I’ve been reading Eamon Duffy’s excellent collection of historical and biographical essays, Reformation Divided, which takes a very long and searching view of the Reformation era in England specifically. It was with great interest that I read Duffy’s treatment of Thomas More, who has been sort of abused in popular history, first in admiration. Onstage and in film, he was turned into a mere humanist and voice of “conscience,” which distorted his commitment to the Roman Catholic Church and his hatred of heresy. But then, Hilary Mantel’s fictionalization of this era has More as a bloodthirsty maniac, unmoored from reason or compassion.

Duffy’s portrait is more rounded and explains well how the author of Utopia could also be a scourge of heresy. Of particular interest is Duffy’s defense of More’s book The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (1531), which is basically the first superlong blog post, quoting perhaps the whole of Tyndale’s work in an attempt to refute it honestly and without falling to the temptation to selectively engage it. Also, regarding More’s willingness to resort to violence to prevent heresy, this was because he believed heresy itself would be the cause of greater uncontrolled violence. In his polemic with Luther, he predicted that the spread of Luther’s beliefs would lead to masses “drunk with the blood of princes and reveling in the gore of the nobles,” while “commoners run each other through.” He made this awful prophecy for Germany exactly one year before the Peasants’ War, during which 100,000 or more died.