His books and writing materials were taken away in the spring of 1535. Henry VIII had decided that More’s silence — his refusal to speak either for or against the Act of Supremacy recognizing the King as head of the Church in England — was itself a form of defiance that could not be permitted to continue. Among the comforts removed were the papers on which More had been writing in his Tower cell a long meditation on Christ’s agony in the garden, the De Tristitia Christi — The Sadness of Christ — which would survive only because his son-in-law William Roper managed to preserve the manuscript. It is still in Valencia, Spain, in the Real Colegio Seminario del Corpus Christi, where it has remained for nearly five centuries.
Thomas More had been in the Tower of London since April 1534, arrested for refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy. He was 56 years old, a former Lord Chancellor, the most eminent lawyer in England, the author of Utopia, the friend of Erasmus, a man whom Henry had once walked arm in arm with in the garden at Chelsea, “holding his arm about his neck.” None of it mattered now.
What strikes those who read his prison correspondence is the quality of the attention he brought to his situation. His letters to his daughter Margaret — who visited him whenever she could, who carried messages and little luxuries, who filled one letter to him with persuasions to take the oath as a ruse to fool Cromwell’s interceptors — are among the most remarkable things he wrote. He was, he told her, “in good health of body, and in good quiet of mind.” He described his imprisonment as among the greatest benefits God had ever bestowed on him. In one letter, he wrote of his fear that his courage might fail at the crucial moment, and reached, characteristically, for the example of Peter sinking in the water:
He was tried for treason on July 1, 1535. The case against him rested on the testimony of Richard Rich, the Solicitor General, who claimed that More had, in a private conversation, denied the King’s supremacy. More’s defense was devastating — he described Rich as a man whose word no one in England would take on oath on a matter of serious consequence — but the jury deliberated for 15 minutes and returned a guilty verdict. More’s response, once the sentence was pronounced, was to speak freely for the first time of his belief that no temporal authority could claim headship over the Church of Christ.
On the evening of July 5, the day before his execution, he wrote his last letter to Margaret. Henry had ordered his books and writing materials removed, so he wrote with a stick of charcoal, on cloth. The letter is full of blessings — for Margaret, for her husband, for her little boy, for each of his children and grandchildren, for his godchildren, for his friends. At the end he wrote: “I cumber you good Margaret much, but I would be sorry if it should be any longer than tomorrow, for it is Saint Thomas’s eve, and the Utas of Saint Peter, and therefore tomorrow long I to go to God… Fare well my dear child and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends, that we may merrily meet in heaven.”
He was executed the following morning on Tower Hill. He appeared calm and, characteristically, in good humor. He asked the Lieutenant of the Tower to help him up the scaffold steps and promised he would manage to come down on his own. His final words were: “I die the King’s good servant, and God’s first.”
Margaret retrieved his head from London Bridge, where it had been set on a spike. She kept it as a relic until her death, and it is believed to rest still in the Roper vault at Saint Dunstan’s Church in Canterbury. What remains of the De Tristitia Christi — the meditation on Christ’s suffering that the guards interrupted when they took away his pen — ends in mid-sentence. The manuscript simply stops, in the middle of a word. More was in the garden with Christ when they came for him, and he did not get to finish his thought.
He was canonized by Pius XI in 1935, four hundred years after his death. John Paul II declared him patron saint of statesmen and politicians in the Jubilee year 2000. While he is celebrated with John Fisher (the bishop-martyr killed the same year) on June 22, July 6 is the anniversary of More's death — a summer saint, for summer reading.
