Ten Tudor Statesmen

by Arthur D. Innes

More stood in high favour. He had not climbed to a great position by arduous effort; greatness, worthy of it as he was, had been thrust upon him. His advancement was promoted by Wolsey, who was seldom vindictive except towards rivals whose power might make them dangerous. In 1521 he was knighted. When Parliament was summoned in 1523 he was made Speaker, by no means at his own desire, but chiefly at that of the King and the Cardinal. The result was probably not quite what Wolsey had anticipated. On his appointment, he had implied very clearly, though in diplomatic terms, that he meant to uphold freedom of speech in the House. But the business on hand was the voting of money, and Wolsey made the mistake of attempting to overawe the Commons by coming down to the House himself. The Members declined to speak or vote in his presence; the Cardinal’s demands were received with dead silence. Wolsey turned on the Speaker. The Speaker made it perfectly clear that the House could not give way on the question of privilege. When Wolsey withdrew, Parliament demonstrated its loyalty by making a substantial grant.

According to More’s son-in-law, this incident brought More into the black books of the Cardinal, who with ill intent tried to get him sent on an embassy to Spain, under colour of complimenting him. If Wolsey really meant evil by him, his designs came to nothing, for there was no sign of any diminution in the royal favour. Already, however, in 1525, Wolsey’s position was becoming precarious, though to all appearance he was as dominant as ever. More’s next advancement was to the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1526; and from this time Henry’s personal demands on his time and his society became exceedingly pressing. A year later, the whole of the king’s real interest was absorbed in the divorce question, which was to seal Wolsey’s fate directly, and More’s indirectly. Henry consulted him about it, and More then as always told his master honest truth—he did not see how the marriage with Katharine could lawfully be voided. From that position he never swerved. The king could respect conscientious scruples on the part of a favourite, and did so as long as More remained a favourite. More, however, had no illusions about the king’s constancy. “If my head,” he told Roper, “would win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go.” But when Henry decided that Wolsey could no longer serve his turn, it was More whom he selected to fill the office of Lord Chancellor, in spite of his views of the divorce.

During these years, the uprising of Luther had developed into a widespread religious revolt. Henry, having no quarrel with Pope Leo, and proud of his own attainments as a theologian, chose to enter the lists for the demolition of Luther; producing an apologia for the Papacy which earned him the title of “Defender of the Faith.” Before publishing this work he showed it to More, who warned him, with shrewd foresight, that, if ever he did come to have a quarrel with the Pope, he would find it very difficult to get over his own argument, which proved too much in support of Papal authority. Henry, however, would not modify the view then expressed, and succeeded in satisfying his counsellor that it was sound. In due course the prophecy came true: Henry repudiated the position he had formerly defended. Unhappily for More, however, the king had finally convinced him, and he declined to surrender his conviction: with fatal consequences.

Viewed even exclusively as a religious movement, Luther’s revolt would not have attracted More’s sympathies. He had never doubted any of the dogmas of the Church, though he had a plentiful contempt for many prevailing corruptions which were recognised as such by men to whom heresy was never imputed by their bitterest enemy. He believed with conviction a great deal that Erasmus accepted merely pro forma. Luther not only propounded views on specific dogmas which More regarded as heretical, he challenged the whole authority of Rome; and More believed in the authority of Rome. But beyond all this the Lutheran revolt was very soon followed by the German Peasant revolt, which deluged half Europe with blood. The Peasants’ War was completely misapprehended in England, where the agricultural troubles, bad as they were, could bear no comparison with the oppression from which the German peasants suffered; but its leadership fell, naturally enough, into the hands of men as fanatical in their zeal for religious as for social reform. The overthrow of all authority and the universal triumph of sheer anarchy appeared to be their goal; and the world believed, or was taught to believe, that it was Luther who had started the conflagration. The heretical pamphlets which issued from Germany and Switzerland—lumped together, by those who did not know the facts, as Lutheran—gave colour to this belief by the virulence of their attacks on the Papacy and the clergy; and it is small wonder that many of the most liberal-minded men could anticipate nothing but stark ruin, the coming of chaos, unless the torrent were stayed. The threatening crash of all reverence, of all authority save such as could be enforced by push of pike, seemed to be brought measurably closer, when, in 1527, the Imperial armies sacked Rome in emulation of Alaric, and the representative of St. Peter was held a prisoner by the representative of Caesar Augustus.

In the abstract, and under Utopian conditions, More was singularly alive to the beauty of the principle of practically universal toleration. But Europe and England were presenting a problem which could never have arisen in Utopia at all. Even in Utopia, it was recognised that certain negations were directly anti-social, and that the propagation of them must be repressed. Here in Europe, it seemed as if every negation of a received dogma was to be turned into an anti-social engine. Under the conditions, the toleration of any heresy, certainly of all such as palpably involved an attack on authority, tended to anarchy. The conclusion that what was good unreservedly in Utopia would not be good in England is obvious. We can all see now, of course, that More misinterpreted the facts. The anarchism was an accident of the religious movement, which it shed of itself, not an inherent part of it: the Church lost as much ground by the action of her own zealots as by the attacks of her most fanatical opponents. But for a man who interpreted the facts as More did, there was nothing inconsistent in declaring for toleration in Utopia, but in England repression.

There is another point, too, which is generally unnoticed. The Utopians arrived at their religion by reason; they had no way of ascertaining truth except through reason; hence, for one man to condemn another for holding a different “doxy” would be in itself irrational. Christendom, in More’s view, was in a different position. It had received Truth by direct Revelation, and an Exponent of Truth by Divine appointment. What the Church had definitely pronounced to be heterodox was to be regarded finally and conclusively as false. To permit the preaching of doctrine known to be false was quite different from permitting the discussion or inculcation of divergent opinions on which there was no authority qualified to pronounce absolutely. Even at the moment when More was describing the religion of Utopia, before he had ever heard the name of Luther, he might with perfect consistency have held that heresy ought to be repressed in Christian countries. The argument, of course, has nothing to do with the wisdom or unwisdom of a repressive policy; it is concerned merely with the “inconsistency” of More’s Utopian theory and his Catholic practice. Those who found the Divine Revelation not in the voice of the Church but in the text of Scripture, were equally convinced that deviation from indisputable Truth should be punished by the strong hand.

Broadly, the suggestion here put forward is that the Utopian religions are philosophies: that all philosophies are matter of argument; that intolerance of opinions which are matter of argument is irrational. On the other hand (to More), Catholic Christianity is not a philosophy, but is revealed truth; not therefore matter of argument, except so far as details have not been defined; that suppression of doctrines subversive of Catholic truth is certainly legitimate, and may be necessary.

However that may be, it is undeniable that More appears in the least favourable light as a Catholic controversialist; losing balance and tone, he writes currente calamo, without restraint, with lapse of dignity, and with only an occasional redeeming turn of humour. That is to say, he drops to the normal level of contemporary controversialists on both sides, instead of abiding in that serene atmosphere which otherwise distinguishes him. The aggressive bellicosity of princes grieved him, and the king’s divorce business vexed him: but the spread of heresy was the one thing which upset his equanimity. “I pray God,” said he to Roper, “that some of us, as heigh as we seeme to sitt upon the mountaines, treadinge heretickes under our feete like annts, live not the day that we gladly would wish to be at leagge and composition with them, to let them have their Churches quietly to themselves; soe that they would be content to lett us have ours quietly to our selves.”

Similarly, the one and only ground of reproach against his conduct in any public matter is that as Chancellor he may have sanctioned putting heretics to the torture, and did during the last six months of his office—not before—send certain heretics to the stake. It is true that the only men in England, in those days, who, having the opportunity, did not send a single heretic to the fire, were the much-abused Protector Somerset and the still more abused Wolsey. But we would fain have had Thomas More an exception. Still, it can at least be affirmed positively that the penalty was only inflicted when all hope was over of persuading the “heretics” to recognise their error, and save their bodies as well as their souls; and that every effort was made to give them the opportunity of doing so. Given More’s premises, the conclusion that their death would tend to the salvation of other souls was irresistible.

It was towards the end of 1529 that Wolsey was struck down, and More, very much against his will, was elevated to the Chancellorship. For a commoner and a layman to receive the appointment was almost revolutionary—at least it was a very signal mark of the depression of the nobility, although it was many a year since any but an ecclesiastic had held the office. In everything, More proved himself a notably admirable occupant of the post, dealing out justice with unprecedented despatch; not only without allowing himself to be corrupted, in which he was not unique, but also without accepting those substantial compliments from suitors which less rigidly scrupulous judges were in the habit of profiting by, even when they did not allow their decisions to be affected. No personal or professional considerations were ever permitted by him to interfere with the ends of justice, the most exact that it was in his power to achieve. But his tenure of the Chancellorship was brief. More was unique in many respects, and in his own day he was unique in refusing to retain office when he could no longer do so without violating his conscience—without making himself a party to a policy which he held to be wrong. Other men shifted the responsibility on to the king; More felt that the responsibility could not be shifted, and in 1532 he resigned.