ABSTRACT
When Ben Jonson wrote in his Discoveries that ‘good councillors to princes are the best instruments of a good age’ he was making a commonplace argument.1 As the following brief catalogue testifies, the idea that good counsel was essential to successful government was articulated by a wide variety of medieval and early modern English authors. The lawyer Henry de Bracton argued that kings should rule by considered judgement rather than through their arbitrary will.2 The poet Thomas Hoccleve advised the youthful Henry V never to undertake public activities without counsel, which ‘may wele be likened to a bridelle/Which that an hors kepethe up from fallynge’.3 Early Tudor humanists wrote works suggesting that it was incumbent upon wise men to benefit the commonwealth through service in the councils of kings.4 Indeed, as late as 1642 the authors of the Nineteen Propositions implied a relationship between counsel and the public good when, echoing earlier writers, they suggested that the provision of counsel to an English monarch was too important to be limited to the king’s private companions.5
