The Tudors (36 page)

O
n Thursday, July 1, 1535, dressed in a plain robe of the coarsest wool, his once clean-shaven face covered by a long gray beard, filthy after long confinement and leaning heavily on a staff, Thomas More emerged from the Tower of London like some terrible vision out of the Old Testament. A week had passed since the killing of John Fisher, and now it was More’s turn to stand trial for high treason. He was led under guard through the capital’s busiest streets to the seat of government at Westminster—put on display, in effect, so that the people could see yet again the price of failing to believe what the king believed.

At Westminster More was taken before a panel of eighteen judges, among whom were Thomas Cromwell, Chancellor Thomas Audley, the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and Anne Boleyn’s father and brother. No longer able to stay on his feet as he had through the innumerable interrogations to which he had been subjected during his imprisonment, More accepted the offer of a seat. Promised release if he would affix his signature to the oath of supremacy, he thanked the gentlemen and politely declined. He then listened as the indictment was read aloud. It was ridiculously long, piling item upon item and burying each in a heap of explanatory verbiage, but essentially it boiled down to four charges: that More had committed treason by refusing during interrogation to acknowledge the king’s supremacy, by conspiring with Fisher while both were prisoners, by describing the Act of Supremacy as a double-edged
sword that killed either the body or the soul, and finally by telling Richard Rich—that name again—that the act was not legitimate.

More would have understood, even more clearly than Fisher, that this was a show trial, the outcome of which could not have been more certain. In defending himself, therefore, he focused not on trying to save his life—he could have entertained no hope in that regard—but on creating an indelible record of the absurdity of the proceedings and his reasons for declining to swear as ordered. His best weapons were the power of his own mind and the fact that his case really
was
being handled in an outrageously unfair manner. One by one he was able to dispose of the charges. He invited his accusers to show that he had ever uttered a word in opposition to the Act of Supremacy, and they were unable to do so. He asked for evidence of any conspiracy between Fisher and himself and was shown none. He acknowledged having described the Supremacy Act as a sword that would destroy the soul of anyone who
falsely
swore to it—swore without believing it to be true—but repeated that he had never spoken against it. He turned the judges’ attention to the fact that even under the king’s new laws it was not possible to construe silence as treason. On point after point the prosecution was stymied.

Which left Richard Rich as the Crown’s last hope not of convicting More—his conviction remained inevitable—but of making the trial seem something less ignoble than a lynching. What Rich had to say was similar in significant respects to his testimony in the Fisher trial. Again he told the court of having visited the defendant in the Tower, and of a conversation that culminated in a statement—an undeniably incriminating statement—of opposition to the Act of Supremacy. There were important differences this time, however. Rich said that on June 12 he had gone to the Tower not with a message from the king but simply to take away the last of More’s personal belongings, his books and writing materials. (Obviously this had been done as part of the steadily intensifying effort to make life in prison unbearable. Until deprived of the means to do so, More had devoted his empty hours to composing two books, devotional works titled
A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribution
and
On the Sadness of Christ.
) While waiting for More’s things to be bundled up, supposedly just to pass the time, Rich had engaged the prisoner in a kind of lawyerly word game. Suppose, he had said, that Parliament declared that I,
Richard Rich, were king. And suppose Parliament declared also that it would be treason to deny that I were king. Would you then agree that I was king? More said that he would, because Parliament had the power to declare who was king of England. Then he offered a question of his own. How would Rich respond if Parliament declared that God was not God and made it treason to say otherwise? Would he accept that? Rich replied that he would not—that “no parliament may make any such law.”

This was Rich’s account of the first part of the conversation, and More never disputed it. What happened next, however, has been a puzzle ever since. According to Rich’s testimony, he threw another question at More—a question that the surrounding circumstances loaded with all-too-obvious significance. What, he claimed to have asked, if Parliament declared the king to be supreme head of the English church? What would More say to that? Rich swore that More replied that Parliament could do no such thing, because England was forever part of the Christian community that had always recognized the bishop of Rome as its head. Such words were clear and certain treason as Parliament had defined treason in 1534—assuming that More spoke them.

But at this point More’s story diverges radically from Fisher’s. Whereas Fisher never denied saying the things that Rich had reported him as saying, complaining instead that he had opened himself in response to the king’s request and under a promise of confidentiality, More vehemently denied having said anything to incriminate himself. There is of course no documentary evidence to establish who was and was not speaking truthfully. Two potential witnesses—the men who were packing More’s books while he and Rich had their exchange—were called to testify but claimed to have paid no attention to the conversation. (It would be understandable if they had no wish to get involved in such a foul and dangerous business.) Be that as it may, More was unquestionably the more credible witness. He knew that he faced certain death, nothing could be more obvious than his determination to prepare himself for a “good” death, and for a man of his convictions lying under oath would have been tantamount to self-damnation. Nor is it easy to believe that a man as intelligent and careful as More, a man of his skill in the law, could have fallen into such an obvious trap. More himself asked his judges if they found it credible that he would have allowed himself to be drawn by Richard Rich, of all people, into revealing
thoughts that he had been keeping from the whole world, even from his own family, from the beginning of his troubles.

“Can it therefore seem likely unto your honorable lordships,” he asked,

Regardless, he was that same day found guilty. Before sentence was passed, he requested and was granted the customary right of a convicted prisoner to address his judges, the usual strategy at this point being to argue that there should be no punishment because the conviction had been illegitimate. Being a good lawyer, More did exactly this, saying that the acts of Parliament that had brought him before the bench were “directly repugnant to the laws of God and his whole church.” But he did so in a way that offered not the slightest possibility of saving him from execution. He was speaking now not to the men who had judged him but to posterity, hoping to put himself on record forever. He said that no layman, not even a king, could be supreme head of the church even in a single country. He said that England was one part of the great thousand-year-old community of Christendom, and that it could make no laws contrary to the ancient understanding that bound that community together. He spoke for an ideal that was even then passing out of existence. When he had finished he was condemned to die, exactly as he and everyone present had known he would be from the start of the day’s proceedings.

Later he was informed that the king, as a special favor, had ordered
him like Fisher to be beheaded rather than hanged, drawn, and quartered. “God preserve all my friends from such favors,” he said cheerfully. On the Tuesday following his conviction he was awakened early and informed that he was to die at nine o’clock. He was advised that the king wished him to say little before dying. He said he was grateful to be so informed, because although he had planned to say nothing that would displease the king, he had intended to speak at some length. “I am ready,” he said, “obediently to conform myself to his grace’s commandments.” When his hour came round, he found himself too weak to climb the stairs of the scaffold unassisted. “I pray you, master lieutenant,” he told the man in charge, “see me safe up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself.” Hoisted to the chopping block, he kissed the executioner, telling him that “thou wilt render me today the greatest service in the power of any mortal.” He asked the crowd of onlookers to bear witness that he was dying “in and for the faith of the Catholic Church,” and that he died “the king’s good servant, but God’s first.” His last words came as he lowered himself to the floor, placed his head on the block, and moved his beard out of the way. The beard had committed no treason, he said, and did not deserve to be cut in two. His head joined Fisher’s on London Bridge.

Cromwell now turned his attention to one of the main pillars not only of the church but of English society as it had evolved through the Middle Ages, the more than eight hundred monastic institutions that dotted the landscape from the cliffs of Dover to the Irish Sea. In January he had been given, as an addition to the offices he already held, that of vice-regent, first “for the sole purpose of undertaking a general ecclesiastical visitation” but later and more broadly as “vicar-general and principal commissary with all the spiritual authority belonging to the king as head of the church, for the due administration of justice in all cases touching the ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the godly reformation and redress of all errors, heresies and abuses in the said church.” It was not only a lofty commission but an improbable one, conferring virtually absolute authority over the practices and beliefs of the church in England on a man with no background in theology, canon law, or related disciplines and no experience in ecclesiastical administration aside from the financial work done years earlier for Wolsey. The king had demonstrated the fact of his supremacy, the extent to which the church was
now subordinate to the civil government and the civil government to his every whim, by placing Cromwell above every clergyman including the archbishop of Canterbury, every nobleman including even the dukes, and every other officer of the Crown including the lord chancellor. To drive home the point, he next suspended by royal edict all the traditional powers of the bishops—the authority to ordain priests, for example, as well as to administer the ecclesiastical courts and probate wills. The bishops were required to petition the Crown for permission to resume their work, and by doing so they would acknowledge that they derived their authority solely from the king. As a final insult, the bishops were told that their petitions were being granted not because they were essential to the proper functioning of the church but because the vicar-general was unfortunately unable to do everything himself. That the lords of the church submitted to this humiliation virtually without complaint shows what they had learned from the examples of Fisher and More: to resist was to die, to protest was to die, even to do nothing was, if the king wished it, to die.

Whether any action on Rome’s part might have made a difference is a moot question, because Rome did not act. In the aftermath of Fisher’s execution, members of the papal court had demanded that Pope Paul do
something
. A bull was drawn up giving Henry ninety days in which to admit his errors and either appear in Rome personally or send representatives. The penalties for failing to comply were to be weighty if theoretical: excommunication, loss of the English crown, loss of the right of Henry’s descendants by Anne Boleyn to inherit the crown, the withdrawal of all clergy from the kingdom, a papal order for Henry’s subjects to rebel, and more. But the pope, when the bull was ready for publication, thought better of it. He realized that the only men in Europe who might conceivably back it up with force were the emperor Charles and Francis of France, and that neither was likely to prove able (or for that matter willing) to do so. He realized also that to issue such a document under current circumstances could only underscore the impotence of the papacy and expose it to ridicule. Thus it was locked away. The new pope remained, as far as anyone in England could tell, as passive as his predecessor Clement.

There was a second reason, one more substantial than a symbolic demonstration of the king’s might, for suspending the powers of the
bishops at precisely this time. The Reformation Parliament, in taking from the bishops their ancient responsibility to make occasional visits of inspection to the monastic houses, had placed a new and potent weapon in the king’s hands. Visitation was now the Crown’s business, which meant it was Cromwell’s, and no man of the new vice-regent’s vitality, ambition, and determination to please the king could have been given such an opportunity without finding use for it. By the time of More’s death, Cromwell was ready to move against the religious orders and their houses. Aside from the monks and nuns living in those houses, the people most likely to object were those men who until recently had regarded the monasteries as theirs to oversee, to protect, and sometimes to exploit: the bishops. Suspension of their authority deprived them of even an historical basis for protesting: what had traditionally been regarded as their rights were no longer rights at all but privileges conferred by the king. The requirement that they ask the Crown to restore their ability to function made it indelibly clear to the bishops themselves, to the whole of the church including the religious orders, and to anyone else inclined to take an interest that none of them had any rights except those the king might choose to grant them.