XII.] HIS ANOMALOUS CHARACTER. 191 thereof, but as I plainly told them, I would rather have cast their money into the Thames than take it."1 Tyndale had a strange and unfounded notion that the retirement of Wolsey and the elevation of More were only a little dramatic scene, without any reality-a change got up to please the people offended by the Cardinal, and, the end being served, the actors would return to their former position. Sir Thomas More was a man of great breadth of intellect and of high mental culture; yet, when the Church was in question, his geniality of nature forsook him, "an evil spirit troubled him," and he could act and write in a style of gross and vulgar fanaticism. He was truly an anomaly. He had been all but seduced into the "idle celibacy" of the Charterhouse; but his intimacy with Colet and other friends saved him from such a fate, and he became with them a reformer. Yet this man, of proverbial humour and hilarity, wore a hair shirt2 next his skin, and flagellated himself with a whip of knotted cords, "especially every Fridai and great Saincts eves, and the fouer tymes of Ember Weeke." His dwelling was the abode of peace; his loving nature filled it with sunshine. It was not merely, according to Erasmus, like "the Academy of Plato," it was "a school of the Christian religion." More was fond of showing the animal pets of his children; and in Holbein's charming picture of his household, the monkey is seen lying in the folds of Dame Alice's dress, and the domestic fool also appears in the group. But with all this overflowing kindliness of nature, he could say of poor men as honest as himself, "that there should have been more burned by a great many than there have been within the seven years last past, the lack whereof, I fear me, will make more to be burned within this seven year next coming." He main 3 'Apology, Works, p. 867, ed. 1557. The hair shirt, given by him to his daughter Margaret a short time before his execution, is said to be still preserved in the convent of Spilsburg, in the neighbourhood of Blandford. 4 3 Erasmus had already immortalized the monkey, as he had seen itslyly and effectually defending a rabbit hutch from the attacks of a weasel. 4 His second wife, whom, according to Erasmus, he styled nec bella nec puella. tained in the case of Barnes, that he should have been burned, notwithstanding the king's safe-conduct; and in the case of Bilney, that the curt process should have been, Burn him to-day and try him to-morrow. The hands which had never been polluted by a bribe were, during his last months of office, stained with blood. Vindicating in his " Utopia," which apparently represents his own original beliefs, the doctrine of toleration-" for as man cannot make himself believe anything he pleases, no violence should be used to correct him"-he yet could have persons seized, scourged, and consumed to ashes, because of difference of religious opinions. He judged it, in his imaginary commonwealth, to be "foolish and indecent to threaten and terrify another for the purpose of making him believe what did not appear to him to be true," and he wished that "the world were all agreed to put all violence and compulsion away on all sides;" but he could go and see Bainham of the Middle Temple racked in the Tower—his crime being that he thought Tyndale's New Testament to be "utterly good," and the poor prisoner was at various times mercilessly whipped and tortured.1 He had no difficulty in trying to force the conscience of other men; but rather than violate his own he willingly laid his head upon the block. All the while he was devoutly conscientious, and thought that he was doing God service in the repression of error, even to stripes and death; for, to any one who regards toleration as "soul-murder," the extirpation of heretics must be a paramount duty. His earlier theory was flung aside, and he sank, in some respects, to the level of his age. But he denies the story, afterwards told by Foxe and Burnet, that he had a tree in his garden called the Tree of Troth, to which he tied heretics that he might scourge them. He admits, 1 Bainham had married the widow of Simon Fyshe, author of "The Supplication of Beggars," to which More had replied by, "The Supplication of Souls in Purgatory." In his address at the stake, 30th April, 1532, he said, "The articles I die for be these--first, I say it is lawful for every man and woman to have God's Book in their mother tongue.” . . . He called the Chancellor his "accuser and judge," and his last words were "The Lord forgive Sir Thomas More." XIL.] HIS ZEAL AGAINST HERETICS. 193 however, that he had ordered castigation to a young servant, who had been venting gross sacramentarian error taught him by George Joye, and that he had caused such things to be done by the officers of the Marshalsea to some classes of heretical offenders. He acknowledges, too, in his own picquant way, that heretics were very loath to fall into his hands, and he wonders at their reluctance, "for they were burnt none the sooner." In the administration of justice he was honest beyond suspicion, and laboured to conclude all actions within a reasonable period; nay, "the poorer and meaner the suppliant was, the more affably would he speak unto him, and the more heartily he would hearken to his cause and despatch him."1 But not only did he administer the law against religious offenders with special zealousness, he also, as first judge under the crown, ordered or allowed the statutes against heretics to be so illegally stretched or disregarded, as to be the means of inflicting wanton outrage on helpless sufferers.2 But lighter punishments were sometimes inflicted. When John Tyndale was arrested on the charge of corresponding with his brother, sending money to him, and receiving and selling the version, not only were he and Thomas Patmore, a London draper, very heavily fined, but the facetious Lord Chancellor of England sentenced them to be exhibited for a laughing-stock at the standard in Cheapside, on horseback with their faces to the animals' tails, and their cloaks garnished with copies of the forbidden Testament. 3 He had composed a Latin poem 1 Life by his great-grandson Cressacre More (p. 182), who, however, makes the mistake of calling his ancestor the first lay chancellor. The despatch sent to the English ambassador at Paris, giving an account of More's execution, uses language of vehement exaggeration to cover the weakness of its argument, "they were well worthy, if they had a thousand lives, to have suffered ten times a more terrible death." This form of punishment might N not appear so singular in those days, for Lord Ellesmere, more than half a century afterwards, in the reign of James I, when a "Replication," extending to six score sheets, and which might have been contained in sixteen, was brought before him, ordered that the parchment should have a hole cut in the middle of it, and in this way be put over the head of the attorney who framed it, that it might hang over his shoulders with the written side outward, and in high praise of the new sovereign, Henry VIII, on his accession; but he soon came to know the character of his royal master, for, speaking to his son-in-law Roper of the singular favour with which the king regarded him, he added, "Howbeit, son Roper, I may tell thee that I have no cause to be proud thereof; for if my head would win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go;" and it did go on the 6th of July, 1535. He had enjoyed the witty and erudite conversation of Erasmus; and even when he held the Great Seal, he was so humble that he was wont to put on a surplice and sing among the choristers in his parish church of Chelsea. Yet his elevated and noble nature could stoop to use this language: "Our Saviour will say to Tyndale, Thou art accursed, Tyndale, the son of the devil, for neither flesh nor blood hath taught thee these heresies, but thine own father, the devil that is in hell." Or again, in another style: "Judge, Christian reader, whether it be possible that he be any better than a beast, out of whose brutish, beastly mouth cometh such a filthy foam of blasphemies against Christ's holy ceremonies." More had a profound admiration for Pico della Mirandola, whose Life he had translated, with portions of his Works, in 1510; and it would have been well if he had remembered one of the Italian prince's sayings, Englished by himself: "Take no heed what many men do, but do what thing the very law of nature, what thing very reason, what thing our Lord himself showeth thee to be done." He eulogizes Savonarola as "a preacher, as well in cunning as in holiness of living most famous," even though he had been excommunicated by the Pope, and at length hanged and burned as a heretic; and might not he have allowed that others who opposed the Papacy were as honest and upright as the Florentine reformer? But, in his own words, "he had been troublesome to heretics," and, as he writes, in explanation of his self-made epitaph, to Erasmus, he had done it "with ambition." 1 More, however, stands in that he, so ornamented, should be led round the various courts of Westminster Hall. 1 Quod in epitaphio profiteor, me hæreticis esse molestum, hoc ambitiose feci. XII.] HIS OUTRAGEOUS RAILING. 195 finitely higher than some of his successors-than Audley, so obedient a minister in Henry's worst crimes; than Wriothesley, who, when Ann Askew was tortured, put his own hand to the rack to increase the lady's agony; or than Rich, whose "infamy" is chronicled by Lord Campbell.1 In his preface to his Confutation, adverting stoically to various sufferers, he stigmatizes Hitton as "a new saint of Tyndale canonization," but "the devil's stinking martyr," &c.; and when he refers to Tewksbury, a London tradesman, who had been arraigned before him in his own house at Chelsea, and sent by him and the Bishop of London to the fire, he declares that the martyr "owed all his heretical opinions to Tyndale's ungracious books, for which the poor wretch now lyeth in hell, and crieth out on him; and Tyndale, if he do not amend in time, he is like to find him, when they come together, a hot firebrand burning in his back.... The marvel is, Tyndale denieth purgatory except he intend to go to hell." Though his abuse of his opponents be so rabid, he contrives, like a clever lawyer, to fix on them a charge of railing: "To match them therein I neyther canne thoughe I woulde, neyther wyll I though I coulde, for in rayling standeth all their revel; with their railing all their roste meate is basted, all their potte seasoned, all their pye meate spiced, all their manchetes, and all their wafers, and all their ypocrase made." 3 But, having washed his hands, and taken this protest, he could style Tyndale "one of the hellhounds which the devil hath in his kennel"-" a devilish dronken soul." Tyndale had called the writings of Aquinas "draff,” and for this sin More describes him as "this drowsy drudge, who hath drunken so deep into the devil's dregs, that he may hap ... to fall into the mashing fat, and turn himself 1 Lives of the Chancellors, vol. II, p. 143. An interesting interpretation of the side glances in the Utopia, at things and customs in England, may be found in Brewer's Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol II, pt. 1, p. cclxvii, London, 1864. 2 Hitton, 66 an honest, poor man," had been across the seas, and brought back two New Testaments. After trial he was sentenced to the stake by Archbishop Warham, and he was burned in February, 1529. Foxe, vol. VIII, Appendix. 3 Apology, Works, p. 866, ed. 1557. |