The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  Mountjoy’s enthusiastic letter to Erasmus, then residing in Rome, summoned his old teacher to the brave new world which seemed about to open. William Warham had promised the Dutch scholar a benefice on his return to England, and Mountjoy sent him five pounds for the expenses of his journey. Erasmus left almost at once and, on his arrival in London, lodged with More and his wife at their house in Bucklersbury. The strain of travel and the sea-crossing had brought on a pain in his kidney and he was forced to spend several days indoors. His library of books had not yet arrived and, in order to occupy his time, he wrote a little treatise. By this time the More family had substantially increased. Four children had been born since the marriage; Margaret, now four, was the eldest and was succeeded by Elizabeth, Cicely and John. It was not a quiet household, therefore, and yet within the space of seven days Erasmus completed the work which more than any other is now associated with his name and fame. The title itself suggests its origin in the More household, Moriae encomium, ‘In Praise of Folly’, but also, with a subtle shift of language, ‘In Praise of More’. However, More is connected to the book by more than a pun. Erasmus describes him as its ‘auctor’, or its inspiration, and he also refers to the jokes10 that he and More shared. But these were not necessarily of a frivolous nature. The vivid and acerbic tone of Moriae encomium represents the temperaments not only of More or Erasmus but also of what Hazlitt called ‘the spirit of the age’. The Dutch scholar read it out to More’s friends in Bucklersbury, who were delighted by it. On its eventual publication, it sold rapidly and widely. It became the most famous secular work of the century, affecting writers as diverse as Rabelais and Cervantes, and can almost be read as a general compendium of Northern humanism. It was prefaced by a letter from Erasmus to More, in which he describes his friend as the Democritus of a new age; by which he meant that More was constantly amused by the follies all around him, but managed to blend his sense of the ridiculous with manners at once ‘so friendly and pleasant’.11 The main text is an oration by Folly herself, in which she exposes those of her adherents who pretend to be wise men and announces her courtiers as flattery and self-love, sophistry and delusion. Folly soon proves herself to be the true deity of this world, with all of its people as her followers. In many respects Moriae encomium is the forerunner to More’s Utopia; both books use irony and ventriloquy in order to reveal contemporary society within a wider and clearer perspective. The great success of the book suggests that there was an appetite for the kind of writing which pricked the follies and abuses of the period, with attacks upon lazy mendicant friars as well as greedy princes of the church, lawyers as well as scholastic theologians. It is as if the whole structure of the late medieval world was being shaken.

  In this spirit, too, we must understand More’s enthusiasm at the accession of the young king. Now anything seemed possible. More’s life of Pico della Mirandola was published by his brother-in-law John Rastell and was soon pirated by Wynkyn de Worde. The renovated spirituality of that treatise perfectly complements the close of Moriae encomium, in which Erasmus extols the life of simple piety. In the same spirit, too, John Colet was discussing with his friends the constitution and the syllabus of his new school. Colet wrote that ‘My entent is by thys scole specially to incresse knowlege and worshipping of god and oure lorde Christ Jesu.’12 The new learning was not incompatible with a deep piety; indeed, for Colet, it was an aspect of faith. Neither was it incompatible with secular business. John Colet asked the Mercers’ Company to maintain the school, for which purpose he gave them estates in Middlesex, Buckinghamshire and elsewhere. So this group of London merchants became the trustees and governors of a school devoted to ‘Christ Jesu’; once again it emphasises the extent to which spiritual and secular concerns were part of the same pattern and texture of living. Land was granted for the school in 1509, but actual building began more than a year later; the school, complete with master’s house and chapel, was finished in 1512. It was situated in the east part of St Paul’s churchyard, beside the great stone bell-house containing the four ‘Jesus bells’, which were reputed to be the loudest in the kingdom. Some ground was leased where the children might urinate, the rent being a red rose every ninety-nine years.13 Late medieval ecclesiastics did not necessarily lack a sense of humour.

  More himself was vitally concerned with the manner and methods of education; he would later set up a flourishing ‘school’ within his own household. But other friends became involved in Colet’s enterprise, preeminently Erasmus and Thomas Linacre; as More put it in a letter to Colet, St Paul’s was designed to banish ignorance14 and he made a pointed allusion to the Greeks who subverted ‘barbaram Troiam’.15 He envisaged the school, in other words, as a preserve of the new learning. One other, more exotic, scholar might also have been an adviser: the hermeticist and exponent of angel-magic Cornelius Agrippa stayed with Colet in 1510. This was the year in which he had completed De occulta philosophia, a subject in which Colet was deeply interested; in fact there is a strong tradition of magical theory and practice in the work of the humanists whom Colet most admired, Ficino and Pico and Reuchlin, concerning such matters as the cabbala and the summoning of angels. This was magic performed in an atmosphere of piety and prayer, which Agrippa himself described in language close to Colet’s own meditations and to the spirit of Thomas à Kempis and devotio moderna: ‘Faithe and Praier: not the studie of longe time, but humblenes of Spirite and cleannesse of Hart’.16

  It may have been Agrippa who suggested to Colet that the number of boys at his new school should be limited to 153, a powerful piece of number symbolism related to the Trinity. The school was one large chamber divided into four apartments by means of curtains, and even the interior reflected the advice of More and his friends. At the suggestion of Erasmus, for example, an image of the boy Jesus ‘in the attitude of teaching’ was placed above the master’s chair, with an image of God the Father saying ‘Ipsum audite’.17 Erasmus’s influence on the school was profound and particular. He composed a textbook for the boys, De Copia (‘Of Abundance’) which proved popular for more than a hundred years, as well as some prayers and sermons; he translated a little catechism by Colet into Latin hexameters, and went to some trouble to find a suitable under-master for the school. It is likely that he also helped to draw up the syllabus. Colet also enlisted Thomas Linacre, to compose a Latin grammar; Linacre entitled it Rudimenta, but it was not rudimentary enough for the young scholars of St Paul’s. Colet eventually rejected it on the grounds that it was too abstruse. This provoked some bad feeling between the two men, as always fuelled by spiteful gossip, but Erasmus acted as placator and mediator. As a result Colet asked another member of this London group, William Lily—whom he had already chosen as high master of the school—to help in the preparation of an easier textbook.

  So they all worked together on Colet’s educational project. That More, and his colleagues, were markedly different from other groups in London is well established. Erasmus tells the story of how a scholastic philosopher scorned his concern in the teaching of the London children; the more orthodox scholars were not interested in the training of the juvenile mind, precisely because they were not interested in the possibilities of a new age of piety and learning. Another assault upon ‘the Greeks’ came from the quondam and perhaps even self-styled poet laureate John Skelton, some seven years after the establishment of the school. Skelton attacked a new Latin grammar which Lily had adopted for his pupils, and the ensuing exchange of pamphlets and poems became known as ‘the grammarians’ war’. In particular Skelton believed that the young pupils were being introduced to classical texts before they had mastered the elements of syntax and vocabulary; it is an old and perhaps permanent argument between educational theorists but Skelton’s extraordinary poem, ‘Speke, Parrot’, brings its sixteenth-century manifestation vividly to life:

  Plautus in his comedies a chyld shall now reherse

  And medyll with Quintylyan in his Declamacyons.18

  Thus the new humanis
ts—More, Erasmus, Linacre and Lily—‘go about to amende, and ye mare all’.19 The irony is that the curriculum which Colet eventually organised was highly conservative and orthodox in intent. He wished to educate the children with ‘Cristyn auctours’,20 preferring those from the fourth century rather than the classical writers themselves. It seems likely that this instruction was quietly broken by William Lily—there was no substitute for Cicero or Quintilian—but it emphasises that, in this London circle, piety was often considered more important than learning. Some of Colet’s injunctions to the pupils may also help us to comprehend the life of the period—‘Lose no tyme’, ‘Wasshe cleane’, ‘Awake quykly’, ‘Reuerence thyne elders’, ‘Enrich thee with vertue’. At the end of his introduction to grammar, he introduces a note which brings us closer to the man than a thousand precepts: ‘And lyfte vp your lytel whyte handes for me, which prayeth for you to god.’21

  The cause of restored piety was not confined to the schoolroom. Colet shared his contemporaries’ concern with education as part of the humanist endeavour but, like them, he was equally convinced of the need for reform within the Church. In a speech to convocation which he made in the year after Henry’s accession to the throne, he declared that the ‘Church is become foul and deformed’22 with abuses. He condemned ‘the secular and worldly way of living on the part of the clergy’,23 in particular the search for benefices as well as the inclination towards sensuality and hypocrisy. He recognised that the Church was troubled by heretics, but said that the greater heresy lay ‘in the vicious and depraved lives of the clergy’.24 Then he spoke of the need for ‘Reformation’—not as it came to be applied twenty-five years later but, rather, a reformation of mind and spirit. It was a carefully worded attack, at all times adverting to scriptural authority, and was part of the concerted attempt to revive and restore the Church at this fortunate moment in English history. Of course the substance of Colet’s sermon was not new. There had been attacks on Church abuses almost from the moment of the Church’s foundation; fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sermons, for example, are filled with attacks upon priests who are ‘fornicators … gluttons … plunderes in the church of God’.25 A previous Bishop of Rochester, Thomas Brunton, spoke of other prelates as ‘Dumb dogs’,26 and the vices of the clergy provoked his early sixteenth-century successor, John Fisher, into believing that God was ‘in a maner in a deed slepe’.27 Yet the Church was even then in the midst of one of its periodical fits of reform. Many of the bishops whom Colet addressed in convocation were both active and virtuous; the problem of the non-residency of hired clergy was in that period being addressed, and it is clear from the written evidence that the educational standards of clerics had been improving. Smaller monasteries were being dissolved—sometimes to make way for collegiate foundations—and the records of Archbishop Morton’s ‘visitations’, in the late 1480s and 1490s, reveal a surprisingly low record of abuses. In fact most of the complaints about the clergy came from the clergy themselves. The record of lay beneficence, the provisions of wills and the level of bequests confirm what religious historians have already established: the piety of the people was actually increasing in the last decades of the fifteenth, and early decades of the sixteenth, centuries. It was the great age for the building, and rebuilding, of churches. But, more importantly, the inner faith and private spirituality, encouraged both by Colet and More, addressed the very needs and preoccupations of the time.

  That is why it is impossible to separate More’s theoretical interests from his practical pursuits; the immediate point of his humanism was social reform and, after the accession of Henry VIII, he played an increasing part in the affairs of London and neighbouring counties. John More and ‘yong More’, as he was called in a chronicle for this year, were part of a royal commission concerned with the legacy of a dead viscount; father and son were also part of a larger royal commission for Middlesex. A few months later More was member of a party ‘to see and viewe the comen grounde whereuppon the Master of seint bartholomus hath bilded’.28 This was the area where he had disputed as a schoolboy; now he was one of London’s guardians. It is also likely that he played some part, at the end of 1509, in negotiations to create ‘an unity’ between the Merchant Adventurers and the Merchants of the Staple. It was the kind of task which he had been trained all his life to fulfil.

  In that same month of December a more singular honour was afforded him: ‘Thomas More, mercerus’ was elected as a burgess for London at the next meeting of ‘the parlement’. He was one of four representatives of the city at Westminster, and had been chosen to replace another mercer. He did not have to suffer the indignity of a free vote; his election was theoretically based upon the suffrage of the freemen of London, but in practice it was arranged by the mayor, aldermen and senior councillors. More was now part of the hierarchy which promoted him, of course, and the role of ‘burges’ was becoming increasingly important. The accounts of the chamberlain of London show that ‘extraordinary’ expenses and clothing allowances were liberal; when the London MPs met in a parliament at Cambridge, for example, their staff included ‘a steward, butler, cook and kitchen boys’.29 More’s experience in civic and mercantile matters, as well as his reputation as a lawyer, would have given him authority in the ‘Common House’, where matters of taxation and subsidy were pre-eminent. But ‘yong More’ may also have been chosen because of his amicable relations with king and council.

  He was one of some three hundred members of the Commons, who generally assembled in the chapter house of Westminster Abbey. Parliament met only irregularly over the years—it had last been summoned six years before—and the duties of its members were not arduous. They convened between eight and eleven in the morning, over a period of approximately four weeks. The chapter house was filled with merchants, knights of the shire, citizens, burgesses, lawyers and landowners; anyone who wished to speak walked to a lectern in the middle of the room and addressed his colleagues. At the end of each session, the Speaker summarised the various arguments and proffered his own advice about how best to proceed. He might then crave audience with the lords temporal and spiritual, sitting in Westminster, where he would present the arguments of their inferiors. There might be supplications, or petitions, or the rehearsal of grievances, or remonstrances about taxation. But if it was still in theory a petitionary rather than a legislative body, the Commons was now also originating bills to be amended or passed. There survives a drawing of the parliament chamber itself, with the bishops, abbots, archbishops and lords seated in due order in a rectangular-shaped area; the judges sit on woolsacks in the centre, while two clerks are seen kneeling with pen and parchment in hand. The Speaker of the Commons stands behind a barrier and addresses them.

  The parliament of 1510, which More attended, had been called by Henry VIII just a few months after his accession to the throne; it met on 21 January, and continued until the last week of February. The most important consideration was, as always, finance. There were various other bills, on the limits of prosecution and against justices of assize as well as technical matters of ‘escheat’ and ‘traverse’, but the main business lay in the granting of customs duties to the king; money was also given to his Household and Wardrobe. As a representative of the London merchants Thomas More must have been urged to speak out against some of the sums involved, and it seems that there was some overt opposition to the king’s demands from the London burgesses, but by the end of the year Henry had prevailed. It was an early lesson for More in power, perhaps, but he was not averse to royal authority; the next time he returned to parliament, thirteen years later, it was as Henry’s appointee as Speaker.

  Other official posts followed his entry to parliament. In the autumn of 1510, for example, he was appointed as one of the two under-sheriffs of London, the judicial representative of the sheriff who presided over the Sheriffs’ Court. It was convened at the Guildhall on Thursday mornings, on a raised stage at the east end of the Hall. (More was also in charge of the ‘Poultry Compter’, a c
ommon gaol situated to the north of Bucklersbury and only a few yards from his own house.) In the Guildhall itself More dealt with the cases involving ‘foreigners’, an unhappy term for those Londoners who were not freemen as well as people from the rest of the kingdom. He held the post for eight years and during that period he had to deal with every kind of crime and offence—robbery, rape, assault, vagabondage and arson among them. He was in the middle of London’s ‘low life’ and encountered a noisome and pestilential environment. He wrote once, with some conviction, of the taverns and bathhouses, the public toilets and barbers’ shops, used by servants, pimps, whores, bath-keepers, porters and carters, all of them swarming among the streets. There was an epidemic of what seems to have been influenza in the year that More began his duties, and plague was always in the air; certainly the diet of poverty, disease and violence which he endured each week must have considerably hardened his character. It is sometimes surmised that his obscene vocabulary and bawdy humour are derived from Chaucer or the balladeers, but he could have found them closer to home. He left only brief allusions to his time among the condemned men and women of London. There was a thief who, sentenced to death, stole a purse at the very bar of the court. When asked the reason, since he was due to be hanged the next morning, he replied that ‘it didde hys heart good to be lorde of that purse one nyght yet’.30 In a long attack upon Luther, More ruefully compares the German reformer to the whores who, when accused of some offence, reply ‘impudenter’31 (‘You’re a liar!’). These were Londoners whom he knew at first hand.