Book of Fire (47 page)

In the preface to the
Confutation
, More devoted almost as much space and vitriol to Barnes as to Tyndale. Barnes, an Augustinian friar who had been the prior of his order in Cambridge, had abjured in 1526 and fled abroad two years later. He met Luther in Wittenberg and later moved to Antwerp. Barnes wrote
A supplicatyon unto kinge henrye the eyght
in 1531, a vigorous attack on ‘oure spiritualtye’, accusing the clergy of usurping the king’s authority, and forcing a ‘true preacher’ such as himself into exile. His views on the pope coincide with Henry’s over the annulment – ‘can not the pope erre? let hym rede his awne lawe’ – and a copy was sent from Antwerp to Cromwell by Stephen Vaughan.

Henry did not greatly care for its theology – the first ‘comon place’ of faith it listed was the Lutheran insistence that ‘Alonlye faith iustefyeth before god’ – but he was flattered by its praise for the royal prerogatives. Barnes offered to return to England to ‘eyther proue these thygnes by godes worde agenst you al or els I wylk suffer at hys gracis plesure …’. The king had refused a similar offer from Tyndale but he accepted the one from Barnes. Cromwell arranged a safe conduct and Barnes arrived on a visit to London of six to eight weeks at the end of 1531.

More had him followed by spies, intercepted his letters, and interrogated those whom Barnes met. He noted that Barnes was sporting a beard and wore merchant’s clothes; he wrote of meetings that Barnes had ‘in the house of hys secret hostes at the sygne of the botell at Botolfes wharfe’, and said that he visited friends in London who subsidised him while he was abroad. Humphrey Monmouth, Tyndale’s old benefactor, may have been among them; in his will, Monmouth named Dr Barnes as one of those he would like to preach at his funeral, and he left Barnes £10 and a gown. Barnes was allowed to debate with senior clerics. Although
he had licence ‘wythout perell to saye what he wolde’, More gloated of a debate with Stephen Gardiner, Barnes ‘was therin confuted so clerely & so playnly, that all hys evangelycall bretherne of hys hundred sectes, wolde haue ben ashamed to se it’.

More would have sent him to the stake. He wrote that Barnes ‘hath so demeaned hym selfe hys comynge hyther that he hath clerely broken & fofayted hys saufe conductede, and lawfully myght be burned for hys heresyes’. In fact, Barnes had shown his safe conduct to Frith, who reported that it had no conditions, and no time limit other than that Barnes must start his visit to England before Christmas 1531, which he had done; it would thus have been illegal to have burnt him. Frith said that Barnes feared for his life because of More, despite his safe conduct; he therefore kept himself as ‘secreatly’ as he could, and thought it best ‘prively to departe the realme’.

The royal safe conduct prevented More from acting, but his comment on Barnes’s safe departure is chilling. ‘Lette hym go thys ones,’ More wrote, ‘for god shall fynde hys tyme full well.’

Barnes left England early in 1532. Only his reputation remained in England, and this More savaged in the preface to
Confutation
. ‘Of all [the reformers’] bookes that came yet abroade in englysshe … was never none yet so bad, so folysshe, nor so false as hys,’ More wrote, claiming that, on his visit to England, Barnes was ‘in suche wyse fynally confounded wyth shame that he was in a mamerying [hesitation] whyther he wolde retourne agayne over the see, or tary styll here and renounce hys heresyes agayne, and tourne agayn to Crystes catholyke chyrche …’. More lashed him as a grotesque, a renegade and apostate, writing a mocking ‘
Confutation of Friar Barnes’ Church
’, in which he linked the ‘contrarye folies’ of Barnes and Tyndale.

He claimed that Barnes was a Zwinglian, who denied the real presence at the Eucharist, and who had converted Tyndale to the same belief. Barnes was stung enough to write ‘a letter to me of hys
own hand,’ More recorded, ‘wherein he wryteth that I lay that heresye wrongfully to his charge, and … he sayth he wyll in my reproche make a boke agaynst me …’. Barnes did not, in fact, devote a book to refuting More, as Tyndale had. Instead, unlike Tyndale, he turned the sea change that had overcome the fortunes of the reformers to good use. He was soon busy in Germany as a diplomatic agent on behalf of Cromwell. He also began work on a revised edition of his
Supplication
, in his new role as a propagandist for the king.

Barnes was back in England in October 1533 to prepare for a diplomatic mission to Hamburg. He returned to London in the summer of 1534 with an embassy from the Hanseatic cities of Lübeck and Hamburg, lodging with the envoys in the Steelyard. The revised edition of his
Supplication
was published in London in November 1534 bearing the colophon of the printer John Byddell. It was the first work by a foe of More to be openly printed in England and it revealed the increasing confidence of the reformers. Barnes was less strident than he had been in the first edition – ‘masyter Moore … layeth to my charge, that I counted all the spiritualitie to be noughte … I confesse many good men to have shaven crownes and also long gownes’ – and he showed real sympathy for the plight of his now imprisoned adversary.

Though More had used ‘foule and shameless wordes’ against him, Barnes said that ‘truely, as God shall iudge me, I am sory for his trouble, yf I coulde helpe hym with any lawfull meanes, I wolde do my best …’. More was abandoned, alone in the Tower with Fisher and his conscience. ‘Yea, his owne churche is agaynste hym’, Barnes wrote, and it was true, for the ‘Byshoppes, Universities and best learned’ of the realm had submitted to the royal supremacy and showed less compassion for the disgraced lord chancellor than a heretic.

Whether More was aware of Barnes’s noble sentiments towards him, we do not know; it is possible, given the lax regime at the
Tower, that a copy of
Supplication
found its way to him. But it will not have softened More’s attitude to Barnes; on the contrary, it was the way in which the influence of such reformers was swelling that most frightened and enraged him.

When Phillips came calling on Tyndale in May 1535, Barnes was safe in England; he was shortly to be sent to Wittenberg as a royal chaplain on Henry’s behalf to persuade Luther’s fellow worker and successor, Philip Melanchthon, to pay a visit to England. Whoever wished Phillips to seize Barnes as well as Tyndale was playing with the betrayal of a royal diplomat to a foreign power, an act that was classified as treason. We know of only one man who thought that Barnes should be arrested for heresy, regardless of a royal safe conduct, but that in any event ‘god shall fynde hys tyme’. That, of course, was Thomas More.

There appears to be one overriding reason why More cannot have commissioned Phillips. He was locked up in the Tower of London when the betrayal took place, and he had only a few weeks to live.

In April 1535 the priors of the Charterhouses of London, Beauvale in Nottinghamshire and the Isle of Axholme in Lincolnshire, and a Carthusian monk of Sion, who were imprisoned with More in the Tower, were tried for refusing to acknowledge the king as head of the Church. They were sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 4 May 1535. Meanwhile, they were chained up by the leg and neck to posts in their cells and More’s adopted daughter, Margaret Clement, visited them secretly and brought them food.

On 30 April, the day after the trial of the first Carthusians, More was examined in the Tower by Cromwell and several lawyers. When asked whether he would acknowledge the king as the supreme head of the Church, he refused to answer. Fisher was interrogated separately. On 3 June, a fortnight after Tyndale’s betrayal, More was again examined in the Tower by Cromwell,
Cranmer, Audley, Suffolk and Wiltshire. He was told that Henry ordered him to say whether he agreed that the king was the head of the Church.

More answered that the question was a double-edged sword. If he did not believe the king to be the supreme head – and he would not say whether he thought this or not – then, by swearing he believed it, he would perjure his soul, and by refusing to swear it he would imperil his life. He did not think it right that a man should be forced to answer what he believed in under these circumstances. Cromwell replied that More, when chancellor, had forced suspected heretics to answer whether they believed that the pope was the head of the Church, knowing just as More did now that, if they answered yes, they violated their conscience, and if no they would burn. So why should More not be asked? More replied that there was a distinction. When he was examining heretics, every country in Christendom laid down that the pope was head of the Church, whereas the new doctrine that the king was head of the Church was accepted in only one country and rejected by every other in Christendom.

A few days later, the authorities found that More had written letters at the end of May to Fisher, carried by More’s servant. In them, he told Fisher that he was refusing to reply when asked for his opinions on the king’s position in the Church; he suggested that Fisher adopt a different line, so that it would not seem that they were colluding. On 12 June, More was deprived of writing materials, and also of his books. As chancellor, he had ordered that heretics should not be allowed books or pen and paper, so he was hard pressed to complain. He was questioned about the letters on 14 June. He said that he had written only to comfort Fisher, whom he knew to be a fellow prisoner in the Tower.

On 22 May, the pope, hearing that Fisher was in danger of the death sentence, had created him a cardinal. The papal motive was to safeguard Fisher with a public demonstration of support.
Instead, infuriated, Henry declared that he would send Fisher’s head to Rome for the pope to place a cardinal’s hat on it. Three more Carthusians were hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 19 June. On 22 June, Fisher was beheaded on Tower Hill for high treason in denying the royal supremacy.

More was brought to trial on the same charge in Westminster Hall on 1 July before special commissioners sitting with a London jury. The judges were hardly impartial, for Cromwell, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Anne Boleyn’s father and brother, Wiltshire and Rochford, were among the commissioners with the lord chancellor, Audley, presiding. Unlike Fisher and the Carthusians, More denied that he had ever said that the king was not head of the Church, and that silence could never be construed as high treason.

The law required evidence of a ‘malicious’ denial of one of the king’s titles, making this a great legal difficulty for the prosecution. But the solicitor general, Sir Richard Rich, then gave evidence of a conversation that he had had with More on 12 June. Rich had visited More in the Tower that day in another attempt to have him take the Oath of Supremacy, and also apparently to remove More’s books and writing materials. Rich said to More that the king in parliament could enact any law and that all subjects were bound to obey. He asked More whether, if parliament passed an Act requiring everyone to swear allegiance to Rich as king, More would be compelled by law to comply. More admitted that he would be forced to obey such a law, or so Rich alleged, but added that this was a ‘light’ case, and he would put a ‘higher’ case to Rich: if parliament passed an Act that God should no longer be God, would this Act take effect? More claimed that Rich was lying. If so – and he had made a long career as a lackey of the crown – Rich perjured himself enough to ensure that More was found guilty. The jury was out for only fifteen minutes.

More addressed the court before sentence was pronounced. He said that parliament had no power to abolish the papal supremacy
over the Church. Audley interrupted to claim that most learned doctors took the opposite view. More said, in silent reproach to his erstwhile friends, Tunstall and Stokesley, that for every bishop supporting the royal supremacy, there were a hundred learned men throughout Christendom who supported his own position. He added that all the General Councils of the Church for the last thousand years stood firmly against the Act of parliament. ‘Not only have you no authority, without the common consent of Christians all over the world, to make laws and frame statutes, acts of parliament or councils against the said union of Christendom,’ he said, ‘but you and the others sin capitally in doing so.’

It was the brave speech of a courageous man, whose love for the old religion was equal to Tyndale’s rapture with the new. But the tide was against him. For refusing to swear the Act of Succession, legitimising the Boleyn marriage, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. For refusing the Act of Supremacy, Audley sentenced him to be hanged, cut down while still alive, castrated, his entrails cut out and burnt before his eyes, and then beheaded. The king in his graciousness commuted this to beheading.

More was to die on 6 July 1535. The night before his execution, he sent his daughter Meg his hair shirt, so that she could treasure their secret link; and he wrote her a last letter with a piece of coal. ‘I would be sorry if it should be any longer than tomorrow,’ he wrote. ‘For it is St Thomas Even; and therefore I long to go to God; it were a day very mete and convenient for me. I never liked your manner toward me better than when you kissed me last; for I love when daughterly love, and dear charity, hath no leisure to look to worldly courtesy. Farewell, my dear child, and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends, that we may merrily meet in Heaven.’

Meg brought out the tenderness in this strange, tortured and cruel man. She could not bring herself to attend the execution, and it was his adopted daughter Margaret Clement who took the
headless corpse to Meg at the church of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower, where the family had permission to bury it. The head of Sir Thomas More was boiled before being exhibited, to preserve it and add terror to its demeanour, overboiled in fact, so that it turned black. It was put on the pole on London Bridge which Fisher’s head had occupied for the past fortnight. After a few days, Meg Roper bribed a constable of the watch to take it down and give it to her. She hid it and eventually it was placed in the Roper family vault in St Dunstan’s, Canterbury.

News of Tyndale’s arrest would clearly have lightened More’s steps to the block. The drama and courage of his death, and his confinement in the Tower, do not diminish the probability that More commissioned Tyndale’s betrayal. In Scottish law, juries may return a verdict of ‘not proven’. This is very far from ‘not guilty’. The jury recognises that the prosecution has failed to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, but it does not find the accused to be innocent.