St. Thomas More writes the cardinal he served as a boy into Utopia

LONDON, 1516 AD — Saint Thomas More put Cardinal John Morton into Utopia, printed at Louvain in December 1516 AD, and set him at the Cardinal’s own dinner table. St. Thomas More had waited at that table as a boy of thirteen. In the book Morton is the one man at dinner who gives a stranger’s plan for punishing thieves a fair hearing.

St. Thomas More’s father placed him in the household of Morton, then Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England, at Lambeth in 1491 AD. At Christmas the boy would step in among the players and make up a part of his own on the spot. Morton used to tell the noblemen dining with him: “This child here waiting at the table, whosoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man.” About a year later Morton sent him on to Oxford.

By 1516 AD St. Thomas More was a London lawyer of thirty-eight, and he wrote the first part of Utopia in London that year, in Latin. The book is the report of Raphael Hythlodaye, an invented Portuguese sailor, who tells it to St. Thomas More and his friend Peter Giles at Antwerp.

The first part turns on one question: should a wise man give his advice to a king? Giles and St. Thomas More urge Hythlodaye to enter a prince’s service. Hythlodaye refuses. At court, he says, anyone who proposes something new is run down by counsellors who fear it will make them look less wise, and he has seen these “proud, morose, and absurd judgments of things in many places, particularly once in England.” The story of Morton’s table is his proof.

Hythlodaye stops to describe Morton to Giles: “a man,” said he, “Peter (for Mr. More knows well what he was), that was not less venerable for his wisdom and virtues than for the high character he bore.” In Hythlodaye’s words, Morton “was of a middle stature, not broken with age; his looks begot reverence rather than fear; his conversation was easy, but serious and grave,” and he liked to test people who came to him on business “by speaking sharply, though decently, to them.”

One day at dinner an English lawyer praised the hanging of thieves, “sometimes twenty on one gibbet,” and said he could not understand why so many thieves were still robbing everywhere when so few escaped the rope. Hythlodaye answered that hanging thieves was unjust and did not stop theft, because no punishment holds back men who have no other way to live. When Hythlodaye said England had a cause of theft all its own, Morton asked him what it was. Hythlodaye blamed the sheep, “which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order,” but “may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns.” Landowners were fencing in thousands of acres for pasture and turning the families who farmed them off the land, with nothing left to do but steal or beg.

The lawyer set out to answer him point by point. He had got as far as “there were four things—” when Morton cut in: “Hold your peace!.. this will take up too much time.” Morton asked Hythlodaye a question of his own instead: if not death, what punishment would he give a thief?

Hythlodaye described the Polylerits, an invented people who make a thief pay back what he took and work for the public instead of being hanged. The lawyer said it would endanger England, and “all the company seemed of his opinion, except the Cardinal.” Morton said no one could judge a method never tried. He proposed that when a thief was sentenced to death, the king should spare him for a while and put him to the Polylerit punishment instead, and hang him after all if it did not work. “When the Cardinal had done, they all commended the motion, though they had despised it when it came from me,” Hythlodaye says.

A jester at the table then proposed a law sending all the beggars to the monasteries. “The Cardinal smiled, and approved of it in jest, but the rest liked it in earnest,” Hythlodaye says. When the jester turned the joke on the friars, a friar at the table lost his temper and called him “knave, slanderer, backbiter, and son of perdition.” The friar kept on until Morton “made a sign to the Fool to withdraw, turned the discourse another way, and soon after rose from the table.” Morton sent his guests away and went to hear the cases waiting for him.

Hythlodaye says he told the story to show how the guests flattered the Cardinal. St. Thomas More, speaking in the book as himself, answers him: “you have made me imagine that I was in my own country and grown young again, by recalling that good Cardinal to my thoughts, in whose family I was bred from my childhood; and though you are, upon other accounts, very dear to me, yet you are the dearer because you honour his memory so much.”