English Lands, Letters and Kings, vol. 1: From Celt to Tudor

by Donald Grant Mitchell

Another favorite of Henry in the early days of his kingship, and one bearing a far more important name in the literary annals of England than that of Wolsey, was Sir Thomas More. He was a Greek of the very Greeks, in both character and attainment. Born in the heart of London—in Milk Street, now just outside of the din and roar of Cheapside, he was a scholar of Oxford, and was the son of a knight, who, like Sir Thomas himself, had a reputation for shrewd sayings—of which the old chronicler, William Camden,[71] has reported this sample:—

“Marriage,” said the elder More, “with its chances, is like dipping one’s hand into a bag, with a great many snakes therein, and but one eel; the which most serviceable and comfortable eel might possibly be seized upon; but the chances are largely in favor of catching a stinging snake:”

But, says the chronicler—this good knight did himself thrust his hand three several times into such a bag, and with such ensuing results as preserved him hale and sound to the age of ninety or thereabout. The son inherited this tendency to whimsical speech, joining with it rare merits as a scholar: and it used to be said of him as a boy, that he could thrust himself into the acting of a Latin comedy and extemporize his part, with such wit and aptness, as not to break upon the drift of the play. He studied, as I said, at Oxford; and afterward Law at Lincoln’s Inn; was onewhile strongly inclined to the Church, and under influence of a patron who was a Church dignitary became zealous Religionist, and took to wearing in penance a bristling hair-shirt—which (or one like it) he kept wearing till prison-days and the scaffold overtook him, as they overtook so many of the quondam friends of Henry VIII. For he had been early presented to that monarch—even before Henry had come to the throne—and had charmed him by his humor and his scholarly talk: so that when More came to live upon his little farm at Chelsea (very near to Cheyne Row where Carlyle died but a few years since) the King found his way thither on more than one occasion; and there are stories of his pacing up and down the garden walks in familiar talk with the master.

There, too, came for longer stay, and for longer and friendlier communings, the great and scholarly Erasmus (afterward teacher of Greek at Cambridge)—and out of one of these visitations to Chelsea grew the conception and the working out of his famous Praise of Folly, with its punning title—Encomium Moriæ.[72]

The King promised preferment to More—which came in its time. I think he was in Flanders on the King’s business, when upon a certain day, as he was coming out from the Antwerp Cathedral, he encountered a stranger, with long beard and sunburnt face—a man of the “Ancient Mariner” stamp, who had made long voyages with that Amerigo Vespucci who stole the honor of naming America: and this long-bearded mariner told Sir Thomas More of the strange things he had seen in a country farther off than America, called Utopia. Of course, it is something doubtful if More ever really encountered such a mariner, or if he did not contrive him only as a good frontispiece for his political fiction. This is the work by which More is best known (through its English translations); and it has given the word Utopian to our every-day speech. The present popular significance of this term will give you a proper hint of the character of the book: it is an elaborate and whimsical and yet statesmanlike forecast of a government too good and honest and wise to be sound and true and real.

Sir Thomas smacked the humor of the thing, in giving the name Utopia, which is Greek for Nowhere. If, indeed, men were all honest, and women all virtuous and children all rosy and helpful, we might all live in a Utopia of our own. All the Fourierites—the Socialists—the Knights of Labor might find the germs of their best arguments in this reservoir of the ideal maxims of statecraft. In this model country, gold was held in large disrespect; and to keep the scorn of it wholesome, it was put to the vilest uses: a great criminal was compelled to wear gold rings in his ears: chains were made of it for those in bondage; and a particularly obnoxious character put to the wearing of a gold head-band; so too diamonds and pearls were given over to the decoration of infants; and these, with other baby accoutrements, they flung aside in disgust, so soon as they came to sturdy childhood. When therefore upon a time, Ambassadors came to Utopia, from a strange country, with their tricksy show of gold and jewels—the old Voyager says:—

“You shᵈ have sene [Utopian] children that had caste away their peerles and pretious stones, when they sawe the like sticking upon the Ambassadours cappes;—digge and pushe theire mothers under the sides, sainge thus to them,—‘Loke mother how great a lubbor doth yet were peerles, as though he were a litel child stil!’ ‘Peace sone,’ saith she; ‘I thinke he be some of the Ambassadours fooles.’”

Also in this model state industrial education was in vogue; children all, of whatsoever parentage, were to be taught some craft—as “masonrie or smith’s craft, or the carpenter’s science.” Unlawful games were decried—such as “dyce, cardes, tennis, coytes [quoits]—do not all these,” says the author, “sende the haunters of them streyghte a stealynge, when theyr money is gone?”

The Russian Count Tolstoi’s opinion that money is an invention of Satan and should be abolished, is set forth with more humor and at least equal logic, in this Latin tractate of More’s.