These guild plays were performed in at least twelve different cities, providing a national dramatic repertoire which has few parallels in other periods or other cultures. They celebrated the entire history of the world, from the Creation and Fall to the eventual Day of Doom; the theatrical rituals were presented on Corpus Christi since the world was, in a real sense, the suffering body of Christ. Christ’s passion and crucifixion were of course central, but there were other biblical scenes which became a standard part of the performances, among them Cain and Abel, Noah and his wife, Abraham and Isaac. Individual guilds were responsible for each specific scene or pageant, and were chosen appropriately—‘The Last Supper’ was assigned to the bakers, for example, and ‘The Shepherds’ Play’ to the shearmen—but the plays were given a unity and coherence not only through their themes but also through the nature of their staging in the streets of the city. There is the story of the Warwickshire curate who, after expounding the beliefs of the Church, informed his parishioners, ‘If you believe not me then for a more sure and sufficient authority, go your way to Coventry, and there ye shall see them all played in Corpus Christi play.’17
The pageant wagons were approximately eighteen feet in height; they were stored in sheds, and then wheeled out into the streets of Coventry for the play. It is not clear whether each pageant wagon had one stationary site, or whether they were wheeled to different positions for various performances; common sense suggests that, in a city of six thousand people, increased by curious visitors, the latter was the case. The inventories of some pageants still survive: ‘A brandreth of Iren that god sall sitte vppon when he sall sty vppe to heuven … ii peces of rede cloudes & sternes of gold langing to heuven … vii grete Aungels halding the passion of god … A grete coster of rede damaske payntid for the bakke side of the pagent … helle mouthe.’18 Hell mouth was characteristically a painted set of gaping jaws, perhaps on a separate smaller wagon wheeled in front of the main pageant; the unfortunate victim could then be seen to be devoured alive to the sound of pipes, drums and gitterns. The ‘brandreth’ of iron was a small tripod which was winched up on pulleys so that Christ or the Virgin might ascend from the pageant stage into an upper region of heaven decorated with angels and painted clouds. It was a highly embellished dramatic art, with certain scenes played out in the street with noise and bustle, while others were presented in the solemn stillness of a holy picture. Adam and Eve wore white leather costumes to symbolise their nakedness, the prophets wore golden wigs while Judas was conventionally adorned with one of flaming red; yet, on the whole, the actors wore contemporary dress. The Corpus Christi play was not an historical entertainment, but a restatement of the eternal truths and episodes of the faith.
Its significance lies in the living moment of its conception, when a whole community was caught up in the rituals of a common faith. When Herod grows wrathful, ‘I stampe! I stare! I loke all abowtt!’,19 he is not an allegorical, but a living, figure. He is the parish clerk who, in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, ‘pleyeth Herodas upon a scaffold hye’. When the shearmen and tailors of Coventry presented their nativity pageant it was as if the images upon the church wall had come alive and were being revived by the people themselves. There was also live animals (foreshadowing Shakespeare’s use of the bear in The Winter’s Tale), flying machines, burning fires as an accompaniment to the gaping jaws of hell; the sacred scenes were interspersed with episodes of sometimes ribald comedy, such as the famous one in which Noah tries to persuade his foul-mouthed wife to enter the Ark. Once again the spiritual and the secular need not be separate, since they were aspects of the same reality. Comedy and irony came not from ambiguity or disbelief; in many respects they emerged from an excess of belief in a world where sacred truths need not be questioned. Even the hierarchy of the guilds who staged the pageants was a reflection of the hierarchy of the heavens. All his life More referred to human affairs as a spectacle upon a stage or wooden scaffold; and when on the last day of his life he advanced among the crowd to a more solemn scaffold, he might have been enacting his own mystery play.
He is not known to have visited Coventry again, and indeed there could have been few occasions when he had the opportunity to break from legal work and London business. In Lincoln’s Inn, for example, he was being promoted to positions of more responsibility: he became pensioner, or financial administrator, before becoming in succession butler, marshal and autumn reader. These were the stages of the cursus honorum which the successful lawyer was obliged to follow, moving forward according to the principle of ‘ancienty’. The roles of butler and marshal were administrative or disciplinary, while as the autumn reader he was engaged only in instruction. At eight o’clock in the morning, in front of the assembled Inn, More lectured for four mornings of four weeks in Law French; it was the practice of the reader to interpret aspects of statute law in that strange argot, and his exposition was followed by responses from the more senior members of the Inn. There were also formal reader’s dinners, and throughout the term of his appointment he was granted special privileges. He was in a literal sense following the path of his father, who had also been butler and marshal of the Inn.
We must see More as submitting to a hierarchy of needs and obligations. That is why, like his father before him, he was made a ‘freeman’ of the Mercers. In March 1509, ‘Maister Thomas More, gentilman, desired to be fre of this felishipp, which was graunted hym by the holle compeney to haue it franke & fre’.20 Part of the oath which More then read counselled mutual obligation and dependence, ‘the secrets whereof to you shewed you shall keep secret’,21 as well as piety and obedience. It was the policy of the Mercers to bring influential Londoners within their ranks; John Colet, for example, had been made a freeman only the year before. And it is likely that More was recruited as a freeman precisely because of his legal acumen. The Mercers were at the time engaged in a protracted struggle with Henry VII, who had determined to curtail the powers of the established City companies; the king had been actively promoting the interests of a new guild, the Merchant Taylors, and had directly interfered in City elections. Equally importantly, four months before More’s entry into the fellowship, he had threatened to levy a new tax upon cloth exports. It was in the interest of the Mercers, therefore, to have as members the best lawyers in London in order to protect their interests. The advantages for More, in turn, were obvious. He was joining the richest and most powerful of the City companies, highly influential in London administration, with a network of contacts throughout England and Europe.
There were more than sixty guilds or fraternities within the city at this date, but the Mercers were at the forefront of affairs. London had been a mercantile city since its earliest foundation; it had been built upon commerce and the profits of trade. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the fellowship of the ‘merchant adventurers’ would be paramount. Trade guilds have existed for almost as long as trade itself, of course; in second-century Italy, workers ‘associated by a common trade’ would partake together of meals and divine worship.22 But the growth of the London guilds was peculiarly elaborate and complex. The first surviving records of an association of Mercers come from the late twelfth century, but its origins are earlier. It was known variously as ‘Compeny’, ‘the Mystere of Mercers’, ‘craft of the city’, guild or fellowship. By the time of More’s association it included the Company of Merchant Adventurers, the Merchants of the Staple and other interested parties variously engaged in the export of cloth and wool. Its headquarters, Mercers’ Hall, lay by Cheapside and Ironmonger Lane—the area in which More had dwelled all his life—beside the church of St Thomas of Acon to which it was affiliated.
John Colet said that he trusted this body of London citizens more than any other estate or degree and, in order to understand More’s role among them, it is important to remember that the company was established upon community and religion as well as commerce. One early ordinance requires ‘the cherishing of unity and good love’ among them,23 and we must see it as pa
rt craft, part fraternity and part religious society. More would have been obliged to wear the ‘livery’ on formal occasions; this included hood and robe of red or scarlet, although the precise colour seems to have been changed every two years. He would have engaged in the feasts on holy days, contributed to the funds for ‘decayed’ mercers, and walked in the procession of the festive pageants. The pageant image of the Mercers was that of the Blessed Virgin, and for the celebrations of the Midsummer Watch a ‘Maiden Chariot’ was drawn through the streets in honour of Our Lady and various allegorical personages who shared the stage with her. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the religious aspects of the Company were not the most important; yet the mercers prayed together in the church of St Thomas of Acon ‘the better to their great worship and profit in this world, but also to the great merit both to their bodies and souls after the departing out of this present life’.24
More’s particular role in the Mercers was as negotiator and orator, and documents survive which show how he conducted himself in such business. Only six months after being ‘made free’ of the company, he was involved in complicated bargaining with the ‘Pensonary’ or chief magistrate of Antwerp over the precise streets and houses which the English merchants would be allowed to use in that city. The records demonstrate just how prominent a part he played. At eight o’clock, on a Thursday morning in September, they all assembled in the Mercers’ Hall on the appropriate benches, ‘euery man in his degre’, and the Pensonary of Antwerp was summoned from the church below. More sat opposite him ‘ende next the wyndowe’ and, after politely desiring him ‘to Couer his hedd’, he ‘tolde a longe and goodly proposicion in Latin’ on the business to be transacted. In fact the magistrate from Antwerp was already known to him: Jacob de Wocht, known in humanist circles as Jacobus Tutor, was an intimate friend of Erasmus. The Dutch scholar had once lived with him for three months, and had also dedicated his edition of Cicero’s De Officiis to him; this treatise is concerned with the conflict between justice and expediency, which might be thought to have some bearing upon the negotiations of the Mercers. Certainly, in the colloquies of More and Tutor, we have a vivid and practical example of the way in which learned European humanists were also at the heart of commercial and social affairs in this period. After More had finished his initial peroration, Tutor ‘tolde his tale in Latyne and first he commended Maister More greatly for makyng of his Oracion’. And so it continued, with More translating Tutor’s remarks for the Englishmen assembled and then replying in Latin.
The negotiations continued for several days, until a final settlement was reached. ‘Than when that he had declared as is a forsaid all in Laten, Maister More dyd enterpret the same in Englisshe to the compeny, and than they arose and euery man went his waye.’25 The agreement was satisfactory to the Mercers, principally because they obtained everything they wanted; More was a skilful lawyer who, as Erasmus once said, could defend cases which were not the best.26 There is an intimation here that Erasmus did not necessarily approve of all More’s public activities, and thought he was somehow betraying his gifts by working as a lawyer, but he could not have foreseen then the full tragedy of his friend’s public career. That career might even be said to have begun in these months of 1509, for something had happened between More’s entry into the Mercers and his conduct of the autumn negotiations. In the spring of the same year the old king had died, and Henry VIII ascended the throne.
CHAPTER XIII
MILK AND HONEY
ENRY VII had reigned for twenty-four years; the eight-year-old boy living in Milk Street witnessed the victor of Bosworth’s triumphal progress along Cheapside, in the early autumn of 1485, surrounded by the dignitaries of London ‘all clothed in Violet’,1 and during the course of his reign More had grown to adulthood. His notions of order and authority might in part be derived from his experience of that monarch’s personal rule; certainly More died a sacrifice to the principle of kingship which Henry VII helped to establish. He was the victim of the older, no less than the younger, Tudor. More’s family, however, had flourished under Henry’s rule. His policy of reforming administration had meant that lawyers as well as clerics were now at the centre of affairs; his role as a patron of continental scholars had also created the climate in which men such as Colet and Linacre could flourish. Equally importantly, Henry had restored peace and stability within the realm. Two kings of England had suffered violent deaths during More’s early childhood; through a judicious mixture of military expertise, financial exaction and political acumen the new king created a secure regime which would last more than a hundred years. The fact that he came between two monsters, at least of historical legend—Richard III and Henry VIII—has meant that his actual stature and achievement have been eclipsed. Yet if it had not been for the order which Henry maintained, the whole humanist enterprise in England, for example, would have been impossible. His close supervision of all aspects of administration, financial and political, suggested that in a real sense all authority now radiated from the monarch; he was the central symbol of the power and unity of the nation. It was a legacy that his son would exploit for quite different purposes.
The long rule of this autocratic king helps to explain More’s youthful preoccupation with the nature of true kingship as opposed to tyranny. It is a theme of his Latin epigrams. Even such later works as The History of Richard III and Utopia are concerned with the contrasts of just and vicious government. In a Latin poem celebrating the coronation of Henry VIII, which was transcribed in a highly embellished presentation copy, More invokes the atmosphere of fear, suspicion and rapacity that the dead monarch’s avarice had created. It was an opinion shared by other contemporaries and, although modern historians have tended to regard his exactions less as evidence of greed than as an instrument of royal supremacy, it is not lightly to be disregarded. There is also the story of the delight of the English Court when Henry VII’s pet monkey destroyed the papers in which he had set down his observations and criticisms of those around him.
Yet the old king had died muttering words of contrition, a crucifix held before his face. His body was carried from Richmond Palace through the streets of London, surrounded by priests and bishops, followed by six hundred of his household bearing lighted tapers; a large effigy of him, in royal state, had been placed upon the hearse. During his funeral oration in St Paul’s, John Fisher emphasised Henry VII’s devotion to the crucifix and his desire always to be ‘kyssynge it’.2 Then the body was taken to Westminster Abbey, where it was interred. In his will Henry had left money for the purchase of ten thousand masses to be celebrated for the sake of his soul and, after the obsequies in the Abbey, all departed for ‘a greate and a sumptuous feast’.3
Other celebrations were about to begin. Less than a month later, in April 1509, the seventeen-year-old Prince Henry assumed the throne as Henry VIII. The old king had been of sallow complexion, with black decayed teeth and thinning hair. The new king was as handsome as he was amiable, known both for his piety and his prowess, a young man acquainted with books as well as with jousts and hunting. In his coronation poem Thomas More described him as the glory of the era, renowned no less for learning than for virtue; truly this prince was about to inaugurate a new golden age. When he appeared on the streets of London the crowds filled the houses and rooftops along his route and thronged about him so that he was hardly able to make his way. Lord Mountjoy, in a letter to Erasmus, proclaimed that under the rule of this great prince ‘Ridet aether, exultat terra; omnia lactis, omnia mellis’ (‘the heavens laugh and the earth rejoices, all is milk and honey’).4 Baldassare Castiglione, the courtier and diplomat from Mantua, had in more general terms depicted the monarch as ‘full of liberality, munificence, religion and clemency … capable of being regarded as a demigod rather than as a mortal man’.5 This reverence may elucidate More’s own attitude towards the young king. On the day before the coronation, when Henry and his new queen processed through the streets of London, Cornhill and Cheapside were hun
g with cloth of gold; ‘Virgins in white, with braunches of white Waxe’6 lined the route together with all the guilds of London in their preordained order, as well as priests in rich copes who censed the royal couple as they passed. Edward Hall devotes many pages of his chronicle to the finery of this procession as well as to the coronation itself, with its mixture of piety, drama, politics and spectacle. He dwells upon the richness and grandness of the apparel of the various guests, with damask gold and cloth of silver, green silk and blue velvet, all ‘poudered’ and embroidered. There are ritual challenges and elaborately staged feasts, carefully ordered manifestations of rank and authority, displays of wealth and power, all contributing to a picture of the world in this lower sphere where we may mimic the magnificence and splendour of heaven.
More was already close to members of the young king’s household; he was also on good terms with some of the clerics who were part of the council, in particular with William Warham and Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham. His immediate political hope, as an influential Londoner, was that the new king was about to lift taxes and reform the conduct of policy; Henry was expected to renew the arts of ruling.7 This is the principal theme of More’s coronation verses, with his celebration that unjust laws and unfairly imposed debts are to be repealed. He speaks here as a representative of the merchant class. But there is another aspect of his encomium. The young Henry had already been instructed in noble arts,8 and in ‘Philosophia’.9 More’s own humanist interests here become paramount. Not much older than the century itself, Henry might be considered to be the king for a new age of restored piety and scholarship. There seemed every reason to believe he would patronise the new learning and, more importantly, maintain the peace and stability in which such learning could flourish. It is hard to think of any other century, or reign, in England which opened with such hopes.
The Life of Thomas More Page 16