Justified True Belief

(●) The lawyer who invented Utopia, governed England, and went to the block rather than swear to something he did not believe. + In the spring of 1534 a middle-aged English lawyer was handed a piece of paper and asked to swear to it. He had spent his whole life in the service of the law and of his king, he had a wife and children and a good house by the river, and almost everyone he knew had already signed. He would not. Fifteen months later they cut his head off on Tower Hill. Four hundred years after that Rome made him a saint, and within another fifty the English church that had killed him was keeping his memory on the same day of the year. Thomas More matters to a Christian reader for two reasons that pull in opposite directions, and honesty needs both. He is the man whose refusal put the word "conscience" at the centre of the argument about what a government may demand of a soul, and who then made the argument stick by dying for it. He is also the man who wrote, in print and under his own name, that burning heretics is lawful and well done, and who was Lord Chancellor while six men went to the fire. A heretic, in the England of his day, meant a person who held or taught what the church had formally condemned, and the punishment the law kept for the one who would not take it back was burning. The same person did both things, in the same city, within six years. One fact is worth carrying through everything that follows. His great book, Utopia, describes an island where nobody may be punished for his religion, and where the founder made a law that a man might hold what he liked so long as he argued for it gently. More wrote that in 1516. He was prosecuting heresy in 1530 and defending the burning of heretics in print. He never explained the distance, and neither half of him can be quietly dropped to make the other easier to admire.

(●) 1478 AD: Born in Milk Street to a London lawyer who meant his son for the law. + Thomas More was born on 7 February 1478 in Milk Street, in the middle of the City of London, a few minutes’ walk from the Guildhall. His father John More was a lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn who eventually rose to be a judge of the King’s Bench, and the son grew up in a world of writs and contracts and guild disputes rather than of manors and hunting. That upbringing shows in everything he wrote. Even his most fanciful book is full of the practical questions a city lawyer actually hears: what to do about vagrants, what a fair wage looks like, why a man steals. He was sent first to St Anthony’s in Threadneedle Street, one of the best grammar schools in the city, where boys learned Latin by hearing it, speaking it, and being caned for getting it wrong. London in the 1480s was a city of perhaps fifty thousand people packed inside a Roman wall, loud with bells, and More would live and die within a few miles of where he was born.

(●) c. 1490 AD: He waited at table in the house of the Lord Chancellor of England, who sent him on to Oxford and then home to the law. + At about twelve, More was placed as a page in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England, who would be made a cardinal three years later. A page in a great house waited at table, carried things, and learned by watching. More, according to his son-in-law William Roper, also learned to entertain: at Christmas he would step into the middle of the players’ interlude without any rehearsal, invent a part for himself on the spot, and get more laughs than the professionals. Morton took to him. Roper reports him telling his dinner guests, "This child here waiting at the table, whosoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man." Morton sent him to Oxford for about two years, on an allowance his father kept small enough that there was nothing to spend on amusements, and then called him home for the law. He went first to New Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery where a boy learned the rudiments, and then in 1496 to his father’s own Lincoln’s Inn, one of the four Inns of Court, which were where England trained its lawyers: part college, part lodging house, part professional guild, the sort of place where a young man learned by arguing mock cases in hall and listening to real ones. He was called to the bar and built one of the busiest practices in London, in a subject Erasmus, the Dutch scholar who would become the closest friend of his life, thought barbarous and empty of real learning. The Greek came later, in London, from William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre, two of the men who had carried the new learning back from Italy. The new learning meant going back to the Greek and Latin texts themselves, Plato and Cicero and the New Testament in the languages they were actually written in, rather than to the centuries of summary and commentary the schools had piled on top of them. Somewhere in these years he also gave a public course of lectures on Augustine’s City of God in the church of St Lawrence Jewry. He was in his early twenties and not ordained, and Roper records who turned up to listen: Doctor Grocyn himself, and all the chief learned men of the city.

(●) c. 1501 AD: He spent about four years beside the London Charterhouse, weighing the cloister against marriage. + The Charterhouse was the London house of the Carthusians, the strictest order in England: monks who lived alone in separate cells around a cloister, ate alone, kept silence most of the week, and wore hair shirts, garments of coarse animal hair worn next to the skin to keep the body uncomfortable on purpose. More moved in beside them and lived their life as far as a layman could. Roper’s phrase is exact and worth keeping: he gave himself to devotion and prayer there, "religiously living there without vow about four years." No vow. He was testing, not joining. Erasmus, writing about his friend nearly twenty years later, described the outcome in a sentence that has been quoted ever since: having prepared himself by "watchings and fastings and prayers and such like exercises," More found one obstacle he could not get past, which was that he still wanted to marry, and so "he resolved to be a chaste husband rather than a licentious priest." He kept the Charterhouse with him. He wore a hair shirt next to his skin for the rest of his life, which his eldest daughter Margaret washed for him so the rest of the household would not see it, and the habit of early rising and long prayer never left him. This mattered enormously at the end: when the Carthusians of that same house were dragged out to die in 1535, More was watching from a window in the Tower. Around 1505 he married Jane Colt, a gentleman’s daughter from Essex. Roper tells a story about the match that is either charming or appalling depending on the century you read it in: More preferred the second daughter, then reflected that it would shame the eldest to see her younger sister married first, and turned his affection to Jane instead. They had four children, Margaret, Elizabeth, Cecily and John. Jane died in 1511, and within a month More married Alice Middleton, a widow several years his senior, to keep a mother in the house.

(●) 1516 AD: He published Utopia, and his house became the most talked-about household in England. + In 1515 More was sent to Flanders on a trade embassy, found himself with time on his hands in Antwerp, and began writing a book about a traveller who claimed to have found a better-run country. He finished it in London, sent the manuscript to Erasmus and asked him to find a printer, and Erasmus passed it to his own printer, Dirk Martens at Louvain, who brought it out in December 1516. The Latin title was De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia: on the best state of a commonwealth and on the new island of Utopia. More coined the name from Greek, and it puns: ou-topos is "no place" and eu-topos is "good place," and the reader is not told which one is meant. His friendship with Erasmus was the great intellectual friendship of the age. Erasmus had written The Praise of Folly in More’s London house in 1509 and dedicated it to him, and the Greek title Moriae Encomium is a joke on More’s name. When a German knight asked Erasmus what More was actually like, Erasmus wrote back a long letter that is the best portrait we have of him. He said More seemed "to be born and made for friendship." He also reported, with some amusement, that More filled his house with birds and monkeys and foxes and ferrets simply because he liked watching how creatures behave, and that he bought any odd object he came across so that there would be something in every room to catch a visitor’s eye. In 1525 the whole establishment moved out of the city to Chelsea, then a village upriver, into a house he had built on land bought the year before. More educated his daughters in Latin and Greek to the same standard as his son, which in England in the 1520s was close to unheard of, and his eldest, Margaret, became a scholar whom learned men corresponded with in her own right.

(●) 1529 AD: Henry VIII made him Lord Chancellor, and he turned the law against Tyndale’s books and the men who carried them. + More had entered the King’s service around 1518, been knighted and made under-treasurer in 1521, served as Speaker of the Commons in 1523, and run the Duchy of Lancaster from 1525. On 26 October 1529, after Cardinal Wolsey fell for failing to get Henry his annulment, the Great Seal went to More: a layman and a common lawyer taking the highest office in the kingdom from a prince of the church. An annulment is a ruling that a marriage was never a marriage at all, and Henry wanted one for his first marriage so that he could make a second. Rome would not give it, and Wolsey, who had promised to get it, went down with the failure. The Great Seal was the stamp that made a document the King’s, and the man who kept it was Lord Chancellor, the King’s chief officer and the head of his justice. Roper preserves the scene that says most about his position. Henry came down to Chelsea unannounced one day, dined, and then walked in the garden for an hour with his arm around More’s neck. Roper, watching, told his father-in-law afterwards how fortunate he was. More’s answer was flat: he believed the King favoured him as much as any subject in England, and "howbeit, son Roper, 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 there was war between us) it should not fail to go." As Chancellor he was quick, honest, and by the standards of the age astonishingly fast at clearing a backlog. He was also the crown’s chief officer during a campaign against the smuggled English New Testament of William Tyndale and the Lutheran books coming in with it. Tyndale had put the New Testament into English and had it printed abroad, out of reach of the English bishops, and the copies came home in the merchants’ cargo along with the writings of Martin Luther and the men who followed him. Owning such a book was a crime, and the crime had a machinery behind it. A church court decided whether a man was a heretic, and then, since churchmen did not shed blood with their own hands, a man who would not take his words back was handed over to the secular arm, meaning the ordinary officers of the crown, who burned him. Six men were burned for heresy in England during his two and a half years in office, every one of them condemned in a church court and handed to the secular arm to die. Two of those names are worth keeping apart, because only one of them is on his account. The lawyer James Bainham was taken and examined while More was Chancellor, and was burned at Smithfield in April 1532. The Cambridge preacher Thomas Bilney was condemned by the bishop of Norwich’s court and burned outside that city in August 1531, with no part in it from More, who afterwards defended the proceedings in print. More wrote hundreds of thousands of words against Tyndale in these years, and he never afterwards pretended the burnings had been a regret. What he did deny, in his Apology of 1533, was the charge that he had heretics beaten in his own garden: of all who came into his hands for heresy, he wrote, none ever had "any stripe or stroke given them, so much as a fillip on the forehead." A fillip is a flick of a finger. That denial is narrow and precise, and it is worth reading exactly as narrowly as he wrote it: the charge he is answering is that prisoners were beaten under his own roof, and that is the only charge he answers (†3).

(●) 1532 AD: He gave back the Great Seal the day after the clergy submitted to the King, and went home poor. + On 15 May 1532 the English clergy surrendered their power to make church law without the King’s consent. Until that day the church in England had written its own rules for its own courts; after it, no new rule could be made without the King’s licence, and the old ones went to a commission of his choosing to be looked over and kept or struck out. On 16 May More resigned. He gave no public reason, and for the next two years he gave none, which was the whole of his strategy: a man who says nothing has said nothing to convict him with. The single day between the two events is the nearest thing to a comment he ever made on the first. The resignation cost him everything. He had held the greatest office in England and he came out of it with, by his own reckoning, little more than a hundred pounds a year. He gathered his household and explained, cheerfully, that they would step down by stages: they would begin at the standard of Lincoln’s Inn, and if they could not keep that up they would drop to New Inn fare the next year, and after that to Oxford fare, and if even that failed, "then may we yet with bags and wallets go a-begging together," singing at doors for charity and keeping company merrily. Roper noticed one small change more than any other. On holidays, when the service at church was over, a gentleman of the household had always gone to Lady Alice’s pew and announced, "Madam, my Lord is gone." The first holiday after the surrender, with the gentlemen dismissed, More came to his wife’s pew and said it himself.

(●) 1535 AD: He would not swear an oath that denied the Pope’s authority, and on 6 July they beheaded him on Tower Hill. + On 13 April 1534 More was summoned to Lambeth and offered the oath attached to the Act of Succession, the statute settling the crown on the children of the King’s new marriage. He said he was willing to swear to the succession itself, and would not swear to the preamble, which denied the Pope’s authority. A preamble is the opening passage of a statute, the part where Parliament sets out the grounds the law is resting on, so the line he was drawing was an exact one: who sits on the English throne is England’s own business to settle, and what the whole church of Christ may hold is not (T4). He would not say why. Four days later he went into the Tower, where he stayed fifteen months. Roper records what happened in the boat on the way to Lambeth. More had been to church that morning, heard Mass, and made his confession, as he always did before anything serious. At the gate he would not let his children walk him to the boat as they usually did; he pulled the wicket shut behind him and left them inside. Then he sat silent for a while, leaned over, and said in Roper’s ear, "Son Roper, I thank our Lord, the field is won." Roper had no idea what he meant, and worked out only later that his father-in-law had already fought the fight, and won it, before anyone asked him a question. On 4 May 1535 he stood at his Tower window with Margaret beside him and watched the prior of his old Charterhouse go out to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, with two other Carthusian priors, a Bridgettine monk and a parish priest. "Lo, dost thou not see, Meg," he said to her, "that these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage?" He added that he, who had spent his life in comfort, was evidently not yet fit to follow them. His trial came on 1 July 1535 in Westminster Hall. The case turned on the evidence of Richard Rich, the Solicitor General, who swore that More had denied the King’s supremacy in private conversation in the Tower. The supremacy meant the King, and not the Pope, as head of the church in England, and to deny it out loud was treason. More answered on oath that Rich had always been a man of no truth, and that he would not have opened his conscience to him of all people. He was convicted anyway, and only then did he speak his mind freely (T4). Five days later he was taken to Tower Hill. The scaffold was so flimsy that he asked the Lieutenant, "I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself." He asked the crowd to pray for him, told the headsman to take courage because his neck was short, and was killed with one stroke. He was fifty-seven.

What He Taught

(T1) A country that turns its farms into sheep pasture and then hangs the men it has made into thieves is punishing its own policy. + Book I of Utopia turns on an argument at Cardinal Morton’s dinner table about why England has so many thieves and why hanging them is not working. The traveller Raphael Hythloday, the character who does most of the talking, makes a point that must have sounded impertinent in 1516 and reads like plain economics now. Wool was fetching a very good price. Landlords had worked out that a hillside carrying sheep earned more than the same hillside carrying tenants, so they pulled down the cottages, and sometimes whole villages, fenced the fields, and put sheep on them. The families who had farmed there walked away with nothing, spent what little they had, and then either begged or stole. England then hanged them for stealing. Hythloday’s conclusion is the part worth holding on to: a government that creates thieves and then hangs them is doing something worse than failing, because it is making a crime and punishing the crime with the same hand. "For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this but that you first make thieves and then punish them?" Enclosure, the fencing-in of open fields for private pasture, is the specific policy he is attacking, and it went on for another three centuries. Behind the economics there is a moral claim that Scripture presses everywhere in the Prophets: a society is judged by what happens to the people at the bottom of it when the people at the top find something more profitable to do (Isaiah 5:8). More was not proposing revolution. He was a royal servant writing in Latin for other royal servants, and his method was to make them laugh at their own arrangements until the arrangements looked absurd.

(Q) "Your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns." + Source: Thomas More, Utopia, Book I (Gilbert Burnet’s translation of 1684, public domain). Hythloday is answering a lawyer at the dinner table of Cardinal Morton, the same Morton in whose house More had waited at table as a boy. The lawyer has just said that there is work enough for any man who wants it, in a handicraft or in husbandry, unless he would rather follow ill courses. The image of gentle animals eating people was famous within a generation of the book’s appearance, and it is still the line most people know from it (T1).

(T2) What keeps most people poor is not shortage but pride. + Think about why anyone wants a watch that costs as much as a car. It keeps no better time. What it does is tell other people something, and what it tells them depends entirely on their not having one. That is the whole of More’s argument at the close of Utopia, four and a half centuries early. Hythloday has just finished describing an island where nobody owns anything privately, everyone works a six-hour day, the storehouses are open, and as a result nobody goes hungry. He then asks the obvious question: if this works, and if it is so plainly better to lack nothing necessary than to have heaps of things nobody needs, why has the rest of the world not copied it? His answer is not ignorance and not difficulty. It is pride, which he calls the plague of human nature, and his definition of it is the sharp part. Pride does not measure its happiness by what it has. It measures by what other people do not have. A pride that had nothing to look down on would not be satisfied, because looking down is the whole point of it. This is straight Christian moral theology, and More knew it. Scripture sets God himself against the proud by name, and puts a fall at the end of pride (James 4:6; Proverbs 16:18). What More adds is an economic observation: as long as pride is the engine, no distribution of goods will ever be enough, because the thing being competed for is not goods at all. Whether he thought his island could actually exist is a question readers have argued over since 1516, and the book deliberately refuses to answer it.

(Q) "Pride thinks its own happiness shines the brighter by comparing it with the misfortunes of other persons." + Source: Thomas More, Utopia, Book II, closing pages (Burnet translation, 1684). The sentences around it are harder still. Pride "would not be satisfied with being thought a goddess, if none were left that were miserable, over whom she might insult," and More calls it "that infernal serpent that creeps into the breasts of mortals, and possesses them too much to be easily drawn out" (T2).

(T3) No one can be frightened into believing anything, and truth asks only to be given a hearing. + The most startling pages of Utopia are the ones about religion, and they were startling in 1516, ten months before Luther posted his theses and the Reformation began. The island’s founder, King Utopus, arrives to find the natives so divided over religion that they cannot combine to fight him, which is how he wins. Having won, he does not impose a creed. He makes a law that every man may hold whatever religion he pleases and may try to win others to it by argument, "by amicable and modest ways," so long as he uses no violence and no abuse. Anyone who does otherwise is condemned to banishment or slavery. More gives Utopus two reasons, and the second is the interesting one. The first is public peace. The second is that religion itself is better served this way: if only one religion is true, "the native force of truth would at last break forth and shine bright, if supported only by the strength of argument," whereas if the argument is carried on with violence, then since the worst men are always the most obstinate, "the best and most holy religion might be choked with superstition, as corn is with briars and thorns." That is a serious claim about how truth actually travels. Force cannot produce belief, because belief is not the sort of thing a threat can reach; it can only produce people who say what they are told to say. Two qualifications keep this honest. Utopus does draw a line: a citizen who denies that the soul survives death or that the world is under providence is held unfit for office, though even he is not punished, "because they lay this down as a maxim, that a man cannot make himself believe anything he pleases." And this is a character in a fiction, not a manifesto. More never signed his name to Utopus’s law. But he wrote it, he was capable of thinking it, and thirteen years later he was prosecuting men for what they believed (†3).

(Q) "He therefore thought it indecent and foolish for any man to threaten and terrify another to make him believe what did not appear to him to be true." + Source: Thomas More, Utopia, Book II, on the religions of the Utopians (Burnet translation, 1684). The sentence describes King Utopus’s reasoning behind the island’s law of toleration, which the narrator introduces as "one of their most ancient laws, that no man ought to be punished for his religion" (T3).

(T4) A conscience cannot be lent out, not even to the best man alive. + In August 1534, four months into his imprisonment, More had a long conversation in the Tower with his daughter Margaret, who had come to argue him into swearing. Her case was the sensible one that everybody was making: the bishops had sworn, the universities had agreed, the whole realm had signed. Why did he think he knew better? His answer does not claim that he knows better. It claims something narrower and much harder to get around. Every one of those men will die his own death and answer for his own soul, and so will More, and no arrangement exists by which one man’s certainty can be transferred to another man’s account. He puts it as a picture: he will not pin his soul at another man’s back, because he cannot see where that man will carry it. And he is not cynical about it. He grants that the men who swore may have sworn for excellent reasons, or out of fear, or by talking themselves into a conscience they did not have, and he says he will not judge any of them. He simply will not borrow their verdict. Conscience here does not mean a feeling or a preference. More means the judgment a person has actually reached about what is true and what is owed to God, after taking all the trouble he can to get it right. On that understanding, the demand that he swear was a demand that he say before God something he believed to be false, which is why he treated a refusal to speak as the only ground he could hold. At his trial, once the verdict was in and silence no longer helped him, he said the rest: one kingdom cannot legislate for the whole church of Christ, and "therefore am I not bounden, my lord, to conform my conscience to the council of one realm against the general council of Christendom." Christians disagree, and have since, about whether he was right on the substance of the question. What has been almost universally admired is the thing he was doing with it: refusing to let a parliament tell him what he thought.

(Q) "I never intend (God being my good lord) to pin my soul at another man’s back, not even the best man that I know this day living; for I know not whither he may hap to carry it." + Source: More’s words in the Tower, reported by his daughter in her letter to Alice Alington, August 1534 (letter 206 in the Rogers numbering; spelling standardized by the Center for Thomas More Studies). Alice Alington was More’s stepdaughter, and she had written to Margaret in alarm after Sir Thomas Audley, the Lord Chancellor who now kept the Great Seal in More’s place, told her that her stepfather was being obstinate about nothing. The letter that came back is Margaret’s account of a Tower conversation, and many scholars think More dictated or drafted much of it himself (T4).

(T5) Being afraid to die is not a failure of faith, because Christ was afraid first. + In the Tower, with the axe fairly clearly coming, More wrote a book about how to face it. A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation is set in Hungary in the shadow of a Turkish invasion, which let him write about persecution without writing about Henry VIII, and it is a conversation between an old man named Anthony, who is dying, and his young nephew Vincent, who is frightened. The best thing in it is the way it handles fear. A great deal of devotional writing tells the frightened reader that a real Christian would not be frightened, which is both untrue and cruel, and leaves the reader with a second problem on top of the first. More does the opposite. He points at Gethsemane. Christ in the garden was so distressed that his sweat fell like blood, and he said so out loud to his friends (Matthew 26:38; Luke 22:44). More’s reading of that scene is that Christ went through it on purpose, for exactly this, so that nobody in a cell at three in the morning could conclude from his own terror that he had been abandoned or that his faith had collapsed. Fear is not the opposite of faith; giving in is. So the counsel he gives is double, and the two halves are meant for different days. When you feel brave, remember how weak you are, because bravery on a calm afternoon proves nothing about a bad morning. When you feel like a coward, remember that the strength on offer is not yours. He then says something that only a man in his position could say without it sounding glib: God may answer by keeping you from the painful death, or by holding you up in it, and the second is the greater mercy of the two.

(Q) "When we feel ourselves too bold, let us remember our own feebleness, and when we feel ourselves too faint, let us remember Christ’s strength." + Source: Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, Book III, chapter 27, the closing chapter (Monica Stevens’ modernized English, Sheed and Ward, 1951). The sentence continues: "In our fear, let us remember Christ’s painful agony, that he himself would for our comfort suffer before his passion, to the intent that no fear should make us despair." More was writing it in a cell in the Tower, for a household he would not see again (T5).

(Q) "He died the King’s good servant, and God’s first." + Source: the Paris News Letter, a French account of the trial and death written within weeks of it and the earliest surviving report of his last words (printed among the appendices to E. V. Hitchcock’s edition of Harpsfield’s Life, Early English Text Society, 1932; English in Wegemer and Smith, A Thomas More Sourcebook, 2004). On the scaffold he asked the crowd to pray for the King and to ask God to give him good counsel, and protested that he died the King’s good servant and God’s first. The order of the two loyalties is the whole point, and he never claimed the first was worthless. Roper, writing separately, records him asking the onlookers to bear witness that he died in and for the faith of the Catholic Church. The words travelled fast, and they are why he is remembered as he is.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His death turned a private word into a public argument: what a government may and may not demand of a soul. + Europe reacted to the execution immediately and badly for Henry. Roper, who had the story from Sir Thomas Elyot, reports that the Emperor Charles V sent for the English ambassador, told him that the King his master had put to death his wisest councillor, heard the ambassador answer that he had been told nothing of it, and said that he would rather have lost the best city of his dominions than such a man. Within weeks a Latin pamphlet came out of the circle around Erasmus at Basel, carrying the news of More’s death and Fisher’s across the continent; it was long credited to Erasmus himself, and is now thought to be the work of his assistant Philippus Montanus. What made the case travel was not the theology but the shape of it. Here was a loyal, moderate, thoroughly establishment man, no rebel and no zealot, who had served his king in every office he was given, and who was killed for declining to say a sentence. The question that leaves behind is one every Christian tradition has had to answer since, and it is older than any of them: what happens when the law of the land and the judgment of a believer’s conscience give different orders? Peter had already given the short answer in front of the Sanhedrin, the ruling council in Jerusalem, which had just ordered him to stop preaching. "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). The irony is that More’s own answer got used most powerfully by people who thought he was wrong about the thing he died for. English Protestants who would themselves have been burned for denying the Mass, and who had no patience at all for papal supremacy, the claim that the bishop of Rome holds authority over the whole church, could still recognize what he was doing when he refused the oath, because within twenty years they were doing the same thing themselves, in the same city, standing on their own consciences against the law of the land and dying for it. The principle outran the man.

(†) Rome made him a saint four hundred years on, and the church that killed him now keeps his day as well. + Rome beatified More in 1886 and Pope Pius XI canonized him in 1935, four hundred years after Tower Hill, together with John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester who had been executed two weeks before him for the same refusal. The two words mark two steps: beatification says that a person may be honoured by part of the church, and canonization is the formal judgment that he is a saint in heaven and may be honoured by all of it. In 2000 Pope John Paul II named him patron of statesmen and politicians, on the reasoning that his particular temptation, the one that comes to a person holding office, is the temptation to treat conscience as a thing you set aside during working hours. The more surprising honour came from the other direction. In 1980 the Church of England added both men to its calendar, and Common Worship, its present book of services, keeps 6 July, the day More was killed, as the commemoration of "Thomas More, Scholar, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Reformation Martyrs, 1535." That is the church founded on the supremacy More refused to acknowledge, honouring the man who refused it, in a calendar that also honours Tyndale, whose books More burned, and Cranmer, the archbishop who wrote the Book of Common Prayer and who went to the fire himself two decades later, taking back at the stake the recantations he had signed to save his life. There is no tidy way to hold that together, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But the joint commemoration is not sentimentality. It is a judgment that a man who dies rather than swear falsely has done something the whole church can recognize, whatever it makes of the proposition he would not deny. His books helped: Utopia never stopped being read, and gave English a word that has since been attached to every scheme for a better world, whether or not More would have recognized any of them.

(†) Where he fell short: he argued in print that burning heretics was lawful and well done, and meant it. + This is his own ledger, not anyone else’s, and the primary sources are not ambiguous. In A Dialogue Concerning Heresies of 1529, the thirteenth chapter of Book IV carries his own summary at its head: the author shows his opinion concerning the burning of heretics, "and that it is lawful, necessary, and well done." His case in that chapter is that the fire is not the clergy’s doing but the temporal law’s, and that a commonwealth may defend itself against heresy as it would against any other deadly harm. He puts the reason in one sentence: "And yet were heresy well worthy to be as sore punished as any other fault, since there is no fault that more offendeth God." Three years later, composing his own epitaph for the tomb at Chelsea, he chose to record that he had been, in the old English rendering of his Latin, "to thieves, murderers and heretics grievous." He wanted that on his grave. Two things are worth saying beside it, and neither is an excuse. The first is that his own denial was narrower than it is usually quoted: he denied beating heretics in his house, not prosecuting them. In the same passage of the Apology he cheerfully describes having a man who disrupted the Mass bound to a tree in the street and whipped with rods. The second is that almost nobody in Europe in 1529 disagreed with him about the principle, including the reformers, who burned and drowned people wherever they got the power to do it. That is context. It is not a defence, and More would have thought it a poor one, since he judged Tyndale by the truth and not by the customs of the age. The gospel’s answer to him is plain enough, and it was available in the New Testament he read daily. - Christ forbade the weeding. In the parable of the wheat and the weeds the servants ask permission to go through the field and pull out what the enemy planted, and the master refuses, because they will tear up the wheat with it. "Let both grow together until the harvest" (Matthew 13:30). The sorting is God’s work and it happens at the end, not ours and not now. - The apostles named the method. Paul tells Timothy that the Lord’s servant must be "kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness" (2 Timothy 2:24-25), because repentance is something God grants and not something a magistrate extracts. Peter says the same about giving a reason for hope, "with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15). - The weapons are the wrong kind. "For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds" (2 Corinthians 10:4). Christ told Pilate that his kingdom does not fight because it is not from this world (John 18:36), and told Peter to put the sword away in the one hour when a sword might have saved him. - He had already written the answer himself. The law of Utopus, that no one should be terrified into believing what does not appear to him to be true, and that truth left to argument will shine out by its own force, is better than anything in the Dialogue Concerning Heresies (T3). More thought of it first, in his own book, and then went the other way. The last point is the one that should stay with a reader, and it is not primarily about the sixteenth century. A man can see something clearly, write it down beautifully, and still not do it when the pressure comes on and his own side is frightened. More went to his death for the right of a conscience not to be coerced, having spent his years in office coercing other people’s. Both are true, and a reader who can only hold one of them has not met him.