Tolerant Repression

Letters

Vol. 12 No. 12 · 28 June 1990

From George Bernard

In discussing Thomas Mayer’s Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal (LRB, 10 May), Blair Worden endorses Mayer’s claim that Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset was a ‘reform programme to be taken seriously as a plan to rehabilitate the high nobility and to restore it to its proper place at the head of the English commonwealth.’ Such an interpretation takes as fact the highly questionable assumption that the power of the nobility had declined in the early Tudor period. Neither of the debaters in the Dialogue says any such thing: noblemen are seen as having too much of the wrong kind of power – too many servants, too many opportunities of waste. ‘Pole’ criticises noblemen for their ignorance, idleness, extravagance, and barbarous habit of living in the country rather than in cities. Worden notes that criticism but does not grasp just how much it undermines Mayer’s argument that the Dialogue was a manifesto for the nobility. When Pole offers a plan for a standing council to meet when parliament is not in session, he puts a few of the greatest and most ancient lords on it, and suggests that its head should be a nobleman holding the revived office of constable. But he also includes bishops, lawyers and citizens of London. Worden notes that the high nobility would be in a minority and that therefore the Dialogue is far less of a scheme of ‘aristocratic conciliarism’ than Mayer would claim, but he at once reduces the impact of his critical comment by adding, puzzlingly, that ‘nonetheless Mayer has established aristocratic medievalism as one of the two principal influences on Starkey’s political thought.’

Worden also endorses Mayer’s claim that the Dialogue was written by Thomas Starkey as a call to his patron Reginald Pole to assume the leadership of a group of aristocratic reformers. Yet there is no tangible evidence for this. In the Dialogue Lupset urges Pole to take an interest in public affairs, but he has little difficulty in persuading Pole to do just that. Pole behaves as a free-ranging counsellor offering criticism and advice on all manner of contemporary problems, not as a leader of the nobility, for which role Reginald Pole, as a younger son, was not an obvious choice.

Mayer’s argument demands that the Dialogue be taken as critical of Henry VIII and his policies. Worden agrees, treating Pole’s insistence that he is in no way criticising Henry, but simply drawing attention to the fundamental flaws in a system of hereditary monarchy, as disingenuous and ironic. Worden rather sees the Dialogue as implicitly accusing the King of tyranny. But it is hard to see that the Dialogue endorsed any such charge. Pole rejected Papal supremacy, deplored appeals to Rome and denounced the payment of annates to Rome. Pole might well have approved of Henry’s break with Rome. That the real Pole did not, but came so vigorously to defend the Papacy, must cast doubt on Mayer’s association of Pole with Reginald Pole. Pole is much more plausibly a reflection of the views of Thomas Starkey. And Star-key, unlike Reginald Pole, went on in the mid-1530s to defend the break with Rome and the royal supremacy and to urge a via media in religion directed by the King, which must sharply qualify Worden’s claim that he was ‘England’s first Classical republican’.

It seems unlikely, then, that the Dialogue had as much to do with particular political issues as Mayer and Worden would believe. Much of the Dialogue is a moral treatise deploring moral failings – idleness, selfishness, gluttony – and their economic and social consequences. But in so far as the Dialogue is a political text, it is best seen as a theoretical exercise exploring how Italian and Classical forms of government might be applied to deal with English ills, an exercise that its author may have hoped would win him recognition and patronage – above all, from the King or from leading ministers. It would be a great pity if that ‘expanding readiness to relate the politics of the past to its literature’ – to ‘the literature of ideas and imagination’ and to the literature of political theory – which Worden so rightly commends should lead, by the imposition of circular and highly speculative interpretations far removed from the evidence for the politics of the day, to just the arid scholasticism which he has long so eloquently and properly deplored.

George Bernard
University of Southampton