Bridgett, in his "Life of Sir Thomas More," gives some details of the conclusion of the discussion that have a very human interest: "When he saw his daughter, after this discussion, sitting very sadly, not from any fear she had about his soul, but at the temporal consequences she foresaw, he smiled again and exclaimed: 'How now, daughter Margaret? What now, Mother Eve? Where is your mind now? Sit not musing with some serpent in your breast, upon some new persuasion to offer Father Adam the apple yet once again.'
"'In good faith, father,' replied Margaret, 'I can no further go. For since the example of so many wise men cannot move you, I see not what to say more, unless I should look to persuade you with the reason that Master Harry Pattenson made.' (It will be remembered that Pattenson was More's fool, now in the service of the Lord Mayor.) 'For,' continued Margaret, 'he met one day one of our men, and when he had asked where you were, and heard that you were in the Tower still, he waxed angry with you and said: "Why, what aileth him that he will not swear? Wherefore should he stick to swear? I have sworn the oath myself." And so,' says Margaret, 'have I sworn.' At this More laughed and said 'that word was like Eve too, for she offered Adam no worse fruit than she had eaten herself.'"
All the details of the scenes of his death have a deep interest of their own. He was ready to obey the King in everything, except where he felt his conscience was involved. When they came to ask him not to make a speech at his execution, because the King wished him not to, he thanked them very simply and said he was glad to have had the King's wishes conveyed to him and that he would surely obey them. He added that he had had in mind to say something, but that now he would refrain. When it was called to his attention that the clothes that he wore would fall as a perquisite to the executioner, and that therefore the worse he wore the less his loss, he asked if there was anyone who could do him a greater favor than the headsman was going to perform and [{241}] that he would prefer to wear his best. He had actually donned them when it was represented to him by the Governor that this was a bad precedent to set, and then he changed them for others. He was the same, meek gentleman in everything, though it might be expected that his insistence on his conscience against that of all the others would mark him as an obstinate man absolutely immovable in his own opinions.
The humor that characterized all his life and that had so endeared him to his friends did not abandon him even to the very end. Twenty years before Erasmus had written about it, punning on the name, Encomium Moriae, using the Greek word Moria for folly. Years and high office, serious persecution, bitter imprisonment, lofty decisions involving death all had not obliterated it. When he was about to ascend the scaffold the steps of that structure proved to be rather shaky, and he asked that he should be given a hand going up, though as for coming down he said he felt that he might be left to shift for himself. On the scaffold he commended himself to the headsman, gave him a present and then, as he was placing his head on the block, his beard, which he had been unused to wearing before he went to prison, coming on it he pushed it out of the way, saying "This at least has committed no treason." All the rest was silent communion with his God.
Thus died one of the greatest men of his race--great in intellect, in sympathy, in practical philosophy, great above all in character. Totus teres atque rotundus.
Of his execution Lord Campbell, in his "Lives of the Lord Chancellors of England," said: "Considering the splendor of his talent, the greatness of his acquirements, and the innocence of his life, we must still regard his murder as the blackest crime that has ever been perpetrated in England under the forms of law."
In closing his life of him in "The Lives of the Lord Chancellors," Lord Campbell, who had no sympathy at all with More's religious views and who is quite sure that the Reformation was a very wonderful benefit to England, declared:
"I am indeed reluctant to take leave of Sir Thomas More not only from his agreeable qualities and extraordinary merits, but from my abhorrence of the mean, sordid, unprincipled chancellors who succeeded him and made the latter half of the reign of Henry VIII the most disgraceful period in our annals."
