Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dr. Jordan Grumet, on Tyrants Vs. Saints)

“The tyrant seeks to bend the world to their will. They apply power externally to remake the environment, people, or culture around them, often in the belief that if they can just change enough out there, they will finally feel whole inside. Saints, on the other hand, reverse this equation. They focus their power inward—working on themselves, healing their wounds, mastering their habits, refining their values. Ironically, it’s through this inward mastery that they end up changing the world more deeply than any tyrant ever could.”— Dr. Jordan Grumet, “Tyrants vs. Saints: The Power That Changes Everything” (“The Regret-Free Life” blog), Psychology Today, Apr. 15, 2025

The image accompanying this post shows perhaps the epitome of a saint in conflict with a tyrant: left to right, a pensive St. Thomas More and a browbeating King Henry VIII (played by, respectively, Paul Scofield and Robert Shaw) in the 1966 Best Picture Oscar winner, A Man for All Seasons.

The crisis that Henry forced on More is a reminder not only of the heavy burden that public officials face in drawing a moral line that arbitrary rulers cannot cross, but also the responsibility that ordinary individuals must maintain in upholding the primacy of conscience.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thomas More, With Advice on Dealing With Leaders)

“You are now entered into the service of a most noble, wise, and liberal prince. If you will follow my poor advice, you shall, in your counsel giving unto his Grace, ever tell him what he ought to do, but never what he is able to do. For if the lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him."—English statesman, lawyer, author, and Roman Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), with advice to Henry VIII’s new adviser Thomas Cromwell, quoted by William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More (1626)

An initial instinct of a historian, let alone an inveterate skeptic, would be to question possible bias in the source of this quote: a biography of Sir Thomas More by son-in-law William Roper.

But this sounds exactly like the kind of thing that More would say, demonstrating loyalty to King Henry VIII while increasingly conscious that the monarch, in his single-minded pursuit of a divorce from Catherine of Aragon to wed Anne Boleyn, was anything but a “most noble, wise, and liberal prince.”

It was also carefully phrased wisdom for Thomas Cromwell, the rising power in the nation because of his support of the king in Parliament. It reflected how More—resigning as Lord Chancellor and desiring to be left alone in retirement—knew that anything negative he said would be reported immediately to Henry—more likely than not, by Cromwell himself.

With Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novel trilogy and its PBS adaptation, Cromwell has emerged as a revisionist hero of sorts, with More depicted as a religious fanatic bent on persecuting heretics.

To be sure, More did prosecute heretics. But, for all his energy, intelligence, and administrative ability, Cromwell was not only no improvement but worse than More, torturing and putting to death Catholics who opposed Henry’s break from Rome (a rupture motivated by dynastic and libidinal reasons rather than by theology). 

In transforming this ruthless minister into a sympathetic figure, Mantel engineered one of the more successful historical hijackings in recent memory.

(See my prior post on how Simon Schama, Eamon Duffy, and other historians persuasively argue that, despite Mantel’s considerable skill as a novelist, “Just because More hardly qualifies as a perfect man does not make Cromwell a remotely good one.”)

Moreover, while More abstained from the perks of power, Cromwell relished them—not just from all the offices and titles that Henry bestowed on him (for a time), but also from confiscations related to the dissolution of Roman Catholic monasteries. Self-interest—the acquisition of power and wealth—guided his actions.

In the end, did it really profit him? More’s warning proved prophetic. In his anxiety to do the king’s bidding, Cromwell met with disaster, as—a couple of the king’s wives later—he arranged a match with Anne of Cleves, a woman the monarch found so homely that he had his counselor beheaded.

Current events should make those who look kindly on Cromwell think again on this Machiavellian counselor who pioneered the modern police state. Appeasing a capricious leader with a voracious appetite for power (“I run the country and the world”) offers only initial benefits.

Conscience may or may not be dead among his enablers. But they will continually dread the possibility that, as More warned, it may no longer be possible to persuade or “rule” their mad leader about what constitutes his real interest anymore—and he may even turn on them in the end.

This Day in English History (Birth of Catherine of Aragon, First—and Best—of Henry’s Six Wives)

Dec. 16, 1485—Catherine of Aragon, whose marriage into the Tudor dynasty was intended to advance power relations between two of Europe’s major royal houses but wound up putting them at odds and widening the continent’s Catholic-Protestant fracture, was born in Alcala de Henares, Spain, the last child of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile.

Catherine’s pivotal role in the fate of Europe came about, of course, because she was the first of the six wives of King Henry VIII of England—the king whose desire to obtain a divorce set off England’s violent and protracted split from Catholicism. For years, schoolchildren desperate to distinguish her fate from that of her successors as Henry’s wives remembered that she was the first in the following helpful mnemonic device:

“Divorced, beheaded, died;
Divorced, beheaded, survived.”

I first became aware of this wronged woman back in the summer of 1971, through the U.S. premiere of the BBC mini-series The Six Wives of Henry VIII. As fine as the series (and especially Keith Michell as Henry) was, it helped further the general visual representation of Catherine as an aging, tired, pious spouse unable to compete with court minx Anne Boleyn.

That picture needs some adjustment. Particularly at the beginning of their marriage in 1509, Catherine was regarded as having few rivals for beauty in England. At the time, 18-year-old Henry not only had no problems with her, but was even eager to wed this attractive widow of his older, sicklier brother, Prince Arthur. “She was 23, plump and pretty, and had beautiful red-gold hair that hung below her hips,” according to historian Alison Weir. “Henry spoke openly of the joy and felicity he had found with Catherine.”

Many people have written about Catherine over the years, in fiction and nonfiction alike. One of the more fascinating accounts is Garrett Mattingly’s 1941 biography, Catherine of Aragon, which approaches her from his primary interest: diplomatic history. 

Expertly using recently discovered archives in Vienna and Brussels, Mattingly depicted a woman who needed all her strength, intelligence and faith to keep her footing amid neglect by her father, court intrigues waged by royals, envoys and clerics, and settlement in a strange foreign land—all at the hands of males who, more often than not, did not have her best interests in mind.

But one drawback of this biography is its author’s male point of view. Mattingly simply couldn’t understand why Catherine might quarrel with Henry over his infidelity. After all, royal wenching was the norm in that time. Even Catherine’s father, Ferdinand, was unfaithful.

It seems never to have occurred to Mattingly that some women are sincerely bothered by husbands who can’t control their wayward impulses—and don’t even try.

There is a further irony in Catherine’s sad fate: though Henry came to fault her inability to produce a male heir, neither could Anne Boleyn--and the one he was eventually able to have, crowned Edward VI, lasted on the throne only six years before dying himself.

For all his sexism, Mattingly couldn’t help praising Catherine for her “core of iron self-reliance [and] lonely stubbornness.” Like him and the current saucy interpreter of the royals, Lucy Worsley, I, too, am a member of “Team Catherine.”

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, With Advice for a Hotheaded Leader)

"Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot

That it do singe yourself."—English playwrights William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and John Fletcher (1579–1625), Henry VIII (1613)

Boy, just when you think The Bard’s time came and went centuries ago and he doesn’t have anything to say to us, you come across something like this…

And these lines, from the Prologue to Henry VIII, may be even more pertinent to our present reality:

“I come no more to make you laugh: things now,

That bear a weighty and a serious brow,

Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,

Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow,

We now present. Those that can pity, here

May, if they think it well, let fall a tear;

The subject will deserve it.”

This Day in Religious History (Cranmer Named Archbishop of Canterbury)

March 30, 1533—Thomas Cranmer achieved the dream of many British clergymen, before and since, when he was formally consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet the cleric’s immediate actions demonstrated that he was now in a position of extraordinary ambiguity, even danger. First, though he had secretly taken a wife while on a trip to Germany in the past year, he kept her out of public view lest he anger his monarch, King Henry VIII, who still believed in the Roman Catholic norm of priestly celibacy.

Second, though he was also obliged to take an oath of obedience to the pope along with one to the king, he insisted, in a secret oath immediately taken before it, that allegiance to the pontiff extended only insofar as it was consistent with loyalty to Henry.

The second action, in fact, underscored a prime concern of Cranmer for the next two decades: words. Words had the potential to bring him to the scaffold, as it would his clerical colleague, Bishop John Fisher, and a layman renowned for his intellect and faith, Sir Thomas More.

Yet words were also what he worshipped fervently only slightly less than God. They comprised his extensive library, which, at 700 volumes, exceeded not only private collections but those of Oxford and Cambridge in his time; they were what he insisted that students know thoroughly, as part of the Bible, when he taught at Cambridge; and they were the weapons he would use to transmit Protestantism and contribute to the literary landscape of Great Britain.

There is little if any reason to doubt that Cranmer was the most controversial figure of the English Reformation. If there is any historian who doesn’t agree that Henry was a capricious, cruel king, I would like to meet him. Similarly, for all the expert revisionism supplied by Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell remains best known as the ambitious roughneck who speeded the looting of the abbeys and the execution of those who ran afoul of Henry in the monarch's quest for a wife who could make him happy and produce an heir.

In contrast, Cranmer is seen, depending on one’s point of view, as the courageous herald of a new faith, a slippery theological facilitator of his king’s desires, or as a vacillating prelate who watched—and, on occasion, revised—what he wrote or said.

This post won’t review this contentious question. It will confine itself to how he got his position in the first place, and to an area on which much more agreement rests: his secure place in English letters.

Cranmer owed his position partly to an accident of fate: a plague, the so-called "sleeping sickness," that drove him away from Cambridge and out to Essex, where he was staying in the same neighborhood where Henry was lodging. It came to the attention of Henry and his counselors that Cranmer had found a justification for the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon (a passage from Leviticus 20:21 against wedding the widow of one’s brother) and a means by which to implement it (a decision by the nation’s canonists and universities that marriage with a deceased brother's widow was illegal, thus bypassing the by-no-means-certain approval of Pope Clement VII).

At the direction of Henry, Cranmer put aside all his other labors to securing the monarch’s desire. In the summer of 1532, the death of Archbishop William Warham of Canterbury allowed Henry to replace an aged prelate who had finally dared to break with him over his increasing estrangement from Rome with someone far more compliant.Yet the new appointee, undoubtedly sensing what he might be in for, delayed his return to England for seven weeks in the hope that something might happen to prevent the appointment. But the paperwork came back from Rome (an institution that would, in time, excommunicate Cranmer) and he began his uncertain and dangerous work.

Within two months after his consecration, Cranmer had granted Henry his divorce. Amazingly, as others (including Cromwell) incurred the monarch’s displeasure and suffered the fatal consequences, Cranmer managed to outlive the king.

Cranmer’s dramatic death in 1556, in the short reign of the Catholic Queen Mary—first recanting his views, then publicly recanting the recantation, thus bringing about his immediate execution—secured his place among Britain’s Protestant martyrs. In the decade before his death, however, he made a lasting contribution to the new faith and his nation’s language.

In 1549, at Pentecost, his Book of Common Prayer was introduced, followed by a revision three years later. Written in English, it embodied his belief that services should be conducted in a nation’s language rather than the universal language of Latin mandated by the Catholic Church. Together with the King James Bible introduced in the following century, it formed the foundation of worship in now-Anglican England.

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-1921) aptly summarized the influence of Cranmer through The Book of Common Prayer: “There is all the difference in the world between the crude bareness of the Litany as he found it, and its majestic rhythm when it left his pen.” Though not the sole author of the book, he is generally acknowledged as its prime mover and principal inspiration, in a way considerably different from the more committee-written King James Bible.

Through the following centuries of British life, as the country’s flag came to be flown through a worldwide empire, the cadences of The Book of Common Prayer became instilled in millions. Cranmer’s use of idiom, cadences, imagery, repetition, contrast and general rhythm impressed itself on the ear and heart. Using the simplest, most monosyllabic of (usually Anglo-Saxon based) words, he managed to imprint on generations of worshippers—and even those of his countrymen who have long fallen away from the faith—sentences and phrases impossible to forget:

“We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.”

“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.”

“Give peace in our time, our Lord.”

“Deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil.”

“To have and to hold from this day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.”

“In the midst of life we are in death.”

“

Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.”

This work has also contributed phrases that have become titles of well-known books: P.D. James’ Devices and Desires, Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast. It has also even informed the work of others who have not shared the prelate's beliefs in any manner, such as Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett. Even New Yorker literary critic James Wood, an avowed atheist, on the 350th anniversary of its slight amendation, noted that the “acute poetry, balanced sonorities, heavy order, and direct intimacy of Cranmer’s prose have achieved permanence.”

 

This Day in British History (Thomas More, Saint and Richard III ‘Biographer,’ Born)

February 7, 1478— Sir Thomas More (left), a witty intellectual who rose to the heights of English law and politics, was born just down the street in London from Thomas Becket, another commoner martyred and canonized (three centuries before) for defying a monarch named Henry.

Two recent events have thrust More—already powerfully etched in the history books, especially as hero of the play and film made from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons—once again into the public eye:

*The Royal Shakespeare Co. has announced that it will mount a stage version of two novels spotlighting Thomas Cromwell, one of More’s chief antagonists in the struggle arising from Henry VIII’s attempt to make his mistress Anne Boleyn the queen: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. (Previously, the BBC had announced separate plans for a mini-series based on these works.)

*Scholars announced that, after digging beneath a parking lot, they had discovered and positively identified the skeleton of Richard III, the king that More had immortalized, in an influential tract, as the epitome of treachery and tyranny.

More, Cromwell and Richard have a couple of things in common. First, all are connected, in some way, to the Tower of London—More and Cromwell as prisoners, and Richard as a monarch who ordered his enemies there (several of whom famously died untimely deaths). Second, all three ran afoul of the Tudor dynasty—More and Cromwell, executed on orders of the King they served as counselors, Henry VIII, and Richard killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, by troops under the man who took his throne, Henry VII, father of the fellow with six wives.

This particular blog post, in considering these three figures, is, in a real sense, concerned with reputation and revisionism. It’s about how history obscures lives, attempts to compensate by wiping the slate clean—and, in the process, continues to mess matters up, albeit differently.

Take Richard III, for instance. The man who overthrew him to end the War of the Roses, Henry Tudor, received an honored resting place in Westminster Abbey, even though his life didn’t really measure up to that hallowed institution. (He grasped money as tightly as power.) In contrast, Richard was dislodged from what was believed to be his original resting place, a church in Leicester,100 north of London, by what historian Eamon Duffy has called “The Stripping of the Altars,” i.e., the dismantling of England's churches and monasteries as part of Henry VIII’s effort to bring the Roman Catholic Church to heel. Then, the last of the Plantagenets had to endure lying underground, without any known shroud or coffin, for centuries--as we know now, more recently, even beneath a parking lot.

But, long before piles of dirt obscured the site of his remains, metaphorical ones had already been heaped on his reputation, courtesy of William Shakespeare. And one of the Bard’s major sources for his tragedy is More’s History of Richard III.

More’s work about the monarch is especially curious, given its influence on histiography and theater, for several reasons:

*It was never published in More’s lifetime—and in fact, according to the statesman’s biographer, Peter Ackroyd, it may have been intended more as a grammatical and rhetorical exercise for students that More was teaching at Oxford around 1513;

*More never completed the work, not getting close to what should have been its climax—Richard’s defeat and death at Bosworth;

*Other writers of the Tudor period incorporated More’s work into their own, and these latter materials were ultimately what Shakespeare saw when he wrote his play;

*More freely invented entire speeches for his characters, a practice almost no modern historian uses (this was before tape recorders or even stenographers), though such reputable ancient chroniclers as Thucydides and Tacitus had done likewise;

*It is unknown how many eyewitnesses More interviewed (one likely source: the Bishop of Ely, who had known the young More, and may have related to him Richard’s request for flowers—an anecdote that Shakespeare picked up on, too);

*More got some dates and names wrong, so he was not particularly accurate;

*Most tellingly, More may well have exaggerated Richard’s physical imperfections (the scoliosis of the spine present in the discovered skeleton) into the “croke backed” usurper we know, and he gave full credence to the part of Richard’s reign that weighs most powerfully in Shakespeare’s indictment: that he had his two young nephews killed while they were in the Tower of London.

Speaking of the Tower of London…Nearly two weeks ago, on the tail end of a business trip, I saw it at the start of a bus tour of Britain’s capital. It was hard to believe that the place I saw, albeit from a slight distance, on one sunlit morning, was a savage place once, but it was—a relic of a time of civil unrest and moral darkness.

This was the universe of what is now projected as Hilary Mantel’s historical trilogy on the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. I am halfway through the first of these three works, Wolf Hall, and Mantel’s ability to evoke the atmosphere of Henry VIII’s time—and to penetrate Cromwell’s psyche—are masterful. She is fully deserving of the critical acclaim (including receiving the Man Booker prize, Britain’s highly touted literary award, twice) that has come her way.

The most often used literary device of More's was irony. Now, in an ironic turn of events, the man who helped darken Richard’s character in the eyes of posterity is seeing his own reputation called into question. Mantel’s More suffers in constant comparison with her protagonist Cromwell, a figure long derided as ruthless. While she depicts Cromwell as accepting a new religion (Protestantism) based on individual interpretations of the Bible, More is rendered as a relentless heretic-hunter and book burner.Cromwell is shown as a loving widower; More, as a prude with no affection for his (second) wife, Alice. Cromwell might be tough, even ruthless, when he has to be, but he's a proto-democrat who's risen from common origins (a blacksmith-brewer father who mercilessly beat him) to take down entrenched, privilege nobility and clergy of England.

The beauty of Mantel’s style make all the more seductive a portrait of More with virtually no redeeming qualities. Even More did not deny Richard’s courage in battle, but in Mantel the only hint of the wit so often remarked upon in More is a scene where he mocks the intellectually inferior wife. Even one of the aspects of More’s private life most attractive to modern readers—his pride in his  daughter Margaret, easily one of the most learned women of the Tudor Era—comes off in Mantel’s depiction as incestuous.  

The practice of source-based, dispassionate history as we know it did not exist in More's time. But he was no mere Tudor propagandist (otherwise, he would have finished his history of Richard, and made sure it received the widest possible circulation). He did not have the benefit of distance from the events he describes, nor the freedom to tell about it--but, again ironically, he also did not mix rampant speculation and extensive historical research into his account as the presumably more reality-based Mantel did. 

Mantel was right, as she wrote in an account in Britain's Telegraph of how she came to write Wolf Hall and its sequels (the third installment of the trilogy, taking Cromwell up to his own execution, is in the works), that the confrontation between More and Cromwell was "more nuanced than the one familiar to us from A Man for All Seasons." But it is also more nuanced than the one she has presented. A figure who had a spy network everywhere, who exploited a time of uncertainty to overturn the civil society of his time,who ordered the rampant seizure of others' properties that created for his ruler a source of wealth independent of the long-established pillars of society, who himself became powerful in the service of a capricious authoritarian, would, under normal circumstances, be seen as the harbinger of a 20th-century apparatchik for a totalitarian regime. It is the seductive power of Mantel's work this same figure--Cromwell--becomes, in her view, a gregarious, humane man who met a brutal world on its own terms.

Shakespeare's (and, it might be said, More's) Richard III sought to "set the murderous Machiavell to school," but it might more truly be said that Cromwell (who knew The Prince quite well) succeeded in applying its lessons more thoroughly.