The Many Lives of Thomas More

Thomas More, in critiquing the historical work of a contemporary, wrote,

"Let historians begin to show either prejudice or favoritism, and who will there be to lend any credence at all to histories?"

This admonition could apply to most words written about More himself, whose legacy has for five centuries been the source of significant debate and even conflict. For many Catholics, More is the martyred saint who had the courage to stand up to the tyrannical King Henry VIII, while the Church was being fatally divided during the Reformation. He was the man for all seasons who was executed for refusing to violate his conscience. For Protestants, and many admirers of Hilary Mantel, he is a grubby and compromising figure whose pious support for the established church enabled him to justify the killing of brave men and women who wanted the word of God to reach the masses.

Additionally, More's most famous work, Utopia, which was published in 1516, inspires equally impassioned argument. For some readers, it is interpreted as a communist text showing the benefits of a society without personal property. For other readers, this complex work represents something of a nightmare: a police state in which individual freedom is severely limited, proper religious faith is unknown, and reason is deployed to justify oppression.

Complexity is the keyword here. More is as enigmatic and contradictory as his best-known work; however, the answer is not to take one side or another or to carve him up into easily digestible morsels. It is to accept the deeply contradictory nature of a human being living in tumultuous times. Even brilliant, otherwise rational minds can be driven—primarily by fear—to positions of hatred, violence, and obstinacy. Our vantage point of the twenty-first century invites us to sort historical figures into camps of "good" or "bad," "hero" or "villain," but that is as pernicious to our perspective on the present as it is on the past, as Thomas More himself pointed out, some 500 years ago.

The contradictions that have been observed in More’s character are nearly endless. He was a devoted family man but had an attitude to women that would be condemned today. While he established his own humanist school in his house and taught his daughters alongside his sons, he also believed that women were intellectually inferior to men and could never reach the same levels of intellectual accomplishment. (More was, in fact, not a priest but rather a layman, hence his marriage and family.) He had a great capacity for male friendship and established a lifelong relationship with Erasmus, probably the pre-eminent intellectual in Europe, which was maintained through visits and encounters as well as a vast correspondence. Even so, this friendship was not without its low points, with Erasmus unable to comprehend More’s decision to enter Henry VIII’s service instead of developing his own ideas as a free man.

More was a trenchant defender of the church’s age-old values. He was eager to take on Martin Luther and the forces of the Protestant Reformation, arguing that, despite its worldly flaws, the Church had to be united as God’s institution on earth. This was to save the souls of those entrusted to its care. For More, Protestantism not only damned souls, but its attendant division promised the end of civilization. Hell awaited on earth, as well as after death.

The afterlife explains the force behind More’s extensive writings on heresy, one of the central features of his later career and one that modern readers find especially hard to grasp, especially his belief that heretics had to be burned alive to save their souls and to purge Christian society of infection. In More's view, if the church splinters and heresy is allowed to flourish, then millions of souls will be damned to eternal hell fire. Therefore, the church authorities need to do whatever they can to prevent this tragedy. If that includes burning a few recalcitrant heretics who have been given chances to repent, then that was a small price to pay. More’s position, however, did not go unchallenged in his lifetime, even among erstwhile allies.

More saw the same dividing force of pride in Henry VIII’s break with Rome as he did in the Lutheran movement. His silence when asked to swear the oath recognizing Henry as Supreme Head of the English Church was deemed to be malicious and in contravention of the 1534 Treason Act, which stated that it was a capital crime to challenge the king’s supremacy over the church. (This act was notably passed through Parliament during More’s imprisonment.) In prison, More, who was always an energetic man who found time to write whatever the circumstances, produced works designed to comfort himself and his family, as well as to provide solace for others facing a similar fate. He was executed on July 6, 1535, dying, as he said, "the King’s good servant, and God’s first." These last words have been frequently misquoted as "but God’s first." More was crucially proclaiming that service to God and service to the King were not, in fact, a contradiction, even if they seemed so at first.

More was widely admired soon after his execution. His son-in-law, William Roper, wrote a biography that emphasized More's gentle, spiritual side and stoical wisdom, which has served as a cue for many subsequent lives. More was also known as a jokester with the ability to smile in the face of terror. The Elizabethan play, Sir Thomas More, partly written by Shakespeare, repeats the already established anecdote of More asking his executioners to help him onto the scaffold but noting that he could make his way down himself. Chroniclers wondered whether More was a  "wise foolish man" or a "foolish wise man," once again perhaps failing to appreciate the complex humanity with which More lived his life.

It is tempting, as authors of a recent book on More, to claim that we have the final word on his life, works, or legacy. But such a proclamation would be a sad thing indeed, as well as a death knell to the very project of the humanities, of which More was an early proponent. If we did that, who indeed would give any credence at all to the histories we write? 

Andrew Hadfield is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Sussex and a fellow of the British Academy. His edition of the Parnassus plays, edited with Neil Rhodes, will appear later this year. Joanne Paul is an Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Sussex. Her biography of Thomas More, Thomas More: A Life, was released last year.