The Life of Thomas More (69 page)

It was at this point that he was once again led before the commissioners. They revealed to him the number of the London clergy who had sworn the oath that day, even as he had waited in the burned chamber, but he still would not be drawn. He simply repeated his position that he could not join them in their assent. They asked what particular aspect of the oath disturbed him. More replied that he had offended the king already, but ‘if I should open and disclose the causes why, I shall therewith but further exasperate his Highnes, which I will in no wise do, but rather will I abide all the danger and harm that might come toward me than give his Highnes any occasion of further displeasure.’
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His was a subtle strategy of silence and non-compliance, but it had its dangers. The commissioners immediately accused him of stubbornness and obstinacy, but More knew the law better than any of them. ‘But yet it
thinketh me,’ he told them, ‘that if I may not declare the causes without perill, than to leaue them vndeclared is no obstinacy.’
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No man is obliged to condemn himself. Cranmer then intervened. More had agreed that the swearing of the oath was ‘vncertain and doubtfull’,
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precisely because his own conscience did not match that of others; but since it was his certain duty to obey his prince, why not take the less doubtful course and swear? More saw the force of the argument and could reply only that ‘in my conscience the trouth seems on the tother side’. The Abbot of Westminster then asked him to estimate the weight of his conscience, when opposed by so many of the clergy and the parliament, but More answered that he could claim in his support ‘the generall counsail of Christendome’. This was his central argument; the derivation of ‘conscience’ suggests knowledge-with-others, which for More included the communion of the dead as well as the living. It was this understanding which afforded him the strength and confidence to continue what seemed, to almost everyone, a foolish and futile struggle.

Thomas Cromwell, recognising More’s position to be unalterable, swore ‘a gret oth’ that he would rather have seen his own son beheaded than be a witness to More’s refusal. The mention of a beheading here was surely significant. Cromwell went on to suggest that the king would now ‘conceiue a great suspicion’ against More, and that in particular the machinations of the Nun of Kent would be blamed upon him. Their conference ended soon after, with More apparently conceding that he might swear to the succession if the oath was differently framed. He did not elaborate upon the necessary alterations, but once more invoked the principle of human conscience and finally declared that ‘me thinketh in good faith, that so were it good reason that euery man should leaue me to myne’.
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He was now, effectively, a prisoner. He had rejected the oath and was therefore to be charged with ‘misprision of treason’. But he had refused to give his reasons for his fatal decision and, at this moment, he entered silence. Or, rather, silence entered him. In a sense it was no longer his own choice; he ceased to be aware of himself, and at this level of conscience or knowledge he became part of the larger world of faith and spirit. He had always followed the imperatives of duty and service, but now that duty had turned irrevocably from his society to his God. If the will of heaven is vouchsafed to a human being in a wholly private way,
demanding an act of faith as it had once been demanded of Abraham, then he cannot speak to the world. The world will not understand.

But if he did not explain the specific legal reasons for refusing the oath of succession, it is perhaps possible to reconstruct them. He told his daughter later that he had refused the oath because it was ‘not agreeable with the statute’;
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by which he meant that, in his careful consideration and rereading of the two documents, he had realised that the oath itself went far beyond the matter of the royal succession. It required obeisance not only to the Act of Succession itself, in other words, but also to ‘all other Acts and Statutes made since the beginning of the present Parliament’.
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This included all the antipapal legislation within the Acts of Annates, of Appeals, of Dispensations, and of Peter’s Pence. If More had sworn the oath, as presented to him with this wording, he would have concurred in the forcible removal of the Pope’s jurisdiction and the effective schism of the Church in England. This he could not do, even at the cost of his life. He might have been willing to swear to a differently phrased oath, as he had suggested, as long as it did not include any other matters.

After the formal interrogation was over More was delivered into the custody of the Abbot of Westminster, under whose supervision he remained for the next four days. The truth was that no one knew precisely what to do with him; his case was not like that of John Fisher, who had formally been ‘attainted’ through his association with the Nun of Kent, and there was some discussion among the king’s commissioners about the proper course of action. Cranmer wrote to Cromwell suggesting that More (and also Fisher) should be asked to swear only to the Act of Succession itself, thereby avoiding all the problems of acceding to the other Acts; he also suggested that their compliance, if it came, ‘should be suppressed’ or concealed until the right moment for its publication. Their oath of loyalty to the new royal family would be advertised, in other words, for the maximum possible effect upon the king’s opponents. The importance being attached to More, in particular, was clear. But when Cromwell put Cranmer’s arguments to the king, Henry refused to countenance any such compromise; he argued, with some justification, that it might act as a precedent. What if any others refused to swear to the entire oath?

So More’s last hope of freedom was gone. On 17 April he was sent by
river from Westminster to the Tower of London. He was wearing his gold chain of livery, as a solemn token of his service to the king, and he was advised to deliver it into the safekeeping of his family; but he refused, with a characteristic piece of irony: ‘For if I were taken in the field by my enemies, I would they should somewhat fare the better by me.’
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The boat steered its course towards Traitor’s Gate, where a great oaken wicket was opened to receive the prisoner. The wooden gate may be taken as an image for a subsequent conversation.

More
: Well met, my lord, I hope we shall soon meet in heaven.

Fisher
: This should be the way, Sir Thomas, for it is a very strait gate we are in.
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At the landing stage beneath St Thomas’s Tower More was met by the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edmund Walsingham, and by the porter of the wicket. It was an old custom for the porter to request the ‘upper garment’ of any new prisoner. More proffered him his hat and explained that ‘I am very sorry it is no better for you’.

‘No, sir,’ came the reply, ‘I must have your gown.’
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More would have known perfectly well the tradition of handing the man his gown, and his offering of the hat may be construed as an example of that humour which always emerged in the most grave situations. Sir Edmund Walsingham led him up the narrow spiral stairway, with its thick stone and worn steps, the darkness punctuated briefly by slits carved in the massive outer wall. It was fortunate, perhaps, that Walsingham was a ‘good friend and old acquaintance’ of More’s;
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he took him to his cell, or chamber, and ‘desired him that he would accept in such cheare as he was able to make hym’.
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His famous prisoner replied that ‘if any here like it not, turne hym out of dores for a churle’.
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If I complain, in other words, then eject me from the Tower. It is not at all certain in which part of the building More was imprisoned, but it seems most likely to have been within the Bell Tower or the Beauchamp Tower. It is reasonable to suppose, however, that he was moved during the period of his imprisonment.

He was taken to one of those apartments which were reserved for the more influential or privileged ‘guests’ of the lieutenant. His was a pentagonal stone chamber, with a vaulted ceiling; it was some nineteen feet in height, with a floor space of approximately eighteen feet by twenty feet. The walls themselves were between nine and thirteen feet thick, the
floor flagged with rough and uneven stone, the windows merely arrow-slits or ‘loops’.
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More’s furnishings were of the simplest; they included a table and chair as well as a ‘pallet’ bed. There was a small brick stove, to heat this cold room, and More arranged for mats of straw to be placed upon the floor and against the walls. He described it as ‘metely feyre’ and ‘at the lest wise it was strong ynough’;
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indeed he would not have necessarily been uncomfortable. His old servant, John a Wood, was allowed to attend him; board and lodging, for both of them, amounted to fifteen shillings a week, which was more than adequate for food and clothing.

Wood remained his faithful servant through the entire period of More’s imprisonment and might himself, if anything else were known of him, provide an interesting study in loyalty and affection. But he is only ever mentioned as a silent attendant upon his unfortunate master. When Wood and More were first shown the prison chamber by Walsingham, for example, More insisted that his servant swear an oath to the effect that if he, More, ever said anything to the king’s detriment then Wood must report his comments to the lieutenant of the Tower. His master was not held with any strict discipline, however; it was appropriate for a prisoner of his rank to be given permission to walk within the ‘liberties’ of the Tower and to stroll in its gardens. More’s fascination for animals was such that he perhaps visited the royal menagerie, where he might refresh his memory of the lions which ‘in the night walken’. Much more importantly, however, he was allowed to attend Mass each day to pray for his own salvation and for the spiritual comfort of those close to him.

He wrote to his daughter, Margaret, soon after his arrival in order to calm her fears. ‘I am in good health of body, and in good quiet of minde,’ he told her, and beseeched their creator to ‘make you all mery in the hope of heauen’.
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This letter was written ‘with a cole’, or piece of charcoal, because More then had no other pen. He wished to console them because he knew in what desperate need of comfort they stood; the house in Chelsea was searched on more than one occasion, and in a dialogue he composed in his cell a young man described how ‘our pore famely be fallen into suche dumpes, that scantly can any such comfort as my pore wyt can give them, any thyng asswage their sorow’.
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They spoke of More constantly, as Margaret told her father later, and repeated
to each other the proverbs and
dicta
by which he had tried to fortify them.

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’
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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’.
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He confessed that he considered ‘the very worst and the vttermost that can by possibilite fall’,
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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’;
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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’.
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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’;
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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.’
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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.