Appendix, A. (1)

Some particulars in the life of Sir Thomas More I am obliged to leave to more fortunate inquirers. They are, indeed, very minute; but they may appear to others worthy of being ascertained, as they appeared to me, from their connection with the life of a wise and good man.

The records of the Privy Council are preserved only since 1540, so that we do not exactly know the date of his admission into that body. The time when he was knighted (then a matter of some moment) is not known. As the whole of his life passed during the great chasm in writs for election, and returns of members of parliament, from 1477 to 1542, the places for which he sat, and the year of his early opposition to a subsidy, are unascertained;—notwithstanding the obliging exertion of the gentlemen employed in the repositories at the Tower, and in the Rolls’ chapel. We know that he was speaker of the House of Commons in 1523 and 1524. Browne Willis owns his inability to fix the place which he represented; but he conjectured it to have been “either Middlesex, where he resided, or Lancaster, of which duchy he was chancellor.” But that laborious and useful writer would not have mentioned the latter branch of his alternative, nor probably the former, if he had known that More was not Chancellor of the Duchy till two years after his speakership.