The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Or who do not climb to that height by violence and deceit,” as the commoner in Machiavelli proved to his fellows in a formal speech: who do not rise by knavery, force, foolery, villainy, or such crooked means. Those who are wealthy are commonly powerful; virtue and riches seldom settle in the same person. Who, then, fails to see the base beginnings of nobility? Plunder enriches one man, usury another, treason a third, witchcraft a fourth, flattery a fifth, lying, stealing, and false witness a sixth, adultery a seventh, and so on.

One makes a fool of himself to amuse his lord; another pampers my young master and gives him a little horse; a third marries a woman with a damaged sexual reputation, and so on. Now, if it please your worship, your lordship, who first founded your family? The poet answers:

He was either a shepherd, or something I prefer not to name.

Was he the better gentleman, or are you? If he was, then we have tracked him to his lair. If you are, what are you boasting so much about? That you are his son. Perhaps you are his heir, his supposed son, and yet a priest or a servant may in fact have been the boy’s real father. But we will not dispute that now: married women are all chaste. You are his son’s son’s son, conceived and born “within the four seas,” and so on.

Your great-great-great-grandfather was a rich citizen, and therefore most likely a usurer; a lawyer, and therefore a—; a courtier, and therefore a—; a country gentleman, and then he scraped his wealth together from sheep, and so on. And you are heir to all his virtues, fortunes, and titles. What, then, is your gentility but, as Jerome says, “old possessions, long-established riches”: ancient wealth? That is the definition of gentility. The father often goes to the devil to make his son a gentleman.

What is it at present? It began, says Agrippa, with vigorous wickedness, tyranny, oppression, and so on; and so it is maintained. Wealth began it, no matter how acquired; wealth sustains and increases it. Those Roman knights received that designation if they could spend so much a year. In the kingdom of Naples and in France, whoever buys certain lands buys the honour, title, and barony with them. Among us, those able to spend a certain amount must be called to hold office, receive knighthood, or pay a fine for refusing it. As one writer observes, “they judge nobility by a man’s assessed wealth”: our nobles are measured by their means.

And what is honoured now? What sustains our gentry but wealth? “Nobility without property is worth less than washed-up seaweed.” Without means, gentility is worth nothing; nothing is so contemptible and base. “To argue about noble birth without riches is to argue about the nobility of dung,” says the lawyer Nevisanus. To discuss gentility without wealth is, begging your pardon, to discuss the pedigree of a turd. Wealth alone gives the title; money maintains it and gives it existence; anyone can have it for money.