EARLY LIFE: WHILE HE WAS YET "A BEARDLESS BOY" (1478-1504)

Before he arrived at the cardinal’s house, More spent five or six years studying at Saint Anthony’s School in London. There he had begun study of the seven “liberal arts,” which constituted formal education throughout the Middle Ages. The liberal arts were divided into two groups: the trivium (grammar, logic/ dialectical reasoning, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). At Saint Anthony’s, More would have concentrated on the trivium. The study of language, and especially of Latin, which was then the international language of theology, scholarship, literature, diplomacy, and trade, was supremely important. As with many of his educated contemporaries, More’s skill in Latin would become so great that it would become his second language of conversation. Well-educated people were expected to know the distinct properties of words and the exact use of terms in a well-reasoned argument, thus grammar and logic. But such knowledge was not fully realized until it could be expressed in persuasive rhetoric—that is, in closely reasoned arguments presented in writing, but better still through eloquent speech.

With the cardinal’s encouragement, More left Lambeth Palace in 1492 to attend Oxford University. Already a renowned university, Oxford was an intellectual forge that shaped and tempered young minds through disciplined learning and the practice of spirited debates (disputations). The debate questions that professors put to students dealt with matters of Scholastic philosophy and the nature of language itself. For recreation, students could debate less weighty matters, such as whether the stem or the flower was more valuable to a plant, and the like. These were cloistered debates, academic exercises meant to toughen a student’s intellectual mettle. It did not matter which side one took, so long as one could stand toe-to-toe with an opponent and give as well as one got. Years later, More would use the debate format in his polemical writings as one strategy to argue against the Reformation. Better known, the first book of his Utopia (1515-16) poses a question about what sort of state is best. The ensuing recreational debate produced one of the world’s most celebrated flights of political fancy.

More did not complete a degree at Oxford, but that was not uncommon. A university education in those days usually led to a career in the academic community, the church, or both. Those who aspired to secular careers headed back to the cities, and especially to London, for further education or training. More’s father, Sir John More, a lawyer, had a legal career planned for his son, and Thomas was a dutiful son. So, in 1494, at age 16, More left Oxford and returned to London to pursue the study of law.

In More’s London a legal education was had at the Inns of Chancery and the Inns of Court. More began his studies at New Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery. The Inns of Chancery prepared young or insufficiently trained students for more rigorous study of law in the Inns of Court. In addition to sharpening his skills in language and reasoning, More would have also studied history, divinity, and music. England had its own long tradition of history writing, but the histories that were attracting the most attention in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the classical histories of ancient Rome. When More came later to write The History of King Richard III (ca. 1513-ca. 1518), it would be to those classical models that he would turn for guidance. The study of theology and divinity would still have been heavily influenced by Scholastic traditions, but because More was embarking on a course of legal training, there would have also been considerations of the relations of church law to civil law and of the disputes over competing jurisdictions. In More’s History of King Richard III, for example, there is a long scene involving a debate over the rights of the church to provide sanctuary (actual physical protection within the church). As for music, it claimed a prominent place for study because of its inclusion in the quadrivium. More esteemed music highly. In his Utopia it gets special notice as one of the disciplines in which the Utopians excel. In his own household, More encouraged both of his wives and all of his children to learn to play instruments and to sing. William Roper tells us that More loved to sing in his church choir (Roper 26). Desiderius Erasmus (ca. 1466-1536), the great Dutch scholar and More’s good friend, notes that “though [More] is fond of music of all kinds,” “he does not seem framed by nature to be a singer.”3 The two observations are not necessarily contradictory. In 1496 More was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn, one of the Inns of Court, to complete his legal studies. There he would have heard lectures on the law from esteemed practitioners (“readers”), observed pleadings in the courts at Westminster, and then been questioned about what he had observed. Readers at the Inns of Court would test their students’ growing knowledge of the law not only through questioning but also through the “putting of cases,” which posed legal issues and points of law for them to argue. In an odd turn of events, More’s life would eventually hang on what he misconstrued to be an innocent putting of cases about the extent of Parliamentary powers.

More's Date of Birth

There is some uncertainty about the date of More's birth, as there is about the birthdates of many people, famous or not, who lived in the Middle Ages. (The high rate of infant mortality discouraged making much over a child's birth; it was a child's survival that counted, and consequently death records are more prevalent and reliable.) To his credit, Thomas's father, Sir John More, attempted to record his son's birth with utmost accuracy, jotting down immediately after the event that Thomas was born between two and three in the morning on the Friday after the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin in the seventeenth year of the reign of King Edward IV. So far, so good. Then, just to make things certain, Sir John later added the phrase, "to wit, the seventh day of February." Because the seventeenth year of Edward IV's reign did not begin until March 1477, it seems that a birth year of1477 is ruled out. But in 1478, February 7 fell on a Saturday, not a Friday, which it had done in 1477. The same Friday after the Feast of the

Purification of the Blessed Virgin in 1478 would have fallen on February 6. We are left with a conundrum, and the best that we can say without fear of contradiction is that Thomas was born on February 6 or 7 in either 1477 or 1478. If we take it that Sir John was very sure of the date as being February 7 and that he was just as sure that his son was born during the seventeenth year of Edward IV's reign (two very solid bits of information strongly asserted), then we may suppose that Sir John, in the excitement of the moment and in the wee hours of the morning, simply got his days of the week mixed up. Richard Marius suggests that Sir John's apparent confusion may be accounted for by the medieval custom of not counting a new day as begun until sunrise. So, even though Thomas was born early on Saturday morning, Sir John may still have thought of the pre-dawn time as Friday, so Thomas was probably born on February 7, 1478.

More completed his studies in good time and “was made and accounted a worthy Utter Barrister” in 1501 or 1502 (that is, he was now allowed to plead cases; Roper 4). He completed his studies, was called to the bar, and began his career as a writer and public speaker all at the same time. While he was a student, More also attended lectures at Saint Paul’s Churchyard and elsewhere to hear the foremost scholars of the day speak on Greek philosophy and literature, on theology, and on ancient history. The study of ancient Greek and the revival of classical studies in England was just beginning, and More got caught up in the movement, befriended the best of the new scholars, and soon began to show the fruits of his own classical studies. As More was reaching the end of his legal studies, he joined Erasmus in translating into Latin the satirical works of Lucian (ca. 125-ca. 180), a Roman author who wrote in Greek. Among the works of Lucian that More translated was the Menippus, a story of a fantastical journey to Hades to find an answer to the question of what sort of life is best. The fanciful nature of that work would influence More’s composition of Utopia. More also translated epigrams from the Greek anthology into Latin with his friend, William Lily. Though the epigrams often reflect More’s sense of humor, they also reveal his hatred of tyranny. More was both terrified and outraged at the notion of a king becoming a tyrant. There was for him a clear difference between rule by authority and the raw exercise of power. Later in life, after he had resigned as Lord Chancellor, More advised Thomas Cromwell, the king’s secretary, to “ever tell [the king] what he ought to do, but never what he is able to do. . . . For if a lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him” (Roper 28). Some of the epigrams that More translated condemned tyranny as a mad delusion and others as the cruelest form of foolishness.

In 1501 William Grocyn invited More to lecture on Saint Augustine’s The City of God. We are told by Nicholas Harpsfield, another of More’s early biographers, that More packed the house, drawing an even larger audience than Grocyn when he had lectured at Saint Paul’s Churchyard."* In 1503

Queen Elizabeth, the wife of King Henry VII, died and More wrote “A Rueful Lamentation,” a poem in rhyme royal5 to be displayed over her tomb. In the poem Elizabeth expresses her sorrow at having left behind all that she loved on Earth. In one stanza, the queen laments her separation from her daughter:

Farewell my daughter lady Margaret,

God wotte* full oft** it grieved hath my mind *knows **often That ye should go where we should seldom meet.

Now am I gone, and have left you behind.

O mortal folk that we be very blind.

That we least fear, full oft it is most nigh,

From you depart I first, and lo now here I lie.6

There is some dramatic irony in this stanza, for Margaret married James IV of Scotland in 1503, and in leaving England she worried that she was leaving her mother behind, but it is the queen who has left Margaret behind. Also, the notion that the things that “we least fear” are sometimes the most dangerous will return when More describes the duplicity of Richard III. Finally, “A Rueful Lamentation” is also a reflection on the “last things” (death, judgment, heaven, and hell), a common medieval approach to contemplating the impermanence of the material world. More’s later biography of Pico della Miran-dola and the prayer that More wrote while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London reflect the same spirit. By 1503, More’s legal career and literary life were off to a brilliant start and running at an astonishingly fast pace.

In 1504, King Henry VII called a Parliament, and More was elected to serve in the House of Commons, though we do not know which constituency he represented. Henry sought financial aid from Parliament to recover the cost of knighting his eldest son, Arthur, in 1489 and the cost of the marriage of his daughter, Margaret. The levies he sought could have easily run to ?60,000 or more, a great sum of money indeed. In the end, the king had to settle for half of what he wanted. According to William Roper, it was More who argued most persuasively against Henry’s demand. As he tells the story,

At the last debating whereof [More] made such arguments and reasons there against, that the King’s demands thereby were clean overthrown.

So that one of the King’s Privy Council named Master Tyler. . . brought word to the King out of Parliament House that a beardless boy had disappointed all his purpose. (Roper 5)

So soon a lawyer, so skilled a debater, and so quickly in trouble! The king was furious and “could not be satisfied until he had some way revenged it” (Roper 5). The new lawyer and member of Parliament had no property or fortune to lose by his arguments, but his father, Sir John, did. Roper concludes the story by telling us that “His Grace [King Henry VII] devised a causeless quarrel against [More’s] father, keeping him in the Tower until he had made pay to him an hundred pounds fine” (Roper 5). In 1504, ?100 was not a trivial amount of money, either. In time, More’s professional skills and rhetorical powers would dispel his father’s misgivings and win him recognition far beyond Sir John’s greatest hopes. Sir John died in 1530, but he lived long enough to see his son appointed Lord Chancellor of England, the highest judicial officer in the realm.