Bolt and the Bastardized Saint
In praise of Thomas More the man, in protest of his caricature
The New Digest is delighted to present an essay on St. Thomas More — the man and the literary character — by Jack Kieffaber. Mr. Kieffaber received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2023.
Anyone who’s ever lectured you on the rule of law has likely recited the Nicene Creed of the FedSoc boomer:
“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
That’s the famous line from Saint Thomas More, the literary character in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. It’s already well documented that Thomas More the man never said these words — and a new book, The Controversial Thomas More, does yeoman’s work showing that he didn’t share their sentiments, either. But that’s not going to dissuade the generation of lawyers who cite the quote as gospel; these guys like Hamilton, we’re not nitpicking our way out of this one.
Rather, I want to mount a frontal assault: The quote itself, inaccurate or not, doesn’t make any sense. And its influence, particularly among conservative Christians, has helped create a generation of half-moralist, half-proceduralist chimeras that don’t make much sense either. The result is an element of absurdity that’s gone understudied both in Bolt’s play and in conservative legal culture.
This is a big hornet’s nest to kick, so at least give me a running start. What follows is an attack on More the character, not More the man.
The premise of A Man for All Seasons is simple: Man’s law compels Thomas More to do one thing while God’s law compels him to do another. The former comes as King Henry VIII, who wants to be the Pope of his own made-up religion; the latter comes as God, who says Henry can’t do that. In the middle of it all sits More, caught between his devout Catholic faith and his fealty to the King as England’s Lord Chancellor. And by the end, he’s got two clear-cut options: Pledge fealty to the King’s new religion, or get beheaded.
Even based on raw utilitarianism, the choice between King and God is pretty obvious: The King rules an island, God rules the universe. When you cross the King to serve God, the absolute worst case scenario is you get martyred and enjoy eternal bliss in heaven; when you cross God to serve the King, you burn in Hell for all eternity. Easy call; the only world in which you’d ever even consider crossing God to serve the King is if you didn’t actually think there was a God in the first place — and thus viewed a long life on Earth as, basically, the best thing you could hope for.
But Saint Thomas More — even Bolt’s version — is a saint. He unequivocally believes in God to the most muscular extent. So obviously, he tells the King to pack sand and takes the beheading like a champ. Right?
Well… no. But he doesn’t side with the King either. What makes the play tick is that More tries to make up his own “Option C”: Processmaxxing. Simply put, More knows the law better than anybody else — and he knows that, under the law’s black letter, the King can’t make him state his position on the matter. And so, he convinces himself that he can keep hiding behind the trees and the Devil won’t see him.
So framed, the play very nearly becomes a comedy. Cue the Benny Hill theme as the King keeps unilaterally changing the black letter law and More keeps finding textual loopholes that let him stay silent. First, More quietly resigns his chancellorship — foreshadowing Justice Scalia’s stunning assertion that, if tasked with judging during a duly enacted holocaust, he would simply quit his post. Then he outwits lesser legal minds like Thomas Cromwell, who try and fail to trap him in legal games of chess. Even when Henry cuts to the chase and forces all of England to swear an oath to his religious primacy — and the yakety sax is really blasting now — More’s first reaction isn’t fight or flight. It’s that he wants to read the damned thing first to see if the plain text lets him weasel out again.
Of course, there is no loophole. So More refuses the oath and faces arrest — but still hangs his hopes on the background procedural norm that silence implies consent. This is baffling on many fronts. For one, if silence implies consent… that means he consented. And his approach here is absurd: If More thought that manifesting consent in human terms while secretly maintaining a holy mind would satisfy God’s law, why didn’t he just say aloud “I consent” with his fingers crossed behind his back? At this point the comedy hits its climax; More is trying to loophole both the King and God at the same time.
He fails on both fronts; his old acquaintance Richard Rich lies on the stand, testifying that More had privately disparaged the King’s new stint as vicar, and they throw the book at him. Only then, with no tree left to cower behind, More loudly and vigorously chooses God over King. Then they lop his head off and the play ends.
Against this backdrop, we revisit the famous quote: More’s admonition to William Roper, the foolish young man who would dare to chop down all the trees in the forest lest the Devil turn ‘round on him. What happened to the trees More so scrupulously kept erect throughout his loophole crusade? The Devil snapped his fingers and they disintegrated. That’s a feature, not a bug; the Devil rules this Earth until Christ comes back to reclaim it. Trees don’t do the trick; even the slowfooted Cromwell had a chainsaw of his own to match Roper’s.
So the metaphor breaks down on simple logistics — but it flounders more broadly on its epistemic merits. Why is Thomas More afraid of the Devil? Again, the worst the Devil can do is martyr him and send him to eternal bliss. If you rolled your eyes at that line, it’s not because my logic’s faulty; it’s because you don’t think God works like that. But if God doesn’t work like that… how does he work? Does God burn people in Hell for following his decrees to the death? Such zeal hung Peter from an upside down cross; is Peter in Hell? No. Doing God’s will results in salvation. You can only fear the Devil, then, for two reasons:
You don’t believe in God.
You’re not actually sure what God wants you to do.
Which of these camps did Thomas More, the character, fall into? Because he certainly fell into one; if he believed in a God that would redeem him for eternity and knew for a fact that opposing Henry’s new church was what God wanted him to do, he would never have even resigned his post as Chancellor — he would have stated his objection straight away and faced the consequences with a smile. But was he unsure what God wanted him to do? His final statement suggests not; few heresies are more obvious than Henry’s, and More quite clearly had his mind made up from the start.
That only leaves one option — and it’s a strange one for Bolt to attribute to a Saint. But even Saints are humans. They sin. And doubt is the root of all sin; any hedonistic pleasure, indulged in the face of eternal hellfire, is an action so illogical that it can only suggest doubt as to that hellfire’s inevitability — either via outright atheism or a presumptuous reliance on God’s mercy coming without reservation. Fear of death is doubt, and Thomas More the character feared death. Some may rebut that More had a family to protect — that he feared for their souls rather than his. But the King’s inevitable course of action is written on the wall from the play’s beginning and More is no fool; in spite of that, he takes no measures to flee or otherwise hide his family. So More, in Bolt’s telling, didn’t just fear death. He also feared change — and seized on even the remote chance that, with the help of text and process, he could keep his morals and his manor house. He kept only one, salvaging his morality in the end before dying and leaving his family to Henry’s mercy.
What I’ve laid out here is a draconian position: You should obey God without any fear of consequence. You almost certainly disagree. And on some level, so do I; my life, like yours, is wrought with the kinds of indulgences and concessions that belie a quotient of doubt. We both disagree not because my premises are faulty; if God is what the Bible claims and is knowable, there is no logical conclusion but to follow him at all costs. We disagree because we doubt. But most of us don’t follow that doubt to its inevitable amoral depths; nihilism, like total faith, is entirely too logical and all-consuming a position to admit we hold. So we pick Option C; finding ourselves neither Christ nor Richard Rich, we pit ourselves against King and Creator both.
The result is a third religion — neither civic nor spiritual — whose gospel is legal text and whose church is the mitigating institution. It’s a religion of protected indecision, whereby arbitrary human processes preserve a status quo — be it monarchist acquiescence or enlightenment hivemind. To be sure, that status quo is always a decision in its own right; More’s own plan of inaction, had it succeeded, would’ve found him swearing a constructive legal oath to the Anglican regime. But it allows us to maintain our delusion of independence — declaring, like More in his last words, that “I die his Majesty's good servant, but God's first” as though one could serve both agendas coterminously. False; More was his Majesty’s good servant only insofar as he counseled the King towards Godliness. When it came to executing his Majesty’s earthly wishes, More was a mutinous servant — and rightly so.
Our natural conclusion, then, is perhaps the only line in Bolt’s play more famous than the one quoted at the outset: “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?” One could just as easily ask Bolt’s protagonist, as he parsed the plain text of the King’s oath: “But for life, Thomas?” And the dilemma need not be so stark to carry weight: “But for a living?” “But for safety?” “But for freedom?” Lawyers, along with all wealthy men, conceive of the Devil’s bargain as a soul in exchange for riches untold — or, at least, unpossessed. But Wales and the world and our very lives thereupon are all equals to the extent eternity dwarfs them; any other view is born of disbelief. Disbelief, to be sure, may prove just as practicable a worldview as its Holy counterpart. But thoroughly impracticable is the middle way, that religion of least resistance. And every existential quandary that plagues America today stems from our attempt to worship it.
You might be wondering what the real Thomas More did. The answer is as radical as it is logical. He refused the Oath of Succession outright. He was jailed for it. In prison, he waged a war of conscience in ink — likening the King to a “Turk” and a “midday devil’s minister” while eviscerating bishops who caved to royal pressure. He feared eternal damnation more than death; to quote Pope Leo XIV in a recent address, his “readiness to sacrifice his life rather than betray the truth ma[de] him a martyr for freedom and the primacy of conscience.”
As a man, Thomas More was a Saint. As a literary character, he is the decline of our nation.
I'm not so sure about this analysis. I think the duty to honor the king, rooted in the fourth commandments is underappreciated here and possibly in the play - but not by More the man.
While the full-throated principled stand certainly has precedent (see John Fisher's handling of the situation), More's recognition of man's law as a participation in natural and therefore God's law is quite possibly a plausible explanation for his course of action.
Aquinas' opinions on the grounds for rebelling (narrow to none) would certainly be familiar to More, and should be considered in the background to his approach to Henry
From Hilaire Belloc’s “Characters of the Reformation” (1936), pp. 68-69:
Observe the circumstances of that death, and see how strange they were compared with what might be called, with due respect, the general run of martyrdoms.
The King had determined to get his true marriage declared null, to make Anne Boleyn his queen, and to make Anne Boleyn's child his heir. Sir Thomas More did not protest when he saw that the royal policy was drifting more and more away from unity with the Holy See; he resigned his office, but he did so without explanation. If another should take his place who had not these scruples, he would raise no voice against the newcomer.
When the royal supremacy was declared in its final and most conclusive form, in November of 1534, and the Pope was repudiated (though the Mass and everything else went on as usual) he remained what was called, in the language of the day, a loyal subject to his "natural Lord," King Henry.
He did not challenge; he remained silent, so far as official action went, although, of course, his private conviction was known.
Even when the Oath of Supremacy was administered he was prepared to accept the marriage of Henry with Anne, and to admit that their child should inherit the throne, through the disinheritance of the true heiress, the Princess Mary.
When the document was put before him for his acceptance, to be sworn to in the presence of Granmer at Lambeth in the Archbishop's palace, he made no protest against it as a whole. All he said was that there was a point in the Preamble which he could not accept. He held out over a detail or what seemed to contemporaries a detail. "One" poor scruple." He said that the Preamble implied something he could not in conscience accept.
They did not want to sacrifice him. They bade him think it over; and he walked up and down in the gardens of Lambeth palace thinking it over, as they thought, but he was not likely to think himself into another state of mind. He stood firm, on that one small point: that the phraseology of one small part of a law which, in everything
else, he accepted, was at issue with orthodoxy. For that he was imprisoned, for that, many months after, he willingly accepted death.
When they went through the form of trial in the last days before his sacrifice, it is remarkable to observe how silent he still remained, how wholly upon the defensive, still asking his opponents to prove their case, and keeping back in reserve all that he might have said. Until sentence was delivered no man could have proved out of his own mouth what that doctrine was for which none the less he was ready to lay down his life. Only when sentence had been passed did he speak at last, fully, and tell them precisely what his position was.