Pilgrim Ways

Prime Ministers such as Gladstone and Churchill and to the kings and queens they served.

Westminster Hall is where visiting statesmen have been invited by both houses of Parliament to address Commoners and Peers, as the greatest honour that Parliament can confer. Most memorable in recent times was the visit of South Africa‟s President Nelson Mandela, particularly poignant for those of us who had supported him during his long years in prison and throughout his steadfast campaign to end the evil of apartheid. But for me it is More, the greatest of Englishmen, who occupies the place of precedence in the history of this most significant of English buildings. Perhaps it is suitably ironic that a plaque commemorates this former Lord Chancellor and Speaker of the House of Commons, and author of Utopia, although there is nothing here to commemorate his principal adversary, Henry VIII. It was this plaque which Mother Teresa of Calcutta knelt down to kiss during her visit to Parliament in 1989.

More‟s Cell After his trial More was taken to the Tower of London. The modern pilgrim can now, since January 2000, visit the cell in the lower part of the Bell Tower, which is said to be the cell where More was detained. Perhaps this was one of the most significant gestures of the coming of the third millennium, that 465 years after he was beheaded on Tower Hill, we can at last stand where More languished and prepared himself for death. Over the distance this will be a more enduring sign of the millennium than the Greenwich Dome, full of materialistic trinkets and worthless artifacts. Today‟s pilgrims visiting More‟s cell will see only a bare stone floor and the handsomely vaulted ceilings. There are none of the hangings and furniture which Henry‟s former Lord Chancellor would have been permitted to bring there. The Tower‟s curator, Anna Keay, says that More was “a high status prisoner. He was allowed visitors and writing materials and would have been allowed to furnish the cell more or less as he wished. ” She adds that “we know very little about what was there so to put anything in the cell at all would have been based on total conjecture and the room itself is architecturally very interesting.” The Catholic pilgrim to the Tower is likely to be less interested in the architecture than in the exhibition, “Thomas More, Man and Martyr”, which Miss Keay has assembled in an adjacent ante-room. This puts flesh on the dry bones. Here is the now ragged and tattered transcript of the conversation between More and the Solicitor General, Richard Rich. It is Rich who finally undoes More by perjuring himself during the trial. His pay-off is a sinecure in Wales. The treachery is brought vividly to life in Zinnemann‟s film with More asking Rich whether this was the best price he could extract: was his life to be paid for by a minor political post in the principality? Rich‟s evidence was to lead directly to More‟s conviction on the charge of treason. Also in the exhibition is a relic of More‟s hair shirt, loaned by the Diocese of Portsmouth, which he frequently wore as a penance for his own sinfulness. The modern pilgrim feels distinctly uncomfortable when confronted with the fight which such a self-evidently holy man was prepared to put up against the temptations which beset us all. Here, too, are the transcripts of some of his letters, including the final letter which he composed to one of his daughters before his execution.

More‟s Pilgrimage To The Tower More was detained here for 15 months, along with his fellow martyr, Bishop John Fisher. He had been educated at Oxford and was regarded as one of the greatest scholars of his age. He was a close friend of Erasmus and Holbein. His exploration of what an egalitarian society might be like, Utopia, still remains well read and influential. Initially he considered becoming a Carthusian monk, and remained close to that order throughout his life. Ultimately, it was