There is further evidence of his spiritual devotion in a short treatise which he translated from the Latin in this period. It is a biography of Pico della Mirandola, the young Italian scholar and philosopher who died of a fever in Florence, in 1494, after seeking the truths of the universe. It is likely that More was introduced to his work by John Colet; Colet had already annotated Pico’s commentary upon Genesis, and he was in any case immensely attracted to the mixture of cabbalism, Neoplatonism and deep spirituality that the Italian exemplified. The formal context for More’s translation was that of a traditional new year’s gift; he presented what was essentially a devotional work to a friend, Joyeuce Leigh, who had been admitted to the order of the Poor Clares or Minoresses—a house of nuns situated outside the city walls, just beyond Aldgate. It is likely that she came from a wealthy London family well known to the Mores and had made the orthodox journey into relatively comfortable seclusion. More’s translation was part of a hagiographical tradition, but it was not merely an exercise for a specific occasion. It is clear that he was powerfully affected by his subject; there were similarities between the two young men which could not fail to have impressed themselves upon More. Pico possessed ‘an incredible wit’ and ‘a marvelous fast memory’ but his ‘besy & infatigable study’ was tempered by the fact that ‘He was of chere alwaye mery & of so beninge nature he was never troubled with Angre’ and always evinced ‘a plesaunt and a mery cotenaunce’.26 He derived ‘great substance’ from reading Greek and Latin authors, but gained no profit from academic learning which ‘leyned to no thing but only mere traditions & ordinaunces’. Precisely the same qualities and opinions were shared by More, and it seems likely that Cresacre More was right to believe that his great-grandfather saw in Pico a very pattern of action and belief.27 There was much emphasis in this period on the virtues of ‘imitation’—Imitatio Christi being the single most important example—which is the more pious aspect of that conception of the world as a stage in which each must play a part.
If we can take the Life of Pico as in certain respects an act of self-definition, then, More’s excisions from, and alterations of, the original (written by Pico’s nephew) take on a biographical relevance. More is particularly interested in explaining how Pico had for a time followed ‘the croked & ragged path of voluptuouse lyving’28 but had chastened the appetites of the flesh with prayers and self-flagellation. A later printing of the little book has on its title-page an image of the crucified Christ, along with the assorted scourges and whips of his Passion. It is clear that the need to tame the possibilities of ‘delirious pleasure’29 was one of More’s early and principal concerns. The omissions within his translation are also significant, since he touches only lightly upon the more quixotic or occult reaches of Pico’s knowledge in order to emphasise his devotional orthodoxy. Walter Pater in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance turned Pico della Mirandola into a fabulous youth whose mission was to reconcile pagan and Christian learning; certainly his interest in esoteric knowledge, and his almost Paracelsian belief in the image of the divine man within every human being, suggest his true affinities. But the young More had no interest in such matters and instead celebrates his subject’s following of God, Church and ‘ye faith of Chryst’.30
His relation to the text is also marked by his additions; he inserted an opening paragraph on the importance of true virtue rather than inherited honour, although this was becoming a commonplace in More’s circle of friends and London citizens. He also versified some of Pico’s spiritual precepts, and out of them created some powerful and haunting poetry. It is upon More’s great theme of mutability and transience, animated by the fervent desire ‘To bere his body in erth, his mynde in heven’ and deepened by the knowledge that life passes ‘As doth a dreme or a shadowe on the wall’.31 This is the music that More carried with him always, even though in some of his later prose works the tone is more combative and theoretical. More’s poetic powers are often undervalued, but the remarkably controlled and melodious ‘rhyme royal’ of these interpolated verses—a form borrowed from Chaucer, the English poet whom he most admired—suggests that he was one of the most accomplished poets of the early sixteenth century. The prose of this biographical treatise is perhaps not so successful, yet the occasional awkwardness of More’s style testifies to the enthusiasm with which he treated the pious and scholarly life of the young Italian who died at the age of thirty-one and was buried in the habit of a Dominican monk. The Life has something of the charm and impetuousness of a first novel or, rather, a Bildungsroman in which More could convey an idealised image of himself. Of course, like many writers of such romances, he did not necessarily tell the whole story. ‘Fashion thyself,’ as Pico himself wrote, ‘in what form thou likest best.’32
More’s spiritual preoccupations did not inhibit his work in the world, and it is important to recognise that throughout these formative years he was playing an active role in the social, administrative and institutional affairs of London. In the same period that he was lecturing on The City of God in St Lawrence Jewry, he was also Reader in Law at Furnivall’s Inn—this was an Inn affiliated to his own Lincoln’s Inn and it is further evidence of his burgeoning reputation as a lawyer as well as a scholar. He lectured here for three years to an audience of clerks and young attorneys and no doubt he seasoned the instruction with the stories he took delight in telling—how one witness was so forgetful that he handed his counsel ‘hys tynder boxe wyth hys flynte and hys matches’33 rather than the box of evidence, which he had left at home; or how one conscientious juror refused to accede to a majority decision by saying ‘I dare not in such a matter passe for good cumpany’.34 More was certainly also practising as a lawyer, conducting the same kind of London business as his father, and there are brief extant records of his being nominated as a London alderman, of his being in some way associated with the guild of the Mercers, of his even renting a house owned by that guild.35 But he was not lacking social connections of a grander kind.
The death of Prince Arthur in the spring of 1502, followed by that of his mother, Elizabeth of York, ten months later, provides a solemn context for More’s direct experience of royal life. Her body was laid in state in the Tower, close to the spot where her two brothers had been secretly buried twenty years before; for the funeral procession a wax effigy of her in full royal regalia was carried on a chair above the coffin, while along the route groups of thirty-seven virgins were stationed, dressed all in white and carrying lighted tapers—their number bearing witness to Elizabeth’s age at the time of her death. In a powerful memorial elegy on the death of Elizabeth, whom he had known well, Thomas More returned to his theme of human transience and the prospect of eternity around ‘Ye that put your trust and confidence/ In worldly joy and frayle prosperitie.’36
Only months before, he had witnessed the procession of Catherine of Aragon, chosen companion to the short-lived Prince Arthur, as she made her triumphal way into the city. This provided the opportunity for one of the most gorgeous and elaborate spectacles, with pageants and tableaux greeting her on the various stages of her journey from London Bridge and Gracechurch Street, turning into Cornhill before moving along Cheapside towards St Paul’s. On her route were displayed painted castles, gushing fountains and elaborate mechanisms; there were dramatic monologues and allegorical scenes, making use of a wealth of astrological and numerological symbolism as well as biblical allusions and contemporary references. More goes on to mention that the Spanish escort looked as if it were made up of ‘pigmei Ethiopes’.37 In the midst of display and magnificence, he never lost his eye for the ridiculous.
This is nowhere more evident than in a comic ballad he composed in the same period. It is entitled ‘A meri iest how a sergeant would learne to play the frere’, and develops the themes of disguise and false identity which are so central to the period:
In any wyse
I would auyse
And counsayle euery man,
His owne craft use,
All newe refuse …38
The mode of address and general tenor of the verse strongly suggest that it was recited—or dramatised—at a banquet of one of the London guilds. It is delivered to ‘masters all’ and the injunction for each man to keep to his ‘craft’ was a conventional stricture in so elaborate and hierarchical a society; we can imagine the young More standing in front of his fellow Londoners and acting out all the voices in this theatrical ballad. His general high spirits, and what we know from his contemporaries of his ‘deadpan’ delivery of comic lines, ensured its success.
But his role in London affairs may have required a wider stage. William Roper suggests that More was ‘a burgess of the Parliament’ for one session during the reign of Henry VII and that his intervention was responsible for the king’s financial demands being ‘clean overthrown’.39 The king was so incensed, again according to Roper, that he promptly imprisoned More’s father in the Tower until John More had paid a fine of £100. More himself is supposed to have considered leaving England in order to escape Henry’s vengeance. It is a perfect story to emphasise how More’s conscience worked against the king’s will, even in these early days, but it has the disadvantage of being less than plausible. There is no record of More in the Commons at this early date and, in any event, the king’s demands were not ‘overthrown’; Henry VII eventually accepted less than parliament offered him. It was the first session in seven years and the king would have shaped its deliberations carefully. It is also highly improbable that Henry would imprison one of his own serjeants, especially upon so outrageous a pretext; certainly in the chronicles of London there is no mention of any such remarkable incident. All the signs are that More and his father were prospering; in the year of the supposed parliamentary fracas, 1504, together they purchased part of an estate in Hertfordshire. Two years later More was dedicating his translations of Lucian, in fulsome terms, to the king’s own secretary. Yet it would be unwise completely to dismiss biographical anecdote; it is evident from More’s coronation poem to Henry VIII that he detested the old king’s financial exactions and considered him to have become grasping and tyrannical. More was already associated with the London merchants upon whom, according to his own report, harsh duties had been exacted; no doubt he implicitly sided with those members of court or council who distrusted or disliked the king’s policies. Here, if anywhere, lies the truth of Roper’s story.
There is at least one clearer token of More’s character and behaviour during this period, since it is to be found in his own words. In a letter to John Colet, he laments his friend’s absence from the city and in an elaborate passage complains of the difficulties of leading a virtuous life in London among false friends and enemies, beset on every side by tradesmen ministering to greed, surrounded by tall houses so that he cannot even see the heavens. More’s words should not be taken literally, since he is engaged in a self-conscious performance of ars dictamen, or letter-writing, and for the purpose descants upon the familiar topic of the evils of the city; he could have borrowed it from Juvenal or Seneca or St Gregory. Yet there are two points of special relevance from the young man who had lectured upon Augustine’s City of God. He alludes to his efforts to ascend the track of virtue,40 while at the same time confessing that by some strong force and urgent necessity41 he is in peril of being thrust down again into darkness. It is hard not to recall here Erasmus’s comment that More’s sexual appetite dissuaded him from ordination, and it seems likely that More himself is here confessing his own weakness. But he knew well enough the cure for lechery. He decided to marry.
CHAPTER XI
HOLY, HOLY, HOLY!
ND when More attended Mass each day, as was his custom, what were the sights and sounds which encompassed him? The church is a busy and noisy place, visited by moments of stillness and solemnity, echoing to bells, prayers and whispered gossip. All around him are wax tapers and tallow candles lit before the images of the saints and the Holy Family, together with paintings and cloths and banners and richly decorated carvings; the whole effect is of a mysterious painted chamber with the gleam of crucifixes and candlesticks, chalices and patens, against the old stone. The melody of plainsong or prick song might linger in the recesses and corners of this place, together with the odours of incense or of charcoal mingled with the human smell of the worshippers come to witness the Mass. They stand or kneel in the nave with the great picture of the rood or crucified Christ hanging before them, waiting to glimpse part of the drama which is about to take place within the chancel itself. The church of St Stephen Walbrook, which soon became More’s principal place of worship, had images of the apostles and the holy doctors; there were stone tablets upon which were inscribed the commandments as well as ‘the seven works of Mercy and the seven deadly sins’.1 More heard the Mass here with his family; he heard the same Mass at St Thomas of Acon, where he worshipped with the mercers; he heard it with the monks of the Charterhouse and the students of Oxford, and would hear it with the king at Greenwich and with the judges in Holborn, with the villagers of Chelsea and with the prisoners of the Tower. It was the single most important aspect of his life, and the source from which much of his earnestness and his irony, his gravity and his playfulness, springs.
The priest enters, together with his ministers and servers, and stands before the altar step while the others take up their customary positions for the ritual; then he ascends to the altar and inclines before it while he intones the orison. After the Office and Kyries he censes the altar and then lifts up his hands to proclaim ‘Gloria in Excelsis’. So the Mass begins. The worshippers in the nave are separated from these rites by the rood screen; they can see only stray gestures and hear muttered words in a language most of them could not understand. They are not expected to participate in, or even necessarily follow, the Mass; they have their own sets of prayers and devotions, with particular attention being given to the hours of the Virgin, the psalms of penitence and the Office of the Dead. The Mass was in some sense a secret ritual, all the more powerful for being partly concealed; the prayers and blessings of the Mass were known to have mysterious efficacy and its words were not translated into the vernacular for fear that they might be misused by witches or ‘cunning men’. The host was a magical talisman which was reputed to heal sickness, to cure blindness and to act as a love charm. Those who saw its elevation would suffer no hunger, or thirst, or ill fortune, that day. The eucharist was displayed to some unruly Londoners in Fleet Street, as a way of quelling the disturbance. There was an inexpressible element of wonder and awfulness in a ceremony that brought the body and blood of Christ down to the earth once more; in a world of mysteries and miracles, this was the greatest mystery of all. It is what More meant when he wrote of ‘the mystycall gestures and ser-emonyes vsed in the masse’.2 But essentially it was a public, rather than a private, ceremony. The Mass at the high altar was conducted behind the rood screen, but in innumerable chapels and side-altars it was celebrated with the worshippers sometimes literally crowded around. The notable divine Thomas Cranmer relates how people called on their neighbours to ‘stoop down before’ so that they could get a better view.3
In ceremonial manner the priest enacted the stages of Christ’s ministry, passion and death; as one spiritual writer put it, ‘the process of the mass representeth the very progress of Christ to his passion’.4 Every movement and gesture of the celebrant had dramatic significance so that, for example, when the priest holds out his arms before the altar he is an image of the crucified saviour. The most sacred truths of the faith are given full material reality, leading up to that moment when Christ himself becomes present at the altar. This was marked by the moment of elevation when the priest held up the host, become by a miracle the body of Jesus. At that instant candles and torches, made up of bundles of wood, were lit to illuminate the scene; the sacring bell was rung, and the church bells pealed so that those in the neighbouring streets or fields might be aware of the solemn moment. It was the sound which measured the hours of their da
y. Christ was present in their midst once more and, as the priest lifted up the thin wafer of bread, time and eternity were reconciled. The worshippers knelt down and held out their arms in adoration, since this was the sight for which they had come. There are reports of the people running from altar to altar to catch a glimpse of the consecrated host at different Masses, and one priest complained that at the sound of the sacring bell the people rushed away from his sermon to witness the elevation.
The lay congregation generally communicated once a year but, after the sacrifice of the bread and wine was complete, a holy object or ‘pax’ was passed among them to be kissed and handled. This was a small wooden tablet or metal amulet upon which was carved a paschal lamb, or a cross, with the legend IHS—Iesu Hominum Salvator. Then, at the conclusion of the Mass, bread is blessed and distributed to the congregation; it was known as ‘singing bread’, and, when one martyr at the moment of death in the flames is supposed to have smelled of baking bread, perhaps this was the variety implicitly meant. These were the rites of the community, affirmed and strengthened by Christ’s presence within it; the parishioners were bound to their church precisely because the Mass was the centre of their lives and activities. It redeemed them from their toil and their sinfulness, from their tedium and their suffering.
But this was not simply the communion of the living; at the most sacred moments of the Mass prayers were offered up for the dead and, once a year, the names of dead parishioners were recited from the ‘bede-roll’. The souls in purgatory, in particular, were anxiously watching the living, seeking their prayers and acts of charity to allay their own sufferings; the dead were in a real sense mingled with those still upon the earth. If at the moment of elevation time and eternity were reconciled, so also were the living and the dead, past and present coming together in the form of the body of Christ. His body was considered not only to be the transubstantiated host, but also the entire Catholic Church from its beginning in human history. The public drama of the Mass was enacted each day as a memorial to this historical community, Christ returned to earth in the form of the consecrated host and in the presence of the worshippers. This is what Thomas More meant when he invoked ‘thys vyne of Crystes mystycall body the knowen catholyke chyrche’,5 and when he quoted from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, ‘We many be one bread and one body’.6 There are intimations here of Christian society making up one physical body, but we must see it more properly as a symbolic and imaginative order in which Christ, the eucharist and the Church partake of the flesh and the blood and are incarnated in the heart of the city.
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