In the series 'The Tudors' which I know is pretty dire but I confess I have seen when Thomas More resigns the Chancellorship he promises Henry that he will not speak about Henry's Great Matter. I think that is fact? However he also promises that he will not write anything against it either. I know that he did write, a lot, and as I can't imagine him as the king's good servant breaking a promise, is that part true? Did he in fact promise not to write against it?
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The King's Good Servant but God's first.
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Re:Did Thomas break a promise? 9 Months, 1 Week ago
When Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor in 1532, he promised to withdraw from public life in order 'to bestow the residue of my life in mine age now to come about the provision for my soul in the service of God, and to be your Grace's beadsman and pray for you'.
Shortly after Christmas 1533, Thomas Cromwell received an anonymous tip-off that Thomas More was preparing to publish an attack on Henry. Unable to take the risk, Cromwell raided the shop of More's publisher. Nothing was found, and More told Cromwell in a letter that he hadn't written anything recently, apart from a book defending the theology of the mass.
But had he written anything that might give Henry and Cromwell pause? And was there something that might be regarded as returning to public life? A month before Anne Boleyn's coronation in 1533, More had published 'The Apology of Sir Thomas More', a long book defending the old order in the Catholic Church. More advised 'every good Christian man and woman' to 'stand by the old, without the contrary change of any point of our old belief for anything brought up for new'. He urged all Henry's subjects 'to stand to the common well-known belief of the common-known Catholic Church of all Christian people, such faith as by yourself, and your fathers, and your grandfathers, you have known to be believed, and have (over that) heard by them that the contrary was in the times of their fathers and their grandfathers also taken evermore for heresy'. Did Cromwell think those remarks subversive? Did they imply that Henry's divorce and remarriage to Anne Boleyn were wrong?
Lying is a tricky word, because no one thought then it was wrong to 'dissimulate'. Especially in a 'godly' cause. When Thomas More was a prisoner in the Tower, he and Bishop John Fisher persuaded one of the lieutenant of the Tower's servants, George Gold, to carry letters between them. Asking what he should do if he were caught and questioned, Gold was told by both More and Fisher to deny everything as by English law he was not bound to incriminate himself. But 'if he were sworn upon a book [i.e. questioned on oath], that then ... he should discharge his conscience and say the truth.' Thomas More thought that dissimulation and deceit were morally justifiable in the face of Henry's cruelty, except on oath.
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when Thomas More resigns the Chancellorship he promises Henry that he will not speak about Henry's Great Matter. I think that is fact? However he also promises that he will not write anything against it either. I know that he did write, a lot, and as I can't imagine him as the king's good servant breaking a promise, is that part true? Did he in fact promise not to write against it?
