Thomas More

Life and Ministry

Thomas More was born in London in AD 1478, son of a justice of the King's Bench, educated at Oxford and Lincoln's Inn, and shaped in his early years by a sustained engagement with the Charterhouse Carthusians and with Erasmus, whose Praise of Folly was composed in More's London house and dedicated to him. He rose through royal service to become Lord Chancellor of England in AD 1529, the first layman to hold the office, succeeding Wolsey. His humanist scholarship (Utopia, AD 1516) and his polemical defense of Catholic doctrine against the early English Lutherans (the Dialogue Concerning Heresies, AD 1529) made him a leading voice of the late-medieval English church. He resigned the chancellorship in AD 1532, unable in conscience to support Henry VIII's break with Rome and the king's claim of supremacy over the English church.

Circumstances of Death

More refused to take the Oath of Supremacy when it was tendered to him in AD 1534, and was committed to the Tower of London on 17 April. After fifteen months of imprisonment, during which he wrote A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation and the Treatise on the Passion, he was tried at Westminster Hall on 1 July AD 1535 on a charge of treason for denying the king's supremacy. The principal evidence — perjured by Richard Rich, the solicitor general — claimed that More had explicitly denied parliament's authority to make the king head of the church in a private conversation in the Tower. Convicted, he addressed the court briefly to give his reasons, was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered (commuted to beheading by the king), and on 6 July climbed the scaffold at Tower Hill, declared himself the king's good servant but God's first, and was beheaded.

Legacy

More's witness has been claimed across confessional lines. The Catholic Church canonized him in AD 1935 as patron of statesmen and politicians; the Anglican Church added him to her calendar in AD 1980; the Russian Orthodox Church has venerated him among the Western saints since 2000. His death set the pattern for the conscience claim against absolute state authority that runs through the modern Western tradition. His witness declares that the office of magistrate, lawyer, and chancellor is held under God before it is held under any sovereign; that a man may serve king and country wholeheartedly until the day the king claims what belongs only to God; and that the line is not arbitrary — the king's good servant, but God's first.