Abstract
William Cecil accepted Thomas Smith’s Ramist notions but diluted them in political practice. The unexpected death of Edward de Vere’s father in 1562 consigned the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford to the Court of Wards and Liveries. Queen Elizabeth had appointed Cecil master of this court in 1561. The young earl, who thrived intellectually in the humanist environment of Cecil House, cultivated his rounded attitude toward Ramism: he came to appreciate both its strengths and its weaknesses. In February 1571, Elizabeth raised Cecil to the Peerage. Ten months later, Burghley realized a dynastic ambition: he gave his daughter Anne in marriage to Oxford. Other matters soon overwrote Burghley’s satisfaction, however, with the event that martyred Peter Ramus: the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August 1572.
What warrant can the French make now? Seals and words of princes being traps to catch innocents, and bring them to the butchery.
—Sir Thomas Smith (qtd. in John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith [121])
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Notes
- 1.
This was another appointment held by Cecil until his death.
- 2.
See also Christina Hallowell Garrett, The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- 3.
See Jolly’s “‘Shakespeare’ and Burghley’s Library” for more details.
- 4.
Eddi Jolly and Patrick O’Brien (22) provide these details.
- 5.
Cecil’s award was somewhat surprising: he had been chancellor of the university for five years.
- 6.
Marie-Dominique Couzinet summarizes the differing remarks of Théophile de Banos and Nicolas de Nancel concerning Ramus’s conversion. According to Banos, “Ramus, a good Catholic, had gradually slipped into Protestantism.” According to Nancel, “Ramus always attended daily Mass and imposed such attendance on all members of the college.” His attendance and its associated imposition lasted until 1568 (289). Scrupulously disinterested, “Nancel does not comment on Ramus’s motives” for this subterfuge; rather, he proposes that Ramus “acted either by personal conviction or by a desire to deprive his opponents of any opportunity to slander his religious practice” (289–90).
- 7.
The outburst over Plato’s “almost womanly jealousy” recalls Ramus’s lament concerning Quintilian’s overflowing vanity.
- 8.
Gordon “must have gone to England as planned, but without seeing Cecil,” reasons Quynn, “for he wrote Cecil in December, 1569, referring to his arrival a year and a half earlier, ‘cast upon his (Cecil’s) shores, as if by ship-wreck, and despoiled of all his possessions and his fortune’” (121). Onto this letter, Gordon scribbled “notes in six languages, Syriac, Ethiopie, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, in the hope of empressing [sic] Cecil with his ability along these lines.” These additions, however, “consist only of salutations and familiar phrases which anyone could copy, and in some cases they are obviously the work of one who did not know the languages. Whatever Ramus may have thought of Gordon’s learning, it was certainly less extensive than Gordon pretended” (121).
- 9.
This was another appointment held by Cecil until his death.
- 10.
Travers had an “interest in Ramism” (31), as Steven J. Reid notes, despite (or because of) his time at Trinity College. Henry Alvey had studied at St. John’s College. William Temple had attended King’s College.
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Wainwright, M. (2018). Peter Ramus, Edward de Vere, and the Basis of Logic. In: The Rational Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95258-1_3
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