The Life of Thomas More Read online

  Praise for The Life of Thomas More

  by Peter Ackroyd

  “Frank and masterful.… [Ackroyd has a] gift for describing what it all looked and felt like.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “An exceptionally fascinating, colorful and moving biography.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Mr. Ackroyd skillfully captures the life of a consummate lawyer, humanist, martyr and Renaissance man.…”

  —The National Law Journal

  “Beautifully written, comprehensively researched.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Exquisite.… [Ackroyd has] a sense of history and a wonderful command of the English language.… Highly recommendable.”

  —Library Journal

  “A limpidly written and superbly wrought portrait.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  PETER ACKROYD

  The Life of Thomas More

  Peter Ackroyd is a prizewinning writer. His biographies include T.S. Eliot, recipient of the Whitbread Biography of the Year Award and joint winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award; and Blake. His novels include Chatterton, Hawksmoor, and most recently, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree and Milton in America. He lives in London.

  BY PETER ACKROYD

  FICTION

  The Great Fire of London

  The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

  Hawksmoor

  Chatterton

  First Light

  English Music

  The House of Doctor Dee

  Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

  Milton in America

  The Plato Papers

  NONFICTION

  Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession

  London: The Biography

  Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

  BIOGRAPHY

  Ezra Pound and His World

  T. S. Eliot

  Dickens

  Blake

  The Life of Thomas More

  POETRY

  Ouch!

  The Diversions of Purley and Other Poems

  CRITICISM

  Notes for a New Culture

  The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories, Lectures edited by Thomas Wright

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, DECEMBER 1999

  Copyright © 1998 by Peter Ackroyd

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Chatto & Windus, London in 1998. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in 1998.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday edition as follows:

  Ackroyd, Peter, 1949–

  The life of Thomas More / Peter Ackroyd. — 1st ed. in the U.S.A.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. More, Thomas, Sir, Saint, 1478–1535. 2. Great Britain—

  History—Henry VIII, 1509–1547—Biography. 3. Great Britain—

  Politics and government—1509–1547. 4. Christian martyrs—England—

  Biography. 5. Statesmen—Great Britain—Biography. 6. Humanists—

  England—Biography. I. Title.

  DA334.M8A64 1998

  942.05′2′092—dc21

  [B] 98-24333

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82301-4

  www.anchorbooks.com

  Author photograph by Roderick Field

  v3.1

  FOR THOMAS WRIGHT

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I THIS DARK WORLD

  II PRETTY PLAYS OF CHILDHOOD

  III ST ANTHONY’S PIGS

  IV COUGH NOT, NOR SPIT

  V SET ON HIS BOOK

  VI DUTY IS THE LOVE OF LAW

  VII MOST HOLY FATHER

  VIII WE TALK OF LETTERS

  IX IF YOU WANT TO LAUGH

  X THE WINE OF ANGELS

  XI HOLY, HOLY, HOLY!

  XII CRAFT OF THE CITY

  XIII MILK AND HONEY

  XIV A JOLLY MASTER-WOMAN

  XV KINGS’ GAMES

  XVI THE BEST CONDITION OF A SOCIETY

  XVII WHOLLY A COURTIER

  XVIII HE SAT UPON A THRONE OF GOLD

  XIX MY POOR MIND

  XX EQUES AURATUS

  XXI I AM LIKE RIPE SHIT

  XXII LONG PERSUADING AND PRIVY LABOURING

  XXIII THY FOOLISH FACE

  XXIV YOU ARE BUT ONE MAN

  XXV FOOLISH FRANTIC BOOKS

  XXVI WE POOR WORLDLY MEN OF MIDDLE EARTH

  XXVII INFINITE CLAMOUR

  XXVIII ALL THE BEASTS OF THE WOODS

  XXIX THE WRATH OF THE KING MEANS DEATH

  XXX THE WEEPING TIME

  XXXI PECK OF TROUBLES

  XXXII CALL FORTH SIR THOMAS MORE

  XXXIII THE KING IS GOOD UNTO ME

  SOURCE NOTES

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  14.1 Sir Thomas More, Hans Holbein the Younger (The Royal Collection © Her Majesty The Queen)

  14.2 The More household at Chelsea, Hans Holbein the Younger (Kunstmuseum, Basle)

  14.3 Sir John More, Hans Holbein the Younger (The Royal Collection © Her Majesty The Queen)

  14.4 William Roper, ascribed to Hans Holbein the Younger (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

  14.5 Margaret Roper, ascribed to Hans Holbein the Younger (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

  14.6 Elizabeth Dauncey, Hans Holbein the Younger (The Royal Collection © Her Majesty The Queen)

  14.7 Cicely Heron, Hans Holbein the Younger (The Royal Collection © Her Majesty The Queen)

  14.8 Anne Cresacre, Hans Holbein the Younger (The Royal Collection © Her Majesty the Queen)

  14.9 John More, Hans Holbein the Younger (The Royal Collection © Her Majesty The Queen)

  14.10 Henry VII, ascribed to Michael Sittow (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  14.11 Richard III, unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  14.12 Elizabeth of York, unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  14.13 The young Henry VIII, unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  14.14 Catherine of Aragon, unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  26.1 Anne Boleyn, unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  26.2 Sir Thomas More, Hans Holbein the Younger (Frick Collection, New York; Bridgeman Art Library)

  26.3 Desiderius Erasmus, Quentin Matsys (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome)

  26.4 Peter Gillis, Quentin Matsys (Private collection; Courtauld Institute of Art)

  26.5 John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  26.6 Thomas Cromwell, unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  26.7 Martin Luther, Lucas Cranach the Elder (City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery; Bridgeman Art Library)

  26.8 Thomas Cranmer, Gerlach Flicke (National Portrait Gallery, London) John Colet, Pietro Torrigiano (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  26.9 Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  26.10 Coloured bust of Henry VII, Pietro Torrigiano (Victoria & Albert Museum; Bridgeman Art Library)

  26.11 The Execution of William Tyndale, Oc
tober 1536, unknown artist (British Library)

  26.12 Henry VIII, Hans Holbein the Younger (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano; Bridgeman Art Library)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I should like to express my obligation and gratitude to the editors of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, as well as to the Yale University Press, which has published the fourteen volumes of that enterprise. Theirs is a magisterial work of scholarship, and although many of the writings are available elsewhere the Yale edition has become the indispensable companion to More studies. The other major work, in this context is The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, edited by E. F. Rogers and published by Princeton University Press. I also wish to express my thanks to the institutions and libraries that have harboured me over the last three years, in particular to the North Library of the British Library and to the London Library. I would like to thank Dr David Starkey for his suggestive advice. I must register a more private debt to my assistants, Thomas Wright and Carl Dennison.

  CHAPTER I

  THIS DARK WORLD

  HE infant was taken, within a week of its birth, to the precincts of the church; the child of wrath must be reformed into the image of God, ‘the servant of the fiend’ made into ‘a son of joy’.1 At the church-door the priest asked the midwife if the child were male or female, and then made a sign of the cross on the infant’s forehead, breast and right hand. He placed some salt in the baby’s mouth according to custom; then the priest exorcised the devil from its body with a number of prayers, and pronounced baptism as the sole means ‘to obtain eternal grace by spiritual regeneration’.2 The priest spat in his left hand and touched the ears and nose of the child with his saliva. Let the nose be open to the odour of sweetness. It was time to enter the church itself, the priest taking the right hand of the new-born child who had with the salt and saliva been granted the station of a catechumen.

  The litanies of the saints were pronounced over the baptismal font; the priest then divided the water with his right hand and cast it in the four directions of the cross. He breathed three times upon it and then spilled wax in a cruciform pattern. He divided the holy water with a candle, before returning the taper to the cleric beside him. Oil and chrism were added, with a long rod or spoon, and the child could now be baptised. Thomas More, what seekest thou? The sponsors replied for the infant, Baptism. Dost thou wish to be baptised? I wish. The child was given to the priest, who immersed him three times in the water. He was then anointed with chrism and wrapped in a chrismal robe. Thomas More, receive a white robe, holy and unstained, which thou must bring before the tribunal of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that thou mayest have eternal life and live for ever and ever. The candle was lit and placed in the child’s right hand, thus inaugurating a journey through this dark world which ended when, during the last rites, a candle was placed in the right hand of the dying man with the prayer, ‘The Lord is my Light and my Salvation, whom shall I fear?’ Whom shall this particular child fear, when it was believed by the Church that the whole truth and meaning of baptism was achieved in the act of martyrdom? ‘Baptism and suffering for the sake of Christ’, according to a second-century bishop, are the two acts which bring full ‘remission of sins’.3

  It was considered best to baptise the child on the same day as its birth, if such haste were practicable, since an infant unbaptised would be consigned to limbo after its death. To leave this world in a state of original sin was to take a course to that eternal dwelling, Limbus puerorum, suspended between heaven, hell and purgatory. There the little unbaptised souls would dwell in happy ignorance beside the more formidable and haunting Limbus patrum, which contained the souls of Noah, Moses and Isaiah together with (in Dante’s epic) Virgil, Aristotle, Socrates and all the good men who lived on earth before the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus. Adam had already been dragged from this place at the time of Christ’s crucifixion, but there was continual debate within the Church about the consequences of denying new-born children the eternal comfort of paradise. Could a child be saved by the desire, the votum, of its parents? Thomas More himself would eventually concede only that ‘those infantes be dampned onely to the payne of losse of heauen’.4

  In various late medieval pictures of baptism, in manuscripts and devotional manuals, the priest stands with his surplice and stole beside the font. Sometimes he seems to be balancing the infant in the palm of his hand, yet the child is so unnaturally large and alert for such an early stage in its life that we can only assume it acquired mental consciousness with its spiritual renovation. A clerk with a surplice stands behind the priest, while two sponsors and the child’s father are generally seen beside the font. In some depictions of this first of the seven sacraments, an image of the dying Christ hangs behind the human scene. But the mother was rarely, if ever, present.

  In the more pious households, she would have worn a girdle made out of manuscript prayer rolls in the last stages of her pregnancy, and it was customary in labour to invoke the name of St Margaret as well as the Blessed Virgin. She remained secluded after giving birth, and two or three weeks later was led out to be ‘churched’ or purified. When she was taken to the church, her head was covered by a handkerchief, as a veil, and she was advised not to look up at the sun or the sky. She knelt in the church while the priest blessed her and assured her, in the words of Psalm 121, that ‘the sun shall not burn her by day, nor the moon by night’.5 It was a ceremony both to celebrate the birth of the child and to give thanks for the survival of the mother. This is the late fifteenth-century world into which Thomas More was baptised.

  CHAPTER II

  PRETTY PLAYS OF CHILDHOOD

  HOMAS More’s birth was noted by his father upon a blank page at the back of a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae; for a lawyer John More was remarkably inexact in his references to that natal year, and the date has been moved from 1477 to 1478 and back again. Although it is of no real consequence to the drama of More’s life, the most likely day remains 7 February 1478. He was born between two and three o’clock in the early hours of Saturday morning, in the heart of London. Milk Street is in the ward of Cripplegate Within, bordering upon that of Cheap. It has been supposed that More was baptised either in the church of St Mary-le-Bow or of St Giles, but they are both in other wards; the ritual was probably performed in St Lawrence Jewry or in the parish church of Milk Street, St Mary Magdalen, now long destroyed and forgotten. If you walk down that narrow thoroughfare today, between the banks and the companies which have their home in the ‘City’, you will see a small statue of the Virgin lodged about thirty feet above the pavement.

  Milk Street was part of a fashionable and prosperous ward: in the last quarter of the fifteenth century there were seventeen mercers, or merchants, residing in Cripplegate itself.1 The great London chronicler and antiquarian John Stow describes the street as ‘so called of milk sold there; there be many fair houses for wealthy merchants and other[s]’.2 More was the scion of a wealthy and influential family; the churches closest to his house showed visible evidence of that urban power. St Lawrence Jewry, a few yards to the north of Milk Street, near the Guildhall, was as ornate and as sumptuous as any parish church in London. Its inventory at the time of its despoliation in the 1540s listed altar cloths of silk and velvet and sarcanet, robes and vestments of damask or linen, chalices and cups, great curtains and candlesticks. It was a church where many merchants were buried: nine are mentioned by name in Stow’s Survey. At the other end of Milk Street, just before the corner of Cheapside, stood the little parish church of Mary Magdalen: apart from mayors and other city officials, its graves mentioned by Stow are also those of merchants. More was born within an urban tradition as closely packed and as circuitous as the streets of Cripple-gate or Cheap wards. The sponsors who were his witnesses at the baptismal font were the visible tokens of his inheritance, but behind them we can see in emblematic array other figures rising up within the main body of the church—the mercers in their livery of red and violet, the me
mbers of other London guilds, the lawyers and the sheriffs, who composed the child’s destiny. Beyond them, too, we will recognise the officers of the courts and of the royal Court, and then further still the circles representing the clerks and officials of the Catholic Church, all of them bound together in a complicated network of affiliations and connections, evincing a range of duties, favours, services and obligations which make up their ‘affinity’. These are the true sponsors at the baptism of Thomas More.

  It was customary to give a single name to the baptised child, and More’s parents chose one which was as familiar to them as to every other Londoner. More’s maternal grandfather had the same name, but it was also the defining name of an urban cult. Thomas Becket was still the great saint of the city, the martyr and subsequent worker of miracles. He had been born just twenty yards from More’s own house in Milk Street, near the corner of Ironmonger Lane and Cheapside, and it is a striking coincidence that these two Catholic Londoners—both martyred and canonised—should have been, some centuries apart, almost nextdoor neighbours.

  So the name Thomas was explicable, but the origins of More’s surname cannot be so easily discovered. If such names derive from some sense of place, then the great moors or marshes around London might find an echo here. It is also a name upon which a number of puns were constructed. ‘More’ could be the ‘Moor’ or black Ethiop and Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch humanist who became his close companion, sometimes called him ‘Niger’. On More’s family arms, there was the head of a ‘blackamoor’, and the same device appeared upon his seal when he was under-treasurer of England. On his crest, too, were ‘moorcocks’. ‘Morus’ was also the Latin term for the mulberry tree, and Thomas More would plant one of these ‘wise’ trees in his garden at Chelsea. He was aware of the power of names, therefore, to create or evoke their own set of circumstances. ‘Morus’ is fool and ‘Mors’ is death. Erasmus’s title for his most celebrated work Moriae encomium—‘In Praise of Folly’—was designed also to praise More, in whose house the book was written. More himself invented puns upon his surname—Memento Mori aeris (Remember More’s money) might become Memento morieris (The remembrance of death)—in a transition like that within the contemporaneous music of Lambe or Fayrfax. Yet the suggestivity of the name created effects beyond punning: Mors and Morus were the syllables of More’s own destiny. Characteristically he meditated upon death and the passing shadow of the world, while also he ‘played’ the fool with those who were closest to him. What is in a name? For the sake of authenticity to the period as well as to the man, it ought also to be noted that there were in London eight men with the name of Thomas More in the years from 1400 to 1550.3