The Life of Thomas More (70 page)

Yet, even
in extremis
, there was a measure of consolation. He had taken with him to his prison chamber a copy of the New Testament as well as the Psalter and Book of Hours; from his references in his ‘Tower writings’ he is also likely to have had beside him such books of devotion as the
Catena Aurea
and the
Monotessaron
of Jean Gerson. In particular he meditated upon the testing of St Peter, the martyrdom of St Stephen and the passion of Christ. He wrote to his daughter that ‘I neuer haue prayde God to bringe me hence nor deliuer me fro death, but referring all thing whole vnto his onely pleasure’,
³³
and, when she was eventually allowed to visit him, he told her that of all God’s spiritual favours ‘I recken vpon my faith my prisonment euen the very chief’;
³⁴
by which he meant that he had been granted the opportunity to withdraw entirely from the world and prepare his soul for eternity. The great fear of the faithful was of a sudden or unexpected death and thus of meeting the creator without ‘schrift’ or ‘housel’, the last confession and communion. More knew that he had at least escaped that fate.

In all outward aspects he remained patient and mild now, not caring even to speak against heretics; he knew that he was likely to die soon enough, but the prospect of death was not an unwelcome one. In the words of Thomas a Kempis, he had grown to love his cell—‘In this thy cell thou shalt find what abroad thou shalt too often lose … thou must always suffer, willingly or unwillingly, and so shalt thou always find the cross … endure patiently the contempt which is thy due … I am not then worthy of anything but to be scourged and punished.’
³⁵
More retained his hair shirt as he dwelled in his chamber, and is reported to have whipped himself for penitence; he fasted on the appointed days, sang hymns and prayed both day and night. Before he slept, according to one of his first biographers, ‘he wrapt hym selfe in a linen sheet, like a bodie to be laid in a grave’. He no longer cut his hair and within a few months his beard emphasised the haunted and emaciated look which later (and no doubt posthumous) portraits reveal. When Pope Benedict XIII was imprisoned in Avignon, he vowed that he would not cut his beard until he had been released; this was an old oath, but it is clear enough that More never expected to regain his liberty. His hair began to show through his hood. This is a medieval expression which meant that he had fallen into misfortune, but it did not seem an unhappy fate to More himself. He had in a sense returned to the time of his early adulthood, when he had participated in the rituals and services of the London Charterhouse. He had become a monk at last.

In his Book of Hours he wrote one line above and below the woodcuts which depicted the progress of Christ towards his crucifixion; taken together these lines form a ‘Godly Meditation’ in which he absorbs the images of ‘the passion that christ suffred for me’ in order to render himself more worthy of divine grace. Each image, whether that of the ‘crowning with thorns’ or ‘carrying the Cross’, afforded endless material for More’s contemplation as he considered his own last hours. He prayed ‘gladly to bere my purgatory here’ and to ‘have ever afore myn yie my deth that ys ever at hand’, finding in the sufferings of Jesus the inspiration to endure his own. So he divided each day into the cycles of prayer, the canonical hours which comforted and protected him. In his Psalter, also, More made his own annotations. The words of the thirty-ninth psalm proclaim the silence of the psalmist before the deceits
and lies of his enemies; More wrote beside it a note that he must remain quiet, also, and bless those who conspire against him. He marked or ‘flagged’ certain verses, which could be brought together in a ‘cento’ prayer filled with images of tribulation and imprisonment; one passage from the sixty-ninth psalm is particularly emphasised with its verse ‘I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother’s children’. Against the verse of the eighty-seventh psalm, ‘I am become as a man without help’, More appended the phrase
‘in tribulatione uehetnente et in carcere’
(‘in grievous suffering and in prison’).

Yet the central allusion, occurring forty times, is to ‘demones’; he places it repeatedly against those psalms which implore deliverance from the snares of evil men or ask for patience in the face of enemies. More wrote in the margin of the fifty-ninth psalm, which opens ‘deliver me from mine enemies’,
‘uel demones uel malos homines’
(‘either demons or wicked men’). For him, in the battle for his religion more than his life, there was little difference between the demonic agencies and those who tempted or tried to force him to forswear his faith. More knew from Augustine that demons might possess bodies composed of ‘thick moist air’ like that which rises from a heated bath; perhaps the exhalations of his prison chamber reminded him of their presence.

His annotations and marginalia were written in ink, the psalms being generally lightly marked with a stroke or word, so it is clear that More’s use of charcoal at the beginning of his imprisonment was only a temporary expedient. He had been given writing materials and during these early months of confinement he composed a lengthy treatise entitled
A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation
; in that respect, it springs directly from the threatened and attentive piety which is visible in More’s annotations.

But this late and last dialogue has a private and self-communing, almost brooding, quality which distinguishes it from its predecessors. It is the strangest mixture of narrative and fable, filled with recollection and animated by a curious passion for the absurd or the bizarre. There are memories here of More’s childhood and of children’s games, of his schooldays and of the London Charterhouse, of early friends such as Linacre, of Wolsey and of Dame Alice, of sea voyages and jury rooms. There is a discussion on the nature of dream and reality which provides the most appropriate setting for some of the strangest stories More ever
told. He narrates, for example, the short history of a woman who wished to ‘angre her husband, so sore that she might give hym occasion to kyll her & than shuld he be hangid for her’;
³⁶
the man did indeed chop off her head and witnesses ‘herd her tong bable in her hed & call horson horson twise after that the hed was fro the bodye’.
³⁷
More mentions the act of beheading on several occasions, as if his own fears were striated throughout the narrative. He relates the story of a rich widow, for example, who wished to be beheaded by her neighbour and somehow taken for a martyr; she also wished ‘the blody axe’
³⁸
to be secretly conveyed to another neighbour’s house, and so instigate a false charge of murder. More tells the tale of a man who wished his wife to crucify him, in remembrance of Christ, but was eventually satisfied by a scourging.

There are also stories of those with a manic desire to commit suicide, and a vignette of a sick woman who in the act of making love vomits over her companion. He evokes a fervent and fervid world of ‘wakyng revelacion’ and ‘false dremyng delusion’, a world in which all the horrors of frail humankind are displayed. It is the world of visions and illusions in which the ‘mad nun’ of Kent had dwelled, but it is also the world as seen from the vantage of a prison chamber. It is the world of artists such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel, with the same fascination for the deformed and the demonic, with the facetiae of natural life transformed into the giant marks of the flesh and the devil.

He was also writing to allay his own desperate fear of pain or torture, shut up in that straitened room, aware of all the temptations and delusions of the anxious mind. The
Dialogue
is set in 1528, two years after the first invasion of Hungary by Suleiman the Magnificent; he was poised to attack again and the conversation between an old and young inhabitant of that country, ‘Antony’ and ‘Vincent’, is ostensibly designed to bring comfort to those unfortunate Hungarians who seemed destined to suffer at Turkish hands. Yet his real subject lies much closer to home. When More writes of a time when our friends ‘vnder colour of kyndred’ become ‘our most foes’,
³⁹
for example, he was describing the period in which he dwelled. In the guise of Antony More is also able to relive, or relieve, some of his own most powerful and unspoken reflections. He describes those who ‘semed they neuer so good & vertuose before’ were discovered to be ‘holow light & counterfayte in dede’;
⁴⁰
despite his public wish not to meddle in any other man’s conscience, it seems likely that he is here condemning those orthodox clergy who had signed the oath of succession. There are also a number of allusions to ‘the lion’. This was already well known as an image of the king himself, but in More’s writing the royal beast becomes curiously entangled with other figures. The Turkish ‘persecusion for the fayth’ is depicted as ‘a rampyng lyon’,
⁴¹
and at the close of this narrative, when More meditates upon the agonies of Christ, the devil suddenly appears ‘runnyng & roryng like a rampyng lyon abowt vs’.
⁴²
So we have the king, the Turk, and the devil encompassed in the same range of imagery; in More’s peril and isolation, he has conflated all of the enemies of the faith into one demonic form.

Those who die for their faith are promised a martyr’s crown and everlasting glory, but More was not so presumptuous as to believe himself worthy of them. Half of his struggle lay in preventing himself from rushing to such a death, and indeed many of his references in the
Dialogue
concern those who suffer from spiritual pride or are tempted into that dreadful vanity by the devil himself. There are further snares. In the course of the book he names the four great temptations of the faithful: the terror by night, the arrow that flies by day, the pestilence that wanders and the devils of noon. This last ‘mydday devill’ is the strongest and most to be feared, since for More it represents the open persecution of the faithful. So More invokes the protection of God, and in several passages he alludes to the ‘pavis’ or shield of His presence.

Antony compares himself ‘to the snofe of a candell that burneth with in the candell styk nose … yet sodenly lyfteth a leme halfe an Inch aboue the nose, & giveth a praty short light agayne’
⁴³
until it finally goes out. It is a pretty image, but it cannot disguise the weariness of a man who now looked towards death and reckoned ‘euery day for my last’.
⁴⁴
This late work is filled with sudden and perhaps inadvertent allusions to More’s own constrained state, with images of ‘a little narrow room’, ‘key cold’, ‘men [that] get owt of prison’, and ‘this wepyng world’. It is also a fevered world, of ‘siknes’ and ‘phisike’, of the memory of his own ‘fittes’ in earlier life, of vertigo upon ‘an high bridge’ and the ‘toth ache’, of ‘drugges’ and ‘desease’, of ‘medycyns’ and ‘poticaryes’. What is this life but a vast chamber of the mortally sick, watched over ‘by the great phisicion god’?
⁴⁵
More’s own condition, in
extremity, is also the condition of the world. And what is the world, in any case, but a vast prison no different in nature from the cell in which More found himself? ‘In this prison they bye & sell, in this prison they brall and chide, in this they run together & fight, in this they dyce, in this they carde, In this they pipe & revell, In this they sing & dawnce.’
⁴⁶
Then God becomes ‘the chiefe gaylour ouer this whole brode prison the world is’.
⁴⁷
This dark and hard dialogue reflects a faith of equal severity and unambiguity, established upon principles of order and authority where God is both doctor and prison warden. More can then reflect, with a certain degree of irony, on his own likely fate: ‘Now to this greate glory, can there no man come hedlesse. Our hed is Christ.’
⁴⁸

There was still humour to be found, even in his confinement; he was anxious but not sorrowful and he had occasion to write some short English verses or ‘balletes’. The second of them is addressed to ‘lady luck’ and ends

He had enough leisure, also, to write letters. He was well aware of John Fisher’s presence in the Tower and through the agency of the lieutenant’s servant, George Golde, various ‘scrolls’ were passed between them; they would not have been of a compromising nature, but Golde always took the precaution of burning them. ‘There is no better keeper,’ he used to say, ‘than the fire.’ According to both Fisher and More, on a later examination, they had simply exchanged the prayers and comforts which seemed appropriate in their similar circumstances. Only once did they discuss the ‘king’s matter’—in the summer of the year they both described to each other their attitude to the oath of succession. More explained that he had not sworn, but would say nothing further on the subject.

He was no more forthcoming with his daughter. At first he had been refused visitors, but Margaret had written a letter in which she urged him to follow her example and accept the oath. He had once said that ‘all the pynch’ was in the ‘paine’ of torture or death, but there was another kind of pain; he was deeply wounded and disturbed by her letter ‘surely farre aboue all other thynges’.
⁴⁹
Twice he mentioned that
Margaret had ‘labored’ to persuade him and, although her letter is not extant, it is clear that she tried every kind of exhortation on the issues which touched his conscience. This was the hardest suffering of his imprisonment. It was not simply that More, so much a man of the household and the society established upon it, had been separated from his family; he also knew that they could not understand his avowal of the principles which had led to his arrest and imprisonment. He was truly alone.

At this point Cromwell decided that she might visit her father, perhaps in the hope that a little filial affection and persuasion might soften him. More, on seeing his daughter in the sad confines of his stone chamber, might come to understand the folly or futility of his own situation. So she journeyed from Chelsea to the Tower, and was taken to her father’s cell. They wept and chanted together the Seven Psalms and Litany. ‘The wepyng tyme,’ he wrote, ‘… is the tyme of this wrechid world.’
⁵⁰
When he asked about Dame Alice and the rest of the household Margaret reassured him, as she mentioned on a later occasion, that his wife was in ‘good comforte’ and all else in ‘good order’ with the family ‘disposing them self euery day more and more to set litle by the worlde’.
⁵¹