ERICA BENNER - How Machiavelli Trolled Europe’s Princes
Machiavelli’s advice for rulers was ruthless and pragmatic - and he may have
intended for it to secretly destroy them. In the winter of 1538,
an Englishman living in Italy travelled to Florence. Cardinal Reginald Pole was a devout adherent of the Church of Rome at a time when the English Reformation
threatened to tear the Church apart. He had fled into self-imposed exile from
his native shores after opposing King
Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and settled in Italy. Along with his other
business in Florence, Pole had a personal mission. About a decade before this
journey, he’d had a conversation with Thomas
Cromwell, a man of low origins who now served as the king’s most intimate
counsellor. Cromwell had stopped at nothing - or so it seemed to Pole - to indulge
Henry’s lusts and blasphemies. It was this ambitious adviser who, Pole
believed, had masterminded the monarch’s divorce, put England in a state of war
with the Church, had priests and noblemen murdered - and had always found some
righteous pretext to color these deeds.
Contemplating the
evils that had driven him from his homeland, Pole longed to get his hands on a
book about statecraft that Cromwell had praised when they’d met. The book’s
author was a citizen of Florence. He had died over 10 years previously, so Pole
could not meet him in person. But if the cardinal could read that book, it
might help him better understand Cromwell’s mind and Henry’s actions, and
thereby make sense of what was happening to his poor England. On acquiring a copy,
Pole began to read with fascination, then with growing horror. “I had scarcely
begun to read the book,” he later wrote, “when I recognized the finger of
Satan, though it bore the name of a human author and was written in a
discernibly human style.”. The Florentine’s text
laid bare all the doctrines that seemed to guide Cromwell’s policies. Princes,
it said, should build their states on fear rather than love. Since they live in
a world teeming with lies and violence, they have no choice but to practise
duplicity. Indeed, the prince who best knows how to deceive will be the most
successful. In short, Pole declared, the book Cromwell so admired is full of
“things that stink of Satan’s every wickedness.”Its author is clearly “an enemy
of the human race.” The book that so appalled Cardinal Pole was the Prince, and
the name of its author Niccolò
Machiavelli.
Aghast and intrigued,
Pole was determined to find out more about the man who could write such things.
Machiavelli, it transpired, had at one time caused a good deal of trouble for
Florence’s own princely family, the Medici. In 1512, a year before Machiavelli
wrote his most notorious work, the new Medici government had ejected him from
the civil-service posts he’d held for nearly 15 years, then imprisoned and
tortured him on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the principality. These
fragments of biography must have come up when Pole asked his Florentine hosts
about their compatriot. For, he wrote, when he told them his thoughts about the
book, they excused the author, “answering the charge with the same argument
that Machiavelli himself had offered when they had confronted him.”
Machiavelli’s reply,
the Florentines said, had been that not everything in the Prince expressed
his own opinions. Rather, he’d written what he thought would please a prince,
particularly the Medici prince to whom he dedicated the slender volume: Lorenzo
di Piero de’ Medici, a young man with tyrannical leanings. But, Pole’s unnamed
hosts continued, Machiavelli’s aim wasn’t just to flatter his way into favour:
he had a more sinister purpose. This wiliest of
writers had no illusions about the utility of his cynical teachings. In fact,
he was sure that any prince who put them into practice would soon arouse
popular hatred and self-destruct. And this, said Pole’s Florentine friends, was
precisely what Machiavelli wanted. His design “was to write for a tyrant those
things that are pleasing to tyrants, bringing about in this way, if he could,
the tyrant’s self-willed and swift downfall.” In other words, the book’s most
shocking advice was ironic. Its author wore the mask of a helpful adviser, all
the while knowing the folly of his own advice, hoping to ensnare rulers and
drag them to their ruin.
This explanation made
sense of something that had bothered Pole while reading the Prince. Though
Machiavelli was clearly a man of uncommon intelligence, some of his maxims
seemed to show, as the cardinal put it, a “crass stupidity.” It seemed obvious
to Pole that a prince who wins power through fear won’t achieve security for
himself or his state. The Prince claimed to put hard political
facts ahead of moral ideals. But as a handbook on how to secure power, its
advice was flagrantly unrealistic. Machiavelli’s self-proclaimed realism, his
book’s main selling point, was a fraud. And Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and
England were among its first victims. Cromwell had taken the Prince at
face value, Pole insisted, imbibing its devilish doctrines in the belief they
were highest prudence - and in doing so had walked straight into Machiavelli’s
trap. If the writer were alive, he’d be laughing at his handiwork. The results,
though, were no laughing matter. England in 1539 was far along the road to
perdition, and other Christian monarchs might soon go the way of Henry, should
they or their counsellors fall under Machiavelli’s spell. “Mark this well,
rulers,” Pole warned; beware of this two-faced writer. “For it is the aim of
his doctrine to act like a drug that causes princes to go mad,” making them
attack their own people with “the savagery of the lion and the wiles of the
fox.”.. read more:
