The Sixteenth Century and Bacon

Abstract

Barclay looked little like a Renaissance humanist; his contemporary, SIR THOMAS MORE (1478–1535), whose medium was prose, has an altogether more modern look. The English version of his Latin Utopia is not his, but we can witness his mature prose in the History of King Richard III, a piece of Tudor propaganda powerful yet not unadorned, its word-order contrived for effect. All More’s Cockney shrewdness and bluntness, his utter familiarity with Latin, and his devotion to Henry VII and Henry VIII, come out in this book — written by him in Latin and English in the second decade of the 1500s. The language (once the spelling is adjusted to our conventions) is recognisably our own, save for the patches of alliteration like the l…l…l…r…r…r…t…t…t… in the first sentence here. The Princes in the Tower have been smothered, buried, exhumed, re-buried and lost.