Noble Tutor

This chapter investigates Hobbes’s teaching of William Cavendish, second Earl of Devonshire, at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire in the 1610s. It sets Hobbes’s tutoring in the general context of aristocratic education in early-modern England, and, through evidence of library purchases and surviving manuscripts, explores the particular context of tutoring at Hardwick. In so doing it confirms the distinctively aristocratic and Tacitean complexion of humanism at Hardwick. The chapter examines the composition of the Discourse against Flatterie and the other essays and discourses appearing in Horae subsecivae, evaluating the influence on them of Bacon, and demonstrating their dependence on Joseph Lange’s anthology, Polyanthea nova. These works are shown to constitute something of an apology for young Cavendish’s various indiscretions.