By 1523, More had been a member of the king’s Privy Council for six years and undertreasurer of England since 1521 and had proved himself to be a talented advisor and administrator. He was also good company. Both Henry and his queen, Catherine of Aragon, enjoyed his sophisticated conversation and wit, and More was their frequent guest. Henry’s esteem for More, as fortune would have it, involved him in a tangle of religious and political issues that led to his elevation to the office of Lord Chancellor and then to his fall from favor, imprisonment, and eventual execution.
Given his education, abilities, and experience, More was perhaps the inevitable choice of the king to provide editorial assistance in the composition of his book against Luther. In 1520, Luther had published a pamphlet, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in which he argued that only three sacraments were instituted by Christ himself and were essential to salvation: baptism, penance, and the Eucharist. He also argued that confirmation, marriage, ordination, and extreme unction (last rites) were not sacraments, regardless of what the church said, and were not essential to salvation. Luther’s attack was two-pronged, first claiming that only those acts that were instituted by Christ himself could be considered sacraments and, second, that the only authority to speak on the matter was scripture, and not any of the councils of the church. Luther’s attacks were taken by faithful Catholics to be a rejection of the one true church, consecrated by Christ and sustained for 1,500 years by a succession of apostolic leaders beginning with Saint Peter himself. Catholics such as More were horrified, frightened, and enraged all at the same time. It is difficult to imagine a corresponding modern phenomenon, though the works of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, and Albert Einstein had comparable effects on some populations when they were first published. King Henry decided to respond to Luther’s attacks in a theological book of his own, the Assertion of the Seven Sacraments. It was a straightforward reaffirmation of Catholic theology and doctrine, for which More was, by his own description, “a sorter out and placer of the principal matters” (Reynolds 149). Henry had the book printed in 1521. One copy was richly bound, autographed by him, and sent to Pope Leo X. For his efforts, a papal council conferred upon Henry the title of defender of the faith. It is a title that every English monarch since has claimed.
The range of Luther’s criticisms of the church was wide. In addition to the number of sacraments and the shared authority of scripture and church, Luther opposed the supreme authority of the pope and the church’s teachings on transubstantiation, free will, monasticism, the intercession of the saints, celibacy of the clergy, the sale of indulgences, the efficacy of pilgrimages, and the veneration of relics. Luther could be caustic and personally abusive in defending his positions, and he was not intimidated by the ecclesiastical or secular authority of any of his opponents. In 1522 he responded to Henry’s Assertion with a nasty little volume of vulgar insults entitled Against Henry, King of England. It would have been unseemly for Henry himself to respond, but he did need to respond, and More became his champion. In 1523 More wrote his Response against Luther under the pseudonym of “William Ross.” In his Response More attacked Luther’s arguments point-by-point and Luther himself with equal vehemence and obscenity. By writing under a pseudonym,
More could vent his hatred of Luther and all that constituted the Protestant defiance of the church without compromising his position in Henry’s court or inviting others to question the extent of his contribution to Henry’s Assertion. More’s Response against Luther was really a defense of the three institutions that More valued most: the church, the English legal system, and the monarchy, all of which derived authority in part from their long traditions.
In 1525, William Tyndale published his English translation of the New Testament in Germany. It was smuggled into England, and by 1526 it had already inspired many to join the Protestant movement. Much of Tyndale’s English translation still survives, as many of its passages were incorporated into the King James Bible. In October 1526, Cuthbert Tunstall (then bishop of London) and others bought up all the copies of Tyndale’s Bible they could find and staged a public burning of them and other Protestant books at Saint Paul’s Cross in London. The book burning, however, called attention to Tyndale’s translation, financed the printing of more copies, and increased the number of his Bibles smuggled into the country. This is just what More had feared would happen. In March 1528, Tunstall gave More permission to read heretical works so that he could respond to them, and in June 1529, More published A Dialogue Concerning Heresies. The book is in the form of a witty and genial debate: More charitably depicts the Protestant advocate as an intelligent inquirer, rather than as a committed heretic. This would be More’s last friendly attempt to argue Protestants back to the Catholic Church. In 1530 Tyndale responded to More’s book with his An Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue. More’s massive Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (1532-33) is 10 times the size of Tyndale’s book and is an exhaustive picking apart of his arguments.
In addition to his charge to write against the Protestants, More was the designated leader of the royal court’s offensive against them. More discharged his responsibilities with some vigor. He led raids on the Steelyard shipping docks in London, where many Protestant books were smuggled into England, and a number of Protestants were burned at the stake as heretics during his administration. More has been much criticized for the harshness and, in some cases, the brutality of his attacks on the Protestants. Some scholars find it hard to excuse or forgive him. Other scholars note that More was a man of his own times, and the times then could be grotesquely brutal. Traitors, for example, were routinely executed by being dragged through the streets on hurdles (like ladders), hanged until they were almost dead, then emasculated, then disemboweled while they were still alive, and finally beheaded. After death, their heads were stuck on long poles called “pikes” and displayed on London Bridge. Their bodies were cut into quarters and hung in four different parts of the City as a warning to would-be traitors. Women convicted of treason were either beheaded or burned at the stake. More’s persecution of heretics reflects his horror at what he feared to be the end effects of the Reformation—the disintegration of the one true church and the collapse of the whole of English and Continental social order. It must have seemed to him that the world was headed for apocalyptic ruin at the hands of Martin Luther and William Tyndale.
In recognition of More’s services as editor, judge, and Court administrator, Henry elevated him to the office of Lord Chancellor on October 25, 1529. The primary duty of the Lord Chancellor was to preside over the Court of Chancery, the highest judicial body in England. More was the first layman in English history to hold that office. His predecessor had been Thomas Wolsey, a cardinal of the church and archbishop of York. Wolsey had long sought to advance Henry’s claims to territory on the Continent, to manipulate the princes of Europe into advantageous alliances with Henry, and to position himself to be elected pope. His strategies were convoluted, subtle (frequently secret), and often frustrated by the weight of their own intrigue and the clever maneuvering of others. His alliances for Henry never seemed to come to fruition, his advancement of Henry’s claims on territory did not yield much, and his own campaign to become pope failed miserably. In what would become known as the king’s “great matter”—Henry’s desire to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon—Wolsey had been ineffectual.
Catherine had come to England in 1501 to marry Henry’s older brother, Prince Arthur, but Arthur died six months after their marriage. Henry VII was reluctant to return Catherine’s dowry, and her parents, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, sought to keep their alliance with England alive by having Catherine marry Prince Henry. But there were problems. Church law forbade a man from marrying his brother’s widow, and canon lawyers pointed out that Leviticus 20:21 specifically says, “He that marrieth his brother’s wife, doth an unlawful thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be without children.” For Henry and Catherine to marry, Ferdinand and Henry VII petitioned Pope Alexander VI for a dispensation of the prohibition, which he granted. By 1527, however, a biblical curse seemed to have befallen Henry (king since 1509) and Catherine. True, they did have a daughter, Mary (born 1516, later Queen Mary), but Henry wanted a son to guarantee the survival of the Tudor line and dynasty. Since the birth of Mary, however, there had been a succession of miscarriages, stillbirths, and infant deaths. Catherine was getting older, and Henry was getting desperate. Henry wanted out of his marriage and the freedom to marry Anne Boleyn, who was young, vivacious, and irresistibly attractive.
In 1529, Henry turned out Wolsey and turned to More to provide a fresh start. More’s brief tenure as Lord Chancellor (1529-32) was dominated by the king’s great matter, just as the latter part of Wolsey’s term had been. Though he made significant contributions to improving the administration of the law courts, More never influenced policy the way Wolsey had. Henry hoped that More’s support in his effort to divorce Catherine would influence others, but More wanted to avoid the dangerous issue. Later on, he reminded the king’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell, of Henry’s promise to leave him out of the matter if he could not see his way clear to support the divorce. More wrote to Cromwell on March 5, 1534, that Henry had advised him to
Consider his great matter, and well and indifferently [without prejudice] to ponder such things as I should find therein. And if it so were that
Thereupon it should hap me to see such things as should persuade me to [the king’s] part, he would gladly use me among other of his councillors in that matter, and nevertheless he graciously declared unto me that he would in no wise that I should other thing do or say therein, than upon that that I should perceive mine own conscience should serve me, and that I should first look unto God and after God unto him, which most gracious words was the first lesson also that ever his Grace [i. e., the king] gave me at my first coming into his noble service. (Rogers 209)
At the time that Henry gave this assurance to More he likely believed what he said. More surely did. But Henry’s conscience was unsteady, and what once had seemed a generous pledge for him to make became increasingly troublesome for him to honor. After a time it was forgotten altogether.
On the face of it, all Henry had to do was approach the pope once more to request an annulment of the marriage, but time had passed and a new pope, Clement VII, sat on the Chair of Saint Peter. Clement favored Queen Catherine and her parents and was not sympathetic to Henry’s cause. Neither canon law nor papal politics could be bent to serve Henry’s purposes. Henry looked for a way out of his problem. He began to bully his clerics into finding theological arguments to support the divorce. As time passed, he increased pressure on them by accusing them of having given the pope undue honor and authority over the church in England. To this Henry added charges that the courts of the church violated the supremacy of English law. Both charges were shams, because earlier in his reign Henry had supported the deferential honors given to the pope and the integrity of the ecclesiastical courts. To appease the king, the bishops offered to pay a fine of ?40,000, but Henry increased it to ?100,000 and required them to acknowledge him as “Supreme Head of the Church of England.” In February 1531, the clergy accepted the terms, but added the phrase “as far as the law of Christ allows” to qualify the extent to which “supreme” could be construed. Henry’s claim to supreme ecclesiastical authority was the root cause of England’s atypical turn to Protestantism. The issues were first political and dynastic, and only afterward theological.
More was distressed by these events, but he kept quiet, trusting that the king would keep his pledge and leave him out of the conflict. When Henry turned to Parliament to confirm his new status and title, More had to get involved. When Parliament was in session, the Lord Chancellor was the voice of the king to the Lords and Commons. More tried every way he could to avoid making any personal statement about the king’s marriage. His reluctance to speak displeased the king. Still, Henry was unwilling to grant More’s wish to resign from office, perhaps because he thought that the accumulating weight of the testimony of others would sway More’s opinion in his favor. As long as More was Lord Chancellor and the matter not finally resolved, his reputation would give the proceedings an air of respectability. In March 1532, the House of Commons passed a “Supplication against the Ordinaries [i. e., bishops]” that summarized all of the complaints, large and small, new and old, against the clergy. This supplication was presented to a convocation of bishops at Canterbury. The bishops prepared a vigorous defense. At the same time, though, the House of Lords was preparing a bill to abolish the payment of a bishop’s first-year income to the pope. This was power politics directed against the authority and the wealth of the church. The bishops were overwhelmed by these charges and especially by an ominous one that accused them of swearing allegiance to the pope over the king. On May 15, 1532, the convocation submitted to the demands of the king and Parliament. The next day, presumably as soon as news reached him from Canterbury, Thomas More resigned from the office of Lord Chancellor.
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