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Reading and Politics
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10224 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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8 / 1993 |
4,437 Words |
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Anthony Grafton
Anthony Grafton is professor of history at Princeton
University. |
The governors of Elizabethan England, and even the queen herself, were threatened in February 1601 by an uprising led by the discontented earl of Essex. The rebellion, however, failed; order was maintained, and the culprits were arrested.
While dealing with the offenders, Sir Robert Cecil received an anonymous memorandum, probably from Sir Thomas Arundel. The text asked clemency for the earl of Southampton, who had been involved in Essex's rising in London. These circumstances--the failed coup, the suspects begging for pardon or incriminating each other, the grim government officer reading files to determine individuals' fates--sound all too familiar in the late twentieth century, the age of the fictional George Smiley and so many worse realities.
By contrast, the excuse Arundel offered seems strange, even outlandish. Essex, he explained, had sent one Henry Cuffe, formerly professor of Greek at Oxford, to read Aristotle's Politics with Southampton in Paris, "with such expositions as, I doubt, did him but little good." Not a bad character or convictions, but a bad kind of reading, a wrong approach to a dangerously volatile classical text, had brought Southampton into dangerous company. Arundel's argument, moreover, carried the day. Southampton escaped with life imprisonment, while Cuffe--like Essex--was executed.
READERS AS LEADERS
The excuse was no mere fiction. Cuffe had read the classics subversively with others, including Essex, who in fact, meanly blamed Cuffe's advice, which rested on book learning rather than practical experience, for his pathetic rebellion. More important than the facts of this case, however, is the larger situation it reveals. Essex and Cecil, the rebel and the inquisitor, had much in common: Both had sound classical educations and could refer to a handy classical tag when the need arose; both assumed that men with some grounding in the classics should make the great decisions in politics and law; both gave preferment to other men who shared their training and their values; and both knew that bad scholarship could have dramatically evil consequences in real life. The political elite of late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, in short, were readers as well as leaders: They assumed that in any government, good or bad, scholarship and power would interact in powerful ways.
Historians of the English Renaissance have long known and celebrated the classical learning of the Renaissance courtier. Historians of
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