The Life of Thomas More (48 page)

During her tenth adventure she arrives at the More household where she ‘deceiued three yong men … that were seruants to Syr Thomas More’.
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There were candles in the chamber where she stayed, and an attendant ‘tymbred her fyres’; another servant stood behind her at dinner, dispensing malmsey and ale. In these affluent surroundings she once more starts work. She tries to beguile one young servant with tales of her wealth, and then resorts to direct action.

This sets the scene for the rest of the story; her duplicity is discovered and, as a revenge, the servants secretly feed her ‘Pouder Sinipari’ which gave her strenuous and abnormal diarrhoea. At which point, still in the household, she is placed in chains for three weeks where her distress was no doubt unabated. These mishaps not only presage More’s later treatment of heretics, but they also provide that strange combination of scatological imagery and repressive control which seems to be related to
More’s own sardonic humour. One other detail has not yet been mentioned, but it is important. Edith had travelled to Battersea before beginning her tenth adventure and was rowed in a wherry across the river:

CHAPTER XXIII
THY FOOLISH FACE

drawing of the More family at Chelsea, by Holbein, survives still. It is a preliminary sketch for, or copy of, a larger tempera painting which was destroyed in the mid-eighteenth century. Another painted version was completed by an English artist at the end of the sixteenth century, but of course it is not as suggestive as the Holbein original. The principal members of the household are preparing for their devotions in a room on the first floor of the house—Elizabeth Dauncey, Margaret Giggs, Sir John More, Anne Cresacre, Thomas More, John More, Henry Patenson the fool, Cicely Heron, Margaret Roper and Alice More. They have been placed by Holbein in subtly fluent arrangement, as if to emphasise the harmony of their spiritual and scholarly discourse. They are sitting in a spacious, well-timbered and modern room, with a few touches of Holbein’s pencil to suggest that there were rushes upon the floor. It is clearly meant to be an exact representation of the interior. On the left side of the drawing, against the wall, is a sideboard which has a canopy above it; a salver, a vase of flowers, a bottle and some cups have been placed there, but Holbein has also sketched a viol beside it with the inscription ‘clavichord and other instruments are on the shelf’. On the wall, above the seated figure of Thomas, there hangs a weight-driven clock and pendulum. It would have possessed only an hour hand. To the right there is an interior canopied porch which leads to another room, while within the right wall is a diamond-latticed window and sill. Upon the sill are two or three books, piled against each other, as well as a salver, a candlestick and a jug.

The expressions of the sitters have a certain gravity and seriousness. Margaret Giggs leans forward to point out a passage in the devotional
work she is holding but Sir John More, seeming to ignore her, gazes forward with some interior preoccupation. Thomas More sits beside him in furred robe and cap, wearing the Tudor livery chain; in the painted copy of 1590 a dog, which seems to be a spaniel, lies at his feet. Elizabeth Dauncey is pregnant; the young John More is noted by Holbein to have a ‘brown’ complexion of a standard London type; Dame Alice More kneels at a prie-dieu. Holbein has added a note beside her—‘This one shall sit’—so perhaps she had complained of discomfort. All the women in the drawing are dressed in the height of fashion and the room itself is evidence of wealth and learning; it is curious, perhaps, that although the sitters hold works of devotion there are no religious images upon the walls.

It is likely that the painting was commissioned to mark Thomas More’s fiftieth birthday, and Holbein has taken that opportunity to create a family group worthy of Erasmus’s description of it as an English, perhaps spiritualised, version of those Neoplatonic academies which had flourished at Florence and elsewhere. Holbein would have had occasion to learn of the More household in some detail from Erasmus himself, since he had painted two portraits of that scholar only two years before. More pertinently, perhaps, Holbein had already executed woodcuts for
Utopia.
The artist had arrived in England from Antwerp at the end of 1526, presumably carrying a letter of introduction from Erasmus, and it has often been suggested that he stayed at Chelsea. There is no evidence for this, except for the drawing itself, but there is confirmation of More’s enthusiasm for Holbein’s work; in a letter to Erasmus, he extolled him as
‘mirus … artifex’.
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That wonderful artist in turn created, at the request of More, what has been described as the first great work of secular portraiture in Northern Europe. It is conceived as a record of familial history, a pictorial archive or ‘tree’ which reflects More’s own profound sense of tradition; but it is also a study of intimate relations, touched by spiritual awareness and enlightened by knowledge.

They had come to Chelsea at some point in 1525 or early 1526; the date is uncertain because More also owned land and property in Butclose (just west of the present Royal Albert Hall), where the family might have stayed while the great house was being completed. Chelsea, or Chels-hithe, had a reputation for healthy air; Jonathan Swift stayed
there two centuries later and wrote to Stella of the sweet odour of its countryside. The village was approximately two miles from the city and was approached by crossing the Westbourne river on horseback while avoiding the marshy fields and creeks which were known to be the haunts of footpads. It was also possible, of course, to travel there by means of barge and wherry; that may indeed have been one of the reasons why More chose the spot, since it was almost equidistant from the royal palaces of Greenwich and Richmond. The Thames at this point, however, was known to be particularly rough; the villagers spoke of the water ‘dancing’ to the sound of drowned fiddles.
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The river itself was filled with salmon, perch, carp and so many other varieties of fish that the people along its banks characteristically earned their living as fishermen. The view from More’s house on the Chelsea side, across the Thames, was of the woods and pastures of Surrey filled with wild duck and water-fowl, while beyond rose the hills of Clapham and of Sydenham. Yet London was always clearly visible, with the steeple of St Paul’s rising above the roof-tops; indeed More created or preserved an ‘eminence’ in his garden from which the prospect was at its best. He never wished to lose sight of his own earthly city.

He purchased land in the area now bordered on two sides by the King’s Road and the river, and on the other by Milman’s Street and Old Church Street; there had been a farmhouse or small manor house on the site, which was pulled down to make way for More’s larger dwelling of Tudor red-brick. It was grand indeed with a frontage of some 164 feet, with a porch and two bays, and two sets of casement windows on either side. Holbein described it as dignified without being overtly magnificent.
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We may approach it in imagination, as we leave the river-side and walk through the gardens towards it; there were two gates and two gatehouses in front of us, approximately 300 yards apart, while the gardens were filled with a variety of trees and herbs and flowering shrubs. In particular there was a mulberry tree, because its name is
morus
, as well as rosemary and lilies, gillyflowers and sweet cabbage roses. There was an orchard with its apple trees and pear trees, plums and apricots and spreading vines. The house was approached by a path, with a few steps leading up to a front porch decorated with jasmine and honeysuckle. This entrance led directly to the interior, where, on the right-hand side, were wooden screens; these protected the great hall, at
the eastern end of which was a raised dais where the More household ate. It was a large room, more than seventy feet in length, and rose up to the beamed and timbered roof. On the first floor, looking down into the hall, was a covered gallery with oriel windows. A door by the raised dais led to the staircase and chapel; the chapel, like the hall, could be viewed from above while the rooms on the first floor comprised the bedchambers and
‘cubicula’.
The servants’ quarters as well as kitchen, buttery and pantry were on the left-hand side of the house, opposite the great hall.

In the grounds of the house More also built a library and private chapel which became known as the ‘new building’; there was also a gallery here, and no doubt in his library he kept a desk and candle-stick so that he might work late into the night. He required a private chapel in order literally to fulfil the injunction of Thomas à Kempis that ‘If thou desirest true contrition of heart, enter thy secret chamber and shut out the tumults of the world’.
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As More himself later wrote, it is necessary for a man to ‘chose hymselfe some secret solitary place in his own house as far fro noyse & companye as he conveniently can, and thyther lett hym some tyme secretely resort alone ymagynyng hym selfe as one goyng out of the world’.
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He must fall prostrate before God, keeping in front of him ‘some pitifull image of christes bitter passion’, and there confess all his faults. In particular he must declare the temptations of ‘his worldly frendes’ and say in his heart
‘Inimici hominis domestici eius’
,
⁶
which has generally been translated as ‘And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.’
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It would have been in this private chapel, away from the eyes of his own family, that More scourged himself with a leather thong.

There was also a small village church close to his estate, which had been built in the twelfth century and dedicated to All Saints; soon after his arrival in Chelsea, More restored its largest chapel as a ‘family chapel’. A gate and arch separated it from the chancel, with carved capitals on either side in an ‘Italo-English’ style that is reputed to be the work of Holbein. On the eastern capital have been carved More’s coat-of-arms and crest, together with the date ‘1528’, while the other bears the emblems of a holy water pail, prayer book, tapers and crossed candlesticks, which were the instruments used by More during his participation in the ceremonies. More would have prayed in the chancel
while Alice More, according to the ruling of the council of Nantes, remained at her devotions within the chapel itself. The vault of the chapel was also restored, and it was designed by More to be his family’s last resting place. He had the remains of his first wife transported from St Stephen Walbrook, and he composed a fine epitaph in which he expressed the wish that he and Dame Alice might one day lie beside her.