The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  In a description of More’s post Erasmus noted that he had a reputation for quick and fair decisions; it seems that no one promoted London justice more effectively and, in addition, More often remitted the fees which litigants were generally obliged to pay. As a result he was held in the highest affection by the City.32 This might simply be regarded as friendly flattery, but the evidence of More’s later career as judge and Lord Chancellor corroborates Erasmus’s testimony. Erasmus believed that More’s responsibilities were not particularly onerous, largely because the Sheriffs’ Court met only once a week. But as under-sheriff More played several different roles. He acted as legal adviser on various city bodies—perhaps the most important being concerned with the maintenance and administration of that great urban thoroughfare, London Bridge—and he acted as the representative for London at the Westminster courts of justice. It also seems likely that he played some part in the court of the Lord Mayor, where he would be asked to consider matters of maritime law and Roman law. His son-in-law wrote, with some truth, that ‘there was at that tyme in none of the princes courtes of the lawes of this realme, any matter of importans in controversie wherein he was not with the one parte of Councell’.33 Of course More was following familial precedent and so the duties were not unknown to him; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Graunger, had been a sheriff of London, and his father had been a member of the same City bodies as More himself. There was one other, less happy, precedent. Sir Edward Dudley, member of the old king’s council, had also once served as under-sheriff of London. In the month before More himself took up that office, Dudley was beheaded on Tower Hill. Such was the way of this world, as More had already come to know it.

  CHAPTER XIV

  A JOLLY MASTER-WOMAN

  ESPITE More’s increasing public duties the Old Barge had developed into a scholarly household in the spirit of, if not upon the same scale as, the academies of Italy. One of its members was congenitally restless, however, and in the spring of 1511 Erasmus travelled to Paris in order to arrange the publication of Moriae encomium. He was on occasions also absent-minded and eventually recalled that he had left some books, borrowed from John Colet, in his ‘cubiculum’ or study in Bucklersbury. So he quickly wrote to another scholar living with the More family, Andrew Ammonius. Ammonius was an Italian, who earned his living first as Latin secretary to Lord Mountjoy and then to the king. He and the Dutchman traded complaints about English houses and English manners; they grumbled about draughts, bad wine and offensive smells. But they had not refused More’s hospitality, and now Erasmus asked Ammonius to remind their host that the books had to be returned to their owner. It is a measure of More’s own relation to the household that Erasmus did not write to him directly: he knew that he was too busy.

  In reply to this letter from his colleague and companion, Ammonius sent the greetings of More and his household to Erasmus. Jane More was affable and the whole family in good health. But then something happened. Three months later Jane More, at the age of twenty-two, was dead. The cause of her death is not certainly known. It might have been the plague, or the sweating sickness, or influenza, or any of the other feverish disorders which visited London; an allusion in the letters of Erasmus, however, suggests that she died in childbirth together with the new-born child. This seems likely, since her pregnancies were frequent and regular. She was buried in St Stephen Walbrook by the parish priest, John Bouge, who took up the story: ‘within a month after, he came to me on a Sunday at late night and there he brought me a dispensation to be married the next Monday without any banns asking’.1 More had been given especial permission by a friendly churchman to marry quickly, but there is no reason to interpret his rapid action in an unfavourable light. This was not an age of individual romance and it was not uncommon for a man to have two wives in relatively quick succession—or, indeed, for a woman to take two husbands in a similar manner. But this has not prevented More’s detractors from such comments as ‘he mourned her [Jane] in a wedding garment’.2 He was an intensely practical as well as a decisive man; he had a young family to care for as well as a household to maintain, and really had no choice but to find a helpful partner.

  Alice More, or ‘Dame Alice’ as she has come to be known, has always been a stock figure of fun for More’s biographers. The family version of their courtship introduces her in a characteristic light. More is supposed to have approached her on a friend’s behalf, but she replied: ‘Your wooing will speed better if you do it on your own account, Mr More. Go tell your friend what I have said.’3 It is highly improbable, but it reflects the familiar image of Dame Alice as a plain-speaking and perhaps imperious lady who might have ‘caught’ innocent More unawares. Certainly he himself seems to have encouraged the impression that he had married a woman whose temperament lay somewhere between the Wife of Bath and Noah’s Wife in the guild pageants. He repeats anecdotes of his unsuccessful attempts to tutor her in the more abstruse disciplines: she pretended to listen to his account of the lack of motion at the centre of the planetary sphere, for example, but ‘she nothyng wente about to consyder hys wordes but as she was wont in all other thynges, studyed all the whyle nothynge ellys, but what she myghte saye to the contrary’.4 She later borrowed her maid’s spinning-wheel and declared that any stone thrown through it ‘wolde gyue you a patte vpon the pate that it wolde make you clawe your hed’.5 On another occasion More was attempting to teach his children the properties of a straight line, but Dame Alice called them into the hall and pointed to a wooden beam. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘is a line.’6 As More told her himself, ‘I neuer found you willyng to be rulid yet.’7 According to Cresacre More, he called her ‘a iollie Maister-woman’,8 all bedecked in finery ’with strayt bracyng in her body to make her mydle small’.9 In More’s anecdote he tells her, ‘Forsoth madame if god give you not hell, he shall do you greate wronge.’10 Yet ‘somewhat in dede he stode in awe of her’ and at one example of her somewhat strident manner ‘he durst not laugh a lowde nor say nothing to her’.11 All the evidence suggests, however, that they did make each other laugh and the testimony of one of More’s own stories may have a homely application. A wife came back from confession and said: ‘I purpose now therfor to leve of all myn old shrewdnes & begyn evyn a fresh.’ Yet her undertaking is succeeded by a remark that ‘she said yt in sport to make her husband laugh’.12

  More knew Alice Middleton long before he decided to marry her; it is likely that he was acquainted with her even before he met his first wife.13 Her first husband, John Middleton, had been a wealthy silk merchant who was part of the Merchant of the Staple; he was a member of the Mercers’ Company, therefore, of which More himself was also a freeman. It is inconceivable that they did not know each other, especially since More would already have been well aware of Alice. Her family owned a manor and estates in Essex, where their neighbours were the Colts—when Jane Colt was three, Alice was twenty-one. Alice was a member of the Arden family and was related to Owen Tudor, great-grandfather of Henry VIII. Her own grandfather had been a serjeant-at-law, just like John More, and such connections ensured that Thomas More knew of Alice’s character before he married; it is precisely why he did marry her.

  Alice Middleton was, in other words, a good prospect for any man rising in the world. On the death of her merchant husband, she had become a considerable heiress with estates in Essex, Yorkshire and elsewhere. It is often suggested that this apparent termagant was also much older than the innocent and victimised More; in fact she was eight years senior to her new husband, who was already in his thirty-third year. But no doubt she offered a sharp contrast to the young and apparently docile (‘facillima’) Jane More; she was of a grand family, technically an heraldic heiress, and she was of independent means. She was forceful, witty, practical and efficient; more significantly, she was faithful to her bewildering husband even to the end. She was one of those women of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries who defy categorisation; far from being oppressed by what we might now term a male-dominated and h
ierarchical society, their strong characters were recognised and appreciated. Andrew Ammonius and Erasmus seem to have delighted in mocking her, but only behind her back. Ammonius, in cautious Greek, called her ‘a hook-nosed harpy’.14 Erasmus described her as unyielding and, even more insultingly, after only eight years of marriage, as approaching old age.15 No doubt she suffered the whims or demands of her husband’s guests with less compliance than the much younger Jane; she had been brought up among gentry and businessmen and may not have been impressed by wandering scholars. It is unlikely that she could converse in Latin, either, or bother to understand it. More is supposed to have described her as neither pretty nor young;16 once again one must assume that he wished to minimise any intimacy, sexual or otherwise, which he shared with her. The business of running a household seems to have been conceived as a duty and obligation rather than a pleasure but it is also likely that, in the case of Alice More, he did not wish to reveal how large and forceful a role she came to play in his life and later career.

  They were married in the early autumn of 1511 in the parish church of St Stephen Walbrook. The service was similar to that of More’s first wedding but, since both partners had been married before, there was no blessing of union. The marriage seems to have been happy enough, even according to Erasmus; he speaks of the Mores’ domestic peace, and remarks that More had persuaded his wife to practise upon the lute, the lyre and the recorder.17 The contemporary humanist Richard Pace recalls that More learned to play the lute with his wife. It is a pleasant picture of familial harmony. Alice More participated not just in music-lessons, however, and More relates how she enthusiastically entered discussions on church matters—to the extent that she would let a meal wait rather than miss an argument.18 On one occasion she took the trouble of checking a heretic’s apparent quotation from the gospels and discovered that it was not there.19 So she was shrewd, as well as interested. The surviving portrait of her, after Hans Holbein, shows a middle-aged woman expensively dressed and ornamented in the fashion of the day. She holds a devotional manual, but seems to be entertaining some private and amusing thought; her nose is large, even slightly protuberant, but she has the broad forehead which was a Renaissance token of female beauty. More alludes to the ‘payne she toke in strayte byndyng vpp her here to make her a fayre large forhed’20 and in another place refers to a woman who prides herself upon ‘her brode forehead’ but is better known for ‘her crooked nose’.21 He was an ironical, if not sarcastic, husband.

  There are also hints of quarrels; More writes of the desire to enter a monastery ‘when our wyues are angry’22 and in a letter to a friend he remarks that, if you have a wife, you will never be free of trouble.23 But there must have been a large element of playfulness here, at least as much as is exhibited in the last phrase of a letter from More to Erasmus. The Dutch scholar had wished Dame Alice a long life—for which, More says, my wife thanks you since it will give her more time to be ‘molesta’24 or vexatious. Yet even here there is a suggestion of the old tale of the wife as shrew, and he seems unwilling to describe his private affairs in terms other than those of convention. The sermons and tales of the period are filled with images of garrulous or disobedient wives; ‘over much spekynge’25 and quarrelling were constantly cited as the characteristics of women. There was also the stock figure of the widow who takes care to dress in the fashions of the day. And of course ‘Dame Alice’, as More’s wife was known, is also the name of the Wife of Bath, who displays all these female propensities to their utmost extent. That is why Alice More has been generally treated as if she were a literary character, with the salient addition that More himself initiated and encouraged the process both in his letters and in his printed works.

  The family in Bucklersbury had been quickly and securely reconstructed; it was indeed one of the most important aspects of More’s life. Erasmus depicted the household as one of peace and amity, with More himself as the benign agent of harmony. His eldest daughter, Margaret, said that she had seen her father angry only twice—they must have been striking occasions to be so firmly retained in her memory. More might not have wished to accept all the praise for such a well-tempered and well-ordered family, however, since on one occasion he wrote of the spirit which maintained household peace.26 It might be noted that ‘familia’ described the residents of a monastery as well as of more secular households. Certainly he created his own family as if it were a pious community of souls, regularised by method and ordered by discipline. There were prayers each morning and evening in which the entire household joined; at table, passages of sacred scripture and biblical commentary were read aloud for the edification of family and guests. No games of dice or cards, or any form of gambling, were permitted among servants or children. The sexes were also kept segregated; male and female servants slept in different quarters of the house and More ensured that they were fully occupied at all times. On holy days everyone was awoken, in the middle of the night, for the appropriate Office. He might be said to have organised the household as a form of lay monastery following the liturgical cycle. He was also obeying the precepts of those who taught the rules of the ‘mixed life’; Walter Hilton, for example, considered it a divine commandment to keep ‘a good household in good Christian order and fashion’.27 In The City of God Augustine had extolled the ‘ordered peace’ and ‘domestic harmony’ of a true Christian household, and in particular emphasised that ‘a man has a responsibility for his own household’.28 But there is no doubt that, even by sixteenth-century standards, the family at Buckletsbury was carefully and consciously controlled. Family life and public life were not to be separated; both were suffused with the same spirit of duty.

  It was predominantly a household of females. Alice More brought one daughter with her from her marriage to the silk merchant (a second had died two or three years previously) and of course More had three daughters of his own. A few months after his second marriage he obtained the wardship of another young girl, Anne Cresacre; she had inherited estates as well as income, and was therefore a suitable candidate for More’s affluent and increasingly well-connected family. More, as guardian, was in sole charge of her property until she came of age; shortly after that climacteric she would marry More’s only son.

  More was deeply interested in women; clearly there was some sexual component to his attachment, but his concerns were more profound and persistent than that lust which he tried to slake with prayer and penitence. It could fairly be said, for example, that he was the first Englishman seriously to consider the education of women, whom he considered not a jot less intelligent or scholarly than men. But his opinion, and practice, should be set in context. As well as the stock image of the woman as the source of sin (the ‘Queanes’ and ‘Kits’ of the Southwark brothels testified to that) there was an equally strong tradition of female virtue and holiness. The extensive cult of Mariolatry encouraged attention to the female role in the life of piety, but female saints were also venerated; there were holy nuns and female recluses who completed this picture of sanctity. It has sometimes been suggested that the central role of women in the worship of the Church meant that, in Catholic England, women were treated with more respect and seriousness than they ever were after the Reformation. There were certainly some powerful women in late medieval society; Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, was perhaps the single greatest benefactress of education in the period. The wives of merchants were allowed to continue with their husbands’ trade and could also become officers of their guild. But the status of a few women should not be misinterpreted. The legislation against ‘scolds’ and the proclamation at one time of crisis that husbands should prevent their wives from ‘babble and talk’ together,29 suggests that they were the oppressed sex. It was also taken for granted that a man was allowed to beat his wife, as long as he used a stick ‘no thicker than his thumb’.30

  In a letter to his children’s tutor, some years later, More remarked that erudition in women was a new development,31 but that there was no r
eason why women should not acquire learning as well as men. We will find proof of this in the life of his eldest daughter: Margaret translated Erasmus and Eusebius, was complimented for her emendation of a corrupt passage in St Cyprian, composed in both Latin and Greek, wrote a treatise on ‘The Four Last Things’ and an oration after Quintilian. She was undoubtedly the most learned woman of her day, at least in England, and once engaged in a philosophical disputation before the king. When More’s household is being portrayed, therefore, it must be seen as the setting for what he called ‘mea schola’.32 This was almost a school in a literal sense and, in subsequent years, there were between eleven and thirteen wards or grandchildren attending it.

  It had been established around the time of his second marriage, when Margaret was six years old. More was responsible for the curriculum and there is one indication of his early method; he made use of the fact that children enjoyed archery, and had the letters of the Latin and Greek alphabets put up in place of the standard target. His young family would learn them by shooting at them. He might have taken advice from Erasmus when instituting this game, since the Dutchman wrote frequently of the need to educate children from the earliest possible age by combining instruction with pleasure. In that sense it might be said that More was the first Englishman to employ humanist methods of learning. The studies were equally innovative, at least for young girls, and over subsequent years they included logic, geometry, astronomy and philosophy as well as Latin and Greek. One daughter would be asked to translate a Latin epistle written by her father into English, while another would then turn it once again into Latin. The young family were also taught to memorise and interpret the sermons that they heard, whether they were delivered in Latin or in English. Indeed More was as concerned with the vernacular as with the classical tongues; two of his children eventually translated Latin works into English, while Margaret completed an original composition in her native language. She was, as one contemporary put it, ‘erudite and elegant in eyther tong’.33 Music was not neglected, of course, in a household where husband and wife were accustomed to practise the lute together; it can be assumed that Alice More played some part in that training, and her role in the school should not be underestimated. Erasmus describes her as the director or overseer of the ‘collegium’,34 who kept everyone at their studies; she may not have been learned, but she was pragmatic and sensible. She also maintained the children in good health, at a time when mortality rates were high, and in a letter to a subsequent tutor More praised her maternal tenderness35 in the training of her adopted children.