Editor’s note: This entry is part of an ongoing series of personal essays by the author on love and life. You can read here parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9.

“It is part of the business of life to be affable and pleasing to those whom either nature, chance or circumstance has made our companions.”
– Sir Thomas More

I don’t think I can stress this enough, but I love travelling. I have already written a travel log for this series, and while it was as exciting, unexpected and delightful as I recounted it, I think I should engage once again in such exercise, especially now considering I recently had another of those marvelous short trips that are out of the usual.

Last month, as a pre-birthday gift, this year I had the chance to go for a short study seminar to London, following the steps of Sir Thomas More. While in principle this cannot sound as the most interesting experience one could think of, it turned out to be another unrepeatable trip in my list, not because I won’t return to the United Kingdom soon, but because the circumstances in which this trip was prepared, as well as the activities in which I participated during it made it particularly unique. It also served as a practical exercise into an idea I have long been thinking about, which is that of friendship. I made me value the friends I have around, the friends I meet along the way, and the friends I’ve lost and found in time.

Unlike my last solo trip to Vienna, this trip to London was a group enterprise: first of all, it had originally been organized by a law professor associated to my residence hall here in Kraków, which ensured of sorts that it would be a quite Catholic travel experience, and it turned out to be, but not as in a spiritual retreat, but as in a cultural discovery of the spots a normal tourist would care. It was, first and foremost, a scholarly visit to a city that lays between the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane, the magnificent and the mundane.

Let’s begin by saying that before it even started, our travel party had two losses: first, one of our dorm mates, who stayed due to personal issues, and second, our own organizing professor, who could not join due to health reasons, and which left us with one lecture less in our schedule in the British capital, and feeling a little orphaned, at least until our arrival to our pre-booked hotel/compound.

The trip started without any major problem nor feeling, as I left my work earlier to go to the airport, met on the train my other two dorm mates who would also be going to London with me, and we all ended up boarding the plane by early afternoon, arriving to our destination, which was quite far from London itself, still with sunlight, but to our place to stay after the sun had set.

Maybe that was what influenced my initial impression of London, as did the weather we had to endure the next day: it was a dark, rainy, expensive and cosmopolitan city, full of foreign cultures and little regard for your fellow man. While this might be true for many people, I don’t think this is what ultimately happened with us, and pretty soon, we found out we three, coming from Kraków, were not alone in our Thomas More study seminar, and we would be soon joined by a group of people linked to the city of Bilbao, in Spain, who had or were arriving to London for the same reasons as us.

Our first day began at Westminster Cathedral, a Neo-Byzantine church building located in the center of London, quite close to other famous landmarks, such as including Buckingham Palace, the Anglican Westminster Abbey, and 10 Downing Street, work address of the British Prime Minister, although we would not see those until our last day.

After morning Mass, we quickly went via the London Underground to the Tower of London complex, walking by chance through his memorial stone in Tower Hill, before we were joined by he who would become our guide in our niche journey through London, architect and scholar on Thomas More, Frank Mitjans, as well as by our first friends from Bilbao.

Our Tower of London tour, again, was not a normal tourist visit, as we were escorted by a Yeomen Warder, also known as a Beefeater, into the cell in which Sir Thomas More was held in his captivity for having refused to sign the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging the King Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church of England and not agreeing to support the annulment request of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, ultimately choosing not to attend attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn as Queen of England, which was the actual cause for his arrest under treason charges.

We also had the chance to go to the rather hidden Royal Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London, and while we wandered around, Frank would delight us with facts and knowledge about the life of Thomas More, as well as of others of his fellow friends, rivals and other contemporaries, such as Emperor-King Charles V/I of the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, Cardinal John Fisher, Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell and Renaissance Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam.

After we finished our visit, we went to have lunch, with a nice pint of dark Guinness beer, of course, before we went to the Palace of Westminster to visit the Rt. Hon. Lord Brennan and his wife Lady Brennan, who would host us in the House of the Lords for the afternoon, and with whom we would discuss about the meaning of a Christian vocation in law, politics and charity, with their lives and careers as the practical example.

For an heraldry enthusiast like me, aside from the overall pleasant aesthetics of the Houses of Parliament, our visit to Westminster Palace was quite unique, as I was marveled at the many coats of arms and other heraldic achievements that decorated the walls and stained glass of this historical and still useful building.

Aside from our conversation with Lord Brennan and being shown around the place by Lady Brennan, we managed to attend as guests two sessions of Parliament that were happening in real-time, one in the proper House of the Lords and one in the House of the Commons, just to get acquainted with the whole debate and deliberation process so usual in the Westminster parliamentary system.

By the end of our visit, we said farewell to our noble hosts, and departed, still under the rain, for dinner at the also historic Netherhall House in Camden, courtesy of Frank, where we joined other resident students for their night meal and for an impromptu piano-cello-violin performance that was organized in their auditorium that day.

Our day finished back into our hotel, sharing milk and cookies with one of our friends from Bilbao, Iñigo, a fellow Barbour-wearing, maths & physics studying prep, who had joined us from Bath in our House of the Lords visit. (Curiously, one of the songs from a band I had recently discovered, Night Tapes, also coincidentally based in London, is titled Inigo. Talk about synchronicity!)

The next day began with a walk to Chelsea, to attend Mass at another Thomas More site, the Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer and St Thomas More, before he had breakfast and before we were joined again by Frank, who led us to the Chelsea Old All Saints Church (another heraldist’s visual feast), past Crosby Moran Hall, and then into the Victoria and Albert Museum to look at the Sir Thomas More & His Household & Descendants painting by Rowland Lockey, which he later told us had been the spark in his interest in the life of the patron saint of statesmen.

We then went to the City of London, stopping by Trafalgar Square and Lincoln’s Inn (one of the four Inns of Court in London to which English and Welsh barristers must belong to lawfully practice the legal profession), having a very traditional Fish & Chips (and the inevitable pint of Guinness) lunch before we arrived to Guildhall, where we would meet Vincent Keaveny, Esq. an Irish lawyer and Lord Mayor of London for 2021-2022, who would host our visit in the seat of the City of London Corporation, the ancient and symbolic, yet still important municipal governing body of the historic centre of London that houses much of the United Kingdom’s (and even the world’s) financial sector.

Aside from being in yet another building full of heraldic eye candy for me, a running joke we had in our visit with Lord Mayor Keaveny was about the symbolic importance of hats in the ceremony of appointment as Lord Mayor, and how, in a sense, since the keys to the City are held and transferred inside those felt hats, power and authority are stored in the hat.

Our next stop was the Oriental Club, again in Westminster, where we had been invited for afternoon tea with a Spanish businessman, to further discuss the role Catholics like us should have in the public sphere. It was certainly a nice experience, and it made me enjoy once again to drink tea with milk, although I haven’t been able to replicate the same taste nor the texture of the tea we had there.

While at the Oriental Club, one figure we were repeatedly told about was the Duke of Wellington, who was its first president, in his capacity as a veteran of the conflicts of the East India Trading Company with the Princely States in Bharat.

Wellington was another figure in this trip, always tailing us in the most expected places, like Guildhall or Parliament, also a little bit like Cardinal John Henry Newman, who we would also find in some corners, books or conversations.

Anyhow, after having tea at the Oriental Club, we returned once again to Netherhall House for dinner, and this time, instead of a musical performance, we had some of the resident students join us for a pub crawl around London, first off a Polish bar, to the joy of my Polish trip mates, and then to a classic British pub, before we ended in our third pub, where I befriended (or maybe rizzed?), for the benefit of my shy friends, a trio of girls studying at the University of the City of London, who joined our group for the rest of the night.

Our day thus ended very late but very successfully, and once again, we were good to go for the next one, which started similarly in Westminster Cathedral, continued with some sightseeing and ended with us returning to the airport and then back to Kraków.

With this account, I finish the travel log part of this essay, because if I learnt something from this trip, it was about a deeper understanding of friendship and what it means for the larger idea of love.

I have never been too much of a social guy. Not in the sense of belonging to large groups of friends or having cliques in which I could find myself. Despite my best attempts at exercising some natural charisma I may have, my leadership was usually cut short by the extent of my influence. My friends were usually the two or three that would hang out with mean in any different given time, and sometimes, we could have some external figure, like an interesting bystander, welcomed into our group.

Still, I’ve always been more of a loner, maybe by subconscious choice, or by the circumstances of my upbringing, which I explained in length in the last entry of this series. When you don’t belong to the larger collective, it becomes more complicated to belong to smaller social bodies.

There’s a relative advantage in that, as I discussed with one of those friends we find in unexpected places, like my co-worker with a similar background, who used to blog around a decade ago. He told me this, whatever it is, mostly loneliness, is the price of the freedom we truly enjoy.

As one of the few people I can truly commute in ideas and share in deep conversion in my current context, I appreciate his insight quite a lot. Maybe that’s because most of my more intellectually inclined friends are always older men of the mentor type, like him, or my co-editors at The Miskatonian.

I thought a lot about the meaning of friendship during this trip to London, as I found more about my dorm mates, their lives and their ideas, as I shared in aesthetic fellowship with our companions from Bilbao, as we enjoyed the hospitality and the knowledge from Frank Mitjans, from Lord and Lady Brennan, from Lord Mayor Keaveny and from our Spaniard host at the Oriental Club.

I also though about all the friends and acquintances I have all around the world, from the United States to Latin America and other parts of Europe. I though about the ones I still have frequent contact with, and about the ones I reach out every now and then. I thought about the people from the Catholic youth ministry I recently joined, about the coworkers I hang out with the most, about my other dorm mates, my past and current classmates… About every single person, either by nature, chance or circumstance, life has made my companions, and how I may or may not have succeeded in being affable and pleasing. In being their friend.

And I thought about my closest friend as of now here in Kraków, who despite being younger than me, has taught me valuable life lessons from his own experience, not to the point of reverting our relationship to that of mentor and mentee, but maybe getting it to a pure state of equality, in which we may see each other as the other’s peer. And well, by extension, that also includes his now fiancée, since I have the chance to have befriended both him and her, as they are pretty much a strong unit now, with a bright future together in their horizon.

These ideas play well with the life of Sir Thomas More, because I believe he embodies a certain spirit of Christian friendship that cannot be found in other figures. What may have started as a trip about the Christian vocation in public life turned to be about the meaning of friendship in the Christian sense.

I may be forcing this a little bit, for Thomas More is remembered more for his role as a statesman than as an example of the virtue of friendship, but I suppose two of his closest relationships could and should be considered in this light, particularly with Erasmus of Rotterdam and with King Henry VIII.

With Erasmus, Thomas More found a fellow humanist, having first met him during Erasmus first of many trips to London, in 1499. They belonged to the same circle of Classical scholars to which William Blount, 4th Baron Mountjoy belonged (and who had invited Erasmus to England after having been taught by him), well versed in ancient Greek, and their mutual fondness soon developed into a close friendship and a strong collaboration in their works, continuously exchanging letters.

They both had higher spiritual inclinations, but of the two, only Erasmus took the religious path, while Thomas More chose a family life, better suited for his station and his aspirations and goals in life. Thus, at Erasmus’ second visit to England, in 1505, he was kindly hosted in More’s household, by them composed by Thomas’ first-born daughter Margaret, his pregnant wife Joanna, also called Jane, More (née) Colt, and his friend Thomas himself.

A well-known anecdote from the early days of Erasmus and Thomas More’s friendship recalls the time they went together on a walk to visit the children of King Henry VII on their schooling place in Eltham so More could present to young prince Henry (future Henry VIII) a piece he had written for him, only for Erasmus to excuse himself not having prepared something for the prince as well, requesting three days to do so.

This kind of banter would follow their lives, and would be very well recorded in their epistolary exchanges, with Erasmus jokingly scolding More on the lateness and length of his replies during his stay in Oxford, and Thomas More later doing the same during Erasmus’ travels around France, the Low Countries and Italy.

But for both of them, this was the beginning of a relationship as confidants and peers, as much as Erasmus, considered that “for the first time in his life” he had “made friendship of men of his own caliber“, and asking himself if “nature [had] ever [invented] anything kinder, sweeter or more harmonious than the character of Thomas More?”

Since Erasmus’ first and second visit, Thomas More had greatly progressed in his career, and by that point he was already a practicing barrister and a Member of Parliament, representing Great Yarmouth in the House of the Commons, as well as a skilled translator.

This time, Erasmus could have stayed permanently in England, even under the support of the English monarch, who was well acquainted with his intellectual capacity and his scholarly prestige, but Erasmus declined, understanding he was not inclined to politics in the same way as his friend Thomas More was, and mostly, because he valued above else his freedom as an independent scholar, distrusting any ties that could restrict his thought.

Thomas More and Erasmus would continue to write to each other, and by 1510, Erasmus would return to England for a third time, being again hosted by Thomas More in his house, who now was undersheriff of the City of London, equity judge in the Court of Requests and Privy Counselor, where he recovered from an illness that afflicted him and where he would write his book The Praise of Folly, and where he encouraged his friend to write his own book Utopia, which he would get published by 1516, when More stayed in a diplomatic post in the Low Countries.

Again, Erasmus could have stayed permanently in England in this occasion, having received an offer from the Chancellor of University of Cambridge, John Fisher, so he would become a tenured professor of divinity, but again, Erasmus rejected the offer, and leaving again for Continental Europe.

The two friends would meet again in Brabant shortly after, as Thomas More joined the diplomatic corps that was sent to negotiate on behalf of now King Henry VIII with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, of whom Erasmus was now a councilor, as well as tutor to his brother future Emperor Ferdinand I.

Erasmus and Thomas More would attend together the Field of the Cloth of Gold summit in Calais between Henry VIII and French King Francis I, that sought to outlaw war forever among Christian peoples as the common will of two pretentious Renaissance monarchs, but to no result.

After that, they would part ways and would never had the chance to meet in person again, but would continue to exchange letters until their respective deaths in 1535-36, in a world that had seen them both rise through their talent and receive the protection of different monarchs, holding their mutual esteem as a source of inspiration and help.

And of their friendship Thomas More wrote to Erasmus: “We are ‘together, you and I, a crowd’“, with Eramus, much later, at the time of More’s death, commenting it to his Polish friend Piotr Tomicki that his friendship with Thomas More was as two bodies sharing “a single soul as Pythagoras once said.“

Thomas More and Erasmus’ friendship is one of this historical examples of the spark that gets lighted in two people that allows them to share in life and in mind, and to mutually contribute to their greatness and their sanctity. These are the kind of friends that raise you higher and fill your heart with joy of recognizing another so like-minded that the bond formed just flows naturally.

But just as their friendship was exceptional, Erasmus and Thomas More lived through very changing times, with religious reform swiping across Europe. They both remained Catholic, but for Thomas More, due to his political exposure, this ultimately meant his death by the order of his former protector.

And thus here I shall talk about a different kind of friendship and what it means in its hardship: that of Thomas More and Henry VIII.

It is hard to define the relation of a civil servant with their monarch as one of friendship, but as the trusted chief minister of King Henry VIII for three years, and having known him for almost 30, it would be inadequate to simply call it one threaded in the cloth of politics.

First of all, because Thomas More was King Henry’s secretary since 1519, that is, ten years after the start of his reign, and twenty after Erasmus met him through More, which means he had been relatively close to the king pretty much all his life.

However, More’s rise at the service of Henry VIII came through his connections with Archbishop Thomas Wolsey, who employed young More before and during his own time as Lord Chancellor and the king’s chief legal adviser, that is, from their time in together in the Low Countries until Wolsey’s fall from grace after failing to get Henry’s marriage with Catherine of Aragon annulled in 1529.

Despite the increasingly growing problem that Henry VIII’s marital policy was posing, More, who had already built his prestige as a jurist, served his monarch loyally and lawfully, compensating his dual allegiances to King and Church without any major issue, even if he personally, but privately, disagreed with Henry’s decision to break his marriage with Catherine.

For three years, More juggled in the incoming class between the British Monarchy and the Roman Papacy, and as Lord Chancellor, decided on the King’s name as his delegate judge and enforce the King justice for his subjects, staying out of the issue as long as he could, although he would be soon put to test, as he was requested to sign a letter by the leading English churchmen and aristocrats asking Pope Clement VII to annul Henry’s marriage to, and to sign the Oath of Royal Supremacy of the King as Head of the Church of England.

He refused, and eventually resigned from his position as Lord Chancellor, but stayed in Henry VIII’s favor until he refused to attend Henry’s new wife (and ex-mistress) Anne Boleyn’s coronation as Queen, an act that put bad blood between them.

Unlike More, who has chosen to stay silent regarding his King’s decision as a way to respectfully disagree with him, his successor as chief advisors to Henry VIII, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and new Chancellor Thomas Cromwell, where his enablers, and allowed for Boleyn’s coronation, reforms to the crown succession laws, and the legal establishment of the Church of England, separate from Rome, under the King’s headship, progressively adopting more and more elements of Protestantism in their religious policy.

The King and his opportunistic entourage ended up having More’s accused of treason for not complying with the acceptance of the new religious status quo given his silence, and had him executed on those grounds after making him go through various months of seclusion at the Tower of London.

As he was lead to his death for having remained in his faith against the Henry VIII’s whims, he was said to be dying “the king’s good servant, but God’s first“.

Like many others, this is a well known story, and one that remains in the collective memory hundreds of years after it happened. Many different accounts of it have been told and produced, but not many of them have tried to portray Henry VIII and Thomas More relationship as one of friendship, mostly due to the power plays at hand.

But even in such cases, service is also a gate to friendship, and friendship may take many different forms, not only the encounter of equals engaging in intellectual and spiritual fellowship.

At its heart, Thomas More’s objection to King Henry’s action was an act of friendship braver than any of the ones taken by his enablers could have ever been. It takes a strong character to oppose someone that feels, or is, higher than us, but when that opposition in grounded on a just cause, it achieves some equality between the parties, for only equals can be mutually confronted.

Thomas More was maybe Henry VIII’s only real friend because he dared to oppose him in the might of his power, having known him all his life and rejecting his wishes out of principle. And it did cost him his life.

A friend cannot be an enabler. Friendship involves the joy of sharing and indulging in the most proximate bonds of society, built around common interests, common goals, common fondness for the other, but it also involves the responsability to care for your fellow man or woman and to help them keep or achieve virtue.

And this is pretty much what I’ve learnt from the couple true friendships I’ve developped over the years, that they can both be like finding a sibling of the mind and the heart, but also like a respectful clash of dissimilar opinions, that makes us confront our shortcomings and our egos.

I think that those friendships, when accepted as they are in their full dimension, makes us grow as well, as they shows us a form of humility that cannot really be achieved when we only deal with people above or below our station.

In friendship, we find true equality, both as fellow travelers along the way of life, and as unmovable anchors of reason when our loved ones do wrong. That is the meaning of a friend. And that may be the first and foremost form of love we must cultivate for a virtuous life.