Thomas Wilson (rhetorician)

Thomas Wilson (1524–1581) was an English diplomat, judge, and privy councillor in the government of Elizabeth I. He is now remembered for his Logique (1551) and The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), an influential text. They have been called "the first complete works on logic and rhetoric in English."

He also wrote A Discourse upon Usury by way of Dialogue and Orations (1572), and he was the first to publish a translation of Demosthenes into English.

He was the son of Thomas Wilson, a farmer, of Strubby, Lincolnshire. He was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, where he joined the school of Hellenists to which John Cheke, Thomas Smith, Walter Haddon and others belonged. He earned a BA in 1546, and an M.A. in 1549.

Wilson was an intellectual companion to the sons of John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, especially with John, Ambrose, and Robert Dudley. When the Dudley family fell from power in 1553, he fled to the Continent. He was with Sir John Cheke in Padua in 1555–1557, and afterwards at Rome, whither in 1558 Queen Mary wrote, ordering him to return to England to stand his trial as a heretic. He refused to come home, but was arrested by the Roman Inquisition and tortured. He escaped, and fled to Ferrara, but in 1560 he was once more in London.

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