The Jesuits are literally one of the greatest creations of this great period. Not to know them as such is to miss the significance of their order and not a little of the true spirit of the epoch from which they sprang. The arts and literature of the Renaissance produced no work destined to live so vividly, nor to influence men in all succeeding generations so deeply, as "the little company of Jesus," as Ignatius of Loyola conceived and organized it.
HOLBEIN, SIR THOMAS MORE
CHAPTER IV
SIR THOMAS MORE AND SOME CONTEMPORARIES
While in this great period of the Renaissance, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and so many others, were demonstrating the power of the human mind to express itself in aesthetic modes of all kinds, and Copernicus and Regiomontanus and Vesalius and Paracelsus were showing how man's intellect might penetrate the mysteries of the universe without him and that smaller universe the microcosm that he is himself, and Erasmus and Pico della Mirandola and Linacre were exhibiting human scholarship at its highest, a great contemporary in England expressed human life at its best in strong terms of the human will. This was Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, put to death by Henry VIII, but not until he had succeeded in making out of his life a wonderful work of living art of the profoundest significance, to which men of all classes have been attracted ever since. He was a great scholar, a great lawyer, a great judge--the only man who ever cleared the docket of the English Court of Chancery,--a writer of distinguished ability not only in his own language but in Latin, a philosopher who so far as the consideration of social problems was concerned deserves a place beside Plato: yet not for any of these attainments is he famous, but for his unflinching following of what he saw to be his duty even though it cost him everything that men usually hold dear--life, reputation, property and even the possibility of poverty and suffering for those he held dear after his death.
Sir Thomas More was born in London, February 7, 1478. We are likely to think of the Wars of the Roses as farther away from us, but they were not yet over. Edward the Fourth was now firmly fixed on the throne, but there had been stormy times for the monarchy in his reign. Edward [{224}] originally ascended the throne in March, 1461, but the revolt of the Kingmaker Earl of Warwick had led to the restoration of poor Henry VI in 1470, and Edward had to flee the country. He returned in 1471, defeated Warwick at Barnet, April 14, 1471, and Margaret of Anjou at Tewkesbury, May 4, 1471. There was tranquillity for a dozen of years after this, but it was not until Henry VII defeated Richard III at Bosworth in 1485, and then married the Yorkist Princess Elizabeth, that peace was assured to England. It was into a very disturbed England, then, that Sir Thomas More was born. As a boy he had as teacher Nicholas Holt, who seems, with the true Renaissance spirit, to have been thoroughly able to arouse the youth's interest. At the age of twelve he entered the household of Cardinal Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was the good old custom at that time to have boys brought up in the households of distinguished nobles or high ecclesiastical dignitaries, with the idea that association with men of parts represented the best stimulus for that development of the intellectual faculties which constitutes real education.
It was not long before young More attracted the attention of the distinguished old Cardinal, who prophesied his future greatness. Roper, who married More's daughter Margaret, tells an incident of the boy's life at this time and adds that, as a consequence of the Cardinal's appreciation of him. More was sent to the university. He says in a famous paragraph that shows us More's precocity and that sense of humor that was to characterize him all his life:
"Though More were young of years, yet would he at Christmas suddenly sometimes step in among the players, and never studying for the matter, make a part of his own there presently among them which made the lookers on more sport than all the players beside. In whose wit and towardness the Cardinal much delighting, would often say of him to the nobles that divers times dine with him: 'This child here waiting at the table, whoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man.' Whereupon for his better furtherance in learning, he placed him at Oxford."
After some four years in the Cardinal's household, More [{225}] went to the university on the bounty of his patron, and afterwards took up the study of law and was admitted to the bar.