Ted Williams, the last man to achieve a batting average over .400 in the Major Leagues, said that all he asked was that when he walked down the street, people would say “There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.”  And he is beloved by Red Sox fans not because he was a great man or even a good man, but because he was one of them and gave everything he had to the Red Sox attempt to break the curse of the Bambino.  The curse, it turned out, was not yet half done when Williams retired in 1960.  It still had 44 years to go.

The PBS presentation of “Wolf Hall,” which so far (I have watched two episodes) has done a spectacular job (in my opinion) of bringing the Hilary Mantel novel to the screen, offers us television viewers a new portrait of Saint Thomas More.  Is it possible that Thomas More is revered by the Roman Catholic Church for Red Sox reasons?  Is his historical eminence due to his service to the Church rather than to any great principle for which he sacrificed himself?  It is not quite 500 years since his death, which let us agree was a judicial murder, and in that long span of time More has had a very good press.   He was on friendly terms with the Dutch humanist Erasmus, who was a great admirer of More and wrote a flattering portrait.  And no one ever has a bad word to say about Erasmus.  More was greatly admired by Cardinal Wolsey and by Henry VIII, both of whom made sure to bring him into the Wolsey administration. Henry had More as a dinner guest on many occasions and made him chancellor after he dismissed Wolsey. He was the first layman in English history to serve as chancellor.  How many other men have been made a knight by the King of England and a saint by the Roman Catholic Church?  On top of that, he is the star of “A Man for All Seasons” where he was played brilliantly by Paul Scofield.  In that play, he is the very model of a tolerant, patient, scholarly, saintly man of God.

And yet, there have always been doubters and skeptics.  One might read here and there that while More was a great scholar and a fine writer, he was intolerant of dissent, he tortured and burned heretics – and his notion of heresy took in a very wide field – while his religious observances involved more physical mortification than piety required.

Here is Cromwell quoting More, as imagined by Hilary Mantel:  “More says it does not matter if you lie to heretics, or trick them into a confession.  They have no right to silence, even if they know speech will incriminate them; if they will not speak, then break their fingers, burn them with irons, hang them up by their wrists.  It is legitimate, and indeed More goes further; it is blessed.”

The author of the Catholic Encyclopedia article about More does a masterful job of putting the best face on him as the scourge of the heretics.  He tells us that More enforced the laws against heresy but hated the sin not the sinner.  The skeptic might note, though, that it was the sinner that was burnt.  But the encyclopedia has an answer for that, too:  “[h]e never proceeded to extremities until he had made every effort to get those brought before him to recant”.   “Extremities” refers to burning at the stake, and the article notes that there were only four who required “extremities” at More’s hands.  I am afraid this means that the rest broke under torture so severe and inhumane that our civilized twenty-first century minds cannot imagine it. (Although Hilary Mantel helps us to do so.  Difficult for those of us with morbid imaginations.)

So, he broke minds and bodies, and those he could not break, he burned.  But what was the great cause for which Saint Thomas (he was canonized in 1935, 400 years after his death) exposed heretics to “extremities”?

In “Wolf Hall” More is focused on those who would read the Tyndale Bible.  William Tyndale was not the first man to translate the Bible into English, but his translation was the most current at the time of the story.  He used the English that was then in common use, the language that in the final decade of the century would reach the threshold of maturity at the hands of its finest exponent.  And those who opened the Tyndale Bible learned that many of the institutions and practices of the day were not derived from the words set out in the book itself.  Nothing about Purgatory, or popes, or indulgences.  (I should emphasize that I do not have a dog in this fight.  I am happy for Protestant and Catholic to work out their differences as they will, while we all live under a Constitution that provides that there shall be no religious test for public office.)  Was it for reasons of principle or of comfort that the leaders of the Church suppressed a Bible that the English could understand?

The translation into the common tongue would, it was feared, work to undermine the authority of the Church.  But the Bible of the day was written and read in Latin, which was not the language of the original texts.  More, Erasmus, and all the princes of the Church knew this, of course:  Latin was not the language in which the Bible was originally written.  Most of the Old Testament was originally written in ancient Hebrew (it wasn’t ancient at the time, needless to say) and the rest in Aramaic.  The New Testament was written in Greek.  Why were these books translated into Latin?

I was interested to learn recently that the Latin language lived a double life during the Roman Empire.  Anyone who wanted to be part of the Roman elite had to learn classical Latin, a language whose style was established in the first years of the Empire and was based on the works of exactly four writers.  A student would begin studying grammar at the age of about eight and would study grammar for some seven years.  Sentences of the four canonical writers would be pulled apart word by word, studied, synthesized, and reproduced until the student could write on any subject in the approved style.  Then the student would begin a course in rhetoric that would continue for several years.  Only those who could in their spoken and written language express themselves in the received manner could hope to enter the elite and enjoy the wealth and status that were available to Romans of the upper classes.  Upper class Romans judged people by their ability to express themselves in the approved manner, using the approved forms.

This went on for hundreds of years, even after the central government collapsed in the fifth century.  The result was that classical Latin did not develop or change.  However, the Latin spoken by the ninety percent of the population that was not part of the elite continued to evolve.  The language that the common folk used to buy a drink or a meal, place a bet, tell a joke, and find a date was called “Vulgar Latin” (vulgar meaning “common” not necessarily coarse or crude) or Vulgate.  It was into this common or Vulgate Latin that the elders of the Church had the Bible translated specifically in order to reach the common people.  (“Everyday people” if you prefer.)  During the imperial era and beyond, many Church leaders preached in Vulgate Latin for the very purpose of making sure that they were understood by their parishioners.

Vulgate Latin eventually evolved into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages, while Vulgate remained the province of monks, priests, and other learned people who continued to use it to communicate with each other.  The impulse to translate from Vulgate (or from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) into other languages seems to have continued throughout the Middle Ages.  John Wycliffe and his co-workers finished a translation into Middle English (Chaucer’s English) at the end of the fourteenth century.  The impact of this work was sufficiently alarming to the establishment that unauthorized translations were banned by act of Parliament after 1408.   That’s why Tyndale had to move to the continent to work on his translation.

It would seem that the motives behind More’s desire to see Tyndale destroyed were not those of a saint.  But they were those of an adherent, an advocate.  I offer this little discourse on translation as Exhibit One to make the case that More’s canonization was done for Red Sox reasons and not because his adherence to the Vulgate Bible was derived from some great principle that the Church fathers wanted others to follow by example.  The other great stand that he took related to the relative position of King and Church, but I will wait to say anything about that until the Wolf Hall tale reaches that point, which is still some five story years ahead of us.  (I don’t know where the TV series will end, so it is possible that we won’t get to this point until Wolf Hall, Season Two, if such a thing is planned.)

Over the centuries during which More has enjoyed his high reputation, it has been hard to find anyone with a good word to say about Thomas Cromwell.   The great Whig historian G. M. Trevelyan says: “Henry needed also a rougher and less scrupulous servant [than Cranmer] and found one in Thomas Cromwell.”  On the next page, Trevelyan refers to Sir (not Saint) Thomas More as “noble”.  Trevelyan’s “Shortened History of England” was published in 1942.  After World War II, historians began to take a more tolerant, even admiring view of Cromwell.  Geoffrey Elton was, I understand, the most eminent of this point of view and is said to be an important influence on Hilary Mantel’s view of Cromwell.  His “England under the Tudors” is the next book up on my reading list.

The England of this period was in transition from the Middle Ages to modern times.  The War of the Roses, a fight for money and power between competing descendants of Edward III, was the last gasp of medieval times in England and resembled nothing as much as the gang warfare of 1920s Chicago.  That war had ended in 1485, barely a lifetime before the Cromwell-More tale now being told, when (quoting Trevelyan) “a Welsh gentleman named Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, was able to put up a very respectable case for himself on the Lancastrian side.”  That is a very generous judgment.  On his father’s side, Henry Tudor was descended from a man who was married to the widow of Henry V, so Henry Tudor’s father was a half-brother to Henry V’s son (Henry VI), but was tied through their mother, who was not in line for the throne.  On his mother’s side, he was descended from an illegitimate grandson of Edward III.  The line had been legitimized by Parliament during the reign of Richard II, and then later by Henry IV after he deposed Richard – he was legitimizing his half-siblings – but this Henry added the condition that the descendants could not succeed to the English crown.  What made the case for Henry Tudor respectable was that everyone else on the Lancastrian side was dead.  It was either Henry or the sitting King, Richard III for whom, Trevelyan tells us, “the mass of his English subjects were ashamed to fight.”  Henry won the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.   Richard III died conveniently on the battlefield.  Henry Tudor was crowned Henry VII, and spent the next 24 years increasing the size of the Treasury and marrying off his children.  If anyone had opened his wallet after he died, moths would have flown out of it.

What I do not understand is the bloody-mindedness of his son, Henry VIII.  When he succeeded to the throne in 1509, he wanted to ingratiate himself with the common people, show them that he understood their problems.  Two of his father’s advisers were hated throughout the realm because they had administered Henry VII’s tax policies.  Henry VIII had them removed from office, impeached, tried for treason, and executed.  Would it not have been enough to strip them of their offices, send them to a monastery and forbid them from taking further part in public life?  Why kill two men who were faithfully executing a policy that their sovereign had made?  Incidentally, Henry kept the money they had raised and used it for his own purposes.  Throughout his reign, he continued to execute people who stood in his way.  The list includes two of his wives (numbers 2 and 5) and two of his chancellors (More and Cromwell).  He would have executed Cromwell’s mentor Thomas Wolsey, but Wolsey died before he could be put to death.

You get the sense when reading about other English leaders that they understood at some level that they were governing a free people.  John Milton, a century later, could write to Parliament:  “Consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, . . . a Nation not slow and dull, but of quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours . . . .”  One senses that Elizabeth admired this quality in the English, while her Stuart cousins found it an annoyance, something to be suppressed, but still a fact of life to be reckoned with.  But for Henry VIII, I feel that this quality of the English was in his way.  People who spoke their minds had to be hanged and quartered as traitors or, if he was in a generous mood, beheaded, but it was not his job to rule so as to protect the rights of a free people, a people who had tied a sovereign to the yoke of Magna Carta three centuries before.  It was his job to have his way and to destroy those who slowed him down or tried to stop him.  In my opinion, he was a very nasty piece of work.

Which brings us to the genius of Thomas Cromwell.  I think he had a sense of what his nation could be, of the potential for greatness that was just over the horizon.  He took things as he found them, realizing that for better or worse, the English were to be ruled for Henry’s lifetime by an emotional, stubborn, irrational, vengeful man who nevertheless was prepared to allow himself to be guided from time to time by competent professional advisors, as long as they engaged in sufficient flattery and sycophancy to make it clear at all times that it was Henry and not Wolsey, More, Cromwell or anyone else who was in charge.  Cromwell took that situation as it was, accepted the risks of serving such a sovereign, and played his part in building the foundations of a state that would come to play a special role in history.  I don’t suggest that Cromwell was working to lay the foundations for the Declaration of Independence.  I do think that he is an early and stunning example of a modern political leader, prepared to use the tools of rational management, law, and efficient administration to advance the interests of the nation, including its people and its sovereign, into which he was born.

I am looking forward to the remaining episodes of this series.  I’ll write again after I have had a chance to watch a couple of further episodes.  Until then . . . .