Utopia

UTOPIA

By THOMAS MORE

Translated by GILBERT BURNET

Preface by HENRY MORLEY

Introduction by WILLIAM D. ARMES

Utopia

By Thomas More

Translated by Gilbert Burnet

Preface by Henry Morley

Introduction by William D. Armes

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7561-1

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7728-8

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

OF THE BEST STATE OF A COMMONWEALTH

OF THEIR TOWNS, PARTICULARLY OF AMAUROT

OF THEIR MAGISTRATES

OF THEIR TRADES, AND MANNER OF LIFE

OF THEIR TRAFFIC

OF THE TRAVELLING OF THE UTOPIANS

OF THEIR SLAVES, AND OF THEIR MARRIAGES

OF THEIR MILITARY DISCIPLINE

OF THE RELIGIONS OF THE UTOPIANS

BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

Preface

Sir Thomas More, son of Sir John More, a justice of the King’s Bench, was born in 1478, in Milk Street, in the city of London. After his earlier education at St. Anthony’s School, in Threadneedle Street, he was placed, as a boy, in the household of Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor. It was not unusual for persons of wealth or influence and sons of good families to be so established together in a relation of patron and client. The youth wore his patron’s livery, and added to his state. The patron used, afterwards, his wealth or influence in helping his young client forward in the world. Cardinal Morton had been in earlier days that Bishop of Ely whom Richard III. sent to the Tower; was busy afterwards in hostility to Richard; and was a chief adviser of Henry VII., who in 1486 made him Archbishop of Canterbury, and nine months afterwards Lord Chancellor. Cardinal Morton—of talk at whose table there are recollections in Utopia—delighted in the quick wit of young Thomas More. He once said, Whoever shall live to try it, shall see this child here waiting at table prove a notable and rare man.

At the age of about nineteen, Thomas More was sent to Canterbury College, Oxford, by his patron, where he learnt Greek of the first men who brought Greek studies from Italy to England—William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre. Linacre, a physician, who afterwards took orders, was also the founder of the College of Physicians. In 1499, More left Oxford to study law in London, at Lincoln’s Inn, and in the next year Archbishop Morton died.

More’s earnest character caused him while studying law to aim at the subduing of the flesh, by wearing a hair shirt, taking a log for a pillow, and whipping himself on Fridays. At the age of twenty-one he entered Parliament, and soon after he had been called to the bar he was made Under-Sheriff of London. In 1503 he opposed in the House of Commons Henry VII.’s proposal for a subsidy on account of the marriage portion of his daughter Margaret; and he opposed with so much energy that the House refused to grant it. One went and told the king that a beardless boy had disappointed all his expectations. During the last years, therefore, of Henry VII. More was under the displeasure of the king, and had thoughts of leaving the country.

Henry VII. died in April, 1509, when More’s age was a little over thirty. In the first years of the reign of Henry VIII. he rose to large practice in the law courts, where it is said he refused to plead in cases which he thought unjust, and took no fees from widows, orphans, or the poor. He would have preferred marrying the second daughter of John Colt, of New Hall, in Essex, but chose her elder sister, that he might not subject her to the discredit of being passed over.

In 1513 Thomas More, still Under-Sheriff of London, is said to have written his History of the Life and Death of King Edward V., and of the Usurpation of Richard III. The book, which seems to contain the knowledge and opinions of More’s patron, Morton, was not printed until 1557, when its writer had been twenty-two years dead. It was then printed from a MS. in More’s handwriting.

In the year 1515 Wolsey, Archbishop of York, was made Cardinal by Leo X.; Henry VIII. made him Lord Chancellor, and from that year until 1523 the King and the Cardinal ruled England with absolute authority, and called no parliament. In May of the year 1515 Thomas More—not knighted yet—was joined in a commission to the Low Countries with Cuthbert Tunstall and others to confer with the ambassadors of Charles V., then only Archduke of Austria, upon a renewal of alliance. On that embassy More, aged about thirty-seven, was absent from England for six months, and while at Antwerp he established friendship with Peter Giles (Latinised Aegidius), a scholarly and courteous young man, who was secretary to the municipality of Antwerp.

Cuthbert Tunstall was a rising churchman, chancellor to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who in that year (1515) was made Archdeacon of Chester, and in May of the next year (1516) Master of the Rolls. In 1516 he was sent again to the Low Countries, and More then went with him to Brussels, where they were in close companionship with Erasmus.

More’s Utopia was written in Latin, and is in two parts, of which the second, describing the place (Οὐτόπος—or Nusquama, as he called it sometimes in his letters—Nowhere), was probably written towards the close of 1515; the first part, introductory, early in 1516. The book was first printed at Louvain, late in 1516, under the editorship of Erasmus, Peter Giles, and other of More’s friends in Flanders. It was then revised by More, and printed by Frobenius at Basle in November, 1518. It was reprinted at Paris and Vienna, but was not printed in England during More’s lifetime. Its first publication in this country was in the English translation, made in Edward’s VI.’s reign (1551) by Ralph Robinson. It was translated with more literary skill by Gilbert Burnet, in 1684, soon after he had conducted the defence of his friend Lord William Russell, attended his execution, vindicated his memory, and been spitefully deprived by James II. of his lectureship at St. Clement’s. Burnet was drawn to the translation of Utopia by the same sense of unreason in high places that caused More to write the book. Burnet’s is the translation given in this volume.

The name of the book has given an adjective to our language—we call an impracticable scheme Utopian. Yet, under the veil of a playful fiction, the talk is intensely earnest, and abounds in practical suggestion. It is the work of a scholarly and witty Englishman, who attacks in his own way the chief political and social evils of his time. Beginning with fact, More tells how he was sent into Flanders with Cuthbert Tunstall, whom the king’s majesty of late, to the great rejoicing of all men, did prefer to the office of Master of the Rolls; how the commissioners of Charles met them at Bruges, and presently returned to Brussels for instructions; and how More then went to Antwerp, where he found a pleasure in the society of Peter Giles which soothed his desire to see again his wife and children, from whom he had been four months away. Then fact slides into fiction with the finding of Raphael Hythloday (whose name, made of two Greek words ΰθλος and δάιος, means knowing in trifles), a man who had been with Amerigo Vespucci in the three last of the voyages to the new world lately discovered, of which the account had been first printed in 1507, only nine years before Utopia was written.

Designedly fantastic in suggestion of details, Utopia is the work of a scholar who had read Plato’s Republic, and had his fancy quickened after reading Plutarch’s account of Spartan life under Lycurgus. Beneath the veil of an ideal communism, into which there has been worked some witty extravagance, there lies a noble English argument. Sometimes More puts the case as of France when he means England. Sometimes there is ironical praise of the good faith of Christian kings, saving the book from censure as a political attack on the policy of Henry VIII. Erasmus wrote to a friend in 1517 that he should send for More’s Utopia, if he had not read it, and wished to see the true source of all political evils. And to More Erasmus wrote of his book, A burgomaster of Antwerp is so pleased with it that he knows it all by heart.

HENRY MORLEY

1889.

Introduction

I. THE LIFE OF SIR THOMAS MORE

Thomas More was born in London, February 7, 1478, the son of a lawyer in but moderate circumstances, who in 1517 became a judge in the Court of Common Pleas and three years later was transferred to the King’s Bench. After he had attended a free school in London, the boy, when about twelve, was placed in the household of Cardinal Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, as a page; and at once made a great impression on his patron. William Roper, who became More’s son-in-law, says in his Life of More: Though he was young of years, yet would he at Christmas-tide suddenly sometimes step in among the players, and, never studying for the matter, make a part of his own there presently among them, which made the lookers-on more sport than all the players beside. In whose wit and towardness the Cardinal much delighting, would often say of him unto the nobles that divers times dined with him, ‘This child here waiting at the table, whosoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man.’ The feeling of More towards his patron is shown in the eulogy that he goes somewhat out of his way to introduce into the Utopia.

That the boy’s natural abilities might be developed by education, the cardinal sent him, about 1492, to one of the colleges of Oxford. Here he remained two years, devoting himself to Latin, the newly introduced Greek, history, mathematics, and music. Young as he was, he became known as one of the foremost champions of the New Learning.

As More’s father wished him to follow his own profession, he withdrew him from the university when he was about sixteen and entered him as a student in one of the legal associations of London. After studying equity for two years at New Inn, an inn of chancery, he entered Lincoln’s Inn, an inn of court, for the study of the common law. So able and diligent was he that erelong he was appointed reader on law at one of the inns of chancery, and as such gave so great satisfaction that the appointment was renewed three years or more.

Notwithstanding his success, More was not, however, whole-heartedly devoted to his profession; but had a great longing for the religious, even the monastic, life. At one of the London churches he delivered a series of lectures on St. Augustine’s City of God, to which all the chief learned of the city of London resorted; and for about four years he gave himself to devotion and prayer among the Carthusian monks in the Charterhouse, subjecting himself, though without a vow, to their austerities, fasting, wearing a hair shirt next his skin (a practice he never entirely gave up), and even scourging himself. Finding, however, that his longing for a family life was too great to be overcome, he gave up all thought of becoming a monk, a Franciscan friar, or a priest; and devoted himself unreservedly to his profession.

Meanwhile, about 1498, he met the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, and a warm and enduring friendship grew up between them. They were united, writes Guthkelch, not only by their love of classical literature, but also by the likeness of their characters—their love of truth, their hatred of all shams and hypocrisies, their kindliness; above all, perhaps, by the possession of that kind of humor which pierces to the reality lying beneath the pomps and shows of the world. This friendship with Erasmus, who was thirteen years his senior and already had a European reputation as a scholar and writer, was of the greatest possible benefit to More in developing his genius and determining the character of his work.

In 1504 More became a member of Parliament, and at once made his influence felt. Henry VII. had asked for certain grants in connection with the marriage of his daughter to the King of Scotland that to More seemed excessive; he therefore led the opposition and succeeded in having the amount granted cut down to but a little over a quarter of that asked for. He is the first person in our history, writes Sir James Mackintosh, distinguished by the faculty of public speaking. Great was the king’s amazement on hearing that his ministers had been outwitted and his expectations disappointed by a beardless boy, and so sore was his displeasure that More found it prudent to retire to private life.

In the spring of 1505 More married Jane, or Joan, Colt, the daughter of a gentleman of Essex. Erasmus, who later in the year was again in England and was for some time a guest in More’s home, writes that, as she was a country-bred girl, he took care to have her instructed in learning, and especially in all musical accomplishments, and had made her such that he could have willingly passed his whole life with her, but a premature death separated them. During their five years of happy married life she gave More three daughters and a son.

While Erasmus was More’s guest, the two friends utilized their leisure by translating from Greek into Latin some of the dialogues of Lucian, the second-century satirist, More selecting as his share the Cynicus, Menippus, and Philopseudes; a work which was published in 1506. On a third visit to England, in 1508, Erasmus, while again More’s guest, composed in his home what became his most famous work, The Praise of Folly, the Latin title of which, Encomium Moriœ, has an intentional joke on the name of his host. In the same year, 1508, More made his first visit to the Continent. Nothing is known concerning it save his statement that he visited the universities of Paris and Louvain and took pains to ascertain what was taught in them and by what methods.

The year 1510 was a noteworthy one in More’s life: his first wife died and he married again, his second wife being Alice Middleton, a widow some years older than himself; he published a translation of a Life of John Picus, Earl of Mirandola, with letters and other writings by that famous scholar of the Italian Renaissance; and he was made under-sheriff of London, an office that required him once a week to act as judge in civil cases. He had won great fame as an able, upright lawyer, who would plead no cause that he considered unjust and took no fees from widows, orphans, or the poor he soon gave no less satisfaction and won no less renown as a judge than he had attained as a barrister. Roper states that there was no important case in which he was not engaged, and that by his private practice and his official position he made not less than £400 a year, which at the present time would equal an income of nearly $25,000.

In 1513 More composed his History of Richard III, which he did not complete and which was not published until long after his death. He wrote it not only in Latin but also in English, and thus became the first Englishman who wrote the history of his country in its present language.

Naturally Henry VIII., who succeeded his father in 1509, wished to have such an able and popular lawyer in his service. Loath to give up his freedom, More refused to be tempted; but later circumstances forced him to yield. Trouble that had arisen between the London merchants and the association of foreign merchants there resident made necessary a meeting between representatives of the King of England and those of the Archduke of Flanders, and the Londoners asked