MORE, Henry (1614-1687), one of the most remarkable and interesting of the “Cambridge Platonists,” was born at Grantham in Lincolnshire in the year 1614. His father was “Alexander More, Esq., a gentleman of fair estate and fortune,” highly spoken of by his son, who attributes to his father his own poetical tastes and generous love of learning from his early youth. Both his father and mother, he further tells us, were “earnest followers of Calvin,” but he himself “could never swallow that hard doctrine.” As soon as he went to Eton he gave himself up to what he considered a more genial and encouraging train of religious thought. From his boyhood in the Eton playing-fields he was a philosophical and religious dreamer, and he describes his moods of religious reverie in a very interesting manner. His communings and ecstasies have no morbid taint; they are the natural carriage of a strangely gifted spirit. “From the beginning all things in a manner came flowing to him,” and his mind, according to his own saying, “was enlightened with a sense of the noblest theories in the morning of his days.” In 1631 he went to Cambridge, and was admitted at Christ’s College about the time Milton was leaving it. He immersed himself “over head and ears in the study of philosophy,” and fell for a time into a sort of scepticism, from which, however, he was delivered by a study of the “Platonic writers.” He was fascinated especially by Neo-Platonism, and this fascination never left him. The Theologia Germanica also exerted a great and permanent influence over him. He entered upon a course of spiritual self-discipline which made all his previous studies seem of comparatively no value; and gradually light as well as peace came to him. He got “into a most joyous and lucid state of mind,” which he described in a Greek epigram, as he had formerly described his state of mental and spiritual darkness in the same manner. He took his bachelor’s degree in 1635, his master’s degree in 1639, and immediately afterwards was chosen fellow of his college. In this position he may be said to have remained all his life. Many offers of preferment were made to him, but he refused them all, with one exception. Fifteen years after the Restoration, he accepted a prebend in Gloucester cathedral, but only to resign it in favour of his friend Dr. Edward Fowler, afterwards the well-known bishop of Gloucester. He had no ambition, and steadily declined all attempts to draw him towards public life. He would not even accept the mastership of his college, to which, it is understood, he would have been preferred in 1654, when Cud worth was appointed. He drew many young men of a refined and thoughtful turn of mind around him, but among all his pupils the most interesting was a young lady of noble family, a “heroine pupil,” as his biographer (Ward) says, “of an extraordinary nature.” This lady is supposed to have been a sister of Lord Finch, afterwards earl of Nottingham, a well-known statesman of the Restoration. She afterwards became Lady Conway, and at her country seat at Ragley in Warwickshire More continued at intervals to spend “a considerable part of his time.” She and her husband both greatly appreciated him, and amidst the woods of this pleasant retreat he composed several of his books. There is reason to think that the spiritual enthusiasm of Lady Conway was a considerable factor in some of More’s speculations, none the less that she at length passed from his religious pupilage into the ranks of the Quakers. Susceptible to all the excited impulses of her time, this lady became the friend not only of More and Penn but of Baron van Helmont and Valentine Greatrakes, mystical thaumaturgists who played a considerable part amid the teeming enthusiasms of the 17th century. Ragley became a centre not only of devotion but of wonder-working spiritualism. “Many happy days,” More says, he spent in this “paradise,” and its fantastic mysticism had more allurements for him than he himself realized. His genius suffered in consequence, and the play of rationality which distinguishes his earlier is much less conspicuous in his later works. He was a voluminous writer both in verse and prose, and the mere list of his works would occupy more space than we can give to it. Many of his productions are now unreadable; but the Divine Dialogues, published in 1668, may be still read with pleasure. It is animated and sometimes even brilliant, with less prolixity and digression than his other productions, while it has also the advantage for modern readers that it condenses his general view of philosophy and religion. Most of his. characteristic principles may in fact be gathered from it.
The year in which he composed the Divine Dialogues may be said to mark the highest point of his intellectual activity. His Manual of Metaphysics and elaborate treatises on Jacob Boehme and Spinoza were subsequent to this; but the elasticity and freshness of his philosophical genius are less buoyant in these efforts, and the prophetico-mystical elements which were a weakness in his mental constitution from the first grew as his years advanced. He represents more than any other member of the school the mystical and theosophic side of the Cambridge movement. Its lofty rationality, the rationality of which he himself had spoken earlier in noble language, at length evaporates in him in intellectual reverie and dreams. The Neo-Platonic extravagances which lay hidden in the school from the first came in his writings to a head, and merged in pure phantasy,—a set of favourite ideas which not merely guided but dominated the reason. Withal Henry More can never be spoken of save as a spiritual genius and significant figure in the history of British philosophy, less robust and manly and in some respects less learned than Cudworth but more interesting and fertile in thought, and more sweet, singular, and genial in character. From youth to age he describes himself as gifted with a most happy and buoyant temper. The presence of nature filled him with rapture; he wished he could be always sub dio. “Walking abroad after his studies his sallies towards nature would be often inexpressibly ravishing, beyond what he could convey to others.” His own thoughts were to him a never-ending source of pleasurable excitement. His mind moved with great rapidity and at a lofty elevation, so that, as he says, he seemed “all the while to be in the air.” This mystical glow and elevation were the chief features of his mind and character, a certain transport and radiancy of thought which carried him beyond the common life without raising him to any false or artificial height, for his humility and charity were not less conspicuous than his piety. The last ten years of his life are without any special record, and he died on the morning of 1st September 1687, and was buried in the chapel of the college he loved so well, where within less than a year his friend Cudworth was laid beside him.
Before his death More issued complete editions of his works, his Opera Theologica in 1675, and his Opera Philosophica in 1678. The chief authorities for his life are Ward’s Life, 1710; the “Prefatio Generalissima” prefixed to his Opera Omnia, 1679; and also a general account of the manner and scope of his writings in an Apology published in 1664. The collection of his Philosophical Poems, 1647, in which he has “compared his chief speculations and experiences,” should also be consulted. An elaborate analysis of his life and works is given in Principal Tulloch’s Rational Theology, vol. ii., 1874.
MORE, Thomas (1478-1535), lord chancellor, and one of the most illustrious Englishmen of his century, was born in Milk Street in the City of London, 7th February 1478. He received the rudiments of education at St Anthony’s School in Threadneedle Street, at that time under Nicolas Holt held to be the best in the city. He was early placed in the household of Cardinal Morton, archbishop of Canterbury. Admission to the cardinal’s family was esteemed a high privilege, and was sought as a school of manners and as an introduction to the world by the sons of the best families in the kingdom. Young Thomas More obtained admission through the influence of his father, Sir Thomas, then a rising barrister and afterwards a justice of the Court of King’s Bench. The usual prognostication of future distinction is attributed in the case of More to Cardinal Morton, “who would often tell the nobles sitting at table with him, where young Thomas waited on him, whosoever liveth to trie it shall see this child prove a notable and rare man.” At the proper age young More was sent to Oxford, where he is said vaguely to have had Colet, Grocyn, and Linacre for his tutors. All More himself says is that he had Linacre for his master in Greek. Learning Greek was not the matter of course which it has since become. Greek was not as yet part of the arts curriculum, and to learn it voluntarily was ill looked upon by the authorities. Those who did so were suspected of an inclination towards novel and dangerous modes of thinking, then rife on the Continent and slowly finding their way to England. More’s father, who intended his son to make a career in his own profession, took the alarm; he removed him from the university without a degree, and entered him at New Inn to commence at once the study of the law. The young man had been kept in a state of humiliating dependence in money matters, having had no allowance made him, and having had to apply to his father even for a pair of new shoes when the old were worn out. This system was pursued by his parents not from niggardliness but on principle; and Thomas More in later years often spoke with approbation of this severe discipline, as having been a means of keeping him from the vulgar dissipations in which his fellow-students indulged. After completing a two-years’ course in New Inn, an Inn of Chancery, More was admitted in February 1496 at Lincoln’s Inn, an Inn of Court. “At that time the Inns of Court and Chancery presented the discipline of a well-constituted university, and, through professors under the name of readers and exercises under the name of mootings, law was systematically taught” (Campbell). In his professional studies More early distinguished himself, so that he was appointed reader-in-law in Furnival’s Inn; but he would not relinquish the studies which had attracted him in Oxford. We find him delivering a lecture to audiences of “all the chief learned of the city of London.” The subject he chose was a compromise between theology and the humanities, being St Augustine’s De Civitate. In this lecture More sought less to expound the theology of his author than to set forth the philosophical and historical contents of the treatise. The lecture-room was a church, St Lawrence Jewry, placed at his disposal by Grocyn, the rector.
Somewhere about this period of More’s life two things happened which gave in opposite directions the determining impulse to his future career. More’s was one of those highly susceptible natures which take more readily and more eagerly than common minds the impress of that which they encounter on their first contact with men. Two principal forms of thought and feeling were at this date in conflict, rather unconscious than declared, on English soil. Under the denomination of the “old learning,” the sentiment of the Middle Ages and the idea of church authority was established and in full possession of the religious houses, the universities, and the learned professions. The foe that was advancing in the opposite direction, though without the conscience of a hostile purpose, was the new power of human reason animated with the revived sentiment of classicism. In More’s mind both these hostile influences found a congenial home. Each had its turn of supremacy, and in his early years it seemed as if the humanistic influence would gain the final victory. About the age of twenty he was seized with a violent access of devotional rapture. He took a disgust to the world and its occupations, and experienced a longing to give himself over to an ascetic life. He took a lodging near the Charterhouse, and subjected himself to the discipline of a Carthusian monk. He wore a sharp shirt of hair next his skin, scourged himself every Friday and other fasting days, lay upon the bare ground with a log under his head, and allowed himself but four or five hours’ sleep. This access of the ascetic malady lasted but a short time, and More recovered to all outward appearance his balance of mind. But he never entirely emancipated himself from the sentiment of devotion, though in later life it exhibited itself in a more rational form. Even when he was chancellor he would take part in church services, walking in their processions with a surplice. This, however, was at a later time. For the moment the balance of his faculties seemed to be restored by a revival of the antagonistic sentiment of humanism which he had imbibed from the Oxford circle of friends, and specially from Erasmus. The dates as regards More’s early life are uncertain, and we can only say that it is possible that the acquaintance with Erasmus might have begun during Erasmus’s first visit to England in 1499. Tradition has dramatized their first meeting into the story given by Cresacre More, —that the two happened to sit opposite each other at the lord mayor’s table, that they got into an argument during dinner, and that, in mutual astonishment at each other’s wit and readiness, Erasmus exclaimed, “Aut tu es Morus, aut nullus,” and the other replied, “Aut tu es Erasmus, aut diabolus !” Rejecting this legend, which bears the stamp of fiction upon its face, we have certain evidence of acquaintance between the two men in a letter of Erasmus with the date “Oxford, 29th October 1499.” If we must admit the correctness of the date of Ep. 14 in the collection of Erasmus’s Epistolae, we should have to assume that their acquaintance had begun as early as 1497. Ten years More’s senior, and master of the accomplishments which More was ambitious to acquire, Erasmus could not fail to exercise a powerful influence over the brilliant young Englishman. More’s ingenuous demeanour, quick intelligence, and winning manners fascinated Erasmus from the first, and acquaintance rapidly ripened into warm attachment. This contact with the prince of letters revived in More the spirit of the “new learning,” and he returned with ardour to the study of Greek, which had been begun at Oxford. The humanistic influence was sufficiently strong to save him from wrecking his life in monkish mortification, and even to keep him for a time on the side of the party of progress. He acquired no inconsiderable facility in the Greek language, from which he made and published some translations. His Latin style, though wanting the inimitable ease of Erasmus and often offending against idiom, is yet in copiousness and propriety much above the ordinary Latin of the English scholars of his time.
More’s attention to the new studies was always subordinate to his resolution to rise in his profession, in which he was stimulated by his father’s example. As early as 1502 he was appointed under-sheriff of the city of London, an office then judicial, and of considerable dignity. He first attracted public attention by his conduct in the parliament of 1504, by his daring opposition to the king’s demand for money. Henry VII. was entitled, according to feudal laws, to a grant on occasion of his daughter’s marriage. But he came to the House of Commons for a much larger sum than he intended to give with his daughter. The members, unwilling as they λvere to vote the money, were afraid to offend the king, till the silence was broken by More, whose speech is said to have moved the House to reduce the subsidy of three-fifteenths which the Government had demanded to £30,000. One of the chamberlains went and told his master that he had been thwarted by a beardless boy. Henry never forgave the audacity; but, for the moment, the only revenge he could take was upon More’s father, whom upon some pretext he threw into the Tower, and he only released him upon payment of a fine of £ 100. Thomas More even found it advisable to withdraw from public life into obscurity. During this period of retirement the old dilemma recurred. One while he devoted himself to the sciences, “perfecting himself in music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, learning the French tongue, and recreating his tired spirits on the viol,” or translating epigrams from the Greek anthology; another while resolving to take priest’s orders.
From dreams of clerical celibacy he was roused by making acquaintance with the family of John Colt of New Hall, in Essex. The “honest and sweet conversation” of the daughters attracted him, and though his inclination led him to prefer the second he married the eldest, not liking to put the affront upon her of passing her over in favour of her younger sister. The death of the old king in 1507 restored him to the practice of his profession, and to that public career for which his abilities specially fitted him. From this time there was scarce a cause of importance in which he was not engaged. His professional income amounted to <£400 a year, equal to £4000 in present money, and, “considering the relative profits of the law and the value of money, probably indicated as high a station as £10,000 at the present day” (Campbell). It was not long before he attracted the attention of the young king and of Wolsey. The Latin verses which he presented to Henry on the occasion of his coronation did not deserve particular notice amid the crowd of congratulatory odes. But the spirit with which he pleaded before the Star Chamber in a case of the Crown v. the Pope recommended him to the royal favour, and marked him out for employment. More obtained in this case judgment against the crown. Henry, who was present in person at the trial, had the good sense not to resent the defeat, but took the counsel to whose advocacy it was due into his service. In 1514 More was made master of the requests, knighted, and sworn a member of the privy council. He was repeatedly employed on embassies to the Low Countries, and was for a long time stationed at Calais as agent in the shifty negotiations carried on by Wolsey with the court of France. In 1519 he was compelled to resign his post of under-sheriff to the city and his private practice at the bar. In 1521 he was appointed treasurer of the exchequer, and in the parliament of 1523 he was elected speaker. The choice of this officer rested nominally with the House itself, but in practice was always dictated by the court. Sir Thomas More was pitched upon by the court on this occasion in order that his popularity with the Commons might be employed to carry the money grant for which Wolsey asked. To the great disappointment of the court More remained firm to the popular cause, and it was greatly owing to his influence that its demands were resisted. From this occurrence may be dated the jealousy which the cardinal began to exhibit towards More. Wolsey made an attempt to get him out of the way by sending him as ambassador to Spain. More defeated the design by a personal appeal to the king, alleging that the climate would be fatal to his health. Henry, who saw through the artifice, and was already looking round for a more popular successor to Wolsey, made the gracious answer that he would employ More otherwise. In 1525 More was appointed chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, and no pains were spared to attach him to the court. The king frequently sent for him into his closet, and discoursed with him on astronomy, geometry, and points of divinity. This growing favour, by which many men would have been carried away, did not impose upon More. He dis couraged the king’s advances, showed reluctance to go to the palace, and seemed constrained when there. Then the king began to come himself to More’s house at Chelsea, and would dine with him without previous notice. Roper mentions one of these visits, when the king after dinner walked in the garden by the space of an hour, holding his arm round More’s neck. Roper afterwards congratulated his father-in-law on the distinguished honour which had been shown him. “I thank our Lord,” was the reply, “I find his grace my very good lord indeed; and I believe he doth as singularly favour me as any subject within this realm. Howbeit, son Roper, I may tell thee I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head would win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go.” As a last resource More tried the expedient of silence, dissembling his wit and affecting to be dull. This had the desired effect so far that he was less often sent for. But it did not alter the royal policy, and in 1529, when a successor had to be found for Wolsey, More was raised to the chancellorship. The selection was justified by More’s high reputation, but it was also significant of the modification which the policy of the court was then undergoing. It was a concession to the rising popular party, to which it was supposed that More’s politics inclined him. The public favour with which his appointment had been received was justified by his conduct as judge in the Court of Chancery. Having heard causes in the forenoon between eight and eleven, after dinner he sat again to receive petitions. The meaner the suppliant was the more affably he would speak to him, and the more speedily he would despatch his case. In this respect he formed a great contrast to his predecessor, whose arrears he soon cleared off. One morning being told by the officer that there was not another cause before the court, he ordered the fact to be entered on record, as it had never happened before. He not only refused all gifts, such as had been usual, himself, but took measures to prevent any of his connexions from interfering with the course of justice. One of his sons-in-law, Heron, having a suit in the chancellor’s court, and refusing to agree to any reasonable accommodation, because the judge “was the most affectionate father to his children that ever was in the world,” More thereupon made a decree against him.
Unfortunately for Sir Thomas More, a lord chancellor is not merely a judge, but has high political functions to perform. In raising More to that eminent position, the king had not merely considered his professional distinction but had counted upon his avowed liberal and reforming tendencies. In the Utopia, which, though written earlier, More had allowed to be printed as late as 1516, he had spoken against the vices of power and declared for indifference of religious creed with a breadth of philosophical view of which there is no other example in any Englishman of that age. At the same time, as he could not be suspected of any sympathy with Lutheran or Wickliffite heretics, he might fairly be regarded as qualified to lead the party which aimed at reform in state and church within the limits of Catholic orthodoxy. But in the king’s mind the public questions of reform were entirely sunk in the personal one of the divorce. The divorce was a point upon which Sir Thomas would not yield. And, as he saw that the marriage with Anne Boleyn was determined upon, he petitioned the king to be allowed to resign the great seal, alleging failing health. With much reluctance, the royal permission was given and the resignation accepted, 10th May 1532, with many gracious expressions of good will on the part of the king. The promise held out of future bounty was never fulfilled, and More left office, as he had entered it, a poor man. His necessitous condition was so notorious that the clergy in convocation voted him a present of <£5000. This he peremptorily refused, either for himself or for his family, declaring that he “had rather see it all cast into the Thames.” Yet the whole of his income after resigning office did not exceed £100 a year.
Hitherto he had maintained a large establishment, not on the princely scale of Wolsey, but in the patriarchal fashion of having all his sons-in-law, with their families, under his roof. When he resigned the chancellorship he called his children and grandchildren together to explain his reduced circumstances. “If we wish to live together,” said he, “you must be content to be contributories together. But my counsel is that we fall not to the lowest fare first: we will not, therefore, descend to Oxford fare, nor to the fare of New Inn, but we will begin with Lincoln’s Inn diet, where many right worshipful men of great account and good years do live full well; which if we find ourselves the first year not able to maintain, then we will in the next year come down to Oxford fare, where many great learned and ancient fathers and doctors are continually conversant; which if our purses stretch not to maintain neither, then may we after, with bag and wallet, go a-begging together, hoping that for pity some good folks will give us their charity.”
More was now able, as he writes to Erasmus, to return to the life which had always been his ambition, when, free from business and public affairs, he might give himself up to his favourite studies and to the practices of his devotion. Of the Chelsea interior Erasmus has drawn a charming picture, which may vie with Holbein’s celebrated canvas, The Household of Sir Thomas More.
“More has built, near London, upon the Thames, a modest yet commodious mansion. There he lives surrounded by his numerous family, including his wife, his son, and his son’s wife, his three daughters and their husbands, with eleven grandchildren. There is not any man living so affectionate to his children as he, and he loveth his old wife as if she were a girl of fifteen. Such is the excellence of his disposition that whatsoever happeneth that could not be helped, he is as cheerful and as well pleased as though the best thing possible had been done. In More’s house, you would say that Plato’s Academy was revived again, only, whereas in the Academy the discussions turned upon geometry and the power of numbers, the house at Chelsea is a veritable school of Christian religion. In it is none, man or woman, but readeth or studieth the liberal arts, yet is their chief care of piety. There is never any seen idle; the head of the house governs it not by a lofty carriage and oft rebukes, but by gentleness and amiable manners. Every member is busy in his place, performing his duty with alacrity; nor is sober mirth wanting.”
But More was too conspicuous to be long allowed to enjoy the happiness of a retired life. A special invitation was sent him by the king to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn, accompanied with the gracious offer of £20 to buy a new suit for the occasion! More refused to attend, and from that moment was marked out for vengeance. A first attempt made to bring him within the meshes of the law only recoiled with shame upon the head of the accusers. They were maladroit enough to attack him on his least vulnerable side, summoning him before the privy council to answer to a charge of receiving bribes in the administration of justice. One Parnell was put forward to complain of a decree pronounced against him in favour of the contending party Vaughan, who he said had presented a gilt cup to the chancellor. More stated that he had received a cup as a New Year’s gift. Lord Wiltshire, the queen’s father, exultingly cried out, “So, did I not tell you, my lords, that you would find this matter true?” “But, my lords,” continued More, “having pledged Mrs. Vaughan in the wine wherewith my butler had filled the cup, I restored the cup to her.” Two other charges of a like nature were refuted as triumphantly. But the very futility of the accusations must have betrayed to More the bitter determination of his enemies to compass his destruction. Foiled in their first ill-directed attempt, they were compelled to have recourse to that tremendous engine of regal tyranny, the law of treason. A bill was brought into parliament to attaint Elizabeth Barton, a nun, who was said to have held treasonable language. Barton turned out afterwards to have been an impostor, but she had duped More, who now lived in a superstitious atmosphere of convents and churches, and he had given his countenance to her supernatural pretensions. His name, with that of Fisher, was accordingly included in the bill as an accomplice. When he came before the council, it was at once apparent that the charge of treason could not be sustained, and the efforts of the court agents were directed to draw from More some approbation of the king’s marriage. But to this neither cajolery nor threats could move him. The preposterous charge was urged that it was by his advice that the king had committed himself in his book against Luther to an assertion of the pope’s authority, whereby the title of “Defender of the Faith” had been gained, but in reality a sword put into the pope’s hand to fight against him. More was able to reply that· he had warned the king that this very thing might happen, that upon some breach of amity between the crown of England and the pope Henry’s too pronounced assertion of the papal authority might be turned against himself, “therefore it were best that place be amended, and his authority more slenderly touched.” “Nay,” replied the king, “that it shall not; we are so much bound to the see of Rome that we cannot do too much honour unto it. Whatsoever impediment be to the contrary, we will set· forth that authority to the utmost; for we have received from that see our crown imperial,” “which,” added More, “till his grace with his own mouth so told me, I never heard before.” Anything more defiant and exasperating than this could not well have been said. But it could not be laid hold of, and the charge of treason being too ridiculous to be proceeded with, More’s name was struck out of the bill. When his daughter brought him the news, More calmly said, “I’ faith, Meg, quod differtur, non aufertur: that which is postponed is not dropt.” At another time, having asked his daughter how the court went, and how Queen Anne did, he received for answer, “Never better; there is nothing else but dancing and sporting.” To this More answered, “Alas, Meg, it pitieth me to remember unto what misery, poor soul, she will shortly come; these dances of hers will prove such dances that she will spurn our heads off like footballs; but it will not be long ere her head will dance the like dance.” So the speech runs in the Life by More’s great-grandson; but in the only trustworthy record, the life by his son-in-law Roper, More’s reply ends with the words, “she will shortly come.” In this, as in other instances, the later statement has the appearance of having been an imaginative extension of the earlier.
In 1534 the Act of Supremacy was passed, and the oath ordered to be tendered. More was sent for to Lambeth, where he offered to swear to the succession, but steadily refused the oath of supremacy as against his conscience. Thereupon he was given in charge to the abbot of Westminster, and, persisting in his refusal, was four days afterwards committed to the Tower. After a close and even cruel confinement (he was denied the use of pen and ink) of more than a year, he was brought to trial before a special commission and a packed jury. Even so More would have been acquitted, when at the last moment Rich, the solicitor-general, quitted the bar and presented himself as a witness for the crown. Being sworn, he detailed a confidential conversation he had had with the prisoner in the Tower. He affirmed that, having himself admitted in the course of this conversation “that there were things which no parliament could do,— e.g., no parliament could make a law that God should not be God,” Sir Thomas had replied, “No more could the parliament make the king supreme head of the church.” By this act of perj ury a verdict of “guilty” was procuredfrom the jury. The execution of the sentence followed within the week, on 7th July 1535. The head was fixed upon London Bridge. The vengeance of Henry was not satisfied by this judicial murder of his friend and servant; he enforced the confiscation of what small property More had left, expelled Lady More from the house at Chelsea, and even set aside assignments which had been legally executed by More, who foresaw what would happen before the commission of the alleged treason. More’s property was settled on Princess Elizabeth, afterwards queen, who kept possession of it till her death. At his death Sir Thomas More was in the fifty-eighth year of his age. He was twice married, but had children only by his first wife. His eldest daughter Margaret, married to William Roper, is one of the foremost women in the annals of the country for her virtues, high intelligence, and various accomplishments. She read Latin and Greek, was a proficient in music, and in the sciences, so far as they were then accessible. Her devotion to her father is historical; she gave him not only the tender affection of a daughter but the high-minded sympathy of a soul great as his own.
It is unfortunate for More’s reputation that he has been adopted as a champion of a party and a cause which is arrayed in hostility to the liberties and constitution of his country. Apart from the partisan use which is made of his name, we must rank him among the noblest minds of England, as one who became the victim of a tyrant whose policy he disapproved and whose servile instruments he despised. If his language towards the tyrant is often more servile than became a freeman, we must remember that such was the court style of the period, and that we must not construe literally phrases of compliment. It is, however, impossible to deny that More’s policy in later life did not bear out the more liberal convictions of his earlier years. His views and feelings contracted under the combined influences of his professional practice and of public employment. In the Utopia, published in 1516, he not only denounced the ordinary vices of power, but evinced an enlightenment of sentiment which went far beyond the most statesmanlike ideas to be found among his contemporaries, pronouncing not merely for toleration but rising even to the philosophical conception of the indifference of religious creed. It was to this superiority of view, and not merely to the satire on the administration of Henry VII., that we must ascribe the popularity of the work in the 16th century. For, as a romance, the Utopia has little interest either of incident or of character. It does not, as has been said, anticipate the economical doctrines of Adam Smith, and much of it is fanciful without being either witty or ingenious. Mackintosh says of it: “It intimates a variety of doctrines, and exhibits a multiplicity of projects, which the writer regards with almost every possible degree of approbation and shade of assent, from the frontiers of serious and entire belief, through gradations of descending plausibility, where the lowest are scarcely more than exercises of ingenuity, and to which some wild paradoxes are appended, either as a vehicle, or as an easy means, if necessary, of disavowing the serious intention of the whole of this Platonic fiction.”
The Epistola ad Dorpium at a later date exhibits More emphatically on the side of the new learning. It contains a vindication of the study of Greek, and of the desirability of printing the text of the Greek Testament,—views which at that date required an enlightened understanding to enter into, and which were condemned by the party to which More afterwards attached himself. At the most, he can be doubtfully exculpated from the charge of having tortured men and children for heresy. It is admitted by himself that he inflicted punishment for religious opinion. Erasmus only ventures to say in his friend’s defence “that while he was chancellor no man was put to death for these pestilent opinions, while so many suffered death in France and the Low Countries.”
The Life of Sir Thomas More was written by his son-in-law Roper about the end of Mary’s reign. It was preserved in MS. during the reign of Elizabeth, and handed about in copies, many of which were carelessly made. It was not given to the press till 1626, with the date of Paris. Reprints were made by Hearne (1716), by Lewis (1729,1731), and by Singer (1817, 1822). Roper's life is the source of all the many subsequent biographies. More’s Life in MS. (Harleian 6253), anonymous, but by Nicolas Harpsfield, was also written in Mary’s reign. All that is material in this MS. is taken from Roper. Another anonymous Life, written in 1599, printed in Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Biography, ii. 43-185, is chiefly compiled from Roper and Harpsfield. The preface is signed B. R.
Stapleton (Tree Thom«, s. res gestae S. Thomae apostoli, S. Thom« archiepiscopi Cantuanenns, Thom« Mori, Douay, 1588, Cologne, 1612, and the Vita Thom« Mori (separately), Gratz, 1689) translates Roper, interweaving what material he could find scattered through More’s works and letters and the notices of him in the writings of his contemporaries. Cresacre More, great-grandson of Sir Thomas, compiled a new life about the year 1627. It was printed without date but, according to the editor, Hunter, in 1631. The title of this edition is— The Life of Sir Thos. More, Lord High Chancell<nιr of England, 4to, s. 1. et a. and with new title-page, 1642,1726,1828. This life is cited b
