More has left only one anecdote about Linacre; he describes a physician, ‘the best expert, & therwith the most famouse to, & he that the greatest cures did vppon other men’ who, when he himself grew sick, was so fearful of every symptom that ‘his feare did hym some tyme much more harm than the siknes gave hym cause’.6 In Moriae encomium Erasmus describes Linacre as a jealous and distracted man, who never could find rest in physic or in grammar. There are other reports of his being busy, no doubt over-bearing; one contemporary account describes how as the King’s physician ‘he might be seen striding among the nobles of the royal court, wearing a crimson gown reaching to his ankles, and a full cloak of black velvet thrown across his shoulders’.7 This touch of extravagance will be seen among others of the ‘More circle’.
It may even help us to understand the fourth of the English scholars, whom Erasmus most admired and whom More most loved. John Colet was a Londoner, from a famous and wealthy mercantile family living in Budge Row; his father had been Lord Mayor on two occasions, as well as a member of parliament for the City. Colet was one of only two of the twenty-two children of his family to survive; this would probably guarantee a curious or at least idiosyncratic attitude towards life, even in the funereal conditions of late fifteenth-century London, and there is no doubt that Colet left a definite impression upon his contemporaries for his character as much as his scholarship. He had also gone to St Anthony’s School in Threadneedle Street, though before More, and had then been admitted to Cambridge University; Sir Henry Colet and John More were part of the same group of lawyers and administrators who organised the City’s affairs, but it is not known for how long John Colet and Thomas More had known each other. The earliest document that brings them together is from 1502, reporting a ceremony at which More acted as a witness for Colet’s resignation of an ecclesiastical preferment, a role that suggests, if nothing else, a measure of friendship. John Colet’s younger brother, Richard, had entered Lincoln’s Inn in the year before More was admitted to New Inn; the two families, then, had much in common. Colet left Cambridge to pursue studies in divinity at Oxford, but in his early twenties he also made the pilgrimage to Italy, where he was impressed by the fervent works of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, as well as by the fiery words of Savonarola. It is said that, in his academy in Florence, Ficino was accustomed to keep a votive lamp before the bust of Plato as well as the image of the Virgin; he wrote that man’s whole duty lay in the aspiration towards immortality and the infinite, in the ascent of the soul to God by means of contemplation. It was in this heady atmosphere that Colet found his true faith. He has been variously described as a Christian Neoplatonist and a Catholic reformer, but really he was neither; like More, he simply found a more arresting method for fulfilling what remained essentially a late medieval piety. On his return from Italy, he took up a professorship at Oxford, where he began a series of lectures and commentaries upon the Bible and, in particular, upon the letters of St Paul.
There is an amusing description of John Colet in one of Erasmus’s Colloquies, concerning pilgrimages; they had travelled together to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in the cathedral church of Canterbury, where Colet was less than impressed by the various relics paraded before them by the pious guides. He drew back in disgust from a holy arm which still had some flesh adhering to it; he was ‘of ardent temper’,8 too, and berated one priest for not distributing some of the riches of the shrine, bedecked in gold and silver and jewels, to the poor people of the area. There was one other characteristic touch when Colet, offered a piece of linen once supposedly used by Becket as a handkerchief, ‘disdainfully replaced it; pouting out his lips as if imitating a whistle’.9 The little moue which Colet made is entirely recognisable; he was a man of fastidious temperament, abstemious to a fault, disturbed by ‘indecent or ambiguous words’,10 and a great preacher upon the horrors of the flesh. After he had become Dean of St Paul’s, he ordered that signs be put on its walls and doorways proclaiming ‘This is a holy place, and urinating is forbidden.’ Colet also had a reputation for irascibility, contentiousness and stubbornness; as More said, he had a habit of ‘disputandi’11 and was therefore fond of argument. His withdrawal from the finery and pleasures of the world was also emphasised by his dress; he always wore black, while his ecclesiastical rank demanded a scarlet hue. There was without doubt a certain extravagance in Colet’s behaviour, which we may see as characteristic of this era in English life in which dress and gesture and deportment were considered to be indispensable elements in the creation and presentation of character.
Certainly the strident example of John Colet had a profound effect upon More, and he is described by two early biographers as the younger man’s ‘mentor’.12 There seems little doubt that Colet introduced the younger man to the work of Pico della Mirandola, whose biography More subsequently translated; perhaps more importantly, Colet’s sermons and arguments provided a model for reconciling More’s intelligence, austerity and devotion. When Colet delivered his commentaries upon the letters of St Paul, for example, he was drawing upon the central texts of the period; the epistles, with their news of awakening and regeneration through the Holy Spirit, were soon to become of crucial importance in the theology of the Reformation; Luther would claim for his own new faith the apostle’s conclusion that ‘a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law’.13 But Colet was no reformer, at least not in that fundamental sense. In his own commentaries upon the Pauline texts, he chose to interpret the apostle’s notions of grace and illumination within the context of the Neoplatonism Colet himself had imbibed at Florence. The declarations of Paul were taken as indications of the soul’s thirst for the divine presence and of its ascent through the hierarchy of the universe towards the vision of godhead. It might be argued that Colet anticipates Luther in his emphasis upon individual enlightenment, but for Colet it takes place within the stable sphere of the Church upon earth. But his central point, for any understanding of More, is that the life of the spirit could be amplified by reference to classical sources.
Colet had a particular, angry dislike for the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, for example, and it is in this spirit that we can understand his emphasis upon love rather than knowledge in his Lectures on Romans. ‘It is beyond doubt,’ he wrote, ‘more pleasing to God himself to be loved by men than to be surveyed, and to be worshipped than to be understood.’14 Colet also talks of the need for the loving imitation of Christ, as the true model of active virtue in the world. It is possible to see here how religious devotion and the new emphasis upon classical scholarship are part of the same movement of the spirit—the return to the pristine sources of truth and the avoidance of commentary and interpretation, are part of the same great renovation of piety and learning which More and his contemporaries ardently wished for. They are a part, too, of their sense of the necessity for active involvement in the world. If Augustine learned from Paul, More in turn learned from Augustine.
These were the interests, then, that brought together Linacre the physician and Lily the grammarian, More the lawyer and Colet the preacher and educator. But there is one other person who would play a permanent and significant role in Thomas More’s life. The name of John Rastell is now forgotten, yet he could lay claim to the title of ‘Renaissance man’ with greater plausibility than most of his more famous contemporaries. He was an ‘utter barrister’ of the Middle Temple, some two or three years older than More, and it is likely that they met when the younger man first entered New Inn. Rastell married More’s sister, Elizabeth, while he was still a student of the law; some three years later, in 1499, he provided security for a loan together with John More and Thomas More. He and his wife returned to his birthplace of Coventry for a few years, but on his return to London he manifested all the energy which the city seemed to invest in those of a passionate nature. The details of his career can be summarised here as an indication of the range of interests associated with the ‘More circle’ itself. John Rastell was a playwright, theolo
gian and compiler of English history; he was a maker of pageants, a mathematician and a student of cosmography; he was an engineer, a legal theorist and a putative religious reformer; he constructed the first public London stage and proposed to set up a colony in the New World; he was an MP, a printer and a publisher. It was Rastell (and, later, his son) who published More’s polemical works, for example, and from his press issued a number of plays, legal abridgements, ‘merry tales’ and musical texts which owe some of their inspiration—if not their origin—to Thomas More and his household.
So we may include John Rastell with Linacre, Lily, Colet and More himself as constituting a group which has been variously described as that of ‘London humanists’ or ‘London reformers’. It is pertinent that they came to prominence at a time when intellectual self-consciousness itself was beginning to emerge from the communal spirit of medieval piety. They found their proper role, too, in a city whose mercantile power under Henry VII was at last commensurate with its status as the central focus of national life; it was this moment of confidence and prosperity that encouraged the spirit of reform. Most importantly, perhaps, the London reformers were in positions of power and authority—Linacre tutor to the Prince of Wales, John Colet soon to be Dean of St Paul’s—which allowed them to exert a direct and sometimes decisive influence upon the more public aspects of London life. It would not be too much to claim that the progress of law reform and the changes in the educational curriculum, let alone the improvement in public hygiene and the conduct of general administration through various humanist courtiers, were directly attributable to the work of this group of people. There are other significant associations. John Morton had been a patron of the ‘new learning’ and his successor, William Warham, also played a part in promoting it. Other leaders of the English faith, such as Christopher Urswick and Richard Fox, supported it as an important means of improving the piety of the Church and renovating its teachings.
It would be wrong to apply the title of ‘London humanism’, however, in too narrow or exclusive a sense. As far as Thomas Linacre was concerned, for example, his interest in a revived classical scholarship was inspired and shared by the scholars of Louvain, Antwerp, Florence and elsewhere. In particular he kept up a close and steady contact with the great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, who had published his translation of De Sphaera. More importantly, Aldus had single-handedly promulgated the works of Aristotle; he had constructed a Greek typeface in 1498, and Linacre himself had already participated in the ‘Aldine Academy’, which was devoted to the study of the language and literature of that civilisation. Clearly Aldus was not a printer, or publisher, in any contemporary sense of those terms. He was, rather, one of a group of innovative technicians and intellectual pioneers who had found in the invention of printing access to a whole new conception of learning. Johann Amerbach, and later Froben, were responsible for the first publication of the works of St Ambrose and St Augustine in Basle; there was Plantin-Moretus of Antwerp, Badius of Paris and Theodoricus Martens of Louvain. These were the actual sources of that learning which the reformers and humanists of London were in the process of expounding. Their workshops were also libraries, with the press and the foundry as the indispensable furniture in what were literally the newest academies of learning. They hired scholars to improve the editing of texts; their premises were used for lectures and public readings.
But they were only the intellectual vanguard of a rapidly growing trade; by the end of the 1470s there were printers in all the major cities of the Low Countries, and it has been estimated that by 1500 there were altogether seventeen hundred presses in operation throughout Europe.15 It was a world in which commerce and learning, scholarship and merchandise, came together for the first time. That is why it has been suggested that the proliferation of books and pamphlets is directly related to the success of the Reformation in parts of Europe; this, at least, was the theory of the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, who believed that God’s cause was ‘advanced, not with sword or target … but with printing, reading and writing’.16 In fact there is every reason to believe that the expansion of the printing press led to a revival of Catholic piety in the publication of saints’ lives, arts of dying and various works of a liturgical or homilectic nature. More himself encouraged his close relations, the Rastells, to publish an extensive variety of books both in Latin and in English.
There were certain colleagues of More—in particular Colet and Grocyn—who made no determined effort to launch their own work into print, however; they still relied upon the resources of the manuscript culture of their youth. This may in turn be related to Colet’s continuing interest in cabbalistic learning, in the ‘secrets’ of such ancient writers as the pseudo-Dionysius, not to be divulged to the vulgar throng. It is certainly true that the enclosed and hierarchical nature of the medieval Church could not easily have withstood the climate of learning and opinion generated by the printing press, but this was something which the London reformers understood perfectly well. That is why their concern was with a purified faith, together with the persuasive eloquence of the classically trained grammarian or orator, as a means of renovating that Church. That is also why Thomas More used the new printing technology with an assiduity and determination worthy of any Lutheran reformer. It is at this moment, too, that another figure should enter the narrative of More’s life—a Catholic scholar and rhetorician who used the art of printing to disseminate his work across all Europe. It is Desiderius Erasmus to whom we must now turn, when he visited England for the first time in 1499.
Since there is a tradition of anecdotes concerning the meeting of great personages, it is not surprising that the first encounter of More and Erasmus has been embellished with coincidence and with Latin witticisms; in one version Erasmus admits to coming ‘ex inferis’, which might mean from the cellar, hell, or the Low Countries. In this particular account the two men are supposed to have met at the table of the Lord Mayor of London; this is probably the reflection of some garbled report that they were introduced at the house of John Colet’s father, Sir Henry Colet, who had indeed held that office. But it is more likely that they met at the London house of Sir William Say, who was the father-in-law of Erasmus’s most noble pupil and a member of Henry VII’s council.
The great scholar of late medieval Europe was born in Rotterdam in 1466; he was some twelve years older than Thomas More, therefore, and was the child of very different circumstances. He was illegitimate, but was nevertheless supported by both parents; at an early age he was sent to a school at Deventer, where his youthful proficiency, quick understanding and retentive memory brought him to the attention of his elders. ‘Well done, Erasmus,’ one of them is supposed to have exclaimed, ‘the day will come when thou wilt reach the highest summit of erudition.’17 It is very much like the prophecy of John Morton on the future of young Thomas More and, in both cases, we may safely place the remarks within the standard repertoire of the ‘golden legends’ of historical figures.
Both of Erasmus’s parents died of the plague fever when he was in his thirteenth year, and when at a later date he revealed that ‘some secret natural impulse drove me to good literature’18 it is possible that part of this impulse derived from grief and the need for forgetfulness. His books became his companions; they did not change, or decay, or die. ‘I was just a sick and solitary child,’ he once wrote;19 such a child is likely to be drawn to reading, and to its concomitant learning, as a bulwark and defence. After the death of his parents his guardians sent him to a monastic school, or ‘Brothers’ House’, where he came under the aegis of a group of lay brothers known as ‘the Brethren of the Common Life’; these men and women practised a religious life deeply imbued by the spirit of devotio moderna, a form of austere and practical piety which dwelled upon the inward imitation of the life of Christ rather than upon external observances and rituals. Erasmus was not altogether impressed by their devotion, excluding, as it did, the appetite for learning and the aptitude for scholarship; but at a late
r stage its influence upon him, and more especially upon More, will become apparent.
Already it is possible to see how different an education this was from More’s; his was a practical and administrative training, whereas that of Erasmus led ineluctably towards teaching or the Church. Under the influence of his guardians he was persuaded to enter a monastery of Augustinian canons, where he was ordained in 1492. The length of his residence there has been estimated variously between six and ten years, certainly long enough to give him a permanent distaste for monastic life. Yet it afforded him the opportunity to indulge that passion for friendship which was, according to his biographers, one of his salient characteristics; Erasmus said that ‘life without a friend I think no life, but rather death’.20 He believed himself to be ugly and when he remarks upon More’s ‘venustus’,21 charm or beauty, there is a note of self-abnegation which in certain circumstances might lead towards excessive devotion to those more favoured than himself. It is no surprise, then, that his enthusiasm for companionship often led to disappointment or a sense of betrayal. His true friends, after all, were indeed his books. On several occasions he echoed Pliny’s belief that time not spent in study is time wasted, and he often repeated the precept that you must ‘live as if you are to die tomorrow, study as if you were to live for ever’. It was an instruction which he took to heart, as anyone who has had cause to review the extent of his work will testify, and even in this early part of his life he lost himself in manuscripts and words. He was largely self-taught and from the beginning he wrote so eagerly, effortlessly and fluently that we may say of him what he once remarked of St Jerome, that ‘compared with him, the others appear able neither … to … read nor write’.22 He composed poetry, and quoted as his authorities in that pursuit Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Statius, Martial, Claudian, Persius, Lucan, Tibullus and Propertius. It is a long list, but there is every indication that he knew his models very well. His reputation for eloquence and learning was such that he was taken into the service of the Bishop of Cambrai, but in 1494 he was given permission to undertake further studies at the University of Paris. He was compelled to earn his living there as a teacher of rhetoric, and for a while he was resident tutor in a boarding-house for the sons of English nobles and gentlemen; in this household he first met William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who eventually persuaded him to travel to England.
The Life of Thomas More Page 10