Heroes of the Catholic Reformation. Joseph Pearce
not united with a good life, is nothing else than splendid and notorious infamy.” Concerned with the education of his three daughters, More was at pains that they should know the classics. “[I]f a woman (and this I desire and hope with you as their teacher for all my daughters) to eminent virtue should add an outwork of even moderate skill in literature, I think she will have more real profit than if she had obtained the riches of Croesus and the beauty of Helen. I do not say this because of the glory which will be hers … but because the reward of wisdom is too solid to be lost like riches or to decay like beauty.”21 Commenting on More’s philosophy of education, his biographer Christopher Hollis sees him as a champion of the philosophy of homeschooling:
More had not, it seems, any belief in schools and indeed, where the family was of sufficient size to give companionship and where the home life was such as that of the More household, it would have been folly to have sent the children away from such a home to school.22
Perhaps we cannot discuss the importance of Thomas More without at least referencing his Utopia, an early work which has not only established More’s place in the literary canon but one which continues to confuse even the most diligent reader. Alluding to this work in his essay on More, G. K. Chesterton reminds us that More “was not only a humanist, but a humorist.”23 Listing a litany of the outlandish ideas that More entertains in his prototypical fantasy, Chesterton endeavors to put More’s flights of fancy into perspective:
[I]f it be asked how or why a Catholic, let alone a great and holy Catholic, even entertained such ideas, the answer is that a thinking Catholic always does entertain them — if only to reject them. Thomas More did primarily entertain them and did finally reject them. A Catholic is not a man who never thinks of such things. A Catholic is a man who really knows why he does not think they are true. But when people begin to think they are true, to think that far worse things are true, to force the worst things of all upon the world, the situation is entirely different; and cannot be related in any way to the jokes which a young Renaissance humorist put into a book like Utopia.24
We will leave it there, even though much more could be said. Hollis grapples with it manfully in his biography of More, devoting a whole chapter to More’s utopian enigma, and I have grappled with it manfully, or as manfully as I’m able, in both the classroom and in discussion with people who know it much better than I. Enough. Let’s move on.
In 1522, long after More had made a name for himself in court and had become a favorite of the king, he displayed his own detachment from all such trifles and trinkets in the first of his great contemplative essays, an examination of the Four Last Things, which are, lest we need reminding, Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. In such a somber work, it was not surprising that More should gain inspiration from Boethius, whose Consolatio is perhaps the finest contemplation on such things ever written. Thus, translating liberally from Boethius’s Latin, More writes: “One man to be proud that he beareth rule over other men is much like one mouse would be proud to bear a rule over other mice in a barn.”25 Thus More and Boethius join with Shakespeare’s Lear to “laugh at gilded butterflies,” those courtiers, those “poor rogues” festooned in bright colors, peacock-proud, who “talk of court news … who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out.”26 Yet, as ridiculous as such worldly pride might be, More’s experience of life in King Henry’s court had tempered the temptation to laugh too loudly, not least because he knew that such “gilded butterflies” carried a sting in their tails. “It is,” he would write in the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation at the end of his life, “hard for any person either man or woman, in great worldly wealth and much prosperity, so to withstand the suggestions of the devil and occasions given by the world, that they keep themselves from the deadly desire of ambitious glory.” Such words should be borne in mind as we consider the fall from grace of Henry VIII who, in 1521, with the help of More and others, possibly including John Fisher, was working to defend the doctrines of Holy Mother Church from the attacks of Martin Luther.
After his initial rebellion in 1517, Luther had finally broken from the papacy in 1520 with the propagation of his treatise on the Babylonish Captivity of the Church. Henry had read this in April 1521 and was resolved to respond to it in person. With the publication of his Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (A Defense of the Seven Sacraments), he emerged as a champion of the Church. It was described by his biographer J. J. Scarisbrick as “one of the most successful pieces of Catholic polemics produced by the first generation of anti-Protestant writers.”27 Henry dedicated the volume to Pope Leo X who responded by bestowing upon Henry the title Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith), a title which would be revoked following Henry’s own break with Rome. The Assertio was widely read and within a year had been published in two separate German translations, prompting Luther’s response, Against Henry, King of the English, to which Thomas More wrote his Response to Luther, defending the king’s position, which was also, of course, the position of the Catholic Church. The other main defender of the king in the face of Luther’s tirade against him was John Fisher, who issued his own riposte to Luther’s broadside. Alluding to Fisher’s response to Luther, More defended the papacy against Luther’s attacks upon it:
As regards the primacy of the Roman pontiff, the Bishop of Rochester has made the matter so clear from the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and from the whole of the Old Testament and from the consent of all the holy fathers, not of the Latins only but of the Greeks also (of whose opposition Luther is wont to boast), and from the definition of a General Council in which the Armenians and Greeks, who at that time had been most obstinately resisting, were overcome and acknowledged themselves overcome, that it would be utterly superfluous for me to write again upon the subject.
Needless to say, the loyalty of neither More nor Fisher would mean anything to the king once they were forced, in conscience, to oppose his will on this very issue of papal primacy. It is surely one of the great ironies of history that the point of contention which would lead Henry to put his erstwhile friends and allies to death would be the very issue which he had himself so vociferously asserted and which More and Fisher, as his allies, had defended him so vociferously for so doing.
More was, however, under no illusions with respect to the king’s character. After his son-in-law, William Roper, had congratulated him on his receiving the king’s favor, having observed the king enfolding his arms affectionately round More’s neck, More replied that he had “no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head would win him a castle in France … it should not fail to go.” This was in 1525. By 1529 he had won the favor of the king to such an extent that, following the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, More was appointed to the position of Lord Chancellor. Having little option but to accept, he must have felt that the king had handed him a poisoned chalice, one which might well cost him his life. He was already in a precarious position because he had expressed to the king his opposition to the king’s plans to have his marriage with Catherine annulled. It was true that Henry, having appointed More as his Chancellor, had told him that he would not force his conscience on the issue of the marriage, telling him that he must first look to God and after God to the king; yet, even so, More could not feel confident that his opposition to the king’s plans would be tolerated for long.
As it became clear that the pope would not bend to the king’s will on the matter of the annulment, Henry began to listen to the self-interested promptings of the anti-Catholic Thomas Cromwell that, as the king, he should free himself from the will of Rome by making himself the head of the Church in England. Such a suggestion was reinforced by the anti-clericalism of Parliament. “Now with the Commons is nothing but ‘Down with the clergy,’” Bishop John Fisher complained, “and this, meseemeth, is for lack of faith only.”28
On May 16, 1531, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, delivered to the king a document that became known as “the submission of the clergy,” placing the hierarchy of the Church in England under the will and rule of the king. On the same day, Thomas More resigned as Chancellor with the excuse of ill health. For More, the king’s triumph had changed the very nature of England, destroying the very legal system on which she stood and which had held the king as having authority sub Deo et lege (under God and the law). Having declared himself head of the Church in his realm, Henry, like the