Bacon and Machiavelli
Bacon and Machiavelli
I will never set politics against ethics; especially for that ethics are but a handmaid to divinity and religion.
—Francis Bacon, Considerations Touching a War with Spain
Modern scholarship habitually pairs Francis Bacon with Niccolò Machiavelli as joint progenitors of modern political and intellectual realism, and this pairing is not without textual warrant. Bacon does cite Machiavelli on numerous occasions, often in a conciliatory or diplomatically neutral register, and he clearly regarded Machiavelli as a writer who could not be ignored by any serious observer of power. In this respect, the association is historically understandable. Machiavelli’s decisive break with external authority, divine, natural, or customary, has come to function as a symbolic origin point for modern instrumental reason, and Bacon is frequently drawn into that lineage as a sympathetic heir. Yet this habitual alignment risks obscuring important distinctions. A closer examination of Bacon’s writings reveals a persistent unease with precisely those Machiavellian commitments that have most shaped his reputation: the reversibility of virtue, the tactical manipulation of appearance, and the substitution of adaptability for moral continuity.
What complicates the picture further is that many of Bacon’s engagements with Machiavelli turn out to be allusive references to a book known as Anti-Machiavel. Published anonymously in French at Geneva, Anti-Machiavel went through twenty-four printings in five languages and was quite influential in its time. It is attributed to Innocent Gentillet, a French Huguenot lawyer who fled to Geneva after the St. Bartholomew massacres in 1572, however, there is reason to doubt this attribution, and a bibliographer questioned it as early as 1584: “For my part, I believe that all these Gentillets are masks, and that the author of Anti-Machiavel is not known.”[1]
I believe internal evidence suggests that Bacon himself wrote Anti-Machiavel while he was at Cambridge; this may sound absurd, but in over fifty places it parallels his later writings. I will refer to them as different authors, but my argument is that this is actually the early work of Shakespeare. T. S. Eliot may have hinted about this, in the introduction he wrote for The Wheel of Fire (1949): “What at first appears to be their ‘philosophy of life’ sometimes turns out to be only a felicitous but shameless lifting of a passage from almost any author … [Shakespeare] has his Montaigne, his Seneca, and his Machiavelli, or his Anti-Machiavelli like the others.”
Beginning with the 1577 Latin translation, Anti-Machiavel bears a dedication to Francis Hastings and Edward Bacon, Francis Bacon’s half-brother. The Bacon family’s connections to Protestant Geneva went back to Lady Anne Bacon’s father, Sir Anthony Cooke, who lived on the continent as a Protestant exile during the reign of Mary I; he corresponded with Calvin and met Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva, who approved Anti-Machiavel for publication. The dedication exhorts Edward to
Imitate the wisdom, sanctimony, and integrity of your Father, the right Honorable Lord Nicholas Bacon, Keeper of the broad Seal of England, a man right renowned; that you may lively express the image of your Father’s virtues in the excellent towardness which you naturally have from your most virtuous Father.[2]
The dedication opens with a story from Plutarch about the Greek statesman Solon talking with Thespis, the poet and actor for whom thespians are named, often called the inventor of tragedy:
After Solon had seen Thespis’ first edition and action of a tragedy, and meeting with him before the play, he asked if he was not ashamed to publish such feigned fables under so noble, yet a counterfeit personage. Thespis answered that it was no disgrace upon a stage, merrily and in sport, to say and do anything. Then Solon, striking hard upon the earth with his staff, replied thus: “Yea but shortly, we that now like and embrace this play, shall find it practiced in our contracts and common affairs.” This man of deep understanding saw that public discipline and reformation of manners, attempted once in sport and jest, would soon quail; and corruption, at the beginning passing in play, would fall and end in earnest.
Bacon shared this concern with the pedagogy of the stage, as expressed in The Advancement of Learning:
Dramatic poesy, which has the theatre for its world, would be of excellent use if well directed. For the stage is capable of no small influence both of discipline and of corruption. Now of corruptions in this kind we have enough; but the discipline has in our times been plainly neglected. And though in modern states play-acting is esteemed but as a toy, except when it is too satirical and biting, yet among the ancients it was used as a means of educating men’s minds to virtue.
After the dedication, Anti-Machiavel opens with a discussion of inductive vs deductive reasoning:
Aristotle and other philosophers teach us, and experience confirms, that there are two ways to come unto the knowledge of things. The one, when from the causes and maxims, men come to knowledge of the effects and consequences. The other, when contrary, by the effects and consequences we come to know the causes and maxims… The first of these ways is proper and peculiar unto the mathematicians, who teach the truth of their theorems and problems by their demonstrations drawn from maxims, which are common sentences allowed of themselves for true by the common sense and judgment of all men. The second way belongs to other sciences, as to natural philosophy, moral philosophy, physic, law, policy, and other sciences, whereof the knowledge proceeds more commonly by a resolute order of effects to their causes, and from particulars to general maxims.
This is very close to what is found decades later in the Novum Organum:
There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and middle axioms . . . The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all; which is the true but unattempted way.
Again and again, Bacon’s reflections on constancy, reputation, suspicion, tyranny, and the moral dangers of simulation align more closely with Gentillet’s anti-Machiavellian framework than with Machiavelli’s own prescriptions. His insistence that virtue is constitutive rather than cosmetic, that power reveals rather than creates character, and that the erosion of moral continuity produces political instability, are all articulated most fully and explicitly within the anti-Machiavellian tradition. What The Prince authorizes is not merely dissimulation in extremis, but the institutionalization of dissimulation as a standing posture. Virtue becomes provisional, identity becomes reversible. The prince must appear “merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright,” yet remain inwardly prepared to become their opposites whenever necessity requires. This is not hypocrisy as weakness or lapse; it is hypocrisy as design. Virtue is stripped of intrinsic gravity and reduced to reputational utility.
It is here that Machiavellian realism crosses from prudence into something more radical: the liquidation of moral continuity as a governing constraint. Bacon’s political and moral writings register a persistent unease with precisely this move. He allows for reserve, indirectness, prudential silence, and dissimulation at times; but he does not allow for the reversibility of moral identity. In Gentillet’s Anti‑Machiavel, Machiavelli is not rejected because he is cruel or cynical, but because he dissolves the conditions under which authority remains intelligible. Once virtue is reduced to appearance, the “credit of virtue” becomes actively dangerous: it enables exploitation without restraint. Constancy, by contrast, is treated not as one virtue among others, but as the condition of possibility for virtue as such. Without constancy, justice, mercy, and faith become interchangeable masks.
This is why both Bacon and Gentillet place such weight on constancy. Bacon writes that “constancy is the foundation on which virtues rest,” a claim that closely echoes Anti-Machiavel: “constancy is a quality which ordinarily accompanies all other virtues; it is, as it were, of their substance and nature.” This point is crucial. Constancy is not one virtue among others; it is the condition of possibility for virtue as such. Without it, mercy, justice, and faith are reduced to interchangeable masks—precisely the condition Machiavelli recommends. Power then becomes a theater of simulation rather than a moral office.
The same concern animates Bacon’s reflections on office, suspicion, and reputation. In the essay “Of Great Place,” he observes that “a place showeth the man, and it showeth some to the better, and some to the worse,” a formulation that Anti-Machiavel renders proverbially: “honors change manners.” Elevation does not create virtue or vice; it exposes what was already there. Rank dissolves disguise. The question is whether character can withstand visibility without corruption. Likewise, in the essay “Of Suspicion,” Bacon notes that “men of base nature, once suspected, will never be true.” Suspicion does not corrupt the virtuous; it crystallizes the corrupt. Anti-Machiavel makes the political analogue explicit: “the best fortress that is, is not to be thought evil by subjects; and if a prince is once thought so, there is no fortress that can save him.” Reputation, once forfeited, becomes irreversible not because subjects are irrational, but because moral judgment precedes obedience. Where Machiavelli treats this as a problem of optics, Bacon and Gentillet treat it as a problem of being.
Shakespeare does not argue this thesis; he stages it. In Measure for Measure, a play obsessed with delegated, partial, and ideological authority, he writes “it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking.” Constancy here is what separates justice from zealotry, law from enforcement without restraint. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the line spoken by Proteus, “were man but constant, he were perfect” is devastatingly ironic. The character named for mutability confesses the very lack that ruins him. In Shakespeare’s work, inconstancy is not cleverness or adaptability; it is the seed of betrayal, faction, and tyranny.
Anti-Machiavel gives this insight emblematic form. “As soon as the prince shall clothe himself with Proteus’ garments,” it warns, “and has no certitude in word or deed, men may well say that his malady is incurable, and that in all vices he has taken the nature of the chameleon.” This passage does not merely describe Machiavellian behavior; it pathologizes it. Three things are happening at once. Proteus signifies radical mutability, the absence of stable form. The chameleon signifies adaptive appearance without inner substance. And the diagnosis of incurability marks this not as prudence under pressure, but as degeneration. Once identity itself becomes tactical, there is no longer a subject capable of rule—only a succession of masks. Shakespeare makes the same point with Gloucester (Richard III): when selfhood becomes simulation, tyranny is not an aberration but the logical outcome:
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.[1]
The pairing of Proteus and the chameleon was not idiosyncratic. It was a humanist commonplace, widely disseminated through Erasmus’s Adages, where both figures function as warnings against inconstancy, unreliable counsel, and corrupted prudence. These were not obscure symbols but part of a shared moral lexicon that an educated reader would recognize immediately. This makes Francis Bacon’s private indexing of the same imagery in his Promus collection especially revealing. Among its entries appears the compressed triad: “Chameleon, Proteus, Euripus.” Euripus, the Aegean strait whose currents were thought to reverse direction predictably, completes the pattern. Taken together, the triad warns against policy without principle, knowledge without stability, and rule without orientation. It names not Machiavellian prudence, but the pathology Machiavellianism risks becoming.
Another parallel is found in Bacon’s essay “Of Seditions and Troubles”:
Also, as Machiavel noteth well, when princes, that ought to be common parents, make themselves as a party, and lean to a side, it is as a boat that is overthrown by uneven weight on the one side… For when the authority of princes is made but an accessary to a cause, and that there be other bands that tie faster than the band of sovereignty, kings begin to be put almost out of possession.
Anti-Machiavel:
For if he nourishes partialities among his subjects, he cannot possibly carry himself so equally towards both parties, but in them both will be jealousy and suspicion. Each party will esteem the other to be more favored, whereupon he will hate his prince, and by that means it may come to pass that the prince shall be hated by both parties; and so both the one and the other shall machinate his ruin, which he can hardly shun, having all their evil wills.
There are very clear Shakespearean dramatizations of exactly this insight. In fact, Shakespeare returns to it repeatedly, as if testing the same political theorem under different historical conditions. King Lear is the paradigmatic case, the purest dramatic embodiment of the principle that the ruler must be a common parent. Once he becomes partial, authority becomes “accessary to a cause”; factions form stronger bonds than sovereignty, the ruler is hated by all sides and displaced. Lear does not merely abdicate power; he redistributes it along factional lines, rewarding performative loyalty and punishing restraint. Once he aligns himself emotionally with Goneril and Regan, withdrawing from the role of impartial arbiter, he becomes a dependent partisan, a client rather than a sovereign, a king “almost out of possession.” The result matches Anti-Machiavel line for line: jealousy between parties, mutual suspicion, hatred of the prince by both sides, and finally his political nullity. Lear’s tragedy is not madness first—it is partiality first, madness second.
If Lear shows partiality through weakness, Coriolanus shows it through pride. Here the ruler (or ruling class) leans openly to one side: patricians vs. plebeians, honor vs. appetite, martial virtue vs. civic mediation. Rome ceases to function as a polity and becomes a battlefield of factions, each bound by loyalty stronger than the state itself. Coriolanus is destroyed not because he lacks virtue, but because he cannot occupy the role of common parent, he cannot speak to both sides, and thus becomes the symbol of factional domination. Rome, like Bacon’s boat, capsizes from uneven weight.
One of the most revealing points of convergence between Bacon, Anti-Machiavel, and Shakespeare occurs around Machiavelli’s appeal to the myth of Chiron. Machiavelli’s claim that the education of princes requires learning how to act both as man and beast, lion and fox, became a kind of shorthand for the new political realism. Bacon addresses it directly, and with visible irritation, in The Advancement of Learning:
In the fable that Achilles was brought up under Chiron the Centaur, who was part a man and part a beast: expounded ingeniously but corruptly by Machiavel, that it belongeth to the education and discipline of princes to know as well how to play the part of the lion in violence and the fox in guile, as of the man in virtue and justice.
The rebuke is carefully framed. Machiavelli’s ingenuity is conceded, but it is labeled corrupt. What is at stake is not whether princes sometimes act forcefully or cunningly—Bacon is no naïf about power—but whether the myth authorizes a collapse of the human measure itself. That same objection is stated even more bluntly in Anti-Machiavel:
But should we call this beastliness or malice, what Machiavelli says of Chiron? Or has he read that Chiron was both a man and a beast? Who has told him that he was delivered to Achilles to teach him that goodly knowledge to be both a man and a beast?
The force of the question lies in its refusal to accept Machiavelli’s premise. The myth of Chiron does not teach oscillation between man and beast; it presupposes the distinction. To erase that distinction is not prudence but degradation. What Machiavelli redefines as wisdom, both Bacon and Gentillet identify as a loss of form.
This objection is not merely theoretical. It is dramatized with extraordinary clarity in Timon of Athens, in what is perhaps the most explicit repudiation of Machiavellian prudence in the Shakespearean canon:
A beastly ambition, which the gods grant thee t’
attain to! If thou wert the lion, the fox would
beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would
eat thee; if thou wert the fox, the lion would
suspect thee… What beast couldst thou be, that
were not subject to a beast? And what a beast art
thou already, that seest not thy loss in
transformation!
The brilliance of this passage lies not merely in its imagery but in its logic. Shakespeare takes Machiavelli’s lion–fox synthesis and runs it through a reductio ad absurdum. No beastly posture is stable. Each invites its own undoing. What Machiavelli presents as adaptive mastery is exposed as endless vulnerability. The problem is not choosing the wrong animal, the problem is becoming an animal at all. The closing line is decisive: “What a beast art thou already, that seest not thy loss in transformation!” This is almost a dramatic paraphrase of Anti-Machiavel’s central charge. Moral degradation is not a risk that accompanies Machiavellian prudence; it is its operating principle. Transformation itself is the loss. Timon’s world, where loyalty is performative, friendship transactional, and power circulates through flattery and calculation, reveals the political consequence of this doctrine. Once politics is reduced to animal cunning and force, everyone becomes prey. That diagnosis aligns precisely with Bacon’s fear that Machiavellian realism, once normalized, corrodes the conditions of civic trust rather than securing them.
Hamlet and Anti-Machiavel
Anti-Machiavel:
When the emperor Claudius would espouse Agrippina, his brother’s daughter, he made a law whereby he authorized the marriage of the uncle with the niece, which was published all over . . . indeed this marriage fell out not well for him; for Agrippina poisoned him to bring Nero to the empire, her son by another marriage; although Claudius had by his first wife Messalina a natural son called Brittanicus, whom Nero poisoned when he came to the empire. So that by the incestuous marriage wherewith Claudius had contaminated and poisoned his house, he and his natural son, who by reason should have been his successor, were killed with poison.
This passage is uncannily close to the moral architecture of Hamlet, and the proximity goes well beyond a shared classical anecdote. What Gentillet is doing here is supplying a ready-made moral template that Shakespeare appears to dramatize, rather than merely allude to.
In Anti-Machiavel, the story of the Roman emperor Claudius is not presented neutrally. It is a causal narrative: moral transgression precedes and generates political catastrophe. Law is bent to justify appetite; once that happens, the household becomes poisoned, literally and figuratively. This is precisely the logic Machiavelli suppresses and Anti-Machiavel insists upon. Shakespeare’s Claudius reproduces this pattern with striking fidelity.
Even the method, poison, carries over. In Anti-Machiavel, poison becomes the emblem of a house already morally infected. In Hamlet, the poison poured into the ear becomes the master symbol of corrupt persuasion, corrupted law, and corrupted lineage.
One of the most important elements in Gentillet’s passage is this: he made a law whereby he authorized the marriage… This is not incidental. It is a direct indictment of Machiavellian statecraft, where law becomes an instrument of will rather than an expression of moral order. In Hamlet, Claudius does the same thing rhetorically rather than formally: he normalizes the marriage through court language, he reframes grief as political danger, and he substitutes policy for justice. Thus Claudius’s Denmark, like Claudius’s Rome, is a state where law no longer restrains desire but ratifies it. That is the precise nightmare Anti-Machiavel warns against.
Gentillet’s conclusion is devastating: by the incestuous marriage wherewith Claudius had contaminated and poisoned his house… This is not metaphorical flourish, it is structural. The house (domus) is the seed of the state (res publica). Corrupt the one, and the other must follow. Shakespeare translates this directly into drama: the royal bed is corrupt, the court is corrupt, the state is corrupt, and nature itself is out of joint. Hamlet’s famous intuition, that Denmark’s sickness begins in the king’s private crime, is exactly the lesson Gentillet extracts from Roman history.
Is this direct influence? What can be said confidently is that this episode from Anti-Machiavel provides a fully articulated anti-Machiavellian reading of Claudius; Shakespeare’s Hamlet enacts the same moral logic, with the same crimes, symbols, and consequences; and the name Claudius itself functions as a signal, not a coincidence. Shakespeare does not merely borrow Roman history; he stages Gentillet’s argument.
I should also briefly mention The Great Assizes holden in Parnassus (1645, attributed to George Wither), which features a court of poets and scholars, with Francis Bacon as Chancellor of Parnassus, before whom are arraigned authors charged with “strange abuses, committed against [Apollo] and the Nine Muses”:
He was accused, that he had used his skill,
Parnassus with strange heresies to fill,
And that he labour’d had for to bring in,
Th’ exploded doctrines of the Florentine,
And taught that to dissemble and to lie,
Were vital parts of humane policy.
“Th’ exploded doctrines of the Florentine” can only refer to Anti-Machiavel. The court of Parnassus also includes William Shakespeare as “Writer of weekly accounts,” Ben Jonson as “Keeper of the Trophonian Den,” and the scholar Isaac Casaubon, a friend of Bacon’s who was born in Geneva to Huguenot refugee parents. Casaubon is best known for proving that the Corpus Hermeticum dates from the Common Era; in a later chapter we will discuss Bacon’s possible role in some of the Hermetic literature of his time. Bacon wrote in a letter to Casaubon: “To write at leisure that which is to be read at leisure matters little; but to bring about the better ordering of man’s life and business, with all its troubles and difficulties, by the help of sound and true contemplations—this is the thing I am at.”[2]
Machiavelli and Leicester’s Commonwealth
Leicester’s Commonwealth can be read as an English case study of the political pathology Gentillet anatomizes in the Discours contre Machiavel. Gentillet’s polemic proceeds by exposing Machiavellian maxims in the abstract and then demonstrating their consequences for religion, justice, and sovereignty; the pamphlet reverses this procedure, beginning with concrete accusations against Robert Dudley and inviting the reader to infer the maxims that must govern a man who behaves in such a fashion. The author leaves little doubt as to the inference he expects, repeatedly identifying Dudley as one who acts by the counsel of “Seignior Machiavel my Lord’s counsellor.” The two works thus share not merely a moral outlook but a conceptual grammar.
Central to both texts is the insistence that Machiavellian power prefers secrecy to spectacle. Gentillet repeatedly condemns the use of hidden cruelty—poison, contrived accidents, silent removals—as the characteristic technique of the modern tyrant, precisely because it preserves outward reputation while securing inward fear. The pamphlet’s obsessive return to allegations of poisoning and covert murder, beginning with the death of Amy Robsart, is therefore not incidental sensationalism but doctrinally precise. Leicester is depicted as one who obeys what the author calls “a settled rule of Machiavel which the Dudleys do observe, that where you have once done a great injury, there must you never forgive.” Mercy would expose the crime; therefore the victim must be removed. What Gentillet theorizes as a structural danger to princely government, the pamphlet dramatizes as a pattern of lived practice, turning political life into a theater of suspicion.
Equally exact is the alignment on religion. Gentillet’s most sustained objection to Machiavelli is not atheism in the crude sense, but the reduction of religion to an instrument of rule, a mask to be worn or discarded according to convenience. Leicester’s Commonwealth repeatedly accuses Dudley of precisely this duplicity. His public Protestant zeal is portrayed not as conviction but as leverage: a means of intimidating rivals, dividing the realm, and consolidating personal authority. In this respect he exemplifies the Machiavellian “statist,” and the pamphlet remarks with bitter irony that “when he plays the ‘statist,’ wringing very unluckily some of Machiavel’s axioms to serve his purpose, then indeed he triumphs.” Gentillet’s warning that feigned piety corrodes religion rather than strengthening it is here translated into political narrative: instrumental godliness produces faction, hypocrisy, and ultimately impiety.
The pamphlet’s handling of foreign policy likewise mirrors Gentillet’s critique of Fortune. Gentillet insists that Machiavelli’s exaltation of adaptability and audacity in place of providence encourages reckless opportunism, substituting moral restraint with tactical gambling. Leicester’s intervention in the Low Countries is framed in exactly these terms: not as principled Protestant solidarity, but as ambition disguised as policy. Military incompetence and diplomatic confusion are attributed to a man who trusts stratagem over order, calculation over conscience. The pamphlet thus converts Gentillet’s abstract claim, that politics severed from providence will collapse, into a concrete historical narrative of national risk.
Most important, however, is the shared deployment of the “evil counsellor” framework. Gentillet preserves the legitimacy of monarchy by locating corruption not in the prince but in those who govern the prince’s will. Machiavellianism, in this account, does not seize the crown; it governs from behind the throne. Leicester’s Commonwealth follows this logic with remarkable discipline. Elizabeth herself is repeatedly exonerated, even idealized, while Leicester is accused of monopolizing access, filtering information, and ruling without title. The implication is made explicit: “Why, then, the Earl of Leicester means and plots to become king himself,” not by open usurpation, but by Machiavellian control of counsel. This is Gentillet’s model almost verbatim: tyranny without a crown, power exercised invisibly through proximity rather than office.
The charges concerning justice and administration likewise track Gentillet’s fear of legal formalism emptied of moral substance. Machiavelli, Gentillet argues, reduces law to an appearance maintained for convenience, subordinating justice to expediency and fear. Leicester is accused of manipulating courts, obstructing redress, and ensuring that law serves personal interest rather than public equity. The pamphlet identifies here a familiar Machiavellian sleight: “of driving men to attempt somewhat whereby they may incur danger or remain in perpetual suspicion or disgrace,” so that enemies destroy themselves while the architect remains concealed. Law survives in form, but its spirit is hollowed out.
Economic exploitation plays a similar role. Gentillet criticizes Machiavelli for undervaluing the political danger of avarice, insisting that monopolies and oppression generate hatred that no amount of prudence can manage. Leicester’s wealth is therefore presented not as evidence of success but as an index of systemic corruption. His enrichment widens the indictment from court politics to the commonwealth at large, supplying empirical confirmation of Gentillet’s theoretical warning.
Underlying all these charges is a shared moral anthropology inherited from Erasmus: the Machiavellian as Proteus or chameleon, a figure without constancy who adapts endlessly because he possesses no stable moral core. Gentillet condemns such mutability as the negation of virtue; the pamphlet depicts Leicester as exactly this kind of man: one thing to one faction, another to the next, trusted by none because grounded in nothing. Mutability becomes not strength but moral vacancy, rendering governance impossible.
Read together, then, Leicester’s Commonwealth emerges as the practical demonstration of Gentillet’s anti-Machiavellian thesis. Every major accusation against Leicester corresponds to a Machiavellian maxim Gentillet condemns: secret cruelty, instrumental religion, reliance on Fortune, manipulation of law, enrichment at public expense, and the corrosion of counsel. The pamphlet does not merely attack a man; it stages an English experiment in Gentillet’s political theology, warning that when cunning replaces virtue and prudence is severed from providence, corruption becomes systemic and ruin inevitable. In this sense, Leicester functions not simply as a historical villain, but as the English Machiavel—an embodied proof that Gentillet’s fears were not speculative, but urgently real.
Vindiciae contra tyrannos
The same anti-Machiavellian logic governing constancy and virtue also underwrites the Protestant theory of resistance articulated in Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579), translated into English as A Defense of Liberty against Tyrants. The work was published in Basel with a false imprint of Edinburgh, and issued pseudonymously as Stephanus Brutus Junius, a name deliberately invoking both Marcus Junius Brutus, assassin of Julius Caesar, and Lucius Junius Brutus, the legendary founder of the Roman Republic after the expulsion of the Tarquins—a genealogy of resistance that runs directly through Roman constitutional myth and into early modern political thought. Shakespeare portrayed the latter in The Rape of Lucrece—the beginning of the Roman Republic—and the former in Julius Caesar, the end of the Republic and beginning of the Roman Empire.
The choice of pseudonym is itself a rebuttal to Machiavelli, who notoriously warned that “Whoever takes up a tyranny and does not kill Brutus, and whoever makes a free state and does not kill the sons of Brutus, maintains himself for little time.” Machiavelli treats Brutus as a structural threat to any regime, whether tyrannical or republican, a remainder that must be eliminated. The Vindiciae, by contrast, restores Brutus as a moral necessity. Resistance is not an accident of politics but its corrective principle when lawful authority dissolves into personal rule.
This contrast becomes explicit in the Vindiciae’s account of Tarquin the Proud, which defines tyranny not by cruelty alone but by the systematic abandonment of counsel, law, and covenant:
Tarquinius Superbus was therefore esteemed a tyrant, because being chosen neither by the people nor the senate, he intruded himself into the kingdom only by force and usurpation . . . The true causes why Tarquinius was deposed, were because he altered the custom whereby the king was obliged to advise with the senate on all weighty affairs; that he made war and peace according to his own fancy; that he treated confederacies without demanding counsel and consent from the people or senate; that he violated the laws whereof he was made guardian; briefly that he made no reckoning to observe the contracts agreed between the former kings, and the nobility and people of Rome.
What is striking here is how closely tyranny is identified with inconstancy. Tarquin’s crime is not merely usurpation at the outset, but the abandonment of stable forms: consultation, law, contract, and continuity. Kingship becomes will. Authority becomes improvisation. This is precisely the condition Bacon, Gentillet, and Anti-Machiavel identify as politically fatal. The parallel account in Anti-Machiavel reinforces the same diagnosis in more explicitly moral terms:
Tarquin, who enterprised to slay his father-in-law king Servius Tullius to obtain the kingdom of Rome, showed well by that act and many others that he was a very tyrant. . . when he changed his just and royal domination into a tyrannical government, he became a contemner and despiser of all his subjects, both plebian and patrician. He brought a confusion and a corruption into justice; he took a greater number of servants into his guard than his predecessors had; he took away the authority from the Senate; moreover, he dispatched criminal and civil cases after his fancy, and not according to right; he cruelly punished those who complained of that change of estate as conspirators against him; he caused many great and notable persons to die secretly without any form of justice; he imposed tributes upon the people against the ancient form, to the impoverishment and oppression of some more than others; he had spies to discover what was said of him, and punished rigorously those who blamed either him or his government.
Here tyranny is rendered as a syndrome: concentration of force, liquidation of counsel, privatization of justice, surveillance, and punishment of dissent. What Machiavelli would redescribe as prudent security measures are reclassified as symptoms of moral degeneration. Crucially, this degeneration is not episodic but cumulative. Once Tarquin abandons lawful form, every subsequent act reinforces the disorder. Tyranny is thus not merely unjust, it is unstable.
This constellation of ideas passes almost verbatim into Shakespeare’s poetic treatment of Roman history. The argument of The Rape of Lucrece opens with an account of Tarquin that closely echoes both Anti-Machiavel and the Vindiciae, and may exemplify what T. S. Eliot famously called Shakespeare’s “shameless lifting” from Gentillet:
Tarquinius, for his excessive pride surnamed Superbus, after he had caused his own father-in-law Servius Tullius to be cruelly murdered, and, contrary to the Roman laws and customs, not requiring or staying for the people’s suffrages, had possessed himself of the kingdom . . . the people were so moved, that with one consent and a general acclamation the Tarquins were all exiled, and the state government changed from kings to consuls.
What matters is not the question of direct literary borrowing but the shared moral grammar. In all three accounts, Vindiciae, Anti-Machiavel, and Shakespeare, tyranny is defined by rupture: rupture with law, with counsel, with continuity, and with trust. The expulsion of the Tarquins is not framed as revolution but as restoration. Constancy, once broken at the top, can only be recovered by removal.
Seen in this light, Shakespeare’s Roman poems do not merely recount classical history; they dramatize the same anti-Machiavellian principle we have traced in Bacon and Gentillet. When authority becomes Protean, answerable only to circumstance and advantage, it forfeits its claim to obedience. The Brutus Machiavelli fears is precisely the Brutus the anti-Machiavellian tradition requires: the figure who restores moral continuity by terminating simulation.
Anti-Machiavel in folio (1602)
The decision to print Anti-Machiavel in folio format in 1602 is a strong contextual marker of how the work was meant to function. Folio was not the default format for controversial or polemical writing; it was expensive, prestigious, and normally reserved for texts that aspired to authority: law books, classical histories, patristic works, Bibles, and major works of statecraft. To issue Anti-Machiavel in folio was to present it not as a pamphlet for debate, but as a reference work, something to be consulted, cited, and kept. That alone suggests confidence that the book could circulate openly among educated and official readers without fear of suppression.
The contrast with The Prince is striking. Although Machiavelli’s text circulated widely on the Continent in Latin and Italian, it did not appear in English until 1640, nearly four decades later. This was not because it was unknown, but because it was regarded as dangerous, corrosive, and politically destabilizing. In Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, Machiavelli’s ideas were already notorious—absorbed indirectly through rumor, drama, and polemic—but the text itself remained effectively unlicensed. That Anti-Machiavel could be printed openly, and in a format associated with institutional seriousness, while The Prince could not be printed in English at all, points to a clear asymmetry in what the English state was prepared to endorse.
Taken together, these facts suggest that Anti-Machiavel functioned as more than a private moral critique. It reads plausibly as a sanctioned counter-text, articulating an officially acceptable response to Machiavellian realism without naming it as policy. In a political culture deeply concerned with stability, succession, and the moral legitimacy of rule, Gentillet’s work provided a way to confront Machiavelli’s influence while reaffirming a Christian-humanist conception of sovereignty. The folio format reinforces this role: it presents the book as a serious intervention aligned with law, ethics, and governance, not as an underground provocation.
The marginalization of Gentillet
Gentillet has, whether by design or by inertia, been effectively buried in modern scholarship. A revealing episode in this process is the 1974 Stewart and D’Andrea edition of Anti-Machiavel, whose preface is remarkable for its astonishingly dismissive tone. The editors remark that “we cannot expect today’s scholars to concern themselves with such erudite puzzles,” a statement that functions not as a gesture of humility but as an act of intellectual gatekeeping. It reads less as a neutral editorial judgment than as a warning: do not look deeper. It is historically unusual, indeed almost unprecedented, for the editors of a major scholarly reprint to discourage inquiry into the very complexities that justify republication. The effect is to close a line of questioning at precisely the point where it ought to begin.
Scholars have noticed this pattern, albeit quietly and without sustained follow-through. Harro Höpfl has observed that Gentillet is “persistently downplayed” despite his demonstrable historical impact. Sydney Anglo has gone further, lamenting that Gentillet’s role in anti-Machiavellian discourse has been “systematically neglected.” Paul A. Rahe has been more explicit still, calling Gentillet “the most underestimated political theorist of the sixteenth century.” These assessments, emerging independently from different corners of early modern scholarship, suggest that the marginalization of Gentillet is not accidental. One need not posit deliberate suppression to recognize a recurring pattern of scholarly avoidance.
Why, then, would twentieth-century political theory find it convenient to sideline a major critic of Machiavelli? One reason lies in the dominant narrative constructed around Machiavelli himself. Modern political thought has largely rehabilitated Machiavelli as the founder of political realism, the harbinger of secular rationality, and even a proto-liberal or proto-republican thinker. This story requires that Machiavelli’s opponents appear backward, dogmatic, moralistic, or naïve, figures who resisted modernity rather than helping to shape it. Gentillet is an awkward fit for this role. He is systematic rather than reactive, relatively secularized compared to earlier Huguenot writers, historically informed, and politically practical. His critique of tyranny overlaps in important ways with later constitutional and resistance theories. Rather than representing an obsolete moralism, Gentillet complicates the triumphalist narrative in which Machiavelli leads cleanly and unopposed into modernity. For that reason alone, he is easier to sideline than to integrate.
A second reason is that Gentillet opens the door to a set of textual and ideological puzzles that cross national, confessional, and even authorship boundaries—puzzles for which existing institutional frameworks offer no easy answers. Why does Anti-Machiavel anticipate themes, formulations, and anxieties that later appear with striking clarity in Shakespearean drama? Why are there strong echoes between Gentillet, the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, and early Stuart resistance theory? Why do English texts, including those associated with Bacon’s circle, show signs of deep familiarity with Gentillet’s arguments, despite modern British scholarship’s reluctance to acknowledge such influence? And how did a French or Genevan polemic penetrate so thoroughly into Elizabethan intellectual life without leaving a neat documentary trail? Academic gatekeepers tend to be uncomfortable with questions that destabilize disciplinary boundaries or require speculative reconstruction across languages and genres. Faced with such puzzles, it is institutionally easier to say nothing at all. The Stewart and D’Andrea preface makes this avoidance almost explicit.
Nevertheless, several scholars have hinted that there is more to this story. Sydney Anglo has noted “striking and never-explained parallels” between Gentillet and English dramatic and political literature, suggesting the possibility of a lost or obscured channel of transmission. Höpfl has characterized the erasure of Gentillet as a matter of scholarly prejudice rather than historical fact. Rahe has described the paucity of Gentillet scholarship as “perplexing,” given the work’s documented circulation and influence. Jean-Louis Fournel and Jean-Claude Zancarini have argued that the traditional narrative surrounding Gentillet is incomplete and in need of revision. These are restrained, professional formulations, but taken together they amount to a shared intuition: something does not add up.
Is the modern burial of Gentillet therefore suspicious? Not in a conspiratorial sense, but in an ideological and institutional sense, very much so. Marginalizing Gentillet serves several functions at once. It protects the dominant modern reading of Machiavelli, avoids uncomfortable parallels with Shakespeare and English resistance theory, and keeps authorship debates confined within familiar and manageable boundaries. Shakespeare scholars, in particular, have little incentive to engage deeply with sixteenth-century Huguenot political philosophy, which threatens to complicate entrenched assumptions about intellectual lineage and national culture. Academia, like any institution, tends to bury what does not fit prevailing paradigms. Gentillet fits none of them, and so, for generations, he has been quietly set aside.
Authorship questions
In volume I of Les bibliothèques françoises by François Grudé de La Croix du Maine and Antoine du Verdier (1584), the entry on Anti-Machiavel includes the striking comment: « Pour moy, je croy que tous ces Gentillets sont masques, & que l’autheur de l’Anti-Machiavel n’est point cogneu. »—”For my part, I believe that all these Gentillets are masks, and that the author of the Anti-Machiavel is not known.” This is not casual skepticism but a deliberate bibliographical judgment, offered by compilers whose very purpose was to identify, classify, and stabilize authorship.
What makes the statement especially important is its plural formulation “tous ces Gentillets.” It implies that Innocent Gentillet was not merely suspected of being a pseudonym, but that the name itself may have functioned as a collective or reusable mask, a convenient authorial persona under which a politically dangerous work could circulate. In the context of late sixteenth-century Europe, where Machiavelli’s name was radioactive, censorship severe, and the stakes of political theory extremely high, this is entirely plausible. The Anti-Machiavel presents itself as a French Protestant critique of Italian political immorality, yet its sophistication, breadth of sources, and dramaturgical awareness suggest a hand (or hands) operating at a higher strategic level than that of a single moralizing pamphleteer.
This testimony matters because it reopens the question of authorship at precisely the moment when the book is closest to state power. Anti-Machiavel appears in an expensive folio edition in 1602, decades before The Prince is printed in English, and long before Machiavelli is widely accessible to the English reading public. A contemporary French bibliographer’s admission that the author is “not known” undermines later assumptions of transparent attribution and invites us to consider Anti-Machiavel as a programmatic intervention rather than a personal tract, an instrument rather than a confession.
Placed alongside Francis Bacon’s lifelong engagement with Machiavelli, his insistence on masks and his own habit of indirect authorship, this remark from La Croix du Maine and Du Verdier becomes especially suggestive. At the very least, it licenses methodological caution: we are not obliged to accept “Gentillet” as a settled fact when early modern authorities themselves refused to do so. At most, it points toward a culture of strategic anonymity, in which political philosophy circulates under borrowed names, and where the true author remains concealed precisely because the work is meant to operate at the level of states, not reputations.
In short, this sentence from Les bibliothèques françoises is not marginalia. It is a contemporaneous acknowledgment that Anti-Machiavel already appeared, to informed readers, as a masked text, one whose intellectual provenance could not be straightforwardly named.
Bacon’s position recovered
Seen in this light, Bacon’s relation to Machiavelli is neither naïve nor deferential. His measured tone is method, not equivocation. He refuses to normalize hypocrisy as policy. Power, for Bacon, is a test of character, not a license to discard it. Constancy is not rigidity; it is orientation. Virtue is constitutive, not cosmetic.
What emerges across Gentillet, Bacon, and Shakespeare is not a doctrine but a shared moral grammar. Simulation proves unstable. Identity treated as tactic dissolves trust. Tyranny is not the exception; it is the endpoint. Modernity did not begin as a single, unified break with moral authority. It emerged as a struggle between competing visions of power—one instrumental, the other moral—whose consequences remain with us still.
[1]Henry VI Part 3, act 3 scene 2
[2] Spedding, James. The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, Vol. IV, p. 147. London: Longman, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1868.
[1]Les bibliothèques françoises de La Croix du Maine et de Du Verdier, volume I, p. 220. Paris: Saillant & Nyon, 1772.
[2] The anonymous author of the Arte of English Poesie (1589), which bears a dedication to Francis Bacon’s uncle Lord Burghley, was also intimately familiar with Sir Nicholas: “I have come to the Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, and found him sitting in his gallery alone with the works of Quintilian before him; indeed, he was a most eloquent man, and of rare learning and wisdom, as ever I knew England to breed, and one that joyed as much in learned men and men of good wits.”