In the Library of St Paul's Cathedral is kept one of two surviving copies of William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament. It is probably our rarest book, and it is remarkable to read it and find how much of the very familiar Authorised Version has been taken word for word in all its beauty from Tyndale. Surprising therefore that anyone reading such a book should have wanted to throw it on a fire. But that, sadly, is precisely what happened. The kindly Cuthbert Tunstall who was Bishop of London in the 1520's before going on to Durham, bought every copy he could lay his hands on and had them publicly burned.

This to begin with was actually a great benefit to Tyndale and his followers as they ploughed the money back into their society's funds and promoted their cause elsewhere. But what is also surprising is that the attack on Tyndale should have been continued and promoted by the great humanist, lover of letters, reader of Erasmus Greek New Testament and Latin paraphrase, none other in fact than the subject of this sermon, Thomas More. Perhaps he never was allowed to hold a copy in his hand, never heard the music of the prose, never soaked in the teaching and the wisdom in his own mother tongue. I doubt that he was as obtuse as his friend Linacre, the great Greek scholar of Oxford, who picked up St Matthew's Gospel in Greek, read the first three chapters for the first time and exclaimed "Either this is not the Gospel or I am not a Christian". As he was quite sure he was a Christian, he threw St Matthew's Gospel away and went back to his medicine and the dogmas of the popes and fathers. But that was not Thomas More. Not More, whose closest friend was the Dutchman who had presented the world with endless new and reliable texts of the New Testament and the Fathers; not More whose friend Colet, Rector of Stepney and Dean of St Paul's boldly lectured on the plain sense of Holy Scripture, not allegorising as previous generations had done but telling us clearly what St Paul, for example, said and meant. More was no archaist, no traditionalist in the sense that he would have nothing new, nothing changed. But it was More, we have to remember who as Chancellor approved the death sentence for no less than six heretics (Wolsey, as Chancellor, had sent no one to the scaffold on this account). More in this capacity knew his duty. Tyndale was abroad, Tyndale was a heretic. English Bibles were being smuggled into England; sedition was rife; the peace of the country was at risk. As one of his biographers says "Given More's conviction that heresy was inherently violent and seditious, the spread of Lutheranism into England could only mean one thing; that England would slide relentlessly towards chaos unless heresy was exterminated." Hence his action against heretics; hence his enormously lengthy refutation of Tyndale which occupied him till the moment of his resignation as Chancellor.

Many have wondered at this apparent contradiction in More, between the son of the Renaissance who delighted in the fresh air of the New Learning, was steeped in the classics, and whose greatest pleasure, like that of the Utopians was in the pursuit of literature and learning when the day's work was done; and on the other hand the catholic statesman, loyal in every degree to his church, prepared to oppose the highest power in the realm on the grounds that the Sovereign himself had usurped an unwarranted authority over the church and thereby had denied catholic truth. More has undoubtedly been raised to the altars of the Roman Catholic church for these reasons. The process of beatification and the ratification of this many years later shows that the Roman church firmly believes that More died in defence of the catholic faith when challenged by Protestantism, and that he died in defence of the papacy when opposed by the King.

But here we have to be very careful. The fanatical papalist in this whole story is not More but Henry VIII. It was Henry who partnered the Pope via Wolsey in endless wars on the continent of Europe; it was Henry who flung the book at the Lutherans and swore that the Pope was the great authority in matter spiritual (and then gave a very high church summary of the catholic faith - for all of which he received the title, Defender of the Faith). But it was More who cautioned Henry not to go over the top in his praise of the papacy. In temporal matters, More warned, the Pope was like any other prince and could be involved any way he chose in the conflict of European nations (as indeed he was). But Henry ignored him. He went in with the Pope against France, against Spain. He taxed the nobility, he threatened a tax on the clergy; with Wolsey, he pretty well ruined the exchequer. Only when Henry was disillusioned because the partnership with Charles V fizzled out after the Treaty of Cambrai, did he come down off his high pedestal of veneration for the papacy; then came the refusal by Rome to recognise the divorce from Catherine of Aragon; then came the suspicion that even his own clergy were against him; then with the Pope firmly out of Henry's sights, came the demand that Henry as King should under God and next to God be seen as supreme Head in matter spiritual as well as temporal. And it was precisely at this moment, at the moment when Henry became a fallen or lapsed papalist, when Henry struck out at the Church catholic, at the one institution that More felt could have been an instrument for peace and harmony - just and exactly at that moment, More resigned as Chancellor and handed in the Great Seal.

His friends thought him mad. In the long run, so did his wife, Dame Alice. To what was he really objecting ? Henry was a devout Catholic to the end of his days. Cranmer was not really in evidence. The Church stood firm in its teaching; the Mass was celebrated regularly by every priest and with fervour. Souls in purgatory had the unfailing support of the prayers of the faithful and the rites of the chantry. For centuries it had been claimed that Kings were God appointed; for centuries in England, King and Pope together had chosen bishops, nominated to livings and canonries, celebrated a union of church and state to the mutual interest of each. Why then More's inability to continue as the King's servant when the clergy as a body made the act of subscription to the Royal Supremacy.

The spectre before More's eyes as he discharged himself from the greatest office in the land was undoubtedly that of tyranny. Much earlier in his life, he had placed great hopes in the young Henry. Henry's rather grim father had been a threat to More; More had seen him as a tyrant, and had welcomed his death, welcomed the new reign, welcomed the literate and intelligent prince with the beautiful wife, welcomed his interest in music and dancing, welcomed his sociability and reverence for the church which both married him and crowned him. More, one suspects, hadn't bargained for Wolsey, hadn't reckoned on that prelate's hold over the young king, sweeping him into wars he could not afford, financial relationships he could not sustain, and into doubts even about his home life and his marriage.

Wolsey was undoubtedly unscrupulous, piling up livings and preferments to afford him an income commensurate with his political programme. But the cardinal, it would seem, had led the King to the brink of the apotheosis of power; and when Europe and the papacy said a very firm "No" to Henry's projects and ambitions, Henry, like the child he was, claimed kingdom and church for his own. His power was absolute; nobody could say him nay. And More saw in this the beginning of the ruin of the reign. Five marriages later, with the economy in tatters, the monasteries ruined, the church plate melted down, the intelligentsia clamouring for reform and the country people sparking revolts, Henry was to die of syphilis. His madness had achieved nothing. Suspicion and vanity had led him to put to death those who could have been his closest allies.

So it is with all tyrants; and if there is any lesson we can learn today from the wisdom of Thomas More, then it is that tyranny brooks no criticism, and that the ingrained selfishness of the tyrant is only overcome by the self sacrificing integrity of the martyr. A grim message perhaps, but one that has been reiterated over and over again in Eastern Europe and in Southern Africa. Someone has to say "No"; someone has to stand for truth. And there is a line of martyrs from Dietrich Bonhoeffer through the victims of the Gulag Archipelago to those recently murdered in the black townships of South Africa whose life rose above tyranny and whose death ultimately sealed the fate of the tyrant, even though the tyrant long outlived the martyr.

So More, seeing the misery and suffering consequent upon such a hopeless tyranny, looked wider to a new Europe, based on virtue rather than power, seeking peace rather than war, and a justice rooted in mutual respect and appreciation, and in the sharing of material wealth. It is undoubtedly this realisation and hope that confirmed him in his belief in the papacy and the ideal of an international church; whatever the Popes he had to contend with, a polity based on universal cooperation was to him infinitely better than an island commu ity defending itself against the rest of the world and seeking such advantage as it might find when political and economic barriers were down elsewhere. In this new Europe, proselytising sects claiming a monopoly on religious truth had no place. Luther, as Erasmus had warned him, was not the new learning but an apocalyptic anarchist, forcing his own limited views of Revelation on a world unable to receive it. For More, the whole world of civilisation was God's wonder, the whole wisdom of ancient man a preparation for the Gospel, the whole conduct of affairs both in state and in private a science long worked out by philosophers and statesmen and now crowned by the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. Perhaps he was a European before his time; perhaps he died for an ideal that could only be born out of the crucible of three hundred more years of war and conflict. He would have rejoiced to see Henry's daughter Elizabeth; he would have loved the world of Shakespeare and Raleigh, delighted in actually setting foot in the New World whence Raphael Hythlodae had brought him news of Utopia. That was not to be. But today, as we stand on the brink of a closer European unity than we have ever seen before, as we see the Church of England and the Church of Rome in conversation deeper and more thorough than we could have ever dreamed, we should be proud of More, proud of his vision and pray that in our own day, it may both sustain and enlighten us, as he in his person sustained and encouraged many a brave soul to see beyond the narrow boundaries of nationalism into the open world of a shared culture and a united faith.

© 2004 The Vicar and Wardens of Chelsea Old Church. All rights reserved
Website by Intendance Ltd