The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [141]
Now there was no one left but More.
More must stand trial, and it must be a grand and public trial in the largest hall in the kingdom: Westminster Hall, where Coronation banquets were held. More was too monumental a public figure to command less.
First he had had several “pre-trials,” or examinations. These examinations were led by Cromwell, Cranmer, Audley (who had replaced More as Chancellor), Brandon, and Thomas Boleyn. In all of them he maintained his “silence.” I could report all the intricate reasonings he used, but I will not. The truth of the matter is that he based his case (clever lawyer that he was) upon legal hair-splitting-basically upon whether his silence was “malevolent” or not. It was the legal implications of silence that were on trial, not More himself.
His sophistry and legalisms did not impress his judges, and they found him guilty.
Once he saw that silence could do him no good (and that his judges had fathomed him true, in any case), he asked to make a statement. This request was granted.
“This indictment is grounded upon an act of Parliament directly repugnant to the laws of God and His Holy Church,” he said. He went on to explain that no one portion of Christendom could make laws governing the Church in that particular land, if they ran counter to the laws in every other land. England could not declare herself above the laws binding other Christian countries. We—Parliament and I—claimed that we could. And there the argument ended.
I have restrained myself from describing More’s trials and arguments in all their details, since the end was the end. It is torture to retrace each step and say where one action, one word, could have altered the outcome. His family came to visit him in the Tower and did their utmost to persuade him to sign the Oath, excuse himself, liberate himself.
In the Tower he spent his time writing. There were several books, some in Latin—Of the Sorrow, Weariness, Fear and Prayer of Christ before his Capture was the longest—and others in English: A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation; The Four Last Things. The latter described the four things that a man on his deathbed must deal with: ly cys of heaven.
More examined the moment of death carefully and concluded that there was no “easy” death: “for if thou die no worse death, yet at the leastwise lying in thy bed, thy head shooting, thy back aching, thy veins beating, thine heart panting, thy throat rattling, thy flesh trembling, thy mouth gaping, thy nose sharping, thy legs cooling, thy fingers fumbling, thy breath shortening, all thy strength fainting, thy life vanishing, and thy death drawing on” was in store for you.
From his window in the Tower, More saw Richard Reynolds of Syon and the Carthusian monks being carted out of the Tower for their felons’ execution at Tyburn. Reportedly he looked at them longingly and then said to his daughter Margaret (who continued to visit him and beg him to recant), “Lo, dost thou not see, Meg, that these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage?”
Then he berated himself for his “sinful” life. He was ever obsessed with his own sinfulness and even of the sorrow of the world at large and its purpose. He wrote:
But if we get so weary of pain and grief that we perversely attempt to
change this world, this place of labour and penance, into a joyful haven
of rest, if we seek Heaven on earth, we cut ourselves off for ever from
true happiness, and will drown ourselves in penance when it is too late
to do any good, and in unbearable, unending tribulations as well.
More had at last embraced his dark side. When he closed the gate at Chelsea on his way to his first examination, he was said to have murmured, “I thank God, the field is won at last.” He had turned his back on that quietude of Chelsea, on his wife and family, too, and thanked God that they would no longer be there to torment him, keeping