St. Thomas More

1. The Man of Integrity

Thomas More was the Lord Chancellor of England, a brilliant lawyer, and a close friend of King Henry VIII. He was known for his wit, his happy family life, and his incorruptible honesty.

The reputation for honesty was contemporary and specific. In an age when judicial office was expected to enrich the holder, More was noted for clearing the backlog in Chancery and for refusing the gifts that suitors ordinarily offered. Erasmus, who knew him for a quarter of a century, described his household in letters that still survive, and those letters are the reason we know what his domestic life looked like.

The household at Chelsea was unusual. More educated his daughters in Latin and Greek to the same standard as his son, at a time when almost nobody in England did that, and his eldest daughter Margaret became a scholar in her own right and corresponded with Erasmus. There were animals, a private chapel, and a routine of family prayer. Under his fine clothes he wore a hair shirt, which Margaret is said to have washed for him, and he rose very early to pray. Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly at More's house in 1509, and the Latin title, Encomium Moriae, is a pun on his friend's name.

He had been near to another life entirely. For about four years in his early twenties he lived close to the London Charterhouse and shared in the discipline of the Carthusians while deciding whether to become one. He decided on marriage and public life. Several of the Carthusians he had lived among were executed in 1535, weeks before he was, and he watched them go from a window in the Tower.

2. The Divorce

When Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife Catherine to marry Anne Boleyn, he declared himself the Head of the Church in England. He demanded everyone swear an oath of supremacy. Thomas More refused. He didn't speak out against the King; he simply remained silent. But his silence deafened Europe.

The sequence took eight years. Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, his brother's widow, had been contracted under a papal dispensation. From about 1527 he sought a declaration that the marriage had been invalid from the start, which is an annulment rather than a divorce in the modern sense. Pope Clement VII would not grant it. Catherine was the aunt of the Emperor Charles V, whose troops had sacked Rome in 1527, and the political situation made a favourable ruling impossible even had the case been strong.

More became Lord Chancellor in October 1529, after Cardinal Wolsey fell for failing to deliver the annulment. He was the first layman in generations to hold the office. He took it having made clear that he would not be required to work on the King's matter, and for two and a half years he ran the courts while the pressure on the Church in England increased around him.

He resigned on 16 May 1532, the day after the clergy of the Convocation of Canterbury submitted to the King's demand that they legislate nothing without royal assent. He gave ill health as the reason and left office poor. He did not attend Anne Boleyn's coronation in June 1533, and the absence was noticed.

The Act of Succession of 1534 required subjects to swear an oath. More told the commissioners he was willing to swear to the succession itself, since Parliament had power to settle the crown, and that he could not swear to the preamble, which repudiated papal authority. That distinction is the whole of his case, and it was refused. He was committed to the Tower of London on 17 April 1534. Our page on the Reformation covers the wider break, and our page on the Church of England covers what it produced.

3. The Scaffold

Imprisoned in the Tower of London, he was eventually convicted on false testimony. On the scaffold, he joked with the executioner, helping him up the stairs. His final words were: "I die the King's good servant, but God's first."

He spent fifteen months in the Tower, during which his books, papers and finally writing materials were taken from him. He used the time to write. A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, cast as a conversation between a Hungarian uncle and nephew facing a Turkish invasion, is about how a person prepares to lose everything, and it is not a book about politics. He also began De Tristitia Christi, a meditation on the agony in the garden, which breaks off unfinished at the point where he was deprived of pen and paper. The manuscript in his own hand survives.

He was tried in Westminster Hall on 1 July 1535 and executed on Tower Hill five days later, on 6 July. The details of the execution come from early accounts, above all the life written by his son-in-law William Roper, who had lived in his household, and from a French newsletter circulated within weeks. They report that he asked an officer to help him up the weak scaffold and said he would shift for himself coming down, that he asked the crowd to pray for him and to bear witness that he died in the faith of the Catholic Church, and that he moved his beard aside on the block, observing that it had committed no treason.

His body was buried in the church of St Peter ad Vincula inside the Tower. His head was set on a pike on London Bridge, and it was retrieved by his daughter Margaret Roper; it is traditionally held to have been buried with her family at St Dunstan's, Canterbury.

4. More and the Heresy Prosecutions

More enforced the heresy laws as Lord Chancellor, and six men were burned in England during his term from 1529 to 1532, among them Richard Bayfield, John Tewkesbury and James Bainham. He defended the burning of obstinate heretics in print, in the Dialogue Concerning Heresies of 1529 and the Confutation of Tyndale's Answer of 1532. Protestant writers, above all John Foxe in Acts and Monuments of 1563, later charged that he whipped and tortured suspects at his house in Chelsea. More denied that in his Apology of 1533, admitting only that a servant boy was caned for repeating a heresy about the Eucharist and a man whipped for disrupting Mass. Modern biographers including Richard Marius and Peter Ackroyd find no evidence for the torture charge and reject it, while the prosecutions and the burnings themselves are established fact and remain part of his record. He was executed in 1535 and canonised in 1935.

Two pieces of context belong alongside that, and neither of them is an excuse. Burning for heresy was already the law of England before More held office, under a statute of 1401, and the sentence was carried out by the secular authorities after conviction in an ecclesiastical court. And the position More argued for in print was the common position of European governments of every confession in the sixteenth century; Protestant regimes executed dissenters on the same reasoning where they held power.

The Church's own teaching has since moved, and moved explicitly. The Second Vatican Council's declaration Dignitatis Humanae of 1965 taught that the human person has a right to religious freedom, that nobody is to be forced to act against his conscience in religious matters or prevented from acting according to it within due limits, and that this right is founded in the dignity of the person. That is now Catholic teaching, and it is not what More argued in 1529. John Paul II, in the Jubilee of 2000, publicly asked forgiveness for methods of intolerance and violence used in the service of truth by members of the Church.

Holding both halves at once is the honest position. More was canonised for the manner of his death and for the integrity that led to it, and not for the Chancellor's court. Our page on the Inquisition examines the wider question of how the medieval and early modern Church handled heresy.

5. Who Thomas More Was

He was born in Milk Street in the City of London on 7 February 1478, the son of John More, a lawyer who became a judge of the King's Bench. He was sent as a boy to St Anthony's School and then placed as a page in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, which was the standard route into public life for a promising boy of that class. Morton sent him to Oxford. His father recalled him after about two years and put him to the law at the Inns of Court in London, where he was called to the bar.

He entered Parliament in 1504 and made an early reputation by opposing a subsidy demanded by Henry VII, which is said to have cost his father a spell in the Tower. He married Jane Colt in 1505 and had four children in rapid succession. Jane died in 1511, and within weeks he married Alice Middleton, a widow some years older, who ran the household and appears in Erasmus's letters as a woman of decided opinions.

He rose steadily under Henry VIII: undersheriff of London, then a diplomat and Master of Requests, then Privy Councillor, knighted in 1521, Speaker of the Commons in 1523, where he asserted the freedom of the House to debate without fear, then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and finally Lord Chancellor in 1529. He was on genuinely friendly terms with the King, who visited him at Chelsea. Roper records More's own comment on that friendship: that if his head could win the King a castle in France, it would not fail to go.

6. Utopia, Erasmus and the Humanist

Utopia was published in Latin at Louvain in 1516, and it is the book that made More's European reputation. It describes an island commonwealth reported by a traveller, in which property is held in common, everyone works a short day, gold is despised and used for chamber pots, war is avoided and paid for by hiring mercenaries when unavoidable, and a wide religious toleration is enforced by law. The name is a Greek joke, meaning no place.

What More meant by it has been argued about for five centuries. It has been read as a socialist blueprint, as a humanist satire on the England of Henry VIII with its enclosures, its thieves hanged for theft and its idle nobility, and as a philosophical exercise about what reason alone could achieve without revelation. The first book, a dialogue about whether a scholar should serve at court, is the part that reads most directly on More's own later life.

The tension every reader notices is between the religious toleration of Utopia and the Chancellor who prosecuted heretics thirteen years later. The usual scholarly answer is that Utopia is a pagan commonwealth reasoning without the Gospel, and that More's view of what a Christian state owed the truth was different in kind. Whether that fully resolves it is a fair question, and this page does not pretend it is settled.

The humanist circle around him was the most distinguished in northern Europe. Erasmus was his closest friend and stayed at his house repeatedly. More corresponded with scholars across the continent, learned Greek when it was still a novelty in England, and lectured publicly on Augustine's City of God as a young man. Hans Holbein the Younger came to England with a letter of introduction from Erasmus to More and painted him and his family, which is why we know exactly what he looked like.

7. The Silence, the Oath and the Trial

More's silence is often described as a moral gesture. It was also, and first, a legal position, and understanding that makes his conduct clearer rather than smaller.

He never stated in public why he would not swear. He told his interrogators repeatedly that he had said nothing against the statute and that he would not discuss his reasons. The common law maxim he relied on is that silence is taken for consent, qui tacet consentire videtur, so that a man who says nothing cannot be convicted of denying anything. As long as he said nothing, there was no treason on the record. He was a very good lawyer and he was using the law as it stood to stay alive without lying.

Parliament closed the gap. The Act of Supremacy of November 1534 declared the King Supreme Head of the Church in England, and a new treasons act made it treason to deprive the King of his titles maliciously, including by words. More was interrogated in the Tower several times and gave the same answer each time.

The trial

He was tried in Westminster Hall on 1 July 1535 before a special commission. The case rested at the decisive point on the evidence of Sir Richard Rich, the Solicitor General, who had visited More in the Tower to remove his books and who testified that More had in conversation denied that Parliament could make the King head of the Church. More denied saying it, and told the court that in sixteen years he had never known Rich to be trusted, and that if he had kept silence before the King's council he was hardly likely to have opened his mind to Rich. Two men who had been present, Richard Southwell and a servant named Palmer, said they had not attended to the conversation. The jury convicted in a short time.

Once the verdict was given, the rule of silence no longer applied, and More spoke. He said that the indictment was grounded on an act of Parliament repugnant to the laws of God and his Holy Church, that no temporal prince could presume to take the spiritual government belonging to the See of Rome, and that England alone could not make a law against the general council of Christendom. He also said, at the end, that he trusted he and his judges might yet meet merrily together in heaven.

8. Canonisation, Feast Day and Patronage

Leo XIII beatified More in 1886, in the first group of English martyrs of the Reformation period to be raised to the altars. Pius XI canonised him on 19 May 1935, the four hundredth anniversary of his death, together with John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, the only English bishop to refuse the oath and beheaded a fortnight before More.

His feast is 22 June, a joint memorial with John Fisher, the date being Fisher's execution. It was moved to that date in the calendar reform of 1969. The Church of England commemorates both men on 6 July, the date of More's death.

On 31 October 2000 John Paul II issued a motu proprio proclaiming him the patron of statesmen and politicians. The reasoning given was that More served the state at the highest level and held that public authority is exercised under a moral law it did not create, and that he showed by his life and death that a person cannot be separated from his conscience. He is also invoked as a patron of lawyers, of civil servants, of large families and of adopted children.

The site of his house at Chelsea is marked, and Chelsea Old Church contains a chapel he built. The Church of England, unusually, commemorates a man executed by the English state for denying the royal supremacy, which is a measure of how the reputation has travelled.

9. The Modern Image: A Man for All Seasons

Most people who admire Thomas More today have met him through Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, first staged in 1960 and filmed in 1966. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and its More has largely replaced the historical one in public memory.

Bolt was not a believer, and he said so in his preface. His More is a hero of the self: a man with a sense of his own identity so exact that he cannot sign away the part of himself that a false oath would cost. That is a modern idea, and it is very well done, and it is not quite what the historical More thought he was doing.

More's own position, stated in his own words after conviction, was that a particular kingdom cannot make a law against the whole body of Christendom, and that the spiritual government of the Church belongs to the See of Rome by the appointment of Christ. His conscience was binding on him because it was bound to something outside him. He argued the point about authority; Bolt argued the point about integrity.

Historians have also filled in what the play leaves out, above all the Chancellor who prosecuted heretics, which the section above covers. A reader who wants the historical man should go to William Roper's short life, written by his son-in-law, to More's own Tower writings and letters to Margaret, and to modern biographies including those of Richard Marius, Peter Ackroyd and John Guy, who disagree with each other usefully.

10. What a Reader Can Take From St. Thomas More

He conceded everything he could concede. He offered to swear to the succession and refused only the clause about papal authority. He was not looking for a fight, and he drew the line at exactly one place and stayed there.

The pressure came from people who loved him. His wife told him he was a fool, and his daughter Margaret was sent to persuade him. Opposition from enemies is easier than this.

Preparation is what makes the hour survivable. Fifteen months in the Tower produced a book about how to face losing everything. He had been rising before dawn to pray for thirty years before he needed it.

A saint's record can contain something indefensible. Canonisation is a judgment that a life ended in union with God, and it is not a certificate that everything the person ever did was right. Saying that about More is more respectful than not saying it.

Be a good servant, in that order. The King's good servant, and God's first, is a statement about which loyalty gives way when the two collide. It assumes both are real.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Thomas More?

St. Thomas More was an English lawyer, humanist scholar and statesman who lived from 1478 to 1535. He was Speaker of the House of Commons in 1523 and Lord Chancellor of England from 1529 to 1532, resigning rather than support Henry VIII's campaign to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled. He refused to swear an oath repudiating papal authority, was imprisoned in the Tower of London for fifteen months, and was beheaded on Tower Hill on 6 July 1535. Pius XI canonised him in 1935.

Why was Thomas More executed?

He was convicted of treason for denying the King's supremacy over the Church in England. He had told the commissioners he was willing to swear to the succession settled by Parliament and could not swear to the preamble of the Act of Succession, which repudiated papal authority. He then kept silence about his reasons, relying on the legal maxim that silence is taken for consent. He was convicted on 1 July 1535 on the evidence of Sir Richard Rich, the Solicitor General, who testified that More had denied the supremacy in conversation in the Tower, which More denied.

What were Thomas More's last words?

According to the early accounts, above all the life written by his son-in-law William Roper and a French newsletter circulated within weeks of the execution, he asked the crowd to pray for him and to bear witness that he died in the faith of the Catholic Church, and said that he died the King's good servant, and God's first. The same sources report that he asked an officer to help him up the weak scaffold and said he would shift for himself coming down, and that he moved his beard aside on the block, observing that it had committed no treason.

Did Thomas More burn Protestants?

Six men were burned for heresy in England during his term as Lord Chancellor from 1529 to 1532, among them Richard Bayfield, John Tewkesbury and James Bainham, and he defended the burning of obstinate heretics in print. John Foxe later charged that he whipped and tortured suspects at his house in Chelsea, which More denied in his Apology of 1533, and modern biographers including Richard Marius and Peter Ackroyd find no evidence for the torture charge and reject it. The prosecutions and the burnings are established fact. Burning for heresy was already English law under a statute of 1401 and the sentence was carried out by the secular authorities.

When is St. Thomas More's feast day?

His feast is 22 June, a joint memorial with St. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who was beheaded a fortnight before him. The date is Fisher's execution, and the joint memorial was placed there in the calendar reform of 1969. The Church of England commemorates both men on 6 July, the date of More's death.

Is Thomas More the patron saint of politicians?

Yes. John Paul II proclaimed him patron of statesmen and politicians in a motu proprio issued on 31 October 2000, on the grounds that he served the state at the highest level, held that public authority is exercised under a moral law it did not create, and showed by his life and death that a person cannot be separated from his conscience. He is also invoked as a patron of lawyers, of civil servants and of adopted children.

Is A Man for All Seasons historically accurate?

Robert Bolt's play of 1960 and the 1966 film follow the main events closely and shape the meaning to a modern theme. Bolt, who was not a believer, presents More as a hero of individual integrity who will not sign away his own identity. More's own stated position after his conviction was that a single kingdom cannot make a law against the whole body of Christendom and that the spiritual government of the Church belongs to the See of Rome. The play also leaves out his record as a prosecutor of heretics.