Thomas Elyot’s Theory of Political Counsel: The Right of the Citizen and a Humanist Education for the Public Good

Thomas Elyot is a complex character who lived and worked in an equally complex moment in history. Driven by an unwavering belief in the humanist educational tradition, the theories of education, counsel, and rhetoric presented in The Boke Named the Governor (1531) would repeat throughout Elyot’s scholarship, creating a coherent and comprehensive articulation of political counsel within a monarchy. Because Elyot’s work so completely interacts with the political and social reality of his time which was consumed by the reign of Henry VIII, scholarship on Elyot often has trouble separating his written works from his early interactions with Henry. They attribute to Elyot a self-centered desire to appease Henry, to get back into his good graces and reclaim a place at court. Very little scholarly attention has been given to the curriculum Elyot presents in his writing and even less discussed the pedagogical theory Elyot employs. For Elyot education was political, and to try and separate the educational values from his works’ political nature is not only a disservice to Elyot the humanist and intellectual but a complete misreading of Elyot’s historical importance both in the realm of Tudor politics and the history of education. This chapter is an attempt to put education back into Elyot’s political theory of humanist counsel – to offer a cursory understanding of how the two are tightly intwined forming a comprehensive pedagogical theory of humanist political education.