The Tudors (35 page)

What was perhaps even more surprising, Fisher did not challenge the truthfulness of Rich’s testimony. He erupted with the furious indignation that had been characteristic of him for years now, ever since the king had begun claiming that his marriage to Queen Catherine was not valid, but his anger here was aimed less at what Rich was saying than at his daring to say it in court. Rich, it turned out, had in his visit to the Tower told Fisher that he had been instructed by the king to ask for the bishop’s opinion of the Supremacy Act, and to promise that nothing he said would be used against him in court or otherwise. He had added, Fisher told the judges, that the king sincerely wanted to know what he thought “for the great affiance [trust or confidence] he had in me, more than in any other.” There had followed—again according to what Fisher told the court—an explicit suggestion that Henry, after taking Fisher’s position into account, “was very like to retract much of his former doings
and make recompense for the same, in case I should so advise him.” To all this Rich had added his own promise not to repeat anything Fisher told him to anyone except the king. Fisher had responded as any honest, trusting, and even moderately courageous subject would have under such circumstances. For the first time since coming under suspicion, at the king’s request and for the king’s sake, he unburdened himself. In doing so he committed treason.

It is impossible to know anything about the characters of the two men involved in this exchange—or for that matter, of Henry VIII—and doubt Fisher’s account. This is all the more true because even Rich himself, who was building a phenomenally successful career on a willingness to do and say whatever was likely to be most pleasing to those more powerful than himself, never challenged what Fisher had said. And because Fisher, who to his dying day never lost a profound if exasperated respect for Henry as king and an equally deep affection for him personally, would certainly have responded to even an indirect appeal from him for guidance. He may have had little opportunity to get to know Richard Rich or to learn what kind of man he was. He would have been reluctant to think any man capable of making the kinds of pledges that Rich made not only on his own behalf but on the king’s and then breaking his word in the most destructive way imaginable.

“What a monstrous matter is this!” Fisher cried.

Rich, accused not only of disgracing himself but of suggesting disgraceful behavior on the part of the king, might well have responded by calling Fisher a liar. Instead he accepted Fisher’s version of what had
transpired between them, probably in order to keep the Crown’s case intact. Rich and Fisher were together in testifying that the bishop had—regardless of his reasons, whether or not he had been deceived—denied the supremacy. That was enough; it gave the king’s judges all they needed. Tacitly accepting that Henry had, in effect, promised Fisher immunity, they set aside Rich’s assurances to the bishop as making no difference. Every other argument that Fisher offered in his defense was likewise swept aside. Inevitably (the jurors understood that they had no choice if they valued their own liberty and livelihoods) he was convicted, sentenced to death, and returned to the Tower. Perhaps because of his wretched physical condition, perhaps because the king still felt some of his old affection, Fisher was told that he would merely be beheaded, not subjected to the horrors that had been visited upon the Carthusians.

June 22, the day of his execution, found him prepared and at peace. He was awakened at five
A.M.
and told that this was the day he had been expecting—that he was to be killed at ten. His response was to ask to be left to sleep longer. When he arrived at Tower Hill, the scaffold on which he was to die was still under construction, so that he had to spend an hour on muleback, waiting for the preparations to be completed. The assembled crowd was large and, being sympathetic to the old man, markedly subdued. Before putting his head on the block Fisher asked for the prayers of the crowd, telling them that though up to this point he had remained unafraid, he feared that his faith might fail him at the last moment. He asked the people to pray for their king, too, and to love and obey him, “for he was good by nature.”

When it was all over, Fisher’s head was set atop London Bridge. A story was circulated—an expression of the esteem in which he had been held—that every day that head grew pinker and healthier and more lifelike. He was the first English bishop ever to be condemned in a judicial proceeding and put to death by authority of the Crown. There had been no death remotely like his since Thomas Becket’s murder more than three centuries before. England was shocked by it. Europe was shocked. Henry and Cromwell were now at liberty to turn their attention to Thomas More, who was still in the Tower and still refusing to share his thoughts with anyone.

THE EXECUTION OF JOHN FISHER AND THE IMPRISONMENT of Thomas More electrified not only England but all of Western Christendom, and for a reason that was entirely novel. The two men were phenomena of a type that had only recently appeared on the world stage: famous living authors, and therefore international celebrities. The books they had written, and the books written about them and sometimes against them, had spread through Europe’s fast-growing reading public with a speed that would have been impossible just a few generations earlier. They had created the kind of sensation that only the news of the day can generate.

It was all part of the revolution sparked by the invention of the printing press—of movable and reusable type, one of the most world-altering technological breakthroughs in history. By the time Henry decided to discard Catherine of Aragon, printing was Europe’s leading growth industry. The new ability to mass-produce long texts at low cost was transforming everything: education, religion, the economy, the very character of civilization. It was affecting everyday life more dramatically and profoundly than the automobile would in the twentieth century, or the Internet in the twenty-first. It had so accelerated the movement of new ideas, and so magnified the impact of those ideas, that all Europe was left almost literally dizzy. At a time when being educated meant reading Latin, a controversialist like Martin Luther—or like Fisher or More—could become famous from Vienna to Lisbon in a matter of months.

Difficult though it is to measure something as amorphous as fame at a distance of four and a half centuries, Fisher at the time of his death was probably better known than More. He had been early to involve himself in the religious disputes that evolved into the Reformation, and his deep learning and the firmness of his opinions made him a formidable advocate. His book
Assertionis Lutheranae confutatio
appeared in 1523, just
six years after Luther first raised his voice against Rome, and was so widely reprinted and held up so well under rebuttal that it came to be regarded as
the
standard statement of orthodoxy. Within the next two years Fisher produced two additional responses to Luther—both were published in Cologne rather than England, an indication of Fisher’s international reach—and they were followed in 1527 with a treatise on the Eucharist that would have a formative effect on Catholic thinking for many years. All this work had the enthusiastic approval of Henry VIII, but the attention it received explains why Fisher’s subsequent objections to the king’s divorce and claim to supremacy brought such wrath down upon him. His researches had placed him among the leading authorities on the history of church doctrine, and his flagrant refusal to accept the king’s interpretation of that history was genuinely dangerous. There was no way that the man Henry had become by the 1530s could have found Fisher’s resistance anything other than intolerable.

More’s fame was of a different character than Fisher’s, if no less likely to cause trouble when he declined to approve Henry’s innovations. Outside England it was based mainly on his “novel” (as it is sometimes anachronistically described)
Utopia
, which he began writing in 1516 while on a diplomatic mission to Flanders and spending much time with his friend Erasmus. Written in Latin, the description of a visit to an imaginary island, the book
appears
to function on two levels: as a satirical commentary on contemporary life, and also as More’s vision of how society (even a non-Christian society, one lacking revelation and therefore obliged to depend upon natural law for guidance) might best be organized. However, it is so complex, containing so many intentional ambiguities and possible red herrings (the name of the character who brings news of Utopia translates as “dispenser of nonsense”) that critics and scholars still disagree about where More was being serious, where he was joking, and what the whole thing actually means. It definitely expresses a yearning for a simpler, less materialistic society than Tudor-era Europe—much the same kind of yearning, interestingly, that would be characteristic of the kinds of evangelical reformers whose rejection of the Roman church later horrified More. There is no private property in Utopia, the laws are so straightforward that the legal profession does not exist, and all people do manual work and wear the same plain clothing. The book also expresses the reverence for tradition and order, the almost
obsessive fear of disunity and disruption, that later would turn its author into a determined persecutor of those people whose beliefs and practices he regarded as heretical: premarital sex is punished with enforced lifelong celibacy in Utopia, adultery with enslavement.

Surely More must have been joking in making it a capital crime to discuss politics anywhere except in Utopia’s government buildings (one way to eliminate tedious conversations!). And it is curious, in light of his later history, that although belief in the immortality of the soul is mandatory (because essential to mortality) on the island, unbelievers are not punished but converted through instruction. More appears to have written the book for his amusement and that of his friends rather than for publication, and when Erasmus published it in Louvain in 1516 he did so without the author’s knowledge or consent. It was a huge success from the start, establishing the thirty-eight-year-old More among the best-known writers of the day. Some of the book’s most sensitive elements—its discussion of why kings are so inclined to start pointless wars, the suggestion that republics are the best-governed states—may explain why More, though he revised
Utopia
before republishing it in Switzerland in 1518, never translated it into English or allowed its publication in England. The elusiveness of its meaning foreshadows his later behavior when, under attack by the king, he refused to explain himself to anyone. In any case it was nothing that
Utopia
said but simply the fame it had brought to its author that drove Henry VIII to the belief that he had to make an example of More one way or another.

Printing’s effects on the lives and careers of Fisher and More were nothing compared to what they did to and for Martin Luther. Without the magnifying power of the press, the disputes that Luther triggered might never have become anything more than what Clement VII called them: a dreary argument among monks. It can almost seem that printing arrived just in time to serve Luther’s purposes; the last of the ingredients that made it possible fell into place only shortly before his birth. Astonishingly, paper (which originated in China and long remained the secret of Arab producers) was never seen in Europe until the twelfth century and was not produced there until the thirteenth. And although movable type first appeared in China by the eleventh century and in Europe three centuries later, no one knew how to produce raised letters that were hard or durable enough to make mass production possible. Only in the
fifteenth century did the goldsmiths, silversmiths, and jewelers of Germany and the Rhineland take up the challenge, slowly developing the alloys and production methods with which Johannes Gutenberg was able to produce his magnificent two-volume Bible in 1455. That was only twenty-eight years before Luther’s birth, and, as great an achievement as the Gutenberg Bible was, it was just the beginning. (For one thing, a single copy cost as much as a common laborer could earn in three years.) But from that point the refinements came one after another at a quickening pace. By 1517, when Friar Martin posted his complaints about papal indulgences on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, the technology of printing was very nearly as advanced as it would remain for the next several centuries. Luther the writer proved to be as prolific as he was powerful, churning out books with almost unbelievable frequency, shifting from Latin to the vernacular and shaping the German language at least as much as Thomas Cranmer with his Prayer Book would soon be shaping English. Much of Europe was hungry for his words, and now it was possible to deliver them quickly wherever they were wanted.

“Preserve My Friends from Such Favors”