ruths of supreme importance were being subordinated

to questions of political convenience, something that

would eventually transform France, the Catholics feared,
into a secular state.
Here the criticism comes closer to the real spirit of
Machiavelli. Renaissance Humanism in general had shifted
the focus of intellectual reflection from questions of the#ology and metaphysical
truth to matters of immediate and
practical human interest. In general, however, lip service
had always been paid to the ultimate superiority of reli#gious matters and writers
had avoided suggesting that there
might be a profound incompatibility between rival value
systems: it was perfectly possible, that is, to be a good Chris#tian and an
effective political leader.
Machiavelli, on the contrary, made it clear that, as he
saw it, Christian principles and effective political leadership
were not always compatible; situations would arise where
one was bound to choose between the two. It was not,
as his critics claimed, that he rejected all ethical values
outright; the strength, unity and independence of a people
and state certainly constituted goals worth fighting
for (‘I love my country more than my soul’, Machiavelli
declared in a letter to fellow historian Francesco Guicciar#dini). But such goals
could not always be achieved without
abandoning Christian principles; two value-systems were
at loggerheads. To make matters worse, Machiavelli did
not appear to be concerned about this. He took it as an
evident truth: Christian principles were admirable, but not
9780141395876_ThePrince_PRE.indd 32 21/05/15 3:00 PM
xxxiii
Introduction
applicable for politicians in certain circumstances; the idea
that all human behaviour could be assessed in relation to
one set of values was naive and utopian. It was in so far as
Machiavelli allowed these dangerous implications to sur#face in his writing that he
both unmasked, and himself
became identified with, what we might call the unaccept#able face of Renaissance
Humanism.
How much the presentation of the Machiavellian villain
in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, from Kyd and Marlowe,
through to Middleton, Shakespeare and ultimately Ben
Jonson, owed to Gentillet’s ‘Anti-Machiavel’ and how much
to a direct knowledge of Machiavelli’s writings is still a
matter of academic dispute. In the 1580s an Italian version
of The Prince was printed in England, avoiding a publication
ban by claiming falsely on the frontispiece that it was
printed in Italy. Many educated English people at the time
had a good knowledge of Italian. Sir Francis Bacon had
certainly read The Prince before its first legal publication in
English in 1640, defending the Florentine in the Advancement
of Learning (1605) with the remark: ‘We are much beholden
to Machiavel and others, that write what men do and not
what they ought to do.’
But the ‘murderous Machiavel’ who gets more t