The Life of Thomas More (33 page)

But there were distractions. Erasmus visited him at the end of May, en route from London to Basle, and as usual their conversations were a mixture of scholarship and business. Erasmus had just completed his
Education of a Christian Prince
, in which he recorded the virtues of certain pagan princes of history, with the refrain of ‘How much more should a Christian prince …’
⁷
It is in large measure a study of statecraft; the prince is urged to seek a true understanding of human affairs, since only then can he rule by principle rather than by expediency. Under his guidance, a virtuous society might be created. The book was addressed to Charles, who was even then proving so difficult in the commercial negotiations, but its discussions of proper statecraft might have provoked similar reflections in More—at a slightly later date More informed Erasmus that he had dreamed of reigning as king of the island called Utopia.

Yet, in Bruges, practical matters had also to be resolved. Erasmus was in need of funds, as always, and discussed with More the possibility of accepting the canonry of Tournai, which had recently been captured from the French. Thomas Wolsey had received the bishopric, although even then the resident French bishop was resisting the change. For various reasons Erasmus was reluctant to accept the post and a few days later More himself rode the forty miles to Tournai, where he was told that Wolsey had conferred the canonry upon another claimant without
realising that Erasmus had been considered for it. At this, More suggested that a letter be written to Wolsey explaining that the post had previously been conferred upon Erasmus and that, in recompense for the Dutchman withdrawing from it, a greater and better provision should be made for him. None of this was true, of course, but More’s wiliness suggests how difficult and tricky he could be; as he admitted himself, on occasions he did not shrink from
‘mendaciolum’
⁸
or a small lie.

More returned from Tournai at the beginning of June, only to face further protracted and inconclusive negotiations. By the second week of July, when More had anticipated that the embassy would have completed its work, the English commissioners were compelled to write to the king’s council ‘that wee may haue by the mean of your good lordshippis more money sent vnto vs’.
⁹
More himself, on a stipend of 13s 4d a day, was particularly embarrassed; Cuthbert Tunstall told Wolsey that ‘Master More, at this time, at being at a low ebb, desires by your grace to be set on float again’.
¹⁰
There is also an indication, again from Tunstall, that he and More had been swindled by moneychangers in the city. Certainly More was not happy. He complained later to Erasmus that he had been compelled to support a household both in Bruges and in London, with the result, as he said ironically, that his wife and children did not have enough to eat in his absence. But the exaggeration can be excused; he was receiving less than a quarter of the income he earned in London, while having to maintain himself in the state customary to ambassadors of his country. He was also plainly missing his family; even when absent for a short time, he explained to Erasmus, he longed to see them again.

At the end of July, however, he made one other, and more significant, journey away from Bruges. Taking advantage of the fact that the Netherlands commissioners had returned to Brussels for further instructions, he rode to Antwerp. More already had amicable relationships with its city government, since he had once supervised the successful negotiations over the status of London merchants in the Antwerp market, and he may have wanted to enlist the help of the trading authorities there with the apparently fruitless negotiations at Bruges. Antwerp was now the most energetic and busy of all the ports in that region. It was also the site of new banking, and the elaborate market or bourse in the
centre of the city testified to its commercial success. On the first page of
Utopia
More refers to its cathedral of Notre Dame, but at the time of his visit the church was still being built. He could see a new city rising before him.

He stayed for a time with a close friend of Erasmus, Peter Gillis; Gillis had been Chief Secretary to Antwerp for five years, but he had, more particularly, helped to see Erasmus’s works through the Antwerp press of Theodoricus Martens. Here was another contemporary, a man whom he called
‘dulcissime’
(‘the sweetest’),
¹¹
with whom More formed a unique attachment—unique in the sense that he immortalised Gillis by making him a protagonist of
Utopia.
This was no formal tribute. More remained in Antwerp for approximately six or seven weeks and during that period, in the company or even in the house of Gillis, he conceived the idea of his famous commonwealth. In fact Peter Gillis played such a large part in preparing and circulating the finished treatise—he was also its main patron and its overseer through the press—that he felt a personal share in it. Both men were concerned with the nature of equity and civic duty and both were involved in the economic and political travails of the time; they had witnessed the perfidiousness of leagues and the abrogation of treaties.

So their colloquies on humanist values, and
Utopia
itself, did not arise in some sphere removed from the politics of the day. More was involved in the duties of an ambassador, with all the follies and futilities which such a role entailed. It was said that envoys ‘wore’ their words as they wore their clothes, for adornment or display, within a game of power and deception, limitation and improvisation. But, significantly, even as More sat with Peter Gillis in Antwerp the conduct of European affairs was being generally and violently disrupted. The new French king invaded northern Italy and, in a battle in the middle of September, defeated a force of Swiss mercenaries who had been deployed against him; he regained control of Milan and Pope Leo was forced to come to terms with this young man who had become the leading monarch of Europe. This was not at all to the liking of Henry, as More would have known only too well, and fresh instability entered international affairs. These were the circumstances in which the island of Utopia floated into the view of the world.

He began to write it after his return to Bruges at the end of September,
at a time when his own role in the negotiations had become much less significant; at the beginning of October it even seemed possible that affairs would be concluded within a week or so. More wrote to Richard Pace, Wolsey’s secretary, asking him to ensure that he was called home before any fresh complications arose.
¹²
Even while he was writing
Utopia
in Bruges, however, he found time to compose a long and elegant letter defending Erasmus and humanist scholarship in general; it was addressed to Martin Dorp, a theologian at Louvain who had criticised Erasmus’s
Moriae encomium
as well as his project of comparing the Vulgate version of the New Testament with the original Greek. Surrounded by the Christian humanists of the Netherlands, who played such an important part in the affairs of state, More felt certain of his position in attacking scholastic dialectic and reaffirming the importance of rhetoric and grammar for the progress of human understanding. The letter is couched in familiar rhetorical form—it might even be seen as a prime example of the kind of forensic oratory More employed in the courts of law—but it is marked by passages of heavy irony and light sarcasm that are never far from the surface of his prose. He was engaged, however, in more than a personal dispute; if a theological faculty decided to condemn the pioneering work of Erasmus, elements of the new learning might effectively be suppressed. Certainly Erasmus had formidable enemies—the inquisitional Dominicans among them—and the path of true scholarship was by no means assured. But More’s sharp letter had the appropriate effect: eventually Dorp withdrew his criticisms, and the letter itself was never published.

More’s appeal to be allowed to return home had been successful, and his letter of recall came just as he was finishing his epistle to Dorp. He seems to have left for England as quickly as possible, and just three days later met Richard Pace at Gravelines, ‘in the highe wave’
¹³
a few miles north-east of Calais. It was, in one sense, an inauspicious meeting; the author of
Utopia
, at least in its early stages, encountered the man who had been sent by Henry to purchase Swiss mercenaries to fight against France. Peace met, and kissed with, war.

At a later date More professed himself delighted by the result of the Bruges negotiations, however protracted and laborious they had become, but he had greater cause to be pleased by a success of his own—a treatise that was first entitled not
Utopia
but
De Optimo Reipublicae
Statu
or ‘The Best Condition of a Society’. The evidence suggests that he originally wrote the second book, with its description of the island of Utopia, and then at a later stage added a first section which acts as a contemporary introduction to his fantastic society of equal citizens. Erasmus states that he had written this second book at his leisure; since the only leisure he enjoyed was during his enforced stay in Bruges and Antwerp and, since More thanks Peter Gillis for providing him with the opportunity for preparing the book, we can safely assume that the mission to the Low Countries had indeed produced immortal fruit.

It begins in Antwerp itself, outside the cathedral church of Notre Dame where Thomas More has just attended Mass. In the square outside he sees Peter Gillis talking to a sunburnt stranger with a long beard, dressed in a cloak which hangs casually from his shoulders. Gillis introduces him to More as Raphael Hythlodaeus, a Portuguese traveller who has journeyed with Amerigo Vespucci and who has visited many regions of the earth. More promptly invites him to his house where, on a turf-covered bench, Hythlodaeus converses with him on the many unknown countries which exist
‘sub aequatoris linea’.
¹⁴
And then, on this morning of late summer or early autumn, he tells More of the Utopians. He has lived among them for more than five years and is eager to extol their institutions, which are established upon the common ownership of all property and goods.
¹⁵
He invokes Plato’s imaginary commonwealth as an apt analogy, and More asks him to give a full account of Utopian laws and customs.

After dinner, Raphael Hythlodaeus begins to describe Utopia itself. Here was the first marvel: the dimensions of this island are the same as those of England and the number of its city-states equals the number of English counties together with London. It is also approximately the same distance from the equator as England. Its principal city, Amaurotum, is itself like some reversed image of London; it has the same expanse as the city (if you include the urban areas beyond the city walls) and is situated below gentle hills from which a river flows as does the river Fleet. The principal river, however, runs through the city; it has its own tides and is the same distance from the sea as the Thames at London. This river is also spanned by one magnificent stone bridge, while Amaurotum itself is protected by great walls. It is London redrawn by visionary imagination, a pristine city in which, according to
Hythlodaeus, there is no greed or pride or disorder—these vices have been altogether banished from the commonwealth of Utopia. The streets and houses of the city are laid out in uniform geometrical pattern, with pleasant houses and gardens which are exchanged between the citizens every ten years; members of the commonwealth learn the craft to which they are most suited, and all wear the same clothes of undyed wool with distinctions only for sex or marital status. Six hours of the day are devoted to work, while the rest of the time is spent in learning or healthful recreation. Meals are eaten in communal dining-halls, with the supervisor of each hall taking free food from the common stock of a central market. The Utopians do not value gold or silver, but use them to manufacture fetters and chamber pots. They have a population of slaves, generally comprising criminals or prisoners of war, which is treated with paternal rather than tyrannical severity. And so Hythlodaeus continues to amplify this catalogue of benevolence.

Much ingenuity and scholarship have been employed to trace the literary sources of this fabulous island of equality and happiness; among them may be mentioned Macrobius, Aristotle, Seneca, Lucian and Cicero. There is room for the Bible, too, with especial reference to Acts of the Apostles, where ‘they had all things common’.
¹⁶
But since Plato is mentioned seven times within the treatise, and four times in its accompanying letters, it seems plausible that
The Republic
also furnished a model for More’s own commonwealth. At the conclusion of Plato’s ninth book, Socrates describes his ideal society as perhaps only a
‘paradeigma’
¹⁷
residing in heaven;
Utopia
is an attempt to bring it down to earth. Of course there are many dissimilarities between the two books and the states which they describe. More’s work is less profound, more hastily written and altogether less satisfying than Plato’s great discourse; nor does More address those philosophical questions on the nature of happiness or the principles of harmony that are at the centre of the earlier work. Yet clearly More has taken certain aspects of
The Republic
—in particular the obligation upon the ‘guardians’ to share everything in common and to own no private property—and proceeded to examine how they might work in practice. Plato insisted that only a philosopher can properly administer his republic, and at the beginning of
Utopia
More refers to the founder of the state—Utopus—who
trained his people to the highest level of
‘cultus’
and
‘humanitas’
.
¹⁸
The conditions, then, are similar to the point where some resemblance is manifestly being suggested.

And so More devises a republic like that of Plato. In
The City of God
Plato is extolled as the greatest of pagan philosophers, who can be seen to anticipate Christianity and Christian revelation. But Plato was never vouchsafed that revelation, at least according to Augustine, and his insights were achieved through ‘natural reason’.
¹⁹
This is also the condition of the Utopians, who throughout their history of 1760 years have been denied the truths of divine law. That is why they encourage euthanasia, condone divorce and harbour a multiplicity of religious beliefs—all of which actions were considered dreadful by More himself and by Catholic Europe. This may be no ideal commonwealth, after all, but a model of natural law and natural reason taken to their unnatural extreme.