The Reformation was an idea, not an event. Ideas mature slowly. So it is impossible to ascribe its origin to any one date. But the time and place at which the challenge to the Church of Rome gained irresistible momentum can be identified. On October 31st 1517, Martin Luther nailed a copy of his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the castle church in the German city of Wittenberg, and what came to be called Protestantism – already a force in northern Europe – had a hero and a text around which its sympathisers could rally. The Theses were best known, and became most resented by the Church, because of their attack on the sale of indulgences. But they amounted to a comprehensive assault on Roman Catholic theology as well as on the conduct of the Roman Church. The two complaints were indivisible. The sale of indulgences – the exploitation of simple laymen by a corrupt priesthood – could not be separated from the belief that tormented souls languished in purgatory until enough of their friends and relations had bought their redemption. The idea that one man’s redemption was dependent on another’s generosity was too absurd to escape Luther’s excoriation. And he examined the whole body of Catholic doctrine with the same calm logic and in the same explosive language. The Ninety-Five Theses challenged the whole dogma, authority and conduct of the Roman Catholic Church. It was the arguments they raised, not disagreement over the validity of a marriage, which sustained the long years of the English Reformation.
At the time of the Theses’ publication, Henry VIII of England rejected, without very much thought, the concepts on which they were based. He accepted the authority of the Pope and the dogma of the Church of Rome. He believed that the Virgin Mary interceded on behalf of sinners and that, during the Eucharist, the wine and the wafer were transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. The idea that men of humble origin were capable of understanding the Bible for themselves he regarded as both dangerous and absurd. So, in his opinion, was the contention that, because Christ had been sacrificed to redeem the world, men could be saved by faith alone. The priesthood he knew to be, in part, corrupt. But he regarded corruption as endemic throughout society. Henry was not a good man, but he was, at the time, a good Catholic – more out of habit than conviction. When he was eventually persuaded to denounce Martin Luther (or arranged for others to denounce the apostate in his name), the polemic that he published represented his genuine, if recently dormant, views.
Luther’s early work had been sold in England, without its sale being suppressed or denounced as the propagation of heresy. Its free circulation did not survive a sequence of events that began on June 15th 1520, when their author was formally excommunicated. Luther retaliated by publicly burning the Papal Bull by which he had been anathematised and publishing three tracts – On the Liberty of a Christian Man, An Address to the Nobility of the German Nation and On the Babylonian Capture of the Church of God. They were all direct attacks on the Pope and the papacy and, in consequence, made the campaign to proscribe Luther’s work – burning his books and prosecuting those who read them – irresistible throughout the Holy Roman Empire. England (notorious, then as now, for its semi-detachment from continental Europe) did not immediately join in the required destruction. The Vatican sent a stern message which demanded compliance.
Thomas Wolsey – a cardinal since 1515, Papal Legate, holder of numerous other honours and offices, both Roman and English, and a defeated candidate for the papacy – received a letter from an exasperated Pope Leo X, which asked, ironically, if he possessed enough power to take the necessary action.1 William Warham, both Chancellor of Oxford University and Archbishop of Canterbury, reinforced the demand for suppression of the offending tracts with the warning that Luther’s writing was growing increasingly popular within the university. Cambridge, he added in resentful embarrassment, had already ordered its proctors to confiscate and burn Protestant work.
Wolsey responded in a manner which was consistent with his character. He commanded the organisation of a book-burning extravaganza. It was held at St Paul’s Cross on May 12th 1521 and was preceded by a service in the cathedral. The Cardinal approached the Cross under a golden canopy which was held above him by four doctors of divinity. The Archbishop of Canterbury was in attendance but John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, preached the sermon. Being a man of generous disposition, as well as a scholar, he commended Luther’s personal purity, but condemned the arrogance with which he disputed papal authority. The pieties being complete, Wolsey read the full text of the bull of excommunication to a crowd which was estimated to be 30,000 strong. The offending books were ceremoniously burned. Wolsey then, reverentially, displayed the manuscript of a book which he said had been written by the King himself. It was entitled Assertio Septem Sacramentorum.
Wolsey was, at best, exaggerating. The Defence of the Seven Sacraments was based on the work of a number of scholars, which – after Thomas More had acted as a ‘sorter-out and placer of the principal matters contained therein’2 – Henry, in effect, edited. It is not clear who – the King or More – should take credit for the literary style. Luther was dismissed as ‘a venomous serpent … infernal wolf … detestable trumpeter of pride’.3 The vulgar abuse proved popular, and translations were made as gifts for the German Protestant princes. A special copy – its binding decorated with gold and jewels and with poetry written by the King himself in the form of a dedication – was presented to the Pope in October 1521. Shortly afterwards its ‘author’ received the title that he and his successors were to retain, with doubtful legitimacy, for the next five hundred years.
Henry was not made Defender of the Faith, as is popularly supposed, as a reward for the publication of the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum in his name. As early as 1512 the King’s emissaries had petitioned Julius II to grant him a title which was comparable to those in which the Most Christian King of France and the Most Catholic King of Spain rejoiced. Their suggestions included King Apostolic and Protector of the Holy See. Despite the petition being presented time after time for nine years, Julius had not responded. Then Leo X succeeded to the papal throne and, in May 1521, the English emissaries petitioned again, adding the publication of the Assertio to the arguments in support of a the claim to a papal honour. The new Pope did not think that the pleasure of frustrating Henry’s wishes was worth the tedium of arguing with his petitioners. So the King of England became Fidei Defensor. The title was granted to Henry for a lifetime of loyalty and was meant to be a personal award. It was an Act of Parliament, passed in the reign of Elizabeth I, which bestowed it on English monarchs in perpetuity. By then ‘the faith’ was no longer the faith of Rome.
Martin Luther read a German translation of Assertio in the year that followed its presentation to the Pope. His published reply was as notable for its vituperation as for its theology. So – although others, who should have known better, followed suit – he must share with King Henry much of the blame for the degeneration of the argument into an exchange of insults. Luther described the King as a ‘deaf adder’, a ‘miserable scribbler’ and a ‘fool’.4 Henry did not condescend to respond in public, though he wrote, in private, to the Duke of Saxony to remind him of the vicissitudes that Catholic princes had to endure. Instead, John Fisher contested Luther’s theological argument, point by point, in an erudite disquisition on the indisputable power of Rome. Its title, The Defence of the King’s Assertion Against Babylonian Captivity, was an image stolen from the unauthorised, and therefore schismatic, translation of the Bible by William Tyndale. But even the scrupulous Bishop of Rochester felt no obligation to acknowledge his debt to a known dissident and heretic. Thomas More – undoubtedly at the King’s request – replied to Luther with a short volume of abuse, which he composed in 1522 but held back from publication until King Henry had completed and sent the more measured letter to the Duke of Saxony.
Although Wolsey arranged a series of book-burnings in outlying parishes, he must have realised that it was impossible to destroy or confiscate every copy of all the books named on the continually expanding ‘index’ of forbidden works. The best that could be done was a public show of moral outrage. So a second ceremonial book-burning was arranged. A thunderstorm – so violent that the burning had to take place inside the church rather than at St Paul’s Cross – did nothing to convince the organisers that God did not approve of their decision. Once again Wolsey was supported by the princes of the English Church, and once again John Fisher preached the sermon. An added feature of the service was the parade of convicted heretics. Among them were Robert Barnes, an Augustinian friar who had been under arrest since he was interrogated by Wolsey; Henry Pickles, the vicar of All Hallows in London (who had replied to the charge of reading Luther with the defence that, since it was in Latin, he could not have understood it); and three merchants from the Hanseatic League (of German traders) who had been found guilty of importing heretical literature. They all had faggots – the badge of heresy and the symbol of the heretic’s fate – tied round their necks and, throughout the service, knelt in supplication. Each of them recanted, but Robert Barnes was returned to the Fleet prison. He escaped before he could face his trial by bishops. Pickles and the Hansa merchants were released after they had promised to be of good behaviour and were warned that, if they lapsed again into heresy, there would be no second chance of their escaping death by burning.
Man’s ingenuity and his insatiable desire for knowledge – especially knowledge that he has been forbidden to acquire – made it impossible for the book-burners even to reduce the number of forbidden volumes in circulation. And they were attempting to extinguish a fire which had burned for two hundred years. Making ‘knowledge’ freely available, rather than ‘secret’ to the priesthood, had been an essential element of the Protestant faith ever since 1378 when John Wyclif had contended – in his treatise On Truth and the Holy Writ – that an English translation of the testaments was essential to the belief that Christians could commune with God without the intercession of saints or priest. The Lollards, who followed Wyclif’s teaching, had done their best to find and distribute vernacular testaments. The numbers had been so small that – although the reading of unauthorised versions of the Bible had been illegal in England since 1410 – the Church had done little more than disapprove. When, in or about 1525, William Tyndale – a West Country school master – started to make a new English translation, the threat of unregulated knowledge began to be taken seriously.
The rise of Protestantism, and Luther’s intellectual aggression, made Tyndale a greater threat than Wyclif had ever been. Anticipating arrest, he fled to Germany, where his work was finished and published. Not only was his bible more easily available than any earlier unauthorised version, but it had become one of the texts of an international theological revolution. Tyndale had visited Luther to pledge his support for the Protestant cause and his treatise, The Obedience of the Christian Man, proclaimed that ‘the pope’s doctrine is not of God’. But the offence of which he was convicted, condemned and eventually burned was not the dissemination of heretical ideas. It was the sin of making it possible for the laity to read the Bible themselves – a prospect so vile that Wolsey instructed the whole Church to rise up in defence of the clergy’s exclusive right to receive, directly, the Word of God.
Most of the episcopate responded to the call to arms with undisguised enthusiasm. Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, instructed – on pain of excommunication – every archdeacon in his diocese to demand that all copies of the Tyndale Bible be handed to Church authorities within thirty days of the announcement. In the parishes, the edict – which was unenforced and unenforceable – was greeted with some defiance and much weary cynicism. Father John Parkyns of St Andrew’s, Eastcheap, told a friend, ‘If I had twenty books of the Holy Scriptures translated into English, I would bring none of them in for my Lord of London, curse he or bless he, for he does it so that we should have no knowledge but keeps it secret to himself.’5
The enemies of Protestantism had still to learn that men may be executed, but ideas do not die. The suppression of Luther’s theology was as impossible as the suppression of his books. It had already taken root. In Cambridge, the White Horse Tavern had become so notorious for harbouring men who would not have their thoughts circumscribed that it was known as ‘Little Germany’. The leaders of the group – including Robert Barnes and Thomas Bilney, a Cambridge divinity graduate – were certainly attracted by Luther’s theology. But some of its members were true to Rome and attended because they were interested in ideas. From time to time Stephen Gardiner – the Bishop of Winchester, one-time private secretary to King Henry and a sufficiently reliable Roman Catholic eventually to become Mary Tudor’s Lord Chancellor – joined the discussions. It was because of its ecumenical membership that the King and Court – still violently opposed to Luther and all his work – were willing, for a time, to tolerate what they believed to be harmlessly academic activities. They did not remain harmlessly academic for long.
The first offence was impudence. Two regular visitors to ‘Little Germany’ – William Roy and Simon Fish – wrote and produced within the Tavern a play which mocked the pride and pomp of the episcopacy. Roy himself played the main character in a way which left no doubt that Wolsey was the target of his scorn. That notwithstanding, the two men were allowed to slip, discreetly, away to the Netherlands, but on Christmas Eve 1525, Barnes – back in England – abandoned comedy and preached a sermon which denounced the celebration of holy days. That could not be overlooked or brushed aside. He was summoned to appear before Wolsey who, at first, passed lightly over questions of faith, but then asked for Barnes’ opinion about satire on extravagance in high places. Much to his credit, Barnes replied – with courage if not relevance – that Wolsey would be a better Christian if he gave all his wealth to the poor. The Cardinal changed tack again and said that the assault on feast days would have to be referred to a tribunal of bishops – and then, surprisingly if not sincerely, wished Barnes well.6 The Cardinal had more important things on his mind.
Books disputing the truth and wisdom of the Roman Catholic religion were coming into England in increasing numbers. In 1526 – after several members of ‘Little Germany’ moved from Cambridge to Oxford to teach in Wolsey’s new Cardinal’s College – banned books were found buried in a field near the university. Twenty-two suspects were interrogated. Half of them admitted their offence and were imprisoned. In 1529 a change of tactics followed the appointment of Thomas More as Chancellor. Wrongful reading was to be suppressed by the burning both of books and of the men who were found to possess them.
Execution of one sort or another – burning, beheading or hanging with attendant butchery – was already the usual punishment for spreading the ideas which the prohibited books contained. But there was still an army of willing martyrs who were prepared to risk – indeed, to embrace – the flames. In 1525 Thomas Bilney, one of the regular visitors to ‘Little Germany’, had been granted a preaching licence by the Bishop of Ely. Although he had promised, on oath, not to spread the Lutheran heresies, his sermons reflected, if they did not advocate, Luther’s criticisms of Catholicism. He condemned the worship of saints, denounced lighting candles before statues and argued that the Church required the observations of so many regulations that failure to comply was unavoidable. He was arraigned before two archbishops and eight bishops, who took it in turn to examine him about twenty-four ‘errors’ which they had discovered in his sermons. Some of his answers satisfied his interrogators. Others did not. It was clear that he was not a Lutheran but, almost as bad, a man of independent thought and judgement.
Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, pressed Bilney to recant. He refused, with the claim that nothing he had said offended against the teaching of the Church. His defence guaranteed that he was condemned as a ‘contumacious heretic’. Tunstall, still hopeful of recantation, did not pronounce sentence and was rewarded when Bilney eventually agreed that in seven of the twenty-four ‘errors’ of which he had been accused, the case against him had been proved. He agreed only to preach when given explicit permission to do so, and carried a faggot in procession to St Paul’s Cross, where he stood, head bent in shame, throughout the subsequent service. His reward was imprisonment for life, rather than death, the usual fate of heretics.
Bilney had served a year of his prison sentence when he was allowed to return to Cambridge. His promise to preach only when given permission, was kept for as long as his conscience allowed. Then, after announcing that he was ‘going up to Jerusalem’,7 he set off for Norwich where – often in fields, since no church was open to him – he preached, as before, against the veneration of saints and the worship of statues. Only one result was possible. Thomas Bilney was convicted as a lapsed heretic and burned at the stake. The epoch of religious martyrdom had begun. The charges became more numerous and the offences more widely defined. In 1532, Thomas Bennet in Exeter, Thomas Harding in Chesham and James Bainham in Bristol were executed for doing no more than expressing sympathy with unspecified Protestant dogma.8
In Norwich, Thomas Bilney’s execution had been followed by half-hearted demonstrations of sympathy and support. But England was still a Catholic country and most of the Protestant martyrs went to their deaths unmourned. Some of them went to their place of execution accompanied by the excoriation of the mob. In Exeter, Thomas Bennet was stopped on his way to the stake by citizens who threatened to carry out the execution themselves and told him, ‘Whoresome heretic. Pray to Our Lady and say Sancta Maria ora pro nobis, or by God’s wounds I will make thee do it.’9 In Chesham, a hotbed of Lollardry, the fire that consumed Thomas Harding was fed by wood carried to the pyre by local children.10 The people’s ardour was encouraged by carefully contrived miracles. When a fire almost destroyed the parish church in Rickmansworth, John Longland, the Bishop of Lincoln, announced that it had been the work of heretics and, despite an equal lack of evidence, attributed the preservation of the host and rood screen to divine intervention.
The time was fast approaching when all of England would be required to change its religious allegiance. In the year that Thomas Bilney was executed, Sir Thomas Boleyn of Kent – the father of Anne – told the Papal Nuncio that England ‘cared neither for pope or popes’. Henry was ‘both pope and emperor in his own kingdom’.11 The King was about to end the burning of men because they rejected the Pope’s doctrine, and start burning them because they upheld the Pope’s authority. The Henrician Reformation was under way.
It is understandable that Cardinal Reginald Pole, the most powerful statesman and one of the most distinguished theologians of Mary Tudor’s reign, should have chosen to attribute the whole English Reformation to ‘fleshy will, full of carnal concupiscence’.12 But Pole must have known that Henry’s rage to marry Anne Boleyn swiftly turned into a passion to rule – supreme and unlimited – in his own kingdom, and that England accepted the rejection of Rome for far more complicated reasons than solidarity with the King in his determination to have a new wife and a male heir. The Pope’s refusal to make way for the new union, by endorsing the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, was the occasion, not the fundamental cause, of a schism that was bound to have happened sooner or later. The King’s temperament made the break from Rome likely. The disposition of the English people – pragmatic, insular and religiously indolent – made it inevitable.
At first, Henry was determined to dispose of his old wife with the blessing and approval of the Pope, and he worked hard and waited long to convince Rome that he could be lawfully married to Anne. His motives were more complicated than simply respect for the Holy Father or sympathy for the discarded queen. He was fearful of offending powerful foreign princes and did not anticipate that most of the ‘devout Catholics’ at Court – far from opposing him – would lamely accept and articulate views on papal supremacy which, before the great schism, they had denounced as heresy. Romantic fiction paints a portrait of a briefly infatuated king and a beautiful young woman who withheld her favours from him until they were married. Authors disagree about the lady’s motives. Some say that she was chaste. Others insist that she was merely ambitious. Of one thing we can be sure: whether or not Henry was deeply in love with Anne Boleyn, he was certainly out of love with Catherine and profoundly – and, by the standards of the time, legitimately – concerned by her apparent inability to produce a male heir, guarantee the succession and ensure that England was not, once again, rent by dynastic wars.
After much agonising about the future of the kingdom – and a little agonising about the future of his soul – Henry came to the convenient conclusion that he was, or should be, free to marry Anne. He had, he decided, offended Providence by entering into an unlawful union with Catherine. The offence had been committed when he was a boy of fifteen, acting under his father’s instructions. But that in no way reduced his guilt. Catherine had been married to Prince Arthur, Henry’s elder brother. On his death she had, for reasons of state, become the wife of the new heir apparent. Marriage to the widow of a deceased brother was against the law, but there had been some argument about whether or not Catherine’s first marriage had been consummated. Young Arthur’s boast that he had spent ‘all his wedding night in Aragon’ was generally attributed to youthful wishful thinking. But, back in 1509, Julius II had agreed to avoid all possible embarrassment to Prince Henry and his family by granting a dispensation which said, in effect, that if the marriage between Arthur and Catherine had ever been lawful, the law was overruled.
When, in 1527, the 1509 dispensation had become an obstacle rather than a convenience, Henry responded by showing a laudable respect for the Old Testament as well as a remarkable knowledge of its contents. He quoted Leviticus, Chapter 20, Verse 21: ‘If a man marries his brother’s wife, it is an act of impurity.’ Reliance on the scriptures rather than on their interpretation by Rome was a Protestant way to behave. But it was realpolitik, not dogma, that made the Pope, Clement VII, unsympathetic to Henry’s cause. Queen Catherine was the aunt of Charles V of Spain and, while Henry was deciding how to pursue his claim that she had never been his legal wife, the Holy Roman Emperor had invaded Italy and taken the Pope prisoner. Clement was neither in the position nor the mood to rule that Charles’ aunt had lived in sin with Henry for twenty years. There was a moment of fantasy when Wolsey suggested setting up a rival papacy in Avignon, forging a new alliance with France and declaring, ex cathedra, that Henry was free to marry. No one else found merit in the proposal.
What little hope there was of the Pope acting against the interests of the Emperor’s family depended on his agreement to send an emissary to London with the instruction to prepare, with Wolsey, an opinion on Henry’s claim. Before he left, the Pope and the Emperor were reconciled. Clement had no intention of risking a renewal of hostilities. And, thanks to the return of confidence which followed the rapprochement, the Pope was explicit that if Henry had a request to make, he – or his representative – must travel to Rome to make it. The message was accompanied by rumours from Rome that Henry’s submission had indeed offended, by implying that biblical texts were superior to papal pronouncements. Henry’s emissaries, nevertheless, made the journey. Their claim was rejected.
Wolsey appealed to Clement to establish a ‘decretal commission’ which would first set out the law in principle and then decide how it applied in Henry’s case. The idea, he argued, should be attractive to both Pope and King. No appeal against its findings would be possible. So there would be no question of the Pope coming under pressure to offend the Emperor by supporting Henry’s claim. The Pope’s agreement to the proposal was unrelated to either its merits or its ingenuity. Wolsey was Rome’s only true friend at the English court and needed some sort of victory to guarantee the continuation of the King’s favours. Henry agreed to the scheme because he foolishly assumed that, with Wolsey a member, he could rely on the commission’s findings being in his favour.
Pope Clement announced his agreement in April 1528. Six months later, Cardinal Campeggio arrived in London to chair the commission. The wheels of Rome ground slowly. The commission opened its proceedings in June 1529 – by which time its purpose had already been undermined. Knowing that the conclusions could not be the subject of an appeal to Rome, Catherine had petitioned the Pope before the proceedings began. John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, who bravely acted as counsel for the Queen, was addressing the court with a vigorous defence of Pope Julius’ dispensation when Charles V – in a sudden change of allegiance – turned on the French army that was besieging the Pope in his own capital. The rescue confirmed the Pope’s dependence on the all-powerful Emperor’s goodwill. Clement announced, ‘I have quite made up my mind to become an imperialist’13 and disbanded the decretal commission.
Henry had lost all hope of immediate papal support and endorsement of his divorce – or, as he would have it, annulment. Wolsey’s enemies announced that the collapse of the commission was conclusive proof that the Cardinal had failed in his duty to the King. An indictment was drawn up. It included ‘the abomination, ruin and seditious and erroneous violations used at the pulling down of the abbeys’14 – the dissolution of the monasteries for which Henry had been directly responsible. Wolsey fell, although – by the standards of the time – he was treated with a leniency that amounted to indulgence.
All hope of legitimising the King’s divorce depended on the King’s advisers finding, or inventing, proof that two Popes were wrong – Julius II for issuing the dispensation that declared Prince Arthur’s marriage invalid, and Clement VII for upholding that decision. The newest recruit to the group of scholars who had prepared his case for the aborted decretal commission was Thomas Cranmer, sometime Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, habitué of ‘Little Germany’ and public opponent of papal power. He suggested that the legitimacy of Julius’ dispensation should be examined by academic authorities on canon law – itself an implication that the Pope could be wrong. Emissaries with the mandate to prove that Henry was free to marry were despatched to all the universities and libraries of Europe. Among them was Reginald Pole, a descendant of the Plantagenet Duke of Clarence and a temporary royal favourite. Pole was a devout believer in papal authority – a theological view that was to qualify him to become Mary Tudor’s First Minister. His agreement to participate in what he must have known to be a sham, designed to provide spurious proof of a legal opinion which he knew to be false, illustrates one of the shameful truths about the Reformation. In England, few men in high places remained true either to Rome or to the Reformation. Constancy was the prerogative of the humble and the meek.
Pole – whose studies in Padua had been financed by the King – had returned to England faithful to the Church of Rome, but a humanist who, under the influence of Erasmus, believed that its teaching should reflect the realities of earthly existence as well as the hope of heaven. He had taken up residence in the Carthusian monastery at Sheen and was appointed Dean of Exeter in absentia. After the fall of Wolsey, when it became clear to even the most preoccupied scholar that Henry was going to marry Anne, he had applied to the King for permission to continue his studies in the University of Paris. It was then that Henry had the idea of making him his Paris advocate. So Pole’s wish was granted. He left for Paris with the King’s blessing and a gift of £100, in return for his promise to argue the merits of a case in which he did not believe.
Pole was doubly unsuited to the task before him. As well as respecting the authority of the Pope, he had personal reasons for opposing Henry’s plans. His mother, the Countess of Salisbury, was a close friend of Queen Catherine and governess to the Princess Mary, whose status would be changed, by an annulment, from heir presumptive to bastard. Yet he agreed. Not only did he accept the King’s commission, but he set about his task with such determination that Henry awarded him an additional £70 and he received, from the King himself, a letter which expressed royal approval in the most fulsome terms: ‘To your dexterity and faithfulness we ascribe the furtherance of our cause.’15 Unfortunately for Henry, the exercise of those qualities did not have the desired result. Paris found against the King. Pole was recalled and, despite the failure of his mission, was showered with gratitude.
Cardinal Wolsey died in November 1530. Pole – just thirty and yet to be ordained priest – was offered the vacant Archbishopric of York, on condition that he confirmed his support for the royal annulment. His reply was both craven and bold. He opposed the annulment in the King’s own interest. Were it to be ruled that the marriage to Catherine was invalid, Henry would have lived in sin for twenty years. The King stood ‘on the brink of the water and may yet save all his honour. But if he put forth his foot one step forward, all his honour is gone.’16 His warning to Henry might have cost a less-favoured man his head. But Pole persisted. Henry – dissatisfied but, for once, not vengeful – agreed that Pole should leave England for ever. He was to return in righteous glory when the Princess became the Catholic Queen of England.
Throughout Europe, independent scholars were near to unanimous in their judgement that Henry’s marriage to Catherine had been lawful. A majority of university faculties – some of them bribed – favoured the King’s contention that it was not. The findings which supported the King’s case were based on the supposed evidence that, since ancient times, a king had been absolutely sovereign in his own country. They were collected in a volume entitled Collectanea Satis Copiosa and the King, having decreed that there was enough evidence to support his cause, prepared for the battle by leaving the episcopate in no doubt that they had to choose between giving him their support and incurring his profound animosity. At the Convocation that met at Canterbury in January 1531, Henry threatened to issue a writ of Praemunire (unlawfully asserting or upholding papal jurisdiction) against the entire clergy – citing, as reason for the prosecution, the whole episcopate’s complicity in what he chose to misrepresent as the treachery of the late Cardinal Wolsey. The bishops knew they had not ‘applied the laws of an alien jurisdiction against the sovereignty of the monarch’. But they had no doubt that Henry was prepared to charge them with the offence and find them guilty. So when, in his benevolence, the King was prepared to grant a general pardon if Convocation was sufficiently contrite, they gladly agreed. Contrition, Henry estimated, cost £100,000 (£35 million in today’s prices). That, Henry calculated, would compensate him for the expense he had incurred by pursuing, on the bishops’ advice, the divorce suit which, they should have known, Rome would dismiss out of hand. After some half-hearted haggling, Convocation paid the full amount.
Henry announced his intention to prepare (or to have prepared) a document which defined his own and the episcopate’s role within the Church. Although they expected that their powers would be drastically reduced, many of the bishops were grateful that they would, at least, have rules to guide their conduct which, if they were observed, would protect them from arbitrary assault. But the time had not yet come when Henry’s opponents bowed to his wishes without a fight. And, before the breach with Rome was too wide to bridge, the King was not ready to brush all opposition aside. So there was much haggling about the text in which the definition would appear. It ended in a defeat for the King. The notion of royal supremacy, which Henry had wished to establish, was not fully accepted by either Church or Parliament.
The King had wanted the text to declare him ‘Supreme Head’ of the Church in England. Bishop Fisher suggested adding the caveat ‘as far as the law of God allows’, and Archbishop Warham persuaded Henry to agree. The compromise left the Church compliant but resentful. The final wording – ‘singular protector, supreme lord and even, as far as the law of Christ allows, supreme head of the English church and clergy’ – was endorsed by the bishops only because Archbishop Warham ruled that silence meant consent. The first step had been taken towards the Church’s acceptance that the sovereign possessed both spiritual and temporal authority in England. The inevitable consequence was the separation of the Church of Rome and the Church in (and eventually of) England.
To most of Henry’s subjects, the Reformation – assuming they had even heard of the dispute between King and Pope – meant nothing. Neither the litany nor the dogma of their Church had changed. The notion that John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli were heretics because they did not believe in transubstantiation and that Luther was a heretic, even though he did, passed them by. Their King knew a theological debate was raging in Europe. But – until he was persuaded that there was a relationship between the denial of his sovereignty and the whole body of Catholic doctrine – Henry never thought of disturbing the workings of the Church. So most of England worshipped unmoved by, or oblivious of, the religious revolution that was about to engulf them.
The Church’s acceptance – reluctant and partial – of the King’s enhanced authority had been supported by the publication of new, though corrupt, academic opinions. They were in Latin. Henry, breaking all established precedent, ordered their immediate translation into English and wide circulation of the judgement that ‘it is so unlawful for a man to marry his brother’s wife that the pope hath no power to dispose therewith’.17 That limitation on the power of the Pope was another assertion of Henry’s power and a justification for a view of national sovereignty – a matter of high principle which often required the diversion of money from the Church to the King’s coffers. In 1532 he instructed the House of Lords to demonstrate England’s independence by withholding the payment on annates or first fruits: taxes paid to Rome after the inauguration of every new bishop. A year later he claimed that the decision was justified by the cost of subduing the Catholic-inspired uprising in Ireland. Resistance in both Houses of Parliament – less the result of respect for Rome than of fear that the Holy Roman Empire would combine to retaliate by imposing a trade embargo – was peremptorily swept aside. Henry decided that the time had come to put Parliament in its place. Help in that endeavour was at hand.
In 1528, Thomas Cromwell – a former soldier of fortune, and by then only a virtually unknown Member of Parliament – had drafted a Supplication of the Commons Against the Ordinaries. It was a bitter complaint that ecclesiastical courts were usurping the powers of the civil judiciary. The Supplication had lain fallow for two years. But by 1531 Cromwell had become Master of the Jewels and Wards and was about to take Wolsey’s place as Henry’s most trusted minister. Motivated by the belief that an independent England could become the most powerful state in Europe, and untroubled by theological arguments, he was to drive the Reformation on, long after Henry had begun to lose his enthusiasm and his nerve. But at the time of the Supplication’s emergence, Cromwell was the King’s enforcer, the man who made sure that neither malice nor incompetence prevented the royal wishes being obeyed. His role and character are both exemplified by a letter which he sent to an emissary who was to negotiate with the King of France. It is authoritative, precise in its language and menacing in tone – characteristics that leave little doubt about why Cromwell was not greatly loved by the rest of King Henry’s court:
You will receive letters from His Highness concerning matters of great importance. Just as he has no doubt that you will, with utter dexterity, shed light on these matters for the accomplishment of his desire, so too is it his desire that you should elaborate on the delivery of ships with such great zeal and strength that you should not only obtain the thing itself but that you should also explain and expound how unworthily he has behaved with His Highness in this matter.18
The original version of the Supplication – even though it contained the justified allegation that ecclesiastical courts were imposing secular laws – was robustly challenged by the bishops. Indeed, Convocation’s response, the Answer of the Ordinaries, was so aggressive in its affirmation of their rights and powers that Henry – who had previously been preoccupied – thought it necessary to intervene and secure a result that was consistent with his view of the relationship between Church and state. The King – at a meeting with Members of Parliament – encouraged the Commons to repeat, in a stronger form, its assault on the bishops’ power. Their response was so enthusiastic that when he was sent by the Speaker of the House of Commons to the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham composed a reply which was less a defence of the Church’s rights than a plea for mercy and protection against the anti-clericalism of the Commons. The clergy, he claimed, were even subject to Commons-inspired physical violence, ‘so injured in their own persons, thrown down in the kennel in the open streets in mid-day even here within your own city’.19
Warham seems not to have realised that the King had encouraged the Commons in its assault on the Church’s assumption of powers, but Henry’s response to the Church’s cry of anguish must have convinced him that he could expect royal assault rather than regal protection. He ignored what the bishops had actually said and addressed the Commons as if the episcopacy was in open revolt. ‘We thought that the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly but we have now well perceived that they are only half our subjects … For all the prelates at their consecration make an oath clear contrary to the oath they made to us.’20 It was the bridging passage that united Henry’s assault on the Church in England for the usurpation of royal powers and his assault on the Church of Rome for the denial of his sovereign authority. It was also the beginning of the obsession with oaths that was to be a feature of the debate on divided loyalty – Rome versus England – for the next three hundred years.
Only seven bishops had the courage to attend the meeting of the Canterbury Convocation at which the King’s message was considered. One of them, John Clerk of Bath and Wells, anticipating a decision to which he could not subscribe, left before the response was agreed. The rest eventually acquiesced, with varying degrees of reluctance, to the formal Answer of the Ordinaries. It was called, with no intention of irony, the Submission of the Clergy – it was fulsome in its acceptance of the King’s authority, but demanded that Parliament respected the ‘liberty and privileges of the Church’. Henry – unwilling to accept anything except capitulation – determined not to give ground on any aspect of his supremacy.
Confident of the Commons’ support, the King laid down his terms of surrender. They were very near to unconditional. All future Church legislation could be negated by royal veto. Existing canon law was to be examined, and when necessary revised, by a committee that included laymen. All the canon law which then remained was to be acknowledged as only possessing legislative force because it had been endorsed by the King’s authority. Henry announced the immediate prorogation of Parliament – meaning that the Church must either meet the King’s demands or face uncertain consequences. The bishops capitulated and accepted, virtually word-for-word, Henry’s redraft of their Submission. Thomas More – who was bitterly opposed to the bishops’ surrender to the temporal power – had wanted, for over a year, to relinquish the office of Lord Chancellor. In his last act of friendship to a man he had once claimed to love, Henry allowed him to resign. His successor, Thomas Audley, immediately released all the heretics who had been imprisoned by More. Denigrating the Pope was no longer a crime.
There followed an annual reduction in the Pope’s power in England. In 1533 the Act of Appeals decreed that all matrimonial dispute and disagreements over tithes (once decided under consistory jurisdiction) must be settled in English courts. The preamble referred to England as an empire, to emphasise its status as a sovereign state. Then, in 1534, a swathe of Acts confirmed Henry’s authority over the English Church. The Act in Restraint of Annates abolished completely the previously suspended payments to the Pope, and the Act of Praemunire made it illegal to refuse to consecrate a bishop who had been nominated by the King. The Submission of Clergy Act enforced by law the erosion of power to which the bishops had already agreed. The Heresy Act declared that it was no longer illegal to deny the Pope’s authority and, during a second session of Parliament in 1534, the process of rejecting all papal power was completed by passage of the Acts of Supremacy and Succession, which established Henry’s overriding authority and made the issue of his union with Anne heirs to the throne of England. A Treason Act followed. Under its provisions, a Syon monk, three Carthusian priors and the vicar of Isleworth were executed at Tyburn on the same day for denying that the King was head of the Church.21
From then on, prosecution (or persecution) of heretics took second place to the persecution (or prosecution) of ‘traitors’ who refused to subscribe to the principles laid down in the Acts of Supremacy and Succession. Most of the population knew neither that the laws had once been administered by the Church nor that they had become the responsibility of the secular authority. The few who did realise that they lived in turbulent times accepted the change with supine resignation. The Oath, swearing to uphold the new laws, was signed by every member of both Houses of Parliament who was present on the prescribed day. Citizens of London who were members of guilds were instructed – worshipful company by worshipful company – to affirm their agreement. There is no record of any guildsman refusing to sign. Even after the Pope had struck back, by declaring that Henry and Catherine were still married, there was little resistance to the demand that every citizen, when required to do so, should take the Oaths of Succession and Supremacy. The two glorious exceptions were John Fisher and Thomas More.
There was a moment when the high drama of the Reformation briefly turned into tragic farce. Elizabeth Barton, a Kentish servant girl, had first heard voices when she was nineteen. An examination by Church authorities concluded that they were genuine and responded to her wishes that she be found a place in a nunnery by admitting her to St Sepulchre’s Convent in Canterbury, where she became an object of veneration – a status confirmed by her acquisition of the sobriquet ‘Maid of Kent’. The voices followed Elizabeth into her cloisters, but in 1534 they began to express recklessly controversial opinions. It was, they said, Elizabeth’s duty to tell the King that he must accept the supremacy of the Pope and warn him that, if he married Anne Boleyn, a great plague would destroy the nation. Somehow Elizabeth Barton gained access to the royal presence and repeated the warnings. The King was moved neither to heed nor punish her. But some members of the Privy Council thought it right to examine her further. Thomas More neither rejected nor supported her views, but urged her to be cautious in expressing them. It was a severe tactical error. Henry saw The Barton Affair as an opportunity to dispose of More who continued publicly to oppose the King’s refusal to accept the Pope’s judgement on the validity of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. When Elizabeth Barton was named in a Bill of Attainder (an indictment for treason which allowed conviction without due legal process), More was accused of being party to her treachery.
The name of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was also added to the bill. He had certainly met Elizabeth Barton and – even after she had called for the King to abandon Anne Boleyn – had expressed direct sympathy for her honesty and implied sympathy for her views. That was wholly consistent with Fisher’s conduct and character. From the earliest indication that the King was contemplating a divorce, he had been Catherine’s man. At first he had done no more than provide scholarly evidence that Henry’s first marriage, having been validated by a papal dispensation, was ‘indissoluble’. Then he had argued the Queen’s case before the decretal commission and had gone on to oppose, in the House of Lords, the King’s claim to be Supreme Head of the Church in England. All in all, it was amazing that he had survived for so long with only one brief period of house arrest, one shooting (narrowly avoided) and one attempted poisoning, as the price of his independence. He escaped the poisoning – probably contrived by the Boleyn family rather than the King – because of his habit of fasting and giving what he would have eaten to the poor. Two beggars died and Fisher’s cook was executed, as the law required. He was boiled to death.
Thomas More and John Fisher – each of them major players in the drama of the Reformation – both chose death rather than commit apostasy. In other ways their lives could hardly have been more different. Fisher, the son of a Beverley merchant, was a scholar whose worldly success was due to his single-minded devotion to learning and the greater glory of Cambridge, which university rewarded him for his scholarship – and the new colleges that he had founded – by electing him Chancellor for Life. His academic distinction had attracted the attention of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s elderly mother, and it was through her that he briefly became a figure in society. He preached the sermon at Henry VII’s funeral in 1509 and remained sufficiently in favour, even in the new reign, to accompany the Court to the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520. But he found high life uncongenial. So he declined all offers of promotion from the poor and unfashionable See of Rochester and spent his time writing learned treatises on the errors of Protestantism. Fisher, untypically of his times, never resorted to the brutality that was endemic in society. The story of him using hot coals to burn the feet of John Browne, a Lollard, was invented by John Foxe – later famous for his Book of Martyrs.
Fisher suffered from the inability – literally fatal at the Court of Henry VIII – to hide his feelings or disguise his beliefs. When Henry turned on the monasteries and convents (more to raise revenue than because of their loyalty to Rome), it became fashionable to attack the extravagance and debauchery that were said to be a feature of cloistered life. But Fisher had been an early public critic of the clergy’s shortcomings. ‘They were wont, and indeed ought still, like lights of the world to shine in virtue and godliness [but] now there cometh from them no light but rather an horrible misty cloud or dark ignorance.’22 The expression of such sentiments offended complacent bishops as well as indolent and sinful priests – even though, like Thomas More, Fisher moderated his criticism in order to avoid contributing to a process which he feared might end, as in Germany, with the total alienation of the people from the priesthood.
In 1529, the House of Commons had debated the financial exploitation of parishioners by their priests. There was particular resentment at the fortunes made from the mortuary fees – levies collected when a corpse lay overnight in church – charged during the previous year’s epidemic of the sweating sickness. The condemnation was unanimous and a bill, limiting mortuary fees, was sent up from the Commons to the Lords, where John Fisher chose to say what he believed about clerical greed: ‘If the truth were known, ye shall find that they rather hunger and thirst after the riches and possessions of the clergy, than the amendment of their faults and abuses.’23 That was bad enough, but when he went on to warn the Lords about the dangers of following in Germany’s footsteps, he ended with the expression of his forebodings: ‘All these mischiefs among them riseth from a lack of faith.’24 It was clear enough that his complaints were being made against the Germans. But his critics believed, or pretended to believe, that he referred to the English clergy. The uproar that followed illustrated the penalties incurred by those who speak their minds. It was a habit that Fisher could not break.
When Henry told Convocation that it would no longer possess an independent right to pass Church legislation, Fisher – although already suffering from the illness which would have killed him, had Henry not ended his life on Tower Hill – drafted a declaration. It was entitled ‘That the bishops have immediate authority of Christ to make such laws as they shall think expedient for the weal of men’s souls’.25 From then on, a head-to-head collision, with only one possible result, was inevitable. And Fisher did nothing to avoid it. In May 1533, after Cranmer had pronounced the legality of Henry’s annulment in the Upper House of the Canterbury Convocation, John Stokesley, the Bishop of London, and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, argued the King’s case. Fisher spoke against. When the Convocation capitulated and denied that the ‘Bishop of Rome’ possessed either authority in or over England, Fisher was too ill to attend. Nobody doubted that the sickness was genuine. Had he been fit, he would have been there to argue his case.
Most often consistency is a virtue, but it can become a dangerous liability, especially when it is combined with an inability to temporise or prevaricate. Working from the first principle that God wanted England to return to the Catholic faith, and judging, on the basis of empirical evidence, that Henry’s stranglehold could not be broken without outside help, Fisher concluded that salvation lay in invasion. For ten years he urged the Catholic powers of Europe to do their duty. He was the most distinguished example of a condition which was common in King Henry’s England – high-minded high treason.
Obsessive consistency was not one of Thomas More’s failings. The son of a Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, he was of equal intellectual standing to Fisher. But his metropolitan background combined with his cultivated tastes to make him a much more sophisticated figure. The temperamental differences that distinguished More from Fisher were exemplified by the conflicting ways in which they responded to the Maid of Kent indictment. More pleaded his innocence in letters to Thomas Cromwell and the King and – after an examination by Cromwell, which dealt less with the relationship to the Maid of Kent than with his attitude towards the royal divorce and marriage – confirmed his evidence in writing. In a passage which the hagiologies omit, he repudiated the suggestion that he had ever opposed the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine. ‘I neither murmured at it, nor dispute upon it, nor never did nor will.’26 Then he reinforced his repudiation of Elizabeth Barton with an equivocation that was so blatant it could only have been the result of desperation. He was, he wrote, unable to respond to questions about the King’s supremacy until he had read Assertio Septem Sacramentorum – Henry’s own treatise on the subject, to which More had himself contributed. Then he confirmed his claim to the King’s affection by sending an obsequious letter to Thomas Cromwell, which he clearly hoped Henry would read. More was found not guilty.
John Fisher’s response to his inclusion in the Bill of Attainder was clearly also calculated to secure an acquittal, but it was the sort of demonstration of intellectual superiority that is more likely to cause offence than to encourage sympathy. Fisher, no doubt to the King’s irritation, argued points of logic. He admitted to knowing that Elizabeth Barton had warned the King that he would die within a month of marrying Anne Boleyn, but had no reason to believe that she had made the same prophecy to anyone else. If she had only told Henry of the danger he faced, she could hardly be guilty of treason. If she was innocent, so was he. It was not an argument Henry was disposed to accept.
More was cleared of all charges. Fisher was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was pardoned and required to pay a crippling fine. It was clear from the accompanying reproof which he received from Thomas Cromwell that he was punished not for the single offence, but for his unremitting opposition to Henry’s rejection of papal authority: ‘I believe that I know the king’s goodness and natural gentleness so well, that his grace would not so unkindly handle you, as you unkindly write of him, unless you gave him other causes.’27 From then on, the only doubt about Fisher’s downfall and execution was the date on which the formal processes of indictment would begin. The Maid of Kent’s fate was not so long delayed. She admitted, under torture, that her voices had been an invention. Together with her alleged accomplices, she was sentenced to death.
Barely a decade earlier, both John Fisher and Thomas More, acting on the King’s behalf, had denounced Martin Luther and all his works in tracts that, in their differences of approach, had illustrated the temperamental gulf which separated the two men. Fisher had contested Luther’s theological argument point by point, in an erudite disquisition on the indisputable power of Rome. More had composed a short volume of abuse, which illustrated both the violence of his nature and the vulgarity of his mind. He later defended his descent into crude vituperation with an explanation that was as perverse as was his choice of language. The object of his hatred would, he claimed, be most likely to abandon his heresy if he were ‘overwhelmed in filth’. So he wrote that Luther was a ‘lousy little friar’ who was ‘filthier than a pig and more foolish than an ass … Father Toss pot’, who had been a pimp and allowed ‘nothing in his mouth but privies, shit and dung’. He was only fit ‘to lick with his anterior the very posterior of a shitting she mule’ and should be required to ‘swallow down his filth and lick up the dung’.28 More’s scatological language – he accused Luther of celebrating Mass while defecating29 – was extreme, even by the standards of the age. Sometimes he was vicious and absurd in equal measure. He claimed that Luther’s marriage to a woman who had once been a nun made him an ‘open, incestuous lecher, a limb of the Devil and a manifest missionary from Hell’.30
It is always said, in More’s defence, that his failings – the brutality of his prose, the suppression (rather than refutation) of inconvenient ideas and the enjoyment of gratuitous brutality – were simply a reflection of the habits of his age. But More is, to his many devotees, a man who rose above the barbarity of his times. One of his claims to progressive admiration is the publication of Utopia, which, as well as adding a new word to the English language, set out his vision of the ideal state. In ‘Nowhereland’, education is universally available, religious tolerance accepted as normal as well as necessary, and freedom of expression regarded as a mark of the civilised state. Yet when high office required it, More became – as well as a heretic hunter – an enthusiastic book-burner. Worse still, for a man with intellectual pretensions, devotion to truth seemed to baffle him. In an admission of complete incomprehension, which suggests that he did not even understand the true nature of faith, he was open in his astonishment that so many men were prepared to risk so much in order to bring bibles into England: ‘Though they cannot there be printed without great cost [nor] non there sold without great adventure and peril, yet they cease not, with money sent from thence, to print them thither by whole vats full at once and in some places, looking for no lucre, cast them abroad at night.’31
More did not just acquiesce in the errors of the time. He exhibited a positive enthusiasm for compounding them. Despite his high office, he personally led a company of men-at-arms in a raid on the Hansa headquarters and, himself, arrested the Scandinavian merchants who had brought ‘the most horrible plague’ of banned books into England. He then pursued the culprits through the courts. For him, the suppression of dangerous ideas was a matter of absolute principle. ‘Our Lord,’ he wrote, ‘send us now some years as plenteous of good corn as we have had of late years of plenteous evil books.’32 He then went on to argue that evil books are more deadly than famine and that the ‘years as plenteous of good corn’ would be ended by divine retribution for the growing habit of reading heresy. That is not what they believed in Utopia.
Cardinal Wolsey, for all his many faults, was not an enthusiastic burner of men. He sent men to their death when it was politically expedient to do so. Thomas More – Wolsey’s successor as Lord Chancellor of England and a late convert to outright opposition to the King’s rejection of the Pope’s authority – burned with a passion which came from the conviction that he was doing God’s will. Catholics, who believe that some truths transcend time and place, must defend his gratuitous barbarity with the claim that he was a man of his time. But there were men of pity and compassion even in Tudor England. In contrast to them, More’s view on burning combined respect for the division between ecclesiastical and temporal law with a positive relish for the thought of the victim’s suffering and a fine disregard for God’s infinite mercy: ‘The clergy doth denounce them … the temporality doth burn them. Then, after the fires of Smithfield, hell doth receive them where the wretches burn for ever.’33 Even in an age when death was the punishment for petty theft, that must have sounded very like a symptom of dementia.
More’s appointment as Chancellor was followed by an incident which raises more doubts about his sanity than are provoked by his addiction to self-flagellation – as well as posing more questions about his saintly disposition. Ten days after Wolsey’s fall, More spoke in Parliament in support of a petition which demanded that his deposed predecessor should be more severely punished. That was, in itself, bad enough. He knew that Wolsey’s only crime was failure to deliver the divorce to which, Henry should have known, the Pope would never agree. The debate provided an opportunity for More’s grotesque imagination to allege a new offence for which Wolsey had to answer: breathing in the King’s face with the intention of infecting him with syphilis.
Most saints are less than saintly in their early lives. Some of them are sanctified because of the courage with which they turned their backs on sin. But More’s place in Catholic history is the result of an unusual indulgence. The early years – more gross than gracious – are not forgiven. They are ignored. More’s reputation, within the Catholic Church and beyond, is largely dependent on his choice of death and his conduct between his arrest, on or about April 13th 1534 and his execution on July 6th 1535. Until then he was a scholar of some merit and a statesman of some distinction. But without that final year he would not have become the moral paragon against whose behaviour generations of Catholics were judged. The apparent sudden change of character is not easily explained. Perhaps the prospect of death concentrated his mind on the need to rise above his baser instincts. Catholics – who admit his early failings – will attribute the conversion to Divine Grace. All of which we can be sure is that More changed.
The days of glory began with Thomas More receiving a summons to appear at Lambeth Palace and answer for his conduct. The King already knew that his fallen favourite contested the legality of the royal divorce and was opposed, in principle, to the consequent rejection of the Pope’s authority. But the tribunal before which he appeared – Cranmer, Cromwell, Audley (the Chancellor) and the Abbot of Westminster – politely invited him to sign the Oath of Allegiance. After requesting, and receiving, permission to study the Oath’s wording and the text of the Act of Parliament which gave it statutory force – the first indication of the legalistic battle that More intended to fight – the invitation was rejected. Audley showed More a list of signatures as proof that everybody else of consequence supported the King’s pretension. He misjudged his man. More’s resolution was strengthened by the knowledge that he stood alone.
On April 17th More was taken to the Tower – in time to see Elizabeth Barton, Maid of Kent, and the five priests who had supported her, strapped to boards and dragged behind horses through the city of London before they were hanged, drawn and quartered. A year of butchery had begun. In the first month of More’s imprisonment, the London regular clergy were called to take the Oath. Only one, Nicholas Wilson, refused. He was executed. May was the month of the religious houses. On the 4th the priors of Charterhouse, Beauvale and Axeholme and a Carthusian monk, who had ignored the injunction, were butchered at Tyburn. On June 19th, the vicar of Isleworth and three more Carthusians went to their deaths. The Catholic Church in England was beginning to accumulate its most precious asset, a heavenly host of martyrs.
During his early weeks in the Tower, More refused visits from his family. So Margaret Roper, his daughter, wrote to him. It may be that dark days in prison – as well as the thought of impending death – softened both More’s heart and his language. Much of what is known of his last days – both the conditions in which he lived and his thoughts on the word, the flesh and the devil – was obtained from letters that he wrote in reply. They were addressed to his family, but clearly intended for posterity. Some of them were written with what was described as ‘a coal’. Although More was housed in one of the ‘apartments’ which were kept for the occasional use of the rich and famous, he was at first denied the use of a pen. All his letters display a certainty of salvation and a serenity in the face of death. He feared torture, but composed himself sufficiently to assure Margaret that he was ‘in good health of body and in good quiet of mind’.34 The best service she could render him was to ‘make you all merry in the hope of heaven’.35 Her pleas for him to recant, sign and save his life were gently rejected. ‘I neuer haue prayed God to bring me to hence nor deliuer me from death, but referring all things whole vnto his onely pleasure.’36 When he was allowed books, pen and paper, he read devotional works, by and about the saints and the early Fathers, and he wrote about the victory of faith.
On the day before his execution Thomas More wrote to his daughter, ‘I cumber you, good Margaret, much, but I would be sorry if it should be longer than tomorrow … I never liked your manner to me better than when you kissed me last; for I love it when daughterly love and clear charity has no leisure to love worldly courtesy. Farewell my dear child and pray for me, and I shall for you and all our friends that we may merrily meet in Heaven.’37 That last message contributed to the picture of More which the early biographers – conscious of its importance to the Catholic cause – chose to paint. Many of the letters that they, understandably, chose not to publicise reveal a character that was deeply disturbed. Attempts ‘perversely [to] change the world … into a joyful haven of rest’ could only result in the denial of ‘true happiness’ in heaven.38 Christ had shown the way by using his divine power to increase his suffering to a level never experienced by a mortal. More lived up to that desperate view of salvation by wearing a hair shirt and regularly mortifying the flesh with self-flagellation. Severity was all. The expulsion from the Garden of Eden was, More believed, the result of Eve answering God’s questions rather than referring them to her husband.
More’s conduct during the long wait for certain execution would, in itself, have been enough to guarantee his place in Catholic history, but his posthumous reputation was further enhanced by what he said, or is believed to have said, during his trial and imprisonment and on the scaffold. Nicholas Harpsfield, a Catholic scholar writing about More’s trial fifty years after his death, reported the most famous of all the defendant’s rebukes to his accusers: ‘I have, for every Bishop of yours above one hundred; And for one Councell or Parliament of yours (God knows what manner of one) I have the Councells made these thousand years. And for this one kingdome, I have all other Christian Realms.’39 There is disagreement about whether or not More joked that his beard should not be severed as it had done no wrong; and he may, or may not, have warned the executioner that, because he had a short neck, a clean cut would need much skill. William Roper, his son-in-law and devoted follower who was close by, wrote that More asked the watching crowd ‘to bear witness with him that he should now there suffer death in and for the Holy Catholic Church’, and then protested that he was always ‘the King’s good servant, but God’s first’.40
John Fisher’s last words were not immortalised in the lexicon of martyrs’ valedictions. Created Cardinal by the Pope, in the unaccountable belief that Catholic eminence would save him from execution, he was beheaded, quietly, on Tower Hill on June 22nd 1535. More followed him to the block on July 6th. Both men were canonised on the same day in 1936. More is remembered – in the words of Erasmus, the humanist theologian – as ‘the man for all seasons’. Fisher, although not accorded such historical renown, was, according to Erasmus, ‘the one man of his time who was incomparable for uprightness of life, for learning and for greatness of soul’. He was also venerated by his repentant contemporaries. On his deathbed, John Stokesley, sometime Bishop of London and flagrant apostate, cried out, ‘Oh that I had holden still with my brother Fisher and not left him when time was.’41
Integrity, constancy and learning do not count for as much as glamour, when history makes heroes. Fisher suffered the fate of a self-effacing martyr. More enjoyed the benefit of celebrity status. He possessed all the glamour of the sinner come late to repentance – despite having more to repent than Fisher. In the years that immediately followed their deaths, there were hundreds of martyrs for the faith who – although humble and inarticulate – equally deserve our admiration. Their sacrifice kept the Catholic Church alive in what is now the United Kingdom. During the dark days which followed the Acts of Supremacy, many thousands of men and women – torn between faith and fear – were inspired to hold fast to truth by the example of those who had gone before. And More, despite his faults, became the most famous martyr of them all. Without his example, thousands more Catholics would have fallen by the way.