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Thomas More’s Confutation: A Literary Failure?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
Between June 1529 and December 1533 Thomas More published no fewer than seven books comprising more than a million words against the Reformation. The young More had achieved European fame as the author of Utopia, and the friend and defender of the greatest scholar, satirist and literary innovator of the age, Desiderius Erasmus. Utopia remains one of the handful of books which would have to be included in any representative library of Western civilization. More himself, however, came to place a far higher value on the remarkable stream of English works which gushed from his pen in the four years leading up to his arrest and imprisonment in the Tower, which, however, are nowadays read, if at all, mainly as evidence that More was losing his grip. They form a remarkable series: the Dialogue Concerning Heresies and the Supplication of Souls, in June and September 1529 respectively; the Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (Part I, the Preface and Books I–III, published in January 1532, and Part II, Books IV–VIII, more than a year later, after his resignation as Chancellor). That same year, 1533, saw the last four in this astonishing polemical outpouring, the Apology of Sir Thomas More, the Debellation of Salem and Byzance, the Answer to a Poisoned Book and the Letter Against Frith. Though these books were directed against a variety of authors, Mores main target, implicit even in writings ostensibly directed against others, was the Bible translator and controversialist William Tyndale. More viewed Tyndale as the most important conduit for Lutheran ideas into England, and he saw in Tyndale’s version of the New Testament the fountainhead from which lesser heresiarchs drew lethal draughts of error with which to poison the souls of unsuspecting English men and women.
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References
1 In all cases More’s writings are cited from the Yale edition of The Complete Works of St Thomas More. A Dialogue Concerning Heresies is vol. 6, ed. Thomas M. C. Lawlor, Germain Marc’hadour and Richard C. Marius (New Haven, CT, 1981). The Supplication of Souls and the Letter Against Frith are both in vol. 7, ed. Frank Manley, Germain Marc’hadour and Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT, 1990). The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer is vol. 8, ed. Louis A. Schuster, Richard C. Marius, James P. Lusardi and Richard J. Schoeck (New Haven, CT, 1973). The Apology of Sir Thomas More is vol. 9, ed. J. B. Trapp (New Haven, CT, 1979). The Debellation of Salem and Byzance is vol. 10, ed. John Gut, Ralph Keen, Clarence H. Miller and Ruth McGugan (New Haven, CT, 1987). The Answer to a Poisoned Book is vol. 11, ed. Stephen Merriam Foley and Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT, 1985).
2 For which see Richard Rex, ‘The English Campaign against Luther in the 1520s’, TRHS ser. 5, 39 (1989), 85–106.
3 Complete Works of Thomas More, 5: Responsio ad Lutherum, ed. Headley, John (New Haven, CT, 1969)Google Scholar.
4 On the shifting of gears in the campaign against heresy, see Craig D’Alton, ‘The Suppression of Lutheran Heretics in England, 1526–1529’, JEH 54 (2003), 228–53.
5 Rogers, E. F., ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton, NJ, 1947), 386–8 Google Scholar (letter 160).
6 Hughes, P. L. and Larkin, J. F., eds, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols (New Haven, CT, 1964), 1: 194 Google Scholar [hereafter: TRP].
7 TRP, 1: 181–6; the proclamation condemns books first published in 1530, making the date suggested by the editors (March 1529) impossible.
8 For summaries of More’s activities against heresy, see Guy, John, The Public Career of Thomas More (Brighton, 1980), 97–174 Google Scholar; idem, Thomas More (London, 2000), 106–25. For a sane and judicious overview of More’s anti-heretical activities and attitudes, see Rex, Richard, ‘Thomas More and the Heretics: Statesman or Fanatic?’, in Logan, George, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More (Cambridge, 2010), 93–115 Google Scholar.
9 More, Apology, 116–20.
10 Chambers, R. W., Thomas More, Bedford Historical Series 2 (London, 1938), 274–82 Google Scholar.
11 Erasmus’s letter to Hutton is in Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen et al., 12 vols (repr. Oxford, 1992), 4: 17 (no. 999).
12 Elton, G. R., Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 4 vols (Cambridge, 2003), 4: 148–9 Google Scholar.
13 Ibid. 3: 352–5.
14 More’s most influential modern biographer, Richard Marius, similarly saw in More a man ‘cruelly divided’ by his decision to marry on the one hand and his longing for the cloister on the other. These unresolved sexual and psychological problems gave a ‘terrible intensity’ to his anti-heretical writings, and in Marius’s view account for the ‘grim pleasure’ he took in the burning of heretics: Thomas More (London, 1993; first publ. 1974), 35, 37, 42, 320–1, 331, 391, 396, 403, 450.
15 Fox, Alistair, Thomas More: History and Providence (Oxford, 1982), 111, 119–20, 123, 125, 143, 145 Google Scholar.
16 Moynahan, Brian, William Tyndale: If God Spare My Life (London, 2003), 349 Google Scholar.
17 Mantel, Hilary, Wolf Hall (London, 2009), 298–9 Google Scholar.
18 Sylvester, R. S. and Marc’hadour, G., eds, Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Thomas More (Hamden, CT, 1977), 392–3 Google Scholar. See also the positive view of the Dialogue in Brian Cummings, ‘Reformed Literature and Literature Reformed’, in David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 1999), 834–5. For a recent positive discussion of the Dialogue which sees it as the signal for a new and sterner phase in the anti-heresy campaign, see D’Alton, Craig, ‘Charity or Fire? The Argument of Thomas More’s 1529 Dyaloge’, SCJ 33 (2002), 51–70 Google Scholar. I have discussed the Dialogue at greater length in ‘“The comen knowen multytude of crysten men”: A Dialogue Concerning Heresies and the Defence of Christendom’, in Logan, ed., Cambridge Companion to More, 191–215.
19 More, Confutation, 17, 41–2.
20 Elton, Studies, 3: 347, 349, 352, 446; Fox, History and Providence, 23 Simpson, James, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 263 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daniell, David, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT, 1994), 185 Google Scholar.
21 A point I owe to my colleague Richard Rex.
22 Proceedings of the Commission in Wilkins, Daniel, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, 4 vols (London, 1737), 3: 727–37 Google Scholar. These measures were reiterated in a proclamation of 22 June 1530, which More almost certainly drafted, so it has been assumed that he endorsed and perhaps even initiated this ban on an English Bible. In fact the ban probably originated with the more conservative clerical members of the Commission, and More probably disagreed with it. He had argued at length for a Catholic translation of the New Testament in the Dialogue. Despite the official moratorium on such a translation till the populace ‘do utterly abandon and forsake all perverse, erroneous and seditious opinions’, More retained his arguments for an official Bible translation in the revised edition of the Dialogue published in 1531. As Chancellor he was obliged to defend the ban in justifying royal measures against heresy in the Confutation, but he reiterated his personal support for an English New Testament in the Apology a year later.
23 For a (slighdy overheated) account of the 1530–I campaign and More’s part in it, see Brigden, Susan, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), 179–98 Google Scholar.
24 Guy, Public Career, 165–74.
25 Lehmberg, Stanford E. The Reformation Parliament 1529–1536 (Cambridge, 1970), 138–9 Google Scholar.
26 So, e.g., Brigden, London and the Reformation, 181: ‘This Chancellor’s campaign against heresy was desperate because he knew that time was short’. For ‘More’s Gethsemane’, see Confutation, 1229.
27 An Answere Unto Sir Tltomas More’s Dialoge, ed. O’Donnell, Anne M. and Wickes, Jared. The Independent Works of William Tyndale 3 (Washington, DC, 2000), xxxv Google Scholar.
28 More, Dialogue, 201, 422.
29 Tyndale, Answer, 112; for the six victims, ibid. 424–6.
30 More, Confutation, 3.
31 Ibid. 11–12.
32 Ibid. 17.
33 Ibid. 16–17, 34.
34 Simpson, Burning to Read, 265.
35 More, Confutation, 16.
36 Ibid. 18.
37 Ibid. 22.
38 Ibid. 23.
39 Ibid. 23–5.
40 Starting, classically, with Foxe: Foxe, John, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online, 1185ff (1570 edn, republ. Sheffield, 2011), online at <http//www.johnfoxe.org>Google Scholar; unpersuaded modern discussions in Rupp, Gordon, Studies in the Making of the English Protestant Tradition (Cambridge, 1966), 29–31 Google Scholar; Guy, Public Career, 167–71; Marius, Thomas More, 396–401.
41 Ibid. 131.
42 Ibid. 141.
43 More, Apology, 6.
44 Ibid. 8.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid. 10.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid. 12.
49 Ibid. 11.
50 More, Confutation, 36–9.
51 Ibid. 883–905.
52 Ibid. 169–73.
53 Ibid. 139.
54 The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght (London, 1557)Google Scholar; the Confutation occupies pages 614–832.
55 Harding, Thomas, A confutation of a booke intituled An apologie of the Church of England (Antwerp 1565 Google Scholar); Walsham, Alexandra, ‘The Spider and the Bee: The Perils of Printing for Refutation in Tudor England’, in King, John, ed., Tudor Books and Readers (Cambridge, 2010), 163–90 Google Scholar, quotation at 169. Surprisingly, Professor Walsham makes no allusion to More’s responsibility for or use of the form.
56 Jewel, John, A defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande conteininge an answeare to a certaine booke lately setfoorthe by M. Hardinge, and entituled, A confutation of &c. (London, 1567)Google Scholar.
57 Walsham, ‘Spider and the Bee’, 172, 174.