More thinks of fleeing from England.
Empson and Dudley.
Henry VII.’s exactions.
Henry VII. dies.
As to More; during the remaining years of Henry VII.’s reign, he was living in continual fear—thinking of flying the realm[332]—going so far as to pay a visit to the universities of Louvain and Paris,[333] as though to make up his mind where to flee to, if flight became needful.[334]
Nor were these fears imaginary. More was not alone in his dread of the King. Daily the royal avarice was growing more unbounded. Cardinal Morton’s celebrated fork—the two-pronged dilemma with which benevolences were extracted from the rich by the clever prelate—had been bad enough. The legal plunder of Empson and Dudley was worse. It filled every one with terror. ‘These two ravening wolves,’ writes Hall, who lived near enough to the time to feel some of the exasperation he described, ‘had such a guard of false perjured persons appertaining to them, which were by their commandment empannelled on every quest, that the King was sure to win whoever lost. Learned men in the law, when they were required of their advice, would say, “to agree is the best counsel I can give you.” By this undue means, these covetous persons filled the King’s coffers and enriched themselves. At this unreasonable and extortionate doing noblemen grudged, mean men kicked, poor men lamented, preachers openly at Paul’s Cross and other places exclaimed, rebuked, and detested, but yet they would never amend.’[335] Then came the general pardon, the result, it was said, of the remorse of the dying King, and soon after the news of his death.
Accession of Henry VIII.
Henry VIII. was proclaimed King, 23rd April, 1509. The same day Empson and Dudley were sent to the Tower, and on the 17th of August, in the following year, they were both beheaded.
More was personally known to the new King, and presented to him on his accession a richly illuminated vellum book, containing verses of congratulation.[336] These verses have been disparaged as too adulatory in their tone. And no doubt they were so; but More had written them evidently with a far more honest loyalty than Erasmus was able to command when he wrote a welcome to Philip of Spain on his return to the Netherlands. More honestly did rejoice, and with good reason, on the accession of Henry VIII. to the throne. It not only assured him of his own personal safety; it was in measure like the rise of his own little party into power.
The Oxford Reformers in favour with the King; but no mere courtiers.
Not that More and Colet and Linacre were suddenly transformed into courtiers, but that Henry himself, having been educated to some extent in the new learning, would be likely at least to keep its enemies in check and give it fair play. There had been some sort of connection and sympathy between Prince Henry in his youth and More and his friends; witness More’s freedom in visiting the royal nursery. Linacre had been the tutor of Henry’s elder brother, and was made royal physician on Henry’s accession.[337] From the tone of More’s congratulatory verses it may be inferred that he and his friends had not concealed from the Prince their love of freedom and their hatred of his father’s tyranny. For these verses, however flattering in their tone, were plain and outspoken upon this point as words well could be. With the suaviter in modo was united, in no small proportion, the fortiter in re. It would be the King’s own fault if, knowing, as he must have done, More’s recent history, he should fancy that these words were idle words, or that he could make the man, whose first public act was one of resistance to the unjust exactions of his father, into a pliant tool of his own! If he should ever try to make More into a courtier, he would do so at least with his royal eyes open.
More made under-sheriff of London.
How fully Henry VIII. on his part sided with the people against the counsellors of his father was not only shown by the execution of Dudley, but also by the appointment, almost immediately after, of Thomas More to the office of under-sheriff in the City, the very office which Dudley himself had held at the time when, as speaker of the House of Commons, he had been a witness of More’s bold conduct—an office which he and his successor had very possibly used more to the King’s profit than to the ends of impartial justice.