The Life of Thomas More (45 page)

More’s treatise was medieval in style as well as in theme; in returning to the piety of his London childhood, he reverts also to the techniques of alliteration which were at the centre of old Germanic prosody and which found their finest expression in England during the fourteenth century. It was the metre that More would have heard in nursery rhymes, ballads and oral poetry of all kinds. In the
Responsio ad Lutherum
, More uses a phrase which now seems as strange as alliteration itself—‘a dog, when goaded, will usually laugh’.
³⁴
The image of a laughing dog is thoroughly medieval. It evokes those pictorial images which furnish the rich detail of ordinary medieval life; there are illustrations in which a farmer carries two wooden buckets upon a staff, a boy scares away crows, a woman spreads out a linen cover to dry in the sun. It is an art that never loses its interest, however mundane the activities which it depicts, because the ordinary world is known to be shaped by spiritual forces. There are certain phrases of More’s which possess the same resonance, some of them as simple as that describing a man who ‘getteth hym to the fyre & shaketh hys hatte after a shoure of rayne’.
³⁵
He also mentions a slogan which was often chalked on London walls—‘D.C. hath no P.’
³⁶
—and which ‘toucheth the readiness that women hath to fleshly filth, if she fall in drunkeness’. Graffiti are as old as the city itself. Here are More’s contemporaries
‘digito purgamus nasum’
,
³⁷
picking their noses, and scratching their head, and cleaning their fingernails with a pocket-knife. And then, in the tavern, they dance. When they sing they do not say plainly ‘gyf me a spade’ but ‘gyf me a spa he ha he ha he-hade’.
³⁸

There is an anecdote about More which has that same medieval note. He was sitting with his dog on the roof of his gatehouse, meditating, when a madman came up behind him and tried to hurl him to the ground; they struggled, and More suddenly cried out, ‘Stay. Let us throw the dog down and see what sport that will be.’ The man stopped, and threw over the dog. ‘This is fine sport,’ More said. ‘Let us fetch him up, and try it again.’ Whereupon the lunatic hurried down the stairs to pick up the animal; More fastened the door, and cried for help.
³⁹
It is a strange story, related by John Aubrey in the seventeenth century, and is
perhaps apocryphal; but it is so strange that it is hard to imagine it being invented.

The laughing dog in
Responsio ad Lutherum
might conceivably have been laughing at More since More’s great opponent, Luther, has been described as ‘the first Protestant at the end of the age of absolute faith’.
⁴⁰
The denial of tradition in the partial destruction of the Catholic Church, together with the loss of faith in purgatory and in the living presence of the dead, strongly suggest that history itself was being forsaken; it is as if the memory of the past had to be erased before the next leap forward could be taken. The cult of the dead, so prominent in late medieval worship, was discontinued. The concept of immutable and complex law, manifest in elaborate structures and hierarchies, evinced in unwritten codes of honour, duty and mutual obligation, was gradually eroded. From the wreckage of this universal consensus emerged the sovereign state and, as Luther had so firmly asserted, individual faith or conscience.

This departure from the customs of a thousand years was part of a general dislocation of values. It can be traced in the attention to privacy in domestic life, the substitution of simple for complex spaces in religious architecture, the abandonment of canon law in the universities, the theory of national empire promulgated by Henry, the word ‘state’ displacing
‘res publica’
or ‘commonwealth’. What emerged in England was an energetic and male-dominated society of commerce and of progress, together with its own state church; it was a religion of the book and of private prayer, eschewing all the ritual, public symbolism and spectacle which had marked late medieval Catholicism. The age of More was coming to its close.

CHAPTER XXII
LONG PERSUADING AND PRIVY LABOURING

MID the reports and preparations for war against France, More was chosen by Henry and Wolsey to be the Speaker of the 1523 parliament. He was formally ‘elected’ by the Commons on Saturday, 18 April, though there was never any question that he was other than a royal servant placed to charm or cajole the members to do the king’s will. It was customary for the Speaker to be formally attached to the monarch, either as a member of his Household or Council, and More was perhaps the obvious choice. But here again there appears that odd motif in his public career which is so important to any understanding of his character. He did not seek; he acquiesced. He took on, apparently willingly and cheerfully, the most demanding posts without any private schemes or ambitions of his own. He was indeed the king’s true servant, and was duly appointed an MP for Middlesex before his election as Speaker.

There is an engraving (taken from a miniature) of the opening of this 1523 parliament in Blackfriars, the house and church of the Dominican friars stretching north from the Thames up to Ludgate; the engraving shows the king on his dais, covered by a canopy, with the Archbishops of York and Canterbury below the steps at his right hand. Before him, sitting in rows, are arrayed the bishops and the abbots, the barons and the earls. In the middle of the floor between them the judges sit upon their woolsacks. There is a figure standing by the bar at the very bottom of the illustration; this is Thomas More, and beside him stand other members of the ‘Common House’. There was of course a formal ritual of petition and rejection in the appointment of a Speaker, but in his opening address More volunteered his own plea for freedom of speech among his fellow members, where many who are ‘boisterous and rude
in language see deep indeed, and give right substantial counsel’.
¹
So he urged Henry ‘to take all in good part, interpreting every man’s words, how uncunningly soever they be couched, to proceed yet of good zeal’.
²

The parliament had been called to raise money for Henry’s projected invasion of France, and for the cost of continual skirmishing on the Scottish border. Wolsey spoke, at its commencement, of Henry’s desire to guard ‘his honour and the reputation of this his realm’ by keeping ‘his oath and promise’ to Charles V and therefore prosecuting war against his ‘ancient enemy, the French King’.
³
The cardinal had exacted money in the previous year, but now demanded that a very large sum be raised in further taxes and forced loans. As the king’s close counsellor and under-treasurer in charge of royal finances, More would have collaborated with Wolsey to ensure that parliament voted the king’s way. Certainly, throughout the summer and autumn of the previous year, More had been deeply involved with his two employers in reporting all the preparations for war as well as transmitting news or instructions to the various parties. The first example of the combined efforts of More and Wolsey came two weeks after parliament had opened: angered by the Commons’ delay and by reports of their hostility to the king’s demands being ‘blown abroad in every Alehouse’
⁴
Wolsey entered the Commons with a large retinue. Some members had demanded that he appear with only a few retainers, but More had persuaded his colleagues to allow him unimpeded access. He is said to have argued that the ‘Alehouse’ reports might then be believed to come from Wolsey’s own servants, if they were present at the deliberations, though it is likely that he and Wolsey arranged this show of power to overawe the Commons. Wolsey berated the members for their reluctance to comply with the king’s financial requests and demanded that a subsidy or tax of £800,000 be raised. More strongly supported Wolsey’s demand, but his colleagues proved less accommodating; they suggested the establishment of a committee to find ways of reducing the sum, whereupon the cardinal replied that he would ‘rather have his tongue plucked out of his head with a pair of pincers’ than make any such suggestion to the king.
⁵
He then descended upon the Commons for a second time, and once more demanded the full amount. There was a ‘marvellous obstinate silence’ at this,
⁶
and Wolsey demanded replies from individuals whom he knew. ‘How say you?’ Still he received no answer, and finally
he turned to the Speaker. More fell upon his knees and begged that his colleagues be excused, since to debate with Wolsey ‘was neither expedient nor agreeable with the ancient liberty of the house’.
⁷
More then claimed that he could not answer for them, since he was not sure of their general conclusions upon the matter. So the deliberations were once more adjourned.

Clearly this was now the occasion for More to deploy his skills as a mediator and negotiator; by the middle of the following month the ‘Common House’ did finally vote a large sum of ‘supplies’ to the king, but not without a great deal of polemic and division. One letter from a member of that parliament throws a vivid, if indirect, light upon the conduct of More. There had been ‘the grettiste and soreste’ argument, ‘debated and beatten xv or xvi dayes to giddir’
⁸
with the possibility of the parliament being completely split. Eventually, the more powerful force prevailed: those members of the Council, ‘the Kings servaunts, and gentilmen, of the oon partie’ were ‘in soo long tyme … spoken with and made to sey ye’.
⁹
The Speaker of the Commons would have helped to ‘make’ them ‘sey ye’, perhaps, according to the letter, against their ‘hert, will, and conscience’. They made up the majority of the MPs, or at least they were ‘the more parte … assembled’, and the grant was agreed. ‘I have herd no man yn my lif that can remembre that ever ther was geven to any oon of the Kings auncestors half so moche at oon graunte.’
¹⁰
Yet it was still not enough for the cardinal and so one of the king’s servants, Sir John Hussey, Master of the King’s Wards and Chief Butler, harried his colleagues into enlarging the grant—‘for the whiche,’ according to Edward Hall, ‘Sir Ihon Huse had muche evill will’.
¹¹