Translation is an art whose purpose is often abused, made to suit the political self-interests of the translator. One of the first English Italophiles was Edward VI’s tutor, William Thomas, who surmised that Italian political thought, especially as he had learned it from Machiavelli’s writings, might be helpful for bringing about political change in England. In the discourses he wrote for Edward, Thomas actually translated Machiavelli in such a manner as to transfer the Italian’s precepts to an English ethos, but in the transpositions he made, Thomas eliminated the theological references from his original. Thomas was the first Englishman to translate the Florentine, and was also the first Englishman to argue that English, not Latin, ought to be the language of education in England, another lesson, arguably, that he learned from Machiavelli.