The Life of Thomas More (75 page)

Thomas More
: Nay, nay, very and pure necessitie, for the discharge of my conscience, enforceth me to speake so muche. Wherein I call and appeale to God, whose onely sight pearceth into the very depth of mans heart, to be my witnes. Howbeit, it is not for this supremacie so much that ye seeke my bloud, as for that I would not condiscende to the marriage.

Sir Thomas Audley
: My Lord Fitzjames, how do you find the case?

Lord Fitzjames
: My lords all, by St Julian, I must needs confes that if thacte of parliament be not vnlawfull, then is not the Indictment in my conscience insufficient.

Sir Thomas Audley
: Loe, my Lordes, loe, you heare what my lord chief Iustice saith. You are judged to be guilty, Sir Thomas More. Do you have anythinge els to alleage for your defence? We will grant your favourable audience.

Thomas More
: More haue I not to say, my Lordes, but that like as the blessed Apostle St Pawle, as we read in thactes of the Apostles, was present, and consented to the death of St Stephen, and kepte their clothes that stoned him to deathe, and yeat be they nowe both twayne holy Sainctes in heaven, and shall continue there frendes for euer, So I verily truste, and shall therefore hartelye pray, that thoughe your Lordshippes haue nowe here in the earthe bine Judges to my condemnacion, we may yeat hearafter in heaven meerily all meete together, to our euerlasting saluacion and thus I desire Almighty God to preserue and defende the kinges Maiestie, and to send him good counsaile.

Sir Thomas More, you are to be drawn on a hurdle through the City of London to Tyburn, there to be hanged till you be half dead, after that cut down yet alive, your bowels to be taken out of your body and burned before you, your privy parts cut off, your head cut off, your body to be divided in four parts, and your head and body to be set at such places as the King shall assign.
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CHAPTER XXXIII
THE KING IS GOOD UNTO ME

T is one of the most celebrated trials in English history. At first he had stood before his accusers, like Jesus, but weariness and debility mastered him before the end of the proceedings; he told one of his household that the preliminary reading of the indictment was so long that he could not properly follow its third count. He had not been given any advance warning of the case against him, although he must have anticipated its main thrust; in treason trials the accused man had no ‘rights’ in the contemporary sense. There was no presumption of innocence, and the prisoner was given no opportunity to call witnesses in his defence; as the testimony of Rich suggests, the rules of evidence were by no means strict. There is no reason to believe that the jury of twelve men, listening to his testimony in Westminster Hall, were overtly persuaded to find the case against More proven; but if they had declared him innocent, they might themselves have been imprisoned or even attainted. It was not a trial which More could have won.

He made his case skilfully, however, and his penultimate speech ‘in arrest of judgment’ was a masterpiece of legal tact and nicety. His argument was that if a parliamentary statute offends against the law of God it is ‘insufficient’, and cannot be imposed upon any Christian subject. The court disagreed with him, implicitly asserting English law over canon law. As for the charge of treason itself More had argued, again skilfully, that there had been no ‘malicious’ intent in his conversation with Richard Rich. The court and jury disagreed, on the presumption that malice was implied in any denial of the king’s supremacy—or, more particularly, in More’s refusal to swear the oath to that effect. There has been some controversy over the fact that Sir Richard Southwell
and Mr Palmer declined to corroborate Rich’s testimony concerning the conversation in More’s cell, but their silence did not seem to affect the jury’s decision.

More’s own silence is more interesting. He maintained that it was not of a ‘corrupt’ or ‘perverse’ nature; he also applied the commanding argument that human law could not judge what Thomas Aquinas called
‘interioribus motibus’
and Christopher St German described as ‘inward things’. This concerned the law of God and was, in human terms, essentially a matter of conscience. More put the case that ‘in thinges touching conscience, euery true and good subiect is more bounde to haue respect to his saide conscience and to his soule than to any other thing in all the world beside’. More was engaged in a particularly difficult and subtle testing of human, as opposed to divine, law, with all the resources of his legal experience being deployed to justify his beleaguered position. His contemporaries believed that he was acting obsessively or irrationally, but he believed himself to be acting legally—in the fullest possible meaning of that term. It has often been surmised that the trial of More represents the defeat of the individual conscience by the forces of the emerging nation-state, but that is profoundly to misunderstand his position. Conscience was not for More simply or necessarily an individual matter; as Lord Chancellor he had been charged with the application of conscience to law, but upon general and traditional principles. At his trial he was affirming the primacy of law itself, as it had always been understood. He asserted the laws of God and of reason, as they had been inherited, and he simply did not believe that the English parliament could repeal the ordinances of a thousand years. It is significant that he was found to be guilty because of that conversation with Rich in which he ‘put the case’. He was in that sense condemned for acting like a lawyer and, at the trial itself, he was also convicted for maintaining traditional law. He embodied law all his life, and he died for it.

He is reported to have remained impassive and composed during these proceedings, his visage showing signs of weariness but not of fear; like the early Christian martyrs who ‘gazed steadfastly’ at their accusers,
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More was imperturbable. He had prepared himself for the ordeal, after all, when in his prison writing he had meditated upon the strength and humility of Christ before his Passion. By his unwavering firmness More embodied the principle of law which he wished to uphold. He
spoke out after the verdict had been given against him, because at that moment his fate was determined; he could not be accused of inviting death by his own words. There was nothing tragic about his situation, as many have supposed, and indeed for More all worked towards what was for him the happiest outcome. It might even be described as a form of Socratic comedy in which the outcast is the one who remains most faithful to himself and to his principles. He rose above those who were about to kill him—it is worth noting that he spoke of ‘your law’ and ‘your statute’—by remaining true to his divinely ordained conscience.

After the sentence had been pronounced against him he was led away from the bar of the King’s Bench and escorted from Westminster Hall. The constable of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, was in charge of the guard which accompanied the prisoner from Westminster Stairs towards the Tower; the swift tides made it impossible to cross beneath London Bridge and instead the armed party disembarked from the barge at Old Swan Stairs. Here William Kingston began to cry as he took his leave of him, but More comforted him by saying, ‘Good Master Kingston, trouble not yourself but be of good cheer; for I will pray for you, and my good Lady your wife, that we may meet in heaven together, where we shall be merry for ever and ever.’ Kingston reported this to More’s son-in-law a little while after, and added, ‘In good faith, Master Roper, I was ashamed at myself that, at my departing from your father, I found my heart so feeble, and his so strong, that he was fain to comfort me which should rather have comforted him.’
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More was taken up Old Swan Lane and then turned right into Thames Street, which would lead him back to the Tower; he was walking, according to report, in a coarse woollen gown.

His children were waiting for him close by the Tower itself. John More knelt down in the street, and, weeping, asked for his father’s blessing. Margaret Roper also knelt upon the ground and received his blessing but then a few moments later, in the words of her husband, ‘hasting towards him and, without consideration or care of herself, pressing in among the midst of the throng and company of the guard, that with halberds and bills [swords] went round about him, hastily ran to him and there openly, in the sight of them all, embraced him, took him about the neck, and kissed him’.
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It was later reported, by Cresacre More, that those around him ‘smelt a most odoriferus smell to come
from him’.
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He blessed Margaret again and comforted her; she started to walk away but then ‘having respect neither to herself nor to the press of the people and multitude that were there about him, suddenly turned back again, ran to him as before, took him about the neck, and divers times together most lovingly kissed him’.
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William Roper adds that, among the large crowd assembled to see the famous prisoner, many then began ‘for very sorrow thereof to mourn and weep’. Eventually More was escorted back to his cell. It has been suggested that, as a condemned man, he would have been consigned to the dungeons, which dated back to the earliest building of the Tower. It is much more likely, however, that he returned to the prison chamber which had now become so familiar to him.

For the last six days of his life he prayed and fasted. The stories of that short period are generally of an apocryphal or hagiographical nature, but some of them have the advantage of emphasising More’s wit even in extremity. A barber was sent to cut More’s beard and hair, but the prisoner is supposed to have declined his service by saying ‘The king has taken out a suit on my head and until the matter is resolved I shall spend no further cost upon it.’ One anecdote, in particular, is characteristic of More. He showed a visitor the urine in his chamber pot and, examining it, declared, ‘For anything that I can perceive, this patient is not so sick that he may do well, if it be not the king’s pleasure he should die.’
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There is certainly no reason to doubt that he retained his humour until the end; he had conquered all the temptations of the world and may have surprised even himself by his own lack of fear.