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Chapter 3

Thomas More

For all his learning, and the “incomparable uprightness of life” and “greatness of soul” for which he earned the praise of Erasmus, John Fisher has been somewhat eclipsed by the man with whom he shares a date on the calendar of saints.

As history and especially recent history testifies, Thomas More continues to inflame the imagination. We think perhaps of Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, adapted into a classic Oscar-winning movie in 1966 starring Paul Scofield as More and an all-star supporting cast, including Orson Welles, Robert Shaw, Susannah York, and a young Vanessa Redgrave as Anne Boleyn. Alternatively, we might think of the later TV movie, first aired in 1988, in which Charlton Heston plays More, the inimitable Sir John Gielgud plays Cardinal Wolsey, and an older Vanessa Redgrave plays More’s wife, Alice. More recently, and much more ignominiously, we might think of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the BBC’s 2015 miniseries in which the conniving Thomas Cromwell becomes the hero, and the saint, Thomas More, becomes the villain. “Through Cromwell,” writes Thomas More scholar William Fahey, “we hear Mantel’s own frustration with the enduring nature of the truth and the haggard, but consistent, account of Catholic history.” According to Fahey, Mantel’s revisionist distortion of history is an “attempt at clouding any clear memory of a Catholic Britain and a Catholic sensibility towards life.”¹¹

Having highlighted what might be called the good, the not so good, and the downright ugly in recent dramatic interpretations of the life and legacy of Thomas More, we can hardly pass over the manner in which More has inspired the imagination of the greatest playwright of them all. The story of Shakespeare’s involvement in the play Sir Thomas More has all the ingredients of a first-rate mystery story that warrants our attention. A pro-Catholic play written in very anti-Catholic times, it illustrates the powerful presence of Sir Thomas More in England’s cultural, religious, and political consciousness more than sixty years after his martyrdom and offers valuable evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholic sympathies.

Before such evidence is examined, we should consider the evidence of Shakespeare’s admiration for More discernible in a pun on More’s name in the Poet’s Sonnet 23:

As an unperfect actor on the stage,

Who with his fear is put besides his part,

Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,

Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;

So I for fear of trust forget to say

The perfect ceremony of love’s right,

And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,

O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might:

O let my books be then the eloquence,

And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,

Who plead for love, and look for recompense,

More than that love which more hath more expressed.

O learn to read what silent love hath writ,

To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

Clearly the twelfth line of the sonnet comes alive with allegorical significance when the middle or final “more” is capitalized: More than that love which More hath more expressed, or, alternatively, More than that love which more hath More expressed. Once the pun is accepted, the sonnet springs to life metaphysically and metaphorically, contrasting Shakespeare’s own “unperfect” love, weakened by “fear” and “rage,” with the holy love “which [M]ore hath more expressed.” There is also a sublime allusion to the Mass as “The perfect ceremony of love’s right,” reinforced by the pun on “right/rite,” and illustrating a deep theological understanding of the Mass as the “perfect ceremony” which re-presents Christ’s death for sinners as “love’s right” and “love’s rite.” Unlocking this beguiling sonnet still further, we see that the Poet laments that he is not present at this “perfect ceremony” as often as he should be because of “fear of trust,” perhaps a reference to the spies who were present at these secret Masses intent on reporting the names of “papists” and on betraying the priests to the authorities. Since he does not have the heroic self-sacrificial love, even unto death, of Thomas More, the Poet desires that his “books” be his “eloquence,” the “dumb presagers of my speaking breast.” The final two lines are surely addressed to both the Poet himself and to his Reader, beseeching the latter to “learn to read” in his plays what the Poet’s love, silent through fear, dare not speak openly. Since they will not hear the Poet speak his mind openly, his readers must see what he means in his plays, hearing with their eyes and using their own “love’s fine wit” to discern his deeper meaning.

O learn to read what silent love hath writ,

To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

Bearing in mind Shakespeare’s evident devotion to Thomas More, it would not be too surprising to believe that he had written or collaborated on a play about the English Reformation’s most famous martyr, whose martyrdom served as the archetype and antetype of all the martyrs to follow, including several whom Shakespeare seems to have known personally.¹²

Returning to the play Sir Thomas More, it is intriguing that the manuscript contains the handwriting of six other people besides that of Shakespeare. It is clearly a collaboration by several of the best-known writers of the day to get the play past the state censor. The censor’s handwriting is one of the six, the other five being the collaborating playwrights, and it is interesting that the censor’s comments illustrate that he is at pains to remove or minimize any suggestion that Thomas More and his fellow martyr, John Fisher, were justified in their refusal to kowtow to Henry VIII’s demands that they sign the Oath of Supremacy. The censor, Sir Edmund Tilney, deleted the whole of the passage in which More and Fisher are shown to be right and virtuous in their opposition to the king’s imposition of a state religion. Tilney’s unease at such praise of Catholic dissidents in the heated religious and political situation in Elizabethan and Jacobean England is hardly surprising. Indeed, one wonders why the playwrights should ever have believed that such overt criticism of Queen Elizabeth’s father and such obvious sympathy for Catholic martyrs would ever escape the censorship of the ever-vigilant Tilney. Quite simply, Thomas More was still a hot potato, more than sixty years after his death, touching a raw nerve, not only with Elizabeth, whose father had the saint’s blood on his hands, but to the Elizabethan state as a whole. As such, any positive depiction of More could be seen as a dangerous indictment of England’s present rulers. Considering that Catholic priests were being put to death in the 1590s and considering that Elizabeth was a jealous guardian of her position as head of the Church of England, inherited from her father, it was surely unthinkable that such a play would ever be approved in Elizabeth’s reign.

Such evidence points inescapably to the play being submitted to Tilney after Elizabeth’s death in March 1603, at a time when it was widely believed that the new king, James I, would show tolerance to Catholicism, as he had hinted in the years before his accession and as was suggested by the fact that his wife was a Catholic. It was seen as confirmation of James’s moderation in religious matters that one of his first acts following his accession was to make peace with Spain, thereby significantly alleviating the religiously charged atmosphere of English foreign policy. In the first year of his reign it was decreed that fines and other penalties would no longer be imposed on Catholics. With the onerous pecuniary burden removed, thousands of closet Catholics stayed away from Anglican services and sought once again to practice their faith fully and openly. “It was at once apparent,” wrote the celebrated Shakespeare scholars Mutschmann and Wentersdorf, “that Elizabeth’s policy of extermination had not achieved its purpose, and that Catholicism still constituted a formidable power in most parts of the country.”¹³

There is no doubt that England’s beleaguered Catholic population felt a sense of elation that “Bloody Bess” had died, hoping that the decades of relentless persecution would die with her. Shakespeare’s own sense of elation is perhaps evident in the title of the comedy All’s Well That Ends Well, which he wrote at around this time, and also in the writing of Measure for Measure, arguably his most openly Catholic play. It’s almost as though a huge weight had been lifted from the Bard’s overburdened muse and that he felt finally able to express himself more freely without fear of censorship or retribution. If the evidence of these plays is to be believed, it is clear that the “honeymoon period” following James’s accession presented a golden opportunity to publish a play on the martyr Thomas More, which would have been impossible earlier.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon period would be short-lived, lasting from the queen’s death in March 1603 to the renewal of full-blown anti-Catholic persecution in July of the following year. It is extremely likely, therefore, that the play was submitted to Tilney during this sixteen-month period and that the revisions in the handwriting of the other playwrights were also written during this period. Following the renewal of persecution, all hopes of the play getting past the censor would have evaporated as would the unusual collaboration of the five playwrights. It would be a further four hundred years, during the reign of another Elizabeth, before Sir Thomas More would finally be performed. When the Royal Shakespeare Company staged the play at the new Globe Theatre in the summer of 2004, Shakespeare and More were at last united in art as they had always been in creed. The Bard who, in Ben Jonson’s memorable tribute, “was not of an age, but for all time,” had finally been allowed to pay homage to the Saint who, reminding ourselves of the title of Robert Bolt’s play, was “a man for all seasons.”

Having perambulated for a while in pursuit of the manner in which England’s greatest writer was inspired by arguably her greatest saint, we’ll return to the mundane facts of More’s life, the raw material which would serve as fuel which the Muse of Shakespeare and others would ignite.

Thomas More was born in the city of London on February 6, 1478. Like Fisher, he was a great scholar and an inheritor of all that was best in the Christian humanism of the Renaissance. He read Aristotle in the Greek at Oxford and, while still a young man, had mastered not only Greek and Latin, but French, arithmetic, and geometry. He learned to play the viol and the flute and tried his hand at verse. Inspired perhaps by his reading in the original Latin of Boethius’s Consolatio (The Consolation of Philosphy), his early verse cycle on the fickleness of Fortune rehearses one of the great themes of his life, the need to remain detached from the vicissitudes of life:

Whoso delighteth to proven and assay

Of wavering Fortune the uncertain lot,

If that the answer please you not always

Blame you not me, for I command you not

Fortune to trust; and eke¹ full well you wot²

I have of her no bridle in my fist,

She runneth loose and turneth where she list.

As a young man, More lectured in law and also on St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (City of God). Augustine’s theme, that the whole of human history is a war between the forces aligned to the Catholic Church (the City of God) and those aligned with the devil and the forces of evil (the City of Man), could be seen as the motif for More’s whole life and the philosophy which underpinned it. Like Augustine after his conversion, More always sought the City of God, forsaking the comforts that the world has to offer in order to remain focused on the promise of heaven, thereby spurning the empty promises of the Earthly City or the City of Man. Once we understand the influence of Augustine, we will better understand why More chose the path in life that he took, irrespective of the personal cost. Seeing with the eyes of Augustine, More always mistrusts those who give their loyalty to the City of Man, immersing themselves in the cares and pleasures of a transient decaying world, and puts his trust instead in the City of God.

Shortly after giving his series of lectures on De Civitate Dei, More went to live near the London Charterhouse so that he could test his vocation to the religious life. For some four years he took part in the daily religious life of the Carthusians, and one can only imagine the depth of the impact which these years as a lay associate of the Carthusian monks had on his heart, mind, and soul. One can also scarcely imagine what thoughts and prayers must have been going through his mind more than thirty years later when he watched from his prison cell these same London Carthusians passing below his window en route to the gallows, knowing in his mind that he would soon be destined to follow in their footsteps.

Although he would eventually discern a vocation for marriage, the habits of prayer and mortification that he learned from the Carthusians would remain with him for life. “He used oftentimes to wear a sharp shirt of hair next to his skin,” Cresacre More writes in his biography of More, published in 1630.¹⁴ Only More’s daughter, Margaret Roper, was privy to her father’s habit of wearing the hairshirt, which he never “wholly” left off, and it’s likely that we would never have known of this penitential habit if More’s daughter-in-law, Anne Cresacre, had not caught sight of it, much to More’s displeasure. Other mortifications included regular fasting and allowing himself only four or five hours of sleep. It was his habit to rise at two o’clock in the morning and devote five hours to study and devotion. Then, at 7 a.m., before commencing with the business of the day, he would always attend Mass. Thomas Stapleton, an early biographer of More, tells us that More’s daily Mass attendance was so much an integral part of his life that he would not even allow the summons of the king himself to disturb him:

This duty [of Mass attendance] he so strictly observed that, when summoned once by the king at a time when he was assisting at Mass and sent for a second time and third time he would not go until the whole Mass was ended; and to those who called him and urged him to go at once to the king and leave the Mass, he replied that he was paying his court to a greater and better Lord and must first perform that duty.¹⁵

On another occasion, after More had been made Chancellor of the realm, he rebuked the Duke of Norfolk for suggesting that the king would be offended at his dressing in a surplice and singing in the choir now that he held such an illustrious office of state: “My master, the King, cannot be displeased at the service I pay to his master, God,” More replied. In similar fashion, he was once invited to ride on horseback during a religious procession as befitted his dignity. “My Lord went on foot,” he replied, referring to the Via Dolorosa. “I will not follow Him on horseback.”¹⁶

More married Jane Colt in 1505, with whom he had three daughters, Margaret, Elizabeth, and Cecily, each of whom were born in three successive years after the marriage, with a son, John, arriving shortly afterwards. Following the sudden and untimely death of his wife in 1511, More married again within a few weeks, no doubt needing someone to help him raise his four children, all of whom were under six years old. Alice Middleton, his second wife, much maligned for no good reason as she has been by More’s biographers, remained with him, through good times and bad, for the rest of his life. Throughout his married life, More seems to have been an exemplary husband and father, yet he never seemed to have entirely gotten the Carthusians out of his system. “I believe, Meg,” he said to his beloved daughter Margaret when she visited him in the Tower shortly before his execution, “that they that have put me here ween they have done me a high displeasure, but I assure thee on my faith, mine own good daughter, if it had not been for my wife and ye that be my children I would not have failed long ere this to have closed myself in as strait a room and straiter, too.”¹⁷

Like Fisher, More was a friend of Erasmus, whom he first met in 1499 when Erasmus was in London en route to Oxford. More was only twenty years old, eleven years Erasmus’s junior, but the two men struck up an instant and lasting friendship. Within a year of their first meeting, Erasmus was writing to a friend asking whether nature had ever molded “a character more gentle, endearing and happy than Thomas More.”¹⁸ A student of the Greek classics, like both Fisher and Erasmus, More epitomized the best of the Christian humanism of the Renaissance. “Reason,” he wrote, “so far from being an enemy to faith, is servant to faith.”¹⁹

More’s personal piety is legendary. It is said that whenever he heard that a woman was in labor he would begin praying and not cease doing so until news of the baby’s birth was brought to him. His almsgiving was munificent and magnanimous. There are stories of his wandering the streets of London inquiring into the state of poor families and relieving their necessities with gifts of gold. Whenever his work at court or elsewhere kept him from visiting the poor in person, he would send members of the family to offer relief, especially to the sick and the aged. We hear that he often invited poor neighbors to his house for dinner, “receiving them … familiarly and joyously.” We are told also that he “rarely invited the rich and scarcely ever the nobility.”²⁰ He rented a house in his local parish of Chelsea, then a village separated from London to its east, in order to provide a home for the sick, the poor, and the elderly, maintaining them at his own expense. When at home at Chelsea, he would always assemble at bedtime his family and other household members for prayer. All would kneel and recite three psalms, after which they would pray the Salve Regina and end with the De Profundis for the dead.

More took great care and interest in the education of his own children, hiring a tutor to teach them at home. In a letter to the tutor, we catch fleeting glimpses of More’s own philosophy of education. “Though I prefer learning joined with virtue to all the treasures of kings,” he wrote, “yet renown for learning, when it is not united with a good life, is nothing else than splendid and notorious infamy.” Concerned with the education of his three daughters, More was at pains that they should know the classics. “[I]f a woman (and this I desire and hope with you as their teacher for all my daughters) to eminent virtue should add an outwork of even moderate skill in literature, I think she will have more real profit than if she had obtained the riches of Croesus and the beauty of Helen. I do not say this because of the glory which will be hers … but because the reward of wisdom is too solid to be lost like riches or to decay like beauty.”²¹ Commenting on More’s philosophy of education, his biographer Christopher Hollis sees him as a champion of the philosophy of homeschooling:

More had not, it seems, any belief in schools and indeed, where the family was of sufficient size to give companionship and where the home life was such as that of the More household, it would have been folly to have sent the children away from such a home to school.²²

Perhaps we cannot discuss the importance of Thomas More without at least referencing his Utopia, an early work which has not only established More’s place in the literary canon but one which continues to confuse even the most diligent reader. Alluding to this work in his essay on More, G. K. Chesterton reminds us that More “was not only a humanist, but a humorist.”²³ Listing a litany of the outlandish ideas that More entertains in his prototypical fantasy, Chesterton endeavors to put More’s flights of fancy into perspective:

[I]f it be asked how or why a Catholic, let alone a great and holy Catholic, even entertained such ideas, the answer is that a thinking Catholic always does entertain them — if only to reject them. Thomas More did primarily entertain them and did finally reject them. A Catholic is not a man who never thinks of such things. A Catholic is a man who really knows why he does not think they are true. But when people begin to think they are true, to think that far worse things are true, to force the worst things of all upon the world, the situation is entirely different; and cannot be related in any way to the jokes which a young Renaissance humorist put into a book like Utopia.²⁴

We will leave it there, even though much more could be said. Hollis grapples with it manfully in his biography of More, devoting a whole chapter to More’s utopian enigma, and I have grappled with it manfully, or as manfully as I’m able, in both the classroom and in discussion with people who know it much better than I. Enough. Let’s move on.

In 1522, long after More had made a name for himself in court and had become a favorite of the king, he displayed his own detachment from all such trifles and trinkets in the first of his great contemplative essays, an examination of the Four Last Things, which are, lest we need reminding, Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. In such a somber work, it was not surprising that More should gain inspiration from Boethius, whose Consolatio is perhaps the finest contemplation on such things ever written. Thus, translating liberally from Boethius’s Latin, More writes: “One man to be proud that he beareth rule over other men is much like one mouse would be proud to bear a rule over other mice in a barn.”²⁵ Thus More and Boethius join with Shakespeare’s Lear to “laugh at gilded butterflies,” those courtiers, those “poor rogues” festooned in bright colors, peacock-proud, who “talk of court news … who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out.”²⁶ Yet, as ridiculous as such worldly pride might be, More’s experience of life in King Henry’s court had tempered the temptation to laugh too loudly, not least because he knew that such “gilded butterflies” carried a sting in their tails. “It is,” he would write in the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation at the end of his life, “hard for any person either man or woman, in great worldly wealth and much prosperity, so to withstand the suggestions of the devil and occasions given by the world, that they keep themselves from the deadly desire of ambitious glory.” Such words should be borne in mind as we consider the fall from grace of Henry VIII who, in 1521, with the help of More and others, possibly including John Fisher, was working to defend the doctrines of Holy Mother Church from the attacks of Martin Luther.

After his initial rebellion in 1517, Luther had finally broken from the papacy in 1520 with the propagation of his treatise on the Babylonish Captivity of the Church. Henry had read this in April 1521 and was resolved to respond to it in person. With the publication of his Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (A Defense of the Seven Sacraments), he emerged as a champion of the Church. It was described by his biographer J. J. Scarisbrick as “one of the most successful pieces of Catholic polemics produced by the first generation of anti-Protestant writers.”²⁷ Henry dedicated the volume to Pope Leo X who responded by bestowing upon Henry the title Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith), a title which would be revoked following Henry’s own break with Rome. The Assertio was widely read and within a year had been published in two separate German translations, prompting Luther’s response, Against Henry, King of the English, to which Thomas More wrote his Response to Luther, defending the king’s position, which was also, of course, the position of the Catholic Church. The other main defender of the king in the face of Luther’s tirade against him was John Fisher, who issued his own riposte to Luther’s broadside. Alluding to Fisher’s response to Luther, More defended the papacy against Luther’s attacks upon it:

As regards the primacy of the Roman pontiff, the Bishop of Rochester has made the matter so clear from the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and from the whole of the Old Testament and from the consent of all the holy fathers, not of the Latins only but of the Greeks also (of whose opposition Luther is wont to boast), and from the definition of a General Council in which the Armenians and Greeks, who at that time had been most obstinately resisting, were overcome and acknowledged themselves overcome, that it would be utterly superfluous for me to write again upon the subject.

Needless to say, the loyalty of neither More nor Fisher would mean anything to the king once they were forced, in conscience, to oppose his will on this very issue of papal primacy. It is surely one of the great ironies of history that the point of contention which would lead Henry to put his erstwhile friends and allies to death would be the very issue which he had himself so vociferously asserted and which More and Fisher, as his allies, had defended him so vociferously for so doing.

More was, however, under no illusions with respect to the king’s character. After his son-in-law, William Roper, had congratulated him on his receiving the king’s favor, having observed the king enfolding his arms affectionately round More’s neck, More replied that he had “no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head would win him a castle in France … it should not fail to go.” This was in 1525. By 1529 he had won the favor of the king to such an extent that, following the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, More was appointed to the position of Lord Chancellor. Having little option but to accept, he must have felt that the king had handed him a poisoned chalice, one which might well cost him his life. He was already in a precarious position because he had expressed to the king his opposition to the king’s plans to have his marriage with Catherine annulled. It was true that Henry, having appointed More as his Chancellor, had told him that he would not force his conscience on the issue of the marriage, telling him that he must first look to God and after God to the king; yet, even so, More could not feel confident that his opposition to the king’s plans would be tolerated for long.

As it became clear that the pope would not bend to the king’s will on the matter of the annulment, Henry began to listen to the self-interested promptings of the anti-Catholic Thomas Cromwell that, as the king, he should free himself from the will of Rome by making himself the head of the Church in England. Such a suggestion was reinforced by the anti-clericalism of Parliament. “Now with the Commons is nothing but ‘Down with the clergy,’” Bishop John Fisher complained, “and this, meseemeth, is for lack of faith only.”²⁸

On May 16, 1531, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, delivered to the king a document that became known as “the submission of the clergy,” placing the hierarchy of the Church in England under the will and rule of the king. On the same day, Thomas More resigned as Chancellor with the excuse of ill health. For More, the king’s triumph had changed the very nature of England, destroying the very legal system on which she stood and which had held the king as having authority sub Deo et lege (under God and the law). Having declared himself head of the Church in his realm, Henry, like the Caesars of old, had effectively declared himself divine, above the laws of either God or man. He was now a law unto himself who could and would do as he willed.

The rest of the sordid history leading up to the arrests of Fisher and More has been covered in the previous chapter, so we will not repeat it here. More was arrested on April 17, 1534, for refusing to take the oath of succession and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Bishop John Fisher, having also refused to take the oath, was imprisoned in the Tower nine days later. Now, all that awaited them was their final via crucis, the way of the cross and the path of sorrows which leads, via martyrdom, to the heavenly reward.