Note 187 — Chapter X · FREETHOUGHT IN THE RENAISSANCE

A hint of what was possible in the direction of freethought in the England of Henry V and Henry VI emerges in some of the records concerning Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, the youngest son of Henry IV. Gifted but ill-balanced, Humphrey was the chief patron of learning in England in his day; and he drank deeply of the spirit of Renaissance scholarship.187 Sir Thomas More preserves the story—reproduced also in the old play, The First Part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster—of how he exposed the fraud of a begging impostor who pretended to have recovered his sight through the virtue of a saint’s relics; and a modern pietistic historian decides that the Duke “had long ceased to believe in miracles and relics.”188 But if this be true, it is the whole truth as to Humphrey’s freethinking. It was the highest flight of rationalism permissible in his day and sphere.