THE NEW FEDERALIST

March 31, 1989

Pages 6-7

American Almanac

The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More

Part II
by Christina Nelson Huth

Hans Holbein's great portrait of More, painted in 1527 while More served as
a chief adviser to King Henry Vlll's government, hangs today in the Frick
Museum, New York City.

In Part I, we discovered the political forefathers of Sir Thomas More in the

early fifteenth-century Council of Florence, and the English adherents of the
Italian Renaissance program for the development of a system of sovereign
nation-states across the continent of Europe. In the intellectual and political
development of More, a lawyer and judge as well as a devout Catholic
layman, we gave special attention to the fifteenth-century Englishman Sir
John Fortescue, also a lawyer and judge, and the churchman John Morton.
We traced More's education, in the circles of the New Learning exported
from Italy, at Oxford University, and at London's Inns of Court school for
the study of law. We saw More take his place at the center of the early
sixteenth-century Christian humanist movement, and saw his most famous
dialogue, Utopiaa polemic for a Christian humanist ordering of societycapture the attention of Europe immediately upon its publication in 1516.
In the 1520s, we saw More, by then a high-ranking adviser to King Henry
VIII of England, emerge as a leading spokesman against the Protestant
movement that was gathering influence in Europe. Finally, we identified the
individual who was to become his chief adversary within the English court,
one Thomas Cromwell, as an agent of the oligarchical city-state of Venice, a
prime mover of the social movement that was to become known as the
Reformation.
The 'King's Great Matter'
During the spring of 1527, while More was serving full time as a member of
the King's Privy Council, Henry VIII became obsessed with the idea of
setting aside the Queen, the former Princess Catherine of Aragon, and taking
a second wife, in hopes of producing a male heir to the English throne.
Henry became fixed on the idea that Queen Catherine's failure to bear him a
living son, and the infant deaths of the male children Catherine had brought
into the world, were God's punishment against him, for marrying her after
she had been widowed by his brother, Arthura marriage that had required
a papal dispensation.
This set of circumstances soon became known throughout Europe as the
King's Great Matter. Before it was over, Thomas More had been executed
on orders of King Henry VIII, the Venetian agent Thomas Cromwell was in
control of both the King and his government, the English economy was
being reorganized to de-emphasize industrial production and facilitate
looting by foreign financial powers, the English church had been cut off

from Rome, and Cromwell was moving rapidly to expropriate all of its
financial resources. Cromwell had engineered a coup in England, which,
although conventional historical accounts say just the opposite, led to the
surrender of England's national sovereignty to foreign game masters and
financiers representing the nation's oligarchical enemies.
Over the recent decades, there have been dozens of sensationalized soap
opera accounts of Henry's eight-year-long campaign for divorce. None has
considered the obvious question of where Henry got this idea in the first
place. In 1527 he had been contentedly married to Catherine for eighteen
years. He had several illegitimate sons, one of whom was being considered
as his heir, and, while he hoped for a legitimate son, he was not obsessed by
dynastic considerations.
Henry's one living child by Catherine, the twelve-year-old Princess Mary,
was being trained as a possible successor to the throne. The Queen, a former
Spanish princess, was extremely popular in England, and had been a great
diplomatic asset to the Crown's relations with Spain, whose King Charles I
was also reigning as the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
There is every indication that the court faction behind Catherine's lady-inwaiting, Mistress Anne Boleyn, set the King on course for the divorce.
Henry had become infatuated with Anne, but she refused to submit to his
advances. Such modesty was virtually unknown among court-situated
young women under suit by the King; it was considered a high honor to be
taken as the King's mistress, and even to bear him illegitimate children. It
seems that, in her flirtation with Henry, Anne was coached and contained by
her father, her uncle, and other powerful nobles who wished to bring the
King under their influence, using the girl as their snare.
That influence was directly tainted by Lutheranism, and a strong hatred for
the papacy. The Duke of Norfolk, Mistress Boleyn's uncle, campaigned very
early in Parliament for legislation allowing the Crown to seize church
properties throughout England. This was in 1529, a full seven years before
Thomas Cromwell was to undertake the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
There are also accounts of Anne inciting Henry to open conflict with Pope
Clement VII, whom she branded a heretic. Thomas Boleyn, the Earl of
Wiltshire, although not a declared Lutheran, supplied his daughter with
copies of the English heretic William Tyndale's gnostic books and translations of the Bible, which Anne in turn supplied to Henry.

In 1528, when Henry's first efforts at gaining Pope Clement VII's approval
for an annulment of his marriage to Queen Catherine had been stalled, Anne
Boleyn gave her copy of William Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christen
Man to the King. The central theme of the tract, which was printed in the
Netherlands and smuggled into England, was that Europe's kings were
supreme rulers by divine authority, and answerable only to God in all
matters, temporal or spiritual, despite the claims to authority of the Bishop
of Rome. Reportedly, Henry responded with enthusiasm to Tyndale's thesis.
Anne's backers were More's enemies. They were also, for a brief period, the
natural allies of More's successor, Thomas Cromwell. When Cromwell
brought More to trial in 1535, he collaborated with Thomas Boleyn to locate
and draft an old enemy of More's to sit on the jury.
In summer 1527, Henry VIII began a series of appeals to Rome, seeking a
divorce on the grounds that the dispensation granted by Pope Julius II for his
marriage to Catherine had been defective. This should have been a simple
matter: the Holy See often granted divorces to kings for dynastic reasons;
most recently, in 1514, the Pope had ordered the wife of France's Louis XII
into a monastery and granted the French monarch the right to marry for a
second time.
But the King's Great Matter soon turned into an international crisis, with
forces outside of England seemingly just as anxious as the Boleyns to see
the battle lines drawn. Pope Clement, whose territories were occupied and
had recently been sacked by the armies of Charles V, Catherine's nephew,
prevaricated. When Catherine was offered the solitude of the convent as a
solution to the growing controversy, she refused.
Thomas More was appointed Chancellor of England in the early autumn of
1529. He followed the Catholic Cardinal Thomas Wolsey into that office,
after Wolsey had utterly failed to reach a resolution on the divorce matter,
and to solve the growing financial problems resulting from Henry's foreign
wars.
More had been asked by the King as early as October 1527 to study the
question of the divorce. More's conclusion, after months of research and
reflection, was not, as is usually asserted, that Henry could not divorce the
Queen to marry Anne Boleyn. It was that laws concerning marriage need be
obeyed only to the extent that they conform to Christian natural law, which
is embodied in the laws of the church, as administered by the Pope.

But on this issue, More presented only his research findings, and not his
personal conclusion to the king. According to More's biographer William
Roper, he chose to keep his peace, to warn the King against poor advice
from other quarters, and to suggest that Henry refer to authorities beyond
intimidation or flattery, including "St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and divers
other holy doctors, both Greeks and Latins."
Though discretion and public silence regarding the King's divorce were to be
the hallmarks of More's chancellorshipand of his defense against the
charges of treason later brought against him by Cromwellit should not be
imagined that More accepted England's most powerful political office with
the intention of remaining neutral as to the outcome of the King's Great
Matter. More had spent much of the 1520s as Europe's leading polemicist in
defense of the Catholic Church against Luther, Tyndale, and the other Protestant evangelists who were being sponsored and bankrolled by the Venetian
oligarchy. He believed that Protestant controversy was thinly disguised
heresy, with a great potential for creating social upheaval, and represented
the most sophisticated form of cultural warfare against Christian Europe.
For More, the office of Chancellor represented an opportunity to turn back
the progress of this cultural warfare campaign in England, and possibly to
deal it a defeat which could shift the course of events on the continent. The
fact that to accept this high office meant to place himself, relatively unprotected, in grave danger, did not weigh heavily in the balance of his thinking.

Englishman William Tyndale (portrait by an unknown artist), the Lutheran

schismatic whose tract, The Obedience of a Christen Man, enflamed Henry
VIII against the papacy.

Queen Catherine of England (portrait by an unknown artist), the former

Spanish princess, whose divorce by King Henry VIII was manipulated to cut
off the English Church from Rome.

Mistress Anne Boleyn (portrait by an unknown artist), whose flirtation with

Henry VIII was used to set off the King's Great Matter.

More as Chancellor
More accepted the chancellorship in October of 1529. In April 1530, the
Venetian agent Thomas Cromwell entered the King's service, in the office of
secretary to the King. Cromwell soon set into motion a broad-ranging program to reorganize the government of the realm, and to destroy the Church
in England. Without a doubt one of the most clever administrators in
English history, Cromwell exploited the avarice of England's old noble
families, and the historical anticlerical sentiment in Parliament, as the main
assets of his campaign. His targets were the limited monarchy system
championed by England's earliest commonwealth party men such as John
Fortescue, and Sir Thomas More, whom he immediately identified as a
powerful and implacable adversary.
After More's execution, Cromwell wrote a letter to one Gregory de Casale, a
secretary to Pope Paul III in Rome, to outline the basis for the Crown's
charges against More. More, Cromwell asserted, had been at the center of a
nationwide organizing project, to sway the English public mind against the
King's policy, and to stir up opposition against Henry VIII's divorce in the
Parliament.
Cromwell's letter can be considered from the standpoint of historical propaganda. It was, of course, the throne's official apology to the Vatican for the

judicial murder of one of Europe's best-loved spokesmen for the Catholic

Church. But beyond its propaganda value, it sheds some light on the truth.
More used his office as Chancellor for two purposes. First, to maintain, as
far as was possible, England's foreign policy stance as a backer of Christian
unity. He believed that only a unified Christian West could meet the growing strategic crisis of the time, which stemmed from the growth of the Protestant movement, and, in stark military terms, from the Ottoman Turks,
whose armies had ravaged Austria in 1527, and threatened further depredations in Europe.
From the center of power domestically, More also worked to rally a small
party of allies, including John Fisher, the learned bishop of Rochester,
William Peto, warden of the Observant Franciscan Friars of London, and
churchman Richard Reynolds. This group worked tirelessly to counter
Cromwell's influence, on Henry VIII, within the Parliament, and on the
English population in general. They did so using the classic methods of
political organizing: dissemination of ideas and program through every
institutional channel which could be found.
The most significant centers of potential resistance were the Church and the
Parliament. John Fisher, who was to be martyred with More, used his pulpit
for the cause. So did William Peto, whose eloquent sermons became the talk
of pubs and gathering places around London. In fact, the sermons of Peto
and his brother Franciscans, became models for priests throughout the realm.
This effort at mass organizing apparently had its effect, as public sentiment
turned markedly against Anne Boleyn, and the former Queen Catherine's
popularity began to rise.
The same Peto, Fisher, and Reynolds were also involved in organizing a
faction within Parliament to resist Cromwell's attempts to legislate against
the Church and clergy in England. Their talks with members of the House
of Commons resulted in fiery speeches against the Cromwellian program,
and some delays for More's enemies.
By summer 1530, Cromwell had resolved to concentrate most of his
energies on capturing the King. He saw to it that Henry VIII was supplied
with a collection of essays compiled by the Lutheran schismatics Edward
Foxe, Nicholas de Burgo, and John Stokesely. The collection, compiled
under the title Collectanea satis copiosa, purported to supply the historical
and legal justification for the theory of absolute monarchy championed in

the Tyndale tract supplied to Henry by Anne Boleyn in 1528, The Obedience
of a Christen Man. The authority of the King within the English system was
elevated to that of absolute monarch, in contrast to the limited monarchy
conception developed by John Fortescue and the early commonwealth party
men, which emphasized that the actions of the just monarch must conform to
natural law.
The corollary to the Collectanea's theory of absolute monarchy was that the
Church in England enjoyed freedom of action, if it had any in fact, only
because it had been granted to it by the second century monarch, the Briton
Lucius I. This reference to the probably apocryphal Lucius contradicted
Article One of the 1215 Magna Carta, which granted the Catholic Church
autonomy in England.
Study of the Collectanea enflamed Henry VIII. By late summer 1530, the
King was asserting that the Pope had no authority in spiritual matters in
England, and never had. Therefore, said Henry, Pope Julius II's 1504
dispensation regarding his marriage to Catherine was invalid, and he had
been living in sin with the Queen for nearly two decades. Next, Henry
ordered the English ambassador to Rome to inform Pope Clement VII that
he would not comply with the Vatican's request to appear at a hearing on the
divorce.
After the Collectanea had rendered Henry VIII his virtual captive, Cromwell
moved more boldly for a complete coup against the English Church. By
September 1530, Cromwell was assisting in the preparation of indictments
against 60 bishops and abbots, and 150 additional lower church officials on
charges of praemunirehaving illegally encroached on the jurisdiction of
the royal courts. Cromwell's tack, More's biographer Roper reported, was to
convince the King that an attack on the Church would make him "the richest
King in Christendom" and to flatter Henry with the idea "that his will and
pleasure [be] regarded as law."
Having forced Parliament to deliver this first blow against the English
system and clergy, Cromwell stepped up his agenda. In mid-July 1531,
Catherine was banished from the court, to a location outside of London,
from which she never returned.
Over the next months, More applied himself to his English-language refutation of the writings of Tyndale and other Lutherans, an effort compelled by
the fact that thousands of English-language Lutheran books, including

Tyndale's translation of the New Testament, were flooding into England.

More's second lengthy refutation of Tyndale's heresies, The Confutation of
Tyndale's Answer, was completed in 1532 and printed in early 1533.
During the spring of 1532, Cromwell succeeded in leading a new Parliamentary attack on the Church. Legislation was passed forbidding the payment of
Church tithes to Romethe Bill of Annates. Cromwell also secured the
passage of the revolutionary Submission of the Clergy legislation, which
awarded Henry doctrinal control over the Church in England. This occurred
despite a pitched battle in the House of Commons, inspired from behind the
scenes by More, Reynolds, Peto, and Fisher.
In More's eyes, with this legislation, Cromwell and Henry had taken the
government of England outside the realm of law. More considered the
Pope's temporal powers to be extremely limited under English law. He did
not, however, believe that a national law of any country could limit the
spiritual authority of the Holy See. In May of 1532, immediately following
Parliament's passage of the Act of Submission, More surrendered the great
seal of the chancellorship, and retired to his home, his family, and his books,
in Chelsea.
His battle with Thomas Cromwell, however, was far from over.
Cromwell Reorganizes England
On May 23, 1533, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer of London annulled Henry
VIII's marriage to Queen Catherine. Five days later, Henry and Anne
Boleyn were married in a private ceremony; that marriage was immediately
recognized by Archbishop Cranmer. On June 1, Anne Boleyn was crowned
Queen of England in Westminster Abbey.
Perhaps from the standpoint of Henry VIII, the King's Great Matter had now
been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. But Thomas Cromwell and his
Venetian backers were far from satisfied. The English Catholic Church had
not yet been entirely cut off from Rome, and Thomas More, the Englishman
with more influence in Western Europe than any other, steadfastly refused to
speak out in support of the King's new assertion of royal power.
While More remained home at Chelsea, writing, and corresponding with
Erasmus and other friends on the continent, Thomas Cromwell set about to
execute the most far-ranging changes in the structure of England's govern-

ment to date, with the purpose of destroying both More and the Church in
England.
Beginning in 1533, Cromwell engineered the next in his series of bills in
Parliament which were to cow and finally break the English clergy. The first
was the March 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome, which disallowed
the appeal of court cases dealing with testaments, spiritual revenuesand
marriage or divorcefrom English courts to the papal courts outside of
England. This bill was a giant step toward isolating the English Church
from Rome.
Shortly thereafter, Cromwell pushed through legislation which marked the
beginning of his looting of the English Church. This bill levied a ten percent
tax on every parish, and raised 40,000 for the crownmore than ten times
the revenue which had previously been sent to Rome.
Then, in the winter of 1534, Cromwell pushed through Parliament the notorious first Act of Succession. This legislation cut the Princess Mary out of
the line of royal succession, which was awarded first to male heirs of Henry
and Anne, and next to the Princess Elizabeth, their newborn daughter. But
the bulk of the act dealt with England's relations with the Pope, who was
criticized for meddling in crown affairs in the past, and whose authority to
grant dispensations of church law was denied.
Most important, however, the Act of Succession established as treasonous
any criticism of Henry's new marriage, and provided that all subjects of the
crown take an oath to uphold the act, or be charged with misprision, or
intention of committing, treason.
This is the legislation that allowed Cromwell to harass and finally imprison
More.
More Refuses the Oath
Most of the realm responded with appalling apathy to the Act of Succession.
Every English subject over twenty-one years of age, of both sexes, was
required to swear the oath pledging to uphold the Act. Thousands of copies
of the oath were printed, and circulated throughout the country, to be administered by local authorities. At Lambeth Palace, a commission composed of
Archbishop of Canterbury Cranmer, Chancellor Audley, and the Duke of
Suffolk sat to administer the oath, as hundreds of leading citizens filed by to
swear.

On March 30, 1534, the entire bodies of the House of Lords and House of
Commons swore the oath to uphold the Act. Cromwell then demanded that
the entire clergy of England swear the oath by May 1. The will of England's
clergy to resist Cromwell had already been broken, and churchmen from
across the realm began to come forward.
On April 17, Cromwell ordered More to appear before a royal commission in
London. There, the ex-chancellor was asked to swear. After seeing a copy
of the oath, he declared himself willing to accept the line of succession as
laid down by Parliament, but refused to swear the oath. He was immediately
jailed in the Tower of London.
More's old friend, Bishop John Fisher, was the single other public figure to
refuse to take the oath. Fisher was jailed in the Tower on the same day as
More, on the same chargemisprision of treason, an offense which carried a
life sentence of imprisonment and confiscation of all worldly goods. Eight
monks of the Carthusian order were the only clergymen besides Fisher to
resist. They were found guilty of treason, tortured by being tied immobile to
poles in the prison yard for three weeks, and then executed by being drawn
and quartered.
To what in the oath did More, Fisher, and the Carthusian fathers object?
Little of offense was to be found in the text of the oath itself; but to take the
oath meant a personal pledge of conscience to uphold every provision of the
Act of Succession, one section of which placed the prerogatives of the
English King over those of the Roman Pontiff, in questions of a spiritual
nature.
Once More was remanded to the Tower, Cromwell was temporarily content
to let him rot in jail. His immediate concern was to bring Henry VIII, and
therefore the military and economic power of England, under the power of
his program.
This he accomplished with the November 1534 Act of Supremacy, a piece of
legislation which granted the King unlimited power over temporal and
spiritual affairs in England, and named Henry VIII the Supreme Head of the
Church in England. With the Act of Supremacy, Cromwell not only severed
England from the Catholic Church, but transformed its government from one
based on the rule of law, and moved England toward the ideal of Aristotle's
Nichomachean Ethics, in which the rule of menin this case the rule of the

suggestible and unstable Henry VIIIwas concealed behind the appearance

of the rule of law.
At this point, the content of More's disagreement with the King's new chief
adviser became crystal clear for all the world to see, despite the fact that
More continued to refuse to comment publicly, or during any of his many
interrogations by Cromwell, as to why he refused to swear the oath.
One historian of the period comments on the disagreement thus:
Cromwell wished to free statute from that older limitation
which wished to test it by reference to some external lawthe
law of nature, the law of Christendom (Thomas More's test).
He held that [the positive law of a nation or state] was omnicompetent, and must be obeyed.
Thomas More, the Chancellor of England who was known as the champion
of the principle equityor truthfrom his position on the bench in the
realm's Court of Chancery, thus came face to face in the court of world
opinion with Thomas Cromwell, who seized and transformed the English
government for his oligarchical masters on the basis of the brutal maxim,
Might Makes Right, so long as the forms of law are observed.

Hans Holbein's portrait of King Henry VIII of England, painted in 1536,

after Cromwell had arranged the decapitation of Henry's second queen, Anne
Boleyn.

Left: Holbein's chalk and pen drawing of Sir Richard Southwell, 1536. The
artist doesn't hide his opinion of the moral character of his subject, who was
brought forward to perjure himself against Thomas More in 1535.
Right: Holbein's famous portrait of Thomas Cromwell, which hangs today
opposite the Holbein portrait of Sir Thomas More, in New York City's Frick
Museum.

Cromwell Frames Up More

With Henry and Parliament brought under his control by the legislative
program of 1533-34, Cromwell returned his attention to the political
problem posed by More. News of More's refusal to take the Oath of
Succession had spread like wildfire across the continent, spurring sales of
his Utopia, his polemics against the Lutheran Tyndale, and a rising tide of
protest against the incarceration of one of the leading Christian humanist
intellectuals of the day. It soon became clear to Cromwell's Venetian
backers that a living More, even confined to jail, was a tremendous political
liability.

But there existed no legal grounds on which to proceed further against the
ex-Chancellor. Cromwell was unsuccessful during 1534 in dragging More
into the affair of the Nun of Kent, a deranged woman who roamed the
English countryside preaching heresy, forecasting the King's death, and
criticizing Queen Anne. He was also unsuccessful at discovering corruption
in More's practice as a judge, although, on one occasion, working on evidence supplied by Thomas Boleyn, Cromwell questioned the ex-Chancellor
about his alleged acceptance of an expensive Italian silver cup as a bribe.
All this came to nought, until Cromwell secured passage of the Treason Act
of December 1534. The new Treason Act was the first bill to define
treasonable acts against the state since Edward Ill's statute of 1352. This
abominable piece of legislation made it a treasonable offense to merely
speak against the King, or to deprive the monarch or a member of his family
of "their dignity, title, or name of their royal estate." Under the legislation,
information supplied to the authorities concerning "speaking out against the
King" could be used to prove treasonable intentin other words, the door
was opened wide for the use of professional government informants against
any political target.
With the Treason Act in his pocket, Cromwell arranged his political frameup of Thomas More.
First came the selection and grooming of a proper informant. Cromwell's
choice was the venal Richard Rich, an acquaintance of More's household
who was to rise to the post of Chancellor of England as the culmination of a
career which blossomed with his perjured testimony against More.
Next, came preparations for fixing the trial, beginning with the rigging of the
jury. Here, Cromwell's man was a London draper named John Parnell.
Parnell was on the losing end of a case brought before More in the Court of
Chancery in 1529. Both Thomas Cromwell and the Boleyn family knew
every detail of Parnell's vendetta against More. Cromwell had been the
business partner of Parnell's opponent in the suit, and followed More's action
in the case very carefully. After the decision favoring his opponent, Parnell
presented himself to Anne Boleyn's father, Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, claiming to have evidence of corrupt activity by More on the King's
bench. Parnell may, in fact, have been the informant used by Cromwell to
begin the failed investigation into More's receipt of the Italian silver cup.

Most definitely, he was the juryman responsible for stampeding the guilty
verdict against More.
Finally, Cromwell prepared the indictment against More. What were the
charges that he chose to level against his political adversary? They are
similar, in spirit if not in letter, to the most common charges wielded in
political indictments of today, more than 450 years later: treason and
conspiracy.
Cromwell's two-thousand word, four-count indictment specified the following offenses: treason, for refusing to take the oath to the Act of Succession;
incitement to treason, for encouraging Bishop John Fisher not to take the
oath; conspiracy, with Bishop Fisher, to avoid taking the oath; and treason,
for declaring during a visit by Richard Rich to the Tower in June of 1535,
that England's Parliament did not have the power to declare the King the
head of the Church.
On the basis of this indictment, Sir Thomas More was brought to trial by the
Court of King's Bench, before a royal commission on July 1, 1535. Anne
Boleyn's father, uncle, and brother, sat on the commission.
More's conduct of his own defense during the proceedings against him was
reported by both William Roper and the biographer Nicholas Harpsfield at
some length. Through Harpsfield's account, written with the collaboration
of More's son-in-law William Roper during the 1550s, we see one of the
greatest courtroom dramas ever to be played out in the Western world. It
also contains the clearest formulations of what must have been Thomas
More's view of the King's Great Matter, and the schism of the English
Catholic Church from Rome. More saw this as a great tragedy for the
nation, because it would separate England both from her history as a leader
in the seventh- and eighth-century battle to Christianize Europe, from the
current battle against Venice's Reformation, and from a future role in a
united Christian Europe.
The trial was opened in Westminster Hall on July 1, 1535, before a standing
room crowd, filled with representatives of the European press. Arguing for
the prosecutors, Thomas Cromwell repeated the charges of treason and
conspiracy, adding that the Crown considered More's refusal to swear to the
Act of Succession and his silence on the issues involved to be a maliciously
motivated act of treason against Henry VIII.
More answered the first charge of treason thus:

Touching the first article, wherein it is purposed that I, to utter

and shew my malice against the King and his late marriage,
have ever repined, and resisted the same, I can say nothing but
this; that of malice I never spake against it.
He asserted that treason must consist of words or deeds, and reminded the
commissioners that, under the English common law, silence must be
understood as consent. If, as the law states, Silence Gives Consent, More
argued, his silence concerning the Act of Succession must be construed as
consent to its provisions:
I answer that, for this my taciturnity and silence, neither your
law, nor any law in the world is able justly and rightly to punish
me, unless you may besides lay to my charge some word or
some fact in deed.
More answered the second charge of inciting Bishop Fisher to treason, and
the third charge of conspiracy, by asserting that nothing had passed between
him and Bishop Fisher in the Tower, with the exception of notes of greeting
and exchange of food:
I answered [letters from Fisher with] nothing else but that I had
informed and settled my conscience, and that he should inform
and settle his. And other answer, upon the charge of my soul, I
made none. These are the tenors of my letters, upon which ye
can take no hold or handfast by your law to condemn me to
death.
Up to this point, Cromwell's case against More was going very badly. His
courtroom was being turned into a forum in which More could justify before
all the world why, by keeping silent on the question of the King's divorce
and remarriage, he remained legally blameless, although his international
reputation as a statesman and thinker turned his refusal to speak into a
clamoring rebuke of Henry and Cromwell. What Cromwell needed was
proof that the ex-Chancellor had not kept his peace.
Then, Richard Rich stepped forward to testify. Fictional accounts of More's
trial, such as Robert Bolt's drama, A Man for All Seasons, portray Rich as a
classic Judas personality. Chided by More early in his career for laziness
and mediocrity, Rich is seen offering himself up to Cromwell, as an informant against More, in exchange for profitable political appointments. The
historical record shows that, by the time of More's trial, Rich had been

closely associated with Cromwell for about three years, and had been instrumental, only two weeks earlier, in the frame-up that led to the execution
of the jailed Bishop Fisher.
Under oath, Rich told the commissioners and the jury that, during a private
conversation in the Tower, More had said to him that the Parliament did not
have the right to make the King head of the Church in England. According
to Roper, More answered this charge, with an oath:
If I were a man, my lords, that did not regard an oath, I needed
not, as it is well known, in this place, at this time, nor in this
case to stand here an accused person. And if this oath of yours,
Master Rich, be true, then pray I never see God in the face,
which I would not say, were it otherwise, to win the whole
world.
To Rich, More said:
In good faith, Master Rich, I am sorrier for your perjury than
for my own peril.
To back up his perjury, Rich produced two close associates, also on Cromwell's payroll: Richard Southwell and John Palmer. After their perjury was
heard, the jury was dismissed to find a verdict.
The jury returned its verdict of guilty, fifteen minutes after its deliberations
began.
More's statement to the court, after he had been found guilty, but before he
was sentenced to death, included the following moving passages:
Seeing that I see ye are determined to condemn me (God
knoweth how) I will now in discharge of my conscience speak
my mind plainly and freely touching my Indictment and your
Statute, withal.
And foreasmuch as this Indictment is grounded upon an Act of
Parliament directly repugnant to the laws of God and his holy
Church, the supreme Government of which, or any part whereof, may no temporal Prince presume by any law to take upon
him . . . it is therefore in law amongst Christian men insufficient
to charge any Christian man.

Harpsfield's account continues:

So further shewed he that it was contrary both to the laws and
statutes of our own land yet unrepealed, as they might evidently
perceive in the Magna Carta. . . . For as St. Paul said of the
Corinthians, "I have regenerated you, my children in Christ," so
might St. Gregory, Pope of Rome, of whom by St. Augustine
his messenger we first received Christian faith, of us Englishmen truly say, "You are my children, because I have given you
everlasting salvation, a far higher and better inheritance than
any carnal father can leave to his children, and my regeneration
made you my spiritual children in Christ."
Lord Chancellor Audley, sitting on the judges' bench, then reprimanded
More for ignoring the opinions of "the bishops, universities, and best learned
of the realm."
More replied with an appeal to universal history:
I am not bounden, my Lords, to conform my conscience to the
Council of one realm against the general Council of Christendom. For of the aforesaid holy bishops I have, for every bishop
of yours, above one hundred; and for every Council or Parliament of yours (God knoweth what manner of one), I have all
the Councils made these thousands years. And for this one
kingdom, I have all other Christian realms.
More was then sentenced to death, and led back to the Tower, to await the
announcement of the day of his execution.

Holbein's drawing of Henry VIII as Solomon Receiving the Homage of the

Queen of Sheba was done in 1535, at the height of controversy over the trial
and execution of Thomas More. Contrasted to Lorenzo Ghiberti's dignified
depiction of the same biblical theme on the famous Gates of Paradise doors of
the Cathedral of Florence baptistry (right), King Henry is portrayed as a
swaggering autocrat, surrounded by gossiping advisers and sycophantic
courtiers. It is possible that Holbein, who studied the Italian artists of the
Golden Renaissance and almost certainly traveled to Italy, was familiar with
Ghiberti's use of the theme of the pagan Queen of Sheba's marriage to the
King Solomon of Israel, as interpreted by Saint Ambrose, to publicize the
Council of Florence's efforts to unify the Eastern and Western factions of the
Catholic Church. Holbein treated the same theme to the opposite purpose of
commenting negatively on Henry's break with Rome.

Epilogue
Henry VIII, in what was considered a great act of concession for the times,
ruled on the day before More's execution, that his ex-Chancellor be buried in
London, with his family present. More's body was buried the day after he
was beheaded, but it had been separated from his head. On the King's
orders, the head was impaled on a pike, and displayed on London Bridge
until a month later, when More's daughter Margaret Roper was given leave
to take it down.
News of More's execution reached his friend Erasmus in Basel, where he
was working with the printer Johannes Froben. Erasmus said: "In More's

death I seem to have died myself; we had but one soul between us." But the
significance of More's martyrdom was lost to Erasmus, who wrote six weeks
after his friend's death in a letter to the German scholar Bartholomew
Latomus: "Would that [More] had never embroiled himself in this perilous
business and had left the theological cause to the theologians."
More was beatified by the Roman Catholic Church in 1885, and canonized
as a saint in 1935, four hundred years after his martyrdom. In 1978, on the
500th anniversary of his birth, Sir Thomas More was eulogized in the Times
of London as the greatest national hero of the English people.
Almost exactly one year to the day after Thomas More's execution, Queen
Anne Boleyn and her brother George, Lord Rochford, lost their heads at the
block, after being found guilty of treason, adultery, and incest, charges
contrived with ease by Cromwell.
Thereafter, Cromwell's work consisted mainly of looting the English
Church, and the English people, to satisfy the growing demands of Henry
VIII's foreign creditors. The dissolution of the monasteries began in earnest
in the spring of 1537; by the time it was completed, 527 Church properties
had been stripped of their assets, and their property sold or given to English
nobles. Works of art collected over centuries by the monasteries and religious houses were collected, catalogued, and sold; the cultural legacy of the
English Church was scattered to the four winds.
By early 1540, Cromwell was so desperate to find new assets to collateralize
English borrowing abroad, that he ordered the lead to be stripped off the
roofs of all Church buildings, melted down, and transported to London to be
stockpiled for foreign creditors.
Almost exactly five years to the day after Thomas More's execution, Thomas
Cromwell fell from the King's grace, at the instigation of his enemies in the
English nobility, was arrested on charges of treason, and was executed by
beheading. Cromwell, on the scaffold, referred to no higher power than that
of the will of the King.
Henry VIII was to marry four new wives between Anne Boleyn's execution
in 1536 and his death in 1547. None was to produce a male heir who
survived to rule England in his maturity. The crown passed to Catherine's
daughter Mary in 1553, whose bloody attempts to return the Church of
England to Rome were orchestrated by the ubiquitous Reginald de la Pole.

On Mary's death in 1558, the crown passed to Anne Boleyn's daughter,

Elizabeth.
During the last years of Henry VIII's reign, the English economy was taken
apart, piece by piece, as Cromwell had taken apart the monasteries. The
trade in wool cloths stagnated and declined, collapsing by 40 percent from
the previous year in 1551, three and a half years after Henry's death. A trade
boom in the early 1540s represented little more than the looting of England
by creditor Italian merchants, on horrible terms of trade. Under Queen
Elizabeth I, cloth manufactures and trade never exceeded 70 percent of what
they had been during the most prosperous years of the first half of the
century.
Borrowing abroad pushed the crown deeper and deeper into debt. The Royal
Mint, answering the treasury's desperate pleas for bullion, debased the
nation's coinage to the point that the English pound and shilling were no
longer accepted as currency in international trading. Prices, unemployment,
and vagabondage rose steadily for the next three decades.
In the early 1550s, led by the John Hawkins family of Plymouth, England
entered the international black slave trade. Thomas Cromwell would have
been proud: England had taken its first step toward becoming the rapacious
empire that maintained world domination for more than a century, based on
Venetian-style looting of economies and populations.
The face of Europe was changed by religious warfare, and by the threat of
invasion from the forces of barbarism in the East, a threat which Martin
Luther called God's punishment against Christendom. Between 1600 and
the end of the hellstorm of religious warfare known as the Thirty Years War,
the population of the German principalities was reduced from 16 million to 6
million souls.
But, a little more than a century after his death, Thomas More could have
seen, in the non-Catholic tradition of England's Commonwealth Party and
the Englishmen who settled North America's shores, his spiritual heirs.
The author wishes to thank David Cherry for his insights, particularly on
the matter of Thomas Cromwell's affiliations to the Venetian oligarchy.