The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  Thomas More: And so, though your lordships have in the matter of the matrimony kept yourselves pure virgins, yet take good heed, my lords, that you keep your virginity still. For some there be that by procuring your lordships first at the coronation to be present, and next to preach for the setting forth of it, and finally to write books to all the world in defense thereof, are desirous to deflower you; and when they have deflowered you, then will they not fail soon after to devour you. Now, my lords, it lieth not in my power but that they may devour me. But God, being my good Lord, I will provide that they shall never deflower me!40

  This apt speech may have been partly rewritten by his son-in-law, in his biography, but the classical allusion and the resonance of deflower/devour are characteristic of More. He knew, by this stage, the power and the danger of the forces opposing him; ‘they’ are Cromwell and his agents, with the monarch in the recesses beyond, but More speaks of them here in the terms he usually reserved for heretics and ‘demones’; is it possible he believed that the agents of the council were indeed devils sent to inaugurate the reign of Antichrist?

  A month after the coronation, Thomas More decided to pay a visit to Elizabeth Barton, who was then residing at Syon Abbey. The Bridgettine fathers there had promised More that they would notify him of her next visit and there is a strong suggestion that this meeting with the ‘holy maid’ was of some urgency. They spoke alone, in a small private chapel. Did the nun reveal to him further prophecies about the downfall of the king and the reign of Queen Mary? Was he now inclined to believe her? More’s own account, written later to exculpate himself, is circumspect. He stated that he introduced himself as one who did not wish to hear her revelations but, rather, ask for her prayers. He had heard of her virtue and in turn the nun replied ‘that of me she had manye suche thinges harde, that allredy she prayed for me, and ever wolde’.41 They discussed a woman from Tottenham who had been troubled by visions, which Elizabeth Barton had persuaded her to be false. Then the ‘holy maid’ or ‘mad nun’ told More of her own visitations from the devil, who had appeared ‘in likenes of a bird … fleeinge and flickeringe about her in a chambre, and suffered hyme self to be taken’.42 The devil was much on More’s mind at this time and there is no reason to suppose that he disbelieved her.

  As a young scholar and as a lawyer, he had displayed no real interest in the paraphernalia of popular piety; he seems to have had no extravagant devotion to the saints and no particular fondness for relics, but he had instead practised a Christological devotion. In the altered circumstances of the time, however, he had acquired a love and reverence for all the customs of the old faith. He and the nun were now in affinity, and did indeed need to pray for one another. Yet More remained cautious in his letter to Cromwell, insisting that ‘we talked no worde of the Kinges Grace or anye great personage ells, nor in effecte, of anye man or woman but of her selfe, and my selfe’.43 Herself and myself, both growing increasingly isolated in a world which had little place for them. At the end of their interview, More gave her a double ducat and asked her to pray for him.

  Yet not all was as it seemed. After her interview with More, the holy nun had ridden to the mansion of the Exeters in Surrey. They urgently wished to hear her prophecies because they touched directly upon the fate of the Lord Marquess, Henry Courtenay. He believed himself to have good title to the throne, and it can be supposed that he wished to have the nun’s support. It was declared, in later evidence to Thomas Cromwell, that she had fallen into a trance and in that condition given a term to the king’s life; she was questioned by Lady Exeter and replied that ‘in so many months that her husband should reign’.44 This was very close to treasonable talk.

  It is clear that More knew of the nun’s departure and journey to Surrey, if only because he wrote a curious letter to her touching on the matters which she was discussing with the Exeters. He addressed her as ‘Good Madam and My Righte Dearlie Beloved Syster in our Lorde God’, and then humbly begged her to consider his advice in a particular matter; but before he delivered his ‘poore mynde’ he asked her to recall that ‘I shewed you that I neither was, nor wolde be, curious of eny knowledge of other mennes matters, and lest of all of eny matter of princes or of the realme’.45 More kept his own copy of the letter, and this inserted ‘remembrance’ seems to have been written for the eyes of any future investigator rather than the nun herself. But then he came to the point; some of her admirers ‘happe to be curiouse and inquisitive of thinges that litle perteine vnto theire partes: and some mighte peraduenture happe to talke of suche thinges, as mighte peraduenture after turne to muche harme’. If his meaning was not already clear enough, he recalled the fate of the Duke of Buckingham, who, after being persuaded by a monk of his royal destiny, had been executed for treason. He then concluded by advising her once more of the dangers involved in talking ‘with any persons’ on ‘suche maner thinges as perteyne to princes’ affeirs’.46 He had issued a specific warning, therefore, against her collusion or association with the Marquess of Exeter, who might, in turn, invite the fate of Buckingham.

  It has sometimes been suggested that he was being less than candid in his assertion that he never discussed the ‘matter of princes’ with Elizabeth Barton. One member of the Syon Community, who later gave evidence against the nun, declared that More had spoken to her ‘divers times’ about her revelations concerning the king.47 His evidence is tainted, however, to the extent that it is exactly the kind of thing Thomas Cromwell wished to hear. A biographer of Father Richard Reynolds, also of Syon, claims that More spoke to the nun on two separate occasions; this is not difficult to believe, but it does not necessarily suggest any collusion between them. A member of the More household gave evidence to the effect that Elizabeth Barton came twice to see him; she conversed with Margaret Roper and Giles Heron on those occasions, since More himself ‘would not speak with her at neither of both times’.48 The most plausible interpretation of these reports is that More no longer wished to speak to her: he realised that she had gone too far in her talk of the king’s deposition or death, and he kept away from her. He did not wish to be implicated in any religious or political conspiracy. Yet he had another reason for concern; the nun was a defender of the old faith and, if she were compromised, the cause itself would be placed in jeopardy.

  In the summer of this year Cromwell wrote to the king about the ‘holy maid’; Henry had asked for her activities to be investigated and Cromwell promised that with Cranmer he would test the ‘dissymuled holyness and supersticious demeanoures of the Ipocryte Nunne’.49 He also reported that two Friars Observant had been arrested, after secretly visiting Catherine of Aragon, and he suggested that they be put on the rack to discover their secrets. At this time More made another visit to Syon, where, discussing Elizabeth Barton with the fathers, he gave a highly ambiguous and complicated description of her revelatory claims: ‘I assure you she were likelie to be verye bad, if she seamed good, erre I shoulde thinke her other, tyll she happed to be proved naughte’.50 But his discretion did not free him from suspicion; even as Cromwell investigated Elizabeth Barton, so he also pursued Thomas More. His agent, Stephen Vaughan, had returned to Antwerp in order to learn more about the activities and supporters of two Franciscans who had fled London: Father Peto, who had once preached so vociferously in the king’s presence, and Father Elstow were busily engaged in promoting works favouring the cause of Catherine of Aragon. They were compiling their own Latin treatise on the validity of her marriage and acted as distributors for books of a similar kind. Their work was in turn being financed and supported by sympathisers in London. ‘They be so much helpen out of England with money,’ Vaughan reported to Cromwell, ‘but I cannot learn by whom.’51 He did have suspects, however.

  Fisher’s tract against the annulment was to be found in Antwerp and ‘if pryvey searche be made and shortly, peradventure in the howse of the same Busshop shalbe founde his first copie’. One of the friars helping to support Peto and Elstow was being financed by a certain merc
hant residing in London. Vaughan did not name him but it is at least possible that this merchant was Antonio Bonvisi, the close friend of More who most recently had been a sponsor at the baptism of John More’s second child. The investigations were coming closer. ‘Maister More hathe sent often tymes, and lately bookes unto Peto in Andwerp, as his book of the confutacion of Tyndale, and Frythe his opynyon of the sacrament, with dyvers other bookes. I can no further lern of More his practises, but if you consider this well, you may perchance espye his crafte.’52

  Then came upon More various torments and fears of the night, ‘forecasting all such peryls and paynfull deathes, as by any maner of possibilitie might after fall vnto me’.53 As he lay in the dank sweat of his ‘nightes feare’ where fantasy ‘dowbleth … feare’54 he envisaged torture upon the rack and terrible pain inflicted by more ingenious instruments; he envisaged death by disembowelling, his heart torn out of his body and shown to him while he was still alive. He quotes from the words of the psalm, which he recited at the time. ‘Thow hast good lord set the darknes, & made was the night, & in the night walken all the bestes of the woodes[,] the whelps of the lions roryng & calling vnto god for their meate.’55

  CHAPTER XXIX

  THE WRATH OF THE KING MEANS DEATH

  HERE was an occasion now when, as the More household sat down to their dinner, a sudden knock at the door roused them. It was a messenger from the king, demanding that More appear forthwith before the royal commissioners. Some of the household wept, knowing the reason for this summons, while others were braver or more restrained. More noted their responses to this unexpected intruder and reproved those who had lamented his likely fate.1 It was not a royal summons at all; More had concocted the scene in order to test and prepare those around him for what might be a real ordeal. He had not been able to speak to them (not even to his wife) about his own night fears and daily anxiety; he was so inhibited about revealing the true state of his feelings that he had created a drama in order to convey his meaning.

  Where matters of faith and order were concerned, however, he still felt compelled to speak out. Christopher St German had, again under the guise of anonymity, printed an attack upon More’s Apology in which he accused the ex-Lord Chancellor of misrepresenting the processes of the law; he also accused More of bad faith and subterfuge. As soon as More read St German’s Salem and Bizance he replied, composing his Debellation of Salem and Bizance within a few days. He could not keep silent; he had to go on, even if, and perhaps especially because, it was the last moment. St German had blamed the clergy for their treatment of heretics, with the insinuation that the behaviour of the priests had promoted the growth of heresy, and this More refused to admit. St German’s own plans for reform of the church courts would encourage heretics and heresy while at the same time leading to ‘the mynysshement and decaye of the catholyke chrysten fayth’.2 Here he writes of ‘decaye’ as if he knew what might be about to happen. His horror at the prospect is revealed in his story of the madman Cliff, who had attacked an image of the Virgin and Child placed upon London Bridge. In his folly he had snapped off the head of the Christ child. Some of those who dwelled in shops and houses upon the bridge surrounded him and asked why he had committed such a blasphemy. According to More, ‘he began to loke well and erenestly vpon them and, lyke a man of sadnesse and grauyte, he asked theym, “Tell me thys amonge you there, Haue you not yet sett on hys hed agayne?”

  “No. We cannot.”

  “No, by ye masse it is the more shame for you. Why speke you to me of it than?” ’3

  It is a story about the irrevocable nature of blasphemy and heresy, but it is also an indication of the extent to which Christopher St German (and, by implication, the heretics) blamed the clergy and others for their own actions. It had another pertinent message for More himself since he mentioned that in recent times a statue of St Thomas Becket, also upon London Bridge, was defaced and torn down. This was at the instigation of the reformers, who considered Becket to be no saint and martyr but a papal traitor within the realm. There is no doubt that More felt a strong attachment to his saintly namesake, now that his own life in opposition to the king so closely resembled that of the murdered archbishop. Yet his assault upon the legal recommendations of St German is not simply a theoretical and spiritual affair; his rebuttals still display his practical experience of the courts, and, once more, he uses the language of London as a way of refuting the more impersonal objections of his opponent. ‘This is a very colde tale,’ he writes, ‘& as dede as euer was dore nayle.’4

  But More must have guessed that it was growing too late for the war of the books, especially since he knew that he was increasingly coming under the surveillance of Thomas Cromwell. St German’s treatise, to which he had taken such violent exception, had been published by the king’s printer. It was becoming dangerous, even in matters of legal argument and theory, to speak out. But he did so for one last time. As soon as he had finished the Debellation, he began work upon yet another polemic which celebrated the doctrine of transubstantiation. His new work was entitled The Answer to a Poisoned Book, the ‘poisoned book’ in question being an anonymous tract entitled The Souper of the Lorde. He published his Answer only five weeks after he had begun its composition. Five months earlier Frith had been burned for heresy, with the direct authority of the king, and More may now have believed himself to be on safer ground in attacking heretics rather than Henry’s legal advisers. Yet this last of his polemical works, this last gasp, is a disquieting and dispirited book. On its opening pages More has a vision of the ‘corrupt cankar’5 of heresy growing all around him, and he advises his good Christian readers thoroughly to exorcise the ‘newe men’ from their company—‘not so mych as byd theym good spede or good morow whan we mete them’.6 It is a treatise aimed not only against those who deny the sacrament but against ‘al this hole wretched world’,7 which even then he might have been wishing to leave.

  The Answer is written so swiftly and with such passion that the reader can glimpse the very movement of More’s mind. ‘But go to nowe … Let vs now to ye secund than … I saye no not all … to that say I agayne … I haue as you se so well auoyded his gynnys and his grinnes and all his trymtrams.’8 And in that same hasty and forceful cadence it is also possible to glimpse the character of More unfolding upon the page; he is in turn clever and defensive, sharp and disdainful, with a tendency towards malice and towards pride. Within the text he continually invokes images of juggling and of subterfuge, of masked men and games of chance, as if he were truly revealing the treacherous and secretive nature of the time.

  Even now, in solemn consistory, the Pope had condemned Henry’s separation from Catherine and had threatened him with the terrible punishment of excommunication if he did not return to his first wife. The anger of the king can be gauged from his treatment of those within the kingdom who supported the papal cause. The households of Catherine and Mary were dissolved and, more significantly for More’s own fate, Elizabeth Barton and her closest associates were arrested and taken to the Tower for interrogation. The nun was brought before the Star Chamber, where she was accused of high treason. Even the threat of excommunication was blamed upon her; the new Lord Chancellor, Thomas Audley, stated that the Pope had been seduced ‘principally by the damnable and diabolical instrumentality of the said nun and her accomplices’.9 The methods by which their statements and confessions were extracted from them can only be surmised, but on 23 November Elizabeth Barton and seven others were taken from the Tower to Paul’s Cross, where she stood upon a scaffold and confessed that her revelations and visitations had been entirely fraudulent. More was among the crowd which heard her, and at once sent word to the prior of Charterhouse that Elizabeth Barton had at last been proved to be ‘a false deceyvinge ypocrite’.10 Did he also know, or guess, that Cromwell’s interrogators had been trying to establish the nun’s complicity with Catherine of Aragon and More himself?

  He was now Cromwell’s principal suspect in all matters pertaining t
o opposition to the king, and an incident of the period demonstrates the terrible insecurity of his position. One month after Elizabeth Barton’s confession, the king’s council distributed throughout the kingdom a book of Articles which defended the autonomy of the realm, denounced the excommunication of Henry and condemned the Pope himself as ‘bastard, simoniac and heretic’.11 Two or three weeks later, Cromwell received news that a reply had been published. At once he sent for More’s printer, William Rastell, and questioned him closely about More’s possible involvement in this disloyal response. He even used the publication of The Answer to a Poisoned Book as an indication of More’s hostility to the Articles, until Rastell was able to prove that that polemic had been published before the Articles themselves had been promulgated. Yet Rastell was so alarmed that he asked More to write to Cromwell exonerating them both. More’s letter is a masterpiece of dis-ingenuousness; he signed himself ‘Assuredly all your owne’,12 but he gave nothing away. He denied having written any hostile pamphlet, and, as for the Articles, ‘of many thinges which in that boke be touched, in some I knowe not the lawe, and in some I knowe not the fact. And therefore would I neuer be so childish nor so plaie the proud arrogant fole … as to presume to make an aunswere to the boke.’13 He also stated that ‘I know my bounden duety, to bere more honour to my prince, and more reuerence to his honorable Counsaile’ than to deem himself worthy to reply to any book issued by them. Of course he did not mention that he had replied to the works of Christopher St German, issued by the king’s printer. And his response may not necessarily have convinced Cromwell. In the month in which he had interviewed Rastell he had drawn up a memorandum—‘To cause indictments to be drawn up for the offenders in treason & misprision concerning the nun of Canterbury’, to which is added ‘Eftsoons to remember Master More to the king’.14