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Transcriber's Notes.

Where no illustration caption appeared below the image, the
corresponding wording from the list of illustrations has been included
as a caption.

Italics are surrounded with _ _. The oe ligature has been replaced
in this version by the letters oe. Some words have been represented
in the print version as the first three letters of the word followed
by the last letter as a superscript and with a dot underneath. The
superscripted letters have been represented in this version as ^[.x].

On p. 59 of the original book, a presumed printer's error has been
corrected:

  "She seems 'em now!" (as printed in the original) has been changed to
  "She sees 'em now!" (in this version)

On p. 201, the date 1543 has been changed to 1534. This can be fairly
presumed to be the intended date based on historical occurrences
referred to and based on the continuity of entries.




  THE
  HOUSEHOLD OF
  SIR THO^[.S] MORE


  By the same Author

  _In crown 8vo, cloth, gilt top, 6s._

  Illustrated by JOHN JELLICOE and HERBERT RAILTON

  The Old Chelsea Bun-Shop:
  A Tale of the Last Century

  Cherry & Violet:
  A Tale of the Great Plague

  The Maiden and Married Life of Mary
  Powell, afterwards Mrs. Milton

_The many other interesting works of this author will be published from
time to time uniformly with the above._




  [Illustration:

  The Household of
  SIR THO^[.S] MORE

  _Illvstrations by_ John Jellicoe &
  Herbert Railton

  _Introdvction by_ The Rev^[.d] W. H. Hutton

  LONDON
  John C. NIMMO
  MDCCCXCIX
  ]

  [Illustration: LIBELLUS A MARGARETA MORE QVINDECIM ANNOS NATA CHELSELAE
  INCEPTVS

  _Nvlla dies sine linea_ ]

  [Illustration: "Anon we sit down to rest and talk"]




  THE
  HOUSEHOLD OF
  SIR THO^[.S] MORE


  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
  THE REV. W. H. HUTTON, B.D.
  FELLOW OF S. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD


  AND TWENTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS
  BY JOHN JELLICOE AND
  HERBERT RAILTON


  LONDON
  JOHN C. NIMMO
  NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
  MDCCCXCIX


  Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
  At the Ballantyne Press




  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  _From Drawings by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON.


  "ANON WE SIT DOWN TO REST AND TALK."
    _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON        _Frontispiece_

                                                              PAGE

  TITLE-PAGE.
    _Designed by_ HERBERT RAILTON                                iii

  MOTTO OF MARGARET MORE.
    _Designed by_ HERBERT RAILTON                                 iv

  SIR THOMAS MORE'S HOUSE.
    _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON                                     1

  ERASMUS AND THE PEACOCKS.
    _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE                               _To face_ 6

  JACK AND CECY.
    _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE                                      26

  MORE IN THE BARROW.
    _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE                                      38

  MARGARET IN THE TREE.
    _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE                              _To face_ 44

  "I NOTICED ARGUS PEARCHT."
    _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON                            _To face_ 52

  GAMMER GURNEY.
    _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE                                      58

  MORE READING WYNKYN DE WORDE.
    _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON          _To face_ 70

  THE JEW.
    _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE                                      76

  THE CARDINAL'S PROCESSION.
      _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE                                    87

  "I FELL INTO DISGRACE FOR HOLDING SPEECH
    WITH MERCY OVER THE PALES."
      _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON      _To face_ 110

  "LORD SANDS SANG US A NEW BALLAD."
      _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE      120

  "THE KING WAS HERE YESTERDAY."
      _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON      _To face_ 142

  "SHE COMETH HITHER FROM HEVER CASTLE."
      _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON      _To face_ 148

  THE BEGGAR-WOMAN'S DOG.
      _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE      161

  IN THE GARDEN.
      _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON      165

  "AND SAYTH, LOW BOWING AS HE SPOKE, 'MADAM,
    MY LORD IS GONE.'"
      _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON      _To face_ 172

  "IN COMETH A PURSUIVANT."
      _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE      203

  THE STAIRS.
      _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON      210

  "HIS FEARLESSE PASSAGE THROUGH THE TRAITOR'S
    GATE."
      _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON      _To face_ 220

  GILLIAN AND THE FLOUR SACKS.
      _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE                                237

  MORE RETURNING FROM HIS TRIAL.
      _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE                            _To face_ 258

  "NOR LOOKT I UP TILL ANEATH THE BRIDGE-GATE."
      _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON                           _To face_ 262




Introduction


It is not always from the closest and most accurate historian that
we receive the truest picture of an age or of a character. The
artist gives a more real picture than the photographer; and it needs
imagination and sympathy, as well as labour and research, to make a
hero of old time live again to-day. The minutest investigation will
hardly better the vivid reality of Scott's James I. or Charles II.,
or portray more truly than Mr. Shorthouse has done the fragile yet
fascinating personality of Charles I. Yet to say this is not to
undervalue history or to contemn the labour of true students. Rather,
without their aid we cannot rightly see the past at all: it comes to us
only with the distortions of our own prejudice and our narrow modern
outlook. We need both the work of the scholar and the imagination of
the artist. Without the first we could not behold the past, without the
second we could not understand it.

In religion, in politics, in art, in all that makes life beautiful and
men true, we must know the past if we would use the present or provide
for the future. And our knowledge is barren indeed if it does not touch
the intimacies of human existence. What we must know is how men lived
and thought, not merely how they acted. We must see them in the home,
and not only in the senate or the field. It is thus that the Letters
of Erasmus, or Luther's Table Talk, are worth a ton of Sleidan's
dreary commentaries or Calvin's systematic theology. And yet we cannot
dispense with either. We must study past ages as a whole, and then
bring the imagination of the artist and the poet to show us the truth
and the passion that lies nearest to their heart. It is thus, then, in
history that the imaginary portrait has its valued place.

Saturated with contemporary literature, yet alive to the influences
of a wider life, the student who is also an artist turns to a great
movement, and with the touch of genius fixes the true impression of its
soul in poetry, on canvas, or in prose. Such was the work of Walter
Pater. He taught us, through the delicate study of a secondary but most
alluring painter, to "understand to how great a place in human culture
the art of Italy had been called." In his picture of a great scholar
and a beautiful, pathetic, childlike soul, he showed the fascination
of that priceless truth--that what men have thought and done, that what
has interested and charmed them, can never wholly die--"no language
they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their
voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds,
nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and
zeal."

And more. He taught us not only how to understand the past,
but he showed us how it understood itself. "A Prince of Court
Painters"--Watteau, as he was seen by one who loved him, by a
sympathetic woman--like all such, the keenest of critics, yet the
tenderest of hearts--is given to us as not even pictures or personal
letters could give. Sebastian van Storck, Duke Carl of Rosenmold--they
are portraits, though it is only imagination that makes them live.

I remember Mr. Freeman once saying to me, as he took me his favourite
walk at Somerleaze, that he had read a study of Mr. Pater's--a strange
mediaeval story of Denys l'Auxerrois--and could not be satisfied till he
knew what it meant. Was it true? It was a question befitting one who
had made the past to live again. Truth was the first, almost the only,
thing the historian prized. Denys the organ-builder may never have
watched the decoration of the Cathedral of Saint Etienne, or made, by
the mere sight of him, the old feel young again. And yet Walter Pater
had painted a true portrait, as so often did Robert Browning, though it
were imaginary; and the artist as well as the historian had imaged for
us the reality of a past age.

Mr. Pater, though the most perfect artist of this school, was not the
first. Humbler writers have long endeavoured to draw the great heroes
as they thought their contemporaries saw them, by a fiction of memoir,
or correspondence, or journal. And the "Prince of Court Painters" is a
sketch in the same medium as "The Household of Sir Thomas More."

This charming book has passed through many editions, but its author, of
her own choice, remained almost unknown. The "Dictionary of National
Biography" has strangely passed her by. Almost all that her wishes
suffer us to know is that she was sister of Mr. William Oke Manning,
to whom she affectionately dedicated the fourth edition of the book
which is now reprinted; that she was never married; and that she was a
genuine student and an indefatigable writer on historical and literary
subjects. In "Mary Powell" she touched the heart of her generation, and
few books of its day had a wider circulation. "The Household of Sir
Thomas More" is a still more painstaking study, and a more complete
and delightful portrait. Its perfect sympathy and its quaint charm
of manner secured for it a welcome even among those who claimed for
the hero and his opinions a sanctity which Miss Manning's historical
judgment did not ratify. Cardinal Manning, writing on March 11, 1887,
rejoiced at its republication, and said: "The book is a singularly
beautiful one, and I regret that I had not the pleasure of knowing the
writer, whose mental gifts were of a very high order." Miss Manning
was a keen critic of the Romanism of the Reformation period, as her
Appendices to the fourth edition of her book show; but she did not
suffer her own opinions to destroy her sympathy for him whom Reginald
Pole called "the best of all the English."

"The Household of Sir Thomas More" is an imaginary portrait of a noble
character. It professes to be the journal begun by Margaret, More's
eldest daughter, most learned and best beloved, when she was but
fifteen years old, and continued till she had taken her father's head
from the pole whereon it was exposed, to treasure it till she should
lay it on her breast as she too passed into the peace of God. Among
"fair women" the heroic daughter is immortal:--

    "Morn broaden'd on the borders of the dark
    Ere I saw her, who clasped in her last trance
    Her murder'd father's head."

So Tennyson recorded the pathetic legend with which Miss Manning ended
her beautiful book.

When she wrote, it was not so hard as it is now to recall the London of
Henry VIII. Miss Manning herself described very happily in 1859 what
she remembered many years before.

"When we say," she wrote, "that some of our happiest and earliest
years were spent on the site of Sir Thomas More's country house in the
'village of palaces,' some of our readers will hardly believe we can
mean Chelsea. But, in those days, the gin-palace and tea-garden were
not; Cremorne was a quiet, aristocratic seclusion, where old Queen
Charlotte

     'Would sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.'

"A few old, quiet streets and rows, with names and sites dear to the
antiquary, ran down to the Thames, then a stranger to steamboats; a row
of noble elms along its strand lent their deep shade to some quaint
old houses with heavy architraves, picturesque flights of steps, and
elaborate gates; while Queen Elizabeth's Walk, the Bishop's Walk,
and the Bishop's Palace gave a kind of dignity to the more modern
designations of the neighbourhood.

"When the Thames was the great highway, and every nobleman had his six
or eight oared barge, the banks of the river as high as Chelsea were
studded with country houses. At the foot of Battersea Bridge, which
in those days did not disfigure the beautiful reach, Sir Thomas More,
then a private gentleman and eminent lawyer in full practice, built
the capital family house which was afterwards successively occupied
by the Marquis of Winchester, Lord Dacre, Lord Burleigh, Sir Robert
Cecil, the Earl of Lincoln, Sir Arthur Gorges, Lord Middlesex, the
first Duke of Buckingham, Sir Bulstrode Whitlock, the second Duke of
Buckingham, the Earl of Bristol, and the Duke of Beaufort. It stood
about a hundred yards from the river; its front exhibited a projecting
porch in the centre, and four bay windows alternating with eight large
casements; while its back presented a confused assemblage of jutting
casements, pent-houses, and gables in picturesque intricacy of detail,
affording 'coigns of vantage,' we doubt not, to many a tuft of golden
moss and stone-crop. This dwelling, which for convenience and beauty
of situation and interior comfort was so highly prized by its many and
distinguished occupants, appears at length to have been pulled down
when it became rickety and untenantable from sheer old age--in Ossian's
words, 'gloomy, windy, and full of ghosts.'"

Nor was Miss Manning obliged to rely only on her memory for a picture
of More's house as it had been. The site, when she knew it, was like
the New Place at Stratford-on-Avon, where only a few stones and
foundations enable us to picture how stood the house where Shakespeare
died. But while the household was still fresh in men's minds, and More
was beginning to be reverenced as a martyr and a saint, Ellis Heywood
published at Florence, in 1556, his sketch, "Il Moro," in which he set
in a true description of the Chelsea garden an imaginary picture of
the Chancellor and his friends talking on matters of high import to
soul and spirit. "From one part of the garden," he tells us, "almost
the whole of the noble city of London was visible, and from another
the beautiful Thames, with green meadows and wooded hills all around."
The garden had its own charm too. "It was crowned with an almost
perpetual verdure, and the branches of the fruit-trees that grew near
were interwoven in a manner so beautiful that it seemed like a living
tapestry worked by Nature herself."

So wrote Ellis Heywood of the external beauty of the scene. Of
the inner harmony Erasmus had written years before to Ulrich von
Hutten:--"More has built himself a house at Chelsea. There he lives
with his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, his three daughters and
their husbands, with eleven grandchildren. There is not a man alive
so loving as he: he loves his old wife as if she were indeed a young
maiden." For Dame Alice, whom More had wedded very soon after the
death of his first child-wife, was _nec bella nec puella_--neither a
beauty nor a girl. And besides these, in the year when little Margaret,
according to Miss Manning, began to write in her "fayr Libellus" which
her tutor, Master Gunnel, gave her, there were dwelling in the house
the aged father, Sir John More, good judge and humorous man, with his
third wife.

"And the household," said Erasmus, "was a very 'platonic academy'--were
it not," he adds, "an injustice to compare it with an academy where
disputations concerning numbers and figures were only occasionally
mingled with discussion on the moral virtues. I should rather call his
house a school of Christianity; for though there is no one in it who
does not study the liberal sciences, the