The Life of Thomas More (68 page)

Yet it would be wrong to consider
A Treatise on the Passion
as an entirely private and meditative work; everything which More wrote also had a public context and significance, and in this book there are obvious calls to ‘christen readers’ and ‘good readers’ to stand firm
within their faith.
⁴⁵
More believed, with much justification, that the destruction of the old religion was being undertaken at the behest of an arrogant and impetuous king, together with councillors who hoped to benefit from the disorder; the ‘reformation’ was being imposed, therefore, upon a nation which remained generally pious and devoted. The substitution of king for pope as head of the Church may not have seemed a particularly damaging or damning development, but More saw further and more clearly than most of his contemporaries; once the community of the faithful, the living and dead, was broken by schism then the faith itself would be placed in severe peril.

More prophesied that the time would come when the faith was so harassed and persecuted that ‘it shall seeme that there shall bee than no chrysten countreyes left at all’.
⁴⁶
This may be construed as the time of Antichrist, but his reign ‘shal be but short’. Then Christ will come ‘and finyshe thys presente worlde, and rewarde euerye good manne after hys good woorkes wrought in hys true catholike faythe’.
⁴⁷
More may well have believed that he was witnessing the events which would lead to the end of the world itself. That is why he continually exhorted his compatriots to remain true to the old religion and why he came to the conclusion of his work with a great paean in honour of the blessed sacrament, that mystical body of Christ which in its earthly form the king seemed about to tear apart. But he never completed
A Treatise on the Passion
; his last words here are ‘quicke liuely membres in the spirituall societie of sayntes’.
⁴⁸
Before he could write the next sentence he was consigned to a cell in the Tower of London.

CHAPTER XXX
THE WEEPING TIME

N the first week of April 1534, More travelled on pilgrimage to Our Lady of Willesden; it was a church favoured by Londoners, and was well known to him. He stayed at the house of Sir Giles Alington, husband to his stepdaughter, and from there wrote to his secretary concerning changes to
A Treatise on the Passion
; ‘thus much is perplex enough,’ he concluded. He was concerned at this time to put his life in order and, a week before, he had arranged ‘a conveyance for the disposition of all his lands’ on his decease;
¹
two days after the first conveyance, he bequeathed to the Ropers a portion of his estate. Evidently he was trying to protect the interests of his family, and no less clearly was he preparing for his own death. All the members of parliament had taken the oath of succession at the end of March, and More realised that soon he would be invited to follow their example. On 12 April, Low Sunday, he attended Mass in St Paul’s; after it had been celebrated he left the church and walked to his old house in Bucklersbury where John and Margaret Clement now lived. But, on this occasion, he was being followed. He had been observed in St Paul’s, and an official of the council tracked him down. Even while he remained in these familiar surroundings, he was handed a summons directing him to appear at Lambeth Palace on the following morning and there to take the oath of succession.

The moment, so long feared, had come. He returned at once to Chelsea and acquainted his family with the unwelcome but not unanticipated news. Then he spent most of the night in prayer. Early the next morning he attended Mass in the village church and was given holy communion; before he left his house for ever, he walked with his family in the garden. He told them that he was likely to be imprisoned and
took his leave of them there; he would not allow them to accompany him to the landing stage where his boat was waiting, but closed the wicket gate and ‘shut them all from him’.
²
Only William Roper was allowed to stay with him and, as his servants rowed them down the Thames to Lambeth, More remained deep in thought. Eventually he roused himself and whispered, ‘Son Roper, I thank our Lord the field is won.’
³

‘Sir, I am thereof very glad.’

Roper later admitted that he did not know what his father-in-law had meant, and it is indeed a somewhat cryptic remark. It is susceptible of at least two interpretations. He had managed to conquer his natural feelings for his family, so that he would not be tempted to betray his conscience for their sake; the gesture of shutting the gate behind him is indicative of this. But he had also won the field on his own behalf; as the events of succeeding weeks will testify, he had managed largely to conquer his own anxieties and had determined how to conduct himself in all dealings with his adversaries. And so his boat came up to the landing stairs at Lambeth, next to the horse ferry; forty-four years before, More had come here with his father on entering the service of Archbishop Morton. The elaborate gateway to the palace had not then been finished, but now More passed through it in his last act of freedom. Other people had already assembled there to take the oath of succession before the king’s commissioners, but Thomas More was the first to be called. He also noticed that he was the only lay person present, which must have suggested to him the importance that was being attached to his decision.

He was led before Cromwell, Cranmer, Audley and William Benson, the Abbot of Westminster. They asked him if he was now ready to swear the oath and he expressed a wish to see it; a small slip of parchment, beneath the impress of the Great Seal, was handed to him and he read it carefully. Then he requested a copy of the Act of Succession itself, which was given to him in the form of a ‘printed roll’.
⁴
He read this, too, and in his precise way he compared the oath to the Act. The commissioners were waiting impatiently for his answer and, finally, after detailed consideration of both documents, he spoke out. ‘My purpose is not to put any fault either in the Act or any man that made it, or in the oath or any man that swears it, nor to condemn the conscience
of any other man. But as for myself in good faith my conscience so moves me in the matter, that though I will not deny to swear to the succession, yet unto the oath that here is offered to me I cannot swear, without the jeoparding of my soul to perpetual damnation.’ It may be supposed that this statement, constructed in the manner of a lawyer to avoid prejudice, had been rehearsed during More’s sleepless nights. All along he had known the opinion of his family. His wife had told him that ‘God regardeth’ the heart rather than the tongue and that the meaning of the oath thereby ‘goeth vpon that they thinke, and not vpon that they say’.
⁵
But More was not capable of such dissimulation. Instead he made a careful point to the commissioners. ‘If you doubt whether I do refuse the oath only for the grudge of my conscience, or any other fantasy, I am ready here to satisfy you by my oath. Which, if you do not trust it, why should you be the better to give me any oath? And if you trust that I will herein swear true, then I trust of your goodness you will not move me to swear the oath you had offered me, perceiving that for to swear it is against my conscience.’
⁶
So he was invoking the dictates of his conscience for his refusal, but at no stage did he explain what they were.

Lord Chancellor Audley then replied to him. ‘We all are sorry to hear you say thus, and see you refuse the oath. On our faith you are the first that has ever refused it, and it will cause the King’s highness to conceive great suspicion of you and great indignation toward you.’ He then showed More a printed roll, with the signatures of the Lords and Commons inscribed upon it, but More simply reiterated his first statement. ‘I myself cannot swear, but I do not blame any other man that has sworn.’ He was then silent, and was asked to walk down into the garden for further reflection or meditation. But it was a hot day and he decided to rest in ‘the olde burned chamber’ on the first floor, which overlooked the garden and the river; this was a ‘waiting’ room, next to the guards’ chamber, that had suffered a fire in the time of Archbishop Warham. As he lingered there he saw Hugh Latimer walking with some of the Lambeth clergy; Latimer was laughing and joking with the chaplains, putting his arm around the shoulders of one or two of them ‘that if they had been women, I wolde haue went he had been waxen wanton’.
⁷
Latimer was of strongly Lutheran tendencies, and had been continually under threat of imprisonment because of his beliefs; but he was laughing
now, in the knowledge that half of his cause was won. More looked on and perhaps raised his eyes to the ever-flowing river.

A fateful spectacle was then played out before him. Dr Nicholas Wilson, a scholar and divine, was escorted from the interview chamber; he was ‘brought by me’, according to More, ‘and gentilmanly sent straight vnto the Towre’.
⁸
He, too, had refused to swear the oath; he had been ‘brought by’ More as living proof of what would happen to all recusants. There was, for them, only one ultimate destination. More later learned that John Fisher had also been taken before the commissioners and dispatched to the Tower for the same reason. The anxiety and threat were too great for some to endure and the vicar of Croydon, Rowland Phillips, well known for his orthodox opinions and his devotion to the old faith, swore to the oath and signed his name. More heard that he had then gone down to the ‘buttry barre’ and ordered drink ‘either for gladnes or for drines [dryness], or else that it might be sene’.
⁹
He might also have called for drink, of course, as a way of slaking his conscience as well as his thirst. In a description of the scene to his daughter More used a phrase from the gospel of St John, with the clear implication that he himself was in the position of St Peter just before he denied Christ. Yet there would be no denial from him. More called all these events a ‘pageant’, and indeed it might have been devised as a theatrical scenario for the state of the realm—a reformer rejoicing, an orthodox cleric bowing to the king’s will and a defiant scholar sent to the Tower.