Born in London on February 7, 1478, Thomas More followed his father in a law career and served in public office for most of his life as a Parliamentarian, a judge, an ambassador, a privy counsellor of King Henty VIII, and ultimately as Lord Chancellor of England.

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Deeply devout and scholarly from a young age, More in his early twenties seriously considered the priesthood and religious life, daily praying with the Carthusian monks of London before deciding to marry. He was about 26 when around 1504 he married Jane Colt, with whom he had four children - three girls and a son. More’s daughters were considered among the most highly educated women in Europe at that time; Margaret, the oldest of the children, was More’s star pupil, proficient in Latin and Greek studies.

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 In 1511, Jane died at the early age of twenty-three. With four young children ranging in age from two to six who needed a mother, More quickly decided to marry again, this time to a widow about six or seven years older than himself, Alice Middleton. Alice brought into the More household the youngest of her children from her prior marriage. The couple also adopted a girl named Margaret Gigs. In 1524, More moved his family from the Bucklersbury neighborhood of London to his new estate known as Chelsea, just outside the city.

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More’s public and private life was immersed in a highly developed spiritual life marked by daily prayer, daily attendance at Mass, a profound devotion to both the Passion of Christ and the Holy Eucharist, and a habitual remembrance of his own mortality. Evidence of More’s devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Blessed Virgin Mary can also be found in his writings.

More’s intense personal pursuit of scholarly studies in which he exchanged ideas with the most prominent Christian Humanist scholars of his time, most famously Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, would ultimately be directed to the service of the Church. Although More as a writer has most often been associated with his witty 1516 political satire Utopia, most of his voluminous writings are in fact devoted to the defense of the teachings of the Catholic Church and to Catholic spirituality. While More began writing on spiritual topics early in his career as a published author, his apologetic writings came later as a direct response to the most calamitous event in his lifetime, the Protestant Reformation that began in 1517, instigated by Martin Luther. Beginning in 1523, More penned a series of books masterfully refuting in great detail not only the heresies of Luther but also those of Luther’s English disciple William Tyndale and several other early Protestants. These apologetic writings of More, amounting to over two thousand pages, constitute collectively a veritable encyclopedia of Catholic beliefs and practices.

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It was ultimately the impact of the Protestant Reformation upon England’s king that would bring Thomas More’s life to an end as a martyr for the faith. Although Henry VIII initially reacted with adamant opposition to the ideas of Martin Luther, publishing in 1521 a tract defending the Seven Sacraments of the Church to refute Luther, just a few years later he would find in a book of the English heretic William Tyndale, the 1528 treatise The Obedience of a Christian Man, the justification he was looking for to legitimize his adulterous desire to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon and marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn. The affair with Boleyn that began in 1526 would ultimately draw Henry into open rebellion against the Catholic Church as he sought to force the Church to approve of his adultery. In short, England’s subsequent rupture from the Catholic Church was wrought by Henry’s evil desire for Anne Boleyn.

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 As a faithful Catholic on the King’s Privy Council, Thomas More could not in good conscience support Henry’s pursuit of the divorce, come what may. Obsessed with winning More’s approval, Henry grew increasingly angry with More’s refusal to give his consent. Despite this tension, in October of 1529 Henry decided to make More Lord Chancellor of England in the hope that More would do his bidding in what was the country’s highest office under the king. But when in May of 1532 Henry pressured the archbishop of Canterbury William Warham and several other leading English prelates to sign the “Submission of the Clergy,” a declaration that essentially surrendered the governance of the Church to the King, More immediately resigned from his office.

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Determined to crush all opposition to his break with the Church and his marriage to Anne Boleyn, Henry succeeded in getting the Parliament to pass in March of 1534 the First Act of Succession that ordered all those summoned by the Realm to take an oath of absolute obedience and fidelity to the King alone and his heirs to the exclusion of any other authority, to recognize the validity of his 1533 marriage to Anne Boleyn, and deny the validity of his 1509 marriage to Catherine of Aragon. When in April of 1534 More was summoned to take the oath but refused to do so, he was imprisoned in the Bell Tower of London’s royal prison complex, the Tower of London. Seeking to make More either change his mind or compel him to divulge his reasons for refusing the oath, reasons that could be used to charge him with speaking treasonous words and to sentence him to death, the King’s officials repeatedly questioned More, but to no avail. More prudently refused to give any answers that could be used to charge him with treason.

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During his final years as a free man and over the course of the fourteen months that he spent in the Tower of London, More devoted much of his time to writing on the spiritual life, penning a series of spiritual classics on human tribulation, the Passion of Christ, and the worthy and fruitful reception of Holy Communion. His book on Christ’s Agony in the Garden, entitled The Sadness of Christ, was his final and supreme literary masterpiece. It was also during this period that More wrote deeply moving letters to his family and friends.

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In November of 1534, the Supremacy Act was passed by Parliament at the King’s behest, declaring him “supreme head” of the Church in England and imposing an oath to avow Henry VIII’s supremacy over the Church. A month later, the Treasons Act was passed, mandating the death penalty for anyone deemed guilty of having denied in any “malicious” way the king’s ecclesiastical supremacy.

 

On July 1, 1535, Thomas More was put on trial in London’s Westminster Hall, charged with high treason ultimately based upon the false evidence of a witness named Richard Rich, who at the trial perjured himself by accusing More of having verbally denied the King’s supremacy title in a private conversation with him. Immediately after the proclamation of a guilty verdict from the jury, More felt completely free to give public witness as to why he could not take the supremacy oath – that the King’s claim to supremacy over the Church in England constituted an open attack upon the primacy of the supreme pontiff:

 

“And forasmuch as this Indictment is grounded upon an Act of Parliament directly repugnant to the laws of God and his Holy Church, the supreme Government of which, or of any part whereof, may no temporal Prince presume by any law to take upon him, as rightfully belonging to the See of Rome, a spiritual pre-eminence by the mouth of our Saviour himself, personally present on earth, only to St. Peter and his successors, Bishops of the same See, by special prerogative granted; it is therefore in law, amongst Christian men, insufficient to charge any Christian man.”

 

More was likewise dying in defense of the indissolubility of Christian marriage, as he made clear in his concluding words to those in Westminster Hall:

“Howbeit, it is not for this supremacy so much that ye seek my blood, as for that I would not condescend to the marriage [to Anne Boleyn].”     

On the morning of July 6, 1535, Thomas More walked from his cell to the place of execution carrying a small red cross. Before mounting the scaffold to be beheaded, he spoke his final words, telling those present that he was dying as “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” Following his execution, his head was mounted on London Bridge, as was the cruel custom with the bodies of those convicted of treason. More’s daughter Margaret recovered this precious relic of her father. Years later, when Margaret herself died, the head of her father was buried with her.

 

Four centuries later, on May 19, 1935, Pope Pius XI canonized Thomas More together with his friend and fellow martyr, the English bishop Saint John Fisher. On the current liturgical calendar, these two English saints are jointly commemorated with a memorial on the anniversary date of John Fisher’s martyrdom, June 22.