Two Heads
Are Better than One - though Henry VIII Disagreed! Two Heads Are
Better than One - though Henry VIII Disagreed! Two Heads Are Better
than One - though Henry VIII Disagreed!

Two Heads Are Better than One - though Henry VIII Disagreed!

From 1979-1986, I attended a school called English Martyrs, named after the Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales (though the Taffies were left out of the school title!), and this coming Monday, 22nd June, is the feast day of two of those saints: John Fisher and Thomas More.  Both men are great examples of learning and scholarship, but are put before us above all because of the heroic virtue they displayed in following their conscience - flesh and (plenty of) blood reminders that we are always meant to do what we believe to be the right thing.

Fisher was a Yorkshireman, a priest and bishop of the Catholic Church (his See was that of Rochester), and Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. As confessor to Queen Catherine of Aragon, Fisher would support neither King Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn nor the King’s new claim to authority over the English Church (with its implicit rejection of the Pope’s authority).  In April 1534, having refused the Oath prescribed by the Act of Succession, Fisher was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London before being tried and condemned to death.  On 20th May 1535, a month before his execution, Pope Paul III made Fisher a cardinal.  He thought this would save Fisher’s life and arranged to have the scarlet cardinal’s hat sent to England.  King Henry simply remarked that Bishop Fisher would have no head on which the hat could be placed and had him executed on 22nd June.

Two weeks later, on 6th July, the same grisly fate befell Thomas More. Thomas was a husband, father, lawyer and, as Lord High Chancellor of the Realm (appointed by Henry), a powerful political and legal figure.  He is the patron saint of lawyers and politicians.  More and Henry were great friends, but More, like Fisher, refused to sign the Oath.  There is a very famous film about the life of Saint Thomas More called A Man for All Seasons (the title comes from a description of More in 1520 by one of his contemporaries, Robert Whittington). Although it is now 60 years old, it’s worth a watch if you get the chance. The film tries to portray Thomas as a man of integrity throughout the time of his trial and imprisonment in the Tower of London. His uprightness and honesty are set in stark contrast to the conduct of the people around him - bishops, priests and cardinals, chancers, frauds, and people trying to save their own skin, advance their own career and hang on to their power. At one point, one of them says, “Thomas, disobey conscience for friendship’s sake.” Thomas replied: “And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for following your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not following my conscience, will you join me in hell, for friendship’s sake?”

If we have read or watched the TV version of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, we will see a somewhat different portrayal of More.  Mantel’s version sketches an emotionally unintelligent and heartless religious fanatic, a somewhat deranged enforcer of Catholic dogma, rather than the “man of principle, courage and conscience in terrible Tudor times” about whom the Head of my former school annually eulogised!

The older I get, the more I think that perhaps we need several perspectives when trying to evaluate reality.  Two angles on something, two heads, are usually better than one.  Historians bring ideas to the table, as do playwrights, novelists, film-makers, theologians, philosophers, theists, atheists and agnostics, as we seek to sift knowledge and truth.  We are all complex, many-sided individuals.  Different people see different things in what they perceive, and some of those perspectives will be well-founded, and others more influenced by their own background and starting points.  We live in (philosophically, if not economically) more egalitarian times, which may be why Mantel’s novel makes a different Thomas (Cromwell) the moral hero of her story.  She portrays Cromwell as a self-made man who has dragged himself out of a lowly birth in a scary home where he was abused by a violent father.  Mantel shows how Cromwell, loathed by the nobles around him yet grimly determined in the face of such opposition, strives to know the law as well as More or any other privileged legal grandee as he fights and schemes his way to the top of the political pile. Cromwell is placed before us as a modern meritocratic upstart, an affront to the superiority-by-birth of More.  There has, of course, been pushback against Mantel’s portrayal, with critics pointing out that More himself was a noted Renaissance humanist man of letters, and not some religious fundamentalist.  Different views of the same person, the same saint.

A few questions emerge for me as we approach this Monday’s Feast.  Am I open to seeing other people’s perspectives and entertaining them seriously?  Am I open to having cherished viewpoints challenged, or at least refined?  I do not have to agree with another person’s view, but am I at least open to the possibility of being wrong, of seeing another angle on something or someone?  How do I arrive at my judgments?  Do I instinctively trust certain kinds of authority (scientists, historians, philosophers, theologians, novelists) more than others, and if so, why? What does that say about my own starting point?  When I encounter two sharply conflicting accounts of the same person, is my first instinct to choose, or to sit with the discomfort of not knowing? Is it possible to admire an aspect of someone’s character and still find aspects of their worldview troubling? Do I find it easier to divide the world into goodies and baddies, to embrace someone because I like certain things they say, or write somebody off because I don’t like one aspect of what they think? Surely it is truer to say that all people are mixtures of good and bad, truth and error?  Can I hold both at once, or do I feel compelled to resolve the tension?  Why do so many people need to divide the world into goodies and baddies?  When I defend a figure I admire against a critical portrayal, am I protecting truth, or protecting something in myself?  Do I ever do what I know to be wrong? Do I ever go along with people - friends perhaps, or colleagues - just to keep myself in with the right people? A famous Dominican priest once said to me, “A little tip for life: nothing in life is worth doing, brother, if it will be a reason to worry on our deathbed!”

This Monday, as Catholics mark the Feast of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More, we might borrow something from both men, regardless of whether our own tradition of thought and life is religious or secular: their stubborn refusal to sleepwalk through life. May we have the integrity to know what we actually believe, the openness to refining it when necessary, the honesty to act on what we believe, and the courage to live in a way that leaves us with nothing to regret or fear as our own end approaches.