9781405953603

A Life and Death in Tudor England

Thomas More

Thomas More A Tudor Life

joanne paul

michael joseph an imprint of penguin books

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Copyright © Joanne Paul, 2025

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To my children

‘It is not so surprising if I love you with my whole heart’

List of Illustrations

1a. Lambeth Palace, Wenceslaus Hollar (1649). Iconographic Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.

1b. Illustration from the presentation copy of More’s Coronation Ode of King Henry VIII (1509). From the British Library archive / Bridgeman Images.

2a. Richard Hunne found dead in his cell, from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563). Heritage Image Partnership Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo.

2b. Map of Bruges, from Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg (late 16th–early 17th century). Abbus Acastra/Alamy Stock Photo.

3a. Map of Utopia, Ambrosius Holbein (1518). From the British Library archive/Bridgeman Images.

3b. Image from Utopia (1518). AF Fotografie/Alamy Stock Photo.

4a. Final page of a letter from More to Wolsey (6 July 1519). BL MS Cotton Galba B/V F.296. From the British Library archive/Bridgeman Images.

4b. Sketch of the Courts of Chancery and Court of the King’s Bench in session at Westminster Hall (early 17th century). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

5a. Portrait of Henry VIII, by an unknown artist (c. 1520). Collection/ Active Museum / Le Pictorium / Alamy Stock Photo.

5b. Portrait of Catherine of Aragon, by an unknown artist (c. 1520). Collection/ Active Museum / Le Pictorium / Alamy Stock Photo.

6a. Portrait of Thomas Wolsey, by an unknown artist (1589–1595, based on a work of c. 1520). ICP/Alamy Stock Photo.

6b. The Field of Cloth of Gold (1520), British School (c. 1545).

PAINTING/Alamy Stock Photo.

7a. ‘The King’, from The Dance of Death, by Hans Holbein the Younger, printmaker Lützelburger, c. 1526, published 1538, MET Museum.

8a. 1523 Parliament at Blackfriars, from Thomas Wriothsley’s Garter Book (c. 1530). History and Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

9a. Portrait of Erasmus, by Hans Holbein the Younger (1523). Artelan/ Alamy Stock Photo.

9b. Portrait of William Warham, by Hans Holbein the Younger (1527). Artelan/Alamy Stock Photo.

10a. Preparatory drawing of Thomas More, by Hans Holbein the Younger (1527). Skimage/Alamy Stock Photo.

10b. Portrait of Thomas More, by Hans Holbein the Younger (1527). IanDagnall Computing/Alamy Stock Photo.

11a. Thomas More and his Family, by Hans Holbein the Younger (1592 copy of 1527 original). ARTGEN/Alamy Stock Photo.

12a. The More Chapel at Chelsea Old Church (1801). The London Archives (City of London) Heritage Images/Alamy Stock Photo.

13a. Portrait of Anne Boleyn, English School (c. 1550). CBW/Alamy Stock Photo.

13b. Portrait of Thomas Cromwell, by Hans Holbein the Younger (1532–1533). IanDagnall Computing/Alamy Stock Photo.

14a. Portrait of Thomas Audley, English School (1569). GL Archive/ Alamy Stock Photo.

14b. Drawing of John Fisher, by Hans Holbein the Younger, (c. 1532–1535). World History Archive/Alamy Stock Archive.

14c. The Tower of London (c. 1483). World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

15a. Henry VIII’s signature on a writ declaring More a traitor (25 June 1535). From the British Museum archive/Bridgeman Image.

15b. Westminster Hall (1865). JT Vintage/Alamy Stock Photo.

16a. The execution of William Tyndale, from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563). Photo12/Ann Ronan Library/Alamy Stock Photo.

Note on Conventions

Spelling

Quotations have been modernised, but an effort has been made to preserve punctuation and archaic vocabulary, with definitions provided in the notes and glossary. I have modernised place names. I have given the most common version and spelling of people’s names and used variations of spelling to distinguish between people of the same name as well as characters in More’s books. Where translations are my own, I have given the original in the notes. Titles are given

Dates

Dates here have been given in Old Style (according to the Julian calendar), but with the presumption that the new year begins on the 1 January, not the 25 March.

Money

All values have been given in contemporary terms. One pound in 1500 was worth about £665.96 in 2017. These values have been taken from https://www.nationalarchives.gov. uk/currency-converter/. More detailed and slightly different conversions accounting for inflation can also be found at https://measuringworth.com/.

Johanna (1475–1542)

Thomas Elyrington (d.c. 1523)

John Middleton (d. 1509)

Abel (d. 1486)

William More (d. 1469)

Johanna Joye (d. 1470)

Joan Marshall (d. 1505)

Joan Bowes (d. 1520)

Alice More

John (c. 1451–1530)

Richard Staverton

m. 1511

Alice Harpur (1474–1551)

Alice Middleton (1501–63)

m. 1521

Margaret (1505–44)

THOMAS (1478–1535)

m. 1505

Jane Colt (c. 1487–1511)

Giles Allington (1499–1586)

William Roper (1498–1578)

Elizabeth (1506–64)

m. 1525

William Daunce (d. 1543)

This is an abridged family tree limited to those dealt with in the text.

m 1474

? Thomas Graunger (d.c. 1482)

Agnes Graunger (d. 1499)

Agatha (b. 1479)

John (b. 1490)

Edward (b. 1480)

Elizabeth (1482–1538)

John Rastell (c. 1472–1536)

William Rastell (1508–65)

Cecily (b. 1507)

m. 1525

Giles Heron (d. 1540)

m.c. 1526

John Clement (c. 1500–72)

Margaret Giggs (1508–70)

John (1509–47)

m. 1529

Anne Cresacre (1511–77)

Castle

Windsor Castle Tyburn

Westminster Hall

Westminster Palace

Chelsea

Hampton Court Palace

St Giles Redcross Street

St Michael’s Bassishaw

St Martin’s le Grand

City Walls

Guildhall

St Lawrence

Cheapside

St Paul’s Cathedral

St Lawrence Jewry The Barge

TSt Anthony’s Threadneedle Steet

St Thomas of Acre

St Stephen’s Walbrook

The Steelyard

h a m e s

Tower of London

To the Reader

This book details the life of one of the most divisive figures in English history. With very few conceivable exceptions, no other Englishman or Englishwoman is, centuries later, both worshipped as a saint and condemned as a vicious murderer.1

Thomas More was also a key player in perhaps the most dramatic and dramatized moments in English history, the divorce of King Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon and his remarriage to Anne Boleyn. An opponent of the Break with Rome and of Henry’s henchman Thomas Cromwell, More has been portrayed both as a champion of religious loyalty and an enemy of progress.

Additionally, amongst his impressive and lengthy oeuvre is arguably the most influential work of literature by an Englishman between Chaucer and Shakespeare (who admired him). His Utopia spawned a genre and inspired generations of revolutionaries, though it has also been condemned as a precursor of modern authoritarianism.

And yet, among all this debate and dispute over More’s legacy, one spectacular thing can be said with certainty: Thomas More did almost nothing to change the course of English history.

When the axe fell on Sir Thomas More in July 1535, Henry VIII and Cromwell had done nothing more than remove a particularly irksome pebble from their shoe as they made their determined way down the path of the English Reformation.

Had More survived, he could not have truly stood in their way. As it was, he was relatively easy to dispense with – it required only a little legal finagling – and his prolific head was removed from his already ailing body.

In contrast to Thomas Cromwell – with whom he is so often compared – little of immediate significance can be directly attributed to Thomas More. It is difficult to point to any event or moment in Tudor history and claim that it would have been vastly different without his intervention.

This, however, is where his importance lies. And I believe it can be presented without finding ourselves ensnared in the centuries-long tangle of conflicting reputations over More’s legacy.

In a deeply dangerous time, Thomas More was one of the few who overtly opposed the growing tyranny of Henry VIII, and he did so with full knowledge of his own powerlessness and the deadly consequences. His willingness to stand firm and speak truth to an overwhelming power is as relevant in today’s world as it was to that of Henry VIII. Tyrants, it will not surprise you to learn, still exist. Those who are willing to destroy anyone who stands in opposition to their will – a will driven by self-interest, pride and desperate paranoia – rule today as they did 500 years ago. In fact, this might be one of the most pertinent parallels between the Tudor world and the twenty-first century. The unconstrained power of petty, insecure men remains deeply dangerous.

Those, like Thomas More, who stand up to these men and remind them of higher principles, deeper truths, greater duties, must be remembered for their efforts, even when they come to nothing. Their effort to change history – and their failure – is just as important as those whose participation in the tides of their time makes them ‘great’. They are the figures who inspire us when a great booming voice from above tells

xviii

us we must obey, must submit, and a voice deep within us responds, no matter how quietly, ‘No.’

Whether you hold More to be a divinely inspired saint or a zealous prosecutor of the innocent – and I hope this book convinces you that both of those positions are reliant on some rather ahistorical mythologizing – we must not overlook him as a man who spoke truth to power, even while trembling with fear.

Dr Joanne Paul

Sussex, UK November 2024

To have ever fore mine eye my death

Whoever delights to behold these fashioned figures, But thinks them, by a wonderous art, to be true to life, Is able to nourish his soul on true things, As he nourishes his eyes on the painted images. For indeed he will see how the slippery goods of the fragile world No more quickly come than they quickly pass away.

‘Pageant

Verses’: ‘The Poet’

Bonfires raged across England. Sending thick, foul-smelling smoke to the heavens, they consumed not just the piles of wood at their base but also the condemned men and women tied to stakes in the midst of the conflagrations. Fires had been ignited across England – from Chester to Lewes – but nowhere burned more brightly than London. By Easter 1557, nearly 300 people had been bound and set alight, condemned to die as traitors to the Catholic faith. The burning of heretics had been law in England for a century and a half, though never had it been effected on such a scale and with such zeal. What’s more, the persecuted were tried and executed for practising a faith that, just years before, had been law.

The heretics put to the flames under the reign of Queen Mary I were those known as Lutherans, evangelicals or –increasingly – Protestants. The previous king, Edward VI, had himself been a Protestant and had persecuted Catholics. The first executions of Protestants by fire had taken place under the reign of Edward’s and Mary’s father, King Henry VIII, and, more precisely, under his Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More.

As the most powerful statesman in the realm, Thomas More had led the charge against these heretics, desperate to burn out the contagion of Lutheranism before it tore apart Christendom. In the blink of an eye, however, Fortune’s Wheel had turned, and the king whom he served so faithfully had turned his back on the Roman Catholic Church.

More’s objections were silenced in July 1535, when Henry had his servant put to death for his refusal to acknowledge the king, and not the Catholic pope, as Supreme Head of the Church in England. In killing Thomas More, Henry had declared his power and his disregard for the wagging tongues of Christendom. He had also, however, created a martyr.

In the weeks after his death, More’s eldest daughter, Margaret Roper, had bribed a guard to retrieve her father’s head from the spike on London Bridge upon which it was affixed: the relic of a saint. This terrified Thomas Cromwell, the king’s leading minister, who had overseen More’s downfall. ‘What communication have you had’, Cromwell demanded of suspected traitors three years after More’s execution, ‘touching the death of Sir Thomas More?’1 Two years later, Cromwell too was dead by the king’s hand. But not before he had set in motion the hanging, drawing and quartering of More’s son-in-law.2 Soon after, another son-inlaw (Margaret’s husband, William Roper) was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London, along with several other

members of the More family and circle. It was a warning. When matters got much, much worse for Catholics under Edward VI, most of the remaining members of the family and their supporters fled abroad.

As the fatal fires were lit across England during Eastertide 1557, a small group of Catholics, recently returned from exile, gathered to immortalize the memory of the man who had struck the first spark. More should be remembered for ‘his worthy works and godly end’, his nephew wrote, and William Roper commemorated him as ‘a man of singular virtue and of a clear unspotted conscience’.3 The cult, fostered by the Catholic reign of Mary I, had formed and found its central mission: to have Thomas More canonized as a saint.

While the repatriated More circle compiled their hagiographies, Protestant exiles fearing Mary’s flames worked on a very different portrait of Thomas More. More cast heretics ‘in prison in his own house’, the martyrologist John Foxe wrote, and personally whipped them ‘at the tree in his garden’, before sending them to the Tower to be racked, watching gleefully as they were rendered lame by the torture.4 Rather than a martyr himself, Foxe described More as a ‘heavy troubler of Christ’s people’, the relentless pursuer of true martyrs to God.5

By the light of bonfires and candle flames, and with weapons built of scaffolds and pen-strokes, the nature of Thomas More’s soul became a battlefield. To Catholics, he was a saintly martyr; to Protestants, a villainous persecutor. There was no middle ground: either he was a warrior for God, or the devil’s instrument; a valiant protector of God’s people, or their deadly enemy.

Thomas More bore either the shining light of the faith, or fearsome hellfire.

Decades earlier, before the first fire had been lit, and before there was any chance of history recording his name, the

young Thomas More, too, sat down to write. ‘Fame’, More instructed posterity, ‘often times did hurt to men while they live’ and is ‘never good when they be dead’.6

Who, then, was Thomas More, before fame and the fires of faith consumed him?

p

A family not famous, but honourable

For as the flame is next to the smoke, so is death next an incurable sickness, and such is all our life.

Four Last Things

When seen from above, the thousands of small flickering flames, as they met and merged through the streets of London, might appear as a single unwavering light. It was only as one approached, stepping foot on those muddied lanes, that each point of light became clear, illuminating the faces of the countless individuals grasping the tapers upon which the flames danced.

The people of London – young and old, male and female, rich and poor – processed through the winding streets. Each held a small candle, lit against the cold and darkness of early February, the midpoint between the shortest day of the year and the spring equinox. In clusters they proceeded to their respective parish churches – one for every 400 or so inhabitants – to attend the celebration of mass.1

This was the Christian feast of Candlemas, or the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, held to commemorate the day

when Mary, having borne her son, the Lord Jesus Christ, was presented to the Temple in Jerusalem. The holy day had been celebrated in the Catholic Church for more than a millennium and was almost certainly inspired by the even older pagan tradition of februa – ‘purification’ – which had given this cold, dark month its name.2

As they had been for the pagans before them, fire and light were essential symbols for Christians. Fire was representative of purification itself, burning contaminants and contagions from the body. This was why, for centuries, Christian heretics as well as persecuted Jews and Muslims had been put to the flames. The fire burned away the infection introduced into the body of the Church, as well as signifying the eternal hellfire awaiting those who broke away from the community of believers.

Alongside the fierce, threatening imagery of fire came the softer, comforting vision of light. The communal body of the Christian Church was represented in the light that its people bore and shared on Candlemas. The candles that Londoners brought to mass were blessed in their parish churches alongside the great Paschal candle which stood by the baptismal font. The tapers given to new Christians at their baptism would be lighted from it, connecting them all in the flame of Christ, even in the darkest season of the year.

For the young lawyer John More, as he made the journey home past Smithfield and through the western gates of the nearly twenty-foot-high London Wall, this year’s celebration was especially meaningful. Candlemas was one of the ‘Grand Days’ of the legal calendar and was celebrated with feasting, music and dancing.3 Even the eminent judges and serjeantsat-law joined in the revels, making it an opportunity for a young ambitious lawyer such as John to benefit from their advice and guidance.4 It helped that this year he could enjoy

the celebrations without the burden of planning them; he had given up the taxing position of Master of the Revels of his Inn of Court, Lincoln’s Inn, the September before. But that alone was not what gave this year’s Candlemas its heightened sense of both joy and anxiety.

John More and his wife, Agnes, were awaiting the birth of their second child. Their firstborn, now nearly three years old, had been a girl. They would pray that this second child would be a son.

They had christened their daughter ‘Johanna’, a name she shared both with her grandmother and great-grandmother. The latter had been the daughter of John Leycester, a Chancery clerk in the opening decades of the tumultuous fifteenth century. Leycester had been one of many clerks who attended to the business of the Court of Chancery, presided over by the powerful Lord Chancellor, which heard cases that could not be solved by the sort of common law practised by his descendant John More. When John Leycester had died mid-century, Johanna and her brewer husband, John Joye, inherited everything. The Joyes had raised their children at their brewhouse, The Falcon and the Hoop in Aldersgate ward. The Falcon and the Hoop, with its 54-foot-long hall, doubled as the meeting place of the Fraternity of the Holy Trinity, to which the Joyes belonged. Such associations – in the region of 150 across London – offered collegial community as well as insurance: by paying into a fraternity you ensured that its members would look after you or your family in need.5 Perhaps more importantly, fraternities supported their parish church, supplying and tending the many candles it required throughout the year and especially at feasts such as Candlemas.

John Joye had risen to become first warden and then master of his fraternity. From these neighbourhood positions of authority he was elected to the Common Council of

London. Here he was expected to represent the interests of his ward in making city-wide municipal decisions, supported by Londoners’ taxes. The unwritten contract was well understood: if Londoners were to be taxed, they ought to have a say in how that money was spent. And so, every year, they elected members of the Common Council, like John Joye, and sent them to represent their communities.

The Joyes’ daughter had married two London bakers: John Chester and, following his death, William More, with whom she had several children, including the future lawyer John More.6 His parents’ marriage had in all probability been a strategic one, to secure the ownership of a property that had been held jointly by the Joye and More families in North Mymms, Hertfordshire, some twenty miles north of London.7 The manor had once been in the possession of John Leycester, alongside a man named William More. If this More was indeed an ancestor of the lawyer John More, the marriage of John’s parents made very good sense indeed, as there would be no other claims to the property when it passed on to his own heir, anxiously awaited that Candlemas.

John’s father had died ten years before, when John was only a boy of sixteen, leaving him his blue cloak trimmed with marten fur and a portion of the nearly £90 owed by the Earl of Northumberland for bread.8 William More’s early death may have been the reason that John had entered the legal profession instead of his father’s trade. The legal world was not a complete unknown to him. At the time of his demise, William More had been living in the parish of St Dunstan’s in the ward of Farringdon Without, which lay to the west of the London Wall and adjacent to Temple Bar, one of the main entrances to the city. This was a neighbourhood dominated by the Inns of Court, including the Middle and Inner Temples, Serjeants’ Inn on the other side of Fleet

Street, and Lincoln’s Inn, a short walk up Chancery Lane to the north. As he came of age, John More exchanged the ovens and loaves of his childhood home for legal documents and disputations at Lincoln’s Inn.9

There was not such a distance between baker and lawyer as it might seem. The professions shared characteristics that they also had in common with many London trades. To practise, one had to belong to and be approved by the company or guild which oversaw the craft. John’s father had needed to be a member of the Company of Bakers in order to bake his bread and sell it on the streets of London. The loaves had to be stamped with William More’s mark and could only be sold at market after nine o’clock in the morning on Wednesdays and Saturdays.10 Such strict regulation was tempered with the joys of brotherhood and, of course, the liberal application of ale. Like the Candlemas celebrations from which John had just come, meetings of the bakers’ halimote began and ended with ale and feasting, and were punctuated by the playful application of minor fines (such as for fiddling with one’s beard during the proceedings or telling a fellow baker that ‘he had a thick skull’).11

John’s professional community had formed around him when he became a member of Lincoln’s Inn in 1475. Like the other four Inns of Court, Lincoln’s Inn had emerged out of an effort to separate temporal and worldly matters from spiritual ones, when the pope in Rome decreed that the clergy were no longer allowed to teach civil law. Its origins also lay in an attempt to remove the troublemaking, boisterous and often lawless students of the law from the city of London. At some point, Lincoln’s Inn had found itself a field to build on, to the west of London, where the city became pasture. Its records, known as the Black Books of Lincoln’s Inn, were begun a half-century before John More’s name was first entered in

them. So it was that John found himself walking home from Lincoln’s Inn to Cripplegate amid the lights of Candlemas, perhaps a little the worse for copious amounts of drink.

John More’s home in Cripplegate sat at the north-west corner of the busy city. One of the twenty-five wards that made up the city of London, and named for the gate which it traversed, Cripplegate stretched from the Eleanor Cross and the Standard on Cheapside in the south to Barbican and Finsbury Court in the north. At this northernmost point, Cripplegate encompassed some of the relatively untamed moorland outside the towering city wall, not yet conquered by London’s sprawl. Those who wandered these fields at night, wobbly from a visit to one of the disreputable taverns nearby, risked not only thieves and pickpockets but a sudden and fatal slip into a drainage ditch or one of the deep pools that lay in the churchyards. Inside the wall, it was difficult to find anything aside from the busyness of commerce, and the many intersecting communities that came with it.

The house that John More returned to was neither in the wild moors nor in the fashionable area around Cheapside, but in the growing suburban area just north of the wall itself.12 This neighbourhood was popular among brewers and chandlers, whose work frequently involved smells Londoners would rather keep outside the city proper (not to mention that the defensive ditch in front of the wall was routinely repurposed a rubbish dump).13 It was also associated with lawlessness, frequented by thieves and sex workers.14 That being said, thanks to its ambitious brewers and chandlers, Cripplegate Without was rapidly becoming one of the wealthiest suburbs of London, and its connections to the city centre allowed for the mobility of its residents, both geographically and socially.15 John More had decided to settle his family in Cripplegate Without due to the connections he had gained when he’d

married Agnes Graunger before the church doors of St Giles without Cripplegate four years earlier.16

For Agnes More, watching the inhabitants of Cripplegate carry their flickering flames, Candlemas might have brought back memories of her own childhood. She was the daughter of a tallow-chandler of some standing, Thomas Graunger. As a child, she would have been expected to help her mother and father in the trade, transforming animal fats into candles for homes and businesses, as well as for the more than 100 churches across London.17 The preparations for Candlemas, in particular, would have taken weeks. Her father was not just a member of his guild but had been elected its warden, helping oversee his craft and all within it.

He had also been a leader in the community in which Agnes now lived. When St Giles without Cripplegate was visited by representatives of St Paul’s Cathedral twenty years earlier, Thomas Graunger had been its warden, and he had appeared as witness on deeds regarding a property in Cripplegate’s Redcross Street in 1474, six months after his daughter’s wedding.18 Agnes’s family were also members of the Fraternity of St Nicholas, which met at the Brewers’ Hall (proximity to inebriants being a key requirement of fraternity meeting places), just south-east of where Cripplegate pierced the mighty London Wall.19 John and Agnes would be accepted as members of this local fraternity once Agnes was delivered of her child.

Agnes’s labour pains began a few days after Candlemas. It was an especially holy week to be giving birth, though that may have offered little comfort to Agnes as her contractions grew increasingly difficult to bear. That year, Ash Wednesday (its date determined by the waxing and waning of the moon) fell on the earliest date possible, two days after Candlemas. On this sombre festival, Christians were again united by a

fire-related symbol, the wearing of burnt ashes. These were a remembrance of their own mortality, the dust to which they would return in death, and thus a sign of their humility before an eternal God. Ash Wednesday marked the beginning of the forty-day period of Lent, a time of fasting, abstinence and prayer. But unborn children care little for Christian calendars; Agnes’s baby was coming, whatever the season.

As her labour pains increased, Agnes was led to her birthing chamber, where she would spend the hours until the delivery of her child. She was accompanied by female friends, relatives and neighbours; men were allowed to enter the confines of the room only if her or the child’s life was at stake. And this was more than possible. If the mother died before giving birth, the midwife was authorized by the Church to cut the child from her, to ensure it was baptized into the Christian community of believers before it, too, died.20

To prevent such a tragedy, Agnes’s female companions shared various remedies and recitations. Together, they could chant charms, passed down from woman to woman through the generations: ‘Christus te vocat, ut nascaris. Exinanite. Exinanite. Exinanite’ – ‘Christ calls you to be born. Empty. Empty. Empty’. These served the double purpose of sending prayers up to God and his saints and regulating Agnes’s breathing as she strained.21 Amulets with further religious invocations, to the saints or to Mary the Holy Mother of Christ, might also be tied to the mother’s thigh or foot, to ease her pain and aid her delivery, and prayer rolls could be laid like a girdle across her belly. Childbirth was ‘as great a miracle as the raising of a dead man’.22

With God’s blessing, Agnes More’s son arrived in the early hours of a cold and dark February morning.

Like the Virgin Mary before her, Agnes was expected to undergo purification before re-entering the community

of believers. Known as ‘churching’, the ritual reinstating a mother in the Church occurred forty days after the birth of a male child. So, just as Agnes’s son had been born at the beginning of the holy period of Lent, her churching would take place at its end.23 On the day of the ceremony, Agnes approached her parish church, a candle in her hand. The priest recited psalms over her, blessed her with incense, and at last led her into the church where her little flame would rejoin the great light of the Church.

The date of Agnes’s churching coincided with Maundy Thursday. This sacred day in the Christian calendar celebrated the institution of the sacrament of Holy Communion. Sharing sacred bread, divinely transformed – or transubstantiated –into the body of Christ himself, bound together the members of the Church into one body. At the end of Maundy Thursday mass, the holy altar on which the Communion had been consecrated was stripped of its ornate coverings. It was washed with a broom of sharp twigs, to echo the torture of Jesus Christ before his Crucifixion, marked the following day, on Good Friday.24 Once done, the previously shining and decorated altar stood bare, as if the power of faith itself had left it. All of the candles which had lighted the church at the beginning of the service were snuffed out, save one. This lone flickering flame was ‘Our Lady’s Candle’, representing the ‘light of faith’ which continued to burn within the Virgin Mary.25

Three days later, on Easter Sunday, this candle reignited the doused wicks.26 The altars were arrayed once more in bright draperies, to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. In the first centuries of the Church, Easter had also traditionally been the day on which recently born children were baptized. Since the thirteenth century, earlier baptisms had become more common, to ensure that vulnerable babes did not die

outside the communion of faith.27 If Agnes’s son had not been baptized in the week after his birth, during the dark days of Lent, he would have been baptized at Easter.

Like Agnes’s wedding ceremony and churching, her son’s baptism began at the church door, where the priest cast demons out of the infant and claimed him for God, intoning: ‘Be not deceived, Satan, punishment threatens you, the day of eternal punishment, that day which is about to come as a fiery furnace.’ This done, the priest, child and the baptismal party were allowed to enter the sacred grounds of the church.28 The child’s godparents, two men and one woman, were not expected to be members of his family by blood, but rather were chosen to reinforce the ties between his parents and their other local or professional networks.29 Agnes and John’s newborn son was brought to the font near the western entrance to the church, where he was washed with holy water and cleansed of his original sin. The priest then drew a cross on the infant’s right hand – the hand he would use throughout his life to make the sign of the cross, as well as to write.30

John and Agnes’s newborn son was christened ‘Thomas’, perhaps for one of his godfathers or for his grandfather. His parents may have also had in mind the local saint, Thomas Becket, who had been born in nearby Cheapside in the twelfth century and later killed on the orders of Henry II. The Church taught that death began at birth. From the time he left his mother’s womb, Thomas More was already dying. Life, he later reflected, was a slow but steady walk towards God’s preordained gallows.

As the ceremony came to a close, a small candle was lit and placed in Thomas’s little hand, supported by those who stood around him.31 The newly baptized Thomas More, as he was escorted out of the church in his chrismal robe and onto the streets of London, was welcomed not just as a member of

Christendom but also as a subject of the realm of England, a land which had suffered decades of violent turmoil. As John and Agnes brought their newly baptized son home, this chaos was on the brink of boiling over once again, and few – no matter their age or standing – would escape being caught up in its ferocity.

In play is all my mind

. . . these matters be King’s games, and for the more part played on scaffolds . . .

History of King Richard the Third

Eager Londoners hovered around the sides of newly cleaned streets, craning over the members of the city companies who lined the streets in their best liveries, and tried to evade the constables who pushed the overkeen back with staves.1 To avoid the crush, some watched from upper-storey windows, their view unobstructed by the usual forest of hanging shop signs, which had been removed for the event. Instead, on that July afternoon, bright cloths and tapestries hung from the windows of London, cushioning the elbows of its residents, who stretched their necks to catch a first glimpse of the procession as it moved past them. The smell of wine hung in the air, pouring from public conduits and fountains. Suddenly, heralded by trumpets, they appeared: the lords and knights leading the procession, mounted on brightly caparisoned horses, gilt and gold catching the light, the hooves crunching on newly laid gravel. They were followed by the city’s aldermen, robed in scarlet, and then the blue-and-white-garbed

Knights of the Bath. In pairs, the royal heralds passed, followed by the trumpeters and minstrels whose music had travelled before them. King’s officers walked behind the musicians, along with the Lord Mayor and the Lord Chancellor, the realm’s leading statesman. And then, at last, the people of London were presented with their new king.

It had been twenty-two years since a king had been crowned in London. At the last coronation, the lawyer John More had been little older than his eldest son was now. As Londoners congregated on the afternoon of 5 July 1483, however, it was to catch sight of a very different king than the one they had expected to see crowned that summer.

The events culminating in this coronation had coincided with Thomas More’s birth five years earlier. The infant More was not yet two weeks old when the then king, Edward IV, had his brother, George, Duke of Clarence, killed. Locked away in the imposing Tower of London, the 28-year-old Duke of Clarence had been quietly and privately executed, to avoid a public scene and riots on the London streets.

At the time of his brother’s execution, and Thomas More’s birth, King Edward IV had maintained a tenuous grip on the English throne for nearly twenty years, albeit frequently challenged by uprisings and rebellions, and interrupted briefly by the return of his predecessor, Henry VI, over the winter of 1470–71. This rebellion had been supported by Clarence, though he had later switched sides to support Edward IV once more.

The brothers’ reconciliation had been short-lived, as Clarence again began to challenge his brother’s power. Not a year before his death, he had abducted the former servant of his late wife, accusing her (falsely) of her mistress’s murder. He had tried and executed her within a day, without recourse to the king’s justice. Shortly after, he became associated with an

elaborate plot involving dark magic, prophecy and treason. Under torture, an Oxford astronomer and necromancer, Dr John Stacey, confessed to having employed the dark arts to try to bring about the death of Edward IV and his heir, and implicated Thomas Burdett, a member of Clarence’s household. Burdett, along with Stacey, was hanged, drawn and quartered, much to the ire of his master, the Duke of Clarence, who burst into the king’s council chamber and had Burdett’s protestations of innocence read aloud. These actions were the last straw for Edward IV, and he saw no other option but to have his brother killed, which he did in February 1478, a fortnight after a boy named Thomas was born to a young lawyer in Cripplegate Without.

Rumours about the nature of the execution had blown through the London streets like ill winds. More himself, decades later, reported that the king, out of a sense of mercy towards his brother, had sought ‘to make his death as easy as possible’ and so ordered an unconventional form of execution: Clarence was ‘hastily drowned in a butt of Malmsey’ wine.2 More heard it whispered, years later, that the ‘secret and cunningly hidden plans’ of the king’s youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, ‘also played a part in the destruction of his brother, the Duke of Clarence’, in order to bring him one step closer to the throne held by Edward IV. These events would later interest the adult Thomas More, but he was only weeks old when the drama itself was unfolding. His date of birth had been recorded by his father, who, ever the lawyer, documented the births of all his children in the leaves of a book in his possession, possibly a gift from his father-in-law. ‘Following the Festival of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary’, the entry read, ‘was born Thomas More, son of John More, gentleman, in the seventeenth year of the Reign of King Edward IV.’3

Like many manuscripts of the times, the volume in which Thomas More’s birth was recorded contained several texts within its leather bindings. By far the lengthiest was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (Historia regum Britanniae), a twelfth-century account that spanned from the ancients, through the adventures of the legendary King Arthur and beyond. But the volume contained much more. In many ways it was a compendium of the world’s knowledge, covering everything from ancient medical knowledge to medieval visions of hell. It even held learning from the East: the Secret of Secrets (Secreta Secretorum), purportedly a letter of advice from the ancient philosopher Aristotle to his pupil the young Alexander the Great, which had been composed in Arabic in the tenth century as the Sirr al-Asrar.

Perhaps the most useful text in the compendium for John More and his young family was a thirteenth-century poem in Anglo-Norman French, The Treatise of Walter of Bibbesworth. Containing instructions for parents and children, it was designed to be read together and had been specifically written for mothers like Agnes More who had primary oversight of their offspring’s care and education in the early stages of childhood.4

As London whispered about the secretive execution of the king’s brother, the infant Thomas was swaddled in linen strips of cloth, to keep him immobile in his crib and protected from any cold drafts. The Treatise recommended a rocker to sooth the child to sleep and a bib to prevent him dribbling on his swaddling clothes. A rattle was another childhood staple, designed to amuse an infant and stop his crying.5 Thomas might also be given a ‘poppet’ or doll, perhaps one cast aside by his elder sister, stitched together from the rags of old clothes. As he grew, he would begin to make the sounds associated with babyhood – ‘wa’, ‘ba’ and ‘da’

– which would become the infant-speak names for his parents – ‘dad’ and ‘mam’.6

Agnes balanced the care and feeding of her infant son with that of her daughter and their growing family. Johanna More turned three a month after her brother’s birth, and Agnes was pregnant again a month after that. The Treatise advised that Johanna could be employed in helping to care for her younger brother, guarding him from ‘knocks and hurts’ as he learned to walk around the family home.7

Little Thomas most likely toddled about an L-shaped house with street frontage and hall at right angles around a central courtyard. The floors under his uncertain feet would be covered with rushes, frequently changed, especially when there were accident-prone children tottering about. There would be few private chambers, but as little Thomas began to reach for solid food he might be quickly shooed out of the kitchen, parlour and buttery, where large fires and sharp knives could be a danger. Walter recommended that little children be fed with pieces of bread and egg, alongside chunks of apple with the peel, stalk and pips removed. A quick game of ‘handy-dandy’ – making the child guess which hand was hiding a desired bit of food – might result in some added coos and giggles as Thomas ate.

The second stage of Thomas’s childhood began shortly before his younger brother, John, was born. At this point he was weaned, and the work to teach him to properly speak could begin. Walter suggested that the first words a child should learn were those of possession: ‘my’ and ‘your’. With his book to aid them, Agnes might encourage Thomas to point to the different parts of his body and name them out loud: ‘my head, the crown of my head . . . here is my scalp, my forehead and my brain’. Being able to speak properly, the Treatise stressed, would be essential to a child’s future standing.

As well as identifying the different parts of his body, the young Thomas was expected to begin to look after them, to ‘wipe the rheum from your eyes and the snot from your nose’. He would also start his toilet training, learning to use the privy in the garden, a small outhouse with a hole over a stinking pit.8

The young More’s day began around dawn, with prayers. He was supposed to memorize the sounds of the three most important prayers – the Paternoster (‘Our Father’), Ave Maria (‘Hail Mary’) and Holy Creed – even before he knew what their Latin words meant.9 He could then attend to the first chores of the day, washing himself and cleaning his teeth, before putting his bedding away. Agnes could use the Bibbesworth book to help teach Thomas how to dress in the mornings, to ‘pull on your gloves, shoes and breeches; set on your hat, cover your head; do up your buttons and after all this gird yourself with a leather belt’. Once dressed, mother and child might venture out into the garden or to visit the farms nearby. Together they could recite the noises of some of the animals they might meet: ‘horse neighs, lark sings, dove coos, cock crows, cat mews, snake hisses, ass brays . . .’

As an adult, Thomas More would associate childhood with its toys and games: spinning tops and balls, quoits and cock-steles. Whereas the quoit was innocent enough, lobbing rings at a peg in the ground, the cock-stele prepared a child for a life of violent blood sports, throwing sticks at a halfburied cockerel. Such games could be played by Thomas in his garden or the street outside his house, either by himself or with his siblings. By the time he was four, he and Johanna had been joined by sisters Agatha and Elizabeth and brothers John and Edward, though Agatha and Edward disappeared from their games very early.10 Thomas would come to learn that it was common for infants and children to die young.

Life was not something to be relied upon, and death stalked even children’s games.

The More children could gather with others of the neighbourhood, a makeshift pack of various ages, playing in the streets and gardens of Cripplegate, overseen by parents, godparents, servants and local passers-by. The houses of London were densely packed together, frequently with stairs or ladders on the outside so that each storey could be used as a separate tenement. Signs hung everywhere, identifying public houses, shops and services, all operating out of people’s homes.

The street itself was crowded with shopkeepers’ stalls and those who paused to peruse them. Young Thomas, as he played, would pass between clerks and merchants, mothers and midwives, craftsmen and labourers, servants and smiths, prostitutes and priests, beggars and drunks. The rich variety of local inhabitants was reflected in their clothes, vivid colours – violets, russets, greens and crimsons – and fabrics of silk, velvet, linen, wool, trimmed with fleece, fur or even cloth of gold or silver. Beyond the use of fur, which was reserved for knights and ladies, there were few laws regulating what those of certain social orders could wear, and the abundant secondhand market and tendency to bequeath clothing meant that even those of the lower orders might wear garments of lush colours and fabrics, albeit faded and oft-repaired. This vibrant rainbow made those few dressed in sombre colours stand out even more, primarily those who had chosen religious vocations: friars, monks, priests and nuns.

On each side of the street were gutters collecting excess rainwater and waste, from food, animals and neighbours, in addition to the stinking ditch of the London Wall itself. It did not mean, however, that young Thomas played in filth; refuse was removed by rakers and carts and regulated by locals keen to report anyone adding unnecessarily to the

uncleanliness of the streets. In any case, an adult’s trash was a child’s treasure, and children like Thomas were keen to pick up and collect dropped buttons, trinkets and beads. As an adult, he would write about the fun children had making ‘castles of tile shards’ only to enjoy knocking them down again.11

The marginal position of Cripplegate Without on the northern edge of London meant that Thomas and his companions could also venture into its natural surrounds, balancing on logs, catching birds and climbing trees. During the late summer months, they might seek out sweet fruits – cherries, apples, pears and plums – snatching them off neighbours’ trees and making games with the pips and stones, pitching them at holes in the ground.12 Decades later, More would speak of ‘a bag of cherry stones’ hidden away by a child like an old man might store ‘bags stuffed with gold’.13 If Thomas and his friends were caught thieving fruit, the penalty could be painful as well as shameful; corporal punishment was sanctioned and encouraged as a means of producing a virtuous and obedient child. It was Thomas’s duty to accept such a beating and avoid giving cause for it again (ideally through good behaviour, not greater surreptitiousness).

Agnes might call her children to join the family in the hall for the main meal of the day, just before noon. Sitting on benches at a long table, children were often asked to open the meal with a short prayer.14 Thomas might expect some bread, perhaps a few pieces of roast meat and vegetables and fruit, depending on the season. Accompanying the meal was wine or beer: only two or three drinks during the meal for children, and never before, to avoid drunkenness and deformation of their young minds. If there were cats and dogs around, Thomas would be instructed not to feed them from the table.

After a day’s adventuring, he and his siblings were expected back home by the time the sun went down, to have a small evening meal – perhaps some pottage or eggs – and say their evening prayers before settling into a shared bed. Thomas was taught to cross himself: first taking his right hand to his forehead, for God the Father; then to his chest, for the descent of Christ the Son; and then to the left and right shoulders, for the Holy Spirit.15 The bells of St Giles signalled the beginning of curfew, around nine or ten o’clock in the evening, at which point any remaining patrons of the nearby Bell and Maidenhead taverns hurried home or risked an uncomfortable encounter with the ward’s night watch. While Thomas slept next to his siblings, the rest of the city was meant to join him, but much business could occur in the darkness of the London streets.16

Dodging the night watch, William Mistlebrook rushed through the parish of St Giles without Cripplegate on a dark night in 1483, ten days after Easter. A servant of the king, Mistlebrook had made the long journey to St Giles from the palace of Westminster. At last he found the door he was looking for on Redcross Street, around the corner from the church, and pounded on it urgently. It wasn’t long before Mistlebrook was hastily ushered into the home of Richard Potter, one of the servants to the king’s younger – and now only – brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. What happened next occurred behind closed doors, but members of Potter’s household were privy to it, and they reported the conversation to curious neighbours, including Thomas More’s father. John More was informed that Mistlebrook had relayed stunning news to his friend Potter: King Edward IV, aged only

forty, had died, leaving his 12-year-old son as his successor. The king’s health had been failing for weeks, the result of what Thomas More later referred to as ‘his rather loose living and fleshly indulgence’.17 His death left the crown in a precarious position; there were enemies everywhere and rival factions at court. A young king was vulnerable and easily manipulated by ambitious courtiers and relatives. Manipulated, or overthrown.

Potter’s response to the news lodged it firmly in John More’s memory. ‘By my troth, man,’ Potter said to Mistlebrook, ‘then will my master the Duke of Gloucester be king.’18 This was treasonous; Edward IV’s son, not his brother, was the rightful ruler. It would take a carefully staged coup indeed to upset the divinely ordained succession. Potter was close to Gloucester, which is how, Thomas More later speculated, he might have known of Richard’s plans.

The next morning, London was told of the king’s death. The Lord Mayor called together the wardens of the city companies and the constables of the wards, charging them to keep the peace during the transition of power. As a group, they travelled to Westminster to view the body of their king, naked aside from a cloth which covered him from his navel downward.19

As the rest of London prayed for the soul of their late king, the wheels were in motion to secure the next reign. King Edward V was still a child, just seven years older than young Thomas himself, but the decision was made to allow him full rule, rather than have him guided and governed by a regent. This may have been to avoid the unstable precedent that had been set during Henry VI’s minority, but the consequence – intended or otherwise – was that it blocked the power of the young king’s last remaining royal uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. This did not last long; Gloucester

had his enemies arrested and took control of Edward as he travelled towards London from where he had been residing in Ludlow, Shropshire.

The king, duke and entourage entered London almost a month after Edward IV’s death. They were greeted by 500 riders sent out by London’s Common Council, the mayor and aldermen dressed in scarlet, and representatives of the various guilds and companies in violet.20 Thomas More later recalled this vast and impressive company, who processed very near to his own home, meeting first for bread and drink at the Goldsmiths’ Hall in Aldersgate ward, due south of St Giles without Cripplegate, before riding out to meet the king.21 They escorted Edward V back through the city to where he would be temporarily housed, in the palace of the Bishop of London, in the courtyard of St Paul’s Cathedral.22

Within days, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had been named Lord Protector. By then, according to More’s recollections, the news of Gloucester’s actions had ‘quickly spread; everyone was talking about it’, and his fellow Londoners were ‘all overwhelmed with amazement and rage, fear and sadness’.23 Knowing how London had become the focal point for rebellions in the past, its citizens ‘began to stand watch to guard the city from sudden disaster’. Despite More’s later remembrances, Gloucester’s assumption of the role of Protector had widespread approval, at least among London’s leading citizens.24 It may have been the case, all the same, that this support did not include the residents of the More household, as John More was deeply loyal to Edward IV, and thus to his son.25

By Whitsuntide – the celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit to Christ’s Apostles – the king had been conveyed from the bishop’s palace to the Tower of London, where

kings were traditionally lodged before their coronation. With gossip rife, Londoners flocked to see their new king process across the city. More later recalled that the king and his retainers were ‘escorted through the middle of the city by a large retinue, attended on all sides by cheers’.26 It was the sort of event, so near to where the More family lived, that John More might have wanted his young son to witness: a king entering his palace in triumph, the king under whom young Thomas might be expected to live for decades to come.

King Edward V’s reign, however, was over within weeks. On 13 June, at a meeting in the Tower of London, Gloucester had several members of the king’s council removed. This included the Bishop of Ely, John Morton. As the Master of the Rolls, Morton was the most senior of the Chancery clerks, a role once held by John More’s great-grandfather, John Leycester. Morton was accused of treason and imprisoned in the Tower. His treatment was relatively merciful; his fellow councillor, William Hastings, was executed immediately. Thomas More remembered that ‘the news of this killing flew rapidly, first through the city, then in every direction’, like ‘a wind in every man’s ear’.27 To counter this growing gale, Gloucester moved impossibly fast: within two hours of the execution, More reported, a proclamation against Hastings was ‘read aloud by the crier when the commons had been gathered by the sound of a trumpet at the principal points of assembly’.28 These meeting-points for London’s citizens included the Cheapside Cross, due south of St Giles without Cripplegate, and St Paul’s Cross, the open-air pulpit in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral. More described the crowd’s scepticism, in words his father had probably overheard. One teacher from neighbouring St Paul’s School muttered that

‘here is a gay goodly cast, foul cast away for haste’.* A merchant, probably from nearby Cheapside, added sarcastically that the proclamation was put together so quickly, it must have been ‘written by prophecy’.

These opponents dispensed with, the Duke of Gloucester put off his mourning black in order to dress himself in purple, and surrounded himself with an impressive entourage. 29 He was not ignorant of the need to win the support of the citizens of London. The city was tense, as armoured men kept watch in Cheap Ward, instructed by the mayor and aldermen to stand guard from early morning until near sundown in case of trouble.30 Gloucester wined and dined London officials, particularly Sir Edmund Shaa, the mayor, and took ‘popular preachers’ into his confidence, including the mayor’s brother, Dr Ralph Shaa.31 ‘From the pulpit,’ More later wrote, ‘they delivered extremely elaborate sermons in praise of the Protector.’32 Both Shaa brothers lived in the parish of St Giles without Cripplegate and were members of its fraternity; Edmund Shaa was especially well known to residents such as the Mores, having first been elected as alderman for Cripplegate ward the year before John and Agnes were married. Thomas More remembered him as a man ‘of a proud heart’ who was ‘wooed by the promise of great profits’ by Gloucester to ‘frame the city to their liking’. 33 The campaign to win the support of Londoners began in earnest on 22 June – the day when Edward V was originally to have been crowned. On that Sunday, two days before the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist – who had heralded the arrival of the ‘King of Kings’ – Londoners once again gathered at St Paul’s Cross. There, Dr Ralph Shaa

* ‘Goodly cast’: a fine trick or artifice.

preached a sermon, as More later recorded it, on a line from the Wisdom of Solomon. The text, ‘Bastard slips shall never take deep root’, was an innocuous one, against extramarital sex and the children that might result.34 Shaa, however, had a deeply political, and deeply shocking, message to deliver. He claimed that King Edward V had been the child of an illicit union. He told the people that Edward IV had contracted another marriage before taking the Queen as his wife; as such, their marriage and any resulting children could not be considered legitimate. In one fell swoop, as directed by Gloucester, Shaa had wiped from the succession not only Edward V but also his younger brother and five sisters. What’s more, Shaa wasn’t even sure that Edward IV and his brother the Duke of Clarence had been legitimate children; only Richard, Duke of Gloucester, resembled his father.

Shaa proclaimed that he risked great danger by speaking thus, but that ‘truth should be held to be more important than even life itself’.35 He reminded those assembled that John the Baptist had faced death for protesting at the marriage of Herod to his brother’s former wife and for ‘condemning the unlawful marriages of kings’.36

According to More, this sermon landed poorly; the people ‘stood as they had been turned into stones, for wonder of this shameful sermon’.37 He even suggested that Shaa, mortified by his part in proceedings, returned home, presumably to north Cripplegate, ‘and never after durst look out for shame, but keep him out of sight like an owl’, and soon died, having discovered that ‘there was in every man’s mouth spoken of him much shame’.38

The next step in the growing public campaign for Gloucester occurred just two days after Shaa’s sermon, on the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist itself, which also coincided with the celebration of Midsummer, on 24 June. The night before,

Londoners had been out celebrating, with bonfires burning throughout the city. Morris dancers entertained children and adults alike, and pageants celebrated ancient pagan wisdom and Christian saints. The mayor, aldermen and other city officials took part in the ‘Midsummer Watch’, parading through London, torches alight.39

It might have been with a few headaches, then, that on Midsummer Day ‘great crowds’ and ‘all the commons of the city’, along with ‘school-boys’ not much older than More himself, gathered in Cheapside at the Guildhall, the centre of London politics. Entering by Guildhall Yard, the crowds proceeded past the grand Gothic façade and into the Great Hall. At 153 feet long, 50 feet broad and about 55 feet high, it was the largest hall that most Londoners would ever enter, outdone only by Westminster Hall, reserved more for royal than for civic ceremonies. On a platform at the east end of the hall, ‘surrounded by nobles and the aldermen of London’, Henry Stafford, the 28-year-old Duke of Buckingham, stood to speak.

His speech sought consent from the people of London for the accession of Richard as king. As More reported it, no such assent was given, despite the work of the mayor, Edmund Shaa, to manufacture it and Buckingham’s threats that the accession would proceed without it. Instead, after several attempts to force their endorsement, ‘the people began to whisper among themselves secretly’, filling the hall with a noise like ‘the sound of a swarm of bees’.40 At last, a few – whom More suspected were planted by Buckingham –took up the cry of ‘King Richard’. They were joined by easily swayed young men and schoolboys, who joyously threw their hats and caps into the air. The duke and mayor took this as ‘every man with one voice’ assenting to Richard as king, and the crowd dispersed, ‘the more part all sad, some with glad

semblance that were not very merry’ and some ‘who were unable to hold in the grief which they dared not display, and who had to turn aside, face to the wall, while their eyes burst forth with their heart’s sorrow’.41

The final act in the performance occurred the next morning at Baynard’s Castle, on the Thames, due south of St Paul’s. This was a particularly significant location; it had been a bastion for Edward IV and his allies during the previous decades’ wars; his reign had been declared there in 1461. In its grand hall, Buckingham, the mayor, aldermen, and other city officials in livery gathered and humbly petitioned Gloucester to take the crown. Richard at first refused to see them, More wrote, then at last condescended to appear in the gallery above them. 42 Once he had heard their petition, he theatrically refused the crown, but soon he bowed to their insistence and accepted the title of king.

According to More, those who witnessed this performance ‘departed for home with mixed feelings’.43 What they had seen was a ‘tragicomedy’: ‘these matters be King’s games’, they concluded, ‘as it were stage plays, and for the more part played upon scaffolds’.44 If any of them had interrupted with ‘untimely truth’, then Richard’s supporters ‘might hap to break his head’. The following day, Richard rode with his followers through the city, his horse saddled with crimson cloth of gold trimmed with fur and fringed with more gold. The cavalcade proceeded to Westminster, where he was given the royal sceptre, and the beginning of the reign of King Richard III was declared.

So it was that, nine days later on 5 July, the London crowds gathered once more during this politically eventful summer. They pressed against each other despite the heat to watch King Richard III parade through the streets of the city the afternoon before his coronation. The king wore a doublet

of blue cloth of gold, embroidered with a lattice pattern and pine cones, and over it a long riding gown of purple velvet furred with ermine. Through the slits in its sides, spectators could see the king’s gilt spurs and ornate garter. He rode a horse trapped in purple cloth of gold furred with yet more ermine and saddled in crimson cloth of gold trimmed with even more gold (coronations were not a time for subtlety or restraint). Light glinted off the king’s richly jewelled collar, dancing on the red and green canopy held over him. Decorated with gold thread and silver bells, the canopy twinkled and chimed as it moved through the streets. Following the king were lords, knights, and officers of the royal household, who preceded the queen, Anne Neville, as she was borne in an open litter of white damask and cloth of gold. She wore a jewelled gold circlet over her hair, which fell loose over her white robes. She was trailed by noblewomen in blue and ladies-in-waiting in crimson.

The procession had begun at the Tower of London, to the east of the city, and organized itself upon reaching the broad market street of Cheapside. Stopping at the Cheapside Standard at the southern end of Milk Street, the king heard songs from local children and speeches from city officials. From there, Richard and his train processed past St Paul’s Churchyard, and under the arch of Ludgate. They continued west along Fleet Street past Temple Bar and along the Strand to Charing Cross before turning south to their ultimate destination at Westminster. It may have been the king’s coronation but it was the city’s celebration, paid for by ward collections and bedecked with fabrics and metalwork by the craftsmen of London.45

Nevertheless, there would have been good reason for the More family to avoid the event in protest. Thomas More mentioned it later only in passing, to note that the ceremony

‘was furnished for the most part, with the self same provision that was appointed for the coronation of his nephew’.46 Richard III had stolen Edward V’s coronation as well as his crown.47

It was the day after St Nicholas’s Day, in the second year of the new reign, that another proclamation from the king was read out. For Thomas More, like others his age, 6 December heralded the beginning of the Christmas season, and was to be celebrated with feasting, music and spectacle. St Nicholas had a particular bond with the young, and even at six years old Thomas probably knew the story, morbid as it was. Two small boys had been killed and cut up to be sold as pickled pork by the landlord of the inn at which they were staying. They were rescued by the intervention of Nicholas, who prayed that the boys be saved. Their dismembered body parts emerged from the brining liquid and miraculously reassembled themselves, and the boys departed safe and sound.48 It was an event often portrayed in the plays performed on St Nicholas’s Day, to the delight of an audience of spellbound children. Of course, the feast was especially important to the More family, who were members of the Fraternity of St Nicholas in Cripplegate.

The day after St Nicholas’s was the second Sunday of Advent, and it might be expected that proclamations from the king would be read out after mass, perhaps from church pulpits, or, more likely, at community gathering places, such as St Paul’s Cross. As the people of London congregated, they –inevitably – gossiped. It had only been a year since the Duke of Buckingham, that great ally of Richard III, had been executed by the king for rising in rebellion against him. He had been joined by his former prisoner the Bishop of Ely, John Morton.

In fact, More would later suggest that it was Morton who had planted the seed of insurrection in the duke’s ear; the bishop ‘craftily sought the ways to prick’ the duke towards rebellion, ‘keeping him close within his bonds, that he rather seemed him to follow him than to lead him’.49 Although Richard had overcome the rebels, and Morton fled to Italy, the revolt had further turned public opinion against the king, and driven more of his subjects to congregate around a competitor for the throne.

It was this opposition which was addressed by the royal proclamation issued on 7 December. London’s citizens were warned by their king that across the Channel ‘rebels and traitors’ were gathering.50 They had ‘chosen to be their captain’ a man who ‘of his ambitious and insatiable covetise encroacheth and usurpeth upon him the name and title and royal estate of this realm of England’.* To prevent him seizing the kingdom, ‘every true and natural Englishman born must lay to his hands for his own surety and weal’. This invader against whom all of London was called to arms was derisively referred to in the proclamation as ‘one Henry Tydder’. The Welsh family name, inherited from his father, hid the pretender’s claim to the English throne. It was a weak claim, through an illegitimate female line, but as people began to turn away from Richard III, they turned towards this leader across the sea.

Those who stood against Richard III, as the Mores did, had a new saviour: Henry Tudor.

* ‘Covetise’: covetousness.

These hateful books all

Any one man who has command of many men owes his authority to those whom he commands; he ought to have command not one instant longer than his subjects wish.

Epigram no. 121

When Thomas More was a boy of seven, England was invaded. The force of about a thousand men first landed at Milford Haven in Wales on 7 August 1485, having sailed from Harfleur in northern France, and then marched towards the heart of England.1 The eventual target was London, though they first headed east and north, accruing supporters along the way. Since June, King Richard III had been resident in Nottingham, awaiting the invasion he was assured was coming. From there, he reissued the proclamation he had sent out in December 1484, calling all Englishmen to arms. By 11 August, he was told that forces had landed and, a week later, he knew that they had reached Shrewsbury, less than a hundred miles west of his position, without any resistance. Not for the first time that century, the matter of who wore the crown would be decided on the battlefield.

The invading force was led by the man Richard III had sneeringly referred to as ‘Henry Tudor’. Henry himself preferred the name ‘Henry of Richmond’, as he had inherited the title of Earl of Richmond from his father, Edmund. It was not, however, from his father that he owed his claim to the throne. Although Edmund Tudor was not without royal connection – his mother had been Catherine de Valois, the widow of the great king Henry V – his father had been no more than a lowly squire. Instead, the royal blood Henry risked shedding against Richard III came from his own mother, Margaret Beaufort, a fourth-generation descendant of Edward III, though the legitimacy of that descent could easily be questioned, never mind that it was also through a woman.

The weakness of his claim had not hampered Henry of Richmond, however. Just shy of thirty, fiercely intelligent and cultured, he had, with the help of his mother and her allies, pulled support from some of Richard’s most stalwart followers; instead of meeting resistance as he marched across Wales and into England, men flocked to his side. Richard III rode out to meet this growing force fifteen miles west of Leicester, near the village of Dadlington, just south of the town of Market Bosworth.2 The two armies camped and faced each other across the fields on 21 August, a Sunday. The next day, they would decide the fate of the country in bloody battle. The men prepared their souls. Tomorrow would bring bloody, brutal death. *

As day broke on 22 August, and the opposing forces arrayed themselves for battle, the 7-year-old Thomas More awoke to another school day in London, 100 miles to the south-

east. In that powerful city, over which the two far-off armies warred, few were aware that the question of who possessed God’s authority to rule them was about to be decided on a battlefield. Certainly it was not meant to preoccupy young boys such as More, who, having reached the age of reason, was expected to focus on his studies. This did not mean, of course, that the colossal clashes of kings could not fascinate. After all, much of the compendium in which Thomas’s father had listed his children’s birthdates was taken up with The History of the Kings of Britain, which vividly narrated such epic shifts in power. Perhaps the grandest tale was that of King Arthur – who, like the invading Henry of Richmond, had Welsh roots – a ruler of ‘outstanding courage and generosity’, loved by his subjects and with ‘a claim by rightful inheritance to the kingship of the whole island’, which he fulfilled by conquest.3

Oblivious, then, to the future importance of the day, Thomas More rose, said his prayers and prepared for school. Unlike the slightly unruly days of his infancy, his routine was now more structured. Time, he had been taught, was a holy thing, created and given by God, and thus had to be marked and lived out in a sacred manner.4 Sunday, which had just passed, was of course the most hallowed day of the week, set aside for worship and prayer. He was expected to attend church with his family, listening as the priest intoned the Latin mass. Until he mastered that ancient language, the words the priest said would have meant little to him, though the music, bells, images, vestments and ceremony communicated the sacredness of the event. Friday was associated with fasting and penitence, and Thomas might expect to eat fish rather than meat then, as well as on the occasional Wednesday and Saturday. There were also saints’ festivals and other holy days sprinkled throughout the week, some 200

of various levels of importance in the year.5 This particular Monday in August, however, aside from being the feast day of some minor Roman martyrs, was not especially holy or penitential. So, just after dawn, young Thomas More set off to school.6

His destination was St Anthony’s School on Threadneedle Street, to the north-east end of Cheapside, just south of the London Wall.7 There was good reason for John and Agnes More to send their son to St Anthony’s: it was the only grammar school in London that did not charge a fee. Founded less than half a century earlier, St Anthony’s was one of a score of new Latin-focused grammar schools established under the reign of Henry VI.8 The advancement it offered students otherwise unable to afford an education in the language of scholars, priests and goverment was essential to social mobility; a generation before, it might have provided a leg-up to John More himself, the baker’s son who was now a lawyer in increasingly good standing.9

Young Thomas was expected to have been introduced to the fundamentals of written language before beginning school.10 The little instructional books called ‘primers’ had become increasingly available and affordable thanks to an innovation known as the printing press. Thomas More and English print were of an age; the first London printer, William Caxton, began producing texts there around the same time that Thomas was born. Caxton focused initially on producing books for parents and their children, such as primers.11 In addition to the alphabet, these books contained the prayers and psalms that formed the foundations of a young boy’s education.12 Thomas’s mother could use a primer – if not one owned by the family, a second-hand copy borrowed from a friend or neighbour – to help her son learn the shape of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet and the sounds of

each.13 He would then begin to sound out the words of the Paternoster: ‘Pater noster, qui es in caelis; sanctificetur nomen tuum: adveniat regnum tuum; fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra’ – ‘Our Father, who is in heaven; hallowed be your name: your kingdom come; your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven . . .’14

From the earliest days of Thomas learning letters at home, his education was intended to serve a triple purpose. Certainly, there was the secular aim of professional training, but this could not be disentangled from the religious aims of schooling. Latin was the language of Christian worship as well as of temporal law and politics, and Thomas’s alphabet was learned with the aim of helping him better study and understand the prayers and Scripture that were the foundation of a Christian life. For this reason, every recitation of the alphabet began with the sign of the cross and ended with ‘amen’.15

Wrapped up in both these aims was the hope that, through education, the young Thomas would become a more virtuous person. Children of his age were considered morally malleable. Intervention at an early stage, for good or ill, could establish a person’s moral makeup. One of Caxton’s books of moral instruction for small children compared them to supple wax, which ‘receiveth print and figure’ from all who handled them.16 So too were children impressionable at a tender age.

St Anthony’s was an excellent choice to achieve all these educational ends. Its name came from its association with St Anthony’s House, the ‘hospital’ next door which sheltered and cared for the poor; between them, the twin institutions combined the functions of worship, charity and education.17 The walk to the school from St Giles without Cripplegate was just over half a mile, skirting Cheap Ward, perhaps