 Without family, connections or means of his own, Bruno relied on his wits. For example, at Noli, between Nice and Genoa, he taught Latin to schoolboys and elementary astronomy to “certain gentlemen” (Firpo 2000: 45). In Geneva, he worked in a printer’s shop, correcting proofs. He aspired to greater things. His goal was to teach philosophy without the trammels of revealed truths, preferably at a university. On several occasions, a position of this kind seemed within his grasp. Two factors, however, conspired to thwart his ambitions. The first was the unsettled circumstances of Reformation Europe. At Toulouse, for example, he taught philosophy at the university for nearly two years (1579–81), but renewed conflict between Catholics and Huguenots in the summer of 1581 forced him to leave the city. His notoriety further complicated matters. In a dispatch dated 28 March 1583, the English ambassador in Paris, Henry Cobham, alerted Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Francis Walsingham, to Bruno’s impending arrival: “Il Sr Doctor Jordano Bruno Nolano, a professor in philosophy, intendeth to pass into England; whose religion I cannot commend” (Aquilecchia 1995: 22, 24). Not by chance does Bruno have the distinction of being the only known sixteenth-century philosopher to have been excommunicated from all three major confessions: Roman Catholic (Naples, 1576), Calvinist (Geneva, 1579) and Lutheran (Helmstedt, 1589). The second factor was his temperament. Intolerant of those whom he deemed fools, Bruno repeatedly caused offence. In The Ash Wednesday Supper, the first and best known of the six philosophical dialogues in Italian that he published while living in London, he decried the ignorance and pomposity of English men of learning and cast aspersions on the London commoner. He compared himself, “a Neapolitan born and bred under a more benign sky”, with a hapless antagonist at Oxford University, whom he described as a discourteous “pig” (BOI I, 535). Such was the offence that the work caused that he began his next dialogue, On the Cause, the Principle and the One with an elaborate apology in which he retracted his comments while simultaneously justifying them. It was a ploy that he would use again, ill-advisedly, during his trial.