Thomas More is known for refusing the oath of succession and remaining silent about his reasons for doing so. His prison literature, however, tells a different story. Under the threat of execution, More waged an astonishingly prolific and often coded writing campaign in rebuke of King Henry VIII’s claim to be supreme head of the Church in England. Travis Curtright’s groundbreaking book shows how William Rastell, More’s nephew and printer, fashioned a historically inaccurate depiction of More, one that persists to this day. He asserted while imprisoned in the Tower of London, More stopped his polemical writing and turned his mind exclusively toward heaven. In contrast, Curtright proves that More’s prison writings are not just devotional literature but also a powerful defense of a united Church under the pope, reestablishing More as a key political and religious thinker, defiant of King Henry VIII.
With More’s death, he became a martyr according to his own definition of the Church, a witness to the “one true Catholic faith.” Like the Carthusians who went before him, More’s death amounted to what Anne Dillon calls “a new form of martyrdom,” which was exclusively Catholic and witnessed to the authority of the pope. To put it another way, More was a “new martyr” because he died in rejection of Henry’s denial of papal authority. De tristitia’s originality, ultimately, is due less to its theological teaching and more to what that teaching imparts to its author and to his subsequent witness upon the scaffold in 1535.
Rastell recognized and appropriated this new kind of martyrdom. He placed “A devout prayer, made by sir Thomas More, knight, after he was condemned to die, and before he was put to death” in a collection of prayers that follows More’s treatment of the Passion. There, More writes: “Good Lord, give me the grace in all my fear and agony to have recourse to that great fear and wonderful agony, that thou my sweet savior had at the mount of Olives before thy most bitter passion, and in the meditation thereof, to conceive spiritual comfort and consolation profitable for my soul.” “My fear and agony” parallel “my soul” and both formulations indicate the personal and political position of the petitioner in Rastell’s presentation. More seeks comfort for himself, but he is also a type of the new kind of martyr, who is a fearful martyr besides. “Whoever is utterly crushed by feelings of anxiety and fear and is tortured by the fear that he may yield to despair,” More writes in lines that applied to those persecuted like himself, “let him consider this agony of Christ, let him meditate on it constantly and turn it over in his mind.” As such a new martyr, Rastell could see More suffering, like Christ, for his friends, his nation, and a united Christendom.
More himself, though, had already imagined that others would follow his example as he followed Christ’s own. “And in our agony remembering His,” he wrote, “let us beg Him with all our strength that He may deign to comfort us in our anguish by an insight into His” (253/3-255/3). Others like More may humbly expect and faithfully hope for profitable “spiritual comfort and consolation” and the “strength to stand” against Henry. What More might have told his jailer after his books were removed takes on a new meaning as well. More closed his shop because his “implements” already produced the goods he needed.
Of Sleeping Apostles
The propagandistic rather than devotional aims of More, finally, become most clear in analysis of his allegories. As More identified himself with a suffering Christ, he associated the apostles, who abandoned their Master in the garden of Gethsemane, with the bishops in England. In these sections of De tristitia, More’s treatment of the Passion is no mere academic dispute or personal means of meditation. More’s concern over the sleeping apostles, after all, was personally involved and polemically motivated. He contrasts the alert Judas, who is wide awake and intent upon betraying Christ, with the apostles who are buried in sleep, even after the third time that their lord returns to them, inciting them to stay awake and pray. More, in turn, expands the gospel episode into an image of his times:
Does not this contrast between the traitor and the apostles present to us a clear and sharp mirror image (as it were), a sad and terrible view of what has happened through the ages from those times even to our own? Why do not bishops contemplate in this scene their own somnolence? Since they have succeeded in the place of the apostles, would that they would reproduce their virtues just as eagerly as they embrace their authority and as faithfully as they display their sloth and sleepiness! (259/7-261/1)
To heighten the above, More called upon “the story of that time when the apostles were sleeping as the Son of Man was being betrayed” as a “mysterious image of future times” (341/3-6). He writes: “I think we would not be far wrong if we were to fear that the time approaches when the son of man, Christ, will be betrayed into the hands of sinners.” For such betrayal occurs “as often as we see an imminent danger that the mystical body of Christ, the church of Christ, namely the Christian people, will be brought to ruin at the hands of wicked men” (345/7-347/3). When the Church is destroyed or attacked, Christ’s mystical body is crucified, an overtly polemical claim in 1535 against both heresy and schism.
(excerpted from chapter 5)