Each of those periods presents us in England with one political thinker of the highest rank whose utterances before the great change are cited in authority by progressives, while their later pronouncements or actions are cited with approbation by the opposing forces. There is nothing surprising about the change in political attitude which unexpected events produce in a Stephen Gardiner or a William Pitt; it is merely a divergence from the earlier course. But Burke and More give a _prima facie_ impression of a complete reversal of principle. “Miscalculation and inconsistency were the moving causes of the vicissitudes of Thomas More’s career”; so Mr. Sidney Lee has very recently written of him; as other critics have fallen back on the theory that Burke’s intellect went to pieces. Both these great men did, in fact, misinterpret the very startling events of which they were witness, partly because actual facts was misrepresented to them. Neither believed that a work-a-day world with established institutions could be accommodated to ideal polities where those institutions had never grown up. They had in practice to adapt their ideals to what they saw as hard facts. Hence they condemned in the concrete what they would have approved in the abstract. Yet both were close and acute reasoners, and probably neither would have admitted for a moment that he had deserted in later life a single principle which he had maintained at an earlier stage.
_From a Painting by_ HOLBEIN _in the National Portrait Gallery_]
But whether critics differ in their attempts to reconcile the More who wrote the “Utopia” with the Lord Chancellor More, or give up the attempt to explain the paradox as hopeless, the attractiveness and nobility of the man stand unchallenged, as his intellectual eminence is indisputable. It is impossible not to love and admire him. Of the other nine men treated in this volume, all have apologists more or less enthusiastic, but all have bitterly or contemptuously hostile critics. More is one of the few men that have left their mark on our history, who has won the tribute of universal affection and esteem.
Thomas More was born in London in 1478, seven years after Thomas Wolsey, and about the same length of time before Thomas Cromwell. There is a rather curious prevalence of the name Thomas among prominent men at this time, Cranmer being a fourth, and the youngest of the quartet. More’s father was a barrister, who later became a judge; a gentleman with a pleasant humour, a turn for economy, and conservative views. John More was married thrice, and seems to have been comfortably wived, being responsible for a witticism on the subject of matrimony such as usually emanates from men whose personal experience contradicts it. “Taking a wife,” said he, “is like putting your hand into a bag containing a number of snakes and one eel. You _may_ lay hold of the eel.” His son was not warned off the experiment, either by the jest or by his experience of step-mothers.