St. Thomas More plans his family's descent, stage by stage, to begging

CHELSEA, Middlesex, 1532 AD — Saint Thomas More has taken his own house apart. The plate is sold, and this year he called his children together at Chelsea and asked them how the family was to live on what was left. He had been Lord Chancellor of England, the King’s chief officer in the law, until he handed back the great seal in May.

The King wants his marriage to Catherine of Aragon set aside and Anne Boleyn put in her place, and he is taking the English Church out of the Pope’s hands one statute at a time. By proclamation in February of last year he required the clergy to acknowledge him supreme head of the church in England, in the proclamation’s own words “as far as the law of Christ will allow”. St. Thomas More offered to give up the chancellorship as soon as he heard the King had taken that title. He asked the Duke of Norfolk to press the King to discharge him, and gave as his reason that he was too ill to go on. On May 16 he gave back the great seal, after little more than two and a half years in the office.

His wife heard of it in church. On holy days during the chancellorship, one of his gentlemen used to come to Dame Alice’s pew door when the service was over. He would tell her, “Madam, my lord is gone.” By the first holy day after the seal went back, the gentlemen were no longer in the house. St. Thomas More came to the pew door, bowed low, and said the words. Dame Alice took it for one of his jokes. Then St. Thomas More told her plainly that he was no longer Chancellor. Dame Alice answered him angrily. He called his daughters over and asked whether they could see anything wrong with the way their mother was dressed. The daughters looked, and said they could not. Their father told them Dame Alice’s nose was crooked, and she walked away from him in a rage.

The house at Chelsea held Dame Alice, St. Thomas More’s son and daughter-in-law, his three daughters and their husbands, and eleven grandchildren — all his children and their children under one roof. The land he had bought, all of it before he was ever Chancellor, brought in no more than twenty marks a year. The plate was sold, and he kept the gold chain he wore.

He dealt with the servants first. Many of them were gentlemen of good family. St. Thomas More told the servants he could not keep them as he would like to, asked each man what he meant to do next, and offered to place any who wanted to serve a nobleman. They answered him in tears that they would rather serve him for nothing than serve most men for a good wage. He would not have it, and settled them one by one in the houses of noblemen and bishops. He placed Henry Pattison, the household jester, with the Lord Mayor of London, and arranged that each year Pattison should go on to whoever next held that office. The eight watermen who worked his great barge went to Sir Thomas Audley, who has his old office, and he gave Audley the barge with them.

Then St. Thomas More called his children in — among them his daughter Margaret and her husband, William Roper, who had been living in the house for years — and asked what they thought. He told the children he could no longer pay for the whole family as he always had and would still gladly do. What he wanted from them was a way for all of them to go on living together.

Not one of them answered him.

“Then will I show my poor mind to you,” he said. He had come up through Oxford, an inn of chancery, Lincoln’s Inn and the King’s court, from the bottom to the top. What was left to him now, he told them, was “little above a hundred pounds by the year”. If the family stayed under one roof, every one of them would have to put money into the house.

His advice was not to drop to the bottom at once. They would begin by eating as the men at Lincoln’s Inn ate, where plenty of respected older men did well enough on it. If they could not hold that through the first year, they would come down the next year to what was eaten at New Inn, “wherewith many an honest man is well contented”. The year after that they would come down again to Oxford fare.

And if they could not manage even that, St. Thomas More told them, there was one step below Oxford: “then may we yet, with bags and wallets, go a-begging together, and hoping that for pity some good folk will give us their charity, at every man’s door to sing Salve Regina [Hail, Holy Queen], and so still keep company and be merry together.”