Beyond Utopia: Thomas More as a political thinker

ABSTRACT

Despite his producing voluminous writings beyond Utopia, scholarly consensus seems to be that if we want to understand the political thought of Thomas More, we must turn to this ‘little book’. This approach, however, has yielded little consensus about how to categorise More as a political thinker, as Utopia is notoriously and intentionally enigmatic. This article attempts to generate a portrait of More as a political thinker by going beyond an investigation of Utopia alone and taking into consideration those texts often overlooked or rejected by scholars, primarily his polemical and religious writings. Doing so provides an outline of More as a thinker concerned with themes of natural and artificial inequality, popular authority and representation and, at the least, justifies the exercise of reading More’s work beyond Utopia.

KEYWORDS:

• Thomas More
• Utopia
• renaissance
• politics
• authority
• inequality

Despite his producing voluminous writings beyond Utopia, scholarly consensus seems to be that if we want to understand the political thought of Thomas More, we must turn to this ‘little book’.¹ Centuries of parsing, however, has provided little concrete insight. Utopia is intentionally enigmatic, and debate continues as to where it puts More in the spectrum of political thinking. More has been placed amongst the neo-Roman republicans by Quentin Skinner, a view which has been opposed by Eric Nelson, who maintains he is better thought of as a neo-Greek.² Gerard B. Wegemer has drawn attention to More as a proponent of liberty, while Richard Marius sees the authoritarian leanings of his work.³ Through the nearly five centuries since his death, More has also been associated with utilitarianism,⁴ socialism,⁵ communism,⁶ and totalitarianism.⁷ Regardless, in the battle over More’s ideological identity Utopia remains the most frequently deployed weapon.

On occasion, More’s other ‘humanist’ texts are pulled into the fray, but More’s polemical and religious texts, written between 1523 and his death in 1535, are almost entirely neglected, and his reflections on religious themes, including those written during his imprisonment in the Tower of London, too are little studied, especially for political content (Table 1).⁸ Making up numerous volumes, the polemic and religious texts are often deemed tedious and intellectually unimportant, and many scholars have found them difficult to grapple with because of their weighty theological and religious content.⁹ The problem, as well, is the nature of this religious material, which presents intense and often vitriolic arguments. More can emerge from these texts as an irrational and violent zealot, an enemy of freedom of religion, and especially of any form of thought opposed to the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. Viewed in this way, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, for instance, becomes ‘an interminable desert, stretching to a hellish horizon under the untempered sun, and we find burning on every page a monotonous fury that deadens the soul’.¹⁰ The project of attempting to understand any political theory embedded in such texts has proved objectionable work to many.¹¹

Table 1. Thomas More’s Works.

	Date(s) of Composition	Date of First Print Publication
English Poems	c. 1492–1509, c. 1534–5	1557 Workes
Latin Poems	c. 1496–1509	With 1518 Utopia
Life of Pico della Mirandola	1505/1510^a	1510
Translations of Lucian	1505	1506
History of King Richard the Third	c. 1513–1517	Published piecemeal in Chronicles in the 1530s and 1540s, published in full in the Workes of 1557
Utopia	1515–1516	1516
Letter to Dorp	1515	1563
Letter to Oxford	1518	1588
Letter to a Monk	1519	1520
Letter to Lee	1519	1520
Four Last Things	1522	Workes 1557
Responsio ad Lutherum	1523	1523
Letter to Bugenhagen	1525–6	1568
Dialogue Concerning Heresies	1528–9	1529
Supplication of Souls	1529	1529
Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer	1531–1533	1532, 1533
The Apology of Sir Thomas More.	1533	1533
The Debellation of Salem and Bizance	1533	1533
Letter against Frith	1533	1533
The Answer to a Poisoned Book	1533	1533
A Treatise upon the Passion	1534	Workes 1557
A Treatise to Receive the Blessed Body	1534	Workes 1557
Devout Instructions and Prayers	1534	Workes 1557
A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation	1534	1553
De Tristitia Christi	1535	Workes 1557 (translation); 1976

^a Frank Mitjans, Thomas More’s Vocation (Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2023), 72, 78, 121–3, based on the evidence in later biographies, suggests that More translated the Life of Pico in 1505. The Works of Thomas More, published by William Rastell in 1557, suggests it was translated ‘about the year of our Lord 1510’.

This article attempts to correct this scholarly imbalance by generating a portrait of More as a political thinker beyond an investigation of Utopia alone. In so doing, we find that at the foundation of More’s thought is the assertion that people are naturally – before birth and after death – equal. This is in contrast with the social inequalities of the temporal world, which he sees as artificial or fictional. This natural equality should, for More, lead us to an acknowledgement of our commonalities and to the unity of the commonwealth; however, people become too caught up in fictional inequalities, leading to pride and self-interest. Ultimately this results in the dissolution of political concord through competing claims to authority. A single arbiter is needed to maintain unity, which More places in the collective body of the people; it is their consent which bestows authority, whether linguistic, religious or – of particular concern to us here – political. This authority can then be represented, most effectively in assemblies, thanks to an imagined historic moment of authorisation. Although, given his context, More’s attention to such themes are most explicitly stated in regard to the Church, he leaves enough textual evidence to support the argument that he applies the same ideas to the secular political sphere as well. In addressing the central problems of domination (through an engagement with tyranny) and pluralism (through his arguments about humanism and the Reformation), More devises a rich political theory that calls attention to the artificiality of the political sphere and the authority of the people. These lessons, expressed in the corpus of More’s works, are also evident in Utopia, but cannot be uncovered through a focus on that text alone. Like the island of Utopia itself, its meaning remains hidden to all but those who have already visited its shores.

This investigation requires a few qualifications. First, in order to build up an understanding of More’s political thought, I have less to say about other topics, for instance his rhetoric¹² or theology¹³, except in the ways in which they overlap with his comments on the political. This sifting requires a prior, and perhaps modern, understanding of what constitutes ‘political’, though I have attempted to be open-minded in my understanding of that term, including an understanding of the Church as a quasi-political entity. This more modern understanding applies as well to terms such as ‘private interest’ or ‘artificial inequality’, which are not More’s, but speak to the vocabulary and metaphors that More uses to express these ideas.

Second, I am aware of the danger of the ‘mythology of coherence’, and the importance of More’s changing contexts throughout his literary career. Too much emphasis has thus far been placed on what changed in More’s thought, on apparently shocking contradictions, resulting in an anachronism quite at odds with the mythology of coherence: the idea of ‘multiple Mores’.¹⁴ Faced with these opposing and divergent personae it is no wonder that historians have often happily sectioned off Thomas More the humanist, alongside his Utopia, as the focus of their study. My intention here is not to suggest that More’s ideas did not change; indeed, we will see some areas in which they changed dramatically. More was actively engaging in different sets of debates in the late 1520s and 1530s than he was in the 1510s. That being said, drawing too firm a line between the scholastic-humanist debates of the 1500s and 1510s and later ‘Reformation’ debates is deeply anachronistic, and More did adhere to a few central ideas that he deployed in a variety of contexts, albeit in different ways.¹⁵

1. I.

If there is one theme that runs throughout More’s oeuvre, it is the abhorrence of pride. By reorienting our perspective to what is eternal, and away from what is worldly, More suggests that people can see past the ‘pageantry’ or ‘stage-play’ of artificial inequality, thereby avoiding the destructive force of pride. For More, these religious and moralistic ideas also contained powerful lessons about the nature of the political and individuals’ place within it. To maintain the essential unity of the commonwealth, we must participate in the fictions it contains while acknowledging them as fictions, focused always on what is held in common. Put simply, private interest tears the commonwealth apart; common interest holds it together.

The central metaphor that More employs for pageantry of worldly things comes from his translation of Lucian’s Necromantia, or Menippus.¹⁶ In a central passage, the main character travels to the Afterlife and is struck by what he sees. The bones of all who have lived are piled ‘one on top of another, ill-defined, unidentified, retaining no longer any trace of earthy beauty’.¹⁷ It is impossible for him to identify who had been a king or a hero, and who had been a servant or a slave. He concludes that:

… human life is like a long pageant, and that all its trappings are supplied and distributed by Fortune, who arrays the participants in various costumes of many colours. Taking one person, it may be, she attired him royally, placing a tiara upon his head, giving him body-guards, and encircling his brow with the diadem; but upon another she puts the costume of a slave … And often, in the very middle of the pageant, she exchanges the costumes of several players; instead of allowing them to finish the pageant in the parts that had been assigned to them, she re-apparels them … For a brief space she lets them use their costumes, but when the time of the pageant is over, each gives back the properties and lays off the costume along with his body, becoming what he was before his birth, no different from his neighbour.¹⁸

Although Fortune, a capricious and vacillating force in More’s thought, may place one man above another for a brief time, this is a fiction.¹⁹ The reality, before the curtain goes up and after it goes down, is one of fundamental equality. This does not preclude the idea that some individuals will be morally better than others through their lives – there is still ample room for free will and choices that lead to either salvation or damnation – but at our most basic, our commonalities reveal the lie of any sense of inequality generated by society.²⁰

For More, following Augustine, this recognition and the mutual love that results should foster unity within the commonwealth.²¹ He writes that ‘A kingdom in all its parts is like a man; it is held together by natural affection [amore]’.²² In Richard the Third this love becomes gratia, rooted in the popularity of the monarch, such as Edward IV, whose ‘loue of hys people and theyr entire affeccion towarde him’ was responsible for the tranquility of his reign (despite his many vices).²³ Edward tells his nobles that they should be brought together by love, and the acknowledgement that they are all ‘christen men’ held in ‘common humanity’.²⁴ This unity, he says, can be threatened by ambition and ‘desyre of vaineglorye and soueraigntye’ or ‘pride and the lust for supremacy’.²⁵

Pride forms the opposing force to love and affection. More writes of pride in Utopia: ‘Pride [superbia] measures prosperity not by her own advantages but by others’ disadvantages’.²⁶ This involves not just ambition, but a comparative self-interest: ‘Pride would not consent to be made even a goddess if no poor wretches were left for her to domineer over and scoff at’.²⁷ Because of pride’s connection to self-interest and desire resulting desire to see or create inequality, it is a vice which necessarily cuts across the bonds which should unite people. The division it draws on and fosters takes away from the common feeling that can be found in a recognition of the sort of natural equality described above. For More, it is the ultimate social, religious, and political problem.

To journey to Utopia for a moment, there this issue of common-feeling versus pride is once again connected to the fiction of reality and the truth that exists beyond our world. Though Utopia is fantastic, the island is in some sense more real than More’s own Europe, because the latter rests on artificial social practices and hierarchies.²⁸ Property and its attendant social status may not be real; however, the pride and self-interest, which kindled by them, have very real effects, tearing apart the commonwealth.²⁹ There is no better example of this than in enclosure, which Hythloday notes in Book I; self-interested landowners cut off bits of common land for themselves, ripping the commonwealth to pieces.

In Utopia, by contrast, what is common is upheld over what is individual. It is because of this that it is not only the best commonwealth, but, according to Hythloday, the ‘only one which can rightly claim the name of a commonwealth. Outside Utopia … men talk freely of the public welfare – but look to their private interests only’.³⁰ In contrast, ‘In Utopia, where nothing is private, they seriously concern themselves with public affairs [negotium]’.³¹ Because there is no private interest, there is no threat to the unity of the commonwealth. In Utopia, the ‘common interest’ is served because ‘all men have all things in common’ and thus ‘every action, whether public or private, regards not the greed of the many or the caprice of the few’ but ‘is totally directed to the maintenance of one uniform justice, equality, and communion’.³²

More repeats a similar lesson in his Letter to a Monk, written three years after Utopia. He suggests that ‘God showed great foresight when he instituted all things in common’ and ‘Christ showed as much when he tried to recall mortals again to what is common from what is private’.³³ This is because ‘corrupt mortal nature cannot cherish what is private without detriment to what is common’.³⁴ Once we ‘call anything our own’, our interests are diverted ‘from the service of the common good [communium cultu rerum]’.³⁵ More’s point is not to suggest that property should be held in common, as many have posited. Instead, he is arguing that a discussion of common property serves as a reminder to value common things over individual ones, including – and perhaps especially – the common good over that of individuals.³⁶

Decades later, while imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1534, we see More articulating a very similar treatment of the issue through the character of Anthony in The Dialogue of Comfort. Anthony suggests that economic inequality is in fact necessary to the commonwealth; there must be ‘men of substaunce … for els mo beggers shall you haue’.³⁷ Although necessary, such inequality is shown to be artificial. Anthony gives an example like the Lucianic illustrations from More’s early works: if one of two beggars is given a home and nice clothes on a temporary loan, the two are still fundamentally equal, as the property does not really belong to the beggar. This lesson is expanded to encompass all peoples, who are levelled by what they hold in common, not differentiated by what property or social standing they hold: ‘in this world, between the rychest & the most pore, the differense is scant so much’, because nothing truly belongs to us.³⁸ In the face, however, of social inequality, there are still ways and means to counteract the influence of pride, by keeping in mind this more fundamental equality: ‘yf a man kepe riches aboute hym for a glory and rialtie of the world … takyng the porer for the lack therof/ as one far worse than hym self: such a mynd is very vayne folysh pride’.³⁹ However, if, on the other hand, he doesn’t love his riches but uses them for the benefit of the commonwealth, then he has done as much, even more, than one who gives his riches away.

With this assessment, we can recognise that More’s vision of an ideal commonwealth, where the recognition of natural equality, and the love that results, forms the basis of all political and social institutions is, of course ‘easier … to wish for in our countries than to have any hope of seeing realized’.⁴⁰ Its purpose, however, like the remembrance of death, is to remind individuals of this fundamental equality and commonality, as a means to stifle the pride that can arise from the conventions of private property and social hierarchies, encouraging those of wealth and position to use their means to advance the common good, generating not the ‘ideal state of the commonwealth’, but one that nevertheless reflects those values.⁴¹

2. II.

From this treatment of commonality and political unity, More is left with the problem of political authority: in a situation of fundamental equality, how can political authority be legitimate?⁴² For More, there should be no tension between our essential equality and the source of authority, because our equality allows for the generation of concept of ‘the people’ – variously conceived – as a corporate whole, who then become the source of all authority. More found himself repeating this idea in a variety of debates throughout his career, first against the scholastics (regarding language) and then against the evangelicals (regarding religion). He did not engage with the issue of political authority as directly – his context did not demand it in the same way, and rather discouraged such interventions – but there is sufficient material in order to make the argument that More saw the same principles expressed in these other debates at work in the political.

Common property continues to form a central pillar in the construction of More’s approach to authority. When dealing with linguistic authority, More (drawing on Lorenzo Valla, who, in turn, was drawing on Quintilian) emphasises common usage, suggesting that words are ‘public property’ and their sense is determined by the people.⁴³ Prideful scholastics ‘crown themselves victors just because we do not know in what sense, against all common sense, they have secretly agreed to construe our own words’.⁴⁴ Linguistic authority, then, comes from the people, and those who seek to impede it are motivated by pride to distinguish themselves. In doing so, they disrupt this shared community of meaning and understanding, and stand in the way of truth itself (Table 1).

The same can also be said for religious truths. For More, the proper lessons of Holy Scripture are ‘common’; thus a prideful man cannot distinguish himself by their study. Instead, focusing on Scripture alone, he invents ‘paradoxis and straunge oppynyons agaynst y^e commen fayth of Crystes hole chyrch’.⁴⁵ More sees religious truth much like language – it is worked out by common custom (for this reason More unites arguments against Tyndale’s translation of the Bible with arguments about Church authority). More maintains that in addition to the written word of God, in which the evangelicals place their faith, there is the unwritten word of God, which God inscribed in the hearts of men. This is the ‘true gospel of Christ’ which was written ‘before the books of the evangelists’.⁴⁶ It is not only prior, but more authoritative, for it is by this knowledge that God’s written words can be understood.

It is God’s unwritten word in every person which allows for the creation of the single universal Church, built on consensus: ‘the Holy Spirit of God interiorly inspires His church with truth … He alone makes those who dwell in a house to be one of mind, that he teaches so that they understand the same thing, judge the same, teach the same, prove the same, confess the same, follow the same’, and so on.⁴⁷ Without this consensus, and resulting uniformity of action and worship. the Church falls apart, which More holds as evident in the events of the Reformation. The Church is defined by this community of consensus: ‘the comon knowen catholyke people, clergy, lay folke, and all/ whych what so euer theyr lyuinge be … do stande to gether and agre in the confessyon of one trew catholyke fayth, wyth all olde holy doctours and sayntes, and good crysten people bysyde that are all redy passed thys fyftene hyndred yere byfore’.⁴⁸ Thus the Church, so defined, becomes the arbiter of religious authority; it ‘may be vsed as a sure iudge, for to decern bytwene y^e trew doctrine & the false’.⁴⁹ Religious knowledge is authoritative because it is shared by all those who profess it, and this defines the religious community itself.

The greatest threat posed by the heretics, for More, is to this single body of authority. Luther’s heresy encourages pride individuals, persuading them that they each have the power to interpret scripture according to their own judgement, and not that of the church: ‘euery obstynate heretyke, eyery pratelynge fole, euery smaterer in scrypture/ shall be iudge ouer all the generall counsayles, and ouer all the hole corps of crystendome, to tell them all that hym selfe vnderstandeth the scrypture better then they all’.⁵⁰ The Lutheran heretics are like the scholastic linguists, who wish to interpret words differently to the common use and understanding, simply to differentiate – and thus elevate – themselves. There is no pride to be found in what is common, but More wants to make the point that it nevertheless is the source of all truth and right.

Central to this problem is the heretics’ transfer of authority from the people, as a corporate whole, to single individuals. Luther removes ‘the authority of judging doctrines … from the people and delivers it to anyone whatever’.⁵¹ More often repeats this distinction between the people (populus) and ‘anyone whatever’ (quislibet) and suggests that by transferring authority from the corporate whole to individuals one necessarily runs up against the issue of a plurality of views and the loss of a single authoritative truth. Heresy, thus, leads to anarchy, with religious, intellectual and political authority dismantled: ‘with the papacy abolished together with the decrees of councils and monastic vows and all universities and absolutely all doctors, the people would neither be ruled by laws nor obey rulers nor listen to doctors, but would be so free and unbridled, with the freedom of the gospel of course, that no one would be forced, nor commanded, nor counselled nor taught anything’.⁵² If everyone is free to generate their own sense of authority in any given question, there can be no foundation or justification for authority, to hold others in awe and order.

For More, to put it in modern terms, this extreme individualism would result in an anarchic post-truth state. As he writes in the Responsio, ‘you will find nothing else [in Luther’s work] but these two propositions: that nothing is true and certain apart from evident scriptures; [and] that all other traditions are the work of men and are left to the free choice of the individual’.⁵³ Even the ‘truth’ of scripture is left to individual discretion, because all other sources of authority are rejected, and so the Lutherans have no single ‘truth’ at all. He tells the story of a Turk, who finds in the Lutheran church no authority to turn to, diverse practices everywhere, and so necessarily falls into heresy because he uses his judgment alone. This is in contrast to the individual, ‘E’, who encounters the true Christian Church. What he sees is consistency, both across time and space, and so, ‘E would have no doubt that, if there is any true church of Christ on earth, it is this congregation’.⁵⁴ As the people are the Church, this truth is clear not only in their present customs, but also ‘out of the books of those who have lived before us’ which tell of past custom.⁵⁵ Thus, in both the cases of religion and language, common custom holds the key to truth.

In the secular political realm, consent and consensus are just as important, possible through the recognition of commonality, established above. From his earliest writings, More suggests that there is a need for the people’s consent to legitimize government. In a Latin poem, ‘The Consent of the People Both Bestows and Withdraws Sovereignty’, More writes that a prince ‘ought to have command not one instant longer than his subjects wish’ and in another, ‘What is the Best Form of Government’, a title shared with Utopia, More interrupts the question of whether a monarch or a senate is best (he was leaning towards the latter) to interject ‘ – but say, what started you on this inquiry anyway?’.⁵⁶ Why, he asks, would anyone ask this question, as there is no place where ‘you yourself, by your own decision, can impose either a king or a senate’.⁵⁷ He tells his reader to ‘stop considering to whom you may give power’, as it is irrelevant. Instead, one ought to consider ‘whether [being able to give power] would do any good [expediat]’.⁵⁸

In the Richard the Third, More once again plays on this theme, showing how Richard makes a mockery of the idea that the people ‘consent’ to their sovereign. He sends the Duke of Buckingham to gain the approval of the people of London to his accession, but he is greeted by silence. In the end, Buckingham must fabricate their consent, by relying on some supporters planted in the crowd to shout for Richard. In accepting the crown, Richard draws attention to these lies, noting that ‘no earthly manne can gouerne [England] again[st] [the people’s] willes’.⁵⁹ Richard is proved to be correct; the people did not consent to his authority, and he is not able to rule them for long. His reign is illegitimate from the outset, at least in part because it lacks the true consent of the people.

So how does More see such consent operating? First, it does not appear to require unanimity. In the Responsio, More opposes Luther’s assertion that ‘‘Neither pope, nor bishop, nor any man has the right to impose a single syllable on a Christian man without the latter’s consent’’.⁶⁰ Based on the above, we might have thought More would (albeit uncharacteristically) agree with Luther here. The issue, however, is the individual nature of Luther’s assertion, or at least More’s interpretation of it. More leaves aside the question of the ‘worship of God’ and deals explicitly with ‘civil laws’ in this discussion, suggesting that ‘If no one has the power to establish a single syllable for the Christian man without his consent, then neither the king nor the whole people can establish any law which is valid against anyone who opposed it at the time it was proposed’, and furthermore, ‘according to this reasoning, should everyone unanimously agree, yet the law can have force only until a new citizen is born or someone is enrolled as a citizen’.⁶¹ Notably, for More, both the king and ‘the whole people’ have at least the potential to legislate, and ‘the whole people’ can been seen to do so despite an individual objecting. Thus, for More, consent applies to the body of the people as a whole and not every individual within it, generating a clear distinction between a corporate body understood as ‘the people’ and a sense of the people as an aggregate of individuals.

Foundational to this argument about consent appears to be More’s assertion that the people ought not to be ruled by an arbitrary will. In the Responsio ad Lutherum he writes that ‘if you take away the laws and leave everything free to the magistrates either they will command nothing and they will forbid nothing, and then magistrates will be useless; or’, more worryingly, ‘they will rule by the leading of their own nature and imperiously prosecute anything they please, and then the people will be in no way freer, but, by reason of a condition of servitude, worse’.⁶² In other words, being ruled by laws, established by consent, makes one more free, because one is no longer ruled by the arbitrary will of another, a condition that More deems to be slavery.

Although More says little further about this view of liberty, he frequently dismisses the suggestion that liberty (libertas) consists in doing as one wants (licentia). In A Dialogue of Comfort, the character of Anthony seeks to provide reasons why captivity is not a limit on liberty. He begins by defining ‘Captivitie, bondage, or thraldome’ as ‘the violent restraynt of a man, beyng so subdued vnder the domynyon, rule & power of an other/ that he must do what the tother lyst to commaund hym, & may not do at his libertie such thinges as he lyst him self’.⁶³ He gives the example of being captured by a Turk, which would cause a person to bemoan the loss of their previously-held liberty. This person, Anthony goes on to argue, would be wrong, for: ‘what fre man ys there so fre that can be suffred to do what hym lyst’.⁶⁴ We are restrained by God’s laws (when we bother to obey them) as well as ‘the lawes made by men’, which we follow ‘for feare of the paynes that fall thervppon’.⁶⁵ Furthermore, Anthony goes on, the authority of lords also constrains us, forcing us to do things we would not wish to. He concludes ‘Let euery fre man that rekenyth his libertie to stand in doyng what he lyst, consider well these poynts/ and I wene he shall then fynd his libertie much lesse than he toke yt before’.⁶⁶ But even if we could do what we wanted, More contends, this would not be real freedom, as it is so often compelled by our passions. Anthony suggests that the devil drives us to sinful actions by way of our ‘blinde affeccions’, so that ‘we finde in oure naturall fredome, our bonde seruice suche, that neuer was there any man lord of any so vile a villain, y^t euer would for very shame commaund hym so shamefull seruice’.⁶⁷ Although we might ‘do as we list’ in such a case, it is in fact more slavish than doing what we are rightly commanded. License, therefore, doesn’t truly exist, and the exercise of what we think of as license runs entirely contrary to the true practices of liberty.

Once again, Lutheranism has fed the confusion, to the destabilisation of political authority. The ‘euangelycall liberty’ of Luther and Tyndale, by which ‘euery man may bylieve euen as hym list, and after that lyue euyn as hym lyste to, with out any lorde or any lawe to lette hym’, has as its ‘very pryncipall poynte’ the undermining of the authority of princes, because it would allow ‘all [to] ryne at ryot wythout any bond or brydell’.⁶⁸ As we’ve seen, without such political limits, we would be more unfree; we would be slaves under the arbitrary will of magistrates (without laws) and the devil (without authorities).⁶⁹

Properly established political systems, with right and just laws, thus become the means to protecting the safety, liberty and virtue of the people. In the Confutation, More writes that ‘a cytye and a realme standeth not so mych by the dygnytye of the rulers, as it standeth by wysdom, good order, true dealynge, and iustyce’.⁷⁰ These things, however, ‘wolde fayle’ if there were ‘no rulers to se them kepte’.⁷¹ The rulers are a ‘ryghte second sorte’, but the people would be worse off without them, and are thereby bound to obey them.⁷² Properly authorised by the consent of the people, rulers ensure freedom, rather than restrict it.

The superiority of political rulers, then, serves a purpose, and so artificial inequality can be useful to the commonwealth (and those within it), reinforcing the lesson we saw above, that even though we might recognise the ‘stage play’, we must play our parts within it.⁷³ More, as Erasmus had, uses this recognition of artificiality to enforce upon rulers the ways in which their roles place certain expectations upon them.⁷⁴ In De Tristia Christi, More writes that there is ‘a lesson to be learned by all who exercise high public office’ that ‘when they are addressed with solemn titles’ they ought not to allow this to fuel their pride.⁷⁵ Instead, ‘such titles are truly fitting only if those who bear them know in their hearts that they have in fact lived up to such honorific names’ through a performance of their duties.⁷⁶ When they do not, those titles become reproaches, whereby the office-holder is called back to their proper duty: the freedom and safety of the people. He writes that ‘A gouernour of people is made for the people and not the people for the gouernour’.⁷⁷ Acknowledging the social construction of the symbols which mark rulers out as superior, instead of being spurs to pride, these symbols can be reminders of rulers’ fundamental duties, and the origin of their power in the people themselves.

It is worth pausing here to note that, although there are consistent themes and arguments, there is undoubtedly a shift in More’s approach to political authority between his works in the 1500s and 1510s and those of the 1520s and 1530s. In his earlier writing, as we have seen, More is at pains to demonstrate the artificiality of politics and our essential equality. In his later texts, More still acknowledges these, but is seeking to reinforce the importance of political authority, despite its basis in fiction. In other words, in the early part of his literary career, More argues against those who take authority and hierarchy too seriously; in the latter half, he argues against those who do not take them seriously enough. For this reason, in 1532 More says that he would burn his own earlier writings, for although they contain no ‘harme therin/ folke yet beynge (as they be) geuen to talk harme of that that is good’, he would rather they be burned, indeed would ‘helpe to burne them both wyth myne owne handes’, than anyone take harm of them, ‘seying that I se them lykely in these dayes so to do’.⁷⁸

Although More is often considered a proponent of free speech, for More burning dangerous books was necessary when they threatened the unity of the commonwealth.⁷⁹ The importance of public authorisation and consent did not mean that the people should be free to discuss all goings-on of government, quite the contrary. In the Life of Pico, More details how Pico’s works had to be kept, rightfully, from the public for ‘ther were in them many thyngis straunge and not fully declared’ which were ‘more mete for secrete communication of lerned men than for open heryng of commone peple which for lake of connynge might take hurt therby’.⁸⁰ Even in Utopia, where the people engage in scholarly disputations and elect their political officials, ‘to take counsel on matters of common interest outside the senate or the popular assembly is considered a capital offense’.⁸¹ More writes that the Utopians do this in order to avoid the ‘tyrannous oppression of the people’.⁸² Although More sees the people as holders of authority, this can get lost if public opinion is swayed the wrong way, which is easily done. Especially ‘the vulgar’ are susceptible to the persuasions of pride and self-interest, which will lead them away from the truths that are held in common.

The spread of dangerous ideas can, More suggests, plant the seed of doubt and inspire the desire for license, threatening the unitary source of political authority that More sought to defend. Even if it is merited, More writes, it ‘were a lewde thinge to suffre any prynce, estate, or gouernour, to be brought in sclaunder amonge the comen people’, because it will produce contempt of all ruling classes, whom the people ought to obey.⁸³ This is not to say that there is no way to curb princes who have betrayed their duty. If a prince is ignorant of his own faults, it is not for the people to ‘murmure’ about it, but it ‘serue[s] their confessours and counsaylours’ to attend to.⁸⁴ This applies too to laws. As More writes in his Apology, it is only though ‘secrete aduyce and counsayle’ that suggestions regarding the reform of laws should be made, not in ‘bookes in wrytynge amonge the people’.⁸⁵ He goes on to say that if he thought a law was ‘nought’ he would ‘in place and tyme conuenient’ give his ‘aduyce and counsayle’, rather than publishing it, and he would advise the same for other men. If a law is ‘so farre agaynst the law of god, that it were not possyble to stande wyth mannys saluacyon’, then ‘euery man’ would be able to give such advice and counsel, but the ‘open reprofe and redargucyon therof’ is not permissible.⁸⁶ As More writes in A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, until a law’s reform is made through the proper channels, it should not be debated publicly, because of the people’s (misplaced) desire ‘to lyue all at lyberte vnder none [law] at all’.⁸⁷ In other words, the people can become seduced by license and thus misled in open political fora.

But what about the case of a tyrant who cannot be counselled, or a prince who governs contrary to God’s law? More largely writes in favour of political obedience. He is especially at pains to dismiss the idea that the ‘commodyte’ of the people is enough to rebel against a prince.⁸⁸ A ruler may be in place for the benefit of the people, but that does not serve a sufficient cause to overthrow him: ‘god all though he wyll that the gouernours and rulers of the world sholde be good and profytable to the people/ yet wyll he not that the people shall measure the dewty of theyr obedyence by the onely rule and measure of theyr owne profyte and commodyte/ but that they shall obaye theyr prynces and other rulers and gouernours, bycause that they be theyr gouernours and rulers, and bycause that god hath so commaunded’.⁸⁹ Despite More’s emphasis on the common good, it is not a sufficient reason to justify political resistance or rebellion to those God has set in authority.⁹⁰

More does, however, defend the suggestion that this obedience is limited by God’s law. He writes that Jesus commanded obedience to secular authority, not meaning ‘that they sholde obaye any commaundement that by god were forbeden, nor to set goddes law asyde for mennys tradycyons’.⁹¹ Secular authority, he seems to suggest, operates in accordance with or in the silence of Scripture. Jesus was ‘forbedynge them to refuse to fulfyl y^e commaundement of theyr rulers, wherof there were no mencyon made in scrypture, where the commaundement tended to vertue, good maners, or goddes honour’.⁹² As More later writes in his own defense after his arrest: where ‘the [Church] doctors stand in great doubt’ then ‘the King’s commandment’ resolves all uncertainty.⁹³ Although More objects to Tyndale’s suggestion that ‘A crysten man is bounden to obay tyranny/ yf it be not agaynste his fayth nor the law of god’, he does so based on Tyndale’s interpretation of the ‘law of god’, and the suggestion that everyone has the authority to likewise provide their own interpretation (a revival of his objection to Luther’s elevation of ‘anyone whatever’). Otherwise, he says ‘[Tyndale’s] wordes … were very well sayed’.⁹⁴ After all, More writes in the Dialogue of Comfort, a man cannot serve two lords at once.⁹⁵

This foundation of obedience, consensus and tradition causes More take a conservative line on legal reform. This is especially clear in More’s argument with the scholar Christopher St. German, who was arguing for an alteration in heresy laws on behalf of Henry’s regime. More writes that St. German seeks to change ‘lawes all redy well made’ which he ‘wolde haue made wurse’.⁹⁶ In short, if a law isn’t broken, we shouldn’t try to fix it: ‘yf a man wolde come forth & labour vs to breke euery olde lawe longe vsed in this realme, whych he could not proue but that it were good inough/ but yet wolde nedes haue it chaunged, bycause that if it were not to make, hym self coulde he sayth make it better’.⁹⁷ More’s problem with St. German is the same problem he had had with the scholastics and the evangelicals: St. German pridefully thinks that he can oppose the authority of countless generations before him: ‘his request is now no better, but in effect euyn this, that agaynst euery wyse mannes reason well approued hytherto, euery man shold in this mater now, eyther trust vnto his, or else that the lest wise euery man to his owne/ and in stede of a better old law, make a new much worse’.⁹⁸ In particular, More is appalled at St. German’s willingness to oppose laws ‘so long approved throughout the whole corps of Christendom’ and which were ‘in thys realme ratyfyed specyally by parlyament’.⁹⁹ It is not the only time that More draws a connection between the body of the people and the political authority of parliament.

3. III.

As we have seen, the consent of the people forms the foundation of political authority for More. This can be communicated through customs and traditions, the slow development of common law, but it can also be seen more openly in representative institutions.¹⁰⁰ On balance, More has little to say about the authority of such institutions. As we’ve already seen, although he gives several arguments in favour of the rule of a senate over that of a monarch in his poem ‘On the Best State of the Commonwealth’, he stops before giving a conclusion, to ponder the purpose of such a question when there is no power to establish a form of government different from the one under which the reader lives. In Utopia, More establishes a conciliar government, and in his Latin Historia Richardi Tertii, More writes that parliament, which he calls a senatus, has ‘supreme and absolute’ authority.¹⁰¹ He does not, unfortunately, go beyond these suggestions, to make an explicit argument about the function and design of representative institutions.

Fortunately, he does in the case of Church government. In his polemics he presents a fascinating account of the establishment of governmental authority through the people and its representation in a conciliar body. Although not ‘political’ in the modern secular sense, it is an account of the justification and representation of legislative power. Furthermore, there is enough in what More says to suggest that he saw a similar system also at work in the temporal political of England.

For More, the General Council is the ultimate governing authority in the Church, and he remains attached to this position throughout his polemical writings.¹⁰² He invests the General Council with the authority to depose a bad pope: ‘in the next general council it may well happen that this Pope may be deposed and another substituted in his room’.¹⁰³ Whereas he might be unsure about the institution of the pope’s primacy, he says with surety that ‘as for the general councils assembled lawfully … the authority thereof ought to be taken for undoubtable’.¹⁰⁴ In demonstrating this, More draws important parallels between the General Council, as representative governing body, and parliament: ‘synodis & cousayles do represent the whole chyrch … lyke wise as parliament representeth y^e hole ream’.¹⁰⁵ Thus although one might say (to borrow More’s example) that England passed a law condemning heretics, what is really meant is that parliament passed this law. The same manner of speaking, More asserts, can be used to describe the form of representation in the General Council.

More here is drawing from the conciliar tradition which brought together ideas of the corpus mysticum with that of the corpus reipublicae mysticum.¹⁰⁶ In both cases, the ‘people’ become a corporate body, holding the authority of God, which could then be represented. More, like his conciliarist predecessors, articulates a view of representation as authorisation, in which incorporation is prior to – and required for – representation, not the other way around.¹⁰⁷ Thus, rather than the pope being required to unite the body of the people in a single individual, this singular body already exists, and can authorise a smaller body to represent it.¹⁰⁸

So how does this authorisation take place in the case of the General Council? For this, More embarks on a thought experiment. In the Confutation, he asks his reader to imagine that sometime during the reign of Pope Gregory the whole Christian body was called together for a meeting, perhaps on Salisbury Plain. This, he says, could only be done with great difficulty; people had to leave their work behind, take their entire family with them and travel great distances. As such, while they were there, they decided

to take an order and make a lawe amonge them there, that for any nede that sholde at any tyme after happen, there sholde neuer more all the whole people be called agayne to gether … And that such an assembly so gadered to gether, sholde represent y^e whole peple, and sholde haue the selfe same authoryte full and whole, in all lawes after to be made, and all doutes of scryptyre or questyons of the catholyke fayth to be declared [as if all were present].¹⁰⁹

The purpose of this account for More’s overarching argument is to suggest that if such an assembly had been (or ever were) gathered, they would have made such a decision, investing their authority into a representative General Council. Thus, More asserts, one can proceed as if it had happened: ‘For be the thynge neuer so false and impossyble to/ yet may it be putte and admytted, to consyder therby what wolde folow or not folow therupon, yf yt were both possyble and trew’.¹¹⁰ In this way, the General Council becomes a legitimate representative body of the authority of the corpus mysticum, as surely the Church would have invested it with such power, had they ever physically gathered in such a way.

More holds parliament and the General Council to be comparable in their capacity to represent the body of the people. In his final letters, More continues to compare the parliament with the General Council, albeit favouring the greater jurisdictional authority of the latter. He writes ‘If there were no mo[re] but myself on my side and the whole Parliament upon the other, I would be sore afraid to lean to mine own mind only against so many’.¹¹¹ However, on his side is ‘as great a council’ as parliament, ‘and greater too’, because it represents the whole Church.¹¹² And so he will not bend his conscience ‘to the council of one realm, against the general council of Christendom’.¹¹³ Again, at his trial, according to his son-in-law’s account, More drew a parallel between the General Council and parliament, this time using the latter as an analogue of the former. Upon receiving his sentence, More ‘declared that this Realm, being but one member and small part of the Church, might not make a particular law disagreeable with the general law of Christ’s universal Catholic Church, No more than the city of London, being but one poor member in respect of the whole realm, might make a law against an act of parliament to bind the whole Realm’.¹¹⁴ Each of these bodies, the city of London (as senatus Londinensis), English Parliament and General Council are representative bodies, each representing progressively larger bodies of people. As the General Council is the largest of these, encompassing the other two alongside many others, its authority surpasses the others.

Can we take these comments as indicative of More’s view of parliament as the representative body of the corpus reipublicae mysticum, whose authority is transferred by the people in an imagined moment of authorisation? The king, like the pope, would then become a figure whose place is legitimised by that institution and by long convention, but who ultimately answers to the representative body of the people and may, like his analogue the pope, be deposed by it. If this is indeed what More had in mind, it may be no wonder that so many of his works are so enigmatic and his comments on the topic so widely dispersed within them.

4. IV.

The purpose of this paper has been to generate an overview of More’s political thought that goes beyond an engagement solely with Utopia, considering all of More’s writings and especially his oft-neglected later works. In so doing, we can see that More begins with an argument that all people are naturally equal, and that social and political inequalities are mere ‘pageantries’. This allows him to level a critique at those whose pride causes them to advance their own self-interest over that of the common good, demonstrating its detrimental effects to the essential unity of the commonwealth. This pride is especially manifest in the assumption of one’s own authority over that of the corporate body of the people, which More censures in his debates with the scholastics and evangelicals. Without a single source of authority, More fears a descent into an anarchic system, in which ‘true’ liberty is lost. Political hierarchies, although artificial, are thus necessary, to preserve the safety and freedom of the people.

More’s remarks on political systems are diffuse, but compelling. In Church governance, he establishes the General Council as a representative institution of the common corps of Christendom, which has ultimate authority, even over that of the pope. The legitimacy of this representation can be understood and perhaps even justified through an imagined moment of authorisation. More’s suggestions that the Council’s representation is akin to that of the parliament, and his republican comments elsewhere, leads to the proposal that More’s view of political bodies, such as parliament, might follow the same line of thinking.

The Yale edition of More’s works stretches into fifteen weighty volumes, and one could never hope to do justice to all More has to say in regard to politic thinking in one short paper. My purpose here has been to demonstrate that the project of discovering More’s political ideas beyond Utopia is a worthwhile one. Much more needs to be done to interrogate these ideas, place them more definitively within their contexts and to demonstrate their influence on later thinkers. Venturing into the rocky and ‘interminable desert’ of More’s thought beyond the limits of Utopia might yield fruit after all.

Acknowledgements

This article has gone through many revisions over many years, and it would be difficult to properly thank all those who have contributed to it. Nevertheless, special thanks are owed to Quentin Skinner and Adrian Blau for supportive comments throughout the process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘libellus’, from the original title of the book we now know as Utopia: De Optimo Reipublicae Statu Deque nova insula Utopia libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, clarissimi disertissimique viri Thomae Mori inclytae civitatis Londinensis civis & Vicecomitis. See, for instance, Ian Adams and R. W. Dyson, Fifty Major Political Thinkers (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 47: ‘More’s contribution to political theory lies entirely with his short book, Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia.’ For political theory survey texts that primarily or exclusively treat Utopia see B. Bradshaw, ‘Transalpine Humanism’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 95–131; Eric Voeglin, History of Political Ideas: Renaissance and Reformation (Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 109–30; Anthony Kenny, The Rise of Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 275–80; Alan Ryan, On Politics (London: Penguin, 2012), 311–19. The only one of More’s texts to be in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series is Thomas More, Utopia, George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The most notable exception is Gerard B. Wegemer, Thomas More on Statesmanship (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996).

2 Quentin Skinner, ‘Thomas More’s Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility’, in Visions of politics: volume 2, ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 213–44; Eric Nelson, The Greek tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 1.

3 Gerard B. Wegemer, Young Thomas More and the Arts of Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Richard Marius, Thomas More: a biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 235.

4 See Helen Taylor, ‘Sir Thomas More on the politics of To-Day’, The Fortnightly Review 44 (1870): 132.

5 See Karl Kautsky, Thomas More and his Utopia, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), 94; Norman Dennis and A. H. Halsey, English Ethical Socialism: Thomas More to R. H. Tawney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

6 See Edward L. Surtz, ‘Thomas More and communism’, PMLA 64.3 (1949): 549–64; Gregory Claeys, ‘Utopia at Five Hundred’, Utopia Studies 27, no. 3 (2016): 402–11; Terry Eagleton, ‘Utopias, Past and Present: Why Thomas More remains Astonishingly Radical’, Utopian Studies 27 no. 3 (2016): 412–17. See the Alexander Garden Obelisk in Moscow, which lists More as one of history’s great communists.

7 Wolfgang E. H. Rudat, ‘Thomas More and Hythloday: some speculations on Utopia’, Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 43 no. 1 (1981): 123–7; J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Hanan Yoran, Between Utopia and Dystopia: Erasmus, Thomas More, and the Humanist Republic of Letters (Lexington Books, 2010), 13, 167, 174, 182–3.

8 Cathy Curtis considers the poems and Richard the Third, but doesn’t go into More’s religious texts, ‘“The Best State of the Commonwealth”: Thomas More and Quentin Skinner’ in Annabel Brett and James Tully with Holly Hamilton-Bleakley, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 93–112. Although ‘Reformation’ is technically an anachronistic term, it here serves a purpose as designating those debates over the nature and purpose of the Church in the 1520s and 1530s; see Richard Rex, ‘Thomas More and the heretics: statesman or fanatic’, in The Cambridge companion to Thomas More, ed. George Logan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 97. I have used ‘evangelical’ for the anachronistic ‘Protestant’, in line with the work of Diarmaid MacCulloch, The boy king: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 2 and Peter Marshall, ‘Evangelical Conversion in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in The beginnings of English Protestantism, eds. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15.

9 Eamon Duffy, ‘“The comen knowen multytude of Crysten Men”: A Dialogue Concerning Heresies and the defence of Christendom’, in The Cambridge companion to Thomas More, ed. George Logan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 191.

10 Marius, Thomas More, 425.

11 Rex, ‘Thomas More and the Heretics’, 93–115 gives a summary of many of these views. There are exceptions: particularly Alistair Fox, Thomas More: History & Providence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Wegemer, Thomas More on Statesmanship ; Thomas Curtright, The One Thomas More (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012); Joanne Paul, Thomas More (Oxford: Polity, 2016) all of which attempt to examine More’s ideas beyond Utopia.

12 See Elizabeth McCutcheon, ‘More’s Rhetoric’ in The Cambridge companion to Thomas More, ed. George Logan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 52–3.

13 See Brian Gogan, The Common Corps of Christendom: Ecclesiological Themes in the Writings of Sir Thomas More (Leiden: Brill, 1982); Paul, Thomas More, chapter 4.

14 These are treated in Curtright, The One Thomas More, 1–14. See Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Thomas More as Renaissance Humanist’, Moreana 65 (1980): 5.

15 Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

16 More’s translation reinforces these messages. For instance, he adds the reference to pride in those who had ‘forgotten that because they were mortals, they were only acquiring mortal and perishable goods’; CW 3, I, 30. References to More’s works are from the Yale Edition of the Collected Works of Thomas More (CW). I have added the titles of the works, where not cited in the body of the text, for clarity.

17 CW 3, I, 176.

18 Ibid.

19 For More’s further reflections on pride and the stage-play, drawn from Lucian, see The Four Last Things, CW 1, 150–8.

20 For More’s comments on free will, see Letter to Bugenhagan, CW 7, 49–83; Dialogue Concerning Heresies, CW 6.1, 373; CW 8.3, 497–8. For a discussion of these themes see Wegemer, Thomas More on Statesmanship, 29–31, 60, 176–7.

21 See for instance, Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 602. More references Augustine on pride as ‘The Mother of all Heresies’; Dialogue Concerning Heresies, CW 6 no. 1: 423.

22 Latin poems, CW 3, II, 164. Wegemer, Young Thomas More, 45 shows how this image is also related to Seneca.

23 CW 2, 5.

24 Ibid., 12; CW 15, 333 (the Latin edition and translation of the text).

25 CW 2, p. 12; CW 15, 335.

26 CW 4, 243.

27 Ibid. See Thomas I. White, ‘Pride and the Public Good: Thomas More’s Use of Plato in Utopia’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 20 no. 4 (1982): 346.

28 For the ways in which the Renaissance dialogue played with the barrier between fact and fiction, see Chloë Houston, The Renaissance Utopia: Dialogue, Travel and the Ideal Society, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 10. The same can be said of the genre of travel writing, which More also employs, see Andrew Hadfield Literature, travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–2.

29 Pride is not born of these things (it emerges from Original Sin), but it is stoked by them.

30 CW 4, 239. The lesson is made even more striking in the 1551 English translation: ‘For in other places they speak still of the common wealth; but every man procureth his own private wealth’, Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson (London, 1551), sig. R, 7^r.

31 CW 4, 239.

32 Ibid., 35.

33 CW 15, 279.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 More makes a similar point in Treatise on the Passion, CW 13, 8–9.

37 CW 6, I, 179.

38 Ibid., 163.

39 Ibid., 185.

40 CW 4, 247.

41 For this reason, the map of Utopia resembles a skull, a memento mori; see Paul, Thomas More, 55–6.

42 See Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93.

43 Letter to Martin Dorp, CW 15, 35; Paul, Thomas More, 7.

44 CW 15, 37. As Stephanie Elsky, ‘Common law and the common place in Thomas More’s Utopia’, English Literary Renaissance 43, no. 2 (2013): 195 points out, such scholastic theologians commit the same crime as the propertied nobles in Utopia.

45 Dialogue Concerning Heresies, CW, 6, I, 123.

46 Responsio ad Lutherum, CW 5, 101.

47 Ibid., 623.

48 Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, CW 8, I, 480–1.

49 Ibid., 399.

50 Ibid., 343.

51 Ibid., 613.

52 CW 5, 159.

53 Ibid., 93.

54 Ibid., 191.

55 Ibid., 251.

56 CW 3, II, 161, 231; see Wegemer, Thomas More on Statesmanship, 54–5.

57 Ibid., 231.

58 Ibid.

59 CW 2, 79.

60 CW 5, 279.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid., 277. ‘Leges ergo si tollas: et omnia permittas libera magistratibus: aut nihil neque praecipient: neque uetabunt: et iam inutiles erunt magistratus: aut naturae suae ductu regent: et pro imperio, quidlibet exequentur, et iam nihilo populus erit liberior, sed seruituis conditione deterior; Ibid., 276. See also Dialogue Concerning Heresies, CW 6, I, 262, which contains a discussion of the partiality of judges and the impartiality of the law.

63 CW 12, 252.

64 Ibid., 253.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

68 Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, CW 8, II, 597–8, 585.

69 See also Responsio, CW 5, 141; Confutation, CW 8, II, 580, 595.

70 CW 8, II, 911.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid.

73 Life, then, despite being ‘artificial’ in this way, is not wholly trivial. My thanks to the anonymous reader for bringing this out.

74 In both the Institutio and the Moria, Erasmus notes how the trappings of kingship should recall a monarch to the virtues that they are meant to exhibit, Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, Lisa Jardine, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16; Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folie, trans. Thomas Chaloner (London, 1549), sig. O, ii^v.

75 CW, 14, 373.

76 Ibid.

77 Confutsation, CW 8, I, 75.

78 Ibid., 179. This is in the context of speaking about Erasmus’s Moria.

79 Wegemer, Statesmanship, 4, 65, 208. More’s petition for free speech as Speaker of the House of Commons was limited to that institutional space.

80 CW 1, 58.

81 CW 4, 125.

82 Ibid.

83 Confutation, 8, II, 561.

84 Ibid., 590.

85 CW 9, 96.

86 Ibid.

87 CW 6, I, 335.

88 Confutation, CW 8, I, 56.

89 Ibid.

90 This appears in contradiction to his comments, detailed below, about the power of a representative body to overthrow the king/pope. This might be a straightforward contradiction, or it might be to do with More’s thinking on the relationship between consent, authorisation and authority. It is a fruitful topic for further investigation. My thanks the anonymous reader for bringing this to my attention.

91 Ibid. 353.

92 Ibid.

93 Elizabeth Frances Rogers, ed., St. Thomas More: Selected Letters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 221.

94 Confutation, CW 8, I, 31, 32.

95 CW 12, 230; see Matthew 6:24.

96 The Debellation of Salem and Bizance, CW 10, 15.

97 Ibid., 138.

98 Ibid., 119.

99 Ibid., 229.

100 As Lord Chancellor, and thus Keeper of the King’s Conscience in the Court of Chancery, More was also open to the ways in which ‘conscience’ and ‘equity’ could guide the development of law. This was, importantly, not arbitrary; see William Bader, ‘Saint Thomas More: Equity and the Common Law Method’, Duquesne Law Review 52, no. 2 (2014): 435; Merridee L. Bailey, ‘“Most Hevynesse and Sorowe”: The Presence of Emotions in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Court of Chancery’, Law and History Review 37, no. 1 (2019): 9–10.

101 CW 15, 321. In the Confutation, CW 8, I, 287 he argues this approach also translates to city governance, suggesting that ‘senatus Londinensis’ could be translated ‘as mayor, aldermen, and common council’.

102 For the context of English conciliarism see Francis Oakley, ‘Constance, Basel and the two Pisas: The conciliarist legacy in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England’, Annuarium historiae conciliorum 26 (1994): 87–118.

103 Rogers, ed., Letters, 213–14.

104 Ibid., 213.

105 Confutation, CW 8, I, 146.

106 See Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), 28–31.

107 David Runciman and Monica Brito Vieira, Representation (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 10.

108 Ibid., 11.

109 CW 8, II, 937.

110 Ibid., p. 938.

111 Rogers, ed., Letters, 221.

112 Ibid.

113 Ibid., 222.

114 William Roper, The life of Thomas Moore, Knight, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 93.