The Life of Thomas More (36 page)

More was also concerned with the spread of learning in a more private sense; throughout the spring and summer of 1516 he was trying to complete
Utopia.
Erasmus had visited London briefly at the end of July, and stayed with the More household in Bucklersbury. He found the
presence of Alice More somewhat forbidding on this occasion, however; he confessed to Andrew Ammonius that she might have found him a pitiably decrepit guest,
¹⁵
and he left after a few days. He was preoccupied with his recension of the New Testament, which had just been published in Basle, but there was time to discuss the progress of
Utopia.
And, when Erasmus went to Rochester, where he stayed with John Fisher for ten days before returning to the Low Countries, More rode down in order to see him again. Clearly there was an intimacy of purpose between them that goes beyond the bland formalities of many humanist friendships. But their letters throughout this period are not filled with apothegms of wisdom, whether secular or religious; they are, instead, preoccupied with money, preferment and plans for publication. More, especially, shows a practicality and efficiency which were so much part of his life in the world; he is even caught again, on two occasions, telling what he called ‘small lies’ in order to expedite his affairs.

More’s visit to Erasmus preceded the no less welcome arrival of
Utopia.
The Dutch scholar received the manuscript just three weeks later, after his return to Antwerp. It was then entitled
Nusquama
(‘Nowhere’) and More said, with perhaps false modesty, it was nowhere written well. But he was genuinely anxious about its reception, and in a number of somewhat plaintive letters he urged Erasmus to discover what Tunstall and Gillis, among others, thought of it. He enclosed a letter to Peter Gillis with the original manuscript, which became the dedicatory epistle to
Utopia.
In turn Erasmus persuaded other northern European humanists to add their own letters and tributes, so that the treatise on an ideal commonwealth might have the best possible introduction to the world of humanist learning. He also supervised every stage of the book’s preparation and publication. He edited it—it might even have been Erasmus, rather than More, who changed the title to
Utopia
—and may have added certain of its marginalia. He arranged the text for printing and, approximately two months after he received it, gave it to Theodoricus Martens of Louvain. The book itself emerged from the press by the end of that year, small in size but eventually large in reputation. More told Erasmus that he was awaiting its arrival with as much expectation as a mother for her son who has travelled overseas.

In many of his letters during this period, to Erasmus and others, More professed himself to be so pressed by urgent matters that he had no time to write or think;
¹⁶
he was ‘distringor’
¹⁷
or distracted. His continual attendance with the council in the Star Chamber meant that, according to Erasmus, he was being carried away by the tempest of public service.
¹⁸
But he was also still under-sheriff of London, while at the same time pursuing cases for private clients. He was asked by the Mercers for his ‘advice and counsel’
¹⁹
on legal matters, for example, and it is reported by his first biographer that he acted on behalf of the papal interest when one of the Pope’s ships was seized at Southampton. He was also asked to adjudicate in a boundary dispute between the parishioners of St Vedast and the Saddlers’ Guild, who had adjacent premises in Forsters Lane, and in the same year he was sitting on commissions variously concerned with park lands, enclosures and the maintenance of yeomen. So he wrote of the hard grind
²⁰
of public life, and told Erasmus that he was being diverted from all learning by
‘forensibus litigiis’
(‘legal disputes’).
²¹

His work as under-sheriff, in particular, had not decreased. There was a drought in the autumn of 1516, and very little rain fell for nine months; this was a serious matter when so many used the water from the rivers and streams, from the Fleet and the upper reaches of the Walbrook, which flowed down into the City and its environs from the northern hills. Then, on 12 January 1517, a great frost descended upon London ‘in suche wise that no bote might goe betwixt London and Westminster all the terme tyme’.
²²
There were alterations in inner, as well as outer, weather. In the spring of 1516 a virulent form of the sweating sickness emerged and for three years lingered in the city, breaking out with particular ferocity in the summer of 1517. Colet and Wolsey both suffered from it several times, but recovered; the king anxiously moved from place to place in order to avoid the contagion. More wrote to Erasmus that everyone was in a state of grief as well as danger and that many people were dying all over the city—More’s own household had been affected, although his wife and children were safe. After a fever of twenty hours, Andrew Ammonius died in that most difficult summer.
²³
There are numerous and rather lurid accounts of its symptoms. It killed most on the first day, sometimes within an hour or two;
it manifested itself by ‘a profuse sweat which dissolves the frame’
²⁴
and which smelt foully with ‘a great and a strong sauore’,
²⁵
as well as by extreme thirst, delirium and eventually the drowsiness that led to death.

Epidemic sickness was often considered as a harbinger of disease in other parts of the body politic; Polydore Vergil notes how the first appearance of the sweating sickness had been taken as a sign that the rule of the old king, Henry VII, was to be a harsh one—although Vergil himself believed that it was a token that Henry would have to govern ‘in the sweat of his brow’.
²⁶
Certainly, at this later date, a kind of fever or delirium visited the people of London for a time. In the spring of 1516 a notice was fixed to the main doors of St Paul’s and All Hallows, Barking, declaring that foreign merchants residing in London ‘brought wools to the undoing of Englishmen’;
²⁷
an attempt was made by the authorities to find the offender, principally by scrutinising the handwriting of every literate citizen. The complaints of city merchants against ‘aliens’ were perennial but then, in the following year, more decisive and dangerous action was taken.

A London broker (the word was in general use by this time), John Lincoln, approached the popular warden of the Franciscan community of Grey Friars by the City wall and asked if he would preach against the abuses of the foreign merchants; Henry Standish declined, but another priest obliged. During Easter week he delivered a sermon in the fields near St Mary Spital, in which he declared that ‘this land was given to Englishmen’.
²⁸
In the same period a mercer is reported to have threatened certain Lombard rivals that ‘by the Mass, we will one day have a day at you’.
²⁹
And that day came. There had been threats and insults directed against foreign merchants since the sermon in the Spital fields, and on 28 April some ‘aliens’ were attacked by apprentices in the London streets. All the reports suggested that there was to be a riot on May Day itself, and that the foreigners were to be murdered. There was also talk of freeing prisoners held in the compters of Poultry and Wood Street. At seven o’clock on the evening of 30 April, Thomas More attended a meeting of the City authorities in the Guildhall; as both under-sheriff of the City and a member of the king’s council, he was arguably the most important figure to deal with the encroaching crisis. From the Guildhall he rode either to Westminster or the cardinal’s dwelling, York Place, where he consulted with other members of the council. It was
decided that an immediate curfew should be ordered, and at 8.30 More came back to the Guildhall with that demand. The aldermen returned to their wards with the news that no citizen ‘should stirre out of his house, but to keep his doores shut, and his servants within’ until the next morning.
³⁰
But it may already have been too late. One city official tried to break up an apprentices’ sword game of ‘bucklers’ in Cheap-side, thereby creating a minor riot. By eleven o’clock that night a crowd of artisans, apprentices and children ran through Newgate Market and down St Nicholas Shambles, just to the north of St Paul’s churchyard; More with other officials met them at the corner of St Martin’s, and attempted to persuade them to disperse.

It is at this moment that drama, or popular legend, enters history. In a late sixteenth-century play,
Sir Thomas Moore
, one long passage has been ascribed to Shakespeare; it is concerned with this confrontation between More and the crowd at the corner of St Martin’s. He steps forward and calls out to the apprentices: ‘Good masters, hear me speak.’ More then goes on to calm the people with a homily on the need for order and obedience together with a pointed reference to the fact that, if they were banished, they would become in turn ‘straingers’ in a foreign city. His entreaties succeed and the apprentices declare that ‘Weele be ruld by you master moor.’
³¹
The evidence supports Shakespeare’s authorship of the fragment but, in any event, this dramatic episode confirms the importance of the event in London’s history and suggests the esteem in which More himself was held by its citizens; it is not often that a condemned traitor to his king is praised, some fifty years after his death, as a popular figure.

On this particular occasion, however, Shakespeare nodded. More’s attempts to calm the crowd succeeded momentarily but then some stones and clubs were hurled at the official party; one serjeant-at-arms was hit and shouted furiously, ‘Down with them!’ Thereupon a full riot ensued. The houses of foreigners were attacked and ransacked, especially those of the French, who in this period were particularly disliked, while several ‘straingers’ were injured. The sporadic violence and destruction continued until the early hours of the morning, but at five o’clock the earls of Shrewsbury and Surrey (together with other noblemen) rode through the streets of the city and restored order; three hundred were arrested and, on the following Monday, eleven were
sentenced. Four prisoners were to be hanged, drawn and quartered at various sites of London (two at the Standard in Cheapside, close to More’s house) and the other seven hanged at other positions in the city.

There was an appropriately theatrical sequel to the riots of May Day. The three hundred condemned men and women, with halters around their necks, were led in to the king’s presence at Westminster Hall; Henry sat upon a raised platform and listened as Cardinal Wolsey pleaded for their lives. He refused. Then all of them fell down upon their knees crying, ‘Mercy, gracious lord, mercy!’ The queen knelt, too, and begged her husband’s forgiveness for the unhappy offenders. Wolsey himself ‘besought his Majesty most earnestly to grant them grace’
³²
and, eventually, Henry consented to their pardon. Wolsey announced it to them with tears in his eyes; all of them took off their halters and threw them up to the roof of the hall. ‘They jumped for extreme joy,’ according to one witness and altogether ‘it was a very fine spectacle’.
³³
More, dressed in black for the solemn occasion, looked on.

But he was involved in foreign, as well as domestic, adventures. The affairs of Europe were like Mahomet’s tomb, suspended between heaven and earth; there was no open warfare but there was no general peace. There were intrigues, doubtful treaties and, as always, troubling rumours. It was in this atmosphere, in the summer of 1517, that More joined a diplomatic mission to Calais to negotiate about various commercial disputes that had arisen between the merchants of both countries, and to deal with questions of piracy on the seas where English and French seem to have been equally at fault. It was not an assignment that More welcomed. He was to reside in Calais for three months, dated from the beginning of September, and was to involve himself in the complicated processes of French law. There were also reports of plague in Calais. But his role as a member of the council incurred responsibility such as this and, before he left London, he asked the Mercers to report ‘any injuries or wrongs done unto them by Frenchmen’.
³⁴
He was soon complaining of the tedium involved in the negotiations, however, and letters to the council from More and the other commissioners—even in their incomplete state—are filled with detail. There are various references to ‘provisions’ and ‘ordinaunces’, ‘complayntis’ and ‘certeficacions’, ‘communycacions’ and
’quereles’.
³⁵
The favourites of kings, as Erasmus said ironically of More’s plight, can expect such advantages.

There were, however, genuine benefits. Soon after his arrival at Calais he received from Erasmus a diptych, which displayed painted images of Peter Gillis and of Erasmus himself on two wooden panels. It was a tribute to the friendship between the three men, which had in particular fostered the publication of
Utopia
, but it was also a celebration of humanist learning itself. Erasmus is the image of contemplative and scholarly life, while Gillis holds a letter from More and looks out into the world. This double portrait was painted by Quentin Matsys, then the most famous portraitist in Antwerp, whose extraordinarily delicate realism announced a profound and revolutionary change in portraiture; it was as though men and women were seeing themselves clearly for the first time. The fine nervous features of Erasmus seem momentarily at rest, as he writes with a reed pen his paraphrase of Romans;
³⁶
upon the shelf behind him is his
New Testament
as well as a copy of St Jerome’s Vulgate. Erasmus is indissolubly linked to that other great scholar, and the entire conception of Matsys’s portrait owes something to the orthodox images of St Jerome in his famous study (although the lion is missing). Here, in iconographic form, is the history of true scholarship. Gillis holds the letter from More in one hand, while the other rests lightly upon a copy of
Antibarbari
by Erasmus; volumes of Seneca and Suetonius lie on the shelves behind him. The references are clear enough, but what we also see upon the painted panels is that combination of startling realism and resonant historicism which was also characteristic of the new learning. That is what More meant when, in a set of verses, he praised Matsys as
‘Veteris nouator artis’
(‘the reviver of old art’).
³⁷