History: A Man for More Seasons

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In an essay on Mohandas Gandhi, George Orwell declared that saints must be presumed guilty until proved innocent. The earthly life of Thomas More, saint though he be, makes such presumption easy. More was a consummate political insider, upwardly mobile in a Machiavellian age and seemingly indispensable at the volatile court of England's tyrannical Henry VIII. With crafty language and veiled speech, he was master of the legalistic surmise and the affidavit of denial. He was the pre-eminent lawyer of the realm. At the same time, More could spit scatology with the foulest pamphleteers in that feverish dawn of the printing press. And as he spewed, he cast a censorious eye on the revolutionary and newfangled free flow of information. He believed in banning books. He believed in burning heretics.

Such affronts to modern sensibility are not whitewashed in Peter Ackroyd's brilliantly conceived biography The Life of Thomas More (Doubleday; 447 pages; $30). Jarringly inconsistent with the figure idolized in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, as well as its multi-Oscared 1966 film version, the sins are nevertheless integral to the man who emerges from Ackroyd's book, which was a No. 1 London Times best seller earlier this year and has been climbing several U.S. lists since being published here last month. Thomas More is not hagiography. Yet here is the paradox: it has the power of a second, secular canonization, establishing More, sans halo, as a martyr for a lost cosmic connectedness, the exemplar of a once commonplace mysticism that Ackroyd has evoked and mourned in recent work.

In our century, More, in his opposition to the divorce and remarriage of Henry VIII, is celebrated as a bulwark of the individual conscience. The genius of Ackroyd's book is its reminder that More's conscience was communal, standing in defense of the colorful and emotional piety of an England born of, and bound most preciously to, Catholic Christendom. It was to preserve those ties that More, the great humanist and loyal church reformer, debated the disloyal Protestants. It was to preserve his pious England that More enforced the ban on translations of the Bible into the incendiary vernacular, arguing that to "believe nothing but plain Scripture" was "pestilential heresy." There were more things than words to treasure in a London, as depicted by Ackroyd, full of Maypoles and processions and founts of sacredness, a city in which each day was significant in God's calendar. More knew the King's marriage would shatter that order with the force of apocalypse. And he was right. His England was swept away in the ensuing years, replaced by one that disavowed the old pieties while hungering for them.