Thomas More
Thomas More
Thomas More (1478–1535) was an English lawyer, scholar and statesman, remembered both as a humanist writer and as a man of conscience who placed his faith above royal favor. A friend of the scholar Erasmus, he wrote Utopia (1516), a classic work imagining an ideal commonwealth. He rose in the service of King Henry VIII to become Lord Chancellor in 1529. As the king moved to break with the Church of Rome, More resigned in 1532 and later refused to swear an oath that he believed went against his conscience. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London and executed in 1535, declaring that he died "the king's good servant, and God's first." The Catholic Church canonized him in 1935, and in 2000 he was named patron saint of statesmen and politicians. His integrity is portrayed in the play A Man for All Seasons.
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The Tudor Age
Thomas More served Henry VIII as Lord Chancellor but refused, for reasons of conscience, to accept the king as head of the English church. Henry's daughter Elizabeth I presided over a flourishing of English culture and seafaring: Sir Francis Drake sailed around the world, Edmund Spenser dedicated The Faerie Queene to her, and William Shakespeare's first plays reached the London stage.
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Saints and Reformers of Christianity
St. Paul spread the early Christian faith through his journeys and letters, and St. Augustine's Confessions and City of God shaped Christian thought for centuries. St. Francis of Assisi embraced poverty and founded the Franciscan order, and St. Thomas Aquinas composed the Summa Theologiae. In the sixteenth century, Thomas More and Martin Luther stood on opposite sides of the Reformation.
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