The great English statesman, Sir Thomas More, is often and justly revered as the patron of conscience rights. Despite a lifetime of faithful and diligent service to King Henry VIII, More’s silent opposition to the Act of Supremacy led to his eventual and famous execution at Tower Hill on 6 July, 1535. Unknown to many who celebrate More’s fateful silence, however, is the same man’s ardent defense of free speech—a defense that first came to the fore, quite appropriately, during More’s tenure as Speaker of the House of Commons, some twelve years before his death.
It was on 15 April, 1523, that King Henry opened Parliament in the hopes of securing £800,000 for his war against France—an agenda bound to cause serious consternation among the English populace, and especially among those gathered at Blackfriars. It was on the same day that Speaker More submitted, in the words of R.W. Chambers, an “epoch-making” request to the King on the part of the Commons. While it was traditional for a Speaker to urge the King toward clemency in the event that some opinion aired should prove unpleasing to His Majesty, More went a step further. Rather than pleading merely for future pardon, he made the bold suggestion that freedom to speak one’s mind was, in fact, an essential principle of honest and profitable debate.
More’s son-in-law and chief biographer, William Roper, provides an account of the Speaker’s petition:
Most gracious Sovereign, considering that in your High Court of Parliament is nothing intreated but matter of weight and importance concerning your realm and your own royal estate, it could not fail to let and put to silence from the giving of their advice and counsel many of your discreet Commons, to the great hindrance of the common affairs, except that every of your Commons were utterly discharged of all doubt and fear how any thing that it should happen them to speak should happen of your Highness to be taken… It may therefore like your most abundant Grace, our most benign and godly King, to give to all your Commons here assembled your most gracious licence and pardon, freely, without doubt of your dreadful displeasure, every man to discharge his conscience, and boldly in everything incident among us to declare his advice.
Although More assures the King that each man’s words are intended “towards the profit of your realm and honour of your royal person,” a pressing war and £800,000 is no trifling matter. The Speaker well recognized the gravity of this particular Parliament; no doubt, his experience as Under-Treasurer in the years just prior afforded him an inside perspective on the status of the royal exchequer, and the dire need—from Henry’s perspective—for a hike in taxes. Yet astonishingly, we are told, More’s petition is swiftly and solidly vouchsafed.
The man on the throne in 1523 was another Henry than the man who ordered the deaths of More, Fisher, and so many others just a decade later. In 1523, Henry was a humanist, and he no doubt granted More’s petition because he subscribed (or at least wished to ascribe) to the values it relied upon. Speaker More, on the other hand, was precisely the same man as Lord Chancellor More, and as “the King’s good servant” who lost his head because he clung to his ideals. Although he was officially arraigned on charges of treason, it was More’s well-known belief “every man to discharge his conscience” that landed him in the Tower. And it was his commitment to freedom of speech, over anything else, that lent weight to More’s persistent and deafening silence on the matter of the King’s supremacy. Qui tacet consentire videtur, indeed—through the eyes of the law. But Cromwell was not wrong to suggest that the silence of Thomas More was rather a strong and clear statement of defiance.
For us today who admire Sir Thomas More’s courage in the face of totalitarian injustice, it would do well to recall that conscientious objection is nothing without a firm grounding in free and truthful speech. In his petition before Parliament, More understood his duty as the “Common Mouth” to be one not of lip service, but of fair estimation, judgment, and public assessment. In short, he realized his indispensible role in the well-being of the realm as one founded upon honesty and fortitude—and not, contrarily, upon relativism or passivity. Moreover, the values to which he held were evident not only in his silence—an easily romanticized feature of his character—but even to some greater degree in his voiced and public sentiments. After all, lest we forget, More’s trip to the executioner’s block was no mournful dirge, but a march peppered with accounts of his mundane pronouncements, wit, and wisdom.
If then, after all these years, we can be so bold as to glean one further lesson from the life of Thomas More, it might be this: that offering oneself up for the sake of the public good means nothing, if the life offered is not characterized by regular, ardent, and unfailing pursuit of the truth—both personally and publicly. As is well known, it was More’s unswerving commitment to his posts as lawyer, judge, Speaker, and finally Lord High Chancellor that made him “the King’s good servant.” But it was his uncompromised integrity, conviction, and assertions throughout that made him “God’s first.”
Andrew Haines is a PhD student in Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, and president of the Center for Morality in Public Life.
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Comments:
'tis sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard. William Tyndale's example is truly inspirational.
More threw protestants in prison and had them executed, ripped apart families to get at people who read the Bible in English, and, as someone already noted, placed quite a montrous price on William Tyndale's head. Why? Because Tyndale was attempting to speak freely.
How is he a champion of free speeach again?
http://strangeherring.com/2011/09/15/thomas-more-inquisitor/
As much as it pains me to admit it, I think Sacramone has the better part of this dispute.
I can't imagine a much less fitting description of More. You can easily argue that he was a defender of the Roman Catholic establishment and died faithful to such but "conscience rights"? Not even slightly...
Remember, until Henry VIII decided to go for broke and to put himself over Christ's Church, even he acknowledged the truth of the Catholic Faith. That was why Henry was awarded the title Defensor Fidei.
Viewed in a non-anachronistic context, More's efforts necessarily occurred in the first 16 years of Protestantism (because he was imprisoned 16 years after Luther nailed his theses). From his viewpoint, Protestantism was an effort to destroy the unity of Catholicism and More clearly opposed that effort because he knew where it likely was headed. More evidently thought that Tyndale's effort did more damage to the commonweal than any impact suppression of Tyndale would have had on freedom of expression.
Was More right? One thing is for sure, the unity of Christianity in England has been irrevocably broken as a result of events set in motion in More's lifetime. Even the King's top-down expropriation of the Catholic Church, though, has proven just a way stop on the centrifugal path English Christianity has taken since Tyndale first published his bible.
Because Henry's child, the boy-king Edward VI, was ruled by a group of regents who were vicious in their efforts to loot what remained of the Catholic Church's patrimony after Henry's depradations, a more radical form of Protestantism was unleashed by the ever compliant Cramner in 1549 and the looting continued throughout Edward's (and then after a brief respite throughout Elizabeth's) reign. And the assault on Christian unity got even worse in the next Century when all the varying religious factions (e.g., the Levelers and Fifth Monarchy men) on the Republican side of the English Civil War vied with one another for mastery over the State and State Church.
Despite all the efforts over the intervening 500 years to destroy the English and Irish Catholic Church, it should be noted that the King's (or Queen's) Church is now disestablished in Ireland and moribund in England.
Resh Galuta, Justin Spencer, Barry Arrington et al are quite right to be puzzled that More is being held up as a champion of free speech. As Henry's Lord Chancellor, More had heretical “newe men” arrested and imprisoned, interrogated them in Star Chamber, and had those condemned by the Church as heretics burned in places like the Lollard's Pit. Many of those burned were arrested because they possessed banned books, like Tyndale's NT.
I cannot imagine how Andrew Haines can reconcile his call for a life “characterized by regular, ardent, and unfailing pursuit of the truth—both personally and publicly” with the life of Thomas More, who said of John Tewkesbery, a London leather seller who had a taste for banned books and who Lord Chancellor More had burned to death in Smithfield, that he was “burned as there was never wretch I ween better worthy.”
In More's day, heresy wasn't considered a mere eccentricity--it was considered not only a danger to the individual soul, but a communicable one that could infect the souls of a nation's populace. If one shares this view, heresy might seem far more dangerous and less forgivable than an honest subject's constructive critique of the king's policies. It'd be a distinction of kind, not of degree or subject matter. And there'd be nothing hypocritical about seeing poison in the first, and goodness in the second.
And I wish this were needless to say, but maybe not: I DO NOT support the legal proscription of heretics, much less their execution. But More, Tyndale, and most other Catholic and Protestant martyrs of the period would have found that sentiment odd, if not impious.
I think if this were a discussion about the relative merits of the Reformation generally, and the effect the indiscriminate use of scripture had on church unity more specifically, you would be absolutely correct.
However, Haines makes it perfectly clear that he is championing More, not as a defender of unity or a champion of Roman Catholic teaching, but exactlyas a proponent of free speech and conscience. Sacramone has the high ground here precisely because he has taken Haines to task on Haines' own major premise.
To request that we consider More's thought in light of the times in which he lived is understandable if we're engaged in a sociological quest. However, any attempt to sanctify stake-burnings it is not a little like saying we need to understand early 19th century white folks in Alabama who thought their slaves were less than human. It made sense to them, AND it was horribly misguided and deadly.
After all the mitigating circumstances around stake-burnings have been considered, from Queen Isabella to St. Thomas More to Calvin's Geneva, it is, in the end, a really nasty business bearing little resemblance to Christian behavior.
I'm not saying that they (or Tyndale before them) LIKED being executed, but the historical evidence strongly suggest that they, More, and most other Christians of the day were of one mind about what should be done with heretics. They simply differed about which of them was the heretic.
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I agree that both Catholic More and many of the Protestant “newe men” (most especially after they had established themselves) subscribed to a notion that heresy, however defined, was not to be tolerated and that heretics were to be persecuted.
However, do you really think that an historical relativist defense of Haines' thesis is appropriate?
If I were an historical relativist, I would be compelled to say something like this: it is ridiculous for moderns to praise Thomas More for being a defender of free speech when what we moderns would call “free speech” was not something More defended. Quite the contrary, especially after 1529.
Doesn't the tyrant always have some excuse? I would suggest that there were many things about More that were admirable and should be held up, and many that were less so and should not.
Maybe not, since you put it that way. I wouldn't hesitate to call More a good man, or an exemplar of integrity (maybe even "a man for all ..." something or other; it'll come to me). But I agree that his ideas of "free speech," like those of even the best of his contemporaries, have but limited parallels to our conception of the term.
Thomas More was the main orchestrator of the prosecution, torture and grisly burning of Thomas Hitten, Thomas Bilney, Richard Bayfield, John Tewkesbury and James Bainham.............all Englishmen who believed that English commoners should be able to speak freely and have the right to read Bibles written in English (as opposed to Latin).
More was nothing more (pardon the pun) than an enforcer of the Catholic Church and whose allegiance was to Rome and NOT to England.
Neither side was supporting "freedom of speech" as we'd understand it. Virtually everyone at that time would have deemed "freedom of speech", in the public sphere anyway, to be immoral and anarchic. From More's perspective "heresy" separated England from too much and created a bad basis for society. It was also not very well supported outside London. (More leaned toward favoring some kind of republican government, in the Renaissance sense of Republic. He did dislike the power that being in charge of the Church would give Henry) Henry was fairly skeptical of "heresy" himself and even after breaking off from Rome he'd still kill "heretics." However Henry believed his marriage to Catherine was cursed and likely wanted more power. As well as wanting the money being head of the Church could provide. Both maybe had allegiance to England as they saw it or, alternatively, neither had allegiance to England.
Still More is the one who suffered not Henry. And he did so for his principles even if one loathes those principles. Perhaps as important his death was certainly not ridding England of a Torquemada or bring some age of liberty.
Just how did this guy get canonized? Remember it was the same Vatican which thought him a saint that also made a Konkordat with the Austrian-German antichrist and his demonic henchmen.
