The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  Margaret made other visits and employed her maid, Dorothy Colley, to run various errands to the Tower. He had given his daughter a formal letter ‘to all my louinge frendes’, in which he told them that Margaret was to act as his proxy in the outside world. It is also likely that she smuggled out letters or pieces of his work and provided him with any books he required for his devotional writings. His daughter was, in the first two or three months, the only visitor allowed to enter his cell. But eventually his wife was also given permission to see him. Their son-in-law has an account of the meeting which is vivid but not necessarily inaccurate.

  Alice More: What the good-year, Master More, I marvel that you have been always hitherto taken for so wise a man will now so play the fool to be here in this close, filthy prison and be content thus to be shut up among mice and rats.

  She then went on to expatiate upon the delights of their Chelsea house.

  Thomas More: I pray thee, good Mistress Alice, tell me one thing.

  Alice More: What is that?

  Thomas More: Is not this house as nigh heaven as my own?

  Alice More: Tilly-valle! Tilly-valle!

  Thomas More: How say you, Mistress Alice, is it not so?

  Alice More: Bone deus, bone deus, man, will this gear never be left?56

  ‘Tilly-valle’, derived from the name of the demon Tityvillus, was the phrase for idle talk. It is in fact quite likely that his wife did converse in this manner to him. More himself described the occasion when Alice berated him for lack of ambition: ‘will you sitt still by the fier & make goslynges in the asshis with a stikke as children do? Wold god I were a man, and loke what I wold do.’57

  More also provided a scene from their dialogue in his prison chamber, when his wife lamented that the door was locked against him at night. ‘For by my trouth,’ she said, ‘yf the dore shuld be shit vppon me, I wold wene yt wold stopp vpp my breeth.’58 More ‘laughed in his mynd’ at that, since he knew that she always closed the doors and windows of her bedchamber before retiring. Roper adds another detail of their conversation, in which More again renounced all his worldly goods. ‘What cause have I then to like such an house,’ he said, ‘as would so soon forget his master?’59 The mixture of gravity and irony, with remarks which are in turn earnest or playful, is appropriate for one of their last conversations upon this earth. It was characteristic of an affectionate relationship in which both thought that they had the measure of each other; Alice More’s practical sense was not incompatible with More’s own deeply rooted piety, while his honesty and good judgement were a match for her apparent worldliness and worldly intuition. But, in the end, he became unfathomable to her. He became absurd. Or, perhaps, he became sublime. The routines and conventions of the world fell from him, like the linen cloth which the disciple of Christ threw off in order to escape his enemies, and the thin, bearded, spiritual man who looked at Alice More might as well have been a stranger to her.

  But although he had renounced the world, the world had not forgotten him. There were still those, like his family, who believed that he might be relieved of his imprisonment and returned to Chelsea. The Mores were well connected, too, and in the late summer of the year Thomas Audley arrived at Horseheath, the estate of More’s stepdaughter and her husband. Here the new Lord Chancellor ‘took a course at a buck’, to use the conventional expression, and then invited Alice Alington to visit him the following day at the house of his father-in-law nearby. The interview was carefully prepared by Audley, with the aim of discovering More’s intentions or of obliquely applying familial pressure upon the prisoner. Like Polonius he might ‘by indirections find directions out’.60 Alice was of course happy to talk to him ‘because I woulde speake to him for my father’.61

  Alice Alington: I desire you humbly that you woulde, as I haue herd say that you hath ben, be still good lord unto my father.

  Thomas Audley: It appeared very well [for him] whan the mater of the nonne was laide to his charge. And as for this other mater, I marvel that your father is so obstinate in his own conceite, as that every body wente forthe with all saue only the blynde bishop and he. And in goode faithe I am very glad that I haue no lerninge but in a fewe of Esoppes fables of the which I shall tell you one.62

  He went on to tell two stories; the first concerned the folly of those who appear to be over-wise, and the second suggested the perils of an excessively scrupulous conscience. And then ‘my Lorde did laugh very merily’.63 It was not unusual for opinions and judgements to be conveyed by fables or parables rather than by any personal statement; but the conclusions of Audley were clear enough, and at least there was no suggestion that he believed More to be guilty of conspiracy. Alice Alington immediately wrote to her half-sister, Margaret, with the news of this disheartening conversation; and, on the next occasion Margaret was allowed to visit her father, she brought the letter for him. It was evidence that, as she put it, ‘you are likely to lose all those frendes that are hable to do you any good’.64 He smiled upon her. ‘What, mistress Eve, as I called you when you came first, has my daughter Alington played the serpent with you, and with a letter set you to work to come tempt your father again?’

  There then followed a long explication of his beliefs, all contained in what purports to be a letter from Margaret Roper to Alice Alington. In fact it looks like the work of More himself, who had frequently employed this fiction of authorship in order to speak his own deepest truths. The letter has been compared to Plato’s Crito and Phaedo, dialogues on the last hours of Socrates, and there are indeed similarities between the two men in their respective prison cells. Socrates followed his conscience and spoke of a truth beyond the jurisdiction of the court which condemned him; he was urged to escape, but insisted upon his duty to uphold the process of the law. He also died with a joke upon his lips. But there the resemblance ends. More’s letter is not meant to be a majestic and harmonious encomium on the principles of one man but, rather, a fundamental restatement of the objective truths to which he was attached. Socrates trusted in the immortality of the soul, but believed that no person of intelligence could know the exact nature of life after death; the dialogue concludes with a salute from Phaedo to this ‘best, wisest, and most just of men’. More’s letter, however, concluded in the manner with which he often ended his conversations: ‘I full hartely praye for vs all, that we may meete together once in heauen, where we shall make merye for euer, and neuer haue trouble after.’65

  He was now suffering from the effects of his confinement, and had spoken to his daughter ‘of his diseases, both in his breste of olde, and his reynes now by reason of grauell and stone, and of the crampe also that diuers nightes grypeth hym in his legges’.66 He reassured her that these symptoms of cramps and stones were no more severe than those before his incarceration, but in a letter to a fellow prisoner, Nicholas Wilson—whom he had last seen while resting in the ‘burned chamber’ of Lambeth Palace—he revealed that there had been two occasions when he believed he was about to die. In the colder weather the walls of his prison cell would become damp, and seem to ‘sweat’ in mimicry of human fever. John Fisher had already complained about the cold and the poor diet which had severely strained his own health; during the September of this year another eminent prisoner, the ninth Earl of Kildare, died in his cell. It was at this time that More’s old friend Antonio Bonvisi gave him a camlet gown with which to warm himself as well as providing him with meat and drink. More, in return, sent him an elaborate and touching letter of gratitude in which he also alludes to the fact that he might never be able to write to him again. He was going to sign it ‘Tuus T. Morus’, your Thomas More, but declared that now ‘I am not such a one that it forceth whose I am’.

  He had been warned by Thomas Cromwell, through Margaret, ‘that the Parlement lasteth yet’,67 by which Cromwell meant that further and heavier penalties might soon be visited upon him. More replied that ‘if they would make a law to doe me any harme, that lawe coulde neuer be lawfull’.68 But in this he was too sangui
ne, when the practice of the world was even then over-riding the theoretical concerns of justice. The Friars Observant of Greenwich and Richmond had already been ‘putt out of their places’,69 and indeed the whole order was ‘putt downe’ because of its support for Catherine of Aragon.

  In October Thomas Cromwell was named as Master of the Rolls, and a month later the seventh session of the ‘Reformation’ parliament opened; this session marked a further consolidation of the great social and cultural revolution which was taking place and, in addition, provided the fatal bills by which More and Fisher were eventually condemned to death. A second Act of Succession was promulgated with its own particular oath, thus remedying the defect which More had found in the first and too broadly inclusive oath. Of greater significance, an Act of Supremacy was introduced, proclaiming Henry to be ‘the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England, called Anglicana Ecclesia’. In a further measure, the English Church was obliged to yield a tenth of its income to its new master. But there followed other proposals which touched upon More directly, as surely as if the king had run upon him in the tilting yard. A Treason Act went through the parliament, albeit with some difficulty, which for the first time made it a capital offence to ‘maliciously wish, will, or desire, by words or writing’ to deprive the royal family of their ‘dignity, title, or name of their royal estates’, or to declare the king ‘heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel’. To call Henry a schismatic, therefore, would be to incur the penalty of a lingering death. There then followed two Acts of Attainder duly passed by the parliament; the first was directed against John Fisher and several others, but the second was aimed specifically and only at Thomas More. This Act denounced him for ‘intending to sow sedition’ by refusing the oath of succession and went on to accuse him of having ‘unkindly and ingrately served our sovereign lord by divers and sundry ways’.

  So the door of his prison was shut upon him. His manors and estates became forfeit to the crown—that of South, in Kent, went to George Boleyn—and his household apparently impoverished. Dame Alice More wrote to the king, as soon as the parliamentary session was over, beseeching him ‘to remitte and pardon your moste grevous displeasure to the saide Sir Thomas’, who now lay incarcerated ‘in greate continuall sicknes of bodye and heuines of harte’;70 she repeated the family belief that his obduracy was ‘a longe contynued and depe rooted scrupple, as passethe his power to avoyde and put awey’.71 It was, in other words, an obsession of the same pathological kind as those which he had described in A Dialogue of Comfort. It was a ‘frantik fantasye’ or ‘develysh fantasie’, to use More’s own phrases in that book, which has the connotations of a diabolic temptation. He would not necessarily have thanked his wife for her diagnosis, therefore, especially since he had spent the last eight months in battling against those snares of the devil manifest in spiritual pride and the over-bearing desire for martyrdom.

  Dame Alice also lamented that she was likely to be ‘vtterlye vndone’ if More’s ‘landes and tenementis’ were confiscated; here we may suspect her of pardonable exaggeration, since she remained a wealthy woman from the inheritance of her first husband. She still possessed, for exampie, her estate in Hitchin. Her daughter and stepchildren had also profited from good marriages, although it is true that John More was now held to be responsible for his father’s outstanding debts to the king. There are one or two subtle allusions in More’s correspondence from prison which suggest that the more valuable ‘moveable goodes’ had already been quietly taken by the family from Chelsea; he cared nothing for himself now, but he was deeply anxious for the welfare of his household.

  Just before the Act of Attainder was passed against him, More was thrust into much more rigorous confinement. He told his daughter, in a long letter, that he was being held in ‘close keping’ because of ‘some newe causeles suspicion’ and ‘some secret sinister informacion’;72 he also warned her of the possibility that ‘some new sodain searches may happe to be made in euery house of ours as narowly as is possible’. He had always suspected that his liberty had gone for ever, but the passing of the Act now determined his fate; he was for a time allowed no visitors, and was prevented from attending daily Mass in the chapels of the Tower. He had also become the subject of false rumours. A report reached him, from the outside, that he had indeed succumbed and sworn to the oath of succession; he denounced this story as a ‘very vanitye’73 and repeated once again that ‘conscience is the cause’ rather than ‘obstinate wilfulness’.74 He would also not have appreciated a remark volunteered by Erasmus a little time later—‘If only he had left theology to the theologians!’ This is not perhaps as sympathetic as circumstances might have allowed, but it is a measure of the real distance between More and his old humanist friend. In this period of his more severe confinement, More wrote a memorandum to himself on the subject of perjury; he concluded, in the space of approximately four hundred words, that it would be wrong to betray a secret lawfully entrusted to him. But whose secret did he mean? Something conveyed to him by John Fisher? Or was it, perhaps, that Henry had privately informed him of something which had a material connection with More’s refusal to take the oath? And of what, then, might such a secret consist? The rest is silence.

  Now he began his last work. De Tristitia Christi is, as its title infers, a disciplined meditation upon the ‘sadness’ of Christ; it is a commentary upon certain verses of the New Testament concerned with the agony in the garden, the slumber of the disciples and the arrest of Jesus after his betrayal by Judas. Its last words—‘and they laid their hands upon Jesus’—might serve as an introduction to More’s own imprisonment and likely death, but the treatise has a more general spiritual import. It was composed in Latin, so at the close of his life More was reverting to the larger community of the faithful; it is in turn ironic and passionate, filled with intensely dramatic moments upon which he elaborates in a style at once analytical and celebratory. His well-known fears of schism and heresy are included even in his exposition of Christ’s suffering, and the slumber of the disciples is associated with the silence or inaction of the English bishops in the face of the destruction of their Church. In certain passages More compares the suffering of Christ’s physical body with the destruction of His mystical body within the communion of the faithful. Yet the weariness and sorrow which More depicts here are also his own. He writes ‘qui nihil sum’ (‘I who am nothing’)75 and locates the tendency of the book in a phrase which means simply that life is a sad thing when compared to death.76

  The pages of De Tristitia were smuggled out of his prison cell, probably in small batches, and they have become known as the Valencia Manuscript. From the evidence of this extant manuscript it is clear that he was not at all sure whether he would have the time or opportunity to complete it; sometimes he looked over a few pages at a later date but generally he revised as he went along, fashioning sentences and periods with the instinctive skill of a rhetorician. There are phases of Christ’s suffering which touched him deeply, however, and in these passages there are manifold signs of hesitancy, revision and deletion. In his allusions to martyrdom, to the physical and mental pain attendant upon death, to the states of uneasy slumber and wakefulness which spring from anxious fear, More can be said to approach the very moments of his own death with terror and trembling. He seems weary and somewhat distracted when he deletes four lines at the beginning of the sixty-second sheet (there are 155 altogether, with approximately fifteen lines upon each) and revises a sentence that contains an entire litany of suffering, ‘tristiciam timorem tedium et dirae mortis horrorem’.77 The last phrase can be translated as the horror of a terrible death. In his prison cell More shares the agony of Christ at Gethsemane. At one point in giving the example of Jesus as the paradigm of all martyrs,78 More started to write that ‘we’ will learn from him but then altered it to ‘they’. The association, however, was clear enough. Yet then he regains his fluency and, when describing the divine consolation which is offered to those approaching a violent death, his
writing becomes firmer and bolder.

  At the end of the Valencia Manuscript several sheets have been included which reveal that More was noting down short biblical extracts for his own comfort. The edges of these papers have been worn away, and it has been suggested that he kept this small compilation in his pocket when his books were eventually taken from him. And what are the central themes to be found here? He admonishes himself to forgive his enemies and to endure his suffering patiently, as Jesus did; he tells himself that he need not be afraid and that he must not save his own life unworthily. If he remains confident all temptations can be endured and, as he had often told his family, ‘a man maye in suche case leese his heade and haue no harme’.79 He also wrote a small treatise on the blessed body of Christ, so that by ‘deuout meditacion’ he might talk with him, as well as certain short prayers of supplication. He prostrated himself in his cell, meditating on the bloody sweat of Christ, hoping that ‘I will heare what our lord will speake within me’.80

  Perhaps the Lord spoke to him of a time, soon to come, when there would be no more lights and images, no more pilgrimages and processions, no guild plays and no ringing for the dead, no maypoles or Masses or holy water, no birch at midsummer and no roses at Corpus Christi. Yet More might already have anticipated that the ‘reformation’ of the last three years would lead ineluctably to the ransacking of the monasteries, the destruction of libraries, the pillage of those ornaments, vestments and jewelled relics which were part of the glory of medieval England. From the church of St Lawrence Jewry, where More had once worshipped and lectured, we read of the despoilation of ‘an awter of wode with Carued images’; we learn of books and bells and silver plate, of vestments of ‘old white silk embroidered with gold’81 as well as capes of blue velvet and cloth of gold, of basins and stone altars and marble, all demolished or taken away. From the church of St Stephen Walbrook, where More had worshipped for many years, the communion cups, burial cloths and chalices were removed; the plate was sold to a goldsmith and the vestments purchased by sundry others.82 In the other London churches which More had known all his life the stained-glass windows were destroyed and the painted walls defaced, all their gilded interiors whitewashed. At the same time, shrines were torn down and tombs removed. With the extinguishing of candles, came the end of such rituals as beating the bounds and the feast of the ‘Boy Bishop’. This reformation did not occur quickly; it was a slow and difficult process, reversed and then advanced, working through three reigns against the natural piety and traditionalism of the people. Forty years after the death of More, it was complete.