Parliament wherein was demanded by the king (as I have heard reported)
about three-fifteenths, for the marriage of his eldest daughter,
that then should be Scottish Queen; at the last debating whereof he
made such arguments and reasons against, that the king’s demands were
thereby overthrown. So that one of the king’s privy chamber being
present thereat, brought word to the king out of the Parliament house
that a beardless boy had disappointed all his purpose. Whereupon the
king, conceiving great indignation towards him, could not be satisfied
until he had some way revenged it. And forasmuch as he, nothing have,
nothing could lose, his Grace devised a causeless quarrel against his
father, keeping him in the Tower till he had made him pay a hundred
pounds fine.... Had not the king soon after died, Sir Thomas More was
determined to have gone over sea, thinking that being in the king’s
indignation, he could not live in England without great danger.”
The grant from parliament to the king was reduced from £113,000 to
£30,000 by More’s action; and if this action brought royal anger, it
won for More the confidence of his fellow-citizens in London, so that
we see him in the second year of Henry VIII. under-sheriff for the
city, and according to Erasmus and Roper, the most popular lawyer of
the day. With all his legal business, and good income, More is never
anxious after money. “While he was still dependent on his fees, he gave
to all true and friendly counsel, considering their interests rather
than his own; he persuaded many to settle with their opponents as the
cheaper course. If he could not induce them to act in that manner--for
some men delight in litigation--he would still indicate the method that
was least expensive.”[85]
More’s rising reputation was bound to attract the notice of Henry
VIII., for the king was alert in the early years of his reign to
get good men at the court, and Wolsey, who had become chancellor on
Archbishop Warham’s retirement in 1515, was anxious to enlist More in
the royal service. The court had no attractions for More, his embassies
to Flanders and Calais, to settle trade disputes and difficulties
with France, wearied him, and in 1516 he was engaged in finishing
his _Utopia_. According to Roper, it was More’s independence of mind
that made the king force office at court upon him. A ship belonging
to the pope, which had put into Southampton, was claimed by Henry as
a forfeiture. More argued the case so clearly that the commissioners
decided in the pope’s favour, and the king at once declared he must
have More in his service.
Then for the next twelve years Sir Thomas More enjoyed the royal
favour and friendship. His promotion was rapid. Secretary of state,
master of requests when the king was travelling, privy councilor,
under-treasurer, or chancellor of the exchequer--all these offices were
filled. In 1521 More was knighted, in 1523 he was speaker of the House
of Commons, and in 1525 chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
Erasmus writes to Ulrich von Hutten in 1519 in praise of More’s public
work: “In serious matters no man’s advice is more prized, and when the
king wishes for recreation no man’s conversation is more entertaining.
Often there are matters deep and involved that demand a grave and
prudent judge, and More unravels these questions in a way that gives
satisfaction to both sides. Yet no one has ever prevailed on him to
receive a gift for his decision. Happy that commonwealth where kings
appoint such officials! No pride has come to him with his high estate.
With all the weight of state affairs he remembers his old friends,
and returns from time to time to the books he loves so well. Whatever
influence has come to him with his high office, whatever favour he
enjoys with his wealthy king, he uses all for the good of the state and
for the assistance of his friends. Ever fond of conferring benefits and
wonderfully prone to pity, his disposition has grown with his power of
indulging it. Some he helps with money, to others he gives protection,
and others he recommends for promotion. When he can help in no other
way he does it by his advice: no one is sent away dejected. You
might well say that he had been appointed the public guardian of the
distressed and needy.”
If the cares of state did not cut off Sir Thomas More from assisting
old acquaintances, they made great inroads into the home life he loved
so well. He had married again on the death of his first wife, and
his letters to his children, especially to his “most dear daughter,
Margaret”--Roper’s wife--are full of tenderness. He is anxious about
the education of his children, and rejoices that his daughter shares
his love for books. We find him writing to Margaret Roper just after
her marriage in 1522:--
“I am therefore delighted to read that you have made up your mind
to give yourself diligently to philosophy, and to make up by your
earnestness in future for what you have lost in the past by neglect.
My darling Margaret, I indeed have never found you idling, and your
unusual learning in almost every kind of literature shows that you
have been making active progress. So I take your words as an example
of the great modesty that makes you prefer to accuse yourself falsely
of sloth rather than to boast of your diligence, unless your meaning
is that you will give yourself so earnestly to study that your past
history will seem like indolence by comparison.... Though I earnestly
hope that you will devote the rest of your life to medical science and
sacred literature, so that you may be well furnished for the whole
scope of human life, which is to have a healthy soul in a healthy body,
and I know that you have already laid the foundations of these studies,
and there will be always opportunity to continue the building; yet I am
of opinion that you may with great advantage give some years of your
yet flourishing youth to humane letters and liberal studies.... It
would be a delight, my dear Margaret, to me to converse long with you
on these matters, but I have just been interrupted and called away by
the servants, who have brought in supper. I must have regard to others,
else to sup is not so sweet as to talk with you.”[86]
The close friend of Erasmus and Dean Colet, an accepted champion of the
New Learning, More was naturally enthusiastic for education--for girls
as for boys. He had written to Gunnell, for a time the tutor of his
family:--
“Though I prefer learning, joined with virtue, to all the treasures
of kings, yet renown for learning, when it is not united with a good
life, is nothing else than splendid and notorious infamy: this would be
especially the case in a woman.... Since erudition in woman is a new
thing and a reproach to the sloth of men, many will gladly assail it
and impute to literature what is really the fault of nature, thinking
from the vices of the learned to get their own ignorance esteemed as
virtue. On the other hand if a woman (and this I desire and hope with
you as the teacher for all my daughters) to eminent virtue should add
an outwork of even moderate skill in literature, I think she will have
more real profit than if she had obtained the riches of Crœsus and the
beauty of Helen.”
In this letter More goes on to speak of the profit of learning and the
happiness of those who give themselves to it--“possessing solid joy
they will neither be puffed up by the empty praises of men nor dejected
by evil tongues.”
“These I consider the genuine fruits of learning, and though I admit
that all literary men do not possess them, I would maintain that those
who give themselves to study with such views (avoiding the precipices
of pride and haughtiness, walking in the pleasant meadows of modesty,
not dazzled at the sight of gold) will easily attain their end and
become perfect. Nor do I think that the harvest will be much affected
whether it is a man or a woman who sows the field. They both have the
same human nature, which reason differentiates from those of beasts;
both therefore are equally suited for those studies for which reason is
perfectioned, and becomes fruitful like a ploughed land on which the
seed of good lessons has been sown.”
This strong love for wise learning, laying emphasis on a complete
education--the training in virtue no less than the knowledge of
letters--had its roots in More’s character. The “genuine fruits of
learning” ripen in his life and death. His wide toleration, which will
blame no man for not taking the path he trod to martyrdom, is coupled
inextricably with a refinement of conscience that cannot be sullied by
a denial of his faith. The freedom of conscience Thomas More claimed
for himself he most willingly allows to others. Just as the education
he valued for himself he extends to all his children.
Standing largely aloof from the violent controversies Luther had
started, hating the bitter intolerance and savage abuse of theological
strife, refusing to be drawn into the deadly discussion of Henry
VIII.’s divorce, Sir Thomas More is content to live in loyal devotion
to his religion and to the service of the state, if haply he may. And
when this is denied him he is content to die, retaining his tolerant
good-humour and the love of his kind to the end, and without resentment
at his fate.
The courage of the sage never failed Sir Thomas More in his public
work. As “a beardless boy” he had resisted in parliament the king’s
extortions, as speaker of the House of Commons he protected the
privileges of the commons. Wolsey had come down to the House with all
his train to command a subsidy, but no word was uttered in reply to his
address. In vain Wolsey appealed for an answer, Sir Thomas More could
only declare that the speaker, then the mouthpiece of the commons, had
nothing to say till he had heard the opinion of the House. “Whereupon,
the cardinal, displeased with Sir Thomas More that had not in this
parliament in all things satisfied his desire, suddenly arose and
departed.”
High as More stood at that time in the affection of Henry, Sir
Thomas knew the king, and the nature of the favour of princes. Roper
relates that when he offered his congratulations, at the time of the
appointment to the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster, More
answered, “I may tell thee I have no cause to be proud thereof, for
if my head would win him a castle in France (for then was there war
betwixt us) it should not fail to go.”
Aware of Henry’s character, More yet had no choice but to accept the
lord chancellorship from the king on Wolsey’s fall in 1529. It was
no matter for personal satisfaction, and More’s reply to the Duke of
Norfolk was substantially the same as his previous answer to Roper:
“Considering how wise and honourable a prelate had lately before taken
so great a fall, he had no cause to rejoice in his new dignity.”
Erasmus wrote, “I do not at all congratulate More, nor literature; but
I do indeed congratulate England, for a better or holier judge could
not have been appointed.”
On November 3rd, 1529, Sir Thomas More, as chancellor, opened
parliament, and in a long speech declared that “the cause of its
assembly was to reform such things as had been used or permitted by
inadvertence, or by changes of time had become inexpedient.” It was the
opening of the seven years’ parliament, and before six years should
run, this same parliament would, at the king’s order, condemn Sir
Thomas More by act of attainder.
The position of the new chancellor was dangerous from the first. Wolsey
had fallen because he had failed to help Henry to a divorce from his
queen, Catherine of Aragon, and More had been made his successor
because the king had counted on him to accomplish the “great matter.”
All that Sir Thomas could hope for was that he might be allowed to do
his work as chancellor without being mixed up with divorce proceedings.
As long as he was not called upon to declare publicly that the divorce
was right, he had no wish to interfere in the matter. First to last
no word of approval came from More’s lips to encourage Henry in the
divorce, but he was not the man to express judgment on a case that he
did not wish brought before him.[87] In the end the chancellor’s very
silence turned Henry’s disappointment to active displeasure, and More’s
life was taken in savage revenge for non-compliance with the royal will.
Henry’s divorce dates the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in
England--of that ecclesiastical revolution in which the supremacy of
Rome was rejected, the crown superseded the pope as supreme head of
the Church of England, and England was detached from the rest of Roman
Catholic Christendom. In the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth the
revolution proceeded still further, and Catholic rites and doctrines,
service books and ceremonies were rigorously cast out of the Church
of England, and all who adhered to the old order in religion were
punished by law. But those days were far off as yet.
More, at the outset of this revolution, declines to follow the king in
the rejection of the old allegiance to Rome. All he asks for is freedom
of conscience to remain in the faith of his fathers, to worship as
Christians in England had worshipped since the coming of Augustine. To
escape death by giving up this freedom is impossible for Sir Thomas
More.
The divorce from Queen Catherine is the turning point in More’s worldly
fortunes as well as in ecclesiastical affairs in England.
Eighteen years passed from the day of Henry’s marriage to Catherine,
on his accession to the throne, before the divorce was mooted. The
scruple was that Catherine had been formerly betrothed to his dead
brother Arthur; the moving force of Henry’s petition for divorce was
the desire to marry Anne Boleyn. Unable to get the marriage annulled at
Rome, or to get a favourable opinion from the universities, Henry fell
back on Archbishop Cranmer to decree the divorce, and finally this was
done in 1533, all appeals to Rome being henceforth forbidden. Henry
had already, in 1531, called upon the clergy to acknowledge him as the
supreme head of the Church of England, and the following year they were
required to surrender the ancient right to meet and enact canons.[88]
In these four years the chancellor had kept out of political life as
far as he could, and had given his attention to his judicial work. But
in May, 1532, he resigned the great seal into the king’s hands, “seeing
that affairs were going badly, and likely to be worse, and that if he
retained his office he would be obliged to act against his conscience,
or incur the king’s displeasure as he had already begun to do, for
refusing to take his part against the clergy. His excuse was that his
salary was too small, and that he was not equal to the work. Everyone
is concerned, for there never was a better man in the office.”[89]
Nothing is known of Sir Thomas More’s work in the chancery except his
integrity and his despatch. “When More took the office there were
causes that had remained undecided for twenty years. He presided so
dexterously and successfully that once after taking his seat and
deciding a case, when the next case was called, it was found that
there was no second case for trial. Such a thing is said never to have
happened before or since.” (Stapleton.)
For nearly two years More lived unmolested after his resignation of
the chancellorship; but he had incurred the enmity of the king and the
hatred of Anne Boleyn, and Henry was swiftly driving at certain changes
in religion that were to bring Sir Thomas More to the Tower and the
block, and many another honest Christian to the prison and the gallows
of Tyburn.
In June, 1533, after Cranmer had duly pronounced Henry’s marriage with
Catherine void, came the coronation of Anne Boleyn, and Sir Thomas More
declined an invitation from some of the bishops to be present at the
celebration. He knew that his absence would be marked unfavourably by
the king, and was ready to pay the penalty; but his care in avoiding
the expression of any disapproval of Henry’s proceedings required an
equal care that no approval should be expressed. To have been present
at the coronation of Anne would have been, for More, to condone the
divorce.
In the autumn came an attempt to include More, with Bishop Fisher
and certain monks and friars, in the treason of the “Holy Maid of
Kent,”--Elizabeth Barton, a Canterbury nun. The “treason” amounted to
this, that the nun, who was given to prophesying, declared that God had
revealed to her to speak against Henry’s divorce, and it was sufficient
to bring her to Tyburn. But against Sir Thomas More no shred of
evidence could be procured, for none existed. He had seen the nun, and
talked with her, and “held her in great estimation,” but would neither
commit himself to a belief in her visions, nor permit any discussion on
the king’s doings; but wrote to the nun a letter which could not have
been more prudent, as he exhorted her “to attend to devotion, and not
meddle in the affairs of princes.”
The name of Sir Thomas More was struck out of the bill of attainder,
but the days of his liberty were already numbered.
The Act of Succession, passed in March, 1534, made Mary, the daughter
of Henry and Catherine, illegitimate, and Elizabeth, Anne’s child,
the heir to the throne. The act also declared that “all the nobles of
the realm, spiritual and temporal, and all other subjects arrived at
full age, should be obliged to take corporal oath, in the presence
of the king or his commissioners, to observe and maintain the whole
effect and contents of the act,” under the penalties for treason for
refusal. The words of the oath were not inserted in the act, and the
commissioners drew up a formula, requiring all persons to affirm in
addition that the marriage with Catherine was invalid, and the marriage
with Anne valid, and further to recall and repudiate allegiance to any
foreign authority, prince, or potentate. This was a much larger demand
than parliament had authorised, for it contained a denial of the papal
supremacy, while all that the act had required was an acknowledgment
of the succession to the crown. The pope had only just given his final
decision on Henry’s appeal for divorce (March, 1534), and the decision
had been against the king and in favour of the marriage. The oath now
administered was in direct opposition to the supremacy of Rome, and
as such was impossible to the consciences of men like Sir Thomas More
and Bishop Fisher, though the great bulk of the clergy took it without
giving any trouble.
More was quite prepared to swear to the succession of Elizabeth.
Parliament had, in his eyes, a plain right to decide who should wear
the crown, and the doctrine of divine hereditary kingship does not
come in till the Stuarts. But this mere willingness to comply with
the letter of the law was not sufficient. More’s silent want of
sympathy with the divorce, and with the breach it involved with Rome,
was intolerable to Henry, who had counted More amongst his dearest
friends; for friend or foe, in Henry’s power, could only live by abject
agreement with the royal pleasure. No king had three more faithful
servants than Henry VIII. had in Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, and
Thomas Cromwell, and no king destroyed his ministers with such fierce
caprice.
Sir Thomas More, unable to take the oath, was sent to the Tower in
April, 1534, Bishop Fisher having already been lodged there. In
November parliament met again, and passed the Act of Supremacy, making
Henry VIII. “the supreme head of the Church of England,” and declaring
that on and after the first of February, 1535, it was high treason
“to deprive the king’s most royal person, the queen’s, or their heirs
apparent of their dignity, title or name of their royal estates, or
slanderously and maliciously publish or pronounce, by express writing
or words, that the king, our sovereign lord, should be heretic,
schismatic, tyrant, infidel, etc.” Under this act Sir Thomas More was
to be assailed and to die. That the martyrdom was a “judicial murder”
is plain--to Lord Campbell it was “the blackest crime that ever has
been perpetrated in England under the form of law.”[90]
The indictment was for treason, and on July 1st, a week after Bishop
Fisher’s execution, Sir Thomas More was brought before the judges.
To the charge of having refused the king, “maliciously, falsely, and
traitorously, his title of supreme head of the Church of England,”
More answered that the statute had been passed while he was in prison,
and that he was dead to the world, and had not cared about such
things--“your statute cannot condemn me to death for such silence, for
neither your statute nor any laws in the world punish people except for
words and deeds--surely not for keeping silence.”
“To this the king’s proctor replied that such silence was a certain
proof of malice intended against the statute, especially as every
faithful subject, on being questioned about the statute, was obliged
to answer categorically that the statute was good and wholesome.”
“Surely,” replied More, “if common law is true, and he who is silent
seems to consent, my silence should rather be taken as approval than
contempt of your statute.”
To the first article charging him with having always maliciously
opposed the king’s second marriage, More had answered that anything
he had said had been according to his conscience, and that for “this
error,” he had already suffered fifteen months’ imprisonment, and the
confiscation of his property.
The trial was soon over, for the king had decided on More’s death
when Fisher was executed, ordering the preachers to set forth to the
people the treasons of the late Bishop of Rochester and of Sir Thomas
More; “joining them together though the later was still untried.”[91]
The jury, after a quarter of an hour’s absence, declared him guilty
of death for maliciously contravening the statute, and sentence was
pronounced by the chancellor “according to the tenour of the new law.”
Death being now in sight, and faith having been kept with his
conscience, More has no longer any reason to observe silence. To the
usual question whether he has anything to say against the sentence, he
replied, that for the seven years he had studied the matter he could
not find that supremacy in a church belonged to a layman, or to any but
the see of Rome, as granted personally by our Lord when on earth to
St. Peter and his successors; and that, as the city of London could not
make a law against the laws of the realm of England, so England could
not make a law contrary to the general law of Christ’s Catholic Church;
and that the Magna Charta of England said that “the English Church
should be free to enjoy all its rights,” as the king had sworn at his
consecration. Interrupted by the chancellor with the inquiry whether
he wished to be considered wiser and better than all the bishops
and nobles of the realm who had sworn to the king’s supremacy, More
retorted, “For one bishop of your opinion, my lord, I have a hundred
saints of mine; and for one parliament of yours, and God knows of what
kind, I have all the general councils for a thousand years.” The Duke
of Norfolk said that now his malice was clear.
On the sixth of July, 1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded on Tower Hill,
for the king remitted the ferocious mutilations that accompanied the
executions for treason at Tyburn. “The scaffold was very unsteady, and
putting his feet on the ladder, he said, merrily, to the lieutenant of
the Tower: “I pray thee see me safe up, and for my coming down let me
shift for myself.”[92]
Then, with a simple request to the people standing round to pray for
him, and to bear witness that he died a Catholic for the faith of
the Catholic Church, a friendly word to the executioner, and a last
prayer--the 51st Psalm--the axe fell, and More was dead.