Saint Thomas More (1478-1535)

Birth and family (1478)

Thomas More was born on 7 February 1478 in London, into a family of the minor legal gentry.^[4][5] His father, Sir John More, was a lawyer and later a judge of the King's Bench; he passed on to his son a love of the law, a sense of rigour and a solid faith. The boy received his first schooling at St Anthony's School in London, one of the best schools in the city.

At about thirteen or fourteen, as was the custom of the time, young Thomas was placed as a page in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England. This prelate, a shrewd judge of men, would often say of him to the nobles dining at his table, according to his son-in-law and biographer William Roper: "This child here waiting at the table, whosoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man."^[6] This early contact with the government of the Church and the realm left a lasting mark on More's mind.

Education: Oxford, the law and Lincoln's Inn

Around 1492, More studied at the University of Oxford, where he was taught by the first English humanists, Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn, who introduced him to Greek and the classical letters.^[7] But his father, anxious to secure him a career, called him back to London to study law. More then entered New Inn and then Lincoln's Inn, one of the great schools of English lawyers (the Inns of Court), and was called to the Bar around 1502.^[8]

This twofold education — classical letters and law — made More a complete mind: all his life he would remain divided, yet harmoniously, between humanist learning, practice at the Bar and public service.

The temptation of religious life — the London Charterhouse

Before choosing marriage and the world, More went through a decisive period of spiritual discernment. Between about 1503 and 1504, he lived near the London Charterhouse and shared, without taking vows, the monks' life of prayer and austerity.^[9] He seriously considered becoming a Carthusian, or even a Franciscan.

He finally gave up the monastic life, judging that his vocation lay elsewhere — but he would bear its marks all his life: he secretly wore a hair shirt against his skin, practised fasting, the discipline and long prayers.^[10] His holiness as a layman would sink its roots in this hidden discipline of a monk who had stayed in the world.

That discernment sealed his choice: not a withdrawal from the world, but a holiness to be lived at the heart of his century, as a layman.

Marriage, fatherhood and the Chelsea household

In 1505, More married Jane Colt, by whom he had four children: Margaret (the best loved and the most learned), Elizabeth, Cecily and John.^[11] Jane died in 1511; More, with a household and souls in his charge, remarried a few weeks later a widow, Alice Middleton, older than himself, whose daughter and several wards he also raised.

At Chelsea, More created a home that struck his contemporaries: a true house of learning where prayer was said and theology and letters discussed, and where — a rare thing at the time — the daughters received the same classical education as the sons.^[12] His daughter Margaret Roper would become one of the most cultivated women in England, able to converse in Latin and Greek. Erasmus, a regular guest in that house, admired this home where the family prayed and studied together, daughters as well as sons.

A European friendship

The friendship between Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam, the prince of humanists, is one of the most famous of the Renaissance. The two men met in 1499 and kept up a steady correspondence. Erasmus saw in More a model of balance: a man of wit, profoundly believing, capable of anything — hence the phrase that remained attached to him, "a man for all hours" (omnium horarum homo).^[13]

It was in More's house in London that Erasmus composed in 1509 his satirical masterpiece, the In Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium) — whose very title plays on the name of More (Morus / mōria, folly in Greek). He dedicated it to him, a sign of the intellectual and spiritual intimacy that united them.^[14]

Utopia (1516): a critical mirror of Europe

In 1516, More published in Latin at Louvain his most famous work: De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia — commonly called Utopia.^[15] The word, coined by More from the Greek, literally means "in no place" (ou-topos): it is he who gave the world the term "utopia".

The book describes an imaginary island where there is neither private property, nor idleness, nor ostentatious luxury, and where broad religious tolerance reigns. Utopia has long been read in contradictory ways: as a political programme, a humanist game, or a satire on the vices of the Europe of his day. The fairest Catholic reading sees in it less a project to be realized than a critical mirror: by painting a society of virtuous pagans governed by natural reason alone, More holds up to the Christians of Europe the image of their own injustices — the greed of the rich, the enclosure of lands, the harshness of the penal laws, the wars of princes.

It would be anachronistic to make More a forerunner of communism or relativism: the author of Utopia is the same man who would die for the unity of the Church and vigorously combat heresy. Utopia is the work of a Christian moralist who uses fiction to make his readers think, not of an ideologue.

The defender of the faith against Luther

When the Protestant Reformation spread, More took up his pen to defend the Catholic faith. He first helped Henry VIII draft (or revised) the Assertio septem sacramentorum (1521) against Luther — the work that earned the king the pontifical title of "Defender of the Faith." Then, under his own name and under a pseudonym, More published long polemical refutations of Luther and of William Tyndale, the English Bible translator who had gone over to the Reformation.^[16]

This part of his life is also the most debated today. But it sheds light on one essential point — long before dying for it, More was convinced that the unity of the faith and communion with Rome were not negotiable. His martyrdom would not be an isolated impulse, but the coherent crowning of a whole life.

From Parliament to the King's Council

More's public career was meteoric. Elected to Parliament as early as 1504, undersheriff (municipal magistrate) of the City of London in 1510, he entered the service of the Crown: Privy Counsellor in 1514, he carried out diplomatic missions on the continent.^[17] Henry VIII, a young cultivated king, grew attached to this brilliant and witty mind; he knighted him in 1521 and raised him to several offices, including that of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

In 1523, More was elected Speaker of the House of Commons, where he defended, prudently but firmly, Parliament's freedom of speech against the Crown's fiscal demands.

Lord Chancellor (1529): the first layman

At the fall of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, disgraced for having failed to obtain from the Pope the annulment of the royal marriage, Henry VIII appointed More Lord Chancellor of England in October 1529.^[18][19] It was an event: More was the first layman to hold this office, until then almost a monopoly of the high clergy. He thus became the highest magistrate of the realm and the second personage of the State after the king.

An upright and expeditious judge

As Chancellor, More distinguished himself by exemplary integrity and astonishing speed in dispatching business. Tradition reports that at one point in his tenure he entirely cleared the roll of cases pending before the Court of Chancery — so rare a feat that it gave rise to a satirical couplet. Reputed incorruptible, he refused gifts and judged without regard for the rank of the parties.

The following table sets out the main stages of this rise, which prepares the contrast with his fall:

"The King's great matter"

Everything turned on what contemporaries called "the King's great matter." Henry VIII wanted the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had given him no male heir, in order to marry Anne Boleyn. Pope Clement VII, under pressure from Emperor Charles V (Catherine's nephew), refused to declare the nullity.^[20]

More, deeply attached to the indissolubility of marriage and to the authority of the Apostolic See, could not follow the king onto this ground. As early as 1530, he refused to sign the letter of the English lords asking the Pope for the annulment.^[21] His position became more untenable every day.

The resignation (1532)

When the clergy of England, under duress, recognized the king as head of the Church "as far as the law of Christ allows" (the Submission of the Clergy, 1532), More understood that he could no longer serve without denying himself. On 16 May 1532, he returned the seals of the Chancery to the king and withdrew from public life.^[22]

He left power poor, having profited little from his offices, and silently prepared for the trial he sensed coming. For two years he avoided all provocation: he did not publicly criticize the king, took part in no plot, but equally refused every gesture of approval. His strategy was that of the prudent silence of a lawyer who knows the law.

The Act of Supremacy and the oath (1534)

In 1534, Parliament voted the Act of Succession, then the Act of Supremacy, which made the king "the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England" and declared the marriage to Anne Boleyn lawful. All subjects of note were summoned to take the oath.

More agreed to swear loyalty to the succession (Parliament's right to settle the devolution of the Crown), but refused the part of the oath that implied recognizing the king's spiritual supremacy and disowning the Pope's authority.^[23][24] Summoned on 13 April 1534, he refused to take the oath in its entirety. In law, that was the gesture that undid him.

His constant position before the king's commissioners, as it emerges from his Tower letters, was this, in substance: he judged no one's conscience, but could not surrender his own, on which his salvation depended.^[25]

The Tower of London

For his refusal, More was imprisoned in the Tower of London on 17 April 1534.^[26] He would remain there fifteen months. Little by little he was deprived of his books, of his means of writing, of visits from his own. His wife Alice could not understand his obstinacy; his daughter Margaret, for her part, came to see him and received his highest confidences.

The Dialogue of Comfort and the letters to Margaret

In his cell, deprived of almost everything, More wrote one of the finest spiritual books in the English language: A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation.^[27] In it he stages, in Hungary threatened by Suleiman's Turks, an old uncle, Anthony, consoling his nephew Vincent in the face of fear, suffering and death. Beneath the fiction, it is More himself preparing for martyrdom and consoling his own.

His letters to Margaret, sometimes written in charcoal for lack of ink, rank among the most moving texts on freedom of conscience. He refused to judge those who had taken the oath, but he himself could not act against the inward light — in substance: he would neither condemn another's conscience to save his life, nor betray his own to stay alive.^[28]

The trial of 1 July 1535 — Richard Rich's perjury

More was tried for high treason on 1 July 1535 at Westminster Hall.^[29][30] The prosecution rested almost entirely on the testimony of Richard Rich, the Solicitor General, who claimed that More had, in a private conversation in the Tower, denied the royal supremacy. More demolished the account: why would he have confided in the most dubious of men after keeping silent before all? The two other witnesses present that day declared they had heard nothing.^[31]

The jury, under enormous pressure, declared him guilty in a quarter of an hour. The sentence was terrible — hanging, disembowelling and quartering — but the king commuted it to simple beheading. Once condemned, More could finally speak: he then declared that no man can be made supreme head of the Church, which is one, and that no Parliament of England can undo the unity of Christendom.^[32]

The scaffold (6 July 1535)

On the morning of 6 July 1535, Thomas More was led from the Tower to the scaffold on Tower Hill.^[33] To the very end he kept that cheerful serenity which had struck those close to him. Helped up onto the shaky platform, he called out to the officer:

"I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself."^[34]

Then, pointing to his beard, which he moved aside from the block, he joked: his beard, at least, had never committed treason and did not deserve the edge of the axe.^[35] He forgave the executioner, embraced him, recited the psalm Miserere, and declared that he died "the King's good servant, and God's first."^[36]

His head was displayed for a month on London Bridge, then recovered by his daughter Margaret, who kept it piously. Fourteen days earlier, on 22 June 1535, Bishop John Fisher, the only bishop in England to have refused the oath, had been beheaded for the same cause.^[37] The two men would be canonized together.

A hidden holiness: the hair shirt and prayer

Behind the public man — the chancellor, the worldly humanist, the pleasant table companion — hid an ascetic. More wore against his skin a hair shirt which he showed only to his daughter Margaret, who was charged with washing it; he rose early for prayer and meditation on the Passion, attended Mass daily, and practised bodily disciplines.^[38] His most famous relic, that hair shirt, is kept today at Buckfast Abbey in Devon.^[39]

This concealed austerity explains his strength at the hour of trial: he was not a man improvising martyrdom, but a long-standing man of prayer for whom detachment was already a habit.

The primacy of conscience

The heart of More's holiness is fidelity to a right conscience. For him, conscience is not the whim of the individual against authority, but obedience to the truth which God inscribes in the heart and which the Church teaches. That is why his disobedience to the king has nothing revolutionary about it: he refused to lie before God, that is all. John Paul II stressed this point with force:

"His life teaches us that government is above all an exercise of virtue. […] More defended the value of a moral conscience which is 'the witness of God himself.'" — Saint John Paul II, motu proprio E Sancti Thomae Mori, 31 October 2000^[40]

It is precisely this inseparability of faith and public life — "man cannot be separated from God, nor politics from morality" — which makes More a patron of political leaders.^[41]

Joy and humour as virtues

A rare trait in a martyr: More was joyful. The grammarian Robert Whittington had described him as early as 1520 as "a man of merveylous myrth and pastymes, and somtyme of as sad gravyte… a man for all seasons" — the origin of the phrase "a man for all seasons."^[42] That joy was not lightness: it was the sign of an inward peace which neither disgrace, nor prison, nor the axe could shake. His jokes on the scaffold are not bravado, but the crowning of a life reconciled with death.

A prayer by Thomas More

Among the texts More composed in his last years, this prayer expresses all his abandonment:

It is, in substance, what the psalm of detachment he composed in the Tower asks: the grace to set nothing above God, to detach his heart from the world little by little, and to find all his contentment in thinking of Him.^[43]

Relics and memory

More's body was buried without honour in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, inside the Tower of London, where several of Henry VIII's victims rest.^[44] His head, saved by Margaret Roper, is traditionally venerated in the Roper chapel of St Dunstan's church at Canterbury. His hair shirt is kept at Buckfast Abbey. Very soon, More's memory was surrounded by a veneration that crossed confessional frontiers: to this day, the Anglican Communion commemorates him among its witnesses of the faith.

Beatification (1886) and canonization (1935)

The process of official recognition was long. Thomas More was beatified by Pope Leo XIII on 29 December 1886, among a large group of English martyrs of the Reformation.^[45] Nearly half a century later, Pope Pius XI canonized him on 19 May 1935, together with Saint John Fisher, on the fourth centenary of their martyrdom.^[46] In his homily, Pius XI presented More as a model of the Christian layman's fidelity and of courage before power.

Patron of statesmen and political leaders (2000)

On 31 October 2000, by the motu proprio E Sancti Thomae Mori, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Saint Thomas More heavenly patron of rulers and politicians.^[47] The decision answered the request of several heads of State, political figures and episcopal conferences. The Pope saw in More the proof that a public leader can serve the State without betraying his conscience, and that on the threshold of the third millennium the political world needed "credible models able to indicate the path of truth."^[48]

Liturgical feast and patronages

The feast of Saint Thomas More is set on 22 June, which he shares with Saint John Fisher.^[49] Beyond statesmen, popular piety has made him patron of lawyers, magistrates, barristers and politicians; he is also invoked for difficult families and numbered among the saints for situations in which fidelity has a price.

Saint Thomas More was not martyred for having preached, founded an order or worked spectacular miracles. He died for something the world often judges derisory: not signing, not taking an oath contrary to his faith. His martyrdom is that of the upright conscience raised, without hatred and without noise, before a power that seeks to subdue everything.

His life holds together what is so often believed irreconcilable: success and holiness, wit and faith, humour and martyrdom, engagement in the world and inward detachment. A layman, married, a father, a man of money and power, he shows that one can be a saint at the summit of the State as at the bottom of a cloister.

Such was, to the very end, the division he refused to cross: to the king the obedience of a subject, to God alone the soul and the conscience.^[50]

That is why, nearly five centuries after his death, Saint Thomas More remains a figure of astonishing relevance: for every Christian engaged in public life, in justice, in politics, or simply in a society that demands compromises with the truth, he remains the saint who recalls, smiling even on the scaffold, that one must be a good servant of the State, but God's first.

• Saint John Fisher (1469-1535) — the Bishop of Rochester, the only English bishop faithful to Rome, beheaded fourteen days before More and canonized with him in 1935.
• Anglicanism — the Church born of Henry VIII's break with Rome, which More refused to endorse.
• The Protestant Reformation — the European context in the face of which More defended the unity of the faith.
• Leo XIII (1810-1903) — the pope who beatified Thomas More among the English martyrs in 1886.
• What the Church says about politics — to place More's patronage of political leaders in context.