The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  Since his death came to define him, his first biographers were happy to provide suitable anecdotes for the origin of a martyr. His mother is supposed to have dreamed of all her children, engraved upon her marriage ring, but the name and likeness of Thomas shone brighter than all the rest. Apparently More was told this by his father, which suggests familial expectations as great as filial obligations. There are more obvious examples of hagiography. He was being carried across a river by his nurse, in his early days, when her horse stumbled; the nurse threw the infant over a hedge in order to save him from falling into the water. When she reached dry ground, ‘she found the babe lying unhurt and laughing’.4 This is all in the tradition of the Golden Legend and the other stories of saints which would have surrounded More as a child. The real circumstances of his early life and inheritance are more interesting, if perhaps less remarkable.

  More’s paternal grandfather was a baker, the son-in-law of a London brewer, and his maternal grandfather, Thomas Graunger, was a tallow chandler.5 Both grandfathers were members of their guilds—Graunger was a warden of the Tallow Chandlers’ Company—as well as citizens of London. The fact that within four generations they produced judges, landed gentlemen and even a Lord Chancellor is not necessarily surprising. The greatest men in London had been merchants for three centuries; Richard Whittington had been a mercer, and William Caxton still was a member of the fraternity. They were the ‘most worshipful’ of Londoners, amassing large fortunes, helping to control City government, directing the patterns of commerce, and in time often becoming associated with the king in various financial or advisory capacities. Thomas More would move easily all his life among the most powerful and wealthy citizens; he was, after all, one of them.

  It might be tempting to describe him as an integral part of London’s ‘aristocracy’, but that would be anachronistic in a hierarchical society where degree and rank were not applied in a random or metaphorical way. The world of More was one of status rather than of class, where the inheritance of feudalism and authoritarian religion pre-eminently demanded the virtues of loyalty and duty. In later life he described himself (in almost conventional terms for a London citizen) as being born of a family noted for its honour rather than its illustriousness. This is not some token phrase, however, but a true definition of what the London merchants believed to be their proper role and destiny. The most powerful citizens could attain only baronial rank, and were therefore inferior in degree to ‘noblemen of the true noble blood’.6 Yet for Londoners such as More, true virtue sprang not from high birth but from honesty and piety. In his translation of the life of Pico della Mirandola, More wrote that it was the possession of such virtues which produced honour, ‘as a shadow folowith a bodi’.7 Virtue, in other words, cannot be inherited; it is not a simple attribute of rank. The City merchants also knew that the nobility had no exclusive claim to wealth and influence.

  Consider the case of Thomas More’s father. John More was sixteen years old when his own father died, but he and his five siblings were not reduced to any state of orphaned wretchedness. William More was a ‘baker’ on the grandest scale; in his will he noted that the Earl of Northumberland still owed him the very large sum of £87 16s 2d ‘for bread bought of me’.8 And, as so often happened, William More had married well—indeed the resources of the bride or the bride’s family were the most important aspects of any marriage. His wife, Johanna Joye, was the daughter of a prosperous brewer and the granddaughter of John Leycester, formerly a clerk of Chancery. Leycester was a gentleman, entitled to bear arms, and a man of some wealth with properties both in London and in Hertfordshire. So John More was from his earliest years part of a world in which the merchants and citizens of London were acquiring land and money in equal proportions.

  The father of Thomas More moved easily enough, therefore, from trade to law. At the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, at about the time of his marriage, he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn. Social historians of this period have often observed that London lawyers had more opportunities of acquiring land than London merchants, but John More was a landowner by inheritance. His main business seems to have been with various City companies and guilds, and he became known as a lawyer with connections and influences which could expedite the general affairs of London merchants. This is also the milieu to which Thomas More would most easily adapt himself. In later years John More would be raised to the rank of ‘serjeant’, before joining, as a judge, the Court of Common Pleas and eventually the Court of the King’s Bench.

  It would be unhelpful to apply some nineteenth-century model of a member of the ‘middle class’ thrusting forward and upward. Merchants and lawyers could become gentlemen and landed gentry, but the actual nature of the society was not thereby changed. The formulae of rank and hierarchy, based like medieval architectonics upon subordination and symmetry, remained intact. In a closed system, everyone has a determined place. In the Act of Apparel 1483, for example, purple and velvet were forbidden to lawyers; in 1486 it was decreed that the hems of livery gowns were to be ‘one foot above the soles’ of shoes.9 The colour and material of dress were also of paramount importance in a society which was established upon display and spectacle. Of course there were exceptions, but generally and characteristically each member of the body politic remained within the appropriate estate, or order, or degree, just as the head, eyes and limbs of the body cannot be interchanged. John More, as judge, was one of the eyes. The image of the human body was of central importance in the political and religious discourse of the period; it might be related to medieval cabbalism, but it also emerges in Thomas More’s own epigrams upon the perfect kingdom.

  John More married Agnes Graunger in the church of St Giles, Cripplegate; there is no name in late medieval London without its own particular resonance and, according to John Stow, Cripplegate was the site where the lame were healed when the body of St Edmund the martyr was brought into the city. They were married on 24 April 1474, the Vigil of St Mark the Evangelist, John More being described as ‘Gent.’.10 Agnes Graunger was the first of More’s four wives, but it is likely that she bore all of his six children. Thomas More rarely discussed his siblings, and two of them are never mentioned by him. It is likely that they were part of that infant mortality which had provoked such concern for early baptism. At an appropriate age Thomas More’s younger sister, Elizabeth, married a lawyer; his elder sister in turn married another lawyer, who later became a coroner. They had remained, in other words, within the connections of a larger official family. He had a younger brother who also survived: the young John More acted as an occasional secretary to Thomas More, but died at some time in his thirties. Agnes Graunger herself died young, although the cause and circumstances of her death are unknown. Her last child was born in the autumn of 1482, and it is possible that she died in the great epidemic of sweating sickness which visited London three years later. But, in a volume entitled Ancient Funerall Monuments, there is a description of a tomb in St Michael Basings Hall, in the ward of Coleman Street; the Latin epitaph upon it commemorates an Agnes More who died in 1499. This stray token of mortality is inconclusive, but it can be inferred that the mother of Thomas More died at some point in his youth or early manhood. How else would John More have been able to marry on three subsequent occasions? It might also explain one of More’s early Latin epigrams, translated from the Greek, which declares that even a loving stepmother brings no good fortune to her stepson.11 It may even be that the relatively early death of his mother engendered in More that self-protectiveness which was so marked a feature of his temperament.

  Upon his own epitaph Thomas More described his father as ‘Homo civilis, suavis, innocens, mitis, misericors, aequus, et integer’; the Latin is clear enough hardly to need translation, but it is interesting to note that More emphasises his qualities of sweetness, affability and compassion. The description does not fit later accounts of apparent miserliness and strictness; but the disparity need not yet be resolved. It is typical, in any case, that Th
omas More preferred to tell worldly anecdotes about his father in which the element of judgement is suspended. ‘I have heard my father merrily say every man is at the choice of his wife, that ye should put your hand into a blind bag of snakes and eels together, seven snakes for one eel, yet would I ween reckon it a perilous choice to take up one at adventure though you had made your special word to speed well.’12 It is not a sympathetic remark from a man who was married four times, but caustic comments about wives were part of the repertoire of medieval humour. A second anecdote, again retold by Thomas More, has a similar import; his father had said ‘that there is but one shrewde wyfe in the worlde, but he sayth in dede that euery man weneth he hath her, & that that one is his owne’.13 ‘Shrewd’ here, in one of those obliquities of meaning which render some medieval terms ambiguous, means ‘shrewish’ rather than perspicacious.

  Yet marriage was not supposed to be a matter of ‘courtly love’, and there is no doubt that John More prospered. The property in Hertfordshire bequeathed to him was substantial enough for anyone who wished to think of himself as ‘a landed gentleman’ and who had his own coat of arms. Gobions, or Gibions, or Gubynnes, or Gubbeannes (the orthography of the period, before the full impact of the printed word, was not exact) was a ‘capital messuage’14 or main house in the parish of North Mimms, with adjoining orchards and fields as well as lands in neighbouring parishes. Little is known about the More dwelling in Milk Street itself, except that it must have been one of the ‘fair houses’ mentioned by John Stow. The antiquarian describes London dwellings of stone, but most were of wooden construction; others were of mixed type with stone gateways and cellars, timber-framed walls of lath and plaster, and tiled roofs.

  We know of another successful merchant in the parish of St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street: James Olney, who had eight rooms ‘for bedrooms and parlours’.15 Imagine, then, a gateway on Milk Street which led into a square courtyard roughly twenty-five feet by twenty-five feet. On the left side was a single-storeyed hall, which was the principal room of the house. It was the chamber for dining and entertaining, with its long table and chairs, with its screens and tapestries and candles for both decoration and comfort; it would have been heated by a fireplace, or by a brazier, and the fire would have lit up the ‘steyned cloths’ hanging upon the walls. In this room, too, was placed the cupboard of plate; these were the most expensive and important items in any household, and in the hall of John More we would expect to see goblets, basins, ewers, patens and great spoons glowing in the light. Furniture was of a plain sort, with chairs and stools, small tables and chests, placed upon the rushes which acted as a covering for the floor. Here, too, would be sensed all the odours of timber and stone and smoke, of dried herbs and roasted meats.

  Beyond the hall were the kitchen, pantry and butlery—even, sometimes, a parlour, where the family might dine together. But the other rooms were in the adjoining wing of the house. Earlier in the century it had been customary for families to share one bedroom, with a canopied and curtained bed for the master and the mistress, and trestle beds or mattresses for everyone else. But by the late fifteenth century two bedrooms were often used by the family (the servants slept in the attic spaces), and the surviving inventories of featherbeds, blankets, sheets, pillows and counterpanes suggest that they were designed to be as luxurious as possible; there were also various ‘chambres’, ‘orioles’ (small rooms or bays) and ‘solars’ (upper rooms). Such wealthy late medieval households lived in comfort. Their rooms were decorated with tapestries or stained cloths, while woodwork and wooden panelling were painted in delicate shades; halls and parlours were wainscoted, and sometimes depicted figures out of the Bible or classical legend. In the courtyard there was space for bright flowers and herbs, vines and figs and laurel trees; geese and chicken were kept here and, in one account, there is mention of ‘six water potts of tyn for byrds to drynke of’.16

  The young Thomas More, then, was raised in a prosperous and comfortable household. The prose of his maturity contains allusions to infant games and childhood ballads. Even in the anxious and bitter period of his polemical writing, he invokes a ‘good chylde’ playing such ‘prety playes … as chyrystone mary bone, bokyll pyt, spurne poynt, cobnutte or quaytyng’.17 ‘Cobnutte’ remains as the children’s game of ‘conkers’, and the game of quoits or ‘quaytyng’ still flourishes. It is clear that little children also played with cherrystones and used marrow bones as bats or markers. In another place he writes of children shooting arrows high into the air18 and in fact quite young boys were given bows and arrows with which to practise their skills. There are metaphors of archery throughout More’s writings, with his references to ‘a full shotte’, the ‘but’ and the ‘prycke’.19 It is hard to imagine his ever being a good archer, however, let alone an enthusiastic player of ‘foteball’, with an inflated pig’s bladder used as a ball, or of ‘cokesteel’ with a cock buried up to its neck in the ground and used as a target for missiles. It is easier to see him playing less ferocious games in the courtyard, ‘as chyldren make castelles of tyle shardes’.20

  There is a charming reminiscence of a late fifteenth-century childhood written by a twelve-year-old schoolboy, in which he recalls how ‘I was wont to lye styll abedde tyll it was forth dais, delitynge myselfe in slepe and ease. The sone sent in his beamys at the wyndowes that gave me lyght instede of a candle.’ And what did the young boy see around him, on these mornings five hundred years ago? He used ‘to beholde the rofe, the beamys, and the rafters of my chambre, and loke on the clothes that the chambre was hanged with!’ Then he ‘callede whom me list to lay my gere redy to me’ and ‘my brekefaste was brought to my beddys side’.21 This pampered childhood is enough to dispel quaint illusions about the necessary hardship of fifteenth-century life. There are other memories, too. John Colet, who became More’s religious mentor, remembered the painted dolls and rocking-horses of his infancy. In John Heywood’s interlude Wytty and Wyttles, a child remarks that ‘All my pleasure is in catchynge of byrdes/And makynge of snowballys and throwyng the same’;22 he failed to mention skating, using the bones of sheep for skates, which was another popular winter pastime.

  More had his own reminiscences, which are expressed by a protagonist in his Dialogue of Comfort: ‘My mother had whan I was a litell boye, a good old woman that toke hede to her children, they callid her mother mawd.’ One can imagine her in close cap and stuff gown. ‘She was wont whan she sat by the fier with vs, to tell vs that were children many childish tales.’23 He then recounts one of the fireside stories in which a fox, Father Raynard, hears the confessions of a wolf and an ass. The moral is concerned with the problems of an over-scrupulous conscience, but includes the recognisable details of city life—the pigs sleeping in ‘new straw’ and the goose in ‘the powlters shop’ with its feathers ‘redy pluckyd’.24 It is not a tale out of Aesop, since the Greek fabulist could hardly have anticipated priests or rosary beads ‘almost as bigg as bolles’,25 but it is an animal narrative of the same stable. Mother Mawd was clearly devout, also, and the devotion of More’s own nature may have first sprung from such close childhood influence.

  During More’s childhood, in 1479 and again in 1485, there was ‘an hugh mortalyte & deth of people’ in London; it was the ‘sweating sickness’ or ‘English sweat’, which, in the autumn of the latter year, may have claimed the lives of his mother and of two siblings. Two years later the plague visited Westminster and caused ‘grete deth’.26 Certainly his abiding and central preoccupation with death was shared by his contemporaries. The reports of these epidemics come from the London chronicles of the period, and in the pages of these long forgotten memorials the customary life of the city around the young More is also restored—men hanged and then burned for robbing a church and despoiling the blessed sacrament, bills fastened upon church doors, the gates being shut against riotous assemblies outside the walls, new towers and conduits and weathercocks being erected, a world of portents and providential signs, lavish spectacle and continual urba
n improvement. It was also the period that witnessed the short reign of the supposed ‘crippleback’, Richard III, who is presumed to have murdered the young heirs of Edward IV in Thomas More’s own fifth year.

  Henry Tudor was in turn the victor on Bosworth Field in 1485, More’s seventh year, but those dynastic struggles or ‘Wars of the Roses’ did not necessarily play any formative role in City trade and politics. It has been variously estimated that the amount of actual warfare in the years between 1455 and 1487 was twelve or fourteen months, and fifteenth-century London was a relatively peaceful and increasingly prosperous city. The authorities generally ensured that they were seen to be on the ‘right side’ on the appropriate occasions, and supported whichever monarch emerged from the processes of fate, time and faction. John More himself is an interesting example of the alliance which might be formed between the City and the royal court; it is clear, from his will and other evidence, that he had an especial loyalty towards Edward IV, in whose reign the young lawyer rose to prominence. It was in Edward’s reign, too, that the heralds bestowed on More a coat of arms. It is also clear that he had a particular connection with Archbishop Morton, who served Edward IV and, subsequently, Henry VII. The precise nature of their relationship cannot now be uncovered, and might well have resisted analysis at the time; it remained a matter of mutual services and obligations, the filaments of which over the years created a network of amity and trust. Indeed, it is much easier to chart John More’s legal career in the years of Thomas More’s childhood. He was involved for some years on a City body concerned with the maintenance and development of London Bridge but, while specialising in London affairs, he was also ascending the hierarchy of Lincoln’s Inn. He was in turn master of the revels, butler and marshal; these posts may sound absurd or servile, but they were of paramount importance in the good administration and reputation of the Inn. The ‘master of the revels’, for example, was not some figure out of Rabelais but an official in charge of its most elaborate and prestigious annual ceremonies. Thomas More himself accepted the post even when he was serving as Lord Chancellor of England.