We will not follow the narrative through the subsequent lawsuit brought by Mallerie against Hall’s servants, the trial presided over by Recorder Fleetwood, the death of Mallerie, who “departed well leanyng to the olde Father of Rome, a dad whome I have heard some say Mr Hall doth not hate” or Hall’s subsequent expulsion from Parliament.  This is enough to show the sort of harmless, vain braggarts some of these “Italianates” were, and how easily they acquired the reputation of being desperate fellows.  Mallerie’s lawyer at the trial charged Hall with “following the revenge with an Italian minde learned at Rome.”

Among other Italianified Cambridge men whom Ascham might well have noticed 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.