Sir Thomas More, son of Sir John More, a justice of the
King’s Bench, was born in 1478, in Milk Street, in the city of
London. After his earlier education at St. Anthony’s School,
in Threadneedle Street, he was placed, as a boy, in the household
of Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord
Chancellor. It was not unusual for persons of wealth or
influence and sons of good families to be so established together
in a relation of patron and client. The youth wore his
patron’s livery, and added to his state. The patron used,
afterwards, his wealth or influence in helping his young client
forward in the world. Cardinal Morton had been in earlier
days that Bishop of Ely whom Richard III. sent to the Tower; was
busy afterwards in hostility to Richard; and was a chief adviser of
Henry VII., who in 1486 made him Archbishop of Canterbury, and nine
months afterwards Lord Chancellor. Cardinal Morton—of talk at
whose table there are recollections in “Utopia”—delighted in the
quick wit of young Thomas More. He once said, “Whoever shall
live to try it, shall see this child here waiting at table prove a
notable and rare man.”
At the age of about nineteen, Thomas More was sent to
Canterbury College, Oxford, by his patron, where he learnt Greek of
the first men who brought Greek studies from Italy to
England—William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre. Linacre, a
physician, who afterwards took orders, was also the founder of the
College of Physicians. In 1499, More left Oxford to study law
in London, at Lincoln’s Inn, and in the next year Archbishop Morton
died.
More’s earnest character caused him while studying law to aim
at the subduing of the flesh, by wearing a hair shirt, taking a log
for a pillow, and whipping himself on Fridays. At the age of
twenty-one he entered Parliament, and soon after he had been called
to the bar he was made Under-Sheriff of London. In 1503 he
opposed in the House of Commons Henry VII.’s proposal for a subsidy
on account of the marriage portion of his daughter Margaret; and he
opposed with so much energy that the House refused to grant
it. One went and told the king that a beardless boy had
disappointed all his expectations. During the last years,
therefore, of Henry VII. More was under the displeasure of
the king, and had thoughts of leaving the country.
Henry VII. died in April, 1509, when More’s age was a little
over thirty. In the first years of the reign of Henry VIII.
he rose to large practice in the law courts, where it is said he
refused to plead in cases which he thought unjust, and took no fees
from widows, orphans, or the poor. He would have preferred
marrying the second daughter of John Colt, of New Hall, in Essex,
but chose her elder sister, that he might not subject her to the
discredit of being passed over.
In 1513 Thomas More, still Under-Sheriff of London, is said
to have written his “History of the Life and Death of King Edward
V., and of the Usurpation of Richard III.” The book, which
seems to contain the knowledge and opinions of More’s patron,
Morton, was not printed until 1557, when its writer had been
twenty-two years dead. It was then printed from a MS. in
More’s handwriting.
In the year 1515 Wolsey, Archbishop of York, was made
Cardinal by Leo X.; Henry VIII. made him Lord Chancellor, and from
that year until 1523 the King and the Cardinal ruled England with
absolute authority, and called no parliament. In May of the
year 1515 Thomas More—not knighted yet—was joined in a commission
to the Low Countries with Cuthbert Tunstal and others to confer
with the ambassadors of Charles V., then only Archduke of Austria,
upon a renewal of alliance. On that embassy More, aged about
thirty-seven, was absent from England for six months, and while at
Antwerp he established friendship with Peter Giles (Latinised
Ægidius), a scholarly and courteous young man, who was secretary to
the municipality of Antwerp.
Cuthbert Tunstal was a rising churchman, chancellor to the
Archbishop of Canterbury, who in that year (1515) was made
Archdeacon of Chester, and in May of the next year (1516) Master of
the Rolls. In 1516 he was sent again to the Low Countries,
and More then went with him to Brussels, where they were in close
companionship with Erasmus.
More’s “Utopia” was written in Latin, and is in two parts, of
which the second, describing the place ([Greek text]—or Nusquama,
as he called it sometimes in his letters—“Nowhere”), was probably
written towards the close of 1515; the first part, introductory,
early in 1516. The book was first printed at Louvain, late in
1516, under the editorship of Erasmus, Peter Giles, and other of
More’s friends in Flanders. It was then revised by More, and
printed by Frobenius at Basle in November, 1518. It was
reprinted at Paris and Vienna, but was not printed in England
during More’s lifetime. Its first publication in this country
was in the English translation, made in Edward’s VI.’s reign (1551)
by Ralph Robinson. It was translated with more literary skill
by Gilbert Burnet, in 1684, soon after he had conducted the defence
of his friend Lord William Russell, attended his execution,
vindicated his memory, and been spitefully deprived by James II. of
his lectureship at St. Clement’s. Burnet was drawn to the
translation of “Utopia” by the same sense of unreason in high
places that caused More to write the book. Burnet’s is the
translation given in this volume.
The name of the book has given an adjective to our
language—we call an impracticable scheme Utopian. Yet, under
the veil of a playful fiction, the talk is intensely earnest, and
abounds in practical suggestion. It is the work of a
scholarly and witty Englishman, who attacks in his own way the
chief political and social evils of his time. Beginning with
fact, More tells how he was sent into Flanders with Cuthbert
Tunstal, “whom the king’s majesty of late, to the great rejoicing
of all men, did prefer to the office of Master of the Rolls;” how
the commissioners of Charles met them at Bruges, and presently
returned to Brussels for instructions; and how More then went to
Antwerp, where he found a pleasure in the society of Peter Giles
which soothed his desire to see again his wife and children, from
whom he had been four months away. Then fact slides into
fiction with the finding of Raphael Hythloday (whose name, made of
two Greek words, means “knowing in trifles”), a man who had been
with Amerigo Vespucci in the three last of the voyages to the new
world lately discovered, of which the account had been first
printed in 1507, only nine years before Utopia was
written.
Designedly fantastic in suggestion of details, “Utopia” is
the work of a scholar who had read Plato’s “Republic,” and had his
fancy quickened after reading Plutarch’s account of Spartan life
under Lycurgus. Beneath the veil of an ideal communism, into
which there has been worked some witty extravagance, there lies a
noble English argument. Sometimes More puts the case as of
France when he means England. Sometimes there is ironical
praise of the good faith of Christian kings, saving the book from
censure as a political attack on the policy of Henry VIII.
Erasmus wrote to a friend in 1517 that he should send for More’s
“Utopia,” if he had not read it, and “wished to see the true source
of all political evils.” And to More Erasmus wrote of his
book, “A burgomaster of Antwerp is so pleased with it that he knows
it all by heart.”
H. M.