Although Petrarch meant his words to apply only to philosophers, they still well describe the ends of this first thorough intellectual and biographical study of Thomas Starkey. Petrarch's subjects were also well known, but this cannot be said of Starkey. He was born about the end of the fifteenth century into a reasonably well-off Cheshire family which paid for his education at Magdalen College, Oxford. In addition to an initiation into a rudimentary variety of humanism, Starkey there met the man who would have the most decisive impact on his life, Reginald Pole, grandson of the Duke of Clarence and protégé of Henry VIII. After gaining his MA in 1521, Starkey probably made his first trip to Italy, the determining event in his life. He would spend about a decade out of the next thirteen years acquiring an Italian education, mainly while moving in Pole's circle in Padua. His training there, first in natural science and then in civil law, prepared him to fulfil his ambition to enter royal service.

If it had not developed before, Starkey's aim to attract Henry's patronage matured in the last years of the 1520s, which he divided about equally between England and France.