The impending Reformation was hastened by a famous invective in the form of “The Supplication of Beggars.” Its flagrant argument lay in its arithmetic. It calculated all the possessions of the clergy, who though but “the four-hundredth part of the nation, yet held half of the revenues.”
More replied to “The Supplication of the Beggars” by “The Supplications of the Souls in Purgatory.” These he represented in terror at the sacrilegious annihilation of the masses said for their repose; and this with the Romanist was probably no weak argument in that day.
More more reasonably ridicules the extravagance of the estimates. Such accounts, got up in haste and designed for a particular purpose, are necessarily inaccurate; but the inaccuracy of a statement does not at all injure the drift of the argument, should that be based on truth.
With More “the heretics” were but ordinary rebels, as appears by the style of his narrative. “A rabble of heretics at Abingdon did not intend to lose any more labour by putting up bills (petitions) to Parliament, but to make an open insurrection and subvert all the realm, to kill the clergy, and sell priests’ heads as good and cheap as sheep’s heads—three for a penny, buy who would! But God saved the church and the realm. Yet after this was there one John Goose roasted at Tower-hill, and thereupon some other John Goose began to make some gaggling awhile, but it availed him not. And now we have this gosling with his ‘Supplication of Beggars.’ He maketh his bill in the name of the beggars. The bill is couched as full of lies as the beggar swarmeth full of lice. We neither will nor shall need to make much business about this matter; we trust much better in the goodness of good men.”
The marriage of the clergy was no doubt at first abused by some. More describes one Richard Mayfield, late a monk and a priest, and, it may be added, a martyr, for he was burned. Of this man he says, “His holy life well declares his heresies, when being both a priest and a monk he went about two wives, one in Brabant, another in England. What he meant I cannot make you sure, whether he would be sure of the one if t’other should happen to refuse him, or that he would have them both, the one here, the other there; or else both in one place, the one because he was priest, the other because he was monk.”[7]
Such is the ludicrous ribaldry which runs through the polemical works of Sir Thomas More: the opposite party set no better example, and none worse than the redoubtable Simon Fish, the writer of the “Supplication of Beggars.” Oldmixon expresses his astonishment that “the famous Sir Thomas More was so hurried by his zeal that he forgot he was a gentleman, and treated Mr. Fish with the language of a monk.”
Writers who decide on other men and on other times by the spirit of their own, try human affairs by a false standard. More was at heart a monk. He wore a prickly hair-shirt to mortify the flesh; he scourged himself with the knotted cord; he practised the penance; and he appeals to miraculous relics as the evidences of his faith! I give his own words in alluding to the Sudarium, that napkin sent to king Abgarus, on which Jesus impressed the image of his own face: “And it hath been by like miracle in the thin corruptible cloth kept and preserved these 1500 years fresh and well preserved, to the inward comforts, spiritual rejoicing, and great increase of fervour in the hearts of good Christian people.” To this he joins another similar miraculous relic, “the evangelist Luke’s portrait of our blessed Lady, his mother.”[8]
Such were considered as the evidences of the true faith of the Romanists; but More with his relics was then dealing in a damaged commodity. Lord Herbert has noticed the great fall of the price of relics at the dissolution of the monasteries: some which had been left in pawn no one cared to redeem.
“The History of King Richard the Third,” which first appeared in a correct state in this folio, has given rise to “historic doubts” which led to some paradoxes. The personal monster whom More and Shakspeake exhibited has vanished, but the deformity of the revolting parricide was surely revealed in the bones of the infant nephews. This, the earliest history in our vernacular literature, may still be read with delight. As a composition the critical justice of Lord Orford may be cited. “Its author was then in the vigour of his fancy, and fresh from the study of the Greek and Roman historians, whose manner he has imitated.” The details in this history of a prince of the house of York, though they may be tinged with the gall of the Lancastrian Cardinal Morton, descend to us with the weight of contemporary authority. It is supposed that More may have derived much of the materials of his history from his early patron, but the charms which still may retain us are the natural yet dramatic dialogue—the picturesque touches—and a style, at times, whose beauty three centuries have not wrinkled—and the emotions which such vital pages leave in the reader’s mind.[9]