The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  So we may place More’s treatise firmly in the context of Plato and his Renaissance interpreters—within, that is, the context of humanist discourse. The very form of Utopia may have been modelled upon Parmenides. In a sense More always needed the safety of an inherited model. Just as his history of Richard III had been in part based upon Sallust, so this more accomplished production seems to rest upon Plato. The very nature of More’s genius can be glimpsed here, in his ability to reformulate the classical tradition on his own terms while at the same time employing all the ironies and ambiguities of his own nature.

  This in turn heralds the most interesting and significant aspect of his imaginary dialogue with Hythlodaeus, when the two men argue over the merits of royal service. Hythlodaeus rejects any suggestion that he might advise a king, on the grounds that only flattery and hypocrisy succeed in such councils; a good man is either scorned or betrayed, with his virtues acting as a cover for the activities of more vicious men. The character of More, presented in the dialogue, disagrees with this analysis and argues instead for the necessity of practical philosophy and pragmatic guidance as an arbiter of public good. This was a matter of pressing import to More, since in this period he was actually considering whether to join the king’s council. Yet it is a measure of his innate caution and distance that he is able to play with the arguments on both sides as if indeed it were a drama of which he is the spectator. But Hythlodaeus is in many respects portrayed as a blusterer, mixing specious argument with impractical fantasy, and the plain fact that the traveller opposes royal service may be the single most important reason for entering it. That is, exactly, what More now proceeded to do.

  CHAPTER XVII

  WHOLLY A COURTIER

  T the beginning of the following year, 1516, More was said to be frequenting the smoky courts of Westminster,1 where he was always most punctilious in greeting Thomas Wolsey each morning. He had returned from his mission in the Low Countries in the previous autumn, and such was his success that Henry offered him an annual pension; More told Erasmus that he was inclined to refuse it, on the grounds that too close an association with royal administration might compromise his activities on behalf of the City. But he had not entirely waived the possibility of accepting it and was writing on the subject to Erasmus in the same period that he was cultivating the attention of the new cardinal. Wolsey, having become Archbishop of York, cardinal and chancellor, was the most powerful man in the kingdom, apart from the king himself, and More seems genuinely to have believed that he represented the best hope of reformation in Church and state. He praised his skills as chancellor in the highest terms and wrote two Latin poems to him as ‘pater alme’2 or bountiful father.

  So it was More’s custom to greet him in Westminster Hall. The cardinal wore the rich crimson apparel of his rank, with a sable scarf and a scarlet hat; he held an orange in his hand, hollowed out and filled with a sponge soaked with vinegar and various herbs, which he held up to his nose while in a crowd of suitors or claimants. From York Place (his London residence, situated at what is now the top of Whitehall) to Westminster Hall, he rode upon a mule; it was a sign of humility to travel in such a manner, since Our Lord Himself had entered Jerusalem upon an ass, though the animal was nevertheless decked out in velvet cloths and gilt spurs. Before him, on horses, rode two cross-bearers with two great crucifixes of silver, and a member of his household bearing a pillar of silver as a token of his possession of York; he was also accompanied by four footmen carrying gilt pole-axes, with other members of his retinue and household following close behind. On his arrival at Westminster Hall his ushers parted the throng with ‘On my lords and masters, make way for my lord’s grace!’3 He walked forward, with the orange in his hand.

  In popular legend he is always depicted as portly, not to say fat, but the surviving pictures show a large, strong man with a handsome profile; he was only five years older than More himself, but had already made the journey from royal chaplain and almoner to an eminence where the greatest of the land deferred to him. The progressive historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have taken pleasure in depicting this last of the great pre-Reformation English cardinals as a devious and cunning prelate who wrapped himself in houses and in jewels. He was in fact an inexhaustible administrator and loyal servant of the king; certainly he was a brilliant, witty and fluent man who impressed all those with whom he dealt. Of course he made enemies, notably John Skelton, who in ‘Why Come Ye Not to Court’ mocked his ‘magnificence’ and wished ‘The devil kiss his arse!’;4 the poet terribly berates him for his pride and temper, but these apparent vices can be interpreted as skilful attempts to impress upon ambassadors and other dignitaries the authority of his king and of his country. A wonderful insight into the personality of Wolsey is given by the Venetian ambassador Sebastian Giustinian, who wrote a series of despatches to his own court between 1515 and 1519—the years in which More first entered royal service. Giustinian believed Wolsey already ‘to have the management of the whole of this kingdom’,5 and chronicled his occasional anger as well as what he described as his ‘very warm language’.6 He spoke of contemporary affairs ‘with extreme vehemence and mental excitement’ and, on one matter of concern, declared: ‘I, who am at least a cardinal, do not deserve an “if indeed”.’7 The ambassador had to pass through eight sumptuously tapestried rooms before coming to the audience chamber where the prelate was arrayed in pomp, with cardinal’s robes that seemed to be dipped in the colours of heaven. Wolsey could also be humorous or learned, according to mood, and at all times evinced a command of address and fluency of language that rendered him a great master of diplomacy; he listened attentively, although he was prone to interrupt and ask questions; he employed biblical allusions and parallels when he wished to make a point; he was a master of decorum, but could feign temper when it was required.

  There also survive records of his domestic as well as foreign authority. When certain merchants were summoned to the court of Chancery ‘theye came up and kneled dowen byfor hys Grace’,8 and Wolsey addressed them with ‘Ye wardens of the Mercers, what is the mynde of your Company?’ and, to one of the plaintiffs, ‘Woman, ye be gretely beholden to the wardens of the Mercers.’9 The general air is one of swiftness and authority, assisted by a magisterial bearing and a quickness of wit. This was the man to whom More deferred in the courts of Westminster, bidding him good morning when he appeared with his escort and entourage. More would later say of Wolsey, ‘gloriouse was he very far above all measure & that was greate pitie for it did harm, and made hym abuse many greate giftes that god had givyn hym. Neuer was he saciate of heryng his own prayse.’10 Yet at this stage their relations were entirely cordial.

  By the autumn of 1516 More had joined the king’s council or, more precisely, the Council of the Star Chamber, which was controlled and administered by Cardinal Wolsey. Even if he were a reluctant servant of the Crown, which seems unlikely, there were others who would have persuaded him. His father, John More, had become a member of the council in the spring; John Colet was also there and, according to Erasmus, was ‘intimus’ with the king.11 The influence of his wife cannot be neglected, either, in his decision to accept such an influential position. Alice More knew the nature of power in her society, since she had been close to it all her life. The Council of the Star Chamber met in a building of Westminster Hall, by the side of New Palace Yard closest to the river and just south of the landing known as Westminster Stairs; there was the chamber itself, given its name because ‘the roof thereof is decked with the likeness of stars gilt’,12 behind which was an inner chamber used for private consultation and for dining, with various other rooms beyond.13 It has been estimated that between eleven and twenty councillors met in the Star Chamber on four days a week, although two other days were reserved for ‘reformacion of misorders and other enormityes’.14 Only on Sundays did they rest from their judicial labours. They met during term-times, six months of the year, and sat in the mornings. The majority of cases brought before
the council concerned disputes over property and title, the real bedrock of Tudor economic transactions, but it was also involved in administrative and executive matters. In questions of law, long depositions from the parties in dispute were presented to the councillors, who might then examine witnesses before reaching their decision. Among its members were the judges and serjeants-at-law, but the central figure was Wolsey himself, who helped to promote its judicial work and thereby reserve more sensitive or secret matters to himself.

  It is not difficult to understand why More was chosen for such a post; he was a common lawyer of established reputation who had already proved himself adept in negotiations. It is not in the least surprising, either, that he accepted his new role; the path from legal work to royal service was a traditional one. More’s earlier biographers, wishing to emphasise his spirituality and maintain his role as defender of the old faith, have often presented him as a man torn between his duties to king and Church; but, in a period when royal power was considered to be enacted through divine agency, there was no such contrast. Nor was royal service in the least incompatible with More’s humanism since members of the court and council included Richard Pace, Cuthbert Tunstall and Andrew Ammonius; Linacre was the king’s physician and Colet the court preacher. Wolsey himself, so far as his multifarious activities allowed, also encouraged the new learning. The prospects for educational and religious reform were bright indeed; at the time More joined the council in the Star Chamber, new foundations of scholarship were being created. St John’s College was founded in Cambridge, under the auspices of John Fisher, in the summer of 1516; Richard Fox established Corpus Christi, Oxford, in the spring of the following year, with public lecturers in Divinity, Latin and Greek. This provided the surest possible basis for humanist learning and, in the following year, Wolsey rode to Oxford in order to announce the creation of six new professorships.

  More was also concerned with the spread of learning in a more private sense; throughout the spring and summer of 1516 he was trying to complete Utopia. Erasmus had visited London briefly at the end of July, and stayed with the More household in Bucklersbury. He found the presence of Alice More somewhat forbidding on this occasion, however; he confessed to Andrew Ammonius that she might have found him a pitiably decrepit guest,15 and he left after a few days. He was preoccupied with his recension of the New Testament, which had just been published in Basle, but there was time to discuss the progress of Utopia. And, when Erasmus went to Rochester, where he stayed with John Fisher for ten days before returning to the Low Countries, More rode down in order to see him again. Clearly there was an intimacy of purpose between them that goes beyond the bland formalities of many humanist friendships. But their letters throughout this period are not filled with apothegms of wisdom, whether secular or religious; they are, instead, preoccupied with money, preferment and plans for publication. More, especially, shows a practicality and efficiency which were so much part of his life in the world; he is even caught again, on two occasions, telling what he called ‘small lies’ in order to expedite his affairs.

  More’s visit to Erasmus preceded the no less welcome arrival of Utopia. The Dutch scholar received the manuscript just three weeks later, after his return to Antwerp. It was then entitled Nusquama (‘Nowhere’) and More said, with perhaps false modesty, it was nowhere written well. But he was genuinely anxious about its reception, and in a number of somewhat plaintive letters he urged Erasmus to discover what Tunstall and Gillis, among others, thought of it. He enclosed a letter to Peter Gillis with the original manuscript, which became the dedicatory epistle to Utopia. In turn Erasmus persuaded other northern European humanists to add their own letters and tributes, so that the treatise on an ideal commonwealth might have the best possible introduction to the world of humanist learning. He also supervised every stage of the book’s preparation and publication. He edited it—it might even have been Erasmus, rather than More, who changed the title to Utopia—and may have added certain of its marginalia. He arranged the text for printing and, approximately two months after he received it, gave it to Theodoricus Martens of Louvain. The book itself emerged from the press by the end of that year, small in size but eventually large in reputation. More told Erasmus that he was awaiting its arrival with as much expectation as a mother for her son who has travelled overseas.

  In many of his letters during this period, to Erasmus and others, More professed himself to be so pressed by urgent matters that he had no time to write or think;16 he was ‘distringor’17 or distracted. His continual attendance with the council in the Star Chamber meant that, according to Erasmus, he was being carried away by the tempest of public service.18 But he was also still under-sheriff of London, while at the same time pursuing cases for private clients. He was asked by the Mercers for his ‘advice and counsel’19 on legal matters, for example, and it is reported by his first biographer that he acted on behalf of the papal interest when one of the Pope’s ships was seized at Southampton. He was also asked to adjudicate in a boundary dispute between the parishioners of St Vedast and the Saddlers’ Guild, who had adjacent premises in Forsters Lane, and in the same year he was sitting on commissions variously concerned with park lands, enclosures and the maintenance of yeomen. So he wrote of the hard grind20 of public life, and told Erasmus that he was being diverted from all learning by ‘forensibus litigiis’ (‘legal disputes’).21

  His work as under-sheriff, in particular, had not decreased. There was a drought in the autumn of 1516, and very little rain fell for nine months; this was a serious matter when so many used the water from the rivers and streams, from the Fleet and the upper reaches of the Walbrook, which flowed down into the City and its environs from the northern hills. Then, on 12 January 1517, a great frost descended upon London ‘in suche wise that no bote might goe betwixt London and Westminster all the terme tyme’.22 There were alterations in inner, as well as outer, weather. In the spring of 1516 a virulent form of the sweating sickness emerged and for three years lingered in the city, breaking out with particular ferocity in the summer of 1517. Colet and Wolsey both suffered from it several times, but recovered; the king anxiously moved from place to place in order to avoid the contagion. More wrote to Erasmus that everyone was in a state of grief as well as danger and that many people were dying all over the city—More’s own household had been affected, although his wife and children were safe. After a fever of twenty hours, Andrew Ammonius died in that most difficult summer.23 There are numerous and rather lurid accounts of its symptoms. It killed most on the first day, sometimes within an hour or two; it manifested itself by ‘a profuse sweat which dissolves the frame’24 and which smelt foully with ‘a great and a strong sauore’,25 as well as by extreme thirst, delirium and eventually the drowsiness that led to death.

  Epidemic sickness was often considered as a harbinger of disease in other parts of the body politic; Polydore Vergil notes how the first appearance of the sweating sickness had been taken as a sign that the rule of the old king, Henry VII, was to be a harsh one—although Vergil himself believed that it was a token that Henry would have to govern ‘in the sweat of his brow’.26 Certainly, at this later date, a kind of fever or delirium visited the people of London for a time. In the spring of 1516 a notice was fixed to the main doors of St Paul’s and All Hallows, Barking, declaring that foreign merchants residing in London ‘brought wools to the undoing of Englishmen’;27 an attempt was made by the authorities to find the offender, principally by scrutinising the handwriting of every literate citizen. The complaints of city merchants against ‘aliens’ were perennial but then, in the following year, more decisive and dangerous action was taken.

  A London broker (the word was in general use by this time), John Lincoln, approached the popular warden of the Franciscan community of Grey Friars by the City wall and asked if he would preach against the abuses of the foreign merchants; Henry Standish declined, but another priest obliged. During Easter week he delivered a sermon in the fields near St Mary Spital, in wh
ich he declared that ‘this land was given to Englishmen’.28 In the same period a mercer is reported to have threatened certain Lombard rivals that ‘by the Mass, we will one day have a day at you’.29 And that day came. There had been threats and insults directed against foreign merchants since the sermon in the Spital fields, and on 28 April some ‘aliens’ were attacked by apprentices in the London streets. All the reports suggested that there was to be a riot on May Day itself, and that the foreigners were to be murdered. There was also talk of freeing prisoners held in the compters of Poultry and Wood Street. At seven o’clock on the evening of 30 April, Thomas More attended a meeting of the City authorities in the Guildhall; as both under-sheriff of the City and a member of the king’s council, he was arguably the most important figure to deal with the encroaching crisis. From the Guildhall he rode either to Westminster or the cardinal’s dwelling, York Place, where he consulted with other members of the council. It was decided that an immediate curfew should be ordered, and at 8.30 More came back to the Guildhall with that demand. The aldermen returned to their wards with the news that no citizen ‘should stirre out of his house, but to keep his doores shut, and his servants within’ until the next morning.30 But it may already have been too late. One city official tried to break up an apprentices’ sword game of ‘bucklers’ in Cheap-side, thereby creating a minor riot. By eleven o’clock that night a crowd of artisans, apprentices and children ran through Newgate Market and down St Nicholas Shambles, just to the north of St Paul’s churchyard; More with other officials met them at the corner of St Martin’s, and attempted to persuade them to disperse.