The Life of Thomas More (26 page)

The cause of restored piety was not confined to the schoolroom. Colet shared his contemporaries’ concern with education as part of the humanist endeavour but, like them, he was equally convinced of the need for reform within the Church. In a speech to convocation which he made in the year after Henry’s accession to the throne, he declared that the ‘Church is become foul and deformed’
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with abuses. He condemned ‘the secular and worldly way of living on the part of the clergy’,
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in particular the search for benefices as well as the inclination towards sensuality and hypocrisy. He recognised that the Church was troubled by heretics, but said that the greater heresy lay ‘in the vicious and depraved lives of the clergy’.
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Then he spoke of the need for ‘Reformation’—not as it came to be applied twenty-five years later but, rather, a reformation of mind and spirit. It was a carefully worded attack, at all times adverting to scriptural authority, and was part of the concerted attempt to revive and restore the Church at this fortunate moment in English history. Of course the substance of Colet’s sermon was not new. There had been attacks on Church abuses almost from the moment of the Church’s foundation; fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sermons, for example, are filled with attacks upon priests who are ‘fornicators … gluttons … plunderes in the church of God’.
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A previous Bishop of Rochester, Thomas Brunton, spoke of other prelates as ‘Dumb dogs’,
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and the vices of the clergy provoked his early sixteenth-century successor, John Fisher, into believing that God was ‘in a maner in a deed slepe’.
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Yet the Church was even then in the midst of one of its periodical fits of reform. Many of the bishops whom Colet addressed in convocation were both active and virtuous; the problem of the non-residency of hired clergy was in that period being addressed, and it is clear from the written evidence that the educational standards of clerics had been improving. Smaller monasteries were being dissolved—sometimes to make way for collegiate foundations—and the records of Archbishop Morton’s ‘visitations’, in the late 1480s and 1490s, reveal a surprisingly low record of abuses. In fact most of the complaints about the clergy came from the clergy themselves. The record of lay beneficence, the provisions of wills and the level of bequests confirm what religious historians have already established: the piety of the people was
actually increasing in the last decades of the fifteenth, and early decades of the sixteenth, centuries. It was the great age for the building, and rebuilding, of churches. But, more importantly, the inner faith and private spirituality, encouraged both by Colet and More, addressed the very needs and preoccupations of the time.

That is why it is impossible to separate More’s theoretical interests from his practical pursuits; the immediate point of his humanism was social reform and, after the accession of Henry VIII, he played an increasing part in the affairs of London and neighbouring counties. John More and ‘yong More’, as he was called in a chronicle for this year, were part of a royal commission concerned with the legacy of a dead viscount; father and son were also part of a larger royal commission for Middlesex. A few months later More was member of a party ‘to see and viewe the comen grounde whereuppon the Master of seint bartholomus hath bilded’.
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This was the area where he had disputed as a schoolboy; now he was one of London’s guardians. It is also likely that he played some part, at the end of 1509, in negotiations to create ‘an unity’ between the Merchant Adventurers and the Merchants of the Staple. It was the kind of task which he had been trained all his life to fulfil.

In that same month of December a more singular honour was afforded him: ‘Thomas More, mercerus’ was elected as a burgess for London at the next meeting of ‘the parlement’. He was one of four representatives of the city at Westminster, and had been chosen to replace another mercer. He did not have to suffer the indignity of a free vote; his election was theoretically based upon the suffrage of the freemen of London, but in practice it was arranged by the mayor, aldermen and senior councillors. More was now part of the hierarchy which promoted him, of course, and the role of ‘burges’ was becoming increasingly important. The accounts of the chamberlain of London show that ‘extraordinary’ expenses and clothing allowances were liberal; when the London MPs met in a parliament at Cambridge, for example, their staff included ‘a steward, butler, cook and kitchen boys’.
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More’s experience in civic and mercantile matters, as well as his reputation as a lawyer, would have given him authority in the ‘Common House’, where matters of taxation and subsidy were pre-eminent. But ‘yong More’ may also have been chosen because of his amicable relations with king and council.

He was one of some three hundred members of the Commons, who generally assembled in the chapter house of Westminster Abbey. Parliament met only irregularly over the years—it had last been summoned six years before—and the duties of its members were not arduous. They convened between eight and eleven in the morning, over a period of approximately four weeks. The chapter house was filled with merchants, knights of the shire, citizens, burgesses, lawyers and landowners; anyone who wished to speak walked to a lectern in the middle of the room and addressed his colleagues. At the end of each session, the Speaker summarised the various arguments and proffered his own advice about how best to proceed. He might then crave audience with the lords temporal and spiritual, sitting in Westminster, where he would present the arguments of their inferiors. There might be supplications, or petitions, or the rehearsal of grievances, or remonstrances about taxation. But if it was still in theory a petitionary rather than a legislative body, the Commons was now also originating bills to be amended or passed. There survives a drawing of the parliament chamber itself, with the bishops, abbots, archbishops and lords seated in due order in a rectangular-shaped area; the judges sit on woolsacks in the centre, while two clerks are seen kneeling with pen and parchment in hand. The Speaker of the Commons stands behind a barrier and addresses them.

The parliament of 1510, which More attended, had been called by Henry VIII just a few months after his accession to the throne; it met on 21 January, and continued until the last week of February. The most important consideration was, as always, finance. There were various other bills, on the limits of prosecution and against justices of assize as well as technical matters of ‘escheat’ and ‘traverse’, but the main business lay in the granting of customs duties to the king; money was also given to his Household and Wardrobe. As a representative of the London merchants Thomas More must have been urged to speak out against some of the sums involved, and it seems that there was some overt opposition to the king’s demands from the London burgesses, but by the end of the year Henry had prevailed. It was an early lesson for More in power, perhaps, but he was not averse to royal authority; the next time he returned to parliament, thirteen years later, it was as Henry’s appointee as Speaker.

Other official posts followed his entry to parliament. In the autumn
of 1510, for example, he was appointed as one of the two under-sheriffs of London, the judicial representative of the sheriff who presided over the Sheriffs’ Court. It was convened at the Guildhall on Thursday mornings, on a raised stage at the east end of the Hall. (More was also in charge of the ‘Poultry Compter’, a common gaol situated to the north of Bucklersbury and only a few yards from his own house.) In the Guildhall itself More dealt with the cases involving ‘foreigners’, an unhappy term for those Londoners who were not freemen as well as people from the rest of the kingdom. He held the post for eight years and during that period he had to deal with every kind of crime and offence—robbery, rape, assault, vagabondage and arson among them. He was in the middle of London’s ‘low life’ and encountered a noisome and pestilential environment. He wrote once, with some conviction, of the taverns and bathhouses, the public toilets and barbers’ shops, used by servants, pimps, whores, bath-keepers, porters and carters, all of them swarming among the streets. There was an epidemic of what seems to have been influenza in the year that More began his duties, and plague was always in the air; certainly the diet of poverty, disease and violence which he endured each week must have considerably hardened his character. It is sometimes surmised that his obscene vocabulary and bawdy humour are derived from Chaucer or the balladeers, but he could have found them closer to home. He left only brief allusions to his time among the condemned men and women of London. There was a thief who, sentenced to death, stole a purse at the very bar of the court. When asked the reason, since he was due to be hanged the next morning, he replied that ‘it didde hys heart good to be lorde of that purse one nyght yet’.
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In a long attack upon Luther, More ruefully compares the German reformer to the whores who, when accused of some offence, reply
‘impudenter’
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(‘You’re a liar!’). These were Londoners whom he knew at first hand.

In a description of More’s post Erasmus noted that he had a reputation for quick and fair decisions; it seems that no one promoted London justice more effectively and, in addition, More often remitted the fees which litigants were generally obliged to pay. As a result he was held in the highest affection by the City.
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This might simply be regarded as friendly flattery, but the evidence of More’s later career as judge and Lord Chancellor corroborates Erasmus’s testimony. Erasmus believed
that More’s responsibilities were not particularly onerous, largely because the Sheriffs’ Court met only once a week. But as under-sheriff More played several different roles. He acted as legal adviser on various city bodies—perhaps the most important being concerned with the maintenance and administration of that great urban thoroughfare, London Bridge—and he acted as the representative for London at the Westminster courts of justice. It also seems likely that he played some part in the court of the Lord Mayor, where he would be asked to consider matters of maritime law and Roman law. His son-in-law wrote, with some truth, that ‘there was at that tyme in none of the princes courtes of the lawes of this realme, any matter of importans in controversie wherein he was not with the one parte of Councell’.
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Of course More was following familial precedent and so the duties were not unknown to him; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Graunger, had been a sheriff of London, and his father had been a member of the same City bodies as More himself. There was one other, less happy, precedent. Sir Edward Dudley, member of the old king’s council, had also once served as under-sheriff of London. In the month before More himself took up that office, Dudley was beheaded on Tower Hill. Such was the way of this world, as More had already come to know it.

CHAPTER XIV
A JOLLY MASTER-WOMAN

ESPITE More’s increasing public duties the Old Barge had developed into a scholarly household in the spirit of, if not upon the same scale as, the academies of Italy. One of its members was congenitally restless, however, and in the spring of 1511 Erasmus travelled to Paris in order to arrange the publication of
Moriae encomium.
He was on occasions also absent-minded and eventually recalled that he had left some books, borrowed from John Colet, in his
‘cubiculum’
or study in Bucklersbury. So he quickly wrote to another scholar living with the More family, Andrew Ammonius. Ammonius was an Italian, who earned his living first as Latin secretary to Lord Mountjoy and then to the king. He and the Dutchman traded complaints about English houses and English manners; they grumbled about draughts, bad wine and offensive smells. But they had not refused More’s hospitality, and now Erasmus asked Ammonius to remind their host that the books had to be returned to their owner. It is a measure of More’s own relation to the household that Erasmus did not write to him directly: he knew that he was too busy.