The Life of Thomas More

by Peter Ackroyd

Overview

Peter Ackroyd's The Life of Thomas More is a masterful reconstruction of the life and imagination of one of the most remarkable figures of history. Thomas More (1478-1535) was a renowned statesman; the author of a political fantasy that  gave a name to a literary genre and a worldview (Utopia); and, most famously, a Catholic martyr and saint.

Born into the professional classes, Thomas More applied his formidable intellect and well-placed connections to become the most powerful man in England, second only to the king. As much a work of history as a biography, The Life of Thomas More gives an unmatched portrait of the everyday, religious, and intellectual life of the early sixteenth century. In Ackroyd's hands, this renowned "man for all seasons" emerges in the fullness of his complex humanity; we see the unexpected side of his character—such as his preference for bawdy humor—as well as his indisputable moral courage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385496933
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/09/1999
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	5.21(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Peter Ackroyd is a bestselling writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books include the biographies Dickens, Blake, and Thomas More and the novels The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, Milton in America, and The Plato Papers. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award (jointly), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and The Guardian fiction prize. He lives in London.

Read an Excerpt

This Dark World

The infant was taken, within a week of its birth, to the precincts of the church; the child of wrath must be reformed into the image of God, 'the servant of the fiend' made into 'a son of joy'. At the church-door the priest asked the midwife if the child were male or female, and then made a sign of the cross on the infant's forehead, breast and right hand. He placed some salt in the baby's mouth according to custom; then the priest exorcised the devil from its body with a number of prayers, and pronounced baptism as the sole means 'to obtain eternal grace by spiritual regeneration'. The priest spat in his left hand and touched the ears and nose of the child with his saliva. Let the nose be open to the odour of sweetness. It was time to enter the church itself, the priest taking the right hand of the new-born child who had with the salt and saliva been granted the station of a catechumen.

The litanies of the saints were pronounced over the baptismal font; the priest then divided the water with his right hand and cast it in the four directions of the cross. He breathed three rimes upon it and then spilled wax in a cruciform pattern. He divided the holy water with a candle, before returning the taper to the cleric beside him. Oil and chrism were added, with a long rod or spoon, and the child could now be baptised. Thomas More, what seekest thou? The sponsors replied for the infant, Baptism. Dost thou wish to be baptised? I wish. The child was given to the priest, who immersed him three times in the water. He was then anointed with chrism and wrapped in a chrismal robe. Thomas More, receive a white robe, holy and unstained, which thou must bring before the tribunal of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that thou mayest have eternal life and live for ever and ever. The candle was lit and placed in the child's right hand, thus inaugurating a journey through this dark world which ended when, during the last rites, a candle was placed in the right hand of the dying man with the prayer, 'The Lord is my Light and my Salvation, whom shall I fear?' Whom shall this particular child fear, when it was believed by the Church that the whole truth and meaning of baptism was achieved in the act of martyrdom? 'Baptism and suffering for the sake of Christ', according to a second-century bishop, are the two acts which bring full 'remission of sins'.

It was considered best to baptise the child on the same day as its birth, if such haste were practicable, since an infant unbaptised would be consigned to limbo after its death. To leave this world in a state of original sin was to take a course to that eternal dwelling, Limbus puerorum, suspended between heaven, hell and purgatory. There the little unbaptised souls would dwell in happy ignorance beside the more formidable and haunting Limbus patrum, which contained the souls of Noah, Moses and Isaiah together with (in Dante's epic) Virgil, Aristotle, Socrates and all the good men who lived on earth before the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus. Adam had already been dragged from this place at the time of Christ's crucifixion, but there was continual debate within the Church about the consequences of denying new-born children the eternal comfort of paradise. Could a child be saved by the desire, the votum, of its parents? Thomas More himself would eventually concede only that 'those infantes be dampned onely to the payne of losse of heauen'.

In various late medieval pictures of baptism, in manuscripts and devotional manuals, the priest stands with his surplice and stole beside the font. Sometimes he seems to be balancing the infant in the palm of his hand, yet the child is so unnaturally large and alert for such an early stage in its life that we can only assume it acquired mental consciousness with its spiritual renovation. A clerk with a surplice stands behind the priest, while two sponsors and the child's father are generally seen beside the font. In some depictions of this first of the seven sacraments, an image of the dying Christ hangs behind the human scene. But the mother was rarely, if ever, present.

In the more pious households, she would have worn a girdle made out of manuscript prayer rolls in the last stages of her pregnancy, and it was customary in labour to invoke the name of St Margaret as well as the Blessed Virgin. She remained secluded after giving birth, and two or three weeks later was led out to be 'churched' or purified. When she was taken to the church, her head was covered by a handkerchief, as a veil, and she was advised not to look up at the sun or the sky. She knelt in the church while the priest blessed her and assured her, in the words of Psalm 121, that 'the sun shall not burn her by day, nor the moon by night. It was a ceremony both to celebrate the birth of the child and to give thanks for the survival of the mother. This is the late fifteenth-century world into which Thomas More was baptised.

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS	ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS	xi
I THIS DARK WORLD	3
II PRETTY PLAYS OF CHILDHOOD	6
III ST ANTHONY'S PIGS	17
IV COUGH NOT, NOR SPIT	29
V SET ON HIS BOOK	38
VI DUTY IS THE LOVE OF LAW	53
VII MOST HOLY FATHER	65
VIII WE TALK OF LETTERS	71
IX IF YOU WANT TO LAUGH	87
X THE WINE OF ANGELS	96
XI HOLY, HOLY, HOLY!	112
XII CRAFT OF THE CITY	118
XIII MILK AND HONEY	129
XIV A JOLLY MASTER-WOMAN	141
XV KINGS' GAMES	151
XVI THE BEST CONDITION OF A SOCIETY	165
XVII WHOLLY A COURTIER	180
XVIII HE SAT UPON A THRONE OF GOLD	194
XIX MY POOR MIND	203
XX EQUES AURATUS	214
XXI I AM LIKE RIPE SHIT	224
XXII LONG PERSUADING AND PRIVY LABOURING	235
XXIII THY FOOLISH FACE	251
XXIV YOU ARE BUT ONE MAN	263
XXV FOOLISH FRANTIC BOOKS	276
XXVI WE POOR WORLDLY MEN OF MIDDLE EARTH	287
XXVII INFINITE CLAMOUR	313
XXVIII ALL THE BEASTS OF THE WOODS	330
XXIX THE WRATH OF THE KING MEANS DEATH	347
XXX THE WEEPING TIME	359
XXXI PECK OF TROUBLES	384
XXXII CALL FORTH SIR THOMAS MORE	393
XXXIII THE KING IS GOOD UNTO ME	399
SOURCE NOTES	407
INDEX	435

Editorial Reviews

"Superb....Ackroyd describes the London More knew, the ferment of humanism to which he contributed, and the contemporary appeal of Catholicism."
—The New Yorker

"Brilliantly conceived....Ackroyd's vividly human More is...imperfect yet inspiring."
—Time

"This is the first biography of More to have absorbed the small revolution in Reformation scholarship of the last twenty years....The innovation is that he is able to see More as a particularly sensitive and elegantly playful representative of a vibrant, late medieval Catholic England."
—Andrew Sullivan, The New York Times Book Review

"Impressively thorough....This stunning book corrects...mistaken impressions of More."
—Chicago Tribune

"A sensitive, well-informed work that will be of value to anyone seeking a deeper knowledge of More's personal history."
—The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

In The Life of Thomas More, acclaimed author Peter Ackroyd tackles the familiar story of the man for all seasons and manages to shed new light on a life that has been the focus of scholars and historians for more than four centuries.

bn.com

This is the first biography of More to have absorbed the small revolution in Reformation scholarship of the last 20 years...and is able to see England, through the mists of Protestant and Whig propaganda, as one of the most authentically Cahtolic countries in the history of Europe. -- The New York Times Book Review

Andrew Sullivan

Brilliantly conceived.

Time Magazine

Sensitive [and] well-informed.

The Wall Street Journal

Wonderfully vivid.

The Boston Globe

Brilliantly conceived....Ackroyd's vividly human More is...imperfect yet inspiring.

Time

This superb biography does more than narrate the life of the Lord Chancellor who was beheaded and later canonized for refusing to accept Henry VIII as head of the church. It describes the London More knew, the ferment of humanism to which he contributed, and the contemporary appeal of Catholicism. It also portrays an archetypal zealot: More denied heretics their rights of conscience, but later pleaded his own conscience without ever glimpsing the parallel between himself and the Protestants he had executed.

The New Yorker

A vividly evocative portrait of the lawyer and statesman who was 'the King's good servant, but God's first,' from award- winning biographer and novelist Ackroyd (Blake, 1996; T.S. Eliot, 1984). Thomas More was born in 1479 in Milk Street, in what is now the center of London's financial district, to Agnes and John More, a tradesman-turned-lawyer. Thomas would be one of the great intellects of his time, and Ackroyd gives particular attention to young More's rare and prolonged education: his apprenticeship at the court of the learned Archbishop and Chancellor John Morton of Canterbury, his grounding in the liberal arts at Oxford University, and his legal education at New Inn and Lincoln's Inn. More's upbringing and education, Ackroyd shows, left their permanent imprint upon him: His extensive training in dialectical logic served him well at the bar and on the bench, his time with Archbishop Morton made him familiar with the world of prelates and statecraft, and his Latin and literary training fitted him for his career as a humanist. Ackroyd vibrantly evokes the devout London in which More lived, where even successful lawyers meditated on life's transience and participated in endless rounds of prayer and ritual. He also gives an intimate picture of More's affectionate relations with his family and tells the familiar story of More's rise to favor in the court of Henry VIII, his friendship with Erasmus, his tenure as lord chancellor, and his fall from grace as the crisis of the king's divorce of Catherine of Aragon worsened. Ultimately, More's constancy to his church outweighed his obeisance to the king: Ackroyd gives what amounts to a transcript of the trial in whichMore refused to endorse Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, and narrates his imprisonment in the Tower of London and execution in 1535. A limpidly written and superbly wrought portrait of a complex hero who was truly, as his friend Erasmus stated, 'omnium horarum homo,' a 'man for all seasons.'

Kirkus Reviews