vable on suspicion of a design to
enslave his people." In England the work of slavery was being quietly
wrought, hints the great lawyer, through the law. "There will never be
wanting some pretence for deciding in the king's favour; as that equity is
on his side, or the strict letter of the law, or some forced
interpretation of it: or if none of these, that the royal prerogative
ought with conscientious judges to outweigh all other considerations." We
are startled at the precision with which More describes the processes by
which the law-courts were to lend themselves to the advance of tyranny
till their crowning judgement in the case of ship-money. But behind these
judicial expedients lay great principles of absolutism, which partly from
the example of foreign monarchies, partly from the sense of social and
political insecurity, and yet more from the isolated position of the
Crown, were gradually winning their way in public opinion. "These
notions"--More goes boldly on in words written, it must be remembered,
within the precincts of Henry's court and beneath the eye of
Wolsey--"these notions are fostered by the maxim that the king can do no
wrong, however much he may wish to do it; that not only the property but
the persons of his subjects are his own; and that a man has a right to no
more than the king's goodness thinks fit not to take from him." It is only
in the light of this emphatic protest against the king-worship which was
soon to override liberty and law that we can understand More's later
career. Steady to the last in his loyalty to Parliaments, as steady in his
resistance to mere personal rule, it was with a smile as fearless as the
smile with which he penned the half-jesting words of his Utopia that he
sealed them with his blood on Tower Hill.

CHAPTER III
WOLSEY
1514-1529

[Sidenote: Wolsey's rise]

"There are many things in the Commonwealth of Nowhere that I rather wish
than hope to see embodied in our own." It was with these words of
characteristic irony that More closed the first work which embodied the
dreams of the New Learning. Destined as they were to fulfilment in the
course of ages, its schemes of social, religious, and political reform
broke in fact helplessly against the temper of the time. At the moment
when More was pleading the cause of justice between rich and poor social
discontent was being fanned by new exactions and sterner laws into a
fiercer flame. While he was advocating