the realm’ and even ‘of the commonwealth’. The protagonists of the
Dialoguewere real people, humanist divines who had known each other
as students at Padua. Lupset died in 1530, but Pole moved from
Henry VIII’s patronage to open opposition to the king’s policies, orga-
nized from Italy, where he was made a cardinal and twice in the 1550s
might conceivably have been elected pope; after the accession of Mary
Tudor and Cranmer’s deposition he became archbishop of Canterbury
and died on the same day as the queen in 1558. Starkey spent several
years in the future cardinal’s household, but it is his own ideas for social
reform that he makes Lupset put into the mouth of Pole in the Dialogue;
on his return to England late in 1534 he sought to impress them on
Henry’s minister, Thomas Cromwell, and the manuscript of the work
(which the use of Pole’s name made unpublishable) survived among
state papers.^28
Humanist in its form and general ideas, the Dialoguecan be seen to
follow an argument similar to the Utopia’s, but it is in English and
applied straightforwardly to England. At the beginning Lupset seeks to
persuade Pole that ‘civil order and politic life’ are a virtuous ‘con-
spiracy’ and that ‘marvellous good laws, statutes and ordinances’ are,
like agriculture, arts and crafts, and ‘moderate pleasure with women for
increase of the people’, part of the wonderful works of men. Pole has a
duty to his nation and country not to shun public life but to offer his
wisdom to those who have authority to make human law, which is the
law of nature interpreted by the opinion of people in particular
commonwealths (so that the Turks are not bound to abstain from flesh
on Fridays or observe monogamy). Pole gives in and agrees to debate
with Lupset ‘the order of our country and commonweal, to the which
purpose also meseemeth the time exorteth us, seeing that now our most
noble prince hath assembled his parliament and most wise counsel, for
the reformation of this his common weal’; the commonwealth is indeed
‘the end of all parliaments and common councils’, and in them everyone
speaks of it (17–18). Pole’s first point is that the prosperity of a
commonwealth rests on the same principles as ‘the weal and prosperous
state of every private man’ (pp. 22 ff.): there has to be a combination of
a healthy body (neither too many nor too few people, and all of them
fulfilling their office), a soul which is ‘civil order and politic law’ to give
the body life, and a heart which is ‘the king, prince and ruler of the
state’ (31–3).
The ‘weal and prosperous state of the multitude in every commonalty’
308 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^28) Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. T. F. Mayer, Camden 4th ser.
37 (London, 1989); G. R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common
Weal(Cambridge UP, 1973), 46–58; T. F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal:
Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII(Cambridge UP, 1989); Skinner,
Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ii. 91, 100–5, 356.