Doctor Augustine, physician to Cardinal Wolsey and King Henry VIII.

I. THE WOLSEY YEARS It is odd that Augustine de Augustinis, M.D., native of Venice but denizen of England for more than twenty years, has not drawn more attention from Tudor historians. Until the publication in 1960 of the first volume of the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1960), which includes Mario Rosa's sketch, only meagre biographical details had appeared in print. And yet Augustine's service as the personal physician of Cardinal Wolsey and his subsequent position as physician-inordinary to King Henry VIII projected him into the mainstream of English political life. In the former post he had been a colleague of Thomas Cromwell, who was to discover in him a useful agent for espionage and diplomacy, while his propinquity to the monarch during the Reformation years enabled him to profit munificently from the allocation of ecclesiastical properties and transformed him in remarkably short order from household servant to member ofthe bourgeoisie. The career of Augustine bears a bizarre, even sinister, quality. His political assignments, frequently carried out in the penumbral milieu of Renaissance diplomacy, now and then took him away from the court itself into the shadowy world of taverns, inns and back streets, not only in London, but in Antwerp, Brussels, Regensberg, Bologna, Florence and Rome. There he trafficked in the intrigueswhose details itwas his mission to seek out and report to his employers at the English court. The fact that he survived two arrests and two incarcerations in the Tower of London stamps him as a nimble agent and suggests why he was able to end his days quietly in Lucca. He seems always to have been held in slight distrust, even by his employers, but his linguistic skills and his talent for espionage rendered him useful, and in the diplomatic world of the early sixteenth century who could be more useful than a medical spy whose access to the bedchambers of political personages was taken for granted? Shortly after he had risen to prominence in the household of Wolsey, Augustine came to the attention of Claude Dodieu, secretary to the French embassy in London, who found him "very uneasy in his manner and suspicious".'