Thomas More on integrity and death
We must stand fast even at the risk of being heroes
Or Thomas More in the words of the English playwright Robert Bolt in his play and movie A Man For All Seasons. More, who was declared a saint in 1935, refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the divorced and remarried King Henry VIII that, as a Catholic, he could not swear. Henry tried to break him and then had him executed when he didn’t. These lines are taken from the play.
Thomas More explains to his daughter Margaret swear an oath he does not believe, when she urges him to “say the words of the oath and in your heart think otherwise”:
When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. [He cups his hands] And if he opens his fingers then — he needn't hope to find himself again. Some men aren’t capable of this, but I'd be loathe to think your father one of them.
More answers her when she tells him that he would be “raised up high” if the state weren’t “three-quarters bad,” and that he’s trying to appoint himself a hero:
If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all . . . why then we must stand fast a little — even at the risk of being heroes.
The court reminds him at his trial that the punishment of his alleged crime is death, and More responds:
Death . . . comes for us all, my lords. Yes, even for Kings he comes, to whom amidst all their Royalty and brute strength he will neither kneel nor make them my reverence nor pleasantly desire them to come forth, but roughly grasp them by the very breast and rattle them until they be stark dead! So causing their bodies to be buried in a pit and sending them to a judgment . . . whereof at their death their success is uncertain.
More on the way to the scaffold to his daughter Margaret:
Have patience, Margaret, and trouble not thyself, Death comes for us all; even at our birth, even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh. It is the law of nature, and the will of God.
The executioner after executing More:
It isn’t difficult to keep alive, friends — just don’t make trouble — or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that’s expected. Well, I don’t need to tell you that.
Previous: Cynthia Ozick on the only way literature can change anything.
Next: Christopher Hitchens on antisemitism.