§
“a man for all seasons”
This phrase is used by both Robert Whittington in 1520 and
by Erasmus, in Latin, in 1521. Here is the immediate context:
“More is a man of an angel’s wit and singular learning.
He is a man of many excellent virtues; I know not his fellow.
For where is the man (in whom is so many goodly virtues) of that gentleness,
lowliness, and affability, and as time requires, a man of marvelous
mirth and pastimes and sometime of steadfast gravity — a man for all
seasons.”
--Robert Whittington,
Vulgaria, 1520 1
“…it would be hard to find anyone who was more truly a man
for all seasons and all men…”
(…omnibus omnium horarum homo…: Here Erasmus alludes to
1 Corinthians 9:22, “I become all things to all men, that I
might save all.”)
--Erasmus, Letter to Guillaume Budé, 1521.
2
Dr. Clarence
H. Miller3 on "a man for all seasons" -- click
here
--Thomas More Conference, 5 November 2005
§ “I die the king’s
good servant, and God’s first.” (Translation
of the Paris Newsletter account, August 4, 1535: “qu’il mouroit
son bon serviteur et de Dieu premierement.”)
More describes
an important conversation about conscience which he had with King Henry
and to which he alludes in his last, brief statement, “I die the king’s
good servant and God’s first”:
"I had always, from the beginning [of my service to Henry
VIII, in 1518], truly conducted myself by looking first upon God and
next upon the King according to the lesson that his Highness taught me
at my first coming to his noble service, the most virtuous lesson that
ever prince taught his servant . . . ." (from the “Letter
to Margaret," June 3, 1535”)
". . . His Highness. . . made me [in 1529], as you well know,
his Chancellor of this realm. Soon after, his Grace asked me
yet again to look and consider his great matter, and well and indifferently
to ponder such things as I should find.... And nevertheless he graciously
declared unto me that he would in no wise that I should do or say anything
except that I should perceive my own conscience should serve me, and
that I should first look unto God and after God unto him, which most
gracious words was the first lesson also that ever his Grace gave me
at his first coming into his noble service." (from the “Letter to Cromwell,
March 5, 1534,” Selected Letters, 209)
For another version of both conversations, see More’s “Letter
to Wilson” (1534):
". . . . For other commandment had I never of his Grace in
good faith, saving that this knot his Highness added thereto that I
should therein look first unto God and after God unto him, which word
was also the first that his Grace gave me what time I came first into
his noble service and neither a more indifferent commandment nor a more
gracious lesson could there in my mind never King give counselor or any other
servant." (Selected Letters, 229)
1. (Ed. Beatrice White, with the Vulgaria of John Stanbridge,
Early Eng. Text Soc., O. S. (London, 1932), p. 187.
2. For the full text, see Collected Works
of Erasmus, Volume 8, Letter 1233, p. 297. Trans. R. A. B. Mynors,
University of Toronto Press, 1987-8.
3. Dr. Miller served
as Executive Editor of Yale UP's Complete Works of St. Thomas More.
