Thomas Extra was a “failure,” however one worthy of emulation—even or maybe particularly right this moment, 5 centuries later. So declares Joanne Paul, in a preface to her partaking and exquisitely researched biography, Thomas Extra: A Life.
However a failure how? Extra rose from modest origins to grow to be Lord Chancellor of England underneath King Henry VIII. In Samuel Johnson’s judgment, he was “the individual of biggest advantage these [British] isles ever produced.” He would posthumously grow to be a Catholic saint, to not point out the hero of a play and a film (A Man for All Seasons) that received the Oscar for Greatest Image. How then was he a “failure”?
Extra lived by means of a fulcrum interval in Western historical past when the Christendom of the earlier thousand years was disintegrating and the trendy secular state was starting to emerge. This was a change that Extra anticipated with dread, and he devoted his monumental abilities and the perfect years of his life—certainly his life itself, which he finally sacrificed on a scaffold—to resisting it.
However his resistance would “come to nothing,” Paul explains. “It’s troublesome to level to any occasion or second in Tudor historical past and declare that it will have been vastly completely different with out his intervention.”
Even so, Paul sees in Extra’s failure one thing admirable and ominously well timed. “Tyrants, it is not going to shock you to be taught, nonetheless exist. Those that are prepared to destroy anybody who stands in opposition to their will—a will pushed by self-interest, satisfaction and determined paranoia—rule right this moment as they did 500 years in the past.” And Extra’s “willingness to face agency and converse reality to an awesome energy is as related in right this moment’s world because it was to that of Henry VIII.”
Not everybody has admired Extra, after all. He has been depicted (in John Foxe’s Ebook of Martyrs, for example, or in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Corridor novels) as a shriveled-up, mean-spirited inquisitor. Paul herself doesn’t overtly take sides in these interpretive contests. She principally follows the literary technique of “present, don’t inform,” hardly ever providing her personal speculations or judgments about Extra’s choices and deeds (besides within the preface and the epilogue, the place she briefly steps exterior her scholarly persona).
Her descriptions themselves are fantastically textured. A lot of the ebook reads virtually as if Paul had adopted Extra round with a video digicam, deftly recording (with all of the sights, sounds, even smells) the occasions, discussions, and disputes by means of which his life unfolded. How had been the chambers adorned? Who was there, and the way had been they dressed? Who spoke first, who responded, what precisely did they are saying? The element is outstanding—I typically discovered myself questioning, “How does she know all these items?”—and it helps deliver Extra’s world to life.
It was an earthy world, but in addition a sacramental world, with fixed connections to transcendence. Paul thus tells us in regards to the quite a few non secular festivals, processions, feasts, and ceremonies of their splendid particularities: the candles, the vestments, the liturgies, the music, the bells. These items constituted the consecrated world that Extra tried desperately however unsuccessfully to protect.
However after all, that world was not all candles and festivals; it was a scene of pervasive violence and political peril as nicely. As an toddler, Extra was nurtured inside a morning’s stroll of the murderous doings by which Richard III seized energy. As an grownup, Extra lived by means of a sequence of overseas wars and, much more ominously, inside political developments whereby Henry VIII consolidated despotic energy whereas dispatching into exile or to execution those that stood in his means. “These issues be King’s video games,” Extra noticed, “because it had been stage performs, and for probably the most half performed upon scaffolds.”
However Extra was not a mere spectator of those “stage performs”; he was a central participant. This function was the results of a portentous alternative—a alternative that in a single kind or one other many confront once more right this moment. In a political world fraught with hazard, corruption, and outright wickedness, ought to an individual try and retain his purity by remaining politically indifferent? Or ought to he immerse himself on the planet, even perhaps compromising himself, in an effort to information political issues in a passable course?
Extra’s good friend Erasmus, the famend humanist scholar, implored him to remain away from kings’ affairs, to proceed within the scholarly and literary work mirrored in Extra’s traditional Utopia. However Extra made a special alternative, guided by St. John Chrysostom’s counsel to pursue a life “busy amongst cities.” And thus he rose from lawyer and native lecturer on St. Augustine to undersheriff of London, thence to overseas diplomat, to member and later speaker of the Home of Commons, to shut good friend and counselor to the king, to Lord Chancellor.
It was in his final years, nevertheless, that Extra’s character—each his admirable qualities and what no less than from a recent perspective could appear his extra censurable tendencies—manifested themselves most starkly. Two developments dominated these final years: the trouble in England to suppress the unfold of Protestantism, and the tumultuous and transformative doings that surrounded Henry’s marketing campaign to finish his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and to consummate his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Extra participated vigorously within the first of those developments. He tried desperately to keep away from involvement within the second. And in every occasion, he failed.
As king’s councilor and particularly as Lord Chancellor, Extra energetically opposed the introduction of Lutheranism into England. He wrote treatises denouncing Luther and his concepts. He vigorously enforced legal guidelines prohibiting the importation or possession of Lutheran writings. He imprisoned and interrogated suspected Protestants, generally at his own residence. And when the suspects persevered of their heresies (as he believed), Extra generally had them burned on the stake.
Extra’s world was not one which had embraced the precepts of a John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.
Such actions provoked each defenses and fierce criticisms on the time, and naturally, they’re much more disturbing to up to date liberal sensibilities. Important biographer Richard Marius discerned in Extra’s actions a deep anger and virtually depravity of character. Hilary Mantel described him as a “blood-soaked hypocrite.” Defenders have argued, conversely, that Extra was solely imposing the legal guidelines; that the variety of Protestants condemned to demise underneath his administration was small in comparison with the variety of Catholics who could be executed underneath Thomas Cromwell, Extra’s successor as Henry’s right-hand man; and that Extra’s world was not one which had embraced the precepts of a John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.
Paul describes the measures Extra took, and she or he studies Extra’s personal explanations. Extreme measures had been vital, he argued, to guard harmless believers and certainly the dominion from a lethal theological contagion that might undermine civilization itself. Such self-discipline was additionally typically the perfect treatment, he mentioned, for the wayward heretics themselves (for whose welfare Extra all the time professed concern).
Had been these defenses honest, and did they justify Extra’s actions? As common, Paul tells us what Extra did and mentioned however presents no “harmless or responsible” verdict of her personal.
As for “the king’s Nice Matter”—specifically, his want to separate from Catherine and to marry Anne—it was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s failure to attain papal approval for the annulment that led to his downfall and to Extra’s appointment to interchange him as Lord Chancellor. In accepting the appointment, Extra obtained Henry’s permission to observe his conscience. However because the controversy escalated and as Henry’s obsession intensified, it turned inconceivable to stay indifferent. Extra appears to have cooperated as a lot as he may. At one level, he appeared earlier than each Homes of Parliament and made the king’s case in lawyer-like style, presenting the supporting arguments and proof with out purporting to provide his private views.
And when this was not sufficient, Extra resigned the workplace, hoping to stay out his life in personal along with his household and his books. But it surely was too late for that.
Because it turned clear that the pope wouldn’t grant the annulment, Henry concluded that the one strategy to finish his marriage was to separate from the Roman Church. To that finish, the king and his males employed varied barely or not fairly authorized means to intimidate the English clergy into submission. They revived and expanded an previous authorized concept of “praemunire,” which forbade appeals to Rome, with a view to indict your entire clergy for illegality and disloyalty. When the prelates didn’t act on a proposal to make Henry head of the church, the king’s males invoked an previous authorized maxim treating silence as equal to assent. Parliament was induced to amend the definition of treason in order that any criticism of the king would now qualify as treasonous if performed “maliciously” (a time period that, as Extra anticipated, turned out to imply just about regardless of the king and the judges needed it to imply). The regulation was being cynically used—and abused—to attain no matter these in energy needed.
After which new legal guidelines had been handed requiring all English topics to take an oath affirming the validity of the annulment, the succession of Anne as queen, and, by clear implication, the elevation of the king to be head of the church. Extra’s refusal to take this oath led to his imprisonment within the Tower of London for fifteen months and, finally, his trial and execution. Each the king’s males and Extra’s family and friends pleaded with him to take the oath, as almost everybody within the kingdom (together with his household) had performed. He was repeatedly assured, even on the day of his trial, that if he would merely affirm the phrases of the oath, he could be restored to his freedom and his household. But he refused, saying merely that he couldn’t act in opposition to his conscience.
Whether or not he was justified on this refusal was and is debatable, however his braveness by means of the entire affair is unmistakable. Paul relates all the pertinent developments in riveting element: the authorized maneuvering, the confrontations with Cromwell and others, the earnest conversations with and letters to Extra’s household. She does so once more with little commentary, however it’s inconceivable to not discern the integrity and depth of Extra’s character by means of these excruciating occasions.
Paul studies Extra’s well-known declaration on the scaffold that he was the king’s good servant however God’s first: “As he went to his demise, nevertheless, Extra may consolation himself with the reassurance that he had lived his life—and given his life—in service of these issues he held most expensive.”
So, sure, he had lived and given his life in service of these treasured issues, however he had not managed to protect them. In an epilogue, Paul portrays the reworked, disenchanted world that was to observe, using her precept of “present, don’t inform.” Chapter one of many ebook relates how Extra was born simply after the celebration of Candlemas, or the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, and it describes the “hundreds of small flickering lights” because the “individuals of London—younger and previous, female and male, wealthy and poor—processed by means of the winding streets” of town. A century later, the epilogue studies, “no candles had been carried by Londoners by means of their metropolis” for Candlemas. The Tudor revolution had banished the celebration.
Extra’s efforts had failed. However Paul means that they nonetheless had their worth, and that they’re related nonetheless:
These, like Thomas Extra, who stand as much as these males [of power] and remind them of upper rules, deeper truths, better duties, have to be remembered for his or her efforts, even once they come to nothing. … They’re the figures who encourage us when an important booming voice from above tells us we should obey, should submit, and a voice deep inside us responds, regardless of how quietly, “No.”
