Dr. Joanne Paul (6:07)

There's two pieces of evidence near contemporary to his life that suggest that he wore a hair shirt. One is a letter from his former vicar, his former priest, when he lived in central London at Bucklersbury, very shortly after More's death. It's praising More as a member of the faith and it mentions the hair shirt. The other mention of it comes from More's son in law, William Roper, his account of More's life. So both of them are posthumous, both come after More's death. Both suggest that More was very secretive about his hair shirt, that he wore it under his clothes, that very few people knew about it, largely his daughter who washed it, his wife discovered it. And the other thing to mention in favor of the idea that he did is that the hair shirt that is purported to be his still exists. It's still a saintly relic that you can go and visit.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (7:07)

And sorry to be really dumb about this, but what is a hair shirt?

Dr. Joanne Paul (7:12)

A hair shirt is a shirt, a garment made of very, very rough, uncomfortable cloth, usually goat hair or horse hair, that's designed to make it uncomfortable to live in. It's meant to make your life difficult. Essentially it's a form of self penitence.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (7:33)

But the two sources you've mentioned both had perhaps an agenda of creating More as a Catholic saint. So should we be suspicious of that?

Dr. Joanne Paul (7:47)

I think there are reasons to consider those accounts, as you say, in context. They were designed to be praiseworthy of More. They were designed, especially Ropers, to compile evidence to show that he is a saintly figure, that he should be canonized by the Catholic Church. They're part of a tradition that we can see very clearly in St Thomas Becket as well. He was supposed to have been found secretly wearing a hair shirt after he was killed, apparently on the orders of another king Henry. The connections drawn between Thomas Becket and Thomas More were present during More's life and really gained traction after his death. And that was a way to connect the two saintly figures. So I think it's possible that More certainly wore something, some sort of garment like a hair shirt under his clothes. But it does seem unlikely. It's the sort of thing that had very much gone out of fashion by the time that Thomas More lived. And it isn't really consistent with a lot of his other life as a courtier in the court of Henry viii.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (8:58)

In other words, this idea is one that is deployed in order to make the connection between Moore and that other saintly Thomas Becket. For those who are reading it, that association would have been quickly made in the 16th century, rather than necessarily representing how Thomas More lived his life.

Dr. Joanne Paul (9:19)

Yeah, it's part of the legacy, what becomes a sort of mythology around Thomas Moore. As the cult of Thomas Moore forms through the 16th century, and especially as Catholics are persecuted throughout the 16th century, he is held up as a saintly figure and the connections to Thomas Becket are drawn very clearly.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (9:39)

But More did oversee the burning of books. Why?

Dr. Joanne Paul (9:43)

More was involved in the hunting down of illegal texts smuggled in from the continents. We know in particular that he led a raid on the steelyard in London. He brought a sort of retainer of guards with him, got everyone into the hall and ordered a search of all of the rooms in the steelyard in order to find these books. And then people who had them were later interrogated and punished for their possession of these texts. There's really two reasons why he does this. One is because it was the law. These were texts that were forbidden, that weren't meant to be smuggled into the country that you weren't allowed to own. And he also does it because he was very concerned about the influence that these texts would have on people. He felt that Lutheranism was a sort of seed for sedition, for rebellion, for anarchy, that he saw in it the breakdown of society as well as the threat to people's souls. So he was very passionate about ensuring that these texts stayed out of people's hands. And so gathering them up in these public book burnings was a way of keeping them out of people's hands, but also showing people that they were dangerous.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (11:08)

So we get this picture of More as a man who's passionately committed to keeping heresy, by which he means what will come to be called Protestantism at bay. In fact, he even writes a book, his Dialogue Concerning Heresies, that is exactly engaging with these questions. And I wanted to ask you a bit more about that, because one of the things that you do in your book is that you are very good at describing atrocities in excruciating detail. And you are quoting More's Dialogue Concerning Heresies, where he talks about the atrocities committed during the 1527 sack of Rome. And I say the word Sack of Rome all the time without thinking about exactly what happened. So what I want to know is what? When More features these in his dialogue concerning heresies. Are these things that can be corroborated or are they a rhetorical device to emphasize the evilness of the Lutheran heresy?

Dr. Joanne Paul (12:02)

I went looking for the sources of what More describes in the dialogue and didn't find the exact descriptions. Didn't find these exact atrocities, which, as you say, are very shocking. I didn't find the exact match. So I'm not precisely sure where Moore was getting them. I would be surprised if Moore was inventing them entirely. I think he is convinced that they happened. And that's, I think, the important part. Whether or not they happened is, I think, beyond something that we can determine. But I think what's important is that Moore believed that they happened. Because I think for Moore, it's very compelling that what he sees as a Lutheran driven massacre occurs in Rome, in this holy city. He attributes it to Lutherans because a large part of the army are German mercenaries. And so he sees a direct connection between Lutheran beliefs. So the fides by faith alone, nothing to do with good works and the rejection of free will. He sees this as directly connected to. To a way of acting that has no consequence, that if everything can be attributed to God's will, then you can do what you like. If good works don't matter, then you can be as bad as you like. You can treat your fellow man as violently and cruelly as you wish. And for him, the sack of Rome represents precisely what he had been concerned. Lutheranism might result in that by believing in what seem to be abstract concepts, that you know that there's no free will that directly leads to the atrocities that he hears about on the streets of Rome.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (13:48)

Do you think that this sense that More is a holy man is important in determining his next step up the ladder? Because in the aftermath of Wolsey's fall, More, who is a layman, is chosen to be Lord Chancellor. And this has been a position that's normally been filled by senior churchmen, isn't it?

Dr. Joanne Paul (14:09)

Yeah. For hundreds of years, with a few very brief exceptions, Lord Chancellor has been a clergyman. And this makes sense largely because for hundreds of years they had been the most educated people, so they had been very able administrators. But also because Lord Chancellor is keeper of the king's conscience and therefore the conscience of the realm. So of course it should be a clergyman. And so when Thomas More is chosen in the wake of Wolsey's fall, it's in some ways very strange and abnormal appointment. In other ways, though, when you look at the context of it, it makes a huge amount of sense, Wolsey fell in a wave of anti clerical sentiments. He had fallen in large part because there had been questions about his allegiances that had become caught up with his allegiance to the Pope. And leading up to what we know will be the break with Rome, there had been all sorts of complaints about the abuses of the clergy. And so Wolsey's fall is part of all of that. And when they look to make someone else Lord Chancellor, it's unlikely that they're going to choose another clergyman for those reasons and Thomas More, for people like the Duke of Norfolk, who are out there looking for the next Lord Chancellor represents the best of all worlds. He certainly knows theology. He has engaged in these religious polemics, these debates in what we now call the Reformation. At the same time, though, he's been equivocal on the importance of the Pope, on allegiance to the Pope. He refuses to put into writing defense of the Pope's sense of supremacy. He's an able administrator, he's a lawyer, so they know that he's educated. He can complete the tasks associated with Lord Chancellor and the legal elements of the job. But I think what makes Thomas More really appealing to people like the Duke of Norfolk is that he can be raised up and brought down very easily. He doesn't have the Church behind him, he's not a nobleman. In some ways, I think he represents the first of many Lord Chancellors who actually don't have that much power, who actually aren't that important in the running of the country and the court. I think they figure that he can be manipulated and that he can be removed if he becomes an obstacle.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (16:45)

That's so interesting. So what looks like the pinnacle of power, this grandson of a baker becoming Lord Chancellor, actually potentially is not quite as grand as it seems.

Dr. Joanne Paul (16:56)

I think if he had gotten in line with the King's great matter and what would soon become the break with Rome, he might have had a fair bit of influence. But I think that they know that he might not get in line. And I think that they're aware that if he doesn't, that's okay, they can bring him down and there'll be few ramifications of that. He won't be able to put up the sort of fight that a very high level clergyman, another archbishop or bishop or a noble would be able to. He's essentially a new man in that sense of coming from very little, being very well educated, but being subject to the whims of the King and the court.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (17:38)

On which note then, in late 1520, 9 Henry asks more his opinion of the king's attempted divorce and makes More a promise. What does Henry promise? What does More say?

Dr. Joanne Paul (17:52)

More later reports that Henry makes him a sort of promise at several times through their interactions with each other. It first comes up when he enters Henry VIII's service in 1518. More is to put God first and Henry second. It comes up again when they talk in 1527 about the king's great matter, when it's first brought to More's attention, when Henry first shows him the passage from Leviticus and asks him what he thinks. But it's made most clear in 1529, shortly after more becomes Lord Chancellor. Henry thinks that More must have been talked around. He thinks that More is going to support his divorce from Catherine and what ends up becoming the break with Rome. And More says he hasn't become convinced. And I think this is probably a shock to Henry that he's realizing that he has elevated someone who fundamentally disagrees with what he thinks is the priority of the regime at the time. But according to More, he adds, after accepting this, that there was no expectation that he should do anything or say anything beyond what his own conscience should serve. So he reiterates this promise from 1518 that more should first look unto God and after God unto him. And this is very important to More that this promise takes place. He records this much later, when it's very important that Henry had given him the sanction to believe what he believed and the freedom to do even within the king's surface, that first he should look unto God and then unto Henry.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (19:39)

Now, during More's time as Lord Chancellor, we move from the burning of books to the burning of heretics. And we have More commenting, among others on the death of Thomas Bilney, and it tells us his attitude to the execution of heretics. So what was that attitude and how was he involved?

Dr. Joanne Paul (20:00)

There are six heretics, as they were known at the time, who are put to death, while More is Lord Chancellor. Three of them he has direct contact with. He would imprison those suspected of heresy, those accused of heresy, in the gatehouse of his home at Chelsea. According to him, he earnestly entreated them to change their minds, to recant for the salvation of their souls. According to others, he tortured them, certainly he questioned them and used that information to find others who were spreading these ideas, whether by word of mouth or through smuggling in texts and sharing texts. And when he had to use his phrase, earnestly entreated them as far as he could. He handed them over to the authorities to be tried, and if they would not recant, executed. So More had no actual jurisdiction to try or to sentence these men. He never did. But he did hand over the evidence of his encounters with them while they were imprisoned in the gatehouse of his home at Chelsea. If he had indeed been torturing them and accusations were made in his own lifetime, which he then attempted to dispel and to counter, that would have, of course, been illegal. And so it was certainly in his interest to counter those rumors. It's impossible to say whether or not there was anything to those rumors. Certainly More gives accounts of those that he had physically beaten. But torturing heretics in his gatehouse would not have been considered to be legal if that's what went on. Certainly More thinks that the execution of unrepentant heretics is right. And he talks about, for instance, the execution of Billney as doing more profit unto his soul Than if he had lived many years more and died in his own bed. That actually that death was not only good for Billy's soul, but for the soul of the realm as well. And he speaks about other unrepentant heretics in the same terms, that they were well and worthily burned. That there were never wretches better worthy of that fate. He's very cruel in his language around these deaths.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (22:36)

So this is a little bit naughty, but you've said it's impossible to know. Do you have a sense from all the time you spent with Moore whether he would have done such a thing?

Dr. Joanne Paul (22:45)

Yeah. You are trying to get me into trouble now by speculating. Having spent over a decade with Moore and with these works where he discusses these things. I think More was a very legal mind. I think More was very to the letter about things. I think putting accused heretics in stocks and imprisoning them was already pretty cruel. I think that it's unlikely that he used any torture devices to make that experience worse. But I think he would have used whatever rhetorical means at his disposal. I think he would have made the experience of that imprisonment as uncomfortable as it needed to be with the aim of saving their souls. I'm maybe still trying to skirt around a direct answer, but the fact of the matter is, putting someone in stocks in a gatehouse for days or weeks at a time is already a torturous experience. I don't think he needed to, as he was accused of, tie them to a tree and beat them or to use a rope with cords around their head to make that any worse. And I think it's unlikely that he would have done that himself. We do have accounts of people in positions similar to Mor's, racking people with their own hands. I don't see it as in Mor's character, as I do in the character of those other people. I think he would have stayed within the letter of the law.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (24:29)

By now, More's neutral ground was shrinking. What finally tipped him into resigning the Lord Chancellorship and Henry into accepting, according.

Dr. Joanne Paul (24:41)

To not only Roper, but also Eustace Chapuys, More had considered resignation for some time before he eventually resigns in May 1532. There had also been rumours of discussion of removing him from the office because he was not only opposed to the divorce, but he was opposed, I think, more importantly, to the legislation that was handing the supremacy of the Church to Henry VIII and was suppressing the power and the jurisdiction of the clergy. More strongly believed in the separation of political temporal authority and the spiritual authority of the Church in England. And so the suppression of essentially the Church's Parliament convocation to Henry VIII and the secular power was something to which More was very much opposed and he thought would lead to really the condemnation of the country. And so the submission of the clergy, which occurs in May of 1532, really is the final straw for More. And it's the next day that he formally resigns and hands over the Great Seal to Henry viii. And no one questions the idea that he resigns in protest. He's very adamant it's to do with his ill health and he stresses that in various letters. But the timing of it leaves very little doubt in anyone's mind why it is he resigns.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (26:20)

And so he's finally, to use Erasmus words, not storm tossed on the sea of business. So what does his resignation mean for his household?

Dr. Joanne Paul (26:29)

His resignation put a lot of question marks on the survival of his household. He had been living at the level of a Lord Chancellor. He had a very large household. He was supporting all of his children and their spouses and their children, as well as a large number of servants. All of this was required of someone of his standing who would be hosting very important individuals, reportedly even the King. And so when he resigned, he was really only allowed to keep the pension that he'd been given when he first joined the council in 1518, which amounted to only a hundred pounds a year. And he couldn't rely on that being paid regularly or at all, having been removed from his position. And so there's a great discussion in Roper where he gathers the household and tells them he's going to do his best to keep them at the level that they had when he was a lawyer in London. And if not, he'd try to keep them at the level when he was a student at Oxford. And if he couldn't do that, then they'd have to go a singing and a begging in the streets. But they do that as a family. And it's a very sort of heartwarming scene and may not have happened, but I think that the point of that is that he was much reduced and many members of his household had to find new appointments.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (27:50)

How did Moore spend his time?

Dr. Joanne Paul (27:52)

Moore really took the opportunity of not having much employment, not having much else to do what he'd always claimed that busyness had kept him from. Which is right. And so we see a string of very long, very intense texts leaving More's pen. From his resignation onwards, he had already begun the confutation of Tyndale's answer. So this is engaging with the work of William Tyndale. He had published one half of that while he was Lord Chancellor. He turns to the second half in. He then also publishes his apology, which is a sort of defense of his views and his actions. And he engages with a number of other Lutheran texts during this time. And so millions of words pour out of his pen. He would consider that and defended it as well. A continuing what he had done since his response to Luther, which had come at least on the suggestion of the king and also continuing his scholarship. But as the years go on, he's engaging more and more not with people who are enemies of the regime, but people who are employed by it or whom the regime are interested in bringing in. And so he's becoming more controversial really, by saying the same things. It's because. Because everything is shifting around him.

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Dr. Joanne Paul (30:19)

After dark Myths, misdeeds and the Paranormal is a podcast that delves into the dark side of history. Expect murder and conspiracy, ghosts and witches.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (30:31)

I'm Anthony Delaney. And I'm Maddie Pelling. We're historians and the hosts of After Dark From History Hit, where every Monday and Thursday we enter the shop shadows.

Dr. Joanne Paul (30:41)

Of the past, discover the secrets of the darker side of history on After Dark From History hit wherever you get your podcasts.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (31:01)

So we get Quite quickly to 15:34, when he's first implication implicated in a treason case, but manages to dodge it. But then comes the act of Succession and More is summoned to Lambeth palace to swear the Oath of succession, as every man in the country has been required to do. And he would not, and he did not declare the grounds on which he would not. Why do you think he chose not to swear? What can we deduce the prior question.

Dr. Joanne Paul (31:34)

To that is what precisely he was asked to swear? It's actually unclear. There's been some great work done on the oaths that were floating around at that time. It was a very slapdash affair, really, this oath taking. It was rushed and there was a real urgency behind it. And so the commissioners who were sent out often had very different oaths, and particularly the clergy appear to have been asked to swear something different from the lay population. And because More is asked to swear in the context of a host of clergy at Lambeth, it's unclear whether he was asked to swear the oath, for instance, that MPs were asked to swear. So there's a lot of confusion about what exactly he was asked to swear. If it was just the act of Succession, it still would have contained a preamble that recognized Henry as Supreme Head of the Church. And it also asked him to defend all of the legislation that had come in the previous term of Parliament, which contained acts that he was strongly against. So he's very much a lawyer in these interactions. We do only have his accounts of these conversations. And he presents himself, at the very least, as very much a lawyer that he asks to look at the act, he asks to see other acts. He's very careful in his consideration of his response and, as you say, refuses to give his answer. He does at one point say that he will answer why he's not going to swear to the oath if they can promise that he won't be punished for that response. And they say that they can't. And so he says, when? I'm not going to tell you because it puts me at risk. I suspect from what he says later on that it's very Clear that it isn't to do with the succession itself. At one point, Cranmer in particular proposes a compromised oath for More and for Bishop Fisher, which asks them just to swear to the succession. Henry viii, through Cromwell, hates this idea and rejects it outright as a compromise. But I think Cranmer is right that More would have sworn to that he's generally happy to acknowled the succession, because that's something that he thinks that Parliament has the jurisdiction to decide. He doesn't think that Parliament has the jurisdiction to make Henry supreme head of the Church in England. And so I think that's the core of why he refuses.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (34:09)

And it absolutely would have been the core of Henry's objections to his refusal, because it's the thing that Henry is so passionately attached to as an idea. But of course, there were consequences for not swearing he was imprisoned in the Tower in the end, he'd be there for 15 months in that time, for as long as he could. He wrote to comfort those who faced his very own situation and perhaps gives us a bit of an insight into his mind to think about what comfort he offered. You know, what was he thinking on as he contemplated the possibility of death?

Dr. Joanne Paul (34:48)

He writes the dialogue of comfort, which, as you say, is designed to offer comfort, reassurance to those in similar positions, to those facing their own mortality, to those facing imprisonment, to those facing physical tortures and very cruel and difficult deaths. I think the main thrust of that text is that actually there is great comfort in the remembrance of death, that there is great comfort in the remembrance that all mortals will die, and the circumstances of those deaths actually aren't important. He talks, for instance, about the pain that comes of being sliced apart from the inside, as opposed to being sliced apart from the outside, that actually there's very little difference between those things and actually the pain that could come from disease, for instance, can be much worse than the pain that comes from an executioner's blade. He talks about the embarrassment that can come from a public death and reassures his readers that dying alone is a horrible process as well. But also that even when a crowd is jeering you in your final moments, there is a larger crowd that is cheering you on, that is encouraging you. So the remembering, the righteousness of your cause. And so this idea that there is something universal about death, regardless of the circumstances, and that there is something righteous in a good death, a death for right reasons. He also talks specifically about imprisonment, facing perhaps a lifetime of imprisonment. And again, he draws the connection to all mortals experience the idea that everyone is imprisoned on Earth, that this is not something you can just escape or walk away from, and that death actually is the release from imprisonment. And so he falls back on very Christian ideas that life is prison, that death is a release, and he finds comfort in those things. For him, this might have been very pertinent as well, because according to his letters, he is actually suffering from some sort of illness or disease at this time. And so his writings are full of this awareness of regardless what happens, he feels very close to death.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (37:25)

It's really fascinating, isn't it, because it's a totally different way of seeing the world, and yet it still stands that with regard to humans, the statistics are the same hundred percent mortality rate and more is moved closer to that whilst he's in the Tower of London, because treason gets redefined to include maliciously denying the King his titles, including that of Supreme Head. And Moore yet again chooses a course of silence. Why does he do that?

Dr. Joanne Paul (38:01)

I think partly, again, he's the lawyer. He thinks that he can find safety in silence. He's aware of the legal principle that silence is seen as consent in the eyes of the law. But also there's a more spiritual reason as well. We have his prayer books while he was in the Tower, and so we know that he was reading the Psalms at the time. He makes various annotations of the Psalms and particularly seems interested in a passage from the Psalmist where he talks about being dumb, but speechless and humbled and keeping silence, though nevertheless, as the Psalm continues, my heart waxed hot within me, and in my meditation a fire shall burn. So this idea that silence is an acceptable, spiritual, godly response to persecution and doesn't change the fact of the sort of burning faith that exists within the heart. So he finds that as a strategy, really, during his time in his meditations in the Tower.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (39:14)

And then in mid June 1535, he's visited by Richards, Rich and Southwell. Who were they? What happened? And did Rich perjure himself to get More to trial?

Dr. Joanne Paul (39:28)

Richard Rich is leading this group who enters Morse Cell in order to collect his books and papers. So there's already something very upsetting going on because More, as we've said, has been finding comfort in reading, in writing to his friends, to his family, and that's all being taken away. And for someone who had spent his life as a scholar, as a writer, and who had such great affection for his friends and family, this is a hugely upsetting moment. Rich is a lawyer who was known to More. He was slightly younger to Moore, Roper Moore's son in law suggests that More had even known him as a youth and had long thought not great things about him. We don't know if that's necessarily true, but certainly they would have known each other and importantly, they knew each other as lawyers. Because Rich and we have this from several different accounts and several different angles, Rich engages with More in a game of putting of cases, which is a sort of legal hypothetical game that lawyers would play, especially popular amongst law students, that tested their knowledge and played with the possibilities of the law. And it was very much a hypothetical sort of thought experiment type game. And so Rich asks him if there were an act of Parliament that the realm should take him, Richard Rich as king, would More not take him for king? More says, yes, I would take you for King if Parliament made you king. And then Rich, according to at least one of the accounts, suggests, surely then if Parliament should make an act making me Pope, would you not then Thomas More take me for Pope? And More responds with another hypothetical, that if Parliament should make a law that God were not God, would Rich suggest then that God were not God? And Rich says, no, of course not. Parliament doesn't have that jurisdiction. And More says, aha. In the same way, then Parliament can't make you Supreme Head of the Church. In other words, Pope. And so Rich writes this all up and hands it to Cromwell. And he ends the letter by saying, More's silence is very frustrating and he should be prosecuted for his silence. Which tells us that Rich doesn't think that More has said anything. He's upset by his silence, not the words that he said. But Cromwell seems to realize that More has said something that can be used against him. That by removing this context of legal hypotheticals and by focusing on those words of no more can the Parliament make the King Supreme Head of the Church. He can suggest that More has denied the King a title. And the question of whether or not it's malicious is so subjective that it really shouldn't matter.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (42:26)

In other words, you are situating it in Cromwell's doing rather than Rich. That's really interesting. Okay, so More is brought to trial. How did he defend himself there?

Dr. Joanne Paul (42:41)

There are three charges brought against Moore, and the first two More manages to defend himself against. The first is that his silence is itself a malicious denial. And for that, More uses the legal principle that silences consent. The second is that he had colluded with Bishop Fisher, who at this point has already been tried, convicted, and executed for treason. And there is no actual evidence of that. All their letters had been burned. And so there's nothing that can be presented against More's denial for that. It's the third charge that in his conversation with Rich he had maliciously denied the King's supremacy. That is the charge that stands against More. And Rich is the only witness to this. The other two who had been in the room said that they didn't really hear anything, don't back it up. But Rich's testimony is all that's required. More, according to the accounts that we have, objects to Rich's presentation of their conversation, that it wasn't quite how it had actually happened and that they were engaging in this game of putting up cases. And so of course it was hypotheticals. It can't possibly be considered malicious. It can't even really be considered a denial. And that Rich takes out this fact that they were talking about the King can't be Pope, not Supreme Head of the Church in England, but can't be made Pope by the Parliament. And so he objects to these. But it doesn't matter. The jury returns a decision in 15 minutes which is shockingly fast. It usually took about an hour in a treason trial. They're back in 15 minutes and so he's convicted of treason according especially to the account from his son in law. It's then that More does break his silence and does speak his conscience and his objections to the King's supremacy, saying that Parliament lacks the jurisdiction to decide something that splits the Church in this way. That Henry VIII as a layperson as not being clergyman can't possibly be made Supreme Head of the Church and speaks about the implications that the ramifications of this splitting apart of Christendom. Whether or not he actually gave that speech is hard to know. But it would be consistent with More to have waited until there was nothing to lose that he had already been convicted for this malicious denial. To speak his mind on the question.

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (46:21)

So we get to his execution. They narrowly miss having him executed on the feast day of St. Thomas Becket, which would have been a PR disaster, but he's pretty quickly killed and dies with those famous lines, I die the King's good servant and God's first. I want to know what, having spent all this time with him, you make of him. You've written an account which is vivid but judicious in trying to weigh up the evidence that we have. And I'd like to know what you make of him as a person.

Dr. Joanne Paul (47:01)

It's a really difficult question for at least two reasons. One is, I think as a historian, we're trained not to have feelings of liking or disliking those we study. I think we're encouraged to have a sort of distance. There's a great quote from Hilary Mantel, actually. She writes a letter to Thomas More and she says, liking you, disliking you, it shouldn't matter to sober minded historians. And I like to think that I am a sober minded historian. The other, I think, difficulty is that he's such a complex individual whom we actually know very little about. In terms of these major questions that you and I have been discussing, the question of torture, for instance, we can bring into it also the question of how he treated the women, his family, or the question of how he acted as a courtier, the question of how much he really believed and felt those things and about unrepentant heretics who were executed. All of these questions. And there are all these layers that he himself creates around his own Persona. That all being said, what really stands for me is the importance of trying to understand him. Aside from liking or disliking him, I think understanding his motives, his central beliefs is really important to not condoning or forgiving anything that he might have done that we would like to condemn, but to understand why he did those things or said those things. To understand, for instance, the connection between the sack of Rome and the violence and the atrocities that he heard of happening. And the line that he then drew towards Lutheran theology. It's not this just sort of stark condemnation of a belief that is different from his own. He saw real world effects coming from this very different theology. And I think when we do that, we start to understand the complexity not only of this individual, but of any historical subject that you might point to, and indeed ourselves and other people that we encounter that we might have different views from. I think understanding them is Very important to historians task and to human beings task moving about in the world. I'll also say when I talk about this in my letter to the reader that I found in More, something that I think is very pertinent to today, and that is a willingness to speak truth to power. A willingness to stand up against an overwhelming strength, a strength that is larger, greater, more powerful than yourself and say no and refuse to go along with something that you see to be tyranny. And whether you agree with the reasons why he did that or not, I think that there is something to be said for our world today about that willingness to stand up to tyranny, even when it's sure to go wrong and does indeed go wrong at the end of the day. Thomas More didn't actually change that much about history. There's not that much you can point to and go, ah, he did that. But what we can point to is this inspiration. I think we can see Thomas More as someone who refused to just go along with the tides of his time. And I think that's important.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (50:54)

It does matter what a person is standing for though, doesn't it? Because you can be very ardent in support of something terrible. So I guess I'm just pushing a little bit more to say, do you think he was heroic?

Dr. Joanne Paul (51:10)

I wouldn't say that. I think that presenting him as a hero or as a villain in those very stark terms misunderstands the complexity of him as a historical subject, as a historical figure, as a person.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (51:28)

And yet that's precisely how we've seen him to date. We've seen these different interpretations of Moore in the artistic representations of his character in A Man for All Seasons in Wolf hall, people seem very invested in these polarized alternatives. And I was struck by the fact that when it comes to writing More's biography, John Guy declared that it was an impossible task. But here it is. You've done it. So how did you find your way between these positions of Moore as hero and villain and complete this task?

Dr. Joanne Paul (52:07)

It's funny. I actually spoke to Professor Guy about the fact that he had declared a truly historical biography of More to be impossible. And we agreed that he'd written that some decades ago now and that there had been sufficient changes and developments that made that not the case. So I was very pleased to hear that from him. For me, the key was to not pay undue attention to the accounts that emerged after his death. Those of Roper and the other members of the More family circle, or those of Fawkes and other anti Catholic Writings that were designed to paint More in these two lights, but rather to focus, as I think we tend to do, with other historical figures on the material from their own time. In More's case, that meant all sorts of institutional archives. I visited the Mercer Company archives, Brewer's hall, all of these London archives. It also meant paying particular attention to his own letters and his own writings. I think that there is often a tendency with Thomas More, and I understand this tendency, to skim through or skip past entirely the bulk of what he wrote. It has been compared to an interminable desert. There's a lot of words, and they're not always the most thrilling or compelling, but they do say a lot about him. They speak at various points about his own life. And so I attempted in some ways to tell his story in his own words. That's not necessarily going to give us precisely what happened, but it will give us an insight into him and who he was.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (54:01)

And you make the point in your book, in the End Matter, that why it has become possible, I suppose, to write this biography is because a quarter century ago there were sources, there were databases, there were things that could not have been accessed that. No, now, with the resources we have today, we can access. So technology has made this project possible, hasn't it?

Dr. Joanne Paul (54:26)

I've been very lucky. I started this project just after COVID lockdown lifted, but when things were still very difficult to access. You and many of your listeners will know that the British Library became almost impossible to use at various points over the last few years, and for various personal reasons as well. I haven't gotten out much in the last few years, but I've been able to access a very great deal digitally. I did also, of course, visit archives in person, but again, those have become searchable in ways that wasn't the case decades ago. All of Moore's works have been collected in the Essential Works of Thomas More, which are searchable, which are you're able to access and engage with in ways that you can't with a physical text. And so there's all of these things, the state papers online, you're able to compile all of Moore's letters and search them all in this very quick and compact way, and also access the manuscripts at the same time. So because I think More touches all of these very different areas, London government, the court of Henry viii, religious polemics and so on, and because he wrote all of these words, if you don't have these digital tools, it does start to become an almost impossible task.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (55:50)

So there's a Sense, from what you're saying, that the writing of history is changing, that we still need the old skills, we still need to be able to read 16th century handwriting, paleography. We still need languages, Latin particularly, for more. We still need to spend time reading the text. But there's a whole host of useful resources now that make it possible for the individual scholar to encompass more in a shorter period of time, perhaps more in a lifetime, than anyone would have been able to do 30, 40 years ago.

Dr. Joanne Paul (56:27)

I think that's excellently put. There's a way in which I think these tools enable us to have both the micro and the macro at the same time, that we're able to engage, as you say, very closely with these texts. Reading the manuscripts, looking even at the way that they were writing, the paper that they used, the things that they crossed out, while at the same time having an overview, something like the Essential Works of Thomas More, where you can engage with it all very quickly. I think that balance between the two and that conversation between the two is what allows a project like this to flourish.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (57:06)

And just to center myself, you and I had several email exchanges where we looked at that kind of granular level of detail, like this particular phrase, how do we translate it? And that was lots of fun. It's really good to be able to do that kind of level of detail. One last question then, about writing history and your approach to writing history. You are particularly good at evoking the sounds, the smells, the sights, the stuff, even the pains and horrors, as I've indicated, of the past. And I was struck by the contrast, that here we have Thomas More, a man of ideas, and yet what you have done is put him back into the physicality of existence. And I wanted to ask you why it was important to you to do this.

Dr. Joanne Paul (57:49)

First of all. That's very kind, thank you. I'm glad that it came across that way, as you say. That is very important to me to be able to do that. I don't think I have written very academic, we might call dry history in the past. But what really compels me and what I enjoy about writing is that sense of being there. So I don't think I could have written this text any other way. I remember staring at that blank page and that blinky cursor for a very long time and making various attempts to start. And many of those attempts were, I think, what we might expect more from a biography, where you go, oh, there's various different sources, and these are the difficulties with them, and this is what we discover when we look at this, it was just not a form of writing that captured me, that felt authentic to me. What does feel authentic is trying to ground it in the physicality, as you say, in the lived reality of it. I think as a historian, that's much of our job. Our job, or at least one large part of it, is to help people understand the past. And I think that there are multiple ways of creating that understanding. One is telling people this is what it was like, but the other is showing people, is getting them to understand the past in a more visceral, even emotional way, to understand what people's experiences were, to understand what it was like. And the best way that I can do that as a writer is to try to plant people into that reality.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (59:34)

Well, you do it with great aplomb. Dr. Joanne Paul, thank you so much for talking to us about both the rise and now the fall of Thomas More.

Dr. Joanne Paul (59:45)

Thank you so much.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (59:47)

Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. And to my producer Rob Weinberg, we are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line and Not Just the tutors@historyhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from History Hit.

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (61:19)

SA.