Thomas More

Thomas More was born in London in 1478, the son of Sir John More, a lawyer who later sat as a judge of the King's Bench, and Agnes Graunger. He belonged to the prosperous legal elite of late fifteenth-century England. After schooling at St Anthony's in London he served as a page in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, who sent him to Oxford, where he studied for about two years, probably at Canterbury College, and encountered humanist Latin learning. He then trained in the common law at New Inn and Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in the early sixteenth century. In youth he was strongly drawn to the contemplative life: he lived for a time near the London Charterhouse, sharing the spiritual exercises of the Carthusians, and considered joining either that order or the Franciscans. He finally chose marriage and a public career, while retaining lifelong practices of prayer, fasting, and the wearing of a hair shirt.

Around 1505 he married Jane Colt, daughter of an Essex gentleman. They had four children who survived infancy: Margaret, Elizabeth, Cecily, and John. Jane died in 1511, and shortly afterward More married Alice Middleton, a widow with a daughter of her own. The household he established at Chelsea became known as a centre of piety and of humanist education, unusual in that his daughters as well as his son were taught Latin and Greek. Margaret, the eldest, was later noted both for her scholarship and for her loyalty to her father in his last years. Alongside family life More pursued a distinguished legal and civic career, serving as undersheriff of London, sitting in Parliament, and earning a reputation for integrity. His Latin writings, above all the satirical dialogue Utopia, printed at Louvain in 1516, and his friendship and correspondence with Erasmus of Rotterdam, placed him among the leading northern humanists of his generation.

More entered the service of Henry VIII and rose rapidly. He was knighted, served as Speaker of the House of Commons, and in 1529 succeeded Cardinal Wolsey as Lord Chancellor, the first layman in many years to hold that office. As chancellor he was a determined opponent of the early Reformation in England, writing polemics against Lutheran teaching and presiding over examinations of suspected heretics; a number of heretics were burned during his tenure. His chancellorship coincided with the king's effort to have the marriage to Catherine of Aragon declared null so that he might marry Anne Boleyn. More regarded the original papal dispensation as valid and the emerging royal claim to supremacy over the English Church as a usurpation of spiritual authority. He refused to support the divorce, resigned the Great Seal in 1532, and withdrew from public life.

When the Act of Succession and the Act of Supremacy required an oath acknowledging the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England and the legitimacy of Anne Boleyn's issue, More declined to swear. He was committed to the Tower of London in 1534. In more than a year of imprisonment he wrote devotional works, including A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Tried for high treason in 1535, largely on the testimony of Richard Rich, he was convicted and condemned. On 6 July 1535 he was beheaded on Tower Hill. Contemporary and near-contemporary reports record that he described himself as the king's good servant but God's first. His body was buried in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower; his head, after being displayed on London Bridge, was recovered by his daughter Margaret and is traditionally said to rest in the Roper vault at St Dunstan's Church, Canterbury.

More was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 among a group of English martyrs and canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1935. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 22 June, together with Bishop John Fisher, who was executed shortly before him. He is invoked as patron of lawyers, statesmen, politicians, and civil servants, and also of adopted children, large families, stepparents, widowers, and those in difficult marriages. From the sixteenth century to the present his life has been read as a witness to the claims of conscience against the demands of the state, and Utopia has remained a central text in literary and political discussion.