Chapter 5 explores the distinct dynamics of Plutarch reception in England prior to the famous 1579–1603 translations of Thomas North (1535–1604). In England at this time, Plutarch’s work was read largely through a Ciceronian lens. I reflect on the vernacular translations of Plutarch’s moral essays by Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542), Thomas Elyot (1490–1546), Thomas Blundeville (1522–1606), Richard Taverner and Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) as well as explore the place of Plutarch in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). I argue that prior to the translations of Thomas North, Plutarch was read predominantly in England as a thinker whose political insights were secondary to his moral ones. While the increasing precariousness of the English realm into the latter sixteenth century changed the tone of political thought, the English never read their Plutarch in the vernacular with the same attention to the nature of public office and the public realm in the way prevalent in France earlier in the century.

The events of the Henrician Reformation served to put pressure on the problem of counsel and especially on its proposed timely solution. A second generation of English humanists took on this question, thinking more deeply about what the opportune moment was and how it related to the question of frank counsel. Thomas Starkey makes this issue central to his Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset, criticizing More’s approach, though he never resolves the problem fully. It is Thomas Elyot, in his works published in 1531 and 1533, who writes at length on the issue of right-timing and counsel, like Starkey coming to a critique of the ‘silence until kairos’ strategy espoused by Erasmus and More. These writers are also directly concerned with the relationship between counsel and command. In the context of the late 1520s and 1530s, theirs is a concern that counsel does not have enough authority over command, and that it will need to be supported or bolstered in some fashion to have its proper influence.