By Hans Holbein the Younger - Google Arts & Culture — WQEnBYMfBeoSdg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13466190
An early mentor cautioned me against a search for “heroes” to emulate. Don’t idealise or find perfection in any human being. Inevitably, people you place on a pedestal will let you down. Instead, be realistic and do hard nosed assessments of people. Are they smart and intellectually curious? Do they fulfill their personal and moral obligations? Do they have character and integrity? Are they honest? Do they strive to overcome their weaknesses and minimise their flaws? If the ledger come up positive, you have found someone worthy of your admiration. Searching for heroes is foolhardy, but finding someone to admire is completely appropriate. Admiration should be measured and always subject to review as additional information comes to your attention. I adopted this philosophy and I can report that one of the first giants of history to capture my imagination and earn my admiration was St Thomas More. To understand why some perspective is necessary.
Let’s begin with More’s “A Lawyer’s Prayer” which hung on the wall of my law office for 45 years. I share in full.
“PRAY THAT, FOR THE GLORY OF GOD AND IN HIS PURSUIT OF JUSTICE, I MAY BE TRUSTWORTHY WITH CONFIDENCE, KEEN IN STUDY, ACCURATE IN ANALYSIS, CORRECT IN CONCLUSION, ABLE IN ARGUMENT, LOYAL TO CLIENTS, HONEST WITH ALL, COURTEOUS TO ADVERSARIES, EVER ATTENTIVE TO CONSCIENCE. SIT WITH ME AT MY DESK AND LISTEN WITH ME TO MY CLIENT’S TALES. READ WITH ME IN MY LIBRARY AND STAND ALWAYS BESIDE ME SO THAT TODAY I SHALL NOT TO WIN A POINT, LOSE MY SOUL. PRAY THAT MY FAMILY MAY FIND IN ME WHAT YOUR’S FOUND IN YOU; FRIENDSHIP AND COURAGE, CHEERFULNESS AND CHARITY, DILIGENCE IN DUTIES, COUNSEL IN ADVERSITY, PATIENCE IN PAIN, THEIR GOOD SERVANT.”
WOW! Has any single statement better stated what principles should govern the personal and professional actions of a public spirited and high integrity lawyer. Ultimately, it is about your soul, not just being clever or a “winner.” It belongs in the pantheon and explains why More assumed a special place in the Catholic imagination. Public service and private conscience need not be enemies. The message of More was drilled in me by nuns in grammar school, the archdiocesan priests in high school and the Jesuits in college. People named their children after Thomas More. Did you ever notice that Senator Edward Kennedy’s middle name was More? Pope Pius XI canonised More in 1935 and the canonisation homily emphasised his personal holiness, the discipline of his private prayer, his fidelity to human respected his refusal to let even his family’s tears to move him from what he believed to be true. Compelling stuff! I suspect More’s Prayer is not featured on the walls of Trump’s Department of Justice.
The legacy of More received public validation through Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons published as a play in1960 and released as an award winning movie in 1966. I have seen the play at least three times and loved the movie. Paul Scofield’s extraordinary portrayal of More gives us the complete package- Thomas More as the ultimate Renaissance Man. Bolt’s More is a moral paragon, a genuine scholar, the celebrated author of Utopia, intimate of Erasmus, Speaker of the Commons and finally Lord Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII. He is a man of conscience who chooses the Tower and the scaffold over hypocrisy and lies. Importantly, I didn’t just take Bolt’s word for it. I researched the man. The biography was real. More was educated in the household of Archbishop Morton, trained as a lawyer, briefly tested a monastic vocation, lived a life of private austerity, married happily, raised a family and developed a reputation as the wittiest man in England. Erasmus, the greatest philosopher of the age LOVED him and dedicated In Praise of Folly to More. This is a formidable fellow by any measuring stick.
The core of the legend though is More’s public position on two oaths: First, the Act of Succession which required English subjects to swear to a preamble denying Papal authority over the English Church and later the Act of Supremacy which made King Henry its head outright. More, despite his loyal career of service to Henry would not swear. He retreated into a careful legal silence, arguing that silence itself could not constitute treason. He was pressed repeatedly by friends and colleagues while he sat in the Tower of London to simply sign and be done with it. Why defy the King? He even rejected the pleas of his wife Alice and his daughter Margaret. He was convicted on the perjured testimony of Richard Rich and beheaded in 1535. On the scaffold, he declared himself “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” On its own terms, More sacrificed himself out of principle. I may not believe in heroes, but his behaviour is genuinely heroic and he therefore achieved a special place on WFM’S “Most Admired Persons” list.
Sadly, my assumptions have been aggressively challenged in recent years. I am a great admirer of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, beginning with Wolfe Hall in 2009. We saw the play over two days in New York and watched the brilliant mini series. Her works have been lionised by the critics and she is a true contemporary superstar novelist. She is also amusing in podcast interviews. She mocks the popular More legacy. She portrays him as cold-hearted, rigid, intolerant, unbending, self destructive and a single minded zealot. She compares him unfavourably to Thomas Cromwell, his cunning and wily successor as Lord Chancellor. She clearly relies on Protestant Reformation advocates who wrote critically of More a generation after his death. John Foxe, in 1563, wrote Acts and Notes, a popular tract which shaped English religious opinions and memories for centuries. He described More as a bigot and torturer of idealist Protestant reformers while he was Lord Chancellor. He invented stories that More personally participated in torture, including whippings and the rack. 20th century historians built on that argument. British writers Elton, Marius, Ridley and Starkey were very negative on the “real” Thomas More. He is an intelligent man, but a fanatic who pursued unjustified investigations of “heretics.” They even questioned his devotion to his family. More is a vengeful prosecutor who is self righteous and obstinate and a man who basically “cancelled” himself and engineered his own execution.
Mantel also reframes “the Great Matter” itself. Bolt stages Henry’s demand for the oath as tyranny, plain and simple. Mantel’s Cromwell sees a practical and administrative problem. The King needs an heir and a church-state settlement is necessary to secure the Tudor Dynasty’s future. More’s opposition is needlessly intransigent, particularly since the Pope in Rome is outrageous corrupt anyway. A curious fact basically ignored by both Bolt and Mantel is that King Henry was never a Protestant by conviction. He had personally written theology critical of Martin Luther and had earned the title Defender of the Faith from Rome for it. He would have happily stayed Catholic and kept England that way if the Pope had granted his annulment. His break with Rome was a marital manoeuvre, not a revolt driven by religious or doctrinal differences. This fact cuts both ways. More’s death is not an act of courage driven by resisting a dangerous ideology, but from refusing to bless what was in substance a fiction of royal convenience. It is not a theological martyrdom but a precise lawyerly refusal to notarise or consent to something which is false. It is less glamorous act in this context, but remains an act of principle.
A recent biography of Thomas More by Joanne Paul has clarified the historical sources for me. Six people were burned for heresy during More’s tenure as Chancellor and he was the lead prosecutor in 3 of those cases. He vigorously denied personally torturing suspects but he did defend in print the state’s right to burn heretics for the sake of Catholic unity. She dismisses the early Foxe era atrocity stories as unproven and ideologically driven propaganda. Paul is persuasive and I recommend her book. I now recognise that the hagiographic version of More I accepted in my youth is naive. More, like most men, was complicated and had shadows and nuance. The heresy prosecutions are real and no amount of context fully absolves them. BUT. More approved these burning not out of cruelty but out of fear. He was an unusually intelligent and principled man who concluded the rise of Lutheranism and the collapse of a unified Christian order would destroy Europe and create endless schisms and disorder. The survival of the Catholic Church was the driving principle. It was a sober view that in many respects turned out to be correct. He was not a monster or a fanatic, but his status as a Saint is certainly worthy of debate and dialogue.
And yet I remain, on balance, in the More camp. It is not the simple worship of my catechism year, but a more chastened and balanced admiration. The oath, his silence, the trial, the walk to the scaffold- his behaviour in those circumstances holds up well. He was a man who had every reason just to speak a few simple words and live, but refused to do so out of conviction. This is not a manufactured legend- it happened. You can’t erase the enormous courage and faith that generated that decision, by correctly pointing out he was not a perfect fellow. Both things are true and I choose to embrace the whole story than opt for a simpler or cleaner version. The prayer stays on my wall. I understand the man who wrote it a little better now but I am still convinced of its wisdom.
