Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

by Ephraim Emerton

"I will now go back to your work, which all are praising to the skies. Above all the archbishop of Canterbury was so pleased and delighted, that I could not get it out of his hands. 'But,' you will say, 'so far nothing but praises.' The same archbishop promises you a living if you will return and has given me five pounds cash to be sent to you for the journey. I add as much myself, not really as a gift, for this is not the kind of thing to be called a gift, but only that you may hasten to us and no longer torment us with longing for you.

"Finally, there remains only this bit of advice to give: don't imagine that anything can be more grateful to me than your letters or that I could be offended by anything from you. I am exceedingly troubled that your health has become impaired in Italy; you know I was never greatly in favour of your going there. But when I see how much work you accomplished and how much fame you have won there, by Jove! I am sorry I did not go with you. For I think that such learning and such fame would be well bought with hunger, poverty, and pain, nay, even with death. Please find enclosed a draft for the money; look out for your health and come to us as soon as you can."

Certainly a more than friendly letter. True, Mountjoy makes no definite promises on his own account, but his glowing picture of the great times coming for English letters was enough to fire the ambition of a less credulous scholar than Erasmus. The definite promise from Archbishop Warham of a church-living and the earnest of a gift for travelling expenses were attractions not to be resisted.

Erasmus arrived in England in 1509, and remained there until the early part of 1514. Of these nearly five years we have but little satisfactory account. There is no indication that it was anyone's affair to look after him in any way. We know that he lived chiefly at Cambridge and London. He may even have made a short trip to the Continent in the interval. He was evidently much concerned with money matters, making continual complaints of poverty; but at the same time he lived in apparent comfort, not to say a kind of luxury. What he meant by poverty was the absence of a sufficient estate from which to live as he would have liked to live. He certainly had money more or less regularly from Mountjoy, and at some time during his English residence he was also handsomely furnished with a regular income by Warham. The peculiar thing about these English pensions was that they were generally paid when due, and that was more than could be said of any of the other benefits promised to Erasmus, either before or afterward.

The arrangement with Warham was one quite in accord with the practice of the day in such cases, but not altogether in harmony with some of Erasmus' lofty pretensions about pecuniary burdens. When Warham offered Erasmus the "living" of Aldington in Kent, it was rather a severe test of the famous critic's sincerity in his utterances on church morality. A more flagrant case of abuse of church funds, so far as the principle was concerned, could hardly be imagined. Here was a needy foreigner, who had, to be sure, the ordination of a priest, but who from the moment of his ordaining had never done a single clerical act, to be set over a congregation of English souls, only that their contributions might go to support him in a life of scholarly production. To be sure there were excuses enough in the habits of the day, but it was precisely as a critic of such corrupt practices that Erasmus was now before the world. Another palliation may be found in the nature of the work which the scholar hoped to do in the leisure thus acquired. He was laying great and far-reaching plans for such an advancement of theological study as should bring in a really new era of Christian faith and practice. Still all such reasoning could not obscure the real fact that to accept such a parish living meant to take money for which no proper equivalent was given to those who furnished it. This was not Warham's money, but only a trust in his hands for the benefit of the souls of Aldington.

Erasmus' own account[88] of the transaction represents himself as very reluctant to take the benefice, and Warham as insisting upon it so urgently that he finally could no longer resist. Fortunately we have the original documents[89] in Warham's own words, and there is no hint of any reluctance on Erasmus' part. The fact was, at all events, that he took the living, did nothing by way of service, and in a few months resigned it in exchange for an annual pension of twenty pounds. Warham's account of the matter goes far beyond the ordinary limits of a deed of record, and is in fact nothing less than a frank apology for a practice which he did not himself approve. It was far too common for a parish priest to resign a living with duties in exchange for a substantial life-pension without duties, and Warham declares his determination not to permit this sort of thing in the diocese of Canterbury. He makes, however, an exception in Erasmus' case, he says, for several reasons: First, he is

"moved by the countless good qualities of Erasmus, a man of consummate ability in Latin and Greek literature, who adorns our age with his learning and talent like a star, to draw back a little from our general principle. And no one ought to think it strange if in the case of so rare a man and one placed beyond every hazard of genius, we thought we ought to change somewhat of our previous custom. For when we had conferred on him a benefice with the cure of souls, namely, the church of Aldington, although he was extremely learned in theology, as in every other branch of learning, still as he could not preach the word of God to his parishioners in English or hold any communication with them in their own tongue, of which he is entirely ignorant; for this reason desiring to give up the before-mentioned church, he begged us to provide for him an annual pension in the same. We thought that to agree to his suggestion would be profitable to the souls, and at the same time he would be able the more freely to pursue those literary studies to which he is completely devoted. We were also not a little moved by his unusual affection toward the English, for he had given up Italy, France, and Germany, where he might have lived prosperously enough, and preferred to betake himself hither, that he might pass the remnant of his life here among friends, and that these in turn might enjoy the companionship of so learned a man."

Here is the plain evidence of a serious document of record that Erasmus not only took his pension gladly, but actually begged for it, and it is quite in harmony with this that we afterwards find him quarrelling with his successor about certain tithes which the latter thought were to be deducted from the twenty pounds.