While more contemporary scholars tend to qualify Fulke Greville's debt to Machiavelli, intriguing parallels between the two thinkers proliferate in Greville's writings. It is in his "Treatise of Monarchy" that Machiavelli's notion finds its most exact, if most world weary, Grevillean expression.

Copyright Oxford University Press(England) Dec 2000

CHARLES LAMB, as early as 1808, called the works of Fulke Greville `nine parts Machiavel . . for one part Sophocles and Seneca',<sup>1</sup> asserting an intellectual connection between Greville and the Florentine Secretary which has proven durable in the critical canon. Greville's chief modern editor, for example, finds him `nearer than any other Elizabethan Englishman to Machiavelli'.² And while it is true that more contemporary scholars tend to qualify Greville's debt to the Italian - Ronald A Rebholz, in his important biographical study, observes that `Greville's "Machiavellism" . . . was in fact [no more than] the pessimism of a [Christian] moral idealist'3 - it is none the less obvious that intriguing parallels between the two thinkers proliferate in Greville's writings.

In chapter 15 of the Prince, for example, Machiavelli takes up his famous raison d'etat argument regarding the relative nature of political virtue. The prince, he maintains,

should not be too worried about incurring blame for any vice without which he would find it hard to save his state. For if you look at matters carefully, you will see that something resembling virtue, if you follow it, may be your ruin, while something else resembling vice will lead, if you follow it, to your security and well-being.⁴

Greville walks a similar road in several strophes of his long Treatise of Monarchy (c. 1600). ]Emile Gasquet, in a recent comparative study, sees Monarchy 149, specifically, as mirroring the above-cited Florentine dictum:

III chosen vyces vanish in dispaire

Well chosen still leave something after faire.⁵

But these lines make no mention of virtue, consideration of which his central to the Machiavelli passage. Even less convincing is Gasquet's subsequent reference in this regard to Monarchy 153, which bears only tangential connection to the Secretary's remarks.

Gasquet overlooks the concluding couplet of Monarchy 152, which much more dependably supplies the Machiavellian link he seeks:

Thus pleasing vices sometimes raise a Crowne, As austeere vertues often pull it downe.⁶

Here, clearly, Greville is most faithful to the paradoxical spirit of his Machiavellian model: 'austeere vertues', both writers argue, can actually undermine the `security and well-being' of the prince, whereas `pleasing vices' may well insure his promotion and safety.

It is in Monarchy 152, therefore, that Machiavelli's notion finds its most exact, if most world weary Grevillean expression.