The portrait of Erasmus (now in the Royal Collection) was painted first. He is depicted in front of a bookcase telling us he is a notable scholar.The tools on the shelves behind him are all his own works, one of them a collaboration with Thomas More. His clothes tell us he is not a poor scholar and the purse on his lap tells us he has achieved wealth and position through his talents while the religious nature of the books testify to his good character.
The other picture, the one that I chose for my book cover, was delayed because Peter Giles fell ill. He was ill for some time and when he finally showed up the painter, who was a remarkably fine portrait painter, complained he looked nothing like the man he had sketched earlier. "He's been ill,"they said. "He's lost a lot of weight. Too many purgatve pills." He seems also to have got a lot older. Peter Giles was 28. The man in the painting looks to be contemporary with Erasmus, a man, well-preserved,in his mid-forties. Henry Medwall was 46.
Peter Giles had died and Henry Medwall had taken his identity.
It was natural that Thomas More would want a portrait of his mentor. Medwall has been his teacher when More was a page in Cardinal Morton's household where Medwall was a chaplain. He had fond memories of the entertainment at Lambeth Palace where Medwall was also 'Master Merryman' - the Master of the Revels and rather surprisingly according to his son in law, William Roper, More was quite a hoot at Christmas himself.
Apart from the age of the sitter what else suggests this is not Peter Giles?
Look at the books behind him. Clearly marked are not the titles but the authors. Seneca and Aristophanes were the models for all the Tudor playwrights. The name of Aristophanes is given in Greek. According to Thomas More who depicts Medwall as Raphael Hythlodacus (a lover of trifles) in Utopia he was very good Greek scholar but not so good in Latin which is why Thomas More writes the book which was originally published in Latin.
This is not a 28-year old Flemish town clerk but a leading European writer and philosopher. This is Henry Medwall - Master Merryman.
And look at how he is dressed - fur collar and velvet hat, heavy gold ring on his finger. Flemish burghers were not allowed to wear fur. It was reserved by law for aristocrats. So this man is a foreigner but one who has done very well for himself through his own talents. The chalice on the shelf indicates his good character and his earlier career as a churchman.
The portrait is not given the name of the sitter but is titled Aegidias, the Latin form of the Greek Agidios. Various art critics have ingeniously argued that the name Giles or Gillis comes from the Latin Aegidias and the title is therefore a compliment to Peter Gillis.
I'm not so sure.
The legend of Agidios, an Athenian of Royal descent, tells how he gave away all his riches and sailed away until he landed at Marseilles where he became a hermit and subsequently founded an Abbey. (One of the earliest Christian monasteries, that of John Cassian, was at Marseilles.)
In 1499, when Cardinal Morton died, Henry Medwall resigned from his household and disappeared.
History then forgets him.
Or perhaps not?
The name Aegidius may not refer to Peter Giles at all but to Aegidius Romanus, Aegidius of Rome, a mediaeval philosopher and scholastic theologian (1297-1316) who wrote a book 'On Ecclesiastical Power", a mediaeval theory of World Power and a poem "De Regimine Principum", a guide to Christian temporal leadership, both of which must surely have been on Cardinal Morton's bookshelf. He also published the Uncanonical gospels so just the man for someone who is both a humanist and a Reformer of both church and state.
At the end of Utopia is a letter from 'Peter Giles' to Thomas More thanking him for a copy of the book which was published not in London but in Antwerp. The tone of the letter, indeed its literary style is different from all that has gone before. It is very tongue in cheek. The writer refers to Raphael Hythlodacus and applauds the 'notable, yea, almost divine wit of the man'. You cannot take the jokes out of a comic playwright.
He goes on to say that no-one knows what has become of the eccentric traveller. He has simply vanished.
He died in Antwerp in 1533.
