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.