Pope Benedict XVI addresses Britain's leaders where St. Thomas More was condemned

LONDON, September 17, 2010 AD — Pope Benedict XVI told the politicians, diplomats, academics and business leaders of the United Kingdom today that the questions at stake in the trial of Saint Thomas More are still being asked. He was speaking, on a papal visit to Britain, in Westminster Hall — the room where St. Thomas More was tried for high treason and condemned to death in 1535 AD.

King Henry VIII wanted St. Thomas More, who had been his Lord Chancellor, to say publicly that the King was supreme head of the Church in England and that the King’s second marriage was lawful. He would not say it, and he would not say why. He refused the oath put to him at Lambeth on April 13, 1534 AD, and four days later he was sent to the Tower of London. That November Parliament gave the King the title of Supreme Head for the first time, and made it high treason maliciously to deny any royal title — the law the Crown could reach him with, and its penalty was death.

The charge that convicted him rested on a single conversation. On June 12, 1535 AD, Richard Rich, newly made the King’s Solicitor, came to the Tower to carry away St. Thomas More’s books. While two other men packed the books, Rich put a case to the prisoner: if an act of Parliament made Rich king, would St. Thomas More accept him as king? He would, St. Thomas More said. Rich asked the same about being made pope, and St. Thomas More put a case of his own — if Parliament decreed that God should not be God, would Rich say God was not God? No parliament could make such a law, Rich said. Rich reported afterwards that St. Thomas More had answered that Parliament could no more make the King head of the Church. On Rich’s word alone he was charged with high treason, and the charge called his denial malicious, traitorous and diabolical.

A special commission of oyer and terminer (to hear and determine) — judges, peers and councillors named by the King to try one named case — was issued on June 26. It named the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Audley, the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Cromwell, seven more peers and ten judges, among them Queen Anne Boleyn’s father and brother. The commission sat on July 1, 1535 AD in Westminster Hall, the great hall of the royal palace. The royal courts met there, and the Crown tried its great cases there. The charges were read out with St. Thomas More standing in front of the judges.

He pleaded not guilty. Of his silence he told the court: “the faithful subject is more bound to his conscience and his soul than to anything else in the world… and I assure you that I have never discovered what is in my conscience to any person living.”

Rich gave his evidence on oath, and St. Thomas More denied to Rich’s face that he had ever spoken the words. “And if this oath of yours, Master Rich, be true, then I pray that I never see God in the face,” he said, “which I would not say, were it otherwise, to win the whole world.” The jury came back in a quarter of an hour with a verdict of guilty.

The verdict freed him to speak, and he interrupted Audley as the sentence was being passed. The charge rested on an act of Parliament that went directly against the law of God and of His holy Church, he said, and no earthly ruler can be made head of the Church. Told he was setting his judgment above all the bishops and nobles of the realm, he answered: “My lord, for one bishop of your opinion I have a hundred saints of mine; and for one parliament of yours, and God knows of what kind, I have all the General Councils for 1,000 years, and for one kingdom I have France and all the kingdoms of Christendom.”

The sentence was death at Tyburn, by hanging, disembowelling and quartering. On July 5 the King commuted the sentence to beheading. St. Thomas More was beheaded on Tower Hill the next morning, July 6, 1535 AD, telling the people that he died the King’s good servant, and God’s first.

Pope John Paul II declared him the heavenly Patron of Statesmen and Politicians in 2000 AD. A brass plate is set in the floor of the hall, marking the spot where he was sentenced.

Standing in that hall today, Pope Benedict XVI called St. Thomas More “the great English scholar and statesman, who is admired by believers and non-believers alike for the integrity with which he followed his conscience, even at the cost of displeasing the sovereign whose ‘good servant’ he was, because he chose to serve God first”. The dilemma that faced St. Thomas More, he said, was the perennial question of what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God.

“And yet the fundamental questions at stake in Thomas More’s trial continue to present themselves in ever-changing terms as new social conditions emerge,” Pope Benedict XVI said. Religion, he said, “is not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation”. He said he was troubled that some, in trying to stamp out discrimination, now argue that Christians in public roles should sometimes be required to act against their conscience.