Many of the posts on Clay Lane are by well known writers such as William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Others are by less well known authors who have something no less important to say.
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Thomas Elyot (?1490-1546) was the son of a judge, and under the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey he was appointed clerk to the King’s Council in 1523. After Wolsey’s fall from favour, Henry VIII suspected Elyot of sympathies with Queen Catherine, and a year after he was knighted in 1530 he was sent abroad as ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire. That same year, 1531, he published The Boke Named the Govenour, the work for which he is most remembered. Elyot also wrote on medicine, made the first English translations of several Greek classics and published a groundbreaking Latin dictionary. Less creditably, he played a key part in bringing the exile William Tyndale, whose Bible translations are the basis of the Authorised Version, to trial and execution by the Imperial authorities near Brussels in 1536.
