The Life of Thomas More (62 page)

On the first day of the new year, 1532, Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More exchanged festive gifts; More presented the king with a walking stick inlaid in gold leaf and in turn he was given a great golden bowl. Two weeks later the parliament met, in a session which would decide the course of the Reformation and determine More’s own fate. The struggle began in earnest in February when a bill was presented to the parliament through the agency of Cromwell; it was designed to put pressure on the Pope by denying him much English revenue paid as ‘annates’ by new bishops. At the same time indictments were laid against the privileges of several leading clergy. The direction of policy seems clear, but in practice the situation was thoroughly confused. Henry was still courting the Pope even as he threatened the English Church. The lower house of parliament, in the words of Norfolk, was filled with the ‘infenyte clamor of the temporalyte … agaynst the mysusyng of the spiritual jurysdiccion’,
²⁶
yet at the same time the bill depriving the Pope of annates was strongly resisted; the king himself visited Westminster on three occasions in order to secure the passage of the legislation, and in the end it was passed only when he demanded that the members of the Commons physically stood up to be counted. Those opposing and those supporting his measure were instructed to go to opposite ends of the chamber, thus creating the first recorded parliamentary ‘division’. It was not an auspicious beginning, however, for Cromwell’s schemes against the power of the clergy. Thomas More presided over the Lords for all this period, where he had also witnessed strong resistance to the king’s demands. There must have seemed an opportunity for conciliation or compromise, and More was no doubt ready to put all his skills into the most urgent business of his life.

But then Thomas Cromwell struck again, on this occasion by introducing a petition which complained of the injustice involved in trials for heresy; here, of course, he was attacking the methods and procedures
close to More’s own conduct. The ‘Supplication of the Commons Against the Ordinaries’ ranged over the whole field of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and in large part reflected Christopher St German’s theoretical objections to the clerical courts. The chronicler of this parliament, Edward Hall, reports the agreement of the Commons that ‘all the griefes which the temporall men were greved with should be putte in writying and delyvered to the kyng, which by great advyse was done’.
²⁷
In the middle of March the members of the Commons accordingly submitted a petition to Henry which explained ‘how the temporal men of this realme were sore agreved with the cruel demeanoure of the prelates and ordinaryes [the secular clergy], which touched both their bodyes and goodes’;
²⁸
they then implored the king to establish ‘your jurisdiction and prerogative royal’ thereby bringing his subjects, both clerical and lay, into ‘perpetual unity’.
²⁹
The specific complaints and charges were, on any close scrutiny, unjustified; but that was not the point. Cromwell and his agents were obliged to maintain their campaign against the clergy, if only because it had seemed to be losing any of the momentum which it had once possessed. The Commons, however, delivered their supplication to the king only to request that the parliamentary session be forthwith prorogued. The king rebuked them for their nonchalance and then passed the supplication to Archbishop Warham and convocation. He was assuming the role of supreme mediator between all his subjects.

More realised well enough the pressing danger: his entire career as Lord Chancellor and prosecutor of heresy was being undermined, and it might be that by parliamentary statute heretics would soon be able to ‘swarm’ in the streets without any check. The Commons did adjourn, over the holy period of Easter, but the days of late March and early April were filled with strident controversy. The Church was being seriously threatened and some of its more outspoken members were already fighting back. William Peto was head of the Franciscan Observants at Greenwich and in the Chapel Royal he preached to the king in the manner of Savonarola. ‘Your Highness’s preachers are too much like those of Ahab’s days, in whose mouths was found a false and lying spirit. Theirs is a gospel of untruth … not afraid to tell of license and liberty for monarchs which no king should dare even to contemplate.’
³⁰
Once again the king’s desire to annul his marriage was being implicitly
aligned with his wish to curb the powers of the Church. Peto then delivered his most solemn rebuke. ‘I beseech your Grace to take good heed, lest if you will need follow Ahab in his doings, you will surely incur his unhappy end also, and that the dogs lick your blood as they licked Ahab’s—which God avert and forbid!’
³¹
On the next Sunday a more amenable preacher, Hugh Curwen, accused Peto of being another Micah speaking evil to kings—‘Thou art a dumb dog, or else art fled.’ No sooner had he uttered these solemn words from the pulpit of the Chapel Royal when Henry Elstow, the guardian of the Greenwich Observants, spoke out to rebuke him. He reminded the preacher that Peto had fled only so far as a provincial council in Canterbury, and then accused Curwen of being ‘one of the four hundred lying prophets, into whom the spirit of lying is entered: thou seekest by proposing adultery to establish a succession. In this, thou art betraying the King to everlasting perdition!’

This was a significant moment, when the king’s opponents found their voices. The Earl of Essex, sitting with the king, shouted out. ‘You shameless friar! you shall be sewn up in a sack and thrown into the Thames, if you do not speedily hold your tongue!’ Elstow replied finely: ‘Make those threats to your fellow courtiers. As for us friars, we make little account of them indeed, knowing well that the way lieth as open to heaven by water as by land.’
³²
Peto and Elstow were popular preachers, with a holy mission to mingle with all of the people, and in that sense they represented a real threat to Henry’s stratagems. A sermon in London could become a great public event, and the volatility of the populace was well known. That is why official papers of the time display evident unease at the prospect of controversy stirred by the words of priests and friars. There were also the presses. A treatise by Catherine’s chaplain, entitled
Invicta Veritas
, had been imported, while various ultra-orthodox sermons and treatises were reissued with warnings against the ‘false and subtyll deceites’
³³
of the heretics.

This was the atmosphere in which parliament reassembled on 10 April, with the supplication of the Commons not yet answered by the prelates. More sent for one of the members who supported the queen’s cause, Sir George Throckmorton, and received him ‘in a little chamber within the Parliament chamber where, as I do remember, stood an altar or a thing like unto an altar whereupon he did lean’.
³⁴
More was at that
moment holding a conversation with a conservative bishop, but he broke it off. Throckmorton was one of those who met at the Queen’s Head tavern to plan their strategy and now, before the most fateful events of the session, More wished to encourage him. ‘I am very glad,’ he said, ‘to hear the good report that goeth of you and that ye be so good a catholic man as ye be; and if ye do continue in the same way that ye began and be not afraid to say your conscience, ye shal deserve great reward of God and thanks of the king’s grace at length and much worship to yourself.’
³⁵
It is unlikely that Throckmorton was the only member to be summoned by More in order to be told to stand firm, and the evidence suggests that there was now an organised attempt to thwart the king’s will. Throckmorton, for example, had already been instructed in the same manner by Father Peto, whose stern sermon to the king had led to his confinement within Lambeth Palace; it was here that Peto urged Throckmorton to serve the queen’s cause ‘as I would have my soul saved’.
³⁶
Throckmorton also conferred with three others supporting the cause of the queen and the old faith, Nicholas Wilson, Richard Reynolds and John Fisher. It is perhaps significant that More had told him that the king would thank him ‘at a later date’; clearly he believed that this struggle would be of some duration and that any favourable outcome would take time. But there was no time.

Ten days after the opening of parliament the convocation of the clergy gave their answer to the ‘supplication’, which was no answer at all; it simply reaffirmed the rights and duties of Christ’s Church on earth. A more substantial document was presented a week later, but this second answer proved no more favourable to a king who was all the time testing the extent of his new-found power; he handed the letter to the Commons with the remark that ‘We think this answer will smally please you, for it seemeth to us very slender’.
³⁷
His anger was also directed at those members of the Commons, such as Throckmorton, who openly expressed their support for Catherine.

The king’s distrust of the bishops and his displeasure at what seemed like organised opposition to him in parliament, meant that More and the Aragonese loyalists were losing ground. There were rumours of bills or statutes designed to strip the Church of its powers, and on 8 May a deputation of prelates implored the king to defend their ancient liberties. Two days later he delivered an unexpected and unwelcome reply;
in return for royal favour and protection, he demanded that all legislative power be given into his own hands. On the following day he maintained the pressure upon an increasingly hapless clergy by summoning members of parliament into his presence. He displayed to them the oath which prelates made to the Pope at the time of their consecration and addressed them with stern words. ‘Well beloved subjects, we thought that the clergie of our realme had been our subjects wholy, but now wee have well perceived that they bee but halfe our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects.’
³⁸
He then instructed the Commons to take action. Two days later the clergy began to debate a possible compromise, yet still Henry made more demands. A bill was being prepared by Thomas Cromwell, which would have transferred the powers of the Church to parliament. Eustace Chapuys noted, on 13 May, that ‘The king also wishes bishops not to have the power to arrest persons accused of heresy’.
³⁹
This was at the heart of More’s concerns, and at this juncture he expressed his thorough opposition. ‘The Chancellor and the bishops oppose the bill as much as they can,’ Chapuys continued, ‘at which the king is exceedingly angry, especially against the said Chancellor.’
⁴⁰
More had come out into the open at last.

His decision was a token of the urgency, or danger, of the situation; but already it was too late. The king had found his power, under the guidance of Thomas Cromwell, and now pressed the clergy into final surrender. He again prorogued parliament and on the following day, 15 May, convocation accepted his demands in a document known as the ‘submission of the clergy’. Effectively he destroyed any independence which the Church still enjoyed, by insisting that all ecclesiastical law required royal assent and that canons or constitutions could be changed only with his approval. He, not the Pope, was truly the head of the Church in England. On the day after the clergy submitted, Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor.

He had failed in almost all of his objectives, and in a polemic he was then completing he wrote that ‘Our sauyour sayth that ye chyldren of darkenes be more polytyke in theyr kynde then are the chyldren of lyght in theyr kinde. And surely so semeth it now’.
⁴¹
He also condemned ‘traytors’ at court and berated convocations ‘of theyr dewty so neglygent’;
⁴²
clearly he believed that the débâcle was the result both of secular conspiracy and clerical incompetence. It is true that the clergy
had voluntarily surrendered to the king, rather than being obliged to do so by parliamentary statute, and in that sense the ‘submission’ was without the absolute force of law. But this was small comfort. The ‘faction’ or ‘coalition’ which More had helped to organise had been unable to check the course of events. The Church had lost its independence and papal authority had been fatally compromised; the authority of More, also, had been undermined. It is possible, indeed probable, that Henry was waiting for his resignation. The two men met for the last time in the garden of York Place; More handed back the great seal, bowed, and withdrew.

CHAPTER XXVIII
ALL THE BEASTS OF THE WOODS