The Life of Thomas More (14 page)

But cannot obedience and sacrifice be intimately related? Two episodes from this period make a suggestive connection. In later life More wrote a Latin poem to a lady called ‘Elisabetha’, in which with much
circumstantial detail he recounts his youthful infatuation for her. He says that he was sixteen at the time (and therefore about to enter New Inn), she fourteen, when he was struck by
‘innocuo … amore’
,
¹⁵
or harmless love, at a dance. She seems to have returned his affection, but a
‘custos’
or guardian was employed to keep them apart. The poem is possibly a poetic fiction, designed simply to display More’s skills in amatory elegiacs, but it does receive some corroboration from Erasmus. He wrote a letter, at about the same time as More composed the poem, in which he describes how the youthful More was not immune to the charms of young women.
¹⁶
But he hastens to add that More preferred a union of minds rather than of bodies and that he stopped short of
‘infamia’
or disgrace. It is in a similar spirit that More, in his poem, emphasises more than once that his love for Elizabeth was
‘sine crimine’.
¹⁷
It is an interesting little story, not least because it marks one of the few occasions when More was willing openly to discuss his private feelings, but it has an even more intriguing sequel.

According to one of More’s biographers—one who had the additional advantage of talking to those who had known him—‘even as a youth, he wore a hair-shirt’
¹⁸
as a form of penance and mortification. Cresacre More repeats a similar claim: ‘When he was about eighteen or twentie years olde, finding his bodie by reason of his yeares most rebellious, he sought diligently to tame his unbrideled concupiscence by wonderfull workes of mortification.’
¹⁹
One is reminded, somehow, of his large nose and rather thin lips. So he tried to chastise and tame his ‘unbrideled’ sexuality, even to the extent of wearing a rough and knotted hair shirt at such a young age. In his later work he evinces what is almost disgust at the body and its functions; he despised lechery and drunkenness, and there are reports that when a very young man he drank water rather than beer. The sense of order was one which had invaded his own physical being; he bore its marks in a literal sense, when he put on the hair shirt which chafed his skin. This, too, is the bitter fruit of duty and obedience.

If we reflect upon his relationship with his father, as well as on the general authority which John More embodied, we might be tempted to see his whole career in the light of that obedience. There may be no need to look for any private motive or specifically individual choice in any of his decisions (perhaps not even that concerning his death), but
rather the dutiful assumption of public roles. There is, after all, an element of humility and self-abasement in the acceptance of the parts which he played—whether that of lawyer, or diplomat, or courtier.

When Thomas More knelt down with reverence before his father in Westminster Hall, his bowing was a form of humility and clarity of spirit. He was bowing to the Church and to the Law, to the authority of the past and the hierarchy of the world, to the eleven circles of the eleven heavens, to the order of the spheres which proceeds upwards to the crystalline universe, to the
primum mobile
and to that eternal ‘circuite [of] enumerable angells singing’
²⁰
around God. He is bowing with gravity and deliberation. But is he also smiling? He believed implicitly in the need for this ritual, but he was also playing a role to perfection.

CHAPTER VIII
WE TALK OF LETTERS

URING the reign of Edward III literate laymen had been granted the privilege of clergy and were not subject to the jurisdiction of the secular courts. But in 1489 the legislation was changed, and lay scholars became distinguished from clerks in holy orders; if they committed murder, for example, they would have the letter ‘M’ branded upon their heads as the punishment for a first offence. Nothing could better demonstrate the respect afforded to those who could read; they were, literally, members of a privileged class who might get away with murder. It is the most appropriate context for More’s first entry into print.
Lac puerorum
, or
Milk for Children
, was published in 1497. It was a basic Latin grammar for schoolboys—a book about learning how to read. Its author, John Holt, had been a teacher of grammar at Magdalen College School in Oxford, but was at this time resident tutor for the younger members of Cardinal Morton’s household at Lambeth Palace. Since the little treatise is dedicated to John Morton, and since it includes two Latin poems by an erstwhile member of that school, Thomas More, we may be inclined to see
Lac puerorum
as a production from the very centre of ecclesiastical and administrative life in the period. More refers to the lessons within it as
nostra
, ‘ours’, and it may be that he contributed more than poetry to its making. He was nineteen at the time of its publication—on an early page, his poems are described as the work of
‘diserti adolescentuli’
¹
or eloquent young man—and the treatise bears all the marks of a youthful attempt to purge the basic curriculum of the dead matter which had grown about it. The lessons are conveyed in English, with little woodcuts of a candlestick and open hand as aids in the memorising of Latin cases and declensions. But no activity in the late fifteenth century was
without possible spiritual connotation; the declension of Latin nouns was sometimes compared to the declension of the soul into the body.

John Morton died in the autumn of 1500 without, it must be said, any great evidence of public grief. By that time, however, Thomas More had clearly attracted the attention of other mentors. The evidence suggests that, even while studying at Lincoln’s Inn, he found himself among a small group of scholars and clerics who had already sensed his worth. They have become known in recent years as the ‘More circle’, but at the time he was by no means the most eminent among them. In a letter of Erasmus’s from this period More is praised for being
‘mollius’, ‘dulcius’
and
‘felicius’
,
²
easy-tempered and generally charming. These are hardly words of praise for his intellectual abilities, unless we take
‘felicius’
in its subsidiary meaning of being fruitful of good works, but the important point of the letter is the setting in which Erasmus places More. It is a setting of erudition and classical scholarship, where the exemplary figures are John Colet, William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre and More himself. Colet is compared with Plato, while Grocyn is praised for his learning and Linacre for his good judgement. It is all the more remarkable that More should be included in this company, when it is remembered that Grocyn was thirty years, and Linacre almost twenty years, older than he was; Colet himself was born more than ten years before him. In his dialogues More tends to place an older man in conversation with a younger one, and it seems that the notion of wisdom and guidance being transmitted from age to youth was one that he established in his own life. In a letter to Colet, for example, he refers to Grocyn as the
‘magister’
or director of his life and Linacre as the
‘praecepter’
or instructor of his studies;
³
Colet himself acted as More’s ‘confessor’. In the pattern of these relationships it is possible to recognise the role which the young More frequently adopted towards those closest to him. Two salient characteristics of his friends are also relevant; they all took religious orders and all had spent some years in Italy or Greece as part of their scholarly training. So Thomas More was the exception among them; he was much younger, a student of the law and a layman apparently dedicated to a lay career. It is hard to assess the impact upon him of those who had lived or worked outside England, but it is significant that all his life he was able to combine a comprehensive understanding of what might be termed ‘European’ culture with a
specific instinct for the life and genius of London. There was no necessary disjunction between the two. More had become attached to a group of people who, as far as Erasmus was concerned, comprised one of the finest centres of classical learning in Europe and one which was indeed superior to any in Italy.
⁴
The Dutch scholar was inclined to flattery, especially when it concerned prospective patrons, but there was a genuine truth to his remark. In these early days of what has become known as Christian humanism, before the Henrician reforms helped to destroy any English participation in this more general European culture, the scholars of Oxford and London and Cambridge were at the centre of intellectual enquiry and classical studies.

William Grocyn was the oldest of the group, but in a sense his career was exemplary. He had begun his studies at Oxford, where he became a fellow and later a Reader in Divinity; he was one of the few scholars there who acquired a knowledge of Greek, perhaps through one of those private tutors who, before the advent of humanism, kept alive the memory of the classical world. In 1488, in his early forties, he resigned his academic posts and travelled to Italy, part of that migration among the wealthier or more devoted English scholars towards the fount and source of good learning. There were tutors here from Athens and Jerusalem as well as Florence and Padua; there were small academies devoted to classical learning; there were manuscripts and libraries and printers. On his return to England Grocyn kept chambers in Exeter College, Oxford, where he taught and lectured in Greek studies. After some five years at Oxford Grocyn received the ‘benefice’ of St Lawrence Jewry through the agency of the Bishop of London—the acceptance of a ‘benefice’ from a patron, by those scholars who were also in holy orders, was the best way of ensuring a modest income with which they could continue their studies. St Lawrence was the church close to More’s home in Milk Street, and here More himself would later lecture upon St Augustine’s
City of God
; in turn Grocyn would lecture on the pseudo-Dionysius in St Paul’s at John Colet’s instigation.