Free Republic

Holy Week is always a good excuse to revisit A Man for All Seasons.The passion of Sir Thomas More (played by the great Paul Scofield) unfolds like a religious parable crossed with a legal thriller, told with a Shakespearean sense of tragic grandeur. Frequently described as a “conservative” movie — a label that has been used to both praise and denigrate it — the 1966 Oscar winner for best picture is resonating anew for conservatives following the indictment of former President Donald Trump.Is Trump our modern version of the martyred Sir Thomas More? Some pro-Trump influencers have made the connection....

“Wolf Hall,” the Man Booker Prize-winning historical novel about the court of Henry VIII — and most dramatically, the conflict between Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More — is now a TV series (presented on PBS). It is maddeningly good. Maddening because its history is tendentiously distorted, yet the drama is so brilliantly conceived and executed that you almost don’t care. Faced with an imaginative creation of such brooding, gripping, mordant intensity, you find yourself ready to pay for it in historical inaccuracy. And “Wolf Hall’s” revisionism is breathtaking. It inverts the conventional view of the saintly More being undone...

...He could have had his substantial properties restored if he had just sworn that oath, others would say, in order to provide material safety for his beloved family. Instead, this man who loved life, loved his family, loved his career and properly loved the world and all of its goods, loved the Lord first and would not compromise the Truth. He was an ordinary Christian who shows us ordinary Christians the way to living a unity of life in the midst of the creeping darkness and distractions of our own age. He held in harmony his vocation as the father...

Cromwell: Now, Sir Thomas, you stand on your silence. Sir Thomas More: I do. Cromwell: But, gentlemen of the jury, there are many kinds of silence. ... Suppose I were to take a dagger from my sleeve and make to kill the prisoner with it; and my lordships there, instead of crying out for me to stop, maintained their silence. That would betoken! It would betoken a willingness that I should do it, and under the law, they will be guilty with me. So silence can, according to the circumstances, speak! Let us consider now the circumstances of the prisoner's...