More was seven years old when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1483. When he served as a page in Cardinal Morton’s household, More surely heard eyewitness accounts of Richard’s rise to power, reign, defeat, and death. Morton himself had been a major player during Richard’s reign and an early supporter of Henry. His stories were likely as thrilling to hear as they were biased against Richard. Henry Tudor did not have as great a claim to the throne as Richard did, so any account that would undermine Richard’s legitimacy and bolster Henry’s would serve the new Tudor dynasty well. Making Richard out to be a deformed, murderous, usurping tyrant would be best of all. Around 1513 More began to meld his accumulating information about Richard, his hatred of tyranny, his interest in the classical historians, and his flair for drama to produce his History of King Richard III.
More’s principal literary models for the History were the Roman historians Sallust, Suetonius, and Tacitus. R. S. Sylvester says that More “must have had [Sallust] by heart.”14 In reading Sallust, More found a way to treat the theme of the usurpation of political power both as a study of history and as political theatre through set speeches and character dialogue. Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars gave More license to spice up historical narrative with gossip and a sprinkling of scandalous details. From Tacitus’s Annals, More learned how to construct a driving narrative through the codependent nature of character and event. Both the Annals and More’s History begin in a world at peace and under the rule of an idealized monarch, Caesar Augustus for Tacitus and Edward IV for More. From those starting points, each introduces a cast of characters that will reduce what had been idyllic states into brutal regimes ruled by tyrants, Tiberius for Sallust and Richard III for More. Protagonists and antagonists are both given psychological motives that push them forward into action. In both histories, the tyrants pursue their goals through dissimulation, the art of concealing true motives behind an outward show of benevolent piety. The dissonance between outward show and concealed motive contributes significantly to the dramatic irony in both works.
Sylvester’s favorite adjective to describe More’s History is not “historical” but “dramatic,” and with good reason, as More was influenced by drama all his life. More acted in plays, wrote plays, and had friends and relatives who were involved in the composition, production, performance, and publication of plays.15 More must have also known Medwall’s morality play, Nature, which has as its chief dramatic device the ploy of the Seven Deadly Sins masquerading as Virtues in order to deceive mankind. More’s Richard is well practiced in the same strategy. In the History, Queen Elizabeth, arguing to keep her son safely with her in sanctuary, vents her anger to Richard’s henchmen, saying, “troweth [Richard] that I perceive not whereunto his painted process draweth”?16 Her bitter crack at Richard’s expense suggests that she sees through his outward show of virtue to his true demonic self behind the mask.
More’s History is an extraordinary work in progress. In fact, it is two works in progress, because More wrote separate versions of the History in English and Latin, one version for his native audience and another for an international readership. They are not simply translations of each other, because the international readership needed background information on English law and customs. Neither version was ever finished. More began working on the History around 1513. He worked on his drafts for about three years before he left them off to complete Utopia. After the publication of Utopia he worked on the History for another two years or so, before finally abandoning it.
The History begins with More’s depiction of an England at peace, ruled by the wise and benevolent King Edward IV. Into this realm of peace and love, like a serpent come into Eden, enters Richard duke of York, Edward’s youngest brother. Richard is everything that Edward is not. More tells us that he was “little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard favored of visage [ugly], and such as in states called warly [warlike], in other men otherwise” (Sylvester 8). About his character, More says that Richard “was close and secret, a deep dissimuler [dissembler, deceiver], lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly coumpinable [friendly] where he inwardly hated, not letting [hesitating] to kiss whom he thought to kill” (Sylvester 8-9). Soon after Edward’s death, Richard has himself named protector of Edward’s young sons, the uncrowned Edward V and his younger brother Richard duke of York. The designation of Richard as the protector of the boy princes, when in fact he is their worst enemy, is one example of the dramatic irony that pervades the History. The words “protect” and “protector” occur over a hundred times in the History and contribute to its ambience of danger lurking close by. One thinks back to More’s poem “A Rueful Lamentation” and its caution that “That we least fear, full oft it is most nigh.” The sentiment is repeated in the History as a reflection on the death of Lord Hastings, the Lord Chamberlain. Hastings had been an early supporter of Richard but had fallen out of favor. Richard calls for a meeting of his councillors at the Tower of London on Friday June 13, 1483, an unlucky day for Hastings. Richard begins the meeting cordially, even asking John Morton, then bishop of Ely, to have some of his famous strawberries served to the company. In the time that it takes to fetch the strawberries, Richard’s mood turns lethal and he accuses Hastings of treason. Hastings protests, but to no avail, and he is taken from the room to his immediate execution. Hastings’s fall causes More to comment, “O good God, the blindness of our mortal nature! When he most feared, he was in good surety; when he reckoned himself surest, he lost his life” (Sylvester 53). This “strawberry” scene is famous not only for More’s narrative in the History, but also for Shakespeare’s dramatization of it in his Tragedy of King Richard III (3.2 and 3.4). In the History the scene already has the makings of a successful drama: a cast of remarkable characters, personality conflicts, sharp dialogue, eerie premonitions of danger and calamity, rising tensions, a sudden turn of fortune, and a disastrous climax.
Not surprisingly, the most famous figurative expression in the History is More’s stage analogy for court politics, which comes as a comment on Richard’s pretense of not wanting the crown. The duke of Buckingham brings “the mayor [of London] with all his aldermen and chief commoners” to ask Richard to take “upon [himself] the crown and governance of [the] realm” (Sylvester 80). Richard refuses their first two requests. They ask a third time, and Richard, “much moved,” finally accepts. The scene has been a sham performance. Success in theatre depends on the willingness of actors and audiences to believe in the reality of a shared imaginative experience. If anyone breaks faith with the shared experience, whether maliciously or stupidly, the truth of the play is destroyed for all. More explains these codependent relationships this way:
And in a stage play all the people know right well that he that plays the sowdaine [sultan] is percase [perchance] a sowter [shoemaker]. Yet if one should can so little good [be so foolish as] to show out of season what acquaintance he hath with him and call by his own name while he standeth in his majesty, one of the tormentors might hap to break his head, and worthy [deservedly] for marring of the play. And so they said that these matters be kings’ games, as it were stage plays, and for the more part played upon scaffolds, in which poor men be but the lookers-on. And they that wise be will meddle no farther. For they that sometime step up and play with them, when they cannot play their parts, they disorder the play and do themselves no good. (Sylvester 83)
The problem for the dumbfounded crowd witnessing Richard’s staged refusal-refusal-acceptance of the crown is that Richard has abandoned the part for which he was cast and usurped the lead role. Richard had been cast to be the protector of Edward IV’s sons. Instead, he has imprisoned both princes in the Tower and will soon have them murdered. The play is unraveling from the inside out, and the audience can do nothing to save it.
For a dramatic history or a historical drama to be compelling, its action must come to a moment of moral decision that will be difficult to make and important in its consequences. Tacitus knew this, and so did the playwrights of medieval drama. And so did More. For nearly all of his History More tells the story of Richard’s rise to power and the disastrous effects of his murderous ambitions. But More left the History unfinished, so we do not know where he was going to take it. We can speculate, though. If the History were going to offer any moral instruction about what good people can do in the face of tyranny, then it would lie in the moral decision to oppose Richard. The History breaks off as Bishop Morton is drawing the duke of Buckingham into seeing that the wrong man was made (or made himself) king. In the last line of the History Morton suggests that the better man for England would be the duke himself. Their talk is exceedingly dangerous. In October 1483, Buckingham did lead a rebellion against Richard, was captured, and subsequently was executed on November 2. Morton, however, was fortunate, for he was able to flee the country to join Henry Tudor on the continent. He returned to England as a member of the victorious party. For his troubles, Henry VII made Morton his Lord Chancellor. We might guess that More would portray his old mentor as a wise and wily man of God who, at great danger to himself, chose to oppose tyranny and help set a just king on England’s throne.
As history, More’s Richard III is not altogether reliable, but as a work of literature it has proved an enduring success. Some of the reasons for the History’s vitality are well known. It can be read as a sensational bit of Tudor propaganda. Its conclusions about the character of Richard and his guilt in the murder of the boy princes please some readers and antagonize others. It serves as an example par excellence of how the English humanists sought to apply classical models to the writing of their own history. Finally, it is very dramatic storytelling and the source of Shakespeare’s play. As R. W. Chambers remarks, “Shakespeare’s Richard is More’s Richard. . . . A comparison of Shakespeare’s Richard III and More’s leaves one astonished at the debt” (Chambers 117).
More finally abandoned the History around 1518. His last scene, depicting a Morton-Buckingham conspiracy, must have seemed a tender subject. The Tudors were not that well established on the throne and not at all secure in the continuance of their lineage. There were also some at court, such as Edward Stafford, third duke of Buckingham, who were direct descendants of people who had rebelled against Richard. The History ran the risk of being misconstrued by Henry VIII as a treasonous protest against his own reign. In fact, Edward Stafford was convicted of high treason and executed on May 17, 1521. More may have thought that it was better to let sleeping dogs lie. Whatever the reason, More gave up one sort of political tale set in familiar surroundings for a new and different sort set in a safely remote never-never land called Utopia.
Utopia (1515-16)
More began writing Utopia in 1515 while he was on a diplomatic mission to Flanders. It is a slender volume divided into two parts called “books.” He finished it in late August or early September 1516, and with the help of Erasmus had it published in December in Louvain. More wrote it in Latin, but in an informal style so that it might better catch the tone of the summer conversations that inspired the book. His inventive stitching together of an account of his own activities with a fictitious meeting of Raphael Hythloday, an intriguing travel tale, a critique of European social norms, a vision of the best of societies, and a dollop of sly humor found a wide and appreciative audience. Utopia was reprinted in 1517 in Paris and then twice again in 1518 in Basel. By the middle of the sixteenth century it had been translated into German (1525), Italian (1548), French (1550), and English (1551). By the end of the sixteenth century Utopia was an international bestseller. It still is. More’s invention of the word “utopia” is another of his gifts to the English lexicon. It is a word found in many languages now and used to describe any sort of imagined ideal community.
More drew on some actual and some fictional travel tales for his real-life “framing” and account of Utopia. In that Age of Discovery travelers’ accounts of voyages to the New World, especially those of Amerigo Vespucci published in 1507, were popular reading. More makes the most of the reports of the New World to add a dash of concrete reality to Hythloday’s tale. He also drew upon the fantastic travel tales of Lucian (ca. 125-ca. 180), particularly his Menippus, already mentioned above, and A True History, which could be called the world’s first science fiction novel, as it includes a voyage to the moon, among other adventures. Lucian’s deadpan narrative lampoons those who believed in the literal truth of the fabulous incidents described in such works as Homer’s Odyssey. If More hoped his own deadpan seriousness would coax an unwitting reader into believing in the actual existence of Utopia, he may have succeeded. In his prefatory letter to Utopia, More wrote that “there are various people here [in England], and one in particular, a devout man and a professor of theology, who very much wants to go to Utopia. . . to foster and further the growth of our religion, which has made such a happy start there.”17
Utopia is a two-part traveler’s tale inside a traveler’s tale. Book One begins with More sharing an account of his diplomatic mission to Flanders. When he finds that he has some free time, More and his secretary, John Clement, head off to Antwerp. While there they meet Peter Giles, a young scholar and a native of the city. More thus begins his tale by grounding it in the Europe that his readers already know. But then his story takes a turn into fantasy. He tells us that he happened to come across Giles one morning talking to an impressive-looking stranger. The stranger is Raphael Hythloday, a sailor-adventurer who has just returned from a voyage to the New World as a member of Amerigo Vespucci’s crew. More learns that Hythloday has an astounding story to tell about his discovery of Utopia, the best society in the world. Book Two is taken up almost wholly by his afternoon monologue about Utopian society. Hythloday and his story are the inventions of More’s imagination, though some of Utopia’s social structure is similar to that described in Plato’s Republic. Hythloday’s observations on the ills of European society and how Utopia provides a model for their remedy are matters that are debated by the characters inside the book. They are matters that were debated by More’s contemporary readers. They are matters that are still debated.
Book One records the morning conversation of More, Hythloday, and Giles. It begins pleasantly, because Hythloday knows Cardinal Morton and has visited him in England, much to More’s surprise and delight. By the end of Book One Hythloday has More in an awkward position, because he has questioned how anyone in good conscience (including More) could choose to serve any of Europe’s monarchs, when their collective record of social justice is universally abysmal. Hythloday cites a debate that he participated in at Morton’s house. The question raised there was whether the execution of thieves had positive or negative impacts on society. Hythloday took the negative side and pressed his listeners to examine the root causes of the crime. Capital punishment for theft, he argued, is no solution to the crime at all, when poverty and hopelessness drive people to steal. Capital punishment is in fact worse than no solution, because it is not a deterrent and may tempt a thief to commit murder, as the penalties for both crimes are the same. Further, landowners are buying up farmland and turning it into pastures for sheep, which displaces a whole class of able-bodied farm workers, making for more poverty and more crime. Thieves should not be executed but put to work, as they are in Utopia, so they can make restitution to their victims, earn keep for themselves, and put a little money into the state’s treasury. His arguments, Hythloday says, were well received by the cardinal but were tolerated by the others only because of Morton’s approval.
After hearing this story, More urges Hythloday to become an advisor to a prince, but Hythloday rejects the notion, saying that princes are not interested in his sort of counsel. He contends that they are more interested in gathering power and money to themselves than in taking care of their people. He concludes that “there is no place for philosophy in the councils of kings” (Utopia 25). Then More has to explain himself, because he is a learned man in the service of a king. More’s argument that there is a kind of “philosophy that is better suited for political action” takes the form of a stage analogy (Utopia 25). This sort of philosophy, he says, “takes its cue, adapts itself to the drama in hand, and acts its part neatly and well” (Utopia 25). If the play that you are in, he says, is a comedy, it will do no good for you to deliver a speech from some tragedy that you like better. More argues that
You pervert and ruin a play, when you add irrelevant speeches, even if they are better than the original. So go through with the drama in hand as best you can, and don’t spoil it all simply because you happen to think another one would be better. (Utopia 26)
It is hard to tell in Utopia when More is speaking in his own voice or as a kind of “straight man” to feed lines to Hythloday so that Hythloday can speak for him. Much of what Hythloday says would sound radical to any European prince. If More, the character, can sound utterly conventional but provoke Hythloday into saying the things that More, the author, advocates, then anything that displeases a powerful prince or two can be blamed on the ramblings of a fictional character. More adds another layer of authorial protection, too: “Hythloday,” derived from Greek, means “dispenser of nonsense.” The consensus among readers nowadays is that in this stage analogy More is speaking in his own voice. He seems to be arguing that, yes, we live in an imperfect world, but it is the only world we have, so we need to find a way to make the best of it, or at least make it as good as possible. (In context, though, this reads humorously, because More, as author, ignores his own counsel and proceeds to give us a detailed picture of a world that Hythloday happens to think is better!) It was a philosophy that served More well until there came a time when, by analogy, Henry VIII rewrote the whole play from top to bottom, abandoning all the known principles of good dramaturgy.
In Book Two, Hythloday gives More and Giles a description of the land and people of Utopia, including its geography, urban planning, labor practices, social and business relations, travel and trade, monetary policy, moral philosophy, education, use of slaves, marriage customs, codes of criminal justice, foreign relations, conduct of war, and religious diversity. Two of these aspects may serve to illustrate Utopia’s narrative method: the communal organization of Utopian society and the principles of Utopian moral philosophy and religious tolerance. Utopia’s geography and social design make it an enclosed state. It is an island nation protected on three sides by mountains and on the fourth side by a fortified harbor. Its towns are laid out in identical grid-like patterns and are heavily fortified. They, too, are enclosed communities. The people all wear the same drab clothes, and all goods and resources are held in common. There is no private property and little personal privacy. There is no money. Gold and precious gems are considered worthless, because they have no practical utility. The cities are governed by elected officials who serve one-year terms, with the exception of the elected prince of each city, who serves for life, “unless he is suspected of aiming at tyranny” (Utopia 35). There is no king or ruling official who governs the whole country. All citizens are required to spend time working in agriculture, in addition to practicing their own trades. No one is idle, unless illness or old age prevents work. Of the 24 hours of the day, 6 are devoted to work; the rest are given to meals, recreation, intellectual and personal improvement, and sleep. Except for the time when mothers nurse their infants, all children are raised in common. People work diligently, produce food and goods in abundance, and never lack for what they need nor desire what they do not need. A few Utopians who demonstrate exceptional intellectual ability are exempt from manual labor and are admitted to the “class of learned men,” from whom all ambassadors, priests, city governors, and the prince himself are chosen (Utopia 39). This selective ruling class is reminiscent of the philosopher-kings of Plato’s Republic.
Some readers have objected to what they see as More’s desire to impose a communistic model on sixteenth-century society. They see not an idyllic “utopia” but an oppressive “dystopia,” where the human spirit is stifled under the weight of a collective mind-set, something like the Big-Brother-is-watching sociology of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Other readers, perhaps those with Marxist sympathies, support More’s social model. More’s first model was, in fact, the communal life of the early church, as described in Acts 4:32-37. Also underlying his description of the Utopian social order is More’s cherished memory of living in the London Charterhouse of the Carthusian monks.
According to the principles of their moral philosophy, Utopians conform to a life “where everything has been established according to plan, and the commonwealth is carefully regulated,” not by fear of external pressures but by an inner experience of happiness based on pleasure. This “pleasure principle” joins their “philosophic rationalism” to the essential tenets of their religions. They profess that when “a man obeys the dictates of reason in choosing one thing and avoiding another, he is following nature.” The first rule of reason is “to love and venerate the Divine majesty to whom men owe their own existence and every happiness of which they are capable” (Utopia 51). The second rule “is to lead a life as free of anxiety and as full of joy as possible, and to help all one’s fellow men toward that end” (Utopia 51). Some have read the Utopians’ esteem for pleasure as simply a high gloss on hedonism. Hythloday, however, takes care to qualify what sort of pleasure a Utopian ought to pursue, which is “following his senses and his right reason [to] discover what is pleasant by nature—it is a delight that does not injure others, that does not preclude a greater pleasure, and that is not followed by pain” (Utopia 52). The greatest pleasures for the Utopians are the pleasures of intellectual challenge and meaningful discovery. Among their prayers is the petition that “if they are wrong in [their idea of the best commonwealth], and if there is some sort of society or religion more acceptable to God than the present one, they pray that he will, in his goodness, reveal it to them, for they are ready to follow wherever he leads them” (Utopia 81). Hythloday is presenting Utopia not as the ideal commonwealth, over and done with, but as the best commonwealth. Being best does not have to mean being perfect, it only has to mean being better by comparison with all others. Being a perfect commonwealth would make Utopia a static society, but the Utopians are eager to learn from others, to acquire books and knowledge, and to improve themselves and their society. They choose to be a dynamic society; in fact Hythloday says he brought them books of history, philosophy, drama, and poetry from ancient Greece and Rome, which the Utopians received gladly and read avidly.
Many aspects of Utopia resonate with More’s esteem for the monastic life: the enclosed geography of the island state; the walled, fortified, enclosed design of the cities; the communal life free of money and possessions; the complete obedience to wise and benign leaders; the uniform dress code and carefully ordered daily schedule; and the happiness found in lives that integrate contemplation and meaningful action. But Utopia cannot simply be the superimposing of a monastic order on a secular society, as society is full of the evil, violence, and temptations of the devil, the world, and the flesh that monasteries built walls against. If More did, however, look to monastic communities for a model of the best society, then his challenge in writing Utopia was to imagine a way in which monastic ideals could plausibly be made to work in the secular world. Looked at the other way around, the question is: to what extent can a secular state be brought into line with monastic ideals and still be able to function successfully in the actual world? Perhaps Utopia is More’s attempt to answer those questions. Could such a place actually exist, even thrive? More’s tongue-in-cheek answer to those questions was, yes, of course, in Utopia it can. But “utopia,” derived from Greek, means “no place”—that is, nowhere. Not even the monasteries of More’s own times lived up to their own ideals.
Utopia may also be a veiled criticism of the church, which ought to have been providing a better model for the social organization of secular states. If so, there was a painful coincidence in it, because at the same time as More was writing Utopia a monk in Wittenberg, Germany, was also itemizing his criticisms of the church. Instead of writing a witty political satire comparable to Utopia, however, Martin Luther chose to pursue matters according to traditional Scholastic practice. On October 31, 1517, he posted 95 theses (questions) on the door of his church. He sought thereby to initiate a scholarly disputation on matters of church doctrine and institutional reform. It was a call to debate like thousands of others during the Middle Ages, but the questions that Luther posted would fly far outside the walls of his monastery and into the world at large. More would soon have to pay attention to Luther’s criticisms and to their effects on the church and European society. When he did take up the debate, it changed the course of his life. From then on, his days were increasingly troubled by the theological and political shocks of the Protestant Reformation.
World History
