The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  More has left a record of his own conduct in such raids as that on the merchant’s house by the river. There was a man named Richard Webb who had been denounced by various informants and whose name had emerged in More’s interrogations of certain heretics. So More ordered ‘a doser’ or dossier to be prepared and summoned Webb to appear before him. The intricacies of the case, in which Webb was betrayed by one of his fellows, are less interesting than the words and demeanour of More on such occasions.

  Richard Webb: I have heard that those who are true and plain in examination with you have always found you good and favourable.

  Thomas More: If I find you true, then you will find me favourable. But I fear that your answers are not all true.

  Richard Webb: Sir if you find any of my answers false, never be a good lord to me and never trust me while I live.

  Thomas More: Is Bristol in Holborn, and is six weeks half a year?

  With this remark the prisoner realised that part of his testimony had been undermined. ‘Then downe he fell vppon hys marybonys, & pytuously prayed me to forgyue hym that one lye.’

  Richard Webb: In good faith, sir, there is not in all mine answers any one thing untrue but that.

  Thomas More: Well, Webb, in faith if that be true, then will I wink at this one and let it go for none.

  Richard Webb: I would not be so mad to say as I do, and forsake your favour so foolishly.

  Thomas More: Well, when saw you Robert Necton?

  Richard Webb: Now by my soul, sir, as I have showed your lordship upon my oath, I saw him not this half year to my remembrance.

  Thomas More: Was yesterday half a year ago? And were you not with him at saint Catherine’s? Are you not now shamefully forsworn?48

  And so it goes on, with More probing and sometimes taunting his prisoners with information gathered from his spies. He epitomised, in modern terms, the apparatus of the state using its power to crush those attempting to subvert it. His opponents were genuinely following their consciences, while More considered them the harbinger of the devil’s reign on earth. How could there be moderation in any confrontation between them? He was, in large part, successful; he managed to check the more open expression of heretical opinion and thereby prevented it from being accepted piece by piece or gradually condoned. He also disrupted the community of ‘newe men’ in Antwerp and helped to diminish the flow of banned books into England.

  The following year, 1531, was the time of burning. It was inaugurated by a macabre episode, with which More was not personally involved. A last will and testament had been judged heretical; the corpse of the perpetrator, William Tracy, was dug up and then ceremonially burnt. More was concerned with living heretics, however, and a few months later he became involved in the case of Thomas Bilney. He was known as ‘Little Bilney’ because he was ‘of little stature and very slender of body’;49 he was also a fervent and devoted man, who preached the gospel in leperhouses and in prisons. He had recanted in the time of Wolsey, and was one of those who bore the faggot at the great ceremony by Paul’s Cross in 1527, but he had since relapsed into heretical opinions. After examination the suspect was given into the custody of the ecclesiastical authorities, who pronounced him guilty of heresy and sent him back to secular officials for punishment. He was burned in the Lollard’s Pit, outside Norwich, and was supposed to have recanted once more before the flames reached him. It is said that he had inured himself against the pain of fire by putting his hand over a lighted candle in his prison cell. But his apparent recantation became a highly contentious matter, involved with the sensitive question of the king’s ecclesiastical authority, and More launched a swift if not very subtle Star Chamber investigation to stifle any possible controversy. Although this scheme was effective More felt obliged to defend the official account of events in the polemical work he was then writing. He declared that God ‘of hys endles mercy brought hys body to deth’,50 but in the process saved Bilney’s soul.

  He approved of burning, therefore, and in that respect was no different from most of his contemporaries. He remarked that heresy in England—‘a good catholyke realme’, as he could still put it51—had for centuries been ‘punyshed by deth in ye fyre’.52 He was correct, of course, and as early as 1210 we read of an Albigensian being consigned to the flames. There were less severe punishments available; some heretics had been burned on the left cheek, or obliged to wear clothes embroidered with a red cross for the rest of their lives. But burning was the natural remedy for those who refused to recant or who later relapsed. Lollards were burned in the fifteenth century, and it has been calculated that in the hundred years before More’s chancellorship there were in the region of thirty fires.53 So his actions were not exceptional, and it might be argued that his severe stance was a reaction to the menaces of the period. There is no doubt about his tenacity of purpose, for example, when he declares ‘And after the fyre of Smythfelde, hell dothe receyue them where the wretches burne for euer’;54 they are ‘well and worthely burned’.55 These men anticipated the Antichrist who, as far as More was concerned, might soon be born among the wreckage of the world. Their words might tempt poor souls into eternal damnation. They had to be prevented by all and any means.

  The condemned heretics were led to a wooden platform, some three feet from the ground, and were bound to the stake by a heavy chain; the bundles of sticks were then piled around them so high that their limbs were partly concealed from the circle of spectators. The mayor called out ‘Fire the faggots!’ and ‘Fiat justitia!’ (‘Let justice be done!’); then the executioner, after testing which way the wind blew, lit the wooden pile with a torch. There are many woodcuts of the proceedings, in some of which the church of St Batholomew can be seen behind the Smithfield fire. A large crowd is always gathered around the stake; on occasions the devout people have to be restrained by officials on horses and men brandishing halberds. A bench is erected for the benefit of ‘nobles’ who wish to view the interesting proceedings. Other people watch from open windows as the body of the condemned man, charred and melted by the flames, topples forward from its chain onto the fire. The timing of that moment was never certain, however; one heretic took forty-five minutes to die, and John Foxe records of him that ‘when the left arm was on fyre and burned, he touched it with his right hand, and it fell from his bodye, and he continued to pray to the end wythout mouyng’.56

  There were other burnings after that of Bilney, but not before More inflicted damage at the centre of the network of brethren. More received information that George Constantine, a ‘carrier’ of forbidden books, had secretly travelled to London. After investigations and searches, Constantine was discovered and taken to Chelsea, where he was placed in the stocks in order to await questioning by the Lord Chancellor. His interrogation lasted for several days, and, as More declared, there may have been no physical punishment except for that of the stocks. But there is a letter concerning Constantine, written to Thomas Cromwell from one of those suspected of heresy, which throws an interesting light on the nature of More’s investigations. The correspondent, Stephen Vaughan, had been informed that More displayed a ‘clear desire in his countenance and haviour to hear something of me’;57 Vaughan then noted Constantine’s ‘imminent peril and danger’ before adverting to ‘tortures and punishments’. Vaughan did not suggest that More himself inflicted these—he referred to unnamed ‘ministers’—but he went on to mention ‘threatenings of tortures and punishments’.58 Here, in the realm of subtle threat and innuendo, we must imagine More.

  Constantine talked. In More’s words he ‘vttered and dysclosed dyuers of hys companyons’59 and he revealed the method of smuggling ‘those deuelysshe bokes whyche hym selfe and other of hys felowes hadde brought and shypped’;60 he told More the name of the shipman and the secret marks placed on bundles of heretical material. This was a great coup for More, who at once went to work. Many books were seized and burned, but volumes alone were not sufficient. Constantine had named Richard Bayfield, a defaulting Benedictine and
trader in banned books; he was arrested and, again in More’s words, ‘the monk and apostata’ was ‘well and worthely burned in Smythfelde’. More had joked with Constantine about Archbishop Warham’s former policy of buying up the stock of heretical books in Antwerp; this tactic had served only to enrich the brethren, and the Lord Chancellor’s stringent measures were intended to provide a more powerful lesson. And then Constantine escaped—or, as seems more likely, he was allowed to escape after providing such good service to the old faith. Less than three weeks after the burning of Bayfield, More dispatched another heretic to Smithfield. The house of a London leather-seller, John Tewkesbery, was found to harbour banned books; he had recanted two years before but now, after at least two public examinations led by the Lord Chancellor, he was sentenced to death. More declared that he had reverted to heresy as a dog returns to his own vomit, and so he was ‘burned as there was neuer wretche I wene better worthy’.61 Now he lay in hell, ‘an hote fyrebronde burnynge at hys bakke, that all the water in the worlde wyll neuer be able to quenche’.62 He was soon joined in that inferno by Thomas Dusgate, burnt for heresy in Exeter.

  Yet there were still certain constraints upon More. A leading Lutheran and English exile in Antwerp, Robert Barnes, was given ‘safe conduct’ by the king to travel to England and remain for six weeks; it is not hard to discern the reason for this apparent welcome of a heretic, since, only a few months before, Barnes had written A Supplication unto King Henry the Eighth, which combined a generally anticlerical diatribe with an assault upon the authority of the Pope—‘can not the pope erre? lett hym rede his awne lawe.’63 There were also familiar theological arguments drawn from Luther, but the king was now interested in theology only in as far as it concerned himself; this was a period when Henry seemed about to sever the ancient bonds of England with Rome and he was willing to listen to those who could provide cogent scriptural or doctrinal reasons in defence of his action. That is why Barnes was allowed to remain in London during the last weeks of the year.

  Although More did not approve, he could do nothing but keep a close watch upon Barnes. He could perhaps frighten him a little by intercepting letters and questioning those whom the exile met; but, fundamentally, he was helpless in the face of this heretic. Barnes safely left the country and, as More wrote in a subsequent polemic against Supplication, ‘lette hym go thys ones, for god shall fynde hys tyme full well’.64 He was more cordial towards a German scholar of Zwinglian sympathies, Simon Grynaeus, who had travelled to England in order to pursue his study of Plato’s texts. More made no effort to impede his movements but as a precaution he asked John Harris, his own servant, to accompany Grynaeus everywhere.

  One of More’s last triumphs came in the destruction of James Bainham, whose marriage to the widow of Simon Fish, author of Supplication for the Beggars, had cast grave doubts upon his orthodoxy. He was also a member of the Middle Temple, at a time when lawyers were becoming the most vociferous opponents of clerical power. More pounced upon him. He was taken to Chelsea and interrogated; More called him ‘Baynam the iangler’65 or empty talker, which suggests that the questioning was not altogether successful. Foxe reports that he was whipped and then put to the rack in the Tower, but this is most unlikely. It is true that Stokesley joined the interrogations at More’s house, however, and eventually Bainham confessed to the ownership of heretical books. He was then offered the choice of recantation or the fire, but he prevaricated and joined the thirty or forty other Lutherans who were said to have been consigned by More to various prisons within the city.

  Two months later Bainham formally abjured and was released, but his faith or conscience proved too strong; he relapsed into heresy, was taken up by the authorities, and ‘The last day of Aprill, 1532, one Baynam, gentleman, was burnt in Smythfeild for heresie’.66 According to the Book of Martyrs, Bainham, when tied to the stake, declared that ‘I come hither, good people, accused and condemned for a heretic, Sir Thomas More being my accuser and my judge’. He then read aloud the articles of his faith and the citizens cried out: ‘Set fire to him and burn him!’ To which the condemned man replied, ‘God forgive thee, and show thee more mercy than thou showest to me; the Lord forgive Sir Thomas More; and pray for me, all good people.’ Then he himself prayed ‘till the fire took his bowels and his head’.67

  Bainham the ‘jangler’ appears in the book that More was writing at the time of the Smithfield fires. It is entitled The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer and has the distinction of being the longest religious polemic in the English language. In the spring of 1531 William Tyndale had issued An Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, in which he used a rebuttal of Dialogue Concerning Heresies to mount a larger assault upon the rites and sacraments of the Church. Almost immediately More began to compose his Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, which, in the space of half a million words, attempts to answer Tyndale point by point. These books represent the most important dialogue within English religious discourse, perhaps of any age. The confrontation between Tyndale and More embodies the struggle between the opposing tendencies of the period—inner prayer and belief against communal worship and ritual, faith against works, the direct inspiration of scripture against inherited orthodoxy, redemption through Christ rather than the sacramental system. Of course it would be entirely wrong to see these tendencies as of equal force, or weight, at this moment of transition. The brethren remained a very small sect indeed, and the people of England were as notably pious as before; but More sensed the danger. If the king were to defy the Pope, and to use the Lutherans for purposes of his own, then the fate of Germany might be visited upon them all. There was also a more general change which he could not have observed or anticipated except in the shape of the Antichrist; others have preferred to describe it as the emergence of the modern world.

  More had reached such a pitch of nervous intensity that he could not rest from the fight; his whole life and duty lay now in his battle to protect the Church. Late at night, after his extensive duties as chancellor were completed, he sat up by candlelight in his library at Chelsea; he wrote quickly, almost furiously, composing thousands of words each week through the summer and winter of that year. That is why the Confutation is conceived in the form of a dialogue, in More’s characteristic manner, as if the atmosphere of public disputation had to be maintained.

  William Tyndale: Marke whyther yt be not true in the hyest degree …

  Thomas More: Tyndale is a great marker. There is nothynge with hym now but marke, marke, marke. It is pytye that the man were not made a marker of chases in some tenys playe.68

  It is dramatic and colloquial speech, as the protagonists confront each other upon the stage of Christendom itself. More has the advantage of humour in the exchanges, with the intentional use of ribaldry and insult as a way of belittling those opponents gradually growing in strength. He adopts the language of the ‘comon peple’ as a way of confronting Tyndale’s own vivid use of demotic.

  William Tyndale: Iudge whyther yt be possible that any good sholde come oute of theyr domme ceremonyes and sacramentes.

  Thomas More: Iudge good crysten reader whyther yt be possyble that he be any better than a beste oute of whose brutyshe bestely mouth, commeth such a fylthye fome.69

  His use of current phrases, as well as proverbs and anecdotes and stories, conveys his belief that the old faith is part of the customs and traditions of the people, whereas the heretics embrace only ‘newfang-lynes’.

  William Tyndale: But that the apostles gaue us any blynde ceremonies, whereof we coulde not knowe the reason, that I denye and also defye.

  Thomas More: Forsoth saue for the ryme I wolde not geue a ryshe, neyther for his denyeng nor for hys defyenge.70

  The Confutation was intended to be read aloud; the manner of the narrative is designed to ensure that short sections can be extracted and read to a group of people. That is why More’s imagery is close to the popular sermons of the period and why he mentions both specific locations and individual citizens. He
needed to capture the attention of his auditors in order to emphasise the pressing danger of these heresies.

  William Tyndale: More muste nedes graunte that chyrche is as comen as ecclesia.

  Thomas More: Fyrst I say that mayster More must not nedys graunte thys to Tyndale neuer a whytte.71

  The argument here is over a crucial point of translation, and at such points in the narrative More tries to anticipate every line of attack, to leave nothing undecided or undefended, to quibble and question and define and distinguish until his opponent sinks exhausted under the weight of his cross-examination.

  William Tyndale was himself a grave and learned scholar; he was a courteous and unworldly man but, if he was diffident on his own account, he was fervent for the truth. He was also a wonderful exponent of a plain English style, as any reader of his biblical translations will know, and there was some justice in his attack upon More as a mere poet, a juggler of words who ‘biteth, sucketh, gnaweth, towseth and mowseth Tyndale’.72 More was a sophister who dealt in ‘taunts and mocks’,73 a charge which was also levelled at him by others who denounced his resort to farce and ‘feyning’. This was always the principal criticism directed against him and it suggests, perhaps, the image he gave to the world. But if they found fault with him for not treating Tyndale ‘with no fayrer wordes nor in no more courteyse maner’,74 the other complaint was, in More’s own words, that ‘my writyng is ouer longe, and therfore to tedyouse to rede’.75 His explanation for this repetitiveness lay in his need continually to concentrate upon certain key themes and doctrines so that the good Christian ‘Shal not nede to rede ouer any chapyter but one’.76 Where men like Barnes typically wrote brief tracts, with their points succinctly made, More felt obliged to reply with discourses which try to stop up every gap, close any loophole, destroy every argument, with an urgency that is palpable upon the page; it is as if he were intent upon out-shouting or deafening his opponents. There is perhaps a more private reason, too, for the length and elaboration of his polemic. He writes all the more volubly and excitedly here because he could not properly speak out in council or at the court; his polemic was a form of compensation for his incapacity as a maker of policy.