The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  On Corpus Christi, then, when the sacrament was carried in procession down the main streets ‘wyth baners, copys, crosses, and sencers’,7 London is not only a physical community but also a host of angels singing ‘Holy, holy, holy!’ The consecrated wafer was surrounded in Cornhill and Cheapside by a hundred torches of wax and two hundred priests chanting. It is the genius loci, the meaning of the place where they stand. In the same spirit passion plays were performed in Clerkenwell and Skinners’ Well. The presence of relics, of shrines and of holy wells, in London and elsewhere, testifies to a sense of time utterly at odds with the twentieth-century vision of the city as a quickly running mechanism or an endless flow of passing human beings. In early sixteenth-century London time was not considered to be some evenly flowing current or stream; although the comparison would not have occurred to the citizens themselves, it might be seen as resembling a lava flow from an unknown source of power. Some parts of time moved more sluggishly than others, and some parts did not move at all because they were already mingled with eternity. The sense of the sacredness of place is central here: in Rogation Week the bounds of each parish were walked in ritual procession with sacrament and cross, handbells being rung perpetually to banish demons and other evil spirits (Thomas More firmly believed in demons) from the vicinity. One foreign observer was surprised by the piety of Londoners, and remarked, with some exaggeration, that ‘they all attend Mass every day, and say many Paternosters in public (the women carrying long rosaries in their hands), and any who can read taking the Office of Our Lady’.8 Against that testimony we must place More’s lamentations on the viciousness of the city, on the prostitutes and the cut-purses, but of course in such a culture the accounts of sacredness and sin are not incompatible. Who knows what might have happened in Paternoster Row, Creed Lane or Ave Maria Lane?

  In St Paul’s itself we read of sermons and services being drowned out by the sound of general business being conducted elsewhere in the church and of what John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, called ‘the great noyse of the people’.9 Forty Masses were said each day within the cavernous cathedral, while outside in the courtyard and precincts the business of the city was conducted. The rood at the north door of the cathedral was supposed to have been carved by Joseph of Arimathea, and was the site of miracles; under the weathercock had been placed a relic of the Holy Cross. On the feast day of the commemoration of St Paul, a buck was brought to the high altar; it was then killed and its head fixed upon a pole for a procession to the west door, at which time horns were blown through the city.

  The festivals and holy days of the ritual year now seem inconceivably remote, so thoroughly has the work of the reformation been done. Yet they were an important part of the faith, and the city, in which More dwelled. A long pole was kept on iron hooks beneath the roofs of a row of houses in Shaft Alley, off Leadenhall, and on May Day it was set up on the south side of St Andrew the Apostle, which was given the name ‘St Andrew under Shafte’; it was one of London’s many maypoles, with a ‘knape’ or bunch of flowers on its top, so high that it towered over the steeple of the church itself. It may also be seen, perhaps, as an emblem of the paganism generally present within London rituals.

  John Stow tells the story of this maypole and how it was eventually hacked to pieces as an ‘idol’ in 1549. He is an altogether reliable chronicler of the London ceremonials that had all but disappeared in his own lifetime. He depicts the dances, pageants and ‘shows of the night’ on May Day itself, the ivy and bays put out before every house at Christmas, the procession of the Skinners’ Guild through the streets of London on Corpus Christi, the plays and disguisings of the Midsummer Watch when the doors of London houses were ‘shadowed with green Birch, long Fennel, St John’s wort, Orpin, white Lillies, and such like, garnished upon with Garlands of beautiful flowers’.10 There were bonfires in the main thoroughfares; in New Fish Street, Thomas Street and other places hundreds of glass lamps were hung in curious display. These were the streets where More walked, and on these days of festival they created an atmosphere of play-acting and game which seems to have been close to More’s own temperament. Yet the play-acting was part of customary ritual and the games an aspect of religious observance. That is why everything, for More and his fellow citizens, has its source and origin in that single most dramatic moment of faith when the host is raised before the adoring people.

  CHAPTER XII

  CRAFT OF THE CITY

  ICO della Mirandola had departed in the time of lilies, according to prophecy, while Thomas More still walked among the temptations of London: better to marry than to become an unchaste priest, better even to marry than to burn, and at the age of twenty-six, in the first month of 1505, he was duly wed. The little that is known about Jane Colt can soon be told; she was the daughter of a titled landowner, Sir John Colt, or Cowlt, of Essex. His household at Netherhall, in the parish of Royden, was fifteen miles from the Mores’ Hertfordshire estate at North Mimms; only a gatehouse of faded red brick still remains, but it is clear that it was an impressive and even grand house. If you are to marry the daughter of neighbours, it is important that they are affluent and well connected: the tomb of Jane Colt’s grandfather, in the parish church of Royden, proclaims him to have been ‘Edwardi regis consul honorificus’. Jane Colt, sixteen years of age, was the oldest daughter of the family; More’s son-in-law, William Roper, records that More preferred a younger daughter but chose Jane out of a sense of propriety and ‘a certain pity’.1 The anecdote suggests the sense of duty which More carried with him everywhere, but if, as seems likely, it was told to Roper by More himself, it also confirms a slight attitude of dismissiveness or comic disparagement towards his wives. When asked why he chose short women, he is supposed to have replied ‘of two evils you should choose the less’; it sounds like a remark made by his father and is perhaps not to be taken seriously except to the extent that he feared or distrusted his own sensuality and therefore felt the need to caricature the women who ministered to it.

  It is not known in which church Thomas More and Jane Colt were married, although it is likely to have been the parish church of Royden where her ancestors were interred. Much of the ceremony took place outside the door of the church, the man standing to the right hand of the woman to signify that Eve was formed from one of Adam’s left ribs. The banns were asked by the priest, the cause of any impediment enquired and then the bride was given in marriage—the ring placed upon her fourth finger because it was believed that a vein ran from there directly to the heart. Only after the marriage ceremony had been performed did the participants enter the church itself for Mass. At one point the husband and wife prostrated themselves upon the steps of the altar, with a pall extended over them while benediction was bestowed; that night the priest entered their bedchamber, blessed the bed itself and then sprinkled holy water over the couple.

  In a Latin poem where he refers to ‘mea’,2 which might imply my wife or my betrothed, More counsels against choosing a girl for her beauty or dowry alone; she must be modest, reserved, of good parents, capable of being instructed as a true companion and educated in good letters or at least with a propensity to study them.3 He also suggests that she becomes versed in the best of the old books. It is not known to what extent Jane Colt met these requirements but, according to Erasmus, from the start More determined to fashion her character and to educate her in all forms of music as well as ‘literis’:4 the Dutch scholar would have had the opportunity of discovering this at first hand, since he visited them soon after their marriage. More was almost ten years her senior and, although it was not a particularly unusual disparity of age in this period, it gave him the opportunity of training her in the same manner as he later trained his own daughters. It provided an opportunity for controlling the female spirit, of course, but it was also a means of exercising his dramatic imagination. It was a question of inculcating true virtue as well as learning, in the style recommended by manuals devoted to female perfection, and there is a sense in which he m
ust have treated her as a child as well as a wife. Another friend described her as ‘facillima’,5 most good natured or tractable, and there is no reason to doubt that she responded eventually to her husband’s guidance. Since More was just as determined and methodical, if more gentle, with the members of his family as he was with himself, there may have been some early disagreements. In a story from one of Erasmus’s Colloquies a young girl from the country is married to a man who wished to instruct her in literature, music and other accomplishments; she was not accustomed to such a regimen at home and seems violently to have objected until she was persuaded by her father to behave like a good and docile wife. The anecdote may have no connection with Thomas More and Jane Colt but it is suggestive. Certainly his wife was compliant in another sense: she bore at least four children in the remaining six years of her short life.

  After their marriage they moved to a house in Bucklersbury, off Cheapside, which More leased from the Mercers. Some confusion exists about what he leased, and where he leased it, in this early period; there is also a record of ‘Thomas More’ renting from the Mercers a ‘messuage’—a site of land with a dwelling erected upon it—called the White Hart, beside the church of St Thomas of Acon in Cheapside, in the April of this year. But it may be another Thomas More, or it may be that he leased it for members of what had become an even more extended family. Or perhaps, since it was just around the corner from Bucklersbury, he and Jane Colt stayed here while their new chambers were being prepared. The two significant aspects of this transition are that More was already associated with the Mercers, and particularly with the House of St Thomas of Acon where the guild met, and that for the first time his sixteen-year-old wife, brought up and educated in the country, was plunged into the bewildering and noisy life of London.

  Yet Bucklersbury was not as unsavoury as other quarters of the city. It was a rather grand street, only recently repaved, and was the locality for the shops of herbalists and apothecaries who sold spices and preserves, ‘dragon-water’ and ‘treacle’. Falstaff speaks of young gallants who ‘smell like Bucklersbury in simple time’,6 or midsummer, and in a sermon one preacher commented that ‘they that be used to stinking savours can not live in Bucklesbury or in the poticaries shoppe’.7 More and his wife inhabited part of a large house here, known as the Old Barge, and eight years later he leased the whole of it. It was the last house on the south side of the street, by the corner of Walbrook, and was described by Stow as a ‘great stone building … manor or great house’;8 one map depicts gardens behind the row of houses of which it is a part. It was called the Old Barge because the adjacent Walbrook, before it was paved over, had been used by vessels coming up from the Thames. It may not have been as sweet-smelling as the sources suggest, however, since the ‘pissing conduit’ and the Stocks Market were only a few yards to the north.

  By a stroke of good fortune it is still possible to enter the house, in imagination, and view some of its contents. An inventory survives from the time of the tenants to whom More in turn leased the house; they were his adopted daughter and the tutor to his children, so they were in a real sense members of the household. We can assume, then, that we are in the presence of family items—a ‘gret cage fir birds’, a ‘gret crucyfyx and dyvers images in the chapell’, ‘a gret mapp of all the world’, ‘a table of Sir Thomas More’s face’, by which a picture is meant, and more than three hundred books. We read of more homely items in the Old Barge, also, with ‘two lomes to work gyrdells and rybandes’, ‘a myll to grynd corne’ and ‘a payer of balans to waye medycyns’.9 We can reconstruct a grand and commodious house of studies, chambers and parlours, a chapel and a gallery, stables and servants’ quarters, great hall and courtyard. It was the London house where More was to spend the larger part of his adult life.

  The parish church, of which he was also to become a part, was across the road. St Stephen Walbrook was of ancient foundation, but had been rebuilt less than a hundred years before More moved to the parish: it was here that he worshipped, served at the altar, sang (albeit not very well) and went in procession. It was filled with pictures and statues—in the lady chapel alone, there were seven wooden images—and in its accounts there are references to the amount spent on the singers ‘at the alehouse after the last evyn song’.10 It was a typical, if perhaps more than usually wealthy, London church.

  When Erasmus visited London in the spring of 1505, he found More as cheerful and as witty as ever; More’s mind was so extraordinarily sharp and subtle that he made the perfect advocate.11 Since Erasmus had no very high opinion of lawyers, this is true praise. They were working together on the translations of Lucian, and More, in his high spirits, had persuaded his reticent friend to declaim in Latin. From the evidence of Erasmus’s letters, it is possible to sketch out the atmosphere and society of which the brilliant lawyer was a part. It was essentially a world of power and privilege: Lord Mountjoy, now a member of the king’s council, had invited the Dutchman to England in the first place. Erasmus had been promised a benefice by the king, and renewed his acquaintance with the young Prince Henry; he had rowed over the Thames to Lambeth to see the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, and had stayed with John Fisher. He was in his own words mingling with the greatest and most learned of the kingdom;12 these were also the people with whom Thomas More was associated. Of course the names of More’s closest friends also appear in Erasmus’s correspondence: he knew Grocyn well by now, for example, and Thomas Linacre acted as his doctor in London. John Colet had also returned to the city, having been appointed Dean of St Paul’s in May of that year, and shortly after he began to outline to his friends and acquaintance a wonderful project; his father died that autumn, leaving a great inheritance, and with that sum Colet decided to establish a school in the precincts of St Paul’s to be known as St Paul of the School of Child Jesus. If he could enlist the help of men such as Erasmus and More, it might be a new school for a new age.

  It was almost certainly at Erasmus’s urging that More made his first journey out of England; in particular he visited two great centres of learning, Paris and Louvain. Erasmus had been attached to the universities in both cities, and had recently spent two years at Louvain: his various contacts with printers and scholars would also have been useful for the Englishman. We do not know the names of the scholars and humanists whom More met on this journey, but in his only surviving recollection he makes it clear that one of his principal aims was to study the curricula and the methods of teaching currently available. It is possible that he was conducting legal business on behalf of the London merchants, but in his capacity as a trained grammarian and orator he was also taking stock of the progress of the ‘new learning’; in these early years of the sixteenth century, More clearly saw himself as part of a European community of scholarship.

  Another journey at this time was more provincial in nature. At some point after his marriage, More decided to visit his sister Elizabeth in Coventry. She had married the lawyer John Rastell, who succeeded his father as coroner of that city in 1506. Since he also presided over the Court of Statute Merchant, and since many citizens of Coventry were merchants of the Staple of Calais, it is possible that More was involved in business as well as family reunion. Coventry was a city of ‘fayre stretes’ and ‘fayre towers’, their stone a ‘darkshe depe redde’.13 It was also noted for its devotion. The Cathedral Church, Trinity Church, the Church of Grey Friars and the Churches of St John and St Michael were the five most eminent places of worship; there was a Charterhouse of Carthusians and a famous Hall of St Mary which was filled with tapestries emblazoned with the Virgin’s heavenly splendour. At the time of More’s visit the city was seized by a particularly severe fit of Mariolatry, with a Franciscan monk preaching the good news that whoever recited ‘psalterium beatae virginis’14 (by which he meant the rosary) each day could never be damned.

  More took horse and began his three-day journey, along well-kept country roads and across the many stone bridges, through Barnet and Dunstable and
Daventry. Almost as soon as he arrived, as he himself told the story, he was asked if he believed the Franciscan’s precept. He laughed off the whole matter as ‘ridiculum’15—‘Contempsi’, I scorned it. Here again we have a brief vision of More’s manner in the world, at least when confronted by the excesses of popular devotion. But then, at dinner, he was interrogated by the monk himself, who had brought with him several books containing accounts of miracles and other divine interventions in the affairs of men; More tried to treat the matter lightly, but eventually made the reasonable response that it was unlikely anyone could purchase heaven at so little cost. Whereupon he was laughed at for being foolish.16 The new humanism was no match against the credulity of the people.

  Another possible reason for More’s visit to Coventry, also connected with his extended family, was that the city had become the single most important site for the staging of the Corpus Christi play. The annual event attracted people from all over the kingdom; in 1492 Henry VII watched the pageants at Jordan Well and Broadgate. It would have been natural for More to have made the journey with this other purpose in mind, if only because John Rastell was involved in the ritual celebration. He was known to be an ingenious maker of pageants and spectacles; as a boy in Coventry he had been admitted to the Guild of Corpus Christi, which played a prominent part in the annual cycle of plays, and it can be assumed that he first acquired his skills as a pageant-maker while preparing for the Coventry cycle of plays.