The beginning, however, was auspicious. More was instrumental in passing an Act which restored the judicial capacities of the Star Chamber in the interests of equity. He sat in that court even while parliament was in session, and there is a record of his committing a man to prison ‘for his obstinacy’.18 Throughout this period, indeed, he was busily engaged in all the affairs of state. In the first week of December, for example, while parliament was still sitting, he was involved in hard negotiations with the Spanish ambassador on matters of trade; More, as usual, prevailed. In that same week he had also signed the bill against Wolsey, entreating the king to act so firmly that the cardinal could never ‘vex and impoverish’ the nation again.19 The regal decision upon Wolsey’s future had yet to be made but the fact that the petition was also signed by Lord Mountjoy, another ‘humanist’ from the early days of the century, suggests that there was a genuine belief in the possibility of reform under the new Lord Chancellor’s guidance. At a great dinner to commemorate the feast of St Simon and St Jude, in the court of the Lord Mayor of London, More was listed first in the order of precedence. He sat beneath a rich cloth of arras; he was alone at the head of the table, with the great dukes and lords of the land sitting below him. Here, in striking form, is the measure of his new authority.
For thirty-one months Thomas More embodied the law of England. He was the presiding figure in Chancery and in the Star Chamber; he was known as ‘the keeper of the king’s conscience’ and, in that capacity, he was permitted to apply equity and moral judgment to the strict application of the law. William Roper depicted him as so practical and energetic a judge that the entire ‘backlog’ of cases from Wolsey’s administration was cleared; apparently he was so assiduous that there were days when there were no cases remaining for him to investigate. The reality was more complicated and more interesting.
The distinction between the Courts of Chancery and of Star Chamber was a nice one; both dealt with civil actions, largely involving disputes over property and contracts, but the Star Chamber was primarily concerned with cases where criminality was also being alleged. Hearings in Chancery, however, reveal the very fabric of Tudor life. Robert Farmer, a London seller of leather, tricked a young man into the poor purchase of worsted cloth; Robert Eland was forcibly removed from the manor of Carlinghow by a rival claimant to the property; Richard Fisher complained that he had been illegally ‘bound’ to a London draper; Richard Boys, a skinner of London, was about to be falsely imprisoned for debts; John Parnell, a draper of the city, refused to deliver cloths and woad for which payment had already been made. More listens intently.
He sits in his scarlet robe trimmed with lambskin, a brown cap upon his head, flanked by the Master of Rolls and the Masters in Chancery. Below them are the registrars and the other officers of the court; some of them sit around a table covered in green cloth, upon which are various rolled papers, folded writs, documents, waxes and seals. Behind the bar stand the serjeants, barristers and apprentices; the senior of them wear striped or ‘party-coloured’ gowns, while the others wear robes of single colour. A clerk scribbles down the words of Sir Thomas More, as he makes a point or delivers a judgment. A sealed paper is handed to him and, if we look carefully, we can see him writing upon it ‘per se vel per atturnatum’. The phrase represents one of his innovations as Lord Chancellor; he was willing to allow various interested parties to be represented in the court by their ‘attornies’ rather than being compelled to appear in person.
Unlike Wolsey, More brought to the practice of justice a huge resource of knowledge and experience. The cardinal had known much less about legal precedent and authority, which meant that his judgments were often erratic or overtly personal. This was indeed one of the complaints against him, and More had alluded to the problem in his Responsio ad Lutherum, where he had defined the relationship between magistrate and statute; no judge could decide matters at his own pleasure,20 but must rely upon the framework of good and settled laws. There were differences of emphasis, too, which help to define More’s new role more closely. Part of his duty as Lord Chancellor was to introduce the principles of equity into the system of justice and, by ordering his conscience ‘after the rewles and groundes of the law’,21 to remedy manifest injustice or assist those who seemed to be thwarted by the strict procedures in the ordinary courts. The chancellor was, in a sense, ‘procurator fatuorum’; ‘Morus’, the fool, had become the protector of the foolish. The courts of common law were ‘grounded upon the maximes and customes and the rules of the law, and according to the process’, but More was in a position to make his judgments ‘grounded upon the lawe of reason and the lawe of God’.22
There was no necessary disjunction between the two, of course, but one incident in his tenure of the office suggests how practical differences might arise. He had been informed of some judges’ complaints against his injunctions, and so he invited them to dinner in the council chamber at Westminster. He discussed with them all the cases that had provoked controversy, carefully going through the details of each one, until the judges themselves agreed that they would have acted in the same manner as More. He then proposed an informal arrangement; if the judges would ‘upon reasonable considerations, by their own discretion’ mitigate and change ‘the rigour of the law’, as in conscience they were already bound to do, then he would agree to grant no further injunctions. But after debating the matter the judges refused his offer. ‘I perceive, son,’ More explained to William Roper, ‘why they like not so to do, for they see that they may by the verdict of the jury cast off all quarrels from themselves upon them.’23 The judges refused to make individual or sensitive decisions, in other words, but instead relied upon the verdict of the jury as well as the strict application of legal precedent and procedure. This could not be the path taken by More. Nothing could better illustrate the quasi-religious nature of the law than the fact that part of his duty as Lord Chancellor was carefully to consider, and then to purge, the conscience of the malefactor. In the process More had to examine his own conscience, to ensure that his private judgement did not in any way flout or compromise the ‘commen order and longe contynued law’;24 a suggestive analogy might be drawn here with More’s similar phrase concerning ‘the comen knowen catholique chyrche’.25 It goes to the heart of the medieval dispensation which he was struggling to uphold.
More’s growing isolation from the king’s counsels meant that he had far more time to devote to his duties than ever his predecessor did; Wolsey had received 540 chancery petitions each year, whereas the average for More was 900.26 It seems likely, then, that plaintiffs preferred the verdict of Thomas More rather than that of a jury. There were other contrasts which might be drawn with the practice of Wolsey. More was a cautious exponent of the law and it was his habit to examine bills very carefully before issuing writs of subpoena or corpus cum causa. He involved himself in cases more directly and he was also much sterner with those who disobeyed his injunctions. A measure of that strictness emerges even in his treatment of his own household. In the case of Giles Heron v. Nicholas Millisante, in bundle 643 of early chancery proceedings, More ‘made a flatt decree against’ his son-in-law.27 As More had once said to William Roper, ‘were it my father stood on the one side and the devil on the other, his cause being good, the devil should have right’.28 Sometimes he sat in the hall of Lincoln’s Inn, sometimes he sat at his own home in Chelsea, where plaintiffs came to plead their case with him. Here was a lawyer who had reached the pinnacle of his profession, dispensing justice with equity in a manner which the prelates of the Church, his predecessors, had never been able to achieve.
One judicial anecdote from Chelsea, of a trivial kind, illustrates that mixture of good humour and common sense which marked his public life. A beggar-woman had lost her dog, which had subsequently been adopted by Alice More; the beggar eventually discovered where the animal had been taken and complained to the master of the household. But was it truly her dog? So the Lord Chancellor set up a test; he asked his wife an
d the beggar to stand at opposite ends of the great hall and to call for the dog, which had been placed between them. The animal ran to the beggar and was returned to her. But Alice More bargained with her and bought the dog for a piece of gold—‘so all parties were agreed; everie one smiling to see his manner of enquiring out the truth’.29 His practicality in this matter resembles another occasion when a judge complained of the ease with which pockets could be picked in London; More then arranged for the judge’s own purse to be taken. The story offers an instructive moral that More himself understood well; the greatest judge is not above the weakness and folly of the world, but is a simple Christian in need of salvation. One other anecdote will suffice. A learned and perhaps portentous attorney, Mr Tubbe, had asked More to sign a subpoena; it was only after he had left the court that he realised the Lord Chancellor had simply written across it ‘A tale of a Tubbe’.30 Not all such stories are proven—they might not, for example, stand up in a court of law—but their survival suggests the general impression that More made upon his contemporaries.
More once even joked about a heretic. He had imprisoned him in the porter’s lodge of his house at Chelsea, where, for punishment, he had kept him in the stocks; it is not clear whether the man’s head, hands or feet were confined within the small holes. When the prisoner escaped More instructed his porter to mend this wooden frame of torture, in case the man should try to get back in again. He was informed that the heretics were jubilant over the escape and wrote in reply: ‘neuer wyll I for my part be so vnreasonable, as to be angry wyth any man that ryseth if he can, whan he fyndeth hym selfe that he sytteth not at hys ease.’31
This is just one of many reports of his behaviour as the hunter of heretics. From John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and other post-Reformation sources we learn that he tied heretics to a tree in his Chelsea garden and whipped them; we read that he watched as ‘newe men’ were put upon the rack in the Tower and tortured until they confessed; we learn that he was personally responsible for the burning of several of the ‘brethren’ in Smithfield. Stories of a similar nature were current even in More’s lifetime and he denied them forcefully. He admitted that he did imprison heretics in his house—‘theyr sure kepynge’32 he called it—but he utterly rejected claims of torture and whipping. There were only two occasions when he had ordered beating. A child of his household had once been instructed by a heretic and had begun to spread a blasphemy about the holy eucharist to another young servant; More, on hearing of this, caused him to be whipped ‘lyke a chyld before myne houshold’.33 It was customary to beat a child before the entire family, but this seems to be a different More from the one who chastised his own children with peacock feathers. The other case involved a madman, lately out of Bethlem, who practised ‘many madde toyes and tryfles’ in church; during the silent moments when the priest was about to hold up the eucharist, he would creep behind kneeling women and, in a medieval parody of the elevation, lift their gowns over their heads. More, ‘beyng aduertysed of these pageaunts’, ordered him to be arrested, tied to a tree in the village of Chelsea, ‘and there they stryped hym with roddys therfore tyl he waxed wery’.34 It is likely that this incident prompted the later rumour that he had tied heretics to the tree in his garden, a report that More specifically rejected, ‘as helpe me god’.35 He was not a man falsely to invoke the deity and it can be believed that the heretics whom he detained and interrogated suffered ‘neuer … so mych as a fylyppe on the forhed’.36
More began his campaign against the ‘brethren’ almost as soon as the parliamentary session had ended. In the first month of the new year, through the agency of the council, he issued a proclamation against heretics and heretical texts; he commanded every office-holder in the country to search them out, and issued a list of prohibited books of which the ownership would bring immediate imprisonment. The whole power of the realm, from the greatest sheriff to the humblest Dogberry constable, was now directed against the ‘newe men’. In a letter to Erasmus he confirmed that he found them to be odious, and announced his determination to be as active against them as lay within his power; he told his old friend that the future of the world itself was in peril. It is not clear whether Erasmus shared these passionate sentiments—he may have agreed with St Bernard that in matters of faith it was better to persuade than to impose—but he understood the nature of More’s hatred for ‘seditiosa dogmata’.37 ‘Seditious’ is precisely the point since, for More, heresy was a form of disorder on every level. His duty to his religion and to his country came together, lending him a double strength and authority.
The first burning of his chancellorship was in no way connected with him, but his comments upon it are suggestive. Thomas Hitton was a Catholic priest who, after embracing the doctrines of Luther and of Zwingli, became an evangelical ‘runner’ between England and the Low Countries; he carried communications between the brethren of London and Antwerp, while at the same time distributing forbidden books. He was found, curiously enough, loitering in Gravesend; he was suspected of stealing some linen cloth which had been hanging on a hedge close by, but during a search letters ‘vnto the euangelycall heretykes beyonde the see’38 were discovered in the concealed pockets of his coat. It was only a month after More’s proclamation against heresy and, in this new climate of suspicion and persecution, Hitton was brought before the Archbishop of Canterbury. Under interrogation he firmly proclaimed the tenets of his new-found faith. ‘The masse he sayed sholde neuer be sayed … Purgatory he denyed … no man hath any fre wyll after that he hath onys synned … all the images of Cryste and hys sayntes, sholde be throwen out of the chyrche …’39 Here was an abominable heretic indeed, and the archbishop dispatched him to the secular powers for punishment. He was burned at Maidstone, the first of the ‘newe men’ in England to be consigned to the flames. Thomas More derived a certain satisfaction from his fate or, rather, from the purging of that ‘spiryte of errour and lyenge’ which had taken Hitton’s soul ‘strayte from the shorte fyre to ye fyre euerlastyng’.40
In the month after Hitton’s burning, More found a new ally in the war against heresy. John Stokesley succeeded Tunstall as Bishop of London and immediately became known as the hammer of heretics or, in the words of one of those whom he pursued, a ‘blody bisshop crysten catte’.41 The two men collaborated closely—on occasions Stokesley interrogated suspects in More’s house at Chelsea—and there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that they successfully set up a network of spies and informants within the capital. In his own writings More takes great pleasure in explaining how he intercepted letters or interrogated witnesses; he describes in detail certain people and certain houses which were being closely watched. One heretic had secret friends ‘at the sygne of the botell at Botolfes wharfe’,42 for example, an inn only a few yards from London Bridge. More knew that the mistress of this inn, ‘the good wyfe of the botell of Botolphs’, had a pronounced limp; he knew that she had previously allowed two renegade nuns to sleep ‘in an hygh garet’ of the house and had then smuggled in two men to lie with them; he also informed his readers that the good ale-wife ‘is nat tong tayed’.43 He added, perhaps rather chillingly, ‘I haue herd her talke my selfe.’44 His surveillance was exact in every particular, and he went so far as to warn the heretic residing at Botolph’s Wharf that he had been seen disguised ‘in a mertchauntes gowne wyth a redde Myllayne bonet’.45
More’s position as a layman defending the Church was unique; his closest colleagues were now not the king and his courtiers, but the clergy. In the spring of 1530 he and his wife received a ‘letter of confraternity’ from the Benedictine foundation of Christ Church, Canterbury, and in the same period he was the only secular member of an ecclesiastical commission which met at Westminster to discuss heretical literature. More was particularly commended for his ‘dylygent and longe consyderacyon’,46 a diligence that was reinforced when a further proclamation against heretical books was issued in June. More had once agreed upon the need for a translation of the Bible into the verna
cular, but this proclamation gave as a reason to ban all such translations ‘the malignity of this present time, with the inclination of people to erroneous opinions’.47 More was becoming harsher and stricter.
The first fruit of this new repression arrived that autumn, when a number of people were arrested for owning banned books. More interrogated them in Star Chamber and then consigned them to the Tower, the Fleet or the Counter. The condemned heretics were forced to ride, facing the horses’ tails, with various of their texts pinned to their clothing. They became, as it were, living books of heresy; during the journey from the Tower to Cheapside Cross, the citizens obliged by pelting them with rotten fruit and dung. One prisoner’s servant was so alarmed by his employer’s condition that he drew up a petition to the parliament, where it was believed there were men more favourable to the cause of reform; More summoned the servant and consigned him to the Fleet prison. Subsequently he launched a sudden raid upon the house of John Petyt, a wealthy merchant who resided in Lyon’s Quay, just a few yards from the notorious inn at Botolph’s Wharf. More led a search for heretical volumes, but it is reported that he could find no incriminating material; instead he relied upon the testimony of a priest who declared that Petyt had helped to finance the publication of Tyndale’s books. Petyt eventually died as a prisoner in the Tower.
An interesting aspect of this unhappy case is that Petyt was a close friend of, and collaborator with, Thomas Cromwell, who was even then framing anticlerical legislation for parliament. There were reports that the king himself favoured a vernacular Bible and had studied various heretical texts, and that Cromwell had already made contact with certain of the ‘newe men’ in Antwerp and elsewhere. That is why the severity and urgency of More’s conduct were a direct response to political, as well as spiritual, affairs.
The Life of Thomas More Page 37