Writer and diplomat, born in Wiltshire, S England, UK. In 1523 he became clerk of the king's council, was ambassador to Emperor Charles V in 15312, and became MP for Cambridge in 1542. His chief work, The Boke Named the Gouernour (1531), is the earliest English treatise on moral philosophy. He was a strong supporter of the use of English (as opposed to Latin and Greek) in scholarly work and added many new words to the language, including encyclopaedia (1539). He was knighted in 1530.
Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490 – March 26, 1546), was an English diplomat and scholar.
Thomas was the fruit of Sir Richard Elyot's first marriage with Alice Fynderne, but neither the date nor place of his birth is accurately known. Elyot himself says in the preface to his Dictionary that he was educated under the paternal roof, and was from the age of twelve his own tutor.
He supplies, in the introduction to his Castell of Helth, a list of the authors he had read in philosophy and medicine, adding that a "worshipful physician" (Thomas Linacre) read to him from Galen and some other authors. In addition to his father's lands in Wiltshire and Oxfordshire he inherited in 1523 the Cambridge estates of his cousin, Thomas Fynderne. Elyot, in a letter addressed to Thomas Cromwell, says that he never received the emoluments of this office, while the empty honour of knighthood conferred on him when he was displaced in 1530 merely put him to further expense.
In 1531 he produced the Boke named the Governour, dedicated to King Henry VIII. The work advanced him in the king's favour, and later that year he received instructions to proceed to the court of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, to try to persuade him to take a more favourable view of Henry's proposed divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
Elyot was probably suspected, like Vaughan, of lukewarmness in carrying out the king's wishes, but was nevertheless blamed by Protestant writers. As ambassador Elyot had been involved in ruinous expense, and on his return he wrote to Cromwell, begging to be excused from serving as sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, on the score of his poverty. There is little doubt that his known friendship for More militated against his chances of success, for in a letter addressed to Cromwell he admitted his friendship for More, but protested that he rated higher his duty to the king. William Roper, in his Life of More, says that Elyot was on a second embassy to Charles V in the winter of 1535-1536 and received the news of More's execution while at Naples.
Elyot received little reward for his services to the state, but his scholarship and his books were held in high esteem by his contemporaries. The Boke named the Governour was printed by Thomas Berthelet (1531, 1534, 1536, 1544, etc.). Elyot expressly acknowledges his obligations to Erasmus's Institutio Principis Christiani but he makes no reference to the De regno et regis institutione of Francesco Patrizzi (d.
As a prose writer, Elyot enriched the English language with many new words. The copy of the first edition in the British Museum contains an autograph letter from Elyot to Cromwell, to whom it originally belonged. It was edited and enlarged in 1548 by Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, who called it Bibliotheca Eliotae, and it formed the basis in 1565 of Cooper's Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae.
His Image of Governance, compiled of the Actes and Sentences notable of the most noble Emperor Alexander Severus (1540) professed to be a translation from a Greek manuscript of the emperor's secretary Encolpius (or Eucolpius, as Elyot calls him), which had been lent him by a gentleman of Naples, called Pudericus, who asked to have it back before the translation was complete. In these circumstances Elyot, as he asserts in his preface, supplied the other maxims from different sources.
He was violently attacked by Humphrey Hody and later by William Wotton for putting forward a pseudo-translation but Henry Herbert Stephen Croft (1842-1923) later discovered that there was a Neapolitan gentleman at that time bearing the name of Poderico, or, Latinized, Pudericus, with whom Elyot may well have been acquainted.
Select list of Elyot's translations
The Doctrinal of Princes (1534), from Isocrates;He also wrote:
The Knowledge which maketh a Wise Man and Pasquyll the Playne (1533) The Bankette of Sapience (1534), a collection of moral sayings Preservative agaynste Deth (1545), which contains many quotations from the Church Fathers Defence of Good Women (1545).
User Comments Add a comment…