The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  But it would be wrong to suggest that there was some generally violent wave of reprisal or repression; those proved heretical were compelled to bear the faggot, or were placed in the stocks, but there were no burnings. The authorities were intent upon removing possible sources of heresy and were not engaged in stifling a popular movement. No such movement existed. The conditions of the time, in any case, were not propitious. In 1528, one of the ‘dere yeres’ when the corn was scarce and the bread dear, More was part of a commission appointed to search for grain supplies in barns or outhouses; he himself disclosed that he was feeding one hundred people each day at his house and farm in Chelsea.7 During that summer there were also virulent outbreaks of the plague and the sweating sickness; the courts at Westminster were suspended and the king fled. The whole time seemed out of joint, and it is significant that More should believe the ‘lakke of corne and catayle’ to be a ‘sore punishement’ from God ‘for the receypte of these pestylent bokes’ of heresy.8

  Yet still those books were smuggled into England. Jerome Barlowe’s The Burying of the Mass was a verse attack upon ‘the papysticall secte’, but it was followed by two more substantial and significant works. Tyndale’s Parable of the Wicked Mammon was succeeded by The Obedience of a Christian Man. In these treatises Tyndale expounded Lutheran doctrines, in particular the belief in justification through faith alone and the opinion that a temporal prince should also exercise ecclesiastical power. It is not surprising, therefore, that in this year More was asked to launch a fierce reply to what he called these ‘folysh frantyke bokes’. Cuthbert Tunstall’s licence, for the reading of heresy, was the merest formality; the two men were close friends and it is likely that More suggested a counter-offensive in the vernacular in order to warn and advise ‘simplicibus et ideotis hominibus’9 (which can roughly be translated as ‘the man in the street’) on the perils of alien creeds. If Lutheranism could be denounced as a foreign doctrine, then the patriotic citizens might immediately disown it. More was already busily employed at Westminster and at court, but the rebuttal of heresy was seen by him as a paramount duty; he mentioned once the need of a man to ‘wryte by candellyght whyle he were halfe a slepe’.10 The danger was too great for delay.

  He called them by many names—these ‘new men’, ‘new named bretherne’, ‘evangelycall fraternyte’, ‘new false sect’ of ‘our evangelycall Englysshe heretykes’. He linked them to the plague and to the abhorrent violence of the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany, as well as to the sack of Rome. Heresy was a poison, an infection, a contagion attacking the body of Christendom. They scorned the sacraments of the Church and derided the notion of purgatory; they encouraged sexual licence and were intent upon bringing ‘all out of order’.11 They denied the eucharist and reviled the Mass. They believed that the Church of Christ was fundamentally corrupted and should be swept away. More knew that all the certainties of inherited belief and the prevailing social order would thereby be destroyed; it would be tantamount to the collapse of the entire structure of the world. This was the Antichrist, and very soon More was talking about ‘the daye of Iudgement’ and ‘dredefull dome’.12

  More’s first defence of the Church, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, was written in this year of dearth and sickness; it was a topical book in every sense, filled with local detail and circumstance. The narrative opens with the description of a scholar from one of the universities questioning More on matters of faith. He has read Tyndale and knows about the preaching of Bilney; he is a thoroughly modern young man who is ‘nothynge tonge tayed’13 and is veering towards the doctrines of Martin Luther. At a little before seven in the morning, More takes him into ‘my study’14 at Chelsea and begins a dialogue which ultimately convinces the young man to remain within ‘the comen fayth and byleue of the hole chyrche’.15 It is a conversation, almost a drama, but it does not share the irony or the ambiguity of Utopia. More adopts the role of a polemicist and propagandist, rather than that of a scholar concerned with good letters and the new learning; as a result the main interest for the contemporary reader lies in its language rather than in its argument. It was the first book which More had published in the vernacular, and it displays the living speech of the period leaping ‘lyke a flounder out of a fryenge panne in to the fyre’.16 Running through the stories of juggling and baking bread, songs ‘of Robyn hode’ and ballads of love, are phrases that bring the people closer to us: ‘the lytle apple of myne eye … as bare as a byrdys ars … that can perceyue chalke fro chese well ynough … to proue the mone made of grene chese … one swalow maketh not somer’.17

  But if some of the phrases and stories are immediately recognisable, others are mysterious. Who will now, for example, ‘tourne a plum into a doggys torde in a boyes mouthe’?18 And was it ‘alway that the cat wynked whan her eye was out’?19 There is mention of a church where there were models in wax of male and female genitalia hanging upon the walls, while near the altar were ‘two rounde rynges of syluer, the one moche larger than the other. Thrughe whiche euery man dyd put his preuy membres at the aulters ende. Not euery man thrughe bothe but some thrughe the one and some thrughe the other. For they were not bothe of a bygnes.’20 The church was in Flanders, but it might as well have been in London. There were always wonders to be seen there, and More recounts how some handkerchiefs woven by the Virgin Mary had been found concealed in a tabernacle at Barking Abbey. The thieves of London prayed to the robber who had hung on the right side of Christ; they called upon ‘Dysmas’ to help them in their crimes. The Dialogue reveals a world of miracles and pilgrimages, of painted images and wonderful relics, of a true Church commanding all. More celebrates, in a double sense, what was essentially and primarily an oral culture. He employs it in the dialogue itself, but he also uses it to defend the traditions of the Church; they have been transmitted by word of mouth, ‘by onely wordes and prechynge … by mouth amonge the people’.21 That is why More considered it dangerous to rely upon the written Scriptures, but it is also why he employed the form of dialogue. There is a public truth which can be debated, rather than some private and individual truth to be found in secret musing.

  It is perhaps too late now to sift through the dust of forgotten controversies, but it will be instructive to describe More’s conclusions. The Catholic Church was a visible church, with its own hierarchy and known places of worship, rather than a fleeting sect of believers; it was a Church with a proven tradition of faith reaching back for fifteen hundred years, which was transmitted in both oral and scriptural form. It possessed the authority of the apostles and the church fathers and had been guided by the Holy Spirit since the resurrection of Christ. It was a historical faith, established upon a consensus of the faithful. Its teachings were manifested in papal or conciliar decrees, whereby general opinion and traditional belief were given dogmatic force ‘and so comen downe to our dayes by contynuall successyon’.22 Its divine origin was proved by miracles and reinforced by pilgrimages. It was the mystical body of Christ, comprising the living and the dead. For More it was the vehicle of God’s purpose and the paradigm for all earthly law and authority. But if it was the model of unity and continuity, it now found itself in a world which seemed to be breaking down. There had been heresies and heretics before who ‘lefte the common fayth of ye catholyke chyrche preferrynge theyr owne gay gloses’,23 but the situation of Christendom had never been more perilous. The Turks had moved as far west as Hungary and might one day threaten Rome itself, while the heretics of Germany and Switzerland were intent upon a more insidious destruction of the established order. It is no wonder that present events seemed to More to be an anticipation of ‘domesday’.

  The whole theme and purpose of his Dialogue Concerning Heresies had been to celebrate that common culture which was under threat; by employing the stories and proverbs that were in the air around him and by drawing upon the resources of the medieval tradition of caricature and speech he was implicitly appealing to his audience to consider what would be lost if Christendom fell into schism.
A religion and a way of life might disappear. More’s prose is highly significant in that respect.

  As a Latinist he has a tendency to break up the periods of Cicero with the expletives of Terence, thus creating a colloquial and on occasions harsh style; as a writer of English he presses that advantage home, and reflects what he once called the ‘comen custume and usage of speche’.24 On the bad reputation of priests, for example, he writes that ‘If they be famylyer we call theym lyght. If they be solytary we call theym fantastyke. If they be sadde we call theym solempne. If they be mery we call theym madde … they say that yf a woman be fayre than is she yonge and yf a preste be good than he is olde.’25 There are many examples of this quick demotic throughout More’s writing, but his is not simply an ear which caught the inflections of the London streets. He is also part of a tradition of devotional and homiletic literature which has been traced back to the religious treatises of the eleventh century and even, indeed, to Aelfric and the supposed writings of Arthur. His use of balanced and alliterative sentences is a clear token of his medieval affinities—‘hys open lyuyng in lechery wyth his lewd lemman the nunne’26 is one such example—but the vigour of his writing owes some debt to the long history of the London sermon. It should be recalled that More’s vernacular works were, in large part, intended for an illiterate audience and were therefore to be read aloud.

  But it would be wrong to suggest that his was a simple colloquial or dramatic style. He resorts both to brevity and to amplification; he mixes ornate diction with plain speech. He seems to wander through examples, but in the midst of simile or metaphor he always sustains the momentum of his argument. He puts on voices—imitating the speech of a Kentish man, a Yorkshire man, or a German—and then reverts to his own. He was devoted to the traditional order but, in linguistic terms, he is a great innovator. Some of the words and phrases he introduced into written English include ‘fact’, ‘taunt’, ‘shuffle’, ‘anticipate’, ‘paradox’, ‘pretext’, ‘obstruction’, ‘monosyllable’, ‘meeting’, ‘not to see the wood for the trees’, and ‘to make the best of something’.

  He wrote very quickly and neatly, marking the page with careful underlinings and revisions. The absence of large-scale emendations suggests that he knew what he wished to say and revised only in order to add clarity or emphasis to his points; he changed sentences, but rarely altered arguments or long sections of prose. Indeed, he wrote in large structural units, which could be moved to different parts of the narrative. The common method of erasing words was to ‘scrape theym out’ with a small knife,27 but More deleted them with a delicate cross-hatching of lines. In similar fashion he creates his own persona in the dialogue; he had to remain calm, confident, and meticulous, in the rebuttal of false doctrine. That is also why he carefully proofread the first edition of Dialogue Concerning Heresies; it was printed by his brother-in-law John Rastell, ‘at the sygne of the meremayd at Powlys gate next to chepesyde’.28 Because he had already asked for the ‘examynacyon and iudgment’ of men such as Tunstall and Fisher and had as a consequence already ‘put out or chaunged’29 certain things, his additions at this later stage were not large. A second edition was printed two years later by his nephew William Rastell, who had established his business by St Bride’s churchyard, and for this More added passages emphasising the danger of heretical books; the titlepage states that it had been ‘newly ouersene’ by him. One sentiment remains unaltered, however. There can be no ‘couenant’ with the heretics, and at the last they must be ‘punyshed by deth in ye fyre’.30

  In the early months of 1529 a small tract was ‘sown’ in court circles, to use the word of Cardinal Campeggio, which even came to the attention of the king himself. It was entitled Supplication for the Beggars and had been written by the same Simon Fish who had once impersonated Cardinal Wolsey at a Gray’s Inn disguising. Fish had wisely moved to Antwerp after this event, from which place he issued his violently anticlerical pamphlet. He accused the English clergy of rapacity, of grabbing as much land and as many tithes as they could while in the process reducing the kingdom to beggary. He declared that they owned one third of the property of the kingdom and had debauched 100,000 women. He also accused them of attempting to filch the authority of the king and ‘translate all rule power lordishippe auctorite obedience and dignite from your grace vnto theim’.31 Fish’s humble suggestion to Henry was that he should assert his ‘hyghe power’ against this evil generation of priests, with the further implication that he could appropriate church property. It was an interesting suggestion, given the frustration and uncertainty of Henry’s relationship with Rome.

  More may have known about certain private matters concerning this subject. Anne Boleyn had obtained a copy of the book, according to John Foxe, and presented it to the king. Then Henry ‘kept the booke in his bosome 3. or 4. dayes’32 and was told that Fish, this strident supporter of his ‘auctorite’, had already fled the country ‘for feare of the Cardinall’.33 But there is an ambiguity here, since Foxe also suggests that the book was read to the king by two merchants; the monarch is then supposed to have replied that when you remove a lower stone from a wall, an upper stone might follow. It has also been recorded that the book Boleyn gave to the king was Tyndale’s treatise, The Obedience of a Christian Man, which similarly argued that the king’s authority should be extended over ecclesiastical affairs. According to this version, Henry is reported to have read it and then declared: ‘This is the book for me and all kings to read.’34 In either case, the tendency of events was clear enough. Heretical and anticlerical books were being countenanced at court, even while public measures against their distribution were being strengthened.

  More acted rapidly and within weeks, perhaps even days, of reading Supplication for the Beggars he composed a reply approximately ten times the length of the original tract. He called it The Supplication of Souls and addressed it ‘To all good Crysten people’,35 although there is no doubt that it was also addressed to the king himself. There are passages when it shows signs of being hastily written but in certain respects it is an extraordinary performance, in which More dramatises the voices of those souls still being licked by purgatorial fire. Simon Fish had suggested that Masses for the dead were only another means of wresting money from the living, but More’s souls ‘in most pytuouse wyse continually calleth’ for prayer and remembrance. There are some wonderful descriptions of their agony in More’s best late medieval manner—‘the gay gere [clothes] burneth vppon our bakkys: and those prowd perled pastys [ornaments dangling from the hair] hang hote about our chekis’.36 This is not some ‘feynyd fyre payntyd on a wall’, but a true token of life after death. Purgatory was visualised by More’s contemporaries in direct and dramatic terms; it is a large open area, with neither ascending nor declining ground, marked by invisible boundaries. Here devils and human beings cohabit. In one celebrated Cistercian treatise, the landscape is depicted with shadowy meadows, wheels of fire and freezing rivers.37 The dead call out for the living to save them from torment and, as More asks in his account, would you not reach out to snatch your mother from the fire? When the souls of purgatory ‘vomyte, yet shall they vomyte styll and neuer fynde ease therof’.38 ‘Remember our thurst,’ they call, ‘whyne ye syt & Drynke.’ Although More is concerned to emphasise the close and sometimes terrifying communion between the living and the dead, he is equally intent upon reaffirming the importance of tradition and of inherited belief. At this point in his career he resembles St Augustine, himself a man of law who had turned his rhetorical skills into polemic against his religious enemies. Augustine had, for example, composed vitriolic and unfair attacks upon the Donatists and the Pelagians in a spirit close to that of More. Augustine has been described as perhaps ‘the first theorist of the Inquisition’,39 and More would perhaps have been happy to be placed in the same company.

  But he also had a more immediate purpose. If Henry had indeed read Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man, he would have been told that he was appointed by God to pro
tect and guide the Church of his country—and whoever resisted him ‘resisteth God’.40 That is why More responded so fiercely to Simon Fish’s pamphlet. He repeatedly emphasised the power and authority of the king, far beyond that of convocation or the ‘spiritual arm’ of parliament, and then strenuously denied that the clergy were filching any of the wealth of the kingdom. This was plainly an effort to reassure Henry, and More berated Fish for daring ‘to take vppon hym to gyue counsayle to a kynge’.41 But it was not simply a matter of presumption. More believed that the attack upon the priests was a partially concealed attempt to introduce Lutheran heresies within the kingdom, so that the wreckage of the clergy would be followed by the destruction of the Mass and the sacraments. And what then would follow but the riot and warfare which had already afflicted Germany? The seizure of church lands would be succeeded by the theft of other property, and the assault upon the Church would encourage an attack upon all forms of authority. The forces of innovation and sedition would spread, ‘and at laste bryng all the realme to ruyne and thys not wythout bochery and fowle blody handys’.42 More was warning Henry against these siren voices of the anticlerics, which would inevitably lead to the destruction of his realm. That is why his metaphors during this period are those of expulsion and rejection. He wrote in his Supplication of stopping up a gap ‘all redy with such a bush of thornys as will pryk theyr handys thorow a payre of hedgyng glouys’.43 Yet still volumes of heresy were passing through those gaps into England—a book by William Roye on Lutheran doctrine, a book by John Frith on the Antichrist who sits in Rome, a book by Simon Fish on false sacraments, a revised English primer designed to promote the Protestant cause. The time was at hand, however, when More would act more directly and more violently.