The Life of Thomas More (46 page)

This had already been a long parliament, but after a recess of three weeks it met again at Blackfriars for further wrangling on grants and taxation. The burgesses of the towns accused the knights of the shires of being ‘enemies to the realme’, but More negotiated between them and ‘after long perswadyng and privie laboryng’
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an agreement was reached. Another member, Thomas Cromwell, complained that he had endured a parliament that had continued for seventeen weeks, in which ‘we haue done as our predecessors haue been wont to doo, that ys to say, as well as we myght, and lefte where we begann’.
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But he was not wholly right. Cromwell had been opposed to the invasion of France and
had composed a long speech outlining the reasons against it, but the king had obtained the funds necessary for war. Wolsey and More, together with other of the king’s servants, had been successful.

There is a story, first told by William Roper, of Wolsey berating More in York Place for failure. ‘Would to God you had been at Rome, Master More, when I made you Speaker!’ To which More is supposed pleasantly to have replied, ‘Your grace not offended, so would I too, my lord.’ He then added, equally pleasantly, ‘I like this gallery of yours, my lord, much better than your gallery at Hampton Court.’
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Wolsey is then supposed to have tried to despatch More as ambassador to the Imperial court in Spain, as a sign of his displeasure at his conduct as Speaker, but the king disapproved. It is in accord with certain other implausible Roper stories that are designed to detach More from Wolsey and all secular preoccupations. And it is reminiscent of another anecdote, which at least has the merit of humour. Wolsey is said to have rounded on More, exclaiming, ‘By the mass, thou art the veriest fool of all the council.’ To which More replied, ‘God be thanked the king our master hath but one fool in his council.’
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Actually, Wolsey was so pleased with More’s conduct of the Speakership that he asked the king to reward him with an extra grant of £100, in addition to the conventional fee of the same amount and the various emoluments to be picked up by the Speaker in assisting individual bills, such as the one forbidding the hunting of hares when snow was upon the ground. He also became one of the collectors of the parliamentary subsidy in Middlesex. As More put it, I ‘shalbe dayly more and more bounden to pray for your Grace’.
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If there is any possible truth in the story of the conversation between Wolsey and More in York Place, it may be that it was staged for the benefit of certain people who ‘overheard’ it; itself unlikely, the theatrical manoeuvre would at least be in keeping with the characters of both men.

The additional payment of £100 was timely, since More was engaged in two property speculations. In the summer of 1523, while parliament was still in session, he purchased Crosby Place in Bishopsgate Street for £150. It is described in the indenture as a ‘grete Tenement … with sellers sollers gardeyn’
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—a ‘soller’ being a kind of parlour—and at the same time More bought ‘ix other measuages therunto adioyning’. John
Stow described Crosby Place itself as ‘very large and beautiful, and the highest at that time in London’.
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It was a truly grand house, with a great hall, a parlour known as the ‘Council Chamber’ and another great room known as the ‘Throne Room’ because of its association with that Duke of Gloucester who murdered his nephews. More had had occasion to mention it in his history of Richard III, as ‘Crosbies place in Bishops gates strete wher the protectour kept his household’.
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More purchased it from John Rest, who happened to be lord mayor of London when More was one of the under-sheriffs, and then sold it eight months later to his great friend Antonio Bonvisi, at the considerably higher price of £200; Bonvisi, in turn, eventually leased it to William Roper and William Rastell. The reason for these elaborate transactions is not easy to guess, but it may be that More had originally bought the property on behalf of his family as well as Bonvisi. The Italian merchant may also have been paying him, indirectly, for other services rendered. In the following year More purchased twenty-seven acres of land in Chelsea for £30, and seven and a half acres of land in Kensington for £20. It was in Chelsea that his great house was being constructed; it may have been greater than even his means allowed, since in this period he borrowed more than £700 from the king himself.

Wolsey, as a token of gratitude, continued to grant him preferments. In the summer of 1524 he was appointed High Steward of Oxford University and in the following year he was given the same post at Cambridge. These were judicial and financial, rather than academic, appointments. He was involved in trying serious offenders within the jurisdiction of either university, but he was also concerned with what he described as business affairs.
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From his enthusiastic letter of acceptance to the congregation and masters of Oxford, it is clear that he had successfully performed such services for his university in the past. On one occasion he was informed that the merchants of Oxford were charging unfair prices to the poorer scholars, and he insisted that the burgesses of that city return the money to him; he then distributed it among the same scholars. Another story concerns his relationship with the students of the time. Because he was a famous and powerful man, known for his skill in disputations of any kind, he was visited by young men from both universities. He would engage in friendly debate with
them, but if they proved unequal to the task ‘then, lest he should discomfort them, would he by some witty device courteously break off into some other matter and give over’.
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His assistance was also on a more private level when, with the approval or assistance of Wolsey, he was able to procure a readership at Oxford for Juan Luis Vives. Vives was a Spanish humanist who had been introduced to him by Francis Cranevelt during the negotiations at Bruges in 1520; he was fourteen years younger than More, but was even then working on an edition of Augustine’s
City of God.
This connection would be strengthened over the next few years as Vives composed a number of treatises on themes, such as good government and the education of women, which were central to More’s own concerns. Vives first came to England in 1523, and it became for a while the principal home of this young wandering scholar whose memorial stone is now to be found hidden beside a Bruges canal. More admired him and spoke ruefully of the younger man’s resourcefulness and productivity. He told Erasmus that he felt very ashamed in comparison;
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he considered himself less successful in the cause of good letters, and probably he blamed this upon his general business in the affairs of the world. Yet he could serve that cause indirectly and he asked one of his children’s tutors, Richard Hyrde, to translate the treatise of Vives upon the education of Christian women. More himself then corrected it before publication. He must have been instrumental, too, in persuading Wolsey to grant Vives a readership at the newly established Cardinal College at Oxford. There is a further connection of interest. Through More’s agency Vives joined the circle of pious scholars around Catherine of Aragon, who eventually entrusted her compatriot with the education of her daughter. There is an anecdote of Vives and the Queen of England, sailing by barge upon the Thames from Richmond Palace to the Bridgettine house of Syon; it was a short journey down river, but there was time for reflection. After a life of some drama and hardship, Catherine said that she wished only for a tranquil life; but if she had to decide whether to endure great fortune or great calamity, she would choose the latter as the more spiritual course. As the barge drifted towards the landing-stage at Syon, perhaps she already had some inkling of her unhappy fate.

We might then follow the ever-flowing river to Westminster, where
More was at work. He regularly attended meetings of the king’s council there, though much of his time was spent on various small committees established by Wolsey to promote the administration of justice. He was, for example, deputed to a special Star Chamber court which dealt with cases from Middlesex; he was a member of an inquiry into the conduct of a judge who eventually ‘was deposid hys office’,
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and was appointed to various commissions attempting to control the vagrants and prostitutes of the city. It was a world he had known well during his eight years as under-sheriff of London. He also investigated the cloth trade, identified grain supplies and became the commissioner of sewers along the bank of the Thames from Greenwich to Gravesend. He still found time to assist the affairs of the City, of course, and remained highly influential there; he arranged for one of his servants, for example, to be granted the post of sword-bearer to the Lord Mayor.

But his real power and influence remained in his proximity to the king. While other courtiers waited in galleries and passages, hoping to catch the attention of the monarch as he passed, More was always beside him. A mark of his authority is to be found in his presence at the ceremony ennobling Henry’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitz Roy, where More ‘read out the letters patent granting the earldom’.
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He was also the royal orator on formal diplomatic occasions, and at this time the Venetian ambassador reported him to be ‘a man of singular and rare learning, and in great favour with the king and cardinal’.
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Wolsey’s proposed changes to the Royal Household in 1526, known as the Eltham Ordinances, illustrate the nature of that ‘favour’. More was named as one of the four counsellors obliged to attend ‘what place so ever his highness shall resort’ with ‘two of them at the least’ to be in the king’s dining chamber ‘every day in the forenoon by ten … and at afternoon by two’.
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More was also given the task of examining any petitions made to the king in the course of his travels. That these ordinances were never employed does not affect the obvious esteem in which More was held. Further evidence of his intimacy with the royal family is contained in an exchange of letters between Vives and Erasmus, in which Vives mentions that Henry and Catherine had admired the Dutch scholar’s
De Libero Arbitrio—‘non dubito,’
he wrote, they will discuss your book
‘cum Moro’.
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There were other discussions with Henry of a more importunate nature.
After his duties as Speaker had been completed he returned to the side of the king, as his secretary, and became once more involved in the highest and most secret matters of state. For it was, now, a time of war. Much of that warfare, and the motives behind it, can be gauged from More’s letters to Wolsey; he wrote at the dictation or instigation of the king, whose voice can almost be heard examining the details of the ‘Great Enterprise’ against France. He spoke to More of his determination to set aside Francis I, as his father had vanquished Richard III at Bosworth; he talked of ‘th’ Emperor’ and ‘the Duke of Burbone’,
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who, in the autumn of 1523, joined with him in an invasion of France. There was a great flurry of letters in September when Wolsey and Henry agreed that ‘my Lord of Suffolke’ should end his siege of Boulogne and march ‘in to the bowellis of Fraunce’.
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The king had been opposed to the notion, for good practical and strategic reasons, but he allowed himself to be persuaded otherwise by Wolsey and his commanders. He insisted, however, that the country be open for ‘burnyng and spoile’
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—without ‘the profite of the spoile’ the English soldiers would become discouraged ‘and theyre capitayns shall haue mych a doo to kepe theym from crying, Home! Home!’
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More’s hopes for peace had now foundered. Although he speaks of it only twice in his own correspondence of this period—once to Wolsey and once to Cranevelt—it is certain that his instincts lay in that direction. Yet, when some had argued in Council that England should not intervene in the wars between the French king and the emperor, Wolsey had said that wise men took to caves when it began to shower, while the fools stayed in the open and were ‘wasshed with the raine’; but when the wise men came out from their shelter, ready to ‘vtter their wisdome’, the fools ‘agreed together against them, and ther all to bete them’.
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France and the emperor would, in other words, one day fall upon England if Henry did not at this stage assert his strength and influence. ‘I trust we neuer made warre as reason wolde,’ More said later, ‘but yet this fable for his parte, did in his daies helpe the Kynge and the realme to spende many a faire peny.’
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The siege of Boulogne was lifted and the Duke of Suffolk marched with the English soldiers towards Paris; he came within seventy miles of the city but the familiar lack of money and supplies, as well as problems of bad weather, determined that he would go no further. There were
sporadic mutinous outbreaks among his men, and in the winter of that year the orders were given for a retreat to Calais. The adventure had by no means matched the triumph of Henry’s predecessor at Agincourt, but it had proved that he could gain ‘fre entre’
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into the heart of France; it may have even been enough to assuage his appetite for glory. The cost of prolonged warfare was proving very high, in any case, and Wolsey’s attempts to raise money were meeting severe resistance. It was at this time, then, that the diplomatic and reticent More became involved in secret negotiations with an envoy from France. In the spring of the following year a Genoese friar, John Joachim, travelled to London and stayed with Antonio Bonvisi at Crosby Place. Joachim became well known to More over the eighteen months of his stay, especially since under cover of business he had come to arrange a secret treaty between Henry and the French king. This was of course in direct contradiction to the terms of the alliance with the emperor, and so there were all sorts of covert explanations and double-dealings involved during Joachim’s presence in England. In these, too, it can be assumed that More played a part. Certainly he collaborated with Wolsey in another, somewhat devious, plan. A courier, carrying letters from the Imperial ambassador to the emperor, was detained just outside London and was taken to More’s house; More promptly opened the letters, read what should have been privileged diplomatic despatches, and then sent them on to Wolsey. Another courier from the ambassador was also intercepted, and the ambassador himself called before the Council to explain the nature of his missives to Charles V. These were highly irregular incidents, but relations between allies and combatants were now becoming so complicated and ambiguous that duplicity was part of the game. That was why, in this period, More wrote that all
‘priuatas sollicitudines’
(‘private cares’)
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were completely overwhelmed by collective disasters and concern for the public welfare.