Thomas More

Sir Thomas More was an English lawyer, humanist scholar and statesman who served as Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII. He is best known as the author of Utopia, a witty and puzzling account of an imaginary island republic that gave its name to a whole genre of writing. A fierce opponent of the Protestant Reformation, he refused to accept the king as head of the Church in England and was executed for treason in 1535. The Catholic Church venerates him as a saint and martyr.

More was born in London on 7 February 1478, the son of John More, a successful lawyer who later became a judge. As a boy he served as a page in the household of John Morton, archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, who is said to have predicted a great future for him. He studied at Oxford for about two years before his father brought him back to train in the law at New Inn and then Lincoln's Inn.

For several years he seriously considered becoming a monk, and lived near the Carthusians of the London Charterhouse, sharing in their prayers. He decided instead on marriage and a public career, but kept up religious disciplines all his life, including wearing a hair shirt. He married Jane Colt in 1505; after her death in 1511 he quickly married Alice Middleton, a widow, to care for his four young children. He insisted that his daughters receive the same classical education as a son, and his eldest, Margaret Roper, became one of the most learned women in the Kingdom of England.

More met Erasmus in 1499, and the two became close friends. They translated the Greek satirist Lucian into Latin together, and Erasmus wrote The Praise of Folly at More's house, giving it a punning Latin title on his host's name. More's own early works include Latin epigrams, a life of the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola, and The History of King Richard III, an unfinished portrait of a scheming tyrant that later shaped William Shakespeare's play.

More wrote Utopia in 1515–1516, partly while on a trade mission to Flanders, and Erasmus saw it through the press at Leuven in 1516. The first book is a conversation between More, his friend Peter Giles and a fictional traveller, Raphael Hythloday, about whether a wise man should advise kings, and about the ills of England, where enclosure of land for sheep was driving the poor to theft and the gallows. In the second book Hythloday describes the island of Utopia, a name that plays on Greek words meaning "no place" and "good place".

The Utopians hold all property in common, work six hours a day, eat in communal halls, despise gold, which they use for chamber pots and slaves' chains, and practise religious toleration, though not for atheists. They also keep slaves, permit euthanasia and divorce, and wage war through mercenaries. Readers have argued ever since about what More meant. Some see a serious blueprint for a just society, a forerunner of socialism; others a satire on Christian Europe, which fails to live up to what reason alone achieves in a pagan state; others a deliberately open-ended exercise in the style of the dialogues of Plato, whose Republic it echoes. More gave no clear answer, and the irony is part of the point. The work belongs to Renaissance Philosophy as much as to literature.

From around 1517 More entered the service of Henry VIII, who valued his learning and company. He became a royal councillor, was knighted in 1521, served as Speaker of the House of Commons in 1523, where he made an early argument for free speech in Parliament, and was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from 1525. He helped the king write a defence of the seven sacraments against Martin Luther, and himself wrote long English polemics against Luther and the Bible translator William Tyndale.

In October 1529, after the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, he became Lord Chancellor, the first layman to hold the office in many years. He pursued heresy vigorously. Six people were burned for heresy during his chancellorship, and he took part in investigating several of them, though historians disagree about later Protestant accounts that he had suspects tortured in his own house. He defended the burnings in print as just punishment of those who endangered souls.

More's career collided with the king's wish to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. As Henry broke with Rome and the clergy were forced to recognise him as their supreme head, More resigned the chancellorship in May 1532, giving ill health as his reason. He did not attend Anne's coronation in 1533. In April 1534 he refused to swear the oath attached to the Act of Succession, which required rejecting papal authority, though he was willing to accept the succession itself, and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. There he wrote A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation and other devotional works.

He kept silent on the reasons for his refusal, which under the law protected him. On 1 July 1535 he was tried for treason at Westminster Hall and convicted largely on the testimony of the Solicitor General, Richard Rich, who claimed More had denied the king's supremacy in a private conversation; More called him a liar. Only after the verdict did he state openly that no temporal ruler could be head of the church. He was beheaded on Tower Hill on 6 July 1535, declaring, according to a contemporary account, that he died the king's good servant, but God's first.

The Protestant Reformation in England went ahead without him, and for Protestant writers such as John Foxe he was a persecutor. For Catholics he became a martyr of conscience: he was beatified in 1886, canonised in 1935, and in 2000 named patron saint of statesmen and politicians. Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, and its 1966 film, made him a popular hero, while Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall novels presented him as a harsh zealot. Utopia has never been out of print, and its title became the common word for an ideal society, central to the literary and intellectual history of the United Kingdom.