The Life of Thomas More (31 page)

It is hard to strip this employment of its modern connotations; lawyers are not necessarily supposed to be devout or principled, except in the minutiae of legislation, but for More the law was a central image of natural reason and authority. It furnished the principles which governed his behaviour in the world, established upon order in all its forms. It should come as no surprise, for example, that in this period he was also enrolled as a teacher of grammar at Oxford University; he was required to lecture upon Sallust and write an epigram in praise of the university which could be affixed to the doors of St Mary the Virgin. This was another formal investigation into precedent and order. To ‘inform in’ grammar, as the phrase went, was primarily to teach Latin language and literature, but in More’s words
grammaticus
meant the same thing as
litteratus
;
¹⁹
the grammarian was a man of letters. His
extant remarks upon the use of the definite or indefinite article, as well as of periphrasis and hyperbole, suggest that he was well versed in the technicalities of the subject; but, as an exponent of the new learning, he was most concerned with practice and usage. Order and experience had to be harmoniously combined. He was, therefore, like Erasmus, convinced of the need to restore texts to their original purity; only then could the true usage of the classical authors be ascertained. It is a happy coincidence that More should be licensed for the teaching of grammar in the same period that Erasmus was Professor of Greek at Cambridge. But the circumstances were not necessarily propitious for humane learning.

From the autumn of 1511 Erasmus had been making anxious enquiries about the condition of Europe where the various principalities and powers—Spain, France, Venice and the Pope among them—had been engaged in consistent but sporadic warfare. At the time these conflicts were blamed upon the greed and vainglory of princes, but in retrospect we might attribute some of the animosity to the assertiveness of burgeoning nation-states. The collapse of European Christendom was only two decades away. Erasmus placed much of the responsibility for the warfare upon Pope Julius II, known as
‘Il Terribile’
, who in full armour led his troops against Perugia and Bologna; he was a man of silent thoughtfulness and violent temper, reputed to have the body and soul of a giant with the will of a Titan. He commissioned Michelangelo to sculpt a fourteen-foot statue of him in bronze, and patronised the young Raphael. He fathered three children, in his earlier days as a cardinal, and the citizens of Rome adored him.

Yet Julius II was not the only ruler who wished to stalk the fields of Europe with fire and sword. It was rapidly becoming clear to More and his contemporaries that their young and pious king, in whom all their hopes resided, was not necessarily a prince of peace. He yearned for battle, even if his martial longings took a knightly and courtly form. His examples of history were set, not by impersonal forces or causes, but by myth and glorious precedent. Just as piety was sustained by saints’ lives and popular legend, so good and noble governance was guided by patterns of virtuous kingship. The young king was in particular affected by the exploits of Henry V, whose successes in France were directly to inspire his own attacks upon that country.
Gesta Henrici Quinti
, or
Deeds of Henry V
, was to be found in two manuscripts, and no doubt had been required reading for the heir apparent; significantly, they were published as a volume in 1513. But the single most important lesson of these
‘gesta’
was of piety rather than valour. The historian of Henry V was likely to have been a cleric, and throughout his narrative he suggests that Henry’s conduct and combat were part of God’s providence; he was the Lord’s anointed, tested and proved by divine dispensation, whose devotion gave him a private and intercessionary relationship with the spirit of God. The victory at Agincourt was the single most important token of divine favour and blessing. All the actions of Henry VIII’s reign suggest that he believed himself—or wished to believe himself—to be similarly blessed. His predecessor had been ‘the floure of chivalrie’, according to John Lydgate’s
Troy Book
, illustrious both for his commitment to just governance and for his courageous pursuit of glory in battle. The new king wished to follow the same course; to go to war against France with papal approval was the first stage of proving himself a worthy successor of a most holy king.

Henry had in fact been promoting the conflict ever since his accession to the throne, against the inclinations of some of his council, and within three years the pageants and spectacles of court took on ever more ardent forms. On the new year’s night of 1512 there appeared in the great hall of Greenwich Palace ‘a Castle, gates, towers, and dungeon, garnished with artillery, and weapon after the most warlike fashion’;
²⁰
on a banner before the castle was inscribed ‘
le Fortresse dangerus’
, and it was ritually taken by the king himself with five other knights in richly apparelled coats of fine gold. These were true war games, since three months before Henry had joined with the Pope and Spain in a Holy League against France. It is not coincidental that, at this time, the men who espoused learning and piety condemned war as the greatest of all social evils; Colet and Warham delivered sermons in praise of the pleasures of peace, while Erasmus’s lamentations could also be heard in
Moriae encomium.
But the twenty-one-year-old king was more enamoured of conquest than of learning; in the space of two or three years, he had disappointed the extravagant hopes that the humanists had placed in him. There is no need here to chronicle the tides of war; one year was squandered in futile and self-defeating activity, while the second brought small successes hailed as triumphant victory. The principal
military action of the period, that of the defeat of the Scots on Flodden Field in 1513, was undertaken while Henry was in France.

More’s response was to compose Latin epigrams in celebration of his monarch’s exploits. Many of his friends had gone over to France with the king—Ruthall, Mountjoy and Andrew Ammonius among them—and his own attitude to these first manifestations of war was characteristically more ambiguous than that of Erasmus. In a sermon against war preached before Henry himself at Greenwich, John Colet had declared it more fitting to follow Christ rather than Caesar; but More, in a verse celebrating the capture of Tournai, declared that the king was
‘maior Caesare’
(‘greater than Caesar’).
²¹
When a French poet wrote an epic poem in praise of his country’s supposed success in a sea-battle off Brest, More retaliated with some furiously sarcastic epigrams against him as the exponent of
‘falsa’.
²²
Of course much of his enthusiasm came from his loyalty to the king and established authorities of his country, yet it is also susceptible of a wider interpretation. More believed, or professed to believe, that Henry had engaged in war on behalf of, and at the behest of, the Pope. Julius II had formed the Holy League in the face of French attempts to promote schism within the Church; this had at least become the respectable formal cause of the war, and there is reason to suppose that More accepted it. The fact that he died for that concept, of the unity of the Catholic Church, suggests that it was of some importance to him. So in his encomia he praised Henry’s participation in war at the request of the Pope
²³
and his conquests on behalf of
‘Rhomano pontifici’
.
²⁴
The belligerent character of Julius II was well known to him but, according to Catholic doctrine, a wicked priest could still perform the miracle of the Mass. The frail human was less important than the institution that he represented.

Throughout this period More was well aware of human frailty; he was engaged on the ‘history’ of Richard III, the usurper of evil countenance through whose brief reign More himself had lived. It is a ‘history’ in the loosest possible sense, even by the historiographical standards of the early sixteenth century, and has variously been described as drama, biography or propaganda. Since it is the primary source of Shakespeare’s play on the same subject, which fixed for ever the image of the malevolent hunchbacked king, it might also now qualify as myth. Its origins and purpose are wholly obscure. No original texts survive and
editors have relied upon manuscript copies of some supposed first source. There are versions in both Latin and English, at various stages of completion, and it has to be presumed that More composed in both languages. They are not straight translations of each other but, rather, original works displaying the particular merits of each language. In both versions the story remains approximately the same; it is the tale of the ‘croke backed’ usurper who came from his mother’s womb ‘feete forwarde’ and was for the rest of his life ‘malicious, wrathfull, enuious … euer frowarde’,
²⁵
‘not letting [averse] to kisse whome hee thoughte to kyll’.
²⁶
On the death of his brother, Edward IV, he welcomed the king’s sons under the guise of avuncular responsibility only to remove those closest to them; he obtained the crown by a mixture of guile and hypocrisy, and of course killed the lawful king and his brother in the Tower. It is a satisfactory and theatrical version of evil-minded dynastic politics.

Thomas More, according to one of his earliest biographers, was an eager reader of historical works who took up any treatise he could find; he would have known the London chronicles and the monkish annals, the lives of the saints and the moralised histories of the world since Creation. But his own account of Richard III bears little relation to any of these except, perhaps, by a form of ironic reversal in which the usual accoutrements of the saint’s life are turned upside down. But More also knew the work of contemporary historians (sometimes, even, the historians themselves), such as
Gesta Henrici Quinti
and Andrae’s life of Henry VII. It is also likely that he saw, in manuscript form, the
Anglica Historia
upon which Polydore Vergil was engaged. They were both members of Doctors’ Commons. But it is not likely that he saw his own work in a similar light; there are coincidences of phrasing which suggest echoes or borrowings from Polydore Vergil, for example, but More’s work is too badly structured to meet the requirements of serious historical narrative; more importantly, it is incomplete and shows no signs of being intended for publication of any kind. It is also replete with errors and omissions, the most noticeable occurring in the first sentence, where the age of Edward IV is overstated by thirteen years. More relied upon his own invention on certain occasions; many of the long speeches which fill the narrative seem to have been composed by him rather than the actual participants in the events.

But the history is also heavily dependent upon oral sources and, in particular, upon the anecdotal memories of those who witnessed the rise and fall of Richard III at close hand. It was recent history, after all, and instinctively More was careful not to offend the sensibilities of anyone still living who might have participated in Richard’s supposedly tyrannical reign. Even if the text was not to be published, it would still have circulated in manuscript form. He was evoking a period crucial to any understanding of the new Tudor order which had succeeded the instability of Richard’s short rule, and More has written a kind of morality drama in which fate, fortune and evil are the players. Certainly he had little interest in those ideas of causation, or evidence, which exercised other historians. But with his use of dramatic irony, and with that gift for vivid characterisation first seen in his epigrams, he revives the past in the manner of a pageant staged in the London streets. That is why his account is filled with sounds, with speeches, with ‘muttering amonge the people’.
²⁷
There was a tradition of literature on the subject of tyranny; Plato and Aristotle had speculated on the subject but, in More’s own lifetime, Erasmus and Machiavelli and Castiglione (not to mention a host of lesser theorists) all considered the conditions for good or bad government. William Caxton had also written of that instruction in ‘governance of empires’ which might ‘withdrawe emperors and kynges from vycious tyranny’.
²⁸
But More’s narrative is far more sensational and, at this late date, more appealing. Richard himself was ‘close and secrete, a deepe dissimuler, lowlye of counteynaunce, arrogant of heart’.
²⁹
And then there were moral lessons to be drawn for the benefit of the reader. ‘O good god,’ More wrote of one fallen nobleman, ‘the blindnes of our mortall nature, when he most feared, he was in good suerty: when he rekened him self surest, he lost his life, & that w[ith]in two howres after.’
³⁰

If he did not look to recent histories for inspiration, More may have turned to the texts of the classical historians, among them Sallust, Tacitus and Suetonius. With its mixture of highly charged narrative and long dramatically placed oration,
The History of Richard III
bears more than a passing resemblance to Sallust’s
Bellum lugurthinum
and the
Annalium libri
of Tacitus. Erasmus had been praising this form of history since 1495.

This curious document has baffled many commentators; the fact that
its English version breaks off inconclusively, for example, has been explained either by More’s loss of interest or by his susceptibility to current political issues. But it is possible that his life of Richard III was designed to be a rhetorical and grammatical exercise. Although More began composing the work at the time he had been given permission to teach grammar at Oxford, it may have been the basis of exercises given to his own school or even to the boys of St Paul’s: there is a sudden reference to a ‘scole master of Poules’
³¹
for no good reason. It was composed in both Latin and English, and thus complies with the methods of composition and translation which he impressed upon his own children—one of the surviving Latin manuscripts of the work is prefaced by the explanation that it was written
‘exercitationis gratia’
(‘for the sake of practice’). One of the models of its form is clearly Sallust, and More had been instructed particularly to teach Sallust at Oxford. He had also recommended that author for his children’s reading. And what could be a better way of studying classical rhetoric and vocabulary than to apply them to the description of more recent events? Sallust then became a living author, and a living influence, in the way that the humanists preferred. More did not need to look far for precedents; Augustine’s most accomplished biographer has explained how the saint adapted Sallust’s ‘moral history’
³²
for his own account of the decline of Rome. More adapted Sallust, also, to depict the corruption and hypocrisy of Richard’s brief rule.