The Athenian Courtier: Ascham’s Isocrates, Tudor Statecraft, and Elizabeth’s Last Tutorial

Marginalia in Roger Ascham’s Greek Isocrates record two decades of tutorials at the pinnacle of Tudor politics. In the early 1550s, Ascham (1514/15–68) and Sir Richard Morison (ca. 1510–56) read ancient Athens into the Reformation as they dispatched diplomatic reports to the Privy Council from the imperial court at Augsburg. Then, almost twenty years later, on 14 November 1568 and just six weeks before his death, Ascham was invited back to Hampton Court for one last tutorial. As Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and her childhood tutor read Isocrates on free speech, frank counsel, and intervention in foreign wars, an anxious faction of humanist courtiers was peering over Ascham’s shoulder, desperate to secure the project of conciliar rule and the future of the English Reformation.