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of his faith, but accredited advocate of his Catholic Majesty, the King of Spain.

From the little village of Sanginesio in northern Italy, where he was born in 1552, he went up to the famous university of Perugia, which bestowed upon him the degree of Doctor of Civil Law when he was twenty years of age. With his natural ability and with the support of his father, who was a man of substance and of standing in the profession of medicine, he could look forward with confidence to an honorable career in his native land, but Protestantism had infected several of the cities of northern Italy; Alberico and his father became adherents of the new heresy, and in 1579 were obliged to seek refuge beyond the Alps. His brother Scipione stopped in Germany and remained there to pursue the study of law and to become in time professor at the University of Altdorf. Alberico, however, continued his journey into England, where he found a number of compatriots who, like himself, were religious refugees. One of these introduced him to Sir Philip Sidney, to whom Gentili dedicated his first great work, the treatise On Embassies, which was brought out the year before Sidney's tragic death at Zutphen. This was his first important excursion into the field of international law, and the circumstances in which he came to take up the work are worth mentioning. In 1580 the famous Jesuit mission under Campion and Parsons was sent to England to organize a general Catholic movement against Elizabeth. The Duke of Guise, who was interested in the plot, found means of attaching to it James of Scotland and Philip of Spain. By 1583 matters were nearly ripe for action, but the spies of Walsingham had scented the coming danger, and just before the conspiracy for the assassination of Elizabeth could be carried out, documents were discovered at the house of Thomas Throgmorton, one of the active participants in the plot; he was put on the rack, and all the plans of the conspirators were laid bare. The disclosures involved Mendoza, the Spanish Ambassador at the court of Queen Elizabeth, and inquiry was made of Alberico Gentili if Mendoza could be sentenced to death in England. Although the pressure upon Gentili must have been great to yield to the popular demand for the exemplary punishment of the man who had violated the elementary principles of hospitality in supporting the plot of the assassins and revolutionists, he bravely replied that no other

action could be taken against Mendoza than dismissal from England. Out of this reply he developed his book On Embassies.

To a second Italian exile who was attached to the court of Queen Elizabeth, he owed his introduction to Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, an event which counted for so much in his subsequent career. The Earl of Leicester was at that time Chancellor of Oxford and thanks to his influence Gentili was received as a Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford and made Reader, at first at the newly established St. John's College, and later at New College. In 1587, seven years after his arrival in England, he was advanced to the position of Regius Professor of Civil Law, the chair occupied in our own day by James Bryce. At this point in his career he turned his attention largely to international law, and within the next three years he brought out the great work by which he is best known, his treatise On the Law of War. His literary activity during his years of residence in England was prodigious. In addition to works on international law and on civil and canon law, in the long lists of his writings which Professor Holland has drawn up one finds pamphlets on Virgil, on the first book of Maccabees, on the Latin of the Vulgate Bible, on the orthography of Aldus Manutius, and a discourse in praise of his two Alma Maters, Perugia and Oxford.

To his affection and admiration for Oxford he gives expression in a letter of dedication, addressed to the Earl of Leicester, which is prefixed to one of his books written in 1582. These feelings he cherished in spite of the fierce religious controversy which raged there during the entire period of his residence. Cardinal Pole had established the Catholics in power, when he entered on the Chancellorship of the University in 1556, by prohibiting the use of English in the college halls, by burning English bibles in the market-place, and by removing Protestant books from the libraries. But with the accession of Elizabeth visitors were appointed "to make a mild and gentle, not rigorous, reformation." But the assumption of the Chancellorship by Leicester in 1564 and his incumbency of this office for twenty-four years led to results which were far from being mild and gentle. The most important of his measures, introduced in the year after Gentili reached the university, stipulated that all students above sixteen years of age should subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles and the Royal Supremacy. Elizabeth's early

reforms had precipitated a struggle between the Protestants and Catholics; the new rule, although directed against the Catholics, militated against the Puritans and led to a feud between them and the adherents of the Church of England. Twenty years later the field of battle shifts once more. As early as 1606 we hear of William Laud, of Gentili's old college, St. John's, preaching in St. Mary's and "letting fall divers passages savouring of popery." This was two years before the death of Gentili, and in his last days he must have looked forward to still another period of religious dissension in his beloved university. With which side in these various controversies he was friendly we do not know. It may be surmised with considerable probability, however, that his sympathies lay with the Puritans. Many of the Protestant refugees were radicals, and Gentili's intimate relations with Leicester would bear out the hypothesis that he belonged to the religious party of Leicester.

It was only natural that the commissaries who visited the university from time to time to satisfy themselves concerning religious practices there should inquire into the private life of members of the suspected faction with special care. In the history which Rashdall and Rait have written of New College, where Gentili lived, we find some records of the results of these investigations which throw an interesting light on conditions in the college. We learn that "Richard Deale, civilian, accused of wearing a yellow doublet, pleaded that it was subrusi coloris, also of frequent absence from morning chapel, which he denied." "Benedict Quarles was accused of pawning his gown, books, and other goods potandi et luxuriandi causa." "Christopher Diggles was accused of frequenting suspected places for the purpose of dancing." "Edward White was accused of reading profane books in Chapel, and at other times the hours of the Virgin." "Thomas Reading, M.A., Reader of Greek in the College, was accused of negligently reading that tongue." Two of the regulations which grew out of a visitation made to New College shortly before the appointment of Gentili to a Readership there are interesting in connection with Gentili's work in that college. They are to the following effect: (1) "The Readers of Philosophy and Law are required to lecture five times a week," and (2) "The disputations are frequently begun late at night, and only last a quarter of an hour. They are in future to begin not later than 8 P. M. and to last two hours."

Both Queen Elizabeth and King James took a lively interest in Oxford, and a few years after Gentili's advancement to a Regius Professorship the Queen made a ceremonious visit to the university. From a Cambridge gentleman who attended Lord Burleigh on the visit we have a long account of the programme which was carried out for the edification and entertainment of Elizabeth. It ran through a period of six days, from September 22 to 28, 1592, and included a portentous series of sermons, addresses, and disputations, so that we are not surprised to hear of the impatience of the Queen in the middle of a particularly tedious session when "the Proctors uttering their accustomed words unto the Replier, viz., 'Procede, Magister,' her Majestie, supposing it had been spoken to the Answerer, said, that 'He had bene already too longe."" The public exercises of the last day must have been those with which Gentili was most concerned, for they were given over to law and divinity. "At three of the clock in the afternoone, hir Majestie being again come to St. Marye's (attended, as already sayd), Mr. Dr.— B- answered in Law, and four other Doctors replied. The question which they most stood upon was this; viz., 'An Judex debet judicare secundum allegata & probata, contra Conscientiam?' which (after the Disputation) was concluded in the affirmative by Mr. Dr. (Francis Bevans, LL.D.), Master of Jesus Colledge there, and then Chancellor of Hereford." We may surmise with some plausibility that Gentili, the Regius Professor of Civil Law, was one of the "four other Doctors" who replied.

It would be interesting to know who the friends of Gentili were during his residence at Oxford, but, with the exception of a few men to whom he refers in his Advocatio and in other writings, we cannot say. Laud and Hobbes came to the university during his time, but they were much younger than he was. To one of his contemporaries, Sir Thomas Bodley, however, we feel that he must have been drawn by the common passion which both men had for books, of which in the case of Gentili we have such striking proof in his Advocatio.

The composition of the book just mentioned falls during the closing years of his life, and the work was not published until after his death. During the last part of the sixteenth century and the early years of the seventeenth, Spain and the Netherlands were at war with each other.

Out of this conflict there developed between the Spanish and the Dutch a great many difficult questions of international law, in which England as a neutral nation was concerned, and, as Gentili's brother Scipione remarks in his preface to the Advocatio, James I "could not help allowing the controversies and quarrels which these people had referred to him to be settled in accordance with the principles of law and equity." The cases at issue were heard by the English Court of Admiralty, and Alberico Gentili, with the approval of King James, represented the interests of Spain at the hearings. He acted in this capacity from 1605 up to his death in 1608. His appointment to this post testifies to the high esteem in which he was held as a jurist and to the reputation throughout the world which his writings on international law had brought him. Perhaps the opinion which he rendered to the English court in the case of the Ambassador Mendoza also made the King of Spain look with favor on his appointment.

The arguments which he made in support of Spanish claims, and the opinions which he wrote on other matters of international and of private law were published after his death and at his request in the Advocatio Hispanica. Within my somewhat limited acquaintance with legal works of this period this book is unique. It is unique in two respects. The jurists who preceded Gentili or were his contemporaries composed treatises on general subjects or comments and observations on particular laws or fictitious legal cases. In this book Gentili presents the arguments actually made before the court and where important issues were at stake. We have in it therefore the actual application of the principles of international law to concrete cases. Dealing as it does largely with decisions, precedents, and usage, it is conceived more in the spirit of modern discussions of the subject than any of the other legal writings of the time. It is unique also in the fact that it has a personal note in the letters which it contains addressed by the author to the Spanish Ambassador and to others on certain cases after the decision on them had been rendered.

The presence in the book of one class of questions illustrates some of the important changes which civilization has undergone since the sixteenth century. The pirate, the privateer, the Berber, and the Turk figure largely in Gentili's pages. What constituted piracy? This

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