Tower of London

The Tower of London is a royal prison whose successive occupants make it a measure of the changing boundaries between religious dissent and political disobedience. Humphrey Monmouth and Thomas Bilney are confined there amid the suppression of evangelical reform; later Thomas More is held there as the Crown demands acceptance of its religious settlement. The prison’s narrative significance lies not simply in confinement, but in the way its prisoners’ different convictions expose a kingdom moving from ecclesiastical authority toward royal jurisdiction.

A prison in the campaign against reform

When Humphrey Monmouth’s house is searched, it contains no writings that can connect him to William Tyndale or his associates. Nevertheless, he is taken to the Tower. Monmouth is a respected master draper, a member of his guild, and a benefactor who buys cloth during poor trade to keep weavers employed. The evidence against him is insufficient, and he is eventually released; the ashes in his hearth cannot establish what the searchers hoped to prove. Imprisonment nonetheless damages his business, which is tottering by the time he returns home. His case shows how detention can punish a suspected supporter of reform even where an accusation cannot be substantiated.

The Tower also holds Thomas Bilney, a timid and physically frail priest who has spent a year in confinement. Thomas Cromwell asks Thomas Wolsey to release him, making Bilney the New Year’s gift he requests. Cromwell’s appeal is shaped by the recent deaths of two scholars, Clerke and Sumner, who had been shut in the cold college cellars intended for fish storage and died there without a priest. Wolsey agrees to intervene on Bilney’s behalf, on condition that Bilney return to Cambridge and abandon his plan to go to Rome to address the Pope. The episode links the Tower to a wider system of detention in which religious dissenters are confined while authorities seek recantation or compliance.

The Tower and the politics of religious authority

The novel places the Tower within a contest between competing jurisdictions. In conversation with Katherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor, Cromwell explains the formula that names Henry VIII head of the Church in England “as far as the law of Christ allows.” Mary recognizes that the wording leaves room for later reinterpretation; Cromwell likewise insists that the settlement is not irrevocable. The scene makes visible the tension between royal claims, the authority of the Pope, and the possibility of negotiation. The Tower’s prisoners are caught within this contested landscape: the question is not only what they believe, but which authority has the right to define and enforce belief.

Cromwell’s account of Marsiglio of Padua gives the political argument a more explicit form. He presents the prince as responsible for governing citizens and determining civil matters such as marriage and legitimacy, while the king derives his authority through a legislative body acting for the people. The argument also assigns church property and its use to secular authority. In this context, imprisonment becomes one instrument by which the Crown’s claim to govern religious and political life is made effective. The Tower is a setting for individual confinement, but its implications extend to Parliament, the Church, and the limits of obedience.

More’s confinement and the new oaths

Thomas More’s imprisonment at the Tower belongs to a later stage of the conflict. After he refuses the Oath of Succession, his refusal leads to a bill against him that would forfeit his goods to the Crown. In a subsequent confrontation, he is required to answer whether the Act of Supremacy is lawfully made. More declines to give a direct answer, arguing that an oath could imperil either his body or his soul: to refuse risks punishment, while to swear would violate his conscience. His position makes the Tower the place where the abstract dispute over royal authority becomes a personal choice with legal consequences.

The terms of More’s confinement tighten after he refuses the further oath associated with the Act of Supremacy. Cromwell tells him that he will no longer receive visitors or be allowed to walk in the gardens, though he may still have his books, write letters, and keep his servant John Wood. More asks what there is to see outside at that time of year, treating the restriction with dry composure. The surviving permissions do not alter the central fact: the Crown has narrowed his access to other people and to movement beyond his cell, while leaving him some means of reading, writing, and communication.

The Tower’s political function is sharpened by the law that accompanies these demands. The new treason measure makes it an offence to deny Henry’s titles or jurisdiction, or to speak or write maliciously against him. Cromwell defends the law as a clarification of existing principles, while recognizing that it makes speech itself legally dangerous. More’s case shows the resulting distinction between silence and assent: he refuses to swear, yet carefully avoids stating the opinion that the oath is designed to expose. In the Tower, conscience is not outside politics; the terms in which a prisoner speaks, and the terms in which he declines to speak, can become evidence.

A changing population, a continuing meaning

The Tower’s occupants represent different forms of suspicion and resistance. Monmouth is detained because of his suspected connection to Tyndale; Bilney is imprisoned for his religious commitments; More is confined after refusing oaths that affirm the king’s authority. Their cases are not identical, and the novel does not make the institution stand for a single, unchanging policy. Instead, their sequence traces a development: a campaign against reforming texts and their supporters gives way to a state that requires public conformity to its own religious settlement.

The prison thus connects household-level losses and anxieties to the transformation of national law. Cromwell’s intervention for Bilney follows the deaths of Clerke and Sumner; his later dealings with More reveal the consequences of legislation that binds political loyalty to religious declarations. Across these episodes, confinement is both a practical punishment and a test of authority: it shows who can be held, what they may be required to affirm, and how far a person can preserve conscience within the king’s jurisdiction. The Tower of London is therefore not merely the background to the prisoners’ stories. It is one of the novel’s clearest settings for the collision between belief, law, and the expanding power of the Crown.