Thomas More and Tyranny

Abstract

Although for some twenty years the scholarly consensus has been to stress the Ciceronian imperatives of the good citizen and the vita activa in shaping Thomas More’s attitude to royal service, especially shortly before and after the writing of Utopia, a reconsideration of More’s life experiences between 1509 and the onset of Henry VIII’s first divorce campaign in the spring of 1527 suggests that a rejection of a courtier’s life may have ranked equally high in his consciousness. This conclusion is reinforced by More’s sustained interest in the writings of Seneca, an interest he had shared with Erasmus since the latter’s second stay at Bucklersbury in 1509-11. The coincidence of the publication of Seneca’s moral essays in Erasmus’s Senecae Lucubrationes of 1515, the first printing widely available outside Italy, and the gestation of Utopia is suggestive. It is likely to have been the call to duty arising, first, from the Lutheran threat after 1521, and then from the divorce after 1527, that finally turned More into a full-blooded Ciceronian.