The Life of Thomas More (21 page)

His relation to the text is also marked by his additions; he inserted an opening paragraph on the importance of true virtue rather than inherited honour, although this was becoming a commonplace in More’s circle of friends and London citizens. He also versified some of Pico’s spiritual precepts, and out of them created some powerful and haunting poetry. It is upon More’s great theme of mutability and transience, animated by the fervent desire ‘To bere his body in erth, his mynde in heven’ and deepened by the knowledge that life passes ‘As doth a dreme or a shadowe on the wall’.
³¹
This is the music that More carried with him always, even though in some of his later prose works the tone is more combative and theoretical. More’s poetic powers are often undervalued, but the remarkably controlled and melodious ‘rhyme royal’ of these interpolated verses—a form borrowed from Chaucer, the English
poet whom he most admired—suggests that he was one of the most accomplished poets of the early sixteenth century. The prose of this biographical treatise is perhaps not so successful, yet the occasional awkwardness of More’s style testifies to the enthusiasm with which he treated the pious and scholarly life of the young Italian who died at the age of thirty-one and was buried in the habit of a Dominican monk. The
Life
has something of the charm and impetuousness of a first novel or, rather, a
Bildungsroman
in which More could convey an idealised image of himself. Of course, like many writers of such romances, he did not necessarily tell the whole story. ‘Fashion thyself,’ as Pico himself wrote, ‘in what form thou likest best.’
³²

More’s spiritual preoccupations did not inhibit his work in the world, and it is important to recognise that throughout these formative years he was playing an active role in the social, administrative and institutional affairs of London. In the same period that he was lecturing on
The City of God
in St Lawrence Jewry, he was also Reader in Law at Furnivall’s Inn—this was an Inn affiliated to his own Lincoln’s Inn and it is further evidence of his burgeoning reputation as a lawyer as well as a scholar. He lectured here for three years to an audience of clerks and young attorneys and no doubt he seasoned the instruction with the stories he took delight in telling—how one witness was so forgetful that he handed his counsel ‘hys tynder boxe wyth hys flynte and hys matches’
³³
rather than the box of evidence, which he had left at home; or how one conscientious juror refused to accede to a majority decision by saying ‘I dare not in such a matter passe for good cumpany’.
³⁴
More was certainly also practising as a lawyer, conducting the same kind of London business as his father, and there are brief extant records of his being nominated as a London alderman, of his being in some way associated with the guild of the Mercers, of his even renting a house owned by that guild.
³⁵
But he was not lacking social connections of a grander kind.

The death of Prince Arthur in the spring of 1502, followed by that of his mother, Elizabeth of York, ten months later, provides a solemn context for More’s direct experience of royal life. Her body was laid in state in the Tower, close to the spot where her two brothers had been secretly buried twenty years before; for the funeral procession a wax effigy of her in full royal regalia was carried on a chair above the coffin,
while along the route groups of thirty-seven virgins were stationed, dressed all in white and carrying lighted tapers—their number bearing witness to Elizabeth’s age at the time of her death. In a powerful memorial elegy on the death of Elizabeth, whom he had known well, Thomas More returned to his theme of human transience and the prospect of eternity around ‘Ye that put your trust and confidence/ In worldly joy and frayle prosperitie.’
³⁶

Only months before, he had witnessed the procession of Catherine of Aragon, chosen companion to the short-lived Prince Arthur, as she made her triumphal way into the city. This provided the opportunity for one of the most gorgeous and elaborate spectacles, with pageants and tableaux greeting her on the various stages of her journey from London Bridge and Gracechurch Street, turning into Cornhill before moving along Cheapside towards St Paul’s. On her route were displayed painted castles, gushing fountains and elaborate mechanisms; there were dramatic monologues and allegorical scenes, making use of a wealth of astrological and numerological symbolism as well as biblical allusions and contemporary references. More goes on to mention that the Spanish escort looked as if it were made up of ‘pigmei Ethiopes’.
³⁷
In the midst of display and magnificence, he never lost his eye for the ridiculous.

This is nowhere more evident than in a comic ballad he composed in the same period. It is entitled ‘A meri iest how a sergeant would learne to play the frere’, and develops the themes of disguise and false identity which are so central to the period:

The mode of address and general tenor of the verse strongly suggest that it was recited—or dramatised—at a banquet of one of the London guilds. It is delivered to ‘masters all’ and the injunction for each man to keep to his ‘craft’ was a conventional stricture in so elaborate and hierarchical a society; we can imagine the young More standing in front of
his fellow Londoners and acting out all the voices in this theatrical ballad. His general high spirits, and what we know from his contemporaries of his ‘deadpan’ delivery of comic lines, ensured its success.

But his role in London affairs may have required a wider stage. William Roper suggests that More was ‘a burgess of the Parliament’ for one session during the reign of Henry VII and that his intervention was responsible for the king’s financial demands being ‘clean overthrown’.
³⁹
The king was so incensed, again according to Roper, that he promptly imprisoned More’s father in the Tower until John More had paid a fine of £100. More himself is supposed to have considered leaving England in order to escape Henry’s vengeance. It is a perfect story to emphasise how More’s conscience worked against the king’s will, even in these early days, but it has the disadvantage of being less than plausible. There is no record of More in the Commons at this early date and, in any event, the king’s demands were not ‘overthrown’; Henry VII eventually accepted less than parliament offered him. It was the first session in seven years and the king would have shaped its deliberations carefully. It is also highly improbable that Henry would imprison one of his own serjeants, especially upon so outrageous a pretext; certainly in the chronicles of London there is no mention of any such remarkable incident. All the signs are that More and his father were prospering; in the year of the supposed parliamentary fracas, 1504, together they purchased part of an estate in Hertfordshire. Two years later More was dedicating his translations of Lucian, in fulsome terms, to the king’s own secretary. Yet it would be unwise completely to dismiss biographical anecdote; it is evident from More’s coronation poem to Henry VIII that he detested the old king’s financial exactions and considered him to have become grasping and tyrannical. More was already associated with the London merchants upon whom, according to his own report, harsh duties had been exacted; no doubt he implicitly sided with those members of court or council who distrusted or disliked the king’s policies. Here, if anywhere, lies the truth of Roper’s story.

There is at least one clearer token of More’s character and behaviour during this period, since it is to be found in his own words. In a letter to John Colet, he laments his friend’s absence from the city and in an elaborate passage complains of the difficulties of leading a virtuous life in London among false friends and enemies, beset on every side by
tradesmen ministering to greed, surrounded by tall houses so that he cannot even see the heavens. More’s words should not be taken literally, since he is engaged in a self-conscious performance of
ars dictamen
, or letter-writing, and for the purpose descants upon the familiar topic of the evils of the city; he could have borrowed it from Juvenal or Seneca or St Gregory. Yet there are two points of special relevance from the young man who had lectured upon Augustine’s
City of God.
He alludes to his efforts to ascend the track of virtue,
⁴⁰
while at the same time confessing that by some strong force and urgent necessity
⁴¹
he is in peril of being thrust down again into darkness. It is hard not to recall here Erasmus’s comment that More’s sexual appetite dissuaded him from ordination, and it seems likely that More himself is here confessing his own weakness. But he knew well enough the cure for lechery. He decided to marry.

CHAPTER XI
HOLY, HOLY, HOLY!

ND when More attended Mass each day, as was his custom, what were the sights and sounds which encompassed him? The church is a busy and noisy place, visited by moments of stillness and solemnity, echoing to bells, prayers and whispered gossip. All around him are wax tapers and tallow candles lit before the images of the saints and the Holy Family, together with paintings and cloths and banners and richly decorated carvings; the whole effect is of a mysterious painted chamber with the gleam of crucifixes and candlesticks, chalices and patens, against the old stone. The melody of plainsong or prick song might linger in the recesses and corners of this place, together with the odours of incense or of charcoal mingled with the human smell of the worshippers come to witness the Mass. They stand or kneel in the nave with the great picture of the rood or crucified Christ hanging before them, waiting to glimpse part of the drama which is about to take place within the chancel itself. The church of St Stephen Walbrook, which soon became More’s principal place of worship, had images of the apostles and the holy doctors; there were stone tablets upon which were inscribed the commandments as well as ‘the seven works of Mercy and the seven deadly sins’.
¹
More heard the Mass here with his family; he heard the same Mass at St Thomas of Acon, where he worshipped with the mercers; he heard it with the monks of the Charterhouse and the students of Oxford, and would hear it with the king at Greenwich and with the judges in Holborn, with the villagers of Chelsea and with the prisoners of the Tower. It was the single most important aspect of his life, and the source from which much of his earnestness and his irony, his gravity and his playfulness, springs.