The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  Yet he also was obliged to console himself. It has been recorded that a new prisoner is so overwhelmed with feelings, on his first admittance to his cell, that he does not notice the hardness of his bed until the second night. We cannot hope to follow More’s unwritten meditations, but on several occasions he accused himself of being ‘faint-hearted’26 and prey to many fears. There were the natural concerns for his family, who might now be reduced to penury; there was his constant anxiety for the safety and future of his Church. But he also suffered from the stronger and more deadly fear that he would not be courageous enough to sustain his lonely course and that he would, in the end, surrender. His great fear was of torture, of ‘duresse and harde handelinge’ and ‘violente forceble waies’.27 He confessed that he considered ‘the very worst and the vttermost that can by possibilite fall’,28 and that he found ‘my fleshe much more shrinkinge from payne and from death, than me thought it the part of a faithfull Christen man’;29 indeed he seems to have had some compulsion to dwell upon all the vagaries of anticipated torment.

  The events of the outer world could only have confirmed these worst fears of isolation and death. His old friend Cuthbert Tunstall had been summoned to London and there complied with the king’s wishes; newly consecrated bishops also swore an oath to maintain Henry as ‘the chief and supreme head of the Church of England’, while commissioners were being despatched all over the country to tend the oath of succession to the king’s subjects. Three days after More was brought to the Tower, ‘all the craftes in London were called to their halls, and sworne on a booke to be true to Queene Anne and to beleeve and take her for a lawfull wife of the Kinge’.30 But, on that same Monday in April, there was a fateful event which touched More closely. On the same day that the City guilds pledged their allegiance to the king, Elizabeth Barton and the five priests who had supported her were taken from their cells in the Tower and lashed to wooden planks; their wrists were tied together, as if they were at prayer. More would have heard, if not seen, the proceedings—a large assembly of officers and councillors had gathered to watch the last journey of the traitors to Tyburn. The wooden hurdles, on which the ‘holy nun’ and her accomplices had been tied, were then hitched to horses which dragged them over the unflagged stones, cobbles, mud and mire of the city. It was the fate to which More knew he might be consigned. In this painful and ignominious position the condemned prisoners journeyed the five miles to Tyburn.

  Elizabeth Barton died first, having confessed to being a ‘poor wench without learning’ who ‘fell into a certain pride and foolish fantasy with myself’;31 she was hanged, but since there was no ‘drop’ in this period the public executioner pulled down upon the legs until she gave up her ghost. Her accomplices were not so fortunate, and an account written by a Franciscan some years later confirms that the priests suffered all the penalties of the law for treason. Each one was hanged until he lost consciousness, and then was revived so that he could watch as his penis was cut off and stuffed in his mouth; his stomach was then cut open and his intestines tossed in a cauldron of boiling water so that the dying man might smell his own mortality. Then the heart was plucked from his steaming body and held before his face. One of the victims is supposed to have cried, ‘What you are holding is consecrated to God.’32 Then all were beheaded, their heads parboiled to be placed upon poles on London Bridge. This was the fate, too, which More might expect. These were some of his night fears as he lay upon his pallet in the stone chamber.

  Yet, even in extremis, there was a measure of consolation. He had taken with him to his prison chamber a copy of the New Testament as well as the Psalter and Book of Hours; from his references in his ‘Tower writings’ he is also likely to have had beside him such books of devotion as the Catena Aurea and the Monotessaron of Jean Gerson. In particular he meditated upon the testing of St Peter, the martyrdom of St Stephen and the passion of Christ. He wrote to his daughter that ‘I neuer haue prayde God to bringe me hence nor deliuer me fro death, but referring all thing whole vnto his onely pleasure’,33 and, when she was eventually allowed to visit him, he told her that of all God’s spiritual favours ‘I recken vpon my faith my prisonment euen the very chief’;34 by which he meant that he had been granted the opportunity to withdraw entirely from the world and prepare his soul for eternity. The great fear of the faithful was of a sudden or unexpected death and thus of meeting the creator without ‘schrift’ or ‘housel’, the last confession and communion. More knew that he had at least escaped that fate.

  In all outward aspects he remained patient and mild now, not caring even to speak against heretics; he knew that he was likely to die soon enough, but the prospect of death was not an unwelcome one. In the words of Thomas a Kempis, he had grown to love his cell—‘In this thy cell thou shalt find what abroad thou shalt too often lose … thou must always suffer, willingly or unwillingly, and so shalt thou always find the cross … endure patiently the contempt which is thy due … I am not then worthy of anything but to be scourged and punished.’35 More retained his hair shirt as he dwelled in his chamber, and is reported to have whipped himself for penitence; he fasted on the appointed days, sang hymns and prayed both day and night. Before he slept, according to one of his first biographers, ‘he wrapt hym selfe in a linen sheet, like a bodie to be laid in a grave’. He no longer cut his hair and within a few months his beard emphasised the haunted and emaciated look which later (and no doubt posthumous) portraits reveal. When Pope Benedict XIII was imprisoned in Avignon, he vowed that he would not cut his beard until he had been released; this was an old oath, but it is clear enough that More never expected to regain his liberty. His hair began to show through his hood. This is a medieval expression which meant that he had fallen into misfortune, but it did not seem an unhappy fate to More himself. He had in a sense returned to the time of his early adulthood, when he had participated in the rituals and services of the London Charterhouse. He had become a monk at last.

  In his Book of Hours he wrote one line above and below the woodcuts which depicted the progress of Christ towards his crucifixion; taken together these lines form a ‘Godly Meditation’ in which he absorbs the images of ‘the passion that christ suffred for me’ in order to render himself more worthy of divine grace. Each image, whether that of the ‘crowning with thorns’ or ‘carrying the Cross’, afforded endless material for More’s contemplation as he considered his own last hours. He prayed ‘gladly to bere my purgatory here’ and to ‘have ever afore myn yie my deth that ys ever at hand’, finding in the sufferings of Jesus the inspiration to endure his own. So he divided each day into the cycles of prayer, the canonical hours which comforted and protected him. In his Psalter, also, More made his own annotations. The words of the thirty-ninth psalm proclaim the silence of the psalmist before the deceits and lies of his enemies; More wrote beside it a note that he must remain quiet, also, and bless those who conspire against him. He marked or ‘flagged’ certain verses, which could be brought together in a ‘cento’ prayer filled with images of tribulation and imprisonment; one passage from the sixty-ninth psalm is particularly emphasised with its verse ‘I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother’s children’. Against the verse of the eighty-seventh psalm, ‘I am become as a man without help’, More appended the phrase ‘in tribulatione uehetnente et in carcere’ (‘in grievous suffering and in prison’).

  Yet the central allusion, occurring forty times, is to ‘demones’; he places it repeatedly against those psalms which implore deliverance from the snares of evil men or ask for patience in the face of enemies. More wrote in the margin of the fifty-ninth psalm, which opens ‘deliver me from mine enemies’, ‘uel demones uel malos homines’ (‘either demons or wicked men’). For him, in the battle for his religion more than his life, there was little difference between the demonic agencies and those who tempted or tried to force him to forswear his faith. More knew from Augustine that demons might possess bodies composed of ‘thick moist air’ like that which rises f
rom a heated bath; perhaps the exhalations of his prison chamber reminded him of their presence.

  His annotations and marginalia were written in ink, the psalms being generally lightly marked with a stroke or word, so it is clear that More’s use of charcoal at the beginning of his imprisonment was only a temporary expedient. He had been given writing materials and during these early months of confinement he composed a lengthy treatise entitled A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation; in that respect, it springs directly from the threatened and attentive piety which is visible in More’s annotations.

  But this late and last dialogue has a private and self-communing, almost brooding, quality which distinguishes it from its predecessors. It is the strangest mixture of narrative and fable, filled with recollection and animated by a curious passion for the absurd or the bizarre. There are memories here of More’s childhood and of children’s games, of his schooldays and of the London Charterhouse, of early friends such as Linacre, of Wolsey and of Dame Alice, of sea voyages and jury rooms. There is a discussion on the nature of dream and reality which provides the most appropriate setting for some of the strangest stories More ever told. He narrates, for example, the short history of a woman who wished to ‘angre her husband, so sore that she might give hym occasion to kyll her & than shuld he be hangid for her’;36 the man did indeed chop off her head and witnesses ‘herd her tong bable in her hed & call horson horson twise after that the hed was fro the bodye’.37 More mentions the act of beheading on several occasions, as if his own fears were striated throughout the narrative. He relates the story of a rich widow, for example, who wished to be beheaded by her neighbour and somehow taken for a martyr; she also wished ‘the blody axe’38 to be secretly conveyed to another neighbour’s house, and so instigate a false charge of murder. More tells the tale of a man who wished his wife to crucify him, in remembrance of Christ, but was eventually satisfied by a scourging.

  There are also stories of those with a manic desire to commit suicide, and a vignette of a sick woman who in the act of making love vomits over her companion. He evokes a fervent and fervid world of ‘wakyng revelacion’ and ‘false dremyng delusion’, a world in which all the horrors of frail humankind are displayed. It is the world of visions and illusions in which the ‘mad nun’ of Kent had dwelled, but it is also the world as seen from the vantage of a prison chamber. It is the world of artists such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel, with the same fascination for the deformed and the demonic, with the facetiae of natural life transformed into the giant marks of the flesh and the devil.

  He was also writing to allay his own desperate fear of pain or torture, shut up in that straitened room, aware of all the temptations and delusions of the anxious mind. The Dialogue is set in 1528, two years after the first invasion of Hungary by Suleiman the Magnificent; he was poised to attack again and the conversation between an old and young inhabitant of that country, ‘Antony’ and ‘Vincent’, is ostensibly designed to bring comfort to those unfortunate Hungarians who seemed destined to suffer at Turkish hands. Yet his real subject lies much closer to home. When More writes of a time when our friends ‘vnder colour of kyndred’ become ‘our most foes’,39 for example, he was describing the period in which he dwelled. In the guise of Antony More is also able to relive, or relieve, some of his own most powerful and unspoken reflections. He describes those who ‘semed they neuer so good & vertuose before’ were discovered to be ‘holow light & counterfayte in dede’;40 despite his public wish not to meddle in any other man’s conscience, it seems likely that he is here condemning those orthodox clergy who had signed the oath of succession. There are also a number of allusions to ‘the lion’. This was already well known as an image of the king himself, but in More’s writing the royal beast becomes curiously entangled with other figures. The Turkish ‘persecusion for the fayth’ is depicted as ‘a rampyng lyon’,41 and at the close of this narrative, when More meditates upon the agonies of Christ, the devil suddenly appears ‘runnyng & roryng like a rampyng lyon abowt vs’.42 So we have the king, the Turk, and the devil encompassed in the same range of imagery; in More’s peril and isolation, he has conflated all of the enemies of the faith into one demonic form.

  Those who die for their faith are promised a martyr’s crown and everlasting glory, but More was not so presumptuous as to believe himself worthy of them. Half of his struggle lay in preventing himself from rushing to such a death, and indeed many of his references in the Dialogue concern those who suffer from spiritual pride or are tempted into that dreadful vanity by the devil himself. There are further snares. In the course of the book he names the four great temptations of the faithful: the terror by night, the arrow that flies by day, the pestilence that wanders and the devils of noon. This last ‘mydday devill’ is the strongest and most to be feared, since for More it represents the open persecution of the faithful. So More invokes the protection of God, and in several passages he alludes to the ‘pavis’ or shield of His presence.

  Antony compares himself ‘to the snofe of a candell that burneth with in the candell styk nose … yet sodenly lyfteth a leme halfe an Inch aboue the nose, & giveth a praty short light agayne’43 until it finally goes out. It is a pretty image, but it cannot disguise the weariness of a man who now looked towards death and reckoned ‘euery day for my last’.44 This late work is filled with sudden and perhaps inadvertent allusions to More’s own constrained state, with images of ‘a little narrow room’, ‘key cold’, ‘men [that] get owt of prison’, and ‘this wepyng world’. It is also a fevered world, of ‘siknes’ and ‘phisike’, of the memory of his own ‘fittes’ in earlier life, of vertigo upon ‘an high bridge’ and the ‘toth ache’, of ‘drugges’ and ‘desease’, of ‘medycyns’ and ‘poticaryes’. What is this life but a vast chamber of the mortally sick, watched over ‘by the great phisicion god’?45 More’s own condition, in extremity, is also the condition of the world. And what is the world, in any case, but a vast prison no different in nature from the cell in which More found himself? ‘In this prison they bye & sell, in this prison they brall and chide, in this they run together & fight, in this they dyce, in this they carde, In this they pipe & revell, In this they sing & dawnce.’46 Then God becomes ‘the chiefe gaylour ouer this whole brode prison the world is’.47 This dark and hard dialogue reflects a faith of equal severity and unambiguity, established upon principles of order and authority where God is both doctor and prison warden. More can then reflect, with a certain degree of irony, on his own likely fate: ‘Now to this greate glory, can there no man come hedlesse. Our hed is Christ.’48

  There was still humour to be found, even in his confinement; he was anxious but not sorrowful and he had occasion to write some short English verses or ‘balletes’. The second of them is addressed to ‘lady luck’ and ends

  But in faith, I bless you again a thousand times

  For lending me now some leisure to make rhymes.

  He had enough leisure, also, to write letters. He was well aware of John Fisher’s presence in the Tower and through the agency of the lieutenant’s servant, George Golde, various ‘scrolls’ were passed between them; they would not have been of a compromising nature, but Golde always took the precaution of burning them. ‘There is no better keeper,’ he used to say, ‘than the fire.’ According to both Fisher and More, on a later examination, they had simply exchanged the prayers and comforts which seemed appropriate in their similar circumstances. Only once did they discuss the ‘king’s matter’—in the summer of the year they both described to each other their attitude to the oath of succession. More explained that he had not sworn, but would say nothing further on the subject.

  He was no more forthcoming with his daughter. At first he had been refused visitors, but Margaret had written a letter in which she urged him to follow her example and accept the oath. He had once said that ‘all the pynch’ was in the ‘paine’ of torture or death, but there was another kind of pain; he was deeply wounded and disturbed by her letter ‘surely farr
e aboue all other thynges’.49 Twice he mentioned that Margaret had ‘labored’ to persuade him and, although her letter is not extant, it is clear that she tried every kind of exhortation on the issues which touched his conscience. This was the hardest suffering of his imprisonment. It was not simply that More, so much a man of the household and the society established upon it, had been separated from his family; he also knew that they could not understand his avowal of the principles which had led to his arrest and imprisonment. He was truly alone.

  At this point Cromwell decided that she might visit her father, perhaps in the hope that a little filial affection and persuasion might soften him. More, on seeing his daughter in the sad confines of his stone chamber, might come to understand the folly or futility of his own situation. So she journeyed from Chelsea to the Tower, and was taken to her father’s cell. They wept and chanted together the Seven Psalms and Litany. ‘The wepyng tyme,’ he wrote, ‘… is the tyme of this wrechid world.’50 When he asked about Dame Alice and the rest of the household Margaret reassured him, as she mentioned on a later occasion, that his wife was in ‘good comforte’ and all else in ‘good order’ with the family ‘disposing them self euery day more and more to set litle by the worlde’.51

  Then More and his daughter engaged in earnest conversation about his refusal of the oath. On this occasion he may have informed her that it was not appropriate to the statute, but on the more general question he made it clear that he could in no way be swayed from the dictates of his conscience. He told her that he had come to his fatal decision only after long consideration and after reflecting upon the ‘very worst and the vttermost that can by possibilite fall’.52 There was much more talk on what Margaret had called her father’s ‘scruple of his conscience’,53 most of it taken up in his rehearsal of the truths by which he was guided. Once more he affirmed the unity of Christendom as well as the inherited doctrines of those holy doctors and saints who, rejoicing in the presence of God, sustained the communion of the faithful upon earth. Margaret may have expressed her unease about More’s health and at the manifestly unhealthy conditions of confinement, but he was inclined to bless his captors. Her husband reported his words as ‘if it had not been for my wife and you that be my children, whom I accompt the chief part of my charge, I would not have failed ere this to have closed myself in as strait a room—and straiter, too.’54 His last words, before Margaret left the cell, also deserve to be quoted here: ‘God maketh me a wanton, and setteth me on His lap and dandleth me.’55 He had become a child again, supported and protected by his true father.