by Thomas Penn
More’s debate with himself about whether or not to enter this world, to test himself against its dangers and pitfalls, had found expression in his recent translation of a biography of Pico della Mirandola, the Italian thinker whose deep spirituality had a profound and formative influence on him. More’s Life of Pico stressed the Italian’s refusal to compromise his principles, his constant cheerfulness in the face of tribulation, and his eventual turning away from the world to a life of piety. Pico was a ‘pattern of life’ to More – not least because More, like him, was drawn irresistibly towards that public arena whose temptations and corruptibility he so feared. All this was evident in a letter that More had written to Colet, in which, describing his native London as a claustrophobic city of sin, he lingered over a description of its vices with a brilliant, lascivious relish.
The overhanging upper storeys of buildings, he wrote, leaned in on the narrow streets, seeming to block out natural light. The atmosphere choked and asphyxiated, heightening the senses: the gleam of goldsmiths’ and silversmiths’ shops, the fine, richly coloured silks of drapers, the tempting scents of cooking mingling with the sights and smells of decay and corruption. All this, More wrote, to produce an endless supply of ‘materials for gluttony and the world, and the world’s lord, the devil’.6 This was now More’s everyday life, surrounded by ‘feigned love and the honeyed poisons of smooth flatterers’, by ‘fierce hatred and quarrels’. It was a struggle that he found intoxicating, and his vocal opposition to Henry’s tax in the 1504 parliament displayed a desire to get involved at the sharp end of politics. Despite – or perhaps because of – all this, Erasmus found his friend, at the centre of a busy household surrounded by servants and the constant stream of lawyers, clients and city and royal officials that beat a path to his door, as ‘cheerful as ever’.7
For his part, More was delighted to see Erasmus. He, too, had been working hard on his Greek, and he suggested to his friend that they translate into Latin some dialogues of Lucian, a withering classical satirist newly in vogue. This would be not just a linguistic exercise but also a political one. As an exposer of sham and pretension, a scourge of sacred and secular customs, Lucian’s relevance appealed to both men – and he would, they hoped, also appeal to Henry VII’s counsellors, to whom they planned to present their work.
Erasmus made new acquaintances too, among them a young Italian scholar recently arrived in England. Andrea Ammonio had made the long journey from Rome not in hope, but in expectation. The son of silk-weavers from the Tuscan city of Lucca, he had gone to Rome to seek his fortune at the papal curia, where he had joined the circle of Lucchese high in the favour of Pope Julius II. Among them was Silvestro Gigli, Henry’s ambassador and bishop of Worcester, who had taken the talented young intellectual under his wing. When, having helped secure the dispensation for Prince Henry’s marriage to Catherine, Gigli made his triumphant journey back to England in mid-1505, Ammonio travelled with him. Staying in the Gigli household in Coleman Street Ward, south of Lombard Street, he settled among the Italian expatriate community and quickly made friends with Mountjoy and More.8 But the man whose acquaintance he was desperate to make was Erasmus, whom he hero-worshipped. For his part Erasmus, who always welcomed the company of charming young men, was particularly taken with Ammonio.
Like Erasmus, Ammonio would not find things in England as straightforward as he suspected. Neither would his boss, the divisive and self-aggrandizing Gigli, who brought the combustible politics of Italy and the papal curia into the heart of Henry VII’s court and, via Ammonio, to the intellectuals who aimed to shape the king’s son: More, Erasmus and Mountjoy.
Away in Rome, Henry’s other representative at the curia, Cardinal Adriano Castellesi, had developed a persecution complex. Convinced that Julius II, with his venomous hatred of everybody and everything associated with the former regime of the Borgia pope Alexander VI, was intriguing against him, he was also sure that his place in Henry VII’s favour was slipping, that the king was sidelining him for the more effective Gigli.
Castellesi’s pressure valve was gossip, and he started sniping about his English employer. Inevitably, his comments reached the pope’s inner circle and found their way – doubtless via his rival Gigli, now at the king’s side in England – to Henry himself.9 Julius also stoked the fire. When he received a letter from an incensed Henry, demanding to know if the rumours about Castellesi were true, Julius seemed to defend the cardinal before murmuring that yes, perhaps he had been a little indiscreet.
When news of the correspondence reached Castellesi, he was thoroughly alarmed. He fired off a letter to Henry, protesting that he was loyalty itself and that the whole thing was a smear campaign, designed to blacken his good name. He also realized that he needed to do something about Gigli. Writing to Richard Fox, the man who had done much to advance him in the king’s favour over the years, Castellesi suggested he examine very closely the documentation that Gigli had brought back to England with him from Rome. Gigli, said Castellesi, was in the habit of forging documents, and he had proof: one of the papal licences appointing the diplomat Robert Sherborne to the bishopric of St Davids was a fake. Fox agreed.
An accusation of this kind was potential dynamite. For if one of the papal documents Gigli had obtained were proven to be false, the validity of others could be called into question – including the most significant document of all, which had made his English reputation: the dispensation for Catherine’s remarriage to the prince. Henry may have had his son repudiate the marriage, but it had been done in secret, and was something he could always reverse if circumstances dictated. If, on the other hand, the dispensation wasn’t worth the parchment it was written on, then neither was Catherine – and Henry would be deprived of one of his most significant cards at the poker-table of European power politics.
Henry was enraged. He hated his affairs being made public at the best of times, and this very conspicuous spat between two of his ambassadors did nothing for his credibility in Rome. The affair provoked uproar among Henry’s high-level diplomats. Sherborne, Gigli and their chief backer William Warham – who, as archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps felt duty-bound to back the pope’s favoured representatives – were ranged against Castellesi’s supporters, headed by Fox.10 On the face of it, Fox’s backing of the increasingly paranoid and gaffe-prone cardinal seems curious. Gigli was high in papal favour and Henry, lavishing gifts and offices on him, was surely grooming him to replace Castellesi as England’s point man in Rome. But Fox continued to support Castellesi – and, despite his anger, Henry was content to tolerate him as well.
Castellesi, of course, had a long association with both the king and with Fox, and his largely faithful record of service probably counted for something. Henry always liked to have at least two independent lines of intelligence in any situation, so that he and his council could compare – and contrast – information that was sent them. Where Gigli was a papal loyalist, Castellesi was now a distinctly contrarian voice, increasingly disinclined to toe the papal party line. This was of particular use to Henry. Although he went out of his way to show himself a faithful son of the church, lavishing favour on the pope’s friends and relatives, he was deeply concerned about what Julius II was up to.
Following his election, Julius was proving the latest in a long line of popes ambitious to transform the papacy into a secular power to be reckoned with. His predecessor, Alexander VI, had attempted much the same thing. Trying to turn the papacy into what was more or less a Borgia family empire, Alexander had constructed a succession of complex and changeable alliances with a variety of European states, from France, to Venice, Spain and the Habsburgs against France, then back to France with Venice’s help, mostly under the pretext of a crusade against the Turks (whose help against France he had at one stage also unsuccessfully tried to enlist). When Alexander VI died, the inevitable happened: his allies moved in. Declaring itself ‘liberator’ of the rich lands in the Romagna conquered by Alexander’s son Cesare Borgia, Venice a
nnexed them.11
The republic of Venice irritated Julius beyond measure. Not only had it absorbed papal lands into a land and maritime empire that stretched from Bologna to Cyprus, but it had a stranglehold on eastern Mediterranean trade and, as far as the Turks were concerned, far preferred peace – and profit – to crusade, to the detriment of papal finances. One commodity that Venice continued to import in huge quantities, turning a deaf ear to Julius’s increasingly strident orders to desist, was alum. Desperate to protect the value of papal alum through the papacy’s cartels, Julius took a particularly dim view of Venice flooding a northern European market desperate for the mineral. If the republic would not stop, then he would put a stop to it.12
For Henry, Julius’s belligerence was highly problematic. The pope was muscling into the Italian financial and commercial centres with which Henry did considerable business: Genoa, and the Tuscan cities of Florence and Lucca. And in the economic superpower of Venice he was targeting one of England’s main trading partners, whose galleys, en route to the Low Countries, docked at Southampton loaded with luxurious commodities, and exported vast quantities of English wool and cloth for processing and reselling by the thirty thousand employees of Venice’s textile industry. What was more, in agitating for his crusade, Julius had started moves to bring together the mutually antagonistic dynastic players in Italy – Spain, France and the Habsburgs – in an anti-Venetian alliance, a move that would realign Europe in a way entirely contrary to Henry’s plans. If Julius could bring off such a reconciliation, it would wreck Henry’s self-styled role as European power-broker. And then there was the alum, in whose illegal trade Henry was involved up to his eyeballs, brokering deals through Florentine banks, and doubtless with the co-operation of Venice, the gateway to the eastern Mediterranean.13
Apart from the considerable profits alum brought him, Henry understood perfectly well the political ramifications of what he was doing. By increasing the alum supply, he lowered its value and hence papal profits, something which was an effective bridle on Julius’s ambitions. At the same time, it allowed him a handle on international affairs.
For his part, Julius knew exactly what Henry was doing. By 1505 he was chasing the king’s carrack, the Sovereign – funded by the Frescobaldi bank and skippered by one of Henry’s chief captains, Nicholas Waring – around the western Mediterranean, writing to princes from Portugal to Genoa promising indulgences to any who detained the ship, arrested its crew and impounded its cargo. But besides issuing irate proclamations and writing letters to Henry telling him to desist, there was not a great deal the pope could do. Julius simply did not have the muscle to back up his threats. Henry made polite, obedient noises in reply, and ignored him.
In all this, Castellesi assumed a greater significance. As the former private secretary to Alexander VI, he had a wealth of experience and contacts with Venice, the former Borgia ally. In Castellesi’s unseemly spat with Gigli, Julius’s man, foreign policy on a grand scale crystallized. And, as the dispute involved Henry’s foremost diplomatic advisers, Fox and Warham, on either side, it also sucked in others.14 With courtiers and counsellors aligned around the two Italians, a discernible fracture began to emerge among the intellectuals at court. In Gigli’s corner, Warham was an admirer of Erasmus and sympathetic to Andrea Ammonio. Like Gigli himself, these avant-garde men-of-letters were desperate for royal favour – and envious and contemptuous of those who had it. Faction began to emerge.
One of the men in possession of such favour was Castellesi’s deputy, Polydore Vergil. Arriving in England in 1502, when his boss was still in high favour with Henry, he recalled how the king was ‘gracious and kind’, ‘attentive to visitors’; Vergil, indeed, is probably the first and only courtier to go on record as saying that Henry was ‘easy of access’. Whereas the doors to royal favour remained shut fast to most, to Vergil they swung magically open.
To those in residence at the Old Barge, Vergil inspired envy and fury in equal measure. Erasmus loathed him, labouring under the mistaken belief that Vergil had stolen the idea for his Adages, the collection of classical proverbs and epigrams that he had published in Paris on his return from England in 1500, and which became his first international bestseller. Vergil’s admittedly very similar book had in fact been published before his own, something he would later acknowledge. But Erasmus’s grudge was fuelled not only by envy of Vergil’s success and wealth but also by his friend Ammonio, whose resentment of Vergil took on a political edge: Vergil and Ammonio eyeballed each other with mutual suspicion, Castellesi’s man against Gigli’s.15 There was, however, another Italian at court who attracted the ire of everybody in Erasmus’s circle: Henry’s Latin secretary, Pietro Carmeliano. Not only was Carmeliano close to the king, at the nerve centre of his foreign policy, and very rich to boot, he was also a Venetian agent.
A native of the Lombard city of Brescia in Venetian territory, Carmeliano had been an unobtrusive presence at Henry’s side since the start of the reign, when he had transferred his loyalties easily and effortlessly from Richard III. His literary skills attracted scorn from Erasmus and his friends – but as a tireless, well-connected diplomat and spy he had proved himself exceptional. As a royal chaplain, Carmeliano was a familiar face in the king’s private apartments, where he and Henry discussed confidential foreign affairs. He was inconspicuous, a man who stayed in the shadows, going largely unnoticed by English courtiers. Foreigners and diplomatic staff, however, watched his movements like hawks. When he disappeared from public view, they reasoned, it generally meant that something was up: back in 1500, when last-minute doubts surfaced over Prince Arthur’s marriage to Catherine, de Puebla had got particularly jumpy at the Italian’s absence, thinking that he was involved in negotiations to marry Arthur off to somebody else. Close to Henry, Carmeliano had quietly accumulated massive wealth. One year, his New Year’s gift to Henry of £50 trumped that of Sir Thomas Lovell, one of Henry’s richest counsellors, by a cool £30.
Somehow, Carmeliano had maintained loyalties to both Henry and to Venice for two decades. His influence reached behind the marble façade of the Doge’s palace, to the heart of its government, the Signoria, to whom he was known simply as ‘the friend’. As he stood demurely at the king’s side, writing and performing diplomatic orations, penning official letters, and tiptoeing about the privy apartments, Carmeliano was also a go-between, Venice’s man in the king’s secret chamber. And, as papal sabre-rattling against the republic grew ever louder, so his role as Henry’s foreign-policy adviser became increasingly significant. From his privileged vantage point, Carmeliano eyed the manoeuvrings of Julius’s favourite Silvestro Gigli, watched him circling ever closer to the king’s counsellors.16 He would have been perturbed when Henry appointed Gigli to the small coterie of royal chaplains that doubled as high-level diplomats, papal intriguer and Venetian agent sizing each other up as they discussed international affairs with the king. And neither was he particularly well disposed to Gigli’s protégé Ammonio, who, he rightly suspected, was after his job.
By the end of 1505, Erasmus had finished the first of his dialogues. He aimed high. On 1 January 1506, he sent a presentation manuscript to Richard Fox, prefaced by a typically arch, self-abasing dedication that begged him to accept the ‘trivial’ New Year’s gift, and hoped that he would continue to ‘cherish, succour and help Erasmus, as you have done for so long’. In fact, there was no indication that Fox had ever helped Erasmus. Nor was he about to.17
Erasmus’s timing could not have been worse. At the turn of that year, Henry’s counsellors were working frantically to prise the earl of Suffolk from Philip of Burgundy’s stronghold of Namur; barely two weeks after Erasmus’s manuscript landed on Fox’s desk Philip was shipwrecked on the Dorset coast. Fox, the arch-diplomat, was at the forefront of the reception committee and the ensuing negotiations for Suffolk’s extradition. He was up to his ears in work, and petitioners of all kinds were getting short shrift: the archdeacon of Wells found Fox, as he delicately put it,
‘somewhat rough’ at a meeting, though he had recovered his silky demeanour the following day. Worse still, with Henry mobilizing all available resources in his extended charm offensive, Lord Mountjoy was also co-opted, dancing attendance on the volatile Queen Juana. Erasmus’s impeccably turned phrases fell on deaf ears.18
He tried other avenues. On the 24th he and William Grocyn wandered down the teeming Thamesside streets to the river, where they took a boat west to the archbishop of Canterbury’s palace at Lambeth. There, William Warham received Erasmus’s literary gift with enthusiasm but, as Erasmus acidly pointed out to his friend as they were rowed back to London, bestowed only a meagre tip by way of reward. With a twinkle in his eye, Grocyn replied that the archbishop suspected Erasmus got full value from his works by dedicating them to a number of different patrons at once.19 Erasmus, characteristically, bridled. Grocyn, however, had hit the nail on the head: if Erasmus was to attain substantial favour, he would have to make real demonstrations of his commitment and loyalty.
Months passed. In the first days of April Erasmus wrote exasperatedly and with typical self-absorption that Philip of Burgundy, who was still in England, had distracted Henry from delivering on the benefice that – Mountjoy had assured Erasmus – he had promised, and that his English stay was now costing him ‘a pretty penny’. But through all Erasmus’s correspondence at this time, the name notable by its absence was that of the prince.
If Erasmus managed to catch any glimpse of Prince Henry during this time, it seems to have been fleeting. A crashing name-dropper, he would have been sure to mention any prolonged meeting with the prince in his letters. Not only was access to the prince restricted but Erasmus’s avenue to him, Lord Mountjoy, had his hands full, running around at court after Philip and Juana – and ‘at his own expense’, Erasmus reported, no doubt echoing Mountjoy’s own grumbles – not to mention his responsibilities at Hammes. The prince, meanwhile, was fully absorbed with Philip and his knights, revelling in the warlike chivalric culture by which Erasmus was so appalled. But though Erasmus may have been out of sight, he was not wholly out of mind. Later, commenting on Henry VIII’s letter-writing, he would remark that it was ‘no wonder the prince had a pleasing style’ since Mountjoy, Erasmus’s own protégé, had encouraged him to read Erasmus’s works.20