Lord Chancellor who died refusing Henry’s church
Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), Renaissance humanist, lawyer, and Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor (1529–1532), wrote Utopia and fought Reformation theology. He refused to accept Henry as Church of England head or the royal annulment logic, and was executed. Pius XI canonised him in 1935; John Paul II named him patron of statesmen in 2000.
Born 7 February 1478 in London to lawyer-judge John More and Agnes Graunger of Milk Street. Polemics targeted Luther, Zwingli, and Tyndale as conscience hardened against the king’s supremacy claims.
His patron Morton, a champion of the New Learning later called humanism, put him forward for Oxford, where from 1492 he studied under Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn and mastered Latin and Greek. After two years his father made him switch to law at New Inn. More bantered in Latin as easily as in English and translated a life of Pico della Mirandola. Erasmus reports that he seriously weighed becoming a monk and, in 1503 and 1504, lived beside the London Carthusians and joined their devotions; he wore a hair shirt for the rest of his life.
In 1505 he married Jane Colt and settled at the Old Barge in Bucklersbury. When she died he remarried within 30 days, choosing the widow Alice Middleton to run the household, a haste that required a dispensation from the banns. He insisted his daughters get the same classical schooling as his son, and his eldest, Margaret, won admiration for her Greek and Latin, an example that swayed other noble families and even softened Erasmus's views.
Hans Holbein the Younger painted the family, but the original burned in the eighteenth century and survives only in copies commissioned by More's grandson, which show a lute and viol in the background; More himself played recorder and viol. Erasmus, his closest friend, praised him for 35 years, calling him in 1519 a man made for friendship and, after his death, saying it felt as though he had died himself. Pope John Paul II's proclamation praised his moral conscience while admitting that his treatment of heretics reflected the limits of his era.
Source: Thomas More
