For a time, More was able to retreat to his home in Chelsea, where he lived simply and continued to write against the Protestants. He wanted to be left out of the king’s great matter not only to protect himself but also to protect his family. As it was, however, both he and his family began to suffer. After he resigned his office, More was left with an income of “little above an hundred pounds a year,” a modest sum with which to maintain a household (Roper 27). It was, in fact, too little, and he had to discharge his household staff. Perhaps sensing that his retirement would be short lived, More published several works in rapid succession. In addition to completing his Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, More also wrote The Apology of Sir Thomas More, Knight (1533), The Answer to a Poisonous Book (1533), and The Debellation [Conquest] of Salem and Bizance (1533). The Apology was More’s response to critics of his earlier works, while The Answer and The Debellation continued his attacks on Tyndale and other Protestants and offered defenses of church practice and doctrine, especially its doctrine on the Eucharist. In The Apology More responded to the charge that he had defended the church solely for his own personal gain by demonstrating that he had never accepted any compensation whatsoever, despite repeated offers from prominent clerics. The Debellation is More’s response to a Protestant attack on the church that was written as a dialogue between two speakers, “Salem” and “Bizance.” If he could have remained secluded in Chelsea, More might have made for himself a kind of monastic life of quiet, productive work that he had always longed for. His life, however, was not destined to be quiet or secluded or free from the concerns of the world.
In January 1533, Henry married Anne Boleyn. More did not attend the ceremony, nor did he later attend Anne’s coronation. The wedding was timed awkwardly, for it was not until May 23 that Thomas Cranmer archbishop of Canterbury called a court at Dunstable to nullify Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. More hoped, perhaps desperately, that the king’s desire for popular support in “these matters within a while be not confirmed with oaths” (Roper 28). As it turned out, that is just what Henry would demand. On July 11, 1533, the pope excommunicated Henry and declared his marriage to Anne invalid. Henry was growing more isolated and less secure. All of his former advisors were gone, and his new advisors, Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, had yet to prove their loyalty. Henry began to demand from his court their complete agreement with all of his decisions. The person who did have influence over him—for a brief while, anyway—was his new queen. Anne took a great dislike to More and used her influence to put forward ways to disturb his peace at Chelsea. Henry resented More’s attitude toward Anne, his deliberate absence from court, and his studied silence.
More had to fend off first small charges, then greater ones, as his reluctance to speak on the king’s divorce and marriage drew wider attention. There were inquiries about whether he had written some of his works to oppose arguments in books that the king had written. A quick check of the printing histories made it clear that More did not write in response to anything the king had said or published. Next, there were accusations by Anne’s father that More had taken bribes while he was Lord Chancellor, all of which were shown to be untrue. A charge of greater significance was that More had heard treason spoken by Elizabeth Barton, a prophetic nun popularly known as “the Maid of Kent,” and did not inform the king. Elizabeth had predicted that if Henry divorced Catherine, he “should no longer be King of this realm” (Reynolds 286). More had not heard words of this sort from Elizabeth herself, nor did he speak of the king’s matter with her. He did warn her not to meddle in affairs of state. More had kept records of all of his meetings with Elizabeth, along with copies of his correspondence. He felt compelled to send letters to Cromwell and to the king with detailed accounts of all of his dealings with her. His letter to the king also reminded Henry of his promise to be More’s “good and gracious lord” after his resignation (Rogers 202). Nonetheless, More’s name was included in a Parliamentary Act of Attainder with that of Elizabeth and others. If it stayed in the Act, he could suffer execution as a traitor without even a trial.20 To examine More about the Maid of Kent the king appointed a four-person commission, which included Thomas Cranmer archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor Thomas Aud-ley, Thomas Howard duke of Norfolk, and Thomas Cromwell secretary to the king. It soon became clear to More that this high-powered commission meant to intimidate him into accepting the king’s divorce and new marriage. They threatened him with the king’s great displeasure, because he had, they said, persuaded the king to support the pope in his Assertion of the Seven Sacraments. More responded with “My lords. . . these terrors be arguments for children, and not for me,” which brought the examination to an abrupt end (Roper 33). The king relented. More’s name was removed from the Act, though the king cancelled his income as a councillor. The Maid of Kent was not so fortunate, for she, along with her close colleagues, was executed on April 21, 1534.
More had not been healthy before these shockwaves came at him, and he was even less so after he had suffered through them. He began to take legal action to secure his estate for his family after his death. Though he did not know what form it would take, he knew another attack by Henry would come. He did not have to wait long. Early in 1534, Parliament passed an Act of Succession, which declared that after Henry’s death the crown would pass to his eldest son, but if there were no son then it would go to Princess Elizabeth, his daughter by Anne Boleyn. Princess Mary, Catherine’s daughter, was excluded from the line of succession. There were severe penalties for those who denied the Act, ranging from execution and forfeiture of property for high treason to imprisonment and forfeiture of property for misprision (hiding) of treason. The Act required every subject to swear a corporal oath21 in support of all the provisions of the Act, which included not only the matter of succession but also the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine, the validity of his marriage to Anne, and the rejection of the authority of the pope in the matters of marriage. Those who refused to take the oath and were obstinate in their refusal would be guilty of misprision of treason.
More was summoned to appear at Lambeth Palace on April 13, 1534, to take the Oath of Succession. Lambeth Palace was the official London residence of the archbishop of Canterbury, and it was where over 40 years earlier More had served as a page and invented parts for himself in Christmas plays. One wonders if those memories came back to him, when he was about to assume a role that he did not look for or want to accept. When he was asked to take the oath, More first asked to read it. He also asked to read the Act of Succession itself. When he had done these things, he said that he would swear to the succession itself, but he could not swear to the oath as presented to him “without the iubarding [jeopardizing] of my soul to perpetual damnation” (Rogers 217). The commissioners sent him to the palace gardens to reconsider his decision while he watched the free comings and goings of prominent people who had sworn to the oath. We are led to believe that the moment had been staged to move him to change his mind. About this “painted process” More later wrote to his daughter Margaret, “When they had played their pageant, and were gone out of the place, then was I called in again” (Rogers 219). The commissioners tried to impress him with the names of many well-known people who had already sworn to the oath. When that did not work, they wanted to know to what parts of the oath he objected. More remained silent. The commissioners tried other arguments, to no avail. Not being sure of what to do next, they put More for a few days under the charge of the abbot of Westminster. More stayed in the monastery and waited. On April 17, 1534, he was called back to give answer to the commissioners. Once again, he refused to take the oath and refused to say why he would not take it. He was then arrested and removed to the Tower of London.
More was a prisoner in the Tower for 15 months. For about 12 of those months he had books and writing materials, and after a time he was allowed to have some visitors, including his wife, his daughter Margaret, and her husband, William Roper. Perhaps the king thought that, given enough time in the Tower, More would eventually come around to his point of view. He was mistaken. More used his year of relative leniency to read and write. He wrote personal and touching letters to his family and especially to Margaret. He also wrote devotional works, including these four: A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, A Treatise on the Passion, The Sadness of Christ, and A Treatise to Receive the Blessed Body of Our Lord. More was turning his mind back to those things that had always given him comfort: contemplating the suffering of Christ for the salvation of souls, the mystery of the holy Eucharist, and the consolations of philosophy. He had with him a Book of Hours, which guided his daily prayers and meditations. In the margins of that book, he composed his own prayer, which reiterates themes that had permeated his earlier works such as The Life of Pico della Mirandola and The Last Things. They continued to permeate his life. The prayer begins:
Give me thy grace, good Lord To set the world at naught;
To set my mind fast upon Thee,
And not to hang upon the blast Of men’s mouths;
To be content to be solitary,
Not to long for worldly company;
Little and little utterly to cast off the world,
And rid my mind of all the business thereof. (Reynolds 355; I have modernized spellings and supplied punctuation.)
Elsewhere in the prayer, More counsels himself to be “joyful of tribulations” and “To have ever the last thing in remembrance; / To have ever before my eyes my death that is ever at hand” (Reynolds 355, with my modern spellings and punctuation). Little over a month after he was imprisoned, Margaret came to visit him. She must have been distressed to see him in his cell, because More attempted to comfort her by saying,
I believe, Meg, that they that put me here, ween [believe] they have done me a high displeasure. But I assure thee, on my faith, my own good daughter, if it had not been for my wife and you that be my children, whom I account the chief part of my charge, I would not have failed long ere this to have closed myself in as strait a room and straiter too. (Roper 37)
He added, “For me thinketh God maketh me a wanton, and setteth me on his lap and dandleth me” (Roper 37-38). The picture that More conjures here of being bounced on the lap of God like a playful toddler is an astonishingly intimate and happy one. It suggests that More felt that he had finally come to the place that he had always longed for, odd as it may have appeared to Margaret and the rest of his family. to the king, he was set free from the cares of the world. He had always longed for a monastic cell, and now he had a kind of one. He was living an austere, monk-like life of prayer, contemplation, and good works. He anticipated death and rejoiced that he had been faithful to his conscience and his obligations to the church. The only questions that remained to him were how and when the king would bring about his end.
Henry’s fifth Parliament opened its seventh session on November 3, 1534. Its actions would determine More’s fate. The first Act that the Parliament took up was the Act of Supremacy, which gave statutory authority to the king’s complete takeover of the church. The qualifying phrase, “so far as the law of Christ allows,” which had been added by the bishops in their submission to the king three years before, was pointedly cut out of the Act. The Act of Supremacy was followed by a second Act of Succession that formalized the wording of the oath required by first Act and restated the explicit requirement that “every of the King’s subjects. . . shall be obliged to accept and take the said oath” (Reynolds 327). Next, Parliament passed an Act of Treasons that made simply writing or speaking against the king or denying any of his titles treasonable offenses. Near the end of its session, Parliament passed Acts of Attainder against More and some others, including his old friend John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. The charge against More was that “he had ‘obstinately, frowardly [perversely] and contemptuously’ refused to take the oath” (Reynolds 329). This charge amounted to misprision of treason, the penalty for which was imprisonment and loss of property and goods. More was already in prison, but his property was then confiscated and given away to others. His family’s income was severely reduced. According to the world’s measure, More had lost everything but his life. He would lose that presently.
More’s continued refusal to take the oath to the Act of Succession or to say why he would not take it troubled the king. Henry had not expected More to be so steadfast in his resistance nor so constant a reminder of the uncertain validity of his claim to supremacy over the English Church. As long as More lived, it seemed, the matter could be questioned, but if he could be heard to deny the king’s title, then his crime would escalate to high treason and his life would be forfeit. Several interrogations of More to catch him out were held over the next few months. The first interrogation came a day or so after three Carthusian monks were found guilty of high treason. One of them, John Houghton, was from the London Charterhouse that More had visited in his youth, and another, Richard Reynolds, was a personal friend. They were hanged, drawn, and quartered. More’s grief must have been profound, and so must have been his respect for their courage. The first interrogation failed to prod More into speaking, and so did those that followed. When it was suggested to him that his refusal was mean-spirited and a cause for others to resist the king, More replied, “I do nobody harm, I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive in good faith I long not to live” (Rogers 247-48).
In early June, the Privy Council ordered that More’s living conditions in the Tower be made less comfortable, and on June 12 Sir Richard Rich, the king’s solicitor general, came to take away his books and writing materials. While Rich’s men were collecting the books, he engaged More in conversation. Under the guise of one lawyer talking to another, Rich began putting cases about Parliamentary authority. Rich first put the case of Parliament making him king. Would not then More accept him as king? More’s answer was yes, because Parliament had the authority to decide on kingship. Rich went a step further and put the case of Parliament enacting a law that would make him the pope. Would not More take Rich for the pope? This was getting too close to the central issue of More’s refusal to take the oath to the Act of Succession, so More did not answer directly and countered with a different case to demonstrate that there were limits to Parliamentary authority. More put the case of Parliament enacting a law that God should not be God. He asked Rich if he would then accept that God was not God. Rich said that he would not, “since no Parliament may make any such law” (Roper 42). Here was the true sticking point. Just what were the limits of Parliamentary power? We know that More did not believe that Parliament had the power to make Henry (or anybody else) the Supreme Head of the Church. The king, the Privy Council, and Sir Richard Rich likely suspected More’s true opinion, too, but they did not have any legal case to make against him so long as he remained silent. At this point in the conversation More might have made the slightest of mistakes, because according to Rich, More responded, “No more. . . could the Parliament make the King Supreme Head of the Church” (Roper 42). These, however, are words that Rich attributed to More when he submitted his report at More’s indictment. We do not know, apart from Rich’s notes, what More actually said, if anything. In his notes of the conversation jotted down immediately after he left More’s cell, Rich records that he ended his conversation with More by saying,
Well, Sir, God comfort you, for I see your mind will not change which I fear will be very dangerous to you for I suppose your concealment to the question that hath been asked you is as high offence as other that hath denied. (Reynolds 344)
This note suggests several interpretations: More may have never said the words that Rich attributed to him; or, if he had said some such thing, Rich may not have believed that More had actually denied the king’s title; or Rich may not have immediately grasped the full implications of what More had said; or Rich did not realize at the time how his conversation with More could be recast to sound as if More had denied the king’s title. It is unlikely that More would have been tricked by a lesser legal mind, unless his physical strength and mental state had badly deteriorated. The commissioners interrogated More once again after his conversation with Rich, so they must not have believed that More had denied the king’s title. What does count is that when More was brought to trial on July 1, Sir Richard Rich testified that he had explicitly denied the title.
Those who had not seen More for over a year were shocked at his physical appearance when he was brought to trial. He looked ill and frail, “sustaining his weak and feeble body with a staff” (Harpsfield 156). He had let his beard grow long. More faced four charges, all of which had to do with his alleged denial of the king’s title of Supreme Head of the Church. If found guilty, he would be liable to the same punishment that the Carthusians had suffered. The first three charges were that More had remained obstinately and maliciously silent when he was asked about the king’s title, that he had sent incriminating letters to Bishop John Fisher, his friend and fellow prisoner in the Tower, and that he had collaborated with Fisher in preparing their testimonies. More’s response to the first charge was that silence could not be construed as malicious; only words and deeds could be so construed. Further, he pointed out that common law held that “he that holdeth his peace seemeth to consent,” or, in other words, “Silence gives consent” (Reynolds 363). It was a legal point. In law, his silence had to be interpreted that he had consented to the title, and not that he denied it. The record of the trial does not indicate how More dealt with the second and third charges, but the letters between More and Fisher had been destroyed. More denied collaborating on testimony with Bishop Fisher, and no one could prove any different. The fourth and last charge, supported only by Rich’s testimony, was that More had explicitly denied the king’s title. More prefaced his response by addressing Rich directly, saying, “In good faith, Master Rich, I am sorrier for your perjury than for my own peril” (Roper 43). More then spoke against Rich’s credibility and his testimony with vehemence. Rich, he said, was not a man to be believed, for he was generally esteemed “very light of. . . tongue, a common liar, a great dicer, and of no commendable fame” (Roper 43); it was not likely, he continued, that he would have opened his mind to Rich when he had not done so to the king’s councillors; and lastly, that whatever he said to Rich was in the harmless context of the putting of hypothetical cases. More’s argument was forceful, but it did not prevail.
It took just a quarter of an hour for the jury to convict More of high treason. The Lord Chancellor then, “incontinent upon their verdict,” moved to pronounce sentence, but More interrupted to remind him that “the manner in such case was to ask the prisoner before judgment, why judgment should not be given against him” (Roper 45). The Lord Chancellor yielded the floor. Free then to discharge his conscience, More finally spoke his mind about the king’s title. His words, resounding in classical cadences, must have reminded everyone that he was not only a man of principle but also one who could still command a powerful rhetoric:
Forasmuch as [because], my lord, . . . this indictment is grounded upon an Act of Parliament directly repugnant to the laws of God and his Holy Church, the supreme government of which or of any part whereof, may no temporal Prince presume by any law to take upon him, as rightfully belonging to the See of Rome, a spiritual pre-eminence by the mouth of Our Saviour himself, personally present upon the earth, only to St Peter and his successors, Bishops of the same See, by special prerogative granted, it is therefore in law amongst Christian men insufficient to charge any Christian man. (Roper 45)
More went on to point out that Henry’s claim to supremacy over the church violated the protection of the church guaranteed in the Magna Carta (signed by King John on June 15, 1215) and in the king’s own coronation oath.22 After he had discharged his mind and conscience, More heard the sentence of death pronounced against him. He was led back to the Tower to await execution.
On the morning of Tuesday July 6, 1535, More was informed that he would “the same day suffer death and that therefore forthwith he should prepare himself thereto” (Roper 49). The day before, he had sent his hair shirt home to Margaret with a short note saying that he hoped to be executed on July 6 because that was Saint Thomas’s Eve, before the feast day of Saint Thomas the Apostle, his namesake. More was also informed that the king had been merciful to him and that his execution would be by beheading. Word of his speech at the trial must have been communicated to Henry, for More was told that the king’s pleasure was that at his execution he “shall not use many words” (Roper 49). More dressed himself in a coarse, plain gown that had once belonged to his servant, and he set aside one gold coin to give to his executioner. He was led just outside the walls to Tower Hill, where a raised scaffold had been erected to provide a better view of his execution. Though he was physically weak, More had not lost his wit nor his sense of moment and place. This last public event of his life was not without a theatrical dimension, and More was careful to play his role well. When he had trouble climbing the steps of the scaffold, “which was so weak that it was ready to fall,” he said “merrily” to the officer who assisted him, “I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself” (Roper 50). It was just the sort of tragicomic line often found in the morality plays and Tudor interludes that More loved. Like many of those lines, More’s comment was disarming on purpose, as it relieved a moment’s tension only to heighten the dramatic effect of his final statement to come, which R. W. Chambers claims to be the “most weighty and most haughty ever spoken on the scaffold” (Chambers 350). The Paris Newsletter’s published report of More’s death says that:
He spoke little before his execution. Only he asked the bystanders to pray for him in this world, and he would pray for them elsewhere. He then begged them earnestly to pray for the King, that it might please God to give him good counsel, protesting that he died the King’s good servant but God’s first. (Chambers 349)
More’s headless body was taken back into the Tower and buried in the Chapel Royal of Saint Peter ad Vincula (Saint Peter in Chains). There it remains. His head was parboiled, stuck on a long wooden pike, and displayed on London
Bridge. Before it could be destroyed, Margaret bribed the executioner to take it down and give it to her. She kept it safe with her for the rest of her life, after which it was deposited in the Roper family vault in Saint Dunstan’s, Canterbury.
World History
