From Utopia to the King's Service
How did the man who held such ideas come, a year after the publication of the Utopia, to join Henry VIII's service? Perhaps the reason was that the king, though famed for learning, could not read a work in Latin, and he died before More's book appeared in English. Only More's close friends knew of his radical thoughts. Henry knew of More's rare ability, competence and integrity, thought him fit to represent the Commons, made him a knight, appointed him under-treasurer (1521) and entrusted him with the most delicate political missions. More opposed Wolsey's foreign policy, which set England against Charles V. He knew the emperor's formidable and unassailable power, and he regarded him as the champion of Christendom against the Turks. After Wolsey's fall, More turned so firmly from his methods that he pressed Parliament to reconsider the policy that had brought Wolsey down. As leader of the minority party in Parliament he was Wolsey's natural successor, and he served England as chancellor for thirty-one months.
But Wolsey's true successor was the king himself. Henry now took all the powers of government into his own hands. By his own account he had resolved to free himself from an obstinate and hostile pope and to regularize his marriage to the woman he desired, from whom he expected an heir to the English throne. More found that he was not the political leader of the country but a tool for furthering ends that did not agree with his deepest feelings and wishes.
Defender of Unity, Persecutor of Heresy
To console himself, More turned to writing against Protestantism and to prosecuting Protestant leaders. In the Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1528) and in works that followed, he joined voices with Ferdinand II (so the book), Calvin and the Lutheran princes of Germany on the need for unity of religious belief to preserve a nation's strength and calm. He feared that disagreement would split the people of England into dozens or hundreds of sects. More, who had earlier supported Erasmus's Latin translation of the New Testament, now set himself against its English translation by Tyndale, on the ground that Tyndale had bent the text in favor of Luther's followers. He believed that the Church was the foundation of social order, a comfort to mankind and a source of revelation and inspiration, and that such an institution must not become the plaything of men's whims or be broken apart by the hasty reasoning and judgment of vain disputants.
Out of this conviction he took part in the burning of Protestants. Whether anyone was whipped for heresy in his own house is disputed. More's definition of the offender had nothing to do with theology. In his words the offender was "a thief who spies on a devout woman ... and when she kneels, absorbed in prayer to the Lord ... robs her of her goods." Perhaps, when three persons were condemned to death within the diocese during his chancellorship, he was following a law that made the state the armed arm of the Church courts; but there is no doubt that he approved of burning the condemned. He did not find his treatment of Protestants inconsistent with the wide freedom he had given the followers of different religions in Utopia. Even in Utopia he had refused toleration to atheists, to deniers of the soul's survival and to those who attacked or insulted the beliefs of others. All the same, he himself abused the Protestants of England more than anyone else did.
Break with the King
A day came when More judged Henry the most misguided man of his age. He refused to approve Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, and he considered the anti-clerical legislation of 1529–1532 the deadliest blow struck at the Church, which he held to be the support of social order. When More resigned his public and Church offices and withdrew to his own estate at Chelsea (1532), he was fifty-four. Seeing his death near, he tried to prepare his children and relatives for the calamity that lay in wait by praising self-sacrifice for the truth. His son-in-law William Roper writes that he spoke of the martyrdom of the saints, their amazing patience, and the suffering of those who preferred death to denial; of the virtue of losing property and land, of enduring the pains of prison and of giving one's life for the truth. He told his children that if he could be sure they would not be grieved by his sacrifice for his lofty cause, he would welcome death cheerfully.
Prison, Trial and Death
What he awaited finally came. At the start of 1534 he was accused of taking part in the plot of the Nun of Kent. More said he had met the nun and thought her inspired, but knew nothing of any plot. At Thomas Cromwell's intercession Henry pardoned him. But on 17 April he was arrested and imprisoned for refusing to take the oath to the Act of Succession, which removed the pope from authority over the Church of England.
His beloved daughter Margaret wrote to him, begging him to swear to the Act. More answered that her plea was harder for him to bear than the pain of prison. His second wife visited him and, according to Roper, reproached him for obstinacy: "What a good year it is, Mr. More! I wonder that you, who have been thought so wise, now play the fool, lying in this filthy, close prison among mice, when if you would do as the bishops and the wise men of this realm have done, you would have the favor of the king and his privy council and live free and return to your library. When I think of your house, your library, your books, your galleries, your orchards and the comfortable life you might have with your wife, children and household at Chelsea, I wonder what you are waiting for here." Many others tried to save him and urged him to swear loyalty to the king. But More refused them all with a smile.
On 1 July 1535 More was tried for the last time. He defended himself skillfully, yet he was condemned for treason. As he was led back from Westminster to prison, his daughter Margaret twice broke through the line of guards to embrace her father, and More gave her his blessing. The day before the execution he sent his cap to Margaret with the message: "Tomorrow I shall go to God ... Farewell, my child; pray for me, and I shall pray for you and your friends, that we may meet again in heaven." As he climbed the scaffold (7 July, as the book gives it) and found it so rickety that he feared it would fall, he said to one of the guards, "Mr. Lieutenant, I pray you see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself." The executioner begged his pardon, and More embraced him warmly. By Henry's order More was not allowed to say more than a few words before his death. He asked the onlookers "to pray for him and bear witness that he died in the faith of the Holy Catholic Church and for its sake." Then he asked the people to pray for the King of England and that God would give the king good counsel, and declared that he died the king's faithful servant, but God's first. Then he recited the fifty-first Psalm. As he laid his head on the block, he carefully moved aside his long white beard so that, in his words, it should not suffer, "for it has committed no treason." His head was set up on London Bridge.
Europe's Reaction
More's cruel killing angered the English people and raised an outcry across Europe. Erasmus took More's death as his own: "We were one soul in two bodies"; and he said he no longer wished to live. A year later he too closed his eyes on the world. When Charles V learned of More's death he summoned the English ambassador and told him, "Had we possessed such a faithful servant ... we would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than so worthy a counselor."
Pope Paul III excommunicated Henry and cast him out of the Christian community. He forbade religious assemblies in England, banned trade with England, warned the English not to obey Henry, and commanded the English people and all Christian rulers to overthrow him. But since neither Charles nor Francis would obey such a command, the pope postponed publication of the bull until 1538. Even after it was issued, Charles and Francis, who opposed the pope's supremacy over kings, kept it from being published in their territories. The failure of the bull weakened the pope's power further and helped the growth of an independent, self-sufficient national state in England.
Jonathan Swift called More "the person of the greatest virtue this kingdom ever produced." In 1935, on the four-hundredth anniversary of the deaths of More and Fisher, the Church of Rome numbered them among its saints.