The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  There are of course touches peculiar to More himself. He emphasises the role of London and London government in a manner not shared by other chroniclers of Richard III and, perhaps as a result, he deepens that vision of the world as stage which he had first gained from Lucian. He describes the ‘aldermenne in scarlette with fiue hundred horse of the citezens in violette’; he depicts ‘theues’ and ‘murtherers’ dwelling ‘in the verye bowelles’34 of the city. He knew, also, of the political rituals played out in the streets around him. When Richard pretends to take up the crown reluctantly, many of the people wondered at the guile but ‘they said that these matters bee Kynges games, as it were stage playes, and for the more part plaied vpon scafoldes. In which pore men be but ye lokers on. And thei yt wise be, wil medle no farther. For they that sometyme step vp and play w[ith] them, when they cannot play their partes, they disorder the play & do themself no good.’35 There is an irony here which cannot escape any observer of More’s career.

  There is also a long divagation on the life of Mistress Shore, the concubine of Edward IV, not suitable in a history but useful in an exercise perhaps partly composed for his daughters. It may vaguely be based upon Sallust’s portrait of Sempronia in Bellum Catilinae—both are called ‘docta’—but More’s is a far more charming and affectionate portrait of a woman of great grace and affability, able both to read and to write, the favourite of the king (and others besides) who ‘neuer abused to any mans hurt, but to many a mans comfort & relief’.36 She had once been considered one of the most beautiful and influential women in the kingdom: she was still living when More wrote his narrative, a creature ‘old lene, withered, & dried vp’ who had been reduced to beggary.37 Since Mistress Shore was the heiress of a wealthy merchant, this impoverished fate seems most unlikely;38 but it would provide a fitting conclusion to an educational homily. In any case it is a fine and moving character study, which inspired many writers and artists to portray her in subsequent centuries.

  There are other episodes and events in More’s account which have been equally influential, even if they have no claim to historical accuracy. There is a scene when Richard, about to embark upon one of his more murderous courses, charmingly asks the Bishop of Ely, ‘My lord you haue very good strawberies at your gardayne in Holberne, I require you let vs haue a messe of them.’39 The Bishop of Ely had at this time been John Morton, More’s earliest patron and benefactor. It is likely that Morton told him this story, although it is possible that More himself had admired the strawberries in that Holborn garden and had introduced them for light relief before a scene of butchery. It is the sort of detail that lingers in the memory, and Shakespeare borrows it for his more formal drama, when Richard once again asks: ‘My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn,/ I saw good strawberries in your garden there./ I do beseech you send for some of them.’40 This illustrates, if nothing else, the curious and often eccentric process of cultural inheritance, when an exercise in rhetoric can become a constituent of great drama eighty years later.

  And then, even as More was composing The History of Richard III, the winter of military planning and diplomatic plotting was made glorious summer by the peace of August 1514 agreed between England and France. Julius II had died, not a moment too soon, and the emollient figure of Leo X had assumed the papacy. The old king of France had also died but his young successor, Francis I, renewed the treaty of peace. All seemed to be set fair. The city authorities asked More to deliver a Latin oration in welcome of the Venetian ambassador, Giustinian, and both men engaged in an elaborate rhetorical game of compliments. More’s stepdaughter made a very good marriage and his brother-in-law, John Rastell, moved down from Coventry and took a house near John More’s estate in Hertfordshire. And it was May-time. The parishes of London had their maypoles and dances in the day, stage plays and bonfires in the evening. On May Day itself the king and queen rode out from Greenwich Palace, and on their way were met by ‘Robin Hood’ with two hundred archers dressed in green garments; the royal pair were invited to dine in a wood near Shooters Hill where, to the sound of flutes and singing birds, organs and lutes, they feasted on venison and wine. So did Henry and Catherine ‘fetch in May’. There was less appetising fare to come.

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE BEST CONDITION OF A SOCIETY

  HOMAS More’s journey to Utopia was by way of the Netherlands. In the spring of 1515, at the urgent request of the king’s council as well as the Merchant Adventurers, he was asked to join an English mission which was being despatched to Flanders in order to renegotiate commercial and diplomatic treaties. More’s presence was needed because this was not a simple matter of renewal—‘weightye matters and of greate importance’1 were involved at a time when the trade in wool between England and the Low Countries was being seriously threatened by disagreements over tolls, taxes and ports. Commerce was also affected by the games of rulers. The young regent of the Netherlands, Charles, had recently entered an ‘alliance and amity’ with the French and the merchants of London feared that if no new ‘intercourse’ was agreed their ships would be seized and their goods impounded. It can only be assumed that More had become a master of the intricacies of commercial law, of the ‘Sewestoll’ and ‘toll of the Hound’, since he was summoned by the council at ‘short warnyng’.2 The day after he was given his commission for ‘the kinges ambasset in to Flaunders’, the City authorities allowed a deputy to take over the ‘Rowme & office’ of under-sheriff in his absence. Indeed, he and his colleagues on the mission, Cuthbert Tunstall and Richard Sampson, received such short notice that ‘our tyme was very lityll and skarse to prepayr our self’3 for what turned out to be a long stay in a foreign country.

  They began their journey on 12 May, riding down to the coast and there taking ship across the North Sea. We may assume that they boarded one of the small English merchant ships of the period with a single square sail or perhaps, if they were in luck, the larger three-mast variety. The pilot knew the stars, the coastline, the phases of the moon, and used his ‘lead and line’ to measure the depths of the water; the master had his rolled manuscript of ‘Routes from Silley and England into Flaunders’4 as well as his ‘compus’ and his ‘dyall’. More and his colleagues would have travelled together with a cargo of cloth or wool or animal hides (even, perhaps, live animals). It was customary for the traveller to take his own bed and chest with him, together with rations of bread, meat, salt and beer. He was also advised to travel with a servant, though More took one of the members of his household, John Clement, who had studied at St Paul’s. More rarely mentioned his travels in foreign lands—he was not a private writer in any sense—but there is perhaps the slightest token of his voyage in his account of a sea ‘sore wrought, & the waves rose very high’ while the traveller ‘lay tossid hether & thether’.5

  The party arrived in Bruges six days later and prepared to enter the business of negotiations. Behind the image of the Christ child in Van Eyck’s The Virgin of the Chancellor Rolin, the Flemish painter has depicted a fifteenth-century city. There has been speculation about its original, from Lyon to Liege, but it can best be seen as the image of a city such as Bruges itself, where the artist lived for ten years—with its churches, and guildhalls, and towers, spiralling into the air. It represents all the splendour and monumentality of a great mercantile centre. When More stayed in Bruges he was in a city of wide streets and grand houses, of market halls and mansions, of canals and great ramparts, of richly decorated shrines and elaborate churches; yet all of them were already touched by intimations of decline or decay. Bruges was a city whose time had gone; by the late fifteenth century its river had silted up and no large ship could reach it. He and his colleagues were formally met and greeted by the ‘princeps’ of the city as well as some of the regent’s negotiators—chief among whom was Georges de Themsecke, a lawyer and orator who was known to Erasmus as a learned scholar. The affairs of men were being conducted by humanists, even as their princes squabbled, and More was thoroughly at ease with such professi
onal administrators.

  For the first two weeks there was nothing to be done at all; some of Charles’s commissioners had not yet arrived in Bruges and the city authorities themselves were proving particularly recalcitrant. When the full council for the negotiations had assembled, the business was woefully protracted and desultory; according to the English contingent the Netherlanders deliberately misinterpreted earlier treaties and refused to specify their exact demands. More remained self-possessed and, according to one participant, demolished certain arguments ‘in measured tones and with a calm countenance’.6 But it was clear that his opponents were delaying for tactical reasons and it was feared that they were waiting for the formal opportunity to seize English ships and cargoes. More, for once in his life, was not wholly pressed by business: so it was that this unwelcome but salutary departure from the daily routine of his London life created the conditions from which his most famous and inventive book sprang. He always wished to be busily engaged and if there were a hiatus in his activities he would simply set to work on something else. Why not a treatise, like the Moriae encomium of his friend?

  But there were distractions. Erasmus visited him at the end of May, en route from London to Basle, and as usual their conversations were a mixture of scholarship and business. Erasmus had just completed his Education of a Christian Prince, in which he recorded the virtues of certain pagan princes of history, with the refrain of ‘How much more should a Christian prince …’7 It is in large measure a study of statecraft; the prince is urged to seek a true understanding of human affairs, since only then can he rule by principle rather than by expediency. Under his guidance, a virtuous society might be created. The book was addressed to Charles, who was even then proving so difficult in the commercial negotiations, but its discussions of proper statecraft might have provoked similar reflections in More—at a slightly later date More informed Erasmus that he had dreamed of reigning as king of the island called Utopia.

  Yet, in Bruges, practical matters had also to be resolved. Erasmus was in need of funds, as always, and discussed with More the possibility of accepting the canonry of Tournai, which had recently been captured from the French. Thomas Wolsey had received the bishopric, although even then the resident French bishop was resisting the change. For various reasons Erasmus was reluctant to accept the post and a few days later More himself rode the forty miles to Tournai, where he was told that Wolsey had conferred the canonry upon another claimant without realising that Erasmus had been considered for it. At this, More suggested that a letter be written to Wolsey explaining that the post had previously been conferred upon Erasmus and that, in recompense for the Dutchman withdrawing from it, a greater and better provision should be made for him. None of this was true, of course, but More’s wiliness suggests how difficult and tricky he could be; as he admitted himself, on occasions he did not shrink from ‘mendaciolum’8 or a small lie.

  More returned from Tournai at the beginning of June, only to face further protracted and inconclusive negotiations. By the second week of July, when More had anticipated that the embassy would have completed its work, the English commissioners were compelled to write to the king’s council ‘that wee may haue by the mean of your good lordshippis more money sent vnto vs’.9 More himself, on a stipend of 13s 4d a day, was particularly embarrassed; Cuthbert Tunstall told Wolsey that ‘Master More, at this time, at being at a low ebb, desires by your grace to be set on float again’.10 There is also an indication, again from Tunstall, that he and More had been swindled by moneychangers in the city. Certainly More was not happy. He complained later to Erasmus that he had been compelled to support a household both in Bruges and in London, with the result, as he said ironically, that his wife and children did not have enough to eat in his absence. But the exaggeration can be excused; he was receiving less than a quarter of the income he earned in London, while having to maintain himself in the state customary to ambassadors of his country. He was also plainly missing his family; even when absent for a short time, he explained to Erasmus, he longed to see them again.

  At the end of July, however, he made one other, and more significant, journey away from Bruges. Taking advantage of the fact that the Netherlands commissioners had returned to Brussels for further instructions, he rode to Antwerp. More already had amicable relationships with its city government, since he had once supervised the successful negotiations over the status of London merchants in the Antwerp market, and he may have wanted to enlist the help of the trading authorities there with the apparently fruitless negotiations at Bruges. Antwerp was now the most energetic and busy of all the ports in that region. It was also the site of new banking, and the elaborate market or bourse in the centre of the city testified to its commercial success. On the first page of Utopia More refers to its cathedral of Notre Dame, but at the time of his visit the church was still being built. He could see a new city rising before him.

  He stayed for a time with a close friend of Erasmus, Peter Gillis; Gillis had been Chief Secretary to Antwerp for five years, but he had, more particularly, helped to see Erasmus’s works through the Antwerp press of Theodoricus Martens. Here was another contemporary, a man whom he called ‘dulcissime’ (‘the sweetest’),11 with whom More formed a unique attachment—unique in the sense that he immortalised Gillis by making him a protagonist of Utopia. This was no formal tribute. More remained in Antwerp for approximately six or seven weeks and during that period, in the company or even in the house of Gillis, he conceived the idea of his famous commonwealth. In fact Peter Gillis played such a large part in preparing and circulating the finished treatise—he was also its main patron and its overseer through the press—that he felt a personal share in it. Both men were concerned with the nature of equity and civic duty and both were involved in the economic and political travails of the time; they had witnessed the perfidiousness of leagues and the abrogation of treaties.

  So their colloquies on humanist values, and Utopia itself, did not arise in some sphere removed from the politics of the day. More was involved in the duties of an ambassador, with all the follies and futilities which such a role entailed. It was said that envoys ‘wore’ their words as they wore their clothes, for adornment or display, within a game of power and deception, limitation and improvisation. But, significantly, even as More sat with Peter Gillis in Antwerp the conduct of European affairs was being generally and violently disrupted. The new French king invaded northern Italy and, in a battle in the middle of September, defeated a force of Swiss mercenaries who had been deployed against him; he regained control of Milan and Pope Leo was forced to come to terms with this young man who had become the leading monarch of Europe. This was not at all to the liking of Henry, as More would have known only too well, and fresh instability entered international affairs. These were the circumstances in which the island of Utopia floated into the view of the world.

  He began to write it after his return to Bruges at the end of September, at a time when his own role in the negotiations had become much less significant; at the beginning of October it even seemed possible that affairs would be concluded within a week or so. More wrote to Richard Pace, Wolsey’s secretary, asking him to ensure that he was called home before any fresh complications arose.12 Even while he was writing Utopia in Bruges, however, he found time to compose a long and elegant letter defending Erasmus and humanist scholarship in general; it was addressed to Martin Dorp, a theologian at Louvain who had criticised Erasmus’s Moriae encomium as well as his project of comparing the Vulgate version of the New Testament with the original Greek. Surrounded by the Christian humanists of the Netherlands, who played such an important part in the affairs of state, More felt certain of his position in attacking scholastic dialectic and reaffirming the importance of rhetoric and grammar for the progress of human understanding. The letter is couched in familiar rhetorical form—it might even be seen as a prime example of the kind of forensic oratory More employed in the courts of law—but it is marked by passages of heavy irony and
light sarcasm that are never far from the surface of his prose. He was engaged, however, in more than a personal dispute; if a theological faculty decided to condemn the pioneering work of Erasmus, elements of the new learning might effectively be suppressed. Certainly Erasmus had formidable enemies—the inquisitional Dominicans among them—and the path of true scholarship was by no means assured. But More’s sharp letter had the appropriate effect: eventually Dorp withdrew his criticisms, and the letter itself was never published.

  More’s appeal to be allowed to return home had been successful, and his letter of recall came just as he was finishing his epistle to Dorp. He seems to have left for England as quickly as possible, and just three days later met Richard Pace at Gravelines, ‘in the highe wave’13 a few miles north-east of Calais. It was, in one sense, an inauspicious meeting; the author of Utopia, at least in its early stages, encountered the man who had been sent by Henry to purchase Swiss mercenaries to fight against France. Peace met, and kissed with, war.

  At a later date More professed himself delighted by the result of the Bruges negotiations, however protracted and laborious they had become, but he had greater cause to be pleased by a success of his own—a treatise that was first entitled not Utopia but De Optimo Reipublicae Statu or ‘The Best Condition of a Society’. The evidence suggests that he originally wrote the second book, with its description of the island of Utopia, and then at a later stage added a first section which acts as a contemporary introduction to his fantastic society of equal citizens. Erasmus states that he had written this second book at his leisure; since the only leisure he enjoyed was during his enforced stay in Bruges and Antwerp and, since More thanks Peter Gillis for providing him with the opportunity for preparing the book, we can safely assume that the mission to the Low Countries had indeed produced immortal fruit.