CHAPTER XXIV
Henry VIII and Thomas More
1529–35

I. THE REFORMATION PARLIAMENT

IN the Parliament that assembled at Westminster on November 3, 1529, the controlling groups—the nobles in the Upper House, the merchants in the Commons—agreed on three policies: the reduction of ecclesiastical wealth and power, the maintenance of trade with Flanders, and support of the King in his campaign for a male heir. This did not carry with it approval of Anne Boleyn, who was generally condemned as an adventuress, nor did it prevent an almost universal sympathy with Catherine.¹ The lower classes, politically impotent, were as yet unfavorable to the divorce, and the northern provinces, intensely Catholic, sided wholeheartedly with the Pope.² Henry kept this oppisition temporarily quiet by remaining orthodox in everything but the right of the popes to govern the English Church. On that point the national spirit, even stronger in England than in Germany, upheld the hand of the King; and the clergy, though horrified at the thought of making Henry their master, were not averse to independence from a papacy so obviously subject to a foreign power.

About 1528 one Simon Fish published a six-page pamphlet which Henry read without known protest, and many read with frank delight. It was called “The Supplication of the Beggars,” and asked the King to confiscate, in whole or part, the wealth of the English Church:

The nobles and merchants might have admitted some exaggeration in the indictment, but they thought it led to a charming conclusion—the secularization of Church property. “These lords,” wrote the French ambassador Jean du Bellay, “intend... to impeach... the Church and take all its goods; which it is hardly needful for me to write in cipher, for they proclaim it openly .... I expect the priests will never have the Great Seal”—i.e., never head the government—“again, and that in this Parliament they will have terrible alarms.” ⁴ Wolsey had held off this attack on Church property, but his fall left the clergy powerless except through the (declining) faith of the people; and the papal authority that might have protected them by its prestige, its interdicts, or its allies, was now the main object of royal wrath, and the football of Imperial politics. Custom required that legislation affecting the Church in England should be passed, or require confirmation, by the Convocation of the clergy under the archbishops of Canterbury and York. Could this assembly assuage the anger of the King and check the anticlericalism of Parliament?

The battle was opened by the Commons. It drew up an address to the King, professing doctrinal orthodoxy, but strongly criticizing the clergy. This famous “Act of Accusation” charged that Convocation made laws without the consent of King or Parliament, seriously limiting the liberty of laymen, and subjecting them to heavy censures or fines; that the clergy exacted payment for the administration of the sacraments; that the bishops gave benefices to “certain young folks, calling them their nephews,” and despite the youth or ignorance of such appointees; that the episcopal courts greedily exploited their right to levy fees and fines; that these courts arrested persons, and imprisoned them, without stating the charges against them; that they indicted and severely punished laymen upon suspicion of the slightest heresy; and the document concluded by begging the King for the “reformation” of these ills.⁵ Henry, who may have been privy to the composition of this address, submitted its main points to the Convocation, and asked for an answer. The bishops admitted some abuses, which they attributed to occasional individuals; they affirmed the justice of their courts; and they looked to the pious King, who had so nobly rebuked Luther, to aid them in suppressing heresy. Then, grievously mistaking the royal temper, they added warlike words:

The issue was joined. Henry did not meet it at once. His first interest was to get Parliament’s approval for a strange request—that he be excused from repaying the loans that had been made to him by his subjects.* The Commons protested and consented. Three other bills were introduced, which aimed to check the authority of the clergy over the probate of wills, their exaction of death taxes, and their holding of plural benefices. These bills were passed by the Commons; they were passionately opposed by the bishops and abbots sitting in the Upper House; they were amended, but in essence they were made law. Parliament adjourned on December 17.

During the summer of 1530 the King received some costly encouragement. Thomas Cranmer, a doctor of divinity at Cambridge, suggested to Henry that the major universities of Europe should be polled on the question whether a pope could permit a man to marry his brother’s widow. A merry game of rival bribery ensued: Henry’s agents scattered money to induce negative judgments; Charles’s agents used money or threats to secure affirmative replies.⁷ The Italian answers were divided; the Lutheran universities refused any comfort to the Defender of the Faith; but the University of Paris, under pressure by Francis,⁸ gave the answer so doubly dear to the King. Oxford and Cambridge, after receiving stern letters from the government, approved Henry’s right to have his marriage annulled.

So strengthened, he issued through his attorney general (December 1530) a notice that the government intended to prosecute, as violators of the Praemunire Statute, all clergymen who had recognized Wolsey’s legatine power. When Parliament and Convocation reassembled (January 16, 1531), the King’s agents happily announced to the clergy that the prosecution would be withdrawn if they would confess their guilt and pay a fine of £118,000 ($11,800,000?).⁹ They protested that they had never wanted Wolsey to have such power, and had recognized him as legate only because the King had done so in the trial of his suit before Wolsey and Campeggio. They were quite right, of course, but Henry sorely needed money. They mournfully agreed to raise the sum from their congregations. Feeling his oats, the King now demanded that the clergy should acknowledge him as “the protector and only supreme head of the Church and clergy of England”—i.e., that they should end their allegiance to the Pope. They offered a dozen compromises, tried a dozen ambiguous phrases; Henry was merciless, and insisted on Yes or No. Finally (February 10, 1531) Archbishop Warham, now eighty-one, reluctantly proposed the King’s formula, with a saving clause—“so far as the law of Christ permits.” The Convocation remained silent; the silence was taken as consent; the formula became law. Mollified, the King now allowed the bishops to prosecute heretics.

Parliament and Convocation adjourned again (March 30, 1531). In July Henry left Catherine at Windsor, never to see her again. Soon thereafter she was removed to Ampthill, while Princess Mary was lodged at Richmond. The jewels that Catherine had worn as Queen were required of her by Henry, who gave them to Anne Boleyn.¹⁰ Charles V protested to Clement, who addressed a brief to the King (January 25, 1532) rebuking him for adultery, and exhorting him to dismiss Anne and keep Catherine as his lawful queen until decision should be given on his application for annulment. Henry ignored the rebuke, and pursued his romance. About this time he wrote one of his tender missives to Anne:

When Parliament and Convocation reconvened (January 15,1532) Henry secured from all four houses further anticlerical legislation: that clerics under the degree of subdeacon, when charged with felony, should be tried by civil courts; that fees and fines in ecclesiastical courts should be reduced; that ecclesiastical death dues and probate fees should be lowered or abolished; that the annates (the first year’s revenues of a newly appointed prelate) should no longer be paid to the Pope; and that the transfer of English funds to Rome for dispensations, indulgences, and other papal services should cease. A sly hint was sent to the Curia that the annates would be restored to the Pope if the marriage with Catherine should be annulled.

By this time a majority of the bishops had been won over to the view that they would not lose in authority or revenue if the English Church were independent of Rome. In March 1532, the Convocation announced its readiness to separate from the papacy: “May it please your Grace to cause the said unjust exactions to cease.... . And in case the Pope will make process against this realm for the attaining these annates .... may it please your Highness to ordain in the present Parliament that the obedience of your Highness and of the people be withdrawn from the See of Rome.”¹² And on May 15 the Convocation presented to the King a pledge to submit all its subsequent legislation to a committee—half laymen, half clergymen—empowered to veto any ordinances which it should judge injurious to the realm. So, in this epochal “Reformation Parliament” and Convocation the Church of England was born, and became an arm and subject of the state.

On May 16 Thomas More, having failed to stem the anticlerical tide, resigned as chancellor, and retired to his home. In August Archbishop Warham died, after dictating a deathbed repudiation of the Convocation’s submission to the King. Henry replaced More with Thomas Audley, and Warham with Thomas Cranmer. The revolution proceeded. In February 1533, Parliament enacted a “Statute of Appeals,” by which all litigation that had formerly been sent for judgment to Rome was henceforth to be decided “in the spiritual and temporal courts within the Realm, without regard to any... foreign... inhibition, excommunication, or interdict.”¹³

On January 15,1533, Henry married Anne, who was already four months pregnant.¹⁴ The King had now urgent reasons for the annulment of his union with Catherine. Having made, without result, another appeal to the Pope, he secured from Convocation an approval of his “divorce” (April 15 3 3); on May 2 3 Cranmer, as Archbishop of Canterbury, declared the marriage with Catherine unlawful and void; and on May 28 he pronounced Anne to be Henry’s lawful wife. Three days later Anne, in brocade and jewels, rode to her coronation as Queen of England in a stately pageant designed by tradition and Hans Holbein the Younger. Amid the exaltation she noticed the disapproving silence of the crowd, and she may have wondered how long her uneasy head would wear the crown. Pope Clement pronounced the new marriage null, and its future offspring illegitimate, and excommunicated the King (July 11, 1533). On September 7 Elizabeth was born. Charles’s ambassador reported to him that the King’s mistress had given birth to a bastard.¹⁵

Parliament, which had adjourned on May 4, resumed its sittings on January 15, 1534. Annates and other papal revenues were now definitely appropriated to the Crown, and the appointment of bishops became in law, as already in practice, a prerogative of the King. Indictments for heresy were removed from clerical to civil jurisdiction.

In 1533 Elizabeth Barton, a nun of Kent, announced that she had received orders from God to condemn the King’s remarriage, and had been allowed to see the place that was being prepared for Henry in hell. The royal court put her through a severe examination, and drew from her a confession that her divine revelations were impostures, and that she had permitted others to use them in a conspiracy to overthrow the King.¹⁶ She and six “accomplices’ were tried by the House of Lords, were judged guilty, and were executed (May 5, 1534). Bishop Fisher was accused of having known of the conspiracy and of having failed to warn the government; it was also charged that he and Catherine had been privy to a plan, conceived by Chapuys and discouraged by Charles, for an invasion of England to coincide with an insurrection of Catherine’s supporters.¹⁷ Fisher denied the charges, but remained under suspicion of treason.

Henry’s most aggressive agent in these affairs was Thomas Cromwell. Born in 1485, the son of a Putney blacksmith, he grew up in poverty and hardship, and wandered for years, as practically a vagabond, through France and Italy. Back in England, he entered the textile business, became a moneylender, and made a fortune. He served Wolsey faithfully for five years, defended him in adversity, and earned Henry’s respect for his industry and loyalty. He was made successively chancellor of the exchequer, master of the rolls, and (May 1534), secretary to the King. From 1531 to 1540 he was the chief administrator of the government as an obedient executor of the royal will. His aristocratic enemies, who despised him as a parvenu symbol of their rising rivals, the businessmen, accused him of practicing the principles of Machiavelli’s Prince, of accepting bribes, of selling offices, of inordinately loving wealth and power. His aim, which he hardly sought to disguise, was to make the King supreme over every phase of English life, and to finance an absolute monarchy with the confiscated wealth of the Church. In pursuing his purposes he showed consummate and unscrupulous ability, multiplied his fortune, and won every battle except the last.

It was probably at his suggestion and through his manipulation that Henry, disturbed by increasing hostility among the people, persuaded Parliament to pass an Act of Succession (March 30, 1534) which declared the marriage with Catherine invalid, transformed Mary into a bastard, named Elizabeth heiress to the throne unless Anne should have a son, and made it a capital crime for any person to question the validity of Anne’s marriage to Henry, or the legitimacy of their offspring. All Englishmen and women were by the Act required to take an oath of loyalty to the King. Royal commissioners, supported by soldiery, rode through the country, entered homes, castles, monasteries, and convents, and exacted the oath. Only a few refused it; among these were Bishop Fisher and Thomas More. They offered to swear to the succession, but not to the other contents of the Act. They were committed to the Tower. Finally the Parliament voted the decisive Statute of Supremacy (November 11, 1534); this reaffirmed the King’s sovereignty over Church and state in England, christened the new national Church Ecclesia Anglicana, and gave the King all those powers over morals, organization, heresy, creed, and ecclesiastical reform which had heretofore belonged to the Church. The Act made it treason to speak or write of the King as a usurper, tyrant, schismatic, heretic, or infidel. A new oath was required of all bishops, that they would accept the civil and ecclesiastical suoremacy of the King without the reservation “So far as the law of Christ allows,” and would never in the future consent to any resumption of papal authority in England.

All the forces of the government were deployed to paralyze the opposition to these unprecedented decrees. The secular clergy generally pretended to submit. Many monks and friars, owning a direct allegiance to the Pope, shied away from the oaths, and their resistance shared in the King’s later decision to close the monastries. Henry and Cromwell were especially incensed by the obstinacy of the friars in the Charterhouse, a Carthusian monastery in London. Three Carthusian priors came to Cromwell to explain their reluctance to acknowledge any layman as head of the Church in England; Cromwell sent them to the Tower. On April 26, 1535, they, with another friar and a secular priest, were tried by the King’s judges, who were for pardoning them; but Cromwell, fearing that lenience would encourage wider resistance, demanded a verdict of guilty, and the judges yielded. On May 3 all five men, still refusing to accept the Act of Supremacy, were dragged on hurdles to Tyburn, and one after another was hanged, cut down alive, disemboweled, and dismembered.¹⁸ One severed arm was hung over the entrance arch of the Charterhouse to instruct the remaining friars, but none withdrew his refusal. Three were put in the Tower; they were fastened to uprights by irons around their necks and feet, and were forced to stand in that position for seventeen days, fed, but never loosed for any natural need. The remaining Carthusians, still obdurate, were dispersed among other monasteries, with the exception of ten who were imprisoned in Newgate; nine of these died of “prison fever and filth.”¹⁹

Henry was now the sole judge of what, in religion and politics, the English people were to believe. Since his theology was still Catholic in every respect except the papal power, he made it a principle to persecute impartially Protestant critics of Catholic dogma, and Catholic critics of his ecclesiastical supremacy. Indeed, the prosecution of heresy had continued, and would continue, all through his reign. In 1531, by order of Chancellor More, Thomas Bilney was burned for speaking against religious images, pilgrimages, and prayers for the dead. James Bainham was arrested for holding that Christ was only spiritually present in the Eucharist; he was tortured to draw from him the names of other heretics; he held fast, and was burned at Smithfield in April 1532. Two others were burned in that year, and the Bishop of Lincoln offered an indulgence of forty days to good Christians who would carry a faggot to feed the fire.²⁰

This reign of terror reached its apex in the prosecution of Fisher and More. Erasmus had described the Bishop of Rochester as “a person loaded with every virtue.”²¹ But Fisher had himself been guilty of persecution, and he had joined the Spanish ambassador in urging Charles to invade England and depose Henry.²² In law he had committed treason to die state, which could not excuse him on the plea that he had been loyal to the Church. The new pontiff, Paul III, made the mistake of naming the imprisoned Bishop a cardinal. Though Fisher declared that he had not sought the honor, Henry interpreted the appointment as a challenge. On June 17, 1535, the Bishop, now in his eightieth year, was given a final trial, and again refused to sign the oath acknowledging Henry as head of the English Church. On June 22 he was led to a block on Tower Hill; “a long, lean body,” an eyewitness described him, “nothing in a manner but skin and bones, so that the most part that there saw him marveled to see any man, bearing life, to be so far consumed.”²³ On the scaffold he received an offer of pardon if he would take the oath; he refused. His severed head was hung upon London Bridge; it might now, if it could, said Henry, go to Rome and get its cardinal’s hat.²⁴

But a more troublesome recusant remained.

II. THE UTOPIAN

The father of Thomas More was a successful lawyer and prominent judge. Thomas received his education at St. Anthony’s School in London; was farmed out as a page to Archbishop Morton, and was by him confirmed in orthodoxy, integrity, and a cheerful piety. Morton predicted, we are told, that “this child here waiting at table .... will prove a marvelous man.”²⁵ At fifteen the youth went to Oxford, and was soon so fascinated with classical literature that his father, to save the youth from becoming an impecunious scholar, pulled him out of the university and sent him to study law in London. Oxford and Cambridge still aimed at preparing students for an ecclesiastical career; New Inn and Lincoln’s Inn trained the men who were now taking over from the clergy the government of England. Only eight members of the House of Commons in the Reform Parliament of 1529–37 had received a university education, while a rising proportion were lawyers and businessmen.

In 1499, aged twenty-one, More met Erasmus, and was charmed into humanism. Their friendship is one of the fragrant essences of the time. They were both given to a measured merriment, and salted their studies with laughing satire. They shared a distaste for Scholastic philosophy, whose subtleties, said More, were as profitable as milking a he-goat into a sieve.²⁶ They both hoped for a reform of the Church from within, avoiding a violent disruption of religious unity and historical continuity. More was not the peer of Erasmus in learning or tolerance; indeed, his customary gentleness and generosity were sometimes interrupted by strong passions, even by bigotry; in controversy he stooped now and then, like nearly all his contemporaries, to fierce invective and bitter vituperation.²⁷ But he was the superior of Erasmus in courage, sense of honor, and devotion to a cause. The letters that they exchanged are a precious testimony to the graces of an ungracious age. “Farewell,” ends one of More’s, “sweetest Erasmus, dearer to me than my eyes!” ²⁸

He was one of the most religious men of the century, shaming with his laic piety the wordliness of ecclesiastics like Wolsey. At twenty-three, when he was already advanced in the study of law, he thought of becoming a priest. He gave public lectures (1501) on Augustine’s City of God, and such older pundits as Grocyn sat in his audience. Though he criticized the monks for shirking their rule, he fervently admired the sincere monastic state, and sometimes regretted that he had not chosen it. For a long time he wore a horsehair shirt next to his skin; now and then it drew enough blood to visibly stain his clothing. He believed in miracles and saintly legends, therapeutic relics, religious images, and pilgrimages,²⁹ and wrote devotional works to the medieval tune that life is a prison, and that the aim of religion and philosophy should be to prepare us for death. He married twice, and brought up several children in a Christian discipline at once sober and cheerful, with frequent prayer, mutual love, and complete trust in Providence. The “Manor House” in Chelsea, to which he moved in 1523, was famous for its library and gallery, and its gardens extending for a hundred yards down to the Thames.

At twenty-six (1504) he was chosen a burgess delegate to Parliament. There he argued so successfully against a measure proposed by Henry VII that the King briefly imprisoned and heavily fined the senior More as a devious means of teaching the young orator the comforts of conformity. At the close of that Parliament More returned to private life, and prospered in the practice of law. In 1509 he was persuaded to take the office of under-sheriff in the City—i.e., ancient London north of the Thames. His functions, suiting his temperament, were judicial rather than adventurous. His judgments earned him wide renown for wisdom and impartiality, and his polite refusal of presents from litigants violated time-dishonored precedents that were still vigorous in Francis Bacon’s day. Soon he was back in Parliament; and by 1515 he was Speaker of the House of Commons.

In a famous letter to Hutten (July 23, 1517) Erasmus described More as of medium height, pale complexion, auburn hair, careless of dress or formality, abstemious in food and drink, cheerful with quick humor and ready smile, inclined to jokes and pranks, and keeping in his house a jester, a monkey, and many minor animal pets; “all the birds in Chelsea came to him to be fed.” A faithful husband, a loving and idolized father, a persuasive orator, a judicious counselor, a man alert with charity and friendly offices—“in short,” concluded this fond sketch, “what did Nature ever create milder, sweeter, and happier than the genius of Thomas More?”³⁰

He found time to write books. He began a History of Richard III, but as its tenor was sharply against autocracy, and autocracy was on the throne, he thought it discreet to avoid the fatality of print. It was published after his death; Shakespeare based a play on it; and the biography, broadcast by the drama, may bear some responsibility for the character that Richard bears. In 1516, as if in a playful aside, More tossed off, in Latin, one of the most famous of all books, creating a word, setting a precedent and pace for modern utopias, anticipating half of socialism, and voicing such criticism of English economy, society, and government that again he put valor behind discretion, and had the volume published abroad in six Latin editions before allowing it to be printed, still in Latin, in England. He professed to have written it for amusement, with no intention to make it public; but he thanked Erasmus for seeing it through the press at Louvain.³¹ It was translated into German, Italian, and French before the first English version appeared (1551), sixteen years after the author’s death. By 1520 it was the talk of the Continent.

More had called it Nusquama, Nowhere; we do not know who had the happy thought of changing this, amid the printing, to the Greek equivalent Utopia? ³² The mise-en-scène of the tale was so ingenious that many readers took it as authentic history, and a missionary was said to have planned to go and convert the Utopians to Christianity.³³ More had been sent by Henry VIII on an embassy to Bruges (1515); thence he had passed to Antwerp with a letter of introduction from Erasmus to Peter Giles, the city clerk. The prelude pretended that Giles had introduced More to a bearded, weather-worn Portuguese mariner, Raphael Hythlodaye (Greek for “skilled in nonsense”), who had sailed with Amerigo Vespucci in 1504, had made his way round the globe (six years before Magellan’s voyage), and had visited, in the New World, a happy island whose inhabitants had solved most of the problems plaguing Europe at that time. The Louvain edition made the hoax more plausible by prefixing a woodcut of the isle, and a specimen of the Utopian language. Only one slip gave the plot away: Hythlodaye digresses to praise Archbishop Morton,³⁴ in terms more natural to More’s gratitude than to the mariner’s experience.

The imaginary Magellan describes the communism of the islanders:

In Utopia each man takes his product to the common store, and receives from it according to his needs. None asks more than enough, for security from want forestalls greed. Meals are eaten in common, but if a man wishes he may eat at home. There is no money in Utopia, no buying cheap and selling dear; the evils of cheating, stealing, and quarreling over property are unknown. Gold is used not as currency but to make useful things, like chamber pots. No famines or lean years come, for the communal storehouses maintain a reserve against emergencies. Every family engages in both agriculture and industry, men and women alike. In order to ensure adequate production, six hours of work per day are required of each adult, and choice of occupation is limited by collective needs. The Utopians are free in the sense of freedom from hunger and fear, but they are not free to live on the labor of others. There are laws in Utopia, but they are simple and few; therefore every man is expected to plead his own case, and no lawyers are allowed. Those who violate the laws are condemned for a time to serve the community as bondmen; they do the more disagreeable tasks; but after finishing their turn they are restored to full equality with their fellow men. Those who repeatedly and seriously offend are put to death. The supply of bondmen is raised by ransoming prisoners condemned to death in other lands.

The unit of society in Utopia is the patriarchal family. “The wives be ministers to their husbands, the children to their parents.” ³⁶ Monogamy is the only form of sexual union permitted. Before marriage the betrothed are advised to view each other naked, so that physical defects may be revealed in time; and if they are serious the contract may be annulled. The wife after marriage goes to live with her husband in his father’s household. Divorce is allowed for adultery and by free mutual consent, conditional on the consent of the communal council. Annually every thirty families choose a phylarch to govern them; every ten phylarchs choose a chief phylarch to administer a district of 300 households. The 200 phylarchs serve as a national council, which elects for life the prince or king.

A basic obligation of the phylarchs is to preserve the health of the community by providing clean water, public sanitation, medical and hospital care; for health is the chief of all earthly boons. The rulers organize education for children and for adults; they stress vocational training, support science, and discourage astrology, fortunetelling, and superstition. They may make war on other peoples if they judge that the good of the community so requires. “They count this the most just cause of war, when any people holdeth a piece of ground void and vacant to no good nor profitable use, keeping other from the use or possession of it, who... by the law of nature ought thereby to be nourished and relieved.” ³⁷ (Was this a defense of the colonization of America?) But the Utopians do not glorify war; “they hate it as plainly brutal.... and, contrary to the sentiment of nearly every other nation, they regard nothing more inglorious than glory derived from war.”³⁸

Religion in Utopia is almost, not quite, free. Tolerance is given to any creed except atheism and the denial of human immortality. The Utopian may, if he wishes, worship the sun or the moon. But those who use violence of action or speech against any recognized religion are arrested and punished, for the laws seek to prevent religious strife.³⁹ Deniers of immortality are not punished, but they are excluded from office, and are forbidden to voice their views to any but priests and “men of gravity.” Otherwise “it should be lawful for every man to favor and follow what religion he would... and might do his best to bring other to his opinion, so that he did it peaceably... and soberly, without haste and contentious rebuking and inveighing against other.” ⁴⁰ So in Utopia there are various religions, but “the most and wisest part.... believe that there is a certain godly power unknown, everlasting, incomprehensible, inexplicable, far above the reach and capacity of man’s wit, dispersed through the world.”⁴¹ Monasticism is permitted, provided the monks will busy themselves with works of charity and communal utility, such as repairing roads and bridges, cleaning ditches, cutting timber, and acting as servants, even as bondmen; and they may marry if they so desire. There are priests, but they too marry. The state keeps as religious feasts the first and last of every month and year, but in the religious exercises of these holydays “no image of any god is seen in the church,” and “no prayers be used but such as every man may boldly pronounce without the offending of any sect.” ⁴² On each of these holydays wives and children prostrate themselves before their husbands or parents, and ask forgiveness for any offense committed, or any duty omitted; and no one is to come to church until he has made peace with his enemy.—It is a Christian touch, but More’s youthful humanism appears in his partial acceptance of the Greek view of suicide: if a man suffers from a painful and incurable disease he is permitted and encouraged to end his life. In other cases, More believes, suicide is cowardice, and the corpse is to be “cast unburied into some stinking marsh.”⁴³

We do not know how much of this represented More’s considered conclusions, how much was Erasmus, how much was half-playful imagination. However, the young statesman carefully dissociated himself from the socialism of his Utopians: “I am of opinion,” he represents himself as saying to Hythlodaye, “... that men shall never live wealthily where all things are in common. For how can there be abundance of goods .... where the regard of his own gains driveth not to work, but the hope that he hath in other men’s travails maketh him slothful.... It is not possible for all things to be well unless all men were good—which I think will not be yet these good many years.” ⁴⁴ Yet some sympathy with radical yearnings must have inspired so extensive a picture of the communist ideal. Other pages of the Utopia criticize with angry severity the exploitation of the poor by the rich. Enclosures of once common lands by English lords are condemned with such detail and spirit as seem unlikely in a foreigner. Says Hythlodaye to More:

It is almost the voice of Karl Marx moving the world from a foot of space in the British Museum. Certainly Utopia is one of the most powerful, as well as one of the first, indictments of the economic system that continued in modern Europe until the twentieth century; and it remains as contemporary as a planned economy and the welfare state.

III. THE MARTYR

How did it come about that a man with such ideas seething in his head should have been appointed to Henry VIII’s council in the year after the publication of Utopia? Probably the King, despite his reputation for learning, could not bear to read the book in Latin, and died before it was Englished. More kept his radical fancies for his friends. Henry knew him as a rare synthesis of ability and integrity, valued him as a tie with the House of Commons, knighted him, made him Under-Treasurer (1521), and entrusted him with delicate tasks of diplomacy. More opposed the foreign policy by which Wolsey led England into war with Charles V; the Emperor, in More’s view, was not only dangerously resourceful, he was also the heroic defender of Christendom against the Turks. When Wolsey fell More so far forgot his manners as to review, in Parliament, the faults and errors that had caused the fall. As leader of the opposition he was the logical successor of the Cardinal, and for thirty-one months he served as Chancellor of England.

But the real successor to Wolsey was the King. Henry had discovered his own power and capacity, and was resolved, he said, to free himself from an unfriendly and obstructive papacy, and to legitimate his union with the woman whom he loved, and who could give him an heir to the throne. More found himself no guide of policy, but a servant of aims that ran counter to his deepest loyalties. He consoled himself by writing books against Protestant theology, and prosecuting Protestant leaders. In A Dialogue Concerning Herestes (1528), and in later works, he agreed with Ferdinand II, Calvin, and the Lutheran princes on the necessity of religious unity for national strength and peace. He feared the division of Englishmen into a dozen or a hundred religious sects. He who had defended Erasmus’ Latin translation of the New Testament protested against Tyndale’s English version as distorting the text to prove Lutheran points; translations of the Bible, he felt, should not be turned into weapons for tavern philosophers. In any case, he held, the Church was too precious a vehicle of discipline, consolation, and inspiration to be torn to pieces by the hasty reasoning of vain disputants.

From this mood he passed to the burning of Protestants at the stake. The charge that in his own house he had a man flogged for heresy ⁴⁷ is disputed; More’s account of the offender seems far removed from theology: “If he spied any woman kneeling” in prayer, and “if her head hung anything low in her meditations, then would he steal behind her, and .... would labor to lift up all her clothes and cast them quite over her head.” ⁴⁸ It may be that in the three death sentences pronounced in his diocese during his chancellorship he was obeying the law that required the state to serve as the secular arm of ecclesiastical courts;⁴⁹ but there is no doubt that he approved of the burnings.⁵⁰ He admitted no inconsistency between his conduct and the large toleration of religious differences in his Utopia; for even there he had refused toleration to atheists, deniers of immortality, and those heretics who resorted to violence or vituperation. Yet he himself was guilty of vituperation in arguing against the English Protestants.*

The time came when More thought Henry the most dangerous heretic of all. He refused to approve the marriage with Anne Boleyn, and he saw in the anticlerical legislation of 1529–32 a ruinous assault upon a Church that to his mind stood as an indispensable base of social order. When he retired from office to the privacy of his Chelsea home (1532), he was still in his prime at fifty-four, but he suspected that he had not much longer to live. He tried to prepare his family for tragedy by talking (so reports his son-in-law William Roper)

His expectations were fulfilled. Early in 1534 he was indicted on a charge of having been privy to the conspiracy connected with the Nun of Kent, He admitted having met her, and having believed her to be inspired, but he denied any knowledge of conspiracy. Cromwell recommended, Henry granted, forgiveness. But on April 17 More was committed to the Tower for refusing to take oath to the Act of Succession, which, as presented to him, involved a repudiation of papal supremacy over the Church in England. His favorite daughter Margaret wrote to him begging him to take the oath; he replied that her plea gave him more pain than his imprisonment. His (second) wife visited him in the Tower, and (according to Roper) berated him for obstinacy:

Other efforts were made to move him, but he smilingly resisted them all.

On July 1, 1535, he was given a final trial. He defended himself well, but he was pronounced guilty of treason. While he was returning from Westminster to the Tower his daughter Margaret twice broke through the guard, embraced him, and received his last blessing. On the day before his execution he sent his hairshirt to Margaret, with a message that “tomorrow were a day very meet” to “go to God.... Farewell, my dear child; pray for me, and 1 shall pray for you and all your friends, that we may merrily meet in heaven.” ⁵⁴ When he mounted the scaffold (July 7), and found it so weak that it threatened to collapse, he said to an attendant, “I pray you, Mr. Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.” ⁵⁵ The executioner asked his forgiveness; More embraced him. Henry had given directions that only a few words should be allowed the prisoner. More begged the spectators to pray for him, and to “bear witness that he... suffered death in and for the faith of the Holy Catholic Church.” He then asked them to pray for the King, that God might give him good counsel; and he protested that he died being the King’s good servant, but God’s first.⁵⁶ He repeated the Fifty-first Psalm. Then he laid his head upon the block, carefully arranging his long gray beard that it should take no harm; “pity that should be cut,” he said, “that hath not committed treason.” ⁵⁷ His head was affixed to London Bridge.

A wave of terror passed through an England that now realized the resolute mercilessness of the King, and a shudder of horror ran through Europe. Erasmus felt that he himself had died, for “we had but one soul between us”;⁵⁸ he said that he had now no further wish to live, and a year later he too was dead. Charles V, apprised of the event, told the English ambassador: “If I had been master of such a servant, of whose doing I myself have had these many years no small experience, I would rather have lost the best city in my dominions than lose such a worthy councilor.” ⁵⁹ Pope Paul III formulated a bull of excommunication outlawing Henry from the fellowship of Christendom, interdicting all religious services in England, forbidding all trade with it, absolving all British subjects from their oaths of allegiance to the King, and commanding them, and all Christian princes, to depose him forthwith. As neither Charles nor Francis would consent to such measures, the Pope withheld issuance of the bull till 1538. When he did promulgate it Charles and Francis forbade its publication in their realms, unwilling to sanction papal claims to power over kings. The failure of the bull signalized again the decline of papal authority and the rise of the sovereign national state.

Dean Swift thought More the man “of the greatest virtue”—perhaps using this word in its old sense of courage—“this kingdom ever produced.” ⁶⁰ On the four hundredth anniversary of their execution the Church of Rome enrolled Thomas More and John Fisher among her saints.

IV. A TALE OF THREE QUEENS

Within some thirty months of More’s death Henry lost three of his six queens. Catherine of Aragon wasted away in her northern retreat, still claiming to be Henry’s only lawfully wedded wife and England’s rightful queen. Her faithful maids continued to give her that title. In 1535 she was removed to Kimbalton Castle, near Huntingdon, and there she confined herself to one room, leaving it only to hear Mass. She received visitors, and “used them very obligingly.” ⁶¹ Mary, now nineteen, was kept at Hatfield, only twenty miles away; but mother and daughter were not allowed to see each other, and were forbidden to communicate. They did nevertheless, and Catherine’s letters are among the most touching in all literature. Henry offered them better quarters if they would acknowledge his new queen; they would not, Anne Boleyn had her aunt made governess to Mary, and bade her keep “the bastard” in place by “a box on the ears now and then.” ⁶² In December 1535, Catherine sickened, made her will, wrote to the Emperor asking him to protect her daughter, and addressed a moving farewell to her “most dear lord and husband” the King:

Henry wept on receiving the letter; and when Catherine died (January 7, 1536), aged fifty, he ordered the court to go into mourning. Anne refused.⁶⁴

Anne could not know that within five months she too would be dead; but she knew that she had already lost the King. Her hot temper, her imperious tantrums, her importunate demands, wearied Henry, who contrasted her railing tongue with Catherine’s gentleness.⁶⁵ On the day of Catherine’s burial Anne was delivered of a dead child; and Henry, who still yearned for a son, began to think of another divorce—or, as he would put it, an annulment; his second marriage, he was quoted as saying, had been induced by witchcraft, and was therefore void.⁶⁶ From October 1535 he began to pay special attention to one of Anne’s maids, Jane Seymour. When Anne reproached him he bade her bear with him patiently, as her betters had done.⁶⁷ Perhaps following ancient tactics, he accused her of infidelity. It seems incredible that even a flighty woman should have risked her throne for a moment’s dalliance, but the King appears to have sincerely believed in her guilt. He referred the rumors of her amours to his Council; it investigated, and reported to the King that she had committed adultery with five members of the court-Sir William Brereton, Sir Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, Mark Smeton, and her brother Lord Rochford. The five men were sent to the Tower, and on May 2,1536, Anne followed them.

Henry wrote to her holding out hopes of forgiveness or lenience if she would be honest with him. She replied that she had nothing to confess. Her attendants in prison alleged that she had admitted receiving proposals of love from Norris and Weston, but that she claimed to have repulsed them. On May 11 the grand jury of Middlesex, having been asked to make local inquiries into offenses allegedly committed by the Queen in that county, reported that it found her guilty of adultery with all five of the accused men, and gave specific names and dates.⁶⁸ On May 12 four of the men were tried at Westminster by a jury including Anne’s father, the Earl of Wiltshire. Smeton confessed himself guilty as charged; the others pleaded not guilty; all four were convicted. On May 15 Anne and her brother were tried by a panel of twenty-six peers under the presidency of the Duke of Norfolk, her uncle but political enemy. Sister and brother affirmed their innocence, but each member of the panel announced himself convinced of their guilt, and they were sentenced to be “burned or beheaded, as shall please the King.” On May 17 Smeton was hanged; the other four men were beheaded as befitted their rank. On that day Archbishop Cranmer was required by royal commissioners to declare the marriage with Anne invalid, and Elizabeth a bastard; he complied. The grounds for this judgment are not known, but presumably Anne’s alleged prior marriage with Lord Northumberland was now pronounced real.

On the eve of her death Anne knelt before Lady Kingston, wife of the warden, and asked a last favor: that she should go and kneel before Mary and beseech her, in Anne’s name, to forgive the wrongs that had come to her through the pride and thoughtlessness of a miserable woman.⁶⁹ On May 19 she begged that her execution should take place soon. She appeared to derive some comfort from the thought that “the executioner I have heard to be very good, and I have a little neck”—whereupon she laughed. That noon she was led to the scaffold. She asked the spectators to pray for the King, “for a gentler and more merciful prince was there never; and to me he was ever a good, a gentle, and sovereign lord.” ⁷⁰ No one could be sure of her guilt, but few regretted her fall.

On the day of her death Cranmer gave the King a dispensation to marry again in renewed quest for a son; on the morrow Henry and Jane Seymour were secretly betrothed; on May 30, 1536, they were married; and on June 4 she was proclaimed queen. She was of royal lineage, being descended from Edward III; she was related to Henry in the third or fourth degree of consanguinity, which called for another dispensation from the obedient Cranmer. She was of no special beauty, but she impressed all with her intelligence, kindness, even modesty; Cardinal Pole, Henry’s most thoroughgoing enemy, described her as “full of goodness.” She discouraged the King’s advances while Anne lived, refused his gifts, returned his letters unopened, and asked him never to speak to her except in the presence of others.⁷¹

One of her first acts after marriage was to effect a reconciliation between Henry and Mary. He did it in his own way. He had Cromwell send her a paper entitled “The Confession of the Lady Mary”: it acknowledged the King as supreme head of the Church in England, repudiated “the Bishop of Rome’s pretended authority,” and recognized the marriage of Henry with Catherine as “incestuous and unlawful.” Mary was required to sign her name to each clause. She did, and never forgave herself. Three weeks later the King and Queen came to see her, and gave her presents and 1,000 crowns. She was again called Princess; and at Christmas, 1536, she was received at court. There must have been something good in Henry—and in “Bloody Mary”—for in his later years she almost learned to love him.

When Parliament met again (June 8, 1536) it drew up at the King’s request a new Act of Succession, by which both Elizabeth and Mary were declared illegitimate, and the crown was settled on the prospective issue of Jane Seymour. In July Henry’s bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, died; now all the hopes of the King lay in Jane’s pregnancy. England rejoiced with him when (October 12,1537) she was delivered of a boy, the future Edward VI. But poor Jane, to whom the King was now as deeply attached as his self-centered spirit allowed, died twelve days after her son’s birth. Henry was for some time a broken man. Though he married thrice again, he asked, at his death, to be buried beside the woman who had given her life in bearing his son.

What were the reactions of the English people to the events of this world-shaking reign? It is difficult to say; the testimony is prejudiced, ambiguous, and sparse. Chapuys reported in 1533 that, in the opinion of many Englishmen, “the last King Richard was never so much hated by his people as this King.” ⁷² Generally the people sympathized with Henry’s desire for a son, condemned his severity to Catherine and Mary, shed no tears over Anne, but were deeply shocked by the execution of Fisher and More. The nation was still overwhelmingly Catholic,⁷³ and the clergy—now that the government had appropriated the annates—were hoping for reconciliation with Rome. But hardly any man dared raise his voice in criticism of the King. Criticism he received, and from an Englishman, but one with the Channel between him and the King’s practiced arm.

Reginald Pole was the son of Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury, herself the niece of Edward IV and Richard III. He was educated at Henry’s expense, received a royal pension of 500 crowns a year, and was apparently destined for the highest offices in the English Church. He studied in Paris and Padua, and returned to England in high favor with the King. But when Henry insisted on hearing his opinion of the divorce, Reginald frankly replied that he could not approve of it unless it should be sanctioned by the Pope. Henry continued the youth’s pension, and permitted him to return to the Continent. There Pole remained twenty-two years, rose in papal esteem as scholar and theologian, and was made a cardinal at the age of thirty-six (15 3 6). In that year he composed in Latin a passionate attack upon Henry—Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione (In Defense of Church Unity). He argued that Henry’s assumption of ecclesiastical supremacy in England invited the division of the Christian religion into national varieties, and that the resultant clash of creeds would bring social and political chaos to Europe. He charged Henry with egomania and autocracy. He scored the English bishops for yielding to the enslavement of the Church by the state. He denounced the marriage with Anne as adultery, and predicted (not too wisely) that the English nobility would forever rank Elizabeth as “a harlot’s bastard.”⁷⁴ He called upon Charles V to waste no ammunition on the Turks, but to turn the Imperial forces against England’s impious King. It was a powerful invective, spoiled by youthful pride in eloquence. Cardinal Contarini advised the author not to publish it, but Pole insisted, and sent a copy to England. When Paul III made Pole a cardinal Henry took it as an act of war. The King abandoned all thought of compromise, and agreed with Cromwell that the monasteries of England should be dissolved, and their property added to the Crown.