The truth about Thomas More, Henry VIII's brutal enforcer

Telegraph

18-05-2025

Over the last century, Thomas More has undergone three posthumous transmutations. In 1935 – exactly 400 years after he was executed for refusing to swear that Henry VIII was Supreme Head of the English Church – he was canonised by Pope Pius XI as a holy martyr. This declaration of his sanctity met a frosty reception in Anglican England, where the part More had played in putting Protestants to death for heresy before the break with Rome hadn't yet disappeared from historical memory.
Then in 1967 came Paul Scofield's moving performance as More in the film of Robert Bolt's play A Man For All Seasons. Rooted in hagiographical accounts written by members of More's family, it made him a hero, wise, erudite and humane, a man who chose to die rather than compromise his conscience in the face of tyranny. Yet a twist in the tale remained: the publication in 2009 of Hilary Mantel's world-conquering Wolf Hall. In Mantel's exquisite prose it's Thomas Cromwell, not Thomas More, whose brilliant mind wrestles with the relationship between faith, integrity and power, while More, Cromwell's opponent, becomes a callous, self-regarding zealot.
In Thomas More: A Life, her absorbing and deeply researched new biography, Joanne Paul sets out to rescue More from these violent swings of the historical pendulum. Her goal is to tell his story 'forward', using sources from More's own lifetime, rather than 'backward', from texts indelibly coloured by the circumstances of his death.
Born in 1478, More is a Londoner through and through, the son of a lawyer and grandson of a baker and a candle-maker. (A candle-lit procession on the streets of London is the first of many vividly realised scenes through which we experience the early decades of his life.) As this precociously bright boy goes to grammar school, then into service at Lambeth Palace, then to Oxford and on into training for the law, London itself becomes a character in a drama that unfolds tableau by tableau, much like the pageants Paul describes in vibrant detail.
That drama, however, soon turns dark. When More is five, the Yorkist king Edward IV dies suddenly. The people of London find themselves co-opted participants in the dethroning of Edward's young son, Edward V, by the dead king's brother Richard. Two years later, Richard III loses his crown on the battlefield at Bosworth, and the capital reshapes itself for the coming of yet another new king, Henry VII.
Paul tells this story in part through More's own unfinished work The History of Richard the Third (1513-18), a humanist text – or texts: More wrote his History in both English and Latin – drawing on classical models. But what emerges here is the extent to which More was also recording the memories of his upwardly mobile London family as they tried to survive terrifying political change. The possible psychological effects of these childhood experiences are fascinating. Can More's own earliest memories – growing up in a nurturing household under the corporate governance of a city violently shaken by the effects of individual self-assertion – be connected with his later insistence on the prime importance of unity and authority, and what he saw as the essential relationship between the two?
In the early years of his career, More explored how best to accommodate his talents within what humanists called a 'mixed life', combining scholarship and religious devotion with marriage and public service. His best-known work, Utopia, was written in 1515-16, just as he was beginning to be employed as a diplomat by the young king Henry VIII. Its two parts consider the fundamental questions with which he was grappling: how far should a philosopher involve himself in the world, and what form should an ideal state take?
But the conclusions of its enigmatically supple satire have never been easy to pin down. Where does the truth lie in a dialogue about an imaginary republic called 'Utopia' – 'no place' – described by Raphael Hythlodaeus, a character whose name means 'peddler of nonsense', to a fictionalised 'Thomas More', whose surname in Latin is a pun on the Greek for 'fool'?
Initially, the world seemed to confirm that More could serve Church and state together. When Henry VIII embroiled himself in printed argument with Martin Luther, a German friar who was challenging the doctrines and hierarchy of the Church, More stepped forward in the king's defence as a theologian as well as a politician. His newly polemical style in his Response to Luther (1523) is a pointed reminder that the urbane figure in A Man For All Seasons is not the historical More. He was throwing back into Luther's 's----y mouth, truly the s--tpool of all s--t,' he wrote, 'all the muck and s--t which your damnable rottenness has vomited up'. By October 1529, when he replaced Cardinal Wolsey as Lord Chancellor at the head of Henry's royal administration, More's writing against the spread of Lutheran ideas had gathered scale and pace. Soon, he was taking a personal hand in the interrogation and burning of English heretics.
But England's unity was already irreparably fractured. Pope Clement VII refused to annul Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that the king could marry Anne Boleyn; in 1531, the king therefore rejected the power of the pope. More would have to choose between different kinds of unity, different forms of authority. On May 15 1532, the English clergy submitted to Henry's demand that they recognise him as Supreme Head of the Church in England. The next day, More resigned as Chancellor.
In her account of these years and those that followed, Paul keeps admirably close to More's own words, thousands upon thousands of which poured from his pen. Ultimately, his conclusion on the king's 'great matter' would not be a defence of individual conscience, but the paradoxical reverse: More could not accept Henry's claim to be head of the English Church because it seemed to him inconsistent with the unity of Church tradition, a wider authority without which, he believed, individual opinion had no legitimate force.
And yet More the lawyer, fearful and human, tried to save More the theologian. He did everything he could to avoid expressing his opposition to the royal Supremacy explicitly or publicly, until in the spring of 1534 Henry decided that his subjects must swear an oath to uphold his new status. More refused but wouldn't say why, hoping that silence might allow him to live out his days in a quiet retirement. It did not. Henry sent him to the Tower, and a year later – once a means had been found to convict More of treason – to the block.
In 2000, Pope John Paul II named More the patron saint of statesmen and politicians. Yet Joanne Paul points out that, in his entire political career, 'Thomas More did almost nothing to change the course of English history'. Nor did he want to take a public stand on the issue for which he is venerated as a martyr. The man for all seasons was a man of intense contradictions: generous and self-aware, vituperative and self-righteous. Paul is excellent on the development of his ideas, though More himself – like his most famous book – remains difficult to 'see' as a coherent whole.
Still, as this moving and resonant account makes clear, his refusal to abandon the conscientious line he eventually drew raises deep questions about the limits of legitimate authority and the threshold for resistance – questions which, as we face contemporary challenges to constitutional norms and the international order, have lost none of their troubling power.