First, in chapter one, "The Creation of More's Tower Works", Curtright deals with how the More family and friends, Roper, Rastell, and Harpsfield framed More's last months in their biographies and crucially, how Rastell edited the Tower Works for the Catholic audience in England during Mary I's reign. He argues that these presentations have been very influential in the biographies and studies of More in the last century, and in the publication of the collected works by Yale University Press. One crucial issue is how Rastell conflated a work More wrote before he was taken to the Tower of London with one he did write during his imprisonment: A Treatise upon the Passion of Christ Reconsidered and De Tristitia Christi.
The former work is the subject of chapter two, "A Treatise upon the Passion of Christ Reconsidered, 1534" as Curtright untangles the circumstances of its composition while More was still at home in Chelsea--and how he continues the theme of defending the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament against the Sacramentarians of the time. More upholds the Scholastic explanation of Accidents and Substance in his own terms against Tyndale's view that what mattered was the recipient's belief, not the mysterious reality of the impassible being passable.
In chapter three, Curtright examines "The (Auto) Biographical More and "A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation," 1534-1535. He posits that More writes this to prepare his family for what he and they and Catholic believers in England are facing, that is "A Dialogue of MORE Against Tribulation". Applying Ciceronian rhetoric tropes, "Deliberative Discourse" arguing for preparing and being willing to do the honorable thing in spite of the dangers faced, More is the uncle Anthony helping his nephew Vincent (Margaret and others) to endure pain and even death to be faithful and true. Thus, he's preparing Margaret for faithful resistance to the "Henrician schism" to come. (p. 77)
The words referring to More's exchange of letters with Margaret More Roper as "masterpiece of rhetorical self-fashioning" on page 85 of chapter four, "A Letter from Prison to Alice Allington, 1534" led me to the Bibliography where sure enough I found Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare which I read in graduate school decades ago! In this chapter, Curtright looks back at More's Utopia and the crucial argument between "More" and Hythlodaeus about whether or not a humanist scholar should become an advisor to a monarch--an obvious sign of continuity of how More thought about and dealt with practical issues based on principles. Again, the forms of discourse, "Forensic Dialogue" and the "Familiar Letter" are important tools for Curtright in this chapter, explicating both method and medium.
In chapter five, "The True Martyr in De Tristitia Christi, c. 1535", the passage of the Bill of Attainder against More and Fisher made it clear that More could not use his strategy of silence for much longer, so his efforts to meditate on the Passion of Christ as preparation for suffering and the death of a traitor--hanging, drawing, and quartering--intensified. "Spoken malice" did not require words to be spoken--"More's intentions [treason and sedition] are declared for him in the bill" (p. 114) So More, figuratively in my words, thinks back to John Colet and Erasmus debating years ago (in 1498) about whether or not Jesus really felt fear and anguish even unto death in the Garden of Gethsemane or just "let" Himself express such agony. Colet said no; Erasmus said yes. (Again this is a subject I studied in an undergraduate class at WSU with J. Kelley Sowards, one of the great Erasmus scholars of that time.) More is also afraid, but he is also ready to chastise "the sleeping apostles" of his time, the bishops of England, who were then siding with the enemies of the Church (Judas). They're the shepherds of the flock and except for John Fisher, also in the Tower, they've abandoned both the flock and The Good Shepherd.
The "Conclusion: The Case of Malicious or Merry More" posed the cases of More's trial as presented in A Man for All Seasons and/or Wolf Hall. In the former, Richard Rich is the perjurer; in the latter, More! The real text to be dealt with is however the account and grounds of More's "moot" with Richard Rich in the Tower--a hypothetical exercise of "putting the case"--so again, More could argue that in that disputation with Rich he was not malicious or treasonous. He had not presented HIS case; he had argued A case. But the "regime's pursuit of More" (p. 137) ended with him unable to defend himself against the one indictment he lost at his trial.
But then Curtright demonstrates that More had really provided the regime with plenty of evidence to condemn if only Cromwell, Rich, Audley, et al., knew how to read in the controversial works he'd been writing in the Tower: Henry VIII was the tyrannous Turk of the Dialogue of Comfort; the Schism of England was the Passion of Christ repeated; the rebuke of the Greek Church at the Council of Florence was the rebuke of England's parliament and king; the bishops of England were "the sleeping Apostles," not praying and watching with Jesus . . .
Finally Curtright directs us to More's final words in his defense--he is Stephen the Martyr; his judges and jury are Saul (who may repent like Paul):
More have I not to say, my lords, but that like as the blessed apostle Saint Paul, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, was present and consented to the death of Saint Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they now twain holy saints in heaven, and shall continue there friends forever: so I verily trust and shall therefore right heartily pray, that though your lordships have now in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together to our everlasting salvation.
As Curtright notes, those words are "a customary mixture of humility and humor, irony and honesty" (p. 142), both excusing and accusing.
Did St. Swithun Wells know that More had said that? Before his execution on December 10, 1591, he said to Richard Topcliffe, Elizabeth I's chief pursuivant and bloody torturer: "I pray God make you a Paul of a Saul, of a bloody persecutor one of the Catholic Church's children." Wells could have read the trial accounts or some of the works published before 1558.
This book is volume in "The Beginning and the Beyond of Politics" series from Notre Dame Unversity Press. There's a very helpful Appendix of Key Dates, Notes (I need to look at them again), an extensive Bibliography, and an Index. Highly recommended--reminder: I bought the book.
Now I'm anticipating another delivery: an edition of 1929's The Fame of Blessed Thomas More from Cluny Media:
In 1929, seven of the leading men of the English Catholic Church gathered to give evidence of [More's] reputation, their words foreshadowing the message of Pope Pius XI in the years to come: that this star of sanctity, shining in a dark period of history, was a bright champion of the Christian people, undaunted by the fallacies of heretics and the threats of the powerful, willing to shed his blood in testimony of devotion to Jesus Christ and His Church.
The Fame of Blessed Thomas More offers that evidence in these essays by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc; Bede Jarrett, O.P., and Ronald Knox; Henry Browne, S.J., and Reginald Blunt; R. W. Chambers and Lord Justice Russell .
Originally published in limited editions in 1929 and 1933, The Fame of Blessed Thomas More is a rare piece of Catholic literature and a profound tribute to a great saint by his own countrymen, celebrating—in the words of Monsignor Knox—“one of the most successful men who ever lived,” who sought, and won, the favor of Almighty God.
Saint Thomas More, pray for us!
Saint John Fisher, pray for us!
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