Heresy was firmly established in Catholicism as the most mortal of all sins. ‘In our charity towards God’s sheep, who must all die some day, some way,’ St Augustine, greatest of the Latin Fathers, had written in 430, ‘we should be more afraid of a butchery of their minds by the sword of spiritual evil than of their bodies by a sword of steel.’ He condoned the use of torture for heretics. ‘We often have to act with a sort of kindly harshness, when we are trying to make unwilling souls yield,’ he wrote, ‘because we have to consider their welfare rather than their inclination.’ It was good for a heretic to suffer, since ‘nothing is more hopeless than the happiness of sinners’.
The principle of the ‘just war’ against heretics had been enshrined by the Bolognese monk and jurist Gratian in the
Decretum Gratiani
of about 1140. This passed into the
Corpus Iuris Canonici
, the chief collection of canon law, which laid down ecclesiastical rules on faith, morals and discipline in the Catholic Church for the next nine centuries. ‘
Ecclesiasticae religionis inimici etiam bellis sunt cohercendi
’, Gratian wrote in his concise and unyielding Latin, ‘the enemies of the Church and religion are coerced by war’. St Thomas Aquinas, known as ‘Doctor Angelicus’ for the divine inspiration that he was thought to bring to his teaching, had demonstrated to the satisfaction of the medieval
Church that heresy separates man from God more than any other sin. As an actual and physical emissary of Satan, the heretic was held to merit the fiercest punishment of burning alive. As the successor to St Peter, Catholics believed, the pope was God’s representative on earth. He therefore had the right to establish the Inquisition, and to encourage and condone acts of repression that included the torture and burning of ‘newe men’.
The evangelicals did not yet have the power to punish others in England and the Low Countries. Tyndale had no way of unleashing the ‘holy work’ of divine retribution against recalcitrant Catholics. For the moment, at least, Catholics remained in authority, and the English had in Thomas More a chancellor whose wrath with heretics was boundless.
The time of burnings had come.
T
here had been no burnings in England for eight years. More soon put a stop to that. He did not quite condemn his predecessors – ‘I will not say that the Judges did
wrong’ – but he made it clear that he thought them lax. The heretic had been mollycoddled, allowed to escape through recantation and faggot-carrying, and in this the bishops and church officers were ‘almost more than lawful, in that they admitted him to such an abjuration as they did, and that they did not rather leave him to the secular arm’. He concluded that ‘in the condemnation of heretics, the clergy might lawfully do much more sharply than they do’.
The little phrase ‘leave him to the secular arm’ is very much less innocent than it seems. In legal terms, a prisoner was ‘relaxed’ after the Church had found him guilty of heresy. This did not involve a period of rest and relaxation for the unfortunate, of course, far from it. It meant that the Church authorities ‘relaxed’ their hold on him by transferring him to the secular authorities for execution. The ritual handing over was designed to preserve the principle that
Ecclesia non novit sanguinem
, the Church does not shed blood. It provided a form of ecclesiastical fig leaf, since
laymen carried out the actual burning, but it was a singularly transparent one. No churchman exonerated the Pharisees for the death of Christ on the grounds that they had merely handed Jesus to Pilate for sentencing, and that Roman soldiers had performed the crucifixion.
A priest named Thomas Hitton was the first to suffer from More’s new ‘sharpness’. He was seized near Gravesend in January 1530 as he was making his way to the coast to take a ship for Antwerp. Hitton had fled to join Tyndale and the English exiles in the Low Countries after becoming a convinced evangelical. He returned to England on a brief visit to contact supporters of Tyndale and to arrange for the distribution of smuggled books. The first English psalter had been published in Antwerp in January, as well as Tyndale’s Pentateuch, in a translation by George Joye that included a commentary ‘declarynge brefly thentente and substance of the wholl psalme’.
Hitton was walking through fields by the coast, his mission completed, when he was stopped by a posse of men looking for a thief who had stolen some linen that was drying on a hedge. They searched him. He had no linen, but hidden pockets were found in his coat that held letters ‘unto the evangelycall heretykes beyonde the see’. Unfortunately for the wretched Hitton, the new chancellor’s strictures on heretics were fresh in people’s minds. The men handed Hitton over to the archbishop of Canterbury’s officers.
At his interrogation before the archbishop, Hitton refused to recant and remained true to his new beliefs. ‘The mass he sayed sholde never be sayed’, it was recorded of his answers. ‘Purgatory he denyed … No man hath any fre wyll after that he hath ons synned … all the images of Cryste and hys sayntes sholde bde throwen out of the chyrche.’
Sentence was swiftly passed and executed: Thomas Hitton was burnt alive at Maidstone on 23 February 1530. He was the first of the Reformation martyrs. The English exiles in Antwerp were
shocked. They had a new calendar printed with 23 February marked as the ‘day of St Thomas’.
More gloated. He claimed that Hitton was arrested ‘for pilfering certain linen clothes that were hanging on a hedge’, which was untrue, and he indulged his strange obsession with married Lutheran priests. Hitton ‘meant by likelihood that it was good enough to wed upon a cushion when the dogs be abed, as their [Lutheran] priests wed,’ he wrote, ‘for else they let not to wed openly at church, and take the whole parish for witness of their beastly bitchery’.
In fact, there is no evidence that Hitton wished to marry, although most evangelical converts in the priesthood did so. But More’s speculation was bound up with his guilt at his own marriage, and his desertion of a Church career. He wore a hair shirt as an act of permanent though secret penance. Among his family, he told only his daughter Meg, although his daughter-in-law spotted it once in the summer as he sat at supper in his doublet and hose, wearing a plain shirt without ruff or collar to hide it. He whipped himself as well, though the Church had frowned on this since the excesses of the flagellants who had roamed Europe during the Black Death, beating themselves and murdering Jews, and singing the haunting words of the
Stabat Mater
:
Wound me with his wounds
Let me drink his cross
For the love of thy son.
Meg used to wash the bloodstains from his shirt. ‘He used sometimes to punish his body with whips, the cords knotted,’ his son-in-law William Roper wrote, ‘which was known only to my wife, his eldest daughter, whom for her secrecy above all other he specially trusted, causing her as need required to wash the same shirt of hair.’
More used the Hitton case to vent his spite against Tyndale. He wrote that Hitton had learnt his ‘false faith and heresies’ from ‘Tyndale’s holy books’. Under Tyndale’s influence, the ‘beggarly knave’ had ‘cast off matins and mass and all divine service’ and had become ‘an apostle, sent to and fro between our English heretics beyond the sea and such as were here at home’. And now, at Maidstone, More wrote with the murderous glee of a man possessed, ‘the spirit of errour and lyenge hath taken his wretched soule with him strayte from the shorte fyre to ye fyre euer lastyng. And this is lo syr Thomas Hytton, the dyuyls stynkyng martyr, of whose burnynge Tyndale maketh boste.’
The wrath of the Church, and of More, had special qualities. They damned their victims twice. The
poena sensus
, the punishment of the senses, had been achieved by the earthly ‘shorte fyre’ at Maidstone. But the heretic was also condemned to the
poena damni
, the sentence of damnation that separated him from God for ever in the fires of hell. Tyndale had himself translated the biblical passages that would in time be used to condemn him. The justification for the first penalty came from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘And the fyre shal trye every man’s worke, what it is.’ (I Corinthians 3:13) Christ himself was invoked for the second: ‘Departe from me ye cursed, into ever lastynge fyre, which is prepared for the devile and his angells’ (Matthew 25.41).
The dead man was no saint, More said, but a thief and a coward. Tyndale should not glory in him, but should scrape his name from the calendar, and ‘restore the blessed bishop saint Polycarp’, burnt in Smyrna in about 155.
The malice that drove More against Tyndale was a phenomenon, insatiable, galloping, morbific. It consumed his finer instincts, including his respect for the law. He was bound by oath as chancellor to abide by fourteenth-century statutes that required him to exert himself to the maximum in suppressing heretics. He was equally bound to obey the laws regulating their punishment.
The acts under which heretics were liable to persecution had been passed under Henry IV in 1401 and under Henry V in 1414. The bishops were obliged by the Act of Henry IV to bring offenders to trial in open court within three months of their arrest. If conviction followed, they could imprison the offender at their discretion. They were not at liberty to imprison any suspect except under these conditions. Under the Act of Henry V, a heretic who was first indicted in front of a secular judge had to be delivered to a bishop, ‘to be acquit or convict’ by a jury in the spiritual court, within a maximum of ten days.
A suspected heretic thus had some clearly defined rights. A secular judge could detain him for no more than ten days before delivering him to a bishop. The bishop could not imprison him for more than three months before trial. Neither judge nor bishop had the power to extend imprisonment if the trial was delayed. If the accused was acquitted, he could no longer be detained on the same charge. These safeguards were hardly onerous to the prosecution, and the chancellor, as the senior law officer in the kingdom, should have set an example in upholding them. Wolsey had done so.
More broke them within six weeks of coming to power. His first victim was a Londoner named Thomas Philippis, or Philips, a leather seller whom More took home to interrogate in Chelsea. ‘Vpon certayn thynges that I found out by him,’ More recollected, ‘I sent for, and when I hadde spoken wyth hym, and honestly intreated hym one day or twayne in myne house, and laboured about his amendement in as harty louynge maner as I coulde: when I perceyued fynally the person suche that I could fynde no trouthe, … a man mete and lykely to do many folkie mych harme: I by endenture delyuered hym to his ordynary.’ The ‘ordinary’ to whom More delivered his prisoner was Cuthbert Tunstall, the bishop of London, acting as the judge in the ecclesiastical case of heresy brought against Philips. Tunstall’s vicar general, a man named Foxford, prepared the charges.
By rights, Philips should have been consigned to the bishop’s prison. More feared a repetition of the Richard Hunne scandal, however. He said that Philips had ‘a great spyce of the same spyryt of pryde that I perceyued before in Rycharde Hunne when I talked with him’; he feared that ‘yf he were in ye byshoppes prysone, his gostely enymy ye deuyll myghte make hym there destroy hym selfe’. Whatever More thought of the ‘hearty loving manner’ in which he interrogated Philips, the example had certainly terrified a cousin of Philips, a ‘barbour in Paternoster row called Holy Iohan’, who, ‘after that he was susspected of heresye and spoken to thereof’, had drowned himself in a well. More said that he did so ‘ferynge the shame of the worlde’, but it is equally possible that the unfortunate Holy John killed himself in fear of the ‘hearty loving manner’ which More had brought to the examination of his cousin. Determined to watch his own back and ensure that no ‘new besynes aryse agaynste master chauncellour’, More arranged for Philips to be ‘receyued prysoner in to the towre of London’.
The only evidence Foxford found against Philips was a ‘general rumour’ that he was a gospeller. Philips denied each separate charge in detail. The jury refused to convict him. He was ‘found so clear from all manner of infamous slanders and suspicions,’ Philips’s petition to parliament later declared, ‘that all the people before the said Bishop, shouting in judgement as with one voice, openly witnessed his good name and fame, to the great reproof and shame of the said Bishop’.
The case having failed, More was obliged by law to release Philips immediately. Instead, he called on the prisoner to confess his guilt by abjuring his heresy, ‘as if,’ Philips himself wrote, ‘there were no difference between a nocent and an innocent, between a guilty and a not guilty’. In February 1530, the humane Tunstall had been elevated to the ancient bishopric of Durham, where he was to distinguish himself during the persecution of Protestants in Mary’s reign by refusing to permit executions,
though the fires burnt brightly in surrounding dioceses. He was replaced as bishop of London by John Stokesley, previously a chaplain to the king who had flattered his master by working hard for the divorce, a man altogether fiercer and suited to Thomas More’s taste.
More and Stokesley sent for Philips from time to time, examining him in private, again illegally. They repeated their calls to him to confess, Philips complained, ‘to save the Bishop’s credit’. When they tired of his obstinacy, Stokesley declared Philips to be excommunicated. There was no appeal against this arbitrary sentence, except to the pope. It left the miserable Philips outside the protection of the law, and he was committed to the Tower, where he languished for three years.
John Petite was another of Tyndale’s readers who ‘cowght a swheetnes in Godes worde’, and fell foul of More. Petite was a city burgess of London and one of its four Members of Parliament, a Grocer, an educated man well versed in history and the Latin tongue. He was also ‘sore suspected of the lord chawncelor’ of being a believer ‘of the relegione that they called newe, and also a bearer with them in pryntyng of theyr bookes’. He lived in a house at Lion’s Quay, on the river next to Billingsgate close to what is today the Swiss Bank building, a substantial property known as Petite’s Quay.