The Life of Thomas More (27 page)

In reply to this letter from his colleague and companion, Ammonius sent the greetings of More and his household to Erasmus. Jane More was affable and the whole family in good health. But then something happened. Three months later Jane More, at the age of twenty-two, was dead. The cause of her death is not certainly known. It might have been the plague, or the sweating sickness, or influenza, or any of the other feverish disorders which visited London; an allusion in the letters of Erasmus, however, suggests that she died in childbirth together with the new-born child. This seems likely, since her pregnancies were frequent and regular. She was buried in St Stephen Walbrook by the parish
priest, John Bouge, who took up the story: ‘within a month after, he came to me on a Sunday at late night and there he brought me a dispensation to be married the next Monday without any banns asking’.
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More had been given especial permission by a friendly churchman to marry quickly, but there is no reason to interpret his rapid action in an unfavourable light. This was not an age of individual romance and it was not uncommon for a man to have two wives in relatively quick succession—or, indeed, for a woman to take two husbands in a similar manner. But this has not prevented More’s detractors from such comments as ‘he mourned her [Jane] in a wedding garment’.
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He was an intensely practical as well as a decisive man; he had a young family to care for as well as a household to maintain, and really had no choice but to find a helpful partner.

Alice More, or ‘Dame Alice’ as she has come to be known, has always been a stock figure of fun for More’s biographers. The family version of their courtship introduces her in a characteristic light. More is supposed to have approached her on a friend’s behalf, but she replied: ‘Your wooing will speed better if you do it on your own account, Mr More. Go tell your friend what I have said.’
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It is highly improbable, but it reflects the familiar image of Dame Alice as a plain-speaking and perhaps imperious lady who might have ‘caught’ innocent More unawares. Certainly he himself seems to have encouraged the impression that he had married a woman whose temperament lay somewhere between the Wife of Bath and Noah’s Wife in the guild pageants. He repeats anecdotes of his unsuccessful attempts to tutor her in the more abstruse disciplines: she pretended to listen to his account of the lack of motion at the centre of the planetary sphere, for example, but ‘she nothyng wente about to consyder hys wordes but as she was wont in all other thynges, studyed all the whyle nothynge ellys, but what she myghte saye to the contrary’.
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She later borrowed her maid’s spinning-wheel and declared that any stone thrown through it ‘wolde gyue you a patte vpon the pate that it wolde make you clawe your hed’.
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On another occasion More was attempting to teach his children the properties of a straight line, but Dame Alice called them into the hall and pointed to a wooden beam. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘is a line.’
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As More told her himself, ‘I neuer found you willyng to be rulid yet.’
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According to Cresacre More, he called her ‘a iollie Maister-woman’,
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all bedecked in finery
’with strayt bracyng in her body to make her mydle small’.
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In More’s anecdote he tells her, ‘Forsoth madame if god give you not hell, he shall do you greate wronge.’
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Yet ‘somewhat in dede he stode in awe of her’ and at one example of her somewhat strident manner ‘he durst not laugh a lowde nor say nothing to her’.
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All the evidence suggests, however, that they did make each other laugh and the testimony of one of More’s own stories may have a homely application. A wife came back from confession and said: ‘I purpose now therfor to leve of all myn old shrewdnes & begyn evyn a fresh.’ Yet her undertaking is succeeded by a remark that ‘she said yt in sport to make her husband laugh’.
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More knew Alice Middleton long before he decided to marry her; it is likely that he was acquainted with her even before he met his first wife.
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Her first husband, John Middleton, had been a wealthy silk merchant who was part of the Merchant of the Staple; he was a member of the Mercers’ Company, therefore, of which More himself was also a freeman. It is inconceivable that they did not know each other, especially since More would already have been well aware of Alice. Her family owned a manor and estates in Essex, where their neighbours were the Colts—when Jane Colt was three, Alice was twenty-one. Alice was a member of the Arden family and was related to Owen Tudor, great-grandfather of Henry VIII. Her own grandfather had been a serjeant-at-law, just like John More, and such connections ensured that Thomas More knew of Alice’s character before he married; it is precisely why he did marry her.

Alice Middleton was, in other words, a good prospect for any man rising in the world. On the death of her merchant husband, she had become a considerable heiress with estates in Essex, Yorkshire and elsewhere. It is often suggested that this apparent termagant was also much older than the innocent and victimised More; in fact she was eight years senior to her new husband, who was already in his thirty-third year. But no doubt she offered a sharp contrast to the young and apparently docile
(‘facillima’
) Jane More; she was of a grand family, technically an heraldic heiress, and she was of independent means. She was forceful, witty, practical and efficient; more significantly, she was faithful to her bewildering husband even to the end. She was one of those women of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries who defy categorisation; far from being oppressed by what we might now term a male-dominated
and hierarchical society, their strong characters were recognised and appreciated. Andrew Ammonius and Erasmus seem to have delighted in mocking her, but only behind her back. Ammonius, in cautious Greek, called her ‘a hook-nosed harpy’.
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Erasmus described her as unyielding and, even more insultingly, after only eight years of marriage, as approaching old age.
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No doubt she suffered the whims or demands of her husband’s guests with less compliance than the much younger Jane; she had been brought up among gentry and businessmen and may not have been impressed by wandering scholars. It is unlikely that she could converse in Latin, either, or bother to understand it. More is supposed to have described her as neither pretty nor young;
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once again one must assume that he wished to minimise any intimacy, sexual or otherwise, which he shared with her. The business of running a household seems to have been conceived as a duty and obligation rather than a pleasure but it is also likely that, in the case of Alice More, he did not wish to reveal how large and forceful a role she came to play in his life and later career.

They were married in the early autumn of 1511 in the parish church of St Stephen Walbrook. The service was similar to that of More’s first wedding but, since both partners had been married before, there was no blessing of union. The marriage seems to have been happy enough, even according to Erasmus; he speaks of the Mores’ domestic peace, and remarks that More had persuaded his wife to practise upon the lute, the lyre and the recorder.
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The contemporary humanist Richard Pace recalls that More learned to play the lute with his wife. It is a pleasant picture of familial harmony. Alice More participated not just in music-lessons, however, and More relates how she enthusiastically entered discussions on church matters—to the extent that she would let a meal wait rather than miss an argument.
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On one occasion she took the trouble of checking a heretic’s apparent quotation from the gospels and discovered that it was not there.
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So she was shrewd, as well as interested. The surviving portrait of her, after Hans Holbein, shows a middle-aged woman expensively dressed and ornamented in the fashion of the day. She holds a devotional manual, but seems to be entertaining some private and amusing thought; her nose is large, even slightly protuberant, but she has the broad forehead which was a Renaissance token of female beauty. More alludes to the ‘payne she toke in strayte
byndyng vpp her here to make her a fayre large forhed’
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and in another place refers to a woman who prides herself upon ‘her brode forehead’ but is better known for ‘her crooked nose’.
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He was an ironical, if not sarcastic, husband.

There are also hints of quarrels; More writes of the desire to enter a monastery ‘when our wyues are angry’
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and in a letter to a friend he remarks that, if you have a wife, you will never be free of trouble.
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But there must have been a large element of playfulness here, at least as much as is exhibited in the last phrase of a letter from More to Erasmus. The Dutch scholar had wished Dame Alice a long life—for which, More says, my wife thanks you since it will give her more time to be
‘molesta’
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or vexatious. Yet even here there is a suggestion of the old tale of the wife as shrew, and he seems unwilling to describe his private affairs in terms other than those of convention. The sermons and tales of the period are filled with images of garrulous or disobedient wives; ‘over much spekynge’
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and quarrelling were constantly cited as the characteristics of women. There was also the stock figure of the widow who takes care to dress in the fashions of the day. And of course ‘Dame Alice’, as More’s wife was known, is also the name of the Wife of Bath, who displays all these female propensities to their utmost extent. That is why Alice More has been generally treated as if she were a literary character, with the salient addition that More himself initiated and encouraged the process both in his letters and in his printed works.

The family in Bucklersbury had been quickly and securely reconstructed; it was indeed one of the most important aspects of More’s life. Erasmus depicted the household as one of peace and amity, with More himself as the benign agent of harmony. His eldest daughter, Margaret, said that she had seen her father angry only twice—they must have been striking occasions to be so firmly retained in her memory. More might not have wished to accept all the praise for such a well-tempered and well-ordered family, however, since on one occasion he wrote of the spirit which maintained household peace.
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It might be noted that
‘familia’
described the residents of a monastery as well as of more secular households. Certainly he created his own family as if it were a pious community of souls, regularised by method and ordered by discipline. There were prayers each morning and evening in which the entire household joined; at table, passages of sacred scripture and biblical
commentary were read aloud for the edification of family and guests. No games of dice or cards, or any form of gambling, were permitted among servants or children. The sexes were also kept segregated; male and female servants slept in different quarters of the house and More ensured that they were fully occupied at all times. On holy days everyone was awoken, in the middle of the night, for the appropriate Office. He might be said to have organised the household as a form of lay monastery following the liturgical cycle. He was also obeying the precepts of those who taught the rules of the ‘mixed life’; Walter Hilton, for example, considered it a divine commandment to keep ‘a good household in good Christian order and fashion’.
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In
The City of God
Augustine had extolled the ‘ordered peace’ and ‘domestic harmony’ of a true Christian household, and in particular emphasised that ‘a man has a responsibility for his own household’.
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But there is no doubt that, even by sixteenth-century standards, the family at Buckletsbury was carefully and consciously controlled. Family life and public life were not to be separated; both were suffused with the same spirit of duty.

It was predominantly a household of females. Alice More brought one daughter with her from her marriage to the silk merchant (a second had died two or three years previously) and of course More had three daughters of his own. A few months after his second marriage he obtained the wardship of another young girl, Anne Cresacre; she had inherited estates as well as income, and was therefore a suitable candidate for More’s affluent and increasingly well-connected family. More, as guardian, was in sole charge of her property until she came of age; shortly after that climacteric she would marry More’s only son.

More was deeply interested in women; clearly there was some sexual component to his attachment, but his concerns were more profound and persistent than that lust which he tried to slake with prayer and penitence. It could fairly be said, for example, that he was the first Englishman seriously to consider the education of women, whom he considered not a jot less intelligent or scholarly than men. But his opinion, and practice, should be set in context. As well as the stock image of the woman as the source of sin (the ‘Queanes’ and ‘Kits’ of the Southwark brothels testified to that) there was an equally strong tradition of female virtue and holiness. The extensive cult of Mariolatry encouraged attention to the female role in the life of piety, but female saints were
also venerated; there were holy nuns and female recluses who completed this picture of sanctity. It has sometimes been suggested that the central role of women in the worship of the Church meant that, in Catholic England, women were treated with more respect and seriousness than they ever were after the Reformation. There were certainly some powerful women in late medieval society; Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, was perhaps the single greatest benefactress of education in the period. The wives of merchants were allowed to continue with their husbands’ trade and could also become officers of their guild. But the status of a few women should not be misinterpreted. The legislation against ‘scolds’ and the proclamation at one time of crisis that husbands should prevent their wives from ‘babble and talk’ together,
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suggests that they were the oppressed sex. It was also taken for granted that a man was allowed to beat his wife, as long as he used a stick ‘no thicker than his thumb’.
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