Elyot, Sir Thomas

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Elyot, Sir Thomas (c.1490–1546). Humanist, administrator, and political theorist. Elyot, whose family were Wiltshire lawyer-landowners, was educated at Oxford and the Middle Temple. Clerk to the justices of assize (1511–26) and to Henry VIII's council (c.1523–30), he retired in 1530 to Carlton, near Cambridge, being knighted in the same year and made ambassador to Charles V in 1531–2. In the 1520s Elyot frequented the humanist circles of Richard Pace and Thomas More. Though remaining a suspect catholic, he benefited materially from the dissolution of the monasteries. A portrait drawing of him by Holbein (c.1532) is at Windsor castle. Elyot's Book Named the Governor (1531) advocated a monarchical ‘public weal’ for England and described the education, on Italian humanist lines, necessary to prepare Englishmen to help the king rule it. His use of English for his Governor and more than a dozen other works was intended to show how the vernacular, improved by Latin and Greek example, could encourage wise conduct.

J. B. Trapp

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