On Tyranny: Thomas More and the Renaissance

At the UDallas annual St. Thomas More Conference, Dr. James Hankins, Professor of History at Harvard, presents a paper illuminating St. Thomas More’s understanding of tyranny in the context of Renaissance humanism. Hankins highlights Thomas More’s unique perspective as presenting the most thorough understanding of the characteristics and problems of tyranny, as well as solutions for creating virtuous government.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to our 25th annual Thomas Moore Conference on the weekend that marks the 25th anniversary of Thomas Moore's becoming patron of statesmen. The Center of Thomas Moore Studies was founded in 2000 to help prepare for that important event, and we're grateful for our long affiliation with the University of Dallas. Tonight we're very pleased to welcome back Dr. James Hankins as our keynote speaker. He is professor of history at Harvard, having taught there since 1985. Happy 40th anniversary. And having done his undergraduate degree in classics at Duke, and then his master's and PhD in history at Columbia University. He has published extensively, most recently, earlier this year, this 10,300-page history of Western Civilization. Part one. Up to 1500. But also, this is the year that he has published the 100th volume in the Etati series of Italian classics. And this series has sold well over 100,000 volumes already. Thank you for your invaluable scholarship, Dr. Hankins, and welcome back to the University of Dallas. And thank you for sharing the fine wine from 40 years of uh careful and deliberate labor in vineyards of our time. Please welcome Dr. Hankins.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Thank you very much for that kind introduction. I uh I wanted him to hold up both volumes, the Essential Works of Thomas Moore, and my book, to show mine is bigger.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

What beautiful illustrations.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

I think there's more words in this, so it's but holding two of them at the same time, it's a bodybuilding exercise. So we we won't do that. Uh thank you for coming. It's nice to be back in in uh at the University of Dallas. Uh I want to talk about Thomas Moore and the Renaissance conceptions of tyranny tonight, which means I'm going to try to put them into the context of thought about tyrants, not just the Italian humanists I've spent most of my life studying, but also Aristotle and some juristical thinkers as well. So let's start with a quotation which we are discussing today, actually, at the conference, uh, which is among the most famous independent testimonies to Thomas Moore's political convictions. So this is a letter of Erasmus de Ulrich von Hutten, written in 2019, in which he writes, I'll read the translation. He once was rather averse to court and to the company of princes because he always had a special hatred for tyranny, uh, just as equality much pleased him. So um this is it. So I want to leave aside for the question uh for now the question whether and to what extent Moore had Republican sympathies. We started talking about that today at the conference, and we'll talk more uh tomorrow. Although I want to comment, I think the word iqualitas in this in this uh quote um means social equality, which is somewhat deflationary. There are other philosophers and students of uh uh of Moore and Erasmus who say this is about uh political equality or equality under the law or evangelical equality or the equality of all in the sight of Christ, sight of God. So there are different opinions on this. I think it just means that that he liked social equality. Um uh so Erasmus is saying that Moore disliked the hierarchical character of court life, preferring company of his social equals. Uh, and the more surprising I I think that's what it means to read the rest of the context. And then he goes on to uh cover himself because Rasmus wrote letters which he knew would be read by other than the persons to whom he was writing them. They circulated. So uh he might have been worried that I think he was worried that Henry VIII would hear about this, because Henry the VIII he was trying to get a job. He's trying to get a job in England for 20 years before he he wrote this, or maybe around uh maybe 18 years before he wrote this, and he wanted to work for Henry VIII. So then he goes on to say that, you know, the court of Henry VIII, of course, isn't that way, it's not tyrannical. You know, you you can barely see any, any, um, any uh uh Ulam Alton Alam, uh court that's so modest and has you know has less, did not have so much uh uh strepitus, which is um is uh you know noise, you know, clamor and ambition. So he goes on to say that that Henry VIII court's not like that at all, no, so because he wants, I think, still uh to work there. Okay, so um I don't think that we should take the word Tranos here, uh stricto sensu. Um if you look at the collector works of Erasmus, they translate it differently. Uh they see the problem of translating that simply by Gironus. Uh so they translate it as absolute rule, and that translation makes a lot more sense. Uh uh as it's more consonant with Moore's beliefs, which are well attested elsewhere. Uh and it's uh so Moore what he he's not equating the rule of princes with tyranny. There are people who do that in the Western tradition, that all princes are tyrants. Uh I guess the Greeks before the fourth century mostly say that. I think Xenophon is supposed to be the first uh theorist to distinguish legitimate kingship from uh tyranny. The Greeks don't really have a word for it before that. Uh so um, but this doesn't agree with the other things that Moore uh says elsewhere that are pretty well attested. First of all, it's certainly the case that kingship can be good. There's such a thing as good kingship for Moore, uh, and legitimate kingship, that's even more important. Secondly, that kings can be constrained by law, should be constrained by law, and the prerogatives of parliament. And legitimate kingship requires in some way the assent of the people, which is uh said a number of times in several epigrams, uh, and also uh it's implied by the history of Richard III, to which we'll return. Uh and uh right, so more equated absolute kingship with tyranny, um absolute kingship with tyranny, not constitutional kingship with tyranny, but a constitutional king could be perfectly legitimate. So there's a kind of slide, there's a natural slide from absolute kingship to tyranny, but it's not necessarily tyranny. All right, so in Epigram 198, you'll remember that Aristotle uh says pretty much the same thing that uh absolute kings are more uh you have to absolute uh kings that are also virtuous are extremely rare. Uh maybe there is one, there's one every 500 years or something, like the Phoenix. This is in book uh three of the politics. So um I think more is leaving open the possibility of absolute king, pan bazilea is what Aristotle calls it, uh, that that that a pot that an absolute king might be at least for a time or once in a while uh it's a it's a it's a it's a possibility, right? But it's not likely. So in Epigram 198, uh, what is the best form of government? Moore prefers an aristocratic republic ruled by a senate to a king, but his preference is presented as a prudential judgment uh uh rather than as a matter of legitimacy and illegitimacy. Right? So he's just saying it's you know, which would be the best form of government, what are the what are the possibilities, uh, which is the most advisable in most circumstances? So it's a prudential prudential thinking, it's not this is not legal thinking in this context. Uh and that's generally a uh I call this the history, he he belongs here to what I call the historico-prudential uh uh uh tradition of of political reasoning, which I talk about in a book I published in 2023 on Francesco Petrizzi of Siena. So, all that said, it's clear from his epigramm and from the history of Richard III that Moore, like most humanists from the time of Petrarch on, uh, hated and loathed tyranny. That's not in question. So, in order to explore what he means by tyranny precisely, my paper is going to focus on two questions. How Moore understood tyranny, how he distinguished it from virtuous and legitimate forms of monarchy, and secondly, his explanation of tyranny's causes. So, to get to uh Moore's analysis of tyranny as a form of rule, I'm going to discuss Moore's access to the ancient sources for the concept of tyranny, but also the way those sources were interpreted and used by jurists and Renaissance humans before his time, mostly in Italy. Um, I I should probably have confessed at the outset that I'm not a great expert on Moore. Moore's my patron saint. I love Thomas Moore, but I I I don't know his works as well as many people in this room. My my real uh expertise, such as it is, is Italian Renaissance humanism. So I expect to be I expect and welcome to be well, I expect to be corrected, and I will pretend that I'm welcome to be corrected. Right. Okay. So to get at the causes of tyranny, I will look in some detail at his history of King Richard III, a remarkable work in which Moore's narrative of the Duke of Gloucester's coup, in my opinion, far surpasses in psychological insight his ancient models, Sallust and Tacitus. I have to say, I just reread this thing for the for this paper, and I've read it years and years ago. I once went through all the works of Moore when I was uh actually I started going through all the works of Moore when I was in college. And I've gone back to Moore at various times. I've taught the Utopia for 20 years, or 40 years, sorry, I keep forgetting how old I am. Um I know that those texts, but I reread it again, and I was really struck by how good it is. It's really kind of an amazing uh piece of uh uh of work. So my thesis is that Moore's analysis of the nature of tyranny and its causes can give us a deeper insight into the ideal society he imagines in the utopia. In asserting that utopia is intended as an ideal model, I'm aware uh that I'm barging into a complicated issue in a room full of people who have strong views on this subject. And of course, it's a difficult question how seriously more intense is Ideal Republic. Um, and there's a lot of you know crazy stuff uh which is probably, I think, humorous that's in it. And if you say it's seriously intended, then you start to get the whatabout problem. You know, what about abortion? What about uh religious toleration? So uh so I think it's a difficult question, but but you know, is it just a witty tale, is a kind of satire of contemporary Europe, or is it a philosopher's republic, as it says on the title page, right? It's a uh is a philosophical city. Uh in other words, a thought experiment meant to educe political principles, or is it a serious blueprint for the future? My own preference among these alternatives is that Utopia was intended as a philosopher's republic, meant to work out in literary form political principles and explore alternatives, but not to lay out actionable policy goals. So there's a lot of stuff in that uh work which, as someone was saying today, uh allow a certain amount of deniability because it's obviously humorous and joking, but there's a lot of serious stuff in it. The core is very serious. By the way, this is the commonest Renaissance interpretation of what Plato was doing in his Republic. Um I looked at many, many, I looked at all the manuscripts of Plato in Latin, uh, and they often have words like, uh, you know, ludit, he's made he's he's having a good time, or Ironicae dicta in the margins when they get to the stuff about in Plato's book five uh of the republic about, you know, uh sharing, sharing the guardians sharing their womankind and all their goals. They think this is all kind of uh play. Uh the republic's most influential 15th-century interpreters, Cardinal Basarian and Marsilla Ficino, both assumed this work was a thought experiment. It was not a model, but was designed to elaborate theoretical principles that were later applied concretely in Plato's laws. So laws is the is the practical working out of the principles that are explored in the Republic. This, by the way, is a position that's recently been defended very well by Julia Annas in a short book about the laws. So that's why the work is so important for the interpretation of humanist political thought. Moore's ideal state goes well beyond the standard humanist proposals for educational reform, which are first outlined by Francesco Petrarca in the 14th century. The humanists were mostly conservative reformers. They don't venture to challenge existing forms of government. You don't find many Bolshy humanists, right? They're mostly working for the powers that be, so they have to be very careful about criticizing forms of government. In fact, if you go in Venice, you know, it's it's a it's a it's an actionable offense. You can be tried for criticizing the form of government. You can say anything you want in council chambers, but if you're on the street and you start saying Venice has got problems, you know, I don't like the way it's set up, you can be arrested for that. They didn't allow criticism. This Venice is a republic, and they don't allow criticism of the state and the way the state's set up, sort of like China today. So um in the utopia, Moore proves to be one of the few humanists who can imagine the sort of radical structural changes that would be needed to abolish tyranny and set up a good government. The implications of Book II's thought experiment are that it would take radical economic and social change for a polity to be governed by a virtuous, well-educated class of mandarins. That's Trevor Roper's term, but I think it's a good one. Because, you know, all the upper-level officials of utopia are taken from the educated classes. And also, this is the hard part, receive strong support from the populace. The result would be a stable, flourishing commonwealth and a contented citizenry. So Moore's imaginary count of utopia, in fact, offers a solution to one of the naughtyest problems of meritocratic theory. How can an educated elite secure the willing assent of those that they govern? So that the elite does not have to rely on tyrannous methods of control to secure the obedience of non-elite citizens. So, this is the problem that's you know currently at the center of American public life, right? We have the problem of do the elites have any authority with non-elites? Answer no. All right, so, sorry, I didn't mean to editorialize. Uh, all right, I always editorialize. So, in imagining deep structural changes to the city republic that might neutralize the power of wealth and ancestry and elevate the wise and the good to positions of power, Moore had one predecessor among the Italian humanists, uh Francesco Patrizzi of Siena, not to be confused with Francesco Patrizzi da Cerso, who's a Platonist of late 16th century. This is a 15th-century political thinker from Siena. His dates are 14, 13 to 1494. And um it's my belief that Moore somehow had access to this work and manuscript before writing the utopia. Just so Patrizzi is a um he's a citizen of Siena who rises to high office. He's a highly educated man. He's one of the first person to learn Greek in Siena. He's taught by Falolfo, one of the great Greek teachers. Uh he is thrown out in the populist revolution and almost executed, except his buddy Enia Silvia Piccolomini, from a noble family in Siena, has him saved. He's the cardinal of Siena, so he has him saved, uh, on the grounds that uh the the Sienese should not kill someone who's a great Latin poet. They didn't know about his political theory yet. So he goes off and uh Neo Silvia Piccolomini becomes Pius II, a great humanist pope. He appoints Patrizzi to write a um a work on uh on political, on the ideal republic, basically, uh on how to found a republic, which is supposed to take in and digest all of the great uh works of plausible antiquity that had been translated in the previous 50 years. So before uh 1402, they had just Aristotle's politics in a very difficult translation to study. They had really very little ancient political theory. But after 1402, they had the Republic, three different translations, they have dialogues of Plato, they have Xenophon, they have Isocrates, were both important for political theory, and they have the Greek historians, which had never been translated before. So um so Pius II says to Aeneas Silvius says to um Patrizi, uh, I want a new political theory which takes into account all these ancient Greek sources. Okay, so I was just filling you in a bit on who Patrizi is. But I believe that Moore knew this text. Um and I'm gradually developing the evidence. And those of you who were here, as there's some people here, my last lecture, I was still I was gathering evidence back then, which is 2023, uh, but I'm still gathering evidence. And I've got a very uh incredibly smart student right now who does AI very well, and we're gonna do a uh we're gonna do a textual comparison of the utopia with uh Patrizi's institution de uh I'll show you, he's in my group, we have a research group for Patrizzi. Um and we're gonna do a we're gonna do a uh an AI-aided comparison of the text of uh the instant and the founding of a republic by Patrizzi and the Utopia. So I'll finally have the evidence I need to make the positive assertion that that Utopia that they knew the Utopia. There are manuscripts that floated around. I think the the real objection to my thesis is that the utopia is published in 1516, and the first printed edition of Patrizzi is 1518. Uh, so that's a tough case to make. Um however, if you go back to the uh Yale edition, 1965 of Utopia, which has very useful source notes, uh they keep finding parallels, like 50 parallels between they they look at all the Italian uh political theorists before Moore, and they they studied them, and they have about 50 parallels between Patrizzi and Moore, but they don't assert that Moore knew Patrizzi because of the date problem. Um but in a more recent bilingual edition of George Logan, um, Robert Adams and Clarence Miller, uh, they say an interesting question is whether Moore also borrowed from Renaissance discussions of the best commonwealth, especially those by Platina Baraldo and Francesco Patrizzi of Siena. As the Yale commentary makes abundantly clear, there are many parallels between the writings of these moderns, especially Patrizzi. But it seems to be impossible to say whether the parallels represent borrowings or simply the fact that Moore and the Italians read the same classical book. Don't worry, I haven't left the subject of tyranny behind. I'm just uh I'm just uh trying to fill in the background here. Okay. So, but did Moore and Patrizi in fact read the same classical books, in particular the same Greek sources? Moore certainly knew Plato's Republic, first hand, he owned a copy of the 1513 Editio Princeps in Greek, published by Aldus, and his knowledge of the sources for ancient Sparta, especially Plutarch, is well established. However, um Edward Surtz, the co editor of the L edition, discourages source hounds like me when he writes that the possible sources are countless. That's very discouraging for a researcher. So I'm going to refrain from going down. That particular rabbit hole, tempting as it is, and I'm going to let my uh my uh my new uh younger uh c colleague help me with comparing these texts electronically. All right, and we're gonna we're we're publishing the uh the problem with the 1518 edition is what the textual critics call insincere. The uh editor of it, who's a you know minor French humanist, says at the end, well, I didn't really like the way Patrizi wrote Latin, so I I changed things and you know I inserted more references and took some references out. So the 1518 edition is nothing like, well, it has a lot of differences from the dedication copy, which is online at the Vatican Library, and three other copies that have uh marginalia in Patrizzi's hand. So we're editing that text, and we're also doing an English translation uh of that text, which will be up very shortly uh on our website before granting season gets started. All right. So um enough advertising about Patrizzi. I always feel it's my moral duty to advertise Patrizzi, who in my mind is the anti-Machiavelli, and that's a good thing to be. All right, so I will point out, however, that um whatever access Moore may or may not have had to Patrizzi when writing Utopia in 1515-1516, the reforming group of humanists around Erasmus knew Patrizzi's major political works very soon after they were published in 1518. And in fact, Erasmus uh was this is a later uh edition, but Erasmus had his own uh Institutio Christiane Princopis turned into an epitome. And there was another uh, we don't know who it was actually, um, there was another epitomator of uh of Patrizzi's texts, and they published them together. And there are 18 editions of this in the 16th century, some in Latin, some in French. This is a late French edition. But they were still publishing this in the 1590s. So Erasmus saw his own work in some way as supplementary or as corrective, possibly, of Petrizi's work on uh on uh on republics and kingdoms. What happened in the Epitome is they Petrici wrote two major treatises, one called the De Reno and Kingship, one called On How to Found a Republic. Uh, and the Epitometer just put them together and made one book out of them. And then Rasmus had an epitome made of his work, and they were printed together. Uh so he sees his work as parallel in some way to Patrizzi. Um, so the combination of Erasmus and Patrizzi was popular. Uh I've now found evidence that Juan Luis Dives uh used Patrizi in his De Europae De Citi Isit Republica of 1526. Uh in the second preface to Henry VIII, there's uh there's verbal parallels between Patrizzi's um institu uh I call it De Republica just to be short, his work on republics, uh, which are very this is a text that's dedicated to Henry VIII. And then Sir Thomas Elliott, who I've got a nice holine drawing of, um, who's an intimate member of Moore's circle, uh, recycled large chunks of the first three books of Patrizzi's Day Regno in the first book of his own book named The Governor. So the rabbit hole is beckoning again, but I'm I'm going to resist its charms and turn to the question of Moore's conception of tyranny. So in my 2019 books called Virtue, Politics, Soldcraft, and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, I had a 50-page chapter devoted to early Renaissance conceptions of tyranny. Throwing scholarly caution to the winds, I made a generalization that there are two major streams, uh among Western conceptions of tyranny, a Greek philosophical conception founded on Plato, and a Roman legal conception that was promoted by Cicero. For Plato, what made it I'm gonna just have a little drink, sorry. Okay. Okay. So for Plato, what made a tyrant was absolute power joined with weak character and an absence of wisdom. The cure for this destructive combination, which led rapidly and ineluctably to the ruin of both the tyrant himself and his city, was philosophy. Aristotle in his politics, book five, um, supplied more empirical detail about the tyrant's downfall. Uh so he lays out twelve uh tropoi or modes that tyrants use to keep control of the city. So the word in Greek is, you know, techniques or modi, in Latin, that's the word uh you might recognize that Machiavelli uses all the time uh on the modi to how to control how how a prince can control his city. And I think it clearly comes from Aristotle. Um it's a common word for uh modes of government, techniques of government. So um the tr though he has these twelve tropi, and this isn't a tropoi, sorry, in book five uh of the politics where he's talking about how to secure power, how to make power stable, uh he laid out these modes that tyrants use to control the city, all of which, for Aristotle, are negative utility. Right? They there's something that tyrants are driven to do, but they're not gonna work long term. Uh this is this is if you you know you he's addressing the almost addressing the tyrant. You know, you want to be a tyrant, this is what you're gonna have to do. Uh uh one of these, uh one or more of these, you'll have to do many of these things, actually. Put to death men in spirit. Suppress civil society, no private clubs or political clubs. Uh, he should outlaw humane education, he should prevent the fidea as the words that's used, he should prevent political class from forming friendships, he should force the populace to appear in large public spaces before his palace so he everybody knows who's boss. He should spy on the people using informers, eavesdroppers, he should sow quarrels among the citizens, he should keep his people poor and hard at work on building projects, he should multiply taxes, and Aristotle mentions the proud case of one of one tyrant who uh in the space of five years succeeded in having the entire uh income of all of his people in his own pocket. Uh, and he should continually be embroiled in wars because the the tyrant is usually a military leader, he's uh he's got his own private army, and uh, if he's involved in wars to defend the city, the people will say, well, we need somebody to defend the city, and this guy's a good military leader, and he's got an army, so they put up with him. That's but but it's there's an incentive to be at war all the time if you're a tyrant. And you should be preferred to be bad, served by bad men and foreigners rather than citizens. Okay. So the the tropoy of, by the way, some of this comes really out of Xenophon's Hyro, which is very well, or De Timano, the very well-known text in the 15th century. Uh there's a translation by Leonardo Bruni, which, hundreds of manuscripts, very popular text. Um, and Aristotle reduces this to a kind of uh theoretical form. The twelve tropoi of the tyrant became famous in late medieval and renaissance period because they were absorbed into the most popular work of scholastic political theory, the De Regime Aprincopum of Giles of Rome. Um, this is, I think, not as well known as it should be. Uh, it's very clear to people who study political scholastic political thought in the period that Giles of Rome has cornered the market for scholastic political theory. He's a student of Aquinas, he's the former tutor of the King of France. Uh, there are hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts. It was used in schools. So, this is the work actually that Patrizzi's trying to drive out of the market. But he has the twelve modes in there, and that's so people know it because of Giles of Rome. Uh, they're also used as an analytical framework for the leading jurist of the 14th century, Bartellus's Sassoferato, who we uh talking about earlier, he does seem to be known to uh more, uh, though that has to be developed a bit more, I think. So Bartholus's influential treatise, uh uh, the De Cirano, um, uses Aristotle's twelve trumpoe as legal criteria to judge when some ruler had become a tyrant, uh ex parte exercitii. So Bartholus Sacerato is the most eminent jurist of the of the 14th century. Um commentator on Roman law, and in Roman law, as it develops in the 12th, 13th century, you can uh try someone for tyranny. Tyranny is considered a form of uh of les maestos, of les majesties. Uh, and there are actually trials of various uh leaders uh who were uh accused of being tyrants by their cities, and they were they went through a legal process. So what Bartolus is trying to do, it was a very contested, very highly politicized process, as you can imagine, holding some tyrant uh uh guilty of tyranny. So Bartulus is trying to develop um a uh a legal framework for deciding when someone is a tyrant. So he can Bartolus is on the side of the free cities, he doesn't like tyrants, so he's he's very interested in the subject. So um he uh he develops the twelve modi as uh the way that rulers exercise power like a tyrant rather than a good ruler. So this is tyranny ex parte exerchiti, um meaning on the part of exercise. So there are two ways you can become a tyrant. One is not to have not to have title, right? Um, not to have a just title, and the other way is that you can act like a tyrant. You might come in by just title, you might be elected, you might do do whatever needs to be done, um uh, but you would then be uh you would then be um exercising power in a tyrannical way. So uh so that's one one way of understanding uh what a tyrant is uh that's legally actionable, is to see whether he exercises power using one one or more of the tyrannic modes. Uh for Cicero, on the other hand, uh, what made a man a tyrant was precisely this question of title to rule. He became a tyrant when he violated youth. This is all in the Deophices. I should advance the slide. Um Cicero set out this argument in the Deophices in the context of denouncing Julius Caesar for tyranny. In establishing his perpetual dictatorship, Caesar had defied the Senate and thus the principles of Roman civil law. He had seized the republic violently without just title, and was thus ao ipso a tyrant. Roman civil law was derived, of course, from the law of nations, and ultimately from natural law, so Caesar was a tyrant not only according to the laws of man, but also those of God and nature. So, when he's when in the analysis of the jurisbart, which made use of both the ex parte uh exerciti arguments and the Roman and the Greek arguments for character, um, the argument the argument about violation of right was turned into a question of just title. If the tyrant had seized power violently without following the established legal procedures for succession in power, whatever they happened to be, elections, acclamation by the people, sortition, co-optation, princely laws of succession like the salient law in France, or what have you, uh the holder is uh was uh the holder of power was presumptively a tyrant. You seize power not according to standard procedures, you're a tyrant. Okay. Back to the twelve tropoi. Uh so Bartless also argues, because he's trying to develop a full panoplay of ways to go after a tyrant in legal terms, uh by legal argument. So he also argues that you need to analyze both the tyrant's behavior, his tropoy, and also examine whether his title was legitimate in order to establish that a ruler was a tyrant. This is because, first of all, legitimate governments, the reason why he's doing this is because it's not evident from the fact that a tropoy is being used, one of the twelve tropoi, that it's being done by a tyrant. Because there are some, he says, Bartulus, there's sometimes that legitimate governments have to use these tropoy. For example, if there's sedition, you might have to uh shut down, you might have to uh stop uh political meetings, you might have to send out spies to find out what people are doing. Uh so it's not prima facie evidence, it's premifia-well, it's not hard evidence that a ruler is a uh a tyrant if one or two or three of these uh things are employed under certain circumstances. So Bartolus's comment is that all governments are a little bit tyrannical sometime. Okay, and that's not a reason to overthrow them. Right? If they're a little tyrannical sometime, for good reason you have to kind of wink at that, even though they're not optimal. All right. So use of one or more tropi is not in itself definitive proof of tyrannical rule. On the other hand, tyrants sometimes corrupted or faked legitimate processes, acclamations by the people, for example, or endorsement by the Senate, or court judgments, these can all be corrupted, to make it seem as though their titles to rule were legitimate. So, in order to establish that a ruler is tyrannical, says Bartlus, you need both an assessment of his political character, uh, the tropoy of his rule, and also a careful assessment of his title to make sure that it was not obtained by a bribery or threats of violence or metus in some form. So 15th century humanists, thanks to the near ubiquity of illegitimate rulers in Renaissance Italy, tended to dismiss the criterion of legal validity or title and to judge tyrants mostly on the basis of their actions and moral character. So in the 15th century, actually from the 12th century on there in Italy there is a sharp division between legal legal uh cultures uh and education and humanist cultures and education. So the humanists are suspicious of lawyers in general. There's a famous story about Lorenzo Valla gets thrown out. He he infiltrates a legal, uh a doctoral defense in Pavia, and uh during the defense he starts to be create a ruckus because of all the all the mistakes in Latin that are being used by the by the by the lawyers. You know, this is a famous case of of you know look uh humanists sniffing at the at the use of scholastic Latin. But they had they had a real problem with legal authority. They were initially, anyway, um, they were initially uh seen saw themselves as as the alternative to legal education, which was a horrible form of education that made people uh venal and you know make write bad Latin and culturally defective. Uh later on in the late 15th century, this is important for more, of course, there's a uh an attempt to reform legal education in the light of humanist principles. So the humanists in the 15th century, the literati, as I prefer to call them, the lovers of classical literature and the teachers of classical literature, tend to dismiss the criterion of legal validity and to judge tyrants on the basis of their actions, their moral character. And some like Calluccio Salotati in his treatise de Tirano even made the argument against Cicero. This is pretty, this is a pretty strong move for a humanist to make an argument against Cicero, but Salotati does it. He says illegitimate rulers could make themselves legitimate through virtue. So Salotati argues that Caesar had done just that. Although he had violated use by invading his own country, defying the Senate, uh, his virtues, especially clemency, later won him the support of the people and even the Senate. So thus he acquired legitimacy eventually, despite his earlier criminal behavior. I keep thinking of Edward IV, right? Uh that uh it's possible to turn a uh a power that has been illegitimately acquired into something that's legitimate merely through virtues. That's kind of an extreme position, but it it is out there. All right, since humanist literati universally held that moral character could be improved by humanistic education, this emphasis on moral character furthered the agenda of virtue politics, which includes study of the classics, the use of the classics to build moral character, uh, even when it's not obviously self-serving. Sometimes it's self-serving. Now, Thomas More, due doubtless to his legal formation, had an understanding of tyranny that was more balanced between the Greek and the Roman views or between Bartholus's views and the Italian humanists. He's concerned with both title and uh moral character. So I'm going to look at the history of King Richard III, where uh Moore twice explicitly labels Richard a tyrant. In this text, Moore uses both behavioral and legal criteria to establish the fact of Richard's tyranny. So the grave character faults that made Richard unworthy of kingship are brought to light, brought into high relief by the contrasting portrait of Edward IV that opens the volume. Edward's kingly presence and great virtues, uh, despite pardonable overindulgence in vions and venery, that's food and sex, by the way, um, you know, he's a fat man, uh, make him beloved of the people. Their love of him only grows with time, as the memory of the civil war with King Henry VI fates. Richard, by contrast, was never able to win the people's affections. A lump of foul deformity, his repulsive features and physical deformities were the outward signs of his debased character, malicious, wrathful, envious, and before his birth and from before his birth, ever froward, which means perverse. And that refers to his birth, which is he was born feet first. He jumped feet first into the world, which is you're not supposed to do, you're supposed to jump head first into the world from his mother's womb. All right. So Richard had courage, intelligence, and was good at war, uh, but untotally unsuited for peace. Uh, of course, the humanists of the 1520s in particular, well, even before, uh, for them, uh peace is the sign of a good ruler, right? A good ruler wants peace, so he doesn't want peace. Rich uh his above average liberality won him only unsteadfast friendship, while pillaging the wealth of his enemies earned him steadfast hate. I won't, maybe I should read this. Um we read this today, so I'm hesitating, but I'll read a little bit. He was close, and this is quoting more. He was close and secret, a deep dissimilar, uh lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable, where he inwardly hated, not letting or not not hesitating to kiss whom he thought to kill, dis merciless and cruel, not for evil will always, but after for ambition, and either for the surety or increase of his estate. Friend or foe was much what indifferent where his advantage grew. He spared no man death whose life withstood his purpose. Didn't make a difference whether friend or enemy, they stood in his way, they got the chop. He slew with his own hands King Henry VI, being prisoner in the tower, as men constantly say, and that without commandment or knowledge of the king, which would undoubtedly, if he had intended that thing, have appointed that butcherly office to some other than his own born brother. Okay, so Moore is not leaving you in any doubt that this was a bad guy, okay? So his tropoy or modes of achieving and maintaining power likewise contrasts sharply with the wise counsel of Edward IV at the end of his life. Uh King Edward on his deathbed demands his estranged relatives to keep peace among themselves. In the deathbed speech that Moore writes for him, Edward observes that a king will not receive wise and loyal counsel in a factionalized kingdom, since faction generates fear. Hence, counselors will have to consider first their own safety and put politics above the common good. So here's one of the first occurrences of the of the problem. Actually, I I learned today that there are earlier occurrences of the problem of fac of counsel being in Moore's mind. Alright, so I'm not going to read the long quote. But I think it's interesting that one of the things he observes about the kingdom, the descent into factionalism is one effect of the descent into factionalism, is that you can't good get good counsel because people are always thinking about the next move. So Edward has hardly breathed his last before his brother Richard sets about sowing suspicion and quarrels among Edward's relatives using clever lies and deceit. As events unfold, Richard ticks off a good number of Aristotle's tyrannical trumpoi. He puts to death men of spirit, he divides the political class, he undermines trust and friendship, he spies on the people, he prefers bad men to good, he undermines natural family, and so forth. So you can make a good case just from the history that this is a tyrant ex parte exercitii. However, Moore's narrative is equally concerned to demonstrate that Richard's duplicitous schemes to establish just title to the succession render his rule illegitimate. This is the voice of the lawyer we hear in the biography coming out. So in his own authorial voice, Moore takes pains to weigh and disprove Richard's outrageous claim that Edward's sons were bastards. The claim was mere invention, says Moore. It was pretext invented so that Richard's supporters would have some talking points. Moore doesn't say talking points, that's my version, knowing full well that their claim could not be disproved, since there was no court that would could or would expose the slippery ground on which it was built. Under Richard, you have a lawless republic, just like the late Roman Empire, right? First century BC. Lawless republic. The courts are corrupt. No one trusts the court to give justice. And that's why they could get away with this. As Moore tells the story, the people of London found these claims implausible when they were presented at a public meeting. Despite the rhetorical skills of two corrupt clerics, John Shaw and the Friar Panker, the townspeople summoned to hear their public addresses at Paul's Cross remained unwilling to acclaim Richard as king. Moore writes, The people were so far from crying, King Richard, that they stood as though they had been turned into stones for wonder of this shameful sermon. So the people are listening to this and you say, What? You know, they're not buying it. So a few days later, the Duke of Buckingham's sophistical eloquence is equally unable to persuade a mixed audience at the Guild Hall of London. You get the impression that one in Paul's cross is a comp the common people, and then when you get to the guild hall, you get more ranks of society. So the Duke of Buckingham tries to get them to call upon the protector, the Duke of Gloucester, to assume the title of King Richard. The crowd assembled is representative of the whole people by the lights of Roman law, uh, because the Popolis includes both the plebs and the upper, the popolis officially by Roman law includes the plebs, which are the lowest elements and also the more honorable people. So you have the whole republic there, um uh as well as some budding lawyers, some of whom might well be uh Moore's father, Thomas Moore. So some people in this new biography of Moore by Joanna, um Joanna Paul, um she suggests that that Moore got information directly from his father, who had been present at the guild hall. I think that's possible. I don't know. It's not provable, but it would be uh interesting if that were the case. So, and and Moore, again, people don't buy it. The whole republic now doesn't buy it. The people were so far from crying King Richard that they stood as though they had been turned into stones for wonder of the shameful sermon. I'm sorry, I just read that. I got it wrong. Okay. Uh I just that was that was John, uh that was the preacher Shea in Paul's Cross. So um Okay. I glossed too much and lost my thread. All right, so but instead of the hoped-for cries at the guild hall of King Richard, King Richard, the crowd remains hushed and mute. Uh Buckingham then resumes his speech at an even higher pitch of rhetorical display, but still no one is convinced. Morse says, every man much marveled at hurt him and thought that they had never in their lives heard so evil a tale so well told. That's uh this this one of the things I love about the Richard Third is full of these very witty uh statements that they um uh they remind you almost of Tacitus, his ability to to uh to uh turn uh turn a clever phrase that sums up everything. Uh so instead of the uh so uh so to overcome the audience's obst to overcome the audience's obstinate silence, the protector's men are obliged to summon a clack of retainers whose shouts of King Richard are taken for assent. Okay, now we're gonna get the earliest portrait of him. At least that's what Wikipedia says. Probably some people here know better than Wikipedia. Um, but anyway, this is uh said to be the earliest portrait of Richard done around 1520. Yeah. So there follows some days later a mockish election that transforms England's protector into its king. But the last threats of Richard's kingship disappear only when later that summer a pair of hired thugs smother the young princes in their beds. Once that happens, Richard casts off all disguise and openly adopts the ways of a tyrant. And as Moore summarizes, uh now fell their mischiefs thick. And as the thing evil gotten is never well kept through all the time of his reign, never ceased their cruel death and slaughter till his own destruction ended it. Okay, so this is this is uh really summarizing very quickly because he hadn't didn't finish this part uh of the unfinished uh history. And this is also, by the way, the classical end of a tyrant. Usually tyrants don't rule very long because they're not in control, their mind doesn't control their passions and appetites, uh, so they uh fall very quickly. That's the ancient view that tyrants are are um are self-destructive. Uh distinguishing them, by the way, from the prince of Machiavelli, who is not stupid. The prince of Machiavelli uh knows when to use tyrannical devices and when not to use them, uh, when to pretend to be a virtuous king, which is most of the time you should pretend to be a virtuous king, but if at a certain point you need to knock somebody off, you do it. So it is I have a long argument in my virtue politics book about why um Machiavelli's prince is not a uh is not a tyrant in the ancient sense. I just mentioned that because I've read so many people, so many uh secondary literature people say that that Richard III is Machiavellian. I don't think uh Machiavelli would accept that. He wouldn't say, he wouldn't think that Richard III is smart enough to be a Machiavellian prince. All right. To sum up now Moore's account of the causes of Richard's tyranny, his history lays out not only the grave character defects that brought the man to rule like a tyrant, but also historical proofs of the illegitimacy of his rule. Moore's narrative reveals the violence, terror, and fraud Richard used to take the crown, all legal grounds to deny him just title, and shows that his kingship was never affirmed by free acclamation of either the common people or the men of rank. What's extraordinary about Moore's narrative is how it shows the dynamic interplay between character and action. This is really wonderful. Richard's foul schemes to establish legitimacy by any means necessary unfold with an almost tragic necessity to them. The king's combination of deep insight into human character and motivation, its lawyerly use of evidence, and its narrative vigor is remarkable. I know nothing like it in any biographical study of an Italian tyrant written during the early or high Renaissance. The closest parallel might be to Poliziano's Celestian history of the Pazzi conspiracy, the Cogniratia Pactiana, which is written for Lorenzo de' Medici. But though his latinity is far more elegant than Moore's, it has to be said, uh, the Florentine's work comes off as morally shallow and cartoonish in comparison with the compelling psychodrama of the Tudor historian. I just had to get that out. Even though I study Italian humanism, I know when they're licked, and Moore is better in every way than any well any uh account I know of tyranny written by Italian humanists. So I'm going to end with another feature of Moore's history that sets it apart from Italian Renaissance historiography of the previous century. It's deployment of Christian faith to persuade the reader of the evils of tyranny. This new element in humanist historiography and political thought was a distinguishing feature of Christian humanism in northern Europe during the first two decades of the 16th century, before the movement was derailed by Luther's Reformation. If we go back to Quattrocento Italy, we can find numerous biographies of prominent churchmen written by humanists such as the bookseller Vespasiano da Besti, or the papal humanist Bartolomeo Platina, or a slew of other writers in the De Veris Illustribus tradition. You find lots of biographies of churchmen. One often finds in them respect for Christian piety, a record of the subject's acts of Christian virtue. As a rule, however, they avoid the excesses of hagiography, especially miracles. So yeah. So what I've never found in 40 years studying Italian Renaissance sources is anything like the sanctuary scene describing the protector Richard's cruel plot to tear his Edward IV's younger son, Richard, Duke of York, away from his mother and from the sacred sanctuary where the two had taken refuge. The whole scene, I suggest, is intended to put the reader in mind of the murder of Thomas Becket in the Canterbury Cathedral. I think that's I think you're supposed to think of that, that this is a a religious crime as well as a uh a failure of legitimacy. Perhaps it would even mourn future kings that sacrilegious behavior will not work out to their advantage as it did not for Henry II, when he had uh, well, when he suggested that it might be a good thing to go over to the cathedral and and bump off uh Becket. So I'm not going to dwell on the brilliance and psychological drama of this narrative, the sanctuary drama, it's just fantastic, where the remarkable dialogue between the Queen Mother Elizabeth and the protector's smooth-tongued agent, the Cardinal Archbishop of York. And I've been told that that uh they get them mixed up, that the actual person uh who is the archbishop of the actual person uh was um was must have been Rotherham. Or I got that wrong. Is it Boucher or or Rotherham, who's the actual assassin?

SPEAKER_00 56:06

Rotherham.

SPEAKER_01 56:07

It's Rot Rotherham. That's what I thought, yes. Sorry, I got mental I just read that a few days ago, so I was trying to make sure I didn't make any mistakes, so I just made one. So um in any case, uh Elizabeth, one of the two remarkable female characters in history, immediately sees through the Duke of Gloucester scheme. She knows right away what's going on, right? She knows that what Richard is doing, that Richard of Gloucester protector is doing. He's trying to uh get both princes together so that they can be bumped off and that there won't be any claimants to the to the throne. Uh so Richard's strategy is twofold. One is to say the princes are illegitimate, the second is to get them both together in the Tower of London where they can be disposed of. And she knows what's going on. But it's it it uh um she immediately sees through the scheme, but her initial refusal to turn over her son is gradually worn down. In the end, she allows herself to be persuaded by the archbishop, who's portrayed as a scholastic quibbler, um, and gives up her weeping child, and she starts to weep, and it's a very affecting scene. Uh and what's interesting to me is how she gradually is worn down, and she's fooled by this man of God, of more learning than virtue, of more fame than learning. Wonderful more phrase. Um the Archbishop succeeds in persuading Queen Elizabeth, in part because he has from ambition or from an instinct for self-preservation, allowed himself to be gulled by Richard and his supporters, um, in part because he's unable to imagine the depths of evil in the protector's soul. Innocence is unable to imagine so corrupt a heart. I think that's what's going on. I'm willing to be corrected, but it looks to me like uh there's also this ambiguity with the uh with the so-called Archbishop of York who uh allows himself, you can correct me on this, who allows himself to be persuaded because he he wants to he wants to be in the regime. His ambition wants him to be in the regime. So it's not really clear whether he believes what he's saying or not, uh, but he's able to make an argument because he's so uh he's so uh uh uh uh skilled at legal um uh legal quibbling. What's remarkable, however, in the present context is the way that Moore uses the presumed Christian sympathies of his readers to add another dimension to the repulsiveness of Richard's behavior and thus to the image of the tyrant in English and Latin literature. I think it's worth placing Moore's history next to Erasmus's education of a Christian prince, written around the same time. Erasmus 1516. Erasmus himself adds another dimension to the mirror of princes genre by creating a hierarchy between pagan and Christian princes. This is not done in Mirrors of Princes in the Renaissance or 14th century, okay? Many mirrors of princes were written by Italian humanists, but none that made so insistent of use, a use of what I call the quantum maius trope. Sir No Malcolm calls it shame praising. So what you do uh over and over Erasmus in the Institutio raises up some example of pagan virtue, only to say, by how much the more, quantum maius, should the Christian king display the same virtue? We Christians with the advantage of grace and revelation ought to be better than the pagan ancients before the time of Christ. Yet we are often worse. This should be a source of shame to Christian princes who need, furthermore, to behave in an exemplary fashion if they hope to use Christianity to bind their peoples together in obedience to their common faith. When they behave in an unchristian way, they lose the respect of the people. So there's a prudential argument, an argument from faith, that if you're a good Christian prince, and all these guys said that they were good Christian princes, if you're really a Christian prince, you won't do stuff like this. And of course, Moore deploys the Christian faith in the service of humanistic reform in the opposite way. For a Christian to behave like Richard III was just unfathomable. His scheming, evil mind violates every rule of Christian faith. It's not just Richard, of course. He's aided by the highest nobility and the most eminent churchmen in the land. The ruling elite of England are woefully corrupt and unchristian. Only the middle classes and the common people remain relatively uninfected by the virus of sin in Moore's telling. It is a society that needs radical reform. It needs to have a utopia for a model and a measure to help it discover why and how and to what extent it has sunk so low. So here the utopia is shining again through the Quantomius trope. He says, you know, look how good the utopians are, uh, and they're so much better even without Christianity. Of course, when Christianity is offered to them, they immediately leap at it, but they are better than us now. So, and this is another kind of uh text-length uh use of the Quantomius uh trope. So um Henry VIII, the only king of Northern Europe in his time to have a humanist education, was already showing signs of morphing from a humanist prince into the foul tyrant and destroyer of Christendom that he eventually became. Had Moore finished his history and had Henry read it, he might perhaps have glimpsed his own lineaments reflected back in the image of Richard III. So there are positive mirrors of princes, but there are also negative ones. And the prince is supposed to see the famous one is uh just uh Procopius's uh secret history of the reign of Justinian Theodora, it's the negative, it's a negative mirror. Uh and uh there's some other uh Greek examples. So the prince is supposed to look in Richard III and see what he's doing wrong. Um so had Moore finished his history and had Henry read it, he might perhaps have glimpsed his own lineaments reflected back in the image of Richard III, but by that time it might already have been too late. Okay, I want to uh end with um uh part that I haven't written yet, but it occurred to me as I think is is true, and it's about the significance of of Thomas More in the history of uh history of Christian civilization, because in the Italian Renaissance they have Oh sorry. So in the Italian Renaissance, they um the humanists try to distinguish themselves first from the lawyers. I already mentioned that. They have uh and that what they say is that humanist culture makes people better, gives them better character. Uh uh. And the lawyers uh, of course, say what lawyers say. Um and then but there's also the Christian teaching versus humanist teaching. So the humanists also distinguish themselves from the teaching of the church. The typical position, uh, which you find in a way in Thomas's, well, not the typical position is there's a natural and supernatural end of man, is Thomas's position, right? And what the humanists say is that the supernatural end of man is the job of the church. And that's the way, that's how they can avoid conflict with the church because they're teaching pagan authors, and they will say uh the natural end of man is the job of the human, the earthly city. Uh and the earthly city will can run, as it were, independently. The natural and supernatural end of man can be uh different departments, as it were. The department of humanities is going to take care of the natural end of man and the supernatural end of man. Go down the hall and study theology. So what's interesting about Moore to me is I I just I think this has come to me, and I I want to hear people uh take it apart. Uh that Moore actually is the one who brings all these three things together, right? Because he he he understands the legal tradition uh and he values the legal tradition. He understands the humanist tradition, uh, and he also is a Christian, and he tries to introduce Christian standards into the mirror of princes. And Erasmus is doing well, Erasmus does not have the legal training to do this, but Moore does. So that's my conclusion that Moore uh stands at the confluence of these great traditions in the history of uh Western thought, and that's one more reason why we should consider him one of the greatest authors of the Renaissance and of Christian Christian history. Thank you.