The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  So he arrived in the summer of 1499, with an early if still somewhat inconclusive reputation as a poet and a scholar. We might see him, on first encountering More in a London household, as unaffected and fastidious, reserved and delicate. He was a man with a great desire for the peace and security which his own early years had unhappily lacked. But it would be wrong to present too mild or bland a description of the great scholar; the man whom More was to call ‘my derlynge’23 was also possessed of a spirited and sometimes sarcastic sense of humour. The irony, sometimes light and sometimes ferocious, in Moriae encomium or in Colloquies, is evidence of a man who knew the world well enough to be able to mock it successfully. Yet he was capable of great enthusiasms—for learning, for books, for scholarship—and the secret of his swift and intimate companionship with More may be gauged from Erasmus’s recollection of another friendship. ‘We talk of letters,’ he once wrote, ‘till we fall asleep, our dreams are dreams of letters, and literature awakens us to begin the new day.’24 So they met, conversed gaily in Latin, and within four months Erasmus was addressing More as mellitissime Thoma (‘sweetest Thomas’).25

  One other record of their intercourse, during Erasmus’s first visit to England, has survived. It comes from Erasmus himself in a ‘catalogus’ written some twenty-four years later, in which he recalled an occasion during the summer of 1499 when he was staying at the country house of Lord Mountjoy in Greenwich. More arrived there with a friend from Lincoln’s Inn, Edward Arnold, and he suggested to Erasmus that they all walk to the neighbouring village of Eltham. In fact they were to visit the royal palace there, where Prince Henry was in residence; More and Arnold thereupon presented the prince with some ‘writings’ to commemorate the occasion. Erasmus was annoyed at not having been warned to prepare verses of his own but, after a request from the young Henry, produced some suitably patriotic poetry three days later. It is an intriguing story, not least because for the first time it brings More face to face with the prince who was one day to be master of his destiny. Who could have imagined that this pretty boy of nine years would one day bring such havoc upon the Church and the civilisation which both More and Erasmus came in their different ways to represent?

  But there is a more immediate interest to Erasmus’s anecdote. It was surely unusual for a young law student to be allowed access to the royal family of England, and to be on terms of such familiarity that he might bring a companion apparently unannounced. Certainly it throws a distinctive light upon More’s social position, at the very summit of that world of privilege and authority in which he had moved easily all his life. The evidence of his later career testifies to his self-confidence and social ease, qualities which came as much from his background of affluence and power as from his personal virtue. But if his place in that world can be described, it is difficult to know precisely how to define it, sustained as it was by a network of friendships, affinities, households and social obligations. How, for example, was it that young More was able to stroll across the new stone bridge over the moat and walk into the great hall of Eltham Palace with its music gallery, mullioned windows and panelled screen?

  It has already been noticed that Erasmus was staying on the Greenwich estate of William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, at the time of the Eltham expedition. Mountjoy had been his student in Paris over a period of three years, and eventually Erasmus had come to reside with Mountjoy’s household in that city. Mountjoy was the same age as More, and had already gained such a reputation for honesty and learning that Henry VII had chosen him as a companion for his younger son and, according to Erasmus, as an associate in the young Henry’s studies of Latin and of history. That is also why there were members of Mountjoy’s household in attendance at Eltham Palace when More, Erasmus and Arnold made their journey there. The connection between Mountjoy and Erasmus is clear, therefore, but it is not enough to explain More’s familiarity with the young royal family. More and Mountjoy were contemporaries enamoured of the new learning, and Mountjoy’s father-in-law, Sir William Say, was acquainted with John More; a few years later we find More himself named as a trustee for one of his estates. The executor for the will of Sir William’s father was, in one of those many circuitous links characteristic of the fifteenth century, none other than Archbishop John Morton. So by means of many different paths Thomas More and William Mountjoy could have met.

  But friendship might in turn become part of faction. It has often been suggested that, at a later date, More professed hostility towards the financial exactions which Henry VII tried to levy upon London. There is no evidence of any open dispute but certainly, at the time of the accession of his son, More composed a sharp attack upon the dead king. He could not have done so, had he not been absolutely sure of his ground; so it seems possible (to put it no higher) that the association of More, Mountjoy and the young prince eventually acquired a politic flavour.26

  Mountjoy did not introduce Erasmus to More only, and through his agency the Dutchman became acquainted with those humanists whom he extolled in his subsequent letters; he met scholars such as Grocyn and patrons such as Warham, then Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, all adding to his impression that England was a fortunate island to have such people in it. But the most immediate impression and influence upon him derived from John Colet, the black-gowned lecturer upon the Pauline epistles. In the autumn of 1499 Erasmus determined to visit the University of Oxford; he arrived as a visitor at St Mary’s College, a hostel for members of his own order, where two or three days later he received a letter of welcome from Colet. Erasmus replied in his usual fulsome manner and the two scholars were soon on good enough terms to argue over points of theology. Erasmus, styling himself ‘the poet’, recounted one occasion at dinner when he and Colet disagreed over the nature of Cain’s first fault. The English divine was ‘grave’ and ‘severe’, but it seems that the force of his argument overcame all others. On a different occasion he and Erasmus disputed the nature of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane, before his arrest and death upon the cross, and once again it seems that Colet’s dogmatic and insistent arguments vanquished those of his opponent—or perhaps Erasmus was polite, or ironic, enough to retire from the unequal struggle. But if there were differences of emphasis and interpretation between the two scholars, there was still broad agreement upon certain essential principles. Here, too, we may bring in Thomas More as the silent party to that agreement. Colet moved much closer to the Neoplatonism of Florence than Erasmus ever did, and the Dutch scholar had a much broader range of learning as well as a more complex understanding of the theological tradition; but both agreed fundamentally upon the need for a spiritual reception of the gospels and the epistles of the New Testament, as part of a simplified and deepened piety free of scholastic commentary or interpretation. The early Fathers were praised by both men for their lucidity, and in the same spirit the connection between classical and Christian ideals was reaffirmed; true eloquence might lead auditors once again to true piety, and the communion of the faithful be restored. Their shared ambition was for a Church purified of the dross of observances and rituals which had accrued to it; when they eventually journeyed together to the shrine of Becket, it was in a similar spirit of detached and even sardonic enquiry. They were not reformers, only renovators; that is why their inspired efforts to restore the Church were frustrated and dissipated by the more subversive actions of Luther or of Zwingli. More himself, an admirer of Augustine, shared their practical concerns during this period. When the Church became the object of sustained and ferocious attack from the European reformers, he returned to a wholly traditionalist defence of its customs and ceremonies; but, in the early years of the sixteenth century, it was possible for him and his companions to believe that the Church itself could be made new.

  Erasmus returned to France in the first month of 1500, having first been relieved of all his money by officials at Dover. His stay in England had been profitable in other senses, however, not least because it inaugurated his long friendship with Thomas More. The
story of their relationship is well known, at least by its fruits in Moriae encomium and Utopia, but it may be worth rehearsing certain of its aspects which throw some light on their conduct over the next few years. Both men looked after each other’s interests, ‘puffing’ works where necessary and providing elaborate testimonials to publishers, patrons and fellow-humanists. They shared other secular interests, too, but there were certain divergences of taste and opinion which materially affected their respective fates. It might be said that, in the end, Erasmus was not wholly convinced of More’s humanism and not wholly inclined to share his friend’s particular forms of piety. He did not share More’s temperamental attraction towards monasticism, for example, perhaps because he had experienced it at first hand, and he never really understood the darker recesses of More’s spiritual life. Certainly Erasmus was not interested in martyrdom of any kind, and his lament at what he believed to be More’s unnecessary fate was part of his general aversion to dogmatic dispute and doctrinal divisiveness.

  Yet their shared belief in educational reform and their mutual interest in patristic literature provided the foundation for a friendship which survived the various pressures of many difficult years. They have been enrolled in the ranks of ‘humanism’ but it is better to be wary of the term, not least because it was coined at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The circumstances of ‘humanists’ in the period when More and Erasmus shared their enthusiasms can be better described by means of a book, a seal and an anecdote.

  CHAPTER IX

  IF YOU WANT TO LAUGH

  N his return to Paris in February 1500, Erasmus set to work upon the publication of his first book. Adagiorum Collectanea came from a small press in the rue Saint-Marceau; it was announced as the first selection of classical adages and proverbs ever printed, or what Erasmus described as the material for ‘noui operis’1 or new work. He had collected more than eight hundred maxims, in Latin and Greek, to which he appended short commentaries of his own. In later years Erasmus was inclined to condemn it as roughly and hastily conceived, but this little volume of some 140 pages, published at the very beginning of the sixteenth century, was the harbinger of a literature which was to change the nature of European discourse. It was published in twenty-six editions within the lifetime of Erasmus himself, and for almost three centuries it was the companion of the parlours and bedsides of Europe. Yet its first impact was of a different kind; this slim book, printed in what was the then revolutionary ‘roman’ typeface as a mark of its novelty, offered for most contemporaries their first general and accessible view of the classical past. It was part of Erasmus’s aim to restore the meaning of that past by emphasising the presence and permanence of the truths that Greek and Latin authors had adumbrated, albeit in a language more polished and refined than anything to which a late medieval audience was accustomed. The Adages also furnished conclusive proof that classical wisdom and scriptural revelation were not incompatible; Erasmus’s quotations from Plato or from Cicero are amplified by biblical allusions, with the strong intimation that a forgotten area of spiritual and intellectual endeavour was being restored to a generation at last capable of profiting from it. In his dedicatory letter Erasmus credited his inspiration for the work to Lord Mountjoy and to the prior of the Oxford college where he had stayed, and parcels of the book were sent across the Channel for the immediate perusal of More, Grocyn and others. He must have done some work of preparation and organisation in England, since it was published just six months after his departure from Dover, and there can be no doubt that he was actively encouraged by More and those other Englishmen who were also intent upon the study of Greek and Roman originals.

  From Erasmus’s book we may move to More’s seal. It is known that in later life More acquired a collection of ancient coins; some of them he gave as presents to those who would appreciate them, while the rest have been dispersed and lost irretrievably. Perhaps his collection was confiscated, along with so much else, after his imprisonment. But one of his classical memorials survives intact; it is an impression of the private seal which he used for his correspondence. The seal had been remodelled from an antique coin bearing the head of the Emperor Titus, and takes its place with two others that More used—one seeming to bear the imprint of the goddess Fortuna and the other of a bearded Roman emperor or statesman. For More, also, the classical past did not comprise some closed library of books and manuscripts but, rather, it represented a valuable and living reality. It was a way of retrieving a lost inheritance in a world that seemed to More and his contemporaries to have grown stale and decayed in its attachment to old verities.

  There is an anecdote of More told by another contemporary ‘humanist’ and courtier, Richard Pace. It seems that More, while still an adolescens, was in the company of two scholastic philosophers who informed him that King Arthur had manufactured a cloak from the beards of the giants whom, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, he had slain in battle. More apparently received the news with his customary composure, perhaps not even remarking that in Geoffrey’s account it is the giant Retho who disposes of his hirsute victims in that manner. Instead he asked them the technique which Arthur used, and was informed that the hair of the dead stretches wonderfully well. The young More asked them, in turn, if it were true that when one of them milked a he-goat the other waited with a sieve to collect the drops. This little sally, a tribute to futility and ignorance, actually comes from Lucian’s Demonax; but there is no reason why he should not have borrowed it for the occasion. For Pace it was another example of More’s sarcasm, but it can also be seen as an indication of his dislike for the vagaries of scholastic enquiry. His borrowing from Lucian was highly appropriate, too, as we shall soon discover.

  Book, seal and anecdote illustrate the complexity of the term ‘humanism’. If Cardinal Wolsey, Desiderius Erasmus, Marsilio Ficino and Thomas More were all humanists, then the term has such a wide applicability that it becomes for all practical purposes useless. If we stay close to the immediate context, however, we may define the humanist as a student of classical learning in the related fields of grammar, rhetoric and literature. This is studia humanitatis, the pursuit of bonae litterae, which in turn is related to educational reform and to a more disciplined training in the principles of good government. It was in one aspect, then, a civic and secular movement which directly affected developments in rhetoric, medicine and law; in retrospect, at least, it seems also to have demonstrated a certain piety and purity of intent with its return to the pristine sources of classical literature and with its aversion to medieval codes of war and chivalry.

  It has of course been related to the gradual decay or dissolution of the old European medieval order, at least in those historical narratives which treat the past as a form of heroic fiction in which various protagonists fight for mastery. But it might be more fruitful to recognise in the writings of the humanists a culmination of various aspects of medieval thought which had hitherto escaped intense examination or elaboration. The pursuit of classical rhetoric, for example, had always been part of the life of the Italian city-states; the dictatores or public orators had followed the model of Cicero or Quintilian throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There were ‘humanists’—scholars who were interested in obtaining and reading classical texts—at both English universities throughout the fifteenth century. Manuscript copies of Cicero, Plato and Plutarch, among many others, were available in college libraries, while there was a steady trade in imported books during the last decades of the century. In addition, Greek and Italian scholars were welcomed both in the universities and in the courts of Edward IV and Richard III. It would be quite wrong, therefore, to suggest some sudden awakening or resurgence of learning in England.

  The single most important patron of humanistic learning in More’s lifetime was Henry VII. He was known for his partiality towards foreign scholars (sometimes to the chagrin of the indigenous variety) and throughout his reign he employed ‘humanists’ in various royal and ecclesiastical
duties. These clerks and secretaries were patronised precisely because of their rhetorical skills, in the writing of letters as much as in the delivery of formal orations. Indeed, More’s eventual entry to the court of Henry VII’s successor was not some misjudgement on More’s part—as has been suggested by those who wish to emphasise the saintly or scholarly aspects of the man—but the obvious and almost inevitable culmination of his career as a practising orator and trained grammarian.

  Yet this affirmation of continuity, rather than change, might be questioned by those who note the scorn of More and others for the ‘barbarism’ of much earlier learning; it was More, after all, who is supposed to have laughed at the scholastic theologians and who on many occasions was scathing about the ignorance and triviality of those who refused to acknowledge the merits of ‘graecarum … literarwn’2 or ‘seculares disciplinas’.3 There can be no doubt that there was a sense of ‘new learning’ in the air, together with an atmosphere of reform and renovation; but how exactly, then, does More’s interest in classical literature differ from that of previous scholars? It is a matter of timing and of time itself. When Erasmus appends his commentaries to the maxims of Plato or of Terence in his Adagiorum Collectanea, he invokes a long temporal perspective in which the implications and connotations of those phrases have changed; he is creating a history of usage. It was also plain to his first readers that the civilisations of Rome and Athens were markedly superior to any they might see around them; as well as being a history of usage, the Collectanea was a history of decline (and even, sometimes, fall). Repeatedly Erasmus emphasises the dangers and inconstancies of the modern world as opposed to a classical culture erected upon ‘the noble old systems of thought’.4 This perspective—which we might describe, perhaps anachronistically, as one of historical relativism—is quite different from any that More would have known in the scriptural dramas and historical compilations of his youth. In a play where Noah or Judas would wear contemporary dress, and in a history where miracle and legend emphasised the archetypal significance of events, there is no decline and no progress, only the re-enactment of the rituals of eternity. The world was suspended in a cosmos of unchanging truths. It is all in marked contrast, therefore, to that history of change, decay and possible restoration which is at the centre of the humanist enterprise as outlined by Erasmus and More.