Thomas More

A very brief history

John Guy

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780281076185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

'If the English people were to be set a test to justify their history and civilization by the example of one man, then it is Sir Thomas More whom they would perhaps choose.' So commented The Times in 1978 on the 500th anniversary of More's birth. Twenty-two years later, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Thomas More the patron saint of politicians and people in public life, on the basis of his 'constant fidelity to legitimate authority and... his intention to serve not power but the supreme ideal of justice'.In this fresh assessment of More's life and legacy, John Guy considers the factors that have given rise to such claims concerning More's significance. Who was the real Thomas More? Was he the saintly, self-possessed hero of conscience of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons or was he the fanatical, heretic-hunting torturer of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall? Which of these images of More has the greater historical veracity? And why does this man continue to fascinate, inspire and provoke us today?

Part 1

The history

1

Shaping a mind

The boy who would grow up to write Utopia and afterwards defy Henry VIII over his break with the papacy was born in Milk Street, off Cheapside near St Paul’s in London, probably on Friday, 6 February 1478. Named Thomas after Thomas Becket, the twelfth-century archbishop of Canterbury who had been bludgeoned to death in his cathedral by armed knights during vespers for opposing King Henry II, he was the second child and eldest son of John More, then a barrister, later a judge. His mother was Agnes Graunger, a London merchant’s daughter.

John More yearned for his son to be a lawyer like himself. He sent Thomas to learn the rudiments of English and Latin grammar at St Anthony’s School in Threadneedle Street, a short distance from Cheapside, and then found him a place at Lambeth Palace on the opposite bank of the Thames as a page in the household of Cardinal Morton, King Henry VII’s trusted councillor, archbishop of Canterbury and lord chancellor. One of the age’s most influential movers and shakers, Morton also held the post of chancellor of Oxford University, where Thomas More went to study when just 14 or 15. John More agreed to this, but insisted that his son should not stay for longer than a couple of years.

For all his bonhomie and love of practical jokes, the elder More was a man of steel. Around 1494 when his son was 16, he ordered him back to London. After two years studying at New Inn off the Strand, Thomas was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in Holborn, where he embarked on the rigorous course of readings, lectures and moots that would prepare him for his legal career.

In Oxford, however, Thomas had encountered William Grocyn, an inspirational teacher with a passion for the new ancient Greek learning that had reached England from northern Italy. Under Morton’s guidance, Oxford was becoming a centre for the Renaissance-inspired curriculum known as the liberal arts. Thomas seems to have attended Grocyn’s divinity lectures, famous for using the earliest, most authentic Greek sources to rewrite the early history of Christianity and expose the errors in the Latin versions of several key texts. To prepare himself, Grocyn spent three years mastering ancient Greek, chiefly in Florence, where he took under his wing a younger Oxford man, Thomas Linacre, a physician studying mainly in Padua and Venice and needing Greek for his research into Galen’s writings.1

After leaving Oxford, Thomas More obediently threw himself into his legal training – until, first, Grocyn was appointed vicar of the parish church of St Lawrence Jewry beside Guildhall in London where the More family worshipped, and then Linacre took a house close by, some 50 yards from St Paul’s. Within a few months, Thomas More had fallen under their spell and was embarking eagerly on a study of Greek poetry before switching to history and moral philosophy.

Joining them was John Colet, son of a wealthy mercer twice lord mayor of London. He had lived for a while in Rome and Florence and was lecturing in Oxford and London on the epistles of St Paul. Always better equipped as a philosopher than a linguist, Colet brought a fresh pair of eyes to the ‘Greek project’ on which his friends had embarked. Soon they imagined themselves to be explorers on a voyage of discovery equal to anything achieved by Christopher Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci in the New World. Their notion of progress depended on rediscovering the best ideas of the ancient Greek world and then improving their own society by applying those values to their own times.

A purely chance encounter, one that changed Thomas More for ever, took place in the summer of 1499. William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, the son-in-law of a neighbour of the More family at Gobions, their country estate near North Mimms in Hertfordshire, introduced Thomas and his friends to his tutor at the University of Paris, the maverick genius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who was visiting London. The most illustrious champion of the liberal arts north of the Alps, Erasmus saw that Grocyn’s methods could be applied not merely to church history, but to transforming the text of the New Testament. Soon Erasmus would be carefully deciphering, collating and editing as many of the Greek manuscripts of the Gospels as he could find, before translating them into fluent, colloquial, accurate Latin. He intended to publish the Greek text and his translation on facing pages so that anyone could easily compare them and draw their own conclusions.

In 1501, Thomas qualified as a barrister, after which he earned a living by lecturing to first-year students preparing for admission to the inns of court. His ambition for a conventional lawyer’s career had flagged, much to the irritation of John More, who resented what he always regarded as the malign influence of Erasmus, someone he judged to be a dangerously overeducated scrounger. Later, Erasmus reflected that Thomas as a younger man:

devoted himself to the study of Greek literature and philosophy, with so little support from his father . . . that his efforts were deprived of all outside help and he was treated almost as if disinherited because he was thought to be deserting his father’s profession.2

The result was a family quarrel. Thomas More left his father’s house, moving to West Smithfield to live among the Carthusian monks, in or about the grounds of the Charterhouse on a site surrounded by gardens, fields and burial pits about 20 minutes’ walk from Lincoln’s Inn. There he tested his vocation for the priesthood – not that he withdrew completely from the world, for he continued to teach his students, and he returned to Grocyn’s church to deliver a series of well-attended lectures on St Augustine’s City of God. The legend is that he wanted to be a priest or monk, but sex got in the way.

Thomas certainly enjoyed the company of women: one of his Latin poems, written when he was 41, expressed his delight at fleetingly seeing again a woman with whom he had fallen madly in love when he was 16.3 That said, the idea that he was a ‘failed monk’ who spent the rest of his life attempting to atone for his moral weakness is ill conceived.4 His departure from the Charterhouse, rather, reflected his intention to seek political engagement in the world: we should imagine him as a lawyer who loved justice more than he liked lawyers, living at a time of rapid social and economic change. Most lawyers took the view that English law, based as it was on customs and principles dating back to Magna Carta, already served the common welfare and should not be changed. Thomas profoundly disagreed. He had come to think that the best way to improve society was not to retreat to a life of prayer and contemplation in the cloister, but to confront life’s challenges as an active citizen of a Christian commonwealth. In reaching this conclusion, the biggest challenge he faced was himself. Always able to see both sides of the question, his Charterhouse years were when he realized that, at heart, he might always be something of a divided consciousness.

Thomas must have left the Charterhouse by January 1504, because he took his seat as a member of the House of Commons then. It all went horribly wrong: he came to Henry VII’s attention in the worst possible way by speaking out against royal taxation. After that frightening brush with power, he kept his head down and, to his father’s delight, concentrated on his legal practice. According to Erasmus, ‘there was no one whose advice was more freely sought by litigants’, and Thomas found himself able to command substantial fees.5 He quickly married, choosing Joanna (or Jane) Colt, the eldest daughter of Sir John Colt of Netherhall, near Roydon in Essex. The families were already acquainted, and Roydon was within easy riding distance of Gobions.

After the wedding, in or around November 1504, Thomas leased The Barge at Bucklersbury, a large, rambling stone and timber dwelling with an enormous garden in the parish of St Stephen Walbrook, off the east end of Cheapside, close to the Stocks Market where meat, poultry and fish were sold. When the newlyweds first moved in, they had a lease for only a part of the property: it took Thomas eight years before he could afford a 40-year lease of the whole site. His four children, three girls and a boy, were born there, and a foster-sister was adopted as a playmate for his eldest daughter, Margaret.

In 1505–6, when Erasmus came to stay, he and Thomas amused one another by translating the dialogues and declamations of Lucian of Samosata, a second-century Greek writer whose sharp wit and cutting satire were the closest thing the two friends could find to their own ideal of humour. Trenchant, pithy, caustic, the master of derision, Lucian punctured pride and pretension by showing that the worst of the pretenders were priests and politicians. Always something of a jester with a love of ‘merry tales’, Thomas would later in life describe himself ‘of nature even half a giglet and more. I would I could as easily mend my fault as I well know it.’6 (A ‘giglet’ is someone excessively prone to jesting and merriment.)

In these months, Thomas drafted a particularly fine speech in reply to Lucian’s The Tyrannicide in which a citizen claims to deserve the city’s reward for killing a tyrant. More’s reply, addressed to the same fictional jurymen, reveals his loathing of tyranny, which he sees as inexorably rooted in human nature, but also his obedience to law and legitimate authority. His main conclusion is that a wise politician must have an accurate knowledge of the true roots of political disease before he can hope to cure it. Assassination is never likely to be the solution to tyranny.

Two months after More’s thirty-first birthday in 1509, the teenage Henry VIII succeeded as king. By way of homage, Thomas presented him with a handsomely illustrated set of verses celebrating his coronation and marriage to Katherine of Aragon. The verses ended with a eulogy of Katherine, whom Thomas had admiringly watched riding in procession after her first arrival in London to marry Henry’s elder brother, Arthur, who had died in 1502. More, who, in the company of Erasmus and a fellow law student, had first been introduced to Henry in 1499 when they paid a visit to the royal schoolroom at Eltham Palace, regarded his accession as a joyous turning-point. Thomas in his verses praised his new sovereign’s looks, intellect, physical prowess and respect for justice and the rule of law. In a calculated risk, he said the young king had banished fear and oppression (‘Only ex-informers fear informers now’) – tantamount to an open rebuke of Henry VII’s methods, but exactly what his son wanted to hear.7

Was Thomas already looking to Henry as a possible future employer and to himself as a royal councillor? Was this the way he believed he might put into practice the more abstract ideas he had spent so long discussing with Grocyn, Linacre and Colet? Outwardly, he denied the charge. Already, though, he was serving as a legal adviser or arbitrator in high-profile disputes between Londoners and wealthy foreign merchants. In recognition, the Mercers’ Company had recruited him as one of their honorary members. When in September 1509 the ‘pensionary’ or chief city clerk of Antwerp visited London to settle some commercial disputes, he made his first grand entrance into Mercers’ Hall to find Thomas waiting to greet him in elegant, fluent Latin, ready to open negotiations on behalf of the English merchant adventurers.

More’s career took another leap forward a year later, when he was appointed an undersheriff of London, a permanent official who advised the sheriffs and sat as judge in the sheriff’s court. The undersheriffs received a generous stipend, but they also had a lucrative right to represent the City in the royal courts at Westminster. Meanwhile, Thomas found himself drawn into a variety of other special tasks. He assisted the staff of the court of chancery as a part-time examiner and arbitrator. He became the link man between the City and the royal Court after Henry declared war on France in 1512. One of his earliest responsibilities was to oversee the provision by the London bakers of the huge quantities of dry biscuit needed for Henry’s navy. Soon he would be meeting royal councillors regularly ‘for divers causes’ on the City’s behalf.

In the summer of 1511, More’s wife Joanna died at the age of 23, most likely in childbirth. Within a month he had married a wealthy widow seven years older than himself. His new wife was Alice, widow of John Middleton, a wool exporter and mercer based in Fenchurch Street, whom he had known for almost 20 years. The speed of his remarriage made Thomas the subject of gossip, but the evidence is undisputed. John Bouge, More’s confessor, later a Carthusian monk, wrote:

[Thomas] was my parishioner at London. I christened him two goodly children. I buried his first wife. And within a month after, he came to me on a Sunday, at night late, and there he brought me a dispensation to be married the next Monday, without any banns asking.8

The fact is that Alice was sassy and redoubtable, a woman already past the age of childbearing who loved to joke and banter with Thomas, and he with her. Erasmus, who stayed at Bucklersbury for a second time in 1509–10 (it was then that he wrote and dedicated to More his coruscating critique of all that was wrong in the Church and the monasteries, The Praise of Folly*), kept away once Alice was in charge. In letters to his friends, Erasmus depicted her as loud, bossy and ignorant, more fishwife than lawyer’s wife. For all that, she was at ease with herself and the world, taking charge of Thomas’s household and his children from the moment she arrived, an arrangement that clearly suited them both well.

It was a highly sensitive star chamber case, begun in the spring of 1514, concerning an impounded cargo of alum belonging to Pope Leo X that propelled Thomas most conspicuously into the limelight in these years and encouraged the great Cardinal Wolsey, Henry’s first chief minister, to single him out as a high flyer. The case arose after the Duke of Suffolk, Henry’s favourite jousting partner, seized 4,000 barrels of alum valued at 12,000 ducats at Southampton. An essential fixer of dyes for wool, silk and linen fabrics, alum came from the papal mi...

Table of contents

• CoverImage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Part 1: The History
• Part 2: The legacy
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Notes
• Further reading
• Search terms