Parliament was reconvened on Thursday, 15 January 1534, and at first concerned itself with specific or local legislation such as the paving of Holborn and the punishment for sodomy. But by the second week of February the king’s more pressing concerns came before the two Houses. A dowry bill confirmed Catherine of Aragon’s new and unhappy status, while the second Act of Annates emphasised the fact that the king and not the Pope elected the bishops of the realm. A few days later Elizabeth Barton, now the ‘Ippocrite Nunne’ rather than the holy maid, was indicted by an Act of Attainder which confirmed her treason; at the preliminary inquiry into her activities there had been cries of ‘To the stake! To the stake!’, which was the direction in which she now would surely go. But the drift of Cromwell’s policies became clear when a bill was drawn up that included the names of More and Fisher among her accomplices. More’s name had been included in the bill ‘concerning the Attainder of Elizabeth Barton and others’ at the last minute, apparently at the insistence of the king, and he was accused of ‘misprision of treason’ or concealment of treason on the grounds that he knew about Elizabeth Barton’s dealings with the Marquess of Exeter. More was informed at once, by Fisher himself, and wrote to Cromwell asking for a copy of that bill, ‘which sene, if I finde any vntrue surmise therein as of likelihode there is’15 he begged leave to bring his suit to the king. But there is no doubt that the king and Cromwell were now using Elizabeth Barton to bring down their principal opponents; Cromwell informed William Roper, still a member of the Commons, that More had not only ‘had communicacion’ with the nun but had also ‘gyven her aduice and cowncell’.16
This was tantamount to accusing him of treason, and More immediately dispatched to Cromwell a long letter in which he detailed all his knowledge of the woman he now called ‘the lewde Nonne’.17 He concluded by swearing that, as long as he should live, no man or woman would ‘make me digresse frome my trothe and faithe’18 towards God and the king. It is a measure of his anxiety as well as his pain, perhaps, that he referred to ‘this disceace of myne’19 which prevented him from writing in his own hand: it was the same disease in his ‘breste’ which had afflicted him since the death of his father.
After Cromwell received the letter he requested that More visit him for an informal conversation. More travelled, downriver, to Westminster. It was clear enough, from the letter and from other witnesses, that his dealings with the nun could not be construed as treasonable; so it seems that most of the interview was concerned with the issues of the king’s marriage and the papal supremacy. The bill including his name had already been given a second reading, but at this stage it seems more likely that the king wished to coerce rather than to punish More. In particular he wanted him ‘to relent and condescend to his request’20 to compose a treatise in favour of the annulment of Henry’s first marriage. When Cromwell questioned him about his attitude to the whole affair, More reiterated the policy of silence and non-involvement that he had always supposedly pursued; as he wrote in a subsequent letter to Cromwell, I ‘neither murmure at it, nor dispute vppon it, nor neuer did nor will’.21 This may have struck his interlocutor as peculiar from one who had helped to organise the ‘Aragonese’ opposition to the annulment and who had refused to attend the wedding of Henry and Anne Boleyn; but even if Cromwell suspected More of double-dealing, there was no evidence for any worse offence. On the second issue, of the papal supremacy, More was equally guarded. He explained to Cromwell that he had not been convinced of the matter until he had read the king’s own treatise, Assertio septem Sacramentorum, in which the divine origin of the papacy was asserted. It was a shrewd hit but, before this interesting meeting ended, More begged Cromwell to impart to the king his utter faithfulness, truthfulness and loyalty.
A day or two after his return to Chelsea More composed two letters. One of them was to the king, in which he declared himself lying ‘prostrate at your graciouse feet’;22 he begged Henry to consider if he could be capable of such ‘monstrouse ingratitude’ as to conspire against him and, if the king still trusted his fidelity, asked him to ‘releive the turment of my present hevynesse, conceived of the drede and fere’23 which the bill had instilled in him. He signed the letter ‘Your most humble and moste hevy faithfull subgeitt and bedeman’.24 The king did not believe his protestations of innocence, but there is nothing in More’s conduct to suggest that they were untrue. He considered himself to be always pursuing the king’s best interests; as he had said to his colleagues, Henry would ‘in the end’ thank them for their efforts on behalf of Catherine and of the old faith. His nicely trained sense of order and obedience made it impossible for him even to consider disloyalty, let alone treachery, and his polemics against St German as well as his early interest in the Nun of Kent were ways in which he hoped to keep Henry on the right and noble path of sovereignty. But his fidelity was construed as faithlessness, and his loyalty as treason.
The second letter was to Thomas Cromwell and seems designed to convey More’s own written record of their conversation; it was one of his most characteristic devices, and shows the caution of his legal mind. In this letter he also adverts to the ‘wofull hevynesse in which myn harte standeth’25 as a result of being falsely accused of disloyalty. He had already learned from William Roper, however, that Cromwell was now urging the king to drop the bill against More—probably on the reasonable grounds that there was no solid evidence to connect him with the activities of the Nun of Kent. Although this afforded him some ‘reliefe and cumfort’,26 it was by no means the end of the process. The king refused to remove More’s name, but he did agree that the accused man should be allowed to defend himself in front of a committee of the Star Chamber. Even as the Lords began their third reading of the Bill of Attainder, which despite Cromwell’s efforts still included the name of More, the suspect was summoned to Westminster once again.
He appeared before a small committee that included Cranmer and Audley, as well as Cromwell, and they began by treating him ‘very friendly, willing him to sit down with them, which in no wise he would’.27 This account comes from Roper, who must have heard it from his father-in-law soon after the meeting. Audley opened the formal interview by descanting on the honours and privileges which the king had granted to his former Lord Chancellor. More replied, equally graciously, that there was no man living ‘that would with better will do the thing that should be acceptable to the king’s highness’.28 On the matter of the nun More simply rehearsed the extent of his involvement.
The second, and more important concern, was the marriage of the king to Anne Boleyn. More replied, as he had always done, that he had ‘plainly and truly declared my mind unto his grace, which his highness to me ever seemed like a most gracious prince very well to accept’.29 This was not enough to satisfy his auditors, however, who now abruptly shifted from affability to threat. They declared that ‘never was there servant so villainous, nor subject to his prince so traitorous as he’.30 They also threatened him with various forms of condign punishment but he responded, in the words of St Basil to the Arian emperor Valens who was trying to convert him with threats, ‘My lords, these terrors be arguments for children and not for me.’31 The commissioners specifically accused him of persuading the king to write his Assertio septem Sacramentorum against Luther, the treatise that had unfortunately included an unambiguous defence of papal supremacy. More justifiably denied being the instigator of the project and repeated his remark to Cromwell that the king had in its writing actually persuaded More of the paramount importance of the papacy. There was little more to be said. The committee of the Star Chamber broke up without any result—‘thus displeasantly departed they’, in the words of William Roper32—and More returned by boat to Chelsea.
On his homecoming, he walked with his son-in-law in the garden.
‘I trust, sir,’ Roper asked him, ‘that all is well because you are so merry.’
‘It is so indeed, son Roper, I thank God.’
‘Are you then put out of the Parliament bill?’
‘By my truth, son Roper, I never remembered it.’
‘Never remembered, sir! A case that toucheth yourself so near, and us all for your sake. I am sorry to hear it. For I verily trusted, when I saw you so merry, that all had been well.’
‘Wilt thou know, son Roper, why I was so merry?’
‘That I would gladly, sir.’
‘In good faith, I rejoiced, son, that I had given the devil a foul fall; and that with those lords I had gone so far as, without great shame, I could never go back again.’33
More’s lapse of memory about the bill concerning his relations with the Nun of Kent need not be taken literally; in his letters to Cromwell and to the king, the matter of the ‘wicked woman’ clearly concerned him a great deal. But the Star Chamber committee had been less interested in Elizabeth Barton’s activities than in More’s attitude toward the king’s new marriage and toward the theory of papal supremacy. And it was here that Henry personally wished to test his erstwhile servant. More had been able to convey his reservations—in that sense, as he had said, he could not ‘go back’ upon his words—but had done so without incriminating himself. He was relieved to have been able to disburden his conscience while remaining strictly faithful to the king. It was the first time he had been formally interrogated by his peers upon those affairs which troubled him so deeply, and he had calmly triumphed over his adversaries. He also had some reason to be sanguine, at least on one matter. The upper house of parliament, having heard that More had been interrogated privately in special committee, sent a memorial to the king ‘whether it squared with the King’s mind, that Sir Thomas More and the others named with him in the said Bill … should be called before the Lords in Parliament’34 so that they might defend themselves. Clearly it did not seem just that so eminent a man should be imprisoned and stripped of all his possessions merely for being named in the bill.
The request did not please the king, who was anyway unhappy with the course of the Star Chamber interrogation which had revealed nothing to More’s detriment; he insisted upon retaining More’s name in the Bill of Attainder, and when Audley warned him that the entire bill might then be thrown out (thus freeing Elizabeth Barton as well as her ‘accomplices’) the king threatened to attend the proceedings in the upper chamber. He would, in other words, cow the Lords into submission. At this point, according to William Roper, his councillors fell upon their knees and begged him to reconsider; their argument to the king was that, ‘if he should, in his own presence, receive an overthrow, it would not only encourage his subjects ever after to contemn him, but also throughout all Christendom redound to his dishonour forever’.35 Eventually the king accepted the force of their arguments and More’s name was removed from the bill; but not before Henry, in his anger, stopped his remaining income as a councillor.
Cromwell came up to William Roper in the chambers of parliament and gave him the welcome news; Roper was dining in London that day, so he sent a message to Margaret Roper who thereupon informed her father. He took the news gravely enough, with the reply ‘In faith, Meg, quod differtur non aufertur’ (‘what is deferred is not avoided’).36 He expected Henry to find another way of reaching him, and in that he was a shrewd judge of his old master. He was, indeed, unwittingly echoing what Audley and his colleagues had already told the king; even though More’s name had been taken out of the bill, ‘they mistrusted not in time against him to find some meeter matter to serve his turn better’.37 The Duke of Norfolk then met with More, in a last attempt to help him or suborn him.
‘By the Mass, Master More, it is perilous striving with princes. And therefore I would wish you somewhat to incline to the king’s pleasure. For, by God body, Master More, Indignatio principis mors est.’ (‘The wrath of the king means death.’)
‘Is that all, my lord? Then in good faith is there no more difference between your grace and me, but that I shall die today and you tomorrow.’38
And, soon enough, there was ‘meeter matter’ with which to serve up Thomas More to the king. Just two weeks after his appearance before the royal commissioners, an Act of Succession was put before the Lords; it pronounced the marriage between Henry and Catherine of Aragon to be ‘void and annulled’ and then, in a curious but consistent extension of policy, dealt with the matter of all such ‘prohibited’ marriages. It was claimed that no power on earth could sanction them, and in one sentence the Act thereby destroyed the jurisdiction and authority of the Pope. The succession was then established through the children of Queen Anne, followed by a list of offences of treason or misprision of treason to be incurred by those who ‘slandered’ or ‘derogated’ the royal family. Then came the stipulation that eventually took More to his death on the scaffold: all of the king’s subjects ‘shall make a corporal oath’ to maintain ‘the whole effects and contents of this present Act’.39 More had anticipated the time when all would have to be ‘confirmed with oaths’, and he must immediately have understood the significance of this new development. The Act of Succession was also interpreted, even at the time of its promulgation, as the defining measure of what Cranmer later called ‘this world of reformation’;40 so entered the language the term which would ever afterwards signify that great process of change which More understood and feared. On the day the Act of Succession was given its first reading, the brother of one MP wrote that ‘after this day the Bishop of Rome shall have no manner of authority within the realm of England’.41
That Act was one of several which, in the course of this parliamentary session, would utterly destroy the dispensation of a thousand years. The proponents of change claimed that they were only restoring the ancient privileges of the English Church, but the evidence suggests that this was a theory devised merely to justify wholesale ‘reformation’. The Acts of Annates, of Appeals, of Peter’s Pence and of Dispensations brought the Church under the king’s control in every particular, whether in the appointment of bishops, the preparation of clerical statutes or the visitation of monasteries. A new heresy law, in addition, abolished the old system of ecclesiastical justice that More had used and defended; it was also no longer deemed an offence to speak against the Pope. The first phase was complete.
In this period which witnessed the rejection of his beliefs, and the destruction of the very order to which he clung, More turned from polemic to meditation and prayer. He began to compose A Treatise on the Passion. It is in many ways a standard votive work, which combines the exegesis of biblical texts concerning the last days of Jesus with passages of devotion and exhortation. Yet he composed it in these weeks and days of change, and there are intimations within it of that evil and confusion by which he believed himself to be surrounded. When he writes of the Jewish elders who concealed ‘worldly wynning’ and ‘pryuate malice’ under ‘the pretext of a great zeale vnto the common wealth’,42 it is hard not to trace a contemporaneous allusion. When he prayed that God grant him the grace never to ‘giue mine assent to folow the sinful deuice of any wicked counsail’,43 he was also invoking the specific situation in which he then found himself. The treatise was, in this respect, a way of concentrating his mind and his faith in an age of anxiety; more deliberately, perhaps, it was also a means by which he prepared himself for his own death. The passion of Jesus ‘of which he was so ferd, and for which he was so sorowful’44 might then be seen as an object of release as well as devotion, since by meditating upon the torments of Christ More was better able to understand and endure those which he anticipated for himself.
Yet it would be wrong to consider A Treatise on the Passion as an entirely private and meditative work; everything which More wrote also had a public context and significance, and in this book there are obvious calls to ‘christen readers’ and ‘good readers’ to stand firm within their faith.45 More believed, with much justification, that the destruction of the old religion was being undertaken at the behest of an arrogant and impetuous king, together with councillors who hoped to benefit from the disorder; the ‘reformation’ was being imposed, therefo
re, upon a nation which remained generally pious and devoted. The substitution of king for pope as head of the Church may not have seemed a particularly damaging or damning development, but More saw further and more clearly than most of his contemporaries; once the community of the faithful, the living and dead, was broken by schism then the faith itself would be placed in severe peril.
More prophesied that the time would come when the faith was so harassed and persecuted that ‘it shall seeme that there shall bee than no chrysten countreyes left at all’.46 This may be construed as the time of Antichrist, but his reign ‘shal be but short’. Then Christ will come ‘and finyshe thys presente worlde, and rewarde euerye good manne after hys good woorkes wrought in hys true catholike faythe’.47 More may well have believed that he was witnessing the events which would lead to the end of the world itself. That is why he continually exhorted his compatriots to remain true to the old religion and why he came to the conclusion of his work with a great paean in honour of the blessed sacrament, that mystical body of Christ which in its earthly form the king seemed about to tear apart. But he never completed A Treatise on the Passion; his last words here are ‘quicke liuely membres in the spirituall societie of sayntes’.48 Before he could write the next sentence he was consigned to a cell in the Tower of London.
CHAPTER XXX
The Life of Thomas More Page 44
