Serving dishes at thirteen, England's Lord Chancellor at fifty-one

LONDON, 1491 AD — In 1491 AD a London lawyer sent his son, aged thirteen, to live in another man’s house. The boy’s job there was to wait at the table. The boy was Saint Thomas More. The house was Lambeth Palace in London, the home of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury.

St. Thomas More’s father, John More, was a barrister who later became a judge. He was the only one of John More’s sons who lived to grow up. He had already been to St Anthony’s School in Threadneedle Street, where boys learned Latin. In those days the houses of great churchmen worked like schools for the sons of well-off families, even noble ones. A boy kept up his lessons there, and he learned how to behave around important people.

Morton held two of the biggest jobs in England at once. He was Archbishop of Canterbury. He was also Lord Chancellor, and King Henry VII relied on his advice more than on anyone else’s. The Lord Chancellor kept the King’s great seal, the stamp that made the King’s orders official. No formal order from the King could go out without the Lord Chancellor.

On June 28 of that same year, King Henry VII had a baby son. He was named Henry.

The boy who jumped into the play

St. Thomas More was a page. His job was to wait at the table, serving the Archbishop and the noblemen who often came to dinner. Morton liked to test how quick the boy was. Christmas was the best time for it, because the people of the house put on plays for fun.

Every so often, St. Thomas More would step in among the actors in the middle of a play. He hadn’t practised anything. He made up a part of his own on the spot. William Roper, who later married St. Thomas More’s daughter Margaret and wrote his life, said the boy’s acting “made the lookers on more sport than all the players beside.”

The Archbishop was delighted with him. Morton often said to 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 decided the boy should leave. People were always coming and going on government business at Morton’s house. The boy couldn’t study there as much as Morton wanted him to. So Morton sent him to Canterbury Hall at Oxford, when he was about fourteen.

The baby born in the summer of 1491 AD grew up to be King Henry VIII. On October 25, 1529 AD, at Greenwich Palace, King Henry VIII handed St. Thomas More the great seal. Morton had kept King Henry VII’s great seal when St. Thomas More was a boy carrying dishes at his table. Now St. Thomas More was Lord Chancellor of England, and he kept King Henry VIII’s.

The next day, in Westminster Hall, St. Thomas More swore the oaths of his new office. He was fifty-one. He was the first Lord Chancellor of England who wasn’t a churchman.