More and Henry VII
That the name of the tyrant is Richard III rather than Henry VII is probably due to More's awareness of the possible perils of publication, to himself and others. He wrote one draft in Latin, presumably to circulate abroad; any such draft would have eventually come to the attention of Henry's son who now sat on the throne. Although the Tudors had reigned for thirty years, their claim upon the crown was insecure. Plantagenets still lived who could be considered rivals for the throne, and Henry VIII had as yet no male heir.
Henry VII
The Latin draft ends with the first hint of the October 1483 treason and rebellion by Henry Stafford, second Duke of Buckingham, which ended in his execution. At the time that the History was written, Buckingham's son Edward, third duke, was Henry's heir presumptive. Edward was later executed by Henry for talking too freely of his claim to the throne.[15] The dangers of reminding a Tudor about Plantagenet claims to the throne were only too real, and More doubtless realized this and broke off before the parallels became too pointed.
The English version stops where Henry Tudor, in the course of history, made his first appearance onto the world stage. Kendall writes that More found himself unable to continue writing because the text demanded a savior from the monster king he had created, and he could not bring himself to cast Henry VII in that light (as one earlier Tudor-supported historian had, and as Shakespeare would do at the end of Richard III). Kendall writes:
Master More, M.P. and lawyer, would know that it was impossibly dangerous for him to reveal his feelings about Henry VII, and Thomas More, historian, could perceive that he would be unable to continue his work without doing so.
Therefore, abandoning the "middle way" of history, More expressed his political concerns more obliquely in the satiric fantasy Utopia (1516) and then more directly by entering the service of the King in 1518.[16]
But Henry did not escape More's pen altogether. The famous description of Richard could have been written about Henry himself:
Richard...was in wit and courage equal with either of them, in body and probity far under them both: little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard-favoured of visage and such as in princes called warlike... malicious, wrathful, envious...close and secret, a deep dissembler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable where he inwardly hated, not hesitating to kiss whom he thought to kill, pitiless and cruel, not for evil will always but oftener for ambition and either for the surety or increase of his position. "Friend" and "foe" were to him indifferent: where his advantage grew, he spared no man's death whose life withstood his purpose.[17]
The physical description of Richard as "Crookback" had never been remarked upon by Richard's contemporaries. Interestingly, More's written description and the extant portraits of Richard agree only in that Richard was small, dark-haired, and a worrier. Erasmus wrote to Ulrich von Hutten in 1519 that More's right shoulder was higher than his left (a reversal of Richard's deformity), and More was, of course, small and dark-haired.[18]
More's only direct reference to Henry and his reign was couched discreetly, but is pointedly similar to the description of Richard as a dissembler:
All things were in late days so covertly managed, one thing pretended and another meant, that there was nothing so plain and openly proved but that yet for the common custom of close and covert dealing men had it ever inwardly suspect, as many well counterfeited jewels make the true mistrusted.[19]
Farther than that, More could not venture, a telling reflection on the dangers of challenging a Tudor in Tudor times compared to the freedom during the reign of the last Plantagenet, whose Parliament passed laws protecting booksellers from royal wrath for selling unpopular or unflattering books. At any rate, More abandoned the work and never returned to it. Instead, he wrote Utopia, another long essay on the evil of absolute state power but one which named no dangerously real names.
Next
Footnotes
[15] Potter, Good King Richard?, 116.
[16] Kendall, The Great Debate, 28.
[17] Thomas More, The History of King Richard the Third, reprinted in Kendall, The Great Debate, 35.
[18] Erasmus to Ulrich von Hutten, quoted in The Essential Thomas More, edited by James J. Greene and John P. Dolan (New York: New American Library, 1967), 288.
[19] More, History, reprinted in Kendall, The Great Debate, 103.
Contact me at planosoprano@gmail.com.