"presidents to themselves": a letter to an honorable lady, merciful commentary, and ethical...

8/9/2019 "Presidents to themselves": A Letter to an Honorable Lady, Merciful Commentary, and Ethical Discourse

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Joel DavisOklahoma State University

Presidents to themselves:A Letter to an Honorable Lady, Merciful Commentary, and

Ethical Discourse

One of the most important projects of Renaissance prose, both on the continent

and in England, was to investigate new methods of what we now call moral, political, and

historical inquiry. Intellectual historians of the last few decades have shown how

skeptical methods of inquiry transformed the early humanist reliance on exemplarity into

more recognizably modern notions of historical cause and effect, thereby producing a

divorce between ethics on one hand and the disciplines of history and politics on the

other.1

Timothy Hampton has shown how, as humanists had begun to distrust historical

exemplarity, they sought more urgently to articulate the relation between the reader and

the text.2

The well-known belatedness of the northern Renaissance set the stage for a

revision of a favorite form of humanist discourse, the familiar letter a form that

articulates the relation between reader, writer, and text in terms of privacy. Early

humanists like Petrarch had sought to engage ethics in the epistolary form, but by the

time the Renaissance had reached the north and especially England, the early notion of

effecting political reform by inculcating virtue in the leaders and advisors of states had

fallen under suspicion.3 Relatively early English humanist tracts like ElyotsBoke

1 See, for instance, Victoria Kahn,Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell Univ. Press, 1985); Nancy Struever, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance

(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992); Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus toSpinoza (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1979); and Timothy Hampton, Writing from History:

The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).2Writing from History, 16, 62-79, 136, 192, 300-02.

3 Struever, 26-28; Guillen, 78 ff.; see also Warren Boucher, Vernacular Humanism in the Sixteenth

Century, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,


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Named the Governour(1531) still sought to reform the prince, long after the leading

Italians had given up the project, but it was increasingly apparent that the humanist

pedagogy of civic virtue did not necessarily produce the political reforms envisioned by

earlier humanists. One manifestation of this realization, much admired by Englishmen

like John Florio and Matthew Gwinne (who are thought to have assisted Fulke Greville in

editing the 1590Arcadia) was exemplified in MontaignesEssais: an aristocratic move

toward enveloping moral discourse in the private forms of the epistle and the familiar

essay, which also expressed itself in a shift in preference from rounded Ciceronian to

pointed Senecan prose style.

4

At about the same time that Montaigne was writing the

Essais, the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius published his influential 1575 edition of

Tacitus, which, in conjunction with his later writings, in particularDe Constantia (1584,

translated into English in 1591) andPoliticorum, sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (1589),

influenced the scholarly world much as MontaignesEssais influenced literary taste.5

Lipsius also popularized neostoicism. Neostoic thinkers looked toward the Roman

historian Tacitus for a model of history that accounted for the bankruptcy of civic virtues,

and yet showed the forces of historical change to be the ethical predilections of an elite

who conducted politics in private, rather than in public.6

If Tacitean neostoicism

1996), 189-202; and F.J. Levy, Hayward, Daniel, and the Beginnings of Politic History,Huntington

Library Quarterly 50 (1987): 1-13.4 Morris Crolls essays on sixteenth and seventeenth-century prose style, collected in Style, Rhetoric, and

Rhythm: Essays of Morris Crolled. Max J. Patrick, Robert O. Evans, John M. Wallace, and R. J. Schoeck

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966) are still among the most useful on the topic. See also StanleyFish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: the Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of

California Press, 1972).5 See J.L. Saunders,Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism (New York: The Liberal Arts

Press, 1955) 14 24. See also Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, particularly Attic Prose in theSeventeenth Century, pp. 54 ff. Croll argues that Lipsius mentor Antoine Muret realized that sixteenth

century politics was being conducted in the private chambers of monarchs, and in response shifted the

stylistic emphasis of his teaching from Ciceronian oratory to Senecan essay; Saunders (16) follows Croll.6 See also J.M.H. Salmon, Stoicism and the Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England,

Journal of the History of Ideas 50.1 (1989): 199-225; Alan T. Bradford, Stuart Absolutism and the


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conceded the futility of the early humanist enterprise of reforming the state by reforming

the prince, it nevertheless asserted the primacy of maintaining virtue and resisting

corruption among the aristocracy, thereby privileging both the aristocracy and ethical

discourse.7 As prominent French, Dutch, and English writers of the later sixteenth

century embraced Senecan style, explored the essay and the Senecan epistle, and

engaged neostoicism, they did not give up ethical discourse, but rather revised its form

and the scope of its ambitions.

As we have revised intellectual history, we have also sought to clarify the

historically particular and local conditions that gave rise to the distrust of exemplarity and

the concomitant concern over the relation of reader to text.8

Fulke GrevillesLetter to an

Honorable Ladyprovides a mostly overlooked opportunity for just such a historically

specific inquiry: it is a letter of advice that offers a map showing a noblewoman

unhappily married to a philanderer howe you should carry your selfe through that

Laberinth, wherin it semes tyme, and mischance have imprisond you (137.2-5).9 The

Letteris primarily an ethical discourse that draws on political and historical analyses. As

such, it points us directly at a distortion that twentieth-century preoccupations with

politics and history have foisted on our understanding of the intellectual divorce between

Utility of Tacitus,Huntington Library Quarterly 23 (1993): 128, 133; Malcolm Smuts, Court-Centered

Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c. 1590-1630, in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England,

ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake(Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993), 40.7 See Gordon Braden,Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Angers Privilege (New Haven,

CN: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 9-21, for a succinct account of how stoic ethical discourse served the needs of

the aristocratic imagination in an increasingly centralized state. See also J.M.H. Salmon, Seneca and

Tacitus in Jacobean England, in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 188, for the particular appeal of Tacitus.8

Besides Hampton, see also F.J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought(San Marino, CA: Huntington Library,

1967), and Levys Fulke Greville: The Courtier as Philosophic Poet,Modern Language Quarterly 33(1972): 433-448; Rebecca Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English

Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990) is also helpful.


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ethics, politics, and history: our accounts privilege the disciplines of history and politics,

and therefore show how these disciplines turned away from ethical concerns as they

became more recognizably modern, butA Letter to an Honorable Lady shows that

Renaissance ethical discourse was likewise in the process of divorcing itself from politics

and history. For English writers like Sidney, political and ethical discourse remained

closely bound to each other, as Blair Worden has shown, and yet it is significant that

Sidney addressed theArcadia (at least the Old Arcadia) to his sister as a private

recreation the sort of space in which ethical discourse thrived but was not taken

seriously until, perhaps, Adam Smiths Theory of Moral Sentiments was published in the

eighteenth century.10

Unlike Sidney, however, Greville attempted to distinguish clearly

between political and ethical discourse. Precisely because Greville was concerned with

the worldly, the political and the historical, we can trace in his letter of advice the tension

between political analysis and ethical advice, and we can see how Greville mistrusts the

applicability of historical anecdote to the advice he gives, even as he strains to draw

analogies between the private politics of marriage and the ostensibly public politics of the

court. This tension emerges as Greville tries to balance the political purpose of theLetter

against its moral purpose, and it is based in Grevilles neostoicism, which advocates, on

one hand, and ascetic withdrawal from the political sphere, but on the other hand purports

to offer political advice.11

9 This and all succeeding parenthetical citations ofA Letter to an Honorable Lady give both page and line

numbers, and refer to The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, ed. John Gouws (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,

1986).10

The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidneys Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, Conn: Yale Univ.Press, 1996).11

The same tension, in turn, may be reflected in the conflicting assessments of Seneca available to

Renaissance thinkers, namely, Dio Cassius contemptuous account of Seneca as a hypocrite who professedascetic withdrawal while he amassed a fortune as advisor to two emperors, and Tacitus more friendly

account of Seneca. Dio Cassius recounts Senecas death at 8.129; Tacitus in hisAnnales at 15.62. I refer


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However, one of the hazards that beset anyone trying to understand Fulke

Grevilles works is that fact that they are very difficult to place in a local context.

Greville never published his own writing, and apparently kept it so closely guarded that

very little circulated. TheLetter to an Honorable Lady, which, like most of Grevilles

work, lay unpublished until 1633, five years after his death, poses an even more difficult

problem, since it never was finished. Moreover, the best arguments for dating theLetter

apparently conflict with the best arguments for its intended audience.

On one hand, a number of parallels between the lives of Margaret Clifford,

countess of Cumberland, and Grevilles Honorable Lady suggest that the countess was

Grevilles addressee. Margaret Cliffords marriage was famously unhappy: her husband,

George Clifford, Third earl of Cumberland, was frequently away from home and

indiscreet with his mistresses; Grevilles Honorable Lady suffers the same fate.

Indeed, the countess is the subject of a Hilliard miniature with the motto Constant in the

midst of Inconstancey. Moreover, the Appleby triptych portrays the countess daughter,

Anne, holding a copy of Grevilles published works. The inconstancy surrounding the

countess may also refer to the Catholicism of the Clifford family and of Yorkshire in

general, which was inhospitable to the Protestant countess.12

Cumberland sold off

numerous estates in the 1580s and 1590s to finance his privateering enterprises, which

parallels Grevilles Ladys financial fears. Cumberland also willed a large share of his

estate to Robert Cecil, a longtime foe of Greville and the Protestant Essex faction.13

All

to the Loeb LibraryDios Roman History, trans. Earnest Cary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press,1969), and the Loeb edition of TacitusAnnales, trans. John Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.

Press, 1937).12

See Richard T. Spence, The Privateering Earl(London: Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1995), 1-60.13 Spence, 60, 215-16. See also G.C. Williamson, George, Third Earl of Cumberland(Cambridge:

Cambridge Univ. Press, 1920), 287.


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of these parallels support the theory that the countess of Cumberland should be

understood as the addressee of theLetter to an Honorable Lady.

On the other hand, Ronald Rebholz has argued that theLetterprobably was not

written with the countess in mind, because he dates it earlier than August 1589, a time at

which the countess had only one living child (not the children mentioned by

Greville).14

Indeed, Rebholzs reading raises the question whether theLetterwas

intended to be read at all: he argues that theLetterwas one of Grevilles most optimistic

explorations of stoic philosophy, in which he tried essentially to convince himself of the

potency of stoic philosophy. Rebholz contends that theLetter remains unfinished

because Greville failed to convince himself of the efficacy of stoic philosophy, and thus

began the process of deepening self-doubt that eventually led to his conversion to an

extremely pessimistic Calvinist outlook.15

Although Rebholz is probably right about the

approximate date of theLetter, his dating isnt as precise as he makes it out to be, nor

should a 1589 date be construed as evidence that Greville couldnt possibly have written

theLetterwith the countess in mind. The countess had two living children, Francis and

Robert, from 1585 to December of 1588; moreover, she was pregnant with Anne for most

of 1589. Given that Greville wrote slowly and revised constantly, he could well have

been referring either to Francis and Robert or to Robert and the unborn Anne within

Rebholzs dating scheme; thus there need not be a conflict between theLetters addressee

and its date, and it seems likely that theLetterwas composed circa 1590 with the

countess of Cumberland in mind. This would confirm a growing consensus among

14Rebholz dates the letter on the basis of a reference to Henry of France: he observes that Greville

always distinguishes carefully between Henry III and Henry IV and concludes that Greville must have leftoff working on theLetterbefore August 2, 1589, the death of Henry III. For more details, see his The Life

of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (London: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 328 ff.


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scholars about the addressee of theLetterwithout necessitating that we overlook the best

argument we have for its date.16

The date and addressee of theLetterare crucial for understanding its meaning, for

they point to the local conditions out of which its philosophical arguments arise and the

form in which Greville chose to work. TheLetteris a formally organized Senecan

epistle, meant for private circulation or publication. Its form removes its arguments from

the public arena to the private, and allows them to do their political work under the

pretense of avoiding politics: it says nothing publicly, depending on the notion of its

privacy having been violated to protect it from unfavorable interpretations. Indeed, the

Letters form demands that outside readers take into account the local, private

circumstances of its addressee, and so it articulates the relationships among writer,

reader, and audience far more specifically than a treatise in prose or poetry. Moreover, it

establishes a temporary and artificial relation of social equality between Greville and the

countess, mentor and protg. This equality is predicated on a shared subjectivity, in

which Greville and the countess objectify those outside the writer/recipient relation in

order to analyze them. Because the epistolary form evokes the subjectivity only of the

writer and the recipient and contains them within a sphere of privacy it is free to

portray them in some detail, but not obligated to characterize them as extensively as in a

work of fiction or drama: it can, instead, choose to represent the writer and recipient only

insofar as needed to flesh out the context in which the philosophical argument it presents

15 Rebholz, 85.16

Two recently presented papers make similar arguments: Helen Vincent, Fulke Grevilles Women:Theory and Practice, 35th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI 2000; and Dan

Hedley, Not to deale betwene the barcke, and the tree: Fulke Greville and Samuel Daniel Advising

Honourable Ladies, presented at Fulke Greville is a Good Boy: A Symposium on the Life, Times, andWritings of Fulke Greville, Shrewsbury School, Shropshire, April 1998, abstract published in the Sidney

Journal16.1: 57-81.


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is relevant.17

These advantages made the epistolary form attractive to men like Greville

in particular, to partisans of the Essex faction.

In the later 1580s and 1590s, the Essex circle turned to the epistolary form to

advertise the virtues of its policies and its constituents, making use of the forms

amenability to presenting personae and reasoned arguments. Essex and his clients fought

for influence at court primarily against the Cecil faction, which included Margaret

Cliffords husband, George.18

And in the 1590s, Cumberland vied with Essex for the

privilege of leading naval expeditions against the Spanish. For example, Essex won from

Cumberland the right to command the Cadiz expedition in 1596, much to Cumberlands

frustration.19

Grevilles role in the Cadiz expedition was to circulate a heroic account of

Essexs role in the undertaking, the True Relation of the voyage. In fact, Greville

publicly took the blame for continuing to circulate the True Relation in spite of the

crowns insistence that it be suppressed.20

Greville took part in other public relations schemes depending on the circulation

of letters, as well. He allowed himself to be the addressee of a letter of advice from Essex

concerning the employment of scholars. Essexs advice to Greville showcases the earls

prowess as an intellectual and spymaster, explaining that paid scholars should like

labourers, bring stone, timber, mortar, and other necessities to your building, but you

17 See Morris Croll, one of the most astute readers of GrevillesLetter: The work is in fact an attempt in

another literary form at the same object attained in the dramas, philosophical exposition by means ofconcrete figures in a formal artistic guise; and it illustrates not less remarkably the subtlety of Grevilles

mind in this kind of exercise. As to its philosophic teaching, it deserves more attention as do Grevilles

other works than students of philosophy, repelled by its amateur form, have accorded it, The Works of

Fulke Greville. Philadelphia, PA: JB Lippincott Co, 1903 (University of Pennsylvania MA Thesis, 1901),52. See also Claudio Guillen, Notes Toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter, inRenaissance

Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Univ. Press, 1986), 70-101.18 Robert Cecil would receive a large share of Cumberlands inheritance in 1605. See Spence, 215.19 See Richard T. Spence, The Privateering Earl(London: Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1995), 132.


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should put them together, & be the master-workman yourself.21

Another exemplary

letter of advice was attributed to Greville himself, and was printed in the 1633 edition of

his works and is extant in three other manuscript copies. It is addressed to a cousin in

France and counsels him how to make the best use of his Continental travels how to

take note of the terrain and the political situation, and other potentially useful

information. This letter was evidently much used by Essex and his clients: letters from

Thomas Bodley to Francis Bacon and from Essex to the young earl of Rutland are nearly

identical transcriptions, differing only in salutations and closures. All these letters

portray their authors as seasoned men offering politically useful advice to younger

men. They represent their authors as knowledgeable political agents, well suited for the

Privy Council (in Essexs case) or for service at court or abroad (in the cases of Bodley

and Greville).22

This context reveals that GrevillesLetter to an Honorable Lady serves a political

purpose as well as an ethical purpose, both of which hinge on its ethical content. First, the

Letterattacks the earl of Cumberland, one of Essexs chief rivals and an important part of

the Cecil faction, under the veil of privacy. It makes a case for the neostoic political

philosophy of the Essex circle by inviting readers to compare a peculiar exemplar of that

philosophy, the countess of Cumberland, to her husband. Second, theLetteroffers

ethical advice to the countess. These two goals seem to converge neatly: one might

suppose that theLetteradvises the countess how to be a good wife and political subject,

20 See Ronald Rebholz, the Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 99.21

See Paul E.J. Hammer, The Uses of Scholarship: The Secretariat of Robert Devereaux, Second Earl ofEssex, c. 1585-1601,English Historical Review 109 (1994): 46, and Hammer, The Earl of Essex, Fulke

Greville, and the Employment of Scholars, SP91 (1994): 171. The Essex letter is quoted from Hammer,

Secretariat, 48.22 See Norman Farmer, Fulke Grevilles Letter to a Cousin in France and the Problem of Authorship in

Cases of Formula Writing,Renaissance Quarterly 22 (1969): 145-46.


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in contrast to her husband and, by extension, to the enemies of the Essex faction. Indeed

it seems intended for that purpose. But neostoicism is itself a divided philosophy,

because its moral efficacy demands withdrawal from political activity and such political

quietism has long been a lightning rod for critics of stoic ethics; thus the political purpose

of theLetterconflicts with its professed ethics. An important part of Grevilles solution

to this conflict is that he advises a married woman, and his advice is that she choose to

remain obedient to her husband. To the extent that Greville intended, at least at some

point, to circulate theLetteramong a courtly audience, it is a symptom of the feminized

position of the courtier in an increasingly absolutist regime. TheLetterin fact articulates

a kind of moral and political agency that appeals to, and modifies, the well-known

injunctions that early modern women should be chaste, silent, and obedient: it seeks a

way for the early modern subject of increasingly centralized political authority,

constrained similarly to women, to retain agency. Thus it takes an active role in

feminizing the position of the courtier and it does so in order to carve out a discrete,

private space for ethical discourse.

These tensions between the public and private, masculine and feminine, underlie

theLetters anxiety over the right use of exempla. TheLetter to an honorable Lady

exhibits a strong distrust of the ethical efficacy of exempla even as it relies on them

extensively for its political purposes. Exempla, drawn primarily from history, are used to

give a concrete, sensual dimension to moral and political advice; they are used primarily

to move the reader to right action to be imitated or to be avoided by readers who cannot

grasp the principles that exempla embody. And because their purpose is to appeal to the

senses, they are bound to opinion which is nought els but a vaine image and shadow


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of reason: whose seat is the Sences rather than to reason.23

Thus GrevillesLetter to

an Honorable Lady constantly negotiates the tension between the rejection of

exemplarity implicit in its neostoic ethical discourse, and the reliance on exemplarity

demanded by its political purposes.

A closer examination of theLetteritself reveals that it attacks the earl of

Cumberland largely by comparing his character unfavorably to that of his wife: as the

straight line showes both it selfe, and the crooked, Greville explains, so doth an upright

course of life yeeld all true wayes of advantage, and by masteringe our owne affections,

anatomizeth all inferior passions (169.20-23).

24

In other words, we perceive virtuous

and vicious conduct only by the differences between them in some ways like the

Saussurian notion that we understand one sign only by means of its difference from other.

But Grevilles ends concern practical knowledge, and so he subordinates theoretical

questions to practical how ought we to interpret examples of virtuous and vicious

living?

The first part of his answer, as we shall see, is that only from the vantage of a

state of virtue can we make correct interpretations to begin with, because moral

corruption is a corruption of the faculty of judgment. Greville shows the crooked line

of Cumberlands infidelities by the reaction of his wife in the single most personal

moment in theLetter the moment that most fully exploits the capacity of the epistolary

form to create a sense of intimacy in its characterization. He writes, meethincks (Noble

Ladie) I even nowe see your face blushe, while your thoughts tell me, that your Lordes

23 Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. Sir John Stradling, ed. Rudolph Kirk (New Brunswick,

NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1939), 82.


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affections have soe many vents, as there is no danger of breakinge the vessell with

fullnesse, nor yet of multiplienge devotion by restraint (143.9-12). The wifes blush at

the husbands sexual indiscretions marks the straight and the crooked, and it is a

metonymy for theLetteritself: the blush is a virtuous response to the presence of vice, as

theLetteris likewise a virtuous response to vice.

In Grevilles hands, moreover, Cumberlands infidelity becomes a sign of a far

more dangerous lack of political judgment. Thus Greville continues his anatomy of

Cumberlands vices, claiming that the dotage of the earl on his mistress is an

unscrutable depth; it puts seales to blancks, makes contradictories true, and sees all

thinges in the superlative degree. To be short, it is a prospect into the land of ignorance,

which they say no man can describe, but that he is past it (143.14-18). To see all

thinges in the superlative degree is, for Greville, to be unable to compare them to other,

similar objects of desire or possible courses of action, and thus to be unable to judge their

moral worth. The seals synecdochically represent political authority, and putting seales

to blancks represents authorizing political action without forethought, extending the

failure of the earls moral judgment into the political realm. If Cumberland demonstrates

such a lack of perspicacity as to overlook the worth of his own wife, the argument goes,

surely he cant be trusted to make difficult political judgments. Moreover, the idea that

no man in the grip of dotage can describe that state reduces the earl to objectified

silence. Only Greville, through theLetter, and the countess, through her blush, can

describe the dotage of the earl.

24This is not a unique formulation. Sidney, for example, describes Euarchus virtue as that which made

the line of his actions straight and always like itself, no worldly thing being able to shake the constancy of

it (Robertson, Old Arcadia, 357-365).


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Finally, when Greville speaks most directly, he claims that I knowe your

husbands nature, which is rather weaklie, then stronglie evill; full of respects, desires,

feares; jealouse, and careless; factiouse, and unresolute; rather inclining to crafte, then

violence (163.14-17). Greville characterizes the faults of the husband by comparing him

to what he would later categorize as weak and strong tyrants.25

The attack on the earls

political judgment is grounded, rather circularly, in Grevilles method for making moral

and political judgment: we are to interpret the earl as an exemplar of vicious living by

comparing his faculty for judgment to the standards that Greville presents. It anticipates

Grevilles better-known formulation of tyranny inMustapha: where declining spirits /

To governe mighty Scepters God ordains, / Order noBasis findes; Honor must fall: /

Where man is nothing, Place cannot doe all (1.2.198-201).26

By implication, Grevilles

method of interpretation is a path toward virtue (where virtue is a ground for clear

judgment), and of course the countess as well as the occasional reader who consult

Grevilles mappe have the requisite virtue to learn from the comparisons Greville

presents.

The second part of Grevilles inquiry into how we ought to interpret examples

entails the characteristic neostoic turn away from sense and emotion, and a withdrawal

into the reasoning self. In neostoic terms, the point of such withdrawal is to see the

dictates of reason of natural law clearly, so that its self-consistent nature is evident.

In contrast to her husband, the countess harbors those moderate sweet humors, which I

have knowne to be in you, and Greville advises her to enrich your selfe upon your

25A Treatise of Monarchy stanzas 80-105 and 146-191, in Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke: The Remains,

Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion, ed. G.A. Wilkes (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965).


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owne stocke, not lookinge owtwardlie, but inwardlie for the fruite of true peace (153.25-

26, 154.10-12). But the countess has more than her owne stocke on which to rely: she

has theLetteritself, which represents the philosophically informed judgment of Greville

and his allies.

In fact, Greville finesses the neostoic distrust of exemplarity by presentingLetter

as itself an exemplary response to the countess plight a textual representation of a

process of judgment, rather than a representation of a person. The epistolary form of the

Letteris ideally suited to this purpose, because it portrays Greville as a reasoning subject,

extending the same to the countess and by implication to the audience. This relocates the

site of virtue to the private sphere of the study. At the same time, theLetterkeeps the

figure of Greville-as-author carefully distanced from the object of his analysis. In

neostoic terms, Grevilles response to the countess problem is one of mercy rather than

pity. Seneca writes that pity is a failing of a weak nature that succumbs to the sight of

others ills.27 Lipsius follows Seneca almost exactly, explaining that pity is the fault of

an abject and base mind, cast down at the show of anothers mishap, whereas mercy is

an inclination of the mind to succor the necessity of misery in another.28

Whereas a

person moved by mercy wishes to alleviate suffering in another, one moved by pity feels

emotional empathy for the sufferer; consequently his or her action will be based on

emotion rather than reason, and therefore will be corrupt. As we shall see, Greville uses

26Geoffrey Bullough, ed.,Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke, vol. 2 (New York:

Oxford Univ. Press, 1945)27

De Clementia 2.5.1, in Seneca: Moral Essays, vol. 1, trans. John Basore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1963).28Two Bookes of Constancie, Written in Latin by Iustus Lipsius, Englished by Sir John Stradling, ed. and

introduction by Rudolf Kirk (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1939), 98.


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this merciful hermeneutic as the lynchpin of his approach to exemplarity the

approach that theLetterultimately insists is the only safe way to read exemplars.

Greville uses the distinction between pity and mercy (though not its precise terms)

to justify his relationship to Margaret Clifford, and to articulate the relationship between

the reader and the text that troubles late humanists. TheLettersets out the commonplace

that an interloper ought not to insinuate himself between a wife and a husband, the

barke, and the tree of a marriage. But in the particular circumstances in which the

Letterexists, Greville rejects the ancient adage. Greville claims to have the trust of the

countess, and claims to be bound to her by her worth and favor (137.9-10). Thus, he

will regard the warnings as precepts not fitt to guide our loves, or lives by (137.12-13).

Moreover, he offers the countess knowledge and advice to relieve her distressed mind,

rather than her body, and he deems his advising to be charitie (137.14). Indeed, the

charity and mercy that Greville professes toward the countess mirror the example of

virtuous love he advises her to emulate, so that she (and a wider audience) may see the

difference between virtuous love and the debased love that characterizes her marriage to

the earl. In this way, Greville presents his love for the countess as an exemplar of mercy.

As Greville writes mercifully rather than piteously, so he demands that his

audience read with mercy rather than pity. This stems, in part, from Grevilles theory of

time and the relation of the individual subject to history. For Greville, history is a

continuous decline from a golden age of moral and political virtue. The passage of time

is marked by an increase in corruption loosely analogous to the way that current

thermodynamic theory supposes that the arrow of time points toward increasing entropy.

Greville touches on his theory of time when he excuses himself for pointing out the


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countesss past mistakes, claiming because [these mistakes] teach you to knowe, that

time is it which makes the same thing easie, and impossible, leavinge withall an

experience for thinges to come (137.26-28). What makes the same thinge easie, and

impossible is the irreversible flow of time. What is easy in the uncorrupted, edenic

beginning is impossible in later, more corrupted times. So in the honeymoon phase of

marriage, a wife and husband exchange love for love, all for all, but to such a period

in the vicissitude of thinges, and tymes, there must of necessitie followe aBrasen age

(138.23-29), in which one party seeks advantage over the other and the equality of

exchange is broken. Once lost, the ideal relationship may not be recovered. As in

marriage, so in history: Greville writes that the original ideal state of marriage is a

livelie Image of that Golden age, which the Allegories of the Poets figure unto us . . ..

Equalitie guided without absolutenesse, earth yeilded fruict without labor . . . the names

of wealth, and povertie were strange, no owning in particular (138.20-22).

Because history entails the inevitable decline of virtue, the maintenance of virtue

must be a private, feminized endeavor. Thus, paradoxically, the loss of equal affection is

a point of ill housewifery (138.13-14): it is the wifes responsibility to maintain the

balance in a relationship; and yet the means to maintaining equal affection, which is to

work affection, while she is yet in her pride, to a reverence; which hath more power then

it selfe, requires advantage, or at least equalitie and art, both of which Greville

supposes the countess to have lacked in the beginning of her marriage. The countess has

the responsibility, but not the means, to enforce the reverence that would have preserved

her marriage. The balance ofA Letter to an Honorable Lady addresses the art of

demanding and deserving the reverence needed to maintain the sort of equality in an


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unequal relationship of power that concerns Greville. But as a writer working in the

belated northern humanist tradition, Greville concedes that reforming the relationship is

impossible, and urges the countess to content herself, instead, with a kind of self-reform.

It is a mistake to suppose that the significance of Grevilles comparison of the

progress of marriage to that of history is nothing more than a Protestant predilection for

comparing marital to political relationships. Such a supposition overlooks the point of

Grevilles claim that movement through time inevitably results in corruption. The point

of this claim is that virtue is essentially resistance to corruption. Thus Greville relies on

the doctrine of plenitude for his account of evil and corruption: the beinge of evill [is]

nothinge, but onlie a deprivinge of the good, and the captivinge of our freewill-lights to

the worcks of darcknesse. The consequence of this account of corruption is the

irreversible nature of corruption: it must needs come to passe that when her conquering

venomes are once distilled through all our powers, and wee wonne with our selves, that

there can be no thought within us to heare, or entreat; and without us, though authoritie

may cutt of the infection of ill example from others; yet can it no more take away the

Divells part in us, then call up the dead (144.9-17).

Here, too, stands revealed one of Grevilles tenets for reading examples: it is the

function of authoritie to cutt of the infection of ill example from others. That is, the

commentator must prevent the evil of negative exemplars from infecting the

unsuspecting reader. For Greville, this is the most important function of the

commentator, because examples are treacherous texts, dangerous to interpret. This is

analogous to the earlier contention that the wife must work affection into a kind of

reverence, but the commentator in Grevilles model maintains an authority that the wife


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lacks. Thus, Greville claims moral authority based on the mentoring relation he has set

up within the privacy of theLetter. And yet even this authority is much abridged, for the

corrupt man may not benefit from studying historical exemplars, even if correctly guided

though authoritie may cutt . . . the infection of ill example from others; yet it [cannot]

take away the Divells part in us. Corruption is no more reversible than death: indeed,

the inscription on Grevilles tomb, trophaeum peccati emphasizes the fact that he felt

death to be the natural end of the corrupting process of life.

In spite of authors and commentators attenuated capacity to effect moral reform,

they can do some good. Because history unfolds a process of moral and political

corruption, its study reveals the primary engines of corruption, which are for Greville

hope and fear. Grevilles assertion that the two false rudders of Hope, and Feare

govern worldly affairs is typical of neostoicism. For example, Lipsius devotes two

chapters ofDe constantia to a relatively detailed anatomy of how hope and fear distract

us from legitimate goals, concluding with an explication of the commonplace motto, nec

spe nec metu: Neither with hope, nor with feare . . .. Thou shalt be a king indeed free

indeed, only subiect vnto God, enfranchized from the seruile yoke of Fortune and

affections (83-84). Greville, however, takes a more Machiavellian approach to hope and

fear. First, he writes that they are the enseignes of the Princes of the earth, by which

subjects are controlled.

Then he gives an inspired psychological insight not found in eitherDe Constantia

orThe Prince: Greville explains that hope and fear are the means by which power makes

the subjects of history signify the extent to which they are susceptible to coercion.

Subjects of hope and fear show their superiors how they may best be manipulated. Thus,


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hope and fear are twoe craftie spies of power gevinge intelligence what may be forced

within us; therby to enhance the tributes of Tyranie, till it have drawne up our browes,

after our sweate; and given lawes to thirst, as well as drinckinge (156.32-33; 158.4-8).

This is the insight of Greville-as-spymaster, the recipient of Essexs letter concerning the

employment of scholars, and the author of the letter of advice to a cousin travelling in

France. It this insight that later leads Hamlet to taunt Guildenstern, Sblood, do you

think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though

you can fret me, you cannot play upon me (3.2.339-41). In contrast to Hamlet, who

responds to Claudius probing by giving him false information, the neostoic refuses to

respond to the hope and fear by which power reads its subjects. For Greville, such a

strategy makes the subject less susceptible to manipulation.29

Accordingly, Greville seeks to inoculate the countess against hope and fear,

assuaging her fears that the earl could do her lasting harm with arguments drawn largely

from SenecasDe Constantia, and attempting to pull down those ruines of yours so that

the countess does not build false hopes upon this broken foundacion (150.9-10).

Because exempla are thought to inspire virtuous behavior emotionally, by playing

precisely on the hopes and fears of the subject, Greville treats his exempla very

cautiously in theLetter, usually keeping them on the same logical plane as precepts.

Exempla yield precepts ethical maxims, suited to a particular set of circumstances, not

to be applied universally, and not to be used in analogies except with great caution. And

Greville is no casuist: his works demonstrate a consistent belief that general principles

are the ground from which precepts spring in response to particular circumstances.

29 Hampton makes a similar generalization about Montaigne: The true exemplars act would signify

nothing, his soul would never move (160). This should be unsurprising, given Grevilles close association


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Indeed, he warns: no man can governe his life whollie by precepts; humane wisdome it

selfe varieinge with circumstance of occasion, place, tyme and nature; and so neither the

same in all thinges, nor still the same in anie (Gouws, 155.5-9).

Thus, rather than presenting exempla for imitation, or as grounds for deriving

precepts for conduct, Greville instead uses exempla generally to dissuade the countess

from acting on faulty precepts. For instance, he asserts that the countess may try to

mende her wayward husband, or she may try to master both his evill, and his estate,

or she may try to please him (142.12-14), none of which are advisable. The simplest

and most nearly self-evident exempla Greville uses to illustrate the futility of reforming

Cumberland: Sisyphus and the sisters who attempt to fill sieves with water, the Belides.

The second precept, to seek to wrest a comfortable share of wealth from Cumberland in

the courts, Greville illustrates with two more negative exempla, the giant Antaeus and the

Babylonians. He writes that This earth of your estate is patience, and humilitie, and

that, like Anateus, the countess derives her strength from the earth. From the

destruction of the Tower of Babel and the confusion of tongues Greville derives an

excellent course of the wisdome, to punishe vayne ends by fruictlesse labors (145.3-20).

The logical links between these mythological and biblical exempla are futility and failure,

but Grevilles concern with futility and failure is more serious and more political than

these examples demonstrate, as his third example reveals: trying to please Cumberland is

like trying to please a tyrant. The countess cant please him with herself, since to suit his

changeable humors she would have to be sometimes short, sometimes longe; now fayre,

now browne; wanton, modest, and all at once (146.19-21). In the face of this, Greville

posits that the countess would have to please her husband with himselfe (147.1).

with John Florio, Montaignes first English translator.


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Grevilles explication of what it is to please ones husband with himself compares the

marriage again to a tyranny.

But here the vehicle of Grevilles metaphor eclipses the tenor, and, as Greville

strays into political discourse he reaches for the trope of allegory to re-establish his moral

point. Uppon this stage, Greville writes, if Superiors delight in lust; Panders are the

ministers of credite: if in wealth; the sparinge the negative voyces be the councells of

advancement (147.7-10) a circumstance that he dramatizes later with the parade of

vices inAlaham.30

Rather than stop at a comparison of the countess marriage to a

tyranny, Greville doubles the comparison, so that the tyrannical court is like an

allegorical painting of the vices Boschs Garden of Earthly Delights comes to mind

and, for once, Greville appeals to a visceral sense of revulsion in drawing out the

significance of the comparison:

Howe uglie a prospect such rootes, and branches must be to all free mindes, you

shall easilie see, if it please you to looke upon the Poeticall Mappe, wherin the

Painter, livelie describinge a pageant of worldlie vanities, with the plagues, and

deformities of everie sinne, represent misshapen humane shapes unto us, eyther

longe tayles, cloven feete, hornes, or such like antiques, as with too manie, or too

fewe members lively represent us the Monstrous birthes of error. And when you

have exactlie vewd it, I dare undertake,you shall not see in that mappe so

horrible, and fearfull images to the soules of men; as you shall in those

Tyrannicall courts to the bodies, and fortunes of the worthiest. (147.27 148.1,

my emphasis)

30Chorus Secondus, inPoems and Dramas of Fulke Greville.


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What Greville implies here is that the violence and distortions the artist uses allegorically

to represent vice are, in fact, made literal in a tyrannical court. Thus the bodies, and

fortunes of the worthiest are deformed more horribly in the court of a tyrant than the

bodies painted in an allegorical picture, and as the ugliness of a Bosch painting represents

vice, so the deformity of bodies in the tyrannical court represents vice. For the countess

to please the earl with himself, then, she would have to mirror his vices, for which,

Greville notes, she would first deface honor, shame religion, and all other honest limitts

in your selfe (149.2-3).

The few positive exemplars in theLetter, which do yield precepts, generally

advocate inaction over retaliation against wrongs: this, Greville calls obedience. The

countess is not to follow any one of these exemplars, but rather to infer from Grevilles

discursive arrangement that inaction is the best policy. Greville invites the countess to

compare her situation to that of Ulysses passing the Sirens, avoiding the general run of

worldly threats and temptations by stoppinge our eares, and closinge our eyes, least our

rebellious senses, as apt to flatter, as be flattered . . . leade our mistie understandinges

captive to perdition (152.28-31). More particularly, Job is to be the countess exemplar

in refusing to be moved by fear, and Octavia is to be her exemplar in refusing to act on

the basis of hope. Greville stresses that although Octavia had the social status and

political power to revenge herself on Antony, she refused, and was content, when she

could not doe the workes of a welbeloved wife, yet to doe well, as becomes all excellent

women (167.7-8). In refusing either to receive the fears and hopes the world offers or to

act on either fear or hope, all these exemplars resist the encroachments of power and vice,

in Grevilles model. That these exemplars are meant as reasons to refrain from action is


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made explicit by another comparison: Greville compares Octavias course of inaction to

Junos practise to reign in her philandering husband. All of Junos machinations and

plots come to nothing, argues Greville, for Jupiter always finds a way to work his own

venereal will. Junos plots are the crooked line illuminated by the straight line of

Octavias self-regarding inaction. These two exemplars, from the fifth chapter, are the

last Greville develops in any detail in theLetter to an Honorable Lady.

Obedience, according to Greville, is the single virtue appropriate to a wife, for in

obedience reside all other virtues. He defines obedience only in relation to authority,

where authority is A commandinge power, that hath relation to the obedience of

inferiors (164.16-17). The point of such an abstract definition is to make it inclusive, so

that obedience is owed equally to supreme, or meane authoritie (164.28-29); indeed,

even abusive authorities are to be obeyed as either rodds of trialls, which we inferiors

must kisse, or as mistes of mutinouse self-love which deceive, and make man as well

misunderstand his diseases, as their remedies (165.21-25). But Grevilles notion of

obedience is also tempered by his Tacitean inclinations, for he writes that there is

neither in yours, nor in any other subjection, any true peace to be gotten by trust of

Superiors; nor honour by strife against them (158.12-15). The inferior in a corrupt

environment must obey, but not out of blind trust in authority. This sort of talk is

consistent with the absolutism that Greville is said to have developed later, under James.

What is happening here, though, is that Greville is laboring to make obedience a self-

consistent and unchanging abstract principle a virtue that retains the same value even as

its correlative, authority, shifts wildly in value from divine glory to petty tyranny.


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Greville claims that, to worldly eyes, obedience appears as constancy; to divine, as

humility.

It is precisely Grevilles struggle to make obedience into a universal virtue that

betrays the particular circumstances that conditionALetter to an Honorable Lady. This

definition of obedience rests a priori on the existence of a subject-position of inferiority,

one that obtains both politically and ethically in public and in private spaces. Yet when

Greville seeks to provide an example of obedience only to show that it is possible, not

to show any precepts or actions to be imitated he produces only Octavia. He could

easily invoke Job as a male exemplar of obedience; he cites Job as an exemplar of

refusing to be moved by fear earlier in the text. Moreover, Greville cites both male and

female examples of disobedience: along with Juno, he points to the falls of Sejanus

underTiberius; the Duke ofGuise underHenrie of France, among others (165.11-12).

Although it could be argued that Greville chooses a female exemplar of obedience

because he addresses a woman, the better explanation for the gendering of his positive

exemplar lies in his understanding of the nature of obedience. There are two main

reasons for this. In the first place, he does not labor under the assumption that readers

may profit only from exemplars of their own sex: just as he presents the countess with

male and female exempla in other places, so he presents the countess herself as an

example to what presumably would be a mostly male coterie audience. This rests on the

premise that readers profit from exempla by deriving abstract moral principles from

them, and theLetteris itself an example of how this is to be done. In the second place,

the root from which Greville derives his universal definition of obedience is a female

subject-position: that of a wife. From an ethical standpoint, agency entails responsibility,


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and as we have seen, the responsibility of a wife is both to stimulate the appetites of

them we would please and to transform the husbands sexual appetites into the respect,

and reverence that will keep such appetites focused within the marriage (138.11-12,

139.3). The failure to keep sexual appetites directed toward procreation within marriage

is a point of ill housewifery, as we have also seen (138.13-14). By analogy, the moral

responsibility of the inferior is to make it desirable for superiors to command virtuously,

and, indeed, to inspire a reverence for a virtuous political relationship in the superior, all

by obeying properly. From an ethical standpoint, the wife occupies a courtly position as

much as the courtier occupies a feminized or, rather, wifely position. Octavia

embodies both these principles: she is a good wife and a good political subject. As a

moral agent, she meets her responsibilities, since her deportment would have inspired

fidelity in any rational man, if not in Antony. For Greville, obedience is a gendered

virtue, even if men may practice it. Thus Greville uses only Octavia to show that

obedience is possible.

When he turns to pointing out the path to obedience, however, Greville eschews

exemplarity altogether. The sixth and final chapter of theLetterpresents an abstractargument lacking developed examples. Greville announces that as he changes

argumentative techniques he will concomitantly widen the scope of his argument, as

well: he will no longer confine himself to deriving concrete, particular arguments

(precepts) from exempla. He writes, I will leave this bondage of precepts, to walke in a

larger feilde: and through an unproper comparison of Divine, and humane power

togeather, shew you by humilitie a way into the one, and by discreete constancie a

passage out of the other (156.3-7). That is, Greville will reveal the passage the


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countess is to take by making arguments on an abstract level: in particular, the sixth

chapter compares the worth of winning one man (like the countess husband) to winning

the world by the fame of her virtue, and begins to compare these to the worth of

winning divine favor by means of humility.

At just this point, where ethical discourse is most nearly divorced from the

particularity of history and politics, Greville returns to the discourse of history and

politics, although he tries to keep them subordinated to ethical discourse. The link

between political and ethical discourse is, once again, exemplarity. Greville suggests that

the countess particular situation is the ground for her Platonic transcendence into a world

of abstract ideas: without your husbands unkinde dealinge, you would perchance have

doted too much in the worshippe of one man, but because of this mistreatment you are

driven from these narrowe sanctuaries of selfe affections, which imprisond you; to take

into your hart neweIdeas, larger ends, and nobler wayes (172.23-32, Grevilles

emphasis). As if to symbolize an original form of ethical inquiry, Greville suggests that

even as the first authors in all innovations . . . [are] forcd to be presidents to

themselves, so the countess will be her own precedent. Greville goes even further,

arguing that to become an example hath something in it worthie of adventure (175.21-

29). Thus, as Greville suggests that the countess could be an exemplar he reintroduces

the discourse of politics though still trying to keep ethics and politics separate. The

political example to be set works like all political examples it is to be interpreted by

the vayne world (made to be deceived) . . . as a lively picture of her antient pompe and

greatnesse (175.13-15). The countess exemplarity would result incidentally in fame.

At the same time, the countess is to take herself as an exemplar indeed, she is the only


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trustworthy exemplar in Grevilles world in the pursuit of humility and what Greville

calls the right worshippe of God (176.4). This is possible because of the two aspects of

Obedience, the worldly Constancy in the midst of Inconstancey is humility in the eyes

of God. Thus the porosity of Grevilles distinctions between the political and the ethical,

public and private become clear: Grevilles greatest distrust is of the public sphere, the

vayne world (made to be deceived): well-reasoned ethical and political arguments will

only be misunderstood in the public sphere, and even if they are heeded, they will be

heeded for the wrong reasons, applied wrongly, and eventually must contribute only to

the historical declination of humanity. Only within the private mentoring relationship

staked out byA Letter to an Honorable Lady can reasoned arguments take effect

properly. Moreover, politics is hopelessly corrupt for Greville, and so he attempts, albeit

unsuccessfully, to restrict his abstract reasoning (the only path to virtue) to the moral

sphere.

Nevertheless, theLetteritself must signify real virtue in the political sphere, a

task that Greville finds suspect given that the vayne world is bound to misinterpret it.

This is what Greville tries to get around by comparing the proposed self-precedence of

the countess to the first authors in all innovations. Both the countess and these first

authors shall finde audacitie in undertakinge the hardest of their worke (175.21-24).

Grevilles own solution to the problem of finding sufficient audacity is to take refuge in

the putative privacy of the epistolary form, to attempt to de-politicize what is in fact a

tract with political ends from its inception. Thus he claims that winning reverence

serving as a personal example of virtue, or as a textual example of virtuous counsel is

itself virtuous


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because in our ends, we embrace the ends of all men; and thereby are advanced

without prejudice, or discontent to anie. Hence, from the equalitie of nature

grewe up all estates of superioritie; this is that servinge of the multitude, which

commands them; this is to be least, and greatest; one, and rule manie: yea, even

this is that greate art, which hath ever florished in the bravest spirits, and most

florishinge ages [which has been] forgotten by the corruption, or vicissitude of

times (174.34-175.11).

One gains the audacity to set ones own precedent by professing to embrace the ends of

all men. But therein lies another contradiction, for Grevilles theory of history admits

only of inevitably increasing corruption. Greville finally tries to have it both ways,

contending that virtue can be exercised privately by public figures, even though public

political interpretations of virtue are hopelessly corrupt. The path to such virtue is the

neostoic philosophy espoused by the Essex faction, which recognizes the ultimately

private nature of virtue and yet comprehends the practice of politics.

In the end,A Letter to an Honorable Lady tries to perform its political work by

means of the comparative methodology that it encourages in its reader from the

beginning. As the constant countess of Cumberland is to be compared to her inconstant

husband, so the logically self-consistent neostoic philosophy of theLetteritself is to be

contrasted with the passionate, self-destructive self-interest of the earl. The reader may

extend by a reversal of the very sort of exemplary reasoning from which Greville tries

to extricate his ethical inquiry this last comparison to a comparison of the Essex faction

and its enemies. The only kind of exemplarity that may legitimately claim to be useful is

textual exemplarity, where the text is a kind of mappe of the reasoning that leads to a


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path through a morally difficult situation. Neither people nor their virtues can be

exemplars in this way of thinking: rather, they can serve as particular instances to be

analyzed by a comparative method, which is to yield the abstract reasoning that generates

the exemplary map. Yet it is significant that all this analysis happens under a veil of

privacy invoked by Grevilles choice to present his ideas in the form of a letter.

Grevilles political situation, the political work he wants theLetterto perform and,

perhaps, his temperament make the epistolary form most attractive for the ethical topics

he treats. All of these elements, in alignment with Grevilles own Calvinism, tend to

move the locus of virtue from the public sphere to the private, from deeds to motives.

If Grevilles relocation of virtue from public to private seems to be somewhat

derivative of continental luminaries like Montaigne, it is worth noting that he has few

English precedents and that he certainly is not part of a larger English movement of the

early 1590s to re-evaluate the private realm. Also, unlike Montaigne and Sidney,

Greville eschews the attempt to move his audience emotionally toward virtuous conduct,

because he finds affective persuasion morally suspect and therefore suited only for the

public discourse that must traffic with the hopelessly vayne world. Instead, Greville

attempts to cultivate virtue by the appeal to reason via abstract argument, attempts

likewise to train his reader to seek virtue through abstract reasoning, and places this

attempt into the only place virtue may reside, which is the private realm of the familiar

letter. The private persona GrevillesLetter to an Honorable Lady creates is not the

sincere and yet manipulative persona of MontaignesEssais, nor is it again the

Machiavellian manipulator of BaconsEssays. Rather, Grevilles persona is that of the

stoic sage, retired from politics and yet, unavoidably, engaged in politics; a visionary who


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locates virtue in the private realm and hopes that it can perform a public good by

deceiving a fallen world into a false optimism about its own ability to recover virtue.

"presidents to themselves": a letter to an honorable lady, merciful commentary, and ethical...

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