The Life of Thomas More (13 page)

He had not entered the world fully armed with these notions of authority or tradition, of course, and we must look elsewhere for their origins. Thomas More had followed his father’s steps by joining Lincoln’s Inn—John More was a bencher there even as his son sat below him as an inner barrister—and in their reciprocal relations something may be revealed. There is evidence of three books owned by John More. One was the history of Britain composed by Geoffrey of Monmouth (in the pages of which he had entered the birth date of his son), and the two others were volumes of legal precedents and abridgements. There is a story of Thomas More using the arcane concept of ‘withernam’, a term used for a legal act of reprisal, to confound an opponent. It is in itself an uninteresting story (except so far as it provides evidence for More’s occasional sarcasm) but it has one significant aspect: John More’s extant book of abridgements concludes with three of his handwritten notes on the subject of ‘withernam’. His own concerns were, in a real sense, Thomas More’s inheritance.

CHAPTER VII
MOST HOLY FATHER

HOMAS More, as Lord Chancellor of England, invariably attended Westminster Hall to preside over the Court of Chancery; John More was a justice of the King’s Bench in the same Hall and, whenever Thomas More passed him on his way to his duties, he knelt down among the noise and business in order to ask his father’s blessing. The scene is evocative enough to have been described by all of More’s biographers, suggesting, as it does, More’s reverence for authority as well as his humility; he took precedence as Lord Chancellor, but maintained his obligations as a son. It also suggests in cryptic form the preoccupation with ceremony and display that More shared with his contemporaries. It was, you might say, his habit. Every morning and evening, when he was a child, he would also have knelt down in reverence before his father.

There is a drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger of John More; it shows him as judge, wearing the cap and the robe edged with miniver fur (believed to have been that of the Siberian squirrel). But it is the individual face and temperament that arouse interest. Holbein was depicting medieval men, but he was not a medieval artist; he illustrates his sitters in the light of some sudden but characteristic emotion, as if he had caught their thought on its wing. Thus they seem purposeful without being, in a fifteenth-century sense, emblematic. The drawing of John More must have been completed rapidly, in preparation for the great portrait of the More family at Chelsea, but the artist has sketched the lineaments of a full and awakened life; the thin mouth and fleshy nose are recognisable features of the More physiognomy, but the study of John More has none of the remoteness and diffidence which appear in the portrait of his son. The father’s eyes are bright, almost glaring,
with the set composure of the face suggesting the presence of someone who has mastered and understood his world. There is a starkness in the face, not untouched by humour but calculating and forceful nonetheless.

It would be foolish to establish an entire biographical narrative upon the basis of one sketch, even by so distinguished an artist. On this occasion it is important only to register the dependence of father and son; the whole of Thomas More’s life is caught up in the maintenance of authority, and we can look for the first stirrings of it within the family of Milk Street. It might be said that More possessed genius precisely because he stood in symbolic relation to his age; he embodied the old order of hierarchy and authority at the very moment when it began to collapse all around him. He died for the sake of the order which he had first learned in his father’s house.

The discipline of late medieval households was well known; one manuscript in the Ashmolean Library describes how men and women even in their thirties might not sit in their parents’ presence ‘without leave, but stood like mutes bare-headed among them’.
¹
This may be an exaggeration, designed to impress rather than to inform, but it imparts the general tenor of household life. Manuals suggested early and strict discipline for the child—with the use of ‘harsh suppositories’ to encourage toilet training
²
—and More’s references to his nurse rather than to his mother in turn imply a degree of separation or estrangement. His relationship to his father was, according to the later members of his own family, equally subdued. Cresacre More reports that More ‘never offended nor contradicted him in anie the least worde or action’.
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No doubt there would have been penalties for so doing, and in later life More asserted the symbolic significance of the father chastising the child—‘that father is not accompted for vnlouyng and cruell that beteth hys chyld but rather he that leueth yt vndone’
⁴
—as an image of divine paternalism. Yet the mature Thomas More never beat his own children except, on occasions, with peacock feathers. John More is supposed to have been economical with his son’s funds; Thomas More was continually giving gifts and coins to his own children. His daughter remembers her father losing his temper only twice in the whole course of her life. Would it be too much to suggest, in similar spirit of reprisal, that More witnessed his own father losing his temper too often? It does not take a
psychologist, of whatever school, to realise that such reversal of his father’s habits suggests a certain innate dislike or hostility which can be expressed in no other way. Yet throughout his life he displayed nothing but a meek spirit towards John More. It was a form of piety in the strict sense—in
The City of God
, Augustine defines piousness as the attitude of duty and deference to parents—and bears the marks of the prevailing belief that it was sinful to disobey lawfully constituted authority. More also defines it as the ‘naturall charitie’ that ‘bindeth the father and the childe’
⁵
and tells his own son, also named John, that he should be ‘eager to delight’ and ‘cautious not to give offense’ to his father.
⁶
Certainly More himself gave no offence and followed a career which delighted his father.

John More must have been an ambitious man to succeed in becoming serjeant and justice, especially since he was the first member of his family ever to train as a lawyer, and no doubt he also focused his ambition upon his son. Was More following his father’s orders in becoming Lord Chancellor? There is no evidence at all that he did so unwillingly; the facts suggest the opposite, and it can be surmised that More ‘internalised’ his father’s predilections and preoccupations without undue disquiet. He stands in marked contrast once again to his greatest opponent: Martin Luther defied his father’s wish that he should become a lawyer, and it could be said that Luther’s quarrel with paternal authority was eventually heard all over Europe. But More suffered from no such neurotic or ideological crisis and it was he who, against Luther, defended the old order of Christendom. It is interesting to note, when More was attacking heresy, the particular way in which he chose to remember his father; he is generally described as recounting oral tales or proverbial phrases. In
A Dialogue Concerning Heresies
, John More appears on four occasions—telling the story of a feigning beggar in the days of King Henry VI, for example, and of a ‘gentlewoman’ who refused to believe that ‘our lady was a Iewe’ but when convinced of the fact by John More affirmed ‘so helpe me god and holydom I shall loue her the worse whyle I lyue’.
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So the father is connected with earlier times and with the old faith, conveyed in stories and remarks that emphasise the common frailty of humankind. These stories can be seen as the oral equivalents of the histories, precedents and legal abridgements which were part of his library. The inheritance and meaning of the past
are to inform present actions; as in the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, the dead can and must be heard among the living. The name of the father, too, can be heard throughout More’s writings. In
Utopia
, the inhabitants of that ambiguous country worship an eternal unknown being called father.
⁸
In more theoretical contexts More always adverts to the authority of patristic sources, ‘the fathers’ whom he addresses as
sanctissitnos
(‘most holy’) and
doctissimos
(‘most learned’).
⁹
But the image of the father is not simply representative of ancient wisdom; in the context of religious change it becomes of pressing contemporary significance, since the English Church could no more forsake Rome ‘than might the child refuse obedience to his natural father’.
¹⁰
In this refrain of ‘father’ and of ‘fathers’, most holy and most learned, we can hear also the cry for authority and restraint.

More’s single most bitter accusation against Luther and his followers, was that they incited disorder. He is the first English writer to employ the Greek term
anarchos
, and he related the whole great change of European consciousness in the sixteenth century to the ‘hatred that they beare to all good order’ and ‘the great hunger yt they haue to brynge all out of order’.
¹¹
He detested vain meddling and what he called ‘newefangylness’; even if there were to be such a thing as a bad law, he once argued, public discussion of the matter was to be avoided at all costs. But when Luther attacked Henry VIII and the Pope he seemed to More to be also imperilling the civilisation of a thousand years. His attitude is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote, three hundred years later, that ‘The people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them’.
¹²
It is why More had no ‘ideas’ as such; he had no need for them, and part of his dislike for medieval logic was its potential for creating discordancies or problems where none had previously existed. It is significant in this context that an extant copy of Euclid’s
Elements
, with annotations in More’s hand, shows him to have been particularly interested in theoretical geometry and altogether impressed by a closed system of knowledge which offered ‘absolute certainty’ and ‘self-evident truths’.
¹³
In the words of the prophet Samuel, ‘to obey is better than sacrifice’.
¹⁴