Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (6 page)

But in these years, outwardly so prosperous, there were pains and signs of future troubles. His first wife died in 1511 and before the end of the year More had married Alice Middleton, a mercer’s
widow elder than himself who had a reputation for being a harpy, but who made a good home for his four young children and ran his very busy household efficiently. More was worried by the state of Europe. He was shamed to see the fierce old Pope, Julius II, put on armour and lead the papal forces against enemies while Rome itself was sunk in corruption and nepotism. He feared for the policies of Henry VIII and Wolsey which, largely in support of the papacy, threw away the cautious good sense of Henry VII and drew England into one extravagant and inconclusive European war after another. He feared the growing capriciousness and intemperance of the King’s character that caused the peaceful, even cowardly, Erasmus to write that he felt uneasy in Engand. He saw the slackness, indolence and ignorance of the English clergy which his friend Colet had denounced in the most passionate terms in a sermon before Convocation in 1511. He saw, especially through his work in the courts and as a London official, the terrible injustices of the State, the dispossession of the peasants, the beggary of the townsfolk, which were soon to distress so many notable men, from the proud Cardinal Wolsey to the honest Protestant Bishop Latimer. The contemplation of all this caused him to write his
Utopia
.

Utopia,
the Isle of Nowhere, the ‘fruitful, pleasant and witty work, of the best state of a public weal’, was written in Latin and published at Louvain in 1516. It was written for the delight of his scholar friends all over Europe and is perhaps the only work of humanist Latin that is remembered today. No reformer had a better knowledge of social conditions than More, no other writer on the evils of society had more experience of administration and government. Thomas More wrote without illusion, and therefore without hope. What might have been a work of denunciation written in English, was instead a witty fantasy, a make-believe, written in Latin. It is one of the saddest commentaries on the brutal self-interest, intransigence and stupidity of human beings. Nowhere among the nations of Christendom does More’s traveller find ‘any sign or token of equity and justice’. The rich control all things for their own greed, though the wealth of the country comes from the labour of the common man. The law itself is a futile instrument taking no account of social reality: ‘we first make thieves and then punish them.’ But change is impossible. ‘Where possessions be private, where money beareth all the stroke, it is hard and almost
impossible that there the weal-public may justly be governed and prosperously flourish.’ That is the indictment. The witty answer appears in the picture of
Utopia
where there is communism, uniformity, no war, no revealed religion, and no liberty. The answer of course is no solution, because if men had it they would not want it and for that reason More makes Utopia the never-never land of Nowhere. The sly conclusion of the book is that man’s lot on earth is pain and injustice, that politics can never supply any remedy, and that grand schemes of reform are insubstantial dreams. For More the hope of man lay elsewhere, in faith, and the business of the world had nothing but his condemnation.
Utopia
, the portrait of depraved humanity, is closest to
Gulliver’s Travels
, another witty flaying of mankind; and it is notable that Swift makes Thomas More the only modern in his pantheon of heroes.

When
Utopia
was published More was in his mid-thirties, a successful lawyer, an experienced and highly popular city official. Erasmus gave a full portrait of his friend in a letter to Ulrich von Hutten. He was of medium height and healthy, with dark auburn hair and a cheerful countenance. His hands were a little coarse. His clothes were simple and he dressed without much care and without ornaments. He ate the plainnest food without complaint, drank small beer and wine from a loving-cup lest he should seem unsociable. His favourite dishes were milk, cheese, fruit and eggs. He was fond of music but did not sing; his voice was strong and deliberate. He was easy and familiar with everyone and avoided great men because he did not like formality. He liked jokes and laughter and composed epigrams for his own amusement. His son-in-law Roper, who lived in his house for sixteen years, wrote that he never saw More ‘as much as once in a fume’. He was not ambitious, Erasmus continued, and had no care for money, spending what he got freely. He loved freedom and leisure to think far more than business, yet took such pains over his court work that he often slept only four hours a night. He liked animals and kept a small menagerie of monkeys, beavers, foxes and other unusual beasts. His piety was constant but unobtrusive. He slept with a block of wood as a pillow and often wore a hair-shirt, though only his wife and eldest daughter knew this. His philosophical, kindly and happy life might have continued until his death but for two events. In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door and set the Reformation under way. And at the end
of the same year More was drawn into the service of Henry VIII.

No man entered the royal service more unwillingly than Thomas More. He knew well the dangers of court life under the Tudors and spoke with feeling of the ‘bondage unto kings’. He had no appetite for money, power or high position. More had already taken part in a foreign embassy at the request of the city merchants. In May 1517, with courage and good sense he helped to compose a riot that broke out among the apprentices in London, and then pleaded their forgiveness to the King. Later, he was retained by the Pope in a court case over a forfeited papal ship at Southampton which the King claimed. More argued so well that he won the case and impressed the King so much that Henry was determined to employ him: ‘for no entreaty’, Roper wrote, ‘would the King from thenceforth be induced any longer to forbear his service.’ More could do nothing but obey and was made a member of the Privy Council.

More advanced steadily in the King’s service. Henry was pleased with his work and delighted with his company, summoning him on holidays to his private chamber to talk endlessly of astronomy, geometry, divinity and politics, or calling him out suddenly at night and taking him on the roof to look at the stars. After the Council had met, the King would insist that More stayed to entertain him and the Queen at supper and kept him so much from his family that ‘he could not once in a month get leave to go home to his wife and children (whose company he most desired)’. He began to dissemble, wearing a long look and refraining from witty replies so that the King would release him. And he had more than his own inconvenience to worry about at court. He could not approve of the pride and greed of Wolsey, nor did he like the policies of Wolsey and Henry which imbroiled England in European wars. A desire for peace was his constant preoccupation. He stated his wish most clearly in
Utopia
, and ever after decried the wasteful horror of any war: ‘the world once ruffled and fallen in a wilderness,’ he wrote, ‘how long would it be, and what heaps of heavy mischief would there fall, ere the way was founden to set the world in order and peace again.’ Erasmus, having left England for the last time in 1517, wrote fulsome letters to Henry and Wolsey in which he saw ‘an Age truly Golden arising’ under these two princes of State and Church who were so wise, learned and kind to the arts. The Cardinal was indeed a great patron of learning, founding six new professorships at Oxford. He was also, despite his own corrupt
life, an advocate of Church reform and a keen champion of impartial justice. But it was not enough to make a golden age. The sickness of society, diagnosed so clearly in
Utopia
, was well advanced, and king and cardinal had not the medicines to remedy it.

So Thomas More served Henry as best he could, but he was never the King’s man. He became Master of the Court of Requests—known generally as the Court of Poor Men’s Causes; he attended Henry when the kings of England and France met at the Field of Cloth of Gold in June 1520; he became Under Treasurer of the Exchequer in May 1521 and was knighted; he went on embassies to the continent where his knowledge of London commerce and merchants was very useful. In April 1523 he was chosen Speaker of the House of Commons. Six years later he reached the pinnacle of his worldly career, following Wolsey as Lord Chancellor.

The years were not restful. The execution of the Duke of Buckingham in 1521, for no other reason than that he was of the royal blood, warned More and the kingdom of Henry’s desperation over the succession, and showed the brutality of the King’s nature which was soon to be a notorious mark of his reign. In the wake of Luther’s action, angry religious controversy had risen up. In 1521 Henry had composed his
Assertion of the Seven Sacraments
against Luther for which he received the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ from a grateful Pope Leo. Luther replied with his usual blunt language, and since the King could not stoop to a slanging match with this lowly German, More took up the quarrel on Henry’s behalf trading violence for violence, acrimony for acrimony, in Latin under the pseudonym of ‘Gulielmus Rosseus’. Henry’s faithful subservience to papal ambition also worried More. He warned the King that the Pope, in his temporal role, was only ‘a prince as you are’, and that England should not be tangled by the temporal affairs of this Italian ruler. Perhaps he anticipated the King’s disappointment if the papacy should alter its alliance, as Leo later did from England to Spain. He could hardly have foreseen Henry’s intense anger when the Pope refused to give him an annulment of his marriage after all the years that England had supported the papacy.

More, therefore, was a critical observer rather than a wholehearted participant in Henry’s policies. The actions of a king are especially worrying when he is (as the French ambassador said of
Henry) ‘a statue for idolatry’. ‘From the prince as from a perpetual wellspring’, More wrote, ‘cometh among the people the flood of all that is good or evil.’ Aware of the appalling power of the monarchy, More thought that the royal prerogative should not be exercised without the best advice. In April 1523, on the one occasion when Parliament met during Wolsey’s fourteen years in office, More, the Speaker of the Commons, pleaded with Henry to allow freedom of debate and license to speak the mind. Permission was graciously given, but amounted to little; in the King’s view the only purpose of Parliament was to vote funds for his war, and Wolsey bullied the Commons with his usual arrogance until they partly complied. The gloominess of the times, with England slipping without sense into expensive war, with the kingdom at home perplexed by social and economic problems, and with the noise of religious argument always growing, was reflected in More’s
Four Last Things,
grim thoughts on man’s end, full of medieval pessimism and
contemptus mundi
.

The higher More rose, the worse was the view. In 1527 Henry, now contemplating the divorce of Catherine, asked More for his opinion on the matter. He managed to satisfy the King with some careful answers, but knew that delaying tactics would not work forever. In the same year the sack of Rome by the troops of the Emperor Charles altered the alliances of Europe with disastrous consequences for Wolsey’s foreign policy. Hoping to salvage something for England, More accompanied two embassies to the continent, the first with Wolsey to Amiens in 1527 to induce the French to make war on Charles; the second hurriedly to Cambrai in 1529 with Bishop Tunstall to keep the peace with Charles when it appeared that France and Spain were about to unite against England. At this time, walking by the river in Chelsea near his new house, More unburdened his mind to his son-in-law Roper, wishing himself put in a sack and thrown in the Thames if only three things could be established in Christendom. ‘The first is,’ he said, ‘that where the most part of Christian princes be at mortal war, they were all at a universal peace. The second, that where the Church of Christ is at this present sore afflicted with many errors and heresies, it were settled in a perfect uniformity of religion. The third, that where the King’s matter of his marriage is now come in question, it were to the glory of God and quietness of all parties brought to a good conclusion.’ The achievement of these things had been beyond
the cunning of Cardinal Wolsey. He was dismissed and disgraced. On 23rd October 1529 Thomas More took his place as Lord Chancellor.

Now it appeared he had it all—the Great Seal of the Chancellor, the good opinion of the King, the admiration of all humanists, the best regards of the people who remembered his justice in the courts, the love of his numerous family and retainers grouped about him in his new house at Chelsea. But the matter of the divorce, which had tripped Wolsey, was still unsettled, and More had already made his opposition known to the King. The Reform Parliament was about to meet and it was common knowledge, wrote the French ambassador, that the lords and the property owners intended to plunder the possessions of the Church. More hated the rapacity of these greedy men. Why was he chosen? Henry was always patient, and thought in time he could bend the new chancellor to his will; and for the present More was the best man in the kingdom for the position. Erasmus wrote that even Wolsey, who did not like More but ‘was assuredly no fool’, stated that ‘in the whole island there was no one who was equal to the duty of Chancellor except More alone’. Why did he accept? His nephew William Rastell says that he wanted to refuse. But it was too late; twelve years before he had entered the King’s service and now he was bound to obey. Also, More was never a man to shirk the responsibilities of his conscience. Queen Catherine had been his friend for many years and he would stand by her now; nor would he desert the faith he believed in.

The Parliament which met in 1529 for the re-ordering of the English faith was one on which the King could rely. The members were the burgesses, landlords, property owners of the country, and they were united only in their lust for possessions and wealth. They scented the downfall of the proud and mighty Church, and they rushed to dismember the vast body. The talk in the Commons was nothing but ‘Down with the Church’, said Bishop Fisher, and added that this attack was ‘me seemeth for lack of faith only’. But the attack was licensed and encouraged by the King. The sins of Wolsey, who died in 1530, were visited on the clergy generally. In February 1531 the Convocation of Canterbury was compelled to pay the King £100,000 and recognize him as ‘Supreme Lord, and, as far as the Law of Christ allows, even Supreme Head’. The anti-clerical movement overwhelmed More. He had hoped by
his presence to temper the royal irritation with Rome, to prevent Henry, who was no supporter of Lutheran theology, from taking a desperate step against the Church. But the forces behind the Reform Parliament were too strong and various—a real desire to put right a corrupt clergy, the gross venal ambition of the wealthy expressed through Parliament, and finally the King’s determination to have his divorce and secure the succession. The work of Parliament was done despite the opposition of the chancellor: ‘against this one parliament of yours (God knoweth what manner of one)’, he said at his trial, ‘I have all the councils of Christendom made these thousand years.’ His power was gone by February 1531. In May 1532, the day after the final submission of the clergy to Henry’s supremacy, he resigned his office.