The Life of Thomas More (53 page)

In the following year Wolsey and Tunstall took more deliberate action when a Cambridge scholar, Thomas Bilney, was brought for trial on the grounds of preaching heresy in London and elsewhere; he abjured and bore the faggot, but remained in prison for eleven months. More had interrogated a confederate of Thomas Bilney’s and had also attended the trial. He gives such circumstantial detail of the case that it is clear he was already engaged in what would now be called surveillance and entrapment among the leather-sellers, tailors, fishmongers and drapers of London. He envisaged small groups of people, perhaps three or four at each clandestine meeting, gathering at midnight in locked rooms, a ‘nyght scole’
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of evil and sedition. One of their number would read aloud from the Scriptures, or from texts smuggled into the city. Sometimes whole families worshipped together, but more often city merchants and apprentices would meet together in a ‘conventicle’ organised by a disaffected priest or scholar. We read, for example, of Thomas Geffrey, tailor; of John Medwall, a scrivener’s servant; of Matthew Ward, a merchant adventurer; and of Robert Ward, a shoemaker by Fleet Street; all of whom were arrested and forced to recant their heretical beliefs. John Foxe, in his
Actes and Monuments
, mentions approximately thirty Londoners who abjured and suffered public penance, but there were others. These small assemblies may be compared to the banned radical groups in late eighteenth-century London, as well as to the puritan millenarians of the 1640s, and capture the inherent spirit of civic revolt.

Within three months of Bilney’s trial, a concerted assault upon presumed heretics was conducted by More and his ecclesiastical colleagues.
More wrote to the Oxford authorities, for example, and demanded that one ‘Henry the mancypull of Whyte Hall’ be put under close arrest and brought to him in London; he insisted at the same time that they ‘handle the matter so closelye that ther be of hys apprehension and sendyng vpp as lytyll knowleg abrode as may bee’.
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Such secrecy was necessary so that More could question the man without alerting any other Oxford ‘heretics’, who might fly or conceal their books. On the order of the council, More also personally searched the house of one of Tyndale’s patrons, Humphrey Monmouth, who later confessed that ‘al the lettres and treatyes that he sent me … I did burne them in my howse’.
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In the same period an Oxford scholar, Thomas Garrett, was arrested and questioned; as a result of these interrogations, the rooms of certain other scholars were searched and a hundred banned books were discovered. Six students were then summarily imprisoned for some months in the fish cellar of Cardinal College, where it is reported that three of them died. In London and Colchester, too, there was renewed activity among the hunters of heresy; Lollards, as well as members of a clandestine group of reformers known as the Christian Brethren, who disseminated Tyndale’s New Testament, were arrested and forced to abjure.

But it would be wrong to suggest that there was some generally violent wave of reprisal or repression; those proved heretical were compelled to bear the faggot, or were placed in the stocks, but there were no burnings. The authorities were intent upon removing possible sources of heresy and were not engaged in stifling a popular movement. No such movement existed. The conditions of the time, in any case, were not propitious. In 1528, one of the ‘dere yeres’ when the corn was scarce and the bread dear, More was part of a commission appointed to search for grain supplies in barns or outhouses; he himself disclosed that he was feeding one hundred people each day at his house and farm in Chelsea.
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During that summer there were also virulent outbreaks of the plague and the sweating sickness; the courts at Westminster were suspended and the king fled. The whole time seemed out of joint, and it is significant that More should believe the ‘lakke of corne and catayle’ to be a ‘sore punishement’ from God ‘for the receypte of these pestylent bokes’ of heresy.
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Yet still those books were smuggled into England. Jerome Barlowe’s
The Burying of the Mass
was a verse attack upon ‘the papysticall secte’,
but it was followed by two more substantial and significant works. Tyndale’s
Parable of the Wicked Mammon
was succeeded by
The Obedience of a Christian Man.
In these treatises Tyndale expounded Lutheran doctrines, in particular the belief in justification through faith alone and the opinion that a temporal prince should also exercise ecclesiastical power. It is not surprising, therefore, that in this year More was asked to launch a fierce reply to what he called these ‘folysh frantyke bokes’. Cuthbert Tunstall’s licence, for the reading of heresy, was the merest formality; the two men were close friends and it is likely that More suggested a counter-offensive in the vernacular in order to warn and advise
‘simplicibus et ideotis hominibus’
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(which can roughly be translated as ‘the man in the street’) on the perils of alien creeds. If Lutheranism could be denounced as a foreign doctrine, then the patriotic citizens might immediately disown it. More was already busily employed at Westminster and at court, but the rebuttal of heresy was seen by him as a paramount duty; he mentioned once the need of a man to ‘wryte by candellyght whyle he were halfe a slepe’.
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The danger was too great for delay.

He called them by many names—these ‘new men’, ‘new named bretherne’, ‘evangelycall fraternyte’, ‘new false sect’ of ‘our evangelycall Englysshe heretykes’. He linked them to the plague and to the abhorrent violence of the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany, as well as to the sack of Rome. Heresy was a poison, an infection, a contagion attacking the body of Christendom. They scorned the sacraments of the Church and derided the notion of purgatory; they encouraged sexual licence and were intent upon bringing ‘all out of order’.
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They denied the eucharist and reviled the Mass. They believed that the Church of Christ was fundamentally corrupted and should be swept away. More knew that all the certainties of inherited belief and the prevailing social order would thereby be destroyed; it would be tantamount to the collapse of the entire structure of the world. This was the Antichrist, and very soon More was talking about ‘the daye of Iudgement’ and ‘dredefull dome’.
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More’s first defence of the Church,
A Dialogue Concerning Heresies
, was written in this year of dearth and sickness; it was a topical book in every sense, filled with local detail and circumstance. The narrative opens with the description of a scholar from one of the universities questioning More on matters of faith. He has read Tyndale and knows
about the preaching of Bilney; he is a thoroughly modern young man who is ‘nothynge tonge tayed’
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and is veering towards the doctrines of Martin Luther. At a little before seven in the morning, More takes him into ‘my study’
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at Chelsea and begins a dialogue which ultimately convinces the young man to remain within ‘the comen fayth and byleue of the hole chyrche’.
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It is a conversation, almost a drama, but it does not share the irony or the ambiguity of
Utopia.
More adopts the role of a polemicist and propagandist, rather than that of a scholar concerned with good letters and the new learning; as a result the main interest for the contemporary reader lies in its language rather than in its argument. It was the first book which More had published in the vernacular, and it displays the living speech of the period leaping ‘lyke a flounder out of a fryenge panne in to the fyre’.
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Running through the stories of juggling and baking bread, songs ‘of Robyn hode’ and ballads of love, are phrases that bring the people closer to us: ‘the lytle apple of myne eye … as bare as a byrdys ars … that can perceyue chalke fro chese well ynough … to proue the mone made of grene chese … one swalow maketh not somer’.
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But if some of the phrases and stories are immediately recognisable, others are mysterious. Who will now, for example, ‘tourne a plum into a doggys torde in a boyes mouthe’?
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And was it ‘alway that the cat wynked whan her eye was out’?
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There is mention of a church where there were models in wax of male and female genitalia hanging upon the walls, while near the altar were ‘two rounde rynges of syluer, the one moche larger than the other. Thrughe whiche euery man dyd put his preuy membres at the aulters ende. Not euery man thrughe bothe but some thrughe the one and some thrughe the other. For they were not bothe of a bygnes.’
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The church was in Flanders, but it might as well have been in London. There were always wonders to be seen there, and More recounts how some handkerchiefs woven by the Virgin Mary had been found concealed in a tabernacle at Barking Abbey. The thieves of London prayed to the robber who had hung on the right side of Christ; they called upon ‘Dysmas’ to help them in their crimes. The
Dialogue
reveals a world of miracles and pilgrimages, of painted images and wonderful relics, of a true Church commanding all. More celebrates, in a double sense, what was essentially and primarily an oral culture. He employs it in the dialogue itself, but he also uses it to defend
the traditions of the Church; they have been transmitted by word of mouth, ‘by onely wordes and prechynge … by mouth amonge the people’.
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That is why More considered it dangerous to rely upon the written Scriptures, but it is also why he employed the form of dialogue. There is a public truth which can be debated, rather than some private and individual truth to be found in secret musing.

It is perhaps too late now to sift through the dust of forgotten controversies, but it will be instructive to describe More’s conclusions. The Catholic Church was a visible church, with its own hierarchy and known places of worship, rather than a fleeting sect of believers; it was a Church with a proven tradition of faith reaching back for fifteen hundred years, which was transmitted in both oral and scriptural form. It possessed the authority of the apostles and the church fathers and had been guided by the Holy Spirit since the resurrection of Christ. It was a historical faith, established upon a consensus of the faithful. Its teachings were manifested in papal or conciliar decrees, whereby general opinion and traditional belief were given dogmatic force ‘and so comen downe to our dayes by contynuall successyon’.
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Its divine origin was proved by miracles and reinforced by pilgrimages. It was the mystical body of Christ, comprising the living and the dead. For More it was the vehicle of God’s purpose and the paradigm for all earthly law and authority. But if it was the model of unity and continuity, it now found itself in a world which seemed to be breaking down. There had been heresies and heretics before who ‘lefte the common fayth of ye catholyke chyrche preferrynge theyr owne gay gloses’,
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but the situation of Christendom had never been more perilous. The Turks had moved as far west as Hungary and might one day threaten Rome itself, while the heretics of Germany and Switzerland were intent upon a more insidious destruction of the established order. It is no wonder that present events seemed to More to be an anticipation of ‘domesday’.

The whole theme and purpose of his
Dialogue Concerning Heresies
had been to celebrate that common culture which was under threat; by employing the stories and proverbs that were in the air around him and by drawing upon the resources of the medieval tradition of caricature and speech he was implicitly appealing to his audience to consider what would be lost if Christendom fell into schism. A religion and a way of life might disappear. More’s prose is highly significant in that respect.

As a Latinist he has a tendency to break up the periods of Cicero with the expletives of Terence, thus creating a colloquial and on occasions harsh style; as a writer of English he presses that advantage home, and reflects what he once called the ‘comen custume and usage of speche’.
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On the bad reputation of priests, for example, he writes that ‘If they be famylyer we call theym lyght. If they be solytary we call theym fantastyke. If they be sadde we call theym solempne. If they be mery we call theym madde … they say that yf a woman be fayre than is she yonge and yf a preste be good than he is olde.’
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There are many examples of this quick demotic throughout More’s writing, but his is not simply an ear which caught the inflections of the London streets. He is also part of a tradition of devotional and homiletic literature which has been traced back to the religious treatises of the eleventh century and even, indeed, to Aelfric and the supposed writings of Arthur. His use of balanced and alliterative sentences is a clear token of his medieval affinities—‘hys open lyuyng in lechery wyth his lewd lemman the nunne’
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is one such example—but the vigour of his writing owes some debt to the long history of the London sermon. It should be recalled that More’s vernacular works were, in large part, intended for an illiterate audience and were therefore to be read aloud.

But it would be wrong to suggest that his was a simple colloquial or dramatic style. He resorts both to brevity and to amplification; he mixes ornate diction with plain speech. He seems to wander through examples, but in the midst of simile or metaphor he always sustains the momentum of his argument. He puts on voices—imitating the speech of a Kentish man, a Yorkshire man, or a German—and then reverts to his own. He was devoted to the traditional order but, in linguistic terms, he is a great innovator. Some of the words and phrases he introduced into written English include ‘fact’, ‘taunt’, ‘shuffle’, ‘anticipate’, ‘paradox’, ‘pretext’, ‘obstruction’, ‘monosyllable’, ‘meeting’, ‘not to see the wood for the trees’, and ‘to make the best of something’.

He wrote very quickly and neatly, marking the page with careful underlinings and revisions. The absence of large-scale emendations suggests that he knew what he wished to say and revised only in order to add clarity or emphasis to his points; he changed sentences, but rarely altered arguments or long sections of prose. Indeed, he wrote in large structural units, which could be moved to different parts of the narrative.
The common method of erasing words was to ‘scrape theym out’ with a small knife,
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but More deleted them with a delicate cross-hatching of lines. In similar fashion he creates his own persona in the dialogue; he had to remain calm, confident, and meticulous, in the rebuttal of false doctrine. That is also why he carefully proofread the first edition of
Dialogue Concerning Heresies;
it was printed by his brother-in-law John Rastell, ‘at the sygne of the meremayd at Powlys gate next to chepesyde’.
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Because he had already asked for the ‘examynacyon and iudgment’ of men such as Tunstall and Fisher and had as a consequence already ‘put out or chaunged’
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certain things, his additions at this later stage were not large. A second edition was printed two years later by his nephew William Rastell, who had established his business by St Bride’s churchyard, and for this More added passages emphasising the danger of heretical books; the titlepage states that it had been ‘newly ouersene’ by him. One sentiment remains unaltered, however. There can be no ‘couenant’ with the heretics, and at the last they must be ‘punyshed by deth in ye fyre’.
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