To the first article charging him with having always maliciously opposed the king’s second marriage, More had answered that anything he had said had been according to his conscience, and that for “this error,” he had already suffered fifteen months’ imprisonment, and the confiscation of his property.
The trial was soon over, for the king had decided on More’s death when Fisher was executed, ordering the preachers to set forth to the people the treasons of the late Bishop of Rochester and of Sir Thomas More; “joining them together though the later was still untried.”[91] The jury, after a quarter of an hour’s absence, declared him guilty of death for maliciously contravening the statute, and sentence was pronounced by the chancellor “according to the tenour of the new law.”
Death being now in sight, and faith having been kept with his conscience, More has no longer any reason to observe silence. To the usual question whether he has anything to say against the sentence, he replied, that for the seven years he had studied the matter he could not find that supremacy in a church belonged to a layman, or to any but the see of Rome, as granted personally by our Lord when on earth to St. Peter and his successors; and that, as the city of London could not make a law against the laws of the realm of England, so England could not make a law contrary to the general law of Christ’s Catholic Church; and that the Magna Charta of England said that “the English Church should be free to enjoy all its rights,” as the king had sworn at his consecration. Interrupted by the chancellor with the inquiry whether he wished to be considered wiser and better than all the bishops and nobles of the realm who had sworn to the king’s supremacy, More retorted, “For one bishop of your opinion, my lord, I have a hundred saints of mine; and for one parliament of yours, and God knows of what kind, I have all the general councils for a thousand years.” The Duke of Norfolk said that now his malice was clear.
On the sixth of July, 1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded on Tower Hill, for the king remitted the ferocious mutilations that accompanied the executions for treason at Tyburn. “The scaffold was very unsteady, and putting his feet on the ladder, he said, merrily, to the lieutenant of the Tower: “I pray thee see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.”[92]
Then, with a simple request to the people standing round to pray for him, and to bear witness that he died a Catholic for the faith of the Catholic Church, a friendly word to the executioner, and a last prayer—the 51st Psalm—the axe fell, and More was dead.
Beyond More’s scholarship and wit, and his affection for his family and friends, stands out his great, unflinching quality of loyalty to conscience. When the power was in his hands as lord chancellor, no one was put to death by Sir Thomas More for heresy in England, though he did what he could by his pen to check the innovations of Luther, which he hated,—not only because they broke up the unity of Christendom, but because, it seemed to him, they struck at all social morality and decency.[93] The violence of Luther’s outbreak, the determination of the Lutherans—sure of their own possession of the truth—to allow no liberty to Catholics, and the antinomian communism of the anabaptists—all these things made Protestantism detestable to men like Sir Thomas More and Erasmus, and made More declare that dogmatising heretics ought to be repressed by the state as breeders of strife and contention. But his own record is clear: “And of all that ever came in my hand for heresy, as help me God, saving (as I said) the sure keeping of them, had never any of them any stripe or stroke given them, so much as a fillip on the forehead.”[94]
“What other controversialist can be named, who, having the power to crush antagonists whom he viewed as the disturbers of the quiet of his own declining years, the destroyers of all the hopes which he had cherished for mankind, contented himself with severity of language?”[95]
The author of the Utopia was a critic, as Colet and Erasmus were, of abuses in the Church; but like his friends he lived and died a Catholic. He saw Lutheranism as the source of a thousand ills, and with Erasmus opposed it; but though heretics were anti-social and factious, he would not put one to death for error.
It is all through Sir Thomas More’s character—this respect for conscience. There is no going back on the wide toleration of his early manhood, and high office and responsibilities of state no more cramp or belittle his faith than they destroy his playfulness or the warmth of his affections.
He died a martyr for the religion of his life, for the simple right to abide in the old Catholic paths of his fellow-countrymen.