Thomas vs Thomas vs Thomas

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My wife got me a membership in The Rest is History Club for Christmas, so for the last four months or so I’ve been enjoying the back catalog of Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s bonus episodes as well as the regularly released new ones. These are great fun, and offer a lot of food for thought.

This past week’s club episode ended with an intriguing counterfactual game submitted by a listener: “Of the three executed Tudor-era Thomases—Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer—you have to execute one, imprison one for life, put one of them back in power. How would you decide?”

Holland’s answer:

  • Execute: Cromwell

  • Back in power: Cranmer

  • Imprison: More (“but I’d let him write”)

Sandbrook’s answer:

  • Execute: More

  • Back in power: Cromwell

  • Imprison: Cranmer

My verdict: Holland’s answers are good, not great. Sandbrook’s are wrong at the two most crucial points.

Sandbrook expressed some hesitation about imprisoning Cranmer, preferring to “let him crack on” as Archbishop of Canterbury if he could, but was firm on one answer: “Definitely execute More.” Shortly thereafter:

Sandbrook: I mean, Thomas More’s ultimately disloyal, Tom.

Holland: Not to his God. Not to his God.

Sandbrook: No, but to put God above your king, and your country, is unbe—it’s to put your petty prejudices—

The discussion continues in what I think is a tongue-in-cheek tone. I hope so. Because More had his priorities exactly right.

I was surprised at Sandbrook’s reasoning. Given his jocular John Bull way of playing up his English Protestantism since the show’s Martin Luther episodes I was prepared for some kind of invocation of John Foxe, the slanders in his Acts and Monuments (aka Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) being what I most often see presented as grounds for criticizing More. But the view that More, a good classicist and Christian Humanist, should have been more loyal to the City of Man than to the City of God is a strange one.

It’s funny to me that, given that I probably agree with Sandbrook’s perspective about 90% of the time, whenever I blog about the show I seem to be taking exception to something he’s said. Regardless, kudos to Holland for—again, lightheartedly—sticking up for More.

My own choices:

  • Execute: Cromwell, this being the only proper fate for a hatchet man

  • Back in power: More, because the state needs more people who are obstructively “disloyal” to tyrants and keep God in his place above state and nation

  • Imprison: Cranmer, but, as Holland would for More, “let him write,” since despite my misgivings about him his religious rhetoric in the Book of Common Prayer is second only to the King James Bible in its value to English

Fun stuff, and fun to discuss with my wife afterward. It also occurred to me that, if we could loosen the “execution” requirement, we could make things even more interesting by throwing Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey into the mix.

Might be time to break out my old DVD of A Man for All Seasons.

In the meantime, let me recommend Peter Ackroyd’s Life of Thomas More or, if you’re in a more fictional and speculative frame of mind, RA Lafferty’s Past Master, in which More is saved from the scaffold by agents of a far distant human space colony and asked to untangle their political problems. If you’re curious about the space I carve out for Cranmer’s masterful religious language, definitely read Alan Jacobs’s The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography.