New Worlds, Lost Worlds

                                                   The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

In 1515 Thomas More, then under-sheriff of London, wrote an elusive work of fiction, Utopia. He presented an imaginary vision of Utopia, an island state far beyond the equator and out of contact with Europe for 1,200 years. As the story begins, an imaginary traveller, the philosopher Raphael Hythloday, steps into the real world of More, who is on an embassy in Antwerp and has just come from attending Mass. Hythloday has travelled with Amerigo Vespucci on his later voyages to the New World, and in his travels has encountered the Utopians, with whom he has lived for five years, sharing his knowledge and their lives. More places himself in his fiction as the character Morus, and presents the plodding Morus in debate with the brilliant Hythloday. Morus implores Hythloday to describe all
that he has seen. And so Hythloday does. In writing Utopia More was inspired by classical authors, especially by Plato, but Plato had devised only a theoretical Republic. As More recounted Hythloday's
tale he brought a just and happy society to life, as though he had walked in its gardens and dined with
its citizens. Here in Utopia was 'the best state of a commonwealth', thought Hythloday.
Utopian society was a true commonwealth; founded indeed on common wealth. The Utopians' abolition of private property, their holding of everything in common - as friends should and early Christians had done - guarded the Utopians against the malign tendencies of human nature to pride,
greed, and envy. In Utopia nothing was private. Labour was a communal, universal duty. There was no money, no ownership, yet everyone was rich, for there could be no greater riches than to live happily and peacefully, without worries about making a living. The Utopians were freed to concern themselves
with the common good. Once they had been ruled by a king, but now they elected their governors, 
choosing them for their virtue. Tyranny was an evil Utopians so far condemned that, although they
hated war, they should intervene to save their neighbours from oppression. Their society was pacific and benevolent, tolerant and temperate, and, said Hythloday, capable, so far as anyone could tell,
of lasting forever.
Utopia was an artifical state, the creation of an enlightened despot, King Utopus. Rescuing the island from the chaos of religious schism, he had left the Utopians under the necessity only of believing that the soul is immortal, that there is a divine providence at work, and that eternal reward and punishment
await in the afterlife. The Utopians of More's imagining were evolving a natural theology through the
processes of reason, and far surpassed European Christians in matters quintessentially Christian.
They lived lives of virtue, wisdom, justice and charity, in the way that Christ had commanded.
Yet they did not know Christ, and had not received the illumination of the Gospel. When Hythloday
and his fellow travellers revealed Christ's teachings, the Utopians recognized them as truths to which they already aspired, and were eager to be converted to the faith of the Old World, believing that 
the life of apostolic purity was to be found among the truest society of Christians. And where was
that? Certainly not in More's own society.
Hythloday knew not only Utopia, which was, for him, the best state of a commonwealth, but also England, which was not. The fantasy, ideal world of Utopia is set starkly in More's work against
the society of contemporary England and Europe, which was neither just nor happy. The imaginary traveller recalled a debate in 1497 at the table of Cardinal Morton, Lord Chancellor and Archbishop
of Canterbury, at which a dismal catalogue of England's social evils had been rehearsed. And no
one had listened. Hythloday presented a picture of European society chained to custom, incapable 
of reform. While Utopia was a society without hierarchies save of virture,where deference was given
only where it was deserved, England was obsessed by honour, ruled by a wanton aristocracy whose
title to govern was not virtue but birth and wealth. Those whose wealth rested upon their daily exploitation of the poor made laws to justify that oppression, and then sat in judgement upon the poor whom they had ruined. In England, law was not justice, and the penalties went beyond justice.
A lawyer at Morton's dinner had boasted of the strict penalties meted out to thieves, who were hanged
twenty at a time. He wondered why so many stole. No wonder in such a society, judged Hythloday.
The poor found themselves under a terrible necessity; first to steal, and then to die for it. The nobility,
Hythloday thought, were doubly guilty: they lived like drones on the labour of others, demanding more and more from the tenants of their estates, and then corrupted the crowds of servants they took into service by making them live as idly as they did themselves. A circumstance unique to England made the plight of the poor more desperate: the landowners enclosed land for pasture, driving poor farmers from the soil and families from their homes to wander and beg - sheep became 'devourers of men'. They very fertility of England was a reproach, for it was exploited by the wealthy as a monopoly, leaving the common people destitute. When Hythloday surveyed contemporary European society he found nothing but a 'conspiracy of the rich'.