Richard Marius - Thomas More

ALSO BY RICHARD MARIUS

FICTION
THE COMING OF RAIN
BOUND FOR THE PROMISED LAND

NON FICTION
LUTHER

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

COPYRIGHT 1984 BY RICHARD MARIUS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED UNDER INTERNATIONAL AND PAN-AMERICAN COPYRIGHT CONVENTIONS. PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC., NEW YORK, AND SIMULTANEOUSLY IN CANADA BY RANDOM HOUSE OF CANADA LIMITED, TORONTO. DISTRIBUTED BY RANDOM HOUSE, INC., NEW YORK.

GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS MADE TO THE FOLLOWING FOR PERMISSION TO REPRINT PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED MATERIAL:

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS: EXCERPTS FROM THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ERASMUS. VOL. 3, COPYRIGHT 1976; VOL. 4, COPYRIGHT 1977; VOL. 5, COPYRIGHT 1979. ALL BY THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS. USED WITH PERMISSION. YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS: EXCERPTS FROM TWO EARLY TUDOR LIVES, ED. RICHARD S. SYLVESTER AND DAVIS P. HARDING, COPYRIGHT 1962; THE YALE EDITION OF THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ST. THOMAS MORE. VOL. 4, UTOPIA, ED. EDW. SURTZ, S.J., AND J. H. HEXTER, AND VOL. 5, RESPONSIO AD LUTHERUM, ED. J. M. HEADLEY, TRANS., SISTER SCHOLASTICA MANDEVILLE, COPYRIGHT 1963 BY YALE UNIVERSITY; VOL. 3, PART 2, LATIN POEMS, ED. MILLER, BRADNER, LYNCH, AND OLIVER, COPYRIGHT 1984 BY YALE UNIVERSITY. USED WITH PERMISSION.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

MARIUS, RICHARD.
THOMAS MORE.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: P.
1. MORE, THOMAS, SIR, SAINT, 1478-1535.
2. GREAT BRITIANHISTORYHENRY VIII, 1509-1547.
3. STATESMENGREAT BRITIANBIOGRAPHY.
4. CHRISTIAN SAINTSENGLANDBIOGRAPHY. I. TITLE.
DA344.M8M275 1984 942.0520924 [B] 94-47645
eISBN: 978-0-307-82805-7

v3.1

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
TO THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND
RICHARD S. SYLVESTER
AND IN HOMAGE TO MY FRIEND
MILTON KLEIN
OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE

Illustrations follow .

Source references will be found in the notes at the end of the book, located by page number and an identifying phrase from the text.

A BIG BOOK creates big personal debts for any author. I cannot repay all the debts I owe for this book, but I can at least acknowledge some of them.

To no one is my obligation greater than to my editor, Ann Close. To detail all her work on this book would require a book almost as large. She asked relentlessly intelligent questions, and she always made me think of the general audience of intelligent and educated people I hope will read the work. She kept me (I trust) from being either obscurely pedantic or patronizingly obvious. She also weeded out some heavy clumps of verbiage. And she never once lost patience through three major drafts of the manuscript.

Robert Gottlieb believed in the book before he ever saw a page of it and supported it and me far beyond the original deadline. Erasmus would have called him a Maecenas; More would have enjoyed his company.

My colleague David Sacks gave the first draft of the manuscript an astonishingly close reading and made dozens of valuable suggestions, especially relating to English government in the sixteenth century. Professors John Headley, Walter Kaiser, and Thomas White also read that enormous, chaotic first draft and commented helpfully on it. My colleagues Terry Shaller and Jay Boggis read chapters of the work and talked about them with me, and my good neighbor in Widener Library, Professor Gwynne B. Evans, read the chapter on Mores History of King Richard III. While I was working on the book, I read parts of it as lectures at Villanova University, Agnes Scott College, Gannon University, Thomas More College, Marshall University, the University of Mississippi, the University of Rhode Island, Brown University, and Yale University and received many helpful comments after these presentations.

My conversations about More with Nicholas Barker, G. R. Elton, Stephen Foley, John Guy, the late Davis Harding, J. H. Hexter, Ralph Keen, Lee Cullen Khanna, Dan Kinney, Thomas Lawler, James Lusardi, Louis Martz, Frank Manley, Clarence Miller, Joe Trapp, and the late Warren Wooden have gone on through the years and have been immeasurably valuable in forming my opinion of the man and his times.

The late Richard S. Sylvester, executive editor of The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, helped me with my dissertation, Thomas More and the Heretics, and when I had received my Ph.D. at Yale in 1962, brought me on as an editor of the edition. He was a scholar of unmitigated energy, loyalty, and generosity. He died in 1978, but his legacy lives on in the hearts of those he loved and helped and especially in those of us who came to Thomas More through him and remained with More longer than we dreamed we would.

Yet inevitably anyone who works at any subject as long as I have worked with Thomas More comes to some independent judgments and disagrees with his dearest and most respected friends. I have deliberately avoided making this book a running scholarly debate that would appeal only to specialists in the field. But it is worth saying that I take a minority view of many issues. I think that More and Erasmus were profoundly different and that their famous friendship was not nearly so close as modern liberal Catholics yearn for it to have been. I also believe that the religious revolution of the sixteenth century involved much more than conflicting interpretations of how people might win eternal salvation. I think it arose partly out of a profound skepticism about Christianity itself and that many people who battled and burned each other over dogma were fighting away a horrendous doubt that God ruled in His creation.

There are many other places in this book where I have disagreed with my friends, and no one should read my appreciation of them as their certification of my arguments.

My secretary, Amelie Ratliff, helped much in the preparation of the final manuscript, and by her cheerful, efficient magic regularly reduced tornados in our office to zephyrs and gave me time to write.

To others, mercifully uninterested in Thomas More, I owe perhaps my most profound debts. My wife refused to let Thomas More make our house a mortuary during these past years and frequently declared a moratorium on my writing and got me away from it for a while. My three sons remained delightful and delightfully unimpressed. Their attitude was: The More the merrieror perhaps: The More the Marius. And I gratefully acknowledge the sustaining laughter and good talk of E. T. Wilcox, Burriss Young, Douglas Price, Susan Lewis, Douglas Bryant, Bob Kiely, Kiyo Morimoto, Donald Stone, Donald Fanger, Stephen Williams, and my dear and special friends Jean and David Layzer, and Connie and Ralph Norman. Perhaps I owe my greatest debts to my brother John.

R ICHARD M ARIUS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
December 21, 1983

B IOGRAPHERS of Thomas More have always praised him and made him an example for their own times. This exemplary mood was set by the first biographical account we have of him, that written by Erasmus of Rotterdam in a letter to young Ulrich von Hutten of Germany in 1519, when More was in the prime of life.

Erasmus makes one negative commentthe observation that although More loved music, he did not have a good singing voice. Otherwise Erasmus gives us a detailed and laudatory description of a paragon a little past forty, a member of the royal council of King Henry VIII, a family man, a devout Christian layman, a scholar, friend, and wit.