Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 14.djvu/756

 THOMAS

692

THOMAS

principis mors est". " Is that all, my lord, " answered More, "then, in good faith, between your grace and me is but this, that I shall die to-day, and you to- morrow." In March, 1534, the Act of Succession was passed which required all who should be called upon to take an oath acknowledging the issue of Henry and Anne as legitimate heirs to the throne, and to this was added a clause repudiating "any foreign authority, prince or potentate". On 14 April, More was summoned to Lambeth to take the oath and, on his refusal, was committed to the cus- tody of the Abbot of Westminster. Four days later he was removed to the Tower, and in the following November was attainted of misprision of treason, the grants of land made to him in 1523 and 1525 being resumed by the Crown. In prison,' though suffering greatly from "his old disease of the chest . . . gravel, stone, and the cramp", his habitual gaiety remained and he joked with his family and friends whenever they were permitted to see him as merrily as in the old days at Chelsea. When alone his time was given up to prayer and penitential e.x- ercises; and he wTOte a "Dialogue of comfort against tribulation", treatise (unfinished) on the Passion of Christ, and many letters to his family and others. In April and May, 1535, Cromwell visited him in person to demand his opinion of the new statutes conferring on Henry the title of Supreme Head of the Chin-ch. More refused to give any answer beyond declaring himself a faithful subject of the king. In June, Rich, the solicitor-general, held a conversation with More and, in reporting it, declared that More had denied Parliament's power to confer ecclesiastical supremacy on Henry. It was now discovered that jNIore and Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, had exchanged letters in prison, and a fresh inquiry was held which resulted in his being deprived of all books and writing materials, but he contrived to write to his wife and favourite daughter, Margaret, on stray scraps of paper with a charred stick or piece of coal.

On 1 July, More was indicted for high treason at Westminster Hall before a special commission of twenty. More denied the chief charges of the in- dictment, which was enormously long, and denounced Rich, the solicitor-general and chief witness against him, as a perjuror. The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to be hanged at Tyburn, but some days later this was changed by Henry to beheading on Tower Hill. The storj- of his last days on earth, as given by Roper and Cresacre More, is of the tenderest beauty and should be read in full; certainly no martjT ever surpassed him in fortitude. As Addison wrote in the Spectator (No. 349) "that innocent mirth which had been so conspicuous in his life, did not forsake him to the last . . . his death was of a piece with his life. There was nothing in it new, forced or affected. He did not look upon the severing of his head from his body as a circumstance that ought to produce any change in the disposition of his mind". The execution took place on Tower Hill "before nine of the clock" on 6 July, the body being buried in the Church of St. Peter ad vincnla. The head, after being parboiled, was exposed on London Bridge for a month when Margaret Roper bribed the man, whose business it was to throw it into the river, to give it to her instead. The final fate of the relic is somewhat imcertain, but in 1S24 a leaden box was found in the Roper \-ault ;it St. Dunstan's, Canterbury, which on being opened was found to contain a head presumed to be M ore's. The .Jesuit I'athcrs at Stonyhurst possess a re- markable collect ion of sec(>n<larv relics, most of which came to them from I'ather Thomas More, S.J. (d. 1795), the last male heir of the martyr. These in- clude his hat, cap, crucifix of gold, a silver seal, "George", and other articles. The hair shirt, worn

by him for many years and sent to Margaret Roper the day before his martyrdom, is preserved by the Augustinian canonesses of Abbots Leigh, Devonshire, to whom it was brought by Margaret Clements, the adopted child of Sir Thomas. A number of autograph letters are in the British Museum. Several portraits exist, the best being that by Hol- bein in the possession of E. Huth, Esq. Holbein also painted a large group of More's household which has disappeared, but the original sketch for it is in the Basle Museum, and a sixteenth-century copy is the property of Lord St. Oswald. Bl. Thomas More was formallv beatified by Pope Leo XIII, in the Decree of 29 December, 18S6.

Writings. — More was a ready writer and not a few of his works remained in manuscript until some years after his death, while several have been lost altogether. Of all his writings the most famous is imquestionably the "Utopia", first published at Louvain in 1516. The volume recounts the fictitious travels of one Raphael Hythlodaye, a mj'thical charac- ter, who, in the course of a voyage to America, was left behind near Cape Frio and thence wandered on till he chanced upon the Island of Utopia (ou, t6tos or "nowhere") in which he found an ideal constitution in operation. The whole work is really an exercise of the imagination with much brilliant satire upon the world of More's own day. Real persons, such as Peter Giles, Cardinal Morton, and More himself, take part in the dialogue with Hythlodaye, so that an air of reality pervades the whole which leaves the reader sadly puzzled to detect where truth ends and fiction begins, and has led not a few to take the book seriously. But this is precisely what More intended, and there can be no doubt that he would have been as delighted at entrapping William Morris, who discovered in it a complete gospel of Sociahsm; or Cardinal Zigliara, who denounced it as "no less foolish than impious"; as he must have been with his own contemporaries who proposed to hire a ship and send out missionaries to his non-existent island. The book ran through a number of editions in the original Latin version and, within a few years, was translated into German, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, and English.

A collected edition of More's English works was published by William Rastell, his nephew, at London in 1557; it has never been reprinted and is now rare and costly. The first collected edition of the Latin Works appeared at Biisle in 1563; a more complete collection was published at Louvain in 1565 and again in 1566. In 16S9 the most complete edition of all appeared at Frankfort-on-Main, and Leipzig. After the "Utopia" the following are the most important works: "Luciani Dialogi . . . compluria opus- cula . . . ab Erasmo Roterodamo et Thoma Moro interpretibus optimis in Latinorum lingua traducta . . ." (Paris, 1506); "Here is con- teigned the l_\-fe of John Picus, Earle of MjTandula . . ."(London, 1510); "Historic of the pitiful life and unfortunate death of Edward the fifth antl the then Duke of Yorke his brother . . . ", printed incomplete in the "English Works" (1557) and re- issued with a comijletion from Hall's Chronicle by Wm. Sheares (London, 141); "Thomae Mori v. c. Dissertatio Epistolica de aliquot sui temporis theo- logastrorum ineptiis . . .' (Leyden, 1625); Epi- grammata . . . Thomae Mori Britanni, plera- que e Graecis versa. (Basle, 1518); Eruditissimi viri Gul. Rossi Opus elegans quo pulcherrime retegit ac refellit insanas Lutheri calumnias (London, 1.523), written at the request of Henry ^TII in answer to Tj\ither's reply to the royal "Defensio Septeni Sacramentorum"; " .\ dyaloge of Syr Thom;is ^lon- Knt ... of divers maters, as of the veneration and worshyp of y mages and relyques, praying to sayntys and goyng on pylgrymage. . ." (Lon-