The Life of Thomas More (59 page)

Two months later Bainham formally abjured and was released, but his faith or conscience proved too strong; he relapsed into heresy, was taken up by the authorities, and ‘The last day of Aprill, 1532, one Baynam, gentleman, was burnt in Smythfeild for heresie’.
⁶⁶
According to the
Book of Martyrs
, Bainham, when tied to the stake, declared that ‘I come hither, good people, accused and condemned for a heretic, Sir Thomas More being my accuser and my judge’. He then read aloud the articles of his faith and the citizens cried out: ‘Set fire to him and burn
him!’ To which the condemned man replied, ‘God forgive thee, and show thee more mercy than thou showest to me; the Lord forgive Sir Thomas More; and pray for me, all good people.’ Then he himself prayed ‘till the fire took his bowels and his head’.
⁶⁷

Bainham the ‘jangler’ appears in the book that More was writing at the time of the Smithfield fires. It is entitled
The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer
and has the distinction of being the longest religious polemic in the English language. In the spring of 1531 William Tyndale had issued
An Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue
, in which he used a rebuttal of
Dialogue Concerning Heresies
to mount a larger assault upon the rites and sacraments of the Church. Almost immediately More began to compose his
Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer
, which, in the space of half a million words, attempts to answer Tyndale point by point. These books represent the most important dialogue within English religious discourse, perhaps of any age. The confrontation between Tyndale and More embodies the struggle between the opposing tendencies of the period—inner prayer and belief against communal worship and ritual, faith against works, the direct inspiration of scripture against inherited orthodoxy, redemption through Christ rather than the sacramental system. Of course it would be entirely wrong to see these tendencies as of equal force, or weight, at this moment of transition. The brethren remained a very small sect indeed, and the people of England were as notably pious as before; but More sensed the danger. If the king were to defy the Pope, and to use the Lutherans for purposes of his own, then the fate of Germany might be visited upon them all. There was also a more general change which he could not have observed or anticipated except in the shape of the Antichrist; others have preferred to describe it as the emergence of the modern world.

More had reached such a pitch of nervous intensity that he could not rest from the fight; his whole life and duty lay now in his battle to protect the Church. Late at night, after his extensive duties as chancellor were completed, he sat up by candlelight in his library at Chelsea; he wrote quickly, almost furiously, composing thousands of words each week through the summer and winter of that year. That is why the
Confutation
is conceived in the form of a dialogue, in More’s characteristic
manner, as if the atmosphere of public disputation had to be maintained.

William Tyndale
: Marke whyther yt be not true in the hyest degree …

Thomas More
: Tyndale is a great marker. There is nothynge with hym now but marke, marke, marke. It is pytye that the man were not made a marker of chases in some tenys playe.
⁶⁸

It is dramatic and colloquial speech, as the protagonists confront each other upon the stage of Christendom itself. More has the advantage of humour in the exchanges, with the intentional use of ribaldry and insult as a way of belittling those opponents gradually growing in strength. He adopts the language of the ‘comon peple’ as a way of confronting Tyndale’s own vivid use of demotic.

William Tyndale
: Iudge whyther yt be possible that any good sholde come oute of theyr domme ceremonyes and sacramentes.

Thomas More
: Iudge good crysten reader whyther yt be possyble that he be any better than a beste oute of whose brutyshe bestely mouth, commeth such a fylthye fome.
⁶⁹

His use of current phrases, as well as proverbs and anecdotes and stories, conveys his belief that the old faith is part of the customs and traditions of the people, whereas the heretics embrace only ‘newfang-lynes’.

William Tyndale
: But that the apostles gaue us any blynde ceremonies, whereof we coulde not knowe the reason, that I denye and also defye.

Thomas More
: Forsoth saue for the ryme I wolde not geue a ryshe, neyther for his denyeng nor for hys defyenge.
⁷⁰

The
Confutation
was intended to be read aloud; the manner of the narrative is designed to ensure that short sections can be extracted and read to a group of people. That is why More’s imagery is close to the popular sermons of the period and why he mentions both specific locations and individual citizens. He needed to capture the attention of his auditors in order to emphasise the pressing danger of these heresies.

William Tyndale
: More muste nedes graunte that chyrche is as comen as ecclesia.

Thomas More
: Fyrst I say that mayster More must not nedys graunte thys to Tyndale neuer a whytte.
⁷¹

The argument here is over a crucial point of translation, and at such points in the narrative More tries to anticipate every line of attack, to leave nothing undecided or undefended, to quibble and question and define and distinguish until his opponent sinks exhausted under the weight of his cross-examination.

William Tyndale was himself a grave and learned scholar; he was a courteous and unworldly man but, if he was diffident on his own account, he was fervent for the truth. He was also a wonderful exponent of a plain English style, as any reader of his biblical translations will know, and there was some justice in his attack upon More as a mere poet, a juggler of words who ‘biteth, sucketh, gnaweth, towseth and mowseth Tyndale’.
⁷²
More was a sophister who dealt in ‘taunts and mocks’,
⁷³
a charge which was also levelled at him by others who denounced his resort to farce and ‘feyning’. This was always the principal criticism directed against him and it suggests, perhaps, the image he gave to the world. But if they found fault with him for not treating Tyndale ‘with no fayrer wordes nor in no more courteyse maner’,
⁷⁴
the other complaint was, in More’s own words, that ‘my writyng is ouer longe, and therfore to tedyouse to rede’.
⁷⁵
His explanation for this repetitiveness lay in his need continually to concentrate upon certain key themes and doctrines so that the good Christian ‘Shal not nede to rede ouer any chapyter but one’.
⁷⁶
Where men like Barnes typically wrote brief tracts, with their points succinctly made, More felt obliged to reply with discourses which try to stop up every gap, close any loophole, destroy every argument, with an urgency that is palpable upon the page; it is as if he were intent upon out-shouting or deafening his opponents. There is perhaps a more private reason, too, for the length and elaboration of his polemic. He writes all the more volubly and excitedly here because he could not properly speak out in council or at the court; his polemic was a form of compensation for his incapacity as a maker of policy.

The central theme of the
Confutation
is that there is only one true Church, the visible and orthodox communion of Catholics. Throughout its history its members have been frail or weak, but that in no way affects its authority as Christ’s mystical body upon the earth. It is the
permanent and living sign of Christ’s presence, sustained by inherited custom and maintained by traditional knowledge. It is a visible, extensive and palpable community rather thana few ‘brethren’ gathered in secret rooms. Just as parliament was considering plans for the reformation of abuses among the clergy, More was insisting that the sinfulness or folly of individuals—even the wickedness of a bad pope—in no way affected the divinely instituted
sanctitas
of the Catholic Church. There were covert messages here to the king as well as to the members of parliament, but no one chose to listen to them.

A more general interpretation can also be offered. When More writes of ‘one fayth in the howse of god’,
⁷⁷
he is at the same time invoking the medieval society of the household. Among the articles of his creed, in other words, are the precepts of the world in which he grew up—a world where communality and tradition were no less important than external ritual and inherited faith. Indeed they cannot be separated one from another without a general dissolution of ‘the comen knowen catholique chyrch’.
⁷⁸
Yet William Tyndale was possessed by an alternative vision of private belief and individual grace; he made the distinction between ‘an hystorycall fayth’ and ‘a felynge fayth’,
⁷⁹
with all his trust residing within that ‘sure felynge’ which is vouchsafed to those when ‘god shall wryte yt in theyr hertes wyth his holy spyryte’.
⁸⁰
His was a powerful statement of individual redemption, but one that More rejected utterly as the shortest way to pride and anarchy. More was fully acquainted with the frailty of ‘we pore worldely men of mydle erth’,
⁸¹
therefore, and from this awareness springs much of his irony and humour. From it, too, comes his overwhelming desire for discipline and external authority.

What if that authority should, then, disappear in some new age of the world? The presiding image of
The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer
is that of ‘Tyndales great Mayster Antecryste’.
⁸²
This was not for More some bugbear to scare children, but a real and pressing threat. Martin Luther had married a Cistercian nun, Katharina Bora, or, in More’s words, ‘toke out of relygyon a spouse of Cryste’
⁸³
and it was generally believed ‘that Antecryste sholde be borne betwene a frere and a nunne’.
⁸⁴
So the beast might be about to come forth, and on two occasions More adverts to the approaching horror, when ‘the great archeheretyke Antycryste come hym selfe whyche as helpe me god I fere
be very nere hys tyme’
⁸⁵
and ‘now very nere at hande’.
⁸⁶
This was the terror which he was preparing himself to face; he truly believed that Luther and Tyndale were the false prophets or disciples of the great beast. It is now possible, perhaps, to understand the feverish haste and urgency of his work, a clamancy which is not untouched by a sense of weariness and feeling of doom. There are times when More begs his ‘good cristen readers’ not to study any heretical books; he even implores them, in one remarkable passage, not to read his own in case the very mention of false beliefs might contaminate or confound them. This was the pass to which he had come; he abhors the mention of heresy even as he launches a huge barrage of words against it.

There was another reason for his weariness and sorrow. In the winter of 1530 his father, Sir John More, died; he had not quite reached his eightieth year, according to Erasmus, but until the end had seemed wonderfully alert. Family history reports that he died from eating ‘a Surfeit of Grapes’,
⁸⁷
which does not suggest fading health; on his own epitaph More preferred to believe that his father died ‘having witnessed his son made Lord Chancellor of England’. His son-in-law recalled that, in the moments of his father’s death, More ‘with tears taking him about the neck, most lovingly kissed and embraced him, commending him into the merciful hands of almighty God’.
⁸⁸
This is the first report of More’s tears, which would be plentiful in the years that followed. And then he grew sick. After the death of his father he began to suffer from some disease of the chest;
⁸⁹
he also confessed that he began to feel himself growing very old.
⁹⁰
His was a severe and in a literal sense morbid reaction, yet not perhaps unexpected in a man who used the image or metaphor of ‘the father’ as the token of social order and authority. By strange chance Cardinal Wolsey, under arrest at the king’s command, died within two or three days of John More; in their joint passing we might see the demise of the old order itself.

More’s father was buried in the church of St Lawrence Jewry, a few yards from the family home in Milk Street, and had asked that his funeral be ‘not to pompiously perfourmed’.
⁹¹
The coffin was sprinkled with holy water before being lowered into the stone tomb; the mourners, arrayed in special gowns of black, white or russet, held lighted torches at the moment of interment. It was generally believed that thirteen was the optimum number for those present, in commemoration of
the last supper, but for so grand a man as Sir John More there may have been many others. There was then a funeral feast, in honour of the living and the dead, as John More entered the great communion of souls. He became a spiritual member of what More, in the fourth book of his
Confutation
, had called ‘thys great knowen congregacyon’.
⁹²
But a great change had come upon More himself when he wrote those words; he had resigned as Lord Chancellor and, in horror at the collapse of the established authority of his Church, he had retreated to Chelsea.

CHAPTER XXVII
INFINITE CLAMOUR