The Life of Thomas More (66 page)

HERE was an occasion now when, as the More household sat down to their dinner, a sudden knock at the door roused them. It was a messenger from the king, demanding that More appear forthwith before the royal commissioners. Some of the household wept, knowing the reason for this summons, while others were braver or more restrained. More noted their responses to this unexpected intruder and reproved those who had lamented his likely fate.
¹
It was not a royal summons at all; More had concocted the scene in order to test and prepare those around him for what might be a real ordeal. He had not been able to speak to them (not even to his wife) about his own night fears and daily anxiety; he was so inhibited about revealing the true state of his feelings that he had created a drama in order to convey his meaning.

Where matters of faith and order were concerned, however, he still felt compelled to speak out. Christopher St German had, again under the guise of anonymity, printed an attack upon More’s
Apology
in which he accused the ex-Lord Chancellor of misrepresenting the processes of the law; he also accused More of bad faith and subterfuge. As soon as More read St German’s
Salem and Bizance
he replied, composing his
Debellation of Salem and Bizance
within a few days. He could not keep silent; he had to go on, even if, and perhaps especially because, it was the last moment. St German had blamed the clergy for their treatment of heretics, with the insinuation that the behaviour of the priests had promoted the growth of heresy, and this More refused to admit. St German’s own plans for reform of the church courts would encourage heretics and heresy while at the same time leading to ‘the mynysshement and decaye of the catholyke chrysten fayth’.
²
Here he
writes of ‘decaye’ as if he knew what might be about to happen. His horror at the prospect is revealed in his story of the madman Cliff, who had attacked an image of the Virgin and Child placed upon London Bridge. In his folly he had snapped off the head of the Christ child. Some of those who dwelled in shops and houses upon the bridge surrounded him and asked why he had committed such a blasphemy. According to More, ‘he began to loke well and erenestly vpon them and, lyke a man of sadnesse and grauyte, he asked theym, “Tell me thys amonge you there, Haue you not yet sett on hys hed agayne?”

“No. We cannot.”

“No, by ye masse it is the more shame for you. Why speke you to me of it than?” ’
³

It is a story about the irrevocable nature of blasphemy and heresy, but it is also an indication of the extent to which Christopher St German (and, by implication, the heretics) blamed the clergy and others for their own actions. It had another pertinent message for More himself since he mentioned that in recent times a statue of St Thomas Becket, also upon London Bridge, was defaced and torn down. This was at the instigation of the reformers, who considered Becket to be no saint and martyr but a papal traitor within the realm. There is no doubt that More felt a strong attachment to his saintly namesake, now that his own life in opposition to the king so closely resembled that of the murdered archbishop. Yet his assault upon the legal recommendations of St German is not simply a theoretical and spiritual affair; his rebuttals still display his practical experience of the courts, and, once more, he uses the language of London as a way of refuting the more impersonal objections of his opponent. ‘This is a very colde tale,’ he writes, ‘& as dede as euer was dore nayle.’
⁴

But More must have guessed that it was growing too late for the war of the books, especially since he knew that he was increasingly coming under the surveillance of Thomas Cromwell. St German’s treatise, to which he had taken such violent exception, had been published by the king’s printer. It was becoming dangerous, even in matters of legal argument and theory, to speak out. But he did so for one last time. As soon as he had finished the
Debellation
, he began work upon yet another polemic which celebrated the doctrine of transubstantiation. His new work was entitled
The Answer to a Poisoned Book
, the ‘poisoned
book’ in question being an anonymous tract entitled
The Souper of the Lorde.
He published his
Answer
only five weeks after he had begun its composition. Five months earlier Frith had been burned for heresy, with the direct authority of the king, and More may now have believed himself to be on safer ground in attacking heretics rather than Henry’s legal advisers. Yet this last of his polemical works, this last gasp, is a disquieting and dispirited book. On its opening pages More has a vision of the ‘corrupt cankar’
⁵
of heresy growing all around him, and he advises his good Christian readers thoroughly to exorcise the ‘newe men’ from their company—‘not so mych as byd theym good spede or good morow whan we mete them’.
⁶
It is a treatise aimed not only against those who deny the sacrament but against ‘al this hole wretched world’,
⁷
which even then he might have been wishing to leave.

The
Answer
is written so swiftly and with such passion that the reader can glimpse the very movement of More’s mind. ‘But go to nowe … Let vs now to ye secund than … I saye no not all … to that say I agayne … I haue as you se so well auoyded his gynnys and his grinnes and all his trymtrams.’
⁸
And in that same hasty and forceful cadence it is also possible to glimpse the character of More unfolding upon the page; he is in turn clever and defensive, sharp and disdainful, with a tendency towards malice and towards pride. Within the text he continually invokes images of juggling and of subterfuge, of masked men and games of chance, as if he were truly revealing the treacherous and secretive nature of the time.

Even now, in solemn consistory, the Pope had condemned Henry’s separation from Catherine and had threatened him with the terrible punishment of excommunication if he did not return to his first wife. The anger of the king can be gauged from his treatment of those within the kingdom who supported the papal cause. The households of Catherine and Mary were dissolved and, more significantly for More’s own fate, Elizabeth Barton and her closest associates were arrested and taken to the Tower for interrogation. The nun was brought before the Star Chamber, where she was accused of high treason. Even the threat of excommunication was blamed upon her; the new Lord Chancellor, Thomas Audley, stated that the Pope had been seduced ‘principally by the damnable and diabolical instrumentality of the said nun and her accomplices’.
⁹
The methods by which their statements and confessions
were extracted from them can only be surmised, but on 23 November Elizabeth Barton and seven others were taken from the Tower to Paul’s Cross, where she stood upon a scaffold and confessed that her revelations and visitations had been entirely fraudulent. More was among the crowd which heard her, and at once sent word to the prior of Charterhouse that Elizabeth Barton had at last been proved to be ‘a false deceyvinge ypocrite’.
¹⁰
Did he also know, or guess, that Cromwell’s interrogators had been trying to establish the nun’s complicity with Catherine of Aragon and More himself?

He was now Cromwell’s principal suspect in all matters pertaining to opposition to the king, and an incident of the period demonstrates the terrible insecurity of his position. One month after Elizabeth Barton’s confession, the king’s council distributed throughout the kingdom a book of
Articles
which defended the autonomy of the realm, denounced the excommunication of Henry and condemned the Pope himself as ‘bastard, simoniac and heretic’.
¹¹
Two or three weeks later, Cromwell received news that a reply had been published. At once he sent for More’s printer, William Rastell, and questioned him closely about More’s possible involvement in this disloyal response. He even used the publication of
The Answer to a Poisoned Book
as an indication of More’s hostility to the
Articles
, until Rastell was able to prove that that polemic had been published before the
Articles
themselves had been promulgated. Yet Rastell was so alarmed that he asked More to write to Cromwell exonerating them both. More’s letter is a masterpiece of dis-ingenuousness; he signed himself ‘Assuredly all your owne’,
¹²
but he gave nothing away. He denied having written any hostile pamphlet, and, as for the
Articles
, ‘of many thinges which in that boke be touched, in some I knowe not the lawe, and in some I knowe not the fact. And therefore would I neuer be so childish nor so plaie the proud arrogant fole … as to presume to make an aunswere to the boke.’
¹³
He also stated that ‘I know my bounden duety, to bere more honour to my prince, and more reuerence to his honorable Counsaile’ than to deem himself worthy to reply to any book issued by them. Of course he did not mention that he had replied to the works of Christopher St German, issued by the king’s printer. And his response may not necessarily have convinced Cromwell. In the month in which he had interviewed Rastell
he had drawn up a memorandum—‘To cause indictments to be drawn up for the offenders in treason & misprision concerning the nun of Canterbury’, to which is added ‘Eftsoons to remember Master More to the king’.
¹⁴

Parliament was reconvened on Thursday, 15 January 1534, and at first concerned itself with specific or local legislation such as the paving of Holborn and the punishment for sodomy. But by the second week of February the king’s more pressing concerns came before the two Houses. A dowry bill confirmed Catherine of Aragon’s new and unhappy status, while the second Act of Annates emphasised the fact that the king and not the Pope elected the bishops of the realm. A few days later Elizabeth Barton, now the ‘Ippocrite Nunne’ rather than the holy maid, was indicted by an Act of Attainder which confirmed her treason; at the preliminary inquiry into her activities there had been cries of ‘To the stake! To the stake!’, which was the direction in which she now would surely go. But the drift of Cromwell’s policies became clear when a bill was drawn up that included the names of More and Fisher among her accomplices. More’s name had been included in the bill ‘concerning the Attainder of Elizabeth Barton and others’ at the last minute, apparently at the insistence of the king, and he was accused of ‘misprision of treason’ or concealment of treason on the grounds that he knew about Elizabeth Barton’s dealings with the Marquess of Exeter. More was informed at once, by Fisher himself, and wrote to Cromwell asking for a copy of that bill, ‘which sene, if I finde any vntrue surmise therein as of likelihode there is’
¹⁵
he begged leave to bring his suit to the king. But there is no doubt that the king and Cromwell were now using Elizabeth Barton to bring down their principal opponents; Cromwell informed William Roper, still a member of the Commons, that More had not only ‘had communicacion’ with the nun but had also ‘gyven her aduice and cowncell’.
¹⁶