A Man for More Seasons

By Howard Chua-Eoan

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.

Ackroyd's vividly human More is Arthurian rather than canonical, imperfect yet inspiring. And that is the gloss that Ackroyd develops in what may be called a fantastic sequel to More--even though it was published one year earlier. In the novel Milton in America, Ackroyd has the 17th century Puritan poet and radical escaping to New England after the collapse of the English revolution that he helped foment--itself a catastrophic result of the Protestantism set loose by Henry VIII's divorce. Instead of writing Paradise Lost, the blind and defeated rebel arrives near Plymouth in 1660. As he proceeds to plant an intolerant city-state on American soil, this Milton sneers at the memory of More, calling him an idolater who had had his head chopped off. And yet Milton must repress his delight in Utopia, More's 1516 tract about a perversely perfect new world. He heaps murderous scorn on neighboring English Catholics, although he is surreptitiously enthralled by their pageantry. He is Satan, and tragically, he knows it.

Milton is a perfect and delicious literary counterweight to More. And both the history and the fiction emanate from and complement Ackroyd's 1996 biography of the late 18th century poet and artist William Blake, who cast himself as Milton in the epic of the same name to redeem the older poet. Blake's works remythify Britain, replacing an imposed sanctity with the rediscovery of sacredness. Blake begins the restoration of God's calendar by pointing out that there is "a moment in each day that Satan cannot find."

There is this consistent emblem in Ackroyd's More and Milton and Blake: London is the pivot into eternity. More's city, piously Catholic, fades into Camelot-like legend, shunned yet desired by Milton, who cannot regain it, all his monumental words raising only a pandemonium finally becalmed by Blake, who walks its shadows to find the city become Jerusalem. All three men were Londoners--as is Ackroyd. "It's always been ugly, a vandalized city," the novelist and biographer said recently. "But I hope it stays that way because that's its nature." His next book, he says, will be a biography of London itself. That should be quite the event. In its guilty streets, he has already found the footprints of the most enigmatic saints.