The Life of Thomas More (39 page)

For a time he remained ‘Master More’. An instructive contrast might
be made with a younger contemporary at court, Thomas Wyatt, a poet as well as courtier. More must have known him well, but he never mentions him. Where More tended to deal with matters of trade or treaty, Wyatt was despatched on missions to the Pope or the emperor. Wyatt was also Marshal of Calais for a time. He took part in tournaments and he also translated Plutarch for the queen. He was a grander and more expansive figure than More, a better poet but not necessarily a better man. We must think of More as dealing with him directly, and perhaps intimately, in the course of his duties. Wyatt’s own evocations of court life are filled with lamentations upon its craft and corruption, its ‘colours of device’ and the devotion of courtiers to ‘Venus and Bacchus all their life long’.
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It is curious to consider More writing a treatise on ‘last things’ while serving in a world where Wyatt, at a slightly later date, was composing his own lines of plangent dismay at ‘the press of courts’. In his poetry Wyatt was trying to define English verse, and indeed himself, in terms of an inheritance which included Seneca and Plato; his work is in that sense complementary to that of Castiglione. It is testimony, if nothing else, to the richness of experience at the centre of Tudor life.

Castiglione was always aware of court society as a game in which each courtier must fulfil a role to the best of his ability. It is a world in which words become a form of artifice, where men and women even speak of themselves as if they were literary figures. In certain senses it is a strikingly optimistic vision, equivalent to that of Pico della Mirandola; each person can create himself (or, sometimes, herself) through the power of words or appearances. The court was the one arena of the nation where human contradictions could be amended, where Christian belief and classical wisdom, allegory and argument, male and female, modesty and pride, might all be reconciled. Yet the harmony is necessarily fragile and may be brief indeed, as Wyatt evokes:

More’s distinguished career suggests that he flourished in such a setting. His dramatic skills and his dialogues, in which he consistently
played roles for the benefit of an argument, reinforced his success as both orator and diplomat, but his preoccupation with the study of rhetoric was of no less significance. That discipline presumes a public world, and audience, while at the same time establishing the rules of performance within it. Rhetoric also encourages the display and promotion of fictional narratives, as a means of graceful persuasion. To be effective in the world, even while playing a part, is the mark of an unusually clever man such as Thomas More. No doubt he delighted in the game. It is likely that he was galvanised and excited by the affairs of the world even, or especially, when he realised their emptiness.

More’s private feelings about ‘worldly pomp & vanyte’ are not in doubt. Only four years after entering the king’s court he composed a private treatise for his household in which he compares worldly authority to that of ‘the tapster … in the marshalsye’ prison.
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Certainly it is possible to see Henry, or Wolsey, in such a part. More never seems to have disclosed his feelings about those of noble birth who crowded the court and among whom he moved, except for a brief remark in the same treatise. Having a coat of arms, he wrote, is ‘as if a gentleman thefe when he should goe to Tyburne, wold leve for a memoriall the armes of his auncesters painted on a post in Newgate’.
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Why should we ‘envy a poore soule, for playing the lord one night in an interlude’?
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That More himself was entitled ‘armiger’, and was therefore able to bear heraldic arms, seems only to complicate and deepen our understanding of his part in the radiant court of Henry VIII.

CHAPTER XIX
MY POOR MIND

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A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation
, written in the prison cell which was his last home on earth, More condemned the ‘round bisy mase of this divill that is callid besynes’.
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Yet he had walked through that maze of business, that ‘folysh myserye’ as he termed it, for much of his life. It was not long after he joined the court, for example, that he found himself at the centre of England’s administration. He became the king’s second secretary and, since the principal secretary, Richard Pace, was for a long time out of the country on secret diplomatic business, More was soon the regular mediator of the correspondence between Henry and Wolsey. Some of More’s own letters to Wolsey have survived, the first of which dates from the summer of 1519, and they are of great significance in ascertaining the nature of his role and relationships at court. His simplest function was as an amanuensis; he would be called into the king’s presence and would write letters to his dictation. He would then make a fair copy (as well as a second copy) and present it for the royal signature. He also read aloud to the king communications from Wolsey, and on one occasion the cardinal even urged him ‘to take your tyme that ye may dystynctly rede’ matters of ‘gret importance’.
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Sometimes the communications were of such consequence that More was still working ‘late in the nyght’ or writing back to the cardinal ‘aboute mydnyght’.
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He invariably addressed Wolsey as ‘your good Grace’, with Henry invoked as ‘his Grace’ or ‘the Kingis Grace’, characteristically concluding as ‘Your most humble seruant and mooste bounden beedman’.

The letters are concerned with urgent matters of war and peace, with details of army movements as well as secret negotiations, and there can
be no doubt that More was entirely trusted by both men. He was one of only two or three courtiers who had attained that position of confidence. But one of Henry’s letters can suddenly turn from high matters of state to a detail of ecclesiastical patronage; in the same way More can remain perfectly clear and measured about official business, while on occasion introducing a private note which suggests that he was altogether at ease with his masters. On the cardinal’s good health he passes on the king’s message that ‘he saith that ye may thank his counsel thereof, by which ye leue the often takyng of medicines’.
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Henry claimed to have foreseen a foreign cardinal’s duplicity, and asks More to remind Wolsey ‘wherby he thinketh your Grace will the bettre truste his coniecture hereafter’.
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Only once does More venture his own opinion in the correspondence between the two men; when Henry seems to be moving towards war and More interjects ‘I pray God send his Grace an honorable and profitable peace’.
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There is no evidence of More’s advice being sought or offered, but there are stray signs of his participation in the great debates of the period. ‘And whan,’ he wrote to Wolsey in one long letter, ‘I was abowte to haue shewed his Highnes sumwhat of my pore mynde in the matter …’;
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he was interrupted on this occasion, but the reference does suggest that his ‘pore mynde’ was sometimes employed. He may not have been a forceful or opinionated counsellor, however, since, as Wolsey informed the king, More was ‘not the most ready to speake and solicite his own cause’.
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In turn both of his masters are ready to compliment him and commend ‘my pore service’.
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But the cardinal once wrote to him, on a certain diplomatic matter, that ‘I am in noo smal perplexite howe the same may be continued’;
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it may be an oblique message to the king, but it may also be an implicit request for More’s advice. It is impossible to be sure of such things, of course, but it may be supposed that More on occasions played more than a secretarial part.

Yet Wolsey was the principal agent in such matters. More is continually passing on compliments to him from the king, in which More himself sometimes joined; ‘hit is for the quantite one of the best made lettres,’ he said of one diplomatic communication concocted by Wolsey, ‘… that ever I redde in my life’.
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There are various references to the cardinal’s ‘labor, travaile, study, payne and diligens’,
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and it becomes clear that Henry was often ready to defer to his advice. Letters from the
king were sometimes ‘devised by the prudent caste of your Grace’,
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and Wolsey was often asked to devise ‘the moost effectuall meanys’
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to expedite policy. It was not that Henry lacked self-confidence; the overwhelming impression of the king’s letters is that of a man swift and certain of his judgement in most personal matters, but more wary and circumspect in the great affairs of state. Impressions are sometimes so strong that we might be listening in the next room: ‘Nay by my soul that will not be, ffor this is my removing day sone at New Hall. I will rede the remenaunt at night.’ So Henry replied to a request from More. Of Wolsey, he once exclaimed: ‘He has hit the nayle on the hed.’
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Here are some phrases taken from a conversation between More and the king:

‘Nay veryly, Sir, my Lord hath yit no word …’

‘No had? I mych mervaile …’

‘Sir, if hit lyke your Grace this mornyng my Lord Grace had no thing herd …’

‘Mary, I am well a paied thereof …’

The king laughs. ‘And his Grace answered me that he wold takea breth therin.’
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And so it goes on, this invaluable record of the relationship between three highly dissimilar men—each of them, in their own way, intelligent and watchful—in which friendship and formality, irony and authority, secrecy and service, are strangely mingled.

More’s work as royal secretary was not confined to the correspondence between Wolsey and the king. If a member of the Council had important news for Henry, they would generally write to More. He also received the foreign post and was one of the principal agents in dealing with foreign courts and ambassadors; such was his legal expertise that it is likely he read over the first draft of treaties or diplomatic instructions. He held the ciphers for secret correspondence and maintained the diplomatic registers. He controlled access to the king, at least in epistolary matters, in a period when such access was of paramount importance; to be physically close to the king was in a sense to imbibe power and More, even though he often denied it, became a very powerful man indeed. He was responsible for checking various grants and appointments; he signed warrants and witnessed royal documents.