Synopses & Reviews
Thomas More's treason trial in 1535 is one of history's most famous court cases, yet never before have all the major documents been collected, translated, and analyzed by a team of legal and Tudor scholars. This edition serves as an important sourcebook and concludes with a 'docudrama' reconstructing the course of the trial based on these documents. Legal experts H. A. Kelly and R. H. Helmholz take different approaches to the legalities of this trial, and four experienced judges (including Justice of the Queen's Bench Sir Michael Tugendhat) discuss the trial with some disagreements - notably on the meaning and requirement of 'malice' called for in the Parliamentary Act of Supremacy. More's own accounts of his interrogations in prison are analyzed, and the trial's procedures are compared to and contrasted with 16th-century concepts of natural law and also modern judicial practices and principles. The book is a 'must read' not only for students of law and Tudor history but also for all concerned with justice and due process. As a whole, the book challenges Duncan Derrett's conclusions that the trial was conducted in accord with contemporary legal norms and that More was convicted only on the single charge of denying Parliament the power to declare Henry VIII Supreme Head of the English Church (testified to by Richard Rich) - a position that has been uniformly accepted by historians since 1964. HENRY ANSGAR KELLY is past Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA. LOUIS W. KARLIN is an attorney with the California Court of Appeal and Fellow of the Center for Thomas More Studies, University of Dallas. GERARD B. WEGEMER is Director of the Center for Thomas More Studies.
Synopsis
There have been innumerable studies about Thomas More and his eventual downfall at the hands of Henry VIII. The 1535 trial in which More was convicted of treason has long been denounced as a typical political miscarriage of justice. However, more recently the trial has been taken seriously as a carefully prepared and executed judicial process. This book disagrees with this consensus. It opens with a procedural review of More's trial by Ansgar Kelly. Since the 1960s historians have agreed that the judges accepted More's objections against the first parts of the indictment. Kelly concludes that, on the contrary, the indictment as a whole was presented to the jury, and that More was found guilty of the whole. The judges should be found guilty of bowing to political pressure and convicting More against the clear intention of Parliament. R. H. Helmholz analyzes More's options from the point of view of sixteenth-century natural-law theory, while Louis Karlin and David Oakley describe More's trial procedures in light of modern juridical practices. Elizabeth McCutcheon analyzes More's accounts of the attempts of the King's Council to intimidate him before the trial, followed by discussions of the trial by four practicing judges. The book concludes with an edition of the pertinent documents of the trial. An appendix gives a dramatic reconstruction of the trial in light of the above analyses. HENRY ANSGAR KELLY is Professor Emeritus of English, UCLA. LOUIS J KARLIN is Research Attorney Los Angeles and Fellow of the Center for Thomas More Studies, University of Dallas. GERARD B. WEGEMER is Director at the Center for Thomas More Studies, Department of English, University of Dallas.
Synopsis
This book challenges the recently established consensus that the trial was a carefully prepared and executed judicial process in which the judges were amenable to reasonable arguments.