Two houses both alike in dignity: Reginald Pole and Edmund Harvell

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the period 1520–50 there was a large English community in the Veneto. This has traditionally been associated with the household of Reginald Pole, who is believed to have dispensed learning and patronage to those who went to the University of Padua in search of a continental education. However, an examination of both primary and secondary sources for the life of Pole suggests that he was only one of a number of reference points for young English scholars and travellers. Of equal, and perhaps greater, importance was the household of Edmund Harvell, a merchant who became English ambassador to the Republic. His household was philo-protestant in tone, and linked to Venetian dissenters and literary circles. These two central figures presented English scholars with the chance to experience the varying strands of Venetian political and religious philosophy at a time of great intellectual vitality. Men such as Richard Morison and Thomas Starkey returned home to write books about English government and society. When their work is set against the Venetian milieu of Harvell and Pole, we can gain a greater understanding of those Venetian influences which underpinned English political thought in the Tudor period and beyond.