More, Thomas, Saint
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Thomas More (1478–1535) was an English lawyer, scholar and statesman. Born in London, the son of a judge, he studied at Oxford and trained in the law at Lincoln’s Inn, and became one of the leading humanists of his age and a close friend of Erasmus, who dedicated The Praise of Folly to him. He wrote Utopia in Latin and published it in 1516, and also left an unfinished history of King Richard III. More rose in the service of Henry VIII and succeeded Cardinal Wolsey as Lord Chancellor in 1529, in which office he vigorously pursued Protestant reformers. He resigned in 1532 as the king broke with Rome, and when he refused to swear the oath acknowledging Henry’s new marriage and rejecting the pope’s authority, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London and beheaded for treason in July 1535. The Catholic Church canonised him in 1935.
