The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  On feasts such as that of Epiphany or All Saints, entertainment was provided after the religious observances had been fulfilled. Some scholars furnished their own form of ‘misrule’ at the festival of the Holy Innocents, three days after Christmas, and in one Oxford college there was a rex fabarum or king of beans.32 There were also occasions when minstrels and players would be introduced into the normally sober precincts of hall or college, among them the fistulatos and the tubicens. By the time that More had come to Oxford, comedies and other plays were also acceptable entertainment; there are records of the works of Plautus and Aristophanes, two of the favourites of student comedy, being performed on just such occasions. The young More had ‘stepped in’ among the players in the hall of Lambeth Palace, but his dramatic skills were greatly extended after his arrival at Oxford. Erasmus mentions in one letter that, while he was still an adolescens (a youth of fifteen years or upwards), More wrote, and performed in, short comedies or comic sketches.33 There is confirmation of the fact in the first sentence of More’s earliest extant letter, when he mentions the composition of ‘partes’ or a role in a comedy about Solomon.34 Comic episodes of this kind were often employed in the teaching of grammar. Scholars were sometimes also required to compose short plays in order to furnish proof of their grammatical and rhetorical abilities. We cannot divorce More the scholar from More the dramatist, therefore, and any modern idea of ‘creative literature’ must give way to a proper understanding of rhetoric as the basis of all his work. His wit, his ingenuity as a writer, his skill as an actor, and his public roles, were all part of the same dispensation.

  More had also begun to write poetry, of a highly accomplished kind. We must turn again to Erasmus for the information that in his youth More wrote verses—‘carmine … exercuit’35 is the phrase, which might mean either songs or lyric poems. Recent scholars have suggested that certain epigrams and comic English verses might be attributed to More, but the evidence is at best only conjectural. It would be inconceivable that he did not compose in verse, however, especially since it was one of the requirements of the curriculum. There is in any case no doubt about his first elaborate poem, ‘Nyne pageauntes’, which appeared in the English edition of his works some twenty years after his death. The publisher of his verse and prose ‘in the Englysh tonge’, his nephew William Rastell, states that More ‘in his youth deuysed in hys Fathers house in London, a goodly hangyng of fyne paynted clothe, with nyne pageaunts’, complete with verses.36 Another story suggests that John More was so delighted by the proficiency of his son’s poetry that he had cloths painted and hung upon the walls in order to display it to best advantage. Over the first image, of a boy playing with a whip and top, More has written a verse of iambic pentameters in the form of rhyme royal. It begins,

  I am called Chyldhod, in play is all my mynde

  To cast a coyte, a cokstele, and a ball.37

  Eight other painted scenes follow, to display the passing ‘pageant’ of the world from youth to age, accompanied by images of death crushed under the feet of Lady Fame and of time prostrate before ‘Eternitie’ sitting in a great chariot like some figure out of Petrarch’s Trionfi. It is all highly theatrical, and might even have set the stage for dramatic recitations by the More family. The powerfully assured verses of ‘Nyne pageauntes’ emerge from a technical mastery of grammatical and rhetorical devices which seems almost unprecedented in a young scholar. This was no doubt one of the skills which appealed to Samuel Johnson, that great classicist and composer of Latin verse, who in his History of the English Language devoted more than twice as much space to More’s poetry as he did to Chaucer’s. He praised its ‘pure and elegant style’,38 and indeed all of More’s English verse is characterised by great purity of diction and simplicity of cadence. It represents in the very finest form what was known as ‘discrecion’ in the apt arrangement of parts. That is why ‘Nyne pageauntes’ should be read and understood in terms of its use of metonymy and metaphor, asyndeton and metathesis, peristasis and paralepsis. It is necessary to expel any notion of poetry as self-expression and to consider it instead as a particularly affecting form of grammar.

  But it should not therefore be assumed that it was some theoretical exercise; grammar was the companion of rhetoric and oratory, which in turn are implicated in drama. More might equally well step among the pageants as among the players, since the very scheme and cadence of the poem associate it with the guild pageant plays and the mysteries which he saw performed on the streets of London. It has been suggested that More owes his central debt to the verse of Petrarch, but we may find his inspiration closer to home. In Clerkenwell or in Cheapside, figures from classical and biblical legend would be displayed upon chariots, or would step down and address the crowd in the same spirit as More’s emblems of time and fatality. On the afternoon of Corpus Christi thirty-six painted pageants passed through the streets of London with these verses of explanation hung among them:

  With theos figures shewed in youre presence,

  By diuers likenesses you to doo plesaunce.39

  The pageant wagons for the procession of the Midsummer Watch were constructed and stored in Leadenhall; they were painted, gilded, and carried in procession upon the shoulders of porters. In the morality plays performed at Skinners’ Well, and elsewhere, the rise and fall of humankind were plotted in much the same terms as More’s rendition of youth and age. ‘I gynne to waxyn hory and olde,’ declares Mankind in one such play, ‘My bake gynnyth to bowe and bende’.40 A pageant was literally, in the words of one contemporary, ‘a house of wainscot painted and builded on a cart with four wheels’41 and upon these wagons allegorical figures would address each other just like Fame and Eternity in More’s own poem. When a prominent member of the Spanish royal family entered London, she was greeted by six pageants constructed at various points along her route from London Bridge into the City. Painted wooden castles built upon stone foundations, columns and statues, fountains and artificial mountains, mechanical zodiacs and battlements, were all arranged before her as Virtue spoke:

  And therffor wyth lesse labour and payn

  To myne acquayntance ye shal well attayn.42

  The verse is not as skilful as that of More, but the general form of address and meaning is very similar. It has been necessary to multiply these examples of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century theatrical rituals to suggest the urban tradition and inheritance from which Thomas More drew. He might have derived inspiration, also, from the allegorical figures of illuminated manuscripts, from the stock types and situations to be found in sermons and fabliaux, from the richly painted verses and pictures upon the walls of the cloister of Paul’s Pardon Churchyard close to his house in Milk Street. All these images and words were around him since the young More was part of a culture which was still oral, communal, spectacular and ritualistic. His ‘Nyne pageauntes’ harbours a medieval voice in which the cadences of the liturgy and the plays, of debate and disputation, as well as a whole wealth of sounds and signs and emblems, are still to be recognised. It was his genius, as we shall see, to put his rhetorical and grammatical skills at the service of this popular culture; but, at this point, we may return with him to that city which, according to John Lydgate in ‘London Lykpeny’, ‘of all the land … beareth the pryse’.43

  CHAPTER VI

  DUTY IS THE LOVE OF LAW

  E left Oxford, without acquiring a degree, and took up his studies at New Inn. This was one of the Inns of Chancery, where More—now sixteen years of age—began a legal training which would last for the next six or seven years. The general supposition among his biographers is that he was commanded by his father to follow a legal course, against his own better wishes and instincts. It is certainly true that a few of his contemporaries at Oxford or Cambridge (most of them later became his friends) had decided to pursue a different career directed towards what was called the ‘new learning’; these were the scholars who would in retrospect be given the title of ‘humanists’ or even the ‘London
humanists’. They took part in what was already a familiar pilgrimage to the sites of new classical scholarship; in Florence, Padua, Rome, Ferrara and Jerusalem, they placed themselves in the care of tutors imbued with Neoplatonism and Greek study, concerned with a purer grammar taken directly from classical sources, intent upon training the understanding as well as the memory. Thomas Linacre had gone to Padua in 1487; William Grocyn was in Florence by the following year. John Colet travelled in Italy for three years after finishing his studies in England, and More’s nearest contemporary at Oxford, Cuthbert Tunstall, followed Linacre to Padua in search of further enlightenment. In the autumn of 1494, when More attended New Inn, Savonarola was preaching, with a tongue of flame, upon apocalypse and the rebirth of grace in Florence. The cities of Italy seemed, in their different ways, to be advancing the cause of rinnovazione. This is to say nothing of Leonardo in Milan, or of Michelangelo in Florence itself.

  But the young Thomas More returned to the household in Milk Street. He seems to have had little interest in scholarship or the pursuit of classical studies for their own sake. Instead he prepared himself for what, with only a slight anachronism, can be described as the family business. Did his father force him to do so, as biographers have suggested? Erasmus intimates that John More threatened to disinherit his son if he did not enter an Inn,1 but all the circumstances of More’s life and temperament suggest that this was never the case. He had an abiding respect for the practice, and a deep admiration for the principles, of law. He knew that human justice was only the faintest reflection of divine law, but it became for him the principle and model of conduct upon the earth. Of course more practical reasons might have persuaded the young More to embark upon a legal career. In the same sentence that Erasmus talks of More being disowned or disinherited (the verb ‘abdicare’ has both connotations) he goes on to admit that characteristically in England lawyers were ‘magni clarique’, important and distinguished. He was certainly well informed on that point, since in the last decades of the fifteenth century lawyers were seen as a professional class of administrators who took up the key positions in various royal councils and offices. The sons of the landed gentry were now being directed towards the law, where there were growing rewards of prestige and wealth, rather than to the Church or trade. Serjeants-at-law, one of the principal ranks among common lawyers, were considered to be of equal status with knights. But they were not necessarily held in such high esteem, however, since they were often condemned as avaricious and mendacious. The possibilities of financial reward were obvious enough, and one metrical tale of the period makes the point succinctly:

  To grete worshippe hath the lawe

  Brought forth many a pouere man.2

  And how could it not be so, in a society and culture which have been rightly called obsessed by the law and legal relationships? Every activity of life was seen within a network of duties and obligations, which in turn led to a concern for precise formulae and ordinances. It has been estimated that in each law term there were more than a thousand pleas or bills being conveyed through the various courts.3

  More had not advanced to the later stages of an Oxford education precisely because it seemed to offer no advantage in the affairs of men. On entering the field of law, however, he was being despatched to a practical career in the public world. It was only within this sphere that he could properly deploy the lessons in rhetoric and dialectic which he had already learned. There were also more immediate advantages to be gained from his admission to New Inn. The sons of other gentlemen and of nobles were also being educated there, and at once the young More was in the company of those people who would eventually administer the affairs of the king and the nation.

  Perhaps most importantly, the role of lawyer suited his own temperament. He was a resourceful actor and he became an equally skilful rhetorician; in later life he was sought by both Court and City for his gifts as an orator. (That is why he also became, according to the reports of foreign observers and others, the perfect diplomat.) His polemic texts reveal the persistence, subtlety and inventiveness of his attacks against his opponents; as a forensic orator, and judicial examiner, he is as fierce as he is persuasive, continually changing or extending his line of attack, looking for the smallest inconsistencies, finding weaknesses and deriding mistakes of terminology or presentation. More as a lawyer is the apotheosis of the clever and practical man. Yet cleverness alone is not enough. In More it was accompanied by a consistent doubleness or ambiguity of mind. He had been thoroughly trained in the art of disputation, where it was necessary to take up either side of a question, and his prose works themselves are generally couched as dialogues or debates. The most famous description of him by Erasmus as a man ‘omnium horarum’,4 because of his affability and sweetness of nature, was translated in the period as ‘a man for all seasons’; but it could have additional connotations. He was always most reluctant to reveal himself as the author of his works and often used the masquerade of an assumed name. Throughout his life, in fact, he seems to have maintained a curious detachment—one example of which lies in his almost impersonal maintenance of authority both as councillor of the king and defender of the faith. He was always precise and shrewd, but there is a suspicion at times that he was playing some kind of game. His son-in-law remarked that More never showed ‘of what mind himself was therein’.5 Here, then, are the makings of a perfect lawyer—skilful yet detached, cautious as well as theatrical, persuasive and practical in equal measure.

  New Inn, formerly a tavern known as Our Lady Inn, was situated at the lower end of Drury Lane (where the crescent of the Aldwych was built in the early twentieth century); it was not a pastoral spot, despite the fields and grazing cattle shown around it on an Elizabethan map, since it was essentially a legal quarter between the City and Westminster, where other Inns were to be found. There were at least ten Inns of Chancery, most of them being connected as preparatory institutions to one of the four Inns of Court—New Inn was affiliated with the Middle Temple, for example, although Thomas More followed recent family precedent by going on to Lincoln’s Inn. Familial ties might well also have been responsible for his admission to New Inn. The property upon which it stood was owned by a serjeant-at-law and later chief justice, John Fineux, who is believed to have been associated with Lincoln’s Inn (and therefore with John More) and who was certainly the grandfather of More’s son-in-law and first biographer, William Roper. It is often difficult to discern all the lineaments of family connection or affinity, but they are almost always present beneath the surface of any important medieval transaction.

  The great fifteenth-century master of jurisprudence Sir John Fortescue described the Inns of Chancery as the proper home for ‘young men, learning or studying the originals, and as it were the elements of Lawe, who … as they grow to ripenesse, so are they admitted into the greater Innes of the same studie, called the Innes of Court’.6 The history of these Inns is as mysterious as the origin of English law itself (some historians dated it to the time of Julius Caesar or even, in one case, to the beginning of the world), but it seems likely that they developed from the hospicia or hostels in which lawyers stayed while they pleaded at the nearby courts of Westminster; the tavern of Our Lady in Drury Lane was no doubt among them. By the time of Thomas More’s admission, however, the Chancery Inns were well established. They comprised approximately one hundred students, or apprenticii, and were considered to furnish ‘an university or schoole of all commendable qualities requisite for Noblemen’.7 They were indeed universities but with a more specialised curriculum; Oxford and Cambridge provided some kind of training in civil and canon law, but the Inns of Chancery taught English common law—the law of the courts—which was perhaps the single most significant achievement of medieval England.

  The young More set out to acquire the basics of what had become an elaborately codified system of procedures and precedents. But first it was necessary to understand a new language, the language of the law, which was not simply a matter of termino
logy but also of tongue. English was used for general argument in the courts, while most of the statutes and writs were composed in Latin; but formal pleading, and the exercises known as ‘moots’, were conducted in a strange judicial vernacular called ‘Law French’. This was an inheritance from the Norman kings, but it had developed into a hybrid form of speech suited only to judges and lawyers: ‘Est un question in nos livres si … l’opinion des touts les justices … Amendez votre ple.’8 Even the ‘Year Books’, those records of pleas and cases going back to the thirteenth century, are in that tongue. It is testimony to their faith in custom and authority that English common lawyers continued to use this hybrid form, although Latin and English were readily available. And when one of More’s earliest biographers records that ‘he learnt French, as being useful for diplomatic work’,9 we can note the fact but alter the reason for it.

  Early training began, also, with the intensive study of particular statutes or pleas, as well as treatises of a more general nature on the role of custom and reason in the formation of law. The Year Books would have been too cumbersome and elaborate for a sixteen-year-old ‘apprentice’; there was instead one of the few law books in print, the Old Abridgment, which contained judicious summaries of various aspects of royal prerogative. The king’s ‘priviledges’ became one of the great concerns of More’s own writings and would of course eventually decide his fate; but, as a student, he merely had to learn them by note. Procedure, in the strictest and most formal sense, was the centre of the law; the process was of more importance than any judgment, and the formal rituals of presentation and challenge took precedence over the desire for any particular result. The young More had to learn how to classify and formalise the materials of an individual case; he was first brought to the learning of writs which were, as one parliamentary petition of the previous century had put it, ‘the chiefest part of that law which is the sovereign law of king and kingdom’.10 The oldest book of common law was the Register of Writs; it was not printed until 1531, but there were manuscript copies in the great households as well as the Inns. Here the writs were classified according to custom—writs of trespass and writs of liability, writs of covenant and writs of right, writs for every manner of action and occasion, all of which had to be studied and remembered. The lawyer was obliged to choose exactly the right writ before proceeding; otherwise his client’s case, however apparently just, would be rendered void and inadmissible. The choice of writ determined the nature of the court, the nature of the proceedings and, of course, the nature of the judgment.