The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  More returned to Bruges with Wolsey in the middle of August 1521, and here the covert discussions with Charles began. In Utopia the character of More argues that the royal servant’s duty is to lend good advice in order to guide affairs, tactfully and carefully, towards the honourable course. Raphael Hythlodaeus dismisses this as wishful thinking and suggests that a wise counsellor will simply be used as a disguise or cover for the wickedness and folly of others. It is impossible to be sure whether this was the situation in which More found himself at Bruges, but the evidence suggests that he was a willing or at least not unwilling accomplice in Wolsey’s designs. It was his obligation to obey the commands of his king, after all, and no one possessed a stronger sense of duty. Yet there is no reason to suppose that he believed his masters to be acting foolishly or wickedly. There was always a strong possibility that Wolsey would be able to arrange a truce between the two warring parties. His Treaty of London had, in any event, maintained peace for almost three years; it was the French themselves who, in the spring of 1521, had begun offensive action. More was not always favourably inclined towards that nation, as some of his Latin verses demonstrate, and he may not have been so naturally or instinctively predisposed to peace as, for example, Erasmus. Erasmus belonged to no country; More was always a Londoner and Englishman. To enter a secret alliance with the emperor, which would be put in action if the negotiations failed, could well have seemed the most effective way of curtailing French power and thereby securing a prolonged peace.

  More remained in Bruges after Wolsey’s departure in order to continue the negotiations with ‘the bodye of the Haunz’;20 there were the usual delays and prevarications and it seems that he left the city before any composition of the various disputes had been arranged. He rejoined Wolsey in Calais at the end of September and in the middle of the following month was despatched to England with ‘urgent causes of consideration’ to be delivered ‘by word of mouth’ to the king. It was a period of French military success and Wolsey was confronted by demands from Francis I to which he could not accede. He found time in his message to Henry, however, to commend More’s ‘laudable acquittal and diligent attendance’.21 More may have been too assiduous, since on his return he immediately lapsed into a tertian fever and suffered three or four ‘fittes’.22 He experienced the strangest symptoms, too, feeling himself to be ‘hott & cold’ all over his body at the same time, and his doctors could prescribe no certain remedy. But then his adopted daughter, Margaret Giggs, remembered reading of his condition in Galen’s De Differentiis Febrium, and eventually a remedy was found; with the help of his highly educated ‘school’, he had recovered by the middle of November.

  There had been lighter moments in his long mission away from home. He had taken with him his household fool, Henry Patenson, ‘a man of knowen wysdome in London and almost euery where ellys’,23 as More put it with a tincture of irony. More tells one story of him that provides an authentic vignette of late medieval city life. In Bruges it soon became apparent that Patenson was a ‘man of specyall wytte by hym selfe and vnlyke the comon sorte’, and some of the citizens (no doubt mainly children and apprentices) began to throw stones at him. Patenson gathered up the stones and then stood upon a bench, angrily proclaiming that everyone should leave the scene except those that had hurled the stones at him—then, he said, he could fire back at his known enemies. Unfortunately he had spoken in English and no one had understood what he meant. So the good people of Bruges merely laughed at him and began to stone him again. Whereupon he threw some back in retaliation, and broke the head of an apparently innocent bystander. Patenson went up to the man and asked him to bear his injuries bravely, because he had been given fair warning.

  There was also the episode of ‘Dauy a douche man’,24 whom More had retained and who ‘wayted vpon me at Bruges’. He had told More that his English wife had died at Worcester two years before and recalled ‘his bytter prayours at her graue’. More relayed this touching information to his wife and, on the day Davy was to marry for the second time, a letter arrived from Alice in London. She informed More that the supposedly dead and buried Mrs Davy was alive and had come to Bucklersbury searching for her errant husband. More summoned Davy, about to commit bigamy, and read out the letter to him. The rest can be put in More’s words.

  ‘Mary, mayster, that letter sayth me thinke that my wyfe is a lyue.’

  ‘Ye beste, that she is.’

  ‘Mary, then I am well a payed, for she is a good woman.’

  ‘Ye, but why art thou such a noughty wreched man, that thou woldeste here wedde a nother? Dyddest not thou say she was dede?’

  ‘Yes mary, men of worcester told me so.’

  ‘Why, thou false beste, dydest not thou tell me and all my house that thou were at her graue thy selfe?’

  ‘Yes mary, so I was. But I could not loke in, ye wote well.’25

  The conclusion of this episode is not known, but More would have loved this kind of sharp retort. There is one last story from his residence at Bruges, which has often been cited as an example of More’s own quickness of wit. A member of the emperor’s court put up a notice, stating that he would dispute with any member of the English delegation on matters of law. More promptly published his question for debate—‘An averia capta in withernamia sunt irreplegiabilia?’,26 which can be translated, equally unfathomably, as ‘Can cattle captured in withernam be irrepleviable?’ It is a highly technical question about the distraint of livestock in legal proceedings, and of course the putative disputant was quite unable to respond to the challenge. As a result he became an object of ridicule. Or so the story goes. But there is no reason to believe that a Dutch doctor or jurist would not have understood the concept of ‘withernam’; it may be that More posed the question because it had some bearing on his negotiations with the Hanseatic merchants, and was thus embarrassingly unanswerable. In either case it demonstrates that superior sarcasm which he could readily deploy. It may have been in these somewhat combative circumstances that More defended his native language. Ambassadors from various countries had been praising their own tongues and condemned English as the worst. More challenged them to utter a sentence in their own language, which he then perfectly imitated. ‘Now I will speak but three words, and I durst ieopard a wager that none here shall pronounce it after me.’ The phrase was ‘Thwaits thwackt him with a thwitle’.27 Who else but More could say it?

  By the time he had recovered from his fever he was involved in early preparations for the war with France. In the spring of 1522 Wolsey ordered a great survey of the financial as well as military resources of England, while at the same time More was concerned with the internment of French enemy aliens. Charles V arrived in order to consolidate the treaties between himself and Henry, and at the beginning of June both men were met in London by ‘diverse pagents’, with the crafts standing in the array of their liveries and ‘the freers, priestes, and clerkes, standinge in copes, with crosses, sensures and candlesticks’28 all the way from London Bridge to Cheapside. More was chosen by the City authorities to deliver ‘an eloquent Oration’29 in praise of the two monarchs and in celebration of the ‘comfort it was to their subjects to see them in such amity’,30 for which service he was granted £10 for the purchase of a velvet gown. Warfare was about to begin, but there was another and perhaps more dangerous enemy with whom More was soon to be engaged.

  CHAPTER XXI

  I AM LIKE RIPE SHIT

  HEN Martin Luther proclaimed his theses at Wittenberg he was announcing, too, the triumph of his own self-awareness. The era of Protestantism, as it has been called, was inaugurated by the drama of one man’s spiritual torment. It began when a bolt of lightning hurled him to the ground and, as he lay prostrate in the thunderstorm, instilled in him a great fear. ‘Help me, St Anne!’ he called out. ‘I want to become a monk!’1 Stefan Zweig described Luther as ‘the only genuinely dramatic nature in German history’, and the episodes of his religious reawakening have all the lurid emotionalism of that moment
when, while participating in the Mass, he fell to the floor of the choir and raved as if in the grip of demonic possession. ‘Non sum!’ he cried out. ‘Non sum!’ It is not clear whether, in his frenzy, he spoke in German or in Latin; in English we may take it to mean ‘I am not’ or ‘I am not present’. His was a character doomed always to live in lightning. In that respect he is strangely similar to another great German visionary, Jakob Boehme, the cobbler from Upper Lusatia who saw a vision of the universe in the sunlight reflected upon a pewter dish. Boehme was reviled and rejected by the burghers of the German cities, but his essential message remained intact ‘to show how man may create a kingdom of light within himself’.2 The spirit of Luther’s writing, too, with its reliance upon paradox and dramatic conflict as well as its attentiveness to the whole struggling process of human becoming, anticipates the style of such German philosophers as Hegel and Heidegger.

  Yet how different Luther was from Thomas More; they might even be cited as the two great figures representing the ‘medieval’ and the ‘modern’ worlds. Luther disobeyed his father completely and irrevocably, while More remained the model of filial piety. Luther abandoned the law in order to enter a monastery, where More had forsaken the Charterhouse for Lincoln’s Inn. More moved easily within any institution or hierarchy to which he became attached; Luther was seized by violent fits of remorse and panic fear in any fixed or formal environment. It is hard to imagine More screaming out ‘Non sum!’ during the Mass. More obeyed and maintained all the precepts of the law; Luther wished to expel law altogether from the spiritual life. More believed in the communion of the faithful, living and dead, while Luther affirmed the unique significance of the individual calling towards God. More believed in the traditional role of miracles; Luther saw visions. More’s irony and detachment were very different from the intense seriousness and self-absorption of Luther. Yet one characteristic was held by them in common, even if it served only to embitter and inflame their dispute; as Luther confessed, ‘he heard God’s voice in his father’s words’.3 If one were to write the psychopathology of the Reformation, one might begin by examining the different reactions to that paternal voice as exemplified in the careers of Luther and More.

  Luther’s final revelation came to him in the Tower Room of Wittenberg, where a verse of St Paul led him ineluctably to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. It was at this point, of course, that he involved the world. The history of the events which led directly to the publication of Luther’s ninety-five theses is well known; but his central assault upon the role and privileges of the Church was only just beginning and, three years after the events at Wittenberg, he published three pamphlets which entirely changed the religious discourse of the period. In the summer of 1520 appeared An Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, in which he urged the temporal powers to lead and guide their communities outside the Roman jurisdiction. Three months later he published a short treatise, Concerning the Babylonish Captivity of the Church, in which he attacked the sacramental system of the Catholic faith and insisted that the gospels lent their authority only to baptism, confession and communion. His last and shortest work in this year of invective was entitled On the Liberty of a Christian Man and provided a succinct if startling account of his speculations on faith, free will and good works—with the doctrine that true freedom can be obtained by faith alone. Man receives grace through divine mercy, vouchsafed by faith, and good works do not earn merit or salvation. With the publication of these three pamphlets Luther lost the sympathy of those, such as Erasmus, who had seen him as a possible ally. He had gone too far in his attack upon the Church’s authority, and its sacramental system, to be considered a humanist reformer. Pope Leo X issued a bull threatening excommunication, Exsurge Domine, which Luther publicly burned in Wittenberg together with some books of canon law. This has been taken by many historians to mark the first moment of the Reformation. Then, in January 1521, Luther was solemnly excommunicated and ipso facto damned.

  The ecclesiastical authorities in England were already aware of the Lutheran heresies; there were reports, indeed, that Lutheran doctrine was being disseminated among the students of Oxford and Cambridge. Cuthbert Tunstall had written to Thomas Wolsey from Worms, where Luther publicly defied both pope and emperor, imploring him to forbid the importation of the heretic’s books into England ‘lest thereby might ensue great trouble to the realm and Church of England’.4 The king himself took a central role in combating the new heresy; in 1518, the year after Luther had promulgated his ninety-five theses, Henry had started work on a book condemning the message of Wittenberg but he had never completed it. In the opening months of 1521, in the full glare of Luther’s defiance, Henry set to work again upon a treatise in defence of the Seven Sacraments entitled Assertio septem Sacramentorum adversus Martin. Lutherum. It was a reply to the second of Luther’s pamphlets, published in the previous year, and set a royal seal upon the attempts of the English clergy to extirpate the teachings of the erstwhile monk. It is not at all certain that Henry himself composed every word, but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he wrote most of it; he was a good Latinist and a not uninformed theologian. It is more likely, however, that arguments and materials were suggested to him by divines such as John Fisher and Edward Lee; at some point the papers were given to Thomas More for perusal, and he described his role as that of ‘a sorter-out and placer of the principal matters contained therein’.5 He put the book in order, therefore, but he also offered comments of his own; he advised the king, for example, to subdue his enthusiasm for papal primacy ‘and his authority more slenderly touched’.6 The king refused to do so in an exchange which, a few years later, would take on a darkly ironic aspect. On 12 May 1521 Thomas Wolsey walked in stately procession to the churchyard of St Paul’s, where, in front of a crowd numbering some thirty thousand according to one contemporary account, the books of Luther were ritually despatched into the flames of a great bonfire. John Fisher delivered a sermon on the pestilence of the new opinions, and Wolsey held in his hand the unfinished manuscript of the king’s own polemic against Luther. Catholic England had responded with horror and outrage to the reformer.

  When Henry’s book was completed it was presented to Pope Leo X, with a solemn oration professing that there was ‘no nation which more impugns this monster, and the heresies broached by him’;7 the pontiff deemed it good and rewarded Henry, ‘this great Prince’, with the title of ‘Fidei defensor’. Martin Luther was not slow in presenting his opponent with a less welcome gift; he wrote a diatribe against Henry and, in defence of his own beliefs, did not scruple to describe the king as a pig, dolt and liar who deserved, among other things, to be covered in excrement.8 Thomas More, as councillor attendant and royal servant, now entered the imbroglio. John Fisher was already composing a grand theological tract against Luther, but More was given a simpler task. He was ordered to reply on behalf of his master in the same vitriolic terms, trading text for text and insult for insult. It was a role not necessarily to his taste and he went to elaborate lengths to concoct pseudonyms for this Responsio ad Lutherum. He created a sub-plot in which the author of the book was a Spanish scholar, horrified by Luther’s insolence and impiety; but some months later he altered his plan and the writer of the Responsio was named as ‘Gvilielmvs Rosseus’ or William Ross. There were various prefatory letters to add substance and detail to this subterfuge, which seems to have been designed only to shield Thomas More. Could the celebrated exponent of the new learning admit to composing what one eighteenth-century divine called ‘the greatest heap of nasty language that perhaps was ever put together’?9 Could a prominent royal servant and diplomat be revealed as ‘having the best knack of any man in Europe at calling bad names in good Latin’?10 It was not to be thought of.

  More began Responsio ad Lutherum in February 1523, six months after Luther’s assault upon the king had been published. He wrote a first version quickly—perhaps within six weeks—but then revised, and added to, a final d
raft which was published at the end of the year. The delay in publication may have been for political as well as stylistic reasons; there was talk of Luther recanting, of Erasmus launching an attack upon him and of the emperor controlling his unruly subject. More profited from the delay by consulting with a German monk recently arrived in London, Thomas Murner, who was thoroughly acquainted with Luther’s opinions. It has even been suggested that Murner wrote some of the Responsio, but this is highly unlikely. That he inspired particular passages, however, is certain. More also took the opportunity of clarifying his own opinions on the nature of the Church and of the papacy, and of re-evaluating the traditions of his faith in order properly to defend them. One long addition to the first version of Responsio marks an advance in More’s ecclesiology that would have immense consequences for his later career. He had been discussing the matter of papal primacy with his Italian friend Antonio Bonvisi, and had at first argued that the papacy was ‘inventyd of men and for a polytical ordre, and for the more quyetnes of the ecclesiasticall bodye, than by the very ordynance of Chryste’. After some days of study and thought, however, he changed his mind. He returned to Bonvisi and admitted that he had been wrong and that the papacy was indeed of divine origin; it ‘holdyth up all’.11 This was the rock upon which More would eventually be wrecked.