were specific grievances which up to a certain point he sought to
remedy. Without surrendering any of the privileges of his order, he
made in his own Legatine Courts a vast improvement on the practice of
the ordinary Ecclesiastical Courts. He did away with a considerable
number of small religious Houses whose condition was more or less of
a scandal. His visitations brought about improved discipline in many
of the larger Houses; some of his appointments, as to the Abbey at
Glastonbury, were notably admirable; in rejecting an unworthy abbess
for Wilton he braved the anger of the king at a time when he ran an
exceptionally heavy risk in doing so. Above all, he was fully alive
to the necessity of educating a new generation of clergy up to a high
standard; and to that end he created his great foundations of Ipswich
and Cardinal College (Christ Church), Oxford, carrying out on a much
more extensive scale what Dean Colet and Bishop Fox had set themselves
to do before him. His college was crippled and his school was wrecked
when he fell; but in this at least he deserves to be honoured by the
side of William of Wickham. Yet the name of William is hardly to be
coupled with those of Luther or Loyola. Wolsey was a real and sincere
patron of education; he had a sufficiently keen sense of order and
public decency to be a just judge and something of a disciplinarian;
but much more than this would have been required to make him a potent
moral force; and without being that he could not, even had he become
Pope, have affected the Reformation in a permanent manner, though he
might have modified its political course. He was the consummation
of the old school of political ecclesiastics. Probably he was never
so much as conscious that a moral revolution was in progress. What
he did know was that the political position of the Holy See, and of
the whole ecclesiastical system, was threatened, and his legatine
and Papal ambitions may fairly be attributed as much to a belief in
his own fitness to pilot the ship as to selfishly personal motives.
But the mere fact that, with the powers he did acquire and the vast
abilities he possessed, he yet accomplished practically nothing either
as a reformer or as a bulwark of the old order, is fairly conclusive
proof that he was neither the “greatest of English statesmen” nor “the
master-mind of his age.”
VII
WOLSEY’S FALL AND CHARACTER
The Legatine Court was suspended, and the question of the divorce
advoked to Rome, in July 1529. The signs of Wolsey’s doom were quick to
gather. His master practically ceased to hold personal communication
with him. It was evident, when writs for a Parliament were issued in
September, that the Cardinal was no longer directing the king: for he
had consistently aimed so far as possible at the suppression of the
functions of Parliament. Campeggio was hardly out of the country when
his colleague was indicted under the Statute of Præmunire for having
exercised the legatine office contrary to the law. The Dukes of Norfolk
and Suffolk deprived him of the Great Seal which he held as Chancellor.
Ill and despairing, he retired to his house at Esher, shorn of all
his offices. He was attainted in the House of Peers, and the Bill was
passed. In the Commons, however, the vigorous opposition to it made
by Cromwell, and a feeling that the king was not unfavourable to its
rejection, resulted in its being thrown out.
Probably Henry had not yet thoroughly made up his mind as to his course
of action, and wished to preserve a possibility of recalling his
minister to his counsels. He was told that he might be permitted to
discharge some of his pastoral functions, and was allowed to retire in
the spring to York, to take up the duties of the Archbishopric; and in
spite of the immense fines imposed on him, he was by no means stripped
bare of this world’s goods. York was fixed on as being more remote from
the neighbourhood both of Henry and of the Continent than Winchester.
He threw himself into the unaccustomed _rôle_ with apparent zest, and
seemed on the verge of achieving an unexpected reputation for pastoral
piety and devotion, when a fresh blow fell. He was summoned to London
on a charge of treason. He had been unwise enough to write to Francis I
and pray for his intercession with Henry; he was also accused, though
groundlessly, of having made really treasonous proposals to the Pope.
Already ill when he started, he became rapidly worse on his journey
south, and having reached the Abbey of Leicester, was unable again to
rise from his bed. There he passed away, pathetically forlorn; but at
least spared the last undeserved ignominy of a traitor’s doom.
On the high road to success and in the height of his power, Wolsey
extorts an admiration which is still somewhat reluctant. His figure
cannot be called attractive. Over the business of the divorce it is
difficult not to feel him positively repellent. But in his fall he rose
to moral heights of which his previous career gives no warning. What
shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
Here, it would seem, was one who--not voluntarily surrendering but
forcibly bereft of the world, when he had gained it--found thereby his
soul’s salvation. Through tears and tribulation, pain of the worn-out
body, anguish of the spirit, he won it. In the day of his triumph, his
countrymen hated him while they could not but admire; hated him with a
rare bitterness which made even Thomas More ungenerous; save some few
of his own household, none felt a touch of sympathy, unless perhaps the
king, who condescended to send him one or two kindly messages to salve
his own royal conscience while he was stripping his most loyal servant
of everything he possessed. Yet in the months of his retirement,
while, in his diocese of York, he devoted himself to the care of his
spiritual flock, the fallen Cardinal won on all hands a passionate
affection bestowed only upon men and women who can forget themselves in
their thought for others. At bottom there must have been in the man an
essential sweetness and loveableness repressed--dried up in the fires
of ambition, parched in the sunshine of prosperity, welling forth in
the shadow of adversity. Gone was the power that swayed the politics of
a continent; gone the gorgeous pomp, the insolent state, that stirred
the impotent malice of the lesser men he had overshadowed. But with
their loss, the hidden best that was in the fallen minister found free
play.
Wolsey’s chroniclers have been against him. Those who wished to
magnify the king pointed to the Cardinal as the evil genius who had
prompted every ill-judged deed. The nobility hated him as an insolent
and upstart foe to their order. Katharine’s party hated him, because
he was credited not only with anti-Spanish policy but with being the
prime mover of the divorce. The Boleyn party hated him, because they
knew that he loathed the Boleyn marriage. He had no sympathy from
the Protestants, since he stood for the old ecclesiastical order;
none from the later Catholics, since his attitude to the Papacy was
misunderstood; none from the populace, because he embodied the most
unpopular characteristics of ecclesiasticism. Even Cavendish, who
admired him, is careful in his record to point the moral that pride
goeth before a fall, lest his praise of the Cardinal’s demeanour in his
last year of life should be regarded as unduly laudatory. From Skelton
to Fox the martyrologist, every man had some motive for throwing a
stone at him.
But if Shakespeare--or another--has summed up for us the libels of his
enemies, the same hand has shaped the far truer eulogium pronounced by
the “honest chronicler” Griffith in the same play. By his own talents
he had made himself great: in his high station, if in some respects he
abused his power, yet in the main he worked for the glory of England.
It is inconceivable that when he fell, when the world slipped from
the grasp of one who had been the very type of worldliness, he should
have kissed the rod with perfect resignation, and found no taste of
bitterness in the cup allotted to him. Yet there was at least a solid
proportion of truth in the pious words of Griffith:
His overthrow heaped happiness upon him;
For then, and not till then, he felt himself,
And found the blessedness of being little;
And, to add greater honours to his age
Than man could give him, he died fearing God.
No amount of historical inquiry will ever suffice to displace in the
public mind a portrait bearing Shakespeare’s signature. The Wolsey of
the play is not easy to reconcile with the Wolsey Griffith described
after his disappearance from the stage: but these words are still a
part of the Shakespearean portrait.
SIR THOMAS MORE
I
INTRODUCTORY
Reverence for tradition is not inconsistent with a belief in progress.
History yields us abundant instances of great minds which have combined
a keen appreciation of the ideas of liberty and equality with a strong
predilection in favour of time-honoured institutions. Sometimes, but
rarely, the conservative instinct predominates in youth, and gives
way to the liberal instinct as time goes on. Sometimes, not rarely,
the liberalism of youth yields to the conservatism of later life. In
either case, we are presented with the apparent paradox of the man who,
maintaining the complete consistency of his own career, is found to be
at one period of his life on the side of the reformers, and at another
period on the side of the reactionaries. When political movements are
comparatively slow, these paradoxes do not obtrude themselves: but when
revolutions are in the air, they become conspicuous. There are two eras
which are particularly fruitful in such phenomena; those, namely, of
the Reformation and of the French Revolution.
Each of those periods presents us in England with one political
thinker of the highest rank whose utterances before the great
change are cited in authority by progressives, while their later
pronouncements or actions are cited with approbation by the opposing
forces. There is nothing surprising about the change in political
attitude which unexpected events produce in a Stephen Gardiner or a
William Pitt; it is merely a divergence from the earlier course. But
Burke and More give a _prima facie_ impression of a complete reversal
of principle. “Miscalculation and inconsistency were the moving causes
of the vicissitudes of Thomas More’s career”; so Mr. Sidney Lee has
very recently written of him; as other critics have fallen back on the
theory that Burke’s intellect went to pieces. Both these great men
did, in fact, misinterpret the very startling events of which they
were witness, partly because actual facts was misrepresented to them.
Neither believed that a work-a-day world with established institutions
could be accommodated to ideal polities where those institutions had
never grown up. They had in practice to adapt their ideals to what they
saw as hard facts. Hence they condemned in the concrete what they would
have approved in the abstract. Yet both were close and acute reasoners,
and probably neither would have admitted for a moment that he had
deserted in later life a single principle which he had maintained at an
earlier stage.
[Illustration: _SIR THOMAS MORE_
_From a Painting by_ HOLBEIN _in the National Portrait Gallery_]
But whether critics differ in their attempts to reconcile the More
who wrote the “Utopia” with the Lord Chancellor More, or give up the
attempt to explain the paradox as hopeless, the attractiveness and
nobility of the man stand unchallenged, as his intellectual eminence
is indisputable. It is impossible not to love and admire him. Of the
other nine men treated in this volume, all have apologists more or less
enthusiastic, but all have bitterly or contemptuously hostile critics.
More is one of the few men that have left their mark on our history,
who has won the tribute of universal affection and esteem.
II
UNDER HENRY VII
Thomas More was born in London in 1478, seven years after Thomas
Wolsey, and about the same length of time before Thomas Cromwell. There
is a rather curious prevalence of the name Thomas among prominent men
at this time, Cranmer being a fourth, and the youngest of the quartet.
More’s father was a barrister, who later became a judge; a gentleman
with a pleasant humour, a turn for economy, and conservative views.
John More was married thrice, and seems to have been comfortably wived,
being responsible for a witticism on the subject of matrimony such
as usually emanates from men whose personal experience contradicts
it. “Taking a wife,” said he, “is like putting your hand into a bag
containing a number of snakes and one eel. You _may_ lay hold of the
eel.” His son was not warned off the experiment, either by the jest or
by his experience of step-mothers.
Young Thomas was a lad of parts; his father was a person of distinction
in the great city. Morton, Archbishop and Lord Chancellor, and
subsequently a Cardinal, the wise counsellor of Henry VII. throughout
the first half of his reign, took the boy into his service, and
evidently found much satisfaction in cultivating and encouraging his
remarkable intelligence and wit; prophesying “marvellous things”
of him. The great man’s kindness was repaid by the very attractive
portrait which his _protégé_ has given us in the first book of the
“Utopia.” By Morton’s influence, Thomas, at fourteen, was sent to
Oxford--not an unusual age. Cranmer too was sent to Cambridge at
fourteen: while Wolsey’s youth was exceptional, for he took his degree
at the same age. More’s undergraduate career, however, was brief. He
was intended by his father to follow the profession of the law, and
John More took alarm when he found that his son was being beguiled into
an enthusiasm for the recently introduced study of Greek. There was
no connexion between law and Greek; besides, Greek was unsettling: it
seemed to put new-fangled and heterodox ideas into folk’s heads. So
after two years, More was withdrawn from Oxford, entered at New Inn
to study the law, and in February, 1496, was admitted a student at
Lincoln’s Inn: just about the time when John Colet was returning from
Italy.
There is every probability that Colet and his younger contemporary
had already foregathered at Oxford, in listening to the teaching of
Grocyn: otherwise it is not very easy to account for the warm intimacy
which arose between the Oxford Divinity Lecturer and the young student
of Lincoln’s Inn: though the fact that both their fathers were men of
such eminence in London, that the families may easily have been brought
into contact, must not be forgotten. In any case, the names of Colet,
Erasmus and More became closely associated between 1496 and 1500.
Erasmus paid a flying visit to England in 1498. Colet’s discourses were
already famous, and the Dutchman and the Englishman were introduced to
each other by Prior Charnock of the College of St. Mary the Virgin: to
their great mutual satisfaction. As the story runs, Colet told Erasmus
of the surprising genius of his young friend Thomas More, and told More
of the amazing endowments of his new acquaintance. The two, unknown
to each other, met at the same table, and fell into a dialectical
discussion which neither could resist; till at last the elder, putting
two and two together, exclaimed “Aut tu es Morus, aut nullus,” the
younger promptly responding “Aut tu es Erasmus, aut Diabolus.” Whether
the tale be true or not, the acquaintance was made, and ripened
rapidly into the warmest of friendships. In those days, complimentary
epithets between scholars were nearly as cheap and meant nearly as
little, as vituperative ones; but there is no mistake about the genuine
and spontaneous character of the terms in which Erasmus wrote to
and of Thomas More. He is always _dulcissimus_, _iucundissimus_, or
something equally endearing. Erasmus had superlatives for other people
too, but there is no one else on whom he lavishes the same wealth of
playful affection. It was to Robert Fisher that the scholar about
this time wrote his classic appreciation of his young friend--_Thomae
Mori ingenio quid unquam finxit natura vel mollius, vel dulcius, vel
felicius?_ “What hath nature ever fashioned more tender, more charming,
more happy, than the character of Thomas More?”
It was during this visit that More played a characteristic trick
on Erasmus, one which shows how well the quondam page of Cardinal
Morton (who had just entered on the last year of his life) stood in
distinguished quarters. Erasmus was staying at Greenwich with his
patron Lord Mountjoy. Thither came More, with a friend, to see him
and carry him off for a walk, in the course of which they came to a
handsome building, where More said he wished to pay his respects.
Somewhat to his dismay, Erasmus found on entering that they were
invading a royal domain, and that their visit was to Prince Henry and
his brother and sisters who wanted him there and then to produce them
a poem. He demurred, but was let off on condition of his promising to
send them one--a promise faithfully carried out.
More shared with his older friend a capacity for perceiving the
humorous side of things which stood him in good stead all his life. But
he had a deeper vein of seriousness, and to him--as to Colet--religion
meant a great deal more than it did to the cosmopolitan scholar. The
profession for which he was still training--he was not yet called
to the Bar--was one to which his abilities were eminently adapted,
and his intimacy with Colet did not prevent him from loyally devoting
his time and his studies to that training, as his father desired.
But as soon as he was duly called, he began to give his natural
predilections freer play, and we find him delivering in the City a
course of lectures on Augustine’s _De Civitate Dei_: to the admiration
of his old master Grocyn and others. Not, however, to the neglect of
his legal pursuits, for he was appointed Reader at Furnivall’s Inn;
or of larger ambitions, for, young as he was, he appeared as a member
of Henry VII.’s Parliament of 1504. The story of the “beardless boy”
persuading that assembly to reject a royal demand for cash, as told by
his son-in-law William Roper, is familiar; and even if not altogether
accurately reported, leaves no doubt that he did so offend Henry that
he felt it advisable to retire into political obscurity--the king
characteristically taking his revenge by extracting a fine from his
father.
It may have been this episode which gave him a temporary inclination to
betake himself to a monastic life: but this did not last. Investigation
did not lead to the conclusion that life in a monastery was quite the
same in practice as in theory, and a _penchant_ for asceticism could be
indulged without entering the cloister. Moreover, this summer Colet was
in London, probably to commence work at St. Paul’s, where he had just
been nominated to the Deanery; and Colet was not the man to counsel
such a step. On the contrary, he advised his friend to marry, and the
advice was taken next year.[B] The story is quaintly characteristic.
Visiting “one Mr. Colte a gentleman of Essex,” he was attracted by the
three daughters of the house. The second being the prettiest, took
his fancy, but he thought it would be hard on the elder sister if the
younger got a husband first, so he “of a certayne pittie framed his
fancie towardes her” instead--with excellent results.
[B] Roper’s chronology is not very intelligible. He says
that--after being called to the Bar--More was three
years a Reader at Furnivall’s Inn, and then passed four
years in the Charterhouse without taking the vows. The
other evidence, however, points pretty conclusively to
1505 as the date of his marriage.
On the whole it does not look as if More went in any very great fear
of the old king’s wrath. Mr. Colte would not have been in a hurry to
bestow his daughter in marriage on a young man whom Henry was seeking
occasion to slay: and probably More himself would have hesitated to
give hostages to fortune under those conditions.
III
THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY VIII
Whatever reason he may have had to fear ill-will from Henry VII.--who
seldom wasted vindictive sentiments on people whose punishment could
not be substantially expressed in terms of hard cash--More could count
on the goodwill of his young successor. More than one of the princes of
those days ranked among the most accomplished men of their times; and
like his brother-in-law of Scotland, Henry would have more than held
his own in any company, intellectual or athletic. As yet, the world did
not know that his abilities were matched by a ruthless selfishness. He
seemed a brilliant and charming boy, frank-hearted and open-handed,
with just the carelessness becoming to his age: the very reverse of
the old king as men thought of him in his later years, sordid, crafty,
griping. The reign of Empsons and Dudleys was at an end; the approach
to the new king’s favour was to be through very different avenues. To
have been in the black books of Henry VII. was no reason for fearing
Henry VIII.
More prospered rapidly in his profession, and had no desire to be drawn
to Court or into the whirl of politics. He was very soon appointed to
the important office of Under-Sheriff in the City, and his private
practice was ere long bringing him a very substantial income. Also, to
his great satisfaction, the expectation of a more cheerful _régime_
in England was bringing Erasmus back again--there had been one flying
visit in the interval--to write the _Encomium Moriae_ under More’s
own roof, and still further to enrich and stimulate that congenial
intellectual society in which More himself had been living ever since
Colet had taken up his duties as Dean of St. Paul’s.
But however little ambitious More might be, his talents were too
conspicuous to permit of his being left alone. In 1515, the commercial
war with Flanders--an outcome of the foreign complications in which
Henry VIII. had become involved--was embarrassing both countries so
much that there was a strong desire for adjustment. An embassy was to
be sent, with Cuthbert Tunstall at its head. The merchants of London
desired to be represented; they wanted More to represent them; Wolsey,
now supreme, acceded; More was attached to the embassy, and the
abilities he displayed marked him out as a man fitted for the king’s
service. For a time More resisted; but his masterly conduct of a case
in which he was appointed as counsel for the Pope (in respect of a
ship which the Crown claimed as forfeit) caused Henry to put renewed
pressure on him. In 1518, he had become a courtier in his own despite.
This, by the way, may have some bearing on the fact that in that year
his father was elevated to the judicial Bench.
Some years earlier, More’s domestic life had suffered: his first wife
dying in 1512 and leaving him with four little children on his hands.
To provide the orphans with a mother, he took to himself a second wife,
some years older than himself; a kindly conventional soul, as it would
seem, who quite understood that her husband was a very clever man,
but was eternally puzzled by his disregard of worldly considerations,
and hopelessly confused by the whimsical irony with which he loved to
meet her “Tilly vally, Sir Thomas,” when he had been doing something
peculiarly exasperating from her point of view. She mothered his
children, and himself as much as he would let her; and never succeeded
in disturbing his humorous equanimity, though her own must have been
everlastingly ruffled.
The embassy to the Netherlands sealed More’s fate, by forcing him into
political life. It is also intimately associated with the one great
original literary work produced in England in the first half of the
sixteenth century: a work which established the fame of its author as
a political thinker of the highest rank, in spite of the intentionally
fantastic form in which it was cast.
IV
THE UTOPIA