Thomas More

For the Elizabethan play, see Sir Thomas More (play).

For the numerous educational institutions, see Thomas More College.

Saint Thomas More
Portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger (1527).
Martyr
Born	February 7, 1478 London, England
Died	6 July 1535(1535-07-06) (aged 57) London, England
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church, Anglican Communion
Beatified	1886, near London Hill by Pope Leo XIII
Canonized	1935, Rome by Pope Pius XI
Feast	June 22 (Roman Catholic Church), July 6 (Anglican Communion & Traditional Roman Catholics)
Attributes	Martyr; Axe; dressed in a Chancellor's robe with a neck chain of office
Patronage	Adopted children, Arlington, Virginia, civil servants, court clerks, difficult marriages, large families, Pensacola-Tallahassee, Florida, lawyers, politicians and statesmen, stepparents, widowers, Ateneo de Manila Law School, University of Malta, University of Santo Tomas Faculty of Arts and Letters

Sir Thomas More (February 7, 1478 – July 6, 1535), also Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, author, and statesman who in his lifetime earned a reputation as a leading humanist scholar, and occupied many public offices, including Lord Chancellor (1529–1532). More coined the word "utopia", a name he gave to an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in the eponymous book published in 1516.

In 1935, four hundred years after his death, Pope Pius XI canonized St Thomas More in the Roman Catholic Church; More was declared Patron Saint of politicians and statesmen by Pope John Paul II in 1980. St Thomas More shares his feast day, June 22 on the Roman Catholic calendar of saints, with Saint John Fisher. In 1980, Sir Thomas More was added to the Church of England's calendar of saints. Traditional Roman Catholics continue celebrating his feast day on July 6, the day of his martyrdom. He was voted thirty-seventh of the historical 100 Greatest Britons.

Early political career

From 1510 to 1518, Thomas More was one of the two undersheriffs of the city of London, a position of much responsibility, wherein he earned a reputation as an honest and effective public servant. In 1517 More entered the King's service as counselor and personal servant. After a diplomatic mission to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, he was knighted, and made under-treasurer in 1521. As secretary and personal advisor to King Henry VIII, Sir Thomas became governmentally influential (welcoming diplomats, drafting official documents) and liaison between the King and his Lord Chancellor Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, the Archbishop of York.

In 1523 More became the Speaker of the House of Commons. As such, he expressed the first known request by a Speaker of the House for free speech. He later was high steward for the universities of Oxford and of Cambridge. In 1525, he was chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a position holding administrative and judicial control of much of northern England.

Marriages and family

The Thomas More Family, by Hans Holbein the Younger

In 1505, aged twenty-seven, More married his first wife, Jane Colt, ten years his junior. According to his son-in-law and first biographer William Roper, More wanted to marry Jane's second sister, but felt Jane would be humiliated if a younger sister married first. Their marriage was happy and bore four children; three daughters and a son — Margaret (Meg, his favourite), Elizabeth (Beth), Cicely (Cecy), and John (Jack); besides his children, More adopted an orphan girl, Margaret Giggs. As a very devoted father, he asked his children write to him when away, even if they had nothing particular to say, and did not beat them. Unusual for the era, he educated his daughters as he did his son, saying that women were just as intelligent as men, taking particular pride in eldest daughter Meg's achievements.

Jane Colt died in 1511, and More remarried almost immediately, so his children would have a mother. His second wife, Alice Middleton, was a widow seven years his senior; they bore no children, although he adopted her daughter, Alice; of wife Alice, he said: "nec bella, nec puella" — neither a pearl, nor a girl. Erasmus cruelly described her nose as "the hooked beak of the harpy". Despite very different characters, More and Alice were affectionate, though he was unable to educate her as he had educated Jane and his daughters. In his epitaph, which he wrote himself, More praised Jane for bearing him four children, and Alice for being a loving stepmother. He declared that he could not tell whom he loved best, and expressed the hope that they would all be reunited in death.

Dean's mum is a monkey!

Ancestry

				Sir John More
	Saint Thomas More
							Thomas Granger (or Grainger)
				Agnes Granger (or Grainger)

Scholarly and literary work

Woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein for a 1518 edition of Utopia. The traveler Raphael Hythloday is depicted in the lower left-hand corner describing to a listener the island of Utopia, whose layout is schematically shown above him.

Despite his busy political career, he was a prolific scholar and literary man. His writing and scholarship earned him great reputation as a Christian Renaissance humanist in continental Europe, and his friend Erasmus of Rotterdam dedicated to him the masterpiece, In Praise of Folly; (the book's title puns More's name, "moria" is folly in Greek.) In his communications with other humanists, Erasmus described him as a model Man of Letters and as an omnium horarum homo. The humanistic project embraced by Erasmus and Thomas More sought re-examination and revitalization of Christian theology by studying the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers in light of classical Greek literary and philosophic tradition. More and Erasmus collaborated on a Latin translation of the works of Lucian, published in Paris in 1506.

History of King Richard III

Between 1513 and 1518, More worked on a History of King Richard III, an unfinished historiography, based on Sir Robert Honorr's Tragic Deunfall of Richard II, Suvereign of Britain (1485), that also greatly influenced William Shakespeare's play Richard III. Both More's and Shakespeare's works are controversial to contemporary historians for their unflattering portrait of King Richard III, a bias partly due to both authors' allegiance to the reigning Tudor dynasty that wrested the throne from Richard III with the Wars of the Roses. More's work, however, little mentions King Henry VII, the first Tudor king, perhaps for having persecuted his father, Sir John More. Some historians see an attack on royal tyranny, rather than on Richard III, himself, or on the House of York.

The History of King Richard III is a Renaissance historiography, remarkable more for its literary skill and adherence to classical precepts than for its historical accuracy. More's work, and that of contemporary historian Polydore Vergil, reflects a move from mundane medieval chronicles to a dramatic writing style, for example, the shadowy King Richard is an outstanding, archetypal tyrant drawn from the pages of Sallust, and should be read as a meditation on power and corruption as well as a history of the reign of Richard III. The 'History of King Richard III was written and published in both English and Latin, each written separately, and with information deleted from the Latin edition to suit a European readership.

Utopia

In 1516 More wrote his most famous and controversial work, Utopia, a novel wherein a traveller, Raphael Hythloday (in Greek, his name and surname allude to archangel Raphael, purveyor of truth, and mean "speaker of nonsense"), describes the political arrangements of the imaginary island country of Utopia (Greek pun ou-topos [no place], eu-topos [good place]) to himself and to Peter Giles. This novel presents the city of Amaurote as "of them all this is the worthiest and of most dignity".

Utopia contrasts the contentious social life of European states with the perfectly orderly, reasonable social arrangements of Utopia and its environs (Tallstoria, Nolandia, and Aircastle). In Utopia, private property does not exist, and there is almost complete religious toleration. The novel's principal message is the social need for order and discipline, rather than liberty. The country of Utopia tolerates different religious practices, but does not tolerate atheists. More theorizes that if a man did not believe in a god or in an afterlife he could never be trusted, because, logically, he would not acknowledge any authority or principle outside himself.

More used the novel describing an imaginary nation as means of freely discussing contemporary controversial matters; speculatively, More based Utopia on monastic communalism, based upon the Biblical communalism in the Acts of the Apostles.

Utopia is a forerunner of the utopian literary genre, wherein ideal societies and perfect cities are detailed. Although Utopianism typically is a Renaissance movement, combining the classical concepts of perfect societies of Plato and Aristotle with Roman rhetorical finesse (cf. Cicero, Quintilian, epideictic oratory), it continued into the Enlightenment. Utopia 's original edition included the symmetrical "Utopian alphabet", that was omitted from later editions; it is a notable, early attempt at cryptography that might have influenced the development of shorthand.

Religious polemics

Utopia is evidence that he greatly valued harmony and a strict hierarchy. All challenges to uniformity and hierarchy were perceived as dangers; practically, the greatest danger he saw was the challenge that heretics posed to the established faith. For Thomas More, the most important thing was maintaining the unity of Christendom; to his mind, the Lutheran Reformation's fragmentation and discord were dreadful.

His personal counter-attack began in the manner expected from a writer. He assisted Henry VIII with writing the Defence of the Seven Sacraments (1521), a polemic response to Martin Luther's On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. When Luther replied with Contra Henricum Regem Anglie (Against Henry, King of the English), More was tasked with writing a counter-response, Responsio ad Lutherum (Reply to Luther). This violent exchange had many intemperate personal insults; it deepened More's commitment to the order and discipline outlined in Utopia. CS Lewis describes More as "almost obsessed with harping on about Luther's 'abominal bichery' to the point where he loses himself in a wilderness of opprobrious adjectives".

Chancellorship

More, until then fully devoted to Henry and to the cause of royal prerogative, initially cooperated with the king's new policy, denouncing Wolsey in Parliament and proclaiming the opinion of the theologians at Oxford and Cambridge that the marriage of Henry to Catherine had been unlawful. But as Henry began to deny the authority of the Pope, More's qualms grew.

Campaign against Protestantism

For More, heresy was a disease, a threat to the peace and unity of both church and society. His early actions against the Protestants included aiding Cardinal Wolsey in preventing Lutheran books from being imported into England. He also assisted in the production of a Star Chamber edict against heretical preaching. Many literary polemics appeared under his name, as listed above. After becoming Lord Chancellor of England, More set himself the following task:

Now seeing that the king's gracious purpose in this point, I reckon that being his unworthy chancellor, it appertaineth... to help as much as in me is, that his people, abandoning the contagion of all such pestilent writing, may be far from infection.

As Lord Chancellor, More had six Lutherans burned at the stake and imprisoned as many as forty others . His chief concern in this matter was to wipe out collaborators of William Tyndale, the exiled Lutheran who in 1525 had published a Protestant translation of the Bible in English which was circulating clandestinely in England (Tyndale had also written The Practyse of Prelates (1530), opposing Henry VIII's divorce on the grounds that it was unscriptural and was a plot by Cardinal Wolsey to get Henry entangled in the papal courts).

In June 1530 it was decreed that offenders were to be brought before the King's Council, rather than being examined by their bishops, the practice hitherto. Actions taken by the Council became ever more severe. In 1531, Richard Bayfield, a graduate of the University of Cambridge and former Benedictine monk was burned at Smithfield for distributing copies of the New Testament . Further burnings followed. In The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, yet another polemic, More took particular interest in the execution of Sir Thomas Hitton, describing him as "the devil's stinking martyr." Rumors circulated during and after More's lifetime concerning his treatment of "heretics", with some, such as John Foxe (who "placed Protestant sufferings against the background of ... the Antichrist" ) in his Book of Martyrs, claiming that he had often used violence or torture while interrogating them. More strongly denied these allegations, swearing "As help me God," that heretics had never been given, "so much as a flyppe on the forehead.". However, Michael Farris in his book "From Tyndale to Madison" claims that in April 1529 a "heretic", John Tewkesbury, was taken by Thomas More to his house in Chelsea, and so badly tortured on the rack that he was almost unable to walk. Tewkesbury was subsequently burned at the stake.

Resignation

In 1530 More refused to sign a letter by the leading English churchmen and aristocrats asking the Pope to annul Henry's marriage to Catherine. In 1531 he attempted to resign after being forced to take an oath declaring the king the Supreme Head of the English Church "as far as the law of Christ allows." In 1532 he asked the king again to relieve him of his office, claiming that he was ill and suffering from sharp chest pains. This time Henry granted his request.

Trial and execution

The last straw for Henry came in 1533, when More refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn as the Queen of England. Technically, this was not an act of treason as More had written to Henry acknowledging Anne's queenship and expressing his desire for his happiness—but his friendship with the old queen, Catherine of Aragon, still prevented him from attending Anne's triumph. His refusal to attend Anne Boleyn's coronation was widely interpreted as a snub against Anne.

Shortly thereafter More was charged with accepting bribes, but the patently false charges had to be dismissed for lack of any evidence. In 1534 he was accused of conspiring with Elizabeth Barton, a nun who had prophesied against the king's divorce, but More was able to produce a letter in which he had instructed Barton not to interfere with state matters.

On 13 April of that year More was asked to appear before a commission and swear his allegiance to the parliamentary Act of Succession. More accepted Parliament's right to declare Anne the legitimate queen of England, but he refused to take the oath because of an anti-papal preface to the Act asserting Parliament's authority to legislate in matters of religion by denying the authority of the Pope, which More would not accept. The oath is written here in modern-day English.

....And at the day of the last prorogation of this present Parliament, as well the nobles spiritual and temporal as other the Commons of this present Parliament, most lovingly accepted and took such oath as then was devised in writing for maintenance and defence of the said Act, and meant and intended at that time that every other the king's subjects should be bound to accept and take the same, upon the pains contained in the said Act, the tenor of which oath hereafter ensueth:

"Ye shall swear to bear faith, truth, and obedience alonely to the king's majesty, and to his heirs of his body of his most dear and entirely beloved lawful wife Queen Anne, begotten and to be begotten, and further to the heirs of our said sovereign lord according to the limitation in the statute made for surety of his succession in the crown of this realm, mentioned and contained, and not to any other within this realm, for foreign authority or potentate: and in case any oath be made, or has been made, by you, to any person or persons, that then ye are to repute the same as vain and annihilate; and that, to your cunning, wit, and uttermost of your power, without guile, fraud, or other undue means, you shall observe, keep, maintain, and defend the said Act of Accession, and all the whole effects and contents thereof, and all other Acts and statutes made in confirmation, or for the execution of the same, or of anything therein contained; and this ye shall do against all manner of persons, of what estate, dignity, degree, or condition soever they be, and in no wise do or attempt, nor to your power suffer to be done or attempted, directly or indirectly, any thing or things privily or apartly to the let, hindrance, damage, or derogation thereof, or of any part of the same, by any manner of means, or for any manner of pretence; so help you God, all saints, and the holy Evangelists."

And forasmuch as it is convenient for the sure maintenance and defence of the same Act that the said oath should not only be authorized by authority of Parliament, but also be interpreted and expounded by the whole assent of this present Parliament, that is was meant and intended by the king's majesty, the Lords and Commons of the Parliament, at the said day of the said last prorogation, that every subject should be bounden to take the same oath, according to the tenor and effect thereof, upon the pains and penalties contained in the said Act....

— 

Four days later he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he wrote his devotional Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation.

On 1 July 1535, More was tried before a panel of judges that included the new Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Audley, as well as Anne Boleyn's father, brother, and uncle. He was charged with high treason for denying the validity of the Act of Succession. More believed he could not be convicted as long as he did not explicitly deny that the king was the head of the church, and he therefore refused to answer all questions regarding his opinions on the subject. Thomas Cromwell, at the time the most powerful of the king's advisors, brought forth the Solicitor General, Richard Rich, to testify that More had, in his presence, denied that the king was the legitimate head of the church. This testimony was almost certainly perjured (witnesses Richard Southwell and Mr. Palmer both denied having heard the details of the reported conversation), but on the strength of it the jury voted for More's conviction.

More was tried, and found guilty, under the following section of the Treason Act 1534.

Be it therefore enacted by the assent and consent of our sovereign lord the king, and the Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commons in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, that if any person or persons, after the first day of February next coming, do maliciously wish, will or desire, by words or writing, or by craft imagine, invent, practise, or attempt any bodily harm to be done or committed to the king's most royal person, the queen's, or their heirs apparent, or to deprive them or any of them of their dignity, title, or name of their royal estates, or slanderously and maliciously publish and pronounce, by express writing or words, that the king our sovereign lord should be heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper of the crown, or rebelliously do detain, keep, or withhold from our said sovereign lord, his heirs or successors, any of his or their castles, fortresses, fortalices, or holds within this realm, or in any other the king's dominions or marches, or rebelliously detain, keep, or withhold from the king's said highness, his heirs or successors, any of his or their ships, ordnances, artillery, or other munitions or fortifications of war, and do not humbly render and give up to our said sovereign lord, his heirs or successors, or to such persons as shall be deputed by them, such castles, fortresses, fortalices, holds, ships, ordnances, artillery, and other munitions and fortifications of war, rebelliously kept or detained, within six days next after they shall be commanded by our said sovereign lord, his heirs or successors, by open proclamation under the great seal:

That then every such person and persons so offending in any the premises, after the said first day of February, their aiders, counsellors, consenters, and abettors, being thereof lawfully convicted according to the laws and customs of this realm, shall be adjudged traitors, and that every such offence in any the premises, that shall be committed or done after the said first day of February, shall be reputed, accepted, and adjudged high treason, and the offenders therein and their aiders, consenters, counsellors, and abettors, being lawfully convicted of any such offence as is aforesaid, shall have and suffer such pains of death and other penalties, as is limited and accustomed in cases of high treason.

— Treason Act 1495 — Bold print shown as in original article.

Before his sentencing, More spoke freely of his belief that "no temporal man may be the head of the spirituality". He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered (the usual punishment for traitors) but the king commuted this to execution by beheading. The execution took place on 6 July. When he came to mount the steps to the scaffold, he is widely quoted as saying (to the officials): "See me safe up: for my coming down, I can shift for myself"; while on the scaffold he declared that he died "the king's good servant, but God's first." Another statement he is believed to have remarked to the executioner is that his beard was completely innocent of any crime, and did not deserve the axe; he then positioned his beard so that it would not be harmed. More's body was buried at the Tower of London, in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. His head was placed over London Bridge for a month after which it was rescued by his daughter, Margaret Roper, before it could be thrown in the River Thames. The skull is believed to rest in the Roper Vault of St. Dunstan's, Canterbury.

Canonization

Statue of Thomas More by Leslie Cubitt Bevis in front of Chelsea Old Church, Cheyne Walk, London.

More was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 and canonized with John Fisher after a mass petition of English Catholics in 1935, as in some sense a 'patron saint of politics' in protest against the rise of secular, anti-religious Communism. His joint feast day with Fisher is 22 June. Fisher was the only remaining loyal Bishop (owing to the apparent and coincident natural deaths of eight aged bishops) during the English Reformation to maintain, at the King's mercy, allegiance to the Pope. In 2000 this trend continued, with Saint Thomas More declared the "heavenly Patron of Statesmen and Politicians" by Pope John Paul II. He even has a feast day, 6 July, in the Anglican calendar of saints.

Influence and reputation

The steadfastness and courage with which More held on to his religious convictions in the face of ruin and death and the dignity with which he conducted himself during his imprisonment, trial, and execution, contributed much to More's posthumous reputation, particularly among Catholics.

More's conviction for treason was widely seen as unfair, even among Protestants. His friend Erasmus, himself no Protestant, but broadly sympathetic to reform movements within the Catholic Church, declared after his execution that More had been "more pure than any snow" and that his genius was "such as England never had and never again will have."

House of Thomas More in London.

Roman Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton said that More was the "greatest historical character in English history."

Literary Echoes and Evaluations

More was portrayed as a wise and honest statesman in the 1592 play Sir Thomas More, which was probably written in collaboration by Henry Chettle, Anthony Munday, William Shakespeare, and others, and which survives only in fragmentary form after being censored by Edmund Tylney, Master of the Revels in the government of Queen Elizabeth I (any direct reference to the Act of Supremacy was censored out).

Catholic science fiction writer R. A. Lafferty wrote his novel Past Master as a modern equivalent to More's Utopia, which he saw as a satire. In this novel, Thomas More is brought through time to the year 2535, where he is made king of the future world of "Astrobe", only to be beheaded after ruling for a mere nine days. One of the characters in the novel compares More favorably to almost every other major historical figure: "He had one completely honest moment right at the end. I cannot think of anyone else who ever had one." He was also greatly admired by the Anglican clergyman, Jonathan Swift.

The 20th century agnostic playwright Robert Bolt portrayed More as the ultimate man of conscience in his play A Man for All Seasons. That title is borrowed from Robert Whittington, who in 1520 wrote of him:

"More is a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons."

In 1966, the play was made into the successful film A Man for All Seasons directed by Fred Zinnemann, adapted for the screen by the playwright himself, and starring Paul Scofield in an Oscar-winning performance. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture for that year. In 1988, Charlton Heston starred and directed in a made-for-television remake of the film.

Karl Zuchardt wrote a novel, Stirb Du Narr! ("Die you fool!"), about More's struggle with King Henry, portraying More as an idealist bound to fail in the power struggle with a ruthless ruler and an unjust world.

As the author of Utopia, More has also attracted the admiration of modern socialists. While Roman Catholic scholars maintain that More's attitude in composing Utopia was largely ironic and that he was at every point an orthodox Christian, Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky argued in the book Thomas More and his Utopia (1888) that Utopia was a shrewd critique of economic and social exploitation in pre-modern Europe and that More was one of the key intellectual figures in the early development of socialist ideas.

A number of modern writers, such as Richard Marius, have attacked More for alleged religious fanaticism and intolerance (manifested, for instance, in his persecution of heretics). James Wood calls him, "cruel in punishment, evasive in argument, lusty for power, and repressive in politics". The polemicist Jasper Ridley goes much further, describing More as "a particularly nasty sadomasochistic pervert" in his book The Statesman and the Fanatic, a line of thinking also followed by Joanna Dennyn in her biography of Anne Boleyn. Brian Moynahan in his book "God's Messenger: William Tyndale, Thomas More and the Writing of the English Bible", takes a similarly critical view of More, as does the American writer, Michael Farris.

Aaron Zelman, in his nonfiction book "The State Versus the People" describes genocide and the history of governments which have acted in a totalitarian manner. In the first chapters "Utopia" is reviewed along with Plato's "The Republic". Zelman noted facts about "Utopia" which were ridiculous in the real world, such as agriculture, and could not draw a conclusion whether More was being humorous towards his work or seriously advocating a nation-state. It is pointed out, as a serious point for consideration, that "More is the only Christian saint to be honored with a statue at the Kremlin", which implies that his work had serious influence on the Soviet Union, despite its general antipathy towards organized religion.

Other biographers, such as Peter Ackroyd, have offered a more sympathetic picture of More as both a sophisticated humanist and man of letters, as well as a zealous Roman Catholic who believed in the necessity of religious and political authority.

The protagonist of Walker Percy's novel, Love in the Ruins, is Dr. Thomas More, a reluctant Catholic.

Sir Thomas More is mentioned briefly in The Shins' song, So Says I on the album Chutes Too Narrow - "Tell Sir Thomas More we've got another failed attempt 'cause if it makes them money they might just give you life this time."

He is also the focus of the Al Stewart song A Man For All Seasons from the 1978 album Time Passages.

Jeremy Northam portrays More in the television series, The Tudors, where he is shown as a peaceful man—a sometime-advisor to Henry VIII, a devout Catholic, and family head. However, Season 1, Episode 7 hints at a different side of More, as he unabashedly expresses his loathing for Lutheranism. Yet throughout the season, it shows a conflicted side of More: He orders that Martin Luther's books be destroyed, yet when the books are actually burned, he expresses a sense of unease and regret. In episode 10 of the same series, More is shown exercising his new power as chancellor by burning convicted heretics.

Institutions Named after Thomas More

As a saint in the Roman Catholic church, there are many parish churches dedicated to him around the world. In addition a number of legal institutions and colleges are named in his honour.

Thomas More College of Liberal Arts is a four year liberal arts college in Merrimack, NH and Rome Italy.

Thomas More College is a private Diocesan college in Crestview Hills, Kentucky.

College of Saint Thomas More is a small, private, Catholic (but not Diocesan) college in Fort Worth, Texas.

St. Thomas More Academy is a private elementary and high school in Cavite, Philippines.

The Thomas More Law Center is a legal aid organization that provides law services for those arguing conservative-aligned issues, especially those dealing with religious liberty and expression.

Magdalen College School, Oxford's politics society is named the St Thomas More society.

The Cathedral of St. Thomas More is the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Virginia.

The Thomas More Building at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, London, is an 11 storey office block built in January 1990 containing the courts of the Chancery Division of the High Court. These are known as the Thomas More Courts.

There are various St Thomas More Societies for Roman Catholic lawyers, "inspired by his example".

Historic Sites

Crosby Hall, located along the Chelsea embankment in London, is the still-standing home of the More family, and his crest can be seen over the main entrance. Apartment buildings and a park are built over the former locations of his gardens and orchard. One block from Crosby Hall, which is closed to the public, is Chelsea Old Church, an Anglican parish on Old Church Street whose southern chapel dates from the time of the Saint and in which he sang with his parish choir. The remainder of the church was destroyed in the Second World War and was rebuilt in 1958. This church is open to the public at specific times. Outside of Chelsea Old Church is a statue commemorating him as "saint", "scholar", and "statesman". In the same neighborhood, on Upper Cheyne Row, is the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Savior and St. Thomas More, which honors him according to the Church he defended with his life.

Visitors to the Parliament at Westminster Palace in London will also notice a plaque in the middle of the floor of Westminster Hall commemorating his trial for treason and condemnation to execution in that original part of the Palace.

The execution site at the Tower of London may also be visited. The nearby Anglican chapel of St. Peter Ad Vincula would contain the remains of his body (minus his head, which was stuck on Traitor's Gate) in a mass grave for the condemned underneath the church.

St. Dunstan's Church in Canterbury contains in the Roper family vault in the Nicholas Chapel to the right of its main altar, More's head rescued by his daughter Margaret Roper. Visitors may see the stone marking the sealed vault below this chapel. Also within the church are impressive stained glass windows donated by Roman Catholics to commemorate the events in the Saint's life. This is an Anglican parish. Down and across the street from the parish the facade of the Roper home is maintained and demarcated by a plaque.

Biographies

• William Roper, "The Life of Sir Thomas More" (written by More's son-in-law ca. 1555, but first printed in 1626)
• Cresacre More, The life and death of Sir Thomas More, Lord High Chancellour of England (written by his great-grandson), 1630
• Princesse de Craon, Thomas Morus, Lord Chancelier du Royaume d'Angleterre au XVIe siècle (First edition in French, 1832/1833 - First edition in Dutch 1839/1840)
• E.E. Reynolds, The Trialet of St Thomas More, (1964)
• E.E. Reynolds, Thomas More and Erasmus, (1965)
• Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (1984)
• Gerard Wegemer, Thomas More: A Portrait of Courage (1995)
• Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (1999)
• John Foxe, Foxe's Book of Martyrs
• Brian Moynahan "God's Messenger: William Tyndale, Thomas More and the Writing of the English Bible" (St Martin's Press, 2003).

See also

• English Reformation

External links

• Thomas More Studies database: contains several of More's English works, including dialogues, early poetry and letters, as well as journal articles and biographical material
• Works by Thomas More at Project Gutenberg
• Sir Thomas More, or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society at Project Gutenberg
• Sir Thomas More by William Shakespeare (spurious and doubtful works) at Project Gutenberg
• Sir Thomas More: A Man for One Season, essay by James Wood. Presents a critical view of More's religious intolerance
• More and The History of Richard III
• Thomas More and his Utopia by Karl Kautsky
• Utopia by Thomas More
• Thomas More and Utopias - a learning resource from the British Library
• Utopia HTML-formatted text on Marxists.org
• Integrity and Conscience in the Life and Thought of Thomas More by Professor Gerald Wegemer
• Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "St. Thomas More" . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
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• Saint Thomas More Academy in Buckeystown, Maryland
• St. Thomas More Collegiate in Burnaby, British Columbia
• Stirnet: 'Temp07' (More family is first on page)
• St. Thomas More School in Oakdale, Connecticut
• St. Thomas More Church in Oceanside, California
• Memorial pages on the body and head of Thomas More at Find A Grave

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