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.

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.

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

Throughout More’s life, revolutionary forces had been at work in the political, the intellectual, and the religious world; but as yet they had not concentrated in any volcanic explosion. At present, More’s most intimate associates stood in the very forefront of the most advanced school, and his “Utopia” was to make his position beside them as conspicuous to the world as it was assured in fact. He had taken to Greek, in spite of his anxious parent, like a duck to water: his affinity to the Platonic Socrates is obvious. John Colet was his guide, philosopher and friend; and the downright reactionaries, like the Bishop of London, had vain hankerings to suppress Colet as a dangerous heretic. He was the chosen intellectual mate of Erasmus, who had done or was doing more than any man living, to rid men’s minds of the shackles of the old scholastic formalism. The grosser popular superstitions, the worship of the letter and neglect of the spirit, the pursuit of worldly advancement by the successors of the apostles, were constant subjects for pulpit castigations by the one friend, and the lively and scathing mockery of the other. The mediÆval theory that war is a pastime for the ambitions of princes was vigorously denounced by both. In all these things More was with them heart and soul; and he had already given audacious indication of his belief that the function of government is to seek the good not of the governors but of the governed, when he incurred the displeasure of Henry VII. in 1504. This progressive attitude of mind found its complete expression in the fantasy of Utopia.

The notion of constructing an imaginary Commonwealth under ideal conditions on ideal lines was of course derived straight from Plato’s Republic. That any existing State could be reformed into the semblance of such a Commonwealth by the fiat of legislators, neither Plato nor More ever dreamed. Neither the Republic nor the Utopia is in the nature of one of those paper Constitutions whose devisers would fain impose them in all their logical perfection upon recalcitrant nations. They aim at setting forth those fundamental principles which must indeed lie at the root of all healthy forms of government, but must also inevitably materialise into different shapes under differing conditions. The reproach that such schemes are not practical, which is damning to a paper Constitution, is here wholly irrelevant. They were never meant to be practical. Sir Galahad is not a practical model for the British citizen, who would take warning from the career of the Knight of La Mancha. Yet the conception of Sir Galahad is worthy of serious contemplation by the British citizen, who may therefrom derive not a little practical direction in the conduct of his life. To condemn the presentation of avowed ideals as unpractical, is merely to display a complete misapprehension of the meaning and use of ideals.

More, however, did not derive his method from Plato. The Athenian started by looking for the logical principles on which a State should be constructed, and built it, storey by storey. The Englishman imagined his State already complete and expounded the finished structure; taking example by other myths than the Republic. With happy ingenuity, he made use of a suggestion from the records of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci to locate his dream-city in realms which some of that eminent traveller’s company might have visited, alone of Europeans. In similarly happy vein, he utilised his embassy to the Netherlands to provide an introduction, the form of which was doubtless suggested by Platonic precedent, though it is in no sense an imitation. The characterisation of the persons whose conversation is reported is not unworthy of the master.

The work is in two parts: the account of Utopia itself, and this preliminary book, which introduces the traveller Hythloday, with his criticisms on European politics in general, and the state of England in particular. This, More would have us believe, is the way in which a foreign Odysseus having “viewed the cities and marked the ways of many a People” would judge the institutions on which the Englishman prided himself. The suggestion that he wished to make himself safe by attributing those criticisms to some one else is hardly tenable. It does not appear that any one ever suspected Hythloday of having had a more material existence than Lemuel Gulliver after him. The intention is simply to dispose the reader’s mind so as to accept the verisimilitude of what he knows to be a fiction; the intention of every dramatic artist. Reason tells you that you are sitting in a theatre and watching actors behind the footlights. Imagination tells you that real events are going on before your eyes. If imagination fails, tragedy becomes burlesque, and comedy silliness. The description of Utopia appeals with tenfold force when your imagination accepts it as a place which a real human traveller has seen; and the illusion is only possible when the real human traveller has been convincingly presented. Raphael Hythloday is as real as Robinson Crusoe. But there is no reason to suppose that More wanted any one to think that Hythloday had an address in Antwerp—as Peter Giles says, “Some ... for that his minde and affection was altogether set and fixed upon Utopia, say that he hathe taken his voyage thetherwards agayne.” “No-where land” is the unsubstantial resting-place of the non-material but convincing traveller. Similarly, by putting his criticisms on English affairs into the mouth of a foreign observer, from whose lips they come with a perfect fitness, the artist procures for them an attention and consideration which would be refused if they were being thought of as the criticisms of an Englishman vilifying his own country. Again, the illusion is needed only till the required effect is produced, namely, recognition of the validity of the criticism.

The illusion is created with subtle skill. More relates how he was sent on the Netherlands embassy, with various references to his associates, and the actual facts of that episode in his career, and tells how his (real) friend, Peter Giles of Antwerp, introduced the traveller Hythloday—an interesting person who had voyaged to those lands of which Europeans as yet knew exceedingly little and imagined an infinite deal. More draws him out, and extracts from him his impression of England, where he had visited Cardinal Morton, of the state of Europe in general, and finally, by way of contrast, of that remote and unknown State of Utopia, which has opened his eyes to what lies at the root of so much that is unsatisfactory in the realms of Christendom. Thus More is enabled to win interested attention to his own criticism of the social and political conditions prevalent, and his own political philosophy. Whatever the latter may be, the former is as practical as possible.

The picture given of the world in which men were actually living and moving, and pursuing their business or their pleasure, is vivid and impressive. Moreover, its truth is borne out by all other evidence. It is the work of a keen and humorous observer; and the analysis of the causes of the pervading evils is unerring. It was no doubt wise of More to antedate the description by a score or so of years, referring it to Cardinal Morton’s days; but in 1515, every evil depicted had become even more marked—and, it may be said, continued to increase progressively until the reign of Elizabeth, the same causes continuing to operate, with the addition of others which intensified the effects. Every rising in the reigns of Henry VIII., of Edward VI., and of Mary, whatever its ostensible ground, bears unmistakeable signs that the agricultural depression with its attendant evils was a secondary, if not the primary cause.

It would be too much to expect that the remedies More recommended should have been equally above criticism. Economic science was in its earliest infancy; in spite of experience, no one had begun to suspect the inefficacy of legislation in certain directions, and there are plenty of people who still believe that natural forces can be regulated by statute. In no single respect was any thinker of his times in advance of Sir Thomas More in these matters. But in many respects he was in advance not only of the foremost of his contemporaries, but even of current opinion and practice three hundred years later.

Thus, after describing the prevalence of thieving and robbery, he points to idleness as its cause, but dwells emphatically on the distinction between the idleness which is of choice and that which is enforced by lack of employment. Half the thieves would be honest labourers if they had the chance. The maintenance or development of industries which provide employment would be an effective cure; but instead of seeking a cure, the authorities fall back on punishment. But the severity of the law, instead of checking the minor misdemeanours, converts the pickpocket into a dangerous robber who—having no worse penalty to fear for the graver offence—resorts to violence without hesitation: so that the system regularly manufactures the worst ruffianism.

The instability and disorganisation of industry produced by what we now call “corners,” has its prototype in the “engrossing” and “forestalling,” by which wealthy men make themselves monopolists. The inevitable tendency of capital to flow in dividend-producing, not philanthropic, channels, is foreshadowed by the steady conversion by wealth-seeking landlords of arable land into sheep-runs; a process which left much of the rural population without work, wages, food, or home. Incidentally it may be noted that, while modern historians are disposed rather to dwell on the substitution of greedy laymen for the monasteries as landlords as one of the later causes of this particular trouble, More expressly includes “certeyn abbottes, holy men no doubt,” in his denunciation thereof. He may, however, mean no more than that even the Church was not exempt from this reproach. In dealing with this economic tendency for capital to seek the most lucrative channel, More made the universal mistake of his day in believing that it could be effectively restrained by Acts of Parliament.

In a vein no less practical, and no less opposed to the conventional ideas of the time, and with a still more playful seriousness, the traveller discourses of high politics and finance as they were debated in the Cabinets of Europe, with the aggrandisement and enrichment of monarchs as the one end in view. “‘This myne advyce, maister More,’ says he, ‘how think you it would be harde and taken?’ ‘So God helpe me, not very thankefully’ quod I.’”

By this discussion, the way is prepared for Hythloday to favour his company with an account of the remarkable polity which he found in Utopia (a State as to the whereabouts of which More subsequently writes in anxious inquiry to Peter Giles, who answers in the like vein of pretended regret at being unable to answer the question). This account occupies the second book, forming about two-thirds of the whole work.

In this fantasy, practicality vanishes at the outset. Such are the defences, natural or artificial, of this most favoured island, that any would-be invader is doomed to certain destruction, while the country produces everything that man requires for comfort. It needs no army and no navy, self-defence and self-assertion being equally superfluous: its relations with foreign States are purely complimentary. The Utopians make no foreign leagues. Where the bonds of goodwill are not sufficient to maintain friendly relations, nations enter upon leagues, but only to desert them at the first call of interest. Such is the strange conviction of the Utopians, though they had not themselves experienced the kaleidoscopic permutations and combinations of Ferdinand the Catholic, Maximilian, Louis XII., Henry VII., Julius II., and the Venetians. If by any chance they find it necessary to go to war, there is a convenient breed of fighting men in a country not too far away, who can always be hired for the purpose.

Being thus preserved from the creation of a military caste, while universal education has prevented knowledge from being concentrated in a priestly caste, it has been easy to prevent the development of any sort of privileged class through the accumulation of private property, which is prohibited. Hence, in Utopia, communism is practicable, and the whole system is as a matter of course communistic, though the principle is not extended to the relations between the sexes. Having arrived at their religion not through the Christian Revelation, but by Reason, any religious views are tolerated which are not manifestly anti-social. It is a corollary of these conditions that government is in the hands of elected magistrates, who have neither class interests nor personal interests to deflect them from their proper function of ruling with a single eye to the interests of the whole people. The possibility that sectarian interests might have developed as a disturbing factor does not seem to have presented itself; perhaps, where no religious views might be aggressively expressed or repressed, no strife of sects was to be feared. In every direction, of course, the manners and customs of the Utopians suggest that the manners and customs of the English are susceptible of improvement. They take a philosophic view of the pleasures of life, reckoning the gratification of animal appetites exceedingly low in practice as well as in theory. They have no lust of gold and jewels. They have no craving for display, for gambling, for the baser forms of sport. On the other hand, they appreciate the value of sanitation. There is no idleness, since every one is required to do his share of work, but there is ample leisure for all; instead of one half of the population having too much, and the other half too little, to do. Thus they can enjoy in abundance those rational pleasures in which they take a true delight, abiding in health and wealth.

V
MORE IN PUBLIC LIFE

It should be sufficiently clear that no one was more thoroughly aware than Sir Thomas More himself that the Utopian conditions could not be produced in a European State, and that Utopian institutions could only exist under Utopian conditions. Of that fact he was destined to give practical demonstration when called upon to discharge the functions of a practical ruler.

In 1518 More became a Privy Councillor, and probably his influence may be detected in the efforts, renewed about this time, to check the conversion of arable land into pasture, and the evil practice of enclosures. But Martin Luther’s activity was just beginning, and its results were to make the contrast between Utopia and England even more marked than previously. Before entering, however, on More’s attitude to this new phase of the Reformation, we have to note some other points in this stage of his career.

More stood in high favour. He had not climbed to a great position by arduous effort; greatness, worthy of it as he was, had been thrust upon him. His advancement was promoted by Wolsey, who was seldom vindictive except towards rivals whose power might make them dangerous. In 1521 he was knighted. When Parliament was summoned in 1523 he was made Speaker, by no means at his own desire, but chiefly at that of the King and the Cardinal. The result was probably not quite what Wolsey had anticipated. On his appointment, he had implied very clearly, though in diplomatic terms, that he meant to uphold freedom of speech in the House. But the business on hand was the voting of money, and Wolsey made the mistake of attempting to overawe the Commons by coming down to the House himself. The Members declined to speak or vote in his presence; the Cardinal’s demands were received with dead silence. Wolsey turned on the Speaker. The Speaker made it perfectly clear that the House could not give way on the question of privilege. When Wolsey withdrew, Parliament demonstrated its loyalty by making a substantial grant. According to More’s son-in-law, this incident brought More into the black books of the Cardinal, who with ill intent tried to get him sent on an embassy to Spain, under colour of complimenting him. If Wolsey really meant evil by him, his designs came to nothing, for there was no sign of any diminution in the royal favour. Already, however, in 1525, Wolsey’s position was becoming precarious, though to all appearance he was as dominant as ever. More’s next advancement was to the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1526; and from this time Henry’s personal demands on his time and his society became exceedingly pressing. A year later, the whole of the king’s real interest was absorbed in the divorce question, which was to seal Wolsey’s fate directly, and More’s indirectly. Henry consulted him about it, and More then as always told his master honest truth—he did not see how the marriage with Katharine could lawfully be voided. From that position he never swerved. The king could respect conscientious scruples on the part of a favourite, and did so as long as More remained a favourite. More, however, had no illusions about the king’s constancy. “If my head,” he told Roper, “would win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go.” But when Henry decided that Wolsey could no longer serve his turn, it was More whom he selected to fill the office of Lord Chancellor, in spite of his views of the divorce.

During these years, the uprising of Luther had developed into a widespread religious revolt. Henry, having no quarrel with Pope Leo, and proud of his own attainments as a theologian, chose to enter the lists for the demolition of Luther; producing an apologia for the Papacy which earned him the title of “Defender of the Faith.” Before publishing this work he showed it to More, who warned him, with shrewd foresight, that, if ever he did come to have a quarrel with the Pope, he would find it very difficult to get over his own argument, which proved too much in support of Papal authority. Henry, however, would not modify the view then expressed, and succeeded in satisfying his counsellor that it was sound. In due course the prophecy came true: Henry repudiated the position he had formerly defended. Unhappily for More, however, the king had finally convinced him, and he declined to surrender his conviction: with fatal consequences.

Viewed even exclusively as a religious movement, Luther’s revolt would not have attracted More’s sympathies. He had never doubted any of the dogmas of the Church, though he had a plentiful contempt for many prevailing corruptions which were recognised as such by men to whom heresy was never imputed by their bitterest enemy. He believed with conviction a great deal that Erasmus accepted merely pro forma. Luther not only propounded views on specific dogmas which More regarded as heretical, he challenged the whole authority of Rome; and More believed in the authority of Rome. But beyond all this the Lutheran revolt was very soon followed by the German Peasant revolt, which deluged half Europe with blood. The Peasants’ War was completely misapprehended in England, where the agricultural troubles, bad as they were, could bear no comparison with the oppression from which the German peasants suffered; but its leadership fell, naturally enough, into the hands of men as fanatical in their zeal for religious as for social reform. The overthrow of all authority and the universal triumph of sheer anarchy appeared to be their goal; and the world believed, or was taught to believe, that it was Luther who had started the conflagration. The heretical pamphlets which issued from Germany and Switzerland—lumped together, by those who did not know the facts, as Lutheran—gave colour to this belief by the virulence of their attacks on the Papacy and the clergy; and it is small wonder that many of the most liberal-minded men could anticipate nothing but stark ruin, the coming of chaos, unless the torrent were stayed. The threatening crash of all reverence, of all authority save such as could be enforced by push of pike, seemed to be brought measurably closer, when, in 1527, the Imperial armies sacked Rome in emulation of Alaric, and the representative of St. Peter was held a prisoner by the representative of Caesar Augustus.

In the abstract, and under Utopian conditions, More was singularly alive to the beauty of the principle of practically universal toleration. But Europe and England were presenting a problem which could never have arisen in Utopia at all. Even in Utopia, it was recognised that certain negations were directly anti-social, and that the propagation of them must be repressed. Here in Europe, it seemed as if every negation of a received dogma was to be turned into an anti-social engine. Under the conditions, the toleration of any heresy, certainly of all such as palpably involved an attack on authority, tended to anarchy. The conclusion that what was good unreservedly in Utopia would not be good in England is obvious. We can all see now, of course, that More misinterpreted the facts. The anarchism was an accident of the religious movement, which it shed of itself, not an inherent part of it: the Church lost as much ground by the action of her own zealots as by the attacks of her most fanatical opponents. But for a man who interpreted the facts as More did, there was nothing inconsistent in declaring for toleration in Utopia, but in England repression.

There is another point, too, which is generally unnoticed. The Utopians arrived at their religion by reason; they had no way of ascertaining truth except through reason; hence, for one man to condemn another for holding a different “doxy” would be in itself irrational. Christendom, in More’s view, was in a different position. It had received Truth by direct Revelation, and an Exponent of Truth by Divine appointment. What the Church had definitely pronounced to be heterodox was to be regarded finally and conclusively as false. To permit the preaching of doctrine known to be false was quite different from permitting the discussion or inculcation of divergent opinions on which there was no authority qualified to pronounce absolutely. Even at the moment when More was describing the religion of Utopia, before he had ever heard the name of Luther, he might with perfect consistency have held that heresy ought to be repressed in Christian countries. The argument, of course, has nothing to do with the wisdom or unwisdom of a repressive policy; it is concerned merely with the “inconsistency” of More’s Utopian theory and his Catholic practice. Those who found the Divine Revelation not in the voice of the Church but in the text of Scripture, were equally convinced that deviation from indisputable Truth should be punished by the strong hand.

Broadly, the suggestion here put forward is that the Utopian religions are philosophies: that all philosophies are matter of argument; that intolerance of opinions which are matter of argument is irrational. On the other hand (to More), Catholic Christianity is not a philosophy, but is revealed truth; not therefore matter of argument, except so far as details have not been defined; that suppression of doctrines subversive of Catholic truth is certainly legitimate, and may be necessary.

However that may be, it is undeniable that More appears in the least favourable light as a Catholic controversialist; losing balance and tone, he writes currente calamo, without restraint, with lapse of dignity, and with only an occasional redeeming turn of humour. That is to say, he drops to the normal level of contemporary controversialists on both sides, instead of abiding in that serene atmosphere which otherwise distinguishes him. The aggressive bellicosity of princes grieved him, and the king’s divorce business vexed him: but the spread of heresy was the one thing which upset his equanimity. “I pray God,” said he to Roper, “that some of us, as heigh as we seeme to sitt upon the mountaines, treadinge heretickes under our feete like annts, live not the day that we gladly would wish to be at leagge and composition with them, to let them have their Churches quietly to themselves; soe that they would be content to lett us have ours quietly to our selves.”

Similarly, the one and only ground of reproach against his conduct in any public matter is that as Chancellor he may have sanctioned putting heretics to the torture, and did during the last six months of his office—not before—send certain heretics to the stake. It is true that the only men in England, in those days, who, having the opportunity, did not send a single heretic to the fire, were the much-abused Protector Somerset and the still more abused Wolsey. But we would fain have had Thomas More an exception. Still, it can at least be affirmed positively that the penalty was only inflicted when all hope was over of persuading the “heretics” to recognise their error, and save their bodies as well as their souls; and that every effort was made to give them the opportunity of doing so. Given More’s premises, the conclusion that their death would tend to the salvation of other souls was irresistible.

It was towards the end of 1529 that Wolsey was struck down, and More, very much against his will, was elevated to the Chancellorship. For a commoner and a layman to receive the appointment was almost revolutionary—at least it was a very signal mark of the depression of the nobility, although it was many a year since any but an ecclesiastic had held the office. In everything, More proved himself a notably admirable occupant of the post, dealing out justice with unprecedented despatch; not only without allowing himself to be corrupted, in which he was not unique, but also without accepting those substantial compliments from suitors which less rigidly scrupulous judges were in the habit of profiting by, even when they did not allow their decisions to be affected. No personal or professional considerations were ever permitted by him to interfere with the ends of justice, the most exact that it was in his power to achieve. But his tenure of the Chancellorship was brief. More was unique in many respects, and in his own day he was unique in refusing to retain office when he could no longer do so without violating his conscience—without making himself a party to a policy which he held to be wrong. Other men shifted the responsibility on to the king; More felt that the responsibility could not be shifted, and in 1532 he resigned.

The cause of the resignation was Henry’s ecclesiastical policy; its immediate occasion, the submission of the clergy. The fall of Wolsey was simultaneous with the summoning of the famous “Seven Years” or “Reformation” Parliament of Henry VIII. The king had given no sort of sign of any disposition to relax the severity of his attitude towards heresy; but as the months and years passed, it became increasingly evident that his rigid orthodoxy was to be accompanied by a prolonged anti-clerical and anti-Papal campaign, the meaning whereof was to be revealed only by degrees. A twelvemonth had barely passed when the clergy were suddenly notified that they had as a body been guilty of a breach of PrÆmunire in accepting the Legatine authority of Wolsey, and this was followed up by requiring Convocation to affirm that the king was sole and Supreme Protector and Head of the Church. No new authority was directly claimed for the Crown—without reading between the lines; though it was tolerably clear that a good deal more might be read into the declaration. The clergy yielded. Then the Commons presented their supplication against the ordinaries. The subsequent operations showed that the Royal Supremacy was to be applied after quite a new fashion. The clergy yielded to the logic of force, and made their “submission.” More, holding that no layman, king or not, could by any possibility be rightfully head of the Church in this new sense, concluded that he had no alternative but to retire into private life.

VI
INDIGNATIO PRINCIPIS

The divorce was Henry’s first objective; it was duly pronounced by the new Archbishop in the following spring. The step, however, was intensely unpopular. The more clearly this was brought home to the king’s mind, the more anxious he became to have the avowed support of every one whose opinion carried weight. Irritation reached its climax over the affair of the “Nun of Kent,” a young woman named Elizabeth Barton, who had for some little time been posing as a sort of prophetess. How far she believed in her own imposture it is not possible to tell, but she was certainly exploited by fanatical adherents of the Papacy, and when she took to denouncing the wrath of God against the king for the divorce, there was a real risk that the superstition of the day would make her ravings dangerous. There were two men whom no persuasions had prevailed upon to pronounce in favour of the Boleyn marriage—Fisher of Rochester and Sir Thomas More. It was found that both had had some sort of dealings with the nun. Henry determined that they should both suffer as her accomplices, unless they would openly range themselves with his supporters. But the case against More was so hopelessly futile that the king’s advisers warned him that the ex-Chancellor’s inclusion in the Bill of Attainder could only result in the Bill itself being thrown out. His name was therefore removed, to the great rejoicing of his friends. More saw farther into the king’s mind than they did. “Quod defertur non aufertur,” he said to his daughter.

He was right. The king and Cromwell were ready to go to the last extremity to force the two recalcitrants into line. An Act had been passed, fixing the succession to the throne on the children of Anne Boleyn. The ratification of the marriage had led him to remark to Roper: “God give grace, son, that these matters be not in a while confirmed with oaths.” The Act of Succession carried with it authority to impose an oath to maintain it; but the oath subsequently formulated was so worded as to bind the subscriber to the admission of the invalidity of the marriage with Katharine, and the denial of the Papal authority. The oath was proffered to More and Fisher; both refused it, though both were ready to maintain the succession. Both were sent to the Tower.

It was in fact more than doubtful whether the Act warranted the imposition of the oath in the prescribed form. The imprisonment of the culprits without trial was in any case illegal, and every attempt to persuade them to yield failed. The King always preferred to have the letter of the law on his side; and it was impossible to pretend that the refusal to subscribe involved treason. To give their destruction a legal colour, a fresh Act of Succession was passed at the end of the year (1534), expressly confirming the form of the oath; and this was accompanied by an Act of Supremacy, making it treason to refuse to affirm the Royal Supremacy. After that, it was simple enough to send More and Fisher to their doom. To deny the Supremacy was one thing; More had abstained from that. To refuse to affirm it was another; More had always done so. He maintained his position, and was condemned to death as a traitor, under the law which had been framed expressly to enmesh him. His defence was only that the law itself was invalid as being against the law of Christendom, and the liberties of the Church as affirmed in Magna Charta; which of course the judges could not admit. A week later, on July 6—the Eve of St. Thomas (of Canterbury)—1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded.

VII
CHARACTER AND DEATH

Thanks mainly to the charm of the biography by his son-in-law, William Roper, the private life and character of Thomas More are among the most familiar to us in history. It is a life good to dwell upon, sweet and wholesome. Even in its public aspects there is but the single note that jars, his harshness—molestia he called it—towards the heretics, whom he classed with homicides and robbers: in its domestic aspects it is wholly charming. In his private capacity he could love even a heretic. Roper himself, the sympathetic husband of his favourite daughter Margaret, was bitten with Lutheran doctrines, which even the persuasiveness of his revered father-in-law could not induce him to relinquish. To the error, as he deemed it, which was not accompanied by propagandism, More was as tender as could be desired. “Meg,” he said to Mistress Roper, “I have borne long with thy husband; I have reasoned long time with him, and still given him my fatherly counsel; but I perceive none of this can call him home again. And therefore, Meg, I will no longer dispute with him, nor yet will I give him over, but I will go another way to work, and get me to God and pray for him.”

There we have the natural Thomas More, obeying the kindly dictates of his own heart, which held no rancour towards any one who had not in some sort constituted himself an enemy of the “weal publick.” Personal hostility to himself he held of no account. Shortly before he was made Lord Chancellor, an old servant of his came to him in great indignation against some merchants who had been “liberally rayling” at More. Would he not, seeing what his favour was with the king, punish these scurrilous people as they deserved? But More’s reply was a very sound piece of philosophy in his usual humorous vein—“Would you have me punish them by whome I receave more benefitt than by you all that be my friends? Lett them a God’s name speake as lewedly as they list of me, and shoote never soe many arrowes at me, so long as they do not hitt me, what am I the worse? But if they should once hitt me, then would it a little trouble me. Howbeit, I trust by Gode’s helpe, there shall none of them all be able once to touch me. I have more cause, I assure thee, to pittie them than to be angrie with them.”

We are told much of his simple piety and faith. The same ardently reverent spirit, which made him cling to the Church and uphold her authority, at one time very nearly sent him into the cloister, and did cause him to retain so much of the ascetic tradition that he wore a hair-shirt next his skin all his days; though it was only by accident that any one save his beloved “Meg,” Margaret Roper, became aware of the fact. His subjugation of the flesh was free from its too common accompaniment of arrogant or morbid austerity. It was little more than an avoidance of insidious and apparently harmless temptations, an appreciation of the unimportance of gratifying physical appetites. He reaped his reward. The sudden descent from ample wealth to a narrow income, involved in his resignation of the Chancellorship, had no terrors for him. He had tried hard fare at Oxford, less hard at New Inn, something better at Lincoln’s Inn. He and his family could very well live by the Lincoln’s Inn standard. If they found that too high for the reduced exchequer, there was the New Inn standard to fall back on, and after that the Oxford standard. And even after that “May we yeat with bagges and walletts go a-begging togither ... and soe still keepe companie merrily together.” A cheery philosophy.

Two of Roper’s anecdotes show, in the dramatic touches which bring a very living Duke of Norfolk before us, how the son-in-law profited by his father-in-law’s example; besides illustrating More’s quaint combination of seriousness and humour. The duke went to see him about his resignation, at Chelsea, and found him singing in the Church choir. “To whome after service, as they went home togither arme in arme, the duke said, ‘God body, God body, my L^d. Chancellor, a parish Clarke, a parish Clarke, you dishonour the King and his office.’ ‘Nay,’ quoth Sir Thomas Moore smilinge upon the Duke, ‘your Grace may not thinke, that the Kinge your Master and myne, will with me for serving God his Master be offended, or thereby count his office dishonoured.’” And again, when he had escaped the Bill of Attainder: “The Duke sayd unto him, ‘By the masse, Mr. Moore, it is perillous strivinge with Princes, and therefore I would wish you somewhat to inclyne to the Kinge’s pleasure. For by Gode’s body Mr. Moore Indignatio principis mors est.’ ‘Ys that all, my Lord?’ quoth he. ‘Is there in good fayth noe more difference betweene your Grace and me but that I shall dye to day and you tomorrow?’”

But in the last days, the never-failing humour has an exquisitely pathetic setting.

The worthy wife, “somewhat worldlie too,” comes to see her husband in the Tower; she cannot understand why he is so silly as to stop there, when he might so easily recover the king’s goodwill by doing “as all the Busshopps and best learned of this realm have done.” He listens placidly to the outburst, then: “I pray thee, good Mistress Alice, tell me one thing: is not this house as nighe heaven as mine own?” We are reminded of the last words Humphrey Gilbert was heard to utter before the Squirrel foundered: “We are as near God by sea as by land.” But there was no one to reply to Gilbert as “shee, after her accustomed fashion, not likeinge such talke, answeared Tille valle, tille valle.” The good soul has no patience for such incomprehensible folly. Margaret Roper visits him, the darling daughter, of all his children the likest to him in wit and in person; with her he is sure of perfect sympathy. She knows that his doom is absolutely certain, nor is she one to dissuade him from following the dictates of his conscience. After the sentence in Westminster Hall, she is waiting at the Tower wharf for the last fond farewell, the parting blessing. Heedless of spectators, she darts through the press of halberdiers guarding the prisoner, to fling herself on his neck, pour out her tears and her love on his breast. He soothes her with words of tender counsel and affection. At last she tears herself away, but overcome with the passion of devotion, “suddenlye turned back againe, and rann to him as before, tooke him about the necke, and divers times togeather most lovingely kissed him, and at last with a full heavie harte was fayne to separate from him: the behouldinge whereof was to manye of them that were present thereat soe lamentable that it made them for very sorrow to mourne and weepe.”

Shall we wonder at such love for the man who on receiving sentence could say to his judges, as reported by Anthony St. Leger, “I verily trust and right heartily pray that though your lordships have now in earth been Judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together to our everlasting salvation”; whose spirit was so imperturbable in its serenity, that it looked upon death as a mere casual episode which in no wise ruffled his habitual humour. “I pray you, Mr. Lieutenant,” he said, with his foot on the scaffold, noticing how ill it had been put together, “see me safe up. For my coming down, let me shift for myself”: and as he laid his neck on the block, moving his beard aside, “Pity that should be cut; it hath committed no treason.”

His head, according to custom, was set on Temple Bar, but Margaret Roper, she “who clasped in her last trance her murdered father’s head,” was allowed to obtain possession of it, and preserved it in spices till her own death. The news of the execution was conveyed to Charles V. His comment is endorsed by posterity—“If we had been master of such a servant, we would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than have lost such a worthy Councillor.”