Thomas Starkey and the Commonwealth: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Thomas Starkey (c. 1495–1538) was the most Italianate Englishman of his generation. This book places Starkey into new and more appropriate contexts, both biographical and intellectual, taking him out of others in which he does not belong, from displaced Roundhead to follower of Marsilio of Padua. Beginning with his native Cheshire, it traces his career through Oxford, Padua, Paris, Avignon, Padua again, and finally England, where he spent the last four years of his life trying to fulfil his ambition to serve the commonweal. Most of Starkey's career revolved around his patron Reginald Pole, scion of the highest nobility, but Starkey (and many other Englishmen) managed to balance loyalty to Pole with allegiance to Henry VIII. Out of favour with the king's secretary after the middle of 1536, Starkey turned increasingly to religion, continuing to cling to his conciliarist and Italian Evangelical opinions until his death. In the first twenty or twenty-five years of his life, Thomas Starkey parlayed social standing and moderate wealth in his native Cheshire into one of the best humanist educations available in England. Thomas F. Mayer. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. 287-305.