Read A Journey Through Tudor England for Free Online

years of age. He was called to the Bar five or six years later.
    The Lincoln’s Inn that More knew centred on the Old Hall, built between 1489 and 1492, only a few years after Henry VII came to the throne and before Christopher Columbus headed for the New World. This beautiful building would have been where the young More ate and drank, debated with his friends, or watched the Christmas revels when a ‘Lord of Misrule’ (often some lowly person, dressed in motley) presided over the Feast of Fools, a bacchanalian time of drinking and partying. The hall was enlarged with two bay windows in 1582, and has been remodelled over the years (in the eighteenth century, a disproportionately heavy plaster ceiling was added which was removed when the hall was rebuilt stone by stone in 1924—8), but it would still be familiar to More, whose arms are now shown in two of the windows. In later years, More would also have regularly walked into the Inn through the old gatehouse on Chancery Lane, which was built in 1521 (the gates themselves date from 1564).
    It was Thomas More’s early adult life at Lincoln’s Inn that fundamentally shaped both his identity and destiny. Here, More made some influential friends: scholars like John Colet, the future Dean of St Paul’s, and Thomas Linacre, the noted physician. They were humanists, which in the sixteenth century did not imply atheism but an intellectual focus on the rediscovery of classical learning, including an interest in reforming the Church by turning to the original Greek scriptures. Through another scholar, Lord Mountjoy, More met the greatest humanist of the age, Desiderius Erasmus, who became his lifelong friend, and in whose company, in 1499, More walked from Lincoln’s Inn to Eltham Palace tomeet the young Prince Henry, who would ultimately determine his fate.
    More was attracted to the austere monastic life and spent time at nearby Charterhouse. Later, his son-in-law recorded that More wore a hair shirt and practised self-flagellation. More, however, decided against the monastic life and chose instead to marry — in 1505 to Jane Colt and, after her death in 1511, to Alice Middleton — and accounts of his character suggest a cheerful, charismatic and intelligent man. Erasmus called him ‘a man for all seasons’ — the moniker Robert Bolt used as the title to his famous play and film about More’s life — because of his jovial disposition, while in 1521, Richard Whittington described him as ‘a man of angel’s wit and singular learning’. This wit found its apogee in his book Utopia (‘utopia’ is an ambiguous word that suggests both the Greek for ‘no place’ and ‘happy place’). This is a satirical account of a traveller in a fabled land in which pride and greed do not exist, war is thought only fit for beasts, all property is communal and potential spouses can inspect each other’s naked bodies before deciding to marry. The book remains one of the founding texts of political science and philosophy, and is still on undergraduate reading lists around the world.
    More eventually entered the public sphere. He sat in Parliament, acted as a diplomat and became a member of Henry VIII’s council. Henry was very fond of More: there are accounts of the two going up onto a palace’s lead roofs to study the stars and planets together, and of Henry visiting More at his house in Chelsea and walking with him in the garden ‘by the space of an hour, holding his arm about his neck’.
    Henry was particularly pleased with More’s help in composing the riposte to Martin Luther that won the King the title of ‘Defender of the Faith’. It was the first of More’s many antiheretical actions: in 1525, More was involved in raids on Lutheranbooks, and four years later produced a sharp and brilliant volume called Dialogues Concerning Heresies which challenged and refuted the teachings of William Tyndale, among others. After Cardinal Thomas Wolsey fell from grace [see C HRIST C