Virtual Grub Street: Johannes Sturmius's Winding Path to Impress the English.

Johannes Sturmius was born “Johann Sturm,” to Wilhelm and Gertrude Sturm, on the 1st of October 1507.[1] The family lived on the slopes of the Eifel Valley some 50 miles from the border with Belgium. Wilhelm was the accountant for the Count de Manderscheidt. Gertrude was likely a member of the wealthy bourgeois Huls family of Cologne.[2] Young Johann himself lived a solidly bourgeois childhood and Wilhelm was able to support him financially during his college years and to provide the funds to launch him in his first business venture.

Beginning in 1521, Johann attended the Gymnase de Saint-Jérôme prep school, in Liège, Belgium. The school had only a loose relationship to the Catholic orthodoxy at the time. It believed in advanced curriculum and teaching methods. Latin and Greek classics and mathematics were stressed.

Three years later he attended the equally progressive Royal College at Louvain. There he continued to increase his command of Latin and Greek and added Hebrew under the finest professors in each discipline. There he joined the publishing business of the school’s Greek master, Rudiger Rescius. He purchased his share with funds provided by his father.[3]

In 1528, Sturm moved to Strasbourg. He may have chosen to do so because the town was beginning to have a reputation for exceptional professors in Protestant subjects. The next year he relocated to Paris to act as the sales agent for the books he and Rescius were publishing. In order to assure himself a sufficient living he took a degree in medicine. It is not clear that he ever actively practiced as a professional.

What is clear is that he assured himself a living through his association with Guillaume and Jean du Bellay, friends and counselors of the French King Francis I, and many of the finest intellectuals of the day. Jean du Bellay, in particular, had already been appointed Bishop of Bayonne by Francis. Sturm’s own reputation as an intellectual — foremost as a Latinist — was second to none. For his part, he thought of himself equally as a professor of classical logic.

At the same time, the industrious Sturm was gaining a reputation as an intellectual leader of the Protestant movement. He was in regular contact with Philip Melanchthon and Martin Bucer (the two greatest Protestant figures of the day after Luther).

After Francis I reacted with violence against the growing population of French Protestants, on two occasions during the 1530s, he found the strength of the backlash surprising. The Protestant German princes had gathered together in the League of Smalcalde. The French Protestants looked to them for allies and inspiration. Creating an enemy simultaneously within and just across the French borders was clearly unwise.

Bishop du Bellay being among his most trusted advisors, the king accepted his nomination, in 1540, of Jean Sleidan and Sturmius as his agents to begin negotiations with the Protestants.[4] While the two were Protestant and the Royal administration Catholic, du Bellay had absolute trust that his longtime friends would placate the Protestants and properly represent the Catholic’s interests.

The state of the negotiations would fluctuate for years before Henry VIII and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, signed a separate treaty that allowed the English king to invade France. Francis I’s situation was rapidly deteriorating. Henry, however, had limited funds and could not mount sufficient forces to win a war outright. By the summer of 1545 England and France were at a stalemate. Sleidan and Sturmius’s negotiations already having involved Charles V, and the Protestants hugely complicating the situations of both the Emperor and the French King, Du Bellay (now Bishop of both Bayonne and Paris and a Cardinal to boot), advised expanding the mission of the two agents.[5] At this point Sturmius had been much the more impressive and he was given a French pension (i.e. salary) and acted de facto as France’s most trusted ambassador in spite of the fact that he was not French but a citizen of the free city of Strasbourg.

It is in this way that Johannes Sturmius first came to the attention of the English Court. The English were begrudgingly impressed. From the start, Sturmius dominated all other parties in the negotiation.

Thirty years later, Sturmius would be in their employ. Many members of the English Court would avail themselves of the scholar’s hospitality as would Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford.

[1] Schmidt, Charles, La Vie et Les Travaux de Jean Sturm (1855), 1.

[2] Manes Sturmiani siue Epicedia, scripta in obitum summi viri Ioan Sturmius… (1590). “matre, lectissi

mascemina Gertrudide Нulsana”, A1. Schmidt, 2.

[3] Schmidt, 7.

[4] Ibid., 50.

[5] Ibid., 60. “Les Etats désignèrent, pour être ambassadeurs auprès du roi de France , Christophe de Venningen , conseiller du duc de Wurtemberg , Jean Bruno de Nidbruk et Sturm , chargés en même temps d'intercéder en faveur des protestants français persécutés;…”. Schmidt does not cite Sturm specifically as the head of the delegation but English state papers make the matter clear that he was such from the first.

Lord Burghley to John Sturmius, Sept. 15, 1572. April 22, 2018. "W. Ron Hess has suggested that Sturmius was a spy station-master and money launderer for the infamous spy network of Francis Walsingham and the Baron Burghley and that Edward de Vere's visit, in 1575, was a spy mission."
Bayle's Dictionary Entry on Johannes Sturmius. April 15, 2018. “Diligence makes clear that his reputation as a cloak-and-dagger English spy is without basis. He did pass along information he thought might be of interest from his correspondence with many contacts throughout Europe to William Cecil and Francis Walsingham.”
Leonard Digges and the Shakespeare First Folio. November 30, 2017. "Upon receiving his baccalaureate, in 1606, Leonard briefly chose to reside in London. After that he went on an extended tour of the Continent which ended around the year that Shaksper died."
Edward de Vere's Memorial For His Son, Who Died at Birth May 1583. July 5, 2017. "The brief Viscount Bulbeck being the son of the renowned poet and playwright Edward de Vere, we might have hoped to have the text of the father’s own memorial poem. As far as traditional literary history is concerned, no such poem has yet been discovered."