The third visit of Erasmus to England was brought about, if we may trust his own account of it, by very urgent requests on the part of his English friends. He liked to speak of the "mountains of gold" which had been promised him if he would only come thither, and it was a delightful grievance for him to fancy that he had been torn from his beloved Italy, where he had consistently complained of his lot, and to which he looked back as the source of all his later physical ills, only to suffer a new series of misfortunes in England. The fact very likely was that, hearing of the change of government in England, and having done what he went to Italy to do, he hoped for some advantage from a move, and sounded his English friends on the prospect. Our earliest clue is a letter from Mountjoy,[85] to which, curiously enough, the date 1497 has been affixed in the collection. Mountjoy speaks of receiving two letters from him, which are, unfortunately, lost to us, and also of having written him personally a congratulatory letter on the completion of his Adages, which letter, together with the bearer, had been lost on the way. It is evident, therefore, that so far as Mountjoy was concerned, Erasmus had not, in any strict sense, been "invited" to come into England. Evidently he had complained of his misfortunes in Italy, and consulted with Mountjoy about a change:

Even before the king's death a letter[86] had been sent to Erasmus by the Prince of Wales, but it contained nothing more than a formal compliment upon the great clearness of his style, and a mild reproof that he had had the bad tact to recall to him the recent loss of his royal brother, the King of Castile. Next time, he hopes, he may write of something more agreeable.

But, if he was not "called" to England, certainly Erasmus had reason to believe he would be welcome there. The accession of the young king, whose generous disposition and taste for the refinements of life were well known, seemed to open up a vista of promise for all kinds of talent. Mountjoy writes[87]:

The letter then briefly summarises the contents of the lost epistle and continues:

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

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.

This document bears date the last day of July, 1512, so that Erasmus was unquestionably well provided for from that day on. The date of his first induction into the parish was March 22, 1511, and as he thus had a right to the whole income of the place during a year and a third, there is no reason why he should not have had a tidy sum to his credit.

The letters of Erasmus during this English visit are few and give but little insight into his way of life. The most interesting of them are those written from Cambridge to another foreigner, an Italian, Andreas Ammonius, who, like himself, had wandered to England to seek his fortune, and had become a Latin secretary to the young King Henry VIII. In addition to this function he appears later as holding some papal commission in England. With this cheerful and practical specimen of the gay Italian Humanism of the day our scholar corresponded with great freedom. Ammonius was not troubled by Erasmus' dread of place-holding, and was frankly enjoying the sunshine of the court. He seems to have advised Erasmus to try his fortune also in London. Erasmus replies:

Little inclined as Erasmus was to try his hand at court, it was not for lack of theories as to how one might best get on there. He gives Ammonius the benefit of them in this classic passage[90]:

This is a very exact description of Erasmus' own tactics in the Battus days, and continues to fit his action very well whenever he was considering a change of residence.

In 1511 he writes to Ammonius:

Writing from Queen's College in August, 1511, he says:

Ammonius sent the wine, not so much as Erasmus had expected, but refused with some heat to hear of pay, and we have Erasmus' reply:

Ammonius accompanied the English army in the Flemish campaign of 1513, and Erasmus writes to him in camp, thanking him for the vivid description of army life which he has sent home, and introducing him to various friends of his own in the Low Countries.

At Cambridge, as elsewhere, Erasmus seems always to have been on the eve of flight, working away at what interested him, but neglecting everything else as far as possible.

Ammonius reports upon his progress in begging for Erasmus, and Erasmus, quite in the tone of the old correspondence with Battus, thanks him and urges him to further effort.

These dolorous letters bear date 1511, but cannot all belong in that year, and month and day are often obviously incorrect. Dated early in 1512 we have a letter to the abbot of St. Bertin. After explaining why he had not reported himself earlier, Erasmus goes on to say:

It is idle to attempt to determine which of these moods represents the real state of mind of Erasmus at Cambridge. Probably he was at his old tricks of making himself valued by threatening to leave an unbearable situation, and at the same time making that situation appear as delightful as possible to anyone outside who might conceivably raise a bid for him in another quarter. He tells Ammonius again how charming Italy was to him and what a prospect he had given up there to come to England. He thinks he will come to London, and begs Ammonius to find him a warm lodging not too far from St. Paul's. He cannot go to Mountjoy's so long as "that Cerberus" is there. Evidently he did not have the run of many hospitable homes in London.

As regards Erasmus' official position at Cambridge there is some room for doubt. He appears in the lists of university officers as the "Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity," but precisely what this means is not clear. The Lady Margaret was the Countess of Richmond, mother of King Henry VII., never queen herself, but claiming the doubtful honour of blood-relationship to sixty or seventy persons of royal lineage. This benevolent lady, influenced undoubtedly by the advice of John Fisher, afterward Bishop of Rochester, had founded in 1503 a readership in divinity at each of the great English universities. The endowment had been intrusted to the abbey of Westminster with instructions to pay over the salary to the holder. The election to the office was to be biennial, and besides the chancellor all doctors, bachelors, and inceptors in divinity were to have the right to vote. The place was to be no sinecure. The reader must read libere, sollenniter, and aperte. He was to have no fees beyond his salary, and must read such works in divinity as the chancellor with the "college of doctors" should judge necessary. He must "read every accustomed day in each term, and in the long vacation up to the eighth of September, but might cease in Lent, if the chancellor should think fit, in order that during that season he and his auditors might be occupied in preaching." Evidently it was contemplated that the reader of the Lady Margaret should devote himself wholly to this work. The salary was the very respectable sum of sixty-five dollars a year, enough to provide a modest living for a man of quiet habits. We are almost wholly without information as to Erasmus' performance of the duties of this office. Everything points toward the belief that in the sense described by the act of foundation he never filled it at all. The only references he makes are to his attempts to teach Greek, certainly not one of the functions of the Lady Margaret Professor. It has often been assumed that[91] Erasmus' complaints about his Cambridge life were caused by a sense of failure in his work as a teacher. We are prepared to believe from all his previous experience that he never cared to succeed as a teacher, and, further, we may be tolerably sure that, for this quite sufficient reason, he was not a very good teacher. He held his readership, we may believe, for two terms of two years each—if indeed he held it at all—and meanwhile tried to give Greek lessons, but could get neither pupils nor pay. Mr. Mullinger says, "Disappointed in his class-room, he took refuge in his study," as if his literary work were a kind of last resort on the failure of his true profession.

The truth would seem to be just the opposite of this. What really commanded the allegiance of all that was best and most effective in Erasmus' makeup was his study and writing. His proper medium of self-expression was his pen, and until he took his pen in hand he was not his best self. If he was capable of any sincere utterance he was sincere when he said to Ammonius that he felt himself moved by an almost divine inspiration when he got going on his Jerome. A few more glimpses at the working of his mind at Cambridge and we will pass on to see what he accomplished there in the way of contributions to learning.

Besides Ammonius his other most important correspondent during this time was his old friend, John Colet, now definitely settled in London as dean of St. Paul's and greatly absorbed in the work which was to be his most lasting monument, the new school for boys. The correspondence seems to have begun by a begging letter from Erasmus in which he had gone beyond the limits of good taste, and to which Colet had replied with some heat. It is not beyond our belief that Erasmus may have given his letter a jocose form, and that Colet, Englishman as he was, had not seen the joke. At all events, Erasmus writes:

Singular that in all Erasmus' complaints of his Cambridge life he makes no reference to any failure on the part of the authorities to pay him his due stipend. It seems clear either that he held no position which carried a salary with it, or that his begging was for "extras" beyond the modest needs of a celibate scholar. Some light is thrown upon this point in a letter to Colet, dated October, 1513, but quite as likely belonging, as Mr. Drummond suggests, in 1511.

These selections from the English correspondence have made it clear that Erasmus in England was precisely what he had always been, a keen-sighted observer of men and things, a hater of all shams but his own, a sturdy beggar, a jovial companion and correspondent when he was in the mood, above all an independent liver and thinker, dreading any routine that was not self-imposed, but capable of steady and persistent work when he could put his time on congenial tasks. Of these labours, to which he devoted himself in England, the new edition of the Greek New Testament, or, as he preferred to call it, the "New Instrument," held the first place in his interest. It was not to be published until 1516, a year or more after he had left England, and Erasmus says that he consulted manuscripts in Brabant and Basel before printing; but it seems tolerably clear that a considerable part of the preparatory work was done at Cambridge. He writes to Colet,[93] as early as 1511: "I have finished the collation of the New Testament," by which he must mean that he had done all that he intended to do at it in England. In speaking of the work at Basel he refers to the great haste with which it was pushed, the object being, probably, on Froben's part, to get ahead of a similar undertaking reported to be under way in Spain. This latter work, to be known as the "Complutensian Polyglot," was going on under the direction of Cardinal Ximenes at AlcalÁ (Complutum). It was to include the whole Bible, and though the New Testament was completed in 1514 it was held back to appear with the rest in 1520. When Erasmus says[94] that he used "very many manuscripts in both languages, and those not the readiest to hand, but the most ancient and most correct," he is speaking after the standards of his day. In fact, recent scholarship has shown that he not only used very defective manuscripts of no great antiquity, but that he failed to make adequate use of the best one at his disposal.[95]

In spite of the fact, then, that the actual work of publication was done at Basel, we may fairly count this great work as one of the fruits of the English period. Rightly to estimate the value of this service to the cause of a reasonable Christianity, we must consider for a moment the conditions of biblical scholarship in the year 1511. That the ultimate appeal in matters of Christian faith lay to the inspired word of the recognised canon of Scripture, no one doubted for a moment. True, the governing powers of the Church had insisted that alongside this source of truth there were two others of equal importance, the tradition of the Church and the authority of the Roman papacy; but Church and papacy had always been conceived of as expressing their own judgment through their interpretation of Scripture. Nothing which they could lay down could ever be in contradiction to the true teaching of the canonical writings. A modern mind would say, therefore, that nothing could have seemed more important to these interpreting agents than to know precisely what the writers whom they were interpreting had said and meant. One would think that every effort would have been made from the beginning to secure and maintain a version of the Scriptures in their original form, of such unquestionable accuracy that all deviations of interpretation could be anticipated and checked.

The immense prestige which the Roman government of the Church might thus have secured to itself was deliberately thrown away. Not only did the chief church authority do nothing itself to promote so practical and so profitable an undertaking, but it systematically checked the efforts of individuals and groups of scholars to contribute toward this end. It rested all its own interpretation upon a translation into Latin, the so-called Vulgata, which had been made by Jerome in the years just before and just after 400, and repeatedly declared by the Church to be the sole authorised version. This translation was, so far as the New Testament was concerned, a revision of earlier Latin versions carefully compared with the Greek originals. The Old Testament was translated from the original Hebrew with close reference to the Septuagint and the early Greek commentators. The obvious motive of the Church in clinging to this defective presentation of its own supreme authority was the motive of uniformity. The longer the correction of errors could be postponed, the more hope that no effective criticism of institutions resting, perhaps, on errors would arise.

Of all tendencies in human society none was so greatly and so justly dreaded by church authority as the tendency to criticism. And by criticism we do not mean a carping opposition. We mean only what the word properly denotes: inquiry into the exact facts about any given subject. In proportion as the great structure of ecclesiastical authority had grown more complicated, this nervous dread of free inquiry had increased. Nor was the central authority alone responsible for this state of mind. Every part of the church organisation had done its share to fix this notion of an unchanging uniformity upon the Christian world. The whole philosophy of the Middle Ages, which prided itself, above all else, upon being a Christian philosophy, had exhausted itself in giving a pseudo-scientific form to the most unscientific view of truth the world had ever seen.

The great service of Erasmus was, therefore, that he proposed to find out as nearly as he could what the writers of the New Testament had actually said. Of course his apparatus for this inquiry was still, from the point of view of modern science, very defective. He had no earlier scientific commentators to consult, with the single exception of Laurentius Valla, the Italian humanist, who a few years before had published annotations to the Greek text. His criteria of judgment had to be evolved from his own sense of accuracy as he went along. All that vast assistance to intelligent editing which in recent times has come from the cultivation of the historic sense was wanting to him. Nothing was farther from Erasmus' mind than any radical discussion of Christian doctrines. He continually declares his fixed determination to abide by the faith of the Church, and whatever adverse criticism he had to make was against evil practices which always seemed to him only perversions of the essential Christianity of apostolic times. So we are not to look to his New Testament for startling innovations. What gave offence to his enemies was the same quality which gave value to the book,—namely, the single effort to put things as they were. What the "men of darkness" who had come largely to control the practical working of religious affairs least of all desired was precise truth to facts. They were getting on comfortably with a version of truth which suited them very well, and were not inclined to see their precious ease invaded by any restless seeking for ultimate accuracy. They felt, and quite truly, that any jarring of the foundations might bring the whole structure of ceremonies and usages in which they were thriving, about their ears. Erasmus might protest as he would, but the instinct of self-preservation on the part of those who were enjoying the high places of the Church was rightly alarmed.

The other work on which Erasmus spent most of his time in England was his share in a new edition of St. Jerome, which was being brought out by the great printing house of Froben at Basel. It will be more in order, perhaps, to speak of this when we have followed Erasmus to the Continent and seen him established in the full career of an editor and author which was to occupy the remainder of his life. It may not be out of place here to quote his own description of the principles which governed him in his editorial work. He was accused of inaccuracy and undue haste in giving to the world the results of unripe scholarship. He acknowledges the facts, but defends himself as follows,[96] speaking at the moment of the epistles of Jerome:

"I gave such care to this work [the edition of 1524] that the attentive reader may easily see that I did not undertake this revision in vain. The control of ancient manuscripts was not lacking, but these could not preclude the use of conjecture in some places; but these conjectures I so modified in the notes that they could not easily deceive anyone, but could only stimulate in the reader a zeal for investigation. And I hope it may come to pass that someone equipped with more correct texts may restore also those points which have escaped me. To these I will gladly render the praise due to their industry and they will have no reason to find fault with my attempts; for while I have been fortunate in restoring many points, in some I have been compelled to follow the ancient proverb:—'not as we would, but as we can.'

"For there are men of such a disposition that if they can add anything to the efforts of their predecessors, they claim all the praise for themselves and make a tremendous fuss if one has even nodded at any point or not accomplished what one has undertaken. I know not whether we ought to despise more the rudeness of such persons or their ingratitude. No one stands in their way, if they wish to produce something better. They say that nothing ought to be published that is not perfect. Now, whoever says that, simply says that nothing at all should be published; nor was ever anything properly edited down to the present day. I was editing these things for Batavians, for monks and theologians, who were for the most part without classic learning; for liberal study had not yet penetrated so far as these.

"If one will just consider, he will see that I am entering upon no unworthy or unfruitful field. Will not Italian critics give the same indulgence to barbarians which they have been compelled, willing or unwilling, to give to their own scholars, to Filelfo, to Hermolaus, or to Valla, whenever during the past sixty years they have aided the learning of the community by their zeal in translating Greek authors or emending Latin ones? Those who publish nothing avoid all blame, but earn no praise;—nay, while they are barely avoiding the blame of men, they fall into the worst kind of blame;—unless, indeed, he is less blameworthy who gives to his famished friends nothing from his splendid table, than he who freely and gladly gives what he has and would be glad to give more sumptuous things if he had them.... I confess myself greatly indebted to Beatus Rhenanus, who has given us Tertullian emended at many points, though it is incomplete and beside that is thick-sown with blunders. He does no injury to his reputation who gives a service proportioned to his day and opens the way to others to do more finished work. Nor have I suffered from any more unjust critics than those who publish nothing and do not even teach, as if they begrudged any usefulness to the world, or as if whatever they gave to the community were a loss to themselves. And if ever they detect a human error, what snickerings, what abuse, what a rumpus!"