‘A reputation for meanness disgraces the King and detracts from the royal dignity.’ This banal sentiment can be taken as characteristic of the jumbled sentiments and moralisations to be found in profusion in the extensive literature of political advice produced between the middle of the twelfth century and the middle of the fifteenth: the genre of ‘Mirrors for Princes’. It is found in perhaps the last example of the genre to come to the eyes of an unimpeachably legitimate English king, the De quadripartita regis specie written for Richard II in the 1390s and found in his Book of Geomancy, and is distilled from the Secreta secretorum, the pseudo-Aristotelian tract served up in various dishes to any number of princes of the fourteenth century.Footnote ¹ Richard II's form of it lies near though not quite at the end of a succession of moral political tracts for the use of princes in which the political thought of the University of Paris from John of Salisbury through Giles of Rome to Marsilius of Padua is distantly reflected. At the turn of the fifteenth century it was being superseded by a new form of political literature, more realistic and more specific, which is found in the memoranda of ministers and officials, also for the use of princes, a literature which reached its most general form in the sixteenth century in the works of Machiavelli and Giovanni Botero. The essence of this kind of literature is its distillation of the experience of government into political advice primarily on particular issues, though in Machiavelli's case of a more general nature. My purpose today is to identify some strands and themes in the experience of government by princes and their ministers in the fifteenth century. I will concentrate primarily though not exclusively on the English experience of government, and especially though again not exclusively on the early part of the century. I will argue that the supersession of general moral precepts by particular prudential advice after 1400 was not an expression of political cynicism or realpolitik: that it was offered by councillors careful of their conscience; that the conscience of the prince was at the centre of fifteenth-century political decision-making; and that in an era when government was exercised by an educated military nobility and a cadre of graduate careerists, both of whom were demonstrably sensitive to inward moral pressure, specific political decisions were discussed as particular casus conscientiae on which confessors might advise, but for which in the court of heaven princes and their servants would have to account.

The psychology of government in the fifteenth as in any other century has perhaps never been dissected so ruthlessly as Augustine of Hippo had done in the City of God. In spite of his acute sense of evil, he knew that it could not simply be summed up as libido dominandi, the mindless ambition for power. Rather, he had described it in terms of irresoluble tension, for instance in the work of a judge whose irremediable ignorance of the circumstances of his case, as he peers through ‘the mists of mortal society’, condemns the innocent to death: but ‘he has to sit; he is bound to it by his place, which he holds it wickedness not to discharge, and by the state's command, which he must obey’.Footnote ² This is of course the universal curse of responsibility, in the fifth, fifteenth and twenty-first centuries. Historians are perhaps rather inclined to take the lust for power for granted in describing the political conflicts of the past, attributing to their subjects the simple appetite of Madame Nhu, the redoubtable South Vietnamese lady of the 1960s, who reportedly misquoted Acton: ‘power is delightful: absolute power is absolutely delightful’. The contemplative writer Walter Hilton was more realistic, focusing on the responsibilities of power in the febrile 1390s: temporal men, as he wrote, ‘which have sovereignty with much possession of worldly goods, and have also as it were lordship over other men for to govern and sustain them, as a father has over his children, a master over his servants, and a lord over his tenants’ could receive ‘of our Lord's gift grace of devotion’ and participate in some way in the contemplative life.Footnote ³ For Hilton, unlike his monastic predecessors, worldly responsibility was natural, and open to grace, and he addressed those who held it. He could have had in mind not just sober and respectable statesmen like Thomas Arundel, archbishop of York and later of Canterbury whose circle promoted contemplative literature, but young active and ambitious laymen such as Thomas Mowbray earl of Nottingham, founder, about the age of thirty, of Axholme Charterhouse (1395–7), or the even younger and more dizzyingly ambitious Thomas Holand, duke of Surrey, founder of the Mountgrace Charterhouse at the age of twenty-six in 1397.Footnote ⁴ These Carthusian houses would play an active part in bringing Hilton's practice of the ‘mixed life’ of contemplation and action to the notice of the Lancastrian political world. Their young founders, manoeuvring precariously in a capricious court, are unlikely to have enjoyed so robust a luxury as libido dominandi. They must, however, have at least understood the Carthusian call to inward reflection in the exercise of public office.Footnote ⁵

In England in 1400, as in most other parts of Europe, public office was the monopoly of two groups of contrasting experience. One, the more traditional, was a nobility of service – a noblesse, in the wider French sense – whose apprenticeship had been served in war, in diplomatic missions, on local commissions such as the justices of the peace and in the government of their own estates.Footnote ⁶ The other was a cadre of graduate careerists, with degrees in civil or canon law or in theology, and nearly always in at least minor orders. Akin to the latter category but with some characteristics of the first group were common-law judges trained in the Inns of Court by methods parallel to those of the universities (but by 1400 almost all laymen), and clerks of Chancery or the Privy Seal apprenticed in their departments, like the poet Thomas Hoccleve (most of whom, at that date, were in minor orders).Footnote ⁷ The experience of the graduate cadre lay in the legal or administrative service of princes, focusing above all on the art of persuasion, exercised indifferently in secular and ecclesiastical business. The general sophistication and ability of the first group has long been established; there is some evidence for the primary education of noble children in the 1390s and the 1410s, showing that their literacy in Latin was taken for granted.Footnote ⁸ Where their inventories survive, they indicate that the lay nobility possessed substantial numbers of books. For all we know, cultivated learning may have characterised them for several previous generations: what was perhaps new is evidence that the generations born after 1350 had independent and individual religious views and tastes. We know that Thomas of Woodstock duke of Gloucester caused a debate between a rather Lollard-minded secular clerk and a friar to be held in his presence, and that he possessed a copy of the Wycliffite scriptures; we know that Sir William Beauchamp Lord Abergavenny patronised Lollard preachers, while nursing a devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus; we know of Henry Lord Fitzhugh's devotion to St Brigit and his cousin Lord Scrope's collection of contemplative texts. We can reconstruct the confessional practice of Humphrey de Bohun earl of Hereford and the prayers of his two daughters, and we may be able to identify the devotional reading of his countess, whose influence on her grandson Henry V was considerable.Footnote ⁹ This is a cross-section of the nobility selected only by the chance of surviving evidence; it would seem to imply that a private religious life, perhaps sharpened by confession, was becoming the norm. This does appear to be a novelty of the years about 1400. The religion of the men in this group, active in government and warfare as they were, gave them no respite from the violence, the moral compromises and the inevitable betrayals inseparable from public life under Richard II and Henry IV. It may, at least, have stirred the consciences which their personal devotion must have sharpened.

The mentality of the graduate cadre, whose part in the counsels of princes was growing rapidly in the years around 1400, is more difficult to pin down. Careerists with their way to make in the world like their lay contemporaries, the bare record of their offices and preferments gives the impression of coldly ambitious pluralists whose university degrees were just a step to the rewards of practice in the ecclesiastical law courts, government sinecures and the episcopal bench. But the case of the most powerful and most richly rewarded of them all, Thomas Arundel, the archbishop of Canterbury restored by Henry IV and perhaps his closest confidant throughout the reign, indicates otherwise. The few intimate glimpses we have of him, personally interviewing heresy suspects and listening patiently to the holy woman Margery Kempe, while she expounded her revelations and her practice of weeping aloud in church ‘til sterrys apperyd in the fyrmament’, confirm the indirect evidence of his promotion of contemplative practice among the laity.Footnote ¹⁰ If as archbishop he consistently sought to strengthen a common, uniform faith and a common form of worship among his flock, he and his circle of Cambridge church lawyers persevered with equal tenacity in making the English works of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and Nicholas Love easily available – the classics, to modern eyes, of late medieval contemplative literature.Footnote ¹¹ These books did much to make familiar the practice of expressing complex ideas in English. They also had almost official status, being at the elbow of princes and ministers. Among contemporary intellectuals with university degrees Arundel was undoubtedly one of the more strong-minded. The experience of public affairs upon his generation of graduates as they progressively found places in the service of government seems to have been, on the evidence of surviving comments of a personal kind, rather more stressful. The university-educated clergy, sometimes theologians but more often canon or civil lawyers, filled the councils of every prince and were the backbone of secular diplomacy. They had a pivotal role both in directing the conscience of princes and ministers, and in filling the office of minister themselves. Their gradual infiltration of the higher dignities of the church, and thereby the councils of princes, seems to have modified significantly the political culture of the age: by making available intelligent and rational advice, they encouraged secular princes to cooperate, to be less quick to take offence and to develop lines of action closer to what in modern language would be called policy. In return, they earned the rewards of what French scholars have termed the régime bénéficial, the system of ecclesiastical patronage through which princes, popes and the higher clergy sustained persons in their service. The system might seem to offer graduate careerists both self-respect and material comfort, gently guiding the caravan of state while grazing in the pastures of the church.

Where, however, the private and authentic voice of the graduate cadre can be detected, among their highly articulate but overwhelmingly formalised utterances, a more jarring note than the sound of the contented ruminant is repeatedly struck. That the evidence of personal responses to the régime bénéficiale, where responses have survived, indicates an underlying anxiety is not perhaps so surprising to those who have witnessed, or experienced, the crises of conscience of intellectuals, deraciné or otherwise, in the twentieth century. Even in the fourteenth century they were recruited and consulted not to be routine pen-pushers, but to provide ideas and arguments as discomfiting to some as they were convenient to others. These voices were only occasional, and as they were barely raised at all among the reticent English, the cases I shall cite are primarily though not entirely continental. The first two are those of graduates who became spiritual leaders. Gerard Groote was a not particularly distinguished product of the canon law faculty of the University of Paris, who took no degree, but about 1370 represented his native town of Deventer in a case before the Roman curia. His private fortune and his canonries at Aachen and perhaps Utrecht kept him in comfort, but an illness in 1372 provided the catalyst for Groote to formulate to himself his dissatisfaction with an undemanding way of life, which provoked a conversion experience. His rather incoherent notes, his Conclusa et proposita, record the process of his renunciation of its various elements: of ambition, of everything he had learnt in the arts course in Paris; of his legal expertise, unless called on for charity; of his acquired perquisites, the canonries, and of his inherited property.Footnote ¹² This was no simple religious conversion. Groote had no idea how to lead a life in accord with his uneasy conscience; he tried a spell of residence at Aachen, the life of a recluse in a corner of his former property in Deventer, and a vocation at the local Carthusian house at Monnikhuizen, before realising that his destiny was to preach among the rural population of the Low Countries. His missionary base was a community of like minded graduates which formed around him at Deventer, bound by no kind of vow and therefore known (though not in Groote's time) as the Brethren of the Common Life. Their simple form of the contemplative life, akin to the ‘mixed life’ advocated by Walter Hilton, would have a profound influence as the Devotio Moderna. But its roots in Groote's anxiety about the easy life open to church lawyers comes out in a letter to a Parisian student contemporary: Paris, and above all its law faculty, were the source of the evil in the world, the place where pharisees taught ‘ancient human codes of law, out of accord with the law of God’.Footnote ¹³ This did not prevent him citing canon law texts read at Paris in his many moral tracts. His letter affords a glimpse, the more convincing for being indirect, of the burden of guilt he carried on account of his education and career; that his training had been conventional and his use of it straightforward awakens the suspicion that his personal experience may just have articulated the anxieties of a generation.

If Gerard Groote might well have served one of the princes of the empire, the duke of Guelders or the bishop of Utrecht, the chances of Walter Hilton's advancement were better still. One of the circle of lawyers in the Ely consistory court in the 1370s, he was well placed to rise, like Richard Scrope and others, with the fortunes of his bishop, Thomas Arundel, to a place of authority under the English crown. But he too threw up his career for an uncertain future, trying to live the life of a recluse and perhaps other spiritual avocations before finding peace in the small priory of Thurgarton. Hilton's anxiety comes out in a letter to an unnamed correspondent who like him had given up benefices, honours, the favour of the great and the praise of his family – probably a lawyer therefore – and was now a solitary. The anonymous master's renunciation had not stilled his interior turmoil, which had moved him to lament to Hilton. But Hilton dealt savagely with his complaints: he had not rid himself of his worldly desires, but had translated them into spiritual pride. It soon becomes clear that Hilton's unmerciful response and brusque dismissal of the hermit's lifestyle was really directed at himself: ‘What are we doing, the two of us and our like, lazy and useless men standing idle all the day long?’Footnote ¹⁴ He was articulating the burden of guilt accumulated in his professional career, which had not been eased by his new life of pious solitude. At a later and more serene stage of his life he was able to set out a programme of spiritual exercises for graduate careerists active in the world, but in this agonised letter, written perhaps in the early 1380s, we can, I think, hear the interior voice of a whole new cadre of government: the highly educated, professional holders of higher degrees from universities, fortunate in the value newly placed on their expertise by princes and ministers, and accordingly rewarded with comfortable benefices, whose tender consciences nevertheless were disturbed by their involvement in the brutal world of politics and worldly ambition.

The voices of Gerard Groote and Walter Hilton may express the moral perplexities of the graduate careerist, but when we hear them they were not close to any centre of power. The circle of intellectuals in 1390s Paris among whom Jean Gerson was a leading member was, however, close to the French court and to that of the pope of the Avignon obedience, Benedict XIII, and eloquently expressed in their correspondence and pamphlets their acute discomfort at the moral dilemmas in which proximity to power placed them. One focus of discomfort was, of course, the Great Schism itself, but the Schism was only a particularly scandalous example of the personal ambition which the régime bénéficial promoted. One of the more fastidious of Gerson's circle, Nicholas de Clamanges, who had become secretary in the chancery of Pope Benedict, wrote about 1400 one of the best-known denunciations of the corruption of the papal court, his De ruina ecclesiae: ‘the frauds, the strategems, the backbiting, the bribery, the assaults on the rights of innocent people, the corrupt judgements’, the pride and greed of cardinals with their pluralism and simony – these vices, far from being selected at random, were the precise indictments of a well-informed insider.Footnote ¹⁵ Nicholas went on to describe accurately the process of application for papal provisions by the recommendation of princes, indignantly pointing out how popes consolidated their position by seeking the good will of temporal powers. He was no more indulgent to bishops, whose way of life made it just as well that they were absent from their sees, and ended by hoping for the thorough humbling of the church. These puritanical sentiments, much employed in reformation controversy, could not have been made with such force had Nicholas not had first-hand experience of the curia at Avignon. Equally, their author's circumstances give them further significance. At the moment of writing them, he was enjoying the emoluments of the office of treasurer of Langres, a benefice bestowed on him directly for his services in the curia. Though he could have claimed that without the support of his benefices he would have been unable to fulfil his duty as papal secretary, so could the other beneficiaries of papal provisions, and a similar claim could be made for the whole body of graduate careerists on whose behalf the régime bénéficial had grown up. As a privileged alumnus of the Collège de Navarre with a passion for classical literature, Nicholas may have avoided the vulgar clamour for ecclesiastical places, but his studies could no more than his secretarial duties have been sustained without them. We can be sure that, as an acute and reflective observer, he was aware of the paradox. De ruina ecclesiae is a lament on the inexorable progress of patronage which evokes an ideal concept of clerical life; it hardly sets out a practical programme for reform. It is also a witness to the uncomfortable moral position of the graduate careerist as he surveyed his natural habitat, the superstructure of the church.Footnote ¹⁶

Such protests arising from the Schism were personal cris-de-coeur rather than coherent plans of reform. We find another at much the same time and not directly provoked by the Schism in Gerson himself, who gave voice to his own disgust with the business of government at the French court. Brilliant, successful and discontented, he was chancellor of the University of Paris and an admired court preacher. In such a milieu he was naturally compelled to be sociable, and it irked him. As he wrote to an unknown correspondent (possibly Pierre d'Ailly) from Bruges in February 1400, he had to let himself be carried this way and that in the court, being polite to grandees who disliked him; above all, he had to listen to friends, importunissimi amici, urging him to promote the ignorant and the corrupt. In order to live, he had to be an absentee pastor when he should be edifying his flock by precept and example. So he had resolved, or almost resolved, to resign the chancellorship and retreat into a life of contemplation in his church at Bruges, leaving it to others to cope with the discontents of office.Footnote ¹⁷ But Gerson was made of sterner stuff than his sensitive friend Nicholas de Clamanges. He gradually realised that his students, budding careerists that they were, could at least be improved if they were aware of the contemplative life, and like Walter Hilton's readers partake of it in the interstices of their activities. His lectures on mystical theology, a new departure in the Paris theology faculty, were delivered in 1402 and 1403. We hear no more of his painful conscience. This more resolute Gerson, sustained by his new sense of purpose, is the familiar figure who would contribute powerfully to the reform of the church at Constance.Footnote ¹⁸

These Parisian intellectuals could be dismissed as untypical, with their Proustian sensibilities, of the ambitious careerists of their time. But it would be difficult to dismiss in this way a man of business such as Matthew of Cracow, who was effectively the prime minister of Rupert III of the Palatinate, king of the Romans from 1400 to 1410, and whose vision of evil at the curia of Boniface IX, Pope Benedict's rival, is one of the most impressive witnesses to the disturbed conscience of an intellectual in politics. Born in Cracow in 1345, he read arts and theology in Prague and incepted in 1384. He was at once involved in the pastoral work of the great reforming archbishop of Prague, John of Jenstein, as a preacher and confessor; a sermon-cycle survives, and a work on confession and a dialogue between reason and conscience show him addressing individuals as well. Clearly sympathetic to the contemplative life, he was one of the proposers in the process of canonisation of Bridget of Sweden. However his vocation was the proper government of the institutions of the church. He was called to Cracow in 1390 to assist in the reorganisation of the university, and in 1394 to perform the same service in Heidelberg. Effectively the head of the university until 1406, he was one of the counsellors of the Elector Palatine Rupert from 1400 king of the Romans and emperor-elect), and was made bishop of Worms from 1406 to his death in 1410. Matthew, as one of the most active figures in the German church, was well placed to represent the emperor-elect at the Roman curia in 1403 and 1404; unlike Nicholas of Clamanges, he appeared as a mature, confident and independent churchman, ready to deal with the curia as an equal.Footnote ¹⁹ His De praxi Romanae curiae is a brisker and more practical work than De ruina ecclesiae, written more in a spirit of exasperation than rhetorical lamentation, but its author's shocked reaction to the ‘negligent’ disposition of ecclesiastical benefices by the curia is unmistakable. His enumeration of the church's evils was more or less identical to that of Nicholas, though characteristically he offered a feasible remedy, the abolition of expectatives, or promises of future promotion to benefices. His deep respect for the papal office did not alter the plain truth, in his eyes, that ‘if the pope lacked the cooperation and loyalty of the church, then what was he, and who would take any notice of him? Just as a prince without the allegiance of his subjects and the help of the public could do nothing further.’ Matthew's no-nonsense style does not however disguise the clear implication, that his vision of evil in the church was framed in the eye of interior conscience. He compared it to the burning bush which appeared to Moses, ‘the friend of solitude’, in contemplation in the desert; Matthew, a sinner, and ‘the companion of many a curious notion (curiosae considerationis)’ also looked out upon the exterior world, and saw the ecclesiastical estate, the clergy, burning in as terrible a fire. ‘If this is a real vision, crystal clear to anyone who wants to see it – let it open their eyes . . . and talking, writing, counselling, preaching, let them speak out with me’.Footnote ²⁰ The busy German churchman lacked the highly strung sensitivity and the literary culture of Nicholas de Clamanges, and the inner vision of Gerson. This makes all the more telling his clear appreciation of the self-destruction of the clerus, his own estate as a successful graduate careerist.

These voices, provoked largely but not entirely by the general crisis of the Schism, provide broad evidence of the anxiety which involvement in the public sphere produced among the graduate cadre around the year 1400. It was a protean anxiety, experienced in many different ways of which I have given only a few examples: one could add, in Bohemia, the apocalyptic preaching of graduates of the University of Prague, among whom Jan Hus was the latest, or in Italy the wide-ranging debate on the contemplative and the active life, in Italian terms the life of ideas and that of the responsible citizen, conducted notably by Coluccio Salutati, the enlightened but conscientious chancellor of Florence. His approach to this standard monastic topos fluctuated, though it hardly amounted to an attempt to find a moral basis for the pursuit of politics and public affairs, either in the form of Walter Hilton's defence of the mixed life or that of his disciple Leonardo Bruni's Ciceronian justification of active politics.Footnote ²¹ But however widespread and multiform the anxieties of intellectuals, the imperatives of government required decisive action, and in the minds of princes in the first decade of the new century above all in bringing to an end a papal schism which threatened the legitimacy of every secular power. Decisive action, involving numerous European princes and more to the point the graduate careerists who advised them, was indeed forthcoming. It is tempting, though probably not quite accurate, to place the watershed between this common mood of fastidious detachment on the part of intellectuals, and the more committed and businesslike attitude of the next generation, at this juncture, the high summer of 1408, when a common decision to depose both the schismatic popes, a decision which graduate councillors in high ecclesiastical and temporal office had to take for themselves, was finally taken in the councils of the kings of France, England and a number of other princes, and in the two colleges of cardinals. What it cost some of them to accept this personal breach of faith and departure from the letter of ecclesiastical law can be detected in the correspondence of the strong-minded Pierre d'Ailly, the bishop of Cambrai, who had, until now, consistently and conscientiously maintained his allegiance to Benedict XIII.Footnote ²² How it affected the more reticent Archbishop Arundel is not known.Footnote ²³ But the decision was taken, with careful consultation among canon lawyers and with reference to the Aristotelian principle of epieikeia, the idea that necessity knows no law. Its broad acceptance was not the result of theoretical arguments by canonists or theologians, but arose in the course of diplomatic deliberations, and led to an international congress, the Council of Pisa. Once the decision had been made, it released, in a spirit of palpable optimism, extraordinary energies on the part of the leading theologians and canonists of Europe. Their constructive joint action to end the papal schism was followed by a serious attempt to correct the abuses which they detected in the government of the church, in two general councils of an entirely new character: in effect, a genuine and even enthusiastic gathering of those graduate careerists whose malaise in previous years had been so paralysing. Its modest beginning with perhaps a hundred theologians gathered for about eight weeks at Pisa in 1409 allowed only for minimal common work; the more definitive reunion at Constance in 1414, with an elaborate committee organisation and several years of discussion, was as the work of Phillip Stump has now shown highly constructive in modifying several aspects of the régime bénéficial, the system of preferment which supported the graduate careerist but which troubled his fastidious conscience.Footnote ²⁴ Many, perhaps most, of the delegates represented absent ruling princes or prelates; but it is clear that in most of the details of the reform programme they acted on their own judgement as professional canon lawyers and theologians, and the effect of their representative status was really to involve the lay powers in backing their decisions. The novelty of the international congress and the significance of its precedent in the gestation of the modern state can hardly be overstressed. Constance would be the paradigm of similar gatherings of princely councillors and diplomatists, whose effective role was often to educate their masters in a more enlightened self-interest, at the Council of Trent, at Münster in Westphalia, at the Treaty of Utrecht and at the Congress of Vienna. Such gatherings of educated and internationally minded public servants, infrequent as they were, would prove to be indispensable lubricants in the European state system, in the nineteenth as in the fifteenth century.

The change of mood seems to have allowed ministers and councillors to articulate their advice in a new and more practical language. The second decade of the fifteenth century was the first age of the political memorandum, one of the earliest examples of which is the document drawn up for Henry V about November 1418 to set out the possible case for an alliance with the Dauphin Charles, perhaps by Dr Philip Morgan or Dr John Kemp. This is a notably realistic briefing, which makes no bones about the cost of the king's wars and the refusal of the enemy to treat with him; logically argued, and acute in working out the possible outcome of various courses of action, it is devoid of moralistic sentiments. On the other hand it is not in any crude sense Machiavellian or amoral: the author took due account of the royal conscience, posing the question ‘whether the King may with his worshippe and in conscience and also savyng of his title to the coroune of France werreie with (that is, make war as an ally of) the Douphin’.Footnote ²⁵ In the following October Philip, the new duke of Burgundy, sought the advice of his council as to whether he should accept the terms of peace offered by Henry V, in the new situation created by the murder of the duke's father by partisans of the dauphin, which might involve his renouncing his pledged allegiance to King Charles VI. The advice was proffered in scholastic form, with arguments listed for and against. Like Henry V's councillors, the duke's advisers took careful note of the point of conscience respecting his allegiance, and also of his honour were his father's murderers to be left unpunished, ‘if [the duke] does not agree soon to the terms, he might not recover what he requires in respect of his honour and his profit’.Footnote ²⁶ The memorandum seems to be the first of a genre which would soon be common in the records of Philip the Good's government, notably from the pen of Hue de Lannoy, the governor of Holland.Footnote ²⁷ They are cognate with the opinions recorded more or less verbatim in the Florentine Consulte e pratiche, among which Professor Brucker has noted, about 1410, a distinct change from sentiments expressed by the spokesmen of particular families, guilds or neighbourhoods to the remarks of ‘discrete individuals formulating independent opinions . . . whose views carried weight by virtue of their particular expertise or status in the regime’.Footnote ²⁸ Acting as the Florentine equivalent of an English or Burgundian councillor, one such prominent individual, Agnolo Pandolfini, explicitly put experience above theoretical knowledge (scientia) in coming to decisions.Footnote ²⁹ The quality of official advice given in such documents indicates that their authors, whether clerical or lay, were both experienced and educated, and its unsentimental tone is not a sign that the conscience of the Prince is to be ignored. Rather, it is an indication that a disciplined conscience, guided more by the accumulated wisdom of the experienced confessor than by abstract moral principles, was the right attribute of a prudent prince or for that matter of a wise minister or councillor. We can see why so many of them in this generation, both princes and ministers, laity and clergy, soldiers and statesmen, having, in Walter Hilton's words ‘sovereignty with much possession of worldly goods’, should have left evidence of an active conscience in their devotional books and charitable support of Carthusian houses dedicated to circulating such books, or, to quote Hilton again, to have ‘receyued of our Lord's gift grace of devocioun, and in partie savoure of spiritual occupacioun’.Footnote ³⁰

In this same second decade of the fifteenth century the Carthusian Order acted, with startling rapidity, to supply the political world with practical spiritual guidance, in the form of suitable texts culled from recent contemplative literature. Many of these texts, originally in various vernaculars like the Dialogo of Catherine of Siena or Jan Ruysbroeck's Van de blinkenden steen, were translated into Latin and some of them then retranslated into other vernaculars: Catherine's Dialogo was available in English as The Orcherd of Syon before 1420. Other texts were collected in carefully edited anthologies such as the Donatus devocionis, excerpts of which were written out by John count of Angoulême, in his own hand as a spiritual exercise, probably when he was a prisoner in England in the 1420s.Footnote ³¹ The original impetus of this complex and apparently coordinated work may have come from Stefano Maconi, the Carthusian translator of Catherine's Dialogo into Latin, who was prior general of the Order's Urbanist half from 1398 to 1410.Footnote ³² By 1417, the practice of preparing texts for a lay readership was widespread enough for compilers to need guidance on preserving or restoring a correct version, guidance supplied in the handbook of textual criticism written by a Carthusian of the Grande Chartreuse, Oswald de Corda, in his Opus pacis.Footnote ³³ The surviving fragments of these texts written out in the hands of occasional lay noblemen or women are evidence that their efforts were not wholly in vain.

This body of literature gave firm and orthodox guidance to the political world. But it was left to Henry V to make the disciplined conscience the linchpin of an aggressive and highly controlled style of government, in which both the lay nobility and the graduate careerists would equally put their independent intelligence and their several professional skills to his demanding, exhausting but satisfying and in the end life-transforming service. For his deeply personal religion, we have the evidence of his chaplain:

This is a description of Henry V in the privacy of his chamber, but the author treats it as the starting point of a style of government. It is a style of ruling the essence of which is in the phrase ‘learning to fear’; to fear God in the person of the king, the avatar of Moses, who in Deuteronomy lays down in detail the canons of an orthodox way of life for a disobedient people. Its public consequences were a programme of religious reform which had its heart in a projected monastic palace complex at Sheen, of which the Sheen Charterhouse and the Brigittine convent over the river at Syon were realised. These foundations became, as was clearly intended, powerhouses of intercessory prayer for the realm of England and the focus of orthodox guidance for the personal religion of the laity. Another consequence, of course, was his project for founding an English empire in France which sometimes seemed to assume the moral force of a crusade. If these ambitious plans naturally put his graduate servants under great strain, they seem to have faced his service with professional stoicism and looked back on it, when Henry's short life was over, as the gold standard of good government; Henry Chichele, his diplomat and archbishop, would evoke the king's memory years later in his foundation statutes for All Souls College in Oxford, dedicating his foundation to the arduous service of the state.Footnote ³⁵ The discipline and professionalism of Chichele seems a world away from the agonised consciences of Gerson and Nicholas de Clamanges.

The recovery of discipline over the conscience was a lasting feature of fifteenth-century government. It was achieved by hard, or hardened, men like Arundel, Henry V or Pierre d'Ailly, capable of intelligent cooperation as the Council of Constance showed, but prepared too to impose sanctions, including the extreme penalty, on those of their number, like Jan Hus, who put the demands of their private conscience before the discipline of unity. In the record of fifteenth-century government, references to the conscience of the prince abound; indeed the greater his prerogative, the sharper his sense of personal sin. It was a duty of ministers to reconcile princely misgivings with the dictates of prudence: in the words of the secretary of Ludovico il Moro duke of Milan, a ruler whose political career had been far from saintly, ‘we must always be alert to the safekeeping of your conscience’.Footnote ³⁶ The political classes of the fifteenth century had certainly been made aware of individual conscience, which at many points might be in conflict with their duty of service and cooperation in government. As a result one of the strongest features of the early modern state was its demand for commitment not only of service but of opinion; the principled cruelty of its discipline seems to have arisen from the fear of untrammelled conscience and the destruction it could bring. In that perspective, the concept of raison d'état was a doctrine of comfort for unquiet souls: as Machiavelli remarked, a prince should not worry if he incurs reproach, non si curi di incorrere nella fama, for his cruelty so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal.Footnote ³⁷ United and loyal – but in defiance of the variable dictates of their consciences, and under the tensile force and the artifice of the modern state. It was not surprising that princes should worry, living under constant moral pressure. For many of them, power was not delightful – that was a fantasy of the impotent – but a burden fit to crush all but the hardest men. Forced into judicial severity and bound by political imperative, princes and ministers must take what comfort they could in the doctrine of necessity, in the Aristotelian notion of epieikeia, as they had in 1408, or in the modern defence of raison d'état, as their confessors might allow, from the unsleeping accusations of their conscience.