The Life of Thomas More (41 page)

That household was certainly flourishing and, in this period, being extended in the familiar Tudor way of marriage and alliance. His future biographer, William Roper, the son of an old family friend, lodged at Bucklersbury upon entering Lincoln’s Inn, and within three years was betrothed to Margaret. At the same time Sir John More was, apparently effortlessly, ascending the judicial hierarchy; he was knighted in 1518, the year in which his son became a councillor attendant, and two years later was promoted to the King’s Bench. Legal historians have suggested that his advancement owed as much to his son’s powerful position as to his own legal abilities; but the case cannot be proven. There were, in addition, wider connections between Bucklersbury and the public world. More’s brother-in-law, John Rastell, had come down from Coventry and had established himself as a printer and bookseller; he had
moved his shop from Paul’s Chains and was now conveniently placed at Paul’s Gate, by the archway into the churchyard. Rastell was equally involved in public affairs: he had arranged pageants on behalf of the City and had also played an important part in building English fortifications in France. But if he was a man of eminence, he was sometimes an unlucky one. He had planned and fitted an expedition to the New World, sailing with two ships from Gravesend in the summer of 1517; certain members of the crew, however, had no intention of voyaging to what Thomas More once called that ‘ferme lande and contynent, dyscouered and founden out wythin this fourty yeres laste passed’.
³²
They were happier with shorter, and generally piratical, voyages; so Rastell was left in Ireland, where he spent two years before returning to London as a litigant against them. The More family was directly involved in these incidents, since Sir John More had stood surety to the Crown for the voyage and now owed 250 marks.

Another member of the extended household was soon also enjoying public eminence, largely as a result of More’s own efforts. John Heywood had married John Rastell’s daughter, who was thus also More’s niece; in doing so, he had become part of the complicated structure which included Rastells and Ropers and Mores, and which would soon exert a formidable influence in law and religion. Soon after More had become a courtier attendant, Heywood was appointed as a groom of the royal household, denoted first as ‘synger’ and later as ‘pleyar of the virginals’.
³³
He ‘became noted to all witty men’, according to Anthony à Wood, and was ‘very familiar’ with Thomas More;
³⁴
no doubt their friendship sprang from the fact that Heywood was particularly esteemed ‘for the myrth and quicknesse of his conceits’.
³⁵
He also remained faithful to the Catholic religion until his death in 1580, and it is not surprising that More became his particular patron.

John Heywood and John Rastell shared another characteristic which throws an interesting light upon the More household. They were two of the first known English dramatists, writing plays and interludes which survive still. It has been suggested that Heywood was the first ‘proper’ English playwright, but there is a better case for suggesting that Rastell built the first ‘proper’ English stage. It was set up in Finsbury Fields and was close to those other London theatres which predate the Globe, the Theatre and the Curtain. The plays of Heywood are more substantial
and inventive than the interludes of Rastell, but they share an interest in disputation and debate of a kind derived from the educational methods of the period. Drama was still, in a sense, part of the rhetorical tradition of the universities and the legal Inns, and it is significant that the earliest English tragedy,
Gorboduc
, had its first performance at the Inner Temple. So it is likely that the scenes of court were succeeded by more domestic episodes when, in the hall of Bucklersbury, short dramas like Heywood’s later
Johan Johan
or
The Playe called the foure PP
were performed.
Johan
is concerned with the lubricious activities of a bad priest, while
The Playe
comments upon the trade in such false relics as the wedding cup of Adam and Eve and ‘the great toe of the Trinite’.
³⁶
These were the comic matters which moved More and his household to laughter, together with that continual ribald facetiousness which was a mark of London humour:

It is an apt quotation to put beside the image of More as the discreet and cautious counsellor.

CHAPTER XX
EQUES AURATUS

N the autumn of 1518, after the sporadic and inconclusive warfare of the previous years, Thomas Wolsey contrived a pact of universal peace which was generally known as the Treaty of London. His essential motive was to gain further honour for his prince and to establish England’s central importance in European affairs; but there can be little doubt that the craving for peace, so brilliantly conveyed by Erasmus, was also a main context for his actions. Yet the making of policy was inseparable from spectacle, and there were some wonderful moments of theatre. When the general treaty was celebrated in St Paul’s, Henry and Wolsey together with the legates from France ascended to the high altar where they simply whispered the articles of agreement; this was taken to mean by the Venetian ambassador that a proposed expedition against the Turks had been cancelled. Thomas More, now within the circle of power, would have known exactly what was happening. Once the ceremony was over, a dinner was held in the banqueting hall of York Palace, where the guests were surrounded by rich tapestries and great vases of gold and silver. Then, after dinner, they gambled with cards and dice.

The great game of nations continued with the betrothal of Henry’s daughter, aged two, to the infant dauphin of France. There were now two kings and an emperor in uneasy alliance—Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France, together with Charles V who was Holy Roman Emperor as well as the ruler of Burgundy and Spain—and soon negotiations and elaborate preparations were made for them separately to meet in sumptuous array. Thomas More’s role among the pomp and circumstance was as one of a small group charged to prepare treaties and to resolve outstanding disputes. With Pace and Tunstall, for example, he
was commanded in the spring of 1520 to negotiate with the representatives of Charles in separate diplomatic and commercial matters; he and his colleagues were designated as
‘consiliarii, oratores, procuratores, legati et commissarii’
,
¹
with each man appending his seal and signature to the final document in the chapel of Greenwich Palace. Even before the agreement had been concluded, More was ordered by the king to help in the preparations for Charles’s arrival at Canterbury. He then became one of Henry’s retinue which sailed to Calais in the early summer of that year for those negotiations with Francis I which have become known, iconically, as ‘The Field of Cloth of Gold’.

There is a painting of the scene, by an unknown artist, which gives some indication of the magnitude and magnificence of the occasion. Here are palaces and towers and gateways, adorned with great statues and painted devices, all of them fabricated for the occasion; here are fountains, pouring forth beer or wine, as well as artificial lakes and bridges. Here are great lines of foot-soldiers, as well as nobles and retainers, while in the distance can be seen vast tents and pavilions of richly painted cloth. The principal French pavilion was covered in gold brocade and azure velvet,
²
while its interior was decorated in a zodiacal display with all the ‘Orbes of the heauens’.
³
The English palace contained galleries, apartments and rooms on the grandest scale; its defending walls were of painted cloth, and some five thousand feet of glass were used in its construction. The kings of England and of France met in a valley which had been partially redesigned with artificial mounds; they approached each other with a retinue of more than two thousand men. Henry was covered in ‘fyne Golde in Bullion’,
⁴
and it was said that the French king was so dazzlingly arrayed that it was impossible to gaze upon him. There were also games and masques, dances and banquets, jousts where the contestants of the two nations sported various devices—the English bearing a ‘heart on fire’
⁵
which was being quenched by a watering can. There was a High Mass conducted by Wolsey, during which a fiery dragon (or, according to some reports, a eucharist) was launched into the sky. It was a great spectacle denoting peace, and More was at the centre of it. The foreign legates described him as
‘secretarius regius’
⁶
and his signature is to be seen on a treaty between Henry and Charles, who had met soon after the French negotiations in order to make further secret agreements of their own. There was also,
and typically, another family connection; More’s brother-in-law, John Rastell, had been responsible for devising many of the ornaments and astronomical devices of the English palaces and pavilions.

It could not have been altogether an unwelcome occasion for More, in any case, since he met other courtly humanists during the great displays. Erasmus had arrived as part of the retinue of Charles V—the ruler for whom he had once written
The Education of a Christian Prince
—and the great scholar and antiquarian Budé was similarly accompanying Francis I. More had already corresponded with the French humanist; Budé had been one of those who furnished
Utopia
with dedicatory epistles, and as a measure of his gratitude More sent him a pair of English dogs, probably mastiffs, or ‘Master-thiefs’, which had become something of a national symbol. He professed to be even more grateful for Budé’s treatise on ancient coinage,
De Asse
, which represented one of the first serious attempts to understand the true nature of classical civilisation. More himself collected ancient coins and seals as a visible token of the past, and in a letter to Budé he congratulated him for restoring the dead to life. But there were also the living to consider: Erasmus had brought with him to France a collection of polemical letters addressed to his opponent Edward Lee, which he probably gave to More on being formally reconciled with Lee in Calais itself.
⁷
So the accord of princes was matched by the union of humanists with, alas, equally fruitless results.