were George Acworth and William Barker. Acworth had lived abroad
during Mary's reign, studying civil law in France and Italy. When
Elizabeth came to the throne he was elected public orator of the
University of Cambridge, but through being idle, dissolute, and a
drunkard, he lost all his preferments in England.[127] Barker, or
Bercher, who was educated at St John's or Christ's, was abroad at the
same time as Ascham, who may have met him as Hoby did in Italy.[128]
Barker seems to have been an idle person--he says that after travels "my
former fancye of professenge nothinge partycularly was verye muche
encreased"[129]--and a papistical one, for on the accession of Mary he
came home to serve the Duke of Norfolk, whose Catholic plots he
betrayed, under torture, in 1571. It was then that the Duke bitterly
dubbed him an "Italianfyd Inglyschemane," equal in faithlessness to "a
schamlesse Scote";[130] _i.e._ the Bishop of Ross, another witness.

Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, famous for his rude
behaviour to Sir Philip Sidney, whom he subsequently tried to dispatch
with hired assassins after the Italian manner,[131] might well have been
one of the rising generation of courtiers whom Ascham so deplored. In
Ascham's lifetime he was already a conspicuous gallant, and by 1571, at
the age of twenty-two, he was the court favourite. The friends of the
Earl of Rutland, keeping him informed of the news while he was
fulfilling in Paris those heavy duties of observation which Cecil mapped
out for him, announce that "There is no man of life and agility in every
respect in Court, but the Earl of Oxford."[132] And a month afterwards,
"Th' Erle of Oxenforde hath gotten hym a wyffe--or at the leste a wyffe
hath caught hym--that is Mrs Anne Cycille, whearunto the Queen hath
gyven her consent, the which hathe causyd great wypping, waling, and
sorowful chere, of those that hoped to have hade that golden daye."[133]
Ascham did not live to see the development of this favorite into an
Italianate Englishman, but Harrison's invective against the going of
noblemen's sons into Italy coincides with the return of the Earl from a
foreign tour which seems to have been ill-spent.

At the very time when the Queen "delighted more in his personage and his
dancing and valiantness than any other,"[134] Oxford betook himself to
Flanders--without licence. Though his father-in-law Burghley had him
brought back to the indignant Elizabeth, the next year h