Words, words, just words

“Words, words, just words” is a remembered phrase from Thomas More that returns at a decisive moment in his confrontation with Cromwell. First heard by Cromwell as a child when More covered a book with his hands, it comes to signify not the emptiness of language but the contested power of words: who may define them, conceal meaning within them, or make them answer to the king.

The childhood memory

Cromwell recalls running up the stairs at Lambeth at about seven years old, carrying More a measure of small beer and a wheaten loaf in case he woke hungry during the night. More was reading. When he looked up, he held his hands over the great book as if protecting it. The boy asked what it contained; More answered, “words, words, just words.”

The scene survives not as a shared memory but as Cromwell’s: More first doubts that they met when Cromwell was seven, then concedes that if it happened, he probably laughed at him. The difference matters. For the child, the guarded book and casual answer suggested that More was making fun of him. For the adult, the phrase has become a way to name a much larger struggle over what words can mean and what obligations they impose.

Words as persuasion and escape

In the Tower, Cromwell tries to persuade More to speak the words required for his release. He offers a route back to Chelsea, to Alice and the household’s familiar comforts, even imagining More returning to his cell and devotions after a brief freedom. More listens, then says Cromwell should write a play. The comment recognizes the scene’s performance: Cromwell is composing a vivid future to persuade a prisoner, while More remains unwilling to give the assent that would make it real.

More’s answer, “Words. Words. Just words,” echoes his childhood remark but sharpens its irony. Cromwell has just insisted that More needs only to say some words; he even offers to put them in writing for him to sign. To Cromwell, the formula could be a small verbal price for life and freedom. To More, words cannot be detached so easily from the person who says them. The apparent simplicity of the bargain exposes the gulf between political compliance and conscience.

A phrase that changes meaning

The recollection opens “a strange country” for Cromwell, with a cold wind from childhood. He reconstructs details More does not remember: the hour, the bread and beer, the book shielded by More’s hands. The phrase thus joins two different moments without making them identical. The boy hears a dismissive answer; the adult hears an unresolved question about language, loyalty, and what a spoken or written declaration commits its author to.

The book may have been a dictionary, Cromwell suggests, but More cannot confirm it. That uncertainty remains inside the phrase. At the trial, More’s silences and qualifications are described as a contest between “More’s dictionary” and Cromwell’s: silence, too, can be full of words. The phrase’s recurrence therefore turns a remembered exchange into a measure of their opposing accounts of speech—one cautious about what words can be made to mean, the other insisting that language has political force and consequences.