Heroes of the Catholic Reformation. Joseph Pearce
the reign of another Elizabeth, before Sir Thomas More would finally be performed. When the Royal Shakespeare Company staged the play at the new Globe Theatre in the summer of 2004, Shakespeare and More were at last united in art as they had always been in creed. The Bard who, in Ben Jonson’s memorable tribute, “was not of an age, but for all time,” had finally been allowed to pay homage to the Saint who, reminding ourselves of the title of Robert Bolt’s play, was “a man for all seasons.”
Having perambulated for a while in pursuit of the manner in which England’s greatest writer was inspired by arguably her greatest saint, we’ll return to the mundane facts of More’s life, the raw material which would serve as fuel which the Muse of Shakespeare and others would ignite.
Thomas More was born in the city of London on February 6, 1478. Like Fisher, he was a great scholar and an inheritor of all that was best in the Christian humanism of the Renaissance. He read Aristotle in the Greek at Oxford and, while still a young man, had mastered not only Greek and Latin, but French, arithmetic, and geometry. He learned to play the viol and the flute and tried his hand at verse. Inspired perhaps by his reading in the original Latin of Boethius’s Consolatio (The Consolation of Philosphy), his early verse cycle on the fickleness of Fortune rehearses one of the great themes of his life, the need to remain detached from the vicissitudes of life:
Whoso delighteth to proven and assay
Of wavering Fortune the uncertain lot,
If that the answer please you not always
Blame you not me, for I command you not
Fortune to trust; and eke1 full well you wot2
I have of her no bridle in my fist,
She runneth loose and turneth where she list.
As a young man, More lectured in law and also on St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (City of God). Augustine’s theme, that the whole of human history is a war between the forces aligned to the Catholic Church (the City of God) and those aligned with the devil and the forces of evil (the City of Man), could be seen as the motif for More’s whole life and the philosophy which underpinned it. Like Augustine after his conversion, More always sought the City of God, forsaking the comforts that the world has to offer in order to remain focused on the promise of heaven, thereby spurning the empty promises of the Earthly City or the City of Man. Once we understand the influence of Augustine, we will better understand why More chose the path in life that he took, irrespective of the personal cost. Seeing with the eyes of Augustine, More always mistrusts those who give their loyalty to the City of Man, immersing themselves in the cares and pleasures of a transient decaying world, and puts his trust instead in the City of God.
Shortly after giving his series of lectures on De Civitate Dei, More went to live near the London Charterhouse so that he could test his vocation to the religious life. For some four years he took part in the daily religious life of the Carthusians, and one can only imagine the depth of the impact which these years as a lay associate of the Carthusian monks had on his heart, mind, and soul. One can also scarcely imagine what thoughts and prayers must have been going through his mind more than thirty years later when he watched from his prison cell these same London Carthusians passing below his window en route to the gallows, knowing in his mind that he would soon be destined to follow in their footsteps.
Although he would eventually discern a vocation for marriage, the habits of prayer and mortification that he learned from the Carthusians would remain with him for life. “He used oftentimes to wear a sharp shirt of hair next to his skin,” Cresacre More writes in his biography of More, published in 1630.14 Only More’s daughter, Margaret Roper, was privy to her father’s habit of wearing the hairshirt, which he never “wholly” left off, and it’s likely that we would never have known of this penitential habit if More’s daughter-in-law, Anne Cresacre, had not caught sight of it, much to More’s displeasure. Other mortifications included regular fasting and allowing himself only four or five hours of sleep. It was his habit to rise at two o’clock in the morning and devote five hours to study and devotion. Then, at 7 a.m., before commencing with the business of the day, he would always attend Mass. Thomas Stapleton, an early biographer of More, tells us that More’s daily Mass attendance was so much an integral part of his life that he would not even allow the summons of the king himself to disturb him:
This duty [of Mass attendance] he so strictly observed that, when summoned once by the king at a time when he was assisting at Mass and sent for a second time and third time he would not go until the whole Mass was ended; and to those who called him and urged him to go at once to the king and leave the Mass, he replied that he was paying his court to a greater and better Lord and must first perform that duty.15
On another occasion, after More had been made Chancellor of the realm, he rebuked the Duke of Norfolk for suggesting that the king would be offended at his dressing in a surplice and singing in the choir now that he held such an illustrious office of state: “My master, the King, cannot be displeased at the service I pay to his master, God,” More replied. In similar fashion, he was once invited to ride on horseback during a religious procession as befitted his dignity. “My Lord went on foot,” he replied, referring to the Via Dolorosa. “I will not follow Him on horseback.”16
More married Jane Colt in 1505, with whom he had three daughters, Margaret, Elizabeth, and Cecily, each of whom were born in three successive years after the marriage, with a son, John, arriving shortly afterwards. Following the sudden and untimely death of his wife in 1511, More married again within a few weeks, no doubt needing someone to help him raise his four children, all of whom were under six years old. Alice Middleton, his second wife, much maligned for no good reason as she has been by More’s biographers, remained with him, through good times and bad, for the rest of his life. Throughout his married life, More seems to have been an exemplary husband and father, yet he never seemed to have entirely gotten the Carthusians out of his system. “I believe, Meg,” he said to his beloved daughter Margaret when she visited him in the Tower shortly before his execution, “that they that have put me here ween they have done me a high displeasure, but I assure thee on my faith, mine own good daughter, if it had not been for my wife and ye that be my children I would not have failed long ere this to have closed myself in as strait a room and straiter, too.”17
Like Fisher, More was a friend of Erasmus, whom he first met in 1499 when Erasmus was in London en route to Oxford. More was only twenty years old, eleven years Erasmus’s junior, but the two men struck up an instant and lasting friendship. Within a year of their first meeting, Erasmus was writing to a friend asking whether nature had ever molded “a character more gentle, endearing and happy than Thomas More.”18 A student of the Greek classics, like both Fisher and Erasmus, More epitomized the best of the Christian humanism of the Renaissance. “Reason,” he wrote, “so far from being an enemy to faith, is servant to faith.”19
More’s personal piety is legendary. It is said that whenever he heard that a woman was in labor he would begin praying and not cease doing so until news of the baby’s birth was brought to him. His almsgiving was munificent and magnanimous. There are stories of his wandering the streets of London inquiring into the state of poor families and relieving their necessities with gifts of gold. Whenever his work at court or elsewhere kept him from visiting the poor in person, he would send members of the family to offer relief, especially to the sick and the aged. We hear that he often invited poor neighbors to his house for dinner, “receiving them … familiarly and joyously.” We are told also that he “rarely invited the rich and scarcely ever the nobility.”20 He rented a house in his local parish of Chelsea, then a village separated from London to its east, in order to provide a home for the sick, the poor, and the elderly, maintaining them at his own expense. When at home at Chelsea, he would always assemble at bedtime his family and other household members for prayer. All would kneel and recite three psalms, after which they would pray the Salve Regina and end with the De Profundis for the dead.
More took great care and interest in the education of his own children, hiring a tutor to teach them at home. In a letter to the tutor, we catch fleeting glimpses of More’s own philosophy of education.