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.”[1] 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 perjury a verdict of “guilty” was procured from the jury. The execution of the sentence followed within the week, on the 7th of 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. Sir Thomas More was twice married, but had children only by his first wife, who died about 1511. His only son, John, married an heiress, Ann Cresacre, and was the grandfather of Cresacre More, Sir Thomas More’s biographer. His eldest daughter, Margaret (1505–1544), married to William Roper (1496–1578), an official of the court of king’s bench and a member of parliament under Henry VIII., Edward VI. and Mary, 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.
More was not only a lawyer, a wit, a scholar, and a man of wide general reading; he was also a man of cultivated taste, who delighted in music and painting. He was an intimate friend of Holbein, whose first introduction to England was as a visitor to More in his house at Chelsea, where the painter is said to have remained for three years, and where he probably first met Henry VIII. Holbein painted portraits of Sir Thomas and his family. More was beatified by Leo XIII. in 1886.
The Epistola ad Dorpium 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. On the other hand, he can at the most 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.” His views and feelings contracted under the combined influences of his professional practice and of public employment. In the Utopia, published in Latin in 1516 (1st English translation, 1551), 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. The idea of putting forward political and philosophical principles under the fiction of an ideal state was doubtless taken from Plato’s Republic. The Utopia in turn suggested the literary form adopted by Bacon, Hobbes, Filmer, and other later writers; and the name of the book has passed into the language as signifying optimistic but impracticable ideals of reform.
For a bibliography of More’s numerous works see the article in the Dict. Nat. Biog. and the Catalogue of the Alfred Cock collection of books and portraits of or relating to Sir Thomas More which is preserved in the Guildhall Library, London. The more .important of his works and their editions are here given. Luciani dialogi . . . compluria opuscula ab Erasmo Roterodamo et Thoma Moro . . . traducta (Paris, 1506 and 1514; Venice, Aldus, 1516, &c.) was accomplished by Erasmus and More in 1505. The Lyfe of John Picus, earle of Mirandula . . . printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1510, translated by More from the Venice ed. of 1498, was edited by J. M. Rigg for the Tudor Library in 1890. Historie of the pittiful Life and unfortunate Death of Edward the Fifth and the then Duke of York with . . . Richard the Third was written, according to Rastell, in 1513, and first printed in a corrupt version in Grafton’s continuation of Hardin in 1543; it is included by Rastell in his 1557 edition of More’s Workes, but it has been suggested that the Latin original was by Cardinal Morton; as the History of King Richard III. it was edited by J. R. Lumby for the Pitt Press in 1883. The Libellus vere aureus . . . better known as Utopia, was printed at Louvain in 1516, under the superintendence of Erasmus, and appeared in many subsequent editions, many of them of great bibliographical value, the finest being the Basel edition of 1518. It was translated into the chief languages of Europe, and into English by Ralph Robinson as A fruteful and Pleasaunt Worke of the best State of a Publyque Weale, and of the newe Yle called Utopia (Abraham Nell, 1551); modern editions are by J. Dibdin (2 vols., 1808), Professor E. Arber (English Reprints, 1869), by J. R. Lumby for the Pitt Press (1879), by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press (1893), by J. Churton Collins for the Clarendon Press (1904), by R. Steele for the King’s Classics (1908), &c. Other translations of Utopia are by Gilbert Burnet (1684) and by A. Cayley (Memoirs of More, 2 vols., 1808). Against Luther and Tyndale Sir T. More wrote A Dyaloge of Syr Thomas More, Knt., written in 1528 and printed by John Rastell in 1529; Sir Thomas More’s Answere to the fyrste parte of the Poyson’d book . . . The Souper of the Lorde (William Rastell, 1532) with a “Second Parte” in 1533. The Apologye of Syr Thomas More, written in 1533, is a defence of his own polemical style and of the treatment of heretics by the clergy. A Dyaloge of Comfort against Tribulacion, printed by Rastell in 1533, was destined primarily for More’s family.
More’s English works were collected by William Rastell and published as The Worke of Sir Thomas More Knyght by Cawood, Waly and Tottel in 1557; his Latin works Thomae Mori . . . Lucubrationes were partially collected at Basel 1563 and in 1566 (omnia opera) at Louvain; a fuller edition drawn chiefly from these two appeared at Frankfort and Leipzig in 1689. Modern selections were edited by W. J. Walter (Baltimore, 1841), by T. E. Bridgett (Wisdom and Wit of Blessed Thomas More, London, 1891). His
- ↑ Cresacre More, p. 231.
