inspiration for the group of preachers and writers in the middle years of
the sixteenth century known as ‘the commonwealth men’.)^21
The message of Utopiaseems to be that the best state of the common-
wealth is one not divided by pride and ambition and the pursuit of
empty honours but in which justice to the whole people is the first con-
sideration. In contrast to his contemporaries Machiavelli and Seysell,
More views the polity from the angle of the common welfare rather
than of the government of princes. That rulers should take counsel
before legislating was a commonplace of political thought. The state-
ment that, among the Utopians, ‘to take counsel on matters of common
interest outside the senate or the popular assembly’ was deemed a con-
spiracy between the governor and his officials ‘to change the state of the
commonwealth’ (statum reipublicae mutari), and thus a capital offence,
seems to reflect the stronger hold of a parliamentary tradition in the
English commonwealth.^22
Thomas Elyot’s commonwealth is dully conventional compared with
More’s. Elyot was a leading humanist with minimal training in the law
(though as a junior clerk of the king’s council between 1526 and 1530
he would have recorded the examination of defendants and witnesses in
the Court of Star Chamber), and in The book named The Governor,
published in 1531, he parades classical precepts and historical examples
for the moral, rather than political, education of ruling elites. That he
nevertheless starts from a discussion of ‘the signification of a public
weal’ and ‘why it is called in Latin Respublica’ shows the power of the
idea of the commonwealth in England. Philosophers had defined it ‘in
sundry wise’. Elyot’s own view is that: ‘A public weal is a body living,
compact or made of sundry estates and degrees of men, which is dis-
posed by the order of equity and governed by the rule and moderation
of reason’, and as an ordered hierarchy of wealth and condition is
notto be called a commonweal, where ‘everything should be to all men
in common’. The book ends with considerations on ‘good counsel’:
‘consultation is but of a small effect wherein the universal estate of
the public weal do not occupy the more part of the time, and in that
generality every particular estate be not diligently ordered’.^23
Comparing and criticizing states of commonwealths 305(^21) For the ‘commonwealth men’, see Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought
(Cambridge UP, 1978), i. 226–30.
(^22) More, Complete Works, iv. 124–5, 202–9, 217–21.
(^23) Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London:
Everyman’s Library, 1962), 1, 240–1; A. Fox and J. Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age:
Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 25, 43–5, 52–62,
138–40; Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, i. 214–16, 234–5, 237–8, 249.