A plan for getting poorer, one step a year

CHELSEA, Middlesex, 1532 AD — This year St. Thomas More’s great barge went to Sir Thomas Audley, the man who had taken his job. The eight watermen who worked it went with it. He placed Henry Pattison, the household jester, with the Lord Mayor of London. Each year after that, Pattison would move on to the next Lord Mayor.

Until May, St. Thomas More had been Lord Chancellor of England, the King’s chief officer in the law. Almost all his money had come from that job.

He had asked to go. King Henry VIII wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon set aside, and Anne Boleyn put in her place. He was also taking the English Church out of the Pope’s hands, one law at a time. In February of last year the King ordered the churchmen of England to call him supreme head of the church in England. St. Thomas More heard that the King had taken that title, and offered to give up the job. On May 16 he handed back the great seal. He had held the office a little more than two and a half years.

His wife heard about it in church. On holy days, while he was Chancellor, 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.

There were a lot of people to feed. The house at Chelsea held Dame Alice, his son and his son’s wife, his three daughters and their husbands, and eleven grandchildren.

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. He asked each man what he meant to do next, and offered to place any who wanted to serve a nobleman. The servants cried, and said they would rather work for him for nothing than work for most men for good wages. He would not let them stay unpaid. Instead he found each of them a place in the house of a nobleman or a bishop.

The question nobody answered

Then he called his children in. Among them were his daughter Margaret and her husband, William Roper, who had been living in the house for years. He told the children he could not pay for the whole family any more, the way he always had. 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, the law schools 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 they all stayed under one roof, every one of them would have to put money into the house.

They would start by eating the way the men at Lincoln’s Inn ate. Plenty of respected older men did well enough on that food. If they could not keep it up through the first year, the next year they would come down 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 the food he had lived on as a student at Oxford.

And if they could not manage even that, St. Thomas More told them, there was one step below Oxford. He said: “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.”