The Life of Thomas More (63 page)

HOMAS More, having resigned as Lord Chancellor, approached Dame Alice More in her pew at church; he stood before her, with his cap in his hand, and asked, ‘May it please your Ladieship to come forth now my Lord is gone.’
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The purport of this family story is clear enough, in its mixture of self-conscious irony and grave humour. His behaviour in the months ahead, however, suggests that he relished his fall from power as a blessed release from the perils of pride or worldliness and thus as an act of saving grace. His fool, Henry Patenson, put it his own way when he said that ‘Chancellor More is Chancellor no more’.
²
It was in this period, too, that he composed the epitaph for the stone tomb where, he trusted, he would one day be allowed to rest; it was a conventional preparation, of course, but it suggests also that More believed he might soon die. William Roper records that in the period after his resignation he had discussions with his family on the nature of martyrdom; ‘upon his faith,’ More said, ‘if he might perceive his wife and children would encourage him to die in a good cause, it should so comfort him that for very joy thereof it would make him merrily run to death’.
³
The irony here, however, is that they in no sense encouraged him to embrace that fate and never understood why he chose to do so.

His epitaph opens simply with ‘Thomas More, a Londoner borne, of no noble famely’ and then proceeds to enumerate his official posts in the service of a king extolled as ‘the defender of the faith, a glory afore not herd of’; he professes his own competence in such offices and ends with his decision to be relieved from ‘the business of this life’ in order to prepare his soul for immortality. More told Erasmus that he had composed these lines
‘ambitiose’
, in order to ‘show off’; but it is significant
that he nowhere mentions his own writings. It was as if
Utopia
had never been composed.

In a little Latin poem he completed at the same time, he scorns any hope of remaining upon this earth for very long.
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Now that the glory of the world had departed he wished for a secluded, even monastic, life and there are family anecdotes which suggest his desire for plainness. His son-in-law reports that he gathered ‘all of us that were children to him’,
⁵
and explained that his income was now so greatly reduced that he needed their advice how they might ‘live and continue together as he wished we should’. There was silence, and so More answered his own question. ‘Then I will show my poor mind to you,’ was one of his customary and favourite phrases. He believed that they should all now contribute to the cost of the household, and that they should also modify their ‘diet’ by degrees. It is also reported that the family were so straitened that they were obliged to burn bracken or fern to warm themselves, but this is unlikely. He remained an affluent, if not wealthy, man with the income of a king’s councillor (which he retained until 1534) and estates in Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire and Kent. Alice More also had a large private income, from her previous marriage, as well as land of her own. But although the legend of More’s poverty is insupportable it is true that he could not live in the munificent style of previous years; his children went to their own properties and he was obliged to reduce the size of his general household. In a letter to Erasmus, written in the early summer of this year, he explained that his doctors had advised him to lead a restful and secluded life.

The three letters of this period, two of which are addressed to Erasmus and the third to another European humanist, are characteristic of More; they seem to reveal, yet manage to conceal, the truth of his life. He declares in each of them, for example, that he resigned his office as Lord Chancellor as a result of his poor health and that the king had accepted his resignation most reluctantly. This might be described, in the language of our age, as the ‘official’ explanation, which concealed all the hostility and distrust involved in his departure. More did not feel obliged to give a more truthful explanation, if only because his letters would be shown to others, but there is a touch of ambiguity which would not have escaped Erasmus’s attention. More writes that his
‘pectus’
⁶
was afflicted; this would ordinarily and properly be taken to mean
that he suffered in his chest, but the word can also be implied to mean ‘courage’ or ‘conscience’.

There is one other insistent topic in this correspondence which, unsurprisingly, concerns his battle against the heretics. He describes his delight on hearing a report that two of their leaders had died—namely Zwingli and Oecolampadius—and goes on to amplify his hatred and horror of the heresies spreading everywhere. It remained the greatest battle of his life and, deprived of the chance to imprison or to burn, he returned to angry and elaborate polemic. The first part of his
Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer
had been published in the spring, just before his resignation, and now he began working on a second part, which was longer and more closely controlled. In particular, during this period of grave threat to the English Church, he emphasised the unity and traditional authority of the Catholic faith; he wished to defend, therefore, precisely those aspects of it which Henry was challenging. It was in this period, too, that the bishops wanted to repay him for his work in parliament on behalf of the clergy, as well as for his polemical writings; in the words of William Roper, ‘they agreed together and concluded upon a sum of four or five thousand pounds at the least, to my remembrance, for his pains to recompense him’. But More refused the gift, telling Tunstall and others that ‘I wolde rather haue caste theyre money into the Temys thenne take yt’.
⁷
He wrote later that ‘loke I for my thanke of god that is theyr better, and for whose sake I take the labour and not for theyrs’.
⁸
He was also aware that Tyndale had accused him of avarice, and clearly wanted to avoid any such unfounded charge. Instead, he simply ‘carried the Crosse in procession in his parish Churche at Chelsey’.
⁹

Yet the Church itself was changing. Archbishop Warham died in the summer of 1532 and it eventually became clear that Henry had chosen as his successor the relatively unknown and untried Thomas Cranmer. This was the man for the Boleyns, since he was the scholar who had always followed the king’s orders and had even translated a treatise justifying Henry’s desire to annul his marriage. The old faith was again under renewed assault; Thomas Cromwell was even then drawing up proposals for the next parliament which would further subdue the powers and privileges of the Church, and at the same time he was compiling notes and lists of all those who opposed the king. Through his agent in
Antwerp, Stephen Vaughan, he was also in contact with Tyndale and other ‘newe men’. One of them even returned to England after More’s resignation, with the expectation that Lutheran reformers would no longer be persecuted with the same fervour. John Frith arrived in the summer and quickly proved himself to be a young scholar of skill and eloquence; it seems likely that Cromwell had some wish to turn him into a representative of the king’s cause. But Frith had come too soon. Henry had named himself the supreme head of the English Church and for that reason alone he could never condone heresy; he believed himself to have acted according to ancient custom, and therefore had to be seen as a true defender of the faith. That is why he still needed the tacit support of Thomas More, even in retirement, and why he could not allow himself to be compromised by Cromwell’s association with the ‘bretherne’.

In the autumn of the year Frith was arrested and taken to the Tower, in which confinement he wrote two or three short treatises on the new faith. One of More’s informants, probably a member of the network which had flourished during his chancellorship, obtained a copy of one of these works and brought it to Chelsea. It was, in More’s words, ‘a false folysshe treatyce agaynste the blessed sacrament of ye aulter’.
¹⁰
The eucharist was the symbol of divine presence within the material world, and a token of Christ’s mystical body on earth; this of course was also the Church itself, and so the transubstantiated bread was a visible sign of the eventual redemption of the world. When More read Frith’s denial of what was for him a sacred truth, he reacted immediately by writing a reply which was then distributed among his friends. It was reported by the brethren themselves that More was so incensed with Frith that he exclaimed that his treatise ‘sholde coste hym the beste bloude in hys body’.
¹¹
This was indeed a calumny, given More’s relative powerlessness, and he went to great trouble at a later date to explain precisely what he had meant; he had declared only that ‘I fere me sore that Cryst wyll kyndle a fyre of fagottes for hym, & make hym theirin swete the bloude out of hys body here, and strayte frome hense send hys soule for euer into the fyre of hell’.
¹²
The vision of flames was constantly with him at this time, and one of the most arresting images in his ‘letter’ to Frith evokes the fire of heresy that ‘begynneth to reke oute at some corner … burneth vp whole townes, and wasteth whole
countrees … lyeth lurkynge styll in some old roten tymber vnder cellers & celynges’.
¹³

More was still a master of prose and it may well be that the force of his polemic helped send the young scholar to his death among the flames of Smithfield seven months later. More’s letter to Frith had a private circulation partly because ‘I wolde wysshe that the comon people sholde of suche heresyes neuer here so myche as the name’.
¹⁴
But there was another reason why he arranged that his reply should reach the eyes of only the most influential citizens. There is nothing in More’s life, at this stage, that did not have public ramifications. He knew that Frith was being held in loose confinement and that he was being actively courted by Cromwell and his agents as a possible supporter of the king’s ‘divorce’; More’s attack was a way of exposing him. Frith was a dangerous heretic who threatened the nation, ‘where as the kynges gracyouse hyghnes lyke a moste faythfull catholyke prynce, for the auodynge of suche pestylente bokes’ had already banned ‘suche poysened heresyes’.
¹⁵
It was a means of warning Cromwell not to go too far, and perhaps also of reminding Henry himself of his spiritual duties. If he colluded with heretics, he might even lose his kingdom.

The same tactics determined the writing of his next polemic, which was directed at Thomas Cromwell’s strategy. At the end of 1532 Christopher St German, the author of various legislative proposals yet to be enacted, published a treatise ‘concerning the diuision betwene the spirytualtie and temporaltie’. Here he pursued his central aim of raising English common law above canon law, and of removing all forms of secular jurisdiction from church courts; in particular St German criticised the procedure in trials for heresy. Although the book’s author had not been revealed, More knew precisely who had written it, and he started at once upon a reply to St German’s arguments. Indeed, the anonymity of the treatise served More’s purpose; instead of attacking by name someone close to the king’s council, he was answering an unknown opponent. He could never be seen as striking at Henry’s own policies, especially as he had pledged to retire from temporal business, but there was no harm in a good ‘catholyque’ man contradicting the mad proposals of an unnamed scribbler.

The apologye of syr Thomas More knyght
provides more than a simple rebuttal of St German. In some of his most artless, or at least
plainest, prose he defends his own conduct as a polemicist before delivering a sustained and impassioned warning about the true state of the realm. ‘Good catholyque folke’
¹⁶
were too complacent or too accommodating, for example, allowing heretics ‘boldely to talke vnchekked’.
¹⁷
More’s frustration and impatience are everywhere apparent; he believed his ‘good cristen reders’ to be true members of the old faith, but few seemed to be aware of the threat to their practices and beliefs. That is why he still wrote in the vernacular, repeating the same arguments and addressing the same themes, in an exhausting and almost single-handed fight against the ‘bretherne’, as well as against those who supported them for political purposes. He conveys the fear or anger of a man who feels himself to be outnumbered by those, such as Cromwell and St German, who wished to change the nation’s polity. The horror of their enterprise is conveyed by More in his image of a procession at Corpus Christi, bearing the blessed sacrament, being attacked by a gang of villains who ‘cache them all by the heddys, and throw them in the myre, surplyces, copys, sensers, crosses, relyques, sacrament and all’.
¹⁸
It was in this context that More turned to the arguments of St German, calling him ‘Syr Pacifyer’ in ironic tribute to his efforts to widen the divisions between the people and the clergy. He accused his opponent of wiliness, hypocrisy and wilful imposture in an attempt to subvert the Catholic Church. In one of More’s most unusual pieces of demotic, he writes that the nation ‘maye fall so farre downe downe down downe’
¹⁹
that it might never rise again.