murdering of the child’. But still he was not released until well into November, when the fine had, unaccountably, increased by another ?100, and Sunnyff had been forced to sign another bond for his future good behaviour – which might, in the hands of Camby and his cohorts, be triggered again.37
Whether or not Henry knew the truth of Sunnyff’s matter – or of the slew of other manipulated cases – he was unconcerned to find out. He approved Sunnyff’s fine and signed his pardon; all the money was paid into the hands of John Heron in the king’s chamber treasury.38 Sunnyff and his wife had spent six and a half months in separate prisons, on trumped-up charges, without trial, had their names dragged through the mud, their house ransacked and goods stolen, and had been mulcted of ?600 into the bargain. Little did he know it, but Sunnyff’s Kafkaesque ordeal, even then, was still not over.
When Thomas More had written to his friend John Colet describing London as a city of sharp eyes, silver tongues and barely suppressed violence, his letter had not been mere literary conceit. This, after all, was a city that felt itself infiltrated, besieged by royal informers; where the knocks on the door, the arbitrary summons to court, were becoming ever more frequent; where merchants like Sunnyff were imprisoned at random, their houses broken into and their goods confiscated; and where people died of stress after months of harassment at the hands of the king’s promoters. The shadow of More’s near neighbour and fellow-lawyer Edmund Dudley, whose house lay a brief walk from the Old Barge, down Walbrook, also fell across his family and friends and, it seems, More himself.
One friend was Mountjoy who, as he never failed to remind everyone, was up to his ears in debt – not only his own, but the financial bonds of at least twenty-one others, for whom he stood surety. Mountjoy’s father-in-law, Sir William Say, a close friend of the More family, was also in desperate trouble. As well as being embroiled in a lawsuit with his son-in-law, he was in bond to the king for ?1,666, as Dudley recorded in his account book. Another name that Dudley had written down was that of Thomas More’s father, Sir John.39
As a sergeant-at-law, Sir John More was a member of the elite group of common lawyers from whom the king chose his judges. Whatever he thought of the promoters’ excesses, Sir John was part of the establishment, a legal adviser who had been chosen to uphold the king’s law. He was hardly likely to start pleading against the king’s causes; rather, he would have been among those lawyers who, when approached by defendants desperately seeking legal advice, would say that the best counsel they could give was to ‘fall to agreement’ with the king. But even sergeants-at-law were not safe. One of Sir John’s colleagues, Sir William Cutler, had recently nipped in the bud a plot to forge a treasonous letter in his own hand, and ‘the same letter to have been cast into the king’s chamber’ – at which point, as his defence simply but eloquently put it, Cutler would have ‘stood at his own jeopardy’. According to Thomas More’s son-in-law William Roper, Sir John himself fell victim to the king’s promoters, imprisoned in the Tower until he stumped up a fine of ?100.40 And then, according to Roper, Thomas More himself was targeted.
After More’s vocal part in the 1504 parliament, things seemed to go quiet. Then, one day, More had gone to see Richard Fox on a ‘suit’, possibly legal matters relating to the city. After official business was concluded Fox drew More aside and, ‘pretending great favour’, advised him to ‘confess his offence against the king’. Henry, Fox implied, was distinctly ill-disposed towards the young lawyer, and a full confession would immediately restore him to the king’s good books. More evidently said he would think about it. Coming away from the meeting, he fell into conversation with Richard Whitford, who was well placed to give an opinion: this close friend of Mountjoy, Erasmus and More was also Fox’s chaplain. Whitford’s advice was emphatic. ‘In no wise’, he said, should More confess to anything at all – particularly to Fox. What More had to understand, Whitford continued, was that Fox would do anything to serve the king; why, he would even sign his own father’s death warrant. According to custom, in which members of Parliament in formal session were allowed to oppose the king, provided they did so with the requisite deference, More had done nothing wrong. If he confessed to a crime, however, that was a different matter entirely. He would have been condemned out of his own mouth.41
In Roper’s hagiographical biography of Thomas More, these two episodes formed part of a systematic campaign of intimidation waged against More and his father by Henry VII, the result of More’s speaking truth to power in the 1504 parliament. As ever, Roper tried to claim particular privilege for the Mores’ suffering. Although the possibility remains that Henry harboured specific ill-feeling towards Thomas More, both father and son were more likely to have been victims not of special treatment, but quite the reverse: the indiscriminate and terrifying opportunism of Henry’s lawyer-counsellors. Sir John More was arrested on a ‘causeless quarrel’, probably a legal technicality of the kind Dudley’s promoters delighted in spotting; the ?100 he paid for his release – while, very probably, entering into further financial bonds – was precisely the kind of ‘agreement’ with the king that so many were forced to make. Likewise, in implying that Thomas More had somehow incurred Henry VII’s wrath, Fox was trying the same tactic, intimidating him into admitting some unspecified offence – a confession that could only end in More and his family being snared in the king’s financial web.
From that time on, More viewed Fox with unease. Erasmus noted how, for More, Fox was the malign genius behind Henry’s novel methods of taxation commonly known as ‘Morton’s Fork’. Erasmus, too, talking to the garrulous Andrea Ammonio some years later, would warn him to be particularly careful about what he said in front of Fox – an opinion that seemed to come straight out of the Old Barge. Indeed, it was a view shared by the young Henry VIII himself: ‘Here in England’, he later informed the Spanish ambassador, ‘they think he is a fox – and such is his name.’42
Sometime in late 1507 or early the following year, More left England for a period of study leave at the universities of Paris and Louvain. Perhaps the timing was a coincidence – or perhaps, as people often did at such times, he had thought it best to remove himself from the tense atmosphere of city and court, to let things cool down a bit. At that stage in his life, he may have thought discretion the better part of valour.43
Even as Henry’s other counsellors worked with Empson and Dudley at the task of enforcing bonds, collecting fines, imprisoning and asset-stripping their victims, they looked askance at the two men whose pre-eminence had been emphatically asserted during the recent crisis of the king’s illness, as they and their friends clustered around his bedside. Henry, increasingly, seemed to go directly to them, over the heads of other members of his inner circle. In a series of memos on a variety of matters to the chancellor, Archbishop Warham, the king told him simply to take Dudley’s advice and follow his instructions; one such command told Warham to get Richard Fox to draw up writs preventing people from leaving the kingdom, ‘after [such] manner, form and effect as our trusty councillor Edmund Dudley shall show unto you.’ To veteran advisers like Fox and Warham, being lectured by the king’s keen new protege must have been deeply irritating. So, too, it seems, were Dudley’s views on religion.
On the face of it, Dudley’s disapproving attitude towards the church – a vast, wealthy corporation that was answerable in the final analysis to Rome rather than the king of England – was no more than the robust orthodoxy of the time. In the eyes of many, the church was simply too political, too worldly, too powerful. Ecclesiastical abuses were endemic: absenteeism and pluralism – being away from one’s flock and holding more than one holy office – went hand in hand with simony, paying for holy office: ‘temporalities’, the lands and incomes that came with church livings, were often highly attractive. All this was frowned upon. The role of priests and bishops was to provide a moral and spiritual example to the realm, not to sully themselves in the world of politics. And above all, privileges like sanctuary and benefit of clergy – where clerics were allowed to opt for favourable trials in church courts, rather than submitting themselves to the king’s justice – allowed people to get away, literally, with murder. Appealing legal cases to Rome, effectively in contempt of the king’s law, was even worse.44
Plenty of people, men like Fox and John Colet – a friend of Dudley’s, as it happened – believed to some degree or other, and for differing reasons, that the church’s practices, or abuses, or organization, needed sorting out. Neither did they see their own devotion to the church as remotely inconsistent with pursuing the regime’s vested interests and their own: Lady Margaret Beaufort, with her intense piety and vigorous deployment of her son’s lawyers – Empson and Dudley included – in pursuit of her various business and legal matters being a case in point. But Dudley, Empson and the other common lawyers among Henry’s counsellors had a particularly aggressive attitude towards the church. They were, after all, the self-styled ‘high priests’ of the common law, and it was their job, and in their interests, to tighten the king’s hold over the church, to close the legal loopholes – and, in the process, bleed the ecclesiastical cash cow for as much money as they could get, on the king’s behalf. Inevitably, their assault on the church became another focus for resentment. Among the spirituality, religious concerns mingled with corporate solidarity: churchmen stuck together. In the likes of Lady Margaret, Fox and Warham, this fused with a feeling that they had, somehow, been displaced from the king’s side.45
All this came together in the person of Christopher Urswick, Henry’s former almoner. Urswick had been friendly with Bray and Archbishop Morton; he was close to Fox and Lady Margaret, whose confessor he had been, and with the intensely spiritual John Fisher, the cleric who Henry had appointed bishop of Rochester as a salve to
