Thomas More
Prisoner in the Tower
Thomas More (1478 – ), lawyer, philosopher, and author of Utopia (1516).
You would keep a tribe of Freudian analysts in business for life. They would hold conferences devoted just to you. An absentminded professor with a sideline in torture, you turn on a sixpence, from threatening to cajoling to whimisicality. Ill-at-ease in your skin, self-hating, you show your inner confusion by your relationship with your clothes; you look as if you are wearing someone else’s, and got dressed in the dark. This disarrayed outside makes you seem vulnerable, even harmless; but inside, your barriers are rigid and our core is frozen.
Hilary Mantel, notes on characters
The story so far…
Week 1: Across the Narrow Sea / Paternity
We are introduced to More in the context of investigating heresy. Wolsey deals leniently with suspected heretics. For there is always the threat of More, who will “shut them in his cellar” and “all we will hear is the sound of screaming.”
Week 2: At Austin Friars / Visitation
In 1527, Cromwell notes that “Wolsey will burn books, but not men.” More, on the other hand, goes after the men. Cromwell, an ally of heretics, does what he can to frustrate More “and his clerical friends”.
In 1529, Cromwell confidently bets with George Cavendish that More will accept Wolsey’s title of Lord Chancellor. More is opposed to the divorce, but the king will give it to him anyway. “Perhaps” muses Cromwell, “he hopes to be saved from himself”.
Week 3: An Occult History of Britain (Part 1)
More has a colourful imagination. When German soldiers rampage through Rome, he imagines them “roasting live babies on spits”. More operates on a different planet to Cromwell. When More “wakes up in Chelsea to the prospect of morning prayers in Latin”, Cromwell wakes up to a creator “who speaks the swift patois of the markets”. More wears a jerkin of horsehair and beats himself with a small scourge. Meanwhile, Cromwell is checking the day’s exchange rate.
Week 4: An Occult History of Britain (Part 2)
At the start of this week’s reading, we learn of the moment when More and Cromwell met at Lambert Palace. Cromwell was a kitchen boy and More, a pale-faced scholar on his way to Oxford. He barely notices Cromwell and certainly doesn’t remember him. When Tom asks More what is in his book, Master Thomas replies, ‘Words, words, just words.’
In 1528, we get a good hard look at the man. He is “always genial” with a grubby collar. Like a good lawyer, he tries to trip Cromwell up on words. More has a dispensation to allow him to read heretical texts. Cromwell does not. He invites Cromwell to dinner at Chelsea and says, “we must be friends”. Cromwell thinks it sounds like a threat.
Week 5: Make or Mar / Three-Card Trick
The Lord Chancellor adds his own articles against Wolsey. He accuses the cardinal of whispering in the king’s ear and breathing in his face, in order to infect the monarch with his own contagion. “Imagine living inside the Lord Chancellor’s head”, Cromwell thinks, when he hears of this.
More is dining with his friend, the merchant Antonio Bonvisi. It is Spring 1530, and inconveniently Cromwell is there:
‘Did you want to talk about me?’ he asks. ‘Yu can do it while I’m here, Lord Chancellor. I have a thick skin.’
More can rise above all this, for he lives in Utopia. He is a scholar and a wit. He will outlast us all. His advice to Cromwell: speak to Henry’s good heart, not his strong one.
But when More speaks ill of the cardinal, Cromwell is ready for the fight. He accuses the Lord Chancellor of hypocrisy. Of condemning Wolsey’s ambition while denying his own love of this world:
‘Let’s have this straight. Thomas More here will tell you, I would have been a simple monk, but my father put me to the law. I would spend my life in church, if I had the choice. I am, as you know, indifferent to wealth. I am devoted to things of the spirit. The world’s esteem is nothing to me.’ He looks around the table. ‘So how did he become Lord Chancellor? Was it an accident?’
Let us not forget who was Lord Chancellor before More. The other Thomas, Wolsey.
Week 6: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 1)
Cromwell goes to Chelsea to dine with the More household. More is “fraying … a suspicion of unravelling weave.” He shows off his turkey carpet, and Cromwell tells him it is not fit for hanging. It is flawed, but it hardly matters. “A turkey carpet is not an oath.” They joke as though they are friends. They are not.
More at home is a sober monster. He tells his wife she is ugly, and relates the time he gave his daughter-in-law Anne dried peas instead of a pearl necklace. “More goes to bed at nine o’clock,” says Gardiner, but not to his wife. He has made himself plain in all things, Thomas More. When he became Lord Chancellor, he said he wouldn’t be involved in the king’s divorce. Gardiner: “the king accepted that, but I wonder how long he will accept it.”
Week 8: The Dead Complain of Their Burial / Arrange Your Face (Part 1)
The Lord Chancellor is present when Cromwell is sworn onto the king’s council. His father has died. “He seems to diminish, and his whole body to leak tears.” He feels his age. He hopes Cromwell will advise the king on what he ought to do, and not merely what he can.
“The word is that the Lord Chancellor has become a master in the twin arts of stretching and compressing the servants of God.” He has arrested a grocer called John Peyt.
Week 10: 'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 1)
Many are coming around to Cromwell’s way of thinking, which is of course, the king’s pleasure. But not Thomas More. “Perhaps his time has passed. Utopia, after all, is not a place one can live.”
More has been busy in Dystopia, bringing men like John Petyt to reckoning, locating their breaking point in The Tower.
He goes to visit Cromwell. “Master Cromwell, you think because you are a councillor you can negotiate with heretics, behind the king’s back. You are wrong.”
“Are you threatening me? I’m just interested,” Cromwell asks.
“Yes,” More says sadly. “Yes, that is precisely what I am doing.”
The balance of power has shifted between them.
More says it does not matter if you lie to heretics, or trick them into a confession. They have no right to silence, even if they know speech will incriminate them; if they will not speak, then break their fingers, burn them with irons, hang them up by their wrists. It is legitimate, and indeed More goes further; it is blessed.
In May, he resigns as Lord Chancellor. He will go away to write and pray.
“Write only a little,” Cromwell advises. “And pray a lot.”
“Now, is that a threat?”
Week 12: Anna Regina (Part 1)
“Leave us, daughter,” he tells Meg Roper as Cromwell arrives. “I won’t have you in this devil’s company.”
Cromwell tries to persuade More to attend the coronation. He’ll even buy him a new coat. He asks about the Holy Maid and More says “we would not receive her.” He has instead written to her, telling her “to cease to trouble the king.”
While, Meg is out fetching a copy of the letter, Cromwell raps his fingers on the table to make More pay attention. Help save Frith. “Let him live… you are an eloquent man, you are the great persuaded of our age, not me — talk him back to Rome, if you can.”
Week 14: Devil’s Spit / A Painter’s Eye
Thomas More comes to see Elizabeth Barton’s public penance at St Paul’s Cross. Cromwell and he speak “lawyer-to-lawyer” but then he, More, hesitates. He wants Cromwell to know that he is in the clear. “In the name of Christ, you know that.” It is rare for Mantel to use italics. You can feel the fear in his voice.
Cromwell suggests a letter to the king. But there is only so far More will go. “He is afraid to lose his credibility with the scholars in Europe.” He will not accept Henry as head of the church.
Week 15: Supremacy
Anne makes Henry put Thomas More’s name of a bill of attainder for those associated with the Elizabeth Barton affair. “I want him frightened,” says Anne. “Fright can unmake a man.”
They beg the king to remove More’s name from the bill. This buys them time to sit down with Thomas More and get him swear the oath to Anne’s marriage. He will not do it, but he won’t say why.
‘You say Parliament is behind you, and I say all the angels and saints are behind me, and all the company of the Christian dead, for as many generations as there have been since the church of Christ was founded, one body, undivided –’
He riles Cromwell and makes him lose his temper. More leaves victorious. “Depend upon it,” says Cromwell, “in the eyes of Europe we will be the fools and the oppressors, and he will be the poor victim with the better turn of phrase.”
His daughter Meg says More “believes you understand him. As he understands you.” Cromwell prepares the note to send More to the Tower. But he hesitates.
Week 16: The Map of Christendom (Part 1)
Cromwell gets Antonio Bonvisi to bring More food in the Tower. He is refusing to swear the Act of Supremacy. His goods are forfeited and he will no longer be allowed visitors.
Cromwell tells him that he just has to say “some words” and tempts him with thoughts of home and bed with Alice. “You would write a play,” says More.
Cromwell asks whether More remembers him. At Lambeth Palace, when he was seven. Was the great book he held a dictionary?
Alice resents how close Margaret is to Thomas More:
‘She’s close, you know. Keeps her own counsel, and his. She tells me now he gave her his shirts to wash the blood out, that he wore a shirt of hair beneath his linen. He did so when we were married and I begged him to leave it off and I thought he had. But how would I know? He slept alone and drew the bolt on his door. If he had an itch I never knew it, he was perforce to scratch it himself.’
But she says she feels “to him as you might a child.”
Week 17: The Map of Christendom (Part 2) / To Wolf Hall
I always forget, he thinks , how More neither pities himself nor takes pity on others. Because I would have protected my own girls from such a sigh, I think he would too. But he uses Meg to harden his resolve. If she will not give way, he cannot; and she will not give way.
Cromwell argues with More, who says: “Ever since I came here I have been prepared for my death, as your hands — yes, yours, — or at the hands of nature.”
A committee comes to put the oath to him. Audley tells More that there will be an indictment for treason and a trial. “I do nobody harm. I say none harm. I think none harm.” Cromwell explodes:
‘You do nobody harm? What about Bainham, you remember Bainham? You forfeited his goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with your own eyes, you locked him in Bishop Stokesley’s cellar, you had him back at your own house two days chained upright to a post, you sent him again to Stokesley, saw him beaten and abused for a wekk, and still your spite was note exhausted: you sent him back to the Tower and had him racked again, so that finally his body was so broken that thhey had to carry him in a chair when they took him to Smithfield to be burned alive. And you say, Thomas More, that you do no harm?’
Richard Riche stays behind and puts cases to More. Hypothetically speaking. He gets More to say spiritual justification is out of this realm. “Hang him for a papist,” says Cromwell.
He visits Cromwell one last time before the trial.
‘Your task is to kill me. Mine is to keep alive. It is my role and my duty. All I own is the ground I stand on, and that ground is Thomas More. If you want it you will have to take it from me. You cannot reasonable believe I will yield it.’
But still, More is afraid of the manner of his death. Who wouldn’t be?
At court, he attacks Riche’s character. But the jury is against him and so is their judgement. After sentencing, he speaks out. He breaks his silence. “But there was nothing new it it,” thinks Cromwell. “Not new anyway to him.”
The night before Thomas More dies, Thomas More is sleeping. So Cromwell keeps a vigil for him alone.
He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.