Chapter VI: Part 6

Then came word that the passage of London Bridge was stopped, and the right of entry to the city barred against the commons as against a foe. Cade took this as a declaration of war, of the civil war he had done his best to prevent, and sallied out to force an entrance. At nine o’clock the battle began on the bridge, and all through the short summer night it raged, neither side effecting victory. “For some time the Londoners were beat back to the stulpes at St. Magnus corner, and suddenly again the rebels were repulsed and driven back to the stulpes at Southwark.” It was not till nine o’clock on Monday morning that the commons, wearied and disheartened, fell back from the fray, and Cade understood that the attack had failed, and that for the first time since the assembling of the people on Blackheath, at the end of May, a check had been given to the democratic movement. A hasty truce was settled between Cade and the mayor, that while the truce lasted the commons should not cross into London nor the citizens into Southwark. Cardinal Kemp, Archbishop of York, the king’s chancellor, who with old Archbishop Stafford had been left undisturbed in the Tower since the king’s ignominious flight, immediately decided that the time had come to arrange a settlement with the Captain of Kent.

Kemp sent messengers that day to the White Hart, asking Cade to meet the representatives of the king, “to the end that the civil commotions and disturbances might cease and tranquility be restored,” and Cade consented.

Kemp, who had himself presided at the trial and condemnation of Suffolk, brought to the conference, which was held in the church of St. Margaret, Southwark,[80] on July 7th, Archbishop Stafford and William Waynfleet, Bishop of Winchester. The chancellor, bent on making peace, also brought pardons to all concerned, duly signed and sealed. He listened courteously to Cade’s “complaints” and “requests,” received the petition, promised it should have the full consideration of parliament, and then announced a full pardon to all who should return home.

The proposals of the bishops won the general approval of the commons. There was nothing to be gained, it seemed, by remaining in arms, now they had won a promise that their charter should come before parliament.

Cade alone hesitated. What if parliament should disavow these “pardons,” and the commons be treated as the peasants were treated when they trusted a king’s word? He asked for the endorsement of his own pardon, and the pardons of his followers, by parliament before his army dispersed. Chancellor Kemp explained that this was impossible, because parliament was dissolved. The people were satisfied with the cardinal’s word. The rising was at an end.

The following day the bulk of the commons departed from Southwark for their farms and cottages in Kent and Surrey and Sussex. Cade watched them go. His own mind was made up. Not till parliament should give him a pardon of indisputable legality would he lay down his arms. With a small band of followers he set off for Rochester, sending what goods and provisions he had by water.

The rising was at an end, and nothing more was heard in parliament, or elsewhere, of the famous charter of “complaints” and “requests.”

With the break-up of the insurgent army, the government woke to activity. Alexander Iden was appointed sheriff of Kent, and marrying Crowmer’s widow, subsequently gained considerable profit. Within a week the king’s writ and proclamation, declaring John Cade a false traitor, was posted throughout the countryside, and Cade, defeated in an attempt to get possession of Queenborough Castle, was a fugitive with the reward of 1,000 marks on his head, alive or dead, and with Sheriff Iden in hot pursuit.

Near Heathfield, in Sussex, Iden came up with his prey, early on Monday, July 13th.

Cade died fighting. A broken man, worn and famished, friendless and alone, he still had his sword. The spirit of Mortimer, Captain of Kent, flickered up in the presence of his enemies--it were better to die sword in hand fighting for freedom than to perish basely by the hangman. So Cade fought his last fight in the Sussex garden, and fell mortally wounded, overpowered by the sheriff and his men.

In all haste Iden sent off the dead body to London; it was identified by the hostess of the White Hart, and three days later the head was stuck on London Bridge. The body was quartered and portions sent to Blackheath, Norwich, Salisbury, and Gloucester, for public exposure. The sheriffs of London, upon whom the gruesome task fell of despatching these remains, complained bitterly of the cost of this proceeding, “because that hardly any persons durst nor would take upon them the carriage for doubt of their lives.”[81]

Iden got his 1,000 marks reward, besides getting the governorship of Rochester Castle, at a salary of £36 per annum.

Cade was “attainted of treason” by act of parliament, and all his goods, lands, and tenements made forfeit to the crown. A year later another act of parliament made void all that had been done by Cade’s authority during the rising.

In January, 1451, Henry VI. went into Kent with his justices, and this royal visitation was known as the harvest of heads; for in spite of Cardinal Kemp’s pardons, twenty-six men of Canterbury and Rochester implicated in the rising were hanged.

So the last echoes of the rising died away, and corruption and misgovernment remained. But the commons of Kent and their captain had done what they could, and in the only way that seemed possible, to get justice done, and their failure was without dishonour.

Sir Thomas More and the Freedom of Conscience

1529–1535

AUTHORITIES: William Roper--_Life of Sir Thomas More_, 1626; Harpsfield--_Life of More_ (Harleian MSS.); Stapleton--_Ires Thomæ_, 1588; Cresacre More--_Life of More_, 1627; Erasmus--_Epistolae_ (Leyden, 1706); Sir James Mackintosh--_Life of More_, 1844; Campbell--_Lives of the Chancellors_; Foss--_Lives of the Judges_; _Calendar of State Papers--Henry VIII._, edited by Dr. Brewer and Dr. Gairdner (Rolls Series); _More’s English Works_, edited by William Rastell; Rev. T. E. Bridgett--_Life of Blessed John Fisher_, and _Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More_, 1891.

(_From the Drawing by Hans Holbein._)]

SIR THOMAS MORE AND THE FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE

1529–1535.

“Did Nature ever frame a sweeter, happier character than that of More?”--so Erasmus wrote in 1498, when Thomas More was twenty, and Erasmus, recently come to England, some ten years older. It was at the beginning of their friendship, a friendship that was to last unbroken till death,[82] and More had then passed from the household of Cardinal Morton to Oxford, and from Oxford to Lincoln’s Inn, to take up his father’s calling and follow the law as a barrister.

Twenty years later Erasmus, writing at length to Ulrich von Hutten, gives us a portrait of More in full manhood. Temperance, simplicity, human affection, good humour, independence of mind--these qualities are conspicuous.

“I never saw anyone so indifferent about food. Until he was a young man he delighted in drinking water, but that was natural to him. Yet, that he might not seem to be singular or unsociable, he would conceal his temperance from his guests by drinking the lightest beer, or often pure water, out of a pewter vessel.”

“He prefers milk diet and fruits, and is especially fond of eggs. He would rather eat corned beef and coarse bread than what are called delicacies.”

“He likes a simple dress, using neither silk nor purple nor chains of gold--except on state occasions. It is wonderful how careless he is of all that ceremony which most men identify with politeness. He neither requires it from others nor is anxious to use it himself, though when it is necessary, at interviews or banquets, he knows how to employ it. But he thinks it unmanly to waste time over such trifles.”

“He seems born and fashioned for friendship, and is a most faithful and enduring friend. He is easy of access to all; but if he chances to get familiar with one whose vices will not brook correction, rather than a sudden breaking off, he gradually relaxes the intimacy and quietly drops it. He abhors games of tennis, dice, cards, and the like, by which most gentlemen kill time. Though he is rather too negligent of his own interests, no one is more diligent in behalf of his friends. So polite, and so sweet-mannered is he in company, that no one is too melancholy to be cheered by him. Since boyhood he has always so delighted in merriment that it seems to be part of his nature; yet his merriment is never turned into buffoonery.”

“No one is less led by the opinions of the crowd, yet no one is less eccentric.”

The friendship of More and Erasmus had ripened in those twenty years. In More’s house, and at his instigation, Erasmus had written the _Praise of Folly_,[83] and the great scholar watched with warm interest the famous career and the brilliant character of the man he loved so heartily.

More was already high in Henry VIII.’s favour when Erasmus could write that no one was less led by the opinions of the crowd, and more than once his independence and courage of mind had been proved in the twenty years that had passed.

Drawn at first to the monastic life, More had spent four years (1500–1504) with the Carthusians in Smithfield, “frequenting daily their spiritual exercises, but without any vow.” Then it is plain to him that his vocation is not the priesthood, but marriage and public life, and he leaves the Charterhouse, and in 1505 is married and in Parliament.[84] But all his life the devotion to religion, and to the services of the Church, remain in More, and he is ascetic in the mortifications of the body till the spirit and the will ride supreme.

In the House of Commons More stood out against the exactions of Henry VII., and at once fell under the king’s displeasure.

More’s son-in-law, Roper, tells the story:

“In the time of King Henry the Seventh, More was made a burgess of the Parliament wherein was demanded by the king (as I have heard reported) about three-fifteenths, for the marriage of his eldest daughter, that then should be Scottish Queen; at the last debating whereof he made such arguments and reasons against, that the king’s demands were thereby overthrown. So that one of the king’s privy chamber being present thereat, brought word to the king out of the Parliament house that a beardless boy had disappointed all his purpose. Whereupon the king, conceiving great indignation towards him, could not be satisfied until he had some way revenged it. And forasmuch as he, nothing have, nothing could lose, his Grace devised a causeless quarrel against his father, keeping him in the Tower till he had made him pay a hundred pounds fine.... Had not the king soon after died, Sir Thomas More was determined to have gone over sea, thinking that being in the king’s indignation, he could not live in England without great danger.”

The grant from parliament to the king was reduced from £113,000 to £30,000 by More’s action; and if this action brought royal anger, it won for More the confidence of his fellow-citizens in London, so that we see him in the second year of Henry VIII. under-sheriff for the city, and according to Erasmus and Roper, the most popular lawyer of the day. With all his legal business, and good income, More is never anxious after money. “While he was still dependent on his fees, he gave to all true and friendly counsel, considering their interests rather than his own; he persuaded many to settle with their opponents as the cheaper course. If he could not induce them to act in that manner--for some men delight in litigation--he would still indicate the method that was least expensive.”[85]

More’s rising reputation was bound to attract the notice of Henry VIII., for the king was alert in the early years of his reign to get good men at the court, and Wolsey, who had become chancellor on Archbishop Warham’s retirement in 1515, was anxious to enlist More in the royal service. The court had no attractions for More, his embassies to Flanders and Calais, to settle trade disputes and difficulties with France, wearied him, and in 1516 he was engaged in finishing his _Utopia_. According to Roper, it was More’s independence of mind that made the king force office at court upon him. A ship belonging to the pope, which had put into Southampton, was claimed by Henry as a forfeiture. More argued the case so clearly that the commissioners decided in the pope’s favour, and the king at once declared he must have More in his service.

Then for the next twelve years Sir Thomas More enjoyed the royal favour and friendship. His promotion was rapid. Secretary of state, master of requests when the king was travelling, privy councilor, under-treasurer, or chancellor of the exchequer--all these offices were filled. In 1521 More was knighted, in 1523 he was speaker of the House of Commons, and in 1525 chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

Erasmus writes to Ulrich von Hutten in 1519 in praise of More’s public work: “In serious matters no man’s advice is more prized, and when the king wishes for recreation no man’s conversation is more entertaining. Often there are matters deep and involved that demand a grave and prudent judge, and More unravels these questions in a way that gives satisfaction to both sides. Yet no one has ever prevailed on him to receive a gift for his decision. Happy that commonwealth where kings appoint such officials! No pride has come to him with his high estate. With all the weight of state affairs he remembers his old friends, and returns from time to time to the books he loves so well. Whatever influence has come to him with his high office, whatever favour he enjoys with his wealthy king, he uses all for the good of the state and for the assistance of his friends. Ever fond of conferring benefits and wonderfully prone to pity, his disposition has grown with his power of indulging it. Some he helps with money, to others he gives protection, and others he recommends for promotion. When he can help in no other way he does it by his advice: no one is sent away dejected. You might well say that he had been appointed the public guardian of the distressed and needy.”

If the cares of state did not cut off Sir Thomas More from assisting old acquaintances, they made great inroads into the home life he loved so well. He had married again on the death of his first wife, and his letters to his children, especially to his “most dear daughter, Margaret”--Roper’s wife--are full of tenderness. He is anxious about the education of his children, and rejoices that his daughter shares his love for books. We find him writing to Margaret Roper just after her marriage in 1522:--

“I am therefore delighted to read that you have made up your mind to give yourself diligently to philosophy, and to make up by your earnestness in future for what you have lost in the past by neglect. My darling Margaret, I indeed have never found you idling, and your unusual learning in almost every kind of literature shows that you have been making active progress. So I take your words as an example of the great modesty that makes you prefer to accuse yourself falsely of sloth rather than to boast of your diligence, unless your meaning is that you will give yourself so earnestly to study that your past history will seem like indolence by comparison.... Though I earnestly hope that you will devote the rest of your life to medical science and sacred literature, so that you may be well furnished for the whole scope of human life, which is to have a healthy soul in a healthy body, and I know that you have already laid the foundations of these studies, and there will be always opportunity to continue the building; yet I am of opinion that you may with great advantage give some years of your yet flourishing youth to humane letters and liberal studies.... It would be a delight, my dear Margaret, to me to converse long with you on these matters, but I have just been interrupted and called away by the servants, who have brought in supper. I must have regard to others, else to sup is not so sweet as to talk with you.”[86]

The close friend of Erasmus and Dean Colet, an accepted champion of the New Learning, More was naturally enthusiastic for education--for girls as for boys. He had written to Gunnell, for a time the tutor of his family:--

“Though I prefer learning, joined with virtue, to all the treasures of kings, yet renown for learning, when it is not united with a good life, is nothing else than splendid and notorious infamy: this would be especially the case in a woman.... Since erudition in woman is a new thing and a reproach to the sloth of men, many will gladly assail it and impute to literature what is really the fault of nature, thinking from the vices of the learned to get their own ignorance esteemed as virtue. On the other hand if a woman (and this I desire and hope with you as the teacher for all my daughters) to eminent virtue should add an outwork of even moderate skill in literature, I think she will have more real profit than if she had obtained the riches of Crœsus and the beauty of Helen.”

In this letter More goes on to speak of the profit of learning and the happiness of those who give themselves to it--“possessing solid joy they will neither be puffed up by the empty praises of men nor dejected by evil tongues.”

“These I consider the genuine fruits of learning, and though I admit that all literary men do not possess them, I would maintain that those who give themselves to study with such views (avoiding the precipices of pride and haughtiness, walking in the pleasant meadows of modesty, not dazzled at the sight of gold) will easily attain their end and become perfect. Nor do I think that the harvest will be much affected whether it is a man or a woman who sows the field. They both have the same human nature, which reason differentiates from those of beasts; both therefore are equally suited for those studies for which reason is perfectioned, and becomes fruitful like a ploughed land on which the seed of good lessons has been sown.”

This strong love for wise learning, laying emphasis on a complete education--the training in virtue no less than the knowledge of letters--had its roots in More’s character. The “genuine fruits of learning” ripen in his life and death. His wide toleration, which will blame no man for not taking the path he trod to martyrdom, is coupled inextricably with a refinement of conscience that cannot be sullied by a denial of his faith. The freedom of conscience Thomas More claimed for himself he most willingly allows to others. Just as the education he valued for himself he extends to all his children.

Standing largely aloof from the violent controversies Luther had started, hating the bitter intolerance and savage abuse of theological strife, refusing to be drawn into the deadly discussion of Henry VIII.’s divorce, Sir Thomas More is content to live in loyal devotion to his religion and to the service of the state, if haply he may. And when this is denied him he is content to die, retaining his tolerant good-humour and the love of his kind to the end, and without resentment at his fate.

The courage of the sage never failed Sir Thomas More in his public work. As “a beardless boy” he had resisted in parliament the king’s extortions, as speaker of the House of Commons he protected the privileges of the commons. Wolsey had come down to the House with all his train to command a subsidy, but no word was uttered in reply to his address. In vain Wolsey appealed for an answer, Sir Thomas More could only declare that the speaker, then the mouthpiece of the commons, had nothing to say till he had heard the opinion of the House. “Whereupon, the cardinal, displeased with Sir Thomas More that had not in this parliament in all things satisfied his desire, suddenly arose and departed.”

High as More stood at that time in the affection of Henry, Sir Thomas knew the king, and the nature of the favour of princes. Roper relates that when he offered his congratulations, at the time of the appointment to the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster, More answered, “I may tell thee I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head would win him a castle in France (for then was there war betwixt us) it should not fail to go.”

Aware of Henry’s character, More yet had no choice but to accept the lord chancellorship from the king on Wolsey’s fall in 1529. It was no matter for personal satisfaction, and More’s reply to the Duke of Norfolk was substantially the same as his previous answer to Roper: “Considering how wise and honourable a prelate had lately before taken so great a fall, he had no cause to rejoice in his new dignity.” Erasmus wrote, “I do not at all congratulate More, nor literature; but I do indeed congratulate England, for a better or holier judge could not have been appointed.”

On November 3rd, 1529, Sir Thomas More, as chancellor, opened parliament, and in a long speech declared that “the cause of its assembly was to reform such things as had been used or permitted by inadvertence, or by changes of time had become inexpedient.” It was the opening of the seven years’ parliament, and before six years should run, this same parliament would, at the king’s order, condemn Sir Thomas More by act of attainder.

The position of the new chancellor was dangerous from the first. Wolsey had fallen because he had failed to help Henry to a divorce from his queen, Catherine of Aragon, and More had been made his successor because the king had counted on him to accomplish the “great matter.” All that Sir Thomas could hope for was that he might be allowed to do his work as chancellor without being mixed up with divorce proceedings. As long as he was not called upon to declare publicly that the divorce was right, he had no wish to interfere in the matter. First to last no word of approval came from More’s lips to encourage Henry in the divorce, but he was not the man to express judgment on a case that he did not wish brought before him.[87] In the end the chancellor’s very silence turned Henry’s disappointment to active displeasure, and More’s life was taken in savage revenge for non-compliance with the royal will.

Henry’s divorce dates the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in England--of that ecclesiastical revolution in which the supremacy of Rome was rejected, the crown superseded the pope as supreme head of the Church of England, and England was detached from the rest of Roman Catholic Christendom. In the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth the revolution proceeded still further, and Catholic rites and doctrines, service books and ceremonies were rigorously cast out of the Church of England, and all who adhered to the old order in religion were punished by law. But those days were far off as yet.

More, at the outset of this revolution, declines to follow the king in the rejection of the old allegiance to Rome. All he asks for is freedom of conscience to remain in the faith of his fathers, to worship as Christians in England had worshipped since the coming of Augustine. To escape death by giving up this freedom is impossible for Sir Thomas More.

The divorce from Queen Catherine is the turning point in More’s worldly fortunes as well as in ecclesiastical affairs in England.

Eighteen years passed from the day of Henry’s marriage to Catherine, on his accession to the throne, before the divorce was mooted. The scruple was that Catherine had been formerly betrothed to his dead brother Arthur; the moving force of Henry’s petition for divorce was the desire to marry Anne Boleyn. Unable to get the marriage annulled at Rome, or to get a favourable opinion from the universities, Henry fell back on Archbishop Cranmer to decree the divorce, and finally this was done in 1533, all appeals to Rome being henceforth forbidden. Henry had already, in 1531, called upon the clergy to acknowledge him as the supreme head of the Church of England, and the following year they were required to surrender the ancient right to meet and enact canons.[88]

In these four years the chancellor had kept out of political life as far as he could, and had given his attention to his judicial work. But in May, 1532, he resigned the great seal into the king’s hands, “seeing that affairs were going badly, and likely to be worse, and that if he retained his office he would be obliged to act against his conscience, or incur the king’s displeasure as he had already begun to do, for refusing to take his part against the clergy. His excuse was that his salary was too small, and that he was not equal to the work. Everyone is concerned, for there never was a better man in the office.”[89]

Nothing is known of Sir Thomas More’s work in the chancery except his integrity and his despatch. “When More took the office there were causes that had remained undecided for twenty years. He presided so dexterously and successfully that once after taking his seat and deciding a case, when the next case was called, it was found that there was no second case for trial. Such a thing is said never to have happened before or since.” (Stapleton.)

For nearly two years More lived unmolested after his resignation of the chancellorship; but he had incurred the enmity of the king and the hatred of Anne Boleyn, and Henry was swiftly driving at certain changes in religion that were to bring Sir Thomas More to the Tower and the block, and many another honest Christian to the prison and the gallows of Tyburn.

In June, 1533, after Cranmer had duly pronounced Henry’s marriage with Catherine void, came the coronation of Anne Boleyn, and Sir Thomas More declined an invitation from some of the bishops to be present at the celebration. He knew that his absence would be marked unfavourably by the king, and was ready to pay the penalty; but his care in avoiding the expression of any disapproval of Henry’s proceedings required an equal care that no approval should be expressed. To have been present at the coronation of Anne would have been, for More, to condone the divorce.

In the autumn came an attempt to include More, with Bishop Fisher and certain monks and friars, in the treason of the “Holy Maid of Kent,”--Elizabeth Barton, a Canterbury nun. The “treason” amounted to this, that the nun, who was given to prophesying, declared that God had revealed to her to speak against Henry’s divorce, and it was sufficient to bring her to Tyburn. But against Sir Thomas More no shred of evidence could be procured, for none existed. He had seen the nun, and talked with her, and “held her in great estimation,” but would neither commit himself to a belief in her visions, nor permit any discussion on the king’s doings; but wrote to the nun a letter which could not have been more prudent, as he exhorted her “to attend to devotion, and not meddle in the affairs of princes.”

The name of Sir Thomas More was struck out of the bill of attainder, but the days of his liberty were already numbered.

The Act of Succession, passed in March, 1534, made Mary, the daughter of Henry and Catherine, illegitimate, and Elizabeth, Anne’s child, the heir to the throne. The act also declared that “all the nobles of the realm, spiritual and temporal, and all other subjects arrived at full age, should be obliged to take corporal oath, in the presence of the king or his commissioners, to observe and maintain the whole effect and contents of the act,” under the penalties for treason for refusal. The words of the oath were not inserted in the act, and the commissioners drew up a formula, requiring all persons to affirm in addition that the marriage with Catherine was invalid, and the marriage with Anne valid, and further to recall and repudiate allegiance to any foreign authority, prince, or potentate. This was a much larger demand than parliament had authorised, for it contained a denial of the papal supremacy, while all that the act had required was an acknowledgment of the succession to the crown. The pope had only just given his final decision on Henry’s appeal for divorce (March, 1534), and the decision had been against the king and in favour of the marriage. The oath now administered was in direct opposition to the supremacy of Rome, and as such was impossible to the consciences of men like Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, though the great bulk of the clergy took it without giving any trouble.

More was quite prepared to swear to the succession of Elizabeth. Parliament had, in his eyes, a plain right to decide who should wear the crown, and the doctrine of divine hereditary kingship does not come in till the Stuarts. But this mere willingness to comply with the letter of the law was not sufficient. More’s silent want of sympathy with the divorce, and with the breach it involved with Rome, was intolerable to Henry, who had counted More amongst his dearest friends; for friend or foe, in Henry’s power, could only live by abject agreement with the royal pleasure. No king had three more faithful servants than Henry VIII. had in Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, and Thomas Cromwell, and no king destroyed his ministers with such fierce caprice.

Sir Thomas More, unable to take the oath, was sent to the Tower in April, 1534, Bishop Fisher having already been lodged there. In November parliament met again, and passed the Act of Supremacy, making Henry VIII. “the supreme head of the Church of England,” and declaring that on and after the first of February, 1535, it was high treason “to deprive the king’s most royal person, the queen’s, or their heirs apparent of their dignity, title or name of their royal estates, or slanderously and maliciously publish or pronounce, by express writing or words, that the king, our sovereign lord, should be heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, etc.” Under this act Sir Thomas More was to be assailed and to die. That the martyrdom was a “judicial murder” is plain--to Lord Campbell it was “the blackest crime that ever has been perpetrated in England under the form of law.”[90]

The indictment was for treason, and on July 1st, a week after Bishop Fisher’s execution, Sir Thomas More was brought before the judges. To the charge of having refused the king, “maliciously, falsely, and traitorously, his title of supreme head of the Church of England,” More answered that the statute had been passed while he was in prison, and that he was dead to the world, and had not cared about such things--“your statute cannot condemn me to death for such silence, for neither your statute nor any laws in the world punish people except for words and deeds--surely not for keeping silence.”

“To this the king’s proctor replied that such silence was a certain proof of malice intended against the statute, especially as every faithful subject, on being questioned about the statute, was obliged to answer categorically that the statute was good and wholesome.” “Surely,” replied More, “if common law is true, and he who is silent seems to consent, my silence should rather be taken as approval than contempt of your statute.”

To the first article charging him with having always maliciously opposed the king’s second marriage, More had answered that anything he had said had been according to his conscience, and that for “this error,” he had already suffered fifteen months’ imprisonment, and the confiscation of his property.

The trial was soon over, for the king had decided on More’s death when Fisher was executed, ordering the preachers to set forth to the people the treasons of the late Bishop of Rochester and of Sir Thomas More; “joining them together though the later was still untried.”[91] The jury, after a quarter of an hour’s absence, declared him guilty of death for maliciously contravening the statute, and sentence was pronounced by the chancellor “according to the tenour of the new law.”

Death being now in sight, and faith having been kept with his conscience, More has no longer any reason to observe silence. To the usual question whether he has anything to say against the sentence, he replied, that for the seven years he had studied the matter he could not find that supremacy in a church belonged to a layman, or to any but the see of Rome, as granted personally by our Lord when on earth to St. Peter and his successors; and that, as the city of London could not make a law against the laws of the realm of England, so England could not make a law contrary to the general law of Christ’s Catholic Church; and that the Magna Charta of England said that “the English Church should be free to enjoy all its rights,” as the king had sworn at his consecration. Interrupted by the chancellor with the inquiry whether he wished to be considered wiser and better than all the bishops and nobles of the realm who had sworn to the king’s supremacy, More retorted, “For one bishop of your opinion, my lord, I have a hundred saints of mine; and for one parliament of yours, and God knows of what kind, I have all the general councils for a thousand years.” The Duke of Norfolk said that now his malice was clear.

On the sixth of July, 1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded on Tower Hill, for the king remitted the ferocious mutilations that accompanied the executions for treason at Tyburn. “The scaffold was very unsteady, and putting his feet on the ladder, he said, merrily, to the lieutenant of the Tower: “I pray thee see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.”[92]

Then, with a simple request to the people standing round to pray for him, and to bear witness that he died a Catholic for the faith of the Catholic Church, a friendly word to the executioner, and a last prayer--the 51st Psalm--the axe fell, and More was dead.

Beyond More’s scholarship and wit, and his affection for his family and friends, stands out his great, unflinching quality of loyalty to conscience. When the power was in his hands as lord chancellor, no one was put to death by Sir Thomas More for heresy in England, though he did what he could by his pen to check the innovations of Luther, which he hated,--not only because they broke up the unity of Christendom, but because, it seemed to him, they struck at all social morality and decency.[93] The violence of Luther’s outbreak, the determination of the Lutherans--sure of their own possession of the truth--to allow no liberty to Catholics, and the antinomian communism of the anabaptists--all these things made Protestantism detestable to men like Sir Thomas More and Erasmus, and made More declare that dogmatising heretics ought to be repressed by the state as breeders of strife and contention. But his own record is clear: “And of all that ever came in my hand for heresy, as help me God, saving (as I said) the sure keeping of them, had never any of them any stripe or stroke given them, so much as a fillip on the forehead.”[94]

“What other controversialist can be named, who, having the power to crush antagonists whom he viewed as the disturbers of the quiet of his own declining years, the destroyers of all the hopes which he had cherished for mankind, contented himself with severity of language?”[95]

The author of the _Utopia_ was a critic, as Colet and Erasmus were, of abuses in the Church; but like his friends he lived and died a Catholic. He saw Lutheranism as the source of a thousand ills, and with Erasmus opposed it; but though heretics were anti-social and factious, he would not put one to death for error.

It is all through Sir Thomas More’s character--this respect for conscience. There is no going back on the wide toleration of his early manhood, and high office and responsibilities of state no more cramp or belittle his faith than they destroy his playfulness or the warmth of his affections.

He died a martyr for the religion of his life, for the simple right to abide in the old Catholic paths of his fellow-countrymen.

As Sir Thomas More was not the first of the Catholic martyrs at the Reformation, for he had seen his old friends, the Carthusian monks, carried to Tyburn, so he was not the last. For the next fifty years of Henry and Elizabeth, English men and women were to suffer for the old faith of England, and in Mary’s reign to die as bravely for Protestantism.

In spite of monasteries and priories destroyed, and parish churches stripped and plundered, in spite of penal laws which banned its priesthood and proscribed its worship, the Catholicism More died for has endured in England. All that parliament could do to exterminate the belief in papal supremacy has been done; all that panic and prejudice could accomplish by “popish plots” to the same end has been accomplished. These things have been no more successful than the mad “no popery” riots of Lord George Gordon in crushing the faith of the Roman Catholic minority. The penal laws have gone, Catholic emancipation has been obtained, a Catholic hierarchy has been set up, and to-day in England the freedom of conscience that was refused to Sir Thomas More is the accepted liberty of all.

In 1887 Sir Thomas More, with Bishop Fisher and the Carthusian martyrs, were beatified by Pope Leo XIII. Serving their religion in life and death, they served the cause of human liberty, withstanding Henry as Anselm withstood the Red King, and as Langton withstood John.

Robert Ket and The Norfolk Rising

1549

AUTHORITIES: _The Commotion in Norfolk_, by Nicholas Sotherton, 1576 (Harleian MS.); _De Furoribus Norfolciensum_, by Nevylle, 1575 (Translated into English by Wood, 1615); Holinshed--_Chronicle_; Sir John Hayward--_Life of Edward VI._; Strype--_Memorials_; Blomefield--_History of Norfolk_; F. W. Russell--_Kett’s Rebellion_; W. Rye; _Victoria County History--Norfolk_.

ROBERT KET AND THE NORFOLK RISING.

1549.

The Norfolk Rising of the sixteenth century was a land war, caused directly by the enclosing of the common fields of the peasants, and the break up of the accustomed rural life.

The landowners finding greater profit in breeding sheep and cattle than in the small holdings of peasants, began, about 1470, to seize the fields which from time immemorial had been cultivated by the country people in common, and to evict whole parishes by pulling down all the dwelling places. For eighty years these clearances were going on. Acts of Parliament were passed in 1489 and 1515 to prohibit the “pulling down of towns” and to order the rebuilding of such towns, and the restoration of pasture lands to tillage, but both acts were quite inoperative. In 1517, Cardinal Wolsey’s Royal Commission on Enclosures reported on the defiance of the law in seven Midland counties, where more than 36,000 acres had been enclosed; but legal proceedings against the landowners were stayed on the latter promising to make restitution.

Thomas More, in the first part of his _Utopia_, in 1516, described for all time what the enclosures he witnessed meant for England.

“For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure--nothing profiting, yea, much annoying the public weal--leave no ground for tillage, they inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made a sheep fold.... They turn all dwelling-places and all glebe land into desolation and wilderness. Therefore, that one covetous and insatiable comorant may compass about and inclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression, or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied, that they be compelled to sell all. By one means therefore or another, either by hook or by crook they must needs depart away, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, mothers with their young babies, and their whole household small in substance and large in number, as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in.... And when they have wandered abroad till the little they have be spent, what can they then else do but steal, and then justly be hanged, or else go about a begging. And yet then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not: whom no man will set a work, though they never so willingly proffer themselves thereto. For one shepherd or herdsman is enough to eat up that ground with cattle, to the occupying whereof about husbandry many hands were requisite.”

This was social England in the early years of Henry VIII., and every year saw things grow worse for the rural folk, in spite of further royal proclamations against enclosures in 1526. A series of bad harvests drove a starving population to riot in Norfolk in 1527 and 1529. In 1536 came the suppression of 376 lesser monasteries, followed two years later by the dissolution of all remaining monasteries and priories, and in 1547 by the royal confiscation of the property of the religious guilds and brotherhoods.

The landowners having established a starving unemployed class by the simple process of depriving people of access to the land, and the crown having removed the only source of relief to the unemployed by destroying the monasteries, it remained for parliament to deal with the “social problem” thus created by declaring poverty a crime, and the unemployed person a felon. The lash and the gallows were to solve the problem.

In 1531, an act of parliament granted licences to the impotent beggar, and ordered a whipping for all other mendicants. Five years later stronger measures were adopted, and whipping was only permitted to first offenders: mutilation and hanging were the subsequent penalties on conviction, and thousands of unemployed men and women suffered under this act. But still the unemployed existed, for the enclosures had not been stopped; and so the first year of Edward VI. saw an act passed declaring the convicted unemployed “a slave.” (As it seemed to many that parliament had got rid of papal authority only to bring back slavery in England, this act was repealed in two years, and the act of 1531 revived.)

The bitterness of the agrarian misery, the violent destruction of all the old religious customs and habits of the people, the confiscation of the funds of the guilds, the open despoiling of the parish churches of the people[96]--all these things plunged the country into confusion and despair. The general rising in Lincolnshire and the north in 1536 (known as the “Pilgrimage of Grace”) against the suppressions of the monasteries, and the rising in Cornwall and Devon in 1549 against Edward’s VI.’s new Book of Common Prayer were strong manifestations of the popular dislike of the changes made in religion by Henry VIII. and the ministers of Edward VI.

In Norfolk, in 1537, the people made an insurrection against the suppression of the monasteries; but the later risings of 1540 (at Griston, when one John Walker “exhorted the people to destroy the gentry”), and in 1549, under Ket, were not concerned with the religious troubles of the times, but were frankly agrarian. The Norfolk rising, which Ket led, was no more connected with Protestantism than the Peasant Revolt of 1381 was with Lollardy. Agrarian disturbances took place in a number of counties in 1549. In May the peasants of Somerset and Lincoln were in revolt, and in July there were tumults in Essex, Kent, Wiltshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire. A rude Cambridge ballad of the time extols the pulling down of enclosures:

Cast hedge and ditch in the lake,
Fixed with many a stake;
Though they be never so fast,
Yet asunder they are wrest.
Sir, I think that this work
Is as good as to build a kirk.

In 1548 Protector Somerset had followed Wolsey’s footsteps in issuing a proclamation for a royal commission to inquire and report concerning enclosures, and to give the names of all who kept more than two thousand sheep or who had “taken from any other their commons.”[97] The commissioners were also “to reform” any cases of the enclosing of commons and highways, “without due recompense,” which they might find; “and to the intent your doings may proceed without all suspicion, and the people conceive some good hope of reformation at your hands, we would that as many of you as be in any of the cases to be reformed, do first, for example’s sake, begin to the reformation of yourselves.”

Somerset’s ingenuous suggestion was naturally disregarded by the commissioners, and beyond making inquiries and publishing a report--to the effect that in the counties of Suffolk, Essex, Hertford, Kent, and Worcester nearly all the common lands[98] had been enclosed, while in Norfolk and Northampton large enclosures had been made--the commission of 1548 was as fruitless as its predecessors. Somerset, however, got some reputation by it as an enemy to the enclosures, and certainly incurred the dislike of the landowners. But where Wolsey, in the hey-day of power, had failed, there was small chance of success for Somerset, with the country in a state of anarchy, and the nation rent and distracted by a violent revolution in the Church.

The only strong movement to prevent the utter downfall of the country-people was the Norfolk Rising, which Robert Ket directed in the summer of 1549. It failed in the end, but for more than six weeks the power of the landlords was broken round Norwich, their enclosures were stopped, and the hope of better things filled the hearts of the peasants.

The rising began at Attleborough on 20th June when Squire Green, of Wylby, set up fences and hedges round the common lands at Harpham and Attleborough, and the people, excited by news that in Kent similar fences had been destroyed, proceeded to pull them down. For the next fortnight the revolt had neither leaders nor organization. “There were secret meetings of men running hither and thither, and then withdrawing themselves for secret conferences, but at length they all began to deal tumultuously and to rage openly.” On July 7th the annual feast at Wymondham, in honour of the translation of St. Thomas of Canterbury, brought the country folk together from miles round; and at the close of the fair they all set off to break down the fences set up round the common lands at Hetherset by one Sergeant Flowerdew.[99]

Flowerdew, unable to save his fences, proposed a diversion. The Kets at Wymondham had made enclosures, why shouldn’t the rioters deal with them in similar fashion? Flowerdew actually paid over 40d. to encourage an attack on the Kets.

Robert Ket and his brother were well-known men. Both were craftsmen, Robert, a tanner, and William, a butcher. They were landowners besides, and men of substance and of old family, for it was said the Kets had been in the land since the Norman Conquest. Robert Ket held three manors from the Earl of Warwick; his yearly income was put down at £50, and his property valued at 1,000 marks. Like other landowners, the Kets had made enclosures, but on the arrival of the people from Hetherset they at once declared themselves willing to stand by the movement for freeing the land. Robert Ket felt the misery of his neighbours. He saw that if the revolt was to be anything more than a local riot it must have necessary guidance, and his sympathies were entirely on the democratic side. And so from that time forward he gave up the quiet of a country gentleman’s life at Wymondham for the strenuous movement of an insurgent camp.

To the appeal of the people for help, Ket answered passionately, “I am ready, and will be ready at all times, to do whatever, not only to repress, but to subdue the power of great men. Whatsoever lands I have enclosed shall again be made common unto ye and all men, and my own hands shall first perform it.”

Then Robert Ket went on to commit himself body and soul to the movement, resolved that the peasants should not be left unaided in the struggle they had begun, and willing to take upon himself the burden and responsibility of leadership.

“You shall have me, if you will, not only as a companion, but as a captain; and in the doing of the so great a work before us, not only as a fellow, but for a leader, author and principal.”

If the ambition which clutches at sovereignty and rule is despicable, even more despicable is the weakness which refuses to take command at times of peril.

To Robert Ket and his brother there was no promise of the world’s honour and glory should the rising be successful. At the best would be the satisfaction of a battle fought and won for the deliverance of long-suffering peasants. At the worst the laying down of life in a good cause, as Geoffrey Litster and many a Norfolk man had done in bygone days.

Robert Ket’s leadership was acclaimed with enthusiasm, nor was it ever disputed throughout the rising. In this, the last of the great popular risings in England, the Norfolk men were as loyal to their leader as the men of Kent were to Wat Tyler and Jack Cade. And in each case that loyalty had ample justification.

There were but a thousand men involved when the rising began, but under Ket’s command the movement passed rapidly from the fluid “running hither and thither” condition of the first fortnight, and became the march of an organized army.

On July 10th, two days after Ket took command, this army was on the road to Norwich, and after crossing the river at Cringleford, lay encamped at Eaton Wood.

It is plain from Ket’s speeches to his men, and from “The Rebels’ Complaint,” which he published at this time, that to Robert Ket the rising was not only to put down enclosures, its aim was rather to strike at the root of the evil and to put an end to the ascendancy of the landlord class, and make England a free commonwealth. Either the people must put down landlords, or very soon the landlords would have the whole land in their possession, and the people would be in hopeless and helpless subjection. Had not an act of parliament been actually passed making “slaves” of the landless men, dispossessed by enclosures? When parliament was establishing slavery it was time for honest men to be up and doing, rousing the people to action.

Ket’s speech at Eaton Wood is a fierce attack on the landlords, and a reminder that having ventured so far, the peasants must advance yet further:

Now are ye overtopped and trodden down by gentlemen, and put
out of possibility ever to recover foot. Rivers of riches ran
into the coffers of your landlords, while you are pair’d to the
quick, and fed upon pease and oats like beasts. You are fleeced
by these landlords for their private benefit, and as well kept
under by the public burdens of State wherein while the richer
sort favour themselves, ye are gnawn to the very bones. Your
tyrannous masters often implead, arrest, and cast you into
prison, so that they may the more terrify and torture you in
your minds, and wind your necks more surely under their arms.
And then they palliate these pilleries with the fair pretence
of law and authority! Fine workmen, I warrant you, are this law
and authority, who can do their dealings so closely that men
can only discover them for your undoing. Harmless counsels are
fit for tame fools; for you who have already stirred there is
no hope but in adventuring boldly.

In “The Rebels’ Complaint,” the same note is struck. Only by taking up arms, and mixing Heaven and earth together, can the intolerable oppression of the landlords be ended.

The pride of great men is now intolerable, but our condition
miserable.