The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  There is one painting of Henry which can be dated to approximately two years after More entered royal service; the artist is unknown and the image is quite different from anything executed by Holbein. It shows a pensive and refined young man, magnificently dressed but somehow suggesting a depth of interior temperament. It is too close to the stereotypes of previous royal portraits to be taken at face value, but it is at least a reminder that the king who persuaded More to enter court was in certain respects distinct from the king who killed him. Henry was twenty-seven when More became councillor attendant; he was a proficient linguist, an excellent musician and a student of theology who had developed a fine Latin style. He had also shown much skill as a mathematician, in earlier years, and was fascinated by the new speculations of astronomers. Soon after entering court, More described his master as a courteous and benevolent monarch who increased daily in both erudition and ‘virtus’.4 The Venetian ambassador offered a similar impression. ‘He is affable,’ he wrote to the Signory, ‘gracious; harms no one; does not covet his neighbour’s goods, and is satisfied with his own dominions.’5 Contemporary reports advert to his beauty, his well-proportioned frame and his athletic prowess as both hunter and jouster; these were of course also the conventional attributes of a chivalric king and suggest the extent to which the young Henry could be seen as the epitome of royal virtue. His great love of music and dancing—he was a performer on both the organ and lute, as well as a composer of such songs as ‘Pastyme with Good Companye’—also contributed to the impression of a well-tempered prince who bestowed harmony upon his realm. His apparent generosity of spirit was celebrated in various anecdotes; he was almost killed by the Duke of Suffolk in a jousting accident, for example, ‘but the king said that none was to blame but himself’.6 He. was also exceptionally pious and attended several Masses each day.

  Yet who knew better than More the deception of mere show and semblance? The chronicler of Richard Ill’s feigning and the author of a commonwealth where all outward magnificence is rejected might have concurred with Machiavelli’s incisive description of the young king as ‘ricco [rich], feroce et cupido di gloria’.7 There were already portents of that thirst for glory. More had heard Henry declare, at a great conference in Blackfriars, that ‘the Kings of England in time past have never had any superior but God alone’.8 To attend Mass so frequently was an act of loyalty and almost filial respect. Two years previously, Henry had ordered the imperial crown to be stamped upon the coins used by the occupying forces in Tournai, and the same device was also blazoned upon a royal pavilion just two years after his accession to the throne. It cannot be assumed, then, that More suffered from any illusions on becoming a councillor attendant. Some years later he advised Thomas Cromwell that, in serving the king, ‘ever tell him what he ought to do but never what he is able to do … For if a lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him.’9 This is similar to the recommendation given by Thomas Wolsey to another royal servant: ‘I warn you to be well advised and assured what matter ye put in his head; for ye shall never pull it out again.’10 Wolsey, too, dwells upon the cupidity of the king—‘rather than he will either miss or want any part of his will or appetite, he will put the loss of one half of his realm in danger’.11 Both men spoke of a man whom they knew intimately, but perhaps even they could not then have guessed the carnage and destruction which would follow their own deaths. In this earlier time, however, at the beginning of More’s service, the indomitable self-will of the king could perhaps be mistaken for authority and his extraordinary self-belief recognised only as courage.

  The court itself formed the penumbra of the king’s presence. It was in many respects highly structured and hierarchical, yet it was also based upon informal associations and connections; it was the arena for spectacle and display, but also the centre for secret negotiations and clandestine meetings; it was the high point of power and of game; it was the site of betrayal and arrest, but also of music and dancing. For the next eleven years Thomas More remained one of its most significant and powerful figures. He was a member of the Chamber, but his continual attendance upon the king meant that he was ex officio a member of the Privy Chamber. These might be described as the king’s private offices and are to be distinguished from the Household, which dealt with more general matters of food, accommodation and entertaining. More’s affairs at court would have been conducted within a set of rooms literally ‘behind the scenes’ of the great theatrical and ritual displays which comprised so much of royal life. Here were the present or presence chamber, the withdrawing chamber, the privy chamber itself and a set of lavishly tapestried and gilded ‘privy lodgings’ which included the king’s bed chamber and raying chamber. The privy chamber was staffed by approximately six ‘grooms of the chamber’ and administered by the ‘groom of the stool’;12 but it was also the abode of Henry’s seven or eight ‘minions’ of noble or gentle birth. Among them all, among the attendant guards and ushers and pages, walked ‘Master More’. It was a world within a world, an intimate and lavishly appointed centre of royal government.

  The collective name for those around More was, in the fifteenth century, ‘a threat of courtiers’.13 One contemporary described the court as ’quesy’ and ‘unstable’. ‘It is hard trusting this wylle worlde,’ he continued, in which ‘every man is here ffor himsylff’.14 Erasmus had attacked court follies in Moriae encomium, where are to be found ‘nothing more indebted, more servile, more witless, more contemptible’ than the courtiers themselves.15 It was a world of faction and patronage, ‘affinity’ and ‘worship’, where competing groups intrigued in order to gain access to the king and where offices could be bought and sold. ‘Affinity’ is a word that has now lost its force, but it helps to define that intricate network of association and relationship which characterises sixteenth-century English society. ‘Advancement in all worlds,’ as one observer remarked, ‘[is] obtained by mediation and remembrance of noble friends.’16 A man’s ‘worship’ was in a literal sense his honour or repute, but it included the visible tokens of renown; the retinue of a nobleman, the servants of a lord, the sumptuousness of dress, even the gold and silver plate displayed in a household, all contributed to this ‘worship’. It is related to that sense of life as drama which is so much part of late medieval Catholic sensibility, and is also intimately associated with the rituals and devices of the court itself.

  Chambers could be treated like theatres, with tapestries and hangings introduced for certain scenes; halls could become arenas for elaborate allegorical performances. Lords and ladies of the court would enter upon pageant cars; one vehicle is covered with trees, flowers and fruit to represent a wooded mount, while another is pitted with rare minerals, coral and gold to signify a desert place. Thomas More looks on. There were mummeries, and revels, and jousts, and disguisings. The king, embellished in gold and diamonds, sets up a challenge. A winged horse speaks words of peace. Trees grow from painted rocks. To the sound of trumpets a ‘spell wagon’ enters, together with four gentlemen dressed in robes of blue and gold. These lords and ladies are extravagantly arrayed, in crimson satin and damask gold, cloth of silver and yellow sarcanet, playing the parts of Ardent Desire or Lady Pity or Lady Strangeness. The ingenious dance goes on, as ‘one moves tranquilly, without agitation, in the most gracious fashion’17 to the sound of tabors and viols, flutes and recorders, virginals and trumpets. The harp was particularly fashionable in this period, the harmony of its strings reproducing the order of the equally fashionable ‘basse Daunce’. Above the sprightly dancing partners hangs suspended a model of the universe, the eleven circles of the eleven heavens turning together. At one great triumphal banquet in July 1520 the noble guests were supposed to look up and gaze upon a mappa mundi of the elements in glorious display. (A great wind brought it down as a token, perhaps, of a fickle and unstable natural world.) They are all members of a society where form and formal elaboration are instruments of authority. There is power in the appearances, whether that of an amber
mountain or a portrait of the glittering king.

  There was another aspect of the court, which found its centre in the queen. Catherine of Aragon was no less pious than intelligent; a product of that Spanish ‘renaissance’ which had emphasised the importance of female education, she patronised those scholars and humanists who, like More himself, were another adornment of royal power. Her piety also had a Spanish flavour. Under her robes of state she wore the habit of the third order of St Francis; she attended Mass each day and spent several hours in her private chapel, kneeling in prayer upon its stone floor. When a girl was cured of convulsions by a vision of Our Lady, Catherine and Thomas Wolsey travelled on pilgrimage to the site of the visitation, which had already been turned into a shrine. Thomas More, in every sense the faithful courtier, advanced the cure as an example of miraculous intervention.

  There was one influential book which was soon to establish certain ideal rules of such courtly conduct. Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier was read by two of More’s most famous contemporaries, Thomas Wyatt and Thomas Cromwell, and Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V, kept it by his bed together with Machiavelli and the erotic prints of Bellini. It was not printed in volume form until 1528, but, since it had already been widely disseminated in manuscript, it is likely that More knew of its existence even if he was not fully acquainted with its precepts. Yet he hardly needed to read the entire treatise; in part, he embodied it. The Book of the Courtier is not so much a study of court etiquette as a manual for virtuous living. ‘Just as,’ Castiglione wrote, ‘… there exists the idea of the perfect Republic, of the perfect King and the perfect Orator, so there exists that of the perfect Courtier.’18 Service to a king or prince becomes, therefore, the model for all good conduct in the world; to be a courtier, like More, was to occupy an illustrious and at times almost solemn position. So it is that, in the course of four evening conversations at the court of Urbino, Castiglione defines the ideal courtier as a man of learning and of virtue, a pleasing orator and dutiful servant, a charming companion and prudent counsellor who combines fortitude with temperance and modesty. The Mantuan writer concludes with a moving evocation of the Platonic desire for spiritual beauty, at which point More might have substituted the idea of sacrifice and obedience to God. Yet there can be no doubt that he fulfilled many of Castiglione’s more exacting requirements. Erasmus described him in precisely the same terms—in a letter written the year after More became a councillor attendant, his friend reports him to be a wise counsellor and agreeable companion to the king. He added that Henry could hardly bear to be separated from him; this may be an overstatement but it is at least partially confirmed by More’s son-in-law, who entered the household of Bucklersbury during this period. Roper relates how the king would detain More in talk of geometry or divinity and how, sometimes, they would go upon the roof of the palace to discourse upon the ‘motions, and operations’ of the stars.19 It is an apt image of the time, when the concern for astronomy and mathematics, cartography and horology, determined the new face of the universe. Roper also observes how More would often ‘sit and confer’ with Henry upon ‘worldly affairs’, and how after dinner he would ‘be merry’ with both king and queen.20 Of course More knew all the formulas of courtesy to superiors—‘yt may lyke you’ and ‘yt may please you’ among them21—and recognised, too, that ‘men must make courtesy to them, & salute them with reuerence, & stand barehed before them, or vnto some of them knele peradventure to’.22 He could have learned from Cicero’s De Officiis the moral value of decorum, but his own innate sense of irony conformed to Castiglione’s belief that ‘joke, with an element of irony, is very suitable’ in court conversation where it can be ‘both grave and pungent’.23 Erasmus had also described how More’s judgement and good sense helped to reconcile private quarrels and to promote good fellowship; this description is supported by an entry in the State Papers, where he is recorded acting as a mediator between Sir Arthur Poole and the Earl of Arundel.24 More might here again have been taking Castiglione’s advice on the need for ‘harmony’25 in the affairs of life and state.

  For a time he remained ‘Master More’. An instructive contrast might be made with a younger contemporary at court, Thomas Wyatt, a poet as well as courtier. More must have known him well, but he never mentions him. Where More tended to deal with matters of trade or treaty, Wyatt was despatched on missions to the Pope or the emperor. Wyatt was also Marshal of Calais for a time. He took part in tournaments and he also translated Plutarch for the queen. He was a grander and more expansive figure than More, a better poet but not necessarily a better man. We must think of More as dealing with him directly, and perhaps intimately, in the course of his duties. Wyatt’s own evocations of court life are filled with lamentations upon its craft and corruption, its ‘colours of device’ and the devotion of courtiers to ‘Venus and Bacchus all their life long’.26 It is curious to consider More writing a treatise on ‘last things’ while serving in a world where Wyatt, at a slightly later date, was composing his own lines of plangent dismay at ‘the press of courts’. In his poetry Wyatt was trying to define English verse, and indeed himself, in terms of an inheritance which included Seneca and Plato; his work is in that sense complementary to that of Castiglione. It is testimony, if nothing else, to the richness of experience at the centre of Tudor life.

  Castiglione was always aware of court society as a game in which each courtier must fulfil a role to the best of his ability. It is a world in which words become a form of artifice, where men and women even speak of themselves as if they were literary figures. In certain senses it is a strikingly optimistic vision, equivalent to that of Pico della Mirandola; each person can create himself (or, sometimes, herself) through the power of words or appearances. The court was the one arena of the nation where human contradictions could be amended, where Christian belief and classical wisdom, allegory and argument, male and female, modesty and pride, might all be reconciled. Yet the harmony is necessarily fragile and may be brief indeed, as Wyatt evokes:

  Always thirsty yet naught I taste

  For dread to fall I stand not fast.27

  More’s distinguished career suggests that he flourished in such a setting. His dramatic skills and his dialogues, in which he consistently played roles for the benefit of an argument, reinforced his success as both orator and diplomat, but his preoccupation with the study of rhetoric was of no less significance. That discipline presumes a public world, and audience, while at the same time establishing the rules of performance within it. Rhetoric also encourages the display and promotion of fictional narratives, as a means of graceful persuasion. To be effective in the world, even while playing a part, is the mark of an unusually clever man such as Thomas More. No doubt he delighted in the game. It is likely that he was galvanised and excited by the affairs of the world even, or especially, when he realised their emptiness.

  More’s private feelings about ‘worldly pomp & vanyte’ are not in doubt. Only four years after entering the king’s court he composed a private treatise for his household in which he compares worldly authority to that of ‘the tapster … in the marshalsye’ prison.28 Certainly it is possible to see Henry, or Wolsey, in such a part. More never seems to have disclosed his feelings about those of noble birth who crowded the court and among whom he moved, except for a brief remark in the same treatise. Having a coat of arms, he wrote, is ‘as if a gentleman thefe when he should goe to Tyburne, wold leve for a memoriall the armes of his auncesters painted on a post in Newgate’.29 Why should we ‘envy a poore soule, for playing the lord one night in an interlude’?30 That More himself was entitled ‘armiger’, and was therefore able to bear heraldic arms, seems only to complicate and deepen our understanding of his part in the radiant court of Henry VIII.

  CHAPTER XIX

  MY POOR MIND

  N A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, written in the prison cell which was his last home on earth, More condemned the ‘round bisy mase of this divill that is ca
llid besynes’.1 Yet he had walked through that maze of business, that ‘folysh myserye’ as he termed it, for much of his life. It was not long after he joined the court, for example, that he found himself at the centre of England’s administration. He became the king’s second secretary and, since the principal secretary, Richard Pace, was for a long time out of the country on secret diplomatic business, More was soon the regular mediator of the correspondence between Henry and Wolsey. Some of More’s own letters to Wolsey have survived, the first of which dates from the summer of 1519, and they are of great significance in ascertaining the nature of his role and relationships at court. His simplest function was as an amanuensis; he would be called into the king’s presence and would write letters to his dictation. He would then make a fair copy (as well as a second copy) and present it for the royal signature. He also read aloud to the king communications from Wolsey, and on one occasion the cardinal even urged him ‘to take your tyme that ye may dystynctly rede’ matters of ‘gret importance’.2 Sometimes the communications were of such consequence that More was still working ‘late in the nyght’ or writing back to the cardinal ‘aboute mydnyght’.3 He invariably addressed Wolsey as ‘your good Grace’, with Henry invoked as ‘his Grace’ or ‘the Kingis Grace’, characteristically concluding as ‘Your most humble seruant and mooste bounden beedman’.