Introduction: Ancient Rome in English Political Culture, ca. 1570–1660

This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Justin Champion (1960–2020) scholar, teacher, colleague, friend

cicero's de officiis, that most iconic of texts in the humanist curriculum, was popularized in England in a version by the apostate Protestant cleric Nicholas Grimald, Bishop Nicholas Ridley's former chaplain. First printed in 1556, Grimald's Cicero reappeared within two years with its English and Latin texts side by side, suggesting the volume's extensive use in schools. There were five more such bilingual editions by 1605.¹ The ubiquity of Marcus Tullius Ciceroes thre bokes of duties, as Grimald christened his work, has been seen as prime evidence of the spread of civic republican ideas in later Tudor England.² Those ideas are in turn typically taken to define the outlook of Elizabethan Protestants. Queen Elizabeth's principal adviser, William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, whose rich archive facilitates detailed study of his thought—and who reportedly carried a copy of Cicero's De officiis with him at all times—is often cited as the perfect embodiment of what Patrick Collinson has dubbed "monarchical republicanism."³

What, though, of the fraught confessional dimension of Grimald's Cicero as reflected in its dedication, never mind the compromised reputation of the translator himself? Until 1600, editions of the book sported an oleaginous dedication to Thomas Thirlby, the Marian Bishop of Ely, who was also a Privy Councillor and a prominent diplomat. Flatteringly compared to "so noble a Senatour of Rome," Thirlby, who had been instrumental in effecting England's reconciliation with Rome and, in February 1556, presided over the divestment of the future martyr Thomas Cranmer, is touted as the ideal patron of the English Cicero—which, says Grimald, "so rightly point[s] oute the pathwaye to all vertue: as none can be righter, onely scripture excepted."⁴ Extolled by pagans and Christians alike—Augustus Caesar, Emperor Severus, Erasmus—Cicero's wholesome doctrine, Grimald vouchsafes in the preface, will guide readers, whether rulers or ruled, on how to conduct themselves in both private and public, commensurate with their station in life.⁵ Meanwhile, Grimald's apostasy, and his likely betrayal of his friend and patron Ridley, came under withering attack in personal testimonials collected in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments.⁶

Modern studies characteristically neglect to explore, or else dismiss or seek to explain away, the significance of Grimald's apparent conversion to Catholicism. One has argued that Grimald's Cicero represents "subversive Protestant conformity" and "a subtle critique of the Marian regime."⁷ Even if we were to accept—and it is a big if—that Grimald's aim in publishing the translation was to hint at his continuing evangelical allegiance, and that it was read as such by the cognoscenti, the book must have acquired a troubling and potentially contradictory resonance following Elizabeth's accession and the ejection and imprisonment of its episcopal dedicatee, "so reverend a father in god," for refusing to embrace the royal supremacy.⁸ For Grimald's edition—through which generations of schoolboys and others, both ardent Protestants and Church papists, were gaining access to Cicero's treatise lamenting the fall of the Roman republic—bore the marks of its inception during the reign of the Catholic queen and king. And that poses something of an obstacle to treating it as the Protestant catechism of quasi-republican ideology.

The case of Grimald's Cicero is symptomatic of wider scholarly reticence about how divided confessional loyalties shaped the uses of romanitas in post-Reformation England. This is despite early modern Catholicism's by now unassailable place in the historiographical mainstream, and the efflorescence of scholarship on various aspects of English, British, and European Reformations—including exile, conformity, recusancy, martyrdom, and their competing expressions in imaginative literature.⁹ So, too, reluctance to consider this question epitomizes the dominant "republican" paradigm in modern intellectual history, whether "monarchical republican" inspired by Patrick Collinson, "civic republican" spearheaded by Markku Peltonen, or "neo-Roman" championed by Quentin Skinner, who cites Grimald's Of Duties in his influential account of the impact of...