The Life of Thomas More (25 page)

The long rule of this autocratic king helps to explain More’s youthful preoccupation with the nature of true kingship as opposed to tyranny. It is a theme of his Latin epigrams. Even such later works as
The History of Richard III
and
Utopia
are concerned with the contrasts of just and vicious government. In a Latin poem celebrating the coronation of Henry VIII, which was transcribed in a highly embellished presentation copy, More invokes the atmosphere of fear, suspicion and rapacity that the dead monarch’s avarice had created. It was an opinion shared by other contemporaries and, although modern historians have tended to regard his exactions less as evidence of greed than as an instrument of royal supremacy, it is not lightly to be disregarded. There is also the story of the delight of the English Court when Henry VII’s pet monkey destroyed the papers in which he had set down his observations and criticisms of those around him.

Yet the old king had died muttering words of contrition, a crucifix held before his face. His body was carried from Richmond Palace through the streets of London, surrounded by priests and bishops, followed by six hundred of his household bearing lighted tapers; a large effigy of him, in royal state, had been placed upon the hearse. During his funeral oration in St Paul’s, John Fisher emphasised Henry VII’s devotion to the crucifix and his desire always to be ‘kyssynge it’.
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Then the body was taken to Westminster Abbey, where it was interred. In his will Henry had left money for the purchase of ten thousand masses to be celebrated for the sake of his soul and, after the obsequies in the Abbey, all departed for ‘a greate and a sumptuous feast’.
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Other celebrations were about to begin. Less than a month later, in April 1509, the seventeen-year-old Prince Henry assumed the throne as Henry VIII. The old king had been of sallow complexion, with black decayed teeth and thinning hair. The new king was as handsome as he was amiable, known both for his piety and his prowess, a young man acquainted with books as well as with jousts and hunting. In his coronation poem Thomas More described him as the glory of the era, renowned no less for learning than for virtue; truly this prince was about to inaugurate a new golden age. When he appeared on the streets of London the crowds filled the houses and rooftops along his route and thronged about him so that he was hardly able to make his way. Lord Mountjoy, in a letter to Erasmus, proclaimed that under the rule of this
great prince
‘Ridet aether, exultat terra; omnia lactis, omnia mellis’
(‘the heavens laugh and the earth rejoices, all is milk and honey’).
⁴
Baldassare Castiglione, the courtier and diplomat from Mantua, had in more general terms depicted the monarch as ‘full of liberality, munificence, religion and clemency … capable of being regarded as a demigod rather than as a mortal man’.
⁵
This reverence may elucidate More’s own attitude towards the young king. On the day before the coronation, when Henry and his new queen processed through the streets of London, Cornhill and Cheapside were hung with cloth of gold; ‘Virgins in white, with braunches of white Waxe’
⁶
lined the route together with all the guilds of London in their preordained order, as well as priests in rich copes who censed the royal couple as they passed. Edward Hall devotes many pages of his chronicle to the finery of this procession as well as to the coronation itself, with its mixture of piety, drama, politics and spectacle. He dwells upon the richness and grandness of the apparel of the various guests, with damask gold and cloth of silver, green silk and blue velvet, all ‘poudered’ and embroidered. There are ritual challenges and elaborately staged feasts, carefully ordered manifestations of rank and authority, displays of wealth and power, all contributing to a picture of the world in this lower sphere where we may mimic the magnificence and splendour of heaven.

More was already close to members of the young king’s household; he was also on good terms with some of the clerics who were part of the council, in particular with William Warham and Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham. His immediate political hope, as an influential Londoner, was that the new king was about to lift taxes and reform the conduct of policy; Henry was expected to renew the arts of ruling.
⁷
This is the principal theme of More’s coronation verses, with his celebration that unjust laws and unfairly imposed debts are to be repealed. He speaks here as a representative of the merchant class. But there is another aspect of his encomium. The young Henry had already been instructed in noble arts,
⁸
and in
‘Philosophia’.
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More’s own humanist interests here become paramount. Not much older than the century itself, Henry might be considered to be the king for a new age of restored piety and scholarship. There seemed every reason to believe he would patronise the new learning and, more importantly, maintain the peace and stability in which such learning could flourish. It is hard to
think of any other century, or reign, in England which opened with such hopes.

Mountjoy’s enthusiastic letter to Erasmus, then residing in Rome, summoned his old teacher to the brave new world which seemed about to open. William Warham had promised the Dutch scholar a benefice on his return to England, and Mountjoy sent him five pounds for the expenses of his journey. Erasmus left almost at once and, on his arrival in London, lodged with More and his wife at their house in Bucklersbury. The strain of travel and the sea-crossing had brought on a pain in his kidney and he was forced to spend several days indoors. His library of books had not yet arrived and, in order to occupy his time, he wrote a little treatise. By this time the More family had substantially increased. Four children had been born since the marriage; Margaret, now four, was the eldest and was succeeded by Elizabeth, Cicely and John. It was not a quiet household, therefore, and yet within the space of seven days Erasmus completed the work which more than any other is now associated with his name and fame. The title itself suggests its origin in the More household,
Moriae encomium
, ‘In Praise of Folly’, but also, with a subtle shift of language, ‘In Praise of More’. However, More is connected to the book by more than a pun. Erasmus describes him as its
‘auctor’
, or its inspiration, and he also refers to the jokes
¹⁰
that he and More shared. But these were not necessarily of a frivolous nature. The vivid and acerbic tone of
Moriae encomium
represents the temperaments not only of More or Erasmus but also of what Hazlitt called ‘the spirit of the age’. The Dutch scholar read it out to More’s friends in Bucklersbury, who were delighted by it. On its eventual publication, it sold rapidly and widely. It became the most famous secular work of the century, affecting writers as diverse as Rabelais and Cervantes, and can almost be read as a general compendium of Northern humanism. It was prefaced by a letter from Erasmus to More, in which he describes his friend as the Democritus of a new age; by which he meant that More was constantly amused by the follies all around him, but managed to blend his sense of the ridiculous with manners at once ‘so friendly and pleasant’.
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The main text is an oration by Folly herself, in which she exposes those of her adherents who pretend to be wise men and announces her courtiers as flattery and self-love, sophistry and delusion. Folly soon proves herself to be the true deity of this
world, with all of its people as her followers. In many respects
Moriae encomium
is the forerunner to More’s
Utopia
; both books use irony and ventriloquy in order to reveal contemporary society within a wider and clearer perspective. The great success of the book suggests that there was an appetite for the kind of writing which pricked the follies and abuses of the period, with attacks upon lazy mendicant friars as well as greedy princes of the church, lawyers as well as scholastic theologians. It is as if the whole structure of the late medieval world was being shaken.

In this spirit, too, we must understand More’s enthusiasm at the accession of the young king. Now anything seemed possible. More’s life of Pico della Mirandola was published by his brother-in-law John Rastell and was soon pirated by Wynkyn de Worde. The renovated spirituality of that treatise perfectly complements the close of
Moriae encomium
, in which Erasmus extols the life of simple piety. In the same spirit, too, John Colet was discussing with his friends the constitution and the syllabus of his new school. Colet wrote that ‘My entent is by thys scole specially to incresse knowlege and worshipping of god and oure lorde Christ Jesu.’
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The new learning was not incompatible with a deep piety; indeed, for Colet, it was an aspect of faith. Neither was it incompatible with secular business. John Colet asked the Mercers’ Company to maintain the school, for which purpose he gave them estates in Middlesex, Buckinghamshire and elsewhere. So this group of London merchants became the trustees and governors of a school devoted to ‘Christ Jesu’; once again it emphasises the extent to which spiritual and secular concerns were part of the same pattern and texture of living. Land was granted for the school in 1509, but actual building began more than a year later; the school, complete with master’s house and chapel, was finished in 1512. It was situated in the east part of St Paul’s churchyard, beside the great stone bell-house containing the four ‘Jesus bells’, which were reputed to be the loudest in the kingdom. Some ground was leased where the children might urinate, the rent being a red rose every ninety-nine years.
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Late medieval ecclesiastics did not necessarily lack a sense of humour.

More himself was vitally concerned with the manner and methods of education; he would later set up a flourishing ‘school’ within his own household. But other friends became involved in Colet’s enterprise, preeminently
Erasmus and Thomas Linacre; as More put it in a letter to Colet, St Paul’s was designed to banish ignorance
¹⁴
and he made a pointed allusion to the Greeks who subverted
‘barbaram Troiam’.
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He envisaged the school, in other words, as a preserve of the new learning. One other, more exotic, scholar might also have been an adviser: the hermeticist and exponent of angel-magic Cornelius Agrippa stayed with Colet in 1510. This was the year in which he had completed
De occulta philosophia
, a subject in which Colet was deeply interested; in fact there is a strong tradition of magical theory and practice in the work of the humanists whom Colet most admired, Ficino and Pico and Reuchlin, concerning such matters as the cabbala and the summoning of angels. This was magic performed in an atmosphere of piety and prayer, which Agrippa himself described in language close to Colet’s own meditations and to the spirit of Thomas à Kempis and
devotio moderna
: ‘Faithe and Praier: not the studie of longe time, but humblenes of Spirite and cleannesse of Hart’.
¹⁶

It may have been Agrippa who suggested to Colet that the number of boys at his new school should be limited to 153, a powerful piece of number symbolism related to the Trinity. The school was one large chamber divided into four apartments by means of curtains, and even the interior reflected the advice of More and his friends. At the suggestion of Erasmus, for example, an image of the boy Jesus ‘in the attitude of teaching’ was placed above the master’s chair, with an image of God the Father saying
‘Ipsum audite’
.
¹⁷
Erasmus’s influence on the school was profound and particular. He composed a textbook for the boys,
De Copia
(‘Of Abundance’) which proved popular for more than a hundred years, as well as some prayers and sermons; he translated a little catechism by Colet into Latin hexameters, and went to some trouble to find a suitable under-master for the school. It is likely that he also helped to draw up the syllabus. Colet also enlisted Thomas Linacre, to compose a Latin grammar; Linacre entitled it
Rudimenta
, but it was not rudimentary enough for the young scholars of St Paul’s. Colet eventually rejected it on the grounds that it was too abstruse. This provoked some bad feeling between the two men, as always fuelled by spiteful gossip, but Erasmus acted as placator and mediator. As a result Colet asked another member of this London group, William Lily—whom he
had already chosen as high master of the school—to help in the preparation of an easier textbook.

So they all worked together on Colet’s educational project. That More, and his colleagues, were markedly different from other groups in London is well established. Erasmus tells the story of how a scholastic philosopher scorned his concern in the teaching of the London children; the more orthodox scholars were not interested in the training of the juvenile mind, precisely because they were not interested in the possibilities of a new age of piety and learning. Another assault upon ‘the Greeks’ came from the quondam and perhaps even self-styled poet laureate John Skelton, some seven years after the establishment of the school. Skelton attacked a new Latin grammar which Lily had adopted for his pupils, and the ensuing exchange of pamphlets and poems became known as ‘the grammarians’ war’. In particular Skelton believed that the young pupils were being introduced to classical texts before they had mastered the elements of syntax and vocabulary; it is an old and perhaps permanent argument between educational theorists but Skelton’s extraordinary poem, ‘Speke, Parrot’, brings its sixteenth-century manifestation vividly to life:

Thus the new humanists—More, Erasmus, Linacre and Lily—‘go about to amende, and ye mare all’.
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The irony is that the curriculum which Colet eventually organised was highly conservative and orthodox in intent. He wished to educate the children with ‘Cristyn auctours’,
²⁰
preferring those from the fourth century rather than the classical writers themselves. It seems likely that this instruction was quietly broken by William Lily—there was no substitute for Cicero or Quintilian—but it emphasises that, in this London circle, piety was often considered more important than learning. Some of Colet’s injunctions to the pupils may also help us to comprehend the life of the period—‘Lose no tyme’, ‘Wasshe cleane’, ‘Awake quykly’, ‘Reuerence thyne elders’, ‘Enrich thee with vertue’. At the end of his introduction to grammar, he introduces a note which brings us closer to the man than a thousand precepts: ‘And
lyfte vp your lytel whyte handes for me, which prayeth for you to god.’
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