he lay in the Tower of London at the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign,
condemned for his ruthless enforcement of the king’s feudal rights as a
leading member of Henry VII’s ‘council learned in the law’. Sir Edward
Coke would cite him as one who had subverted the ‘ancient and funda-
mental law’ of the land contained in Magna Carta, but Dudley eulogizes
the young king as one who ‘shall revive the common wealth within this
realm’ and restore ‘the prosperous estate of my natural country’, firstly
by tending the ‘root of Justice without which the tree of comon welth
cannot continue’. Another root is ‘the concord of the estates of our
sovereign lord, the chivalry and the commonalty’; the nobility must
learn to be good neighbours and landlords, the commonalty to avoid
eating the rotten fruit of ‘lewd enterprise’, which makes them grasping
and arrogant and prone to pamper their wives.^19
Thomas More’s Utopia, published in Latin at Louvain in 1516 and
translated into English by Ralph Robinson in 1551, uses the humanist
project of a search for the ‘best state of a commonwealth’ (optimus
reipublicae status) to satirize contemporary society and give the notion
new depth. This great but elusive work can be so subversive because it
purports to describe, in the form of a humanist dialogue, the ways of a
far-away kingdom reported by Ralph Hythloday, a traveller to the New
World. The moresand institutaof Utopia, which Robinson translates as
‘the manners, customs, laws, and ordinances... of that weal-public’—
the common ownership of property, rational planning, education in
civility, and equal worth of citizens—are in fact a reproach to the
corrupt and intellectually decadent ruling elites of Europe, where ‘what
are called Respublicaetoday are just a kind of conspiracy of the rich’.
At the beginning of the work Hythloday speaks of a visit he once made
to the household of Cardinal Morton, Henry VII’s chancellor and
confidant (in which the young More had in fact been brought up) and
his fruitless attempt to persuade ‘a certain layman expert in the laws of
the country’ that the poor in England should be helped rather than con-
demned for their petty thieving.^20 (It is here in book 1 that occur the
famous passages on social justice, the evils of private property, and the
way enclosures mean that ‘sheep eat up men’, which would provide an
304 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^19) The Tree of Commonwealth: A Treatise written by Edmund Dudley, ed. D. M. Brodie
(Cambridge UP, 1948), 22, 31, 34, 44–5, 48, 51.
(^20) Utopia, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, iv, ed. E. Surtz SJ and J. H. Hexter
(Yale UP, 1965), 47, 52, 54, 58, 60, 108, 236–41; cf. More’s Utopia, tr. Ralph Robinson
(London: Everyman’s Library, 1951), 13, 17, 18, 21–3, 53, 130–3; for commentary on Utopia
see: Surtz and Hexter (above); A. Fox, Thomas More, History and Providence(Oxford:
Blackwell, 1982), ch. 2; Q. Skinner, ‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopiaand the Language of
Renaissance Humanism’ in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed.
A. Pagden (Cambridge UP, 1987); B. Bradshaw, ‘Transalpine Humanism’, in The Cambridge
History of Political Thought 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns and M. Goldie (Cambridge UP,
1991), 110–13, 116–31.