Nicholas Bourbon (the elder)

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicholas Bourbon the elder arrived in England in 1535 carrying a debt he could not repay with money. The French poet and teacher had spent years imprisoned in France, punished for verses that the religious establishment found dangerously sympathetic to reform. His journey across the Channel was an act of gratitude toward the two people whose influence had helped secure his freedom: Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. What kind of man earns a royal rescue, befriends the greatest portrait painter of his age, and still calls his collected works "trifles"? And what does it mean that his poems in praise of Anne Boleyn describe her as one of God's beloved servants, written at a moment when that praise carried real political weight? Bourbon's life moves through some of the most charged corners of sixteenth-century Europe, from the canon foundries of Vendeuvre-sur-Barse to the humanist circles of Lyon, touching figures as different as François Rabelais and Hans Holbein the Younger. The threads that connect them tell a story about what it cost to think freely in an age when words could land a scholar in prison.

• 2. A Poet in Chains

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  Bourbon's first published collection appeared in 1529 under the title Vandoperani, campani, epigrammata, a gathering of epigrams, canticles, dialogues, and epistles. Four years later he followed it with the first edition of Nugae, a Latin word meaning trifles, rendered in French as Bagatelles. The title was modest. The contents were not. In the epigram In laudem Dei optimi maximi, Bourbon appeared to align himself with religious reform, a position that made him an immediate target for authorities already suspicious of humanist writers. The work also reportedly contained veiled criticisms of Noël Béda, a theologian and a determined opponent of humanist thought. The combination proved explosive. Bourbon was imprisoned, and he stayed imprisoned despite appeals to multiple protectors, despite a royal commandment that explicitly called for taking Borbonius out of prison, and despite a petition directed at Cardinal Jean de Lorraine. It was Francis I who finally ordered his release in 1535.

• 3. England and Anne Boleyn

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  Anne Boleyn had been a lady-in-waiting to Claude of France before becoming the second wife of Henry VIII, and she arrived at the English court already shaped by continental religious ideas. She was a proponent of moderate evangelical reform, and when Bourbon reached England she helped him find work as a tutor. Bourbon repaid that shelter in verse: the poems he later wrote cast Anne as one of God's beloved servants, language that carried a precise theological charge in the reforming circles of the 1530s. During his time at the English court, Bourbon moved in company that included Hans Holbein the Younger, then on his second stay in England. Holbein drew Bourbon's portrait in 1535. Bourbon admired Holbein deeply enough to give him a title borrowed from antiquity, calling him "the Apelles of our time," a reference to the legendary painter of ancient Greece.

• 4. Lyon and the Humanist Circle

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  Bourbon returned to France in 1536 and settled in Lyon, where a loose community of poets and humanists had gathered around Étienne Dolet. The group was known as the école lyonnaise, the Lyonnaise School, and its members included Jean Visagier, Eustorg de Beaulieu, Gilbert Ducher, and Symphorien Champier. Within that circle Bourbon encountered François Rabelais, who had himself drawn fire from religious authorities over Pantagruel. In 1538 Bourbon issued a second edition of Nugae, expanded with many new pieces but notably quieter on the controversial epistles that had caused him such trouble. The revision shows a writer who had learned exactly how much candor the times could bear. Clément Marot, one of the notable poets in service to the Queen of Navarre, acknowledged Bourbon in the introductory texts of Adolescence clémentine, including an epigram that named him "Bourbon, dit Borbonius, poète lyonnais."

• 5. Teacher to Royalty

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  Around 1540 Bourbon took on the role of précepteur to Jeanne d'Albret, the daughter of Marguerite de Navarre. The appointment placed him at the heart of one of France's most cultivated royal households. Teaching was never a sideline for Bourbon; it had been central to his life from early on. He had taught humanities in Amiens, Langres, and Troyes, and had served as tutor to the household of the Cardinal of Tournon. His earliest surviving poem, De Ferraria, was written about his origins and his home city of Vendeuvre-sur-Barse, a place known in the fifteenth century for its cannonball forges. That image of iron and fire sits oddly beside the word Nugae, but perhaps not so oddly for a man who spent years in prison for verses he called trifles. Bourbon's Nugae would eventually attract the attention of the Welsh epigrammatist John Owen, who made the collection the subject of one of his own epigrams.