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Telegraph
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The truth about Thomas More, Henry VIII's brutal enforcer
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.
New York Times
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What It Was Like to Edit the ‘Wolf Hall' Books
Last summer, when The Times released its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, one of the authors with multiple titles on that list was Hilary Mantel, who died in 2022. Those novels were 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies,' the first two in a trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, the all-purpose fixer and adviser to King Henry VIII. Those books were also adapted into a 2015 television series starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damien Lewis as King Henry. It's now a decade later and the third book in Mantel's series, 'The Mirror and the Light,' has also been adapted for the small screen. Its finale airs on Sunday, April 27. Joining the host Gilbert Cruz on this week's episode is Mantel's former editor Nicholas Pearson. Pearson currently serves as the publishing director of John Murray Press in Britain, but he previously worked for more than two decades at the publisher Fourth Estate, where he had the opportunity to work with Mantel on her 'Wolf Hall' trilogy. He describes what it was like to encounter those books for the first time, and to work with a great author on a groundbreaking masterpiece of historical fiction. We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
New European
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Everyday Philosophy: What is the meaning of life?
He is publishing these in book form as The Meaning of Life: Letters from Extraordinary People and their Answer to Life's Biggest Question, due out on April 3. Judging from the response on social media to a selection from it published in last weekend's Guardian, it will be a huge success. When James Bailey was 'unemployed, heartbroken, and questioning his purpose on the planet', he decided to write to a range of luminaries and ask them what the meaning of life is. Surprisingly, perhaps, he received numerous replies, including from Jane Goodall, Anil Seth, Jimmy Carter, Ranulph Fiennes, Terry Waite, Michael Frayn, Hilary Mantel, Joan Armatrading, and many more. People want to know what the meaning of life is. And they want to know what other people think it is. They really do. Bailey took his cue from Will Durant, an American philosopher, author of the 1926 bestseller The Story of Philosophy, one of the most successful popular philosophy books of all time. Durant followed that with On The Meaning of Life, published in 1932. This, like Bailey's book, was a collection of responses to the big question. Like Durant, Bailey also invited respondents to relate how they found 'meaning, purpose and fulfilment in their own lives', a somewhat different question from the big one. Fans of Monty Python will already know what the meaning of life is. It was revealed at the end of their film of the same name. It's this (spoiler alert): 'Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations'. The Monty Python team, like many when asked the big question, interpreted it as 'How should we live?' The last bit of their answer was quite close to Bertrand Russell's famous message to the future from 1959: 'love is wise, hatred is foolish'. Russell insisted that 'we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.' Very sadly, that's a lesson yet to be learnt. Strictly speaking, though, if you ask someone what the meaning of life is, you're asking something a bit different from 'How should we live?' Those who think life does indeed have a fixed meaning tend to be religious. Life has meaning because we are God's (perhaps gods') creations: we exist for some purpose even if there is dispute about what precisely that is. All meaning stems from the Designer's plan. As an atheist, I agree with Hilary Mantel's response to Bailey's question, however. She wrote to Bailey: 'I'm not sure that life has a meaning, in the abstract. But it can have a definite purpose if you decide so – and the carrying through, the effort to realise the purpose, makes the meaning for you.' That's very close to Jean-Paul Sartre's position in his 1945 lecture 'Existentialism is a Humanism'. There he argued that unlike a penknife, which has an essence, a set of properties that it must possess to be a penknife, properties defined in advance by its designer, human beings have no essence, no way we have to be. We become who we are through the choices that we make in a world without pre-existing values. We create all meaning for ourselves because there is no God to create it for us. In an important sense, for Sartre, we are what we do. That is the only meaning available for human beings, the meaning that we create – though Sartre adds the daunting requirement that if we are authentic, our choices should exemplify what we think a human being ought to be like, as if the whole world were watching us. The further question that Durant and Bailey asked, of how individuals find meaning in their own lives, is more psychological than philosophical. There are so many ways of giving a sense of purpose and importance to what we choose to do. This meaning comes from commitment. One person finds it through helping the homeless, another through walking in the hills; others through music, painting abstract designs or collecting matchboxes. For me the message from Mantel and Sartre rings true. The only meaning of life is the meaning you give it. Don't expect to find it elsewhere. You have to create it for yourself, find your own purpose for existing, and then commit to it.
