The reputation of St Thomas More has for centuries survived the “shafts of falsehood and of folly”, to borrow a phrase of William Cobbett, the 19th-century polemicist. In spite of dying as a traitor, and his defence of the Catholic Church (not always a crowd-pleaser in these islands), the former Lord Chancellor of England retains a place in the popular imagination as a man of tremendous courage and integrity, the “man for all seasons” who was “always the King’s good servant, but God’s first”.
Even in secular Britain, it is not difficult to find roads, buildings and even housing estates named after him. He is held in equally high esteem abroad and more profoundly within the Catholic Church, which honours him as patron saint of politicians, statesmen and lawyers. In a poll conducted by this magazine in 2005,
St Thomas was voted the greatest of all English saints.
The latest serious attempt to traduce his reputation, his “perverse” depiction by Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall, will surely not stand the same test of time. My guess is that her whitewashing of Sir Thomas Cromwell, a thief and murderer, will come to be seen as propaganda nearly as daft as Springtime for Hitler in The Producers, the 1968 Mel Brooks movie.
What the popularity of Mantel’s books points to, however, is our enduring fascination with the Tudor period. For this reason the opening of a new shrine incorporating a “major relic” of St Thomas, never displayed in public until now, is a significant occasion for our country.
The relic is the hair shirt worn by St Thomas as he contemplated martyrdom during his own hour of Gethsemane, in the Bell Tower of the Tower of London. The shrine is appropriately situated in Buckfast Abbey, the Devon monastery dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539 – four years after the death of St Thomas – and rebuilt on the same spot a century ago by Benedictine monks from France and Germany.
The rough, knotted garment was made from goats’ hair. It was designed to be uncomfortable, worn next to the skin to assist in the mastery of self-control and as atonement for sins. Dom David Charlesworth, the abbot of Buckfast, says that such self-mortification was a spiritual workout, comparable to physical gains from going to the gym. “Wearing such a thing was a tough way forward. It was a very manly thing to do,” the abbot says.
“It is linked to his life of conversion and his identification with the sufferings of Christ.”
St Thomas probably acquired the practice from the Carthusian monks of the London Charterhouse, where he tested a possible vocation to monastic life while he trained as a lawyer in his early 20s. He continued to wear the shirt into his two marriages, but very privately. Peter Ackroyd, in his book The Life of Thomas More, writes that it was only by accident that one of his four children discovered that he wore it at all.
The shirt is also mentioned by William Roper, the son-in-law of St Thomas, in his biography of the saint. Roper tells of how More, a week after he was sentenced to death, sent the shirt to his family, “not willing to have it seen” by the populace.
It was kept by St Thomas’s stepdaughter Margaret Giggs (later Clement) and stayed in her family until 1626, when it was bequeathed by Dr Caesar Clement, the vicar-general and dean of the Cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula in Brussels, to the English community of Augustinian nuns at St Monica’s Convent in Louvain. Clement’s aunt – the youngest daughter of Margaret – had been prioress there for 30 years.
As persecution in England abated, the nuns resettled at Abbotskerswell in Devon, bringing the shirt with them. The priory closed in 1983 and the shirt was passed to the Diocese of Plymouth, which placed it in the custody of the Bridgettines of Syon Abbey in the village of South Brent in Dartmoor. In 2011, Bishop Christopher Budd, then bishop of Plymouth, asked Buckfast to put the shirt in a place where it could be venerated by the public.
This October, the folded garment was encased without fanfare in an adapted side altar of the abbey church, in a box sealed partly to prevent relic-hunters from helping themselves (an over-zealous Dominican nun once hacked off a piece of the shirt with a pair of scissors).
Bishop Mark O’Toole of Plymouth, a Londoner with a lifelong devotion to the saint, hopes that the shrine will draw pilgrims from around the world, an aspiration shared by the abbot.
“If someone came to me and said would we sponsor a conference on St Thomas More, I would say ‘yes’ straightaway with the relic as a focus for that,” Fr Charlesworth said. This is foreseeable, he suggests, because the relic represents far more than an interesting historical artefact. It speaks principally of the faith of St Thomas, but also of the authentic meaning of the role of conscience – especially when an individual finds him or herself in a situation of conflict with the state.
“In this day and age,” Fr Charlesworth said, “so many people want to force you to do what they say you should do – as has happened in the past. Not only do they want you to do as they say, they want you to think as they say, and Thomas stands against that. He stands up and says: ‘No, my conscience comes first’.
“Elements within the Church sometimes use that against papal teaching,” the abbot added. “It’s not that. He was a faithful son of the Church. What he was standing up for was freedom in our society. This is an issue of freedom and the paramountcy of conscience. That is why the relic is very relevant in our day, especially when free speech appears to be under attack in our universities and so on.”
Benedict XVI once praised St Thomas as Britain’s “other great witness of conscience” alongside Blessed John Henry Newman, a theologian who had described conscience as an echo of the voice of God, the “connecting principle between the creature and his Creator” and the “guide of life, implanted in our nature, discriminating right from wrong” in concrete situations.
For St Thomas, “conscience was not at all an expression of subjective stubbornness or obstinate heroism”, the Pope Emeritus explained. “He numbered himself, in fact, among those faint-hearted martyrs who only after faltering and much questioning succeed in mustering up obedience to conscience, mustering up obedience to the truth, which must stand higher than any human tribunal or any type of personal taste.”
A month after the shrine opened, Buckfast Abbey was visited by Francis Campbell, the vice-chancellor of St Mary’s University in Twickenham, who warned the Church that a retreat from education would weaken democracy and contribute to the rise of totalitarianism.
A fortnight later, an official report on integration by Dame Louise Casey led to renewed attacks on the perfectly benign system of Christian schools, in which a third of the nation’s children are educated. Faith schools were elitist and pointless, and they encouraged “a form of apartheid”, fulminated a columnist in the Times, scolding Prime Minister Theresa May that “there is nothing One Nation about faith schools”.
Repeated contemporary attacks on freedom of religion, conscience, speech, expression and thought may be more conducive to a “One Nation” model – but it will be the uniformity of an intrusive atheistic and plutocratic police state.
St Thomas More shows us a way to resist that. To anyone who truly cares about freedom, I would recommend a pilgrimage to Buckfast Abbey to offer a few prayers before a hair shirt which represents so much of what we hold dear.
Simon Caldwell is a freelance journalist
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.