Thomas More 1478 – 1535

Sir Thomas More was an English Renaissance humanist, lawyer, statesman, and Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. A close friend of Erasmus, he produced the Utopia in 1516, a Latin work whose imaginary island society of communal property and religious toleration inaugurated a new genre of political imagination and named it. Refusing on grounds of conscience to recognize the king as supreme head of the Church of England, he was tried for treason and beheaded in 1535. He was canonized in 1935 and is honored as the patron of statesmen and lawyers.

Thomas More was born in 1478 in London, the son of the lawyer and later judge Sir John More. After service as a page in the household of Cardinal John Morton and a brief period at Oxford, he completed his legal training at New Inn and Lincoln's Inn, was called to the bar around 1502, and within a few years was both a leading London lawyer and a member of the city's humanist circle. His friendship with Erasmus, begun in 1499, lasted the rest of his life.

His major works are the Latin Utopia (1516), the History of King Richard III, the long polemics against William Tyndale and Christopher Saint-German, the Dialogue Concerning Heresies, and the prison writings — most movingly the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Drawn into royal service from 1517, he succeeded Cardinal Wolsey as Lord Chancellor in 1529 and held the office until his resignation in 1532 over the divorce of Katherine of Aragon.

Refusing to take the oath of supremacy that recognized Henry VIII as supreme head of the Church of England, More was imprisoned in the Tower of London in April 1534 and beheaded on Tower Hill on 6 July 1535. The Utopia, with its ironic portrait of a commonwealth without private property, remains the founding text of the modern utopian tradition. He was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1935.