As a contemporary John Clapham reported, Queen Elizabeth I ‘had pleasure in reading the best and wisest histories’, and translated the Roman historian Tacitus as a ‘private exercise’. This has been confirmed by a manuscript of a translation of Tacitus corrected by her, recently discovered in Lambeth Palace. But what on earth was she doing that for?
It was nothing as juvenile as showing that she was the equal of any man in the education stakes. The point is that, up till the 16th century, Tacitus had enjoyed little reputation. This was because renaissance ‘humanism’, forged in city-state republics such as Florence and Venice, had found its origins in the noble liberty and self-government of republican Rome. Cicero was their hero. But by 1500, these city states had almost all been replaced by monarchies and princely courts, and men like Machiavelli had started to preach a different gospel: that trickery and deception were legitimate means to political ends.
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