The Life of Thomas More (58 page)

The first fruit of this new repression arrived that autumn, when a number of people were arrested for owning banned books. More interrogated them in Star Chamber and then consigned them to the Tower, the Fleet or the Counter. The condemned heretics were forced to ride, facing the horses’ tails, with various of their texts pinned to their clothing.
They became, as it were, living books of heresy; during the journey from the Tower to Cheapside Cross, the citizens obliged by pelting them with rotten fruit and dung. One prisoner’s servant was so alarmed by his employer’s condition that he drew up a petition to the parliament, where it was believed there were men more favourable to the cause of reform; More summoned the servant and consigned him to the Fleet prison. Subsequently he launched a sudden raid upon the house of John Petyt, a wealthy merchant who resided in Lyon’s Quay, just a few yards from the notorious inn at Botolph’s Wharf. More led a search for heretical volumes, but it is reported that he could find no incriminating material; instead he relied upon the testimony of a priest who declared that Petyt had helped to finance the publication of Tyndale’s books. Petyt eventually died as a prisoner in the Tower.

An interesting aspect of this unhappy case is that Petyt was a close friend of, and collaborator with, Thomas Cromwell, who was even then framing anticlerical legislation for parliament. There were reports that the king himself favoured a vernacular Bible and had studied various heretical texts, and that Cromwell had already made contact with certain of the ‘newe men’ in Antwerp and elsewhere. That is why the severity and urgency of More’s conduct were a direct response to political, as well as spiritual, affairs.

More has left a record of his own conduct in such raids as that on the merchant’s house by the river. There was a man named Richard Webb who had been denounced by various informants and whose name had emerged in More’s interrogations of certain heretics. So More ordered ‘a doser’ or dossier to be prepared and summoned Webb to appear before him. The intricacies of the case, in which Webb was betrayed by one of his fellows, are less interesting than the words and demeanour of More on such occasions.

Richard Webb
: I have heard that those who are true and plain in examination with you have always found you good and favourable.

Thomas More
: If I find you true, then you will find me favourable. But I fear that your answers are not all true.

Richard Webb
: Sir if you find any of my answers false, never be a good lord to me and never trust me while I live.

Thomas More
: Is Bristol in Holborn, and is six weeks half a year?

With this remark the prisoner realised that part of his testimony had
been undermined. ‘Then downe he fell vppon hys marybonys, & pytuously prayed me to forgyue hym that one lye.’

Richard Webb
: In good faith, sir, there is not in all mine answers any one thing untrue but that.

Thomas More
: Well, Webb, in faith if that be true, then will I wink at this one and let it go for none.

Richard Webb
: I would not be so mad to say as I do, and forsake your favour so foolishly.

Thomas More
: Well, when saw you Robert Necton?

Richard Webb
: Now by my soul, sir, as I have showed your lordship upon my oath, I saw him not this half year to my remembrance.

Thomas More
: Was yesterday half a year ago? And were you not with him at saint Catherine’s? Are you not now shamefully forsworn?
⁴⁸

And so it goes on, with More probing and sometimes taunting his prisoners with information gathered from his spies. He epitomised, in modern terms, the apparatus of the state using its power to crush those attempting to subvert it. His opponents were genuinely following their consciences, while More considered them the harbinger of the devil’s reign on earth. How could there be moderation in any confrontation between them? He was, in large part, successful; he managed to check the more open expression of heretical opinion and thereby prevented it from being accepted piece by piece or gradually condoned. He also disrupted the community of ‘newe men’ in Antwerp and helped to diminish the flow of banned books into England.

The following year, 1531, was the time of burning. It was inaugurated by a macabre episode, with which More was not personally involved. A last will and testament had been judged heretical; the corpse of the perpetrator, William Tracy, was dug up and then ceremonially burnt. More was concerned with living heretics, however, and a few months later he became involved in the case of Thomas Bilney. He was known as ‘Little Bilney’ because he was ‘of little stature and very slender of body’;
⁴⁹
he was also a fervent and devoted man, who preached the gospel in leperhouses and in prisons. He had recanted in the time of Wolsey, and was one of those who bore the faggot at the great ceremony by Paul’s Cross in 1527, but he had since relapsed into heretical opinions. After examination the suspect was given into the custody of
the ecclesiastical authorities, who pronounced him guilty of heresy and sent him back to secular officials for punishment. He was burned in the Lollard’s Pit, outside Norwich, and was supposed to have recanted once more before the flames reached him. It is said that he had inured himself against the pain of fire by putting his hand over a lighted candle in his prison cell. But his apparent recantation became a highly contentious matter, involved with the sensitive question of the king’s ecclesiastical authority, and More launched a swift if not very subtle Star Chamber investigation to stifle any possible controversy. Although this scheme was effective More felt obliged to defend the official account of events in the polemical work he was then writing. He declared that God ‘of hys endles mercy brought hys body to deth’,
⁵⁰
but in the process saved Bilney’s soul.

He approved of burning, therefore, and in that respect was no different from most of his contemporaries. He remarked that heresy in England—‘a good catholyke realme’, as he could still put it
⁵¹
—had for centuries been ‘punyshed by deth in ye fyre’.
⁵²
He was correct, of course, and as early as 1210 we read of an Albigensian being consigned to the flames. There were less severe punishments available; some heretics had been burned on the left cheek, or obliged to wear clothes embroidered with a red cross for the rest of their lives. But burning was the natural remedy for those who refused to recant or who later relapsed. Lollards were burned in the fifteenth century, and it has been calculated that in the hundred years before More’s chancellorship there were in the region of thirty fires.
⁵³
So his actions were not exceptional, and it might be argued that his severe stance was a reaction to the menaces of the period. There is no doubt about his tenacity of purpose, for example, when he declares ‘And after the fyre of Smythfelde, hell dothe receyue them where the wretches burne for euer’;
⁵⁴
they are ‘well and worthely burned’.
⁵⁵
These men anticipated the Antichrist who, as far as More was concerned, might soon be born among the wreckage of the world. Their words might tempt poor souls into eternal damnation. They had to be prevented by all and any means.

The condemned heretics were led to a wooden platform, some three feet from the ground, and were bound to the stake by a heavy chain; the bundles of sticks were then piled around them so high that their limbs
were partly concealed from the circle of spectators. The mayor called out ‘Fire the faggots!’ and
‘Fiat justitia!’
(‘Let justice be done!’); then the executioner, after testing which way the wind blew, lit the wooden pile with a torch. There are many woodcuts of the proceedings, in some of which the church of St Batholomew can be seen behind the Smithfield fire. A large crowd is always gathered around the stake; on occasions the devout people have to be restrained by officials on horses and men brandishing halberds. A bench is erected for the benefit of ‘nobles’ who wish to view the interesting proceedings. Other people watch from open windows as the body of the condemned man, charred and melted by the flames, topples forward from its chain onto the fire. The timing of that moment was never certain, however; one heretic took forty-five minutes to die, and John Foxe records of him that ‘when the left arm was on fyre and burned, he touched it with his right hand, and it fell from his bodye, and he continued to pray to the end wythout mouyng’.
⁵⁶

There were other burnings after that of Bilney, but not before More inflicted damage at the centre of the network of brethren. More received information that George Constantine, a ‘carrier’ of forbidden books, had secretly travelled to London. After investigations and searches, Constantine was discovered and taken to Chelsea, where he was placed in the stocks in order to await questioning by the Lord Chancellor. His interrogation lasted for several days, and, as More declared, there may have been no physical punishment except for that of the stocks. But there is a letter concerning Constantine, written to Thomas Cromwell from one of those suspected of heresy, which throws an interesting light on the nature of More’s investigations. The correspondent, Stephen Vaughan, had been informed that More displayed a ‘clear desire in his countenance and haviour to hear something of me’;
⁵⁷
Vaughan then noted Constantine’s ‘imminent peril and danger’ before adverting to ‘tortures and punishments’. Vaughan did not suggest that More himself inflicted these—he referred to unnamed ‘ministers’—but he went on to mention ‘threatenings of tortures and punishments’.
⁵⁸
Here, in the realm of subtle threat and innuendo, we must imagine More.

Constantine talked. In More’s words he ‘vttered and dysclosed dyuers of hys companyons’
⁵⁹
and he revealed the method of smuggling ‘those deuelysshe bokes whyche hym selfe and other of hys felowes
hadde brought and shypped’;
⁶⁰
he told More the name of the shipman and the secret marks placed on bundles of heretical material. This was a great
coup
for More, who at once went to work. Many books were seized and burned, but volumes alone were not sufficient. Constantine had named Richard Bayfield, a defaulting Benedictine and trader in banned books; he was arrested and, again in More’s words, ‘the monk and apostata’ was ‘well and worthely burned in Smythfelde’. More had joked with Constantine about Archbishop Warham’s former policy of buying up the stock of heretical books in Antwerp; this tactic had served only to enrich the brethren, and the Lord Chancellor’s stringent measures were intended to provide a more powerful lesson. And then Constantine escaped—or, as seems more likely, he was allowed to escape after providing such good service to the old faith. Less than three weeks after the burning of Bayfield, More dispatched another heretic to Smithfield. The house of a London leather-seller, John Tewkesbery, was found to harbour banned books; he had recanted two years before but now, after at least two public examinations led by the Lord Chancellor, he was sentenced to death. More declared that he had reverted to heresy as a dog returns to his own vomit, and so he was ‘burned as there was neuer wretche I wene better worthy’.
⁶¹
Now he lay in hell, ‘an hote fyrebronde burnynge at hys bakke, that all the water in the worlde wyll neuer be able to quenche’.
⁶²
He was soon joined in that inferno by Thomas Dusgate, burnt for heresy in Exeter.

Yet there were still certain constraints upon More. A leading Lutheran and English exile in Antwerp, Robert Barnes, was given ‘safe conduct’ by the king to travel to England and remain for six weeks; it is not hard to discern the reason for this apparent welcome of a heretic, since, only a few months before, Barnes had written
A Supplication unto King Henry the Eighth
, which combined a generally anticlerical diatribe with an assault upon the authority of the Pope—‘can not the pope erre? lett hym rede his awne lawe.’
⁶³
There were also familiar theological arguments drawn from Luther, but the king was now interested in theology only in as far as it concerned himself; this was a period when Henry seemed about to sever the ancient bonds of England with Rome and he was willing to listen to those who could provide cogent scriptural or doctrinal reasons in defence of his action. That is why
Barnes was allowed to remain in London during the last weeks of the year.

Although More did not approve, he could do nothing but keep a close watch upon Barnes. He could perhaps frighten him a little by intercepting letters and questioning those whom the exile met; but, fundamentally, he was helpless in the face of this heretic. Barnes safely left the country and, as More wrote in a subsequent polemic against
Supplication
, ‘lette hym go thys ones, for god shall fynde hys tyme full well’.
⁶⁴
He was more cordial towards a German scholar of Zwinglian sympathies, Simon Grynaeus, who had travelled to England in order to pursue his study of Plato’s texts. More made no effort to impede his movements but as a precaution he asked John Harris, his own servant, to accompany Grynaeus everywhere.

One of More’s last triumphs came in the destruction of James Bainham, whose marriage to the widow of Simon Fish, author of
Supplication for the Beggars
, had cast grave doubts upon his orthodoxy. He was also a member of the Middle Temple, at a time when lawyers were becoming the most vociferous opponents of clerical power. More pounced upon him. He was taken to Chelsea and interrogated; More called him ‘Baynam the iangler’
⁶⁵
or empty talker, which suggests that the questioning was not altogether successful. Foxe reports that he was whipped and then put to the rack in the Tower, but this is most unlikely. It is true that Stokesley joined the interrogations at More’s house, however, and eventually Bainham confessed to the ownership of heretical books. He was then offered the choice of recantation or the fire, but he prevaricated and joined the thirty or forty other Lutherans who were said to have been consigned by More to various prisons within the city.