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.
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?”