The Life of Thomas More (72 page)

Now he began his last work.
De Tristitia Christi
is, as its title infers, a disciplined meditation upon the ‘sadness’ of Christ; it is a commentary upon certain verses of the New Testament concerned with the agony in
the garden, the slumber of the disciples and the arrest of Jesus after his betrayal by Judas. Its last words—‘and they laid their hands upon Jesus’—might serve as an introduction to More’s own imprisonment and likely death, but the treatise has a more general spiritual import. It was composed in Latin, so at the close of his life More was reverting to the larger community of the faithful; it is in turn ironic and passionate, filled with intensely dramatic moments upon which he elaborates in a style at once analytical and celebratory. His well-known fears of schism and heresy are included even in his exposition of Christ’s suffering, and the slumber of the disciples is associated with the silence or inaction of the English bishops in the face of the destruction of their Church. In certain passages More compares the suffering of Christ’s physical body with the destruction of His mystical body within the communion of the faithful. Yet the weariness and sorrow which More depicts here are also his own. He writes
‘qui nihil sum’
(‘I who am nothing’)
⁷⁵
and locates the tendency of the book in a phrase which means simply that life is a sad thing when compared to death.
⁷⁶

The pages of
De Tristitia
were smuggled out of his prison cell, probably in small batches, and they have become known as the Valencia Manuscript. From the evidence of this extant manuscript it is clear that he was not at all sure whether he would have the time or opportunity to complete it; sometimes he looked over a few pages at a later date but generally he revised as he went along, fashioning sentences and periods with the instinctive skill of a rhetorician. There are phases of Christ’s suffering which touched him deeply, however, and in these passages there are manifold signs of hesitancy, revision and deletion. In his allusions to martyrdom, to the physical and mental pain attendant upon death, to the states of uneasy slumber and wakefulness which spring from anxious fear, More can be said to approach the very moments of his own death with terror and trembling. He seems weary and somewhat distracted when he deletes four lines at the beginning of the sixty-second sheet (there are 155 altogether, with approximately fifteen lines upon each) and revises a sentence that contains an entire litany of suffering,
‘tristiciam timorem tedium et dirae mortis horrorem’.
⁷⁷
The last phrase can be translated as the horror of a terrible death. In his prison cell More shares the agony of Christ at Gethsemane. At one point in giving the example of Jesus as the paradigm of all martyrs,
⁷⁸
More
started to write that
‘we’
will learn from him but then altered it to
‘they’.
The association, however, was clear enough. Yet then he regains his fluency and, when describing the divine consolation which is offered to those approaching a violent death, his writing becomes firmer and bolder.

At the end of the Valencia Manuscript several sheets have been included which reveal that More was noting down short biblical extracts for his own comfort. The edges of these papers have been worn away, and it has been suggested that he kept this small compilation in his pocket when his books were eventually taken from him. And what are the central themes to be found here? He admonishes himself to forgive his enemies and to endure his suffering patiently, as Jesus did; he tells himself that he need not be afraid and that he must not save his own life unworthily. If he remains confident all temptations can be endured and, as he had often told his family, ‘a man maye in suche case leese his heade and haue no harme’.
⁷⁹
He also wrote a small treatise on the blessed body of Christ, so that by ‘deuout meditacion’ he might talk with him, as well as certain short prayers of supplication. He prostrated himself in his cell, meditating on the bloody sweat of Christ, hoping that ‘I will heare what our lord will speake within me’.
⁸⁰

Perhaps the Lord spoke to him of a time, soon to come, when there would be no more lights and images, no more pilgrimages and processions, no guild plays and no ringing for the dead, no maypoles or Masses or holy water, no birch at midsummer and no roses at Corpus Christi. Yet More might already have anticipated that the ‘reformation’ of the last three years would lead ineluctably to the ransacking of the monasteries, the destruction of libraries, the pillage of those ornaments, vestments and jewelled relics which were part of the glory of medieval England. From the church of St Lawrence Jewry, where More had once worshipped and lectured, we read of the despoilation of ‘an awter of wode with Carued images’; we learn of books and bells and silver plate, of vestments of ‘old white silk embroidered with gold’
⁸¹
as well as capes of blue velvet and cloth of gold, of basins and stone altars and marble, all demolished or taken away. From the church of St Stephen Walbrook, where More had worshipped for many years, the communion cups, burial cloths and chalices were removed; the plate was sold to a goldsmith and the vestments purchased by sundry others.
⁸²
In the other
London churches which More had known all his life the stained-glass windows were destroyed and the painted walls defaced, all their gilded interiors whitewashed. At the same time, shrines were torn down and tombs removed. With the extinguishing of candles, came the end of such rituals as beating the bounds and the feast of the ‘Boy Bishop’. This reformation did not occur quickly; it was a slow and difficult process, reversed and then advanced, working through three reigns against the natural piety and traditionalism of the people. Forty years after the death of More, it was complete.

CHAPTER XXXI
PECK OF TROUBLES

HE defenders of the old faith were fast fading. John Fisher was ill and weary in his prison cell; he was so wasted and worn that there were times when he looked as if he were already dead. But the king sent doctors, to restore him to the health he needed for his trial and execution. In the spring of this year, 1535, three Carthusian priors were cast into prison and interrogated by Thomas Cromwell. One of those questioned was John Haughton, prior of the London Charterhouse where More had once worshipped and prayed. It had been his spiritual foundation in every sense, and the eventual fate of the monks was intimately related to his own. They were asked if they would accept their king as supreme head of the Church of England; they refused to swear such an oath and one of them, Richard Reynolds of Syon, added that ‘he doth this as thousand thousand that be dead’.
¹
Two weeks later they were committed to trial on the charge of high treason, which they strenuously denied. Richard Reynolds, on being questioned by Audley, declared that ‘I am sure the larger part is secretly of our opinion, although outwardly, partly from fear and partly from hope, they profess to be of yours’.
²
The three priors were then condemned to be taken to Tyburn.

Two days after their trial in Westminster Hall, Edmund Walsingham came to More’s cell and told him that Cromwell wished to speak with him. More put on his gown and walked out upon the stone gallery that connected the chambers of the Tower; he entered a room where Cromwell sat with four others. He was also invited to sit down, but he refused to do so. He was asked if he had read the new statutes, recently promulgated by the parliament; More replied that he had seen ‘the boke’ but had returned it shortly afterward. He had not studied it, or
put it ‘in remembraunce’.
³
He was then asked if he had at least read that particular statute confirming Henry as ‘Supreme Hed’ of the Church. ‘Yes,’ was all he said. Then he was told that the king now did ‘demaund myne oppinion’
⁴
on that matter. He replied in his familiar fashion—he had in the past declared his mind to Henry himself but, having reserved his life for prayer alone, he now refused ‘to medell’ in such matters.

Cromwell then tried to kill More with kindness, professing the benevolent intentions of a king who would be willing to show mercy and allow his old servant to be ‘abrode in the worlde agayne among other men as I haue bene before’.
⁵
But More no longer wished to exist in that world. ‘My hole study,’ he told the commissioners, ‘shal be vppon the passyon of Chryst.’ At this point he was sent out of the room and waited while they deliberated upon his perplexing and difficult case. For many prisoners the times of interrogation must have been marked by intense distress and anxiety, all the more discomfiting in these old chambers of stone, but it may be assumed that More tried to possess his soul in quiet.

He was called back and was immediately asked if he should not be as subject to parliamentary statutes as any other man. He replied, characteristically, ‘I will not say the contrary.’
⁶
Then Cromwell touched one of the primary reasons for More’s imprisonment, ‘that my demeanour in that matter was of a thyng that of likelyhode made now other men so styffe therin as they be’. More knew what ‘other men’ he meant. The three Carthusian priors had been interrogated and had also refused to swear to the supremacy, giving reasons similar to those which More himself had employed. They were about to be killed for their obstinacy, and Cromwell was implying that More might be held partly responsible for their cruel and lingering deaths. This proved too much for him and he expressed his indignation in some of the most forceful terms he had ever used in the Tower.

Thomas More
: I do nobody harme, I say none harme, I thynke none harme, but wysh euerye bodye good. And yf thys be not ynough to kepe a man alyue, in good fayth I long not to lyue. And I am dying alredy, and haue syns I came here, bene dyuers tymes in the case that I thought to dye within one houre, and I thank our Lorde I was neuer sory for yt, but rather sory whan I saw the pang
past. And therfore my pore body ys at the Kyngis plesure, wolde God my deth myght do hym good.