The Life of Thomas More (24 page)

Its significance lies in the living moment of its conception, when a whole community was caught up in the rituals of a common faith. When Herod grows wrathful, ‘I stampe! I stare! I loke all abowtt!’,
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he is not an allegorical, but a living, figure. He is the parish clerk who, in Chaucer’s
Miller’s Tale
, ‘pleyeth Herodas upon a scaffold hye’. When the shearmen and tailors of Coventry presented their nativity pageant it was as if the images upon the church wall had come alive and were being revived by the people themselves. There was also live animals (foreshadowing Shakespeare’s use of the bear in
The Winter’s Tale
), flying machines, burning fires as an accompaniment to the gaping jaws of hell; the sacred scenes were interspersed with episodes of sometimes ribald comedy, such as the famous one in which Noah tries to persuade his foul-mouthed wife to enter the Ark. Once again the spiritual and the secular need not be separate, since they were aspects of the same reality. Comedy and irony came not from ambiguity or disbelief; in many respects they emerged from an excess of belief in a world where sacred truths need not be questioned. Even the hierarchy of the guilds who staged the pageants was a reflection of the hierarchy of the heavens. All his life More referred to human affairs as a spectacle upon a stage or wooden scaffold; and when on the last day of his life he advanced among the crowd to a more solemn scaffold, he might have been enacting his own mystery play.

He is not known to have visited Coventry again, and indeed there could have been few occasions when he had the opportunity to break from legal work and London business. In Lincoln’s Inn, for example, he was being promoted to positions of more responsibility: he became pensioner, or financial administrator, before becoming in succession butler, marshal and autumn reader. These were the stages of the
cursus honorum
which the successful lawyer was obliged to follow, moving forward according to the principle of ‘ancienty’. The roles of butler and marshal were administrative or disciplinary, while as the autumn reader he was engaged only in instruction. At eight o’clock in the morning, in
front of the assembled Inn, More lectured for four mornings of four weeks in Law French; it was the practice of the reader to interpret aspects of statute law in that strange
argot
, and his exposition was followed by responses from the more senior members of the Inn. There were also formal reader’s dinners, and throughout the term of his appointment he was granted special privileges. He was in a literal sense following the path of his father, who had also been butler and marshal of the Inn.

We must see More as submitting to a hierarchy of needs and obligations. That is why, like his father before him, he was made a ‘freeman’ of the Mercers. In March 1509, ‘Maister Thomas More, gentilman, desired to be fre of this felishipp, which was graunted hym by the holle compeney to haue it franke & fre’.
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Part of the oath which More then read counselled mutual obligation and dependence, ‘the secrets whereof to you shewed you shall keep secret’,
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as well as piety and obedience. It was the policy of the Mercers to bring influential Londoners within their ranks; John Colet, for example, had been made a freeman only the year before. And it is likely that More was recruited as a freeman precisely because of his legal acumen. The Mercers were at the time engaged in a protracted struggle with Henry VII, who had determined to curtail the powers of the established City companies; the king had been actively promoting the interests of a new guild, the Merchant Taylors, and had directly interfered in City elections. Equally importantly, four months before More’s entry into the fellowship, he had threatened to levy a new tax upon cloth exports. It was in the interest of the Mercers, therefore, to have as members the best lawyers in London in order to protect their interests. The advantages for More, in turn, were obvious. He was joining the richest and most powerful of the City companies, highly influential in London administration, with a network of contacts throughout England and Europe.

There were more than sixty guilds or fraternities within the city at this date, but the Mercers were at the forefront of affairs. London had been a mercantile city since its earliest foundation; it had been built upon commerce and the profits of trade. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the fellowship of the ‘merchant adventurers’ would be paramount. Trade guilds have existed for almost as long as trade itself, of course; in second-century Italy, workers ‘associated by a common trade’ would
partake together of meals and divine worship.
²²
But the growth of the London guilds was peculiarly elaborate and complex. The first surviving records of an association of Mercers come from the late twelfth century, but its origins are earlier. It was known variously as ‘Compeny’, ‘the Mystere of Mercers’, ‘craft of the city’, guild or fellowship. By the time of More’s association it included the Company of Merchant Adventurers, the Merchants of the Staple and other interested parties variously engaged in the export of cloth and wool. Its headquarters, Mercers’ Hall, lay by Cheapside and Ironmonger Lane—the area in which More had dwelled all his life—beside the church of St Thomas of Acon to which it was affiliated.

John Colet said that he trusted this body of London citizens more than any other estate or degree and, in order to understand More’s role among them, it is important to remember that the company was established upon community and religion as well as commerce. One early ordinance requires ‘the cherishing of unity and good love’ among them,
²³
and we must see it as part craft, part fraternity and part religious society. More would have been obliged to wear the ‘livery’ on formal occasions; this included hood and robe of red or scarlet, although the precise colour seems to have been changed every two years. He would have engaged in the feasts on holy days, contributed to the funds for ‘decayed’ mercers, and walked in the procession of the festive pageants. The pageant image of the Mercers was that of the Blessed Virgin, and for the celebrations of the Midsummer Watch a ‘Maiden Chariot’ was drawn through the streets in honour of Our Lady and various allegorical personages who shared the stage with her. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the religious aspects of the Company were not the most important; yet the mercers prayed together in the church of St Thomas of Acon ‘the better to their great worship and profit in this world, but also to the great merit both to their bodies and souls after the departing out of this present life’.
²⁴

More’s particular role in the Mercers was as negotiator and orator, and documents survive which show how he conducted himself in such business. Only six months after being ‘made free’ of the company, he was involved in complicated bargaining with the ‘Pensonary’ or chief magistrate of Antwerp over the precise streets and houses which the English merchants would be allowed to use in that city. The records
demonstrate just how prominent a part he played. At eight o’clock, on a Thursday morning in September, they all assembled in the Mercers’ Hall on the appropriate benches, ‘euery man in his degre’, and the Pensonary of Antwerp was summoned from the church below. More sat opposite him ‘ende next the wyndowe’ and, after politely desiring him ‘to Couer his hedd’, he ‘tolde a longe and goodly proposicion in Latin’ on the business to be transacted. In fact the magistrate from Antwerp was already known to him: Jacob de Wocht, known in humanist circles as Jacobus Tutor, was an intimate friend of Erasmus. The Dutch scholar had once lived with him for three months, and had also dedicated his edition of Cicero’s
De Officiis
to him; this treatise is concerned with the conflict between justice and expediency, which might be thought to have some bearing upon the negotiations of the Mercers. Certainly, in the colloquies of More and Tutor, we have a vivid and practical example of the way in which learned European humanists were also at the heart of commercial and social affairs in this period. After More had finished his initial peroration, Tutor ‘tolde his tale in Latyne and first he commended Maister More greatly for makyng of his Oracion’. And so it continued, with More translating Tutor’s remarks for the Englishmen assembled and then replying in Latin.

The negotiations continued for several days, until a final settlement was reached. ‘Than when that he had declared as is a forsaid all in Laten, Maister More dyd enterpret the same in Englisshe to the compeny, and than they arose and euery man went his waye.’
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The agreement was satisfactory to the Mercers, principally because they obtained everything they wanted; More was a skilful lawyer who, as Erasmus once said, could defend cases which were not the best.
²⁶
There is an intimation here that Erasmus did not necessarily approve of all More’s public activities, and thought he was somehow betraying his gifts by working as a lawyer, but he could not have foreseen then the full tragedy of his friend’s public career. That career might even be said to have begun in these months of 1509, for something had happened between More’s entry into the Mercers and his conduct of the autumn negotiations. In the spring of the same year the old king had died, and Henry VIII ascended the throne.

CHAPTER XIII
MILK AND HONEY

ENRY VII had reigned for twenty-four years; the eight-year-old boy living in Milk Street witnessed the victor of Bosworth’s triumphal progress along Cheapside, in the early autumn of 1485, surrounded by the dignitaries of London ‘all clothed in Violet’,
¹
and during the course of his reign More had grown to adulthood. His notions of order and authority might in part be derived from his experience of that monarch’s personal rule; certainly More died a sacrifice to the principle of kingship which Henry VII helped to establish. He was the victim of the older, no less than the younger, Tudor. More’s family, however, had flourished under Henry’s rule. His policy of reforming administration had meant that lawyers as well as clerics were now at the centre of affairs; his role as a patron of continental scholars had also created the climate in which men such as Colet and Linacre could flourish. Equally importantly, Henry had restored peace and stability within the realm. Two kings of England had suffered violent deaths during More’s early childhood; through a judicious mixture of military expertise, financial exaction and political acumen the new king created a secure regime which would last more than a hundred years. The fact that he came between two monsters, at least of historical legend—Richard III and Henry VIII—has meant that his actual stature and achievement have been eclipsed. Yet if it had not been for the order which Henry maintained, the whole humanist enterprise in England, for example, would have been impossible. His close supervision of all aspects of administration, financial and political, suggested that in a real sense all authority now radiated from the monarch; he was the central symbol of the power and unity of the nation. It was a legacy that his son would exploit for quite different purposes.