Perhaps Thomas More’s life would have remained untroubled had Henry Tudor not fallen in love with a girl half his age–one who would be his queen but not his mistress–and embarked on a campaign to rid himself of his wife, Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his deceased brother Prince Arthur, to whom she had been married briefly. A dispensation from the Holy See had been required for the marriage of Henry and Catherine, her (by Catherine’s account unconsummated) marriage to Arthur having raised a bar of consanguinity against her marriage to Arthur’s brother.
When Henry began to sue to have his marriage to Catherine set aside, formally on the grounds that Leviticus forbade his marriage to his brother’s widow, a good canon lawyer should perhaps have seen that no matter how sympathetic the Pope might be–and by policy popes were usually sympathetic to sovereigns–Henry would have difficulty dispensing, as it were, the previously given dispensation. The impossibility of the thing would in the long run cause Cardinal Woolsey–who in the 1520s effectively ruled England, a task Henry was willing to delegate–to fall and Thomas More to die at the block.
There is probably no part of Thomas More’s life and thought left uncanvassed by modern scholarship. He is indeed the man for all seasons, but especially for a season like the present in which the shadow of tyranny represented in the sixteenth century by the relentless Tudor regime once again calls into question the claims of religion and conscience. And More is easy to write about, for on the face of his biography he is a charmer; full of wit that never bites and of an irrepressible charity in the face of bitter adversity that alone might have justified his canonization. One of the complexities of his character that is always worthy of comment was his stature as a man of letters, and as such a defender of the modern way in learning. His defense of conscience is always an appealing theme, especially for post-modern Americans, and his defense of the Church laid the groundwork for the thousands of defenses that modernity as it has unfolded would require. These are tempting topics, as is his quiet management of his martyrdom, his manifest desire to find some way, a way not to displease the King, a way not to be a martyr, some way back to Chelsea and his books, if such a way were possible.
My purpose here is not to develop any of these or other popular themes rooted in More’s biography, but to look at Thomas More’s life when displayed in contrast with the biography of his friend, mentor, and executioner Henry Tudor, as illustrative of the crisis of his age. In the twentieth century, English language scholars, especially those in literature and the history of ideas, have displayed an interest in what will often be called ‘the break,’ a point in time when a note of discontinuity defined the margins between an old world of ideas, loyalties, and manners, and a new world whose roots are difficult to discern.
The sense that this has indeed happened is oppressively present in contemporary historiography, although it is treated in very different ways. When I had just begun to think on this theme I happened upon a book, Albert Schweitzer’s Philosophy of Civilization. The book was not profound but symbolic–the burden of which, in the chapter titled The New Way, is the belief that the “optimistic ethical view of life has failed in the face of the impossibility of reconciling our views of nature and the self.” But Schweitzer’s is a mere late-born footnote to a broad position undertaken by almost all of modern philosophy from Pico della Mirandola to Bacon, Kant, and Descartes, that two millennia of philosophy have issued in failure so obvious and profound that we must begin again without reference to this failed history.
This line, from Pomponazzi to Richard Rorty, celebrates the failure of a world considered naïve in favor of the irony and cynicism that teaches the impossibility of goodness and knowledge. Viewing the question from the other side, the non-Rorty side, R. G. Collingwood wrote in his Autobiography in 1939 that moral philosophy, from Socrates down to his own undergraduate days, had been regarded as “an attempt to think out more clearly the issues involved in conduct, for the sake of acting better.” Then Collingwood went on to say that H. A. Prichard, seconding the position of Cambridge don G. E. Moore that ‘good’ has no definable meaning, declared in 1912 that moral philosophy was based upon a mistake.
This is merely one aspect of the discontinuity that haunts the modern and post-modern mind. The fact is not simple, for the world over which thinkers like Prichard and Rorty have pronounced a joyous valedictory does not lie peaceably, and there are others, like Alasdair MacIntyre, Roger Scruton, Michael Oakeshott, and indeed Benedict xvi and C. S. Lewis, who view the great discontinuity in a less than favorable light. When Lewis wrote his De Descriptione Temporum he presented the advent of machines, the dominance of subjectivity, and the failure of modern poetry to discover any range of common meanings with a gentle regret, but Lewis’s regret was reflected then (and now) more sharply by the common usage of the term medieval as an adjective of opprobrium. When Benedict decries what he has called a hermeneutic of rupture and defends a hermeneutic of continuity, he is dealing, late, and on a particular scale, with the same idea. Something has changed, and that something has affected all of thought and life.
Such discontinuity, assuming that the analysis of Lewis, Collingwood, and a hundred others is a fact, did not occur in a day or perhaps not even in centuries. The beginnings of the process might reasonably be located as early as mid-fourteenth century when the perennial philosophy was rendered problematic by a new philosophy that attacked the very ground of knowledge by insisting that those doorways to intelligibility, forms or ideas, were no more than common notions, surely not realities that lived either in things or in some transcendental intellectual heaven. Or it might be dated as late as August 1914, a view put forward, not scientifically but dramatically, by Barbara Tuchman’s Proud Tower, or even as late as 1968, when the real American revolution in ideas and manners occurred.
Here I propose briefly to consider the career of Saint Thomas More, located as it is midway down the path, as the particular locus of ‘the break,’ and by way of synecdoche to take one date in May 1532, the date of the Act for the Submission of the Clergy, the acceptance of which caused More’s resignation, as having rendered that transformation irreversible.
A contemporary politician spoke with a studied cynicism but also with a perhaps unrealized profundity when he said that cultural crisis offers opportunities to do something you could not do before. For however the causality runs, when the tectonic plates of culture shift, new answers to perennial questions, often given in a new language, are somehow teased out of the crisis-ridden civilization. Russian Marxism may be hateful, but it provoked Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff. The collapse of southern civilization may be greeted with regret or approbation, but it was the background apart from which Allen Tate, John Crow Ransom, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy are unintelligible.
Thomas More’s great life was in some way a product of the crisis of the 1520s in which the world of feudal loyalties was deconstructed by a new politics and a new religion. He was born into a civilization dominated by the Church, or more importantly by the religion rooted in the teaching of that Church. When he died he knew that his religion was finished in the culture. But his martyrdom inaugurated a great age, as splendid in witness as it was sordid in pusillanimity, so that from the blood of the Tudor martyrs grew the great teaching of the Council of Trent, the splendors of the Baroque, and above all, Shakespeare, whose plays provided and still provide a Christian way in a world in which memory cannot speak.
But that is for another day. My purpose here is to make the case that Thomas More’s life was the perfect mirror of the discontinuity that constituted the crisis of his age and the background for our own, partly by explicating briefly themes that tied More to the old world and separated him from the brave new world into which Henry Tudor was drawn by his passions, and partly by contrasting More’s life with the emerging world of Cromwell, Tyndale, and, above all of their master Henry, the eighth of that name.
In making this brief argument, I might turn to a reflection on the well-justified commonplaces of the sixteenth century. It did see the beginning of the destruction of manorial farming on behalf of that first great mercantile enterprise: wool shearing. It did see the beginning of the triumph of what might be called the money economy. It did see the beginnings of the expansion of Europe into the new world, an event that provided background for More’s Utopia. But the three examples I cite belong to what might be called the history of the European mind or soul, and of these the lives of More and Henry Tudor are emblematic.
The first transition More experienced was the revisioning of the relation between the present world and God’s future that had been professed by Christians since Pentecost. More was born into a world in which Everyman looked forward to life with Christ, who reigned in heaven with the Blessed Virgin and the Saints; when Thomas More died, confidence was, with increasing regularity, tacitly invested in the present economic and political order. The joy of life realized in duty and cross-bearing in an imperfect world was obscured by what Petrarch called, perhaps with unconscious irony, the simple human joys. The change was neither universal nor absolute, but it was decisive.
Of course men always pursue pleasure; Aristotle considered its status as the most basic of human desires. But in the contest between Henry and More the seeds of something new were sown because private passion was called into court to justify the creation of a new order of heaven and earth. Royal wives had more or less routinely disappeared and royal children born on the wrong side of the blanket rendered legitimate by authority. The first wife of Constantine the Great disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and Charlemagne’s first wife, a project (apparently) more his mother’s than his own, seems simply to have been returned to Sweden. The marriage of Louis vii to Eleanor of Aquitaine was annulled by an assembly of French prelates in the face of the opposition of Pope Eugenius. Katherine de Roet had begun as John of Gaunt’s in-palace mistress, but when Constance of Castile opportunely died, the Pope conveniently validated the marriage and made the children of the union legitimate, thereby incidentally providing the surfeit of heirs that made the War of the Roses almost inevitable.
But, remarkably, there exists very little literature of apology or justification for their irregularities, and the thought that a European monarch would have relocated the Catholic Church in politics and culture for his own convenience had not frequently been proposed. The fact is that a young Henry viii was hurried into marriage in 1509 at eighteen with his brother’s widow for political reasons. When he was thirtyfive, in 1526 or 1527, he fell in love. His letters, with their exaggerated promises of eternal fidelity, are only a cut above Grocery store romances. Of course, there is a whole history of falling in love, and a very complicated history it is, rooted in the love of the lady that belonged to the Troubadours, and efflorescing from a condition which the European aristocracy allowed itself only within the qualifying form of dynastic alliances into the status of universal justification for both marriage and divorce by the twentieth century.
With the King of England, reasons, always framed in service of his passions, were brought forward and converged. Henry had no male heir and he wanted one badly and for good reason. Furthermore the monarchs of Christendom had always chaffed beneath the fact that there was another kingdom within their kingdoms, a kingdom ruled by Christ and represented by a wealthy, powerful, all-too-present hierarchy. So when the political-theological opinion sponsored by Thomas Cromwell, Cranmer, and Nicholas Ridley that Rome had no real authority in anything, certainly not in the king’s divorce, it was decided that the matter could be taken care of at home.
But underneath it all was Anne Boleyn: Nisi aut regina; queen or nothing. And driving the King’s great matter were the king’s unbridled passion and affections. More knew his man. He wrote his daughter Margaret, also with a kind of tender solicitousness for Henry, that it was a “great pity that any Christian prince should be dominated by a flexible counsel ready to follow his passions.” These passions were in full flower when Henry shouted at Catherine that he would “denounce the Pope as a heretic and marry whom he pleased.”
Richard Marius, in one of the few faintly cynical treatments of More’s life, has made the case that More was as much a man of flesh as Henry Tudor. More had a deep-rooted love of life and of all the good things the newly-prosperous Tudor society had to offer. In this light, More’s pleading that he detested life at court is true and untrue. Although he had admired the monastic ideal and had tried the contemplative life with the Carthusians, More was no celibate, deciding finally that he had rather be a passable husband than a failed monastic.
But early in his career More had developed the kind of self-knowledge that Henry Tudor lacked. More spent his life denying himself, curbing his will and affections while Henry spent his realizing his will at the cost of his soul and of the lives and peace of his subjects, always expanding the reach of his affections. More wrote much and often, but most often about the necessity of suffering in this world, of dying to self. On her last visit to the Tower, Meg took away Thomas More’s hair shirt and scourge.
Granting that both men were beset by human desires, Henry became the prototype modern whom Oscar Wilde could have in mind when he counseled that the only way to be rid of temptation was to yield to it. Henry’s life was to an alarming degree neither more nor less than the realization of his affections and policies by an indomitable will, with whatever justifications lay at hand. He was the emblematic bad Catholic, for he liked everything about the Church except those points at which it challenged his will or diminished his resources.
Much ink has been spilled justifying Henry’s bullying domination of the Church, his destruction of the monasteries for gain, and his marriage to Anne Boleyn, but perhaps it was not really so very complicated.
Reginald Cardinal Pole and Henry were second cousins twice over, both descended from Margaret Beauchamp and from Richard Duke of York, the de la Poles being the last representatives of the White Rose, the Yorkists, in sixteenth-century England. Like Thomas More, Pole had been something of a favorite with the King before the matter of the divorce came up. Pole knew that what had stoked the fires of reformation in England was Henry’s insistence that he had a right to the realization of his will. Formally, the king’s case rested on his claim that he had, horrible dictu, been living in sin with his brother’s widow to whom he was related by a consanguinity that the Pope could in no wise dispense.
In 1537 Pole, being safely out of England, wrote:
Cromwell had already promised that he would make the Cardinal eat his own heart. In November of the following year Henry began a pogrom against the White Rose that included the execution of Pole’s brother and his Montague cousin and ended with the death at the block of the Cardinal’s mother, Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury, in her sixty-seventh year.At your time of life, and with all your experience of the world, you were enslaved by your passion for a girl, but she would not give you your will unless you rejected your wife, whose place she longed to take…This was the first origin of the whole lying affair.
But Pole had been right. Although secondary reasons of weight could be put forward, the whole lying affair had been caused by Henry’s desire for a girl, the sister of his mistress, who, to cite Pole again, knew “at least from the example of her sister, how soon you got tired of your mistresses.”
To this celebration of desire, More was the perfecta antitype. Seeking to live day by day in a heart-awareness of the weakness and fallenness of the human condition, More represented a world that stretched backward through the piety of Thomas à Kempis and Augustine to find root in the cross. Henry Tudor anticipated a future that would be echoed by his distant descendent Edward viii, a world in which private passions justified. In things human nothing is ever absolutely new, and Henry Tudor was not the only man to be willing to bring down the heavens to achieve his desire—one might mention, for example, the Borgia papacy—but this building of life and politics on desire and passion would open out toward Marx and Nietzsche, while More’s pattern of life would remain the property of the saints.
A second great shift in the sixteenth century mind, not unrelated to the first, moved the land of heart’s desire from the coming kingdom of Christ to “the simple human joys” and proclaimed the legitimate goal of life this side of the grave. If there is a certain Christian maxim it is that we die in order to live while the world lives only to face death. From middle life until his death, while Henry was perfecting the application of unbridled will, More would study much the way to die to this world so as to live with Christ. The future trumped anything this world had to offer; early on More began a treatise on the four last things. The tower writings were treatises such as The Sadness of Christ. His meditations on death, his fascination with Christ’s sadness, could only have been written by one who understood the beatitude: “Blessed are those who mourn.”
The second aspect of More’s life in which it compassed the division between two worlds was the transition he experienced from a world dominated by the politics of promises to the moral world of manipulation or political utilitarianism in which campaign promise is an oxymoron.
Cromwell had spent time in Venice, and during his Italian years he had acquired a manuscript copy of Machiavelli’s yet unpublished Prince, as well as a copy of Marsilius of Padua’s fourteenth-century best seller Defensor pacis. From Machiavelli Cromwell learned that it was better for the prince to be feared than loved, that power was always self-justifying, and words simply a means to a successful policy, failure being the only thing that doomed a ruler. From the second he learned that it was possible to conceive the clergy of England, or indeed any realm, as servants not of the Church but of the prince.
It is impossible to understand Thomas More’s martyrdom apart from some appreciation of the role of fidelity in his imagination and especially of the claim held by Henry, an anointed king and a friend, on that fidelity. More’s was of course a world of hierarchically arranged obligations rooted in the organization of society that had superseded the law of the Roman Empire. The great Catholic Revival historian Maurice DeWulf was a defender of the thesis that politics, and even personality, was reshaped by early medieval reliance upon the ability of everyman to make a contract and hence to make and keep a promise.
I have in another context made much of a question asked by a commentator on the successful policies and career of Charlemagne. “How did Charlemagne govern a territory that stretched from the Limes to Sicily and from Normandy to the Danube?”
In an age in which horseback was the fastest means of communication and in which there was no standing army, the answer was that every political person was bound by fidelity to his promise, which is, to say shortly, the reason why the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno was occupied by breakers of oaths. Sir Francis Palgrave put it thus: “When Charlemagne compelled a conquered chieftain to become his man he established a legal obligation much stronger than the demand of tribute would have established.”
This civilization of promises died slowly. As an extant European polity, the crucial event was the refusal of bishops who had promised loyalty to James ii to transfer that loyalty to William of Orange even after James Stuart had fled to France. William Sancroft, Thomas Ken and indeed the great lights of the Anglican episcopal bench became what history has called non-jurors or non-swearers because they could not convince themselves that the political defeat of James Stuart obviated their promise of loyalty to him.
Two hundred years earlier, in the 1530s what I have called the civilization of promises was still very much alive. Thomas More is painstaking in his anxiety that he not be seen as a breaker of faith or a traitor to loyalty. Oath breaking has always been part of the panoply of human folly, but the regime of Thomas Cromwell, armed with the ideas set forward in the Prince, destroyed the ideals of truth and fidelity. When Thomas Cranmer was made archbishop of Canterbury, he swore an oath before taking the required oath to the Pope in which he promised that his loyalty to the Pope was given only formally, causing Cardinal Pole to comment, “Other perjurers be wont to break their oath after they have sworn; you brake it before.” And then there was Richard Rich, whose false testimony under oath sent More to the block. And whether the figure depicting a man about to swear as holding his soul in his hand like water is from Robert Bolt or from More himself, we know that while More viewed the oath of succession in the best lawyerly fashion—take it if you can, Meg—he agonized over, and ultimately rejected, the repeated advice of his wife and daughter that he take the oath regarding the succession although he denied it in his heart.
For the oath to serve loyally, the promise to be a good servant, were the glue that bound culture into a moral unity. “It is my humble suit to your excellent Highness principally that your noble grace should have no distrust of my devotion to you. Among my other pleasures in heaven this should be one, that your grace should surely see there then, that howsoever you take me, I am your true beadsman, now and ever have been and will be till I die.” More’s persistent plea was that he was the king’s true subject, that as such he would live and die, “and truly pray for Him will I here and in the other world too.” And then the unforgettable line, “I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first.” Thomas More’s was a civilization of fidelity, of promises and loyalties kept, of loyalty enforced not by power but by the power of the fealty given. There would always be the platitude that men should keep promises, but More’s generation was among the last in whom the idea of pledged loyalty was the wellspring of political life.
Thirdly, this matter of the civilization of promises lay at the heart of a second great transition that marked More’s life, the transition from the cosmopolitan culture of Christendom to the national state which would by its very nature be at war with Christendom. The politics of the Middle Ages was dominated by something called the investiture controversy, investiture being an essential element in the effecting of those promises that made civilization run. Freedom in the post-Enlightenment sense was unknown; everybody was someone’s servant or man in a vast hierarchy that began with God, the Pope, and the Prince. The western theory in its fullness ran like this. All power in heaven and earth is given to Christ. As the Father sent Jesus Christ, so Christ sends the Church (John 20:21), and Peter and Peter’s successors the popes are its head, the necessary and living voice. This Church gives the temporal sword to princes, but princes rule by the authenticating blessing of the Church gained at their coronation, when the prince promised to recognize and defend the rights of the Church.
The only thing this pre-fifteenth century, decidedly messy theory of the relation between prince and church was better than was everything that followed it. It was a system with built-in tensions, for there is no real possibility of separating the temporal and spiritual realms absolutely. Everything temporal is in some sense spiritual and everything spiritual, if it matters, is in some sense temporal. So from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries the Church and the prince lived in a kind of constructive tension marked by conflict and accommodations.
The local representatives of the Church were bishops, powerful and rich, who might or might not support the projects of the king. Kings sought to clarify the situation by insisting that they, not the Pope or his representative, called bishops to their office by investing them with its symbols. The Popes insisted that bishops were their men, their servants, always requiring that they be invested with ring and staff by Papal representatives, not by the King.
Thomas More saw that Henry viii intended to resolve the investiture controversy decisively in his favor, to make bishops the king’s men or servants. Henry’s transformation, under the powerful impetus of his desires, from the most loyal of princes to the enemy of papal authority was justified by the rant of Tyndale that the power of kings knew no limitation. Thus the rejection of papal authority would lead by the broad way to regal absolutism, the guillotine, and the Hobbsean polity of power.
For Henry to triumph, it was necessary to break the will of the clergy, which did not prove difficult. On 16 May, 1532 More was in effect already a dead man, for on that day the act called the Submission of the Clergy was passed and enforced. More resigned the chancellorship within hours, and gave his son-in-law the enigmatic words, “The field is won.” He had done the right thing and perhaps he could foresee the end. In 1516 More published his Utopia, an impenetrably murky allegory that did not appear in English until long after his death. Whatever it meant, whether it was a veiled political commentary or merely a conceit, it contained this prescient criticism: “In courts they will not bear with a man’s holding his peace,…a man must barefacedly approve of the worst counsels and consent to the blackest designs, so that he would pass for a spy, or, possibly, for a traitor, that did but coldly approve of such wicked practices.” Henry Tudor required not silence but approval.
More returned to Chelsea and wrote on behalf of the Church and in defense of the clergy, who, beginning to see him as their champion, proffered the gift of a very large sum, which More refused.
It has often been remarked that Thomas More did not have a very well developed theory of the authority of the Roman See. He wrote that he, like the majority of sixteenth-century mankind, had not thought much about whether the authority of the Papacy was of divine law or traditional; in neither case would he have doubted the authority of Peter’s successor. True, More and the other martyrs did not argue Matthew 16:17 or tradition or canon law, but appealed to what Newman called a fact, that all Christendom took Clement vii to be the successor of Peter and the arbiter of Christendom, so that the default of one small kingdom provided no precedent for refusing obedience to the Roman Pontiff.
More’s words were: “Then said my Lord of Westminster to me, that howsoever the matter seemed unto mine own mind, I had cause to fear that mine own mind was erroneous, when I see the great council of the realm determine of my mind to the contrary, and that therefore I ought to change my conscience. To that I answered, that if there were no more but myself on my side and the whole parliament upon the other, I would be sore afraid to lean on my own mind against so many. But on the other side, if…I have (as I think) upon my part as great a council and greater too, I am not then bounden to change my conscience and conform it to the council of one realm, against the general council of Christendom.” The argument was not the theory, and it was in helping Henry viii compose his Defense of the Seven Sacraments that More first began to see clearly that the authority of Peter was of divine law.
After Henry’s Act of Supremacy the investiture controversy was essentially over, resolved in favor of the prince; the centuries-long project of removing this galling check to royal power was removed. It is a great mistake to think that England was alone in this matter. Henry led the way, the Valois, Bourbons and Hapsburgs followed. Princes were willing to make the customary protestations of piety, some sincere, more or less so, as long as it was clear that each controlled their church in his own realms. It is a commonplace of European history that Henry viii abstracted the Church from the medieval synthesis, thus driving Christianity out of the culture while the other great empires, Spain and France, remained faithful children of Rome. Appealing, but untrue. Gallicanism reigned in France; Josephinism in the Empire. The Falk laws in Germany in the 1870s and the bitter secularization of France in 1905 were steps along the way. More and Fisher and the Carthusians saw that what was at stake was not a matter of local polity but a precedent that would remove Christ from the heart of European civilization.
It is very hard to know whether it was his objection to the divorce or his objection to the rending of England from Christendom as it then was that made More fall silent on the matter but he refused publicly to support Henry’s proceedings. More always argued that he had never in fact opposed them in the public realm; he had never denied that the king and parliament could make Anne Boleyn Queen. But he would not support the king in his ‘great matter’. He had begun to see that Christendom was a something of which the Pope was head, and that to weaken or defy the authority of the Roman pontiff was to weaken, indeed to damage fatefully, the Church and its witness.
He was confronted with the argument that all the realm had consented to the king’s proceedings, why would he hold himself aloof? More’s answer was that, two realms being in conflict, he must stand with what Augustine would have called the City of God. More’s claim is about fidelity, about faithfulness to a realm larger than Henry’s and resting on a higher authority. This was not easy, for one can see in his letters the tension caused by that failing of loyalty to an anointed king to whom he had promised feudal duty. There is no mention in Thomas More’s letters of the historical foundation of the See of Peter or of his commission by Christ, simply an appeal to a fact. Christendom exists; it has its ways; it has its head. I cannot leave this loyalty to the King of Kings to follow even the King of England.
If More is to be located in the context of the three themes I have sketched, is he to be seen merely as a backward-looking figure whose opinions can be disqualified by the adjectives feudal or medieval? Predictably, I will say not so, for with a kind of inspired prescience More took his stand on three ideas apart from which it is impossible to survive in the modernity he foresaw.
These were the truths that followers of Jesus Christ put not their trust in princes but look to life eternal and to the age in which He will reign; that suffering, not self-realization, is the stuff of the good life; that the promise freely given, loyalty freely undertaken, is the best theme of political life, and that while the Church may for reasons partly practical and partly providential be driven from the culture, Christ is still the king of creation. These were ideas with a future.
Two years before he died, Thomas More wrote this little distich:
You who remember More, may your life be long
And your death open the gate to eternal life.
His love of the kingdom that lay beyond that gate and of its King was the spring of More’s soul-survival in the great storm that was the reign of Henry viii.