The Life of Thomas More (30 page)

OW, in his early thirties, More was always occupied. He professed himself to be a bad correspondent because of his work and his duties in the city; the impression he gave was of one thoroughly absorbed in the business of the world. Andrew Ammonius reported, for example, that More was with the Archbishop of Canterbury
‘quotidie’
(‘every day’);
¹
the nature of their transactions is not known, but they must have been of some importance, in a city where the Church was the most powerful landowner and employer. More himself was steadily gathering wealth and property; he decided to take the whole of the Old Barge on a lease from the Mercers and he also purchased some land in Essex. His more formal City business can be partly reconstructed. In the early months of 1512, for example, he was one of a deputation going ‘to the Kynges counsell to knowe their pleasure for Bysket etc. for the Kynge’.
²
From the affairs of bakers he went on to those of the fishmongers, whom he assisted in negotiations, and in the same year ‘yong More’ appeared before the House of Lords with the wardens of ‘all craftes’; they went on a barge to Westminster, where More was one of the principal parties ‘to speke and make aunswere’ for the London guilds.
³
He was also involved in negotiations with the Duke of Buckingham and the Bishop of Norwich over the right of certain tradesmen to participate in City government. Nor had his work for the Mercers noticeably decreased; he was one of eight negotiators ‘whiche the compeny of the Stapull have electe & chosen to haue Communicacion with the merchauntes adventerers’.
⁴
More’s role would have been that of an arbitrator or legal representative trying to conclude an agreement in complex negotiations. It was said of his practice as a lawyer that he always attempted to persuade opposing parties
to agree in advance, thereby avoiding a lawsuit, and he seems to have been preoccupied with the maintenance of harmony and good order. He was also made a commissioner for sewers, covering the long stretch of Thames bank between East Greenwich and Lambeth. His responsibilities comprised such matters as routine maintenance and the avoidance of flooding, but the riverside area included the noisome Long Southwark and Short Southwark (better known today as Tooley Street) as well as the Hospital of St Thomas the Martyr, and there were also real questions of public health to be considered. More, with his connection to Linacre and his deep interest in medical scholarship, was perhaps the first commissioner to deal with such matters in a practical and orderly way.

His legal business was, in the meantime, flourishing. In 1515 he was appointed the senior ‘Lent’ reader of Lincoln’s Inn, where, beginning on the first Monday of that season, he would once again lecture in Law French on legal statutes. He had been made a ‘Double Reader’, an appointment that usually preceded the elevation to serjeant-at-law. It was an honour ‘to which few but rare and singular Lawyers doe euer attaine’,
⁵
and with it More’s legal career was assured: there was every reason to suppose that he would eventually become a ‘Judge of the Lawe’.
⁶
His own practice was eminently successful; as well as being involved in most major cases, he also engaged in the general law business of the day. The case of
Broughton
v.
Thorneton
(1511) includes a record of
‘Thomam More eruditem in lege’
being retained in a dispute over maintenance.
⁷
In his prefatory letter to
Utopia
, More humbly excused the weaknesses of the book on the grounds that he was always involved in legal business, as arbitrator, or counsel, or under-sheriff.
⁸

He had a chamber in Lincoln’s Inn and, such was his name and fame, he had no need to resort like many of his colleagues to the pillars of St Paul’s where new business was to be found. No record of his pleadings has survived, but he has left evidence of his style in certain published disputations. We may imagine him in one of the courts of Westminster Hall, on a floor spread with rushes mixed with cloves and crushed herbs; all around him was the noise of argument and debate, with the rustling of papers and the mending of pens, the hurried consultations and the sporadic abuse from prisoners who were sometimes brought in cages to the Hall itself. More would have worn the ‘party coloured’
gown of the barrister with stripes of light blue, or green, or brown. He stood at the bar before the judges, or beside a table covered with papers, writs, seals and subpoenas.
‘Quaeso iudices diligenter attendite’
:
⁹
I ask you, judges, to listen carefully … Who would have believed it … Let us imagine … Who would have thought?… I request you again and again to be as attentive as possible … Let us look into the matter more carefully … I will provide you with very clear and sound arguments. And then, at the close,
‘Dixi’.
I have finished.

But his legal associations were not simply with Westminster Hall and his interests were wider than those of a common lawyer. At the end of 1514, for example, he was admitted as a member of Doctors’ Commons in Paternoster Row; this was a loose association of canon lawyers and civil lawyers involved in international and maritime affairs. It has been suggested that he joined this body, later known more formally as the College of Advocates, in order to prepare himself for the diplomatic and commercial ambassadorial career which soon followed. But Doctors’ Commons was also a convivial society that offered an opportunity to discuss affairs away from the press of business. Among those who met in that narrow street north of St Paul’s were John Colet, Andrew Ammonius and William Grocyn, any one of whom could have persuaded—or invited—him to join them. At precisely the point More was admitted, however, there were tokens and intimations of significant change in the application of canon law. One case, in particular, was an object of intense speculation among More’s colleagues.

The affair of Richard Hunne remained a source of polemic and controversy for more than thirty years. A convenient if not exact analogy might be with the Dreyfus scandal in France—not exact because it can plausibly be claimed that the Hunne imbroglio was the first indication of that great transformation in England which was to occur at the Reformation. Richard Hunne was a wealthy London tailor. His infant child, Stephen, died at the age of five weeks; the rector of the parish in Whitechapel where he was buried, Thomas Dryffeld, asked in traditional fashion for the dead baby’s christening robe as a ‘mortuary’ gift, but Hunne refused to make this customary offering. A year later he was summoned to Lambeth Palace, where Cuthbert Tunstall—the chancellor of the diocese—declared him to be at fault. Still Hunne refused to pay the ‘mortuary’. Two significant events followed. At the end of that
year, when he entered his parish church of St Margaret in Bridge Street for Vespers, the priest formally excommunicated him with the words ‘Hunne, thowe arte accursed and thow stondist accursed’;
¹⁰
not only was Hunne exiled from the life of the community, but he was also in peril of losing his own soul within the perpetual flames of hell. But Hunne struck back. He accused the priest of slander and then issued a writ of praemunire against Dryffeld and his assistants. Praemunire was a late fourteenth-century provision which maintained the rights of the king and the common law courts against the Pope and the clerical courts; in essence by involving praemunire Hunne was claiming that the ecclesiastical authorities had no right to claim his property, the christening robe, with perhaps the further claim that by being tried in Lambeth Palace he had been brought before ‘a foreign and illegal bar’.
¹¹
The king and his judges, not the Pope and his representatives, should be the final arbiter of English rights.

This was a vivid anticipation of later struggles, of course, but the Hunne case had its own sensational outcome. Hunne was next accused of heresy—both of protecting a known heretic and of possessing heretical books in English. On the face of it this might seem a fabricated charge to discredit Hunne’s resort to praemunire, but evidence exists that he was one of those London merchants who supported (and even espoused) Lollardy. His wife’s father had been a proselytiser of that radical cause, so close in many respects to early Protestantism, and it seems likely that Hunne had originally challenged the right of ‘mortuary’ precisely because of his Lollard or Wycliffite sympathies. He was arrested and imprisoned within the Lollards’ Tower in the west churchyard of St Paul’s. But before any conclusion had been reached, on the matters of slander or praemunire, he was found dead in his cell. Although the church authorities declared that he had hanged himself, rumours spread that, in the words of John Foxe, ‘his neck was broken with an iron chain, and he was wounded in other parts of his body, and then knit up in his own girdle’.
¹²
A coroner’s inquest was held, which concluded that Hunne had been murdered by the Bishop of London’s chancellor, Dr Horsey, as well as by the sumner and bell-ringer of St Paul’s.

Huge consternation and uproar followed as a result of this verdict. The furore was deepened when the Bishop of London declared Hunne
to be a heretic, posthumously, and ordered that his corpse be taken to Smithfield and ceremonially burned. The ramifications went much deeper than the death of one man. After numerous disputes in parliament and convocation, it became clear that the death of Hunne raised questions about the privilege of clerics to be tried only by the spiritual courts. Could Dr Horsey escape secular justice? The details of the statutes and precedents were so intricate that the king himself initiated a series of great debates, in the newly improved Baynard’s Castle by the Thames, on the Hunne case and its consequences. The lords temporal and spiritual, as well as the judges of the realm and other interested parties, listened to conflicting arguments and testimony. Yet it was the king’s silence which prevailed. He refused to respond to a request that the whole matter should be laid before the Pope in Rome and, by insisting that his own traditional powers should in no manner be abridged, he dismissed any suggestion that praemunire should be lifted; the minor clerical orders were, therefore, still in peril of being surrendered to the secular courts. But the decisions had this further consequence. If papal jurisdiction could be exercised only after royal licence, then essentially the Church could be reformed only by consent of king or parliament. The young king had in the plainest fashion asserted his own authority and had thereby threatened the powers of Pope and Church.

More never forgot the Hunne affair, and at a much later date provided an elaborate defence of the Church’s role. He was also involved with the matter in a more immediate context. He had been present at one of the conferences called by the king in Baynard’s Castle, where the question of Hunne’s death had been discussed; he had also been present at the ecclesiastical judgment given in St Paul’s by the Bishop of London, where Hunne’s books and body were ordered to be burned in Smithfield. Indeed, he was so engaged in the case that, as he wrote later, ‘I knowe it frome toppe to too that I suppose there be not very many men that knoweth it moche better’.
¹³
He provides a colourful account of the proceedings in Baynard’s Castle, for example, which evince a mixture of formality and comedy possible only in a culture where ceremonial order is so much taken for granted that it can be breached without offence. The lords temporal and spiritual had been told that there was one man who claimed that ‘he coulde go take hym by the sleue that kylled Hunne’;
¹⁴
but, as it transpired, each witness claimed to
have been told this story by a neighbour. Eventually the supposed infallible claimant turned out to be ‘an Egypcyan’—a gypsy woman—who had been lodged in Lambeth but had now gone overseas. As More writes in the colloquial speech of which he was a master, ‘here was a grete post well thwyted [whittled] to a puddynge prycke’.
¹⁵
A second witness claimed to be able to tell, on sight, if a hanged man had committed suicide; but his testimony collapsed under questioning when it was discovered that he had only ever seen one such sight in his life, and ‘that was an Irysshe fellowe called croke shanke whome he had sene hangynge in an olde barne’.
¹⁶
And, as More reports, ‘the lordys laughed well’.
¹⁷

But More is also at pains to make light work of it. His principal concern is to defend the Church authorities against any and every attack, so he suggests that Hunne did indeed hang himself when he realised that his praemunire suit was about to fail and that he was also to be convicted of heresy. His vice, More believed, was ‘pryde’,
¹⁸
which shrank back from publicly bearing a bundle of sticks as a mark of the heretic and symbol of the Smithfield fire. On Horsey and the other supposed conspirators to murder, More rightly points out that they were proven not guilty; but the circumstances of the acquittal were somewhat obscure and Horsey was quickly removed from London. There is no reason to believe that More was deliberately misrepresenting the truth; he was only doing what was natural to him, in putting a lawyer’s gloss upon ambiguous circumstances.