Under investigation, St. Thomas More sets down the King's first question

CHELSEA, Middlesex, March 5, 1534 AD — Saint Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England until he resigned in May 1532 AD, is under investigation. On February 21 his name went before the House of Lords in a bill of attainder against the friends of Elizabeth Barton, the nun known as the Holy Maid of Kent. The bill charges him with misprision of treason — knowing of a treason and failing to report it. The Duke of Norfolk warned him this year that indignatio principis mors est (the anger of the prince is death); St. Thomas More answered that the difference between them was that he would die today and Norfolk tomorrow.

Today he has written to Thomas Cromwell, the King’s secretary, one of the four councillors before whom he was summoned to answer for the Barton business. The letter answers three charges: the nun, the King’s marriage, and the primacy of the Pope. The middle one is why it should be read closely. There St. Thomas More sets down what happened in September 1527 AD, when King Henry VIII first spoke to him of his doubts about his marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon. The account is his own, and seven years old.

Queen Catherine had first been married to the King’s elder brother, Prince Arthur. After Arthur died she married Henry under a papal dispensation. By 1527 AD the King doubted whether any dispensation could have made that marriage lawful.

St. Thomas More was on his way home from an embassy to France. In August 1527 AD he had been at Amiens, negotiating in the company of Cardinal Wolsey. He went to report to the King at Hampton Court, and the King had something else to put to him. St. Thomas More writes: “At which time suddenly his Highness walking in the gallery, brake with me of his great matter, and showed me that it was now perceived, that his marriage was not only against the positive laws of the Church and the written law of God, but also in such wise against the law of nature, that it could in no wise by the Church be dispensable.”

Part of it he already knew. Before he sailed he had heard the dispensation attacked from Leviticus and Deuteronomy, though he had thought the stronger ground was a flaw in the document that granted it. Queen Catherine’s side then produced a second paper, a brief, meant to repair those defects. The King’s Council suspected the brief was not genuine, St. Thomas More writes, and a great deal of work went into testing it. On how that ended he marks the limit of what he knows: “wherein what was finally founden, either I never knew, or else I not remember.”

The argument from the law of nature was the new thing, and St. Thomas More is exact about it: “The first time that ever I heard that point moved, that it should be in such high degree against the law of nature, was the time in which… the King’s Grace showed it me himself, and laid the Bible open before me, and there read me the words that moved his Highness and divers other erudite persons so to think, and asked me further what myself thought thereon.”

St. Thomas More’s answer is the sentence the letter turns on: “At which time not presuming to look that his Highness should anything take that point for the more proved or unproved for my poor mind in so great a matter, I showed nevertheless as my duty was at his commandment what thing I thought upon the words which I there read.” He gave no opinion at all on the marriage.

St. Thomas More calls it his “sudden unadvised answer”, and records that the King took it well and sent him to confer with the royal almoner, Master Foxe, over a book on the King’s case that was then still being written.

Two years later he was Lord Chancellor, and the King asked him to weigh the case again. The King, St. Thomas More writes, “graciously declared unto me that he would in no wise that I should other thing do or say therein, than upon that that I should perceive mine own conscience should serve me, and that I should first look unto God and after God unto him, which most gracious words was the first lesson also that ever his Grace gave me at my first coming into his noble service.” That first lesson was older. The King laid it on St. Thomas More when he entered the royal service, about the summer of 1518 AD.

St. Thomas More studied the case with the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Doctor Foxe and an Italian friar, Doctor Nicholas, and then told the King a conclusion the King did not want. After that, St. Thomas More writes, the King used only those whose consciences were persuaded and left the rest alone, “nor never was willing to put any man in ruffle or trouble of his conscience.”

That last claim is the hardest thing in the letter. This is a defence, written by a man whose name has just been in a bill of attainder, addressed to one of the councillors who summoned him, about a conversation seven years gone with no other witness. St. Thomas More says why he tells it: so “that you may see cause with the better conscience to make suit unto his highness for me.”

St. Thomas More calls the whole letter “a long process of these matters”, and says he would not dare trouble the King with it directly. What he asks Cromwell to carry to the King instead is this: the only fault that will ever be found in him, he writes, is “that I cannot in everything think the same way that some other men of more wisdom and deeper learning do; nor can find in mine heart otherwise to say than as mine own conscience giveth me.” He signed it at Chelsea, the fifth day of March.