To Gain at Harvest

Portraits from the English Reformation

Jonathan Dean

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780334056898
• eBook ISBN: 9780334056911
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

To Gain at Harvest celebrates the courage, intellect, humility and passion displayed by figures of all shades of opinion and belief during the English Reformation. Offering insights into the turbulent period of the English Reformation and its ideas, Jonathan Dean demonstrates the qualities of mind and heart, and the gifts of faith and character, which some of its leading proponents possessed. Including chapters on Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Harpsfield, Elizabeth I, Matthew Parker, and Katherine Parr, the book moves beyond old confessional lines to reveal the gifts and virtues possessed by women and men whose lives still inspire and whose writings remain one of the greatest treasures of English religious life.

1

The Ground of Charity: Thomas More

He was the greatest Englishman of his age. He has a strong claim to be the greatest of any age. In learning he was a polymath, gifted in languages, fluent in philosophy, made curious by the acquisition of knowledge in all its forms and genres. In literature he was a fluent and poetic writer, capable of both exquisite, captivating language and mordant, devastating polemic. He was a lawyer of renown who rose to the top of his profession, insightful in judgement, incisive in forensic evaluation of the case and implacable in the prosecution of what he deemed dangerous to the realm. His friendship was the most prized of his generation and his company widely sought after. In the presence of Thomas More the world seemed a better place: one of enjoyment, wit and laughter. His circle counted themselves fortunate, and for a while his circle included his king. Henry VIII adored him, quite as susceptible to More’s qualities and virtues as anyone else, and preferred him to the highest office in the land below his own. Then came one of history’s most dramatic falls from grace, and a traitor’s ignominious death on Tower Hill. The flower of the age, felled by the executioner’s axe and the power of the state he had himself until so recently commanded.

Five centuries after his death, Thomas More has continued to interest and intrigue us. He has been co-opted into all manner of causes and admired by all manner of enquirers. His portrayal in literature has been bewilderingly dissonant, from Robert Bolt’s saintly champion of individual conscience in A Man for all Seasons to Hilary Mantel’s dour, ruthless heretic hunter in Wolf Hall. Both are great works of literature; both fail egregiously in capturing him cleanly and interpreting him accurately. But then he is hard to capture, a man whose parts and passions it is hard for us to put together in a way that makes sense. We are perhaps no more able than was his wife to understand why he might give his life to prevent a divorce; we are certainly unable to comprehend a man who would push so zealously for the execution of heretics. His practice of traditional methods of self-mortification, wearing a hair shirt as part of his personal spiritual discipline, seems to sit most uneasily for his modern assessors with his ‘merry tales’ and his abundance of good humour. It might even be hard to piece the constituent components of his life together and comprehend his sheer variety and dazzling brilliance, and the way the great causes of his life were, for him, all of a piece, demanding, when the ultimate test came, nothing less than everything.

The diverse causes of his life, too, have made him fair game for a whole gamut of those seeking to co-opt him into their own pantheon. Lenin saw in Utopia, More’s tour de force of philosophical imagination, the ideas that laid the ground for Communism, and celebrated More on a public monument in Moscow accordingly. The victims of Soviet Communism instead saw More, and his Utopia, as an accurate predictor of the tendency of Communist nations towards servitude and the brutalization of their people. Some project on to him the very modern idea, wholly alien to him, of the absolute prerogative of individuals to live by their private convictions and personal beliefs. The Roman Catholic Church, naturally enough, has found the nature of his stance against the Reformation and his willingness to die for the primacy of the Pope a compelling exemplar of both piety and courage. We will have much more to say about the nature of his stand and the use made of it by the generation immediately following his own, but it is interesting to note for now that More’s canonization came only in 1935, a helpful propaganda moment for Pius XI at a time of increased defensiveness at the Vatican. Nor did the proclamation of his sainthood particularly dwell on the agony by which he reached his eventual belief in papal authority. Nevertheless, he is now the patron saint of both lawyers and politicians: many of the former would be aghast at many of More’s legal methods; most of the latter would find his willingness to relinquish power because of principle entirely incomprehensible.

Perhaps the first key to thinking about Thomas More is to remember him as one of history’s great ‘bridges’: born into one age and dying in the next, and finding the world dizzyingly changed in between. More entered the world at the very end of the medieval age (as we now think of things), into a well-to-do family in London, with Edward IV on the throne for the second time. He was just seven years old when the usurper Henry Tudor seized the crown, and the world as Englishmen had known it was thrown into chaos. More’s family lost no time in accommodating themselves to the new order, however, and he was in effect apprenticed to the great bishop-cum-statesman of his own youth, John, Cardinal Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who acted also as King Henry’s Lord Chancellor. Young Thomas learned much as Morton’s page that he would later remember and draw on when he inherited the lord chancellorship himself from another ecclesiastical politician, Thomas Wolsey. This early formation led to an Oxford education and then to the Inns of Court. The young lawyer, steeped in the religious commitments of his time and deeply invested in the ‘new’ learning with all its seemingly limitless potential, was on his way.

He also made the most important friendship of his life, even as he stood on the edge of a promising career. Desiderius Erasmus was in England in the late 1490s, near the beginning of his one-man effort to have all Europe adoringly at his feet. Erasmus embodied the kind of learning that was now the trend and that More was himself devouring, and the two of them, both just beginning to make a way in the world that would make them famous for centuries to come, soon fell heavily for one another, delighting in all they shared and in the rare company of an intellectual equal. They also shared a keen eye for the flaws and foibles of their fellow humanity, a biting wit in which to frame them and a devastating turn of phrase with which to describe them. With the future constraints of high office far ahead of him too, More was more free to pursue his philosophical interests wherever they led him, in the company of his beloved Erasmus who, eight years his senior, may also have acted as older brother and mentor, at least for a while.

The ancient languages and cultures of the Greek and Roman worlds, and the firm belief that their rediscovery contained the intellectual and cultural power to revivify European life and thought, formed the heart of the ‘new’ approach to learning that More and his new best friend shared and came to exemplify. Erasmus in particular also came to the view that there should be a particular focus in this on the ancient and authoritative texts of Christianity: if they could be rediscovered, reassimilated and re-presented to the Church and its people, nothing less than the renewal of the faith itself would then follow. Supremely, Erasmus later laboured to retranslate the Bible itself, from the thousand-year-old Vulgate of Jerome into a new Latin version, more accurate, lively and better framed for the needs of a new age. It was an ambitious, exciting, all-consuming project – new methods for a renewed Church in a changed world – and Erasmus was its intellectual leader, its guiding spirit and its ablest scholar. He came to England at the beginning of a career that was to encompass and inform the life of a whole continent. Like More, he always remained both adamant that his discoveries were mandating radical reform for the Church, and yet also viscerally devoted to its unity of belief, devotion and common life all across the known world.

It surprises some to learn of the extent to which, in these early years of their friendship, More and Erasmus criticized their Church and those who led it. Indeed, to some they appear proto-Protestants. A decade and more ahead of Martin Luther’s fateful decision to challenge Catholicism’s teaching on penitence and the afterlife, the two friends were calling for the kinds of reform later to be common parlance from the ‘Evangelicals’ across Europe. They were advocates of a Bible in English, properly translated to avoid error but enabling literate people better to mine the riches of their own Scriptures. They found the proliferation of myriad monastic orders in Europe, all with their own peculiar and particular rules and customs, traditions and doctrines, a monstrous waste of money and a massive distraction from the essential task of deepening lay piety. They were aghast at the follies and extravagances of some elements of Catholic devotion: the excessive toiling to spurious pilgrimage sites to venerate alleged bits of saintly bone or scraps of apostolic tunics, not to mention the obviously erroneous claims of many churches to possess fragments of the true cross or sightings of the Virgin. In their mind, well-intentioned Christians were failing to give attention to what might actually aid their spiritual growth, while being fleeced by the con men and women of the medieval veneration business.

More had in fact pondered a monastic vocation early in his life, before deciding, with characteristically clear self-knowledge, that it would not be for him. As a family man, lawyer and statesman, he did always seek to enshrine a monastic mode into his daily rhythm of life, in prayer, devotion, learning and solitude. But for a mix of reasons likely to be far more complex than we have sometimes assumed (it wasn’t all about a resistance to celibacy!), he freighted the balance of his life in favour of family while retaining a monk-like cell in the grounds of his Chelsea home. Erasmus, by contrast, was a monk: of a sort. He had gained a measure of release from his Augustinian vows to become a freelance scholar, and his commitment to his own order waned with the years. And it was a book containing an excoriating attack on monks and monasticism that was also his most public tribute to More and their friendship. The Praise of Folly (in Latin, Encomium Moriae) of 1511 contained in its very title the pun that revealed its dedicatee. A great lampoon of the idiocies and excesses of the age, combined with a heartfelt call for renewed simplicity in the Church’s life, it provoked admiration, hilarity and scorn in almost equal measure. As satire it remains among the liveliest and most effective examples of the genre. But it set an example, too, in elegance, fluency and wit, which More’s own greatest work was to mirror and recall.

Erasmus was the prime mover in ensuring the publication of More’s Utopia in 1516. It has never ceased to fascinate, amuse, amaze and above all cause consternation, wherever it has been read in the five hundred years since. An early literary marvel of the modern age, and still one of the finest books ever written by an Englishman, it is an impressionistic work of great genius, teasing and toying with its readers. In the light of More’s later career, and of his obdurate refusal to tolerate heretics or countenance the royal divorce, the playful spirit of Utopia can seem puzzling. More holds ideas up to the light, tests theories and advances strange notions, all in the cause of an examination of good governance and the wisest way to order human affairs.

The mysterious traveller, Raphael Hythlodaeus, whom More creates as his dialogue partner in Utopia, recounts his experience of studying the island of Utopia, founded by Utopus, over the course of five years. Society is ordered rather differently there: princes are elected; there is no private property; priests may marry and divorce; euthanasia is permitted; wealth and material goods are scorned (slaves’ chains and chamber pots are made of gold to encourage this). Perhaps most strikingly, couples intending to marry are required to see one another naked before the marriage as a way of helping to ensure compatibility. Clearly, there are elements of Utopian life the mature More would have found horrifying if enacted in early sixteenth-century England, but that is to miss the point of this extraordinary exercise in philosophical imagination, which was itself fashioned after the great dialogues of the ancient world, most notably those of Plato. Utopia was meant to provoke conversation, to engage readers’ minds and stimulate reflection on human affairs. To read it as a literal blueprint for an actual system of governance denies its power. Like the philosophical equivalent of a painting by Salvador Dali, it sought to reflect reality by playing with it, asking its readers to be delighted and bewildered by this evocation of a strange and remote country such that they returned to their own with fresh questions and different eyes.

The religious polity of the Utopians has seemed especially puzzling to some readers, given More’s own commitments and later reputation. King Utopus, seeing the capacity of religions to be a source of friction and division within countries like his:

made a decree, that it should be lawful for every man to favour and follow what religion he would, and that he might do the best he could to bring others to his opinion, so that he did it peaceably, gently, quietly and soberly, without hasty and contentious rebuking and inveighing against others. If he could not by fair and gentle speech induce them unto his opinion, yet he should use no kind of violence, and refrain from displeasant and seditious words … This law did King Utopus make not only for the maintenance of peace … but also because he thought this decree should make for the furtherance of religion.7

Here again, however, More’s imaginative playfulness toys with us, imagining the enlightened condition of a nation that does not know the unifying Truth of Christianity, and contrasting the natural attitude of such a nation with the petty and sometimes destructive squabbles of humanity more generally. Nor, in his mind, would the behaviour of the Reformers have kept to the legal boundaries the King had himself imposed.

In any case, Utopia only heightened More’s renown. The book had been conceived and written while on diplomatic missions in Europe, and his success in them guaranteed he would continue to rise in the affairs of the government. He became Speaker of the Commons in 1523 and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster two years later. The King adored him and sought his company frequently, but apparently not in a way More ever entirely trusted, if at all. More’s son-in-law and biographer, William Roper, once commented to his father-in-law on the familiarity and warm jocularity with which Henry treated him on his visits to the More family home in Chelsea. More replied that he did indeed feel fortunate to be the King’s favourite, but that such intimacy with monarchs was often a dangerous thing: ‘for if my head could win him a castle in France, it would not fail to go’. Prescience and insight like that, as we will see, were among More’s greatest virtues.

The closeness of his family life was the bedrock of everything else, and the hinterland of his public life and rapid promotion to the high offices of state. More had married Jane, who died after bearing four children. Having chosen marriage over the cloister, More moved with extraordinary and even mildly scandalous speed to remarry, choosing Alice Middleton, a wealthy widow whose strength of character and force of opinion he sometimes mocked but whose presence he certainly relied on with a young family and many and growing responsibilities. Against expectation and received opinion, More insisted on educating his daughters as highly as his sons; indeed, his daughter Margaret was one of the cleverest and most accomplished women of her age, as well as her father’s counsellor and closest companion. Theirs was a remarkable relationship of confidence, mutual affection and regard, and for both it was a vital one, both in times of prosperity and amid the seasons of crisis and insecurity that followed.

It’s at this stage of More’s life, and in the legal career that led to it, that we encounter one of the most difficult elements of his character for modern people: his resistance to heresy. Thomas More pursued those who propagated heretical opinions with a ferocity and a ruthlessness we find unconscionable and that many have judged cruel. How could such a champion of the ‘new’ learning, such a doyen of the European intelligentsia, have countenanced such behaviour, which involved ensuring that those whose religious beliefs did not represent orthodox Roman Catholicism were burned at the stake and thus absolutely obliterated from the earth, along with their views? And why, as lawyer, public official and ultimately a statesman, did he make the fight against heresy such a central and unrelenting emphasis in his career, on behalf of his nation?

To begin to understand we must do More the courtesy of remembering that he was a child of his time. It is almost impossible for us to imagine a world that knew the level of religious unity More was born into, and it is an even further reach to appreciate the gratitude More and his generation experienced for the security and unanimity this produced in their life. Despite the usual human disagreements about various other matters, the fabric of European society was knit together by a shared view of divine presence and of the ways human beings might order their lives around that central conviction. The papacy represented all that bound Christendom together in charity and kinship, not merely a symbol but also the guarantor of community. To see the need for reform by no means undermined the comfort and pride to be taken from belonging to this extraordinary society, whose authority was vested in an institution that stretched back to Christ himself and the primacy of St Peter, and whose appeal was thus rooted in the strongest claims to respect and admiration. To be a Christian in More’s day was far from a simple private conviction about spiritual matters, or a personal choice to accept a particular understanding of life and death; it was an acknowledgement of one’s membership in and debt to a vast community of others, our brothers and sisters in faith and in life itself, stretching through time and space, which anchored life in the present more firmly and more meaningfully than was possible easily to convey. Membership of the Church was one’s birthright and one’s privilege, bringing with it the stable ordering of society itself, not only in the particular country one lived in but across the Christian world.

For Thomas More, an attack on this vision of unity was an attack on humanity itself and on the providence of the God in whose wisdom the world had been ordered this way. It was to put at risk not only a particular religious view of certain matters but the very way of life of all Christendom. To be a heretic was not merely to hold views incompatible with the Church’s theology but to be an anarchist. It was to mount an attack on the safety of the realm and the security of the whole people. Like a cancer, More believed, heresy voraciously devoured everything it touched, laid waste to every element of common life and destroyed the welfare of everyone it reached. Far better to eradicate its proponents absolutely than to allow its toxic effects to spread through the Christian world like some ravening parasite. The merest tolerance of it would soon prove a fatal error, he believed.

More felt that his view of heresy was proven, too, in the words and actions of a German monk, Martin Luther, and in the dangerous protection granted him by his prince. King Henry, at that point eager ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Ground of Charity: Thomas More
• 2 Ambition and Fidelity: Thomas Cranmer
• 3 A Tudor Woman’s Passion: Anne Askew
• 4 Manifold Passions: Katherine Parr
• 5 ‘Nourished with Hope’: Nicholas Harpsfield
• 6 The Virtue of Moderation: Matthew Parker
• 7 Governing with Subtlety: Queen Elizabeth I
• 8 The Piety of Prayer and the Fluency of Speech: Lancelot Andrewes
• 9 ‘Make me Thine’: George Herbert
• 10 Felicity and Desire: Thomas Traherne
• Epilogue
• Index of Names
• Copyright