The Life of Thomas More (42 page)

Soon after the negotiations at Calais had been concluded, More moved on with other councillors to Bruges, where various commercial disputes with the Hanse merchants were in need of resolution. More seems to have been unimpressed with the citizens of Bruges, considering them avaricious, and during a period of seven or eight weeks the negotiations with the merchants were prolonged, frustrating and ultimately unproductive. The Hanse merchants themselves were not charmed by More, however; they reported that he used more words than truth and employed sophistry, cunning and trickery in his conversations with them while retaining a calm demeanour and
‘blando sermone’
(‘temperate speech’).
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Yet More did manage to make one friend in the city; he was introduced by Erasmus to Francis Cranevelt, an assistant to the magistrates of Bruges who became well known for his achievement in learning Hebrew without any assistance. Some of the letters between
More and Cranevelt have survived, and they are touched by passages of sexual humour which are not found elsewhere in More’s correspondence.

In the early autumn of 1520 More finally was able to return to England after an absence of almost three months, and, as he wrote in one of his Latin poems, ‘To Candidus’, you will rejoice when you forsake the company of men and rest in the bosom of your knowledgeable wife.
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He was now always surrounded by company and his eminence at court was such that, in the spring of the following year, he was granted the lucrative post of under-treasurer. In this role he was charged with supervising the work of the Exchequer, where the officials recorded the proper disbursement or collection of allowances and fees, grants and annuities, customs and receipts; he was obliged to draw up the annual accounts of the treasury and to look after the expenses of the king’s council. By Henry’s own commandment he was also responsible ‘for costes and expences whiche shal behoue vs to haue and susteyne aboutes our howsholde and our greate wardrobe’ as well as the payment of courtiers and servants; there is even a reference to the purchase of ‘parchemente paper ynke wax bagges Canuas’ for use at court.
¹⁰
It was hardly a sinecure, therefore, and on one occasion Wolsey was obliged to apologise to the king for More’s absence from court for five days on the grounds that he was delayed at the Exchequer ‘in consequence of great matters at the knitting up of this term’.
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The under-treasurer was also given a knighthood, according to custom, and so in this period Master More was transformed into Sir Thomas More. He had become, in the words of the king, ‘our trusty and wel bilouyd counsellor Thomas Moore now knighte’.
¹²
He was
eques auratus
, and was obliged to put on the chain of knighthood as well as to wear golden spurs while riding. He was a knight of cheerful countenance, but behind that assumption of rank there was still a living tradition of honour and chivalry which More would have imbibed from Chaucer, Malory and Lydgate; the ‘parfit gentil’ knight was one who loved ‘Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie’.
¹³

His annual salary as under-treasurer was £173 6s 8d; it was the second highest in the exchequer, but it was by no means his only source of profit. As a favoured servant of the king he became the recipient of various sinecures and grants which more than doubled his income. In
1520 he had received one half of the revenue to the royal exchanger, or keeper of the foreign exchange, who controlled the exodus of bullion from the country. At a later date he was granted a licence to export a thousand woollen cloths; he would have sold it on to a merchant in that commodity although for those who persist in believing that the author of
Utopia
spoke in his own voice it might seem an inappropriate gift to the denouncer of excessive sheep-rearing. More also purchased the guardianship of two wealthy landowners who were deemed to have lost their wits, Edmund Shaa and John Moreton; this testifies to his financial acumen, perhaps, but it also suggests that he had a genuine interest in observing or managing the insane who were believed to suffer from an excess of black bile. (He once referred to an inmate of Bethlem, just beyond Bishop’s Gate, who laughed aloud at ‘knocking of his own hed against a post’;
¹⁴
there is every reason to believe that More visited this hospital of the deranged.) There were yet further sources of income. He received an annual ‘retainer’ from the Earl of Northumberland of £21, as well as other payments from a bishop and a lord; he was given a pension from the French king, the presentation of a canonry from Henry, and various sums for expediting the business of the Mercers; in the year after he was appointed under-treasurer, for example, he received twenty marks for helping to arrange protection for a fleet of merchant ships departing from the Low Countries. There were doubtless other transactions of this kind, but they have not been recorded. And then there were the lands. The king awarded him the manors of Doglyngton and Fryngeford, as well as some other property in Oxfordshire, and in the spring of 1522 he was granted the manor of South in Kent which had belonged to the Duke of Buckingham and which provided £67 each year in revenue. More was even accused of illegal enclosure, but successfully defended himself against the charge.

In this gift of Buckingham’s manor lies a story of pride, treachery and death which is so resonant with Tudor fate and polity that More himself used it as an example. What if, he wrote in an unpublished treatise, ‘thou knewest a great Duke’, and envied him his estates and his worship, only to be informed that ‘for secret treason lately detected to the king’ his goods and estates were suddenly ‘broken vp’ and ‘ceased’, with the duke himself put to death?
¹⁵
This is precisely what happened to Edward, Duke of Buckingham, who in the spring of 1521 was
charged with treason, convicted by his peers, and beheaded on Tower Hill a month after his arrest. There has been much controversy over his case, with certain historians assuming that it had been concocted by Henry and Wolsey to remove an innocent nobleman who was considered ‘over-mighty’ and who happened to be a claimant to the throne of England. In that sense it could be viewed as a harbinger of the king’s suspiciousness and ruthlessness. It is not at all clear that this was the opinion of Buckingham’s contemporaries, however, and we are left with the fact that More willingly took land from the estates of the attainted man. His own account of the ‘great Duke’ who suffers an equally great fall is employed by him as an example of human folly in a world of which only the end is certain and where ‘deth shal take away all that we enuy any manne for’.
¹⁶
Yet he was not averse to profiting from some, if not all, of these enviable possessions. Here we come close to one of the complexities of More’s life and career. He lived in the spiritual world as well as the secular world. In the former he practised individual prayer and penitence, while in the latter he derived his identity from the social hierarchy in which he found himself. One was a question of private, the other of customary, ritual. To be a good Christian, in both worlds, required obedience and the fulfilment of obligations—which included providing an inheritance for his descendants. One may be labelled piety, the other decorum; but they are both aspects of the same religious civilisation.

More was involved with the execution of the Duke of Buckingham in one other sense; his status as a Londoner was such that he was asked to address the Court of Aldermen in order to rebuke them for various disloyal reports and complaints on the manner of the duke’s attainture. He returned to the same court, four days later, and remonstrated with the aldermen again. It is reminiscent of the scene in his own history of Richard III when, ironically, the previous Duke of Buckingham had spoken in favour of the king before the citizens at Guildhall; on that occasion ‘the people began to whisper among themselfe secretely’.
¹⁷
These were not the only occasions when More was obliged to censure or rebuke the City authorities, but he nevertheless remained the ‘specyall lover and ffrende in the Busynesses and Causes of this Citie’.
¹⁸

He was a friend in the cause of Wolsey’s foreign policy, too, and less than a year after his last visit he returned to Bruges. He stayed at the
court of the Counts of Flanders, the Princenhof, although in earlier correspondence with Francis Cranevelt he had been enquiring about the rental of a private house with eight or ten beds—which suggests that he travelled with a relatively large retinue. Once again he was involved in wearisome dealings with the Hanseatic merchants, but he was also required to attend important business elsewhere. Before the negotiations had been completed, he rode to Calais and joined the entourage of Cardinal Wolsey. His presence had been urgently requested by the king, who, in a letter to Wolsey on the subject of his ‘grette affayris’, ‘desyrith Your Grace to make Sir Wyllyam Sandys, and Syr Thomas More, priveye to all such matiers as your Grace schall treate at Calice’.
¹⁹
They were serious matters indeed. Wolsey had travelled to Calais ostensibly to resolve the burgeoning conflict between Francis I and Charles V; king and emperor were already vying for territory, and whoever was deemed the aggressor would thereby have violated the Treaty of London and instigate English military action against him. But Wolsey had come with an ulterior motive; it had already been decided that, under the cover of negotiations, he would arrange a secret treaty with Charles V against France which would eventually result in a joint invasion of that country. These were the ‘grette affayris’, involving dissimulation and double-dealing, in which More was to participate.

More returned to Bruges with Wolsey in the middle of August 1521, and here the covert discussions with Charles began. In
Utopia
the character of More argues that the royal servant’s duty is to lend good advice in order to guide affairs, tactfully and carefully, towards the honourable course. Raphael Hythlodaeus dismisses this as wishful thinking and suggests that a wise counsellor will simply be used as a disguise or cover for the wickedness and folly of others. It is impossible to be sure whether this was the situation in which More found himself at Bruges, but the evidence suggests that he was a willing or at least not unwilling accomplice in Wolsey’s designs. It was his obligation to obey the commands of his king, after all, and no one possessed a stronger sense of duty. Yet there is no reason to suppose that he believed his masters to be acting foolishly or wickedly. There was always a strong possibility that Wolsey would be able to arrange a truce between the two warring parties. His Treaty of London had, in any event, maintained peace for almost three years; it was the French themselves who, in the spring of
1521, had begun offensive action. More was not always favourably inclined towards that nation, as some of his Latin verses demonstrate, and he may not have been so naturally or instinctively predisposed to peace as, for example, Erasmus. Erasmus belonged to no country; More was always a Londoner and Englishman. To enter a secret alliance with the emperor, which would be put in action if the negotiations failed, could well have seemed the most effective way of curtailing French power and thereby securing a prolonged peace.

More remained in Bruges after Wolsey’s departure in order to continue the negotiations with ‘the bodye of the Haunz’;
²⁰
there were the usual delays and prevarications and it seems that he left the city before any composition of the various disputes had been arranged. He rejoined Wolsey in Calais at the end of September and in the middle of the following month was despatched to England with ‘urgent causes of consideration’ to be delivered ‘by word of mouth’ to the king. It was a period of French military success and Wolsey was confronted by demands from Francis I to which he could not accede. He found time in his message to Henry, however, to commend More’s ‘laudable acquittal and diligent attendance’.
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More may have been too assiduous, since on his return he immediately lapsed into a tertian fever and suffered three or four ‘fittes’.
²²
He experienced the strangest symptoms, too, feeling himself to be ‘hott & cold’ all over his body at the same time, and his doctors could prescribe no certain remedy. But then his adopted daughter, Margaret Giggs, remembered reading of his condition in Galen’s
De Differentiis Febrium
, and eventually a remedy was found; with the help of his highly educated ‘school’, he had recovered by the middle of November.

There had been lighter moments in his long mission away from home. He had taken with him his household fool, Henry Patenson, ‘a man of knowen wysdome in London and almost euery where ellys’,
²³
as More put it with a tincture of irony. More tells one story of him that provides an authentic vignette of late medieval city life. In Bruges it soon became apparent that Patenson was a ‘man of specyall wytte by hym selfe and vnlyke the comon sorte’, and some of the citizens (no doubt mainly children and apprentices) began to throw stones at him. Patenson gathered up the stones and then stood upon a bench, angrily proclaiming that everyone should leave the scene except those that had hurled the
stones at him—then, he said, he could fire back at his known enemies. Unfortunately he had spoken in English and no one had understood what he meant. So the good people of Bruges merely laughed at him and began to stone him again. Whereupon he threw some back in retaliation, and broke the head of an apparently innocent bystander. Patenson went up to the man and asked him to bear his injuries bravely, because he had been given fair warning.

There was also the episode of ‘Dauy a douche man’,
²⁴
whom More had retained and who ‘wayted vpon me at Bruges’. He had told More that his English wife had died at Worcester two years before and recalled ‘his bytter prayours at her graue’. More relayed this touching information to his wife and, on the day Davy was to marry for the second time, a letter arrived from Alice in London. She informed More that the supposedly dead and buried Mrs Davy was alive and had come to Bucklersbury searching for her errant husband. More summoned Davy, about to commit bigamy, and read out the letter to him. The rest can be put in More’s words.