?S7 



MOKE, SIB THOMAS. 



MORELL, THOMAS, D.D. 



338 



to show the greatest marks of favour to More, and, as a proof of Lis 

 esteem, appointed him, in 1525, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. 



On the downfal of Wolsey, More was made chancellor, on the 25th 

 of October 1529. He discharged the duties of his new dignity with 

 the greatest impartiality and integrity, and was never accused by his 

 bitterest enemies of any corrupt exercise of power. The only charge 

 ever brought against him was first promulgated by Fox, in his 

 ' Martyrology,' and copied by Burnet, in his ' History of the Refor- 

 mation.' According to these writers, More was guilty of great cruelty 

 in persecuting the Protestants ; but we have, on the contrary, the 

 testimony of Erasmus, that " whilst More was chancellor no man was 

 put to death for these pestilent dogmas," which is confirmed by 

 More's express declarations in his 'Apology,' published in 1533, after 

 his downfal from power, when he was surrounded by enemies, and 

 his assertions, if false, could have been easily contradicted. 



More continued chancellor till the 16th of May 1532. Henry had 

 doubtless advanced More to the chancellorship with the hope that he 

 would assist him in his divorce, and marriage with Anne Boleyn, and 

 therefore pressed him strongly for his opinion on the subject. But 

 More was sincerely attached to the Roman Catholic Church ; he 

 looked with a certain degree of horror upon a project which was 

 denounced by the supreme head of the Church, and therefore begged 

 Henry to excuse him from giving an opinion. This was granted for 

 the time ; but as it was evident that Henry had determined to effect the 

 divorce, and would soon require the active co-operation of his chan- 

 cellor, More aked and obtained permission to retire from the office. 

 From this time Henry, who never seems to have recollected any 

 former friendship when bis purposes were in the least degree thwarted, 

 appears) to have resolved upon the destruction of his old favourite. 

 More was originally included in the bill of attainder which was passed 

 against Elizabeth Barton and her accomplices; but his innocence in 

 this case was so clear, that his name was afterwards omitted. The 

 court party however soon found an opportunity of gratifying their 

 vindictive master. By a law passed in the session 1553-4 it was made 

 high treason, by writing, print, deed, or act, to do anything to the pre- 

 judice, fie. of the king's lawful matrimony with Queen Anne; and it 

 was also provided that all persons should take an oath to maintain the 

 whole contents of tlio statute. At the end of the session commission- 

 era were appointed to administer the oath, and on the 15th of April 

 1534, More was summoned before them to take it This More 

 declined doing, but at the same time offered to swear that he would 

 maintain the order of succession to the throne as established by par- 

 liament. In consequence of his refusing to take this oath, More was 

 committed to the Tower; and in the same year two statutes were 

 passed to attaint More and Fisher [FisnER] of misprision of treason, 

 with the punishment of imprisonment and loss of goods. More re- 

 mained in prison during thirteen months, during which time several 

 efforts were made to induce him to take the oath and also to subscribe 

 to the king's ecclesiastical supremacy ; but as he refused to do to, he 

 wan, at the end of that time, brought to trial for high treason. He 

 appears to have been indicted under the statute alluded to above, 

 which made it high treason to do anything to the prejudice of Henry's 

 lawful marriage with Queen Anne, and also for refusing to admit the 

 ecclesiastical supremacy ; and although the evidence against 

 him completely failed, he was found guilty and condemned to death. 

 Ho was beheaded on tlie Oth of July 1535, and met his fate with 

 intrepidity and even cheerfulness. 



More's character was singularly faultless. His sweetness of temper 

 and amiable disposition are frequently mentioned by his contem- 

 poraries. His piety was unaffected and sincere ; and it was his love 

 of truth alone which occasioned his death. In private life his conduct 

 was moat exemplary ; he was a kind husband, an affectionate father, 

 and a faithful friend. Erasmus, who often visited his house, says, 

 that " with him you might imagine yourself in the academy of Plato. 

 ll'it I should do injustice to his house by comparing it to the academy 

 of Plato, where numbers and geometrical figures, and sometimes 

 moral virtues, were the subjects of discussion : it would be more just 

 to call it n school and an exercise of the Christian religion. All its 

 inhabitants, male and female, applied their leisure to liberal studies 

 and profitable reading, although piety was their first care. No 

 wrangling, no aogry word, was heard in it; no one was idle; every 

 one did his duty with alacrity, and not without a temperate cheer- 

 i." (Translated by Sir J. Mackintosh, in ' Life of Sir T. More,' 

 p. 15.) More was married twice ; first to Jane Colt, the daughter of 

 a gentleman of Kesex, who left a son and three daughters ; and after- 

 wards to Alice Middleton, a widow seven years older than himself. 

 The last male descendant of Sir T. More was Thomas More, a Jesuit, 

 whp wan principal of the College of Jesuits at Brugea, and died at 

 Bath in 1795. 



The English works of Sir T. More were collected and published at 

 London in 1557, and his Latin works at Louvain in 1556. His letters 

 to Erasmus are printed in the collection of Krasmus 8 letters pub- 

 lished at London, 1642. His 'Utopia' has been translated into 

 h by Hobynson, London, 1551, by Bishop Burnrt, and more 

 recently by Arthur Caylcy, Lond., 1808. 



The Life of Sir T. More has been written by his non-in-law, Roper, 

 who married his favourite daughter Margaret ; by his great-grandson 

 T. More; by Hoddeston, London, 1852 ; by Cayley ; and by Sir James 

 BIOO. Drv, VOL. iv. 



Mackintosh, in 'Lives of Eminent British Statesmen," published in 

 Dr. Lanlner's ' Cabinet Cyclopaedia.' 



MOREAU, JEAN VICTOR, a general who rose to celebrity in the 

 wars of the French revolution, was born iu 1763, at Morlaix in 

 Brittany, of highly respectable parents, who designed him for the 

 legal profession. But at the age of eighteen years, he had conceived 

 such a passion for military service, that he enlisted as a private 

 soldier ; and though his father purchased his discharge, and sent him 

 to study law at Rennes, where he soon made himself conspicuous and 

 popular in defending the privileges of the provincial parliament against 

 the government, he never cordially followed this profession. When 

 therefore the Revolution burst forth, his spirit also broke its fetters ; 

 and, accepting the command of a volunteer legion of the Breton youth, 

 he joined at its head the army of the North. From that hour he 

 devoted himself so ardently to the science and practice of arm?, that 

 he soon attracted the favourable notice of Pichegru, and rose iu two 

 years, by his recommendation, to the rank of general of division. In 

 this capacity, in the campaign of 1794, he signally distinguished him- 

 self at the head of a separate corps of 25,000 men, by the rapid 

 reduction of several strong places in Flanders. Moreau himself was 

 politically attached to the Girondists : yet, though the Jacobins 

 brought his unoffending father to the guillotine, he continued to 

 serve under the government of that detestable faction until its over- 

 throw. 



After assisting Pichegru in the conquest of Holland, Moreau was 

 appointed commander-in-chief of the army of the Rhine and Moselle, 

 and opened tho campaign of 1796 by the defeat of the Austrian 

 general Wurmser, whom he drove across the Rhine, and pursued into 

 Germany. The Archduke Charles of Austria, who attempted to 

 arrest his course, met, for some time, with no better success; until 

 the Austrians were so largely reinforced, that Moreau was compelled 

 to yield to number?, and he then finished this memorable campaign 

 by a masterly retreat through the defiles of the Black Forest, in 

 which, though assailed on all sides by a hostile peasantry, and with a 

 superior army hanging on his rear, he triumphantly fought his way to 

 the Rhine, and covered himself with more glory than by his preceding 

 victories. At the commencement of the next campaign Moreau was 

 placed in a most embarrassing situation, by the discovery, through 

 some intercepted despatches, that his old friend Pichegru was iu 

 correspondence with the Bourbon princes. He concealed the fact for 

 four months, uutil Pichegru had been arrested on other information ; 

 when he made a show also of denouncing the plot to the republican 

 government. But he found himself BO justly an object of suspicion, 

 that he solicited and obtained leave to retire from the army. His 

 services however were too necessary to be long dispensed with; and 

 he was again actively employed, both in Italy, where he distinguished 

 himself in the campaign of 1799, so disastrous to the French, aud also 

 on the Rhine, whither ho was recalled to oppose tho Austrians. 



On Bonaparte's return from Egypt, Moreau proffered and rendered 

 him his services in effecting the revolution of the 18th of Brurnaire, 

 and almost immediately afterwards received the command of the 

 armies of the Danube and Rhine; at whose head, at the close of tho 

 year 1800, he won from the Austrians the sanguinary and decisive 

 battle of Hohenlinden. The first consul loaded hitu, on his return to 

 Paris, with eulogy ; but Bonaparte aud Moreau were each too eager 

 on tho pame career of ambition to pursue it without dangerous 

 collision. Bonaparte affected to speak of the victor of Hohenlindtn as 

 "the retreating general;" Moreau retaliated with bitter justice by 

 terming the first consul "a general at ten thousand men a day." Aud 

 when he was invited to become a member of Napoleon's new legion 

 of honour, he opeuly refused, with the contemptuous sarcasm " The 

 fool ! does ho not know that I have been enrolled in the ranks of 

 honour these twelve years ! " 



But the impatient spirit of Moreau was no match for the ascendant 

 genius and fortune of his rival ; and in the beginning of 1804 a charge 

 which pretended to implicate him in the royalist conspiracy of 

 Pichegru and Georges Cadoudal was sufficient to decide his fate. Ho 

 was condemned, without a shadow of evidence, to an imprisonment 

 for two years, which, by his own request, was commuted into banish- 

 ment. He retired to America, where he lived tranquilly, with his 

 wife and child, for several years, until, in an evil hour for his fame 

 and his fortunes, he accepted, in 1813, a proposal from, the Russian 

 Emperor Alexander to assist the allied armies by his counsels against 

 his country. He had scarcely arrayed himself in their ranks when he 

 was mortally wounded at the battle of Dresden, and died in a few 

 day?, after bearing the amputation of both legs without a groan. 



MORELL, THOMAS, was born at Eton in 1703. Ho studied first 

 at Eton College, then at Cambridge, where he became a fellow of 

 King's College, and in 1743 took his degree of D.D. He was a dis- 

 tinguished classical scholar; ho edited several tragedies of ^Eschylus 

 and Euripides with notes, and made English translations of the ' Pro- 

 metheus ' of the former, and of the ' Hecuba' of the latter. He also 

 edited improved editions of the Greek Lexicon of Hederich, and of 

 Ainsworth's Latin Dictionary. His other works are 1, 'Thesaurus 

 Gneca) Pocseos, five Lexicon Grceco-Prosodiacum,' 4to, 1762; repub- 

 lished since, with considerable additions, by Dr. Maltby, Cambridge, 

 1815 ; 2, 'Annotations on Locke's Essay on the Human Understand- 

 ing,' 8vo, 1793; 3, 'A Sermon on the Death of Queen Caroline, 



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