It is likely to have been in this period that Henry made his famous visit to More’s house in Chelsea, where he walked in the gardens with his arm around his counsellor’s neck. The king’s affection may or may not have been genuine on that occasion, but More probably shuddered at the touch; scrupulous and reticent as he was, he would have wished to keep his distance in order to preserve his integrity. He also had doubts of a more general kind, doubts which he expressed while walking along the riverside at Chelsea with William Roper.
‘Now would to our Lord, son Roper, upon condition that three things were well established in Christendom, I were put in a sack and here presently cast into the Thames.’
‘What great things be those, sir, that should move you so to wish?’
‘In faith, son, they be these. The first is, that where the most part of Christian princes be at mortal wars, they were all at an universal peace. The second, that where the Church of Christ is at this present sore afflicted with many errors and heresies, it were well settled in a perfect uniformity of religion. The third, that where the King’s matter of his marriage is now come in question, it were to the glory of God and quietness of all parts brought to a good conclusion.’17
Warfare, heresy and the annulment, then, were the three concerns which moved together in More’s mind. Although it would be too much to claim that he foresaw the Reformation and its consequences he had at least noticed a dangerous tendency in English policy which it was his duty to avert. At a slightly later date Wolsey himself was to speak of ‘infinite and imminent perils’,18 but More had already glimpsed them. That is why his conduct over the next two years, before he was appointed Lord Chancellor, must be seen steadily and as a whole. The king had asked More to engage in further study of his ‘great matter’. The central question concerned the extent of papal power and, in particular, of the ability of the Pope to waive the injunction of Leviticus. One of Henry’s arguments consisted of the claim that divine law had made his marriage abhorrent to God and that no pope had the authority to abrogate that law. The Pope had, in any case, granted annulments in the past; Henry’s request was not unwarrantable and there was no reason to believe that it would be denied. Papal authority was not yet at the centre of the controversy, although in the end it did become the principal issue. In a letter to Thomas Cromwell, some years later, More claimed that ‘by this continuaunce of these x yere synnys’19 he had been considering the question of ‘the prymatie of the Pope’.
He had addressed the problem in Responsio ad Lutherum, but only in a partial fashion; he was already well acquainted with the behaviour of bad or weak popes and may at one stage have inclined towards a ‘constitutional’ or ‘pluralist’ view of church authority, with the Pope himself as primus inter pares. But eventually papal supremacy became for More a question of faith. It was not for him, therefore, a minor or peripheral matter. He read the New Testament, as well as the writings of such holy doctors of the Church as Jerome, Cyprian and Gregory; he also examined the records of the general councils. The conclusions he then reached after his study were those which he soon applied to all other matters of religious conscience. Papal primacy had been instituted or established ‘by the corps of Christendom’;20 it was manifest through ‘the general counsell of the whole body of Christendome’ or the ‘whole catholike church lawfully gathered together in a generall counsell’,21 which was itself governed by ‘the spirit of God’. Here is the creed of a man who was guided all his life by the powers of institutions and hierarchies. He was also, as a late medieval lawyer, an exponent of customary as well as statutory law; that is why he believed in the power of the inherited traditions and beliefs of the Church. On the matter of papal primacy, in particular, it had been ‘corroborate by continuall succession more than the space of a thowsand yere at the leist’.22 In that sense it did not matter ‘whither the prymacie were instituted immediately by God or ordeyned by the Church’;23 it had become a matter of consensus and authoritative tradition.
But More knew well enough the limitations of any theory. In the great debate between king and pope, for example, two forms of authority were placed in confrontation without any certain result. The Pope prevaricated, owing to the unfortunate international situation which had left him a virtual prisoner of Catherine’s nephew, and there were weary months of messages and meetings. In the summer of 1528 Cardinal Campeggio had been dispatched from Rome, in order to establish a legatine court in London which would decide the matter of the king’s annulment. But he did not arrive in England until the autumn, so slow was his progress, and there followed a further eight months of negotiations. The career of Wolsey seemed linked to the result of the case, however, and a ‘memorandum’ was drawn up for the king’s attention by a noble courtier, Thomas Darcy, which declared ‘that never legate nor cardinal be in England’ and ‘that it be tried whether the putting down of all the abbeys be lawful and good or no’.24 Although not directly involved in these events, Thomas More remained alert to every movement and decision—the attempt to drive Catherine into a nunnery, the appointment of various scholars and lawyers to defend her in the legatine court, the sudden disappearance and appearance of significant documents, the warnings of Wolsey to the Pope that the Church in England would be destroyed, the pious if self-serving public declarations of Henry, the veiled threats to accuse Catherine of sedition, the rumours of the Pope’s death which then proved to be unfounded. The fury and impatience of the king were everywhere apparent, dominating all aspects of English policy.
This was the setting for a great drama at Blackfriars, which materially affected the destruction of the Church in England and helped to decide More’s own fate. The legatine court, established to assess the validity of the royal marriage, was formally opened on the last day of May 1529 in the parliament chamber of Blackfriars, while the king and queen were residing close by in Bridewell Palace; a wooden bridge over the Fleet River connected the two great establishments. The parties involved, Henry and Catherine, were summoned to appear before the court on Friday 18 June. There then followed, through that hot summer, a series of scenes and tableaux which were worthy of the attention that Shakespeare later devoted to them in All Is True. Two days before she was asked to appear at the court, Catherine summoned eight bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury in order to declare before them that she wished to revoke the whole matter to Rome. More did not attend this solemn meeting, but there is good reason to suppose that he was present in the Blackfriars court two days later when the queen delivered a formal protest against the process she was being forced to endure. There was further business of ‘protestation’ and ‘appeal’, so the cardinals asked her to return three days later when they would deliver their judgments on the matters laid before them.
A large audience of courtiers and interested parties witnessed the events of the following Monday when Henry, Catherine and Wolsey all appeared in the court at Blackfriars. Henry was beneath a ‘cloth of estate’ and Catherine sat some distance away; before them were the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other bishops, while on opposite sides had been arranged their various counsels. A witness recorded the beginning of the drama.
‘King Harry of England, come into the court!’
‘Here, my lords.’
‘Catherine Queen of England come into the court.’ She rose without replying, according to this contemporary witness, and walked over to the king. Then she knelt down at his feet and, ‘in broken English’,25 begged him for ‘pity and compassion’. ‘Wherein have I offended you?’ she asked. She went on to say that ‘I loved all those whome ye loved only for your sake’ and declared that she had been a virgin when she was betrothed to him.
The king lifted her up, but she fell upon her knees again; he is supposed to have declared that only his love for her had prevented him before from mentioning his doubts about the marriage and he added that, if the legatine court determined that it was valid, he would gladly and willingly be reunited with her. He lifted her up again and she left the cou
rt. On such a vivid occasion it is pardonable that contemporary observers should season their reports with a little hyperbole, but although surviving accounts differ on the number and order of speeches certain episodes are clear enough. Wolsey rose and begged the king to confirm that he, the cardinal, had never been ‘the chief mover or first inventor of this matter unto Your Majesty, for I am greatly suspected of all men herein’.26 The king graciously confirmed this fact, and himself delivered a speech upon the nature of his scruples about his marriage. But there was one less benign moment which repays attention if only because of its connection with More. John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, was Catherine’s counsel and supporter; he had already written to her, offering advice and encouragement, and played an altogether open part in the affair. This was precisely the role which More himself could not perform, but he supported Fisher’s stance. Both men were confined to the Tower and put to death for the same cause, six years after these events, and for that reason the small incident in Blackfriars is significant. At one point in the proceedings Fisher rose and indignantly denied that he had signed a document encouraging the king to put his case to the Pope. Henry was momentarily surprised but was then heard to say, ‘Well, well, it shall make no matter; we will not stand with you in argument herein, for you are but one man.’27 And how could one man withstand the might and majesty of the king?
The court at Blackfriars was to remain in session for another month, but some three weeks before its adjournment More was obliged once again to travel as an ambassador. All of Wolsey’s great schemes of power and influence were beginning to fall apart; Francis I and Charles V were moving towards a separate peace, and the exclusion of England would have been a considerable embarrassment for the cardinal who believed himself to be the power-broker of Europe. On the last day of June, More and Cuthbert Tunstall, with two other envoys, were dispatched to Cambrai with instructions to derive what advantage they might from a difficult situation. Cardinal Campeggio believed that they had also been ordered ‘to promote the interests of the Pope and the Holy See’;28 this may be seen as part of the great game being played out at Blackfriars. Wolsey was obliged to remain in London, tending the king’s ‘great matter’, but More and Tunstall were practised negotiators. They were both also famous and powerful men; More’s ‘diet’ each day, for example, was a munificent 26s 8d.
They had two principal duties on this embassy. They were to ensure that imperial debts to Henry continued to be paid and that the trade between England and the Low Countries was not threatened. Their letters from Cambrai survive only in fragments, but the tenor of negotiations becomes clear in a careful reading. ‘And as for lending of any more monay … hit shuld be no wisdome … And aftre moche reasonyng on both sides of these two maters, noo thing agreing in any point … Whereunto we aunswered that we had great maruaile [marvel] that they shuld make stikking or make any question therin … we gaue them a shorte and plaine aunswere … a resolute answere … shuld thinke it straunge … And in this case standeth the affairs …’29
In one of his dialogues More employs the terms of a game of chess—‘half a checke in this point … matyd me … it is but a blynde mate’30—to chart the course of a debate. The same metaphor can be used to describe the negotiations at Cambrai, which proceeded by delicate manoeuvre and deliberate delay. All the parties realised that trade between England and the Low Countries should not be interrupted, but Henry’s honour was also at stake. It was important that moneys owing to him from previous treaties were still paid and that England’s high place in the game of nations was maintained. There were frustrations and difficulties, as the letters of the envoys demonstrate, and certain negotiations between the representatives of Francis and Charles were not divulged to More and his partners. Separate agreements were made between Henry and the major participants, however, and a ‘general peace’ between all the nations was proclaimed at the beginning of August. It could not be said that England’s role in previous years had been altogether glorious, but More and his colleagues had successfully salvaged some honour from the wreckage of Wolsey’s grand schemes.
This diplomatic mission was of some significance to More, since it was the only public event which he chose to commemorate upon the tombstone in the Chelsea church where he hoped one day to rest. His epitaph recorded this occasion ‘when the leagues between the chief Princes of Christendom were renewed again and peace so long looked for restored to Christendom’.31 The league lasted for almost fifteen years and represented the best chance for the general peace which More and Erasmus, with the other humanist scholars, had earnestly anticipated since the beginning of the century. He mentioned one other honourable public duty in the course of his epitaph: he had always been ‘molestus’ or troublesome to heretics.
CHAPTER XXV
FOOLISH FRANTIC BOOKS
ORE had already been given permission to read heretical books but, by the spring of 1528, the dissemination of these forbidden texts could not be halted. Tyndale’s English version of the New Testament, in particular, was a cause for concern; when it was ritually consigned to the flames in the autumn of 1526, the fire provoked controversy even among the faithful. Tyndale’s tendentious translation of such key terms as ‘presbyter’ and ‘ecclesia’ was too abstract a matter for most to understand, compared to the spectacle of the Scriptures being put to the torch. Yet hundreds of copies were still being smuggled into England from Antwerp, Worms and Cologne; they could be purchased in Coleman Street, or Honey Lane, or Hosier Lane, or the house of Simon Fish by the White Friars. The same Fish impersonated Wolsey at a disguising in Gray’s Inn, and was afterwards ‘highly rebuked and thretened’1 by the cardinal, who knew nothing of the young man’s proselytising. The episode suggests, if nothing else, how religious and political dissent might together ferment in those young men who, above all, desired change.
At the end of 1526 Tyndale caused to be printed his interpretation of Paul’s epistle to the Romans, in which he used that central text of the reformers to affirm Lutheran doctrines of grace and redemption. In the same period More wrote a letter to Erasmus, from the king’s palace at Greenwich, in which he pleaded with him to complete a work against Luther, of which only the first volume had been published; there is a sense of urgency about More’s entreaty that suggests he might also have been conveying the impatience of the king. But it is important to recognise, also, that for More and his colleagues this was still in large part an intellectual debate. Although there was no popular appetite for Lutheran doctrine—suspected ‘heretics’ were ostracised and derided in London—the ecclesiastical authorities feared that the sources of learning might be corrupted. A circle of Cambridge scholars met at the White Tavern (at least this was the name by which they were eventually known) in order to discuss and disseminate reformist ideas. Some of them—Coverdale, Ridley and Latimer—were to play so formative a role in later events that the importance which the authorities attached to the universities can readily be understood. There were also younger men among them who were fired by the prospects of change and reform; as More put it, ‘yonge scolers be somtyme prone to newe fantasyes’2 and become ‘newfangly mynded’.3
In the following year Wolsey and Tunstall took more deliberate action when a Cambridge scholar, Thomas Bilney, was brought for trial on the grounds of preaching heresy in London and elsewhere; he abjured and bore the faggot, but remained in prison for eleven months. More had interrogated a confederate of Thomas Bilney’s and had also attended the trial. He gives such circumstantial detail of the case that it is clear he was already engaged in what would now be called surveillance and entrapment among the leather-sellers, tailors, fishmongers and drapers of London. He envisaged small groups of people, perhaps three or four at each clandestine meeting, gathering at midnight in locked rooms, a ‘nyght scole’4 of evil and sedition. One of their number would read aloud from the Scriptures, or from texts smuggled into the city. Sometimes whole families worshipped together, but more often city merchants and apprentices wo
uld meet together in a ‘conventicle’ organised by a disaffected priest or scholar. We read, for example, of Thomas Geffrey, tailor; of John Medwall, a scrivener’s servant; of Matthew Ward, a merchant adventurer; and of Robert Ward, a shoemaker by Fleet Street; all of whom were arrested and forced to recant their heretical beliefs. John Foxe, in his Actes and Monuments, mentions approximately thirty Londoners who abjured and suffered public penance, but there were others. These small assemblies may be compared to the banned radical groups in late eighteenth-century London, as well as to the puritan millenarians of the 1640s, and capture the inherent spirit of civic revolt.
Within three months of Bilney’s trial, a concerted assault upon presumed heretics was conducted by More and his ecclesiastical colleagues. More wrote to the Oxford authorities, for example, and demanded that one ‘Henry the mancypull of Whyte Hall’ be put under close arrest and brought to him in London; he insisted at the same time that they ‘handle the matter so closelye that ther be of hys apprehension and sendyng vpp as lytyll knowleg abrode as may bee’.5 Such secrecy was necessary so that More could question the man without alerting any other Oxford ‘heretics’, who might fly or conceal their books. On the order of the council, More also personally searched the house of one of Tyndale’s patrons, Humphrey Monmouth, who later confessed that ‘al the lettres and treatyes that he sent me … I did burne them in my howse’.6 In the same period an Oxford scholar, Thomas Garrett, was arrested and questioned; as a result of these interrogations, the rooms of certain other scholars were searched and a hundred banned books were discovered. Six students were then summarily imprisoned for some months in the fish cellar of Cardinal College, where it is reported that three of them died. In London and Colchester, too, there was renewed activity among the hunters of heresy; Lollards, as well as members of a clandestine group of reformers known as the Christian Brethren, who disseminated Tyndale’s New Testament, were arrested and forced to abjure.
The Life of Thomas More Page 34
