by Linda Proud
A week later came a commission for a fine copy of the works of Hermes Trismegistus in Latin. The request was flattering: ‘Only a patient man could produce work of the quality you achieve. Only a man who has a beautiful soul could produce such fair forms. I would have you make a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum for me,’ Lorenzino wrote, and then went on for a further two pages as to which copy I was to use as an original, which vellum, which inks and their colours, what illumination was required. ‘The border of the frontispiece should include my emblem, the ouroboros.’
The ouroboros, the circular symbol of the serpent biting its own tail, is described by Iamblichus as the symbol of eternity and bore, therefore, the same significance as il Magnifico’s motto, Semper, ‘Always’. But the younger Lorenzo had found an image for the word which not only made the symbol more resonant but showed, to those who knew, that he was familiar with the Neoplatonists. To him ‘eternity’ meant the immortality of the soul. The commission, for one of my best-loved books, from a young man sensitive to philosophy and to symbol: it was almost enough to make a man happy again.
London, December 1st, 1505
As we left the cathedral this evening, the air was filled with the usual London odours: dead fish and urine, horse dung and the sweet stink of breweries. How I hate English ale: the smell of hops makes me gag, especially when mixed with the reek of the Thames. London is tinged with grey-green light as if the air reflects the sea, even this far up the estuary. As the night drew in, grey-green turned grey-blue.
There was no blackfriar haunting me this evening, but my skin is now beginning to prickle whenever I am out of my lodgings. All the time I am expecting a thin hand to grasp my shoulder from behind and an Italian voice to say, Tommaso de’ Maffei?
‘These canons and theologians,’ said Erasmus, ‘are like mangy bats – the kind that get caught squeaking in your hair when you have been brave enough to walk in the dark.’
‘I see them as crows,’ said young Thomas More, who hangs on to the arm of his Dutch friend as if he dare not let him go. ‘They peck up the good seed only to shit it out.’
‘Thomas!’ said John Colet, leading the way across the yard to the deanery, ‘this is sacred ground. Reserve such language for the inns of court.’
Thomas and Erasmus exchanged amused glances. ‘Tut!’ said the Dutchman, slapping his young friend across the back of the head. ‘The eloquence and rhetorical skills of barristers, eh? You lawyers have mouths full of mud.’
I smiled at them both fondly, aware of how dirty Erasmus’s own mouth could be when not in earshot of his revered friend and mentor, Colet. Thomas hesitated at the threshold. ‘I thank you for the invitation to supper, Dean, but I must go home.’
‘Come now, was the admonition that severe?’
‘I have a difficult brief to study before appearing in court tomorrow.’
‘Brief?’ said Erasmus. ‘I thought her name was Jane. There’s nothing quite like marriage to draw a man away from his friends.’
‘I love my new wife dearly, but I can wait another hour before I see her. It is work that draws me away, believe me.’
‘No,’ said Erasmus. ‘In the face of truth, let us be honest – it is the thought of one of Colet’s suppers that sends you flying. And you, no stranger to austerity!’
As this banter continued, a servant of the king rode up to us and, having apologised for the interruption, insisted that the physician, Thomas Linacre, go with him to Westminster to attend his master. Linacre promised to return as soon as he could.
‘See that you do,’ Colet urged him. ‘I have things to discuss of great import that will affect you. And Master More, though I appreciate your need to be ready for the law courts, tonight it is the Heavenly Court that requires your attendance.’
Colet has a way of speaking that brooks no argument. More bit his lip and followed the dean indoors. William Lily hesitated on the threshold. ‘Dean? Do you include me also in this invitation?’ His voice was so soft it was barely audible.
‘Of course, come along.’
Although Lily has been to Jerusalem, although he has studied Greek in Italy with Poliziano, he always assumes he is the least of men and not fit to keep the company in which he finds himself. His uncertainty inspired my own. ‘And do you include me, Dean?’ I asked.
‘Maffei, you Florentine, though you are a pagan and a foreigner you are not only welcome at my table but I insist on it. What is the matter with you all tonight?’
The matter with all of us is that we have dined with Colet before, many times; without exception one leaves his table with an empty stomach and an intellect so brimming with inspiration and aspiration that it is impossible to sleep that night. Such evenings with John always turn out to be the best one has enjoyed since the last such occasion, but oddly each time begins with this same reluctance and a massive desire to be doing something else.
Erasmus laughed out loud and said, ‘John, although I have longed for so many years to be with you again, still your hospitality has all the attraction of a cold bath.’
Colet was not offended. ‘It is my duty to live by scripture and to avoid, as best I may, being a hypocrite. My predecessor as Dean of St Paul’s was renowned for his banquets, but who has ever said anything about his spiritual fare?’
The deanery is constructed of the same stone as the church, with slender pillars and turrets and many mullioned windows. On the ground floor is a hall with panelled walls and high ceiling, but Colet never dines there. We went upstairs to the small chamber where the air is full of the smell of beeswax polish and the oaken floor glows. The ceiling, panelled in the same wood, is so low that it seems to press down on your head. In my several years in England, I have never got used to the ceilings and the sense of breathlessness they inspire. This is a raw, rude country which, though it may have heard of the beauty of Italian architecture, has yet to build anything in the style. The English cling to tradition and do not like change.
Around the walls are niches which Colet has emptied of their mediocre statuary and woodcarvings. There remains only a crucifix and a sweet figure of Our Lady. There are marks on the walls where rich tapestries once hung before they too were stripped out and sold, the proceeds going to the poor of the parish. A generous fire burned in the hearth and the table had been laid out by the servants for precisely the number of guests the dean would have once Linacre returned to us. The food that was on the table could not go cold since it was cold already.
‘What I like most about England as the winter draws on,’ said Erasmus, his thin lips down-turned at the sight of fruit and cheese on pewter dishes, ‘is hot chestnuts, with those lovely brown shells blackened by the fire, and that wonderful smell. Chestnuts, John, cannot be an obstacle to the spiritual life, surely?’
We took the seats assigned to us, with William Grocyn, as usual, given the place of honour, since he is the eldest of us, the pioneer of Greek studies in England and Colet’s own fount of inspiration. Grocyn is so weak-sighted that, to save what eyesight he has, he never writes anything but teaches the Word by the word, that is, through speech. Because he sees so little, he lacks the ready smile of a man meeting a friend and stares at you in a way that is easy to misinterpret if you do not know the cause. His hair is sparse and white, his cheeks sunken over gums missing many teeth, and spittle collects at the corners of his mouth. But his spirit is as lively as that of any youth and to see Grocyn is to understand the Platonic notion of the body as a prison of the soul.
Will Lily – or, as More calls him, ‘Willy Nilly’ – gets lost in general conversation and never contributes anything other than an amiable smile and the occasional nod of agreement, muffled as he is by the belief that his intellect, like his body and his name, is diminutive. He sits like a child, his knees together, his legs splayed apart and his feet inturned. In the presence of this company, which includes not only the Dean of St Paul’s but also Will’s reve
red godfather, Grocyn, he is silent, lost in muteness, until the conversation turns to the topic of language, when he shoots out of his shell, his gigantic claw of intellect ready to grasp the subject and devour it. At such times he wonders – as we all do – who the other William Lily is, but once the topic changes, so does the man, and he retreats back behind a bemused smile.
As we took our places at the table, Colet enquired about More’s happiness since he abandoned monkish austerity for a wife. More declared himself to be very content to have joined Lily in the happy state of being a householder. ‘I would recommend it to you all, as it was recommended to me. Choose a girl as pliant as a willow sapling, whom you may educate as you would a child, and raise her as a helpmeet for your work.’
‘Marriage is not for me, alas,’ said Erasmus, crunching on celery.
‘Since you are a canon of the order of St Augustine, that goes without saying.’
‘It is not my vows that keep me celibate,’ Erasmus complained. ‘It is the lack of opportunity to break them. What girl in Christendom would have an ugly stick like me?’
We are used to such self-deprecation from our Dutchman, and I sometimes wonder if he has a distorting mirror. I told him – and perhaps I sounded trite – that beauty, according to Plato and Plotinus, does not rest in the object but is self-existent and may be seen in anything. ‘The cognition of beauty depends upon the seer.’
He looked at me with those bright, dark eyes as if with great amusement. I was not sure what he was seeing and began to grow troubled. Whenever I speak these days, and it is happening with increasing frequency, I hear myself rattle out truisms of the Platonic theology, and they seem more and more like – just words. Good words, fine words, but losing their efficacy with time and repetition. I coughed to hide my sudden sense of embarrassment and fell into silence.
For the sake of Erasmus and myself, the group avoids any temptation to lapse into vernacular English but converses in Latin throughout. Erasmus speaks the ancient tongue with a Dutch accent, a very sibilant and juicy sound with quizzical inflections. To hear that sound again – it calls to the soul like the trill of a blackbird in winter. How I have missed him! To have him with us again is to complete a circle that has been, if not broken by his absence, then imperfect. The difference between a polygon and a circle – worth reflecting on. Together we constitute what Colet calls the ‘true community of scholars in London’, given that we are the only men versed in both Latin and Greek. If this sounds few, Colet thinks our number is greater than even may be found in Italy these days, and he could be right.
Such Latin has not been heard before in London. In this company the rude church Latin, with its mangled grammar and rough phrases, is never spoken. In this company men speak the polished, euphonious – sometimes scatological – language of the ancient authors; here in the deanery it is as if Cicero, Ovid and Virgil live once more. Each man delights in the linguistic accomplishments of the others, and each uses the noble tongue as if it were his own volgare, so that even lewd jokes and witticisms spill out of us fluently – but never in Colet’s presence if we can help it.
After moving from Oxford to London, More shared lodgings with Lily near Charterhouse, that great Carthusian monastery outside the city wall. Together they polished their Latin on the translation of epigrams and, as with all young men, had a disposition for the delights of the flesh. They would spend as many hours in exchanging jokes and comparing experiences as they did in sober study. But as Lily’s youthful lust began to convert naturally into the love of a particular woman called Agnes, whom he made his wife, More’s converted into a sense of sin. He went frequently into Charterhouse to live a part-time life of a penitent, while the rest of the time he studied law, growing ever more ascetic, sleeping on the floor and wearing a hair shirt, until Colet intervened.
While himself celibate, Colet stands with St Paul that it is better to marry than to burn, and he interpreted More’s pallor as the consumption of spirit by the inward fire of lust. He instructed him, with the full authority of St Paul resounding in his voice, to get himself married. More went to his father at his estate at North Mimms, and old John More told him to visit the Coles at Roydon in Essex, ‘who have a good crop of girls’. More chose the eldest, though she was not the prettiest, and returned to London with a sixteen-year old who was to become his experiment in education. This young girl, who had not even heard of Cicero, was soon reading out loud from his works.
Sometimes Jane More throws her book at her husband and, jumping up in tears, cries out loud for her mother, but as the months pass she is growing used to her tormentor, and with More being as attentive to her well-being in bed as he is out of it, she is growing patient with his strange whims and even begins to enjoy his instruction. More is convinced that girls can thrive as well as boys on education – as Plato has shown in the guardians of his ideal Republic – and More’s wife, though started late, is proving him right.
After much opinion had been expressed on this topic, I spoke up as one who has had experience of it, since in Italy learned women are more common than here in England. ‘I would like to agree that women should be educated, if they wish to be, since I know – or have known – so many splendid examples of literate ladies. However, education can ruin a girl, since society will treat her as a miracle at best, at worst as a freak of nature, but never as a scholar in her own right. Take Poliziano’s sister, Maria, for instance. She had to live as a recluse in his house, and all manner of rumours ensued.’
Lily and Grocyn concurred, having met Maria themselves when they were in Florence, students of Poliziano and living in his house. ‘Alas, society does not allow for learned ladies,’ said Grocyn.
‘Then society must change!’ said More. ‘And it is up to us to change it. I have many plans…’ And thus the conversation shifted to More’s favourite topic, which is good government. The group is divided between those who think a nation should be governed by monarchs born to the duty, those who think it should be by men polished in the art of statecraft, and those who think that it should be run by holy men. The majority prefer the latter, saying that the other systems are too prone to corruption. I have lived under all three of these systems and was about to speak up for my own preference when we were interrupted by the return of Linacre. Ushered in by a servant, he entered with a draught of cold air clinging to the black cloak and the scarlet robe he bought when he was in Italy. Tall and lanky, he somehow manages to convey, without saying as much, that here is one with an Italian doctorate, a graduate of the University of Padua with a degree in medicine. It is one thing to be a student of the humanities; quite another to have obtained a degree in one of the traditional subjects most noble and most difficult. But to have obtained that degree in Italy – that makes Linacre a giant in the eyes of his friends. While we have looked into Homer and can identify Greek metre, Linacre has peered into corpses and can name a man’s inner organs. But both in Florence and at Oxford, Linacre has studied literature, and when he is with us the mighty doctor transforms into a poet- philosopher.
‘Ah, good, as I had hoped – pears and dried figs!’ Alone of all of us, Linacre approves of Colet’s choice of diet and says that, if all men ate so frugally, he would be struggling to make a living. As it is, he is called out daily to attend victims of gout and gallstones, especially at court, and is becoming very rich indeed. ‘Are you still drinking that vinegar, Tommaso? I tell you, if you want an English complexion, you must drink English ale.’
I grimaced, as much from the taste of my imported wine as from the thought of ale. It is true that my heavy red wine from Siena has turned to vinegar while at sea. John called a servant to fetch ‘the signor a thimble of mead.’
‘If you are going to buy imported wine,’ More told me, ‘let it be from Bordeaux.’
‘Nothing wrong with English wine,’ said Eramus, raising his glass.
‘It’s white,’ I muttered.
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�And it’s good for you,’ said Linacre, draining his own glass and holding it out for a refill.
In his presence, our talk turned to the king and, as so often these days, quickly became critical. King Henry Tudor, while being in so many respects our benefactor and protector, is becoming more miserly with age and his increasingly tyrannical acts are giving weight to the arguments of those who favour republics. Lily wanted to know how someone so avaricious can be so thin.
‘Misers are always thin,’ Erasmus replied. ‘It is themselves they consume, not their wealth.’
‘I hear His Majesty is trying to exact an even greater subsidy from the public purse than he is allowed by law,’ said Thomas. ‘If I could but have him in the dock, I would ask him a few questions about justice and the duty of a monarch in respect to the people.’
‘Hush,’ said Erasmus warningly, glancing at Linacre.
‘I am confident,’ said More, ‘that in this company even courtiers will not be spies.’
‘My loyalty is to learning,’ said the good doctor, ‘and being frequently in the presence of the king does not turn my head. Besides, he is not the incorrigible tyrant men think he is. Only this evening he spoke to me of his intention to build a new hospital.’
‘Does he want you to be its director?’
‘He wants me to help with the plans. He has heard from Francesco Portinari about the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and is fired to build one just like it here in London, on the site of the old palace of John of Gaunt at Savoy in the Strand.’
Everyone looked at me. I nodded. I know Portinari and I know the hospital which was founded by his illustrious ancestor. ‘It is the finest in the world.’
They guffawed and accused me of Florentine pride.