Saint Thomas More: Lord Chancellor, Martyr, and Patron of Statesmen

Saint Thomas More is the great Catholic martyr of the English Reformation, the Lord Chancellor of England who was beheaded by King Henry VIII in 1535 for refusing to acknowledge the king as the supreme head of the Church of England. His witness, captured for modern audiences by Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, has made him one of the most widely venerated Catholic saints of the modern era.

Early life and legal career

Thomas More was born on February 7, 1478, at London, the son of Sir John More, a successful lawyer and judge. He received the finest education the late medieval English educational system could offer: Saint Anthony's School in London, then in the household of Cardinal John Morton (Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England), then Oxford University, then law studies at New Inn and Lincoln's Inn. He was called to the bar around 1502.

For four years (1499-1503), Thomas considered a vocation to the Carthusian Order, living near the London Charterhouse and following its rule of life as much as a layman could. He concluded that he was not called to monastic life and pursued the secular path. He married Jane Colt in 1505; she died in 1511, leaving him with four young children. He remarried Alice Middleton, a widow of his own age, within weeks of Jane's death; Alice raised the four children with him.

Public career and humanist scholarship

Thomas More rose rapidly in English public life. He served as Under-Sheriff of London (1510), Master of Requests (1514), a member of Parliament, and then in successive royal offices under Henry VIII: privy councillor, Speaker of the House of Commons (1523), Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and finally Lord Chancellor (1529-1532), the highest office in the English government below the king himself.

Throughout his public career he was also among the most distinguished humanists of Renaissance Europe. His friendship with the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus was one of the great intellectual partnerships of the age. He published Latin works of historical, philosophical, and theological scholarship; his most famous work was Utopia (1516), a Latin novel describing an imaginary island commonwealth, which has given the word "utopia" to every European language.

In private life More was known for his intense piety, his daily Mass attendance, his Carthusian discipline (the hair shirt under his elegant robes), his hospitality to scholars and clergy, and his exceptional educational provision for his daughters as well as his sons. His daughter Margaret More Roper, fluent in Greek and Latin, was one of the great female scholars of Tudor England.

The break with Henry VIII

The crisis of Thomas More's life was Henry VIII's attempt to obtain a papal annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. When Pope Clement VII refused to grant the annulment in 1533, Henry took the matter into his own hands: through Parliament, he successively declared the marriage void, married Anne Boleyn, declared the Church of England independent of Rome, and (in the Act of Supremacy of 1534) declared himself supreme head of the Church of England.

Thomas More, while remaining personally loyal to the king, refused to take the oath required by the Act of Supremacy. The oath required acknowledgment of the king as supreme head of the Church and (by implication) repudiation of the Pope's authority over the English Catholic Church. More had resigned the Lord Chancellorship in 1532 specifically to avoid having to enforce policies he could not in conscience accept; now, in 1534, refusing the oath itself, he was placing himself outside the king's protection.

Imprisonment and execution

Thomas More was arrested on April 17, 1534, and imprisoned in the Tower of London. He remained there for fifteen months, during which his wife Alice and his daughter Margaret were granted occasional visits. The state attempted to break him through deprivation and through the appeals of his family; the family in turn could not understand his refusal to take an oath the king demanded, and Margaret pleaded with him to save his life by submitting.

More replied to Margaret in a letter from the Tower that has become one of the great documents of Catholic conscience: "I am the king's good servant, but God's first."¹

The trial of Thomas More on July 1, 1535, lasted a single day. He was convicted on the perjured testimony of Sir Richard Rich, who falsely claimed that More had told him in a private conversation that Parliament could not make the king head of the Church. The Catholic tradition has held this testimony to be perjury; More himself, in his closing address to the court, said so.

The sentence was death by hanging, drawing, and quartering, the standard penalty for treason. The king, perhaps from residual affection for his old friend, commuted the sentence to beheading. More was executed on Tower Hill on July 6, 1535. His last words on the scaffold: "I die the king's good servant, but God's first." He kissed his executioner before laying his head on the block, asking the executioner to grant him "a clean stroke" and saying: "Pray help me up [to the scaffold], and for my coming down let me shift for myself."

Canonization and patronage

Thomas More was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886, four centuries after his death, in a group of fifty-four English martyrs of the Reformation. He was canonized by Pope Pius XI on May 19, 1935, the four hundredth anniversary year of his martyrdom, together with Saint John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester who was beheaded two weeks before More for the same refusal.

Saint Thomas More is patron of statesmen and politicians (specifically declared the patron of statesmen by Pope Saint John Paul II in 2000), of lawyers, of civil servants, of religious freedom, of difficult marriages (from his own difficult second marriage), of adopted children (he raised step-children alongside his own), and of step-parents.

His feast was originally celebrated on July 6 (the date of his execution), then moved to July 9 in some calendars, then fixed at June 22 in the universal Roman Calendar of 1969. It is celebrated as an Optional Memorial.

For the related English martyr beheaded with More, see Saint John Fisher. For the broader Catholic teaching on the Communion of Saints that More's witness exemplifies, see What is the Communion of Saints?.

Sources

For the principal early biographies, see William Roper (More's son-in-law), The Life of Sir Thomas More (c. 1556), and Nicholas Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More (c. 1556). Modern critical biography: Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (Doubleday, 1998). ↩