The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  That household was certainly flourishing and, in this period, being extended in the familiar Tudor way of marriage and alliance. His future biographer, William Roper, the son of an old family friend, lodged at Bucklersbury upon entering Lincoln’s Inn, and within three years was betrothed to Margaret. At the same time Sir John More was, apparently effortlessly, ascending the judicial hierarchy; he was knighted in 1518, the year in which his son became a councillor attendant, and two years later was promoted to the King’s Bench. Legal historians have suggested that his advancement owed as much to his son’s powerful position as to his own legal abilities; but the case cannot be proven. There were, in addition, wider connections between Bucklersbury and the public world. More’s brother-in-law, John Rastell, had come down from Coventry and had established himself as a printer and bookseller; he had moved his shop from Paul’s Chains and was now conveniently placed at Paul’s Gate, by the archway into the churchyard. Rastell was equally involved in public affairs: he had arranged pageants on behalf of the City and had also played an important part in building English fortifications in France. But if he was a man of eminence, he was sometimes an unlucky one. He had planned and fitted an expedition to the New World, sailing with two ships from Gravesend in the summer of 1517; certain members of the crew, however, had no intention of voyaging to what Thomas More once called that ‘ferme lande and contynent, dyscouered and founden out wythin this fourty yeres laste passed’.32 They were happier with shorter, and generally piratical, voyages; so Rastell was left in Ireland, where he spent two years before returning to London as a litigant against them. The More family was directly involved in these incidents, since Sir John More had stood surety to the Crown for the voyage and now owed 250 marks.

  Another member of the extended household was soon also enjoying public eminence, largely as a result of More’s own efforts. John Heywood had married John Rastell’s daughter, who was thus also More’s niece; in doing so, he had become part of the complicated structure which included Rastells and Ropers and Mores, and which would soon exert a formidable influence in law and religion. Soon after More had become a courtier attendant, Heywood was appointed as a groom of the royal household, denoted first as ‘synger’ and later as ‘pleyar of the virginals’.33 He ‘became noted to all witty men’, according to Anthony à Wood, and was ‘very familiar’ with Thomas More;34 no doubt their friendship sprang from the fact that Heywood was particularly esteemed ‘for the myrth and quicknesse of his conceits’.35 He also remained faithful to the Catholic religion until his death in 1580, and it is not surprising that More became his particular patron.

  John Heywood and John Rastell shared another characteristic which throws an interesting light upon the More household. They were two of the first known English dramatists, writing plays and interludes which survive still. It has been suggested that Heywood was the first ‘proper’ English playwright, but there is a better case for suggesting that Rastell built the first ‘proper’ English stage. It was set up in Finsbury Fields and was close to those other London theatres which predate the Globe, the Theatre and the Curtain. The plays of Heywood are more substantial and inventive than the interludes of Rastell, but they share an interest in disputation and debate of a kind derived from the educational methods of the period. Drama was still, in a sense, part of the rhetorical tradition of the universities and the legal Inns, and it is significant that the earliest English tragedy, Gorboduc, had its first performance at the Inner Temple. So it is likely that the scenes of court were succeeded by more domestic episodes when, in the hall of Bucklersbury, short dramas like Heywood’s later Johan Johan or The Playe called the foure PP were performed. Johan is concerned with the lubricious activities of a bad priest, while The Playe comments upon the trade in such false relics as the wedding cup of Adam and Eve and ‘the great toe of the Trinite’.36 These were the comic matters which moved More and his household to laughter, together with that continual ribald facetiousness which was a mark of London humour:

  I shall bete her and thwak her I trow,

  That she shall beshyte the house for very wo.37

  It is an apt quotation to put beside the image of More as the discreet and cautious counsellor.

  CHAPTER XX

  EQUES AURATUS

  N the autumn of 1518, after the sporadic and inconclusive warfare of the previous years, Thomas Wolsey contrived a pact of universal peace which was generally known as the Treaty of London. His essential motive was to gain further honour for his prince and to establish England’s central importance in European affairs; but there can be little doubt that the craving for peace, so brilliantly conveyed by Erasmus, was also a main context for his actions. Yet the making of policy was inseparable from spectacle, and there were some wonderful moments of theatre. When the general treaty was celebrated in St Paul’s, Henry and Wolsey together with the legates from France ascended to the high altar where they simply whispered the articles of agreement; this was taken to mean by the Venetian ambassador that a proposed expedition against the Turks had been cancelled. Thomas More, now within the circle of power, would have known exactly what was happening. Once the ceremony was over, a dinner was held in the banqueting hall of York Palace, where the guests were surrounded by rich tapestries and great vases of gold and silver. Then, after dinner, they gambled with cards and dice.

  The great game of nations continued with the betrothal of Henry’s daughter, aged two, to the infant dauphin of France. There were now two kings and an emperor in uneasy alliance—Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France, together with Charles V who was Holy Roman Emperor as well as the ruler of Burgundy and Spain—and soon negotiations and elaborate preparations were made for them separately to meet in sumptuous array. Thomas More’s role among the pomp and circumstance was as one of a small group charged to prepare treaties and to resolve outstanding disputes. With Pace and Tunstall, for example, he was commanded in the spring of 1520 to negotiate with the representatives of Charles in separate diplomatic and commercial matters; he and his colleagues were designated as ‘consiliarii, oratores, procuratores, legati et commissarii’,1 with each man appending his seal and signature to the final document in the chapel of Greenwich Palace. Even before the agreement had been concluded, More was ordered by the king to help in the preparations for Charles’s arrival at Canterbury. He then became one of Henry’s retinue which sailed to Calais in the early summer of that year for those negotiations with Francis I which have become known, iconically, as ‘The Field of Cloth of Gold’.

  There is a painting of the scene, by an unknown artist, which gives some indication of the magnitude and magnificence of the occasion. Here are palaces and towers and gateways, adorned with great statues and painted devices, all of them fabricated for the occasion; here are fountains, pouring forth beer or wine, as well as artificial lakes and bridges. Here are great lines of foot-soldiers, as well as nobles and retainers, while in the distance can be seen vast tents and pavilions of richly painted cloth. The principal French pavilion was covered in gold brocade and azure velvet,2 while its interior was decorated in a zodiacal display with all the ‘Orbes of the heauens’.3 The English palace contained galleries, apartments and rooms on the grandest scale; its defending walls were of painted cloth, and some five thousand feet of glass were used in its construction. The kings of England and of France met in a valley which had been partially redesigned with artificial mounds; they approached each other with a retinue of more than two thousand men. Henry was covered in ‘fyne Golde in Bullion’,4 and it was said that the French king was so dazzlingly arrayed that it was impossible to gaze upon him. There were also games and masques, dances and banquets, jousts where the contestants of the two nations sported various devices—the English bearing a ‘heart on fire’5 which was being quenched by a watering can. There was a High Mass conducted by Wolsey, during which a fiery dragon (or, according to some reports, a eucharist) was launched into the sky. It was a great spectacle denoting peace, and More was at the centr
e of it. The foreign legates described him as ‘secretarius regius’6 and his signature is to be seen on a treaty between Henry and Charles, who had met soon after the French negotiations in order to make further secret agreements of their own. There was also, and typically, another family connection; More’s brother-in-law, John Rastell, had been responsible for devising many of the ornaments and astronomical devices of the English palaces and pavilions.

  It could not have been altogether an unwelcome occasion for More, in any case, since he met other courtly humanists during the great displays. Erasmus had arrived as part of the retinue of Charles V—the ruler for whom he had once written The Education of a Christian Prince—and the great scholar and antiquarian Budé was similarly accompanying Francis I. More had already corresponded with the French humanist; Budé had been one of those who furnished Utopia with dedicatory epistles, and as a measure of his gratitude More sent him a pair of English dogs, probably mastiffs, or ‘Master-thiefs’, which had become something of a national symbol. He professed to be even more grateful for Budé’s treatise on ancient coinage, De Asse, which represented one of the first serious attempts to understand the true nature of classical civilisation. More himself collected ancient coins and seals as a visible token of the past, and in a letter to Budé he congratulated him for restoring the dead to life. But there were also the living to consider: Erasmus had brought with him to France a collection of polemical letters addressed to his opponent Edward Lee, which he probably gave to More on being formally reconciled with Lee in Calais itself.7 So the accord of princes was matched by the union of humanists with, alas, equally fruitless results.

  Soon after the negotiations at Calais had been concluded, More moved on with other councillors to Bruges, where various commercial disputes with the Hanse merchants were in need of resolution. More seems to have been unimpressed with the citizens of Bruges, considering them avaricious, and during a period of seven or eight weeks the negotiations with the merchants were prolonged, frustrating and ultimately unproductive. The Hanse merchants themselves were not charmed by More, however; they reported that he used more words than truth and employed sophistry, cunning and trickery in his conversations with them while retaining a calm demeanour and ‘blando sermone’ (‘temperate speech’).8 Yet More did manage to make one friend in the city; he was introduced by Erasmus to Francis Cranevelt, an assistant to the magistrates of Bruges who became well known for his achievement in learning Hebrew without any assistance. Some of the letters between More and Cranevelt have survived, and they are touched by passages of sexual humour which are not found elsewhere in More’s correspondence.

  In the early autumn of 1520 More finally was able to return to England after an absence of almost three months, and, as he wrote in one of his Latin poems, ‘To Candidus’, you will rejoice when you forsake the company of men and rest in the bosom of your knowledgeable wife.9 He was now always surrounded by company and his eminence at court was such that, in the spring of the following year, he was granted the lucrative post of under-treasurer. In this role he was charged with supervising the work of the Exchequer, where the officials recorded the proper disbursement or collection of allowances and fees, grants and annuities, customs and receipts; he was obliged to draw up the annual accounts of the treasury and to look after the expenses of the king’s council. By Henry’s own commandment he was also responsible ‘for costes and expences whiche shal behoue vs to haue and susteyne aboutes our howsholde and our greate wardrobe’ as well as the payment of courtiers and servants; there is even a reference to the purchase of ‘parchemente paper ynke wax bagges Canuas’ for use at court.10 It was hardly a sinecure, therefore, and on one occasion Wolsey was obliged to apologise to the king for More’s absence from court for five days on the grounds that he was delayed at the Exchequer ‘in consequence of great matters at the knitting up of this term’.11 The under-treasurer was also given a knighthood, according to custom, and so in this period Master More was transformed into Sir Thomas More. He had become, in the words of the king, ‘our trusty and wel bilouyd counsellor Thomas Moore now knighte’.12 He was eques auratus, and was obliged to put on the chain of knighthood as well as to wear golden spurs while riding. He was a knight of cheerful countenance, but behind that assumption of rank there was still a living tradition of honour and chivalry which More would have imbibed from Chaucer, Malory and Lydgate; the ‘parfit gentil’ knight was one who loved ‘Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie’.13

  His annual salary as under-treasurer was £173 6s 8d; it was the second highest in the exchequer, but it was by no means his only source of profit. As a favoured servant of the king he became the recipient of various sinecures and grants which more than doubled his income. In 1520 he had received one half of the revenue to the royal exchanger, or keeper of the foreign exchange, who controlled the exodus of bullion from the country. At a later date he was granted a licence to export a thousand woollen cloths; he would have sold it on to a merchant in that commodity although for those who persist in believing that the author of Utopia spoke in his own voice it might seem an inappropriate gift to the denouncer of excessive sheep-rearing. More also purchased the guardianship of two wealthy landowners who were deemed to have lost their wits, Edmund Shaa and John Moreton; this testifies to his financial acumen, perhaps, but it also suggests that he had a genuine interest in observing or managing the insane who were believed to suffer from an excess of black bile. (He once referred to an inmate of Bethlem, just beyond Bishop’s Gate, who laughed aloud at ‘knocking of his own hed against a post’;14 there is every reason to believe that More visited this hospital of the deranged.) There were yet further sources of income. He received an annual ‘retainer’ from the Earl of Northumberland of £21, as well as other payments from a bishop and a lord; he was given a pension from the French king, the presentation of a canonry from Henry, and various sums for expediting the business of the Mercers; in the year after he was appointed under-treasurer, for example, he received twenty marks for helping to arrange protection for a fleet of merchant ships departing from the Low Countries. There were doubtless other transactions of this kind, but they have not been recorded. And then there were the lands. The king awarded him the manors of Doglyngton and Fryngeford, as well as some other property in Oxfordshire, and in the spring of 1522 he was granted the manor of South in Kent which had belonged to the Duke of Buckingham and which provided £67 each year in revenue. More was even accused of illegal enclosure, but successfully defended himself against the charge.

  In this gift of Buckingham’s manor lies a story of pride, treachery and death which is so resonant with Tudor fate and polity that More himself used it as an example. What if, he wrote in an unpublished treatise, ‘thou knewest a great Duke’, and envied him his estates and his worship, only to be informed that ‘for secret treason lately detected to the king’ his goods and estates were suddenly ‘broken vp’ and ‘ceased’, with the duke himself put to death?15 This is precisely what happened to Edward, Duke of Buckingham, who in the spring of 1521 was charged with treason, convicted by his peers, and beheaded on Tower Hill a month after his arrest. There has been much controversy over his case, with certain historians assuming that it had been concocted by Henry and Wolsey to remove an innocent nobleman who was considered ‘over-mighty’ and who happened to be a claimant to the throne of England. In that sense it could be viewed as a harbinger of the king’s suspiciousness and ruthlessness. It is not at all clear that this was the opinion of Buckingham’s contemporaries, however, and we are left with the fact that More willingly took land from the estates of the attainted man. His own account of the ‘great Duke’ who suffers an equally great fall is employed by him as an example of human folly in a world of which only the end is certain and where ‘deth shal take away all that we enuy any manne for’.16 Yet he was not averse to profiting from some, if not all, of these enviable possessions. Here we come close to one of the complexities of More’s life and career. He lived in the spiritual world
as well as the secular world. In the former he practised individual prayer and penitence, while in the latter he derived his identity from the social hierarchy in which he found himself. One was a question of private, the other of customary, ritual. To be a good Christian, in both worlds, required obedience and the fulfilment of obligations—which included providing an inheritance for his descendants. One may be labelled piety, the other decorum; but they are both aspects of the same religious civilisation.

  More was involved with the execution of the Duke of Buckingham in one other sense; his status as a Londoner was such that he was asked to address the Court of Aldermen in order to rebuke them for various disloyal reports and complaints on the manner of the duke’s attainture. He returned to the same court, four days later, and remonstrated with the aldermen again. It is reminiscent of the scene in his own history of Richard III when, ironically, the previous Duke of Buckingham had spoken in favour of the king before the citizens at Guildhall; on that occasion ‘the people began to whisper among themselfe secretely’.17 These were not the only occasions when More was obliged to censure or rebuke the City authorities, but he nevertheless remained the ‘specyall lover and ffrende in the Busynesses and Causes of this Citie’.18

  He was a friend in the cause of Wolsey’s foreign policy, too, and less than a year after his last visit he returned to Bruges. He stayed at the court of the Counts of Flanders, the Princenhof, although in earlier correspondence with Francis Cranevelt he had been enquiring about the rental of a private house with eight or ten beds—which suggests that he travelled with a relatively large retinue. Once again he was involved in wearisome dealings with the Hanseatic merchants, but he was also required to attend important business elsewhere. Before the negotiations had been completed, he rode to Calais and joined the entourage of Cardinal Wolsey. His presence had been urgently requested by the king, who, in a letter to Wolsey on the subject of his ‘grette affayris’, ‘desyrith Your Grace to make Sir Wyllyam Sandys, and Syr Thomas More, priveye to all such matiers as your Grace schall treate at Calice’.19 They were serious matters indeed. Wolsey had travelled to Calais ostensibly to resolve the burgeoning conflict between Francis I and Charles V; king and emperor were already vying for territory, and whoever was deemed the aggressor would thereby have violated the Treaty of London and instigate English military action against him. But Wolsey had come with an ulterior motive; it had already been decided that, under the cover of negotiations, he would arrange a secret treaty with Charles V against France which would eventually result in a joint invasion of that country. These were the ‘grette affayris’, involving dissimulation and double-dealing, in which More was to participate.