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Henry VII surrounded himself with men who promoted the Renaissance's ``New Learning.'' The King himself was clearly fascinated by the political and cultural life of the main Italian states, and during his reign, the English court was a more interesting and cosmopolitan place, than it was to be in the time of his successor. Foreign scholars were likely to receive a warm welcome, and Henry was also the leading patron of English writers and poets.
Henry's interest in the arts was widely recognized, and a knowledge of the Classics was regarded as an avenue to royal favor, encouraging others to master the Renaissance learning. Erasmus reported in 1505, that London had eclipsed both Oxford and Cambridge, and had become the country's most important educational center, where ``there are ... five or six men who are accurate scholars in both tongues [Greek and Latin], such as I think even Italy itself does not at present possess.''
After studying in England, most of these scholars travelled to Italy, to master the new Platonic learning. Thomas Linacre, for example, was hired by Henry upon his return from Italy around 1500, first as a tutor to his oldest son Arthur, and then as the King's personal physician. Linacre later became the first president of the Royal College of Physicians, which was incorporated in 1518. William Grocyn travelled to Italy to be educated, and on his return initiated the teaching of Greek at Oxford.
One leading royal patron of education was Lady Margaret Beaufort, the King's mother. She has been described as ``more nearly the typical `man of the Renaissance' than her son,'' and that, even though her ``influence and endowments were ... religious rather than secular, they were outward looking and humanist, never scholastic.'' Lady Margaret was the only woman whose advice the King ever sought or heeded.
Margaret was only fourteen when her son Henry was born. She died in 1509, outliving her son by several months. As a child, she was taught reading, writing, and French. Her tutors remarked on her intelligence. She desired to learn Greek and Latin, but her mother refused to hire a tutor to educate her in the languages that were reserved for men who joined the clergy. As an adult, she completed an English translation of Thomas a@ag Kempis's {The Imitation of Christ,} which had been begun by William Atkinson, as well as translating another religious work.
Lady Margaret promoted the education of the entire population. She was a devout Christian, who championed the preaching of simple but eloquent sermons, which would uplift even the lowliest churchgoer. She promoted the printing of books, and was a leading patron of the first English printer, William Caxton, and his successor.
In 1494, Margaret met John Fisher, a friend and collaborator of Erasmus, who was to be her lifelong confidant, counselor, and companion. Fisher became the Bishop of Winchester, and Cancellor of Cambridge University. He encouraged Margaret to patronize projects that promoted the New Learning. As a result, she supported the founding of two colleges at Cambridge, Jesus College in 1497, and St. John's College after her death in 1509, through a grant in her will. St. John's, which opened in 1516, became the leading college at Cambridge for the next thirty years.
Another patron of education was Bishop Richard Fox, the man who played a key role in Henry VII's foreign policy. In 1517, Fox and Hugh Oldham, bishop of Exeter, founded Corpus Christi College, whose statutes set out in detail a humanist curriculum. Initially, Fox had wished to found a college to educate clergy in the New Learning, but ultimately, the college accepted students destined for secular employment.
Although Henry and his circle favored the New Learning, the universities remained dominated by medieval scholasticism. The efforts of Henry and his circle were ultimately successful, however, as they opened the door for a circle of scholars associated with Erasmus of Rotterdam to create a revolution in education, which led to the great flowering of culture and the English economy during the next hundred years.
The central figure in the circle that launched the English Renaissance was Erasmus of Rotterdam. Born to poor parents in Holland in 1467, Erasmus was educated by the Brotherhood of the Common Life, a teaching order modeled on a Kempis's {Imitation of Christ,} that took in poor, but promising children. Several of his teachers inspired him to take dedicate his life to the promotion of Platonist Classical learning.
Erasmus became the leading humanist thinker of his age, and his name was a household word throughout educated Europe. He published his first work, the {Adages,} in 1500. Works such as {In Praise of Folly} and {The Handbook of the Militant Christian} become enormously popular, precisely at the moment when printing was coming into vogue. His works spread far and wide, and played an important role in promoting literacy throughout Europe.
Among Erasmus's key collaborators in England were Thomas More (1478-1535) and John Colet (1467-1519). They were the nucleus of a small group of Classically educated scholars, formed during the reign of Henry VII, who dedicated themselves to creating a Renaissance that would usher in an age where society would be governed by reason. Colet was the son of a London mercer, who was Lord Mayor in 1486 and 1495. He traveled to Italy, where he became a fervent promoter of Platonism. More (1478-1535) was the son of a London lawyer. He studied Greek and Platonic philosophy at Oxford, and became a key leader of the English Renaissance during the reign of Henry VIII.
These scholars proceeded from the idea that, since man's nature was in the image of God, he could comprehend God's nature through reason. They rejected the stultifying, Aristotelian logic of the scholastics, whose commentaries dominated theology, and sought instead to reintroduce the writings of the early Church Fathers and the New Testament itself, in which they recognized an outlook coherent with Platonic philosophy. For example, in his {Praise of Folly,} Erasmus attacked the Schoolmen for completely missing the central message of Christianity on faith and charity, as stated by St. Paul in I Corinthians 13, that all displays of piety are false, unless they are motivated by charity or {agape.} Erasmus satirized the methods of the scholastics, arguing that the most important sections of the Epistles of the Apostle Paul failed to meet their standards. Erasmus said: ``Paul could present faith. But when he said, `Faith is the substance of thing hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,' he did not define it doctorally. The same apostle, though he exemplified charity to its utmost, divided and defined it with very little logical skill in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter 13.''
Erasmus both promoted and used the method of Socratic dialogue in his writings. In his {Handbook of the Militant Christian,} he demonstrated that the Christian must look beyond sense certainty, to the realm of Platonic ideas. Through this, man can escape the temptations of the flesh, and rise to the spiritual realm. Erasmus says: ``Creep not upon the earth, my brother, like an animal. Put on those wings which Plato says are caused to grow on the soul by the ardor of love. Rise above the body to the spirit, from the visible to the invisible, from the letter to the mystical meaning, from the sensible to the intelligible, from the involved to the simple.''
Erasmus, Colet, and More championed the use of education to transform citizens into the equivalent of Plato's ``philosopher king,'' and sought to bring such men into governing positions in society. A recurrent theme in Erasmus's writings is, that true nobility is based on transforming oneself through learning, so that one's behavior is guided by reason, to seek to do the good. This could be achieved by bringing the Platonic method to children, through schooling in the Classics.
Erasmus first traveled to England during the reign of Henry VII, in 1499. At Oxford, he found John Colet lecturing on the Epistles of Paul. His lectures were well attended, as they rejected the scholastic's Aristotelian method. Colet brought out the coherence of Paul's Epistles with the philosophy of Plato.
The work of Colet and others in bringing this approach to Oxford and Cambridge universities was very controversial, and was only possible because of the support of both Henry VII and later Henry VIII. The universities continued to be dominated largely by the old scholastic methods, however. Therefore, Erasmus and his collaborators set out to recruit a new generation, by introducing the Platonist method of education.
The circle around Erasmus, More, and Colet began to establish schools which became models for the transformation of the educational system. Around 1510, More set up a school in his home, where he taught his own and other children. More's three daughters were famous examples that girls could become highly educated.
During the last years of the reign of Henry VII, Colet finalized plans for a school based on Platonist methods of education. In 1510, Henry VIII granted a license to establish St. Paul's school, which became the model for the reorganization of the English grammar schools throughout the country.
Colet asked Erasmus to become the first headmaster of St. Paul's. When Erasmus declined, Colet selected William Lily, who had studied at Oxford and in Italy. Lily had also travelled to Rhodes to learn Greek.
When Colet asked Erasmus to write a curriculum for the new school, Erasmus produced {De Ratione Studii} ({Concerning the Aim and Method of Education}), which stressed that language should be learned, not as a collection of grammatical rules, but as it is spoken. It must be mastered by studying the greatest authors in Greek and Latin.
Erasmus wrote a series of dialogues and exercises, aimed at teaching language. His {De Copia} and {Colloquies,} or dialogues, were designed to educate students in language as it was spoken, rather than as written text. Erasmus designed these as Platonic dialogues. Indeed, Colet rejected the teaching of logic, because he recognized would it stultify the mind.
Lily, Colet, and Erasmus jointly collaborated in drafting a grammar textbook. By 1542, this text had been adopted as the official Latin Grammar used throughout the schools in England. Its use continued up through the Eighteenth century, and, in a modified form, in many schools even into the Twentieth.
St. Paul's school had many detractors, and in a letter to Colet, More wrote that some opposed St Paul's, because it was serving as a Trojan horse which would bring forth those who would expose their ignorance. The school was defended by Henry VIII's court circles, which continued to promote the transformation of education that had been launched by Henry VII. During Henry VIII's reign, numerous schools were established on the model of St. Paul's, whose method of instruction increasingly became the standard for English grammar schools in general.
The transformation and expansion of the educational system led to a dramatic increase in literacy. By 1615, following the end of the Tudor dynasty with the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, the literacy level in England had reached around 33 percent, one of the highest rates in the world. This was considerably higher than France, where the literacy rate was only around 20 percent at that time.
The Erasmian educational system, and the emphasis on education, was brought to America by the Massachusetts Puritans. Erasmus's {Colloquies} was brought by the English colonists to America, where it was used throughout the grammar schools of New England. By the time of the American Revolution, the literacy rate in New England was approximately 90 percent, the highest in the world, and a key factor in why the American colonists were able to make the Revolution.
Thomas More and Henry VIII
When Henry VII died on April 21, 1509, he left England dramatically transformed. He had found it racked by civil war; he left it solidly united. Feudalism had been replaced by a nation-state on a solid foundation.
Many people believed that in Henry VIII, England would find a great king. His father had ensured that he was well educated in Renaissance learning. The Venetian ambassador Ludovico Falieri said of him, ``Grand stature, suited to his exalted position, showing the superiority of mind and character ...|. He has been a student from his childhood; he knows literature, philosophy, and theology; speaks and writes Spanish, French, and Italian, besides Latin and English.''@s1@s9
One person whose assessment of Henry VIII was less positive was Lady Margaret Beaufort. With her son's death, she had lost her best friend. Her grandson, she found quite distant from her, and very different in character from his father.
Unfortunately, Henry VIII proved to be a pawn of Venetian manipulation. Unlike his father, he became involved in continental wars which were completely destructive to England's interest. He failed to continue the English exploration of the New World, begun by John Cabot under the patronage of Henry VII. Many of Henry VII's economic initiatives were abandoned. Ultimately, Henry VIII became a pawn in the Venetian-manipulated wars of religion.
Ironically, the heir to the legacy of Henry VII was not his son Henry VIII, whose reign was filled with contradictions and ended in tragedy. Rather, the man who best carried forward the efforts launched by Henry VII to establish a true nation-state, was Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, whose most famous work, {Utopia,} advocated that the position of king should be an elective office.
{Utopia} is one of the greatest works on constitutional law ever written. More was probably the individual best qualified to serve as England's ``Solon of Athens,'' but it was not possible for him to play such a role. Instead, he sought to further the much more long-term process of creating a citizenry capable of establishing a republic.
The period from the Sixteenth century through to the Treaty of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648, was a relative Dark Age in Europe, dominated by the attempt of the Venetian oligarchy to destroy the newly emerging nation-states by pitting them against each other in wars of religion and other issues. Henry VIII was a willing pawn in these schemes. Almost from the beginning of his reign, he abandoned his father Henry VII's policy of peace and economic cooperation. Under the direction of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII imagined himself as a master manipulator, who ordered the relations of Europe, and played off one continental nation against another. Cardinal Wolsey even used his position as a mediator between Francis I of France and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, to manipulate the two states into a war. England repeatedly changed sides in alliances, and spent enormous amounts of money fighting wars that in no way served the actual national interest.
Eventually, Henry VIII was induced to break with the Church in Rome, and to align England as a participant in the religious warfare that devastated Europe from the time of Martin Luther until the Peace of Westphalia. The nominal issue was Henry VIII's desire to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, who had failed to produce a male heir. However, Venetian agents at he Court, such as Francesco Zorzi, manipulated the issue, to ensure a complete split between Henry VIII and the Roman Church.
More's Commitment to the General Welfare
On Nov. 4, 2000, Pope John Paul II issued an Apostolic Letter proclaiming St. Thomas More as ``Patron of Statesmen and Politicians.'' John Paul II saw in Thomas More a model of how leaders must serve the common good. John Paul II described this responsibility in a public address the same day:
``Politics is the use of legitimate authority in order to attain the common good of society: a common good which, as the Second Vatican Council declares, embraces `the sum of those conditions of social life by which individuals, families and groups can achieve complete and efficacious fulfillment.'|''
John Paul II says of More in his Apostolic Letter: ``In this context, it is helpful to turn to the example of Saint Thomas More, who distinguished himself by his constant fidelity to legitimate authority and institutions precisely in his intention to serve not power but the supreme ideal of justice. His life teaches us that government is above all an exercise of virtue. Unwavering in this rigorous moral stance, this English statesman placed his own public activity at the service of the person, especially if that person was weak or poor; he dealt with social controversies with a superb sense of fairness; he was vigorously committed to favoring and defending the family; he supported the all-round education of the young. His profound detachment from honors and wealth, his serene and joyful humility, his balanced knowledge of human nature and of the vanity of success, his certainty of judgement rooted in faith: these all gave him that confident inner strength that sustained him in adversity and in the face of death. His sanctity shone forth in his martyrdom, but it had been prepared by an entire life of work devoted to God and neighbor.''
In {Utopia,} More developed the idea that government must promote the General Welfare of all of its citizens. To achieve this goal would require that all the nation's citizens be schooled to become Platonic ``philosopher kings.'' As More states, ``For it is impossible that all should be well, unless all men are good.''
More wrote {Utopia} in the form of a dialogue between himself and a fictional character, named Raphael, who More states has sailed, both geographically and intellectually, ``as Ulysses and Plato.'' More says that Raphael has studied philosophy, ``learning Greek, since the Romans left us nothing that is valuable except Seneca and Cicero.'' Raphael describes to More the imaginary land of Utopia, which has achieved a far higher level of civilization than that of Europe at the time.
In a satire on the current practices of government, Raphael argues that a counselor who advised a king to see himself as the guardian of his people, would be rejected by the king in favor of other advisors who would tell him that he should follow only his own interest. Raphael says, ``I would urge the king to tend his ancestral kingdom and improve it as much as he could. He should love his people and be loved by them.'' The king's other counselors would reject this, however, and give the king contrary advice:
``Thus the counselors agree with the maxims of Crassus: a king can never have enough money, since he has to maintain his army; a king can do nothing unjustly even if he wants to; all property belongs to the king, even the very persons of his subjects; no man has any other property than what the king out of his goodness thinks fit to leave him; the king should leave his as little as possible, as if it were to his advantage that his people should have neither riches not liberty.''
Raphael then asks: Suppose I were to advise the king and his counselors that, ``both his honor and his safety consisted more in his people's wealth than in his own. Suppose I should maintain that men choose a king not for his sake, but for theirs, that by his care and efforts they may live comfortably and safely.|... If I should press these views on men strongly inclined to the contrary, how deaf they would be to it all!''
In discussing foreign policy, More ridicules the practice of almost all European rulers of the time, of treating relations among states as a war ``of each against all,'' in the phrase coined by its later enthusiast Thomas Hobbes. The Utopians' approach, More explains, is superior: They seek alliances based on common interest, and fight wars only when they have a just reason, seeking to win them with as little bloodshed as possible.
More, by describing a dialogue at the dinner table of his former patron John Morton, discusses the foundation of justice in a society which is run on the basis of the General Welfare. More argues that the moral uplifting of the population, is the foundation for any effort to control crime, and that the harsh punishments of the time did not deter crime.
More draws a picture of a Utopian government, as a republic in which most government positions were to be elected; the prince, for example, was to be elected for life. For such a government to function, however, would require leaders who were committed to the common good, as well as a population capable of electing such leaders and advising them in carrying out the functions of government. More tells Raphael: ``Your Plato thinks that commonwealths will only become happy when either philosophers become kings, or kings become philosophers. No wonder we are so far from happiness, when philosophers do not deign to assist kings with their counsels.''
An advanced system of universal education is presented. Commenting on the parasitical nature of the European aristocracy, More remarks that in Utopia, since the entire population works, and there is no aristocratic class that consumes without producing, everyone in Utopia has leisure time for study. Among the subjects emphasized are music, geometry, and astronomy, with the same approach to these subjects as that of the Greeks. In a biting attack on the scholastics. More says of the Utopians, ``they equal the ancients in almost everything, but they are far behind our modern logicians. For they have not yet invented the subtle distinctions and hypotheses which have been so cleverly worked out in our trifling schools of logic and taught to the boys here.''
More saw this idea of the General Welfare as completely coherent with the teachings of Christ. In {Utopia,} he argues that Christianity is coherent with reason. Later on, in debates over the views of Martin Luther, More rejected Luther's doctrine that denied free will and the importance of doing God's work, as leading mankind to an immoral life. More, in disputing Luther's doctrine stated, ``But they fight against faith and deny Christ, who, while they extol only grace and faith, deny the value of works, and make men callous to living well.''
As John Paul II referenced, More did not see a life dedicated to virtue and the service of the General Welfare, as a life of grim, humorless determination. More says of the Utopinas, ``They disagree with the grim and gloom eulogist of virtue, who hates pleasure and exhort us to toils and vigils and squalid self-denial, and at the same time commands us to relieve the poverty and lighten the burdens of others in accordance with our humanity. So they conclude that nature herself prescribes a life of joy (that is, of pleasure) as the goal of life. That is what they mean by saying that virtue is living according to nature.''
More asserts that man must fulfill his need for sustenance, and not live the life of an acetic. But, beyond this, he shows how man can find a higher pleasure than the sensual, which is the pleasure one derives from living a life coherent with reason.
Not long after the publication of {Utopia,} More found himself permanently engaged in the royal service. At this period of his reign, Henry VIII delighted in surrounding himself with men of note and learning. Humanist scholars found a cordial welcome from him and from the Queen. John Colet was their chosen preacher; Linacre, the royal physician; Tunstall, the Master of the Rolls.
The King was determined to attach so brilliant a man as More to his Court. ``He could not rest, until he had dragged More to his Court--dragged is the word,'' wrote Erasmus, ``for no one ever tried more strenuously to gain admission to Court, than he did to escape from it.'' ``He hates despotism and likes equality,'' wrote Erasmus of More. ``He is fond of liberty and leisure, though no one is more ready and industrious when duty requires it. He was much averse from spending his time at Court, though one could not wish to serve a kinder or more unexacting prince.''
Erasmus described how More used his position to protect the poor: ``You would say that he had been appointed the public guardian of all those in need.'' He also used his position to promote the educational reforms launched by his circle. Perhaps the greatest positive accomplishment of the reign of Henry VIII, was the expansion and transformation of the educational system. Backed by Henry VIII, More was able to protect the New Learning against attempts to stifle it. In 1518, More delivered his famous address defending with all his force the New Learning of the humanists, with special reference to the teaching of Erasmus.
More was appointed Chancellor in 1529, after the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey. By then, however, Henry VIII was completely in the Venetian trap. He had embarked on a course of setting himself up as the supreme religious authority in England. The Venetian grouping wanted More out of the way, and succeeded in getting him executed. More was replaced by Thomas Cromwell, who was completely committed to the Venetian strategy.
Part 4: To be added soon
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