The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  It would be foolish to establish an entire biographical narrative upon the basis of one sketch, even by so distinguished an artist. On this occasion it is important only to register the dependence of father and son; the whole of Thomas More’s life is caught up in the maintenance of authority, and we can look for the first stirrings of it within the family of Milk Street. It might be said that More possessed genius precisely because he stood in symbolic relation to his age; he embodied the old order of hierarchy and authority at the very moment when it began to collapse all around him. He died for the sake of the order which he had first learned in his father’s house.

  The discipline of late medieval households was well known; one manuscript in the Ashmolean Library describes how men and women even in their thirties might not sit in their parents’ presence ‘without leave, but stood like mutes bare-headed among them’.1 This may be an exaggeration, designed to impress rather than to inform, but it imparts the general tenor of household life. Manuals suggested early and strict discipline for the child—with the use of ‘harsh suppositories’ to encourage toilet training2—and More’s references to his nurse rather than to his mother in turn imply a degree of separation or estrangement. His relationship to his father was, according to the later members of his own family, equally subdued. Cresacre More reports that More ‘never offended nor contradicted him in anie the least worde or action’.3 No doubt there would have been penalties for so doing, and in later life More asserted the symbolic significance of the father chastising the child—‘that father is not accompted for vnlouyng and cruell that beteth hys chyld but rather he that leueth yt vndone’4—as an image of divine paternalism. Yet the mature Thomas More never beat his own children except, on occasions, with peacock feathers. John More is supposed to have been economical with his son’s funds; Thomas More was continually giving gifts and coins to his own children. His daughter remembers her father losing his temper only twice in the whole course of her life. Would it be too much to suggest, in similar spirit of reprisal, that More witnessed his own father losing his temper too often? It does not take a psychologist, of whatever school, to realise that such reversal of his father’s habits suggests a certain innate dislike or hostility which can be expressed in no other way. Yet throughout his life he displayed nothing but a meek spirit towards John More. It was a form of piety in the strict sense—in The City of God, Augustine defines piousness as the attitude of duty and deference to parents—and bears the marks of the prevailing belief that it was sinful to disobey lawfully constituted authority. More also defines it as the ‘naturall charitie’ that ‘bindeth the father and the childe’5 and tells his own son, also named John, that he should be ‘eager to delight’ and ‘cautious not to give offense’ to his father.6 Certainly More himself gave no offence and followed a career which delighted his father.

  John More must have been an ambitious man to succeed in becoming serjeant and justice, especially since he was the first member of his family ever to train as a lawyer, and no doubt he also focused his ambition upon his son. Was More following his father’s orders in becoming Lord Chancellor? There is no evidence at all that he did so unwillingly; the facts suggest the opposite, and it can be surmised that More ‘internalised’ his father’s predilections and preoccupations without undue disquiet. He stands in marked contrast once again to his greatest opponent: Martin Luther defied his father’s wish that he should become a lawyer, and it could be said that Luther’s quarrel with paternal authority was eventually heard all over Europe. But More suffered from no such neurotic or ideological crisis and it was he who, against Luther, defended the old order of Christendom. It is interesting to note, when More was attacking heresy, the particular way in which he chose to remember his father; he is generally described as recounting oral tales or proverbial phrases. In A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, John More appears on four occasions—telling the story of a feigning beggar in the days of King Henry VI, for example, and of a ‘gentlewoman’ who refused to believe that ‘our lady was a Iewe’ but when convinced of the fact by John More affirmed ‘so helpe me god and holydom I shall loue her the worse whyle I lyue’.7 So the father is connected with earlier times and with the old faith, conveyed in stories and remarks that emphasise the common frailty of humankind. These stories can be seen as the oral equivalents of the histories, precedents and legal abridgements which were part of his library. The inheritance and meaning of the past are to inform present actions; as in the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, the dead can and must be heard among the living. The name of the father, too, can be heard throughout More’s writings. In Utopia, the inhabitants of that ambiguous country worship an eternal unknown being called father.8 In more theoretical contexts More always adverts to the authority of patristic sources, ‘the fathers’ whom he addresses as sanctissitnos (‘most holy’) and doctissimos (‘most learned’).9 But the image of the father is not simply representative of ancient wisdom; in the context of religious change it becomes of pressing contemporary significance, since the English Church could no more forsake Rome ‘than might the child refuse obedience to his natural father’.10 In this refrain of ‘father’ and of ‘fathers’, most holy and most learned, we can hear also the cry for authority and restraint.

  More’s single most bitter accusation against Luther and his followers, was that they incited disorder. He is the first English writer to employ the Greek term anarchos, and he related the whole great change of European consciousness in the sixteenth century to the ‘hatred that they beare to all good order’ and ‘the great hunger yt they haue to brynge all out of order’.11 He detested vain meddling and what he called ‘newefangylness’; even if there were to be such a thing as a bad law, he once argued, public discussion of the matter was to be avoided at all costs. But when Luther attacked Henry VIII and the Pope he seemed to More to be also imperilling the civilisation of a thousand years. His attitude is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote, three hundred years later, that ‘The people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them’.12 It is why More had no ‘ideas’ as such; he had no need for them, and part of his dislike for medieval logic was its potential for creating discordancies or problems where none had previously existed. It is significant in this context that an extant copy of Euclid’s Elements, with annotations in More’s hand, shows him to have been particularly interested in theoretical geometry and altogether impressed by a closed system of knowledge which offered ‘absolute certainty’ and ‘self-evident truths’.13 In the words of the prophet Samuel, ‘to obey is better than sacrifice’.14

  But cannot obedience and sacrifice be intimately related? Two episodes from this period make a suggestive connection. In later life More wrote a Latin poem to a lady called ‘Elisabetha’, in which with much circumstantial detail he recounts his youthful infatuation for her. He says that he was sixteen at the time (and therefore about to enter New Inn), she fourteen, when he was struck by ‘innocuo … amore’,15 or harmless love, at a dance. She seems to have returned his affection, but a ‘custos’ or guardian was employed to keep them apart. The poem is possibly a poetic fiction, designed simply to display More’s skills in amatory elegiacs, but it does receive some corroboration from Erasmus. He wrote a letter, at about the same time as More composed the poem, in which he describes how the youthful More was not immune to the charms of young women.16 But he hastens to add that More preferred a union of minds rather than of bodies and that he stopped short of ‘infamia’ or disgrace. It is in a similar spirit that More, in his poem, emphasises more than once that his love for Elizabeth was ‘sine crimine’.17 It is an interesting little story, not least because it marks one of the few occasions when More was willing openly to discuss his private feelings, but it has an even more intriguing sequel.

  According to one of More’s biographers—one who had the additional advantage of talking to those who had known him—‘even as a youth, he wore a hair-shirt’18 as a form of penance and mortification. Cresacre More repeats a similar claim: ‘Whe
n he was about eighteen or twentie years olde, finding his bodie by reason of his yeares most rebellious, he sought diligently to tame his unbrideled concupiscence by wonderfull workes of mortification.’19 One is reminded, somehow, of his large nose and rather thin lips. So he tried to chastise and tame his ‘unbrideled’ sexuality, even to the extent of wearing a rough and knotted hair shirt at such a young age. In his later work he evinces what is almost disgust at the body and its functions; he despised lechery and drunkenness, and there are reports that when a very young man he drank water rather than beer. The sense of order was one which had invaded his own physical being; he bore its marks in a literal sense, when he put on the hair shirt which chafed his skin. This, too, is the bitter fruit of duty and obedience.

  If we reflect upon his relationship with his father, as well as on the general authority which John More embodied, we might be tempted to see his whole career in the light of that obedience. There may be no need to look for any private motive or specifically individual choice in any of his decisions (perhaps not even that concerning his death), but rather the dutiful assumption of public roles. There is, after all, an element of humility and self-abasement in the acceptance of the parts which he played—whether that of lawyer, or diplomat, or courtier.

  When Thomas More knelt down with reverence before his father in Westminster Hall, his bowing was a form of humility and clarity of spirit. He was bowing to the Church and to the Law, to the authority of the past and the hierarchy of the world, to the eleven circles of the eleven heavens, to the order of the spheres which proceeds upwards to the crystalline universe, to the primum mobile and to that eternal ‘circuite [of] enumerable angells singing’20 around God. He is bowing with gravity and deliberation. But is he also smiling? He believed implicitly in the need for this ritual, but he was also playing a role to perfection.

  CHAPTER VIII

  WE TALK OF LETTERS

  URING the reign of Edward III literate laymen had been granted the privilege of clergy and were not subject to the jurisdiction of the secular courts. But in 1489 the legislation was changed, and lay scholars became distinguished from clerks in holy orders; if they committed murder, for example, they would have the letter ‘M’ branded upon their heads as the punishment for a first offence. Nothing could better demonstrate the respect afforded to those who could read; they were, literally, members of a privileged class who might get away with murder. It is the most appropriate context for More’s first entry into print. Lac puerorum, or Milk for Children, was published in 1497. It was a basic Latin grammar for schoolboys—a book about learning how to read. Its author, John Holt, had been a teacher of grammar at Magdalen College School in Oxford, but was at this time resident tutor for the younger members of Cardinal Morton’s household at Lambeth Palace. Since the little treatise is dedicated to John Morton, and since it includes two Latin poems by an erstwhile member of that school, Thomas More, we may be inclined to see Lac puerorum as a production from the very centre of ecclesiastical and administrative life in the period. More refers to the lessons within it as nostra, ‘ours’, and it may be that he contributed more than poetry to its making. He was nineteen at the time of its publication—on an early page, his poems are described as the work of ‘diserti adolescentuli’1 or eloquent young man—and the treatise bears all the marks of a youthful attempt to purge the basic curriculum of the dead matter which had grown about it. The lessons are conveyed in English, with little woodcuts of a candlestick and open hand as aids in the memorising of Latin cases and declensions. But no activity in the late fifteenth century was without possible spiritual connotation; the declension of Latin nouns was sometimes compared to the declension of the soul into the body.

  John Morton died in the autumn of 1500 without, it must be said, any great evidence of public grief. By that time, however, Thomas More had clearly attracted the attention of other mentors. The evidence suggests that, even while studying at Lincoln’s Inn, he found himself among a small group of scholars and clerics who had already sensed his worth. They have become known in recent years as the ‘More circle’, but at the time he was by no means the most eminent among them. In a letter of Erasmus’s from this period More is praised for being ‘mollius’, ‘dulcius’ and ‘felicius’,2 easy-tempered and generally charming. These are hardly words of praise for his intellectual abilities, unless we take ‘felicius’ in its subsidiary meaning of being fruitful of good works, but the important point of the letter is the setting in which Erasmus places More. It is a setting of erudition and classical scholarship, where the exemplary figures are John Colet, William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre and More himself. Colet is compared with Plato, while Grocyn is praised for his learning and Linacre for his good judgement. It is all the more remarkable that More should be included in this company, when it is remembered that Grocyn was thirty years, and Linacre almost twenty years, older than he was; Colet himself was born more than ten years before him. In his dialogues More tends to place an older man in conversation with a younger one, and it seems that the notion of wisdom and guidance being transmitted from age to youth was one that he established in his own life. In a letter to Colet, for example, he refers to Grocyn as the ‘magister’ or director of his life and Linacre as the ‘praecepter’ or instructor of his studies;3 Colet himself acted as More’s ‘confessor’. In the pattern of these relationships it is possible to recognise the role which the young More frequently adopted towards those closest to him. Two salient characteristics of his friends are also relevant; they all took religious orders and all had spent some years in Italy or Greece as part of their scholarly training. So Thomas More was the exception among them; he was much younger, a student of the law and a layman apparently dedicated to a lay career. It is hard to assess the impact upon him of those who had lived or worked outside England, but it is significant that all his life he was able to combine a comprehensive understanding of what might be termed ‘European’ culture with a specific instinct for the life and genius of London. There was no necessary disjunction between the two. More had become attached to a group of people who, as far as Erasmus was concerned, comprised one of the finest centres of classical learning in Europe and one which was indeed superior to any in Italy.4 The Dutch scholar was inclined to flattery, especially when it concerned prospective patrons, but there was a genuine truth to his remark. In these early days of what has become known as Christian humanism, before the Henrician reforms helped to destroy any English participation in this more general European culture, the scholars of Oxford and London and Cambridge were at the centre of intellectual enquiry and classical studies.

  William Grocyn was the oldest of the group, but in a sense his career was exemplary. He had begun his studies at Oxford, where he became a fellow and later a Reader in Divinity; he was one of the few scholars there who acquired a knowledge of Greek, perhaps through one of those private tutors who, before the advent of humanism, kept alive the memory of the classical world. In 1488, in his early forties, he resigned his academic posts and travelled to Italy, part of that migration among the wealthier or more devoted English scholars towards the fount and source of good learning. There were tutors here from Athens and Jerusalem as well as Florence and Padua; there were small academies devoted to classical learning; there were manuscripts and libraries and printers. On his return to England Grocyn kept chambers in Exeter College, Oxford, where he taught and lectured in Greek studies. After some five years at Oxford Grocyn received the ‘benefice’ of St Lawrence Jewry through the agency of the Bishop of London—the acceptance of a ‘benefice’ from a patron, by those scholars who were also in holy orders, was the best way of ensuring a modest income with which they could continue their studies. St Lawrence was the church close to More’s home in Milk Street, and here More himself would later lecture upon St Augustine’s City of God; in turn Grocyn would lecture on the pseudo-Dionysius in St Paul’s at John Colet’s instigation.

  Grocyn had perhaps become acquainted with More through More’s close fri
end William Lily. Lily had made the customary journey from Oxford to Greece and Italy before returning to London. Here he became a tutor in Greek and Latin studies, in which capacity he assisted More in his private studies; certainly they were soon translating epigrams together. But Lily was also William Grocyn’s godson and may have introduced the younger man to the older. There are other connections: Grocyn and John Colet were already acquainted, sharing an interest in the study of divinity free from scholastic accretions; and Grocyn had travelled in Italy with another of More’s mentors, Thomas Linacre.

  Linacre was a classical scholar with a difference. He made the familiar journey from Oxford, where he had attended More’s college, to the various cities of Italy, where he is believed to have studied at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence, as well as in Padua and Rome. But there came a moment in his Italian travels when he turned to thoughts of medicine; he began to read Aristotle and Galen, in the original Greek texts, and from that time must have harboured the ambition of translating them which eventually (if only in part) he fulfilled. He had returned to London by 1499 and, having already been awarded a degree in medicinis at Padua, he began to practise medicine as well as to teach Greek. In the latter position he had Thomas More as a pupil; William de Selling, the great patron of Canterbury College, had taught Greek to Linacre and now Linacre imparted it to More. He became, eventually, the most famous physician in England and his epitaph in old St Paul’s declared that he had restored to life men ‘who had already despaired of recovery’.5 But his most permanent memorial must be as the expired hero of Robert Browning’s ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’, where he is described as saying, in very mid-Victorian terms, ‘What’s Time? leave Now for dogs and apes! Man has For ever.’ He was for a while also tutor to Prince Arthur, elder son of Henry VII and heir apparent; he translated a cosmographical treatise by the pseudo-Proclus, De Sphaera, but earned his place in Robert Browning’s poem by composing a grammar for schoolboys that was considered as difficult as it was erudite.