Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (5 page)

Morton was a clear-sighted statesman and a very sound administrator; the success of the early Tudor policies was in a large part due to him. He was also a blunt, homely man whose forthright style pleased Thomas More; serving in the household he learnt wisdom and discretion from the prelate’s great experience. Taking note of his good progress, Morton decided to send More to Oxford ‘for his better furtherance in learning’. This favour of a great man was invaluable, but John More, Thomas’s father, was not entirely pleased that his fifteen-year-old son should go to university. Perhaps he thought it time squandered before the boy buckled down to the law, for which Thomas was destined by family tradition: in this period before the Reformation the universities were for the training of churchmen while young gentlemen got their worldly experience at the Inns of Court. Life at Oxford also drew on the family budget. Students were notoriously poor, and John More kept his son as poor as most of them. In later life More praised his father for this austerity, saying that ‘in his youth he did not know
the meaning of extravagance or luxury, could not put money to evil uses, seeing that he had no money to put to any uses at all, and, in short, had nothing to think about except his studies’.

Thus Oxford helped to form his moral character; it also started to widen his mind. His early biographers say that he was ‘both in the Greek and Latin tongue sufficiently instructed’. Good Latin he knew from his earliest youth, but it is doubtful if he knew much Greek after his two years at Oxford. English Greek studies were in their infancy. William Grocyn, the father of English classical scholarship, had recently returned to Oxford, and More may have heard his lectures or those of Thomas Linacre. He knew enough to see that there were extraordinary riches in Greek, but he only felt this wealth about seven years after leaving Oxford when he began a serious study of the language. ‘You will ask me how I am getting on with my studies’, he wrote in 1501. ‘Excellently, nothing could be better. I am giving up Latin, and taking to Greek. Grocyn is my teacher.’

After less than two years at Oxford, More came to London for what were considered his real studies. Like most young gentlemen whose parents intended them to get on in life, he went to the Inns of Court, for as Erasmus noted, the English held it ‘an honour to be born and educated’ in London. More went first to New Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery, and then to Lincoln’s Inn. From Oxford to Lincoln’s Inn was a great advance in ease and comfort. At New Inn, More related, one lived well enough, ‘wherewith many an honest man is well contented’; at Lincoln’s Inn there was almost luxury, ‘where many right worshipful and of good years do live full well’. In the pleasant surroundings of Lincoln’s Inn he was called to the bar and began the practice of law under the eye of his father.

The law, then as now, was the most worldly of professions, leading hopefully to riches and fame. And in the brawling, litigious Tudor times the lawyers were happy, not only busy in the courts and in business, but also needed by the sovereign for the places in the new central administration which all the Tudors built up so resolutely. Thomas Wilson and other economic writers mentioned the vast incomes of the successful lawyers, money not always earned by scrupulous means. Francis Bacon was a type of the Tudor lawyer, having the keenest mind and the shrewdest judgment in England, but a weak sycophant, the deserter of his
friends and the taker of bribes in his lust for power and place. At first Thomas More was uncertain whether or not to follow the law. It was not that he lacked aptitude; within a short time he was Reader in Law at Furnivall’s Inn, a position he held for more than three years. But the religious life tempted him, resulting perhaps not only from his own piety but also from what he had observed in the house of Cardinal Morton and at Oxford. Roper relates that even while practising the law More ‘gave himself to devotion and prayer in the Charterhouse of London, religiously living there, without vow, about four years’. Also, his mind was inquisitive, moved by the glimpses of the new learning that he had seen at Oxford, and he was not sure that the business of the law would give him the time he wanted for study and reflection.

In the summer of 1499 a young Dutch scholar called Erasmus arrived in England in the train of Lord Mountjoy. Erasmus was about thirty and was trying to throw off the shackles of his unfortunate life, which had begun with illegitimate birth, passed into the orphanage, and thence into an Augustinian Priory, though he had no vocation for the religious life. His next years were spent trying to escape from this bondage. His talents got him to the University of Paris, and England was the next resting place in his flight. Here at last he found patrons to support his poverty and friends to encourage him in his life’s work of scholarship; the first of these English friends were John Colet and Thomas More. Colet, wealthy, widely travelled and learned, was the man who encouraged and influenced Erasmus’s studies, but More was the friend of his heart. Thirty-six years later in Basel, when the sick and weary Erasmus heard of the execution of his friend, he wrote: ‘In More’s death I seem to have died myself; we had but one soul between us.’

The friendship with Erasmus drew young More, not yet twenty-two, into the circle of Englishmen labouring to rediscover the riches of the ancient world. Such were the pleasures and the value of this company, Erasmus wrote, that he no longer wished to go to Italy. ‘When I hear my Colet, I seem to be listening to Plato himself. In Grocyn, who does not wonder at that perfect compass of all knowledge? What is more acute, more profound, more keen than the judgment of Linacre? What did nature ever create milder, sweeter or happier than the genius of Thomas More? But why should I run through the whole list? It is marvellous
how widespread and how abundant is the harvest of ancient learning which is flourishing in this country.’ Erasmus no doubt flattered his hosts, but his account does show that the desire for knowledge was great, and that keen intellects were striving after it.

These men were the ‘humanists’ and their passion was classical language. To them, and to their fellows on the continent, we owe the recovery and elucidation of many ancient works in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Though they were scholars first and foremost, their influence went far beyond the lecture halls of universities. They were the standard-bearers of an exact and careful criticism which had hardly ever been applied in the Middle Ages, but was now seized upon with the amazement of discovery and used to examine all contemporary life and society. The mark of their efforts was seen everywhere. The critical examination of biblical sources, especially the attempt to go behind the Latin Vulgate and seek out the Greek and Hebrew texts, brought many humanists into conflict with the Catholic Church and encouraged the reliance on Scripture alone which was one of the distinguishing notes of the Reformation. Reading of the ancients impressed clearly on the humanist mind the Roman civic virtues of gravity and prudence, and they strongly advocated the study of Latin (for humanist culture was predominantly Latin) as an antidote to the barbarous chaos of late medieval times. The humanists attacked medieval philosophy, chiefly on account of its grotesque Latin, and made the ‘scholasticism’ of Aquinas and his fellows a term of abuse. They had a decisive say on matters as wide apart as the duties of the monarch and the education of women.

The humanists were great civilizers, but their influence was not always for the good. Like most enthusiasts they tended to be fanatical and pedantic; they were keen to set up an orthodoxy, a body of laws, as strict, if not stricter, than the one they had overthrown. This was especially the case in the realm of literature. In the main the humanists were scholars, not artists, and they applied rules, not sympathy. The writers of the Middle Ages, for all their muddle and incoherence, often understood the spirit of a great work far better than the humanists, so concerned with propriety and ‘good taste’. Medieval Latin was still a living language, full of strange words and constructions but pithy and forceful, whereas the chaste humanist Latin was careful, artificial and dead. Perhaps the
greatest fault of the humanists was their violent contempt for anything medieval or ‘gothic’. Their minds were closed not only to a large part of history, but also to some of the most impressive works of the European imagination.

After the meeting with Erasmus, More plunged cheerfully into the world of humanism and his enthusiasm continued unabated when Erasmus returned to Paris in 1500. ‘Do come back’, he writes to Colet in the country. ‘In your absence Grocyn is the sole director of my life, Linacre is my tutor in study, and my concerns, all of them, I share with dear Lily.’ He set himself a pattern in Pico della Mirandola, the young star of the Italian Renaissance who died in 1494, at the age of thirty-one, while trying to reconcile all branches of knowledge. Around 1505 More wrote a small
Life of Picus
which he dedicated to a nun of Aldgate. And such was More’s application to his new studies that he was soon following the universal genius of Pico in his own small way as a lawyer invited by Grocyn to lecture on Augustine’s
City of God
in St Lawrence Jewry.

Ardent humanist that he was, More no doubt echoed the prejudices of his friends and rejected the work of the Middle Ages, which Colet termed ‘that filthiness and all such abusion, which the later blind world brought in, which more rather may be called blotterature than literature’. But what the head judges, the heart does not always feel. At this time, More, for his own amusement, was writing some verses in English, and these were wholly medieval in form and feeling, owing nothing to humanism. One poem in particular, a lamentation on the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1503, has a simplicity and a real sense of loss, without the artful classical allusions that a humanist might have added, which make it compare well with the best medieval work.

All the while, More was still living at the Charterhouse and trying to decide between law and the Church. ‘The study of English law is as far removed from true learning as can be’, wrote Erasmus; and he commented that, while More ‘naturally dreaded these studies’, he was very skilled and much in demand. More was also in some trouble with his lawyer father who was offended by the humanist studies and nearly disowned his son. But neither success nor opposition could sway More’s mind. Only the desire to marry finally decided him; he quietly and prudently turned away from the cloister and into the world.

The whimsical story of the courtship and marriage has been told by Roper. More was attracted to the second daughter of John Colt, of Netherhall in Essex. But seeing that the elder daughter might be shamed to have the younger preferred, ‘he then of a certain pity framed his fancy towards her, and soon after married her’. In 1505, when More brought his bride to his new house in Bucklersbury, she was only seventeen. Jane was a country girl, simple and poorly educated, and she found her new life in London, among the most brilliant minds in the kingdom, difficult. Her husband’s attempts to teach her ways of the world were sometimes too much for her. After a while she came to terms with her new life and was happy in her marriage until her early death in 1511. More, too, was content with family life. Four children—three girls and a boy—came in quick succession, and he carefully supervised their upbringing, as Erasmus tells us. Erasmus was back in England, translating Euripides, starting the preparation for the Greek New Testament, and together with More translating Lucian. The community of scholars was happily at work.

Now that he had decided on a career in the world, More never allowed the joys of learning to overwhelm the cares of his profession. Erasmus shrewdly noted that in England ‘there is no better way to eminence’ than the law, and a man of More’s ability soon attracted attention. In 1504 he was elected to Parliament where almost his first act, as a ‘beardless boy’ of twenty-six, was in defiance of the King. Henry VII had demanded a large parliamentary grant on the occasion of the marriage of his daughter Margaret to the King of the Scots. Henry was always greedy for money and the demand was excessive. The grant, in reality a tax, was resented particularly by the burgesses of London whom More represented. The opposition of the bold young man enraged the King. And since he could find no way to hurt young More, who was without property, he turned his anger on the father, John More, whom he gaoled and fined. This was Thomas More’s first experience of the arbitrary power of the Tudors. He took note but was not afraid. He had been elected to represent the city of London, and it was in the interests of the city to resist the gross extortion of Empson and Dudley about whose actions (the chronicler Hall wrote) ‘noble men grudged, mean men kicked, poor men lamented, preachers openly at Paul’s Cross and other places exclaimed, rebuked and detested’. This opposition to the King’s
agents was a brave act for a young fellow with a growing family to support. Roper relates that More ‘was determined to have gone over the sea, thinking that being in the King’s indignation he could not live in England without great danger’. The death of Henry VII on 22nd April 1509 relieved him of this worry.

Free from danger, More began the new reign with great expectations. Like all England, he was greatly attracted by the brilliance of the young King. In verses for the coronation More celebrated Henry’s good looks, bodily grace and intellectual powers; he recalled the King’s descent from such good women as his grand-mother, the Lady Margaret, and his mother, Elizabeth of York, and he praised the virtue of the new Queen, Catherine of Aragon, to whom he remained devoted all his life. And the new reign began fortunately for More. At Henry’s invitation Erasmus was once again in England, staying with More in Bucklersbury and writing the
Praise of Folly
—the
Encomium Moriae
—written as a playful tribute to the genius of his friend. His career was prospering. Londoners, remembering his stalwart service in Parliament, made him one of the Under-Sheriffs of the city in 1510, a post he held for more than seven years. The two Under-Sheriffs, the chief legal officers of the city, were important but not over-worked. More became well known for his integrity. In the Sheriff’s Court, Erasmus says, he usually remitted the fees due from the litigants, which made him very popular in the city. He could afford this generosity, for he was making a good income at the bar; ‘there was at this time’, Roper wrote, ‘in none of the Prince’s courts of the laws of this realm, any matter of importance in controversy, wherein he was not with the one part of counsel.’ He became a Justice of the Peace, a Reader at Lincoln’s Inn and a Commissioner of Sewers. Soon his abilities were required outside the confines of London. In 1515 he accompanied Bishop Tunstall on an embassy to Flanders, an occasion made famous by the beginning of
Utopia
; two years later he was on another embassy to Calais. Nor were his literary studies neglected. About 1515 he began, but never finished, a
History of Richard III
, a pioneer work of English history composed in Latin for his European humanist friends and translated into English for his fellow countrymen.