Historians and Poets

Blair Worden

 early in tom stoppards play The Invention of Love, the underworlds

ferryman Charon is puzzled to nd only one passenger, Stoppards protagonist
A. E. Housman, awaiting conveyance across the Styx: A poet and a scholar is what I
was told.
I think, answers Housman from the bank, that must be me.
Both of them?
Im afraid so.
It sounded like two people.
I know.1
The exchange, which prepares us for the idiosyncratic division within Housmans
life and temperament, plays on a presupposition of the modern audience. Todays
poets, though they are sometimes scholars, are not required or expected to be. In the
Renaissance, Charon would have been spared his perplexity. Learning was judged essential to poetic achievement. Think only of Ben Jonsons insistence on the place of
learning in the literary and human fullment of the poet, or of John Miltons long
and strenuous preparation for poetry through what in Areopagitica he calls a life
wholly dedicated to studious labours. Poetryby which I shall mean, as writers in
the Renaissance did, sometimes verse, sometimes ctionaspired to instill virtue;
and learning was virtues obligatory partner, as that formula of Renaissance encomium, virtuous and learned, reminds us. Only through learning, too, could the
poet draw on the resources of civilization and contribute adequately to them. Poetry
that spoke only from its own time was ephemeral poetry. The true poet was in dialogue with the master-spirits of earlier ages, drawing on them and alluding to them.
Poets engaged not only with the literature and languages of the past but also, on
broader fronts, with its history. Poets and historians were what, in the mental scheme

1. Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love (London, 1997), 2.

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of Stoppards Charon, they ought not to be: the same individuals. Think of Sir Thomas
More, writer of ction and verse and of that pioneering essay in Tacitean history, his
study of Richard IIIs reign; or, across the Scottish border later in the century, of the
historian and poet and playwright George Buchanan, a gure so often admired and
emulated in Elizabethan and Stuart England; of the poet and historian Sir Walter
Ralegh; of Raleghs contemporary Samuel Daniel, who wrote some of the most admired sonnets of the time and, in his prose narrative of medieval England, one of the
subtlest historical works of the era too; of Tom May, the poet and playwright and the
historian of the Long Parliament; of Milton, the author of the History of Britain. One
late-Elizabethan poet and playwright, Thomas Lodge, produced a laborious translation of the historian Josephus; another, Thomas Heywood, published a translation of
Sallust and incorporated avant-garde historical learning both into its preface and into
his tract An Apology for Actors. The Kentish antiquary Sir Edward Dering tried his hand
at playwriting and adapted Shakespeares Henry IV plays for performance on his estate.2 The Caroline courtier William Habington, whose play of 1641, the political allegory The Queen of Aragon, has won modern critical esteem, also wrote love lyrics,
histories of the reigns of Henry V and Edward IV, and observations on the historical
writings of Machiavelli.3 Poets were not only historians but also political thinkers; for
most political thought was historical thought. The political tracts of Andrew Marvell
drew on extensive historical reading. So, in the 1650s, did those of his friends and fellow
poets James Harrington and Marchamont Nedham, those devotees of Machiavelli and
pioneering theorists of republicanism. In the same years Edmund Waller meditated on
Machiavellis writings and had them at the front of his mind in writing his panegyrical
poem on Protector Cromwell.4 The poet James Howell published historical observations, and at the Restoration was made Historiographer Royal, a position in which his
successors would be John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell, both of whom would combine the post with that of Poet Laureate.5 Earlier, Ben Jonson had succeeded Thomas
Middleton as the Chronologer of the city of London.6 Earlier still, Londons Tudor
chronicler John Stow had turned to his historical interests from poetic ones.7
Perhaps some poets wrote or translated history merely to eke out an income.
Perhaps some poems by historians were merely the casual productions of youth. Yet
history and poetry alike attracted earnest spirits. Milton wrote his History of Britain
a work begun and largely compiled at the crisis of the Puritan Revolutionto equip
his countrymen, as his poetry strove to do, for the challenge of virtue and wisdom

2. Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 16321642 (Cambridge, 1984), 12425.

3. Ibid., 62; D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Modern England (Toronto, 1990), 16268.
4. Timothy Raylor, Reading Machiavelli; Writing Cromwell: Edmund Wallers Copy of The Prince
and His Draft Verses towards A Panegyric on my Lord Protector, Turnbull Library Review 35 (2002):
932; Raylor, Wallers Machiavellian Cromwell: The Imperial Argument of A Panegyric to My Lord
Protector, Review of English Studies 56, no. 225 (2005): 386411.
5. D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2000), 127.
6. Ibid., 4243.
7. Ibid., 40.

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confronting them.8 The preoccupation with history of More or Ralegh or Jonson was
no less strenuously intentioned. Jonson wrote not only history plays but also a history
of Henry V, which was lost in the re that destroyed his library, and maybe also a section of Raleghs History of the World. He wrote poems of heartfelt tribute to the writings of the major historians of his timeSir Henry Savile, William Camden, Ralegh,
John Selden. He mingled freely with those authors, and counted Camden and Selden
as his dearest friends, together with Camdens partner in historical labors Sir Robert
Cotton, whose house and company drew poets together. It was Camden, Jonsons
schoolmaster, himself a poet, who taught Jonson to write his poems rst in prose.9
I have been jumping around in a long period, from the early sixteenth century
to the late seventeenth. That era, it will be objected, was not static. Did it not produce
fundamental changes in the writing both of history and of poetry, which gave the
two activities distinctive identities and pulled them apart? Even if poetry and history
overlapped in personnel, did they not increasingly dier in function? In the high and
later Middle Ages, dierences between history and poetry, even where they were recognized, had rarely seemed to matter. Fabulous lives of saints were uncontentiously
passed o as truthful chronicles.10 In the sixteenth century, however, poetry and history alike made new claims and subjected themselves to new tests. The poet became
an inventor, or maker, whose fancy properly soars above fact: 11 a vocation that
found its most celebrated advocacy in Philip Sidneys A Defence of Poetry, written
about 1580. At the same time a growing number of historians struggled to sift myth
from the veriableand became aware how little about the past could be proved: a
process that took its most conspicuous form in the decline of the myth, beloved by
poets, of Brutus, the Trojan founder of Britain. One modern authority remarks that
history and poetry became more and more disparate;12 a second observes a rift
between the literary and the scholarly traditions;13 a third reports a growing readiness to distinguish between history proper ... and poetry or fable;14 a fourth notes
a sharpened sensitivity of audiences to the dierences between history and ction.15
While there is disagreement about the pace and extent of the change, it would be hard
to deny that it occurred. The intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century speeded
8. Nicholas von Maltzahn, Miltons History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English
Revolution (Oxford, 1991).
9. Blair Worden, Ben Jonson among the Historians, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, eds., Culture
and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke, U.K., 1994), 6775.
10. Joseph Levine, Thomas More and the English Renaissance: Fact and Fiction in Utopia, in
Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks, eds., The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain:
History, Rhetoric, Fiction, 15001800 (Cambridge, 1997), 69, 83; William Nelson, Fact or Fiction: The
Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 23.
11. Levine, Thomas More, 8384.
12. F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (1967; New York, 2004), 244.
13. F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought, 15801640
(Westport, Conn., 1962), 47.
14. Woolf, Idea of History, 17.
15. Nelson, Fact or Fiction, 106.

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it. By the eighteenth century, thought was taken to be ever more distant from imagination, learning from wit.16
Yet changes of mentality are never abrupt or straightforward. Developments
over many generations are not always discernible when they occur, at least in the
shapes in which later ages see them. Most people who are aected by them do not exchange one viewpoint for another: they nd ways, usually unknowingly, of combining
the two, with what, to posterity, may seem muddle or contradictionfailings of which
posterity will bear its own share. In another eld we are surprised by, but cannot escape, the suusion of the scientic revolution of the seventeenth century with what to
us are decidedly unscientic notions of hermeticism and millenarianism. The relationship of Renaissance history to Renaissance poetry has similar complications. At
least until the middle of the seventeenth century the overlap of the two, which is my
subject, was more obvious than the divergence.
Alterations of intellectual perception often produce, and are claried by, causes
clbres, such as the suppression of Galileo in the early seventeenth century and the
Battle of the Books around its end. Yet poetry and history rarely confronted each other.
Sidneys Defence of Poetry, which elevates ction and scorns history, met no counterblast from the historians. A quarter of a century later Jonsons rivals hit at the confusion, in his Roman play Sejanus his Fall, of the functions of poet and historian,17 but
the battle barely transcended, and did not outlast, the personal squabble that gave rise
to it. Not even the long argument over the myth of Brutus polarized the genres. Selden,
that leading contributor to the rise of scholarly empiricism in historical writing who
derided the bardic imposture of historical poetry,18 and his friend Michael Drayton
were on opposite sides of the controversy over the Brutus myth. Yet he contributed,
with only the most congenial of disavowals, historical notes to Draytons poem PolyOlbion, which repeated the legend.19 When history and poetry did quarrel, the disputes were those of what a recent account ttingly calls an intense sibling rivalry.20 In
the Elizabethan and Jacobean age, that time of extraordinary accomplishment in both
poetry and history, the siblings came of age.
The intimacy of the relationship is hidden by our sense of teleology: by our
alertness to, and concentration on, distinctions of genre and thought that anticipate

16. Douglas Lane Patey, Ancients and Moderns, in H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, eds., The
Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4, The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge 1997), 4252.
17. John Marston, The Malcontent and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford, 1997), 372; G. K.
Hunter, English Drama 15861642 (Oxford, 1997), 263n (quoting Thomas Dekker). On the distinction,
see also the dedicatory epistle (to Sir Thomas Howard) of George Chapmans The Revenge of Bussy
dAmbois; Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance
England (Durham, N.C., 1979), 36 (quoting Spenser and Ralegh); and John Speeds statement quoted
by Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, 198.
18. Ferguson, Clio Unbound, 37.
19. A subtle account of the positions of Selden and Drayton is given by Bart van Es, Spensers
Forms of History (Oxford, 2002), 13, 912. Van Ess book shows the gains of studying Renaissance
history and poetry together; so does Cathy Shranks Writing the Nation in Reformation England,
15301580 (Oxford, 2004).
20. Kelley and Sacks, eds., Historical Imagination, ix.

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our own mental landscape. It is concealed too by the disciplinary boundaries of academic life, which keep history and literature apart. The division is a modern one. In the
new universities and colleges and the dissenting academics of nineteenth-century
England, the two subjects were commonly taught together. English literature might
have belonged to the History Faculty at Oxford from the 1870s had not the proposal
been resisted by the Regius Professor of History, Bishop Stubbs, who declared that to
have the History School hampered with dilettante teaching, such as the teaching of
English literature, must do great harm to the School.21 Since the nineteenth century it
has been rare in England for historians to write about literature. The neglect, or disdain, has been largely reciprocated. While few literary critics have gone as far as that
formative spirit of Eng. Lit. at Cambridge, I. A. Richards, who in reading for a history
degree found that he couldnt bear history and didnt think history ought to have
happened,22 the run of twentieth-century literary criticism was non-historical where
not anti-historical. From its perspective, poets betray their calling when they descend,
as in the writing of history, from the ight of imagination to the dull earth of fact. In
recent decades, that outlook has lost its ascendancy. An increasing number of literary
critics have turned to historical scholarship (and a larger number to historicism,
which is something dierent). Yet the mental habits formed by departmental structures and peer groups run deep.
Historians, when they do take notice of poetry, tend to raid it: to detach the content of a poem, especially its most quotable content, from its properties of form and
genre. That naivete is a recipe for misinterpretationbut no more so than the separation of a literary text from its historical context. When writers of Renaissance poetry
addressed public issues, form was the servant of content. Literature was for use and for
inuence. Its purpose, when it was spelled out, was to teach, and so improve, the world:
an intention intelligible only when we know something of the world it sought to
change. I do not mean that all literature of the period was didactic. I do not think there
was an ounce of didacticism in Shakespeare (who did not spell out his purpose).23
Even of professedly didactic literature it can be argued that in its highest achievements
in the delightful teaching of Sidneys Arcadia; in the comedies of Jonson that inform men in the best reason of living; in the great argument of Paradise Lost
artistic or human sympathy broke the bounds of didacticism and answered back to its
rigidities. Yet if the relationship of instructive to artistic impulses was complicated, it
took the disciplinary and critical habits of the twentieth century to divide them. I part
company with that excellent editor of the Arcadia, Jean Robertson, who urges us never
to forget that Sidney set out to provide a story rather than a treatiseas if his intentions separated delight from teaching.24

21. D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies (Oxford, 1965), 70.

22. Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 18481932 (Oxford, 1983), 211.
23. Blair Worden, Shakespeare and Politics, in Catherine M. S. Alexander, ed., Shakespeare and
Politics (Cambridge, 2004), 2243.
24. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (Oxford, 1973), xxv.

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If the oscillation of Renaissance writers between fact and ction disconcerts

modernity, it becomes intelligible once we recognize, in the history and poetry of that
time, not distant or opposing activities but alternative and complementary means of
instruction, which alike brought material beyond the real and present world to bear
upon it. In the educational practices and the adult reading of the time, history and ction reinforced each others lessons.25 We cannot often say why writers sometimes
chose one form, sometimes another. Students of Thomas More speculate that he took
up the ction of Utopia because, in struggling with his history of Richard III, which he
did not nish, he could not see how the grim realities of history could be made to
serve the good life.26 Students of Daniel speculate that he moved in what to us may
seem an opposite direction, from verse history to prose history, because the poet in
him yielded to the historian, whose respect for the facts prevailed.27 If so, perhaps
the contrast marks the progress of early modern societyfor better or worsetoward
less poetic and more mundane kinds of political analysis.28 Yet changes of genre were
alterations of means, not of ends. In the years around 1600 the search by Daniels contemporary Jonson for an inuential form of didacticism took him from the comedy of
humours, to comical satire, to mythologically and historically informed royal panegyric, to the writing of a historical tragedy about ancient Rome that trumpeted the
labor and accuracy of its authors research.29
Like poetry, history was for use. It had four main uses. There were the fostering
and expression, through chronicles and antiquarian compilations, of national and regional and civic and family identity and pride. There was history as a court of appeal:
as the arbiter, in a society wedded to rules of precedence and inheritance and hostile to
innovation, of constitutional conict. There was the defense of the Reformation and of
Protestantism in its various forms. But it was on the fourth front that history and
poetry came closest together: as instruments of political instruction.
 Politics and the Lessons of History
Aristotle had explained, and Sidneys Defence repeated, that poetry deals in universals, history in particulars. As a means of education, however, Renaissance history had
aspirations as universal as poetrys, for it had universal truths to proclaim. Since the Industrial Revolution and the Romantic movement, we have been more conscious of
the dierences than of the resemblances between past and present. The Renaissance
dwelled on the similarities, and on the recurrentand thus universalrules and

25. Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (New York, 2001), chap. 5: Histories,
Conduct Manuals, Romances.
26. Levine, Thomas More, 88.
27. Joan Rees, Samuel Daniel: A Critical and Biographical Study (Liverpool, 1964), 14546.
28. Cf. the development in Michael Draytons thinking noted by Levy, Tudor Historical Thought,
22021.
29. Blair Worden, Ben Jonson and the Monarchy, in Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess, and
Rowland Wymer, eds., Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History, and Politics (Cambridge, 2000), 7375.

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 75

patterns of political conduct that were detectable amid the local variations of time and
place. Of course, people knew that the past had seen changes of government and institutions and architecture and costume; they thought that the cycles of history had
brought social and intellectual advances and retreats; they supposed that some ages
had been more alike, and some therefore less alike, than others. But they took it for
granted that human nature never changes, and that for that reason the patterns and
problems of any age will repeat themselves in another. History was thus a storehouse of
example, a database of knowledge and wisdom.
Most of its lessons were political ones, which princes and their advisers and the
ruling order around them ignored at their peril. For over the course of the sixteenth
century, as power shifted from the church to the state and from the regions to the center, the study of history became ever more the study of high politics30especially the
politics of the court, that magnet to poets too. The study of the past not only gave politicians their present bearings. At least within limits, it also enabled them to predict the
future. The political historian (and playwright) Machiavelli explained that, because in
all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were, if one examines with diligence the things past, it is easy to foresee the future of any commonwealth, and to apply those remedies that were used of old; or, if one
does not nd that remedies were used, devise new ones owing to the similarity between
events.31 Jean Bodin, whose inuence on English historical thinking rivaled Machiavellis, agreed: through the study of history not only are present-day aairs readily interpreted but also future events are inferred, and we may acquire reliable maxims for
what we should seek and avoid.32 Politicians can thus deploy history to assess not only
the problems confronting them but also the consequences of the responses that are
open to them.
The usual method of political instruction was to scout the past for examples
that could be applied to the present. To that end political advisers, and sometimes
politicians themselves, compiled commonplace books or collections, where instances were taken from around the periods and were listed under the appropriate
topic or maxim.33 Most of them were plucked from the periods that had been most incisively recorded or that could now be most conveniently studied: the ancient world
30. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, xi, 200; Ferguson, Clio Unbound, esp. 21, 73; Richard Helgerson,
Murder in Faversham: Holinsheds Impertinent History, in Kelley and Sacks, eds., Historical Imagination, 147.
31. The Discourses of Machiavelli, trans. Leslie J. Walker, 2 vols. (1975), 1:302 (bk. 1, chap. 39).
32. Jean Bodin, A Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, ed. and trans. Beatrice Reynolds
(New York, 1945), 9. A striking assertion of the predictive capacity of historical parallels can be found
in The Journal of Sir Simonds DEwes from the Beginning of the Long Parliament, ed. Wallace Notestein
(New Haven, Conn., 1923), 38384.
33. Manuscripts or manuscript annotations that adopt that and similar techniques include
Queens College Oxford, MS. 353 (Sir Robert Cotton); the annotations in Sir Robert Sidneys copy of
Justus Lipsiuss edition of Tacitus: British Library C. 142 e. 13; Kent Archives Oce (Maidstone) U1475
(De LIsle and Dudley papers), Z1/111; the annotations in Bodleian Library, Rawl. 8o. 520; British
Library, Cottonian MS. Titus C.VI (notes of the Earl of Northampton).

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related by Thucydides and Livy and Sallust and Tacitus and Suetonius and Polybius; the
medieval England recorded by the chroniclers; the Italy dissected by Machiavelli and
Guicciardini; the late-medieval France described by Philippe de Commynes. Since all
history was essentially alike, the writers and readers who sought contemporary instruction from it moved easily from one period to another. So did the members of
Parliament who customarily adorned their speeches with historical parallels. In the
1620s the Duke of Buckingham was compared to Sejanus, the favorite of the emperor
Tiberius, by one m.p., to Piers Gaveston, the favorite of Edward II, by another.34 Poets
and playwrights were no less nimble. Jonson began a play about one overmighty
subject who conspired to control the throne, Mortimer under Edward III, and abandoned it to write a play about another, Sejanus.35 When Philip Massingers antiSpanish play of 1631, Believe as You List, which was set in the sixteenth century, ran into
trouble with the authorities, he simply transfered the setting, without evident
diculty, to the classical world. The revised version of the play carried a prologue that
contrived, with delicate mischief, to indicate that the change had not softened the
parallels with the present.36
There was, it is true, a minority, from Guicciardini onward, who protested that
history never, or anyway never quite, repeats itself.37 Modern thinking is on their side.
In some ways, the politic history that in England took wing in the late sixteenth century, and that looked to Tacitus and Machiavelli as its leading lights, does seem to point
toward our own approaches. It made an avant-garde science out of the repetitiveness
of the past, one marked by a new political realism, a new insistence or emphasis on secular as opposed to providentialist explanation, a new impatience with history that narrated events without properly analyzing their causes. But development in historical
writing is rarely the monopoly of one outlook or group of writers. There are respects in
which politic history, at least at its most directly practical, was no harbinger of modern
preferences. To us, the historians rst task is the establishment of context. Politic history was generally non-contextual, even anti-contextual, for an insistence on the particularity or distinctiveness of a historical context tends to obstruct the detection of
parallels and universal rules. We expect historians to re-create the texture of the society
in which a set of events occurred. Politic history, which centered on the personalities of
rulers and counselors and on the processes of decision making, was often indierent to
the larger social picture (though Ralegh and Sir Francis Bacon supply signicant exceptions). We expect historians to be researchers. Politic history did not need research,
merely the reading of earlier historians. Bacon, whose history of Henry VII is a classic
of politic history, thought that research was journeymans work, whose laborers

34. Michelle OCallaghan, The Shepheards Nation: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political
Culture, 16121625 (Oxford, 2000), 195.
35. Worden, Ben Jonson among the Historians, 76.
36. Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance
Drama (Iowa City, 1991), 9799.
37. Woolf, Idea of History, 53; Robert Johnson, Essays (1607), sig. D4v.

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 77

should condense their ndings into forms readily usable by the true historian, who
would do the thinking.38
In those respects the antecedents of modern historical approaches lie elsewhere.
In the seventeenth century there evolved, through the work and inuence of Selden
and Sir Henry Spelman and the medievalists of the Restoration, a graspor at
the least a rmer graspof historical relativism; of the characteristics that have
distinguished one period from another; and of the relationship of politics and institutions to society. Those perceptions, all of which emphasized historical particularities,
derived not from politic history but from the slow march, from the earlier sixteenth
century, of those antiquarian studies whose practitionersthe students of languages
and manuscripts and inscriptions and coins and ruinswere judged citizens of the
second intellectual class.39
In their most concentrated forms, politic and antiquarian history were alike
minority activities. Only occasionally did they contribute to the narrative accounts
that remained the ages most common instrument of historical composition and education. More often than not, politic history stood back from narrative to reect upon
it, normally in essays or short books. For its part, antiquarian scholarship, which produced many longer books, struggled to supply a chronological spine to its ndings.
The opposition between antiquarian and politic history, or more broadly between historical scholarship and the political application of history, should not be sharply
drawn. Some historians who cannot readily be placed in, or conned to, either category absorbed attributes of both. Camden, in his account of Queen Elizabeths reign,
drew on both approaches and transcended them. Other historians moved between
one and the other. On the Continent, Justus Lipsius earned fame and inuence both as
the editor of classical texts and as the writer of essays in politic history. Yet it was in essays that turned aside from the reconstruction of particularities (Lipsius from establishing the texts of Tacitus and Seneca, Ralegh from his narrative of the early history of
the world) to meditate on universal patterns that politic historians spoke most immediately to the needs of political leaders.
The leaders were ready to be instructed. By reading of authentic histories and
chronicles, explained James VI and I, ye shall learn experience by theoric, applying
the bypast things to the present estate.40 The Elizabethan Earl of Leicester delighted
most in reading of histories because it helped him to give counsel like a most prudent
counsellor in public causes.41 As secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham, who himself advised aspiring counselors to learn how to make historical reading serviceable

38. Fussner, Historical Revolution, 259.

39. Ferguson, Clio Unbound. See too David Douglas, English Scholars 16601730, revised ed. (London, 1951); D. R. Woolf, Narrative Historiography in Restoration England: A Preliminary Survey, in
W. G. Marshall, ed., The Restoration Mind (Newark, Del., 1997), 20751; Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries:
The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2004).
40. King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Somerville (Cambridge, 1994), 46.
41. Eleanor Rosenberg, Leicester, Patron of Letters (New York, 1955), 62.

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to the public, turned to Livy for guidance on the conduct of foreign policy.42 His fellow
secretary Sir Thomas Wilson, in trying to persuade the queen that the Catholic powers
were seeking to divide her from William of Orange, pointed to parallel conduct by unscrupulous politicians of ancient Rome, medieval England, modern France.43 (The
learned Elizabeth was equipped to grasp the point: she translated Sallust and, Sir Henry
Savile implies,44 wrote historical reections herself; to which Holinsheds chronicle
adds, in its admittedly hyperbolic account of Elizabeths court, the information that
some of its ancient ladies exercised themselves in continual reading either of the
holy scriptures, or histories of our own or foreign nations about us, and divers in writing volumes of their own, or translating of other mens into our English and Latin
tongue.)45 The late Elizabethan Earl of Essex looked to history for rules and patterns
of policy. He made a close study of Tacitus, who, he remarked, had taught him (among
other things) to understand a knotty problem of modern French politicsjust as
Plutarch taught me ... to make prot of my enemies.46
Todays politicians recruit special advisers as experts or analysts. Essexs special
advisers were historians who discussed historys lessons with him. He also received
historical counsel from that learned politician Lord Henry Howard (the future Earl of
Northampton), who habitually applied historical analogies to public events47and
who, as he acknowledged, plotted the fall of his rivals by revolving histories in his
mind.48 Under James I, the Earl of Somerset, needing an intellectual crash course to t
him for his suddenly acquired political eminence, had accounts of English history
drawn up for him.49 He had much to learn, for history, like poetry, lay close to the surface of the ruling orders mind. When, in the Civil War, the Roundhead general Sir
William Waller famously lamented, in writing to his friend and adversary the royalist
general Sir Ralph Hopton, the destruction wrought by this war without an enemy, he
did not need to explain that he was quoting Lucans account of the hideous civil conict
of late-republican Rome, that bellum sine hoste (book 1, line 682). At the crisis of the
Earl of Essexs abortive rising of 1601, the earls historically learned adviser Henry Cue
invoked lines of Lucans poem in urging a reluctant conspirator to join the revolt.50
42. Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidneys Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New
Haven, Conn., 1996), 25455.
43. Baron J. Kervyn de Lettenhove, ed., Relations Politiques des Pays-Bas et de lAngleterre, 11 vols.
(Brussels, 18821900), 9:33738.
44. Henry Savile, ed. and trans., The Ende of Nero and the Beginning of Galba. Foure Bookes of The
Histories of Cornelius Tacitus. The Life of Agricola (1604 ed.), epistle dedicatory.
45. Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 6 vols. (18078), 1:330. I am grateful to
Paulina Kewes for this reference.
46. Paul Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux
2nd Earl of Essex, 15851597 (Cambridge, 1999), 30616.
47. Ibid., 307.
48. Hope Mirrlees, A Fly in Amber (London, 1962), 188.
49. Woolf, Reading History, 59; Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early
Modern England (New Haven, Conn., 2000), 117.
50. William Camden, The Historie of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princesse Elizabeth (1630),
192. Historical illustrations drawn from Lucan, or from the poetry of Juvenal, Martial, and Ovid, came