The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  So his attack upon Luther was now consistent and complete. It is in one sense a long oration in which More assumes the role of a forensic lawyer pleading his case to jurors—‘Quaeso te lector … Ecce lector … Redeo lector … Audisti lector’.12 Much of the text consists of passages from the Assertio of Henry and the replies of Luther, interspersed with More’s severe and caustic commentary. On the opening page, for example, he excoriates Luther’s first and perhaps gravest offence in attacking the king himself ‘nullius ordinis habita ratione’, without any respect for rank.13 Yet there are other connotations; ‘ordo’ signifies class or rank, but it can be taken to mean order, methodical arrangement, regularity and propriety. In the course of the Responsio, More suggests that these were also the objects of Luther’s scorn and hatred. There is a wonderful letter by Luther, in which he celebrates a sudden vision of ‘the sky and the vault of the heavens, with no pillars to support it, and yet the sky did not fall and the vault remained fast. But there are some who want to see the pillars and would like to clasp and feel them.’14 Thomas More was one who needed pillars and the security of an ordered world; he spoke and argued as a lawyer, but in the Responsio he also introduces the concept of law as the defence against disorder and chaos. ‘Vna est ecclesia Christi’,15 he wrote, and that one church is guided by the workings of the Holy Spirit; it is the manifest, visible and historical faith of ‘the common knowen catholic church’ whose sacraments and beliefs are derived not only from scripture but also from the unwritten traditions transmitted by generation to generation.

  What is it that Luther wrote? ‘Hic sto. Hic maneo. Hic glorior. Hic triumpho.’16 Here I stand. Here I remain. Here I glory. Here I triumph. It does not matter to me if a thousand Augustines or Cyprians stand against me. It is one of the great moments of Protestant affirmation and became a primary text for the ‘individualism’ and ‘subjectivism’ of post-Reformation culture, but to More it was ‘furor’ or simple madness. Only a lunatic, or drunkard, could express himself in such a fashion. More invoked, instead, the authority of the apostles and the church fathers, the historical identity and unity of the Catholic Church, as well as the powerful tradition of its teachings guided by the authority of Christ. Where Luther would characteristically write ‘I think thus’, or ‘I believe thus’, More would reply with ‘God has revealed thus’ or ‘The Holy Spirit has taught thus’. His was a church of order and ritual in which the precepts of historical authority were enshrined. All this Luther despised and rejected. He possessed the authentic voice of the free and separate conscience and somehow found the power to stand against the world he had inherited. He was attacking the king and the Pope, but more importantly he was dismissing the inherited customs and traditional beliefs of the Church itself, which he condemned as ‘scandala’.17 He was assaulting the whole medieval order of which More was a part.

  There is one other instructive comparison. It is often said that those whom we hate most are those whom we most resemble, and there is a sense in which Luther and More are true counterparts. In particular Luther’s early obsession with ascetic practices and his frantic reactions to the monastic life provide an exaggerated caricature of More’s own early conduct. It might even be claimed that the force of Luther’s piety and the almost elemental power of his nature took late medieval Catholicism to its limits—and thereby destroyed the delicate balances which had sustained it. More believed that a monster had been born, slouching away from Rome, but the ‘mooncalf Luther’ was a creature of the Church’s own making.

  Under the influence of Luther, More’s perspective begins to alter. The formal ironies and cultural games of his early work are abandoned and there is no more satire at the expense of foolish friars or bogus relics. There will be no more epigrams, only polemics. There will never be another Utopia. In fact it might be said that More forces his celebrated treatise into the real world. In Responsio Luther becomes a highly inflamed version of the garrulous and improbable traveller, Raphael Hythlodaeus; the German reformer is also filled with absurd fantasies, and even imagines a society of Christians who are no more than ‘Platonis ideis’.18 But More is no longer taking part in an elaborate literary exercise; he is fighting for the life of his world, which, he believes, will otherwise be extinguished by uncertainty and doubt. The battle between the two men is like an internalised conflict between the warring selves of sixteenth-century civilisation.

  And how More did rage! Furfuris! Pestillentissimum scurram! Pediculosus fraterculus! Asinus! Potista! Simium! Improbe mendax! Martin Luther is an ape, an arse, a drunkard, a lousy little friar, a piece of scurf, a pestilential buffoon, a dishonest liar. ‘HA. HA. he, facete, laute, lepide Luthere, nihil supra … Hui.’19 The unmediated demotic speech here will be of interest to anyone who wishes to know how the educated inhabitants of early sixteenth-century London actually sounded when they spoke in Latin, but More’s grasp of colloquialism went much further. Someone should shit (‘incacere’) into Luther’s mouth, he farts anathema, it will be right to piss (‘meiere’) into his mouth, he is a shit-devil (‘cacodemon’), he is filled with shit (‘merda’), dung (‘stercus’), filth (‘lutum’) and excrement (‘coenum’); look, my own fingers are covered with shit (‘digitos concacatos’) when I try to clean his filthy mouth. This is not, perhaps, the normal language of a saint; but More’s scatological obsessions are shared by Luther himself. ‘I am like ripe shit,’ he once said, ‘and the world is a gigantic arse-hole. We probably will let go of each other soon.’20 ‘A Christian should and could be gay,’ he said on another occasion, ‘but then the devil shits on him.’21 More suggested in the Responsio that Luther celebrated Mass ‘super foricam’ (‘upon the toilet’),22 and indeed Luther did state that he had once been visited by the Holy Spirit on the ‘CI’23 or cloaca.

  This particular kind of imagery is to be found in the bawdier verses and fabliaux of the period. It is related to the interest in ‘babooneries’, too, which mark the irruption of the grotesque into the sacred. It is this tradition to which More reverts when in one passage of the Responsio he invokes apes, and fools, and dogs, and in another where Luther is described as an ape dressed in purple. It is the reverse world of the medieval imagination, filled with frantic symbols of fear and disorder. There are passages in More’s treatise which are close to Rabelais—another monk who, like Luther, renounced his profession for literature. When More has an image of the holy eucharist stuffed with sausage meat,24 he is close to the sensuality and spirituality of the contemporaneous French novelist who deployed the grossest types of sexual and scatological imagery.

  More was a model of tact within his own family, however, and his inherent patience and forbearance became evident when his son-in-law, William Roper, began to espouse Lutheran doctrines in Bucklersbury. He allowed his daughter Margaret to marry Roper, even though the young man was at that time filled with ‘Luthers newe broached religion’. When his son-in-law went so far as to indulge in ‘open talke and companying with diuers of his owne sect’,25 he was summoned before Wolsey himself. The prelate released him with a ‘friendly warning’, no doubt because of the family connection, but Roper remained in heresy. More tried to persuade him by argument and debate, but at no point asked him to leave the household. Finally he took his daughter into the garden. ‘Megge,’ he told her, ‘I have bourne a longe time with thy husband … and still geuen to him my poure fatherly counsaile; but I perceaue none of all this able to call him home; and therefore, Megge, I will no longer argue nor dispute with him.’26 Instead he took to praying for ‘son Roper’, who, perhaps as a result, recanted his heresy and returned even more fervent to the Catholic communion.

  It was in the context of his household, too, that More then composed one of his most powerful treatises. It is a meditation on the four last things—‘deth, dome, pain, and joy’,27 which can be translated as death, judgement, hell (or purgatory) and heaven—and remained unpublished in his lifetime, simply because it was a devotional manual for the use of his family. It is emphati
cally a late medieval production, displaying the true sources of More’s piety in the religious practices and principles of his childhood. It is in the spirit of the skeletal effigies adorning ornate tombs, and in the manner of medieval homilies such as the Poema Morale and medieval sermons on death which emphasised the physical facts of human decay when a man’s ‘bake begynnythe for to croke downwarde to the erthe that he came of’.28

  All of these elements are present in More’s treatise, where the reader is exhorted to ‘fantasys thyne own death … thy hed shooting, thy backe akyng, thy vaynes beating’.29 But there are also touches which are peculiar to the adult More. In this little work, addressed to those closest to him, there was no need for pseudonym or elaborate preface; he even abandoned his customary form of dialogue and spoke forth freely. When ‘the very face sheweth the mind walking a pilgrimage’, as he wrote, we ask ‘a peny for your thought’.30 More’s thoughts when his mind went on this pilgrimage to the gates of death were of the world itself as a vast prison, with ‘some bound to a poste, some wandring abrode, some in the dungeon, some in the upper ward, some bylding them bowers and making palaces in the prison, some weping, some laughing, some laboring, some playing, some singing, some chiding, some fighting’.31 It is an effective passage and, written at this time when he was both courtier and diplomat, it reveals his true feelings about those like Henry and Wolsey ‘making palaces’ in this gaol of a world. There is another connotation, too, which reflects the ecclesiology of More’s reply to Luther. In the Responsio he celebrates the historical continuity and traditional rituals of the faith; but might that sense of an overpowering institution lead to a vision of the world itself as a prison? If you must earn merit, a proposition that Luther emphatically denied, then you must also labour. Yet, for More, this is not necessarily a dark vision. ‘If we be not in spirit mery’,32 we will fail in our duty to ourselves and our neighbours; and here, once again, he recommends the proper playing of a role in this ‘stage playe’ of existence. Why, for example, should we ‘envy a poore soule, for playing the lord one night in an interlude’?33 So a meditation on the four last things and on this fallen world leads to joyfulness rather than sorrow; it acts as a further incentive, also, to the coherent and cheerful playing of a part on the earthly stage.

  More’s treatise was medieval in style as well as in theme; in returning to the piety of his London childhood, he reverts also to the techniques of alliteration which were at the centre of old Germanic prosody and which found their finest expression in England during the fourteenth century. It was the metre that More would have heard in nursery rhymes, ballads and oral poetry of all kinds. In the Responsio ad Lutherum, More uses a phrase which now seems as strange as alliteration itself—‘a dog, when goaded, will usually laugh’.34 The image of a laughing dog is thoroughly medieval. It evokes those pictorial images which furnish the rich detail of ordinary medieval life; there are illustrations in which a farmer carries two wooden buckets upon a staff, a boy scares away crows, a woman spreads out a linen cover to dry in the sun. It is an art that never loses its interest, however mundane the activities which it depicts, because the ordinary world is known to be shaped by spiritual forces. There are certain phrases of More’s which possess the same resonance, some of them as simple as that describing a man who ‘getteth hym to the fyre & shaketh hys hatte after a shoure of rayne’.35 He also mentions a slogan which was often chalked on London walls—‘D.C. hath no P.’36—and which ‘toucheth the readiness that women hath to fleshly filth, if she fall in drunkeness’. Graffiti are as old as the city itself. Here are More’s contemporaries ‘digito purgamus nasum’,37 picking their noses, and scratching their head, and cleaning their fingernails with a pocket-knife. And then, in the tavern, they dance. When they sing they do not say plainly ‘gyf me a spade’ but ‘gyf me a spa he ha he ha he-hade’.38

  There is an anecdote about More which has that same medieval note. He was sitting with his dog on the roof of his gatehouse, meditating, when a madman came up behind him and tried to hurl him to the ground; they struggled, and More suddenly cried out, ‘Stay. Let us throw the dog down and see what sport that will be.’ The man stopped, and threw over the dog. ‘This is fine sport,’ More said. ‘Let us fetch him up, and try it again.’ Whereupon the lunatic hurried down the stairs to pick up the animal; More fastened the door, and cried for help.39 It is a strange story, related by John Aubrey in the seventeenth century, and is perhaps apocryphal; but it is so strange that it is hard to imagine it being invented.

  The laughing dog in Responsio ad Lutherum might conceivably have been laughing at More since More’s great opponent, Luther, has been described as ‘the first Protestant at the end of the age of absolute faith’.40 The denial of tradition in the partial destruction of the Catholic Church, together with the loss of faith in purgatory and in the living presence of the dead, strongly suggest that history itself was being forsaken; it is as if the memory of the past had to be erased before the next leap forward could be taken. The cult of the dead, so prominent in late medieval worship, was discontinued. The concept of immutable and complex law, manifest in elaborate structures and hierarchies, evinced in unwritten codes of honour, duty and mutual obligation, was gradually eroded. From the wreckage of this universal consensus emerged the sovereign state and, as Luther had so firmly asserted, individual faith or conscience.

  This departure from the customs of a thousand years was part of a general dislocation of values. It can be traced in the attention to privacy in domestic life, the substitution of simple for complex spaces in religious architecture, the abandonment of canon law in the universities, the theory of national empire promulgated by Henry, the word ‘state’ displacing ‘res publica’ or ‘commonwealth’. What emerged in England was an energetic and male-dominated society of commerce and of progress, together with its own state church; it was a religion of the book and of private prayer, eschewing all the ritual, public symbolism and spectacle which had marked late medieval Catholicism. The age of More was coming to its close.

  CHAPTER XXII

  LONG PERSUADING AND PRIVY LABOURING

  MID the reports and preparations for war against France, More was chosen by Henry and Wolsey to be the Speaker of the 1523 parliament. He was formally ‘elected’ by the Commons on Saturday, 18 April, though there was never any question that he was other than a royal servant placed to charm or cajole the members to do the king’s will. It was customary for the Speaker to be formally attached to the monarch, either as a member of his Household or Council, and More was perhaps the obvious choice. But here again there appears that odd motif in his public career which is so important to any understanding of his character. He did not seek; he acquiesced. He took on, apparently willingly and cheerfully, the most demanding posts without any private schemes or ambitions of his own. He was indeed the king’s true servant, and was duly appointed an MP for Middlesex before his election as Speaker.

  There is an engraving (taken from a miniature) of the opening of this 1523 parliament in Blackfriars, the house and church of the Dominican friars stretching north from the Thames up to Ludgate; the engraving shows the king on his dais, covered by a canopy, with the Archbishops of York and Canterbury below the steps at his right hand. Before him, sitting in rows, are arrayed the bishops and the abbots, the barons and the earls. In the middle of the floor between them the judges sit upon their woolsacks. There is a figure standing by the bar at the very bottom of the illustration; this is Thomas More, and beside him stand other members of the ‘Common House’. There was of course a formal ritual of petition and rejection in the appointment of a Speaker, but in his opening address More volunteered his own plea for freedom of speech among his fellow members, where many who are ‘boisterous and rude in language see deep indeed, and give right substantial counsel’.1 So he urged Henry ‘to take all in good part, interpreting every man’s words, how uncunningly soever they be couched, to proceed yet of good zeal’.2

  The parliament had been called to
raise money for Henry’s projected invasion of France, and for the cost of continual skirmishing on the Scottish border. Wolsey spoke, at its commencement, of Henry’s desire to guard ‘his honour and the reputation of this his realm’ by keeping ‘his oath and promise’ to Charles V and therefore prosecuting war against his ‘ancient enemy, the French King’.3 The cardinal had exacted money in the previous year, but now demanded that a very large sum be raised in further taxes and forced loans. As the king’s close counsellor and under-treasurer in charge of royal finances, More would have collaborated with Wolsey to ensure that parliament voted the king’s way. Certainly, throughout the summer and autumn of the previous year, More had been deeply involved with his two employers in reporting all the preparations for war as well as transmitting news or instructions to the various parties. The first example of the combined efforts of More and Wolsey came two weeks after parliament had opened: angered by the Commons’ delay and by reports of their hostility to the king’s demands being ‘blown abroad in every Alehouse’4 Wolsey entered the Commons with a large retinue. Some members had demanded that he appear with only a few retainers, but More had persuaded his colleagues to allow him unimpeded access. He is said to have argued that the ‘Alehouse’ reports might then be believed to come from Wolsey’s own servants, if they were present at the deliberations, though it is likely that he and Wolsey arranged this show of power to overawe the Commons. Wolsey berated the members for their reluctance to comply with the king’s financial requests and demanded that a subsidy or tax of £800,000 be raised. More strongly supported Wolsey’s demand, but his colleagues proved less accommodating; they suggested the establishment of a committee to find ways of reducing the sum, whereupon the cardinal replied that he would ‘rather have his tongue plucked out of his head with a pair of pincers’ than make any such suggestion to the king.5 He then descended upon the Commons for a second time, and once more demanded the full amount. There was a ‘marvellous obstinate silence’ at this,6 and Wolsey demanded replies from individuals whom he knew. ‘How say you?’ Still he received no answer, and finally he turned to the Speaker. More fell upon his knees and begged that his colleagues be excused, since to debate with Wolsey ‘was neither expedient nor agreeable with the ancient liberty of the house’.7 More then claimed that he could not answer for them, since he was not sure of their general conclusions upon the matter. So the deliberations were once more adjourned.