The Life of Thomas More (32 page)

It is significant, too, that the most elaborate passages of More’s narrative are conceived as speeches; the merits of sanctuary for the royal children are the subject of long debate, for example, while the right of Richard to be king is explained in a number of orations.
The History of Richard III
can be understood, then, as a lesson in the arts of disputation and rhetorical debate similar to those in which More engaged as a schoolboy and a scholar. But it is not a simple exercise for the school or university; More was always interested in practice and usage, rather than theory, and he has the humanist’s concern for persuasion and proper government. It would be absurd to claim that the Hunne case involving praemunire, and the military ambitions of the young Henry, prompted More to consider the life of an evil king; yet they were part of the unsettled conditions in which he chose to allude to the perils of false rhetoric and faulty statecraft. It was generally believed by contemporary
historians that monarchs such as Richard III could at least display, by contrast, ‘the Wisdom, Goodness, Prudence and Verity of their Predecessors’.
³³
In his grammatical work More was instructing those who might well be chosen to administer the government of the state: grammar was part of rhetoric, and rhetoric was part of public duty.

There are of course touches peculiar to More himself. He emphasises the role of London and London government in a manner not shared by other chroniclers of Richard III and, perhaps as a result, he deepens that vision of the world as stage which he had first gained from Lucian. He describes the ‘aldermenne in scarlette with fiue hundred horse of the citezens in violette’; he depicts ‘theues’ and ‘murtherers’ dwelling ‘in the verye bowelles’
³⁴
of the city. He knew, also, of the political rituals played out in the streets around him. When Richard pretends to take up the crown reluctantly, many of the people wondered at the guile but ‘they said that these matters bee Kynges games, as it were stage playes, and for the more part plaied vpon scafoldes. In which pore men be but ye lokers on. And thei yt wise be, wil medle no farther. For they that sometyme step vp and play w[ith] them, when they cannot play their partes, they disorder the play & do themself no good.’
³⁵
There is an irony here which cannot escape any observer of More’s career.

There is also a long divagation on the life of Mistress Shore, the concubine of Edward IV, not suitable in a history but useful in an exercise perhaps partly composed for his daughters. It may vaguely be based upon Sallust’s portrait of Sempronia in
Bellum Catilinae
—both are called
‘docta’
—but More’s is a far more charming and affectionate portrait of a woman of great grace and affability, able both to read and to write, the favourite of the king (and others besides) who ‘neuer abused to any mans hurt, but to many a mans comfort & relief’.
³⁶
She had once been considered one of the most beautiful and influential women in the kingdom: she was still living when More wrote his narrative, a creature ‘old lene, withered, & dried vp’ who had been reduced to beggary.
³⁷
Since Mistress Shore was the heiress of a wealthy merchant, this impoverished fate seems most unlikely;
³⁸
but it would provide a fitting conclusion to an educational homily. In any case it is a fine and moving character study, which inspired many writers and artists to portray her in subsequent centuries.

There are other episodes and events in More’s account which have
been equally influential, even if they have no claim to historical accuracy. There is a scene when Richard, about to embark upon one of his more murderous courses, charmingly asks the Bishop of Ely, ‘My lord you haue very good strawberies at your gardayne in Holberne, I require you let vs haue a messe of them.’
³⁹
The Bishop of Ely had at this time been John Morton, More’s earliest patron and benefactor. It is likely that Morton told him this story, although it is possible that More himself had admired the strawberries in that Holborn garden and had introduced them for light relief before a scene of butchery. It is the sort of detail that lingers in the memory, and Shakespeare borrows it for his more formal drama, when Richard once again asks: ‘My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn,/ I saw good strawberries in your garden there./ I do beseech you send for some of them.’
⁴⁰
This illustrates, if nothing else, the curious and often eccentric process of cultural inheritance, when an exercise in rhetoric can become a constituent of great drama eighty years later.

And then, even as More was composing
The History of Richard III
, the winter of military planning and diplomatic plotting was made glorious summer by the peace of August 1514 agreed between England and France. Julius II had died, not a moment too soon, and the emollient figure of Leo X had assumed the papacy. The old king of France had also died but his young successor, Francis I, renewed the treaty of peace. All seemed to be set fair. The city authorities asked More to deliver a Latin oration in welcome of the Venetian ambassador, Giustinian, and both men engaged in an elaborate rhetorical game of compliments. More’s stepdaughter made a very good marriage and his brother-in-law, John Rastell, moved down from Coventry and took a house near John More’s estate in Hertfordshire. And it was May-time. The parishes of London had their maypoles and dances in the day, stage plays and bonfires in the evening. On May Day itself the king and queen rode out from Greenwich Palace, and on their way were met by ‘Robin Hood’ with two hundred archers dressed in green garments; the royal pair were invited to dine in a wood near Shooters Hill where, to the sound of flutes and singing birds, organs and lutes, they feasted on venison and wine. So did Henry and Catherine ‘fetch in May’. There was less appetising fare to come.

CHAPTER XVI
THE BEST CONDITION OF A SOCIETY

HOMAS More’s journey to Utopia was by way of the Netherlands. In the spring of 1515, at the urgent request of the king’s council as well as the Merchant Adventurers, he was asked to join an English mission which was being despatched to Flanders in order to renegotiate commercial and diplomatic treaties. More’s presence was needed because this was not a simple matter of renewal—‘weightye matters and of greate importance’
¹
were involved at a time when the trade in wool between England and the Low Countries was being seriously threatened by disagreements over tolls, taxes and ports. Commerce was also affected by the games of rulers. The young regent of the Netherlands, Charles, had recently entered an ‘alliance and amity’ with the French and the merchants of London feared that if no new ‘intercourse’ was agreed their ships would be seized and their goods impounded. It can only be assumed that More had become a master of the intricacies of commercial law, of the ‘Sewestoll’ and ‘toll of the Hound’, since he was summoned by the council at ‘short warnyng’.
²
The day after he was given his commission for ‘the kinges ambasset in to Flaunders’, the City authorities allowed a deputy to take over the ‘Rowme & office’ of under-sheriff in his absence. Indeed, he and his colleagues on the mission, Cuthbert Tunstall and Richard Sampson, received such short notice that ‘our tyme was very lityll and skarse to prepayr our self’
³
for what turned out to be a long stay in a foreign country.

They began their journey on 12 May, riding down to the coast and there taking ship across the North Sea. We may assume that they boarded one of the small English merchant ships of the period with a single square sail or perhaps, if they were in luck, the larger three-mast
variety. The pilot knew the stars, the coastline, the phases of the moon, and used his ‘lead and line’ to measure the depths of the water; the master had his rolled manuscript of ‘Routes from Silley and England into Flaunders’
⁴
as well as his ‘compus’ and his ‘dyall’. More and his colleagues would have travelled together with a cargo of cloth or wool or animal hides (even, perhaps, live animals). It was customary for the traveller to take his own bed and chest with him, together with rations of bread, meat, salt and beer. He was also advised to travel with a servant, though More took one of the members of his household, John Clement, who had studied at St Paul’s. More rarely mentioned his travels in foreign lands—he was not a private writer in any sense—but there is perhaps the slightest token of his voyage in his account of a sea ‘sore wrought, & the waves rose very high’ while the traveller ‘lay tossid hether & thether’.
⁵

The party arrived in Bruges six days later and prepared to enter the business of negotiations. Behind the image of the Christ child in Van Eyck’s
The Virgin of the Chancellor Rolin
, the Flemish painter has depicted a fifteenth-century city. There has been speculation about its original, from Lyon to Liege, but it can best be seen as the image of a city such as Bruges itself, where the artist lived for ten years—with its churches, and guildhalls, and towers, spiralling into the air. It represents all the splendour and monumentality of a great mercantile centre. When More stayed in Bruges he was in a city of wide streets and grand houses, of market halls and mansions, of canals and great ramparts, of richly decorated shrines and elaborate churches; yet all of them were already touched by intimations of decline or decay. Bruges was a city whose time had gone; by the late fifteenth century its river had silted up and no large ship could reach it. He and his colleagues were formally met and greeted by the
‘princeps’
of the city as well as some of the regent’s negotiators—chief among whom was Georges de Themsecke, a lawyer and orator who was known to Erasmus as a learned scholar. The affairs of men were being conducted by humanists, even as their princes squabbled, and More was thoroughly at ease with such professional administrators.

For the first two weeks there was nothing to be done at all; some of Charles’s commissioners had not yet arrived in Bruges and the city authorities themselves were proving particularly recalcitrant. When the
full council for the negotiations had assembled, the business was woefully protracted and desultory; according to the English contingent the Netherlanders deliberately misinterpreted earlier treaties and refused to specify their exact demands. More remained self-possessed and, according to one participant, demolished certain arguments ‘in measured tones and with a calm countenance’.
⁶
But it was clear that his opponents were delaying for tactical reasons and it was feared that they were waiting for the formal opportunity to seize English ships and cargoes. More, for once in his life, was not wholly pressed by business: so it was that this unwelcome but salutary departure from the daily routine of his London life created the conditions from which his most famous and inventive book sprang. He always wished to be busily engaged and if there were a hiatus in his activities he would simply set to work on something else. Why not a treatise, like the
Moriae encomium
of his friend?