The Life of Thomas More (16 page)

But they were only the intellectual vanguard of a rapidly growing trade; by the end of the 1470s there were printers in all the major cities of the Low Countries, and it has been estimated that by 1500 there were altogether seventeen hundred presses in operation throughout Europe.
¹⁵
It was a world in which commerce and learning, scholarship and merchandise, came together for the first time. That is why it has been suggested that the proliferation of books and pamphlets is directly related
to the success of the Reformation in parts of Europe; this, at least, was the theory of the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, who believed that God’s cause was ‘advanced, not with sword or target … but with printing, reading and writing’.
¹⁶
In fact there is every reason to believe that the expansion of the printing press led to a revival of Catholic piety in the publication of saints’ lives, arts of dying and various works of a liturgical or homilectic nature. More himself encouraged his close relations, the Rastells, to publish an extensive variety of books both in Latin and in English.

There were certain colleagues of More—in particular Colet and Grocyn—who made no determined effort to launch their own work into print, however; they still relied upon the resources of the manuscript culture of their youth. This may in turn be related to Colet’s continuing interest in cabbalistic learning, in the ‘secrets’ of such ancient writers as the pseudo-Dionysius, not to be divulged to the vulgar throng. It is certainly true that the enclosed and hierarchical nature of the medieval Church could not easily have withstood the climate of learning and opinion generated by the printing press, but this was something which the London reformers understood perfectly well. That is why their concern was with a purified faith, together with the persuasive eloquence of the classically trained grammarian or orator, as a means of renovating that Church. That is also why Thomas More used the new printing technology with an assiduity and determination worthy of any Lutheran reformer. It is at this moment, too, that another figure should enter the narrative of More’s life—a Catholic scholar and rhetorician who used the art of printing to disseminate his work across all Europe. It is Desiderius Erasmus to whom we must now turn, when he visited England for the first time in 1499.

Since there is a tradition of anecdotes concerning the meeting of great personages, it is not surprising that the first encounter of More and Erasmus has been embellished with coincidence and with Latin witticisms; in one version Erasmus admits to coming
‘ex inferis’
, which might mean from the cellar, hell, or the Low Countries. In this particular account the two men are supposed to have met at the table of the Lord Mayor of London; this is probably the reflection of some garbled report that they were introduced at the house of John Colet’s father, Sir Henry Colet, who had indeed held that office. But it is more likely that
they met at the London house of Sir William Say, who was the father-in-law of Erasmus’s most noble pupil and a member of Henry VII’s council.

The great scholar of late medieval Europe was born in Rotterdam in 1466; he was some twelve years older than Thomas More, therefore, and was the child of very different circumstances. He was illegitimate, but was nevertheless supported by both parents; at an early age he was sent to a school at Deventer, where his youthful proficiency, quick understanding and retentive memory brought him to the attention of his elders. ‘Well done, Erasmus,’ one of them is supposed to have exclaimed, ‘the day will come when thou wilt reach the highest summit of erudition.’
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It is very much like the prophecy of John Morton on the future of young Thomas More and, in both cases, we may safely place the remarks within the standard repertoire of the ‘golden legends’ of historical figures.

Both of Erasmus’s parents died of the plague fever when he was in his thirteenth year, and when at a later date he revealed that ‘some secret natural impulse drove me to good literature’
¹⁸
it is possible that part of this impulse derived from grief and the need for forgetfulness. His books became his companions; they did not change, or decay, or die. ‘I was just a sick and solitary child,’ he once wrote;
¹⁹
such a child is likely to be drawn to reading, and to its concomitant learning, as a bulwark and defence. After the death of his parents his guardians sent him to a monastic school, or ‘Brothers’ House’, where he came under the aegis of a group of lay brothers known as ‘the Brethren of the Common Life’; these men and women practised a religious life deeply imbued by the spirit of
devotio moderna
, a form of austere and practical piety which dwelled upon the inward imitation of the life of Christ rather than upon external observances and rituals. Erasmus was not altogether impressed by their devotion, excluding, as it did, the appetite for learning and the aptitude for scholarship; but at a later stage its influence upon him, and more especially upon More, will become apparent.

Already it is possible to see how different an education this was from More’s; his was a practical and administrative training, whereas that of Erasmus led ineluctably towards teaching or the Church. Under the influence of his guardians he was persuaded to enter a monastery of Augustinian canons, where he was ordained in 1492. The length of his
residence there has been estimated variously between six and ten years, certainly long enough to give him a permanent distaste for monastic life. Yet it afforded him the opportunity to indulge that passion for friendship which was, according to his biographers, one of his salient characteristics; Erasmus said that ‘life without a friend I think no life, but rather death’.
²⁰
He believed himself to be ugly and when he remarks upon More’s
‘venustus’
,
²¹
charm or beauty, there is a note of self-abnegation which in certain circumstances might lead towards excessive devotion to those more favoured than himself. It is no surprise, then, that his enthusiasm for companionship often led to disappointment or a sense of betrayal. His true friends, after all, were indeed his books. On several occasions he echoed Pliny’s belief that time not spent in study is time wasted, and he often repeated the precept that you must ‘live as if you are to die tomorrow, study as if you were to live for ever’. It was an instruction which he took to heart, as anyone who has had cause to review the extent of his work will testify, and even in this early part of his life he lost himself in manuscripts and words. He was largely self-taught and from the beginning he wrote so eagerly, effortlessly and fluently that we may say of him what he once remarked of St Jerome, that ‘compared with him, the others appear able neither … to … read nor write’.
²²
He composed poetry, and quoted as his authorities in that pursuit Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Statius, Martial, Claudian, Persius, Lucan, Tibullus and Propertius. It is a long list, but there is every indication that he knew his models very well. His reputation for eloquence and learning was such that he was taken into the service of the Bishop of Cambrai, but in 1494 he was given permission to undertake further studies at the University of Paris. He was compelled to earn his living there as a teacher of rhetoric, and for a while he was resident tutor in a boarding-house for the sons of English nobles and gentlemen; in this household he first met William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who eventually persuaded him to travel to England.

So he arrived in the summer of 1499, with an early if still somewhat inconclusive reputation as a poet and a scholar. We might see him, on first encountering More in a London household, as unaffected and fastidious, reserved and delicate. He was a man with a great desire for the peace and security which his own early years had unhappily lacked. But it would be wrong to present too mild or bland a description of the
great scholar; the man whom More was to call ‘my derlynge’
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was also possessed of a spirited and sometimes sarcastic sense of humour. The irony, sometimes light and sometimes ferocious, in
Moriae encomium
or in
Colloquies
, is evidence of a man who knew the world well enough to be able to mock it successfully. Yet he was capable of great enthusiasms—for learning, for books, for scholarship—and the secret of his swift and intimate companionship with More may be gauged from Erasmus’s recollection of another friendship. ‘We talk of letters,’ he once wrote, ‘till we fall asleep, our dreams are dreams of letters, and literature awakens us to begin the new day.’
²⁴
So they met, conversed gaily in Latin, and within four months Erasmus was addressing More as
mellitissime Thoma
(‘sweetest Thomas’).
²⁵

One other record of their intercourse, during Erasmus’s first visit to England, has survived. It comes from Erasmus himself in a
‘catalogus’
written some twenty-four years later, in which he recalled an occasion during the summer of 1499 when he was staying at the country house of Lord Mountjoy in Greenwich. More arrived there with a friend from Lincoln’s Inn, Edward Arnold, and he suggested to Erasmus that they all walk to the neighbouring village of Eltham. In fact they were to visit the royal palace there, where Prince Henry was in residence; More and Arnold thereupon presented the prince with some ‘writings’ to commemorate the occasion. Erasmus was annoyed at not having been warned to prepare verses of his own but, after a request from the young Henry, produced some suitably patriotic poetry three days later. It is an intriguing story, not least because for the first time it brings More face to face with the prince who was one day to be master of his destiny. Who could have imagined that this pretty boy of nine years would one day bring such havoc upon the Church and the civilisation which both More and Erasmus came in their different ways to represent?

But there is a more immediate interest to Erasmus’s anecdote. It was surely unusual for a young law student to be allowed access to the royal family of England, and to be on terms of such familiarity that he might bring a companion apparently unannounced. Certainly it throws a distinctive light upon More’s social position, at the very summit of that world of privilege and authority in which he had moved easily all his life. The evidence of his later career testifies to his self-confidence and social ease, qualities which came as much from his background of affluence
and power as from his personal virtue. But if his place in that world can be described, it is difficult to know precisely how to define it, sustained as it was by a network of friendships, affinities, households and social obligations. How, for example, was it that young More was able to stroll across the new stone bridge over the moat and walk into the great hall of Eltham Palace with its music gallery, mullioned windows and panelled screen?

It has already been noticed that Erasmus was staying on the Greenwich estate of William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, at the time of the Eltham expedition. Mountjoy had been his student in Paris over a period of three years, and eventually Erasmus had come to reside with Mountjoy’s household in that city. Mountjoy was the same age as More, and had already gained such a reputation for honesty and learning that Henry VII had chosen him as a companion for his younger son and, according to Erasmus, as an associate in the young Henry’s studies of Latin and of history. That is also why there were members of Mountjoy’s household in attendance at Eltham Palace when More, Erasmus and Arnold made their journey there. The connection between Mountjoy and Erasmus is clear, therefore, but it is not enough to explain More’s familiarity with the young royal family. More and Mountjoy were contemporaries enamoured of the new learning, and Mountjoy’s father-in-law, Sir William Say, was acquainted with John More; a few years later we find More himself named as a trustee for one of his estates. The executor for the will of Sir William’s father was, in one of those many circuitous links characteristic of the fifteenth century, none other than Archbishop John Morton. So by means of many different paths Thomas More and William Mountjoy could have met.

But friendship might in turn become part of faction. It has often been suggested that, at a later date, More professed hostility towards the financial exactions which Henry VII tried to levy upon London. There is no evidence of any open dispute but certainly, at the time of the accession of his son, More composed a sharp attack upon the dead king. He could not have done so, had he not been absolutely sure of his ground; so it seems possible (to put it no higher) that the association of More, Mountjoy and the young prince eventually acquired a politic flavour.
²⁶

Mountjoy did not introduce Erasmus to More only, and through his
agency the Dutchman became acquainted with those humanists whom he extolled in his subsequent letters; he met scholars such as Grocyn and patrons such as Warham, then Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, all adding to his impression that England was a fortunate island to have such people in it. But the most immediate impression and influence upon him derived from John Colet, the black-gowned lecturer upon the Pauline epistles. In the autumn of 1499 Erasmus determined to visit the University of Oxford; he arrived as a visitor at St Mary’s College, a hostel for members of his own order, where two or three days later he received a letter of welcome from Colet. Erasmus replied in his usual fulsome manner and the two scholars were soon on good enough terms to argue over points of theology. Erasmus, styling himself ‘the poet’, recounted one occasion at dinner when he and Colet disagreed over the nature of Cain’s first fault. The English divine was ‘grave’ and ‘severe’, but it seems that the force of his argument overcame all others. On a different occasion he and Erasmus disputed the nature of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane, before his arrest and death upon the cross, and once again it seems that Colet’s dogmatic and insistent arguments vanquished those of his opponent—or perhaps Erasmus was polite, or ironic, enough to retire from the unequal struggle. But if there were differences of emphasis and interpretation between the two scholars, there was still broad agreement upon certain essential principles. Here, too, we may bring in Thomas More as the silent party to that agreement. Colet moved much closer to the Neoplatonism of Florence than Erasmus ever did, and the Dutch scholar had a much broader range of learning as well as a more complex understanding of the theological tradition; but both agreed fundamentally upon the need for a spiritual reception of the gospels and the epistles of the New Testament, as part of a simplified and deepened piety free of scholastic commentary or interpretation. The early Fathers were praised by both men for their lucidity, and in the same spirit the connection between classical and Christian ideals was reaffirmed; true eloquence might lead auditors once again to true piety, and the communion of the faithful be restored. Their shared ambition was for a Church purified of the dross of observances and rituals which had accrued to it; when they eventually journeyed together to the shrine of Becket, it was in a similar spirit of detached and even sardonic enquiry. They were not reformers,
only renovators; that is why their inspired efforts to restore the Church were frustrated and dissipated by the more subversive actions of Luther or of Zwingli. More himself, an admirer of Augustine, shared their practical concerns during this period. When the Church became the object of sustained and ferocious attack from the European reformers, he returned to a wholly traditionalist defence of its customs and ceremonies; but, in the early years of the sixteenth century, it was possible for him and his companions to believe that the Church itself could be made new.