Book review: Utopian resolve in the face of Tudor tyranny

Joanne Paul’s biography of Thomas More is a meticulous account of a clever late-medieval Londoner and a tale of social mobility too

A tapestry depicting St Thomas More hanging from a balcony of St Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. File picture: Plinio Lepri/AP 

• Thomas More: A Life in Death in Tudor England 
• Joanne Paul 
• Michael Joseph, €43.50 

Seen from one angle, Joanne Paul’s biography is simply a meticulous account of a clever late-medieval Londoner rising through the ranks in his chosen areas of interest: writing, the law, humanist scholarship, politics. 

A tale of social mobility too: a brewer’s grandson rising to the lofty heights of lord chancellor. A kind of famous man’s fleshed-out CV.

But More is a complex figure, of course. His enthusiastic support for execution as a punishment for persistent heretics makes him a man of his time. 

But his belief in giving girls the same education as boys (he walked the walk in this regard with his daughter, Margaret), and his love of peace in a bellicose age, put him far ahead of his time. 

Indeed, his ultimate defence for the burning of heretics was as a measure to prevent the mass deaths caused by the anarchy, revolts, and civil war that come in the wake of religious dissension. 

(It is hard not to wonder how different the history of Ireland might have been had More managed to succeed in keeping the English monarch in communion with Rome.)

His great friend Erasmus disagreed with him on the heresy question: ‘Fire is not extinguished by fire,’ said the sage of Rotterdam.

Joanne Paul’s style, while flowery and breathless, and too reliant on conjecture in pursuit of novelistic dash, is mainly lucid and steady, and turns out to fit the subject matter eminently well. 

Thomas More could, with the best of them, write the fiery, abusive polemics typical of his day, but the figure who dominates this narrative is calm, resolute, with a desire to be honourable; and Paul does a fine job of letting us see More’s life on those terms. 

But his fame rests primarily, of course, on execution, martyrdom, and sainthood. He takes his place in history as an exemplar of someone who refused to allow a ruler to assume final control of his conscience.

While I thought I knew the story in outline, I hadn’t appreciated it was Henry VIII’s new Treasons Act, rather than not taking the oath of supremacy alone, that truly spelt More’s doom. 

It converted the latter’s quiet refusal into the thing that would put his head on the chopping block; if, that is, the court decided that his silence and obfuscation was undertaken “maliciously”. (The outcome of the entire trial hung upon this word.) 

But since Henry, now growing into his full stature as a tyrant, had made clear that such was his view of it, the outcome was hardly in doubt, even though, in his final weeks More had made it plain that it was not his intention to meddle with anyone else’s conscience but instead to “fix his mind upon the Passion of Christ”.

He wasn’t the first to be put to death under the provisions of the Treasons Act, however. 

First to go were several Carthusian monks, “hanged by the neck until nearly dead, taken down, and their bowels and hearts cut out”.

The trial is spellbinding, all the more so because Paul plays it straight, with little or no heartstring-tugging or purple prose, letting More’s intelligence, equanimity, and magnanimity even, shine out from his own words. 

The account of the journey up the Thames, from Westminster to the Tower, after the trial is very moving, taking More past several landmarks in his life, on the way to the place of his death.

And we are left, then, with what are among the most famous of famous last words: “I die the king’s good servant and God’s first.”