The King asks St. Thomas More if his marriage is lawful

HAMPTON COURT, England, September 1527 AD — King Henry VIII stopped Saint Thomas More in the gallery at Hampton Court this month and asked him what he thought of the King’s own marriage. St. Thomas More, just home from an embassy in France, offered him no opinion on it.

What the King wanted was a judgment that his marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon had never been a marriage at all. Catherine was married first to Henry’s elder brother, Prince Arthur, and after Arthur died Rome gave a dispensation for her to marry Henry, since she had been his brother’s wife. Henry now argued that the marriage broke a law no Pope had the power to set aside, so that the dispensation had never been worth anything.

All Catherine’s children but the Princess Mary had died in infancy, and Henry had no son. He had already sent his own secretary to Pope Clement VII to ask for a ruling that the marriage had never been valid, and for permission to marry again if the ruling went his way. The woman he meant to marry was Anne Boleyn.

St. Thomas More had been at Amiens since August on the King’s business, with Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor. He came straight from Amiens to the King at Hampton Court, Wolsey’s own palace. Henry was walking in the gallery, and without warning he turned to what the court called his great matter. The marriage, he said, was now perceived to be against the law of nature, “that it could in no wise by the Church be dispensable”.

Then the King had a Bible brought and laid open in front of St. Thomas More, and read out the passages of Leviticus and Deuteronomy to him. “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 wrote. He gave his view of the two passages, because the King had commanded an answer. On the marriage he said nothing.

Henry took the answer well, and set him to read the book of arguments then being written for the King’s side. St. Thomas More kept out of the case: “during all which time I never meddled therein”.

On October 25, 1529 AD, at Greenwich, the King put the great seal into his hands, and for the first time the Lord Chancellor of England was a layman.

Soon after, Henry asked him a second time — to look at the great matter properly now, and weigh fairly whatever he found in it. If the study brought St. Thomas More round, the King said, he would gladly use him among his councillors in the business. But he wanted his Chancellor to do and say nothing in it except what his conscience told him was true, “and that I should first look unto God and after God unto him”. To confer with, Henry gave him four of the men who had worked hardest on the King’s side, two of them archbishops.

St. Thomas More read everything on the question he could get hold of, for the King’s side and against it, and went through the case with all four. Then he went back to the King with his answer. He could not agree.

The King carried on with the councillors who were already persuaded and gave St. Thomas More other work; he was “never willing to put any man in ruffle or trouble of his conscience”, St. Thomas More wrote of him. St. Thomas More believed he was clear of the matter after that. He did not think he was safe, though: a disagreement he never spoke aloud could still be the end of him.

He was careful afterwards. He found a book in his study that argued against the King’s case, borrowed from the Bishop of Bath, and offered to give it back; the bishop had burned his own copy long before and asked him to burn this one. He burned it.

He gave up the chancellorship in May 1532 AD, three days after speaking in council against the bill to stop England’s payments to Rome. In February 1534 AD the House of Lords put St. Thomas More’s name into a bill of attainder. A bill of attainder could punish a man without any trial. It charged Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, with high treason for saying she had revelations of God’s displeasure at what the King had done, and St. Thomas More with knowing of her treason and concealing it. He had visited her at Sion House, and had warned her, in person and then by letter, to keep out of politics. He asked permission to defend himself before the Lords and was summoned instead before four of the King’s councillors, Thomas Cromwell among them.

On March 5, 1534 AD, at his house at Chelsea, he wrote to Cromwell, by then the King’s secretary. He set out everything he had ever said to the King about the marriage, from the gallery at Hampton Court onward. He ended on what the King’s good opinion was worth to him: “I nothing have of mine own in all this world, except only my soul, but that I will with better will forgo it than abide of his Highness one heavy displeasant look.”