Page:Historical Lectures and Addresses.djvu/213

 Sylvius, who had become Pope Pius II., in a speech of such exquisite Latinity that it brought tears into the eyes of that too susceptible pontiff. He was a good customer to the great Florentine bookseller, Vespasiano di Bisticci, who has placed him as the only Englishman among the great scholars of the time whose lives he wrote.

But Tiptoft learned more from Italy than Englishmen approved of. Into the unscrupulous politics of the dark days of Henry VI. he introduced an Italian carelessness of human life. The people hated him for his cruelty, and called him "the butcher of England". His Italian biographer tells us that, when he was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1470, the mob cried out that he deserved to die because he had brought to England the laws of Padua. I think that this is an undue charge against English insularity, great as it was; and that the mob cried out against his use of the treacherous methods of Italian politics. Anyhow Tiptoft is a conspicuous example of that truth, so often taught and so constantly disregarded, that when a scholar takes to politics his scholarship does not save him from occasionally losing his head.

The troubled times of the Wars of the Roses dashed the prospects of court patronage; but the tradition still remained. Even so staid a king as Henry VII. had a court poet and historian, Bernard André, a native of Toulouse. André's poetry is irrepressible. We wish he had told us more facts and sung us fewer Sapphic odes, which are at best an imperfect medium for conveying accurate information. Moreover, Henry curiously favoured some Italians who came to England