Day: August 12, 2025

Thomas More was a “failure,” but one worthy of emulation—even or perhaps especially today, five centuries later. So declares Joanne Paul, in a preface to her engaging and exquisitely researched biography, Thomas More: A Life.

But a failure how? More rose from modest origins to become Lord Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII. In Samuel Johnson’s judgment, he was “the person of greatest virtue these [British] isles ever produced.” He would posthumously become a Catholic saint, not to mention the hero of a play and a movie (A Man for All Seasons) that won the Oscar for Best Picture. How then was he a “failure”?

More lived through a fulcrum period in Western history when the Christendom of the previous thousand years was disintegrating and the modern secular state was beginning to emerge. This was a transformation that More anticipated with dread, and he dedicated his enormous talents and the best years of his life—indeed his life itself, which he eventually sacrificed on a scaffold—to resisting it.

But his resistance would “come to nothing,” Paul explains. “It is difficult to point to any event or moment in Tudor history and claim that it would have been vastly different without his intervention.”

Even so, Paul sees in More’s failure something admirable and ominously timely. “Tyrants, it will not surprise you to learn, still exist. Those who are willing to destroy anyone who stands in opposition to their will—a will driven by self-interest, pride and desperate paranoia—rule today as they did 500 years ago.” And More’s “willingness to stand firm and speak truth to an overwhelming power is as relevant in today’s world as it was to that of Henry VIII.”

Not everyone has admired More, of course. He has been depicted (in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, for instance, or in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels) as a shriveled-up, mean-spirited inquisitor. Paul herself does not overtly take sides in these interpretive contests. She mostly follows the literary strategy of “show, don’t tell,” rarely offering her own speculations or judgments about More’s decisions and deeds (except in the preface and the epilogue, where she briefly steps outside her scholarly persona).

Her descriptions themselves are superbly textured. Much of the book reads almost as if Paul had followed More around with a video camera, deftly recording (with all the sights, sounds, even smells) the events, discussions, and disputes through which his life unfolded. How were the chambers decorated? Who was there, and how were they dressed? Who spoke first, who responded, what exactly did they say? The detail is remarkable—I often found myself wondering, “How does she know all this stuff?”—and it helps bring More’s world to life.

It was an earthy world, but also a sacramental world, with constant connections to transcendence. Paul thus tells us about the numerous religious festivals, processions, feasts, and ceremonies in their splendid particularities: the candles, the vestments, the liturgies, the music, the bells. These things constituted the consecrated world that More attempted desperately but unsuccessfully to preserve.

But of course, that world was not all candles and festivals; it was a scene of pervasive violence and political peril as well. As an infant, More was nurtured within a morning’s walk of the murderous doings by which Richard III seized power. As an adult, More lived through a series of foreign wars and, even more ominously, internal political developments whereby Henry VIII consolidated despotic power while dispatching into exile or to execution those who stood in his way. “These matters be King’s games,” More observed, “as it were stage plays, and for the most part played upon scaffolds.”

But More was not a mere spectator of these “stage plays”; he was a central player. This role was the result of a portentous choice—a choice that in one form or another many confront again today. In a political world fraught with danger, corruption, and outright wickedness, should a person attempt to retain his purity by remaining politically detached? Or should he immerse himself in the world, perhaps even compromising himself, in an effort to guide political matters in a satisfactory direction?

More’s friend Erasmus, the renowned humanist scholar, implored him to stay clear of kings’ affairs, to continue in the scholarly and literary work reflected in More’s classic Utopia. But More made a different choice, guided by St. John Chrysostom’s counsel to pursue a life “busy among cities.” And thus he rose from lawyer and local lecturer on St. Augustine to undersheriff of London, thence to foreign diplomat, to member and later speaker of the House of Commons, to close friend and counselor to the king, to Lord Chancellor.

It was in his last years, however, that More’s character—both his admirable qualities and what at least from a contemporary perspective may seem his more censurable tendencies—manifested themselves most starkly. Two developments dominated these last years: the effort in England to suppress the spread of Protestantism, and the tumultuous and transformative doings that surrounded Henry’s campaign to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and to consummate his marriage to Anne Boleyn. More participated vigorously in the first of these developments. He tried desperately to avoid involvement in the second. And in each instance, he failed.

As king’s councilor and especially as Lord Chancellor, More energetically opposed the introduction of Lutheranism into England. He wrote treatises denouncing Luther and his ideas. He vigorously enforced laws prohibiting the importation or possession of Lutheran writings. He imprisoned and interrogated suspected Protestants, sometimes at his own home. And when the suspects persisted in their heresies (as he believed), More sometimes had them burned at the stake.

More’s world was not one that had embraced the precepts of a John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.

Such actions provoked both defenses and fierce criticisms at the time, and of course, they are even more disturbing to contemporary liberal sensibilities. Critical biographer Richard Marius discerned in More’s actions a deep anger and almost depravity of character. Hilary Mantel described him as a “blood-soaked hypocrite.” Defenders have argued, conversely, that More was only enforcing the laws; that the number of Protestants condemned to death under his administration was small compared to the number of Catholics who would be executed under Thomas Cromwell, More’s successor as Henry’s right-hand man; and that More’s world was not one that had embraced the precepts of a John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.

Paul describes the measures More took, and she reports More’s own explanations. Severe measures were necessary, he argued, to protect innocent believers and indeed the kingdom from a deadly theological contagion that would undermine civilization itself. Such discipline was also often the best remedy, he said, for the wayward heretics themselves (for whose welfare More always professed concern).

Were these defenses sincere, and did they justify More’s actions? As usual, Paul tells us what More did and said but offers no “innocent or guilty” verdict of her own.

As for “the king’s Great Matter”—namely, his desire to separate from Catherine and to marry Anne—it was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s failure to achieve papal approval for the annulment that led to his downfall and to More’s appointment to replace him as Lord Chancellor. In accepting the appointment, More obtained Henry’s permission to follow his conscience. But as the controversy escalated and as Henry’s obsession intensified, it became impossible to remain detached. More seems to have cooperated as much as he could. At one point, he appeared before both Houses of Parliament and made the king’s case in lawyer-like fashion, presenting the supporting arguments and evidence without purporting to give his personal views.

And when this was not enough, More resigned the office, hoping to live out his life in private with his family and his books. But it was too late for that.

As it became clear that the pope would not grant the annulment, Henry concluded that the only way to end his marriage was to separate from the Roman Church. To that end, the king and his men employed various barely or not quite legal means to intimidate the English clergy into submission. They revived and expanded an old legal theory of “praemunire,” which forbade appeals to Rome, in order to indict the entire clergy for illegality and disloyalty. When the prelates failed to act on a proposal to make Henry head of the church, the king’s men invoked an old legal maxim treating silence as equivalent to assent. Parliament was induced to amend the definition of treason so that any criticism of the king would now qualify as treasonous if done “maliciously” (a term that, as More anticipated, turned out to mean pretty much whatever the king and the judges wanted it to mean). The law was being cynically used—and abused—to achieve whatever those in power wanted.

And then new laws were passed requiring all English subjects to take an oath affirming the validity of the annulment, the succession of Anne as queen, and, by clear implication, the elevation of the king to be head of the church. More’s refusal to take this oath led to his imprisonment in the Tower of London for fifteen months and, eventually, his trial and execution. Both the king’s men and More’s friends and family pleaded with him to take the oath, as nearly everyone in the kingdom (including his family) had done. He was repeatedly assured, even on the day of his trial, that if he would simply affirm the words of the oath, he would be restored to his freedom and his family. Yet he refused, saying simply that he could not act against his conscience.

Whether he was justified in this refusal was and is debatable, but his courage through the whole affair is unmistakable. Paul relates all of the pertinent developments in riveting detail: the legal maneuvering, the confrontations with Cromwell and others, the earnest conversations with and letters to More’s family. She does so again with little commentary, but it is impossible not to discern the integrity and depth of More’s character through these excruciating events.

Paul reports More’s famous declaration at the scaffold that he was the king’s good servant but God’s first: “As he went to his death, however, More could comfort himself with the assurance that he had lived his life—and given his life—in service of those things he held most dear.”

So, yes, he had lived and given his life in service of those precious things, but he had not managed to preserve them. In an epilogue, Paul portrays the transformed, disenchanted world that was to follow, employing her principle of “show, don’t tell.” Chapter one of the book relates how More was born just after the celebration of Candlemas, or the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, and it describes the “thousands of small flickering lights” as the “people of London—young and old, male and female, rich and poor—processed through the winding streets” of the city. A century later, the epilogue reports, “no candles were carried by Londoners through their city” for Candlemas. The Tudor revolution had banished the celebration.

More’s efforts had failed. But Paul suggests that they nonetheless had their value, and that they are relevant still:

Those, like Thomas More, who stand up to these men [of power] and remind them of higher principles, deeper truths, greater duties, must be remembered for their efforts, even when they come to nothing. … They are the figures who inspire us when a great booming voice from above tells us we must obey, must submit, and a voice deep within us responds, no matter how quietly, “No.”