Roger Ascham

Humanist, born in Kirby Wiske, North Yorkshire, N England, UK. He studied at Cambridge, where he became reader in Greek (c.1538). In defence of archery he published Toxophilus (1545), which ranks among English classics on account of its style. He was tutor to the Princess Elizabeth (1548–50), and later became Latin secretary to Queen Mary I. His principal work was The Scholemaster, a treatise on Classical education, published in 1570.

His name would be more properly spelt Askham, being derived, doubtless, from Askharn in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He was the third son of John Ascham, steward to Lord Scrope of Bolton. The authority for this statement, as for most here concerning Ascham's early life, is Edward Grant, headmaster of Westminster, who collected and edited his letters and delivered a panegyrical oration on his life in 1576.

Ascham was educated not at school, but in the house of Sir Humphry Wingfield, a barrister, and in 1533 Speaker of the House of Commons, as Ascham himself tells us, in the Toxophilus where they were under a tutor named R. Their sport was archery, and Sir Humphry "himself would at term times bring down from London both bows and shafts and go with them himself to see them shoot". Hence Ascham's earliest English mark, the Toxophilus, the importance which he attributed to archery in educational establishments, and probably the reason for archery in the statutes of St Albans, Harrow and other Elizabethan schools. From this private tuition Ascham was sent "about 1530," at the age, it is said, of fifteen, to St John's College, Cambridge, then the largest and most learned college in either university, where he devoted himself specially to the study of Greek, then newly revived. Here he fell under the influence of Sir John Cheke, who was admitted a fellow in Ascham's first year, and Sir Thomas Smith. Dr Nicholas Metcalfe was then master of the college, "a papist, indeed, and if any young man given to the new learning as they termed or went beyond his fellows," he "lacked neither open praise, nor private exhibition." He procured Ascham's election to a fellowship, "though being a new bachelor of arts, I chanced among my companions to speak against the Pope ... The day of election Ascham regarded as his birthday," and "the whole foundation of the poor learning I have and of all the furtherance that hitherto elsewhere I have been tamed."

Ascham's first work, Toxophilus, published in 1545, was dedicated to Henry VIII, and gained him the favour of the King, who bestowed a pension upon him.

In 1548, Ascham, as one of the ablest Greek scholars in England, and public orator of the university, was called to court as tutor to princess (afterwards Queen) Elizabeth in Greek and Latin, which he did until 1550. Of Elizabeth, he later wrote: "Yea, I believe, that beside her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, she readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some prebendary of this church doth read Latin in a whole week."

Ascham himself cultivated music, acquired fame and a beautiful handwriting, and lectured on mathematics. Before 1540, when the Regius professorship of Greek was established, Ascham "was paid a handsome salary to profess the Greek tongue in public," and held also lectures in St John's College. He obtained from Edward Lee, then archbishop of York, a pension of £2 a year, in return for which Ascham translated Oecumenius' Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles. But the archbishop, scenting heresy in some passage relating to the marriage of the clergy, sent it back to him, with a present indeed, but with something like a reprimand, to which Ascham answered with an assurance that he was "no seeker after novelties", as his lectures showed. He was on safer ground in writing in 1542-1543 a book, which he told Sir William Paget in the summer of 1544 was in the press, "on the art of Shooting".

A novelty of the book was that the author had "written this Englishe matter in the Englishe tongue for Englishe men", though he thought it necessary to defend himself by the argument that what "the best of the realm think it honest to use" he "ought not to suppose it vile for him to write". From 1541, or earlier, Ascham acted as letter-writer to the university and also to his college. Perhaps the best specimen of his skill was the letter written to the protector Somerset in 1548 on behalf of Sedbergh School, which was attached to St John's College by the founder, Dr Lupton, in 1525, and the endowment of which had been confiscated under the Chantries Acts. In 1546 Ascham was elected public orator by the university on Sir John Cheke's retirement. Shortly after the beginning of the reign of Edward VI, Ascham made public profession of Protestant opinions in a disputation on the doctrine of the Mass, begun in his own college and then removed for greater publicity to the public schools of the university, where it was stopped by the vice-chancellor. Thereon Ascham wrote a letter of complaint to Sir William Cecil. Ascham had already corresponded with the princess, and in one of his letters says that he returns her pen which he has mended. Through Cecil and at the princess's own wish he was selected as her tutor against another candidate pressed by Admiral Seymour and Queen Katherine. Ascham taught Elizabeth—then sixteen years old—for two years, chiefly at Cheshunt.

In a letter to Sturm, the Strassburg schoolmaster, he praises her "beauty, stature, wisdom and industry. She talks French and Italian as well as English: she has often talked to me readily and well in Latin and moderately so in Greek. When she writes Greek and Latin nothing is more beautiful than her handwriting . she read with me almost all Cicero and great part of Titus Livius: for she drew all her knowledge of Latin from those two authors. She used to give the morning to the Greek Testament and afterwards read select orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles. In 1550 Ascham quarrelled with Elizabeth's steward and returned to Cambridge. It was on his way to join Morrison that he paid his celebrated morning call on Lady Jane Grey at Bradgate, where he found her reading Plato's Phaedo, while every one else was out hunting. Ascham read Greek with the ambassador four or five days a week.

His Protestantism he must have quietly sunk, though he told Sturm that "some endeavoured to hinder the flow of Gardiner's benevolence on account of his religion". In 1555 he resumed his studies with Princess Elizabeth, reading in Greek the orations of Aeschines and Demosthenes' De Corona. The occasion of it was, he tells us (though he is perhaps merely imitating Boccaccio), that during the "great plague" at London in 1563 the court was at Windsor, and there on the 10 December he was dining with Sir William Cecil, secretary of state, and other ministers. A debate took place, the party being pretty evenly divided between floggers and anti-floggers, with Ascham as the champion of the latter. Afterwards Sir Richard Sackville, the treasurer, came up to Ascham and told him that "a fond schoolmaster" had, by his brutality, made him hate learning, much to his loss, and as he had now a young son, whom he wished to be learned, he offered, if Ascham would name a tutor, to pay for the education of their respective sons under Ascham's orders, and invited Ascham to write a treatise on "the right order of teaching".

It is not, as might be supposed, a general treatise on educational method, but "a plaine and perfite way of teachyng children to understand, write and speake in Latin tong"; But Ascham's was the first definite demonstration of humanity in the vulgar tongue and in an easy style and a well-known "educationist," though not one who had any experience as a schoolmaster. What largely contributed to its fame was its picture of Lady Jane Grey, whose love of learning was due to her finding her tutor a refuge from pinching, ear-boxing and bullying parents; The book was not published till after Ascham's death, which took place on the 23rd of December of 1568, owing to a chill caught by sitting up all night to finish a New Year's poem to the queen.

His letters were collected and published in 1576, and went through several editions, the latest at Nuremberg in 1611;