Stories From the Silver Screen: A Man for All Seasons

Part of a series about films so riveting that they deserve to be remembered long after they were first seen.

On a tombstone in a quiet cemetery in West Sussex, England, a brief inscription marks the place where one of the great figures of the English theater awaits the resurrection. His name is Paul Scofield, who died in 2008. “On stage,” the inscription reads, “his voice split the silence / his whisper cast a spell / Now his stage is dark, / Silence reclaims him, / and we his wife and family, / hold close his memory forever.” 

The words are few—perfectly lapidary too—testifying not only to a consummate actor, who over the course of a very long and storied career held countless audiences spellbound, but a cherished husband and father, whose memory will be held close forever. 

For all his fabled achievements, however, whether on stage or screen—and there have been a great many stellar performances—I’d put my money on his portrayal of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons, both in the stage production in 1961 and in the later film version from 1966. It had to have been his most commanding performance ever. Not surprising, therefore, that both he and the film won Oscars that year, he for Best Actor while the movie got Best Picture. 

It was there that he shone most like the sun. Indeed, it was the part for which a wise Providence had long prepared him, the perfect dramatic setting where “his voice split the silence, his whisper cast a spell.” To be sure, he’d been given the most amazingly eloquent lines to speak, issuing forth from the mouth of a man possessed of both “an angel’s wit and singular learning,” to quote an admiring contemporary of More. “For where,” he asks, “is the man of that gentleness, lowliness, and affability?”

And as time requireth a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes; and sometimes of as sad gravity: a man for all seasons.

Yes, Paul Scofield had been given the best, the most inspired lines an actor could possibly ask for in playing the character of England’s Lord Chancellor and a future saint of the Catholic Church. A bird of paradise, no less, who, in the words of that high Tory, Samuel Johnson, whom no one could suspect of papist sympathy, crypto or otherwise, “was the person of the greatest virtue these islands ever produced.”

For most of us it will have been the film version that we remember best, the perfect vehicle for showing off the soul of Thomas More. How many millions of viewers have seen and been moved by it! Who would not wish to cheer on such an attractive and engaging figure? Who could resist so arresting a display of courage and integrity? He was, so the movie reveals, a brave and honorable man forced to stand alone—and even to die—because he would not bend the knee before the tyranny of a king driven mad by ungovernable greed and lust, determined to destroy all who got in his way. Well, More stood in his way, exceedingly tall in the saddle, perfectly resolute to the very end in the teeth of a cowardly and corrupt age.

“You’re a constant regret to me, Thomas,” complained the worldly Wolsey, whose moral shortcomings surely occasioned far greater regret on God’s part. “If you could just see facts flat on, without that horrible moral squint; with just a little common sense, you could have been a statesman.” 

Or in the fraught exchange with Lord Norfolk, who, until the Great Matter of the King surfaced, roiling the waters of both Church and State, had been friend to both More and his family; but now, like most everyone else in the realm, chose to set his sail according to more favorable winds, winds less likely to imperil either his person or his position at court. “I can’t give in,” More tells him. “You might as well advise a man to change the color of his eyes. I can’t. Our friendship’s more mutable than that.” Then, speaking more urgently, he adds, “To me it has to be, for that’s myself! Affection goes as deep in me as you think, but only God is love right through…and that’s my self.” 

All of which leads to the most moving scene of all, that of More being sent to the Tower to await execution for acts of treason which he did not commit. It is there in the midst of his final and most bitter travail that he sees his wife and daughter for the last time. They’ve been summoned by Master Cromwell to attempt persuading More to abandon principle and take the oath declaring Henry VIII Supreme Head on earth of the Church in England. He will refuse, of course, but in the conversation More has with Meg, his beloved daughter, who wishes her father to submit in order that he might return home to his family, the argument he makes will, in the perspective of eternity, prove unanswerable.

“You want me to swear to the Act of Succession?” asks More. 

His daughter answers by saying that since God “more regards the thoughts of the heart than the words of the mouth,” why can’t he just mouth the words of the oath while believing otherwise in his heart? 

“What is an oath then,” he asks, “but words we say to God?” When a man takes an oath, insists More, what he is doing is nothing less than “holding his own self in his own hands. Like water,” he tells her, cupping his hands. “And if he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself again. Some men aren’t capable of this,” he continues, “but I’d be loathe to think your father one of them.”

She is not quite finished, however, and desperately playing her last card, reminds him how, “In any State that was half good, you would be raised up high, not here, for what you’ve done already. It’s not your fault the State’s three-quarter bad…” 

To which her father replies, “That’s very neat. But look now…

If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we’d live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all…why then perhaps we must stand fast a little—even at the risk of being heroes.

“But in reason!” she cries. “Haven’t you done as much as God can reasonably want?” 

More’s answer, his last word on the subject, says everything, revealing not only the ground of his opposition to the king’s tyranny, but the heart of his relationship to the God who has given him everything, including the courage to resist such tyranny even unto death on the scaffold. 

But don’t you see, Meg, it isn’t finally a matter of reason, but a matter of love. 

It is an overwhelming moment, and one sublimely befitting the first of yet more marvelous stories to come.