St. Thomas More and Conscience (Again)

In a letter to History Today, Hilary Mantel states that Thomas More's "conscience [was] captive to tradition and authority"--as though that were a bad thing. Thomas More's understanding of conscience, its formation, and its decision-making process was that the individual conscience must be responding to God's authority and the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church. I'm presuming now, but Mantel might think of conscience as being captive only to the individual's interpretation of events and actions and being consistent with oneself--what Blessed John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century would call conscience's counterfeit.

More offered Cromwell an explanation of the true meaning of conscience in his June 3, 1535 letter to his daughter Meg about his recent interrogation in the Tower of London. Cromwell was accusing him of a double standard, claiming his conscience was better than a heretic's conscience. More explained that the heretic was not appealing to conscience, which should have led him to follow the Church Jesus founded, but to his own ego, which had led him to reject the truth and develop individual ideas about the Church and salvation:

Whereunto I answered I would not dispute the King's authority, what his Highness might do in such case, but I said that verily under correction it seemed to me somewhat hard. For if it so were that my conscience gave me against the statutes (wherein how my mind giveth me I make no dec­laration), then I nothing doing nor nothing saying against the statute, it were a very hard thing to compel me to say either precisely with it against my conscience to the loss of my soul, or precisely against it to the destruc­tion of my body.

To this Master Secretary said that I had before this when I was Chan­cellor examined heretics and thieves and other malefactors and gave me a great praise above my deserving in that behalf. And he said that I then, as he thought and at the leastwise Bishops did use to examine heretics, whether they believed the Pope to be the head of the Church and used to compel them to make a precise answer thereto. And why should not then the King, since it is a law made here that his Grace is Head of the Church, here compel men to answer precisely to the law here as they did then concerning the Pope.

I answered and said that I protested that I intended not to defend any part or stand in contention; but I said there was a difference between those two cases because at that time, as well here as elsewhere through the corps of Christendom, the Pope's power was recognized for an undoubted thing which seems not like a thing agreed in this realm and the contrary taken for truth in other realms. Whereunto Master Secretary answered that they were as well burned for the denying of that as they be beheaded for deny­ing of this, and therefore as good reason to compel them to make precise answer to the one as to the other.

Whereto I answered that since in this case a man is not by a law of one realm so bound in his conscience, where there is a law of the whole corps of Christendom to the contrary in matter touching belief, as he is by a law of the whole corps though there hap to be made in some place a local law to the contrary, the reasonableness or the unreasonableness in binding a man to precise answer, standeth not in the respect or difference between beheading and burning, but because of the difference in charge of con­science, the difference standeth between beheading and hell.

In his chapter on St. Thomas More in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More ("More and the Heretics"), Richard Rex notes that More--and in this he certainly was a man of his time--was certain that he knew the truth. Catholic Christianity was the truth and no one had the right to deny or ignore the truth. Rex notes that we post-modernists can hardly imagine this certainty (our only certainty would be perhaps that we cannot be certain!). In his role as Henry VIII's Chancellor, he was sworn to assist the Church in finding heresy and he fulfilled that role. More regarded the obdurate heretic as a danger to society, an egoist deciding his own interpretation of God's revelation, and a person in certain danger of damnation. Thus, when More made his appeal to his right to follow his conscience, he asserted that his conscience was responding not to his own interpretation but to the teaching of the universal Church, an authority high above Henry VIII, even if the monarch did take over the Church in England.

On the Acton Institute website, writer Marc D. Guerra sums up More's understanding of conscience well; he was indeed guided by tradition and authority:

Whereas modern doctrines of conscience characteristically emphasize the self-sufficiency of the individual’s judgment, More stresses its communal nature. More, to be sure, recognized the uniqueness of the individual conscience. More was, after all, imprisoned precisely because he could not, in good conscience, swear allegiance to Henry VIII’s oath. But in contrast to the modern claim that the individual can create his own moral values, More saw the “formation of conscience” as “the fruit” of an education “in the truth.” Far from being the arbitrator and creator of its own moral order, the human conscience is in need of conforming to the truth. For More, the formation of conscience is the result of a long process in which one discovers a preexisting created moral order. This was, in some sense, the issue in More’s dispute with Henry. Henry sought to substitute his own law for the “higher law of God and Christ’s Church.” Nothing underscores the profound differences between More’s and the modernist’s understanding of conscience more than this fact: Whereas modern thought views the individual’s conscience as being above all other authorities, More’s conscience testifies to the superiority of the church’s authority to his king’s. More’s refusal to take Henry’s oath was not an act of civil disobedience but, rather, of obedience to truth and thus, in his view, an act of “genuine liberty.”

This Afternoon on the Radio: Defending St. Thomas More

The BBC/PBS television series based on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies may be over, but the issues behind her biased view of St. Thomas More linger on. After my article on "Defending St. Thomas More" was published in The National Catholic Register, I received a call to schedule an interview with Kathleen McCarthy on the In His Sign radio station in Rosemont, Pennsylvania.

I'll be on the air today (Wednesday, May 13) from 4:00 p.m. to 4;30 p.m. Central time (5:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Eastern time) on "What the World Needs Now". You may listen live here.

Cutting off Cromwell's Story at the End of "Wolf Hall"

Wolf Hall, the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, ended last night on PBS's Masterpiece Theatre with Thomas Cromwell in Henry VIII's arms after the execution of Anne Boleyn. Henry is very happy; Cromwell looks stunned.

Nancy Bilyeau provides her as usual excellent review and analysis here. I agree with this comment from The New York Times review by Louis Bayard:

Mantel is currently writing the last volume of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy, and I can’t help but wish this superb production had waited to incorporate that final strand. The story, as it stands, is “complete” enough, but it lacks the full arc that Cromwell demands. We need to see him go to his end, not for the sake of retribution but for the sake of reckoning.

Bayard also emphasizes that, whatever modern heroism Hilary Mantel wants to impute to Thomas Cromwell, her protagonist has committed great acts of injustice and violence in this final episode. He may be doing it because the mockery of his former master Chancellor/Archbishop Thomas Wolsey at Court after Wolsey's death, or because his current master Henry VIII wants rid of Anne Boleyn. Cromwell has gone too far, as Bayard contends:

Until Sunday night’s episode, I think, a Cromwell apologist could have written off his actions — even his prosecution of Thomas More — as a kind of hard-edged Realpolitik, anchored to an innate sense of justice. No longer. As we watch Cromwell fasten his web around the lovesick musician Mark Smeaton (Max Fowler), we see an inner rot take hold. “I need guilty men,” he says to Norris. “So I found men who are guilty. Though not necessarily as charged.”

Cromwell knows he is perverting the system of justice in England in the service of the King. Remember the scene in A Man for All Seasons when Thomas More would give even the Devil the benefit of English Law? While Cromwell is approaching the heights of his power in Mantel's narrative, he will soon discover the results of destroying English justice and laws: without evidence of guilt, he will be attainted a traitor and sentenced to death--and Bayard is correct: as the BBC's Wolf Hall stands now it is incomplete, like Henry VIII's own play mentioned last night. He says he's written his own story in a tragedy. Henry has forgotten what happens to the hero of classical tragedy: he dies.

Like Mother, Like Daughter? Joanne Whalley in "Wolf Hall" and "The Virgin Queen"

Historical novelist Nancy Bilyeau is providing historically informed reviews of each episode of Wolf Hall at medievalists.net. In this week's review she provides some analysis of scenes concerning Catherine of Aragon and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Although Cromwell did not really visit Catherine of Aragon in exile, Bilyeau comments on both Catherine's stubbornness and her kindness when Wolf Hall imagines such a scene:

Cromwell then moves from Henry VIII’s future woman [Jane Seymour] to his past woman: Catherine of Aragon. The first wife, after 20 years of marriage, fought hard to preserve her rights, and is still refusing to answer to anyone who will not address her as queen—despite the fact that Henry VIII has married Anne Boleyn and had a child with her. “That’s why he sent you, to see if I am really dying,” she says, weak and fighting spasms of pain. She pleads with Cromwell to allow her to see Mary, the daughter whom Henry keeps isolated and away from Catherine. Finally she says she heard “Boleyn’s daughter” had a miscarriage. “I know how that is,” she says, showing a humanity Anne never for an instance extends her way.

Catherine is also shrewd and picks up on the fact that Cromwell doesn't know if Anne is pregnant again. “I thought she always confided in you—I do hope there is no rift,” she says, allowing herself a moment of malice.

Later in the episode, some other historical inaccuracies are depicted:

In the next scene, an important character, Eustace Chapuys, ambassador to the Emperor Charles V, emerges from the dark shadows of Cromwell’s sitting room at home. They drink wine together, in Cromwell’s increasingly luxurious home, hung with a large tapestry the king personally gifted to him.

“I hear you’re going to put all the monks and nuns out on the road,” says Chapuys sternly, referring to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, one of Thomas Cromwell’s main achievements. Thousands of monks, friars and nuns were in reality ejected from their abbeys as Cromwell oversaw their destruction, the buildings stripped of value and given to the king’s friends. In this scene, Cromwell assures Chapuys that most of the nuns and monks wanted to leave when his commissioners visited their abbeys, which were places of corruption and vice. This is where Wolf Hall falls back into the distortion and propagandizing which marred the previous episode, “Devil’s Spit.” The massive corruption that Cromwell keeps referring to throughout Wolf Hall is exaggerated. It was a pretext to convince Parliament to make legal the seizure of the buildings and land, which poured thousands of pounds into Henry VIII’s treasury.

In a bizarre fiction, Chapuys says, “I see famine before the spring. You’re buying corn from the territories of the Emperor. This trade could be stopped.” When Cromwell asks quietly what Emperor Charles V would gain from starving England, Chapuys says it would prove how badly governed the kingdom of England is.

In the 16th century, the country was in no way reliant on importing food from the land controlled by the Holy Roman Emperor, which included Spain, Portugal and Austria, the German lands, the Netherlands, and part of the Americas. There was trade between England and the Netherlands, mostly of wool. The threat of starving a country to make a point of politics belongs to some more modern age. Also, the show must mean “wheat” when Chapuys says “corn,” a common description of the time, because in the reign of Henry VIII the English did not eat maize, which was discovered by Spanish explorers in Mexico.

Wolf Hall is back on solid ground when Chapuys tearfully begs to be able to see Catherine of Aragon so that she will not die “all alone.” When Cromwell asks the king and queen on Chapuys’ behalf, Anne mocks Catherine. It seems that permission is refused, but in reality Henry VIII relented and Chapuys did visit her in exile the week before she died.

Joanne Whalley plays Catherine of Aragon in Wolf Hall and she played Catherine and Henry's daughter Mary I in a previously aired BBC series on the Tudors, The Virgin Queen. Playing Mary I in the 2005 series, Whalley found some sympathy for the queen usually called "Bloody Mary":

Actress Joanne Whalley is keen to clear up exactly who Queen Mary was, "No one really knows about her. You say I'm playing Queen Mary and they go, 'Oh, Mary Queen of Scots?' and you go 'No! Mary Tudor!' - and they don't know who she is. She is completely overshadowed by Elizabeth - as she was in their time."

"She has a terrible reputation as Bloody Mary but she didn't have an easy time of it. She had a terribly unhappy childhood; she has an unhappy marriage, a nightmare half-sister and religious trouble, so she has a full plate!"

"Elizabeth's mother (Anne Boleyn) replaced Mary's mother in the favour of the King; Mary's mother was sent away to live in exile and Mary wasn't allowed to see her, and she was forced to wait upon Elizabeth's mother," explains Joanne. "So there's a lot of history in their relationship and her paranoia, her fears, are all based in reality. She could have had Elizabeth killed really, but didn't - she was not an unkind person. There are various reports of her showing this much more kind, benign side of her personality, but given the times that she was in that bit wasn't allowed to shine through very often."

"She had a miserable and difficult journey to becoming Queen and it turns out very differently than she had imagined," says Joanne. "One of the keys to that is her relationship with her husband, Philip of Spain. She was hoping for a real marriage, she thinks how wonderful to have a companion - and there was nothing. They had no relationship at all really which is a huge disappointment to her."

All they really seemed to share was their Catholic religion and the desire to overturn the years of Protestant rule instigated by Mary's father, Henry VIII, which led to the religious persecution that earned Mary her gruesome nickname.

"She was very devout and she believed absolutely that she was putting things to rights with the country and in the eyes of God," says Joanne. "Crazy as it is, there is some sympathy to be drawn - she was completely devoted; in her life and her work, everything, she believed she was doing the right thing. Her only moments of joy and pleasure were in her more devout, communing-with-God moments because day-to-day life was pretty tough on her. She was very alone and very conflicted about how to deal with things. I feel sorry for her."

About Catherine of Aragon in Wolf Hall, Whalley commented in Harper's Bazaar:

"We don’t often think of the women around him when we think of Henry VIII. But we should because they were amazing and they operated within such restraints. I didn't expect to like Catherine of Aragon as much as I did. But she was an extraordinary woman. She was well educated and very much into education for women. Women at the time were not generally allowed to run things. But she grew up with her mother as an example - Queen Isabella of Castile - so she wasn't bound, at least in her own mind, by the restrictions of the time. It’s interesting how Elizabethan costume affects everything you do: how you sit, how you stand, how you carry yourself. You don’t have the same physical freedom. And the locations too: I remember shooting at Broughton Hall on the hottest day of the year. The walls were so thick but it was cool inside. You could feel the history in the walls."

On the one hand, it's great to have Nancy Bilyeau correct some of the historical inaccuracies in Wolf Hall; on the other, it's great to see an actress have some sympathy with the historical characters she plays. While she's appearing as the sixteenth century Catherine of Aragon on PBS, Whalley's portrayal of Claudia, Pontius Pilate's wife is on NBC, in A.D. The Bible Continues.

The Real Saint Thomas More on Saturday, May 2nd

The latest episode of Wolf Hall was the best one so far with its focus on Cromwell's efforts to suppress dissension from Henry VIII's new role as Supreme Head and Governor of the Church of England and the breakaway from the Catholic Church. Watching this episode was homework for my presentation this Saturday at the Spiritual Life Center on The Real Saint Thomas More from 9:30 to 11:00 a.m. this Saturday (May 2). If you're in the Wichita area, register here or call 316-744-0167.

While this was the best of the episodes so far, it also contained some historical inaccuracies, as Nancy Bilyeau notes in her review for Medievalists.net:

A tough and wily Cromwell questions Barton, who comes across as vindictive and unbalanced, and then interviews each of the important people who've been conspiring with the nun. Not one of them comes within a country mile of Cromwell’s abilities and intelligence. The true motive of the last remaining Plantagenets’ unhappiness with Henry VIII during this period is not explored in Wolf Hall—their respect and affection for Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon; their (justifiable) fear for what will happen to her daughter Mary; and their fear of the country’s religious future in this fast-moving Reformation. Instead, the Poles and Courtenays and Bishop Fisher, one of the most respected scholars in all of Europe in the early 16th century, are shown as stupid, easily duped, and ungrateful for Henry VIII’s supposed years of kindness.

Wolf Hall strains to connect the followers of Sister Elizabeth Barton to an international conspiracy bent on destroying England and taking orders from Rome. At one point, Cromwell tells Margaret Pole, the niece of Edward IV, that through his spies in the kitchen he knows that her sons, Henry and Geoffrey Pole, had dinner with the Lady Mary twice and “talked about the Emperor, the invasion, and the best way to bring it about.” The Emperor Charles V was Mary Tudor’s first cousin through her Mother, and according to Wolf Hall, England was terrified of Spanish invasion in the mid-1530s.

There are two problems with this scene. One is that as Anne Boleyn made clear at the beginning of the episode, Lady Mary is a virtual prisoner in the household of her half-sister Princess Elizabeth. She was in reality subjected to emotional and even physical abuse during this time and watched like a hawk for receiving any letters from sympathizers. The possibility that she could escape her jailers to have dinner with her Yorkist relations and drink toasts to Spanish invasion is nothing short of ludicrous. Second, if such dinners had taken place it would fit the definition of treason to a “T.” All parties would have been carted to the Tower of London immediately. Several years later, when a religious rebellion in the North of England left Henry VIII even more paranoid, Cromwell would orchestrate the destruction of Henry Pole and Edward Courtenay on evidence much flimsier than the content of these alleged dinners. But the deaths of those found guilty in the “Exeter Conspiracy” lies years ahead of this episode, between Wife No. 3 and Wife No. 4. 

[Note that Bilyeau includes a magnificent sequence on the parties involved in the "Exeter Conspiracy" in her second Joanna Stafford novel, The Chalice.]

and

The marriage of Henry and Anne endures another blow when the queen miscarries. Afterward, the queen is even more vengeful and vindictive. “I’ll have no peace until Fisher is dead,” she says. “I’ll have no peace until More is dead.”

Anne tells Cromwell she wants him to “make” More talk, to say why he won’t sign the oath. When Cromwell replies, “No, Madam, we don’t do that,” she runs from the room.

This is one of the most dishonest moments of Wolf Hall. It is no secret that the real Thomas Cromwell, during this same period, presided over the arrest, questioning and executions of a group of friars and monks who also refused to sign the oath. The Carthusian monks of the Charterhouse were starved, hanged, cut down while still alive, castrated and dismembered. This is one of the most well known aspects of England under Thomas Cromwell: the swift arrests, the torture, the convictions without trial, the harrowing executions. No matter how many kittens that Wolf Hall’s Cromwell cuddles or women he flirts with, the historical record is inescapable. Yet at one point in this series, a fair and tolerant Cromwell tells More to “repent your cruelties.”

Bilyeau is referring to Blesseds Humphrey Middlemore, William Exmew and Sebastian Newdigate, who were executed on June 19, 1535, after being arrested on May 25 and kept bound to pillars with iron rings around their necks, hands, and feet, without any relief for 14 days before trial--the rest of the Carthusians who refused to support Henry VIII's supremacy were imprisoned and left to starve to death without even an attainder. The Observant Franciscans were similarly treated.

Mantel and the BBC deceive viewers when they present such a merciful Cromwell in contrast with such a vindictive More.

Richard Rex analyses the controversy about Thomas More's prosecution of heretics and the rather rough language he used in his apologetics in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More:

Thomas More’s dealings with heresy and heretics have been the most bitterly contested aspects of his career. Even within his lifetime they aroused controversy, as his own Apology demonstrates. John Foxe’s famous ‘Book of Martyrs’ cast More, along with the Tudor bishops, among the deepest-dyed villains, and the stories it told, true and false alike, have been handed down and continue to be supplemented and embellished to this day. Thus Brian Moynahan has bizarrely proposed that More, from his confinement in the Tower of London, masterminded the taking of William Tyndale in Antwerp; while the numbers of heretics executed during More’s chancellorship were recently inflated from half a dozen to ‘a few hundred’ by one of England’s leading journalists; and in 2009 a novelist won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction (appropriately enough) with a story in which she has More admit in conversation the allegations of torture he denied in print. Which all goes to show that, while there have always been admirers for whom Thomas More was a ‘man for all seasons’, there have always been critics for whom he was a fanatical persecutor.

More’s Tudor critics mostly censured him not for persecution as such but for persecuting the wrong people, namely Protestants. Today’s critics censure him rather for the fact of the persecution, and for his emotional intensity in going about it, than for his particular choice of victims. The contrast that mattered for John Foxe was between papist and Protestant; the contrast that matters more today is between the apostle of tolerance some detect in the author of Utopia and the inquisitorial magistrate who became Henry VIII’s lord chancellor.

Defending St. Thomas More in The National Catholic Register

Just in time for the first episode of Wolf Hall this evening on PBS, my article for The National Catholic Register is on-line:

Catholic bishops and fair-minded historians in England protested against the inaccurate portrayal of Sir Thomas More in the BBC miniseries based on Hilary Mantel’s historical novel Wolf Hall when it made its debut in January this year. Since Thomas Cromwell, one of King Henry VIII’s advisers, is Mantel’s hero, Thomas More must be her villain. Mantel and the BBC portray More as cruel, bigoted, fanatical, misogynistic and sado-masochistical.

Viewers of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, whether the 1963 film or the stage play, won’t recognize the witty, intelligent family man and friend if they watch Wolf Hall during its run on PBS’ Masterpiece starting Easter Sunday, April 5, through the Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 10.

Mantel writes historical fiction, so she has the artistic license to interpret historical characters in her novels.

What readers and viewers have to remember is that Mantel’s More is not the real Thomas More; her version of his character does not resemble the description contemporaries like Desiderius Erasmus have left us of a humble, loving, humorous and honest man. Bolt didn’t tell the whole story of Thomas More either, when he made him a hero of individual conscience; Bolt did at least get More’s character and personality right.

If Mantel’s More were the real Thomas More, viewers might be horrified that the Catholic Church has honored More by canonizing him (in 1935 — 80 years ago this year), including him on the universal calendar of saints on June 22 (with St. John Fisher, the great bishop of Rochester, who also opposed Henry VIII’s supremacy and was beheaded) and proclaiming him the patron saint of politicians and statesmen (announced by Pope St. John Paul II in 2000).

St. Thomas More faced charges of treason for opposing Henry VIII’s desire to get a divorce in 1535. In 2015 (480 years later), he now faces charges of being “fussily pious, stiff-necked and unnaturally fond of torturing heretics” (according to Charles McGrath in The New York Times), “with a penchant for self-punishment and a misogynist to boot” (according to Vanessa Thorpe in The Guardian). Since he is not here to defend himself, here are some facts to represent the real Thomas More: . . .

Read the rest at The National Catholic Register.

The First Saturday in May: St. Thomas More

This is a bargain, folks, if I do say so myself: I'll be making a presentation at the Spiritual Life Center here in Wichita on Saturday, May 2 on St. Thomas More. From the Spiritual Life Center website:

The Real Saint Thomas More
A discussion and objection to the portrayal of St. Thomas More in the currently running miniseries on PBS "Wolf Hall"
Stephanie Mann

The 1966 movie A Man for All Seasons has been the most popular and familiar depiction of St. Thomas More. Based on Robert Bolt’s play, the movie presents More as a family man, a man of conscience, faith, good humor, wit, and of course bravery. Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall and the BBC miniseries based on it, now airing on PBS on Masterpiece Theatre, give a very different view of St. Thomas More.

Mann will present this morning program at the Spiritual Life Center on Saturday, May 2 from 9:30 to 11:00 a.m. She will discuss the life and martyrdom of St. Thomas More and review some of the controversies of his era, including state prosecution of religious heresy and the issues of loyalties to secular and religious authority.

“One of the headlines in England when the miniseries first aired asked ‘Sir Thomas More: Saint or Sinner?’ and the answer is yes,” said Mann, “so we’ll reexamine what it means to be proclaimed a saint in the Catholic Church. It certainly does not mean that a saint never committed a sin.”

St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More were canonized as martyrs in 1935 by Pope Pius XI and Pope St. John Paul II named St. Thomas More the Patron of Statesmen and Politicians in 2000. More is also the patron saint of lawyers, large families, and adoption.

The cost for attending this presentation? Time, of course, and transportation--but the Spiritual Life Center's fee is only $10.00!