How Thomas More Inspires Me

The Duke of Norfolk: Oh confound all this. I’m not a scholar, I don’t know whether the marriage was lawful or not but dammit, Thomas, look at these names! Why can’t you do as I did and come with us, for fellowship!
Sir Thomas More: And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not doing mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?

Robert Bolt’s 1960 play A Man for All Seasons tells the story of Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, who obeyed his conscience in the face of state pressure, and was executed for it.

A film version was made in 1966, starring the recently deceased Paul Scofield. I have seen the movie version many times, and am still moved by it. More showed unshakable integrity, combined with shrewd tact and political acumen. He was not an eager or pompous martyr, but someone who only accepted death when the last alternative was to betray his own devout beliefs.

To today’s viewer, the film shows starkly the necessity of freedom of conscience, speech and religion. Bolt’s Thomas More is a martyr of conscience whose death symbolically cries out for the basic justice of liberty of religion and conscience.

Bolt’s Thomas More is also a myth.

The real Thomas More, like the man in the movie, died for refusing to sign the Act of Succession because it included statements denouncing the authority of the Pope. The real Thomas More was truthful, shrewd and devout. The real Thomas More loved his family and treasured education, even for his daughters.

The real Thomas More did not believe in religious liberty.

The real Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, suppressed, persecuted, interrogated and killed Protestants. Six men were burned at the stake by his approval and direction. Dozens more were imprisoned. More wrote in his Confutation of Tyndale’s Error that Reformed theology was a heresy and a pestilence that must be expunged from England before it corrupted the innocent and brought God’s judgment upon the country. Protestants were responsible for the poor harvest, and their continued heresies would bring famine.

Perhaps most significantly, rather than the pacific words about sincerity of belief and obedience to conscience portrayed in the play, More claimed that the Reformers acted knowingly in service of the devil. Protestants were consciously and deliberately evil. Their willingness to be martyred for their beliefs did nothing to change his mind; he called Thomas Hitton, whom he condemned to burning at the stake, “the devil’s stinking martyr.”

I write these things not because I am particularly concerned with Thomas More. He has been dead for hundreds of years, and presumably knows his own errors now better than I do. It is the intersection between myth and fact that interests me.

I find Bolt’s mythic Thomas More inspiring. His determination to be truthful but cagey, shrewd in politics while never saying things that shame his conscience, is an example to anyone who has to combine the stringent claims of conscience with the perils and complications of the real world. And by that, I mean pretty much everyone.

But alongside this myth that inspires me is the reality of the man. The very liberties that Thomas More’s death teaches me to treasure are liberties that he would have denied me. The Reformed faith that shapes and sustains my soul was to him an infection which must be cured by recantation or prevented from spreading by execution. My blog, my library, and possibly my life would not exist in Thomas More’s England.

These two Thomas Mores exist in my brain simultaneously. The irony is in how closely the message of both - the dearness of religious liberty and the call of faithfulness unto to death - is shown by the two contrary pictures: oppressed and oppressor, accused and accuser, martyr and executioner.