The Life of Thomas More (51 page)

There are two preliminary sketches for the completed work. In one of
them More’s visage is as composed and reserved as that of the portrait, but the second drawing is altogether freer and looser: he has a gentler and more benign countenance, with a slightly mournful but open gaze. There is nothing so wistful or fugitive in the painting itself. More sits in front of the half-drawn curtain, attired as a man of power, but his expression is almost unfathomable. Some have found within it traces of anxiety and sensitivity, as if he might already see his own fate unfolding before him, but others have recognised the essential cheerfulness and conviviality of the man. Some find evidence of imperiousness in the portrait, while others have discovered irony and ingenuity. He might be sad, or simply grave; or, as others have suggested, he might be about to laugh. There may be a hint of that stubbornness and severity which his religious opponents ascribed to him, but this may instead be an indication of that clever sharpness which emerged in his ironic asides. There may also be caution, and frugality, and self-distrust.

Holbein has fashioned a great portrait precisely because of these unanswered and unanswerable questions. His is a study in ambiguity and detachment, with the inscrutability of More’s expression as a direct representation of his reticence and impenetrability. Holbein did not know that under the gold chain and velvet doublet More wore a hair shirt which chafed and broke his skin. But once it has been imagined there, the true value of the painting emerges. This is the portrait of a private self dressed as a public image, with the contrast between a secret inner life and rhetorical public role creating this enigmatic and inscrutable figure.

If More played no ostensible part in the matter of the king’s disputed marriage during this period, he was a necessary and visible agent of Wolsey’s diplomacy. The pre-eminence of Charles V had once again forced England into an uneasy embrace with France, and in the early months of 1527 More was one of the central figures in the negotiations for a new treaty. These proved successful, and he was also one of those who signed the document at the end of April. The French envoys were then invited to a tournament, followed by a great banquet and disguising at Greenwich Palace. On that same day of pomp and ceremony, 6 May, imperialist troops entered Rome and wreaked such havoc within the city that the details were not forgotten for a hundred years. Old men were disembowelled and young men castrated, women raped
and tortured, children tossed onto the points of swords before being butchered. The corpse of Pope Julius II was dragged from its ornate tomb and paraded through the streets. The living pope fled to the castle of St Angelo, where he remained a prisoner. It would be tempting to dwell upon the extraordinary disparity between the magnificence of Greenwich and the massacre of Rome, but these occasions are related in much more complicated and ambiguous ways. The English king wanted the Pope to grant him an annulment of his marriage; the Pope was imprisoned by the emperor, Charles V; Francis I and Henry VIII had formed an alliance against the emperor. All the fragments of polity were in the air at the same time and Wolsey was supposed to conjure them into a shape pleasing to his master.

That is why he also needed More’s assistance and counsel. It had been decided that the cardinal, with a great retinue that included More, should travel to France where he would solemnly ratify the treaty with the French king himself. Wolsey rode on a mule out of London, crossing London Bridge at the head of a large concourse before making a stately progress to Canterbury. It was an extraordinarily wet summer, and we may see them proceeding slowly through the rain. He stayed in the town for three days, celebrating Mass for various occasions—the vigil of St Thomas on 6 July and the feast day of the Translation on the seventh—always kneeling on a bench ‘covered with carpets and cushions’.
⁸
In the second week of July they crossed over to Calais. There then ensued the whole panoply of the diplomatic process, which in its essentials was derived from an earlier chivalric age. There were the solemn entries into each town where they were welcomed by persons of ‘rank and distinction’.
⁹
There were the set speeches and the formal presentation of credentials, public processions and ceremonial audiences, all of which were accompanied by Masses as well as more secular festivities. It was not until the beginning of August, therefore, that Wolsey arrived in Amiens, where he was greeted by the French king. Francis also greeted More and, later, Wolsey and More made a ceremonial visit to the queen mother. Two weeks after their arrival the treaty of peace was finally solemnised in the cathedral. (In that church More saw the supposed head of John the Baptist in a crystal case; he did not seem to doubt the authenticity of the relic and noted only the absence of its ‘nether iowe’
¹⁰
or lower jaw.) The English envoys remained in Amiens
until the end of the month, and then began their slow journey home. More himself did not return to England until late September.

Then Henry approached him. More had repaired to Hampton Court, where the king was staying, at which time ‘sodaynly his Highnes walkying in the galery, brake with me of his great mater’;
¹¹
he declared that his marriage to Catherine had been contrary to the laws of the Church, of God and of nature itself. The king ‘layed the Bible open byfore me, and ther red me the wordis that moved his Highnes and diverse other erudite persons so to thinke, and asked me ferther what my selfe thowght theron’.
¹²
The ‘wordis’, in translation, are these: ‘Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife: it is thy brother’s nakedness’
¹³
and ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing … they shall be childless’.
¹⁴
This was the first occasion upon which the matter was directly broached to More. Although he distrusted his ‘pore mynd’, ‘I shewed never the lesse as my dewtie was at his commaundment what thing I thowght vppon the wordis which I there red’.
¹⁵
His answer could not have been wholly satisfactory, since the king ordered him to ‘commune ferther’ with certain royal advisors and to read a ‘booke’ on the need for an annulment, which was even then being compiled.

So at the king’s instigation More had become publicly, if indirectly, concerned with the ‘great matter’ which was to dominate policy for the next five years. It involved issues of substance and of interpretation, of theological argument and diplomatic manoeuvre; it concerned precedents and statutes and bulls. Had Catherine’s brief marriage to Arthur, the older brother of Henry, been consummated? Was there an ‘impediment’ of ‘public honesty’ which could set aside her union with the king? Was their child, Mary, therefore illegitimate? Was it a question of divine law that could not be altered, or of ‘positive law’ that might be modified? These were grave questions indeed, and More could not have been unaware that there was also the risk of king contending against pope. He said later that ‘I neuer medled’ in the affair, since ‘the mater was in hand by an ordynary processe of the spirituall law, whereof I could litle skyll’.
¹⁶
But even if he never directly intervened in the legal process, he may have offered informal suggestions and advice. In this context it is also significant that in the autumn of 1527, and again in the following
year, More’s friend Juan Luis Vives returned to England in order to support and counsel the queen.

The scene is worthy of Moliere or perhaps of Marlowe. Henry seems genuinely to have convinced himself that he had incurred divine displeasure by marrying his dead brother’s wife and that as a result he had merited the biblical punishment of conceiving no male issue from the forbidden union. Yet at the same time he was pursuing Anne Boleyn with gifts and letters. It would not take a cynic to suggest that his desire for an annulment was prompted by sexual as well as religious reasons. But this was the point that could never be made in public. Those around Henry, including More, were compelled to enter an unacknowledged pact of silence about his motives. Catherine’s whole life was being betrayed, too, but nothing could be said of that matter. The atmosphere of court had become difficult as well as delicate and those, like More, who supported Catherine of Aragon had to tread cautiously. One of the games being played was that of waiting, since they hoped that the king’s attraction to Anne was nothing more than infatuation. There was, however, one further problem. There is some evidence to suggest that Anne, who had grown up in the society and culture of French humanists, already espoused what could be called a ‘reformist’ attitude towards church matters based upon an intense reverence for the New Testament. She was by no means a Lutheran, and was indeed much closer to Erasmus; but, in the climate of the time, her position was significant.

It is likely to have been in this period that Henry made his famous visit to More’s house in Chelsea, where he walked in the gardens with his arm around his counsellor’s neck. The king’s affection may or may not have been genuine on that occasion, but More probably shuddered at the touch; scrupulous and reticent as he was, he would have wished to keep his distance in order to preserve his integrity. He also had doubts of a more general kind, doubts which he expressed while walking along the riverside at Chelsea with William Roper.

‘Now would to our Lord, son Roper, upon condition that three things were well established in Christendom, I were put in a sack and here presently cast into the Thames.’

‘What great things be those, sir, that should move you so to wish?’

‘In faith, son, they be these. The first is, that where the most part of Christian princes be at mortal wars, they were all at an universal peace. The second, that where the Church of Christ is at this present sore afflicted with many errors and heresies, it were well settled in a perfect uniformity of religion. The third, that where the King’s matter of his marriage is now come in question, it were to the glory of God and quietness of all parts brought to a good conclusion.’
¹⁷

Warfare, heresy and the annulment, then, were the three concerns which moved together in More’s mind. Although it would be too much to claim that he foresaw the Reformation and its consequences he had at least noticed a dangerous tendency in English policy which it was his duty to avert. At a slightly later date Wolsey himself was to speak of ‘infinite and imminent perils’,
¹⁸
but More had already glimpsed them. That is why his conduct over the next two years, before he was appointed Lord Chancellor, must be seen steadily and as a whole. The king had asked More to engage in further study of his ‘great matter’. The central question concerned the extent of papal power and, in particular, of the ability of the Pope to waive the injunction of Leviticus. One of Henry’s arguments consisted of the claim that divine law had made his marriage abhorrent to God and that no pope had the authority to abrogate that law. The Pope had, in any case, granted annulments in the past; Henry’s request was not unwarrantable and there was no reason to believe that it would be denied. Papal authority was not yet at the centre of the controversy, although in the end it did become the principal issue. In a letter to Thomas Cromwell, some years later, More claimed that ‘by this continuaunce of these x yere synnys’
¹⁹
he had been considering the question of ‘the prymatie of the Pope’.

He had addressed the problem in
Responsio ad Lutherum
, but only in a partial fashion; he was already well acquainted with the behaviour of bad or weak popes and may at one stage have inclined towards a ‘constitutional’ or ‘pluralist’ view of church authority, with the Pope himself as
primus inter pares.
But eventually papal supremacy became for More a question of faith. It was not for him, therefore, a minor or peripheral matter. He read the New Testament, as well as the writings of such holy doctors of the Church as Jerome, Cyprian and Gregory; he also examined the records of the general councils. The conclusions he then reached after his study were those which he soon applied to all
other matters of religious conscience. Papal primacy had been instituted or established ‘by the corps of Christendom’;
²⁰
it was manifest through ‘the general counsell of the whole body of Christendome’ or the ‘whole catholike church lawfully gathered together in a generall counsell’,
²¹
which was itself governed by ‘the spirit of God’. Here is the creed of a man who was guided all his life by the powers of institutions and hierarchies. He was also, as a late medieval lawyer, an exponent of customary as well as statutory law; that is why he believed in the power of the inherited traditions and beliefs of the Church. On the matter of papal primacy, in particular, it had been ‘corroborate by continuall succession more than the space of a thowsand yere at the leist’.
²²
In that sense it did not matter ‘whither the prymacie were instituted immediately by God or ordeyned by the Church’;
²³
it had become a matter of consensus and authoritative tradition.

But More knew well enough the limitations of any theory. In the great debate between king and pope, for example, two forms of authority were placed in confrontation without any certain result. The Pope prevaricated, owing to the unfortunate international situation which had left him a virtual prisoner of Catherine’s nephew, and there were weary months of messages and meetings. In the summer of 1528 Cardinal Campeggio had been dispatched from Rome, in order to establish a legatine court in London which would decide the matter of the king’s annulment. But he did not arrive in England until the autumn, so slow was his progress, and there followed a further eight months of negotiations. The career of Wolsey seemed linked to the result of the case, however, and a ‘memorandum’ was drawn up for the king’s attention by a noble courtier, Thomas Darcy, which declared ‘that never legate nor cardinal be in England’ and ‘that it be tried whether the putting down of all the abbeys be lawful and good or no’.
²⁴
Although not directly involved in these events, Thomas More remained alert to every movement and decision—the attempt to drive Catherine into a nunnery, the appointment of various scholars and lawyers to defend her in the legatine court, the sudden disappearance and appearance of significant documents, the warnings of Wolsey to the Pope that the Church in England would be destroyed, the pious if self-serving public declarations of Henry, the veiled threats to accuse Catherine of sedition, the rumours of the Pope’s death which then proved to be unfounded. The
fury and impatience of the king were everywhere apparent, dominating all aspects of English policy.