Thomas More

Thomas More: The Saint Who Burned Heretics

In 1516 a London lawyer published a small Latin book about an island where nobody owned anything, everyone worked six hours a day, and all religions were tolerated. He built its name from Greek to mean "no place," and gave his narrator a name derived from the Latin for "dispenser of nonsense." Thirteen years later that lawyer became Lord Chancellor of England and sent men to the stake for heresy. Six years after that he was beheaded on Tower Hill for refusing to swear an oath. All three of those men were the same man, and the difficulty of holding them together is the whole problem of Thomas More.

The Judge's Son

More was born in the City of London on 7 February 1478, son of Sir John More, a lawyer who rose to the bench, and Agnes Graunger. He went to St Anthony's School, then spent two years as a household page to John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, before Oxford, where he read Latin and Greek under Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn until his father pulled him back to the law. He trained at New Inn and Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in 1502. Around 1503 he lodged near the Carthusian monastery in London and seriously considered taking vows; he chose the world instead, but kept the discipline, wearing a hair shirt under his clothes for the rest of his life. He married Jane Colt in 1505 and had four children; when she died in 1511 he married the widow Alice Middleton within weeks. He insisted, unusually, that his daughters be educated exactly as his son was. Margaret Roper became a formidable Greek and Latin scholar, and it was she who eventually retrieved her father's head from London Bridge.

Erasmus's Friend

More's friendship with Desiderius Erasmus ran for thirty-five years and put him at the centre of northern European humanism. Erasmus's affection was extravagant — "Did nature ever invent anything kinder, sweeter or more harmonious" — and unfeigned: on hearing of the execution he wrote, "When More died I seem to have died myself." More's own scholarship was substantial. His *History of King Richard III*, written between 1512 and 1519 and unpublished in his lifetime, is a Renaissance study of tyranny that gave Shakespeare his villain.

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No Place

*Utopia* appeared in Latin in 1516. Its frame is a conversation with Raphael Hythloday, a Portuguese traveller who has seen an island commonwealth with no private property, distribution by need, free education for both sexes, minimal law, no capital punishment, and complete religious toleration — though slavery exists there, and atheists are not tolerated. Book I is a savage account of the Europe Hythloday left: the enclosures that let greedy men absorb "field after field" and turned one of England's greatest natural advantages into a national disaster, the aristocratic display financed by rural poverty, the death penalty for theft in a country that manufactured thieves. The book invented a genre and a word; translations into German, Italian and French followed in 1550, English in 1551. Readers have argued ever since whether More meant any of it, and the joke embedded in Hythloday's name suggests he wanted that argument.

The King's Servant

He climbed steadily: undersheriff of London in 1510, Master of Requests and privy counsellor in 1514, knighted and made under-treasurer of the Exchequer in 1521, Speaker of the House of Commons in 1523, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1525, and in 1529 Lord Chancellor. He had form for saying no to kings. Elected to Parliament for Great Yarmouth in 1504, he opposed Henry VII's tax demand so effectively that the king had his father imprisoned and fined £100 in reprisal.

The Burnings

The Reformation turned the humanist into an inquisitor. At Henry VIII's request More wrote the *Responsio ad Lutherum* (1523) defending papal supremacy, followed by the *Dialogue Concerning Heresies* (1528) and, in 1532, the *Confutation of Tyndale's Answer* — roughly half a million words against a single opponent. As Lord Chancellor he pursued around forty suspected heretics. Six were burned during his tenure: Thomas Hitton, Thomas Bilney, Richard Bayfield, John Tewkesbury, Thomas Dusgate and James Bainham. Historians divide sharply on his personal conduct. Diarmaid MacCulloch finds no evidence he took part in torture; More himself acknowledged imprisoning heretics and claimed corporal punishment in only two exceptional cases. Richard Marius reads the whole campaign as a betrayal of everything the author of *Utopia* had argued; Peter Ackroyd sets it inside the ordinary savagery of sixteenth-century religious politics.

The Oath

In May 1532, when the Convocation of Canterbury submitted to royal supremacy over the English church, More resigned. He would not sign the Oath of Supremacy naming Henry Supreme Head of the Church of England, and would not endorse the annulment of the marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Arrested in April 1534, he spent fifteen months in the Tower, writing the *Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation*. At his trial on 1 July 1535 the Solicitor General, Richard Rich, testified that More had denied the king's ecclesiastical headship in private conversation. More disputed the account, pointed to Rich's reputation and the absence of any corroborating witness, and argued that the Statute of Supremacy violated Magna Carta and the law of the Church. The jury took fifteen minutes. Hanging, drawing and quartering was commuted to beheading, and he died at Tower Hill on 6 July 1535, forgiving the executioner, joking about his beard, and saying he died "the King's good servant, and God's first."

Why Thomas Is Called a Genius

The strongest evidence is a word. More coined *Utopia* and it entered every European language, carrying an entire mode of political imagination with it — the systematic description of an alternative society as a way of criticising this one. He founded a literary genre that is still productive five centuries later, and his *Richard III* supplied English literature with its definitive tyrant. He was a first-rank Latin and Greek scholar in the company of Erasmus, a working lawyer good enough to reach the Woolsack, and a father who educated his daughters to a standard almost no Englishman of his rank thought worth attempting. The Church made the judgment formal, beatifying him in 1886, canonising him in 1935, and in 2000 naming him patron saint of statesmen and politicians.

The counter-case is severe and cannot be argued away. The man who imagined complete religious toleration prosecuted heretics and presided over six burnings; Marius is right that this is hard to square with the book. The *Confutation* is not a work of genius but half a million words of grinding invective. His *Richard III* is closer to political propaganda than to history. Most awkwardly, we do not know whether *Utopia* was advocacy or satire — the narrator's name means "nonsense-dispenser" — so the visionary reputation rests on a text that may be mocking its own contents. And a large share of his modern standing comes from Robert Bolt's 1960 play *A Man for All Seasons* and its film, which built a twentieth-century conscience hero out of a sixteenth-century Catholic controversialist.

Legacy

More is claimed by everyone and comfortable for no one: canonised by Rome, commemorated by the Church of England from 1980, admired by socialists who read *Utopia* as a first sketch of common ownership, and held up by liberals as the man who died rather than let the state dictate his conscience. Each reading is partial. What survives whole is the word he made up for a place that does not exist, and the habit of mind it licensed — the willingness to describe, in detail, a world arranged otherwise.