By Patrick F. Cannon

I visited the Frick Collection during a recent trip to New York City. The museum is in Henry Clay Frick’s former mansion on Fifth Avenue. It re-opened last year after renovation and expansion and I was eager to revisit one of the world’s great private art collections.

            Frick was a partner of Andrew Carnegie in what became US Steel. I was born in the Pittsburgh area, and I can tell you that he was hated by those who labored in its mills. In 1892, he sent barges with strikebreakers and Pinkerton agents to break a strike at the Homestead works (where I briefly worked). It turned into a battle in which 16 people were killed. In the end, the Pennsylvania state militia restored order, but it was the end of the union. Since Carnegie was in Scotland at the time, Frick became the villain to steelworkers ever after.

            While he eventually decamped to New York City, he did leave behind his former mansion – now a museum – and a 644-acre park. Since the steel industry is largely gone from the area, few people associate him with anything else. With his fortune, and advice from famous dealer Joseph Nuveen and expert Bernard Berenson, he  amassed an art collection that includes Rembrandt, Valasquez, Goya, Titian, Vermeer, El Greco – well, I could go on and on. It also includes paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger of Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540) and Thomas More (1478-1535). They hang in the same gallery, separated by a fireplace.

            We can be sure the paintings are good likenesses, as they were painted in Holbein’s studio (that’s the More portrait above). Both served as Lord Chancellor for King Henry VIII. Both ended up on the king’s wrong side and were beheaded. The reasons for their executions are quite different and have been explored endlessly in history and fiction.

            Robert Bolt’s 1960 play and 1966 film, A Man for All Seasons, focused on Sir Thomas More’s failure to get Henry’s marriage to Queen Catherin annulled so he could marry Ann Boleyn, whom he hoped could bear him a son and heir; and then More’s refusal to sign an oath recognizing Henry as head of the church in England instead of the Pope. Cromwell is the instrument of More’s downfall. The wonderful Paul Scofield played More in both the play and film and won both a Tony and Oscar for  his efforts. In the film, Cromwell was played by the portly Leo McKern, who somewhat resembled Cromwell in Holbein’s portrait.

            In the television adaptation of Hillary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning novel, Wolf Hall, which appeared here on PBS, Cromwell was played by another great English actor, Mark Rylance. Both Bolt’s play and Mantel’s novel shade the truth a bit. Wolf Hall suggests that Cromwell’s father was a loutish and violent blacksmith. He may have been violent, but he was a reasonably successful local businessman. More’s father was of a higher social class, being a successful lawyer who was knighted. His son was an Oxford-educated lawyer who rose to be Henry’s Lord Chancellor.

            While Cromwell is treated more sympathetically in the novel and television series, there is no question that he is willing to compromise his principles to get ahead. He makes it possible for Henry to marry Ann Boleyn by getting Parliament to declare Henry head of the Church in England. This not only makes the marriage possible but lets the king seize the property and thus the wealth of the Roman church. By this time, More had left public life, but refused to sign the Oath of Supremacy that acknowledged Henry as head of the church.

            There is a scene in Wolf Hall where Cromwell tries to convince More to sign the Oath. Set in a cell in the Tower of London, More, wonderfully acted by Anton Lessor, explains to Cromwell that God has made the Pope head of the church and no one, not even a king, can change that. The irony is that while More is beheaded for keeping the faith, Cromwell later meets the same fate when he rises too high and his jealous associates convince the king he has committed treason. Henry later regrets killing his old friend, but too late for Cromwell’s head to be reattached.

            In 100 years or so, the English would behead King Charles I, setting a precedent later kings wisely remembered. If there is a lesson in the story of the two Thomases, now sharing a wall at the Frick, it’s that it’s better to die with dignity than pander to the king’s fancies and die anyway.

Copyright 2026, Patrick F. Cannon