformation: but it is absolutely essential when such reformation is attempted in a state ‘gained by the sword and conquered, as also corrupted in manners’—‘all which Salamina may well witness unto the worlde’. The governors of Munster had made every effort to proclaim the laws against coynye, livery, and other extortions; and the benefits which would have accrued from all this were patent. Yet it was of no avail; and Warham St Leger, then provincial governor, had to use his forces to suppress ‘the Butlers and Garoldines, which then on every side did arise’. It was not that England lacked the requisite ‘magistrates of rare and excellent virtues’, capable of carrying out effective campaigns in ‘difficult warres’. The weakness had been elsewhere. Good administrators are not sufficient. They must have the support of their government at home, and they must not be passed over the moment a crisis has ended. This was the great error of the 74 There is a curious discrepancy between this accurate Latin rendition of Machiavelli’s original Italian and the version by Stupanus—which otherwise appears to be Beacon’s source. See my ‘Machiavellian Solution’, 158 n. 9. 75 Cf. Discorsi, III. 4, 30.

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Florentines who, abandoning Antonio Giacomini as soon as they thought that they could do without him against the Pisans, thereby blundered into humiliation. Similarly, in Beacon’s opinion, England had lost an opportunity in the time of Lord Gray, but it now has another chance by committing the reformation of Ireland into the hands of Sir William Russell: ‘as unto another Jacomine, by whose rare skill and knowledge in militarie discipline the Pisans have and will be forced at the last to obey the Florentines’ (p. 44).76 Beacon disapproves of the way England has treated its representatives in Ireland: and it is this critical attitude towards government policy which prompts him to wrap up his ideas in the form of a dialogue where one of the protagonists is a character famous for uttering warlike counsel under cover of madness. Indeed, Beacon applies this fiction to himself in his dedication to Queen Elizabeth, when he apologizes for the inadequacy of his presentation of such weighty matters, and expresses the hope that her ‘accustomed clemency will impute this to Solon his folie and lunacie, which now for his boldnes craveth pardon, rather then commendation’ (sig. }.4v). There are many pitfalls in the governing of a subject state, and any one of them may result in ruin. Several have bedevilled the peace and prosperity of Ireland, which is especially difficult to govern because it has different laws, customs, religion, and language, all of which promote ‘disobedience and savage life’. The local nobility, for example, had been allowed to increase in power until they became a law unto themselves, rebelling against their sovereign and oppressing the commonalty (pp. 75–9). Equally disastrous had been the faulty execution of good laws. Greedy self-interested officials, ‘more studious with Savonarola in making profitable lawes, then faithfull observers thereof ’, had brought English government into disrepute.77 Such men could never persuade the multitude to accept their rule and remain quiet and contented. Beacon debates these problems in purely Machiavellian terms, arguing in favour both of a large number of 76 Cf. Discorsi, III. 16. 77 It is amusing to note that Beacon was himself accused of extortionate attempts to fill his own ‘pilling’ purse and of appointing as constables throughout the country men who had been thieves, rebels, and murderers, ‘such as for the most part as if one rake hell, he shall scarce find worse’. See Cal. S.P. Ireland; 1588–92, no. 78.

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independent magistrates and of gaining the support of the multitude against the old nobility whose obedience is neither ‘readily wonne nor so easily kept’ (pp. 79–81).78 It is also important that loyal subjects be defended against enemies and rebels, and that they are adequately rewarded for service to the state, because failure to take heed of merit is often the cause of discontent. This had been one of the reasons for the defeat of the French in Italy, as Epimenides points out in choice phrases culled from Guicciardini: though elsewhere, under the influence of Machiavelli (Il Principe, 3), Beacon is less enthusiastic about advancing subject people to offices and dignities. Another reason for dangerous discontent—also derived from Guicciardini—is the depredation practised by troops. This time, though, Beacon finds the answers in the writings of Jean Bodin (whose name, like those of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, is never mentioned) and in the ‘militarie workes’ of another ‘learned and skilfull writer’ who is identified as ‘Dr Sutclief ’—both of whom recommend strict discipline and regular pay (pp. 85–91).79 Finally, Beacon returns to the fundamental problem, in words which have the ring of unhappy experience: ‘If Princes, Kings, and States, shall not publikely grace, countenaunce, and support all governoures and Magistrates by them placed for reformation of any province or nation during the time of their governement, the subjects shal take thereby occasion of rebelling.’ Worse still, if the magistrates and officers are not given support, the whole business of reformation must fail, and the ‘common-weale it selfe may not long continue’ (pp. 91–2). Beacon’s principal suggestions for an effective English policy in Ireland are gathered together in his final chapter, where he wields scissors and paste with reckless bravura.80 There are eight techniques to be employed, the first of which—good and profitable laws strictly applied by a governor with dictatorial authority—comes from Machiavelli’s Discorsi; while the second, readiness for war, is adapted from Plutarch’s life of Themistocles. The third and 78 Cf. Discorsi, I. 40, 45, 49; Il Principe, 19. 79 Solon, 85–91. Cf. Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, II. iv; tr. Fenton (1579), 89; Bodin, De republica (1586), 657, 669–70; Matthew Sutcliffe, The practise, proceedings, and lawes of armes (1593), ch. 2, pp. 16–28. 80 For this medley of sources, see my ‘Machiavellian Solution’, 161.

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fourth—confederations and subjects well trained in military discipline (not noticeably different from the second)—again come from the Discorsi. The fifth, the securing of strongholds, is illustrated with an example from Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia; and the sixth, the taking of hostages in the fashion of Porsenna, could come from either Plutarch or Livy. The seventh is to disarm the natives: and here Beacon picks out relevant passages from Il Principe and the Discorsi. He then develops a parenthetical argument concerning the dangers of encouraging factions as a means of controlling subject peoples— which he illustrates from Guicciardini, Machiavelli’s Discorsi, and Irish experience—before moving on to his last and most important suggestion. Of all policies, the establishing of colonies is, in Beacon’s opinion, ‘the most beneficiall for containing of a nation conquered in their duty and obedience’. And here (apart from a short, but pregnant, paraphrase of Machiavelli’s view that colonies are an economical way of holding subject states, and a passing reference to Pericles, drawn from Plutarch) Beacon leans heavily on his knowledge of Ireland and upon generous citation from an anonymous ‘learned writer’ and from a ‘man of great understanding’, both of whom, in fact, prove to be Jean Bodin. Yet, even here, an extra convolution is provided, unconsciously, by the fact that Bodin’s views on the immense superiority of colonies over garrisons are, themselves, ultimately derived from Machiavelli. All of this may help towards the ‘happy restitution’ of a declined commonwealth: and by ‘happy’, says Epimenides, he means when it has been accomplished without bloodshed, tyranny, or cruelty. However, at this point, he gives a Machiavellian twist to a Ciceronian tail. Where ‘sanandi medicina may not prevaile’, he says, ‘there execandi is rightly used’ (p. 113).81 And the reader is left in no doubt that, for Beacon, Ireland is a case not for curative pills, potions, and ointments, but for brutal and extensive amputation.82 81 Solon, 113; Cf. Cicero, Letters to Atticus, II. 1: ‘tamen non minus esset probanda medicina, quae sanaret vitiosas partes rei publicae, quam quae exsecaret’. 82 For more surgical metaphors in relation to Irish affairs, see the unpublished treatise The discoverye and Recoverye of Ireland with the Authors Apologye by that tumultuous personality, Thomas Lee—British Library, Add. MS 33743, especially fos. 52 ff.

14 Writers on the Art of War The war epidemic which afflicted Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was accompanied by a marked increase in the publication of military books—ranging from up-to-date, practical, technical manuals to treatises on classical military institutions and procedures—and it is remarkable that, despite all the changes in organization, weaponry, and fortification since Machiavelli’s time, the military observations which filled his works continued to provide nourishment for many authors concerned with the art of war. All his books remained available; and intermediary sources, too, such as Fourquevaux’s Instructions sur le faict de la guerre and Diego de Salazar’s Tratado de re militari, were still being reprinted in the closing decades of the sixteenth century, as were the classical sources which formed the basis of Machiavelli’s thinking.1 Before addressing the hotchpotch of ideas which resulted from all this, it will be useful in this chapter to consider a few writers—a priest, two soldiers, and a scholar—who, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, clearly knew Machiavelli’s writings at first hand and took him seriously as a military authority.

a priest Machiavelli’s trenchancy and pugnacity inspired many strange responses: Nifo’s Aristotelized Il Principe; Salazar’s hispanicized, and 1 The fourth, and last, French edition of Fourquevaux’s Instructions was published in Paris, under the title Discipline militaire, in 1592; an English translation had appeared in 1589; and a German translation was published in Mo¨mpelgard in 1594. Diego de Salazar’s Tratado de re militari was reprinted in Brussels in 1590.

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Fourquevaux’s gallicized, Arte della guerra; Beacon’s hibernicized Il Principe and Discorsi; and (a treat reserved for the end of this book) even an alphabetized Il Principe. But one of the most futile displays of genuine Machiavellian knowledge appeared early in 1610 when the Parisian printer Jean de la Haye issued an Italian text, entitled Aforismi politici e militari, compiled by a certain Fra Matteo Baccellini, who dedicated it, on 1 January, to ‘Sigismondo Miscovschi Marchese de Mirova e gran Marisciale del Regno di Polonia’.2 In his dedicatory letter to Miskovski, Baccellini explains how he had spent many months, ‘years perhaps’, reducing into aphorisms and propositions the art of war and military discipline, written in times past by a ‘common writer’ in the form of a dialogue which, not unjustly, Baccellini regards as a ‘very tedious mode’.3 The common writer is, of course, Machiavelli; the tedious dialogue is the Arte della guerra; and Baccellini has a good deal more to say about this source in the letter ‘Ai Cortesi Lettori’ which follows the dedication. The argument of that dialogue, Baccellini assures his readers, had been treated with such judgement and carried out with so many examples from the ancients, ‘whom I esteem’, that no other writer has up to now reached this level and few will attain to it in the future. Nor is this merely a personal view, because ‘infinite fine spirits who, both by reading books and by practical experience, merit more than moderate praise, have been of this opinion before me’. Outstanding among these admirers is no less a figure than the Emperor Charles V who, ‘the first time that the book was presented to him, had it translated into his native tongue, and always kept it by his bedside at night’.4 This garbled account of Charles V’s 2 Matteo Baccellini, Aforismi politici e militari ne’ quali si mostra come il Principe, e la Republica s’ha` da governare con la militia. E l’arte di creare un essercito, d’armarlo, essercitarlo, alloggiarlo, e condurlo alla giornata. Il modo di edificare Terre, e Fortezze, come si ponno espugnare, e difendere nuovamente posti in luce (Paris, 1610). I have not located a copy of this work in the United Kingdom and I must thank the Biblioteca della Fondazione Luigi Firpo, Centro di studi sul pensiero politico, in Turin for supplying a microfilm of their copy, and my Torinese friend Giorgio Dondi for arranging this and for sending me the microfilm. 3 Aforismi, sig. a˜.2r–v: ‘La onde havendo io in molti mesi, e forse anni, ridotta in Aforismi, & in Propositioni l’arte della guerra, e della disciplina militare, scritta gia` in forma di Dialogo, foggia assai tediosa, da un volgare scrittore’. 4 Ibid., sig. a˜.5: ‘Ne` sono io di si fatto patere autore, perche infiniti belli ingegni, li quali, e per lettura di libri, e per pratica de cose, meritano lode piu`

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enthusiasm for Machiavelli mixes tradition and fact, and gets them both wrong. Charles V had certainly declared an interest in the Discorsi and may have initiated the Spanish translation by Otevanti. He is also said, by Francesco Sansovino, not only to have admired Il Principe as well as the Discorsi and caused them to be translated into his own language, but also to have admired Polybius for ‘the rules of warfare’. Baccellini may simply have forgotten about Polybius and assumed that the book of military rules was Machiavelli’s Arte della guerra. Despite his enthusiasm, Baccellini again complains that the original Dialogo was very difficult to read, wherefore ‘to satisfy the importunate prayers of several princes and knights, in order that the book might more easily be perceived, I have reduced it into 474 [sic] aphorisms, all of which were contained in a tedious dialogue of seven books’. While facilitating the reader’s task, Baccellini has also assured the conscience of Christian readers: having, he says, exerted myself to purge the work of every contagious impiety, in conformity with the sacred decrees of the Council of Trent, as is seen in Aphorism 116, where I have reduced to a good sentiment that proposition which was somewhat suspect and scandalous; just as, in many other places, I have cut out that which I have deemed pernicious. (sig. a˜5v)

Baccellini is anxious to persuade his readers that there is nothing strange in the fact that he, a priest, should undertake to correct a book dealing with political and military matters. Indeed, if the matter be regarded ‘with eye void of rancour’, it will be seen that there is nobody more suitable for accomplishing this task than a priest—and so much the more when he has knowledge of revealed science and divine theology. Baccellini goes further, for, he says, if the political books of the past and present centuries would have been written by, or had passed through the hands of men who feared God, they would not be full of such scandalous errors and ‘in them, the world would have drunk less of the ruinous poison of Atheism under colour of reason of state and political subtleties’.5 che mediocre, prima di me sono stati di questa opinione. Anzi che Carlo quinto Imperatore, ne tenne tanto conto, che la prima volta, che gli fu` presentato, lo fece tradurre nella sua lingua nativa, e lo teneva la notte sempre al capezzale.’ 5 Ibid. sigs. a˜.5v–6r: ‘Anzi, che se I libri politici nel passato, e nel presente secolo fussero stati scritti, o` fussero passati per le mani di persone timorate di Dio,

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Who, he demands, knows better than priests how to establish and govern states? Just look at Moses, ‘who is admired by the politici themselves as the very Idea and form of an excellent statesman and of a bold captain’. Yet he was a priest! This, in Baccellini’s view, is true of the greater part of valiant men, and he cites Gilbert Ge´ne´brard’s commentary on Psalm 93 to prove his point.6 All this is as clear as the sun in the Holy Scriptures. At God’s command, Moses not only instituted the Israelite state but he also chose the soldiers and led the army into battle against the enemy. Furthermore, girded with the sword, he punished the idolaters who had injured God by their worship of the golden calf; and it is well known that the Israelite armies were, for a long time, commanded and advised by priests. Similarly, the pagans themselves never went into battle without first having their priests make sacrifices. In fact, says Baccellini, any consul who ignored this rite was punished by the Senate, ‘as happened to Papirius and to Appius’. This entire passage is interesting not only because it touches upon material familiar to all readers of Machiavelli— Moses as an armed prophet (Il Principe, 6), and the manipulation of auguries by Roman commanders to encourage their troops (Discorsi, I. 14)—but also because, in both cases and unlike other Christian commentators, Baccellini seems to approve. Given his knowledge of the Arte della guerra, it does seem likely that he knew the other works: but there are no verbal echoes, and he manages to misinterpret the story of Papirius and Appius.7 non si vederebbono pieni di tanti scandalosi errori, e meno il mondo haverebbe bevuto in essi il veleno essitiale dell’Ateismo, sotto colore di Ragione di stato, e di avvedimenti politici.’ 6 Aforismi, sig. a˜.6: ‘E chi seppe giamai meglio formare e reggere le Republiche che i sacerdoti? Specchiatevi in Moise, il quale da i politici medesimi e` ammirato, come Idea e forma d’un ottimo politico, e d’un Capitano strenuo, e pure egli era sacerdote, come la maggior parte de’ valenti huomini dimostrano, & in particolare il dottissimo Genebrardo intorno a` quel luogo del salmo novanta tre.’ The work referred to is Gilbert Ge´ne´brard, Archbishop of Aix, Psalmi Davidis, calendario hebraeo, syro, graeco-latino, argumentis et commentariis genuinum eorum sensum, hebraismosque locupletius quam antea aperientibus (Paris, 1577 and later edns.). 7 Machiavelli makes it clear that Appius was condemned for his flagrant disregard of the auspices and for the ensuing defeat, whereas Papirius was honoured for his adroitness and victory.

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Baccellini’s difficulties in trying to Christianize the Arte della guerra are very evident when he arrives at Aphorism 116—singled out, in the letter to the readers, as especially demanding (and receiving) the decontamination process. It is based on a passage late in the second book of the Arte della guerra, where Machiavelli tries to explain why the military virtu` of the ancients has long since vanished. The argument is one of Machiavelli’s poorest.8 First, he says that the Roman hegemony destroyed the virtu` which had formerly been generated by the rivalry of many states, and had thus left nothing apart from the warlike qualities of Rome itself. Then, when Rome itself became corrupt, everything fell apart. This should, logically, have meant a rebirth of virtu` but, says Machiavelli, such a process takes time. He then adds a further argument which had already been advanced in the Discorsi, that Christianity was to blame because it imposes less necessity for men to defend themselves. Formerly wars had been devastating and wholly ruinous; but now, thanks to the Christian faith, the fear of war has decreased with the result that men are less bothered to value and maintain military discipline. Given the frequency and brutality of internecine Christian wars, Machiavelli’s suggestion is nonsensical and had aroused the wrath of several simplistic defenders of the faith, anxious to demonstrate that Christians could be every bit as bloodthirsty as pagans. A typical example of this muddled thinking was Innocent Gentillet, whose clumsy refutation in the 1585 edition of the Contre-Machiavel led to a disastrous, selfcontradictory encomium of godly violence. Baccellini similarly falls victim both to his own and to Machiavelli’s incompetence by trying simultaneously to retain as much of the Arte della guerra’s argument as possible while praising Christian military virtu`. He agrees that the lack of military virtu` in modern times as compared with the ancients is largely due to the Christian religion (e` in gran parte il rispetto della religione Christiana). But then he gets into difficulties. In these happier times, he says, God has, ‘through his immense piety’ and by the laws of grace, moderated the ferocity of men in such a way that they will not wage war other than against the 8 Mazzoni and Casella, 300b–302a. For a criticism of Machiavelli’s argument, see Anglo (1969), 138–41.

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enemies of the faith. And if, sometimes, ‘by diabolical suggestion’, wars do occur between the faithful, they may still be just if fought for reasonable causes and an honest end, and are ended swiftly, through the labour of Christian princes and, in particular, of the most high Roman Pontiff, whose authority, guided by the Holy Spirit, is feared and revered as supreme by true believers. And he, with paternal zeal, intervenes and assuages the tumults.9

After this masterly piece of question-begging, Baccellini returns, more or less, to Machiavelli’s own words: ‘thus there is not imposed on men such necessity to defend themselves, as came about in ancient times’ (cosı` non e` imposta tanta necessita` di difendersi, come anticamente accadeva).10 He then proceeds, with only slight variations in tense and vocabulary, to transcribe Machiavelli’s views on the extreme severity of ancient wars (which had resulted in military expertise) and the comparatively tame modern hostilities which inspired little fear and, therefore, encouraged scant respect for soldierly skills—an especially obtuse failure, on Bacellini’s part, to note what had been happening in France, the Baltic, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Bohemia during his own lifetime. What does it all mean?11 Does Baccellini regard Machiavelli’s remarks as a slur on Christian valour? Does he view Christians favourably because they do wage wars? Does he admire them when they fight among themselves for a ‘just’ cause? Does he not admire them if, induced ‘by diabolical suggestion’, they fight unjustly? Does he agree with Machiavelli that Christians do indeed lack 9 Aforismi, 53–4. 10 Ibid. 54. Cf. Arte della guerra, 3, in Mazzoni and Casella, 302a: ‘perche, il modo del vivere d’oggi, rispetto alla cristiana religione, non impone quella necessita` al difendersi che anticamente era’. 11 We get no clue to the Christianization process from Aphorism 335, based upon a passage in the Arte della guerra, 6 (Mazzoni and Casella, 350b) where Machiavelli points out the difficulties faced by the ancient military captains who had had to contend with omens and auguries and had cunningly interpreted them in order to suit their own purposes. In our time, says Machiavelli, this sort of thing cannot happen since men are not now so superstitious ‘because our religion has completely removed such opinions’. However, should such fears occur, then Machiavelli believes that we should imitate the practices of the ancients. All of this is faithfully transcribed by Baccellini without alteration or comment.

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military virtu`? It is impossible, in his treatment of Aphorism 116, to discover precisely how Baccellini’s Christianization of Machiavelli was intended to work; and this sense of aimlessness is typical of his entire collection of Aforismi politici e militari. He simply works his way through the Arte della guerra, more or less seriatim, from early in Book I to the very end of Book VII, using material drawn solely from the principal speaker, Fabrizio Colonna, and ignoring the speeches of everybody else in the original dialogue. This is reasonable enough since these other characters are mere stooges. On the other hand, Fabrizio’s own observations are themselves subjected to rearrangement and frequent cuts, some of which (Machiavelli’s famous mock battle in Book III, for example) are dictated by the need to exclude any kind of narrative. Other omissions, however, are quite arbitrary and seem motivated solely by a feeling that the work should be kept within bounds. Apart from alteration of tenses, random replacement of Machiavelli’s original words with close synonyms, and a shuttling backwards and forwards between the second and third books of the Arte della guerra (Aphorisms 146 to 153), there is little attempt to personalize the text;12 while of original thinking there is no evidence at all. Just occasionally, as when omitting Machiavelli’s description of the scoppietto (arquebus) as a ‘new and necessary instrument’, Baccellini recognizes that things have changed in the ninety years since the Arte della guerra was first published.13 But, for the most part, not only is he indifferent to the fact that his masterpiece is a

12 The major displacement of material occurs where Baccellini is dealing with the opening sections of the Arte della guerra, 3. He cuts all the material comparing the Roman, Greek, and Swiss methods of drawing up an army, along with the introductory sections of Machiavelli’s proposed combination of the various systems (Mazzoni and Casella, 305a–306b); arbitrarily resumes the Arte della guerra up to the mock battle which is completely cut (Mazzoni and Casella, 309a–310a), and then resumes with Fabrizio’s explanations of the way in which his army had functioned. 13 Arte della guerra, 2 (Mazzoni and Casella, 291a): ‘lo scoppietto, istrumento nuovo, come voi sapete, e necessario’. Lo scoppietto could be any hand-held firearm, but Machiavelli is obviously thinking of the arquebus. Peter Whitehorne translates the phrase as ‘harkabus, a new instrument (as you know) verie necessarie’; and Fourquevaux adapts the passage as ‘La Harquebuze a este´ trouvee de peu d’ans en c¸a, et est tresbonne.’

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maimed version of an archaic military text, but he is also unaware that much of what he reproduces is, in fact, undiluted Vegetius.14 However, Baccellini saves his most thoughtless reproduction of Machiavelli’s words and sentiments for the conclusion of his own book (Aphorisms 475, 476). He is evidently much taken with Machiavelli’s stirring peroration in which the Italian princes of the early sixteenth century were exhorted to follow the methods set out in the Arte della guerra. The first ruler who should do so, exclaimed Machiavelli, would make himself master of the province: just as Philip of Macedon, having based his military organization upon that of Epaminondas and trained his forces (while the rest of Greece wasted their time in idleness and reciting plays), was able to possess the entire state and leave such a foundation that his son became prince of the whole world. All of this is faithfully transcribed by Baccellini in his penultimate aphorism (475) before rounding off his work by cobbling together two disparate sentences from the end of the Arte della guerra: first Machiavelli’s challenge that, whoever ‘despises these studies, if he be a Prince, despises his Princedom, if he be a Citizen, his City’; and secondly, Machiavelli’s quintessentially Renaissance exhortation that the province (and here, Baccellini specifically refers, as Machiavelli did not, to ‘I Principi di Toscana’) seemed destined to resuscitate dead things such as poetry, painting, and sculpture—and, by implication, the art of war. Baccellini’s Aforismi militari would merit attention even if it offered nothing more than the curious spectacle of an early seventeenth-century Italian priest creating a book by cutting and pasting passages from the Arte della guerra, persuading a French printer to issue the fragmented Italian text in Paris, and then being accorded the posthumous accolade of a second edition in Italy.15 But the work is not merely an oddity. For one thing, it is an excellent example both of the craze for aphorization which afflicted 14 Machiavelli’s debt to the ancient authorities, and especially to Vegetius, needs no further stressing here. But it is worth noting Baccellini’s Aforismi, 435– 63, which reproduce (with a few trivial omissions and some juggling of the order) Machiavelli’s own ‘general rules’ (Arte della guerra, 7) which derive, unacknowledged, from Vegetius, III. 26. 15 The work was given its second edition in 1620 by the Venetian printer Giovanni Battista Ciotti, who had earlier published the more soldierly works of Achille Tarducci, which are discussed immediately below.

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contemporary Europe and the ease with which the process could be applied to Machiavelli’s works. For another, it reveals the moral problem posed for pious readers of Machiavelli and the ways in which this could be circumvented. While not naming Machiavelli, Baccellini refers specifically to the fact that his source is a banned author hostile to Christianity but, though condemned by the Council of Trent, still worth knowing for the matchless military wisdom he had included in his dialogue, however ‘tediosa’ that might be. Yet there are only two passages in the Arte della guerra where Christianity is actually mentioned and, while Baccellini is anxious to mitigate observations which he deems irreligious, he does not know how to deal with them. He could easily have solved the difficulty merely by omitting the troublesome sentences, as he omitted so many others which did not fit into his scheme of things. That he chose to wrestle with the problem suggests that, like other pious critics, he deemed Machiavelli’s allegations concerning Christian lack of virtu` too challenging and too important to ignore; and, like those other critics—trying simultaneously to defend ‘just’ modern wars, to praise Moses as both warrior and priest, and to extol Christian pacifism while vaunting Christian valour on the field of battle—he found himself caught in the toils of inextricable contradictions.

a soldier Rather different as a reader of Machiavelli—in formation, perception, and in purpose—was Achille Tarducci, a member of a military family hailing from Corinaldo, just a few kilometres west of Sinigaglia, which had been the scene of Cesare Borgia’s notorious settling of old scores.16 As a youth Achille had been attracted to philosophy and mathematics, and this latter interest proved useful when he pursued a military career: serving against the Turks in 16 Very little is known about Tarducci and most of that little has to be drawn from information provided in his own works. See Carlo Promis, ‘Gl’ingegneri militari della Marca d’Ancona che operarono e scrissero dall’anno MDL all’anno MDCL’, Miscellanea di Storia d’Italia edita per cura dell Regia Deputazione di Storia Patria, 6 (1865), 296–308; and Mattei (1969), 303–6.

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1595 and 1597 as an artillery commander and specialist in fortification for Sigismund Bathory, the brilliant but deranged prince of Transylvania, and for Gian Francesco Aldobrandini, supreme commander of the Italian forces in Hungary. Like many other soldiers of his time, Tarducci was smitten by a literary urge and, in his treatise, Il Turco vincibile in Ungaria, he set forth the methods whereby, in his view, a war of aggression might be successfully waged against the Turks.17 This work, first published in 1597 and reissued in 1600, was based partly upon the author’s practical experiences as a soldier and partly upon his knowledge of theoretical military books, including Machiavelli’s Discorsi, which Tarducci evidently considered still relevant to contemporary warfare. Like so many other Italian writers who found it necessary to refer to Machiavelli at this period, Tarducci either avoids acknowledgement completely or cites his source as ‘Il Segretario’ (a disguise about as discreet and effective as a dark-haired man wearing false ginger mustachios), although, on one occasion at least, he so far forgets himself as to name Machiavelli as the inventor of a battle array based upon Roman usage.18 Tarducci’s Machiavellism goes beyond a mere facility in marshalling apt quotations, but he does not impress as an original thinker able to adapt old ideas to new situations. His general sympathy with ‘Il Segretario’ is revealed in a very long opening discussion devoted first to the various kinds of prudence demonstrated by the Turks—astutia e arte which are laudable, and inganno maligno or fraud which is not—and then to their Forza, which comprises absolute authority, obedience, vast wealth, and a novel military discipline.19 Inganno, not good fortune, has been the basis of Turkish success, and Tarducci refers to ‘il 17 Il Turco vincibile in Ungaria con mediocri aiuti di Germania. Discorso appresentato ai tre supremi capitani dell’essercito confederato contra Il Turco (Ferrara: V. Baldini, 1597). Further references are given in the text. The second issue of 1600 was also by Baldini at Ferrara. Mattei (1969), 304 n. 1, notes a Latin translation published in Germany in 1601, as part of a collection of military works devoted to the problem of defeating the Turks. 18 Il Turco vincibile, 138: ‘Intorno la grossezza delle battaglie, non sendomi parso proporre un ordinanza molto simile alla romana (piu` forsi che l’inventato dal Macchiavelli, come in altra occasione potrei mostrare) e giudicato meglio per le sudette ragioni’. 19 Ibid. 1–63.

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Segretario ne’ suoi discorsi’ as his authority for saying that ‘nobody has ever risen from a very low estate to very great power solely by force without fraud’, although fraud on its own may sometimes succeed (pp. 31–2).20 Throughout Il Turco vincibile in Ungaria, issues arise where Tarducci believes, sometimes mistakenly, that Machiavelli provides the decisive argument. For example, when considering the tactics of Fabius Maximus, he agrees with the favourable judgement advanced in the Discorsi and cites this with approval (pp. 71–2);21 and, when confronting the oft-debated question as to what constitutes the nerve of war, Tarducci bases his own view— that this is to be found in men not money—on Machiavelli, who is again referred to as authoritative (pp. 73–4).22 Like ‘Il Segretario’, he thinks that all terrestrial things have a limited life through being subject to infinite alterations; and he accepts Machiavelli’s observation that, if an excellent prince is followed by a worthless successor, the state may survive provided that another capable ruler immediately follows; whereas, when one worthless prince is followed by another, the state must inevitably collapse (pp. 76–8).23 More interesting, because indicative of lax thinking, is the way in which Tarducci, when discussing the comparative merits of offensive and defensive war, obviously bases himself on the rather noncommittal discussion of the problem in the Discorsi. Then later, in a chapter dealing with a related topic—whether it is better to await an enemy’s attack or to go immediately on the offensive—Tarducci unwisely relies on a particularly poor argument advanced by Machiavelli in the Discorsi, III. 45, where the contrasting examples of the Roman consuls Decius and Fabius are alleged to demonstrate the wisdom of restraining one’s impetuosity but, in fact, prove no such thing (pp. 96–7, 153–5).24 20 ‘nissuno mai, da molto bassa, ad assai gran potenza e` venuto con la sola forza senza la frode, ma bene con la frode senza la forza, come nota il Secretario ne’ suoi discorsi’. The marginal reference to li. 2.c. 13 is correct. 21 Cf. Discorsi, III. 10. 22 Cf. Ibid., II. 10. 23 Cf. Ibid., III. 1; I. 19. 24 Cf. Ibid., II. 12 (although this reference is not provided by Tarducci), and Discorsi, III. 45. On Machiavelli’s non sequitur, in the latter chapter, see Anglo (1969), 256.

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Tarducci is on firmer ground when he cites and paraphrases Fabrizio’s dictum that the ability to gain victory on the field of battle is the most necessary and honourable part of war, for not only does such victory negate all other errors but, conversely, a leader who lacks this skill can never bring a war to a satisfactory conclusion (pp. 103–4).25 Sound, too, is an observation loosely derived from the Arte della guerra on the impossibility of rallying an entire army which is suddenly driven to take flight (pp. 119–20).26 And it is impossible to take exception to observations on the unpredictability of Fortune, though it is scarcely necessary to adduce Machiavelli to establish so trite a notion (p. 171).27 There are, however, issues with wider political or military implications where Tarducci concurs with Machiavelli. An example of this is the method whereby territorial acquisitions may be secured in order to enrich, rather than impoverish, the conqueror. He does not specifically cite Machiavelli on this, but obviously shares with the Discorsi a preference for the Roman method of establishing colonies. Furthermore, pointing out that the Turks have used this practice against their enemies, Tarducci argues that Christian states should do the same in retaliation (pp. 124–7).28 He also follows Machiavelli closely when weighing the relative merits of infantry and cavalry. He has no doubts about the advantages of the former and refers specifically to both the Discorsi—repeating Machiavelli’s example of Carmignuola’s success against the Swiss, when he ordered his cavalry to dismount—and the Arte della guerra, where the superiority of infantry is argued at greater length (pp. 128–31).29 Then, having established this position, Tarducci moves on naturally to assess the rival systems of the Macedonian phalanx and the Roman legion and, although there are no specific allusions to Machiavelli here, the discussion is obviously influenced by the opening of the fourth book of the Arte della guerra, which offers a long comparative 25 Here he cites and paraphrases from the Arte della guerra, 1 (Mazzoni and Casella, 274b–275a) 26 Cf. Arte della guerra, 4 (Mazzoni and Casella, 322b). 27 Here Tarducci refers to the Discorsi, II. 29. 28 Cf. Discorsi, II. 6, 19. 29 Cf. Ibid., II. 18, and Arte della guerra, 2 (although Tarducci wrongly gives a marginal reference to Segre. de Ar. milit. lib 4).

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treatment of the principal ancient and modern methods of drawing up an army for battle (pp. 131–5).30 There is, however, one matter on which Tarducci manages to break free. In a chapter devoted to the use and merits of different kinds of weaponry—a discussion similar to that in the Arte della guerra—Tarducci shows an enthusiasm for the pike w