The Life of Thomas More (54 page)

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 protect 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.

CHAPTER XXVI
WE POOR WORLDLY MEN OF MIDDLE EARTH

N his return from Cambrai, in the third week of August, More found that all was changed. The legatine court had already been adjourned and it seemed likely that Henry’s case would be revoked to Rome. Wolsey had failed in his master’s ‘great matter’. More visited him on 23 August with news of his successful mission, but within a few weeks the cardinal had gone. On 9 October he was indicted on a charge of praemunire and arrested for treason. More would have known about the king’s growing disaffection with his Lord Chancellor, since there had been rumours to that effect circulating since the late spring of the year. Various forces had played their part, among them the influence of Anne Boleyn and her family, as well as the failures of Wolsey’s foreign policy. But the plainest fact seems to be that after the débâcle of the annulment proceedings Henry wished to teach the Church, both in Rome and England, a lesson in power. That is why he appointed a layman as Wolsey’s successor. That, paradoxically, is why he chose Sir Thomas More.

On 17 or 18 October 1529, Wolsey surrendered the Great Seal, ‘contented to obey the King’s high commendment’;
¹
the cardinal loudly lamented his fate, weeping amid his retainers and invoking the example of the early martyrs. ‘But if I had served God as diligently as I have done the King,’ he is reported to have said, ‘He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.’
²
An inventory was made of his possessions, and all his golden bowls and plates, his satins and his cloths of silver, were laid out upon long tables. The seal itself, the authentic impress upon acts of state, was taken in a bag of crimson velvet to the monarch. There then began a week of discussion and negotiation over Wolsey’s
successor, with the king’s council meeting the day after the surrender of the seal and reconvening with the king at Greenwich four days later.

Some report that William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was suggested; others say that the Duke of Norfolk refused to countenance the appointment of Suffolk, and that Cuthbert Tunstall might have been chosen as a ‘compromise’ between the various factions. More was certainly present during these sittings of the council—his name is appended to one of its declarations—but we cannot say with what surprise, or misgiving, he received the news on Monday 25 October that he was to be appointed as the next Lord Chancellor of England. On that same day the king gave him the Great Seal, and on the following morning More was led in procession ‘thorowe Westminster hall up into the Chauncerie’
³
accompanied by the great lords of the realm, both spiritual and temporal. He was escorted to the marble seat of judgment, and then the Duke of Norfolk delivered a speech in praise of his wisdom and virtue; in particular he mentioned More’s conduct of the negotiations at Cambrai, where he ‘so woorthily handled himselfe’ that ‘all Inglande was bounde to him’.
⁴
More replied in words that are no longer extant, although one of his earliest biographers dilates upon a speech in which he is supposed to have discussed the ‘heavier burdens’ that he had to assume and to have reflected ruefully upon the ‘unhappy fall’ of his predecessor.
⁵
This may be a dramatic invention, however, in the manner of Sallust or Tacitus. The words of More’s oath of office do survive, and the new chancellor swore not to ‘suffer the hurte nor disherytyng of the kyng or that the rightes of the Croun be decreysed by any mean’.
⁶
He left Westminster Hall amidst the panoply of office; a gold sceptre with imperial crown was borne by an official on his right side and, on his left, another attendant carried a book.