Thomas More

Thomas More was born in London on February 7, 1478, the son of John More, a successful lawyer who later served as a judge, and his wife Agnes Graunger ^[1]. The family lived on Milk Street in the heart of the city, and Thomas attended St Anthony's School, then regarded as one of the best in London ^[2].

Around the age of twelve he was placed in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England. Service in a great household was a standard route of advancement for promising boys, and Morton, impressed by the youth's quickness, predicted a remarkable future for him and arranged for his studies at Oxford ^[1]. More spent roughly two years at the university, where he was drawn to Greek and Latin literature, before his father called him back to London to train in the law ^[3].

He entered New Inn about 1494 and moved on to Lincoln's Inn in 1496, qualifying as a barrister around 1501 ^[2]. The law would remain the backbone of his career, yet the pull of religion nearly diverted him entirely. For a period in his twenties he lived near the London Charterhouse, joining the Carthusian monks in their devotions while continuing his legal work, and he seriously weighed a monastic or priestly vocation before deciding to marry and pursue public life ^[1].

More entered Parliament in 1504 and built a flourishing legal practice in the city, becoming an undersheriff of London in 1510, a post that made him a judge in civil cases and won him a reputation for fairness among the city's merchants ^[2]. His household on Bucklersbury, and later at Chelsea, became a gathering place for scholars.

The defining friendship of his intellectual life began in 1499, when he met the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus during the latter's first visit to England ^[3]. The two corresponded for decades, and Erasmus wrote his famous satire The Praise of Folly while staying in More's house in 1509, punning on his host's name in the Latin title Moriae Encomium ^[3]. Through Erasmus, More belonged to the international circle of Renaissance humanists who believed that recovering classical learning could reform education, religion and government.

Royal service followed his scholarly fame. After taking part in a trade embassy to Flanders in 1515, More joined the king's council in 1518, was knighted in 1521, and served Henry VIII as secretary, diplomat and confidant ^[1]. He became Speaker of the House of Commons in 1523, where he made an early argument for the free speech of members, and was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1525 ^[2]. Any account of Thomas More achievements has to reckon with how unusual this climb was: a London lawyer's son, without noble blood, rising to the innermost ring of Tudor government on talent alone.

More's lasting literary monument is Utopia, written in Latin and published at Louvain in 1516 with the help of Erasmus ^[3]. The book describes a conversation with a fictional traveler, Raphael Hythloday, who has visited an island commonwealth where property is held in common, gold is despised, religious tolerance is practiced within limits, and citizens work six hours a day ^[4]. More built the title from Greek roots meaning no place, a pun that also suggests good place, and the ambiguity is the point: scholars still argue over how much of the island's communism More endorsed and how much he offered as satire on European greed and misgovernment ^[4].

Book One of Utopia contains a biting analysis of contemporary England, criticizing the hanging of thieves, the enclosure of farmland for sheep pasture, and counselors who flatter kings into war ^[4]. Whatever More's private intent, the book gave European political thought a new instrument, the imagined ideal society used as a mirror for real ones, and the word utopia passed into most modern languages.

His other writings ran from Latin epigrams and a History of King Richard III, an unfinished work that shaped later portrayals of that king including Shakespeare's, to devotional works composed in the Tower at the end of his life, notably A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation ^[1]. From 1523 onward he also poured enormous energy into polemics against Martin Luther and William Tyndale, defending Catholic doctrine in long and often harsh volumes of controversy ^[5].

More married Jane Colt in 1505, and the couple had four children: Margaret, Elizabeth, Cecily and John ^[1]. Jane died in 1511, and within weeks More married Alice Middleton, a widow several years his senior, chiefly, contemporaries believed, to give his young children a mother. The marriage endured for the rest of his life ^[2].

His household was famous across Europe for its learning. Against the custom of the age, More insisted that his daughters receive the same rigorous classical education as his son, and his eldest daughter Margaret Roper became one of the most learned women in England, publishing a translation of Erasmus and corresponding with scholars in Latin ^[3]. Erasmus described the More home as a kind of academy of Christian life and letters.

The most familiar image of the family comes from Hans Holbein the Younger, who lodged with More on his first English visit in 1526 and 1527. Holbein painted a celebrated portrait of More in his chain of office, now in the Frick Collection in New York, and prepared a group portrait of the whole household, known today through his preparatory drawing and later copies ^[6]. Beneath the public splendor, More practiced private austerities, including the wearing of a hair shirt, a detail his family confirmed after his death ^[1].

In October 1529, after the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII made More Lord Chancellor, the first layman in generations to hold the office ^[2]. As chancellor he worked quickly through the backlog of cases in equity and earned praise for the speed of his justice. He also pursued heresy with real severity: six people were burned for heresy during his chancellorship, and he defended the campaign against Protestant books and preachers in print ^[5]. Admirers and critics have argued over this record ever since.

The office came with an impossible problem. Henry wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled so he could marry Anne Boleyn, and when Rome refused, the king moved to break the English church away from papal authority. More, who had told Henry he could not support the annulment, tried to serve while staying silent on the great matter. The position grew untenable, and on May 16, 1532, the day after the English clergy formally submitted to the crown, More resigned the chancellorship, pleading ill health ^[1].

Retirement did not protect him. In 1534 Parliament passed the Act of Succession, requiring an oath that recognized the offspring of Henry and Anne as heirs and, in its wording, repudiated papal authority. More was willing to accept the succession itself but refused the oath as framed, and on April 17, 1534 he was imprisoned in the Tower of London ^[7]. He never explained his refusal publicly, calculating that silence could not legally be treason.

More spent more than fourteen months in the Tower, writing devotional works and letters, many to his daughter Margaret, who visited him and pleaded with him to swear ^[1]. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 declared Henry supreme head of the Church of England, and a new treason law made it a capital offense to deny the king's titles. At his trial in Westminster Hall on July 1, 1535, the decisive evidence came from Richard Rich, the solicitor general, who testified that More had denied the supremacy in conversation. More rejected the testimony as perjury, but the jury convicted him in minutes ^[7].

He was beheaded on Tower Hill on July 6, 1535. Reports of his final moments spread across Europe: he is said to have declared from the scaffold that he died the king's good servant, but God's first ^[2]. His head was displayed on London Bridge and later recovered by Margaret Roper. Erasmus, hearing the news, mourned a man whose soul was purer than snow and whose genius England had never seen before nor would again see ^[3].

The afterlife of his reputation has been long and contested. The Catholic Church beatified More in 1886 and canonized him in 1935, on the four hundredth anniversary of his death, and in 2000 Pope John Paul II declared him the patron of statesmen and politicians ^[8]. Robert Bolt's 1960 play A Man for All Seasons, and the Oscar winning 1966 film made from it, fixed him in popular memory as the model of conscience against power, while Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall novels offered a far darker portrait centered on his persecution of heretics ^[5]. Among the basic Thomas More facts, one endures beyond argument: few figures in English history have been claimed so fiercely by so many different causes. Any serious Thomas More biography must hold the humanist, the heresy hunter and the martyr together in a single frame.