Mirrors (38 page)

Thomas More was understood all too well, and that may be what cost him his life. In 1535 Henry VIII, the glutton king, raised his head on a pike beside the Thames.

Twenty years previous, the man who would be beheaded had written a book that recounted the customs of an island called Utopia, where property was held in common, money did not exist, and there was neither poverty nor wealth.

In the voice of his character, a traveler returned from America, Thomas More expressed his own dangerous ideas:

• On wars:

Robbers prove sometimes gallant soldiers, soldiers often prove brave robbers; so near an alliance there is between those two sorts of life.

• On thievery:

No punishment, how severe soever, [is] able to restrain those from robbing who can find out no other way of livelihood. You first make thieves and then punish them.

• On the death penalty:

It seems to me a very unjust thing to take away a man’s life for a little money; for nothing in the world can be of equal value with a man’s life . . . extreme justice is an extreme injury.

• On money:

So easy a thing would it be to supply all the necessities of life, if that blessed thing called money, which is pretended to be invented for procuring them, was not really the only thing that obstructed their being procured!

• On private property:

Till property is taken away, there can be no equitable or just distribution of things, nor can the world be happily governed.

ERASMUS

Erasmus of Rotterdam dedicated
In Praise of Folly
to his friend Thomas More.

In that book Folly spoke in the first person. She said all joy and happiness was due to her favors, she urged smoothing the furrowed brow, proposed an alliance of children and the elderly, and mocked “arrogant philosophers, empurpled kings, pious priests, thrice-holy pontiffs, and all that rabble of gods.”

This annoying, irreverent man preached the communion of Christian teachings and pagan traditions:

“Saint Socrates, pray for us.”

His insolent output was censured by the Inquisition, placed on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books, and frowned on by the new Protestant church.

ORIGIN OF THE ELEVATOR

King Henry VIII of England had six queens.

He widowed easily.

He devoured women and banquets whole.

Six hundred lackeys served at his table, overflowing with partridge pastries, peacocks in all their sublime plumage, and cuts of mutton or suckling pig on which, knife in hand, he bestowed noble titles before biting into them.

When his last queen arrived, Henry was so fat he could no longer ascend the staircase that led from the dining room to the nuptial bed.

The king had no choice but to invent a chair that by means of a complicated mechanism of pulleys carried him seated from plate to pillow.

PRECURSOR OF CAPITALISM

England, Holland, France, and other countries owe him a statue.

A goodly part of the power of the powerful comes from the gold and silver he stole, from the cities he burned, from the galleons he pillaged, and from the slaves he rounded up.

Some fine sculptor ought to carve an effigy of this armed functionary of nascent capitalism: knife between the teeth, patch on one eye, peg leg, hook for a hand, parrot on the shoulder.

DANGEROUS CORNERS OF THE CARIBBEAN

Pirates built America. On the islands and coasts of the Caribbean, they were more feared than hurricanes.

In his diary, Columbus mentioned God fifty-one times and gold a hundred and thirty-nine times, even though God was everywhere while there was not enough gold to fill a tooth.

But time passed and the fertile fields of America flowered with abundant gold, silver, sugar, cotton, and other marvels. Pirates specialized in purloining such fruit. And in reward for their efforts, these instruments of capital accumulation were inducted into British nobility.

Queen Elizabeth of England was a partner of the fearsome Francis Drake, who provided her with a profit of 4,600 percent on her investment. She made him Sir Francis. She also knighted Drake’s uncle, John Hawkins, and she took part in the business Hawkins founded when he bought three hundred slaves in Sierra Leone, sold them in Santo Domingo, and his three ships returned to London loaded down with sugar, skins, and ginger.

From that point forward, the slave trade became England’s own mountain of silver, the Cerro Rico of Potosí it had lacked.

RALEIGH

In the south of America, he sought El Dorado. In the north, he found tobacco. He was a navigator, a warrior, an explorer, a poet. And he was a pirate.

Sir Walter Raleigh:

who smoked a pipe and revealed the pleasures of tobacco to British nobility;

who in court wore a doublet studded with diamonds, and in battle wore armor made of silver;

the favorite of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen;

who for her named Virginia, the land still called by that name;

who for her assaulted Spanish ports and galleons, and who was made at the tap of her sword a noble knight;

who years later for the same deeds had his head chopped off in the Tower of London.

With Elizabeth dead, King James wanted a Spanish queen, so the pirate Raleigh, the villain of the movie, was convicted of high treason.

His widow received, as was the custom, his embalmed head.

FAMILY PORTRAIT IN ENGLAND

The feud between the Yorks and the Lancasters might not have been more than a quarrel among neighbors if William Shakespeare had not set his pen to the topic.

The poet surely never imagined that by dint of his talent the dynastic war between the white rose and the red rose would acquire a universal dimension.

In England’s history and in Shakespeare’s play, King Richard III, patron saint of serial killers, unleashed a river of blood on his way to the throne. He killed King Henry VI and Prince Edward too. He drowned his brother Clarence in a barrel of wine and, that accomplished, he did away with his nephews. He locked up the two little princes in the Tower of London, smothered them with their pillows, and buried them in secret at the foot of a staircase. He also strangled Lord Hastings and decapitated the Duke of Buckingham, his best friend, his other self, just in case they were plotting something.

Richard III was the last English monarch to die in battle.

Shakespeare gave him the words that made him immortal:

“My kingdom for a horse!”

MARE NOSTRUM

More than a century after the pope in Rome divided half the world between Spain and Portugal, the English jurist John Selden published
Mare clausum
in 1635.

This treatise proved that not only the land had an owner, but the sea as well, and His Majesty the king of England was, by natural right, the legitimate proprietor of the lands and waters of his expanding empire.

Thus the foundation of British property law was laid on the god Neptune, on Noah and his three sons, on Genesis, Deuteronomy, and the Psalms, and on the prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel.