Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

In a famous letter to Hutten (July 23, 1517) Erasmus described

More as of medium height, pale complexion, auburn hair, careless of

dress or formality, abstemious in food and drink, cheerful with

quick humor and ready smile, inclined to jokes and pranks, and keeping

in his house a jester, a monkey, and many minor animal pets; "all

the birds in Chelsea came to him to be fed." A faithful husband, a

loving and idolized father, a persuasive orator, a judicious

counselor, a man alert with charity and friendly offices- "in

short," concluded this fond sketch, "what did Nature ever create

milder, sweeter, and happier than the genius of Thomas More?" `062430

He found time to write books. He began a History of Richard III,

but as its tenor was sharply against autocracy, and autocracy was on

the throne, he thought it discreet to avoid the fatality of print.

It was published after his death; Shakespeare based a play on it;

and the biography, broadcast by the drama, may bear some

responsibility for the character that Richard bears. In 1516, as if in

a playful aside, More tossed off, in Latin, one of the most famous

of all books, creating a word, setting a precedent and pace for modern

utopias, anticipating half of socialism, and voicing such criticism of

English economy, society, and government that again he put valor

behind discretion, and had the volume published abroad in six Latin

editions before allowing it to be printed, still in Latin, in England.

He professed to have written it for amusement, with no intention to

make it public; but he thanked Erasmus for seeing it through the press

at Louvain. `062431 It was translated into German, Italian, and French

before the first English version appeared (1551), sixteen years

after the author's death. By 1520 it was the talk of the Continent.

More had called it Nusquama, Nowhere; we do not know who had the

happy thought of changing this, amid the printing, to the Greek

equivalent Utopia. `062432 The mise-en-scene of the tale was so

ingenious that many readers took it as authentic history, and a

missionary was said to have planned to go and convert the Utopians

to Christianity. `062433 More had been sent by Henry VIII on an

embassy to Bruges (1515); thence he had passed to Antwerp with a

letter of introduction from Erasmus to Peter Giles, the city clerk.

The prelude pretended that Giles had introduced More to a bearded,

weather-worn Portuguese mariner, Raphael Hythlodaye (Greek for

"skilled in nonsense"), who had sailed with Amerigo Vespucci in

1504, had made his way round the globe (six years before Magellan's

voyage), and had visited, in the New World, a happy island whose

inhabitants had solved most of the problems plaguing Europe at that

time. The Louvain edition made the hoax more plausible by prefixing

a woodcut of the isle, and a specimen of the Utopian language. Only

one slip gave the plot away: Hythlodaye digresses to praise Archbishop

Morton, `062434 in terms more natural to More's gratitude than to

the mariner's experience.

The imaginary Magellan describes the communism of the islanders:

-

Among the Utopians... all things being common, every man hath

abundance of everything.... I compare with them so many nations...

where every man calleth that, which he hath gotten, his own proper and

private goods.... I hold well with Plato... that all men should have

and enjoy equal portions of wealth and commodities.... For where every

man, under certain titles and pretenses, draweth and plucketh to

himself as much as he can, so that a few divide among themselves all

the whole riches... there to the residue is left lack and

poverty. `062435

-

In Utopia each man takes his product to the common store, and

receives from it according to his needs. None asks more than enough,

for security from want forestalls greed. Meals are eaten in common,

but if a man wishes he may eat at home. There is no money in Utopia,

no buying cheap and selling dear; the evils of cheating, stealing, and

quarreling over property are unknown. Gold is used not as currency but

to make useful things, like chamber pots. No famines or lean years

come, for the communal storehouses maintain a reserve against

emergencies. Every family engages in both agriculture and industry,

men and women alike. In order to ensure adequate production, six hours

of work per day are required of each adult, and choice of occupation

is limited by collective needs. The Utopians are free in the sense

of freedom from hunger and fear, but they are not free to live on

the labor of others. There are laws in Utopia, but they are simple and

few; therefore every man is expected to plead his own case, and no

lawyers are allowed. Those who violate the laws are condemned for a

time to serve the community as bondmen; they do the more

disagreeable tasks; but after finishing their turn they are restored

to full equality with their fellow men. Those who repeatedly and

seriously offend are put to death. The supply of bondmen is raised

by ransoming prisoners condemned to death in other lands.

The unit of society in Utopia is the patriarchal family. "The

wives be ministers to their husbands, the children to their

parents." `062436 Monogamy is the only form of sexual union permitted.

Before marriage the betrothed are advised to view each other naked, so

that physical defects may be revealed in time; and if they are serious

the contract may be annulled. The wife after marriage goes to live

with her husband in his father's household. Divorce is allowed for

adultery and by free mutual consent, conditional on the consent of the

communal council. Annually every thirty families choose a phylarch

to govern them; every ten phylarchs choose a chief phylarch to

administer a district of 300 households. The 200 phylarchs serve as

a national council, which elects for life the prince or king.

A basic obligation of the phylarchs is to preserve the health of the

community by providing clean water, public sanitation, medical and

hospital care; for health is the chief of all earthly boons. The

rulers organize education for children and for adults; they stress

vocational training, support science, and discourage astrology,

fortunetelling, and superstition. They may make war on other peoples

if they judge that the good of the community so requires, "They

count this the most just cause of war, when any people holdeth a piece

of ground void and vacant to no good nor profitable use, keeping other

from the use or possession of it, who... by the law of nature ought

thereby to be nourished and relieved." `062437 (Was this a defense

of the colonization of America?) But the Utopians do not glorify

war; "they hate it as plainly brutal... and, contrary to the sentiment

of nearly every other nation, they regard nothing more inglorious than

glory derived from war." `062438

Religion in Utopia is almost, not quite, free. Tolerance is given to

any creed except atheism and the denial of human immortality. The

Utopian may, if he wishes, worship the sun or the moon. But those

who use violence of action or speech against any recognized religion

are arrested and punished, for the laws seek to prevent religious

strife. `062439 Deniers of immortality are not punished, but they

are excluded from office, and are forbidden to voice their views to

any but priests and "men of gravity." Otherwise "it should be lawful

for every man to favor and follow what religion he would... and

might do his best to bring other to his opinion, so that he did it

peaceably... and soberly, without haste and contentious rebuking and

inveighing against other." `062440 So in Utopia there are various

religions, but "the most and wisest part... believe that there is a

certain godly power unknown, everlasting, incomprehensible,

inexplicable, far above the reach and capacity of man's wit, dispersed

through the world." `062441 Monasticism is permitted, provided the

monks will busy themselves with works of charity and communal utility,

such as repairing roads and bridges, cleaning ditches, cutting timber,

and acting as servants, even as bondmen; and they may marry if they so

desire. There are priests, but they too marry. The state keeps as

religious feasts the first and last of every month and year, but in

the religious exercises of these holydays "no image of any god is seen

in the church," and "no prayers be used but such as every man may

boldly pronounce without the offending of any sect." `062442 On each

of these holydays wives and children prostrate themselves before their

husbands or parents, and ask forgiveness for any offense committed, or

any duty omitted; and no one is to come to church until he has made

peace with his enemy.- It is a Christian touch, but More's youthful

humanism appears in his partial acceptance of the Greek view of

suicide: if a man suffers from a painful and incurable disease he is

permitted and encouraged to end his life. In other cases, More

believes, suicide is cowardice, and the corpse is to be "cast unburied

into some stinking marsh." `062443

We do not know how much of this represented More's considered

conclusions, how much was Erasmus, how much was half-playful

imagination. However, the young statesman carefully dissociated

himself from the socialism of his Utopians: "I am of opinion," he

represents himself as saying to Hythlodaye, "...that men shall never

live wealthily where all things are in common. For how can there be

abundance of goods... where the regard of his own gains driveth not to

work, but the hope that he hath in other men's travails maketh him

slothful.... It is not possible for all things to be well unless all

men were good- which I think will not be yet these good many

years." `062444 Yet some sympathy with radical yearnings must have

inspired so extensive a picture of the communist ideal. Other pages of

the Utopia criticize with angry severity the exploitation of the

poor by the rich. Enclosures of once common lands by English lords are

condemned with such detail and spirit as seem unlikely in a foreigner.

Says Hythlodaye to More:

-

The unreasonable covetousness of a few hath turned to the utter

undoing of your island.... Suffer not these rich men to buy up all, to

engross and forestall, and with their monopoly to keep the market

alone as pleases them.... `062445 When I consider and weigh in my mind

all these commonwealths which now anywhere flourish, I can perceive

nothing- so God help me- but a certain conspiracy of rich men

promoting their own commodities under the name and title of the

commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts... how to

hire and abuse... the labor of the poor for as little money as may

be.... These devices be then made laws. `062446

-

It is almost the voice of Karl Marx moving the world from a foot

of space in the British Museum. Certainly Utopia is one of the

most powerful, as well as one of the first, indictments of the

economic system that continued in modern Europe until the twentieth

century; and it remains as contemporary as a planned economy and the

welfare state.

III. THE MARTYR

-

How did it come about that a man with such ideas seething in his

head should have been appointed to Henry VIII's council in the year

after the publication of Utopia? Probably the King, despite his

reputation for learning, could not bear to read the book in Latin, and

died before it was Englished. More kept his radical fancies for his

friends. Henry knew him as a rare synthesis of ability and

integrity, valued him as a tie with the House of Commons, knighted

him, made him Under-Treasurer (1521), and entrusted him with

delicate tasks of diplomacy. More opposed the foreign policy by

which Wolsey led England into war with Charles V; the Emperor, in

More's view, was not only dangerously resourceful, he was also the

heroic defender of Christendom against the Turks. When Wolsey fell

More so far forgot his manners as to review, in Parliament, the faults

and errors that had caused the fall. As leader of the opposition he

was the logical successor of the Cardinal, and for thirty-one months

he served as Chancellor of England.

But the real successor to Wolsey was the King. Henry had

discovered his own power and capacity, and was resolved, he said, to

free himself from an unfriendly and obstructive papacy, and to

legitimate his union with the woman whom he loved, and who could

give him an heir to the throne. More found himself no guide of policy,

but a servant of aims that ran counter to his deepest loyalties. He

consoled himself by writing books against Protestant theology, and

prosecuting Protestant leaders. In A Dialogue Concerning Heresies

(1528), and in later works, he agreed with Ferdinand II, Calvin, and

the Lutheran princes on the necessity of religious unity for

national strength and peace. He feared the division of Englishmen into

a dozen or a hundred religious sects. He who had defended Erasmus'

Latin translation of the New Testament protested against Tyndale's

English version as distorting the text to prove Lutheran points;

translations of the Bible, he felt, should not be turned into

weapons for tavern philosophers. In any case, he held, the Church

was too precious a vehicle of discipline, consolation, and inspiration

to be torn to pieces by the hasty reasoning of vain disputants.

From this mood he passed to the burning of Protestants at the stake.

The charge that in his own house he had a man flogged for

heresy `062447 is disputed; More's account of the offender seems far

removed from theology: "If he spied any woman kneeling" in prayer, and

"if her head hung anything low in her meditations, then would he steal

behind her, and... would labor to lift up all her clothes and cast

them quite over her head." `062448 It may be that in the three death

sentences pronounced in his diocese during his chancellorship he was

obeying the law that required the state to serve as the secular arm of

ecclesiastical courts; `062449 but there is no doubt that he

approved of the burnings. `062450 He admitted no inconsistency between

his conduct and the large toleration of religious differences in his

Utopia; for even there he had refused toleration to atheists,

deniers of immortality, and those heretics who resorted to violence or

vituperation. Yet he himself was guilty of vituperation in arguing

against the English Protestants. *06054

The time came when More thought Henry the most dangerous heretic

of all. He refused to approve the marriage with Anne Boleyn, and he

saw in the anticlerical legislation of 1529-32 a ruinous assault

upon a Church that to his mind stood as an indispensable base of

social order. When he retired from office to the privacy of his

Chelsea home (1532), he was still in his prime at fifty-four, but he

suspected that he had not much longer to live. He tried to prepare his

family for tragedy by talking (so reports his son-in-law William

Roper)

-

of the lives of holy martyrs, and of... their marvelous

patience, and of their passions [sufferings] and deaths, that they

suffered rather than they would offend God, and what an happy and a

blessed thing it was, for the love of God, to suffer loss of goods,

imprisonment, loss of lands, and life also. He would further say

unto them that upon his faith, if he might perceive his children would

encourage him to die in a good cause, it should so comfort him that

for the very joy thereof it would make him merrily to run to

death. `062452

-

His expectations were fulfilled. Early in 1534 he was indicted on

a charge of having been privy to the conspiracy connected with the Nun

of Kent. He admitted having met her, and having believed her to be

inspired, but he denied any knowledge of conspiracy. Cromwell

recommended, Henry granted, forgiveness. But on April 17 More was

committed to the Tower for refusing to take oath to the Act of

Succession, which, as presented to him, involved a repudiation of

papal supremacy over the Church in England. His favorite daughter

Margaret wrote to him begging him to take the oath; he replied that

her plea gave him more pain than his imprisonment. His (second) wife

visited him in the Tower, and (according to Roper) berated him for

obstinacy:

-

What the good year, Mr. More, I marvel that you, that have always

been hitherunto taken for a wise man, will now so play the fool to lie

here in this close, filthy prison, and be content to be shut up

among mice and rats, when you might be abroad at your liberty, and

with the favor and good will of the King and his Council, if you would

but do as all the bishops and best learned of this realm have done.

And seeing you have at Chelsea a right fair house, your library,

your books, your gallery, your garden, your orchards, and all other

necessaries so handsomely about you, where you might, in the company

of me, your wife, your children, and your household, be merry, I

muse what a God's name you mean here still thus fondly to

tarry. `062453

-

Other efforts were made to move him, but he smilingly resisted

them all.

On July 1, 1535, he was given a final trial. He defended himself

well, but he was pronounced guilty of treason. While he was

returning from Westminster to the Tower his daughter Margaret twice

broke through the guard, embraced him, and received his last blessing.

On the day before his execution he sent his hairshirt to Margaret,

with a message that "tomorrow were a day very meet" to "go to

God.... Farewell, my dear child; pray for me, and I shall pray for you

and all your friends, that we may merrily meet in heaven." `062454

When he mounted the scaffold (July 7), and found it so weak that it

threatened to collapse, he said to an attendant, "I pray you, Mr.

Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for

myself." `062455 The executioner asked his forgiveness; More

embraced him. Henry had given directions that only a few words

should be allowed the prisoner. More begged the spectators to pray for

him, and to "bear witness that he... suffered death in and for the

faith of the Holy Catholic Church." He then asked them to pray for the

King, that God might give him good counsel; and he protested that he

died being the King's good servant, but God's first. `062456 He

repeated the Fifty-first Psalm. Then he laid his head upon the

block, carefully arranging his long gray beard that it should take

no harm; "pity that should be cut," he said, "that hath not

committed treason." `062457 His head was affixed to London Bridge.

A wave of terror passed through an England that now realized the

resolute mercilessness of the King, and a shudder of horror ran

through Europe. Erasmus felt that he himself had died, for "we had but

one soul between us"; `062458 he said that he had now no further

wish to live, and a year later he too was dead. Charles V, apprised of

the event, told the English ambassador: "If I had been master of

such a servant, of whose doing I myself have had these many years no

small experience, I would rather have lost the best city in my

dominions than lose such a worthy councilor." `062459 Pope Paul III

formulated a bull of excommunication outlawing Henry from the

fellowship of Christendom, interdicting all religious services in

England, forbidding all trade with it, absolving all British

subjects from their oaths of allegiance to the King, and commanding

them, and all Christian princes, to depose him forthwith. As neither

Charles nor Francis would consent to such measures, the Pope

withheld issuance of the bull till 1538. When he did promulgate it

Charles and Francis forbade its publication in their realms, unwilling

to sanction papal claims to power over kings. The failure of the

bull signalized again the decline of papal authority and the rise of

the sovereign national state.

Dean Swift thought More the man "of the greatest virtue"- perhaps

using this word in its old sense of courage- "this kingdom ever

produced." `062460 On the four hundredth anniversary of their

execution the Church of Rome enrolled Thomas More and John Fisher

among her saints.

IV. A TALE OF THREE QUEENS

-

Within some thirty months of More's death Henry lost three of his

six queens. Catherine of Aragon wasted away in her northern retreat,

still claiming to be Henry's only lawfully wedded wife and England's

rightful queen. Her faithful maids continued to give her that title.

In 1535 she was removed to Kimbalton Castle, near Huntingdon, and

there she confined herself to one room, leaving it only to hear

Mass. She received visitors, and "used them very

obligingly." `062461 Mary, now nineteen, was kept at Hatfield, only

twenty miles away; but mother and daughter were not allowed to see

each other, and were forbidden to communicate. They did

nevertheless, and Catherine's letters are among the most touching in

all literature. Henry offered them better quarters if they would

acknowledge his new queen; they would not. Anne Boleyn had her aunt

made governess to Mary, and bade her keep "the bastard" in place by "a

box on the ears now and then." `062462 In December 1535, Catherine

sickened, made her will, wrote to the Emperor asking him to protect

her daughter, and addressed a moving farewell to her "most dear lord

and husband" the King:

-

The hour of my death now approaching, I cannot choose but, out of

the love I bear you, advise you of your soul's health, which you ought

to prefer above all considerations of the world or flesh whatsoever;

for which yet you have cast me into many calamities, and yourself into

many troubles. But I forgive you all, and pray God to do likewise. For

the rest I commend unto you Mary our daughter, beseeching you to be

a good father to her.... Lastly I make this vow, that my eyes desire

you above all things. Farewell. `062463

-

Henry wept on receiving the letter; and when Catherine died (January

7, 1536), aged fifty, he ordered the court to go into mourning. Anne

refused. `062464

Anne could not know that within five months she too would be dead;

but she knew that she had already lost the King. Her hot temper, her

imperious tantrums, her importunate demands, wearied Henry, who

contrasted her railing tongue with Catherine's gentleness. `062465

On the day of Catherine's burial Anne was delivered of a dead child;

and Henry, who still yearned for a son, began to think of another

divorce- or, as he would put it, an annulment; his second marriage, he

was quoted as saying, had been induced by witchcraft, and was

therefore void. `062466 From October 1535 he began to pay special

attention to one of Anne's maids, Jane Seymour. When Anne reproached

him he bade her bear with him patiently, as her betters had

done. `062467 Perhaps following ancient tactics, he accused her of

infidelity. It seems incredible that even a flighty woman should

have risked her throne for a moment's dalliance, but the King

appears to have sincerely believed in her guilt. He referred the

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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