The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  Thomas More’s later praise of Morton, as a man both politic and wise, indicates the extent to which he was influenced by him; from the evidence of his Utopia and The History of Richard III, Morton is one of the most imposing figures of the period. In the register of his routine episcopal business, there are reports of his threatening excommunication against various ‘sons of iniquity’ who had robbed a priory, and of his ordering general processions ‘with chanting and mass if possible’ to petition God’s favour on behalf of the king and granting indulgences to those who participate in them.12 In 1491, the year of Prince Henry’s birth, the archbishop was relieved from his duty of visiting the Pope every three years, largely because of his secular business as Lord Chancellor, and a proctor took his place on these obligatory missions to the apostolic see. The affairs of the Church and of the kingdom were united in his person; Morton was the latest in a long tradition of powerful clerics who served their sovereign as well as God. There was no necessary disparity between these roles, of course, since the divine laws of order and authority were thereby being maintained. In More’s later account of a conversation at Lambeth, when such matters as judicial punishment and land enclosure were discussed, the archbishop orchestrates a debate between a lawyer, idealist, friar, and fool; even in table talk there was a set of unwritten but acknowledged rules which Morton himself gently imposed upon his guests. It is not hard to imagine the admiration, even awe, which he instilled in the young page.

  At the time when More first encountered him, the archbishop was the single most important example of the new unity and stability which the burgeoning Tudor dynasty had brought to the throne. Morton had managed to serve under both Yorkist and Lancastrian sovereigns, earning plaudits on both sides for his integrity, and by almost single-handedly arranging the marriage between Henry VII and Elizabeth of York he brought to an end those dynastic struggles which had threatened the peace and good government of England. During More’s tenure as a page at Lambeth there were already reports of the impostor Perkin Warbeck’s attempts to claim the throne, but these only heightened Morton’s preoccupation with maintaining the balance and firm order of the country.

  The nature of Morton’s career is important in one other respect, since it may help to solve the mystery of More’s later relations with Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII. Morton was both cleric and lawyer, spiritual and secular officer, whose capacities were rewarded with a number of lucrative ecclesiastical benefices and administrative posts. He was known by diplomats to be one of the principal architects of foreign policy, but acquired an altogether less satisfactory reputation for his conduct in domestic affairs. It was he who is said, perhaps inaccurately, to have invented the fiscal policy known as ‘the fork’; it was a device for collecting new revenues for the king, and was best described as ‘perswading prodigals to part with their money because they did spend it most, and the covetous because they might spare it best; so making both extreams to meet in one medium, to supply the king’s necessities’.13 As a result he seems to have been disliked and feared by many who were not always impressed by the king’s ‘necessities’. Francis Bacon describes him as ‘a wise man and an eloquent’ but ‘in his nature harsh and haughty … envied by the nobility and hated of the people’.14 The fact that this was the man whom Thomas More praised for his prudentia (judgement) and auctoritas (authority and prestige) raises interesting questions about More’s scale of values.

  It has often been suggested, for example, that Thomas More despised or distrusted Cardinal Wolsey’s uses of power and displays of pomp. But in neither respect was Wolsey departing from the essential roles promulgated by Morton or his predecessors. Morton, too, loved pomp and circumstance—or, rather, he understood its importance in a culture irradiated by spectacle and display. The performance might sometimes be of a severe kind. In preparation for his installation as Bishop of Ely, he walked bare-legged and bare-footed from Downham to Ely with a rosary in his hands. But when he was to be installed as Archbishop of Canterbury he rode from London with a vast retinue, ‘greatly accompanyde with lordes espirituels and temporels’ and with an estimated cavalcade of a thousand horse in a grand progress that took six days. On his visitations to various of his dioceses in 1490 and 1491—on which occasions it is possible that the young More was in attendance—he insisted upon proceeding in ‘great state’,15 with an imposing cross carried before him and a vast retinue behind him. This was the man whom More praised for possessing prudentiam rerum,16 or one skilled in human affairs. Is it likely, then, that More would have any principled objections to Cardinal Wolsey’s similar use of magnificence and power?

  It is important to remember that, for most of his life, More was a lawyer and a public administrator; he was not a visionary or a scholarly humanist, however much he celebrated men such as Pico della Mirandola and Desiderius Erasmus. That is why he particularly admired in Morton his ‘great experience the verye mother & maistres of wisdom’;17 he believed that experience in the practical business of the world led to prudent deliberation and good judgement. It also becomes clear from his history of Richard III, in which Morton plays a prominent part, that reason or theory does not prevail in human affairs; the wise man is Morton, who manages to guide events with diplomacy and rhetoric. More’s admiration for Morton was based upon that prelate’s astuteness and efficiency, which were precisely the characteristics that More was to display in all the affairs of his life.

  After the meal was over in the Great Hall, there were occasions when players stepped forward to engage in dialogues and dramatic disputations, often accompanied by music and song; it was the natural entertainment for a group of people accustomed to debate and oratory. In one of those cultural transitions which can only be observed in distant retrospect, formal debate was turning into more informal drama; the theatrical world of Marlowe and Kyd is in turn connected with medieval rhetoric. The young More was present at some of these performances, and his son-in-law records that ‘thoughe he was younge of yeares, yeat wold he at Christmas tyde sodenly sometimes steppe in among the players’18 and would then improvise a part so skilfully that he excelled all the other actors. This cannot literally be true, since the decorum and propriety imposed upon a junior member of the household would prevent him from ‘sodenly’ doing anything, but it may be that Archbishop Morton, recognising the boy’s ‘witt and towardeness’,19 asked him to take on a role in the Christmas interlude. Certainly we know what kind of drama would have been prepared for the occasion. Morton’s chaplain by the year of More’s entry into service, Henry Medwall, was a skilful dramatist who supplied material both for professional actors (the mimus or the histrio) and occasional players. At least two of his works survive and one of them, Fulgens and Lucrece, has been dated with reasonable certainty to the time of More’s sojourn at Lambeth Palace.

  It is in many respects the direct heir to the academic and legal disputations of the period, since two characters known respectively as ‘A’ and ‘B’ begin by outlining a plot in which the rival claims of nobility and virtue are to be tested. Cornelius is a wastrel patrician and Flaminius a virtuous plebeian; they vie for the hand of the lovely Lucrece, and the drama of their contest is suitably adorned with legalistic and oratorical terms. It is not hard to imagine More, as a graduate of the St Bartholomew disputations, taking some part in these entertainments. The elevated cadences of the argument (couched in rhyme royal) are, however, in contrast to the scatological aspect of certain passages. There is, for example, a reference to one character who ‘For a medsyn must ete his wyves torde’ and a request that ‘ye had be taken up behynde’.20 Similar jokes will be found in the work of Thomas More. The ‘frankness’ of fifteenth-century people about the body and its functions has often been observed; if you believe human nature to be fallen from grace, and irredeemably flawed, then there is no reason to be discreet or fastidious about its natural properties. It might be useful, even beneficial, to exploit and to parody them. But there was also a positive delight in the material worl
d; in the sacrifice of the Mass, for example, Christ’s actual body was believed to animate the bread and wine. If the natural order might act as a visible token of an invisible sign, then the sacramental and the excremental can be seen in tacit partnership. We know from the babooneries in the margins of certain sacred manuscripts that a sense of ritual and a sense of ribaldry are not unrelated; they can be seen as part of the same instinct for game and for play.

  And so the young Thomas More stepped in among the players. William Roper’s story has an air of authenticity for the manner in which, at the beginning of his biographical narrative, the element of theatricality in More’s character is revealed. He, along with everyone else, acted his part. The discovery of the world as a stage goes back beyond Shakespeare to Lucian and other classical satirists. Yet the apothegm had a particular resonance in the religious culture of the late medieval period; in a world where the truths of divine authority were fixed and established, the fallen world of human nature could be seen in part as a game of little consequence. It is merely the antechamber of eternity. There is no abiding city, as More emphasised in all of his devotional works. So the guests in the Great Hall play their roles according to the divinely ordained hierarchy, dressing (and being addressed) in accordance with their precise degree and estate. But it soon became time for More to play another part. When Archbishop Morton ‘sawe, that he could not profitt so much in his house, as he desired, where there were manie distractions of publick affairs, having great care of his bringing up, he sent him to the Universitie, and placed him in Canterbury Colledge at Oxford’.21

  CHAPTER V

  SET ON HIS BOOK

  HOMAS More entered Oxford University as a scholarship boy, most probably as one of the collegii pueri (‘college boys’) nominated by Archbishop Morton for a place at Canterbury College. At the time of his arrival, in the autumn of 1492, the university contained approximately one thousand young scholars scattered among the colleges of regular and secular clergy as well as the various halls. More was in his fourteenth year, the average age on first coming to the university. His stay at Oxford, and his reasons for being despatched there in the first place, have been the subject of endless conjecture. Since he remained only for two years before moving on to New Inn, in London, it has been suggested that he was the unfortunate object of his father’s ambition; according to this theory John More insisted upon his son following a legal career like his own, thereby forsaking the academic delights of the college library and the dangerous ‘new learning’.

  But there are more convincing explanations for his relatively brief university career. There can be little doubt that Archbishop Morton understood the boy’s potential for public service, and an education at Canterbury College in the charge of Benedictine monks would have been the ideal preparation for a successful career within the ecclesiastical establishment. Morton’s connection with Oxford was a strong one; in 1494 he was elected as its chancellor. The young More would have been able to study civil as well as canon law, as Morton did, before taking holy orders and joining the professional administrative class of church and state. It is possible, on the other hand, that More’s progress from an Oxford college to a London Inn was planned in advance. It was not unusual for young men to spend a year or two at the university, without taking a degree, before moving on to more serious study at an Inn of Court. Several of his contemporaries made precisely that journey; a preliminary grounding in logic and dialectic offered an ideal preparation for the intensive study of common law. It would be of a piece with More’s later career to see his progress from Lambeth Palace to Oxford, from university to Inn, as a carefully managed and willingly undertaken process of advancement.

  There are two extant illustrations of Canterbury College, Oxford, both of them showing it close to demolition in the middle of the eighteenth century. The college had been established in the fourteenth century for a small community of student monks from Canterbury itself—Benedictines or, as they were known, ‘black monks’—but was suppressed with its parent monastery at the time of the Henrician Reformation. It was neither the largest nor the most distinguished of the monastic colleges, but by the 1490s it had already acquired an interesting history. Its warden in 1365 had been John Wycliffe, a little over a decade before he began his more widely known career as a reformer. A recent influence was William de Selling, the prior of Christ Church in Canterbury, who had fostered the teaching of Greek and increased the number of monk-fellows at Canterbury College itself. Selling had brought back Greek manuscripts from two visits to Italy and is believed to have translated a work of St John Chrysostom; he takes his place, then, as one of the first of those pious Christian ‘humanists’ who were to affect More so strongly at a later date.

  The college itself took the shape of a small quadrangle surrounded by hall, chapel, kitchen and chambers for scholars and fellows. The buildings were of two storeys, the ground floor constructed of Headington stone and the upper storey built with timber and ‘covered with plaster impressed with fantastic designs’.1 A library had been completed some forty years before More’s arrival, and within it the books were still fastened upon chains in the old medieval style; this was an understandable precaution, since scholars had been known to remove the more attractive volumes. Surviving lists and catalogues refer to works of biblical and patristic literature, as well as to cupboards containing books of grammar and law. It is difficult to be precise about the number of collegians. There are likely to have been approximately six monk-fellows, together with a warden, and five or six secular scholars like More himself. There were also a number of commorantes—lodgers or ‘sojourners’ who paid for their accommodation. Each chamber was generally shared by two fellows or scholars, with one end of the room partitioned into separate studies.

  So More had entered a small community, organised upon a quasi-monastic pattern. His role as a secular scholar, one of Morton’s collegii pueri, was similar to that of a monastic oblate; he was required to assist during the services in the chapel and to wait upon the fellows in the hall. He was of course accustomed to such service in Lambeth, but the Great Hall of the palace was now exchanged for a smaller room with a central hearth, a high table, a woollen tapestry picked out with images of animals as well as ‘an old hanging with ostrich feathers’2—the feathers no doubt part of some tribute to a Prince of Wales. It was declared, however, that such menial service was not to be so arduous that it interfered with the studies of the collegii pueri; they would have been free, for example, to attend the college lectures or disputations in grammar and philosophy.

  But this may not have been the only institution where the young More received his education. There are persistent reports that he was also a member of St Mary’s Hall in Oxford. One early seventeenth-century account of the university states that he was educated ‘in aula S. Mariae’, and a late history proclaims More as one of the eminent men of that place.3 There is no real contradiction here, since it was possible for More to be formally attached to Canterbury College, while residing (and even being instructed) in St Mary’s Hall; the college and hostel were situated close together in the same street.

  The halls were different in character from the colleges; they were not closed monastic institutions but, instead, were self-governing and for a long period self-regulatory. Each one held less than twenty students, with a central hall for meals and disputations as well as a small number of shared chambers. The image of the family, or household, had a firm hold upon most medieval institutions; the terms aula (‘hall’) or hospicium (‘hostel’) were sometimes exchanged for domus (‘house’). The hours for any ‘yonge scoler’ were long, with his rising at five for divine service before the morning lecture (with perhaps a second lecture at nine) to face a day which included studies between dinner and supper followed by further studies until retiring to his hall at eight or nine in the evening. The students ate together in ‘commons’, with a bell or horn announcing dinner at ten or eleven in the morning and supper at five; only Latin was pe
rmitted in conversation, and of course they were expected to attend Mass each day. After their studies were over, and before they retired to bed, the community of the hall chanted the Salve Regina or some other antiphon to the Virgin Mary. ‘To thee do we cry,’ they sang together, ‘poor banished children of Eve.’ Such were the institutions during More’s short period as an undergraduate.

  His studies were not confined to the college and the hall. In his first year at the university he embarked upon the trivium, incorporating grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the ‘liberall artes’4 as opposed to the study of theology, with much of the emphasis resting upon logic or dialectic. The syllabus was supposed to last for two years and, since More remained at Oxford for that length of time, it can be supposed that he completed it. The texts which he would have been required to read included the Rhetoric of Aristotle (to which three terms were given), Boethius’s Topics, the Nova Rhetorica of Cicero, as well as selected works of Priscian and Ovid. The method of teaching was as precisely organised as the curriculum itself. Public instruction was by the traditional means of lecture and disputation; the lectures were generally held at six o’clock in the morning, at which time the master took up the set book for that part of the curriculum and expounded upon its meaning. He would be expected to provide interpretations of, and glosses upon, the text while at the same time dividing his approach into a number of quaestiones or investigations arising from it. Books were heard, rather than seen. Clearly the approach could be highly formalised and restricted, differing very little from the teaching by rote within the grammar schools, but there were opportunities for resourceful masters to provide more inventive glosses and interpretations. On other days were held the disputations—on a dies disputabilis rather than a dies legibilis—and once again the young Thomas More was involved in the world of formal oratory and public debate. In front of the young scholars, or sophisters, masters and bachelors were required to argue on either side of a proposition or an interpretation—there would normally be one proponent against two opposers—until a final judgment or determinatio on the matter was given by the presiding master.