The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  Parliament’s next session opened in the middle of January 1531, in an atmosphere of rumour, threat and suspicion. Catherine and her supporters were apprehensive, while Anne Boleyn was triumphant in her disdain for ‘the queen or any of her family’.13 It is also possible to detect signs of new belligerence on the king’s part. The convocation of the clergy was summoned from Canterbury to Westminster, where Henry challenged them in two respects. He demanded £100,000 in order to recoup the cost of his fruitless negotiations with Rome, and at the same time threatened to indict the spiritual leaders of the English Church for breach of praemunire in respect of their association with Wolsey. The members of the convocation first prevaricated and then surrendered. They agreed to give Henry the money and sued pardon. In exchange they asked for a restatement of traditional clerical privileges, which Henry refused. At this point the guiding hands of Cromwell and St German can be glimpsed behind the assertion of the king’s will; far from acceding to the demands of the clergy, Henry acted in a manner which shows that he had been a close reader of the legal scholar. He widened the terms of praemunire to threaten the very existence of ecclesiastical courts in England, and also demanded that he be termed ‘sole protector and supreme head of the English Church and clergy’.

  The direction of the king’s policy was now becoming clear and the Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, made a significant announcement to the House of Lords on the matter. ‘We cannot grant this unto the King,’ he declared, without abandoning ‘our unity with the see of Rome … we renounce the unity of the Christian world; and so leap out of Peter’s ship, to be drowned in the waves of all heresies, sects, schisms and divisions.’ The acceptance of regal supremacy would represent ‘a tearing of the seamless coat of Christ in sunder’.14 This was a defining statement, but at this early stage the king did not seem inclined to press the matter too far. After prolonged negotiations a modifying clause was added to the king’s new title—‘quantum per legem Dei licet’; that is, as far as the law of God allows. This was then put to convocation, which responded only with a sullen silence. Archbishop Warham then announced: ‘Qui tacet consentire videtur’ (‘Whoever remains silent can be assumed to agree’). The king’s new title, or authority, was tacitly accepted; but it had been imposed upon an unwilling Church, which remained apprehensive and uncertain.

  The extant records of More’s official business in this period show him to have busily engaged in his judicial duties; but, as leader of the Lords and senior member of the Council, he was perfectly aware of the development of policy. He was even, nominally, a participant in it. Within days of Henry winning the title of ‘supreme head’ from convocation, the Spanish ambassador reported that ‘The chancellor is so mortified at it that he is anxious above all things to resign his office’.15 He chose not to do so, or was persuaded by his friends and allies that it would not serve the cause. His own reasons for remaining in office are clearly depicted in another Spanish dispatch. The Emperor Charles V had written him a letter of support and encouragement for his efforts on Catherine’s behalf; but More declined, in the most polite terms, to receive it. At first he managed altogether to avoid the Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys; when he eventually received news of the imperial missive, he implored Chapuys not to deliver it to him. ‘He begged me for the honour of God to forbear, for although he had given already sufficient proof of his loyalty that he ought to incur no suspicion, whoever came to visit him, yet, considering the time, he ought to abstain from everything which might provoke suspicion; and if there were no other reason, such a visitation might deprive him of the liberty which he had always used in speaking boldly in those matters which concerned your Majesty and the Queen.’ More went on to pledge his most ‘affectionate service’ to the emperor.16

  Certain conclusions can be drawn from this appeal. Clearly there had been no occasion when he had shown any disloyalty towards the king, whatever his own opinions may have been; this in turn suggests that Henry considered him to be an effective and trustworthy Lord Chancellor. Indeed his fidelity afforded him the privilege of offering advice which might not necessarily please the king. There were occasions when he came close to the limit of his master’s tolerance, and he had already once been threatened with dismissal. Nevertheless, he was still so good a servant that he could speak out where others remained silent—although it is likely that he did so in the guise of impersonal or theoretical counsel, in which his own feelings were not involved. That ability to offer disinterested advice would be jeopardised by any communication with the emperor. More’s assurance to Charles V of his ‘affectionate service’, however, suggests that all was not as it seemed; he had his own objectives, which could only be pursued gradually and secretly. This is not to suggest that he was in any sense engaged in treachery or betrayal; he believed that part of his role as Lord Chancellor was to purge the conscience of the king in exactly the same manner as those of the malefactors who appeared before him in Chancery. In his conversation with Chapuys, More had indeed invoked ‘the welfare, honour and conscience’ of his master; he was able to speak out on the queen’s behalf, for example, precisely because Henry trusted More’s good faith, if not his opinions, in these matters. It was a difficult as well as an ambiguous role and More was the only man in the kingdom who could have played it. He also knew well enough the dangers of his strategy; when John Fisher spoke against the king’s assumption of supremacy, according to Chapuys, ‘he and his followers have been threatened with death, by being cast into the Thames’.

  A few days after his conversation with Chapuys, at the end of March, More read out a statement to the House of Lords on the subject of the king’s marriage. He declared that Henry had not pursued an annulment ‘out of love for some lady’ but, rather, for reasons of conscience and religion.17 It is likely that the king had already persuaded himself that this was the truth, and More was doing no more than play the role of a lawyer putting his client in the best possible light. The favourable opinions of the universities were then read out to those assembled, and a formidable case was made. One great scholar of More has confessed that ‘the academic stature and the professional integrity of Henry VIII’s adherents were almost unimpeachable’.18 So More was in no sense compromising himself by these statements in the House of Lords. But then he was asked for his own opinion and, according to an account of the proceedings, he replied that ‘he had many times already declared it to the king; and he said no more’.19 It is interesting to note that he had declared his opposition, or neutrality, ‘many times’ to Henry; yet the king still obliged him to act as his representative on the matter.

  After the address to the Lords, More, with a company of peers and prelates, proceeded to the ‘comen House’, where he spoke again. ‘You of this worshipful House, I am sure, be not so ignorant but you know well that the king our sovereign lord hath married his brother’s wife, for she was both wedded and bedded with his brother Prince Arthur.’20 More clearly spoke against his own belief here, since he was himself convinced of Catherine’s virginity. He went on to say that ‘Wherefore the king, like a virtuous prince, willing to be satisfied in his conscience, and also for the surety of his realm hath with great deliberation consulted with great clerks, and … the chief Universities of all Christendom to know their opinion and judgment in that behalf.’ At this point the clerk of the Commons read out these opinions and judgments. More concluded his performance by declaring that ‘the king hath not attempted this matter of will or pleasure, as some strangers report, but only for the discharge of his conscience and surety of the succession of his realm’.21 His son-in-law reports that after this episode More wished to resign on the grounds of poor health; he asked the Duke of Norfolk for his help in persuading the king to release him from his increasingly compromising and unpalatable duties. Henry was using him in a deliberate or cunning fashion, and he knew it. Yet More stayed, subduing his private inclination for the sake of the great struggles ahead. The parliament deliberated on such matters as the wool trade, the
treatment of vagrants and the punishment for poisoners; the Church had not been attacked and the session came to an end without any further resolution of the king’s ‘great matter’.

  It was a spring and summer of faction. From the dispatches of Eustace Chapuys it is possible to follow More’s increasingly troubled path through court and council. He reported that the Lord Chancellor was already well known in England as ‘the father and protector of the Emperor’s subjects’,22 by which he probably meant the merchants and bankers of Spain or the Low Countries; but it may be also a covert reference to those who wished to defend the old faith. More is also recorded to have expressed his dismay ‘in a very piteous tone, of the blindness of those princes who refused to assist Your Majesty against so cruel and implacable an enemy’ as the Turks;23 this was a clear reference to Henry, whose obsession with the ‘great matter’ was such that he refused to notice the great and pressing danger of the Turkish invasion of Christendom. This was certainly another of More’s preoccupations. It was a further token of the advance of Antichrist and it was believed by many people that the Lutherans were not necessarily opposed to the Muslim onslaught; it was one way of destroying the old Church. There was also a rumour, faithfully reported by Chapuys, that Henry was prepared to declare war against Charles. Yet More had taken the trouble of reassuring the ambassador’s secretary that in England ‘there were no preparations or power to do so’.24 More’s reputation for reticence was such that these oblique comments about the king might even be construed as hostility.

  The growing triumphalism of Anne Boleyn and her adherents was everywhere apparent to him. The royal mistress had evinced ‘such demonstrations of joy as if she had actually gained Paradise’25 at the time the king acquired the title of ‘supreme head’ of the Church in England; she had already ordered to be embroidered upon the coats of her liveried servants the phrase ‘Ainsi sera, groigne qui groigne’ (‘It will happen, whoever grudges it’). At the end of May a party of royal councillors visited Catherine at Greenwich in order to persuade her to abandon her cause; they were not successful. Then, on 11 July, Henry left her for ever. This is the private atmosphere in which the king prosecuted his public campaign by issuing the ‘determinations’ of the universities (with an accompanying treatise) and in which Thomas Cromwell laid plans for the next session of parliament. But if Anne Boleyn and her allies were triumphant, they were not yet omnipotent. There were powerful forces ranged against them, forces who might yet persuade the king to check his personal inclinations for the sake of the realm and the old faith.

  More was not alone at this stage, therefore, although he was the most visible and perhaps most effective member of what has lately been termed as the ‘faction’ supporting Catherine of Aragon. There were women of noble birth who took her side—the Duchess of Norfolk, Margaret Pole Countess of Salisbury, Gertrude Marchioness of Exeter and the Countess of Derby among them. There were courtiers and members of the household such as Sir Henry Guildford and Nicholas Carewe. There were great nobles of the realm such as the Earl of Shrewsbury and Lord Darcy, as well as the Seymours and Arundells, who were determined, in the phrase of the period, to ‘uphold the queen’s rights’. Two of the burgesses of London, William Bowyer and Paul Withypool, publicly represented what was a general City sympathy for Catherine; many London clergy followed the example of Dr Coke, priest of All Hallows in Honey Lane, by preaching against the king’s course. There were the bishops of Ely, Bath, Norwich and St Asaph, who supported the efforts of Cuthbert Tunstall, William Warham and John Fisher. There were many members of the lower house of convocation deeply opposed to any annulment, and there were parliamentarians who met at the Queen’s Head Tavern, in a passage off Fleet Street, in order to plan their strategy against the king and Anne Boleyn. In parliament, too, were a number of members who might be termed More’s ‘allies’ or affinity. Yet some of the most effective opposition came from the religious orders closest to the royal family itself, the Bridgettines of Syon Abbey and the Franciscan Observants at Greenwich. The Austin Friars and Carthusians of London were also opposed to the king’s ‘great matter’. These were significant forces indeed, arrayed against a small group of people who owed everything to Henry’s patronage—Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Audley, Thomas Cromwell as well as Anne Boleyn and her family. In retrospect it might seem that the spirit of the age, or the force of history, or some other deterministic concept, was also with them; but at the time the power and resourcefulness of the Aragonese ‘coalition’ helped to persuade More of the merits of remaining in his post. Catherine, and the old faith, might still be rescued.

  On the first day of the new year, 1532, Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More exchanged festive gifts; More presented the king with a walking stick inlaid in gold leaf and in turn he was given a great golden bowl. Two weeks later the parliament met, in a session which would decide the course of the Reformation and determine More’s own fate. The struggle began in earnest in February when a bill was presented to the parliament through the agency of Cromwell; it was designed to put pressure on the Pope by denying him much English revenue paid as ‘annates’ by new bishops. At the same time indictments were laid against the privileges of several leading clergy. The direction of policy seems clear, but in practice the situation was thoroughly confused. Henry was still courting the Pope even as he threatened the English Church. The lower house of parliament, in the words of Norfolk, was filled with the ‘infenyte clamor of the temporalyte … agaynst the mysusyng of the spiritual jurysdiccion’,26 yet at the same time the bill depriving the Pope of annates was strongly resisted; the king himself visited Westminster on three occasions in order to secure the passage of the legislation, and in the end it was passed only when he demanded that the members of the Commons physically stood up to be counted. Those opposing and those supporting his measure were instructed to go to opposite ends of the chamber, thus creating the first recorded parliamentary ‘division’. It was not an auspicious beginning, however, for Cromwell’s schemes against the power of the clergy. Thomas More presided over the Lords for all this period, where he had also witnessed strong resistance to the king’s demands. There must have seemed an opportunity for conciliation or compromise, and More was no doubt ready to put all his skills into the most urgent business of his life.

  But then Thomas Cromwell struck again, on this occasion by introducing a petition which complained of the injustice involved in trials for heresy; here, of course, he was attacking the methods and procedures close to More’s own conduct. The ‘Supplication of the Commons Against the Ordinaries’ ranged over the whole field of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and in large part reflected Christopher St German’s theoretical objections to the clerical courts. The chronicler of this parliament, Edward Hall, reports the agreement of the Commons that ‘all the griefes which the temporall men were greved with should be putte in writying and delyvered to the kyng, which by great advyse was done’.27 In the middle of March the members of the Commons accordingly submitted a petition to Henry which explained ‘how the temporal men of this realme were sore agreved with the cruel demeanoure of the prelates and ordinaryes [the secular clergy], which touched both their bodyes and goodes’;28 they then implored the king to establish ‘your jurisdiction and prerogative royal’ thereby bringing his subjects, both clerical and lay, into ‘perpetual unity’.29 The specific complaints and charges were, on any close scrutiny, unjustified; but that was not the point. Cromwell and his agents were obliged to maintain their campaign against the clergy, if only because it had seemed to be losing any of the momentum which it had once possessed. The Commons, however, delivered their supplication to the king only to request that the parliamentary session be forthwith prorogued. The king rebuked them for their nonchalance and then passed the supplication to Archbishop Warham and convocation. He was assuming the role of supreme mediator between all his subjects.

  More realised well enough the pressing danger: his entire career as Lord Chancellor and prosecutor of heresy was being undermined, a
nd it might be that by parliamentary statute heretics would soon be able to ‘swarm’ in the streets without any check. The Commons did adjourn, over the holy period of Easter, but the days of late March and early April were filled with strident controversy. The Church was being seriously threatened and some of its more outspoken members were already fighting back. William Peto was head of the Franciscan Observants at Greenwich and in the Chapel Royal he preached to the king in the manner of Savonarola. ‘Your Highness’s preachers are too much like those of Ahab’s days, in whose mouths was found a false and lying spirit. Theirs is a gospel of untruth … not afraid to tell of license and liberty for monarchs which no king should dare even to contemplate.’30 Once again the king’s desire to annul his marriage was being implicitly aligned with his wish to curb the powers of the Church. Peto then delivered his most solemn rebuke. ‘I beseech your Grace to take good heed, lest if you will need follow Ahab in his doings, you will surely incur his unhappy end also, and that the dogs lick your blood as they licked Ahab’s—which God avert and forbid!’31 On the next Sunday a more amenable preacher, Hugh Curwen, accused Peto of being another Micah speaking evil to kings—‘Thou art a dumb dog, or else art fled.’ No sooner had he uttered these solemn words from the pulpit of the Chapel Royal when Henry Elstow, the guardian of the Greenwich Observants, spoke out to rebuke him. He reminded the preacher that Peto had fled only so far as a provincial council in Canterbury, and then accused Curwen of being ‘one of the four hundred lying prophets, into whom the spirit of lying is entered: thou seekest by proposing adultery to establish a succession. In this, thou art betraying the King to everlasting perdition!’