The English in Rome

If I led another life, I think I would spend some convivial time compiling the tale of the English in Rome, constructed as a guide book for those weary of the usual trails. And, so, this is witness to a book that will not be written.

The guide would certainly include the monastery of San Gregorio Magno, which could boast — if only the Camaldolese monks in whose tutelage it is would stoop to such folly — of its views of the Palatine. It is not surprising that a foundation dedicated to the pope who despatched Augustine to Canterbury should be the resting place of Englishmen, but as it happens it was at a particular moment in the history of England that two men came to remembered there. Their monuments now stand near each other in the atrium, creating a corner that is forever English.  The two men were both diplomats and died within eight years of each other, in the 1560s. Their service to Philip and Mary is particularly recorded — and that is the context for their spending their last years far from their homeland, dismayed at yet another turn of events that came with the death of Mary and the accession of her half-sister, Elizabeth.

Monument to Edward Carne, S Gregorio, Rome

The finer tomb is of the older man, Sir Edward Carne, who represented the English court at the papal curia in the mid-1550s. He was summoned home by Elizabeth, but, despite his own protestations, he may not have been too disappointed to be kept in the sun of Rome by Pope, Pius IV’s decision to appoint him warden of the English Hospice. He retired from that post the following year, in 1560, but he lived on for less than a year. There is an interesting detail to his tomb: if you look at the very bottom, you will see a coat-of-arms with a pelican pecking its breast to feed its young with its own blood. That is a symbol of piety and of Christ’s selflessness but it also has a particular English connotation: it is the image chosen by Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester, for his Oxford foundation of Corpus Christi College. Carne himself was an Oxford man, but slightly too old to have been educated at Corpus. Perhaps, though, that image remained in his mind with nostalgic resonances in his final days.

That, of course, is to assume that he had some say in his tomb — and that may be an unwarranted assumption. It is an interesting element of the inscriptions on both monuments that they record two friends of the deceased who acted as their executors and took on the task of commissioning the monument. Those name-checks perhaps intentionally give a sense of a small, close-knit group of Englishmen in Rome, showing their virtue by their care for one another, at a point when their loyalties to crown and to religion were pulled asunder.

It is the second tomb which has the more illustrious names, because it cites as an executor a bishop, Thomas Goldwell of St

Monument to Robert Peckham, S Gregorio, Rome

Asaph’s, though he was very little there and rather more in Milan, with Carlo Borromeo, and in Rome. The person whose monument he oversaw was called Robert Peckham, who died in 1569. He was the son of a diplomat and had himself been on missions. His tomb declares his determination to die a catholic and thus in exile. But there is a final irony that he did not break with England completely: in the medieval tradition of dividing one’s body to be buried in different places one held dear, his heart was removed and returned to England, to be interred in the church of St Mary’s, Denham, Buckinghamshire. Even if in life, Peckham, like Carne, consciously distanced himself from his homeland, in death he effected a sort of miracle of being both absent and present in two places at the same time.

Henry V writes to Martin V in English

I had one of those moments yesterday when a long-gone moment seems suddenly immediate. I was sitting in the peaceful surroundings of the Archivio Segreto and looking through a collection of Martin’s V letters — the collection itself is eighteenth-century, copying from fifteenth-century records. One letter that caught my eye opens:

Cognovimus ex certis litteris quae tua propria manu scriptis dicuntur in Idiomati Anglicam [sic] per interprete nobis expositis Serenitatem tuam egre tulisse quod Venerabilis frater Thomas Episcopus Cicestrensis iam pridem in quodam publico Consistorio fuerit in sedendo tractatus minus honorabiliter quam Oratori Regio conveniret…

You can quite imagine the scene: Thomas Polton, English royal proctor at the the papal curia, holds in his hand a letter that he had received from his master. He hands it to the Roman pope who returns it as he can not make head nor tail of the text, but Polton assures him that it is in Henry’s hand and translates the English into the lingua franca of Latin on the spot. He explains that the king’s English expresses his righteous anger at a slight done to Polton himself in the seating-plan of a meeting — that sort of detail that those of us beyond the diplomatic world can too easily take as downright petty — a slight (Polton goes on to explain) that the king took as being against his own person. You can also imagine Polton himself conjuring up another scene, distant in place but not in time, as he describes how his master the king, on campaign in France, must have been so angry to take the time to demand quill and parchment, so that he could express immediately his  fury in his own words. We might wonder: did Henry actively choose English as a mark of defiance of international protocol, a slight meant to reflect the slight he claimed he felt? Or was it that he did not have the requisite skills to be able to compose on the spur of the moment in a more learned language? I suppose what lies behind that question is a character judgement on whether Henry V was one of those who is unable to control their emotions or whether he was the consummate politican who could manufacture anger and make it felt far from his own physical presence.

The date of the letter is 13th June 1422 — less than two months later the author of the English note would lie dead. As to the note itself, that, of course, is lost. I have not checked in detail but Martin’s conciliatory response, from which I quoted, does not seem to have gained much notice. I would be happily corrected but I can not find it summarised in the relevant volume of the Calendar of Papal Letters or, on a quick search, can I find mention of it in the relevant writings of the great scholars who have written on Angl0-papal relations in this period, Johannes Haller and Magaret Harvey. But, for me at least, it provides a lively vignette of both that whirlwind-king and the ritualism of the papal curia. The image of Polton standing before Martin V and explaining the letter he held in his hand will stay in my mind for some time.

Britons, Bretons and Germans

This is a cautionary tale. It concerns the difficulty of assigning modern nationalities to Renaissance characters. It results from my following up two references in one footnote. I should explain: I have become interested in the practical issues created by the cosmopolitan nature of the Roman curia in the years after the end of the Schism. One article — I won’t mention author or location – makes interesting reference to the critical comment sometimes passed on the accents of foreign preachers or orators in Rome.

The footnote cites two references, the first to Jacopo Gherardi’s Diarium romanum, in which it is said that, in 1481, Guilelmus de Quercu, ‘natione Britannus et principis sui orator ad pontificem, ex Carmelitarum ordine’ gave a good sermon ‘quamvis ab externo barbare pronuntiata’. The article, following the editor of Gherardi’s diary, identifies the preacher as an ‘English Carmelite’, which set me scratching my head as I had not heard of this English representative in Rome. After some searching, the fog of confusion lifted: the reference is actually to Guilelmus de Domo Quercu, then in Rome as the representative of his prince, the duke of Britanny. In fact, his sermon was printed soon after it was given and, indeed, its elegant humanist Latin is available for you to see on-line.

This is not the only occasion of which I am aware where ‘Britannus’ does not refer to Great Britain but to its little relative, the duchy in the geographical area of France. If this raises concerns over how to identify a character, the second reference exacerbates those issues. The article also cites the papal master of ceremonies, Johann Burchard (with a lapsus calami mistaking the page reference). Burchard noted that an English orator’s speech in December 1492 was well composed but not well received ‘propter inexpeditam expressivam’. As that phrase suggests, Burchard was in no position to judge the quality of others’ Latin. That is by the bye, as is the fact that the orator in question was John Shirwood, a collector of humanist manuscripts and printed books, and accomplished author. It should be added that Shirwood died in Rome less than a month after he gave that oration so his ‘inexpeditam’ expression might well have more to do with his age and health than his foreign nature. If this was the last occasion on which Shirwood spoke before a pope, it was not the first — he was in fact a long-term resident in Rome, closely associated with the English Hospice, where he was to be buried. Burchard mentions him several times and — finally I reach the point of this description — on one occasion includes him in a list of significant clerics present in Rome at the time of  the election of Innocent VIII. Burchard organises his list by nation; the entry for Shirwood reads: ‘Ex Germanis: episcopus Dunelmensis, orator regis Anglie’.

Now, the term ‘German’ had a wide reference, encompassing much of the Holy Roman Empire north of the Alps. Those from the Low Countries would often identify themselves by their town or diocese and then add that they were of the ‘German nation’. But could the term be used even more loosely? Burchard, of course, was in a position to know better: was his phrasing a reflection of local Italian usage with a designation as ‘German’ being at times equivalent to saying ‘ultramontane’? There may be other explanations for the phrase but it should, at least, give pause for thought before too ready an acceptance or interpretation of fifteenth-century phrasing as mapping onto modern usage.

There is the moral of my tale. That — and perhaps this: scholarship would be so much easier if one did not check others’ footnotes and took what they said on trust. But, then, no self-respecting academic would dream of doing that. Would they?

More ways of making a point

I have already mentioned my interest in maniculae, those pointing hands that appear in printed books but also in manuscripts. When a history of manuscript annotation comes to be written — to stand alongsie Bill Sherman’s work on early-modern varieties — particular attention will be drawn to the manicula. It is not the only form of annotating symbol, a method of marking a passage of interest or significance; indeed, it is probably rather a late-comer, slapping out of the way the style of face-drawing that is more common in twelfth- or early-thirteeenth-century manuscripts. Sometimes those two forms stand side by side in late medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. I have before me at the moment an interesting specimen, as I sit in the Vatican Library (how things change — when I first came here sixteen years ago, the idea that in this sanctuary next to its roof-top cortile you could be in contact with a wider world was unimaginable. I hanker after those days).

The manuscript, a copy mainly of Pliny’s letters (in the 8 book tradition), has the shelfmark MS. Reg. lat. 1472. It is dated by its scribe to 1453; he signs himself ‘Val. Sal.’. Val not only writes the text, he adds frequent marginalia, in Greek and in Latin, in black and in red ink. He provides plentiful specimens of various maniculae but he does not confine his ‘nota marks’ to these — as I have said, he also includes several faces, one of them distinctive for the Cyrano-like size of his nose and a chin of stubble which is a few centuries ahead of fashion. But it does not stop there: he also provides an example of the annotating symbol which should be known as the ocululus: I know some examples in Leiden, but here the eye is weeping at the beauty of the text (without any water damage). There are also the familiar Greek symbols, and a few Nota monograms. There are other drawings as well: a flowering plant, for instance (presumably considered an appropriate sign to suggest the text should be put into a florilegium). More unusual and less explicable perhaps is the last intervention: the scribe also draws as a nota symbol a boar’s head, with tusks and an extended snout pointing to the text. The animal, I should add, is wearing an elegant collar.

As I have suggested, there is a history to be written of these symbols. You might think that mere antiquarianism but I hope my short description of the scribe’s playful activities in his book has persuaded you, if of nothing else, of the fact that this manuscript — if you pardon the expression — is no bore.