But in the meantime, More had eighteen months of seclusion and study at his home in Chelsea. He lived in relative poverty, for he held no office and relied solely upon the hundred pounds per annum he collected from a property rental.
He did not struggle with the reduction in means, and busied himself with planning a tomb for himself and his wives , as well as defending his faith in various pamphlets. His months of peace ended in , when he refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn. It did not matter. His name was on the attainder and he was brought before the Privy Council in February He answered their queries as best he could, assuring them of his loyalty to king and state and stressing the matter of his personal conscience.
It was his great popularity that saved him. It gave the king pause, and More was allowed to return home. But he knew what was coming. Then, in good faith, between your grace and me is but this, that I shall die today, and you tomorrow. It was the Act of Succession, passed the following month, that sealed his fate.
This More was fully prepared to do. Anne was the anointed queen. And so he was imprisoned in the Tower of London on 17 April More was not a man to be broken by prison, but he suffered physically. His spirits were high when visited by family and friends, though they were only permitted to see him if they took the Oath which he had refused. He encouraged them to do so.
After several months, he was visited by Cromwell, but More refused to engage him in debate and merely declared himself a faithful subject of the king. This was an obvious lie; More had never said anything of the sort to any other visitor, — why Rich? And why such an obvious and clumsy admission? Despite widespread belief, even amongst Protestants, that Rich was lying, his statement was enough for a fresh inquiry to begin.
It was then discovered that More had written to John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, who was also imprisoned in the Tower for not taking the oath. He could now only write to his wife and favorite daughter Margaret with a piece of coal or burnt stick on scraps of paper. On 1 July , he was indicted on high treason. And so he was. It was a small mercy.
One does not have to share his religious convictions to appreciate his inner strength and noble character. He waited five days before being summoned to the scaffold on Tower Hill. Last Letter of Thomas More. If you use any of the content on this page in your own work, please use the code below to cite this page as the source of the content. Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. Sir Thomas More. Read More English History Topics. We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits.
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We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. The psychic focus of their beliefs is one of the factors which makes the monotheistic religion of the Utopians into a prisca theologia or primitive anticipation of Christianity; and we learn that when they have been introduced to Christ's teachings by Raphael and his companions, many of them embrace these eagerly. But, as Raphael points out, conversion is made easier for them by the discovery that Christ had endorsed the communal life led by his disciples and that this is still observed in monasteries CU: ; cf.
Mark —9. The irony needs no comment. What is the reader to make of this newly discovered island and its strange institutions? For a start, he rejects Utopian communalism, as it subverts the. CU: This confronts us again with the Aristotelian-scholastic view of private property as a resource to be used for public benefit, which is a legitimate argument, but the reference to popular opinion, with its echo of Plato's cave, is less reassuring. How far can Utopia be imitated?
One feature which is often overlooked is its foundation: the entire polity, from social organization and street plans to its benign religious toleration, is due to one man, Utopus, whose military conquest of the country enabled him, in Plato's terms, to wipe the slate clean CU: ; Republic A. He represents the ideal philosopher-king who reconciles wisdom with power, and this scarcely makes his precedent an easy one to follow.
This would explain why in his prefatory letters to Pieter Gillis and elsewhere, the author More plays with the interface between fiction and reality. It also fits with More's own practice of political engagement, while preserving his intellectual independence. His writings in defence of Catholic orthodoxy have limited relevance in a philosophical context, but some observations are in order.
His career as a polemicist began when he was drafted, probably by the Council, to answer Luther's assault on Henry's Assertio , and in he was enlisted by Tunstall to provide a vernacular response to the heretical books illegally shipped in from the Continent.
The conventions which he inherited saw the detection of heresy as a means to restore social unity and inclusion Forrest , and he viewed with dismay what he read as signs of social disintegration in the Peasants' Revolt of in Germany and the Sack of Rome in CWM , —72, —28; , Like many Catholic apologists, he claimed misguidedly that Luther's teaching of justification by faith alone was a license for immoral conduct.
It is no surprise, then, that the author of Utopia should defend orthodoxy not as a check-list of doctrines but rather as a culture, an all-embracing way of life, along with the attitudes and practices which that generated. When writing in Latin, More could assume a sophisticated and informed readership, able to handle his criticism of contemporary abuses without drawing false conclusions.
However, in an age of expanding literacy, vernacular readers were more exposed to misunderstanding, especially when confronted by conflicting voices. If A Dialogue Concerning Heresies is the most successful of the polemical works, this is because it is not written as a direct riposte to an opponent but as a dialogue which enacts the process of persuasion.
In this More, again adopting a fictional persona, wins over the youthful Messenger, his interlocutor, whose sincerity is never in doubt but whose anti-intellectual bias and self-reliance makes him representative of an evangelical readership. The most interesting strand in the polemical works is More's idea of the church, since that connects with an important theme in late medieval thought.
Against the reformers generally, he asserts the material insufficiency of Scripture: before the Gospels were ever written, the Spirit had inscribed Christ's teaching on the hearts of the faithful, and it is within this controlling context that the Gospels must be read. But More's conception of the church is far from being a static appeal to tradition, since he sees the Spirit as actively engaged within the church till the end of time as its founding doctrines evolve and develop CWM , — More might be called a moderate conciliarist; and though his refusal to swear the oath of succession arose from its implicit repudiation of the pope's power of dispensation, he saw that power as deriving from the church as the whole people of God.
In his view, the pope might be admonished and even deposed by a council, and he did not hesitate to declare this view to Thomas Cromwell CWM , ; SL: p. Against the more extreme claims of ultra-papal canonists, More's understanding of the pope's office resembles the restrained conception of royal authority expressed by English lawyers like Sir John Fortescue c. The letters written at this time to his daughter Margaret Roper offer a direct insight into his thoughts, but of particular interest is the letter of Margaret to her step-sister Alice Alington Corr.
Both the Dialogue and De tristitia face the issue of suffering, but they transcend private anxiety and are clearly intended for wider circulation. In the Dialogue More returns to his preferred fictional form, setting it in Hungary, as the elderly Antony and his nephew Vincent anticipate persecution in the aftermath of the Ottoman invasion of their country.
The parallel with More's situation is clear: should one accommodate or follow conscience? The older man's serene progress towards acceptance of temporary suffering for a higher good is set against the counterpoint of the younger man's hesitation. A key motif is that of the prison: in an apparent allusion to Plato's myth of the cave, More distinguishes between actual confinement in a cell, rated as a prison in the opinion of the common people, and the more philosophical view that the whole earth is, in effect, a prison and all its inhabitants under sentence of death CWM 12, — The wise prisoner, however narrowly confined, is free as long as he can quiet his mind and is content to be where he is.
Though More's wife finds his prison claustrophobic, the only difference between his cell and her chamber is that his lock is outside, while hers is inside CWM 12, Given More's relatively lonely stand against royal policy, conscience is a crucial term for him, as it touches on the soundness of his own motives, especially when these are criticized as over-scrupulous; and in the beast fable of Mother Maud he playfully navigates a course between the scrupulous conscience and the over-large or elastic conscience CWM 12, — In response, More insists that he acts from an informed conscience, one shaped by many years of study and reflection.
The responsibility must be his alone. It was on the basis of this meticulous self-examination that More went to the scaffold. More's execution discouraged publication of his work; but in the Catholic interim under Mary I his nephew William Rastell edited the vernacular writings, The Works of Sir Thomas More in the Englysh tonge , London, ; reprinted with an introduction by K.
Wilson, Menston: Scolar Press, His complete Latin works, Opera omnia , were printed at Louvain in and , and at Frankfurt in All his extant works are now available in the Yale edition, which provides authoritative texts with comprehensive introductory material and annotation.
More's letters have been edited by Elizabeth F. Rogers; but she does not include his exchanges with Erasmus, and for these the reader must consult P. Allen's Erasmi epistolae , or the correspondence volumes vols 1—21, 15 so far published in the Toronto Collected Works of Erasmus. Abbreviated citations used in the entry are given below. Thomas More First published Wed Mar 19, Life and Works 2.
The Theatre of Politics 3. The Defence of Humanism 4. Utopia 5. Reformation Polemics 6. Life and Works On the title-page of Utopia Thomas More identifies himself as a citizen of the renowned city of London. Augustine would remain central to More's thinking, yet, in his letter to Martin Dorp, he takes the opportunity to criticize the saint's view on the corporeality of demons: Being a man, he could make a mistake. CWM 69 Such an approach to religious authority is evidence of More's adherence to the critical standards of humanism.
The Theatre of Politics One of the best known anecdotes about More concerns a visit paid by the king to his house at Chelsea: when Roper congratulated him on this favour, More—ever the realist—remarked that if his head could win the king a castle in France it would not fail to go Roper When preparing his lectures on the City of God , he must have been struck by Augustine's words on the role of the wise judge: given the darkness that surrounds social life, will the wise man take his seat on the judge's bench, or will he not venture to do so?
The Defence of Humanism Humanism was founded on the philological ambition to recapture the legacy of classical literature, both by the retrieval of texts and by the imitation of classical style; but, equally, it implied the recognition of language as a persuasive medium, the province of rhetoric. Utopia The opening of Utopia at once raises a fundamental issue: the relationship between imagination and experience.
For a start, he rejects Utopian communalism, as it subverts the nobility, magnificence, splendour and majesty which in the popular view are the true ornaments and glory of any commonwealth. CU: This confronts us again with the Aristotelian-scholastic view of private property as a resource to be used for public benefit, which is a legitimate argument, but the reference to popular opinion, with its echo of Plato's cave, is less reassuring. Bibliography Primary Sources More's execution discouraged publication of his work; but in the Catholic interim under Mary I his nephew William Rastell edited the vernacular writings, The Works of Sir Thomas More in the Englysh tonge , London, ; reprinted with an introduction by K.
Thomas More , 15 vols. Edited by Anthony S. Edwards, Clarence H. Miller and Katherine Gardiner Rodgers. Edited by R. Part 1: Translations of Lucian. Edited by Craig R. Part 2: Latin Poems. Edited by Clarence H. Miller, Leicester Bradner, Charles A. Lynch and Revilo P. Edited by Edward Surtz, S. Responsio ad Lutherum. Edited by John Headley. A Dialogue Concerning Heresies.
Edited by Thomas M. Lawler, G. Marc'hadour and R. Edited by Frank Manley, Clarence H. Miller and R. The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer. Edited by Louis A. Schuster, R. Marius and James P. The Apology. Edited by J. The Debellation of Salem and Bizance. Edited by John Guy, Clarence H. Miller and Ralph Keen. He was elected to Parliament in and became Under-Sheriff of London in In , he was appointed to a commission sent to Bruges to negotiate with representatives of the Holy Roman Empire for trade agreements.
It was at this point in his career that he began work on Utopia. Soon after his return from the Netherlands, he was persuaded to enter government service permanently, and his rise to prominence was rapid. In he was appointed to the Privy Council the king's cabinet , and he was knighted in During the decade of the 20s, at Henry VIII's request, he became involved in the writing of polemics defending Catholicism against Luther's attacks. In , following the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey, More became Lord Chancellor, equivalent of Prime Minister; but his tenure in that office was brief and stormy.
In the early s Henry started negotiations to divorce Catherine of Aragon — or have his marriage annulled — and he expected to find a loyal supporter in his Lord Chancellor. More's refusal to second the king's arguments eventually brought about a breach, and More resigned.
Then when Henry broke off allegiance to the pope, declaring himself head of the Church of England, he tried to force all Englishmen to acknowledge the "Act of Succession and Supremacy" under penalty of law. More was one of a distinguished group of faithful Roman Catholics who refused to recognize Henry's proclaimed supremacy over the Church of England.
He was accused of treason, imprisoned in the Tower, and beheaded, July, The full story of More's life and character casts valuable light on Utopia, even those events that came after the writing of the work; but the principal key to its interpretation is the story of More the humanist scholar.
He came to Oxford as a student, when Greek studies were being encouraged through the instruction of William Grocyn, an Englishman who had been trained in Italy. In just fifteen minutes, More was declared guilty.
The case was closed, More was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, an expected punishment given the circumstances, however showing some leniency, Henry VIII ordered for him to be decapitated instead. He was executed, a man who had served King Henry VIII devoutly and yet had stayed true to his beliefs and convictions until the end.
Jessica Brain is a freelance writer specialising in history. Based in Kent and a lover of all things historical. The Dissolution of the Monasteries took place between and and involved the sale or suppression of monasteries, abbeys and religious houses by Henry VIII. Did Tudors wear pants? This morning my choice of clothes was a rather a haphazard affair. Having planned to spend the day writing, I knew…. But Henry was also a complex man: intelligent, boisterous, flamboyant, extravagant.
Athletic, musical, a poet. Ruthless, arrogant, passionate Related articles.
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