By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
After my recent visit to England, and particularly the Tower of London, a friend shared with me an excellent book called “The Life of Thomas More” (by Peter Ackroyd, 1998, Doubleday). The book is full of fascinating characters and events, and reading it left me with several interesting observations.
Thomas More is a powerful figure distinguished by loyalty to his own conscience and to what he viewed to be the rule of law (including the longstanding authority of the pope and the Catholic Church in many matters), which he thought King Henry VIII unlawfully usurped. Those views, and ultimately the dignified, kind, and gentle way that More faced his execution, paved the way for his canonization as a Catholic saint some four hundred years after his death.
Indeed, More told the men who condemned him to death in 1535, “albeit your lordships have been my judges to condemnation, yet we may hereafter meet joyfully together in Heaven to our everlasting salvation.” One of these men, Thomas Cromwell, later also was beheaded on the orders of Henry.
During our recent Tower of London tour, More was described in heroic terms as the greatest man of his generation, but his antagonist Henry VIII? Not so much.
More was realistic about the tenuous relationship that any of the king’s counselors would have with Henry VIII. Early on, More described Henry to family member in this way: “if my head would win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go.” It appears Henry was a beast of a man, narcissistic, lustful, power-hungry, and vengeful. There was an average of 120 executions a month in England during Henry VIII’s reign.
Henry also shifted blame masterfully. After More died, Henry faulted his new wife Anne Boleyn, telling her: “Thou art the cause of this man’s death.” He executed Boleyn just eleven months after More, went on to marry four more wives, and beheaded one more of them before the ordeal was all over in 1547.
Boleyn certainly bears some responsibility for More’s death, but perhaps not as much as Henry gave her. Ironically, Boleyn’s final resting place is just steps from that of More in a chapel on the grounds of the Tower of London.
Henry seems to me to be much more like Richard III, the tyrannical king that his father (Henry VII) defeated and displaced. Henry VII, the first Tudor king and the man who unified England after the War of the Roses, lies in a place of honor in Westminster Abbey. More wrote a history of Richard III on which the playwright William Shakespeare later relied. In Shakespeare’s famous play, Richard is described as a “bottled spider,” an “abortive, rooting hog,” and a “poisonous hunchbacked toad.” Of course, Shakespeare could not say anything like this about Henry VIII because his daughter, Elizabeth I, was the queen and Shakespeare’s patron.
All this domestic and political turmoil was caused, in part, when the Catholic church denied Henry VIII an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. As awful as Henry’s behavior seems, it also appears that Pope Clement VII, who denied Henry his desired marriage annulment, based his decision primarily on political circumstances too, such as the fact that Catherine was the niece of the man who largely controlled the pope’s destiny, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Spain, who formerly had been allied with Henry.
Thus, the interesting dynamic of More’s times was the strong intersection of church and state. More fought to preserve what he thought to be the best of the dynamic which he thought Henry was destroying, but In fact, Henry was simply replacing one form of church/state unity with another.
I’m not sure either man’s approach is the best one. Likely, the excesses of both provoked people like Thomas Jefferson to demand, a few hundred years later, that a wall of separation should exist between church and state. Such a wall was built into the American Constitution. In his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson explained that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship…”
Such a concept would be foreign to both More and Henry VIII, but I for one am very glad that Jefferson thought of it.
