New World, Lost Worlds

                                                The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Whence should remedy come? From kings? Unlikely. The account of the wise and holy institutitons of the Utopians is set against a debate between Morus and Hythloday - either of whoose invented characters More himself might have played; now one, now the other - about the nature of counsel. Hythloday was a philosopher, perfectly qualified to serve princes, urged Morus. But Hythloday knew
that such service was not freedom, and that it was folly to believe that princes would listen to truths that they did not wish to hear. Worse, the wise, the honest counsellor would become a screen for the
wickedness and folly of others. This was precisely the debate that the real More had had with his friend Erasmus, and within himself. When Hythloday described the counsellors to the king of France
in secret session, devising stratagems for foreign conquest, his imaginary picture was tellingly close
to the contemporary diplomatic reality. All their destabilizing schemes were ones which any Renaissance prince, set on glory rather than peace, would use, not least More's own real prince,
Henry VIII. Who could provide an example and restrain the warlike princes of Europe? The Pope,
Christ's vicar? Hardly. When Hythloday told of the Utopians, who needed no treaties because the fellowship created by nature sufficed, he referred to their happy belief that European treaties, sanctioned by the justice of kings and universal reverence for the Pope, were inviolable. Here was
desperate irony, for More wrote at a time when the Pope was leading a martial Holy League, which was neither holy nor a league. As More dreamt of Utopia and thought upon the creation of political
and social institutions which would restrain the human propensity to sin, he was accustoming himself to the prospect of entering royal service. He knew as well as Hythloday that service was near to servitude, and that princes were not inclined to listen. But he accepted the duty to sacrifice private liberty for the public good, and he needed to support his growing family. At certain times the relationship between scholars and rulers is re-conceived. So it was in the Renaissance. Those who were educated believed themselves to be educated for public service, believed that they could persuade princes, in Church and state, to reform. Scholars left the retreat of their studies to guide
the will of princes and thereby change the world. Utopia was written and published for those who
advised princes. Reform was dependent upon power, but power was vested precisely in those institutions most resistant to reform, where reform was most urgently needed. Thomas More chose,
in Utopia, to write not a political treatise, but a satire, hoping perhaps that fiction might achieve what
philosphy alone could not. He hoped that by presenting an ideal, and confronting this ideal with lamentable reality, reform might be generated. The Utopians themselves were eager to learn and to improve, yet Hythloday doubted that his own society would even remember the Utopians, let alone try to emulate them. At the end of the book, when the fictional More leads Hythloday to supper, he admits
that there are many features of the Utopian commonwealth which he would like to see in his own
society. Even as More wrote Utopia he had already begun to conceive his other great political work, The History of King Richard III. This was history, not chronicle, and history with clear moral intent.
It was also a parable and a tragedy; its theme the nature of power and its abuse, of tyranny and the
sin that made it possible. In the History of King Richard III the Devil is a real presence, as he had not 
been in Utopia; the progress of Richard of Gloucester to his kingdom is accursed and execrable.
More's Richard was a parricide and unnatural uncle, a Judas who broke all the ties of kinship, like the
figure of Vice in a morality play. A Protector who was no protector, a dissimulator and a plotter, he
contrived the murder of his nephews, Edward V and Richard of York, the young princes who stood
in his way to the throne. He was abetted by an ambitious Duke of Buckingham, by a nerveless clergy,
and by the common people, who looked on as sullen spectators, powerless to prevent the tragedy played before them. More's Richard and the historical Richard are not one and the same, for More's
purpose was to present a narrative of evil rather than an impartial account. But Richard III has never
been free of the guilt of the massacre of the innocents in his reign. More presented here a 'green world'; green because it was primal and chaotic, and because of the new-minted opportunism of the 
principal conspirators. It might also have seemed by the time he wrote, in 1514-18, a lost world; the world of his early childhood (More was born in 1477 or 1478), when the realm was shadowed by
civil wars, gripped by fear, fought over by overmighty nobles; where political rivals were driven to
seek sanctuary and the uncertain protection of the Church. But More knew that the tyranny which
had existed in his own childhood might come again; that in England, unlike Utopia, political institutions could not prevent it. More's history, both dark and brilliant, was left unfinished, unpublished; perhaps because he was unwilling to allow his royal master to use the history of the
last Plantagenet to sanction and celebrate the Tudor rise to power. The memory of Richard III's reign
- of usurpation and tyranny, of the fragility of the succession, of a world which was not altogether lost and might return - haunted the century.
More's imaginings in his Utopia and History of King Richard III were prescient, even tragic. He lived to regret publishing his fictional Utopia, with its devastating account of his own society.
He had been inspired by contemporary accounts of the people of the New World living lives of
primal innocence, holding all in common. Fortuneately for him, he never lived to see his ideal society
appropriated by Elizabethan adventurers to inspire and justify colonization and expropriation, not
only in the New World but also in Ireland. More, whose indictment of English law was, in Utopia,
comprehensive, became Lord Chancellor in 1529, and presided over the system which Hythloday
had condemned. The English, inured to the brutality of the law's punishments, soon saw even more
terrible penalties inflicted for religious heresies which the Utopians might have tolerated. In 1515 it 
had been possible for More to write, with seeming approval, of the imaginary tolerant society of
Utopia, a pagan world aspiring to perfectability, but this was just before his own world was cleft by
religious divisions deeper than any Europe had yet known. Christian renewal would come from a
direction which appalled More and his friends. When he wrote of the Utopians, religious and austere,
living like a single family, he described a world close to the world of the cloister, a religious life
which would soon be desolated. Hythloday had warned of the dangers of serving a vainglorious prince; of the prince's aversion to listening to counsel which displeased him; of the moal contagion
and delusiveness of life at court. More's own experience vindicated Hythloday's advice, and he learnt the truth of the political maxim, 'The wrath of the prince is death'. More's Richard III would be used
by those who came after him, not as a warning against contemporary misrule, but as a history of tyrany which was past and not to come again, and as a celebration of the Tudor accession.