The New Federalist March 24, 1989 Pages 6-7

American Almanac

The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More

Part I

by Christina Nelson Huth

Hans Holbein's great portrait of More, painted in 1527 while More served as a chief adviser to King Henry VIII's government, hangs today in the Frick Museum, New York City.

Introduction

On July 6, 1535, Sir Thomas More was visited in the Tower of London by his young friend Thomas Pope, an official at the Court of Chancery. With tears in this eyes, Pope gave the ex-Chancellor of England the news for which he had been waiting: his execution was set for nine o'clock that morning. Pope added, according to More's son-in-law and biographer William Roper: "The King's pleasure is further, that at your execution you shall not use many words."

With these final instructions from England's King Henry VIII, More dressed in a silk gown that would later become the property of his executioner, and was led to the scaffold in the great square on Tower Hill. He died with a jest to the hangman, that his beard be spared from the chopping block, "for it had done no treason," a plea to the crowd that they pray for the King, and the final words: "I die the King's good servant, but God's first."

There is one highest law, the law of God and his universe: In the few words begrudged to him by his earthly sovereign, in the last moment before his passage from this world, Thomas More spoke out from the scaffold to defend that precious truth without which Western civilization would not have been born, and without which it assuredly will not survive. That precious truth, is that mankind exists, to better itself, under the rule of a universal natural law, which proceeds from God, is knowable to every individual human being, and which is not subject to change by the arbitrary whim of any temporal power.

In the two thousand year history of Western Christendom, few individuals have lived their lives, and spent their deaths, so effectively in the furtherance of this precious truth as did Sir Thomas More. Although he is acknowledged as a noble martyr by much of today's English-speaking world, More's unswerving commitment to natural law as the basis for the ordering of human affairs has been forgotten, as our civilization itself has rejected natural law as its guiding premise. Because of this, More's pivotal role in modern Western history is little appreciated, by scholars and laymen alike.

What, in fact, did Sir Thomas More accomplish that merits his elevation to the rank of a father of Western civilization? One of the outstanding orators and thinkers of his day, More produced a vast body of historical, philosophi-cal, and theological works, in Greek, Latin, and English. In his day, More's writings instructed all of Europe on the fundamentals of neo-platonic

Christian humanism; later, they provided a rich source material for English historians and playwrights, including Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift, and served as the basis for the King James version of the English vernacular Bible, a cornerstone of English-speaking culture.

A lawyer by training and profession, More spent more than two decades as a judge in the English courts. From his tenure on the bench, both the English common law and the realm's constitutional tradition developed in the direc-tion of the republican self-government which Englishmen later created on the shores of North America.

When Henry VIII's axe fell on Thomas More's neck, all of Europe mourned. For More was one of the best loved intellectual figures of his day, and a leader in the international Christian humanist movement of the early sixteenth century. As a chief adviser to the English king for twenty years, More the statesman rose to a position of power and influence unequalled by any other in the humanist circles of Western Europe.

From this position of power, More sought to transform the nation of England into an instrument of the Good, for all of mankind. What the optimism and political program of the Italian Renaissance had failed to produce in conti-nental Europe, More and his circle believed, could be achieved on the island outpost of England. More envisioned England as a prosperous, developing commonwealth, whose expanding population, under the gentle governance of a constitutional monarch and his wise advisors, could serve as a model for all of the West.

More considered the success of what might be called the Christian human-ists' English experiment to be a strategic necessity for the West. As the sixteenth century entered its third decade, Western European civilization was threatened with destruction—from within, by the forces of the Reformation, from without by the military power of the Ottoman Empire. England was the last stand for the Renaissance program to uplift the populations of Europe, create economically powerful nation-states, and overthrow the centuries-long domination of Europe by a brutal, feudal-minded oligarchy. An England in the hands of the Christian humanist faction could serve as a staging ground for bold new maneuvers, in cultural and economic warfare, both on the continent, and in the New World. In More's view, this was a goal to be fought for, and won, at all costs.

Hence, More accepted the Chancellorship of England, even though, as we shall see, to do so meant to step into the center of the enemy's camp. Thus, he continued to fight, from within England's government, until he had exhausted the means to do so.

More's oligarchical enemies had a different plan for England: they saw the island nation as a fresh looting ground, and, perhaps more important, as a political football whose marginal economic and military resources could swing the balance of power on the continent. When England's labile King Henry VIII fell under their influence, More was forced out of the Chancel-lorship. Yet, even on the outskirts of power, More commanded the influence to craft and carry through the operation which exposed his adversaries within the English court, and humiliate them, in the eyes of all the civilized world, as murderers and enemies of natural law. This was the chain of events which led to More's imprisonment, trial, and execution. It is accurate to say that More's martyrdom was his final act as a strategist and statesman.

Had Thomas More lived, and had the policies he so ably represented pre-vailed, it is possible that England could have proceeded, by the middle of the sixteenth century, straight down the path of industrial capitalist development which in actual historical circumstances did not open up for a century and a half. An industrialized, republican England could have served as a model for both Europe and the New World.

But the population of More's England, and his cothinkers on the continent, allowed him to be martyred and die. The great potential More appreciated for England's international role was lost, with consequences that are still being measured, in terms of human suffering, today.

Above, a mid-sixteenth-century sketch, after a Holbein portrait of More's household in Chelsea, portrays (from left to right), More's adopted daughter; a student of the household; his father, John More; his daughter-in-law; Sir Thomas More; More's son, John; More's servant, Henry Patenson; More's daughter; his eldest daughter, Margaret Roper; and Alice More, his wife. Below, from left to right, King Henry VII of England, More's teacher and friend Thomas Linacre, and Bishop John Fisher, martyred with More.

England and The Council Of Florence

Thomas More's understanding and practice of natural law, as an educator, judge, statesman, and theologian, was one of the outstanding results of the early fifteenth-century Council of Florence. This historic meeting of Chris-tian churchmen from East and West, was convened in the Italian city-state of Ferrara in 1438, and later moved to Florence after the outbreak of the Black Death in Ferrara. It was financed and organized under the auspices of the Medici family then ruling Florence, and guided by the great scientist and Catholic thinker, Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa.

At Florence, a relatively small group of political conspirators set into motion the most powerful, global cultural and political offensive since the advent of Christianity itself. The motor of this great cultural warfare campaign was the Council's resolution, hard fought over the course of almost two years of argument and debate, that all of Christendom would once again be united in its commitment to the doctrine of the Filioque.

The Filioque, reflected down to this day in the Nicene Creed adopted at Florence, asserts that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both God the Father, and from God the Son; therefore, as each individual human being participates in Christ, each individual has the potential for creative participation in the development of the universe—the essence of Christian natural law.

The cultural program of the Florentine Council, in part rooted in a revival of the Greek classics brought to Florence by representatives of Byzantium's Paleologue dynasty, spurred Western Europe's Golden Renaissance of advances in painting, geometry, sculpture, and science. The political program of the Council, sought to capture these great advances in culture, in the establishment of a revolutionary ordering of human affairs in both East and West: the creation and strengthening of sovereign nation-states commit-ted to economic growth, and the development of populations which could eventually function as educated, self-governing citizenries. This was Nicolas of Cusa's ideal of the Concordantia Catolica.

The Florentine project was stymied to the north in Russia, and to the east, as enemies of the Council secured the destruction of the Paleologue dynasty in Byzantium. In Western Europe, the political program of the Council took hold in France under the monarch Louis XI. Across the channel, Louis's efforts were mirrored in the England of Henry VII, a prosperous and opti-mistic time in which Thomas More was educated.

Thomas More was born in February of 1478. Shortly after his seventh birthday, the Lancastrian Henry Tudor seized power in England as Henry VII, with the sponsorship of the heirs of France's King Louis XI, and the support of a circle of English churchmen and scholars dedicated to the establishment of a limited monarchy in England. The two groupings which conspired to put Henry Tudor on the English throne as Henry VII were to have a profound and direct impact on Thomas More's development as well.

The backers of France's Louis XI had been the first-generation adherents to the program of the Council of Florence. In 1461, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, this humanist circle put Louis on the French throne, from whence he undertook an effort, to be completed only after his death, to unify the territory that is today modern France, from a collection of feudal princi-palities. After the death of Louis XI, during England's Wars of the Roses, the regency of Louis's daughter Anne gave both Henry and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, political asylum in France. Later, it was French gold and munitions supplies which allowed Henry Tudor to mount his 1485 invasion of England, unseat the Yorkist Richard III, and take the crown as Henry VII.

As the fifteenth century drew to a close, England under Henry VII was trans-formed from a chaotic backwater enmired in decades of dynastic infighting, to a modern nation, poised on the edge of industrial revolution. It was almost as if the small, backward, and underpopulated island had been singled out, as a demonstration project, to show how quickly a nation-state could be built, under the impetus of the proper economic and social policies.

A virtual miracle occurred in the productive economy of England under King Henry VII. Henry was a dirigist; his arsenal included the full range of modern nation-building weapons: navigation laws, patent and monopoly grants, commercial treaties, protectionist tariffs, preferential taxes for producers, and infrastructure investment. The first Tudor, probably the shrewdest businessman ever to sit on the English throne, wielded these weapons with statesmanlike ruthlessness for 25 years.

When Henry VII took power in England in August 1485, it had been just ten years since England's exports of semifinished cloths had outstripped the nation's exports of raw wool. Under the new monarch, England's incipient shift from being a raw materials producer for the continent to being an ex-porter of manufactured and semifinished goods was completed. The cloth industry boomed, with average yearly exports of broadcloths from London and the outlying ports increasing by 61 percent during Henry VII's reign.

This expansion of industry and commerce, of course, led to a gigantic increase in revenues to the crown, which taxed all imports and exports.

The 1490s also saw a major shift of the English national carrying trade away from foreign merchants and into the hands of a growing English mercantile class. Crown diplomacy saw to it that Italian, French, and Hanseatic League merchants were systematically squeezed out, and slowly but surely the nation's economic and commercial activity became centralized in London, and in the hands of London merchants and entrepreneurs.

At home, Henry VII sponsored a program of internal improvements that began to change the face of England. These included the construction of schools, waterworks, hospitals, and roads, all encouraged by the crown, often in collaboration with the Church. Using every law on the books, medieval and earlier, Henry VII reined in the power of the aristocratic factions chat had perpetuated England's dynastic Wars of the Roses, and reestablished the authority of the central government through an upgraded system of sheriffs and justices of the peace.

Henry also encouraged the most modern shipbuilding throughout the realm. He himself commissioned the construction of the royal ships Sovereign and Regent, floating exhibitions of the most up-to-date design and armament. Both were rented out to merchants who wished to test the new technologies. This was the beginning of England's world-class merchant marine and naval fleets.

For more than twenty years, England's economy prospered, its population grew, and the country remained at peace. When the first Tudor King died in 1509, he left nearly a million pounds in the royal coffers.

The Education of Sir Thomas More

Thomas More was educated in an environment which was at once traditional and revolutionary. As a young man, his intellectual mentors were drawn from the cream of English scholarship—the same outstanding thinkers, who, during the last decades of the fifteenth century, were welcomed to study in Renaissance Italy. William Grocyn, John Colet, and Thomas Linacre, who taught More Greek, all traveled to Italy to study Greek, philosophy, and mathematics. In fact, when Linacre, England's most prominent physician, visited Florence, he was personally hosted by Lorenzo de' Medici.

These scholars exported Italy's so-called New Learning back to England, where it began to flourish in the late 1460s and 1470s, during the reign of the Lancastrian King Edward IV.

The New Learning became Thomas More's daily fare, but not before he had received a conservative, middle-class English education. At the age of about seven, his father, the prominent London lawyer John More, enrolled him in St. Anthony's school. By twelve, he was fluent in Latin, and had mastered the works of the Latin scholars.

It is probable that More was first introduced to Greek in the home of the English Cardinal John Morton, where he served as a page between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Morton arranged for the young Thomas to study at Oxford, where his curriculum centered on the quadrivium of liberal arts: arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. More's interest in music and astronomy, both of which he shared with Henry VIII, lasted to the end of his life.

At the unusually young age of 23, More lectured on Saint Augustine's City of God at London's Church of St. Lawrence Jewry, at the invitation of William Grocyn. For a number of years as a young man, he considered a life of scholarship and prayer in the Church, only to be persuaded to study law by his father.

The second great influence on More came from the circle of fifteenth-century English churchmen and scholars who supported Henry VII's bid for the throne. One of the most remarkable of these was John Morton, whom we have just mentioned. Morton was elevated to the bishopric of Ely by King Edward IV; he fled into exile with the Tudors under Richard III, and served Henry VII as Chancellor of England and Archbishop of Canterbury. Another was Sir John Fortescue, chief justice of the realm under the Lancas-trian kings of the fifteenth century, a friend of the Tudor family, and one of the leading theorists of government and law in English history.

When More was placed as a page in Morton's house in 1490, Morton was serving as the head of Henry VII's government, and Archbishop of Canter-bury. During his two years of service with Morton, no doubt the young More had many opportunities to meet and observe the most powerful and learned individuals in the realm. The lively intellectual character of Morton's home was preserved for posterity by the pen of More himself, who

used Morton's dining table as the setting of the heated debate on the social ills of England, included in Book I of his most famous dialogue, Utopia.

It may also well be that More's famous portrait of the Yorkist King Richard III was influenced by first-hand reports from Morton. A staunch opponent of Richard III, and jailed by Richard, Morton spent the two years of Richard's reign in France and Flanders, organizing to protect Henry Tudor's political exile, and promote the Tudor bid for the English throne.

Sir John Fortescue (1394?-1476?), chief justice of the King's bench during the 1450s in the regency of Henry VI, was the author of The Governance of England, or The Difference Between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy. This was the first book written in English on the constitution and laws of England. Fortescue's Governance begins the English tradition of referring to the body politic as a Commonwealth, in which the well-being of each indi-vidual member, from the king to the lowliest of his subjects, depends upon the prosperity of all.

Moreover, in Governance, Fortescue identifies the limited or constitutional monarchy as an English invention, based on the unique concept of a govern-ment whose sovereignty derives from the people, and functions in the form of the King in Parliament. Fortescue traces the founding of England's system of government back to the Magna Carta of 1215, and warns sternly against disruption of the Commonwealth from any source, be it mob rule, an aristocracy grown too powerful, or a king who turns his back on the mandate of the people.

In Fortescue's view, a country under the power of an absolute monarch will never achieve the economic or military strength of a commonwealth. The nations of Europe ruled by absolute monarchs, Fortescue writes, live under the sway of the laws of the degenerate Roman empire, a code of tyranny which England rejected, in favor of a civil law developed on the basis of such principles as the jury system.

Fortescue's Governance of England began a long tradition of theoretical works on the Commonwealth, which themselves make up the body of English constitutional law. Among these are numbered The Tree of the Commonwealth by Henry VII's minister Edmund Dudley, published early in the sixteenth century, and A Discourse on the Commonwealth of England, by Tudor economic reformer John Hales, published in the early 1550s.

After two years at Oxford, More left the university for a place at London's Inns of Court, a law school located near the royal courts. Fortescue's Governance of England, and his other works were the standard fare of law students at the Inns of Court in More's day. More, who used his spare time during this period to study Greek with William Grocyn, became a lawyer in 1501. He later traveled to study at the universities of Paris and Louvain.

Much more could be said about Thomas More's career as a lawyer and a judge, one of the most outstanding in Western legal history. Here it must suffice to say that, in his theoretical works, as well as in his legal practice and his efforts as a government official, Thomas More located himself firmly within the Commonwealth Party tradition. Among its other heirs are the Commonwealth Party men of Oliver Cromwell's seventeenth-century attempt at republican revolution in England, and our own American found-ing fathers.

Left, map of Utopia, by Ambrosius Holbein, brother of Hans, from the 1518 edition of More's famous dialogue, published in Basel. Right, another illustration by Ambrosius from the 1518 edition, portraying Raphael Hythloday, the fictional seafarer who discovered Utopia, in conversation with More and the Dutchman Peter Giles.

Peter Giles, patron of Erasmus, who oversaw the printing of Utopia in Antwerp.

Thomas More's Utopia

In 1509, the year Henry VIII acceded to the English throne, Thomas More was a young lawyer, working in London. In 1505, he had married Jane Colt, who was to bear him four children before her untimely death in 1511. Aside from his work in the courts, More spent a good deal of his time with the leading scholars of the day, including Linacre, Grocyn, William Lilly, John Colet, dean of London's St. Paul's School, and Erasmus of Rotterdam.

The projects of this circle ranged from translations of the Greek classics into Latin, poetry composition, Erasmus's In Praise of Folly, and his re-transla-tion of the New Testament from Greek into Latin, and, in More's case, two biographies, one of the Florentine philosopher Pico della Mirandola and one of King Richard III.

In September 1510, More was appointed Under-Sheriff of London, the position of legal adviser to the city's chief law enforcement officer, and a very prestigious position for such a young man. By 1515, we see him entered into the service of King Henry VIII, and dispatched on a diplomatic mission to the Netherlands. The mission to Flanders can indeed be consid-ered a turning point in More's life: he was to remain in the service of the King until his execution twenty years later; and during his trip abroad, he was to begin work on his Utopia, the book that made him famous throughout Europe.

Were we living in a still literate society, Utopia would be among our most widely read books, assigned to grammar school students as an introduction to civics and government, used as a philosophy primer in the secondary

schools, and read and reread by the average citizen throughout his life. Today, however, this classic is not used in the schools and not widely available.

The word Utopia, which means, in Greek, nowhere, has come to mean a perfect, but imaginary society. More's Utopia was an advanced, but non-Christian civilization, named after its leader, King Utopus, and discovered by a shipwrecked European sailor in an uncharted quadrant of the globe. The second book of Utopia, written by More in 1515 while he was in Flanders, consists of a description of King Utopus's realm by that sailor, returned to the Netherlands, in dialogue with More.

The sailor, Raphael Hythloday (which means learned nonsense in Greek), describes a prosperous commonwealth, whose citizens disdain war, except for purposes of national defense, share all things in common, including labor and its fruits, and place the highest value on pleasures of the mind: philoso-phy, music, astronomy, and all manner of learning.

Book One of Utopia, written by More on his return home, sets the stage for the examination of this attractive society, with a discussion of the social ills besetting England at the time: costly foreign wars, inflation and high prices, unemployment and vagabondage due to enclosures of agricultural lands by sheep-farmers, the laziness of the aristocracy, and the shortcomings of the justice system.

Since its publication in 1516, every manner of social theorist has attempted to co-opt More's Utopia as the purported theoretical basis for his own thinking. The nineteenth-century "modern" artist William Morris, an associate of British feudalist John Ruskin, hailed it as one of the inspirations of Ruskin's Pre-Raphaelite Society, a movement of oligarchs to turn the clock backward on human progress to the days before the Golden Renaissance. In this century, the German communist Karl Kautsky called Utopia the founding document of the socialist movement, praising More for rejecting the "capitalist mode of production" even before it had been fully established.

But Utopia was neither an apology for antitechnology feudalism nor communism. It was a brilliant argument for the creation of a social order built around the Filioque doctrine of the Council of Florence, and it laid the responsibility for the progress of human affairs in this direction squarely on the shoulders of the monarchs and government leaders of sixteenth-century

Europe. Translated into more than a dozen languages before the middle of the 1520s, More's Utopia was a powerful organizing document for the establishment of a Christian humanist order of sovereign and economically productive nation-states, and it captured the imagination of all of Western Europe.

More shaped his polemic in a fashion reminiscent of Plato's great dialogues: while Hythloday's description of Utopia's laws, customs, and economy unfolds in great and colorful detail, the actual subject under consideration— which is the fundamental nature of Utopian society—remains unaddressed and unseen. It is left to the reader to discover, based on irrefutable evidence buried in the mass of captivating detail presented by Hythloday, that Utopia, however pleasant and progressive, is a flawed society, for it is pagan, and lacking a true appreciation for the sanctity of the individual human life.

While the Utopians abhor violence and war, they condone euthanasia against the sick and elderly, and condemn their law breakers to bondage and unre-lieved physical toil. While they value the products of the individual mind, their code of laws militates against individual creativity. They distrust and disallow freedom of choice in matters moral and personal. Adultery is punished by banishment into servitude. The Utopians dress in identical garments, one designed for all the men, and one designed for all the women; they own nothing, but hold everything in common; they are forbidden to eat alone, or in family groups: they must attend the daily meals in a common cafeteria, where the elders direct discussion at table, and the young people serve and listen.

Utopians are forbidden to discuss affairs of state in private: all must be public, at a time appointed by the state, and breaking of this law is punish-able by death. Utopians are constrained by law to believe in immortality; they are told when to marry, and, before the wedding, led into a viewing room to examine, from behind a screen, the naked body of their intended—lest a physical deformity be discovered after the taking of the vows, and the marriage be ruined.

In these laws, Utopia reminds us of the Spartan social order so unfavorably described by Friedrich Schiller. Yet, Utopia is a society which "defines virtue as a life ordered according to the law of nature," and this common-wealth described by the sailor Raphael Hythloday existed in a more prosper-ous and happy condition than any in sixteenth century Europe.

Here is More's stinging polemic: cannot the Christian princes, who rule from thrones supported by the living example of Jesus Christ's sacrifice for every individual human being, surpass the accomplishments of a pagan commonwealth?

Utopia spread More's fame far and wide, prompting a letter to Erasmus, from the German scholar Ulrich von Hutten. Von Hutten wanted a descrip-tion of the Englishman whose book had burst onto the European scene. Erasmus's reply has left us with a living portrait of More second only to that painted by the artist Hans Holbein.

Erasmus describes a true and generous friend, a modest dresser, with simple habits, and a man who loved a jest, but who never stumbled into buffoonery. More, according to Erasmus, possessed a comely and well-proportioned appearance, a pleasing voice, and a character "entirely free from any touch of avarice." He was a man who counted "it a great gain to himself when he relieves an oppressed person, makes the path clear for one in difficulties, or brings back into favor one that was in disgrace."

More loved animals, kept many pets, and filled his house with artwork and objects of interest. Wrote Erasmus: "If he meets with any strange object, imported from abroad or otherwise remarkable, he is eager to buy it. His house is so well supplied with these objects that there is something in every room which catches your eye, as you enter it; and his own pleasure is renewed every time he sees others interested."

Finally, Erasmus describes More's large and congenial household, which included, besides servants and wife, four children, several stepchildren, several wards, and other young people of a scholarly bent.

More's home was a small school—Erasmus called it Plato's Academy on a Christian footing—located up-river from London in the township of Chel-sea. There, besides carrying on daily classes and a correspondence with notables from all over Europe, More and his family welcomed traveling scholars from across the globe.

It was a happy place, filled with music, not the least of which was produced by More's second wife, Dame Alice, at the gentle insistence of her husband. "With similar kindness," Erasmus wrote, "he rules his whole household, in which there are no tragic incidents, and no quarrels. If anything of the kind should seem likely to happen, he either calms it down, or at once applies a remedy. . . . Indeed, his house seems to have a sort of charmed felicity, no

one having lived in it without being advanced to a higher fortune, no inmate having ever had a stain upon his character."

Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, painted in 1533, two years before More's execution, alludes to European-wide efforts to heal the schism within the Catholic Church, with the inclusion of both Catholic and Protestant musical texts. It portrays Jean de Dinteville, French ambassador to London, and Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavour, both of whom were active in negotiations for a diplomatic settlement of the religious question. This reproduction of the painting has been cropped, omitting a crucifix which should appear in the upper right, on the same plane as the elongated skull in the foreground.

Venice and the Reformation

When Henry VIII took the English throne in 1509, there was universal optimism in Christian humanist circles throughout Europe, about the prospects for advancement in England of the political and cultural program of the Council of Florence. More declared that Henry VIII would "wipe away all tears." William Blount, Earl of Mountjoy and patron of Erasmus, wrote to Erasmus in Rome to encourage him to immediately visit England: "Our King is not after gold, or gems of precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality. I will give you a taste of it. Just lately, he was saying that he wished he were more learned. "That is not what we want from you," I said, "but that you should foster and encourage learned men.' 'Why of course,' he said, 'for without them, life would hardly be life.'"

Unfortunately, the foreign policy and economic decisions of the young monarch soon cast a long shadow over the hopes of Erasmus and his circle. By 1511, England was embroiled in its first foreign military action in more than 30 years, a three-year-long war with France with a price-tag of nearly £900,000. This useless conflict, which netted the throne absolutely zero in strategically useful territories or income, drained away all the national savings accumulated during the reign of Henry VII, and left the crown in debt for the first time since the Tudor dynasty had taken power.

The English-French war of 1511-1514, and the other conflicts that were to bankrupt Henry's government, were orchestrated in large part by the city-state of Venice, an ancient oligarchy founded on slavery, trade war, and usury. The Venetian interest in England's foreign affairs was simple: the city's oligarchs regarded Henry VIII and the might of the English economy and military, as a useful pawn, to be manipulated to their own strategic ends.

Those strategic ends, as documented by my colleague Webster Tarpley in a 1981 study, included the destruction of the Renaissance, and the sabotage of all institutions which embodied and could spread the values of Western civilization made explicit by the Council of Florence. Hence, Venice counted among her mortal enemies the Medici family of Florence, the papacy, and the Catholic Church.

Henry VII had very little truck with the Venetians, and went so far in bucking their power as to initiate and win a trade war with the city-state in 1494. But with the ascension of Henry VIII to the throne, the City of London was virtually overrun with Venetian advisers, merchants, and

diplomats. When the young King, several weeks after his coronation, was petitioned by Pope Julius II to join his League of Cambrai military alliance against Venice, the city-state's diplomats at court succeeded in convincing Henry to stay out of the fray. But when Pope Julius abandoned the Cambrai combination to form the Holy League alliance against France, Venice's agents-of-influence at court gave Henry the go-ahead.

By 1494, Venice had succeeded in destroying the city of Florence—the monk Savonarola, a fifteenth-century version of the Ayatollah Khomeini, took over Florence that year—and began a series of military invasions of Italy that laid waste to the entire peninsula. Charles VIII of France invaded Italy from the north in 1494, reaching Florence. Louis XII followed in 1498, and Francis I in 1515. In 1503, the French and Spanish conquered Naples.

This orgy of destruction culminated in the sack of Rome by troops of Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1527. With the geographic center of the Renaissance laid waste, the Venetian gamemasters next trained their sights against the institution with the greatest potential for preserving and spreading the values of the Renaissance: the Catholic Church.

The full story of the Venetian role in launching the historical convulsion known as the Reformation has yet to be told. When its details are finally unearthed from the history books and primary sources, this story will prove to be one of the most fascinating and intricate in all modern European history. Its chapters will involve espionage, counterespionage, agents, spies, and dupes; informers and infiltrators in ministries, universities, publishing houses, royal courts, and the Church itself; the rise and fall of countless governments, and uncounted fortunes in ducats, gold crowns, francs, and pounds, changing hands over the course of decades.

The Protestant churches, once established, themselves immediately became battlegrounds between the influence of the oligarchical and Christian humanist traditions. Notwithstanding the Christian humanist impulses within the Protestant churches, however, the launching of the Reformation as a social movement was meant to be a vast cultural offensive against Western civilization, which resulted in the destruction of populations, institutions, and untold treasures of art, and which led to one hundred years of religious warfare on the European continent.

What do we know with certainty about the Venetian role in the Reformation? Much of what can be reported directly concerns the life, work, and death of Sir Thomas More.

First of all, the individual with the most hands-on responsibility for More's execution, and the schism of the English church from Rome was one Thomas Cromwell, a Venetian-trained accountant and business agent. Cromwell was in Italy and later the commercial center of Antwerp, working for a Venetian trading and financial house during the second and third decades of the sixteenth century. Once he entered the royal service and began making his way to the center of power, Cromwell was himself surrounded by a coterie of radical Protestants, similarly trained in Venice, or in intellectual salons maintained under the auspices of Venetian agents in other Italian cities. These included Thomas Starkey and Richard Morison, both of whom entered Cromwell's service in the early 1530s.

A closer look at the activities of Starkey and Morison in Italy leads us to bigger fish. Both were patronized by Reginald de la Pole, the expatriate English Catholic churchman who shows up at every important point in the development of both the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation, until his death in 1558. Educated at Oxford, Starkey spent most of the years between 1525 and 1534 (the year he entered Cromwell's service as a chaplain to the King), in the Venetian satellite city of Padua, as a member of Pole's household. Morison lived in Venice from 1532 to 1533, and then joined Pole's household in Padua until he he was sent to enter Cromwell's service as a chief pamphleteer for the Church of England in 1535, right after More's execution.

So, the individuals responsible for organizing the Protestant Reformation of the realm, were supplied to a Venetian-trained Protestant, Thomas Cromwell, by the Venice-linked Catholic de la Pole.

Clearly Pole himself bears closer scrutiny. His closest associate within the ranks of the Church was none other than the Venetian nobleman Gasparo Contarini, also a Catholic, also a radical Protestant in sympathies.

For many years, the careers of Contarini and Pole followed the same road. Both organized and oversaw intellectual circles and salons throughout Italy, devoted during the 1520s and 1530s to discussing Protestant theology. Pole's base of operations was Padua. Contarini's most successful effort was in Venice itself. Hundreds of educated Europeans, including members of the

continent's royal families, flocked to Contarini's Venetian establishment, including Antonio Bruccioli, who produced the first Protestant translation of the Bible into Italian, and who corresponded with Martin Luther.

By 1530, the situation had reached such proportions that Pope Clement VII requested some action against the Protestants from Venice's ruling body, the Council of Ten. The Council of Ten declined to act.

Pole and Contarini were both members of the Oratory of Divine Love, a lay and clerical devotional society within the Catholic Church, which seems to have been heavily factionalized between true adherents of the Renaissance political program, such as the artist Raphael, and their outright enemies. In 1540, Contarini was to launch his own personal operation within the Church, by sponsoring Ignatius of Loyola's Jesuit Order.

Meanwhile, the formidable power of Venice's printing industry was being turned toward the Protestant effort. Contarini, in collaboration with the Catholic Cardinal Morone, also a member of the Oratory of Divine Love, arranged for the publication of 40,000 copies of The Benefit of Christ's Death, a tract on justification by faith alone by the Benedictine monk Benedetto of Mantua. Mantua's book, circulated throughout Europe, was considered the credo of the Italian Protestants.

The doctrine of justification by faith alone, so vigorously promoted if not originated by Venice, is a prime example of the oligarchy's cultural warfare to destroy the influence of the Council of Florence. The Filioque doctrine of the Council asserted the innate capacity of every individual human being to participate in the process of divine creation, as Christ did, through conscious acts in the historically specific time, place, and circumstances of this world—thereby asserting the responsibility of leaders and governments to nurture this human quality in every individual. By denying the efficiency of good works—individual volitional acts by the individual human being—in leading man closer to God through salvation, the dogma of justification by faith alone leaves the individual with no guide-post for concrete action in this world, and leads straight to the worst excesses of fundamentalism.

The doctrine of justification by faith alone thus strips the individual of the responsibility for moral action. The next step in the devolution of this radical ideology stripped the individual of his will to act: this is the denial that God has endowed human beings with free will, expressed by Martin Luther as his bondage of the will dogma, and cast in stone as John Calvin's

doctrine of predestination. With the extremist Calvin, the oligarchy had found a perfect apologist for whatever horrors resulted from the policies of slavery and usury they were imposing on the human species. The illiterate, sick, homeless, and starving, after all, had clearly been predestined by God to suffer.

These were the ideas sponsored in the Italian salons of Pole and Contarini, and exported from Italy throughout Europe.

The Contarini-Pole collaboration outlasted their launching of the English schism. In 1535, both were appointed cardinals by Pope Paul III. Their organizing among Protestant schismatics became European-wide: Contarini was in close touch with the radical Italian Protestant Bernardo Ochino of Siena, who left Italy to roam about Germany and Switzerland, preaching a reform of the faith.

In 1541, both Contarini and Pole were dispatched by the Pope as his emis-saries to the meeting with Protestant leaders at Ratisbon, Germany. Hopes were high throughout Europe that the Catholics, in conference with such eminent Protestant intellectuals as the German Lutheran Philip Melancthon, would succeed in healing the schism in the Church. Melanchthon came to the council with a draft of doctrinal concessions to the Catholic Church on every major issue. But, with Contarini and Pole representing the Holy See, all hopes at reconciliation were dashed.

Melancthon, who was with Luther when 100,000 German peasants were exterminated in the revolt of 1525—and Luther lifted not a finger—said after Ratisbon, "Not all the waters of the Elbe would be sufficient for me to weep over the evils of the Reformation."

What can we conclude, based on these details about the links of Thomas Cromwell and his circle to the efforts of Venice's Pole and Contarini? We can conclude that Venice was a prime mover behind the English Reforma-tion, behind the death of Thomas More, and behind the schism of the English Church from Rome. Now, let us look more closely at exactly how this was accomplished.

To be continued.