Thomas More is one of the few beatified English lay-persons in history. He was beheaded for resisting the coming Protestant Reformation. What comes around, goes around, however; More, in the years before King Henry’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon, oversaw the exercise of the death penalty to several Protestant heretics. He stood, as Ackroyd tells it, for the old way of medieval Christendom. He was unwilling to accommodate the Reformers’ ways of change in England. He refused to take an oath of conformity that King Henry was the Head of the Church in England and did not speak about the King’s divorce. His silence spoke louder than any words and led to his untimely death.
Of course, he famously remained silent on Henry’s second marriage and paid the price for it. He saw the old ways of Natural Law and reason as the true ways and was not afraid of dying for it. One wonders what More would say about the coming bloody purges in English Christianity, with Bloody Mary, Fox’s Book of Martyrs, and Queen Elizabeth.
An American reader cannot help but note the contrast between European Christianity and American Christianity. European Christianity is tied inexorably to the state whereas American Christianity, formed in the incubator of the separation of Church and state, is more of a creative and progressive force in American history – at least until the resurgence of the fundamentalists in the second half of the twentieth century. Reading a biography like More’s induces a longing for atheism and freedom from religion – despite the fact that religious piety animated this man’s silence towards Henry.