The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  This was a significant moment, when the king’s opponents found their voices. The Earl of Essex, sitting with the king, shouted out. ‘You shameless friar! you shall be sewn up in a sack and thrown into the Thames, if you do not speedily hold your tongue!’ Elstow replied finely: ‘Make those threats to your fellow courtiers. As for us friars, we make little account of them indeed, knowing well that the way lieth as open to heaven by water as by land.’32 Peto and Elstow were popular preachers, with a holy mission to mingle with all of the people, and in that sense they represented a real threat to Henry’s stratagems. A sermon in London could become a great public event, and the volatility of the populace was well known. That is why official papers of the time display evident unease at the prospect of controversy stirred by the words of priests and friars. There were also the presses. A treatise by Catherine’s chaplain, entitled Invicta Veritas, had been imported, while various ultra-orthodox sermons and treatises were reissued with warnings against the ‘false and subtyll deceites’33 of the heretics.

  This was the atmosphere in which parliament reassembled on 10 April, with the supplication of the Commons not yet answered by the prelates. More sent for one of the members who supported the queen’s cause, Sir George Throckmorton, and received him ‘in a little chamber within the Parliament chamber where, as I do remember, stood an altar or a thing like unto an altar whereupon he did lean’.34 More was at that moment holding a conversation with a conservative bishop, but he broke it off. Throckmorton was one of those who met at the Queen’s Head tavern to plan their strategy and now, before the most fateful events of the session, More wished to encourage him. ‘I am very glad,’ he said, ‘to hear the good report that goeth of you and that ye be so good a catholic man as ye be; and if ye do continue in the same way that ye began and be not afraid to say your conscience, ye shal deserve great reward of God and thanks of the king’s grace at length and much worship to yourself.’35 It is unlikely that Throckmorton was the only member to be summoned by More in order to be told to stand firm, and the evidence suggests that there was now an organised attempt to thwart the king’s will. Throckmorton, for example, had already been instructed in the same manner by Father Peto, whose stern sermon to the king had led to his confinement within Lambeth Palace; it was here that Peto urged Throckmorton to serve the queen’s cause ‘as I would have my soul saved’.36 Throckmorton also conferred with three others supporting the cause of the queen and the old faith, Nicholas Wilson, Richard Reynolds and John Fisher. It is perhaps significant that More had told him that the king would thank him ‘at a later date’; clearly he believed that this struggle would be of some duration and that any favourable outcome would take time. But there was no time.

  Ten days after the opening of parliament the convocation of the clergy gave their answer to the ‘supplication’, which was no answer at all; it simply reaffirmed the rights and duties of Christ’s Church on earth. A more substantial document was presented a week later, but this second answer proved no more favourable to a king who was all the time testing the extent of his new-found power; he handed the letter to the Commons with the remark that ‘We think this answer will smally please you, for it seemeth to us very slender’.37 His anger was also directed at those members of the Commons, such as Throckmorton, who openly expressed their support for Catherine.

  The king’s distrust of the bishops and his displeasure at what seemed like organised opposition to him in parliament, meant that More and the Aragonese loyalists were losing ground. There were rumours of bills or statutes designed to strip the Church of its powers, and on 8 May a deputation of prelates implored the king to defend their ancient liberties. Two days later he delivered an unexpected and unwelcome reply; in return for royal favour and protection, he demanded that all legislative power be given into his own hands. On the following day he maintained the pressure upon an increasingly hapless clergy by summoning members of parliament into his presence. He displayed to them the oath which prelates made to the Pope at the time of their consecration and addressed them with stern words. ‘Well beloved subjects, we thought that the clergie of our realme had been our subjects wholy, but now wee have well perceived that they bee but halfe our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects.’38 He then instructed the Commons to take action. Two days later the clergy began to debate a possible compromise, yet still Henry made more demands. A bill was being prepared by Thomas Cromwell, which would have transferred the powers of the Church to parliament. Eustace Chapuys noted, on 13 May, that ‘The king also wishes bishops not to have the power to arrest persons accused of heresy’.39 This was at the heart of More’s concerns, and at this juncture he expressed his thorough opposition. ‘The Chancellor and the bishops oppose the bill as much as they can,’ Chapuys continued, ‘at which the king is exceedingly angry, especially against the said Chancellor.’40 More had come out into the open at last.

  His decision was a token of the urgency, or danger, of the situation; but already it was too late. The king had found his power, under the guidance of Thomas Cromwell, and now pressed the clergy into final surrender. He again prorogued parliament and on the following day, 15 May, convocation accepted his demands in a document known as the ‘submission of the clergy’. Effectively he destroyed any independence which the Church still enjoyed, by insisting that all ecclesiastical law required royal assent and that canons or constitutions could be changed only with his approval. He, not the Pope, was truly the head of the Church in England. On the day after the clergy submitted, Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor.

  He had failed in almost all of his objectives, and in a polemic he was then completing he wrote that ‘Our sauyour sayth that ye chyldren of darkenes be more polytyke in theyr kynde then are the chyldren of lyght in theyr kinde. And surely so semeth it now’.41 He also condemned ‘traytors’ at court and berated convocations ‘of theyr dewty so neglygent’;42 clearly he believed that the débâcle was the result both of secular conspiracy and clerical incompetence. It is true that the clergy had voluntarily surrendered to the king, rather than being obliged to do so by parliamentary statute, and in that sense the ‘submission’ was without the absolute force of law. But this was small comfort. The ‘faction’ or ‘coalition’ which More had helped to organise had been unable to check the course of events. The Church had lost its independence and papal authority had been fatally compromised; the authority of More, also, had been undermined. It is possible, indeed probable, that Henry was waiting for his resignation. The two men met for the last time in the garden of York Place; More handed back the great seal, bowed, and withdrew.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  ALL THE BEASTS OF THE WOODS

  HOMAS More, having resigned as Lord Chancellor, approached Dame Alice More in her pew at church; he stood before her, with his cap in his hand, and asked, ‘May it please your Ladieship to come forth now my Lord is gone.’1 The purport of this family story is clear enough, in its mixture of self-conscious irony and grave humour. His behaviour in the months ahead, however, suggests that he relished his fall from power as a blessed release from the perils of pride or worldliness and thus as an act of saving grace. His fool, Henry Patenson, put it his own way when he said that ‘Chancellor More is Chancellor no more’.2 It was in this period, too, that he composed the epitaph for the stone tomb where, he trusted, he would one day be allowed to rest; it was a conventional preparation, of course, but it suggests also that More believed he might soon die. William Roper records that in the period after his resignation he had discussions with his family on the nature of martyrdom; ‘upon his faith,’ More said, ‘if he might perceive his wife and children would encourage him to die in a good cause, it should so comfort him that for very joy thereof it would make him merrily run to death’.3 The irony here, however, is that they in no sense encouraged him to embrace that fate and never understood why he chose to do so.

  His epitaph opens simply with ‘Thomas More, a Londoner borne, of no noble famely’ and then proceeds to enumerate his offi
cial posts in the service of a king extolled as ‘the defender of the faith, a glory afore not herd of’; he professes his own competence in such offices and ends with his decision to be relieved from ‘the business of this life’ in order to prepare his soul for immortality. More told Erasmus that he had composed these lines ‘ambitiose’, in order to ‘show off’; but it is significant that he nowhere mentions his own writings. It was as if Utopia had never been composed.

  In a little Latin poem he completed at the same time, he scorns any hope of remaining upon this earth for very long.4 Now that the glory of the world had departed he wished for a secluded, even monastic, life and there are family anecdotes which suggest his desire for plainness. His son-in-law reports that he gathered ‘all of us that were children to him’,5 and explained that his income was now so greatly reduced that he needed their advice how they might ‘live and continue together as he wished we should’. There was silence, and so More answered his own question. ‘Then I will show my poor mind to you,’ was one of his customary and favourite phrases. He believed that they should all now contribute to the cost of the household, and that they should also modify their ‘diet’ by degrees. It is also reported that the family were so straitened that they were obliged to burn bracken or fern to warm themselves, but this is unlikely. He remained an affluent, if not wealthy, man with the income of a king’s councillor (which he retained until 1534) and estates in Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire and Kent. Alice More also had a large private income, from her previous marriage, as well as land of her own. But although the legend of More’s poverty is insupportable it is true that he could not live in the munificent style of previous years; his children went to their own properties and he was obliged to reduce the size of his general household. In a letter to Erasmus, written in the early summer of this year, he explained that his doctors had advised him to lead a restful and secluded life.

  The three letters of this period, two of which are addressed to Erasmus and the third to another European humanist, are characteristic of More; they seem to reveal, yet manage to conceal, the truth of his life. He declares in each of them, for example, that he resigned his office as Lord Chancellor as a result of his poor health and that the king had accepted his resignation most reluctantly. This might be described, in the language of our age, as the ‘official’ explanation, which concealed all the hostility and distrust involved in his departure. More did not feel obliged to give a more truthful explanation, if only because his letters would be shown to others, but there is a touch of ambiguity which would not have escaped Erasmus’s attention. More writes that his ‘pectus’6 was afflicted; this would ordinarily and properly be taken to mean that he suffered in his chest, but the word can also be implied to mean ‘courage’ or ‘conscience’.

  There is one other insistent topic in this correspondence which, unsurprisingly, concerns his battle against the heretics. He describes his delight on hearing a report that two of their leaders had died—namely Zwingli and Oecolampadius—and goes on to amplify his hatred and horror of the heresies spreading everywhere. It remained the greatest battle of his life and, deprived of the chance to imprison or to burn, he returned to angry and elaborate polemic. The first part of his Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer had been published in the spring, just before his resignation, and now he began working on a second part, which was longer and more closely controlled. In particular, during this period of grave threat to the English Church, he emphasised the unity and traditional authority of the Catholic faith; he wished to defend, therefore, precisely those aspects of it which Henry was challenging. It was in this period, too, that the bishops wanted to repay him for his work in parliament on behalf of the clergy, as well as for his polemical writings; in the words of William Roper, ‘they agreed together and concluded upon a sum of four or five thousand pounds at the least, to my remembrance, for his pains to recompense him’. But More refused the gift, telling Tunstall and others that ‘I wolde rather haue caste theyre money into the Temys thenne take yt’.7 He wrote later that ‘loke I for my thanke of god that is theyr better, and for whose sake I take the labour and not for theyrs’.8 He was also aware that Tyndale had accused him of avarice, and clearly wanted to avoid any such unfounded charge. Instead, he simply ‘carried the Crosse in procession in his parish Churche at Chelsey’.9

  Yet the Church itself was changing. Archbishop Warham died in the summer of 1532 and it eventually became clear that Henry had chosen as his successor the relatively unknown and untried Thomas Cranmer. This was the man for the Boleyns, since he was the scholar who had always followed the king’s orders and had even translated a treatise justifying Henry’s desire to annul his marriage. The old faith was again under renewed assault; Thomas Cromwell was even then drawing up proposals for the next parliament which would further subdue the powers and privileges of the Church, and at the same time he was compiling notes and lists of all those who opposed the king. Through his agent in Antwerp, Stephen Vaughan, he was also in contact with Tyndale and other ‘newe men’. One of them even returned to England after More’s resignation, with the expectation that Lutheran reformers would no longer be persecuted with the same fervour. John Frith arrived in the summer and quickly proved himself to be a young scholar of skill and eloquence; it seems likely that Cromwell had some wish to turn him into a representative of the king’s cause. But Frith had come too soon. Henry had named himself the supreme head of the English Church and for that reason alone he could never condone heresy; he believed himself to have acted according to ancient custom, and therefore had to be seen as a true defender of the faith. That is why he still needed the tacit support of Thomas More, even in retirement, and why he could not allow himself to be compromised by Cromwell’s association with the ‘bretherne’.

  In the autumn of the year Frith was arrested and taken to the Tower, in which confinement he wrote two or three short treatises on the new faith. One of More’s informants, probably a member of the network which had flourished during his chancellorship, obtained a copy of one of these works and brought it to Chelsea. It was, in More’s words, ‘a false folysshe treatyce agaynste the blessed sacrament of ye aulter’.10 The eucharist was the symbol of divine presence within the material world, and a token of Christ’s mystical body on earth; this of course was also the Church itself, and so the transubstantiated bread was a visible sign of the eventual redemption of the world. When More read Frith’s denial of what was for him a sacred truth, he reacted immediately by writing a reply which was then distributed among his friends. It was reported by the brethren themselves that More was so incensed with Frith that he exclaimed that his treatise ‘sholde coste hym the beste bloude in hys body’.11 This was indeed a calumny, given More’s relative powerlessness, and he went to great trouble at a later date to explain precisely what he had meant; he had declared only that ‘I fere me sore that Cryst wyll kyndle a fyre of fagottes for hym, & make hym theirin swete the bloude out of hys body here, and strayte frome hense send hys soule for euer into the fyre of hell’.12 The vision of flames was constantly with him at this time, and one of the most arresting images in his ‘letter’ to Frith evokes the fire of heresy that ‘begynneth to reke oute at some corner … burneth vp whole townes, and wasteth whole countrees … lyeth lurkynge styll in some old roten tymber vnder cellers & celynges’.13

  More was still a master of prose and it may well be that the force of his polemic helped send the young scholar to his death among the flames of Smithfield seven months later. More’s letter to Frith had a private circulation partly because ‘I wolde wysshe that the comon people sholde of suche heresyes neuer here so myche as the name’.14 But there was another reason why he arranged that his reply should reach the eyes of only the most influential citizens. There is nothing in More’s life, at this stage, that did not have public ramifications. He knew that Frith was being held in loose confinement and that he was being actively courted by Cromwell and his agents as a possible supporter of the king’s ‘divorce’; More’s attac
k was a way of exposing him. Frith was a dangerous heretic who threatened the nation, ‘where as the kynges gracyouse hyghnes lyke a moste faythfull catholyke prynce, for the auodynge of suche pestylente bokes’ had already banned ‘suche poysened heresyes’.15 It was a means of warning Cromwell not to go too far, and perhaps also of reminding Henry himself of his spiritual duties. If he colluded with heretics, he might even lose his kingdom.

  The same tactics determined the writing of his next polemic, which was directed at Thomas Cromwell’s strategy. At the end of 1532 Christopher St German, the author of various legislative proposals yet to be enacted, published a treatise ‘concerning the diuision betwene the spirytualtie and temporaltie’. Here he pursued his central aim of raising English common law above canon law, and of removing all forms of secular jurisdiction from church courts; in particular St German criticised the procedure in trials for heresy. Although the book’s author had not been revealed, More knew precisely who had written it, and he started at once upon a reply to St German’s arguments. Indeed, the anonymity of the treatise served More’s purpose; instead of attacking by name someone close to the king’s council, he was answering an unknown opponent. He could never be seen as striking at Henry’s own policies, especially as he had pledged to retire from temporal business, but there was no harm in a good ‘catholyque’ man contradicting the mad proposals of an unnamed scribbler.