Part 1

Transcriber's Notes.

Where no illustration caption appeared below the image, the corresponding wording from the list of illustrations has been included as a caption.

Italics are surrounded with _ _. The oe ligature has been replaced in this version by the letters oe. Some words have been represented in the print version as the first three letters of the word followed by the last letter as a superscript and with a dot underneath. The superscripted letters have been represented in this version as ^[.x].

On p. 59 of the original book, a presumed printer's error has been corrected:

"She seems 'em now!" (as printed in the original) has been changed to "She sees 'em now!" (in this version)

On p. 201, the date 1543 has been changed to 1534. This can be fairly presumed to be the intended date based on historical occurrences referred to and based on the continuity of entries.

THE HOUSEHOLD OF SIR THO^[.S] MORE

By the same Author

_In crown 8vo, cloth, gilt top, 6s._

Illustrated by JOHN JELLICOE and HERBERT RAILTON

The Old Chelsea Bun-Shop: A Tale of the Last Century

Cherry & Violet: A Tale of the Great Plague

The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell, afterwards Mrs. Milton

_The many other interesting works of this author will be published from time to time uniformly with the above._

THE HOUSEHOLD OF SIR THO^[.S] MORE

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE REV. W. H. HUTTON, B.D. FELLOW OF S. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD

AND TWENTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN JELLICOE AND HERBERT RAILTON

LONDON JOHN C. NIMMO NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS MDCCCXCIX

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. At the Ballantyne Press

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

_From Drawings by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON.

"ANON WE SIT DOWN TO REST AND TALK." _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON _Frontispiece_

PAGE

TITLE-PAGE. _Designed by_ HERBERT RAILTON iii

MOTTO OF MARGARET MORE. _Designed by_ HERBERT RAILTON iv

SIR THOMAS MORE'S HOUSE. _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON 1

ERASMUS AND THE PEACOCKS. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _To face_ 6

JACK AND CECY. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 26

MORE IN THE BARROW. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 38

MARGARET IN THE TREE. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _To face_ 44

"I NOTICED ARGUS PEARCHT." _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 52

GAMMER GURNEY. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 58

MORE READING WYNKYN DE WORDE. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 70

THE JEW. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 76

THE CARDINAL'S PROCESSION. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 87

"I FELL INTO DISGRACE FOR HOLDING SPEECH WITH MERCY OVER THE PALES." _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 110

"LORD SANDS SANG US A NEW BALLAD." _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 120

"THE KING WAS HERE YESTERDAY." _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 142

"SHE COMETH HITHER FROM HEVER CASTLE." _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 148

THE BEGGAR-WOMAN'S DOG. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 161

IN THE GARDEN. _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON 165

"AND SAYTH, LOW BOWING AS HE SPOKE, 'MADAM, MY LORD IS GONE.'" _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 172

"IN COMETH A PURSUIVANT." _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 203

THE STAIRS. _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON 210

"HIS FEARLESSE PASSAGE THROUGH THE TRAITOR'S GATE." _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 220

GILLIAN AND THE FLOUR SACKS. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 237

MORE RETURNING FROM HIS TRIAL. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _To face_ 258

"NOR LOOKT I UP TILL ANEATH THE BRIDGE-GATE." _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 262

Introduction

It is not always from the closest and most accurate historian that we receive the truest picture of an age or of a character. The artist gives a more real picture than the photographer; and it needs imagination and sympathy, as well as labour and research, to make a hero of old time live again to-day. The minutest investigation will hardly better the vivid reality of Scott's James I. or Charles II., or portray more truly than Mr. Shorthouse has done the fragile yet fascinating personality of Charles I. Yet to say this is not to undervalue history or to contemn the labour of true students. Rather, without their aid we cannot rightly see the past at all: it comes to us only with the distortions of our own prejudice and our narrow modern outlook. We need both the work of the scholar and the imagination of the artist. Without the first we could not behold the past, without the second we could not understand it.

In religion, in politics, in art, in all that makes life beautiful and men true, we must know the past if we would use the present or provide for the future. And our knowledge is barren indeed if it does not touch the intimacies of human existence. What we must know is how men lived and thought, not merely how they acted. We must see them in the home, and not only in the senate or the field. It is thus that the Letters of Erasmus, or Luther's Table Talk, are worth a ton of Sleidan's dreary commentaries or Calvin's systematic theology. And yet we cannot dispense with either. We must study past ages as a whole, and then bring the imagination of the artist and the poet to show us the truth and the passion that lies nearest to their heart. It is thus, then, in history that the imaginary portrait has its valued place.

Saturated with contemporary literature, yet alive to the influences of a wider life, the student who is also an artist turns to a great movement, and with the touch of genius fixes the true impression of its soul in poetry, on canvas, or in prose. Such was the work of Walter Pater. He taught us, through the delicate study of a secondary but most alluring painter, to "understand to how great a place in human culture the art of Italy had been called." In his picture of a great scholar and a beautiful, pathetic, childlike soul, he showed the fascination of that priceless truth--that what men have thought and done, that what has interested and charmed them, can never wholly die--"no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal."

And more. He taught us not only how to understand the past, but he showed us how it understood itself. "A Prince of Court Painters"--Watteau, as he was seen by one who loved him, by a sympathetic woman--like all such, the keenest of critics, yet the tenderest of hearts--is given to us as not even pictures or personal letters could give. Sebastian van Storck, Duke Carl of Rosenmold--they are portraits, though it is only imagination that makes them live.

I remember Mr. Freeman once saying to me, as he took me his favourite walk at Somerleaze, that he had read a study of Mr. Pater's--a strange mediæval story of Denys l'Auxerrois--and could not be satisfied till he knew what it meant. Was it true? It was a question befitting one who had made the past to live again. Truth was the first, almost the only, thing the historian prized. Denys the organ-builder may never have watched the decoration of the Cathedral of Saint Étienne, or made, by the mere sight of him, the old feel young again. And yet Walter Pater had painted a true portrait, as so often did Robert Browning, though it were imaginary; and the artist as well as the historian had imaged for us the reality of a past age.

Mr. Pater, though the most perfect artist of this school, was not the first. Humbler writers have long endeavoured to draw the great heroes as they thought their contemporaries saw them, by a fiction of memoir, or correspondence, or journal. And the "Prince of Court Painters" is a sketch in the same medium as "The Household of Sir Thomas More."

This charming book has passed through many editions, but its author, of her own choice, remained almost unknown. The "Dictionary of National Biography" has strangely passed her by. Almost all that her wishes suffer us to know is that she was sister of Mr. William Oke Manning, to whom she affectionately dedicated the fourth edition of the book which is now reprinted; that she was never married; and that she was a genuine student and an indefatigable writer on historical and literary subjects. In "Mary Powell" she touched the heart of her generation, and few books of its day had a wider circulation. "The Household of Sir Thomas More" is a still more painstaking study, and a more complete and delightful portrait. Its perfect sympathy and its quaint charm of manner secured for it a welcome even among those who claimed for the hero and his opinions a sanctity which Miss Manning's historical judgment did not ratify. Cardinal Manning, writing on March 11, 1887, rejoiced at its republication, and said: "The book is a singularly beautiful one, and I regret that I had not the pleasure of knowing the writer, whose mental gifts were of a very high order." Miss Manning was a keen critic of the Romanism of the Reformation period, as her Appendices to the fourth edition of her book show; but she did not suffer her own opinions to destroy her sympathy for him whom Reginald Pole called "the best of all the English."

"The Household of Sir Thomas More" is an imaginary portrait of a noble character. It professes to be the journal begun by Margaret, More's eldest daughter, most learned and best beloved, when she was but fifteen years old, and continued till she had taken her father's head from the pole whereon it was exposed, to treasure it till she should lay it on her breast as she too passed into the peace of God. Among "fair women" the heroic daughter is immortal:--

"Morn broaden'd on the borders of the dark Ere I saw her, who clasped in her last trance Her murder'd father's head."

So Tennyson recorded the pathetic legend with which Miss Manning ended her beautiful book.

When she wrote, it was not so hard as it is now to recall the London of Henry VIII. Miss Manning herself described very happily in 1859 what she remembered many years before.

"When we say," she wrote, "that some of our happiest and earliest years were spent on the site of Sir Thomas More's country house in the 'village of palaces,' some of our readers will hardly believe we can mean Chelsea. But, in those days, the gin-palace and tea-garden were not; Cremorne was a quiet, aristocratic seclusion, where old Queen Charlotte

'Would sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.'

"A few old, quiet streets and rows, with names and sites dear to the antiquary, ran down to the Thames, then a stranger to steamboats; a row of noble elms along its strand lent their deep shade to some quaint old houses with heavy architraves, picturesque flights of steps, and elaborate gates; while Queen Elizabeth's Walk, the Bishop's Walk, and the Bishop's Palace gave a kind of dignity to the more modern designations of the neighbourhood.

"When the Thames was the great highway, and every nobleman had his six or eight oared barge, the banks of the river as high as Chelsea were studded with country houses. At the foot of Battersea Bridge, which in those days did not disfigure the beautiful reach, Sir Thomas More, then a private gentleman and eminent lawyer in full practice, built the capital family house which was afterwards successively occupied by the Marquis of Winchester, Lord Dacre, Lord Burleigh, Sir Robert Cecil, the Earl of Lincoln, Sir Arthur Gorges, Lord Middlesex, the first Duke of Buckingham, Sir Bulstrode Whitlock, the second Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Bristol, and the Duke of Beaufort. It stood about a hundred yards from the river; its front exhibited a projecting porch in the centre, and four bay windows alternating with eight large casements; while its back presented a confused assemblage of jutting casements, pent-houses, and gables in picturesque intricacy of detail, affording 'coigns of vantage,' we doubt not, to many a tuft of golden moss and stone-crop. This dwelling, which for convenience and beauty of situation and interior comfort was so highly prized by its many and distinguished occupants, appears at length to have been pulled down when it became rickety and untenantable from sheer old age--in Ossian's words, 'gloomy, windy, and full of ghosts.'"

Nor was Miss Manning obliged to rely only on her memory for a picture of More's house as it had been. The site, when she knew it, was like the New Place at Stratford-on-Avon, where only a few stones and foundations enable us to picture how stood the house where Shakespeare died. But while the household was still fresh in men's minds, and More was beginning to be reverenced as a martyr and a saint, Ellis Heywood published at Florence, in 1556, his sketch, "Il Moro," in which he set in a true description of the Chelsea garden an imaginary picture of the Chancellor and his friends talking on matters of high import to soul and spirit. "From one part of the garden," he tells us, "almost the whole of the noble city of London was visible, and from another the beautiful Thames, with green meadows and wooded hills all around." The garden had its own charm too. "It was crowned with an almost perpetual verdure, and the branches of the fruit-trees that grew near were interwoven in a manner so beautiful that it seemed like a living tapestry worked by Nature herself."

So wrote Ellis Heywood of the external beauty of the scene. Of the inner harmony Erasmus had written years before to Ulrich von Hutten:--"More has built himself a house at Chelsea. There he lives with his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, his three daughters and their husbands, with eleven grandchildren. There is not a man alive so loving as he: he loves his old wife as if she were indeed a young maiden." For Dame Alice, whom More had wedded very soon after the death of his first child-wife, was _nec bella nec puella_--neither a beauty nor a girl. And besides these, in the year when little Margaret, according to Miss Manning, began to write in her "fayr Libellus" which her tutor, Master Gunnel, gave her, there were dwelling in the house the aged father, Sir John More, good judge and humorous man, with his third wife.

"And the household," said Erasmus, "was a very 'platonic academy'--were it not," he adds, "an injustice to compare it with an academy where disputations concerning numbers and figures were only occasionally mingled with discussion on the moral virtues. I should rather call his house a school of Christianity; for though there is no one in it who does not study the liberal sciences, the special care of all is piety and virtue. No quarrelling or ill-tempered words are ever heard, and idleness is never seen."

In such a household it was that Margaret, More's dearest and most heroic child, was nurtured:--

"As it were An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet."

She was one of those fine souls to whom come alike learning and love, and in whom religion shows its fairest fruits. Holbein draws her with a Seneca in her hand, but not far away is her prayer-desk. All the children answered to their father's careful culture, for it is an idle tale that makes young John More but a silly fellow. Elizabeth, who married Mr. Dancey, Cecily, who became the wife of Giles Heron, a ward of her father's, the step-daughter Alice, who became Lady Alington, and the adopted child, Margaret Giggs, whom young Clement, sometime their fellow-scholar, wedded, were all instructed in humane letters. But Margaret was the flower of them all. To her her father wrote when she was still but a child:--

"I cannot tell you, dearest Margaret, how pleasant to me are your most delightful letters. Now, as I was reading them there chanced to be with me that noble youth, Reginald Pole--not so highly ennobled, indeed, by birth as by learning and every virtue. To him your letter seemed a miracle, even before he knew how you were beset by shortness of time and other hindrances. And hardly would he believe that you had no help from your master, till I told him seriously that you had not only no master in the house, but that also there was no man in it that had not more need of your help in writing than you of his."

Indeed a good father and a good teacher made the household the wonder of learned Europe. See what More wrote to the tutor he had chosen, when he was himself abroad on an embassy:--

"I have received, my dear Gunnel, your letters, such as they are wont to be, full of elegance and affection. Your love for my children I gather from your letters; their diligence from their own. I rejoice that little Elizabeth has shown as much modesty of deportment in her mother's absence as she could have done in her presence. Tell her that this delights me above all things; for, much as I esteem learning, which, when joined with virtue, is worth all the treasures of kings, what doth the fame of great scholarship, apart from well-regulated conduct, bring us, except distinguished infamy? Especially in women, whom men are ready enough to assail for their knowledge, because it is uncommon and casts a reproach on their own sluggishness. Among other notable benefits which solid learning bestows, I reckon this among the first, that we acquire it not for the mere sake of praise or the esteem of learned men, but for its own true value and use. Thus have I spoken, my Gunnel, somewhat the more in respect of not coveting vainglory, because of those words in your letter wherein you deem that the high quality of Margaret's wit is not to be depressed, which, indeed, is mine own opinion; but I think that they the most truly depress and affront their wit who accustom themselves to practise it on vain and base objects, rather than raise their minds by the study and approval of what is good in itself. It mattereth not in harvest-time whether the corn were sown by a man or a woman, and I see not why learning in like manner may not equally agree with both sexes; for by it reason is cultivated, and, as a field, sown with wholesome precepts, which bring forth good fruit. Even if the soil of a woman's brain be of its own nature bad, and apter to bear fern than corn, by which saying men oft terrify women from learning, I am of opinion that a woman's mind is, for that very reason, all the more in need of manure and good husbandry, that the defect of nature may be redressed."

In these letters, and in many like them, there is given the best, and the most authentic picture of the household of the great Chancellor.

Of More himself it is difficult to speak without using language which seems extravagant. His character was so beautiful, his life so simple and so pure, his conscientiousness so complete, his end so heroic, that he stands out among the sordid meannesses of the sixteenth century like a single star in the darkness of the world. Sinful popes and wicked kings, greedy statesmen and timid clergy, who will accept the king's supremacy one day and then burn what once they adored--among these More has no place. His is a steadfast soul, happy in prosperity and triumphant in the furnace of affliction. "O ye holy and humble men of heart, O ye spirits and souls of the righteous, bless ye the Lord: praise Him and magnify Him for ever."

And the position of More in the age of the Reformation is the more remarkable because he belonged so clearly to the new as well as to the old. He was, in the best sense, a Humanist. He was a scholar and a bitter foe of all obscurantism. He fought the battle of Greek, and so gave to England the scholarship of the succeeding generation to which true religion and sound learning owe so great a debt. He could take no part with those who could defend the old faith only with the rusty weapons of a philosophic system which had failed to meet the aspirations of the new age. No one laughed more readily than he at the sallies of Erasmus against ignorant monks and illiterate clergy. _Encomium Moriæ, Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, spoke his sentiments as well as those of their authors. But while he loved the new learning and adopted the new methods, he saw that there remained something among the old things that was priceless and imperishable. It may be that he did not clearly distinguish between the essentials and the mere offshoots of a divine faith. It may be--we should say it must be--that if he had lived a hundred years later, or in our own day, he would have thought differently on some matters. The cause of intellectual freedom was presented to him in its worst aspect, and the command to cast away the childish things of mediævalism came in a revolting form from the lips of a coarse and brutal tyrant. Had Colet lived, or Erasmus been a stronger man, all might have been different. As it was, More saw but one side of the new world, and that the worst, and he said, "The old is better."

But while, in his final choice, he seemed to belong rather to the old world than to the new, he had absorbed all the best spirit of the Italian Renaissance, and he belonged as a social reformer to an age in the far future. The _Utopia_, it is true, was the work of his youth, and it is doubtful if much of it was meant seriously, and certain that some was distinctly contrary to its author's mature convictions. But nevertheless it sets forth an exquisite ideal picture of equality in opportunity and of simplicity of life. Its whole tone speaks a protest against the selfishness and the competition of the age that degraded art and divided society. And this protest was enforced by the asceticism of the author's own life and the purity of his household.